tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243780812024-03-07T00:36:39.385-08:00Cost of DiscipleshipΡωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.comBlogger4352125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-20728661644334197742016-11-01T09:05:00.000-07:002016-11-01T09:05:18.646-07:00Romanos Frank Gorny - Feb 8, 1951 - October 27, 2016Dear readers of Cost of Discipleship,<br />
<br />
My name is Jacob Gorny, and I am Romanos' eldest son. I am afraid I have an awful bit of news to share with all of you.<br />
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Last Thursday, when I returned from my business trip in San Antonio, I returned to my dad's house to find he had taken a mid-morning nap and never awoke.<br />
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I am sure you understand the shock that our family is experiencing - he was in great physical and spiritual health, and having lost his wife and my mother on July 8, 2016, his passing into sleep has been a tremendous tragedy for his four sons.<br />
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While I'm sure many of you cannot attend his funeral, I wanted to share the announcement with you:<br />
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My brother John Gorny, who is serving as executor for my dad's estate, has included a donation link for those who are willing and able to do so.</div>
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<a href="https://www.gofundme.com/gornyfamilyfund">https://www.gofundme.com/gornyfamilyfund</a></div>
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Every contributor (whether via his blogs, facebook, etc.) will receive a printed copy of my father's writing that I am personally going to edit and prepare from the source materials I have been able to recover from his archives. I would expect this to be available in Summer 2017 (he had a lot of writing).</div>
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Again, I am truly sorry to have to share this news with all of you. He was a very dear man to me throughout the years - he had many great plans and things he hoped to do in his life - but the Lord designates a time and season for all things. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Yet that which is true is permanent, that which is false can never be permanent. Sky and earth may pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever, and the promise of resurrection and ascension is ahead of all of us waiting to be experienced.</div>
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It is my prayer that you will take five minutes of silence on November 4th - wherever you may be - and direct your attention/meditation to the memory you have of this man, and offer a prayer to the Lord on his behalf. May he pray for all of us here in this plane of existence. May he enjoy reunion with his wife Anastasia in the ascended life. May his memory be eternal. Amen</div>
Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-49136899792458867722016-10-26T07:23:00.002-07:002016-10-26T07:23:47.651-07:00מִזְמוֹר קיט<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeX8Xlw2-3BcDeLvFh71nBKp0MXScg-JRBIN5R2kw-SSUSsiZQsVb1OdDzmTLIvSSgLjIaDKcLWsk3XHKQ43o21mOeoVFHVVl5Kf5TacHQqQh8rWv0f2wdD54ltaeXitvGTeL2Og/s1600/cloudy_morning.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5487117389391267762" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeX8Xlw2-3BcDeLvFh71nBKp0MXScg-JRBIN5R2kw-SSUSsiZQsVb1OdDzmTLIvSSgLjIaDKcLWsk3XHKQ43o21mOeoVFHVVl5Kf5TacHQqQh8rWv0f2wdD54ltaeXitvGTeL2Og/s400/cloudy_morning.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 223px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 400px;" /></a><span style="color: #000066;"><strong><a href="http://jbpsalter.blogspot.com/2011/01/day-26-psalm-119105-176.html">Psalms for the 26th Day</a></strong> <span style="font-size: 78%;">(English)</span></span><br />
<div><strong><span style="color: #000066;">119:</span> <span style="color: #cc0000;">105-176</span></strong> <span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: 78%;">(<em>Nûn~Tav</em>)</span></div><div><span style="color: #000066;"><strong>Psalms for the 26th Day</strong> <span style="font-size: 78%;">(Hebrew)</span></span></div><div><strong><span style="color: #000066;">119:</span> <span style="color: #cc0000;">97-176</span></strong> <span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: 78%;">(<em>Mém~Tav</em>)</span></div><br />
<div></div><div>Psalms, the heart of the scriptures and of the soul of man, the cry of the soul of kings, and of priests, painting them prophets—what a blessing to have this gateway to the throne room of the Most High!</div><br />
<div></div><div>I reach for my copy of <em>Tehillim</em>, the Hebrew psalm book, on this cool, cloudy morning. All my windows have been open all night, and the sun hasn't warmed the air yet. The air is still, and the sound of birds opening their songs is all to be heard.</div><br />
<div></div><div><strong>“26th Day of the Month”</strong> proclaims the header.<br />
The reading begins at verse 97, so I have to turn back a few pages to find the psalm number, to call it out in Hebrew…<br />
<em>Mizmor Qoph Yod Tét</em>, Psalm 119<br />
Then, I return to my place, and see, what a perfect verse to begin the day!<br />
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</div><div><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: 130%;"><strong>מָה-אָהַבְתִּי תוֹרָתֶךָ: כָּל-הַיּוֹם, הִיא שִׂיחָתִי</strong></span></div><div><em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Máh ahávti toratèkha, kol hayyóm hi sichatí…</span></em></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">O how I love Your Torah! All day long it is my conversation…</span></div><br />
<div></div><div>I try to complete the reading, but as I take it into me, verse by verse, my spirit takes <em>seláh</em>, pause, my eyes close and I am lost in wonder, as the Word reminds me of all God's wonderful works. I never quite reach my destination, the end of the psalm. But the day is freshened by this beginning. I will return to it later in the day, and by nightfall, the whole psalm portion will have been read and prayed. God is good.</div><br />
<div></div><div>In the <a href="http://jbpsalter.blogspot.com/2011/01/thirty-day-cycle-english.html">English 30-day psalm cycle</a>, Psalm 119 begins at the end of the 24th day, taking in the first four stanzas, numbered by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, <em>Aleph, Bét, Gímel, Dálet</em>. Then, stanzas <em>Hé</em> through <em>Mém</em> follow as the psalm portion for the 25th day. And on the 26th Day, the remainder of Psalm 119, beginning at stanza <em>Nûn</em>, verse 105 by our reckoning, is to be read and prayed.</div><br />
<div></div><div>Psalm 119 has become for me a kind of favorite, almost a statement and rehearsal of my personal faith and life in Christ, and also something akin to an owner's manual—I am the apparatus, <em>He</em> is the Owner, but in the case of this apparatus, the <em>apparatus</em> needs to read the instructions, <em>not</em> the Owner! </div><br />
<div></div><div>In my original Jerusalem Bible, the book will almost always automatically fall open at the page where Psalm 119 for the 26th day is marked, so it probably has been read more than any other page in the book. I almost always start any bible reading by reciting verse 105, “Now Your Word is a lamp to my feet, a light on my path.” I find the minor difference between the English and the Hebrew psalm portion for this day interesting: The Hebrew starts with, <em><span style="color: #cc0000;">“O how I love Your Torah…”</span></em> while the English commences with, <em><span style="color: #cc0000;">“Now Your Word is a lamp to my feet…”</span></em> Really, two ways of saying the same thing, how valuable, how indispensable, is God's <em>Torah</em>, God's Word, in the life of the disciple!</div><br />
<div></div><div><em>Tehillim</em>, praises, Psalms, songs, truly the heart of the scriptures and of the soul of man!<br />
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Now I know why they used to be included in every edition of the New Testament, though nowadays it is possible to find them omitted. Not only do they present in condensed form the main truths of the Old Testament, providing the prophetic background for the New, but they also teach the disciple to pray, and form his inner man. You can read the New Testament alone all you want, but without prayer, it is impossible to enter into the life described there, you remain a spectator or philosopher only. Psalm 119 concludes,</div><br />
<div></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;"><em>Tav<br />
</em>Yahweh, may my cry approach Your Presence;</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">let Your Word endow me with perception!</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">May my entreaty reach Your Presence;</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">rescue me as You have promised.<br />
May my lips proclaim Your praise,</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">since You teach me Your statutes.</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">May my tongue recite Your promise,<br />
since all Your commandments are righteous.<br />
May Your hand be there to help me,</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">since I have chosen Your precepts.</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">I long for You, Yahweh, my Saviour,<br />
Your Law is my delight.</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">Long may my soul live to praise You,</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">long be Your rulings my help!</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">I am wandering like a lost sheep:</span></div><div><span style="color: #cc0000;">Come and look for Your servant.</span></div><br />
<div><span style="color: #cc0000;">No, I have never forgotten Your commandments.</span></div>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-23961445724301626312016-10-26T07:08:00.001-07:002016-10-26T07:08:14.737-07:00Human lives matter<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-large;">Human lives matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We’re all the same color in the womb.</span></div>
Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-43389521331760320212016-10-26T04:38:00.003-07:002016-10-26T06:52:48.056-07:00Nothing would be impossible<i><span style="color: #783f04;">In barely a fortnight, fourteen days, we in these United States who believe the truth that human life begins at conception, and that to abort an unborn child for any reason other than the probable death of child or mother is infanticide, that is, murder—remember the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill">Sixth Commandment</a> (LXX)—have another chance to overturn the Godless legalisation and slaughter of millions of innocents. Whether you like the man who is running for U.S. President or not, if you elect him, he will have the power to appoint new Supreme Court judges—I can't bring myself to call them 'justices'—who will reverse the law allowing this carnage. If you are a Christian, there should be no question whom to vote for, but even Christians still have free choice and can oppose God to His face. The Church has only as much respect in society as she deserves, not according to her faith, which the world cannot comprehend, but according to her works, as Christ Himself teaches,</span></i> <b><span style="color: #990000;">‘Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven’</span></b> <span style="color: #783f04;">(<a href="http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-16.htm">Matthew 5:16</a>).</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEino3awF1DHDEDvEizhz8vcpx5VB9Cvuzb2sgBs92Ns7Daa3P14j1-oXE8r4BYVYWpXhGHcnX7a6W-ipCoWX6OLLs_BZc1mXOtwTDzBL-A1OxUcLExI4XRbHesxS0Ueu1TOKFSoQQ/s1600/nothing+would+be+impossible.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEino3awF1DHDEDvEizhz8vcpx5VB9Cvuzb2sgBs92Ns7Daa3P14j1-oXE8r4BYVYWpXhGHcnX7a6W-ipCoWX6OLLs_BZc1mXOtwTDzBL-A1OxUcLExI4XRbHesxS0Ueu1TOKFSoQQ/s400/nothing+would+be+impossible.jpg" width="400" /></a>It’s no wonder that the world does not follow the teachings of the Church. Except for when the world is <a href="http://cost-of-discipleship.blogspot.com/2013/09/keep-alive-in-yourselves.html">masquerading as the Church</a> for its own reasons, it is happy to ignore what the Church has to say at best, and at worst, it likes to entertain itself by mocking it.<br />
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The Church, however, has no teachings, even when it says it does because it’s full of its own authority, and it’s that false authority that the world loves to mock. The world incites the Church to claim an authority it does not have, so that the world can mock it,<br />
<em>‘See, you’re no better than us!’</em><br />
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The Church has no teachings and no authority of its own: it has only what Christ has given it, what Christ has handed over to it, as a steward receives from his Lord what is not his, but what is entrusted to him. What has been entrusted to the Church is teachings and authority, from Christ the Only Teacher of mankind, the Only Authority, of whom God the Father says, <span style="color: #cc0000;"><b><span style="color: #990000;">‘You are My Son’</span></b><i style="color: #cc0000;"> </i></span><span style="font-size: 0px; font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="color: #000066;">(<a href="http://jbpsalter.blogspot.com/2011/01/day-1-psalm-2.html">Psalm 2</a>:7).</span><br />
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There is a difference between the perceived truth and the actual truth which even members and leaders of the Church sometimes fail to discern. Discernment, διακρισις, <em>dhiákrisis</em>, is here the key word. So often what the Church has is not discernment, but judgment, κρισις, <em>krísis</em>. When the Church exercises the former, the world fears and respects her, when the latter, she is made a laughingstock.<br />
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In 1983 the Sunday in January that falls closest to the day on which the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade">Roe v. Wade</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v_Bolton">Doe v. Bolton</a> decisions were handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, January 22, 1973—was declared national ‘Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.’ Over the past 43 years, 58.5 million <i>American </i>lives have been taken through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion">abortion</a>. For some, this data is hard to take in, and they ask, <em>‘How long will God forbear with our generation?’</em><br />
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Declarations are human things, the works of those who take on their shoulders the mantle of the King of kings of kings, relying on His promises to be with them, but as rulers not as servants. The world knows when we are playing the game that it plays, even when we are dressed up in that robe.<br />
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Only Christ can wear that robe, and when He reigns from the tree, He has already taken it off, and reigns naked, not only mocked but also rejected by the world which does not know what it is doing, does not know what He has accomplished from that throne of suffering, on which as King of Glory, He reigns.<br />
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Reigns, not rules. Discerns, not judges.<br />
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There is a Kingdom that, as Christ says, is not of this world. That Kingdom in time claims no rights, no power, not even the power to save from death. Christ says,<span style="color: #990000;"><b> ‘Do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father who would promptly send more than twelve legions of angels to My defense?’</b></span> <span style="color: #000066;">(Matthew 26:53).</span><br />
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The scourge and crime of abortion <i>is </i>to be opposed, to be sure, <i>but how? With what weapon that the world cannot turn against us, or that we will not snap in two on a rock?</i> The world brings its epileptic son to the disciples for healing, and they cannot heal him. Yet Jesus shrives the boy with a word.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>‘Faithless and perverse generation! How much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him here to Me!’</b></span> <span style="color: #000066;">(Matthew 17:17)</span> Christ is speaking not only to the wounded and demon-infested world,<i> but to the disciples as well, </i>who come to Him privately and ask,<br />
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<em>‘Why were we unable to cast it out?’</em> He answered,<span style="color: #cc0000;"> <b><span style="color: #990000;">‘Because you have little faith. I tell you solemnly, if your faith were the size of a mustard seed you could say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it would move; nothing would be impossible to you’</span></b></span> <span style="color: #000066;">(Matthew 17:20).</span><br />
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And some manuscripts add,<b><span style="color: #990000;"> <span style="color: #cc0000;">‘As for this kind [of devil], it is cast out only by prayer and fasting.’</span></span></b> </div>
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Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-13558390884600716322016-10-22T21:41:00.001-07:002016-10-22T21:41:42.120-07:00Why the Lord came<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwBMnu7MOP0ebdrbmoOYq2SyE3rWBl5P1CfAd5Jkh8-dtcvGfyVHu2zchwnjz-AfIO7GWDIPjxEk0M6KY5dUNBkwRjCYkokLdmjX4wAUU6oYltDgXmEe7Oihvu3PovYmpPTw1BIA/s1600/why+the+Lord+came1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwBMnu7MOP0ebdrbmoOYq2SyE3rWBl5P1CfAd5Jkh8-dtcvGfyVHu2zchwnjz-AfIO7GWDIPjxEk0M6KY5dUNBkwRjCYkokLdmjX4wAUU6oYltDgXmEe7Oihvu3PovYmpPTw1BIA/s400/why+the+Lord+came1.jpg" width="279" /></a></div><div></div><div>The Lord came, not to do something easy, but to do something true. He came to bring truth and life. By His obedience unto death, He rent from top to bottom the veil of corruption and rebellion that separated us from God, and He opened to us the entrance to the Holy of Holies of freedom and unity. He did not come to unite men among themselves by making light of their differences. He did not come to exhort us to mere "peaceful coexistence." He came to unite us, through Himself, with His Father and our Father. "For through Him we have access in one Spirit to the Father." (Ephesians 2:18) <br />
