Disciple Bible Study 24, Letters of John & Jude

Okay, so we're doing first, second, third, John, and Jude, and I've got some weird bits to introduce to you if you're interested, but it's really weird.

But as always, what did these books do for you?

Did they mirror John?

Did they introduce new things?

Were there things you appreciated or didn't care for?

Well I didn't have all that background.

From the gospel.

Yeah, yeah.

Um it actually portrait of life when God sees it.

God is good in all things.

But uh so um it's um that that's the main thing that I got out of it.

It's actually a letter about what the love of God is like and God sees what God's want to do.

So you want to follow God, be you know, be one with God, this is for how you live.

One of the ways, I mean one of the things you didn't have you did.

Thank you.

I gotta tell you, I didn't get much until I heard this.

This made what I read make sense.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I agree with that.

I I have a different understanding because of that.

Hey, another perspective.

Yeah.

I'm kind of interested in in in the history of these.

I mean, he he gave some historical perspective, but it seems to me that that based on what I hear and now that I've read this, I can see that there was a struggle going on just for the uh life, if you will, of the Christian church.

But I imagine it's not really um too far from any early beginnings of a of a uh belief system.

I imagine they all struggled similarly.

Yeah.

But again it took some some strong voices to allow a foreshead and and and see to grow.

Yeah, and you know, scripture is the living word of God.

Jesus is the word of God.

And um I guess I'm not gonna say you're well you can say what you want, but I think I I appreciate your corrective because I think I was taught scripture is the living word of God and is not.

Scripture teaches that Jesus is the living word of God, not scripture.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the thing is this, since it's living, then what does this, what do these readings say to us today and how we live?

I I think it's a great question, and that's definitely what I think we should dive into.

Yeah, and I think we miss that when we just look at the Bible story or whatever it is, you know, just at face value, so to speak, without saying, well, you know what is that?

You know, human nature has not changed since the beginning of time, by Adam and Eve.

But conditions are always changing.

So the thing is this, we're still dealing with the same problems, but just in a different framework.

Hmm.

Well, do you want to hear a little bit more about some of the history behind this?

Okay.

So he mentions two.

Well, he only mentions one early Christological controversy, and this is, you know, again, if you're ever wondering why the Nicene Creed is so verbose, I mean, it really goes on, especially on the Christ section.

The Holy Spirit doesn't get much, God the Father didn't get much, but but Jesus gets a lot, right?

God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made of one being with the Father.

All that business, right?

There's there's a couple early Christian sort of heresies that a lot of people apparently were interested in.

The first one is he referred to it as called docetism.

Now, um this means like the idea that um there's an appearance of two natures, but there's really just one.

So you can map this either way.

Either Jesus is human and appeared divine, or he was divine but just appeared human.

So it could sort of go either way.

Now, in general, umsetism gazed this way, he appeared divine, because um, you know, uh we we have this hard idea that if God is transcendent and holy and greater than we are, then God doesn't feel pain.

That's a human thing, not a God thing, which means that all of the pain of the cross is just apparent.

So it's a human Jesus, not a divine one.

This is in some ways logically kind of um compelling, and I'll tell you, this is one of the critiques that Islam has about Christianity.

Look, God's too great to be limited to a body, and God's too great to suffer.

That's human stuff.

So if you're a Muslim, Jesus isn't the son of God, because actually, since God's one, God doesn't have children.

We do.

Jesus is a prophet, not God's son.

God has no kids.

This is actually kind of an early bit.

Um, and it it it informs um this other guy uh who comes around in the the 320s and is really, really influential.

He says that Jesus is a created being, the mightiest, but the son is underneath the father.

They're not equal.

There's a hierarchy in heaven, and Jesus was made by God.

I mean, you can sort of see how we want to do that.

Um so again, he just appears to be one of the other.

Now, that's going to sound similar, but it's actually a little different from the adoptionist viewpoint, which is that Jesus was such a good guy that God adopted him at baptism, but abandoned him in the garden.

And once again, that gets God out of suffering because God's too big to suffer.

Now, I'll tell you, I think so.

Docetism does not is not the belief that that at baptism the spirit entered Jesus and before Jesus died on the cross it exited.

No, that's adoptionism.

So he rolled two together in the video, but splitting hairs more properly?

No.

Docetism is the idea that Jesus looked both, but was really just one.

And the one was either or.

In general, it's this.

In general, it's this.

He did not have the he was not in um the spirit had not entered him at any point.

No, or it was the body was a shell, like, but it wasn't re he wasn't really enfleshed.

He didn't feel stuff like we feel.

Docetism was both.

It was either or.

I didn't really see, I mean, it it all depends who you read how much hairs you split.

Um but but again, adoptionism is the idea spirit comes, spirit goes.

Docetism is appears human or appears divine, but in fact wasn't that, depending which side you end up on.

Does that make sense?

Now, you may say, no one thinks that today.

I would tell you actually most Christians are docetists.

By definition.

Because what we don't like to think is that God actually dies.

If you don't think God dies, you're a docetist.

Period.

If you do, then you have to like make some peace with the idea that eternal, undying God dies.

There's this movement, it actually came out on my alma mater, came out of Emory University post-World War II, God is dead.

Now, some people take that to mean, and you can do whatever you want with it, okay, eternal God is dead, so there is no God.

But you know, actually, the story, the crucifixion, is that God is dead, but that death doesn't end the story.

Uh, and that I think is hard for us to hold on to.

See, part of it is if we know on Good Friday that Sunday is coming, then death is kind of an illusion because it doesn't last.

But if you're going with the disciples on Friday, death seems to be forever, and then there's a surprise.

Yeah, but you know saying that God dies during the crucifixion?

