light in the dark

“This point is especially important today, for a significant portion on evangelical Christianity has come under the influence of an escapist apocalyptic theology. Believing Jesus will soon ‘rapture’ Christians out of the world before destroying it, they have little concern with the church being a witness on issues of social justice, global peace, the environment, and so on. To the contrary, in the name of fulfilling biblical prophecy, many are actively supporting stances that directly or indirectly encourage violence, possibly on a global scale (for instance, extremist Christian Zionism). Since the world is doomed for soon destruction, the thinking goes, the only thing that matters is getting individuals ready for the rapture.

   Whatever else one thinks about the New Testament’s eschatology, it certainly does not encourage this sort of irresponsible escapism. The hope offered to believers is not that we will be a peculiar elite group of people who will escape out of the world, leaving others behind to experience the wrath of God. The hope is rather that by our sacrificial participation in the ever-expanding kingdom, the whole creation will be redeemed. God so lovedthe worldhe sent his Son, and we are to so lovethe worldthat we are willing to imitate this sacrificial behavior. If we do this, we will certainly be a ‘peculiar’ people. But following the example of Jesus, our peculiarity will lie in our willingness to incarnate ourselves in the tribulations of the world, not in possessing a ‘rapture ticket’ that allows us to escape the tribulations of the world.”

i just read this. it’s probably pretty important.

“Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.” -N.T. Wright, Simply Christian

i just started to teach jon how to play all of my parts. life’s weird. being home is depressing. but it’s all okay.

but it’s pretty good.

“The point once again, is not that the Law is a convenient moral guide, ancient and venerable. It is that the Torah, like the Temple, is one of the places where heaven and earth meet,  so that, as some Jewish teachers had suggested, those who study and keep the Torah are like those who worship in the Temple. And the early Christians are encouraging one another to live as points of intersection, points of overlap, between heaven and earth. Again, this sounds fearsomely difficult, not to say downright impossible. But there is no getting around it. Fortunately, as we shall see, what ought to be normal Christianity is actually all about finding out how to sustain this kind of life and even grow in it. The fulfillment of the Torah by the Spirit is one of the main themes underlying the spectacular description, in Acts 2, of the day of Pentecost itself. To this day, Pentecost is observed in Judaism as the feast of the giving of the Law. First comes Passover, the day when the Israelites leave their Egyptian slavery behind for good. Off they go through the desert, and fifty days later they reach Mount Sinai. Moses goes up the mountain and comes down with the Law, the tablets of the covenant, God’s gift to his people of the way of life by which they will be able to demonstrate that they really are his people. This is the picture we ought to have in mind as we read Acts 2. The previous Passover, Jesus had died and been raised, opening the way out of slavery, the way to forgiveness and a new start for the whole world- especially for all those who follow him. Now, fifty days later, Jesus has been taken into ‘heaven,’ into God’s dimension of reality; but, like Moses, he comes down again, to ratify the renewed covenant and to provide the way of life, written not on stone but in human hearts, by which Jesus’s followers may gratefully demonstrate that they really are his people. That is the underlying theology by which the remarkable phenomenon of Pentecost as Luke tells it- the wind, the fire, the tongues, and the sudden powerful proclamation of Jesus to the astonished crowds- is given its deepest meaning. Those in whom the Spirit comes to dwell are to be people who live at the intersection between heaven and earth.”

“Despite what you might think from some excitement in the previous generation about new spiritual experiences, God doesn’t give people the Holy Spirit in order to let them enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland. Of course, if you’re downcast and gloomy, the fresh wind of God’s Spirit can and often does give you a new perspective on everything, and above all grants a sense of God’s presence, love, comfort, and even joy. But the point of the Spirit is to enable those who follow Jesus to take into all the world the news that he is Lord, that he has won the victory over the forces of evil, that a new world has opened up, and that we are to help make it happen.”

i’ve had moments where i’ve been sadder than i’ve ever been in my life. but maybe thats a good thing. if nothing else it’s been teaching me the meaning of some coming hope.

