Andy Cornett | living in the new creation

endlessly captivated by the person and work of the resurrected Jesus

History-making

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It may not be Monday, but here is today’s quote of the week:

The mission of the church is not merely an interpretation of history: it is a history making force. It is that through which God brings history to its goal, and only because this is so does it provide the place where the goal of history can be understood.

– Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society

It is a truly humbling thought that history might be made this week as we share in Christ’s mission.
It’s why 1 Corinthians 15:58 seems ever before me these days.

on ministry

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Today I start a new position, and I took some time last night to go back and remember some fundamental realities. These are my quotes for the week!

Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesisa – “Wherever Christ is, there is the church.”(Ignatius of Antioch).

It is not Jesus Christ who needs our ministries: it is our ministries that need Jesus Christ. (Karl Barth)

Wherever Christ is present in ministry, there my ministry may be found. All ministry is sharing in the continuing ministry of Jesus Christ. Our ministries must be displaced by the ministry of Jesus. We must be bumped aside firmly, perhaps mortifyingly. This is the crucifixion of ministry … and crucifixion carries the concept of redemption.

(all cited in Andrew Purves, The Crucifixion of Ministry, 13-14)

From one to another

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Sometimes the simple words in Scripture say exactly what you think and feel. Today as I leave New Hope and head to Signal Mountain, these speak as if from my own heart:

God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.
(Philippians 1:8-11 NIV)

Amen! May it be so.

on grace

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Tim Keller on grace:

“In Christ I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws, but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less. I don’t need to notice myself – how I’m doing, how I’m being regarded – so often… It is only grace that frees us from the slavery of self that lurks even in the middle of morality and religion.”

– The Reason for God. 187, 192.

on truth and kings

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And we who now stand at the foot of the cross have to face the most searching questions because we, too, find it desperately uncomfortable to look at the face of God’s Image, the man, the king, and see there the perfect likeness of the maker and redeemer of ht world. We are so stuck in the system so Caesar – his swords, his coins, his gambling soldiers – that we too have a hard time recognizing truth of any kind, let alone speaking up for it We are so anxious to protect the philosophies upon which our modern works is built that we will do anything to declare that we have no king but Caesar, that when push comes to shove religion is just a private thing which musn’t affect the public sphere, even when Jesus is reminding Caesar’s representative that he only has power because god has given it to him. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why the church is in such pain at the moment, caught between ‘what is truth?’ on the one hand and ‘no king but Caesar’ on the other.

But the good news – and this is after Good Friday – is that this story, for all its searing challenge, remains the story of the scriptures and the power of God, and therefore of the glory and love of God … and if it is true that that love must transform our whole lives, our public life, our grasp of truth on the one hand, our dealings with Caesar on the other, this can only be if we are first grasped and transformed by that same love at the very deepest level of our personalities.

Tom Wright, from “Good Friday,” in The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week. 64-66.

on the cross of Holy Week

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These are some of my favorite words on the cross of Holy Week. From Tom Wright on Matthew 23:34-46, “the Law and the Lord:”

Not a jot or tittle, said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, will pass from Torah until all is accomplished; and as he articulates the greatest commandment in Torah, so he is on the way to its ultimate accomplishment. The vertical commandment, that we should love God with all our heart, is joined together with the horizontal commandment, that we should love our neighbours as ourselves; and Jesus combines the vertical and the horizontal into the greatest symbol of triumphant love the world has ever seen, a symbol at once clear and obvious and yet fathomless in its profundity, all the more so for its having been up to that point a symbol of the triumph of Caesar, his coins and his empire. The cross stretches up to God in loving obedience, and out to the world in loving service, and all because it is not only David’s son but David’s Lord who hangs there, so that the real stretching out is downwards, from God to us.

from “Palm Sunday Matins,” in The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week.

on Holy Week

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Much of Holy Week consists, or ought to consist, in our going back in mind and heart to those first and unique events. In our day particularly we need to be reminded that what happened then was not just one example of a general pattern, but the central and unrepeatable events which form the hinge upon which the great door of cosmic history has swung open at last. That is perhaps the hardest thing for our generation to believe, and we have to rub our noses in it over and over again. But when we do that – when we grasp the unique and decisive and one-off nature of those events, from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and on to Easter itself – we discover again, and it’s bound to be almost as deeply disturbing, that there are similar lessons always to be learn in the church and in our own hearts and lives. When Jesus comes to his church, and to this people, today, he comes with the same message, and with the same warning. He comes seeking fruit, the fruit which belongs to his father. And those of us who decide to make the journey from Palm Sunday to Good Friday can never therefore do so in anything other than fear and trembling. We are, says St Paul, the temples of the living God. God forbid that when the Lord whom we seek comes once again to his temple he should find it necessary once more to come with stories of judgment. May we so hear the word, so live within the story that we find ourselves in six days’ time at the food of the cross, and in eight days at the empty tomb, and find ourselves saying, “this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

