Monday, October 29, 2007
Saturday, October 27, 2007
the mundane miracle
At the emergence conference, the last question the panel was asked was, “what hope does the emergent church have to offer.” “That is a puzzling question,” I thought to myself. The super spiritual me was thinking something like, “only Jesus really offers hope, we merely (trying to find the right word) sloppily participate in that hope…but I’m not sure we really offer it to anyone.”
The last thing I said, and this might be bold to speak on behalf a church community, is that we help people find beauty in mundane life of the Wendell Berry World. I read Jayber Crow some years back now and was struck by how both incredibly boring his life seemed and yet how incredibly sacred it seemed.
I just finished Anne Lamott’s book and I would argue that her book belongs to the canon of the emergent manifesto, though I’m not sure I can use that term since Doug Padgitt and Tony Jones edited a book called the Emregent Manifesto, but you know what I mean. Her work seems to be a cornerstone of identity for those who just can’t seem to find a home anywhere that even remotely smells of traditional.
On the cover the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle remarks, “Anne Lamott is proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes eve in the same breath.”
We’d love to say that our lives are something like Frodo’s…that we participate in this almost transfinite narrative, but the truth is our lives are a lot more about changing dirty diapers, doing the laundry and attending funerals. They just don’t seem like Frodo’s, but they do seem a lot like Jayber Crow’s. And some nights when I tempted to long for Frodo’s story I think of Lamott who reminds me that there is incredible meaning in the dirty diapers, laundry and funerals. Almost can we say, transfinite meaning.
But still…I think about Jesus and I see leapers healed and food multiplied and surely that world must be more exciting than this one. Lamott’s life…my life are just a sequence of messy moments riddled by grace. God walking after us with a dirty dishrag soaked with sin. Then one day I notice the lens through which I see “miracle” has been refocused, and I realize that the changed heart and friend offering forgiveness truly are more miraculous than the cancer that was eradicated and the spine that was straightened.
I guess God’s interested in the mundane miracles.
The last thing I said, and this might be bold to speak on behalf a church community, is that we help people find beauty in mundane life of the Wendell Berry World. I read Jayber Crow some years back now and was struck by how both incredibly boring his life seemed and yet how incredibly sacred it seemed.
I just finished Anne Lamott’s book and I would argue that her book belongs to the canon of the emergent manifesto, though I’m not sure I can use that term since Doug Padgitt and Tony Jones edited a book called the Emregent Manifesto, but you know what I mean. Her work seems to be a cornerstone of identity for those who just can’t seem to find a home anywhere that even remotely smells of traditional.
On the cover the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle remarks, “Anne Lamott is proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes eve in the same breath.”
We’d love to say that our lives are something like Frodo’s…that we participate in this almost transfinite narrative, but the truth is our lives are a lot more about changing dirty diapers, doing the laundry and attending funerals. They just don’t seem like Frodo’s, but they do seem a lot like Jayber Crow’s. And some nights when I tempted to long for Frodo’s story I think of Lamott who reminds me that there is incredible meaning in the dirty diapers, laundry and funerals. Almost can we say, transfinite meaning.
But still…I think about Jesus and I see leapers healed and food multiplied and surely that world must be more exciting than this one. Lamott’s life…my life are just a sequence of messy moments riddled by grace. God walking after us with a dirty dishrag soaked with sin. Then one day I notice the lens through which I see “miracle” has been refocused, and I realize that the changed heart and friend offering forgiveness truly are more miraculous than the cancer that was eradicated and the spine that was straightened.
I guess God’s interested in the mundane miracles.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Yesterday was one of those storybook days that reached an apex in our family’s venture outside to gather fallen pecans from our trees by the house. The pics are from this adventure. The weather was uncharacteristically 58ish with a crisp breeze and I found myself uttering a meaningful prayer in which I thanked God for the struggle to get warm. A rarity in Texas.
