Caritas

*Christmas, Gifts*

In his December 19, 2002 column in World magazine, Marvin Olasky wrote: "The emphasis on material gifts at Christmas may make us think of Christianity as just one more exchange religion: You do something for a god, who will then do something for you. Roman pagans 2,000 years ago. . . understood liberalitas, giving to please a recipient who will at some point please you. The smart set in ancient Rome thought it was better to give than to receive, because by clever giving to wealthy friends they could receive even more later on and they applied the same concept theologically, offering sacrifices as investments.

"Christians, though, practiced caritas, help to the economically poor without expectation of anything in return. They did that to imitate Christ, who was unjustly abandoned, tortured and killed for the sake of all who believe in Him. They praised God's willingness to pour his grace over those who had done nothing to earn it.

"Christmas is about God's caritas. Jesus in the manger may seem cute, but the incarnation for God was actually an enormous comedown, like being born as a dog would be for us. (No, worse: a cockroach or beyond a different realm of being.) And yet, Christ showed caritas right to the last, by telling one of the thieves dying alongside Him that they would be together in paradise."


Hindi kaya some of us Christians preach giving like the Romans? Magbigay ka at ibabalik sa yo siksik, liglig, at umaapaw! Ayos, di ba? But the way to be motivated to give the caritas way is to reflect on God's giving.

Pwede ba Mag-tithe?

There was a question: Is it Biblical for a church to give a tithe of its income to an association or churches or convention?

I answered:

Two levels kasi ang tanong. First, the principle—tithing. Biblical ba ‘to? OF COURSE!!

Second, the application of the principle—can a body, such as a church, give a tithe to a bigger body to which it belongs? Why not? I don’t see anything that would tell the church not to do that. In addition, the church, by this act of giving, is forced to look outside of itself. To be other-centered, kumbaga. Di na siya parochial. I would like to hear more kung ano ang context ng tanong. Besides, kasama rin sa giving ang purpose nito.

Natz

To: Nathan Montenegro
Subject: Re: Tithing

This is the context. The church is in red. The church is giving 10% to the association + convention. Solution: Stop giving the 10% and use it for its own. (Sounds more unbiblical to me.)

Thanks kuya Natz.

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 08:50:57 +0800, Natz wrote:

It seems to me that the issue goes back to the condition of “kulang na nga pera ko, magta-tithe pa ako.” This church does not have a unique problem. Lahat ng naghihirap, individual or family or church or institution, face the same inadequacy of resources. So, where does that leave us? Hindi na tayo magta-tithe kasi kulang bigay ni Lord?

“Hey Lord, you’re not doing a good job of providing for me, so I’ll take care of my needs first. Okay?”

Pwede ba yun sabihin? Baka tamaan ka ng kidlat.

Maraming factor bakit in-the-red ang isang church—legitimate or otherwise. However, the issue for the church to decide is, as part of the body of Christ, can it, as a body, decide to come to the Lord empty? In the OT, the poor were given an option of giving a dove for an offering. That’s why after Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary offered in the Temple the poor man’s offering for the Cleansing ceremony. Poor sila, di ba? But they could not come empty-handed. Pero, in view of what they receive—the Son of God—ano ba naman yung dove? Their hearts were overflowing with gratitude.

If this church begrudges God his tithe, mas mabuti ciguro they should reexamine their attitude on giving. Incidental lang kung saan pupunta ang tithe nila—association or convention. What they cannot not do is give the Lord’s tithe. It’s not their money, isn’t it? Gratitude finds ways and means. Ingratitude finds excuses.

Talangka mentality

The following is an excerpt from an article by Jack Wheeler "The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind". It deals with the sin of envy from an anthropological viewpoint. Do you think this explains a little how "Talangka's" think?

Exploitation and Black Magic

For such understanding, we need to travel to the Amazon. Among the Yanomamo and other tribes deep in the Amazon rain forests still adhering to the ancient hunting-gathering lifestyle practiced by our Paleolithic ancestors, it is an accepted practice that when a woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims her child to be ugly.

