Category: Notes Anthology

Loving People
Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez challenges us: “So you say you love the poor. Name them.” A name is a good place to start, a meal is better, and life together is even better than that. Real love requires knowing, listening, understanding. It cannot be foisted on people from a distance.

Gregory Boyle says, “The measure of our compassion lies not in our service to others but in our willingness to see ourselves connected to them.” Love is not something that you can do to another. It is something you do with them.

Roses
RosesEveryone now and again wonders about those questions that have no readyanswers:
first cause, God’s existence, what happens when the curtain goes down and nothing stops it,
not kissing,not going to the mall, not the SuperBowl.
“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning. “Do you have the answers?
And if you do, would you tell me?”
The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”they said.
“But as you can see, we arejust now entirely busy being roses.”
Mary Oliver. 

Something More
My dad was an artist who made his living near New York City. He painted the portraits of wealthy people and often commented on the subtleties of fine art. One day he told me that if I looked closely at the paintings of the great masters, I would see all the colors of the spectrum in every square inch. This is what gives a portrait its richness and its depth. It’s also the thing that distinguishes the work of a genius from that of an amateur.
After a while, I began to wonder whether our lives are like a portrait being painted by a renaissance artist. If our eyes are too close to the canvas, we might be confused by its complexity and wonder, “What crazy person would put every color of the spectrum in every square inch?” Our souls will focus on disappointing things and we will ask a lot of haunting questions that seem to have no answer. Most importantly, we won’t be able to make sense of the entire work of art because we are too close to the pain.

If we never experience the rude disappointments of life, it is nearly impossible for us to have the richness and depth that a masterful artist seeks to create. We will offer only trite and shallow ‘answers’ to a world that yearns for something more. Someone once said that fundamentalism is to faith what paint-by-numbers is to the Renaissance. It presents a portrait of the divine that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It oversimplifies the complex. Augustine said it another way, “If you can comprehend it, it is not God.”

If it were possible to have our souls painted by a renaissance artist, strange colors in strange places would appear on the canvas – each one emblematic of the events that broke us and deepened us. The richness and depth of our portraits would be reflective of a faith that has matured. It is not a paint-by-number faith. It doesn’t expect easy answers. It’s not intellectually lazy. It longs to uncover deeper and deeper layers of truth. It never attempts to domesticate God. It is wonder-struck by the mysteries that surround us. All these things bear witness to the genius of a divine painter who is still at work in us.
Will Kautz

Resurrection Hope
May God grant for each of us,
If our world has died in the night,
That we may see the first day of a new creation,
A new heaven and new earth.
Because on this day God walks again in the garden,
Not in the cool of the evening but of the dawn.
This, is our resurrection hope.
Duane W.H. Arnold

Grace is Greater than Sin
Celebrating grace is not endorsing, much less condoning, error. On the contrary, celebrating grace is holy acknowledgment of the doctrinal truth that grace is greater than our error (or sin). 
Some do not believe, it seems, this truth.
“Who is a God LIKE YOU?” 
The prophet places the question squarely in the context of the character of the God of Israel, 
“who is a God like you, 
PARDONING INIQUITY 
and passing over transgression … 
because he delights in showing mercy … 
you will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” 
(Micah 7.18-19).
Bobby Valentine

Gospel
While the gospel is a message, it cannot be confined to messages. While the gospel is the truth, it cannot be captured by a series of propositional truths. Before the gospel is anything else, the gospel is God. Gospel means “good news,” and the good news is God. The good news is not that God loves us. The good news is that God is love. The good news is not that Jesus saves. It is that Jesus is himself salvation.
J D Walt

View from the Front Porch
A highlight of our 60th wedding anniversary celebration was having all of our children and their spouses with us. A rarity which we treasure.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Absolutes
So many theological systems are built on “absolutes”.  That is, all questions must be answered.  The answers, in the main, are binary.  They are “yes” and “no”.  We tend to speak of faith in Christ as a “commitment”, made once and then acted upon throughout life.  Yet, in our lives, we all carry questions.  We all carry the “Why?” that Christ cries out in the Passion.  Yet, most theological systems leave little, if any, room for that question.
Duane Arnold

Reasons
It’s a strange paradox. When everything is permitted, when everyone has a “reason” to do something, we act as if that lessens their responsibility for their actions, when it should mean the opposite. The sociological obsession with root causes saps the importance of agency. Monsters become nothing more than “products of their environments” and hence victims, too. We have a twisted and deformed view that monstrous acts are justified if the monster’s feelings of victimization are justified or simply “understandable.”  Jonathan Haidt

Real solutions
…we could do everything right with schools, red flag laws, etc., there’s still the obviously possibility that a person determined to murder large numbers of people will have the determination to work around those obstacles. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth making it harder for murderers to succeed, but maybe the real solution has little to do with putting bigger rocks in better places in the river. Maybe the problem is the river itself.
Learning the life of others, that is, learning to love them, opens us up in ways that expand us into more fully developed persons. In that we realize our own complicities as we learn the experiences of others.
Scot McKnight

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.” ? Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Confidence in the Church
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Tim Alberta – Atlantic

Poets
(not the people who make rhymes) are discerners of newness, people who fashion images for hopes that have not yet become visible, who sense the deep undertow of life and welcome it, who present to us images of reality which are expectant and expansive, who are content to receive what they do not understand arnd to rely on that which they cannot control. It is the gift of breaking out of symmetrical language and symmetrical expectations into a context
where hopes get actualized in surprising and even ragged ways.
Walter Brueggermann

Rules
Rules don’t work. Of course, they are necessary and they have value, but if they are all we have, we don’t have much. Rules can protect us from ourselves and each other. They can create some semblance of external order, but they do not change people. Rules can govern human behavior, but they have no power to order the affairs of our minds and hearts.

