Jim May 31st, 2007
my friend rick got me thinking with the below post…
Do we engage, react and respond to circumstances, situations, events, people, things and places based on who we believe we are in that moment?
If God IS love and Christ (God) IS our life, then is love who we are (our identity).
What would life be like if we adopted and depended upon ‘love’ as our only identity?
What other identities do we adopt and why do we adopt them?
Did Jesus see himself as love, and live out of that identity?
(photo by iheartphotography)
Jim May 27th, 2007
i came across 100percenthuman.org. it got me to thinking how Jesus was 100% human and yet walked in perfect oneness with God. his humanity did not compromise his divinity. so, if Christ is “our life,” does our humanity have to compromise our oneness with God, which Jesus prayed we would experience? also, check out these brief videos at 100percenthuman.org. since the subject of God divides so many people, maybe we can start on the common ground of our humanity.
Jim May 25th, 2007
The Incubator
Once there was an unusual kind of incubator, which was created solely for the hatching of unique little creatures. The little creatures were kept warm and snug within their shells within their incubator. All their needs were attended to.
But as they grew and became ready for hatching, their cozy little egg became less comfortable. Furthermore they could hear the sounds of other creatures already hatching outside and speaking with each other.
The creatures that hatched from their eggs discovered a passageway, and found they could exit into a wonderful bright light. Their reward for escaping from their shells was for them to also escape the dark confines of the incubator and enter into the larger mysterious world of light.
Back inside the warm and cozy incubator, there were many creatures that did not want to hatch. Some were ignorant and fearful of what lay beyond the confines of their shell. Some were too dull and lazy to undertake the demanding effort. Others believed, because they could hear the sounds of other creatures outside their egg, they did not have to struggle through their own hatching. They waited to be let out.
The creatures that had already hatched escaped into the light. The unhatched creatures became more cozy in the darkness.
(photo by tatini)
Jim May 23rd, 2007
my friend david anderson wrote Gracism: The Art of Inclusion. david responds to prejudice and injustice with the principle of “gracism” – radical inclusion for the marginalized and excluded.
here’s an excerpt if you’re interested.
Jim May 21st, 2007
thought this was interesting.
(photo by Wanderfoot)
Jim May 20th, 2007
“Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all religions. …If the cross is the sign of anything, it’s the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all of the world’s problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing. What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can’t do a thing about the world’s problems – that it never did work and it never will.
Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion. Religion consists of all the things (believing, behaving, worshipping, sacrificing) the human race has ever thought it had to do to get right with God. About those things, Christianity has only two comments to make. The first is that none of them ever had the least chance of doing the trick: the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins and no effort of ours to keep the law of God can ever succeed. The second is that everything religion tried (and failed) to do has been perfectly done, once and for all, by Jesus in his death and resurrection.
For Christians, then, the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up and forgotten. The church is not in the religion business. It never has been and it never will be, in spite of all the ecclesiastical turkeys through two thousand years who have acted as if religion was their stock in trade. The church, instead, is in the Gospel-proclaiming business. It is not here to bring the world the bad news that God will think kindly about us only after we have gone through certain creedal, liturgical, and ethical wickets; it is here to bring the world the Good News that ‘while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.’ It is here, in short, for no religious purpose at all, only to announce the Gospel of free grace.
“I want you to set aside the notion of the Christian religion, because it’s a contradiction in terms. You won’t learn anything positive about religion from Christianity, and if you look for Christianity in religion, you’ll never find it. To be sure, Christianity uses the forms of religion, and, to be dismally honest, too many of its adherents act as if it were a religion; but it isn’t one, and that’s that. The church is not in the religion business; it is in the Gospel-proclaiming business. And the gospel is the good news that all man’s fuss and feathers over his relationship with God is unnecessary because God, in the mystery of the Word who is Jesus, has gone and fixed it up Himself. So let that pass.”
Robert Farrar Capon
(photo by lovepink.greece)