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He did not aim to leave behind Him a group of individuals working well together, for even sinners do this: they cooperate with sinners (cf. Matthew 5:47). He came to give us rebirth and to bring a new unity, one which is trinitarian; to bring a peace which passes all understanding, His own: "My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you." (John 14:27)<br />
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…He came to give Himself, to distribute His flesh: "Take, eat My Body which is broken." He came to give His Spirit: "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22). So He created the little flock of the twelve, the Church. He brought to the world the dynamic force and health of the Trinity, the leaven of the Kingdom which will leaven the three measures which represent the whole of creation (Luke 13:21).<br />
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What the world needs is the trinitarian flock, regardless of whether it is small or large. Its greatness is to be found in its trinitarian nature. What man thirsts for is eternity, "even a little part of eternity"; and this is what we have here. To have the character of the Trinity is to be eternal.<br />
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"This is eternal life, that they know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." (John 17:3)<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">— Archimandrite Vasileios</div></div>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-31876622247738547262016-10-22T21:27:00.004-07:002016-10-22T21:31:20.917-07:00The foolish language of God<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcrVMv8Fo7UeWSgOq7pro9ZyeMf8Xdt1SGbop_XYUvmy6w5TUAAxiTYf1pEMPApiqhjKzyo3_cCNgYwpLxWlJTYnKEQbBU0Ev0cpeEr-zap3OVRrrwElPAfi4h8r8Z8_LeVD-PPA/s1600/the+foolish+language+of+god.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcrVMv8Fo7UeWSgOq7pro9ZyeMf8Xdt1SGbop_XYUvmy6w5TUAAxiTYf1pEMPApiqhjKzyo3_cCNgYwpLxWlJTYnKEQbBU0Ev0cpeEr-zap3OVRrrwElPAfi4h8r8Z8_LeVD-PPA/s400/the+foolish+language+of+god.jpg" width="400" /></a>The language of the Cross may be illogical to those who are not on the way to salvation, but those of us who are on the way see it as God's power to save. As scripture says: <em>I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing all the learning of the learned. Where are the philosophers now? Where are the scribes?</em> Where are any of our thinkers today? Do you see now how God has shown up the foolishness of human wisdom? If it was God's wisdom that human wisdom should not know God, it was because God wanted to save those who have faith through the foolishness of the Message that we preach. And so, while the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here are we preaching a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle they cannot get over, to the pagans madness, but to those who have been called, whether they are Jews or Greeks, a Christ who is the power and the wisdom of God.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #000066;">1 Corinthians 1:18-24 <span style="font-size: 78%;">Jerusalem Bible</span></span></div>
Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-59790844379272409572016-10-22T21:18:00.002-07:002016-10-22T21:19:54.686-07:00Fire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the first lessons we learn as young adults, if not earlier, and sometimes at great pain, is not to make a decision when we are angry. The decision can be to speak or not to speak, to act or not to act, or even more subtly, to think, that is, to believe, or not to think. With some reflection and further maturity, we come to realize that it isn’t just anger that is taboo territory for decision making, but almost any strong emotional state. Delight or its opposite, repugnance. Love or hate. High spirits or low. Perhaps one can even include faith or doubt, although faith is more, much more than an emotional state, though its evil twin certainly is.<br />
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It’s easy to see how and why we shouldn’t act when in strong emotional states, a little harder to see how and why we shouldn’t speak, and even harder to understand the limitations we should impose on our own thoughts when we are ruled by a strong emotion. <i>Aren’t some emotions good?</i> Well, yes, perhaps some are, and there’s relatively few occasions when we are totally emotion-free, maybe none. The decisions we make when we are feeling good (not just feeling well) would seem to be risk-free, but uh-uh, sorry, they are not. My point is not to flaunt the obvious, or to save myself from its implications, but to say, it’s our nature.<br />
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Human beings are not God, god, or gods and goddesses (depending on your choice of religion). We are not minerals. Though some of us seem to be vegetables, that is only a metaphor we use to chasten ourselves. We are not spirits either, despite what the poets and theologians tell, but that is almost what we are and possibly what we will become ‘if we make it.’ What we are is, in a word, unstable. We flicker. We are blown to and fro. We blaze up. We die down. We can merge and lose our identity as we move on to consume other fuels. Eventually we go out, either snuffed or, retreating to our coals, glow dimly and then go black.<br />
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</i> <i>What does this sound like?</i> You’ve already pictured it in your minds if you’ve read this far. It is, we are, fire. Now, think of a campfire at night. It glows. It doesn’t keep a shape. Every little shift of the wind contorts it. It burns because it has fuel. There’s wood under it. Other fires burning in other places still consume fuel, couldn’t exist without it, coal, oil, gas, it doesn’t matter what. Fire burns, and unless it has fuel, there is no fire. This is just another metaphor, but it does shed some light on our human nature. What I also want to say is, don’t take your human nature, your life really, too terribly seriously. Even most of your decisions.<br />
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Just as fire needs that fuel to keep burning, to keep existing, we cannot live, at least not for long, unless we have fuel. It may seem harsh or judgmental to hint that some fuel is better than others to keep the fire alive and burning, but it is still true. Start a handful of steel wool on fire, watch it sparkle as it is consumed, and then see the fire go out, all in a matter of seconds. Tear up a phone book and use its pages as kindling under the grate in your family fireplace. Light it and hope that it will burn long enough to catch the real fuel, alder, maple or oak logs, on fire. No one believes filling his grate with just paper will keep him warm.<br />
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It’s no accident in my choice of metaphor that wood is the fuel and paper the kindling. To get your fire going, you may start with paper, but <i>‘paper Christianity doesn’t have much holding power,’</i> I mean, it can’t hold its own, keep burning. It goes out after a few minutes. If we think a little bit harder, we can also see what the wood might be. Some of us wear tiny copies of that wood and say we stake our lives on it, but few of us bear it. Yet that wood is the only fuel that will keep us burning, and burning is our nature. <i>‘There is no higher way above nor safer way below…’</i> It seems odd to me that we should be made this way, but we are.<br />
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As I complete the last months of my sixty-fifth year of life with wretched trepidation, I confess my humanity, my fallenness, my instability, my inability to exist on my own, my need for fuel to keep me going another year. I confess that all my thoughts, words, and actions are flawed, and the decisions I have made and continue to make are somehow outside my control, that I am just a fire blown about by the wind. But I know that the fuel I need to keep burning, because burning is my nature, has been provided. I cannot provide it. Only One can provide it and He has, so that others can be warmed by the heat as I burn, and maybe see by the light. Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-4828159793600801522016-10-22T21:16:00.002-07:002016-10-22T21:16:17.347-07:00Come out!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75yrlnfikqR_Jb-IgiS0K1kMaDPnoWP96yEH1NLQhJf9YawO_E9fQy6dVh7ijVF9CyS3-aM4C8aZ5gVgyjVh7m7pHFJj6jOXiJ044RrAlISItNpD0u7d-1VKiVhY3UM6paexSTg/s1600/1285151256052174.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75yrlnfikqR_Jb-IgiS0K1kMaDPnoWP96yEH1NLQhJf9YawO_E9fQy6dVh7ijVF9CyS3-aM4C8aZ5gVgyjVh7m7pHFJj6jOXiJ044RrAlISItNpD0u7d-1VKiVhY3UM6paexSTg/s1600/1285151256052174.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>It amazes me, that people exist who know the difference between right and wrong and yet consistently choose to do what is wrong. They may have started out like the rest of us, burdened with the built-in law of failure, also known as, ‘original sin,’ making the occasional wrong choice, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, but gradually they felt themselves drawn to ‘the dark side.’<br />
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Christ calls this process of step-by-step accommodation to wrong choices, thoughts and actions <i><span style="color: #990000;">‘building your house on sand,’</span></i> and He prophesies that such a house can only expect to be swept away in one final, great storm. Still, it is a mystery to me that anyone would choose this way for themselves and not feel bad about it, not feel guilty. <i>Where is their conscience?</i><br />
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Now, here’s another strange thing. We all think we’re good. <i>‘What?’</i> you gasp, <i>‘What are you saying? We <u>are</u> good… at least most of the time, at least when people are watching, at least, at least… at least we try.’</i> I listen to myself, helplessly, seeing all my pennants of righteousness droop and hang limp as the winds of self-justification die down.<br />
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Even Christ, answering His flatterers as a man, admits, <i><span style="color: #990000;">‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God,’</span></i> shattering once and for all the very possibility that we could ever be what God alone is—that is, <i>on our own.</i> <i>‘Yes, Christ was, and is, good,’ </i>we insist, <i>‘but He is God. He couldn’t help Himself,’</i> not realizing that we have just theologized.<br />
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Right, He couldn’t help <i>Himself</i>, but He can help <i>us</i>, yes, those people who <i>‘consistently choose to do what is wrong’</i> as well as <i>us</i>, who pitter-patter along the path of self-destruction but are too cowardly to join those others who don’t fear to be flaming offenders. This is the rehabilitation that reaches out to us from a real God.<br />
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And this is the precise proof that all that the Bible tells us about ourselves is true: Rather than reaching out to the real God <i>our </i>half way (which is actually <i>a half-millionth of His</i> reaching half way to <i>us</i>), we try every other regimen of rehabilitation we can find or invent, from psychotherapy to self-realisation, from <i>Alcoholics Anonymous</i> to… you name it.<br />
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Not that any or all of our efforts are camouflages rather than cures, but that without Him they are poor, paltry, pathetic playing at problems instead of facing them, and no wonder. Without Christ’s help, we cannot even lift a finger to help ourselves. There can be no<i> ifs, ands, or buts</i> in the matter. We just have to do it. <i>What is it that we have to do?</i><br />
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No matter how deep the pit is into which we have fallen, we must believe that Christ is there, that He has entered our personal Hades and cleared it like a threshing floor of its dead, yes, of <i>our </i>dead, all those things in us, about us, with us, that have made our lives so intolerably heavy that we’ve sunken even through solid rock, yes, He is even with us <i>there</i>.<br />
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He says, <i>‘If only you will hear My voice, for I am with you, if only you would hear My voice, for I have begotten you, I have redeemed you, I have prepared a place for you, I am calling you as I called My beloved friend Lazarus. If only you would hear My voice, and follow Me, for Mine are the ways of escape from destruction and death.’</i><br />
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Blessed are those who run when He calls, but it is always our choice <i>where </i>to run. He is mercy to those who run to Him, and judgment to those who run away. If we have fallen, then even <i>that </i>will be counted a blessing, for it is He who lifts us up, who raises us up with Him, if only we will hear His voice, and follow Him who says,<i><span style="color: #990000;"> ‘Come out!’</span></i>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-6472134564923374322016-10-22T21:09:00.001-07:002016-10-22T21:09:24.683-07:00Always free choice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhurhWblthiDZ6rK39lPsnpvF1ciI11DZVJqlC3_N1hMavTvdv6_tJI76K91i6h00tCXKB_UzXEexGq7GzfGeY55e3vFbbPfvRyMN1hC2n-BF8HHQKnlI4pb_nm2Eqs1LXNX7qjAA/s1600/bible-study.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhurhWblthiDZ6rK39lPsnpvF1ciI11DZVJqlC3_N1hMavTvdv6_tJI76K91i6h00tCXKB_UzXEexGq7GzfGeY55e3vFbbPfvRyMN1hC2n-BF8HHQKnlI4pb_nm2Eqs1LXNX7qjAA/s400/bible-study.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>For all that people will do to manipulate and twist the biblical texts to fit their own ideas, the comfort is that the Bible is, was, and always will be, exactly what it is, mean what it says, and keep being a home for the homeless, a comfort for the comfortless, and food for the hungry. <em>Why?</em> Because it is the door behind which Jesus Christ Himself stands waiting for us to either open and welcome Him or open and crucify Him. <em>Which will it be?</em> He will not force us to open the door. He will not force us to welcome Him. And He does not defend Himself to us any more than He defended Himself to those who crucified Him the first time. It is always free choice. The Bible tells us more about ourselves than it tells us about God, but at least it tells us as much as we need to know about Him, so we can decide what we will do. It’s always a matter of choice. Our choice.Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-27568629201249601822016-10-22T10:00:00.002-07:002016-10-22T10:00:35.382-07:00Because They do<i><span style="color: #351c75;">This post was original published on August 21, 2015, over one year ago. Where do we find ourselves now?</span></i><br />
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Pre-election America brings out the best and the worst about us and shows it to the world. Pre-presidential election America, that is. No one really cares much about the other elections, but the year leading up to the next presidential election is full of entertainment for the masses, aggravation for the intelligent, and hope for the believers. <i>The believers?</i> Yes, that’s people like myself, who still believe in the promise of America, in spite of it all. Call us naïve, but we are the eternal émigrés, people constantly on the move, west, always west, always seeking the paradise in the west. We can’t help ourselves.<br />
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For me, it runs in the family. My paternal grandfather, Casimir, left his native Poland—it was from the Prussian province of Posen—and traveled west across Brandenburg, stopping awhile in Hanover, and then taking ship at the free city of Hamburg, for the land of the farthest west, America. That was in 1902, when he was 22 years old. Oddly, that was my age when I left my birth place in Illinois and immigrated to Canada, destination Edmonton, in the west. I didn’t stay there long, where I first landed. Neither did grandpa. He went from Florida to Illinois before he settled down. Me, I didn’t stop till I reached Oregon.<br />
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People are all creatures of belief, even when they are deniers. They may deny that they believe in God, or in the goodness of humanity, or in politics, history, or art, but their actions always give them away. The worst of us believe in the worst things, and even when we say there’s no such thing as a real right or wrong, we still find ourselves condemning, or at least distancing ourselves from, people whom we think believe, and do, bad things. The goodness and badness are both relative. Hitler and the Nazis believed in their cause, racial purity, and thought themselves good. The horror of their actions didn’t bother them.<br />
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The American political spectrum ranges from persons who look like they are capable of Hitleresque, or at least Napoleonic, excesses, all the way to persons who speak and act almost as if politics didn’t, or shouldn’t, exist at all. It is the latter group that I tend to identify with. Face it, government, at least all good government, boils down to people living together in peace and safety with as little interference by the collective authority as possible. The primitive communists had this right. In the end, government itself should disappear. <i>Why shouldn’t it?</i> Civilized behavior overtakes the world, fear is eliminated.<br />
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Unfortunately, it’s obvious we’re not there yet, nowhere in the world, not even in Switzerland. Not bringing ‘religion’ into the mix because it’s proven to be incapable of helping us in the long run, it’s still true that Christ is not finished with humanity, hasn’t given up on us. No, not yet, not from His glorious throne in the heavens, where we have banished Him. Yes, Christ isn’t finished with us. He still has a lot to say. He’s sent Someone into the world that will finish the work He became a man to do. The gospels, stripped of religion, are still the most persuasive and effective cure for mankind ever written. Just read them.<br />
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But don’t stop there. Don’t stop to smell the roses, or the incense, in the pursuit of the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness. Give in to what you say you want—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, especially the last, because it is, without a doubt, identical to the gospel pursuit of the Kingdom—don’t just <i>say </i>you want it and then go back to sleep and dream while others do everything in their power to keep it from you. Our political system may separate church and state, but on an entirely different level the two cannot be separate if we are who we say we are, if we <i>live </i>the gospel, not just <i>talk </i>about it.<br />
