Stealing from the title of Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Watershed's story could be equally called A Tale of Two Wisdoms: God's Wisdom and Human Wisdom (1991-2015). I tell this story not in order to disparage the intellect or learning from a human point of view but rather to show how we might have used these two wisdoms incorrectly. Why and how wisdom gets expressed in our lives is what I have in mind.
During a recent Watershed Worship and Discernment service, I confessed my Golden Calf: my creative use of language, my gift of teaching and speaking. The occasion for this confession was Tyler's comment that sometimes what we are overwhelmed by, even obsessed by creatively, can be a gift from God - an expression of our true vocation. To surrender oneself to that creativity seems not the creation of a Golden Calf but rather an enthusiastic response to the divine call. There is an important truth in Tyler's comment that our gifts are from God and that we ought to give ourselves to our vocations as an act of worship.
LITERARY SCHOLARS HAVE called Jack Maggs a post-colonial re-telling of Dickens' Great Expectations. As I read it, Jack Maggs, by the witty Australian author Peter Carey, is a deconstruction of Charles Dickens himself. The message tears apart the pretensions and presuppositions of the great man, turning the original message of Great Expectations on its head and giving us a more satisfactory resolution than the original.
Last class we studied Origen, a guy who was dedicated to understanding the Christian message at its depths and contributed the first systemic theology of Christian thought. Origen lived from 185-251 in Alexandria, a city rich in learning. The wealth of his family allowed him to study, and the martyrdom of his father for his Christian faith must have encouraged his own devotion to the message. Up until this time no one had really sat down and made sense of Christian thought so one of the responses to Christianity was a mocking disdain of it as a folk religion. Origen's
As his narrative turns from Jesus' healing & teaching ministry in the countryside of Galilee towards his long trek to Jerusalem in which he teaches his disciples about true discipleship, Luke is reminding his listeners that Jesus is no ordinary prophet. Luke is saying Jesus is not John the fiery preacher. Nor is he Moses the great law-giver or the larger-than-life prophet Elijah. Jesus, as Peter confesses first, is greater than all of these -- the very Messiah of God. He is the radiant Son of Man who has a profound connection to God. There is urgency to Luke's voice
Luke is a Gospel of Reassurance. It describesthe suffering of discipleship, that Christ is forming us, that we are called to be witnesses of redemption and forgiveness to the world and that we are called to participate, through listening to the Spirit, in the creation of the Kingdom. On Wednesday we began our look at the book of Luke, our focus for 2007. Luke is the best book for learning about discipleship and learning how to live in community. There are a number of different sources that will inform our study including commentaries from Darrell L. Bock (The NIV Application
THE RAPTURE IS IS difficult to evaluate. It honestly deals with the struggle to overcome meaninglessness yet the screenwriter's point of view is so cynical and apparently post-modern that there is no possibility of any genuine healing or meaning. Simply, the film The Rapture could be translated as, "Look how hard I am trying and God just doesn't come through! What a bad God! I think I will damn myself just to get back at Him." The simplistic solutions of sexual swinging and spiritual mindlessness have met a simple partner- modern cynicism.
Even though Paul may not have been the writer of Ephesians, I read a description of him in a recent book that intrigued and inspired me. The apostle we are used to is pretty much a nose-to- the-grindstone kind of guy, a genuinely balanced person on a mission from God. Listen to this different description of him from a recent book by Canadian scholar Donald Akenson: Notice the man coming up the street, you've seen him before, lots of times, on different streets, various cities, other continents. He's the nearest thing we have to a witness so keep your eye