“Equally, he told stories- stories which got under the skin of his contemporaries precisely because they both were and were not the stories they were expecting. The ancient prophets had spoken about God replanting Israel after the long winter of exile; Jesus told stories about people sowing seed, about some seed being fruitful but a good deal going to waste, about seeds growing secretly and then a sudden harvest, about tiny seeds producing great shrubs. These ‘parables’ weren’t, as has often been supposed, ‘earthly stories with heavenly meanings.’ The whole point of Jesus’s work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there. But when heaven comes to earth and finds earth unready, when God’s future arrives in the present while people are still asleep, there will be explosions. And there were. In particular, the people we would today call ‘the religious right,’ led by a popular though unofficial pressure group called the ‘Pharisees,’ objected strongly to Jesus’s teaching that God’s kingdom was coming in this way, through his own work. They were scandalized, not least by the way in which Jesus was celebrating God’s kingdom- another strong symbol, this- with all the wrong people: the poor, the outcasts, the hated tax-collectors- anyone in fact who wanted to join in. It was in response to this criticism that Jesus told some of his most poignant and powerful parables.” -N.T. Wright. the rest of this section is so good but i don’t feel like typing it out.

“I think there is something in the Incarnation (the Son of God coming to Earth as a human being) that God wanted for us to have as a model. He was meek and in many ways lonely. Leaders are often lonely because their concern is about others. Others cannot always physically be present with you.” -John Perkins

Luke 5:16- “But Jesus often withdrew to the lonely places and prayed.”

being a leader in any capacity hurts. it involves dying to yourself, and that’s painful. giving up your own desires and suffering through the pain to ensure that what happens is what’s best for the people you’re leading, not what you think is best for you. forgive me my brothers and sisters when i think about myself, and walk with me through my pain as i suffer for the sake of those around me.

“Immediately following the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11th, President George Bush proclaimed, ‘Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.’ In this speech (and countless speeches like it throughout history), history seems to play the role of God. It is the transcendent judge and mysterious entity to which we owe a moral responsibility. Not only do we owe it our obedience, but also history can actually call on us. This history-god of the state necessarily replaces the supposed God of many of those running the United States: Jesus Christ. The government is teeming with self-proclaimed Christians whose goal is to rid the world of evil. But they cannot obey Jesus and satisfy the state. Jesus was detestable to the state in his day, and he is detestable to our state today. His teachings are impossible for the state to ever follow. What state would ever say, ‘Do not resist the evil person,’ or, ‘Turn the other cheek’? Indeed, for a Christian to participate in ridding the world of evil, one must replace Jesus with the history-god of the state (or get ready to lose their jobs).”

“We must see what is going on today. Something different is happening. We have wasteful technologies used by billions of people growing exponentially, more expansive exploitation, more powerful bombs. And yet people’s hearts are the same as they were thousands of years ago: a chaotic mix of love and hate, creativity and destructiveness. But this is the problem. Our tools have ‘advanced,’ but we haven’t advanced spiritually or morally. And so we, normal people, with the tools of destruction and wastefulness available daily for purchase, cannot handle the power. With all of the destruction that has ravaged the earth since the Industrial Revolution, one wonders if we can even call it advancement. Those who are convinced that we are the ‘the end of history,’ at the apex of civilization’s development, fail to notice that the twentieth century was the bloodiest and most toxic in world history. And to sanctify this chaos, as our friend and priest Michael Doyle has said, the church’s precious words have been co-opted for profit: trust, fidelity, liberty, mutual equity. We can see them all around us in bank statements and on billboards.” -Jesus for President.

““Judaism in Paul’s day was not, as has regularly been supposed, a religion of legalistic works-righteousness. If we imagine that it was, and that Paul was attacking it as if it was, we will do great violence to it and to him. Most Protestant exegetes had read Paul and Judaism as if Judaism was a form of the old heresy Pelagianism, according to which humans must pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps and thereby earn justification, righteousness, and salvation. No…keeping the law within Judaism always functioned within a covenantal scheme. God took the initiative, when he made a covenant with Judaism; God’s grace thus precedes everything that people (specifically Jews) do in response. the Jew keeps the law out of gratitude, as a proper response to grace- not, in other words, in order to get into the covenant people, but to stay in. Being ‘in’ in the first place was God’s gift. Keeping the Jewish law was the human response to God’s covenantal initiative.” -N. T. Wright

“American preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa’s apartheid, or Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to enrage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose, and confront, the great disconnection between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all.” -Peter Storey