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Christ is still the most relevant and the most powerful person in human history, especially when we don’t just stand around worshiping Him and pleading, <i>‘Lord, have mercy,’</i> especially when we don’t leave His words at the altar and pulpit but take them with us. They are the keys that open every door, and open doors that no one can shut. Christ Himself calls them <i><span style="color: #990000;">‘the keys of the Kingdom,’</span></i> gives them personally and permanently to us, again, not for religion, but for transformation, for salvation of the whole human race, starting with <i>us</i>, right now, where we live. His words make every citizen <i>king</i>.<br />
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Not only America, but the entire world, is to become what the idea of America is only the shadow of. This is not a theocratic police state. Leave it to fundamentalist religion to scare us into fearing a sadistic god of hell-fire and damnation. But the God-man Jesus Christ has hulled the kernel of freedom from its religious shell by His mighty words, just as He has liberated the dead from hell by His glorious resurrection. Yet it is still up to us to <i>hear </i>His words and <i>do </i>them, for then the Kingdom of God cannot but follow, just as the dead in Hades must trust Him to lead them out, or else forever remain bound. Yes, trust, obey.<br />
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This year, it seems, we are very close to having hit bottom in a free fall that has been anything but free. The presidential election a year from this November can be just another replay of the same, bogus political soap-opera that has captured the American Dream and boxed it up for resale to the highest bidder, leaving us exitless, passengers on a sinking ship. <i>Is that too many metaphors in one sentence?</i> Yes, I’m afraid this has been a very poor piece of writing, and probably confusing too. <i>Is my ‘message’ religious or political?</i> I mean, <i>am I advocating being a better Christian, or just voting as one?</i> Well, yes, and no.<br />
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Yes, <i>be </i>a better Christian, by all means, <i><span style="color: #990000;">‘seek first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness’</span></i>—yes, <i>His</i>, not <i>ours</i>. <i>How can you vote as a Christian if you are not following Christ, hearing His words, and putting them into practice?</i> No, don’t vote as a Christian if that means reasserting Christian power politics on a nation that must certainly by now be sick of ‘great awakening’ pride. Beyond yes and no, beyond even the next election, we are finally at a place where we can see the failure of human politics and religion to put anything right. Only Truth, only Christ who is truth in Person, as always is calling.<br />
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To respond to that Truth, to not compromise with what our conscience knows is right, but to hold it inviolable, and to think, speak, and act on it, no matter what others say or do, that is as always ‘the winning ticket.’ Now, take that to the primaries, and to the polls come that far November. Meanwhile, live and work as if the world depended on you, and as if God Himself commanded, <b><i>because They do</i></b>.Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-33086461399583079762016-10-21T18:50:00.005-07:002016-10-22T09:56:13.057-07:00Presidentially rambling<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgti1SBmnq2L6LarcKd9CaWZPQC3p6srSKyuCBfG7ZlqEdpy1os9aI-oI299iLPQD4ehRpi0gx6q_k6SQlquslEPSmqpvrSoi1zFrap9wqH0xxtD-ygzbvVZ2YlYBPwR4dtgzeI7A/s1600/voters+and+prayers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgti1SBmnq2L6LarcKd9CaWZPQC3p6srSKyuCBfG7ZlqEdpy1os9aI-oI299iLPQD4ehRpi0gx6q_k6SQlquslEPSmqpvrSoi1zFrap9wqH0xxtD-ygzbvVZ2YlYBPwR4dtgzeI7A/s400/voters+and+prayers.jpg" width="400" /></a>When the Voters’ Pamphlet arrived in the mail this week—<i>I got two of them, lucky boy!</i>—I sat down and seriously pored over one of them. I pulled my worn and tattered precinct card out of my wallet to see which electoral districts I am in, and then began looking for the slate of candidates I could vote for.<br />
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Of course, the first pages of candidates were for the candidates for United States President. I have already voted, in principle, and so I knew that there would be nothing in print that was going to change my mind. Sometimes one just knows what’s behind a candidate, regardless of what they try to project.<br />
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All of the candidates for President and Vice-President had written statements. My pamphlet shows six candidates total, two Republican, two Democrat, one Green, and one Libertarian. I don’t know why the Greens and Libertarians aren’t running candidates for Vice-President. <i>What if one of them were to win?</i><br />
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<i>Nonsense!</i> Jill Stein is just flexing her feminist muscle garbed in Pacific Green proclaiming <i>‘Power to the People’</i> and other out-of-date clichés. Gary Johnson’s statement claims he is best known for resisting temptation (to solve every problem by throwing money at it), but I remember him for <i>‘What is Aleppo?’</i><br />
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Truly, I am <i>very </i>sorry for the hams who think they can wiggle their tails backwards into the big chair in the Oval Office, but then, they’ve seen it done before, and everyone should live in hope. The Democratic candidates pushed the same old polite rhetoric on the theme <i>‘Americans are stronger together.’</i><br />
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A nice truism, but hardly a flag pole around which we can gather for morning prayer.<i> ‘Hillary and I have a plan,’</i> was the Democratic VP candidate’s intro to an assortment of recycled and partly rehabilitated old political promises which everyone’s heard the last eight years and already forgiven and forgotten.<br />
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The Trump and the Pence—sounds like a team for <i>British currency reform!</i>—their two statements, running as Republicans, read almost like a political version of the Nicene Creed, full of <i>‘Trump believes’</i> and <i>‘we need, we must, we will,’</i> possibly echoing in first person plural Caesar’s <i>‘veni, vidi, vici.’</i><br />
<br />
It seemed that the Republican presidential and VPal statements, using Trump’s famous <i>‘Make America Great Again’ </i>as a flag pole—yes, I think we <i>could </i>pray around <i>this one! kumbaya!</i>—spoke of our country’s brokenness and offered a down-to-earth therapy to fix it that would appeal to many voters.<br />
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In contrast, the Democratic statements cheered on the great accomplishments of the incumbent (Democratic) presidency with promises to protect and extend them, starting from a vantage point of an already great America that under our continued management can only become greater. <i>Ahem</i>, yes.<br />
<br />
Enough has been batted back and forth about this probably ugliest presidential contest in America’s long history, and everyone who knows me or has the psychic powers of my best friend’s cat already can tell who I’m voting for in this contest, so I only want to make one other observation, my main one.<br />
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Perusing the pages of candidates (there is also a hefty section on ballot measures), what struck me as very odd was that many of the offices up for grabs did not have at least two candidates running. Where I live is a blue city in a red state, and the reds almost never win, because we’re all rednecks and cowherds.<br />
<br />
No, that’s not why. It’s because enough of us aren’t willing to take on the blue party machine. Admittedly, when people egg your house or threaten you on the street for sporting a Trump sign on your lawn or your laundry,<i> who wants to put their life at risk?</i> No, that’s not the real reason.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib07AJvkbm5ZnYo_DS5iXUtzdfHbmy0z05WVL7kAG-IwU2SEA7fQyWlIsIEg8xtq3h-UsFNS4jMilHqXf23oiGp66wMirxBYHToLGfpRWDsEDIeynyZ6UESdllyZ1m2GttSRoJsw/s1600/us+presidents+6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="77" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib07AJvkbm5ZnYo_DS5iXUtzdfHbmy0z05WVL7kAG-IwU2SEA7fQyWlIsIEg8xtq3h-UsFNS4jMilHqXf23oiGp66wMirxBYHToLGfpRWDsEDIeynyZ6UESdllyZ1m2GttSRoJsw/s400/us+presidents+6.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
And I am not limiting this just to why Republican or local parties aren’t running opposite Democratic candidates. True, one Democratic senator running for reelection has four opponents, but a very high profile Democratic US representative is opposed by a sole fringe party candidate with wild ideas.<br />
<br />
Many local offices have but a single, generally Democratic, candidate. I think this is symptomatic of a <i>non-engaged public</i>. Reading the statements of most of the candidates of all parties what I found was a rhetorical casserole of political jargon that might’ve been written by <i>political candidacy helper</i> software.<br />
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<i>Where can I buy a copy?</i> Maybe I can drum up a polite plate of promissory pieties that can get me into office, never mind which party, they’re all pretty much the same at the lower level. But here and there, I found a candidate whose statement was written as if by a person really awake, really determined.<br />
<br />
Too bad, none of those were people I could vote for, but it still warmed my heart to see that they had the courage to have ideas of their own and run with them. They are, I fervently hope, the first signs of the recovery of our institutions and the restoration of our national spirit, which is one of integrity.<br />
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I have integrated some visuals in this essay, strips of pictures of all our presidents, showing their terms of office in years, in days served, and which ones expired or were assassinated in office. Looking at each President singly and at the whole lineage as it continued, I became aware of the devolution of the Office.<br />
<br />
The earlier presidents look like men of honor, dignity, truthfulness, faith. If I had lived in their time, perhaps I would read other things from their portraits. As the terms succeed each other, well-known portraits gradually become more ’modern’ like the men they represent, a little less virtuous at times.<br />
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Somewhere along the way, the presidents begin to look like what I would call career politicians. This seems absent in most of the earlier presidents, who look instead like patriotic citizens putting their personal and family lives on hold, so they can serve their country. Perhaps this is just an illusion.<br />
<br />
Even among the modern presidents, I see faces that remind me of the heroes of the past, men whose leadership really was a kind of painful self-sacrifice, no matter what it appeared to their contemporaries or to later historians. I wonder what impression you will have of these presidential portraits.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgANCLSTHzymUnnSqu-OXurpTQLFZloISbeCDzo6VKta7UBq2aO61jb-bkktzcS87BlZRs7PB54in_VF4MEwSDyEe9VYL-TgvcqBSi7HFR7SNoPXOJxK5fEyfJgJ_CnwkCOI4oiYA/s1600/220px-Abraham_Lincoln_November_1863.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgANCLSTHzymUnnSqu-OXurpTQLFZloISbeCDzo6VKta7UBq2aO61jb-bkktzcS87BlZRs7PB54in_VF4MEwSDyEe9VYL-TgvcqBSi7HFR7SNoPXOJxK5fEyfJgJ_CnwkCOI4oiYA/s320/220px-Abraham_Lincoln_November_1863.jpg" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Abraham Lincoln</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Meanwhile, the election looms near, and it will be a wonder if it doesn’t end up in some kind of crisis.<br />
<br />
Will there continue to be a United States,<br />
<i>e pluribus unum</i>, or will the political centrifuge that has started its revolutions blow apart this<i> ‘one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’?</i>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-13836487352850800902016-10-21T13:23:00.001-07:002016-10-21T14:13:59.451-07:00Cold War games<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So <i>we </i>won the Cold War,<i> right? </i>Godless international communism was dealt a serious blow when the Soviet Union’s puppet states, Poland, Hungary, Romania in 1989, and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany in 1990, caved in, and one by one the Soviet republics themselves started breaking away, leaving a massive rump, Russia alone, as the ‘Soviet Union.’ Then that resolved itself into a new, non-communist entity, the Russian Federation. <i>We </i>won the Cold War, <i>right?</i> Think again.<br />
<br />
Communism is not, and never was, an exclusive property of the Soviet Union, even though from 1917 to the end of World War II, only the former Russian Empire, and the Great Khanate of Outer Mongolia (and for a short period a lesser Khanate of Tannu Tuva) were communist states. There always was a ‘spectre,’ as <i>The Communist Manifesto</i> of 1848 calls it, behind the <i>visible </i>communism that takes over countries. As it was losing its hold on Russia, it was increasing its hold on America and Western Europe.<br />
<br />
The world we have now is not the Cold War world, divided between the Soviet Union, Red China, and their allies on the left, and the United States, Western Europe and their allies on the right. No, something amazing has happened. The spectre of communism is a notorious shape shifter. It is also very much a social climber. Run-down Russia and its sovietized satellites were not a rich enough prize. Glittering America, the land whose streets were paved with gold, and its rehabilitated allies were better.<br />
<br />
So while the Cold War was going on at the surface, enemy states facing each other and threatening each other’s very existence, the spectre of communism was quietly subverting the social, the educational, and finally the political infrastructures of America, Canada, Western Europe, and their allies all over the world. The spectre has given us the slip, you might say, and the tables have been turned. <i>‘Who’s communist now?’</i> never mind the dictionary and schoolbook definitions of communism, but <i>really</i>.<br />
<br />
In the grossly un-American, un-Canadian, un-British, and un-European governments that are running those countries into the ground culturally, socially, and even economically, we have the seeds of those countries’ destruction. Meanwhile, Russia, and many of the states of the former Soviet Union, are poised to regain their national identities and their historic dignity. We in the West who are ignorant of the history and culture of Russia are unable to see what is happening in a positive light.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the frontispiece<br />
of the book <i>Catacomb Saints</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
We were caught for so long in the Cold War mentality that we seem to be unable to give it up. Growing up in that era, we always felt that the reason we opposed and contained Russia, the Soviet Union, was precisely because it was communist, because it wanted to take over the entire world and make communists out of all of us. That’s what we were told, anyhow. So, <i>what is now the reason we are making ourselves Russia’s enemy?</i> Their communism is over. They’re free. Ours is just beginning.<br />
<br />
We should be rejoicing with Russia in that they are now free to be themselves, to be Russia, not some monster mega-nation whose goal is to gobble up the rest of the world. Instead, we oppose them on every front. Without understanding the history of the Russias—yes, it’s a plural—we cannot properly assess their recent moves, in Crimea, for example. Ukraine, a Soviet-era construct predicated on a linguistic basis, is one of the Russias. Crimea is a Tatar homeland mostly inhabited by ‘Great’ Russians.<br />
<br />
Ukraine, formerly called ‘Little Russia’ is the spiritual center and the bread basket of the Russias. Though ‘little’ it is what makes ‘Great Russia’ great, in much the same way as Scotland is the ‘great’ in Great Britain. It’s hard for us in North America to even imagine the British Empire without the Scots, a distinct people and culture which has contributed more to the Anglosphere than its size would expect. The same is true of the Russian Empire. It’s hard to imagine it without Ukraine and its plenteous contributions.<br />
<br />
Maybe it’s part of the ignorance of America and the West about the history of Russia. Maybe it’s the fact that we feel we have won the Cold War and now have everyone, including Russia, deservedly under our thumb. Maybe it’s because our leaders really are the slaves of the spectre of communism, even though they are not its legal heirs. But we are clearly on the wrong side in almost every struggle for safety, liberty and justice in the world. <i>And why wouldn’t we be?</i> We’re on the wrong side <i>even to ourselves!</i><br />
<br />
Face facts, spectre-haunted houses of Congress and Parliament, and White House, and less guarded commanderies of (false) European Union. Russia is not the enemy. It doesn’t need your land, your people, or your resources. You are on the wrong side in Syria. Stop trying to revive the Cold War. Stop trying to shift the blame for your failures onto somebody else. You have no one but yourselves to blame if you open your doors to your real enemies, while closing them on your potential allies and friends.<br />
<br />
No, <i>we </i>didn’t exactly win the Cold War. A generation ago we had leaders who knew what Truth is, what Freedom is, what Conscience is, yes, even who God is, and in the face of those leaders and the people they mustered, the spectre of communism was revealed even to its dupes how <i>powerless </i>it is, <i>powerless </i>to bring positive change, <i>powerless </i>to produce anything real, and so its prison gates were busted open, and the prisoners released. <i>Where have we seen this pattern of liberation before?</i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #4c1130;">Christ is risen from the dead,</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #4c1130;">trampling down death by death, </span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #4c1130;">and to those in the tombs bestowing life.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-25914674658439446492016-10-20T23:17:00.002-07:002016-10-20T23:17:58.998-07:00Rescued by wedding guests<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0_ho3Iq7VIaNv4EkR-egIZsQZroJNdVmC9JiBddjotmu0N3m5HKFIewkqWmTscqWYA3CHqjKjhyDxZo4jI8jNshdAYvAuYAA3IrR-JudmMvX_aileZdq91Ju8lHxcDJfxxa3a/s1600-h/wedding_feast-481x304.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="252" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322781462116766386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0_ho3Iq7VIaNv4EkR-egIZsQZroJNdVmC9JiBddjotmu0N3m5HKFIewkqWmTscqWYA3CHqjKjhyDxZo4jI8jNshdAYvAuYAA3IrR-JudmMvX_aileZdq91Ju8lHxcDJfxxa3a/s400/wedding_feast-481x304.png" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" width="400" /></a>Whenever I return to a stint of reading the early fathers, that is, those before and just after the peace of the Church wrought by Constantine, I’m always struck by their modernity and the freshness that leaps out at me as I read. It makes me wonder just what ‘modern’ means.<br />
