Category: quotes and reflections

some old, but good thoughts that have come up a few times in recent conversations.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

-max ehrmann

was listening to an old song while driving this weekend and was struck by the words.

on the turning away from the pale and downtrodden,
and the words they say which we won’t understand:
“don’t accept that what’s happening
is just a case of others’ suffering
or you’ll find that you’re joining in
the turning away.”

it’s a sin that somehow light is changing to shadow
and casting its shroud over all we have known
unaware how the ranks have grown,
driven on by a heart of stone,
we could find that we’re all alone
in the dream of the proud.

on the wings of the night as the daytime is stirring
where the speechless unite in a silent accord
using words you will find are strange
mesmerized as they light the flame
feel the new wind of change
on the wings of the night

no more turning away from the weak and the weary
no more turning away from the coldness inside
just a world that we all must share
it’s not enough just to stand and stare
is it only a dream that there’ll be
no more turning away?

Some thoughts from James on being right, being arrogant, and discussing it in public… Definitely worth the read.

if i have difficulty with someone at work, or if i get frustrated with friends or family, or a list of so many other things, i talk about these things at home behind closed doors, or in private. why then, do i parade my religious discussion around in public and wave the banner for all to see? not only is this rude to those around who i might be insulting, but what impression does this leave on those sitting in the establishment. to be honest, i’ve never overheard a religious discussion in public where the people were not talking about how they were better/smarter/whatever than someone else and that these other people were stupid/wrong aka not as enlightened. no wonder people think i’m a hypocrite, i am! in church i talk about how great God is and talk about how loving and merciful but that’s just talk. maybe the real reason that i am a christian is because i want to feel superior, or that i don’t want to be wrong. it seems that i put a lot more thought into how to prove that i’m right over how great it is to be merciful or how I want to be like Christ, or how could we improve how we treat others.

“I have learned not to look too far ahead, but to concentrate on the present.
I am not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die.
I have so much more I want to do.”

–Stephen Hawking, in a recent BBC interview.

I received this post by brian mashburn from a friend. I would highly recommend it.

An excerpt (er… most of it):

We live and move and act within Churches of Christ, and hold dear the idea of becoming more like Christ together, to become a church that is, in actuality, ‘of Christ’.

We are not interested in change. We are interested in Christ, and whatever we must change in order love Him more truly, we are glad and anxious to do so.

We are immovably committed to the Bible. But only inasmuch as it teaches us about and moves us closer to Christ…and we believe it to be the perfect tool for doing so, a gift from God, the written Word that was preserved to lead us to the Living Word. We suffer from a growing intolerance for people who use the Bible merely to defend and maintain strict adherence to certain sets of worship practices, beliefs, or political positions. And most of us are long past satisfying our spiritual zeal by fighting with other attempting Bible-followers about who is right.

…

We are bright and honest and dedicated, but only some of us are educated. And those of us who are rarely point it out, and more often hide from talking about it. That’s because we put very little stock in the educated merely because they are educated. We have met people who are much more devoted to the Divine Master than some who have a Masters of Divinity, and have found them more useful in our own becoming more like Christ. We are not anti-intellectual, mind you. We love smart people. But we have the innate ability to spot unspiritual smart people, and we would define them as those who run after smarts rather than Christ, and mistakenly confuse the two. We want and need smart, educated people. But educated people who expose a lack of self-awareness and humility by expecting deference from others because they know so much, we just leave them to their ivory kingdoms and sorrowfully attempt to pursue Christ’s without them.

We are indignant sometimes, and defensive and rude on occasion, and every now and then, we are angry. For the younger among us, it’s because we feel like we’re being bargained with…asked to ‘please stay in a movement that doesn’t work’ in exchange for job security, or hero status, or at the very least, tons and tons of gratitude and affirmation…and we sense that the strings attached are too costly. For those of us who are old enough, it stems from feeling duped in our younger years, agreeing with things that sapped us, our friends, our parents, our children, and those we tried to evangelize of the very life we said submission to our system offered. Some of us are the ones that faithfully did everything our churches asked of us, and if it asked for more we would’ve done that, but we ended up not looking like Jesus. Maybe it is too much to ask, but we must: Forgive us our inappropriate, un-Christlike reactions to our wounds…we don’t mean to claim perfection of any sort, we only abhor those who seem to claim it themselves. And we are scared to death of becoming like that…and are angry at ourselves for ever being like that.

If you watch us closely, you’ll see that we have stopped complaining about the Church of Christ that we see (for the most part), and have turned our energies to becoming the Church of Christ that we dream of. When we are at our best, we are ushering in a new world, not just yelling at the old one. We are envisioning a new society in the wake of the old, not one that puts a period on the end of the sentence and starts a brand new unrelated one, but puts a “dot, dot, dot”, pausing long enough to look around at all of us, and wake up that it is already new, if we would just engage each other and the world we live in with true spiritual friendship.

