“Look Up”

A Good Friday faith

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

The crucified Christ puts a question to his church – and the question is this: Is it possible to have a disinterested faith, a faith without strings, a faith held not because it’s to your advantage, because you get something out of it, or because it’s deeply satisfying – indeed, it may be to your disadvantage, a burden, even an affliction – but you hold it because it holds you, grips you, the hand of God around your throat. Can we have such a faith?

Never has the question been more urgent than it is today, when the appeal of the evangelism that is making all the running is precisely that faith is a good personal investment. From the vulgar health-and-wealth gospel in the States to the slick Harrod’s gospel of the Alpha Course, from the personal growth gospel of the late M. Scott Peck to the gospel of self-knowledge of Myers Briggs, from the signs-and-wonders gospel of God TV (“Bam!”) to the gospel of churches with the Colgate Smile and the smell of Ivory Soap, where no one has cancer or depression, a mess of a marriage or a kid on crack – openly or subtly the appeal is that here is an offer too good to refuse, here is a faith that pays, if not in pounds and pence, then in happiness, wholeness, enlightenment, experience, consolation, or whatever it is you happen to be searching for. It’s a commodity gospel for a consumerist culture.

Meanwhile a grim grin spreads across the faces of the masters of suspicion, those sophisticated atheists who charge Christians with sloppy and indulgent thinking, with creating a god in their own image, a fantasy deity who meets my needs and fulfils my wishes. Not the New Atheists, of course – they’re the fleas on the lions of the classical atheists like Hume, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. And don’t they have a point, indeed a prophetic point?

What kind of faith, then, am I commending? An old story the rabbis tell should do the trick. The story of a Jew who escapes the Spanish Inquisition and makes his way, with his wife and child, in a small boat across a stormy sea to a rocky island. A bolt of lightning flashes and kills his wife. A whirlwind strikes and hurls his child into the sea. Naked, terrified, wretched, lashed by the tempest, the Jew makes his way onto a barren island. And then, raising his hands, he speaks to God.

“God of Israel, … I have fled to this place so that I may serve You in peace, to follow Your commandments and glorify Your name. You, however, are doing everything to make me cease believing in You. But if You think that You will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, then I cry to You, my God and the God of my parents, that none of it will help You. You may insult me, You may chastise me, You may take from me the dearest and the best that I have in the world, You may torture me to death – and I will always believe in You, I will love You always and forever – even despite You.”

That, I would suggest, is a Good Friday faith. A God-for-nothing faith in a good-for-nothing God. A God who does not promise me success or reward, a faith that does not underwrite my own religious agenda. In the crucified Jesus we see, as Rowan Williams puts it, that “God becomes recognised as God only at the place of extremity, where no answers seem to be given and God cannot be seen as the God we expect or understand.” In the crucified Jesus we see that faith is a balm only as it is a wound, a blessing only as it is a curse – we learn the lesson of Job, the lesson of Jeremiah, the lesson of the Psalms of lament, the lesson of Israel, the Suffering Servant. Such that all authentic evangelism should include an honest dose of dis-evangelism, and carry a health warning with its welcome.

Yet how is the cross conventionally understood? As a place of heroics, where Jesus goes to the gibbet like Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine. Or as a tragic if necessary but temporary intrusion on the way to the happy ending of Easter, as if it were a gym: “no pain, no gain”. Or as a “power encounter” in which God overcomes evil by superior force, now an energy source into which Christians can tap. Or as an episode in which Christ is humiliated, but don’t worry, he’ll be back – and this time it’s personal. And then there are the various models of the atonement which demonstrate, in neat and tidy categories, why the cross was necessary, QED, the worst exhibiting what James Alison calls “an Aztec imagination”, and even the best what he terms “physics envy”, what with their compulsive need for theory. “Oh, so that’s it, now I get it, now I understand.” The thing is, if you do, you don’t.

