A Few Thoughts 25.18

Do you know?
According to research, your toothbrush is likely crawling with over 100 million germs right now.

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Happy and Polite

It is easy to tell how happy someone is to see another person enter a conversation. There is happy, and there is polite, and they look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality: unpredictable, even when it is at a low level. There is an openness, allowing another person to surprise and delight them. The easiest way to say this: there is no script for happy. It tumbles out of the body. Polite comes from the mind—it is restrained and calculated—measured lines and pauses. There are reinforcing loops in a polite person and a happy person. A person closed to the possibility of delight finds less of it. A person open to it finds more.

Shani

Perspective

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Human Flourishing

 Flourishing encompasses how humans live deeply and well—not only with mental and physical health or financial security but also with a sense of meaning and purpose; the cultivation of one’s character; close relationships and community; and, for many, the pursuit of sacred transcendent goods, such as salvation, peace, or union with God.

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Jesus’ strategy

Jesus’ strategy was to enact a prevenient, transforming grace. Zacchaeus changes because he was welcomed and included. A prior embrace prompted a moral change. And it was this reordering–embrace before repentance–that made Jesus’ table fellowship so provocative. Consider the older brother’s reaction in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Or the pride of the Pharisee in the Parable of the Tax Collector and Pharisee. Torah piety was being used to create a caste system, with righteous insiders (the older brother, the Pharisee) shunning sinful outsiders (the prodigal brother, the tax collector). With his mission to regather Israel, Jesus broke down this caste system to seek out and embrace all the lost sheep of Israel. For Jesus, it seems, being a “child of Abraham” was more important than Torah observance. Identity trumped moral performance. Any moral change of these lost sheep, Jesus appeared to assume, would happen upon their experience of grace and inclusion. 

Richard Beck

What Jesus thinks
I would submit to you today that the end of spiritual growth or transformation comes at the point where we are unwilling to allow Jesus to change the way we think about something into the way He thinks about things.

Phoenix preacher

Tradition

The modern world often imagines that “online” education is equivalent to classroom education since the goal is merely the transmission of information. But the transmission of information includes the process of acquiring the information and everything that surrounds it. Those receiving the “tradition” online will have perhaps similar information to those receiving it in a classroom – but they will not receive the same information.

This reduction of the world to information is a common error of the modern period. The world and data-about-the-world are considered to be the same thing. The reduction of the world to information is the reduction of what it means to be human. And the result is a diminished person.  – As an aside, a weakness in the Artificial Intelligence project is its mistaken notions about the nature of information.

Fr Stephen Freeman

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When God shows up

Frederick Buechner, in a sermon, once asked his listeners (and now readers) to suppose God did choose to show up real big. Suppose, he said, God turned the stars of the Milky Way into a message – like I REALLY EXIST or GOD IS. Suppose, he continued, God chose then to add color to the stars and did this every night. Then supposed God added music. Would that do it for us? Buechner says what we know. We’d all get tired of a starry, starry sky telling us there is a God.

What do we want? We want to know, and I quote him again, “that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here in knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world.” What we want is “the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle that we are really after.”

Scot McKnight

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…secular ideas for how to live well.

I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. 

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The concrete path for Christ-followers

…the concrete path for Christ-followers. Not the path of religious privilege or power, but the way of vulnerable solidarity. In our polarized society, this challenges both progressive and conservative versions of Christianity that seek cultural dominance rather than cruciform service. Too often our churches train us to be religious, when Christ calls us to be deeply human with and for each other. In Bonhoeffer’s words, “The attention of responsible people is directed to concrete neighbors in their concrete reality.”

Tripp Fuller

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remember

Freedom can be taken for granted if we don’t take time to remember when we were slaves.
Being found loses its joy if we don’t remember what it was to be lost.
Being alive doesn’t mean much if we don’t remember what it was like when we were dead.

Mike Glenn

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY