"I will build"

We've been in Matthew 16:13-19 in our Tuesday night study, a hugely important passage in Matthew. It's the first time the word church (Greek is ekklesia = "called-out ones") is used in the New Testament; the only other place in the gospels it is used is in Matthew 18.

One of the things we've been discussing is Jesus saying "on this rock I will build my church."

Just thinking out loud... here, in today's epistle reading, Paul writes to the Corinthians about building, and that they are God's building.

1 Corinthians 3:9 For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.

10 According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. 11 For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— 13 each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 14 If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. 15 If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

So what I'm thinking about is whether this passage should be put tightly with Matthew 16, and say that Jesus is building his church through the building work of Paul and the other apostles or that it is a slightly different picture or perspective Paul is presenting...

Paul writes that he laid a foundation and someone else is building upon it... and also says, there is no other foundation than that which is laid, Jesus Christ. Perhaps this means that for each city where the church is established a new foundation of the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ is laid, as opposed to saying that the foundation is already there (in the death and resurrection and reign of Jesus the Messiah).

Ultimately, for today, we ought to ask ourselves: am I being built by Jesus and/or building with Jesus faithfully, today? on a good foundation, with lasting materials, indwelt by worship & the Word & acceptable sacrifices...

Hopefully, I'll have more installments along this line. There's more in Matthew 16, and 1 Cor. 3, we need to consider (and 2 Samuel 7... - check it out).

Lily is 1!

Lily is 1 year old today!

Trouble, Suffering, and Friends

The following comes from an article by Wendell Berry on the economic crisis, in which he is critical of a fundamental premise of free market capitalism, and our whole society: the fantasy of limitlessness (also the original sin...). It's a good article that can be found at Harpers. I share it for the comments regarding his connecting the words friend and freedom, following up on Jesus' encouraging words that he calls us friends:

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you... (John 15:14-16)

Berry writes:

"As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “watershed” or “place.” But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, tewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.

"In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define “freedom,” for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, “free” is etymologically related to “friend.” These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of “dear” or “beloved.” We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our “identity” is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections."

And this is exactly what Jesus, our true friend, did and does for us. He set us free to live within the bounds of boundless love, amidst all the joys and suffering of this life. That was my point Sunday: that while "trouble and suffering" (Greek: thlipsis = tribulation, oppression, persecution, or "that which causes pain") are part of our allotted limits in this groaning world, that we have a friend, and a friend can make all the difference when you're dealing with trouble and suffering.

And as we grow in friendship with Christ Jesus, we become more and more free - to follow him, glorify him, and serve him and his world. Thanks be to God!

more on addiction and grace

Here are the last three paragraphs in that section called "Deliverance" in Gerald May's Addiction and Grace (don't miss the last paragraph):

"I believe that grace's empowerment is present in all true healings, in deliverances of all kinds, and in any movement toward wholeness and love and freedom, however great or small. It is present in physical and psychological healing, in social and political reconciliation, in cultural and scientific breakthrough, in spiritual deliverance from evil, in religious repentance and conversion, and in the ongoing process of spiritual growth. It is present wherever love really grows. In every such situation, grace enables us to make necessary initial changes and to continue, over time, to nurture those changes in creative, constructive ways.

"God does not flash into our lives to work a piece of magic upon us and then disappear. To do so would eradicate human dignity; it would prevent our participation. Instead, God's grace is always present intimately within us, inviting and empowering us toward more full, more free exercise of will and responsibility. The more open and spacious our will and responsibility become, the more God and person commune in creative splendor.

"We are never simply visited with a healing or deliverance, which we can then safely forget. Grace is not a pill we are given or a method applied to us so that we can simply go on about our business. Grace always invties us forward. Every liberation requires continued attention, every healing demands continued care, every deliverance demands follow-up and every conversion requires faithful deepening. If we do not respond to these ongoing calls, if we deny our empowerments for continued growth in freedom and responsbility, our healings may well be stillborn. Then, as in Jesus' words about evil spirits returning to a house swept clean, our last condition may turn out to worse than our first." (pp. 154-155)

Willard on grace

Before I share the second installment of Gerald May, I want to share an excerpt from an interview with Dallas Willard in "Stillpoint," the quarterly magazine of my alma mater, Gordon College. Willard wrote "The Spirit of the Disciplines" and "The Divine Conspiracy" (and several other books) which were both very helpful to me.

Here he speaks concisely of the body, grace, and effort - this ties in with both the addiction and grace themes, and a resurrection ethic of the body. Note especially the last paragraph.

+ + + + +

SP: Your chapter “St. Paul’s Psychology of Redemption” in The Spirit of the Disciplines was enormously helpful to me in understanding the body’s role in our spiritual lives.

DW: Psychology is bodily. The body is a primary spiritual resource. I love this quotation from Sir William Ramsey’s St. Paul, the Traveler and Roman Citizen: “In Paul, for the first time since Aristotle, Greek philosophy made a genuine step forward.” It’s so appropriate to put him in that context because it’s actually true. Ramsey was able to help me see Paul in a different light, to see how really bodily spirituality is. Paul really meant it. Take those passages like “I buffet my body, and bring it into bondage: lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.” That doesn’t mean asceticism--just sensible training of the whole person to do the will of God.