I have my own theory as to why these conventional readings of the cross are so widespread, apart, that is, from our endemic vanity and our capitalist cultural captivity: it’s because post WWII Christianity has never comes to terms with the Shoah, the Holocaust, that most God-forsaken of historical moments. Which would explain why it is no coincidence that the most penetrating and profound theologies of the cross – though they themselves would, quite rightly, dispute, even resent my tribute – they are the Survivors, and the relatives of Survivors. Indeed my source for that rabbinic tale comes from the most extraordinary, incandescent disruption of a text I’ve read since Elie Wiesel’s Night, 23 pages of spiritual semtex entitled Yosl Rakover Talks to God, set in the Warsaw Ghetto as the Nazi tanks close in for the final kill. One of the last remaining resistance fighters cries out to God just as did the forsaken boat-wrecked Jew in the story: “None of this will avail You! … I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You… ‘Sh’ma Yisroel! Hear, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’” Yosl’s last words. And, of course, the last words of another, more famous Jew, in the face of his own dereliction and death…

So let the Good Friday lesson for us Gentiles, grafted by grace into the vine of Israel, be this: to see the light we must see it at night, experience the darkness of God that covers the land as Christ cries out in the agony of torture and abandonment. We must let go – we must be stripped – of all the personal securities, the traditional pieties, the cherished practices, all the usual landmarks by which we find our way around the religious landscape. We must be dispossessed. We must wait. We must yearn. We must hope. We must trust – trust (inverting Bonhoeffer) that the God who forsakes us is the God who is with us. Here is a faith with nothing in it for me – but Him. Him. Only Him. Truly Him. Always Him.

—

Originally posted at http://www.faith-theology.com/2014/04/a-good-friday-faith.html

Hope

In the church calendar, this week is Holy Week – the time leading up to Easter Sunday.  It is marked by Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, before culminating in Easter on Sunday morning.

On Easter Sunday, we Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  Among other things, this is a celebration of hope: hope that in Jesus, God has claimed victory over sin and death; hope that God is bringing new creation to a broken world; hope that we, as followers of Jesus, can share in God’s resurrection life.

One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption, about life in a New England prison called “Shawshank” from the 1940s to the 1960s.  The two main characters are Andy and Red, both inmates who become friends while serving their sentence.  Andy is young and idealistic, and he holds onto hope with great passion.  He tells Red that “hope is good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”  Red, however, is a seasoned inmate who has long given up hope.  “Let me tell you something,” he cautions Andy.  “Hope is a dangerous thing.  Hope can drive a man insane.”

After much struggle, Andy gets out of Shawshank and tries to begin his life anew.  Red is left with a gap in his friendship, and he begins to reconsider Andy’s perspective on hope.  Towards the end of the movie, Red, too, is released from prison.  So he hops on a bus to find Andy.  He says this:

“I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

I wonder: how does hope form our lives?  Are we often like Red in The Shawshank Redemption, calloused and fatalistic and skeptical of too much talk of “hope”?  Or are we like Andy, clinging to hope in the midst of seemingly hopeless situations?  As we move toward Easter, may we find ways to embrace and proclaim hope, that we might find ourselves in the words of the old hymn: My hope is built on nothing less / Than Jesus Christ, my righteousness.

What does it mean to be ‘Presbyterian’? – Part 2

Here is an interesting essay by a pastor and fellow Presbyterian, Christopher Joiner, exploring his connection and commitment to the Presbyterian Church (USA):

Why I Am (Still) a Presbyterian

By Christopher Joiner
September 20, 2013

It happened again yesterday. I lose track in the last nine years how often the question comes, but for some reason yesterday was a tipping point that sends me today to the keyboard and this blog.

Here’s the question (asked sometimes kindly and sometimes with less kindness, but always basically the same):

“Why are you still in the Presbyterian Church (USA)? Don’t you know it is in decline because it is too liberal/too conservative, too traditional/too trendy, too political/not political enough, etc.?”

Well, here’s why.

