Category: Notes Anthology

Civility

Civility does not ban passion from the conversation. It bans speaking of others in language that demeans instead of differs. It bans treating others with disrespect instead of dignity. It bans excludes one kind of American instead of including all Americans.

So speak your mind. Express yourself. Disagree. Then shake hands with one another, or hug your fellow, and continue on in a system shaped by the wonder of checks and balances.

Scot McKnight

Psalm 31:12-13 NIV

I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. For I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side!”

Living 

…to live in a way that you want to know the truth about yourself is a hell of a challenge.

Stanley Hauerwas 

Woman President

Gallup this year found that 5 percent of Americans still said they would not vote for a female candidate for president. That reflects a steady decline in chauvinism — in 1937, 64 percent said they could not vote for a woman —  

True Theology

Nothing is as difficult as true theology. Simply saying something correct is beside the point. Correctness does not rise to the level of theology. Theology, rightly done, is a path towards union with God. It is absolutely more than an academic exercise. Theology is not the recitation of correct facts, it is the apprehension and statement of Beauty.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Sing all the songs

encouragement …to sing, ….all of the songs, even the songs that come most unnaturally. If you only sings songs of hope your faith will become trivial and superficial, disconnected from the injustice and suffering in the world. And if you only sing songs of anger or sorrow you’ll burn yourself out, or fail to offer encouragement to those who most need to hear it. I learned that lesson out at the prison. When I first starting working in the prison I came singing my natural song–sorrow–but what the men in the study most needed was encouragement and hope. Consequently, I have learned to sing songs of hope. 

So, sing your natural song. Embrace it and sing it out loud. 

But also learn to sing all of the songs. Immature Christians tend to sing only one song. Anger, over and over. Lament, over and over. Or praise, over and over.

Mature Christians, by contrast, are better poets, skilled at singing all the songs and adapting the rhyme and meter of faith to the season and situation.

Richard Beck

Evidence is not enough

…actual evidence is not needed for a conspiracy theory. All that is needed is prejudice, disliking something. So in 2018, flat earthers were invited to the Salton Sea in Southern California for a visible – with your own eyes – demonstration. A boat with a multicolored striped mast and sail was set out. 

Everyone sat on the shore, got their cameras, binoculars, video and literally watched as each color bar (starting at the bottom) disappeared. This happens because of the curve of the earth.

Though a whole group of flatters were there, watched it with their own eyes, took pictures themselves, captured the video … they refused to believe it. It was fake. You see because the actual facts do not matter to conspiracy theorists. I don’t believe it, there is a huge secret conspiracy that must be confronted.

People gravitate to these theories out of emotional and psychological factors, not facts, logic and evidence. And certainly not out of faith in the Creator God.

“Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what it fears, or be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (Isaiah 8.12-13)

Bobby Valentine

Nicene Creed

Some people reject the creed for all sorts of reasons:

• Unitarians, who reject the Nicene Creed’s ascription of divinity to Jesus outright.
• Biblicists, who don’t believe anything theological unless it’s found in their KJV.
• Liberals, who think everybody before 1776 was a superstitious moron.
• Liturgists, who are happy to recite it, but don’t really believe it.
• Fundamentalist, who think it is too “ecumenical,” because if Catholics believe it then it must be bad. 
• Primitivists, who want no creed but Christ and no book but the Bible.

Michael Bird

Loving People Or Fixing Projects? 

How do I view any of my personal ministry relationships as projects?

This is why we often get stuck in the mess of discipleship. We don’t want ministry that demands love. We don’t want to serve others in a way that requires so much personal sacrifice.

Are you trying to lob grenades of truth into people’s lives rather than lay down your life for them? Are you treating the work of personal ministry more like an assembly line, where people are objects, and you move them along quickly and mechanically?
The church is not a manufacturing plant, assembling and repairing machines and robots. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and sanctification center, where flawed people place their trust in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he has designed.

Personal ministry relationships are messy and inefficient, but it is God’s wonderful mess—the place where he radically transforms hearts and lives.

Paul Tripp

View from the Front Porch

Adult Children relationships

A Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, more than 70 percent of respondents with children ages 18 to 34 said they talk with their kids on the phone at least a few times a week, and nearly 60 percent had helped their kids financially in the past year. A majority of adult children polled said they turn to their parents for career, money, and health advice. And a 2023 Harris poll found that about 45 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29 reported living with their parents—making it the most common living arrangement for that age group for the first time since just after the Great Depression.

