“God is a subject to be related to, not an object to be studied or mediated on. He exists only for subjective inwardness. The person who chooses the subjective way immediately grasps the difficulty of trying to find God objectively.”
—Soren Kierkegaard. (via goodandimperfect)
September 2011
19 posts
“To be a follower of Christ is to be biased for the poor.
In life, we all have our biases. Some of them are natural tendencies or inclinations and others are habituated. Our culture tells us to be biased — in a deferential sense — towards those who can pay us back or who can look out for us in return. Society tells us to get in with the strong and the powerful because they will give us strength and power in return.
Jesus teaches something very different.
He tells his followers to go hang out with those who are marginalized and picked on by the rest of the culture. He told the poor they were blessed and sent the rich young ruler away.
To be conformed to this world is to be biased for the wealthy and powerful.” —Tim King (via azspot)
In life, we all have our biases. Some of them are natural tendencies or inclinations and others are habituated. Our culture tells us to be biased — in a deferential sense — towards those who can pay us back or who can look out for us in return. Society tells us to get in with the strong and the powerful because they will give us strength and power in return.
Jesus teaches something very different.
He tells his followers to go hang out with those who are marginalized and picked on by the rest of the culture. He told the poor they were blessed and sent the rich young ruler away.
To be conformed to this world is to be biased for the wealthy and powerful.” —Tim King (via azspot)
“
So I’m convinced your deepest problem is not the cigarettes you smoke or the alcohol you drink in secret. It’s not the slander you speak and the gossip you cherish. It’s not the pornography you pleasure yourself with when no one’s looking. It’s not the baby you aborted; it’s not that you betrayed your brother, cheated on your bride, lied about the whole thing, and retaliated with murder [King Herod]. It’s not even that you slaughtered the Lamb and killed the Messiah. Your deepest problem is that somewhere deep down inside, you believe Jesus the Messiah rose from the dead just to kick your ass.
When, in fact, He rose from the dead so you would believe all is forgiven. It is finished! Justice is accomplished. And the Father is pleading, “Come home, come home, come home!
” —via Beth Maynard
“Write to be understood
Speak to be heard
Read to grow” —The Monster in Your Head
Speak to be heard
Read to grow” —The Monster in Your Head
“Do the activities we participate in as church act as token gestures or perverse protests that end up supporting the system they supposedly oppose? Could our prayer meetings and weekly involvement with social justice programs actually operate as a means of preventing us from changing how we spend our time and energy the rest of the week, enabling us to continue in careers that contribute to the very things we are praying against and acting in ways that contradict what we express in our Bible studies?”
—Peter Rollins (via azspot)
“‘I try to believe,’ she said, ‘that God doesn’t give you more than one little piece of the story at once. You know, the story of your life. Otherwise your heart would crack wider than you could handle. He only cracks it enough so you can still walk, like someone wearing a cast. But you’ve still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it. Nobody sees it. Everybody thinks you’re one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they could see that crack.”
—Rebecca Wells (via thefreenomad)
“God, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing.
You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word,
you let me catch my breath
and send me in the right direction.” —Psalm 23:3 (The Message)
You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word,
you let me catch my breath
and send me in the right direction.” —Psalm 23:3 (The Message)
“…I am not asking you
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wilderness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that pace inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst that tugs at my tongue.
But send me
Tough angels,
Sweet wine,
Strong bread:
Just enough.” —Jan L. Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season, quoted here.
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wilderness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that pace inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst that tugs at my tongue.
But send me
Tough angels,
Sweet wine,
Strong bread:
Just enough.” —Jan L. Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season, quoted here.
fCb4: Reaching for the flag instead of the Cross... →
fcb4.tumblr.com
fcb4:
Will Willimon, presiding bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church.
“On 9/11 I thought, for the most powerful, militarized nation in the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents…
“Seek… to create change not because a thing is wrong, but because it no longer makes an accurate statement of Who You Are.”
—Conversations With God, Book One
“This is the way that God seduces us all into the economy of grace—by loving us in spite of ourselves in the very places where we cannot, or will not, or dare not love ourselves. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change; God loves us so that we can change.”
—Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
“The apostle Paul writes to the Romans: “Bless your persecutors; never curse them, bless them. … Never pay back evil with evil. … Never try to get revenge. … If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if thirsty, something to drink. … Do not be mastered by evil, but master evil with good” (Romans 12:14-21). These words cut to the heart of the spiritual life. They make it clear what it means to choose life, not death, to choose blessings not curses. But what is asked of us here goes against the grain of our human nature. We will only be able to act according to Paul’s words by knowing with our whole beings that what we are asked to do for others is what God has done for us.”
—Henri Nouwen (via azspot)
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”
—Noam Chomsky (via illuminatedbeing)
“Much that is called thinking is simply the ego’s stating of what it prefers and likes—and resistances to what it does not like. Narcissistic reactions to the moment are not worthy of being called thinking. Yet that is much of our public and private discourse.”
—Richard Rohr, Adapted from CAC Foundation Set: Gospel Call to Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom) and Contemplative Prayer
“I say I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent son of a bitch. I’m a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I’ve got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it’s too passive. But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all. That’s part of what nonviolence is—the attempt to make our lives vulnerable to others in a way that we need one another. To be against war—which is clearly violent—is a good place to start. But you never know where the violence is in your own life. To say you’re nonviolent is not some position of self-righteousness—you kill and I don’t. It’s rather to make your life available to others in a way that they can help you discover ways you’re implicated in violence that you hadn’t even noticed.”
—Stanley Hauerwas (via invisibleforeigner)
