sermon on the mount

Mars Hill Michigan is starting a 6 month series on the Sermon on the Mount this Sunday. This is one of my favorite (challenging and encouraging and hopeful) passages in the Bible, so I'm pretty excited to join with them over the next half year. As they like to do on these big series, they'll be publishing a page containing verses, thoughts, practices, and prayers at the beginning of the week so you can be meditating on and wrestling with it before the Sunday teaching. There are always some insightful and beautiful ideas so you should get started.

Here's one section that really stood out to me.

No one in his or her right mind would want to live this "blessed" life, would they? Yet Jesus was doing something different from what his hearers expected. He wasn't giving a spiritual to-do list. This wasn't a self-help teaching about how to achieve blessedness by attaining poverty of spirit.

This was an announcement.

The healing that had just taken place was nothing less than the rule and reign of God coming to rest upon the least likely of people.

In the midst of their poorness of spirit, these people had been blessed;the Kingdom of God had come upon them. In other words, fortunate are the racists because the rule and reign of God can come upon even them. Fortunate are the addicts because the rule and reign of God is only a breath away. Fortunate are those who've blown it. Blessed are the nobodies. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with blessing, and there is nothing anybody can do to earn what he's describing.

God is blessing people for no reason other than the fact that blessing is what God does, and everybody, everywhere, is fair game.

They also have some new art for the series which I'm including a small glimpse of below. Click on it to view the whole piece. Open it up and then read the artist's thoughts about their work:

Sometimes I feel as though God is this invisible abstract idea. A voice in my head that has no face but speaks to me in ways I can't even comprehend or explain... Sometimes the vocal is lost among the swirling messages and instruments of the day vying for attention. [But] the voice, the sermon on the mount if you will, never ceases to speak. The father's face can be seen everywhere, even in the speck of dirt the little girl is picking up."

radiohead - all i need

Two Kinds of Grave

The gospels speak of two kinds of grave.

One was whitewashed, the other was empty.

The whitewashed grave is the symbol of the false facade,
     of the outwardly beautiful appearance that does not last.

The empty grave was the grave of the God-man, Jesus Christ,
     the one who was himself emptied….

Around the emptiness of the grave were born both
     the hope of the future and the Church,
     which was, is and must always be
     the Message of what is to come.

Robert Adolfs | Grave of God

(Thanks to Nate Wigfield for first posting this.)

Peter Rollins chat transcript

Peter Rollins did a twitter chat interview with Third Way Magazine yesterday. I put together a transcript for those who would be interested. It was fun to see Peter limited to short answers (twitter only allows messages to be 140 characters long), as he usually has long, detailed responses which bunny-trail in several different directions (and you wonder why I like him!). I cleaned it up a little to get rid of text-speak and possible confusion from the letter limit.

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Third Way: We should get this one in first. Someone asked: 'If I've never heard of you, can you sum yourself up in 140 characters?'

Peter Rollins: Orthodox heretic, a/theist, Christian in the non-Christian sense of the term, bluffer and lover of Columbo

We'll get to some of that but, first, 'Orthodox heretic' sounds like an oxymoron, or is that a false opposition?

Orthodox is often thought to mean 'right belief', but perhaps it is better thought of as 'right praise'... in this way one can be orthodox while being a heretic... i.e. living in praise while acknowledging that we get God wrong

So to be orthodox, or to be heretic, or to be an orthodox heretic – are these things we should have as ambitions?

Being a heretic is not enough. There are good and bad heretics. One must try to be an orthodox one. A heretic who tries to live in love.

Also, being orthodox is not enough... without acknowledging you are a heretic pride can enter

How can you authentically praise something if you know you might be wrong about what you're praising?

If I fall in love I may not know what would please the person, but I act with the best knowledge I have, & in fear and trembling. certainty is not needed in order to act... love is!

@rhull56 asks 'What convinces Peter that the idea of God is worth taking seriously?'

Philosophers take the question seriously. Not so sure Christians should... Christians should b more interested in Christ-living

Wow... its hard getting big concepts shoe-horned into twitter (good question BTW)

Then perhaps he'd add 'Why Christ?' In the book you adapt Buddhist tales, for example.

Because the life (of Christ) that we read of is a radical one that, if followed, could lead to the continued transformation of society... Christianity, I believe is a radical faith based upon a radical idea. But I think that much of the actually existing churches misses this...

Perhaps only Marxists are as guilty as Christians of misrepresenting their founder

The shoe-horn point: The Orthodox Heretic reminds us that Jesus spoke to uneducated 1st Century peasants. Should all theology be that digestible?

We need to distinguish between theology & the truth of faith. The former is intellectually demanding the later is life demanding. Jesus was mostly about the truth rather than theology.

Not that theology is wrong at all! Its just not true :)

When Jesus spoke of the Father, was that true?

