Fairly often people ask me what I have been reading lately.  Here is my list and I recommend every one of these!

Philip Gulley – The Evolution of Faith and If the Church Were Christian

Robin R. Meyers – Saving Jesus from the Church

Richard Rohr – Falling Upward and Breathing Under Water

Rob Bell – Love Wins

M. Scott Peck – The Different Drum

Jacquelyn Small – The Sacred Purpose of Being Human

Frances Gench – Faithful Disagreement

And without a doubt – very much a surprise – a book that I purchased not aware that is was fiction – but it proved to be powerful!

Harry Kraus – Serenity

I would love to know what you have been reading lately – please join in the conversation.

During the last couple of weeks in preparation for my sermon delivered yesterday, February 26, 2012 I encountered some very interesting material on the internet.  A goodly portion of it provided some laughter and entertainment, but not much of it was of any use other than to know that it would not be utilized as part of my sermon.  The Scripture text for the sermon was Mark 13:32-37 and the title of the sermon was “Staying Awake.”  I am endebted to The Reverend Dr. Peter G. James at the Vienna Presbyterian Church for the following sermon illustration which I used toward the end of the sermon.

On May 19, 1780, the sky over Hartford darkened ominously, so much so that some members of the Connecticut House of Representatives feared the end was at hand. Colonel Abraham Davenport, who served as the House Speaker, rose from his seat to say, “The day of Judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. Therefore, I wish that candles be brought.” Candles were brought until the sunlight returned later in the day.

I wonder – when the day of Judgment comes will we be found doing those things that God has called us to do?

In preparation for sermons on the First Sunday of Lent I have been re-reading one of my favorite books – The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle.

A section that once again grabbed my attention follows:

Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.  But they are not what I would call emotions.  They lie beyond the emotions, on a much deeper lever.  So you need to become fully conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them before you can feel what lies beyond them.  Emotion literally means “disturbance.”  The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to disturb.”

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being.  As such, they have no opposite.  This is because they arise from beyond the mind.  Emotions, on the other hand, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites.  This simply means that you cannot have good without bad.  So in the unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle.  Pleasure is alwyas derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Pages 29-30 — http://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330191411&sr=8-1

Toward the end of August 2011 I posted that I would be taking a bit of a break and that posts would resume on September 6 . . . so at this point I guess the best thing for me to observe is “better late than never.”

The intervening time has been filled with several unpredicted twists and turns in my journey of life.  Some of the future posts will deal with a few of these adventures, and while you may not need to read about some, or any,  of them – I know that I still need to do some talking – or writing – about several of them – so – I hope that you will indulge my need and join in the conversation because a conversation – a dialogue – is far more rewarding than an ongoing monologue or soliloquy.

Today is the second day in the season of Lent – traditionally a time when many people make a commitment to give something up during this period of 40 days plus Sundays.  I feel a need to make a commitment to just the opposite of that – rather than giving something up – likely something that would not really be missed anyway – I think I need to take on some things that I know make me a person that is more whole and healthy than when I do not do these things.  One of those is the resumption of writing this blog.

So now is a time for a new beginning . . . or more appropriately a time to resume the journey . . . so I leave you this first day back when some words that have meant a great deal to me over a significant number of years.  They are the opening text of an choral anthem by Allen Pote – the words are credited to Nancy Hollis Dillard and Allen Pote (copyright 1980 by Hinshaw Music, Inc.) and I believe that they offer the opportunity to resume this journey with a right spirit:

“Awake, arise, the journey’s begun.  We travel on together as one.  We know not where the road will lead, but we move in faith making love our creed as we follow: the journey is our home.”

With the posting of this entry I will be taking a bit of a break . . . regular posts will resume on September 6, but for now I invite you to think about these thoughts from William Sloane Coffin*:

There are people and things in this world, and people are to be loved and things are to be used.  And it is increasingly important that we love people and use things, for there is so much in our gadget-minded, consumer-oriented society that is encouraging us to love things and use people. (35)

William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

With gratitude to William Sloane Coffin*:

There is in other words a difference between having a friend and being a friend, between having success and being successful, between getting an education and becoming learned.  If we use knowledge, music, art, sports, and eminently others – if we use them just to enrich ourselves, then paradoxically we impoverish ourselves, at least at our very core.  For all things then become as clothes: they cover but they do not touch or develop our inner being, and we become as those who believe they can only become visible when something visible covers the surface.

But if we give ourselves to art, music, sports, knowledge, and eminently to others, then we expeirence that biblical truth that “he who loses his life shall find it,” shall find life being fulfilled, and find that joy is self-fulfillment, self-fulfillment is joy.

For joy is to escape from the prison of selfhood and to enter by love into union with the life that dwells and sings within the essence of every other thing and in the core of our own souls.  Joy is to feel the doors of the self fly open into a wealth that is endless because none of it is ours and yet it all belongs to us. (122-123)

*William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville: Wesminster John Knox Press, 2004.

One more selection of valuable words from Bill Robinson’s book Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus*:

In some ways, it’s easier to demand openness from our organizations than from ourselves.  What do we do when no one is watching, or a least when we think no one is watching?  For most leaders, someone usually is.  I’ve heard integrity defind as “what a person does when no one is looking.”  It’s hard to deny that we feel greater temptation to breach our standards of honesty and consistency when the bright light of accountability goes dark.  Well, here’s a thought: keep the light on.  Paul calls it not making provision for “the flesh” or sin (Romans 13:14 KJV).

