Direct message from Pastor Bess…

Hi Friends!

When I wrote this piece, my editor/wife commented “this is a bit esoteric.”  When something is esoteric, it is understood by the few rather than the many.  I hope this is not the case because I believe it is an important subject.  I hope it will be read carefully.  I hope it creates discussion and serious thought.  America is more Babylonian than Christian.

Kind regards to all.

Howard

Here is his newsletter article for today…

IS CHAOS A FRIEND OR A FOE? By Howard Bess

Election season is upon us. On a local level we are electing mayors and members of city councils. On a state level we are electing a U.S. Senator, the Alaska member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a governor, and members of the Alaska State Senate and House of Representatives. A variety of bond issues appear on the ballot. The Tea Party has shown up in strength. There are a record number of road signs, almost all of which are certifiably placed illegally.Vying rhetoric completes a snapshot of chaos.

Chaos, and what to do with it, is one of the oldest known problems of human kind. In ancient Babylonian mythology the most powerful Babylonian God was named Marduk. Marduk was a warrior God. The obsession of Marduk was to defeat Tiamat, a god of chaos. They fought an annual war. Marduk always won, however not with finality. Tiamat revived each year and was ready for the next round.  The battle lasted 14 days, but the result was always the same. Marduk just could not put Tiamat away.

Western civilization has never been able to escape the dynamic of the ancient Babylonian myth. Every political candidate wants to fight on my behalf whether I am interested in a fight or not. They are eager to fight against the forces of evil.  They promise to bring order out of the chaos. There is always some evil that must be confronted every 2, 4 or 6 years.

A small remnant of defeated Israelites lived in Babylon for about 70 years. They did not buy the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat. In response to the Babylonian myth, the band of Israelites wrote their own myth. Their response survived and is now found in Genesis 1:1. No passage from the Bible has been more poorly understood.

At the time of the Babylonian empire and the exile of a group of Israelites in Babylon (6th century B.C.E), the issue of beginning and ending was not yet a subject of speculation or interest with either Babylonians or Israelites. Both saw the earth as a given and there is no evidence that thinkers of that era were concerned about how it all began. Their obsession was with the phenomenon of chaos and what to do about it. The Babylonian myth proposed one understanding. The Israelites had a differing opinion.

In the Israelite myth, their God found chaos and confronted chaos with the doing of good. Everything that the Israelite God Elohim touched was turned into good. God established day and night, land and sea, lush growth, and a full range of animal life. His final act was the forming of a human being. All of the language of the story is the language of forming and shaping. Everything that the Israelite God formed was declared good.

Any attempt to insert the Genesis 1 creation myth into a scientific discussion is a travesty. Scientists who criticize the Bible creation story, are as ignorant of Bible mythology as Fundamentalist Christians are ignorant of science and its purposes.

The modern debate that is needed is not about how and when the world (and the universe) began. The debate that is needed is how to address destructive chaos. The arguments have not changed from then to now. The Babylonians and their heirs insist that chaos must be fought in an all out battle that never ends. The Israelite slaves and their heirs insist that the answer is the doing of good in the midst of the chaos.

There is a bit of the Babylonian in all of us. When confronted with the chaos of life, we want to fight to bring order. The Babylonian myth is correct. If we choose to fight chaos, there are times when it appears that a victory has been won; but Tiamat faithfully appears each year ready for another fight.

In this discussion where does Rabbi Jesus from Nazareth fit in? I see him as choosing to do the good in the chaos of life. His suggestion was that we make friends of our enemies. Can chaos become our friend? The discussion of chaos has been around for a long time. Some thinkers believe that chaos is needed to bring truly interesting life to us human beings. The Jesus who walks by my side and looks over my shoulder, sees the possibilities in the world’s chaos and urges me to do the good.

Three centuries ago Newtonian mechanics was triumphant in some intellectual circles. In the process God was reduced to a great clockmaker who put things together and then stepped back as Newton’s laws ran everything in a predictable fashion. We now recognize too many variables, unpredictables, and disorderly behaviors to leave Newton unchallenged. Serious discussion of chaos is back in vogue. One of the rules of chaos is that chaos increases the possibilities. It certainly does.

When I look at the world I see profound possibilities. Even in the seeming chaos of the present election cycle, I can envision life that is rich and abundant. From my vantage point, there is no reason to fear chaos. The Christian life is about the challenge of doing the good.

THE END

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska.

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Thank you, Pastor!

The Christian life is about the challenge of doing good”…can that be restated too often? I say absolutely not. If only all Christians truly understood this, our world – and our country – would be an entirely different place.

I witnessed a little of the opposite Christian behavior today. I had company from Juneau overnight and we went out to breakfast this morning before they headed off on their trip south. As we sat in the small cafe, a half a dozen people came in who had just completed attending the Dominionist Island Chapel services nearby. The same Dominionists I wrote about several months ago who were recruited to this quiet little island to split the nondenominational congregational church, and siphon off the extremists into a new bible-based cult entity. Here is the saying that comes to mind…

“It’s not your Christ that I do not like, it is your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ!” ~ Ghandi

Let me explain. After posting my first article outing just who these zealots are and what their direct connections are to Dominionist funding and biblical worldviews, I was hit with a batch of hate mail from people who were too cowardly to identify themselves, but felt very justified in lashing out at me for daring to speak truth about this sect. This is a small community, and one in which it is virtually impossible to do anything unnoticed. So it takes no effort at all for me to connect the dots as to who my amateur “haters” are, after all I deal with pro-level haters attacking me for my work nationally and for my position at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Yet there is a common thread…they all consider themselves “Christian” and tell me they are praying for me…then quote Old Testament bible verses before they sign off with a “God bless you”.

These folks walked in to the cafe and made concerted effort to avoid eye contact, even after I smiled and addressed one of them directly, by name. Not only was my greeting not returned, he stood there staring at me. I filled in my friends from Juneau that were with me, who I have known many years, as to what the juvenile behavior was about. One of them had even worked in the Palin Administration for a short period of time before opting to retire because she had too much integrity to continue. So this led into a discussion about how blind people are. These sheep that have bought the sales branding that to be a Christian, you must also be a republican. That the two are now synonymous. And as of right now, that has become the reality.

That to expose what a fraud their Queen is becomes an attack. To reveal the extremism of their scripture-twisted views somehow warrants hateful response and total unChrist-like behavior. It is really frightening isn’t it? They dance to the tempo set by millionaires and billionaires who profit from oppressing them, as well as the rest of us. They get their news from a media channel that is owned by foreign investors, one of who is a Prince and a Wahabist Islamic extremist who lives in Saudi Arabia and practices the very evil that these patriotic Dominionists scream they are so afraid of. In fact it was just revealed that in addition to being a part owner in the only source these people trust for their “news”, this Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, is also an investor in the very Park 51 project that they were bursting veins over.

The fact that so many Americans have become crippled through their lack of critical thinking skill; so devoid of understanding that Jesus preached love, peace, acceptance and tolerance – that a group who piously hold themselves to be superior as god-fearing, conservative, patriotic Palin lovers – have COMPLETELY missed the message. And the truth is in front of them the entire time. I will sign off by repeating it one more time…

“The Christian life is about the challenge of doing good”…indeed, Pastor!