THAT TRAMPOLINE IS KEEN!

Look at the movie and you will see
The trampoline's the thing for me.
First I pop up over the rim
And then I'm off with all my vim.
It's up in the air for a cannonball,
Down, and then it's standing tall
With arms all spread and twirling around
Then down on my knees and up I bound.
This time up I touch my nose
Then put my hands out on my toes
Sitting down, then up I vault
And turn a little somersault.
Then land on my back, next time way high
I reach up to touch the sky
  And next,  just  like a circus clown,
  I  lay out on the pad face down,
  Jump up and twist three times around
  And sit up when I touch the ground
  Then fold my arms and bow my head
  And land again with legs wide spread
  There's lots more of these tricks, I know,
  I'll learn new ones wherever I go
  They'll be the best you've ever seen
  Oh boy, that trampoline is keen!

The Y's Way to Get Wet

If this dry season makes you drool
What you need is the swimming pool
Exercise is what you'll get
All the while you're getting wet.

        Chorus:

    Ho , ho, ho for you and me
     The pool is where you want to be

The swimming pool is full  of folk
Who like to paddle, kick and stroke
And if action's what you wish
They'll swing their tail like little fish.

They all are groupies, you must know
Sabrina helps to run the show
Jackie's the conductor, and
Colleen dances to beat the band.

It happens every weekday morning
And so I tell you, here's a warning:
It's not raining  inside, not yet -
Come to the Y and you'll get wet!

 The rains will come, they always do,
We'll all get dampened through and through
Outside it's dry, so get together -
Enjoy October's bright blue weather!

SABBATH

The Hebrew word SEVEN is SHABBAT.  And long before history was written, the seventh day of the week had significance for the Hebrew people.  Writers attributed that special day to a desire for servants's need for rest. 

When the people of Judah (southern Israel) were expelled to Babylonia, the religious authorities were pressed to retain their national customs lest the people become domesticated to their captors' ways. They focused on circumcision and Shabbat as irreducible elements in their religious practice.

However, since the Hebrews had no account of the world's creation, they adopted the Babylonian story of creation arising in eight acts.  But in order to fit the time-honored seventh-day of rest, they condensed the creation sequence into six days, with two acts of creation squeezed into two separate days.  That account, although a bit clumsy, survived as the opening chapter of Genesis. 

In order to reinforce the Shabbat element in their history, the writers inserted seventh-day observances into David's story, for example.  And that practice resounded into the Jesus story as well.  The Christian heritage followed that pattern of weekly-day-of-rest, and western civilization followed suit, despite the oddities that causes in the calendar. The world has adopted that rhythm, so we have today a religion-based order of days.

No Excuse for Groundlings

A favorite story comes from a Danish philosopher named Kierkegaard. He describes a flock of ducks flying over the countryside, swooping and gliding.

One of the ducks suffers a kind of seizure and decides to leave the formation and land in a a farmyard below.  There he joins a flock of chickens, participates in the chickens' routines of feeding and sleeping and strutting about the farmyard. After a few days in that barnyard he decides he has the strength to fly again, so he tries out his wings. But he has lost his flying skills, and cannot fly. Then he sinks back into the chicken yard to resume his comfortable grounded life with the chickens.

That story reminds one of how easy it is to fall into an ordinary routine that loses touch with higher, more demanding ways of life. The apostle Paul pleaded:     

   

"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." That is a good reminder that we live in a world where profits and power are at a premium, where success trumps truth, where revenge and control are valued . . . where Christian virtues of compassion and forgiveness and humility and faith are frequently ignored. We choose many times a day between the conformity and a transformed way of life.

John Oxenham wrote "To Everyman there openeth a high way and a low and every man decideth which way his soul shall go".  And we know that daily  living requires choices. I recall with anguish a choice I made back in fourth grade. In taking a written test, I looked across the aisle to another pupil's sheet to get an answer.  The teacher clapped her hands and said in a loud voice, "Larry, you are cheating."  And I answered, "But other people are doing that too." She called back, "Never excuse yourself for doing what others are doing".

So I got caught in that chicken yard, a groundling who could have been flying.

