Answering 03: Flavoring Matters

Posted on April 7, 2016 by ehurst

There is a tension that is not easily resolved here.

I look back over my own personal journey and I’m embarrassed — at times painfully so — at things I thought and said even just a few years ago. I’ll tell you that this is not some pride thing where I can’t stand the idea that I’m less than perfect. I don’t take myself that seriously. No, it’s a painful recognition that when I say something stupid, it misleads others and delays them on their own journey. I’ve embraced the heavy burden of responsibility for leading only because I can’t make myself stop leading, but I take responsibility for the wreckage I’ve left in the lives of others. The deepest scars on my soul today are from the injuries I’ve left on others.

There’s a little bit of child in all of us. God help me if anything I say or do tends to squelch creativity and the joy of discovery and exploration. At the same time, God help me if I make no effort to stop you from pulling the trigger on a dangerous weapon because you simply don’t know what it will do. I’m not above you, just somewhere down the road in ahead of some of you. Allow me to share my worries with you as your elder, but take it with a grain of salt.

Emphatically and repeatedly we reject Western Civilization and all the associated habits of mind. On the one hand, I can really dig this computer stuff that would not have arisen without Western thinking. On the other hand, using computers is simply making the best of a horrible situation where the moral landscape has been plowed down and paved over with lies. If I could reach out and touch your life without the electronics, I’d ditch all of my computer stuff right now. I’ve spent half my life working them as a central element in my daily existence, and I still hate them. So all this computer technology stuff I’ve posted on this blog is not from a love for computers, but my compassion for humans who deserve better. Just because I understand it really well doesn’t mean it’s all fun for me. I’m doing my best to waste less and less time on computer technology.

Moral truth operates contextually, and it recognizes multiple levels of consideration in all things in this world. Could we construct a better, more ideal life for humans on this planet? Yes, yes, a thousand times, YES. That’s what revelation is all about. Is it likely? Not at all. Then again, perhaps in the microcosm of your own existence, it is plausible that you will travel a path that brings you much closer to Eden than where you now stand. The whole universe will cheer you along and encourage you, because it is not fallen and desperately desires to see us rise above the Curse as far as we can (Romans 8:22). But Jesus pointedly said that most of humanity at any give time simply will not choose that path (Matthew 7:13-14). So any silly notion that you can drag the whole human race along behind you is sin; it’s picking an argument with God.

Scripture likens the fate of humanity to lambs for the slaughter. It likens it to herding cattle who do not comprehend their fate nor much of anything except their petty concerns for survival. You cannot take your rational judgment back into the Bible and pretend God is responsible for being more efficient. You can acknowledge that He is God, all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, but you can’t reconcile those concepts with the results. Why doesn’t He….? That’s the wrong question. Come back when you are God’s equal and maybe He’ll discuss it with you. He’s not accountable to you. Meanwhile, you are accountable to Him. Start with the what He says is the starting point: You are obliged to seek peace with Him on His terms. You can pretend to construct a system that forces some few humans to obey your will for a limited time, but in so doing you make yourself part of the soulless herds that God uses for His inscrutable ends, but you will not be a part of His family when it’s all over.

Or, you can stop and take the time to fall on your face before Him. You can ask Him to awaken that divine faculty He placed in us so that you can begin to see things from His perspective. And you can begin that long painful journey out of your fallen human conditioning and start thinking like someone who is on the way to Heaven.

We don’t have time or space here to chase studies in Comparative Civilization, but I can assure that almost anything is better than the West. The West has this nasty, burned in concept of the universe as fundamentally inanimate matter. That flatly contradicts Scripture. The whole universe is alive with the character of our Creator. When I walk out into the yard in front of my apartment building, I sense the singing life of the grass and dirt under my feet. Even the concrete talks to me, because every subatomic particle is imbued with some of God’s essence. However, the grass and trees and birds and clouds and wind are all relatively unaffected by human meddling, so their voice is much louder in my soul.

Maybe you would struggle saying that to the average Westerner who asks about your faith, but let’s do this one thing: Try to avoid analogies that lean too much on Western technology. That in itself tends to be misleading. I tend to think this is not just an intellectual opinion issue. If you want to train your mind to obey your heart, you can’t keep allowing the mind to work as it did before. Somewhere very early in this process you have to grasp that all of Creation is a living being, and every identifiable constituent element is a “person” in its own right. That bird and that clump of grass are each your friends. God is your Father, not your embodiment of Objective Truth. Truth itself is just a word for an aspect of God’s Person. I may be tied to the English language, one of the sorriest excuses for communication in human history, but we are damned if we can’t rise above its limitations in our thinking.

