The forgotten man

 Matthew 1:18-25:

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 23 “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”   

He was a man faced with a detestable duty. He was a man of compassion, even tenderness. But he was also a man of honor, a man of a stern code. His obedience to the Law was unwavering. The moment he learned that his betrothed wife was pregnant he knew that it was the end of their betrothal, and potentially even the end of her life.

It was two millennia ago in the Roman-occupied land of Judea. Mary, was going to have a baby and it was not his. Compassion, honor, and duty dueled within Joseph. He could not pretend there was no problem. She obviously had betrayed him. The whole town of Nazareth was watching.

It would have been easy for Joseph to put Mary through the spectacle of public denunciation and cancellation of their betrothal, which would have disgraced and humiliated Mary before the entire community. But Joseph was both righteous and compassionate, so he decided to send her away quietly.

It had to have been a tough decision. It wasn’t that Joseph was head over heels in love with Mary. In the arranged marriages of his day, it’s quite possible that Joseph did not even know Mary very well. Joseph’s conflict of conscience was likely not about what to do to one he loved, but over the ever-present tension of how to do what the Law required. 

To say that Joseph was a righteous man meant that he adhered to the Law. Righteousness and religious lawfulness were the same thing to Judean Jews. As a righteous man, Joseph knew he could not pretend Mary had not transgressed, and transgression it could only be since Mary was pregnant and Joseph knew he was not involved. As a righteous man, Joseph could not be blamed for choosing to have Mary disgraced before the community, for the Law did authorize at least that. Joseph’s crisis was that his righteousness impelled him to do the right thing by the Law, but he didn’t like it. Finally, Joseph decided Mary would have to pay the price for infidelity as the Law required, but on his terms. He would break his betrothal to Mary and send her away without fanfare, leaving her to fend for herself. Doubtless from Mary’s point of view that would have been unpleasant, but she would not be subjected to public humiliation. 

After Joseph had made up his mind, he dreamed of an angel. The angel filled Joseph in on the rest of the story that Mary’s unborn child was from the Holy Spirit. 

In Joseph’s dream the angel gave Joseph two instructions. First was to take Mary home as his wife and second to adopt Mary’s child as his own, giving him the name Jesus. 

Matthew uses the word “Jesus” eighty times. This name was a popular one in the first century. Paul mentions a man named Jesus as one who send greetings in his letter to the Colossians. A man named Jesus is included in Christ’s genealogy in Luke, although some Bible versions call this person Joshua or Jose. Even Barabbas’ first name was Jesus. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus names twenty different men he knew named Jesus. “Jesus,” as a name, was about as distinguished as, well, “Don” is today.

The Son of God receives an ordinary name, uniting him with the people of this world rather than separating him from them. In Hebrew the name is Yeshua, which means “God helps.” In Joseph’s day, when a Jewish man gave a name to the child born to his wife, he was announcing that the child was his own. Maybe Joseph’s and Mary’s families knew that Joseph was not the baby’s natural father, maybe they didn’t. It didn’t matter. When Joseph publicly named the baby Jesus, he was also giving to Jesus his own identity, his own lineage, and that settled that. Jesus then could truly be said to be of the line of David, because Joseph was of David’s line and Joseph announced  Jesus as his own son. “This child belongs to me, this child is my child,” is what Joseph proclaimed when he named the child Jesus. 

Joseph gets the short end of the Christmas stick. Mary gets a lot more play. Did you know that Joseph never speaks in the Gospels? Joseph hears, Joseph dreams, Joseph acts and Joseph obeys, but there is no record of even one syllable he uttered. Mary is the one with the speaking part. Mary is the one of whom Michelangelo carved the Pieta, one of the most beautiful statues ever made. Her role is the most sought after in Christmas pageants. 

Another pastor told me of one afternoon before the annual children’s Christmas program, when a mother phoned the church office to say that her son, who was to play the role of Joseph in the Christmas play, was sick and wouldn't be able to be there. “It's too late now to get another Joseph,” the director of the play said. “We'll just have to write him out of the script.” And they did, and few of those who watched that night realized that the cast was incomplete. Joseph is so easy to overlook and leave out.

In 1993, my wife Cathy played Mary in the Christmas pageant at our church in Virginia. They asked her to play Mary because they wanted an actress who was gracious and beautiful and devout. Also, because they needed a woman with a newborn infant, our two-month-old daughter, Elizabeth, to play the baby Jesus. Elizabeth and Cathy, Jesus and Mary, were a package deal, couldn’t get one without the other. But any guy off the street could have played Joseph. In fact, the associate pastor asked me, “Did you want to play Joseph, or should we get a man from the choir to play him?” I said I would but talk about feeling like a fifth wheel … .

Which made me think: We should ponder theologically where Joseph fits in with God’s redemption of humankind. Joseph’s adoption of Jesus is not insignificant. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Paul says that through Jesus Christ we are adopted as children of God. It is a common and emphatic theme with Paul. Paul calls followers of Christ sons of God and children of God, and let’s be fair, if Paul were alive today, he would say daughters of God, too.

Before God adopted us as children of God in the family of Christ, God sent his son to be adopted by Joseph into the family of humankind. Jesus really is Immanuel, God with us. We really are brothers and sisters with Christ and through Christ with one another. Joseph affirmed on behalf of all humanity that God belongs with us. 

What if Joseph had said no to the angel and had sent Mary away anyway? Can we imagine Jesus growing up in the home of an unwed, single mother in first-century Judea? In what way would Jesus have ever known God as his heavenly Father if Joseph had never taken on the role of Jesus’ earthly father? It took courage for Joseph to claim Jesus as his own. His example calls for us to muster the courage to make Jesus our own as well. 

Hear then anew the Word of God, Matthew 1.18-25:

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 

 23 “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”   

24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25 but had no union with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Joseph adopted the Son of God as the child of humankind, and through Christ God adopts human beings as children of God. There seems to be a symmetry of salvation and relationship at work. It is a Marvelous Exchange! We see in Joseph’s story that we and God belong to each other in and through the one whom Joseph named Jesus, “God helps.”

