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Not Faith Alone
13. The indulgences Luther despised were no more dangerous to souls than elevating faith alone. Nearly 500 years ago, Martin Luther (may have) pounded a piece of paper to a church door. A mighty symbolic act of strangely low significance. Imagine hammering your own theses on your church door. It might spark a local stir,…
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Time to Reform Again
12. Reformers sought to end the arrogance of Catholicism with the arrogance of individualism. Reading through Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, you get the impression there’s more than a little irritation there. He’s not just a little upset. Moderately perturbed. Slightly irritated. No. The dude was pissed. He was pissed at his church. He was pissed…
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The Idolatry of Individualism
11. And our communities have driven the divine into individual pursuits. If the command is to love God and neighbor, and if Jesus is present when we are together, and the missio dei (mission of God) is to build the kin-dom, then individualism is the stumbling block, the temptation for power, and anti-Christ. Individualism defined Let…
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Looking for God In All the Wrong Places
10. Our individual pursuit of the divine leads us away from community. The Great Western Heresy When the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori addressed the General Convention of The Episcopal Church in 2009, she spoke to a church on the front lines of our next reformation. A church which was still in conflict over its ecclesiology…
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So We Isolate Ourselves
9. But in the arrogance of Christian piety and Western intellectualism we seek isolation. Jesus wants us to be with one another. So why are we so divided? You know the problem. Or at least part of the problem. Our friends on Facebook have all lost their minds. And depending on where we sit, they’ve…
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God is active with us
8. When we feed the multitudes, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick, we are also with Jesus. There are essentially two ways Christians speak about the material of their faith. We can speak literally or metaphorically. And for those outside the faith, it can be really hard to tell the difference between the two. Just…
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To Create Withness
7. But in Jesus, we are given human responsibility to create withness with one another. The nature of God is withness. From the divine dance of the Holy Trinity to the very withness of Jesus, all of God’s glory is withness. What I mean by “withness” is presence–the eternal and constant being with someone. And this idea of…
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In the Joys and the Junk
6. Through all the great upheavals in history, God has been with the people. The quintessential question of the confused is to ask “Where is God?” In the midst of tragedy, we ask it. “Where is God?” The presupposition of the question is that God isn’t there. But why? Because we first define God as the…