The Father and the Son
Dear Eugene,
In my Small Group, I often asked my friends, my flock to imagine: If an alien from outer-space is to descend upon us and take a seat in our circle, what would our uninitiated visitor come to know about our Father by the end of our hour-long conversation with each others, His children?
Today I asked myself, What if someone is to eavesdrop on the conversations I have with myself? What if a fly-on-the-wall camera were to capture the most mundane details of my daily living, would the viewers see a heralding of the Gospel, the Good News, or would they see me as part of the bad, sad news so pervasive in this world? Would they catch a glimpse of, Yes, God's Kingdom did indeed start to break in, or would they say my life as the usual Hell on earth?
It is spring time, a time for many to, again, "get away." How we've come to call our traveling vacation "getaway" gives away much of how we see our lives. What would the world see in how we pleasure, leisure ourselves? What do our Facebook posts say about us?
We are all building a story, be it an illusion or not, speaking to ourselves, selling to others, arguing for a case, the value of our existence. We all know a picture of our latest dessert place adventure is never about the dessert.
I recall what the great Baptist preacher Frank Boreham once said,
"Laughter, merriment and fun, were quite evidently intended to occupy a large place in this world. Yet on no subject under the sun has the Church displayed more embarrassment and confusion. One might almost suppose that here we have discovered an important phase of human experience on which Christianity is criminally reticent; a terra incognita which no intrepid prophet had explored; a silent sea upon whose waters no ecclesiastical adventurer had ever burst; a dark and eerie country upon which no sun had ever shone. Dr. Jowett tells us of the devout old Scotsman who, on Saturday night, locked up the piano and unlocked the organ, reversing the process last thing on the Sabbath evening. The piano is the sinner; the organ the saint! Dr. Parker used to wax merry at the man who regarded bagatelle as a gift from heaven, whilst billiards he deemed to be a stepping-stone to perdition. The play we condemn; it is anathema, to us. The same play-or a vastly inferior one-screened on a film we delightedly admire. One Christian follows the round of gaiety with the maddest of the merry; another wears a hair shirt, and starves himself into a skeleton. One treats life as all a frolic; another as all a funeral. We swerve from the Scylla of aestheticism to the Charybdis of asceticism. We swing like a pendulum from the indulgence of the Epicurean to the severities of the Stoic, failing to recognize, with the author of Ecce Homo, that it is the glory of Christianity that, rejecting the absurdities of each, it combines the cardinal excellencies of both. We allow without knowing why we allow we ban without knowing why we prohibit. We
We are at sea without chart or compass. Our theories of pleasure are in hopeless confusion. Is there no definite doctrine of amusement? Is there no philosophy of fun? There must be! And there is!"
Sin and salvation, our usual trade talk the world has come to expect to hear from us, why do we circumscribe our discussion to a narrowly defined moral sphere instead of letting the light shine in every corner of our dark rebelliousness, especially where we consider off-limits to God?
Would people take me seriously because they can trust me, not just for what I say, but mostly for how I live? Would they see the Father in this son?
Yours, Alex
In my Small Group, I often asked my friends, my flock to imagine: If an alien from outer-space is to descend upon us and take a seat in our circle, what would our uninitiated visitor come to know about our Father by the end of our hour-long conversation with each others, His children?
Today I asked myself, What if someone is to eavesdrop on the conversations I have with myself? What if a fly-on-the-wall camera were to capture the most mundane details of my daily living, would the viewers see a heralding of the Gospel, the Good News, or would they see me as part of the bad, sad news so pervasive in this world? Would they catch a glimpse of, Yes, God's Kingdom did indeed start to break in, or would they say my life as the usual Hell on earth?
It is spring time, a time for many to, again, "get away." How we've come to call our traveling vacation "getaway" gives away much of how we see our lives. What would the world see in how we pleasure, leisure ourselves? What do our Facebook posts say about us?
We are all building a story, be it an illusion or not, speaking to ourselves, selling to others, arguing for a case, the value of our existence. We all know a picture of our latest dessert place adventure is never about the dessert.
I recall what the great Baptist preacher Frank Boreham once said,
"Laughter, merriment and fun, were quite evidently intended to occupy a large place in this world. Yet on no subject under the sun has the Church displayed more embarrassment and confusion. One might almost suppose that here we have discovered an important phase of human experience on which Christianity is criminally reticent; a terra incognita which no intrepid prophet had explored; a silent sea upon whose waters no ecclesiastical adventurer had ever burst; a dark and eerie country upon which no sun had ever shone. Dr. Jowett tells us of the devout old Scotsman who, on Saturday night, locked up the piano and unlocked the organ, reversing the process last thing on the Sabbath evening. The piano is the sinner; the organ the saint! Dr. Parker used to wax merry at the man who regarded bagatelle as a gift from heaven, whilst billiards he deemed to be a stepping-stone to perdition. The play we condemn; it is anathema, to us. The same play-or a vastly inferior one-screened on a film we delightedly admire. One Christian follows the round of gaiety with the maddest of the merry; another wears a hair shirt, and starves himself into a skeleton. One treats life as all a frolic; another as all a funeral. We swerve from the Scylla of aestheticism to the Charybdis of asceticism. We swing like a pendulum from the indulgence of the Epicurean to the severities of the Stoic, failing to recognize, with the author of Ecce Homo, that it is the glory of Christianity that, rejecting the absurdities of each, it combines the cardinal excellencies of both. We allow without knowing why we allow we ban without knowing why we prohibit. We
Compound for sins we are inclined to
By damning those we have no mind to.
We are at sea without chart or compass. Our theories of pleasure are in hopeless confusion. Is there no definite doctrine of amusement? Is there no philosophy of fun? There must be! And there is!"
Sin and salvation, our usual trade talk the world has come to expect to hear from us, why do we circumscribe our discussion to a narrowly defined moral sphere instead of letting the light shine in every corner of our dark rebelliousness, especially where we consider off-limits to God?
Would people take me seriously because they can trust me, not just for what I say, but mostly for how I live? Would they see the Father in this son?
Yours, Alex
Comments
Post a Comment