<br />
I’ve read somewhere that the beginning of ‘modern’ times occurred in different centuries in different places. Some say in Europe they began in AD 1300 with Dante, others that Francis of Assisi is the first ‘modern’ man in the West: it all depends on when the writer thinks the medieval age ended. In the Far East, modern times are said to have begun during the Northern Sung dynasty, around the year AD 1000, and the criteria are such things as the appearance of printing, paper money, and machinery.<br />
<br />
In my view, what I mean as ‘modern’ has to do with machinery definitely, but even more with the frank and unafraid willingness to question everything to get at the root of truth. This is something that I think we lost during the ‘Church Age’ in the West, when other priorities were substituted for it. The religiosity of medieval Christianity did not even make room for real questions to be asked, hence, the stagnation that took centuries to overcome.<br />
<br />
Back to my topic, the written testimonies of the early Christians.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeUWaFxhMIJA2UPc6IQKuGOt1twzTTrqMqnkV5pziYihcEIu6_EvjWD1RzWEuABy5lTWCyKTsaP9QHDFLr1GX193hF-L1pS1U69iZA5MkJr6AxEHTTaRlVIVvEqUuUsRuWR9FoTg/s1600/eusebius.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeUWaFxhMIJA2UPc6IQKuGOt1twzTTrqMqnkV5pziYihcEIu6_EvjWD1RzWEuABy5lTWCyKTsaP9QHDFLr1GX193hF-L1pS1U69iZA5MkJr6AxEHTTaRlVIVvEqUuUsRuWR9FoTg/s320/eusebius.jpg" width="205" /></a></div>Eusebius’ <em>History of the Church</em> was my leisure reading matter this morning. His text reads as fluently and frankly as if it were written just yesterday, and the events he recounts are both easy to picture and believe as accurate. What a far cry from the miracle stories of Christian piety, always avid to believe anything as long as it’s <em>monstrous</em>—like St Nicholas of Myra reassembling and revivifying the bodies of some boys who had been hacked to pieces and concealed in barrels of pickles—or was it wine?<br />
<br />
I read for a long while about the Church Father Origen of Alexandria who escaped being canonized as Saint Origen for some of his eccentricities of belief or at least of expression. One of his funnier speculations was that our resurrection bodies would be perfect spheres, but he also speculated on pre-existence of the soul and other ideas bordering on pagan philosophy. This speculation, in spite of his sufferings in the Decian persecution, earned him the indignity of being a suspect of heresy. Looking at him through the ‘modern’ approach that one finds in Eusebius’ history, I’d say that Origen deserves better from his ‘carping critics’ as Eusebius calls them. I guess Origen will just have to be classed with Martin Luther, who also falls under the axe of true piety, as he cries out,<i> ‘</i><em>Let the saints canonize themselves!’</em><br />
<br />
Now, for the <em>real</em> topic, a story that I found both exciting and interesting, written in <em>History of the Church,</em> Book 6, Chapter 40, entitled <em>What happened to Dionysius</em>. The account itself was written in a letter by Dionysius, and it is quoted in the book.<br />
<br />
<em><span style="color: #993300;">I speak as in the presence of God, who knows whether I am lying. I did not act on my own judgement or without God when I made my escape; but even before that, when Decius announced his persecution, Sabinus then and there dispatched a frumentarius to hunt me out, and I stayed at home for four days waiting for him to arrive. But though he went round searching every spot—roads, rivers, fields—where he guessed I was hiding or walking, he was smitten with blindness and did not find the house; he never imagined that when an object of persecution I should stay at home! It was only after four days, when God commanded me to go elsewhere, and by a miracle made it possible, that I set out along with the boys and many of the brethren. That this was indeed a work of divine providence was proved by what followed, when perhaps we were of use to some.</span></em><br />
<br />
Let me interject two observations:<br />
<br />
Dionysius tells, almost casually as if it were nothing remarkable, that God commanded him to go elsewhere. These early Christians like us had, and <em>knew</em> they had, direct access to God, without having to resort to a chain of command as later develops in the Church, eventually making it unimaginable in the Dark Ages that anyone but a perfect saint could actually <em>talk</em> to God and get His personal attention, as does Dionysius. This, to me, is a sign of modernity.<br />
<br />
The other thing I want to notice is his use of the word <em><a href="http://cost-of-discipleship.blogspot.com/2012/03/miracle.html">miracle</a></em>. As he continues to tell his story, the miraculous aspect reveals itself to be <em>the acknowledgment that God was personally and intimately directing the flow of events.</em> This too strikes me as modern, that is, frank and honest, not given to exaggeration or tale-spinning.<br />
<br />
Now, to finish the story, Dionysius continues…<br />
<br />
<em><span style="color: #993300;">About sunset, my companions and I were caught by the soldiers and taken to Taposiris; but by the purpose of God it happened that Timothy was absent and was not caught. When he arrived later, he found the house empty except for a guard of servants, and learnt that we had been captured without hope of release…<br />
<br />
And how was God’s wonderful mercy shown? You shall hear the truth. As Timothy fled distracted, he was met by one of the villagers on his way to attend a wedding-feast—which in those parts meant an all-night celebration—who asked why he was in such a hurry. He told the truth without hesitation, whereupon the other went in and informed the guests as they reclined at table. With one accord, as if at a signal, they all sprang to their feet, came as fast as their legs could carry them, and burst in where we were with such terrifying shouts that the soldiers guarding us instantly took to their heels. Then, they stood over us, as we lay on bare mattresses.<br />
<br />
At first, God knows, I thought they were bandits who had come to plunder and steal, so I stayed on the bed. I had nothing on but a linen shirt; my other clothes that were lying near I held out to them. But they told me to get up and make a bolt for it. Then I realised what they had come for, and called out, begging and beseeching them to go away and let us be. If they wanted to do me a good turn, they had better forestall my captors and cut off my head themselves. While I shouted like this, they pulled me up by force, as my companions who shared all my adventures know. I let myself fall on my back to the floor, but they grasped me by hands and feet and dragged me out, followed by those who witnessed the whole scene, Gaius, Faustus, Peter, and Paul, who picked me up and carried me out of the village, set me on a donkey bareback, and led me away.</span></em><br />
<br />
Now, in conclusion I ask you, brethren, <em>isn’t this a great story?</em> Doesn’t it ring true, and even entertain us in a way that doesn’t offend true piety, by the candid artlessness of the author? Here we have an example of what a Christian was like in the third century, before the beginning of the Church Age. There’s a lot here to be learned, and also to help us examine ourselves, to make sure that the faith that <em>we</em> have is the same as that of these early Christians. Reading books like these makes me think that what we have known as the ‘modern’ age has not so much to do with an era of <em>chrónos</em> time, but rather with moments of <em><a href="http://cost-of-discipleship.blogspot.com/2012/06/k-kairos.html">kairós</a></em> time scattered through human history.<br />
<br />
If this be true, what of those who call the present ‘post-modern’? Must we, like Dionysius, have to be yanked out of our resignation by Christ’s wedding guests, flung bareback on an ass, and set free?Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-40850382512174941492016-10-20T15:45:00.003-07:002016-10-20T15:45:34.938-07:00Even of the Sabbath<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ30ijSfbULK4SQlMGsL-xvmA_nJgW1u6xVji7co1htiDpKzYGPgFgLxhGLQxpzues1D4A84dzOyo1sLU7hGE45c0usCSwJwGqhSlFZLJo_7WmYr3WkOrgEFx92WZxeMAdGjFUAw/s1600/Jesus+the+Grain+Field.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ30ijSfbULK4SQlMGsL-xvmA_nJgW1u6xVji7co1htiDpKzYGPgFgLxhGLQxpzues1D4A84dzOyo1sLU7hGE45c0usCSwJwGqhSlFZLJo_7WmYr3WkOrgEFx92WZxeMAdGjFUAw/s400/Jesus+the+Grain+Field.JPG" width="400" /></a>Thinking about a close friend of mine, a fallen-away Episcopalian and somewhat impoverished member of a local ‘old money’ family, whose libertine lifestyle was, at least in middle age, rather more philosophical than physical, his attitude toward sexual morality was that, except for a very restricted class of offenses, there really wasn’t any—sexual morality, that is.<br />
<br />
In our youth, he would have hidden his real lifestyle from me (perhaps), because our friendship was still in its early stages, still very much on the surface. From his viewpoint, I was a somewhat fawning young Episcopalian, with new convert zeal (I had only joined the Church a few years prior), and he would probably not have wanted to offend my (as he thought) pious sensibilities.<br />
<br />
By early middle age we had gotten to know and love each other quite well. At that point, we were co-workers talking amateur ethics and theology, as well as aesthetics, history, science, and politics in our off hours. Our shared Anglican past (by then I had joined the Orthodox Church) gave us many common points of interest and, though temperamentally different, much sympathy for each other.<br />
<br />
I didn’t quite believe him when he told me that he’d been with a few hundred women in his time. I mean, unless it were assembly-line whore-mongering (which would’ve been beneath his sensitive nature), it was an impossibility, and he never confessed to living in a large free-love commune. What I did see was the tail end of one disappointing relationship and the start of another.<br />
<br />
<i>Does it seem that I meant ‘and the start of another’ disappointing relationship?</i> Well, that’s not what I meant, but in fact that is how it turned out. The second relationship of his which I did see was with a woman he’d known most of his life, and whom he had rescued from a very harsh and abusive relationship with another mutual friend. I think it might’ve been a marriage.<br />
<br />
If it <i>were </i>a marriage, then, because of their circle of like-minded lapsed Catholic and Episcopal intellectuals, it would’ve been a marriage just to satisfy some other motive, because the woman and her husband had never had an intention to start a family. They were socialites and left-wing party hoppers. Alcoholism and drug abuse incinerated their ‘marriage.’ My friend came to the rescue.<br />
<br />
They didn’t immediately get married after her divorce, my friend and this woman, but just set up house together. They became ‘a couple.’ It didn’t bother them that they weren’t married. Their sex life was no one’s business but their own. Both had flawed personalities, even what could be termed personality disorders, mental and emotional dispositions that made their lives actually very unhappy.<br />
<br />
Neither had ever been involved in a real marriage themselves and so had no experience of what it takes. Each of them had always used niceness to get through all of life’s roadblocks on the way to their own personal happiness—as individuals. When they spoke of each other’s happiness and how much they wanted it, what they meant was, happiness on their terms, not on the other’s.<br />
<br />
My object is not to single out unmarried sex, or childless marriages, both of which I do believe are moral issues, nor to point out the sinfulness of one or both, but simply to give an example of ‘life beyond the (possibility of) moral laws.’ I do believe that the moral laws are Divine in origin, but only those we call the Ten Commandments. All others, even in the Bible, are adaptations, some good, some bad.<br />
<br />
These friends—now both my friends, as they are a couple, and I believe they did get married (though I accidentally missed the wedding)—would not admit to living beyond the moral laws, only that they follow a different standard of morality. To be sure, by Christ’s standard in His sermon on the Day of Judgment, they would probably be among the sheep who enter paradise on His right.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;">‘Whatsoever you do to the least of these, that you do unto Me,’</span></b> is the line that sticks with me, and I know of at least one instance where this couple would be directed to the right. A mutual friend of ours, a young lawyer from another ‘old money’ family, married and started to live the lifestyle of his class. One day he was diagnosed with a disease that would eventually incapacitate him.<br />
<br />
His wife stayed with him as long as it did not inconvenience her personal and social life, but when it did, she promptly abandoned him to his fate. My two friends, by then living together (in sin, from the Christian viewpoint) began to tend him in his apartment, so he would not have to be transferred to a nursing home. At the end, it amounted to them doing home hospice care—for free.<br />
<br />
This lawyer was someone they’d known almost all their lives. He had been abandoned by his wife. <i>What else could they do? </i>This demonstrates something more than loyalty, perhaps touching on that real moral standard, maybe even going beyond it. In the end, of course, the lawyer died. My friend and his girlfriend got married sometime after. <i>Why?</i> He was heading towards early dementia.<br />
<br />
Unless his girlfriend and he were married, she could not properly care for him and, when his dementia possibly slid into Alzheimer’s, she could still be there to care for him. <i>Again, is this natural loyalty, adherence to the moral law, or what?</i> The bottom line here is that, knowingly or unknowingly, these people were following the word of Jesus, <b><span style="color: #990000;">‘How blessed are the merciful…’</span></b><br />
<br />
I am thinking about laws, about the moral law, the standard that God has created along with creating us, for whom it was made. As long as we are in rebellion against that law, we cannot take our preordained place as ‘lords of the Sabbath,’ as Jesus Christ Himself did. Only by fulfilling the law, letting it teach and regulate us as a society of persons, do we become masters of ourselves, and lords over it.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;">Then the words of Jesus, spoken in prophecy about Himself first and then about us, be fulfilled, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath’ </span><span style="color: #20124d;">(Mark 2:27-28 <span style="font-size: x-small;">ESV</span>).</span></b>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-12971972623587324392016-10-20T13:04:00.000-07:002016-10-20T13:07:56.459-07:00Astonished at His teaching<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghT2E46LU-s0IR4b_8W0C8HW5rR9ANwpf7bXFyBilKAfSXyTIvfARTBoPKnNhPp9xlaSZfQhXhZsezNpYk3KZb-pOCOk4lOP6ViNBCHpPqiLJ-Cp6EaZIhCYAZIfcvOKHEmyynTg/s1600/astonished+at+his+teaching.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghT2E46LU-s0IR4b_8W0C8HW5rR9ANwpf7bXFyBilKAfSXyTIvfARTBoPKnNhPp9xlaSZfQhXhZsezNpYk3KZb-pOCOk4lOP6ViNBCHpPqiLJ-Cp6EaZIhCYAZIfcvOKHEmyynTg/s400/astonished+at+his+teaching.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>In the news this morning I read, the United Kingdom has decided to grant pardon to all the men it has on record, whether alive or dead, who were convicted of the crime of sodomy. The article didn’t use that word, but that’s what it meant. Sodomy as a word has fallen out of favor, another ‘N’ word that mustn’t be used around polite, that is, politically correct, society. In fact, I’m tired of the cliché-ridden term ‘politically correct’ and from now on I’m just going to use the word ‘polite’ to mean the same thing, except when describing the behavior of children.<br />
<br />
At any rate, my personal views on homosexuality aside, if what was once illegal and punishable is now legal, then that means somebody has the power to reverse long-standing laws, that the laws, in fact are admittedly just something we make up as we go along, and not in the least related to any pre-human, that is, pre-existing, moral standard. If this is true, then I think that the United Kingdom should not be issuing pardons but rather apologies, and the gay men should be issuing the pardons. In fact, the whole human race should be asking gays for forgiveness.<br />
<br />
On a less intimate note, but still in the same vein, here in Oregon the production, sale and consumption of marijuana products was, until very recently, against the law. When the law was reversed and contoured to fit within a parameter that would benefit the government, a marijuana establishment suddenly appeared, ready-made, generations deep, and ubiquitous. No one apologized on either side, not the state for prosecuting apparently innocent people, nor the marijuana-enthused for having been breaking the law all along because it was wrong.<br />
<br />
<i>Or was it?</i> The law, I mean. <i>Was the law wrong when it made marijuana use illegal, or was it just being dictatorial, autocratic, arbitrary, and just plain power-obsessed?</i> Well, since the law is not a person, but generally, people, civic-minded people acting on behalf of society at large to enact laws for the preservation of social well-being, none of those adjectives cataloged above, applies. Society has a right to defend itself. In true monarchies, an individual is invested with the responsibility to defend it. In republics, that responsibility is shared among many.<br />
<br />
What I have noticed about laws, human ones but also those believed to be of Divine origin, is that they are usually framed with the good of human society as their object. They may be framed with the good of the individual, or of nature, or of some other good in mind, but always with social good, that is, the health and welfare of society, as the priority. The best laws balance social good with individual happiness. I am not here going to even mention liberty and equality, as these never make people happy if those people are not genuinely seeking happiness.<br />