"Oh yeah?" and "So what"?

Now that the new school year is under way, I am reminded of an experience I had as a classroom teacher.  During one semester a crew-cut boy sat in the front row of desks. Whenever I made an outright statement, he would say in a kind of murmur "oh, yeah?" or else "so what?"

I was startled for the first few times that happened. But as time went by, I learned how important his questioning was. First, could I stand by what I was teaching with authority? Did I know facts to back it up? What references did I have?

The second question asks "Is it important?" and "If so, why?"

I stated at one point that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. And with the "Oh, yeah?" ringing in my ears  I went on to explain Lincoln's determination to set aside compromise solutions to the Civil War despite the awful loss of life being experienced. His Gettysburg address and his second inaugural speech set his presidency in a truly patriotic frame.

Then came the "So what?" query. Despite the antagonism directed toward him, Lincoln's constant insistence that "a house divided cannot stand" and his constant reminder that "all men are created equal" gave a giant start to the civil rights movement. We came to understand that it was not only politically correct but a basic fact that "God made of one blood all nations of men."

So I learned a lot about teaching from that student. When we came to discussing Galileo as the founder of our modern scientific age, I faced the same two queries about the validity and the consequences of that definition. Galileo challenged the ingrained religious belief that the sun revolved around the earth and he was accused of atheism, contradicting so-called "revealed truth." He pursued the method of observation and repeated experimenting that gives us the means of understanding our world today.

In later years I stood in the church pulpit and preached about what Jesus said and did. There I discovered that the same two questions needed to be addressed. It was easy to cite Jesus' call to love our neighbor. He repeated the command and amplified it with parables. But then came the second caution, the "So what?"  Our neighbors surely include the homeless, the disabled, the foreign people in our community. What can we do to love them?  Analyzing their problems is a simple task. But spelling out a solution, answering the "So what?" is a demanding challenge. 

We do not need to be impressed by people who recite verses or even chapters from the Bible, the analysts who quote percentages, the historians who compare today's problems with past situations. They play a part in helping us understand our condition. But the big question remains: how do we give life to these teachings by our actions?  How do we love our neighbors of a different race, a different culture, a different level of society?

 The answer we give to that question is our real religion. 

The Biblical Tree

No matter how the story of the Garden of Eden is told, the focus lands on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But that meaning of that phrase (that Adam and Eve must not eat of that tree) is obscure; and it is not related to some translation judgment. The phrase is correctly translated, and  I think there is a profound message here.

The central idea is that having certainty of one's assessment of good and evil is impossible. When a human being defends his acts on the basis of KNOWLEDGE of good or evil, he is falsely judging his choice. The Garden parable suggests clearly that moral judgments may be based on outlook, prejudice, race, ethics, commands.......anything but knowledge. Every decision we make arises from our character; we are responsible; we cannot know that we are making the right choice. 

I think of the assessment of U.S. presidents: "we won't know whether he was a good president or not for fifty years."  Think of the bitter appraisal of  Lincoln's presidency that  prevailed through the rest of the 19th century, condemning his unwillingness to compromise, citing his opposition to the Dred Scott decision, deriding his bias toward Negro rights. It suggests that we are incapable of calculating the effects of our decisions.

In his book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, Michael Sandel proposes that we "do what is right."   The writers of the Garden parable would not disagree.  But they would emphatically add, "but don't suppose that you can be certainly right." Every decision is more a declaration of faith than a moral certainty

That is why we have the phrase "have the courage of your convictions." The courage to be is the beginning of our journey. The courage to act is a daily challenge.

Original Sin

The idea of original sin was born in a primitive parable designed to explain the origin of human beings.  The moral of the Adam and Eve story was that we folks today suffer evil events because of our immoral behavior, our sins.

The parable was widely accepted, encouraged by the religious establishment which proclaimed its ability to overcome guilt and forgive sins. So the biblical account grounds the origin of human existence in sin and guilt.

Saint Augustine made a fundamental Christian doctrine of this, taking the Garden of Eden story as a historical account. He set up a whole scenario that saw Jesus as the One chosen by God to enable human beings to overcome that original sin. The phrase "Jesus saves from our sins" was born in Augustine's mind.

