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Showing posts from December, 2011

New Year's challenge: Ordering your affections

"We always love, but not always properly" Attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux I love New Years day as it is both a time of reflection and a time of hope.  It is the recognition of how blessed we have been as well as losses we have incurred.  We identify opportunities that we have both seized and ignored.  We gather these sentiments together and propel them into the next year, where we hope to keep momentum from the good, and make changes to the bad.  Interestingly, New Years Day calls us to make choices and define our values. I have been wrestling for several months with the concept of idolatry.  Even writing the word conjures up ideas of bowing to bizarre statues and chanting incantations while smoking hallucinagenic herbs.  Yet, idolatry is much more subtle, even sublime.  It is so common that we often think of it as normative.  I wish I could say that idolatry was foreign experience, but God is dealing with me and the community in which I pastor about the idols in ou

Christmas and the Book of Revelation

A spirit of prostitution leads them astray;  they are unfaithful to their God.  Hosea 4:12 Then the angel said to me, "The waters you saw, where the prostitute sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages Revelation 17:15 The book of Revelation has to be the most misunderstood book in the entire Bible.  With its incredible images of judgements, bowls of wrath, trumpets, scrolls, beasts, scorpions, armies, cosmic war and worship, it is often difficult to understand the message.  The book of Revelation is written in a style of literature described as apocalyptic.  Other books of the Bible like that are the book of Daniel and the book of Zechariah.  Apocalyptic literature uses symbols and metaphors to instill hope regarding the current and future interventions of God. Now, what in the world does the book of Revelation have to do with Christmas?  Christmas on one hand seems to be so joyful (I can hear a chorus singing "Joy to World" in my head as I write thi