Well, how can that be?

Because what death, my understanding of death is when the spirit leaves the body.

It doesn't the spirit doesn't die.

Unless there's some God that I don't know.

So if God is spirit, why would it be necessary for God to die?

The person who died was the human Jesus.

This is really getting down to something that John is addressing that the other gospels don't, and it's probably because John and these letters are written at a later date, which is the idea that we have a spirit that is somehow separate from our body.

You see, our Jewish brothers and sisters never believed that, and they still don't.

You don't have a soul, you are a soul.

Soul is the totality of your being.

So when you read words like resurrection in the Bible, the presumption is a physical resurrection.

No, we don't believe in that anymore.

We don't.

That's because we've adopted the Greco-Roman understanding, frankly, that the body is not as good as the spirit.

The body is somehow a prison, a temporal, crude prison for this immortal, everlasting soul, which is exactly the idea that informed that uh I think how we get Lent so backward in general, that if we punish the body, we're doing good to the spirit.

Body bad, spirit good, deprive the body, enhance the spirit.

This is what led monks to whipping themselves, to mortifying their body.

But every resurrection reference, I mean, you can even see it in Paul, the dead will be raised and they'll come up to the air.

It's not talking about their spirits, it's talking about their bodies.

Well, where does the spirit go when it leaves the body in death?

Well, we have that's not biblical.

I know, but what if we contrived?

We've contrived the idea, not based on the Bible.

This is really important.

I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying it isn't biblical, that our spirit goes somewhere when we die, separate from our body.

Our body goes to the ground and decomposes, our spirit goes to heaven.

It's fine if you believe that.

I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's absolutely opposite of what the Bible has in mind.

Yeah, because heaven will come down to earth.

We'll read that in two weeks.

And there'll be a resurrection.

Of bodies.

Yes.

And reminder that resurrection of the Bible was still a new idea.

It was based on the idea you died because you were persecuted for your faith practice, so you get the rest of your life back.

But this idea of an eternal stuff that gets mapped out over centuries after this, not during.

So, what do we think happens?

Well, it depends who you talk to.

Some people believe as soon as you die, your spirit flies up to heaven and your body goes to the earth and in anything, you know.

What's right?

Well, how can you say what's right?

Yeah, but hasn't thought developed since that Bible was written?

In other words, you know, there are things that we have today that when they started in the beginning, they were small and primitive, and then they started growing, and people understanding grew as those age grew.

So, you know, um the the I I understand I know that the Jews did not uh think about the spirit and body separating.

They they just didn't know actually I understand.

They went to this place called Shell or Hades, uh, which was not a pla happy place.

With a sad place, just underground.

Yeah, it's just where you were.

Apparently there was some knowledge with them down in uh because they had to be aware of what was going on around them, so their bodies didn't go with them, so what did go down there?

No, their bodies do go, that's why it's underground, because you're buried under the grass.

Okay, yeah.

Without the buttons.

But see, I think this is an interesting thing, what what you said, and in some ways I agree with you, like, oh, thoughts developed since then, but it doesn't mean it's developed in the right way.

How do you prove this?

We've mapped the human genome, you know what we didn't find was the spirit gene.

Essentially, it's what we choose to believe about the world, right?

And I'm not really convinced actually that we're completely right because shucks, I mean, it leads us to think that our bodies are bad, and that means that the well, our experience in the body, which is the only one we have now for sure, we tend to look on it like shamefully and diminish it when maybe we're supposed to really live into it.

Yeah, but that was because of the dualism that was brought in by the Greeks, you know, the body and the spirit.

And then anyway, uh there was a time in history, Christian history, when yes, that flagellation and all that was uh uh practice, but the church hasn't moved past that.

Congress and monasteries don't have flagellation anymore, they don't uh some don't, yeah, but ones that are uh extreme.

Yeah.

So I mean, because we don't there is a uh an attitude out there that the body is well I know Chris well Christians have been put a programmed a certain way to think about the body, but that does not necessarily mean that that's right.

I think that's where I'm going with you.

And trying to say, you know, I I think in general our Judeo, well, really our puritanical culture, let's just be honest, is really suspicious about physical pleasure as bad or corrupt or lesser than spiritual enjoyment, and I think that's to our detriment.

Yes.

So other than a puritanical background, where did the idea come that divine was bad?

It came from um the teachings that uh in general, probably the strongest influence is called Manichaeanism.

Augustine was a Manichaeist before he was a Christian.

Now that that was that was not a Christian teaching.

Remember, Augustine came to Christianity later in life, but he'd been involved in this Manichaean second.

Um Gnosticism is in some ways similar.

Um, again, body bad.

Body is a physical prison for immortal, eternal spirit.

So uh you try to diminish, if you embrace the body, then you're neglecting the spirit.

Again, this is not a Jewish idea.

It's not.

And I'm not saying, by the way, that the Jewish idea is better than the Greek idea.

I'm saying it's very, very different.

So we have to sort of, I think, think about this question, um, and I think most of us really do sort of believe we have some essence of us that is greater than our body, that transcends our body, but is, for lack of a better word, confined to our body while we're alive.

And I think if we think that, which I probably do, then we we tend toward this idea that body is less than spirit, less than, which could lead us, I think, to diminishing things like pain and pleasure and enjoyment in our bodies, and that has consequences.

Yeah, but also I view the body as I'm grateful for my body because the spirits you cannot see.

So if we have so if God wants humans on earth and uh the spirit comes from God, it has to have something that shields the spirit, that clothes the spirit to be able to enable it to live in a physical surrounding like we live in.

You know, and really the origins of sin and destruction is in our heads, not in our body.