In Truett’s Spiritual Formation program we did a number of things including trying to learn to be thoughtful in our prayers and experience God through them. I remember one of our leaders in my second semester talking about “feeling the warmth of the water run down one’s back, as one soaked in the grace that can be a warm shower.” That’s how I felt in a real intentional moment yesterday when I paused to notice life seemed perfect in that present moment. There I was collecting pecans with my healthy son and beautiful wife outside a house that we somehow managed to purchase as a part time park ranger and full time teacher. I felt the cold kiss my skin. I caressed my son’s increasingly chubby cheeks. I tasted the fresh fallen pecans. And I gazed at my beautiful wife. I sensed grace there. There, where the veil between heaven and earth seemed especially thin.
In Truett’s Spiritual Formation program we did a number of things including trying to learn to be thoughtful in our prayers and experience God through them. I remember one of our leaders in my second semester talking about “feeling the warmth of the water run down one’s back, as one soaked in the grace that can be a warm shower.” That’s how I felt in a real intentional moment yesterday when I paused to notice life seemed perfect in that present moment. There I was collecting pecans with my healthy son and beautiful wife outside a house that we somehow managed to purchase as a part time park ranger and full time teacher. I felt the cold kiss my skin. I caressed my son’s increasingly chubby cheeks. I tasted the fresh fallen pecans. And I gazed at my beautiful wife. I sensed grace there. There, where the veil between heaven and earth seemed especially thin.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Good
Michael Jordan has far and away been the best athlete I've witness play a sport in my lifetime. Tom Brady is making a case this year.
Emergence 2007 part 2
“There are multiple problems with King’s theology as well as Padgitt’s…the kingdom of God and not the cross of Jesus Christ stands at the center of the liberal theological system.”
Mark Driscoll in response to Doug Padgitt in Listening to the Voices of the Emergent Church, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 145.
Robert Dugan makes fun of my overuse of the words “ontological” and “epistemological.” This is probably warranted, but my defense is that they are useful categories for understanding the relationship between many things in life including the “two legs” (to borrow a term that Doug Padgitt used this weekend) of soteriology.
I grew up with a one leg understanding. I know about the epistemological leg. The leg that rightly informs us that we need to confess Jesus as our savior in order to be saved. It is the leg that is steeped in Paul, knows all about justification by faith alone as well as Paul’s claim to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified.
But something happens. Children die around the world because of aids. Economic and social inequality widens in our communities. There is talk of water shortage around the world and food for everyone is a glaring problem. Suddenly I find myself engaging the social work students who sit across from me in my seminary class rooms and feel as though I haven’t really been embracing the whole picture of salvation.
Why does the whole creation long for redemption? Why is there no talk about belief in the sheep and goats passage? Why does Jesus spend so much time restoring if we all die in the end anyway?
I learned of my need for two legs…and so I discovered the ontological leg of salvation. The leg that has dire need of seeing salvation participate in the now. It’s the leg of salvation that asks you not just to receive something, but to participate in something. It is the leg that people stand on when who they have become is laid against the backdrop of God’s all consuming reality at the end of the Lewis’s The Last Battle.
The best thing I learned this weekend was this. Someone asked if we can separate Jesus from the Kingdom of God? I’m still not entirely sure what was meant by that, but Doug pointed out this verse in Acts 28:31 “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.”
In our journey towards God there is this beautiful interplay between taking one step on the epistemological leg and meditating on the person and work of Jesus and then letting that reality empower your stride with the alternative, ontological leg. The leg that participates in the Kingdom and experiences the KOG today and finds eternal life today.
My response to Marc Driscoll is that I understand the logical priority of the epistemological leg, but not the theological priority. Though the liberal protestants have pushed the ontological leg to the distorted forefront of the picture picture, I don’t think the right backlash is to pit the epistemological leg against and push for the priority of the same.
My thoughts.
Carney
Mark Driscoll in response to Doug Padgitt in Listening to the Voices of the Emergent Church, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 145.
Robert Dugan makes fun of my overuse of the words “ontological” and “epistemological.” This is probably warranted, but my defense is that they are useful categories for understanding the relationship between many things in life including the “two legs” (to borrow a term that Doug Padgitt used this weekend) of soteriology.
