Your Image of God Shapes You! -Richard Rohr

Your image of God shapes you by Richard Rohr

This thread snapped a long time ago.  Sweet Mother of a Split Hair and a Mountainous Molehill.  Jesus thought such as this to be equally jejune. "You strain out a gnat, but gulp down a camel!”  Last heard, we were at around 33,000 de-nomiinations and it’s comically clear that we can and will complicate a one car funeral.  Really.  Read this overly theatrical theologically illogical thread and it’s more divisionally senseless than an outdoors quilting convention.  Christ conveyed a stunningly simple truth and we’d sooner drink Drano than be stunned by simplicity. Our hubris raised hell, earned heaven, hated grace and was bound by de-nominationally determined domination to rescore Christ’s sermon on the mount and make it but mere moonshine.  I recently read where the American adage:  “United we stand, divided we fall,” has conclusively been thought entirely too confusing, by a feckless few theologians, for the common herd to clue into and thus, a concordance is in order.  Indeed!  What could that polysemic double entendre possibly mean?  Well, soon we’ll all find out.  To be sure, some won’t like what they’ll find and a multiplicity of splinter cell small group studies will convoke to discern what the deeper semantical meaning just might mean and then each group will justify what it means.  Another churlish chapter is to be written into ‘Christianity’ and all for the sake of yet another common enemy.

  "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”    But, in America, we don’t have much use for blessing the beasts and the children.  Could it be we too soon see them both as the same?  And the elderly?  "Unless you change and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”  But that’s going backwards, isn’t it?  A child wouldn’t want to imagine messing up a one car funeral.  And Mother Mary or just Mary?  (Trying to contain the camel). Mary saw her Son bloody, naked and unashamed on two occasions.  At Jesus’s birth and at Christ’s death.  Human AND Divine.  But?  No.  “Grace AND Truth.” (John 1:27)  Hardly dualistic.  

Unlike much of today’s ‘Christianity’ these two words aren’t mutually exclusive.  Somehow, neither EITHER nor OR, ‘You’re Wrong BUT I’m Right’ got tossed into the divisional mix.  Truth absent Grace isn’t truth, it’s hostility and if you hold the idea of ‘love thine enemies’ (often merely thine neighbour) in contempt, the hostility metastasises and hatred will hold you hostage.  Humiliation is its own convincing and when it hurts, let it.  Being committed to everything yet surrendered to nothing just won’t get any of us there.  And the little beasts and innocent children are very much the same in three unitive ways:  They don’t judge.  They don’t compare.  They don’t compete.  Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.  If we chose our friends with the same highly conditional exclusivity as we do our so-called foes, we’d likely have far fewer of both.  "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” None of us requires a concordance or even much common sense to get what Christ was getting at, and, is still this very second getting at.