Friday 22 June 2007 at 10:08 am
Caught this on NPR last Tuesday. Thought it was a terrific piece on love. Perhaps the best part of it was what he either would not or could not say, the thing that Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash learned, that love is hard and costly. His best line was "It hints at the towering importance of that moment when love starts to bear the weight of permanence." That indeed is something that our culture does not seem to know or does not want to fess up to. Love costs you everything. We skip to the altar forgetting what exactly an "altar" is for. The cost of admission to love is everything you have. So then why love? CS Lewis reminds us that the choice to not love is costlier still. To not love means to no longer stand a chance of becoming what we were made to be. The heart in a box becomes a heart of stone, not a human heart.
There is a strange sense in Philippians 2 where Jesus becomes who he truly is, fully human and fully God through the process of love. It's a great mystery. How could he not have been fully everything before the cross? Maybe our terms "full" or "complete" are inadequate. He lacked nothing before but he was even more afterwards.
We lack much yet still we cling to our flimsy belongings. Those who lack must give up the little they have in order to gain what they can hardly imagine. It's the widow's two pennies. Maybe that is a part of the story. She was a widow. She had learned about love and loss. pvk
Monday 18 June 2007 at 12:29 pm
This was from a Voices discussion about sin and church discipline.
1. The gravity of sin. It is hard to overstate the calamity, devastation, and bondage that sin is. In my Synoptic Gospels Sunday School class I’m at the crucifixion scene and I don’t think I’ve every really studied a passage that highlights better the way we are blinded by sin. Central to the crucifixion scenes are mockery. The mockery reveals the absolute bondage to sin and blindness to sin that we are all in. Sin is a prison of our own making that we are absolutely incapable of breaking free from. Romans 1 makes this clear of course. We are blind and we are bound, all of us.
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Saturday 16 June 2007 at 1:12 pm
Tim Keller has a couple of good sermons on money and greed. One of his favorite illustrations on the difficulty of greed is by comparing it to adultery. He notes “you don’t look over in bed and say with shock ‘you’re not my wife!” but greed is different.
When it comes to evaluating the behavior of others some areas have more of a binary nature while others seem more fuzzy. Jesus I think in a way lessens this dynamic with the Sermon on the Mount where he notes that adultery need not require physical contact.
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Thursday 14 June 2007 at 10:50 am
I’ll be happy when the word ‘male’ is removed from Art. 3
It is removed. Is that sufficient?
There are classes that are formally excluding women from being seated.
Synod revokes that option. Is that sufficient?
Women may be seated in every classis but they continue to be the minority.
Ginger’s prophesy (that men will slouch out of the church as women assume command) comes true and women now represent a majority. Is that sufficient?
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Tuesday 12 June 2007 at 08:17 am
In a discussion on Voices David Snapper mentioned a seminar he went to where the presenter Bill Hoke suggested that a church's branding is the accumulation of promises that it has kept in its community. I thought that was a pretty vital insight. The issue of promises is not so simple. This is something I wrote as a response.
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Monday 04 June 2007 at 9:24 pm
This was a response to something on CRC Voices that I wanted to keep.
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