Strangely Brilliant

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely brilliant,
In the light of His glory and grace.

I apologize to the hymnist for turning her poetry inside out. What Helen Lemmel penned was,

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim…

Her intent was to accentuate the unequaled beauty of Christ by casting all else in dull, muted tones. Fair enough.

But closeness to Jesus has mostly heightened my awareness of life’s beauty.

…Setting sunlight turning trees and trail to gold
…The glide of a canoe across a mountain lake at dawn
…An ancient marriage proposal sung in Gaelic
…Rhodies blooming
…The crack of a bat on a 98 mph fastball
…A full night of sleep
…The summertime incense of charcoal
…Saltwater and coconut oil
…Friendships rekindled

In my experience, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a baptism of all things into their intended glory.


Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

new things

“See, the former things have taken place,
and new things I declare;
before they spring into being
I announce them to you.” Isaiah 42:9, NIV


The way of faith is not static. Belief moves. God’s call, God’s song unfolds dynamically over time. It’s not a puzzle we solve. It is unfrozen.

Humans were not made for stasis; even our brains function best when we’re in motion. Scientist and author, John Medina, explains this phenomenon in his new book, Brain Rules.

Exercise increases oxygen flow into the brain, which reduces brain-bound free radicals. One of the most interesting findings of the past few decades is that an increase in oxygen is always accompanied by an uptick in mental sharpness.

Exercise acts directly on the molecular machinery of the brain itself. It increases neurons’ creation, survival, and resistance to damage and stress. http://www.brainrules.net/

Clearly, the interplay between physical and mental vitality is profound. I suggest spiritual vigor is integral to the same equation. Our place in creation isn’t merely decorative! We’re made to be played, saxophone-like, resonating with the Creator’s breath.

God reaches toward us from our not-yet and invites us to lean into his all-things-work-together-for-good. This is what it means to follow Jesus. This is why we aren’t interested in religion as usual. This is how we find ourselves flourishing at the edge of brand new things.


“We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God: those who are called according to His purpose.”
Romans 8:28 (Holman Christian Standard Bible)



Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

well woman (John chapter 4)

Jesus seemed willing to engage anyone in conversation, on any topic, at any time. He was extraordinarily skilled at speaking the hardest of truths with kindness and acceptance.

scarcity vs plenty (John 12:1-11)

What Mary did was scandalously extravagant, not to mention conspicuous. A fortune of fragrance emptied over a holy man’s feet…

Judas objected more from greed than charity, according to the narrator. Jesus told him there would never be a shortage of people needing help. And he affirmed Mary’s act as perfectly appropriate.

Mary’s gesture flowed from fearlessness. She didn’t budget her devotion against a bottom line of zero.

God’s economy is not based on scarcity. Mary’s gift wasn’t going to cheat the needy. Jesus was confident that his followers wouldn’t run out of resources necessary to their calling. God’s economy is predicated on plenty.


Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

John 12:1-11 (premeditation)

In the first part of John 12, the religious power brokers are so afraid of Jesus and Lazarus that they begin to plot their murders in earnest. Why? It makes sense that they’d be irate at Jesus for exposing the emptiness of their illusion. And I can see why they’d want to destroy the evidence, so to speak, by erasing the resurrected Lazarus from the scene.

But I don’t see how they could unequivocally dismiss the possibility that Jesus was telling (and living) the truth. How could they be so sold out to their own propaganda that they couldn’t see the sense-making beauty in what Jesus was saying and doing?

One of the reasons I’m so bothered by this riddle is my uneasy feeling that I could do the same thing. What am I guarding? What am I dismissing? What are the fears in me that skew my perceptions? Whose ideas am I ready to erase in order to protect my own?



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

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.

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.”

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.

Peace (& Humor)

Peace is elemental to Emotional Balance; in fact, it fundamentally impacts the health of the whole person.

“A heart at peace gives life to the body,
but envy rots the bones.” Proverbs 14:30 (NIV)

The ancient Hebrew idea of shalom connoted wholeness and well-being: physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual. It’s this sort of peace that Jesus promised his followers in John 14:27.

For me, one way of cultivating peace is to practice nonviolence: interior (toward my own soul), interpersonal (toward other souls), and environmental (toward creation’s soul).

And I’ve found that the power of Humor mustn’t be underestimated in these pursuits. Laughter is not a luxury; it’s impossible to engage the fullness of life without it.

Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

circus ride

The best circus rides are the ones that feel terrifyingly out of control, but are not -- the ones that have been engineered to be completely safe while simulating the sensation of impending disaster. We’ll pay good money for the thrill of careening toward annihilation, as long as the ride comes with a guarantee that all will turn out okay in the end.

Life doesn’t come with that sort of guarantee, of course. But according to Jesus, there is an Author who weaves our crazy fragments into a meaningful narrative. I need for this to be true. Daily, I re-surrender to the trueness of it.

Sometimes my world accelerates into the red zone, when my beliefs, my dreams, and my loves quake on the verge of disintegration. At those moments, I remind myself that all things fall into the hands of God -- nothing slips between those fingers, or spills over the edges. All things constellate meaningfully within the Creator’s cupped hands. And it will turn out okay in the end.

Trinity

The Trinity illuminates perfect relationality, showing the simultaneous, interpenetrating, and ongoing processes of communion and differentiation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit submerge within the One Triune God, and emerge as distinct, unique facets of the Trinity they create.

filtered

“We all have ideas, images of God that are untrue, which the Holy Spirit would remove if we would let Him. These are cultural and doctrinal traditions which have become ingrained in our minds. The power of Christ’s life is filtered and proportionally diminished by the number of these wrong images existing within us.”

