sign on the highway: San Diego River Watershed: Keep It Clean!
listening to American Pie: "and a voice that came from you and me... the day the music died, the day that I die."
How realistic have I been to expect an occasional oasis of good food, good drink and good conversation? How reasonable had I been to expect to be fully re-integrated into and re-claimed by mainstream society and mainline church?
Theology types engage in a fair amount of margin/center // edges/heart talk, especially considering more edgy, less centered liberation, womanist, cruciform theologies. All that's more marginal? Some people in some quarters consider them so, yet throughout the witness of scripture, God consistently acts is ways that subvert that status quo, in way that are hidden and unapparent until later on, until the principles involved step away and look backwards to where they've been and then are able to discern that's happened and even a little bit of how it's happened. Someone said if you keep looking back you can't see where you've going, but if you don't look back for sure you'll make the same mistakes and take the very same mis-steps.
Right now as another season of summer is almost here, I need to do some faithful remembering of Whose I am and who I am: where I've been, the journey I've taken with the gifts and opps God has given me, the people I've met who've ignored or rejected me and even those few people and places who've been occasions of embrace.
For Paul of Tarsus, the gospel is death and resurrection. Originally the literary form "gospel" referred to the returning Roman conquering general's proclamation of his victory over opposing forces, his announcement of how he'd vanquished the enemies to the nether regions of the dead. For Christians, "gospel" is God's victorious action in vanquishing death, "the last enemy" and initiating the victorious reign of life. Baptized, we live within the gospeled community called to reconciliation yet called out from, set apart from and different from the empires of death and deadly imperialisms in which many reside and toward which others strive.
Referencing the Ephesians pericope for Ascension that pleads for "the eyes of our heart" to be enlightened, PGB suggested one of the emphases of the Feast of the Ascension is the Christ Event becoming an event in the heart of God. Here our physical eyes can see nothing without some ambient light, so our heart-eyes need light too. Long ago at the weekly Monday evening women's bible study that met at my house, JHD (she and I were the group's usual leaders/facilitators) pointed out the eye is the most sensitive part of our physical bodies.
Baptismal River Watershed: Keep It Clean! and how, but how?! Keep the commandments, keep covenant with all creation, stay put in community because in spite of everything, most times staying put is the test of faithfulness because we perceive everything as imperfect...
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