#everyone in the notes talking about israel you are literally part of the problem

[tinyshe]

Story at-a-glance

In the spring of 2021, the Biden Administration said it was seriously looking into establishing a vaccine passport system that will allow unvaccinated individuals to be legally treated as second-class citizens

In Israel, vaccine certificates are already required for entry into many public spaces. Activists warn it’s become a two-tiered society where the unvaccinated are ostracized

The public narrative is not only building prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks or get an experimental vaccine, but is also using healthy people as scapegoats from the very beginning, blaming the spread of the virus on asymptomatically infected people

With the rollout of vaccine certificates, we are stepping firmly into discrimination territory. The last step will entail persecution of non-vaccinated individuals. At that point, we will have replicated the Nazi regime’s four-step process of dehumanizing the Jews, which ultimately allowed the genocide to occur

Vaccine passports are about creating justification for segregation, discrimination and elimination of certain groups of people, in this case, people who don’t want to be part of the experimental vaccine program, which identifies them as noncompliant with top-down edicts

This article was previously published on April 6, 2021 and has been updated with new information.

As predicted in 2020, vaccine passports are being rolled out across the world, including the U.S. As reported by Ron Paul in his Liberty Report,1,2 which streamed live March 29, 2021, the Biden Administration said it was "seriously looking into establishing some kind of federal vaccine passport system, where Americans who cannot (or will not) prove to the government they have been jabbed with the experimental vaccine will be legally treated as second-class citizens."

While Biden has yet to formally announce such a program, Paul warns that if it happens, this system "will quickly morph into a copy of China's 'social credit' system, where undesirable behaviors are severely punished." I've been saying the same thing for many months now, and there's every reason to suspect that this is indeed where we're headed.

Indeed, listen to Ilana Rachel Daniel's emotional plea from Jerusalem, Israel, where a "Green Pass" is now required if you want to enter any number of public venues and participate in society. Daniel, who emigrated from the U.S. to Israel 25 years ago, is a health adviser, activist and information officer for a new political human rights party called Rappeh.

The COVID-19 data simply don't support the rollout of this kind of draconian measure. In the absence of a serious, truly massively lethal threat to a major portion of U.S. citizens, having to show vaccine papers in order to travel and enter certain social venues is clearly more about imposing top-down government control than safeguarding public health.

We're Looking at the End of Human Liberty in the West

Mandatory vaccine passports will be massively discriminating, and are quite frankly senseless, considering the so-called COVID-19 "vaccines" don't work like vaccines.

They're designed to lessen symptoms when the inoculated person gets infected, but they do not actually prevent them from getting infected in the first place, and they don't prevent the spread of the virus — which is being proven by the number of fully vaccinated people who not only are coming down with the Delta variant of COVID, but are being told they can spread it to others.

With statistics like this, vaccine passports are nothing but loyalty cards, proving you've submitted to being a lab rat for an experimental injection and nothing more, because in reality, vaccinated individuals are no safer than unvaccinated ones. It's a truly mindboggling ruse, and unless enough people are able to see it for what it is, the world will rather literally be turned into a prison planet.

In Israel … we're hearing from activists that it's a two-tiered society and that basically, activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society, and they are trying to roll it out around the world. ~ Naomi Wolf

As noted by former Clinton adviser and author Naomi Wolf, mandatory COVID-19 passports would spell the "end of human liberty in the West." In a March 28, 2021, interview with Fox News' Steve Hilton, she said:3,4

"'Vaccine passport' sounds like a fine thing if you don't understand what those platforms can do. I'm [the] CEO of a tech company, I understand what these platforms can do. It is not about the vaccine, it's not about the virus, it's about your data.

Once this rolls out, you don't have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. It can be merged with your Paypal account, with your digital currency. Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans.

Your network can be sucked up. It geolocates you everywhere you go. You credit history can be included. All of your medical and health history can be included.

This has already happened in Israel, and six months later, we're hearing from activists that it's a two-tiered society and that basically, activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society, and they are trying to roll it out around the world.

It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass … I cannot stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized."

Largest Medical Experiment in the History of the World

As noted by Donald Rucker, who led the Trump Administration's health IT office, the individual tracking that goes along with a vaccine passport will also help officials to evaluate the effectiveness and long-term safety of the vaccines. He told The Washington Post:5

"The tracking of vaccinations is not just simply for vaccine passports. The tracking of vaccinations is a broader issue of 'we're giving a novel biologic agent to the entire country,' more or less."

In other words, health officials know full well that this mass vaccination campaign is a roll of the dice. It's the largest medical experiment in the history of the world, and vaccine certificates will allow them to track all of the millions of test subjects. This alone should be cause enough to end all discussions about vaccine mandates, yet the experimental nature of these injections is being completely ignored.

Again, by shaming people who have concerns about participating in a medical experiment and threatening to bar them from society, government officials are proving that this is not for the greater good. It's not about public health. It's about creating loyal subjects — people who are literally willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their children at the request of the government, no questions asked.

Vaccinations Are the New 'Purity Test'

Wolf also points out the horrific history of IBM, which developed a similar but less sophisticated system of punch cards that allowed Nazi Germany to create a two-tier society and ultimately facilitated the rounding up of Jews for extermination.

Suffice it to say, some of the most gruesome parts of history are now repeating right before our eyes, and we must not turn away from this ugly truth. Doing so may turn out to be far more lethal than COVID-19 ever was.

The short video above features a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor who compares mask wearing to, as a Jew, having to wear a yellow star to mark their societal status. However, back then, everyone understood what was happening, she says.

At no point were they lied to and told that wearing the star was for their own good, which is what's happening now. So, in that respect, the current situation is far more insidious. She says the "hypocrisy in the public narrative," which claims that we need to wear masks to protect the old, "is absolutely unbearable." "I would love to die in a state [of] freedom," she says, "than live like this."

She adds that at her age, her life expectancy is short, and she would gladly exchange her death for the life and happiness of the next generations. She wants the younger generations to have the freedom "to live their lives, as I have lived mine ... To see people defile their children with masks is something totally unbearable to me," she says. Vaccine credentials, in my view, are even more comparable to the Jewish yellow star, but in reverse.

Not having the certificate will be the yellow star of our day, which will allow business owners, government officials and just about anyone else to treat you like a second-class citizen and deny you access to everything from education, work and travel, to recreation, social engagements and daily commerce — all under the false guise of you being a biological threat to all those who have been vaccinated.

According to the public narrative, vaccine certificates are a key aspect of getting life back to normal, but the reality is the complete converse, as they will usher in a markedly different society that is anything but normal.

Florida Bucks the Trend

As a resident of Florida, I must applaud Gov. Ron DeSantis who announced March 29, 2021,6 that he would issue an executive order forbidding local governments and businesses from requiring vaccine certificates.

He followed up with that order April 2, 2021, saying he was calling on the state legislature to create a measure that will allow him to sign it into law. Unfortunately, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued an injunction August 8, 2021, against enforcing the order; whether DeSantis chooses to fight to keep it is yet to be seen.

"It's completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply participate in normal society," he said at the time he announced the order.

But, no matter what comes of DeSantis' order, other states and countries that do decide on such a requirement are also bound to face the problem of black market vaccination certificates, which have already started emerging.7,8

As reported by the Daily Beast,9,10 a number of health care workers have been caught bragging about forging vaccination cards on their social media channels. Apparently, they have not yet realized the public nature of the internet, but that's beside the point.

In Florida, a man working at a web design company was fired after posting a TikTok video advertising fake vaccine cards,11 and in Israel, where the two-tier society is already forming, a man was arrested for making and selling forged COVID-19 vaccination certificates, which are now required for entry into restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, swimming pools and other public venues throughout the country.12

Around the world, people are also being arrested for administering fake vaccines13,14,15,16,17 and selling bogus COVID-19 tests.18,19

Eugenics and Hygiene Obsessions

While it's often considered bad policy to compare anything to the Nazi regime, the comparisons are growing more readily identifiable by the day, which makes them hard to avoid.

Aside from the parallels that can be drawn between mask wearing and/or vaccine "papers" and the Jewish yellow star, there's the Nazi's four-step process for dehumanizing the Jews,20 — prejudice, scapegoating, discrimination and persecution — a process that indoctrinated the German people into agreeing with, or at least going along with the plan to commit genocide.

In present day, the public narrative is not only building prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks or get an experimental vaccine, but is also using healthy people as scapegoats from the very beginning, blaming the spread of the virus on asymptomatically infected people.

With the rollout of vaccine certificates, we are stepping firmly into discrimination territory. The last step will entail persecution of non-vaccinated individuals. This in and of itself also harkens back to the Nazi regime, which was obsessed with "health guidelines" that eventually led to the mass-purging of "unclean" Jews. As reported by Gina Florio in a December 2020 Evie Magazine article:21

"When Hitler first came to power in Nazi Germany, he kicked off a series of public health schemes. He started by setting up health screenings all over the country, sending vans around to every neighborhood to conduct tuberculosis testing, etc.

Next up was factory cleanliness — he launched a robust campaign encouraging factories to completely revamp their space, thoroughly clean every corner … After the factories, the next mission was cleaning up the asylums …

What started as seemingly innocent or well-meaning public health campaigns quickly spiraled into an extermination of races and groups of people who were considered dirty or disgusting. In short, the beginning of Hitler's reign was a constant expansion of who was contaminated and who was impure …

We're seeing an obsession with covering our faces all the time so we don't spread disease or deadly germs; most public places we walk into won't even allow us to enter without slathering our hands in hand sanitizer; and people act terrified of someone who isn't wearing a mask.

Nobody can say with a straight face that this is normal behavior … We're even seeing people advocate for some kind of tracking device to show that a person is vaccinated or 'clean' enough to enter a venue … Let's hope we can all learn the lessons from the past and we don't witness history repeat itself."

History Is Repeating Itself

Indeed, everyone calling for vaccine certificates — which became part of the public narrative early on in the pandemic — is guilty of following in the well-worn footsteps of this infamous dictator, repeating the very same patterns that were universally condemned after the fall of the Third Reich.

Highlighting them all would be too great a task for one article, so two glaring examples will have to suffice. In December 2020, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneurial attorney with political ambitions, tweeted the following:22

"Is there a way for someone to easily show that they have been vaccinated — like a bar code they can download to their phone? There ought to be … Tough to have mass gatherings like concerts or ballgames without either mass adoption of the vaccine or a means of signaling."

Signaling what, if not your "unclean" biohazard state? In his March 2021 Tweet, law professor, political commentator and former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Harry Litman, was more direct about the ill intent behind vaccine certificates, saying:23

"Vaccine passports are a good idea. Among other things, it will single out the still large contingent of people who refuse vaccines, who will be foreclosed from doing a lot of things their peers can do. That should help break the resistance down."

Comments like these demonstrate that vaccine passports are about creating justification for segregation, discrimination and elimination of certain groups of people, in this case, people who don't want to be part of the experimental vaccine program.

The justification is that they're too "unclean," too "unsafe" to freely participate in public society and must therefore be identified and shut out. In reality, it's really about identifying the noncompliant.

During the Nazi reign, those slated for segregation, discrimination and elimination were identified by their affiliation with Judaism (there's controversy as to whether Jewishness is an issue of race, ethnicity, religion, national identity or familial bonds, which you can learn more about on JewInTheCity.com,24 but all were relevant criteria in the Nazi's hunt for Jews).

Today, the global elimination strategy foregoes such identities, and focuses instead on identifying who will go along with the program and who will be a noncompliant troublemaker.

In short, vaccine passports are a device to identify who the loyal subjects of the unelected elite are, and who aren't. Those unwilling to enter the new world of technocratic rule without a fuss are the ones that need to be eliminated, and willingness to be a test subject for an unproven experimental treatment is the litmus test. It's really not more complicated than that.

Are You Ready To Be an Outcast?

This is essentially the conclusion drawn by Mike Whitney as well, detailed in an article25 posted on The Unz Review. I would encourage you to read the entire article as it succinctly summarizes the reasons behind the current censorship.

In his article, he points out that behavioral psychologists have been employed by the government to promote the COVID-19 vaccination campaign and maximize vaccine uptake. They also have a "rapid response team" in place to attack the opinions of those who question the "official narrative."

Mike also highlights a National Institutes of Health report26 titled, "COVID-19 Vaccination Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence," which lays out the intent to turn vaccine refusers into social outcasts as a tool to coerce compliance.

"This is very scary stuff," Whitney writes.27 "Agents of the state now identify critics of the COVID vaccine as their mortal enemies. How did we get here? And how did we get to the point where the government is targeting people who don't agree with them? This is way beyond Orwell. We have entered some creepy alternate universe …

If behavioral psychologists helped to shape the government's strategy on mass vaccination, then in what other policies were they involved? Were these the 'professionals' who conjured up the pandemic restrictions?

Were the masks, the social distancing and the lockdowns all promoted by 'experts' as a way to undermine normal human relations and inflict the maximum psychological pain on the American people?

Was the intention to create a weak and submissive population that would willingly accept the dismantling of democratic institutions, the dramatic restructuring of the economy, and the imposition of a new political order? These questions need to be answered …

Vaccination looks to be the defining issue of the next few years at least. And those who resist the edicts of the state will increasingly find themselves on the outside; outcasts in their own country."

Will You Obey?

As detailed in an internet blog titled, "Will You Obey the Criminal Authoritarians?" the 1962 Milgram Experiment (embedded above for your convenience), tested the limits of human obedience to authority, proving most people will simply follow orders, even when those orders go against their own sound judgment. They'll commit atrocious acts of violence against others simply because they were told it's OK by an authority figure.

We've already seen examples of this during the past year's mask mandates. Suddenly, people felt empowered to verbally harass, pepper spray and physically attack others simply for not wearing a mask. Families were kicked off planes because their toddlers wouldn't wear a mask. People were even shot for the grievous "crime" of not wearing a mask.

If those things were allowed to happen over mask wearing, one can only imagine what will be tolerated, if not encouraged, when vaccine certificates take full effect. The most obvious answer is to take a firm stand against devolution into inhumanity, regardless of whether you think COVID-19 vaccinations are a good idea or not. The question is, will you? In many ways, the months and years ahead will test the ethics and humanity of every single one of us.

[clumsyclifford]

hi my love i’m hope not too late but i would like you to tell me about my loves jewish cake, anything you want to but specifically baker calum 🥰 thank you i love you

of course you aren’t too late!!! ESPECIALLY to talk about jewish cake oh my goodness meg i shall die for you i love you. alright let’s see what i can dig up

ha’ahava hazot shelanu + it’s so simple

a cut, per usual

so let’s start WITH:

ha’ahava hazot shelanu

jewish cake was a labor of love for myself. little known fact about me is that i am in fact jewish! :) and around christmas time i always get a little prickly about the surplus of christmas spirit and in this case the amount of fic for it. and i’d sort of had this hesitant idea to write a jewish fic in the back of my mind for a long time, but it felt like a really big divergence from the Cast of Characters that was for some reason a lot more dramatic than any other circumstances into which i could place them, so i’d basically been hesitating for several months. in november we had a brief conversation about it in the club which looked like this

but the idea still made me a little nervous and so i kind of talked myself out of writing it, as always. and THEN, middle of december, iba sent me this 1d fic out of nowhere with this accompanying message:

and i kinda lowkey almost cried!! it was such a jewish fic. i read the word kvetch and i almost lost it. the fic was just so unabashedly jewish. and i was like...well. that’s what ive been wanting to do. so now i have no reason not to do it.

in the ao3 notes i talked a little bit about my internal debate over How Jewish To Go with the fic because on the one hand i really do understand that it can feel alienating going into a fic with zero understanding of the culture but on the other hand since it was MY fic i wanted to make it jewish the way i’m jewish. which is like...............very. i don’t think i ended up striking a balance so much as just deciding to say fuck it and write it the way i would want to read it, but i definitely think that was the right decision for me.

there was actually one more motivator for writing this fic, especially the WAY i wrote it, in eight chapters, and that motivator was that i wanted to break 400k on ao3 before the year ended. i just wanted to have an even number and 400k was a good goal. which i did achieve thanks to jewish cake fic being the 13.6k beast that she is! so that was also part of it

NOW! as for the PROCESS. i created the doc on december 22 and i originally kind of thought it was a little bitchy to write a hanukkah fic after hanukkah had already ended but was reminded that most christmas fic is neither written nor posted on actual christmas which reassured me well enough. i had already had the idea to divide it into eight chapters for the eight nights of hanukkah and i thought that would be a nice way to showcase different aspects of the holiday (seeing family, playing dreidel, opening presents etc) and also in certain cases (like the third chapter where they do some baking) some days that weren’t necessarily hanukkah-driven but just a nice natural consequence of being on break for hanukkah. i wanted it to feel like hanukkah feels to me!! normally i don’t like people seeing the way my outlines look but this one i don’t mind sharing so here’s what i had at the top of the doc for reference while i was writing. not everything in that first list got included but most of it did !!! 

i’m not really sure how this fic ended up being cake. i never used to default to cake but for some reason as i was diving into this one it just felt right. that’s all i can say about that. meg you have genuinely shifted my approach to fic i DO default to cake sometimes now and that’s on YOU. 

the very first thing i ever wrote down for this fic was this part that ended up going in the summary:

“Happy Hanukkah,” Calum says, smiling at Luke as their fingers intertwine.