Endnote: Engagement and marriage were different in first-century Judea than for us today. For us, there are two stages of becoming married: engagement and then the marriage ceremony. Joseph and Mary and other men and women of their day and place went through three stages: engagement, or something close to what we think the word means, then betrothal, in which the couple was considered the same as married, but they did not live together nor consummate the marriage. This stage usually lasted about a year, after which they would live together and husband and wife in the normal sense of the word. (Some historians say that engagement and betrothal were actually the same thing back then.) Mary was still betrothed to Mary when he learned she was with child.

 

This is the original ship's bell of USS Arizona, recovered from the sunken vessel and now on display at the entrance to the National Park Service pavilion across the channel from the memorial.

The coming Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference

The final organizational meeting of the not-quite-achieved Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference was held Dec. 4 via Zoom teleconferencing. The Tennessee and Memphis Conferences will be officially merged in January 2022 into the new Conference. 

The entire video record of the Dec. 4 meeting is here and embedded below. Bishop Bill McAllily's message for the day begins at the 33.05 mark. I highly recommend it! 

(For those who may not know, Bishop McAllily is bishop of both present conferences, a practice that began decades before his assignment here.)

The Time of Your Life

One summer Saturday some years ago, my wife and daughter and I were returning from Durham, North Carolina. They wanted to stop at Black Mountain, a small town just north of I-40 to the west of Asheville. They wanted to shop at the Doncaster outlet store there. I argued not. I wanted to go to the town also. I did not want to buy clothing. I wanted to buy some more time. 

There is a place there called Pellom's Time Shop. My friend Gerard Vanderleun wrote about it a few years ago on his web site.

It's the oldest shop in Black Mountain, North Carolina. None of the other shop keepers can remember a time when it wasn't here. Nobody in town can remember a time when Pellom himself wasn't here. The Time Shop and Pellom may well have been here before the town was here; before even the Cherokee were here. Nobody can say. ...

Most people look into the cluttered and dust-layered window of the Time Shop and walk on by. After all, most are retired and have, they think, all the time in the world.

Pellom doesn't mind. He knows what time it is. He also knows what can happen to time. How it can come unsprung. How it can run slow and still run fast. How time runs down. How time goes by. How time runs out. That's why he's careful, when he can, to save time.

You can, if he decides he likes you, buy some time at the Time Shop. All you have to do is to step through the seldom used door of the Time Shop and say "Good afternoon, Mr. Pellom." Then you need to look around the shop carefully and slowly. You need, most of all, to take your time. 

In time, if the time is right, Pellom will glance up at you from behind his bench, his green eyeshade shadowing his eyes, and say, "What can I get you?" Not "What are you looking for?," or "How can I help you?," but "What can I get you?"

You'd be well advised to take him at his word and say, "I'd like to buy some more time."

Then, if your request is timely, Pellom will nod and fetch a small loud-blue glass-stoppered bottle from the shelf behind him and bring it over to the counter and put it down in front of you with a sharp, satisfying clack on the glass of the counter. Looking into it all you will see is, towards the center, the faintest mist made from the color out of space and inside that, towards the core of the mist, a shovel of stars.

"Very good, sir," Pellom will say. "How much time would you like?"

I'd advise you to buy as much time as you can afford, as often as you can afford it, time after time.

Just because Pellom has some extra time today doesn't mean he won't be out of time tomorrow. Most of the time, time is always in short supply. Tonight, while you sleep, your government will be awake printing more money. Nobody is printing more time.

Which is why you should be careful how you spend time in the first place. Just ask Pellom down at the Time Shop.

"Nobody is printing more time."

 
One day in seminary we pulled our desks into a circle and took sixteen squares of paper the instructor passed out. She'd been years a chaplain at a large Catholic hospital. On four squares, she said, write the names of the four people you love most. On another four, the names of the four places you enjoy most to go to. The third, your four favorite ways to spend leisure time. The fourth, your four favorite restaurants. We complied.

"Now listen," she said. "You have recently had exploratory surgery and the doctor has the lab tests back. You are in his office. 'It's cancer,' he says. (Pause) Now, select any one of the sixteen pieces of paper, crumple it into a ball and throw it into the middle of the room."

My piece of paper marked "Six Flags" went sailing. I don't get there all that often and anyway, I can’t take the roller coasters any more.

She said, "You will begin chemotherapy this coming Monday. Toss another piece of paper."

This time I crumpled up a restaurant and pitched it into the pile. 

"The chemotherapy did not work. Next is radiation therapy, but the oncologist has already told you that its chances are less than the chemo. Throw one more piece." 

And so it went. You throw away a piece of your life one at a time. At first, it's not hard because for each of the four categories for which you have written four items, there is always one item that does not mean that much to you and so is quickly tossed. 

Until about the ninth or tenth throw when you realize that you have kept every piece of paper with the names of the people you love most. Almost every restaurant is gone and all but one favorite place to go. Before long she says, "The cancer is in stage four and is inoperable. The doctor prescribes hospice care." 

And your papers mock you like a two-high hand with a missing card, because all that are left are the names of the four people you love most - for me they were my wife and three children.

"Throw away a piece of paper," she says.

I stare. Who shall I throw away? And the answer is no one. Game over. I fold my hand by laying the papers down and leaning back in my chair.

"Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care about time?"

So, I went to find Pellom's Time Shop, not really believing that Pellom would fetch a small, cloud-blue, glass-stoppered bottle from the shelf behind him and bring it over to the counter and put it down in front of me with a sharp clack on the glass on the counter. And even if he did such a thing, I did not think that looking into it that all I would see is, towards the center, the faintest mist made from the color out of space and inside that, towards the core of the mist, a shovel of stars.

It was not easy to find the Time Shop because it is so small. I almost went into the shop next door but corrected myself. A gray-headed man was standing near the door facing the right wall, passing time when I walked in. He turned slightly toward me and said hello. 

"Hello," I answered. I awaited the question I knew had to come: "What can I get you?" Not "What are you looking for?," or "How can I help you?," but "What can I get you?"

"Pretty cool day today," he said. 

"Yes," I answered, "it is." Chit chat was not what I expected. I asked, "Are you Mr. Pellom?" It seemed a foolish question, for who else would be in here?

"John Pellom," he said. "Indeed." He put his right hand out. 

I took at and shook it gently. "My name is Don Sensing." 

