Sunday, October 7, 2012

Preaching Thoughts on a Non Preaching Sunday

Two Sundays in a row without preaching.  Feels odd.  I hope I remember how come next Sunday.  Of course I can't totally doze off today. We have a congregational meeting today to elect a nominating committee, the group charged with finding those whom God is calling to be the deacons and elders who lead this church.  Presumably this will be a rather perfunctory meeting, but one never knows.

I don't know that today's gospel speaks directly to calling and electing leaders in a congregation, but it is interesting to think about a kingdom belonging to little children beside the question of who leads the church. "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs."

Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom.  We forget that in the church sometimes, focusing more on heaven than the Kingdom. But the Kingdom is not a synonym for heaven. So what does it mean to say the Kingdom, God's new day, God's new dominion or realm,belongs to children, and we must receive it as children to enter?

It's worth remembering that Jesus lived in a very different time and culture than we do.  In Jesus' day, children did not enjoy the status they do in our culture. Children had no rights, were property of their father, and, to a perhaps even greater degree than women, were not thought of as full persons. Until they came of age, they really did not matter. "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs." 

The Kingdom belongs to the nobodies, the invisible, the unimportant.  And Jesus seems to think that those of us who are somebodies, who are prominent and important, will have difficulty with this kingdom. Nobodies received the Kingdom easily, but others must become like nobodies in some way.

I'm not sure how to make a smooth segue from nobodies receiving the Kingdom to the question of who leads the church, but is seems to me that the two things should be related in some way.  If the church is to continue the work of Jesus, which must surely mean continuing to proclaim the kingdom, then it stands to reason that we must know something about receiving the Kingdom as nobodies.

 The manner of electing elders and deacons in the Presbyterian Church has changed since I was a child, but I still remember those elections when ballots were handed out and people circled the people they wanted to elect. (Today our nominating committee brings back a slate with the same number of people as offices to be filled.)  In a reasonably large church, this was something of a popularity contest, and the nobodies almost never got elected. In fact, the people I remember as elders and deacons from my childhood didn't seem at all like nobodies to me. They were prominent, important, impressive, and so on. 

Now obviously a church does want leaders with real strengths and abilities, people God has given gifts of discernment and leadership.  But I can't help wondering about how these impressive leaders should relate to a Kingdom that belongs to nobodies.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

What Shapes and Forms Us

One of the trends in my faith tradition has the term spiritual or "Christian formation" supplanting the term "Christian Education."  Directors of Christian Education (DCEs), once common in larger Presbyterian churches, are becoming scarcer while Directors of Christian Formation are seen more regularly.

Religion, like other fields, is often captive to trends, and so churches reorganize and restructure and revision just like other organizations.  And we rename committees and positions without it really changing anything that happens. But I don't think the idea of spiritual formation is simply a passing fad. No doubt there are congregations who rename a DCE as a DCF with no accompanying change in practices. But the name change more often reflects real changes in how churches do what they used to call Christian Education.

In the 1950s, for better or worse, many people expected that participation in the larger culture would form people both as citizens and as people of faith. The idea that America was a Christian nation, however far that was from actual truth, implied that one could learn the habits and practices of being a Christian via active participation in our society.  Practices of sabbath keeping, regular patterns of worship, and shared moral standards were encouraged and enforced by cultural and governmental forces.

In such an environment, church congregations were one player among many in forming Christians, and they could focus on activities such as holding worship and teaching the finer points of the faith (and their version of it) to members. To that end, Sunday School (which itself had begun as social program to educate poor children who couldn't attend regular school) was seen as a classroom much like the ones students attended Monday-Friday.  There were "text books" and various things that needed to be taught. (An unfortunate and unintended side affect of this specialized religious instruction was that religious education came to be seen as the work of experts rather than a primary tasks of parents.)

But over the last half century or so, the cultural components where a "Christian nation" formed people in faith have pretty much disappeared. The culture no longer encourages and enforces sabbath keeping or regular worship. Instead it actively works against these, creating all manner of enticements designed to draw people away from worship or treat Sabbath like any other day. Faithful participation in a religious community has gone from expected to downright counter-cultural.

