Overheard while checking out at the local grocery store, to the strains of “Little Pink House” by John Cougar Mellencamp:
Clerk: Boy, they’re playing a lot of oldies today.
Bagger: Yeah, I heard Madonna a little bit earlier.
I remember when “Little Pink House” first started playing on MTV. I remember when MTV first started on cable. This was back in the dawn of prehistory when MTV actually played music videos. I remember when the phrase “oldies” referred to Motown hits on WAMD.
I’m only 33 for heaven’s sake (turning 34 in June).
This makes me so happy I could burst. 
From The New York Times:
LONDON, April 26 — Justice Peter Smith’s 71-page ruling in the recent “Da Vinci Code” copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge’s occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of
But there is more to it than that. Embedded in the first 13½ pages of the ruling is Justice Smith’s very own secret code, one that when partly solved reveals its name: the Smithy Code.
“The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC,” the judge writes in the 52nd paragraph of the ruling, alluding to his code and referring to the two works at issue in the case —”The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” and “The Da Vinci Code” — by their initials. (In the United States, the book is called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”)
[...continued...]
This is an important book by an important author and religious scholar.
Pagels is a well-regarded researcher, teacher, and historian (she teaches at Princeton these days), and has written several important books on the development of the early church and Christian doctrine, including “Adam, Eve, and the Serpent”, “The Gnostic Paul”, “The Origin of Satan”, and most recently, “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas”.
This book, written in 1979, provides a good overview and examination of the implications of a collection of texts known as the Nag Hammadi Library (NHL), a set of manuscripts from the earliest Christian communities discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. These documents, while diverse in many ways, include a large number of manuscripts regarding an early stream of thought and theology in the church known as “Gnosticism” (the Wikipedia articles I link to here are good overviews and I won’t reproduce them here). Gnosticism emphasizes an inward-focused path of spiritual development, versus the apostolic doctrinal belief orientation of the Roman church (e.g “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”).
Pagels’ overview here is readable and accessible to the non-scholar, and introduces the important themes from the NHL texts, and their implications for understanding the development of an “orthodox” theology in the early church. The big takeaway here for me is the notion that the belief statements that constitute the core theology of the Christian tradition are not monolithic ideas that were delivered from heaven intact, but rather the result of a process of conflict and compromise over a period of several centuries, and can legitimately be questioned and re-examined without breaking faith with the tradition as a whole.
Here’s a quote from the conclusion that I think summarizes what is essential and important about the NHL materials and their implications for our understanding of the Christian faith and tradition today:
[...] Certain creative persons throughout the ages, from Valentinius to Blake, Rembrandt, Dostoevesky, Tolsto, and Nietzsche, found themselves at the edge of orthodoxy. All were fascinated by the figure of Christ — his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection: all returned constantly to Christian symbols to express their own experience. they cannot rest solely on the authority of the Scriptures, the apostles, the church — at least not without inquiring how that authority constituted itself, and what, if anything, gives it legitimacy. All the old questions — the original questions, sharply debated at the beginning of Christianity — are being reopened: How is one to understand the resurrection? What about women’s participation in priestly and episcopal office? Who was Christ, and how does he relate to the believer? What are the similarities between Christianity and other world religions?
[...]
Furthermore, as a person concerned with religious questions, I find that rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian, the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of one’s own experience and that claimed for the Scriptures, the ritual, and the clergy?
If you’re intrigued by some of the historical questions raised in books like The DaVinci Code or are interested in the earliest Church and the development of Christian theology, this book is a great place to start.
I am a member of the Session (governing board) of our small Presbyterian church, and our pastor, as a leadership and spiritual development exercise, asked us to identify some themes, images, or metaphors that are important to our understanding of Christian faith.
This isn’t a brief statement of personal faith - those kinds of writings are hopefully more well thought out than this is, but at the very least this identifies what are for me the important themes in my faith journey, the ideas that excite me, and the tensions that I struggle with - as illustrated by some central Biblical stories for me.
Aaron and the Golden Calf
We are idol-makers from way back, and we’re good at it. This is a constant theme in the Hebrew Testament writings - Israel as a “stiff-necked people” (Exodus 32), and I think a central habit of the human mind and heart. In our modern sophistication we no longer worship graven images, but rather raise up altars of “national security”, “decency and orderliness”, and “personal growth” to which we give our unconscious devotion and allegiance. We are no better in our churches sometimes, where we lift up the Bibleinstead of hearing its message, and even our notions of Jesus Christ,focusing on the man instead of the way that he pointed.
I think of us like my cat or a small child: you point, and they will look at your finger instead of what you are pointing at. We are like that as a people. Perhaps God is working, slowly and over a great span of time, to teach us to overcome this immaturity.
What I hope for in my own life is a deeper appreciation of God’s care for and presence in my life, and to trust God enough to no longer need those false sources of security. The call to Christian life requires a radical recentering of one’s life on God in the manner of Jesus Christ.
The Kingdom In Our Midst
Jesus says many times that the Kingdom of God is at hand, it is in our midst, it is all around us. I understand Jesus to mean that the Kingdom is a new kind of human consciousness, a way of seeing, thinking, living, and feeling that transforms the world. It is a reordering of allegiances, a returning of our hearts and our minds towards God (not Caesar or Mammon), and the living of it is both extraordinarily simple, and yet painfully complex in a world that requires us to choose seemingly on a moment by moment basis where to put our faith and our trust.
We say Jesus’ words from his first sermon every week in our charge (”The Spirit of God is upon us.”). How do we find the Kingdom? By doing what Jesus did: preaching goods news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, receiving of sight to the blind, to free the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Jubilee. And in Jesus’ way of speaking, to say was to do.
Lazarus
The story of Lazarus (John 11) has always moved me deeply, particularly because of John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” It’s the shortest verse in the entire Bible, and perhaps says the most about Jesus, and by extension, about God.
God, who in the person of Jesus lived intimately with his family and community of friends and followers, suffers with us. God mourns with our losses. God knows our pain, our sorrow, and our death. God weeps.
And God calls us forth from our tombs. In the story, Lazarus is really raised from the dead. God brings real comfort, real renewal, and real resurrection. In the midst of seemingly utter finality God brings something new. So it was with Lazarus, so it was with Jesus, and so it is with us.
Also here we see the costly discipleship that Jesus calls us to. For it is the raising of Lazarus that prompts Caiaphas and company to, for fear of Roman retribution at the potential disturbance of the social order, to plot against Jesus life, and ultimately to have him condemned to death as a political criminal. So too our discipleship as followers of the risen (and raising!) Christ may be risky and costly. We must, at the least, risk the death of the life that we know and cling to in order to allow God to create something new in us and in the world.
From the Song of Songs:
[...] Therefore have I pleased the Lord
And he has brought me into his chamber
And said to me: arise my love and come.
For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone,
The flowers have appeared in our land,
The time of pruning is come.
Click on the pics for some more spring pics that my husband took yesterday.