Holy Week 2017

I attended Palm Sunday Service at Cariboo Community Church with Laura, Kevin, Anna and the God Kids.  They were a thorough entertainment. They walk on chairs and crawl on the floors just like Gilbert does.  And the aisles of the church, wide open freeways for fast running children’s feet.  Anna took them out during the sermon.  A serious affair about Passover,  Jews being saved from judgement because of their personal relationship with God and their obedience to God. Sabbath and the Last Supper.  Purification with Hyssop.  Hyssop figures in the psalm of recovery 51.  Hyssop is on the vinegar given to Jesus as he dies on the cross.

Now this is Holy Week.  Palm Sunday was the celebration of Jesus entering triumphant into Jerusalem riding a donkey. I’ve forever loved the donkey.  Perhaps because it figured in the first childhood Sunday School stories.  

We’d go to church with my parents and go downstairs during the service to have a class room of Christian teaching with colouring books of Christian stories.  Later we’d rejoin the parents after the sermon.  Not long away with strangers. I remember well the Sunday School at Trinity Baptist, Fort Rouge, Winnipeg. Later I’d teach Sunday School for a couple of years at Fort Garry United.  Looking back I realize I’ve been of service. I’ve participated.  There’s still too much time watching tv.  Not enough of it watching the Ben Hur’s of today.  Uplifting inspiring tales of Biblical proportion but spins off instead like Star Wars and Star Trek.  I loved studying Joseph Campbell and the role of myth in society.

As a psychiatrist we say if you don’t agree to a collective insanity then you’re doomed to having a personal one.  My favourite collective insanity is the legal agreements we all sign ‘in faith’ with computer companies where on the next to final page we have agreed to give our soul and our kidneys to Microsoft or Apple.

WWIII is heating up.  A competing channel.  I don’t think anything will come of it.  Russia, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Israel and the US all raising the stakes on this Easter week.  Meanwhile the American navy is steaming towards North Korea when the kid, another one, like our own Pretty Boy Prime Minister Trudeau, has blasted off midrange missiles. Sarin in the Middle East and Tomohawk Missiles and the threat of nuclear missiles in the east.  

Jesus, we say was son of God. In the Hindu tradition a man evolves from slug to God. But in this Christian twist on an old story, God descends into Man then resurrects.  The Sufis, despite their Muslim warlord masters believe in the revolutions of the spiritual.  The Christian Jacobs Ladder mysticism is the rising and falling.  The descent and resurrection.  It’s a feeling thing to a mystic.  Meanwhile the Kundalini is another bi-directional thing.  Our minister today at Cariboo Community Church talked of the blood.  

Blood is the circular pumping flow.  The greath is in and out but the blood goes round and round.  It’s all movement. Our minds are the only part that’s stuck.

And Jesus was ever obedient to the prophecy and to the call.

He didn’t have to return to Jerusalem. It’s like New York and the girl from Kentucky.  She didn’t have to go to New York or LA even. If you stay at home you’re safe.  Avoid the big city.  Jesus was from Galilee. He could have stayed safe there but the real egos of the world are always in the government towns.  For us in Canada it’s Ottawa. Her in BC it’s Victoria. For Americans its Washington. For Russians Moscow.  If Jesus was in France today he’d have to go to Paris to be crucified. In China he’d be crucified in Bei Jing.  The Ego of the dictators, republicans, kings and queens and committee leaders and czars and prime ministers demand that Jesus be upstage.

Every day in my moment to moment life there’s God’s will and my will. I say ‘Thy Will Be Done’.  I want to do the right thing but mostly I avoid pain.  Jesus could have avoided pain. He asked that this cup be taken from him.  But he was betrayed and the Government of the day Crucified him.  

To the Christian this world isn’t the big deal it is to the Herod’s of the day and the beheaders of today and yesterday.  Herod wanted to sleep with his daughter so beheaded John the Baptist on a whim.  Beheading wasn’t just an ISIS or French thing. It’s biblical.  So much is. But the education today doesn’t teach history and kids are easily impressed by the plagiarism of television.  All the old myths and stories of Biblical proportion made into cartoons for wealth and profit.

