Not only does John put the event at the beginning whereas the Synoptic Gospels put it at the end, but John makes it seem even worse as John 2:14-15 reads, “And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated. And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturned their tables.”

Come on! I can’t see Jesus whipping people and being UN-Jesus-LIKE? Such intellectual STULIFICATION I can’t accept.

I’ve always had a problem with this verse so let me tell you where I currently have landed.

Paul holds a key for me. Paul was writing when the second Temple was still standing and he reminds us that WE are the TEMPLE (I Cor. 3:16 and I cor. 6:19 as examples). We are a house of prayer- each of us! Have we forgotten that the Old Testament and Leviticus as an example were full of sacrificial lessons and laws. Have we forgotten that it was LEGAL to sell those doves that Jesus was upset about and angry? How would the people’s sins be forgiven without those sacrifices?

It’s a metaphor!

But the church has turned it into a MACHO JESUS proof-text. The church the story, the metaphor, into an excuse for righteous indignation, wars, Crusades, and Inquisitions- IN THE NAME OF JESUS of course! I’m taking the high road here. The moral of the story for me is that I need to drive out the OLD VIEW of an external sacrifice and bring in the NEW VIEW that the Kingdom of God is within me (Luke 17:21) and I need to be radical in driving out all that keeps this spiritual temple from being just that!

Get my drift Cliff?

The Latin word “miraculum” comes from a verb root that carries the meaning to marvel or to wonder. Might we say shock-in-awe? Seriously though one of the very basic definitions of a miracle would be something that happens that evokes AWE. When a baseball team is down 9-2 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and they win- it’s called a MIRACLE!

Hey, I was there when it happened! It was MIRACULOUS!

From a religious standpoint though a miracle is most often thought of and described as “divine intervention”. Someone has a problem. They pray and seek God for some specific act. When that problem is cured, it’s deemed a miracle. As Tom Harpur wrote, “If God can break his own imposed order, the question of why he doesn’t in any particularly agonizing situation becomes unbearably acute.”

Indeed!

So, what’s my take on all this? I’m glad you asked as I am COGNIZANT of the miraculous.

A miracle is something that happens whose underlying laws came into play that we do not yet understand. Agnes Sandford helps me out here with the statement, “God always works lawfully”. In other words, last year’s miracle is this year’s newly acquired leap in consciousness. We’re not really pleading with and persuading a reluctant Deity to come and intervene in our troubles.

God doesn’t make some special visitations to handle our maladies because God-Creator-Consciousness is always here. Where is God not? Is God and the Kingdom not within us? Finally put. Miracles happen when we knowingly or unknowingly pray and or respond to the laws of the Spirit-Universe-Creation-God!

Think about it!

No, wait. Just do it!

I confess that I don’t really get the critical nature that the trinity poses for some denominations within Christianity.

Yes, I spent a great deal of time studying the trinitarian concept. Once upon a time in an arrogant era of my life I thought I KNEW it. Now, I can play around with it, enjoy what it says to me; however, my salvation isn’t predicated on my whole-hearted adherence to such doctrinal guidelines.

How can the finite understand such an infinite paradigm?

Furthermore, why is it so important: since Jesus never believed in such a doctrine, Jesus never required any kind of creedal belief from anyone, and the apostle Paul never mentioned it? Additionally, there are no explicit statements found in the New Testament. What is found is the phrase in Matthew (added much later) about baptizing in the “Father, Son, and Hoy Ghost”.

Then in Acts we’re to baptize only in the name of Jesus too?

And it is a requirement of my faith?

I’m all for whatever anyone wants to believe and any denomination has the right to establish whatever creeds, rules, and rituals they want to follow which is why we have more than 7,000 Christian denominations is America alone. But, don’t ride your high horse into my corral and try to say that your trinity trumps my theology- especially since you’ve never shared a meal with me.

Know what I’m saying Martha?

