Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Fat and Happy
Make a man fat and happy and he will only worry about how he can stay fat and happy. Take away what makes him fat and happy and he will fight with all he has.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Babylon (or the empire that just won't die)
I've been reading again. Go figure. I'm not sure I'm gonna get all my thoughts out on this subject but I'm gonna try. I've been reading "Jesus for President", by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. I've had a lot of these thoughts for a while now but never got the chance to write them down. They started talking about Revelation and the thoughts reared their ugly head again.
The United States is Babylon. There I said it, but Rome was Babylon, too. The writers made some good points about how Babylon is described in Revelation, and they related them to Rome. Most of these points ring true for the US also. I don't want to get into great detail about how the US is Rome is Babylon, maybe in a future post. I just want the thought to be out there. Let you chew on it for a bit. Look it up and ponder the possibility of it.
What I want to talk about is the Church. I want to talk about the Body of Christ. I want to talk about the people in the US that think the US is: heaven, paradise, the kingdom of God. They may not voice this opinion for fear of being labeled a blasphemer, but they live as if they believed this way. I read a post on Internetmonk about "Are American Christians "Persecuted?"." I think the answer lies in the fact that we've been sleeping with the enemy. In better terms we have been intoxicated by Babylon's wine and are sleeping with the whore. So are we persecuted? I think you're only persecuted by your enemies and we've willingly drank her wine and hopped in bed.
The United States is Babylon. There I said it, but Rome was Babylon, too. The writers made some good points about how Babylon is described in Revelation, and they related them to Rome. Most of these points ring true for the US also. I don't want to get into great detail about how the US is Rome is Babylon, maybe in a future post. I just want the thought to be out there. Let you chew on it for a bit. Look it up and ponder the possibility of it.
What I want to talk about is the Church. I want to talk about the Body of Christ. I want to talk about the people in the US that think the US is: heaven, paradise, the kingdom of God. They may not voice this opinion for fear of being labeled a blasphemer, but they live as if they believed this way. I read a post on Internetmonk about "Are American Christians "Persecuted?"." I think the answer lies in the fact that we've been sleeping with the enemy. In better terms we have been intoxicated by Babylon's wine and are sleeping with the whore. So are we persecuted? I think you're only persecuted by your enemies and we've willingly drank her wine and hopped in bed.
I believe we would do well to follow John's advice. He tells us to come out of Babylon. From what I just read, the language implies pulling out before climax during sex. He has us pegged as having an adulterous affair and is calling out for us to abandon this love affair. We participate in the economies that create sweatshops, oppression, and war. If we stood up and refused turn a blind eye on the injustices our country creates; If we started living Jesus' politics the government would be fearful that it had lost its power and would turn on us in persecution.
I think the apostles in Acts were responding to the empire they lived in. They lived together, ate together, worshiped together. I think it was a statement that we're in this world but not of it. I think they were refusing to be ruled by anyone but God. I think they were living God's kingdom in the midst of Babylon, and I believe we can and are called to do the same. The early Christians stopped being persecuted when the Roman empire made it the religion of the empire, but the Roman empire stopped being persecuted by the church, also. Babylon will always feel threatened when confronted with the kingdom of God. It will fight it unless it can get it to conform, because in conforming it has become subdued. This is the fight we are all called to and this is the battle of Armageddon.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
To Believe or not to Believe, that is the question
I got to thinking and had to write this down.
I believe, Lord, help my unbelief. A man who came to Jesus for healing coins this phrase. I believe I just made it my own. I once believed, and this included many things not necessary. Things which at most were petty and distracted from the reason for and the truth of belief. I went to college and studied religion because of this belief. Then things fell apart.
How much I believed is a good question to ponder. I pose this thought because I ran away quite easily, because of many things I brought about myself. I flunked out of college because I failed to go to class and then I came home. I lived with my dad and started working at a restaurant at which I had worked during high school. I worked on Sundays and therefore didn't go to church. I could have asked for Sundays off, but I didn't. Soon, I stopped thinking of God or anything to do with him. This progressed through getting drunk at times, seeking out my lustful urges, and immersing myself in this materialistic, consumerist society. Basically, I had come close to God, got scared about how much I had to give up, and ran the other way.
And yet, he had come close enough to me that I couldn't shake him no matter where I tried to hide. Though I got drunk it was rare, I couldn't push myself past my conscience very far. I never could bring my lustful urges to fruition, and though I bought plenty, I hated the very things I bought. This running and hiding lasted for five years. Near the end of it I had stopped shaking it off and was slowly turning around and searching for what I had ran away from.
