Marginal Christianity

What do you think? Tears began to form and roll down my cheeks as she proclaimed over us, “ In Jesus Christ, we get our bodies back .” I sat on the edge of my seat at full attention – holding back the impulse to stand and cheer. Cherith Nordling’s words were cutting straight to my core during her plenary talk at the first North American Gathering of Missio Alliance.+ Her words registered so deeply and genuinely within me that they became to me Jesus’ gentle touch in my bone-deepest aching. I sensed a holy relief settle throughout the room that afternoon – like we had all been holding our breath for ten years and finally had permission to exhale.+ She announced the possibility of something more. It was an announcement of liberation and renewal. We do not have to be stuck in cycles of hiding and compensating and striving. Even though our humanity is a source of so much pain – something we desperately want to escape – our brokenness and hurt, in Christ, could become – has b...

  0 Sidenotes   One of the most pressing challenges of discipleship and mission that daily confronts me is articulating in word and practice why and how salvation in Christ is good news in a world where Christianity is increasingly perceived as irrelevant to the things that matter most. I am bombarded with this challenge in different places – like in the relational dynamics of my family, in the pressures and complexities of being a pastor to seasoned church-folk, and in the lost and hurting people I regularly encounter at the coffee shop. +   Addressing this challenge involves re-imaging how salvation gets real in the lives we actually live – in the grittiness and fleshiness of embodied life . If we are affirming that salvation is about becoming more, not less, human, I’m learning that the recovery of embodiment is a crucial move. But I’m also learning it doesn’t stop there . We must follow the implications of the incarnation and resurrection a...

As I was re-reading Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome this past fall I ran across this remarkable passage. I will quote it at length. It is a conversation between Dr. Tom More and a presumably mad priest, Father Smith. The old priest is now a fire-spotter for the park service and the conversation takes place in the tower he lives in. We pick up the conversation with Father Smith speaking: “Words are signs, aren’t they?” “You could say so.” ”But unlike the signs out there (the trees on fire), words have been evacuated, haven’t they.?” “Evacuated?” “They don’t signify anymore.” ”How do you mean?” . . . The two proceed to spar verbally until Father Smith proposes a word association exercise. “Let me turn the tables on you and give you a couple of word signs and you give me your free associations.” “Fine.” “Clouds.” “Sky, fleecy, puffy, floating, white – “Okay. Irish.” “Bogs, Notre Dame, Pat O’Brien,“ “Okay. Bla...