Tag Archives: Faith

Faith examined: some comments

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Epiphany, Faith

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Nicholas’ post here ttps://jessicahof.blog/2021/01/25/faith-examined/ is a fascinating one, but maybe I am not just speaking for myself if I say that as a non-philosopher, I found some of the terms rebarabative. I am so grateful to Nicholas for explaining them so well, and wasn’t, as it were, to riff off them to say something about faith.

In the first place by definition for me, faith is about a belief in something you can’t prove. It’s not like gravity. If you say you don’t believe in gravity, jump out of an upstairs window to check it!

I have believed in God longer than my conscious memory can recall. When I went to Sunday school as a small child it all just made sense if things. I’d always known I was not alone, even though I was an only child. Even though I had no mother, I felt there was a maternal love that was gifted me from someone. So when the Sunday school teacher explained about Jesus loving me, I knew who that someone was. It resonated with what I knew by intuition.

Was I indoctrinated? All I can say is that if so, it was a poor programme, as few of those who went to that class stayed with the Faith. I saw the other day that the head of the Humanist organisation in the UK, Professor Alice Roberts wrote about indoctrination in Church schools. That actually made me giggle. I can only assume that the professor has never been taught in one? Still, as she also likened the UK to Iran, and thought that the Bishops who sit in the Lords were part of the “goverment” maybe we should not take her too seriously? For sure, none of the Church schools I attended did much by way of indoctrination.

I actually loved school assemblies, but was one of the few girls who did. I also loved early morning chapel when I was a boarder, but again, was one of the few who did. In other words, while there was nothing in my environment growing up (other than my atheist father and a secular society, so nothing major then!) which militated against my believing, there was certainly nothing in the way of indoctrination. Indeed “Religious Studies” lessons were often more about other religions than they were my own.

It may be that I am just unusually suggestible. I loved my Confirmation classes and found them helpful. I love going to church. Communion, which I am denied at the moment, is so important to my well-being that it feels like the hardest and most prolonged Lent ever.

So, when atheists and others start up with the old routine of “where’s the evidence?” apart from their bad faith, as we all know there is nothing by way of an answer that could ever satisfy their sad reductionist idea of what evidence is, the thing that strikes me is the irrelevance of the question. The evidence is inside me. It is the love I know God has for me which draws my love out to Him.

The Creeds give me all the framework I need. I like my Church precisely for the reasons others don’t. It takes a very broad approach to membership. It often seems illogical and a bit vague on some issues, usually those where logic and precision might harm individuals. It gives a lot of voice to the laity, and it refuses (any longer) to torture itself over the place of women in the ministry, and in the absence of a Pope, we don’t get too worried about the obiter dicta of our chief Bishop. It still sees itself as a place where all who live here can go, and it allows you to come and go as you wish without too much in the way of expectations.

Most of all, it is a Church which recognises we are all sinners and which refuses, as a Church, to throw stones. There is a Judgement. But it will be God who judges, and if we are wise and humble, we will not attempt to anticipate it.

I believe because quite literally, I can do no other. There have been, and there are, times when God seems more remote, but I know why that is. He is where he has always been, it is me who has wandered off. But he’s there when I come back. There I have found praying the daily offices of the Church a real help. Even at the times I feel remote, I feel the connection tighten. Like any relationship, you get out what you put in.

As we approach Lent, it is a time to ask ourselves what we do put in? I am going to be running a Lent Book series, but more about that tomorrow. What we can all do at this time of pestilence and fear, is to be kind to each other, and loving, and examine what our Faith tells us about how we come through to better times. I am not sure that keep on keeping on is a philosophy, but it sounds awfully Anglican, so I will go with it.

Context

25 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in Audre, Faith

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There is a YouTube channel that I’ve been watching for some time now. It is a family man, Alex, in Alberta, Canada, a family man, who owns an antiques store. For Americans, he’s very Canadian (an inside joke, I suspect) but he’s a good guy and constantly busy doing ‘picks’ (looking for items for the antiques store) and or rebuilding old cars as well as typical husband/dad stuff. I enjoy his videos and I love antiques so it’s a good match.

I noticed a title to one of his videos, something along the lines of changing a person’s life for $20. I know my Bible pretty well after all these years and as many times as I’ve read it so I shied away from watching this video. (Matthew 6:4 4so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.)

Today I was watching one his videos and it turned out to be the background story of the video I didn’t watch. Then it was all clear to me. This is how he meets Adam $3500 from a dumpster?! Amazing garbage find! the things people throw away… – YouTube.

