Chronicles in Ordinary Time

The Easter eggs have been found, and the chocolate bunnies have been eaten.
What’s next? In the Church calendar, Pentecost [May 23^rd] is next, followed by Ordinary Time [my life seems to take place mostly in Ordinary Time].

Regarding the above images, Rubens gets the award for accuracy—Jesus was most likely naked when He came out of the tomb—His burial cloths Left Behind. Dürer gets the prize for most literal—Mary Magdalene was said to have thought the Resurrected Jesus was the gardener— Dürer gives Jesus a shovel. The ivory carving is probably the oldest; the one from the Byzantine School probably next oldest. The website that had the image on the far left seems to have misplaced its name and date.

You’re asking, ‘why does any of this matter?’

This morning I saw a reader board at a church:

“JESUS IS ALIVE AND HE IS LOOKING FOR SINNERS”

Maybe I’ve watched too many Westerns—to me the above phrase reminds me of ‘Wyatt Earp coming to clean up Dodge City’…

Jesus never went looking for sinners. Jesus went looking for those who had lost their way. When I was first introduced to Faith, in my twenties, I hadn’t lost my way; I didn’t even know a way existed.

The White Evangelical Church [a term of my preference] would say that Jesus’ Crucifixion means that your sins can be forgiven, and that the point of Jesus’ Resurrection is that Christians will be Resurrected, also.

A problem: This form of theology accepts the idea that 3/4 of all the people that have ever existed, are now burning in Hell; and further accepts the notion that Creator intended for this to happen when humankind was first Created; and that Creator is at perfect ease over the fact that 3/4 of all the humans who have existed burn in Hell. [It is possible that 3/4 is a low number]

And we Americans [rightly] demand that mass murder not occur on our streets and in our schools. If we are irate at wrongful death, why isn’t Creator angry about these wrongful deaths?

The White Evangelical Church misunderstands the reason Jesus was born.

=Ф=

Back When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, my sons were in Boy Scouts; during the summer there were Summer Camp events [including a lot of rain, here in Portland]. Once everyone was in their tents for the night, I would wander to the nearby lake, lie down on the dock and look up into the night sky. It never occurred to me to envision the ‘lights in the sky’ to be at the outer perimeter of our solar system, but apparently that is what a lot of people in America [the only country I’ve lived in] seem to think.

NGC 4380 is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation of Virgo. There are planets in the galaxy we know as NGC 4380; we do not know if these planets are inhabited. We may never know, here on Earth. However, if Newton’s Laws of Motion are accurate, these Laws will apply on NGC 4380. If not there, then Newton’s observations are not Laws, they are merely explanations.

If there are sentient beings on inhabited planets in the NGC 4380 galaxy, they too will have a ‘Jesus’ story. A story of the Creator who became ‘human’ in whatever sense ‘human’ applies there. The image below could be a photo of the ‘humans’ [bipedal is a presumption on our part] living on some planet in the night sky. In the movie, “The Arrival” most weren’t ready to attribute to these creatures the same ‘dignity’ we ascribe to humans [actually, perhaps that was the problem—they did not ascribe the qualities of White Privilege to these ‘aliens’ in the same way brown-skinned humans are treated].

If you can only see Jesus through a First Century lens, you may not understand your faith. If Jesus only has meaning for you in the story of the Nativity during the Christmas and Easter seasons, then you probably don’t understand your faith.

At Christmas we don’t hear of a fairy tale that takes place in a barn, witnessed by Angels and shepherds and cattle. We hear a story of the Creator of the entire Universe entering our time and space in the form of one cell implanted in the womb of a teenager named Mary. Nine months later, Mary gave birth to a boy named Jesus. Jesus grew up as a child grows, observing and learning what all human children observe and learn.

The Easter story takes place around 33 years after the story of the baby in the manger. The story of what happened between the baby in the manger and the day Jesus left his inherited [assumption] carpentry shop doesn’t get told at all, in the New Testament canon. There are a lot of religious texts that didn’t ‘make the cut’ in the Third Century, when Bishops voted as to what would make up that which we know as the Bible.

Jesus’ death was inevitable, from the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine. Everyone knew who Jesus was; small towns lacking newspapers. When the miraculous events began, those stories of Jesus’ colorful life became even more colorful. The Conservative Religious leaders of Jesus’ time began planning to shut Jesus up. Jesus was a troublemaker.

One of my favorite non-Biblical stories is about the boy, Jesus, who would mold birds out of the clay along the river, and then send them flying.

Who gave these Bishops the authority to make these decisions? Well, of course, they gave themselves the authority.

Jacob M. Wright

“Someone asked me if I believed that stories in the Old Testament about God killing people were made up. Here’s what I believe.

“I think it was made up, but out of ancient people’s conceptualizing the world as through mythology. This is literally how the ancients found meaning in the world, through mythologizing their experiences together, and passing these stories down through oral tradition. But I believe God was being revealed through it. Because a myth does not mean that something is entirely false, but that a truth is being revealed through a story that is endowed with sacred meaning.

“So, while people are mythologizing about God destroying nations or killing this or that person, it is taking events and endowing them with cosmic/theological meaning, and while they are not literally true, they are imaginatively attempting to get at meaning in the universe and this was part of the progression towards truth.

“This is being honest about the primitive times in which these texts were written. If the world was so supernatural back then that God would literally just endow a fruit with magical knowledge that would cause the entire downfall of the species, or confuse the languages at Babel to create different cultures, or rain down fire from “heaven” (outer space?) to destroy nations, and swallow up people in the earth, and supernaturally set altars on fire, and supernaturally drown the whole world, and supernaturally fight Israel’s enemies with angels and shoot them down with lightning bolts from the heavens, and supernaturally release plagues on cities by the waving of Moses’ rod, and turn rivers to blood, and part seas for people to walk through and then crash them down on Pharaoh, then why isn’t that the world we live in today? Why was the world such a magical fantasy world 3,000 to 4,000 years ago? It wasn’t. This is mythology typical of those times.

“After we’ve come to terms with that, we can see how the mythology is getting at a truth that is leading the way to Jesus. As CS Lewis said,

“Just as, on the natural side, a long preparation culminated in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing and focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so the Myth remains myth even when it becomes Fact. The story of Christ demands from us, and repays, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response. Thus, the question is not one of theology alone, but of the nature of myth: This involves the belief that myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” – CS Lewis (Miracles, p. 161)

“Jesus is where God actually breaks into history outside of myth.”

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

John Dominic Crossan

Creator is creating the entire Universe.

There is no evidence that the Universe is complete.

There are only theories.

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