If there is a core theme that Jesus comes back over and over again it’s the two rails of “Be not afraid”, and “Be of good courage”.

If you have been to church at least a few times, that theme is seldom heard because what is preached most Sunday mornings is the need to repent from sin, to stay away from evil, and to flee the Devil. The church has drifted knowingly or not into “sin management”. Christianity has been obsessed with sin for centuries. Jesus isn’t credited with saying too much about sin.

Remember how he dealt with the woman caught in adultery?

Listen, when someone has done something they know they shouldn’t have the last thing they need is for the church to remind them of their sin and add shame and condemnation to the mix. The church not only does that, but it sets up voluminous rules for counseling, deliverance, and various disciplines. Jesus just simply said, let it go- don’t do it again.

The real emphasis for Jesus was on living and being the Kingdom of God.

Jesus emphasized the need for FAITH! We are corrupted not so much by SIN as we are by the lack of faith due to our FEARS. Of course though when the early church fathers came up with the concept of ORIGINAL SIN, the dye had been established, and the trend was in. We can trade in our sinful days for more HALCYON days when we realize that we are ONE with God and that He is for us and not against us. God loves us even when we make mistakes. He’s our Creator!

So, be of good courage!

I remember very well a funeral of a beloved close friend more than a decade ago, as I stood before a crowd of five hundred, who were looking to me, as his pastor, for answers. I opened up the funeral ceremony with the words, “I don’t understand it and it hurts like hell”. Of course now that I don’t believe in hell, I‘ve added yet another level of hatred and OPPROBRIUM to my life.

Good thing I’m no longer a pastor (using that word as a NOUN). I am pastoral (the verb usage) though. Does that count?

Thankfully I am now a part of a loving community that allows people to have differing ideas. Love isn’t based on doctrine or beliefs. It’s okay that I will be cremated. I try not to “view” open caskets because I want to remember the life that I saw in their eyes and their faces and not that stilted make up face of death. Why do we do that? Hey, it’s okay if you want to go that route. I’m cool with that for you.

And I’m okay of you’re agnostic too!

I am too on some things. It’s okay!

An interesting word for Barack Obama to use three weeks ago when he said he was agnostic about higher taxes. Maybe he was listening some of the time, when in Jeremiah Wright’s church. Doubt is a part of life. There would be no need for FAITH is there wasn’t doubt. C. S. Lewis became, in part, who he was because of his initial nagging doubts that led him to finally write the book, A Grief Observed.

It’s just life! How are you doing with it- and other people’s view of such?

Do you think it matters to God what you call her?

There it is- that pesky pronoun! Having grown up in a patriarchal society wherein the writers of the Bible were MALES of course Jesus called God FATHER. It’s not being macho, it’s just speaking the FACTS. Of course that was “their facts” some 2-4,000 years ago. God is a BEING, but God is not a male being. God is not a GENDER. God is SPIRIT (surely we can agree on that).

I have been PILLORIED for many things but taking away God’s MALENESS is a biggie.

Ah, let’s be friends and not worry about a NAME for the un-nameable infinite. Let’s not try and put God in any BOX, let alone a gender box. God is much bigger than anything we can imagine. How many millions of galaxies are there, not to mention universes? Wow! So, let us not stumble over pronouns or anything else. Let’s just be the LIGHT & LOVE that we are even though much of it is layered over with ego, suppositions, doctrine, cultural bias, geographical upbringing, and the like.

Isn’t life much bigger than the trivial matters that we seemingly always argue over?

And, how much better, if we could see more of the female side of God, the nurturing nature of God. We need to be reminded of the wisdom (Sophia) of God. We’ve created so much damage to women in society, and to ourselves by a “Males ONLY” country club, church, and general society.

So, lets’ use whatever pronoun is appropriate at the moment and realize that the Creator is that and yet so much more!

One of the problems with the Protestant Revolution is that it replaced an infallible and SACROSANCT Pope with an infallible Book!

Isn’t God the only one that’s infallible?