In this changed landscape, many of those old Sunday School models make very little sense.  Forty five minutes a week in a classroom on a less than regular basis is not likely to profoundly change how people live their lives without some other supporting structures.  If the Christian life is indeed counter-cultural, Sunday School alone doesn't stand much of a chance against all the forces aligned against it.

In short, faith communities are faced with the problem of how to shape and form people for lives that exist in some tension with the community around them.  And while those who want to put prayer or God back into the schools recognize this problem and likely have the best of intentions, the fact is there is no going back. We are not going to get the culture to do this work for us. The culture has too much invested in Sunday soccer, endless childhood enrichment, 24-7 efficiency and productivity, economics based on consumerism, and so on to ever fully buy into a way of life that insists on sabbath rest, on life more focused on others than self, on life lived toward God and not much worried about acquiring more.

In such a setting, the need to form people for faithful lives becomes more and more the issue. Teaching people the Bible and theology is still a big piece, but learning the basic rhythms and practice of a faithful life become critical. We still need to teach beliefs, but we also need to learn ways and habits. We need to help people be formed in ways that allow them to follow Jesus, not simply believe in him.

When I began writing this, I had no thoughts of discussing DCEs or Christian Education. I was reflecting on why Jesus had so much difficulty with the good, religious people of his day. I was thinking about formation from that standpoint, wondering about how Jesus' opponents had been religiously shaped in such a way that they saw him as a threat. This notion of formation made me think of Christian formation and led to the long tangent that has delivered me here. 

But at the end of that tangent, I find myself still reflecting on how those scribes and Pharisees got off track somewhere in their religious formation. And I'm wondering what that means as we in the church face the huge challenge of forming people for Christ in our time.  What does it mean to form and shape people to be like Jesus, someone who adhered to his faith tradition and taught as a rabbi in it, who learned the Scriptures and kept the Sabbath, and yet never let his faith tradition keep him from helping and caring for others.

The Apostle Paul seems to capture this pattern in his famous piece on love from 1 Corinthians 13. Too often relegated to weddings, Paul's soaring words remind us that faith and knowledge and power and abilities are all rendered meaningless without love. And of course Paul is not speaking of romantic love, but of a love that always sees the other as one deserving my care, help, etc. Jesus embodies what Paul describes. Jesus is formed through and through by and for love. Jesus taught and followed the rules, but he never succumbed to what so often happens to good people who have knowledge. Jesus never viewed those without knowledge or outside the rules as somehow undeserving. Rather he sought them out, feeling especially compelled to love and care for them.

How does one teach this? How does a class fill someone with such deep love and compassion that she would cross cultural boundaries and break religious convention to reach out to an outsider? How are we to form people by and for love?

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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Is It Worship?

O sing to the LORD a new song;
   sing to the LORD, all the earth. 

Sing to the LORD, bless his name;
   tell of his salvation from day to day. 

Declare his glory among the nations,
   his marvelous works among all the peoples. 

For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised;
   he is to be revered above all gods. 
(from Ps. 96)

Both this morning's psalms call us to praise and worship God. These psalms don't ask anything of God. They sing about God, brag on God, and tell about the wonderful things God has done. They seem to have no ulterior motive, expecting nothing in return for their worship and praise. They are - to borrow the title from Marva Dawn's book on worship - A Royal "Waste" of Time.

A colleague of mine, James Kim, had a blog post yesterday with this title: "Connecting with God Is Not the Same Thing as Worshiping God." He's correct; it's not. Pastor Kim is contrasting Sunday worship with things that we do outside church to connect with God. But I worry that this connecting with God vs. worshiping God dynamic exists within Sunday worship itself.

In its most basic form, worship is the sort of activity found in today's psalms. But we ask that thing we call a "worship service" to do a great deal, perhaps way too much. The name "worship service" implies that we serve God with our worship  But we expect to be served as well, sometimes so much so that our serving God gets lost.

I'm not suggesting that worship should be nothing more than songs of praise and adoration. We do need to hear God's word speak to us in worship. We do need to be nourished at the Lord's Table. But if we understand worship primarily as something directed at us for our benefit, if we don't have a significant sense of offering ourselves to God in worship, then I fear that we've turned worship into one more consumer item that's supposed to make our lives better. And at that point, we may well have turned God into a consumer item. This consumer-item God does not inspire wonder and awe trembling, but exists solely to make our lives better, happier, more spiritual, more meaningful, etc.

