Saturday, December 10, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Gungor Show-Montgoemery AL
Just returned from seeing Gungor. They were awesome. 7 pieces with totally out of the box playing. guitars played with cello bows, 3 of them played the same piano at once. they did some pickin' in grinnin' on a banjo, some rock opera' ala pink floyd. some blues ala johny lang, some jam band, some jazz. Michael's wife, lisa played this wind keyboard thing. very cool. their passion for worship was great. they did not play white man, my favorite though. I did pick up the first album 'ancient skies" which has white man and 2 tracks we may sing w/ the kiddies at church, "never stop' and "u r the light." also picked up lisa's solo album. they were also there promoting. humanwrong.org an arm of world vision to stop human trafficking. (man, anytime that is mentioned i get VERY ticked... and i am not a 'get ticked' kind of guy.
Rob Bell’s Love Wins in 9 Pages by r.e. higby
In typical Rob Bell fashion, this book can be hard to follow and frustrating. Those are not bad things, they just are. It can be hard to follow sometimes because it is written in his usual, stop-start, top of the mind, write as he talks style. This is entertaining and pleasing to the eye but can be hard to follow but that is ok. It forces me the reader to be fully engaged. Love Wins as with his other books is frustrating in that he asks so many stinking questions. He does not just give me a problem, antidote, scripture to support the antidote and then let me go on my merry way. He forces the reader to have to answer the question or be left with the ambiguity of an unanswered question. (you angst creator you!) He forces the reader to question what they believe. I am good with that. Because I think God is so much bigger than that and he is ok with our questions. Ravi Zacharias has a saying, “helping the believer think and the thinker believe,” will this is definitely appropriate for Rob Bell and “Love Wins”
Due to all the crazy press this book and Rob got I went in to the book with some apprehension. Maybe apprehension is the wrong word but the media did not allow me to go into the book objectively. I have to battle the media barbs in my thought process through the entire read, up until Chapter 5. As soon as I heard he had a new book out, I put it on my list to get. Once I heard all the media uproar, that upped the ante a bit so my quest to get it intensified. After a Starbucks trip one day my wife coaxed me to swing into the Christian bookstore next door to get it. I told her they probably would not carry it. But against my better judgment (because I was on lunch break from work and felt I needed to get back) we went into the store and sure enough, they were not carrying it. This just energized me that much more to get it. So we made a special trip to Target just to see if maybe they had it. As I scoured the bookshelves I did not see it. Till finally on an end cap about knee level, there it was. And only 2 copies were left, which thought was awesome cuz that meant people were buying it. Anyway I bought it and in record time for me, 3 days later I finished it. So here is my little review of this “heretics” J latest book.
So, with Aracely and Gungor playing in the background here are my thoughts. Chapter 5, Dying to Live, was definitely my favorite chapter and the chapter that cleared everything up, cinched it for me. All the negative press went away in Chapter 5. At that point I got it. For me this was the Crux of the entire thing. Chapter 5, about Dying to Live has a line on page 135 that says; “A gospel that has its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story” is the key to the whole book for me. It is about loving God, believing his story and having his freedom and not about a ticket out of hell, believing my story and being in bondage. It is not about doing something to get something but about loving God, accepting Him and letting myself be loved. It is about loving God, doing God things like loving, serving, enjoying the gifts, sacrificing for the good of others, knowing the peace that passes all understanding.
From there till the end of the book I seemed to get it, unlike chapters 1-4 where I was still battling the critics. The parable of the Prodigal Son was very eye opening when we look at the father being the Father and us being one of the 2 brothers. 2 brothers that chose 2 different paths but were still loved by the father.
Ok so that was my little piece, now I will just give you some of the things that stood out to me. Just things that for whatever reason I underlined. This is the ultimate in “taking out of context” but it is what it is. If you want the context I will lend you my copy or you can pick one up. ;-) (My comments are in parenthesis)
PREFACE-MILLIONS OF US
That’s the beauty of the historic, orthodox Christian faith. It’s deep, wide, diverse stream that’s been flowing for thousands of years…
CH 1 – WHAT ABOUT THE FLAT TIME
…all that matters is how you respond to Jesus. …it IS about how you respond to Jesus. … Renee Altson in her book, Stumbling Toward Faith said, “my father raped me while reciting the Lord’s Prayer…my father molested me while singing Christian hymns.