Luke murmurs, “Chag sameach, ahovi,” and Calum’s face is aglow in the candlelight.

that was The Moment for me. i didn’t even write the rest of that scene until later but i had those two lines written down straight out the gate and i knew they were gonna close out the first scene because it just Felt Right. and i was right! very cool and fun for me

now the nice convenient thing about having this fic separated into eight discrete scenes/nights/chapters was that i didn’t have to write it in order, and i didn’t. i DID write the first night/chapter first, but then over the course of maybe a week, i wrote (deep breath get ready): the first half of chapter 2 (hemmings family) > the beginning of chapter 5 (the dreidel game) > most of the scene in chapter 7 > the beginning of chapter 3 (where they bake) > finished writing chapters 2 & 3 > started chapter 4 and finished chapter 5 > finished chapter 4 and wrote the rest of chapter 7 > all of chapter 6 > all of chapter 8 aka the proposal. i deliberately saved the proposal for last because i don’t think i could have written it exactly right without knowing the events that came before it but everything else was all over the place as you can see. 

a problem i ran into a lot, and i talked to my sounding board and fellow jew sam about this among many other things, was that i had a lot of trouble characterizing very obviously Not Jewish people in a way that made them Very Jewish. not even like, Jewish But You Can Ignore It. i wanted them to be front-and-center jewish like i am and that was hard for me to navigate because obviously my speech patterns and vocabulary as an american jew are extremely different from 5sos’s as australian goyim (non-jews) like i do use hebrew words in my day-to-day communication all the time and i somehow had to keep their mannerisms but also insert mine BUT not insert so many of mine that the fic became incomprehensible and it was just. a Challenge. here’s some insight into THAT crisis

and then again writing the other characters in other chapters

i sent sam the doc when i was mostly done writing it, mainly just to be reminded that at least one person was going to appreciate this fic, which worked out nicely because she very very much did. genuinely i cannot stress enough how insecure i was to write and share this fic. like i’m gonna be really straight up with you meg, i think part of the reason i had calum and luke baking sufganiyot was because to me that felt like a sort of bribe? i basically wrote what felt to me like the least appealing fic ever and then my mission from there was to add stuff in that would convince people to give it a shot anyway. i was trying to make it worth everyone’s while. the baking was my trade-off, i was like “well yeah it’s a jewish fic but maybe she’ll be happy enough that it’s cake and they’re baking that she’ll forgive it for being a jewish fic” yes i realize how kind of hilariously tragic this sounds but !!! you never get jewish fics!!! and you especially don’t get them in fanfiction for obviously non-jewish bands!!! anyway. we’re not gonna get into this whole thing but like. even though objectively i knew that i had been told again and again people would appreciate the fic i still had doubts and knowing something and feeling secure in it are very different things.

also, i didn’t remember this, but apparently i had a lot of problems with writing the proposal! here’s a sneak peek into that mental breakdown

don’t actually think the fic specifies (making life easier for myself) but they have already had dinner in that scene. so now you know. 

i could choose to not get this elbows-deep in the details of Crises I Had While Writing This Fic but instead i am choosing to go all out. here’s another thing i had trouble with:

(i did end up using transliteration obviously but i DO think actual hebrew would have been a cool flex)

and as for the title, ha’ahava hazot shelanu is the name of an ivri lider song that i love, and it translates to “this love of ours” and i realize titling the fic in hebrew was a Choice but i did talk to sam about this as well and that went roughly like this

by the way here is the song, i absolutely love it and i cannot recommend it enough. also i’m not sure how glaringly obvious this is but the chapter titles on ao3 are just hebrew numbers. like the first chapter is echad which literally means one. and so on. are they the correct genders? i don’t know ! fuck gendered language.

one more thing and then ill move on but an unfortunate natural consequence of writing a hanukkah fic (at least the way i wrote this one) is that it necessitates presents. so i had to come up with presents for these dumb boys to give each other. and to be completely honest with you i don’t remember how i did!!! the ones calum got for luke were trickier because they were actual things. for some reason this luke was always a version of luke that just kinda like, wore makeup, so that was just a question of figuring out an eyeshadow palette that would be Nice but not obscenely schmancy (i did ask the club for help since i know nothing about makeup but as usual i ignored their replies). but that by itself didn’t feel like enough of a gift, and so i tried to think of something that would be more than just the gift of an object. like, something that would maybe enable luke to spend more time on something he loves. piano music made sense to me because it wasn’t just a thing by itself it was a thing that encouraged luke to play piano and even to improve at it and to learn songs that he could be excited about. so! that was that

the trip to israel gift was a little bit of a retcon situation i really liked the idea that luke had been planning to give that “gift” to calum for a hot sec that he’d have had it ready, but i’d already written the scene where he and mali talk about israel, so i went back to it and edited it a little to hint at the idea (luke plays it off very casually because he is a clever boy) but i thought there was something very romantic in the idea of the israel trip, of luke planning a future with calum and a trip to a place that means so much to him (to me yes maybe luke and i are the same blah blah) and getting to drag calum around to falafel places and teach him words in hebrew and it just seemed like the appropriate trip for these two cute jewish boys to plan so i rolled with it.

okay moving on slightly!! to baker calum <3 baker calum was more of a cameo in the hanukkah fic, in the chapter i wrote with you in mind, but i can talk about it’s so simple here as well because i fucking adore that fic.

it’s so simple

so the inspiration behind the fic came from the “kitchens are for lovers” rhetoric and the realization that that would be the perfect...sort of thesis��to build on for a fic for you in specific, because you are, in my mind, a very kitchen-based person, given your baking habit. it actually just worked out pretty nicely for me honestly because i’ve been wanting to write a big Kitchen Romance type fic for a while and you just gave me the perfect opportunity. here’s what i had at the top of the doc for the fic for you

and then once i sort of landed on the idea for the fic, it just made a lot of sense to make it jewish cake because, well, im gonna be real w you, because i identify very strongly with jewish cake and the kitchen-romance aspect felt like a very bella thing in the same way that jewish cake felt like a bella thing. and so i wanted to be able to romanticize these kitchens to share the way that i, bella, feel about them, and that was easy to do when the characters were so similar to me. not to mention this cake already existed in my head as a very settled, domestic duo, and they had their own home and had already had a kitchen-romance scene in the hanukkah fic and the whole thing just fell together perfectly. i had this sentence in my head and it was: “Shabbat in Luke and Calum’s kitchen looks something like this.” the kind of thing you would read in a fic summary right? and especially having it take place on shabbat felt like an extra layer of domestic easy romance to me so that was kind of my guide

here was my "outline” for this:

Romance :)))

obviously calum was going to be the one doing most of the cooking/baking because he had been established as the Kitchen Boy between the two of them and maybe i realized in the course of writing it that while i was luke, you were very much calum. so the goal was then basically to romanticize (1) the kitchen and (2) luke as much as humanly possible for you (see: message sent to helen and ainslee)

unfortunately i was unable to do baker calum justice as much as i would have liked because i could not have him baking anything complex because i can’t bake anything complex and if i had tried to describe him baking something complex and then described it wrong i would have died of shame so that is why he is only baking brownies BUT they have chocolate chips which hopefully makes up for it. also i just stumbled across this which i think pretty well represents the crisis i had regarding baker calum

:)))

re: the soundtrack (so to speak), i wanted to include some songs that i associate with you meg but you see the situation is that some of those songs are 5sos/mali/atl songs and so i couldn’t include those, for obvious reasons, which did narrow down my choices somewhat. fortunately i think the mcfly worked pretty nicely i mean yeah it’s a little obvious that i was forcing mcfly into the story but they deserved to be there. i think i’ve mentioned this but i genuinely have a memory of listening to star girl on a loop in my kitchen at home and in my head the hood-hemmings kitchen looks like my kitchen because i have zero imagination so it felt to me like these songs just belonged in kitchens. and that they’d be inherently romantic. woah i think my brain is short-circuiting i’m not sure i’m making sense anymore. point being i hoped that you would appreciate it nonetheless.

a note about the short introduction, because it’s very unlike anything i’ve put in any other fic to my knowledge. i kind of wanted it to feel like the prologue to a fairytale, almost. i wanted it to feel like the beginning of a movie, when the camera is slowly, slowly zooming in from a Big Picture down to one house on one street and then through the window into the kitchen while the voiceover is very serenely describing the scene. i wanted it to feel like we were in the kitchen before even calum was and that we were standing against the fourth wall watching the fic unfold. and also, i wanted to make the fic romantic as fuck, from the get-go. there was to be no confusion: this fic was going to romanticize the living daylights out of the hood-hemmings kitchen.

(also you may have noticed that despite having “london” in the list of Meg Things at the top of the doc, the fic never actually specifies that they’re in london. that’s because this fic was really an exercise in “how much can i hint that they’re in london without outright saying it so i don’t establish a canon that i may later regret” which went as far as me asking helen what her kitchen floors and counters are made of. like. if you want it to be in london then hell yeah it’s in london but i didn’t wanna lock myself into that decision just in case so i never actually said it but i hope it kinda felt london-y anyway lmao)

so...............i THINK that’s all i have to say. “all” as if i havent just written an entire dissertation but at least it’s done now. i sure did say a lot! that was a lot!!! but also a very very fun and interesting dive into the ~process~ of writing these jewish cake fics. also, for what it’s worth, the way hanukkah fic was received basically calmed all my fears about writing jewish fic, which was a relief for me. so thank you for loving it, i don’t think you know how much that means to me!!!! i love YOU so very much

[hkvoyage]

I am a real old lady, living in Israel, and I am a Klaine-MPreg addict. Do you have a list, or know of a list, of these stories. The regular klaine list (Lynne & Zinnia) doesn't have one. Thanks. OLK

A search for completed mpreg fics resulted in 183 fics on AO3 and 125 fics on FF.net. Here are the search results on S&C. Judging by the number of hits or favorites on these stories, there are plenty of readers that like mpreg!Klaine fics.

Under the cut are 11 mpreg!Kurt fics and 17 mpreg!Blaine fics. I placed an asterisk against the authors who have written a few mpreg stories.

Warning: Some of these also contain boypussy. Make sure you read the tags or author comments if this bothers you. Happy reading! HKVoyage

MPREG KURT

Who Says by Karanoaoi *

Wolves mate for life once an Alpha claims their Omega mate, but the ways of choosing your mate are changing from the traditional meets where all non-mated wolves of age are thrown in together and you end up with a mate. Alphas still have to start a mating run, but what if the Omega has their eye on a certain Alpha? Follow the Anderson and Hummel families through these changes. A generational fic starting with Grandma Anderson and going through Kurt and Blaines generation. 

Note: Part 1 of the The Life of a Werewolf series

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Not As It Seems by fearlessly

Blaine had been frozen where he stood. The boy in front of him was gorgeous. He had never seen a creature so beautiful in his life and quite frankly, Blaine was awestruck. His eyes, they were like raging ocean storms yet they were gentle, inviting, and so utterly … organic.

~~~~~

The Ultimate Christmas Present by LilLizzie94

Blaine has been in Afghanistan for the past 7 months and Kurt has been home by himself…they recieved some interesting news right before he was deployed…Kurt was pregnant. Blaine has come home early to surprise Kurt for christmas…but he’s not the only surprise in store for the two. MPREG don’t like… Don’t read.

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I’ll Be Home for Christmas by DreamingisBelieving

Imagine person A from your OTP is pregnant during Christmas and for some reason of your choice, person B won’t be home for Christmas, leaving person A alone. 

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The Anderson Rose by missbeizy *

In the mountains of what was once the Northeastern United States of America, the descendants of a band of refugees who had escaped New York City at the end of a great World War are beginning to thrive after almost a thousand years of struggle. Relying on a combination of bits and pieces of advanced technology salvaged from the remains of great cities, as well as the still-pristine forest that they now call home, the people of Westerville are determined to rebuild a world in which peace, love, and cooperation mean more than victory, greed, and wealth. 

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Wont Tell Anyone by karanoaoi *

The Royal family has never had a problem securing their claim to the throne. That was until now. The King and Queen have been unable to bear any children passed their only son, Blaine. Now when their reign is threatened by other Nobel families that declare their family as weak, they turn to the one way they know that will show everyone their family line has not ended. Having their son marry and produce a strong line of heirs.

Sequel: Make a Move

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Be Still My Heart by witchcraftandclickery

During a stressful and almost disastrous Black Friday Shopping adventure for Kurt, he meets and is saved by a strange older man. As their friendship progresses, so does their relationship. After falling in love with the perfect man, Kurt finds out he’s pregnant. Age!difference Older!Blaine 

Note: Although this fic is not marked as completed, the reviews of the final chapter indicate that it is. It is easy to overlook marking a fic as completed on FF.net.

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I Will by witchcraftandclickery 

Kurt, cheerleader with the jock boyfriend is failing English. Blaine, nerd with a crush is actually really good at English. Kurt is sent to Blaine for tutoring, where one thing leads to another. A few weeks later, Kurt learns he is pregnant. MPREG. GKM fill.

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Come Take My Hand Now by controlofwhatido

Post 4x14 AU where Blaine finds out he's pregnant (instead of Rachel).

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Men, Babies and Other Disasters by TheWhiteOwl

Kurt, the 30-year-old successful fashion designer is desperate for a child. He visits a fertility clinic but he soon realizes that getting pregnant won’t be as easy as it first seemed. But than he bumps into Blaine, a cute and hot guy and it changes everything.A quick decision. Just one night with a stranger… Blaine doesn’t even have to about it. Too bad Blaine seems to be everywhere Kurt goes and it makes avoiding him a little bit complicated.

~~~~~

Ontás lýkos by Verseau_87

Back from New York and visiting his parent's during summer vacation, Kurt (literally) bumps into Blaine. Another werewolf like him. Their love is quick and easy, but it seems life is never that simple. Trying to enjoy their time together and merge their respective packs, they both must navigate being in love, over coming every obstacle along the way.

Note: Part 1 of Being Wolves

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Three Times Blaine Doesn't Have Sex with Kurt, and the One Time He Does by ohmywhy

The one in which mpreg!Kurt and Blaine are just friends and shouldn’t be. BP!Kurt

MPREG BLAINE

Chances Verse by DreamingKate *

Kurt liked his new boyfriend but something was a little different about him.

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The Odds by @gleeana *

Canon compliant with the show through the Klaine wedding, with the rather major twist that in this universe, men can become pregnant … and Kurt learns Blaine is pregnant soon after the wedding. A little too soon, given the circumstances.

This is a story about the power of love and family, and about the consequences of secrets.

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Baby Mine (Be My Baby) by anythingbutplatonic

Summary: Just weeks after he confessed to cheating when Kurt left for New York, Blaine discovers he’s pregnant. There’s no doubt in his mind that the baby is Kurt’s, but there’s no way anyone can know. Distraught after the break-up and afraid of being judged if anyone finds out, he decides to hide his pregnancy….until he can’t anymore. AU, obviously.

