[Oe List ...] Paul Clements for Congress

Thu Oct 31 23:44:34 PDT 2013

Am sending a small amount (lots in China) for Paul's campaign.  Go, Paul!

Jaime Vergara
in Shenyang, Liaoning (in the old Machuria)

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Sent: Fri, Nov 1, 2013 1:32 am
Subject: OE Digest, Vol 19, Issue 14

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Today's Topics:

   1. Fwd: November Events:  PAUL CLEMENTS FOR CONGRESS (Al Lingo)
   2. 10/31/13,	Spong: Part V Matthew: Isolating This Gospel from
      All the Others (Ellie Stock)

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 07:15:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Al Lingo <clingojr at aol.com>
To: oe at lists.wedgeblade.net
Cc: tnsmitty80249 at yahoo.com, michael at storywarrior.net,
	atlingo at yahoo.com,	jhpappano at gmail.com
Subject: [Oe List ...] Fwd: November Events:  PAUL CLEMENTS FOR
	CONGRESS
Message-ID: <8D0A441A78C22EB-15EC-1513C at webmail-d270.sysops.aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

 Dear Friends,

Our colleague, Michael Shaw, has alerted us to another of the order's 2nd 
generation significant contributions to our society beyond their early family 
experiences in the Order Ecumenical.

In the 2014 US congressional election Dr. Paul Clements, political science 
professor at Western Michigan University, is a democratic party candidate 
forming a campaign to unseat a longtime republican incumbent in the US House of 
Representatives from Michigan. 

His is a courageous campaign worthy of my financial support, and I trust of 
yours also.  You may follow his intentions at:  http://clementsforcongress.com/.

 Paul has sent his November 2013 calendar of events in Michigan's 6th District 
from the above site which I have included below.  Some of us may remember summer 
farm work in Berrien County and St. Joseph's Michigan.

Paul welcomes participation in his investment in changing the balance of power 
in the US Congress. 

Al Lingo
clingojr at aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Shaw <d.michael.shaw at comcast.net>
To: Dialogue ICA <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Mon, Oct 28, 2013 12:46 am
Subject: [Dialogue] Paul Clements

The following is an excerpt from an email from mutual friends with Molly 
Clements. It seemed like news worth sharing. 
------------------------------

This evening we called Molly Clements in Kalamazoo to confirm arrangements for 
seeing her and other members of the Clements family. 

In our telephone conversation this evening with Molly, she told us that son, 
Paul, is running for Congress, and is running against the long-term (26 years!) 
Tea Party conservative congressman, Fred Upton.  

I'm very pleased to forward his campaign web address: http://clementsforcongress.com/

We say: Go Paul!!!

Al Lingo
clingojr at aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Clements <Clements4Congress at gmail.com>
To: clingojr <clingojr at aol.com>
Sent: Mon, Oct 28, 2013 10:34 pm
Subject: November Events

Dear Friends,          

On Saturday November 9th I will tour the Sixth District to meet people and to 
formally launch the next phase of the campaign which includes getting my name on 
the ballot for next year.
I hope you will make it to one of the stops.  Confirmation of the places and 
times will be on the website ClementsforCongress.com and also on Facebook.  
Tentative details are as follows:  Niles, 9:30 a.m., Cassopolis (CCDP 
Headquarters) 10:30 a.m., Three Rivers 11:15 a.m., Kalamazoo 12 noon, Allegan 
1:30 p.m., Saugatuck 2:30 p.m., South Haven 3:30 p.m., Benton Harbor 4:30 p.m., 
Union Pier 5:30 p.m.
I hope you will be able to come out on Saturday and show your support.
Also in November I look forward to attending the Berrien County Democratic 
Party?s special event, A Conversation with David Axelrod, at the Heritage 
Center, St. Joseph, on November 16 at 7 p.m. I hope you can join me.

