The loneliest flagman

 

Jump like its 1983 - Coldplay

 Jump like its 1983. I don't know what that means but come along with me.

Cold Play 

Glastonbury 2024

Prosperity gospel

   

self destruction for art - Justin Townes Earle

"I discovered very fast that my way of doing things was going to get me in trouble, and I kept going with it, because I believed the myth for a long time, and I believed I had to destroy myself to make great art. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Townes_Earle

Liberalism and the Mediocre Christ -

“Lord, whose love in humble service.

Before I came to St. Martin's in 2012, I was a professor at an American university, and on one occasion, I had a class of 170 students. And I thought I'd ask them what they thought Jesus came to do. I only gave them two options.

Option one was he came to affirm and underwrite the deep purposes of creation and the way things are. And option two was to bring about a great reversal, and uphold those who were oppressed and bring down the mighty. I was slightly shocked to find that two-thirds of them thought the answer number one was the right answer.

I didn't tell them what I thought the answer was, but I was slightly shocked that so many people thought he came to say, it's all just fine, on you go, carry on. The Magnificat is the great statement at the beginning of Luke's gospel that Jesus did not come to say, come, carry on, all's just fine. It's a great song of reversal.

It's a song of reversal in which Mary, as a person pregnant outside what used to be known as wedlock, sees herself and identifies ith the oppressed of the earth and talks about God's great reversal. And it's a way in which Mary personifies Israel in its internal exile and its occupation by the Romans and proclaims God's purposes to restore Israel to its former glory. So we're going to hear a contemporary setting of the Magnificat in a moment.

From Great Sacred Music: Thursday 2nd May: Justice, 2 May 2024

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/great-sacred-music/id1210908650?i=1000654323434

This material may be protected by copyright.

Real Hope in Eternity

Babae, being old I, too, am soon going to die. Going to live, then, in God’s place. I will wrap my arms around your father whom I speared first. There we will live happily together.” 

WAEWAE MURDERED MISSIONARIES BUT DIED A CHRIST-FOLLOWER

ON THIS DAY, 11 February 1997, Gikita (Guiquita) Waewae died. He had been ill for some time and had declared two days earlier that he had lived long enough.

What made the death of this backwoods Ecuadorian significant? The answer to that requires a glance back forty-one years earlier. In January 1956, the world learned that five missionaries had been speared to death on the Ewenguno (Curaray) River in Ecuador. On January 8, Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCulley, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian had landed on a strip of sand in a Piper Cruiser piloted by Saint, hoping to contact Huaorani (also known as Auca or Woadani) Indians with the gospel.

In the past, the Huaorani had fiercely resisted encroachments into their forest, killing many outsiders who ventured near, including members of a recent oil exploration team. The missionaries hoped for a better outcome because they had made contact with the Huaorani in previous months by lowering gifts in baskets from the circling Piper Cruiser. Nonetheless, the Huaorani, led by Gikita Waewae, had speared them.

Meanwhile a Huaorani woman named Dayuma had fled from the tribe because of endemic violence—the murder rate among the Huaorani hovered around 60%. Dayuma lived among the nearby Quichuas. There she became a Christian. Even before becoming a Christian, she had taught phrases of her language to the missionaries who were killed in 1956. When Dayuma's sister emerged from the forest in 1958, looking for her, Dayuma returned to her childhood village and shared the gospel. 

Through her, the Huaorani invited Rachel Saint, sister of the murdered pilot, and Elisabeth Elliot, widow of Jim Elliot, to live with them. The pair agreed. The mission team recorded the gospel on phonograph—four short disks of about three minutes per side. As a consequence, many Huaorani learned to follow Christ. Later, Steve Saint, son of the murdered pilot, also worked among the Huao people.

At first Gikita paid little attention to the message. “When I die, I will just become worms,” he asserted. However, within the year he had begun to pray to God before he entered the forest to hunt. Eventually Gikita Waewae also became a Christian. Under his leadership, Huaorani violence declined. He endeavored to rear upcoming generations in faith.

After Rachel Saint died in 1994, Steve Saint, her nephew (known among the Huaorani as Babae), trekked half a day’s journey to inform Gikita. Gikita replied, “Babae, being old I, too, am soon going to die. Going to live, then, in God’s place. I will wrap my arms around your father whom I speared first. There we will live happily together.” 

