The sacraments of the Catholic Church seem pretty clearly what they have always been, Baptism and Communion, and they added Marriage and Confessions, which isn’t bad and a few more to make it Seven.  Not a bad way to look at the world.  These are the things Scripture says are important, things which we should find identity in doing.

It is interesting to consider other sacraments from some of the other denominations or heresies depending on how you look at it.  Because of the nature of man, every religion has sacraments and every man has his religion. God is not dead, he is merely cheated on or replaced by counterfeits.

The protestants seem to have taken pride in many things anti-Catholic, so we have many sacraments such as reBaptizing.  And the event which triggers the reBaptism, the Come-To-Jesus-Moment.  Which must be accompanied by the dramatic Conversion Story.  Still on pretty solid footing here, the old sacraments of Baptism, and Communion are still there to some degree.  We don’t really like talking about that Confession thing we have wrapped it up in the self-centered conversion story, thank God you chose him.  And that Marriage things is still a pretty good idea as long as it’s not too inconvenient.  You should probably get married before you have kids but then you can leave whenever you feel like it.

The Charismatic anti-Catholics have take this self centered religion even further into the Speaking of Tongues.  Which is mostly just weird.  It reminds me a lot of the homosexualist sacrament of feigning a lisp. Lisping?  I’m not sure if a refusal to take this sacrament will get you kicked out of the rainbow club but it is a sure symbol in Hollywood for the perversion.

And then we come to some mainstream Evangelical sacraments, like the contraceptive device.  Contraception has become a sacrament almost as easy as breathing.  Who thinks about that anymore?  Yet it is a source of pride to the anti-Catholic. And it was a big deal at one time, when the schism first took place.  This is an odd thing to take pride in.  The Scripture is quite clear, children are a blessing.  And the people on the other side were Hitler, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw and other Eugenicist.  The most evil men we can name.  Try not participating in this sacrament, you will get more pushback than if you refused communion or baptism.  “Are you trying to over populate the earth?”  “You know what causes that, right”  “Four Children!!!???”

And more recently I see developing the sacrament of the Bikini.  This is an anti-Muslim semi-Feminist sacrament.  We are free Westerners.  We don’t like Islam covering women.  So we can be as naked as we want.  Na na na na na.  It’s all very mature.  And quite the opposite of Orthodox Biblical teaching.  It is quite clear that modesty is important.  Uncovering nakedness was an Old Testament euphemism for sexual intercourse.  Preserving that modesty apart from the marriage bed makes the marriage bed more valuable.  I think of the missionaries going out the the lost tribes of the world and teaching them how to wear clothes.  This was always the Christian believe.  And why had those peoples, descended from Noah forgotten to wear clothes?  For the same reason we have.  We forgot the creator God and began to worship sex and therefore rob it of it’s magic.  Nudity becomes more and more edgy, until it just becomes boring and you have a bunch of naked pagans.  I find this new sacrament of the Bikini quite disturbing.  Professing Christians pride themselves on their semi-naked posts on various internet platforms.  Get a cross tattooed on your cleavage and share it with the world.

As Margaret Sanger and her rival Anthony Comstock well knew, these things are all connected to the sacraments of feminism.  Wherever you find Contraception and the Bikini you find Pornography and Abortion.  Because isn’t the bikini really just another form of pornography?  And Abortion is clearly the feminist sacrament.  It is what they always march for and what they always mean by ‘the rights of women’.  The black priests on the Supreme court declared the right to the sacrament in Roe v. Wade and the feminists have defended it with unparalleled religious fervor ever since.   Which makes it a tragedy that so many Christians are walking so close to that line and many going over.  I see more and more posts trying to remove any shame from Christian women for dressing immodestly. It’s always the man’s fault these days, and no matter now naked your participation in society that can’t possibly ever cause an unfavorable reaction in men.  Well of course they like the attention but when the attention get’s hands #metoo #metoo.

And in the larger picture these sacraments are all about destroying the sacrament of Marriage.  Divorce the purpose of the marriage union from the family, from sex, from children and wonder why divorce is so common.  Turn the purposeful, responsibility of sexual intercourse into a for-pleasure exercise in self satisfaction and wonder why so many people leave when it becomes inconvenient, destroying children.  Populate our culture with scantily clad women and wonder why men turn to porn.  Glorify Contraception and the prevention of children and wonder why Abortion is so common.

