We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Our now-retired pastor was always attentive to angels in our midst. Angels, with the meaning of messengers with holy messages. You can also always wonder about Christ in the Stranger’s Guise.
…in a culture of abundance and affordable luxury, bodily self-abnegation no longer retains this primeval horror. Rather, the twenty-first-century middle-class American must actively labor not to become fat. Thus eating becomes moralized behavior. How often have you heard a woman describe a rich dessert as “sinful”? To eat is to sin—in secular society, the body replaces the soul. Good and evil are no longer purely spiritual concepts—these words have been transubstantiated into the realm of the flesh.
A terrible storm came into a town and local officials sent out an emergency warning that the riverbanks would soon overflow and flood the nearby homes. They ordered everyone in the town to evacuate immediately.
A faithful Christian man heard the warning and decided to stay, saying to himself, “I will trust God and if I am in danger, then God will send a divine miracle to save me.”
The neighbors came by his house and said to him, “We’re leaving and there is room for you in our car, please come with us!” But the man declined. “I have faith that God will save me.”
As the man stood on his porch watching the water rise up the steps, a man in a canoe paddled by and called to him, “Hurry and come into my canoe, the waters are rising quickly!” But the man again said, “No thanks, God will save me.”
The floodwaters rose higher pouring water into his living room and the man had to retreat to the second floor. A police motorboat came by and saw him at the window. “We will come up and rescue you!” they shouted. But the man refused, waving them off saying, “Use your time to save someone else! I have faith that God will save me!”
The flood waters rose higher and higher and the man had to climb up to his rooftop.
A helicopter spotted him and dropped a rope ladder. A rescue officer came down the ladder and pleaded with the man, "Grab my hand and I will pull you up!" But the man STILL refused, folding his arms tightly to his body. “No thank you! God will save me!”
Shortly after, the house broke up and the floodwaters swept the man away and he drowned.
When in Heaven, the man stood before God and asked, “I put all of my faith in You. Why didn’t You come and save me?”
And God said, “Son, I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What more were you looking for?”
Passion, lust, desire, romantic enchantment are obviously the most powerful human human qualities. Forms of natural intoxication, the older folks say. To paraphrase the apocryphal Washington quote, they can be a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Also, a source of joy and deep contentment.
The classical scholar Bruce Thornton concludes that the ancient Greeks had an “overwhelmingly dark view of sexuality,” adding that “our own Romantic-inspired idealizations of sexuality as a force of personal liberation and self-fulfillment would strike most Greeks as a dangerous folly and delusion.” We can see an instance of their fears in the well-known story of Helen, a daughter of Aphrodite, in which the city of Troy was laid waste as the consequence of illicit sexual passion. Very sensibly, the pre-Christian Greeks believed that sex needed to be controlled in various social institutions. Rejecting such wisdom, we moderns “continue to cling to shopworn Romanticism that idealizes sexual passion and justifies abandoning the time-honored social controls -- marriage and chastity, guilt and shame -- that once helped to prevent sexual excesses from destroying American society,” in Thornton’s verdict.
The story of the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, is the story of how Mordechai, the descendant of the first Jewish king of Israel, snubbed the Grand Vizier of a multicultural empire by refusing to bow to him. The obstinate Benjaminite so infuriated the Vizier that he plotted to kill all the Jews.
The smart thing to do would have been to bow to Haman. To invite him to AIPAC and let him give a pre-written speech and then give him a standing ovation. Then the important official might have been willing to help out the struggling Jews of the Second Commonwealth in Israel. Instead the narrow-minded fanatic offended Haman. And the angry Agagite decides to strangle the newly reborn Second Commonwealth of Israel and all the other Jews throughout the Persian Empire...
Addendum: After reading this essay for the third time, I hear/see the historical idea of Christians, "in the world, but not of it."The Christian sees himself as a sojourner, a Pilgrim, through time too. Empires and nations come and go.
In Sushan, the wine is plentiful, the bazaars are never closed and the empire will never fall.
Instead of joining one of our church's Lenten small groups this year, I plan to simply study this book as a daily discipline: Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches
It's as much an RC theological treatise as it is an historical/architectural text.