1. I think God is big, in the sense of sovereign, in the sense of “such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high, I cannot attain it” (Psalm 139:6), in the sense of “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33). John Calvin thought this was the most important message of scripture, and the PCUSA thinks so too. God is God, and we are not. When you start here, you will not let yourself become doctrinaire, you will make room for a variety of viewpoints (since no one person or church or doctrine can capture all of God), and you will encourage your people to never stop learning. Which leads to…

2. Because God is big, we have a lot to learn. We have ten PCUSA seminaries in the United States. Count ‘em. Ten. We have sixty-five PCUSA-related colleges and universities in this country. Which is not a typo. That’s a lot of higher education institutions for a denomination our size, and there are lots of conversations about closing some of them down. Whether they all make it or not, the fact that we value the education of clergy and laypeople enough to invest in these institutions is itself indicative of a very important denominational value: we believe because God is sovereign and we’ll never know all of God there is to know, our leaders should be life-long learners, exposed to the depths of the tradition, and given the tools to interpret not only scripture but the congregations we serve and the world in which we live. John Calvin said that Christians should never fear knowledge, no matter where it comes from, because any time we learn more of the truth about the world we are learning more about God. You will rarely find a Presbyterian dismissing science or running from an insight because it might challenge her or his faith, and you’ll rarely find a Presbyterian who doesn’t place a high value in thinking for him or her self. Which makes us a rather diverse and disputatious lot…

3. We fight a lot, but we fight fair. If God is sovereign and education is paramount, it follows that if you have ten Presbyterians in a room you’ll have at least twenty opinions. We spend a lot of time in groups talking about what it means to follow Christ, and sometimes those conversations get heated. But we spend a comparable amount of time making sure all voices are heard and all perspectives are honored. Decision-making is therefore messy and slow, and we all spend a fair amount of time complaining about it. But we’ll take messy and slow if it means honoring all the people of God in their rich diversity. And we realize diversity extends beyond the relatively small boundaries of our little denomination, which means…

4. We think it is important to play well with others. In any city in America, you will find Presbyterian (USA) folk partnering with other Presbyterian denominations, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Baptists, and and many others in the work of the Spirit in the world. We welcome their members to take Communion at our tables and their ministers to preach from our pulpits. We see ourselves as a small part of a much larger family of faith, and we have much to learn from them. We do not believe that the Presbyterian way is the only way. Why? See #1 above. Lot’s of things follow from #1, including the last reason I am still Presbyterian (USA)…

5. The world needs our witness. Jonathan Sacks says in America we no longer broadcast, we narrow-cast. It is possible to  construct our world in such a way that we can go through our day never encountering an alternative point of view. Our politics seems irreparably polarized. Ideology trumps everything else. And when you look at religion, it is much the same. Denominations splinter into churches of the like-minded. People run from church to church looking for places that “fit” their own world view. Special interest groups dominate the conversations within denominations. The world and the universal church need to see a group of people who know how to stay together even when they do not always agree, a group of people who believe at the core of their faith that they will never know all of God there is to know and who therefore refuse to narrow-cast. The PCUSA does not do this perfectly, but it does try to be this kind of witness in a world that desperately needs it. It defies the easy categories our culture is so good at imposing (and my interlocutors are always asking me about) – liberal/conservative, traditional/contemporary, Democratic/Republican.

That’s why I’m PCUSA. Still. Because my primary identity is Child of God, a God so much bigger than the categories we seek to impose. The five reasons above will probably not satisfy the people who ask the question of me, but in the end I’m not trying to satisfy them. I’m just trying to be faithful to my call. And I’m so very grateful to be able to do so among these sisters and brothers in our little corner of Christ’s big Church.

————-

Read the original essay here: http://christopherjoiner.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/why-i-am-still-a-presbyterian/

What does it mean to be ‘Presbyterian’? – Part 1

We have recently been looking at what it means to be Presbyterian.  White Memorial is a member of a Presbyterian denomination (the PCUSA), preaches and teaches from within the Reformed tradition, and holds to a Presbyterian form of government.  How can we better understand our place in this particular church as well as in the church universal?