There were clocks scattered around the whole shop, some in pieces. One thing John Pellom has plenty of is time. Time is everywhere in the Time Shop. (It is a real place, you know.) 

"Ah, well, Mr. Don Sensing, I am glad to meet you,” John said. “What brings you here today?" 

"My wife and daughter are presently bankrupting me over at Doncasters, and I don't want to be there for that bloodletting. So I searched for your Time Shop."

"How did you know I was here?"

"I read about your shop on the Internet." I pulled out my smartphone and opened Gerard's essay and showed it to him. He scanned it quietly. He read about the small, cloud-blue, glass-stoppered bottle and the mist of stars. 

"Well," he said, "that would really be something." 

We made small talk for a few moments. I gave him my card and briefly explained what we had done on vacation. He told me that he kept busy repairing globe clocks and putting antique wristwatches back into service. His father opened the Time Shop in 1929. "Not before the Cherokee?" I quizzed.

John chuckled. "Well, I don't think so."

My phone buzzed. I knew it was the deadly shopping duo texting me that the MasterCard was now maxed out and would I please go to a bank and bring them a wheelbarrow full of ben franklins. A look at my phone showed I was right. I nodded at Mr. Pellom. "John, it was a pleasure meeting you. I hope you are open for a long time." I turned toward the door.

"Reverend Sensing," John said. I glanced back. He peered kindly at me a moment. "One more thing I have to ask you." I felt his pale blue eyes looking right through mine to the infinity beyond the Time Shop. 

"What can I get you?" 

I said nothing for two heartbeats, then spoke slowly. "I'd like to buy some more time."

There was no shelf behind him. He reached into his pocket and produced a small, cloud-blue, glass-stoppered bottle. "Take this," he said, "and look inside." 

There was, just as Gerard had written, a faint mist of a color out of space and inside that, towards the core of the mist, a shovel of stars. 

At that time, time stood still. Traffic outside ceased, birdsongs stopped, the dust mites in the sunbeam froze in the air. The ticking of the clocks in the Time Shop stopped. 

The bottle drew me in so that I barely had time to think, then I was surrounded by timelessness. There were scenes. Sometimes just still shots and sometimes short clips of short seconds - except there were no seconds, or minutes, or hours, because those things are all time. Inside the cloud-blue bottle there was no time.

There I was as a small boy learning to ride a bike. There I was with neighborhood kids playing kick the can after dark. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Jarvis, unjustly punishing me for another kid's spill of paint, but I didn't fink. A home run in a backyard game. Walking Valerie home from school. My first job at Woodlawn Market and owner Pappy's fondness for the bottle, but he was always a jolly drunk.

My grandfather teaching me to milk cows and my grandmother rocking me when I was small. Creeks I stomped in, Boy Scout hikes and merit badges. First girl I kissed. Hunting and golfing with my dad. First day of college. First parachute jump. A pretty girl who told me she liked my beard. Commissioned an Army officer. Learning to fly. Wedding day. Births of children. Honors and awards. Ordination service. This was the highlight reel and it felt good. 

The blue bottle wasn't finished.

The lies I told. The kids I treated badly because they were different. The lessons I would not learn. The defiance to my parents. The anger at my brothers. The blows I landed. The push I gave a child when I got home and all he wanted to do was hug me. The prideful stands and the cruel words said. The barriers I put up. The books I didn't read to my children. Contemptuous words uttered. Affections neither accepted nor given. Arguments started. The cursory treatments. The tantrums. The self-centeredness, the caring never rendered, the people dismissed, the love-worthy ignored. This was the low-light reel. It burned white hot.

The blue bottle wasn't finished.

The kindnesses given. Taking Mrs. Adams’ paper to her in the winter because she couldn’t walk in the snow. The elderly befriended. The mother's hand held at her son's last breath. The prayers for the grieving, the bereaved consoled. My shoulder to cry on. The blessings invoked. The needy assisted. The children cared for. The life I saved. The new believers and infants baptized, the celebrations blessed, the dying anointed. The Word spoken truly, the sacraments offered duly. The friendships offered and the hands extended. The prisoners visited, the hungry fed, the naked clothed, the strangers welcomed, the sick cared for. The counsels offered. The listening ear.

The scenes ended. Time returned. I looked up. John Pellom was there as before. I dared to ask, "Did I get more time?"

He shook his head. "Son, no mortal can give you more time."

"But the blue bottle ..."

He raised his hand. "All it can do is show you the time of your life, so far."

My phone buzzed. I ignored it. "Is there a lesson here?"

John glanced at my card. "Reverend, you know the lesson."

I did, but I needed to hear it. "Tell me."

He locked his eyes on mine. "There is only one question you will have to answer before the Lord when that time comes: ‘How did you spend the time of your life?’."

A gentle smile crossed John's face. "Now what do you think the right answer is?"

My phone buzzed again. "It's time for you to go," John said.

"Thank you for your time, John," I answered. We shook hands. "Anytime," he said.

I left the Time Shop and walked back to the car where waited my wife and daughter. We sat in the car for a short time. "Where did you go?" Cathy asked.

I told her of the Time Shop and showed her the two photos I had taken. I tried to read her Gerard's explanation of the Time Shop but could not make it to the end. Time was out of joint. The fabric of time had been ripped and had not yet been woven back together. Rain was falling, closing the world off from us. We were silent for a time, then she said, "It's time to go." 

I started the car and we drove home.

"Does anybody really know what time it is? 

"Does anybody really care about time?"

One of the church seasons is called “ordinary time,” that follows Pentecost. Jesus was born and lived and died in ordinary time, times of triumph and despair, of achievements and setbacks, of caring and injustice. In a way, every day of our lives is ordinary time. 

And yet, is it not still the time of Pentecost? For the Holy Spirit is always among us, always leading, always strengthening us, always at our sides and in our hearts. 

And it is always the time of Christ the King, for Jesus still reigns, he still lives, and still relies on us to do his will. 

This is the season of Advent. It is always Advent, for we always celebrate that Christ has come, and we know that Christ will come again. 

It is the season of Christmas, for we always rejoice that Christ was born, that God became human and lived with us to bring us to eternity with him. 

It is Lent. It is always Lent, for we always should be repentant. 