After success, Alex searches for Adam Paying it forward, changing a homeless man’s life forever for just $20. – YouTube. This is the video I didn’t want to watch because of the title. I watched it today.

This video is the follow up to the first two From $20 in trash to a new life. One year later… Homeless no more! Part 4 – YouTube.

I am humbled by Alex’s good heart and ashamed at my own rigidity or self-righteousness. I judged a book by its cover or, more accurately, a video by it’s title, made assumptions that were wrong, and learned that if I really knew my Bible, or really knew Jesus, I would have been – should have been – intrigued by the title and the promise of how one might change another person’s life. A little knowledge is, indeed, a dangerous thing and I am living proof.

Not everyone or everything is as they appear – there’s always a lot more to each story and I would do well to remember that, going forward. Perhaps this is also a reminder to all who may read this. That is my hope at least.

Oh! Now that you know Alex and Curiosity Incorporated, you may want to watch two series he has about buying a hoarded house – contents and house – called The Potter’s House and then one in which he bought the contents alone, called The Musician’s House. And as a special kick to your heart, watch the episodes in which he does a Go Fund Me for his sometime worker, Hans.

But! There’s this …

28 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by in Audre, Faith

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The year 2020 has been remarkable in so many ways. It seems there are no happy people on the planet. I admit, I’m having more down days than up days, too.

Prayers are built for comfort and they do comfort us. They remind us of Who is in charge and that we are never alone; He will neither leave us nor forsake us. Great comfort in that.

Being human, however, that confidence in Jesus can get a little weak, get a little dimmed by what’s around us. Sometimes, it takes something more to get us back on the right track, restore in full measure what we know so well.

This is a very short article because I’d much rather you focus on these videos. I can not explain in words how the elevate me, how they lift my soul.

So, yes; there’s politics and yes, there’s virus, and yes, there’s the economy. But! There’s this:

And this:

It is well with my soul.

There Is Something About Mary

24 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Faith, Marian devotion

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In her first post here, Jessica said this:

Our Lord Jesus Christ (OLJC) told the Apostles that men would know His followers by their love for each other, and He counselled them to be united; knowing us as He does, He can’t have been all that surprised that we’ve fallen away from those ideals. Perhaps if we were better at them there would be less for the polemicists to reproach us with? Great crimes have been committed in the name of Christianity, that is true, as it is of any great cause entrusted to fallen mankind. It is in our fallen nature to pervert whatever good things we have from God. In our folly we use the consequences of our own sinful state to reject the opportunity to reach out for God’s love; and in our pride erect a superstructure of Pharisaism on OLJC’s words, before proceeding to live in it rather than the love of Christ.

How very true that is we demonstrate each and every day. Yet there are things that we revere that bring us closer together. Today our Catholic brethren will celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham. That dream of Richeeldis de Faverches, A Saxon noblewoman who founded the shrine in 1061. It prospered all through medieval times visited by every King of England from William the Conqueror to Henry VIII. It was destroyed in the second round of the Dissolution of the Monasteries with its renowned statue of Mary being taken to London to be burnt, either in Chelsea or at Smithfield along with many other statues from the monasteries. or was it?

In an article on his blog, Dr. Francis Young summarizes an article he and Fr Michael Rear wrote for the Catholic Herald a year or so ago, on the circumstantial evidence they have found that a statue of the Virgin and child (apparently 13th century) referred to as the Langham Madonna, (pictured above) now at the Victoria and Albert Museum may, in fact, be the statue that once adorned the Holy House at Walsingham. He really doesn’t go into enough detail for me to have an opinion in his blog post, and the Catholic Herald article comes up 404. But he makes a pretty good case for it. Apparently, it was a common form at that time and this is the only one that survived. It’s worth your time to read and wonder. Walsingham has always had something of the miraculous about it, as you’ll know if you’ve read our various posts about it.

It started with Jessica’s Pilgrimage there in 2012 only a couple months after starting this blog, which she detailed here, here, and here. She gives a very good outline history of the shrine in the course of these posts, and in a personal note, she did indeed light candles for her readers, and at that almost precise time, I felt a great peace go through me, and that is when our friendship became deep and unshakable.

The shrine is also connected with us in other ways, including her miraculous cure from cancer.

The Shrine which has been so central to this blog (if you search for ‘Walsingham” you will find many articles, from Jessica, from Chalcedon, and from me dealing with it. But the main thing bout it seems to me to be a unifying force for Christians of all types and places.

There is a Catholic Shrine at the Slipper Chapel which is historically connected with it, there is an orthodox Shrine and Methodist and (I think) even Coptic chapels. And that is also what we for eight years have attempted to do here, to be ecumenical without being syncretic. In the main, we have succeeded.

