I’ve Been Happy in 2016. Happy New Year 2017
January 2, 2017 Leave a comment
You make me happy!
©Ann Johnson Kingdom Venturers
Looking at Life in All the Wrong Ways
December 31, 2016 Leave a comment
“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
-Screwtape, a senior demon, writing to his nephew Wormwood, also his apprentice. From C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters”
~~~
Foods for thought?
The package of corn chips found in the health foods aisle noted how not un-good the contents were to eat: “No Artificial Ingredients” “No Artificial Flavors” “No Preservatives” “Certified Gluten Free” “NON GMO Verified”.
The package of drama found on the cable channel noted how not inhuman the program was: “For Mature Audience” “Adult themes” “Adult Language” ….
~~~
“Fantasy covets the gross, the explicit, the no-holds barred display of the unobtainable; and in crisis of the display the unobtainable is vicariously obtained.
Hard-core pornography provides another instance. Indeed, modern society abounds in fantasy objects, since the realistic image, in photograph, cinema and the TV screen, offers surrogate fulfillment to all our forbidden desires, thereby permitting them…The ideal fantasy is perfectly realized, and perfectly unreal – an imaginary object which leaves nothing to the imagination.” – from Fantasy, Imagination and the Salesman, Roger Scruton’s “Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”
~~~
The fantasy objects removing the sacred from our view? A short list:
Movies and cable TV programs showing ‘snuff films’, violence, mutilation, slaughter, wanton sex, promiscuous sex, misogyny, the profane.
Video games engaging you in violence, mutilation, slaughter, wanton sex, promiscuous sex, misogyny, the profane.
Movies which employ special effects to convey a larger than life experience titillation while offering nothing of value for real life.
Social media – each media element readily offered and responded to, and obtained remotely, removing one from true community towards self-isolation
Animation – the shadowland of phantom cels
Marriage as a secular convention to secure benefit from another up to and including the commodification of the partner’s wealth, insurance, emotional dependency and sexual organs.
Socialism as Utopia
The Social Justice Narrative of “Diversity” and it cognates, wrought by the iron fist of “equality”
Homosexuality, the phallic and misogynistic, and its associated bacchanalia (e.g., Gay pride parades)
~~~
Imagination gathers up the hard-won gold of reality, submits it to the refiner’s fire, allows it to be molded and then offers the higher karatage gold as sincere praise to God.
Fantasy gathers up the hard-won gold of reality for smelting and casting into the golden calf of ephemerality, of likeness, of certainty…
~~~
“The contrast here is between the active work of the imagination, which points to a God beyond the sensory world, and the passive force of fantasy, which creates its own god out of sensory desires…”
– from Fantasy, Imagination and the Salesman, Roger Scruton’s “Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”
~~~
The Adoration of the Golden Calf 1633-4, Nicolas Poussin
~~~
One wonders: does the left brain seek certainty and see fantasy as that certainty while the right brain is dismissed as flaccid and unreliable?
De profundis
December 18, 2016 Leave a comment
De profundis
So, she leapt through each night, to each waking dream saying,
“Have mercy on me, O Lord, for the multitude of my sins”
“Have mercy on me, O Lord, for the multitude of my sins”
“Have mercy on me, O Lord, for the multitude of my sins”
In the morning, she headed out the door saying,
“I commit this day to you, O Lord, and the works of my hands”
“I commit this day to you, O Lord, and the works of my hands”
“I commit this day to you, O Lord, and the works of my hands”
She fell asleep saying,
“Thank you, O Lord, for your lovingkindness and tender mercies”
“Thank you, O Lord, for your lovingkindness and tender mercies”
“Thank you, O Lord, for your lovingkindness and tender mercies”
Amen.
©Ann Johnson Kingdom Venturers
~~~~
Psalms 130. De profundis. OUT of the deep have I called unto thee, O LORD; Lord, hear my voice. O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint. If thou, LORD, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it? For there is mercy with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared. I look for the LORD; my soul doth wait for him; in his word is my trust. My soul fleeth unto the Lord before the morning watch; I say, before the morning watch. O Israel, trust in the LORD; for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his sins.
“Now is the ruler of the world cast out” (Henchmen to follow)
November 27, 2016 Leave a comment
Patria o muerte! [Homeland or death] Che Guevara, December 11, 1964, 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.
