Touched by an Angel Theology

At the climax of each week's Touched by an Angel episode, the struggling human was told by an angel that God loved them and had a plan for their life.  When trying to come up with my "elevator speech" about my faith, I decided that I could believe and say this much for sure to anyone.  I now know that the some have a problem with that word "plan", but I can't remember what was suggested instead.  Process? Purpose?


I asked my spin-class pastor friend:  So what is the point of church?  He reminded me and we agreed , community.  And then, I had an email and a chapter in a book when I  got home from the Y about church and community.  It does seem that God's online and continues in print.

From Inward/Outward:  It is tempting to separate the love of God from the love of community—to sever the head from the body—but we only come to know ourselves as truly loved in the context of authentic community, where we are both known and loved.

From Inward/Outward: We begin to find community–one of the most joyous ways of experiencing God. By community I mean a coming together that puts us in touch with ourselves, with others and with God’s
presence.

From Finding Our Way Again , Bruce McLaren, chapter 11:   . . .between the realm of private contemplative practices and public missional practices is this realm of shared communal practices that is so easily misunderstood.  Some, of course, overemphasize the communal practices, as if being a Christian simply meant going to church.  Others, sadly, under emphasize them, and they do so in one of two ways. . . First they may go to church without understanding the potential and purposes of the communal practices they encounter there . . . others make the opposite mistake . .. to withdraw from communal practices altogether.

I have been considering the second:  withdrawing from communal practices altogether.  But if  I'm to believe these words, my love of God will be more shallow than it need be if I do.

Tomato Pesto Bread Machine Bread

I share a box with the Librarian.  Now this box is full of vegetables that grow in central Texas and is purchased from Hairston Creek Farms as part of a Community Supported Agriculture program. The challenge is to find new and creative ways to use the same things that grow seasonally in Texas week after week.

Part of the fun has been finding food blogs around the world that have great recipes such as blue cheese, beat muffins.  See nami-nami which originates in Estonia.

As a plus share, we receive pesto.  Since I don't really eat much pasta any longer, the pesto had really built up in my freezer.  Then, I found this recipe on About.com by Linda Larsen.  I'm very proud of myself for adapting it for my bread machine.  In fact, it's the first loaf of bread that looked like great homemade bread that I have prepared with this machine.  AND, it uses 1/2 cup of pesto per loaf!

Ingredients:
2t bread machine yeast
2 T sugar
4 T warm water
3/4 c milk
1/2 c pesto
3 c flour
1/4 c finely chopped oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes
1 T melted butter-to put on the crust after removing from the machine.  I omitted this, too.

The original recipe called for 1/2 t salt so this bread is a bit "unsalty", so I may try adding it back.  I placed the ingredients in the machine in the order suggested by the instructions to my machine and put the tomatoes and pesto on the bottom with the liquid ingredients.  I added the water one tablespoon at a time as the dough was kneaded.  I think the varying humidity in Austin affects these machines.

What are we selling?

Sometimes I think we're just trying to get people in the door at my church, so we offer for sale anything that might coax someone into visiting:  authentic community, experiential worship, a people's cathedral..., traditional worship.

We sell worship.  Most often our ads try to distinguish our worship from some other church's worship.  Do we sell community?  There are many groups that sell community based on a common interest.  Do we sell discipleship and spiritual growth? 

I think I am taken with Milkshake Media because their tagline, we build brands that build community, is what I want our brand to be, a brand that builds community.

I stole this from Idea City's website:

"What difference do you really want to make in the world? What’s your fundamental purpose? We believe that great brands are the product of great organizations that truly make a difference in the lives of the people they are trying to serve. If an organization is just a commodity, me-too kind of company looking to do nothing but improve the bottom line, chances are they won’t ever be a great brand (or a great partner for us). We want to work with people as passionate and purposeful about making a difference as we are."

January 1, 1999

Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace,

On this first Sunday of our new year, remind us that your new year began a month ago as we lit candles, prepared our hearts, and anticipated your coming. Now the candles of Christmas are gone, replaced with the star of Epiphany. Keep this star of faith burning in our hearts as the star continues on its path, loses its luster, and is planted in the hard ground of Calvary.