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Apple of My Eye by idoltina *

A fill for this GKM prompt. AU after The Break Up. Blaine finds out that he’s pregnant after Kurt breaks up with him (with Kurt’s child, no less). He tries telling Kurt about it, but Kurt refuses to talk to him. Blaine decides to finish his senior year at home and give the baby up for adoption. Only he doesn’t. He ends up keeping the baby – a daughter – and takes her to New York with him when he leaves for college. He raises her partially on his own with some help from his parents, and tries to juggle parenthood, school, and work. And everything works out okay for a little over two years – until he runs into Kurt.

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At the End of the Road by slaysvamps

AU from 4x10 Glee, Actually. Weeks after leaving Kurt in New York Blaine finds himself in a situation he never would have expected. With Kurt moving on with his life and ignoring him completely, Blaine must find a way handle things on his own. Until he doesn’t.

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What I Call Life by warblerslushie *

Kurt broke off the engagement and left Blaine. Three years later, Kurt’s at a strip club for his bachelor party and sees Blaine working. Blaine’s been working there and enduring uncomfortable glances and touches for a year to make sure that his son was properly cared for. MPREG. Based on a tumblr prompt from blangstpromptoftheday. 

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And Baby Makes Three by anythingbutplatonic

Klaine AU: A few weeks after Mr Schuester’s almost-wedding and the events that followed, Blaine starts having symptoms. Symptoms that appear to be a lot like pregnancy. 

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We’re In This Together Or Not At All. by zigzag18

Blaine Anderson’s life is about to be turned upside down. After a hook-up with head Cheerio Kurt Hummel, Blaine finds out he’s pregnant. He didn’t tell Kurt that he was a carrier, so how is he suppose to tell Kurt? How is he, a 17 year old high school senior suppose to take care of a baby? 

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Apartment 143 by idoltina *

Six years into their marriage, Kurt and Blaine are starting to be established enough in their careers to want to settle down into a more permanent residence. When they happen upon a refurbished apartment in an old building at a price that’s a steal, they immediately snatch it up. They settle into their new home over the summer, and after a fairly intoxicated and intimate Halloween, they find themselves expecting their family to grow by one more. But as the pregnancy progresses, so does the level of paranormal activity in their home. It doesn’t take long for them to bring in paranormal investigators to figure out what inhabits their home, if they can get rid of it, and how to protect themselves and their unborn child from it – if they can. 

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Spark Like Empty Lighters by atticrissfinch

It was supposed to just be a hook-up between student and teacher…and it was. But what will happen when Blaine reveals to Kurt that he’s pregnant with Kurt’s child? an mpreg!blaine au.

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When We’re Older by warblerslushie *

Kurt and Blaine have been married for several years and Blaine’s been wanting to start a family, especially since they’re getting older. However, with their work schedules and the fact that Kurt’s just not ready for kids right now, things have been slow within the Anderson-Hummel household. But what will happen when the couple receives some unexpected news?

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thought i could do this on my own by ShanleenKinnJaskey

Prince Kurt Hummel falls in love with Blaine Anderson, an orphan servant boy, and thankfully he returns Kurt’s affections. But what will happen when one night Blaine disappears, leaving only a letter behind that contains an unbelievable explanation? When, years later, Blaine appears with two sons in tow (one deadly ill), will Kurt finally learn the truth?

Note: Part 1 of the to be loved series

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Don’t Stop Believing by Julesmonster

Blaine is trying hard to win Kurt back now that they’re both going to be in New York, but even if he does, life has a few surprises in store for them, and not all of them are good. Warnings: MPreg, Character Death (Not Kurt or Blaine).

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Hold My Heart by universalromance

GKM Fill: Blaine is a carrier who is sold by his parents when they are in need of money. He is gifted to Kurt by his buyer in order to gain favour with newly elected Congressman Hummel. He is expecting to be mistreated the way he was always told but soon discovers that there is still good in some people.

