Posts Tagged: "Richard Rohr"

Dancing In The Wind

What follows is the manuscript of my sermon – the first in a new series entitled, “Stretchy, Not Sketchy: Honest Conversations About Faith,” in which I attempt to make the case for a vibrant, living, growing faith that is flexible rather than being fundamentalist (rigid, inflexible). The video of the sermon is also available to watch online here.

Finally – after an entire Summer in the Psalms, we have arrived in a new series!

 The title of my sermon today is, “Dancing In the Wind.”

Have you been watching footage from the gulf coast of Florida?

Our family vacationed there a year ago in Saint Petersburg.

st petersburg vacay photo for post

We had a little thunder-and-lightening rain storm that lasted a couple of hours—it was beautiful and spectacular and completely innocuous—fun to watch, no harm, no foul.

But what we see from Hurricane Ian is, in many places, devastatingly destructive.

Roads and bridges destroyed, homes demolished, debris and twisted metal strewn everywhere.

Meyers Beach for post hurricane ian road destroyed for post hurricane ian destruction

Something that struck me was how often the palm trees remained in place, just looking like their hair had been tousled a bit. They had been dancing in the wind, created to withstand hurricanes and storm surge flooding.

I think this provides us with a worthy word picture of the kind of faith we truly want…

One that bends, but does not break. One that is flexible, rather than fragile. One that is planted, rooted, and established. One what can withstand the floods and winds of our time without snapping or worse, dying.

In fact, we see this word picture used in Scripture repeatedly. I think of the first chapter of the book of Psalms which says, God’s people are to be like…

They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In everything, they thrive. (Psalm 1.3)

I want to have the kind of faith that is capable of withstanding the heat and will not wither away, the kind of faith that in everything thrown its way… it thrives.

Art Clokey, the American pioneer in the popularization of stop-motion clay animation is best known as the creator of the character Gumby and… Read More

Most Of Us Have To Hit Some Kind Of Bottom Before We Can Even Start The Real Spiritual Journey

From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward

God must say after each failure of ours, “Oh, here is a great opportunity! Let’s see how we can work with this!”

After our ego-inflating successes, God surely says, “Well, nothing new or good is going to happen here!”

Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. Success is just the opposite. Communities and commitment can form around suffering much more than around how wonderful or superior we are. Just compare the… Read More

14 Good & Bad Stains 2014 Left On Me

*note: The picture above was taken through the window of my room at the Los Angeles Dream Center from our recent trip with a crew from NWLife – serving for a week there.

I’m so ready for 2015.

This year—while it wasn’t all bad—certainly had more than it’s fair share of bad news. I’ve felt like 2014 has refused to go out quietly or peacefully. It all reminds me of the opening lines from Jesus Walks by Kanye West…

Yo, we at war. We at war with terrorism, racism, and most of all we at war with ourselves.

As I reflect on 2014, I’m struck by a number of things that left their mark on me. So here they are: 14 Good & Bad Stains 2014 Left On Me… Read More

Jesus Had No Trouble With The Exceptions

The picture above is of the flowering cereus that blooms at night. The flowers are short lived, and some of these species bloom only once a year—for a single night.

The following are quotes from Richard Rohr‘s book Falling Upward

*    *    *    *

Our daily experience of this world is almost nothing like Plato’s world of universal and perfect forms and ideas; it is always filled with huge diversity, and variations on every theme from neutrino light inside of darkness, to male seahorses that bear their young, to the most extraordinary flowers that only open at night for no one to see.

Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were… Read More

Shadow Work

First, let me start with something light and funny.

I received the following e-mail from Andy Jones the other day:

“Working on some Celebrate Recovery stuff and came across these self evaluation questions…

Have you exaggerated yourself to make yourself look better?  In what areas of your past have you used false humility?

Hahahahahahahahahaha

All pastors.”

*      *      *      *

Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward, talks about the need to do “shadow work.” The following are quotes from chapter 11 – The Shadowlands…

Your shadow self… gradually detaches you from your not-so-bright persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life.

Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.”

It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.

Persona and shadow are correlative terms.

Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.

The more you have cultivated and protected a chosen persona, the more shadow… Read More

Will We Go The World’s Way Or Another Way?

We’ve been invited to participate in the Kingdom of God—right here, right now. This isn’t one of those “mark your calendar” invitations for a future date.

There is a default kingdom we have been experiencing and functioning in for our entire lives… the kingdom of the world. It has its perspectives, its attitudes, its practices, its methods – it’s ways. Because we have spent our lives deep inside the kingdom of the world, its ways come naturally to us.

Richard Rohr, in his book Breathing Underwater, said, “Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often have been given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I’m afraid.”

The drift towards default – the kingdom of the world and its ways – is more widespread in American Christianity than we realize. There is much that falls under the label “Christian” that doesn’t look like the Kingdom of God at all—but instead looks exactly like the kingdom of the world.

There is, however, another way. A different and better way. The Kingdom of God way.

The Kingdom of God doesn’t have the same… Read More

Richer Is Always Better

When I was in first grade, one of the kids in my class told me how girls get pregnant. Before this, I hadn’t given it much thought. But now I knew the facts of life because Steven explained them to me. Here’s what he said:

If you look at a girl’s belly button, she’ll get pregnant.

I took it as a warning. And for a while, I was pretty concerned that I might accidentally see a girl’s belly button and get her pregnant… Read More