I I don't know if this is getting too off track or not, or if this is of interest to you.

It's very complicated.

Or it's really simple.

I mean, that's an interesting thing.

It's either or, right?

So so what if it is just really, really simple?

Like, hey, there is something spiritual about eating.

Oh, it's basic, you know, higher beings don't have to do it.

I mean, maybe.

Or maybe there's something really spiritual about it.

Maybe there's something really spiritual about, sorry, passing waste out of our bodies.

Oh, I look forward to the day I don't have to do that.

Well, who knows what you're going to have to do later.

Is it so bad?

I don't know.

Um it's actually pretty freeing, you know.

Releases a lot of pressure, so thank God for that.

I feel better after this too.

Oh, we all do, yeah.

Uh, we're biochemically engineered uh for that.

Can I uh what I I don't necessarily understand why uh why body bad or spirit better?

Because if God gave us our bodies, yeah, then why would he necessarily expect us to deny the pleasures that come with our bodies?

Wouldn't some of those pleasures be part of the gift of living life?

Yeah, and enjoy and I'm not saying running around and having orgies and stuff like that, but eating, um, hugging, you know, um loving.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess I I've seen bodies for me personally, the only things that are limiting about my body are what I've got.

You know, I I mean, so wait why would it be Why did they feel like it?

Maybe it's because of what you said about I cannot pronounce that word.

Manichaeanism.

Manichaeanism.

In my head, when we were saying it, I was trying to spell it, and that just got crazy.

Why that would be why that would be.

Because you know, we're given our eyes so we can see beautiful things.

We're given our senses, you know, when you go out.

And I mean, I certainly feel like, and I'm not saying if we didn't have bodies, there wouldn't be another way we couldn't see or feel or touch or hear or taste.

But to me, like nature is a huge way to see God and be closer to God.

I need my body to do those things.

So why would that be?

Am I making any sense of that?

I think because why would and does it stem from this?

I think because, and and I again, I think I'm gonna sound like I'm critiquing this, but I'm just naming it.

And I think because I I and everybody else holds to this idea that what is eternal is longer lasting than what's temporal, so it must be better.

And what's eternal?

Not our bodies, our spirits.

And it actually goes back to an even older idea than this, which is not called Platonism, but Neoplatonism, which informs most of our view of the spiritual world.

According to the Neoplatonists, and you'll find this in the Gospel of Thomas as well.

This is what informs Gnosticism Gnosticism the Gnostics and Gnosticism.

Um there was this pure eternal spirit, and then there is this sort of evil, malevolent force called the demi-urge, who breaks that spirit into pieces and embodies it, puts it into a prison, and that's called the fall.

That's really important because the Bible never, ever says there was a fall in the garden.

Never.

I bet you've learned the whole your whole life though that that was the fall.

Yes.

That's a polytheistic, philosophical, neoplatonist term, not a biblical one, but it's captured our imagination.

So Adam and Eve fell in the garden.

The Bible never says that.

But we bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

They fell uh and the spirit became imprisoned in this body, and that's exactly where Augustine gets the idea that they committed original sin, so bodies are inherently bad.

Augustine says that Adam's sperm shrivels so that all children are born inherently less than they were supposed to be.

Or this sensor.

Well, it's very logical.

You may not, and we may say, well, now that I'm explaining, you may say that's the craziest thing.

We all believe it.

I'm gonna tell you, all believe it.

But yeah, but I don't well, yeah, but I have issues with Augustine, so you should.

Although I'll say this, I mean, you know, I don't want to say he's a bad guy.

He was a creative thinker and he was trying to reconcile his Greek education with Christianity.

And for the longest time he thought Christians were dummies until this guy called Ambrose of Milan taught him that the Bible is to be read allegorically, not literally.

He found that really imaginative, compelling, and he tried to do this.

Now, Augustine has some other really interesting ideas, like evil is the absence, not evil is the absence of good.

So evil actually has no reality.

There's no such thing as a dark switch.

There's absence of light.

Now that's interesting, right?

Because kind of what it says is you can't turn on the dark, you can just live without the light.

But you can't snuff light out.

Okay, well, I'm I mean, I think that's actually pretty compelling, and I would tell you, I think that's in 1st, 2nd, and 3 John, that idea.

And he also came up with the idea of predestination.

Augustine.

Uh, yeah, not as Calvin practiced it, but he starts to think that.

Yeah, right?

Another thing we need to remember about Augustine when he talks about sin and all this other stuff, um uh he was a sex addict.

And he had a problem with that all his life.

He thought he was a sex addict because he'd had it.

Yeah.

So, I mean, he he that's something he and I think it colored his thinking to a good degree.

It colored his thinking because he viewed it as base, because animals do that as well.

And Augustine believed that sex was for procreation only.

And our Protestant heritage says, no, in fact, sexuality is for unity first, and it could result in kids, but does not need to.

That's our Protestant heritage.

Thank God for it.

How many kids did he have?

He had one out of wedlock, and that was part of the issue, and that was before he converted.

But you had but you know, it's really interesting, I think, to think.

This I think is using Augustine's argument, thinking about it, if sex really is just about procreation, then we really are just like animals.

Right.

And in general, if you think about that, I mean, if you observe animals, sex is not just about procreation, it's about domination.

And I am positive that using intercourse to dominate is absolutely wrong.

Not natural.

I mean, so this is interesting to think about that, isn't it?

I think they've said before that rape is not a sex act.

Absolutely, it's not, it's a domination act.

And that's how animals do it.

Animals establish the pecking order through sexuality.

I mean, I, you know, dogs mount other male dogs to show that they're inferior, and that's what happens in prisons.

