Edith Schaeffer, Lisby's grandmother, died today.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
The ZigZag Café - March 28
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Here in Switzerland we still recognize something of the relevance of Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. That is to say, they’re still days off for most. Do you think religious markers such as these are important for a culture?
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms - March 27
Awaken us, oh God, to the power of your forgiveness and grace, so that we might experience your love and share this profound truth and community with others. We often struggle with acceptance and approval. It’s all too easy, in reality, to make a mess of things. May your redemption dear Lord, through the power of the Spirit, intensely slash into our lives and forever remind us that our sins are washed away in the blood of the Crucified One, and please radically affirm in us our astounding directedness of being renewed day by day through the resurrected life of the Risen One, as we move towards our ultimate destiny.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Reflection for the Week - March 25
In the early part of the Genesis narrative, we read that God is the Creator of the world and present in it. Creation exists because this particular God created it. It has a sanctity, but not of its own. Creation, therefore, is special and central for many reasons, most notably because it is created with purpose and a divinely personal touch. We also read that there is a clear biblical mandate for respecting creation; caring for it based on God’s actions and enabling creation to fulfill its purpose of praising God. But the created is not God. The soil, sun and moon, animals, and humans are distinct from God. They are not divine. And God, who is Divine, is not some impersonal force or energy aligned with everything else, but a set-apart, personal God—one who relates, makes covenants, and speaks and acts within creation in an ongoing way. We should not think of God as caught up without restraint in the created world or exclusively identified by it. The Genesis God is the God who sees, names, replies to, and proclaims that what is created is good for its purpose. Thus, God is related to and distinct from creation. When Christians ignore either of these two truths, they do so at their own theological and spiritual peril.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
The ZigZag Café - March 21
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What advice would you give someone struggling with low self-esteem?
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms - March 20
I have long struggled with questions of selfhood and identity. There has been so much blurring and blending edges together that viable relationality seems harder and harder to come by. Truth be told, this is my next big project after writing the book on Imagination. My provisional thoughts are moving in this direction. I wager that at least four sources have to be in dialogue for a better picture of who a self is and what makes me who I am. First, God’s point of view is crucial. Acknowledging the problematic of trust and suspicion marks out the landscape and confirms that I need help in discerning appropriate directions. Second, my own perspective is indispensable. There is no legitimate way that I can remove or entirely ignore myself, as my view of myself plays a role concerning whether I’m trustworthy or deceived. Envisioning me in some way or another is part of being human. Third, the responsible other’s outlook is vital. People who know me have a say so as to who I am and can present a challenge of my own pretensions, be they positive or negative. Fourth, the natural world is essential. I can often take nature for granted, but when I do so and get it wrong, I usually end up having to comply. Nature is bigger than I am. When these four relationality ties interact, I should be able to formulate a healthier notion of selfhood and identity, which begins to make sense and becomes fitting for a truer embrace of who me is.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Reflection for the Week - March 18
The New Testament clearly highlights that God is love and that Christians are to love God, themselves, and others. Being loved by God then is an invitation to love. Loving our neighbor as ourselves, loving our enemies, and loving strangers are actions that should identify us as lovers. In a quite stunning and remarkable manner, therefore, God’s love for us opens up possibilities of having a greater love than could ever be the case otherwise.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
The ZigZag Café - March 14
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Someone mentioned to me, “When I’m wronged, I assume I’ve done something wrong.” What do you make of this person’s assumption?
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms - March 13
There is so much controversy about the interpretation of early Genesis nowadays that I have devoted some time and energy to trying to better understand the text. This is not the place to go into great detail about my work, but I would like to offer a few quick thoughts for your consideration.
Two of my reasons for delving more deeply into Genesis are: it is a complex and much debated story about times past, and it is such a remarkably unique text, when compared to other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts. Genesis, for example, de–deifies nature and humanity, as no other story of beginnings does. What is avant-garde and always will be about the creation stories in Genesis 1-3, is their relentless focus, not on the cosmic architecture of nature, but on relationality: God, humanity, and the world. This perspective provides us with both a meaningful structure for and a re-description of reality, which places these chapters in a sacred and destiny oriented context that invites us to make contact with the Creator. In this sense, the text is a living text that recycles our interpretive trajectory through a poetic network of divine and creaturely actions, purposes, and goals.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Reflection for the Week - March 11
There is an acute and desperate need for creating genuine and authentic Christian communities. Churches exist in abundance, but many believers today are sitting on the sidelines about to give up on the faith, or abandoning the church altogether. Searching and perceptive Christians are becoming refugees in what should be the land of the living. When buildings, programs, and events are prioritized above people, we lose the path toward true love and community. In order to reverse our spiritual impoverishment, we need God’s help. It is imperative to move in new directions. Our churches ought to first be true communities. People are the priority. Hospitality, love, and forgiveness are to take precedence, and our communities should be places of alluring redemptive grace. Christian communities, therefore, are not to be “other-worldly,” but “this-worldly.” We are to be down-to-earth, sharing life together in real ways, being real people, and living in the real world. And Christ is to be Lord of it all.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
The ZigZag Café - March 7
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Some say, “I’m not asking for anything more from them than I would expect from myself.” How should Christians live with their expectations of others?
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Living Spiritual Rhythms - March 6
In theory, Christians acknowledge the importance of having the Bible as the map for the journey, but in practice they tend to ignore it in favor of what they interpret as the direct intervention and revelation of the Spirit. Personal and immediate prompting's are assumed to be more spiritual than a careful contemplation of the map. And at what cost? The expense is spiritual impoverishment. There are an unfortunate set of similarities between some of the make-it-up-as-we-go-along views in our culture, and those operating in some Christian circles. These should remind us of our tendency toward false absolutization and the danger of self-deception. Lamentably, biblical map studies often turn into mumbo jumbo, where ambiguity and hyper-subjectivity are as prominent as they are in non-Christian contexts. Cultivated and honed map-reading skills are less prevalent and regrettably marginalized when it comes to our views of spirituality.
Let’s say you meet with twenty-four other people for a Bible study where you all read the same part of the Scriptural map. But then you all “discover” that the Spirit revealed a different interpretation of the map to each of you. And you all piously maintain that your perspective was given to you directly from the Spirit. That would mean that the Spirit is telling each of you to head off in different directions according to your own personal revelation. While this might be possible, it is highly unlikely. This view is closer to relativism than it is to the guidance of the Spirit. The high risk of interpretive self-deception here must not go unchecked.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Reflection for the Week - March 4
In some churches, people currently receive teaching about kingdom life, kingdom theology, kingdom prosperity, and so on. They learn that the Kingdom of God has already arrived in its fullness and everything is here for the taking. Other churches teach their congregations that the Kingdom of God is important, but not for this present life. These people are taught that the Kingdom of God has not yet arrived, but will at some point in the future. Still other churches completely ignore the Kingdom of God, attaching little or no importance to it whatsoever. All three of these orientations are unhelpful. Better to think of the Kingdom of God as a dynamic action and rule that includes God as Creator, God as love, God as judge, God as the covenant-making King of the universe and Israel. This reigning activity was manifested in the Messiah, the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, the church, redemption now, and ultimately final blessing and judgment on the coming day of Christ. The Kingdom of God, therefore, is to be understood as both already present and not yet complete. Churches that polarize, by teaching that the Kingdom of God is either already fully present, not yet present at all, or to be paid no attention to, fail to adequately represent this tensional perspective. An already/not yet tension is closer to biblical narrative, than a either/or resolution.
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