Friday, August 21

7-9pm

@ the Clarks

13701 12th St.

Grandview, MO 64030

Please join us as we gather to wrestle with the thoughts of Shane Clainborne in his book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as Ordinary Radicals. This will be the first in a series of conversations centered around the idea and practice of living as Ordinary Radicals. What you can expect is an open dialogue on the clash of the kingdom of God and the American empire, militarism, capitalism, consumerism and suburbanism. We will also learn about and intentionally develop missional practices in order to embody the gospel in our everyday lives.

For more info and a flyer go here.

“Faith is truly active through love [Gal. 5.6], that is, it finds expression in works of the freest service, cheerfully and lovingly done, with which a man willingly serves another without hope of reward; and for himself he is satisfied with the fullness and wealth of his faith.

“As our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians.

“The good things we have from God should flow from one to the other and be common to all, so that everyone should ‘put on’ his neighbor and so conduct himself toward him as if he himself were in the other’s place. From Christ the good things have flowed and are flowing into us. He has so ‘put on’ us and acted for us as if he had been what we are. From us they flow on to those who have need of them so that I should lay before God my faith and my righteousness that they may cover and intercede for the sins of my neighbor which I take upon myself and so labor and serve in them as if they were my very own. That is what Christ did for us. This is true love and the genuine rule of a Christian life. . . . We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor.”

|| Martin Luther, Freedom of a Christian

And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [as if God is not a given/or does not exist]. And this is just what we do recognize-before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.

Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina [a plot device that tries to solve flaws or loose ends in a narrative]. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which had done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness.

|| Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Letters and Papers from Prison

I had great dreams once. I was going to make my mark on the world. The sort of ideas you have when you’re young. I knew nothing of evil or cruelty. When I was ordained, I was innocent as a baby. Then everything happened at once.
I was a seaman’s pastor in Lisbon, during the Spanish Civil War. I refused to see what was going on. I refused to accept reality. My God and I resided in an organized world where everything made sense.
You see, I’m no good as a clergyman. I put my faith in an improbable and private image of a father god. One who love mankind, of course, but me most of all. Do you see what a monstrous mistake I made? An ignorant, spoiled and anxious wretch makes a rotten clergyman.
Picture my prayers to an echo-god, who gave benign answers and reassuring blessings. Every time I confronted God with the realities I witnessed, he turned into something ugly and revolting. A spider god, a monster.
So I sought to shield Him from life, clutching my image of Him to myself in the dark. The only person I showed my god to was my wife. She supported me, encouraged me and helped me. . . .
Forgive me for talking in such a confused manner, but all this suddenly hit me.
If there is no God, would it really make a any difference? Life would become understandable. What a relief. And thus death would be suffering out of life. The dissolution of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness and fear—all these things would be straightforward and transparent. Suffering is incomprehensible, so it needs no explanation. There is no creator. No sustainer of life. No design. . . .
God . . . why have you forsaken me? . . .
Now I’m free. Free at last.
I had this fleeting hope that everything wouldn’t turn out to be illusions, dreams and lies.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternaum deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

|| Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, book 3, 125

Explore the idea of the death of God through art at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

• What does death look like?
• If death is the absence of life, how is God present in death?
• Is death more real than God?
• Does our world substantiate a God that is living or a God that is dead/absent?
• If there is no God, would it really make any difference?

[time: 6:30pm-7:30ish; if you are interested in carpooling, meet at the Belton High Blue Wellness Center in the south parking lot at 6:00pm.]

. . . life, everything I thought I knew

Celebrate the resurrection and life of God at McCoy’s Public House.

• How does the event of Easter continue in the 21st century?

[time: 7:30pm-9:30ish]

Details to come.

10 Theses

1. Reconciliation is God’s gift to the world. Healing of the world’s deep brokenness does not begin with us and our action, but with God and God’s gift of new creation.
2. Reconciliation is not a theory, achievement, technique or event. It is a journey.
3. The end toward which the journey of reconciliation leads is the shalom of God’s new creation—a future not yet fully realized, but holistic in its transformation of the personal, social and structural dimensions of life.
4. The journey of reconciliation requires the discipline of lament.
5. In a broken world God is always planting seeds of hope, though often not in the places we expect or even desire.
6. There is no reconciliation without memory, because there is no hope for a peaceful tomorrow that does not seriously engage both the pain of the past and the call to forgive.
7. Reconciliation needs the church, but not as just another social agency or NGO (non-governmental organization).
8. The ministry of reconciliation requires and calls forth a specific type of leadership that is able to unite a deep vision with the concrete skills, virtues and habits necessary for the long and often lonesome journey of reconciliation.
9. There is no reconciliation without conversion, the constant journey with God into a future of new people and new loyalties.
10. Imagination and conversion are the very heart and soul of reconciliation.

Violence and Christian Social Reconstruction in Africa: on the resurrection of the body politic

Life Together: a passion for reconciliation

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. || 2 Corinthians 5.17-21