Just some thoughts...

The legacy of the evangelium hammers right at the substance of my own heart. The burden of my regrets, frequent failures, despair and idiosyncratic secret sins lobbies hurling insults that seem to penetrate ever deeper the longer I spend in this “dark world and wide”(Milton). The substance of that etching silence reminds me that partnership is just as endearing and enviable as canker soars on Sunday. The bother of loneliness is just as cold and recalcitrant that contentment seems just as impossible. The loss and the gain have a paradoxical movement spiraling away with out the impetus of my own planning or progress without imposition, though there are days I feel like I have the reigns. These contrasting bipolar tendencies exist in every Christian and the Gospel is both the culprit and the medicine. Christ's wounds have made us priest to God. His work provides means and reason for the kind of lifestyles we care to lead counter to the “call of the wild.” The Gospel preached to Adam that makes us Abraham's and therefore Christ's, is the same Gospel lived out by God in Christ “to wit the filth” (Bunyun). My propensities toward despair and egotism, self-centered-ness and loneliness have their own death in the death of the death of Christ.

Brief lecture given at Vespers

I thought that it would be helpful as a kind of interlude into our own acapella time to entertain an integral distinction. Essentially, it is one of nature and the spirit, the natural and the spiritual. Sure, the interconnectivity and relatedness of the two makes the tension of distinction a rather difficult thing. You might think what does this have to do with singing and worship. Its my argument that without a sense of the distinction unconsciously or consciously, we risk worshiping the True God, wrongly.
Theologically, we have the terms General graces and Special Graces. General graces are those graces given to all mankind “The rain falls of the head of the unjust and just alike.” Creation articulates something about God as it is His Art giving a standard for beauty in general even as it serves as a type and shadow of the “spiritual.”
So we appreciate the noise of someone singing on the toilet in a different way than we do Bach... we appreciate the smell of the same toilet signer in a way different than a rose... We have a framework from which we can describe and define good from not so good...
That said, this is something distinguished though not unrelated to those Graces specially given by God to His people. Remember the Church is given the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God does not abide with all men. You are privileged and this should induce humility and earnestness, not egotism and pride. Without time to tease out all the implications of the distinction, it fits our purposes in this respect.
The distinction has everything to do with the components of that in which we hope to participate, because if all we are concerned with doing is singing we will miss the special reasons why we gather. This may very well be a principal reason we are so disenchanted with church gatherings. If all we see in church gatherings is singing, a lecture, and a social hour, we miss the larger reason why we have gathered. We have gathered because we believe certain things are true. We have affirmed things with our minds and hearts about reality. We have gathered because we believe in Christ's work in Living a life of obedience to all the positive and negative proscriptions of the law in our place, his death for our sins, his resurrection to conquer the last enemy, even death and his ascension... This is not all we believe but we have our grounds and these grounds for gathering are bound up in a perception of God informed by His Word that by the Hearing of the Word the Spirit given by the Father and the Son may act out a sanctifying grace among us and in us to the praise of God alone.
Ultimately, we gather as an act of obedience to God and for God. And He promises to participate with us and bless us in grace as we bless him in praise. With not even a hint of tit for tat, we gather interested in making a joyful noise unto the Lord obeying his command to sign songs of hymns and spiritual songs. Of Consequence, the benefit is two fold: the general thrill and beauty of song singing and the special wonder of participating in an act of worship with God and for God. We are interested in general beauty because it is bound up in an extension of God's own being. And we are interested in the spiritual because of the relationship we have to God in Christ.
This ought to liberate us out of the idiocies of indifference and preference that so often accompany “worship.” Whatever tool that we use in the practice of the presence of God in song, it appropriately is an instrument. An instrument for a practice chiefly interested in affirming things with our minds so that our affections might be rightly informed. Without affirming true things, we invite illusion and the appearance of blessings.
This doesn't mean, “Oh my gosh, I really cannot sing so I cannot participate.” Do we say this about babies who cannot yet walk? Do we say this about our child who does not yet know how to ride a bike? Granted, it may be that a child may never learn to walk or ride a bike but this is in a way unnatural.
Honestly, do we say this kind of thing in any other domain? In our classes, what is our standard? Obviously, the teacher or his expectations provides a standard for the student because the one who knows the most has the best grasp on how little it is he really knows. The best signer too has the best grasp on how much it is he has yet to appreciate about voice in general.
A general concession may then help us, we are all learning and with learning comes the wear and tear of misunderstanding, and mistakes and tension. This is normal and natural. The music elite like to refer to it as dissonance. That said, part of signing involves listening, intentional listening. The kind you exert when you thrust your feet into movement attending to the instructions given by the one who knows how to ride a bike.
Note, that as we sign together corporately there is a real sense of community. It may very well be that through an exercise like this where a sure goal is in mind that we profit one by affirming things together with our minds, and two by participating in the awkwardness and thrill of melody, harmony, and dissonance in song to the Glory of God alone.