Note: Part 1 of Treasure My Heart

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Heart Of Glass by framby

At the end of his senior year, Blaine left Kurt and Ohio without explanation. When they are forced to work together Kurt just wants to get it over with as painlessly as possible. Little does he know that Blaine's secret will turn his life upside down.

~~~~~

Nobody Said It Was Easy by Julesmonster

Following “The Breakup” Kurt and Blaine must discover where their relationship is going and if it will survive even as they face new problems. MPreg. Slash of the Klaine variety. Major spoilers for 4.4.

All Over Again by warblerslushie

Kurt and Blaine have been happily married for close to two decades and have three beautiful children. Not long after their oldest goes off to California to start college, they find out some very surprising news; the kind of news that really shakes up the whole family, especially when you're at that age where you've just started to get settled and ready for an empty nest. MPREG.

[owicpub]

Art of Shallow Neighboring

The Art of Neighboring went through the large churches in my town, and I immediately saw the book and the plan as a problem. Rather than get mad, I wrote a parody instead. You can grab The Art of Shallow Neighboring most places you find books online.

[More Links and Details About this Book]

While most of the book is a parody of the original, I wanted to include part of the Apology section responding to what was wrong with The Art of Neighboring.

Twisted Scripture

All the points above are merely side notes to me. The true test to any book, sermon, or teaching is how well the author wields the Sword of the Spirit. A callous handling of the Bible or twisting passages to fit a narrative are warning signs. Scripture should be handled honestly and interpreted with integrity. The Bible does not mean whatever we want it to mean as some teachers have suggested. To that end, The Art of Neighboring generally wields Bible with same grace a five year old handles a firearm. Several passages are misquoted or quoted out of context. While each chapter seems to have an obligatory single verse or section of the Bible, often times the authors chose scriptures that did not make sense. In many places their point could be perfectly validated using different passages in context. In other places, they are clearly stretching or making arguments from the Bible that not only are absent from the text, but lacking any Biblical support. Taken together, I believe this book is a dangerous read and the misquotations of the Bible do not justify the end-game of being a better neighbor. This section will only focus on correcting scriptures the authors have mis-quoted. First I will address the author’s attempts at redefining the Great Commandment, then we will look at the other misquotations in order of appearance in the book.

What is the Great Commandment?

The authors of this book do an evil deed while attempting to redefine what they call throughout their book The Great Commandment. Some scriptural shenanigans are employed to make the point stick, then they repeat their desired end over and over like a bad commercial attempting to break down our senses. This is critical, so we will take the time to delineate the matter, for which we need to look at all three passages in the synoptic Gospels:

Matthew 22:37-39 - Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

Mark 12:29-31 - “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Luke 10:27 - He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

What we see here in the first two passages (Matthew and Mark), Jesus is speaking, answering a teacher of the law. In these, he differentiates the Greatest Commandment (which is quoted from Deuteronomy 6:5). The third passage in Luke, it is the teacher of the law saying that these two are together. Why the difference? It has to do with the focus of the passage. In Matthew and Mark, the authors were answering the question from the mouth of Jesus and then moving onto other topics. But in Luke, the emphasis was to turn the statement back around on the teacher of the law. In this instance, Jesus asks him what the law says, and so we get the teacher’s answer in verse 27. Jesus then challenges the teacher of the law in verse 28 saying to “go and live likewise”. But in verse 29, the teacher asks the one question this first chapter of The Art of Neighboring should be asking, but does not: Who is my neighbor?

I will note the authors never quote directly from Matthew or Mark, but only from Luke. The challenge is, however, the book does absolutely nothing to direct the reader to the first and greatest commandment according to Jesus: to love the Lord your God. In every context from the first mention of The Great Commandment to the last, the heart and God-centered focus of the verse is totally ignored, and the authors focus exclusively on loving our literal neighbor, usurping the love for the neighbor over the love for God, thus effectively placing the relationship with the neighbor as an idol over God!

The Great Commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength. While loving your neighbor is certainly important, it has become the primary focus in this book and the authors fail to quote from the passages to clarify that point and only focus on the passage in Luke to make it sound as if Jesus brings these two together when in reality, He does not. The Luke passage is differentiated so Jesus could expand on the very question the authors fail to properly address from the start.

Who Is My Neighbor?

In the second chapter, the authors finally tackle the question, “who is my neighbor”. This is funny because for all the differences among churches, including Catholic and Protestant brands, this is one of the only parables that has never been disputed. But these authors completely ignore what has been known about this verse through the centuries and instead come to a conclusion not found in scripture, that they actually have to use outside logic to justify!

The book does correctly assert the teacher of the law is certainly looking for a loophole to justify not loving his neighbor as himself, but Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan to close every conceivable loophole to not love others.

Luke 10:30-37 - In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

The message of the parable is simply this: Loving your neighbor as yourself means to love people you encounter wherever they happen to be when you encounter them. This is not just the guy in the house next door, but anyone in need whom you encounter as you live your life, wherever you happen to be.

This teaching has been clearly understood in every different undertaking I have read to understand the parables. The authors conclude the section without much comment on the parable itself and then launch into a new section specifically titled, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ Once the section starts they talk about neighboring beginning with flexibility and compassion, certainly both traits of the Samaritan in the parable. But we get this snippet which starts to break down Jesus’s own definition of a neighbor:

“As we read this parable two thousand years later, it’s tempting to turn the story of the good Samaritan into a metaphor...If we say, ‘Everyone is my neighbor,’ it can become as excuse for avoiding the implications of following the Great Commandment. Our ‘neighbors’ become defined in the broadest of terms. They’re the people across town, the people who are helped by the organizations that receive donations, the people whom the government helps. We don’t have to feel guilty, we tell ourselves. After all, we can’t be expected to really love everybody, can we?[1]”

The authors here have set up a straw man argument. Jesus never said our neighbor is everyone, or the people across town, or the people in the world helped by world missions. Jesus defined a neighbor specifically as the person whom we encounter when we live our life cognizant of our surroundings. To contrast this, however, the authors want to ignore the part about ‘where we are’ and convert that to ‘where we live’. The teacher of the law wanted a loophole which Jesus closed, but the authors of The Art of Neighboring give us a gaping loophole: those people whom do not live on our block are excluded from being neighbors.

The text continues:

“Today as we read this parable, we go straight for loving the neighbor on the side of the road. Thus we make a metaphor of the neighbors–a metaphor that doesn’t include the person who lives next door to us. If we don’t take Jesus’s command literally, then we turn the Great Commandment into nothing more than a metaphor. We have a metaphoric love for our metaphoric neighbors, and our communities are changed–but only metaphorically...so in addition to thinking of our neighbor metaphorically, as did the good Samaritan, we need to apply Jesus’s teaching to our literal neighbors.[2]”

This be be fine and inclusive of the literal neighbor until we find this quote later in the chapter:

“Jesus says your enemy should be your neighbor. He says you should go out of your way to be the neighbor of someone who comes from a place or history of open hostility toward you or your way of life...we would define this kind of love as advanced or graduate-level love. The reality is that most of us aren’t at the graduate level; we need to start with the basics. [italics theirs] We need to go back to kindergarten and think about our literal next door neighbors before we attempt to love everyone else on the face of the planet.[3]”

So that is how the authors took the least debated parable of all time and completely changed the definition from meeting the needs of the people presently surrounding us to loving only those people in the neighborhood. And to be sure, I have left out a lot of meat of the book, they go into way more detail than I covered here in creating the loophole the teacher of the law so desperately wanted.

What Happened in Numbers 13?

The fourth chapter is about overcoming fear of getting to know the neighbors, but the scripture they choose to use for this section is completely twisted around. We need to start in Numbers 13. Moses sends twelve spies into the land of Canaan to determine how to best take the land, but the spies come back with this report in Numbers 13:27-29:

They gave Moses this account: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan.”

The spies convince the Israelites not to enter the land so they end up wandering around the desert for forty years. The authors pick up with this statement:

“A telling statement came from Rehab, a woman who lived in the land. She explained how, years earlier, things were the opposite of what the Israelites thought were true. Joshua and Caleb had been right all along. When the spies had entered the land forty years earlier, everyone in the land was afraid of them.[4]”

Right after this statement the authors quote Joshua 2:9-11:

“I know that the Lord has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. When we heard of it, our hearts melted in fear and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.

The authors continue immediately after this quote:

“The Israelites’ perception had been wrong all along. They had always feared their neighbors, perceiving them as giants. But in truth their neighbors feared the Israelites because of their God.[5]”

The Art of Neighboring is trying to use this part of Scripture in conjunction with the previous paraphrase to say that, according to Rehab, the people of Canaan were always afraid of the Israelites. This might pass the gaze of a Biblically uninformed audience, but I see multiple problems:

There is no evidence Rehab was talking about fear of the Israelites prior to meeting the two spies Joshua sent, in fact, it is more likely she is talking about the present situation, not the past, because it was known the Israelite army was camped directly across the Jordon.

There is no evidence the spies were seen or the people knew they were there or why (i.e. the objective of a spy is to be secret about his mission).

The defeat of Sihon and Og happened AFTER the twelve spies returned. Rehab would not have been afraid of the Israelites for the defeat of Sihon and Og while the twelve spies looked at the land (Og and Sihon were in Numbers 21 and much later in Chronological history).

The spies sent by Moses came from Northern Paran (Numbers 13:26) but the ones from Joshua came from Shittim (Joshua 2:1), over 100 miles away in a completely different direction.

The authors want to convey that the people all gathered outside Jericho twice while the story was used to show how fear prevented the people from interacting with their neighbors...in this case, to kill them, not to have a fish fry. Nevertheless, the point of this discussion is “when we are following God into our neighborhoods, we have nothing to fear. And often it’s our neighbors that need to be rescued from their fear.[6]”

The callous treatment of the scriptures in twisting this situation leads me to believe that either these pastors are totally ignorant of the Bible, or they are ignoring it to make their point. I do not know which is worse at this juncture.

Give to Get

Some online reviewers of The Art of Neighboring hated the message in chapter six which seemed to get pretty close to a health and wealth gospel at times. I can say I do not see that specific teaching in this book, but I can understand how some may arrive at that conclusion. The authors say, “God uses the small things that we bring him and multiplies them into a miracle in someone else’s life.[7]”

The only passage of scripture in this chapter is John 6:1-13 when a small boy gives his fish and loaves to Jesus who then performs a miracle. The most important section is verses 8-13:

Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish. When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.

This section of scripture is one of the most famous miracles Jesus performed, but the authors turn this into a lesson on what can happen in our lives if we give:

“When you give what you have, Jesus will give you more to give. Even if what you have isn’t enough to solve the whole problem, just do what you can in the moment-give it anyway. Trust that God will fill you up with enough to supply the need that’s right in front of you, and assume he will do it again for the next need as well. If you don’t give, you don’t get a chance to see God do a miracle.[8]”

This sets a dangerous precedent all too often observed in the health and wealth community, so it merits discussion. First, we do need to give, and we need to give sacrificially, but if we give beyond our ability we can move into the field of putting God to the test, and that is also something we are commanded not to do. Secondly, if we are putting God to the test by giving away all our resources we also fail at another task: being a good steward. We should first see that our our needs are met; only after we should start to give sacrificially. That means we are not giving beyond our ability to place us in debt or miss payments, but we are giving enough to crimp our extra lifestyle. Such balance is completely missing from this section of the book.

Being Kind to Mary’s Psyche

In the chapter on receiving, the authors dropped several balls to reference scriptures that are actually about receiving, but they focus on a section of scripture they mention and summarize, but curiously they do not even give us the verses. The section is Luke 7:36-50:

When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.” Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.” “Tell me, teacher,” he said. “Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”

“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said. Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

You can see this powerful exchange is about forgiveness and how this woman was radically praising Jesus for the vast forgiveness extended to her, for Simon was right, this woman was a wretched and vile sinner before her own encounter with Jesus Christ. Rather than understanding the purpose of this exchange, The Art of Neighboring says this:

“She poured the perfume on Jesus in the middle of the party, perhaps making her and Jesus feeling very vulnerable and even in danger, since there were important religious men in attendance. If Jesus had rejected her offering, it would have crushed her. But he didn’t. He actually went so far as to defend her...I doubt that Jesus was in great need of a foot washing and a special perfume treatment...he received it willingly because he knew that his willingness to receive this gift meant everything to her. It meant she could have dignity in her worship and that her gift counted...Jesus chose to make himself vulnerable. The one who came to give everything for us was also willing to receive from us.[9]”

This is truly twisting another very clear parable and passage into something that fits the narrative of the chapter. This is not a feel-good moment for this woman, and Jesus was not exactly taking the gift like we take the pie from the gross neighbor to toss away once our door is closed. To add further discussion, Jesus was not making himself vulnerable. To the contrary, he used this moment to correct the self-righteous indignation of the of the pharisees dining with Him.

Person of Peace

Another great fabrication to fit the narrative comes in chapter 10 on focusing. While the authors start out well quoting some scripture in proper context, we get to this point:

“Jesus instructed them to find a certain type of person in every city they entered-a person of peace (Luke 10:5-6)...The term person of peace [italics theirs] refers to someone hospitable to becoming a friend...This allowed the disciples an opportunity to form deep friendships with those who were gifted at relationships themselves. Not only did they connect with the host of each house, but undoubtedly they were also introduced to the host’s entire network of friends. If a person of peace was someone skilled at being hospitable, then logically they were people who would have very large networks. By directing his disciples to look for the person of peace, Jesus directed them toward those in each city who were the best neighbors.[10]”

That is a total misinterpretation of person of peace. This person is one whom God had sovereignly ordained to receive the message of the Gospel. This is why in the armor of God section in Ephesians, the gospel is specially called the Gospel of Peace (Ephesians 6:15). The person Jesus sends out the disciples to find are people who are prepared and ready to receive the gospel. Of course, The Art of Neighboring is not fundamentally about Jesus or even Christian living. It’s primary focus is on becoming a friend to the neighborhood, so this passage had to be castrated of it’s true meaning, which is about discipleship; a lost art in the Western church. We want to get people to emotionally respond to a fire and brimstone message so they say a little prayer and then we celebrate the numbers of people who raised their hands, but then we never teach them about the Bible or their new faith. In short, they have never counted the cost of being a Christian, which Jesus commands us to do in Luke 14:25-35.

Conclusion

As the authors observed above, we are a church of immature believers, but we ought to be teachers to borrow from Hebrews. The Western Culture is actually free to own and read our Bibles. This is something most of the ‘Christian’ world had not experienced until only a few centuries ago, and even today many societies outright ban the ownership or study of the Bible. We in the Western cultures have access to Bibles but choose to not read them. We have access to tools, but we do not apply them, and the saddest fact of all is this book was not brought to my attention by the crazy ‘over-religious’ nut job, nor did I hear about it on CBN, nor spot it in a bookstore, but it was taught from, promoted, and recommended by what are considered the top churches in my town. The churches gathered together to use this book, which so horribly twisted the Bible they all profess in their doctrinal statements to hold so dear. This blew a serious hit to the confidence I placed in the churches in my local town and I pray this present parody and apologetic might rattle them out of their stupor.

While I can assert being a good neighbor to everyone we encounter (whether they are literal neighbors or strangers on the street) is a great endeavor, I care not about how great and wonderful the house is. When I go to buy a house, I examine the foundation first. If the foundation is shifty, the whole structure is in peril. Rather to explain that point further, I will let Jesus give us the final words of this book:

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

-Matthew 7:24-27

[1]The Art of Neighboring, 34

[2]Ibid, 35

[3]Ibid, 39

[4]Ibid, 65

[5]Ibid, 66

[6]Ibid, 66

[7]Ibid, 87

[8]Ibid, 89

[9]Ibid, 127

[10]Ibid, 147

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[ani-tolaat-bli-toelet]

Unpopular opinion

If the Star of David is not allowed in your Pride, it’s not all-inclusive

You’re not “taking a political stand”, you’re excluding an ethnic and religious group from an event that should be all about loving yourself and celebrating who you are. You’re making people feel unwanted in an event where everyone and everything LGBTQ+ should be welcomed. You’re making a persecuted group feel threatened in an event that’s all about empowering a persecuted group and giving its people a voice, a safe space. But it’s not, not when a part of people’s identity - our fellow LGBTQ+ folks, probably some of your friends, myself - is literally being kicked out.  We can talk about being proud of who we are, celebrate diversity and encourage solidarity as much as we want, but when it’s put to the test, take a stand. Kick this antisemitism’s ass. Let David in (he’s gay for Jonathan, he should be here). Note: if you have issues with the Star of David because you associate it with Israel and you’re anti-Israeli but you have no problem with the Muslim Crest (the literal flag of Turkey; appears four times on the Iranian flag) or the Christian Cross (I’m sure we can all think of a few things about the Church or certain Christian organizations we can all agree are bad) you’re just being a hypocrite. And, again, antisemitic. 

[haveclotheswilltravel]

I’ve experienced boring tours, tours with rude guides and tours that just aren’t all that organized. However, the “Jerusalem, Dead Sea, Bethlehem, & More Group Tour” has taken the cake as the worst tour I have ever done in my life. It was a complete disaster from start to finish.

This type of tour is meant for someone who has VERY limited time in Israel but still wants to try to see the highlights. (Hi, that’s me!) In order for a tour of this nature to go off without a hitch, it needs to be incredibly organized with experienced guides…as there are A LOT of stops and a tight schedule to adhere to. I had taken tours like this with crazy schedules while in Turkey, and they were great tours! This gave me a false sense of confidence in taking this tour in Israel…

For this tour I was working with Tourist Israel, however, I now realize that there are numerous companies this tour can be booked through, and it will all be the same experience. These companies range from Viator to GetYourGuide to Fun-Time Tour & Travel. Everyone on my tour had booked through a different company, but we were all stuck on this crazy day together.

I had also been very confident working with Tourist Israel because they were professional and responsive prior to the tour. (By the way, they sponsored my husband and me on this tour, so if you’re ever worried I’m not 100 percent honest in my blog posts because I’m being sponsored by a company, hopefully, this post will put your mind at ease). Their reviews on Tripadvisor were also very positive, and other people on this tour had used them for tours in Jordan and said they were great. It seems for this particular tour, though, they have not figured out how to do it properly.

Now, that you’ve made it this far, I’m sure you’re curious as to WHY this was such a bad day, and why you should absolutely NOT book this tour. From insanely late starts, to leaving group members behind to pushy sales stops…I’ll take you step by step through it below.

Jerusalem, Dead Sea, Bethlehem, & More Group Tour Itinerary

For reference, this is what the day was supposed to look like.

