Vatican Urges Us To Be Like 1st Christians

(Paul’s 1st Letter to the Hooksettians of NH)

Headline in Zenit – “Vatican Says "Yahweh" Not to Be Pronounced. Calls on Practice Used by 1st Christians’

Does that mean some or all of the following practices familiar to 1st Christians?

• Mercy rather than Judgment
• Kindness instead of Kommands
• Women priests like a lot of the people
• Married priests like a lot of the people
• Bachelor priests like a lot of the people
• No caste system of clergy and laity, just people of God
• Selection from the people for presbyters and elders by example, not by an old boy network
• No pope, just a bishop of Rome, or a successor diocese of import like one in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, the Americas, maybe even in Africa or South America, Australia, The Islands of the Pacific
• No papal primacy
• No curia
• No cardinals
• No higher-archs or high priests as in religions of ancient times, B.C. or B.C.E., i.e. Before Christ came to walk with us, talk with us, be with us and show us how to be
• Plenty of elders, a/k/a Overseers – Latin: Episcopus – now called “bishop” as honest-to-God servants of the servants of God
• No narrow, walled, insular Rome but a catholic town spreading out into the universal world, like Ephesus, Alexandria, Antioch, Lyons, Thessalonica, Colossus, Jerusalem, Constantinople, the whole Mediterranean Basin for a start, a bit beyond Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee
• Searching dialogues, discussions, epistles on who, what, when, where, how Jesus is God and we are us
• Lots of real theologians who can think and speak and write clearly, without being forced to think and speak and write as power-grabbers dictate and command
• No propaganda
• No inquisitions
• No believe or die
• No CDF with yankers of licenses to teach
• No Index of Forbidden Books – early Christians couldn’t read?
• No fish on Friday under pain of mortal sin -- Mediterranean Catholics ate fish every day?
• No Limbo – the unbaptized by water were saved by baptism of desire or fire, a theological invention which came later when theology got creative?
• Inner conviction that we are all fallible, as well as primitive and human – oh! so very, very human
• Pretty good idea that God is ineffable
• Fairly firm conviction that we did not create God in our image and likeness
• Banish hubris
• Banish the clothing and jewels and hats and sticks of hubris, too
• Banish Roman collars
• Dress as locals dress
• When in Rome do as Romans do
• When not in Rome, be yourself
• No fake criteria for being religious like naming poverty, chastity and obedience the three sacred vows
• Unvow vows and replace them with humility, selflessness, and service, a/k/a faith, love and hope
• Take faith and love for granted, but heap on the hope, most important theological virtue, without which we are doomed anyway
• Faith, love and hope, for real
• No cruelty under the pseudonym of obedience
• No killing either, particularly for not being obedient
• Teaching not Terror
• No Magisterium – a Lifelong School for Learning by example
• No catechisms for memorization and paul-parrot-recitation-by-rote without understanding or consent
• No uniformity, absolutely no uniformity
• Plenty of differences, like all of us from all over the world
• Free will and its companion, free intellect, a/k/a, free to think and speak and write what intuition teaches rather than brutal logic on command of one from on-high, without being burned alive or condemned into oblivion
• Conversion of others by example rather than by the sword
• Go forth and teach, not kill and enslave
• Love God
• Change the wording of Stoned Commandments from “Thou shalt not” to “Please do” as our way of proceeding without being commanded so to proceed
• Avoid lockstep
• Drop the commandment for obedience: “Love me or I will kill you” for “Love”
• Love God and be loved by God, regardless of Rome or the Vatican or the Curia or some cardinal who got the pope’s ear
• No Vatican
• No Vatican Museum
• No Vatican treasures
• Genuine poverty with sharing for all
• Christianity as it used to be early on
• Freedom, Freedom, Freedom to be fully human, fully alive
• No more food for lions in the Colosseum
• Bread and wine for suppers in memory of him, who offered them at that supper with his apostles
• No absolute power
• No absolute corruption
• Plenty of power by example
• No canon law
• No canons in the law
• No canon for scripture either
• Check out the Gnostics
• No dogma, doctrine, discipline by majority vote in councils
• Lots of dogma, doctrine, discipline by consent willingly, freely given
• No police in those early assemblies, a/k/a church
• No prosecutor, judge and jury in them either
• No executive, legislative, judicial power in one person
• No infallibility in that person either
• No power to rule, only to serve
• A church, as an assembly where two or more are gathered in his name
• Love of others because they are different in color and culture and the way they comb their hair, use their hands
• Abolish Purgatory
• Avoid Hell
• Keep Heaven
• Feel free to invite God to be present in our lives as our friend, wanting our friendship
• No perfection required except from the sinless
• Mistakes are allowed
• Autochthony – saved the best for the last

Practice helps us be. Not perfect. Just be. Thus and only thus, perhaps, can we be like those early Christian Catholics, so we can, in our own times, be who we are in our own cultures. As were our parents and ancestors on, in, and from the earth where we were born and raised and have our very being.

Be happy, be well, be just, do good work, serve others, keep in touch.

Be church.