Tag Archives: Resurrection

Deep River Washing

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Realistic Pointers 2018

This month’s Realistic Living Pointers contains excerpts from my commentary on the Gospel of Mark. It is about my understanding of the meaning to Mark of John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus.

In these verses of Mark’s narrative about a Jewish peasant from Nazareth named “Jesus” rising from John’s washing from the corruptions of that era of history is prelude to the disciples of Jesus rising from their own deep-water dying experienced when their mentor was crucified. Mark is going lead us from this resurrection in the life of Jesus to the resurrection of Jesus’ life in the lives of the disciples.

If you want the read this whole commentary on the Gospel of Mark, it is published on the Realistic Living blog site for a mere $10 plus your name, your address, and your e-mail address. Just put those four things in the mail to Gene Marshall, 3578 N. State Highway 78, Bonham, TX 7418, and I will e-mail you the password that allows you to download as many copies of this commentary as you want to use for yourself or in your local ministries.

To see more clearly what this commentary contains, you can go to:

https://realisticliving.org/blog/mark-commentary/

Following is an early part of that commentary:

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Being Buddha

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Realistic Pointers 2018,

A number of Buddhist teachers insist that everyone is already a Buddha (The Awake One.) Underneath, we might say, all the falsifications about who we think we are, there exits our Buddha-hood. I believe that something similar can be said about being “in Christ Jesus.” If Jesus, as the Christ (Messiah), is understood as a revelation of our profound humanness, then all of us are already “in Christ.” Our profound humanness has never been missing, and it is still there. We simply have to get our alien self-images out of the way. That is a serious business, for we are sociologically conditioned to a human build world that is a far approximation of what is really real.

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The Good Shepherd Lives

Bible Interpretation, Existential Ethics, Realistic Pointers 2018, , ,

Here is a much mistreated passage from the Fourth Gospel about shepherds and sheep.

I have come that human beings may have life and may have it is all its fullness. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hireling, when he sees the wolf coming, abandons the sheep and runs away, because he is no shepherd and the sheep are not his. John 10 :10-12

Those who give sermons on the good shepherd often assume that this ancient image applies to a contemporary pastor who tells his flock what they should believe and how they should act. Such a view also assumes that most people are sheep in the sense of being gullible, go-along, authority-addicted dumbbells.

I do not believe this was the meaning intended by the original author of these verses. The original shepherd image was grounded in the experience of noticing highly dedicated persons working on a hillside with a flock of sheep, providing them grass and water and protecting them from wolves. Being a follower of Jesus means being such a leader.

So where can we actually experience this Good Shepherd in our lives today? Let me answer this with a fictitious story—a story made out of my own experiences. In my story, Sally McGillicutty teaches an adult class in the Sunflower room of the Umpity Ump Christian Church. Sally trusts the Ultimate Message that the Infinite Silence we meet in every event of our lives loves Sally and every other person (and creature) on this planet or any other planet. Because of her trust in that Eternal Wholeness that is faced by Sally and by us, Sally is thereby an embodiment of the Ultimate Message from Eternity.

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Deep River Crossing

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2017, , , ,

Called to a Next Christianity

Deep river
My home is over Jordan
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground

These opening lines to an African American church-song illustrates the depth of Christian awareness that is hidden in many of those old songs. This “deep river” is an allusion to the cross—understood as an inward death to all our temporal idols. And “campground” is an allusion to the resurrection—to the authenticity that is experienced on the other side this “deep-river crossing.” Few church goers, black or white, have probed the depth of this understanding of the cross and the resurrection. Few of us actually view the resurrection as the hidden side of the cross, or see both cross and resurrection as possible experiences in the depths of our own human authenticity.

Oh don’t you want to go
to that Gospel feast
that promised land
where all is peace.

The death/resurrection crossing is a feast, good news, a promised land of living in peace with the WAY IT IS essentially for all human beings everywhere, no matter what their grim or privileged circumstances. These deep meanings of the Christian revelation are missing in most of the living that goes on in the world today. Why is that so? That will be the question of this essay.

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Some Easter Poetry

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2017, , , ,

Resurrection is about me!
I always sort of knew that.
Why else would I care about it?

And resurrection is not about life after my death.
Resurrection happens now.
Was that not so for Mary, Peter, and Paul?

So what was it that had died in them or me.
that made a resurrection possible?
What died was who I thought I was,
what I thought reality was,
what I thought thought was,
what I thought WAS was and IS is.

Yes, everything had died!
Is that not what death is?
Gone, gone, gone of everything!

Resurrection is what is left
when everything has died!
Leaving plain me, plain reality,
plain thought, plain plainness.
human essence, profound humanness
Holy Spirit, Body of Christ, the REAL ME.

This grand GIFT
is given at the tomb.
No wonder those women in Mark’s narrative
fled from the tomb in terror
saying nothing at all to anyone.

