Dark Matters
“There are several features of our human life and experience - common to more or less all people and cultures – which seem to point beyond themselves, to the meaning of life, and perhaps to God himself. One way of preaching through Lent might be to take these one by one and explore what happens if we treat them as signposts and follow where they seem to point – and then watch, in each case, for the dark twist at the end of the story.
I have worked with seven such signposts. No doubt there are many more but these are central. The seven signposts I’ve worked with are Justice; Love; Spirituality; Beauty; Freedom; Truth; and Power. We all know these matter. Sometimes people try to ignore one or more of them but it usually comes back to bite you...
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What do we do with these deep instincts? Many people have argued that they actually point us to God. The reason we instinctively love justice, value beauty, long for freedom, and so on is (some will say) that these are implanted in us by the God in whose image we are made. We can therefore argue from these instincts up to God himself. Now that is fine up to a point . . . but only up to a point. Here’s the strange thing: we all know these things matter but we all mess them up.”
NT Wright, “Preaching the Cross in Dark Times”
Dear Alex,
As I write now, the U.S. is teetering between hope and ”impending doom”, warning us about the possibility of a fourth pandemic wave. New cases are up, the sick bearing down, the young and yonder in years unified in mourning.
At work daily, I see their faces closeup mired in pain. The Good News feels distanced as do justice, love, spirituality, beauty, freedom, truth and power, our seven signposts lifting the human gaze to what seems like an inhumane God. Does Jesus care for us, for you even if we were to believe in His resurrection?
You cannot care about something or someone without believing in these signposts inherently pulling us up and out with our veins and sinews swinging to and fro, thrashing for answers in shadows and dead ends. If my life were solely outfitted to chase Happiness, supersized in capital letter for my pleasure, it would rush all the same as yours to our common end. In death we bury our differences. My tombstone may be fancier than yours, my leftovers shiny for recollection, but the fallacies of a life preserved in selfish ambitions cannot be embalmed as legacy. Our mortality makes me bow to the tyranny of time.
The Resurrection defies all ancient and modern beliefs, for us marked by the signposts to our final destiny. In real time, the cross is the precise point where God meets you and me in our fractured chambers and crystal balls, when our capacity for possibilities cave into statistics of bad news and mass shootings in parlors and parks. Out there these signposts diverge from our dreams to haunt us more as nightmares. The cross settles this paradox for us: by nature, we are hell-bent but purposed for paradise on earth, our hearts bound and saved by grace.
Such lofty language sounds like a psychedelic trance to those inattentive to the signposts. Listen again, perk up your brows, watch for the cross in our crossroads of daily living to experience for ourselves and with another why inhaling your next breath in this suffocating tunnel can become the reason to see light, not at the end, but through our end to Easter sunrise.
Yours, Kate
I have worked with seven such signposts. No doubt there are many more but these are central. The seven signposts I’ve worked with are Justice; Love; Spirituality; Beauty; Freedom; Truth; and Power. We all know these matter. Sometimes people try to ignore one or more of them but it usually comes back to bite you...
(...)
What do we do with these deep instincts? Many people have argued that they actually point us to God. The reason we instinctively love justice, value beauty, long for freedom, and so on is (some will say) that these are implanted in us by the God in whose image we are made. We can therefore argue from these instincts up to God himself. Now that is fine up to a point . . . but only up to a point. Here’s the strange thing: we all know these things matter but we all mess them up.”
NT Wright, “Preaching the Cross in Dark Times”
**********
Dear Alex,
As I write now, the U.S. is teetering between hope and ”impending doom”, warning us about the possibility of a fourth pandemic wave. New cases are up, the sick bearing down, the young and yonder in years unified in mourning.
At work daily, I see their faces closeup mired in pain. The Good News feels distanced as do justice, love, spirituality, beauty, freedom, truth and power, our seven signposts lifting the human gaze to what seems like an inhumane God. Does Jesus care for us, for you even if we were to believe in His resurrection?
You cannot care about something or someone without believing in these signposts inherently pulling us up and out with our veins and sinews swinging to and fro, thrashing for answers in shadows and dead ends. If my life were solely outfitted to chase Happiness, supersized in capital letter for my pleasure, it would rush all the same as yours to our common end. In death we bury our differences. My tombstone may be fancier than yours, my leftovers shiny for recollection, but the fallacies of a life preserved in selfish ambitions cannot be embalmed as legacy. Our mortality makes me bow to the tyranny of time.
The Resurrection defies all ancient and modern beliefs, for us marked by the signposts to our final destiny. In real time, the cross is the precise point where God meets you and me in our fractured chambers and crystal balls, when our capacity for possibilities cave into statistics of bad news and mass shootings in parlors and parks. Out there these signposts diverge from our dreams to haunt us more as nightmares. The cross settles this paradox for us: by nature, we are hell-bent but purposed for paradise on earth, our hearts bound and saved by grace.
Such lofty language sounds like a psychedelic trance to those inattentive to the signposts. Listen again, perk up your brows, watch for the cross in our crossroads of daily living to experience for ourselves and with another why inhaling your next breath in this suffocating tunnel can become the reason to see light, not at the end, but through our end to Easter sunrise.
Yours, Kate
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