N.T. Wright: Simply Christian
June 25, 2010 Leave a comment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWn-vt7SeNo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn7nbWpOKyw
N.T. Wright Home Page:
Receiving Yourself in the Fires of Sorrow
June 25, 2010 Leave a comment
. . . what shall I say? ’Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. ’Father, glorify Your name’ —Gospel of John, 12:27-28
“As a saint of God, my attitude toward sorrow and difficulty should not be to ask that they be prevented, but to ask that God protect me so that I may remain what He created me to be, in spite of all my fires of sorrow. Our Lord received Himself, accepting His position and realizing His purpose, in the midst of the fire of sorrow. He was saved not from the hour, but out of the hour.
We say that there ought to be no sorrow, but there is sorrow, and we have to accept and receive ourselves in its fires. If we try to evade sorrow, refusing to deal with it, we are foolish. Sorrow is one of the biggest facts in life, and there is no use in saying it should not be. Sin, sorrow, and suffering are, and it is not for us to say that God has made a mistake in allowing them.
Sorrow removes a great deal of a person’s shallowness, but it does not always make that person better. Suffering either gives me to myself or it destroys me. You cannot find or receive yourself through success, because you lose your head over pride. And you cannot receive yourself through the monotony of your daily life, because you give in to complaining. The only way to find yourself is in the fires of sorrow. Why it should be this way is immaterial. The fact is that it is true in the Scriptures and in human experience. You can always recognize who has been through the fires of sorrow and received himself, and you know that you can go to him in your moment of trouble and find that he has plenty of time for you. But if a person has not been through the fires of sorrow, he is apt to be contemptuous, having no respect or time for you, only turning you away. If you will receive yourself in the fires of sorrow, God will make you nourishment for other people.”
Oswald Chambers, from this website, June 25, 2010 reading:
A Temple of the Holy Ghost
June 24, 2010 Leave a comment
Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is a comical story filled with Christian symbolism. There is a “freak”, a hermaphrodite, in the story. The story reveals to us how God regards His creation. Below is a quote from the story. A little twelve-year old girl has just gone to bed after hearing about the freak from two visiting girls. The girls had just returned from the carnival:
“She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking from side to side…She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying “Amen. Amen””
Some commentary about the story:
“O’Connor used the hermaphrodite to illustrate that The Holy Ghost or love of God dwells in each of us, whether pretty, ugly, rich, poor or anywhere in between. Even in the body of the hermaphrodite, a grotesque symbol of the unity of man and woman, a temple of God is a holy thing. The hermaphrodite knew that because God dwells in us, we are all reverent beings, and we should mutually treat each other with care, love and respect.”
Commentary f
rom:
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find”
June 24, 2010 Leave a comment
Here is a quote from Flannery O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”:
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus. Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.
“Yes’m, The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course,” he said, “they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”
Father’s Way 2010
June 21, 2010 Leave a comment
Father’s Day weekend, 2010: Friday night I spent with my son Ryan. My daughter, Rachel, had to work. She finally landed a job after many applications and some interviews. Bless her heart, her determination paid off. She will work mostly weekends at a nearby restaurant. This weekend was the first one scheduled for her.
My son and I went to a local sports place where we had pizza, cold drinks and watched the White Sox on one big screen TV and the World Cup on another. There is a different dynamic when it’s just him and me. He’s more relaxed and funny. Ryan has some new braces so he cuts up all of his food to chew. He shyly smiles when he tells me something he thinks is funny, just barely showing the steel in his mouth. While we sat and ate Ryan ‘texted’ his friends. They are electronically social, recounting to each other what each one is doing at that exact moment in time. After dinner we picked up the new Jackie Chan movie and went home to watch it.
My daughter came home from work and filled us in on her night. She is learning to remember all of the menu items and their ingredients using homemade note cards. No one told her to do this but she is industrious – like her father.