<br />
But good laws establish harmony and facilitate free functioning of society in such a way that fewer laws are needed as the society matures. Fewer laws, not more, equates to less regulation, not more, and this, because good laws are made that educate the public as well as regulate them. Going back to the Bible, which is, like it or not, the ultimate source of Western jurisprudence, we can see that the laws written therein are established for the good of society, not for the good of the individual, which is pure nonsense unless by ‘good’ you mean ‘happiness.’<br />
<br />
Modern man chafes under the notion that God has the right to legislate on such personal matters as what we do with the people whom we sleep with. Once, a very dear friend of mine laughed at me and said, <i>‘Nonsense, God doesn’t care whom we sleep with!’</i> when I naively said something that supported the idea of sexual morality. For him, sex was outside the realm of God’s prerogatives. My friend ‘believed’ in God and enjoyed talking about Him as a form of intellectual stimulation, but morality for him was what <i>he </i>thought right, not what <i>God </i>does.<br />
<br />
But I believe there <i>is </i>a concrete, a very definite, standard of morality, something on which good laws depend and to which they point us. That invisible yet universally recognized standard is something that came into existence at the same moment that humanity became aware of itself and of God, that threshold immortalized in the story of the creation of Adam and Eve. I am not saying that this standard wasn’t always there, uncreated just as God was always there, Uncreated, but that part of the standard which has to do only with us is co-temporal with us.<br />
<br />
After centuries of human progress in every other area of endeavor, as a society we now find ourselves suddenly bereft of a conscience that is in accord with that standard. Individuals still have it. Some people still recognize the voice of the human conscience—which is the same in everyone as it starts out—unaffected by the currents of imaginary ideologies that come against it, but society has once again been subverted by the tyrannical voices that know no moral standard, only their desires, and the pursuit, not of happiness, which they no longer want, but power.<br />
<br />
Happily—yes, there are still people who want happiness—society is still part of nature, still part of God’s creation just as the individual is, and like the rest of Nature, it has built-in mechanisms to heal itself, and like any biological being, will always right itself when it goes wrong, in preference to just giving up hope and perishing. Society, as we see around us today, is again becoming self-aware. The enemies of humanity, themselves human only in form, brand those who oppose them ‘populist’ and accuse them of backwardness, but it is these others who stand on rock.<br />
<br />
If it is backward to stand on rock rather than sand, let me be backward. I know that I have no happiness unless the society I live in is happy. The same goes for everything else in life. We are truly individuals only by being part of society, so let’s put ourselves back on the road that leads to health and happiness.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;">Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;"><br />
</span></b> <b><span style="color: #990000;">Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does <i>not </i>do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #20124d;">And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were </span><span style="color: #0b5394;">astonished at His teaching</span><span style="color: #20124d;">, for He was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #4c1130;">Matthew 7:21-29 <span style="font-size: x-small;">ESV</span></span></b>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-47928705972107477012016-10-18T08:44:00.002-07:002016-10-18T08:44:42.096-07:00The peace of Christ<div align="center">
<em><span style="color: #000066;"></span></em><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFF6Cs0iyZ2qnSy6q_3-R3k2_kyo9aNGjF1z2llStU1o4Qb95KlWro1EzdNmKLrZyMFp6906ksLllPDWGrvZzhfu5r3q6HVkZ5WOOE9SXBcKt3ytNKKr_yDwIr_yhzMebi4COB/s1600-h/159495.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5221782329481209234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFF6Cs0iyZ2qnSy6q_3-R3k2_kyo9aNGjF1z2llStU1o4Qb95KlWro1EzdNmKLrZyMFp6906ksLllPDWGrvZzhfu5r3q6HVkZ5WOOE9SXBcKt3ytNKKr_yDwIr_yhzMebi4COB/s400/159495.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><strong><em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin?<br />
The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.</span></em></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #000066;">—Edward Henry Bickersteth</span></strong> <br />
<div align="center">
<strong><span style="color: #000066;"><em>Hymn writer</em></span></strong></div>
</div>
<div align="left">
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><i></i></span>Peace, that which comes from above and is granted by God alone through Christ is not easy to define, but it definitely does NOT mean something like "all's well" or "peace and quiet" in the usual sense. Peace from God does not necessarily mean that there is no trouble anywhere in our life, nor that we are not faced with problems to which we cannot find a solution.<br />
<br />
It's easier to talk about this peace that comes from God through Christ and is bestowed on us in prayer than it is to actually have it. <em>Why?</em> Because we usually talk about it when we are NOT in any great distress, emergency or need, but after we have been delivered from it. We look back in retrospect and thank God for the deliverance and find words of testimony to give about God's faithfulness.<br />
<br />
<em>What is the best definition of and the most convincing testimony to the "peace from above"?</em><br />
When we are presently in distress, in danger, at risk, beset with problems we see no end of, when we are suffering persecutions, slander, unjust accusations, when no one believes us, when no one cares about us, and we are not sad, not unhappy, not anxious, not disturbed, not reproachful, uncomplaining, unmoved to anger or revenge, still hopeful, still forgiving, still loving our enemies, still seeking God’s Kingdom first and His righteousness, never giving in to despair or abandonment. When we are in THIS place, and can define "the peace of God which passeth all understanding" not only by the word of our confession, but also by our passionlessness, then we have understood and accepted what that peace is. It's the same peace that Jesus knew when He was crucified and when He uttered with His last breath, <span style="color: #cc0000;">"It is finished. Into your hands I commend my spirit</span> (for You have redeemed me, God of Truth)<span style="color: #cc0000;">."</span> It is the same peace which Jesus gave to His disciples when He said, <span style="color: #cc0000;">"My peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give."</span><br />
<br />
This is the peace of Christ. </div>
Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-30247275699817818462016-10-17T12:50:00.000-07:002016-10-17T12:50:08.476-07:00Never refuse to listen when He speaks<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOngLRgvGUMp4nx-ihYN4SjR744SPf5ucqQIjC_MKZUZeeareQLX3GJNhHmYcXU4iqaa4AdKB-VRXWmr0nc6F2azrU3Zzt_uH86sgYvwHJdQVhh6CSUDZGd2lCdpBReYgsQjuRAg/s1600/f-apostles-05.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 263px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 368px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5534787807210313506" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOngLRgvGUMp4nx-ihYN4SjR744SPf5ucqQIjC_MKZUZeeareQLX3GJNhHmYcXU4iqaa4AdKB-VRXWmr0nc6F2azrU3Zzt_uH86sgYvwHJdQVhh6CSUDZGd2lCdpBReYgsQjuRAg/s400/f-apostles-05.jpg" /></a> <div><i><span style="color:#cc0000;">The teaching of the holy apostles…</span></i></div><div><br />
</div>Take care, brothers, that there is not in anyone of your community a wicked mind, so unbelieving as to turn away from the living God.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 3:12</i><br />
</span><br />
<div>Every day keep encouraging one another so that none of you is hardened by the lure of sin.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 3:13</i><br />
</span><br />
</div><div>We shall remain coheirs with Christ only if we keep a grasp on our first confidence right to the end.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 3:14<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>The Word of God is something alive and active: it cuts like any double-edged sword but more finely; it can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit, or joints from the marrow; it can judge the secret emotions and thoughts. No created thing can hide from Him; everything is uncovered and open to the eyes of the One to whom we must give an account of ourselves.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 4:12-13<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>We must never let go of the faith that we have professed.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 4:14b<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Be confident in approaching the throne of grace. We shall have mercy from Him and find grace when we are in need of help.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 4:16<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Through the blood of Jesus we have the right to enter the sanctuary by a new way which He has opened for us, a living opening through the curtain, His body.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 10:19b-20</span><br />
</i><br />
</div><div>Let us be sincere in heart and filled with faith, our minds sprinkled and free from any trace of bad conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us keep firm in the faith we profess, because the One who made the promise is faithful.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 10:22-23<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 10:24<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Do not stay away from the meetings of the community, as some do, but encourage each other to go; the more so as you see the Day drawing near.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 10:25<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen. It was for faith that our ancestors were commended.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 11:1-2<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>With so many witnesses in a great cloud on every side of us, we too, then, should throw off everything that hinders us, especially the sin that clings so easily, and keep running steadily the race we have started.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 12:1<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Let us not lose sight of Jesus who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 12:2<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Think of the way He stood such opposition from sinners and then you will not give up for want of courage. In the fight against sin you have not yet had to keep fighting to the point of death.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 12:3-4</span><br />
</i><br />
</div><div>When the Lord corrects you, do not treat it lightly; but do not get discouraged when He reprimands you. The Lord trains the ones that He loves and He punishes all those that He acknowledges as his sons. Suffering is part of your training; God is treating you as His sons.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 12:5b-7a<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Always be wanting peace with all people, and the holiness without which no one can ever see the Lord.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 12:14<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Be careful that no one is deprived of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness should begin to grow and make trouble; this can poison a whole community.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 12:15<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Be careful that there is no immorality, or that anyone of you does not degrade religion like Esau, who sold his birthright for one single meal.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 12:16<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>What you have come to is nothing known to the senses: not a blazing fire, or a gloom turning to total darkness, or a storm, or trumpeting thunder, or the great voice speaking which made everyone that heard it beg that no more should be said to them.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 12:18-19<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>What you have come to is Mount Zion and the City of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a first-born son and a citizen of heaven. You have come to God Himself, the supreme Judge, and been placed with the spirits of the saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus the Mediator who brings a new covenant and a blood for purification which pleads more insistently than Abel’s. Make sure that you never refuse to listen when He speaks.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 12:22-25a<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>We have been given possession of an unshakable Kingdom. Let us therefore hold on to the grace that we have been given and use it to worship God in the way that he finds acceptable, in reverence and awe. For our God is a consuming fire.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 12:28-29<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Continue to love each other like brothers and remember always to welcome strangers, for by doing this some people have entertained angels without knowing it.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 13:1-2</span><br />
</i><br />
</div><div>Keep in mind those who are in prison as though you were in prison with them; and those who are being badly treated, since you too are in one body.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:3<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Marriage is to be honored by all, and marriages are to be kept undefiled, because fornicators and adulterers will come under God’s judgment.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:4<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Put greed out of your lives and be content with whatever you have.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:5a<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Remember your leaders who preach the Word of God to you and, as you reflect on the outcome of their lives, imitate their faith.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:7<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Jesus Christ is the same today as He was yesterday and as He will be forever. Do not let yourselves be led astray by all sorts of strange doctrines.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:8-9a<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Jesus suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with His own blood. Let us go to Him outside the camp and share His degradation. For there is no eternal city for us in this life, but we look for one in the life to come. Through Him let us offer God an unending sacrifice of praise, a verbal sacrifice every time we acknowledge His Name.<br />
<i><span style="color:#000066;">Hebrews 13:12-15<br />
</span></i><br />
</div><div>Keep doing good works and sharing your resources, for these are sacrifices that please God.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:16<br />
</i><br />
</span></div><div>Obey your leaders and do as they tell you, because they must give an account of the way they look after your souls. Make this a joy for them to do and not a grief. You yourselves would be the losers.<br />
<span style="color:#000066;"><i>Hebrews 13:17</i><br />
</span></div><div><br />
</div><i><span style="font-size:78%;color:#cc0000;">All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).</span></i>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-75880755772060883302016-10-16T11:52:00.000-07:002016-10-16T11:55:04.236-07:00Train yourself spiritually<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitp2WS7lw3esZmCPACI9wcuCABlj0nDgGcI3OyUXm2JhgMltTDkaftV1EclOElGKhmOuT-68nFTDILdWQDEmOg0Auc_4_IIKHPKP4aJloIcgsyn-deESn_vj96yycawa52JH1kfA/s1600/st-paul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitp2WS7lw3esZmCPACI9wcuCABlj0nDgGcI3OyUXm2JhgMltTDkaftV1EclOElGKhmOuT-68nFTDILdWQDEmOg0Auc_4_IIKHPKP4aJloIcgsyn-deESn_vj96yycawa52JH1kfA/s320/st-paul.jpg" width="255" /></a><span style="color: #000066;"><em>The teaching of holy apostle Paul…</em><br />
</span><br />
Insist that people stop teaching strange doctrines and taking notice of myths and endless geneologies; these things are only likely to raise irrelevant doubts instead of furthering the designs of God which are revealed in faith.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 1:3b-4<br />
</span></em><br />
The only purpose of this instruction is that there should be love, coming out of a pure heart, and clear conscience, and a sincere faith. There are some people who have gone off the straight course and taken a path that leads to empty speculation.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 1:5-6<br />
</span></em><br />
Here is a saying that you can rely on and nobody should doubt: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 1:15<br />
</span></em><br />
Fight like a good soldier with faith and a good conscience for your weapons. Some people have put conscience aside and wrecked their faith in consequence.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 1:18b-19<br />
</span></em><br />
There should be prayers offered for everyone—petitions, intercessions and thanksgiving—and especially for kings and others in authority, so that we may be able to live religious and reverent lives in peace and quiet. To do this is right and will please God our Savior: He wants everyone to be saved and reach full knowledge of the truth.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 2:1-4<br />
</span></em><br />
The Spirit has explicitly said that during the last times there will be some who will desert the faith and choose to listen to deceitful spirits and doctrines that come from devils; and the cause of this is the lies told by hypocrites whose consciences are branded as though with a red-hot iron.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 4:1-2<br />
</span></em><br />
Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales. <b><span style="color: #990000;">Train yourself spiritually</span></b>. Physical exercises are useful enough, but the usefulness of spirituality is unlimited, since it holds out the reward of life here and now, and of the future life as well.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 4:7-8<br />
</span></em><br />
