A Cosmic Vision of Dirt

"A new commandment I give you, thou shall not destroy the earth"

How is it that God created the ground, the earth and called it good and somehow we care more about large muti-corporations than we do the land?  When our farming practices are stripping the land, whatever happened to the medieval Christian view of "holy earth?"  Just like Abel's blood was crying out for justice, what about the blood of the earth crying out to justice to God today.

We think the dirt is dirty and so w call things dirty "soiled."  But what if the soil is holy and sacred and good?  In the soil is life and its time for the church to reclaim dirt beneath our feet.  Jesus blood was spilt upon the dirt.  Does not his blood redeem the earth as well?  Does not our planet need healing and restoration?

I am doing a funeral this week and the conclusion of it will be lowering the body into the dirt.  Is it possible for people to have an earthy spirituality today and even find God in the dirt?  People have become so confused about heaven and the afterlife.  Do we need to be confused about the garden of God's green earth and God is here in the dirt with us.

Medieval World

I remember the old classic movie Westworld where robots functioned like slaves at the whims and entertainment pleasures of humans.  There were three worlds created for man's entertainment.  Westworld, medieval world, and future world.  This movie ended with the robots killing the humans because of a computer virus.  I loved this old classic sci-fi movie with Yul Brynner but I have always been enchanted by medieval world.

This vacation, Sandy and I went to 'Medieval Times' where we witnessed beautiful displays of horses, knights, jousts, and hand to hand sword combat.  People cheered and chanted for their heroes of old that had come to life on the realistic stage in front on us. 

Every vacation, I read a new book and this one happened to be Chris Armstrong new book "Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians."  An excellent book calling Christians back to the virtues, wisdom, and spiritual disciplines and medieval sacramental worldview that shaped many a friar, monk, mystic, and dessert fathers.  Learning from both C. S. Lewis and reading books by Christians who lived during medieval times, can we once again recover a robust strong discipleship faith that changes everything rather than the shallow consumerist religion of our modern age?

Jesus to the Rescue

I was in Orlando Florida for vacation and spent wonderful time with my wife, children, and my nieces and nephews.  I listened to a message Sunday morning on the book of Jeremiah dealing with hard-hearted and hard-headed Christianity.  The minister was genuinely vulnerable, refreshingly honest, and compassionate in his response to the Orlando terrorist shooting.  We should mourn and not cheer the death of others.  Like Jeremiah, the church needs to learn to lament and weep more.

I was playing tennis with my wife and my left knee went out on me.  She sent this very nice young man from Puerto Rico to give me a ride back in a golf cart.  The name of the man was Jesus.  I could not help but laugh and think of the irony as the man who came to my rescue that day name was none other than Jesus.  Jesus to the rescue!

The Young Messiah

"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52)

I watched the movie Young Messiah last night and was not disappointed by a powerful fictional story of Jesus at age nine and his developing awareness of life and his identity.  The movie was beautifully directed based off of Anne Rice novel.  We typically either focus on Jesus humanity or Jesus divinity and this movie tried to do both justice.  Jesus is not just fully God and fully man but I could not help watch this movie and think of Jesus as truly man and truly God.

If the world today and other religions simply want to view Jesus as only a man downplaying or denying his divine origin and nature, so the church has the gnostic and docetic tendency to downplay Jesus humanity.  In this movie, Jesus the boy gets scared, he doesn't fully understand his identity or purpose and he even gets sick like everyone else.  The paradox for Christians is to think of Jesus as fully human but never sins as Scripture teaches but then takes it even further that Jesus never has any doubts or is even tempted like we are which Scripture teaches he was tempted just like we are (Hebrews 2:18).

The hard question or new set of questions that Christians need to  start thinking about is how is Jesus fully or truly human like we are?  Could Jesus make a mistake and yet not sin?  Did Jesus ever forget someone's name or forget an appointment?  Did Jesus every oversleep or get moody?  Could Jesus enjoyed practical jokes too much or ever win a bet?  Maybe even harder questions is did Jesus ever get drunk or ever have a non-righteous anger moment?  For some of us, we don't want a superman Jesus who is so other that we can not relate with him.  We want Jesus the down to earth Messiah who is like us and one of us.

Finding God within and in the World

The ground is shaking beneath our feet, do you feel it?  There is a spiritual revolution happening for those who have awakened to God with us and within God's good creation.  God fills us with his Spirit, God is near us when we wake up and when we lie down.  God is in the face of the neighbor, God is with every act of justice, God is with us as we marvel at the stars and the sunrise.

Can you sense it?  A spiritual revolution and an awakening of the soul to the whole cosmos around us.  There is a spiritual revolution of God with us.  Not the religion of dogma or institutions but of a relationship of beauty that God is here in the now and present.  The spiritual revolution is where God and
the world meets in holy communion and sweet embrace.  The spiritual revolution reminds us that we are but dirt and God's love moves both the ground and the galaxies.

