Sometimes it’s so hard to believe, but nevertheless it’s true. God’s wisdom is wiser than human wisdom and God’s wisdom is Christ and Christ crucified. This seems so foolish and foolishness it is. Yet, God’s foolishness outstrips all false powers and authorities, unmasking their desperate attempts to manipulate and control people for their own ends. If we are to be spiritual people, God’s foolishness should permeate our lives, so that we might be truly wise.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Monday, December 9, 2013
Reflection for the Week–December 9
A Christian view of spirituality affirms the truth that there is a creational spirituality. That is, the created world is a world that we are to explore, care for, and sustain as stewards of what has been made. Living and true spirituality does not reject the material world, but engages it in service of God. We are, therefore, to imaginatively participate in the earthly and contribute to bringing goodness to all areas of life. As God has not left creation or humans to desolation, decay, or ultimate death, neither should we consent to dying forms of spirituality that have no capacity to redeem and renew the created.
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Friday, December 6, 2013
Friday Musings – December 6
Feelings of betrayal and abandonment are awful. Life is never less than these, though remember, it is always so much more. While time, precious time, will be necessary to process and work through our sense of hurt and rejection, love and acceptance remains the backdrop that surpasses it all. Seek, therefore, to fill up the empty spaces with good and thereby embrace the “so much more.”
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Thursday Thought – December 5
Out of the mists of time, God authoritatively re-visits the world in Messiah, who magisterially deals with the plight of Israel and humanity through cross and resurrection.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms–December 4
The age long debates about the Christ have reached a stale and musty status quo. As theologians in general and philosophers in particular went down the false path of trying to sort out the ‘what’ of God, his substance – essence, the real question that probably lied on the hearts and minds of early Christians and should resonate with our own, was the mega narrative consideration of ‘who’ God is. This means that the true path of discovery moves in the direction of the ‘identity’ of divinity, rather than its speculative composition. Christ as son of God, for example, is recognized as having the same ‘identity’ as the God of Israel, and then he enacts that ‘identity’ to the awesome degree of a tight compatibility, which didn’t slip out of history, but was noticed and testified to in a plurality of ways. Packed with density, this identification trajectory begins to make good sense, as the interlocking sub-plots connect with the plot, and therefore offer a renewed perception of Messiah and all he means for God, humanity, us, and the world.
Monday, December 2, 2013
Reflection for the Week - December 2
God's way of reconciliation is configured in the death of the Crucified One, which results in not reckoning people's sins against them. God has done everything that there is to be done from his side in order for us to be reconciled. This "logos" of reconciliation has been downloaded into new covenant, which through God's initiation, is written on human hearts and not tablets of stone. But the absolutely massive context for all this is God’s reconciling the world to himself in Christ. This is a big story – a mega-narrative going far beyond personal individualistic salvation, culminating in a new heaven and earth. And if God is reconciling the world to himself in Christ, we are to be ambassadors of this reconciliation, as those through whom God makes his appeal to others.
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Friday, November 29, 2013
Friday Musings – November 29
Admitting that there isn’t total truth will not lead to total relativism. Neither are plausible options. What’s true and what’s relative would seem to have to be considered by degrees, not totalities.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Thursday Thought – November 28
Some things can’t be mediated, but where possible and mediation brings us closer to truth than leaving us further away from it, let’s do it.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms–November 27
The incisive depiction of self-deception found in the biblical text is striking. We are never the selves we simply assume ourselves to be. Consequently, self-designation for good or ill is severely limited, leaving us adrift in a sea of questionable options. There can be no doubt about it – we are in need of more - being and becoming new selves. Receiving the gift of a new self anchored in a call from beyond generated by the love of the Infinite One, deconstructs the death force of manipulative power strategies and sets us on the pathway to life with all its detours and complexities. Vistas of past, present, and future now opened up along the journey are breathtaking, as time and story coalesce and separate on the glistening horizon of the Divine promise of redemption.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Reflection for the Week – November 25
Grace, Grace, Superabundant Grace. I’m thankful I can trust that God will remember me. I leave my destiny to his imaginative impulse of resurrection.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Friday Musings–November 22
Self-knowledge is often viewed as the need to recognize a total dependence on God. I’m not even sure what a total dependence on God might look like, and if I did, it doesn’t seem like it would essentially have any bearing on several dimensions of self-knowledge.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Thursday Thought – November 21
To come to a better understanding of self-knowledge means recognizing that a key feature of knowing oneself is a participation in being known.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms–November 20
Total self-control or total God dependence are not realistic options for life. Totalities are just out of the question. We lack access. Rather, it seems to me that God challenges us to be “dependently independent.” This blended configuration has to be worked out, but it gives us an opportunity to be the creatures he intended us to be, instead of violating ourselves, others, or God through totalizing illusions.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Reflection for the Week–November 18
If the biblical text is not historical in certain places, this is not necessarily a loss of revelatory value. The text has to be taken and read genre by genre. There may be a marked difference, for example, between Genesis 1-3 and the Gospels, though the Gospels may not in every instance be loaded with a historical impulse for them to be packed with sufficiently true testimonies that radiate revelation. A careful reading of the biblical informer then is not an all or nothing enterprise, but an engaging with and being engaged by various interpreted expressions, facts, and stories that God participates in configuring, so that we might be called out of darkness and into light.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Friday Musings–November 15
Beyond the fleeting idolatrous deceptions of the metanarratives of absolutism and relativism, lies the steadfast truth of the Crucified and Risen One.
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