The Meaning of Faith

"Our trusting relationship with a God who saves in Jesus Christ cannot be allowed to reduce or make superfluous human initiative and responsibility.  Excessive emphasis on faith as trust and deemphasis of good works, led, in Dulles’ words, to “equally sharp antitheses between Gospel and law, between the heavenly and the earthly kingdoms.”  As a result, it was easier to understand salvation exclusively in “individualistic and other-worldly terms.”  But when Christian faith is seen as a response to the Kingdom, then no matter how boldly we trust, our relationship with God must also find expression in a life lived by the mandate of the Kingdom, the mandate to love God by loving our neighbor.  Without such living, faith is dead."

— Thomas Groome in Christian Religious Education, quoting Dulles in “The Meaning of Faith”

This Guy

#Repost @mattmcgorry
・・・
Good and true words from ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’. Yes, being the best version of yourself is important, but when it comes to finding someone who loves you, that person will do so even with your flaws and weird-isms. Even if you make up words like “weird-isms”. So the best thing you can do is try to discover your truest, most evolved self and let the rest fall where into place where it may.
Happy Monday, friends.

Classes on Religion I Have Taken

At San Jose State University:

Rels. 99– Death, Dying and Religion

Rels 1– Study of Religion

Rels 70A– Western Religions

Rels 70B– Eastern Religions

Rels143– Traditions of India

Rels. 90– Bible History and Literature

Rels. 142– Modern Buddhism and its Roots

Phil. 109– Philosophy of Religion

Rels. 151– Catholic and Protestant Traditions (History of the Church)

Rels. 148– Religion and Anthropology

Rels. 155– Pagan Traditions

Rels. 165– Religion and the Environment

Rels. 195– Senior Seminar– Religion and Modernity

Rels. 144– Chinese Traditions

Rels. 108– Jewish Mysticism, Magic, and Folklore

RelS 195—Senior Seminar: God Bless America: The History of an Idea

RelS … – Body, Mind, and Spirit

RelS 144—Literature and Religious Experience

RelS 131—Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

RelS 162—Religion and Political Controversy in the U.S.

RelS 195—Senior Seminar (this one was a look at our university experience, basically)


Classes I took at College of San Mateo:

Anth. 180– Magic, Science, and Religion


Classes I Took/Am Taking at Pacific School of Religion:

RA-1156– Visual Arts and Religion

LS-1201– Christian Worship

HS-1120– History of Christianity

CE-1051– Intro to Christian Ethics

NT-2221– The Fourth Gospel

ST–2160– Intro to Theology

SPFT-1082– Spiritual Formation for Leadership

OT-8114– Critical Intro to the Hebrew Bible

NT-1016– Critical Intro to the New Testament

HM-2244– Preaching: Theology and Praxis

ST-3150– Process Theology

PS-1060– Pastoral Care and Congregations

ED-1135– Critical Religious Pedagogy: Christian

HSHR-2035– Introduction to Judaism

Decoration Day

The beginnings of Memorial Day

Karen Baker-Fletcher

Moments

"Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we? Helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are going to come, you can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are."

— Whistler (via josstastic)

(via churchofbuffy)

Original Sin

Perhaps ideas of sinfulness are so attractive because we all feel such deep guilt for our shortcomings.  We fail to recognize that the ability to recognize our brokenness and shortcomings is directly rooted in knowing our potential.  We miss exactly that out of Paul: “You really can do it.”  Maybe living into a better future, into Kingdom, involves tapping into our inner Eden– into the memory of potential and beginnings.  In eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we became so preoccupied with evil.  It took us by surprise because we had only known Good.  We found it in ourselves and it ruined everything… but only because we let it.

We took in the Good, too.  We took on the capacity for Great Good.  As beings in the image of God, we must acknowledge that the Universe, made of the same stardust as we are, is composed also of life and death, destruction, birth, and rebirth.

We recognize our brokenness only because we can see our potential.  We can live forward into it, knowing that the tree gives us sight of Great Good and Great Evil.  We do not need to be overtaken by one or the other, we need to do our best and know that when we fail, when we feel the great guilt and brokenness of failure, we feel so only because we know we are capable of more.  We should live into that possibility– the possibility of reaching our best selves.  We feel bead because we know we are good– we are better.

We celebrate our ability to discern good and bad, our best and worse selves, by continually analyzing our lives and the ways that we can live into the good.   We use this “power” to stop injustice and build peace and freedom.  We do so by continuing to eat from the Tree of Life– engaging in the world in ways that are life-giving and help us to be better people creating a better world.  

Sabbath

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.  Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.  It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

— Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 10.

Resurrection

I just love this. #easter #treeoflife #transformation

Books

The State of Things

#thingsiwriteinmybooks

“American individualism has drawn people out of their systems of meaning.  Capitalism has taken time, individualism has taken family, and sciences have led us to a place where we don’t seem to value spiritual experience and tend to understand everything literally, even if perhaps we shouldn’t.”