Not totally sure what to think about this

avatoln
dusis
aprktos...
mesembria..

notice adam
in 2 Enoch 30. 1of
Sib Or 3. 26

Ac 8.26
mesembria
Cosmic adam...

The transliterations are estimates at best... These are the designations for north, south, east and west.

Art speaks

Beauty is deceptive, defined by lines of gray
where dissonance and color seem to fade away

beauty cuts the deepest better in the back
while decency avoids it by experiential facts

The lines of better find us under water and reverb
without a line to save us from the wells dry earth

A sight will save the blind man from hearing
and feet will free the footless from seeing
Better save the dead man from belief in
something bigger than himself?

the fanciful resentment, of hanging on too long
affirming strange conclusions now appearing to be wrong

the verdict has a jury, the jury has a judge
the judge has his appearance, appearance is as it does..

tattle tale will tell us that beauty has a name
the name is what you make it and making its a game

A sight will save the blind man from hearing
and feet will free the footless from seeing
Better save the dead man from belief in something bigger than himself

...
the debtor knows himself, the judgments are his own

Lewis "Four Loves"

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help? p.14

Lewis "Four Loves"

We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please. p.12

New Song

Its the simple sophistication lost and lobbied off to war...
Its the simple investigations levied by a lovers chord
Please remember

All for dimpled conversations requisite for wanted things
splintered up by Marxist causes wed by wealth of wanted needs
Please remember
Please remember
Loss has its own regressive lines and she sleeps with me from time to time
No one has reason to know... but the losses are bigger alone

Oh for darning in the cold under privileged estate
walking fences all alone without advantages of grace
Please remember
waiting on the unwed proverbs of its never ending curse
wishing that the terms of progress would pay off this debtors purse
Please remember
Please remember
Loss has its own regressive lines and she sleeps with me from time to time
No one has reason to know... but the losses are bigger alone

Terms spent cures before me felt by privileged degrees
oh the cost of etiquette shared by all these pedigrees
Please remember
Work has paid itself in problems pent up in the pennies worth
Weathering the crux of causes paid verse after verse
Please remember
Please remember
Loss has its own regressive lines and she sleeps with me from time to time
No one has reason to know... but the losses are bigger alone


That These criticisms mounting as applied by my esteem
as I watch you improvise and act like you have everything you need
Please remember
That these versions of your victory have there own insightful death
That your sense of things has limits defined by Gods peculiar breath
Please remember
Please remember
Loss has its own regressive lines and she sleeps with me from time to time
No one has reason to know... but the losses are bigger alone
Please remember
Please remember
Please remember
Please remember

It is common to think that age deters ones perception of things, physical capacities or tangential willingness to accommodate. Sure enough, by and by age gives way to a nuanced objectivity subject to the narrowness of our own experiences. This is not to say that wisdom tends to disregard age, but this may be conditionally true. To say the former without qualification would be absurd given the many examples in which wisdom and age correspond. Truth is, the more experience is informed by the same kind of things the more it solidifies the experiences, sometimes in the face of reality in general, sometimes to spite reality just the same.
This reciprocation cycles through informing on the one hand and restraining on the other. While on the one hand we are capable of doing things and learning things, capacity doesn't necessarily give way to activity. In other words just because you can do something doesn't mean you do it. The same can be said about learning or thinking in general. Our capacities are very rarely realized.