People often identify themselves as being either rule followers or rule breakers, and both with equal degrees of pride. We do not need rules. What we need is a Ruler. The lordship of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with following the rules and everything to do with following the Ruler.
JD Walt

Only in Mississippi
..one of his [Michael Guest] campaign pitches is truly something we haven’t heard before—a proposal to provide “newlyweds with a $20,000 wedding gift, paid back if the couple divorces.” Who says Republicans never come up with new ideas?

You can’t successfully deconstruct, then reconstruct your faith by listening to the same voices that put you in crisis in the first place…listen to what other orthodox believers think outside your tradition…you may not be persuaded, but you will be informed…
Phoenix Preacher

San Francisco 
I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.
Wondering what the church might learn from San Francisco ?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

Fighting for the Kingdom
For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. 
Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/

View from the Front Porch
The front porch came alive last week preparing for a celebration of our 60th Wedding Anniversary. All our children were here and many other family and friends. It was a beautiful event and we are still reveling in the afterglow. So much to be thankful for.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Jesus is not a consolation prize when things do not go our way in life. He is the King.
Matt Redmond

Paradox
What do the empirical data actually have to say on one of the greatest paradoxes of our time, which is: If a major point of yoga is quieting the ego and reducing focus on self, why are there so many yoga pose pictures on Instagram?

Certitude
I want to point out that there are two different kinds of certitude: mouthy and mystical.
Just for the sake of alliteration and cleverness, I call the first one “mouthy certitude.” Mouthy certitude is filled with bravado, overstatement, quick, dogmatic conclusions, and a rush to judgment. People like this are always trying to convince others. They need to get us on their side and tend to talk a lot in the process. Underneath the “mouthiness” is a lot of anxiety about being right. Mouthy certitude, I think, often gives itself away, frankly, by being rude and even unkind because it’s so convinced it has the whole truth.
We have to balance mouthy certitude with “mystical certitude.” Mystical certitude is utterly authoritative, but it’s humble. It isn’t unkind. It doesn’t need to push its agenda. It doesn’t need to compel anyone to join a club, a political party, or even a religion. It’s a calm, collected presence, which Jesus seems to possess entirely. As Jesuit Greg Boyle writes, “There is no place in the gospel where Jesus is defensive. In fact, he says, ‘Do not worry what your defense will be’ [Luke 12:11]. Jesus had no interest in winning the argument, only in making the argument.”
Richard Rohr

Lecturing
Lecturing never works. Think about it, the only time we use the word “lecture” in a positive sense is when we voluntarily go to one, which we have probably paid for. That tells us that sometimes we need to wait for the ones we love to come to us for help and guidance and entrust them to God in the meantime.
Matt Redmond

Baseball box score
“Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”
Roger Angell

Moral Seriousness
What do I mean by moral seriousness? I don’t mean guilt and shame. I don’t mean sin and Judgment Day. I simply mean that being a good person was a front burner priority in my childhood home. Moral integrity and virtue were talked about, they were goals. Goodness mattered to my parents, and they wanted it to matter to me. And as a parent myself I put being a good person on the front burner for my two sons. Telling the truth and being honest mattered. It was a priority. Keeping promises mattered. Being patient, kind, and generous mattered. Sticking up for those being picked on at school mattered. Including those who were excluded mattered. Sharing mattered. Eschewing materialism mattered. Resisting stereotypes and racism mattered. And above all, love mattered.
Richard Beck

Is God a fool?
In its excellence, the world did not know Christ. We not only dispise fools but seek incessantly to portray our enemies as fools (“those idiots!”). However:
“God resists the proud but gives more grace to the humble.”
I many times suspect that God stands before us as a “mute fool,” giving no answer to our accusations and recriminations apart from the silence of his corpse on the Cross. One of the desert fathers once said, “If I cannot edify you by my silence, then I certainly cannot edify you by my words.”
In our world, perhaps only a fool could speak the truth. But, then, it would mean that only fools could understand him.
Fr Stephen Freeman

“We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him. So we open our thoughts to Him — feeble our tongues, but sensitive our hearts. We see more than we can say. The trees stand like guards of the Everlasting; the flowers like signposts of His goodness — only we have failed to be testimonies to His presence, tokens of His trust. How could we have lived in the shadow of greatness and defied it.” 
Abraham Hershel – I Asked for Wonder

Every Opportunity
Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. Colossians 4:5–6
Make the most of every opportunity. (v. 5b)
What is the opportunity? I used to think the opportunity was to try and work in some way to share the gospel message with them, which in retrospect looks more like trying to get people enlisted on my multilevel marketing discipleship pyramid scheme.
I think of the sharing the gospel differently now. It’s more about the mystery than the messaging. As we have discussed, the message of the gospel is the mystery of Christ, and the mystery of Christ is Christ in us. To the extent I am attuned to “Christ in me,” I can be present to the person sitting across from me. To the extent I can be present to that person, Christ will presence himself with us and the mystery will become manifest. As I become genuinely interested in another person, Jesus manifests his interest in him or her.
The opportunities are everywhere. The overwhelming majority of people in the world, outsiders or not, are not listened to. No one leans into them and listens with genuine interest. This is what supernatural love looks like in ordinary clothes.
JD Walt

View from the Front Porch
The morning is fitting: gloomy, rainy. My heart is heavy with grief and anger. I am thankful I can speak freely to the ONE who knows and cares, but comfort is AWOL.
My words are complaint, the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father’s heart. (Ann Voskamp)

“My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever.”
??Psalms? ?73:26? ?NLT??

STILL ON THE JOURNEY