I look forward to many more occasions to meet people throughout the district in 
the coming months. 
As always, thanks for the incredible support.
Sincerely,

 Paul Clements
(Campaign contributions can be made at: ClementsforCongress.com, or written to: 
?Committee to Elect Paul Clements? and sent to 2517 Broadway Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 
49008.)

Paid for by Committee to Elect Paul Clements

Clements for Congress
2517 Broadway Avenue
Kalamazoo, MI 49008

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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 10:22:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ellie Stock <elliestock at aol.com>
To: dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net, oe at lists.wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Oe List ...] 10/31/13,	Spong: Part V Matthew: Isolating This
	Gospel from All the Others
Message-ID: <8D0A45BC14B6F1C-14FC-228F at webmail-m292.sysops.aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       
CALENDAR

	Part V Matthew: Isolating This Gospel from All the Others
	Having now introduced you to a different way of reading the gospel of Matthew, 
and puncturing for you, I hope forever, the assumption that this book along with 
all the other gospels was ever intended to be either history or biography, I 
want in this column to double back and focus on the gospel of Matthew as a 
whole. My purpose now is to isolate this gospel from all of the others so that 
we might see it in its pristine uniqueness. What does Matthew?s gospel 
contribute to the developing Christian story? Where in this gospel has the 
author introduced new ideas, new stories or new concepts that have never before 
been heard in Christian circles? Most people, I fear, know the Christian story 
only as one grand, homogenized blend and they have no idea what parts of the 
Jesus tradition are the gifts of the various gospel writers. Today I seek to 
separate Matthew from everything else in the Christian tradition and force it to 
stand alone.
	First, the date of this work needs to be established. Most scholars tend to 
date this gospel in the middle years of the ninth decade, or in the 82-86 CE 
year range. It is all but universally agreed that the author of Matthew was 
familiar with the gospel of Mark. He clearly used Mark and quoted from it 
directly although expanding it considerably. Most scholars date Luke well after 
Matthew, the consensus being perhaps a decade later, but with a minority making 
the radical suggestion that Luke might be as late as 140 CE. The intensely 
Jewish character of Matthew?s gospel is also generally acknowledged. It appears 
to be the most traditionally Jewish of all the gospels. Matthew?s portrayal of 
Jesus in passionate debate with the Pharisees also tends to support a date in 
the middle years of the ninth decade when Pharisaic power was dominant in the 
land of the Jews. A coterie of biblical scholars believe quite firmly that the 
author of this gospel was in fact a Jewish scribe, who ha
 d become a follower of Jesus and who served as the head of a congregation of 
Jewish Christians somewhere in one of the more urban centers of Syria, perhaps 
around Antioch. There is even some agreement among scholars that the author of 
this gospel has placed a self-revealing, autobiographical note into his text in 
which he identifies himself as a scribe: ?Therefore, every scribe, who has been 
trained for the Kingdom of Heaven, is like a householder who brings out of his 
treasure what is new and what is old? (Matt, 13:52). Certainly this gospel 
reveals a passion for things Jewish and an openness to dramatically new 
Christian understandings.
	I will begin this phase of Matthean study simply by listing in bullet-point 
form the things about this gospel that are unique to this gospel.

		Matthew is the first gospel writer to trace the ancestral line that produced 
Jesus of Nazareth. He opens his account with seventeen rather boring verses of 
?who begat whoms.? We will return to these verses later in this series for they 
contain some powerful interpretive clues, but for now we simply note that it was 
important for Matthew and for his community to ground Jesus in the DNA of 
Judaism. Jesus is portrayed as the son of Abraham, the father of the Hebrew 
nation, who left his home in Ur of the Chaldees to form a new people in the 
wilderness. Abraham was said to have made a covenant with the God who called him 
to this new place. Jesus in this genealogy is also designated the son of David, 
a fact the served to establish his messianic credentials, for a major piece of 
Jewish messianic thinking was that the promised deliverer had to restore the 
throne of David. Jesus was also said to have been descended from survivors of 
the Babylonian Exile. Matthew thus rooted Jesus in
  the crucial events of Jewish history.

