2 posts tagged “kim fabricius”
From ReUnion News
Nafs
April 29, 2008 by Peter
The ‘Nafs’ in the Sufi paradigm refer to a group of ‘everyday’ force signals.
We begin good work when we consciously try and clean ourselves of these ‘Nafs’, particularly in tandem with ReUnion clearing.
Take on an alertness as to when the ‘Nafs’ come up in you, and do your best to dissolve them with forgiveness and love…..
Being proud of one’s spiritual state
Arrogance
Envy
Miserliness
Being vengeful
Denying the giver of gifts or belittling the gifts
Being dissatisfied and complaining about one’s state
Ceasing to have hope for God’s Mercy
Being sure of God’s punishment
Condoning tyrany and helping tyrants
Speaking against decent people
Being hungry for approval and compliments
Fearing criticism
Setting traps for others
Fawning over people for personal benefit
Being happy about disasters that fall upon people
Taking pleasure in people’s suffering
Gossiping
Being a hypocrite
Being a coward
Not keeping one’s word
Believing in bad luck
Leading a life of no responsibility
Making excuses
Not keeping to one’s path due to laziness
Lamenting the loss of things
Not accepting one’s error and continue insisting on it
Being afraid of poverty
Making oneself depressed
Taking pleasure in belittling others
Being disdainful of the poor
Forgetting about one’s own shortcomings and being preoccupied with the shortcomings of others
Excluding from one’s heart the love of God
***
And another excellent sermon posted by Kim Fabricius
A bargain with God?
A sermon by Kim FabriciusNot long after I became a Christian, a friend of mine gave me a collection of sermons
by Karl Barth. The collection was appropriately entitled Deliverance to the Captives;
all the sermons were preached towards the end of Barth’s life in the
city prison in Basel. One sermon in particular shocked and overwhelmed
me. It was entitled “The Criminals with Him”, and took as its text a
verse from Luke’s passion narrative: “They crucified him with the
criminals, one on either side of him” (Luke 23:33). “Do you know what
this implies?” asked Barth. “Don’t be too surprised if I tell you that
this was the first Christian fellowship.” And Barth went on to
conclude: “In reality we all are these crucified criminals. And only
one thing matters now. Are we ready to be told what we are? Are we
ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, [and] to ‘get in line
behind’ [them]?”“Get in line behind them?” I thought. Hang on a minute, Karl! I know you’re big on grace, but aren’t you getting carried away, isn’t this taking grace a bit too far? I mean isn’t this unjust, criminals at the front of the queue to the kingdom, evil folk ahead of the good? I was particularly miffed at what Barth preached because I myself came to Christ – or rather Christ to me – out of a rather sordid existence, having lived for a time on the streets of Amsterdam and London, homeless and broke, begging, taking drugs, shoplifting just to survive. I knew what kind of people wheeled and dealed there, the crime and the violence. And now Barth tells me that I’m going to have to get in line behind this scum? And, adding insult to injury, observe: Barth made no distinction between the penitent and the impenitent thief – both were going to precede me. And, in fact, these weren’t just thieves, they were what we would now call terrorists.
MORE>>
A great Flannery O'Connor tale at the end:
Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”
Easter: the one true day
“Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.”
—George Herbert, “Easter” (1633)
*****
Go and read
Easter Sermon
by Kim Fabricius
who writes for the blog
Faith & Theology.
You might also check out his "Ten Propositions" lists for some interesting thinking and theological reflection.
A partial quote from the sermon:
"The peace they receive they must share, declare, and effect. And this peace takes the form of – forgiveness! Jesus says: “If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:23). And though the construction looks like a conditional, as if forgiveness were discretionary – as if the disciples might grant forgiveness to this one but withhold it from that one – the key to Jesus’ command is its gracious sweep and urgency. Forgiveness itself is God’s judgement on sin, and forgiveness itself is the condition that makes justice possible. Wrath – whatever that might mean – must be left to the Father. This is John’s version of Matthew’s Great Commission."
