Messages

1

Your Turn / Re: Roe v. Wade overturned?

« on: May 08, 2022, 04:33:25 PM »

Yes, I heard what the last two supreme court nominees said.  Whether I liked them or not is irrelevant and I completely understand that nominees by in large do not want to make any comment on anything that might come before them (although might not almost anything come before them?).  When I heard their answers I heard a response to a Mom to kid question:  "Did you clean your room?"  Response:  "Mom, you know I love you.  Mom, you know I've followed many of the assignments you give me.  Mom, I know my bedroom is an unsightly mess."  Now, do you for a moment believe that the kid is giving an honest and true response to the parental inquiry?  As Dr. Harvey Stegemoeller once said of the church, could be said of other things:  It is not whether politics has entered the church, but whether the church can baptize its politics. 

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Your Turn / Re: Roe v. Wade overturned?

« on: May 08, 2022, 04:20:39 PM »

I am against abortions.
I do wonder how changing laws will change hearts and minds that do not believe there is anything wrong with abortions and how that will play out in needs that will have to be met apart from putting women, mostly women, in prison.
The question of what the Judicial candidates said and what they did not say...  strange thing, I thought of the oath some take that includes the phrase "without purpose of evasion" and how that applies to the truth, in wholeness and nothing but-ness. 

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Your Turn / Re: Roe v. Wade overturned?

« on: May 05, 2022, 05:10:28 PM »

goading is a sin we practice better than many graces. 
I do confess the we is also an I
but there is goading to good also, isn't there, not only enticing others to predictable precipices ?

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Your Turn / Re: Roe v. Wade overturned?

« on: May 05, 2022, 04:13:28 PM »

I will go against what I said in the quote you must have taken the time to search for and quote in which I spoke a reality, not unloving and unkind (I do not think) which was and will be necessary to reinstitute after this response... so that I will not be unkind or unloving in my responses to you.  The silence is meant to give my pride or self-satisfaction, as best I can manage, what R.S. Thomas called, a hernia.  Everyone must look for their own curvatus in se.  I have been writing a sermon on the Good Shepherd for this Sunday (I don't preach much anymore).  And opening this Forum I find under-shepherds or sheep dogs (as someone in a Doberstein quote called us) at each other's throats with our crooks and staves instead of using them to indicate any still waters or to truly take on wolves. 

Maybe it is just me... but I feel in the large that there has been a great aborting of kindness and love in this Forum.  I do not think it is the way to win anyone to any side or to true consideration of issues, view points or values.

Yes, there's a bit of that going around. 

Sorry, Donald, I do not respond to you, I find it unhelpful.

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Your Turn / Re: Roe v. Wade overturned?

« on: May 05, 2022, 02:02:03 PM »

Maybe it is just me... but I feel in the large that there has been a great aborting of kindness and love in this Forum.  I do not think it is the way to win anyone to any side or to true consideration of issues, view points or values. 

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Your Turn / Re: Political/cultural/religious division

« on: April 26, 2022, 07:34:32 PM »

Oh come on now... being anti-war and against the war in Viet Nam was a position held by many of us who never had a ounce of Communism in our blood!  I agree with Charles, it is hogwash to say so.  Born in 42 some of us lived through those years as a young adults not as people looking back on them in history books.  If I had not answered a call and left for Milwaukee I would have come close to the Kent State confrontation since I was accepted there prior to altering my course. What you are saying is at best controversial and IMO wrong. 

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Your Turn / Re: American Lutherans--Where Are We?

« on: April 21, 2022, 03:56:32 PM »

tho prayer does have its irony, for while I also am not wild about too many intercessions that isolate manatees... we do pray "come Lord Jesus and be our guest and let these gifts, among which is a tuna fish sandwich, to us be blessed."  Of course, that also does only save the tuna from its metal can prison into the freedom of my nutritional needs...   ah, yes, gifts... not necessarily gills or non-human lungs... 

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Your Turn / Re: American Lutherans--Where Are We?

« on: April 15, 2022, 06:12:32 PM »

George, you said, "we opened a floodgate of anything goes wording in liturgy risking a loss of the Ordo along with uncritical use of scripture perhaps jettisoning that for our own words."

I don't think that was really what happened in the first decade or so after 1970s.  I think the uncritical and anything goes stuff is a more recent thing.  At first there was a deep respect for the LBW's basic care in language and restoration of lost practice.   

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Your Turn / Re: American Lutherans--Where Are We?

