The Jesus Manifesto....

Somehow in my cyber travels, I came upon a site called The Jesus Manifesto.  I vaguely remember visiting there before, back when I was reading a lot of Girardian stuff and hanging out at sites like Preaching Peace and Every Church a Peace Church. It is an interesting site...set up in blog format. The Jesus Manifesto..an interesting name. On the "About JM" page it proclaims:

When Jesus started his ministry, he issued a manifesto–a statement declaring the coming of the Kingdom. To find Jesus’ manifesto, some people look to the Sermon on the Mount, but my vote is for Luke 4:18-19:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

I looked up the word "manifesto" for this post.  It is one of those words I "know" the meaning of but am hard pressed to find synonyms to define it.

Emily will often ask me what a word means when I use it in a conversation with her. 

"What does, blah blah mean, Mom?" or "I don't know what blah blah means."

I pause, think a moment and often answer, "You know...blah blah." as if by some magic power repeating the word or phrase will bring the definition from the depths of her subconscious.  It has become sort of a family joke. 

"No, I don't know what it means.  That's why I asked."

Then I struggle to find the synonyms to describe "blah blah." Sometimes synonyms are elusive and putting familiar words in "other words" is difficult. 

So to add to my own mental cache of words and their meanings...and in case Emily ever asks me for a definition of manifesto in the course of a conversation, I offer the following from Wordsmyth:

a public statement of principles and intentions, usually by an organized political group or person.

One of the synonyms listed is "pronunciamento."  Oh, that should come in useful if Emily ever asks.  :)

Anyway, the site comes from an emergent, feed the hungry, clothe the poor, my allegiance is to the Lord sort of perspective.  I don't mean that in an offhanded or condescending way at all.  I didn't spend a lot of time there because I visited on a weekday morning when time is limited.  There were a few writings that piqued my interest. I converted them from text to speech (using Text Aloud) and listened to them on my MP3 player when I took my lunch break stroll around the neighborhood. 

The post called "Ghandi Was Wrong" explores the tension of living in a "now/not yet" Kingdom.  The victory has been won, Jesus accomplished it on the cross yet the lion has yet to lie down with the lamb.  Their view is that we are living in overlapping kingdoms.  It is finished but that is not what we see with our natural eyes...and just what is our responsibility in this overlapping time warp?

Another post I read there is called "Striving for a Just Peace without the Myth of Redemptive Violence" The authors of the writing refer to this myth as the envisioning of:

.....a utopian future brought into the present by efficient violence and skillful use of less violent, but still coercive, soft power.

The post discusses the allegiance to political parties (and in fact the insistence by many members of those parties, that in order to be a Christian one must side with their particular ideology and vote for their candidate.) The solution?

The only way to confront this compartmentalized form of syncretism is to do what Paul does in his letter to the Colossians: announce that Jesus is Lord Redeemer of all areas of life, including all powers and authorities, and that his victory over the forces of evil happened on the cross and in his resurrection.

Anyway, it is an interesting site to go take a look-see. 

Deepak Chopra's Third Jesus...

I just watched the first in a series of six podcasts by Deepak Chopra on Unity. The series is based on his latest book, The Third Jesus.  I like what he's had to say so far.  Below are a few of the points he's made in this podcast "Who is Jesus and Why Does It Matter?"

• The first Jesus he refers to is the historical Jesus. The son of man who walked the dusty trails and vales of the middle east. 
• The first Jesus is mentioned in the writings of Josephus.  Not only that he existed and was crucified, but Josephus also alluded to the resurrection.  I didn't know that. 
• The second Jesus was the Jesus invented by the church...from ancient times to the present. The Nicene Creed Jesus...the pomp and circumstance Jesus...the Jesus whose teachings have been distorted and misinterpreted down through the ages until many bear little resemblance to what he was trying to say.
• The third Jesus is the indwelling Christ...one of the mysteries the Bible speaks of...the Christ in you, the hope of glory. 
• Jesus was not a Christian.  And the people to whom he said things like...."don't you know you are gods" were not Christians.  When Jesus spoke of being born again...he was referring to coming into "God Consciousness"...as in "I and the Father are one"
• References in the scripture to the experience of God Consciousness are largely ignored in Christianity (Jesus said, "You search the scriptures for eternal life but you will not come to me"  Paul said, "The Spirit gives life, the letter kills." John said, "It is the Spirit that quickeneth"  All these are paraphrased) 
• Churchianity has set itself up as the authority on how to "get to God" discrediting the experience of the quickening of the Spirit. Instead of the experience, we have dogma. We have ideology. 
• Then, to defend the ideology, wars are fought.  He said there are 35 wars going on right now..all fought in the name of God. 
• Deepok's view is that the more insecure one is, the tighter they hold onto their beliefs.  He credited fundamentalists as being among the most insecure.
• It is easy to mistake knowing ABOUT Jesus....to knowing ABOUT God...for actually KNOWING Jesus.  For actually KNOWING God. 
• When our consciousness shifts/mutates/is born again, EVERYTHING changes.  Our social interactions, our thoughts, our physical state, our relationships...everything. 

