Dear Mercy-loving God:
Thank you for continuing to accept all of humanity into your loving embrace after you placed the rainbow in the sky; it's more kindness and grace than any human being deserves. You have placed diversity in our lives -- the diversity of love, grace, kindness, mercy, and fellowship.
Thank you for all of my being -- knitted and formed in my mother's womb into a marvelous and wonderful creation for you.
Thank you for the religious leaders you have placed in my life to teach their patch of your tapestry to me:
Thank you for Bill Puder (the foremost influence in my mind -- ELCA). Thank and bless Bill for his teaching from scripture that we fight powers and principalities and not the chosen tigers we catch by the tail. Thank you for fighting the tigers we catch to devour ourselves. For this, you have given us in Torah -- Exodus 14:14, "The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still." Thank and bless Bill for teaching me the phrase "go should on yourself" for those who would should on me; through this, he taught me to have my own values based on my child of Godness and not on the shoulds of the world. He taught me to know You and value You.
Thank you for Jeffrey Hupf (Episcopal USA). Thank and bless Jeff for his humility to help me listen to your voice in my life. He was a support to me when others kept trying to turn me away from your altar. He helped me to learn to set my sails to journey for you, even if I found that I was in the belly of a whale -- you were there with me. He helped and supported me while I was learning that I, too, was your Beloved Child of God when the world had me convinced of your hatred for me. Instead, with Jeff, I embraced my belovedness.
Thank you for Bruce Lawson (Independent Baptist/Episcopal-Anglican). Thank and bless Bruce and his family as they are on their continued journey. He taught me to be enjoy being pursued by You. He wanted me to know that You loved, pursued, and desired me. Shelter and heal him in your love. You wanted me to find the monastery in the world and within so did he. Thank you both for it.
Thank you for Stephen Duncan (OCCA). You gave him the heart of a child for play and music. He has helped me to heal without ever turning me away for more than two decades. Even when he mutters in other languages, I can trust Your Stephen that it isn't a curse; You have helped him to heal.
Thank you for my Rabbis (All kinds through the Federation). They have embraced me while I have been healing with You in the temples and synagogues amongst my people -- Your people. They just welcomed me as one of them; they did not let me get lost in the world. You gave them a heart for the Torah and for people. Thank you for Ed Soloman, my first Hebrew teacher. May you warm his heart with the knowledge that I finally read Shalom in Hebrew. Thank you for the other survivors I have been blessed to know as I sat healing with them. You gave them the strength to continue living and embracing life. They have helped to give this to me. Your survivors honored and cared for me. Their respect for me, shown through Mr. Tibor Schaechner and Mr. Simon --- (my apologies as I have forgotten his name) who made it through the Shoah, will never be forgotten. Thank you for Tibor who has always said on sight to me "how are you, young man?" when the medical professionals around me decided that I was too broken to read/work/thrive ever again. He has always been a source of strength and blessing to me. His smile helped me to not only survive but thrive. May you bless his life and his family. Mr. Simon --- always welcomed me to the Oneg tables that he worked to prepare himself. He helped me keep the strength that I needed on days when I didn't think I could go further. You gave him the strength and grumpiness to keep me going. You have made no other people like these two. Thank you for helping me learn that I am Jewish. I love Your and my people, even Ezra Cappell. He's a good person. You blessed me with him before I knew how to understand his desire for Shabbos' joy in the lives of people around him.
Thank you for Dr. Charles Stanley (He claimed Pentecostal -- I'm going with that). You have taught him to say "out of the body, home with the Lord." You have given him a heart to know you more than anything else. You know it is difficult to have been made to survive for my faith and denied through a civil process for other reasons -- to be told "we're working on it" in America by the prosecution. You know that some days it is too much. Thank you for giving him this final assurance in You.
Thank you for Jay Bakker. He is not the others. You have made him to explore Christianity and be saved through grace. You have given him grace; Lord, help him to embrace it. Thank you for his journey of grace such that he can help others with it. You have made him an example of what most others don't want to be and still he loves you.
Thank you for your chosen remnant people. There have been too many to mention by name. You know who they are. They are the ones You love to love me. They are with me even when I don't know them. Thank you for all of the others I have had influence my life for the better; the names are too numerous for a blog. May they all have blessings in gratitude for You.
Thank you for me. May I not be the most reluctant of them all to be in your presence. Thank you for sitting with me in my joys, my pains, my light, my darkness, my sickness, my human health, my oppression, my freedom, my sin, my trust, my love, and everything else with which I have been blessed. Thank you, that even without one, I've never shed the collar. Thank you for being alive still. Thank you for seeing what people would not see, understand, or accept for nearly a decade. Thank you for sitting with me through all of the issues and the blame that was placed upon me by those who couldn't fathom how my life was ever going to work ever again. Thank you for dwelling in me and giving me all that I have.
