Category: Notes Anthology

Ethic of Jesus

“…the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have ‘gotten us nothing.” – DJT, Jr

…the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go. Decency is for suckers.

• unreligious cruelty toward immigrants, 
• selfish refusal to vaccinate to protect the most vulnerable 
• veneration of a vulgar, misogynistic cult leader. 

If you wonder how so many “people of faith” can behave in such ways, understand that their “faith” has become hostile to traditional religious values such as kindness, empathy, self-restraint, grace, honesty and humility.

Peter Wehner

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Wisdom

Maybe what we lack isn’t love but wisdom. It became clear to me that I should pray above all else for wisdom.

We all want to love, but as a rule we don’t know how to love rightly. How should we love so that life will really come from it? I believe that what we all need is wisdom. I’m very disappointed that we in the Church have passed on so little wisdom. Often the only thing we’ve taught people is to think that they’re right—or that they’re wrong. We’ve either mandated things or forbidden them. But we haven’t helped people to enter upon the narrow and dangerous path of true wisdom. On wisdom’s path we take the risk of making mistakes. On this path we take the risk of being wrong. That’s how wisdom is gained.

Richard Rohr

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Social media

Krista Boan: We hear from families that technology is the No. 1 battleground in their homes. Qustodio, a leader in online safety, recently released its annual report and found that 70 percent of parents assert that screens and technology are now a distraction from family time and device use causes weekly or daily arguments in nearly 50 percent of households. A big new study from Cambridge University, in which researchers looked at 84,000 people of all ages, found that social media use was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today’s teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver’s licenses or play youth sports.

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Purity

Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from….  

Nadia Bolz-Weber

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Finding truth

“The process by which we find truth is maybe the most important thing. It takes work to locate, and often as soon as we think we have grasp it comma it slips away. Truth is not a script. It is not a cheat sheet for life. Truth does not come from picking a set of answers and then arranging all the questions so that they line up correctly. Truth starts with questions, it requires an openness – to other points of view and experiences, to being wrong, to changing one’s mind. A commitment to truth involves A passionate embrace of critical thinking.”

Jon Ward 

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Presented without comment

Abraham Twerski:

The bearded Twerski goes to the airport in his Hasidic garb — the hat, the long coat, the buttoned white shirt. Another Jew, this one modernly dressed, is annoyed by Twerski and unloads on him: “What’s wrong with you? Must you insist on parading around in that medieval get-up as if it were Purim? Don’t you realize how ridiculous you look? You bring nothing but scorn and embarrassment upon us Jews!”

After letting the angry man continue for a while, Twerski says, “I fail to understand what thee art saying. You do realize that I’m Amish, don’t you?”

The modern Jew’s anger quickly turns to embarrassment. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he says apologetically. “I didn’t realize that you were Amish. You look so much like those Hasidic fellows. You should know that I have nothing but respect for you and your people — keeping to your ways without bowing to society’s wills and whims.”

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Belonging 

Most Americans report significant feelings of non-belonging. As the report notes, “64 percent of Americans reported non-belonging in the workplace, 68 percent in the nation and 74 percent in their local community.” Even worse, “nearly 20 percent of Americans failed to report an active sense of belonging in any of the life settings,” 
Belonging Barometer

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Tithing

The study released last week by Lifeway Research, a firm affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, found that 77% of Protestant churchgoers in the U.S. affirm that “tithing is a biblical command that still applies today.” Only 10% rejected this belief and another 13% were unsure.

Yet, the study found that only 12% of Methodist churchgoers tithe; 17% of Restorationist/Church of Christ churchgoers tithe; and 19% of Lutheran churchgoers tithe. Lutherans were also most likely to reject the notion of tithing, with 59% saying they don’t embrace the teaching. 

 Evangelical beliefs in tithing have declined by 6% since 2017, according to the online survey—and also varied by age. Only 66% of respondents aged 18 to 34 affirmed that tithing is currently applicable, the lowest of any demographic group.