There was more said...perhaps I will comment in future meanderings. 

They Do Not Know....

Psalm 82 says:

⁵They do not know, nor do they understand;
        They walk about in darkness;
        All the foundations of the earth are unstable.
⁶I said, "You are gods, 
        And all of you are children of the Most High.  

I came across something the other day in my surfing (don't ask me how or where).  It was the story of an eagle who was raised by a chicken...and so "it did not know, nor understand and it walked about in darkness."  The story was by Anthony De Mello. 

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth--we're chickens."

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.
From the book Awareness, by Anthony de Mello, S.J.

Revelations from Eby...

Recently, I picked up one of Keith's hard copy studies from Preston Eby. It is number 82 in The Candlestick to the Throne series; a study on Revelation that has been going on for several years.  I was somewhat taken aback when I read the following:

Sin, sorrow, and death are God’s great cosmic object lesson! God could have made all of us like robots, programmed to be holy and to act righteously at all times and under all circumstances. But should He have done so, the one thing we all would lack is character. We would be holy, but without the knowledge of why we are holy, or the understanding of the consequences of not being holy. We would not be holy because we desired holiness, or because, with knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, we chose to be holy. God didn’t want robots! He wanted sons and daughters!

God, in His omniscient wisdom and knowledge, understood fully the difference between good, evil, holiness, and life. He planned for us also to understand! Not by being told, counseled, or trained like animals, but by experience. Oh yes, experience is the best teacher! Our heavenly Father purposed to take us a route through which we would learn experientially the true nature of all things, that through the interchange of good and evil, and the deep dealings of the Holy Spirit, every man and every creature ultimately would be brought to the place where they would knowingly, willingly, and eternally choose and cling to the way of life, light, and love! Aren’t you glad!

God deliberately gave to man an area of autonomy — self government — POWER.

I can see some merit in this plan.  There was a time I couldn't. Worded this way, I can even sort of agree that it might be a good idea.... although I still really don't like the suffering parts.  It provides an explanation for the age old theodicy question...the question Beth thinks she's found the answer to when she dons her "YOUR GOD IS DEAD" T-shirt.  Why is there suffering in the world?  The answer? So we learn experientially to cling to the way of life, light and love....,

In his book "Is God To Blame?" Gregory Boyd expresses a similar thought:

God’s plan has always been that we would align our will with his will. But because his plan is a plan of love, this alignment could not be preprogrammed or coerced. The possibility of rejecting it had to exist. If love is the end, freedom must be the means to that end.

God created the world out of love and for the purpose of love. But as all emotionally healthy people intuitively know, love must be chosen. And choice means that a person can say no. Unless people can choose not to love, they can’t genuinely choose to love. The possibility of the one is built into the possibility of the other. Love simply cannot be coerced or programmed into people.

Gregory Boyd is not a universalist. Like C.S. Lewis he believes that "There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way." As a universalist, I believe that God will never say...have it your way. The hound of heaven will relentlessly dog every single soul ever born. He will hunt them down, overwhelm them with his love and goodness until they willingly and joyfully bow their knee to Christ.  Some may take longer than others but he has time on his side...

Regardless of Boyd's stand on UR, aren't these guys both saying that there is an area, a dimension, a sphere, a realm of autonomy, self government...freedom?