We were created to worship.  You become like what you worship. As the Old Testament says, you worship dumb and deaf idols and so you become deaf and dumb.  Evangelical Christians worship far too many of the wrong things, and we are reaping the fruits or the lack of fruits.

 

“After Internet Backlash Kim Kardashian apologizes for weight loss comment: ‘I am close to people with serious eating disorders and should have known better’ ”

All because:

“Kim Kardashian expressed in July during a video with her sisters that she was excited to look like she wasn’t eating as she reached 119lbs.”

This type of thing is really driving me nuts.  It is morality by mob rule.  Do whatever you want, including sleep around, divorce, marry, sodomy, dress in drag, whatever and something is only wrong if a twitter campaign gets riled up about it.  I guess Jesus was guilty then, because the majority of that mob wanted him crucified.  And it wasn’t the first time, other mobs tried to stone him and push him off a cliff.  So there you have it, Jesus was bad.  No, when you agree to a sin you didn’t do, just to get along, that is called lying.  That’s another sin.  It reinforces false morals in both people.  When you agree to your wife’s accusations just so you can sleep in the same bed, you are preventing your wife from facing her sin, and you are exhibiting the sin of cowardice.  This is how you end up with cultural sins.  The mob gets together and tries to change God’s rules.  And so we have what Chesterton says “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

Mob rule, the ‘vox populi’ or populism “is no basis for a system of government”, to quote ‘Dennis’.  Strange women lying about in ponds distributin’ swords, may actually make more sense.  If mobs are correct then morality is based on tribal warfare.  And there really is no basis for one tribe judging another tribe, except for a bloody battle.  The fact that we won WWII didn’t make Hitler wrong, he was wrong.  The fact that the majority of people voted for Hitler’s tyranny, after he wrote a book detailing what he was going to do, doesn’t make it right.  The Germans agreed with Hitler because they all agreed with Darwin.  It’s survival of the fittest and we are the fittest, and we’re going to prove it.  But America stepped in and proved him wrong.  But only partly, Germany is still the most successful economy in Europe.  The adults of the last generation said ‘no’.  They had war tribunals, like Nuremberg and judged people based on objective standards, based on God’s Law.  They hunted down Naizs took them out of their German context and put them in an ‘under God’ context.  The Nuremberg trials didn’t care if they were ‘just following orders’ or if ‘everyone was doing it’.    We had trials and executed them.  But sadly we don’t think this way much anymore.

Evangelical Christians are pretty squishy on the whole law and order thing these days.  We fall into two different mobs both wrong and heretical.  The First Mob says that “all have sinned’ “the heart of man is deceitfully wicked” “he who says he is without sin is a liar”  so what we do doesn’t really matter.  We shouldn’t try to encourage good behavior using the law, because if you aren’t saved then you are going to hell and so nothing really can be expected of you.  If you kill someone or lie on a job application it’s all really the same, “he who transgresses any part of the law is guilty of all.”  And these things are true in their context.  There is an ultimate sense before a Holy God in which we are all guilty.  As humans under Adam we share in his sin.  As groups of humans, Jews and Gentiles, we have no right to judge the other group because both have sin.  But there are tons of verses about hierarchy.  The whole Old Testament law distinguished different punishments for different offenses.  There are even different ultimate rewards and punishments promised to different people.  Some people will just barely make it into heaven.  Some will sit a the father’s right hand.  Some were faithful with much and will be given more, some will have their scraps taken away.  Abraham was called the ‘friend of God’. David was “a man after God’s own heart”.  Job was “blameless and upright who feared God and turned away from evil.” Hebrews 11 has all sorts of commendable people.  Able was better than Cain. Enoch “pleased God”.  And a dozen other people apparently accomplished things they were credited for.  We can’t just grab verses and turn them into platitudes and cliches for all time and peoples in every situation.  Having decided that we are all as bad as we can be, there isn’t much point in doing much of anything.  This group includes the ‘hyper Calvinists’ and those who emphasize God’s sovereignty.  They generally accuse the other mob of being for ‘cheap grace’ but the end result is really similar to the other mob.

