Soul Vent: The Uncut Version

I'm glad you found your way here. I needed a new space to really vent my soul. Suddenly I'm a teacher without a teaching venue, and a thinker without a thinkpad. So this will be my venue and my thinkpad for now.

Since I have a new profession, I will be moving in many circles with people of various motives. My general blog will continue to exist for any who would come by, with general life and family updates.

But this will be the space where purge what I really want/need to purge. If you would like to visit occasionally or frequently, go for it. Please bookmark this blog somehow, because I'm going to remain low-key about its existence. I hope and pray that it will find its appropriate audience in time.

And now, the ribbon-cutting of the uncut version . . . .




Stan the Man is Scared!

Phil Webster posted recently:

"the thing that has kept on coming back to me recently is something that Hauerwas said (shocking, I know) at the end of one of our matthew seminars. after spending the class time to read the entire gospel out loud, the first thing Hauerwas said was, 'I don't know about you guys, but Jesus scares the shit out of me.'"

I was intrigued enough by that quote from a guy with so much insight that I decided to start reading through Matthew, thinking about that to see what exactly prompted the comment.

It didn't take long to see. Chapters 5-7 contain teachings of Jesus that basically say:

1. if you can't get along with another person in your close proximity, you're a murderer!
2. (put another way: if you write some one off as a fool, you're as good as hell-bound)!
3. if you fantasize at all, you're an adulterer!
4. divorced people are adulterers!
5. if some one winds up and smacks the daylights out of you, turn around and give them another free shot!
6. the people in life that you really hate, for good reason --- you are expected to love them!
7. if aren't able to forgive others -- then you're blocking God from forgiving you!
8. most everyone in polite society is really on the highway to hell; the point is to find the narrow path that actually leads somewhere, but most of the people on the planet will not find it!
9. Not everyone who calls Jesus "Lord", prophesies in His name, and performs miracles in His name is going to enter the kingdom of heaven! (question raised: where does that leave us people who have only done two out of three? or less?)

Really, these are quite troubling teachings when taken at face value. Or, as Stan put it, this guy is scary. I'm only through seven of the twenty-eight chapters, and I can see where this stuff is worse than a bad horror movie, really.

For crying out loud, He even says "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." What? I know the word "perfect" there really means "complete" or "fulfilled," but that still doesn't help us out much, does it?

How do we reconcile this with the God who loves like a Father? After all, God the loving Father is what what I've been focusing on for a few years, and still need to allow to sink in at a deeper level. It has become my theological preoccupation, and in a very real and meaningful way. But now this!

The easiest way to reconcile it would be to see this teaching in Matthew 5-7 as Jesus' way of giving a wake up call, of saying: "in case you didn't get the point from the OT law, let me raise the bar so you'll all get the point that you're all completely screwed, without a chance in the world to measure up." Kind of a precursor to fully revealing that God is a loving Father, and that such information is incredibly good news.

That's sure the explanation I want to go with. But I'll keep reading Matthew and trying to figure out why Stan the Man made such a shocking quote. I think it will be a good "check-and-balance" theological exercise for me anyway.