A Sermon

A Sermon: There is no Santa Claus

Scripture: Ezekiel 33:7-11 (This is what got me started on a genuine [well, it's my web site remember] sermon):

(I hadn't done my Zen Bible search [just open it] in a long time, and this is where I found myself [again], so here I go [again].)

. . . . . At a certain level, sometimes the lessons are quick and easy.

touching little personal anecdote to open sermon:

. . . . . There are some of you, I'm sure, who haven't heard about God talking to me. Twice. Once I was struck dumb, but the second time, maybe a year later I knew no response was expected and I was really and truly blessed (2014 note: i was scared of death and the voice told me, shaking and scared and alone, "You could say you saw a ghost.". It was no small, still voice that I had to concentrate to hear. It was truly awesome both times and it might be sacrilege to try and describe it. I hate to admit I can quote only one word from the first discourse; the second time each word will remain with me until I lose my head maybe. The first time I was told that the earth is in the grip of materialism (that's the word, used several times), and then was shown hell, then actually offered complete power over the world, not in words but in impressions and thoughts I attribute to myself, thoughts about changing things to make it better for me. Like I could have changed the time to a date in the future. Just ask that it be done. I guess it might have been dumb not to change anything, but I felt like everything was on the line and I chose to do nothing. For a real long time. Couldn't talk except to answer questions for a long time. Seriously.

. . . . . The other day i was trying to read a book (even when I am able to focus enough to read most of the words I still can't keep track of characters' names ) and came across this short passage in Hadrian's Walls by Robert Draper: "Her voice was steady now. 'God,' she muttered. She turned her head slowly my way. 'What did you do all those years, anyway. Don't you know the first thing about . . . about yourself?'"

. . . . . That little bit of dialog really leapt off the page, because when God spoke to me I really lost all interest in just about everything except reality. Maybe I should say eternity. I actually focused my search, naturally, on God, who simply was not the God exposed to me in Methodist, Episcopal, and Baptist churches. Understandably it was my relationship with God which was a Roman numeral in a pretty short outline because with my discovery of a living God of judgment and mercy came the realization that my soul, my being is going to spend eternity in either heaven or hell 'cause I had been given glimpses of both realities.

. . . . . Heard a (would-be) preacher today say something about how glad he was he didn't have to be lucky. I guess that's what I want to be called: lucky. Because I feel I really have been lucky. Though I prefer to call it blessed. You (would-be) Baptists know what I'm talking about. And actually, as a close reader of these pages might deduce, I have more and more come to believe it is not luck (or blessing) but fate which has led me here. (I think it was the sermon today [or one of them anyway] which referenced Jesus as the Rock of our faith [and i say again there is no faith in the world or miracles would surround us] and i was reminded again of the sense of epiphany i felt twenty years ago and more, reading of "the precious stone" God had laid in Zion, seeing that my middle name [stone] was not happenstance but fate. And my ego would swell and I would be brought down to earth again. Then i would read of the "second child" in Ecclesiastes and think 'oh, it is me who's gonna change it all' and then my mom pointedly (i thought) pointed out an earlier miscarriage.

. . . . . A long and winding road indeed, and sadly (for me anyway) a journey which has led me to seek only escape from reality. The other day I picked up a couple of non-fiction books at the library (it really was weird, i've never been to that section of the library and it was like i was [dare i say] inspired), the first time I've done that in ten years probably. Difficulty dealing with reality. Hey, i'm despised and rejected. Life is a beach. You call it. Anyway, one of the books was The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds. I really can't read it, can't concentrate on stuff anymore hardly. But I opened it just today as a matter of fact and found a couple of things I'd like to interject into my sermon. (Hey, it is my sermon, huh?) The Talmud, of course, is like the collection of the Rabbis' writings (commentaries if you will) which constitute "the basis of religious authority for traditional Judaism" (Websters), mostly about the Torah (i think; some of it certainly is anyway), also known as the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Old Testament (in Christian as well as Jewish circles often ascribed i think to Moses).

