Sojourners Together

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We don’t belong here.
not our home
The longer we live, the older we get, the less we feel at home.
At home on this earth, at home in these bodies.
It doesn’t make sense, it goes against expectation,
unless we were made for something else.
longing for beauty
The longing we feel when we see or hear beauty.
The despair we feel when we hear of yet another way in which our world is broken.
The sadness we feel when our bodies begin to age and fail.
longing for love
All reminds us that the current state is not our end state.
The sword pierce of loss upon death or disaster.
The restless spirit searching for more.
The sense of separation from the God we want so desperately to know.
All reminds us that we are sojourners and that the best is yet to come.
Sojourners. It invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss. Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
And yet.
This piece of earth is also home.
home
There are bits and pieces that feel dear to us. Familiar.
Hearth and garden. Meals with family. Light and warmth.
hearth and warmth
These remind us that we have a home.
We are not home yet. We must not forget.
This world and our bodies and our relationships are still broken.
waiting for restoration
One day they will not be.
One day they will all be whole, perfect, as they were meant to be.
One day this veil will be torn and we shall see Him face to face.
No more estrangement. No more longing.
Sojourners
Until that day, let us be kind and do all we can to help each other through this place and time that is so strange and yet not so strange.
Let us sojourn together.

Art credits: Earth photograph from NASA; last photograph by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2017

The link to Annie Dillard’s book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, is an Amazon affiliate link. Purchases through these links allows you to help support this blog through no added cost to you. Thank you.

 

Election and Free Will in Scripture

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

 

Scripture can be difficult to understand.
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When taken as a whole, when read as one, consistent story, it is easy to get confused by various passages that seem to state different realities.
One such difficulty is how we are able to accept God’s salvation.
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Some passages in Scripture (Ephesians 1 and Romans 9, as only two examples) seem to say that God decrees (or elects) some to be saved and some to be damned.
Other passages in Scripture (Romans 8 and I Peter 1, for example) seem to say that we are given free will in the matter and can accept or reject God’s salvation (having first been given by God the grace to accept). The election comes from God’s foreknowledge, not His decree.
This is, admittedly, a very simplistic version of these complex issues, but it is enough to get us started in our pondering and discussing.
How do we reconcile these? As much as we would wish to sometimes, we cannot ignore the sides of Scripture that are uncomfortable or distressing.
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We in our American culture and modern time cringe at the idea of not having complete free will. It goes against everything in us to think that we have no choice in the matter of salvation or that God would create beings in order to damn them.
Yet we cannot throw out Ephesians and Romans.
So where does that leave us?

Ev. Gesellschaft in Wuppertal Jahresversammlung März 1956 Karl Barth

A man named Karl Barth went the farthest in harmonizing the two varieties of passages. He noticed that in the passages that speak of election, the election is spoken of as in Christ.
We are chosen in Him (Christ) before the creation of the world…God predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.
Barth’s idea is that both the election and the rejection spoken of by Scripture was applied to Christ.
Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man. Two separate natures fully united in one person. Jesus Christ is, then, both the electing God and the elected man, both the subject and the object of election.
God’s welcome and His rejection are both fulfilled in Christ, who was rejected by God for our sake.
Barth writes that “God has given to man the former: election, salvation, and life; for Himself, however, He has chosen the second: rejection, damnation, and death.”
Rembrandt_The_Three_Crosses_1653
God’s no falls on Christ so that God’s yes can fall on the rest of us.
Is Karl Barth correct?
I have no idea.
I apologize if you were hoping for a definitive answer.
If the greatest theological minds over the centuries have not come to agreement on this, far be it from me to speak otherwise.
Yet Barth’s ideas make sense to me as I study and pray.
What do you think?

Thanks to Todd Daly for introducing me to many of these idea.

Art Credits: photograph of Karl Barth from the German Federal Archive; Three Crosses sketch by Rembrandt

