For some reason God seems to do the best character development work when we are in the wilderness. Throughout the biblical text we see people out in the wilderness or in the “wintertime” of their spiritual lives. It is often here that God decides to do something new. “Now my heart is returned to sister winter,” as singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens describes it.
It’s one thing to affirm the need for prayer, but it’s quite another to know what that looks like in practical life. We don’t live in a world very conducive to that sort of life, and it’s not clear that the church does a good job of teaching it. So here I’d like to offer a pattern for prayer that can help any Christian begin to build a rhythm of prayer into daily life.
And when you’re on death row, you’re not really concerned with trivial pursuits, are you? Paul wasn’t dwelling on trivialities; he was dialed into eternities. That’s why it was particularly devastating for Demas to desert him. Because look at what Demas did: he loved this present world – its comfort, safety, and reputation – and in so doing ignored the next one. And Paul, who because he is on death row is dwelling on eternities more than at any other time in his life, knows something deadly: Demas has sacrificed what is eternal on the altar of what is trivial.
Well, the Christian doctrine of the afterlife is simply integral to Christian doctrine, period, and indeed, the faith as a whole makes no sense if the life to come is ignored or trivialized. The heart of the Christian faith is the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, which provides salvation and redemption for God’s whole fallen creation.
I believe these Christian doctrines of the afterlife provide powerful resources to make sense of some of the perennial big questions like the problem of evil, the foundations of morality, and the very meaning of life. And again, insofar as we think Christianity is true because it makes sense of things, we also have reason to think the doctrines of the afterlife are true, since they are integral to Christianity.
In some ways “Calvary” functions like a modern day parable: teasing us into thinking long and hard about its message, meaning, and implications for our world in the 21st century. I propose that the movie answers the question, “what does it look like to live as a royal priest prepared for battle in a Post-Christendom context?”
The similarity between the virtues and sanctification becomes especially clear when we grasp the connection between holiness and happiness. Holiness is a synonym for sanctification, which in the Wesleyan sense is seen as that state whereby our character comes to be defined by holy love.
Methodists gathered together because they were convinced that growth in holiness was most likely to happen in community.
The moment you slip from branding as an evangelistic tool to branding God, your logos and graphics have slipped from tool in service to God to weapon of iconoclasm – destroying an image. Hashtag simony. We do not create Team Trinity.
We are called to receive the brand of Jesus Christ (not his motivational verse t-shirt). Christ imprints himself on our thoughts, our emotions, our decisions. By his stripes we are healed, and there is no web analytics metric to measure the bleeding back of Word Made Flesh. We are called to be made into the image of God, to be bearers of God’s image, and anything that eats away at the image of God in us is violently iconoclastic.
It’s a mistake to criticize questioning by and in itself. An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith will last about as long as Farrah Fawcett hair, Hammer pants, beanie babies, MySpace, “Gangnam Style” and every other grass that withers and flower that doth fade away.
“How is memory significant for us as God’s people? Why is it important for us to remember, and what specifically should we remember most?”
“Who is God? Emmanuel, Word-Made-Flesh, Jesus Christ the fully divine, fully mortal. And the Book of Revelation is understood through Emmanuel, God with us, who makes all things new – new, say, as a newborn, fists tight, eyes blinking, with that delicious newborn smell and tiny tufts of hair. Our world needs to be new again: reborn, pressed against the chest of its Creator.”
“Did your family have a kid’s table? Mine did. This was actually a fun experience, but as you age, you wonder when you might be given a chance to sit at the real table. Though we can joke about these memories, in reality there are people in our world who are wanting and waiting for their chance to gather around the table. This Thanksgiving let’s remember to invite all to the feast and to the table of grace.”