(dang! If forgot about that part. That was explaining peoples perspective of Jesus, in this situation why would she want anything to do with Jesus, if that is the only Jesus she knew)
A passage from Romans 10 is often quoted to explain this trust: “How can they hear without someone preaching to them?” And I wholeheartedly agree...
…the phrase”personal relationship” is found nowhere in the Bible…why is it that no one used this phrase until the last hundred years or so?
…a good story has a powerful way of rescuing us from abstract theological discussions that can tie us up in knots for years.
CH 2 – HERE IS THE NEW THERE
My wife, Kristen, and I often talk about raising our kids in such a way that they have as little possible to UNLEARN later in life.
Death by drowing-Jesus’s idea of punishment for those who lead children astray (referring to Matt 18/stone around neck)
There is only one who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments. (matt 19 rich man)
…Jesus does not tell people how to “go to heaven.” It wasn’t what Jesus came to do
…”life in the age to come.”…eternal life…olam habah (this is one of the awesome things about rob bell he brings in the original Hebrew and Greek and also the context of where, who, etc)
Life in the age to come. Earthy.
Divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving sustainable ways.
How do you best become the kind of person whom God could entrust with significant responsibility in the age to come?
In Jesus’ day, one of the ways that people got around actually saying the name of God was to substitute the word “heaven” for the word “God”
…receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.
Honest business, redemptive art, honorable law, sustainable living, medicine, education, making a home, tending a garden-all sacred tasks to be done in partnership with God now…
Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about lasting things. Ethics are about how you live.
So when people ask, “what will we do in heaven?” one possible answer is to simply ask: “what do you love to do now that will go on in the world to come?” (just like Rob Bell and some other cool guy named Jesus to answer a question with a question) What is it that when you do it, you lose track of time because you get lost in it? What do you do that makes you think, “I could do this forever”? What is it that makes you thing, “I was made for this”? (Teach, speak, music, DJ-maybe writing book review due to the fact that it is 1113 at night and I am up writing this instead of sleeping to wake up at 5 tomorrow morning. Anyway enough about me) If you ask these kinds of questions long enough you will find some impulse related to creation. Some way to be, something to do. Heaven is both the peace, stillness, serenity, and calm that come from having everything in its right place—that state in which nothing is required, needed or mission—and the endless joy that come from participating in the ongoing creation of the world.
(so my question to this is, if one is using their gifts they are participating in the kingdom to come? Mr. Mozingo, you came to mind to ask this one to)
Heaven comforts, but it also confronts (ouch!)
Jesus makes no promise that in the blink of an eye we will suddenly become totally different people who have vastly different tastes, attitude, and perspectives. Paul makes it very clear that we will have our true selves revealed and that once the sins and habits and bigotry and pride and petty jealousies are prohibited and removed, for some there simply won’t be much left. “as one escaping through flames” is how he put it.
…he’s interested in our hearts being transformed so that we can actually handle heaven.
(Richard Grey is a homeless friend of ours, whom me and the girls befriended one day and his only request was to remember and love him)
…after death we are without a body. In heaven, but without a body. A body is of the earth. Made of dust. Part of this creation, not that one.
…eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection with God.
Jesus invites us…to experience the life of heaven now. …God’s peace, joy and love are currently available t us, exactly as we are.
There’s heaven now, somewhere else. There’s heaven here, sometime else. …there’s Jesus’ invitation to heaven here…here and now, in this moment, in this place.
CH 3 - HELL
…very little is given in the way of actual details regarding individual destinies.
What we find in the scriptures is a more nuanced understanding that sees life and death as two ways of being alive.
Gehenna (hell), in Jesus’ day, was the city dump.
Jesus teaches again and again that the gospel is about a death that leads to life.
He’s alive in death, but in profound torment, because he’s living with the realities of not properly dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life that is worth living.
…there are all kinds of hells because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful and human now
There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.
He’s often not talking about ‘beliefs’ as we think of them—he’s talking about anger and lust and indifference. He’s talking about the state of the listeners’ hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.
…how dominant a theme restoration is in the Hebrew scripture.
Egypt was Israel’s enemy.
Failure…isn’t final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction (this stood out to me because I am currently designing a lesson at work on discipline)
CH 4 – DOES GOD GET WHAT GOD WANTS?
(What about when Jesus went to hell?)
“God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2) (sin can’t be in the presence of God)
So, does God get what God wants?
Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants?
