Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

     Love.  I talk about it a lot in this blog.  That is because it is so central to Christianity, in Jesus-brand spirituality as my former pastor and friend used to call it.  According to my counselor, my ability to love is one of my biggest strengths.  But do I really know how to love?  Far from it.  Certain people in my life through certain actions have sent me into a burst of anger that comes out when I talk about them. If I really knew how to love, I would love my "enemies." I would forgive and forget. Because in love, there are no enemies. So why do I rage like this?  You could say it is because I am a fallen man living in a fallen world.  But that is using the garden of Eden as an excuse.  No, there is a much simpler explanation that does not scapegoat good old Adam.       Let me explain.  I've heard it said that the past and the present in our emotional lives are like the ...

     I have been listening to U2's rousing rebel songs from Rattle N Hum all morning.  It is an album written at the height of the resistance to Apartheid in South Africa when I was in high school.  My five-month-old daughter is familiar with those songs because they are the embodiment of what love can do in the world.  They talk about Rev Martin Luther King and Bishop Tutu and death on the green battlefields of the new United States in the 1700's and that world-changing death on the cross. Love is not some nice touchy-feely feel-good emotion you keep for a time and then discard.  The best definition I have ever heard of love is also the most succinct: unconditional positive regard. Doesn't sound like much until you think of how hard it is to always see someone through rose colored glasses. But how can all of this come from love?  How does changing the world by throwing off the shackles of the repressed and the downtrodden and...

     "The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit." Proverbs 18:21  The scripture makes no mistake about it: our words have the power to change the world around us, even the power over life and death. That you will "eat its fruit" if you love it is a reference to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Genesis creation story.  Adam and Eve lived in an idyllic world, in the garden of creation.  But there was one tree they were told not to eat of its fruit.  It was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  When they were wooed by its power they ate of it.  This is the original sin that unleashed death and sin into the world. They loved it - they wanted its power, and the flawed world we know is the result.  A world that is against God by default - not for him. Our words have the power to create or destroy.  When God created the world: the oceans, the land, plants and animals, st...

     Some people read the bible as a list of rules to be followed if one wants to get to Heaven.  Other people read the bible as the stories of heroes they try to imitate.  I postulate that neither of these ways are the correct use of scripture.  The so-called heroes of the bible were horribly flawed.  Think of David, a man after God's own heart who sent a husband to die in battle because he lusted over his wife, Bathsheeba. Think of Moses, a murderer of one of the Egyption slave drivers before he was called to lead the people out of Egypt. There is only one hero in the bible that I think we would do well to imitate.  He is the earthly Jesus.      Jesus, though divine, was also human.  We see this in the way he experienced separation from god when he was dying on the cross: "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?" he says with his last remaining breaths.  Clearly if he was just divine, he would never experi...

     I believe that the church, the body of my fellow believers, has been consistently wrong throughout time and to the modern era on some of its widely held views about Jesus and God and the afterlife.  Consider, for example, the widely-held view that we will be bodily ascending to Heaven when we die.  This is based on a mis-amalgamation of a Jewish view in the Old Testament and the New Testament take on the afterlife. In the Old Testament, many of the Jews had a persistent view that there will be a moment after the coming of the messiah that all the dead will bodily rise from Sheol and will enter the afterlife. Christians all over the world have taken some parts of Revelation and reading it as a literal account of the afterlife, have inferred it supports this view and have come up with the Rapture and they wait in breathless anticipation for its coming.  But even the Pharisees and Sadduces were at odds over the Old Testament view that there was this bodi...

     My wife gave me a perspective that I just wouldn't have thought of on my own.  You see, we had a baby girl three months ago.  She is beautiful and a wonderful addition to our lives.  The pregnancy itself is what gave her this new perspective. My wife said when she was pregnant with her, she thought about the statements Jesus makes about himself and the Father and the Holy Spirit. In John 14:20, Jesus says " On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you."  And he says to Philip in John 14:10, "Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?"  In John 14:16, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit in us, saying, " And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever - the Spirit of truth."        What if we look upon these statements from the perspective of a pregnant woman?  Pregnancy is a rich...

     I was talking with my wife's father, a retired pastor, and he told me about an image he used in many of his sermons throughout the years.  It is a thing that every kid learns on the monkey bars on the playground at school.  It is simply this: when you are on the monkey bars, you can't move forward until you let the hand behind you let go of the last bar.      In this way, I am kind of stuck in my life.  The trailing monkey bar is my smoking cigarettes.  I just haven't been able to let go of that bar no matter how hard I try.  I believe that this bar gives me a lift.  You see, I suffer from a chronic depression.  When I go outside and have a smoke and a caffeinated beverage, I get a little boost to my mood.  Often this gets me back on track and I start doing things besides laying in bed.  I might do the dishes and I feel better about what I have accomplished.  I might, being awake ...