On this first Sunday of our new year, gather us in worship: let us hear you speak through every word, let us hear you sing through every song, and let us give you your place in every heart.

December 26, 1999

We have hurried to Bethlehem. We have cried on our way. We have laughed. There have been tender moments and hurt, angry moments. We have tried to focus on a family in a stable and seen the seams in our family split, widen, come apart. The star's shining illuminates the intensity of the advent season, magnifies every joy, every problem that dull and are ignored the rest of the year.

Let our gift to the Child be to select one of these to work on all year so that a greater blessing may be enjoyed next year, and perhaps, the pain will be less. Grant that this still day after Christmas will give us the time to reflect and choose where to work with God to grow and be ready for a different advent next year.

Leaving the group

I did it! I left the Adult 5 Yahoo group.

If you're a former Southern Baptist, you'll know that historically, Baptists have gathered their adult members into departments, roughly by age. This is the group that is closest to my age although I'm probably somewhere between Adult 4 and Adult 5--the lower the number, the older the group.

Leaving this group frees me from many emails and from many years of friendliness but no friendship. So what in the world took me so long?

This is my first step in freeing myself from something. Don't know quite what. The conundrum: do my belief in God and my church attendance have anything to do with each other?

Read about Kate Horsley: http://www.tviemployees.org/MembershipFiles/parkerarticleincrosswinds.htm

From The Changeling of Finnistuath

As was the tradition on the pilgrimage to Lough Derg, Colin lay down inside the tomblike cave. He made himself into a corpse with his arms folded over his chest. There the pilgrim was to experience his own death, dwell in it, pass through the terror, and try to find the vast and benevolent state of grace in which God allayed all fears. Colin wept, not certain if what he was feeling was God or a surrender to not knowing and perhaps never knowing. But there was calm and relief in the purging. And when he stepped out of the cave, all the world was gray, the lake, the sky, the trees, everything shrouded in gray mist. He knew that the place was holy, that it had been holy all along, before Saint Patrick, before any human, and that perhaps everything, including Saint Patrick, was holy. Holiness was something that could not be contained in one creed or one hero. The words in the box he carried and the words that would be written to dispute those words, they weren’t the truth. They were symbols of symbols, ideas about ideas, threads in a great net in which a man could get entangled and ensnared until he died exhausted from his struggle. And during such a struggle, he missed the fact of a morning’s mist, the taste of cooked fish in his hungry mouth, the ability of his arms to embrace and his feet to dance.

Pelagian Heresay; from the Humanist side: http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/christian/blfaq_hist_pelagius.htm

Then the Abbot heard in his head, perhaps in one of those subtle ways that God communicates, that reconciliation, that peace and grace were not a matter of men being forgiven by God but instead a matter of God being forgiven by men. He felt in his gut that he had to forgive God—for the plague, for the suffering, for the silence. He also had to forgive Jesus. Yes, perhaps Jesus had made a mistake in bargaining with the Devil, but he descended into Hell before taking his place in Heaven, and he had lived as holy a life as he could and endured as much suffering as he could, as few men could. Men, even saviors, had to make minor bargains in order to endure and transform suffering. God waited, ready to embrace those who forgave themselves and others.

Grey floated onsleep with her namelss child. She felt it’s confusion at coming into the world, saw its eyes try to make out what kind of a world it ws, and what it was supposed to do in it. She knew it was her duty to protect the child’s body while its sould grew independent and strong. No damage must be done, no lies told. She pressed her cheek against the infant’s warm forehead and smelled his skin. It was the smell that imprinted itself on every mother who smelled her child’s warm, sweated hair when it slept. Without words, without any document or seal or proclamation, she had been given a solid identity that saturated her and shaped her, put milk in her breasts: she was mother. Awed at the thoroughness of her transformation, she was desperate for the Abbot to help her, for in this role she was not willing to make any error. The child’s needs frightened her, because she could not dismiss them, but she also could not be certain of her ability to fulfill them.

Sometimes she was a warrior, though she still didn’t know what her true cause as a warrior was. Perhaps it was simply living each day without succumbing to bitter sorrow over the pain of being human; perhaps it was fighting to savor what one has and to honor what one has lost.