WHEN HARVARD REJECTED THE MESSENGER

I don’t know if I would call the good news of the love of God a “magic wand”, but it certainly is a “miraculous cross”, don’t you think?

Shame and ostracizing? I can see how you may be right. We do have to protect ourselves from those unrepentant sinners who would selfishly harm us and those we love. (Maybe we also might not want to pick those who preach hate and vice as our leaders either). However, didn’t Jesus see the unrepentant people as lost sheep to be loved and saved? Besides, I know that I have been selfish and have sinned myself – who do I get to shame for sinning? Who am I so superior to that they only merit my disgust, that they don’t deserve my love?

Your knowledge of the Gospels apparently exceeds my own, but the only people that I remember Jesus shaming were those who thought they were superior to other sinners. Am I right? And if Democrats and Socialists are the tax collectors and prostitutes of our time and the self righteous preachers who are shaming and ostracizing them for not following their idea of the rules are the Pharisees of our day, who do you think Jesus would be hanging out with and who do you think He would by calling hypocrites?

While I appreciate the well meaning lecture on the importance of custom verses the law and I can see some truth in what you say, I don’t think that such simplicity reflects the complexities of the law, of human societies or of human behavior. My knowledge of the law and the Constitution recognizes a complex system where rights and responsibilities are most often ascertained when they conflict with one another. But maybe you have studied it more than I and have discovered some more simple Utopia than I learned about in law school. Good on you! Right now, however, I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m unconvinced.

BTW, Happy New Year! I pray the coming year blesses you and yours with grace and joy.

You seem to do a lot of speaking for Democrats. I can only speak for myself and what I believe to be true.

I went to Mass this morning. You may remember that, as the Feast Day of Blessed Virgin Mary in her aspect as the Mother of God, New Years Day is also a Roman Catholic Holy Day of Obligation.

According to our Parish Priest, aside from being the Mother of God, Mary also holds the title of Queen of Peace. Everything we know about her life tells us that it was one of quiet obedient service and love. As such, Mary exemplifies the consummate peace maker. In so far as we also become such peace makers, perhaps in that way we are all her children with Jesus as the children of God. That seems like a beautiful sentiment to me as what Christians might strive for in the New Year, one inclusive family in the incarnate Christ.

I don’t think that the right to discriminate works well for Christians to spread that peace in a free society. When our religion could use the law to force its dogmas on others, then sure, Christianity spread as a form of nationalist power (the return of which seems to be a nostalgic longing for many on the Right these days). But was that really Christ being spread at the point of a sword, or instead, does real Christianity resemble more the refugee family of Jesus fleeing from Bethlehem to Egypt to Nazareth trying protect a God from that same state religious power that would someday crucify Him?

In modernity in nations such as ours where religion is voluntary, even you have often lamented that Christianity seems to be dying. I’m sure many excuses can explain this apparent decline: consumerism, selfishness, rationalist atheists, pubic schools, even those bedeviled secularist Democrats? I can’t help but think, however, that we Christians have deformed Christ’s message of universal peace and love into something judgmentally excluding, venial and petty, an exclusive country club on a hill where we look down smugly on the sinners who’s peculiar sins we judge somehow more damning than our own. This sounds more like a schadenfreude enjoying the crucifixion than Christ calling at our souls from the cross.

My hope is that we have just begun a new evolution in the Christian faith. This evolution avoids judgementalism and exclusion and moves us toward something more like Jesus as the universal Christ. I think that I am just beginning to understand what that looks like, but I know that it manifests itself in mercy, in compassion, in love, in joyful suffering and yes, in peace. I think that, if we can learn to get over ourselves, this piece of the eternal truth kind of sells itself. It’s the only thing I know that actually gives our suffering meaning. We all crave this bread of life even if we don’t know it, don’t you think? In any event, I’m tired of all the fighting over it, as fighting for peace seems to me to be counterintuitive. People either will be willing to believe this good news or they won’t.

You are very right about one thing, I think – we can’t force anyone to love selflessly. That has to be voluntary and even joyful. The law is not voluntary though and deciding under the law what discrimination is a protected right and what is a right to not be discriminated against I think must seems simple to someone who really wants to discriminate, whether that person claims to be a liberal or a conservative. 😉

As I said, the conflict of rights and responsibilities that must be decided at law is very simply decided . . . for the bigot who wishes to discriminate. For judges balancing rights and responsibilities in a free society living under the law and the Constitution, I can assure that it gets more complicated. However, I have no problem if things are as simple as they can be.

“ God judges sinners, and those who don’t repent and accept Christ as their Savior will not be saved.”

Perhaps a merciful God does judge who is saved and who is not, but I don’t think I get to decide these things for God, do you? I don’t think I get to damn, exclude or judge anyone from salvation, even if by my rules he seems beyond redemption. I believe that Jesus asked us to dynamically love our neighbors, even our enemies, whether they are repentant or not. I know, this seems utterly impractical, even stupid, yes, even impossible, but then again, it seems equally stupid to sacrifice oneself on a cross for the just the people who put you there, now doesn’t it?

“My brothers, my sisters, God has called me to walk in the way of humility, and showed me the way of simplicity. . . . The Lord has shown me that he wants me to be a new kind of fool in the world, and God does not want to lead us by any other knowledge than that.” —Francis of Assisi

My wife and I have numerous gay friends who we love dearly. Some of them have gotten married. One of those is even a retired pastor. You believe God wants me to shun these friends and not recognize their love. You think that I should ostracize them because you don’t personally understand the logic of their love. I know that you think that the whole country is somehow discriminating against your religious right to shun these beautiful images of God, and I get the need for you to have that kind of freedom to judge them. I also get how they might be tired of being senselessly hurt and discriminated against by people who claim that an all loving and all merciful God wants them to proclaim their superiority over certain other sinners. The difficulty here is that you see them as an affront to you for just existing and being what they are while, they, by comparison, are actually not trying to hurt you at all, except perhaps your right for your outdated taboos not to be affronted.

