Anger

I really could have sworn that I've posted this before but seeing that I can't find it, I'll just post it.  Evocative words from Buechner about the reality of anger.....

 

Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Algebraic Preaching

This is a really good reminder for those of us who inflict our words on others :)

x + y = z. I f you know the value of one of the letters, you know something. If you know the value of two, you can probably figure out the whole thing. If you don't know the value of any, you don't know much.

Preachers tend to forget this. "Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and be saved from your sins," or something like that, has meaning and power and relevance only if the congregation has some notion of what, humanly speaking, sin is, or being saved is, or who Jesus is, or what accepting him involves. If preachers make no attempt to flesh out these words in terms of everyday human experience (maybe even their own) but simply repeat with variations the same old formulas week after week, then the congregation might just as well spend Sunday morning at home with the funnies.

The blood atonement. The communion of saints. The Holy Ghost. If people's understanding of theological phrases goes little deeper than their dictionary or catechetical definitions, then to believe in them has just about as much effect on their lives as to believe that Columbus discovered America in 1492 or E = mc².

Coming home from church one snowy day, Emerson wrote, "The snow was real but the preacher spectral." In other words, nothing he heard from the pulpit suggested that the preacher was a human being more or less like everybody else with the same dark secrets and high hopes, the same doubts and passions, the same weaknesses and strengths. Undoubtedly he preached on matters like sin and salvation but without ever alluding to the wretched, lost moments or the glad, liberating moments of his own life or anybody else's.

There is perhaps no better proof for the existence of God than that year after year the whole God enterprise survives despite the way the professionally godly promote it. If there are people who remain unconvinced, let them tune in their TVs to almost any of the big-time pulpit pounders almost any Sunday morning of the year.

- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Ha Ha... I just noticed that the number of my posts has declined by half every year for the last four...  guess I'd better get on it ...

Questions

Buechner gives us something to think about... as usual.

On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked,"What is the answer?" Then, after a long silence, "What is the question?" Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.

We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow — the immediate wheres and whens and hows that face us daily at home and at work — but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that matter always, life-and-death questions about meaning, purpose, and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going. There is perhaps no stronger reason for reading the Bible than that somewhere among all those India-paper pages there awaits each one of us, whoever we are, the one question that (though for years we may have been pretending not to hear it) is the central question of our individual lives. Here are a few of them:

• For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? (Matthew 16:26)

• Am I my brother's keeper? (Genesis 4:9)

• If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)

• What is truth? (John 18:38)

• How can anyone be born after having grown old? (John 3:4)

• What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3)

• Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? (Psalm 139:7)

• Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29)

• What shall I do to inherit eternal life? (Luke 10:25)

When you hear the question that is your question, then you have already begun to hear much. Whether you can accept the Bible's answer or not, you have reached the point where at least you can begin to hear it too.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Peace

I love how Buechner talks about peace in this excerpt.

Peace has come to mean the time when there aren't any wars or even when there aren't any major wars. Beggars can't be choosers; we'd most of us settle for that. But in Hebrew peace, shalom, means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself.

One of the titles by which Jesus is known is Prince of Peace, and he used the word himself in what seem at first glance to be two radically contradictory utterances. On one occasion he said to the disciples, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). And later on, the last time they ate together, he said to them, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you" (John 14:27).

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that, for Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Kierkegaard talks about decisons and age

Søren Kierkegaard:

The path of an honest fighter is a difficult one. And when the fighter grows cool in the evening of his life this is still no excuse to retire into games and amusement. Whoever remains faithful to his decision will realize that his whole life is a struggle. Such a person does not fall into the temptation of proudly telling others of what he has done with his life. Nor will he talk about the “great decisions” he has made. He knows full well that at decisive moments you have to renew your resolve again and again and that this alone makes good the decision and the decision good.

Making decisions is often dangerous, or rather, talking about them is.

Source: Provocations

Success - Ralph Waldo Emmerson

This was attached to a joke email I get today, I thought it was worthy.

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success." 

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

C.S. Lewis' converstion to Theism

Plough's devotion today is the account of C.S. Lewis' coming to acknowledging God's existence.  Strangely comforting and appropriate....

C. S. Lewis:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.  That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.  In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.  I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing: the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.  The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet.  But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?  The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy.  The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

Source: Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life