one thing will remain

“So what I am telling you is exactly the same as what I am telling everybody else: there is only one game plan, love, love and more love. Forgive, forgive and more love. Keep yourselves on the ready at all times, lest you be lured back into the ways of suspicion, division and retaliation. Hold on tight to the hope that you’ve put your hands up to. None of this on-again off-again stuff! Think about how to stir one another up to greater and greater love and more and more ways to put it into action. Some people will quit gathering together as a congregation altogether. It’s understandable when the Church has failed so spectacularly, but don’t go down that path. Gather often, support and encourage one another. The closer we get to that final day the more you’ll need one another. The Church is coming crashing down, and the earth is being shaken to its foundations, and everything by which the powers that be maintained their delusions of peace is crumbling to dust in their deceitful grasping fingers. Stand up and rejoice, for when all the bullshit has fallen away, just one thing will remain, love in all its glory, for God is love.”
The Girl with the Dove Tattoo, Brian McLarren

How do we live today?

"Consider the poetic beauty of today’s reading from Isaiah. To the people who knew exactly what it meant to lose a temple, God says, “See, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. So be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating.”

How do we live today when we don’t know tomorrow? We draw strength from God, who invites our participation and endures long after the cities and buildings and stones have crumbled. We adopt a posture that asks not what God can do for us, but calls us to bring the Kingdom of God just a bit closer. We love neighbor as self and we strive for just societies and a stable planet- new heavens and a new earth. We pray without ceasing, and we trust in a mighty God from whom all blessings flow."

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/stw/2013/11/01/26-pentecost-proper-28-c-2013/

We antici.......pate

We anticipate

what is not yet

and practice now

your future

we say and sing

that all you have made

your creation

is good

laboriously

so very slowly

we work out your promise

in hope and fear

and strive to build

a city of peace

a new creation

where you will

be our light,

our all.

Give us strength, O God,

To persevere

And bring us to

A happy end

Huub Oosterhuis

Apocalypse of love

"I don’t know how to love you as Christ loves us. If you do, please clue me in.

In the mean time, what’s to be done with this new commandment? Commandments aren’t issued for default behaviors. You can blame biology or the Fall, but lying, sexual betrayal, killing, and covetousness are quintessentially human. Perhaps I can learn, through a lifetime’s effort, how not to harm my neighbor, but don’t ask me to do the impossible and love him, too.

The more I reflect on this new commandment, the more I apprehend it apocalyptically, a revelation of something already here, yet hidden from human sight. If you ask why I love my wife, I’ll give you dozens of reasons, none of which truly answers your question. In the end, I love by faith and grace; not by sight, knowledge or certainty.

Pray for that faith and grace in all things. Pray that your neighbor will show you how such faith, such grace is lived. Pray for the apocalypse of love."

http://www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2010/04/apocalypse-of-love/

Let us plant dates

What is hope? It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real, and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress us and repress us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual. And that in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection. But, the two, suffering and hope, must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. But hope without suffering creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness. So let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret of discipline. It is a refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our own need for immediate sense experience. And it's a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given saints, revolutionaries, and martyrs the courage to die for the future they envisage. They make their own bodies the seed of their own highest hopes.”

Ruben Alvez b. 1933
Tomorrow's Child

http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/proper28b.html

a world of terror

"Mark takes us into a world of terror. He will go on to speak of trial and betrayal (9-13), of desecration and fleeing refugees (14-20), and again of false hopes and predictions (21-23). The whole climaxes in cosmic disasters (24-25) from which the only hope is divine intervention in human form: the coming of the Son of Man (26-27). It is a supernatural solution, a vision of hope that transcends the categories of human achievement. Terror beyond description is being matched by hope beyond description.
It is hard to enter this world - then and now. We lose our way if we make the passage predict the future. Writings of this kind characteristically enter the terror only to leap into fantasies of hope. We may discard them as unfulfilled and irrelevant or revise them like Matthew and Luke with some updating and seek to maintain their vision. Two millennia later updating is even more difficult! Defiant hope remains. Naming the terror remains. Facing the ambiguities in desperate situations about who speaks for Christ remains."
http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MkPentecost25.html 

Apocalypse 4

Apocalypse now

The word apocalypse simply means to reveal, to uncover, and if facing reality brings us despair, we need to ask why. Above all, we must reject the literalist notion that apocalyptic literature is about a future pie in the sky. It is a command to come to full attention in the here and now. And that is hard to do. Last year one advertisement for a beaded handbag costing thousands of dollars featured a model with her eyes closed, looking beautiful but comatose, as the words "Comfort and Joy" blazed across the page. Let’s keep our own eyes open, and as we prepare to sing of comfort and joy this year, let’s look for them where they may be found.
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3281