No matter, I am getting older, the world is getting smaller and bigger simultaneously, only to throw me into a whirlwind of colliding arguments, ideals, and problems. It is not that you cannot find self-help books that are laden with add-ons and pick-me-ups for these kind of problems or older “friends” and siblings with commercial responses conditionally different than your own struggles. Its that people are talking without good sense. The very prevalence of the self-help boom emancipates a real, genuine problem everyone has and for which everyone has a solution. Talk about Irony.
The strange contradictions run so deep that I find people answering questions they have never asked while dealing arbitrarily with the questions they have asked. Honestly, it is hard to find people who take their own questions seriously; consequently, it is harder to find people with helpful advise than it is to find people willing to talk.

Comments on Worship

If worship entails a commendation extended to God in praise for the glorious kindness he has extended to us in grace then it would seem legitimate to worship God with one word, as I have heard popularized by worship leaders in our day, contingent upon the constitution of that word. I suppose that this could not be true if they meant what they said literally. Think for a moment, “Grace.” Is it possible to make any kind of reference to what you mean or what it's referent is with out other words? Isolating a word, is unhelpful given that it loses any signification and sense without a referent or extension.
It seems that on a very common level cognition has resonating symbols attached to particular significations and therefore a word may have implicit connotative and explicit denotative extensions, as well as anything in between. Commonly then, it would be difficult to restrain yourself to a repetitious activity prohibiting yourself to wonder into the connotative and denotative aspects; because, if the literal restriction is applied, any kind of definition offers new words to which you have resigned yourself. I suppose then these worship leaders mean something a bit more fluid like, “dwell on a word and allow the nuances of that ideal to consecrate worship to God.” This again would imply that other words are employed even in their pleas for simplistic mantras repeated exacting purpose-driven ignorance.
At the risk of sounding to harsh, why do resort to eloquence over substance, the seeming over the real, etc. Its not that these recommended verbal commendations eliminate worship altogether. It is that there are altogether more helpful things to say about what constitutes Biblical worship. Biblical worship has obvious grounding in the Scriptures having much to say about how to entreat the True God in a right way. Whatever the case may be, the trends popularized by worship leaders in our day tend to minimize cognitive functions and elevate sensual experience such that true worship is reduced and neutered.

Maturity

Maturity is oblong, especially for the Christian. It has to a greater or lesser degree sweeping connotations exacting respectively definite terms of manhood and womanhood. As much as I would like to appreciate the terms Westerners tend to associate with it, I cannot. These associations speak apprehensively about competence and certainty in all things which is something bound up in everything we are not. This is not to say we spurn responsibility or abuse opportunities given to us. I am saying the opposite with the caveat that we are failures embracing the victories Christ has won and set before us to walk into. For evangelicals, maturity is something sacred juxtaposed to something secular having affects that stretch into every domain of life. Where commonly, we tend to associate responsibility with lofty motions structured by tempered schedules and planned activities, planning for the sake of acquisition and entitlement is immoral. This is not to say planning itself is immoral, planning is good when it is suited with the realization that God sovereignly holds all things and brings them to pass or he does not. The problems with the Western appeals again and again invite arrogance and pride and given that we all desire to grow up I hope there are better connotations than these...

The Lessers meet the Majors

Greek Cases

"Peace on earth, good will toward men" (Luke 2:14 KJV). You have probably all received Christmas cards containing this part of the angel's song to the shepherds on the fields of Bethlehem. But most modern translations read differently: "'on earth peace to men on whom his [God's] favor rests'" (NIV): "'and on earth peace among those whom he [God] favors (NRSV).'"

The difference between the KJV an the others is the difference betweren the nominative and the genitive. The Greek manuscripts used to translated the KJV contains eudokia (nomination), whereas the older manusripts used to translate the modern versions contain eudokiaV (genitive) -- literally translated, "'of good will'" or "'characterized by [God's] good pleasure.'"

In other words the peace that the angels sang that belonged to the earth as a result of the birth of Christ is not a generic, worldwide peace for all humankind, but a peace limited to those who obtain favor with God by believing in his Son Jesus (see Romans 5:1). What a difference a single letter can make in the meaing of the text!"
~ Verlyn Verbrugge

Heterodoxy

Dr. Revelson told a story about an occurrence that he endured in the classroom having been critiqued by a peer. In that moment when he assumed the possibility that he could have been wrong, and therefore teaching things that were wrong, he was immediately confronted with a kind of enduring and penetrating fear. "What have I done?" Gladly, he was reaffirmed about the veracity of what he was teaching.
Even still, this kind of reaction would be appropriate and I fear that there are too few teachers like him. It seems that a teachers concern for correspondents and truth-agreeing propositions would be a virtuous thing. Sadly too many professional talkers assert themselves and their prerogatives without a concern for whether or not what they are saying is true, whether or not it agrees with the reality of things. It must be said, wrong teaching or heterodoxy echoes forward in such a dynamically transforming way that we may never have the capacity to reverse its affects and effects. Can you imagine what God would do to such a man?