I don’t have any easy answers to the tension that comes from living in a world that rejects the truth before it wakes up in the morning. Somehow we have to alert folks to the truth that we can grasp their level of awareness, but we aren’t there any more. As long as we look, act and talk like these people, we have no message. I can see that there’s a time a place for that, but there comes a time when you must signal a difference. There is a sense in which we have to lead them out of that awful atmosphere into another place where they can at least begin thinking in different terms. Jesus spoke in parables knowing that the majority of His audience wouldn’t get it. He talked about Himself as the Bread of Life (John 6) to purposefully sift out the folks who were looking for the wrong thing from Him. Somehow you have to adapt your witness to thank kind of sifting.

Here’s a clue: “analogy” is a Western thing. The Hebrew language is inherently “parable” — learn the difference between the two. Analogy is conceptual comparison in concrete terms, where items match one-for-one. Parable calls you up to a higher level and demands you apply the symbols far beyond one-for-one. It’s not about discrete objects, but about moral influence in varying contexts. This is why we insist on using the sensory capabilities of the heart as superior to the five senses. And the logic of the heart is superior to that of the intellect. Train your mind to deal with parables. Let’s do computers and technology as mere tools, things we’d love to drop and leave in the dust as soon as God gives us a better means of communication. Please, please, avoid talking about faith in ways that compromise too much with blind souls. That was the sin of the Western Church when the German tribes came crashing through the remains of the Roman Empire. The priests rewrote Christian teaching in terms of the heathen mythology and values, and it wasn’t Christ at all any more.

We are not aiming at some imaginary efficiency in converting minds. We are aiming at living as channels for God’s truth, mirrors to reflect His glory. He chooses who will come to us for His truth; we do not at all pretend we can simply process the whole of humanity through some cerebral renovation. We don’t advertise, but we confront a blind world by living His truth. Few can see that glory in us. In our society today, it might be a good thing to be just a little reticent about it, somewhat evasive until our hearts tell us that the other person has some hope of understanding.

I’m not going to write rules for you, as is typical of Western religious instincts. I’m asking you to breathe life into your witness by making it just a little demanding. The worst thing you can do is let someone believe they got it when they don’t. It’s not a secret requiring a strange coded language like cults do, but the gospel is a mystery that God must open for them. Be careful that you do not package the gospel in ways that suck the life out of it.

The gospel message is not ideas; the gospel is you.

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A Word for Men

Posted on April 7, 2016 by ehurst

The biggest problem is not so much what we do as it is how we abuse God’s wonderful gifts.

As always, what follows assumes you have already recognized the grand failure of Western Civilization. As much as possible you must disentangle your mind from a vast substrate of lies that serve as the foundation for modern Western thinking. I know — it’s a tall order, but if you don’t get started you’ll never make any progress in walking with Christ.

From my experience, America is the epitome of all that’s wrong with the West. Whatever other Western countries might do wrong, America seems to do it even worse in terms of violating God’s moral character. Thus, as I write with a prophetic castigation of American culture in particular, it may or may not fit that well with some other Western society outside America.

In America especially, the model for male consciousness is some grouchy Norse deity with varying names. He’s always capricious and obnoxious, perpetually looking for an excuse to explode with rage, and softens only when he’s drunk. The model for feminine consciousness is derived from the very worst elements of Oester mythology — solipsist to the core, she manipulates with the utter conviction that she is by far the superior sex, the only thing that saves humanity. Variations on these two don’t change how they have pretty much shaped our entire consciousness of sexual identity.

So let’s resolve one thing up front: We are all pussies in God’s Presence. No living being could ever be more masculine than God. And while there is a boatload of blasphemous nonsense about it in Western religion, God is also feminine and nurturing more than any woman could be. He made women, too, and they reflect His divine nature in their own way.

But the one thing Western guys need to understand is that when we come to Him as Lord, we are all the Bride of Christ. Men, we are wired to do this. We have within us the capacity to operate as a female in spiritual terms as His Bride. Sex is a very pale comparison, but it still symbolizes the rapturous communion with God in our spirits. The problem comes when men don’t realize how that wiring exists for that purpose and take two general tracks into abuse of it.