The thing is, I wonder, quite often, if I'm still trying to hide. I came back but I still don't feel like I'm giving up myself. I want to, and yet there are things to which I still cling that hold me back. It is a constant battle and that doesn't surprise me. I'd like to get to the other side and fight from there, though. So I have come to own the phrase, "I believe, Lord, help my unbelief."
I believe, Lord, help my unbelief. A man who came to Jesus for healing coins this phrase. I believe I just made it my own. I once believed, and this included many things not necessary. Things which at most were petty and distracted from the reason for and the truth of belief. I went to college and studied religion because of this belief. Then things fell apart.
How much I believed is a good question to ponder. I pose this thought because I ran away quite easily, because of many things I brought about myself. I flunked out of college because I failed to go to class and then I came home. I lived with my dad and started working at a restaurant at which I had worked during high school. I worked on Sundays and therefore didn't go to church. I could have asked for Sundays off, but I didn't. Soon, I stopped thinking of God or anything to do with him. This progressed through getting drunk at times, seeking out my lustful urges, and immersing myself in this materialistic, consumerist society. Basically, I had come close to God, got scared about how much I had to give up, and ran the other way.
And yet, he had come close enough to me that I couldn't shake him no matter where I tried to hide. Though I got drunk it was rare, I couldn't push myself past my conscience very far. I never could bring my lustful urges to fruition, and though I bought plenty, I hated the very things I bought. This running and hiding lasted for five years. Near the end of it I had stopped shaking it off and was slowly turning around and searching for what I had ran away from.
The thing is, I wonder, quite often, if I'm still trying to hide. I came back but I still don't feel like I'm giving up myself. I want to, and yet there are things to which I still cling that hold me back. It is a constant battle and that doesn't surprise me. I'd like to get to the other side and fight from there, though. So I have come to own the phrase, "I believe, Lord, help my unbelief."
Friday, March 28, 2008
Us Silly Protestants (or is it just the whole western Church)
I've had this problem for a while. I love the Church. It's been a problem for a few years. The problem stems from the fact the Church isn't perfect. It never has been. It's a painful problem. It takes up vast amounts of my time and energy. What makes my love for the Church a problem is that just like a close friend you dearly love, you love it so much you can't let it stay in it's less than whole state. I must admit before we go much further that it's in my nature to fix things. That's right, I'm a problem solver. It's a curse but I believe I was made that way for a purpose.
I've been reading again. Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton. Those have been my recent staples. Merton reminded me today of my love for the Church and my frustrations with it's imperfections.
I've been reading "The Seven Storey Mountain." In it he told of people his father and he boarded with in France. Though only a small amount of time was spent with them he seemed to have received a very lasting impression from them. Their lives were lived as normal lives, with normal professions, and normal actions. Yet, love shined through everything they did. So much so, in fact, that it is really all he remembers of them. Even when they brought up religion the one time, they didn't argue it they only questioned how he could live life without the influence of the Faith.
Shortly thereafter he contrasts these people with his perception of the English (Anglican) Church. This is a rather long quote but it's required to get the point across.
"And, as a matter of fact, the Church of England means all this. It is a class religion, the cult of special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation. That is the principal basis for its rather strong coherence up to now. There is certainly not much doctrinal unity, much less a mystical bond between people many of whom have even ceased to believe in grace or Sacraments. The thing that holds them together is the powerful attraction of their own social tradition, and the stubborn tenacity with which they cling to certain social standards and customs, more or less for their own sake. The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservatism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools: because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of cricket in the long sumer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart.
I got mixed up in all this as soon as I entered Ripley Court, and it was strong enough in me to blur and naturalize all that might have been supernatural in my attraction to pray and to love God. And consequently the grace that was given me was stifled, not at once, but gradually. As long as I lived in this peaceful hothouse atmosphere of cricket and Eton collars and synthetic childhood, I was pious, perhaps sincerely. But as soon as the frail walls of this illusion broke down again - that is, as soon as I went to a Public School and saw that, underneath their sentimentality, the English were just as brutal as the French - I made no further effort to keep up what seemed to me to be a more or less manifest pretense.
At the time, of course, I was not capable of reasoning about all this. Even if my mind had been sufficiently developed to do so, I would never have found the perspective for it. Besides, all this was going on in my emotions and feelings, rather than in my mind and will - thanks to the vagueness and total unsubstantiality of Anglican doctrine as it gets preached, in practice, from most pulpits.
It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world, and of the people that are lost. Perhaps one explanation of the sterility and inefficacy of Anglicanism in the moral order is, besides its lack of vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, the social injustice and the class oppression on which it is based: for, since it is mostly a class religion, it contracts the guilt of the class from which it is inseparable. But this is a guess which I am not prepared to argue out."
