Author Archives: Gordon C. Stewart

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About Gordon C. Stewart

I've always liked quiet. And, like most people, I've experienced the world's madness. "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Jan. 2017) distills 47 years of experiencing stillness and madness as a campus minister and Presbyterian pastor (IL, WI, NY, OH, and MN), poverty criminal law firm executive director, and social commentator. Our cat Lady Barclay reminds me to calm down and be much more still than I would be without her.

Daily Riches: Today’s Need For an Alternative History (Richard Rohr)

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Richard Rohr is a favorite of Views from the Edge. We came upon this post on “Richer by Far” after its host, commented on “The Blogger’s Dilemma: Words and Silence.”

Bill Britton's avatarRicher By Far

“The political terms right and left came from the Estates General in France. It’s interesting that now we use them as our basic political categories. On the left sat the ordinary people, and on the right sat the nobility and the clergy! (What were the clergy doing over there?!) I think you see the pattern. The right normally protects the community and the status quo. The left predictably looks for change and reform, and there is a certain need for both or we have chaos. In history you will invariably have these two movements in some form, because we didn’t have the phenomenon of the middle class until very recently. The vast majority of people in all of history have been poor, as in Jesus’ time, and would have read history as a need for change. The people who wrote the books and controlled the social institutions, however, have almost…

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A Blogger’s Dilemma – Words and Silence

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Although no two days are the same, they divide themselves between up and down, loquacious and dumb, wordy and wordless.

Some days the words greet me in the morning. They pour out through my fingertips before I know what they’ll say. Other mornings the words play dead or hide-and-seek.

The words don’t come when the news is bad…when the world itself is too wordy, when the sacredness of words is profaned by jabber and chatter and pretentious prognostications about … just about everything. Some of those days and weeks I know enough to keep silent. On others I try to write and publish something here on Views from the Edge despite the inner voice that whispers “Shhhh! Not now. Maybe later the words will come. Shhhh!”

Although no two days are ever the same, they group themselves between “Not now; not yet!” and “Good morning! Today’s the day!”

Whether the words know when to be written is another thing altogether. Neither they nor the keyboard knows, and so some days I write in hopes they won’t profane the sacredness of words and silence.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 7, 2015

 

Reunion after 50 Years

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Some will come we never knew
Others we knew well have died
Some faces have never changed
Eyes that smile or smiles that kiss

Age has bent and broken some
Motorcycles carry some
Others have three legs or six
Hair is gone or colored now

Eyes see less and ears have hair
Some wear aids and others should
Minds remember hearts recall
Or we cannot think at all

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 7, 2015

Good News! Goodbye fossil fuels

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Tesla Energy’s announcement of a global solar solution to carbon pollution is a potential game changer. Imagine the world where carbon pollution is nipped in the bud. Tesla Energy has agreed to share its technology in the interest of the planet itself. What a breath of fresh air.

Click Tesla’s Elon Musk just changed the world to hear the story.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 3, 2015

Verse – Grandma’s Garden

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To make grape jelly, she began
three years before by planting vines
along the back fence in her yard.

And now she lets her young grandson
pick purple clumps with his small hands.
With grandma he is never bored,

he helps her cook, and even clean.
She marks the doorway when he stands
to check his growth, just like the plants.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 3, 2015.

Don and Jesus in the Hospital

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Word came this morning that a dear friend, Don, was rushed to the emergency room yesterday with internal bleeding. His hemoglobin count had dropped to a woefully low 5.5. Don is one of six classmates who gather each year for renewal of friendship, reflection, good food, a game of softball, and morning prayers.

Don’s hospitalization drew me back to an as yet unpublished follow up to the “Jesus in the Hospital” post from several weeks back on the weird dream of Jesus as a patient in the hospital.

Some readers stop reading when they see the name Jesus. Others like the name Jesus and are curious to read the story. Yet another group is distraught or confused by the thought of Jesus as a patient in the hospital. He might be the doctor or the healer, but not the patient.

This brief post is written for the latter group of readers.