Most Western men have a phobia about this, so they try their darnedest to bury it. This is partly why men can manifest that grouchy Norse sonuvabitch deity aspect. Instead of simply going away, this marvelous gift from God oozes and extrudes and manifests involuntarily because it cannot die. So the instant a man has a clue what it is, he overreacts to stomp it back down into the basement where he never goes. The result is some really stupid reactions from what men don’t understand about themselves. When you fight your own nature in one way, you tend to fight it in other ways.

The other common track men take is obvious: homosexuality. If you doubt that God says it’s a sin in all contexts, I cannot help you. The problem is not that men aren’t supposed to feel or act like females at all, it’s that we have only one right place for that wiring, and that’s in spiritual communion with God as part of His Bride. Submit emotionally to God, not other men.

But you’ll notice that we are not under the Law of Moses and that a man who can’t or won’t understand why some other men go that false route, such a closed mind is not fit to lead as a shepherd of His pasture. It’s simply a bad way to do something entirely natural for men as males. Get over it. Meanwhile, it also means you have no excuse for not understanding how your wife feels about things, at least on some level. But that grouchy Norse deity is not the God of the Bible, and Western social structure is inherently anti-Christian.

I will let you explore the implications on your own, but this is a prophetic Word from God.

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Answering 02: Two Realms

Posted on April 6, 2016 by ehurst

(This is a reblog linking back the other way, for once.)

How do you explain it?

In my mind there remain a handful of people who seemed to understand. They were on their own path and knew it, so I offer not a word of criticism about their choices. Most of them chose to stay in the churches I simply had to leave. I can recall one good church and a segment of time in a military chapel when things were delightful. Military chapel congregations vary because of the mandatory turnover, so the character of that kind of “church” is a broad snapshot of time and you wouldn’t recognize the character of the group later. One such snapshot brought together a truly amazing congregation at a critical time in my spiritual development. The rich atmosphere faded before I decided it was time to move on, but I stayed past that point because of a few fine people. So in general, I can say I miss certain individuals, but I don’t really miss the churches that much.

About a decade ago was the last time I gave mainstream organized Christianity a try. I’ve stayed close enough to observe, but far enough away to avoid entanglement. Over the years one truly amazing and disconcerting feature remains constant: The jarring disconnection between words and actions. Not the typical hypocrisy you hear or read about from most critics, this is something far more subtle, and far more damaging. So subtle it is that you might not be able to agree with me, even if you grasp the nature of this thing.

To read the rest of this post, click this link to Do What’s Right blog.

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Answering 02: Two Realms

Posted on April 6, 2016 by ehurst

How do you explain it?

In my mind there remain a handful of people who seemed to understand. They were on their own path and knew it, so I offer not a word of criticism about their choices. Most of them chose to stay in the churches I simply had to leave. I can recall one good church and a segment of time in a military chapel when things were delightful. Military chapel congregations vary because of the mandatory turnover, so the character of that kind of “church” is a broad snapshot of time and you wouldn’t recognize the character of the group later. One such snapshot brought together a truly amazing congregation at a critical time in my spiritual development. The rich atmosphere faded before I decided it was time to move on, but I stayed past that point because of a few fine people. So in general, I can say I miss certain individuals, but I don’t really miss the churches that much.

About a decade ago was the last time I gave mainstream organized Christianity a try. I’ve stayed close enough to observe, but far enough away to avoid entanglement. Over the years one truly amazing and disconcerting feature remains constant: The jarring disconnection between words and actions. Not the typical hypocrisy you hear or read about from most critics, this is something far more subtle, and far more damaging. So subtle it is that you might not be able to agree with me, even if you grasp the nature of this thing.

A critical element in Christian Mysticism is a powerful sense of Two Realms. Not in the sense of my doctrinal teaching, but I refer to a full apprehension burned into your awareness. With rare exception, all of the Christians I’ve ever met ascribe to some version “Heaven” as somewhere different from here and now. But it seems most of the time a mere idea. It’s not part of their calculus of life. They act as if it’s not real; they talk and write and construct a whole framework that denies it. This denial is pervasive. The belief is not a truth, but a mere fact for them, and has precious little effect on how they operate. It’s always out there somewhere and they aren’t striving to connect directly. It’s an orthodoxy without faith.