		Matthew is the first New Testament writer to introduce the story of the Virgin 
Birth. The idea that Jesus had a miraculous birth had never before been 
mentioned. Since this gospel was not written until the 9th decade of the 
Christian era we are forced to acknowledge that the idea of a Virgin Birth for 
Jesus is a very late developing tradition and thus not part of original 
Christianity. Paul, who wrote between 51-64 CE, had clearly never heard of this 
miraculous birth tradition. He refers to Jesus only as one who was ?born of a 
woman? like every other person, and ?born under the law? like every other Jew. 
Mark, the first gospel to be written (ca.72 CE), also appears to know nothing 
about a miraculous birth tradition. Mark even portrays the mother of the adult 
Jesus as thinking that he was mentally disturbed (Mark 3:31-35). That is hardly 
the stance of one who was told that she would be the mother of the Son of God. 
So, embrace the fact that Matthew is the gospel writer who i
 ntroduces the Virgin Birth tradition into Christianity. Please note the fact 
that only in Matthew do we find stories about a star in the east, the journey of 
the magi, the slaughter of the innocent children by Herod, the flight of the 
infant Jesus into Egypt and the subsequent settlement of the holy family in the 
Galilean village of Nazareth.

		Matthew is the first Christian writer to introduce Joseph as the earthly 
father of Jesus. This Joseph was also destined to disappear from the Jesus story 
almost immediately after he plays his role in the birth narrative.

		Matthew alone suggests that Jesus preached ?The Sermon on the Mount.?

		Matthew introduces a number of parables into his narrative that no one else in 
the developing Christian tradition seems ever to have heard or known. Among them 
are the parable of the weeds (13:24-20), the parable of the hidden treasure and 
the parable of the pearl of great price (13:44-46), the parable of the net 
(13:47-50), the parable of the householder (13:51-52), the parable of the 
unmerciful servant (18:23-25), the parable of the laborers in the vineyard 
(20:1-16) and, probably the best known of all the Matthew parables, the parable 
of the judgment in which the sheep and the goats are separated (25:31-46).

		Matthew alone adds to the biography of Judas Iscariot the narrative of his 
receiving thirty pieces of silver for his act of betrayal, the narrative of 
Judas repenting and trying to return the money and the narrative of his act of 
committing suicide by hanging.

		Matthew alone asserts that guards were placed around the tomb of Jesus to 
prevent the disciples from stealing his body and then using that story to fuel 
resurrection fantasies. One of those fantasies was that the descending angel 
struck the guards causing them to sink into a state of unconsciousness while the 
angel removed the stone from the entrance to the tomb.

		Matthew was the first New Testament writer to narrate the details of the risen 
Christ appearing to anyone. Please note that this means that appearance stories 
of the resurrected Jesus do not enter the Christian tradition until the ninth 
decade. In Matthew?s first narrated resurrection story, Matthew has the risen 
Christ appear to the women at the tomb at dawn on the first Easter morning. That 
is of special interest since Mark, who wrote earlier than Matthew, and Luke, who 
wrote later, both say that the women did not see Jesus at the tomb on Easter 
morning.

		Matthew is the first gospel writer to describe the actual appearance of the 
risen Jesus to the disciples. Matthew tells us that this appearance took place 
in Galilee on a mountain top, not in Jerusalem at the tomb, and that Jesus 
appeared to them from out of the sky already glorified. He was not a 
resuscitated body appearing out of a grave. Since the story of Jesus? ascension 
does not enter the tradition until Luke, a decade or so later, this scene argues 
strongly that the earliest conception of resurrection was not that of a 
physical, resuscitated body rising from the grave back into the life of this 
world, but rather of one who had somehow been transformed into the eternal life 
of God from which he could be manifested in some visionary way to certain chosen 
witnesses. That puts the resurrection of Jesus into the Old Testament category 
that was believed to have included Enoch, Moses and Elijah.

