Reasonable and Holy?

Four-thirty-three is quite late to start writing my blog post, because on my preaching Sundays I stop whatever I’m doing at five o’clock and spend an hour for a last look at my sermon notes. Sometimes it’s a really good thing, when I realize OMG I can’t say that, and rework the whole mess.

Wake up, get up three a.m., come downstairs, turn on coffee machine, sometimes as today a few minutes on the treadmill, out both doors to get Linda’s PCNH and NYT. Sit with cuppa, MacBook in lap, open mail, read personal, scan NYT and TWP, check word-a-day for something ripe for tossing impressively off the pulpit, maybe glance at Jonathan Turley’s blog.

Jonathan has Guest Bloggers who give the blog wideness, breadth. Yesterday one GB quit with undefined disagreement, this morning another protest resignation. What’s that about? No clue, but one GB’s final post was intriguing. “Bittersweet: Life and Loss” by a Jewish GB includes the statement, “With some religions, like Christianity and Islam, the palliative to mortality is the attainment of ‘heaven’ after we die and thus immortality. In my religion, Judaism, the promise of an afterlife is at best nuanced, or non-existent.” There is more and other, but that caught me up short, especially since for a distraction while walking the treadmill I’ve been reading Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew and with my own theology or philosophy, call it what you will, that “just because you believe it, that don’t make it so,” taken with Borg’s discussion of his own belief in afterlife, that there is something, tempered with his statement that “believing something is true has nothing to do with whether it is true” (my italics). 

Not morbid thoughts of death, but especially suitable for me this chilly morning as in pajamas I donned sandals and a thick, heavy, warm bathrobe with hood for going outside to get the papers. And it occurred to me that should Linda decide to casket me instead of sprinkling me, I want to go dressed comfortably like this, PJs and bathrobe. I sure as hell don't want to wear a suit and tie throughout eternity.

Not today, because we already have a really interesting discussion in mind, but at some point all this may be fair discussion for our adult Sunday school class, overagainst the petition in our liturgy for burial of the dead, “Give courage and faith to those who are bereaved, that they may have strength to meet the days ahead in the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those they love.”

TW+