Without Love

I finished re-reading ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church this afternoon, and this will be my last post from the book. ReJesus is a phenomenal contribution seeking to "explore the connection between the way of Jesus and the religion of Christianity...assess the Christian movement in the light of the biblical revelation of Jesus...and propose ways in which the church might reconfigure itself, indeed recalibrate its mission, around the example and teaching of the radical rabbi from Nazareth." (p. 6) The paragraph below is taken from the top of page 187.

"In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul commends the harmonious expression of the gifts with each member playing his or her part in the building up of the church in the same way that different body parts operate as a united whole. It is no mistake that he then launches into his well-known description of love in 1 Corinthians 13, because without genuine love between the members of a church the differing expressions of giftedness would tear them apart. He is in effect commending a unity-in-diversity approach. We are better together, stronger for the ministries of each other in our lives, built up by all the gifts."

Amen.

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Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World

from pages 45-46 of Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World...

"Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do. It entails a long and painful process of appropriation or, better, incarnation. As long as 'being the Beloved' is little more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, nothing really changes. What is required is to become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specific realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking about, and doing from hour to hour."