Linkathon!

victorious says:

Roger Olson’s experience of sadness to the point of despair when it comes to Post Constantinian and Augustinian Christian ethics moved me even further to embrace and live and disciple others in the way of Jesus embedded in the Sermon on the Mount. No matter what temporal cost and pain I need to trade for it.

Zachary Uram says:

Trump’s gospel is me me me!!! He and his children are not believers!!

Em says:

TNV, your mother sounds like mine. However, mine would have been looking for expensive clothes…..

Em says:

Trump Jr. has no real understanding of what a Christian life is….. ” has gotten us nothing?”
Yes, it hasn’t gotten us anything temporal. His focus is political and his goal is, obviously, to get power….. Turning the other cheek goes right along with my kingdom is not of this world or my followers would fight.
Wait till Jesus. returns to set up His kingdom. There’ll be a short battle. But a big victory for our Lord!
Pray for the Trumps….

Em says:

So?
Is praying for the Trump family wrong?
Is praying for Joe Biden wrong?
They ARE in positions of authority……
For their souls AND for their respect for the Church? Wrong?
Hmmmm
God keeo

Xenia says:

Trump is no longer in a position of authority. Pray for his salvation, if you are so inclined.

The scriptures tell us to pray for our leaders, so over here we mention the President, the governor, and the mayor in our prayers. We also pray for our church leaders. Other than meeting that modest requirement, the list of people we actually know- friends, neighbors, relatives, church folk, etc.- is long enough without adding people we don’t even know. So if God inspires you to pray for Trump and his family, and Biden’s family, too, go for it!

Em says:

Are the Protestant churches political? They never were…. But I am isolated up here in the mountains now
Hmmmm
And, yes, Xenia, I do pray as God leads me…. Right now the list is long up here also. Trump may not be in a position of authority now, but we still have folk who look to him for leadership. So? So yes I will pray for him as I pray against what I see as those who want to destroy our democratic Republic.
But history does cycle, doesn’t it – fascinating study
God keep

Dread says:

Trump causes y’all to forget which kingdom you belong to…

I know the owners of the space, even blog-space, make the rules

That’s how kingdoms work.

I don’t mind it… I think the talk is necessary but when you don’t like how it sounds you do shut it down with high sounding pontificating and demeaning scorn.

Linn says:

i missed the post last night after I processed that I may have been exposed to COVID at a breakfast with one friend yesterday, outdoors, masked up when we weren’t eating. She found out that she had been exposed at church Sunday, and was nice enough to let me know. So, if she tests positive today, my rapid test (which the school gave to everyone to take on Saturday) will come out early. But, I am sure we will all have such stories before the pandemic is over given so many are ill.

But, as to the Trumps–I always knew they weren’t Christians and I despised Sr ever since i learned he didn’t rent to Blacks back in the 70s and the way he conducted himself on “The Apprentice.” I never understood why faithful Christians I’ve known for so many years swallowed his particular brand of KoolAid. I will confess to loathing Sr almost as much as I loathed Nixon back in the day. And Jr isn’t in good standing in my mind, either.

BUT (and it’s the big one-my students always laugh when I say that), there are those verses that tell us to pray for our leaders. I don’t think the Roman emperors were particularly nice people, the Herods were collectively awful (except for the one mentioned in an NT epistle that seems to have converted), and Daniel got along with some pretty evil kings, even praying for their welfare. So, I do pray for those in power, that God would use them to provide some stability to the country and that I would learn to be respectful, even if I don’t like them.

My two cents for the day. I’m lying low until I get a phone call that says my friend is in the clear. I’m actually more concerned about her with COVID as she just finished a round of final cancer treatment, and her immune system is not real good at the moment.

Pineapple Head says:

Yeah, I had to respect Beth’s sincerity, resolve and courage. I hope her venture into the Anglican world will positively shape her.