. . . . . In one of the passages in the book, the author tells of Moses going to heaven and finding God busily decorating the letters of the Torah with ornaments. Moses asks God what He's doing and God says He's doing it because in the future there will be a man who will base a huge amount of Jewish law on these ornaments. Moses asks to see him, and God puts him in the back of a classroom (where the least learned students go) where this man is teaching Torah. Moses can't understand anything and is feeling sad when another student asks the teacher how he knows something is true. The teacher replies, "It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai." At this point Moses asks God why, if such brilliant men as the teacher exist, that Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah to the people. "At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, 'Silence, it's my will!'"

. . . . . Another passage: "The Torah is celebrated as the living word of God even as a group of imaginative men bend and shape it before our eyes so that it can serve human needs." Ask a preacher if he uses commentaries to interpret scripture, if he studied any commentaries in seminary, if he has any commentaries among his books, how many he's read, which one he would recommend to learn about Romans say. Might be enlightening. No doubt there are godly men in organized religions everywhere; by that I mean they spend their lives trying to do God's will. Sadly it is my contention that they are deluded, and might (at this point in time as I gaze toward the future <smile>) expect to be told by Jesus on Judgment Day (when they come saying 'we have done miracles in your name'), "Depart from me; I know ye not. (see Mat 25:41, Mat 7:23, Luke 13:27)"

. . . . . One more passage from the book: "In another Talmudic imagining, Moses actually spends forty days studying Talmud with God, but when the time is over he forgets the whole thing. In this he is like all of us, who, the Talmud tells us, study Torah in the womb, only to forget it when an angel touches our lips before birth--because the business of life is to learn, not to know." (Naturally this story rings a big bell for me: I can still picture standing in the middle of the intersection of Sandy Run and Richburg Roads, talkin' to Johnny 'Blakes' one day in maybe 1983. He was driving a pickup and I saw him from the mailboxes in front of the trailer park I lived in and walked out in the middle of the (busy) road and told the one and only human being I've ever told about God talking to me. (i've told a therapist and a shrink, but i called the voices "aural hallucinations" both times as i recall, so they would know what i was talkin' about.) And I'm sure the most impressive thing of my account to John would be the fact that I could only remember one word from the huge Sermon in the Mind i got (that word being "materialism"). An aside here for some important words from the opening segment of Tao:

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery;
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.

. . . . . At any rate, like I said, since the God I experienced didn't jibe with the God I grew up believing in, I read everything I could get my hands on about other religions. And I spent more and more time just considering this living being who scared hell out of me. As in any endeavor, I suppose, I had my ups and downs, I grew some and I hit plateaus, and I realized not just how important God is but how gray is the world in which we live. I also have come to realize why it is so gray (but more on that in a minute).

. . . . . One more story and I'll get down to the sermon. Promise. (And to see how this fits the contemporary pattern of the sermon quite well thank you, take a look at Sermon Critique Number Six [posted here].) Seems I was watching PBS and see this retired guy who is asked why he settled down where he did. The guy says, well there was never any drug problem around here, and good people too. You might call it a Christian area, the guy said, "if you need help, they'll help you". And I thought, hold the door homer, what about those lines you've been drawin' all your life? Somebody shows up at church looking like me, sayin' they need some bucks to get to California, the ol' love offering might look kinda slim to somebody hungry as me say. And yeah, I hope you caught on to the fact that the lines we draw, mostly figuratively, that separate us one from another are so ubiquitous and finely drawn that now we think of them mostly as a "gray", mysterious, unknowable area; interestingly, when Paul was writing most of the New Testament, he referred to seeing through a glass darkly; the more things change, the more they stay the same.

