Love Perfected: Spiritual Insights From an Irish Poet

A few nights ago I was reading poetry with a very special lady friend of mine when she showed me a short story written by the 19th century Irish poet Oscar Wilde entitled The Nightingale and The Rose. There are many themes the reader can identify within this beautifully crafted narrative, but as I read it there was a very specific part that really tugged on my spirit. 

 As the reader nears the middle of the story, there is a line of dialogue where the tree that is talking to the nightingale explains that in order for the best rose to grow it requires the nightingale's lifeblood. True love is made perfect by death.

 This last part really hit me hard. I thought of how beautiful and sad this is, that true love means not just having the willingness to possibly sacrifice passionately and selflessly, but true love cannot even be true without the constant spirit of selfless, and at many times painful, sacrifice. 

I don't know why but I guess I feel that maybe this is something you might want to look at too.

 "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends" - Jesus (John 15:13 esv).

Click here to view Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose

A thought from the Beatitudes

"But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, so do to them" - Jesus, The Beatitudes (Luke 6:22-23).

Lately I have been reading through the Gospel of Luke, and as you can probably guess I have come to the Beatitudes. As I began reading through I was struck by how much I usually gloss over them. I mean, here are the actual words of God incarnate, and I skip over them as just something Jesus said on his way to the cross to give ME salvation. I am not trying to devalue the cross in any way, but I did realize that I do not take Jesus' actual words seriously enough in the here and now of life. This problem, I think, extends into the evangelical church at large.

A good example of this is, I think, would be the general attitude many (including myself) have had towards giving to the homeless. A common excuse for not giving money to the homeless goes something along the lines of "he'll just use it for alcohol", or "how do I know she won't just buy drugs?". But I think our attitude is all wrong. Christ says, "Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back". As I read this I am struck by how this runs contrary to the many of us in the west think and act. Jesus is showing us a way to live in which selflessness and humble giving are to be ruling principles, yet many of us in the church would balk at such a statement were it made today, and rule it out as "liberal tripe" or "the shallow Social Gospel of the left". We might say, "I have to work and I don't beg so its not fair or right for others to do so!" or "Why would I give up MY cash to a lazy beggar?!".  It seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong, that we listen more to the underlying philosophies of the enlightenment which stress our INDIVIDUAL rights, and we skip over these parts of the Gospel we claim to believe, which blatantly clash with our self -centered worldview. 

When I look at what Jesus said, did, and who he was I see someone who would be very unhappy with the western world and how we live our lives. I see him not just promoting or advocating, but commanding with heavenly authority to practice compassion, grace, and humility with totally lack of regard for the self and full regard for others. And when I see this I realize that I am guilty of not just disobeying, but flat out ignoring these commands. And I figure that just maybe many others in the western church may want to think about this too. . .

Everything Must Change: Jesus of My Suburbia

As I write this I am in beautiful Bakersfield, CA inside a brand new Starbucks coffee shop. For those who have been to Bakersfield you will get the sarcasm hahaha. This summer has presented me with a lot of opportunities to form out my thoughts with hands on experience. As a result, some things have come to light that I felt like throwing out on this blog, which sadly sits forgotten by its author for months at a time. So here it is!I am currently reading a book called Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope by

author Brian D. McLaren. This reading is on the tail of my finishing Tony Jones' The New Christians: Dispatches From the Emergent Frontier and Timothy Keller's The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. This reading list, set to the tune of Green Day's American Idiot album, has inspired quite the activist/revolutionary mood. I do not write out this list to bore, but to give some reference point to my current frame of mind and thinking. Ok. Back to McLaren. 

Let me say, I LOVE this book. It has already begun to stretch my mental framework, and I know it will continue to do so.  What I want to delve into is a specific part of Brian's book, namely the section dealing with the alternative emerging view of Jesus. When I first began this section I expected it to be a complete deconstructionist method with no real regard for scriptural integrity. Its not that I was accusing him of this, just that I could not see HOW he could back it up with any type of Biblical reference. As usual, the much more intelligent author proved me wrong. 

The section begins with Brian talking about the world's most pressing problems and how our modern western take on Jesus and his message has not only become domesticated, but domesticated into such a place that it actually gives credence and contributes to many of the global crisis we know face. This, I think, is an essential and vitally important realization that all Christians must at least examine with open hearts and minds. McLaren cites the typical end times eschatology of modern Christianity as a major cause of this domestication and deviation from the original Gospel message of the Kingdom of God. If we follow this line of reasoning, McLaren argues, the Gospel simply becomes about getting individual souls into a postmortem heaven, and encourages believers into complacency in the here and now, or into a sick kind of happiness when the world progresses towards destruction because who cares right? God is coming to destroy the earth anyways so if anything this human progress towards self destruction means that God can come back faster. Ok.

I will concede that this is a slight exaggeration onto what SOME Christians believe, but the sad truth is that this actually does represent the kind of subtle reasoning behind what drives much of the evangelical Gospel, at least in the more fundamentalist or even my own Southern Baptist roots. Here is the main thing I want to highlight. If we take the conventional view of Jesus and make the Gospel into ONLY about heaven, hell, and Jesus as a transcendent justifying sacrifice for our eternal destination, we are losing a great deal of what Jesus actually SAID. I am in no way saying that Jesus is not the savior of the World, or that we cannot be "saved" through justification by faith, only that the Gospel entails so much more. My friend Jim Grey, who pastors the church RegenerationLA explains how the central message of the Gospel, the Kingdom of God, cannot be divided and compartmentalized. He says that to Jesus, there was no separation between this life and the next. There is only the Kingdom of God. But this it seems, runs contrary to the way most modern Christians think of the Gospel. In fact, I am tempted to say that we, the average evangelical Christian, ignore or downplay a significant portion of the Gospel message and elevate other parts. It is common, in many evangelistic outreaches, to find people who think of Jesus as only a good teacher. We Christians would say that it is impossible, based on Jesus' own teachings to see him as ONLY a good moral teacher. I agree with this, yet it seems that at times we evangelicals are guilty of the opposite extreme as we relegate Jesus' "worldly wisdom" as somehow less important in the scheme of the Gospel message. It seems to me that when we make the Gospel solely about human salvation we are really just getting what benefits us without any real commitment to anything useful RIGHT NOW. McLaren would say that this leaves us with a Gospel more about Jesus rather than a Gospel message of Jesus. I think a both/and mentality needs to be applied in which we can have the Kingdom of God encompassing eternal salvation and the Kingdom now simultaneously. This rethinking may be uncomfortable, but we must realize that this rethinking is not new to the Church's history and should be welcomed with prayer and with the glory of God and his kingdom at the center.