Some people find those numbers alarming, evidence of a quietly mushrooming overdependence among a generation of hapless grown babies, and of caregivers who can’t, for God’s sake, stop giving care. But that’s not necessarily right. Today’s average parent-child bond does seem to involve near-constant communication—yet it also comes with an intensified emotional closeness of the kind once reserved for friends and romantic partners. This doesn’t mean that adult kids are failing to launch or that their parents are suffering. Rather, the way our society understands child-rearing is evolving. The assignment, which was once to raise an independent child and set them off into the world, is now to foster a deep, lasting relationship.

When I first read those numbers I fell into the category of people who find them alarming. Then I read the rest of the article and now I’m rethinking my assumptions about child rearing and parent and adult child relationships. I encourage each of you to read the full article. The Atlantic

It is not a pleasant experience to discover, at any age, how misguided you have been, but at 82 it’s especially painful. Stanley Hauerwas is correct.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune

Rebuke

Rebuke is not something that exists outside a good relationship, brought in only at crisis moments. Rebuke is not a radical moment of truth-telling, with a long list of stern indictments against a person who is significantly rebellious or who has tragically wandered away.

The Bible presents rebuke as a cord of ongoing honesty in an ongoing relationship, a normal part of loving your brother or sister daily. Rather than one big moment of scripted accusations, rebuke is many mini-moments of spontaneous, gentle confrontation.

Paul Tripp

Self Critique

Christianity has the internal tools and resources to think through new challenges, to engage in self-critique, and to bring itself to a more coherent and consensual account of its own faith. It is possible to integrate creeds, consequences, and contexts according to metrics given by the Lord Jesus.

As Augustine said:

“So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them.”

Michael Bird

Power

Power is always tempted to reject reality. If you are on the margins of society, reality is pretty apparent.

Samuel Kimbriel

Contemplation

Contemplation waits for the moments, creates the moments, where all can be a silent prayer. It refuses the very distinction between action and stillness. Contemplation is essentially nondual consciousness that overcomes the gaps between me and God, outer and inner, either and or, me and you.  

The reason why the true contemplative-in-action is still somewhat rare is that most of us, even and most especially in religion, are experts in dualistic thinking. And then we try to use this limited thinking tool for prayer, problems, and relationships. It cannot get us very far. The irony of ego “consciousness” is that it always excludes and eliminates the unconscious—which means it is actually not conscious at all! Ego insists on knowing and being certain; it refuses all unknowing. Most people who think they are fully conscious (read, “smart”) have a leaden manhole cover over their unconscious. It gives them control but seldom compassion or wisdom.  

Richard Rohr

Lament

“The resurrection of the church begins with lament.” This is difficult for many Americans and others living in Western countries to grasp. Our culture teaches us to embrace a triumphalistic and success-oriented posture. Thus we avoid lament. Americans are prone to move quickly to try to fix things, and often we need to lament, mourn, and grieve first to fully experience and understand what has taken place. In cases of injustice and atrocities such as genocide, the only real response we can have at first is to lament. Scripture teaches us that we can’t move toward hope, peace, transformation, and reconciliation without going through sorrow, mourning, regret, and lament…. 

Lament is a demonstrative, strong, and corporate expression of deep grief, pain, sorrow, and regret. Lament and repentance deal with issues of the heart. They pave the way for outer change. Lament is a personal and corporate response to many things: evil, sin, death, harm, discrimination, inequality, racism, sexism, colonization, oppression, and injustice. It is about mourning the painful, shameful, or sorrowful situation, about confessing sin and complicity and sorrow, about calling God to intervene and to change the situation. Finally, lament is about offering thanksgiving and praise to God, knowing that God will intervene and bring change, hope, and restoration. 

Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill 

https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-eijhyg-tlkrtilrty-z

Right Worship

“right worship.” This is the very heart of our life. It is the true home and heart place of the Church’s teaching. The sublime institution of the Eucharist was a revelation of all that Christ had said and done, as well as its ultimate fulfillment on the Cross – all of it made manifest in what would become the central act of worship in the life of the Church. It is a dynamic presence of theosis (bread-become-God) set in our midst.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Grievance

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

Frank Bruni NYT

View from the Front Porch

 Below is a letter I wrote to our Bible Study group in Louisville before we moved to Wilmore. Its message is a timely reminder.

As you probably know, I listen to a lot of sermons and lectures. I’m concerned that I may be a “cognitive behaviorist”. I ran across that term in a book that I just finished. I posted a comment on my blog about it. Here is what I posted:

Occasionally, I look at the mirror and get a glimpse of what I really look like and it isn’t always a pleasant experience. I would prefer to see myself in my mind’s eye. This morning as I was reading Scot McKnight’s “A Community Called Atonement”. As he addressed impediments to the atoning role scripture plays in the life of the church, I had a “glimpse in the mirror” experience. The subject was “cognitive behaviorist”.

