!Seventh day of Christmas
 --- 
agk's diary 
31 December 2025 @ 17:59 UTC
 --- 
written on GPD MicroPC
while Evy's home napping with daughter
 --- 

In flesh and truth, Christ's humble, physical birth
in pungent stable on soft, scratchy hay as rain
dripped from holes in the weathered roof, tore down
temples that forgot enfleshed people's needs.

Ancient Mesopotamian temple bureaucracies pardoned
debt every Jubilee, freed slaves, so no oligarch
could accumulate more power than the city-state.
They taxed for the state's needs and to fill the
storehouse with food for all in times of famine.

Descendents of Israel came to live in Egypt because
Jacob counseled Pharaoh to store against famine,
then Jacob ensued the brothers who mistreated him
were fed when famine came. 

If it isn't pardoned, debt compounds, disposesses,
enslaves some, and enriches others until it produces
greed, sadism, civil war. Isaiah and the prophets
asserted Jubilee would be proclaimed again!

In first century Rome and compradore Jerusalem, I
think Roman and Jewish temple bureaucracies were
experienced by some as professionalized, elite,
serving something immaterial, abstract.

The people want good housing, debt relief, meaning-
ful work, family time and cultural autonomy, stable
prices, help in disaster. First century temple elite
abandoned material obligations for immaterial lies:
speculative bubbles where the house always wins,
abusive subscription services, AI slop, chatbot
sycophants, war propaganda.

Revealed Christ negated captured temples. Humble,
physical, fully man, fully God, concerned with debt,
prisoners, hungerers, chained lunatics, and lepers---
the homeless babe was recognized as sovereign by
odorous shepherds, perfumed kings, and governors.

70 years later, when Jerusalem temple was physically
destroyed, congregations gathered around baptism and
communion, and minyans around Rabbis and Torah, may
have remembered living flesh and its human needs.

 Daddy,
 eternal in the time in which I experience life,
 grow us to be more like the image of you we are.

 Please
  - don't let me starve or be a glutton today. Let
    everyone have enough simple food to eat.
  - don't let me be destroyed today by debts or my
    financial power over others. Pardon my debt,
    help me pardon debtors.
  - don't let me be tempted to mistreat anyone today;
    don't let them convict me for evil I didn't do.
    Keep us from sinning, safe from the evil one.

 If temple bureaucracy's irredeemably broken, emerge,
 God's jubilee and justice, organically, everywhere.

 Amen