"love your neighbor" Tagged Touchpoints
All in the Game, or the Name?
“’In the name of Jesus’ to me means, In the name of the one who wears the wounds of our lives on his back. It is not magical, but it is mystical. In the name of the one whose reputation was of loving indiscriminately. In the name of the one who found a way out of no way, even through doubt and confusion. In the name of the one who has more power than any therapist suggesting I sit beside still waters. Rather, “In the name of” refers to the one who makes me lie down, in the revelation of Gods compassion, beside still waters. Even more, who is calm waters, and whose spirit restores my soul.”
Jesus at the Waffle House
“I don’t believe that God works in mysterious ways. I believe, our mysterious God works in familiar ways; we just need to open our eyes. That’s what it means to experience the second coming of Christ. For me, it is to be able to see Christ in others. Christ in this moment, where matter and spiritual connect. For me, it’s not what we believe about the future that matters, it’s how we experience the Second Coming of Christ breaking through.”
The G.O.A.T.
“All the laws hang on these two commandments and those commandments defer to the real, genuine greatest of all time. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting goat bumps! What if all our efforts to legislate law in our personal lives and communal lives needed to be filtered by these two commandments? What would be different?”
Perfect Love Casts Out Fear
“To forgive one’s self opens us to the possibility of forgiving another. But to forgive another is not to dispense mercy or justice, for only God has that authority. But it is God who is opening us up to grace and mercy, when we are completely unable. We are merely opening ourselves up to what God can do when we can’t.”
Marginalizing Jesus
“Is there a message here for us? That it’s more important to listen to people, especially those on the margins, than to listen to the economic systems, the political systems, and the religious systems in which we have been raised? It is more important to listen to those on the margins than the leaders of those systems or those who have been most successful in them.”
Jesus ‘Buts’ In
Grace and peace from the Mystery in whom we live and move and have our being. Being and belonging. From the Revised Standard Version: You have heard it said … but I say to you” … and again “You have heard it said … but I say to you” … and again “You have heard it said … but I say to you ….” Matthew 5:21-37 Jesus … is a … “but-in-ski.” Following the law The passage this week is…
Who Wants to Be a Saint?
“And one Sunday, it finally dawned on me: “I’m an addict. Only I’m addicted to socially acceptable things. Things like money, the status quo, and prestige.” I’m addicted to avoiding being seen as weak. As a LOSER. And then I realized that the only difference between those addicts and me was while they were ‘recovering addicts’ … I was an ‘uncovering addict.’”
The Heresy of Individualism
“Now you know why Luther was mocked when he insisted on the Real Presence of the Christ in this meal. People laughed at him and said, “If Christ is really present in the bread and wine than you might as well say he is present in the cabbage soup at the local pub.” To which Luther supposedly replied, “Yes, exactly.”
The Great Divide
Grace and Peace to you from the mystery in whom we live and move, and have our being. “First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” Mark 7: 24-37 Let’s get one thing perfectly clear before we begin this Touchpoint… I am not a theologian. I am not Jim Hanson, Sheri Brown, Conrad Braaten, Henry Rojas, or any of the many educated and…