—Dan Graves 

https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine

https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?e=56a8dbceaf&u=8afcbca846220ea5008858654&id=223a43d6f3

On Death and Dying - World View

•  . “How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?” – Carson McCullers
• “Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation.” – Albert Einstein
• “Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.” – Unknown
• “Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality…” – Emily Dickinson
• he life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
• “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.” – Oscar Wilde
• “The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.” – Seneca
• “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” – Rabindranath Tagore
• “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.” – Terry Pratchett
• “For those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.” – Rumi
• “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” – George Eliot
• “How people die remains in the memory of those who live on.” – Dame Cicely Saunders
• “I want to be all used up when I die.” – George Bernard Shaw
• “When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.” – Henry David Thoreau
• “Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” – Helen Keller
• “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” – Steve Jobs
• “Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace.” – Nelson Mandela
• “I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.” – Corazon Aquino
• “Because life is fragile and death inevitable, we must make the most of each day.” – Thomas S. Monson
• “It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.” – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
• Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” – Socrates
• “Nothing in life is promised except death.” – Kanye West
• “Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• “Many people die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they are seventy-five.” – Benjamin Franklin
• “Every man dies – not every man really lives.” – William Ross Wallace
• “Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.” – Mark Twain
• “Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.” – Marcus Aurelius
• “When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.” – Laurie Halse Anderson
• “In the long run, we are all dead.” – John Maynard Keynes
• “Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these, also will vanish with death.” – Ramana Maharshi
• “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.” – Harriet Beecher-Stowe
• "They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time." – Unknown
• You’re not truly dead until your legacy is no longer felt.
• “The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.” – Robert Southey
• For those who are left behind, death leaves a wound that cannot fully heal.
• “Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II
• “A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.” – Gustave Flaubert
• “When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, [who] weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.” – William Tecumseh Sherman
• “Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.” – Andrew Sachs
• “People fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over.” – Jim Morrison
• “It’s funny how most people love the dead; once you’re dead, you’re made for life.” – Jimi Hendrix
• We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” – Criminal Minds
• “True love never dies. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. A man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.” – Second Hand Lions
• “We live and we die by time, and we must not commit the sin of turning our back on time.” – Cast Away
• “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” – Finding Neverland
• “I'll get all the sleep I need when I'm dead.” – Road House
• “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” – The Crow
• “They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.” – St. Augustine
• “He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.” – Matthew Henry
• “Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.” – Buddha
• “Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may swell." – Henry Ward Beecher
• “One has to die to know exactly what happens after death. Although Catholics have their hopes." – Alfred Hitchcock
• “We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: It may be so the moment after death.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.” – Brennan Manning
• “A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.” – Florence Nightingale
• “When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die.” – Jim Elliot
• “When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.” – Sogyal Rinpoche
• “One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly." – Friedrich Nietzsche
• "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail … There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." – Stephen Hawking
• “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.” – Thomas Moore
• “A normal human being does not want life after death: He wants life on earth to continue.”  – George Orwell
• “Of course, you don’t die. Nobody dies. Death doesn’t exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world.” – Henry Miller
• “I don’t believe in the afterlife. I believe this is it, and I believe it’s the best way to live.” – Natalie Portman
• “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.” – Stephen Hawking
• “I know that we’re alive through our offspring. I know that we continue to exist through the earth. Not knowing anything else, I work on the assumption that after death, we go back into the pre-birth phase.” – Ali A. Rizvi
• “There probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.” – Stephen Hawking
• “I’m not scared of dying, because I’m an atheist. I won’t even know I’m dead. Because I’ll be dead.” – Jim Jeffries
• “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Woody Allen
• I'm not afraid of death," she explained to the magazine. "I know where I'm going. I know… the people that I'm gonna see. I think I would be afraid of death if I wasn't a good person. But I am," she said resoundingly.  Shannen Doherty 
• "I am a very spiritual person, so when I have done what I am here for, on this earth for, then that'll be fine," she told People magazine of eventually passing. "But I'm not anywhere near that."  Shannen Doherty 

Imposing Meaning and Interpretation - CS Lewis

 “Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)”

― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

Praise as completion of Joy - CS Lewis

 “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”

― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

Reading the Bible in light of common sense - Did Solomon Really Take an Egyptian Bride?

 Did Solomon Really Take an Egyptian Bride?

