The View from the West Mesa

God loves you, he knows you are human, and he knows you are imperfect. He can live with that because he wants you to be transformed into his likeness. God knows that being transformed is a process that occurs over time. If God wants a people who live in his image; in the way they are made (and he does), then he is able in his patience to wait for you and to cover you with grace while you make mistakes. Scripture in fact tells us just that. God is patient not just with his people, but with the world. Just as God wants you to be transformed, he also wants all people to come to him. His patience and covering grace is part and parcel of the process he is willing to allow for you to grow more perfectly into his likeness. The implications of this are huge. Primarily this means that you aren’t damned just because you aren’t perfect. You aren’t automatically lost if you sin. Just the opposite in fact – your imperfection is the result of training and shaping. Your failure in any given...

So, who are you? Who does God think you are and who does he want you to be? In the last post I suggested that people are made in the image of God – that they are the image of God. Having been made in that image, we are not crafted in perfect likeness of God but with an imprint of his character. That imprint drives our desires and values if we live in it. God sees you as his creation, as his child. He loves you and wants you to grow in his image so that you can live a life most satisfying and sublime. We know he loves you because John tells us that the sending of Jesus was due to God’s love for you. Even while we were sinners, we are told, Christ died for us. In both the Old Testament and the New we are told that God’s intent is to gather all nations to himself. This statement tells us that God indeed loves the world and wants all people to live with him. God sees in you himself; his own image being perfected and shaped through your life on this planet. God is not in a hurry n...

God created Man to live on the Earth, in the image of God. Since we know God is spirit rather than physical, that image cannot be our form and it must be something else. Since Adam and Eve were barred from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, I suspect our intellect isn’t what constitutes that image.  I prefer the conclusion that the image in which we were and are made is the character of God. Man is made with his most innate desires and values matching those of God. Throughout Scripture we are called to become like Christ, we are pointed toward the fruit of the Spirit, we are told to imitate God. I believe we are urged in this direction not because it is so foreign to us, but because they actually describe how we are made to live. If we raise our children in our image or likeness, it isn’t that we have two feet or that we can work logic questions. Most importantly, raising our kids in our image has more to do with the way we see the world, other people, and life ...

A major discussion point in my faith community recently has been the concept of female elders. Not the actuality of female elders mind you, just the concept. Given my previous post on the proper roles of men and women, we need to ask what the purpose of elders is. Elders, rightly understood, are not institutional functionaries. This is clear because an institution is not what God is after. They are instead, sages of the People of God; mature, disciplined, faithful followers of God who grasp the faith as it was intended and can pass it along to younger generations. To do this job, elders form a deliberative and guiding body for the People of God – not a church. As such, elders pray, meditate on Scripture, contemplate what they know of God and His purposes, and provide guidance and correction collectively and individually to the People of God. To pass on the faith – or for the purpose of maturing believers – elders counsel, advise, teach, and preach with an eye toward forming the compl...

Let’s review what God is up to and how the church fits his purposes. By church, we too often mean an institution even if we consciously make a distinction between organizations and organisms. We are familiar with the Episcopal Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of Christ. We have a penchant of arguing over the arguing over the rules for these institutions so that we get “it” right. Unfortunately, this isn’t the point of church. We confuse ourselves by using a Biblical term for a modern manifestation. When God said He would build His church, He meant something more along the lines of “I will call my people out of the nations.” He wasn’t building a “church,” but crafting a people of His own. This people are intended to be a reflection of the originally intended economy – humans who live in the character of their Creator. This is the big disconnect – we want to build churches but God is after a people. Our doctrinal arguments arise often from two primary areas – 1) rule...

Recently I stumbled upon a presentation by the organizational leadership training office of a major entertainment corporation. The point of the presentation was essentially how to get all your employees on board with operational priorities and standards. The priorities of the corporation were presented as: Safety Courtesy Show Efficiency The presenters went to great lengths to make it clear that these were not a list of values (there’s nothing here about human life, or integrity, or anything similar), but were a decision making tool.  These are not just a list of random items, but are given in order so that the higher something is on the list, the more inviolable it is. For instance, courtesy is the second on the list and the corporation always wants to be courteous to its customers – unless safety is involved. If someone is in danger of being hurt, it is acceptable to be reasonably discourteous to a customer. Otherwise, courtesy is more important than efficiency in doing one...

The gospel, Matthew tells us is at least in part that Jesus came to save his people from their sins. In most Evangelical circles this is the case and it is interpreted as a legal or juridical saving. Essentially, people have sins and the payment for those sins is Jesus's coming and eventual death. Pretty short-sighted if you ask me. The context of verse 21 is the promise and directives to Joseph about what God is up to, and Joseph's responsibilities in that working. For some reason, we miss the connection between this statement and the prophecy on which it is based. That prophecy, according to Matthew, does not use the name Jesus, but Immanuel. The implication is that Jesus will save his people from their sins by being God With Us. God has decided it was time to live with his people, and in so doing restore (save) them to full communion with himself. Being saved from sins has a number of connotations including the strictly juridical one. While it is true that we are "save...

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...