. . . . . The other day, March 12, 2000 to be exact, I had a tough time finding a preacher on the tube tuned in to truth. "Faith Arena" had the near pentecostal loon (sorry 'bout that, dude) they usually do; interestingly I caught him saying specifically that we do not have a godly nature and a satanic nature, that the two are not compatible. When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, this guy said, they were given satanic nature, and before they could eat of the Tree of Life God threw them out of the garden so they couldn't have both natures. Students of this site realize this goes directly against the grain of the truths I (attempt to) dessiminate. (I say we have the Spirit of God in our heart and the devil in our [ordinary] mind. [see "Another Sunday School Lesson" for more on this])

. . . . . Picked up this book titled The Battle For God at the library the other day (it's January of '01 for anybody keeping track) that addressed the struggle between mythos and logos, as the author put it. She said "To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical and scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is to mistake the nature and purpose of this story. It is to confuse mythos with logos." As logos, what we might call rational, scientific thought began to be more concerned with the future than meaning of the present (which the author contends is/was the primary function of mythos) more and more people shifted their attention (in contemplative times) from the meaning of the present to concern(s) about the future. The aggressiveness of logos, the author noted, changed people's focus so much to the future that the development of the science of psychotherapy was required to provide meaning for people whose capacities for logos transcended their satisfaction with myth. "During the sixties, the youth revolution was in part a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational language and the suppression of mythos by logos," she wrote. Also, for you Baptists out there: "...a literal reading of Scripture is, as we shall see, a modern preoccupation, springing from the prevalence of the rational over the mythical consiousness."

. . . . . I was quite taken with an Easter survey of (would-be) sermons, mostly with the fact that Christianity today really is mostly all about buying into the fact that the Jesus of contemporary doctrine is modeled after the Santa Claus of contemporary culture. Dean Register of Temple Baptist (I think) in Hattiesburg sounded sold out to myth when he said "We're so much a part of the world it's hard to conceive that (death is the beginning)"; Jeff Clark of First Baptist (I think; and let me add I (did) respect him more than anyone preaching on tv today; much closer to truth than most [maybe, huh?]) in Hattiesburg said, "If you know the Lord it means you will never die," and "knowing Him personally is the entry point". Frank Gunn said "God is always with us if we just walk intimately with Him (DUH! what huge ifs)", and "the true message of Easter (is) . . . it doesn't end with death (DUH! again; is eternity going to be heaven or hell?)." Finally, on "In Touch" Charles Stanley said that God will "change your eternal destiny in a split second," that all you have to do is "invite Him into your heart" as Tim LaHaye put it here.)

. . . . . This I think is not something contemporary (would-be) Christians dispute. In that commentary on Tim's (would-be) sermon, I discuss Baptist doctrine a little. (That's what some people call a "born-again" religion folks.) If you really and truly invite Jesus into your heart (to use Tim's words), then He will come into your heart and you'll have the Holy Spirit in you and the gates of Hell will not prevail against you (or open for you, if that is more apt a phrase) and you are born again, a Saint of the Church of Christ (this isn't a particular church, it's what most Christians call "the body of Christ"), and nothing you ever do can change that, not becoming a drug addict or a strong-arm robber or a murderer. Now admittedly those are what you might call extreme examples of "back-sliding", as Baptists in particular like to say, generally if they hear about somebody consuming a little alcohol or (God forbid) having an extra-marital affair. Even adultery is something a lot of Baptist's will ascribe to backsliding, though you may rest assured that maybe a lot more Baptist's would say of someone getting on my earlier list there (drug addiction, etc.) that the particular person in question was never actually saved to start with.

. . . . . Yeah, the calling on the name of the Lord is often used, like Romans 10:13 ("For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.") though Acts 2:21 ("And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.") should give people who profess to be Christians pause when they read the verse which precedes it. Yeah "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." (Matthew 7:21-23) doesn't seem to have a place except to explain other organized religions.

