BLOG 10/1/15. APOLOGIES AND A GLIMPSE INTO THEMES TO COME
To my subscribers who have been so helpful in creating these blogs, I need to offer a brief word of explanation. I try to post two blogs per week, one on Sunday and one on Wednesday, since such regular posts are recommended by those who study these things. This week was a bit confused and interrupted by a security system with my blog site that I didn’t tune into, and so it got me into all kinds of complications. I think we’ve (my grandson and I) got this reconciled.
But it is also true that when I finally got access to my statistics, that the post of last Sunday obviously struck a chord with many of you and had a record number of visitors. This has to do with the secular-secular dualism that exists within the church, on one hand, and then has implications in the post-Christian culture of secular humanism on the other. I will be coming back to this regularly. It’s much on my mind. It is complicated by the fact that so much of the church’s ostensible worship is an escape from the existential realities of everyday life, rather than an equipping and energizing of God’s people to encounter it as the incarnations of God’s new humanity/kingdom knowledgeably and with Christ’s own passion.
When Jesus came, he inaugurated his Kingdom/New Creation, and that means that God’s age to come invaded (or maybe ‘backed into’) this present age. It is because of this that we pray: “Thy kingdom come/be coming, Thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” This is a here-and-now petition. It means that true worship must always be very ‘this worldly’ even though we know that there will ultimately be a consummation of it at the end of this age when God shall be all and in all. All too much of the church’s sense of the sacred focuses on “in the sweet by and by” rather than on being lights in the darkness in the realities of our personal and corporate lives—which darkness takes all kinds of subtle and malignant forms.
To be continued …
