Category: faith

re: Ragamuffin thoughts

fall from grace - todd baker

Been a while since I’ve updated much on The Ragamuffin Gospel – of course it would help if I’d read it over the last week or so.

I hope I’m not repeating anything here but some great stuff in this book so it’s worth repeating if I have.

Manning: Salvation is joy in God which expresses itself in joy in and with one’s neighbor.

Reminds me of one of the themes Rob Bell spoke on in Dallas recently. Part of accepting grace is giving grace to those around us as well. Loving our neighbor as ourselves. Oh how we I miss this point so often.

Manning: We miss Jesus’ point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others. They are to be taken personally by each of us.

Manning: The deeper we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become – the more we realize that everything in life is a gift… The poor in spirit are the most nonjudgemental of peoples; they get along well with sinners.

Manning: Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, he may be in a Woody Allen film or a Bruce Springsteen concert (or a U2 concert). Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. (related post: Christian is a poor adjective)

Manning: while sin and war, disease and death are terribly real, God’s loving presence and power in our midst are even more real.

Manning: The gospel of grace is brutally devaluated when Christians maintain that the transcendent God can only properly be honored and respected by denying the goodness and truth and beauty of the things of this world. Amazement and rapture should be our reaction to God revealed as Love…. where justice ends, love begins and reveals that God is not interested merely in the dividends of the covenant.

referring to what Jesus told the Pharisees and others:
Manning: These sinners, these people you despise are nearer to God than you. It is not the hookers and thieves who find it most difficult to repent: it is you who are so secure in your piety and pretense that you have no need of conversion. They may have disobeyed God’s call, their professions have debased them, but they have shown sorrow and repentance. But more than any of that, these are the people who appreciate His goodness.

Manning: Grace tells us that we are accepted just as we are. We may not be the kind of people we want to be, we may be a long way from our goals, we may have more failures than achievements, we may not be wealthy or powerful or spiritual, we may not even be happy, but we are nonetheless accepted by God, held in His hands.

Manning: Christianity happens when men and women accept with unwavering trust that their since have not only been forgiven but forgotten, washed away in the blood of the Lamb.

Matthew 25:40.. “insofar as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of min, you did it to me”

Manning: Quite simply, our deep gratitude to Jesus Christ is manifested neither in being chaste, honest, sober and respectable, nor in church-going, Bible toting and Psalm-singing, but in our deep and delicate respect for one another.

Manning: The ministry of evangelization is an extraordinary opportunity of showing gratitude to Jesus by passing on his gospel of grace to others. However, the ‘conversion by concussion’ method with one sledge hammer blow of the Bible after another betrays a basic respect for the dignity of the other and is utterly alien to the gospel imperative to bear witness. To evangelize a person is to say to him or her: you, too, are loved by God in the Lord Jesus. And not only to say that but to really think it and relate to it to the man or woman so they can sense it.

You may want to read that one again. I’ve read it several times. (related posts: And it was good, Quote(s) of the day,Everything Must Change: Chp 1 :: Hope Happens

A message purporting to be the best news in the world should be doing better than this.

Religious Fashion Shows/Frauds

LCRNphotography

Loving that I have the Message REMIXaudio Bible mixed in with my Zune playlist now… this really grabbed me (think I’ll listen to it again):

Religious Fashion Shows
1-3 Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. “The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer.

4-7 “Instead of giving you God’s Law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God, they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals. They seem to take pleasure in watching you stagger under these loads, and wouldn’t think of lifting a finger to help. Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called ‘Doctor’ and ‘Reverend.’

8-10 “Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of ‘Father’; you have only one Father, and he’s in heaven. And don’t let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them—Christ.

11-12 “Do you want to stand out? Then step down. Be a servant. If you puff yourself up, you’ll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you’re content to simply be yourself, your life will count for plenty.

Frauds!
13 “I’ve had it with you! You’re hopeless, you religion scholars, you Pharisees! Frauds! Your lives are roadblocks to God’s kingdom. You refuse to enter, and won’t let anyone else in either.

15 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You go halfway around the world to make a convert, but once you get him you make him into a replica of yourselves, double-damned.

16-22 “You’re hopeless! What arrogant stupidity! You say, ‘If someone makes a promise with his fingers crossed, that’s nothing; but if he swears with his hand on the Bible, that’s serious.’ What ignorance! Does the leather on the Bible carry more weight than the skin on your hands? And what about this piece of trivia: ‘If you shake hands on a promise, that’s nothing; but if you raise your hand that God is your witness, that’s serious’? What ridiculous hairsplitting! What difference does it make whether you shake hands or raise hands? A promise is a promise. What difference does it make if you make your promise inside or outside a house of worship? A promise is a promise. God is present, watching and holding you to account regardless.

23-24 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing on every nickel and dime you get, but on the meat of God’s Law, things like fairness and compassion and commitment—the absolute basics!—you carelessly take it or leave it. Careful bookkeeping is commendable, but the basics are required. Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that’s wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?