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Faith

Faith is not something we are trying to do well or to somehow get right. It is rather an immersive participation in the very life of God—on earth as it is in heaven. To be full of faith is to be infused by the life of God in such a way that crucifies our old sin-sick life and reveals our resurrected life in Jesus Christ, filled by the Holy Spirit, to live the glorious life human beings were originally intended to live. All along, from the very first day to the present day, from first to last, we were intended to live by faith.

J D Walt

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Remembering

God never called us to Make Yesterday Great Again. But he does call us to remember. 

The word “remember” is used in Scripture more than 150 times. When the Bible speaks about remembering, the kind of memory to which it most frequently refers is akin to muscle memory. When you jump on a bike after not riding for years, and your mind and body instantly recall how to balance and pedal as if you’d just done so yesterday, you’re tapping into the way in which we are invited to remember.

The active, present, and all-encompassing nature of remembering in the Bible is captured in the core realities that God remembers his covenant with his people and God expects his people to remember and do what God has commanded. Remembering is a function of a relationship. When we remember Jesus through wine and bread shared together at the table, we are invited to experience it as though we are sitting with him at the final meal he shared with his friends. The Bible doesn’t invite us to recall a set of data points about Jesus when we come to the communion table but to participate with him who is Immanuel, God with us here and now. 

https://www.fathommag.com/stories/noxious-nostalgia

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Briar patch?

In the most famous Uncle Remus story—one that appears in countless versions in cultures around the world, including one from the Apache involving their trickster hero, Coyote—the malicious Br’er Fox makes a doll out of tar (the “tar baby”) and places it in Br’er Rabbit’s path. Br’er Rabbit becomes offended when the creature doesn’t respond to his friendly greeting and lashes out at it, only to find himself stuck to it—and the more he struggles the more firmly stuck he becomes. Then, entangled and exhausted, he is at Br’er Fox’s mercy. And this is when he makes one final plea to his tormentor: Do anything to me, he says, but don’t throw me in that briar patch. Anything but that. Naturally, Br’er Fox, mean creature that he is and nemesis to the rabbit, tosses him right into the briar patch—which is just what enables the victim to detach himself from the tar baby. So Br’er Rabbit taunts Br’er Fox: This might be a place of pain to other animals, but I was born and bred in the briar patch!

An affirmative disposition toward all obstacles—this is the blues idiom in a phrase. Resistance and affliction as the necessary engines of creativity.

Here is where Cosmos Murray comes to our aid. What it contributes is the idea of “an affirmative disposition towards all obstacles,” specifically because obstacles are occasions for improvisation—occasions for living with style, making artful living from the unpromising materials of pain. You can think yourself mistreated, think yourself the object of scorn, and become “the lamenting, protesting, perpetually pissed-off rebel”—the course taken by so many white Christians online—or you can strive to cultivate a “resilience that is geared to spontaneous exploration, experimentation, inventiveness, and perpetual readjustment.” If you take the latter course, then the world can become your briar patch too: Every way that you are thwarted, every obstacle that prevents you continuing in your old familiar habits, can become an occasion for “spontaneous exploration,” for doing old things in a new way—for, in short, living by faith rather than by your own sense of entitled comfort. And if you do that, then even in dark days you have a pretty fair chance of letting the good times roll.
https://comment.org/the-blues-idiom-at-church/

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Sunbelt Nation

The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has noted that in 1920, the Northeast and the Midwest accounted for 60 percent of America’s population. A century later, the Sunbelt accounts for 62 percent of the nation’s population. These days we are mostly a Sunbelt nation.

David Brooks

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Evangelical Moderates

“the evangelical moderate” and the moderate was not an activist on the racial divide. Here are his words to sum up the moderate: “although earlier fundamentalists might have been more explicitly and unashamedly open with their racism, the evangelical moderate remained content to denounce only the most overt and blatant kinds of racial prejudice, to equivocate on the inevitability or necessity of segregation, to vehemently oppose “forced integration,” and to ignore, critique, or explicitly condemn the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and its leaders.” There was no room “for systemic analyses or governmental interventions.”

