Welcome to Pastor Jack Buckley's weekly blog and podcast.
You have three ways to hear his weekly message:
- Read Pastor Jack's GODblog.
- Listen now to an audio of the scripture reading and Pastor Jack's sermon.
- Listen anytime. You choose the time and place. Download Pastor Jack's GODcast to your MP3 player.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Imagine That
"How can I believe?"
I get that question a lot. It's natural, of course. I mean, I am a minister!
My first impulse is to reply, "How can you breathe?"
Either way, you're doing it or you're not.
But I understand the dilemma my questioner wrestles with. Especially in our western tradition, faith seems like the opposite of knowledge. Abstract and ethereal, it easily loses out to concrete measurable facts.
I suppose the question really is, "How can I know that my beliefs are rooted in reality?"
Amen to that! After all, what good is it to have your feet firmly planted in mid-air? The acid test of faith is how it works in real life.
I'm convinced that Jesus felt the same way. For example, in Matthew 13 he uses little stories from everyday life to tease our imagination about what faith means and how it works.
Seven times he says "the kingdom of heaven is like what happens when..." God's kingdom means what God is up to in the world, where God is at work to make us what we're meant to be.
Jesus asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of the people he describes as catching onto God's way with the world.
A farmer doing what every farmer does with seeds, weeds, plows, and reapers...
A woman kneading leaven into dough...
Fishermen netting fish...
On and on, seven times he paints his familiar word pictures, hoping we'll get the spiritual point.
Frankly, some of them read like riddles. The point might as well be at the tip of a needle in a haystack.
But I'm so glad Jesus teases our imagination instead of spelling everything out the way a philosophy professor would.
I think his point behind the point, story by story, is that faith works along the lines of a good adventure story. Harry Potter, the Narnia chronicles, Frodo and the gang -- Kids love 'em, and they call out the inner child in every reader regardless of our age.
It's no accident that Jesus more than once said God's ways are most accessible to children and anyone who's willing to act like one.
Kids love stories. They're curious enough to question everything. And yet they're able to trust that what you see is usually what you get.
Maybe that combination of ingredients is a recipe for faith.
Instead of trying to unscrew the inscrutible with logic-chopping arguments, Jesus invites you and me to listen up with our imagination in gear, to watch what he does and listen to his words carefully enough to get it for once.
Not in contradiction of real-life facts, but in light of them. Faith sees life as all of a piece, the warp and the woof of God's grand tapestry.
posted by Jack Buckley at
10:28 AM
<< Home
|
|
 |
|
|