That Augustinian mind-set has prevailed through the succeeding centuries, still resounding in even liberal-minded theologies. But the onset of the scientific age has made it necessary to put aside that original guilt imputed in Genesis. Galileo, Newton and Darwin have made that parable of origins untenable. No longer can we accept an imaginative  account of original sin as the basis of human existence. We must learn to think in evolutionary terms.  The human experience is the product of a millennia of uninterrupted centuries of upward growth and development.   

 There is no reasonable basis for an account of original sin. The parable served its purpose in fostering a religious frame for human existence, but it has lost its relevance. No longer are sin and guilt the foundation of human life. Human beings have been on an  upward trajectory since their awakening, increasing in skill, intelligence, and ability with the centuries. Our mission is to plan and think forward, not to look back in anguish. 

The phrase " Jesus saves us from our sins" is not biblical.  Jesus did not speak of himself as a savior. Rather, he advocated and demonstrated a new dimension of life, a forward step in the evolution of the Spirit. This is the healing, accepting, loving way that human beings are capable of. Jesus showed that in his life. So he could rightly say " I am the way". 

In the beginning...

T.S.Eliot put it right: "Nobody likes to live with  mystery."   We humans beings have been pondering our origins for centuries, discontented with the elusive mystery of where we came from and why.

Our Old Testament faces up to the question at the very outset: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"  This is a statement of faith, not knowledge.  It says to the reader that an unknown and unknowable force is responsible for the creation.  It does not attempt to suggest what went on before that act of creation; it does not conjecture any motive; it does not describe the substance of that creation.  It is a grand lyrical poem that attempts to account for existence.

The poem consists of eight acts of creation, based on the Babylonian calendar. These eight acts were telescoped to six in the Hebrew poem to fit the creation-in-six-days liturgical week during the Babylonian captivity of Israel. When that "captivity" came to an end, the Hebrews returned to their homeland with a new worship plan (home-based Seders), confirmation of the Shabat (seventh day worship) and a poetic answer to the age-old mystery of the Creation.

In our scientific age, we earnestly search out an answer to that fundamental  question about our origins.  The Hadron Collider is our current enterprise, attempting to discover the elements of our existence and how they came into being.  But the purpose of our existence remains unknowable except in the imaginative weaving of poetry and theology.

These are speculative efforts at best, the "stuff that dreams are made of."

And this is not a bad situation.  We must be thankful that the mystery of our existence is a never-ending challenge to our imagination.  It is not a matter of knowledge.  It is not open to scientific investigation.  This mystery cannot be solved.  It can only stimulate our spirit to commit our selves to channeling our lives in ways that are meaningful to us.  And "meaningful ways" are what lift our lives above the level of mere survival.

Updating Socrates

On July 19th, The New York Times published an op-ed essay “The Trouble With Online Education” by Marc Edmundson.  You can read it here: http://nyti.ms/NBUfBW

Here is my response to his ideas:

Mark Edmundsen makes good points, especially in holding that good education is a dialog, a community enterprise.  However, he stands in the traditional line of transmission of learning through personal teachers.  Good for him!

However, several factors still need to be considered.  Here are a few:

•    The prohibitive cost of traditional educational procedures. 

•    The vehicle of computers which have a grip on the learning process from a very early age. 

•    The interaction provided by Skype that enables discussion and debate. 

•    The lethargy of many professors who are not nearly as sensitive to student concerns as he is.  Edmundson’s overestimation of the amount of student- to-student discussion that may or may not take place. 

•    The suggestion that the Socratic method is the most effective learning technique, intimating that Socrates would not have used the computer if he had one. 

•    The fact that professors would have to search out innovative ways to engage their students in dialog, and that is a demanding task. 

•    That regardless of the method, teachers have to be creative in their approach, finding new ways of presenting material - like daily quizzes, newspaper headlines, exploratory research, self-conducted surveys, etc. 

I would guess that in the upcoming generation we will see skills and talents that this generation barely touches.  I admire Edmundsen for his staunch hold on traditional methods, but the onslaught of distant learning will render him a minority voice before long.