06:30 – Pick up from Tel Aviv 07:45 – Pick up from Jerusalem 08:00 – Guided tour of Jerusalem 11:30 – Head to Bethlehem 12:00 – Tour Bethlehem 14:30 – Drive by Jericho to Qasr al Yehud (time permitting) 15:30 – Free time to relax at the Dead Sea 16:30 – Leave the Dead Sea 18:00 – Dropoff in Jerusalem 19:00 – Dropoff in Tel Aviv NB all timings are approximate

Events (Disasters?) of the Day

*Note: I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to see such historical and incredible places. However, the point of this post is to help other people who are planning a trip to Israel, so they don’t make the same mistakes as us. I want you to have an amazing time in Israel!

Pickup from Tel Aviv

• We were instructed to all meet in front of a hotel in Tel Aviv before 6:30 am. There were multiple tours going to different parts of Israel here, and it was pure chaos. There was one “guide” who was there instructing people as to which bus to take. He was incredibly unorganized and unprofessional.

• At 7 am the “guide” informed us that our bus is late due to a tire problem.

• We departed over an hour late. I understand that these things happen, and I’m not convinced this tour would have been much better even if the bus had departed on time (it just set the tone for how the day would go!)

Arrival to Jerusalem

The Western Wall

• We then exited the bus in front of another hotel in Jerusalem – more confusion, no one knew where our tour is supposed to go. Eventually, 6 of us are stuffed into a vehicle and driven about 2 blocks. (The rest of our group eventually arrives at the same destination after walking.)

• Our driver drove off and said our guide will arrive in 10 minutes.

• We waited 30 minutes before I emailed Tourist Israel, and then we called their emergency number.

The Guide in Jerusalem

• Our guide showed up a full 40 minutes after we had arrived in Jerusalem, after we were already an hour late. He merely waved to us from across the road where we were standing and then proceeded to speed walk ahead of us. He didn’t even introduce himself or offer any explanations.

• We then raced to a spot in Jerusalem (no idea where as we literally received nothing of value in the form of information on this tour). We talked about how old the city is before running to the Western Wall.

• The guide ran through security and did not even wait for our entire group to pass through security before apparently giving a meeting point and time and saying no photos are allowed. Not even half our tour heard this! So, we were all late and wandering around trying to find the group…and we all were in trouble for taking photos. This really burned me, because I LIKE TO FOLLOW THE RULES, but I need to know what they are. I had no idea I wasn’t supposed to take photos, as I had seen TONS of photos of the Western Wall prior to coming here and thought I was OK. (Now I know you can’t take photos on Saturday due to Shabbat – lesson learned.)

The Western Wall – Don’t take photos on Saturday!

• We then go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We are only allowed 10 minutes here. (This is the church that is allegedly built on the site of Jesus’ Crucifixion and burial…so, only 10 minutes here is REALLY disappointing.)

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

• We then ran to some church to talk about something (no idea what, I couldn’t hear the guide) before running through a market.

• The market is crowded and has different alleys to go through, and our guide was literally moving at a jogging pace through it wearing neutral colored clothing and sort of holding up a closed black umbrella. He never even bothered to see if any of the group was following..nor did he have any idea how many of us there actually were, as he never counted our group.

This is the market we were running through. Do you see my guide? I don’t…

• We did eventually lose one group member. We hollered at the guide to go find him…after hollering at him, he did eventually find the missing group member and took us to our next bus.

The guide’s name was Chris, and he had to have been the worst guide I have ever had in my entire life. It was appalling!

Bethlehem

• Our guide here was nice and seemed knowledgeable, however, it was difficult to hear him at many times. He was really quiet, and I only heard about 25 percent of what he said.

Church of the Nativity

Inside the Church of the Nativity

• This guide, once again, did not bother counting our group members…we actually left an elderly woman in Bethlehem because she could not find our group!!! She was transported to our restaurant at lunchtime by the Palestinian police!!!

Side note: many of the group members were upset because we did not get to see the Nativity in Bethlehem…we only visited the church that is built on it. This was something I had been aware of potentially happening due to long lines to see the Nativity. It is clearly stated on Tourist Israel’s website that we may not see it…However, if you booked via Viator or any other of the numerous booking sites out there, this was NOT clearly stated.

Restaurant Stop for Lunch

• The restaurant was the best part of the tour. All went smoothly here and the food was good!

Gift Shop on the Way out of Bethlehem

• So, we RACED through Jerusalem and Bethlehem…so we could stop for 30 minutes at a gift store that wasn’t selling anything interesting?! I could have screamed (and was also regretting not having wine with my lunch by this point).

Dead Sea

• Oh joy, we arrive to the Dead Sea and are ushered into ANOTHER gift store. There’s more pressure to buy “exclusive” Dead Sea products. (It’s almost all AHAVA products – which are carried by Nordstrom.)

The Dead Sea was cool, despite everything. Look – I’m floating!

• The experience floating in the Dead Sea was really amazing. This part of the day was great! (There were no guides, though…so…) I’ll put together a separate post on this whole experience.

• We had just over an hour to float in the Dead Sea and get a beverage from the bar. The bus driver communicated our time of departure and everyone was there on time. BUT, once again, we had to switch buses…and the next bus was late. We left the Dead Sea nearly 45 minutes after we were supposed to…which would have been fine if we weren’t all stuck on a bus for this time. (Another group who joined our bus said this was actually PLANNED to make up for departing late…except no one communicated this to our group!)

Arrival in Tel Aviv

• FINALLY we arrive back in Tel Aviv, but we’re dropped off at a different location than the hotel. I’m not actually sure where we were even dropped off. Not that this is a big deal, Tel Aviv is safe and easy to navigate…it just really was the cherry on the top of a very difficult day.

But Our Group Members Were Awesome!

I do want to give a shout out to all the 26 people (or maybe 27…there honestly might have been one more group member lost in Jerusalem) who were on this tour with me. Every single person was simply a lovely human being. I can’t even imagine how awful this would have been if our group members had been turds as well. These were some of the kindest and most good-natured people I’ve come across on a tour! It pains me that we met on a tour that was such a craptastic experience.

Also, if you need further proof that this tour was a complete sh*t show, I do see that some of the other group members are beginning to write their own reviews on Tripadvisor. I would also like to point out, that our tour members were from all over the world. Some were from the US and some from the UK, as well as the Philipines, India, China, Greece, Romania, etc. They all agreed this tour was HORRIBLE. So, this wasn’t just my American mindset being too critical of a service.

What to Do Instead

I would recommend taking at least one full day at Jerusalem, and then a half day each for Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. And if that is simply not possible, I would book a private tour. This company, here, has nearly perfect ratings for their tours, according to Tripadvisor.

Thank you for reading this really long post! I do hope this helps someone when making a decision of what tours to book in Israel. Please share this with anyone planning a trip to Israel.

I really appreciate if you Pin this image! Thank you!

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*Disclosure: some of these links are affiliate links. Meaning, if you click a link and make a purchase, Have Clothes, Will Travel gets a very small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting the brands that make this blog possible! I am also a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

*Tourist Israel partnered with me for this post. (Obviously.) All opinions are my own, and I am never compensated for a positive review.

Why You Should NOT Book a "Jerusalem, Dead Sea, Bethlehem, & More Group Tour" From Tel Aviv, Israel I've experienced boring tours, tours with rude guides and tours that just aren't all that organized. However, the "Jerusalem, Dead Sea, Bethlehem, & More Group Tour" has taken the cake as the worst tour I have ever done in my life. 2,027 more words

[thedreideldiaries]

Yom HaShoah

So, it’s Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day for at least another hour over here here, and I don’t usually say anything, but this year I have Thoughts, and I have divided them into sections to make them easier to read if you are so inclined.

Yom HaShoah

See, the thing about Yom HaShoah is that, even today, nobody’s really quite sure what to do with it. Congregations will have silent reflections and prayer services and speeches and stuff, and there’s the whole ten minutes of silence thing in Israel but like...I think for the most part we’re not really sure how to talk about it. I think this is reasonable and maybe even a good thing - some things are literally unspeakable. How do you encapsulate something like that into a single day? How do you even talk about it like it was one single event? Like, I feel weird even bringing it up. I’m of the opinion that Holocaust jokes are never, ever funny, but I also sort of get that they come, in part, from a very human urge to laugh in the face of existential dread.

Also, for anyone who’s wondering: Yom HaShoah is actually “Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah,” which means "Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism” in Hebrew. The date was originally chosen in part for its proximity to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 

There are a ton of Holocaust remembrance days of various kinds, because the Holocaust was something of an international affair, and to the surprise of no-one, Wikipedia has a list. 

Other days of particular note include January 27th (International Holocaust Remembrance Day), and May 16th (Romani Resistance Day).  

That One Study About Millennials

I’ve seen this article getting shared around a lot, and there are a couple things I want to say about it. 

I feel a strange, tribal need to step in and defend my generation. Because this isn’t a problem that started with millennials. This level of ignorance began with the people who taught us. Like, I’m sure some of us didn’t pay enough attention in class, but we didn’t create the curriculum (or lack thereof) that did this.

That said, obviously we’re adults who have the responsibility to educate ourselves and each other so like...let’s do that maybe.

It’s strange to me as a sort-of-arguably-Jew to read about someone not being sure whether they’ve heard of the Holocaust because I don’t remember ever not knowing about it. Other ethnically Jewish people I’ve talked to have said similar things. Like, I’m pretty sure I read about it as a kid, but even though I wasn’t raised Jewish, and even though the Jewish side of my family was pretty much all in the US by the 1940s, the idea of the Holocaust was just always...around, and always pretty inextricable from the idea of Jewishness. I don’t know what it means to be Jewish without the Holocaust. I’m not sure anyone does anymore.

Pretty sure the first response to “How Jewish am I” I ever got was “Jewish enough for Hitler!” so like...thanks, Dad. :)

I don’t want to downplay other tragedies. I imagine that if you surveyed people on how much they know about slavery or the genocide of Native Americans, you’d get a similarly distressing result (and maybe we have? Somebody link me to a study like that if there is one). But the whole Never Again thing only works if you know what’s not supposed to happen ever again. The strangest thing about this survey to me was that while 22% of respondents weren’t sure what the Holocaust was, 58% of respondents thought something like it could happen again. I wonder if there was any overlap between the two groups.

Refugees

When we did learn about the Holocaust in elementary and middle school* we got a heavily sanitized version of how the US stepped in and saved everyone. Our textbooks talked about the murder of six million Jews (that’s a conservative estimate, by the way), but neglected to mention how many thousands of those Jews were turned away from the US and forced to return to Europe. This article is from 2015, but it still seems pretty timely. 

Again: I don’t want to pretend the current refugee crisis is the same as the Holocaust, because I think it’s possible to say things are really bad without comparing them to the Holocaust. But there are similarities, and again - we can’t do the whole Never Again thing if we don’t know about what happened and how it happened. A lot of people are worried about the idea of something like the Holocaust happening on American soil, and I don’t think that’s completely impossible, but I think the far more likely outcome, at least in the near future, is that the next time large numbers of people are dying overseas, from war, poverty, or climate change, the US will do exactly what it did for so many years while the Holocaust was going on - refuse to offer them a safe place to go. In case anyone wants to read more about this, here’s some information about the S.S. St. Louis. 

* To their credit, my high school teachers presented a more nuanced picture.

That Trevor Noah Quote

And...the third thing that’s been going around is that quote from Trevor Noah about how we remember the Holocaust but not genocide of Native Americans or the atrocities committed by European colonists in the Congo. He’s got a point - ignorance and awareness of historical atrocities are heavily dependent on a variety of factors and people in general don’t know enough about them -  but his statement severely lacks historical context, and I think that if you have to compare other genocides to the Holocaust, there are more useful ways to do it. This link has the original quote, along with responses from two Jews of color who took issue with it (for those watching at home, I also wrote a brief response and you can find on my blog if you want, but I’m not a Jew of color so). 

Ray Allen

Anyway. I don’t have a conclusion, exactly, so I’m just gonna link to a rather heartening article about Ray Allen, a non-Jewish NBA star who joined the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and has spent a tremendous amount of time and effort furthering Holocaust education.

[the-single-element]

Good morning.

Today, we return to the final part of Jesus's Johannine argument about "bread from heaven".

When we left off, he had just moved from an explanation that sounded metaphorical ("I am the living bread") to one that sounded more literal ("the bread [...] is my flesh"). He got the reaction you could expect: confused incredulity.

Faced with that incredulity, he went even further, even more explicit, shifting his phrasing of "eat my flesh" from a neutral word for "eat" to a more visceral one, one that could almost be translated as "gnaw". He got the reaction you could expect: confused disgust, and a fair number of people becoming convinced he was crazy.

...and they have a point. Not just with the whole "eat me, no literally eat me" thing.

We've talked before about how counterintuitive the Kingdom of Heaven is. This is just a more extreme example.

Isn't the simplest explanation that it is crazy nonsense? That it defies the logic of this world because it is illogical?

Forget that a lot of Jesus's fanbase left over this... why haven't we left too?

In the forty years between leaving Egypt and conquering Canaan, the descendants of Israel were faced with a similar question.

They had been saved from slavery, but they had been led out into a desolate place. They were nomads for two generations. There were hunger and thirst scares, disease, battles with hostile cities... the future seemed scary, uncertain. Again and again, we hear some of them complain that, even if they had been slaves in Egypt, it'd be better than this. It was a hard life, but the hardness was a familiar hardness, not the terror of a fate they couldn't understand or prevent.

They had these doubts even after all the miracles, after the plagues and the parting of the sea and the manna and the travelling spring. After all, these were miracles, but they were miracles they couldn't understand. They couldn't make sense of this god who'd saved them, whose ways were so different than those of any god they'd ever heard of, growing up in Egypt.

Perhaps that's why they turned so readily away from the commandment against idols, and made the golden calf. After all, to imagine God in the Egyptian way... to assign an animal theme to the "god of Abraham" that had rescued them, and make a lavish statue of it, and throw a festival, and offer it sacrifices... that was familiar! That was logical! That made sense!

...when we say something is "logical", it's less about what is actually logically self-consistent, and more about what fits the experiences we've happened to have so far.

I grew up Catholic. I grew up with the nonsensical idea of the "real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist". So I might know intellectually how shocking and nonsensical an idea it is, okay, but it doesn't feel that way? Because I'm already used to it, because I grew up with everyone around me just accepting that it's true.

If I'd grown up atheist... or Jewish... I suspect my initial reaction to hearing the idea would have been way different.

But this doesn't solve our problem.

If what we see as "logical" is subjective, and we want to look outside it for a truth we might have missed, then there are a trillion trillion "illogical" ideas you could latch onto.

Why this one? Aside, again, from having just so happened to have grown up inside it, and thus to not see it as illogical?

...I think there is another qualification, which the message of the Kingdom satisfies.

Peter speaks to it, if clumsily. When he refuses to leave with the others, he does it by expressing a nameless longing: where else could we find something like this? Someone like you?

And one way that we know the truth slips past our cultural preconceptions is by way of nameless longings, for which we long despite not having a name for them.

Consider the person with a vitamin deficiency, who doesn't realize until eating a pickle or whatever that it was what they've been craving, what their body has been needing, for weeks.

Consider - and fight me on this if you must - the trans woman who grew up in a culture where such things were unheard of, but somehow encountered the idea later in life, somehow accepted that it was an option, and then suddenly realized it was an answer to a question that had been murmuring deep inside her for decades, just without the vocabulary to understand it or recognize it for what it was.

Why did the Israelites keep coming back to God after burning themselves on their failures to live up to the covenant? Why did they swear themselves to God in the excerpt from Joshua today, despite his warnings that they would surely fall short of what they swore? What were they looking for?

I once described the Kingdom as our native land, which we had lost somehow, yet still rings a familiar, nostalgic note to us.

And if we are to take pre-accultured longings as evidence, consider what Hassidic Rabbi Tzvi Freeman once pointed out about children: that across the whole world they always long for, expect, a world better than ours. This world's logic has not yet stamped out a child's genetic memory of a world outside its paradigm, where suffering is unnecessary and justice is as natural as the rain and "every tear is wiped away".

After all, if we're "made in God's image", then despite only having the language of this world, we're made for the same world God is from. It's in our flesh and blood, in our DNA, "on our lips and in our hearts". The glimpses of the Kingdom that we get in scripture excite the imagination because they give us a taste of what we had, all this time, been missing without even knowing we were missing it.

Despite Paul only having the language of the culture he grew up in, and its... let's not mince words, sorta sexist ideas of what marriage is about... those are the symbols he has, and so that's how he describes the devotion we feel for God, and the love God feels for us, and the physical closeness that Jesus's gift of the Eucharist can create - a gift that, by a counterintuitive, nonsensical-sounding miracle, satisfies an inexpressible longing for closeness that no merely spiritual or theoretical God could answer, that no cold golden statue could provide.

Despite hearing Jesus try to explain that miracle and gift today, and probably failing to understand it any better than the crowd did, Peter nonetheless recognized that it answers something that nothing else can answer. Because he didn't say he understood - just that... well, even if he doesn't understand, where else can he go? Who else can speak like this? Who else can stir up his heart like this?

Even if it's "illogical"... well, anything you don't understand starts that way.

Even if it's "illogical"... well, people often do things that seem illogical if they've found that they work.

Even if it's "illogical"... well, illogical things can still be valuable.

And we sense that value, because the promises of the Kingdom answer a need that people have been longing to fill since we became people.

And so the Israelites resolved to try again. To vow again, even if they'll break that vow, even if they still haven't begun to understand the logic that justifies the covenant to which they're swearing.

May we be able to take that same sort of leap of faith, to try to live the Kingdom even if we don't understand it, and in doing so, come to understand it through the learned experience of the fruit it bears in our lives.

[grantmewisdom]

In Response to a Concerned Member

I just wanted to add, no matter what we do, we'll never be able to please everyone and ultimately we have to please God. I would also like to clarify that my responses are a means to try and broaden the scope of our opinions/facts we hold onto versus trying to convince anyone. 

With that said, there are of course concerns with non-seminary preachers, they may not have the right training, theology, etc. but I also believe God calls each of us to our own journey; for some pastors, that journey may stray away from seminary. It also seems like Pastor Michael was trained and taught by Bishop Gary Mcintosh for several years so he’s not just making stuff up as he goes along. I also think it is actually limiting what God can do by saying "Only those who hold degrees from seminary can preach." and so I think as long as their message is rooted in scripture and theologically sound, I think it is ok. 

As for the health and prosperity portion of their core beliefs, it is definitely concerning, there is however some ambiguity in what "prosperous" could mean [to the transformation church]. The verses they use to support their "financial" claims  are a bit out of context and definitely do not apply to each individual but actually refer to Israel as a nation, as a whole. From what I've heard in this Marked series, there isn't a lot of this evidenced in their sermons. To me, the problem with the prosperity gospel isn't that they preach every believer is destined to be rich and healthy (what Father wouldn't want that for all his children?), it's that it takes away God's sovereignty over our lives and that they are in control of how they become rich... the idea that praying things into existence, or the idea that tithing $10 will result in $1,000 back to you. WHICH CAN HAPPEN. But in the case of the first example, God also answers our prayers based on his will, for what father would give everything their child asked of them? As for the second example, God does want to bless his children, but it also says in Matthew 19:24 that it is extremely hard for rich people to get into heaven. 

