Maggie's Farm

Good dog for bringing this piece to our attention. This was what I sniffed around mainly in seminary. And was mightily unpopular for it as people generally preferred sunny or at least sun just breaking thru the clouds sermons from a certain beloved preacher we both know.

What about Mark's gospel, where continually Jesus is continually telling a few but keeping the multitudes in ignorance? Why not reveal his truth to all?

It is staggering the Noah and the Ark is such a favorite for Sunday School. A vicious story from beginning to end. I have taught Sunday school for 26 years and you can always tell the brightest, most loving kids in the classs: they are the ones in tears over the plight of the drowned people and animals, the most afraid that God will do the same to them. And no frigging rainbow will reassure them. The entire Old Testament is a record of an out of control, mysterious God making weal and woe. Definitely to be feared.

For some reason, it doesn't unduly faze me. Perhaps I am not the brightest bulb in the box? Or perhaps it's because I was in my mother's first litter, and she weaned me early to go off running off and start her next litter. So I know about abandoment, longing, cold, etc.

The best thing after pure entertainment value of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark was its capturing so vividly the idea that the power of God is to be feared, and never to be appropriated for sinful human political purposes.

Another good writer I go back to each Lent is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose idea of cheap grace in "The Cost of Discipleship" bears pondering and pondering in the lovely warm coziness of a loving American church (for which shelter I daily thank God)

I know that I am a rotten advertisement for a God perceived solely as a cheerleader and comfortern (the Harold Kushner perversion of the solution to the problem of evil. Remember, if my God is all good and all powerful how can he allow bad things to happen to good people). But what if worshipping God were something we were meant to do in fear and trembling. Then religion would not be all the realm of the popular girls and the handsome jocks. It would be something to be worked out earnestly, falteringly, yet faithfully. Like our Puritan ancestors defying the power of the Crown on those soggy, depressing fens of East Anglia. Certain to fail yet they could do no other--they had to obey a Higher Master who would not be denied.