OK, after being distracted by the financial news and some doomsaying, back to the lectionary

Hebrews 3:1-6

¹Therefore, brothers and sisters, holy partners in a heavenly calling, consider that Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, ²was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses also “was faithful in all God’s house.” ³Yet Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. ⁴(For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) ⁵Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that would be spoken later. ⁶Christ, however, was faiithful over God’s house as a son, and we are his house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope.

We are back to fatherhood and heirarchies. Christ  is seen as obedient — and Moses is seen as obedient to Christ (who is the builder of the temple and the law). And our hope is in Christ being God’s son.

Which forces us to deal with God as father. And this sticks in many people’s throats. But if we parse out the justification within the law for our salvation, we are left with this.

No changing language gets around this. Nor can we justify any position where God has to change because of our feelings. Our salvation is quite simple, but parsing this out is quite complicated.

This morning there was this in the Otago daily Times.

Last year, Fonterra froze its domestic milk prices from February to December in the wake of rocketing international prices.

A “softening” of the international price was behind the impending domestic market change, the spokesman said.

Progressive Enterprises spokesman Luke Schepen said it was “good to see the price of milk coming down”.

This is not good news. NZ makes a fair bit of money exporting milk and milk products and wants a relatively high price. This flows to farmers, and into more prosperous provinces, and keeps us running minimal trade deficits.  And this has very little to do with the US consumer because our products are not allowed into the USA — thanks to their dairying lobby.  We are facing deflation of basic food stuffs, despite our currency remaining at basically the same rate (80 US cents).

Which reminds me of Mark Steyn’s quip about small countries being able to decline and recover, while large powers crash. The NZ dollar could gently deflate. But we are not printing money. The US is. And it could crash. Because you cannot run up debt forever. at some point it will stop. You will be adjudged bankrupt, and no banker will lend you, nor will any quasi bank such as the IMF.

If you are Iceland, this is not a disaster. But if you are a global power, this destabilizes everything.