The Bible is the Christian community’s sacred book. It POINTS the way to God and spiritual living with hundreds of examples over dozens of centuries, from various cultures. Let me say that again. The Bible is a POINTER to God and not God! As someone has said, deer tracks and not the same as the deer. But, if deer hunting is your thing, you might look for the tracks which just might lead you to the deer.

Is this that difficult?

Tom Harpur writes, “Sacred books tell of the encounter with God of other humans much like us. They point to where and how we can have a similar encounter ourselves.” The reason that so much (too much) emphasis is placed on sacred works, trying to turn them into infallible, God channeled words, is the egoic need to trump other sacred books.

God’s not into competition, but recognition.

Could you tell a deer track if you saw one? Can you recognize and see God in every person you meet? Everyone does carry a divine light within. Some lights are really hard to see but we can if we look hard enough. Humanity and divinity usually occupy the same geographical territory.

Didn’t the church fathers say Jesus was both fully divine and fully human?

I learned early on how to CONFORM: my EFFICACIOUS teachers left a mark on me!

I stayed within the broad road of my first denominational experience. I embodied the mental image of my teenage years. Since I was raised in a non-Christian from the age of six to sixteen, that decade of wandering taught me to hold tight when I finally got some religious indoctrination to the truth (of my denomination).

Gradually, I discovered that blind faith and the lack of intellectual integrity were too much to supply the answers to life that I needed.

Even more slowly, I began to read books that my denomination told me were “of the Devil”. I listened to men who I was told could “lead me astray”. I even held conversations with people of different faiths whom I was instructed would “dilute my faith”. When you mix dirty water with clean water, you know what you’re going to get!

The problem though, was that I could no longer CONFORM to the rules, rituals, dogma, doctrine, creeds, and customs that once seemed to right! My inner voice, the spirit within me was calling me elsewhere. I was to later see that spirituality was much different than religion. It didn’t have to be that way, but it was!

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote, “Jesus Christ came to abolish religion and the need for it altogether.” Wow, did that ever send my head spinning.

Religion can be a good starting place. Religion can embrace some of the best of spirituality known to man; however, more often than not, religion seeks to have its members CONFORM to whatever the denominational RULES are- that’s why it’s called a denomination.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God”, and “put away childish things” now have far more life than they once did. Are you experiencing the ABUNDANT LIFE (which isn’t the popular sermon of just material wealth)?

I walked the isle at age seventeen in a North American Convention Baptist church where the pastor was supportive of Nixon.

I liked John F. Kennedy but maybe that was only because he was young, as four years later I ran for political office while still in college (Kansas 144th Representative district vs. LaVerne Spears) as a REPUBLICAN! How did I get from “liking Kennedy” to running as a Republican four years later? More PARADOXICAL still, how was it that I was an avid backer of Barry Goldwater as well?

Political skizophrenia?

Carl Jung liked to speak of the SHADOW part of humanity, of the individual. In the last decade we have talked more about a “shadow government”. But, what history has shown me is that ever since the church got in bed with Emperor Constantine way back in the early fourth century, the church has sided with “conservative government”.

Maintain the status quo- of years gone past!

Thus, the church, and especially the fundamentalist right wing of Christianity in America has been on the Republican side of the isle- especially in the last century. The ideal model was the evangelical backing of George W. Bush. The church backed his militarism, just wars, capital punishment, and of course ‘compassionate conservatism’, whatever that was.

The prophets of the Old Testament and the prophetic voice of the New Testament leaders who espoused non-violence were shoved off stage; however, a few men have broken through the “shadow government”. Can you say Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela to name a few.

God is not a politician! God is certainly not a Republican, not a Democrat. Therefore it was easy for Jesus to simply say, ‘Render unto Caesar what belongs to him and unto God that which belongs to God”. Usher in the Kingdom of God which is neither a Blue state, nor a Red state, but a state of consciousness described as unconditional love.