God acts in the big stories in history—those of the Exodus, the Cross, and redemption. But God also acts in and through the smaller stories of human life. If we take time to listen and to reflect, we can discover God’s practices of revealing and acting in the strangest of places.
— John Swinton, Dementia (26)
Amen.
“If riches increase, do not your heart on them.”
— Psalm 62:10b
Once again I gravitate toward the moral performance side of this beautiful Psalm about looking only to God for strength and salvation and love. It’s a good precept, but why not journal about the God-as-source part?
Thank you, God. That’s what I need to do: Thank you.
“One who allows himself license in little things is ruined little by little” (Augustine, as quoted by the folks at Renovaré.
At a very basic level, well-being within Christianity is not gauged in the presence or absence of illness or distress. Religious beliefs and practice may well have therapeutic benefits, but that is not their primary function or intention. Nor is the efficacy of a “spiritual intervention” theologically determined according to criteria such as reduce anxiety, better coping, or a reduction in depression, important as these things may be at a certain level. Theologically speaking, well-being has nothing to do with the* absence or reduction of anything. It has to do with the presence of something: the presence of God-in-relationship. Well-being, peace, health—what Scripture describes as shalom*—has to do with the presence of a specific God in particular places who engages in personal relationships with unique individuals for formative purposes. Rather than alleviating anxiety and fear, the present of such a God often brings on dissonance and psychological disequilibrium, but always for the purpose of the person’s greater well-being understood in redemptive and relational terms.
— John Swinton, Dementia, p. 7
“More than anything else I am thankful to Jesus for being patient with me and for remembering me when I have forgotten whose I am” (John Swinton, Dementia, x).
“I don’t know if it’s a success, but I do know it’s good.”
— myself, quoted despite the gaucheness of doing so instead of just journaled because it seems a multi-purpose saying: I said it originally to Aaron about his running club, but I could say it equally about our church
You want biblical models for how the offender should behave in pursuing forgiveness? Try Jacob and Zaccheus on.
Guilt is good. (The feeling, not the fact.)
You know the allure of your own little child first thing in the morning, how it’s irresistible to give them all your loving attention, to hold them, coo over them, think the world of them, and feel ready to give the world to them? Two notes about that:
The sin Jesus addressed via the Cross was our sin against God, not our sin against one another. The latter still requires the hard work of reconciliation. If we understood this, our track record in handling abuse situations would be vastly improved. Jesus’ work on the Cross is not license to bludgeon victims toward cheap forgiveness of their abusers.
God does not need us to “make good” to him in order for him forgive us. However, humans may need us to do so. There is such a thing as manifesting (bringing forth) fruit of repentance. This makes hyper-Protestants nervous. It need not be so.
Here, Crosby makes the point I’ve been approaching by asserting that the sin God deals with on the Cross is our sin against Him, not our sign against others.
God has given (perfect middle participle– a present reality affecting us at the moment) us, everything necessary for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). We just need to get on with well-executed consistency in basic things, rather than lusting for some ill-defined new level of spiritual catharsis or illumination (Stephen Crosby, “It’s 2019 and God is Not Taking You to New Levels”).
That articles like these still speak to me proves that I’m still a post-Charismatic.
I have started to prioritize sleep catch-up over prayer-walking. Is that okay?
“Not one of those men had ever suggested that a person could be ‘called to anything but ‘full-time Christian service,’ by which they meant either the ministry or the ‘the mission field’” (Jayber Crow, 43).
You can be called to anything in which you can love.
Provided we forgive others, God forgives us if He observes our:
We should do the same.
Is it scripturally defensible to claim that the Cross handles our sin(s) against God but does not do anything about our sin(s) against other people? And that even God’s forgiveness of our sin against Him does not preclude the possibility of rehabilitative action on His part, even punishment? (Restitution would be impossible, of course.) Is this a good way to avoid the pressure to forgive and forget or forgive quickly or superficially and a good way to keep perpetrators from getting off easily and without restitution and without reconciliation and without humbling?