Best of all, thank the Lord, today is Easter. It is Easter every day, for in our baptism we have died as Christ did, we been raised in new life, and we look forward to our own resurrection to come. 

Christ will come again. When he does, no matter how it is phrased, our Lord will really want to know one thing: How did you spend the time of your life?

What do you think the right answer is?

When the Lord returns in his glory, he will say to those at his right hand, 

.“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

.“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another” 

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.’"

 No one is printing more time. The time of our lives is measured only by the love we give away, so make sure you always have time enough for love.

The season's reason

 

Welcome to the Time of Your Life!

 My message for the First Sunday of Advent, Nov. 28, 2021:

Update: The original video for this post simply vanished. This is a later upload.

Facebook Jail for citing the Bible

 I left the following as a comment on a FB friend's post. He is a somewhat progressive Methodist minister whose post was about how the Bible does or does not inform us on our obligations regarding immigrants illegally entering the United States. (That the same obligations would apply regarding those entering legally is not ever brought up, of course.) 

Below was my sole comment, which FB deleted because it "violated" Facebook's nebulous, never-public and ever-changing "community standards," which means it somehow presented a point of view that FB does not want to permit. 

See what you think. This is the verbatim, unedited comment except that I have deleted the name of the FB friend who posted it, nothing else. 

I am not disagreeing with you. But I am going to point out what a quite progressive pastor of my conference said at a ministers' meeting some years ago, I do not recall the context but I do recall her response. It was, "We are all biblical fundamentalists; it just depends on the topic."

There are definitely teachings, requirements, and admonitions in the Tanak about how the people of Israel were to interact with resident aliens. Should we adopt ALL of them as in force for our modern day and time? For example, there are clear, unambiguous mandates that marriages of Jews to foreigners is strictly prohibited. Can we go all fundamentalist with that today?

Then there are modern-day Jewish scholars of biblical Hebrew who say that the term "resident alien" is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word "toshav."

And finally, to close this comment, this article: "The Use and Abuse of the Bible in the Immigration Debate."

Here is the link to the article about the toshav by Joram Mayshar  of The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. 

So what exactly are the "community standards" that this violates? What are the biblical-interpretation credentials of the FB "fact checker" who yanked the comment (or more likely, what algorithm of FB's scanning software got triggered)? 

There is no logic or rationality to how or why of Facebook's cancel culture. 

Military snipe hunts

Originally posted in 2014

Got to admit that in my military career I never personally knew a private who was sent on a military snipe hunt for turn blinker lubricant. Junior enlisted soldiers - and airmen, sailors and Marines - are sent off on such snipe hunts by slightly more senior and experienced troops. Some of the non-existent items they are sent to retrieve are tent locks, range fans to blow the fog off the rifle range, 50 feet of chow line, left-threaded kanootin valves, a can of radio squelch, bayonet extensions and the like. It's a sort of rite-of-passage thing for noobs. So Pvt. Snuffy is told to see the supply clerk for the item. 

The supply sergeant has been around and he immediately understands what's happening, so he says, "I just issued my last propellant regenerator to base piece, try them." So off Snuffy goes to base piece, where he is informed they gave it to the mess section to clean. And the mess section had it just an hour ago, but they sent it to the maintenance section for repair. And around and around and around he goes, never, of course, finding such an item.

Of course, some clever young troops figure out the score pretty quick and realize that they can take a whole day just walking around uselessly while the rest of their section are up to their elbows in grease working on some truck or tracked vehicle. 

A perennial-favorite snipe hunt is to send Snuffy off for a box of grid squares. Now, a grid square is a real thing. Military maps are printed with terrain features overlaid with thin lines forming boxes, representing to scale one kilometer squares. The squares are numbered by their easting and northing, so it makes perfect sense to refer to grid square 1436. Even new privates know this, so when some authority figure - a soldier of a rank or two higher - invents a need for a box of grid squares and sends him off to get it, then he does. But the grid squares are printed on the maps; they are not separate items. So there is no such thing as a "box of grid squares."

Usually. But in the artillery . . .

When I was a second lieutenant in Korea, I was an artillery battery fire direction officer when my battery took duty at fire base Four Papa One at the DMZ. One day Pvt. Snuffy, a mechanic, comes to our bunker and says that the Chief of Smoke (an E7, Sgt. 1st Class, whose duty position was Chief of Firing Battery) had sent him to get a box of grid squares. 

Now an E7 has no business starting this nonsense. These kinds of practical jokes are played by E4's on E2s, not on E2s by E7s. I looked at the buck sergeant who was the fire direction chief, he looked at me, and we both said almost simultaneously, "Wait right here." 

In those days, artillery ballistics computation was not much computerized. We computed firing data manually, using "charts and darts," as we said. We had two large, inclined tables. On one we mounted a large map of the potential targets areas. To keep the map clean we laid over it a sheet of unmarked, transparent plastic that was manufactured gridded in the same scale as the map. We would notate targets and other pertinent data on the plastic overlay and derive terrain information from the map. The other inclined table had no map, just the overlay plastic over white paper. This chart was used only to compute direction data for firing. All the targets were marked on it as well. 

The plastic overlays got scuffed and worn from constantly being written on, erased, and written on again. After about three days they had to be replaced. So we had a bountiful supply of used overlays. We'd keep them for several days then burn them all together. And all the overlays were gridded into squares. 

So my sergeant and I went to the back of the bunker and retrieved a used overlay. Using scissors, we carefully cut out 12-15 of the grid squares from an unused section. We put them in an empty pencil box, marked it "Grid Squares" with a Magic Marker, and gave it to Snuffy without the slightest hint of irony. He thanked me profusely, since he had been sent from the motor pool to the mess hall to the CP section to the base howitzer to the ammo section and finally to us, all with the stern admonition from the Smoke, "Don't come back here without the grid squares." Now, he had them. He was a happy young man. 

I was told by another NCO the next day that Snuffy, innocent as a lamb, went back to Smoke and gave him the box, saying, "Lieutenant Sensing said he can give you all the grid squares you want." And that the look on the Smoke's face when he opened the box to find - sure darn enough, grid squares - was worth taking a burst of six to see.

