Emancipator

This is song is so beautiful

As is this

The album is called “Safe in the Steep Cliffs” and you can listen here.

Letting go and leaving

Eugene Peterson reflects on the biblical story of Abraham:

Habits of relinquishment became deeply ingrained in Abraham. They become deeply ingrained in us as we read. Leaving Ur and Haran, leaving Shechem and Bethel, leaving Egypt and Gerar, leaving Beersheba. Leaving, leaving, leaving. But every leaving was also a lightening of the self, a further cleansing of the toxin of acquisition. A life of getting was slowly but surely replaced by a life of receiving… being transformed into a life that abandons self-sovereignty and embraces God-sovereignty…

In the process of leaving behind, Abraham became more, gradually but certainly realizing that relinquishment is prerequisite to fulfillment, that letting go of a cramped self-will opened up to an expansive God-willed life. Faith…

Every time Abraham left one place, the road lengthened and the landscape widened (Peterson 2007:50).

Leaving, leaving, leaving. Always a different place to go, “each time, hoping the next leap will be the leap home.”

Sometimes its exciting. You’ve caught a glimpse of what you’re moving into and you walk forward confidently, with great hope and expectation. Sometimes it feels much more like a sacrifice. You’re leaving home, instead of going home, and your heart is breaking.

Each time is a matter of trust; that you can let go of what needs to be left behind; that the road will lengthen and the landscape will widen as you walk forward; that the Father knows best.

Of course, letting go and leaving isn’t necessarily about physically moving away. There are certain points in our lives we are asked to make a sacrifice, build an altar, let something go as a form of worship. It’s a healthy cleansing from the ‘toxin of acquisition’ that so easily builds up in us.

It’s also a very good test for our hearts, which are “deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17:9). Are we trusting in God, or are we just using him like a consumer to get our own way?

As for Abraham,

Sacrifice was the motif by which he had lived for years, the letting go, the leaving behind, the travelling light. Faith, repeatedly tested by sacrifice, was a way of life for Abraham. Each sacrifice left him with less and less of self and more of God. Each sacrifice abandoned something of self on an altar from which he traveled onwards with more vision, more promise, more Presence (Peterson 2007:58).

The command to sacrifice Isaac on the altar seems strange to us, terrifying, even. But Peterson suggests this is maybe not so for Abraham.

By now he has lived a history in which God has provided for him in unanticipated, unexpected ways. Maybe by now his is used to living trustingly in the seemingly absurd, that which he could not anticipate, that which is beyond his imagining (Peterson 2007:58).

There are so many times we simply can’t see. We don’t understand and cannot even begin to imagine what God might be doing in this moment. But “If a man or woman is called of God, it does not matter how untoward circumstances are, every force that has been at work will tell for God’s purpose in the end” (Oswald Chambers).

And we can be assured that “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13).

Why “growing up” has failed us.

Dr Tom Wright recently spoke on Radio 4′s Today Programme, about “the long failure of the enlightenment project.” He argues that this seventeenth century idea that we have all really grown up now and figured out the way the world works grossly underestimates the power of humans to mess things up, to sin.

The problem is, when we think we can know the world only through the measurable, the observable and the explainable, we end up thinking we can rationalize our existence without God. When science becomes our dominant epistemology, our understanding becomes narrow. And we limit the options we have to deal with the epidemic of sin and all its multitudinous consequences. As Dr Wright suggests, we think that “implementing a few more interesting social policies” is all we really need to do and everything will turn out fine. We don’t have to look very far to see that things are not turning out fine at all.

The Guardian‘s Andrew Brown, responding to Wright’s speech, acknowledges this and even though he doesn’t wholly agree with Wright, makes an interesting point:

Still, the problem remains. How do we make the new and better people to inhabit our new and better world? …that, I think, does require some set of ideas, symbols and stories around which society can unite, and which collectively form a drama in which we all take part.

There is a reason Christianity is mediated to us in story and song, poetry and history, creation and sacrament and each other. These ways of communicating don’t ignore our intellect, but speak into something deeper than the mind. They draw us into that “collective drama” in which we can participate. They inform our hearts and imaginations and teach us what to love so we can become those “new and better people” the world so desperately needs because, as James K. A. Smith points out, “our primordial orientation to the world is not knowledge, or even belief, but love” (2009:46).

Love it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
There is a design, an alignment, a cry
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be (Mumford & Sons “Sigh No More”)

This is why Jesus said we need to become like little children, and why our attempts to grow up out of this condition for entering God’s kingdom have not served us well. When we can rationalize God out of the world all we are left with is our sorry selves, who have been “lost ever since we left Eden, wandering around looking for home, and getting mighty dirty in the process” (Peterson 2007:136). We’ve squandered the keys to the kingdom and no amount of intellectual reasoning can bring them back.

The only way out of the mess, the only way home, is Jesus.

It seems that all my bridges have been burned,
But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart,
But the welcome I receive with the restart (Mumford & Sons “Roll Away Your Stone”)

Related Articles

• Bishop Tom vs the Enlightenment | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)

Rain: plain depressing or oddly comforting?

Plain depressing…

It’s been pouring for three weeks straight.

The bottoms of your jeans are constantly wet.

Memories of the day you slipped on the wet path and grazed yourself in all manner of places come flooding back.

Your hair gets all frizzy.

The flooding never seems to end.

Oddly comforting…

The rain sings you a lullaby while you’re all snuggled up cozy in bed.

Lights reflect in the water on the road.

The weather seems appropriate to your mood.

You are reminded how it felt to be walking back from school in the rain as a child.

The atmosphere smells like home.

Awake my soul, Mumford & Sons

“Where you invest your love, you invest your life…”