In a loud, mortified lament that the entire tribe can hear, she asks why the gods have cursed her with such a pathetically repulsive infant. She does this in order to ward off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that would be directed at her by her fellow tribespeople if they knew how happy she was with her beautiful baby.

Anthropologists observe that for most primitive and traditional cultures, “every individual lives in constant fear of the magical aggression of others ... there is only one explanation for unforeseen events: the envious black magic of another villager.”

Reflect for a moment on the extent to which tribespeople in a tribal, “primitive” culture suffuse their lives with superstition, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, “black magic,” the “evil eye.” The world for them is teeming with demons, spirits, ghosts and gods, all of whom are malicious and dangerous—in a word, envious.

A great many, if not the majority, of tribal or traditional cultures, whether in the Amazon, Africa or the Pacific, have no concept of natural death. Death is always murder.

For the Shuara Jivaro of the eastern Amazon, the first tribe I ever stayed with, there are three ways to die: actual murder (such as a spear through your stomach); demon-murder (accidental death, such as being killed by a falling tree in a storm or by snakebite, which the Jivaros see as perpetrated by a demon); or witchcraft murder (death by illness or unexplained causes, perpetrated by an envious sorcerer).

The Jivaro, just like the Tiv in Nigeria, the Aritama in Colombia, the Dobua in Micronesia, the Navaho in the Southwest U.S. and the tribal mind in general, attribute any illness or misfortune to the envious black magic of a personal enemy.

Envy is the source of tribal and traditional cultures’ belief in Black Magic, the fear of the envious Evil Eye.

The fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never evolve (e.g., present-day villages in Egypt and India that have stayed pretty much the same for millennia) is the overwhelming extent to which the lives of the people within them are dominated by envy and envy avoidance: as anthropologists call it, the envy barrier.

For the Mambwe in Zambia, for example, “successful men are regarded as sinister, supernatural and dangerous.” In Mexican villages, “fear of other people’s envy determines every detail of life, every proposed action.”

Members of a Hispanic “ghetto” in a community in Colorado “equate success with betrayal of the group; whoever works his way up socially and economically is regarded as a ‘man who has sold himself to the Anglos,’ someone ‘who climbs on the backs of his own people.’ “

It is an ultimate irony of modern times that left-wing Marxist-type intellectuals consider themselves to be in the progressive vanguard of sophisticated contemporary thought—when in reality their thinking is nothing but an atavism, a regression to a primitive tribal mentality. What the Left calls “exploitation” is what anthropologists call “black magic.”

As sociologist Helmut Schoeck summarizes in his seminal work, “Envy: A Theory of Human Behavior” (and who collected the above anthropologists’ observations):

A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another’s superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one’s own deprivation, is also to be found among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better. The primitive people’s belief in black magic differs little from modern ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields part of the former’s harvest.

The primitive atavism of left-wing bromides like “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is best illustrated by arguing that one can be healthy only at the expense of others. That in order to be in superior health, bursting with energy and vitality, one has to make someone else sick or in poor health—just as in order to be rich you have to make others poor.

The healthy are healthy because they unjustly exploited and ripped off the sick, spiriting away the sick’s fair share of health with black magic. In fact, the sick are sick because the healthy are healthy. If this is absurd, then claiming the poor are poor because they have been exploited by the rich is equally absurd.

Mass-understanding

Below is a blog post by a programmer, Gervase Markham, who titled his weblog as "Hacking for Christ". Really! Galing nyang mag-evangelize. See for yourself.

December 06, 2004

Mass-understanding

WierdAl invoked my name ;-) in a blog post.

Like Gervase Markham, I am a Christian, and pretty serious about it.

However I'm afraid that, much as I love the guy (and I really mean that), I'm going to have to put a bit of distance between me and him on this one. He says:

Now, when I was in the U.S. Navy, there were times when we weren't able to celebrate Mass for a month. In fact, it was the Navy that (inadvertently, but nonetheless) came between me and God, and that drove me absolutely batty.

This gets to the heart of one of the massive differences between Christianity and Catholicism.