In a post on Our Lady Day in Harvest, in 2017 A Clerk of Oxford gave us a very good reading as to what Mary meant to our forbearers.

Though they contain plenty of miracles and marvels and angels, they’re somehow very human and ordinary. At the heart of them is a woman, loving and much loved, whose life is traced from the first wonder of her conception to her peaceful death. In a sequence like that at Chalgrove, or in Ely’s Lady Chapel, or in the Book of Hours or the plays, Mary’s life is mapped out through domestic, everyday scenes: parents rejoicing in the birth of a longed-for baby; a little girl learning to read with her mother, or climbing the steps to the temple like a child on her first day at school; a teenage Mary with her female friends, happy with her baby, at her churching, or in the last days of her life. These were familiar rituals of childhood and motherhood which resonated with medieval audiences – with women especially, but not only women. They are completely relatable, not only for mothers like Margery Kempe but for anyone who has ever had a mother, ever been a child, and there’s something beautiful about elevating such ordinary family relationships to the dignity of high art. In these scenes Mary is not an unapproachably distant figure but a woman imagined in relationship to others: a daughter, wife, mother, friend. In particular, the story of her passing is full of other people and their love for her – the apostles and her friends gathering around her bedside, Christ cradling her soul in his arms like a child. She is unique, but never alone.

Personally, I always like to end these posts with these words from St Isaac the Syrian

In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.

“Believe It and You Have It”

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Lutheranism

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If you were to ask Martin Luther, the most famous question in American Evangelicalism, “Are you born again?” He would say, “Of course I am a born-again Christian, I am baptized.” As do many of us to this day. We are Christians, we have always been (as far as we can remember). What is this tosh about born again?

What this is all about is why Lutherans (and I suspect in some ways it applies to all of the older churches), at least those who use the phrase, “One Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church” as we do. we tend to be not wholly Protestant.

That is why there is no revivalism in Lutheranism, or indeed in the Orthodox or Catholic traditions, where we teach baptismal regeneration and practice infant baptism. Let’s look at some differences, shall we?

For Luther, justification isn’t tied to any single event but happens as often as we repent and return to the power of baptism. Justification by faith alone happens in the Catholic context of the Catholic sacrament of penance. Sorry, it’s not a once in a lifetime deal. This doesn’t eliminate choice (one can always refuse to believe).

Luther’s beliefs parallel the Catholic belief in sacramental efficacy, which places salvific power in external things. Without this, we must rely on faith as well, in other words, the fact that I believe.

Luther often says, “Believe it and you have it”, in many variations. This is not because faith earns it or achieves anything, it is simply because God keeps his word.

This is certainly not because of the perception of the mind, this is purely rigorously objective truth, God does not lie. Our certainty is based upon that, not on our faith. In Why Luther Is Not Quite Protestant,¹ Phillip Cary writes.

Whoever believes and is baptized is saved” (Mark 16:16) Luther teaches that the baptismal formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” is the word of Christ.  Luther is emphatic on this point: the words spoken in the act of baptizing are Christ’s own, so it is Christ who really performs the baptism.  Most importantly for the logic of faith, the first-person pronoun in the baptismal formula refers to Christ, so that it is Christ himself who says to me, “I baptize you….”  Ministers are merely the mouthpiece for this word of Christ, just as when they say, “This is my body, given for you.”

Making that decision for Christ or a conversion experience actually detracts from, the point about faith alone. We are justified by believing what Christ says is true. In short, God does not lie.

In brief, it is all based on the truthfulness of God, and we (and Luther did as well) like Paul’s saying in Romans 3:4 “Let God be true and every man a liar.”

And that every man includes us. We can put no faith in our own words, not even in our confession of faith. That is one reason for infant baptism, it’s pretty shaky ground to baptize on the basis of a believer’s confession of faith because we never really know what we believe. Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone means that Christians can’t rely on faith. Faith itself doesn’t rely on itself but only Christ’s promise,

This is the well known Lutheran pro me. The emphasis is not on our experience but on what God said. It’s quite unreflective.

More to come in this series, as I get it sorted myself.

¹Pro Ecclesia 14/4 ((Fall 2005)

Consistent with love?

01 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Reading the BIble

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I recently had occasion to quote this to our long-time commentator, Bosco: “Whatever is not consistent with love of God and neighbour cannot be a right interpretation of Scripture.” St Augustine was the author of this wise saying, and it is the key to our understanding of Scripture.