Groundhog Day, Heaven, and Hell

Yesterday while taking my daily deck break, I paged through what was available on the Fire TV we use out there. I spotted Groundhog Day, a cult classic movie starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, now acclaimed as one of the best films of the 1990s. The movie was about one-fourth done and even though I have it in my collection and have watched it a fair number of times, I clicked it on. 

And it struck me powerfully that this movie is about its lead character, Bill Murray as TV weatherman Phil Connors, living in Hell every day and not even knowing it - until he does. 

He and his producer, Rita (Andi McDowell) and cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) are sent to Punxsutawney, Penn., on Feb. 2 to cover the annual appearance of the famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, and its prediction of six more weeks, or not, of winter. Phil Connors (not coincidentally having the same name as the groundhog) considers the assignment beneath him. He is a jerk from beginning to end and deliberately delivers a sarcastic report of "six more weeks of winter." 

Leaving town, they are unexpectedly forced to return to Punxsutawney because of a snowstorm. But the next day he awakens to his radio alarm clock playing exactly the same song, "I Got You Babe," with exactly the same dialog by the announcer duo as the day before. When he hears them say it is Groundhog Day, he looks out the window to see there is no snow on the ground. 

Henceforth, Phil awakens every morning to discover it is Feb.2, Groundhog Day once again, the very same day it was when he woke up the last morning, and the same Feb.2 it will be the next time. Apparently forever. 

For the first several of relived days, Phil decides to hit on women, steal from an armored car to buy a Mercedes, and generally sate his fleshly desires. He even hits on his producer, Rita. But she tells him he is a jerk and rebuffs him. 

This where is struck me that Phil is in Hell. An apparent eternity of repeated Feb.2s, all identical, stretch before him. Nothing he does changes that. He comes to realize he can do anything he wants and no matter how criminal or virtuous he is, the alarm will awaken him again to yet another same old Feb. 2. 

Driven finally to despair, Phil commits suicide - day after day after day, only to wake up afterward on Feb. 2 all over again. He is living in damnation: sure, certain, and unending. 

Or, as Lewis pointed out as well, "Hell is getting your own way - forever." 

Finally, with no purpose in living one day repeated eternally, but knowing he will, Phil begins to do good things for other people. And, knowing that Rita never knows what a jerk Phil was to her on the previous repeated Feb. 2, he sets about trying to seduce her by appearing genuinely caring and compassionate. 

In that he almost succeeds. He does convince her to come to bed, though both are lying on it still fully clothed, and he tells her to go to sleep, promising, "I won't touch you - much." She does sleep, but when the radio alarm blares at 6 a.m. the next morning, Rita is not there. It is Feb. 2 once again.

Finally, Phil devotes his repeated days to living for others and not for himself. He becomes a beloved figure of the town - at least on that endlessly-repeated day. Moreover, he intentionally sets about becoming literally a different man so that Rita might come to love him as much as he has come to love her. 

But how many years of repeated Feb. 2s does it take for him to do that? According to National Post, 

The screenwriter’s initial plan was to have Connors trapped in the time loop for several millennia. The original script contains a final confession by Connors to his love interest Rita that “I’ve been waiting for you every day for ten thousand years.”

However, director Harold Ramis years later told The New York Times that Phil spent 33 or 34 years of repeated days, and people who worry about such things have generally accepted that. 

Finally he succeeds in romancing Rita. She finally does love him and willingly returns with him to his hotel room. She had been there before, several thousand days ago in Phil's reference, when Phil's manner became so revolting she had slapped him hard and walked right out. But on this trip, Phil makes no advances at all.  He yields control of his love to the one whom he loves. 

She goes to bed with him, but importantly, they are both fully clothed just as they had been decades before. This time, though, Phil has not merely suppressed his fleshly desires. He has discarded them as he became filled with other-centered love. And so the night passes.

As usual, Phil is awakened by the  radio alarm clock blaring the same tune it has blared for 34 years worth of Feb. 2s. But the announcers' dialog afterward is different. Phil opens his eyes and suddenly realizes the radio is not playing the same old thing. And then he sees Rita still lying next to him. 

Phil has escaped Hell and entered Heaven. If, as Lewis said, the gates of Hell are locked only on the inside, Phil discovered that the key to the gates are his heart, mind, body and spirit, and how they all are embodied in love. 

Can we really believe in Hell? 

One thing to realize is that Hell is not a future abode of the damned. Human beings are born damned to begin with. Jesus himself said so in John 3, beginning with verse 16, which we usually recite by itself, thus omitting the basic rhetorical point. Here is the whole quote (italics added):

16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

If Groundhog Day can be seen as a metaphor for Hell and Heaven, neither of them is an afterlife. Phil's damnation is not that he dies and goes to Hell. He is in Hell on earth, in this life. His Hell is that even when he dies he is resuscitated to live that same day all over again. Phil's Hell is in this life, but so is the Heaven to which being filled with a pure love of others and of Rita brings him. 

The producers, writers, and director of Groundhog Day did not set out to make a Christian analog. In fact, IIRC, director Ramis professed and practiced Buddhism and saw the cycles of repeated days as an analog to reincarnation. One can also see Hindu overtones in such reincarnation - it is Phil's karma for being such a jerk, for which it takes countless repetitions for whim to work his way to Nirvana. For sure, there is no external Savior in the movie as there is in Christianity. Phil does, finally, save himself, which we Christians have always held is literally impossible. 

Yet to say there is no precise correspondence between the movie and Christian faith is not to say there is none at all. Most cogently, Phil's damnation does not begin later, it is already in place when the movie begins. 

Hence, Pope John Paul II stood on solid Scriptural ground when he wrote that hell “is not a punishment imposed externally by God but a development of premises already set by people in this life. The very dimension of unhappiness which this obscure condition brings can in a certain way be sensed in the light of some of the terrible experiences we have suffered which, as is commonly said, make life ‘hell.’” Hell “is the ultimate consequence of sin itself, which turns against the person who committed it. It is the state of those who definitively reject” God’s mercy.

The Kingdom of Heaven is among us now

If Hell is a real thing in this world - not a place but a state of being - then is Heaven also? Jesus thought so: 

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” Luke 17.20-21

The Greek of the final sentence may also be translated as "... the kingdom of God is within you," which I think is the better phrasing.

