Imagining our Image

For some time i have wrestled through issues of truth currently on the docket of modern psychology. We as a culture, i am convinced, are at the peak of self-glutton fest where we have reduced human beings to a wal-mart of sorts where everything necessary to accomplish, achieve, fix, imagine is contained inside just in deep recessed aisles not easily accessed all the time.

Neitzsche in his attempt to create uber-self-reliant individuals used to speak of this type of tyranny ironically enough in his work entitled "Beyond Good and Evil". He speaks of a type of livable morality that has moved beyond archaic rules and rigid legalistic slavery, which keeps us from becoming all that we are intended to be. I am afraid that ole Fredrich has gotten exactly what he wished for.

As long as we can throw off these chains that fundamentally tell us who we are and what we were made for we are then capable of making up our own identity as we go. But then again that assumes even then that i should trust myself to tell me the truth about myself. This is what bothers me so much about the Scriptures. The Unholy Trinity as C.S Lewis called it (Flesh, World, and Self) competes to tell me the "truth" about myself and certainly i believe it oft because i am very gullible. Could this be the very thing that Paul wrestles with in Romans 7-8? When i gave my life to Christ i have a new identity. It is fundamentally different and anything good that then went into me at that moment came only from Christ. Now still i like to sin and confuse my identity with what i use to be but as Paul echoes that is not me, but just the sin that still lingers in me. But before me get all high and mighty lets not then go ahead and take credit for the good deeds that flow from us following. If anything good now comes it is completely Christ and not me.

What does this really mean and look like? I am not convinced but i am tired of listening to the wrong voices. I am tired of tricking myself into thinking i am more holy/ or even sinful than i really am. Who are you fundamentally? How do you know the truth about yourself? Can we trust the progress of Nietzsche to really lead us to a race of men and women who can trust their desires only because at that point they are trustworthy?

Maybe we have ears to hear and eyes to see but are doing neither.

Living is Simple

The two simplest commandments in Scripture are to Love God and Love Others as much as i love myself. It is these very two things that have been the stumbling block for literally thousands of people as they consider the claims of Jesus. There is nothing so self-less as giving every inch of your being to a God you cannot smell,taste,touch,hear, or see and to people who will continually dissapoint, hurt, frustrate, and turn a deaf ear to your needs

Certainly we are deaf to the tales of unbelieveably selfless individuals who day after day pour themselves out like drink offerings to the communities around them. Puritan pastor Jonathan Edwards one of the most brilliant theologians ever spent the last years of his life as a domestic missionary to some indian tribes in the northeast. Jim Elliott and others viewed it as unthinkable to do anything but ultimately burn up in the service of Christ.

I hate that we think in America somehow we should be living a different form of safer christianity. Like the Scriptures weren't really supposed to ever be read through the lens of a 21st century american. Can we please stop playing games.

The Simple Way

More oft than not i believe we don't really believe that people can live lives like Jesus details in the Scriptures. I had my paradigm of that thinking rocked this last weekend back in Houston. I go to a lovely church there called Ecclesia (www.ecclesiahouston.org) which is very intentional about being hands and feet of love to a community in Montrose that many churches have completely forgotten about.

They a guest speaker who was from a similar Ecclesia-like experiment church in Philadelphia called the Simple Way. They are loving/being/engaging in life with the homeless and down and out community up there. He told some of the most amazing stories of the power of reckless, God-like love and its ability to triumph so many things/measures which get in the way of change. Lest we forget that Jesus himself was homeless. "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head" in Matthew 8:20. As many of you know Austin has just passed some city ordinances similar to the ones this man described from Philadelpiha which prohibit men and women from sleeping, loitering, panhandling, etc on city property.

He told an amazing story of a group of homeless individuals who had gotten together amidst the frustration of trying to find housing there and ending up squatting in an old catholic cathedral in downtown philadelphia. The church was upset and tried to come kick them out for trespassing. Outside the cathedral the men and women inside had erected a banner that said "How can you worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?" Needless to say the church put off the eviction for a while and you then see a whole community rally around these down and out families who have nothing to call their own. The love of Christ appeals to these real life orphans in the form of real-life Christians not escaping to buildings on sundays but entering into the affliction of the men and women around.

James, the half brother of Jesus in his letter to Jerusalem Christians
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

Maybe our paradigms need to change drastically....

Abre Los Ojos

"Open Your Eyes" is the rough translation of the vanilla sky predecessor. This was a spanish film that has the exact story line of the american verison and as a cherry on top starred penelope cruz as well. What is interesting to me is the concept that there are certain realities that exist in life i will never percieve in life unless i open my eyes.

Let me give you an example... Last night i went to bed relatively early around 11 and spent about 10 hours asleep. I can remember that i had so many unbelieveable adventuresome dreams and experiences i almost have to trick my brain now into thinking they were merely dreams. I wonder why God allowed us to experience dreams as so unbelieveably real as to struggle with differentiating between realities? Why did God even allow us to dream at all? I am more oft than not frustrated when i wake up because my own life doesn't make room for the adventure and excitement that my dreams frequently offer.

Maybe the indictment is upon my own failure to fully accept the adventure of Christ to embrace a rich-young-ruler-live-by-faith-not-security lifestyle. But then again how many individuals do you know that really live that kind of lifestyle. I don't want to resign my optimism yet, but mediocrity and boredom seep in everywhere i look. I must open my eyes to the realities that these are built-in deceptive measures to keep me from the inspiring beauty of Christ. I have to believe that at all costs...