. . . . . It's kind of touchy. I've addressed on this site how the shout of the afflicted in Jesus' presence could have presaged Baptist's beliefs about the born-again experience. But here I've got to say that although Tim maintained and I have witnessed that Baptist doctrine in particular has an explanation (for anything) that makes sense based on some verse or passage in the Bible, there are some points that simply defy logic if you consider another verse or passage of scripture. For example, if you get deep enough into Southern Baptist doctrine about end times you will encounter a thread of doctrine (and of course there are all kinds of wild theories about the future) that absolutely requires you to defy logic if you consider the phrase "the dead in Christ shall rise first". (At least that was my experience with one who was acknowledged as well-versed in church doctrine. [Not to say indoctrinated. No, no.] I mean, it made sense of sorts, but you had to believe some wild stuff.) Interestingly Armstrong wrote that fundamentalists "were as addicted to scientific rationalsim as any other modernists."

. . . . . Kind of like the Mormons (and a whole lot of others i guess) maintaining that families are together in heaven. I didn't get deep into particulars, like inlaws get to be with two familes? or is it just one huge family of angels and you know where to find everybody and it only gets confusing on major holidays? I related a Mormon experience on this site somewhere and it centered on Matthew 22:9-10 "Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." and Mark 12:24-25 "And Jesus answering said unto them, Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God? For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven." Angels are beyond such small issue as family; like somebody said about true reality, "There are no separate things."

. . . . . The Mormon response to this doctrinal response of mine was to give me a single sheet of paper that had like the Mormon creed I guess. (Does everyone know that there is a Book of Mormon, which supplements the Bible, much as the Talmud supplements the Old Testament for the Jews? And that there are huge numbers of commentaries on scripture used by people today as authoritative references on God's Word?) Kind of reminded me of Ken Burns, the documentary film maker, going on record somewhere about how amazing the U.S. Constitution is, adjudicating legal matters of immense complexity for hundreds of years.

. . . . . Well, Ken, it is supposed to be the basis of our nation's body of law, but the Ten Commandments are supposed to be the basis of Jewish law and look at how much they are used to adjudicate matters of doctrine today, no look at how much they were used in 600 AD, at which point the Talmud was pretty much a matter of record and maybe vowels had been put in all the original Hebrew Bible. Both the constitution and the Ten Commandments are starting points, delivered in simpler times perhaps. But it's like "the king" said in Ecclesiastes, "This only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many (mental machinations)." And yeah, I took the liberty to read the Hebrew definitions of "chishshabown" and translate it a little differently than the King James committee did. Rationalizations, folks. Ordinary mind mostly, hard at work, demanding rulings and interpretations and new law. Drawin' lines between us and other people. Making us all pay so little attention to important things that the most important things (according to me and Matthew 22:37-40), God and every body on the planet, the most important things are two completely different things, separated by this immense line, this monstrous gray wall.

. . . . . For people who go to church and take their religion seriously (and I know there are shallow, complacent types and hypocrites there too, 'cause I've seen 'em), this wall which isolates, separates, is the wall of indoctrination into church doctrine. It involves a great deal of rationalization, machinations if you will. It's not easy to keep the open mind of a child. It is easy to "make up your mind" about things, develop arguments to support such things, and not listen (having ears, but not hearing) to reason. That's the hard heart we encounter so often in the Bible. Doesn't mean you don't have feelings; au contrai; means you have bad, wrong feelings that are hard for you to change. (See here for the heart/mind connection.) I don't know of an organized religion which does not support such a wall, acknowledged or otherwise (e.g., Christianity prides itself on being an "open" religion, yet it's major proponents [including well-meaning people like Tim LaHaye] declare from the pulpits a public placating of saints and pleading with sinners [to become saints] and folks, that is simply a judgmental and closed[minded] approach to life; it might be past time for us to look at mankind as the family it is and feed and shelter everyone, even if it comes from a self-serving motivation).

