DECEMBER 29 2018
THE FINAL REFORMATION.
I seriously wanted to write an up-beat piece. So I sat down and tried to conjure something positive. Hey, I thought, perhaps what I wrote last year at the end of 2017 might help me.
So I looked up my December 30 2017 blog. Here’s what I wrote exactly a year ago,
“Last week I was listening to Handel’s Messiah and the aria, “he was despised, rejected by men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.”
No wonder. How would you feel when your Creation, your very finest work of art, is destroyed? How would you feel when the church, your very own people, is the leading agent there? Jesus himself tells us that we, his children, have to suffer with Jesus: no crown without a cross. Instead….
Of course we cannot expect the world to know better but for the church to reject its Saviour by destroying her creation adds insult to injury and most surely calls for LAMENT, LAMENT, LAMENT.
Look at the Protestant church: utterly depressing. Just imagine: Franklin Graham is now a Trump prophet. “Never in my lifetime have we had a President of the US willing to take such a strong outspoken stand for the Christian faith like Donald Trump,” tweeted Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham.
The Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress sees a divine hand at work: “God intervened in our election and put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.”
That was part of last year’s final message.
Oh, dear I thought, if that’s how I felt a year ago, how about the end of 2018 when things look even worse?
So I gave up and let my fingers do the talking.
Here’s what my subconscious mind dictated to me via the motions of my hands.
One year later everything has worsened. While I am writing this, I happen to listen to Bach’s St. Matthew PASSION, just hearing Peter, his disciple, saying “Ich kenne den Menschen nicht”, (I don’t know the man) meaning Jesus, whom he then denied three times, and then “the cock crew.” (krähte der Hahn), and Peter wept bitterly.
That’s how I feel while I write this, looking back to the year of the Lord 2018. Indeed tears well up in my eyes.
Still, for us, this past year has been tremendous in many ways. We celebrated our 65th wedding anniversary, as well as our 90th birthdays. Even though since then my wife has had a mastectomy and failing immediate memory, and losing some of her body balance, she’s always cheerful, one more reason to praise the Lord who has blessed us greatly, including a new great grandson, whom I held in my arms only a few hours after he was born.
Although our extended family has done great, I must confess that I am saddened because I have alienated a dear friend, and doubly saddened that my attempts to heal the breach have been rebuffed, in spite of persistent prayers. I invite your prayers as well: it still hurts and has put a blot on the year.
I am sure that my sadness is also caused by the state of the natural world, where a dangerous tipping point may be reached at any time. That this is not openly discussed and has failed to be a matter of deep concern in the church is something I fail to fathom: we here are talking about God’s creation, his Primary Word.
Pope Francis recently said, “God always forgives, we humans often do that, but Nature never forgives.” Does that mean that sinning against creation is the sin against the Holy Spirit? (“Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3: 29).
Chaos versus Cosmos.
I have always maintained that ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Chaos ecologically and chaos politically and chaos economically and chaos theologically, all are part and parcel of the same evil: estrangement from the Creator. Once we lose God or disconnect God from the Christ and his creation, everything turns topsy-turfy.
The United States has seldom seen a peacetime period of chaos remotely like the past two weeks. The Middle East is where life began, if we believe the events recorded in the Bible. It seems to me that it might end there as well.
Today US politics thrive on chaos. No wonder the stock market is down and gold is up. God created cosmos: everything orderly, each item, each molecule, each atom perfectly in place, to ensure that the world can endure into eternity. But as long as humanity has been on the scene, the perpetual struggle has been between cosmos and chaos, between good and evil, between God and his adversary, Satan, the Devil, the Evil One, whatever his title.
Today, not God, not cosmos, but Satan, chaos, is in charge, the personality who Jesus correctly called, The Prince of this World. (John 12: 31; John 14:30; John 16: 11).
The state of the world, in all aspects, resembles an out of control spiral, looks as if it is being sucked into a downdraft of disorder. Not only is the U.S. capital a portrait of chaos, but so is London, and the BREXIT debacle, and so is the world economy, based on the impossibility of infinite growth, and so is our very own life-style, founded on the premise that the earth has limitless resources.
So from the North Pole, where in this coming year the ice may well be gone, all the way down to the South Pole, where the enormous ice-fields also are on the move, and everything in between, chaos reigns.
There are cycles in history
Bad times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create bad times.
