Category: quotes
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By resurrection Jesus is cleared of the scapegoat charges against him...
By resurrection Jesus is cleared of the scapegoat charges against him. But the resurrection also acquits those who scapegoated him. While they certainly committed the crime and are certainly guilty, it is also incontestable that the one they are charged with killing is alive. They can be declared not guilty of Jesus’ death by the fact that Jesus is not dead. The prosecution cannot proceed in this capital case without a dead body, and the tomb is empty. What the resurrection presents in court is a living person, what [Markus] Barth calls “the evidence of the raised victim.” It is thus righteous of God to account the accused not guilty, or justified by resurrection. Of course, the risen Christ could justly press for retribution against those who had wronged him, even if they did not succeed in silencing him permanently. But this, which is his right, is also his right to decline. And Christ does so, becoming instead an advocate for sinners.
-- S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, Kindle location 1980
I got this book for Christmas and am finally getting the chance to dig into it. This is my first trip into the Girardian scapegoating theory of the atonement, and it’s quite a ride.
Beck: Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
A really good reminder from Richard Beck today:
…it struck me how emotionally reactive we are to social media, our feelings getting jerked around by the latest thing that breaks on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes it is happiness and euphoria. Yay, our side is winning! Sometimes it is despondency and despair. Oh no, the other side is winning! … So let’s remember the wisdom of Thérèse of Lisieux. Our vocation is to be the heart of the church, not the amygdala.
Yes and amen.
A little bit of a bozo
My theme in any discussion over the past couple of years has usually come around to “well, yeah, but… it’s complicated.” So my head started nodding enthusiastically yesterday when listening to the Reconcilable Differences podcast, when I heard Merlin Mann say this about the possibility that he’s a contrarian (at about 22 minutes into the episode):
What a lot of people get and that some people don’t get is that you’re not trying to be difficult, but that the more you enjoy something the more you’re interested in seeing how it could be better. And here’s a thing that’s actually not such a big deal that you could make better. It’s not an insult, it’s not a slam. And for me, whenever people say “oh you gotta to out and set goals for yourself”, I’ll be “well, maybe”. You know goals can really be self-defeating if they aren’t updated and realistic. “Oh you should never have goals.” Well, that’s not true. Do you really wanna play tennis without a net? I feel like maybe I’m more of a contrarian? I feel like, whenever somebody comes up with something that’s, like, an unvulnerable pronouncement about how the world mostly always is, it gets my dander up a little bit, and I don’t feel like I have to say something, but I know I’m thinking that person’s probably a little bit of a bozo.
Preach, brother Merlin. Preach.
Capon on Confession
Confession is not a transaction, not a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness; it is the after-the-last-gasp of a corpse that finally can afford to admit it’s dead and accept resurrection. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have.
-- Robert Capon, from The Parables of Grace
A Timely Word for Today
The Fall is where the nation is… Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for the most part, become consigned to despair. The people have been existing under a state of such interminable warfare that it seems normative. There is little resistance to the official Orwellian designation of war as peace, nor does that rhetorical deception come near exhausting the ways in which the people have found the government to be unworthy of credence or trust. Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance or convenience turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is pervasive babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated. … Americans have been learning, harshly, redundantly, that they inherit or otherwise possess no virtue or no vanity which dispels the condition of death manifest everywhere in the nation.
– William Stringfellow: An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens In A Strange Land, 1973
Not everything that calls itself a church is really a church.
My friend Randy posted a nice little bit of self-observation today that resonates with me:
Q – Randy, are you a heretic or something? What is wrong with you? First, am I a heretic?
No. I hold to the commonly shared beliefs of the church universal without exception. What I am is a critic of the evangelical church in the USA in our era. This church has lost its focus on Jesus and has become some kind of leisure time entertainment/marketing organization. Not that there is anything wrong with that; but of course, there is something wrong with that. Some people fail to distinguish between a local manifestation of the idea of the church and the church itself. If you fail to distinguish those two things, you might see me as destructive rather than constructive. You’ll have to believe me when I say that I love the church. But not everything that calls itself a church is really a church. … Second, what is wrong with me? Lots and lots of stuff.
I love this guy and give him an understanding nod and smile on this Friday.
The command to love my neighbour as myself still retains its claim upon me
I don’t always find myself warmed by the writings of Charles Spurgeon, but my friend Michael Terry sent me this bit yesterday, to which I can only give a hearty Amen!
We have seen such a one limping about with a long doctrinal leg, but a very short emotional leg. It is a horrible thing for a man to be so doctrinal that he can speak coolly of the doom of the wicked, so that, if he does not actually praise God for it, it costs him no anguish of heart to think of the ruin of millions of our race. This is horrible!
I hate to hear the terrors of the Lord proclaimed by men whose hard visages, harsh tones, and unfeeling spirit betray a sort of doctrinal desiccation: all the milk of human kindness is dried out of them. Having no feeling himself, such a preacher creates none, and the people sit and listen while he keeps to dry, lifeless statements, until they come to value him for being “sound”, and they themselves come to be sound, too; and I need not add, sound asleep also, or what life they have is spent in sniffing out heresy, and making earnest men offenders for a word. Into this spirit may we never be baptized!
Whatever I believe, or do not believe, the command to love my neighbour as myself still retains its claim upon me, and God forbid that any views or opinions should so contract my soul, and harden my heart as to make me forget this law of love! The love of God is first, but this by no means lessens the obligation of love to man; in fact, the first command includes the second. We are to seek our neighbour’s conversion because we love him, and we are to speak to him in loving terms God’s loving gospel, because our heart desires his eternal good.
This comes from Spurgeon’s book The Soul Winner. I love both the spirit and the sense of humor displayed here. Good stuff.
I Rest in the Grace of the World
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
--“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
[I needed this today. HT: Richard Beck]
Graffiti vs. real change
Matt Chambers has a piece up today in light of this week’s ongoing arguments about gay marriage, and this paragraph jumped right off the screen:
As it is, we, as Christians / Christ-followers / Believers / Born Agains / [insert latest trendy religious title here], seem to be much more comfortable trying to find a way to use all our energies up in plastering the kingdoms of the world with graffiti that says, “heaven” than actually pouring ourselves out to see God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
Trouble is, graffiti doesn’t fool anyone.
Boom.
Celebration is a craft I need to learn
Sarah Clarkson has a beautiful post over on The Rabbit Room today about, as she says, “the grave importance” of celebrations, and how they remind us that God cares for our joy - not just the joy that we find from spiritual hope in the midst of trouble, but also in the fully-embodied, rollicking joy of song, food, and friendship.
Satan, I think, strikes a few of his best blows when he can persuade us that God is boring. That life with our Savior is a dull and dutiful upward climb toward a summit of righteousness always a little out of reach. We are close to defeat when we start to believe that God cares nothing for joy, that holy people are wage slaves to long days of righteousness. Work, pray, endure, and pay your bills, check off that list of upright deeds. And the image of God in our weary minds becomes that of a long-faced master whose only concern is our efficient goodness. We forget that we are called to a King who laughs and creates, sings and saves. That our end is a kingdom crammed with our heart’s desires. We forget that our God is the Lord of the dance and the one whose new world begins with a feast.