A Child of God,
Israel Andrew
Monday, November 25, 2019
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Change: Accountable Perception
Human beings like to keep track of almost everything. Those of us using Bullet Journals are tracking our goals, daily meetings, finances, water intake and pretty much anything we want, including when we cried the last time or read the Scripture. Our checklists and tick boxes provide for us a sense of accomplishment. We have produced what we desired during the day and had that gratifying checkmark in the bullet point of our own choosing. Apps are made for all phone operating platforms to help us track our success rates, and the rates at which we are able to improve. What tracking doesn't do for people is create a means of accountability. Accountability in a person's life requires several things: 1) mutual understanding, 2) questioning, and 3) self-esteem.
Rule-driven Christians promote their understanding of parts of Scripture in any situation that they find themselves in. I'm a state employee, so I don't promote one religion over another while allowing for the free exercise thereof as given to American citizens in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution at work. Non-citizens in the United States don't have the same constitutional rights as Americans do. I teach argumentation. So, each one of my students is, at the very least, presented with the information that morality and ethics are not the same concepts. Essentially, morality is a matter of personal choice, and ethics has a communal understanding. One -- ethics -- necessitates the benefit of the doubt for a human being, and the other doesn't. Communities in the United States do not have one understanding of a deity, even if the deity is called by the same label. Christians don't have the same religion as religion is determined by the way that the individual lives out one's life.
My classes have been full of people this autumn who have chosen to write about how lying isn't always bad. Lying has its merits and benefits. The common mutual understanding of this is that lying is bad. Human beings and evangelical mainline Protestant denominations particularly, in my experience, love to hold one another accountable for what they perceive to be sin. In this case, lying is lying, therefore, sin by default. The problem with holding another person accountable to one's own perception is that the narrative of humanity is often lost. The grey areas of life -- change -- happen when, as one would say, life is happening. However, it is in the accountability legality in a motivated mind for personal justice that excludes the benefit of the doubt. When we presume guilt, we promote selfish, merciless convictions.
Questioning oneself is the main process through which another may be brought back into right relationship with another. However, if I am focused on the deeds of another, I may not have the means through which to, as they say, "stay blessed" myself. When "stay blessed" turns to "bless your heart," there's a problem in a relationship. Matthew 18-15-20 states: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" (ESV). Out of context and in the mind of, often, younger/immature people or those new to one another, the feeling of injustice and moralistic righteousness causes one to think that another has "sinned" against the person.
Change is not sin. Change has not missed the mark of anything. It is spot on as change. Most syllabi have the phrasing somewhere that the plan of the course is subject to change. Change doesn't mean that the person is wrong. On first reading of this passage today, I initially thought, somewhat jokingly and somewhat not, that the sinner refusing to change must obviously be the pastor. Pastors don't like to hear back from the flock about their own interrelational concerns. Often, the spout of "I have my own accountability partners" is brought forward to make sure that a wall can be built into a relationship. Essentially, the message "communicative intimacy is not welcome here" could not be more broadcast in the statement even if there were protest signs available. People forget that when you come forward to accuse another of sin that they may very well be pointing out their own. Adding two or three others doesn't usually happen in my experience. Getting a group of people together to scapegoat another into not choosing of their own accord and trying to just agree with the status quo probably isn't going to work.
Most religious people are not going to change to what another wants because they want it. I, for example, don't believe in exerting one's own religion over another's as a matter of humanness. No one has to have the same, and can't have, the same relationship with God that I do or it wouldn't be mine. As a part of the tradition I have mainly practiced and have been taught through, your own religion and practice thereof is a matter of your own conscience; the only thing we hold in common is corporate prayer. Those attempting to force another to do so, from my point of view, should lose their freedom in America as everyone has the constitutional right to practice his/her own belief. It is only through questioning that a person can understand if something is continuing in a negative manner if it is indeed a sin to the accused. Perhaps, one's conscience has not agreed that it is sin as some would say because "God has not convicted the person" of it. Who are we to choose conviction of sin if God has not? To do so is merciless, selfish, compassionless, and irrationally arrogant since the Creator of All Things has not deemed it important enough to charge the accused's heart with it.
For some reason, religious believers seem to have a larger propensity for low self-esteem. My own conjecture is that this comes from focusing on another's suffering, Christ's, and one's own sin and people have, not only encouraged, but demanded that believers do. This has denigrated the esteem of people for centuries. It has caused people to focus on suffering instead of helping and building up communities. Change is not sin; therfore, the methodology does not apply. Perception doesn't create sis, except in the perceiver. While we have the Freedom of Religion in American and not from it, one person is not another. If I am not you, then God knows that our virtues and sins are different from one another. If I am you, then we are dysfunctionally codependent. I let Him sort that out instead of choosing whom to slaughter as a sacrificial scapegoat for my own inadequacies. I choose over a decade ago, while in graduate school although my life has been quite the battle since, to work on choosing joy and mercy. To do so, one must choose God frequently. Choosing God is not a one and done conversation.
I practice choosing a less confrontation path because 1) my doctors have asked me to do so and 2) I don't believe in examining the heart of another person, especially since I only have my own human understanding of my own. Of course, when I am the target, and I am often the point of another's accountability interests, my health and religious understanding is usually not considered. Essentially, stripping me of my constitutional rights as an American citizen. Following the doctor's orders, I have learned, is usually heretical to people. I have been an apostate more than once for refusing or turning down pork or choosing to be less confrontational. Somehow, meekness has no value when it is bold to be meek in a society of religious gladiators intent upon pursuing making real men out of boys.
