Dispersing Gifts and Holding Eggs

|  Blessings and Tithes and How You View Your Stuff

[Genesis 12v2]
Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your people and your father's house to the land I will show you. I will make a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great...

...so that the world will be blessed."

Heretical Challenges to the Well Trodden Path of Worship - [A Warning]

|  Cold, Broken, and Empty Hallelujahs

Heretical Challenges to the Well Trodden Paths of Worship - [Guide]

|  A Couple Frameworks to Reactivate Worship

The problem with the word "worship" is the familiarity it breeds in our language. 

There is a sort of assumption of what it is and what it means. Which means we've taken something that is profoundly deep and mysterious made it rather two dimensional; it simply becomes a title that it is then defined by. So we've seen that the worship experience has been trapped in a sort of cage and we've attempted to unleash it, but now we have to start asking what exactly this creature is that we've unleashed. As we wrestle with how to interact with it and navigate it and engage in the act of worship, we have to begin re-instilling the meaning that may have become obscured by our familiarity. 

So I want to offer a couple pictures of this concept of chavah, some frameworks that may help us process how to take this into our contexts and cultures and communities. Because it would be easy to just confront something and then leave the conversation with an aroma of skepticism. It is easy to just negatively challenge what you find yourself if. It is another thing to take some responsibility and try to do something with it. My goal with this whole writing is not to do away with "worship", but to embrace it with such wholeness and beauty and power that we pull it forward to an even bigger understanding, maybe even a more rooted understanding, of what we are handling.

Heretical Challenges to the Well Trodden Paths of Worship - [Provocation]

|  Pumpkins, Grills, and Worship Being More Than Music

The first time we see the word "worship" in the book of Genesis is during this story of a man named Abraham:

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two

of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for 

the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God

had shown him. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.

Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy

and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you."

Now, first of all, the context of this whole thing is that their worship is a burnt offering. They are going to take something and light it on fire.

And they call it worship. 

Too Much Salt

[Matthew 5v13]
"You are the salt of the earth..."

Lately, I've been sharing a meal with a friend of mine every morning in the early hours of the day. We wake up and do some sort of excuse for exercise and, before heading off to class and work, we feast.

On oatmeal and eggs.

Every single morning.

Being Cain and Being Green

A rising awareness has emerged within much of Christianity about the sort of world we are told God creates in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. There has been a resurgence of discovering the sort of relationships and roles that form the identity of what it means to be human in the midst of this interconnected community of creation.

And so in this attempt to push Christianity to "be green", the creation narratives are often referenced again and again and again.

2x4's , Shoes, and Mirrors

There is this discourse Jesus gives that is often referred to as the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain, depending on which version you are looking at, where Jesus is essentially discussing the very essence of the God's Kingdom. What it looks like, who it is for, how it works, and how it doesn't work. And, interestingly, in giving us this picture, Jesus shows us that this whole Kingdom thing has a lot to do with how we are to interact with one another. Jesus' whole progression of the discourse revolves around the very nature of a community that exists in God's Way for the world and Jesus ends it all by saying this:

 "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Torah and the Prophets."

One of the most loaded sentences Jesus utters.

Yet it is also one of the most thrown to the side quotations of Jesus that never really gets a whole lot of thought to what he actually means.