In "Man Is a Free Moral Agent" Eby says the following:

Where do these man-made preachers get the notion that man is a free moral agent? Indeed, he may be free in some minor things that concern his personal conduct, but concerning God's eternal purpose for him He is not free to do his own will.....

Does that mean we are totally free?  Another one of those age old paradoxes that has never been fully sorted out and agreed upon....free will/determinism.  Our choices are not unlimited. Of course God imposes his will on us sometimes.  Often...even most of the time....virtually all the time.   We even pray that he forces his will on others...and oftentimes he does.  Oftentimes there may only be ONE choice based on the overwhelming influences and our character and nature and those things he blinds us to...but sometimes, sometimes we must have a choice, a real choice, not a psuedo choice to demonstrate to ourselves (and if you hold to the open view to demonstrate to him) what we've learned.  Otherwise, we ARE simply robots and our "training for reigning" is akin to "animal training." And if we choose the opposite of life, light and love?  Well, we have to repeat the lesson again and again until we get it right...and then we get to move on to the next one. 

... For the mystery of godliness belongs to those who are willing, not to those who are overpowered. --Gregory of Nazianzus

A Great Irony...

In yesterday's post about Fr. Robert Rohr's thoughts on Eckhart, I closed with the following quote ...

I am willing to hear truth today wherever it comes from, as long as it does not compromise the Gospel.

Me, too.....

Even from Preston Eby.  Let me explain.

I have been ticked off at Preston Eby for ten years.  Even in spite of the fact that his Savior of the World series made a huge impact on me in the early days of coming into UR. I just could not choke down his teachings on suffering and processing during the period of time I was (in varying degrees and levels of intensity) estranged from God.  I hated his emphasis on suffering. Expect to suffer, don't be surprised when you suffer, you WILL suffer.  And his teachings on sovereignty made it even worse. There was no way you could cut the suffering short.  Not with a cheerful attitude, not by being a good student and learning the lessons quickly that the suffering was designed to teach.  Nope...nothing could get you out of the slow, meticulous killing off of the flesh.  

He has always been one of Keith's favorite authors. We have several shelves of a bookcase filled with Eby's teachings.  One thing for sure about Preston Eby; he is a prolific writer. Another thing almost as certain was the inevitability of a heated discussion taking place between Keith and I any time we talked about Eby's teachings.  I didn't understand a lot of what he had to say and most of what I did understand, I didn't like or I disagreed with.  Sometimes vehemently. 

The great irony is that Eckhart Tolle's teachings opened the door of my understanding to a lot of what Eby has been saying for years.  Ironic.  A cosmic joke.  God has a sense of humor. 

Now I am more appreciative of what Eby was trying to teach me and I am going to mine out what is there.  It might take me a while because, as I mentioned, he is a prolific writer.  He has series upon series, volume upon volume.  With a simple exchange of terms (such as carnal mind for egoic mind) I find his teachings complement Tolle's writings....providing the same theme from a totally Christian paradigm. Tolle is, afterall, not a Christian...and I am.  A more Christian understanding of living out of my new nature is a good thing.

Some of the writings I've added to my always, ever expanding queue are The Antichrist, series which gives a detailed description of the egoic nature, The Seed in Every Man, which discusses the christ within and Union by Fusion....to name a few.   

I'll post any profound observations. 

The Immovable Rock...2

As annie was saying in yesterday's post:

"God is not so much interested in our producing "results" as the results he produces IN us."

Yep...there have been some immovable rocks in my life.  There still are.  Nobody likes situations...events...people...that have us pushing against the same damn rock for years and years.  Seemingly nothing changes...and perhaps the changes in us are so subtle we don't even notice them.  Or perhaps we do.  I see changes in me as a result of some of the serious rock pushing I've done over the years.  Doesn't adversity introduce a man to himself?

And if God had flat out told the guy in this story that there was no way he was ever going to budge that rock....would his efforts have been as enthusiastic?  Thus, the changes God intended in/for the rock pusher would have never occurred.  A good example of this principle in action is demonstrated in the book of Ezekiel.