Unto. The. Hills.

When Israel entered Canaan, a pagan land, they listened to the most popular hymn of the locals: "I lift up my eyes unto the hills.........". Their song reminded them that God's home was in the mountaintops. 

The Hebrew faith had something better to offer: "My help comes from Him who made heaven and earth!." It is the Creator, not the creation, which is the center of faith.

But the pagan hymn was appealing  in an agricultural community where so much depends on the sun and rain, factors that are presumably controlled by a deity who lives on the mountain top. So it was that many of the new Hebrew residents joined in the chorus.

Elijah was the first outspoken champion of the Hebrew position as he killed many prophets of  that mountaintop God (Baal).  Later on, King Josiah  led a reform movement - that meant destroying the mountaintop altars of the pagan gods.

A nameless writer put these events into a kind of taunting poem, starting with a line echoing the popular refrain, "I lift up my eyes unto the hills!"  Then the second line, countering the first: but "MY help comes from far beyond the mountain; my help comes from the Lord who created the heavens and the earth."

That abrupt shift between the first and second line of the poem was unfortunately overlooked as  many printed versions of the Bible combined the lines into a single sentence. 'That made it sound as though the writer's help came from the mountaintop.  Make no mistake here! It is the Creator God whom we seek, whom we honor, whom we worship.  Let the marvels of mountain  vistas remain forever attractive; they are not the residence of God.

Kingdom, Power, Glory

Our King James Bible is a translation of ancient manuscripts.  Six committees of brilliant scholars pored over these documents for six years and produced the Bible in 1611. 

We cannot identify any single word or phrase in the Bible with any one of these scholars.  This translation was a group enterprise.  The only phrase that can be surely sourced does not appear in the final version.  It is the phrase that concludes Jesus' prayer:  " Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory."

These words were the creation of Lancelot Andrewes, , bishop of Westminster.  Andrewes was indeed a gifted  leader of his translating group, and his group made a mellow translation of the first five books of the Bible.

But authorship of any specific phrase in the Bible itself cannot be traced to him.

What, then, about these luminous words that have become so readily taken as part of Jesus' own prayer?  When commissioning the translators for their task, King James asked them to produce a "magisterial" work.  He wanted them to depict God with grandeur, to reflect His magnificence in His colleague James.  He asked them to confirm the "divine right of the king."

Lancelot Andrewes took the liberty of concluding the Jesus prayer with these majestic words.  And although they do not appear in the early versions, they have become universally accepted as clues to God's being as Jesus saw Him:

"Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory!"

Theology in Ten Words

The phrase most often repeated from the Bible opens the Lord's prayer: "Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."  These words carry a theology in themselves.

The word "our" clearly is inclusive of every human being.  No person of any race, creed or color can be omitted from this group.  "Our Father" puts every human being into a relationship with our creator and with each other.  We are siblings across the globe.

"Our Father" means that we are not alone.  We are created beings. We are in touch with our creator. Our creator has begotten us as a father conceives. That creator cares for us as a father. We are purposeful creations. Being created means that we have a relationship with all that is past.

"Father" is not a name but a relationship. This puts us in a family with a dimension that reaches not only to a different generation but to different order which we can only imagine.  We pray to our Father "in heaven"  because that Father is beyond earthly definitions and  limitations.

"Hallowed be thy name" because giving a name brings that named being into our level, and that demeans the Creator God.  When we call out a name we are asking for fraternity, but God is in a different phase of being.  His name is unknown to us as a result.  It is hallowed beyond our naming.  The closest we can come to naming God is to recognize God as Father.

The opening of the Lord's prayer opens the door to a first step in identifying God.  We reaffirm our faith every time we say the Lord's prayer.

Twisted Tale

Over many centuries, a debate has consistently been waged on this question: does God reward us for our good acts and punish us for the evil we do?  The positive answer to that equation has been promoted by moralists who insist that God dispenses rewards and punishments according to our actions.  Let's call them PROVERS. .These moralists think that pain and accidents prove God's punishment for evil.

However, some moralists have investigated that idea more deeply.  Call them PROBERS.  These thinkers see that if a person prospers or suffers, these are not the result of God's intervention.