The previous mob said it doesn’t matter what you do because we are all so bad.  This group says it doesn’t matter what you do because we are all so good.  Or they might say that because Jesus is so nice and loving that the bar isn’t really that high, so everyone will be fine.  Taking this to the full extreme is the Universalists, who believe that in the end God is so loving that everyone will go to heaven, because God couldn’t bear to have anyone suffering.  If you back it off a little bit you have people who think that God will save most people except for those who are judgmental, or hypocrites or worst of all the ‘religious’.  The Pharisees were religious and they were evil, so that’s the unforgivable sin.  Everyone else will be fine, and it doesn’t really matter what you do.  They like to talk about free will, and God’s mercy.  It is true that there is free will and that God has endless mercy.  But that is just part of the story.  A lot of the problem stems from the idea that the Old Testament is just about God’s judgement and the New Testament is about a God of love.  So God is bipolar or he matured or something.  But if we actually read the Old Testament we would see that it is all grace.  The Jewish people were a stiff necked people.  They were always failing, often while Gentiles around them showed faith, and God poured out mercy on them anyway.  They didn’t earn it they didn’t deserve it but he did it anyway.  The reality is that Jesus talked about Hell more than anyone.  He did not come to remove the Old Testament and replace it with warm fuzzies.  All of scripture is useful for teaching and reproof(II Timothy 3:16).  We are responsible for our actions, we will be judged for what we do.  And also Romans 9, is true, God is sovereign over all.  They generally accuse the other side of being legalists.

And so we come to connecting these two different worlds.   That is the nature of Christianity, it is in paradox.  Jesus takes two seeming contradictions and smashes them together to make his world.  God is Love, God is Holy.  God is Just, God is Merciful.  God is Three, God is One. God is responsible, men are responsible.  The perennial temptation is to just pick one side and go with it.  Again Chesterton says that heresy is taking any one thing and making it the only thing.  Paradox is woven into the world.  It is the root of conflict but the root also of all that is good.  Paul addresses these paradoxes and how they should work together.  Does marriage really make any sense?  Men and women are completely different, opposite even.  He tells men not to exasperate and to be loving.  He tells women not to nag and to be respectful.  Because each are different and they need different things.  Then these opposite crash together and it’s beautiful.  Young and Old. Mature and Immature.  Servants and Master.  Our culture is almost heretical by definition, even the church.  We choose Women, the Young, the Immature, and we will just pretend that last one didn’t exist.  Everyone seems to agree that making peace by destroying half of the tension is more Christian.  We seem to think that conflict is bad, when really it is part of the system.  Iron sharpening iron.  Coming alongside a fellow brother.  Correcting a brother.  Pastoring, shepherding, leading.  This is the nature of creation.  Women divided from man so that she might relate back to him.

The result is that both these groups seem to leave the writing and enforcing laws up to other people.  Some radial pacifists even think that executing laws are a matter for the world because it might entail executing people and we are not of this world.  But these are very new trends.  We are the people of God, we have his wisdom, it is a light unto the world.  Do we hide our light?  Certainly not, we shine the light of guidance to all the world, for their sake, because we love them because we love Jesus.  Paul’s criticism of lawsuits has been turned into a platitude about  not suing people.  But the point is that we shouldn’t let the world make these decisions because we have the Wisdom of God, don’t you know we will judge the angels?  We are supposed to judge, we will rule the earth judging and even judge the angles who were thought to be the highest beings.  This is another paradox heaven and earth coming together.  This is the real picture of Jesus coming to earth and the picture of Revelation.  Heaven comes down to earth, earth is made like heaven.  “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”  is our prayer.  That is our task.  Getting people saved is only part of that task.  Organizing people and executing the original creation mandate to rule and subdue the earth is part of that task too. And historical Christians have figured out the best way to do that.  It is no surprise that the most successful advances in law did not come from the muslim or the hindu or the buddahist worlds. It is no surprise that the ancient sources of legal wisdom are the two places the children of God were also present, Egypt and Babylon.  We don’t have to wander around experimenting on how to govern groups of people.  We have God’s word and 2000 years of tradition.  We need to stop following foolish mobs and the world.

 

 

 

 

 

one of the biggest mob rules today is believe the woman.