…Psalm 24: “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”
…Philippians 2, “Every knee should bow…and every tongue acknowledges that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Could a person reach the point of no longer bearing the image of God? (wow, that is pretty deep. We are all MADE in the image of God, can that go away?)
God “cannot disown himself.”
Somewhere along the way they were taught that the only option is to declare that a few committed Christians will “go to heaven” when they die and everyone else will not, the matter is settled at death. Not all Christians have believed this, and you don’t have to believe it to be a Christian. The Christian faith is big enough, wide enough, and generous enough to handle that vas a range of perspectives.
The audience of the book of revelation was living at the time the letter was written under the oppressive rule of a succession of Roman Emperors who demanded they be worshipped as the “Son of God.”
…there is no place in this new world for murder and destruction and deceit.
Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choice?
…those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don’t need to resolve them or answer them because we can’t, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires.
We get what we want, God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom; we have the kind of license to that. If we want nothing to do with light, hope, love, grace and peace, God respects that desire on our part, and we are given a life free from any of those realities. The more we want nothing to do with all God is, the more distance and space are created. If we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love.
CH 5 – DYING TO LIVE (my favorite chapter)
The simple icon of a cross with its 2 intersecting sticks, has endured in a way very few images ever have.
That is how it used to work. Offer something, show that you’re serious, make amends, find favor, and then hope that was enough to get what you needed. (old test) So when the writer of Hebrews insisted that Jesus was the last sacrifice ever needed, that was a revolutionary idea.
…through the cross God was reconciling “to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on a cross.
…we’ve been justified by grace through faith in Jesus.
What happened on the Cross? Is the cross about the end of the sacrificial system OR a broken relationship that’s been reconciled OR a guilty defendant who’s been set free OR a battle that’s been won OR the redeeming of something that was lost? …. YES!
What happened on the cross is like….a defendant going free, a relationship being reconciled, something lost being redeemed, a battle being won, a final sacrifice being offered, so that no one ever has to offer another one again, an enemy being loved.
…Jesus. The divine in flesh and blood. He’s where the life is.
A seed has to be buried in the ground before it can rise. Think of what you had to eat today. The death of one living thing for the life of another. Death-and-life mystery…built into the very fabric of creation.
Although the cross is often understood as a religious icon, it’s a symbol of an elemental reality, on we all experience every time we take a bite of food.
Death and rebirth are as old as the world
Seven signs (Jesus’ first miracles)
Seven days of creation
Jesus rises from the dead in a Garden. Which, of course, takes us back to Genesis, to the first creation in a ….garden.
It’s the eighth sign, the first day of the new week, the first day of the new creation. The resurrection of Jesus inaugurates a new creation (great Easter stuff!)
Jesus came to die on the cross so that we can have a relationship with God, Yes, That is true.
…God has inaugurated a movement in Jesus’ resurrection to renew, restore, and reconcile everything on earth or in heaven.
…all of humanity died through the first humans, so “in Christ all will be made alive.”
**A gospel that has its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story.
There can’t be a spring if we’re stuck in the fall.
CH 6 – THERE ARE ROCKS EVERYWHERE
He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called “Christianity”.
Jesus is supracultural He is present within all cultures, and yet outside all cultures.
CH 7 – THE GOOD NEWS IS BETTER THAN THAT
Grace and generosity are not fair; that is their very essence. … That is how things work in the father’s world. Profound unfairness. .. People don’t get what they deserve.
The difference between the stories of the prodigal son and his dad is the difference between heaven and hell (heaven accepting God’s love story/hell not)
…older brother (in prodigal story) right there at the party, but refusing to trust the father’s version of his story. Refusing to join the celebration.
…in spite of what’s been done to us or what we’ve done, God has made peace with us.
We are now invited to live a whole new life without guilt or shame or blame or anxiety.
Hell is refusing to trust, and refusing to trust is often rooted in a distorted view of God.
We can trust God’s retelling of our story, or we can cling to our version of our own story.
A discussion about how to “just get into heaven” has no place in the life of a disciple of Jesus, because it is missing the point of it all.
Many Christian leaders are burned out etc, like the older brother all because they have seen themselves as slaving all these years.
…we do not need to be rescued from God. God is the one who rescues us from death, sin and destruction. God is the rescuer.
We shape our God, and then our god shapes us.
The prodigal son who did not leave’s problem is his “goodness.” His rule-keeping and law-abiding confidence in his own works has actually served to distance him from his father (this sounds a little too close to home for me!)
Jesus forgives them all, without their asking for it.
