July 5, 2009 Tabernacle Message

June 28, 2009 Tabernacle Message

Tabernacle Message

July 21, 2009 Tabernacle Message

Tabernacle Message

This Week at Still Waters - 06/21/09

This week’s Lectionary: psalm 9.9-20, 1 samuel 17.1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49, mark 4.35-41, & 2 corinthians 6.1-13

Working on a Tabernacle message about how we think that we need to defend God; violence, arrogance, separatism, hatred, war, & politics. Christ calms the storm and expects us (in the boat) to have “faith.” Seems, as His “Body,” we sleep at the wrong times, we panic at the wrong times (exhibiting little faith), rush to conquer and control, and if we are His representatives, why do we not calm the storms of those around us?

"Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" (mark 4.40)

What do you think happens when God forgives our sin? Is it God changing and suddenly, reassessing us? Is it God deciding to waive some eternal and required punishment? No! Nothing happens in God. God is a perfect given-ness, totally and always given, literally fore-given, ahead of time, before our act of receptivity.

God does not change; we change. Here is what’s happening in the experience of forgiveness: When God’s arms are tight enough around us, when for a moment we can believe in love, when we let God gaze into your eyes deeply enough and are ready to believe it, than we’re able to let God rob us of our sins! God pulls them out of our pocket while holding us in an intimate and intense gaze. It is the only time we are quite happy to be robbed!

From Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 294, day 307 (Source: Days of Renewal)

Who are the children of God?

We cannot achieve our inherent dignity—our divine sonship and our divine daughterhood. All we can do is awaken to it and start drawing upon it, appreciating it, reveling in it. We know we live in an inherent dignity, a dignity that no one has given to us and no one can take from us. -Fr Richard Rohr

Lent 4 Tabernacle Service

Lent 4 Message is up at: http://www.besidestillwaters.net/ppt.html
Interested in comments not controvery... Very interesting time, leading up to Holy Week.

SUFFERING

Suffering is the necessary feeling of evil. If we don’t feel evil we stand antiseptically apart from it, numb. We can’t understand evil by thinking about it. The sin of much of our world is that we stand apart from pain; we buy our way out of the pain of being human.

Jesus did not numb himself or withhold from pain. Suffering is the necessary pain so that we know evil, so that we can name evil and confront it. Otherwise we somehow dance through this world and never really feel what is happening.

Brothers and sisters, the irony is not that God should feel so fiercely; it’s that his creatures feel so feebly. If there is nothing in your life to cry about, if there is nothing in your life to complain about, if there is nothing in your life to yell about, you must be out of touch. We must all feel and know the pain of humanity. The free space that God leads us into is to feel the full spectrum, from great exaltation and joy, to the pain of mourning and dying and suffering. It’s called the Paschal Mystery.

The totally free person is one who can feel all of it and not be afraid of any of it.
Fr Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 209, day 218

Tent fire destroys homeless couple’s shelter - The Mercury News: Pottstown, PA and The Tri County areas of Montgomery, Berks and Chester Counties (pottsmerc.com)

Tent fire destroys homeless couple’s shelter - The Mercury News: Pottstown, PA and The Tri County areas of Montgomery, Berks and Chester Counties (pottsmerc.com)

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Todd Rundgren Snapshot

Why isn't this guy in the R&R Hall of Fame? He has done nearly everything before folks that are credited as being pioneers... A mystery.


Todd Rundgren - Overdue Overview

Not Knowing = Faith

Your great spiritual teachers always had to balance knowing with not knowing and knowing that you don’t know. This has been almost totally lost. Even the Christian churches largely define faith as knowing, when in fact; biblically it means exactly the opposite.

Faith is being willing not to know, and still being content, because God knows. Now that’s a gift from God—to be able to live with the freedom not to know.
--Fr Richard Rohr