Here is some of what we talked about…

We considered how “being Presbyterian” means being a part of a particular history:

A Brief Look at Presbyterian History

• 1^st century: the Christian church took root in the Middle East. At the time the church was unified; there were no such things as schisms or denominations… yet.
• 4^th century: the church became politically established under the Emperor Constantine
• 11^th century: theological and political disagreements cause a split (“schism”) between the eastern (Greek-speaking) church and the western (Latin-speaking) church.  We know them now as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
• 15^th century: the Renaissance saw the invention of printing press in Europe; common people gained access to the Bible
• 1517: Martin Luther (German priest and teacher) posted 95 grievances on the Wittenburg church door, which sparked the “Protestant Reformation” – a radical revisioning of church structure and authority
• 1537: John Calvin rose to prominence in Geneva, Switzerland; his teachings spawned “Reformed theology”
• 1560: John Knox: studied with Calvin, took Reformed teachings to Scotland.  Other Reformed churches were planted in England, Holland, and France.
• 1706: the first American presbytery is organized.
• 1746: the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University) was established.
• 1983: the Presbyterian Church  (USA) formed as a result of the reunion of PCUS (southern) and UPCUSA (northern)
• Today: As of 2012, there were 10,262 congregations and 1,849,496 in the PCUSA. Other Presbyterian churches in the United States include the Presbyterian Church in America and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

We also considered how “being Presbyterian” means being a part of a particular theological tradition:

Theology

Theology is a way of thinking about God and God’s relation to the world. Reformed theology evolved during the 16^th century religious movement known as the Protestant Reformation. It emphasizes God’s supremacy over everything and humanity’s chief purpose as being to glorify and enjoy God forever.

In its confessions, the Presbyterian Church (USA) expresses the faith of the Reformed tradition. Central to this tradition is the affirmation of the majesty, holiness and providence of God who creates, sustains, rules and redeems the world in the freedom of sovereign righteousness and love. Related to this central affirmation of God’s sovereignty are other great themes of the Reformed tradition:

• The election of the people of God for service as well as for salvation;
• Covenant life marked by a concern for order in the church according to the Word of God;
• A faithful stewardship that shuns ostentation and seeks proper use of the gifts of God;
• The recognition of the human tendency to idolatry and tyranny, which calls the people of God to work for the transformation of society by seeking justice and living in obedience to the Word of God.

And we looked at how being Presbyterian means holding to a particular form of church government:

Polity (church organizational structure)

• Governing authority is given to elected laypersons called elders (the Greek word presbuteros means “elder”)
• Session – comprised of elders and pastors in one congregation – over 10,000 in U.S.
• Presbytery – represents smaller regional area – 173
• Synod – represents larger regional area – 16
• General Assembly – represents entire denomination – 1

Ideas from a Manger

By Ross Douthat 

For The New York Times on December 21, 2013

PAUSE for a moment, in the last leg of your holiday shopping, to glance at one of the manger scenes you pass along the way. Cast your eyes across the shepherds and animals, the infant and the kings. Then try to see the scene this way: not just as a pious set-piece, but as a complete world picture — intimate, miniature and comprehensive.

Because that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the ordinary, the commonplace, the low.

It’s easy in our own democratic era to forget how revolutionary the latter idea was. But the biblical narrative, the great critic Erich Auerbach wrote, depicted “something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life.”

And because that egalitarian idea is so powerful today, one useful — and seasonally appropriate — way to look at our divided culture’s competing worldviews is to see what each one takes from the crèche in Bethlehem.

Many Americans still take everything: They accept the New Testament as factual, believe God came in the flesh, and endorse the creeds that explain how and why that happened. And then alongside traditional Christians, there are observant Jews and Muslims who believe the same God revealed himself directly in some other historical and binding form.

