Here is my Progressive take on yesterday’s text from the RCL. The Audio Link Is below.
Here is my hand out “Random Thoughts” from yesterday’s service as well.
Random Thoughts 11-14-21
- “The Greek phrase John uses for “eternal life” literally means “life of the ages,” as opposed, I think we could say, to “life as people are living it these days.” So John’s related phrases—eternal life, life to the full, and simply life —give us a unique angle on what Jesus meant by “kingdom of God”: a life that is radically different from the way people are living these days, a life that is full and overflowing, a higher life that is centered in an interactive relationship with God and with Jesus. Let’s render it simply “an extraordinary life to the full centered in a relationship with God.” (By the way, I don’t expect you to be satisfied with this as a full definition of the kingdom of God. I’m not satisfied with it myself. But it’s one angle, one dimension, one facet.)””If “eternal life” doesn’t mean “life after death,” what does it mean? Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus reduces the phrase simply to “life,” or “life to the full.” Near the end of John’s account, Jesus makes a particularly fascinating statement in a prayer, and it is as close as we get to a definition: “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom [God has] sent” (John 17:3). So here, “eternal life” means knowing, and knowing means an interactive relationship. In other words, “This is eternal life, to have an interactive relationship with the only true God and with Jesus Christ, his messenger.” Interestingly, that’s what a kingdom is too: an interactive relationship one has with a king, the king’s other subjects, and so on.1”The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything” by Brian D. McLaren
2.Prayer
EVERYBODY PRAYS whether he thinks of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.
According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again (Luke 11:5-8). Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there’s nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says, won’t give his own child a black eye when he asks for peanut butter and jelly, so how all the more will God when his children . . . (Matthew 7:9-11). From Frederick Buechner
- “What Makes a Person a Christian? A Christian is someone who’s animated by the spirit of Christ, a person in whom the spirit of Christ can work. That doesn’t always mean that we will consciously know what we are doing. As it says in Matthew 25: “When have we seen you hungry? When have we seen you thirsty?” We may have no idea that we do what we do for Christ. But Christ said: “Because you did it, you did it for me.” This is the final consequence of the Incarnation of God. The Word is no longer word; it has really become flesh. That means it never depends upon whether we say the right words, but whether we live the right reality. A Christian is someone who’s inhabited by the spirit of Christ, which is a gift. From “Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go” by Richard Rohr .
Random Thoughts 