Friday, September 22
A must read...
My wife has been bugging me to read the introduction to Luke in the Message translation of scriptures...she keeps leaving notes all over the house to remind me...This morning, I finally did...
And once again, she's is right...
This intro by Eugene Peterson is powerful...
Most of us, most of the time, feel left out---misfits. We don't belong. Others seem to be so confident, so sure of themselves, "insiders" who know the ropes, old hands in a club from which we are excluded.
One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are "in" and others "out". The clubs range from informal to formal in gatherings that are in common is the principle of exclusion. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.
Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history...of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a "membership." But with God there are no outsiders.
Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of the New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor. He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn't felt it?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.
May Crossings be a "Gospel of Luke kind of church"...
shalom
Mark Nelson at 8:52 AM 7comments
7 Comments
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at 9:55 AM
said... That IS good. Speaking of Eugene, how 'bout them Ducks? Also speaking of Eugene, have you read "eat this book" yet?
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at 10:12 AM
The Adkins Family said... Hey Jeph,
Are you in some sort of a contest to see if you can leave the first comment on every post?
If so, you're winning.
That intro is amazing Mark.. thanks for sharing.-
at 12:57 PM
said...
Maybe...I...am.
Speaking of winning, I hope you've enjoyed the last 2 years of my fantasy absence. I'm returning next year...kinda like Jordan on his first retirement. I went out on top and plan to return there.
Keep talking wise guy...
:)-
at 3:19 AM
Clinton said...
thats a sick intro...wish i had a woman leaving stickies all over the house that lead me to such insight. thanks for sharing with us.
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at 10:47 AM
said...
Clint,
Pick up your socks and quit leaving dirty dishes in the sink.
- your woman.-
at 3:05 PM
said...
thanks monica (and mark). this is a great final piece for the student leader talk i am giving this evening. and i love that you have another duck fan in the clan! jim
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at 12:51 PM
said...
where are you on your "points of light" right now? any updates on the formation of things? hope all is well.