October 2014

Discipline for Our Own Good

1 Comment / GAPJC Decisions, It All Started in the Garden, PCUSA, Personal, Spiritual Disciplines / By /

Quite often I find myself asking the question, “How did things get this way?” particularly in reference to my tribe, the PC(USA), but also to the culture developing around us all. It is safe to say that we are shaped over time, individually and corporately. The way things are now is the result of decades of shaping mechanisms at work in and among us. You could say the same for any culture anywhere in the world, but my experience limits my thinking to American culture. This weekend I had a chance to air my brains out as I breathed in […]

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Is There Anything “New” under the Sun?—Part II

2 Comments / It All Started in the Garden, PCUSA, Sermon on the Mount, Spiritual Disciplines, The Missional Church, Theological Reflection / By /

Yesterday we considered the human drive toward newness. The writer of Ecclesiastes helped us to see that “under the sun,” that is, in the realm of purely human experience, there is nothing really new. People think they’ve found something new to entertain, feed an addiction, or eat; but chances are pretty good that even a primitive form of that thing has been around for a very long time. To this restless searching, God—through the voice of Isaiah—asks the pertinent question: Why do we waste our money on stuff that does not satisfy (53:2)? God implanted in human DNA a yearning

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Is There Anything “New” under the Sun?—Part I

6 Comments / Death & Dying, It All Started in the Garden, PCUSA, Spiritual Disciplines, Teaching, Theological Reflection / By /

[Got sidetracked yesterday, first with Jury Duty and then with the Giants-Pirates wildcard match-up last night. Okay, I am back in focus!] In my last post, I suggested that just because something is new or experimental, it does not necessarily follow that it is good or orthodox. The catalyst for my comments was an “outside the box” worship service conducted during the last meeting of San Francisco Presbytery.  It makes sense now to explore whether the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and other historic mainline denominations have fallen off the deep end in their efforts to try something new. The motivation, it

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