25-26 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You burnish the surface of your cups and bowls so they sparkle in the sun, while the insides are maggoty with your greed and gluttony. Stupid Pharisee! Scour the insides, and then the gleaming surface will mean something.

27-28 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You’re like manicured grave plots, grass clipped and the flowers bright, but six feet down it’s all rotting bones and worm-eaten flesh. People look at you and think you’re saints, but beneath the skin you’re total frauds.

29-32 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You build granite tombs for your prophets and marble monuments for your saints. And you say that if you had lived in the days of your ancestors, no blood would have been on your hands. You protest too much! You’re cut from the same cloth as those murderers, and daily add to the death count.

33-34 “Snakes! Reptilian sneaks! Do you think you can worm your way out of this? Never have to pay the piper? It’s on account of people like you that I send prophets and wise guides and scholars generation after generation—and generation after generation you treat them like dirt, greeting them with lynch mobs, hounding them with abuse.

35-36 “You can’t squirm out of this: Every drop of righteous blood ever spilled on this earth, beginning with the blood of that good man Abel right down to the blood of Zechariah, Barachiah’s son, whom you murdered at his prayers, is on your head. All this, I’m telling you, is coming down on you, on your generation.

37-39 “Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Murderer of prophets! Killer of the ones who brought you God’s news! How often I’ve ached to embrace your children, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you wouldn’t let me. And now you’re so desolate, nothing but a ghost town. What is there left to say? Only this: I’m out of here soon. The next time you see me you’ll say, ‘Oh, God has blessed him! He’s come, bringing God’s rule!'”

Matthew 23

Obama talks to Beliefnet

Presidential candidate Barack Obama recently spoke to Beliefnet about his (Christian) faith:

The Democratic presidential candidate discusses what he prays for daily and why the Golden Rule applies on the campaign trail.

You spoke at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church this week and speak regularly at other churches. Is there a difference in speaking from a pulpit versus from behind a podium or at a political rally? Do you have a different set of responsibilities?

When I’m speaking behind a pulpit, I’m in church. And what that means is that it’s during a religious service. I’m there, mindful that the primary reason for being in church is to worship. And so I’m going to constrain myself in speaking on purely political issues and am more likely to broaden the theme to address broader issues—values and our ideals, how we can come together to solve the problems that we face as a nation and in the world. But I’m very sensitive to respecting the role that the church service plays and not wanting to abuse the privilege of addressing a congregation.

In writing about your experience encountering church people as an organizer in Chicago, you said you saw “their ability to make a way out of no way, I could see the Word made manifest… I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.” It sounds like a conversion or a born-again experience.

It wasn’t an epiphany. I didn’t “fall out,” as they say in the black church. It was an emotional and spiritual progression, as well as an intellectual one. And it didn’t happen overnight. What happened was that I felt drawn to the message of Jesus Christ and the power of the church to fortify people in their spiritual journeys. And, you know, in my heart, at least, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. So ultimately, as I write in [“The Audacity of Hope”], I submitted myself to his will, dedicated myself to discovering his truths.

But it’s an ongoing process for all of us in making sure that we are living out our faith every day. And, you know, it’s something that I try to pray on at the beginning of every day and at the end of every day, whether I’m living my life in a way that’s consistent with my faith.

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Interview with Brian McLaren


Scott tipped me off to Next-Wave Ezine, where I found a recent interview with “Everything Must Change” author Brian McLaren.

Here’s a preview:

Question: At the beginning of the book ( p.3) you write: “And not only am I often unsatisfied with conventional answers, but even worse, I’ve consistently been unsatisfied with conventional questions.” One interpretation of this remark might be, “conventional questions produce conventional answers.” Is it your position that a large proportion of professed Christians have succumbed to a convenient living out of their faith that is askew with the teachings and life of Christ?

McLaren: Well, I think many people are doing their best to live out their faith in sync with the teachings and life of Christ, but it’s not easy to figure out what that means, especially in changing times. Some things are easy – like knowing you shouldn’t hate or commit adultery or kill. But pretty quickly, it gets complex – like knowing whether pre-emptive and hastily-launched wars fit under killing, for example. And that gets to what I mean about conventional questions. We have lots of religious arguments about the origin of the species, but far fewer dialogues about the extinction of species and what we can do to save species that we all agree are precious parts of God’s creation. We have lots of religious arguments about homosexuality, but far fewer conversations about the growing gap between rich and poor and what we can do about it. We argue about what to do about abortion, but we seem much less concerned about what to do about racial disharmony and political polarization and how we can be peacemakers and reconcilers. I’m not saying the common arguments are unimportant, only that less common questions deserve a lot more attention. I hope my book will help in that regard.

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re: Hanging out with Jesus

my friend John shared his comments via e-mail on the recent Hanging out with Jesus post. He took issue with some of Kevin Hendricks comments:

“He’s not doing anything productive, he’s just hanging out.”

Jesus was intentional in the things he did. He had a purpose.

“Not doing anything productive?” I don’t think so.

Purposeless? I think not.

“Producing” disciples involves intentionality and an investment of time in their lives.

John