That term, ‘true spiritual friendship’ really means something to us. It involves confession, transparency, and vulnerability. It involves mutual introspection for the purpose of personal and each others transformation. The word ‘and’ really means something to us, too. We distrust those who only want to transform us or others who lack the capacity to show that they too are in need of continued transformation. And mere intellectual agreement with the idea that “we all sin and fall short of the glory of God” doesn’t show us anymore. We need to hear confession.

We give extravagantly to and through the Churches of Christ we attend, hoping desperately to play a role in redeeming them and ourselves. We figure that if the mission of Christ is to people, then bringing Christ to the Church of Christ people is as good a target as any. We constantly flirt with taking a few like-minded people and planting new churches, but keep faithful to our Churches of Christ either out of fear of new things, family love and loyalty, or a deep sense of calling, or all three.

…

We’re taking full and total responsibility for our children, completely done with expecting from or blaming the church institution for their spiritual outcomes. We welcome anything it does to help, but we are picking and choosing and investing in relationships with the people that we want influencing our kids, and outright asking them to do so, thinking of anything positive that comes out of our churches children’s and youth programs as only being supplemental, and hopefully useful. We are watching closely, however, for any residual teaching that resembles anything legalistic whatsoever and are preparing to help our kids unlearn it, explaining our love for the church that taught it, showing openly where that teaching comes from, but correcting them as to what discipleship really looks like. If a Church of Christ wants to run us off quickly, which it may want to do because our convictions can be hard to deal with, or hard to argue against, then all it must do is start teaching our kids to be legalistic rule followers instead of passionate Christ followers. We’ll leave. We are already worried enough about what we are doing to them by trying to teach them discipleship at home while their church is trying to teach them why we don’t have instruments in worship.

Our commitment to Churches of Christ remains as long as we can be totally honest (as opposed to being totally right) among them.

Indeed, we have much in common with the Churches we exist within, and yet co-exist with dramatic differences. We are both committed to the Bible, but our approaches to finding its riches stand at odds. We are both committed to the truth, but our definition of truth stands at odds. We are both in love with the church, but our view of who make it up and what it exists for are at odds. We both want to live in the Kingdom of Heaven, but our views of what that means and when that is to take place are at odds. We both want to see ourselves as primarily spiritual, but our comfort with embracing mystery are at odds. We both want to worship God, but our convictions on what the non-negotiables are, are at odds. We wonder if we can really co-exist. We wonder if we are going to have to wait for some funerals to expose ourselves and our thoughts openly in the Church of Christ. We wonder, sometimes, if we can really co-exist at all, feeling sometimes like we are tolerated by our churches only because we walk on eggshells concerning how we talk about what is going on inside of us.

But we sense there is one means of hope that exalts what we have in common, and minimizes where we are different. A focus that allows us both, different as we are, to continue becoming Christians in a way that does not condemn our historical Church of Christ roots, nor restrain or condemn those of us who want to grow beyond it’s limiting beliefs. The means of hope is for all of us to focus seriously on following Jesus.

The Bible’s overarching call is to follow God. Jesus’ overarching call is to discipleship. Our hope is in our mutual agreement to pursue the Restoration of Discipleship. Once again, and all over again, and in a brand new way…following Jesus can be our salvation.

…

We will baptize our children with water, fully immersing them in it as one of the many Biblical steps of coming into the life of Christ, but we will not have an obsessive, myopic focus on it ever again. We will no longer claim to believe in the “priesthood of all believers” when we actually mean the “priesthood of all male believers”. We will not ever again treat other Bible believing, Jesus following fellowships as lost people…and not because we don’t disagree with them on certain significant points…but because we have been humbled by our own disagreement with our past selves, and we hope people who died thinking like we used to were saved by grace, too. We will not write whole books explaining away the Greek word “psallos” to convince everyone instrumental music in unscriptural, we will not write articles and preach sermons focused on the churches down the street and what they are doing wrong, we will not draw lines of fellowship based on whether we should have Bible classes, kitchens, basketball goals, or multiple communion cups. The mere mention of such feuds embarrasses the fool out of us, and we swallow hard and remember our love when we have to be associated with those related to us who have or are.

We wonder if we’ll get to stay in the Church of Christ. Our intolerance for our own personal past and our churches intolerance of us may foil what we feel inclined and called to do, but day by day we pursue Christ sincerely, with all of our hearts. The good news is that it doesn’t take much to encourage us. Any step towards Jesus by any person at all fuels us to take our next one and we are anxious to use both as evidence that we are in the right place.

We want the Church of Christ to be a church that is actually “of Christ”.

a couple of thoughts that jumped out at me this weekend, from “A New Kind of Christian”

At the time, I could see only two alternatives: 1) continue preaching and promoting a version of Christianity that I had deepening reservations about or 2) leave Christian ministry and perhaps the Christian path altogether. There was a third alternative that I hadn’t yet considered: Learn to be a Christian in a new way.