But this biblical world picture is increasingly losing market share to what you might call the spiritual world picture, which keeps the theological outlines suggested by the manger scene — the divine is active in human affairs, every person is precious in God’s sight — but doesn’t sweat the details.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

As these world pictures jostle and compete, their strengths and weaknesses emerge. The biblical picture has the weight of tradition going for it, the glory of centuries of Western art, the richness of millenniums’ worth of theological speculation. But its specificity creates specific problems: how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society.

The spiritual picture lacks the biblical picture’s resources and rigor, but it makes up for them in flexibility. A doctrine challenged by science can be abandoned; a commandment that clashes with modern attitudes ignored; the problem of evil washed away in a New Age bath.

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

So there are two interesting religious questions that will probably face Americans for many Christmases to come. The first is whether biblical religion can regain some of the ground it has lost, or whether the spiritual worldview will continue to carry all before it.

The second is whether the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism — the crèche without the star, the shepherds’ importance without the angels’ blessing — will eventually crack up and give way to something new.

The cracks are visible, in philosophy and science alike. But the alternative is not. One can imagine possibilities: a deist revival or a pantheist turn, a new respect for biblical religion, a rebirth of the 20th century’s utopianism and will-to-power cruelty.

But for now, though a few intellectuals scan the heavens, they have yet to find their star.

——

Read the original here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/douthat-ideas-from-a-manger.html?_r=0

Restoring Broken Places

By John Sowers (for storylineblog.com)

Last week, Icelandic police shot a man.

This hardly seems newsworthy, except, it was the first event of its kind in the history of Iceland. Never before had police killed anyone. Ever.

When the two officers responded to the call and went into the suspect’s house, they were unarmed.

In Iceland this is not unusual; the majority of the Icelandic Police officers don’t carry weapons.

After the event was over and the man was dead, the police officers grieved.

They mourned and regretted the incident and went on to even express sympathy and pay respects to the man’s family. The officers were deeply disturbed and are currently in counseling.

*Photo by Elvert Barnes

This is a far cry from the places we have witnessed and seen on the news: situations where people have used remote devices to dismember and kill marathon runners, the tragedy of an elementary school shooting. Our news is filled with broken places.

This week Iceland gives me hope.

Iceland sounds suspiciously like the land we hope for— one that has come and gone and is, one day, coming again. This is the Everlasting Place where “lion and the lamb lay down together.” In this coming Kingdom, dreams are as bright as the noonday sun reflecting off the snow. People will be cherished and seen, loved, valued and enveloped in a canopy of peace.

This Advent Season, I pray you can approach family and friends open and unarmed. May you see people with eternal eyes, divinely unique and immeasurably valuable, as you hope for the Place that has passed and is coming again. This is the hope found even in the darkness of the Icelandic tragedy. This is the hope of Christmas – a Child has come to restore and renew our broken places.

—-

Originally posted here: http://storylineblog.com/2013/12/13/restoring-broken-places-this-christmas-season/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+storylineblog+%28Storyline+Blog%29

A Prayer for Advent

Week 1:

Arise, shine: for your light has come.

O God, we live as if the light had never defeated the darkness in the world or in us.
And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
We confess that we ignore the Christ you sent to be among us, to be in us.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you.
We’ve kept the birth of your Son confined to the Christmas season and do not yearn for his birth each moment in our waiting hearts.
And the nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.
Lord, you come to us in the fullness of time.
Forgive us for not opening our eyes to your coming.
It’s time that we prepare for your coming.
Let the earth ring with song. Let the light break forth.
Let us all rejoice in the miracle of love.
Let Christ come into the fullness of our time. Amen.

– The Worship Sourcebook (2004)

Conversations on 12 Years a Slave

Last week we gathered at the Rialto to watch the powerful film 12 Years a Slave.  The film tells the story of Solomon Northup, a free man living in New York in the 1840s who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana.  Solomon spent twelve agonizing years as a slave before eventually regaining his freedom.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) night, we will gather to discuss the film from 6:45-8pm in K300.  We’d love to have you join us!