When You’ve had a Rough Week

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It’s been a rough week.
I had all sorts of things I wanted to write about this week: the idea of whether art can be Christian, how to reconcile Calvinism and Armenianism, the sacredness of everyday life.
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Yet here I sit, feeling weary and weighed down. All of those big and beautiful thoughts have flown and what remains is a muddled mess of ugly emotion.
Anyone else?
It’s been a rough week in the world.
Hurricanes and flooding in the south, earthquakes in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
It’s been a rough week at my home.
Multiple kids sick, cranky and ugly attitudes in both kids and parents, downright meanness in the way my girls treat each other. I may have hidden in the nursery closet for a while one day while I was supposed to be homeschooling.
What do we do with these feelings? What do we who follow Jesus do when we are unsatisfied, depressed, weary, weighed down heavy with all of the ugliness in the world and in our lives?
It is not a flashy, feel-good sort of answer, but I believe that Jesus would have us…
take another step.
Whatever the emotion you have swirling around inside, we are simply to continue as we were.
Contiue praying, continue praising, continue in Scripture, continue in study.
Continue serving, continue caring, continue loving, continue working.
Continue.
Perhaps the good feelings will return soon.
Perhaps they won’t.
I don’t think it really matters much.
Jesus didn’t ask us to follow Him when it feels good.
He asked us to deny ourselves to follow Him.
He told us to obey His commandments and then we will abide in His love.
And that is all that really matters. Abiding in His love.
If we know that we are in His love, the same love as the Father’s love for Jesus, we can know that we will be okay.
We may not feel okay, but that is…okay.
If we trust Jesus’ words more than what our feelings tell us, we can know that He in all of His unsurpassable love is with us.
So simply continue.
Take another step.
Do one more thing to make the world more beautiful.
Trust and obey.

Choosing the Given

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Sometimes the life we are given is not the life we would have chosen.
Storm Clouds
We have plans that didn’t work out, dreams that didn’t come true, hopes that just didn’t happen.
Perhaps it is a career that became other than you expected.
Perhaps it is a relationship that feels as though it is failing.
Perhaps it is simply life in its sometimes drudgery that just feels
disappointing.
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Sometimes, too, the life we are given is more than only disappointing.
Sometimes it is terrible, full of pain and suffering and grief.
Those who know this sort of life understand that while God is love, His love can be a fierce love.
The love of a holy God sometimes blazes with a cleansing flame.
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We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. ~ C.S. Lewis
Whether our life is disappointing or full of fire, this is the life we are given.
Is it possible to live a higher life than quietly resigned? Is it possible to accept with joy rather than fighting against what is?
Christ_Walking_on_the_Waters,_Julius_Sergius_Von_Klever
Jesus says it is.
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
To live with joy a life that does not look the way you hoped, you must choose what is given.
Sometimes? Sometimes you must choose fiercely, with the kind of determination that will outlast this world.
You must choose to look only at the given rather than at the might have been.
You must choose to pay attention to the right now rather than to the used to be or the perhaps someday.
weasel
Annie Dillard compares it to a weasel gripping its prey with a grip that lasts longer than the life of the weasel itself.
A weasel that clutches its quarry with such nerve that its skull is found still attached to the throat of an eagle years after the weasel attacked.
Some days do feel that hard.
So hard, in fact, that it is only with the same Holy Spirit power inside of us that raised Jesus from the dead that we are capable of such fierce choosing.
Yet we do have that power.
We have that power and so it is possible to choose the given and to live as joyfully as Jesus means us to live.
I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. ~ Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
Choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
This is the way that leads to joy.

Art credits: storm photos by Kirk Sewell; fire photo copyright Made Sacred 2017; Christ Walking on the Water by Julius Sergius Von Klever; weasel illustration from Brehm’s Life of Animals

The Burdensome Divide of Sacred and Secular

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Sacred and secular.
sacred
secular
It is a burdensome divide.
We drive to and from work and feel guilty for taking time away from godly pursuits to earn money to feed our families.
We spend our days disicplining children and wiping bottoms and wonder when we will have time again for God.
The secular pieces of our lives weigh us down heavy and we long to be lifted back up to the Kingdom.
parenting
cooking
What if this is not what God intended?
Do all to the glory of God.
All? Surely that is only hyperbole.
Paul seems to anticipate our hesitation. Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do…
Eating and drinking to the glory of God.
When we look to Jesus and the life that He lived, we see the same. All that He did was pleasing to the Father. In everything, He obeyed the Father’s commands.
God meant for all of life to be sacred, for the mundane as well as the important to be done in a way that glorifies Him.
By doing the work that God gives us as excellently as we can, we are bringing His Kingdom rule into the space in which we live.
reading
gardening
When you are an excellent engineer, an excellent waiter, an excellent parent,
when you do yard work and clean toilets and cook meals excellently,
when you treat friends and store clerks and children excellently,
you glorify God and work towards bringing His Kingdom to earth.
kitchen work
road work
All those around you see the work that you do and they notice.
They notice when you have excellent work ethic and they notice when you treat others excellently.
People notice when a life is sacred. When all of the pieces of a life are woven together into a sacred whole, God is glorified.
Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament. A. W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God
To lift every act up.
laundry work
dirty toilet work
Even the act of cleaning dirty toilets.
This is what turns the whole of life into a sacrament.
And a whole life?
That is not burdensome at all.
It is exactly how God intended for life to be lived.
As sacred.

Art credits: Church photograph by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2017

The links to A. W. Tozer’s book, The Pursuit of God, are Amazon affiliate links. Purchases through these links allows you to help support this blog through no added cost to you. Thank you.