Isaac B. Sharp -The Other Evangelicals

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Baby Names

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Rule of Life

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time…it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
Annie Dillard

As Dillard says, how we spend our days will be, in the end, how we spend our lives. Intentionality, practiced through a rule of life, defends from chaos and whim, creating a net that catches our days and a lifeboat on which we find ourselves, decades later, still living. 

If you’re wondering about what a rule of life might look like, beyond fixed hour prayer practices, you might check out The Common Rule or Crafting a Rule of Life.

Richard Beck

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The Life of J D Green

“Why was I born black? It would have been better had I not been born at all. Only yesterday, my mother was sold to go to, not one of us knows where, and I am left alone, and I have no hope of seeing her again. At this moment a raven alighted on a tree over my head, and I cried, ‘Oh, Raven! if I had wings like you. I would soon find my mother and be happy again.’ Before parting she [i.e. Mother] advised me to be a good boy and she would pray for me, and I must pray for her, and hoped we might meet again in heaven, and I at once commenced to pray, to the best of my knowledge, ‘Our Father art in heaven, be Thy name, kingdom come. – Amen.’ But, at this time, words of my master obtruded into my mind that God did not care for black folks, as he did not make them, but the devil did. Then I though of the old saying amongst us, as stated by our master, that, when God was making man, He made white man out of the best clay, as potters make china, and the devil was watching, and he immediately took some black mud and made a black man, and called him a N****R.” [I have partially omitted the last offensive term].

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Dying Young

How long a person can expect to live is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country, and here, in the richest country in the world, the answer is not just bleak but increasingly so. Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.

You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80 or perhaps about the so-called deaths of despair among white middle-aged men. These were the predominant explanations five years ago, after the country’s longevity statistics first flatlined and then took a turn for the worse — alone among wealthy nations in the modern history of the world.

But increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers. One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19. Over three pandemic years, Covid-19 was responsible for just 2 percent of American pediatric and juvenile deaths.

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Digital evil

My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger.

My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.

But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/covid-vaccine-misinformation-social-media-harassment/673537/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230328&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily

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Enchantment

There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to to understand: a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning – making.  : It’s not just that the world needs to change-l need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being. I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. The subtle magic of the world  offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it. 

Enchantment – Katherine May Pg 8

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Church as family

As I’ve studied the theme of church as family in Paul’s epistles I’m unconvinced that the biblical model can work with more than 100 people at a time…and that might be stretching it…maybe we should redefine success in ministry…

Phoenix Preacher

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Powerlessness

Admitting we are powerless over people, places and things, and that our lives have become unmanageable, can be one of the most difficult, yet one of the most freeing, admissions of our lives. It is usually beyond our comprehension that admitting powerlessness and unmanageability will help us find peace. For many, if not most of us, this admission implies we have given up or we are defeated. However, this is exactly what the First Step is asking us to do: admit defeat. But, we are only admitting defeat in relation to our way of doing things. 

…what happens on the other side on our admission of defeat: 

Admitting our powerlessness frees us to allow the One who is Power to become active in our lives. We become more open to new ways of doing things as we allow God to love us and teach us how to give and receive love. We also begin to accept people and situations as they are. As we realize we aren’t in control, but God is in control, we are more able to detach from people and situations that are unhealthy for us, and accept these the way they are. This doesn’t mean we quit caring. We care, but we don’t allow the situation to determine our thoughts, actions and feelings. We will discover, as our detachment and acceptance deepens, that we have more emotional energy to spend on ourselves and the activities we would like to do.  

Catherine Chapman

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Love the sinner hate the sin

…Evangelicals don’t approve of gay sexual relations. This is expected given their views that this activity is sinful. But what about the “love the sinner, hate the sin” dynamic? And let’s remember the finding from above: Evangelicals report being the most accepting of people (compared to other religious groups), even when those people are doing things they disagree with. So, do Evangelicals separate their feelings about gay behavior from their feelings about gay persons? The results from another “feeling thermometer”: Of all the religious groups Evangelicals score the lowest with the most negative feelings toward gays as people.