“Executions?” Guevara told the UN General Assembly in 1964. “We execute! And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary.”
“Guevara was a man whose interest in justice is best summed up in his own words, as quoted by Fontova: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” –The bitter truth about Che Guevara
Che Guevara: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute from revolutionary conviction.”
Fidel Castro: “Legal proof is impossible to obtain against war criminals so we sentence them based on moral conviction.”
“The terrible damage that Castro has done will long outlive him and his regime. Untold billions of capital will be needed to restore Havana; legal problems about ownership and rights of residence will be costly, bitter, and interminable; and the need to balance commercial, social, and aesthetic considerations in the reconstruction of Cuba will require the highest regulatory wisdom. In the meantime, Havana stands as a dreadful warning to the world—if one were any longer needed—against the dangers of monomaniacs who believe themselves to be in possession of a theory that explains everything, including the future.”
-From Theodore Dalrymple’s “Why Havana Had to Die,” 2002.
~~~~~
Remembering Castro’s Crimes by William Doino Jr.
~~~~~
You say you want a revolution…
“So don’t worry away with your ‘What’ll we eat?’ and “What’ll we drink?’ and ‘What’ll we wear?’ Those are all the things the Gentiles fuss about, and your heavenly father knows you need them all. Instead, make your top priority God’s kingdom and his way of life, and all these things will be given to you as well. So don’t worry about tomorrow…” – Jesus as recorded in Matthew’s gospel 6: 31-34
The Earth is the Lord’s – Horicon Marsh, WI ©Ann Johnson Kingdom Venturers
“Yes, the gospels affirm Jesus’s divine identity. Yes, they affirm his death on the cross as the climax of God’s age-old plan of salvation. But the purpose of God coming incognito in and as Jesus and the purpose of this Jesus dying on the cross was – so the gospels are telling us – in order to establish God’s kingdom, his justice, on earth as in heaven.” – from N.T. Wright’s “How God Became King”
~~~~~
In case you forget…
Psalm 97
The Lord is king! Let the earth rejoice;
let the many coastlands (and Horicon Marsh) be glad!
Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;
righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
Fire goes before him,
and consumes his adversaries on every side.
His lightnings light up the world;
the earth sees and trembles.
The mountains melt like wax before the Lord,
before the Lord of all the earth.
The heavens proclaim his righteousness;
and all the peoples behold his glory.
All worshippers of images are put to shame,
those who make their boast in worthless idols;
all gods bow down before him. Zion hears and is glad,
and the towns of Judah rejoice,
because of your judgements, O God.
For you, O Lord, are most high over all the earth;
you are exalted far above all gods.
The Lord loves those who hate evil;
he guards the lives of his faithful;
he rescues them from the hand of the wicked.
Light dawns for the righteous,
and joy for the upright in heart.
Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous,
and give thanks to his holy name!
~~~~~
The Day The Revolution began…
“The modern world has displaced the Christian narrative; it isn’t just that most of our contemporaries profess not to believe in God or Jesus, but that they have in their heads a world narrative in which world history arrived at its redemptive moment in the eighteenth century with the rise of science and technology and banishing of God to a distant realm, to be visited by the pious few like a kind family calling on an elderly relative every Sunday. The western churches have regularly colluded with this absurd diminishment of the Bible and the gospel. But the cross, told as the climax of all four gospels and particularly John’s on which I have focused this evening, leaves us no choice. ‘Now is the judgement of this world; now is the ruler of the world cast out; and if I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself.’ This is what it means that the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.”
-from Prof. N.T. Wright’s “Saving the world, Revealing the Glory: Atonement Then and Now.” Oct. 2016
The early Christian creeds – the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene creed – do not speak of the most important elements of why Christ came to earth. It’s as if the creeds were written for man’s purposes and not for God’s purposes.
The kingdom life of Jesus, between his birth and crucifixion, is missing from the creeds. And, as recorded in the gospels, Jesus came to inaugurate his kingdom on earth as in heaven and not to impart the four spiritual laws and get off earth as soon as possible.
So, then, this is the gospel:
That now at the name of Jesus
every knee within heaven shall bow-
On earth, too, and under the earth;
And every tongue shall confess
That Jesus, Messiah, is Lord,
To the glory of God, the father.
The Lord is King, Let the Earth Rejoice This Thanksgiving!