Yes & No. God as a Father 'yes', but as any kind of Father we experience 'no'. This 'yes/no' operates in all theology. It reveals something which remains all the time concealed. Belief should not be read as empirical certainty. Belief is more than this, it involves doubt, commitment, hope, faith and desire

Where does that leave the creeds? The 'We believe'?

The creeds attempt to help re-orient our lives, so that those 'beliefs' become modes of being. We come to live the death and resurrection. When we say, 'I believe in the resurrection' we primarily commit ourselves to becoming the site of new life to those around us. It is not primarily a mere intellectual assent.

There's nothing simple about a fable, but this book is more accessible than the others. What was the thinking behind that?

Buddhism has koans to draw out Enlightenment, we have parables... I wanted to explore this. I think attempting to change how people think is limited. I want to transform who we are. Parables are a mode of doing this.

these fables will get used by preachers. If each reader is the writer, how do we build one united body of believers?

We are unified not by shared belief but by a love and commitment to the same source. Unity in difference. We are often not good at this.

How might that work in practice? Between, say, Bishops Robinson & Akinola?

The creation of suspended space in which liberal & conservative lay down their positions in the liturgical hour2encounter each other. This is the place of 'neither/nor'... neither Jew nor Greek, Gay nor Straight, liberal nor conservative.

It is a participation in the divine Kenosis (see Philippians 2:7: "Jesus made himself nothing...") in which God is emptied of all identity. We do this and take on the identity of Christ.

you suggest that Jesus' teaching was often audience-specific, changing according to context. So was he a moral relativist?

No, he was driven by love. The issue however is that love is not possible to pin down. When we make love concrete we distort love... but we must do this anyway. Love is what drives us, but when we put it in to action it will look different in different contexts

in some tales you, the writer, imagine new words into his (Jesus) mouth. But yet you also warn against personal conceptions of God?

Both under-describing and over-describing are strategies for making sure we do not reduce God to our understanding. The Bible does both. God is given various personalities (warrior, peacemaker, unchanging, changing) & also we are told God is un-nameable.

The point of these parables is not to describe something but to perform something... Parables are a performative discourse

Thanks very much Pete. One final question from @sch3lp: 'What's the dynamic between story, its teller and its hearer?'

hmmm Story is like the child, teller is like the mother and the hearer is like one who adopts the child
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Let me know your thoughts! I especially enjoyed the distinction he made between, theology and the life of faith, as well as the thoughts on belief and certainty.

the Gospel

I believe this is from Nooma 015 | You. This is what we are made, and saved, for.

how i get inspired

some cool art found on ShareSomeCandy, starting with my all-time favorite.

a million miles

Donald Miller's new book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" is coming out soon, and he's posted the first 3 chapters of it online to give a taste and get some feedback. I highly enjoy reading his books so if you've never read anything of his you are in for a nice surprise. Don said in his blog that this book starts a little slow, so that's why you get to read 3 chapters instead of just one sample chapter.

The book is based around some ideas he learned at a writer's conference- that good stories need conflict and difficulty and pain to be enjoyable. Think of your favorite adventure story, one that makes you feel alive and excited, even though you are only observing from a distance. It's probably full of more hardship and loss than most of us have ever imagined in our life. But it's also full of more hope and excitement and triumph than most of us think could really ever happen.

Our lives are usually geared to be as smooth and comforting as possible, and our biggest dreams are often of more stuff that is easily attained. We have no conflict or adventure, and we are bored to death. Maybe even literally.

A note from the beginning of the book:

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you probably wouldn't cry at the end of the movie when he drove off the lot testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn't tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on and sit in a chair to think about what you'd seen. The truth is you wouldn't even remember that movie a week later, except to feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who got a Volvo.

But we spend years living those kinds of stories and expect life to feel meaningful. Maybe that's why we go to so many movies, because our real lives don't feel meaningful anymore.

I know a lot of us are in a place of reassessing our lives, so maybe this will be encouraging to you. I want to get to a place where I am free to follow the dreams God puts in my heart, but I feel stuck because of the bills and responsibilities I have. That's the reason why I am selling my house (and pretty much all my furniture!), and why I downgraded my car a couple years ago, and why I'm trying to stop spending so much money on entertainment. I want to simplify, to need less money, and hopefully then to be able to work less and have more time to invest in the areas I'm really interested in. It's crazy because I don't know how to make money in any of these pursuits, but I'm trying to trust God with that. I think Jesus was serious when he said not to worry about food or clothing or shelter, and I want to start trusting him for even those basic things.

The hard thing about music and books and movies is that sometimes they inspire us to live in new ways, and other times they suck all the creative juices right out of us. Sometimes they take us away to another world and help us imagine how our world could be different too. Sometimes they just help us escape our own pain and fears for long enough to forget the anguish we feel deep inside.

But what if we could live in such a way that we could let out those stories etched deep in our hearts? It's hard for me to believe that those feeble, disjointed dreams rattling in my head are worth the effort it would take to discover if there is anything to them. But what if the whole point of life is not even actually accomplishing something useful or beautiful, but instead just enjoying the story as it plays out?