I think a great deal of the problems of American Protestant Denominationalism is that it divides our beliefs into class religions. We feel the emptiness of being disconnected from the rest of the Body. The many races are divided into separate churches even within denominations. I agree with Merton that we lack the vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, but I would define the True Church across many denominational lines.
I also believe our doctrine is very vague and without depth. We fight over our petty differences on whether we should be allowed to dance, drink, sing hymns or choruses. We've lost touch with an historic commonality. Do we know anything about the saints? The reformists? Those who contributed to the Great Awakenings? Orthodoxy? The Wesleys? What about today's amazing men and women of God? Mother Theresa? Nelson Mandella? Merton? Lewis? Peterson? I could name names all day. Jesus has worked throughout history and we've thrown it out. We're blind because we refuse to look at our pasts and we are leading the blind.
Unity is my prayer. I long for Grace, contact with the body, Love, Justice. I want to be justified by faith, but I want to do Christ's works so my faith isn't dead. I want to follow Jesus and that has never come about by believing and not acting. Do I believe enough to get out of my chair?
I love the Church and because of that I hope we can be reunited. I hope our faults are ironed out of us. Trials must come and we will be strengthened by them. It's for my Saviour to fix but I must, as must we all, be willing instruments.
I've been reading again. Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton. Those have been my recent staples. Merton reminded me today of my love for the Church and my frustrations with it's imperfections.
I've been reading "The Seven Storey Mountain." In it he told of people his father and he boarded with in France. Though only a small amount of time was spent with them he seemed to have received a very lasting impression from them. Their lives were lived as normal lives, with normal professions, and normal actions. Yet, love shined through everything they did. So much so, in fact, that it is really all he remembers of them. Even when they brought up religion the one time, they didn't argue it they only questioned how he could live life without the influence of the Faith.
Shortly thereafter he contrasts these people with his perception of the English (Anglican) Church. This is a rather long quote but it's required to get the point across.
"And, as a matter of fact, the Church of England means all this. It is a class religion, the cult of special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation. That is the principal basis for its rather strong coherence up to now. There is certainly not much doctrinal unity, much less a mystical bond between people many of whom have even ceased to believe in grace or Sacraments. The thing that holds them together is the powerful attraction of their own social tradition, and the stubborn tenacity with which they cling to certain social standards and customs, more or less for their own sake. The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservatism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools: because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of cricket in the long sumer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart.
I got mixed up in all this as soon as I entered Ripley Court, and it was strong enough in me to blur and naturalize all that might have been supernatural in my attraction to pray and to love God. And consequently the grace that was given me was stifled, not at once, but gradually. As long as I lived in this peaceful hothouse atmosphere of cricket and Eton collars and synthetic childhood, I was pious, perhaps sincerely. But as soon as the frail walls of this illusion broke down again - that is, as soon as I went to a Public School and saw that, underneath their sentimentality, the English were just as brutal as the French - I made no further effort to keep up what seemed to me to be a more or less manifest pretense.
At the time, of course, I was not capable of reasoning about all this. Even if my mind had been sufficiently developed to do so, I would never have found the perspective for it. Besides, all this was going on in my emotions and feelings, rather than in my mind and will - thanks to the vagueness and total unsubstantiality of Anglican doctrine as it gets preached, in practice, from most pulpits.
It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world, and of the people that are lost. Perhaps one explanation of the sterility and inefficacy of Anglicanism in the moral order is, besides its lack of vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, the social injustice and the class oppression on which it is based: for, since it is mostly a class religion, it contracts the guilt of the class from which it is inseparable. But this is a guess which I am not prepared to argue out."
I think a great deal of the problems of American Protestant Denominationalism is that it divides our beliefs into class religions. We feel the emptiness of being disconnected from the rest of the Body. The many races are divided into separate churches even within denominations. I agree with Merton that we lack the vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, but I would define the True Church across many denominational lines.
I also believe our doctrine is very vague and without depth. We fight over our petty differences on whether we should be allowed to dance, drink, sing hymns or choruses. We've lost touch with an historic commonality. Do we know anything about the saints? The reformists? Those who contributed to the Great Awakenings? Orthodoxy? The Wesleys? What about today's amazing men and women of God? Mother Theresa? Nelson Mandella? Merton? Lewis? Peterson? I could name names all day. Jesus has worked throughout history and we've thrown it out. We're blind because we refuse to look at our pasts and we are leading the blind.
Unity is my prayer. I long for Grace, contact with the body, Love, Justice. I want to be justified by faith, but I want to do Christ's works so my faith isn't dead. I want to follow Jesus and that has never come about by believing and not acting. Do I believe enough to get out of my chair?
I love the Church and because of that I hope we can be reunited. I hope our faults are ironed out of us. Trials must come and we will be strengthened by them. It's for my Saviour to fix but I must, as must we all, be willing instruments.
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