Biblical scholars and theologians interpret the church’s sacred writings (Holy Scripture) according to the different genres of literature. They also differentiate between Jesus of history (Jesus of Nazareth), and the Jesus of faith (the crucified-risen Christ of believers). In Christian scripture the two are welded together. The Jesus story is told by four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A gospel is by its very nature a witness to faith, written by faith to elicit faith in the reader, not an objective eye-witness account of events in the life of Jesus as a video camera might have given us. The only access we have to Jesus of Nazareth is through the eyes of faith.

The theological tradition of the church has always insisted on the full humanity of Jesus. His humanity was only half the Chaledonian Formula (fully divine, fully man), but Jesus’ humanity is the starting place for any claim to the Formula’s other half: the divinity of Jesus Christ. Time after time there have arisen fanciful representations of Jesus. In some of these, the historical Jesus is, for all intents, obliterated.  He wears flesh and blood the way an actor playing a part assumes a costume to draw into audience into the play. In these versions of Christian faith, the bodily Jesus is a disguise for God.

But a Jesus who was never sick a day in his life, a Jesus without bodily functions, pains, and hungers, a Jesus who didn’t feel the hammer slam his thumb at his carpenter’s bench, a Jesus who couldn’t be admitted to the emergency room with 5.5 hemoglobin and the need for transfusions is a not one of us. That Jesus is a figment of imagination.

Why I dreamt of Jesus in the hospital remains a mystery. What I know is that the dream wouldn’t have come without a deep sense of Jesus, the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. The only way I know to love Jesus is to love those who could end up in the hospital or hospice care. They are Jesus. Jesus is us.

One of the six friends who call ourselves the Old Dogs wrote a prayer for Don:

O Great and Merciful God, hold our brother Don in Your strong and loving hands. Lift him. O Jesus, Lord of the universe, as you did so often and so naturally to the sick and infirm in ancient Palestine, bring new health and healing to Don. And Holy Spirit of Power that tombs cannot contain, be with the Dog we all wish we were with right now, with him, with him. Amen.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 2, 2015.

Verse – what we are supposed to hate

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wanting everyone to know
just how great we really are

or denying to ourselves
and to everybody else
that we have the skills and smarts
that could win 10,000 hearts

treating others as beneath
us or even inhuman

being irresponsible
for myself or for the world

worse is not caring at all
being dead before we fall
finally into our graves
death is god’s last enemy

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 2, 2015

 

“Gut Feelings” – of brains and bowels

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Scientific research adds a new dimension to the discussion of the bowels as the seat of the emotions in Property and Compassion – Plato and Luke (VFTE, 4/29/15). Our friend Gary, who frequently comments on Views from the Edge, brought it to our attention with his response to the Property and Compassion post:

I find it interesting that the intestines were considered the seat of emotions [in the Bible]. I read a couple months ago that we now know that the intestines actually are lined with neurons, i.e., brain cells. “Gut feeling” is more than a metaphor….

Click Gut feelings: the emerging biology of gut–brain communication  to read the full article. Or scroll down two-thirds of the way through the article to read get the essence of the gut-brain connection.

The Hebrew location of the emotions was the bowels, also translated “inner parts” – stomach and intestines. The instinctive response to human need is a pit in the bottom of the stomach, a visceral response. One has to be carefully taught not to feel it. As the author of the New Testament epistle asked,

…whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? [I John 3:17 KJV].

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 1, 2015.

Black Beatings – White Policemen

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How do you explain this? Watch and read Steve’s explanation.

Verse – We Serve & Protect

Sadly, some white policemen
serve themselves, their deepest fears,
on the streets American,
by protecting their ideas:
they think they hear their wives say,
I choose a black man today.

(Only this sort of a Freudian analysis, I think, can explain the extreme anger and violence.)

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 1, 2015

Warning: Danger Ahead

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If you’re interested in a homiletic case consistent with Bernie Sanders, check out the Rev. Ed Martin’s sermon at Shepherd of the Hill Church in Chaska, MN. It’s superb.