Linn says:

Em,
Respectfully submitted, I was in a church for several years where the pastor turned out to be a serial adulterer, and was allowed to leave quietly and go on to serve in another church because the board didn’t want to deal with it. I am very circumspect with church leaders, too. I like to belong to a church where there is a strong elder board (deacon board, session, take your pick) that is not dominated by the pastor. in my current church, the elders have the ability to fire a pastor for “egregious sin”, and they have done it once in the 20 years i have been there. The details came out after the letter of resignation went out, but they did a good thing for the church. Any kind of institutional power can make some people think much more of themselves than they should.

josh hamrick says:

Conservative Christians told me my whole life that character matters.

Those exact same people are still arguing in favor of Trump.

No integrity. I gotta get out.

Linn says:

bob1-I have a habit of praying for whoever is in power, partly after living for 7 years in a country where you couldn’t trust (pretty much) anyone associated with the government. But, Scripture says to pray, and I did. Many times, God arranged what appeared to me to be impossible situations using people i personally wouldn’t have trusted, but they were the people there to help.

Officerhoppy says:

Donald Trump is why I left the Republican Party.

Dread says:

37 mentions of Trump on this thread
2 of Biden
11 of Jesus
41 of church

It doesn’t mean much but I intrigued me so I checked

Babylon's Dread says:

As a very jaded believer thus probably qualifying as a cynic I would tell the author that cynicism has a serious correlation to actual deceit. Not the self deceit of the cynic though that is likely present… they cynicism that comes from lies, shaped narratives, exaggerations, and very intentional deception. We are the object of unceasing lies in the 21st century. Surely this is the vomit from the mouth of the dragon sent to drown the children of the woman in the imagery of the apocalypse No not that literal reference but its cognate.

Cynicism is the honest outcome of hitting more barriers than a maximum security prisoner. We are deluged in flames of thousand fires of hell.

Yes cynicism is my companion in 2021… childlikeness? Now that’s a stranger but I know how to partner with people who have it.

I am also grumpy as a rattlesnake on busy street. No excuses but my second bout with Covid19 has me … it isn’t bad… but it isn’t good. And yes go get those shots. In public health authorities have lied to us more than a carnie hustler but the math is still in favor of those jabs.

Officerhoppy says:

Read this by rabbi Lord Jonathon Sachs. Thought it was a thought provoking approach to the issue of freewill:

Freewill
Vaera
The question is ancient. If God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then it was God who made Pharaoh refuse to let the Israelites go, not Pharaoh himself. How can this be just? How could it be right to punish Pharaoh and his people for a decision – a series of decisions – that were not made freely? Punishment presupposes guilt. Guilt presupposes responsibility. Responsibility presupposes freedom. We do not blame weights for falling, or the sun for shining. Natural forces are not choices made by reflecting on alternatives. Homo sapiens alone is free. Take away that freedom and you take away our humanity. How then can it say, as it does in our parsha (Ex. 7:3) that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart?
All the commentators are exercised by this question. Maimonides and others note a striking feature of the narrative: For the first five plagues we read that Pharaoh himself hardened his heart. Only later, during the last five plagues, do we read about God doing so. The conclusion they draw therefore is that the last five plagues were therefore a punishment for the first five refusals, freely made by Pharaoh himself.
A second approach, in precisely the opposite direction, is that during the last five plagues God intervened not to harden but to strengthen Pharaoh’s heart. He acted to ensure that Pharaoh kept his freedom and did not lose his resolve. Such was the impact of the plagues that in the normal course of events a national leader would have no choice but to give in to a superior force. As Pharaoh’s own advisers said before the eighth plague, “Do you not yet realise that Egypt is destroyed?” (Ex. 10:7) To give in at that point would have been action under duress, not a genuine change of heart. Such is the approach of Yosef Albo and Ovadiah Sforno.
Freewill 1 Vaera

