Y'all, help me out with a decision. l just looked at the part of the Blogger set up about AdSense. At a time when I'm trying to build up several income streams, wouldn't it make sense to let Google publish a few ads down the right side of my blog, or at the very end? Wouldn't cost anybody anything, unless a reader were to click on an ad and actually buy something--and that's not up to me. Problem is, I don't know whether I trust Google to pick out appropriate ads. The process gets complicated, and I'm trying to "Simplify, simplify."
So would this be a cool move on my part? Would I be like the servants who invested the multiple talents and made a return, and conversely if I don't do AdSense, am I like the servant who buried his talent out of fear? Would it be considerate to offer my readers needed goods and services, or would it be insensitive of me to offer a lot of frippery? Is AdSense coin of the realm or mark of the beast?
Please leave a comment. I can't know what you like or don't like if you don't tell me. My name is Nancy, not Clair as in Clair Voyant.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Messiah and "the Messiah.”
What does it mean to be God’s anointed? We don’t do much anointing these days, and we take pretty much for granted the idea that the Messiah (or in Hebrew, Meshiach) came two thousand years ago, and it was Jesus. He promised to come again, to send “another Comforter, who may abide with you forever.” We Christian Scientists, perhaps a tad complacently, take Mary Baker Eddy’s words merely as the great rhetorical cadenza they are in context: “This Comforter I understand to be Divine Science.” (Science and Health 55:28) Nevertheless, the closest we may encounter the idea of the “Messiah” is in Handel’s oratorio Messiah . I make the typographical distinction because (a) titles of books and other large works are put in italics or underlines, not quotation marks, and Messiah, sans “the,” is Handel’s title; and (b) I’m using “the Messiah” in quotation marks, no italics, to represent the concept(s) of the one chosen and anointed by God to bring salvation to mankind and to restore lost Paradise, filtering these ideas of mainstream Judeo-Christian orthodoxies through the teachings of Christian Science. At this point Satan is not the devil but is simply one of God’s angels. He hasn’t rebelled yet, even though there are signs of it shown by his throwing his weight around in the bet with God.
We know that “Comforter” is the Paraclete, the Advocate who argues our case in the court of Spirit. It is Job’s enlightened sense of divine help when he realizes that “I know that thou canst do everything,” the arguments of the three “miserable comforters” have vanished, and Satan will have gone back to walking to and fro and perhaps cooking up revenge in his pique at God for passing him over in favor of Man as His beloved son.
But the important central question remains: who and what is “the Messiah”? We know that the word is Hebrew, and that it came into the Greek as ho Khristos, the anointed one. Anointing is not something we can relate to without a lot of footnotes, and frankly there are many commentaries that do this a lot better than I can. So I just leave it at that: if anointing of kings by divine right is remote and repugnant to us latter-day democrats and republicans, and if the anointing of bishops is too high church for our sensibilities, we can still relate to Mary Baker Eddy’s sense of Oil as per S&H 592:25: “Consecration; charity; gentleness; prayer; heavenly inspiration.”
For this Advent season I had planned to do five Wednesdays on the concept of "the Messiah", the Anointed One, using these five aspects of “OIL” one at a time. But it doesn’t work out: there are four, not five, Wednesdays in December before Christmas, and the sentence, with its implied verb, is punctuated with semicolons, not periods nor commas. This suggests that each of the five flows into all the others, without hard and fast distinctions among them. So, rather than focusing on the anointing, I’ll focus on "the Messiah"–and Messiah. On December 1, however, I will give considerable attention to protection, and will include Psalm 91 and perhaps the protection of the baby Jesus from Herod’s wrath.
Our lessons for the past six weeks, and for the rest of the quarter, have all used at least one text from Messiah, and we’ve had several of the beloved arias as solos: “He shall feed his flock,” “Thou wilt not leave his soul in hell,” “How beautiful are the feet,” “Comfort ye.” Numerous other of the texts have appeared, the latest being “Why do the nations so furiously rage?” And there are more to come. These texts constitute the very core of Christian belief; they are eternal in their implication, and even when they refer to events in time (such as the birth of Jesus) the events perhaps happen over and over again with each telling. That is why we celebrate them.
Anyhow, because Messiah is so ubiquitous, I’ve compiled a chart of all the texts that Handel’s librettist Jennens used, and I’d like you to study them during the next few weeks. I’ll put this on my blog, and will have copies available for the non-techies among us. I’m trying to get it put into PDF or e-book format for downloading.
I’ll be using these texts, and others, in the Wednesday readings, and it would be a powerful concentration of thought and prayer to uplift the thought of this $eason.
