Pine

Pine indoors
Spirit of evergreen
Fragrance of nostalgia
Pining for simpler Christmases



Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

neighborliness

My friend Doug knows what it means to be a good neighbor. He came over at 9:00 a couple nights ago to help me install a new dishwasher. We got a late start because we’d each had very long workdays.

The installation didn’t follow the script. (Do they ever, I wonder?). It was impossible to discern which breaker the electrical was wired to so we turned them all off. Of course, that meant doing much of the job by flashlight.

The not-so-helpful instructions estimated the job should take between one and three hours. Doug left our house at 1:00 in the morning. He was still smiling. Perhaps even more striking was the utter absence of profanity! That’s a good neighbor. In fact, for those four hours at least, I’d say Doug’s neighborliness bordered on the saintly.

Grace arrives in many forms. I’ve found, though, that it usually involves a palpably personal and relational element. Grace usually entails somebody choosing to be available as its conduit.



Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

Thanksgiving Blessing

Even as we express our gratitude for God’s good gifts,
We receive the gift of gratitude itself;
Pressed down and overflowing.

Let us seek the way of pure kindness…
In the name of the Father.

Let us shut the door on anxiety…
In the name of Jesus.

Let us remember beauty…
In the name of the Holy Spirit.

Even as we express our gratitude for God’s good gifts,
We receive the gift of gratitude itself;
Pressed down and overflowing…
Pressed down and overflowing.

Amen

consumerism

"Consumerism is an all-consuming attitude"
Rodney Clapp

controversy

Jesus used controversy to engage the religious elite. It’s odd that some of us who aspire to follow Jesus sometimes (often?) fall into the same sort of closed-system thought that afflicted the Pharisees. Perhaps paradoxically, following Jesus involves an ongoing openness to changing ones own current opinions about what it means to follow Jesus!

overcoming unfaith

In the 9th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, a helpless father desperately implores Jesus to rescue his son. He stands uneasily yet candidly at the crossroads of belief and unbelief. Jesus meets him there.

This kind of faith is not an unquestioning allegiance to ideology. It isn’t reflected in bumper-sticker quips like, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

The simple, soulful confession of this kind of faith is, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” This kind of faith exhibits the virtue of skepticism.

In the field of philosophy there are (at least…) two types of skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian. Academic skepticism asserts the impossibility of truly knowing anything. Its fatal flaw is its own logic: i.e., How can we truly know that it is impossible to truly know anything?

But Pyrrhonian skepticism accommodates an open-minded pursuit of truth. It acknowledges the severe difficulty of apprehending ultimate knowledge while allowing the possibility of knowing truly.

“Christian faith in God is not a naïve basic truth. It is unfaith that has been overcome” Jurgen Moltmann


Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

thriving church

“The thriving church grows because growth is never its primary purpose. Mission is its primary purpose. Increasing participation and membership is a side effect – but it is an inevitable side effect. In the universal yearning for self-worth, inner meaning, and a noble destiny, people always discover that it is far more meaningful actively to give life away to the world, than passively to preserve life within the institution.”

Thomas G. Bandy from Kicking Habits

word and voice

I've been spending some time in John's Gospel lately. I love that book. In the first chapter, Jesus is The Word and John the Baptizer is The Voice. Clearly, it is a book about communication.

leadership

"If the Spirit of God is amongst the people of God then the role of leadership is not command and control, nor is the role of leadership to come up with the right plan. The role of leadership is to create the table… to cultivate the environments… to call into being the spaces where the people of God can begin to dream and imagine and experiment. And that’s not a […] program; it’s a way of life."

Dr. Alan Roxburgh

convert versus converse

There’s such a small difference in letters between convert and converse – between conversion and conversation. But their meanings diverge substantially. I have nothing against conversion, per se, except when someone tries to do it to me. It morphs into something more like coercion. I don’t like that at all. But engage me in a real conversation and there’s a chance that you might convert me to your way of thinking. I like conversation.

astonished

"Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished by it" Thomas Merton (from Opening the Bible)

my soulscape thrums

There are moments
when my soulscape
thrums with jazz and banter
…pulses with brushstrokes and light

And then cuts abruptly
to a vacant soundstage
mute as ash
held like a breath
…pending and panicked

At such times my beliefs
like unemployed actors
must again audition
for their roles
in the script I hold

They are fragile and insecure
It is a wearisome business

But you are singing under a streetlamp
tambourine in hand
refusing to learn your lines
confronting me with hilarity
…reanimating the mundane


Copyright Scott Burnett 2007

harmony

"The outward harmony that we desire between our economy and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own hearts and the originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit as near us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the measure of this obsessively measuring age. We can grow good wheat and grow good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone."
Wendell Berry

practice

"A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life."
Wendell Berry

inimitable

"Almost any other apologetic for the Christian faith can be memorized, rehearsed, and delivered without effect except the apologetic of love. Love, which of its essence seeks only the good of others and is willing to pay the high price of self-forgetfulness is a product that is hard to imitate or counterfeit."

John Powell, S.J.

church perspective (Mayhew)

"The church is not an institution 'out there', which I support. It is the community that enfolds and identifies who I am as an individual."

Ray Mayhew

lead with kindness

I keep trying to set down my impulses to co-opt God’s voice into my power plays. I would much prefer to lead with kindness. (I mean "lead" in the sense of putting that foot forward...) Through kindness, we help humanize one another. When we leverage behavior, affection, support, and so on… out of one another with tools like triangling, we have to ignore or deny human dignity. That’s not good.

present

"...hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present..."

Henri Nouwen

Palm Sunday

Today is Palm Sunday. Every year on this day I think of how amazing it is that Jesus was willing to receive the praises of people he knew didn’t get it. They were excited about an illusion: specifically, that Jesus was going to hit the scene like a holy tornado and kick Rome’s ass. When that illusion evaporated they sold out their new Messiah in a heartbeat.

Neither their illusion nor their disillusionment was a surprise to Jesus. But he inhabited the hosannas nonetheless. This is a big relief to me because my praises are shabby and misdirected too. I bring all sorts of illusions and disillusionments into worship, and Jesus just draws a bigger circle around it. He says, “We can work with that.”

Haiku for Lent

Son of the Maker
Brother in blood, bone, and skin
Generously spent

humble

“I am humble not because I want to be agreeable. I don’t accept being humble for tactical reasons. I am humble because I am incomplete. Just because of that. This is not because I need people to love me, though I need that people love me, but I don’t have to make any kind of trap for the love. Do you see?”
Paulo Freire

about the soul

My long-time friend, Dan Miller, left this as a comment on one of my other blogs, burnettstories.

"It's all about the soul. Jesus understood this. James Brown understood this. In fact, every writer, poet, musician, evangelist, educator, philanthropist and motivator who finds success understands that the soul is the foundation from which vibrant life begins."

I thought it was so nicely put that it warranted the light of day -- or at least the light of a cathode ray screen.

justice

"When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

perichoresis

The model of relationships portrayed by the trinitarian dogma is neither hierarchical nor authoritarian. The relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not subordinationist, but – to use the technical term – perichoretic: God is essentially a dynamic communion of equally and mutually shared love. And this fact implies social impetus. Being made in the image of God calls for ethical and social consequences, it nurtures the spirit of solidarity. Of course, these consequences cannot be simply, mechanically transferred to the areas of human relationships. But they lead, or should lead, the confessor’s heart in an unambiguous direction – toward guarding the faith in the communion of creative love.

Jan Milic Lochman

inexcusable

C.S. Lewis has made the excellent point that there is a huge difference between forgiving and excusing; in fact, he says they might be opposites. His view was that once the excusable elements have been subracted from the equation, i.e. after the offense has been reduced down to the inexcusable, that’s the part that needs forgiveness.

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” C.S. Lewis
(Essay On Forgiveness – Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., N.Y. 1960)

God Sings

“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17, NIV

This little segment of ancient poetry is dense with mystical imagery. The first sentence states God’s nearness, potency, and liberation. The second sentence is a three-dimensional portrait of a shockingly good God.

Delight: There is an unshakable assurance of all-is-well in the notion that my Creator is happy with me. It forms a supremely livable world.

Quiet: I am a noisy-souled man and I live in a world of noise. Love brings peace and sorts the cacophony into intelligibility.

Music: Divine delight manifests in spontaneous melodic improvisation. Aesthetic order emerges in the sounds of everyday life. A key puzzle piece of my theology is that God sings.


Copyright Scott Burnett 2006