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February 22 - April 2, 2018
But this is a God to whom a turn must be made, a God of demand, a God of demand ready to be a God of grace . . . not just hard demand, not just easy grace, but grace and demand, the way all serious relationships work.
For I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.
that he may have mercy . . . for he will abundantly pardon. Isa. 55:7
as those whose lives are built on your call and your promises—not on the easy, seductive forces around
And if we ponder our destination, perhaps it is to be to the neighborhood of shalom, the neighborhood of shared resources, of inclusive politics, of random acts of hospitality and intentional acts of justice, of fearless neighborliness that is not propelled by greed or anxiety or excessive self-preoccupation.
Jesus affirmed that it is possible to be in the world in a new way, to be present to the people and problems around us with some newness and freshness.
Get your mind off yourself long enough to care; be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that you don’t have to worry about your place, your church, your class, your values, your vested interests.
Christians in our society are cast exactly between these voices epistemologically, deciding if we have faith that seeks understanding or if our learning is simply power packaged as knowledge.
Christians in our society are cast between these voices in terms of political and economic power, to see whether we can honor the pain-filled voices of marginality or if we will notice only the tired claims of the old monopolies.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? —Isaiah 55:1–2a
Do what is in sync with the God of the gospel, the God who has another intention for our lives, who wants us out of the rat-race of “big is better” and so has mercy, who gives us pardon when we do not do enough by doing two things at once.
Either way, the truth of the gospel compels us to decide about the things that make God unhappy and the things that make God happy. Because God is God, there are habits of death and there are habits of life.
What an energy and a newness if liberals and conservatives together would make cause together, that we do not want to choose the hard way but must decide to anyway. And then Paul grows lyrical: God chose what is foolish to show the wise little acts of compassion that violate our learning. God chose what is low and despised in the world to reduce to nothing the things that are low and despised, in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, and the rulers of the world are not finished with him yet.
the world waits for newness; settled wisdom knows nothing of newness; settled wealth knows nothing of newness; settled power knows nothing of newness.
the future beyond failure depends completely on God and not us;
We people of faith do not have life on our terms. And we, like Moses, have to decide that we will walk into the future on terms other than our own.
Gathering God, draw us out beyond our cramped circles of care. Draw us toward the neighbor, the other, the outsider, the hurting one. May we practice compassion. Amen.
What if the church becomes the venue for processing loss and acknowledging grief for a world that is gone? It is precisely such processing of grief that permits hope.
And now we stand before the new chance of gospel possibility and old managed truth. Old managed truth, like the rule on the Sabbath, takes many forms. It can be the old world of privilege and power and control. It can be the old truth of settled church orthodoxy. It can be the old mantras of market ideology that reduce life to owning and having and eating.
God—the generous creator who gives good gifts—is the center of your life and that the self-taken-alone does not have the resources or capacity to make a good life.
The alternative to self-focus is to move one’s attention away from self to know that our life is safely and well held by God, who loves us more than we love ourselves, to relish the generosity of God and so to be free of the anxieties and needs and hungers of those who are driven by a mistaken, inadequate sense of self.
God at the center of our lives, our true life is found only in you. May we let go of all that is not life, all that is not you, that we may live in that freedom granted through the cross. Amen.
Goodness and mercy pursue me.” God’s friendliness and kindness will run after me and chase me down, grab me, and hold me.
Our life is not willed by God to be an endless anxiety. It is, rather, meant to be an embrace, but that entails being caught by God.
Desire one thing: God’s presence. And you will be less driven by all those phony desires that matter not at all.
Jesus says to him: “You’ve got to start over! You’ve got to be reborn. You’ve got to be born again. You’ve got to be born from above. You’ve got to become as vulnerable and innocent and dependent as a little child.
In this season of Lent, O God, unsettle us. Increase in us that sense of gnawing that arises from the incongruity between our lives and the life to which you call us, and transform us in newness. Amen.
This is Lent. We are in a season on the way to new life, but now it is time for passion, suffering, death, denial, repentance. In our Lent we yearn for Easter. In our deathliness, we wonder about the gift of life.
Lent is a time to think about another diet, another nourishment, another loyalty.
•We can refuse to recognize that we are caught in the snares of death. •We can deny the saving power of God who changes everything. •We can reject a new life of gratitude.
your job is to get your mind off your ways of need and control, to give your life over to God’s large, hidden way in your life.
In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.
The defining mark of the Easter world is divine, cosmic generosity that outruns our need and our want and our hope and our desire, to endow us with every good gift, most wondrously the gift of new possibility.
Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God’s future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present.
Teach us to identify with the suffering
They believed he would indeed disrupt their failed world, though they knew not how.
We do not need poetry or artistry or imagination, if we only want to wallow in our status quo. The poet stakes a claim against such present reality. This act of imagination subverts our status quo and invites us to an alternative.
The truth is that frightened people will never turn the world, because they use too much energy on protection of self.
only God creates, only God works a genuine new possibility, a new thing beyond our expectations and our extrapolations.
But he was speaking of the temple of his body.
We find ourselves with Easter liberty to be our true selves as he himself was his true self.
We are eager for Easter joy and new life, and yet we are haunted by the space between where we are and where you are. Grant us a new mind, a new readiness, a new heart, that we might stand with you in self-emptying obedience. Amen.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. —Romans 15:13
All around now are barriers and gates and fences that draw lines around gifts and possibilities and resources and access. The lines are drawn closer and closer until all are excluded except the blessed, cunning ones, and even they are left nervous about when the next wall will be built and who will then be excluded.
Out beyond the world of exclusion and rejection and hostility, there is on offer a world of welcome that sees the other not as threat or competitor but as cohort on the pilgrimage of humanity.
That alternative world of welcome is signed by bread and by wine; but it is known by lives that reach out and touc...
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This narrative about the Sunday guy is urgent among us because it is clear that the old narratives of money and power and violence and control have failed.
Forbid us too-easy exits out of the darkness.
