in a mirror dimly: Reflections on Easter
A good friend of mine, my youth pastor (as a youth) and now an elder at the church I’m in community at just started his own blog. A cyber-home for his very good thoughts.
inamirrordimlynm:
Good Friday is a bit of a buzz-kill. I don’t like to think about death. Most of us don’t I would guess. It’s the inevitable shadow at the end of the tunnel we would like to put off as long as possible and keep as far out of mind as possible.
The original good Friday must have been a…
We, and our opinions and perspectives do not dictate what the Church is now and certainly not what it has been, and the experience of this loss of control is itself salutary. We are not the hub, the spring of significance, the norm of interpretation in the Church, and neither is any other one segment of the body. The Church was clearly blasphemously wrong for the greater part of two millenia on the subject of slavery; many would add that it has been no less wrong for even longer about the status of women. To be ‘catholic’ now means to resist the temptation to blot out and forget this past and the equally powerful temptation to condemn from a superior vantage-point. This kind of catholicity obliges us to recognize the Church’s continuing liability to failure and betrayal … We can only be grateful that even a slave-owning church had just enough sensitivity to the challenge of the gospel for a protest to be generated (however slowly) and a new awareness - of which we are the direct beneficiaries - to come into being. This is a catholicity which may weep over the universal liability to error, yet rejoice at the universal pressure towards truth, penitence, and transformation.
(via simplyanglican)
Listen to this again:
Colorblindness has nothing to do with eradicating racism. It is about denying its existence and power.
That is the truth. We are all racists. We’re hardwired to like people who are similar to us, and we’re hardwired to be a little afraid of people who are different from us. It’s part of our makeup. The thing is, though, that we don’t have to let this be all we are. We can choose something better. Believe me: it is a choice. It’s not an easy choice. It’s not a choice we manage to make 100% of the time. But we can choose — we must choose! — to extend respect and dignity to all human beings.
Go support this on Kickstarter and make it happen!
The Kingdom of God is… | Involuntary-Guest-Post
Ever so often I read a blog post, a chapter in a book, a line in a song that makes my heart leap and my soul swell with a resounding YES. This post by Sara at her blog Emerging Mummy is one of those.
Here is an Involuntary-Guest-Post. Read the entire post including the introduction at her blog.
All good and perfect gifts come from the Father. The same Father watching a road for a wayward son, the same Father that gave everything to the older son too. The same Father that cured sin throws the doors open, parties with prostitutes and thieves.
(Photo by joe miller)
Whenever I find myself judging another, may I choose instead to extend love.
Whenever I am given the choice to treat people different from myself with fear, prejudice or contempt, may I choose instead to extend love.
Forgive me for thinking of myself more highly than others, for I do not know anyone’s heart but my own. And indeed, my own heart is in need of repair.
And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.
…language can be a window through which one glimpses God, but never a box in which God can be contained.
This makes light of the issue - but I can’t help but wonder if this might be true.
What if it is?
What if it isn’t?
Does love conquer all?
“Ever since Nietzsche it has been customary to sneer at the apparently wimpish vision of human life in the Beatitudes: the meek, the mourners, the merciful, and so on – when surely everyone knows that the people who make the world go round are the arrogant, the go-getters, the people with sharp swords or at least sharp elbows, the pushy, the proud.
Actually, all Nietzsche did was to articulate what many people, including many would-be Christians, had believed de facto for centuries, but the point is that they, and he, were wrong.
Every professor knows how frustrating it is when a student comes to class so arrogantly convinced of their own theory that they cannot pay attention to the evidence. (Sometimes, of course, students feel that about professors, too, and that makes its own point.)
A University will thrive and flourish, and a society led by its graduates will thrive and flourish, when the Beatitudes’ different, upside-down vision of human flourishing takes effect: when people realise that humility and meekness before the evidence and before one’s peers are the marks of real academic strength; when they recognise that a hunger for justice and a love of mercy form the elusive centre of healthy societies; when they discover that, having invented a thousand clever machines for making war, it is long overdue that they should find one that would make peace.”
— N. T. Wright, The Great Story
I really needed to read this today.
Just yesterday I was saying that I find the ‘brand’ of Christianity I frequently encounter from some of the vocal Christians I know or hear seems to favour the idea violent power and strength, and an angry God. I keep hearing that this message of love and mercy is over-rated. That peace will only come when we wage war and that Christianity has become too ‘sissy’. It’s never said in so many words of course, but that’s what the many statements boil down to at the end of the day… At least to me.
And I just don’t get it.
It leaves me feeling hopeless and confused.
Like the Black Eyed Peas I can’t help thinking, “Where is the love?”
I never thought someone could write a post tying N.T. Wright and Black Eyed Peas together…
Life in Christian-Conservative T̶e̶x̶a̶s̶ Barbados
Replace ‘Lubbock, Texas’ with ‘Barbados’ and this says it almost perfectly.
This small island-country is pretty much the Bible-Belt of the Caribbean. And if life in Lubbock Texas seems contradictory and confusing, life here is equally as paradoxical.
Behind the facade of dread-locks, sandy beaches and sunburnt tourists - the Caribbean is a strange blend of extremely conservative Christian culture and fairly liberal behavior.
The Fine Print Gospel #2
I thought of a series of these this morning as I was waking up, which means this is either a great idea or completely idiotic.
The Fine Print Gospel #1
