So Much To Think About

GOOD NEWS

Loneliness
…mass loneliness is a perversity. If a bunch of people are lonely, why don’t they just hang out together? Maybe it’s because people approach potential social encounters with unrealistically anxious and negative expectations. Maybe if we understood this, we could alter our behavior.
My general view is that the fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.
David Brooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/opinion/social-life-talk-strangers.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220826&instance_id=70280&nl=the-morning&regi_id=98699252&segment_id=102419&te=1&user_id=979ff7ea8eb24fcd7abe710b579081f5

Celeberity
…we need to shift from a culture formed by “success” to a culture formed by “character.” The word success has too often transformed churches and organizations and institutions and seminaries from formation locations into launching pads for entrepreneurial types who want to use the church’s platform to build their brand. Maybe everyone of these types needs to spend two months a year in a church in rural America and do what the majority of pastors are actually doing.
Scot McKnight

Gospel
The gospel proclaims the presence and power of God in our lives through the indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit. The actual spiritual union we experience with God in the Holy Spirit goes well beyond a declaration that God loves you. Again, love is an affection, a feeling. And while feelings are important, something more is available to us in the Holy Spirit. Through the Holy Spirit God is with us and empowers us. Presence and power. These gifts are available to all who believe the Good News.
To be sure, Christians display a lot of diversity about what sort of “power” we have access to through the Spirit. But for this post, we can keep it simple and stick to what all Christians believe, that the Holy Spirit gives us a strength to carry the burdens of our lives that we would not otherwise possess on our own. The gospel is more than a message of God’s affection. The gospel is the offer to share in God’s very own life.
Richard Beck
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-gospel-minus-x-equals-part-7.html

Contempt (https://amzn.https://amzn.to/3PN7ioB )
We are dwelling in an age of contempt.
Contempt for others forms a death-dealing cancer in our culture, in our churches, and in our society – but also in ourselves, the ones contempting others (if that’s a verb).
We dwell today in a world of hot hate and cool hate, and surely more in the cool hate than in the hot hate. Hot hate turns into road rage and sudden outbursts; cool hate seethes and foams and goes indirect and passive. It turns into snark and sarcasm and verbal putdowns.
Kim cites John Gottman’s four horsemen of negative interaction – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. He thinks contempt is the deepest problem. It creates a world of the superior and the inferior, a world of us vs. them. Contempt kills. Others and ourselves.
What Kim knows is that this contempt has invaded the church in “motive attribution asymmetry” (we know we love others but others hate us). So we misunderstand and misattribute. Motive attribution asymmetry is made worse by “online disinhibition effect,” words Orwell would despise, but we can get by the stodgy words to the truth: when we get online it’s much easier to express hatred and contempt and to attribute motive to those we don’t even know.
God has always had a very hard time giving away God: No one wants seems to want this gift. We’d rather have religion, and laws, and commandments, and obligations, and duties. I’m sure many of us attend church out of duty, but gathering with the Body of Christ is supposed to be a wedding feast. Do you know how many times in the four Gospels eternal life is described as a banquet, a feast, a party, a wedding, the marriage feast of the Lamb? There are fifteen different, direct allusions to eternal life being a great, big party. 
Richard Rohr

“It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so the rest lies with God,” C S Lewis

View From the front porch
A bit of poetry:

From where does my praise come?

…from the bounty of my circumstances?

…from the strength of my health?

…from freedom and liberty?

…from my goodness and rightness?

Hallelujah!

So dear God, keep from me

…poverty

…sickness

…imprisonment

…failure and sinfulness

If not, where then would my praise come from?

STILL ON THE JOURNEY