One reason, politeness apart, that I interact with Bosco here is that beneath the unappealing surface of what he writes, there is a child of God and a man who believes that he is “saved” and has a concern for the rest of us. Ironically, when he criticises St Thomas More and others in the Church for the way they treated heretics in the past, he fails to see that they were motivated by much the same thoughts that motivate him, namely the view that someone else is teaching “another gospel” and putting their soul in peril, as well as the souls of others. More, like his Protestant successors, had the power of the State on his side and could use it to correct error. Bosco only has the internet, which he uses to scarify the Catholic Church, which he believes is in error. And so it goes on.

The Bible is not a text-book, it is not a history book, it is not a work of scientific accuracy, and yet we believe, nay we know, that it contains everything we need to know in order to attain salvation. But how are we to understand it? Bosco tells us confidently that it explains itself to the person of faith, and follows that up by demonstrating that it doesn’t, by coming to conclusions the diametric opposite of others who read it. Now, it is of course, just possible that a small group of American Fundamentalists understand the Book Canonised by the Church better than the Church which Canonised it, but on the balance of probabilities, it would be unwise to bet the farm, let alone your soul, on it.

At this point in internet “dialogue” it is common to get into proof-texting. Well, I can speak only for myself and I don’t kow about you, but I am heartily sick of Christians from different Churches throwing proof texts at each other.

In her post yesterday, Audre advised us that she was a “big picture” person, and that is good advice. Once we realise that the biggest picture is that God is love, and therefore any interpretation of Scripture inconsistent with love of God and neighbour cannot be correct. It follows that in our dealings with each other, whilst love might lead us to be alarmed that x or y is “wrong” in their interpretation, so might we be.

It is for that reason that Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox look to the teaching of the Church to support the readings which their own reasoning suggests. No-one who knows anything about the Catholic Church could believe what only those who know nothing about it propound when they suggest that it seeks to tell its members how the read the Bible in every aspect of its richness. That is not, and never has been, the function of the Church.

The Church is the repository of the “rule of Faith”. It is the guardian of the Creeds through which it interprets what it received from the hands of the Apostles themselves. So, to take one example, you can argue about what you think the Trinity is, and you can support yourself with proof-texts, but the Church knows that heretical positions were, in the past (as now) supported by clever men (and it is always men … just saying) with arguments of their own devising, and so, if we are wise, we will turn to the Church to see what it has to say on the matter. There we discover the wisdom of the ages, guided by the Holy Spirit. We can then measure our own conclusions against that collective wisdom. If we think we are right, then of course, we shall act on that. But if we are wise, we will pray for discernment. I don’t know about you, but I lack whatever spirit it is that leads people to believe that they know better than the mind of the Church.

Love is the guide for how we should read Scripture. We bring to it emotional and cultural baggage which is bound to influence how we read and interpret, and it is right that should be the case; even were it not right, it is inevitable. But then let us measure our thoughts against the yardstick that God is Love. The Holy Spirit speaks to us in love, but in the struggle to translate that into words, we can miss the deeper level at which He communicates to us. God abides with us always. Of course we will feel ourselves “unworthy”, and we are – by our standards. If we look at us through God’s eyes, we are the reason that Christ suffered, died, was buried and rose again, we are loved that much. Do you get it? I don’t in my head, but I do emotionally. It makes no sense to my earthly standards, but that just tells me how far those are from God’s.

The Holy Spirit speaks through the Church, and He speaks to all of us if we have ears to hear and a heart open to receiving Him. I am unworthy, and yet Christ died for me, so I am worthy. Yes, I see the distance between this weak and fallible person and the infinite goodness of the Trinity, but then through prayer and through Grace, I have faith that the gap will narrow and I can enter more deeply into the ultimate reality of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

My constant friend

26 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in Audre, Faith, Prayers

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These are such trying times – trying to break us, trying to make us change the way we think and feel about life and about each other. Trying to take away our certainties, our sense of security, our sense of what life should be; how it should be lived.

We had already become house sitters – the internet opened up places and people and experiences few had ever known before. We sit where we are, we sit with our devices, we sit and write comments on videos of folks we’ve never met but feel like we know. Sadly, many – far too many – can look around them, where they are, and not see another soul. They are alone. Many of us are alone.

We are taught that when we pray, we are joined by all the souls in heaven so it’s ok to say ‘we’ in those prayers because we are not alone. We pray in the community of the heavenly. We, like Jesus, walk in two worlds. But it feels lonely in this one. We can’t yet walk in the other. Long hours, awake and alone. Folks begin to feel shut off, ignored, hopeless. Each day leads to another that is just like the day before.