There are numerous cycles in existence. For instance, history teaches us that every 500-600 years a new start is made in religion. Major religions seem to be born every five- six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia, while the Solomon Temple in Jerusalem also was inaugurated in that period. The Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632.
The Crusades – 1096-1291- could be seen as a major change, as the church became militant. This was followed by the 100 YEAR WAR between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population.
All this prepared the world for the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther on October 31 1517.
Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the FINAL REFORMATION.
The Protestant Reformation, taking its cue from Roman Catholicism developed a two-realm approach: The Sacred, in the form of the church, and the Secular, accommodating the world, the division in essence based on ancient and pagan Greek philosophy.
No surprise, the ‘secular, the world’ dominated, and chaos triumphed over cosmos.
Now with everything everywhere in disarray economical, ecological, political, theological, sociological, matters are speeding to the end.
THE FINAL REFORMATION
Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes, and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized – so-called religion-less- society.
Dr. Evan Runner coined the phrase, LIFE IS RELIGION, and, indeed, that is the case. We all have beliefs: they’re part of being human. The symbols are all around us, in churches, in sport arenas, in gold-tinted office towers.
So what is religion? It’s not some intellectual, even though that’s part of it. Descartes emphasized the mind in his well-known maxim, Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Religion is not a theory. Religion is not a set of dogmas, not a something that we memorize and then follow.
Religion is a ‘way’, is a path, which leads to a certain destination. That path is our life, we are born, we grow up, we live, and we die. In that life we are conscious that we die, and then what? Is that the end? There’s where religion points the way.
So what is Religion? By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning. For the Christian that means finding its source in TRUTH, and truth can only be found in God, the Creator, and thus in Jesus, who calls himself, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as expressed in John 14: 6, where Jesus says, “I am the WAY and the TRUTH and the LIFE. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
The Church in medieval Europe certainly had plenty of blotches on its record, one of them preaching the sharp contrast between HEAVEN and HELL. Nevertheless the church brought order where there would have been only chaos. Frightening depictions of Hell that made medieval life look cozy by comparison and kept the nobles from abusing the peasants.
AND TODAY?
Today the shining example of lawlessness is in the White House, to some extent held in check by legal restrictions.
Today the shining example of a humane person is Pope Francis, but the biggest obstacle to renewal in all denominations is its clergy. In the RC church the endless spate of sex-abuse allegations, a true indicator of clerical dysfunction, and in other denominations the refusal to see women as equals and, of course, the preaching of the heaven heresy.
LISTEN TO THE CRIES OF CREATION
The Final Reformation starts with listening to the cries of creation. There is no salvation apart from creation: we are saved as part of creation, not as a member of a church.
The TRUTH is that God created, that we left the path of life that assures us eternity. JESUS walked that path and did it perfectly to the bitter end, paying the ultimate price to make LIFE possible.
When we walk that path, when we with every action, with every step we take, with every breath we inhale, consciously navigate that PATH in creation, then we are on the way that leads to eternity: the Final Reformation.
Romans 1: 20 tells me that creation itself is proof of God’s all-encompassing wisdom: people stand condemned by denying this. The corollary, the direct consequence of this is that acknowledging that creation is God’s work of art, and honoring it as holy, thus following Jesus’ example, that redeems a person.
“Holy Living” gives our life meaning. Not the church, not whether we are Presbyterian or Baptist, Roman Catholic or Jew: all these labels today mean little or nothing.
What truly counts is our humble walk in life, amidst the people created in God’s image, amidst the trees, which give is oxygen, amidst the flowers, which give beauty and nourishment to the insects, valuing the wildlife, loving the soil from which we are formed.
Jesus, in his manifesto, the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5: 5), said, echoing Psalm 37: 11, “But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity”.
The “meek” are not some patsy sort of folk, some doormats, no, they are, as J. B. Philips translates it, “those who claim nothing for themselves”, who see themselves as servants of creation, and not lords over creation.
They are the ultimate winners, again quoting Jesus, “The first shall be last and the last, the meek, shall be first.”
So where do I base this on?
John 3: 16. If God so loved the cosmos that he offered his most precious son to buy it back, then we too must love the world and all that dwells therein.
THE FINAL REFORMATION does not come from the church; does not have rules and dogmas: it is LIFE and that lived to the full. “Those who claim nothing for themselves”, who see themselves as servants of creation, and not lords over creation, they will inherit the Kingdom, the New Creation.
Unbelievable: that’s what my subconscious mind dictated to me via the motions of my hands.