Injustice

You, Canadian Taliban, do not allow a woman!

eejoseph

I have never believed that women are somehow inferior or inadequate (lacking the capacity) to lead. My God, you Euro-American Taliban, I have a mother who knew sonething about Bible power. She could read it. She understood it. She taught me to read it. I have not gotten past “If any person (tis, τις) desires the office of bishop…” being treated as “if one of the boys wants to be a bishop…”, or how mothers can excel at home in nurturing and training both boys and girls to follow the Saviour. Paul’s message to Timothy about the quest for bishop’s office is a great eyeopener but it takes a less than thoughtful apostle or prophet to put up road blocks to the usefulness of women in church.

Focus on the function of the word

The Bible was not written for men. Forget that junk. Its message for the human race in every era never settles for the theory that males are the only heroes of faith. Take another look, please. Dare we say that God wants to equip only men (males) for every good work? Who does God want to to teach, reprove, correct and train in righteousness? Who does he want to be adequate (artios, άρτιος, fit for the time)? Males? Not a chance, Taliban.

People are people to God

Anthropology eludes the elitists in religious circles. They believe, without evidence, that the ancient world had two kinds of people: the elect and the disrespected. They do not care about people, all people. People who are themselves shorthanded and nearsighted will want to find someone to help show their elite standing by way of contrast. Leaving women out of anything has never been successful. Ask Moses and the scribes and Pharisees of New Testament times. It has to be that people who think Paul was following Christ by putting restrirtions on women are less than human. The man of God (the anthropos, ανθρωπος) can be any gender.

2 Timothy 3:16-17, anthropos is “person”

16) All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; 17) so that the man (ανθρωπος) of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

Paul to Timothy 2:3:16-17

Time to address the knee

eejoseph, , , , ,

Remembering George Floyd is more than an emotional experience.  The knee that killed our brother is part of a beast that sees itself as sovereign, which nations can be if God authorizes that status.  When they see the end of their misdeeds they blaspheme and become a lesson to the world of thick darkness and mental obesity.  Understanding the trading of Africans as slaves and their humiliation is the circumcision the world is afraid of.   Sometimes we hear people saying we should forgive the European powers and the United States and move on.  The sentiment comes from the core of the knee.  The knee tries desperately to rewrite history but time just ran out at this juncture in ways we could not foresee, which leads me to the conviction that the time to address the injustices of the so-called Judeo-C⁶hristian world has fully arrived.

Stalled for 230 years!

My head shakes involuntarily when I hear the silly MAGA slogan used by the bigot in the White House to dupe people into looking back for direction.  These are the people who do not understand the nature of their constitution: how it grows and yet keeps the nation on course is not a mystery.  Americans do not need to look to Europe or any other place for guidance in governance.  Christians need to look no further than Jesus and Paul to understand the sources of community conflict.  American history speaks for itself about the willingness to crush dissent and oppress because of jealousy.

They did set the bar – still a low-value metal – for humanity and intricate accountability and justice.  Every observer of modern history knows that America is not Israel – there is only one Israel – and that Americans quickly decided not to vault by hanging on to the marginalization of Black people.  It is like Israel at Sinai: “we will do whatever Yahweh says”, but pay homage to a golden calf as saviour.  America and its institutions, including many denominations, chose to act out in jealousy and pure rage: jealous of the melanin and outraged that Blacks had many more blessings beside the melanin.

Great legal systems have stalled on getting wealth for some parts of their domain, and if there were ships secretly ferrying Africans to poverty today they would proceed with God’s blessing.

The crushing chaos of church commerce

Let’s say we go to church to shop for miracles (knowing full well that they are always free of charge) and not to participate in mutual edification in the excellencies of God our Saviour, it is deceptive not to have a new name for our assembly.  That kind of assembly, for its lack of intelligent and honest participation and for the commerce we think it is, is no longer church in the same way that the Sadducees turned the temple into a place of merchandizing.  It has become a knee on our neck.

Instead of prayers to which we can say amen we are being asked to give the nod to hollow decrees and irrelevant slogans which build neither faith, hope or love.  We can always expect the merchants of magical moments, banquets and devotional books to keep saying they are having a church experience.  We know they are not.  We have to find new words to describe what has become of the great American enterprise.  The church is known for its grace and the secular powers for their law and order regimes.  Isn’t that the thing that sets the levitical kingdom apart from the church?

Knee on our neck

How the knee shows up

  • Lies we identify at first sight
  • Freedom that entails loss of dignity
  • Power practiced as domination
  • Love is realized in perfect compliance
  • New means more of the same

The knee stands for staking a claim where millennial communities were flourishing.   It stands for turning Jesus into a disciple of Moses.  It stands for stifling the dreams of the next generation.   It stands for loyalty displays without a grain of confidence in the symbols that represent the ideals.

Get the knee a new pair of ears

We can close our ears to the truth but it will catch up with us.   The things we say we will defend to the death should involve our own death to the crooked generation that brought us the separation of church and state, righteous nazism, and the televangelist.

America and Europe have not been listening to its geniuses.  They have become roadblocks to their stated destinies. They forget their meagre and late beginnings and act as if they were always prosperous and influential.   Most disturbing is the fact that successive generations of young people have been duped into a sense of maturity based on computer and web savvy, deceived by eastern mysticism, convinced to follow shallow political ideologies, and a paradoxical spirituality, and left exposed to gun violence directed at schools.  The knee is not listening.

This time the people must force the knee to listen

There will not be a Judeo-Christian beacon on any  hill.  That is an utterly schizophrenic concoction designed to nauseate God.  He has been known to vomit.  Since it was not possible for Judeo and Christian strains to combine in the land where both have their roots we should not expect a composite of the two to thrive anywhere.   Looking back to ones roots can be an orienting experience but it can also lead to a pride in the beginning with no view towards growth in the direction of a mature society.  When  Christians look back our eyes get glued to the cross. We are not looking back to a mere event or festival.  We look back to the intervention of God in our world  planned from before the world was made.

For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

1 Cor. 3:11

What they said about Israel-Judah appears in the church

THE KNEE OF ANTIQUITY- sacred and secular

26) Her priests have done violence to My law and have profaned My holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the profane, and they have not taught the difference between the unclean and the clean; and they hide their eyes from My sabbaths, and I am profaned among them. 27) Her princes within her are like wolves tearing the prey, by shedding blood and destroying lives in order to get dishonest gain. 28) Her prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ when the Lord has not spoken. 29) The people of the land have practiced oppression and committed robbery, and they have wronged the poor and needy and have oppressed the sojourner without justice. 30) I searched for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before Me for the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one.

Ezekiel 22:26-30