I grew up with a one leg understanding. I know about the epistemological leg. The leg that rightly informs us that we need to confess Jesus as our savior in order to be saved. It is the leg that is steeped in Paul, knows all about justification by faith alone as well as Paul’s claim to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified.
But something happens. Children die around the world because of aids. Economic and social inequality widens in our communities. There is talk of water shortage around the world and food for everyone is a glaring problem. Suddenly I find myself engaging the social work students who sit across from me in my seminary class rooms and feel as though I haven’t really been embracing the whole picture of salvation.
Why does the whole creation long for redemption? Why is there no talk about belief in the sheep and goats passage? Why does Jesus spend so much time restoring if we all die in the end anyway?
I learned of my need for two legs…and so I discovered the ontological leg of salvation. The leg that has dire need of seeing salvation participate in the now. It’s the leg of salvation that asks you not just to receive something, but to participate in something. It is the leg that people stand on when who they have become is laid against the backdrop of God’s all consuming reality at the end of the Lewis’s The Last Battle.
The best thing I learned this weekend was this. Someone asked if we can separate Jesus from the Kingdom of God? I’m still not entirely sure what was meant by that, but Doug pointed out this verse in Acts 28:31 “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.”
In our journey towards God there is this beautiful interplay between taking one step on the epistemological leg and meditating on the person and work of Jesus and then letting that reality empower your stride with the alternative, ontological leg. The leg that participates in the Kingdom and experiences the KOG today and finds eternal life today.
My response to Marc Driscoll is that I understand the logical priority of the epistemological leg, but not the theological priority. Though the liberal protestants have pushed the ontological leg to the distorted forefront of the picture picture, I don’t think the right backlash is to pit the epistemological leg against and push for the priority of the same.
My thoughts.
Carney
Friday, October 19, 2007
Emergence 2007
This has been a whirlwind of a week including and primarily because of this weekend. Tuesday afternoon I got a call from Tony Jones asking me to consider filling in for Dan Kimball who’s father was in a freak accident and is nearing death. Dan was supposed to be one four panelist for the Emergence 2007 conference in Austin loosely based on his contribution to the book Listening to the Voices of the Emergent Church.
I took the invitation a bit intimidated by the rest of the panel who all have far more ministry experience and theological depth. Tonight was our first session which pinnacled in a discussion about atonement and the scripture. I’m definitely the little fish in the pond, but this experience has been rewarding and I have learned a lot. It has forced to me to be more thoughtful about certain theological issues and also helped me solidify my thinking in other areas.
I will report more…hopefully tomorrow evening.
Goodnight friends.
Please for Dan Kimball and his family.
I took the invitation a bit intimidated by the rest of the panel who all have far more ministry experience and theological depth. Tonight was our first session which pinnacled in a discussion about atonement and the scripture. I’m definitely the little fish in the pond, but this experience has been rewarding and I have learned a lot. It has forced to me to be more thoughtful about certain theological issues and also helped me solidify my thinking in other areas.
I will report more…hopefully tomorrow evening.
Goodnight friends.
Please for Dan Kimball and his family.
Monday, October 08, 2007
American Idle
2008 world series for sale?
"get out the check book. A-Rod 50 million. Bonds 40 million. Japanese pitcher 55 million."
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Green Bay Population 102,313
"the green bay packers organization is a model for all of the rest of professional sports."
keith olbermann
10-7-07 Sunday Night Football Preview
keith olbermann
10-7-07 Sunday Night Football Preview
Thursday, October 04, 2007
political prodigal takes test
My dad forwarded this to me and I found it very helpful. Made me think through what I really think about the issues and how I might cast a vote on them.
who would you vote for?
I've called myself moderate for four years, but have discovered that my top four choices were all jack-asses.
who would you vote for?
I've called myself moderate for four years, but have discovered that my top four choices were all jack-asses.
Monday, October 01, 2007
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