Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
June
2001
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A picture of God |
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The Longing that brings us to worship |
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Jesus’ministry |
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Jokes |
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Worship is part of creation |
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The Ecozoic era |
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Knowing God in Jesus |
Ever since the Companions on the Inner Way conference back in February I have been reading mystery novels. Here’s a gem from Janet Evanovich’s “Four to Score.”
“I always know its Sunday because I wake up feeling apologetic. That’s one of the cool things about being a Catholic…it’s a multifaceted experience. If you lose the faith, chances are you’ll keep the guilt, so it isn’t as if you’ve been skunked altogether. I rolled my head and looked at the digital readout on my clock. Eight. Still time to make late mass. I really should go. My eyes grew heavy at the thought. Next time I opened my eyes it was eleven. Gosh. Too late to go to church. I heaved myself out of bed and padded to the bathroom, telling myself it was okay because God was willing to forgive little things like skimpy church attendance. Over the years I’d evolved my religion and constructed the Benevolent God. The Benevolent God also didn’t care about such trifles as cussing and fibbing. The Benevolent God looked into a person’s heart and knew if she’d been naughty or nice in the grand scheme of things. In my world, God and Santa Claus did not micromanage lives. Of course, that meant you couldn’t count on them to help you lose weight, either.”
How realistic is our own picture of God? As we grow and experience different things in life, our concept of God needs to grow with us. May that happen for you today and always.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
Karl Barth was a great theologian of the last Century. One of his gifts was to put things simply and clearly occasionally. Here is a quote from his book “The Word of God and the Word of Man” taken from the cover of the May 21 edition of Presbyterian Outlook magazine.
“Congregations come to church with a passionate longing to lay hold of that which, or rather him who, overcomes the world because hi is its creator and redeemer, its beginning and ending and Lord…a passionate longing to have the word spoken, the word which promises grace in judgment, life in death and the beyond in the here and now, God’s word.”
Reading through the chauvinist language, I love his description of the qualities of God’s word: life in death and the beyond in the here and now. But the one that caught my attention was “grace in judgment.” How often do we experience judgment in this life? Rather often I believe. But how often does that judgment contain grace. Rather seldom I believe. To remember the grace in God’s judgment is to reach a more mature faith, one that knows there is accountability involved, but also love and grace more powerful than any judgment.
Grace & peace to you,
Geoff
I like to find new expressions of old truths. Here is a description of Jesus’ ministry that I appreciate. It comes from David F. Ford’s “Self and Salvation” published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press.
“It (Jesus’ ministry) is above all about communicating the good news of this God who is radically different from the God represented by most people’s beliefs, fears, expectations and practices. His parables reimagine how God relates to people. His teaching is only acceptable if God really is like that. His miracles are signs of a life that God alone can offer. His meals are celebrations of God’s welcome to the despised, rejected and victimized. His controversies are confrontations with those who, he says, are responsible for the victimizing and despising.”
Knowing who God really is seems to me to be one of the most important steps for us in our faith growth. We so often bow to our own “beliefs, fears, expectations and practices.” Let us match our own pictures of God against what Jesus says, then determine who we really want to worship.
Grace & peace
Geoff
I have begun reading “The Narnia Chronicles” of C. S. Lewis to my 6 year old. They are great children’s stories, full of biblical imagery etc. Here is a line from “The Magician’s Nephew,” set in the creation of Narnia. The animals are given the ability to talk and at their first experience of laughter comes this paragraph:
“Laugh and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come with speech.”
I like the pairing of jokes and justice as indications of intelligence.
Lewis was quite conservative in his views of the church and is reputed to have said that the liturgy should change at the rate of one word every hundred years! I wonder what he would think of the variety of liturgical styles extant today, particularly among those who think the most of his writing. He might need some humor!
Humor and justice, two essentials for the life of faith.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
Presbyterian Outlook Magazine is becoming my favorite source of quotes for these emails. Here is a quote about worship from the March 5, 2001 issue. It comes from the book “Christian Worship: Glorifying and Enjoying God” by Ronald P. Byars, Geneva Press, 2000.
“At worship we trace our origins to some stirring even before the Big Bang that launched the universe. At worship, we find ourselves oriented to an ultimate future that beckons us homeward even though moon, sun, solar system, galaxy—the universe itself—be reduced to darkness. At worship, our consciousness becomes alert to the possibility that there may be One who, as the old spiritual put it, “holds the whole world” in capable hands. Here lies the strangeness of worship. In worship, we gather in the presence of One who was before us; who will be after we are gone; and who, despite our smallness and the brevity of our lives, invites us to some kind of relationship. To see our lives against such a vastness—yet with the possibility of intimacy at its heart—seems altogether different from the notion that the real world has been captured in the raptures of the beautiful and contented people in the ads. Who do you suppose has it right?
Who is right indeed! I like particularly the subjection of even the Big Bang to God’s created order, and tying that together with our participation in worship. Have you even thought about your participation in worship being a further extension of the Big Bang? Does give one food for thought. Eat and digest well!
Grace & peace.
Geoff
On a recent vacation, I began reading “The Great Work” by Thomas Berry. Berry is called “the bard of the new cosmology” as will be evident in this quote. He is talking about the kind of vision of the future we need to be able to have any kind of future. He proposes to call the next phase of earthly existence the Ecozoic Era. Here is as close a definition of that Ecozoic Era as I could find.
“That future can exist only when we understand the universe as composed of subjects to be communed with, not as objects to be exploited. “Use” as our primary relationship with the planet must be abandoned. While there are critical issues in providing food, shelter, and livelihood to vast numbers of peoples, these issues themselves ultimately depend upon our capacity to sustain the natural world so that the natural world can sustain us. All our sciences and technologies and all our social institutions become dysfunctional if the natural life systems cease to function.
For me, Berry epitomized the kind of re-direction of thinking that we need to consider if indeed our planet is going to be able to sustain us. I’m reminded of the scriptures in Genesis 1 and 2 where the earth is given to humans to take care of. Berry and those who think like him give us fresh and needed perspectives on caring for the earth.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
Jacob Boehme was a German Lutheran mystic of the late 16th early 17th centuries who was greatly influential upon such as William Blake, John Milton, Isaac Newton, William Law (one of last week’s email sources) and many others. He spent his life as a shepherd then a cobbler, all the while writing spiritual material of great depth. From his “The Way to Christ” comes this insight on prayer. I’ve taken liberty to update the language in places where it seems to maintain the flow of the writing. It is from his treatise on true repentance and how we are to understand who God is.
“(We are) to consider strongly also that God in Christ Jesus will more readily hear us and receive us into grace than we ourselves want to come to (God); and that in the love of Christ, in the very precious name JESUS, God can desire no evil, that there is no glimpse of wrath in this Name, but that (God) is the highest and deepest love and faithfulness, the great sweetness of the Godhead in the great name JEHOVAH that he revealed to our dead and corrupted humanity in its heavenly part, which disappeared through sin in Paradise; that God therefore was moved in His heart so that He would pour his sweet love into us so that the Father’s wrath, which was enflamed in us, might be put out and changed into love. All of this occurred for the sake of the poor sinner so that he might again gain the open gate of grace.”
I noted how the phrase in the first line is like the prayer that is occasionally said in church about God being more willing to hear us than we are to pray. Beyond that I find this a wonderful picture of God being pure love, the highest and deepest love in the universe, indeed the love that drives the universe.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