A third approach calls into question the very meaning of the phrase, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” In a profound sense God, Author of history, is behind every event, every act, every gust of wind that blows, every drop of rain that falls. Normally however we do not attribute human action to God. We are what we are because that is how we have chosen to be, even if this was written long before in the Divine script for humankind. What do we attribute to an act of God? Something that is unusual, falling so far outside the norms of human behaviour that we find it hard to explain in any way other than to say, surely this happened for a purpose.
God Himself says about Pharaoh’s obstinacy that it allowed Him to demonstrate to all humanity that even the greatest empire is powerless against the hand of Heaven (Ex. 7:5; 14:18). Pharaoh acted freely, but his last refusals were so strange that it was obvious to everyone that God had anticipated this. It was predictable, part of the script. God had actually disclosed this to Abraham centuries earlier when He told him in a fearful vision that his descendants would be strangers in a land not theirs (Gen. 15:13-14).
These are all interesting and plausible interpretations. It seems to me, though, that the Torah is telling a deeper story, one that never loses its relevance. Philosophers and scientists have tended to think in terms of abstractions and universals. Some have concluded that we have freewill, others that we don’t. There is no conceptual space in between.
In life, however, that is not the way freedom works at all. Consider addiction: The first few times someone gambles or drinks alcohol or takes drugs, they may do so freely, knowing the risks but ignoring them. Time goes on and their dependency increases until the craving is so intense that they are almost powerless to resist it. At a certain point they may have to go into rehabilitation. They no longer have the ability to stop without external support. As the Talmud says, “A prisoner cannot release himself from prison.” (Brachot 5b)
Addiction is a physical phenomenon, but there are moral equivalents. For example, suppose on one significant occasion you tell a lie. People now believe something about you that is not true. As they question you about it, or it comes up in conversation, you find yourself having to tell more lies to support the first. “Oh what a tangled web we
weave,” Sir Walter Scott famously said, “when first we practise to
deceive.”
That is as far as individuals are concerned. When it comes
to organisations, the risk is even greater. Let us say that a senior
member of staff has made a costly mistake that, if exposed, threatens the entire future of the company. They will make an attempt to cover it up. To do so they must enlist the help of others, who become co-conspirators. As the circle of deception widens, it becomes part of the corporate culture, making it ever more difficult for honest people within the organisation to resist or protest. It then needs the rare courage of a whistle-blower to expose and halt the deception. There have been many such stories in recent years.
Freewill 2 Vaera
“We lose our freedom gradually, often without
noticing it.”

Within nations, especially non-democratic ones, the risk is higher still. In commercial enterprises, losses can be quantified. Someone somewhere knows how much has been lost, how many debts have been concealed and where. In politics, there may be no such objective test. It is easy to claim that a policy is working and explain away apparent counter-indicators. A narrative emerges and becomes the received wisdom. Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, is the classic parable of this phenomenon. A child sees the truth and in innocence blurts it out, breaking the conspiracy of silence on the part of the
monarch’s counsellors and townspeople.
We lose our freedom gradually, often without
noticing it. That is what the Torah has been implying almost
from the beginning. The classic statement of freewill
appears in the story of Cain and Abel. Seeing that Cain is
angry that his offering has not found favour, God says to
him: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7). The maintenance of freewill, especially in a state of high emotion like anger, needs willpower. As we have noted before in these studies, what Daniel Goleman calls an ‘amygdala hijack’ can occur in which instinctive reaction takes the place of reflective decision and we do things that are harmful to us as well as to others. That is the emotional threat to freedom.
Then there is a social threat. After the Holocaust, a number of path-breaking experiments were undertaken to judge the power of conformism and obedience to authority. Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in which eight people were gathered in a room and were shown a line, then asked which of three others was the same length. Unknown to the eighth person, the seven others were associates of the experimenter and were following his instructions. On a number of occasions the seven conspirators gave an answer that was clearly false, yet in 75 per cent of cases the eighth person was willing to agree with them and give an answer he knew to be false.
Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that ordinary individuals were willing to inflict what appeared to be devastatingly painful electric shocks on someone in an adjacent room when instructed to do so by an authority figure, the experimenter. The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, divided participants into the roles of prisoners and guards. Within days the ‘guards’ were acting cruelly and in some cases abusively toward the prisoners and the experiment, planned to last a fortnight, had to be called off after six days.
The power of conformism, as these experiments showed, is immense. That, I believe, is why Abraham was told to leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house. These are the three factors – culture, community and early childhood – that circumscribe our freedom. Jews through the ages have been in but not of society. To be a Jew means keeping a calibrated distance from the age and its idols. Freedom needs time to make reflective decisions and distance so as not to be lulled into conformity.
Freewill 3 Vaera
“Freedom needs time to make reflective decisions and distance so as not to be lulled into conformity.”