Richard Beck

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We learn by doing it wrong

Any talk of growth, achievement, climbing, improving, and progress highly appeals to the ego. But the only way we stay on the path with any authenticity is to constantly experience our incapacity to do it, our failure at doing it. That’s what makes us, to use my language, fall upward. Otherwise, we’re really not climbing; we’re just thinking we’re climbing by saying to ourselves, “Look, I’m better today. Look, I’m holier than I was last week. Look, my prayer is improving.” That really doesn’t teach us anything or lead us anywhere new.  

In contrast, it is recognizing, “Richard, you don’t know how to love at all” that keeps me on the path of love. Constant failure at loving is ironically and paradoxically what keeps us learning how to love. When we think we’re there, there’s nothing to learn.  

Richard Rohr

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Seeing- Stopping

The practice of Seeing…is simply a posture of social mindfulness. The practice of Seeing is paying attention to–seeing, really seeing–the person right in front of you. 

 Older translations of the Bible use the word “Behold” a lot. “Beholding” is deeper than mere “looking.” You can look, but not behold. The practice of Seeing is a practice of beholding others. Consider the failure of the Rich Man in the parable with the poor man Lazarus. Lazarus sits at the Rich Man’s gate begging, sores covering his body which the dogs came and licked. Though sitting at his very door, the Rich Man never sees Lazarus, never beholds him. Most of our failures to welcome others begin and end with these failures of beholding. Practices of Seeing try to bring people into view.

The practice Stopping is a variant of of the practice of Seeing. We often don’t see people because of the pace of our lives, our hurry and preoccupations. We have agendas and stuff to get done. Consequently, we tend to blow right past people. The practice of Stopping is a practice of slowing and becoming interruptible.

Richard Beck 

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2023/03/practicing-jesus-part-7-practices-of.html

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Global Christianity

In his book “The Unexpected Christian Century,” Scott Sunquist notes that in 1900, about 80 percent of the world’s Christian population lived in the Western world and about 20 percent in the majority world. By 2000, only 37 percent lived in the Western world, and nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world. Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.

“Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century,” said George, “is the most global and most diverse and the most dispersed faith.

Statistics vary but even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.

The future of American Christianity is neither white evangelicalism nor white progressivism. The future of American Christianity is probably not one where white concerns and voices dominate the conversation. The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants or the children of immigrants. And that reality ought to change our present conversations about religion in America.

Tish Harrison Warren NYT

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A Prayer for When God Seems Absent 

Oh God, comfortable would we be if You gave us formulas and answered prayers and realized hope. But You call us beyond comfort. 

But God, life upends us. We face divorce or miscarriages, financial struggles or job insecurity, and the people we love are tossed about by disease or loneliness or homelessness or addiction. 

We are afraid. We don’t have adequate answers. And sometimes we can’t find You. 

Or, we can’t find the person we hoped You would be. 

May we learn to trust that You aren’t asleep on the job. That You haven’t forgotten us. That You are as near to us as our very breath. Give us the courage to press on. To suffer with hope that You have overcome the world. 

May again and again we be awed by Your presence. That even when we feel like we’ve hit rock bottom, may we recognize we have fallen into Your arms because there is no place so deep or so dark or so scary that Your presence cannot reach. 

In the name of the One who can still the seas with mere words, amen.

Kate Bowler Jessica Richie

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Worshipping Satan

When I make myself and my pleasure my highest value, my highest vision of the good life, then I am worshipping the devil. 

I’m convinced the worship of the devil is not so obvious; it is evidenced in a heart that has made its outward priorities an inward map of their motivations, motivations clearly pointed back at one’s own care above others. I’m a big fan of self-care. But it’s not the goal; rather, it is a means to wholeness and fruitfulness for the sake of renewing our call to sonship and daughterhood in the world.

Dan Wilt  

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY