Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Dec 28, 2020

✩🎄★Happy Xmas (War Is Over)★🎄✩

Miley Cyrus & Mark Ronson feat. Sean Ono Lennon

Dec 12, 2019

Miley Cyrus & Mark Ronson feat. Sean Ono Lennon

- Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

Lyrics ★🎄★

So this is Christmas

And what have you done

Another year over

And a new one just begun

And so this is Christmas

I hope you have fun

The near and the dear one

The old and the young

A very merry Christmas

and a happy New Year

Let's hope it's a good one

Without any fear

And so this is Christmas (war is over)

For weak and for strong (if you want it)

For rich and for poor ones (war is over)

The world is so wrong (now...)

And so happy Christmas (war is over)

For black and for white (if you want it)

For left and for right ones (war is over)

Let's stop all the fight (now...)

A very merry Christmas

And a happy New Year

Oh, let's hope it's a good one

Without any fear

And so this is Christmas (war is over)

And what have we done (if you want it)

Another year over (war is over)

And a new one just begun (now...)

And so happy Christmas (war is over)

We hope you have fun (if you want it)

The near and the dear one (war is over)

The old and the young (now...)

A very merry Christmas

And a happy New Year

Let's hope it's a good one

Without any fear

War is over, if you want it

War is over now!

Happy Christmas everybody!

★🎄★

New Years Require Better Resolutions

by R.E. Slater

December 29, 2020

I have been enjoying Miley Cyrus a lot lately. I love her voice, how she thinks and envision's life, her need to speak out against civil and human injustice, and for the beauty she sees all around her. Miley is sounding better to me the older she gets and the more she discovers who she is and what she wants to speak to. And though she's very good at capturing cover songs like the one here, I am more interested in her edginess and how she sees humanity in all its vices and colours.

With the onset of a new year coming in three days I'm asking that we commit ourselves to healing. To the healing of our hearts, our friendships, our community, our country, and our world.

To redirecting all our nervous, sometimes exasperating, sometimes agitating, energy, into goodness and wellbeing for all things human and earthly. Mere wishing for, or singing of, "Peace on Earth, goodwill towards men" are but empty words if we don't actually practice these qualities at all times through all our seasons of life.

Over the last several years we've seen the ugliness of hatred and division and what it does to leaderless people who follow those dark souls who are destroyers of present goodness. They have vexed our hearts and our relationships with one another. They are a scourge to be remonstrated against and removed.

Let us today, this coming year, take up the challenge of our destroyers to rebuild a truer equality and justice for all around us. For each other as well as for nature. So often rebuilding cannot come without deconstructing our past and present. Black Lives Matter has challenged us to do just that. And we will. These are the fundamental challenges we must step up to. Let me share an all too frequent example of expectations versus reality.

The Challenges of Loss

Several years ago I naively bought a house thinking it needed remodeling. I had met the builder and the owner, sent an inspection company out to confirm the site, and read what was written in the contracts. But I couldn't have been more wrong. The house was fundamentally built wrong, found akilter with itself upon it's several elevations, and with a craftsmanship absently confounding. It all was hidden from view innocently enough but the structure was fundamently flawed behind its rustic beauty. The words on the contract which I needed for clarification weren't written down but kept off and hidden (as keeping to the letter of the law of the county but not its spirit of full disclosure). And the inspecting agency counted the nails on the roof, the missing electrical safety features but missed the foundations which were rotting and sagging. These were drywalled over from the inside and packed with gravel around the perimeter making it seem aesthetic when it was actually functional fifteen feet all the way down. A simple tapping of an iron rod through the gravel would've confirmed further discovery. Or a screwdriver through the furnace walls would've told of a wooden foundation. But none of this was disclosed or confirmed. The result? It was all on me. Everything. It was not a good place to be.

An older man, my neighbor, whom I came to know, spoke wisdom confirming what my own heart was saying, against all the others who spoke contrary. I took it as a word from God and proceeded to destroy-and-rebuild and never looked back. It would be another loss in life. Unexpected. Injurious. But something to be overcome. I told my neighbor the house needed a deep renovation - including a completely new, and much stronger foundation, and not the rotting foundation it was lying upon which I had perchance discovered midway through remodeling the lower floor as a front end loader removed the dirt from the buried walls so we could add an extra bedroom and bath to the end of the house. I remember that weekend as being grievous. We were facing a total loss.