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
   let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it.
   Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.


The God of the psalmist is so wonderful and awe inspiring that even creation itself cannot stop from joining in the worship and praise. Is that the God we "worship?"

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

What I Really Need


"Which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Stand up and walk'? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" - he said to the one who was paralyzed - "I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home." (Luke 5:23-24)

I've always been bothered by this passage. Companions bring a paralyzed man to Jesus, and his response is to say, "Friend, your sins are forgiven you." My problem is not that Jesus says this, but that this is apparently all he plans to say.  Perhaps I'm reading the passage too literally, but Jesus does say that he heals the man so that people will know he can forgive sin. This seems to say that the man needed forgiveness more than he needed to be healed of his paralysis.

It's interesting to contemplate the idea that I need forgiveness more than any of the other things I think I need.  My experience as a pastor is that lots of Presbyterians would just as soon not have a prayer of confession in the worship service.  We know we're not perfect, but we're not that bad.  It's not something we need to be overly concerned with.

I wonder if mechanical understandings of forgiveness sometimes accentuate this. We're sinners; Jesus died; we believe; it's all okay now. We get it. No need to go over it and over it.

True, we know the formula, but have we really experienced God's forgiveness? Have we truly felt what it is like to restored, to have a broken relationship healed, to have God make amends for the hurt we have caused, to experience a whole new quality of life?

One of the most basic Christian affirmations is that Jesus is Lord and Savior.  But I really don't want a Lord.  I want to be in charge of my own life. And I'm not all that sure I need saving. I'm a bit like a raging alcoholic who manages to fool family, friends, and himself into believing that he has it all under control.  There is no deep and serious problem. I don't really need any help.

We humans seem to have remarkable abilities to delude ourselves. So I wonder, what is it that I really need?

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Monday, October 1, 2012

For God Alone

For God alone my soul waits in silence;
  from God comes my salvation.
  Ps. 62:1

A question I've gotten from a few folks in my new call goes like this. "So James, what is your vision for our church?"  I confess to being a bit uncomfortable with the question, but I don't think that's a matter of shirking my leadership responsibilities. I'm not at all averse to pointing out things we need to do or pushing for certain things, but I don't think a congregation's vision is supposed to come from me.

One of the things I enjoy about the lectio divina practice of reading Scripture is the way it can open you to hearing a word that you would never get from traditional Bible study. It is important to study the Bible and to explore the meaning of a passage after considering its context, to whom it is addressed, the type of literature, and so on. But hearing God speak is not simply a matter of understanding the Bible, and lectio divina lets us listen in a different way.  This spiritual practice, where a passage is read simply listening for a word or phrase that seems to stand out, is a wonderful way to become more open to God in a manner that is not academic or about what I know.

For God alone...  That grabbed me this morning. And as I reflected on why that might be, I don't think it had much to do with the psalm's looking to God for rescue or security. I heard this as a word for that question of vision. For God alone we wait, hoping to hear clearly.  For God alone we become still and silent, anticipating that God does have plans for us, that God has a calling for us.

I'm not suggesting that our knowledge and understanding don't matter.  If we know our Bibles at all we surely have some idea of the kind of things God expects from us. But what is there that is peculiar to us, to our current moment and particular context? What calling is God placing on us right now?

For God alone my soul waits in silence, longing to hear.

"So James, what is your vision for our church?" True vision is from God, but in the meantime, I have what might be a provisional vision.  May all of us in this congregation become more attentive, waiting for God alone, so that together we may hear God's call.

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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Preaching Thoughts on a Non Preaching Sunday

It's my first "Youth Sunday" in my new call. That's just one in a string of firsts that greet all new pastors.  Next comes my first Stewardship season, followed closely by my first Advent and Christmas, and so on. One of the reasons it takes a pastor a while to get acclimated is the need to go through a string of firsts that takes at least a year.