What we learn from the Bible and archaeology

 Philip D. Stern  October 24, 2023 

Not Pharaoh’s Daughter. This coffin cover belonged to a woman who lived in Thebes during Egypt’s 21st Dynasty. Although her name has not been preserved, she seems to have been wealthy and belonged to the clerical class—as indicated by the style of her coffin cover. The woman lived around the same time as Solomon’s bride, the unnamed daughter of Pharaoh, would have lived. 

King Solomon was famous for his wisdom and, among other things, his many marital and extramarital relationships. His harem is given at 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3)—surely an exaggeration. According to 1 Kings 11, he also took foreign wives, some of whom led him to idolatry. For example, to satisfy his Moabite wives, he built a shrine to the Moabite god Chemosh. The biblical writer trembles with indignation when reporting Solomon’s falling away.

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/did-solomon-really-take-an-egyptian-bride/?mqsc=E4156042&dk=ZE33O0ZF0&utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=BHDA%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=10_25_23_Who_Was_Miriam

Perspectives on Faith - The Flaw of the Excluded Middle - Paul Hiebert

 On the bottom level a holistic theology includes an awareness of God in natural history — in sustaining the natural order of things. So long as the missionary comes with a two-tier worldview with God confined to the supernatural, and the natural world operating for all practical purposes according to autonomous scientific laws, Christianity will continue to be a secularizing force in the world. Only as God is brought back into the middle of our scientific understanding of nature will we stem

the tide of Western secularism.

A second implication is that the church and mission must guard against Christianity itself becoming a new form of magic. Magic is based on a mechanistic view — a formula approach to reality that allows humans to control their own destiny. Worship, on the other hand, is rooted in a relational view of life. Worshipers place themselves in the power and mercy of a greater being.

The difference is not one of form, but of attitude. What begins as a prayer of request may turn into a formula or chant to force God to do one's will by saying or doing the right thing. In religion, we want the will of God for we trust in his omniscience. In magic we seek our own wills, confident that we know what is best for ourselves.

The line dividing them is a subtle one as I learned in the case of Muchintala. A week after our prayer meeting, Yellayya returned to say that the child had died. I felt thoroughly defeated. Who was I to be a missionary if I could not pray for healing and receive a positive answer? A few weeks later Yellayya returned with a sense of triumph. "How can you be so happy after the child died?" I asked. "The village would have acknowledged the power of our God had he healed the child," Yellayya said, "but they knew in the end she would have to die. When they saw in the funeral our hope of resurrection and reunion in heaven, they saw an even greater victory, over death itself, and they have begun to ask about the Christian way." In a new way I began to realize that true answers to prayer are those that bring the greatest glory to God, not those that satisfy my immediate desires. It is all too easy to make Christianity a new magic in which we as gods can make God do our bidding. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20150207083930/http://www.michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions/FlawofExcludedMiddle.pdf

Introducing the Bible - William Barclay

 Here is a new situation with a very great potential. Augustine Birrell used to say that every student should be compelled to read books with the point of which he is in complete disagreement. In Bible study a very mixed group, with widely varying points of view, is much better than a holy huddle of like-minded people. Disagreement can be the way to new discovery and is always a stimulus to thought, for we can never be sure of any position until we have defended it from attack.

Another new attitude is that people have come to see that the Bible is a book, not only to be read, but also to be studied. The old system in which a person read a chapter a day, and just read it, will no longer do. The old battle cry that the Bible is its own best interpreter is no longer acceptable. The Bible is a difficult book, written in different languages, coming from a different civilization, talking about difficult things, and every aid to study great books that must be brought to it. The Bible is like all more we bring to it, the more we will get out of it.

In this book I do not wish to persuade people to think as I do; I only wish to make them think. It is my prayer and my hope that this book will enable people to understand the Bible better, to love it more, and in it to see Jesus Christ more clearly.

Glasgow University

WILLIAM BARCLAY

Dedication to the Gospel - John Livingston Nevius

 “When Christians feel that they are debtors to those who have not heard of Christ, and that the blood of the perishing may be found on their skirts, when they are brought into closer sympathy with Christ, and honestly and earnestly desire the triumph of his kingdom, so that they are willing to make sacrifices to bring about that glorious result, and when they pray with faith for the promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit—then, as believers in the sovereignty and faithfulness of Christ our Lord, we may look for results such as have not hitherto been witnessed.” 

John Livingston Nevius