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Wondering Pilgrim

~ the ramblings of a perambulent and often distracted sojourner

Wondering Pilgrim

Tag Archives: sermon on the mount

Compassion – a “spiritual technology”…

18 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Ministry, Personal, Spirituality

≈ 1 Comment

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compassion, Krista Tippett, postaday2011, sermon on the mount, TED.com

Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with compassion | Video on TED.com.

Compassion has become a cliché through overuse and overexposure, contends journalist Krista Tippett. With story and lateral thinking, she explores new ways to reclaim and implement a sorely needed collective value. By linking it with everyday expressions such as “kindness,” “curiosity without assumption” and “beauty”, she invites us to reinvest in and reinvigourate a core component of being human. She wants to marry creativity with compassion in a “spiritual technology.”

Worth a listen if you are contemplating the climax of this week’s lection in Matthew 5:28-38 “Be perfect, therefore, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (rendered by Luke 6:36 as “Be merciful (compassionate) even as your Father is merciful (compassionate.”)).

[Memo to the pedantic: the contextual and theological relationship between the words “perfect” (teleos), and mercy/compassion (to yield, give way, commiserate, put yourself in place of the other) is defendable]

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Turning the other cheek is not for sissies

17 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Ministry, Personal, Spirituality

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postaday2011, sermon on the mount

Yep – it’s up for preachin’ this Sunday (Matthew 5:28-38)

Turn the the other cheek to the one who strikes you, give your cloak also to the one who sues you for your coat, go the extra mile. What’s the rationale?

According to Walter Wink:

Turn your cheek, thus indicating to the one who backhands you that his attempts to shame you into servility have failed. Strip naked and parade out of court, thus taking the momentum of the law and the whole debt economy and flipping them, jiu-jitsu like, in a burlesque of legality. Walk a second mile, surprising the occupation troops with a sudden challenge to their control. (Walter Wink, “Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination [Menneapolis, Fortress Press, 1992])

Sounds like roses on tanks in Manila, grandmas kissing soldiers in Tahrir square and asylum seeking detainees in Darwin passing the hat around for Queensland’s flood victims.
Sounds like creative and compassionate responses by the powerless to those who would wield power.

Is this what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like?

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Quizzing the Sermon on the Mount

03 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Ministry, Personal, theology

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light of the world?, postaday2011, salt of the earth, sermon on the mount

Jesus looks over the crowd and declares “You are the salt of the earth…You are the light of the world…”
How did he know? What did he see in the disparate mob gathered there? Fisherfolk, tax collector, tenant farmer – the curious, the cynic and the desperado.
Was he declaring what was already innate or something that was yet to be? Or both?

Answers gladly received as I prepare Matthew 5:13-20 for Sunday’s harangue.

-31.911079 115.772731

Would the Beatitudes work in Egypt?

28 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

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beatitudes, Egypt, Kingdom of Heaven, postaday2011, sermon on the mount

The famous opening lines of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount come up this Sunday. (Matthew 5:1-12).

Contextually, they form the foundation of the manifesto for “the Kingdom of Heaven” that is at hand and announced successively by John the Baptist and Jesus. More contemporary language might replace “Kingdom” terms with the “all-pervading consciousness of the presence of God” that begins within one’s self and one’s community and begins to transform the world in ever increasing circles.

Jesus begins his movement of raising this new but continuous phase of God-awareness in Galilee’s lake district amongst the indentured fishing industry. His appeal is largely to crowds dependent on subsistence economy.

Consequently the Beatitudes are not a summons to behaving in a particular way, as religious leaders of the time may have urged, but a recognition and affirmation  of the poor circumstances in which the peasantry of Galilee lived and the call to a new orientation of how they perceived their circumstances – not as victims of Herod’s oriental hierarchy in collusion with the heavy footed might of Rome, but as God-cherished denizens of a new society operating to selfless yet self-affirming standards of behaviour. These principles will be outlined further as the Sermon unfolds.

Food for thought as the Middle East experiences uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon against systems of rule widely perceived as tyrannical. One might be tempted to ponder how the orientation of the Beatitudes might apply in such circumstances (getting past the fact that many within the crowds are calling for the Islamification of government rule). One recalls the tremendous show of solidarity by the Egyptian populace with the beleaguered Coptic community in the wake of the New Year bombing in Alexandria. However, the call is to recognise the proximity of the Kingdom of Heaven to us. We can only respond from ourselves and not the distant neighbour, no matter how closely we hold them. This response however, ultimately embraces all. See a previous post on how prayer works.

Still pondering, but this is a start!

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Wondering about Wisdom

27 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Ministry, Personal, Spirituality, theology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

beatitudes, postaday2011, sermon on the mount, wisdom

For my edification, I am reading Stephen S Hall, Wisdom: from philosophy to neuroscience.(University of Queensland Press, 2010).

As a science writer, the author is particularly keen to explore potential new insights provided by the emerging neurosciences without jettisoning  more conventional understandings of wisdom. In fact, he conjectures, wisdom is a phenomenon that cannot really be grasped without standing back and appreciating the multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, multi-faceted contributions of generations of human existence. One early observation, however, is that it is most often conveyed, not in the rarefied atmosphere of academia or sanctum, but among and within the human population at large.

Without daring to deign a definition, he does lay out some tentative principles associated with wise behaviour before launching into his investigation:

  • wisdom requires an experience-based knowledge of the world
  • wisdom requires mental focus, reflecting the ability to analyse and discern the most important aspects of acquired knowledge on a case by case basis.
  • wisdom requires mediating between conflicting inputs of emotion and reason, self-interest and social interest, instant rewards and future gains
  • wisdom expresses itself through a social vocabulary of interactive behaviour
  • wisdom is marked by a fundamental sense of justice and commitment to social well-being beyond the self
  • wisdom is able to defer immediate self-gratification to achieve the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.
Not a bad check list! We’ll see how it unfolds. Right now I would like to line it up alongside the text of the Beatitudes which comes up this Sunday. This text opens the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s distillation of the teaching (and the wisdom) of Jesus. Hall’s book provides an opening for discourse between wisdom anciently and newly discerned.
Incidentally, Stephen Hall blogs on wisdom right here.
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