Today's first doesn't ask much of me, other than to step aside. As much as I love preaching, a Sunday off when I'm not away on vacation is something of a gift, and so I am happy to accommodate. But as I step aside, and middle and high schoolers take center stage, I find myself reflecting on Kierkegaard's critique of worship as drama.

We Protestants speak of a "priesthood of all believers," meaning that there are no special people needed to act a conduits for divine access.  We all have direct access to God in Jesus, and we all can share God's presence with others. And so it makes prefect sense that people other than pastors would lead worship, would seek to draw others into God's presence.  Indeed, the only reasons that Presbyterians require ordained pastors (or commissioned lay pastors) to preside over baptisms and the Lord's Supper is because they have special training to explain and interpret the meaning of such events. Other than this training, their presence confers no special aura to the moment.

And yet, worship in most churches remains a show of which pastors are lead players along with choirs and others. It is a show folks come to watch.  This is what infuriated Kierkegaard all those years ago, this notion of a drama on stage with the congregation as audience.  He insisted that the only audience for worship was God, and all of us involved are the actors presenting the drama to God.

The Youth Sunday that will unfold later this morning at least has the advantage that people who ordinarily would be part of the "audience" now become the lead actors.  Perhaps in that process, a greater sense of worship as shared offering to God can be glimpsed. If nothing else, perhaps the youth can have a better sense of worship as their offering to God.

But I suspect that for many worshipers, the old patterns are hard to break. The actors on the stage are different this week, but for the most part, the audience remains the same (other than friends, grandparents, etc. in the audience who came especially for this service).  And expectations likely remain the same.  Everyone realizes that worship will look a bit different today, but it will be something done by those on the stage, other than those few moments of congregational speaking of singing.

This is not a critique of congregations on my part, and I don't think of Kierkegaard's part either. I'm inclined to think that whatever sense people have of going to a show has been cultivated by those of us who are the presumed actors. We're the ones who have done worship all these years in a way to focus all attention on us. We Presbyterians speak of the Word being the central part of worship.  In old worship orders this Word functioned as grand finale. In more current orders of worship, the Word is at the center of the service with parts flowing toward or away from it.  But of course the major element of the Word is sermon. There is a long, rich, theological history in our tradition focused on the the Word and its place in worship.  But practically speaking, we pastors oversee a worship tradition in which sermon, if not in fact pastor, is the star of the show.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what a good, viable alternative to this is. And there are no doubt many people in the "audience" who feel very engaged in worship, who feel that their singing, attention, etc. are gifts they offer to God whose presence is quite real to them. But I worry that they are more exception than rule.  And I feel that we need to do more to help others worship on Sunday morning rather than serve as audience.

I'd love to hear from people who think I'm off base, who have ideas that might help, or whatever.  How do we do worship so that it becomes an event in which we all participate, an event where God's presence is palpable, and we offer out best to God?

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Offensive Good News

Any pastor who adopts Jesus' preaching style in today's gospel will have a short tenure in his or her congregation. In Luke's version of the visit to Nazareth's synagogue, Jesus goes out of his way to offend the hometown crowd.  He has no sooner claimed to be the fulfillment of prophecy, the one who comes "to bring good news to the poor... to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor," than he reminds the crowd of those times God's saving power was offered to Gentiles and not to Israel.

It's worth noting that when this Nazareth story is told by Matthew and Mark, Jesus offers no such offense.  The people take offense, but not because Jesus rubbed their face in how God sometimes ignores Israel and helped others. They simply couldn't believe that a local boy, whose family they knew, could be Messiah.

Luke almost certainly had Mark's version of this story when he wrote his gospel, yet for some reason he felt the need to retell events so that Jesus goes out of his way to give offense. In Luke, they chase Jesus out of town not because they can't accept a Messiah with an unimpressive pedigree, but because Jesus tries to offend them. If Matthew and Mark say that God's salvation is offensive because of the surprising way it is manifest, Luke insists that God's salvation is intrinsically offensive to some, most especially to those who think they have advantages.

It's hard to miss this offense when you read Luke's gospel. A pregnant Mary sings of God scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, and sending the rich away empty. In Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount, there are accompanying woes to to go with the blessings or beatitudes. "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep."

