Thought for the Day

From the article "God With Us (and Them)" written by David Dark, in the May/June 2006 issue of Books & Culture:

"There are people, from time to time, who try to live, from time to time, as if Jesus is risen. There is a grace-informed consciousness at work in the world, and it infects the way people think about and talk about rednecks, racists, terrorists, primitives, liberals, and conservatives. This consciousness of the gospel of the coming kingdom is simultaneously no respecter of persons and perhaps the only respecter of persons. This gospel is never at our command, under our copyright, or effectively contained within an -ism, or ideology, or any well-intentioned human construction. Or, to put it another way, no one has successfuly gotten this Jesus. The question is always whether or not Jesus' rare ethos has gotten hold of us.

"Until I became familiar with the likes of the Jesuits and a sense of Christianity as a discernible movement, an alternative lifestyle, within history, I was tempted to view God-language as if it were capital at my disposal. I had yet to properly understand the call to confession, the call to number myself among the not-so-deeply-converted multitudes who can be helped only by forgiveness and more forgiveness. If we view ourselves as learners, rather than knowers or possessors, of the loving way of the Lord and as largely unwilling initiates of a kingdom coming (on Earth as it is in Heaven) to an often horribly hateful world of which we are a part, we might learn a habitual hopefulness concerning human flesh and blood and a redemptive skepticism concerning the systems, structures, and bad ideas that subtly excuse the loss of some human lives as somehow inevitable, necessary, or, as the saying goes, 'worth it.'"