Let us picture these women in the resurrection story in Mark’s “GoodNews” story. They came to this tomb with spices to honor the body of their mentor. Their male companions had already fled to Galilee. Let us further imagine that these women discovered, instead of one more dead body, that they were now, in their own bodies, the resurrection of Jesus. They were Jesus—not Jesus exactly, but the life that was in Jesus was now seen as their own life.

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Uses of the Word “God”

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2017, , ,

A Definition of Theology

“God“ is a relationship word—a word of devotion similar to sweetheart, lover, friend, rock, foundation, shepherd, mother, father, and other such words of devotion.  When  we call the Final Mystery “God,” we are making a religious confession.  If we are not making a religious confession, we do not need the word “God.”  We can get along without the word “God” or any word like it, unless we are a self-conscious Jew, Christian, Muslim, or a member of some other religious community that uses ”God” as a devotion word—as a relationship word for the Final Mystery.

Honestly living within today’s culture, we find no heavenly realm of rational meanings that humans can access to make sense of the absurdity of a Big Bang Beginning, or of an evolution from the single-celled organisms that mysteriously arose on this minor planet of a marginal star in one of the hundred billion or so galaxies.  The sheer Mystery of this vast expanse and of the infinitesimal minuteness of  this physical cosmos is not made less Mysterious by presuming a First Cause or an Ongoing Creator of all this wonderment.  As a solution to scientific meaning or contemplative awareness, the word “God” is not needed for any rational solution.
If we call this Final Mysteriousness “God,” we are making an act of will, an act of devotion, an act of commitment, a leap of trust.  Trust of this Final Mysteriousness does not alter the fact that we still know absolutely nothing about this Mystery— nothing with our scientific research and nothing with our contemplative inquiry.  We know things, but all that we know is approximate and changing.

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Theological Commonalty

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2017, , ,

I am assuming that the common culture of a vital next Christianity will include basic methods of theologizing. I am assuming that it is possible to create forms of Christian organization and practice that avoid the common flaws of: biblical literalism, doctrinairism, sentimentalism, moralism, institutionalism, ineffective witnessing to the core truth of the Christian revelation, and social neglect of economic injustice., ecological devastation, racism, sexism, and more. I am assuming a victory over all these obsolete cultural elements through creating a movement that features a better culture. A new style of theologizing is one aspect of that better Christian culture.

I am using the term “theologizing” rather than “theology,” for I want us to be clear that the theoretics of a vital next Christianity needs to be an ongoing thoughtfulness, rather than a settled “theology.” Nevertheless, there are theological qualities and methods that need to be observed, if we are to have a vital next culture of Christian religion of the sort that I am assuming when I employ the term “a next Christianity.

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Certainty

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2016, , , , ,

A good philosopher of real life begins with what he or she can know with some certainty. We know that we are stuck in time. We have come out of a now absent past, we are in some sort of continuing now, and we are now facing an unstoppable future. We have no perfect knowledge of that past, we only have fragments of memories and factual research open to many different interpretations, all of which are fragmentary at best and delusory at worst. We anticipate a future that we know will be a surprise in many, or even most, of its aspects.

So, we don’t know where we have been, or where we are, or where we are going. We do have images and perhaps careful thought and plans about all of that, but none of those rational products provide certainty. The sheer MYSTERY of it all is our only complete certainty.

Christian faith includes trusting that very MYSTERY that anyone and everyone can know about and have certainty about if they will only admit their ignorance and stop assuming total certainty for their models of thought with which they express and exclude aspects of that MYSTERY. This strange certainty that there is no complete certainty graspable by a human mind is, paradoxically, a type of certainty that we can absolutely count upon.

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In But Not Of

Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2016, , ,

Birth and death are two wings on the same bird, and that bird’s name is time or temporality.  The Christian life is an attitude toward both temporality and Eternity.  Strange as it may seem to people of our era, we are each an inescapable relationship with both the Eternal and the temporal.  The experience of this paradox can be spelled out in terms of these four words:

In But Not Of

The quality of the Christian life has to do with being “in the world, but not of the world.”

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Cross and Resurrection

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, , ,

This post is part of a commentary on the last three chapters of the Gospel of Mark

It is fair to say that the symbols of cross and resurrection are as central to an understanding of the Christian revelation as meditation and enlightenment are to Buddhism. Yet both cross and resurrection seem cryptic to many, even weird.

The last three chapters of Mark’s 16-chapter narrative are about the meaning of cross and resurrection as understood by that mid-first-century author and the surprisingly vigorous religious movement of which Mark was a part. I know of no better way to introduce to a contemporary explorer of Christianity the power of these two symbols than with a commentary on the last three chapters of Mark’s Gospel.

Members of a our current scientific culture may be excused somewhat for having a weak understanding of resurrection. Most of us know, if we are honest, that belief in a literal return to life of a three-day-old corpse is superstition. Yet this meaning of resurrection has been paraded as Christian by many. Mark did not see resurrection in this light. Or perhaps we might better say, “Mark did not see resurrection in this darkness,” for a literal return from the dead means nothing deeply religious to Mark or to you or me. If such an event were to happen today, it would be open to hundreds of speculative explanations, none of which would be profoundly or convincingly religious.

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