Blogging Towards Sunday February 14, 2010

Luke 6:17-26 | 1 Corinthians 15:12-20

What is life about?  How do you live a good life?  What is a good life?  Jesus offers a vision of a nonviolent world of peace, fullness and God-centered-ness in his beatitude teaching, as Luke tells it.  Paul talks about resurrection and how it informs and forms faith.  It's hard to know what "blessed" means in a world in which blessings are associated with brief pre-dinner prayers, year-end compensation, or miraculous salvation from sickness and disaster.  Can you be blessed in everyday life?

In the midst of the deluge of information, propaganda, images and stories, how do we identify the good life?  I don't think that Jesus is merely preaching about a pipe-dream, offering some opium to the poor masses to get them to persevere in their hardships and difficult daily life in ancient Galilee.  He's talking about a new way of being, of a nonviolent revolution that God is birthing in creation through an invitation to us - even us today - to live differently.  What defines a good life? Is one praise-worthy?  Does it go un-noticed?  Is it lived hap-hazardly? ; intentionally? ; individually? ; communally?  Is it even possible in this life - or is Paul telling us that we have to be resurrected, born again in a sense, to find a sense?

Classic Reformed Theology would say that a good life can't be earned, purchased, picked up in some sort of easy access ATM way.  It can only be received, given in the context of community.  It's a sort of flame that has to be fanned and nurtured in order for it to grow, deepen and mature.  It's both the means and the ends, the center of life and the end of the tunnel.  What was it that Jesus spoke of that was so attractive to those that heard him?  How is it that he still attracts and yet our faith communities, supposedly trying to live into this word and live from this mysterious kindgom of God, so often distract instead of attarct?