I write this to you because of how many of you have been challenged about your participation in the life of this church, often with the accusation: but what do they believe over there at Mars Hill? As if belief, getting the words right, is the highest form of faith.
Jesus came to give us life. a living, breathing, throbbing, pulsating blow your hair back/tingle your spine/roll the windows down and drive fast/experience of God right here, right now.
Word taking on flesh and blood.
And so you’ve found yourself defending and explaining and trying to find the words for your experience which is fundamentally about a reality that is beyond and more than words.
So when you find yourselves tied up in knots, having long discussions about who believes what, a bit like dogs doing that sniff circle when they meet on the sidewalk, do this:
Take out a cup and some bread
and put it in the middle of the table,
and say a prayer and examine yourselves
and then make sure everybody’s rent is paid and there’s food in their fridge and clothes on their backs and then invite everybody to say ‘yes’ to the resurrected Christ with whatever ‘yes’ they can muster in the moment and then you take that bread and you dip it in that cup in the ancient/future hope and trust that there is a new creation bursting forth right here right now and then together taste that new life and liberation and forgiveness and as you look those people in the eyes gathered around that table from all walks of life and you see the new humanity, sinners saved by grace, beggars who have found bread showing the others beggars where they found it
and in that moment space
place
remind yourselves that
this is what you
believe.
Remember, the movement is word to flesh.
Beware of those who will take the flesh and want to turn it back into words.
Going to school in Afghanisatan.
Egypt, 2011.
Click photos to view large.
“At His coming, all things approach their judgment. Wise men find their redemption, a wicked king finds his downfall. Angels find their voices and raise them in a manner that exceeds any praise ever offered. Israel becomes the God-trodden land and the Land of Promise becomes the Land of Fulfillment.”
So much wisdom here.
Jean Vanier is the founder of L’Arche, an international foundation which “enables people with developmental disabilities to play their full part in their society…through creating outward facing communities where people with and without disabilities can share life, affirming one another’s unique values and gifts.” L’Arche is also the place Henri Nouwen spent many of the later years of his life working and living in community while he continued to write.
Oh Christmas tree.
Google News visualized.
This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”
By Kate Tropa.
If you don’t take their money, they can’t tell you what to do.
I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done
and in what I have failed to do,
through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.
The new Roman Missal adds “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” to the assembly confession.
Also, the people’s response to “The Lord be with you” is now “And with your spirit” instead of “And also with you.”
Hundreds of people all around the world recorded a piece of their life on the same day, July 24th, 2010.
The world is beautifully complex.
“Older brother, restless soul, lie down
Lie for a while with your ear against the earth.”
Blood by The Middle East
