"Peace is a result not a goal"

"The first thing we need to recover is the knowledge that peace is a result not a goal. Peace is the result of years in a good relationship. Marriages shaped by love result in peace. Instead of focusing on having a good marriage, a husband and a wife who focus on loving one another will have a marriage of peace. Societies that are shaped by justice and love becomes societies marked by peace. Peace, then, should not be our goal; love is. Love is the hard gritty work; love is the way of the cross that produces peace. When we love, justice and peace bubble up as the results of love. People who want peace but who aren't willing to love will not find peace. People who love find peace, whether they think about it or not."

- Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow, 73

(image via cherrybam.com)

Off-the-Cuff: "I am a Concerned Nazarene"

I'm not sure how much good this will do, but I feel compelled to offer a few thoughts, if only because my brother-in-law asked me what I thought about this article.

So, here are my off-the-cuff remarks:

- Crux Probat Omnia. The cross calls everything into question. Doctrine should always be "under attack," lest we be so presumptuous about who God is. But perhaps Jaroslav Pelikan says it best, "What the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God: this is Christian doctrine. Doctrine is not the only, not even the primary, activity of the church. The church worships God and serves mankind, it works for the transformation of this world and awaits the consummation of its hope in the next. 'Faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love' - love, and not faith, and certainly not doctrine. The church is always more than a school; not even the age of Enlightenment managed to restrict or reduce it to its teaching function. But the church cannot be less than a school. Its faith, hope, and love all express themselves in teaching and confession ... The Christian church would not be the church as we know it without Christian doctrine." As Pelikan says elsewhere, It is about continuity and change.

- Because of this I kind of hope we will become who we have never been.

- Continuity and change applies to music as well. (Are we still having this debate?) Hymns or praise songs? If ever there was  false dichotomy. Perhaps the better categories should be beauty and poetry. We just might rid ourselves of the problem before we have to deal with it. I say let the Psalms be our guide. Just try and categorize the scope of the Psalms into either "hymn" or "praise." I dare you to find a place for Psalm 88 and 150 and 33 and 118 and 78. Perhaps the question is not what music should we play but where are the artists can play the music?

- Witch hunts are bad. That's just Being Human 101. Rather than try and argue for the place of a generous and intelligent theological conversation where we love even our enemies, not just the ones who pass a litmus-test, I think I'll just bend down and scribble in the dirt for a while. I hope we rub off on each other.

- Right, mutual respect

- "Missional" does not solve our problems, but it might be a way forward. How can we know what the mission is if we cannot talk about God? What we say about God matters, absolutely. But since God is love, there is a way of being in relationship with God, and therefore one another, where we begin to look and act like God (we share God's character) even before we know exactly how to talk about it. Even still, doctrine is not about narrowing down our words until we arrive at the final, definitive explanation of God and faith. Perhaps theology is more about getting the first words right rather than the last ones. Perhaps the first governing, centering, orienting word is love.

Okay, I'm finished. I thought the spirit of the article was right, of course I would probably nuance it differently, which I hope began to show in this brief reply. What'cha think?

Love, Liturgy, the Mall, and Backward Pants

Here's another one from the Garfield minus Garfield people.










I think this is pretty profound. There are a couple of way to look at this.

It could be that he is elated that someone would want to be him and then crushed when this other person changed his or her mind. Perhaps to Jon Q. Arbuckle his is an identity worth sharing and he wants to share it with everyone.

Or he is eluted to be free of his identity, as if it was something to rid himself of, only to find that the other person has given it back, thus he remains trapped in his identity.

In any case, it reminded me of a quote from James K. A. Smith:

“Liturgies—whether ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’—shape and construe our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.

We are defined but what we love, which could end up being something that we want to share with others or something that we, ourselves, actually want to be free from.

The real question is: do we know what we love? And does it makes us into the kind of people who can/want to share it with others? Or does what we love ultimately trap us in identities not worth sharing. Identities we, in fact, grow to despise.  

I suggest you watch a segment from a lecture Smith did (watch from 7:15 to about 13:00). He uses the Mall as an example of how liturgy works. In the clip he says, "The Mall is a liturgical institution ... a formative institution that wants to shape your identity by shaping what you love." We are what we love.

This is why parody, satire, humor, etc is so powerful. If you don't believe me then consider the phenomenon of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. Deconstruction works the same way, which is why I love these Garfield cartoons. These things can help us recognize the assumptions we make about what is good, true, and beautiful, whether they are good or bad assumptions.

And with that, I close with this. The hope of cultivating a profound awareness about the deep things of God. It is the goal of liturgy.