There have been several interesting articles and interviews on the film popping up on the Internet.  Below are some interesting ones – take a look:

• Wesley Morris for Grantland – http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9870721/the-cultural-crater-12-years-slave
• Stephanie Zecharek for the Village Voice – http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-10-16/film/12-years-a-slave/
• A Conversation with the actors and filmmakers – http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/movies/a-discussion-of-steve-mcqueens-film-12-years-a-slave.html?_r=1&
• The movie discussed on NPR’s Morning Edition – http://www.npr.org/2013/10/17/235486707/12-years-a-slave-160-years-later-a-memoir-becomes-a-movie

 

Reflections on Brennan Manning’s Wrestling Match with God

By Donald Miller

“Once there was a tree and she loved a little boy…” is how Shel Silverstein begins his beautiful children’s book, The Giving Tree. What a terrific first line. What a terrific book.

The little boy and the tree play together, make crowns from leaves and play hide and go seek. The boy loved the tree and so the tree was happy.

But as time went by, the boy grew older and became interested in other things. As an older man, the boy was more interested in money and things than the tree. So the tree offers the boy his apples so he can sell them and have money. The tree loved the boy.

The boy disappeared after taking the apples but then much later came back telling the tree he wanted a house to raise a family. The tree had no house for the boy, but offered him his branches for wood to build a house. The tree loved the boy.

The boy took the branches and used them to make a house. And the boy didn’t come back for a long time. When the boy came back he explained to the tree that life was not fun. He wanted a boat to go far away. The tree then offered the boy his trunk to make a boat because the tree loved the boy.

After a long time the boy came back and was an old man. The tree was a stump now. The old man was too old to collect leaves, his teeth were gone so he couldn’t eat apples, and he was too old to swing on the branches.

The boy was so old and tired that he asked the tree if he could sit on his stump, and the tree invited the boy to rest, because the tree loved the boy.

It’s a wonderful and sad story about the nature of love, about how true love holds up even while being used. It’s also a violent and painful story depending on how you look at it.

• • •
What many people don’t know about that story is that Brennan Manning, who passed away this year, and Shel Silverstein met when they were young and, according to Manning, stayed well in touch. Later, after Shel began to write and Manning became a priest, they had a conversation about God and God’s love. Manning asked Silverstein what he thought God’s love felt like. Silverstein thought about it for a while but had no answer. Much later, Silverstein got in touch with Manning and gave him a copy of The Giving Tree saying the book was his answer to Manning’s question.

Manning told the story so many times you have to wonder if it didn’t become his answer, too. I’ve abused God and He forgives me, Manning seems to be saying.

Manning wrestled with God as much as he walked with Him. He seemed like the kind of man who would constantly tug at God’s shirt tails and ask, for the thousandth time, is it true? only to run into the village and explain to the rest of us that it was. Then to return, tug on God’s shirt tail and ask again, is it true?

• • •

Manning’s ability to stir the imagination of singers, songwriters, playwrights and poets was fierce. Many books, albums, bands and films exist because Brennan Manning convinced the artist of the safety of grace. He was a pivotal voice for me as I began to write. We got together more than a few times. He could be warm and open for one meeting, then cold and crotchety for the next. He taught me I could be the same, that I could be myself.

What gave Manning his magic was not some gift or skill, but his honest and constant wrestling with Jesus. To Manning, life was not about religion or rules or gaining fame or power; it was only about wrestling with Jesus. Is this grace of yours really true? I believe it and I don’t believe it at the same time. You’re saying it’s true, but it’s entirely unnatural and inhuman to be so loving.

He wrote much of his best work in his later years. I like to picture him with a pad and pen, sitting on a stump.

Brennan Manning, called back. Done wrestling. Knows it’s true. Can’t write about it now. May we wrestle half as well.

—————–

Read this article in its context here: http://storylineblog.com/2013/10/31/reflections-on-brennan-mannings-wrestling-match-with-god/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+storylineblog+%28Storyline+Blog%29