It's those people aren't gay in general, because there's there's no subjectivity, it's all about making an object out of somebody else.

Same, same with raping a woman.

There's nothing subjective about that.

It's all about domination.

So I think the question is, do we recognize that for what it is, or do we s or or do we confuse it for what it isn't?

Rape is about sex.

That's a confusion many people make, and it is not.

And I think again, bodies are temporal, they must be bad.

Well, bodies are temporal doesn't mean they're bad.

Right?

I mean, it's true bodies are temporal, that doesn't mean they're less than.

I'm gonna throw out some random and crazy thoughts.

So, if you look at our bodies, they have mass.

They're made up of atoms and molecules and that sort of thing.

And of course, we're bathed in a bath of atoms and molecules.

But um so but when you look at light, light is not composed, as far as we know, of mass.

Now the spirit, what is the spirit?

Is it the kind of the third thing that is it com we don't know what it's composed of?

Um and does Maggie have a spirit?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, strictly speaking, spirit means moving air.

So does Maggie move air?

Yes.

And there's studies now about whether it's space and I'm not moving air.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Then your spirit has probably departed from you.

Well, hopefully I'm gonna have a suit.

Then you'd be moving air.

Then you'd be moving air.

No, I mean that's why spirit can be translated as wind or breath.

Well, that's but what's breath do?

I mean, I think that's a great question.

B breathing air, I mean, in in in a at a certain point, um, you know, air is composed of molecules and you you m and you move them, but movement of molecules doesn't have any mass.

I mean the molecules do, but the movement doesn't.

The molecules just have momentum.

I mean the movement has momentum, which is what light has.

Not mass, but momentum.

I mean, so it's interesting, right?

I mean, light and spirit are not measured in physicality alone, but in movement of physicality.

I mean, surely light moves you because it has momentum.

So, did Jesus have both a spirit and something divine that is separate from the spirit?

We say that, but you know, here's this riddle.

If God is everywhere all the time, is God more somewhere than somewhere else?

If God's omnipresent, is God more in me than in the table?

Or is that a logical contradiction?

If God's everywhere, how can God be more here than here?

So is God more present in Jesus than God is in you?

Is God more present in Jesus than God is in you?

Is Jesus a spirit?

God's presence or is it separate?

I mean, this is a great Christological question.

I don't have the answer.

But I think I wonder about things like that.

That's here here's where I think that line of thinking takes you is exactly where John says, who sort of says, uh, you know, listen, um, if you don't love your brother, you don't love God.

Because God is as present in your brother as God is in you.

And maybe God is as present in your brother as God is in Jesus, so that if you don't love your brother, you don't love Jesus, who is God, and therefore, if you don't love your brother, you don't love God.

Is that strange?

Is it brother, I'm gonna use it with a big B, or brother with a small B?

And I say that because if I I can love a 99 brothers, but there's one out there.

I'm not so sure I can love that brother.

Yeah, I think so.

And I if you're reading the Luke business, I think that's exactly what Luke tries to say.

If you're reading those daily things, I think Luke is all about the universality of God's family.

And listen, I think we often get really confused about love.

We think love is feeling such and such a way towards certain people, and uh, I want to free you from that.

I don't think love is about feeling at all.

I think it's a set of practices.

And I can practice loving people, frankly, I don't like and are detestable to me.

Uh, and they can still be detestable and I can still practice loving them.

That's a lot easier, you know.

Uh actually doing it.

Yeah, well, and I think part of it is I'll just tell you because I wrote another one of these things today for Down the Road, there's people who I think are lazy and bums, and they're like begging for stuff, and I don't even want to look at them.

And maybe I look at them and just say no.

But the fact that I look at them is a lot different than me avoiding them.

Because I'll tell you, my my earthly brothers, sometimes I just say no to him, and I didn't say that disdainfully.

I consider him and lovingly I disagree, and that's okay.

And boy, I don't always feel in love with a bunch of his ideas, but I practice love by making space for them, or you know, if I can't, I practice loving myself by saying, let's not talk about that.

But let's not talk about that doesn't mean I hate you.

In fact, it allows me to practice love more fully.

I mean, we often get confused between love and accountability, and you can have both at the same time.

I actually think the US Constitution is pretty based in the idea of practicing love.

You, you get a trial.

Everyone gets a trial.

Even if I know you did it, you get a trial.

I mean, that's the idea that everybody deserves the dignity of consideration.

We know O.J.

Simpson did it.

We know it.

We just know that the evidence was inadmissible because it wasn't legally acquired.

And I mean, that's considerate in the Constitution.

You may hate that case, but you know, it's it's actually pretty forward thinking.

You can't just steal evidence, you know, like you have to properly obtain it.

And when you make racist remarks on tape, the jury should consider that as bias.

And I mean, you may hate the outcome of that case, but it's but if actually really consider it.

And that's an interesting bit, right?

I mean, if we don't love our brother, sister with a capital B or S, we don't love God.

That's really tough.

It's a lot Thomas Merton said, I it's a lot easier to love humanity than to love humans.

Yeah, and you know, another uh way of loving is just okay, that person has the right to their opinion.

I don't agree with it.

And so you just go separate.

It's uh I think we really do get hung up on the word love because we think that you and it's not that it's just respecting other human beings or accepting where they are and recognizing we don't recognize I don't agree or I don't get a good feeling about them because it says here that do not love the world or the things of the world, this is John 2 3 15.

Um the love of the Father is not in those who love the world.

All that is in the world, the heart of the flesh, the desire of the heart, and which is comes not from the father, but from the world.

And the world is the way that those are the world.

So if we see this daily So if it says it says here in another place.

Oh yeah, um you're talking about the antichrist.

