cairns

Have been thinking about the lesson Steve taught at a previous missions weekend about Cornelius, Peter, the vision of the sheet, the Gospel, the conversion, and the reaction of the church. I learned so much that day, that continues to make more and more sense in light of what I am learning now.

I used it for my devotional in today’s class on Standards Based Differentiated Instruction.

Simon Peter knew the Standards!! He even argues with God as if this is a test he will pass by staying true to the scriptural standards.  But God shows up and reveals a new standard, love and acceptance for all.

He goes and shares the knowledge of his own story and experience with non-Christians who are already God followers, but whom he has been taught his whole life to consider too unclean to visit. And he and those with him see them filled with the Spirit of God. Then, the real rub is that criticism comes from the Church and Peter has to convince them he did not commit a horrible act by visiting with, preaching for, and baptizing these folks who already loved God!

It just brings me up short. Who are the people we (the people I) still consider unclean? Which laws of the Old Testament (or even the New) might God be lowering on a sheet to say, “Quit clinging to these and go love who I love?”  I am sure God is at least saying, “Your interpretation of my Word, is not my Word.  Give it up and do what I am doing.”
peace

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I just finished Tomlinson’s Re-enchanting Christianity.  He makes the strongest case I have ever read that the Gospel represents the news of redemption of everyone and everything.

On the face of it, it immediately leads to more “Christian” responses to the rest of the world, including the people of other beliefs and no beliefs, the animal and plant kingdoms, and the planet itself.  If God originally declared them all “good,” and has now declared them all “redeemed,” “ransomed,” “rescued,” or “saved,” how dare we treat them as anything less than God does?  Tomlinson lays out scriptural evidence for it while refusing to descend into anything goes, all beliefs are right, pantheistic nonsense.  He is not easy to dismiss.  His references and arguments make sense.

And they match what I continue to encounter in the world.  The Native American way was more respectful toward the Creator and the Creation than any church I have yet to attend.  The ancient Chinese, and many of their descendants right up to and through the age of Mao, worship the same God of creation while admitting with humility that to claim full knowledge of this God is hubris at a level the Judeo-Christian world would label blasphemy.  The African “animists” I was told about growing up as worshipers of evil spirits headed surely to hell unless missionaries arrived to teach them the “way of salvation,” turn out also to have  been people (with flaws like all other people) but also deeply connected to all levels of creation.  Exposure to the “christian” west turned them not to life but to generations of war and death.  The Ethiopians turn out to have a connection to the Jewish God far back into antiquity and a “Christian” church older than any other continuous group on the planet.

I meant it when I said I feel closer to God working or socializing with the staff of Christa than in the organization I have mistakenly agreed to call the church.  There is too little God, too much use of people as objects, too much exclusivity in the place I am leaving.  There just may be a wide open Kingdom of widely diverse individual souls moving into wholeness (holiness) and community out in the spaces I am now exploring.

I still see Jesus as central to all of it.  He is the ultimate expression of the Creator as the loving pursuer of relationship with all of creation.  As the book quotes Don Cupitt,

What Jesus preached was ‘the kingdom’ ; what he got was the church!

John 3:35

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.

It gives a whole new level of hope and faith to First Corinthians 13, so often used for a very different message.  Knowing that Love is the ultimate definition of God revealed in Jesus, Paul writes,

⁴ Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; ⁵ does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; ⁶ does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; ⁷ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸ Love never fails. [Really read that! Never fails!  If man can choose wrongly and go to Hell, then love has failed.  That simply is NOT what it says!] But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part. ¹⁰ But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

¹³ And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

[And that is how we will be known -- with, by, in, and through -- the perfect eyes of love!]

I think I am opening to a whole new level of understanding.  SM, I think it is saying that you can’t choose hell even if you want to.  Love wins in the end no matter what kind of nonsense we preach in our churches.  Now that is a Gospel that is Good News.  That matches the Prodigal’s Father running down the road to meet his lost son, and defying custom to reach out to his stubborn self-righteous religious son as well.  That matches a God who would stretch out His arms and die!  Not to save the few with the magic right teachings, but to wrap them back around everything.

I have a lot of happy thinking and praying to do.

peace

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Man, I am going to have to get my hands on this book too!  One great book leads to more…Here is a bit I pulled from the web.

Stage five, Conjunctive faith moves one from stage four’s rationalism to the acknowledgement of paradox and transcendence. It is in this stage that, in Washburnian terminology, one chooses regression in the service of transcendence. In this stage a person grasps the reality behind the symbols of his or her inherited systems, and is also drawn to and acknowledging of the symbols of other’s systems. This stage makes room for mystery and the unconscious, and is fascinated by it while at the same time apprehensive of its power. It sees the power behind the metaphors while simultaneously acknowledging their relativity. In stage five, the world, demythologized in stage four, is re-sacrilized, literally brimming with vision. It is also imbued with a new sense of justice that goes beyond justice defined by one’s own culture and people. Because one has begun to see “the bigger picture” the walls culture and tradition have built between ourselves and others begins to erode. It is not easy to live on the cusp of paradox, and due to its radical drive towards inclusivity, the mind struggles to assimilate and integrate faster than it can work through its cultural and psychological baggage. It is an overwhelming, ecstatic stage in which one is radically opened to possibility and wonder.