I am not implying that integrity requires openness.  Some leaders maintain the highest level of integrity while functioning quite privately in their personal and professional lives.  But openness does encourage integrity.  When Christian leaders subject themselves to visibility and accountability, they reduce dramatically the likelihood of moral or ethical compromises.  Leaders whose assistants always know their whereabouts will like be smart in choosing “where they are about.”

We can all take measures to “keep the light on.”  Positions of leadership often require travel, and travel has gotten brutal.  By the time I arrive at my destination, I’m a wreck.  Agitated, alone in a distant city, feeling deprived at having to be absent from my family, and needing relief from the indignities of air travel, I’m not at the height of my moral strength.  So when I fire up my computer, I find myself tempted to click my way from e-mail to e-crap.  But I don’t.  And one of the reasons I don’t is because I have given permission to our information technology people to check the logs of the websites I’ve visited without notifying me.  Do that and you’ll think twice before you click on garbage.  (Incidentally, a surprising number of people in leadership fail to realize their organizations can track down every website they’ve ever visited.)  I’ve also found that the deprivations of travel can tempt me to live more luxuriously on my business expense account than I would on my own money.  Personally, I don’t think that’s right, so I’ve welcomed people to review my expense reports if they have questions.  Whether our temptations are prompted by travel or by other conditions, the accountability of openness can only help us be the people of integrity God calls us to be. (53-54)

*Robinson, Bill.  Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009.

Currently I am busy preparing for several new and exciting adventures that will begin in the next few weeks.  One of those will be leading a teaching team in a series of gatherings that we will call Living as Mustard Seeds in Cracked Clay Pots.  The series will begin on Monday evening, September 19, 2011 at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas at 6:30.  All – visitors, members, anyone – are welcome!

We will begin with a six week consideration of a marvelous book by Dr. Bill Robinson, retired President of Whitworth University, titled Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus*.  Bill’s book offers remarkable guidance for learning leadership and living.  I hope some of you might join us.  Here is a sample from Dr. Robinson’s book:

Humility’s Ally – Truth

Another way leaders can keep from wearing those jerseys of darkness that absorb the light is to put on the bright reflecting colors of truth.  If God got nothing more out of Christian leaders than the truth, he’d probably consider it progress.  Truth protects against pride because truth recognizes that every gift comes from God.  Truth recognizes grace as the means of our salvation and nothing about which we can boast.  Truth recognizes that the mirror is but a mirror; it’s not the object it reflects.

Truth also competes against a besetting tendency of Christian leaders: We like to spiritualize our accomplishments.  When we attribute a success to God, report why God gave the success, and claim we had nothing to do with the success, we’re speculating.  We don’t know the mind and motives of God.  “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).  Further, our efforts do play a role in what we achieve.  The truths is that when we do the work, God gives the increase.  Scripture connects labor with fruit; if you do the former, you get the latter.  That connection doesn’t give us bragging rights; it simply acknowledges that God uses flawed people to accomplish his purposes. (66)

We are indeed mustard seeds living in cracked clay pots!

*Robinson, Bill.  Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus.  Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 2009.

The claim of biblical authority is not difficult as it pertains to the main affirmation of apostolic faith.  But from that base line, the hard, disputatious work is interpretation that needs to be recognized precisely for what it is:  nothing other than interpretation.  The Bible, our mothers and fathers have always known, is not self-evident and self-interpreting, and the Reformers did not mean that at all when they escaped the church’s magisterium.  Rather, the Bible requires and insists upon human interpretation that is inescapably subjective, necessarily provisional, and, as you are living witnesses, inevitably disputatious.

I propose as an interpretive rule that all of our subjective, provisional, disputatious interpretation be taken, at most, with quite tentative authority, in order that we may (1) make our best, most insistent claims, but then, with some regularity, we may (2) relinquish our pet interpretations and, together with our partners in dispute, fall back in joy into the inherent apostolic claims that outdistance all our too familiar and too partisan interpretations.  We may learn from the rabbis the marvelous rhythm of deep interpretive dispute and profound common yielding in joy and affectionate well-being.  The sometimes characteristic and demonic mode of Reformed interpretation is not tentativeness and relinquishment but tentativenss that is readily hardened into absoluteness, whether of the right or of the left, of exclusive or of inclusive, a sleight-of-hand act of substituting our interpretive preference for the inherency of apostolic claims. (13-14)

Brueggemann, Walter.  “Biblical Authority: A Personal Reflection.”  Struggling with Scripture.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.  5-31.

Thought provoking words from Walter Brueggemann*:

The issue of the authority of the Bible is a perennial and urgent one for those of us who claim and intend to stake our lives on its attestation.  But for all of the perennial and urgent qualities of the question, the issue of biblical authority is bound, in any case, to remain endlessly unsettled and therefore, I believe, perpetually disputatious.  It cannot be otherwise, and so we need not hope for a “settlement” of the issue.  The unsettling and disputatious quality of the question is, I believe, given in the text itself, because the bible is ever so endlessly “strange and new.” (The phrase is an allusion to the famous essay of Karl Barth, “The Strange, New World within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man.  New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1957, 28-50.)  It always, inescapably, outdistances our categories of understanding and explanation, of interpretation and control.  Because the Bible is, as we confess, “the live word of the living God,” it will not submit in any compliant way to the accounts we prefer to give of it.  There is something intrinsically unfamiliar about the book, and when we seek to override that unfamiliarity we are on the hazardous ground of idolatry. (5)

*Brueggemann, Walter.  “Biblical Authority: A Personal Reflection.”  Struggling with Scripture.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. 5-31.