by Elizabeth | Jun 1, 2010 | Learning Story
Today, as promised, guest post from Jane Gilbert, from Compelling Grace blog…
“The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Luke 1:28
I had the privilege of spending the weekend with Elizabeth Turnage where we spent an intensive weekend looking at God’s Story of grace, how it interprets all the stories of our lives, and how our stories help to tell that big, beautiful, glorious Story. Shalom, peace, is the description of every diverse aspect of life (people, environment, dreams, relationships, activities, etc.) existing in perfect harmony and being enjoyed. We say we exist to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, but He has to ask us through Paul, more than on one occasion, ‘What has happened to all your joy?’
So I have gotten to spend a weekend looking at broken shalom and hoping for the restoration of a fulfilled shalom beyond any tastes of it I had before I noticed it was broken. I’m not going to attempt to re-create nor cover all the varied thoughts from this exploration. But here is what stuck with me about my elusive shalom: I am worried and upset about many things (the uncleaned house upon my return, the desire to have a thoughtfully engaging summer for my children, the need to create order among all my papers, to work hard to serve and protect our little church, to connect with friends I’ve missed throughout the year, and so on…). But as He calls me out of the kitchen to sit with Him, Jesus gently reminds me that He has not asked me to “make the most of the moment”, because He already has. He has not put the burden of shaping my children into His image on me but upon Himself. He has not asked me to connect with every person I like or would like to know more, just to love those He has set before me and will set before me in the course of the days He designs for me.”
To read the rest, visit www.compellinggrace.blogspot.com
by Elizabeth | May 29, 2010 | Learning Story
One of the many sweet joys of the past weekend with the Westside Atlanta women was being introduced to ‘new’ music. I am preparing a Sunday school lesson for high schoolers on the importance of knowing the Word in resisting temptation. I am ‘memory-challenged’ now, so my best hope for remembering Scripture is through music like this. Enjoy Malachi 4:2 and 3:17 and God’s deep deep love for you in this song from Welcome Wagon:
by Elizabeth | May 28, 2010 | Learning Story
Following yesterday, I post another paragraph from a paper written nine years ago in a grad class on “Postmodern Ministry.” While the landscape has changed slightly since then — how can the daily news of spill spreading not remind us of our sin-soaked hearts and invite us to return and rely on our Creator and Redeemer — the universals are the same. Here are a few more thoughts on ministering the gospel in any culture. Just substitute any subculture for “postmodern” and see if it makes sense.
“In many ways, postmodern ministry resembles any other type of ministry. It should be guided by the attempt to live out the greatest commandment and the great commission through the power of the Holy Spirit. The leading of the Spirit should mean our ministry is creative, multifaceted, variegated, and flexible. We must also remember that while the post-modern era represents a distinct cultural phenomenon, all of humanity shares certain unchanging characteristics which serve as points of contact. We are all created in the image of God with a love for story and a belief that there is something more than this world. Whether we name it or not, we all recognize our sinfulness and we experience guilt over that sin, while we desire cleansing from sin and freedom from guilt. Finally, we all have a longing to live for glory, for the ‘something more’ that we know exists, even if we do not know how to name it. As Christians, strangers in a strange land, belonging neither to ancient, modern, nor postmodern, we have a story to tell to a world that needs a good (and true) story.”
by Elizabeth | May 27, 2010 | Learning Story
Let me be honest — I am post-challenged this morning, so I’m digging way into the archives. God has deemed me to be ‘disconnected,’ not emotionally but technologically, so I’m at Panera (YES, FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK) to munch a bagel and borrow their connection…I discovered this in a paper on Postmodernity and the Gospel that yes, I wrote back when the word ‘post-modern’ was the big buzz…that seems like ages ago. But — I smile — the gospel seems to have outlasted the p-m buzz. Read and think:)
Go there where you cannot go, to the impossible. It is indeed the only way of going or coming.
Jacques Derrida, Sauf le Nom[i]
How odd that one of the originators of postmodern thought, Jacques Derrida, should express the paradox of Christianity in such eloquent language. Not that he intended to. Or did he? After all, he himself would say that we can’t really get at the origin. But this original thinker has encouraged me to play with language, so I will dare to suggest that Derrida’s words answer the Christian question: “What do I do with culture, or “the world” as the Bible names it?”
The Bible offers no easy solutions to the difficult question of what it means to live out our commission: “Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations.” If we take the ‘world’ to mean ‘culture,’ we discover all sorts of mixed messages. We are told to be “in the world but not of the world,” and at the same time, we are told to “go into all the world.” We are told to be all things to all people, while we are also told that everything is permissible but not everything is good. Our great commission is coupled with the greatest commandment, to love God and to love our neighbor. What in the world are we to do?