Feet First
November 13, 2016 Leave a comment
On January 17th, 2017, the world will witness a peaceful transition of power in the United States of America. And though our country is deeply divided by partisan conflicts there will be not be a violent overthrow of the government or a military takeover such as a coup d’etat. There will not be a slaughter of the innocents by those who embody the Satan. At least, that has been my experience.
~~~
Just over 2000 years ago there was another peaceful transition of power and one not brought about by a popular vote of Jews, Greeks or Romans. Instead, the “electoral college” of Father, Son and Holy Spirit decided that a king would be born. The Creator Word would become a flesh tabernacle and dwell among his creation for some thirty years to inaugurate his Kingdom – a kingdom where heaven and earth would be forever co-joined.
Like the workings of dominions and powers throughout history, much of politics today is about gaining power and control over others and then maintaining power and control over others.
But how did the King of the Glory display his power and control?
In this day of the ubiquitous media’s hyperbolic promotion of self-promoting individuals and ego polishing and reality TV narcissism and take-it-to-the-streets identity politics there is One who has transitioned from power and glory… to washing the feet of others.
No one, especially the Jews in Jesus’ time expected a foot washer Messiah. They expected a takeover guy who would abolish Roman rule by force. That was what Judas the revolutionary wanted and thought he “had” in Jesus. But instead, Jesus washed Judas’ feet along with the other disciples. That act was certainly not the macho response expected by angry unsettled Jews like Judas.
Jesus, as a witness of all that his father is and does, revealed to the world God’s “definition” of power and of love and of truth. In a peaceful transition of power, the holy and invisible Creator God became visible in Christ by emptying himself of his glory and power. Jesus submitted himself to the father and to his creation by taking on the form of a servant. This transition is not something anyone on earth expected to happen. Consider this:
Remember what God said to Moses: “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” -Pentateuch, Exodus 3:5
Fast Forward: “Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God. So, he got up from the supper-table, took off his clothes, and wrapped a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a bowl and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel he was wrapped in.” -The Gospel of John 13
~~~
Followers of the Way:
“This is how you should think among yourselves – with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus:
Who, though in God’s form, did not
Regard his equality with God
As something he ought to exploit.
Instead, he emptied himself,
And received the form of a slave,
Being born in the likeness of humans.
And then, having human appearance,
He humbled himself, and became
Obedient to death,
Yes, even the death of the cross.
And so God has greatly exalted him,
And to him in his favor has given
The name which is over all names:
That now at the name of Jesus
Ever knee within heaven shall bow –
On earth, too, and under heaven;
And every tongue confess
That Jesus, Messiah, is Lord,
To the glory of God, the father.”
Ancient church hymn as recorded in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippian church, chapter 2
And May the Holy Temple Be Rebuilt:
Kingdom Continuum
September 25, 2016 Leave a comment
“…how constant, how divine,
this song of ours will rise…”
-David Crowder’s “O Praise Him”
The Anglican church I attend will be celebrating one-hundred and fifty years of Kingdom Life in 2018. Preparations are being made by the rectors and vestry to tell the narrative of this faith community. A cloud of witnesses will oversee the events.
Chapel & Cemetery ©Ann Johnson Kingdom Venturers
Reflecting on the Kingdom of God several years ago I came to the understanding, with the help of the writings of Pauline Scholar N.T. Wright, that the Kingdom of God on earth is here and now. The Kingdom was inaugurated by Jesus when he walked this earth. Why mention this?
As I walk around on Resurrection ground I am reminded that I walk on the same earth as all the saints from all nations who have gone on before me. Their lives and their faith in God’s covenant faithfulness have made it possible for me to have faith in 2016. The organism of their faith now lives in me.
Now, I could consider myself an Enlightened person who needs nothing and no one but reason and self but then I would shrink myself into a private rather than a public form of consciousness – a community of one, isolated and where the sacred is eschewed and nihilism offers nothing. Rather, I chose this continuum of faith and have identified myself with it. This continuum has, in turn, given me an identity, through baptism. I placed myself in the waters of the Kingdom Continuum.
Our faith community’s coming together to participate in ages old ritual is with the knowledge that we are under judgement. We must recite what we know to be true about God and about ourselves.
