Are You One Of Us Or Not? Communion

In the little tin church in Page the desert sand serves as the floor. Bert Layman , the iron-worker cum preacher who built the church, prays over the rough hewn communion table he has crafted in his own rough hewn image. Grandma Yakashigi, Nakagawasan, Nishikawasan, from Japan are there. Cecil, who baptized me when I was 13, the most gentle of souls, is kneeling up front. Some way Pastor Sheets from the Baptist Church has strayed in – Bert will not be happy. The ordinary folk, the only kind I know, fill the little house of worship.  The journey from dust to dust does not seem so far in this dusty crowd melding into the sand floor. Roy, the local prison guard, comes bearing the emblems and as he bends down he brings me fully awake, I look at Roy who is silent but I hear the question from the emblems: “Paul, are you one of us or not?”[2

[2] The title and ending are from a Fred Chappell novel with a different meaning worked out here.

https://paulandfaithwalking.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/i-am-one-of-you-forever/

Simplistic Morality

"The example of Bonhoeffer indicates that moral insight arises with intellectual depth.  On the other hand, moral inanity was clearly connected to an intellectual banality."

Www.PaulandFaithwalking.wordpress.com

Quite Fools and Active Fools

"What would you have me do?" he said at last. "You know I did all a father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools. Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one."

- Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace 

Empty Promise

"And what have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not perform!"

- War And Peace. Leo Tolstoy.

Source of Proper Doxology And Praxis

".... the study of Scripture properly results in doxology and praxis -  that is, in praise to God and practical application in the lives of believers."
 
- Richard D. Phillips - Philip Graham Ryken. Editors of Reformed Expository Commentary

A Diverse Church?

" A divided nation needs a united church...... People a lot of times will ask me, "Why do you care about unity?"It's  not that i just want people to come together to sing Kumbaya or hosanna.

I care because, one, my generation is growing up with diversity, the most diverse generation. It's just normal to see diversity. We go to Walmart, we see diversity. We go to the highways, we see diversity.  We go to the mall we see diversity.  We can go to the bars and club and there is diversity.

So how can the ministry of reconciliation of the church not have diversity?"

-Grant Skeldon

Unhappy Faith

"You can tell adult and authentic faith by people's ability to deal with darkness, failure, and nonvalidation of the ego - and buy their quiet but confident joy! Infantile religion insists on certitudes or "light" every step of the way and thus is not very happy."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now. 

Immature Faith Without Reasoning

"Immature religious faith is usually prerational, and has not yet passed through the rings of fire...."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now. 

"God has always been willing to work with a remnant, a critical mass, or what Genesis calls "ten just men.""

- Richard Rohr . The Naked Now 

Small People

"Small people make everything small."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Make It Up - Real Good!

".... if one is going to concoct, 

one must really concoct, 

.... if one is going to expose expose someone, 

one should really expose him." 

-Nikolai Krylenko

Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician

Saving Humanity To Be King?

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." 

H. L. Mencken

Eldership Has Been Erased By Leadership

"I don’t believe any doctrine of Holy Scripture should be neglected or defined out of existence. Yet this is precisely what many churches have done to the doctrine of eldership. Even among churches that claim to practice eldership, the elders have been reduced to temporary church board members, which is quite contrary to the New Testament, apostolic model of pastoral eldership. Although such churches may have an eldership, it is not a biblical eldership." --Alexander Strauch, 1995.

Let God "Wow" People

"If I may put it bluntly and clearly, what is needed is not a stunt, but the action of God that will stun people."

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones

You CAN'T Supress Truth If You Don't Know It

"One can only suppress something of which one has knowledge." 

--Douglas Moo, Commentary on Romans, NIVAC, 2000.

Romans 1:18 (ESV): For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

Breaking The Back Of The Church

"..... all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches for the starving!....

From the distance of a half a century, it is easy to reproach the patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian Church ought not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources might not be available to the Soviet government, and who it was who had driven the Volga into famine....

Bishop Antoine Granovsky, a member of the Central Committee of Pamgol: "The Believers fear that the church valuables may be used for other purposes, more limited and alien to their hearts." .....

The petrograd Metropolitan, Veniamin, was similarly impelled by a mood of trust: "This belongs to God and we will give all of it by ourselves." But forced requisitions were wrong. Let the sacrifice be of our own free will. He, too, wanted verification by the clergy and the believers to watch over the church valuables up to the very moment when they were transformed into bread for the starving..... 

Veniamin announced: "The Orthodox Church he is prepared to give everything to help the starving." It's a sacrilege only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was unnecessary.....

The Metropolitan said: "The heaviest burden is division and enmity. But the time will come when the Russian people will unite. I myself, at the head of the worshippers, will remove the cover [of precious metals and precious stones] from the icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan. I will shed sweet tears on it and give it away."  .....

The newspapers began to howl about the "evil pastors" and "princes of the church," and the representatives of the church were told: "We don't need your donations! And there won't be any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government - and the government will take whatever it considered necessary."  ....