I think we in the 21st century have a very skewed perspective of the biblical teachings of prosperity AND the opposite (enduring in suffering). The Israelites and the early Christians are persecuted literally throughout the whole bible. For us to hear the apostles preaching about suffering, endurance, and even death is normal for their time, but for us should be very strange. The world has changed and though it may not seem like it, we are blessed to live in a country with the freedom of religion. I’m not saying that we live in a perfect time and that there are no threats of persecution, but I do think it doesn’t make sense for us to believe that God wants us to suffer more than he wants us to prosper, especially in 2021. 

Touching again on the sovereignty of God and the concern about being marked, but then being disqualified/whited out… I think what Justin said is a good way to clarify how I understood it as well. 

“The disqualification I think that P. Michael is referring to feels less about our mistakes and our pasts preventing us from accessing the gospel and more of like a conscious disobedience even after knowing God's calling or word for us (ex: Luke 6:46-49)

Last part about the "disqualifying ourselves from God's special calling on our lives sooorta didn't sit well with me" point: Yes God can and will work all things for good, even when it's bad. In the first sermon of the series at mark 35:00, P. Michael points out that we read how Saul disqualified himself in a variety of ways but also notes that Saul reigned for over 40 years and that God provides many opportunity to turn back (repentance). I think maybe what the person may be latching onto is his wording of” [Saul] ended his effectiveness when he disobeyed" which I think is a pretty valid point about how disobedience from God's commands especially for personal preference does show bad fruit.”

To clarify even further, it is not that God cuts us off, but simply that the opportunity presented to us is now gone. Remember in Mark 10, Jesus asks the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions and to follow him, he had a personal invite to be Jesus’ disciple, and yet he disqualified himself. I don’t remember the first sermon in the series straying too far off from this idea. Of course if God wants to use you, he’s going to use you, but for change and transformation to happen there has to be something that changes within us, we cannot expect God to do all the work. Even with Paul, it may seem that he was supernaturally changed after the scales fell off his eyes, but remember that he also had “a thorn in his side” and it took him most of his latter life to become the Paul that everyone reveres.

I want to end with 1st Corinthians 8 where Paul talks about eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. He first talks about how knowledge puffs up while love builds up [important] but also talks about causing your brother [and sister] to stumble. 

“9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.”

I am SO thankful for the reminders of your concerns - that David, though he was amazing, could never be compared to Jesus and that you only wish for biblical truth at church! It is a wonderful gift to be discerning and worried for the sake of your brothers and sisters. So if this series is causing you to stumble, I will totally support you in looking into other sermons for our congregation. But if you are able to endure for the sake of that one brother or sister who needs to hear that they’ve been marked and live up to it, or that one brother or sister that needs to learn to pay the price for that mark, or that one brother or sister who needs time to develop in private before serving in the light, then your love may help them to grow.

[frederickwiddowson]

The Acts of the Apostles, the history of the early church, by Luke the physician - Acts 7:1-16 comments : Stephen's defense, part 1

Acts 7:1 ¶  Then said the high priest, Are these things so? 2  And he said, Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken; The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, 3  And said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee. 4  Then came he out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and dwelt in Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now dwell. 5  And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child. 6  And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years. 7  And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place. 8  And he gave him the covenant of circumcision: and so Abraham begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat the twelve patriarchs. 9  And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him, 10 And delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favour and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house. 11  Now there came a dearth over all the land of Egypt and Chanaan, and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance. 12  But when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt, he sent out our fathers first. 13  And at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren; and Joseph’s kindred was made known unto Pharaoh. 14  Then sent Joseph, and called his father Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls. 15  So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers, 16  And were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of Sychem.

 Stephen starts preaching with Abraham’s calling by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees.

Genesis 11:27 ¶  Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot. 28  And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. 29 And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah. 30  But Sarai was barren; she had no child. 31 And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. 32  And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran.

12:1 ¶  Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: 2  And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

4 ¶  So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. 5  And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.

Notice the difference betweens words translated from a Hebrew text and words translated from a Greek text. For instance, Elijah of Malachi 4:5,6 becomes the Elias of Luke 1:17. So here, the Haran of Genesis 12:4 becomes the Charran of verse 2.

We discussed the four-hundred-year timeframe when you and I were going over Genesis. In the comments on Genesis 15:12-16 I noted;

“God tells Abram that his seed will be servants in a foreign land, which we know to be Egypt. They will be afflicted for four hundred years and will serve the people of that land. This is an about, not an exact 400 years, ten months, 23 days, and two hours type of statement.

Exodus 12:40  Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.

And then, Luke recounting what Stephen said, alluding to what Moses had written from God’s words;

Acts 7:6  And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years.

If I wrote you a lesson that said, “in the thousand years since the Norman invasion of England,” and then, in the lesson later wrote, “in the nine hundred and fifty three years since 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at Hastings,” would that be a contradiction or would you understand what I said as meaning the same thing?

Here is Paul referring to this bondage bracketed between the covenant and the giving of the Law.

Galatians 3:17  And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.

Rabbis have written that the affliction begins when Ishmael, the offspring of Abram and Hagar, an Egyptian, begins to persecute Isaac, the son of the promise. They regarded the four hundred years to start from that point.

God also tells Abram that four generations will come into being in Egypt before returning to the land that is promised, The Promised Land of Canaan. For instance, Levi, Jacob’s son, and his son, Kohath, and his son, Amram, and his son, Moses. These were four generations that sojourned in Egypt. It is then important to see that God is talking about two different things; four hundred years of affliction and four generations in a foreign land.”

In verse 14 we have the issue about how many people came to Egypt with Jacob. Here again are my comments from Genesis 46:5-27;

“Verse 15 tells us for that either Dinah wasn’t Jacob’s only daughter or, as said earlier, the daughters could logically include daughters-in-law. Arguing about the count becomes nonsensical when we know everyone wasn’t included in the count of those that mattered to God’s ministry of reconciliation. There are obviously servants to consider, as well, which are not mentioned.

We also come to differences in the count given for different reasons at different times.

Exodus 1:5  And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already.

Deuteronomy 10:22  Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.

Acts 7:14  Then sent Joseph, and called his father Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls.

Some argue about these differences with fundamentalists trying to gloss over what they fear naggingly in the back of their minds is an error in the text. However, the problem is with the modern reader who is infected with a mental problem I call modernism. You read the Bible like you would read the owner’s manual for your car rather than as you would read a letter sent to you from afar, in this case a distant time, a personal account of something dear to the writer. The Holy Ghost, through the wisdom and understanding, the meaning of Biblical inspiration which is not word-for-word dictation, given to Moses, refers to events from the perspective of their importance to the point He is trying to get across (see Job 32:8; 2Peter 3:15). In one reference He may include wives who are not included in another or He may be referring to an event from another angle and only include specific others. The modern fundamentalist who claims to believe the Bible literally, which they don’t really, in their attempts to explain by juggling numbers what the Bible says, is really expressing their own disbelief and lack of faith by trying to explain a contradiction that isn’t there.

I went over this kind of thinking when I was discussing years, back in my comments on 15:12-16, regarding the length of years that the Hebrews were to be persecuted. The point is all of the number references are correct and any differences can be explained by the Holy Ghost counting people in one who are not counted in another. We will find this again in the numbers who will die in a plague later in another book. Verses 26 and 27 warn us that our calculations may not be based on God’s calculations which will keep the doubter or the skeptic spinning his or her wheels trying to find an equation that will make him or her feel better.”

Again we see translation differences as Emmor and Sychem transliterated from Greek were Hamor and Shechem from Hebrew in Genesis 33:19.

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2017, Part II

Part I can be found here. I should have mentioned the films I haven’t seen, which include BPM; Faces Places; The Square; Coco; Thelma; Last Flag Flying; Roman J. Israel, Esq.; Wonder Wheel; Jane; and I, Daniel Blake. Long-time AHOLs also know that I’m in the fifth year of a self-imposed five-year break from superhero culture, so I haven’t seen Logan or Thor or whatever else. With that: ENDEARING CURIOSITIES WITH BIG FLAWS 87. The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou)-  Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall has a lot in common with Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster. Both are high-concept international co-productions that bear just enough of the filmmaker's signature but feel unfortunately cut to ribbons in the editing room. Computers have made us all a little worse at our jobs, Zhang included, and his spectacle is achieved despite CGI, not because of it. I liked watching a boulder's journey through the stages of being catapulted, even if it eventually landed into a physics-negligent pit of cartoon monsters. By the end, the picture is more bloodless, sexless, and simplistic than a game of toy soldiers, which makes it seem just as child-like. It's a forgettable sort of fun, but it is often fun. 86. The Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders)- A bit more comprehensible than the original but far less beautiful. It's a shame that visions of future exteriors haven't improved or at least changed since Blade Runner. Big advertisements. Got it. (Also, we have telepathic walkie-talkies, but people sleep on the floor?) There are a few good ideas drizzled around. If people can basically toggle back and forth between languages, why not hire a famous actor who doesn't speak English for one of the supporting roles? Speaking of acting though, Johansson is pretty bad in this, hamstrung by the whole playing-a-robot problem. (She looks as good as she ever has though, which is saying something.) She could have taken some notes from Michael Pitt, who brings some edge and skitter to his cybernetic replicant or whatever they call it. 85. Wilson (Craig Johnson)- It hits the notes that a Daniel Clowes property usually does: misanthropy, formlessness, begrudging acceptance at the end. I laughed a few times and appreciated the huge left-turn at the two-thirds mark, but I didn't think it amounted to much. 84. Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper)-  Other than the Basterd character, there's nothing really broken about this movie, but I'm selling on anything with double-digit dream sequences. 

83. Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo)- The ending, both the final act and the final note, went a long way to save what was a tedious sit for me. I appreciate the big swings that everyone took with this budget and material--Sudeikis once again gets to show impressive range. But this is an hour of material stretched to an hour and forty-nine minutes. 82. Rough Night (Lucia Aniello)- Hide-the-body movies never work, but what makes this one disappointing is that there's a daring, original corrective somewhere on the margins. You can tell from the comparatively tame bachelor party or the unexpectedly positive threesome that this movie has refreshing ideas, but both the Machine and TV visuals from a TV director shaved the edge down. No one wants to hear such a thing about a sorely-needed female-driven comedy, but Paul W. Downs is the funniest thing in this. 81. Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon)- Shout-out to the morons protesting this movie's gayness but not realizing that the original was always an allegory for AIDS. These live-action remakes are all around the same quality, but this one feels especially bloated, with really dicey CGI. Things get borderline boring in between the musical numbers, but, man, do those numbers hold up. There's the title track obviously, but songs that would be throwaways in something else--"Gaston," "Be Our Guest," "Something There"--are BANGERZ here. The real IP is the music, and Disney is just going to get each generation's Josh Gad to sing them forever. 80. Darkest Hour (Joe Wright)- This movie reminded me of The Imitation Game in the sense that it's a staid presentation with a solid structure that feels cheap whenever it zooms out beyond its back rooms. The grander version of this, which Joe Wright in some ways already made, is probably just as unsatisfying, but it wouldn't have the pinnacle of goofiness that will hereupon be known as The Underground Scene. I’m a bit bored of this type of film. Darkest Hour might be worth seeing for Oldman's performance, which is a true transformation, absent of any actory vanity but invested with some real myth-making. Churchill gets introduced with just his hat, then lit by just a match, then lit by a shock of sunlight. Oldman is very good in his scenes with Scott Thomas, so it's a shame that her character disappears for a half-hour at a time. The more troubling thing to note is that there are many men in this film who are so English that they can't pronounce their r's. If you catch it eawly, it's a weal distwacting pwoblem. 79. The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray)- Since some of the dumbest stuff is some of the best stuff*, I'm not going to get caught in the web of assessing how much sense The Fate of the Furious makes. But I can say that this entry is the least intentionally funny of the series, and other than "the White girls' soccer team is the Monarchs," it loses some of the class undressing of 6 and 7. From the endless scene-setting to the overstuffed character roster, this is now more of a comic book than a movie, an exercise in being a plot without being a narrative. *- See: the "make it rain" sequence, Statham swinging the baby carrier through a gun battle, Rock redirecting the missile with his bare hands.

78. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (Brian Knappenberger)- The first hour, centering on the Hulk Hogan/Gawker case, is compulsively watchable, even if it doesn't shed much extra light for anyone who followed it when it happened. Terry Bollea explaining that his penis is shorter than ten inches while Hulk Hogan's, the character's, is not: That's what I signed up for. When that case veers into the bizarrely vengeful, pretty much when Peter Thiel comes in, Nobody Speak becomes something else. The final third pits the sensitive, diligent bullpen of the Las Vegas Review-Journal against billionaire liver spot Sheldon Adelson, who bought their paper to suppress it. Then, of course, the doc expands to Donald Trump's vilification of the free press. If that sounds like a straight line, it doesn't come off that way in the film. The Hogan/Gawker stuff, which takes up the majority of the running time, feels unresolved after all the tangents. 77. The Reagan Show (Sierra Pettengill, Pacho Velez)- I'm cringing for the next five years, in which I'll have to judge a movie's success based on how subtly it invokes its mandatory Donald Trump comparisons and allegories. They're coming. In general, it's kind of sad to see how much more literate people were even thirty years ago, even as they populated a medium we all agreed was low culture. This documentary feels sharp at first, understanding something essential about the way Reagan owned his own persona. With the American Right treating him like some patron saint, it's also helpful to remember how much pushback he got at the end of his second term, for something that would be, like, the fiftieth most controversial thing Donald Trump would have done already. (See?) When the doc gets to its own fascination with Reagan's Star Wars program, however, it basically loses its thesis. As lean as it is, it still sort of stumbles to the finish line. 76. Beatriz at Dinner (Miguel Arteta)- I appreciated this portrayal of a culture clash way more than I liked it. For a while the characters are highly specific. (The delivery of "It's 6:13, Kathy" made me laugh out loud.) Then the plot turns into "Oh, so we're talking about Trump's America, right?" (See?) Here's a critique that's catty every time: This film has great ideas about class and race if you've never thought about class and race before. 75. I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie)- Oscar is calling...for the fat dude playing Shawn Eckhardt and no one else. If Allison Janney wins for doing the thing she always does over Laurie Metcalf's fully realized human, then it's a huge mistake. Successful in some of its comedic goals, especially in its depiction of northwestern goons, the shame of the working class, and period detail. (I laughed out loud when I saw the Girbaud tag on Gilooly's jeans.) Unsuccessful in most of its other goals--if I'm even reading the film correctly in my assumption of those goals. The most obvious one is the slippery nature of the truth, and that idea is handled clumsily. Gillespie goes to great GoodFellas-aping lengths to grapple with perception--having characters break the fourth wall even though there are already voiceovers and to-camera interviews. That talking to the camera comes up a few times in the disturbing scenes of domestic violence, which do humanize the characters because the other elements of the film can't, but they distract the viewer with their blitheness. The most puzzling angle of the film is the Hard Copy reporter, played by Bobby Cannavale in yet another example of his agent not knowing how famous he is. It's a missed opportunity in a movie full of them. 74. It (Andy Muschietti)- I don't get why people went nuts for this. The ensemble avails itself pretty well, despite all the sitcom-y dialogue. (Dialogue that, based on the Stephen King that I've read, is probably faithful to the book.) Some of the visuals nail the distinction between surreal and unreal--my favorite is the children's TV show that sporadically drifts into the murderous. But the movie just kind of hangs there, all the way to its interminable ending, satisfied with its own literal presentation of events that seem to be metaphorical. As I understand, It--however It manifests itself--represents the death of childhood and the emergence of an adult banality of evil. But the movie engages with that level as little as possible, and maybe that's why people are going nuts for it. This is a scary movie if you're a child, and most of the moviegoing public seem to be children. 73. Before I Fall (Ry Russo-Young)- I mostly watched this because I think Zoey Deutch is a Movie Star, and if I'm going to be there for her Speed, I have to be there for her Love Potion No. 9's as well. I appreciated Before I Fall's brevity, but the premise offers a lot more fun than the film is willing to have. In the end the balance was off: It had to be either more moralistically PG-13 or go way darker. For example, just like in Groundhog Day, the character realizes that she'll live out the same day no matter what she does, and it triggers a nihilistic phase. But rather than going on a shooting spree or stealing stuff from a mall, she just, like, wears a sexier dress and talks back to her parents. Good swing, kids, but I'm waiting for the crazier version.