Francis Frangipane

absence

“The great temptation of the ministry is to celebrate only the presence of Jesus while forgetting his absence. Often the minister is most concerned to make people glad and to create an atmosphere of ‘I’m okay, you’re okay.’ But in this way everything gets filled up and there is no empty space left for the affirmation of our basic lack of fulfillment. In this way the presence of Jesus is enforced without connection with his absence. Almost inevitably this leads to artificial joy and superficial happiness. […] If we deny the pain of his absence we will not be able to taste his sustaining presence either.”

Henri Nouwen
From The Living Reminder

Lawn and Garden Care

An ideal lawn is completely uniform. The grass is one height, one texture, and one shade of green. Needless to say, weeds, moss, and wildflowers have no business there. It would never be confused with the wild; it is set apart from nature. It covers a clearly defined area like a cool, green carpet.

A garden, on the other hand, celebrates variety. It is home to an assortment of plants, each with its own needs and qualities. Deciduous, evergreen, creeping, climbing, twiggy, bushy, leafy, shade-loving, sun-craving, drought-resistant, frost-sensitive, hardy, showy, modest, etc… It is a place for wildly diverse expressions of planthood.

The ideal garden is a seamless, living truce between the tame and the wild – between humans and nature. Lawns, on the other hand, are human creations; nature has only a limited role with them. A proper lawn can’t exist without a lawnmower. Conversely, the thought of mowing a garden is as ludicrous as it is disturbing!

Is the church more like a lawn or a garden? It’s easier to manage a large group of people if their maintenance can be standardized. The same watering regimen, the same fertilizer and the same dose of weed-killer work for everyone. Measuring progress is far less complicated if the target is conformity to one standard.

Sameness isn’t holiness, though. Our challenge is to bring ourselves into alignment with Christ’s image, not conform to someone’s notion of the ideal Christian. It will require a host of believers, each reflecting Christ’s image according to their own unique styles, to even begin to express the vast loveliness of Jesus.

In my opinion, the Creator wants a garden. Jesus interacted with people in all sorts of ways; his approaches were as diverse as the people themselves were. The only group he tended to address in broad, generalized terms was the group that wanted to mow humanity: the religious elite. But it is obvious that his true passion was for individuals. He engaged people creatively and uniquely; he delighted in discovering and illuminating each person’s interior.

A lawn church is fertilized and weeded with a toxic concoction of religion and subculture. Legalism is its lawnmower. It is artificially sustained, separate from both God’s kingdom and the world.

Conversely, the garden church celebrates variety. It is home to assorted humans with assorted needs and qualities. Some are colorful, some muted – some kinetic, some reserved – some produce spiritual fruit continually, while some require seasons of rest after harvests. Some are as fussy as roses; some are as hardy (and occasionally as invasive…) as weeds. Some are as strong as trees, and some cling like vines. Some announce their yield of fruit with showy blossoms, and others bear their fruit invisibly underground. The garden church is a place for wildly diverse expressions of the human faith-journey.

Eucatastrosphere

The twin piercings of humanness are the Incarnation & Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. One interrupts human life; the other, human death.

According to J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.

Tolkien created the term eucatastrophe to fill a hole in the English lexicon. It’s meant to convey the notion that God has planted a seed of infinitely concentrated joy in the soil of human existence. It is a potent goodness, always becoming thinkable, visible, tangible through people saying yes to the Spirit.

The-way-things-ought-to-be exploding redemptively outward into the void of the-way-things-ought-not-to-be like a Big Bang of meaning, beauty, honor, grace...

The space created by this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the Kingdom of God. Building upon Tolkien’s word, I've started thinking of it as the Eucatastrosphere -- a soul-scape shaped in the ripples of divine interruption...

TOE

That's "term of endearment", which is how I feel about Mr. Buzzkill. I am grateful that James' letter made it into the New Testament canon (it was touch and go for a while, you know).

I recently learned (from the intro in my J.B. Phillips Translation) that the Book of James is conceptually linked to the Beatitudes. Of all the NT epistles, it is arguably the one most directly distilled from the words of Jesus.

the p-word

Is patience a tiresome drudgery to which we subject ourselves only to secure a privilege or payday of some sort?

Is it more or less a chore -- on par with bill-paying, clock-punching, gutter-cleaning, dog-bathing, etc.?

Or is patience, in and of itself, a sweet thing?
Is it a component of personal formation?
Is it a change agent?

[Do you find yourself exercising an inordinate amount of patience just reading through this blog entry?]

Patience seems to be a critical attribute of presence -- the art of being where I am... of feeling the feelings of my life... of becoming present. To me, this is one of the most remarkable things about Jesus. It's a characteristic of his that I long to emulate.

Decipher

I currently have a crush on the word decipher because of the fetching poetry of its etymology.

cipher = zero; therefore, decipher = de:zero making nothing into not-nothing un-nothing-ing nothing

Here’s the thing: we communicate via symbols and gestures encoded with meanings. Until decoded (deciphered), our symbols and gestures are null and void of meaning. Zero communication occurs.*

The Jesus Story deciphers the Creator-Created relationship (which is arguably at the heart of human meaning).

Maybe the life of faith boils down to inhabiting the deconstruction of meaninglessness.

Go into all the world and decipher...

*[The continua of coding/decoding accuracy/inaccuracy would be a tantalizing tangent to explore...]