I can recall a session in the NATO chapel with a bunch of teenagers from those military families in the chapel. I tried to convey the concept of our universe as a mere bubble with distinct boundaries and a distinct lifespan existing within a broader existence that has no such boundaries. I used a lot of jargon common to science fiction from those days. I suppose some of them got it, because you could see the proverbial light bulb flash on their faces. But these were kids just a few years from legal adulthood. Why was this so new to them? So I tested the idea against their parents in a different setting, and it was a similar experience. Military adults don’t respond the same way as civilian crowds, but I could see it was news to many of them. These weren’t new converts and not ignorant within their own sectarian backgrounds, but even the typical American evangelicals seemed surprised.

It’s not that anyone argued with me. It’s the sort of thing where, if they got it, they recognized it instinctively as true. Some of them began to exhibit noticeable changes in their moral existence. It awakened something in them.

To this day I can’t explain where the concept came from. I’m pretty sure my youthful obsession with Science Fiction and the theory of dimensional physics was part of it, and I suppose that was the fertile ground for when I began reading Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature and academic explanations of the ANE intellectual background in college. It must have all fit together neatly because I can’t recall any moment when it dawned on me, only that I had assumed it for quite some time. It crystallized when I felt compelled to answer some sharp questions.

By now you probably recognize that people can’t get this concept if it’s not already true inside them in some way. All it does is give some kind of intellectual shape, pulls it into conscious focus from where it stood in the shadows. It was already there or it isn’t something people can accept. We believe that Creation is much bigger than our universe and that some part of us belongs to that higher dimension, but there seems no way for us to actually create the connection, only recognize when it’s there.

We have a distinct cosmology and anthropology. Without them, this whole religion dissolves into mist. We assert by our very lives that there are Two Realms and that we are designed to connect across that dimensional boundary. I can most assuredly tell you what it’s like to lose that connection; God allowed me to experience it briefly and it was worse than dying physically. A lot of things died during that time. The experience was the final destruction of a lot of goofy theology for me, I can assure you. Without these fundamental differences in cosmology and anthropology, our religion doesn’t exist, but we have to be ready to live with the simple fact a lot of folks will never get it. We can do our best to offer some kind of explanation that may or may not work, but we can’t make them see something that doesn’t exist for them.

Answering questions about your faith can mean having no answer for some folks.

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Answering 01: I Believe

Posted on April 5, 2016 by ehurst

Sometimes it helps to reduce the shock for others if you can say something that shows you aren’t entirely outside all familiar Christian doctrine. As always, you are supposed to recognize that this is just my own beliefs in my own words. The idea is that you see beyond the particulars and strive to express your own beliefs. However, to the degree yours and mine coincide, you are welcome to use my words for your own. By hanging around this virtual parish, this is what you’ll get from me. At any given time, I might say it differently based on the context, but for now, this should help indicate the flavor of my soul.

I believe that there is only one God, Creator of all things. The commonly accepted English name for Him is Jehovah; you can call Him whatever you like. The whole point is that we do call on Him as our God. I believe His Person is rooted outside our universe.

I believe that all of humanity suffers from a native tendency to ignore our duty to Our Creator. We are born with an instinct to place our own reason above His revelation and refuse to connect back to His divine character that has been woven into all of Creation. I believe that Creation itself calls to us to acknowledge Him as Our Maker and we are unable by ourselves to engage Him as He demands. The initiative for resolving this conflict lies in His hands alone.

I believe that Jesus Christ was His only literal Son and our Savior. Jesus lived without sin by His own Father’s reckoning, utterly fulfilling the purpose of all the Law Covenants. He died unjustly in our place, murdered by human sin and absorbing the penalties for all such sin. He arose literally from death by His own moral authority over life and death. He lives now in another realm of existence so that we can all commune with Him regardless of our space and time limitations. However, we can commune with Him only on the grounds that we embrace His death in our place, and so offer Him the life we have left. I believe that this communion resolves the conflict between us and Our Creator.

I believe that every human soul is designed for redemption but that most simply will not. I am utterly convinced that no living human can comprehend just how it is God chooses and redeems some of us, but that apparently the majority of us will miss out on this gift of grace. Those of us who find ourselves aware of His redemption in our lives owe Him our very existence and so have no other purpose for living in this world other than to reflect His glory. I am utterly certain we cannot possibly comprehend what fate awaits those who die unredeemed.

