Kester Brewin says the following in his letter to the church in North America : if you want to find the Kingdom of Heaven, you’re going to have to abandon your pursuit of paradise. In other words, the purified utopian ideal is dangerous; God is found in the dirt of the incarnation.

It certainly could be a letter to us in the North too..

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I have posted stuff by Sir Ken Robinson before, and as always it is brilliant.

Jay bakker, Tony Campolo and Brian Mclaren share some thoughts on gay issues. Worth a look and a think.

Tony Campolo says the following in this video:Many people say; love the sinner but I hate the sin, but that is the opposite of what Jesus said. He never said love the sinner but hate

the sin. He said hate your own sin. That is a good place to start.

Brian Mclaren

Mclaren asks,what do I do with those who dont believe what I believe about this issue? Do I cut them off

? Acceptance and approval are they the same thing? My acceptance is not conditioned on my approval.

Jay Bakker is the pastor of this church in New York.

“By acknowledging that all our readings are located in a cultural context and have certain prejudices, we understand that engaging the Bible can never mean that we simply extract meaning from it, but also that we read meaning into it. In being faithful to the text we must move away from the naive attempt to read it from some neutral, heavenly height and we must attempt to read it as one who has been born of God and thus born of love: for that is the prejudice of God.

Here the ideal of scripture reading as a type of scientific objectivity is replaced by an approach that creatively interprets with love.”

–Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God

“One of history’s greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace.

it would have to drop its power politics and renege on its mission to seek advantage over other nations, enhancing itself at the expense of others. And so a religion is in the service of a state is a religion that not only accepts war but prays for victory. From Constantine to the Crusaders to the contemporary American Christian right, people who call themselves Christians have betrayed the teachings of Jesus while using His name in the pursuit of political power.”

–Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence

This occurrence is not limited to just the Christian right. But also to anyone like myself, capable of misusing my religion to violate “the other”, “the other” often being the ones closest to me.

My understanding of the teachings of Jesus often have a starting point of Jesus being a servant, never a dominating superman.

Should we always ask “what do they believe?”

Brian Mclaren has some brilliant things to say taken from the conversation above.

“When I read a book, or listen to music, I’m not always asking “What do they believe?” I’m asking, “What do they have to say to me?” I’m not requiring them to agree with me (and me to agree with them) for me to be stimulated by what they have to say. To me, there is a peculiar problem in a lot of religious readers where their approach is, “I don’t care what the person might have to say to me.

I want to know if he’s right.” And, so they go into the reading and discussion experience with an assumption that they are already right, that they already see things the way they should be. And they’re going through with a checklist. The experience of that for a writer (and for pastoring and preaching), is when you’re in the presence of those people is that it feels like an inquisition. They’re doing a kind of constant heresy hunt. My personal feeling is that there is a place for that. But maybe we could say, “those who live by the sword die by the sword,” i.e., “those who live by boundary maintenance die by boundary maintenance,…those who live by heresy hunting die by heresy hunting.” It is interesting that people read a book that way. To me, that’s a significant problem.

Regarding “provocative ambiguity,” there is some dimension of that. Soren Kierkegaard said, “It is very hard to use indirect communication when you’re talking to someone who is held in the grip of an illusion.” Because if you tell a person who is so absolutely certain, they have absolute certainty that they’re right, when they’re not right, if you tell them they’re wrong, they just assume you’re wrong. Sometimes when talking to people in an illusion, you have to use indirection. Flannery O’Connor said, “With people who can’t see very well, you have to use very large and strange characters.” I also think that in other places, I’m not trying to pass someone’s test, I’m actually trying to challenge them

to think. And sometimes the ambiguity does help with that.”

The full transcript of this interview can be found here.