Now or Then
If one has a remnant of brain left it seems a shame not to use it before it's gone altogether, so I’ll give it one more shot this morning, Monday, 27 Jan 2020.
Reasonable walk for two determined octogenarians in our middle eighties, from Holy Pavilion to Cherry Street, down to W.Beach Drive, along the Bay, then bent over and dragging uphill for a grand total 1.5 miles (who thinks that’s funny, wait till you’re 84 looking at 85). But then next, drive west on Beach Drive to Big Mama’s on the Bayou for enough breakfast to blot out any possible health benefit of the walk. I brought half my breakfast to the office.
Been thinking, after yesterday’s Sunday School session, about St Paul and his apocalypticism that informed the gospel he taught and preached, and further, his view of how that would come to pass. Jesus (Paul mostly says Christ) anointed as God’s Son, returning, as or instead of the cosmic Son of Man of Daniel’s night vision, to earth to judge the living and the resurrected dead, to sort the saved into spiritual bodies, and to reign forever. All this to occur, not in a heaven above the firmament that the first Soviet cosmonauts were said to have noticed wasn't there, but here on earth. This would be the “resurrection of the body” (Baptismal Covenant) or “resurrection of the dead” (Nicene Creed, προσδοκῶμεν ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν, literally, "expecting a dead death", ie, death destroyed) that we subscribe to as an element of faith. In which Who will be Saved is in the power of the Cross and Easter, Romans 10:9, "whoever confesses that Jesus is Lord and believes that God raised him from the dead will be saved”.
My rough spot in all this is that my personal Christian faith is not so I can get into heaven when I die, but to live faithfully in this life, coming from often hearing my father say, “We don’t have a religion to die by, we have a religion to live by”, which I think complies with Paul's exhortation about how we must live until Christ comes as well as with what Jesus commands from Hebrew scripture, Love God & Love Neighbor. I heard my father say this any number of times, in response to the question often heard by those of us who grew up here in the Bible Belt, “Are you saved?”
We took the questioner to be asking about salvation immediately upon death into a delightful afterlife in heaven; whereas Paul’s view is of being asleep in Jesus (ie, dead) now, but soon when Christ returns and stirs the general resurrection and saves all faithful living and dead into the kingdom of God on earth.
Always certain of nothing, I don’t think what Paul envisioned is what Fundamentalists whom I knew as a boy visualized in the question “Are you saved?” Or what the Rev Jerry Falwell had in mind when he exhorted folks to pray the sinner’s prayer so as to be “as sure for heaven as if you’re already there”. For years, I enjoyed Jerry on television, and he closed every Sunday service with that assurance. So, I would need clarification from a Christian who identifies as an Evangelical.
But clarification in face to face discussion, as for example in Sunday School, not on this blog, which is not meant to be a forum. Ones whom we love and have loved, and who have loved us, die, die, die all around us even as we live on without them. What do you visualize? Are they waiting for us? What of the assertion in our PrayerBook (481), "a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love"? What the average Episcopalian in the pew visualizes, I don’t think lines up with Paul’s gospel. Faithwise, I think most folks are into the immediacy that we read into Jesus promising the penitent thief, "Today you will be with me in Paradise". But that's Jesus, not Paul.
IDK. I do know that no amount of belief makes anything true fact; but we're not talking about knowledge here, we're talking about Faith, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
T
Art pinched off the web, with gratitude.
Reasonable walk for two determined octogenarians in our middle eighties, from Holy Pavilion to Cherry Street, down to W.Beach Drive, along the Bay, then bent over and dragging uphill for a grand total 1.5 miles (who thinks that’s funny, wait till you’re 84 looking at 85). But then next, drive west on Beach Drive to Big Mama’s on the Bayou for enough breakfast to blot out any possible health benefit of the walk. I brought half my breakfast to the office.
Been thinking, after yesterday’s Sunday School session, about St Paul and his apocalypticism that informed the gospel he taught and preached, and further, his view of how that would come to pass. Jesus (Paul mostly says Christ) anointed as God’s Son, returning, as or instead of the cosmic Son of Man of Daniel’s night vision, to earth to judge the living and the resurrected dead, to sort the saved into spiritual bodies, and to reign forever. All this to occur, not in a heaven above the firmament that the first Soviet cosmonauts were said to have noticed wasn't there, but here on earth. This would be the “resurrection of the body” (Baptismal Covenant) or “resurrection of the dead” (Nicene Creed, προσδοκῶμεν ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν, literally, "expecting a dead death", ie, death destroyed) that we subscribe to as an element of faith. In which Who will be Saved is in the power of the Cross and Easter, Romans 10:9, "whoever confesses that Jesus is Lord and believes that God raised him from the dead will be saved”.
My rough spot in all this is that my personal Christian faith is not so I can get into heaven when I die, but to live faithfully in this life, coming from often hearing my father say, “We don’t have a religion to die by, we have a religion to live by”, which I think complies with Paul's exhortation about how we must live until Christ comes as well as with what Jesus commands from Hebrew scripture, Love God & Love Neighbor. I heard my father say this any number of times, in response to the question often heard by those of us who grew up here in the Bible Belt, “Are you saved?”
We took the questioner to be asking about salvation immediately upon death into a delightful afterlife in heaven; whereas Paul’s view is of being asleep in Jesus (ie, dead) now, but soon when Christ returns and stirs the general resurrection and saves all faithful living and dead into the kingdom of God on earth.
Always certain of nothing, I don’t think what Paul envisioned is what Fundamentalists whom I knew as a boy visualized in the question “Are you saved?” Or what the Rev Jerry Falwell had in mind when he exhorted folks to pray the sinner’s prayer so as to be “as sure for heaven as if you’re already there”. For years, I enjoyed Jerry on television, and he closed every Sunday service with that assurance. So, I would need clarification from a Christian who identifies as an Evangelical.
But clarification in face to face discussion, as for example in Sunday School, not on this blog, which is not meant to be a forum. Ones whom we love and have loved, and who have loved us, die, die, die all around us even as we live on without them. What do you visualize? Are they waiting for us? What of the assertion in our PrayerBook (481), "a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love"? What the average Episcopalian in the pew visualizes, I don’t think lines up with Paul’s gospel. Faithwise, I think most folks are into the immediacy that we read into Jesus promising the penitent thief, "Today you will be with me in Paradise". But that's Jesus, not Paul.
IDK. I do know that no amount of belief makes anything true fact; but we're not talking about knowledge here, we're talking about Faith, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
T
Art pinched off the web, with gratitude.