The challenging lives of English priests

[coachdoc]

And when you meet God, the answer is, "I tried."

There. That’s the whole thing.

[Cornflake]

"And when you meet God, the answer is, 'I tried.'"

I like that too. I'll never be Saint Francis but I can be a better version of Don.

[Rob Hanesworth]

Me: I tried.

God: It wasn't always apparent.

[t-bob]

When you meet God with a Dog, the answer is, "arf" and I gave him a bone.

I might be a Saint or a good samaritan

[millring]

Dec 25, 2023 22:31:57 GMT -5 aquaduct said:

And when you meet God, the answer is, "I tried."

And, thankfully, the world if full of folks who failed at this more miserably than even I to assure me that I still have hope. . I don't have to be faster than the bear.

Or, I could look to the one who didn't fail at it and promised hope by his provision.

[Cornflake]

I have to use anthropomorphic language here. Don't forget that God loves us. He doesn't want us to fail. We pray for forgiveness and it's given. Accept it and move on. If we keep beating ourselves up over our shortcomings, we're focusing too much on ourselves. IMO.

[Marshall]

I don't focus on the after-life. I have hope that there is something more. But there's nothing I can do about that.

But there's ample reason in the here-and-now to try to do the right-thing in all endeavors.

[millring]

Dec 27, 2023 7:24:25 GMT -5 Cornflake said:

I have to use anthropomorphic language here. Don't forget that God loves us. He doesn't want us to fail. We pray for forgiveness and it's given. Accept it and move on. If we keep beating ourselves up over our shortcomings, we're focusing too much on ourselves. IMO.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[millring]

There's a local church whose congregants are putting out yard signs throughout town. One of them reads: "Loving Kosciusko County for 10 years". Another, though, reads: "Showing the love of Jesus for 10 years".

I'm probably the only one who reads the latter as an audacious claim. Yes, I overthink things. But in part, I can't help this particular bit of overthinking because the sentiment touches on where my sense of Christianity touches (and is perceived by) the world around it.

I would never make the audacious claim that I am showing anyone the love of Jesus. There's a quote I admire from the son of a well known Reformed theologian that says "If you think that because Jesus dined with sinners and prostitutes then you should too, you just might be confused about which one you are in the story."

Do I believe that I'm supposed to love as Jesus loved? Absolutely.

But my understanding of Jesus's teaching about love -- expressly as he did on the Sermon on the Mount -- was not as I sense most people read it: Jesus the Antinomian.

That is: the way I read most people's take on Jesus's teaching about love is that Jesus was saying that you don't need to follow the laws of the previous religion (both moral and religious laws), instead you only have to follow the "Law of Love" (Love God and love your neighbor as yourself). I sense most people's interpretation of that is that Jesus is letting us off the hook. After all, wasn't Jesus himself saying "Come unto me all you who are weary and need rest." and "...my yoke is easy and my burden is light."?

But when I read the Sermon on the Mount I read Jesus' "Law of Love" as more demanding, not less. He seemed to be saying that it wasn't enough to not kill someone (the moral law), but that in addition you needed to love that someone (your enemy). He seemed to be saying that it wasn't enough to not have sex with your neighbor's wife, but that you additionally were held morally culpable by God himself if you even lusted after her (remember how Jimmy Carter was ruthlessly mocked for a public confession that he understood this culpability and was humbled by it?).

The Law of Love is more demanding, not less. By it, I am held accountable not just for my behavior but also for my attitude. That (in my mind) is a FAR greater burden to bear. That (to my way of thinking) is a much higher standard for behavior.

And to get back to that church's yard signs, that's why I immediately read those signs as audacious. They seem to be claiming an ability to live up to God's standard ... when Jesus' entire point was that, though we will ever be HELD to that standard, it is nevertheless an impossible target.

So, why then is Jesus' yoke easy and burden light? I believe it is because the entire sermon was in answer to the central question of God's judgement of human behavior. And though we are held to that judgement, ultimately Jesus was saying that he will be paying the price of our inability. That's why the word "yoke" was used quite intentionally -- Jesus is standing in for mankind -- yoking us and our inability to himself -- and carrying our burden. And God will judge Jesus' ability to do so on our behalf -- all pictured from Genesis through Revelation in exactly the same sacrificial system of having someone or something taking the burden of our shortcomings for us.

I was probably in 7th grade when I first heard the "agape" thing (and the phileo thing and the eros thing). It was the late 60s early 70s and the youth culture was obsessed with "free love". The sexual revolution was upon us and we were all hormonal and looking for any rationalization to justify pursuing our urges. Most of us were raised with a moral imperative against such pursuits, but between our hormone-driven obsessions, and the increasing sense of our parent's being "out of touch", stodgy, and a new class of experts telling us how wrong our parent's generation was, we were ripe for the rhetorical picking: "LOVE".

And who could be against love? Certainly not the teenage girl in the back seat of a parent's Chevy. "What, don't you love me?"

And the church was trying (against all odds) to point out that "...what's love got to do with it (got to do with it)?"

The first teacher who taught me that "The Greeks had six words for LOVE", said it that way...which is sort of backwards. I sensed that right away. Young and uneducated as I was, I caught right away that what he was actually saying was that the Greeks had six words with six distinct meanings, but somehow through time and translations, we unfortunately ended up using one word in place of each of the six, and thereby lost important distinctions in so doing. The Greeks didn't have six words for love.

Oh, maybe in the sense that we have one word for oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruit, and tangerines -- citrus. But really, not even that. Not even that, because the distinctions in those six Greek words is greater than saying that it is a "type" of love. And, really, what has happened because of this bad rhetoric proves the point. Love (agape) has nothing to do with many of the behaviors we ascribe to "love".

It isn't, for instance, loving to affirm people in delusion. Of course I am supposed to love delusional people. I am one, for heaven's sake. But we're all trying to rectify our delusions. Being affirmed in them isn't good for us and it isn't good for society as a whole.

It isn't, for instance, loving to assist me if I insist on a harmful lifestyle.

Some cultures are really good at making these distinctions. Some cultures call a spade a spade and aren't timid about shaming folks who ought to be ashamed. We, on the other hand, are currently fostering a culture in which "shaming" is actually the single taboo of our strange new antinomian code.

[Cornflake]

John, we disagree about some of these things but there's nothing surprising about that. I learn from hearing what you think.

[theevan]

That is a great sermon, John.