Suffering

Suffering etches its way into our lives emphatically imposing itself upon us without invitation. And yet no matter how dynamically difficult things get, the substance and content of our affirmations -especially in these times- must not stray from a right sense of what is, and what corresponds with reality. This gives us every reason to lift our eyes, as it were, and to affix our gaze upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. For He is our ever present help in time of trouble because in an ultimate sense the Truth is in Christ, who is the same yesterday today and forever. In a word, the substance of our peace and serenity in times of sheer devastation and calamity is bound up in the merits of Christ who soverignly holds all things even when things seem so unexplainably hard and chaotic...

Ignatius

"From Syria to Rome I fight with wild beasts, on water and on land, by day and by night, chained to ten leopards [soldiers]made worse by signs of kindness. Yet their wickednesses do me good as a disciple; but not on this account am I justified. Would that I might be glad of the beasts made ready for me. And I pray that they may be found ready for me. Nay, I will fawn upon them, that they may devour me quickly, and not, as they have done with some, refuse to touch me from fear. Yea, and if they will not voluntarily do it, I will bring them to it by force." ~ Ignatius

Ignatius was brought before the Emperor Trajan at Antioch in the ninth year of his reign (107–108), was condemned to death as a Christian, was transported in chains to Rome, was there thrown to lions in the Coliseum for the amusement of the people

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc2.v.xv.vi.html

Today, Jerusalem

Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem... How often I have long to gather you together like a mother gathers her chicks under her arm, and you would not... seeing will not come until you say Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Father(Matt 23)
Whatever it is that Jesus is saying, Matthew intentionally uses this in juxtaposition to Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem in chapter 21 riding in on a donkey, because the crowd says this very thing.

After speaking with a professor here, I was introduced to the fact that Jesus is quoting a famous line from Εὐριπίδης (ca. 480 BCE–406 BCE) play, "Heracles." Megara responds to Amphitryon: "these children of Heracles, whom I am guarding 'neath my wing as a bird keepeth her tender chicks under her" in her bewilderment at the absence of Heracles.
I guess Euripidus's play, "the Trojan Woman," also has a similar play of words meaning that this analogy Matthew is drawing by quoting Jesus' quotation of Euripidus could interplay with "The Trojan Woman" in order to draw a reasonable juxtaposition...

Greek Alphabet and other little ditties

The Koine Dialectus or common dialect is in no case original to itself. It emerges from peculiar and unique process at work in the development of language proper by an evolution familiar in linguistics. Dr. Wagner suggested that History itself is in some measure if not completely dependent upon language. The ideals or memories of a particular dispensation or age are extended to another by means. It seems that by and large memories are fixed to symbols and those symbols represent the memories that are past from one generation to the next. It follows that the more securely a memory is attached to a symbol the more the testimony or story attests to the memory. At the risk of extreme reduction, Cuneiform and Akkadian birth Proto-Canaanite and Egyptian which has bearing in just the way Cuneiform and Akkadian have on the emergence of the Proto-Semitic script. The evolution from Semitic to Greek passes by way of convergence...

Classical Greek takes a very interesting turn with the reign to Alexander the Great. In 333 B.C. Alexander took possession of the orient; his forces had swept into Greek rule the East. Note whenever Alexander conquered he would turn captives into soldiers in this way incurring a greater military capacity. In order to exercise authority over his soldiers it became necessary to have common symbols for the sake of command and comradery - symbols for tactical movements and military strategies. This process contributes to the evolution of Koine - the Common Dialect.
Note over the course of many years scholarship has wrestled with Greek pronunciation having such a corridor of time between then and now and the confusion between intellectuals and commoners. The pure classical language would have no doubt had a different pronunciation than its Koine daughter. Obviously, Homer and Peter spoke distinguished kinds of Greek. To what extent this affects dialect and pronunciation is a matter of debate. One moving through Reuchlin and Erasmus to today's academy. According to Francis Bopp the chief means of reclaiming the original pronunciation was bound up in onomatopoeias. Take for instance the bn . Francis Bopp found references to the sound sheep make in classical Greek and therefore concluded that the b and the n follow the hard b and the short e not the soft v or the long e.