I believe that someday this whole universe will be redeemed, that our space-time continuum will be utterly changed so that we will be unable to distinguish it from total destruction. The changes will affect both this and the higher realm which is our ultimate destiny, so that they are somehow merged, which is most certainly not the case now. In some sense, it will restore the original design God had for us and all other things.

I believe that our just response to all of this is not found in trying to change this doomed existence, but to change ourselves by His power into the likeness of His Son. We can surely enjoy some measure of His intended peace for us now, because Creation is not fallen, but suffers the limitations of our sinful nature as His stewards of this world. Our struggle to rediscover His glory in us serves to restore some measure of communion with His divine character in Creation, but the broader sweep of human history and human future is not ours to understand fully nor to alter.

(Hint: You could as easily substitute any of the classical Christian Creeds from Church History if they express your beliefs.)

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Between the Lines

Posted on April 4, 2016 by ehurst

Sometimes I cruise the various Christian News sites.

It’s always politics, just a peculiar voting block. Some of the most vicious and spiteful commentary on the planet shows up on those sites. The majority of them oppose Donald Trump. I’m no fan of his but I am really seeing a major hypocrisy about it. The one theme that kept showing up on most of them that mentioned him at all is a professed puzzlement at how he garners so very much support from evangelical voters.

I’d give them a hint, but I sense they are actually lying about it and just looking for an excuse to bully and shame the average evangelical reader. They know why he’s popular: He’s honest. In reading through the Christian oriented news sites, I am struck by the huge number of big names that are wallowing in controversy over deception. There might be a lot of more serious problems, but it’s always involving some level of deception, often simply an attempt to hide the scandals. It’s as if you can’t trust any of them.

So it’s obvious that Trump has their support because he’s apparently honest. So far, there’s no dirt on him that he hasn’t openly admitted. Dirty or not, he seems to be transparent over the very things others try to hide. You know pretty much what you are getting. The one thing we haven’t had in politics so far is people who tend to do what they say or give an awfully good honest explanation of why they failed. I really doubt anyone’s fooled about the shadow government any more, and how the faceless bureaucracy will throttle most of his promises, but he won’t play the game of looking for excuses. He’s not a bureaucrat; he’s not one of Them.

Given the dirty tricks already in play with the GOP, I’m not sure he’s going to win under their banner. Most of them are fully committed to the bureaucratic consensus. They aren’t going to go away because there are so very many of them and the are the real government. Still, it’s just possible that some kind of backlash will arise this summer and the GOP leadership might be forced to stand back and let him win.

Evangelical leadership tends to favor the bureaucracy, too. I could name some bigshot pastors right now who are stupid enough to preach about the evils of supporting Trump in the election. Do you suppose this thing will be nasty enough to contribute to some kind of shaking loose of the churches’ membership?

Sometimes it is such a relief to be away from that crap.

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Bike (Updated)

Posted on April 4, 2016 by ehurst

The mountain bike has been covered. Thank you all for praying with me and God bless the donor. Tomorrow I’ll update this post with a picture of it. Now pray with me that I can find a suitable recipient for the hybrid.

Update: The best deal I could get was online only. Such is life. It should ship to my home in a week or so and I get to assemble it from the crate. Having built a few from scratch, this should be no big deal.

It’s a “GT Adult Ricochet Comp” with 29″ wheels. I’ll have to add a few accessories for the way I ride, but I’ll make a fresh post for all that when I get it. Thanks again for all your prayers.

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A Series on Answering

Posted on April 4, 2016 by ehurst

I think I’m through with writing books for awhile.

I’m not through with writing and teaching, and I’m not through with publishing Bible studies as books, but I can’t find any drive to pull together any more big studies on religion and faith right now. Instead, I’m going to invest more energy in active leadership, guiding this religion/faith into a wider human awareness. Meanwhile, I’d love it if someone else decided it was time to write some books. We really do need others involved in this; that’s the whole point of sharing your religion. If it’s good enough to catch the interest of others and help them find their own sense of peace with God, then at least some of them should contribute to the body of expression in writing. I’m not picking anyone for that task; I’m letting you know that God is already working on somebody somewhere in our parish and you should be ready to see some output with a different name on the cover.

So in the business of leadership, I need to help you all come up with ways to help folks on the outside find a doorway they would recognize as an entrance into this rich faith. We have no intention of trapping anyone, so leaving them to find their own door means they can just as easily take their toys and depart when it’s time for them to move on. We share what we have; we can’t share what we don’t have. Somehow it seems my blather to myself has helped others and a number of you hang around for a long time, so it seemed natural to give structure and call it a virtual parish.