But isn't you know, isn't the natural parks worth I mean animals and life and things aren't we meant to enjoy that?

Yes.

Yeah.

Aren't we meant to enjoy food and national parks?

Absolutely, and I think actually part of why in my own head connecting this argument about Jesus being come in the flesh as the necessary confession is that Jesus is come in the flesh and the person next to you.

And and the person far away, for example, us just coming back from the Bedouin country in a way.

I loved it.

I loved it, I I loved the way that people treated us.

I love the way we just can't be anywhere in this world without seeing God and all of those things and all of those people and it's it's just it's a joy for us.

I think I think an interesting extension, right, is that those people fundamentally view our religion as inferior to their own.

Yes, and they practice hospitality.

Don't we say that I'm not convinced we always do the same.

I don't think so.

Yeah, I'm I'm not convinced.

If they had come here, it would have been very different.

Well I mean is I didn't necessarily meant that we that we were hospitable towards them, but don't we think that our religion is superior to the world?

We do, and I think our hospitality suffers from that conviction, and I think that's a fundamental difference.

And I wonder if these books aren't inviting us to reconsider that.

Now, listen, I don't know what John had in mind, but when I read a line that says, anyone who does good comes from God, well, it makes me start to think, then, okay, we have rather myopic thinking, which is only Christian people can do good, and other people are just well doing something nice, but it's not really good because they don't think the right way.

Now you may say, Mike, I've never heard that thinking.

I grew up completely exposed in it.

But if you didn't have the right belief, it was all just hooey.

So this, I think one way to read this is okay, so you think uh so well, and you know, that the Mormon people who do good, even if you think their whole religion is made up and misogynist and whatever, the stuff, the goodness that they do is from God, and that's to be celebrated, not deprecated.

Hey, you know, I I think what I meant was that if you will, I'll say the Christian church and our leaders, I think, not all, but many of the leaders think that Christianity is above everything else.

Now, having said all that, I have friends who are both Muslim and Hindu, mostly Muslim, and they're wonderful people.

And I I tell you, I can't say that they're doing anything wrong.

They would, you know, step in front of a bullet for me and I would for them.

So my point is that that um it's unfortunate that in many cases our religions try to try to compete.

Try to compete, uh, but uh try to put one above the other when in many ways maybe they're just allowed.

My experience is the opposite in terms of Hinduism.

I have all my doctors are Hindus, and I have lots of close friends.

Um uh and and I I just find that yeah, how you're feeling about Muslims, and I just don't know a lot of Muslims.

Um but they would yeah, they would they do good things, they do they could do good things.

Is why Jesus doesn't literally become so when it comes to all these difficulties that we face people are just treating that Jesus.

That's all that I asked about.

Um that's what we mean by loving them.

Yeah, and this I think is a really good reminder.

Jesus didn't always say what people wanted to hear.

That was not his understanding of how to be loving.

And he didn't associate with people like the scribes and Pharisees who were always criticizing him.

And he had encounters with them, and some of them he did have private conversations.

My read is that they left him, he didn't leave them.

That's exactly right.

Honestly, I think he put himself out there and they were the ones who left.

Oh, yeah, I agree with that, but the thing is he didn't pursue them either.

Well, I didn't know that he pursued anybody.

I think he he offered himself to people and they came or they left.

Yeah.

And and that's we're we're all left with, I mean, each one of us has that that given, God-given right and and ability and to to make that choice.

And if they choose to go away and say no, well, you know, that's that's that's up to them.

Yeah, Christians have pursued people, but Christ didn't necessarily pursue people.

Yeah, and sometimes we pursue people when frankly we should just let them go.

Because the worst thing that can happen is you tell someone, I need a break, and they don't give you one.

Yeah.

This is parenting at my worst when my kids are like, I don't want to talk right now, and like youth, you will.

I I mean, no, but that's true.

I mean, when we have altercations out on the playground, nine times out of ten, it's because somebody has asked somebody else to stop, stop, and stop, stop.

And they continue.

They continue.

That one person is so sure that what they have to say or do is so much better and more important.

That they then alienate themselves.

From childhood, and we we don't often grow up and stop being relates.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

So I I want to raise up a couple of thoughts on this, and then I want to make sure we talk about Jude, because it's way weirder than you think.

Um it's really weird.

Um one is um First John tells us true love drives out all fear because fear of punishment does not perfect love.

Say again now.

True love drives out all fear.

True love drives out all fear because fear of punishment does not reflect perfect love.

So I just I want to hold this up to you as frankly one of the ways in which we love one another is rarely complete.

And hold on to this for a second.

If true love draws out all fear and God truly loves us, there cannot be a hell.

Or hell is an empty place.

Or hell is an empty place.

We had a priest who said that to us.

He said hell is an empty place.

I I I just I just logically that must be the case, which means if we come to God to escape hell, there's no love in the relationship.

If we believe in a God who would send us to hell, we must be afraid of that.

And so there's no love in the relationship.

Now I didn't want to destroy hell for you, except that I do.

Well, some people say hell is on earth anyway, as we go through life.

And I think hell then must be a place in which we don't live in true love.

Yeah, but what about the people who just have to turn their backs on God and do evil things?

And I will tell you that I think if we praying shapes believing and believing shapes doing, if we understand that a loving God can send people to hell forever, I think that will determine the way we're in relationship with one another.

Yes.

And I will tell you, uh I don't think it's forever.

I don't think hell is forever.

Yeah, I'm just saying if we think that.

So I I I I think the problem with eternal hell and with punishment and insecure love is that in relationships I'm in, I'm worried I'll lose love because I'm too eccentric or I'm too anxious or I'm too this or too that, and that affects my enjoyment of my relationships.

