Without Running Away - Jason Gray

The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen

For nuclear man the future has become an option.

Only when man feels himself responsible for the future can he have hope or despair, but when he thinks of himself as the passive victim of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, his motivation falters and he starts drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of randomly chained incidents and accidents.

He [nuclear man] is primarily looking for experiences that give him a sense of value. Therefore he is very tolerant, since he does not regard a man with a different conviction as a threat but rather as an opportunity to discover new ideas and test his own... When Christianity is reduced to an all-encompassing ideology, nuclear man is all too prone to be skeptical about its relevance to his life experience.

[Jesus'] appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

I am afraid that in a few decades the church will be accused of having failed in its most basic task: to offer men creative ways to communicate with the source of human life.

When everybody become my 'neighbour' it is worth wondering whether anybody can really become my 'proximus', that it, the one who is most close to me.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

A Christian leader is a man of hope whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived from his personality, nor on specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given to him.

Many churches decorated with words announcing salvation and new life are often little more than parlours for those who feel quite comfortable in the old life, and who are not likely to let the minister's words change their stone hearts into furnaces where swords can be cast into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.

Hospitality is the ability to pay attention to the guest. This is very difficult, since we are preoccupied with our own needs, worries and tensions, which prevent us from taking distance from ourselves in order to pay attention to others.

When the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.

He moved into the neighborhood.

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.

I've thought about this quote often over the past month. I have graduated from University and am wrestling with the question of what it looks like to live an authentic, Kingdom-seeking life. As Ian McIntosh sings,

What does it sound like when you sing heaven's song?
What does it feel like when heaven comes down?

It is simple and complicated. I know that what I do matters far less than what I am. I know that there is great gain in godliness with contentment regardless of circumstances. But I also know that life is not about following the path of least resistance and I want to be one of those people who will pursue the Kingdom, take hold of it forcfully. What does that look like?

I've moved into a new neighbourhood recently. It isn't the place I would most like to be in the world. There are no rolling hills or country lanes, no wild valleys or cosy tea-rooms. At first, I wondered if I had made a mistake coming here, a priviledged little girl who knows nothing of the struggles faced by many families here. What could I possibly have to offer? But as I think of Jesus stepping in to my world, He who is as 'other' to this earth as an author is to his book, I wonder if perhaps we are all called to follow His example in a way. Our words cannot become flesh until we do 'move into the neighbourhood'. The question becomes, "Whose neighbourhood are we called to?"

Maybe it is the neighbourhood of the poor, the neighbourhood of our brothers and sisters who live on the poverty line and lack hope for a future. But it could be the neighbourhood of the desperate, of the friend who is suffering from loneliness or depression. The move is from words to deeds, from speaking of hope to bringing hope. Jesus CAME. Emmanuel. God with us. If we have the life of Christ in us, if we are His hands and His feet, then I think it is worth some thought and deliberation over this question of how we live our lives. What does it look like when we sing heaven's song?

Changing times

Lord, help me now to unclutter my life, to organize myself in the direction of simplicity. Lord, teach me to listen to my heart; teach me to welcome change instead of fearing it. Lord, I give you these stirrings inside me. I give you my discontent. I give you my restlessness. I give you my doubt. I give you my despair. I give you all the longings I hold inside. Help me to listen to these signs of change, of growth; help me to listen seriously and follow where they lead through the breathtaking space of an empty door.

- by Shane Claiborne

Nowhere and Never

Dig, Michelangelo,
Down in the marble,
A wonder is waiting
That no one can see.
Nowhere and never
And now and for ever
I look for a thing
That is looking for me.

Over the water I
Sail, like a fisherman,
Casting my net in
The dark of the sea.
Nowhere and never
And now and for ever
I look for a thing
That is looking for me.

Faith is a digger
And hope is a diver
And down in the marble
Or under the sea
Nowhere and never
And now and for ever
I look for a thing
That is looking for me.

Nowhere and never
And now and for ever
Loving and labour
Will bring it to be
Nowhere and never
And now and for ever
I look for a thing
That is looking for me.

Words and Music by Sydney Carter

The courage to be myself eludes me

The courage to be myself eludes me,
A shadow of what might be I remain,
And all the while in other lives I see
The wholeness that I lack and can’t attain.

The freedom to be myself eludes me,
For freedom itself does not liberate;
To be free to serve is the key to love
That can make of life a meaningful state.

The challenge of loving faith includes me,
I hear this call and can never stay out,
For love without faith is but sentiment
And faith is the courage to live in doubt.

E.M., A nun of Burnham Abbey

Found

Find me here and Hold my hand
it’s Late and I’m Afraid.
The world is Wider than I thought;
sometimes I wish I’d stayed.

Call my name and Search for me
I’m Waiting to be Found.
The road ahead’s a Lonely one,
more Echo than true Sound.

Be my Guide and bring me Home:
I’m Longing to arrive.
I Lost my way some years ago
yet somehow still Survived.

A message

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology" — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane [Claiborne]

Wisdom

This surely is Wisdom: if you live well, if your deeds precede your words.

Wulfstan

Any Shortcuts?

Can you tell me of a shortcut I can take to get through life
Is it any route permitted
Or is my ticket restricted
Can my route be straight and flat without any pain or strife
Must there be mountains to traverse
Can’t I just skip out the perverse
Is it possible to play the game and never get it wrong
Is there a trick or rule of thumb
To guarantee it will be won
Could I get it right the first go without needing to rehearse
Learn from mistakes of other men
And not repeat them all again
Can I learn the lesson well without doing any work
Always the winner and the best
Who scores top marks on every test
But if it’s true that nothing grows until the seed falls down to die:
Will I lose my life to find it
Can I learn to simply submit?

Thistles

My garden’s the one with the thistles
I keep it immaculately wild
The trowel and the spade have rusted away-
Now I sit and smile.

The neighbours have borders and beds
To match their orderly lives;
They grow rows of delicate flowers
But nothing really thrives.

I have the butterflies, I have the birds
My thistles are teeming with life.
Yet all that I do is watch as they grow
I don’t need to be neat or precise.

Because sometimes life must be messy
And growth doesn’t look very nice.
My garden’s the one with the thistles
And thistles, for me, will suffice.