The laws we have are products of a particular group, not universal truths. The question then becomes: who gets to say what? White land-owning founding fathers? Hateful white nationalist? The majority? A greasy wheel minority? In a sense, every rule or law arises out of a specific context, a given historical situation.
The chronology of the week is where the difficulty originates. Most Christians believe that first Jesus was crucified, and then he rose from the dead. The reality is that first came the resurrection and then the crucifixion. This is crucial.
The situation is complicated. Churches are not supposed to endorse candidates. Indeed, many churches have members who support Trump. Some members place more faith in Trump than they do in Jesus. Yes, literally.
The church must create places for dialog and it must do so before it is too late. This winter and next spring the various churches must organize discussions about who we are as the body politic and how we want to live.
The transition from a Medieval to an Enlightenment way of thinking does not come easily. When I was a kid in the Norwegian American Lutheran Church, a bigger-than-life portrait of Jesus praying in Gethsemane was stationed over the altar, a Sunday reminder that his all-important death, soon to come, was our salvation. Jesus loved us, this we knew because the Bible told us so. And the Bible did not lie.
We live in a world defined by the cheapness of human life, indeed, all life. Migrants and refugees are treated no better than the Amazon rainforest. And yet, as entanglement shows us and as the tolling bell reminds us, all is One.
We began with a description of human nature and used that to try to understand who Jesus was and how he was able to impact people, an analysis that bypasses much of the traditional theology about who and what he was.
The history of the church in the first century is both well-hidden and well-studied, and no narrative is guaranteed to be true. The period demands our attention because what really happened then is absolutely crucial to our understanding of both Jesus and the subsequent 2000-plus years of those who would follow him.
It has been shown that wealth actually changes the structure of a person’s brain, destroying a sense of empathy for others while at the same time creating a sense of entitlement.
We don’t know when Jesus was born, but we do know when he died. His birth was linked to existing pagan festivals celebrating the winter solstice, but his death can be dated relatively specifically, and occurred during the Passover Festival, Jerusalem, early April in year 30.