Because I'll lose somebody's love and I'll get the punishment I deserve.

And this I think is a really interesting insecurity that can affect married life, it can affect being children and parents, and and sometimes it happens.

I was really happy to figure out, and I figured this out, that um the worst thing I could ever do for my mom is be gay.

That's the worst thing I could ever do.

But I think I figured out that if I were, my mom would still love me.

So that means uh if that's the case, then I don't really have to worry about anything else.

And we can just tell the truth to each other in love.

Um I can say the same thing about children.

I said if one of my child children is to come to me and say, by the way, I'm gay, um it's not something that I would be terribly happy about, but at the same time, it wouldn't stop me anymore.

I think there's things you're probably more worried about than that, you know what I mean?

And there's a difference between the future we daydream for them and what we can accept.

And then, but see, for in my mother's case, being gay is like the worst thing you can do.

And if I were that, I'm convinced she would still love me.

I know that she would.

Um that's kind of freeing, isn't it?

That at your worst you're still gonna be loved.

And that's maybe a meditation in our marriages, and and honestly, informs, I think, this business about loving our brothers and sisters at their worst, at their laziest, most callous tea party politics or yellow dog democrat, whichever thing you don't like.

We're still committed to loving them.

Because loving doesn't mean agreeing.

My mother would never agree with me being gay.

Would never.

She could never endorse it.

But she would love me because they don't mean the same thing.

And this is this really interesting thing.

Um, I'm taking this new couples therapy thing, which is interesting to think about, that a lot of times when we have troubless couples, it's because we think we we think the same, because we're a couple, we're supposed to think the same.

And when somebody thinks different, like what the hell is wrong with you?

Because we're supposed to think the same.

And um, what we usually think is, well, when we have a difference of opinion, one must be right and one must be wrong.

So we rarely do the work of saying, you know, I can see how you think that, and I imagine if you think that you probably feel this way.

We rarely do empathy because we say, in the end, the empathy doesn't matter.

What matters is who's right and who's wrong.

Which is how we fail to practice love, and usually where most of our disappointment in marriage comes from.

Not recognizing that the other person is somebody different from us.

My dad, uh, my my sister and I was there were six of us, but my sister and I are the only two that have been divorced.

Uh uh, and we've been actually married more than once, okay?

And so my father, my mother had quite a you know, was terribly upset with us, and uh she told my father, I cannot let them enter this house anymore.

They've been with too many men.

I I and so my dad said stop, and I he I she told me he said this.

He says, Stop.

Under no circumstances, never do I shut my doors to my children.

And and she told me that, and I was so touched and moved because I knew she felt that way about my sister and I.

But you know, she would you know would love to lay it off.

But but then I thought, wow, under no circumstances, I don't care what they've done, the door stays open for my children.

And you know, you suddenly you go, wow, he's really special.

You know, so blessed.

And I think the thing that we are always afraid of when we hear that, I mean, as beautiful it is, is we think, oh, well then there's no accountability and there's no standards and anything goes, and that's totally different.

Yeah, it means that the relationship is priority no matter what, which but you may have to do some penance.

No, yeah, no, no, and and you know, when I was a kid, he never struck me, but I'd go in my room and then I couldn't go place to certain places, you know, and I'd uh holler and scream and jump up and down and climb and he would just shut the door and move about his business, and you know, and I'd be throwing his hand and there's something really different about quantum physics, which says, frankly, that no matter how we experience one another, we're entangled at the quantum level, which means we're always in relationship with each other no matter how we experience unrelation.

We can experience it, but it's not real.

You can have people that you hate and you never want to see again, and at the quantum level, you're related to them.

Yes, and you're connected to them.

No matter how strong the disconnect feels, the connection is always there.

And maybe that's what this is about.

We treat each other knowing we are connected no matter what, which means we treat each other with accountability and not punitivity.

Those are different things.

Holding someone accountable is different from punishing them.

Accountability is about restoration and making things right that were made wrong.

Punitivity is about revenge.

Um, can I share with you about Jude?

Because it's a little wacky.

Um, most of Jude is actually copied and pasted from a book that didn't make it into the Bible but almost did, called One Enoch.

The oldest copy of One Enoch we have is not in Greek, nor is in Hebrew.

It's in a language called Ethiopic, and it survived in the Ethiopic Orthodox Church.

And before the Yeah, actually you think that's when we've got it.

So uh One Enoch is about the figure Enoch.

If you remember in the Bible, he walked with God and was no more.

So they developed a legend that Enoch went to heaven.

This is a much later idea, don't you see?

Without dying.

And therefore, he got to see all kinds of mysteries in one Enoch, which is definitely what we call a pseude epigraphic book, pseudo false writing.

Like Enoch didn't write that book, but somebody claims Enoch did, so that it had this authority from heaven's eye to talk about different realities.

So, for example, one Enoch says the days of the year are 360.

And thank God that's wrong.

There's 365 and a quarter.

But Enoch tries to move to the solar calendar, which the Romans were doing.

That's a divine revelation.

Enoch is also the book that starts to inform John Milton because Enoch says that there is essentially this rebellion in heaven.

The rebellion Enoch described is not, hey, better to reign in hell than be second in heaven.

Enoch gives a like a bigger imaginative picture of what happens in Genesis chapter 6, 1 through 4, where the sons of God look on the daughters of men and find them so attractive that they have demigods, essentially, who are the heroes of old, giants and such.

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

And um, the leader of these spirits is called the the Azazel, which in Hebrew means the scapegoat, interestingly enough.

And the Azazel uh sort of, and some of these other spirits, again, have these divine children, and they end up getting imprisoned underneath the earth.

