wondering

"I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3.18-19 tniv).

This morning I began to read a powerful little book, The Truce of God, by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He begins with a critique of our culture. He analyses our modern myths, the stories we tell ourselves in movies and through television. He finds massive fear and anxiety, coupled with pervasive and unpredictable violence in this stories. He is amazed to find, that in the ways we tell these stories, most often we perceive that we are powerless to do anything beyond reacting with further fear and violence to events that we believe are beyond our control.

Archbishop Rowan summarizes our cultural predicament:

"In our day more than ever, war and peace are 'spiritual' as well as tactical and political issues. We shall not understand our society and its terrors and anxieties about total war unless we grasp that behind these anxieties lies a profound sickness of spirit; and it is a sickness which only succeeds in reinforcing the structures that give rise to it in the first place."

"Gospel, good news, for a society like our must involve a clear and accurate diagnosis of this kind of sickness, because only so will it become possible to open the doors of repentance once again.... War is to be dreaded (if we can echo the words of Jesus) not so much because it likds the body as because it destroys both body and soul, because its casualties are health and truth and hope. To resist this destruction is to affirm a faith in a human future; and the Gospel, by driving us to penitence, grounds this affirmation of the future in the loving will of God, remaking us through conversion" (Rowan Williams, The Truce of God, 20-21).

I am profoundly challenged by this analysis of Rowan Williams. It pushes me to imagine the "fullness of God" and the "power" that flows from the knowing the amazing "love of Christ" confronting the spirit of our society which seeks to grasp, to control, and to dominate. I am challenged to wonder personally how I am coopted by this spirit in my own life. And dare I consider this: I wonder how the church has grown silent about the "good news" of this "love" which confronts our fears, anxieties, and brutalities?

I am wondering?

I am wondering. I am wondering about being a leader within the public community of faith. It is a community with a particular faith. We say we are a "community of the good news." The "good news" has a distinctive meaning. It is a code phrase for the whole story of Jesus of Nazareth: " the good news of Jesus, the Christ."

Having just mentioned that name "Jesus" and the title "Christ" I have already begun to tell a particular story. What I'm wondering about is how that story is "good news" for people today in this 21st century world. Will you wonder with me?



"CreationReCreation"

Acrylic painting by Marty Carney

In these uncertain times, with so much threatening our lives and all life on Earth, we long for a renewal. We hope for a new day.

Through the way of Jesus Christ, we see God's "ReCreation" of this evolving world. Through suffering love, God mutates our broken lives, this failing universe, into a new pattern of creation and creativity.

Create us by your Spirit,

give new life to the earth!

from Psalm 104

"CreationReCreation"

Acrylic painting by Marty Carney