Casting Shadows

Shadows that Point to a Fuller Substance

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By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you all think exactly the same way as each other. (John 13:35) Wait. Did I misquote that?

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While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town.

Walter Brueggemann

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The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them. But their despair is, perhaps, more respectable than the insincerity of those who think they can trick God into loving them for something they are not. This kind...

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When I read this, I hear anger and hurt. I hear someone who might have believed God loved him, but never opened up and staked his entire worth on this love. One who is changed by such a love can't help but call 1/3 of the earth's population "so few" because it is a marvel to him that everyone hasn't been enraptured this God.

Regarding the other comments about the poor, I never understood God's love to be incarnated through material riches or health. Rather, God incarnates His love in men and women who cease trying to make the universe revolve around their own wishes and rather try to make their world revolve around the wishes of others.

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As one looks at the history of Christianity, and more so at its present situation, it is clear that reluctance to forgive has been and continues to be one of the most common, if not the most common, stumbling block on the way of others to faith. Too often we Christians are so self-assured in our righteousness, in our orthodox beliefs, and in our certainty on what it is that God wills that we convince ourselves that we have reason not to forgive those whose beliefs, lifestyle, or understanding of the will of God differ from ours. We know that this is uncharitable; yet we justify it by our adherence to the true faith, or to the straight and narrow. In so doing, we may well be precisely the sort of stumbling block that Jesus is talking about in [Luke 17:1-4]. And we would do well to heed the words about the millstone!

Justo Gonzalez

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As all our wickedness consists in turning away from our Creator, so all our goodness consists in uniting ourselves with Him.

St. Alphonsus

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Does everyone realize that God's second greatest gift to humanity is coming out in four days?!

Arcade Fire’s Reflektor!!!!

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Yes Cameron, you can over-exaggerate. But I, too, share your excitement!

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The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them. But their despair is, perhaps, more respectable than the insincerity of those who think they can trick God into loving them for something they are not. This kind of duplicity is, after all, fairly common among so-called “believers,” who consciously cling to the hope that God Himself, placated by prayer, will support their egotism and their insincerity, and help them to achieve their own selfish ends. Their worship is of little value to themselves and does no honor to God. They not only consider Him a potential rival (and, therefore, place themselves on a basis of equality with Him), but they think He is base enough to make a deal with them, and this is a great blasphemy.

Thomas Merton

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Sometimes when people are drowning, they don’t need the Greek definition of ‘drowning’ - they need a life raft.

Carl Lentz

GOOD GAWD. 

(via hislivingpoetry)

Amen!

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In premodern English, believing meant believing in and thus a relationship of trust, loyalty, and love. Most simply, to believe meant to belove.... It meant to trust in God and Jesus. Not to trust in statements about God and Jesus (for this would be “believing that”), but to trust in God as known in Jesus.... Believing that and believing in are very different. The first leads to an emphasis on correct belief, on believing the right things. The second leads to a transformed life.

Marcus Borg

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Sometimes I really miss being a worship leader. They basically function as a pastor and get to share the life of Jesus with others in powerful ways. The only difference is nobody cares what they believe.

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To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. But this is impossible. Is there any more cogent indication of my creaturehood than the insufficiency of my own will? For I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain. When I give myself what I conceive to be freedom, I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency.

Thomas Merton

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Lord, Make me an instrument of your peace.
 Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
 Where there is injury, pardon,
 Where there is discord, union,
 Where there is doubt, faith,
 Where there is error, truth,
 Where there is despair, hope,
 Where there is sadness, joy,
 Where there is darkness, light.
 O Divine Master,
 Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; 
to be understood as to understand;
 to be loved, as to love;
 for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
 and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

— St. Francis of Assisi

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A Parable

A man from a treeless desert once walked through a forest for the first time. Looking up at a fairly old pine tree, he exclaimed, "That is a massive tree!" Just then, a man who lived among redwoods corrected him, saying, "No, that tree is quite small." Which of the two men were right?

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It is the dynamic voice of God that breathes life into the static Word of God. Are we merely reading, or are we also listening?

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Not All Christians Want to Live Free

Not all Christians have been set free.  They have merely moved from a slavery of self to a slavery of self-denial.

To many Christians, phrases like "self-esteem," "self-worth," "self-value," and "becoming more" are dangerous.  To them, they reek of selfishness and work against Jesus' message of dying to self.  Do they?

When Jesus told us to take up our cross daily, He didn't say to stop there. He told us to follow Him.  Perhaps I have a different Bible than most, but when I follow Jesus through the Gospels, He doesn't stop at the cross.  He continues on to the Resurrection.

Let's be clear.  The cross announces my death.  I can no longer live for myself and be selfish.  But to stop here is to limit your Christianity.  To stop hear is to preach a message of death.  To stop hear is to teach others that they are, like you, a mistake.  That God is ashamed of what man has become and wants to wipe every single soul off the face of the planet.  Under this view, Christians are the leaders of this new miserable creature called the human.

But what if we followed Jesus three days longer?  What if we continued from the cross to the empty grave?  From Friday to Sunday?  From death to life?  I think we would find a message that says we are more than we want to believe we are.  We are not a mistake, but perfectly created to fulfill the call God has placed on our lives.  That we indeed have value, worth, and esteem.  That we have reason to have confidence in ourselves as children of God.  

Is this a dangerous message?  Yes.  But not for the believer.  This is a message that endangers the world, the powers that rule it, and the comfortable "status quo."

Jesus wants us to be liberated--even from, if necessary, "Christianity."  His message wasn't die and stay there.  It was die so you can live.  Today.  Right now.

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If your version of Christ matches you in every way, there is probably something wrong with your outlook on Him.