I've been thinking (always a dangerous thing for me) about the "church language" we use in the Western church & in our faith talk. We use words like Lord, King, Majesty, Savior, etc. But, is this just another form of "technospeak?" Do we give any thought to what these words mean? Or do we use them because they are church words? If you ask most believers what these words mean you might get some canned answer out of a catechism or orientation class. But, do we really know the full impact of the words? When I think of Lord, the first thing that comes to mind is a snobbish old goat sitting by the fire in his club drinking a brandy. King? Some old guy sitting on a throne making pronouncements. Majesty? A form of address for the old guy sitting on a throne making pronouncements. Savior? Why, Jesus is my savior. But, do we really ever give thought to what the words mean? Do we have any words in our language today that adequately portray the totality of the meaning of these terms at the very core of our faith?

Who says you have more time when you get older? Golden age, my buttocks!!!

Lately, I've been thinking about living and it's relationship relative to our 'existence' in our Western culture. What is it about us and our culture that reduces life to a joyless, souless existence. Where is the disciples' exuberance over the fact that we are alive in the beautiful world God made for us? Why are we not singing and dancing out of sheer joy? After all, we know that our Redeemer lives. Why is it that we just 'show up'? Why do we make life so difficult? Why do we take everything so seriously? I look around and one thing I rarely see..smiles. Go to church and what do you see...mostly gloomy faces. My heavens, we have the Bread of Life!
We can recite bible verses by the score but never put them into operation in our lives. I sometimes wonder if we really believe what we profess to believe.
Depressing? Yes. How to change after a lifetime of cultural training? Not sure. Perhaps one thing to do is to live intentional lives, turning off the autopilot. Maybe we have to combine our will with the power of the Holy Spirit to 'intend' to be light and salt. All I know is that I'm tired of going through life just existing. I don't think God intended it to be this way.

I think I finally figured out that I've been mistaken about the "Great Commission." I always thought that we were to go into all the world, preach the Gospel and make disciples. Go-Tell-Make. What I didn't know was that down in the fine print it says "But first, thou shalt build."
From my admittedly limited firsthand view of the church world, it seems that we take this command to build to heart. I wonder if there are many churches which are not coming out of capital campaigns, planning them or in the middle of them. It seems that great effort is put into fulfilling this command. Pretty admirable, this sense of dedication, isn't it?
I wonder what would happen if we in the Western Church would put equal effort into the Go-Tell-Make part of the Great Commission. I wonder how many people would come into relationship with our loving Father. I wonder how much suffering would be alleviated. I wonder what would happen if mercy would flow like a river through the land.

About 25 years ago, I took a class on how to manage people. Today, I don't remember much about it, except that we had a very long and heated discussion about money not being a prime motivator. I don't remember much about the discussion except the phrase about money not being a prime motivator. What we decided were prime motivators has been lost. After all, I'm old. But, after thinking about it, observing our culture and the mass media, I have come to believe that the prime motivator today is FEAR.
We fear terrorists so we are willing to allow increased governmental interference in our lives. We fear illness and death so we spend billions on surgery, medicines, herbal remedies. We fear losing our looks or our hair so we have plastic surgery or hair transplants. We fear not being in the 'hip' crowd so we overspend on clothes, jewelry, cars, houses etc. We fear for our jobs so we compromise our principles. We fear the government so we are silent when we should speak out.
We fear being ostracized for taking an unpopular stance so we just go along. We are a fearful culture.
As a follower of Jesus, what does all this mean for me? In reading scripture, it seems that God, or Jesus, or angels are always saying 'fear not.' So, if God says not to be afraid, why am I so fearful? Is it because I really don't believe Him? Or is it because of my sinfulness? Is my focus on Him or me? I tend to believe that it is because I am a sinner, so wrapped up in myself that I won't believe Him. I want to but my carnal self seems to have the upper hand. I feel a lot like the man who asked Jesus to increase his faith and like Paul when he said that he did the things he didn't want to do and not the things he wanted to do. And, also like Paul, I say thanks be to God Who Christ Jesus rescued me from this body of death!
I pray that my faith does increase and that I increasingly meditate on the beautiful gift of grace that is mine through the Cross. Amen!