IMPORTANT! To this end, I suggest that we go as a group to this Messiah Sing-Along:
Our soloist, Beth Bradford, will be singing the mezzo-soprano arias.
For those who may not be familiar with the idea of a sing-along, or “sing your own” Messiah, the idea is that the audience is the Chorus and will sing the choruses such as “And the glory of the Lord,” “For unto us a child is born,” “Lift up your heads, O ye gates”, and of course “Hallelujah!”. Bring your own copies, but usually there are some available for those who don’t have. (It happens that it’s the only musical score I possess at the moment!) And if you don’t want to sing, you can just listen.
There is another sing-along on December 18 in the evening at Central Lutheran, but I thought it might be easier from many of us to go to the one in the afternoon, so I’m proposing that we organize an outing to Vancouver that afternoon. So round up your friends and neighbors, and we’ll “shout, O daughter of Jerusalem!”
We know that “Comforter” is the Paraclete, the Advocate who argues our case in the court of Spirit. It is Job’s enlightened sense of divine help when he realizes that “I know that thou canst do everything,” the arguments of the three “miserable comforters” have vanished, and Satan will have gone back to walking to and fro and perhaps cooking up revenge in his pique at God for passing him over in favor of Man as His beloved son.
But the important central question remains: who and what is “the Messiah”? We know that the word is Hebrew, and that it came into the Greek as ho Khristos, the anointed one. Anointing is not something we can relate to without a lot of footnotes, and frankly there are many commentaries that do this a lot better than I can. So I just leave it at that: if anointing of kings by divine right is remote and repugnant to us latter-day democrats and republicans, and if the anointing of bishops is too high church for our sensibilities, we can still relate to Mary Baker Eddy’s sense of Oil as per S&H 592:25: “Consecration; charity; gentleness; prayer; heavenly inspiration.”
For this Advent season I had planned to do five Wednesdays on the concept of "the Messiah", the Anointed One, using these five aspects of “OIL” one at a time. But it doesn’t work out: there are four, not five, Wednesdays in December before Christmas, and the sentence, with its implied verb, is punctuated with semicolons, not periods nor commas. This suggests that each of the five flows into all the others, without hard and fast distinctions among them. So, rather than focusing on the anointing, I’ll focus on "the Messiah"–and Messiah. On December 1, however, I will give considerable attention to protection, and will include Psalm 91 and perhaps the protection of the baby Jesus from Herod’s wrath.
Our lessons for the past six weeks, and for the rest of the quarter, have all used at least one text from Messiah, and we’ve had several of the beloved arias as solos: “He shall feed his flock,” “Thou wilt not leave his soul in hell,” “How beautiful are the feet,” “Comfort ye.” Numerous other of the texts have appeared, the latest being “Why do the nations so furiously rage?” And there are more to come. These texts constitute the very core of Christian belief; they are eternal in their implication, and even when they refer to events in time (such as the birth of Jesus) the events perhaps happen over and over again with each telling. That is why we celebrate them.
Anyhow, because Messiah is so ubiquitous, I’ve compiled a chart of all the texts that Handel’s librettist Jennens used, and I’d like you to study them during the next few weeks. I’ll put this on my blog, and will have copies available for the non-techies among us. I’m trying to get it put into PDF or e-book format for downloading.
I’ll be using these texts, and others, in the Wednesday readings, and it would be a powerful concentration of thought and prayer to uplift the thought of this $eason.
IMPORTANT! To this end, I suggest that we go as a group to this Messiah Sing-Along:
Saturday, December 11
2:00 p.m.
Sing Your Own "Messiah" -- Clark College Chorale
First United Methodist Church, 401 E. 33rd Street, Vancouver, Wash.
2:00 p.m.
Sing Your Own "Messiah" -- Clark College Chorale
First United Methodist Church, 401 E. 33rd Street, Vancouver, Wash.
Our soloist, Beth Bradford, will be singing the mezzo-soprano arias.
For those who may not be familiar with the idea of a sing-along, or “sing your own” Messiah, the idea is that the audience is the Chorus and will sing the choruses such as “And the glory of the Lord,” “For unto us a child is born,” “Lift up your heads, O ye gates”, and of course “Hallelujah!”. Bring your own copies, but usually there are some available for those who don’t have. (It happens that it’s the only musical score I possess at the moment!) And if you don’t want to sing, you can just listen.
There is another sing-along on December 18 in the evening at Central Lutheran, but I thought it might be easier from many of us to go to the one in the afternoon, so I’m proposing that we organize an outing to Vancouver that afternoon. So round up your friends and neighbors, and we’ll “shout, O daughter of Jerusalem!”
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