Of course, there is no proof of either position.  So the debate continues, fueled largely by the moralists who want to promote goodness by predicting divine punishments and rewards.

Some centuries before Christ, a group of PROBERS decided to demonstrate their conviction by telling a story about a man who suffered unduly.  They pictured a man who was a model of moral behavior, admirable in every way.  But he suffered accident, illness and family disaster.  Friends of the suffering man visited him regularly, accusing him of sinful actions -or else, why would God punish him so severely?

In order to make the story realistic, they gave the sufferer a name: Job. And to make sure that everyone who heard the story knew it was make-believe, the narrators opened the story with a fantasy debate between God and the devil.

Now, the central story is long, consisting mostly of the friends' unyielding efforts to persuade Job that he is a sinner - or else, why would he be suffering? Job is just as certain that he is guiltless, and  he defends himself vigorously.  A grand conclusion comes when God  appears in majestic form and tells both Job and his friends to quit judging what God will or will not do.  God's majesty is far beyond human calculation; his judgments are beyond man's analysis.

The PROBERS have made a strong conclusion, carefully argued and decisively stated.  But, as the strong determination of the PROVERS held that God's judgment favors the righteous and rejects the evil man, their editors dreamed up a new ending to the story, portraying the good man Job recovering his health, possessions and family after all.  This violation of the original story is a shameful reversal of the lesson the PROBERS intended.  But it attached itself to the wonderful picture the PROBERS drew.  And because that second ending was included in early translations, we Bible readers today are the victims of this awful hoax. It's a twisted tale!

Prove It!

Over the centuries, an Easter cry has been made by Christians: " Christ is risen.".  That proclamation has meant to many people that the body of Jesus was somehow transformed and became a living being again.  That miracle is the foundation of many Christian's faith. 

Three important messages are here in those three words.  First, it is Christ who is risen.  Not the body of Jesus the man but the spiritual being, God's offspring. It is Christ the embodiment of God, the carrier of God's presence.

Second, the verb tells us that this is not a historical event but a fact, a declaration.  The verb "is"  proclaims that something exists. And that something is the spirit of the living God, the Christ. 

Third, the statement CHRIST IS RISEN is a personal commitment.  The world listens to the Christian who cries it and says "PROVE IT.  You claim to be the body of Christ risen.  Show us by your actions that the spirit of Christ lives in you.  Your actions, your words, your decisions, your acts of love and forgiveness -these alone can justify your cry!"

Yes, crowds of people shouting "Christ is risen" are not convincing.  The world looks for that Christ to appear, to be visible in our lives.

Good Samaritan

The most familiar story in the New Testament is about an alienated man doing an extraordinary act of compassion.  Jesus concluded the story with a question about being a good neighbor. My ending is different: when the injured man asks the Samaritan why he did this act of mercy, the Samaritan said "I did it so that God might exist."

What the Samaritan did was to transform God from being a distant idea to being a present fact.  In that act, the divine dream becomes a reality.  The unimaginable turns out to be real.

When we love, God becomes tangible.  That is true when we forgive. . . when we work for justice or peace or healing.  It is as though God is waiting for us to let Him/Her loose in our lives. 

That old question that asks "do believe in the existence of God?" cannot be answered with YES or NO.  It can only be answered by enabling your conception of God to act.

Through the ages, theologians have speculated noisily about the nature of God.  That continuing debate provides stimulating discussion.  Bit if we really mean it when we pray "thy will be done", we are responsible for bringing God's will Into existence. Apart from that action, God  is but a concept.

Now is the Time!

As I look over the Christian church across the world, I join God as He "sits in His heaven and laughs".  What strikes me as humorous is the determination of so many to make some past insights meaningful despite their terrible deficiencies.   Catholics are intent on ushering Thomas and Augustine into the 21st century.  Lutherans try to make Luther a theological hero. Presbyterians still try to solve Calvin's predestination.  Evangelicals pursue the 20th century insistence on the Five Fundamentals.  All of them are applying some outworn idea to a new world.

I think of the seventeenth century as the beginning of the modern era.  That century saw the urgency of the people replacing the power of the monarchy.