This thought occurred to me while praying the Lord’s prayer on my walking way up Enterprise Drive to pick up Éa’s bag from Organic Climbing. It is tangentially inspired, I’m sure, by Rutledge’s The Crucifixion and by Denhollander’s piece on how penal substitutionary atonement informs how abusers and victims should be handled.
“Well, I feel better now.”
–When the verse you don’t understand is skipped by your favorite commentary.
Perhaps the joy is lost from listening to and making music largely because it feels desultory: There’s no goal. At least, that’s what it seems like the Spirit may be saying as I possibly discerned on my walk to and from Gary Abdullah’s house to drop off an apology note written by Sullivan for his having tripped over an electrical cord and unplugged Inflatable Christmas Countdown Santa. So, here’s a goal in the absence of a relish for musical theatre, anthem gigs at college basketball games, Puddintown Roots, and the Choral Society: Build your repertoire book.
Before opening my mouth I always ask “Is what I’m about to say edifying?”
To which my brain answers, “One way to find out.”
“The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings” (Psalm 115:16). This jibes with my theodicy.
And yet part of the ambiguity surrounding the human experience of creatures’ diversity is bound up with the fact that the multiplication of creatures is coupled with (and from a purely biological perspective, needed to compensate for) their regular destruction; rather than persisting in the capacious environments that God provides, living creatures, whether considered as individuals or as classes, die, so that, for example, only a small fraction of the terrestrial species that have existed in the half-billion years since the emergence of multicellular life survive today. Yet this fact in itself need not be viewed as inconsistent with creation’s goodness. Although death has most often been viewed in Christian tradition as a punishment for Adam’s transgression, Genesis 3:19, 22 (cf. 6:3) may also be read as teaching that humans (and by extension, other earth creatures) naturally return to the dust from which they were taken unless some other factor intervenes (see Gen. 2:7, 17 Ps. 103:13-16; Eccl. 3:19-20). Certainly there is nothing inconsistent with the goodness of creation that the “place” occupied by every creature should have temporal as well as spatial boundaries, entailing a limited life span no less than limited bodily dimensions; indeed, such temporal limits actually enhance the capaciousness of creation, since two creatures can occupy the same space if they do so at different times. Death can certainly be experienced as a violation of life and so as a curse, but Scripture also can speak of a kind of death that is a life’s natural conclusion, in which an individual dies “old and full of days’ (Gen. 35;29; 1Chr. 29:28: Job 42;17; cf. gen. 25;8; Isa. 65:20). Insofar as extinction of a species is the analogue to the death of an individual creature, one might equally conceive of classes of creatures—trilobites or dinosaurs, say, both of which thrived for tens of millions of years before becoming extinct—as having experience this sort of death. In this way we can understand death as temporal finitude, as a means by which the fullness of creation is arranged along a temporal axis as well as within contemporary physical spaces….
— Ian MacFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation
Ethan told me yesterday morning that a group of African protesters known as NO WHITE SAVIORS has been making waves among Adventures in Missions folks and making many points about short-term mission trips with which Ethan agrees. He indicated he wished to talk about it the next time we chat.
I was at the top of Balmoral Way today, and I asked You about it, and my thoughts poured out naturally: There is no answer to whether “short-term missions” are a good idea generally. There is only the question of whether a a given person being on a short-term mission trip is good, i.e., does his or her presence there produce love, unexploitative joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, or wisdom? If it does, then keep doing it; if it doesn’t, then stop.
I appear to have inadvertently discarded most of my skimpy annotations from Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion under the false understanding that there was no limit to the size of the notes field on Goodreads. Ah, well.
All I’m left with at the moment is the following Barth quotation:
What took place on the Cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV).
This dovetails nicely with the idea that has matured in me in recent months and about which I taught at church a few weeks ago: The primary thrust of Jesus’ earthly mission was to fulfill both sides of the Levitical & Deuteronomic covenant with Israel.
Beyond the above quotation, the thing I am most impressed with about Rutledge’s points is her insistence that impunity is a very unjust thing.
I have asked You, Lord, for answers to the following questions, which are really the same:
Tonight, I believe I received two more pieces to the answer in the form of questions put to me:
That latter point is related to Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.