		Matthew is the first gospel to quote the resurrected Jesus as speaking. Before 
Matthew he had said nothing to anyone. The words Matthew quoted him as saying 
were what we now call ?the Great Commission.? That commission had two parts, a 
command and a promise. The command was to go into all the world, make disciples 
of all nations, baptize and teach them to observe ?all that I have commanded 
you.? The promise was that they would never be alone, for the risen Lord was 
quoted as saying: ?Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.? 
Matthew has no concept of the Holy Spirit coming after Jesus has departed, no 
sense of a ?comforter,? who would replace him as appears in the later gospels of 
Luke and John. The closest thing to Pentecost that Matthew offers is this 
promise of the eternal presence of the living Christ. Matthew opened his gospel 
with an angel stating that Jesus would be called ?Emmanuel,? meaning ?God with 
you.? The circle is completed in Matthew when Jesu
 s makes this claim for himself: I am Emmanuel, the eternal presence of God, who 
will be ?with you always to the end of the age.? The Christ presence is thus 
Matthew?s version of the Holy Spirit.

	Those are some of the distinguishing marks of the gospel we call Matthew. 
Embrace its uniqueness and listen to its special contributions. We will examine 
them all in more detail as this series of columns unfolds.
	For now, grasp first the Jewishness of this gospel and then grasp the fact that 
at the beginning of his Jesus story Matthew shows Gentiles in the persons of the 
Wise Men, compelled to come and worship this Jewish Jesus and at the end of his 
gospel Matthew portrays the risen Jesus commanding his followers to go to the 
Gentiles to make disciples of all nations. It is inside that interpretive 
envelope of the Gentiles coming to Jesus and then the disciples being sent to 
the Gentiles that Matthew?s story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Ken McRae from Toronto, Canada, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
Thank you for your insightful scholarship. My question has to do with free will. 
If we believe we have free will this helps explain the rampant, human-induced 
evil in the world. On the other hand, the Lord's Prayer, wherein we ask that 
"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" must have been uttered millions 
of times to no apparent avail. Those who believe in a benevolent God who answers 
prayers must be stymied and dismayed that these millions of prayers go 
unanswered in the face of evil or - if they are answered - that God?s will 
included mayhem. My take is that there is not a God that answers these prayers 
and that we are on our own - or God?s will is to endorse our free will to carry 
on as usual. Your comments on free will, the will of God and, in this context, 
evil itself would be greatly appreciated.
Answer:
Dear Ken,

The debate between free will and determinism will not be solved in this question 
and reply format. The issues are far too deep, far too complex and our 
knowledge?s far too limited. Just the insights from the field of psychology 
alone help us to understand how much we are motivated by the realm of the 
unconscious.

At the same time to treat God as an external power ready to be supplicated to do 
for us what we cannot do for ourselves is a product of the childhood of our 
humanity that we are outgrowing more with each passing generation. People 
interpret this as the death of God. I see it as the death of our human 
projection and believe that this death will actually open us to a new birth into 
a new dimension of spirituality.

I see nothing wrong with giving voice to our yearning that God?s will might be 
done ?on earth as it is in heaven.? The problem with most of us is that we 
identify God?s will with our desires. They are not the same.

To say that there is not a God who answers prayers is not to say that there is 
no God. It is to say that the popular image of God is woefully inadequate. 
People often in the immaturity of their childish theism confuse God with Santa 
Claus. They are not the same!

John Shelby Spong

	Announcements

	We hope you are enjoying the graceful transition into Fall.

	Perhaps, this Fall Equinox Ritual will inspire you and can be used in your 
family or community...

	Excerpt...

	Gratitude is the counter to greed.  If we neglect to say thanks for what we 
have, we feel eternally dissatisfied, and need more and more.  When we are 
thankful for all we have been given, then we need very little in order to feel 
surrounded by abundance.

	READ ON...

.

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