Advent with Ken Medema's "Kingdom in the Streets": Priorities
I argued in the introductory post that we can think of human beings in terms of the reciprocal interaction of priorities, passions, and practices. This is a logical ordering but in reality it more complicated and more like a continuous feedback loop. All I use it here for is to give us a way to orderly reflect on these realities through Advent. Advent is one of the two times in the church year especially designed for reflective examination of our life in light of the gospel. In the Bible “heart” is what NASA would call the “Command Center” of the person. Intellect, emotion, and will collaborate to integrate and choreograph a life of integrity and coherence. Unfortunately, we often find our Command Center dysfunctional with each of its three elements pushing, pulling, and seeking dominance over the others. Paul’s “What I want to do, I don’t; and what I don’t want to do, I do” in Romans 7 is a classic statement of this conflict. We begin then with priorities. These ...