Not that wealth and profit aren’t a concern. The disciples of Jesus carried Swords. Swords don’t come cheap. I was looking at Glocks and a good one puts you back a thousand.  All the men and women around the presidents and prime ministers and Kings of Saudi and Syria are carrying a thousand dollars of hard ware on their hips or under their arm pits.

Jesus said “My Kingdom is not of this world”.  

Way before physicists rediscovered alternative worlds Jesus was speaking of heaven.  Position is important. Heaven is in here not out there.  The Yogi sings “I am the bubble make me the sea”.  My perception to the psychologist today is like the tip of an iceberg. So much more goes on within.  All the linear journeys of the Bible , from Egypt to the promised land, from Eden to outside Eden, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem are metaphorical.  They’re true just was the Temple of the Jews in Jerusulam is historic and true.  

Alpha is a series of dinners and discussions which goes on in church for anyone who wishes to become a Christian or learn what Christians believe.  There’s the various Creeds and Third Day sings the Creed best of them all but practically it’s just an old fashioned Community Hall.  The Cariboo Community Church had that pentecostal feel. The Hillsong movie catches that Spirit filled grace of the pentecostals. Lots of song and celebration with education in sermons.  Everyone is welcome.

We all says ‘Come to the Table.   Father Matthew at my church helps the homeless old men and then goes to the opera with his lovely wife.  He’s in the guts and gore of creation uplifted by the word of God and music of the ages.  He says, “just think of it as your mothers dinner.”  Mom was always glad to have her kids come for dinner.  

The Prodigal Son, one of my all time favourite Biblical stories, and the masterpiece of painting in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg is about a father inviting his son home after his son has been eating with pigs.  They killed the fatted calf in celebration.

The Last Supper of the Holy Week is Jesus’s gathering with his closest.  It’s the basis of communion.  We celebrate the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine.  The bread is the body and the wine is the blood. It’s a sacrificial symbolic cannibalistic rite. Robert Graves in Golden Bough followed the myth of the sacrifice of the king for the tribe throughout history.

Jesus, the pure, is the sacrifice of man.  

It makes the world go round.

The sun comes up.

We get to live on.

The Pharisees,cynical and arrogant get to judge. The Sanhedrin pompous and vacuous with fear as Sanhedrins always are releases the real rebel because the rebels of the world are nothing compared to the saints.  The saints had a bad lot, killed off by Nero and finally that entertainment stopped only by Constantine because Christians were the only ones truthful in the days of pagans.  

We are slouching towards Bethlehem.

We are nearer Jerusalem. 

There’s death and laughter.  This is just a dream like every day and every night and we awake and it’s all been a play.  We may go again or that may be it.  And for some who want nothing of immortality they might well get the peace of eternity.  But I’m in for the journey.

I’m following Jesus.  A follower of Jesus believes in God and heaven and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.  These were once Canadian values.  Kellie Leitch is trying to get agreement on what is Canadian because Justin Trudeau hating Christians and Catholics and English and most things Canadians has started another Muslim jihad with his encouragement of Bill M-103.  Islamaphobia is to be outlawed by the Christophobe Justin Trudeau.

What will President Trump do.  I don’t think WWIII but maybe it’s about ratings.  As we’re gathering for the ascension of Jesus we may be all taken back to the passover.  I expect buying Hyssop would be in order.  I will trust in the blood of the lamb rather than going around to butcher shops looking for lamb.  Hyssop will have to do.  

Jesus Christ means literally “God within, god will come again.”  So all my life I’ve played hide and seek with God.  They dark times have only been when I was hiding and forgot I was hiding and thought the game was over and no one had come to find me.  All I had to do then was come out and play.  Just like I come when Mamma calls for supper.  Turning and twisting and circling and rising on eagles wings.