Dr. Lawrence M. Principe is Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Principe earned a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the University of Delaware. He also holds two doctorates: a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, the Carnegie Foundation chose Professor Principe as the Maryland Professor of the Year, and in 1998 he received the Templeton Foundation's award for courses dealing with science and religion. Johns Hopkins has repeatedly recognized Professor Principe's teaching achievements. He has won its Distinguished Faculty Award, the Excellence in Teaching Award, and the George Owen Teaching Award. In 2004, Professor Principe was awarded the first Francis Bacon Prize by the California Institute of Technology, awarded to an outstanding scholar whose work has had substantial impact on the history of science, the history of technology, or historically-engaged philosophy of science. Professor Principe has published numerous papers and is the author or coauthor of three books, including The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest.
I'm impressed. He is a young fellow too. With 20+ more IQ points, I could have enjoyed his stellar career.
Most sermons I hear are pretty good. Some are more on the intellectual, apologist side; some more spirit-soaked and uplifting. All good, but all mainly addressed to the converted. (In my view, to become a capital-C Christian one must become a convert regardless of how raised. Some term it "re-born," which is an ok term.)
Jesus didn’t come because humans had somehow missed the point of moral teaching and needed to be set right on a few points and given some inspirational coaching. He didn’t come to do TED talks. He came, the gospel writers believed, because history revealed the failure of the ‘moral approach’ to the problem of evil, and God decided that something more and something different needed to be done.
I recommend it especially to non-Christians and to the Christ-curious, but it refreshed my mind in a good way too.
Readers know that, at Maggie's Farm, we delight in both the religious and the secular hedonistic aspects of Advent and Christmas.
The hedonistic, fun aspects of the season are residues of the Roman Saturnalia. At Maggie's, we love our invitations to Christmas cocktail parties. The fathers of the church were clever to recycle popular pagan feast days by pinning Christian feast days on top of them (eg Easter, Christmas).
Our Puritan New England ancestors hated Christmas and banned its celebration for many years. Pagan and Papist.
The best Advent sermon I ever heard was preached by a lady pastor. She used the metaphor of pregnancy - "expecting" - for the possibility of Christ's spirit growing in our hearts and the expectation of that miracle.
On the topic of birth and re-birth, I still feel that A Christmas Carol combines the religious joy and the secular pleasures of Christmas better than anything else. Scrooge becomes a re-born Christian and experiences all of the emotional turmoil and joys of it. Psychoanalysis before it existed.
Of course Dickens' short novel is worth reading, but the only version worth watching is the 1951 Alastair Sim version. It is better than the Dickens.
Whether Jewish, Moslem, Christian, Hindu, atheist, or whatever, if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye you are probably subhuman.
We should air-drop dvds of it across Islam, including Euroland. Might do them some good.
This year’s calendar offers a way to think about two important dates in Judaism, the birth of today’s Israel and Chanukah. The two dates represent the importance of struggle to accomplish a Jewish state as well as the struggle to deserve a Jewish state.
Four days after I was born, the modern state of Israel was ratified by the United Nations partition vote on November 29, 1947. Here’s a video recollection.
In the video, a commenter says that with the UN resolution Jews were no longer the object of history, acted upon by others, but the subject, taking control over their own fate. Divine intervention may have helped but it was the struggles of man that fulfilled the two-millennia of prayers.
A humorous take is that at the beginning of a year G-d tells a pious man he will be rewarded by winning the lottery before year end. Months pass and come late December the pious man asks of G-d why he hasn’t won yet. The response: “Meet me halfway, buy a ticket.”
The creation of modern Israel is when Jews got the message.Similarly, the two books of Macabbees on the origin of Chanukah offer contrasts between struggles of man and divine intervention. The first book is a fairly straight-forward reputable history. The second book contains more of the divine. (Here’s an analysis of the books of Maccabees, and theories of why they are not included in the Jewish bible.)
Maccabees (left); Hasmonean Kingdom 140-37 BC (right)
The most accepted theory of why the books of Maccabees are not included in the Jewish bible is that the Maccabee Hasmonean dynasty was not of the house of David and that it was itself later corrupted by Hellenism, due to its failure to live up to its nationalistic founding, and because the Jewish bible’s canonizers avoided provoking the Romans after their destruction of Israel, murder of as many Jews as they could and the dispersal of Jews to relative refuge elsewhere.