But what is the kingdom of God? What is it that is among or within us? Nothing more (but certainly nothing less) than what transformed Phil Connors from living hellishly to heavenly. And what was that?

Once, Jesus was talking with some Pharisees, "...  and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him." 

36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Quite simply, the difference between living in Hell and living in Heaven is love. When Groundhog Day opens, Phil is clearly an unlovely man. And he stays that way for countless years of repeated days. Every day an impoverished, homeless man asks him for help, and every day Phil scorns and rejects him. He is a jerk to Rita and to cameraman Larry. He mocks the townspeople and ridicules their way of living. 

Yet viewers can discern his scorn and hatred is really self directed. He does not love others because he does not even like himself. As for Rita, the future altar of his servanthood love, he tries for many years to seduce her in bed for his own pleasure. Only when he discerns that there is literally nothing but eternal misery in hating  and using others does he start to crawl, slowly and uncertainly, out of Hell toward Kingdom living. 

He has learned the hard way that to discover who he is, he must deny himself. He has to face the abyss looming before the Self, or, as David Hart put it, 

And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

Yet to believe in nothing greater than oneself is destructive of mind and spirit and ultimately of body and soul. That is why first the Jews and later Christians emphasized self denial. For denying the Self is to renew Identity, to discover who one actually is.

Not that this is easy, though, nor perfectly achieved even by the most devoted. As Herman Melville's fictional Preacher Mapple put it in Moby Dick,

Then over time and not without difficulty, we may arrive at the fullness of love, when the Self is dethroned and we then come to know and live what we have come to be - someone whose heart is daily renewed in love because in the love of God, we fall into love every day with those whom God loves.  

God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

 

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21 The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. 1 John 4.15-21

Love is the key to the gate out of Hell. It is locked only on our side. 

Update: An Aristotelian analysis is here, "The Philosophy of 'Groundhog Day': You Can't Escape Until You Know How to Live."

The Greek Philosopher Aristotle taught that the happiness for which human beings strive is not about pleasure, contentment, or satisfaction, but is rather an act. It is specifically the activity of moral and intellectual virtues in human life that is the fulfillment, happiness, and ultimate goal of human life (what Aristotle calls “telos”). This kind of philosophy, then, is not predicated upon something that will result in the future, but in the completion of the act itself, in the moment, for its own sake.

 

This is the conclusion that Phil finally reaches after all of his mistakes and detours through destructive philosophy. Reaching the understanding illustrated by Aristotle, he begins to cultivate precisely those moral and intellectual virtues. He learns to play the piano and make ice sculptures, he learns a generosity of spirit in helping others, and comes to the humbling realization that there are some things he cannot control when he comes up against the brick wall of the homeless man who dies on Groundhog Day every time, no matter what Phil does.

 

It is the structure of the plot itself that causes this character development, and the audience can see at the end that the story was leading to this point from the beginning: when every day is the same, it finally forces Phil to realize that the ultimate meaning in his life is never to be found over the hill in some distant future, but rather in the dedicated activity of building the habit of virtue, in the present moment, every single day. It takes him years of the same day to come to this realization, but it turns out that the time loop was ultimately a blessing, as it is only when he learns the true meaning of life and happiness that he wakes up on February 3rd, finally knowing how to live.

There’s nothing better for a lesson in moral virtue than falling into a cosmic temporal wormhole in a small Pennsylvania town.

Where is the cross in violence?

As the dust settled twenty years ago and rescuers began clearing the wreckage in New York, they came upon a startling scene. Amid the ruins, rescuers came upon a perfectly formed Roman cross, made of the iron of I-beams of World Trade Center building six when it collapsed. 

Word quickly spread. Within a day, work teams entering the wreckage started going to the cross first, praying before it or leaving notes on it. 

On October 3 it was moved to a pedestal on the WTC plaza on Church Street.  In October 2006 the cross was moved the St. Peter's church, which faces WTC plaza, bearing a plaque which read, "The Cross at Ground Zero ‑ Found September 13, 2001; Blessed October 4, 2001; Temporarily Relocated October 15, 2006. Will return to WTC Museum, a sign of comfort for all."

On July 23, 2011, the cross was blessed by Rev. Brian Jordan during a short ceremony and then was taken by a flatbed truck back to the scene of the attacks, where it was emplaced in the National September 11th Memorial and Museum.  

Twenty years - and it is still not over

I made this YouTube video for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. But it is not tied to 2011.

Two must reads

 

Click here.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

 

Click here.

Nothing but a new Great Awakening can save America. Sadly, we have had an awakening of sorts, but in the form of an immanentized apocalypse—climate change—and the substitution of Woke cultishness for the old awareness of sin and redemption. Mr. Johnston has done a great service with his comprehensive survey of our follies and their consequences. His indictment of America’s national decline and its causes in economics, culture, and politics is incisive and convincing, and his overreach in history and philosophy is a minor distraction in the construction of his case. His belief that America has the wherewithal to restore itself shines through, especially in his concluding chapters. During the 1930s we sank into Depression and isolationism, but emerged as the most powerful nation on earth and the leader of the Free World in the 1940s. We languished in what Jimmy Carter called a national malaise during the 1970s but came roaring back with the Reagan Revolution. We have yet to see which spirit will move us.

Litany of remembrance for Sunday, September 12

Remembrance for the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001

Leader: Gracious God, in humility we ask your blessings as we remember a day of great violence twenty years ago.

People: You are the everlasting God, whose love extends to all generations. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

We remember with sadness the thousands who died on September 11, 2001, men and women of wealth, blue-collar workers, military members, government employees, airline passengers and crew - all the people who perished in flames and pain.

We are thankful for the bravery of police officers, firefighters and others who selflessly went into danger to rescue the stricken, and lost their lives or suffered injury in their service.

Continue, O Lord, to give comfort to the families of those who died, grace to those who still struggle with anguished memories or the effects of injuries.

May your Spirit rest upon each one who endured that day, and let the assurance of your presence be strong with them always.

We pray for the people of our land and lands far away, who have suffered or died in the wars of the last twenty years.

We pray for our military and their families, who have lost their lives, endured separation and hardship and for many of whom the war will never truly end.

We pray for our enemies as you commanded us to do. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ fall upon everyone who wishes us harm. May we never take your favor for granted, but strive always to abide humbly in your service.