Let those who find change to be sin be bound to their own presumptive judgments now and in the hereafter.
Rule-driven Christians promote their understanding of parts of Scripture in any situation that they find themselves in. I'm a state employee, so I don't promote one religion over another while allowing for the free exercise thereof as given to American citizens in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution at work. Non-citizens in the United States don't have the same constitutional rights as Americans do. I teach argumentation. So, each one of my students is, at the very least, presented with the information that morality and ethics are not the same concepts. Essentially, morality is a matter of personal choice, and ethics has a communal understanding. One -- ethics -- necessitates the benefit of the doubt for a human being, and the other doesn't. Communities in the United States do not have one understanding of a deity, even if the deity is called by the same label. Christians don't have the same religion as religion is determined by the way that the individual lives out one's life.
My classes have been full of people this autumn who have chosen to write about how lying isn't always bad. Lying has its merits and benefits. The common mutual understanding of this is that lying is bad. Human beings and evangelical mainline Protestant denominations particularly, in my experience, love to hold one another accountable for what they perceive to be sin. In this case, lying is lying, therefore, sin by default. The problem with holding another person accountable to one's own perception is that the narrative of humanity is often lost. The grey areas of life -- change -- happen when, as one would say, life is happening. However, it is in the accountability legality in a motivated mind for personal justice that excludes the benefit of the doubt. When we presume guilt, we promote selfish, merciless convictions.
Questioning oneself is the main process through which another may be brought back into right relationship with another. However, if I am focused on the deeds of another, I may not have the means through which to, as they say, "stay blessed" myself. When "stay blessed" turns to "bless your heart," there's a problem in a relationship. Matthew 18-15-20 states: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" (ESV). Out of context and in the mind of, often, younger/immature people or those new to one another, the feeling of injustice and moralistic righteousness causes one to think that another has "sinned" against the person.
Change is not sin. Change has not missed the mark of anything. It is spot on as change. Most syllabi have the phrasing somewhere that the plan of the course is subject to change. Change doesn't mean that the person is wrong. On first reading of this passage today, I initially thought, somewhat jokingly and somewhat not, that the sinner refusing to change must obviously be the pastor. Pastors don't like to hear back from the flock about their own interrelational concerns. Often, the spout of "I have my own accountability partners" is brought forward to make sure that a wall can be built into a relationship. Essentially, the message "communicative intimacy is not welcome here" could not be more broadcast in the statement even if there were protest signs available. People forget that when you come forward to accuse another of sin that they may very well be pointing out their own. Adding two or three others doesn't usually happen in my experience. Getting a group of people together to scapegoat another into not choosing of their own accord and trying to just agree with the status quo probably isn't going to work.
Most religious people are not going to change to what another wants because they want it. I, for example, don't believe in exerting one's own religion over another's as a matter of humanness. No one has to have the same, and can't have, the same relationship with God that I do or it wouldn't be mine. As a part of the tradition I have mainly practiced and have been taught through, your own religion and practice thereof is a matter of your own conscience; the only thing we hold in common is corporate prayer. Those attempting to force another to do so, from my point of view, should lose their freedom in America as everyone has the constitutional right to practice his/her own belief. It is only through questioning that a person can understand if something is continuing in a negative manner if it is indeed a sin to the accused. Perhaps, one's conscience has not agreed that it is sin as some would say because "God has not convicted the person" of it. Who are we to choose conviction of sin if God has not? To do so is merciless, selfish, compassionless, and irrationally arrogant since the Creator of All Things has not deemed it important enough to charge the accused's heart with it.
For some reason, religious believers seem to have a larger propensity for low self-esteem. My own conjecture is that this comes from focusing on another's suffering, Christ's, and one's own sin and people have, not only encouraged, but demanded that believers do. This has denigrated the esteem of people for centuries. It has caused people to focus on suffering instead of helping and building up communities. Change is not sin; therfore, the methodology does not apply. Perception doesn't create sis, except in the perceiver. While we have the Freedom of Religion in American and not from it, one person is not another. If I am not you, then God knows that our virtues and sins are different from one another. If I am you, then we are dysfunctionally codependent. I let Him sort that out instead of choosing whom to slaughter as a sacrificial scapegoat for my own inadequacies. I choose over a decade ago, while in graduate school although my life has been quite the battle since, to work on choosing joy and mercy. To do so, one must choose God frequently. Choosing God is not a one and done conversation.
I practice choosing a less confrontation path because 1) my doctors have asked me to do so and 2) I don't believe in examining the heart of another person, especially since I only have my own human understanding of my own. Of course, when I am the target, and I am often the point of another's accountability interests, my health and religious understanding is usually not considered. Essentially, stripping me of my constitutional rights as an American citizen. Following the doctor's orders, I have learned, is usually heretical to people. I have been an apostate more than once for refusing or turning down pork or choosing to be less confrontational. Somehow, meekness has no value when it is bold to be meek in a society of religious gladiators intent upon pursuing making real men out of boys.
Let those who find change to be sin be bound to their own presumptive judgments now and in the hereafter.
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