The Cubs losing became something familiar, comfortable, but as food for the hope for tomorrow – “someday.” Someday, all the way. Next year. For the Chicago Cubs, it was always regular season, never World Series. It was Friday, but maybe, someday, Sunday would come. The fans kept coming, rain or shine, for the hope of tomorrow, because today stunk. Someday, though. Someday.
Many people need to move from the familiar to the alien, from concrete to abstract. Jesus knew this in his own preaching. To prophetically proclaim is to take people on a journey. When pastors read, pastors deliberately invest in looking for effective ways to communicate the truth of scripture. Engaging in classics not only allows you to use stories and images that will engage your listeners as you bridge them to the biblical text, but also allows you to engage listeners whose intellects will appreciate the connections you draw.
In our public square, women across the country see two primary candidates for President of the United States: one has stuck with a serially unfaithful spouse. The other has regularly said horribly demeaning things to and about women while treating them as a fiscal and personal commodity in his business life. While there are other people on the ballot – thank goodness – the air time has largely gone to these two people. Both traditional political parties have put people front and center who communicate to women with their actions and words that this is the best we can do; this is the best we can expect; this is the best we deserve.
Are you creating new room in your life for the Holy Spirit? Has your life created spiritual clutter? Do you need to sort and toss, mop and box up, or even just shove aside a pile of detritus to make just enough room to lie flat in prayer? Claim some space, now today: it doesn’t have to be much. Just enough time, or attention, or space to pray, “Come on, Holy Spirit…Come on…”
Should Methodists be the most undistracted people on the planet?
In many Wesleyan holiness contexts holiness is preached in the context of the Third Person of the Trinity. Rightly so. But the Holy Spirit does not just infill humans as a kind of sanctified cul-de-sac, detached from the revelation of Christ. The Holy Spirit always witnesses back to Christ, revealing Christ, empowering Christlikeness. The Holy Spirit tells the story of Christlikeness through us.
We must be very careful about how we go about our mission, because across the country our faith community is in crisis. And crisis breeds desperation.
I’ve eaten with Muslims and agnostics, with atheists and Wiccans, with Buddhists and Baptists. I enjoy breaking bread with people who are different than I am. I don’t want any of them to go hungry. I want to share what I have with them, whether they ever believe what I believe or not.
But I’m also comfortable with my vocational call to proclaim Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
We are knit together fearfully and wonderfully in the womb of this galaxy, we neighbors, breathing the air of God’s breath as we blink and squall at the startling light of Triune love. We are still newborns learning to recognize the face of our Creator, learning to move through the example of Christ our brother.
Repetition does not have to imply boredom or meaninglessness – though advertisers attempt to convince us otherwise. The rhythm of seasons is a necessary beauty, like the measured count behind your favorite music.
Perhaps because of it’s very appearance and sound, there’s a halt, a slamming of the brakes. “Righteousness” begins visually and aurally, in English, with “right.” To say definitively that you’re immediately “right” in a pluralistic culture is a non-starter.