We live in a world of wounded landscapes.  We have become disconnected from the very ground and dirt we were created from.  When Jesus rose from the dead, he rose from the ground.  Diana Butler Bass asks, "Might the possibility of resurrection be right under our feet?" (p.50).


Life and destiny are tied to the sold beneath our feet.  The ancients looked to the heaven to find God.  The stars and the heavens still move us to wonder, modern people are discovering that God is as close to us as the soil is to our feet.  The whole universe is God's body and interconnected.  Every living creature and thing is animated by the breath and spirit of God.  God is with us and we are with God.  God is teaching us through this powerful cosmic new spiritual revolution what both the Hebrew and early Christians understood that God is both love and Spirit and near.

All Things New Every Moment

"Behold, I am making all things new" - Revelation 21:5

Are our eyes to old and to blind to see the new things God is doing today?  God is making new wine and making a new creation.  All things are continually being made new by God.  Can you look into the silent, turbulent, boundless mystery of creation.  Can you see the beauty, wonder and mystery of every new heart beat, every new breath, and every new blink of the eyes.  Every molecule in the world is constantly changing.  Even the ground is constantly moving under our feet.  The world is alive with the presence of God.  There is one continuous endless spiral of God who is making all things new.

I see Dead People Voting

The real test of this 2016 election will be to see if there is voter suppression, dead people voting, election fraud, and if democracy still exists or does the wealthy elite control even our electronic voting outcomes? 

Are our major political parties dead?  Is politics dead?

Ascension Today

People are looking at this election year or economy or terrorist attack and feeling despair over so many things that look bleak.  I met with my spiritual director this week who reminded me of ascension week has just passed.  We focus so much on the death and resurrection of Jesus and forget to remember Jesus ascension. 

Acts chapter one speaks of the disciples who just lost their pastor who went to heaven and as they are gazing into heaven and an angel asks them why they are looking into the sky?  They are feeling confused, helpless, and alone.  But the ascension is a reminder that God calls us to the hard work of mission.  The ascension tells us that Jesus is victorious and sits on a throne next to his heavenly father.  Where the world sees failures and setbacks, the ascension sees victories.  Not only do we need to practice resurrection everyday, but we need to practice ascension.  The whole Christian life and experience is one of ascending and becoming transformed into the new creation daily.

Do you know you are in Exile?

I was talking to a group of men in jail where several told me their pain of how difficult it was for them to walk into churches with their tattoos and see negative looks.  One man tearfully said, "They reject us before they ever get to know us."  Exile, have you been there?  In many ways, the church is exiling many people on the one hand as the church lives in exile in a world that rejects them.

Israel lived in exile and the church is in exile whether it knows it or not.  There is a growing restlessness of loneliness, powerlessness, grief and loss by many in the church.  Either people don't feel like they belong in the church anymore or the church has left them behind when it comes to truly knowing them and helping people feel like they belong.  The number one complaint I hear from young people in the church is "don't judge me."  Are we living in a time where there are more people hurt by the church than helped by the church?

There is something terribly wrong when the Bible is used primarily to preserve the status quo?  If Jesus resisted the powers that be during his day, when is the last time you resisted anything?  Are not Christians called today to resist the empire and status quo as Jesus did?  Can exile be the place like Israel where we are called to turn away from our national idols and turn back to God?  Maybe like Israel we can rediscover in exile our conscience and soul?

Mystic Verse

The Bible is a mystical book.  It is full of hidden treasures and the mystery of Christ is on every page.  Can we begin to read the Bible with not our physical eyes or even with just our rational minds.  Can we read the Scriptures with an open childlike heart as Jesus taught his disciples?  Can we see God with new eyes past our schedules, agendas, problems, and concerns.  Can we glimpse God in the every day, especially when we read inspired words of ink and paper.  If God is making all things new, can we not read the Bible with mystical intuitions of seeing God in all things, especially his Holy Word.  Can we notice God even in the spaces and cracks within scripture?  The texts of terror and the hard sayings of Jesus?  Can we contemplate scripture in silence and let scripture speak to our spirit and heart.  When we read the Bible mystically, all the sudden the spaces between the letters explode with the presence of God.  All the sudden we notice little things we never notices before and see patterns and spiritual connections we ignored or missed.  When we read the Bible contemplatively and mystically, one gets lost in speechless wonder.

A Third Party for Real Democracy

Brad Friedman Interview with Jill Stein Green Party Candidate) Salon News

•                                    

(Credit: AP/Elise Amendola)

Joining me now is the 2012 Green Party nominee, and a 2016 Green Party presidential candidate—some might say the leading candidate—Dr. Jill Stein. She’s a Massachusetts physician who is, once again, hoping to make the world a better place and drive millions of Democratic voters nuts in the bargain. Mind you, that’s a very short drive. Oh, and for the moment, at least, it should be noted here that in terms of general election votes, Jill Stein is also the most successful female presidential candidate in U.S. history—at least for the moment.

