How to live in exile

This is no time for panic or resentment; it is certainly no time for hate - we're still to love our neighbours as ourselves...this is a time to be faithful and gentle and firm and evangelistic and loving and principled and not driven by malice or hate or condescension or anger but simply to be Christians.

Don Carson, responding to the decision of the SCOTUS regarding same-sex marriage.

The great shadow departs

'My life' is quintessential Iris DeMent - a bittersweet song, sung with pathos and a lyrical purity. It laments the brevity of life ("only a season, a passing September that no-one will recall"), the seeming insignificance of one human life in this vast cosmos and the futility of "so many things that just never turned out right". Yet it also takes its own small stand against that wall of emptiness by celebrating the possibility that love can bring joy and comfort in pain, even if it can only "make things seem better for a while".

In Psalm 8, David movingly reflects on his own finitude against the backdrop of the endless starry sky and finds meaning and comfort in knowing that the living God cares for humankind and is mindful of them. And, yet, all is not well in that psalm: David refers to enemies - the foe, the avenger - who need to be silenced. In this vast cosmos, home to the blended kindness of God, a darkness prevails.

Psalm 8 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The psalm hints at questions left unanswered, questions that are taken up in Hebrews 2:5ff where the writer is quite plain: we do not yet see humanity flourishing as God intended; evil is present, terrorising souls with the endless waste that is death. No, we do not yet see humanity raised to fulness - but we do see Jesus, the Son of God, made lower than the angels for a time and now crowned with glory and honour, having tasted death, having drunk its bitter cup dry, for us. He it is who calls to us in our bittersweet days, telling us that we are not simply noticed and named but that we can be lifted and loved and filled with immeasurable joy.

Hebrews 2:5-18 It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, a son of man that you care for him? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honour and put everything under their feet.” In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone... ...Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death —that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Why pastors have to be theologians

Great stuff from Kevin Vanhoozer (HT: Mike Bird).

Learning from the wrong discipline?

If the major scriptural images and definitions for the church are family/household and body, why is so much attention given to learning from corporate leadership models rather than family/emotional systems and medicine?

No graven image

Such helpful reflections by Elisabeth Elliot on the role of experience in maturing our relationship with God:

Breaking up my categories is one of Gods methods of bringing me to maturity. I think of Wayne Oates who said the process of giving up false gods to worship the one true God is Christian maturation. This is part of what I was trying to say in No Graven Image. At that point I realized that every experience of life is a breaking down of some image and replacing it with God. But we keep making new graven images and they must be shattered. That’s what experience is. Sometimes it’s the image of ourselves, the image of the way our lives are supposed to work that has to be destroyed in order for us to worship the one true God.