Things I Write in My Books

#thingsiwriteinmybooks

Sand Creek

#blacklivesmatter

My school president and some of our wonderful professors discussing theologies of protest and resistance, specifically as such theologies relate to Baltimore and the Black Lives Matter protests.

Longing

"Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time… You don’t really long for another country.  You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find."

— from “The Bella Lingua”

MLK

#Repost @tza_taught_you
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~ “ Its more than police brutality .. It’s genocide . Stop trying to justify them killing off our brothers , stop telling us that we should peaceful protest when we live in a country that goes to WAR for PEACE . ”

William James

"So long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term… The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner “state” in which the thinking comes to pass… Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very existence itself, its reality and that of our experience are one."

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (via churchtake-out)

Thomas Merton

Wisdom From Television

"To make it - really make it - as a surgeon - it takes major commitment. We have to be willing to pick up that scalpel and make a cut that may or may not do more damage than good. It’s all about being committed, because if we’re not? We have no business picking up that scalpel in the first place.
There are times when even the best of us have trouble with commitment, and we may be surprised at the commitments we’re willing to let slip out of our grasp. Commitments are complicated. We may surprise ourselves by the commitments we’re willing to make. True commitment, takes effort, and sacrifice. Which is why sometimes, we have to learn the hard way, to choose our commitments very carefully."

—

narration from “Let the Angels Commit,” episode 3.06 of Grey’s Anatomy

What are we committing to in our lives?  Our jobs?  Our families?  Justice?

Sermons

“Those who pray as though all depends on God still bear the burden of working as though all depends on themselves.”–Fred Craddock

This reminded me of something Brent Walters, a professor in my undergrad program, said, which was something along the lines of “God’s not going to teach you history or Greek.”  While listening to the Spirit is important and we can expect it to play a role in our sermon writing and delivery as well as in the reception of those sermons, we also need to understand the limits of inspiration.  The work sits on our desk, not God’s.  It’s also important for me to remember that not everything can or needs to be said about a particular passage (“On any given Sunday, many wonderful Christian things will not be said”).  Often in speaking about a particular passage or Gospel, I seek to explain everything as completely as I can, when the reality is that there is such a thing as “too much.”  Sometimes facts can get in the way of a message and sometimes there may be a multiplicity of sermons sitting in a passage, but that doesn’t mean I should try to deliver them all simultaneously.  There will always be another Sunday to talk about the passage again in a different light.

Violence

#Repost @thejusticeconference
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Violence cost the world nearly 10 billion last year. Seems like we should wage more peace than war.

Process and Reality

"Every actual entity in its relationship to other actual entities is in this sense somewhere in the continuum, and arises out of the data provided by this standpoint.  But in another sense it is everywhere throughout the continuum; for its constitution includes the objectifications of the actual world and thereby includes the continuum; also the potential objectifications of itself contribute to the real potentialities whose solidarity the continuum expresses.  Thus the continuum is present in each actual entity, and each actual entity pervades the continuum."

— Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

Center

We need to keep God at the center of our words and actions.  Being able to make powerful criticisms and convey our anger in positive ways– that needs to have God at the center.  Only when we let Love live in our core can we celebrate faith while being honest with how much potential for (and history of) damage religion has.  This is something that I will need to remember, as a person for whom reform is very important.  

Not That I'm Capable, But...

I like sermons that are like (and this is silly, but true), the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland.  It begins meandering and slow, evenly paced, and suddenly you’re rushing down a waterfall and dumped into a dance party.  It made me think of how important it can be to create a snowball effect.  Perhaps saving the most lovely combinations of words and powerful phrasing for the end can be a way to create transformation.  

Responsible Consumerism

I often think about how our systems keep us complicit in the oppression of the voiceless– those trafficked individuals who make our clothes, the animals who we torture for food, the Earth we plunder for profit.  The act of oppressing each of these groups (whether we all agree or not on what we consider appropriate means to ends) is rooted in our anthropocentric understandings of human existence… many of which are rooted in traditional biblical understandings.  I know that a goal of my ministry will be to try to give voice to each of these groups and help people consider the ways that we can “control our ripples” and undermine these cruel acts of dominion by how we (at least those of us who have some agency and freedom in how we can spend money) contribute to these systems and the ways we can reject them.

The Absence of God

Perhaps we can take comfort that our spiritual predecessors whose lives we have glimpses of in the Bible, often lamented the seeming absence of the divine… yet book after book will show us that encounter continues and that our experience is, indeed, cyclical.  The Sun will rise and set.  We have to know it will come back and that there will be periods of darkness.

The Call of an Introvert

I identify as a quiet person who may seem, on the surface, an “unlikely” presence in ministry.  I don’t need to become an extrovert to embrace my voice; I need to offer an authentic self and truly develop who I Am.  What people want or expect is not necessarily what they need and to offer different kinds of voices and presentation is necessary to articulating a vision of God that can encompass all.