We come together in the liturgy. The Celebrant starts…
“Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit…Almighty God, unto all hearts are open…Hear what the Lord Jesus Christ said: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
Our Kingdom community, in worship of the One True God, recites The Gloria. Together we hear sacred texts read. Together we recite the ancient Nicene Creed. Together we participate in the Prayers of the People. Together we kneel accepting judgement. Together we confess – say the same thing about our sin as God does – and then hear the words of absolution. We rise to extend God’s Kingdom peace through a handshake or an embrace of the other.
The Eucharist – the Feast of Thanksgiving – is a rite commanded by The One who said “Do this…” and “I’m telling you a solemn truth. If you don’t eat the flesh of the son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. Anyone who feasts upon my flesh and drinks my blood has the life of God’s coming age, and I will raise them up on the last day. My flesh is true drink and my blood true drink. Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I remain in him. Just as the living father sent me, and I live because of the father, so the one who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven; it isn’t like bread which the ancestors ate, and died. The one who eats this bread will share the life of God’s new age.” The Word became flesh and the Kingdom Continuum becomes sustainable.
We come together knowing that we stand under judgement but also knowing that there is One of us whose sacrificial death pronounces us restored. This inversion, our Lord’s sacrifice into sacrament, is a gift that reminds us that we are redeemed: from fallen to restored. The judgement of many has been answered by the One Death. And like a Greek tragedy, this our tragedy is reenacted over and over in the hearts and souls and minds of the one-hundred and fifty-year-old faith community that is built on Resurrection ground.
Use All Truth-Seeking Resources
August 20, 2016 Leave a comment
Is evolution compatible with Christianity – absolutely!
Are science and Christianity compatible – absolutely!
Is your understanding compatible with both truth-seeking science and Christian Cosmology? – TBD.
Gravity Is Waving. Wave Back.
February 14, 2016 Leave a comment
“It is an easy thing to argue from precedent because it makes everything simple, but it is a risky thing to do. Give God “elbow room”; let Him come into His universe as He pleases. If we confine God in His working to religious people or to certain ways, we place ourselves on an equality with God.” Oswald Chambers, Baffled to Fight Better, 51 L
News Release • February 11, 2016:
Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years After Einstein’s Prediction
“For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.” 
Fellow spacetime travelers, as mentioned last time, the game is afoot!
This week, another substantial mind boggling cosmological clue!
Be reminded: Truth-seeking the not-so-obvious five-sigma answers to your questions takes…spacetime, “elbow room” and the right lab equipment (spectrograph, interferometer, Sola Scriptura, to name a few) 
Gravitational waves, Einstein’s ripples in spacetime, spotted for first time (quotes follow)
“…for the first time, physicists detected the waves, fulfilling a 4-decade quest and opening new eyes on the heavens….”
“It is the prospect of the science that might be done with gravitational waves that really excites physicists. For example, says Kamionkowski, the theorist at Johns Hopkins, the first LIGO result shows the power of such radiation to reveal unseen astrophysical objects like the two ill-fated black holes. “This opens a new window on this vast population of stellar remnants that we know are out there but of which we have seen only a tiny fraction,” he says…
With the black hole merger, general relativity has passed the first such test, says Rainer Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, who came up with the original idea for LIGO. “The things you calculate from Einstein’s theory look exactly like the signal,” he says. “To me, that’s a miracle.”” (emphasis added)
LIGO my Eggo: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) measures waffling gravitational fields created by black holes merging into a dancing embrace. 
“LIGO watches for a minuscule stretching of space with what amounts to ultraprecise rulers: two L-shaped contraptions called interferometers with arms 4 kilometers long. Mirrors at the ends of each arm form a long “resonant cavity,” in which laser light of a precise wavelength bounces back and forth, resonating just as sound of a specific pitch rings in an organ pipe.”
The alpha omega a priori LIGO, the dancing embrace of the Trinity, is aware of every ripple in your spacetime, your prayers, your knocking on His door in the middle of the night, your pinging. Become a “resonant cavity” and you will hear the Trinity moving the universe to answer you. Like Paul…
“I am persuaded, you see, that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord.” The apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.
Make a Spectrograph of Yourself
February 7, 2016 Leave a comment
Another in the Quantum Theology and the Dispensation of Synchronicity Series
_____________________________________________________________________________________
As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveler in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
From the English Lullaby Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1, scene 5
~~~
So you want to know if God is game? It’s elementary dear reader. It’s in the stars and a spectrograph is required. “But I’m into relationships, not science!” Snap out of it, kid! Put on your thinking cap. 