As I understand it, Catholics believe (and Al will have to jump in here if I'm misrepresenting his particular view) that it's vital to go to Mass regularly, because that's where the priest pronounces that your sins have been forgiven. That, it seems, is why Al felt that the Navy came between him and God when it prevented him going to Mass.

But I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation [including the US Navy], will be able to separate [me] from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's from Romans 8, verses 38-39. The Bible clearly teaches that you can have a ongoing relationship with God without the need for any intermediary apart from Jesus, and that it's not conditioned on attendance at any ceremony.

At Mass, Catholics believe, the bread and wine actually change into the body and blood of Christ, as he is sacrificed again for the forgiveness of sins of those present. Catholics are required to attend Mass every week, as the sacrifice is made again and again on their behalf.

But the Bible teaches that Jesus made one single sacrifice upon the cross, and his work is now finished. Hebrews Chapter 10 explains this. Discussing the old, Jewish system it says:

Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest [that is, Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

By his one sacrifice he has (past tense) made Christians perfect forever. He sat down at the right hand of God, his work done and completed. He is now waiting "for his enemies to be made his footstool", which will happen at the Last Day. So there is no need for further sacrifice, and no need for priests to perform it. (This is why many Christian churches avoid using the word 'priest' about their leaders, to prevent confusion.)

So is this just some esoteric religious quibble? No, it's absolutely key. If forgiveness from God is conditioned on something that is done (attending Mass) then we can't be sure that we are saved. If Jesus's saving work needs to be perpetuated, repeated or "made effective" by ceremonies, then it's power is limited and we can't rely on it.

But, wonderfully, on the cross Jesus cried "It is finished!". And it is. So I would encourage Al and anyone else to study the scriptures again, particularly the book of Hebrews (where a key theme is the magnificence and finality of Jesus' work on the Cross), to see if what I'm saying is true. Because it's of vital importance.

[I've just about cleared the backlog; hopefully this post marks the resumption of normal blog service. Thank you for your patience.]

Posted by gerv at 06:53 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

Dawdling toward Gomorrah

The following is from Michael Duduit, citing Calvin Miller:

In his wonderful new book The Unfinished Soul (Broadman & Holman), Calvin Miller has collected "bits and pieces" from a variety of articles and books he has written over the years. The book is filled with fascinating (and often challenging) insights from the "poet laureate" of the evangelical world.

In one vignette, Miller plays off the title of Robert Bork's book Slouching Toward Gomorrah, and wonders if that evil city wouldn't look right at home in today's culture. He closes with these thoughts:

"Gomorrah and its sister city at the end of this tale go up in burning sulfur in a single day. But I believe that sometimes brimstone is gradual. Which of Toynbee's twenty-eight civilizations, rotting from within, woke up and suddenly said, 'Whoa! Look at us! We're post-modern!' None. Neither did Gomorrah. With civilizations, it is always the case of the amphibian in the stewpot. The only way you can cook one is gradually. So when the brimstone fell on Gomorrah, Abraham and God were bargaining over eroded values in a culture which — as the culture itself saw it — no longer sinned. God's narrow view of things surprised everyone on Nightline.

"The odd thing is that the people in Gomorrah seemed not to have been aware that God was bargaining with Abraham over the death of their culture. But we who follow Christ should be ever aware that God has a requirement of those who haggle over just how many are righteous in any city. His requirement is that we, like Abraham, are responsible for doing our part in Christ's rescue operation.

"Imagine this: God loves Sodom and Gomorrah! The moment we forget that, it is not just Gomorrah that is dead. We, too, are dead. God holds no glee over the death of cultures. He grieves over urban evil and longs to call sinners back to their lost Edens.

"It's no easy job being God! To stand for holiness and yet love the unholy is almighty stress — if not for God, for us. To live in Gomorrah and love it is our calling. But to live in Gomorrah and accept it is to accustom ourselves to gradual brimstone."

Three Wise Women

*Christmas*

Do you know what would have happened if it had been Three Wise Women instead of Three Wise Men?

1. They would have asked directions
2. Arrived on time
3. Helped deliver the baby
4. Cleaned the stable
5. Made a casserole, and . . .
6. Brought practical gifts.
(from The Humor Haus newsletter)