So these are spirits that weren't following the spiritual laws.

Their punishment is to be chained up under the ground.

If you read to Peter, which we didn't read, when Jesus dies, he descends to the spirits who are imprisoned.

A clear reference to these.

So Jesus comes not just to redeem humanity, but even renegade spirits get a chance.

I mean, that's the measure of grace into Peter.

All of this business, though, is in one Enoch, and so are these entities called the Watchers, which apparently are watching stuff.

They're sort of like God's TiVo all over the place, or God's a with that anything.

I've got it at my house.

It's uh Arlo, the net security cameras.

So um this is in Juan Enoch, and there's a clear cut and paste.

I mean, Jude clearly quotes Juan Enoch.

Uh if if if you read it um beginning in verse 14, Enoch the Seventh from Adam prophesied about these men.

Here's the clear cut and paste.

See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone and convict all the ungodly of the ungodly acts, they've done it in the ungodly way, and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

See, that's in quotes.

That's a direct quote from one Enoch.

What a lot of other parts in the book are too, including like Archangel Michael.

You never heard of him before?

Yeah, because he's not in the Bible, he just shows up here.

From one Enoch.

So this is an interesting thing that the book of One Enoch almost made it into the Bible, but didn't, but portions of it did.

Why did you not make it yours?

Is there a reason?

Well, there's lots of reasons, I suppose.

I mean, what we don't have is a careful tractate by the uh Council of Chalcedon as to why or why not Shepherd of Hermes and Enoch didn't make it, but James did.

But the clear criterion seemed to be ubiquity of usage.

So um, was it only used in Egypt or was it used all around the known Christian world?

Um did it claim to have apostolic origins?

The Shepherd of Hermes didn't, or it might have made it.

The Shepherd of Hermes was not an apostle, but Jude is.

Now you may say, I don't know an apostle named Jude.

Well, there's this is really hard to know quite who they're thinking of.

Thomas is called Judas Didymus Thomas.

So could be that one.

Well, the very first line is Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, because James was an apostle, right?

And so James is the brother of Jesus, not an apostle.

So this is a Jesus brother, who's somebody who saw Jesus directly, unlike the shepherd of Hermes.

So there's like some options here.

If that makes sense.

So if you don't have apostolic, see now Paul is an apostle because he sees the resurrected Jesus in the sky and goes blind.

Right?

So that's his apostolic origin.

But if you don't have apostolic origin, you don't make it.

And then the other bit starts to be does it coalesce with the other books that have been accepted?

But under those criterion, James barely makes it.

And only because James, the brother of Jesus, he's not one of the disciples, but he's an apostle because he sees Jesus with his own eyes.

This is sort of the idea.

Even though the book of James doesn't claim to be written by James within the text, that's the traditional application.

I hope that's helpful.

So Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, would imply that he saw Jesus.

Yes.

And actually, maybe touched and uh saw him in the flesh, yeah, knew him personally.

But what because he was a servant, he wasn't a disciple.

Or an apostle.

He is an apostle.

He is.

And apostles are people who s who saw the physical or resurrected Jesus, which is why Paul can be one.

I don't know if you um much cared for Jude, but there is an interesting line in there about uh you know avoiding divisive talk.

And bad people essentially not only promulgate false teachings, but they are shepherds feeding only themselves, so they don't feed those that they're meant to care for, and that they use grace as a license, a license to frankly be malevolent.

John seems to be suggesting that as well, that this new teaching, as he says, right, is uh justifying lawlessness.

And it brings up this interesting idea that a conservative is somebody who is conserving something.

So conservative doesn't mean doing it the way it's been done.

The criterion for being a true conservative is there is something worth preserving, and what is it?

What they're trying to preserve in John is the physicality of Jesus because that means the physical things we do matter.

If Jesus was physical, physicality matters.

Which means how we treat each other matters, how we treat our bodies matters.

If Jesus wasn't, none of that matters.

Because one glad morning when this life is over, I'll fly away.

Which is why I think that's a terrible song, even though I really like it.

Any other thoughts?

Which is not just like, oh, you make me feel loved or you make me feel accepted.

Phenomenology always says, where is that feeling manifest in your body?

So a good caregiver is going to be able to say during that moment in our talk, my mouth started to water or my palms started to heat it up because they're aware not just of their feeling, but where their feeling becomes manifest in their bodies.

And we're so rarely aware of that.

We rarely pay attention to those things.

My master's isn't constantly, and so we forget about that.

And I don't practice it.

It's been a year since I've been practicing.

Children will tell you sometimes that their tongue feels funny.

And it's it's you know, our usually what we say is, do you need to go to the bath?

But a lot of times it's exciting or anxiety or fear.

Yeah, I remember telling some teenage boys to oh this weirdo had been calling them.

And they came to tell me, and I said, I wanted to call out something in my tongue.

And I didn't want to be ever and ever, no matter how old you are.

When something feels bad in your tongue, you pay attention, pay attention, yeah.

There is something wrong.

You get away, you say go away, I don't care how you say it to them, but you yeah, it's it's an interesting thing, uh what you said.

I mean, because in in general, trusting our instincts is important, but sometimes retraining our instincts is important.

I've been around people and felt the distrust feeling, yeah, and that said more about my prejudice sometimes than it said about them.

So it's it's this mixed bag, but it's important to pay attention.

Yes, yeah.

And and I and I think hopefully, yeah, because you're absolutely right.

Is it is it m my problem, or is it?

Or are they actually a problem?

Yes, but that's why we always say pay attention.

Yes, even if you do something different than your gut, don't just ignore it.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's like when when you're a teenager and and you attracted to somebody, you know, there's that feeling.