Prism break. In 1814 Joseph von Fraunhofer, a Bavarian lens maker, invented the spectrograph, a device which separates white light into a rainbow of colors. With a lab spectrometer the fingerprints of atoms and their Creator are uncovered.
“The white-hot surface of the sun emits light of all wavelengths, but this light then passes through the relatively cooler gases of the earth’s atmosphere (the “corona”). Here the atoms might absorb just those same wavelengths they like to emit. This absorption accounts for the curious dark lines observed by Faunhofer. Bit by bit, spectroscopy in the post-Fraunhofer era revealed that each element, when heated, produced a characteristic set of “spectral lines,” some prominent (like the brilliant lines of neon gas that are so familiar in neon signs), and some faint (like the dimmer blue of mercury vapor lamps). These lines were the fingerprints of the chemical elements, the first clues to the tiny “tuning forks” within atoms, or whatever the mysterious structures vibrating inside the atom must be.” (emphasis added) from Quantum Physics for Poets by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill
“The game is afoot!”. What game? This game is kind of like Hide and Seek, the kid’s game. But in this game someone hides and the rest must seek out the hider. Like the kid’s game, no one seeking believes that the person hiding is unreal and not there, unless a person enters the game after the person hid. This person then has to believe the other seekers. But this person may think that the others may be tricking him and walk away. That’s his or her choice.
The seekers all must have a well-motivated belief that the hider is there and can be found to win the game. See. I am starting to build relationships.
“Spectroscopy’s second major achievement was a more philosophical. In the sun’s signature of dark lines scientists could read its chemical composition, and lo and behold, they found hydrogen, helium, lithium and the other elements of matter that compose our planet Earth. Since then, we have analyzed the light from the stars in extremely distant galaxies, always finding our own familiar elements: hydrogen, helium and so on. The universe everywhere has the same composition and the same laws of nature, all of which hints at a common origin in some incomprehensible act of physical creation.” from Quantum Physics for Poets by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill
“How I wonder what you are.” Information sourced from a twinkling star spectrum includes: 
Our distance from a star.
The temperature of the star
The size of a star.
The mass of a star.
The elements of a star
The motion of a star.
Using a star’s spectral lines we can measure its gas pressure and the strength of a star’s magnetism at the surface.
And you thought those little white dots in the night sky were there just for romantic reasons? They certainly are! The Creator is engaging his creation. So, “Make a Spectrograph of Yourself”.
[spek-truh-graf, -grahf], noun
1. a spectroscope for photographing or producing a representation of a spectrum.
Like it or not you are taking in the Light of Christ. His Cosmic photons are constantly bombarding us. With it we can see familiar elements and, more closely, the fingerprints of God. And though the Light source seems off hiding somewhere in a distant galaxy there is considerable information for us to take in. We can analyze the Light from Christ and find the familiar incredibly romantic, like the red Valentines rose.
Under light a rose absorbs most colored light of the rainbow and emits red light.
What are you absorbing and what are you emitting? We tend to hunker down with some OTC Christian book that tries to explain God to us in proxy fashion. We ask God about something specific and we expect God to answer us in specific Voodoo-like fashion. “There will be a wet fleece on your doorstep tomorrow. That’s how you will know.” Look around. Adjust your spectrograph and see the full spectrum of answers God has already provided. And, if you ask for wisdom (light), have you used the wisdom God has already given you to find your way?
“The game is on!” Personally and very briefly, I joined the game of Hide and Seek when I started to read and think outside the “Christian” cave. I rid myself of the myopia of single point of light thinking – Sola Scriptura – and I stepped outside. To accomplish the move into the sunlight with a well-motivated belief of greater illumination, over the last several years I began studying science books. This path for me has made all the difference. And this path has shed enormous light back onto Sola Scriptura. God has been found ever since. Yes, he likes to keep hiding and being found. But, is God uncooperative when it comes to me? No!
The Hider is there and His Light is supernal. He wants to be found. Such Light gives itself away!
~~~
When You said, “Seek My face,” my heart said to You, “Your face, O LORD, I shall seek.” Psalm 27:8
May the light of Christ remain with you always…
Cindy Wity 