New Post – “The False Prophet of the Church”

Okay, faithful readers, this is a biggie. Normally, when I post on my other blog, I just say that it is available if you should be so inclined.

However, for this post, I am going to ask that all my readers make time to go to the blog and read it. Well, my Christian readers, that is. After all, my other blog is where I write about biblical topics, etc.

The reason that I am asking you to either go there and read now, or to bookmark it and make time this week, is because I learned something that is absolutely mind-boggling to me: that the Jews were blameless in rejecting the Jesus that the Church presented to them. As I explain in the article, I am not denying the divinity of Jesus, that he was God’s Messiah.

Not at all.

Instead, I learned that because of the false teachings about Jesus, the Church presented a false Messiah, according to God’s own Word.

Please, please, please, take the time to read the article. If you are a regular Christian reader, you know that this is out of character for me, so you know that I believe that this is important information. My post can be found at:

The False Prophet of the Church

Dropping A Veil, pt. 3

In my Dropping A Veil #2 post of last week, I said that I wanted to address two things that I alluded to in the first post, and I wrote about how Christians are all too happy to settle for popular teachers, and don’t really look for writers and teachers who take them “higher up and deeper in.” Realizing that my verbosity had once again gotten the best of me, I ended last week’s post with a promise to address the second topic that had become important in my spiritual life: that of appreciating the difference between the living faith of the dead vs. the dead faith of the living.

Dropping A Veil, pt. 2

As I promised last week, I will finish dropping a veil, and give an explanation for some of my comments last week, and for the views that I hold.

I have no problem with accepting the fact that I am somewhat of a coot, a throwback. I realize that I am not one of the cool kids; never was, never will be. (I can’t tell you the number of my students who were awe-struck by the fact that I admitted that I was a nerd, and had no problem with that.) So when I align myself with…. uh, pretty much nobody, you must understand that it isn’t because I want to be fashionably anything. Whatever is chic, it’s a sure bet that I’m not there.

With that in mind, not caring about how we appear to others when approaching God, there are two things from last week’s post that I want to expand upon, to give a sense of my own take on authentic Christianity. (A spiritual Why & How of my Now, if you will.)

Dropping A Veil

I hope you’ll bear with me today. as I’d like to follow up my All Saints’ Day post. Yes, I’m straying from my normal subject matter, but sometimes, Scheherazade needs to let a veil slip to reveal just a little more. (There’s an image that should make you go, “Ew!”)

Holy Matrimony?

Have we made marriage into a Holy Grail? In the last Indiana Jones movie, the final, climactic scene was in a chamber filled with chalices, cups and goblets. Indiana’s task was to choose, from among all these cups, the one cup that was used at the Last Supper. There were silver cups, there were gold goblets, there were chalices encrusted with jewels. Among all these bejeweled chalices was a simple wooden cup, the “Grail”, the simple cup of a carpenter.

I’m wondering if Christians haven’t done the same thing with marriage, encrusting it with pseudo-spiritual trappings. As an example, in my own life time I have seen something added to weddings that is considered almost de rigueur today. What am I talking about? The Unity Candle. Can you imagine a wedding without a unity candle, today? Of course not; it’s a symbol of God’s eternal love and the couple becoming “one flesh”. However, back in the 60s and 70s, when I first started attending weddings, there were no unity candles. Today, they are a must, they are a part of our traditions.

There seems to be an innate desire to spiritualize the events of our life and give things around us spiritual significance, even if there is nothing inherently spiritual about them. Marriage, of course, is one of these occasions.

I can’t really mean that, can I? As good and earnest Christians, we KNOW that marriage something special, something holy. After all, it’s a sacrament, right? And what better way to prove it that to have a communion service for the bride and groom during the wedding? This is another addition to wedding ceremonies that have become popular, and becoming more and more common today.

I’m not arguing against traditions. Traditions are great. In fact, I read an excellent statement that gives the proper place for traditions. “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” By all means, let us have our traditions. However, do not raise them to the point of holiness, and imbue them with special spiritual significance. The things that God calls “Holy” are holy, and the things that we may add as we go along, while good, are not holy.

So let us have weddings, let us have traditions, but let’s not raise the ceremony and the accompanying trappings that we like to the point of being holy and sacred. Someone married in a hut in India is just as married as someone married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

CSL