72. War Machine (David Michod)- There are some standout moments in War Machine, many of which are thanks to its impressive cast, but I don't think the film is cohesive enough for me to recommend. I know what Michod is against--counter-insurgency, military hubris--but it's harder to figure out what he's arguing for beyond some sort of level of transparency. The war sequence near the end feels at odds with the tone of everything else, even though it benefits from the Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score. In a similarly frustrated vein, I feel as if I know exactly who Glen McMahon is, and the script's greatest strength is how sharply it draws him, but Pitt's studied performance adds distance to it. It's as if all of the film's comedic nature is supposed to come from how people revolve around his straight man, and that expectation is too much to put on his shoulders. There's more than a little Bud Turgidson in the voice Pitt affects, but the difference is that, as mean as this sounds, I always believed George C. Scott when he played a smart person. 71. The Trip to Spain (Michael Winterbottom)- Diminishing returns. 70. Downsizing (Alexander Payne)- There's a meta-effect to the structure of Downsizing. Its characters decide to shrink themselves, finding unpredictable challenges in the process, and the film similarly gets more problematic as it focuses further into each of its four legs. The first part, the outside world, is when the film is at its most cutting and well-observed. It still lays its points on thickly--dude at the bar asking if downsized people should be able to vote, for example--but the questions are worth asking. The second part, Leisureland, the bourgeois subdivision lil' Damon lives in, is more satirical and less satisfying. (I do love that downsizing ends up being such a gauche pursuit though. Payne has always had his finger on the pulse of people with poor taste.) The third part, which takes place in the downsizing slums, is a sharp, unfunny left turn that discards characters but at least develops the protagonist further. And then the wheels come off in Norway. At least we got to hear Udo Kier say, "I do love my boat." 69. Okja (Bong Joon-Ho)- Since Okja is such a unique movie, I feel as if people will overpraise it as a way to brand themselves: Its poster is probably going to be in a lot of dorm rooms. But there's a lot that you have to look past in order to recommend it. In general, I find that Bong's English language work has a bizarre mixture of muddled themes being presented in direct ways. There is some sweetness here--most of it due to the amazingly detailed rendering of the pig--but too much of the comedy doesn't work, and the ending feels a bit easy. I liked most of the stuff with the Animal Liberation Front, and I kind of wish they had been the focal point of the movie. Can I say, as my main takeaway, that I'm worried about Jakey G? He is so big here, so out-of-tune with the rest of the film, that I blame Bong for not reining him in. At the same time, I keep making excuses for Gyllenhaal, claiming that his parts are under-written, but at a certain point, you have to point the finger at him if there's such a pattern of bad performances emerging. I didn't see Everest, but this is his fourth brick in a row. Help us, Dan Gilroy. You're our only hope. 68. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos)- An interesting swing that ends up missing for me. Excepting The Lobster, Lanthimos's works seem obsessed with family dynamics, and he plays some interesting games with this family's perversions. Farrell's character's story about his father dovetails with his somnophilia, which seems to inspire the way his daughter offers herself to her object of affection. From Anna's medical past to Steven's alcoholism, these characters seem to have full lives that have been in motion long before the events of the story. But I kind of suspect I'm worshiping at the altar of auteurism, and I wouldn't have half the respect or patience I do for this film had I not known who made it. The dialogue and performances are purposefully flat and stilted, thus creating an off, eerie quality before we know why we should be unnerved. But what if the performances are just, you know, bad? The film also creates a premise that concludes in an inevitably unsatisfying way. I don't know what I would have done instead, but I'm not a genius filmmaker who gets the benefit of the doubt.

[woodworkingpastor]

With the grain of the universe -- Romans 11:1-2, 29-32 -- Sunday, August 16, 2020

The lectionary gives us a challenging set of verses in a challenging passage of Scripture with today’s text from Romans 11. This is our third (and final) Sunday wrestling with Paul’s dilemma of how it could be that when God moved definitively and finally to redeem all of creation through the person of Jesus Christ, the very chosen people of Israel were missing out on the Good News. How is it that people can look at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; how is it that people can look grace squarely in the eye; how is it that people can look at the condition of the world—in any time and place—and say, “Nah, I think we’re fine just the way we are?

Has God rejected his own people? Paul is not the first person to ask this question. Had we kept reading just a bit we would have been reminded of a story from one of the major characters of the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah. Elijah was a man of great courage, unafraid to stand up for the truth of God in an evil and corrupt time.  And in one of his most famous stories—the one Paul uses here in chapter 11—Elijah has just scored the signature victory of his prophetic career: he has defeated the prophets of Baal in an epic showdown on the top of Mount Carmel.  The idols of the unfaithful king have been exposed as frauds; the Maker of Heaven and Earth has been shown to be the One True God.  

It’s what happens next that is the problem: Elijah’s life is threatened, and he is forced to run for his life.  So Elijah flees from Ahab and Jezebel, taking refuge in a cave.  In the blink of an eye he goes from the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat. He is convinced that he alone is faithful against the forces of evil in his day.

But God shows up and tells Elijah that he doesn’t know everything.  Not only is Elijah not the last prophet, there are 7,000 others who are faithful to God.  One of these was a man named Obadiah. We learn from Scripture that Obadiah is a faithful servant of God, who also happens to be the chief of staff for King Ahab. And of the 7,000 faithful ones who had not bowed the knee to the false prophet Baal, Obadiah was stealthily responsible for 100 of them, hiding them in two caves, feeding them with supplies from King Ahab’s storehouse.

Has God forsaken his people? The point is this: when things seem the most bleak; when the world isn’t going the way we think it should; God is still working to redeem all things in Christ. What is more, God invites us to position ourselves right in the middle of that work.  There is always a remnant, there will always be work to do, even when things look most bleak.  God has called you, and God will not let go.

Understanding sin

To get to his point, Paul comes back again to the reality of sin, something that we should never be too sophisticated to deal with honestly. The Bible talks about sin with deadly seriousness.  Where we tend to talk about sin as an action—something we do that we should not have done, or something we don’t do that we should have done—the Bible often describes sin as a power that lurks about, kneeling at our door as if to catch us and consume us.  Jesus places such a significance on sin that he includes it as a category of the Lord’s Prayer (“forgive us our sin, as we forgive those who sin against us”) and then comes back to the subject at the end of the prayer to impress upon us again the importance of forgiving others, reminding us that our own forgiveness from God is connected to our forgiving one another.    

Sin corrupts everyone and everything it touches, literally ruining God’s good creation. Sin twists and warps relationships, causing us to show partiality to some people over others, separating us from God, blinding us to seeing God as we should. Sin leaves us in a state of disobedience, a state in which we once were. Ultimately it was the warping corruption of sin that led to the Jewish nation of Paul’s day had not yet received Jesus as Savior.

But Paul reminds his hearers that God is still at work, even in ways we cannot see, even when the circumstances suggest otherwise.  God is still doing the messy work of redeeming all things.  Our invitation is to be in the middle of that messy work.

The grain of the universe

How do we know what that work is and what our part in it should be?  Here is one significant clue: God is always moving broken creation toward redemption. It’s what Paul is concerned about in Romans:

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…(Romans 3:22b-24)

It is what Isaiah saw in his vision of the heavenly kingdom:

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9).

It is what John saw in his vision of heaven:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (Revelation 21:1a, 3).

But we encounter God’s will within the context of the choices we have made—choices that sometimes go with the grain of what God is doing, and choices that other times go against the grain of God’s will.

Our calling is captured in a phrase used by some contemporary Anabaptist theologians: “the grain of the universe.”  The image is that of wood grain, which runs in a certain direction in a piece of wood, giving it both strength and beauty. One thing I need to pay attention to when working with wood is to be aware of the direction of the grain.  When I glue boards together, it is important to note which way the grain runs and curves, because wood will shrink and warp in certain directions.  These forces will either balance each other out or fight against one another.  So can our lives.  When we talk about “going against the grain,” it is often about choices or decisions that are in conflict with God’s will or our personal beliefs or ethics.  To go with the grain is to make decisions that are in alignment with our truest selves and what we believe.  Going with the grain is to go in the direction of God.

That’s what God invites us to do—live our lives in a way that goes with the grain of the universe.  God is the one who has established the grain of the universe; it’s the world that is going “against the grain,” wreaking havoc whenever we do so.

Whenever we are working to bring reconciliation to broken places, we are working with the grain of the universe.  Whenever we are working to bring peace and justice we are working with the grain of the universe.  It’s why we proclaim the gospel and invite people to turn from their sin and follow Jesus. It’s why our congregation participates in ministries like backpack meals, Sleep in Heavenly Peace.  It’s why I serve on the Task Force to Reduce Gun Violence.  God invites us to be right in the middle of things, proclaiming God’s grace, reconciliation, and peace.

As Paul concludes this long argument in Romans 11: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To God be the glory forever.  Amen.”

[enouragement-blog]

The point behind the family trees of Genesis

As Christians, we often say that we believe the bible is God’s word, that the whole thing was given to us by God, that it’s totally infallible, yet we maybe don’t really believe that, or at least act like we don’t. Take for instance the genealogies/the family trees in the first book of the bible, Genesis. Most often when we read through parts like that, we just kind of skip past them and never even stop to wonder why it’s even in there.

If you read Genesis 5 for the first time, without any idea of what’s going on, probably the first thing you will notice is that people lived a long time. You might think they really did or you might think that those people didn’t exist or that their lives were miscounted or exaggerated. To be honest, the main point of Genesis 5 doesn’t matter whether you think it is literal history or mythical exaggeration.

There are other ancient records from the Ancient Near East such as the Sumerian King’s list which claimed the kings lived for 30,000 years. Seen in context, it no longer seems that big of a deal that the bible claims people lived a few hundred years. Still, we don’t know how to understand the numbers, whether they are literal or not, but ancient people believed that people used to live a really long time in ages past. Although we don’t quite know what to make of these numbers, it is still interesting to note that the biblical writers claimed much shorter life spans than their contemporaries, and that they weren’t trying to tie it in with the appearance of kingship, or glorify kings. In fact, the purposes of the book of Genesis are much different than other ancient documents.

Believe it or not, the point of the family trees in Genesis 5 is not how long people lived, but rather that they all died. Every single person who is listed, after it lists their firstborn, how long they lived, and the fact that they had other sons and daughters, is then specifically mentioned to have died. Why is that important? We all know we will die some day. It’s important for a few reasons.

First, because in Genesis 3:14-19, after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, God talks to them about the consequences of their actions, and one of those listed consequences is that they will die. So even though God gave them mercy by allowing them to live, at least some of them, a substantial amount of time, they still eventually died.

Second, in the whole list of Genesis 5 of people who died, there is only one person who is mentioned who escaped the fearsome reality of death and punishment. That person is Enoch, the person who lived the shortest out of everyone on the list, yet received the greatest reward. So how did he find blessing, reconciliation, and happiness, even though he didn’t live as long as others? By walking with God. Enoch escaped physical death by walking with God, and found eternal rest and healing from spiritual death. Who says the righteous will always outlive the wicked? God will carry the righteous through death, rather than living in fear as a wicked person.

After Adam and Eve left the garden, they had 2 sons: Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel and was punished, yet God still promised to be with him (Genesis 4). Cain had children and his children had children, and eventually through his line a very evil man named Lamech was born, who was a polygamist, unjust, and a murderer. Lamech is mentioned to have been 7 down from Adam: Adam, Cain, Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methushael, Lamech. Enoch is also the 7th descendant from Adam’s 3rd son Seth: Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch. Clearly, Enoch is contrasted with Lamech, one being good and one being evil. Whereas Cain acted wickedly and his offspring eventually acted even more wickedly, Seth’s family line produced both Enoch and later Noah, showing how our actions affect not just ourselves and those around us but also those who come after us. There are also the similarities in the names of the two family trees to consider, showing that naming somebody something doesn’t automatically determine how they will come out.

That in and of itself is very interesting, but that’s not where the lesson stops. Some things happen in the next few chapters, but in 11:10-25, the lesson continues. This time, its the family line of Shem. The last person listed in the family in Genesis 5 was Noah, and Shem was one of Noah’s sons. How are they connected?

First, they both list 10 people. This tells us that the list is probably not complete, it’s just a way of scanning through history. This time, their deaths are not mentioned, but their lives gradually get shorter. Second, they both begin with a curse. Adam brought a curse on his children in Genesis 3 and Noah brought a curse on his grandchild in Genesis 9:18-29. Third, they both end with salvation as well. In the case of Genesis 5, Noah is the last person mentioned. Noah was saved from destruction and the wrath of God by walking with God, and his righteousness even saved his children from death. In the case of Genesis 11:10-26, Abram is the last person mentioned. Abram was called the father of the promise, and was saved from loss of a future and hopelessness by walking with God.

What’s the importance of Shem? In Genesis 9:27, it was prophesied that God would dwell in the tents of Shem, which was fulfilled later when Israel, descended from Abram, who was descended from Shem, built the Tabernacle, the tent of meeting, where God dwelt with them and they received the Law at Mount Sinai and became God’s people.

So all three of these men, Enoch, Noah, and Abram found salvation and hope by walking with God. It was a blessing to others, and it was a blessing to themselves. The family trees foreshadow (point forward in time to a greater fulfillment) our need to be saved and the one who would come to save us. They show us the way to God and peace, and it’s not in a long life, possessions, living for ourselves, or having no problems, but in walking with God. Enoch found salvation in God by walking with Him even though his time was shorter. noah found salvation in God by walking with Him even though he lost his home, and everyone he knew died. Abram found salvation in God by walking with Him even though there were trials and tests, and God took his time. The family trees are a reminder of salvation. 

And so here we have a proclamation of the coming salvation and our need to be saved all the way back before Jesus, before the prophets, before Israel was a nation. Before Abraham received the promise or Moses the Law, there was hope.

[enddaysengine]

Exploring the Manifest Zone - The Last War

Here's Episode 2 and man have I been looking forward to this one! It's been a while since life kinda happened in between this being released and now, but I'm okay with playing catchup. Today we are talking about the Last War.

https://manifest.zone/02-the-last-war/

I like that Wayne's bringing up the civil war aspect of the Last War. The fact there are no recent civil wars in Europe or North America certainly does alter our vision of what war looks like, although it is worth pointing out that we are still feeling the shock waves of the American Civil War today, even in the not-United States parts of the continent. Imagine what it must be like for those who are only two years removed from a century long civil war.

The tension of having no winner in the Last War is a plot point that you can spin multiple campaigns out of. It was an excellent call for the setting not to resolve the problems that nations are facing. It adds a level of dynamism because everything is so unstable and can collapse into multiple potential futures.

Huh, I never really thought about the Dragonmarked Houses having terms dictated to them by the Empire of Galifar. Maybe that's because I always saw them as being partnered with the royals, but then again, alliances come and go. Just because Galifar I got them on his side doesn't mean they still had a cozy relationship by the time that Jarot rolled around. It makes sense that the Dragonmarks would be screwed before the Last War if the Empire didn't want to play ball. Stormreach was a minor economic player, and while the Lhazzar Principalities were technically autonomous, but they still bent a knee to Thronehold. I could easily many Dragonmarks feeling that the war was horrible, but that in many ways it saved and freed their families.

I'd love to get an entirely in-universe book that shows the history and contents of the Korth Edicts and the Treaty of Thronehold. It probably won't happen anytime soon and would be more likely as a product produced by fans (or Keith) in the DM's Guild once Eberron finally gets allowed.

I hadn't considered that the creation forges might have been shut down because Cannith came in with a weak hand. It always seemed to me like the forges got closed because of escalation fears. The fact that some Cannith heirs may be resentful towards that poor leadership is an interesting perspective.

Warforged leases or rentals. Excellent idea. It makes perfect sense for Cannith to try and extract payment for warforged soliders multiple times. They may even try and argue that this wasn't so different from pain a soldier salary, and to structure their lease agreements to make it look like you paid less for the warforged.

The separate culture of Valenar from Cyre is something that's come up a couple of times, but I don't ever think got the attention it deserved. Take a look at the pre-War map of Galifar:

What is now Valenar is cut off from the rest of Cyre by the Blade Desert. They were nominally part of the nation and the empire, but they were both distant from the heart of its power and geographically isolated. I highly doubt this is the first time they tried to break away and rebel. I also note that as I compare maps, it does look like there is a piece of old Cyre that escaped the Mourning, the south shore of Lake Cyre. It's now part of the Talenta Plains, but I expect this may be one of the last remnants of the nation that still looks much like it did before the war. There could be interesting plot hooks there.

So, Droaam. One of my favourite nations out there, but Keith's suggestion that the Five Nations treats Droaam like Westerns treat Daesh is fascinating. It's not a perfect comparison because Droaam isn't actively at war with everyone around them (can you even got to war with the Shadow Marches), but it does inform other types of attitudes and plots you could use in stories.

The distinction between Droaam and Darguun's political situations is important listening if you want to use either of those countries in a campaign. The goblins were more involved with the war and had gained allies. Essentially, they played the game of politics and came to the table at the Treat of Thronehold with enough clout and chips to offer to gain legitimacy. They also had a past president. For a very different analogy, consider the relationships that Christians and Jews had with the Roman Empire. Both were disruptive to the state religion, which demanded that homage is paid to the Roman emperor and his ancestors. Both Christians and Jews refused, but the Romans allowed the Jews to practice their religion because they saw that religion as being a fundamental cornerstone of an ancient civilization. To the Romans, the Jews had enough historical legitimacy that they would be tolerated, even though they disrupted the religious status quo. The Christians, on the other hand, were a recent phenomenon for the Romans, so they were not seen as having the same pedigree and same legitimacy. Darguun is like the Jews in this scenario. The goblins not only had nations but empires before humanity conquered them. A goblin nation could be seen as a revival of that tradition and be more socially/politically acceptable than a gang of monsters trying to build a state.

Another important note on that legitimacy thing is the age of elves. An elf's lifespan of 750 years for an elf being about the biological equivalent of 110 for a human (before magical enhancement). The Dhakanni Empires collapsed about 5000 years ago, an extremely extended period for humans on modern Eberron, but more like 1283 CE for them the historical memory of elves. Given that countries like Israel and Greece in the real world were able to garner enough recognization using historical memories from the first millennium BCE, it doesn't seem very far-fetched for the elves to view the rise of Darguun as the return of an old but hardly forgotten nation.

The Mournland being in the centre of the continent create some challenges, particularly in the east to west movement, but the payoffs you get are much larger. I've had several campaign hooks hinge of off Breland and/or Darguun trying to restore overland (or underground) transportation routes to Talenta, Valenar, or Karrnath. There's a lot you can play with there. I also really like having the wasteland in the middle of everything. The whole "World's Largest Dungeon" schtick plays well. The Last War is also useful in justifying dungeons beyond modern structures. Large magical explosions could easily have exposed previously hidden ruins, and now that there is peace, those dungeons can be explored.

The Last War is a great story hook for building a character. I really like the idea of starting a group during the war as a prologue/flashback, then skipping ahead to 998 YK. That helps to give a sense of the significance of the Mourning.

Kalashtar can be tricky to include in the War, and I've never really given them much thought in that context. Their culture is a bit isolationist and it has more than a bit of a superiority complex. Why would they get involved in a quarrel between warring siblings when they have all of reality to save? I like the idea "orphaned" kalashatar who have lost contact with their culture. That does not mean they have to be literal orphans, it could be the result of Kalashtar who fled East from Sarlona and ended up in the Shadow Marches or Demon Wastes, or whose Kalashtar parent renounced the shadow war with the Dreaming Dark to live amongst humans. Of course, that the Dreaming Dark may have been one of the groups trying to engineer the Last War is logical and would be a perfect reason for Kalashtar getting involved. That gets lots of cloak and dagger, espionage, and spycraft stories going.

Thinking about the effect war has had on you is interesting. I've dealt with PTSD (not from combat, but still) so I know there's a balance to walk with your character between having the War impact the way you act without crippling your character. I definitely appreciate Scott's perspective. He's given very good advice on how to get inside a military mindset. Handicapping vs storytelling is also an important discussion to have.

Scott's storytelling advice is excellent in general, not just for warfare, but for everything. Get into more senses than just sight and give your players choices of what do, even if it doesn't change the immediate plot to get them to engage in the moment and the emotions. Then let the ongoing plot further develop from those choices. The experiences shared by a party who served in the war together is a great place to start. I like Keith's questionnaire a lot. Definitely going to steal it.