"If being Christian trumped being American, British, or whatever, and if the church itself practiced a politics of peace, then at least we would have something to say to government that wasn’t the mere echo of its own loud voice."
Kim add also, in comments:
"Let me add some Rowan Williams to Herbert McCabe (from the second edition of his great Arius [2001]). After suggesting that God is not a "person" or "individual" like us, Williams continues: "If God is not an individual, God does not compete with us for space; if God is not an individual, God's will cannot be adequately understood in the terms of self-assertion or contest for control in which so much of our usual discourse of will is cast. The implications for theology, for ethics and for prayer and spirituality are enormous; and we are still discovering them." Indeed."
I also recommend "A FUNNY KIND OF CHRISTIAN "
from the Guardian (UK)
"Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ's passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of."
"The French anthropologist René Girard is the modern voice that has done most to explain the nature of this moral change. Human societies, he argues, are often held together by scapegoating. From the playground to the boardroom, we pick on the weak, the weird or the different as a way of securing communal solidarity. At times of tension or division, there is nothing quite as uniting as the "discovery" of someone to blame - often someone perfectly innocent. For generations of Europeans, the Jews were cast in the role; in the same way women have been accused of being witches, homosexuals derided as unnatural, and Muslims dismissed as terrorists.
The crucifixion turns this world on its head. For it is the story of a God who deliberately takes the place of the despised and rejected so as to expose the moral degeneracy of a society that purchases its own togetherness at the cost of innocent suffering. The new society he called forth - something he dubbed the kingdom of God - was to be a society without scapegoating, without the blood of the victim. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, "on earth as it is in heaven". "
**************************Then the comments devolve into a wonderful free-for-all. You won't see the like in this country. The thin-skinned American columnists moderate comments to soft-peddle dissent. Disgusting.
***
Peter started us out this evening with a poem by Emmet Fox:
LOVE
'Love is by far the most important thing of all
It is the golden gate of paradise
Pray for the understanding of love
And meditate upon it daily
It casts out fear
It is the fulfilling of the law
Love is absolutely invincible
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer
No disease that enough love will not heal
No door that enough love will not open
No gulf that enough love will not bridge
No wall that enough love will not throw down
No sin that enough love will not redeem
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble
How hopeless the outlook
How muddled the tangle
How great the mistake
A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all
If only you could love enough
You would be the happiest and the most powerful being
In all the world.'
Continuing our discussion from last Monday, "
"To Show Him the Way To Responsibility and Love..."
we talked more about education, both teaching and learning. Group members talked about their own experiences both teaching and being attentive to the lessons in everything.
Our discussion also went to liturgy and what and how is the church teaching in it's liturgy and preaching? Is it teaching, or is the flow too much in one direction?
Our implications for action were;
How do we handle the 'non-alive liturgies' of our lives ( too much pressure to 'teach to the test' , to teach curriculum too rigidly, to be caught up in the form of things rather than the heart of the matter) ?
How do we re-kindle purpose and passion ? All professions and vocation run into this place where we are simply going through the motions? What is required to keep us 'on the field' and 'in the game' ?
What structures are most useful, and which ones get in the way?
When is more 'space between the monkey-bars' vital?
How can we most usefully solicit imput ? How then can we be responsive to imput to keep the process going?
How can we 'Be the Change we wish to see in the world' ? (Ghandi) How can you BE the thing that you are trying to teach?
Read less books.
Write your own book :)
COLLECT
GOD, YOU ARE TEACHER, LEARNER, AND LESSON.
WE PRAY THAT WE DON'T GET EXPELLED
AND THAT WE BECOME THE TEACHERS THAT WE ARE SEEKING
SO THAT WE CAN LEARN FROM OURSELVES AND OTHERS
AND LIFE.
AMEN
******
Oh -- and for your enjoyment, listen to the MP3 of Mahalia Jackson "It Is Well With My Soul."
Her singing is a complete meditation.
***
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