Post 3: "Dad, Our Daily Bread"—The Shock of Intimacy 🙏

 

All in the family 

“When you pray, say: Father, may your name be revered as holy. May your kingdom come.”
— Luke 11:2, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE)

Sources: Bible Gateway – Luke 11:2 NRSVUE

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The Propaganda: Prayer is formal, sacred, and reserved.

There is a little bit of modern-day folklore, always look to see what the person does not what the person says. This folklore easily transfers to most Christian denominations. 

Most churches, but certainly not all churches, are built with an actual physical separation between the congregation and the pastor. Usually, it's a small fence, for lack of a better term.

With this fence many denominations declare loudly and proudly that the people need the priesthood. Only those people that are declared worthy are allowed to go beyond the fence. Presbyterians took this very seriously.

 They would hand out tokens to the people that the elders of the church thought were worthy of taking communion. Without the token you could not go through the gate that separated the priesthood from the congregation and participate in the sacraments of the church.  

It must be noted that the Presbyterians were not a radical cult. They honestly believed they were following the word of God. But what they were aligning with was not so much the word of God as the movement from a Jewish grassroots movement to a Greco Roman institutional religious format.   

 A little history.  

Paul comes onto the scene, and the emphasis begins to shift from bringing fellow Jews into the movement, to bringing in infidels. 

With Paul the beginning of the Greco Roman institutional religion that came to be known as Christianity, began to use the power structure of the Roman government. To accomplish this the clerics ~ the priests ~ had to establish control.

Part of this control was when the words of Jesus were brought together, they did not use the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, but the Greek that the powers that be spoke. 

It was male; it was hierarchical; it was formal. And there was no place in it for calling God Papa or Dad. The church was on the path to becoming a powerful Greco Roman institution.

And this institution was going to be dominated by men, hierarchical, and in control of the congregation.

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The Truth: Jesus taught his followers to call God Father (Abba).

Jesus spoke Aramaic. The early Jesus movement was a grass root movement in Judaism that was focused on returning Judaism to a more honest as they believed it, relationship to Abba, Dad, Papa. God.

Jesus healed by touching. He proclaimed everyone was worthy of being recognized by Abba when he ate with sinners, when he allowed a prostitute to wash his feet with her tears and her hair. When he humbly kneeled down before his followers and washed his disciple's feet.

There was nothing between the people and their God. Their teacher, their rabbi, their prophet was the one who taught that God was standing beside them and with them and loved them just as they were. No need for priests. No need for fancy churches. All that was needed was to try to live in justice, to offer mercy when needed, and to walk humbly with their God and the rest of the people that they met.

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The Takeaway.

In both the life of Jesus and in the teaching of Jesus if you look honestly, you will find an incredibly loving and intimate relationship between Jesus and his Abba, Jesus and the people he met, and when the people understood an incredible, loving, and intimate relationship was created between them one-on-one and Abba.

I realize that what I have just written will strike some, many, perhaps most, as just left wing radical wokeism. So, I challenge you the reader to highlight the sections you find offensive and research them in the world's largest library. It's all at your fingertips. Just highlight, right click and hit search.

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Brian

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