Through a mirror dimly

Thoughts in Solitude

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to pelase you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

-Thomas Merton from Thoughts in Solitude

In the news

Our church was in the newspaper this morning. Here's a link if you'd like to read it:

http://www.star-telegram.com/religion/story/1725382.html

Read More 0 comments |

Salvation

Martin Luther King Jr. once said "Salvation is being on the right road, not having reached a destination."

I read this quote for the first time this week and have been pondering it ever since. Many people think of salvation as something that happens just once, an experience of "being saved." There are some people that I know that can tell me when and where they were saved -- and it is a profound experience for these people.

A well-kept secret of United Methodists, however, is that we don't believe that salvation is a one-time event. The language of saved and not-saved is not a part of United Methodist vocabulary.

The Methodist understanding of salvation is analogous to MLK's -- salvation is a journey. John Wesley called it the "via salutis" or "the way of salvation." Salvation is something that we have to keep working at, and it's something that primarily happens in this life, not the next. For Wesley, the way of salvation is the story of God's grace flowing into our lives in different forms for different reasons and our subsequent response to this grace.

Sometimes, we need p

revenient grace, the kind that goes before our awareness of God, the kind that is always pulling at us to open our eyes to a wider picture. Sometimes we need justifying grace, that helps us line our lives up with the person that God is calling us to be. And eventually, we need perfecting grace, which sounds bad but isn't. Being "perfect" means to reach a point when the love of God that we experience fills us up to the brimming point and then starts to spill over into other people's lives. My favorite professor, Dr. Elaine Robinson, said that this is like what happens to the Grinch in the Christmas movie. "And what happened then? Well, in Whoville they say that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then - the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of *ten* Grinches, plus two!"

So, I've been thinking, if salvation is more a journey than a one-time event, more about love spilling out of my life than a one-way street between me and God, then that makes a big difference in what Christianity means to me. Being Christian is less about what God does for me, and more about what I do for others. The focus is not inward, but outward. And its less about the rewards of another life, and more about how we act in this life. And that should change a lot of things -- like how we see ourselves in relationship not only to each other, but to the earth, the environment, the good creation.

So, how's your heart? Is it shriveled up and barely pumping, or is it expanding?

Read More 0 comments |

Would you take the stairs?

Jason showed me this video and I stole it from him. My claim to it is that I was a piano major in college. Plus, I advocate for taking the stairs.

See more funny videos and Technology Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Read More 0 comments |

Psalm 23

My prayer life is usually scattered. I always have good intentions but poor follow-through. I have a new tradition, however, of spending some time in the chapel at church on Monday mornings after I drop Jude off in his daycare class. I really don't have an excuse -- his classroom is right next to the door to the chapel. I should spend more time there than just Monday mornings, but hey, it's a start.

This Monday, I had trouble being present to my prayers. My mind kept wandering to things that I needed to do when I got back to my office. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t make myself focus. In one of my seminary classes, we are assigned a psalm a week to reflect on. This week's choice was Psalm 23, so I tried meditating on that, hoping that it would slow me down a little.

Although my meditation was sporadically distracted by other, non-pertinent thoughts, I found myself coming back to the lines “he makes me lie down in green pastures.” Those words are familiar, but I'd never really thought about them before. As I repeated these words to myself, I became aware of what God was calling to me in that moment.

God called me to lie down, to stop, to enjoy the silence, to breathe. In that moment, I understood that God makes me lie down, God forces me to let go when I'm unable to release my anxiety on my own. God says “stop worrying. You’ll get to that soon enough. Right now, just lie down. Let it be. Rest in my presence.” And I discovered that once I was open to this, then my mind calmed down its running a little bit, my body relaxed, my breathing slowed. And I was led beside still waters: my soul was restored.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.

The Great Emergence

I'm currently reading a book by Phyllis Tickle called "The Great Emergence." The central argument is that every 500 years, the church goes through a giant "rummage" sale. Things are cleaned up, thrown away and revitalized with new purpose. For example, roughly 500 years ago was the Protestant Reformation -- people (like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli) "protested" the corruption of the Catholic church and from this emerged the Protestantism that we know today. 500 years before that, the "Great Schism" happened, splitting the church into Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodox. Think that there was something 500 years before that too? Well, as a matter of fact, the Roman Empire fell and the church took over the empire. And if you can count, then you'll notice that roughly 500 years before that was Jesus. And he was a big deal, you know.

So, according to Tickle, we are undergoing a "rummage sale" right now, 500 years or so after the Reformation. An emergence is due, but it is a gradual thing. Tickle writes that you can see contractions of the birth pangs in the impact of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and of course, the internet. 500 years ago, the invention of the printing press made a huge difference on Christianity as they knew it. Printed copies of the Bible were available for many more people, which co-opted the authority of priests who were formerly the sole interpreters of scripture.

Similarly, modern ideas and innovations are leading us to rethink authority in our context. In our globalized world, what value do we find in the Christian claim of exclusivity? In this age when I can write my own definition on wikipedia and post my wandering thoughts for all to read on my blog, how do I believe in one and only one interpretation of Scripture?

I'm only half-way through the book, so I don't know what her conclusion is. But where she's headed is making me excited and anxious at the same time. The church that I love is changing, and despite all its problems and challenges, I'm human and instinctively would rather have the devil I know than the devil I don't know.