The first order of business is reminding everyone that we don’t match the common definition of a “cult.” You can run a search and get a lot of different answers on how that word is defined. On the one hand, we are very different from the mainstream; we are quite unorthodox in many ways. Whether or not it’s a distortion of the original teachings of Christ will always be subject to debate. On the other hand, we deny being any kind of threat. At least in sociological terms, we don’t qualify as a cult. We don’t have any defined rituals; we don’t withdraw from society and build our own little world with secret symbolism. And I deny being the center of things; I openly invite folks to do their own thing and associate on very broad and open terms.

Indeed, my vision does not depend on others being involved, but it surely welcomes them. It’s what I consider the fundamental nature of moral shepherd-craft. To be honest, I’m lazy and would rather just keep to myself and do what I like to do. But I have to make noise or I’m not doing what I like to do. If my noise answers your need, you are welcome to hang around and absorb all you like. I’m lazy but I’m not a grouch, so if you hang around and bug me with your questions, I’m willing to try answering. The door is open and you can move both ways at your whim. That makes extra work for me, but that’s where the Father kicks in and makes me willing to do it that way. Nobody is trapped and I consciously avoid any of the manipulative strategies to keep people involved.

And God forbid I should ever sound like I’m leeching off your resources to support my lifestyle, particularly a lavish one. I consciously avoid anything that resembles panhandling and begging. If you donate anything, it’s because you have arrived at that sense of obligation on your own. And I’m quick to pass stuff on to others to avoid any entrapping accumulations of material property.

(Quick side-note: It’s a lot safer for me if you donate in kind, because the more money that passes through my PayPal account, the more risk there is I’ll have to file it as income on my taxes. The rules keep changing, and for the worse. I’m currently accumulating the PayPal balance for a good business grade laptop, so if you wish to contribute to some other project — like the mountain bike — make sure you let me know. If you have a laptop or bike that seems to fit my request, just let me know and we can arrange shipping. If you want my current bike once I have a mountain bike, again, let me know. And maybe some day we can talk about a better camera, but I’ve already said enough about mere material stuff. Stuff is just tools for serving and we need to keep the focus on serving.)

But if we have to take a label, “Christian Mysticism” isn’t just a mere label. It implies a lack of strong interest in materialism, among other things. It also should imply a lack of deep concern over a defining theology and structure. That sounds cultic to the mainstream, but I don’t want to waste too much time trying to defend against attacks. I’d rather portray a genuine mystical approach of not worrying too much about anything. But the label “Christian Mystic” is intentionally fuzzy and forces people to think and ask questions.

At that moment when someone asks, I have to gauge how to answer for the context. That means putting a little energy into the awareness of context. I have a small advantage in having been obliged to do public relations in the past, not to mention actually preaching to a diverse and cosmopolitan crowd of folks. I’ve taught in schools where the kids were not just Americans, but Canadians, UK, Israeli, Arab, Dutch and even a smattering of other European backgrounds. Their reactions and questions were very instructive in learning to widen my frame of reference. Still, I suppose I have to admit I don’t feel called to work outside the English language, so that carries some limitations of its own. (If you translate anything I write, you’ll take upon yourself the responsibility for reshaping the words to fit the different context.) The net result is that I strive to widen the context as much as possible within the linguistic and cultural expression that comes with the English language now. Frankly, the Internet itself has made that much easier, because it tends to commoditize cultural expression.

In the next few days I’m going to start posting with more focus on how we should attempt to explain what holds us together as a virtual parish, and what makes this religion different. What do we offer? Why does the world need another religion? That’s what we hope to answer. Please, as always, you have as much part as you want in this. I can’t answer the questions you don’t ask.

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Easter versus Resurrection Sunday

Posted on April 3, 2016 by ehurst

This is a rant.

This is a personal reaction that need not apply to you. The mainstream Western Christian celebration of Resurrection Sunday has worn thin on me, and even the corrective blog posts and articles have gotten trite. Over the years it has gotten so annoying that I took a New Testament option of not celebrating the holiday at all, but celebrating His Resurrection every day (Romans 14:5). But I wanted to wait until it was all past to write about it.

