I will quote from a weekly homily (2/1/2023) from Page 7 of The Cavalier Chronicle, entitled Credit Where Cred Is Due. The homily is for Sunday, 2/5/2023, and is from the 1992 Common Revised Lectionary. Then I will respond to the text.: “This life is not all about us. We are not the center of the universe. God is. So whom do our actions glorify? Our good deeds should be a witness for God. Find out more this week in church. Let your light shine. Matthew 5:13-20.”
Judeo-Christian altruist-collectivist ethics regards people as naturally bad, so they are selfish, and need to be good, selfless, and other-centered.
That ethical stance is the first principle underpinning this biblical passage. This life, which each of us is living, is about us, but it is not all about us, and perhaps not ultimately about us.
The proper relationship between the individual and God is not, on one hand, about being irreligious, proud, arrogant and without God in one’s life, boasting and exalting the self against in defiance of God, and that this sinful rebellion against God so angers God that God will humble us in this world and the next in some sort of revenge, or, on the other hand, being utterly submissive, self-effacing and self-denying—humbling the self voluntarily and first so God does not do it for one to one--out of love and fear of the Divinity.
This disjunctive set of choices are both extremist, theatrical, attacks on the self, and offensive to the good deities like Jesus because these deities are proud individuators and individualists (much more powerful and smart than are humans) that want an open, honest, loving but respectful worship from humans that are individuators and individualists, living as the good deities command that we live.
The extremes of sinful, high-and-mighty, contemptuous hostility towards God or masochistic, self-denying displays of prostrate submission to God are not approaches that please or satisfy God.
Rather, God is the first among rough equals, a President for life of our spiritual constitutional republic.
We are not the center of the universe, but the good deities are, but we are not pond scum to the good deities like Jesus either.
Our good deeds should be a witness for God, and we should let our light shin
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