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Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox worked out a theology that makes sense for post-modern, 21st century mystics who want to honor the Christ of John’s Gospel without forcing the text into impossible literalism. Fox’s “Cosmic Christ” evokes responsibility for the condition of all forms of life on Planet Earth, and confers the power to carry out the work that arises from that responsibility.

How do I believe? (How do I understand faith that seems to conflict with science and pluralism?) What should I do? (How do my actions make a difference in the world?) Whose am I? (How do my relationships shape my self-understanding?)

First Presbyterian Church Elizabethton, Tennessee April 6, 2012 Good Friday Mark 15:1-47 A few years ago a poster advertising Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion, featured an image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. The caption read: Dying …

Paul is not talking about life after death. Paul is talking about embracing the challenge of distributive justice-compassion –“the great work” – here and now. John’s Jesus assures us that “the spirit of truth will testify on my behalf,” not about the insane claim that he was God, nor about the resuscitation of a corpse.

But, if we want to follow our Savior through Holy Week, if we want to experience Holy Week in a way that reflects our Savior’s own experiences during that first holy week, then we won’t find ourselves in a pew, in a church, in a service. We would find ourselves in the streets. In anger. In protest. In search of justice.

In The Authentic Letters of Paul, the scholars define “sin” (Greek: hamartia) as “the corrupting seduction of power,” or the “seductive power of corruption.” Paul is not talking about rotting corpses. He is talking about the kind of corruption that arises between people, and in government or economic empires that leads to systems of injustice.

So what do I mean by God, Spirit, the Higher Self? Two things. First, God is the Ground of Being, the absolute, unqualifiable emptiness-in-form. That’s what the mystics in every religion and culture have told us for thousands of years. I believe this because that’s what the evidence tells me – those independent, cross-cultural reports of mystics, and the few glimpses I’ve experienced myself.

The chapters following the last meal contain the heart of John’s argument that Jesus was the Anointed One sent by God to fulfill the longing of the Jewish people for deliverance from injustice, foretold for first century Jews in the book of Daniel.

A brief literature review of cancer survival trials is employed by the author to raise questions on their design and to bring speculatively into discussion concepts such as “worldview”, “intentional normative dissociation”, and “psychosomatic plasticity-proneness”. Using prayer’s psychological dimension as …

The message is that God’s intention – the order of the universe – is distributive justice-compassion. To live in the light is to transform water to wine: to bring healing to everyone, whether they are the children of collaborators with oppression, or ingrates that game the system.

Bible stories, including all of the Jesus stories, were written in a particular time and context. Feel into it for a moment-you’re living in a time when there are almost no scientific explanations for anything, and even if there were, virtually everyone you know is illiterate. What you all know is that, most of the time, things happen as they have, but every so often, something unexpected happens (good or bad).

Thoughtful, progressive, inclusive, compassionate, intelligent, and non-dogmatic children’s curriculum.

INTRODUCTION
Who are we? Jesus responded to the Jews preparing to stone him: “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods?'” John 10:34

What is Holy Thursday about? Will we be thrown by the fact that Scripture scholars will say to us that maybe there wasn’t a “last supper?”

Further, if John Dominic Crossan’s interpretation of Paul’s letters is correct – or at least on the track – the dry bones raised by Ezekiel become a metaphor for those who died in the service of God’s justice; those who died working to restore God’s distributive justice-compassion to God’s earth, and who themselves never saw the transformed earth.

Imagine being truly happy, inside and out. Why not?
Imagine being completely at peace with yourself and the world. Why not?
Imagine living a life that matches your highest vision. Why not?
Imagine changing destructive habits with ease and replacing them with life affirming activities that fill your life with meaning. Why not?