. . . . . I have often denigrated conventional wisdom; in "behold a pale horse" the protagonist "resolutely watched the water boil", but I'm not talking now about old wives tales and fables. I'm talking about simple, unavoidable truth. Like "you can't have your cake and eat it too". And I'm not interested in splitting hairs. I'm just saying that you cannot have it both ways: you cannot base your beliefs and convictions on prophets (and Jesus was a self-proclaimed prophet [Matthew 13:57 and Mark 6:4]) who were reviled, rejected, persecuted, and crucified, then at some later date declare yourself a believer in what they espoused, and at the same time rationalize reasons for not being obedient to their visions.

. . . . . The protestant religions have been based on a theory of justification by faith which, according to the author of The Battle For God, "depicted human beings as utterly incapable of contributing to their own salvation and wholly reliant on the benevolence of God." However, the author and finisher of their faiths related parables and even gave explicit commandments regarding the behaviors He expected of His disciples. For parables, check out the pearl of great price, the virgins and oil lamps, the money left in charge of the servants, and especially the owner of the vineyard who went on a journey and left the vineyard in the hands of finally his son and how all of the groundskeepers (the prophets and the Son) met with consequences meted out by inhabitants of the country. For commandments, check out first the Sermon on the Mount: if you have two coats give one away, sell what you have and give it to the poor (see this for scriptural references), later the first and second commandments (on which "hang all the law and the prophets") are to love God with all your soul and mind and strength and to love your neighbor like you love yourself (and there are no restrictions, no boundries between neighborhoods given). To me, it is self-evident, just as it is self-evident that it ain't all amerikans are born equal, it's every human being.

. . . . . The commandments of the Sermon on the Mount are held "in abeyance until the end times"? (That is a bit of [man's] doctrine discussed a bit here.) Well, all right, let's say that's the truth. And right now (to day, remember?) I am declaring that these are the end times. Look, again, my message is mercy and love and the kingdom of heaven is at hand; it is also we who must accept the message, which is a gift beyond compare (heaven!) and also a covenant, an agreement, "Repent" because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. (See Matthew 4:17 and Mark 1:15 ["...(Jesus) saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel."])

. . . . . I have given the world reason to believe me, in signs and wonders anyway. (See here for an example.) Believe me, I wish it wasn't true. That might even mean I need to defeat death, like in 1 Corinthians 15:26. Because I keep seeing that big old oak tree in my vision of '78 i guess (see this) and realizing that trees grow old and die. It happens every day. There are a lot of souls on earth right now. Maybe a lot more angels than souls. What if there are two living people/sentient beings in the world, and I'm one of them and the other is some woman who maybe I encountered and maybe I didn't. There's a lot I don't know, and there's a lot I believe.

. . . . . Perhaps the most important consideration a Southern Baptist (and to a great degree even those Christians of the Catholic persuasion) can give to his or her situation, just as many preachers have and do maintain, is the personal relationship with The Supreme Being. (Here's some food for thought.) All of the major religions tend to focus on just that. What I would like us to do is consider Jesus' relationship to us, both individually and collectively. Isaiah 28:16 says "Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste." Not make haste to do stuff other than love (all) others as we love ourselves. Remember that God made us upright, but we have sought out many rationalizations (Eccl 7:29), like a market economy. (Yet look what happens when the government deregulates industries it was forced to regulate earlier [because of greed, profit, the love of money].) I mean, God did tell us "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," in Isaiah 55:8. That was a prophet telling the people "Woe to those that are at ease in Zion (Amos 6:1)."

. . . . . And I'm more and more convinced that God is not really so mysterious; it's we the people who get that title. I believe in the Great Spirit of Love which surrounds us today, and I don't believe in Santa Claus. Just imagine if Jesus had a reputation like me, and you were listening to him, not Him, and he said "it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." (Matthew 13:11) and Luke 8:10 ("Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand" (which concludes in Matthew 13:15 "lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them" [emphasis mine]; it just seems to me prophets tend to cop attitudes); Luke 18:8 "Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"