Saturday I woke my daughter up early. She wanted to see her boyfriend before he left on a family trip. She returned around 2:00 pm, got ready for work and left at 3:15 pm. My son (a new 5’10” teenager) slept in till noon. We ate left-over pizza for brunch. Ryan went to a friend’s house. At 4:30 I picked him up and he and I went to a minor league baseball game.
The Cougars night game started at 6:00 pm but the gates were open at 4:00 pm. It was a gorgeous summer evening, no rain and not humid, just pleasant. Our home team lost but it was just fun being there and watching the game and watching the people. The third base side seats were just past the third base towards the outfield. We could see everything.
During the game, Ryan told me that a vendor was hawking “Sno-Cones”. Ryan said that they were not “Sno-Cones because they, in fact, came in round plastic cups. He wanted to make sure I knew this. He’s just like his dad.
In between the innings there is always some kind of family fun stuff going on on the field: a diminutive three year old girl running the bases chasing after Ozzie the Cougars eight foot tall mascot; go-kart races for kids. After 9 scoreless innings for the home team (Rattlers 8 –Cougars 0), the game ended and the Jesse White Tumblers came out on to the field. They jumped, leaped, twirled mid-air and cart-wheeled between first and third base to the music of “Strike it Up”. Ryan liked this after-game show. The kids are his age, doing amazing physical feats. The dazzling fireworks show afterward filled the night sky with glitter and the smell of burning black gun powder.
At home Rachel was waiting for us. When we arrived she talked about work and ate a basil chicken panini sandwich she had brought home. Ryan talked about the game. We sat and watched Raymond together and then each of us went off to bed at different times.
Sunday morning I made French toast for the kids. Rachel started work at 10:30 am. I hung around with Ryan and then we went to Hobbytown. We looked at all of the model cars, the different scales of 1:24 & 1:32. Ryan picked out a cast metal White Lamborghini. I bought him a red Lamborghini a few weeks ago so now he has a collection. We drove home and then Ryan hung out with his friends in the afternoon.
Sunday night: Rachel came home from work and Ryan came home from his friend’s house. I bought some Rib-eye steaks and French Fries and I made Steak Au Poivre Frites for supper. While cooking I played a CD of Dean Martin hits and remembered my dad watching Dino on TV many years ago. When “That’s Amore” came on I began singing; when “Mambo Italiano” played I started dancing. What can I say? Like father, like …
Wise Blood
June 19, 2010 Leave a comment
The boy didn’t need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher. Later, he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
(Hazel Motes, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor)
The blind man gave his edgy laugh. “Listen boy,” he said, “you can’t run away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact.”
(The blind preacher Asa Hawks speaking to Hazel Motes, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor)
She Loved Much
June 14, 2010 Leave a comment
The Gospel reading yesterday came from The Gospel According to Luke:
Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”
Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me, teacher,” he said.
“Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
*****
I have shed many tears during my life – tears of repentance, tears of joy, tears of great sorrow and tears of great loss…
She Loved Much
Surrounded by those who judge me… at a dinner party given for Jesus…
Tears pour from my alabaster heart,
Onto Your Holy earth-born feet, my kisses removing the clay, the dust;
The earthy/musty scent of my adoration-
The pure nard of my love for You-
Captures the room, pushing fear from my senses,
Permeating the place where You are,
The Place I want to be.
May my love for You, O Holy One of God,
Bring You great joy as You dine among the white-washed tombs.
“Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
© Sally Paradise, 2010, All Rights Reserved
*****
“What I believe about God is the most important thing about me.” A.W. Tozer
Truth
March 17, 2010
The person who seeks justice but rejects the truth is really “wicked.” … the words of Goethe: “All laws and rules of conduct may ultimately be reduced to a single one: to truth.”
Definition of a Progressive
February 20, 2010 Leave a comment
The definition of a progressive is one who is so interested in the future that he disregards history. He then repeats it.
Cindy Wity 