Stage six, the final stage, Fowler calls Universalizing faith. While in the previous stage, one glimpses a unitive view of reality, but feels torn between possibility and loyalty, and may even neglect to act on its new understanding out of a regard for self-preservation. In stage six, any such apprehensions dissolve and one becomes an activist for the unitive vision. Fowler describes it best, when he writes:

Persons described by stage six typically exhibit qualities that shake our usual criteria of normalcy. Their heedlessness to self-preservation and the vividness of their taste and feel for transcendent moral and religious actuality give their actions and words an extraordinary and often unpredictable quality. In their devotion to universalizing compassion they may offend our parochial perceptions of justice. In their penetration through the obsession with survival, security, and significance they threaten our measured standards of righteousness and goodness and prudence. Their enlarged visions of universal community disclose the partialness of our tribes and pseudo-species. And their leadership initiatives, often involving strategies of nonviolent suffering and ultimate respect for being, constitute affronts to our usual notions of relevance.” (Fowler, 200)

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/2219.htm

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Here is a hint to see if you do.

If I look up to you, then this song probably talks about you in a positive way:

You’re the one they never tamed

‘Cause you stood your ground

And they could not make you change

You’re the warning they still don’t understand

Watch your back, boy, they’ll kill you if they can

When they burn your brother down in the name of Freedom

I don’t care if its left or right

It’s wrong

If that’s all they can do then you don’t need ‘em

You’re the one, the wild American

You said brother just remember we’re all children of Abraham

Sing a sadder song of freedom

Slowly sinkin’ with the sun

Heroes happen when you need ‘em

You’re the one, wild American.

Kris Kristofferson.

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I used to be a fundamentalist Presbyterian, which was psychotic on the face of it.  Challenging another blogger to define a “better fundamentalist” puts me back to thinking about my own changes over the years.  My fundamentals have changed.  Mostly the list has become far shorter.

1.  I consider it a fundamental truth that the universe was created (how and in what time frame is beyond my limits of sure knowledge) by a loving God who continues to interact and create and to love every person, creature, and form created.

2.  I consider it a fundamental truth that we became separated from fellowship with that God through knowledge and practice of evil.

3.  I consider it a fundamental truth that God pursued reunification with us from the moment of separation, provided it through the redeeming work of Jesus’ life and death, and  continues to pursue it today and will until it is fully restored in practice not just in creeds and beliefs.

4.  I consider it a fundamental truth that I am called to love God and to love and accept you as my brother or sister whether you believe any of those or not, and that I am to be prepared to discuss them with you in a truly loving way that listens at least as much as it speaks.

There are more things I believe, at least today, with what light I have.

But, I am not sure there are any more that I would call fundamentals.  There is a far longer list of things that I now believe are Divine mysteries, reflections of God’s nature being so much bigger than our theories and dogmas, paradoxes that frame the space where we live, and beautiful sources for wonder and worship instead of creeds and accusatory deeds.

At least that’s what I think right now, or think I think. Laugh, its OK.

peace

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“until he acknowledged that the Most High God is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and sets over them anyone he wishes.”

I am still in the process of escaping my supposed literalist (literalistic on anything that favored us and damned others) past.  So, my musings on today’s brief political statement also set me to wondering about the nature of our treasured system of democracy in the light of passages like this one that say the establishment of rulers is God’s business.

Does our cherished democracy set up a false belief that we humans decide who will be in power?

Is our supposedly empowering democracy a more recent version of the casting of lots to see who has already been chosen?

Or most heretical of all, does our democracy give God a less bloody method for conducting His business?

peace

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OK, this post reveals enough about my age and true mentality to get the current church to take away my choices and send me packing! LOL

One of the most powerful moments on this summer’s mission trip was watching a tiny girl push away a large adult bully just as our choir broke into This Is How It Feels to Be Free.  It was awesome.

But, it keeps taking me back to my youth.  I do not know how many times I saw The Who’s Tommy at the theater.  I went every time I had the chance and left dancing down the street every time.  Now in the midst of this church debacle I keep hearing a hymn from that un-saintly choir!

“We’ve all been shown the way before.  Messiah pointed to the door, but no one had the guts to leave the temple! I’m Free! And freedom tastes of reality!  I’m Free!”

amen

How far away from the master’s intent are we when even thinking about walking away from an institution claiming to be His church feels like flying to glorious strands of rock music?

peace

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