The point of all our toiling and battling is that we have put our trust in the living God, and He is the Savior of the whole human race, but particularly of all believers.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 4:10<br />
</span></em><br />
Be an example to all the believers in the way you speak and behave, and in your love, your faith, and your purity. Make use of the time by reading to the people, preaching and teaching.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 4:12-13<br />
<br />
</span></em>Take great care about what you do and what you teach; always do this, and in this way you will save both yourself and those who listen to you.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 4:16</span></em><br />
<br />
Anyone who does not look after his own relations, especially if they are living with him, has rejected the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 5:8<br />
<br />
</span></em>Never make yourself an accomplice in anybody else’s sin. Keep yourself pure.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 5:22b</span></em><br />
<br />
Anyone who teaches anything different and does not keep to the sound teaching which is that of our Lord Jesus Christ, the doctrine which is in accordance with true religion, is simply ignorant and must be full of self-conceit, with a craze for questioning everything and arguing about words. All that can come of this is jealousy, contention, abuse and wicked mistrust of one another, and unending disputes by people who are neither rational nor informed and imagine that religion is a way of making money.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;"><span class="Apple-style-span">1 Timothy 6:3-5</span><br />
</span><br />
</em>We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. As long as we have food and clothing, let us be content with that. People who long to be rich are a prey to temptation. They get trapped into all sorts of foolish and dangerous ambitions which eventually plunge them into ruin and destruction. The love of money is the root of all evils, and there are some who pursuing it have wandered away from the faith.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 6:7-10a<br />
<br />
</span></em>Aim to be saintly and religious, filled with faith and love, patient and gentle.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 6:11<br />
</span></em><br />
Warn those who are rich in this world’s goods that they are not to look down on other people and not to set their hopes on money which is untrustworthy, but on God who out of His riches gives us all we need for our happiness. Tell them that they are to do good and be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 6:17-18<br />
<br />
</span></em>Have nothing to do with the pointless philosophical discussions and antagonistic beliefs of the “knowledge” which is no knowledge at all.<br />
<em><span style="color: #660000;">1 Timothy 6:20<br />
</span></em><br />
God’s gift is not a spirit of timidity, but the Spirit of power and love and self-control.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 1:7<br />
<br />
</span></em>You are never to be ashamed of witnessing to the Lord.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 1:8a<br />
<br />
</span></em>God has saved us and called us to be holy, not because of anything we ourselves have done, but for His own purpose and by His own grace.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 1:9<br />
<br />
</span></em>Keep as your pattern the sound teaching, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. You have been trusted to look after something precious. Guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.<br />
<em><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 1:13-14<br />
</span><br />
</span></em>Accept the strength that comes from the grace of Christ Jesus.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:1<br />
</span></em><br />
You have heard everything. Hand it on to reliable people so that they in turn will be able to teach others.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:2<br />
<br />
</span></em>Put up with your share of difficulties like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:3<br />
<br />
</span></em>Remember the Good News: Jesus Christ risen from the dead.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:8<br />
<br />
</span></em>If we have died with Him, then we shall live with Him.<br />
If we hold firm, then we shall reign with Him.<br />
If we disown Him, then He will disown us.<br />
We may be unfaithful, but He is always Faithful, for He cannot disown<br />
His own self.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:11b-13<br />
<br />
</span></em>There is to be no wrangling about words: all that this ever achieves is the destruction of those who are listening.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:14<br />
</span></em><br />
Have nothing to do with pointless philosophical discussions. They only lead further and further away from the true religion. Talk of this kind corrodes like gangrene.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:16-17<br />
<br />
</span></em>God’s solid foundation stone is still in position, and this is the inscription on it: “The Lord knows those who are His own,” and “All who call on the Name of the Lord must avoid sin.”<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:19<br />
</span></em><br />
Instead of giving in to your impulses, fasten your attention on holiness, faith, love, and peace, in union with all those who call on the Lord with pure minds.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:22<br />
<br />
</span></em>Avoid futile and silly speculations, understanding that they only give rise to quarrels. A servant of the Lord is not to engage in quarrels but has to be kind to everyone, a good teacher, and patient. He has to be gentle when he corrects people who dispute what he says, never forgetting that God may give them a change of mind so that they recognise the truth and come to their senses, once out of the trap where the devil caught them and kept them enslaved.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 2:23-26<br />
</span></em><br />
You may be quite sure that in the last days there are going to be some difficult times. People will be self-centred and grasping, boastful, arrogant, and rude, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, heartless and unappeasable. They will be slanderers, profligates, savages, and enemies of everything that is good. They will be treacherous and reckless and demented by pride, preferring their own pleasure to God. They will keep up the outward appearance of religion but will have rejected the inner power of it. Have nothing to do with people like that.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 3:1-5<br />
<br />
</span></em>Anybody who tries to live in devotion to Christ is certain to be attacked.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 3:12<br />
<br />
</span></em>You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true. Remember who your teachers were.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 3:14<br />
<br />
</span></em>All Scripture is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching, for refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them to be holy.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 3:16<br />
</span></em><br />
Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be Judge of the living and the dead, in the name of his Appearing and of his Kingdom: Proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience. Do all with patience and the intention of teaching. Be careful always to choose the right course. Be brave under trials. Make the preaching of the Good News your life’s work in thoroughgoing service.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Timothy 4:1-2, 5<br />
</span></em><br />
Bring those whom God has chosen to faith and to the knowledge of the truth that leads to true religion, and give them the hope of the eternal life that was promised long ago by God, who does not lie.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 1:1b-2<br />
</span></em><br />
Have a firm grasp of the unchanging message of the tradition.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003333;">Titus 1:9a<br />
</span></em><br />
To all who are pure themselves, everything is pure; but to those who have been corrupted and lack faith, nothing can be pure.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 1:15</span></em><br />
<br />
Preach the behavior which goes with healthy doctrine.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 2:1<br />
</span></em><br />
In everything you do, make yourself an example of working for good.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 2:7<br />
</span></em><br />
When you are teaching be an example in your sincerity and earnestness, and in keeping all that you say so wholesome that nobody can make objections to it.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 2:8<br />
</span></em><br />
There must be no petty thieving. Show complete honesty at all times.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 2:10a<br />
</span></em><br />
God’s grace has been revealed, and it has made salvation possible for the whole human race, and taught us that what we have to do is to give up everthing that does not lead to God, and all our worldly ambitions. We must be self-restrained and live good and religious lives here in this present world while we are waiting for the blessing which will come with the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus. He sacrificed himself for us in order to set us free from all wickedness and to purify a people so that it could be His very own and would have no ambition except to do good.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 2:11-14<br />
</span></em><br />
Be ready to do good at every opportunity.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 3:1b<br />
</span></em><br />
Be courteous and polite to all kinds of people. Remember, there was a time when we too were ignorant, disobedient, and misled and enslaved by different passions and luxuries.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 3:2b-3a<br />
</span></em><br />
If a man disputes what you teach, then after a first and a second warning, have no more to do with him.<br />
<em><span style="color: #000066;">Titus 3:10</span></em><br />
<br />
Faith will give rise to a sense of fellowship that will show you all the good things that we are able to do for Christ.<br />
<em><span style="color: #006600;">Philemon 1:6</span></em><br />
<em><span style="color: #006600;"></span></em><br />
<em><span style="color: #000066; font-size: 78%;">All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966). </span></em>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-67577424140458574762016-10-16T11:48:00.003-07:002016-10-17T07:31:12.290-07:00What shall it profit a man<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3G_yhVi6rNOH4UXsOSSSBBhWj6NBhJTq4XK6J4vDPX9cHxTu18vQg_o_gRRdiNgl9pQSmCZZ9o2fC8XhIWVnMIvV-4aZxqM1kwIiFBiQsfooJWEwh1TalR6Uzu02m8Swqq4NDQg/s1600/the_temptation_of_christ_by_armusik-d4x15hc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3G_yhVi6rNOH4UXsOSSSBBhWj6NBhJTq4XK6J4vDPX9cHxTu18vQg_o_gRRdiNgl9pQSmCZZ9o2fC8XhIWVnMIvV-4aZxqM1kwIiFBiQsfooJWEwh1TalR6Uzu02m8Swqq4NDQg/s400/the_temptation_of_christ_by_armusik-d4x15hc.jpg" width="306" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://armusik.deviantart.com/art/The-Temptation-of-Christ-297345792">The Temptation of Christ</a>, by <a href="http://armusik.deviantart.com/">Eric Armusik</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
We can increase in empathy, if we take the time to consider what it must be like for a certain soul in his or her situation. That’s what the saying means, <i>‘walking in another man’s shoes.’</i> Some religiously minded people practice this kind of meditation with the life of Christ—of course we all do during the services of Holy Week when we relive Christ’s final week on earth with Him—but some do this often, even daily, to sharpen their compassion and empathy. The hoped for result of this contemplation is that we should grow in compassion and empathy for fellow man, but oddly this isn’t always the case.<br />
<br />
For me, my meditation on the souls of others is what forces me—yes, ‘forces’ is not too strong a term—to pray for them, sometimes for people who would not be objects for intercession in the daily flow of events. For the past several days I have been considering this: <i>What must be the state of his soul when a man, in this case, Donald Trump, is engaged in a fight to the finish for the United States presidency? And the state of her soul when a woman, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is fighting tooth and nail for the same?</i> Both are poised on a pinnacle of ultimate danger, much like the parapet of the Temple, as was Jesus.<br />
<br />
Or atop the peak of a very high mountain, as He also was. From the parapet, or guard-railed roof of the Temple, the tempter suggested He throw Himself down, since, if He really <i>was </i>the Son of God as He knew Himself to be, certainly angels would come to the rescue and not let Him be harmed by His fall. And from the mountain top, the tempter suggested that all the world could be His, if only He would bow down and worship him—<i>a disgusting thought!</i> but one that many a mortal man and woman since that time and before has caved in to, and which forms the major narrative of most of the Bible stories.<br />
<br />
Back to the two souls I’ve been thinking about. The state of their souls.<i> What must it be like, what must it feel like, to have to be targeted in such frivolously fierce bombardment with missiles from the past, to have the people who are propping you up on that precarious pinnacle loading your mind (and therefore your soul) with poisonous darts of treachery, some of which you must personally launch? </i>And somewhere on the edges of your daily muse is lurking the knowledge that much of this barrage of assassinoids is simply rubbish, prefab’d for the occasion, fantasy-fused, and for your opponent, <i>fatal</i>.<br />
<br />
No one is actually going to get killed—<i>at least, not yet.</i> Is that the thought that edges the soul of each of them, Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton, closer to the abyss, nearer that point where their souls no longer matter to them, because either they’ve taken the plunge into the arms of guardian angels and disappeared into the vault of invincibility? Or because they’ve already bowed down and worshiped the mirage-making, powerless master of illusion that promises everyone only those things they can never really have, whilst handing over to them the very tools of their own literally restless annihilation?<br />
<br />
Yes, <i>what is it like to be super-human?</i> For that is what two people, a man and a woman, must be who have to face the perpetual and persistent warfare that is this election year in the United States. And <i>what is it like when each of them, momentarily out of the public eye, must face themselves, whether in a mirror or in the reflection of their consciences?</i> Each of them is still a human soul, but both are poised by forces outside their control for either victory or defeat. Only one will taste the first, the other the second. But when the final vote is tallied, not in this or any election, but at the Judgment Seat, <i>who will be the winner?</i><br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;">For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #20124d;">Mark 8:36 <span style="font-size: x-small;">KJV</span></span></b>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-34445865201992223862016-10-15T11:39:00.000-07:002016-10-15T11:39:08.265-07:00Keep the traditions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtJKXrCpggLD3sZSf6k3TSswcdglAz6mwWTH1FejJH90tI51g3ltmttDhXgQARkrL10tUt_cgKTx5o80Ykhyphenhyphentj60_UXGyDVWsgwzNTg6IRA366iUoL75D2oO67Bvdxi3ugQm8yQ/s1600/thessalonians.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtJKXrCpggLD3sZSf6k3TSswcdglAz6mwWTH1FejJH90tI51g3ltmttDhXgQARkrL10tUt_cgKTx5o80Ykhyphenhyphentj60_UXGyDVWsgwzNTg6IRA366iUoL75D2oO67Bvdxi3ugQm8yQ/s320/thessalonians.jpg" width="252" /></a><em><span style="color: #993300;">The teaching of holy apostle Paul…<br />
</span></em><br />
We know that God loves you and that you have been chosen because when we brought the Good News to you, it came to you not only as words, but as power, and as the Holy Spirit, and as utter conviction.<br />
You observed the sort of life we lived when we were with you, which was for your instruction, and you were led to become imitators of us and of the Lord, and it was with the joy of the Holy Spirit that you took to the Gospel.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003300;">1 Thessalonians 1:4-6<br />
</span></em><br />
As soon as you heard the message we brought you as God’s message, you accepted it for what it really is, God’s message and not some human thinking, and it is still a living power among you who believe it.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003300;">1 Thessalonians 2:13<br />
</span></em><br />
What God wants is for you all to be holy.<br />
He wants you to keep away from fornication, and each one of you to know how to use the body that belongs to him in a way that is holy and honorable, not giving way to selfish lust like the pagans who do not know God.<br />
He wants nobody at all ever to sin by taking advantage of a brother in these matters.<br />
We have been called by God to be holy, not to be immoral.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003300;">1 Thessalonians 4:3-7<br />
</span></em><br />
Give encouragement to each other and keep strengthening each other.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003300;">1 Thessalonians 5:11<br />
</span></em><br />
Be considerate to those who are working among you and are above you in the Lord as your teachers. Have the greatest respect and affection for them because of their work.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003300;">1 Thessalonians 5:12-13<br />
</span></em><br />
Be at peace among yourselves.<br />
Warn the idlers.<br />
Give courage to those who are apprehensive.<br />
Care for the weak and be patient with everyone.<br />
Make sure that people do not try to take revenge.<br />
You must all think of what is best for each other and for the community.<br />
Be happy at all times.<br />
Pray constantly, and for all things give thanks to God.<br />
This is what God expects you to do in Christ Jesus.<br />
Never try to suppress the Spirit or treat the gift of prophecy with contempt.<br />
Think before you do anything.<br />
Hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil.<br />
<em><span style="color: #003300;">1 Thessalonians 5:14-22<br />
</span></em><br />
God chose you from the beginning to be saved by the sanctifying Spirit and by faith in the truth.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Thessalonians 2:13b<br />