Something has been bothering me lately. FOOD. I'm not hungry, nor do I have allergies, and there is very little that gives me heartburn. But, food bothers me. Or rather, our Western culture's attitude toward food. We worship food (foodistas, gormands). We take food for granted. It's always there. We don't have to look too far for it. We have an entire cable network dedicated to it. We have cable programs telling us about the 10 top places to 'pig out' on 4 pound steaks, 11 pound pizzas, buckets of ice cream (30+ scoops) and 3 pound burgers. We seek out the trendiest eateries with the newest 'fusion' cooking. We make chefs into celebrities. We spend big bucks buying the latest cookbooks or technical tomes, and then rarely open them. We through away tons of uneaten food because it isn't "fresh." We have "fast food" joints on every other corner competing for our business, offering to supersize and refill. For what? To stuff our supersized guts and satiate our need for more and more. Makes one wonder how much we consume or throw away could have been used to feed people who don't have enough to keep them alive.

Being on the cusp of postmodernism, I sometimes think that reading theology is hazardous to my mental health. It's come to the point that it has become very difficult to tell what is cultural and what is pure 'fact.' Sometimes I find my self asking, a la Pontius Pilate, "What IS truth?"
I hear a lot about "solo scriptura" and scriptural "inerrancy" but I have doubts that we neither mean what we say nor understand what we are saying. It is fairly certain that we really mean partial 'scriptura," picking and choosing those portions of scripture which appeal to our personal or cultural prejudices.
Take for example the current kerfluffle about sexuality. It seems to me that the NT passages we use to condemn homosexuals as 'sinners' contain other things such as greed, licentiousness, etc. which we never mention. I suspect that this interpretation is as much political as anything else.
We say that scripture is inerrant and THIS is what it means. Cultural? Political? I don't know. Myself, I believe scripture is inerrant but, and this is a great but, I just don't happen to know what scripture is being inerrant about in many cases.
So, how do I preserve my sanity? Well, how I've personally dealt with this insanity is to discard most of what I believed to be 'truth.' What have I retained? In brief, Jesus was born, He died, He was raised from the dead & He ascended into heaven, ushering in the Kingdom of God on this earth. Without these central facts, Christianity becomes nothing more than a nice worldview competing with other nice, and not so nice, worldviews. Just another philosophy of life. Just mental/philosophical masturbation. Certainly no 'truth' there..just opinion.

I was looking into the definition of "laity" and got to thinking about how meanings of words change over the years. The original Greek simply meant 'all of the people.' I'm no scholar so I won't pretend to know if this word was even used in New Testament writings or had any Christian meaning whatsoever. I don't know when the term even entered the Church or in what context it was originally used.
I do know that the term 'laity' and its derivative 'laymen' are used quite extensively in the Church today. I do wonder if the 'religious' context and the modern cultural context differ.
From my view from the pew (i.e., my opinion) I think that we in the Church have adopted have adopted the cultural definition, namely that the laity are untrained amateurs and that the clergy are the trained professionals. This is nutty considering that my denomination prides itself on 'solo scriptura.' From my reading of the NT, this definition and 'solo scriptura' don't coincide.
According to the Epistles, we are all ministers of reconcilliation and all have gifts for the building of the Church. With the modern definition, only the professionals do real 'ministry' and the laity confines is ministry to the 'non-spiritual' aspects of ministry. Gnostic?

I thought that blogging was a pretty simple matter. Just start writing whatever comes to mind. But, I'm finding that it isn't quite so simple. Stream of consciousness is not my forte. I tend to belabor an idea almost to death before setting it down in black and white. I've thought of many things to put in my initial post, but translating the thoughts into the written word isn't as simple as I thought.
So, if that's the case, why blog in the first place? After all, writing my thoughts in cyberspace might reveal myself as a fool, a poor confused soul, a "conservative" or "liberal," a religious fanatic or a heretic, and so on. Well, others' "good opinion" has never been a prime consideration of mine. As Popeye said, 'I yam what I yam."
Perhaps the reason I am blogging is that I hope that by writing down my thoughts I might be able to make sense of my life, what I really believe, and how I should live my life as a follower of Jesus. Yeah, that's the ticket. So, I'm just going to ramble on and, with God's help, try to make sense of my life in relation to my faith.