“… cognitive behaviorists teach that if we get things right in our mind we will behave accordingly. With respect to spiritual formation … the theory goes like this: the more Bible we learn, the better Christian we should be; the more theology we grasp, the better we will live. … But we need to make this clear: knowing more Bible doesn’t necessarily make me a better Christian. I have hung around enough nasty Bible scholars and enough mean-spirited pastors to know that knowing the Bible does not inevitably create a better Christian. And I’ve known plenty of loving Christians who don’t know the difference Matthew and John, let alone the differences between Kings and Chronicles”

The cognitive behaviorist approach denies a biblical theory of the Eikon [that humans are created in the image of God]  We are made as Eikons, we cracked the Eikon (through our will), and the resolution of the problem of cracked Eikons is not simply through the mind. It is through the will, the heart, the mind and the soul – and the body, too. No matter how much Bible we know, we will not be changed until we give ourselves over to what Augustine called “faith seeking understanding”. The way of Jesus is personal, and it is relational, and it is through the door of loving God and loving others. The mind is a dimension of our love of God (heart, soul, mind, and strength), but it is not the only or even the first door to open.

I share that with you because I may have communicated in some way that knowing the Bible is all we need to be Christ followers. Knowing the Bible is important, but as stated above, it is not he only thing. Personally, I am trying to develop other dimensions of my relationship with Christ, my will, heart, soul, and body. Spiritual formation is not just about knowing the Bible. I would like to discuss this further when we get together.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Borrow money from pessimists — they don’t expect it back. Steven Wright

the advantages of reading:

Reading transports us to worlds we would never see, introduces us to people we would never meet, and instills emotions we might never otherwise feel. It also provides an array of health benefits. Here are six scientific reasons you should be picking up more books.

1. Reading reduces stress.
2. Reading (especially reading books) may add years to your life.
3. Reading improves your language skills and knowledge of the world.
4. Reading enhances empathy.
5. Reading boosts creativity and flexibility.
6. Reading can help you transform as a person.

via Scot McKnight

Divine Love

Those who are self-sufficient remain outsiders to the mystery of divine love because they will always misuse it. Only the need of a beloved knows how to receive the need and gift of the lover, and only the need of a lover knows how to receive the need and gift of the beloved. 

Richard Rohr

Generosity

• generosity starts by paying attention;
• generosity demands that the gift be appropriate to the receiver;
• a gift is not a gift unless it is released;
• giving is reciprocal;
• giving strengthens human relationships;
• gifts change the people involved.

Michael Moynagh – https://amzn.to/3X9aCke

Protests

In the four years since mass protests broke out over the killing of George Floyd, cities across the US have settled more than 130 lawsuits involving police misconduct with payouts totaling nearly $150m to protesters, journalists, legal observers and bystanders, according to an analysis of the lawsuits published this week.

Mercy

The story comes to mind of the little fish swimming up to its mother, all in a panic: “Mama, Mama, what’s water? I gotta find water or I’ll die!” We live immersed in this water, and the reason we miss it is not that it is so far away but, paradoxically, so close: more intimate to us than our being itself.…  

[Mercy] is the water in which we swim. Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it.…  

The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional—always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too—in the words of Psalm 103—“swim in mercy as in an endless sea.” Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God

Religious Right

“Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary. There was no rhetoric to appalling, no alliance too shady, no biblical application too sacrilegious. Letting go – aphiemi [Greek] – was not an option.”

Scot McKnight – The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

Modernity

…the problem that I want us to see is how Modernity works – and particularly how it works within us. We have internalized the myth of progress and utility. We not only believe that the world and the things around us can be better, but that it is our God-given task to make them so. We push this same cultural mandate into the Scriptures as well. We imagine the parable of the good stewards (those who invested their talents of money and made a profit) to be stories of how God praised and rewarded them for their productivity and usefulness. We fail to wonder what actually constitutes faithful stewardship in the Kingdom of God.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Culture War Christians

“Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.”

…if we want to frank about it, culture war Christians are walking down a path that leads straight to hell. I don’t delight in that assessment, I’m just connecting the dots. I mean, Jesus is the guy who looked the moralism religious folk directly in the eye and said, “I assure you that the tax collectors and sex workers are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” I would not want to be a social media Pharisee wagging a finger at the world the day the Lord returns. I’d rather be sitting at a table being lambasted as the friend of sinners. Just sayin’…

And maybe this why, to return to the issue of mathematics, only “a few find it.” Because you can grow a church with the culture wars. A church fueled by resentment can become “mega.”  
I guess what I’m trying to say is this:
Size makes me suspicious. A wicked Christianity is a scalable Christianity. You can grow a rotten church.
Authentic Christianity is possible, but few find it. 
Richard Beck

View from the Front Porch

Misconceptions

misconceptions people have about the economy, including:

• 55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the U.S. is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
• 49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
• 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY