BEYOND THE VISION OF THE POVERTY MENTALITY
10/01/21 16:05
In Australia people can spend all their lives as rusted on Labor or Liberal supporters. They claim good reasons for doing so and some reasons are certainly valid – if you belong to a certain sector of society.
THE CHALLENGE
There are others, the swinging voters who try to choose the best team of the times. This is difficult if many candidates are company hacks and none of them are blessed with ‘vision.’ Many are not in these times. Because of lack of vision, real leaders are few and many who vote for them are certain that their own ignorance is as good as informed opinion. Thus we have populism and the inane policies that go with ignorance.
NOT A RELIGION
Gordon Moyes observed that Christianity is not a religion but a person. He was right about that. Paul said it’s Christ in you. Christianity is not a religion. Except with many Christians it is. Our inheritance in Jesus following the cross is incarnation in which God comes to live in us.
The Kingdom is a person – the person of Jesus writ into the very being of the human race. That’s if we receive Him. We are no more the Body of Christ just because we wear the label Christian than gold is gold because the rock is yellow and shiny.
THE LAUDING OF STAGNATION
Richard Rohr has observed the appalling truth. The truth that, “Most people have not been offered a different mind, only different behaviours, beliefs, and belonging systems. These do not necessarily nourish us, much less transform us. But they invariably secure us and validate us where we already are.”
Such positions on their own stagnate us and make us dead men talking.
IN LIFE OR NOT
‘Where we already are.’ This is what counts with some believers - an attachment to some icons, to an identity that validates them and clothes them with an imagined status. Never mind that their ‘gospel’ is somewhat untrue or not a gospel at all. But a gross suffication of what Jesus accomplished. ‘Law gospels.’ I’m looking at you. Dispensing with the law is not a reason for sinning. It’s the living way of being righteous because Christ is expressed as you. Not as a religion but as your person.
FICTIONS AS FAITH
Some Believers live behind their wall of fictions, while casting themselves as liberals and thinkers and part of the intelligentsia. But they have adopted the reflexive habit of straining out anything contrary to the perspective they inherited from their parents and which for years has sapped them of spirit and life and undermined their identity as sons/daughters of God.
We can get into eternal life as sons of the slave woman. But we will not multiply divine life on the earth in our time in the body.
UN-BLESSED HOPE
“Non self-critical Christians are no more the hope of the world than non self-critical Muslims or Jews. There is often not much difference between different religions and political parties at the ego level — only the vocabulary, rituals, and conversation circles differ.” (2)
Such a realisation is reason for hope. Especially when Jesus urged us to REALISE. ‘Realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. This is the difference between ourselves as workers and ourselves as sons of God.
(1) Rohr, Richard. The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (p. 91). The Crossroad Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
(2) Rohr, Richard. Ibid. (p. 92). The Crossroad Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.