Tag Archives: Sermon on the Mount

Clerk

Clerk: (n) a person employed to take care of routine activities

I am not completely ignorant.

I do understand that rules are necessary. Without established guidelines, we have many people trying to dictate on the fly, ending up with restrictions which are much more nasty than if they had been thought of before the project began.

But I have just never wanted to be a clerk.

I’m talking about the kind of people who are thrilled there are rules so they can stand with a stony face, reciting them to you as you try to argue, and they sport a
 slight smirk over the control they have achieved.

It happens every day.

Some people are destined to be clerks. They learn the routine and find satisfaction in their lives–sensations of importance–by using the regulations to dash the hopes of those who might walk just a little bit different path.

They quote.

It doesn’t matter if they’re using Shakespeare, the Bible or the company manual–they can give you the exact wording to reinforce their decision to treat you like shit.

Every function in life, every job and every position needs to be tempered by common sense and mercy.

Even the Good Book itself started off with Ten Commandments, shrank to four during the Sermon on the Mount, two later on, and finally ended up with one commandment: love your neighbor as yourself.

For after all, if you do that one, you’re doing the other ten.

When you remove common sense and mercy from your dealings with human beings, you become the catalyst for an unnecessary argument, which can lead to a war.

I don’t want to be a clerk. It’s probably why that position is never offered to me.

Some Big Boss Billy looks me in the eyes and thinks to himself, “I can’t trust that one to be an asshole.”

 

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Cheek

Cheek: (n) either side of the face below the eye.

To write or not to write–there is the question.

As a scribbler of ideas, my “ham” needs to be “let” out at just the right time. Should I talk about butt cheeks? Or take the higher road and
turn to the other cheek?

I could do both. Perhaps the concept the Sermon on the Mount intended us to employ was to moon people, and then allow them to smack our ass. Unlikely possibility, but certainly tickles my innards.

“Yes, my children, when you run across people who mistreat you, pull down your pants and show them your gluteus maximus. And if they decide to slap it, turn the other one to them.”

Of course, I don’t really feel this was the original meaning.

No, there was once a person who walked the Earth who thought it was better to offer the soft tissue of the face, to be bruised, rather than striking out with mayhem and murder.

You can’t break a cheek. It just bruises.

And in that split second–when you decide to turn the other cheek–you let people know that you continue to take the stance of being non-violent, buying time for reason to enter the soul of your adversary. Therefore he or she might give up the attack.

It is risky.

But it certainly is not as risky as reaching up quickly to remove the eye from your enemy, trying to see through your bleeding socket.

 

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Chat

Chat: (v) to talk in a friendly and informal way.

To me, “chat” always seemed like a shortened version of another word. But it isn’t. I thought maybe it was short for “Chatterley.” But that was some lady with a lover.

I used to have a friend who tried to lessen his anger by telling me that he wanted to sit down and “have a chat.” I was always aware that this
 was bad news. His definition of “chatting” was to begin quietly and end screaming. But I guess I have to give him points for trying.

What is a chat?

It is a collection of words not worthy to be called a “talk.”

It is so lacking in value that it doesn’t even get to be considered a “discussion.”

God knows it’s not an “insight.”

And certainly it isn’t an “intercourse” (which should never be used to describe a conversation. Some words only have one meaning.)

“Chat” seems to be infested with a spirit of nonsense–a sensation of insignificance.

It’s the kind of thing where someone says, “Did you see Aunt Myrtle?” and I reply, “We chatted”–to which everyone frowns and thinks, “Oh. Not much there.”

For instance, you would not refer to it as “The Gettysburg Chat.”

Or “The Chat on the Mount.”

No one goes for “marriage chatting.”

Chatting just don’t get no respect.

It is the Rodney Dangerfield of verbiage.

 

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Blasphemy

Blasphemy: (n) the offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things

Dictionary B

Sometimes I allow my idealism to take over the steering wheel and drive me to places of hope.

Generally speaking, there is a car crash along the way.

It’s called “human behavior,” or perhaps, human opinion.

Many years ago I wrote a rock musical called Mountain, which was the Sermon on the Mount set to music. I put together a cast and a twenty-five-city tour.

I was so excited.

The musical had what I considered to be good tunes, choreography, humor and heart.

But my balloon quickly sprang a leak and my dreams began to descend to the Earth.

For you see, some of those who attended objected to the fact that dance was included, since surely Jehovah God only marches and never does the fox trot.

