Lance Orton

This morning’s Texas sunrise From last night’s sunset to this morning’s sunrise. The world will get noisy fast on a Monday, but the light keeps showing up anyway. Here’s a breath of fresh air to start the week.

This morning’s Samwise He is the sass and The sass is with him.

Pleeaaaaaasseee. - Samwise

I went to Caesar’s gate to find Yeshua. He was nowhere to be found.
 I stepped outside into the quiet wind— and there He was. *look for @carrieeorton in this one.

A year ago, I collected all of my highlights from Kindle and saved quotes in Apple Notes in order to create an instructive Gem in @Gemini. The result is a chatbot to which I can pose questions and receive reminders from my own library about what I have read and believe. I am a verbal processor so this is incredibly helpful to me. This morning, I asked it about Mark 12 when the scribe challenges Yeshua on the greatest commandment. Here is a long answer if anyone is interested: *for those who need a sunrise, I have attached one from a few years ago ----------------------------------------- In Mark 12:28–34, when Yeshua observes that the scribe answered nounechōs (wisely, thoughtfully, or with spiritual intelligence), He is not merely complimenting an accurate recitation of Torah. He is recognizing that this scribe has seen through the noise of the temple theater and intercepted the core signal of the Kingdom of God. 1. The Spatial Context: Subversion in the Shadow of the Altar To feel the full weight of the exchange, one must adjust the lens to the physical setting. This conversation does not take place in a quiet academic hall; it occurs in the Court of the Temple in Jerusalem during Passion Week. Just a chapter earlier, in Mark 11, Yeshua had physically disrupted the Temple marketplace, overturning the tables of the moneychangers and animal merchants. The air in the courtyard is literally thick with the stench of burning flesh and fat from the morning and evening sacrifices (holokautōmata). Thousands of animals are being processed through a massive, highly lucrative religious-industrial economy operated by the aristocratic priesthood. In that exact physical atmosphere, the scribe cuts through the smoke and declares that loving God with all the heart, understanding, and strength, and loving one's neighbor as oneself: "...is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." (Mark 12:33) For an authorized scribe of the Law to stand in the Temple precincts and subordinate the entire sacrificial system to the practice of mercy and love was a staggering act of institutional truth-telling. He was publicly stating that the core business of the Temple was not the primary business of God. 2. The Ego’s Addiction to Sacrifice vs. Love Why did religion build such an elaborate sacrificial machine in the first place? Because the human ego vastly prefers transactional sacrifice to transformational love. In Breathing Under Water, Richard Rohr exposes the psychological engine behind performative religion: "The ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control." (p. 25)"Most bogus religion, in my opinion, is highly sacrificial in one or another visible way, but not loving at all. Yet it fools most people." (p. 23) Sacrifice is an economy of control. It allows the religious practitioner to negotiate with the Divine on a balance sheet: I slaughter the bull, I pay the temple tax, I perform the ritual, and thereby I obligate God to bless me and leave my ego intact. It is measurable, external, and keeps God at a safe, transactional distance. In As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Eugene Peterson identifies this same corruption in Ecclesiastes 5: "The 'sacrifice of fools' is the attempt to use God for our own ends." (p. 205) Love and mercy, however, destroy the ledger. You cannot quantify love; you cannot control mercy. Love requires vulnerability, the death of self-justification, and the risk of genuine communion with both God and the messy neighbor. In Jesus’ Plan for the New World, Rohr notes: "Jesus continually interprets the Law of Holiness in terms of the God whom he has met and that God is always compassion and mercy. When the law gets in the way of human compassion Jesus simply disregards the law. He has found its meaning." (p. 87) The scribe saw that sacrifice had become an elaborate cosmetic substitute for the far more demanding work of relational mercy. 3. Dismantling the Scapegoat Mechanism The scribe’s insight also strikes at the root of what René Girard diagnoses in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning regarding sacralized violence: "So sacrifice and scapegoating are two different expressions of the same reality, the victim mechanism by which human societies have typically operated." (p. xii) Archaic religion externalizes its own guilt, violence, and anxiety by slaughtering an innocent victim on the altar to appease the heavens and preserve social order. The Temple cult in Jerusalem had become an institutionalized version of this mechanism. By pairing the Shema (Deut 6:4–5) with Leviticus 19:18 ("Love your neighbor as yourself"), the scribe dismantles the scapegoat mechanism entirely. You cannot love your neighbor while using them—or a surrogate beast—as a transactional pawn to secure your own standing. As Peterson observes in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Leviticus 19:18 is: "...a fiery sentence, an ember of coal warming and illuminating all those tiresome and dull dos and don’ts... Love is not a sentiment; it is a series of concrete actions. It is the practice of justice and mercy in the ordinary details of life." (pp. 36, 38) 4. Why Jesus Says: "You Are Not Far" When Yeshua sees that the scribe grasped this truth, He says: "You are not far from the kingdom of God" (Mark 12:34). Notice the surgical precision of Yeshua's words: He does not say, "You have entered." He says, "You are not far." Why? Because the scribe has achieved High-Resolution Cognitive Clarity, but he has not yet taken the step of Cruciform Congruence. He understands the blueprint intellectually. He has stood on the balcony of the Temple and seen that love outranks the altar. But to actually enter the Kingdom requires abandoning the security of the temple system, sheathing the religious sword of merit, and walking the downward path of love with Yeshua—even when that path leads outside the city gates to a cross. In Mark 13, immediately after this exchange, Jesus walks out of the Temple for good and says of its massive stones: "Not one here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down" (Mark 13:2). The sacrificial system was already an empty shell running on borrowed time. The scribe was standing on the threshold of the New Covenant, where the Temple of stone and smoke collapses, and the only altar that remains is the human heart offering the sacrifice of love, mercy, and unarmored presence.

Samwise - pretty puppy

This morning’s Texas sunrise

Samwise has his eye on you.

I prowl