When I was a kid, I knew it was Easter because it was after Christmas and we would all go and buy new dress clothes. Mom and my aunts would buy extra eggs and talk about dying them. Parents would sneak around getting cheap baskets, fake grass and chocolate bunnies.

Do me a favor, would you? If you want to celebrate Easter (the holy day of Oester), go ahead. But don’t squish into it some passing ritual mention of Christ’s Resurrection, okay? Don’t do Easter stuff at church unless you plan to hold a separate ritual event for the Resurrection. That’s pretty much the minimum if you want me involved.

Sometimes Scripture discusses things directly, usually in its own historical context. Sometimes we have to search for clues with fear and trembling that we don’t blaspheme in the process. The Apostles saw nothing wrong with scholarship and expertise in pagan mythology. The knowledge was not a threat; it was a necessity for dealing with the pagans. Not all pagan religion is a threat to faith. Sometimes there are parallels and insights that actually accord with the Bible. A solid majority of the Covenant of Moses reflects common custom and belief among pagans in that part of the world. God chose to use such things where they were consistent with His revelation. If you don’t know that, then be very careful what you advocate as a believer, because you’ll likely come up wrong on a lot of things.

On the other hand, the Apostles flatly warn us against idolatry. They didn’t word it with quite the severity of Moses because Moses is more about symbolism and national identity, while the New Testament presumes no national identity on the same level. It’s more cosmopolitan about things because our identity is rooted consciously above this realm of existence. We understand the symbolism but we strive to see through it to something difficult to put into words. So Paul lays out a basic guideline that you avoid celebrating a pagan deity. Don’t let your pagan friends think you are worshiping their deities. Find some place in your behavior where you draw a line that they will see and recognize. Don’t be a grouch, but don’t be herded into a festival that is blatantly idolatrous. The whole point is distinguish Christ from the rest.

Obviously I reject the legalism you can find on any number of websites about how “evil” it is to celebrate common cultural holidays in any way. Culture is culture and a lot of our pagan Anglo-Saxon legacy is buried under secularism. You can decide for yourself where to draw the line, but in the back of my mind I never forget that decorating Christmas trees is a pagan religious ritual, as is dying eggs and making chocolate hearts. We aren’t the First Century church, but we do well to realize they celebrated Christ’s Resurrection as a fulfillment of Old Testament celebrations, Passover in particular. That Old Testament stuff is not our heritage of culture, but it is our heritage of faith and revelation. It would be far better to create entirely new rituals for our own context.

Take a moment to consider what an awful thing it was that Constantine managed to seduce the Christian leaders of his day. He offered protection from persecution and favorable imperial policy, and even money, to capture them in his very intelligent scheme of making Christianity more like his favored religion of sun worship. He was a Solarian and he paganized the church to some degree. A great deal of Roman Catholic ritual descends from his influence. We struggle today to unravel the garbage he inserted into the Christian religion of his day, and there is room for debate on a lot of specifics.

On the one hand, I am very conscious of the rhythm of life on this planet. We are obliged as humans to recognize the hand of God in that continuing cycle and celebrate the rich provision for life. On the other hand, I tend to flatline the highs and lows of sentiment that other people seem to want for themselves. In my soul, that roller-coaster stuff is a serious problem, so I try to avoid it. That means I am pretty giddy and nutty every day, but I downplay the holiday celebrations. I might use any contextual factor as leverage to prod people into a stronger awareness of God, but I don’t care for Christmas trees, colored eggs and chocolate hearts. Meanwhile, I love coniferous trees in nature, I eat eggs every day, and I love dark chocolate. I am deeply cynical about flag-waving and other kinds of herding activities, but I am a disabled veteran. I am fiercely nonconformist under whatever you see on my exterior. I won’t piss on your parade without very good reason, but if you begin to sound idolatrous, that might provoke me — especially if you try to rope me into your celebration as if it were a moral obligation.

This is why I didn’t post anything specific about Resurrection Sunday.

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For Mankind, Not By Men

Posted on April 3, 2016 by ehurst

On a human level, it has been overwhelming.

Nothing hinders God from redeeming souls; that whole issue is firmly under His control. The context of this discussion never included a worry that folks would end up in Hell because of the problems we face. Further, we have been warned repeatedly in the Bible that we should expect things to get worse as time drags painfully to the final conclusion, an end for which no living human can predict the timing. Religion isn’t about saving souls but laying claim to what comes with salvation. Religion is a human response to a move of His Spirit resurrecting our dead spirits. God’s finger has written into our convictions this one urge: We seek His glory.