I say it again, this is only a simple problem if only one side’s bigotry is considered. But Jesus never said that His love and His compassion was easy or simple in practice, did He?

You imagine that the harm of two people living together in a loving same sex marriage is the equivalent to committing suicide, and robbing banks? Sounds a bit like you a catastrophizing? When you have to resort to getting this over-the-top to pretend that you are harmed, then it may be good time to rethink the morality of your angry stance. It sounds very much like the end of the world panicking that some folks predicted if black and whites were allowed to work together, school, together, eat together and worst of all, have sex together.

There were gay people at the time of Jesus. If it really rated as a sin up there with murder and grand larceny, you’d think Jesus would have mentioned it at least one, but He didn’t did He? Instead Jesus attributed sin, not to arcane customs and taboos (like pork eating and Circumcision), but instead to our failure the failure to love as we should. This was the ultimate source of all the laws and all the teachings of the Prophets, Jesus told us.

Jesus is often depicted rather androgynously. Perhaps this is because we instinctively recognize something holy in the mix of sexual identity. I saw an amazing fish on a nature show the other night. It spends its whole like as a female being impregnated by the larger males and giving birth. However, some of the females, if they get large enough, will hide and transform themselves into males. In other words, every male was at one time a female.

An infinite God provides a diversity of life that can forever astound our imagination. The most astounding thing to me about being a Christian believer trying to live in constant awe and wonder at God and His/Her creation is that all of us are not constantly more astounded. But you know for certain what kind of exclusive sex the Christ incarnate, the infinite Alpha and the Omega of all things, prefers. Pshaw!

Reality? Tom, that ship has sailed. You sound like the person who continues to claim the Sun actually spins about the Earth long after it was shown that the Earth actually spins on its axis, and as proof, in disbelief you keep chanting like a mantra: “sunrise”, “sunset”, “sunrise”, “sunset” . . . .

As for your quote from Mathew, I heard Jesus condemning divorce, but strangely, as upset as you are about someone else’s legal marriage contract that you aren’t involved in, you are not religiously affronted about having to recognize someone else’s divorce. For example, not once have I heard you complain that Melania is not the “real” First Lady. But you don’t see any contradiction in this selective busybodiness, do you?

“The entire Bible is the Word of God, not just what the Bible’s record of Jesus’ words. If you are a Red Letter Christian, that’s ridiculous.“

Like you, I’m just trying to follow the Word and example of Jesus as best that I can. Is Jesus just another Prophet in a chain of Prophets? Or rather, was Jesus far more transformative, evolutionary and transcending? Did His Word simply compliment and fulfill the Covenant that came before? Or should we recognize a dividing line, a New Covenant, where Christ perfectly defines, explains, completes and climaxes all of God’s Word that came before, indeed to the point that everything in the Old Testament only makes any sense to Christians if we see it through the profound lens that is the Word, the Life, the example, the Sacrificial Crucifixion and the glorious Resurrection of Jesus the Christ?

To my small understanding of this, Jesus’ incarnation is the apex of a mountain from which we meekly try to survey His presence in the entirety of existence, and He has told us that we can only interpret His presence in existence through Him, with Him and in Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit with God’s love and God’s grace. If we want knowledge of God, including God’s Word throughout scripture, I believe this practice and prayer is the way, the truth and the light, a truth that is in and beyond every moment of time.

You know that the truth of the scriptures l is multilayered far beyond the literal and it is also, as you have said, evolutionary, in that it is given for the limited understanding of the people of that time and place and culture. Unlike those who knew only the Old Testament, we now and for two thousand years have had the privilege of the living Word and example Christ incarnate in Jesus. We Christians are now, and unfortunately have been throughout the Centuries, fools not to see EVERYTHING in the Light of His Eternal Truth, and yet over and over again we choose to stumble around in the darkness of those poor pharisaic lawyers who sought to challenge the fulfillment of the Law who was also our Savior from Law with their small misunderstanding of the Law. After thousands of years Paul keeps explaining this over and over to us, but the message frightens us so we cling to a false certainty, miniaturize an infinite God to a sex and size that is less than infinitely mysterious, and close our ears, and then we schism and war over silly dogmas and doctrinal minutia at the expense of the Almighty love He/She/YWH offers us.

BYW, what color letter do you label a Christian who sacrifices the Jesus of the New Testamen again and again for the sake of an arcane understanding of the Old Testament?
🙃

“If you are going to use the government to sanction same-sex “marriage” and force everyone to accept it, then you are the one claiming a certainty. Yet out of the other side of your mouth you are claiming we cannot be certain. That’s logical? Don’t think so. Arrogant, maybe.”

Stifle your tribalism with a dose of reality please. “I” used “my” government? I suppose if I thought I did it alone then that would be arrogant. If I’m stuck with Trump as “my” President, then you are stuck with the rest of “your” government too. This movement started in the states and ended in a Republican Supreme Court. As one lowly citizen in a constitutional republic, “I” had about as much to do with gay marriage being the law of the land as you did. As a straight married Catholic dude, it neither helps me nor hurts me, but I have no problem with it. My view, a view held by most Western Catholics and Christians, is that this does more to fulfill Gods message of love than to hurt it, but, unlike you, I don’t claim to speak for an infinite God on His/Her/YWH’s sexual preferences – the whole concept seems presumptuously and preposterously arrogant to me, even humorously so. 😆