Confessions of a Recovering Pharisee

[Yahoo]

As financial workers suffer through tumultuous times on Wall Street, some are turning to an old source of solace: religion.Religious leaders said attendance was up at lunchtime meetings in New York’s financial district last week, with many more people in business attire than usual.

That is hardly surprising, said Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones of Trinity Church Wall Street, given that people don’t know if their employers will survive from one day to the next.

“The economic financial crisis is a reminder that we cannot put our faith in riches, that we cannot put our faith in money,” Bozzuti-Jones said in his sermon at lunchtime on Friday, which he devoted to coping with the financial crisis.

A handful of men in suits and ties and women in business attire were among dozens of people at the Episcopal church, which was hit by debris from the World Trade Center collapse on September 11, 2001.

The church, which normally attracts tourists and a few financial workers, experienced an upturn in visitors this week, Bozzuti-Jones said. In the past few days he had requests for help to pay rent from those who had lost their jobs.

“People are just sitting there, praying or crying and definitely exhausted. There has definitely been an increase in the number of people who have come in,” he said in his office after the service.

Read more here.

[From me]

Well, if it takes a recession or worse to bring people back to God I may not like it but ultimately it is up to Him.  Are you willing to give up your comforts if it brings people to Jesus?  Really?

What do you think?

Matthew 10:39

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

What does that mean for those of us who live in the wealthiest country in the world?  Suffering for some of us is to cut out a vacation because of the economy.  Maybe we have to downsize or get a 2nd or 3rd job. But what about those in the world who have to give up everything to follow Jesus?  In Muslim countries if a person becomes a follower of Jesus they are disowned by their family.  In the eyes of their family they are dead.

So what does it mean to lose our lives here in the US?  What does it mean to take up our cross in the US?  Is suffering having to drop cable TV?  Is suffering having less Starbucks?  Somehow I think the American church has it all wrong (me included).

What have you lost for Jesus?

[Time]

A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation” could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus’ followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day — and it might even hint that they they could have applied it in their grief after their master was crucified. However, such a contentious reading of the 87-line tablet depends on creative interpretation of a smudged passage, making it the latest entry in the woulda/coulda/shoulda category of possible New Testament artifacts; they are useful to prove less-spectacular points and to stir discussion on the big ones, but probably not to settle them nor shake anyone’s faith.

The ink-on-stone document, which is owned by a Swiss-Israeli antiques collector and reportedly came to light about a decade ago, has been dated by manuscript and chemical experts to a period just before Jesus’ birth. Some scholars think it may originally have been part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a trove of religious texts found in caves on the West Bank that were possibly associated with John the Baptist. The tablet is written in the form of an end-of-the-world prediction in the voice of the angel Gabriel; one line, for instance, predicts that “in three days you will know evil will be defeated by justice.”

Such “apocalypses,” often featuring a triumphant military figure called a messiah (literally, anointed one), were not uncommon in the religious and politically tumultuous Jewish world of 1st century B.C. Palestine. But what may make the Gabriel tablet unique is its 80th line, which begins with the words “In three days” and includes some form of the verb “to live.” Israel Knohl, an expert in Talmudic and biblical language at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who was not involved in the first research on the artifact, claims that it refers to a historic 1st-century Jewish rebel named Simon who was killed by the Romans in 4 B.C., and should read “In three days, you shall live. I Gabriel command you.” If so, Jesus-era Judaism had begun to explore the idea of a three-day resurrection before Jesus was born.

This, in turn, undermines one of the strongest literary arguments employed by Christians over centuries to support the historicity of the Resurrection (in which they believe on faith): the specificity and novelty of the idea that the Messiah would die on a Friday and rise on a Sunday. Who could make such stuff up? But, as Knohl told TIME, maybe the Christians had a model to work from. The idea of a “dying and rising messiah appears in some Jewish texts, but until now, everyone thought that was the impact of Christianity on Judaism,” he says. “But for the first time, we have proof that it was the other way around. The concept was there before Jesus.” If so, he goes on, “this should shake our basic view of Christianity. … What happens in the New Testament [could have been] adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”

Read more here.

[From me]

How do we know the dating is a few years before Jesus?  What is a few years give or take when you are talking 2000 years ago?  Wasn’t the claim by this scholar the same claim the Jews made? Some are trying to say that Jesus stole his teaching from Buddha?  If someone can prove to me that the Resurrection didn’t happen then you have a bombshell!  But that isn’t going to happen.  

The disciples were scared to death and hiding after Jesus death.  What changed following His Resurrection? They saw Jesus.  Then they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to share Jesus message with power and conviction. No one would go to their death for something they knew was a lie.  

The only Sequel will be when Jesus comes back to take believers home.

What do you think?

[TC Palm]

In an effort to bring in more donations, longtime Martin County charity Jesus House of Hope decided to drop the word Jesus from its name.

Patrick Slattery, executive director of the 24-year-old nonprofit, said the change will help the organization fulfill what Jesus commanded in the Gospel of Matthew: Help the needy.

Slattery said many private foundations could not donate to the charity because it includes Jesus in the name, and people are often reluctant to give to what appears to be a house of worship if they already donate to their own church. So the organizations board of directors voted last month to finalize the change.

Were really not religious organization, Slattery said. Theres no church. There were never any ministers, never any priests. Its really kind of a misnomer.

 

Slattery said he feels Jesus would be OK with the decision.

He really doesnt care what we call it, he said. Its what we do.

Read about it here.

[From me]

What would you do?  If you could minister for Jesus without His name do you think Jesus would be OK with it?

What do you think?