 All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Stamp Our Houts With Seals of Commitment

"The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts. The Lama and the Monk withdraw from society to keep a religious vision bright. Our faith teaches us to stay in the world, but to stamp our hours with seals of commitment. The result is, in a way, a troubled life."

- Herman Wouk.  This is my God. Pulitzer Prize or fiction. Jewish Heritage. 

Pride's Beauty and Elitism

The British Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows cautions that this same dynamic holds true in terms of our motivation for prayer and religious practice. Again, sometimes our motivation has more to do with our own pride than with real faith and generosity. Thus, she writes: "The way we worry about spiritual failure, the inability to pray, distractions, ugly thoughts and temptations we can't get rid of..... it's not because God is defrauded, for he isn't, it's because we are not so beautiful as we would like to be."

"And pride, invariably, brings with it a harsh or condescending judgment on others. We see this later aspect, pride as a harsh or condescending judgment of others, most strongly perhaps in the peroid shortly after first conversion; when young lovers, recent religious converts, and neophytes in service and justice, still caught up in the emotional fervour of the honeymoon, think they alone know how to relate to one another, to Jesus, and to the world. Their fervour is admirable, but their pride and judgement of others invariably spawn and arrogance and elitism. But God and nature conspire together to ensure that the grind of the years will eventually restore humility."

"This side of eternity, we never can fully rid ourselves of our faults. They simply take on new and subtler guises, but they never fully disappear. There are always more moral battles to be fought."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire 

Water Does Not Purify From Evil

Dead Sea scrolls. Reading a translation document of the Qumran community.  The "Manual of Discipline" from the Essene community. speaking of  myriad of ceremonial washings common in the day (not to be equated with Christian Baptism)....

"No one is to go into water in order to attain the purity of holy men. For men cannot be purified except they repent their evil. "

- Manual of Discipline.

Essenes of Qumran.

Body and Soul United

Remarkable statement about ancient world views.

"Nevertheless it is true that the Jew maintained a sense of the unity of being which is not native to us,  ..... The remarkable feature of this is not that the Jew or later Judaism could not distinguish between outer and inner but that he would not separate them when he did understand the distinction."

- G.R. Beasley-Murray.  Baptism in The New Testament 

Put In The Right Place

“As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.” 

~ Henri Nouwen

To Become Presence We Risk Absence.

"Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But that is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince" 

Reality Will Leave You Behind Without Knowledge

"..... why do people perish for lack of knowledge? Well, they perish - to make it very short and sweet - because, if you don't have knowledge, reality will run over you, or desert you, or leave you out.

Whereas if we act with knowledge and truth, our actions harmonize with reality. Otherwise, not, or they do it just by chance."

Dallas Willard. 

Prayer Happened, And I Was There.

"Without prayer, the best you can do is know by comparison, calculation, and from the limited view point of "you." Prayer is very traditionally understood, knows reality in a totally different way. Instead of presenting a guard itself to the moment, true prayer stops defending or promoting its ideas and feelings, let's go of any antagonistic attitudes or fears, and waits for, expects, and receives guidance from Another [God] ..... 

Most simply put, as we've seen, prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26 - 27),  much more than anything you privately do. It is an allowing the Big Self [God] more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, "Prayer happened, and I was there" more than "I pray today." All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through and you are no longer in the driver's seat. God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world and becomes at some level your own "I am." You start knowing through, with, and in somebody else. Your little "I am" becomes "We are."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

The Prayer Tuning Fork

"The word is "resonance." 

Prayer is actually setting out a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is get tuned to receive the always present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to..... "

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Religious Love Affair

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."~ G.K. Chesterton

Don't Die Bitter - Is The Religious Imperative

"As we age we need to forgive -forgive those who hurt us, forgive others for our own mistakes, forgive life for having been unfair, and then forgive God for seemingly not having protected us - all of this so that we do not die bitter and angry, which is perhaps the greatest religious imperative of all."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire. 

Our Most Active Years Are A Gift

"Many are the persons who deeply regret that during the healthiest and most productive years of their lives they were too driven and too unaware of the richness of their own lives to appreciate and enjoy what they were doing. Instead of privilege, they felt burden; instead of gratitude, they felt resentment; and instead of joy, they felt anger. 

- Ronald Rolheiser. Sacred Fire. 

Something Worth Doing

"There is something worse than having too much to do, and that is having nothing to do or too little to do of importance."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire

The Who God Isn't Immune To Pain

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" 

-  John Stott

What Kind Of UNITY?

"..... we must not speak of "unity OR truth." We must not speak only of "unity AND truth," or "unity WITH truth," or "unity IN truth." We must pursue the UNITY OF TRUTH."

- Jack Cottrell. The Unity Of Truth

Agenda

“Systems and institutions move at the speed of agenda, family moves at the speed of the slowest.”
~ Wm Paul Young

Seperating Ourselves From The Church Universal

"But if the church is something we are, not someplace we go, how can we leave it unless we abandon Christ himself? And if I think only of a specific congregation as my part of the church, haven’t I separated myself from a host of other brothers and sisters that do not attend the same one I do?"