…God is not waiting for us to get it together, he has already done it.
CH 8 – THE END IS HERE
Love frees us to embrace all of our history
…over time we get our guard up, we don’t easily believe anything and trust can be like a foreign tongue, a language we used to speak but now we find ourselves out of practice.
…transformation requires...an opening up, loosening our hold, and letting go, so that we can receive, expand, find, hear, see and enjoy.
Jesus passionately urges you to live like the end is here, now, today.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Erwin McManus
C.S. Lewis
HarperOne
FURTHER READING
The mystery of Christ – Capon
The great divorce – Lewis
Proclaiming the scandal of the cross- baker
The prodigal son-Keller
The naked now & everything belongs-Rohr
The soul of Christianity-smith
Surprised by hope-Wright
20liters.org
Charitywater.org
ijm.org
twofuturesproject.org
worldrelief.org
Due to all the crazy press this book and Rob got I went in to the book with some apprehension. Maybe apprehension is the wrong word but the media did not allow me to go into the book objectively. I have to battle the media barbs in my thought process through the entire read, up until Chapter 5. As soon as I heard he had a new book out, I put it on my list to get. Once I heard all the media uproar, that upped the ante a bit so my quest to get it intensified. After a Starbucks trip one day my wife coaxed me to swing into the Christian bookstore next door to get it. I told her they probably would not carry it. But against my better judgment (because I was on lunch break from work and felt I needed to get back) we went into the store and sure enough, they were not carrying it. This just energized me that much more to get it. So we made a special trip to Target just to see if maybe they had it. As I scoured the bookshelves I did not see it. Till finally on an end cap about knee level, there it was. And only 2 copies were left, which thought was awesome cuz that meant people were buying it. Anyway I bought it and in record time for me, 3 days later I finished it. So here is my little review of this “heretics” J latest book.
So, with Aracely and Gungor playing in the background here are my thoughts. Chapter 5, Dying to Live, was definitely my favorite chapter and the chapter that cleared everything up, cinched it for me. All the negative press went away in Chapter 5. At that point I got it. For me this was the Crux of the entire thing. Chapter 5, about Dying to Live has a line on page 135 that says; “A gospel that has its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story” is the key to the whole book for me. It is about loving God, believing his story and having his freedom and not about a ticket out of hell, believing my story and being in bondage. It is not about doing something to get something but about loving God, accepting Him and letting myself be loved. It is about loving God, doing God things like loving, serving, enjoying the gifts, sacrificing for the good of others, knowing the peace that passes all understanding.
From there till the end of the book I seemed to get it, unlike chapters 1-4 where I was still battling the critics. The parable of the Prodigal Son was very eye opening when we look at the father being the Father and us being one of the 2 brothers. 2 brothers that chose 2 different paths but were still loved by the father.
Ok so that was my little piece, now I will just give you some of the things that stood out to me. Just things that for whatever reason I underlined. This is the ultimate in “taking out of context” but it is what it is. If you want the context I will lend you my copy or you can pick one up. ;-) (My comments are in parenthesis)
PREFACE-MILLIONS OF US
That’s the beauty of the historic, orthodox Christian faith. It’s deep, wide, diverse stream that’s been flowing for thousands of years…
CH 1 – WHAT ABOUT THE FLAT TIME
…all that matters is how you respond to Jesus. …it IS about how you respond to Jesus. … Renee Altson in her book, Stumbling Toward Faith said, “my father raped me while reciting the Lord’s Prayer…my father molested me while singing Christian hymns.
(dang! If forgot about that part. That was explaining peoples perspective of Jesus, in this situation why would she want anything to do with Jesus, if that is the only Jesus she knew)
A passage from Romans 10 is often quoted to explain this trust: “How can they hear without someone preaching to them?” And I wholeheartedly agree...
…the phrase”personal relationship” is found nowhere in the Bible…why is it that no one used this phrase until the last hundred years or so?
…a good story has a powerful way of rescuing us from abstract theological discussions that can tie us up in knots for years.
CH 2 – HERE IS THE NEW THERE
My wife, Kristen, and I often talk about raising our kids in such a way that they have as little possible to UNLEARN later in life.
Death by drowing-Jesus’s idea of punishment for those who lead children astray (referring to Matt 18/stone around neck)
There is only one who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments. (matt 19 rich man)
…Jesus does not tell people how to “go to heaven.” It wasn’t what Jesus came to do
…”life in the age to come.”…eternal life…olam habah (this is one of the awesome things about rob bell he brings in the original Hebrew and Greek and also the context of where, who, etc)
Life in the age to come. Earthy.
Divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving sustainable ways.
How do you best become the kind of person whom God could entrust with significant responsibility in the age to come?
In Jesus’ day, one of the ways that people got around actually saying the name of God was to substitute the word “heaven” for the word “God”
…receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.
Honest business, redemptive art, honorable law, sustainable living, medicine, education, making a home, tending a garden-all sacred tasks to be done in partnership with God now…
Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about lasting things. Ethics are about how you live.
So when people ask, “what will we do in heaven?” one possible answer is to simply ask: “what do you love to do now that will go on in the world to come?” (just like Rob Bell and some other cool guy named Jesus to answer a question with a question) What is it that when you do it, you lose track of time because you get lost in it? What do you do that makes you think, “I could do this forever”? What is it that makes you thing, “I was made for this”? (Teach, speak, music, DJ-maybe writing book review due to the fact that it is 1113 at night and I am up writing this instead of sleeping to wake up at 5 tomorrow morning. Anyway enough about me) If you ask these kinds of questions long enough you will find some impulse related to creation. Some way to be, something to do. Heaven is both the peace, stillness, serenity, and calm that come from having everything in its right place—that state in which nothing is required, needed or mission—and the endless joy that come from participating in the ongoing creation of the world.
(so my question to this is, if one is using their gifts they are participating in the kingdom to come? Mr. Mozingo, you came to mind to ask this one to)
Heaven comforts, but it also confronts (ouch!)
Jesus makes no promise that in the blink of an eye we will suddenly become totally different people who have vastly different tastes, attitude, and perspectives. Paul makes it very clear that we will have our true selves revealed and that once the sins and habits and bigotry and pride and petty jealousies are prohibited and removed, for some there simply won’t be much left. “as one escaping through flames” is how he put it.
…he’s interested in our hearts being transformed so that we can actually handle heaven.
(Richard Grey is a homeless friend of ours, whom me and the girls befriended one day and his only request was to remember and love him)
…after death we are without a body. In heaven, but without a body. A body is of the earth. Made of dust. Part of this creation, not that one.
…eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection with God.
Jesus invites us…to experience the life of heaven now. …God’s peace, joy and love are currently available t us, exactly as we are.
There’s heaven now, somewhere else. There’s heaven here, sometime else. …there’s Jesus’ invitation to heaven here…here and now, in this moment, in this place.
CH 3 - HELL
…very little is given in the way of actual details regarding individual destinies.
What we find in the scriptures is a more nuanced understanding that sees life and death as two ways of being alive.
Gehenna (hell), in Jesus’ day, was the city dump.
Jesus teaches again and again that the gospel is about a death that leads to life.
He’s alive in death, but in profound torment, because he’s living with the realities of not properly dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life that is worth living.
…there are all kinds of hells because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful and human now
There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.
He’s often not talking about ‘beliefs’ as we think of them—he’s talking about anger and lust and indifference. He’s talking about the state of the listeners’ hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.
…how dominant a theme restoration is in the Hebrew scripture.
Egypt was Israel’s enemy.
Failure…isn’t final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction (this stood out to me because I am currently designing a lesson at work on discipline)
CH 4 – DOES GOD GET WHAT GOD WANTS?
(What about when Jesus went to hell?)
“God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2) (sin can’t be in the presence of God)
So, does God get what God wants?
Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants?
…Psalm 24: “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”
…Philippians 2, “Every knee should bow…and every tongue acknowledges that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Could a person reach the point of no longer bearing the image of God? (wow, that is pretty deep. We are all MADE in the image of God, can that go away?)
God “cannot disown himself.”
Somewhere along the way they were taught that the only option is to declare that a few committed Christians will “go to heaven” when they die and everyone else will not, the matter is settled at death. Not all Christians have believed this, and you don’t have to believe it to be a Christian. The Christian faith is big enough, wide enough, and generous enough to handle that vas a range of perspectives.
The audience of the book of revelation was living at the time the letter was written under the oppressive rule of a succession of Roman Emperors who demanded they be worshipped as the “Son of God.”
…there is no place in this new world for murder and destruction and deceit.
Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choice?
…those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don’t need to resolve them or answer them because we can’t, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires.