That century saw Galileo challenge the authority of tradition and dogma. That century brought the Pilgrims insisting that God's revelation does not depend on kings and councils. A new age was being born.

Call it the age of science - or of democracy - it upended the the formation of truth by crediting the experience of investigative people, researchers or scientists.  One curious event demonstrates the big change: Fra Lippo Lippi was dismissed from his monastery because he drew a picture of a tree with the green leaves he saw instead of the brown leaves required by medieval artistic standards.

We have lived in the midst of this learning community for several centuries.  And we are still reluctant to let of our nostalgic dependence on the past.  This week's news has focused on pageantry with the Queen of England and an obsession with the Pope.  They reflect our reluctance to move away from ancient authority to modern discovery. 

How can the church speak to people today when its language and ideas and information are rooted in a different language?  How can people schooled in evolution and space travel and computers and relativity and ego analysis subdue their intelligence and their culture to embrace that outworn past?

God must be laughing!

Triple Threat

Our minds like to deal with certainties, facts that can be certified. But certainties are rare, and we are required to live on beliefs, convictions, and dreams.

A close view of this situation can be seen in Prospero's clear statement at the climax of Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST. Prospero looks over the stage which has just been filled with actors and scenery, and he points at the insubstantial nature of the scene:

First, the actors have "vanished into thin air". Second, the cloud-capped towers and solemn temples of the stage prove to be formed of "baseless fabric which is soon dissolved". Finally, our lives are depicted as "the stuff dreams are made of". But Prosperous is not proposing that the drama just staged is meaningless.

What is suggested here about the real world we inhabit?  I think he is saying that human life is brief and meaningless without those dreams. Human concerns like beauty, honor, love, justice and truth are without substance. They are creations of the human mind which give us what little "stuff" is available to us. 

We don't need to despair over our lack of certainty or substance. We have the capacity to be nourished by music, encouraged by poetry, strengthened by drama, satisfied with scientific progress, affirmed by our faith, fulfilled with our belief in family. These are compelling realities that give us meaning despite their insubstantial nature. Rejoice in them!

Religion Without Miracles

By the time that the young Christian church was ready to challenge the Roman empire, it had augmented its origins with astounding miracles. The Galilean peasant- become- evangelist Jesus was heralded as being born of a virgin in a sainted village as angels sang in heaven and a star moved across the sky.  His career was filled with miracles and his death affected all mankind. 

These miracles surely impressed the worldly Romans with the cosmic nature of Jesus' ministry.  But without the miracles, would Christianity have held them as a valid revelation of God?  Would we become Christians without those miracles?

Surely those miracles awake our slumbering imaginations.  They arouse our awareness of the unsolved mystery of human existence and beg for any kind of alternative explanation of our being. They argue that if Jesus was to be the savior of mankind, then the usual order of heaven and earth should rightly be altered. Roman civilization was not as skeptical as modern minds are, so it was open to reports of such amazing events.

How about us today?  With our scientific mind-set and our investigative archaeological research, our tendency is to treat these miracles as literary exaggerations. There may be  reasoned explanations for each one, as thousands of sermons attest. But the substance remains questionable: would Christianity be a viable religion without the miracles?

My answer is YES.  The scientific mind-set pays no homage to such naturalistic miracles.  It is intent with miracles on a different scale.  Human existence, the evolutionary urge, the nature of light, the circulation of blood, the convolutions of the ego -  these are among the miracles that beg for some accountability.  The more subtle miracles surround issues of love and forgiveness, grace and faith, and these remain as challenges for every generation.  Poetic and dramatic creations make vivid explanations in every new age.

We have, then, in the biblical record an account of the evangelist Jesus attracting crowds of people to hear his message.  That message had its unique influence.  But it was the charismatic nature of Jesus that caused people to open their passions to him and find  themselves with God.  That experience, augmented with miracle stories, was the Christian message.  Without the miracles, we can still thrive as Christians.

Better and Wetter at the Family Y!

Vacation time!  So now's the time to travel far and wide

Spring rains are gone, the country's high and dry.

You'll find it hot and dusty everywhere you ride:

It's better and wetter at the Family Y.