It seems God has given us an impossible commission and an impossible commandment. And yet, as followers of Christ, we can and must go where we cannot go, to the impossible, because he went first – to the culture and to the Cross. As we ponder the most difficult, but not impossible question, of how to communicate the gospel to a postmodern culture, we are called to do as Christ did, to enter the culture and engage each individual as a person made in God’s image, to speak to the central story of the human heart, of loss and longing, of sin and failure, of redemption and glory. We have a story of great good news to tell to a broken and fragmented world that has lost its story. When Christians become “impassioned by the impossible” (to borrow another Derridean phrase), we are most ready to bring this story to a postmodern world.
[i] Quoted in John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 41.
by Elizabeth | May 24, 2010 | Learning Story
ET note: I wrote this one yesterday morning, on my cell phone, in the mountains of Highlands, NC. I hit ‘post’ and my phone let me know, “your connection was lost…” So here it is again, Monday on Tuesday, which is about the way the timing of this week is going. Submitted from a Panera in Montgomery, Alabama. Almost home. Living in the tension of the already, not yet. Sweet memories and eager anticipation of being home.
Highlands, that is.
Sipping cafe au lait and munching crispy whole wheat toast with jam, both prepared and served to me by my father- in- law. Remembering the glory of the Westside women seeking God in their stories and listening to the Spirit’s call to live their stories in the one minute or one hour they may have with a “stranger.” We will climb to the heights in a while, and I will gaze from above at the beauty spread before me. This afternoon I will go down from the mountain and again immerse myself in dailiness. And I am grateful. Grateful for the joy of deep engagement with precious daughters of the King, grateful for sweet, if too short, times with family, and grateful to go home, for the welcome and reunion. And that’s about all I can type on my Droid:). May your day find some rich coffee and thick tasty bread.
by Elizabeth | May 21, 2010 | Learning Story
When contemplating the law, we must always keep grace in the forefront of our hearts. Listen to what Luther teaches about this in the preface of his commentary on Galatians:
3. Law and grace
It is an absolute and unique teaching in all the world, to teach people, through Christ, to live as if there were no law or wrath or punishment. In a sense, they do not exist any longer for the Christian, but only total grace and mercy for Christ’s sake. Once you are in Christ, the law is the greatest guide for your life, but until you have Christian righteousness, all the law can do is to show you how sinful and condemned you are. In fact, to those outside of Christian righteousness, the law needs to be expounded in all its force. Why? So that people who think they have power to be righteous before God will be humbled by the law and understand they are sinners.
Therefore we must be careful to use the law appropriately. If we used the law in order to be accepted by God through obedience, then Christian righteousness becomes mixed up with earned/moral righteousness in our minds. If we try to earn our righteousness by doing many good deeds, we actually do nothing. We neither please God through our works-righteousness nor do we honor the purpose for which the law was given. But if we first receive Christian righteousness, then we can use the law, not for our salvation, but for his honor and glory, and to lovingly show our gratitude.
4. Living the gospel
While we live here on earth, we will be accused, exercised with temptations, oppressed with heaviness and sorrow, and bruised by the law with its demands of active righteousness. Because of this, Paul sets out in this letter of Galatians to teach us, to comfort us, and to keep us constantly aware of this Christian righteousness. For if the truth of being justified by Christ alone (not by our works) is lost, then all Christian truths are lost. For there is no middle ground between Christian righteousness and works-righteousness. There is no other alternative to Christian righteousness but works-righteousness; if you do not build your confidence on the work of Christ, you must build your confidence on your own work. On this truth and only on this truth the church is built and has its being.
So learn to “speak the gospel” to one’s heart. For example, when the law creeps into your conscience, learn to be a cunning logician–learn to use arguments of the gospel against it. Say:
O law! You would climb up into the kingdom of my conscience, and there reign and condemn me for sin, and would take from me the joy of my heart which I have by faith in Christ, and drive me to desperation, that I might be without hope. You have overstepped your bounds. Know your place! You are a guide for my behavior, but you are not Savior and Lord of my heart. For I am baptized, and through the gospel am called to receive righteousness and eternal life….So trouble me not! For I will not allow you, so intolerable a tyrant and tormentor, to reign in my heart and conscience–for they are the seat and temple of Christ the Son of God, who is the king of righteousness and peace, and my most sweet savior and mediator. He shall keep my conscience joyful and quiet in the sound and pure doctrine of the gospel, through the knowledge of this passive and heavenly righteousness.
When we are assured of this righteousness, we not only cheerfully work well in our vocations, but we submit to all manner of burdens and dangers in this present life, because we know that this is the will of God, and that this obedience pleases him. This then is the argument of this Epistle, which Paul expounds against the false teachers who had darkened the Galatians’ understanding of this righteousness by faith.