Most tragically, there is the moral threat. We sometimes forget, or don’t even know, that the conditions of slavery the Israelites experienced in Egypt were often enough felt by Egyptians themselves over many generations. The great pyramid of Giza, built more than a thousand years before the Exodus, before even the birth of Abraham, reduced much of Egypt to a slave labour colony for twenty years. When life becomes cheap and people are seen as a means not an end, when the worst excesses are excused in the name of tradition and rulers have absolute power, then conscience is eroded and freedom lost because the culture has created insulated space in which the cry of the oppressed can no longer be heard.
That is what the Torah means when it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Enslaving others, Pharaoh himself became enslaved. He became a prisoner of the values he himself had espoused. Freedom in the deepest sense, the freedom to do the right and the good, is not a given. We acquire it, or lose it, gradually. In the end tyrants bring about their own destruction, whereas those with willpower, courage, and the willingness to go against the consensus, acquire a monumental freedom. That is what Judaism is: an invitation to freedom by resisting the idols and siren calls of the age.

Thoughts?

Pineapple Head says:

Just to keep the JMPBP (Jesus mentions per blog post 😉 ) up a bit, this is what I blogged this morning:

As a old year comes to a close, and a new year awaits, many people will be thinking about making resolutions.

Resolutions to eat better.

Resolutions to get fit.

Resolutions to change jobs.

Resolutions to heal relationships.

All good things!

The world only gets better when we seek to make our life more healthy and productive.

But of all the resolutions we can come up with, I believe one matters more than others.

It’s this: resolve to truly follow Jesus in 2022.

Learn what Jesus taught and resolve to practice his teachings.

Study how Jesus lived and resolve to live a life that matches his example.

Determine to stay close to Jesus, whatever the coming year throws at you.

Jesus once said something to this effect: “Seek first the kingdom and righteousness of God, and everything else will fall into place.”

This doesn’t mean that following Jesus necessarily makes the path smoother.

What it means is no matter what the path looks like, we will most likely navigate it way better than if we tried to go on our own.

Most New Year’s resolutions have us trying harder to do better.

But the resolution to follow Jesus is one rooted in restful faith and patient trust.

Follow Jesus.

He’ll make your paths straight.

He’ll make your life matter.

And when 2022 comes to a close, my hunch is you will be able to look back on a year of faithfulness and fruitfulness.

Officerhoppy says:

Piney
Nice post. But I have a serious question. I agree with what you said but are there any boundaries in following Jesus? Can a follower of Jesus say “you behavior is unacceptable. If so! Which kind? Or does following Jesus mean, the jesus you follow is different than the one I deduce from scripture but that’s ok. Know what I mean?

Officerhoppy says:

Thanks my friend!

Em says:

Good words @ 4:10,
Pineapple, good words.. IMHO

Babylon's Dread says:

Thanks everyone

I am recovering… this new variant may be way forward …pray indeed

pstrmike says:

“moving into another dark age.”

so be it.

The Middle Ages had many deep spiritual voices that could speak into our times today and perhaps address some of the longing that has been expressed here. Benedict (depending on how you date the Middle Ages), Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen, just name a few.