Matthew 20
Matthew begins the chapter with Jesus' parable concerning the laborers who are brought in last minute who receive the same benefits as those who had been there longer.
‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? 14 Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?' So the last will be first, and the first last.”

Interesting he prefaces he prophetic testimony with these words.
It doesn't seem that the disciples make the connection - "Son of Man" to Jesus. "Son of Man" terminology was not original verbiage but it seems that they are really missing an important thing here... Either the bit about the prophisized events or the bit about His being the "Son of Man."

Notice - as they were going to Jerusalem Jesus says " See, we are going to Jerusalem..." only to prophesy His own death using a the "Son of Man" title. Here the geographical significance seemingly hints at the consequent activities that He will endure in Jerusalem being the "Son of Man."

Whatever the case, the following passage seems so disconnected from the Jesus own Gospel proclamation. The mother of the sons of Zebedee (unnamed here... like the references to Bathsheba - the wife of David) asks that her sons be given seats right and left of Jesus in Paradise. What a peculiar leap?

All the same Jesus responds to her question: "you do not know what you are asking... the seats are not mine to give but my Father's to give." It seems this is the reason why he emphasises the "what" of Gospel leadership. It seems that he says at least, "The World's Great men Lord their authority over others and yet their authorities lord their authority over these Great men. The paradigm shifts here. The servant will lead. The first shall be last" (25-27) only to emphasize the drama of His own affective leadership, "the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (28).

Note the geographical movement mentioned here. Wherever they were before Jericho, it seems that they are on their way to Jerusalem followed by a crowd as they leave Jericho. Its my inclination that vs. 29 begins a distinguished path but chap 21 will help us in that regard. Let it be said, vs 29 seems a really strange compliment to its previous verses. Blind men call out for vision, the crowd mocks, and Jesus gives sight to the physically bind me. It seems that the truly blind men oppress the needy neglecting the gravity of their own needs. And Jesus heals those who plead for mercy. This seems like a really typical Jesus thing.

Schaeffer "He is there and He is not silent"

The problem of knowing affects four particulars: moral, human, reality and fantasy, and relationships (57).
All men live as though there were correspondence between external and internal world.... even even if they deny it people still love and judge simultaneously denying the existence of love and morals (70).

"Work"

This is the question. Does the context of our own subjective colors bear on the “objective” definition of words? Are the words that we use given particular contextual variation contingent upon our own usage. Although the cultural shift and movement affects words, it seems that the variation imposed should not completely differ from the common accepted usage of a word if you want to be understood.

Take for example the common accepted use of the word “work.” In our day, common to those preceding ours, work's definition includes a vocational investment from which a participant receives a sum. However, this common accepted usage seems to differ and or equivocate an original idea. It seems that work is not exclusively a means to an end. It seems at this point that one particular usage may completely differ from another given the context. In fact the Biblical model seems to offer a peculiar definition for the work of a Christian. To me, this seems more intuitive than subjective, however. It seems that we would be able to distinguish between the two given the content and flow of a given dialouge or text.

When my brother asked, “What does work me to me?” The question seems more unhelpful than helpful. I suppose maybe a better question would have been, How are you using work given the varying definitions of the word? Do you mean a fiscal investment or the God ordained activities for the Christian?

Machen, What then was Christianity at that time when it began?

We can answer the question with
more intelligence, perhaps, if we approach it with the fashionable modern answer to it in
our mind and ask whether that answer is right or wrong. Christianity, according to that
fashionable modern answer, is a life and not a doctrine, it is a life or an experience that has
doctrine merely as its symbolic intellectual expression, so that while the life abides the
doctrine must necessarily change from age to age.
That answer, of course, involves the most bottomless skepticism that could possibly be
conceived; for if everything that we say about God or about Christ or about the future life
has value merely for this generation, and if something contradictory to It may have equal
value in some future generation, then the thing that we are saying is not true even here and
now. A thing that is useful now may cease to be useful in some future generation, but a
thing that is true now remains true beyond the end of time. To say, therefore, that doctrine
is give up the search for truth altogether.