… And where do you seek the face of God?
Look around you and especially in the places of your world where you have been blind to what is right in front of you. Look into the simplest, the most humble of creation. There, too, is God.
We now put all our heart into following you, God,
and seeking your face.
Rescue us
in accordance with your wonderful deeds.(adapted from Daniel 3:31-43)
Keep the faith!
- Amen
86% of Americans think that God should stay on our currency and in our Pledge of Allegiance. 14% say take it off.
I usually dislike questions that ask me if I agree with statistics because that’s like asking if I agree with geometry or physics. There’s not a lot of wiggle room there, but… here goes:
Once again I have failed in ignoring one of those emails that ends with “… and if you believe this, pass it along to all your friends!” I really need to take some time to put some of these folks on my Spam list! But this one caught my attention because it was a reasonable question, and didn’t spew any hate, so I fell victim. And so my response follows.
Without going into the whole “…pass this along to all your friends” ending, the body of the email was to say that there was some survey on the TV news about whether to take “In God We Trust” off currency, and remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag. The gist was then something about asking why we would even consider this, because we need God to be on our side, etc. etc., and pass it along to all your friends if you believe the same, etc. etc.
This is my response to the originator of the email and the 5 or so people on the huge mailing list whom I knew personally and (probably) wouldn’t think I was a nut case with a keyboard.
As with any good sermon, it must start with a preacher joke to warm up the room:
—————————————————————-
Re: the money.
I think the reason it says “In God We Trust” is because they ran out of room, and left off the last half of that sentence:
“…Everybody else pays cash.”
//////////
The “under God” part of the pledge was actually added in the 1950s by President Eisenhower when we were going through another one of our oppressive fevers of conservatism in the country because of “the Red scare.” Think Joe McCarthy here.
If we set that phrase aside and look at the sentence the way it was originally written:
“One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The focus of all Americans should be to make true the words recited here: There’s still God in that, without having to call out the name of God. “under God” is understood by those who speak the words. Or as Southerners are wont to say: “by God!”
The entire pledge is just that: a promise and a statement of what we Americans are. There’s no hiding in a mob on this one. You start out by standing up and saluting (putting your hand over your heart. Up until the 1920s-30s there was a salute used.) We say “I pledge allegiance….” not “we in this group in which some might, and some might not…” (how weak and useless is that!) We each one of us say “I am putting my hand over my heart and (“by God“) I am making this promise…”
Back to the “one nation…” line. The important word is not “God” (because that is just plain old understood that it’s what we’re doing “by God!”) The word where we want to really see God (as you understand that word to be) in our country is to make us one country. Not the North and South (which is why this line was originally written) and certainly not Red States and Blue States. One nation (“by God!“) indivisible (“we are one country”) and I promise and pledge that I will work (“by God!”) to see that all people in our country have the same liberty and the same justice as myself.
Ah! And this is where the rubber hits the road on whether or not you believe that God (as you understand that word to be) is alive and working in our country: you (I) have just promised to see to it that all people have that liberty and justice. How difficult is that! All people. Regardless of whether you like them or not. Whether you agree with their religion (or lack of.) Whether you don’t like the color of their skin, or their gender. All people. (“by God!”)
At the end of our days, the Heaven test breaks down to three simple questions: “Did you feed the hungry?” “Did you clothe the poor?” “Did you make shelter for the homeless?” (see Matthew 25)
There’s no mention in there of “Did you advertise Me by adding My name to the pledge of allegiance,” because if you acted as shown above, and did everything within your power for “preserve, protect, and defend” all that liberty and justice for all people, doing so will (at least partially) answer “Yes!” to those three questions.
“One nation, indivisible.” That is very very hard work and even more so for the Christian looking for God in the pledge. It means stopping all the fighting around you. And it means stepping away from all the fights going on within yourself. That’s what “indivisible” means: we stop fighting against each other and looking at the big rock called “stuff I don’t like” and turn our eyes to “one nation… indivisible.”
