Intersect

As I was driving to church one day, pondering my presentation for Sunday and wondering if the Scripture I’d chosen really conveyed my idea, I saw this truck in front of me. After immediately proclaiming THANK YOU to the universe, I snapped the photo above so I would remember the quote and to look up Galatians 5.1 when I got to the office (No, I do not have large swaths of The Bible memorized). Guess what? The quote, “Don’t forget where you came from” is not from Galatians 5. It’s not from Galatians at all. It’s not even biblical. I cannot find an attribution for the quote anywhere. All of which I find funny because, you know, the quote is about remembering, and nobody can remember the original author! I understand how this sort of thing happens because I’ve always had a selective memory myself. I remember dates, facts, and figures reasonably well. I’m really good at Trivial Pursuit. Memorizing speeches, sermons, lines in a play—none of that comes naturally for me. In high

Hebrews 12.1-2 (CEB) So then let’s also run the race that is laid out in front of us, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. Let’s throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.   Hebrews  is written in the style of Paul for Jewish Christians living in Jerusalem sometime just before the Temple is destroyed around 70 CE. It is highly likely this letter was written by Priscilla, Paul’s confidante, probably his benefactor, and perhaps his greatest pupil. While often classified as a letter, it lacks any traits of typical Hellenistic epistles, such as a preamble.  Hebrews  is more of a rhetorical essay. It’s meant to encourage Jewish followers of Jesus to persevere in their faith, to stay on this new path to God Jesus introduced. When  Hebrews was written in the 60s, Romans were prosecuting members of The Way (the original Jesus movement) while fellow Jews were persecuting them. The stress

We’ve been talking about evolutionary mismatch theory. This is the idea that, at least physically, we are out of sync with the globalized, industrialized society we’ve created. That got us thinking about  spiritual mismatch and the possibility that our selfish genes are preventing us from being more God-connected, Christ-centered, enlightened beings. In our discussion we’ve been talking about God as the fundamental, ethereal,  quantum  energy of the material world. All matter is formed through and from the being of God, the primary string connecting, and emanating into being, everything that exists. Jesus is where humans are perfectly  aware  of their harmonious oneness with God’s quantum energy. In this cosmological view—this understanding of the way the universe works—God doesn’t form universes and galaxies, people, plants, and animals, from the outside. God is not an alien chemist in a lab. I try not to think of God as a being  beyond  the universe. God  becomes  the universe.

Last time, we began considering the concept of “evolutionary mismatch,” the idea that the Red Bull-fueled rush of technological innovation enables us to live in a way that is out of balance with the more gentle, meandering pace of evolution. Our bodies are feeling the effect of this imbalance. We’re prone to diseases primarily caused by our evolutionary drive for a diet that is now out of whack with our sedentary lifestyle. I suggested that perhaps evolutionary mismatch also applies to us spiritually. Is evolution’s glacially slow pace of natural selection and adaptation thwarting possibly faster spiritual progress toward the enlightened being of Christ? Is there anything genetic about spirituality? Was Christhood basically in Jesus’ genes? Is Christhood in all our genes? If so, is part of our spiritual journey about understanding the evolution of self into a perfectly God-matched divinely bound humanity? It’s a lot of questions, I know. Such is the fate of seekers, I suppose. One

Ephesians 2:19-24 So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household. As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit. Once attributed to Paul, most scholars now agree that the epistle to the faithful early Christian community in Ephesus is pseudonymous. The crux of the letter is to encourage its readers to “imitate God.” The letter was written some time after Paul’s original letters had been circulating and acted, at least in part, as a summary of Paul’s ideas, which are then built upon, adapted, and improved for new people in a new era. Partially because their gatherings were often illegal, the early Jesus movement was concerned about community bui

Monday Meditation I force myself to sit quietly and wait impatiently for your touch. I think about not thinking. And then I tingle. My skin buzzes. My mind is free. My soul escapes and we are one. I rest in your presence, the knowing of all-knowing, blanketed by the silky-satin, galaxy-filled folds of heightened senses, extraordinary perceptions, for a more than real, real. In you I am complete, calm, focused, so unconditionally loved that I become love incarnate. Returning to the unreal real I am aware of the infinite loop of the incarnated universe we all share unaware, until suddenly, you are there. Mantra:  Make me love incarnate. Make the world love incarnate.