…

1. I drive my car and listen to the Christian radio station, something my wife always tells me I should stop doing (“because it only gets you upset”). There I hear preacher after preacher be so absolutely sure of his bombproof answers and his foolproof biblical interpretations (in spite of the fact that Preacher A at 9:30 usually contradicts Preacher B at 10:00, and so on throughout the day), his five easy steps (alliterated around the letter P), his crisis of the month (toward which you should give a “love gift … if the Lord so leads”). And the more sure he seems, the less I find myself wanting to be a Christian, because on this side of the microphone, antennas, and speaker, life isn’t that simple, answers aren’t that clear, and nothing is that sure. (Paradoxically, at that moment I might consider sending him some money, hoping that by investing in his simpler vision of the world, I myself will be able to buy into it more. But eventually I will stop throwing good money after bad.)
2. I preach sermons that earn the approving nods of the lifelong churchgoers, because they repeat the expected vocabulary and formulations, words that generally convey little actual meaning after hearing them fifty-two times a year, year after year, but work like fingers, massaging the weary souls of earnest people. Meanwhile, as the initiated relax under this massage of familiar words, as they emit an almost audible “ahh” to hear their cherished vocabulary again, these very massaging messages leave the uninitiated furrowing their brows, shaking their heads, and shifting in their seats. They do this sometimes because they don’t understand but even more when they do understand – because the very formulations that sound so good and familiar to the “saved” sound downright weird or even wicked to the “seekers” and the skeptics. These people come to me and ask questions, and I give my best answers, my best defenses, and by the time they leave my office, I have convinced myself that their questions are better than my answers.
3. I do the reverse: I preach sermons that turn the lights on for spiritual seekers, but earn me critical letters and phone calls from the “veterans” of the church often because the expected fingers didn’t reach through my message to massage them as expected.
4. I have counseling sessions in my office, year after year, during which many wonderful people, people whom I love, people who have a lot of Bible knowledge, Christan background, theological astuteness, and “pew time,” prove to have the same problems, make the same mistakes, harbor the same doubts (though more often unexpressed), indulge in the same vices, and lack the same “spark” that unchurched people often do, the only major differences being that a) the church people tend to use more religious language to define their problems, b) their problems are further complicated by guilt for having these problems in the first place, and c) these religious people nevertheless consider themselves superior to their non-religious counterparts. (I read recently that divorce rates among evangelical Christians – supposed guardians of traditional family values – are actually higher than those in culture at large. What?) After these counseling sessions, I am left troubled, wondering, “Shouldn’t the Gospel of Jesus make a bigger impact than this? And does pew time have to result in spiritual pride and inauthenticity?”
5. I realize that as people come into our church, everybody needs conversion. The not yet committed Christians need to be converted to a vibrant twenty-first century faith, and the already committed twentieth-century (and nineteenth-century) Christians need the same, myself included.
6. I realize, as I read and reread the Bible, that many passages don’t fit any of the theological systems I have inherited or adapted. Sure, they can be squeezed in, but after a while my theology looks like a high school class trip’s luggage – shoestrings hanging out here, zippers splitting apart there, latches snapping, clothes pouring out on the floor like a thrift store horn of plenty. My old systems – whether the Dispensationalism of my childhood, the Calvinism of my adolescence, the “charasmaticism” of my early adulthood, or even my more mature, mainstream “evangelicalism” – cant seem to hold all the data in the Bible, not to mention the data of my own experience, at least not gracefully.
7. I read what other people who are having similar experiences are saying, including people writing outside the religious context – like this from Peter Senge – “In any case, our Industrial Age management, our Industrial Age organization, our Industrial Age way of living will not continue. The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable in ecological terms, and it’s not sustainable in human terms. It will change. The only question is how. Once we get out of our machine mind-set, we may discover new aptitudes for growth and change. Until then, change won’t come easily.” As I read, I feel that “industrial age faith” faces the same fate.
8. I pick up most religious books, like the one you’re holding, and know from somewhere midway through page one what the entire book will say, and I read on anyway to find out that I was right. I wonder: Doesn’t the religious community see that the world is changing? Doesn’t it have anything fresh and incisive to say? Isn’t it even asking any new questions? Has it nothing to offer other than the stock formulas that it has been offering? Is there no Saint Francis or Soren Kierkegaard or C.S. Lewis in the house with some fresh ideas and energy? Has the “good news” been reduced to “good same-old same-old”?
9. I meet people along the way who model for me, each in a different way, what a new kind of Christian might look like. They differ in many ways, but they generally agree that the old show is over, the modern jig is up, and it’s time for something radically new.

Of course, my data isn’t numbers. My data is experience – my experience as a committed Christian and my specific experiences as a pastor. Experiences like these:

…

You see, if we have a new world, we will need a new church. We won’t need a new religion per-se, but a new framework for our theology. Not a new Spirit, but a new spirituality. Not a new Christ, but a new Christian. Not a new denomination, but a new kind of church in every denomination.

I’d have to become a Christian in a new way…

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man,
if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment,
a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential;
if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything,
what would life be but despair?

Soren Kierkegaard

full text is available here. a fantastic farewell from one of the greatest communicators in modern politics. the end:

In the years to come, wherever I am, whatever I do, I’m with you.

Wishing you well.

Wanting you to win.

You’re the future now.

Make the most of it.

a quick thought from my morning playlist:

oh what good is it to live
with nothing left to give
forget but not forgive
not loving all you see?