Churchgoing is probably a common practice for many in Western societies, although apparently this is becoming less popular these days, even among committed followers of Christ. Recently, I read about someone who professes to be atheist yet admits to guilt feelings for sleeping in on Sundays and skipping church. He attributed this to the way he was brought up. As a young person, I remember that missing church services used to be a point of much consternation for some of us. One gimmick some of my friends and I used when we missed Sunday services to assuage the guilt feelings for having missed church was to casually say to a friend when we see them the following week, “Oh, I didn’t see you in church last Sunday!” as a way to distract from the fact that we were the ones who had missed church instead of the other party! What you might call a pre-emptive ambush of sorts!

In any case, for those of us who call ourselves Christians and have been going to church “all our lives” why do we do it? Do we go to church because we want to go, Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Churchgoing

It has been almost two weeks (has it really?) since I posted on Jesus’ clearing out of the temple. I highlighted that the gospel’s story juxtaposed the clearing of the temple with the cursing of the fig tree in a significant way. I drew those two events together as symbolic of Jesus’ abolition of the Old Covenant and establishment of the New. In this post, I will further explain how this event can be seen in context to the flow of the biblical accounts.

As I pointed out earlier, Jesus was incensed at what was happening at the Temple. The main issue with the moneychangers and other traders was not so much a matter of doing business in a house of worship (as some have contended as a mixing of the sacred with the secular) but that what they were doing was their institutionalized oppression of foreigners and the disenfranchised.

Remember that I pointed out earlier that Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: fig tree, Old Covenant, Temple, moneychangers, oppression, foreigners, disenfranchised