The means to that glory is a broad series of tactical questions. The ultimate nature of our warfare is internal. The awareness alone is the flag of victory, so it’s not a question of whether we will win. Once our awareness is awakened; that battle is over. What lies in front of us is the urge to occupy the territory already won. Our problem is not with Creation or the natural world around us, but our fallen nature internally. Nature is just fine; we have to drag our accursed flesh into its place in nature. We have to merge ourselves into the created order, conform to the moral character of God woven into reality.

This is the shape of that nameless and restless urge that drives us until we die. We are bringing to life the Master’s Law in a land that was separated from Him; our souls are that land.

But the undeniable fact of reality is that, as we progress in that mission, God’s glory breaks down resistance in the world around us. If I stand for His divine justice in my soul, the very fabric of reality in my physical home changes. It won’t change the polarity of the electrons in my physical environment, but it adds a presence that was missing and sorely needed. The results would never be so absolute as meets human tests of reason, but very real nonetheless. Satan’s lies begin to lose their grip in the physical vicinity of my residence. Most of the time, that means I’ll be the only one to perceive the change, but often enough it will bring a change others can detect.

The grass outside my window will be greener as an objective fact because I commune with that grass more consistently on the terms my Creator intended. Natural disasters are more likely to pass over us without striking. People who are serious threats to social stability will be more likely to change or be unable to stay. The charged atmosphere of divine justice will change the resonance of the very atmosphere itself. People who reach out to embrace me as kindred souls will receive a share of those things God pours into my life.

If I entangle myself in all those trappings, it will die. If I can keep my eye on the goal of steadily growing in grace, those things will take root and live. Don’t get lost in the context. It is fungible and God can rewrite reality itself on-the-fly. There’s no doubt some of His blessings will be unexpected. My flesh will still tend to register surprises as a bad thing, but my heart knows that the real problem is my expectations, not what God does in comparison to them. I’m training my brain to follow my heart.

I hope you don’t get tired of hearing about how Western Civilization has become the epitome of all that Satan desires to keep us enslaved to his lies. Look around you. This shit is pervasive, a poison that has seeped into everything. How do you oppose a lie that everyone else believes without even being aware that they believe it? A lie so powerful that our natural allies — other Christians — reject us as a threat to their faith? The vast layer of our world’s unconscious assumptions about life itself has turned them against us.

You can use whatever labels you like: neo-cons, bureaucracy, middle-class, materialistic, dehumanized, etc. They are all just single facets on a huge stone of offense. It’s all aimed at killing the connection between the mind and the heart. It’s an attempt to make it impossible to restore that link. Nothing Satan can do is allowed to prevent the heart from awakening; his job is to keep us from connecting to its power. Western Civilization is his greatest achievement in making sure there is no room for such things in human awareness.

But our greatest weapon against that is simply our endeavor to restore it. The mere act of living by the heart softens that massive stone and chips away at its face. So when they try to crush us under the stone, the stone itself is threatened.

Imagine this scene: You are brought before a tribunal of justice for some reason. It is not the justice of God by any means, but some vengeance for offending a very perverted system. Don’t expect any sympathy from the judge. Judges do not get to their position by bucking the system. If the bureaucracy cannot trust this person to represent the perverted values of the soulless system, that person will never be allowed to wear those black robes. The lawyers, guards — everyone in that system has already proven their loyalty to the bureaucracy. Failure to cower will be taken officially as an insult to the system should it turn against you. Never mind whether your mind is pleased with the results of some particular case, the system itself is a lie. God can steer human activities on His own whim, but your escape will be His blessing, not some imaginary justice from the courts. Be gracious and at peace because that’s your only real defense.

And any vestige of belief that the courts are somehow good as protection against evil chaos just shows how far you have to go. The courts are a form of moral chaos in themselves. God’s divine character is excluded by virtue of having been redefined in defiance of His revelation. They imagine they do God’s work but they don’t know Him and would recoil in horror if He ever showed Himself. Theirs is a fig leaf covering from His wrath. Oddly, our heart-led existence in prison would easily find a far more open mission field than in many parts of the world outside such places. Our truth is the answer everyone else is seeking, and the sort of conflict with society that puts people in prison often arises from a sense that things simply are not right, but with no idea how to fix it.

The miracle is that we ourselves have found the path to sanity and peace.

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