With the creation of modern Israel, as well as Jews promoting Chanukah as a counter to the lures upon their young of Christmas festivities, Chanukah has risen from a minor to a major Jewish holiday and the books of Maccabees are read more often.
The same tensions exist for modern Israel as for the Hasmonean and succeeding Herodian and diaspora era Jews.
To what extent is the influence or antipathy of other powerful states to be accommodated or resisted? To what extent can the core nature of the Jewish state be compromised? To what extent are the survival of the state of Israel and the fate of Jews in their own hands?
History and current events are why the original Maccabees are today’s models. Those, within or outside, who counsel surrender of vital interests or defeatism would bring upon Israel and Jews another diaspora, at best, and another likely slaughter.
Pastor preached this morning on the loaves and the fishes and the hungry heart, advising something like this: Whenever you desire anything - food, love, material things, personal importance or glory, amusement, money, beauty, power, relationships, etc., just stop for a minute and ask yourself whether you are just trying to fill the hole in the soul that only God is big enough to fill with the bread of the Spirit.
He could have stopped right there. I have preached the same idea to myself many times. I will tell Pastor that I frequently desire sex, and I know in advance what he will say: "Me too."
Indeed, not all desire is desire for God. Just asking the question is enough, for us mortals. Humans are full of desires and subject to pointless temptations and wonderful desires. Shrinks would pose a similar question, but in a secular format. Pastors pay attention to false idols, and shrinks look for displacements.
The Jewish High Holy Days, the Days of Awe or the Days of Repentance as they are often called, begins tonight with Rosh Hashanah and ends in ten days with Yom Kippur. Compared to other Jewish holidays full of joy and laughs, these are somber days during which our deeds are weighed and our fate sealed for the coming year. G-d weighs our measure in fulfilling our responsibilities to G-d. Others weigh our measure in how we behave to them, and for those we have harmed will our confessions to them, our entreaties for forgiveness, and demonstrations of living better be considered real. Words alone are far from enough. Our actions are necessary in how we live.
We draw inspiration from G-d, and we draw upon our decency and learning to behave in a just way.
The traditional Jewish egg bread, the challah, is usually an elongated braided loaf for the Sabbath. On Rosh Hashanah we bake the challah in a circlular braid, symbolizing the crown of G-d our King and our reverence to G-d's commandments. Many centuries of experience across lands and cultures have proven them to work and be best. We dip apple slices and challah in honey to symbolize our hopes and wishes for a sweet new year to come.
There are many prayers of public confession and begging for forgiveness from G-d and from our fellow beings. Most are ancient and carry special meanings and messages. Some are more recent, or annotated, to help deliver relevant meaning to the reader or listener. There are personal prayers for our own improvement. Most come down to the basic asking G-d to help us find the strength within to do what's right. It is our responsibility to reach down deep and live up to our better self. That is my daily prayer, and it works.
Whether Jewish or other, may the coming year be one of living better.
Most sermons I hear are pretty good. Some are more on the intellectual, apologist side; some more spirit-soaked and uplifting. All good, but all mainly addressed to the converted. (In my view, to become a capital-C Christian one must become a convert regardless of how raised. Some term it "re-born," which is an ok term.)
Readers know that, at Maggie's Farm, we delight in both the religious and the secular hedonistic aspects of Advent and Christmas. 
The creation of modern Israel is when Jews got the message.
From Vanderleun, 
Pastor preached this morning on the loaves and the fishes and the hungry heart, advising something like this: Whenever you desire anything - food, love, material things, personal importance or glory, amusement, money, beauty, power, relationships, etc., just stop for a minute and ask yourself whether you are just trying to fill the hole in the soul that only God is big enough to fill with the bread of the Spirit.
The Jewish High Holy Days, the Days of Awe or the Days of Repentance as they are often called, begins tonight with Rosh Hashanah and ends in ten days with Yom Kippur. Compared to other Jewish holidays full of joy and laughs, these are somber days during which our deeds are weighed and our fate sealed for the coming year. G-d weighs our measure in fulfilling our responsibilities to G-d. Others weigh our measure in how we behave to them, and for those we have harmed will our confessions to them, our entreaties for forgiveness, and demonstrations of living better be considered real. Words alone are far from enough. Our actions are necessary in how we live.