STORY OF THE DAY - COUCH EXPLORER

When I was young I always wanted to go 
exploring in a cave and when I got older 
I finally did & it was dark everywhere & 
there were strange sounds like your 
stomach after a big meal & I couldn't 
wait to get out. I figured out later that I 
mainly liked to go exploring caves in my 
mind where I could be comfortable & 
not get dirty & cold. If you read too 
much National Geographic when you're 
young it's hard to adjust to the real world.

From StoryPeople.

BLOGGER'S SPAM FILTER WORKS

Some weeks ago, I removed the function for typing in the fuzzy and frustrating letters for my readers to  to prove they are not robots.  Blogger's spam filter works quite well.  I have not had a spam comment to delete for days, and my legitimate commenters are not blocked.

For those bloggers amongst you who still enable the fuzzy letter function, I suggest that you disable it and give Blogger's system a try.  If the system doesn't work for you, then you can always enable the robot blocker again.  It's annoying to have to try to decipher the fuzzy letters and then type the pairs of words three or four times before being able to post a comment.

WHO ARE THE PROPHETS TODAY?

Jeremiah - Donatello

The 2d edition of Walter Bruggemann's The Prophetic Imagination was published in 2001.  The book is as relevant today as it was 11 years ago, and I recommend it highly.   Bruegemann writes of the prophets of the Hebrew Testament, and I quote a few short excerpts below.

The following discussion is an attempt to understand what the prophets were up to, if we can be freed from our usual stereotypes of foretellers or social protestors.  Here it is argued that they were concerned with most elemental changes in human society and that they understood a great deal about how change is effected.  The prophets understood the possibility of change as linked to emotional extremities of life.  They understood the strange incongruence between public conviction and personal yearning.  Most of all, they understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness "fresh from the word."  It is argued here that a prophetic understanding of reality is based in the notion that all social reality does spring from the word.  It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that where such language stops we find our humaness diminished. (Preface to the 1st ed., 1978)

....

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.  This enculturation is in some way true across the spectrum of church life, both liberal and conservative.  It may not be a new situation, but it is one that seems especially urgent and pressing at the present time.  That enculturation is true not only of the institution of the church but also of us as persons.  Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric. (p. 1)

In the quote below, substitute for "the king" and "royal consciousness" the government and its nearly seamless mesh with Wall Street.  Or substitute the institution of the Church. 

When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does.  I suspect that our own self-concept as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim.  But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric.  The prophet engages in futuring fantasy.  The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined.  The imagination must come before the implementation.  Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.  The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger.  Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.  It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.  (p. 40)

Who are our prophets today?  Where is our Micah?

  ‘O my people, what have I done to you?
   In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
   and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
and I sent before you Moses,
   Aaron, and Miriam.
O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,
   what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
   that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.’

  ‘With what shall I come before the Lord,
   and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
   with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
   with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
   the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
   and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
   and to walk humbly with your God?

(Micah 6:3-8)

Our Jeremiah?

Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
   and his upper rooms by injustice;
who makes his neighbours work for nothing,
   and does not give them their wages;
who says, ‘I will build myself a spacious house
   with large upper rooms’,
and who cuts out windows for it,
   panelling it with cedar,
   and painting it with vermilion.
Are you a king
   because you compete in cedar?
Did not your father eat and drink
   and do justice and righteousness?
   Then it was well with him.
He judged the cause of the poor and needy;
   then it was well.
Is not this to know me?
   says the Lord.
But your eyes and heart
   are only on your dishonest gain,
for shedding innocent blood,
   and for practising oppression and violence.

(Jeremiah 22:13-17)

My question in the title of the post is serious.  Who are the  prophets who speak "the language of newness" today?  Within religious institutions, or outside?  Or have we no prophets?  Do we see in the present the reality of the words from Proverbs, "Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint..."?  I've been thinking on these things as I read Brueggemann, and I'd like to hear from others.

Image from the Web Gallery of Art.

CARTOON APROPOS OF ALL POLITICAL CANDIDATES

From SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Cheers,

Paul (A.).

OWS SETS UP LIVING ROOM IN BOA LOBBY

A crew of occupiers makes a home of a Bank of America lobby with a couch, a coffee table, a rug and a potted plant. "Bank of America took our homes so we though we'd move in here!" Join them March 15 as America turns the tables on the nation's largest bank!

From Viral Voices for OWS.

FIRST DAY OF SPRING

Q:  Where do people go to learn about the change of season?

A:  At the School of Hard Vernal Equinox!


H/t to Bill in Portland Maine:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/20/1075795/-Cheers-and-Jeers-Super-Duc
k-Tuesday


Cheers,

Paul (A.)

Both Paul (A.) and Bill have been ordered off the stage.

INTO THE 19TH CENTURY

From News Thump UK:

As Dr Rowan Williams announced his resignation from the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, church officials began their search for a replacement sufficiently detached from reality to accurately represent their interests.

Williams is due to take up a post as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he will be able to foist his medieval opinions on the impressionable minds of thousands of young people every year.

However, the void left by his considerable personality will need to be filled swiftly, lest the church accidentally find itself dragged into the 19th century.

As one Church official told us, “We face a homophobic vacuum unless we move swiftly. Without someone to take a stance against the gays we could find ourselves overrun within weeks – like a better dressed scene from The Walking Dead.”

Ouch!  The spoof is very funny, but a bit too suggestive of reality.   Read the rest at the link.

H/T to Leonardo.

WHAT THE BRITISH SAY...

From English Teachers Collective on Facebook via Prior Aelred.

'MADPRIEST'S TOTALLY SERIOUS SUGGESTIONS'

 
...for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury.  I have my own favorite, but I won't say who it is, as I don't wish to influence you as you click on over to Of Course, I Could Be Wrong... to add your suggestions to the mix.  Once you see MadPriest's post, if you're very clever and observant, you may be able to deduce my first choice.

ARCHBISHOP OKOH RESPONDS TO ARCHBISHOP ROWAN's RETIREMENT

From the Church of Nigeria website:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd and Rt. Hon. Dr. Rowan Williams took over the leadership of the Anglican Communion in 2002 when it was a happy family. Unfortunately, he is leaving behind a Communion in tatters: highly polarized, bitterly factionalized, with issues of revisionist interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and human sexuality as stumbling blocks to oneness, evangelism and mission all around the Anglican world.

It might not have been entirely his own making, but certainly “crucified under Pontius Pilate”. The lowest ebb of this degeneration came in 2008, when there were, so to say, two “Lambeth” Conferences one in the UK, and an alternative one, GAFCON in Jerusalem. The trend continued recently when many Global South Primates decided not to attend the last Primates’ meeting in Dublin, Ireland.

Since Dr. Rowan Williams did not resign in 2008, over the split Lambeth Conference, one would have expected him to stay on in office, and work assiduously to ‘mend the net’ or repair the breach, before bowing out of office. The only attempt, the covenant proposal, was doomed to fail from the start, as “two cannot walk together unless they have agreed”.

For us, the announcement does not present any opportunity for excitement. It is not good news here, until whoever comes as the next leader pulls back the Communion from the edge of total destruction. To this end, we commit our Church, the Church of Nigeria, (Anglican Communion) to serious fasting and prayers that God will do “a new thing”, in the Communion.

Nevertheless, we join others to continue in prayer for Dr. Rowan Williams and his family for a more fruitful endeavour in their post – Canterbury life.

+Nicholas D. Okoh

Archbishop, Metropolitan and Primate of All Nigeria

Don't hold back, Abp. Okoh.  Tell us what you really think.

The Nigerian bishops use the phrase, "two cannot walk together unless they have agreed," time and again to justify their decision to "walk apart" from the churches in the Anglican Communion with whom they do not agree.  Is the quote from the prophet Amos in the KJV?  Not really.  The words that come closest to Abp. Okoh's quote are in the form of a question.

Amos 3:3-8

KJV

Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
 
I first heard of the phrase from Abp Peter Akinola, who said, "The Bible says that two cannot walk together unless they are agreed."  The Bible says no such thing that I can find, therefore it appears that Abp Okoh quotes his predecessor, rather than the Bible, when he uses the words.  The two other translations below wouldn't really make the case for walking apart at all.  Of course, people cannot walk together unless they agree to walk together, but they do not have to agree about everything in order to walk together.  I find the apparent misattribution of the words to the Scriptures annoying in the extreme.  Besides, even the GAFCONites do not agree on everything,

NRSV

Do two walk together
unless they have made an appointment?
 
NIV

Do two walk together
unless they have agreed to do so?

Abp Okoh's claim that the Anglican Communion was "a happy family" back in 2002 when Rowan Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury is absurd.  The beginning of the end of the "happy family" began at least as early as Lambeth 1998.