- Wayne Jacobsen 

Language of The Head And Heart

"My unexpected discovery was this: facts are the language of the head; story is the language of the heart. The language of the head encourages debate. The language of the heart encourages friendship."

-Tony Kriz, 'Neighbors and Wise Men'

My Friends Try Me So

"The friend that visits them tires their patience, And yet they do not like him to depart."

- Ion of Greece -

(Ion was believed to have founded a primary tribe of Greece, the Ionians)

You Go With Change

"..... so changes of life do not remove the sorrows and troubles of the soul; which proceed from want of experience and reflection, and from inability or ignorance rightly to enjoy the present."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. First Century Greek Philosopher.

Avoiding Honeymoons

"Classical spiritual writers warn us, after we have broken the Pleasure Principle and reached a mature level of discipleship, the old temptations will resurface with a Vengeance, just in subtler forms....

Their first warning concerns the danger of reverting to immaturity because of the longing for another honeymoon ........  One of the demons that we must wrestle with after we have made lifelong commitments is the powerful temptation to experience yet another honeymoon."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire

Four Ways God Speaks - But One Message, One Voice

"There are four ways in which God reveals His will to us through the scriptures, through providential circumstances, through the convictions of our own higher judgment, and through the inward impressions of the Holy Spirit on our minds. 

We're these four harmonize, it is safe to say that God speaks. 

For I laid lay it down as a foundation principle..... that of course his voice will always be in harmony with itself, no matter in how many different ways he may speak. The voices may be many, the message can be but one. If God tells me in one voice to do or to leave  undone anything, he cannot possibly tell me the opposite in another voice. If there is a contradiction in the voices, the speaker's cannot be the same."

Hannah  Whitall Smith

Trusting FOr Today Or The Future?

"It is generally much less difficult for us to commit the keeping of our future to the Lord than it is to commit our present."

- Hannah Whitall Smith 

Kicking Out Way Into Maturity

"... maturity is often imposed on is by conscription, as the circumstances and responsibilities of our Lives drag as protesting into generosity and adulthood."

- Sacred Fire. Ronald Rolheiser 

Only Church Left Was The Heart.

"We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separation of church and state was so construed by the state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart."

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

What If We Don't Stop Exisiting?

If I am just my brain and everything I'm thinking and doing is chemistry, I want to know that.

I'm not trying to hide from that. 

I mean the the big issue is not "if you're going to stop existing". If you're going to stop existing you're out. It's like going to the dentist, it's unpleasant for a while but it'll be over. The real problem comes if you're not going to stop existing."

- Dallas Willard 

The Burden Of Proof Is Always Mine

"...the burden of proof is always mine, because i am the one who wants to know. 

I'm not in this discussion to put you back on your heals. I'm here to determine the truth, and the burden of proof is mine. I'm not trying to win an argument. 

I think it is one of the most important things especially for christians to understand. They're  not here to try and duck and dodge. If you can find a better way than what Jesus Christ  offers, he would be the first person to tell you to take it. If you don't  believe that about him,  you can't be his disciple becuse you could never trust him. "

- Dallas Willard. 

You Can Not Live Without A World View.

"You "world view" consists of your assumptions about the realities and values that goveren you and the world in which you live..... Thats an important thing to understand about worldviews: is that you don't have to  think about them in order for them to determine your behaviour. We need to let that soak in. 

You can't live without a worldview. 

It is a biological reality, built into your usual actions and responses.

It's built right into your body. Its built right into your life. Built into your body. Your body responds in terms of your world view, whether you think about it or not. Your world view is most clearly  seen in the things you don't  think about and talk about. 

-  Dallas Willard -

- DallasWillard 

"People often asked me, "Since you're so smart, why are you still in church?" and I say to them, "Well, you know, Christians are supposed to love their enemies and they will find a few of those a church. But actually that's true."

- Dallas Willard -

When The Mind Goes Wrong

"When the mind goes wrong, the will is enslaved."

- Dallas Willard -

If Do Nothing, I Do It With Jesus

I understand where Jesus says, "without me you can do nothing". That's granted.  But we need to think the thought that if you do nothing it will be without him. 

And now the questiion is, "What am I to do?"

-Dallas Willard 

"Being a disciple is not an "advanced" spiritual condition.

Thank God for that.  We come into discipleship to Christ with no credentials except our need and our understanding that he has welcomed us to life in him in the kingdom of God.....   you are in a position of a student of Jesus Christ."

- Dallas Willard 

Who Put Out More Effort?

A second reaction to all of this is, this is works, not Grace. and it's very cmmon when the topic of spiritual formation comes up, and you get into the discussion of actually doing something, then people are apt to say, "Well that's works and not Grace." And, unfortunately, it's a pretty harmful understanding of Grace.

 Grace is not opposed to effort. iIn fact, you won't see anyone put out effort like someone who's been touched by grace."

- Dallas Willard.