07-15-24

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
July 15, 2024
Our Regional Minister, Rev. Andy Mangum, wrote the following post. I requested his permission to repost it, as I found it helpful but also deeply profound.

Days like this tempt us to feed an insatiable appetite for information as we convince ourselves that having information is the same as having knowledge and that having knowledge is the same as cultivating wisdom and and that cultivating wisdom is the same as grasping truth.  Scripture has a basic heartbeat from Genesis to Revelation despite the fact that its parts emerge from radically different contexts, and it expresses itself in multiple genres, and even displays a multitude of perspectives and in some places even contradicts itself. The heartbeat is that truth is not something that we grasp; it is someone who grasps us and holds us.  Truth is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. I am not suggesting some sort of retreat from the concerns of this day.  I am not proposing that we lose ourselves in some comforting labyrinth of religiosity and traditionalism only to end up back where we started. Scripture doesn’t disengage from the world.  If social historical criticism has taught us nothing else, it surely has taught us that the writers of scripture were deeply impacted by and invested in the events and concerns of their day.  But they wrote in time to that basic heartbeat. While we may not think that the specific ways they navigated their lives and times in terms of prescriptions for personal, family, ecclesiastical, or corporate behavior work for us, let us follow scripture’s model of beginning and ending focused on our point of origin. For whatever facts are assembled into stories today, our narrative remains that God made us in God’s image, each one of us carry the image of God. God redeems us and in Christ Jesus God has given this beautiful redemption, this gift, grace, to us.  And God, through the Holy Spirit, accompanies us each step of the way.  May our response to our event emerge from the ground of this Truth who grasps us.