SP: There’s so much you miss in the Pauline writings if you’re only looking at him through the lenses we often see him through.

DW: Before I began studying the spiritual disciplines, I was reading St. Paul through the lens of dispensational theology. Basically what that does is relieve us of any genuine responsibilities to do anything except believe correct doctrine. That’s important, but that’s not life. I had to get past the idea that grace had only to do with forgiveness; that grace was opposed to effort--which it isn’t; its opposed to earning--and to understand the power of grace as an activity and a life . . . that was difficult coming from the theological sources I had.

the mystery of grace

The following are a couple of paragraphs from "Addiction and Grace" by Gerald May. This is a section he calls "Deliverance." This means deliverance from addictive behavior, not specifically from demons (though that may be true also). I read this the day after we discussed the power and mystery and hiddenness of the kingdom of God in Bible study (Matthew 13); to me, it rang in harmony with those themes.

"This is the spiritual experience I learned about from recovering addicts, the unique phenomenon that sparked my professional/personal journey into psychology and spirituality. I can only call it deliverance. There is no physical, psychological, or social explanation for such sudden empowerments. People who have experienced them call them miraculous. In many cases these people have struggled with their addictions for years. Then suddenly, with no warning, the power of the addiction is broken. To me, deliverance is like any other miraculous physical, emotional, or social healing. It is an example of "supernatural" or "extraordinary" grace, an obvious intervention by the hand of God in which physical structure and function are changed and growth toward wholeness is enabled. In the case of addiction, healing takes the form of empowerment that enables people to modify addictive behavior.

"I am choosing my words carefully here, Deliverance enables a person to make a change in his or her behavior; in my experience deliverance does not remove the addiction and its underlying attachments. Something obviously happens to the systems of the brain when deliverance occurs; either the addicted systems are weakened or the one seeking freedom are strengthened or both. But there is still a role for continued personal responsibility. Considerable intention and vigilance are still necessary. I have witnessed many healings of substance and nonsubstance addictions and of many other disorders. In none of these miraculous empowerments were people freed from having to remain intentional about avoiding a return to their old addictive behaviors. The real miracle was that avoidance became possible; the person could actually do it. Deliverance does not remove a person's responsibility; it does empower the person to exercise responsibility simply, gently, and effectively.

"In a way, this is how grace seems to work with us in all areas of life. The special flowerings of grace that we call deliverance and miracles seem so extraordinary only because of the way we look at them. The natural grace that God continually offers us in the normal circumstances of our lives is really just as miraculous. It stands ready to transform and empower us in the most ordinary situations. Miracles are nothing other than God's ordinary truth seen with surprised eyes.

"Our very being in this world, our existence as individuals and communities, is miraculous. It is miraculous that God creates us with bodies and brains that are capable of adapting to virtually any conditions, and that God preserves within us an invincible freedom of choice. It is no more miraculous that God can thaw the most frozen of our adaptations and massively, instantaneously, empower our freedom of choice. A particular eruption of grace strikes into a person's life like a lightning bold of loving energy; the power of God's goodness shines in victory over a particular human enslavement or misfortune. The enemy is weakened; the person is empowered." (pages 153-154)

That was more than I intended to share, but that last paragraph was really good. Actually the next three are also, I'll share those separately.

"the natural grace of God... stands ready to transfrom and empower us in the most ordinary of circumstances"

"A particular eruption of grace strikes into a person's life like a lightning bolt of loving energy."

Economics and the devil...

Ken Myers, of Mars Hill Audio, wrote this good and interesting review principally of a Wendell Berry article on economics and limits. Here's part of the into:

"For some time now, I have been growing in my understanding of how many cultural disorders are related to hatred of limits. The aspiration to limitlessness was embedded in the first temptation and the original sin, it informed the earliest docetic and Gnostic heresies, and it inspired the founding intellects of modernity. Many sincere Christians still have some sense that being limited is an effect of sin, rather than a condition of the Creation. Both Genesis accounts of Creation (in chapters 1 and 2) resound with the establishment of boundaries—in time, in space, in ontology, and in vocation. ...

"Almost all human cultures have pursued the task of defining and governing boundaries in human behavior. Philip Rieff argued (in The Triumph of the Therapeutic) that every culture survives "by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood." The story of modern Western culture, however—a culture built around the ideal of the sovereign self—is a story of the abandonment of restrictions and restraints in the name of human freedom. Our institutions have increasingly been defined in terms of encouraging liberation from limits rather than cultivating a conscientious honoring of limits.

"It was in light of this understanding that I read Wendell Berry's essay in the May issue of Harper's with great appreciation. In "Faustian Economics," (subtitled "Hell Hath No Limits"), Berry argues that "we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness," (the rest of the review)