</span></em><br />
Stand firm, and <b><span style="color: #990000;">keep the traditions</span></b> we taught you whether by word of mouth or by letter.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Thessalonians 2:15<br />
</span></em><br />
Pray that the Lord’s message may spread quickly and be received with honor.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Thessalonians 3:1<br />
</span></em><br />
Keep away from any of the brothers who refuses to work or to live according to the tradition.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Thessalonians 3:6<br />
</span></em><br />
Never grow tired of doing what is right.<br />
If anyone refuses to obey, have nothing to do with him, so that he will feel that he is in the wrong, though you are not to regard him as an enemy, but as a brother in need of correction.<br />
<em><span style="color: #996633;">2 Thessalonians 3:13-15<br />
</span></em><br />
<em><span style="color: #003300; font-size: 78%;">All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).</span></em>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-89041751070545553292016-10-14T21:28:00.002-07:002016-10-14T21:39:24.408-07:00For mine eyes have seen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I read recently, that there are about two hundred million galaxies in the observable universe, and that each galaxy is composed of millions of stars like our own sun. The same article made the astonishing claim that this means, there are more stars in the universe than the number of grains of sand on the planet earth. The scientists who discover these things also tell us, that everything in the known universe emerged from a singularity of infinite density and in size very nearly (if not) nothing, and that in the first unimaginably small fraction of the first second of existence, the ‘big bang,’ an event that initiated the expansion of that singularity, had already pushed the limits of all created matter and energy to a circumference far beyond the outermost orbits in our solar system. They did not see it happen. They do not claim to understand what caused the singularity to explode (if that is the right word). It is on the basis of experimentally derived physical ‘laws’ and the logic of (very much) higher mathematics, that they say these things, trying to create models of natural processes that fit human thought patterns.<br />
<br />
Now, it has taken scientists about eight thousand years to arrive at this point. Not much progress was made in the first seventy-nine hundred years, but in the last hundred or so, they have finally arrived at the place where they are today. What they tell us about the creation of the universe takes for granted that everything that exists is evolving. People knew this long before Darwin applied the idea to his theories on natural selection, the survival of the fittest, which have come to be known in the aggregate as ‘the theory of evolution.’ Now, I believe in the first kind of evolution, and am even open to the possibility that the second kind (that of living entities, including man) is also true. But my belief is only that—a belief, or even an opinion, based on the best information I find available. It is still only a belief. What creation is, what existence is, neither I nor anyone else can really know, at least not as we now are.<br />
<br />
There are other ‘technologies,’ if I may call them that, which have arisen and coexisted with the scientific method, even from antiquity. In a very general way, and for lack of a more precise term, I have called them ‘spiritual technologies.’ Ironically, though, they are not really spiritual, well, not exactly. Scientists use devices which they have made to measure what can be measured, and using logic and mathematics, have developed our knowledge of the physical universe. Spiritual technologs (I have to create a new word—<i>sorry!</i>) use the human being as their only device of discovery, and then proceed to do exactly what scientists do, with the exception of using higher mathematics, they logically organize their discoveries into systems. I said that calling this ‘spiritual technology’ is ironic, and indeed it is, because this body of knowledge is still primarily concerned with nature, with physical realities.<br />
<br />
Because the only device or tool of discovery is the human being, in singular and en masse, the body of knowledge is as holistic as a human being is. Not everything about a human being is discoverable by the scientific method. Where that discipline ends, another ancient one begins—theology. Yet even that term is imprecise, because it is one sided. Theology by the meaning of the term should be the body of knowledge about God, but it is actually only about God in His interactions with man, in other words, about nine-tenths about human nature, and one-tenth (if even that much) about Divine Nature. Still, it is what it is. To the scientist God hides Himself absolutely. To the spiritual technolog He reveals Himself—<i>in human flesh!</i>—so amply and pervasively that He can be overlooked. <i>‘What forest? All I can see are trees!’</i> But for eight thousand years this other discipline of discovery, call it what you will, has delivered to us moderns at least as much, if not more, information about the universe.<br />
<br />
The universe was created out of nothing by ‘X’ in a series of time sequences or ages, except for the last and current age, in which all instantaneous creation has abruptly stopped. We who live in this current age have not ever seen anything like the instantaneous creation that occurred in the previous ages, so we can only conclude that things just don’t work that way. Everything evolves. Just as we have noticed evolution, that is, change, happening all around us and within us for the past eight thousand years, we just assume that’s how it’s always been. The human being as instrument of discovery, though, has given those who thus use it, more information than that which can be measured and weighed externally. Something inside us, if we care to look—which is what we were created to do: we are the eyes, ears and mind of the living universe—something inside us has discovered other realities, even the ultimate Reality by coming into contact with It within our own being.<br />
<br />
This is a place where space and time dilate until they become meaningless. Size, or better yet, scale is irrelevant. Zero and infinity are experienced as extremities of the here and now. We go to a lightless field on a cloudless night and look up. Our eyes see, gradually more and more, the visible universe. There are stars beyond all reckoning, and distances unfathomable. Yet something inside us, comforting, says, <i>‘All that you can see is still contained within the plates of your own skull.’</i> Like a young Mother who once bore within her womb the Child who is pre-eternal God, we know inwardly that we are ‘wider than the heavens,’ and that the Sign we bear within us is the key to comprehending the whole universe. There is no being at all without meaning, and it is this meaning that makes all life possible, and all endeavors, even encompassing every discovery of science that has ever been or shall be made. Encompassing all, giving meaning to all, revealing that everything is a function of the one we call ‘X.’<br />
<br />
Yes, once not long ago, only a few centuries, there was a single pursuit—discovering who or what ‘X’ is, and that pursuit uncovered everything else that exists. This pursuit is the main function of the human mind, an intelligence which inhabits the body organ we call the brain. The brain was created, or evolved—whichever you prefer it doesn’t matter—principally so the universe could discover its reason for being. Anything else that the brain does is ‘thrown in’ as a bonus. Well, almost. Brains can’t live in a vacuum, at least not yet. The mind lives in a brain which lives in a body. We live in houses for the same reason, that same Reason whose pattern is indelibly imprinted on the whole universe, that Reason which wants us to discover It. Yes, I am speaking of that ‘X’ again. Bodies were made for the brains to live in, so that the mind could use everything else in our human nature to do what it was made to do—discover.<br />
<br />
Whatever or whoever we call ‘X’ in any particular place or moment of time, it is the same, operates the same, and welcomes all the same, envyless, unprideful, inexhaustibly merciful is its nature, and for what we are, it is the perfect fit. Everything points to it. We only have to look. I termed it ‘X’ to emphasize that I don’t know how it will fit you, and to give you time and space to find it. As for me, I know who, not what, He is, but not why, except that everything He has made calls me by name and welcomes me to His side. Something in me has disclosed the door of the age to come, and to enter that door I want to be ready, as ready as him who said, <i><span style="color: #990000;">‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy Word, <b>for mine eyes have seen</b>…’</span></i>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-63163575140689197352016-10-14T21:18:00.001-07:002016-10-14T21:20:50.618-07:00Keep them in Thy power<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ZCnUy_HtnLmgn9mdhHNfDyIiOyvrYm0KhCXZRIdO1wkzOo566w2-V9W83V66rttJzlOksyX3sZ1ZmD8pq76l7_1pUNCedhAwEM0XQsK4N-_jwzYOdX2Ao_di-Y_sxQRIe5rY/s1600-h/insanity.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="300" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384684444534730402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ZCnUy_HtnLmgn9mdhHNfDyIiOyvrYm0KhCXZRIdO1wkzOo566w2-V9W83V66rttJzlOksyX3sZ1ZmD8pq76l7_1pUNCedhAwEM0XQsK4N-_jwzYOdX2Ao_di-Y_sxQRIe5rY/s400/insanity.jpg" style="display: block; height: 300px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" width="400" /></a><span style="color: #000066;">When I was still working for a living—I am now retired—when I motored to and from work every day, part of my route took me up Portland’s N.E. 82nd Avenue, a major north-south boulevard infamous for its connexion to prostitution, adult video parlors, and strip joints.<br />
<br />
One morning, a forty-ish looking prostitute with long, curly auburn hair, wearing skin-tight blue jeans, and taking a drag on a cigarette, was walking along the road with a man. I just happened to notice her and in that fleeting moment, she stared me in the eyes with an intense look of mixed contempt and anger, and then was gone.<br />
<br />
Another morning, a man in a shabby linen suit, looking about fifty years old, with a shock of red-gold hair and a very thick but trimmed beard to match, was standing on that same sidewalk right at the road’s edge shaking his fist at on-coming traffic and shouting angry words. He wasn’t standing at a corner or at a bus stop. He made no move to jay-walk the busy avenue. He was just expressing himself.<br />
<br />
One night about seven years ago, a friend of mine who happens to be Orthodox, was homeless and staying with me for awhile, was sitting in my livingroom. I was upstairs in my bedroom. I thought I heard the sound of the front door being opened and shut, and I heard him talking to someone, then—silence. I waited a minute or two, and then came downstairs and asked him if there was someone at the door. His response was, ‘<em>No.’</em><br />
<br /><em>‘Well, who were you talking to then?’</em> I asked. ‘<em>I was talking to the man who has been tormenting me for the last ten years,’</em> he answered in an annoyed tone of voice, then mumbled as if to himself, ‘<em>who’s been tormenting me for the past forty years…’</em> and then trailed off. ‘<em>What are you talking about?’</em> I responded. ‘<em>Spirits! There’s spirits outside! Roman, the world is full of spirits!’</em> he retorted in an angry, panicky tone of voice. I left him there and went back upstairs to my evening ‘quiet time.’<br />
<br />
It seems that the world we inhabit is full of insanity or, as my friend put it, spirits. Even though he was a Christian, his mental illness continued and worsened. The Church could do nothing for him, because everything it can do must be done with his full consent, and he wouldn’t give it. Thinking about him and his condition makes me wonder if an insane person actually <em>has</em> free will.</span><br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><br />
</span><span style="color: #000066;">Once, writing about mental illness, I said, <i>‘T</i><em>urning to Christ means sanity; turning away from Him means insanity.’</em> The world that I used to see every day on one leg of my drive to work was (and still is) an insane world, and that world can get very, very close sometimes. It intrudes on my Church, on my own family, even on me. It all comes down to this: Do we turn <em>to</em> Christ or <em>away from</em> Him?<br />
<br />
It’s not hard to see how those who live in the world without Christ can be insane, but <i>how can an Orthodox or any Christian be insane?</i> Well, we still have choices and we make them. Some insanity, maybe most of it, is caused by disorders deeper than the level of will, but there are those forms of insanity which we welcome by our persistent rebellion, our refusal to accept help.<br />
<br />
We can see it in small doses affecting ourselves, but the same rebellion repeated and unrestrained seems to lead us to a point where we no longer have the will to resist it. Insanity, then, becomes our ‘normal’ state, from which we emerge only as necessary to survive interactions with others, and into which we retreat when we find ourselves alone.<br />
<br />
<em>How could my friend be insane and a Christian at the same time? </em>In his case, it seemed to me, it was a disorder of the will, a bent towards the rebellious, a turning away from the <i>real </i>Christ combined with a turning towards an <i>idolatrous image</i> of Christ. He would spend his time ‘praying’ and reading the bible aloud in Greek (he didn’t understand Greek, he just knew how to pronounce it) when he couldn’t find anything else to do. He couldn’t bring himself to actually work (hold a job) because everyone ‘out there’ was out to prevent him from working and leading a normal life. He couldn’t see how he could possibly be responsible for any of his misfortunes.<br />
<br />
It’s the mercy of Christ, coming to him because of his confession of His name, that has kept my friend from total insanity, but it’s like he is hanging on to life by a shoestring. We see him now and then as he cycles through a round of different Orthodox parishes, staying only a short while, and then disappearing again.<br />
<br />
It makes me wonder just how much of what we do and what we are is only because of God’s grace, and how it is that some find themselves turning <i>to </i>Him, and others turning <i>away</i>.<br />
<br />And so my prayer, tonight and every night, drawn from the Night Litany in the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book (Anglican), is ‘<em>For the insane,</em><i> Lord,</i> <em><b>keep them in Thy power</b>.’</em></span>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-34826919992552723572016-10-14T11:36:00.000-07:002016-10-14T11:36:01.675-07:00Renewed in the Image<div>
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<em><span style="color: #993399;"><span style="color: #660000;">The teaching of holy apostle Paul…</span></span></em></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
You will be able to lead the kind of life which the Lord expects of you, a life acceptable to Him in all its aspects, showing the results in all the good actions you do and increasing your knowledge of God. You will have in you the strength never to give in, but to bear anything joyfully, thanking the Father who made it possible for you to join the saints and with them to inherit the light.<br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><em>Colossians 1:10-12<br />
</em></span><br />
He has taken us out of the power of darkness and created a place for us in the Kingdom of the Son that he loves, and in him we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 1:13-14<br />
</span></em><br />
The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory. This is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone, to make them all perfect in Christ.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 1:27-28<br />
</span></em><br />
Make sure that no one deceives you with specious arguments.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 2:4<br />
</span></em><br />
You must live your whole life according to the Christ you have received, Jesus the Lord. You must be rooted in Him and built on Him and held firm by the faith you have been taught, and full of thanksgiving.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 2:6-7<br />
</span></em><br />
Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world instead of on Christ.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 2:8<br />
</span></em><br />
Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven where Christ is sitting at God’s right hand. Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on the earth.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:1-2<br />
</span></em><br />
You must kill everything in you that belongs only to earthly life: fornication, impurity, guilty passion, evil desires, and especially greed, which is the same thing as worshiping a false god. All this is the sort of behavior that makes God angry.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:5-6<br />
</span></em><br />
You must give all these things up: getting angry, being bad-tempered, spitefulness, abusive language and dirty talk, and never tell each other lies.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:8-9a<br />
</span></em><br />
You have stripped off your old behavior with your old self, and you have put on a new self which will progress toward true knowledge the more it is <b><span style="color: #990000;">renewed in the Image</span></b> of its Creator. In that Image there is no room for distinction. There is only Christ. He is everything, and He is in everything.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:9b-11<br />
</span></em><br />
You are God’s chosen race, His saints. He loves you. You should be clothed in sincere compassion, in kindness and humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with one another. Forgive each other as soon as a quarrel begins. The Lord has forgiven you. Now you must do the same. Over all these clothes to keep them together and complete them, put on love. And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, because it is for this that you were called together as parts of one body. Always be thankful.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:12-15<br />
</span></em><br />
Let the message of Christ in all its richness find a home with you. Teach each other and advise each other in all wisdom. With gratitude in your hearts sing psalms and hymns and inspired songs to God. Never say or do anything except in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:16-17<br />
