Sunday, January 28, 2007

Gravity?

Miller, whom I read often, has a way with words that causes me to be amazed. How he can bring out the depravity of man, and encourage me to rise above that with the simplest, most beautiful thing amazes me. He gives an exerpt from a play he wrote, that brough out something very true about our depravity to me.

"I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew and image, I bled a poem of you. You were pretty, and my friends believed I was worthy of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed."

How true is it that we seek validity, worth, and redemption in those around us. We do not love them, we love ourselves. I looked into millers words and found only a mirror pointing back at the wretchedness of my own soul. But he brings about the narrator to a point of understanding, I found it very beautiful.

"I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for you love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to youk, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin in its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God rised Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us."

My I simply love, and thru it understand Gods love for me.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

One Nation Under God?

"The myth of America as a Christian nation, with the church as its guardian, has been, and continues to be, damaging both to the church and to the advancement of God's kingdom. Among other things, this nationalistic myth blinds us to the way in which our most basic and most cherished cultural assumptions are diametrically opposed to the kingdom way of life taught by Jesus and his disciples. Instead of living out the radically countercultural mandate of the kingdom of God, this myth has inclined us to Christianize many pagan aspects of our culture. Instead of providing the culture with a radically alternative way of life, we largely present it with a religious version of what it already is. The myth clouds our vision of God's distinctly beautiful kingdom and thereby undermines our motivation to live as set-apart (holy) disciples of this kingdom." Boyd: Myth of a Christian nation

I believe he is quite right, it is time we re-think whats going on, and our own place within the kingdoms.