– Tom Wright, “Palm Sunday Matins,” in The Scriptures, the Cross, and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week. This book (meditations and addresses from Matthew 21-23, 28 and John 13, 19, 20) has been my holy week companion for several years now. I expect to do the daily readings again this week and post a choice quote or two here or on facebook.

grace and peace – Andy

on Into the Woods

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No more giants
Waging war.
Can’t we just pursue our lives
With out children and our wives?
‘Till that happy day arrives,
How do you ignore
All the witches,
All the curses,
All the wolves, all the lies,
The false hopes, the goodbyes,
The reverses,
All the wondering what even worse is
Still in store?

All the children…
All the giants…

No more.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to watch Bishop Verot High School’s Theater department pull off the famous musical Into the Woods. I took my daughters with me and a few other HS students. We loved it.

The lyrics above pull from a haunting lament by the Baker, in the woods, in the second act – right when the characters and stories suffer most from broken conditions and broken choices all over the place.

Put those lyrics in conversation with this provocative bit from Andy Crouch’s tremendous book “Culture Making:”

This is how deeply culture is embedded in the human character; it is the first response to sin, the first place where the inward alienation from God finds its outward expression … [T]his, then is one of the arcs of the story of Genesis 1-11, from the fig leaves to the tower. Culture attempts to deal with the consequences of sin. But this is a vain attempt, in all the senses of the word vain: prideful, self-regarding, and futile. What human beings make of the world only deepens their alienation and independence from their maker. This is the germ of truth in all condemnations of culture. For all its moments of beauty and ingenuity, culture can easily be Babel: a fist-shaking attempt to take over God’s role for ourselves. (p. 117).

This strikes me as an apt summary of Into the Woods, beautiful and ingenious as it is. I applaud BVHS for taking on this difficult work of art. I hope they (as a Catholic school) and the students in the cast took some time to wrestle with the deeper drama here.

[And in a strange bit of providence, Radiohead’s “No Surprises” came streaming over Pandora as I wrote this. One more expression of futility.]

on leaping

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Hello friends.

It’s leap day, 2012. One extra day to spend. One more day to think, dream, plan, expect, hope. What are you doing with your Leap Day?

I don’t have a story to tell yet (my day isn’t over), but I can point you to one who does:

In April of 2011, Victor Saad wrote an eighteen-month plan to learn about ways to change the world practically and create avenues to help others develop their own ideas to do the same. When realizing that 2012 was a Leap Year…

Find out more about the Leap Year Project. Click on “Hear the Story.” Then Take Your Own Leap.

convicted or convinced?

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One of my delights each month is the Atlantic, and just as often, Christopher Hitches’ regular essay in it. I was aware that the current piece was his last, and tackled no less a subject than the legacy of G. K. Chesterton. (I would like to have met CH, though I would have approached it with fear and trembling). Hitchens writes:

“Chesterton became part of a forgettable rear-guard operation against the age of uncertainty, which has now definitively become our age. It seems that there are no rules, golden or otherwise, even natural or otherwise by which we can define our place in the universe or the cosmos. Those who claim to know the most are convicted of claiming to know the unknowable. There is a paradox, if you like.”

(sigh). I think this is both beautifully insightful and wrong. His judgment of Chesterton may be on point – I haven’t read or understood GKC enough to say – and we are definitely living in the age of uncertainty. But to state that there are “no rules … which can define our place in the universe” (however qualified with “it seems”) is to speak definitively, knowing-ly, and thus be convicted on the same terms as his subject.

I may be “convicted” in his neutral court for my claims to know the unknowable, but I reject the terms and the authority. Anyway, I prefer “convinced” to convicted. The only way I can categorically say that I “know” the “unknowable” is that I have a conviction, I have become convinced, that Someone has grabbed hold of me and that Someone has also rendered this universe intelligible. So while I may humbly know in part, I only apprehend the One who knows in full and fully comprehends me. You are welcome to be convinced by the claim that this is simply “unknowable.”

That may make me a convict – but that makes two of us.

Update: I may have read him wrongly. I don’t take Hitchens to say definitively that there are in fact no rules that define our place. But he does say that we cannot know if there are: that’s unknowable.