The View from the West Mesa

Recently I stumbled upon a presentation by the organizational leadership training office of a major entertainment corporation. The point of the presentation was essentially how to get all your employees on board with operational priorities and standards. The priorities of the corporation were presented as: Safety Courtesy Show Efficiency The presenters went to great lengths to make it clear that these were not a list of values (there’s nothing here about human life, or integrity, or anything similar), but were a decision making tool.  These are not just a list of random items, but are given in order so that the higher something is on the list, the more inviolable it is. For instance, courtesy is the second on the list and the corporation always wants to be courteous to its customers – unless safety is involved. If someone is in danger of being hurt, it is acceptable to be reasonably discourteous to a customer. Otherwise, courtesy is more important than efficiency in doing one...

The gospel, Matthew tells us is at least in part that Jesus came to save his people from their sins. In most Evangelical circles this is the case and it is interpreted as a legal or juridical saving. Essentially, people have sins and the payment for those sins is Jesus's coming and eventual death. Pretty short-sighted if you ask me. The context of verse 21 is the promise and directives to Joseph about what God is up to, and Joseph's responsibilities in that working. For some reason, we miss the connection between this statement and the prophecy on which it is based. That prophecy, according to Matthew, does not use the name Jesus, but Immanuel. The implication is that Jesus will save his people from their sins by being God With Us. God has decided it was time to live with his people, and in so doing restore (save) them to full communion with himself. Being saved from sins has a number of connotations including the strictly juridical one. While it is true that we are "save...

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...

The preacher this morning read a Facebook post from Anne Rice in which she says that she's quitting Christianity. Not God, not Jesus, just the troublesome, overly structured, overly restrictive, and often bigoted institution called Christianity. Well Anne, welcome to the club. In another Facebook post, Anne says she doesn't want to be anti-[fill in your favorite political hot potato] and apparently she thinks that at least some form of Christianity requires that she be anti-something. And she's right. Some otherwise fine Baptists apparently have no trouble telling the world that "God hates fags," and some Catholics don't think Protestants have a prayer. We could go on. In my little denomination we have folks who are against any number of things and expect the rest of us to go along with them. The problem is that from my perspective, they're out to lunch. Whether it's what women can do in church, or what sorts of music can be used in worship, or what so...

This past Saturday morning was spent at the Children's Home in Albuquerque. The summer clean up was in preparation for the two week nigh annual open house and barbeque at the home. This day there were about sixty people from a local congregation helping weed, move rock, and generally spruce up the entire campus. Great folks all, and I'm sure they were a bit sore come Sunday morning. One of the people who came to help was a boy of about seven years who helped clear some of the larger weeds from a fallow section of the campus. As we worked on removing Russian Thistles, he said that tomorrow is church. Having sixty of his fellow church goers on campus, in turn assisting a Christian organization accomplish tasks too large for the staff to do by themselves, I observed that he was in church right now. Understandably, his retort was "where's the church building?" As I was readying a short instruction on "church" and community, someone yelled that it was time fo...

Barbara Brown Taylor remembers that explanation when she asked early in life why the Christians on campus kept saying they loved her. This is her reaction as recorded in An Altar in the World , "This may sound small, but I decided that was not enough for me. I did not want to be loved in general. I wanted to be loved in particular, as I was convinced God loved." I think most people feel the same way. We want folks to love me , for me , not because some third party loves everybody. The problem is that all too often we behave as though we're doing something because God does it, or because God wants us to do it. That seems to me to miss the point of being Christian. We are called to be transformed into the likeness of God and that means that our behavior - our loving others - becomes more and more what we do because we love them. Eventually, our faith, our way of living is supposed to be ours in the fullest sense. Taylor follows up immediately with this, "Plus, I am ...

While reading the Prologue to Walter Kaufmann's translation of Buber's I and Thou , I stumbled across this interesting little gem: "…Hebrew prophecy wasn't meant to be fulfilled." As one of his examples, he uses Jonah's story. While there are clearly prophecy's which are meant to be fulfilled, it is just as true that many prophecies of doom include an "unless clause." God provides an out because He doesn't want to follow through with the promise of doom. The grace and patience of God, as Paul tells us, are intended to give us time to come to our senses. The care of God for his creation prompts Him to warn us time and again to return to Him. This is key, as Kaufmann points out. God is more interested in people who want to follow Him than in any particular ritual or religious practice. It isn't always critical to get the details "right," but wanting to follow God is critical – even if we do so imperfectly. So, give yourself and o...