Welcome to the Journey

The truth is lived before it is understood.

It must be fought for, tested and appropriated.

Truth is the way.

-Soren Kierkegaard

I have been blogging as a private citizen for years now.  Sometimes it has run me into trouble, sometimes it has been helpful, sometimes it has been a joy, other times it just wears me out.  We are in the midst of a re-launch of our church website, and as part of that I am creating this blog, which is going to be my pastoral blog.  This is where we talk theology, and about the life of the church.  I'm not going to specifically "get political," but I will warn you that the Gospel is an inherently political thing, because it deals with a vision of our life together.

My contention is that the Gospel is a radical departure from the political world as we generally know it.  The "Kingdom of Heaven," which John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth go on about is not a kingdom of this world, but at the same time it is intimately involved in this world.  The event of the incarnation of God as a human being is proof of that.  Jesus challenged the supposedly unavoidable reality of worldly power with something more, the power of love.

As the Apostle Paul writes: "if I do not have love, I am nothing." God creates because of pure love, and so Paul is being true to the deepest reality of all things: without love there would be nothing at all, no light, no dark, no land, no sea, no creatures of the deep or birds of the air, no crawling or walking things, nothing.  The writer of Genesis describes the "beginning" as "formlessness and void," it is what God changes by breathing and speaking.

Before we get to anything else, you need to know that you are here because of God's love.  That is the reality of all of our journeys.  Along the way, we seek truth and understanding.  As we go, we encounter joy and suffering.  We are all pilgrims in this world, and disciples on the way with Jesus.  Sometimes we lose our perspective on that reality and we think that life in the church is a destination, a fine little club that we get to fix up just the way we want it, but that is not what church is, and if we try to make into such we will die.

Always remember that God is not afraid of things dying; God knows what to do about that.

This blog will be a journal of the journey that we are on, a place to go a little deeper than maybe we get on Sunday morning. In the Gospel text for this coming Sunday (February 10, 2019) Jesus tells his soon to be disciples to put down their nets into the deep water for a catch, and despite the fact that they "know" it won't work, they do and are overwhelmed with the catch.

Too often I think we fear the "deep water." There may be good reasons for it, after all most people (and fish) live in the shallows, it's comfortable, it's warm and the dangers of the deep can seem far away.  If we are trying to meet people where they are, then I suppose we should be where they are... except maybe not.  Maybe there are things in the deep that we need to know about, maybe there is a reason to go there, even if we don't fully understand why.