The preacher this morning read a Facebook post from Anne Rice in which she says that she's quitting Christianity. Not God, not Jesus, just the troublesome, overly structured, overly restrictive, and often bigoted institution called Christianity. Well Anne, welcome to the club. In another Facebook post, Anne says she doesn't want to be anti-[fill in your favorite political hot potato] and apparently she thinks that at least some form of Christianity requires that she be anti-something. And she's right. Some otherwise fine Baptists apparently have no trouble telling the world that "God hates fags," and some Catholics don't think Protestants have a prayer. We could go on. In my little denomination we have folks who are against any number of things and expect the rest of us to go along with them. The problem is that from my perspective, they're out to lunch. Whether it's what women can do in church, or what sorts of music can be used in worship, or what so...

This past Saturday morning was spent at the Children's Home in Albuquerque. The summer clean up was in preparation for the two week nigh annual open house and barbeque at the home. This day there were about sixty people from a local congregation helping weed, move rock, and generally spruce up the entire campus. Great folks all, and I'm sure they were a bit sore come Sunday morning. One of the people who came to help was a boy of about seven years who helped clear some of the larger weeds from a fallow section of the campus. As we worked on removing Russian Thistles, he said that tomorrow is church. Having sixty of his fellow church goers on campus, in turn assisting a Christian organization accomplish tasks too large for the staff to do by themselves, I observed that he was in church right now. Understandably, his retort was "where's the church building?" As I was readying a short instruction on "church" and community, someone yelled that it was time fo...

Barbara Brown Taylor remembers that explanation when she asked early in life why the Christians on campus kept saying they loved her. This is her reaction as recorded in An Altar in the World , "This may sound small, but I decided that was not enough for me. I did not want to be loved in general. I wanted to be loved in particular, as I was convinced God loved." I think most people feel the same way. We want folks to love me , for me , not because some third party loves everybody. The problem is that all too often we behave as though we're doing something because God does it, or because God wants us to do it. That seems to me to miss the point of being Christian. We are called to be transformed into the likeness of God and that means that our behavior - our loving others - becomes more and more what we do because we love them. Eventually, our faith, our way of living is supposed to be ours in the fullest sense. Taylor follows up immediately with this, "Plus, I am ...

While reading the Prologue to Walter Kaufmann's translation of Buber's I and Thou , I stumbled across this interesting little gem: "…Hebrew prophecy wasn't meant to be fulfilled." As one of his examples, he uses Jonah's story. While there are clearly prophecy's which are meant to be fulfilled, it is just as true that many prophecies of doom include an "unless clause." God provides an out because He doesn't want to follow through with the promise of doom. The grace and patience of God, as Paul tells us, are intended to give us time to come to our senses. The care of God for his creation prompts Him to warn us time and again to return to Him. This is key, as Kaufmann points out. God is more interested in people who want to follow Him than in any particular ritual or religious practice. It isn't always critical to get the details "right," but wanting to follow God is critical – even if we do so imperfectly. So, give yourself and o...

This post is in reply to a comment on a previous post. It's too long to fit a comment box, so I have made it it's own post. There are a couple observations that I would make concerning Psalm 51 and Dale's writing. The first is that Dale is correct when he emphasizes that God is faithful. If Jesus promised that He and the Father would abide with and in the believer, then we believe they do - but it isn't two people, it is God through His Spirit that lives in you. Dale is also correct that we might take having the Spirit for granted. True, but this simply makes our point that we have the Spirit. We do have examples of God seemingly abandoning various peoples. Revelation warns of congregations' lamp posts being removed, and Israel was apparently without God on a number of occasions. These eventualities though are the result of peoples' actions first - not God's. Israel lost focus of who she was made to be, and lost her character. So too with the congregations i...

Nancy Ortberg is speaking on leadership on Thursday morning at Orange 2010 and has made a statement that I paraphrase here: "If we want people to move from poor to great, we have to be OK with them going through the messy steps between poor and great." Good observation but it isn't limited to leadership. It is just as valid within the Christian life. Too many of us suffer from the idea – even if it isn't directly stated – that we have to "be the best we can be" all the time or God leaves us. Some believe that if we "grieve the Holy Spirit," the Spirit leaves us and so we perceive our salvation and position with God as something that ebbs and flows if not comes and goes as we fail and then perform for the Creator. Of course this is not the case as a bit of reflection will reveal. Paul urges us to "be transformed; to become like God." The use of "become" implies – no, demands – a process. A process then implies that we, even thoug...

I am becoming increasingly convinced that Christendom's main problem is our penchant to separate church from life. We have allowed to develop a church separate from life and this is not the idea given in Scripture. The church, rightly understood is not institutional in Scripture but refers to the community of believers – who live lives characterized by the Spirit. Christians assemble for encouragement and worship, but the community is understood to exist at all times. As a result we have created rules for church life that do not reflect or only vaguely reflect the actual lives of church members. I recently had a hallway conversation in which those involved all grew up in congregations that didn't observe Easter, but in which everyone in the pews did observe it. We all received new clothes, the women wore new hats, and church on Easter morning looked like a fashion show. While "the church" couldn't observe Easter – everyone in church did. This duality between the c...

The Shepherds' Sending this week was Matthew 21.12-16, the first half of which reads like this: And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers." These two statements, "My house will be a house of prayer," and "you have made My house a den of thieves," did not simply stand on their own to those first hearers. Rather, when they heard them, there were two texts that flooded their minds. Taking the second first, it comes from Jeremiah 7: "Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We ar...