(no subject)

[primroseburrows]

I'm not a Christian, but when I hear Johnny Cash narrating these words, I realise what an influence the man Jesus has had on this world. I wish that people could listen to his words and not to his followers:

Here was a man, a man who was born in a small village, the son of a peasant woman; he grew up in another small village. Until he reached the age of thirty he worked as a carpenter, then for three years he was a travelling minister. But he never travelled more than two hundred miles from where he was born, and where he did go, he usually walked.

He never held political office, he never wrote a book, he never bought a home, he never had a family, he never went to college, and he never set foot inside a big city, yet...here was a man.

Here was a man, though he never did one of the things that you usually associate with greatness, he had no credentials but himself; he had nothing to do with this world except through the divine purpose that brought him to this world.

While he was still a young man the tide of popular opinion turned against him; most of his friends ran away. One of them denied him, one of them betrayed him, and turned him over to his enemies. Then he went throught the mockery of a trial, and was nailed to a Roman cross between two thieves. And even while he was dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was taken down from the cross and laid in a borrowed grave provided by a compassionate friend.

More than nineteen centuries have come and gone, and today he's the centerpiece of the human race, Our leader in the column to human destiny. And I think I'm well within the mark when I say that all of the armies that ever marched, all of the navies that ever sailed, all of the legislative bodies that ever sat, and all of the kings that ever reigned, all of them put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth so powerfully as that one solitary life...here was a man.

Comments

[erebor.livejournal.com]

Heh, you'll like him. He renders Christianity down to what it should (could?) mean, strips it of all the myths and things we probably fabricated ourselves over the centuries (and that keeps a lot of people away from religion because they look at that stuff and say what silly nonsense, how could religion mean anything when it's so full of fairytales?). Gets back to what Jesus intended. And this is the point we liberal Episcopalians (and many others in other denominations) make: If you can strip away all the bells and whistles and still find insipiration for living and a feeling that the Divine exists in the universe, THEN you have real faith. Yes, it's harder to do when you don't have the Bible standing as the monumental Word to reassure you. That's why it's Faith.

I think his first book was "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism". Quite good. I seem to recall a lot of people wanted to burn him at the stake when that one was published. "This Hebrew Lord" is also quite good. I haven't checked in recent years on what he's published. Gonna do that today!