I'm not exactly sure how literally we are to understand these woes, but Luke clearly sees the salvation Jesus brings as something other than a rising tide that lifts all boats. Luke has Jesus engaged in class warfare, lifting up the poor and lowly and oppressed, but dragging down the rich and powerful and well connected and religiously comfortable.  If you're not on the bottom, how could you not be offended?

Over the years, many have wondered about what happens to the gospel when it moves into the arena of wealth and power. When Christianity was embraced by the emperor Constantine, and over the centuries populated with Christian kings and presidents and factory owners and billionaires, what happens to the good news Jesus proclaims?

I have little doubt that this gospel has remained a powerful force that benefits the world, but there is also little doubt that it nonetheless gets corrupted in the process. Most of the time the gospel's offensive, scandalous nature has been greatly diminished, but it is still there, nagging at us now and then. But we must admit that at times, its offensiveness has been obliterated, and in such times, faith can become an instrument of oppression and hate.

For most of my life, I have lived in a church populated by people who are middle class and above.  I may have encountered the poor via church, volunteering at the homeless shelter or when they came to the church run food pantry or clothing closet.  But for the most part they were people the church helped, not part of the church. In such a church, if Jesus doesn't make us just a little nervous, if he doesn't scare us just a bit, I wonder if we're still proclaiming his good news.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

I Need a Better Religion

I have to admit that I've always had something of a love-hate relationship with religion.  I suppose that requires some sort of definition of "religion." I think that most people are religious in some way. They have an impulse to connect to something beyond themselves. And any way of doing such connecting, barring one that is done in complete isolation, ends up requiring some element of organization or institution. But of course we humans can muck up most anything, and so the religions we practice are a mixed bag. They do help people draw near to God, and they do help people become more like they "should" be. But of course religion also makes people feel superior to others and sometimes makes them feel justified in hating and even killing others. Like I said, a mixed bag.

The churches I've been connected to have not been much into hating, and you have to go a long way back in history to find killings. (John Calvin does take a pretty big hit to his reputation on this one.) But we do proof text from the Bible to support our agendas, agendas that often have little connection to faith. And the fact that Jesus slams the devil for his proof-texting in today's gospel doesn't much dissuade us on that practice.

But my biggest struggle with religion arises in the salvation area.  By salvation I'm not really talking about admittance to heaven.  I'm referring to more concrete examples like those in today's psalm.  "Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; and to you shall vows be performed, O you who answer prayer!.. By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation."  Here the reference is likely to the past rescue from slavery in Egypt as well as present rescue from enemies, drought, etc.  God saves, and the stories of Jesus healing or stilling a storm are there to say that Jesus has that same saving power.

Now here's where my struggle comes in. I regularly come in contact with religious folks who occupy two very different poles regarding God's saving power. On the one hand there are those who regularly post trite platitudes on Facebook that sound naively unaware of anyone ever suffering unjustly or faithfully trying to love and serve God but receiving only heartache for that effort. And then there are folks at the other extreme who seem to think God powerless over the concrete difficulties of life, providing little more than a cosmic shoulder to cry on.

Granted, these are extremes. There are many people somewhere in between these two poles, but I suspect most of us tend one way or the other. I tend toward the second pole, in part because I'm bothered by the first. A lot of people that I know tend this way for the same reason. A loved one has cancer and a "religious" friend says, "If you pray and really have faith, God will heal him."  And we recoil at such notions, as does the book of Job.  But in the process, our God sometimes becomes impotent except as a divine mental health counselor.

I get frustrated because I feel like I have to choose between the two poles. I must either embrace a saving God who always fixes things for the truly faithful.  This of course requires ignoring a lot of evidence to the contrary and is so a very unsophisticated choice. I'm no simpleton, but when I rush to the other pole, I end up with a God who looks little like what my faith proclaims, a mighty God who is sovereign, even over history, and who, in Jesus, is moving the world and history toward something new and wonderful.

I could never be a "fundamentalist" sort of Christian.  Nearly everything about me makes that impossible. But the liberal Christianity I inhabit sometimes seems to have gone too far the other way. By that I do not mean too far left on social or political issues. Rather I mean too far away from an active, powerful God, ending up in a place where God becomes more philosophy than being.

