What I am living for

“If you want to identify me ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the things I want to live for. Between those two answers you can determine the identity of any person.”

~Thomas Merton

15 August 2010 - sermon image preview

Well, the sermon isn't quite put to bed, but some fine thinking this week about these images of judgment from tomorrow's readings, these stark images of a destroyed vineyard, and these stark images of what the Kingdom of God will look like.  But, I hope I have found that the Good News is embedded even within these images - I hope I've found it - embedded in the "cloud of witnesses" from Hebrews, and even the sense that with the coming of Christ, all things will be turned around, turned inside out, and Lord knows we need some help turning things around!

So, here is the image preview of tomorrow's sermon (courtesy of wordle.net) - very nearly completed ...

Blessings,

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

John 5 and Monty Python

Today's reading from John 5 always reminds me of a bit from Monty Python's Life of Brian...

...and, there is a lot of truth there.

Are we ready to take up our mat and walk, or are we content to just stay at the healing pool?

Jesus seemed to have strong opinions about it, "Do you want to be made well?"  "Take up your mat and walk!"

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey





John 5: 1- 18 (NRSV)
1 After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2 Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. 3 In these lay many invalids-blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5 One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" 7 The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." 8 Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk." 9 At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now that day was a sabbath. 10 So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, "It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat." 11 But he answered them, "The man who made me well said to me, 'Take up your mat and walk.' " 12 They asked him, "Who is the man who said to you, 'Take it up and walk'?" 13 Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. 14 Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, "See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you." 15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Be obedient to the grace of God

A hermit said to a brother, "Do not measure yourself against your brother, saying that you are more serious or more chaste or more understanding than he is. But be obedient to the grace of God, in the spirit of poverty, and in love unfeigned. The efforts of a man swollen with vanity are futile. It is written, 'Let him that thinks he stands take heed lest he fall' (I Corinthians 10:12); 'let your speech be seasoned with salt' (Colossians 4:6) and so you will be dependent on Christ."

An (all too) easy faith of American Teens

Wow, this article struck me right where I live, and I feel resonances of it in the work I've done in both churches and in schools...this is a MUST READ, even if you don't agree with all of it...just how dumbed down is the theology and description of the Christian life that we offer our adolescents (and our adults and other children?).

Awesome.

Chilling.

Inspiring!

Take a gander...

Here's a bit of it:

Faith, nice and easy

The almost-Christian formation of teens

In The Christian Century....by Kenda Creasy Dean

In 1984, Marvel Comics created a new nemesis for Spider-Man. The character would be a symbiote, inspired by what parasitologists call the weaker of two organisms inhabiting the same space. The weaker organism can draw life from the stronger, and in the most dramatic cases it siphons off its host's nutrients before the host realizes what's happening. The symbiote survives, but the host is seriously weakened. Once Marvel Comics had a new symbiotic character, that character needed a host. It struck a bargain with another character named Eddie Brock: the symbiote would give Brock its power in return for Brock's life energy. But of course symbiotes from outer space cannot be trusted. Once the symbiote had inhabited Brock, it absorbed his life energy and morphed into the evil Venom. Has something similar happened in American Christianity? Has a symbiote taken up residence without our knowledge? Yes, say Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, who are principal investigators for the National Study of Youth and Religion (a study of congregations in seven denominations). They're seeing an alternative faith in American teenagers, one that "feeds on and gradually co-opts if not devours" established religious traditions. This faith, called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, "generally does not and cannot stand on its own," so its adherents are affiliated with traditional faith communities but unaware that they are practicing a very different faith than historic orthodox Christianity. If teenagers wrote out the creed of this religious outlook, it would look something like this: • A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth. • God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. • The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. • God is not involved in my life except when I need God to solve a problem. • Good people go to heaven when they die. The rest is HERE