1 post tagged “sermon;”

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 Fabricius

Not 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.

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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.”

(Faith & Theology)