« on: April 15, 2022, 02:13:56 PM »

I recall when I took my GRE tests at the end of the Senior College years and I ended up off the charts in Les Belles Lettres or some such category and I had to ask what was that all about, since I did so poorly not only in the Math and Science sections (expected) and also (not so expected) did only OKish in Literature.  Well, the low score in Lit was because while I had read a smattering of big, usual Russian novels, there were questions on stuff I had not read and who reads the literature of China and Japan and India... my concentration (we didn't have majors) was 19 Century English Lit with some courses in Contemporary Drama and 17 Century English Lit and Poetry.  Hey, a bit of SF and the like gets covered, along with art and crazy info like you might find on Trivia cards is Les Belle stuff.  We all tend to specialize in what we like and usually avoid that which bores us.  I often wonder how people will get doctorates in American novels of the late 1990s and 2000's since there are so, so many and most of them not worth much.  Will someone seriously study Paterson or Grisham to the degree that a Twain was studied?  Or even, who will pop up to become an Updike (my favorite and contemporary while in school) when there are so many novelists today.  I try to keep up with contemporary poets and they are well beyond me today and no one reads or publishes verse.  Well, no one meaning few.  And even Tolkien-- if you tried to read all the stuff about him... lots of luck and with his own family writing more in his genre and  extending his stories... 

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Your Turn / Re: Pronouns

« on: April 15, 2022, 12:40:17 PM »

I would dare say that most in these parts would find me to be quite conservative on this issue being discussed... however, to be sensitive:  I have known parents who were presented at birth with a doctor's response that indicated there were reasons for calling the child a boy and others for calling the child a girl and the parents now had some decisions to make that would make most of our theological arguments and defenses seem glib, hasty or weighted to break.  Being a pastor in such times calls for, thank God, more God help than my seminary training or parish experience.  Just saying.  In some things, none of us have anything but ideas. 

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Your Turn / Re: Will the ELCA ever officially discipline and rebuke this congregation?

« on: March 31, 2022, 06:34:31 PM »

work on healing not hurting...  if a surgical scalpel is needed then let it not be a bayonet or butcher's chopper...  do not these issues cry out as needs that often the church has neglected (I include myself as often a neglector), I think so...  I do not think the California church in question is Lutheran and should not be in the Lutheran church and I think if one listened to both Brian and Charles one would hear they are not happy with what it stands for and and teaches... but in these parts we want to them to do something about it (as if they could, the two of them)...  Sometimes it seems IMO that we are less against Her-Church and more against Charles and Brian.  Yes, I used to take, at least Lent, away from this forum because it is a pretty hurtful place. It once, as others have reminded us, was a far more amicable place where disagreements were aired and worked through even without stunning solutions.   

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Your Turn / Re: Will the ELCA ever officially discipline and rebuke this congregation?

« on: March 31, 2022, 05:37:03 PM »

false teachings, heresies and bad ecclesial practices are often looked at as wounds on the church...  as if perpetrated somehow from without

do they not also come from within as growths from other wounds in the church, often self inflicted?

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Your Turn / Re: Will the ELCA ever officially discipline and rebuke this congregation?

« on: March 31, 2022, 03:50:03 PM »

"Much of the discussion that happens here is really for the benefit of lurkers."

A. Is that so?
B. Is that a good so?
C. So why call it then a discussion?

And so, while we know very few folks here change their minds over anything discussed, why act/talk/post like we are attempting to correct/change/whatever, another person... this is one big commercial for whichever side is speaking?

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Your Turn / Re: Will the ELCA ever officially discipline and rebuke this congregation?

« on: March 31, 2022, 11:21:29 AM »

I now officially declare all of you to be winners and Charles and Brian to be losers!

Ah, did any of you help to win Charles and Brian any strengthening of true faith and loss of any sin in forgiveness?

Oh, but it is all  just a theological discussion....  Ah, wasn't that what was attributed to them as missing the reality?

But then, never mind, it is the season of veiled things of deep importance.   

Just an observance.
 

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Your Turn / Re: God, Time, and Free Will

« on: March 26, 2022, 08:32:56 PM »

In the Fall 2021 Forum mag there was a good article by a lay theologian, Larry Rinehart, titled "Providence and Predestination-- A Primer" which dealt with Luther's view of Free Will enhanced and tightened by Gerhard.  Well, worth the read.  The contrast has much that was new to me since I know more of Luther and little of Gerhard.  Reactions by some reader?