But the most comical attack came from an individual who insisted I had committed blasphemy because in one of the scenes, when Jesus was preparing to share his message, he pauses, miming brushing his teeth.

We thought it was cute. Matter of fact, one of the cast members said “adorable.”

But apparently, to this lady in the audience, it showed great disrespect to connote that the Savior might have experienced halitosis.

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Anno Domini — AD

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Anno Domini A.D. (Abbr.) :In a specified year of the Christian era; “in the year of Our Lord”

I think the closest I ever came was when the town council of my little burg where I was born considered having a day designated to me because the musical I had written was going to be premiering in the capital city.

Unfortunately, the measure was voted down because one of the members of the board was an old rival from high school who always thought I had cheated him out of something or other.

So I, who was unable to get a single day of honor in my city of kin, am greatly enamored–and baffled–by how a rejected carpenter from a tiny village in Mesopotamia, who ended up executed for crimes against the state, managed to get the date of his birth marked as the beginning of modern time.

You have to be honest–there is either something magical about that or this guy hired the best damn Jewish agent around. Am I right here? Even when his name is spoken out loud in anger, it’s still great advertising: Jesus Christ!

I know there are those who cannot believe in a SON of God because they don’t believe in God in the first place–very similar to not wanting to see the movie, Son of Flubber because you were disappointed with the first Flub.

But in thirty-three years of human life, he did something right. Maybe we shouldn’t try to study him so much theologically, but rather, analyzing the chemical reaction of human experience. What did he set off that caused such notice and took him from the tiny, fragmented vision of the Jewish people, to dominate the Greeks, Romans, Angles, Saxons and even the Afrikaans and the Chinese?

His message was simple. That was smart. Even though he never had a car, he realized that anything you want people to remember should fit on a bumper sticker.

  • “Love your neighbor”
  • “Love your enemies”
  • “Blessed are the pure in heart”
  • “You must be born again”
  • “Do unto others”

The list goes on and on. Matter of fact, his famous Sermon on the Mount is merely a hodge-podge of many, many sound bites and slogans, glued together by a devotion to mankind and God. The message was so simple that even those who were considered foolish could grasp it, even if they didn’t embrace it.

And for some reason, a hundred and twenty of the remaining followers of this teacher, who survived the horror of his crucifixion, were not only willing to dedicate the rest of their lives to spreading the message, but sacrificed their lives in a belief about his resurrection.

In other words, I think it’s safe to say that most human beings might pursue a hoax if all it meant was that you had to travel and stay in cheap hotels. But when you’re standing in front of a judge and he offers you clemency, if you deny the message and then you choose death, it’s difficult to believe that there is not some credence to the original experience.

So I shall not lament the failure of my local city council–to grant me a day of recognition in my home town. But I will use the awareness of that slight to be in awe–that as I mark my calendar today, I honor the person with the message of love … who got the ball rolling.

 

Abridge

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abridge: (v.): 1. to shorten (a book, movie, text or speech) without losing the sense. 2. curtail: Even the right to free speech can be abridged.

This happened to me several months ago.

I realized that my essays, speeches, and even books were getting too long. They needed to be abridged. But you see, the only problem with making something shorter is that the evidence of truth is often hidden in the longer discourse.

But our entire world is abridged, via texting, tweeting and even an instinct to summarize deep concepts into brief sound bytes. So I was thinking about famous thoughts or virtues that were once spoken in some length that now would be abridged in our society for the sake of convenience and ease of comprehension:

The Sermon on the Mount — It probably would be summarized via a tweet, to four words: Be good to people. Much would be lost in the translation,k but the tweeter would certainly insist that the summary was sufficient and specifics, unnecessary.

The Gettysburg Address: “Lots of dead people. Let’s honor them.” Even though Abraham Lincoln thought he WAS being brief, his words would still not fit into a tweet.

The Declaration of Independence: “We’re all the same, so chill out.” Thomas Jefferson’s eloquence might be lost in this rendition, but you cannot really tweet multi-syllabic words without abbreviating them anyway.

And of course, there’s The Bible, which would basically be tweeted out: “There is a God. Act accordingly.”

Even though I see the value of an occasional Reader’s Digest abridging of certain aspects of human communication, there are thoughts that require the beauty of language and the interlacing of the fabric of phrases.

So brevity is the soul of wit–but sometimes being witty is not nearly as pretty.