We get what we want, God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom; we have the kind of license to that. If we want nothing to do with light, hope, love, grace and peace, God respects that desire on our part, and we are given a life free from any of those realities. The more we want nothing to do with all God is, the more distance and space are created. If we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love.
CH 5 – DYING TO LIVE (my favorite chapter)
The simple icon of a cross with its 2 intersecting sticks, has endured in a way very few images ever have.
That is how it used to work. Offer something, show that you’re serious, make amends, find favor, and then hope that was enough to get what you needed. (old test) So when the writer of Hebrews insisted that Jesus was the last sacrifice ever needed, that was a revolutionary idea.
…through the cross God was reconciling “to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on a cross.
…we’ve been justified by grace through faith in Jesus.
What happened on the Cross? Is the cross about the end of the sacrificial system OR a broken relationship that’s been reconciled OR a guilty defendant who’s been set free OR a battle that’s been won OR the redeeming of something that was lost? …. YES!
What happened on the cross is like….a defendant going free, a relationship being reconciled, something lost being redeemed, a battle being won, a final sacrifice being offered, so that no one ever has to offer another one again, an enemy being loved.
…Jesus. The divine in flesh and blood. He’s where the life is.
A seed has to be buried in the ground before it can rise. Think of what you had to eat today. The death of one living thing for the life of another. Death-and-life mystery…built into the very fabric of creation.
Although the cross is often understood as a religious icon, it’s a symbol of an elemental reality, on we all experience every time we take a bite of food.
Death and rebirth are as old as the world
Seven signs (Jesus’ first miracles)
Seven days of creation
Jesus rises from the dead in a Garden. Which, of course, takes us back to Genesis, to the first creation in a ….garden.
It’s the eighth sign, the first day of the new week, the first day of the new creation. The resurrection of Jesus inaugurates a new creation (great Easter stuff!)
Jesus came to die on the cross so that we can have a relationship with God, Yes, That is true.
…God has inaugurated a movement in Jesus’ resurrection to renew, restore, and reconcile everything on earth or in heaven.
…all of humanity died through the first humans, so “in Christ all will be made alive.”
**A gospel that has its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story.
There can’t be a spring if we’re stuck in the fall.
CH 6 – THERE ARE ROCKS EVERYWHERE
He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called “Christianity”.
Jesus is supracultural He is present within all cultures, and yet outside all cultures.
CH 7 – THE GOOD NEWS IS BETTER THAN THAT
Grace and generosity are not fair; that is their very essence. … That is how things work in the father’s world. Profound unfairness. .. People don’t get what they deserve.
The difference between the stories of the prodigal son and his dad is the difference between heaven and hell (heaven accepting God’s love story/hell not)
…older brother (in prodigal story) right there at the party, but refusing to trust the father’s version of his story. Refusing to join the celebration.
…in spite of what’s been done to us or what we’ve done, God has made peace with us.
We are now invited to live a whole new life without guilt or shame or blame or anxiety.
Hell is refusing to trust, and refusing to trust is often rooted in a distorted view of God.
We can trust God’s retelling of our story, or we can cling to our version of our own story.
A discussion about how to “just get into heaven” has no place in the life of a disciple of Jesus, because it is missing the point of it all.
Many Christian leaders are burned out etc, like the older brother all because they have seen themselves as slaving all these years.
…we do not need to be rescued from God. God is the one who rescues us from death, sin and destruction. God is the rescuer.
We shape our God, and then our god shapes us.
The prodigal son who did not leave’s problem is his “goodness.” His rule-keeping and law-abiding confidence in his own works has actually served to distance him from his father (this sounds a little too close to home for me!)
Jesus forgives them all, without their asking for it.
…God is not waiting for us to get it together, he has already done it.
CH 8 – THE END IS HERE
Love frees us to embrace all of our history
…over time we get our guard up, we don’t easily believe anything and trust can be like a foreign tongue, a language we used to speak but now we find ourselves out of practice.
…transformation requires...an opening up, loosening our hold, and letting go, so that we can receive, expand, find, hear, see and enjoy.
Jesus passionately urges you to live like the end is here, now, today.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Erwin McManus
C.S. Lewis
HarperOne
FURTHER READING
The mystery of Christ – Capon
The great divorce – Lewis
Proclaiming the scandal of the cross- baker
The prodigal son-Keller
The naked now & everything belongs-Rohr
The soul of Christianity-smith
Surprised by hope-Wright
20liters.org
Charitywater.org
ijm.org
twofuturesproject.org
worldrelief.org
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
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