There’s a prayer from the service for ordination that also is part of the last evening prayers of the day (Compline,) in which we (who pray) spend time in our own personal prayer closet asking for help in this matter. The ordination version is a part of a very long litany of things we pray for as a new minister comes into his vocation, and we (the church) must come together, stop our squabbling, and be that indivisible church:
For all who fear God and believe in you, Lord Christ, that
our divisions may cease and that all may be one as you
and the Father are one,
we pray to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
The compline version adds on a few thoughts worth considering too:
For all who fear God and believe in you, Lord Christ, that our divisions may cease, and that all may be one as you and the Father are one, we pray to you, O Lord.
Lord, have mercy.
(…)
For the poor, the persecuted, the sick, and all who suffer; for refugees, prisoners, and all who are in danger; that they may be relieved and protected, we pray to you, O Lord.
Lord, have mercy.
For our enemies and those who wish us harm, and for all whom we have injured or offended, we pray to you, O Lord.
Lord, have mercy.
When we answer those questions, and if we can say “Yes!!” then we know that – whether the word is spoken or not – that we have done all that we can (“by God!“) to promote our indivisible country, and worked for liberty and justice for all God’s people.
Go forward in Peace to love and ….
Keep the faith!
Christ Jesus:
Eternal word of the Father -
You made yourself very small
so as to be close to us.
From then on -
our weakness
no longer separates us from God.
It becomes a door
through which God enters into our life,
so we can say to you:
Come, LORD Jesus.
- Amen
Do you ever find yourself at a loss of things to say when someone tells you that a person close to you or to them has died?
Last week a friend of mine from many years ago passed along to her Great Reward. Unfortunately for health reasons I was not able to attend her Going Home service, out in the country at a beautiful new Presbyterian church that I have been hoping to see for quite some time. Even by name, how can you go wrong with a church called Chapel in the Pines?
I know many prayers quite brief, and many quite long to use for yourself and your friends at times like these. I always refrain from such hackneyed phrases as “gone on to a better place,” or “gone on to a place where there is no pain,” or even “gone home to Jesus.”
They sound shallow to me. They must sound worse to the listener.
Even though the speaker is well-intended in saying so, these words become the invisible words that we speak, and they do not hear. They lose all meaning in the grief and personal pain that we each feel when one of our own has left us here – perhaps alone – to sally on. They do not begin to address the great human question of
“Why has a so-called compassionate God done this to me?”
I read the prayer today in an email from my friend and confessor, Rev. Vicky. I immediately loved it for its concise work of cutting to the chase of what we need to say at that time (by way of prayer), what we believe as spiritual beings, and our true wishes – above all else – for those who have departed.
Disregarding for one moment the triune sequence that is the outline of all prayer:
we speak in these simple words our love and compassion, the same love of God as we know God to be, and our hope – through faith – of the better existence of the one who has left us. I have included the breath points: (*) for those who might wish to also include this prayer in their meditations.
May (his/her/their) soul(s) *
and
the souls of all the departed, *
through the Mercy of God, *
rest in peace. *
- Amen
Remember today the famous promise most know so well from Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For you are with me.”
This great and beloved one, the one who hung the stars in the sky, is with us in these times of passage. Stays with us. Feels the pain with us. Cries with us.
And thus begins to explain the love of God.
Keep the faith!
- Amen
Every religion has those little things that “we’d rather not think about,” linking present-day back to the Good Ol’ Days that conservatives are always stretching to get back to.
Of course the most obvious is in Western Christian religion which points out that marital divorce between a (married) man and woman (with subsequent remarriage) is an abomination punishable by death. Forgetting this small Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) factoid then gives rise to a group with a 50% Abomination Rate (aka: Divorce Rate) to speak out loudly about “defending” the Religious definitions of marriage. They get so wound up as to create laws protecting their Traditional Marriage while somehow skipping over any necessary laws to deal with their own like, nearly half of whom are in the Sin Soup because they have divorced and re-married.
Western Christians are also lousy at basic math, like: How is it that Jesus could have died on (Good) Friday, was in the tomb three days, and then appeared in the garden to the Marys on Sunday, 1.5 days later.
Examples abound.
There is one of those slips from memory that I like only because a really cool song came out of it. The “we don’t talk about that” in this case comes from the LDS Church (The Mormons) and the concept of the planet Kolob.
Before you leave this page and look it up, Kolob, in the early LDS teachings is the heavenly body nearest to the throne of God, as cited in the Book of Abraham (in the Book of Mormon) as follows:
And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it;
And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest.
(Abraham 3:2-3)
The concept doesn’t match with any astrological bodies, and doesn’t come up much in current-day Mormon religious teachings, so it has sort of slipped out of general sight. However it still exists in one of the most fascinating hymns in the American songbook today: “If You Could Hie to Kolob.”
The tune is very recognizable and if you’re the church going type you’ve likely heard it many times, it is the hymn tune Kingsfold, an old English folk tune. In some churches the song is “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say.“
I am neither a fan of nor an expert in Mormon theology. All I know is that 1/2 of my father’s family are LDS from a familial split in the early 19th Century. Half of the folk stayed in North Carolina to scratch out whatever they could while the other half hitched their wagons to the star of the Angel Moroni and landed in Texas, converted to Mormonism, and were there when many of those in the Mormon faith were massacred in attacks that we would today call genocide.
The survivors split, with a few staying in Texas, and the rest moving along to Utah, the epicenter of the Mormon faith. And there my knowledge ends because my part of the family, the outsider part, isn’t spoken of by them, and we don’t know enough on this end to say anything more than…. “they left us.”
I’m not sure how much of the Mormon faith lies in the concept of Gnosticism (the theology of “knowledge“) but the lyrics of this hymn put me of a mind of some of the ancient Gnostic writings, particularly a quote attributed to Jesus (in the Gospel of Thomas-Judas, the Twin) that said (in paraphrase)
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
The gnostic belief was one of self-knowledge and the idea that by knowing that which is within ourselves, we come to know and understand that which is God. Quite literally – God is within us.
This is an easier to understand concept than thinking of God as some old guy with a long white beard sitting on a big throne in the sky, very distant from us. It seems very Eastern in thought and nearly Buddhist. And it was also considered, by the second century Christian church to be blasphemous heresy.
(We can add a bunch of church history and organizational politics on why that happened, but it’s moot to our point. The bureaucratic church decided that the intense personalization of one’s experience with the Divine ran counter to the universal 3 tier arrangement (bishops, priests and deacons) that was becoming the norm.)
Looking at the Kolob song, the gentle meandering tune allows the singer to mentally pause among the words, and (hopefully) drink in the concept the song puts forth of the singular connection between the singer and the Universe/God. If we see Kolob as a metaphor for the spiritual experience, you could mess up the poetry and be saying, “If you could for one instant be standing just to the right side of your Creator, and stand in that presence, would you be able to see deep into the beginnings, way back beyond where we came from, and realize the beginning of the one who created all?
“Would you be standing so close to the Infinite Is-ness … the very being of your God – that you would see (understand) beyond the here-and-now, beyond simple worrying and sadness. Would your understanding of God reach even beyond the stars and planets to that place where there is no place?”
Eastern religions would refer to this as becoming the Enlightened Master.
I have no idea what LDS folk think of when they sing this song, if that universal vision beyond the pale is in their mind, or if it’s just a quaint old tune with a title that sounds vaguely Scottish, and is something-or-other about Heaven.
Listen in your meditations and ask yourself the question that the first verse requires of the singer. Wonder what it would be like to stand so close to that which you believe is that creative being. Would your vision (by faith) extend even beyond that?
Consider what it would be to understand God as that idea exists in the here-and-now. To be closest to God within our own understanding, as the idea of God lives within us, and emanates from us to those around us.
—
I have no doubt that the early church would have considered this beautiful and imaginative hymn a complete blasphemy, too. And so much the less for them, in their narrowed experience of the concept of the ever-changing, always-creating God.
Keep the Faith!
- Amen
If You Could Hie to Kolob lyrics
hymn tune: Kingsfold
If you could hie to Kolob
In the twinkling an eye
And then continue onward
With that same speed to fly
Do you think that you could ever?
Through all eternity,
Find out the generation
Where God began to be
Or see the grand being
Where space did not extend
Or view that last creation
Where gods and matter end
Methinks the spirits whispers,
“No man has found your space’
Nor seen the outside curtains
Where nothing has a place
The works of god continue
And worlds and live about
Improvement and progression
Have one eternal round
There is no end to worry
There is no end to love
There is no end to being
There is no death above