And even if when you're close to them, it's like, yeah.

And then that's that's rumoring.

Yes, that's wonderful how your body just works.

Yes.

When my daughter was born, my first daughter, both of my daughters, but particularly I remember it the most was my first daughter holding her the first time she and I were alone.

And I will tell you, I felt it in here.

You know, it was it was like she's 27, and I could choke up talking about this right now.

And I was wow, like.

Like obviously I've loved people before, uh, you know, um, but this was such a strong phenomenology.

And then when my granddaughter was born, that was even like that.

See, you know, so it's like that.

I do, and I my first grandkid, I said I'm like, oh god.

And it's a physical feeling.

And and like I said, it's such a physical feeling that and she's six, and I'm still, you know.

Oh yeah.

I remember telling my oldest daughter, I said, if I'd known I was gonna feel this way about my grandkids, I would have had them first.

Yeah.

No kidding.

No kidding.

I mean, whoa, yeah, it is over the time.

And then your kids kind of look at you and they're like, do you love her more than us on the world?

No, it's not.

It's you know my daughter laughed.

It's just it's different, but I just said, you know, I don't know.

I would have had them first.

All right, fourth John's got one more question for us.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so I'm I read Romans.

Yeah.

And it's in in here welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.

Then some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.

Those who eat must not despise those who abstain.

And those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat.

For God has welcomed them, welcomed them.

What is the eat thing?

It goes on talking about it.

So remember that all that all meat is sacrificed to idols.

So the eating is meat.

The eating's about meat.

So some people say, since you've sacrificed it to Zeus or Aphrodite, it's been, frankly, offered to a demon, and it's corrupt and is spiritually bad to ingest.

Paul sort of says, since those things aren't real, poppycock, like eat away.

Um, however, he says, be cautious not to lay a stumbling block in front of your brother or sister.

So I think he wants to have his cake and eat it too, and it's really, really hard.

He wants you to be able to have freedom in Christ, but he also doesn't want to use your freedom flagrantly when other people don't have it.

And I think it's really hard to decide how and when you make a stand.

And I'll tell you that what I appreciated most about the Episcopal Church in 2009 when I went to General Convention, I listened to arguments on the floor about whether or not to ordain gay priests.

And the counter-arguments said, listen, the Anglican communion is worldwide, it is huge.

And we can fly our plane, but we can lose our wings.

We need to get there together.

And then I heard other people say, How can we not stand up for this thing?

And to be honest, um I found that spirit of conversation very wise, and I really appreciated it.

It was really about when do we go forward, not if.

And how do we go forward?

And I think Paul struggles with that because you know, if I live my life worried that I'm going to lay a stumbling block to you, I lose big parts of myself, and I may not even be successful.

I will tell you, I I've heard once, maybe, the Bishop of San Diego preached a sermon, and I think he used a profane word in the sermon.

And I looked around because in the churches I grew up in, you'd never do that.

And no one seemed to be lost, maybe because he was the bishop.

I don't know the answer.

Um but I'm not really prepared to do that in my own in my own homily, even if I use that language outside.

You know, I mean, so it's an interesting bit about what we're worried about.

And I will tell you, um, boy, I still will always do this when I go to the hospital unless I'm called instantly and I'm dressed like such, I wear long sleeves.

Because you know, I don't intend to put other people off, but at the same time, I'm not gonna apologize for my skin because it's my skin.

Right, right.

And how we live in between those, I think, is is tough.

I won't take my earrings out for a hospital visit because it's difficult.

And if it matters to you, it's fine, um, but I'm not going to let it matter to me.

I mean, but these are hard bits.

It didn't matter to the uh committee that uh called you.

Well, these didn't, these mattered to some folk, but they y'all didn't have that, but y'all didn't know about I had plenty of other this.

I didn't have it here, I had it everywhere else.

So anyway.

But now we've gotten along with it okay.

You know, I mean, will it be a hang up to other call committees?

My answer is if I go somewhere in the future, it might be, and my other answer is if it is, then we don't have any business being together.

That's exactly right.

There's an interesting transition there that happens.

And I think this is, you know, I mean, I do think this is like the kind of thing we'd talk about if we were reading Romans.

I had somebody about a year and a half ago say, I don't care if you have those or not.

And I had somebody else say, I'm glad you have those, even if I don't want them for myself, because it's who you are.

And those are two very different statements about validation and affirmation.

And I would tell you, I think the second statement has traveled more distance than the first.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm just do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

When when I came here at never and when I saw that you had tattoos, I thought, that's pretty cool.

Some people think that, and other people.

Yeah, well, in other words, that's who you were, and that was part of you, and that was okay.

It's a testament to my mental illness.

But you know, at least you can see it clearly.

Since I didn't hear it, my attitude, I didn't have a I had a questioning attitude about tattoos.

In other words, why do people do that?

Because when I was growing up, you know, the story was totally different.

So I have to work through that.

And uh, but um I have a greater appreciation for them.

I don't I mean, I don't if you want tattoos, that's fine with me.

You know, I'm too old to get it now.

Yeah, it goes all kinds of different ways when you're 82, so I know what I'm talking about.

My my only thing is pain.

I had I had kids in schools.

Didn't it hurt?

Did it oh yes, it's probably hurt.

Well, when I was out in my 20s, I seriously thought about getting a tattoo.

And that was back before I'm 68.

So you can see how long ago that was.

Um, but um, unlike you, I could never think of something that I want.

Yeah, I mean, I thought of a ton of things.

I know what I want and I know where I want it.

I want one on my ankle and I want a d little dolphin because that's my dad's why would you do it then?

Because I'm chicken.

How bad how bad does it hurt?

Um