Autism is my super blessing! I'm a high-school valedictorian, college graduate, world traveler, disability advocate. I'm a Unitarian Universalist. I'm a Progressive Liberal. I'm about equal rights, human rights, civil & political rights, & economic, social, &cultural rights. I do servant leadership, boundless optimism, & Oneness/Wholeness. I'm good naked & unashamed! I love positive personhood, love your neighbor as yourself, and do no harm! I'm also appropriately inappropriate! My self-ratings: NC-17, XXX, X, X18+ & TV-MA means empathy! I publish shows at 11am! Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4
episode 77: Bibliolatry is the worship of a book, idolatrous homage to a book, or the deifying of a book. Worshipping religious texts is immoral!
"1. Jesus is funny
Growing up, I guess I had an image of Jesus from paintings or stained glass windows. Isn’t he distant, emaciated, in pain? But there he is in Luke 10:21—“full of joy.” This word, agalliaō, notes Robert H. Mounce, is “a very strong word depicting unrestrained joy.”
The pacing and tone of his speech seem to have been badly misread. Jesus jokes. He tells one in Luke 14:14–24 that is a bit sexual. The set-up is: three guys get invited to a party. All three say they can’t come. Karl Hand, in “A Wicked Sense of Humor,” maps out the connections:
The first declines because he has acquired land and needs to try it out, the second has acquired oxen and needs to try them out, the third because he has acquired a wife and needs to…decline the invitation. The pregnant pause allows the listeners to observe the sexual implications of the declined invitation — the unspoken ‘‘I must go and try her out . . .” "3. Jesus is gender-bending sexyGrowing up, I thought the messiah came off masculine and not too cute. A regular guy, was the idea. Isn’t that how men were supposed to be? The gospels don’t describe Jesus’ body, but the Old Testament prophet Isaiah does say the messiah will have “no form nor comeliness…no beauty…” (53:2)
That might refer to him having little social importance. As Joan E. Taylor explains in What Did Jesus Look Like? (2018), early Christians understood Jesus to be smoking hot—citing the messianic Psalm 45, a long praise of a beautiful man: “Youthful in beauty you are, beyond the sons of men; grace was poured on your lips.”
But this is the Bible, where heroes—from Joseph to David—tend to be a bit girly. If studying the clues to Jesus’ gender presentation, we don’t see that he’s too manly. As Aída Besançon Spencer notes: “Jesus never uses the Greek masculine term anēr (male) for self-description. Jesus always uses the generic or inclusive term anthrōpos (human).”
He calls himself the ‘son of Man’. “In Hebrew the phrase simply means ‘a human being’,” notes Walter Wink."