I'd like to see the Alamo out on the Texas plain

Where far too many soldiers had to die.

But now that's oil country that's always wanting rain:

It's better and wetter at the Family Y

I'd like to try the stratosphere, just to look down from

The towers of Manhattan or Dubai.

The air is like a vacuum there, it makes you want to come where

It's better and wetter at the Family Y.

I'd like to be in Egypt; I'd like to pet the sphinx,

To see those pyramids reaching to the sky

But it's drier and it's dustier there than anybody thinks.

It's better and wetter at the Family Y

And, oh, to be in Athens to see the Parthenon

With its pillars and its portals standing high.

Now the place is filled with boulders and the roof has fallen in,

It's better and wetter at the Family Y

And then there is old London town, always a lively place The Olympic games are coming in July With sprints and leaps and hurdles clouding up the pace It's better and wetter at the Family Y.

Well, yes, it is vacation time, it's time to make a choice.

With lots of new experiences to try

For the prospect of this summer, everybody raise your voice:

IT'S BETTER AND WETTER AT THE FAMILY Y.

BY NO ONE BUT ME!

Jesus' baffling statement  "No one comes to the Father but by me" comes in John's gospel.  John puts these words forward in a desperate attempt to establish Jesus' uniqueness against the claims of other evangelists.  But the fallout of that assertion is the rejection of every person who does not bow to Jesus as the only savior of all mankind.  Could Jesus have limited everyone's  access to God to only His followers?

The Old testament abounds with required means to approach God.There are over six hundred laws to be obeyed; circumcision; the temple; the rituals; Jerusalem itself; Justice; Israel; the Scrolls.  Is John suggesting that Jesus replaces all of these as a means of coming before God?

.It was John, writing sixty  years after Jesus died, who makes this claim.  John is  intent on singling Jesus as sole means to God as a replacement of all the Hebrew arsenal as well as other evangelists of his time.  This colossal claim is a building block for the growing Christian church, John asserts. How could Jesus outflank his competitors
if their preaching and teaching were regarded as authentic?

John's statement of Jesus' uniqueness here also demolishes the claims  of every other religion in their enterprise of approaching God.  In effect, John is claiming a single
Religion for mankind, one centered in Jesus. Is that possible? Is that conceivable?

I regard John's statement as an overblown fantasy as he is caught up in the stressful action of promoting the Christian church in the midst of Roman power.  Jesus was unique, but he was one of many representatives of God. That is my understanding.  What is yours?

Creative Creation

The most haunting question about human life is answered in the first pages of the  Bible: How and why did it all  begin?   The answer came in the form of a hybrid poem, a product of combined Hebrew and Babylonian poetry.

In the 7th century BC, Babylonians captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and moved the mass of Judah's  people to the Ninevah area.  There, the Hebrews largely refused to accommodate to their newfound culture.  But without a central Temple to worship in, they settled on writing poetic and historic records of their past.l

Their memory of heroic exploits was easy to record.  But when it came to imagining human or cosmic origins, their poets struggled mightily.  It must have come with desperation that they turned to the insights of their captors whose creation account credited God with an eight-day week.

The Hebrew poets insisted  on retaining their sacred six-day tradition, so they squeezed the extra two days into their account, retaining the sequence of the action.  And other oddities broke in, such as Light flooding the earth  before the Sun and Moon were created.

Here was "revealed" the Purpose beyond the tangible world.  Now there came that major shift in loyalty: from Temple to Sacred Scroll.  The Scroll was portable, so it could be copied and carried home as the new center for family worship.

The hunger for the central Temple did not vanish, however.  So a new Temple was built in Jerusalem when the Hebrews returned to their homeland.  But by this time the Sacred Scrolls and family service were so ingrained that they became the focal points of their religious observance.

This hybrid poem, then, has stood the analyses, the tests of over twenty-five centuries. It attempts to unravel millions of years back to a self-evident Creator. Speculation about that Creator will go on forever.  But that Mystery is at the heart of our faith. It is a poem, after all, and its purpose is to challenge and lift our spirits, not to propose a scientific answer to a theological idea.