Help us Lord, to love our enemies and do good to them.

Guide us, O Holy One, to be a nation of holy people. We confess we are not at peace among ourselves or with many peoples across the globe. Lead us of your Churches to move on to Christian perfection in this life. 

We renew our commitment to live as faithful disciples of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, and we renew our obligation to you to lead others to do so also. 

We repent of our sins and pledge to devote ourselves to your Kingdom above all. 

Let there be peace on the earth, O Lord, and let it begin within us and by us starting this day.

Hear us now as we pray together the prayer that our Savior taught us:

Our Father, who are in heaven ... .

Karl Marx on the fundamental error of the $15 minimum wage

Consider:

What Ms. Cash is saying is that she thinks that the amount of work she does must determine the wage she is paid. But not even Karl Marx thought that! In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - The Process of Capitalist Production, Marx gave this explanation:

Karl Marx

Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. ... 

... The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. 

[Following is the key point:] 

The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour's social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

What Marx was saying is that as efficiencies of production increase per unit of time, the value of the labor of the "old" production correspondingly decreases. When powered looms in England doubled the rate of production, the labor value of the prior manual production decreased by half.  

What Ms. Cash and her allies need to understand is what needs to be be said over and over: the actual, real-world minimum wage is $0.00. 

When she gets a raise to $15 per hour she will not increase her production of product. When McDonalds figures out that her work can be automated - as has already happened with electronic ordering kiosks replacing human order takers - the wage value of her work will go down, not up. And she should not be surprised when her wage then drops to zero because her old job is being done by a smart machine for an amortized "wage" of less than $15 per hour.

A good thing to remember

 

How Jesus invented individual liberty

A free nation may be understood as one that is not under occupation or domination of another nation. In that sense the old Soviet Union was a free nation. But it was not was a nation of liberty.

 

Freedom is a political condition. Liberty or its lack is a way of life condition, the ability of a people to live their lives as they wish, with minimum assistance or interference from the state. America's Founders sought to bring forth both a country free of British occupation and a people living in liberty. As Lincoln later put it, America is "a nation conceived in Liberty." Liberty is enjoyed by persons, not by governments. A government may be free, but only persons can be in liberty.

The Declaration of Independence says that one of the unalienable rights of human beings is the right to the pursuit of happiness. No right to achieve it, only the right to pursue it. However the Founders conceived of happiness, they definitely understood that happiness is personal and that the nature of its pursuit was something for each man or woman to decide how best to achieve. That is what liberty means. Our Founders knew that public liberty required private virtue and that liberty did not mean there should be no restraints, but that’s a topic for another day.

My thesis is that the entire idea of individual liberty was invented by Jesus of Nazareth. Literally no one in the world, Jew or Gentile, had conceived of individual, personal liberty before Jesus.

In Jesus’ day the Jews were neither free nor at liberty. Judea, the rump remainder of the ancient, independent Jewish kingdoms, was under direct Roman occupation. The Romans, however, had little interest in how the Judeans lived day to day. As long as the Jews paid Rome’s taxes and accepted Roman dominion peaceably, the Romans were satisfied. The Romans did not even govern Judea directly but through native authorities.

Because of Rome, the Jews were not free. But their lack of liberty was their own doing. Everyone in the ancient Near East, Jews and Gentiles, was tribal. Like today’s Arab Muslims, the Jews identified themselves first by their religion, then their family, clan and tribe, almost always in that order. These groupings defined the norms of behavior and determined almost everything about how its members lived. 

Westerners find it hard to understand the role honor and shame play in Middle Eastern cultures. In 2004, US Marine Maj. Gen. James Mattis, then commanding a Marine division, commissioned a paper for his troops to study called, “Marines are from Mars, Iraqis are from Venus.” Here is how the paper described an Iraqi explaining their sense of honor:

Our sense of honor pervades everything we do. This isn’t the Western definition of honor, it’s more like Hispanic honor of machismo. Perception of manhood is vital and in fact it can be a matter of life and death. A man without honor gets no wife, often no work, and in Iraq he may be shunned or even killed by the own family depending on how grave the offense is. Defending honor is part of our cultural heritage. It is the focal point of everything we do and is jealously guarded. Honor means influence and power, our foremost concern. Less power means fewer contracts, less money, less food, angrier families. We must regain lost honor any way we can, even if it means violently attacking the ones who dishonored us.

Here is a real-world example. In 1982, I was a U.S. Army captain attending the Field Artillery Officer Advanced Course at Ft. Sill, Okla. There were a large number of foreign officers attending. The Arab contingent was pretty large, and most of them were Saudis. But in my section there were two Egyptian lieutenant colonels and one major.

The two light colonels and I became good friends. Their names were Solomon and Osman. They were great guys and real party animals, as Muslim men often are when they reach the decadent, non-Islamic West.

Anyway, one day the entire class of 350 or so was taking a tactics exam in an auditorium-type room. We all sat at long, folding tables and opened the exams when told to start. Needless to say, all the U.S. officers had long ago internalized the credo, "An officer does not lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do." Cheating on this or any other assigned work would end a career!

The first section of the test was multiple choice. To my right rear sat all the Saudi officers in a row. Very soon, we all heard a slue of Arabic, followed by a clear enunciation of the letter, "B." A moment later, more Arabic, then "D." Repeat, ending with "A." And so on.

Throughout the test, the Saudis made no attempt to disguise their verbal collaboration. I was irritated and I was not the only one. But we knew nothing would be done about their cheating for political reasons, and besides, foreign officers' scores did not affect our class standing.

A couple of days later I asked Lt. Col. Solomon why the Saudis were so blatant in their cheating. He broke into laughter and replied, "They were not cheating. The Saudi lieutenant colonel fills the role of the sheikh while they are here. The major next to him was reading his answers to all the rest so they could make sure they did not score higher than him on the test. If they did, it would bring great shame to him and would be dishonorable for the junior officer. Very bad problem, that." 

So to be a first-century Jew or Gentile was to live like that. To be a member of, say, the tribe of Benjamin was to be told what your occupation would be, when you could work and when you could not, whom you would marry, where you would live, what you may do and when, how to treat your parents and relatives, how to raise your children, what you must teach them, how you must worship and when and where, how you must dress, what you may eat and when you may eat it, and countless other things.

