LIfe With Benefits

Our Sunday morning adult class had an interesting discussion on February 7, and I'd like to thank Dan Wendland for sharing a bit of it with me.
They discussed the "benefits" of the Christian life, and although they acknowledged that we don't follow Jesus simply to receive benefits, there are nevertheless good things that come from being his disciple.

It seems to me that this is true on a couple of different levels.  I think it's true good things come from living as God's child. I also think that while we don't love God simply to "get the goods," it would be very difficult to share Good News with people if we believed that God brought drudgery or boredom into our lives, or that our lives became worse because we confess to being followers of Jesus.  The truth is that God wants us to know and share the benefits of a relationship with Jesus in order that others too might see and feel the love of God.  In fact, I think one of the most debilitating myths about the Christian faith is that many non-believers imagine it to be dull and uninteresting, like tepid tea and stale bread.

Here are three of benefits of the Christian life, in the opinions of one group of Jesus-followers.

3.  Living a Christian life helps to provide an organizational framework for all of life (I might call this a world-view): it gives motivation for acts of charity, helps one focus on the "other," not on one's self, provides resolve in trying times, and allows for endless gratitude.

The key to this world-view is the focus away from one's self and toward the neighbor.  Jesus and Martin Luther both used the word neighbor to describe the object of one's love and efforts.  The neighbor-focus means that we do not live life as self-absorbed navel-gazers, but as loving disciples, reaching out to neighbors near and far with acts of kindness and mercy.  Imagine if everyone you know, including yourself, could do just one more act of service to one's neighbor every day.  What a loving place this world could become!

2. Knowing that what comes after death is so much more exciting than this present experience.

The promise of eternal life brings incredible comfort to many followers of Jesus, and the hope of one day being directly in the presence of God makes facing the finality of life on earth less frightening and even less mysterious.  We look forward to an end to human suffering of all kinds, that of nations and of individuals, and we dream of the day when all human sorrow will be no more.  While no one has yet reported back from heaven, we know from the promise of Scripture than God's plan for our eternal future is filled with wonderful, unimaginable joy.  We look ahead with the holy and certain hope of Christ's resurrection, that we too will take our place in God's kingdom. 
and #1 on their list...

1. Knowing for certain that we are deeply loved and cared for by God

I cannot imagine a more important "benefit" for living in this world!  We live in a time and place where we are saturated with messages about how unimportant and unimpressive we are, and that the only hope we have is to buy Product X and hope the extra-strength version is powerful enough to rescues us from our own insignificance.  We know that none of us are immune from relational disintegration, from career implosion or health crisis.  For me, to face the challenges of this world with nothing more than my own meager bootstraps seems like sheer madness and sure failure.  If the world would call me weak for such a confession, so be it, for my own strength is nothing more than a canoe in the ocean.  But knowing that I am loved by God changes everything!  When I know that I will not be abandoned, not set adrift on some stormy sea, but can trust in the love of God in my life, then I can say with the Apostle Paul, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philip. 4.13).

You might have your own "top benefits" you'd like to add to this list.  Please comment below!
Dana

Old Song, New Verse: The Sound of Xenophobia

People who know me well know that I firmly in the middle of the road when it comes to American politics.  I cannot be defined by any single issue, don't vote a party line, and can most often see the other side of an argument, even if I'm pretty convinced of my opinion.

Sometimes, however, things happen in our country that cannot go unchallenged, and for me, celebrity candidate Trump's xenophobic comments about barring all Muslims from entering the US makes me wonder if he will soon appear the flag of the Third Reich as a campaign backdrop.  His words ring hollow against those of the First Amendment, which protects all of us from religious tyranny, not only those who think like "us."  This prohibition on religious profiling protects every American from the censorship of our faith by the government, and though some will argue that we Christians have seen our freedoms diminish in recent years, that only proves the point that this freedom belongs to all of us, and, as such, must be protected.

Trump sounds far too much like Hitler to see his fear-mongering as simply political stagecraft. He wants us to be scared; so scared that we build a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, so scared that we would abandon the principles of our constitution, so scared that we would restrict the movements of an entire group of Americans, or hold them captive against their will.  American citizens! He wants us to be afraid of Americans.  This appeal to fear calls us to abandon intelligent problem-solving and react like cornered animals, lashing out at whatever is closest, regardless of where the actual danger might be.  He wants us to be afraid, because he believes that if we are afraid, it will bring him more power.  So, he reframes our concern about radical, extremist zealots into irrational fear of all Muslims.

He plans to do these things because he believes their religion makes them dangerous.  And, he believes that our law enforcement, intelligence, diplomatic, and military communities are incapable of doing their jobs in the fight against terrorism.

There are surely people in this world who wish to do us harm, even to destroy us, because we are Americans.   We need strong military and intelligence against ISIS, here and abroad, and those who would bring evil against us must expect dire consequences.  We cannot be a paper tiger; our teeth must be quick and sharp.  We must protect the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans.

People of all political stripes, religions, and races must call this what it is; xenophobic, racist hate speech that undermines key American values, feeds fear, and will do nothing to reduce the threat of terrorism in our country.

Well Said, Gov. Jindal!

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/10/politics/jeb-bush-donald-trump-carly-fiorina/index.html

Stephen Colbert and Pope Francis

More from my favorite Catholic theologian :

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/55f0748ce4b093be51bd21e2

Museum Staff?

"The future is our native time zone. Granted, humans are the only species that thinks about the future. It's the time zone that, when we occupy it, we are being most human. But we are being most Christian as well. Jesus comes to us from beyond and pulls us from the future more than pushes us from the past. The Holy Spirit encourages time travel, most often to the future. Close your eyes and travel in time: where do you go? The default timezone of the Christian is what is ahead, not what is behind." Len Sweet, So Beautiful, p. 48.

I don't think most Christians actually think this way. I think we are usually looking backward--more like volunteers at the historical center than lookouts in a ship's crow's nest.

In Dufftown, the lovely town in Scotland where we spent five days, there is a small museum, right across from the clock tower in the middle of the village. on the day we visited the museum, it was staffed by a sweet "older" lady who didn't seem to know much history of the town.  As we looked at the displays and the photos on the walls, she seemed as inquisitive as we were, but no more knowledgeable.  While she welcomed us warmly, she really couldn't tell us much about anything in the town.

Are church folk like that? Volunteers in a museum they don't know much about?

Sweet points out that it is uniquely human to consider the future, and that when we are oriented to the future we are most oriented toward Christ.  What if Christians behaved the way Sweet describes us?  What would the Church look like if Jesus followers were really focused on God's future more than its own past?  Or if we used our understanding of the past to help us look forward with hope and passion?

Gotthard Pass 12 June

Gotthard Pass in Switzerland was one of the most amazing passes we crossed throughout the trip.  The mountains were in the clouds most of the day, but the pass road was really cool. One side was all cobblestones.  It's amazing to think of the manual labor it took to make this road!

You can get a little sense of the steepness here.

The snow had only been off the road for less than a week so there had been very few vehicles to wear down the grasses growing in the cobblestones.

That's us :-).

Time For a Wee Dram