Let me start with a softball for you. Maybe the softest of softballs. What does the Green Party stand for that the Democratic Party does not?

Oh man, wow.

See? Served it right up to you.

Yeah, really. Perfect. I’d say everything. [Laughs] We sort of pick up where the Democrats leave off. Because while the Democrats may say the right thing on supporting working people and our right to healthcare and so on, what they do is something entirely different. You can look at how they’ve treated labor and working people and their massive bailouts for Wall Street. For example, once the White House went Democratic nearly eight years ago, who got the bailouts? Wall Street did in a way that made George W. Bush seem like a wimp. George Bush proposed $700 billion but under Barack Obama it was many trillions. We haven’t seen the end of it.

Or foreign policy. The guys running the show in the Democratic Party are basically the funders, and that’s predatory banks and fossil fuel bandits and war profiteers and the insurance companies, and that’s what we get. And with the Democratic Party, you see basically a “fake left, go right” situation, where they allow principled, inspired campaigns to stand up and be seen, but they sabotage them when push comes to shove. And that, unfortunately, is what we see going on right now with the Sanders campaign, which is making a valiant effort here to do the right thing and change the party. But unfortunately, Bernie’s not the first one to try that and the rules of the game were set up after George McGovern won the nomination as a peace candidate back in 1972. They changed the rules so that you have superdelegates and super Tuesdays, and in addition, you have smear campaigns.

And unfortunately, we’re beginning to see that right now, full blown, particularly in the wake of the Nevada Democratic convention, which was such a horrifying display of manipulation on the part of the Democratic Party insiders to control the process, to ram through new rules and suppress Bernie’s votes. This is like the poster child for what’s going on in the Democratic Party. And then they turn around and they blame the Sanders supporters for trying to stand up for a democratic process. So Bernie’s digging in, the Democratic Party is digging in, but there’s very little question about who’s got the nuclear weapons here. [They’re] in the hands of the Democratic Party.

Our campaign is basically, for some people it’s plan B for Bernie, after Bernie gets wiped out. For others we’re plan A, because what the Democratic Party has shown us over and over again is that while it talks the talk, it walks in exactly the opposite direction. It puts profit over people, and profit over planet, and profit over peace. It will allow these big campaigns to get off the ground, but then it will basically sabotage them and absorb them back into the Democratic Party. And the party keeps moving to the right and the reform effort has to start all over again in four years.

And what’s wrong with this picture? This is like “Groundhog Day,” here, and we gotta wake up. And I think a lot of people are waking up to say, “If we’re gonna have a revolutionary campaign, we need to have it in a revolutionary party.” And that’s what the Green Party is.

If you guys are so inclusive, why does the party have a closed primary out here in California?

Let me answer that in a big way. First of all, how to handle the question of open or closed primaries is hotly debated in the Green Party, so there is not one uniform opinion here. But there is a very uniform, overarching opinion, which is that the rules of the game, as you pointed out earlier, are made as complicated and incomprehensible as possible in order to keep people in the dark and lock them out. Closed primaries is one piece of a massive system to silence and disempower voters. So there’s all kinds of stuff that we need to do.

I personally do think there is an argument for closed primaries in a multi-partisan system. We should have many choices for people. We don’t right now, we only have two, so the whole notion of closed versus open primaries is kind of crazy. It’s a very closed process to start with. It’s also closed because you need a huge amount of money to compete on the current playing field; it’s closed because the press won’t cover you; it’s closed because the ballot access rules keep you off the ballot; and at the end of the day it’s closed because the debates exclude everybody who’s not a part of the two parties who control the debate. So it’s closed from A to Z, and what you’re doing on any one particular detail is not as critical, in my view, as really overhauling the process.

So yes, primaries should be open, but we need to have many choices and many voices that participate in these primaries. And we should have free media for candidates who are ballot-access qualified—if you have a ballot line and you can win the election, voters deserve to know about you. They deserve to know who their choices are, and by shall we say, reclaiming the public airwaves for the public, then we actually make campaigns really teeth and the bottom falls out from under this staggering cost of campaigns just by opening up public discussion to ballot-qualified candidates. And that includes then, of course, simplifying the rules of ballot access, which right now are designed to limit discussion to just the two establishment parties that are throwing us not only under the bus economically, but over the cliff on climate and on international peace and security.

(Keep Scrolling Down)

(HistoryThings)

(Your Daily Dish)

(

• • • 
      
    • 
      
      
      
    • 
      
      
      
• • • 
      
      
      
    • 
      
      
      
    • 
      
      
      
• • • 
      
      
      
    • 
      
      
      
    • 
      
      
      
• • • 
      
      
      
    • 
      
      
      
    •