Maybe I'm must weird on this.  I don't know. I do tend to over-think things.  But I still wonder if the rapidly declining rates of religious participation in our country aren't a bit related to the unsatisfactory nature of both these poles.

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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

I'm Not That Desperate

Imagine that you've been a little disconnected from church or whatever your faith community is (if you even need to imagine). Now imagine that you're feeling inspired.  You want to reconnect. You want to recommit yourself to your faith practices.  And so you head out to worship, feeling very good.  You even get there early and relaxed.  The service starts, and the preacher looks straight at you and says, "What are you doing here, you vermin? What brought you out?  Your little religious stirrings don't impress God at all." Now perhaps the preacher isn't speaking just to you, but it feels like it.

If that happened to me, I rather doubt I'd ever go back.  I probably would leave right then and there. But in today's gospel reading, those people who are listening to John have not left after he called them a brood of vipers. After he had trashed them, they begged him to tell them what they must do.  And in today's reading, they think he might be the Messiah.  Wow, those folks must have been pretty desperate to hang around after John had treated them so roughly and rudely.  We'd never stand for such.

I've been thinking a lot lately about competency and the ability to hear God. I'm still wrestling with this, but it seems to me that highly competent people have more trouble being open to God's voice. By definition, highly competent people are able to get things done. They trust their own abilities, and they aren't prone to feelings of desperation, at least not on a regular basis. 

Spiritually, a lot of we competent sorts don't desperately need God. We may very well need God, but not in some huge, dramatic way.  We need God only a little bit.  We need some help, but not all that much.  We're able to manage for the most part, and we're not desperate enough to hang around if a religious experience doesn't nod approvingly at our willingness to be religious. We don't need God badly enough to put up with much.

As a Presbyterian pastor, that is a pastor who had to learn Greek and Hebrew and get a Master's degree in Divinity, I am filled with religious competency.  And I wonder if that isn't the worst kind, at least when it comes to hearing God. 

I wonder if when Jesus says we must deny ourselves in order to follow him, part of that is denying our competencies.  I don't mean to deny their existence, but rather to let go of the notion that they get us very far in terms of relationship with God or understanding what really matters.

When I think about my own faith, surely one of the biggest sources of frustration for me comes from how difficult it is to hear God with any real clarity. It happens, but it is rare and often fleeting. And I wonder... Might my own competencies - or at least my trust in them - be getting in the way?

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Monday, September 24, 2012

On Hearing Voices

It's curious the way various things can conspire to get you thinking in a particular direction. It happened to me this morning. It actually began a couple of weeks ago in a conversation with a church member. I'm not entirely sure what prompted the remark in question, but I suppose it emerged from my efforts to get the leadership here to listen for God's call to this congregation. "I don't hear voices," the person said.

Truth is, I could probably say the same thing the great majority of the time. But the remark really bothered me. If the church is nothing more than a group of people trying hard, but without any really guidance or assistance other than our own abilities and insights, how can we speak of being the body of Christ?  If all we have is scriptural words about God to use as we best see fit, are we anything more than a philosophy or ideology?


Today brought other partners into this conversation. Today's reading from Acts included this. "One night the Lord said to Paul in a vision, 'Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no one will lay a hand on you to harm you, for there are many in this city who are my people.'"


Then a Facebook friend posted this quote from Rachel Naomi Remen. "We have not been raised to cultivate a sense of Mystery. We may even see the unknown as an insult to our competence, a personal failing." 


Finally, Richard Rohr's daily devotional had this to say. "When we read the prophets, we see that without exception they talk about an intimate relationship with God that, itself, led to radical social critique." The strain of Presbyterianism I live in is very fond of social critique, but I wonder how often it emerges from an intimate relationship with God?


I'm really struck by the idea that Mystery can be a threat to our sense of competence.  It seems to me that it's a short hop from such fears to a full blown idolatry of self.  And I wonder if this isn't a real challenge for liberal Christianity.  Can we discover and be open to ways of hearing God's voice, or will we be content simply to do the best we can on our own, leaving the listening for God's voice to folks less "sophisticated and competent" than us?


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