When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.
– Rudolf Bahro
When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.
– Rudolf Bahro
I’m going to tell you the whole/entire/complete (I hope) Good News of God in Christ, here & now! That may not sound like good news. I’m putting this as delicately and kindly as I can when I say, “If some of you showed up more often then I wouldn’t be forced to do this… I’m just saying. Coming on Christmas & Easter is kind of like showing up at the Opera for the overture, leaving and then showing up again for the Curtain calls. There is a lot of story in between. Well, I’m wasting precious hours. Let’s get to it.
“The glory of God is a living human being.” Saint Irenaeus –
“Tragedy is the inevitable, while Comedy is the unforeseen”. Frederick Buechner – Telling the Truth, the Gospel as tragedy, comedy and fairytale
Neither she or any of us were we there could have seen it coming. But there it is.
Herbert O’Driscoll says that we look in two directions in all sermons:
First: THEM, THEN, THERE
Second: WE, HERE, NOW (Where is the now in the sermon?)
Saint Augustine, “There are many annunciations but few incarnations.”
Dream: the temporary cessation of the waking state.
1. From time to time in this period anything from a single picture or figure to an elaborate story may be vividly perceived, which is in no sense a direct perception of the outer physical world. This happens 4 or 5 times per night.
2. In addition there are periods of conceptual activity or thinking between dream periods. [Parts of the brain never go to sleep].
3. A third form of dream is the spontaneous image or vision that appears to a person in the borderland or wakefulness when a person is not sure they are awake or asleep.
4. The waking dream or vision consists of dream images that intrude into waking consciousness. The images are not different than the ones in sleep.
From God, Dreams and Revelation – Morton T. Kelsey
After a bit of computer trouble I am able to post again. Soon.
The journey is easier at the beginning and the end than the middle when we are far from home and home. As I approach old age I find it hard to remember a time when ministry did not inhabit a large space in my inner life. I was baptized at eight scared into the Kingdom at a Baptist revival. But that was only the outer thing, the thing that hooked my fear and plunged me into the fishpond at the White place over fifty years ago. It was at the same farm that as a three year old I sat in great-aunt Myrtie’s lap on the bank of Anderson creek as my parents were baptized down in the pool formed by a gravel bank.
Thought some might doubt it, I remember it clearly. Like a scene from a movie people were standing and sitting by the water. The grass was green in the way it is in the South before being scorched by the August Sun. Folk went down into the water lost and came up found. I’ve learned since then that found takes a long time. The pilgrimage to God is rarely dramatic it is mostly as an old timer in AA spoke to the wisdom he had gained as he learned “the inevitability of gradualness.”
This was before the Baptist got “baptisteries” those walk-in bathtub artificial kind of “improvements” that keep us from nature and perhaps [they are un-natural which mates poorly with the] super-natural as well. However well intended these innovations, what is gained in convenience is lost in affect. There is something about inconvenience that is comforting in its discomfort. Coming to God is not convenient.
I read once in Anglicans on line that a group of clergy, God help us, were bringing a resolution before the Synod of the Church of England that Easter be fixed on the same Sunday every year. This is about as foolish a proposition as I’ve heard. We will convenience ourselves into nothing at all. C. S. Lewis once said that “the Gospel can be of no concern. The Gospel can be of ultimate concern. The Gospel can never be of moderate concern.” The convenience of moderation has the affect of warm water it is wet but not refreshing.
We are at the midpoint of Lent. It is time to prepare for the Paschal Feast as the Book of Common Prayer states in the second proper preface for Lent. Gradualness will give way to the acute phase we call Holy Week followed by the consequences of resurrection. It happens every year and still I am ill prepared. But then the middle is the most difficult part of the journey, is it not, beloved. JWS