. . . . . But it's the cornerstone aspect of Jesus I want to explore, however briefly. All believers make up the church of Jesus Christ, Christians profess to believe. That virtual church is what some people think won't have to suffer the trials of "the tribulation". Not to digress, think for a moment about that classic Pink Floyd song "The Wall". It's an ego-buster. We're all just bricks in the wall (or church, if you will). The supreme catch is, Jesus is just a brick in the wall. The most important brick, the cornerstone, but still only one part of it. There is no Santa Claus. We know Jeus/God wants to take us under His wing like a mother hen. Jesus' will, God's will for us is that we return to Him. But we have to be willing too and I don't want to cause a panic, this is really supposed to be good news, like there is a God and He is One God for all, everybody keep breathing and then call everybody you know and say "Let's hijack this train bound for hell and head it towards glory". Let's change it all. Now look at Luke 18:8 again and consider, maybe Jesus is coming here to take us home (see web site journal here) or maybe he's so sick of our failure to keep the vineyard in decent shape that He would be willing to go to hell (if it is an all-or-nothing deal), not just because there is so little faith on earth but also because the emptiness of hell seems preferable to the chaos He (re)encounters.

. . . . . "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God," Paul wrote in Romans. (Man, I wish I had time in this service to read from 10:16 to 11:20; there's a lot of truth in that. And notice verse 16 says "have not obeyed the gospel"; it simply is a covenant at the same time it is a gift: if you accept the gift you are obedient to the covenant, starting with Jeremiah 31:33-34 [re: Jeremiah 31's new covenant might have new meaning in the context of this; actually my sermon needs to be renamed "There Is A Santa Claus" because, as Krishnamurti put it in You Are The World,

"You see how quickly the mind is influenced. The mind being pliable, young, innocent, is conditioned as a Communist, Catholic, Protestant, and so on. . . . So the question then is this: Is it possible to be so intensely aware of conditioning that you see the truth of it?__not whether you like or dislike it, but the fact that you are conditioned and therefore have a mind incapable of freedom. Because only the free mind knows what love is."

and the prophecy is about us not teaching kids about God. That's too wild. But saying Santa is going to change us all . . . we're going to lose our minds, our egos, we're going to merge with the spirit of love, the dust of the earth, maybe we won't need to be concerned about real young kids like i've been thinking for years.) These days what is preached is what people want to hear; "the priests bear rule by their means and my people love to have it so" we read in Jeremiah 5:31. (See this.)

. . . . . The Reckoning, a novel by James Huggins, has this: "'Did you know, Gage, that the Greek word, diakonoi, used to designate ministers who teach God's Scriptures in church is the same Greek word used in the Bible to designate those who wield the sword to establish justice on the Earth?' New Paragraph: Gages' face was impassive, mouth grim."

. . . .Reckon that tale in Genesis, where Cain asks God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" has any relevance to us? Reckon I think I'm the bad guy? Go back and read Romans 11:20 again.

. . . . Let us pray. Let us pray that we can agree to prepare for the coming Day. (Like I've said before, our lifestyle here in the US of A might not even deteriorate if we just get our priorities right, and hell, we might be in heaven before it gets to that.)

. . . . . A postscript: I just started reading the book about the Talmud and encountered a story about a man wanting to learn Torah (where "the commentary is not considered, in Judaism, tangential or subsidiary but also Torah") and going to a man who "teaches him a beautiful Rabbinic precept__'Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you'__" and then "'The rest is commentary,' Hillel tells him; 'go and study.'" And I had like an epiphany: It is not by not doing, as the Rabbi says, not by passively trying to be loving and, say, offering help when you see someone begging on the street that one is obedient to that Great Commandment Jesus left us in Matthew 22:37-40 (and Matthew 25:45[ "Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me." (emphasis mine)] and Mark). No, rather, it is a proactive commandment implicit in what Christians call the Great Commission (see here), and it is a commandment that we see to it that all God's children (can there be any debate about defining "God's children"? everybody descended from Adam and Eve [or we all came from the same place like i postulate somewhere]) get fed (see this exhortation) fer Christ's sake!

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