The essay below is running on the First Things website today: http://www.firstthings.com/
And my little movie is out!
This is the short documentary that Andy Crouch filmed last June at my home and church. Christianity Today ended up making 6 short videos about people engaged in the culture. Mine is the last of the 6 videos, and it's about spiritual disciplines. CT is selling the DVD with a Leader's Guide for church and study groups to use in thinking through how Christians can be "a counterculture for the common good."
On the website above there's a 5-minute trailer, and it includes a bit from my video at the end.
here's the First Things piece:
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I was in I was probably not the only person who found his initial response suspicious: "I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in So "I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in But in the rush of travel, I didn't catch any images of Haggard until the return trip Saturday; I didn't know what he looked like. An airline rescheduling unexpectedly brought me back through But I also saw a photo of Haggard, and for the first time connected a face with the name. So that's the guy! I had seen this face before, I guess in photos of evangelical leaders. It sure had struck me as a crazy-scary one - somebody I'd instinctively step away from. http://www.tedhaggard.com/ The zones of his face are sending out conflicting messages. It looks like both terror and attack. The overall effect is frenzied. Ted wrote in the letter read to his church on Sunday: "There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it all my life." http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1326184&secid=1 In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we speak of the impulses that move us toward any kind of sin as "passions." You shouldn't think of this term as related to "passionate." It's more like "passive." (As in "The Passion of Christ;" his passion is what he endured.) These impulses beat us up. They originate as thoughts, sometimes as thoughts that evade full consciousness. The roots are tangled with memories, shame, anger, fear--and the thoughts are also very often inaccurate. All this mess damages our ability to see the world clearly. We go on misreading situations and other people, and venture further into confusion. The illness compounds itself, to the delight of the Evil One who nurtures lies and has no compassion on the weak. To him, the weak are breakfast. Eastern Christianity speaks of this as the darkening of the nous, that is, of the perceptive center of a person. (Most English bibles translate nous as "mind," but that's not quite it; the nous is not the rational intellect, but a perceiving faculty. Thoughts and emotions are subsequent reactions to the nous' perceptions.) The damaged nous is like a pair of glasses fitted with distorting lenses. It needs healing. The Greek word represented by this kind of "passion" is "pathos." It means suffering. It is because we are helpless in our suffering that Christ came. He took on vulnerable human form, and went into the realm of Death and defeated the Evil One. Now we are invited to gradually return to health, by fully assimilating the truth that sets us free - by assimilating the presence and life of Christ himself. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me," In the Eastern Christian understanding, sins are not "bad deeds" that must be made up in order to satisfy justice. They are instead like bad fruit, which indicates a sickness inside the tree (the analogy Jesus uses in Matthew 7:7-8). Sin is infection, not infraction. And God not only forgives freely, but sent his Son to rescue us when we were helpless. With God's help, we begin to heal. Like an athlete striving for the prize (I Cor So it is a mistake to present Christianity the way some churches do, as if it is the haven of seamlessly well-adjusted, proper people. That results in a desperate artificial sheen. It results in treating worship as a consumer product, which must deliver better intellectual or emotional gratification than the competition. And that sends suffering people home again, still lonely, in their separate metal capsules. What all humans have in common is our "pathos." Getting honest about that binds us together. And then we begin to see how the mercy of God is pouring down on all of us all the time, just as the Good Samaritan bound the wounds of the beaten man with healing oil. May God give this healing mercy to Ted and Gayle, and to their children. May God reveal his healing mercy to Michael Jones, who told the truth. May God have mercy on all of us.
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Frederica Mathewes-Green www.frederica.com |
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