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Holy Cross Day

 Holy Cross Day 9-14-2020 Today (Sept 14) is Holy Cross Day in the Ecclesial Calendar. The older, traditional understanding of the Cross (death of Christ) is sometimes referred to as the Augustinian tradition. It goes like this: Humans have “fallen” from their innocent, perfect condition through sin. God is angry at human rebellion. He needs to be appeased. Christ’s death on the cross is the only appeasement available. Christ’s death does in fact cancel the wrath of God and makes union with God assessable again. Christ is the expiation for human sin. His blood is the sign of his sacrifice. This is sort of a “feudal” paradigm of salvation. God’s honor must be won back. Another tradition views Christ’s death as the “victory” over the power of sin, evil, and death. The Cross is the sign of “overcoming.” His voluntary sacrifice has power that destroys the existential enemies of humans: sin, evil, death. This paradigm is known as “Christus Victor.” Christ represents God in the fight against
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    I believe in the Cause that calls. There is a Voice… I live “as if…” (We all live as if.) God is not a thing, but a movement. To participate in the Movement is our calling. As Tillich said, God is “the power of being.” Which is to say: the power of life. God is life-ness. God is Being which is always Becoming. As Dante said, there is the Love that moves the planets and the sun and the other stars. Faith has a vagueness to it. We see in a vague mirror (1 Cor. 13). The ultimate reality is reflected to us in a fuzzy faith. A fuzzy faith. Gas lighting— fundamentalism— believe what I say, don’t believe what you see.  
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In Christ

  I finished reading the book Fare Well in Christ by W.H. Vanstone. I like his comment on the phrase to be “in Christ.” He avers that it doesn’t indicate a sudden ontological change, but simply that those who are “in Christ” know the story of Jesus and its meaning.  I like the quote: “Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he is happy.” It’s a quote from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.
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No magic

    I picked up a book at the library: The Pastor in a Secular Age , by Andrew Root. The subtitle is “Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God.” In our time, when so many people feel they don’t need God, and nothing is “holy,” what is the pastor’s job? Charles Taylor has written about the “immanent frame,” that pervades our culture. That is, we are losing any sense of the transcendent (what we used to call the “supernatural”). The world is no longer “enchanted.” There is no magic. It is what it is.   In the 11 th century priests were frustrated that so many people refused to swallow the host (the bread at communion). They would sneak the body of Christ out of the church to feed it to their sick cows, believing that the holy bread had healing power. The church used to offer a kind of “magic” – supernatural things. But no more. For many, the Big Man in the Sky doesn’t exist. He is equated with Santa Claus—someone made up to enforce good behavior. So, what’s a pastor to do? Be a veste
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Providence

  August 25, 2020   Providence.   In a selection of John Chrysostom's reflections on "providence," he says:   Our fathers in the Old Testament times saw events contradicting he promises of God , yet they were not shocked or worried. They trusted in a Providence beyond their understanding. Knowing the richness and skill of the divine wisdom they awaited the outcome and endured all the adversities, giving thanks to God. (from Drinking from the Hidden Fountain. reading for Oct. 13)   Paul Tillich , in a sermon on Providence, says:   Faith in divine Providence is the faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence. Providence does not mean a divine planning by which everything is predetermined, as is an efficient machine. Rather, Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by an event. (from The Shaking of the Foundations)   In a sermon on the last verses of Rom
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Flickers of thought

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  FLICKERS OF THOUGHT   God is the pronoun for the genderless Reality who holds everything.   God pervades the universe, but is also outside the universe.   My temperament makes it necessary for me to view the world through a metaphysical framework.   God is meaning. Meaning is God. Without meaning my life has no purpose.   Three options: Meaning is given from beyond. There is no meaning. We create our own meaning.   Because we exist within the System (universe/life), we cannot judge the system. It is reasonable to trust the drama of the universe to the One who designed it and will have ultimate control over the consummation of it.   For a human being to judge God is the height of hubris.   Human tragedies are part of the “permission” given to the universe. Without the permission in place the world would be mechanical and humans would have no dignity. Human tragedy is the price we pay for the existence of human dignity and freedom. From our perspective we cannot accept the price withou
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the middle eastern sage

January 15, 2019  From the beginning humans have   perceived or imagined unseen powers and forces which spooked and awed them; and the humans tried to influence those unseen powers to be friendly.   Dying and rising gods and goddesses were already imagined way before the birth of Christianity.   Sagas of an ancient couple named Abraham and Sarah, and their descendants, also tell of a small clan of Semitic people held as slaves in Egypt. These people have a memory of being liberated from the tyranny of a Pharaoh by the power of their God, YHWH. They had stories of tribal leaders, then kings and prophets, followed by forced exile from their homeland in Palestine to Babylon. They eventually return to their homeland and rebuild.   The Christian religion has its roots in the Jewish story. A Jewish man named Jesus was born in Palestine in around the year 4 BCE (which is numbered as year ‘0’ by a historical slippage).   While some people in our time speculate that this Jewish man Jesus never
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