God gave Ezekiel an assortment of arderous busy work to complete in order to illustrate and symbolize the destruction ahead for Jerusalem. I'm sure his assignments also brought about some heavy duty changes in Ezekiel too...something God, no doubt, also had in mind.  Some of the things God required of him?  He commanded him to lie on his left side for 390 days, followed by lying on his right side for 40 days.  After that he was to lie on his back, arms bound, to illustrate the helplessness of Jerusalem against the Babylonian attack.  There were more unpleasant tasks that followed..tasks worse than pushing on a rock.  He was required to cook his food over cow dung, dig a hole in the wall of the city and do some pretty weird things with his hair that involved shaving and cutting and burning.  Worst of all, he was required to give up his beloved wife when God "took her"and not mourn her death.  This was to symbolize the grief the Jewish people would experience, a grief that God would not permit them to outwardly mourn.

If God had informed Ezekiel ahead of time that there was not a chance anyone would heed his words, would his efforts have been as enthusiastic?  Would he have completed his duties with as much resolve?  Would they have reaped the same results?  To coin a phrase Sister Helen Prejean, the nun of Dean Man Walking fame used in her article, "Would Jesus Pull the Switch":

God is a mystery, but one of the definite characteristics of God is that God is sneaky.

Isn't that the truth?  I may have used that quote in a post not too long ago...but it is so true.  So succinct.  God is sneaky.  He rarely tells us if the rock we are struggling against is ever going to budge. He simply says, "Keep pushing."

The Immovable Rock...1

I've been re-visiting some old posts saved on my computer.  Some of the posts were authored by me...some by others I've shared cyber space with on various e-lists and message boards over the years.  Some of the writings go back to the early days when I first became acquainted with the marvels of the internet. 

I've converted some of them to MP3 files using one of those text to voice programs that converts the written word to the spoken word.  From there it can be transferred to an I-pod or MP3 player to listen to while doing any of those other mundane but necessary activities we must do when not staring at a computer screen.  You know...like walking or scrubbing the toilet or cooking supper.

The voice and flow of words sounds a bit like R3PO or Wally the Robot, but it is adequate and can be understood if you listen closely and if you remember it reads what is written...including some very long URLs. It also converts some abbreviations to what it thinks is the correct long word. Example: Gen. as in Genesis becomes General.  Col as in Colossians becomes Colonel.

As I was walking last night, I listened to the following excerpt from a post written by my friend annie.  She has posted the following several times in the years I've known her. 

 

forgive me if i've shared this story before, but it's come around  again in my meditations (contemplations).  there was a man who lived near a large boulder.  God spoke to him and told him to go and push on this rock.  he did so.  it didn't budge.  but every day, God  repeated his instruction and the man obeyed.  this went on for years.  finally one day the man was exasperated.

"God, every day for years i've been pushing on this rock just like YOU told me to.  it hasn't moved even a fraction of an inch.  either i've failed, or i  didn't hear you correctly, or you have cruelly given me an impossible task to perform!" 

but God spoke to him.... "son, I told you to PUSH on the rock.  I never told you to MOVE it.  you think that you have  wasted your time, that you haven't accomplished anything in all of these years.  but, as you pushed on the rock, you have grown strong and what I intended for you has indeed been accomplished".

i can't count the times i've railed at God for allowing "unnecessary" suffering into my life or the lives of those i love.  it makes no more sense to me than pushing the rock did to the man in the story.  but, through it all, we are humbled, we learn mercy, patience,  endurance, faithfulness - we grow strong in the Lord and the power of  his might.  i hate things that are "unfair" or don't go as they should".  but, after the dust settles, (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) i can see God working all things together for good and i  feel stupid for railing at him - kind of like when you lose something and blame whoever else is there, your spouse, the kids, the dog.....  and then find it. 

with that in mind, i'm trying not to behave like an ass when things go "wrong", choosing to not be discouraged by  years of apparent "failure" when circumstances disappoint.  nothing is ever wasted in God's economy - as with the leftovers from feeding  the 5000, he gathers up every fragment.  he redeems the years that  the locust has eaten.  none of our efforts are wasted.  God is not so much interested in our producing "results" as the results that he  produces IN us.  just musing...  -annie

Hmmmm....so "God is not so much interested in our producing "results" as the results that he  produces IN us." 

Damn...I hate it when she says that!!

More of my thoughts on this to follow...