The idea of a party trying to rebuild their bar after it burned down in the war is a great take on how to tie everyone together. I should write some fiction around that. The impact of the war doesn't have to be all angst and devastation. The war can impact people in other meaningful but relatable ways too.

The reignition of the Last War is something I haven't actually played around with much. That said, I have messed around with the breaking of the balance of power. My games have tended to either be localized to specific cities if they deal with politics. I do want to develop Thaliost and a couple of other cities in the future and it would be a good idea to bear in mind some of the potential local sparks that could set the continent back on fire.

The Lord of the Blades leading a warforged nation is something that I have wanted to do, but haven't had the chance to yet. One idea I had was House Cannith and Orien trying to reattach the east-west Lightning Rail trade routes by going under the Mournlands through Kyber. The Lord of Blades doesn't take to kindly to that, claiming that the caverns are part of the warforged's sovereign land and that it was effectively a declaration of war. I love the question of "Is the Lord of Blades Magneto or Doctor Doom?" It gives a nice touchstone to the personality of LoB.

I know this is beating a dead horse, but Eberron's ability to handle issues from the real world is amazing. Cyran refugees is an easy one since it is a hot topic in global politics. You could pretty easily pull up any newspaper, leaf through it, and use any given article about the current plight of refugees to get yourself a plot hook. If you are looking for something a bit more complicated, I suggest reading into the current controversy around Safe Third Country agreement between the United States and Canada.

Above and beyond that, I've plotted a couple of campaigns revolving around Cyran refugees. On is a straight up adaptation of Pathfinder's Kingmaker adventure path, substituting the Stolen lands for Eastern Breland. The general idea was that between the Mournlands and Darguun, Brelanders were fleeing their lands westwards, so New Cyre was allowed to send out companies of refugees to resettle the abandoned lands. It works well and maps pretty nicely to the geography if you flip Kingmakers east and west. The other one was similar in concept but comes from the original ECS itself. Aundair, not wanting to take in any more refugees, instead resettles them in the abandoned town of Desolute in the Demon Wastes. Effectively, Desolute becomes both a frontier city and a high-functioning refugee camp.

I would be all over a book about wartime technology in Eberron. Technological advances in war have driven a lot of Earth's history, so seeing a magical counterpart would hit my sweet spot where science and history overlap. Treetrunk artillery is a wonderful mental image.

Next Up - Dragonmarked Houses. I'll be quicker this time, as long as the Traveller doesn't steal my keyboard.

[tanadrin]

Where I grew up, people had this way of spitting the word “Christian,” wielding it like a spear. That’s not Christian. We’re Christian. Krischin. Krisschin. They didn’t mean “Christian,” they meant Like Me, for better or worse. Only Like Me is neutral, requires context, can even be bad if you happen yourself to be imperfect. That’s not how they meant it of course.

Krisschin meant deserving of respect. Krisschin meant reasonable, normal, relatable. They’re Krisschin meant they’re (possibly) deserving of human decency, and by elimination, everything outside that category you could deal with how you liked. The bare text of the Bible, was, of course, acknowledged, but the implicit undercurrent that ran through the word Krisschin was that these are the things that apply between ourselves. Love your neighbor (he’s Krisschin). Treat others (other Krisschins) how you want to be treated.  Blessed are the meek (if they’re Krisschen), maybe, if you’re lucky.

 I’m appealing to a personal narrative here to give weight to this perspective, but by itself it’s not remarkable. I shouldn’t find it insidious or even particularly interesting to note that assholes are everywhere, and religion is not anti-asshole insurance. Assholery is a function of the human condition, not of religion, and it’s not an indictment of a faith to say some people who profess that faith are dicks, either on doctrinal or organizational grounds. That has, in fact, been my relationship to Christianity for most of the time since letting my Catholicism quietly extinguish itself: there’s this book, with some nice bits and some weird bits, which inspired a religion, which has mostly nice people and a few jerks, like all groups of people everywhere. Surely all people are like that; there is no reason Christianity should be different.

Except. Except then I started singing Sacred Harp music.

Look, you don’t have to believe in God to sing Sacred Harp. You sure as shit don’t have to believe in Jesus. There are Jewish Sacred Harp singers--there’s a community of singers in Israel, even--there are nonreligious Sacred Harp singers, and yeah, there are Christian sacred harp singers of every stripe. You do have to not actively despise religion, which is a high bar for some people to clear (my SO for instance), so I think there are few or no Sacred Harp singers who don’t respect religion. But if you’re the sort of person (as pretty much everybody who sings this stuff is) whose first exposure to hearing Sacred Harp music was “...” “...” “...oh my god that’s amazing,” followed by “I want to do that!” then it doesn’t seem to much matter about your personal relationship to religion.

I have passed through my own various phases of irreligion in life; I started out believing God existed because my parents and teachers told me God existed, and much like F=ma and the conservation of volume, I had no reason to doubt them. I read PZ Meyers’ blog religiously (ha ho) for a while, and went through a phase where I thought on balance religion was probably a net negative for humanity, even if I was never a bitter anti-theist. I have identified as atheist and as agnostic, and I still don’t literally believe in the existence of God, but that feels much less important to me now than it did when I was nineteen.

Sacred Harp did two things for me. One, it gave me an emotional connection to the things it talked about. Catholicism, when you are ten, is a lot of people talking at you about what you should believe: your religion teacher, the priest, etc. It can feel very academic and abstract, and honestly, I never felt that transubstantiation or the wording of the Nicene Creed had a very strong effect on my life (btw, the current translation is shit: “all things seen and unseen” sounds way better than “visible and invisible,” though I know why they changed it. They’re wrong). When you are twenty-seven, and you sing in a chorus words by Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley that talk about grief and terror and hope for salvation better than anyone you have ever heard in your life, that can, uh, have an effect on a person. So yeah, it changed how I related to the topic. Not just the general idea of a benevolent God, but the specific idea that no matter how shitty or ugly or awful you feel in the moment, or even for your entire life, you can hope to be redeemed.

The second thing it did was make me angry at everyone who had ever presumed to teach me about religion in my entire life. More than that: it made me angry at the Krisschins, the ones I grew up around, and the ones I have encountered since. There is something to Christianity, something I never encountered in hours and hours of Mass, or in any religion class, or in any hand-wavy non-answer from the Catholic catechism about whether the Jews are going to hell, but which I do find in 285t, and 30b, and 168. It’s hard to put into words. Something like this: you are suffering now. It’s not your imagination; it’s real, and it’s because the world itself is fucked up and has been from the beginning, but it will be okay. Not now, not soon, and not maybe for a long time to come. But it will be, and when it is, all of this will be worth it, I promise. Only, because it’s music, and not just words, and because it’s music better than all of the shitty, anodyne hymns that passed for church music in Catholicism put together,it actually has weight to it. Even if you don’t believe it, you know Watts and Billings and all the rest did, with every fiber of their being, and that counts for something.

So while intellectually I may think that Christianity is a two thousand year old diverse intellectual movement with murky origins sometime in the first few decades CE with as many disparate interpretations as there are distinct denominations (and there are many, even among pre-Reformation churches and heresies), and therefore despite competing claims to legitimacy no single authority to say what is or isn’t definitely Christian. On the other hand, on a gut level, it feels like someone ripped back a curtain and showed me a fiery luminous jewel, whose light is an abject love for everyone alive. And I look at this jewel at the one hand, and I compare it to the ordinary messiness of the human condition of which the Krisschins are only one not-particularly-terrible example, and I am so. Fucking. Angry.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Christianity was not meant to rule. It was, it can be agreed, an initially small offshoot of an already minority religion, that only latterly became the faith of an empire, whose first bishops led their churches from basements and private homes, not from thrones which they sat on in glittering robes. No movement can endure the negative attentions of authority if it fails to mention the virtue it places on humility and respect; and no king can rule if he says to peasant whose throat he’s stepping on that he is, in the final accounting, just as wretched. I don’t know whether that shining jewel was the totality of what James preached in Jerusalem before Paul came along, and I don’t know for certain that the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch have no knowledge of it as they sit on their thrones. But if there is anything in religion you want to point to as self-evidently good, as a tangible and universalizable righteousness without arrogance or pretense, that is it. No utopian idealist, no flag-waving revolutionary, no prince however wise and no philanthropist however generous has ever promoted a cause more worthy to be cherished, more challenging to or more fulfilling of human nature, and its only competition in that respects tends to a diluted version of it (or the same light from a different direction).

I did not know when you said “Christian” that by it you could mean this jewel; no one ever showed it to me before. Having seen it, I don’t know how you could mean anything else. I don’t know what else, in comparison, could really be important, and spitting the word Christian until it becomes a meaningless phonetic hiss to cut apart the body of the human race, becoming obsessed with the doctrines and the failures that form a kind of klipah that obscures and is utterly opposed to that essential truth, which overthrows all the others, can be considered nothing but human failure.

Except it’s worse than that, if you actually believe. If you actually believe Jesus Christ was God, then you believe your God, ancient beyond time, wise beyond comprehension, good beyond anything any human being could ever aspire to, took the form of a human being and suffered and died for no reason other than love. Failure to endure the brightness of that jewel--turning aside for a moment, or for a day, or for a lifetime--might be ascribed to mere human weakness; but to valorize your failure as orthodoxy, as what your God wanted when he died choking on a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, to despise or shun or judge or sneer at your fellow human beings and to call that Christianity, is the ugliest blasphemy I can imagine. Your God died because he loved everyone alive without reservation, and how dare you spit on him like that.

I’m a big believer in calling yourself what you aspire to be. A rationalist is someone who aspires to be more rational; an artist is someone who aspires  to make beautiful art; the best we can hope for, if we want to be a good person, is to aspire to do as much good as we can. If you call yourself a Christian, and you do not at least aspire toward that kind of abject love, whatever my intellectual knowledge about the messiness of real-world religious movements and the scotsman fallacy say, in my heart of hearts I will believe you to be a hypocrite and a liar.

I will feel more genuine respect for any random selfish asshole who thinks they got theirs, so fuck everybody else, than I will for someone who uses a word that should mean “aspiring toward abject love stronger than you can imagine” to mean “condescends toward people who are different from me,” “silently judges people a bunch of Italians in funny hats told me are going to hell,” or “clutches my pearls every time someone with skin darker than Pantone 2309 comes within fifteen feet.” And I have no respect for doctrines, which, claiming that love as their wellspring and their heart, as the example of all that they aspire to, betray it with a laundry list of bullshit they have furiously rationalized to themselves and their followers.

Something’s shifted in me, has been shifting for a while; I have felt the urge, driven by Sacred Harp, more and more to find some way in my life to give expression to religious modes and thoughts, emotionally, personally, the space for such things is inside a Catholic church, but there’s too much there that feels like a lie, and not a comforting one, an ugly, crass lie where we have taken our worst failures and renamed them holiness. Protestantism has no particular connection for me, emotionally or intellectually, even the liberal denominations that people like to make fun of as not believing in anything (say what you will, at least they’re not hypocrites). So I guess for now I will continue to what I have been doing semi-regularly for the past year, and once a week I’ll go out on Thursday nights, and I’ll sing.

[andrewuttaro]

Hypostatic Thoughts: The Kingdom Christians don’t want

Hello and welcome to the Hypostatic Thoughts blog. This is my newly christened religion blog. If you’re here reading this you’re probably in one of two groups: friends and elders from my past life as a Youth Minister seeing what I write about religion or someone who at least moderately enjoys my sports or review blogs dipping into a blog about… gasps… religion. For group two I am going to send another shiver down your spine: I’m going to talk a lot about Catholicism! AGH! Not often will I talk strictly about that. This is a religion blog generally speaking but I am catholic and some of those opinions and beliefs will be very evident here. Don’t cringe, this isn’t one of THOSE religion blogs. I am not here to judge or spread judgement. That’s not my place and frankly I think the itch to judge is real problem in contemporary Christianity. But that’s an article all its own. In all my blogs I love to start a conversation so please feel free to talk back; even with religion discussion is an important piece.

So admittedly this title is a little bit of clickbait. If you’ve grown up in the orbit of Christian faith you’ve probably heard of this phraseology of the Kingdom of God. The phrase “Kingdom of God” or the invocation of it implicitly is used more than 63 times between the Old and New Testaments. That’s a low estimate at least; if you shorten it to just Kingdom there are 480 instances across 14 translations of the bible. In some denominations the phraseology is used very liberally from naming churches to organizing elder councils. It’s one of those phrases that deserves to be unpacked. Jesus had a lot to say about it as well and its stuck around even in the age of democracy because it’s a call to action as much as it is a theological principle.

The Kingdom of God in the Old Testament was very right-here-right-now. For the Israelite Nation and all the descendants of Abraham even after that nation split it was what they were doing right now. King David and all the Kings of Israel for that matter were thought of as servants of God within this very Kingdom. They were the Kingdom of God because they were his chosen people. All the while the screw ups were constant. There is not a single book in the Old Testament where the story does not somehow involve that very present Kingdom being in some kind of jeopardy because someone or a group of people are screwing it up! Often it was the Israelites themselves screwing it up. The whole back half of the Old Testament is essentially prophets coming to the people and telling them to repent and come back to God and the Kingdom that they were supposed to be in him!

It makes sense then that when Jesus comes along he uses the term liberally as well. Once again for the very Jewish Jesus the Kingdom of God was very much at hand right now. In Matthew 10:7 the gospel talks about Jesus going out and telling people the Kingdom of God was at hand. By that point in history the Israelites were back in their homeland but very much occupied by the Roman Empire. For them the Messiah that the prophets had talked about a few hundred years earlier would be a military leader like King David who would lead them into victory in throwing off their colonial overlords. Jesus preaching about a more metaphysical, religious Kingdom was his first major theological departure from Judaism. That departure is really at the core of what makes us Christians… well Christian.

For us Christians the Kingdom of God, the one spoken of by Jesus, is our Christian community. That understanding permeates the theology of every denomination and sect within this religion to different degrees. Mark 9:1 cements this as Jesus literally tells an assembled group of his followers that some of them will live to see the Kingdom. Unless Jesus was lying, the Kingdom of God would have to be a community of his followers then because the Israelites wouldn’t throw off roman oppression. In 70 AD the Siege of Jerusalem would formally end the original Israelite nation and begin the Jewish diaspora. That said, the teaching of the Kingdom of God is a bit sharper than some of us moderns would like to admit. And no I am not advocating for monarchical rule in anyway.

The Kingdom of Heaven on the other hand is very specific. There’s a distinction to be made there that Heaven is a thing theologically and metaphysically separate, at least in our time and place, from what Jesus means when he says Kingdom of God. In Matthew 6:33 Jesus says to seek the Kingdom of God first and then other virtues will be added to you. That’s life advice different from the aspirational phraseology of getting into heaven even within that same chapter. As the apostles would preach after Christ’s death the Kingdom of God is something to be made here on earth… there are even places where the Greek word for build or build with your hands is used in the books of the missionary disciples later in the New Testament.

The claim I just made isn’t controversial. In most every Christian denomination there is this call to action in building up the Kingdom of God here on earth. It’s in hymns and homilies the world over. Most missionary credos are rooted in some way building up the Kingdom of God in addition to the Great Commission. In the Catholic tradition Saints and Doctors of the Church preach very stridently about how us as one Church need to build up the will of God in the world and establish his Kingdom right here on earth. This is where the eschatology comes in. No, that’s not a medical field, that’s the study of the end times or how theology deals with how human civilization ends. Think of this as the study of the apocalypse but in nicer terms if you will. This is where the Kingdom of God really gets lost on us these days.

How you talk about the end of time matters. While the hardcore biblical flawlessness of some protestant sects have developed an eschatology not unlike a Jerry Bruckheimer apocalypse film a la Armageddon or Deep Impact, the teachings of some of the older, more mainline protestant and catholic/orthodox sects is much lighter on the pyro budget. The Left Behind series captivated me as a child. To think everyone who loves Jesus enough gets vanished away before a decade and a half of absolute mayhem and the eventual Second Coming of Christ in an epic battle against the anti-Christ is pretty rad to say the least. There may or may not be dragons in this version of eschatology, I’m not kidding. It reads like the script for a Video Game I would buy in a heartbeat. Who wouldn’t want that to be true if you count yourself on team Jesus, eh? Well, the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it doesn’t neatly fit into that eschatology.

When I said many mainline protestant and catholic/orthodox sects are a bit lighter on their eschatology I mean it. The canonical Catholic teaching could be summarized on a post-it note: Jesus comes back at the right hand of the father to rule over the Kingdom of God. That’s essentially it. The idea that’s heavily implied in Jesus words and the more orthodox ways to understand Christian eschatology is that there is no trigger for a tremendous religious epic at the end of days. No, the Kingdom of God, if you trace the theological moorings all the way through Bible and Tradition is that we have a job to do.

We have a job to do as Christians that isn’t just bringing others to Christ or love one another. The reality of the teaching of the Kingdom of God the way Jesus preached it is that Christians have world building to do. We have to build the Kingdom of God right here right now until the time Jesus comes back. There is no rapture, we don’t get to say goodbye to the work at some point: we have to build up the Kingdom for Christ to return to. We are the trigger for the establishment of the Kingdom in a way.

But wait Andrew, isn’t that taking a lot from the implied? I don’t know, Rapture and Tribulation theology is a lot to take from a bible that doesn’t ever use the world rapture. Most of the canon of Christian teaching is more or less implied. The way Jesus wants marriage to be is implied for example: the one big mention of the institution of marriage that is so often pointed out in the Gospel of Matthew is unclear whether its Jesus making an incidental comment on cultural mores of the time as part of a larger teaching or any real exhortation of a specific vision for marriage. That example is a fantastic segway into the real kicker of this blog that justifies the clickbait title: we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

Does it help to build up the Kingdom of God to be so divisive? Though we live in a time of greater communications connectivity than any other time in human history, we still find plenty of ways to malign each other and build walls. Christian teaching, particularly in the United States and the industrialized West has taken on a certain spice of consumerism that is ultimately unhelpful. Mega Churches with charismatic preachers at the center preach a buffet version of Christianity that at best asks you to talk about Jesus to your friends occasionally. Meanwhile those same churches go as far as funding political candidates and telling you who to vote for as more a statement of power for themselves than any real concerted effort to build a vision of the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps the most troubling thing I see, even just in American Catholicism, is that political sides get conflated with religious theologies creating two separate ideological camps within the same Catholic Church. And don’t go right to that boomer praying their rosary watching EWTN stereotype. Go on any Catholic forum online and you will quickly run into Millennial Catholics drawing distinctions between “Trads” or Traditional Catholics and “Liberal” Catholics. I’ve done enough study of Catholic theology to tell you there is no conservative or liberal Catholicism, we’ve just gotten to a profoundly stupid time in Christian history where we’d prefer to have distinct factions than unified vision.

The theology of the Kingdom of God in Christian teaching is a call to work together and build a better world. It’s not that hard to figure it out with a basic understanding of Gospel and Tradition. Yet we seem to live in a time where there is Christian Faith and then there is the Kingdom of God that Christians don’t want.

Thanks for Reading.