The very concept of individual liberty was non-existent. If you could go back in time and tell an ordinary Judean that the God-given rights of men and women were the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one would have understood you any more than if you had tried to explain  suborbital mechanics or antibiotics.

This was social system into which Jesus was born. And he set about it with a wrecking ball. Consider this passage, Luke 14:1, 7-24:

14 On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath ... . 7 When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. 8"When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; 9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, 'Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. 11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

Jesus's discourse on jockeying for position illuminates the kind of cultural values that Jesus grew up in 2,000 years ago, and which is still found across most of the Middle East today (and, in his renunciation of those values, helps explain why he made such powerful enemies). Cultures of honor and shame are literally foreign to Western minds. Matters of honor and shame have certainly been powerful in Western history, but such concerns have always been tempered and tamped by Jesus's teachings that "all who exalt themselves will be humbled." 

But Jesus refuted those concepts and by so doing he invented individual liberty along three lines of teaching:

1.                Jesus denounced the social system of honor and shame that dominated how people lived and related with each other.

2.                Jesus directly refuted the idea that blood relationships could determine how an individual lived his life.

3.                Jesus insisted that the heart of true religion was not obligations imposed upon a person externally, but was an ethic of love from within.

In an honor-shame system, one’s social standing is determined by how well one conforms to the norms of the group. (Anyone remember their teen-age years?) These are not systems found among today's Jews, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Jesus wasn't denouncing Judaism (duh) but a wider-ranged social order that inhibited righteousness. 

Honor-shame systems work differently for men than for women. For men, the focus is on where you stand in the pecking order. To be in debt to someone else, either financially or in obligation, is shameful. To have others obligated to you is honorable. To accomplish is honorable, but if you take too many steps up the ladder at one time, that is shameful.

How the family and clan are shamed or honored by its members is especially important. Hence the sixth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” To bring shame upon one’s elders was literally to risk death. In Matthew 17, Jesus recounts this accusation against him: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” Jesus knew what Deuteronomy 21 says,

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, ... 20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours … is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death.

People accusing Jesus of drunkenness and gluttony were not being merely contemptuous. They were issuing a death threat. Jesus knew it, but he was undeterred. In Luke 9, Jesus told a man, “Follow me.”

But he said, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” But he said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.”

Here Jesus openly committed mutiny against the entire way that Jewish society was organized and understood in that day. This man says he will follow Jesus after his father dies. If his father had already died, he would have been buried within 24 hours and the man would have already been able to follow Jesus. He is not at liberty to do so now because of externally-imposed constraints.

Jesus responds that the man was trapped in the way of death. Leave the way of death behind now, Jesus says, and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Another [man] also said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Jesus tells this fellow not even say goodbye to his family. In other words, do not linger in the way things are now, not even to bid it farewell. You can’t plow a furrow backward so don’t even look that way.

That both these conversations took place in the context of family relationships highlights the serious sedition Jesus was mounting against the entire social order of his time. In that day and place, family relationships were absolutely everything. That Jesus was willing to take a chainsaw to the very fundamental way his entire society was organized illuminates how serious he was about a new way of living. At the end of Matthew 12,

While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”   He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus entirely redefined a fundamental fact about not only the basis of the honor-shame system but the whole society itself: the preeminence of blood relationships. True family would no longer be defined by accident of birth. Who one’s father was of no importance any more – this in network of societies, both Jewish and Gentile, where the words, “Name, son of father’s name” or "name of the house of name" was a common way of referring to oneself.

Henceforth, people were to be members of a family of equals in which there was only one Father, God himself.

Men could gain honor or lose it. Women, however, had nowhere to go but down. A woman’s honor was determined by her sexual status, namely:

• Was she married? To be a spinster was dishonorable. To be a widow was more unfortunate than dishonorable, though dishonor was attached to it some. 
• If married or widowed, did she have children? Being childless was dishonorable.
• Was she chaste before marriage and virtuous after marriage? Sexual purity and fidelity practically defined honor for women, though, as Proverbs 31 explains, to be married with children and to be industrious with a good business sense was the most honorable status of all for a woman.

Jesus kicked this norm down, too. He denounced sexual sin but he denounced also the idea that a woman’s worth was irrevocably damaged by it. So Jesus openly talked with a Samaritan woman of loose morals at a well one day, explaining that he knew all about her highly-checkered past, but that it didn't matter because her future under God’s grace was more important than her past under sin’s grip.

Luke 7 relates when Jesus went to dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. A sinful woman of the city, name and occupation unknown, came to Jesus with a jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Simon objected that if Jesus really was a prophet, he would have know what kind of sinful woman she was. Jesus rebuked him and told the woman, “Your sins are forgiven ... go in peace.” This unnamed woman’s status of sinful dishonor was only important to Jesus insofar as it impelled her to come to him for forgiveness and a reset.

Jesus simply rejected the rigid behavioral norms of his day in favor of what the apostle Paul later called “a more excellent way.” Jesus redefined the most basic relationships of his day so that circumstances of birth and relationship could not set one’s worth. Each individual was liberated to control his or her own destiny by relating primarily to God, and through God to everyone else.

Which is to say: there is no greater honor than to be adopted by God and be the brother or sister of Christ. It was not being born that mattered in living, it was being born anew.  Spiritual rebirth supersedes all other arrangements. Hence, in Christ,

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3.28).

These were not merely new teachings, they were positively revolutionary. No one was bound any longer by conferred status; all were liberated by divine endorsement of their inherent worth as beloved of God. Life in Christ brings personal liberation from every kind of spiritual bondage, including but not limited to politics, self-indulgence, selfishness, self-righteousness, entertainment and even religion itself.

Christ has set us free for freedom’s own sake. It is not through religion that we are freed; it is through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We obey the moral commandments of Jewish tradition and the teachings of Jesus, both in order to gain freedom and because we have already been freed.

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Gal. 5.1): free to love, free to live in joy and peace. Free to be generous in all we have, free to know our worth is God given, not human determined, free to live in ways that please God. We are free to love God and neighbor in the fullest way possible. 

Free at last!

Free at last!

Thank God Almighty,

We’re free at last!