Bottom line... I would have to deconstruct the house before reconstructing it properly. It would cost a good deal of money, personal time I didn't have, and the labor of many talented trade workers to overcome the obstacles and oppositions I was facing. And I would have to live with my decisions good or bad. However, the Lord has gifted me with the ability to create investments out of loss. It has been true with lay ministries as it has been true in my life. My gifts it seems is to take challenges and create beauty. Which also means I've had a lot of experience with losses. Or with shoddy envisioning of what beauty means. Or with people or institutions content with the trauma they are living out.

My website, Relevancy22, is a postmodern Christian testament to recreating, or reimagining, a Christianity I was deeply blessed and trained in to maintain its traditional structures. It's classic forms. It's unmitigating foundations. But those structures and foundations needed demolishing - keeping the good as I could while trashing all that withheld seeing God's love truly through the biblical passages and churchly histories and otherwise actions of its people. I had to go through dark days to get there. But the Lord sent me His Holy Spirit to guide through a challenging wilderness to find a way to His light and beauty. It was done by learning to unlearn so that I might re-learn.

So too it is with our lives. We need the Lord's guidance and the discerning grit of hard decisions to be made when we do not know which way to go amid the cacophony of voices telling us what we should do. And for that God had brought to me the help of gifted craftsmen and trades people, a blessed general contractor of generosity and talent, and a small window of purchasing opportunity to buy discounted materials during America's worst times of hurricanes and wildfires. As I labored with the labourers I blessed God many times over during those long 14 months. From beginning to end it was fraught with difficulty personally, financially, health-wise, and emotionally. It was a hard time.

As another example of rebuilding out of neglect let's look at societal structures in their many ways of casual callousness to the suffering and neglect of people living with rot and difficulty on a daily basis. The dispensing of Covid-19 vaccines readily shows to us the struggles we are challenged with in a society when naively promoting our ideals over aiding those truly in need of the miracle vaccine. Rather than serving the homeless, ghettos, the essential, and enfeebled, our dispensatory systems have been prejudiced towards those who have the resources, class, wealth, standing, or perception to receive them. Yet, any nurse, social worker, school administrator, city mayor, priest, pastor, or even private industry boss will learn on their first day whether to choose for equality and fairness or to overlook it in their occupations. Let us chose the path less travelled. The one promising fuller resolve than capitulate to the norm such as profit over care, income over restitution, greed over generosity.

To Serve rather than be Served

Let us at all times be mindful in all things to serve those around us rather than be served ourselves. This is the mindset of Jesus. The challenges in Jesus' day were no different from ours today. So much of our best intentions get usurped by the politician, the greedy, the proud, the corrupt of heart. Their kind of world is dark and odious. But let us be of the light and not of their mindset of self-serving oblivion.

Even those words, or worlds, which might sound "Christian" or "righteous" to our ears can be anything be loving or divine. More like broadbills for waylaid sheep lost and looking for a shepherd but finding crooks and thieves of their souls. And yet, the Lord God has shown His real Self through His Incarnation in the Trinitarian personage of Jesus who opposed the wicked, granted release from bondage to the suffering, and ministered God's love until His death and resurrection into glory while renewing His Covenant of Love double-stamped by His Spirit that He abides with us moment-by-moment in this life and the next.

Those leaderless churches of another gospel are not God's churches of love and welcoming embrace. They are the churches of men who worship the idols of their cultural inheritance and the lies of their future. They protect their past to live as dead people to God in their present. They fear the challenge of change and run from its necessity to moderate, or minister, to the unfortunates in life. Such words, creeds, structures, societies of darkness we would remove, demolish, overcome and replace with love, truth, goodness, and light by leaning into God's continually evolving process of death for renewal, wreckage for reclamation, atonement for redemption, denial of self for resurrection, fear for transformation, and beauty for revival by His Spirit at all times.

Jesus is the benchmark for all humanity. He is the goal and perfector of one's faith. Not the church, not the unenlightened mobs which come and go to the distress of the world of God and man. But Jesus. He is the One we look to for example, truth, and love. Upon Jesus' uplifted Cross we can see the God of Love in full display.

Now this Christmas has come and gone. It's short season is over. Yet Christ has come to us in wintry celebration of His Incarnational Advental Coming. Let us then ask the Lord that Christ's "panpsychic being and becomingness" enters all the way into the deepest parts of our hearts, minds, and souls, as we approach new challenges in this coming new year. Let it be a year of healing. Of atonement. Of redemption. Perhaps, even, a year of hope becoming realized in the work of our hands and feet and lips. Amen and Amen.

And as Ms. Cyrus has well said, "The War is Over." But stop and think... it really is - if... we really want it to be. Thank you Miley.

R.E. Slater

December 28, 2020

11 Memorable Poems About Peace

Goodwill Quotes by GoodReads

Christmas Bells

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat