Monday, March 17, 2008

Reading Large Chunks of Scripture
Day 9/15
Mark 10
(Eugene Peterson's Translation of the Bible - "The Message")

Jesus dives deeper into his teaching. To follow costs everything. You can't simply pick and choose what you want to apply in terms of God's commandments. You can't justify and interpret this phrase and that phrase in this context or that context in order to make it "easier". It costs everything: your mind, your heart, all of your life, your money, your decision-making, your courage to follow, giving up an old, or familiar life, in order to receive a new, or more whole one.

Today I find the encounter with the Pharisees challenging regarding the teaching on divorce. They want to nit-pick. Jesus says do it! It's more complicated than that, but I find myself challenged with my theological and philisophical support of many "hot button issues" that I believe are consistent with what it means for me in my experience to follow Jesus as teacher, prophet, gentle healer and lord. I believe in gay marriage and gay ordination, believing that Jesus would too. How do I justify that? Am I nit-picking, or following? How do we know and decide what it means to follow in the "grey" areas that Jesus didn't cover in the sermon on the Mount? And how do we live in community with other followers of Jesus who have opposite interpretations than we do? Our culture tends to push us to stick with those that are "like minded" and to leave behind those that are our opposites, inviting and encouraging us to view them as polarized ennemies. But that can't be for a community seeking to follow Christ, loving as Jesus loved, choosing to lift up and serve the "least of these." So how do we do this? And why don't we? (Bruce Reyes-Chow ironically blogged a bit about this from a different perspective this past week "How Presbyterian may be able to play 'nice' "

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