If we would only search our hearts – we would know we’re not alone. There is Someone Who cares about us, stays with us in our waking and sleeping, shares our joys and sorrows. Laughs with us; cries with us. No. We are not alone.

We are never alone, even if we feel that way because He walks beside us to keep us company, He walks behind us to keep us going, He walks ahead of us to show us the way.

He is my constant friend. Our constant friend. Your constant friend. Remember He told us He’d never leave us or forsake us? He wasn’t kidding; He didn’t wink when he said that. He didn’t have his fingers crossed behind His back. He said it because He meant; He meant it then and He means it now.

Jesus. My constant friend.

Happy Thanksgiving

28 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Church/State

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Today, in America is Thanksgiving Day. It is a day of celebration of what we have made of God’s gift to us all. Its history reaches all the way back to our Pilgrim forebearers, who felt called to thank God that they had survived the first year in the Massachusetts Bay.

Now it is a day of parades, football, serious overeating, and sleeping off that overeating by sleeping through the football on TV. But I think we all deep in our hearts do remember to thank “The Big Guy” for all we have, and the freedom to enjoy it.

President Washington certainly knew something about dark days, far darker than ours are today, and he (and Congress) thought it fit to remember the Author of our blessings. So should we.

From the Heritage Foundation

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Issued by President George Washington, at the request of Congress, on October 3, 1789

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and—Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favor, able interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other trangressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go. Washington

That’s the reason for the day put as well as anyone has, ever.

My family’s traditional table grace is this

In the press of daily events, it is not always easy to remember just how good we have it. Perry Metzger at Samizdata sums it up well.

We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.

Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.

No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.

Read it all, but realize this is the characteristic Anglo-American achievement, that we have shared with all the world, along with the freedom to enjoy it. Not to mention the freedom to create it, which is why it started with our peoples.

It is indeed meet that we thank our God for our Blessings.

Happy Thanksgiving

Aquatic Endeavors and Kanye West

01 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by in Consequences, Education, Faith, Lutheranism

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Many of us have considered swimming the Tiber, some have swum the Bosporus, some, including one of our founders here, have swum both, looking for an authentic presentation of our Faith. Tom Raabe at Real Clear Religion has some thoughts on another aquatic journey. He thinks, perhaps, some Evangelicals [and perhaps others] might want to consider swimming the Mississippi.

Reasons for their aquatic activities vary. Some like the art and architecture associated with the ancient faiths. Some like the ceremonial aspects–the liturgies, the veneration of icons, the Eucharist. Some like the history that oozes from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, a history that travels through great saints of yesteryear–through Augustine, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nazianzus–but goes largely forgotten in contemporary evangelicalism.

Church-switching among evangelicals has always been popular. It’s become even more so now that so much of the conservative Protestant world has fled so purposely from symbolic architecture and time-honored aesthetics, and has chosen to worship in big boxy rooms with giant worship screens, all-enveloping sound systems, and Chris Tomlin-wannabes singing from the stage. Catholicism and Orthodoxy certainly offer something different from what goes on in that environment.

But evangelicals interested in “swimming” to a different tradition should consider traversing a body of water much closer to home: the Mississippi River, on which is located St. Louis, Missouri, and the headquarters of the premier conservative Lutheran church body in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

He has a point, several in fact, one thing he says, and I want to emphasize is that when we do this we are not changing teams, at worst we are changing positions.

Go ahead and read his article linked above, in many ways, I think he’s got some very good reasoning on his side, especially as the world looks now.

In another although related matter, have you been listening to what Kanye West has been saying? What he is saying, and singing, I guess, not having heard his new album (or any others), sounds better than what many of our priests, pastors, bishops, archbishops, and sundry other Faith leaders are saying. Does he mean it, or is he trying to revive his career? Who knows, but we are the people who believe in redemption, so I think it incumbent to welcome him. One thing that struck Kylee Zempel at The Federalist, and it does me too, is that he is confessing, no he is proclaiming that Jesus is King, and we need to obey him.

I don’t know about you, but for me, that is one of the hardest things about Christianity. Obeying the Lord. If he actually lives that, or even tries, and so far he seems to be, that is a very long step to Salvation.

In Closed on Sunday (Too bad you British let your LGBTQWERTY folks run out the best American fast food and a Christian company) he sings:

Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave
Stand up for my home
Even if I take this walk alone
I bow down to the King upon the throne
My life is His, I’m no longer my own.

How many of us manage to live that way? If he can, then God is indeed working in him. And so, while I doubt I become a fan of his, I certainly hope we can welcome him to our fellowship. We’re due some representation in cultural matters.

Praise God in all you do.