</span></em><br />
Wives, give way to your husbands, as you should in the Lord.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:18<br />
</span></em><br />
Husbands, love your wives and treat them with gentleness.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:19<br />
</span></em><br />
Children, be obedient to your parents always, because that is what will please the Lord.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:20<br />
</span></em><br />
Parents, never drive your children to resentment or you will make them feel frustrated.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:21<br />
</span></em><br />
Whatever your work is, put your heart into it as if it were for the Lord and not for men, knowing that the Lord will repay you by making you His heirs. It is Christ the Lord that you are serving.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 3:23-24<br />
</span></em><br />
Be persevering in your prayers and be thankful as you stay awake to pray.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 4:2<br />
</span></em><br />
Be tactful with those who are not Christians and be sure you make the best use of your time with them. Talk to them agreeably and with a flavor of wit, and try to fit your answers to the needs of each one.<br />
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;">Colossians 4:5-6<br />
</span><span style="color: #993399; font-size: 78%;"></span></em><br />
<em><span style="color: #660000; font-size: 78%;">All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).</span></em>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-80641027371121044652016-10-13T20:51:00.000-07:002016-10-13T20:51:31.046-07:00Just not a joiner<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkuuVne_yHu8jn-AQZ-nuD6m3O0Dv6-24DJkPVCOaJ_ze1YGJmKIfm4bqdleJo8P0OEspQLOtNNcDuRHmJYSpPA427CU2SFK2ys6GKSGV79GtX7F14JhBC0FRTCqsSvrJgnsFfmw/s1600/800px-Wayang_Pandawa.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499783965556835666" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkuuVne_yHu8jn-AQZ-nuD6m3O0Dv6-24DJkPVCOaJ_ze1YGJmKIfm4bqdleJo8P0OEspQLOtNNcDuRHmJYSpPA427CU2SFK2ys6GKSGV79GtX7F14JhBC0FRTCqsSvrJgnsFfmw/s400/800px-Wayang_Pandawa.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 180px; margin: 0px 10px 13px 0px; width: 400px;" /></a>I guess I’m just not a joiner.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBt2xGygK1_dHYG1GrlHgfZL6MHV4saaXafMKx25zCuAkvMYNvpiOhEKW8k68XEetbdmjNzFmtoYLS31bru2Y3mYgS_PPCtmblIkbbfvFGRKfkN2JnnJbEeE7yUWV68jcE9LTv1w/s1600/15-livingroom-to-stairway.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499870179500577106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBt2xGygK1_dHYG1GrlHgfZL6MHV4saaXafMKx25zCuAkvMYNvpiOhEKW8k68XEetbdmjNzFmtoYLS31bru2Y3mYgS_PPCtmblIkbbfvFGRKfkN2JnnJbEeE7yUWV68jcE9LTv1w/s200/15-livingroom-to-stairway.JPG" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; width: 150px;" /></a>One day about six years ago when I was living in my townhouse at the Binfords, an ecology canvasser came to my door, a tall, dark and accented young man seeking my assistance and support for his current project: getting Oregon to be the first state in the nation to ban the use of plastic bags. <em>Ban plastic bags?</em> Well, yes, they are strangling the planet and take literally forever to go back to the elements. I never like to stand in the doorway talking to a missionary through the screen, so I invited the young man in. He acquiesced with some trepidation.<br />
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I never did learn his name (unusual for me) but I did find out that his accent was British, and that he was the offspring of a Burmese mother and British father. I offered him a seat on the sofa and asked him if he’d like some refreshments, or if he needed to use the washroom, both of which offers he declined. As he informed me of his mission to save the planet starting with my state, I prodded him with questions, asking the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys"><em>five why’s</em></a>.<br />
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I reminisced with him about my own youthful missions to save the planet, and what became of them, counter-cultural efforts with people’s food co-ops and the like.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvOi9E6sNGf1Ektm7il3_byANMVXECO_6OkfptFU1SrUyDZpdXMCRr-x3R3GvtCCGPSAlthNGaEnsVQI9r7_Qu84Ugl-_Wm1nRfb5uWzUl0edaJYJCv7OFgE1LiEAozUdAgBQ6sg/s1600/Co-op450W.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499792538182077842" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvOi9E6sNGf1Ektm7il3_byANMVXECO_6OkfptFU1SrUyDZpdXMCRr-x3R3GvtCCGPSAlthNGaEnsVQI9r7_Qu84Ugl-_Wm1nRfb5uWzUl0edaJYJCv7OFgE1LiEAozUdAgBQ6sg/s200/Co-op450W.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 7px 10px 0px 0px; width: 136px;" /></a> As a matter of fact, not a single one of them survived. Bringing our own containers to the food co-op meant that almost no bags or other containers had to be used, and the garbage we used to accumulate that couldn’t be worked back into the soil of our garden amounted in a week’s time to hardly fill a waste paper basket.<br />
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<em>What happened to all that?</em><br />
The world moved in and took over the movement, improved it and made it more profitable as well as trendy. After all, if you’re going to save the planet, you should at least do it in style. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCzoPgLYXIBwTOGVAFMEAFyk4dFELJK5cwpbhJGHdYLLKOHJA1w_lT8BPjD7vv6wVHxkf0mIhj6NU5nHcSF6a9yiVYVd32u61_MpynoZLFA4dxScE5VPmcXJPtAgVl80Xqi9RmBA/s1600/New+Seasons+Market+Portland+Oregon.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499792815861350146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCzoPgLYXIBwTOGVAFMEAFyk4dFELJK5cwpbhJGHdYLLKOHJA1w_lT8BPjD7vv6wVHxkf0mIhj6NU5nHcSF6a9yiVYVd32u61_MpynoZLFA4dxScE5VPmcXJPtAgVl80Xqi9RmBA/s200/New+Seasons+Market+Portland+Oregon.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 150px; margin: 7px 0px 0px 10px; width: 200px;" /></a>So, after all our work, my young friend has to start over at ground zero, and canvass for signatures on a petition to be forwarded to the halls of government, so that virtue can be legislated, or maybe, so that freedom to be bad can be eradicated. That’s one way to save us from ourselves.<br />
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Sitting with me in my front room, the young man looked around nervously as he tried to enlist me in his campaign. I offered my moral support, but I told him that there was a more urgent need that required my full attention. I tried to talk to him about Jesus, who is still the most active person alive in the world today, and about His divine <em>ikonomía</em>, which goes deeper than the symptoms of ecological crisis to their embarrassing source, humanity’s sin, and has provided the way out.<br />
<br />
Now his eyes were open. He understood where he was. Now he knew why those mysterious pictures, the hanging oil lamps and the censer, and that ancient-looking scroll across the room hanging on the wall above the dining room table. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh19cNQrhUOoGOxmKoeckyv_y1RHYLV5CZVOjaajslukpojUS-EVqDA_rUmwFmFcS5PSy8lna3kPWBozSWmF_pEGTeoDs2Pz2YWCQnNy3j0s39Bilg1K5z5uxKpfFitxAqnNjy3lA/s1600/08-livingroom-sunwall-window.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499794803443462866" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh19cNQrhUOoGOxmKoeckyv_y1RHYLV5CZVOjaajslukpojUS-EVqDA_rUmwFmFcS5PSy8lna3kPWBozSWmF_pEGTeoDs2Pz2YWCQnNy3j0s39Bilg1K5z5uxKpfFitxAqnNjy3lA/s200/08-livingroom-sunwall-window.JPG" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 7px 10px 0px 0px; width: 150px;" /></a><em>This guy was a religious nut!</em> But that only gave him another angle to try to get me to join his crusade. <em>“I believe that saving one’s soul can be done while saving the planet, don’t you? And wouldn’t it be good for your soul to give me at least a small donation?”</em><br />
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I looked at him quizzically, trying not to have the “Aha!” look of a zen master who has just been enlightened by understanding a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan"><em>kōan</em></a>. <em>“Golly, I really don’t have any money in the house, I don’t think, and I don’t give to feel good. But here, if there’s anything you see in this room that you need or could use, please take it! Anything.”</em> He looked around and grinned and then said, <em>“Are you sure you don’t have anything, even a dollar, that I can have, so that I can show that we have your support? It’s really important.”</em><br />
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<em>“Okay, wait here,”</em> I responded, <em>“there just might be a dollar in my wallet that I was saving for a candle offering at church tomorrow. If it’s there, you can have it!”</em> And I jumped up and went upstairs to find my wallet. Fortunately, there was a dollar in my billfold.<em> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5HrGivpDr91HO5H3N-xZObdq7Ds4ZH55pmqLWxp3s21bMp-R9ov9X0wm6xYE4n56JrhiIqReSLzBbYaqh9yCb9blOPLbh5Dc-wN0i4vACpSMq3QmM2mFtzmsY-DtjdotT02vh6Q/s1600/chongning.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499866988755020274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5HrGivpDr91HO5H3N-xZObdq7Ds4ZH55pmqLWxp3s21bMp-R9ov9X0wm6xYE4n56JrhiIqReSLzBbYaqh9yCb9blOPLbh5Dc-wN0i4vACpSMq3QmM2mFtzmsY-DtjdotT02vh6Q/s200/chongning.JPG" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 149px; margin: 7px 0px 0px 10px; width: 150px;" /></a><br />
“Hmm,”</em> I thought to myself, <em>“he’s such a nice boy, I wonder what else I can give him to reward him for his efforts, something just for him, that he can’t record in his little book, or spend.”</em> Then I looked over at a small stack of <em>chongnings</em> on my desk.<br />
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<em>“Maybe he would like a thousand year old Chinese coin!”</em> I said, quickly finding the best one in the stack, with beautiful Chinese calligraphy designed by the emperor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Huizong_of_Song">Song Huizong</a> himself, and applied to all coins cast in the year A.D. 1102. The piece was a large, “value-10” coin, round with a square hole in the middle. In today’s money, it would be worth about $10 or so, and was the price you had to pay to enter a bath house in 12th century China. I thought he might like that.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGAsK_C3-a8a62Jt5VThsINGdW5xWD9S2uV6u9ogdll4KLkLQ98Hs1ItYqH5tuN6R1WBeeBt5LfFuYqiOwStV_VtSjv4O0Sj2TrcPGlJzwk0o2yCZtKJ6okBV7Q14KTrkUsjKRrA/s1600/07-stairway-to-entrance.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499793593811305394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGAsK_C3-a8a62Jt5VThsINGdW5xWD9S2uV6u9ogdll4KLkLQ98Hs1ItYqH5tuN6R1WBeeBt5LfFuYqiOwStV_VtSjv4O0Sj2TrcPGlJzwk0o2yCZtKJ6okBV7Q14KTrkUsjKRrA/s200/07-stairway-to-entrance.JPG" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 150px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; width: 200px;" /></a><em>“Well, you’re in luck,”</em> I said as I came down the stairs to where he was still sitting. <em>“There was a dollar in my wallet, but I felt bad that you had nothing for yourself, so I thought you might like this,”</em> I said as I handed him the big, brassy <em>chongning</em>. <em>“This is a coin cast in the year 1102 during the Northern Song dynasty. It was worth about ten dollars back then. You could use it to get into the baths, or to purchase a very nice supper with meat and rice wine. The inscription was written by the emperor himself.” </em><br />
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The young man accepted the coin and smiled. <em>“Even though I am Burmese, I am very interested in Chinese culture and history. Thank you! I really appreciate this!”</em> Then he carefully put it away among his things, and tacked the dollar to his clipboard, and got up to leave. <em>“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink of water at least, or anything? I have ice fruit bars!”</em> I didn’t want to let him pass my house without even a drink, but he refused. I thanked him for stopping by, wished him success, and made to shake his hand.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVLnXZ2hUcY3U8R88g70I1BhyphenhyphencA5ICbZfnX89RqP-h5dRtVBG1wR0YYOrFU9QcTcS7hH67YoGMBXTuf5aQ6dKT_QEbG8CBhbtLI7RgDubXs31OnTorvcVvYN91KVcFb6iJ5q1VUQ/s1600/10-yudhie-wall-wayang-closeup2.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499793926381909010" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVLnXZ2hUcY3U8R88g70I1BhyphenhyphencA5ICbZfnX89RqP-h5dRtVBG1wR0YYOrFU9QcTcS7hH67YoGMBXTuf5aQ6dKT_QEbG8CBhbtLI7RgDubXs31OnTorvcVvYN91KVcFb6iJ5q1VUQ/s200/10-yudhie-wall-wayang-closeup2.JPG" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 150px;" /></a>The look on his face was one of being startled. It were as if he had never shaken anyone’s hand before. I never let anyone go without at least a handshake. So he timidly extended his hand, and I took it in mine, first the modern way, and then I slipped my grip into the comrade’s handshake, which it seemed he was also unaware of. After a moment, he regained his composure and I walked him out, past a large batik map of Indonesia, a framed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayang"><em>wayang</em></a>, and another frame with photos of my Javanese son, Yudhie.<br />
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<em>“Sorry I couldn’t do more to help you. I guess I’m just not a joiner,”</em> I said as he passed out of my life for ever, and again I wished him success. Hopefully I planted good seed, though, that may sprout, grow and bear fruit. Hopefully he won’t forget his visit to Romanos’ house, and not just because of that old coin.</div>
Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24378081.post-34953615030417034572016-10-13T20:30:00.002-07:002016-10-13T20:30:34.320-07:00επι της γης … εν τοις ουρανοις<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTXqp9m3rRAvIumGmS2OSX_CCHsVYUu8knRUMHLcv44wyEuVhyphenhyphenG4e8YzpSRnXaKUoee2AN7UStBlCXxGP6bDd9dTIkoxZCVIgl13xiOvaaY_iZjt6PEMtPWcFApjpbG8W4WSnA_w/s1600/Xristos2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTXqp9m3rRAvIumGmS2OSX_CCHsVYUu8knRUMHLcv44wyEuVhyphenhyphenG4e8YzpSRnXaKUoee2AN7UStBlCXxGP6bDd9dTIkoxZCVIgl13xiOvaaY_iZjt6PEMtPWcFApjpbG8W4WSnA_w/s400/Xristos2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><b><span style="color: #990000;">When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #20124d;">Matthew 16:13-20</span></b><br />
<b><br />
</b> <b><span style="color: #990000;">Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #20124d;">Matthew 28:16-20</span></b><br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;">Upon the earth… in the heavens. </span></i>What kind of power the Son of God has granted to us!<i> Who is He giving this power to? Is it just to the apostle Peter, or is it to the Pope (who some say is the successor of that apostle), or is it to all of us?</i> On this question hinges not only the history of Europe for the last two thousand years, but the history of everyone of us, not just in Europe, but all over the world.<br />
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We can take a very literal view of this and conclude that it is only the apostle, or we can accept the historic view and conclude that it is to the Church in all its forms, especially in the form we personally adhere to. Many of us will excuse ourselves and be resigned<i> <span style="color: #990000;">‘not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.’</span> ‘After all,’ </i>we think,<i> ‘Christ commanded this,’</i> forgetting that He had yet to be risen from the dead.<br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;">The gates of Hades.</span> ‘How does this fit into what Christ is telling us? Didn’t He demolish those gates by His resurrection? If He did, how could they overcome the Church?’</i> We can play this game all day long, all our lives, batting around bible verses, thinking that we are saved or even just safe, enclosed within the strong walls of the Church, because someone has been given the keys of the kingdom of heaven.<br />
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Someone else, <i>not us.</i> We are not worthy. We don’t have enough faith. He can’t be speaking to us. Otherwise, there would be no need for pastors, preachers, popes and presidents. History is history. We absolve ourselves and disappear into the kingdom of crowds, having exchanged our glory for shame. Whatever else is true about Christ, the Church, or ourselves,<i> ‘that man is you’</i> doesn’t apply to us.<br />
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The unbelieving world is happy with this, and with us. They can feel justified by their own righteousness, having rejected the righteousness that comes from faith. They need neither Christ nor the Church. Being a Christian is just belonging to another club. We’ve given them the proof by not giving them<i> ‘the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth.’</i> How could we have, if the Truth is not in us?<br />
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Yet, in spite of what we have done or have not done with the good news that Christ gives, not gave, into our hands, and whether or not we recognize Him who stands in our midst among the golden lampstands, He still walks in the world seeking His lost sheep, still sows His good seed in fields we sow with tares, still buries the treasures of the Kingdom of Heaven where they will be found by those who seek.<br />
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His commandments are still with us, they are living, not dead, written in our flesh, not in stone, waiting for our resurrection at the sound of the trumpet, the same which sounded for John the Revelator, summoning him to attend to the vision of Him <i><span style="color: #990000;">who was, who is, and who is to come,</span></i> the same who says to us,<i><span style="color: #990000;"> ‘surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’</span></i> He is here, with us, now, everywhere.<br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;">Upon the earth… in the heavens, ‘…whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’</span> </i>It is the picture of progression. It is sown as a fleshly body, it is harvested as a spiritual body. These are words spoken to us, by Him who is ‘in the heavens’ yet walks ‘upon the earth’, that whatever we do upon the earth is done in the heavens.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">Then Jesus came to them and said,<i> “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…”</i></span>Ρωμανός ~ Romanóshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212143017939554092noreply@blogger.com0