Richard Avedon

from The Year in Pictures blog

from Sam Taylor-Wood at Art Basel Miami.  

via The Year in Pictures blog

I have wanted to use Etta James' "At Last" as the first dance at my wedding. I love this song. It's a combination of so many great things. Beautiful sound, classic lyrics, longing, fulfillment. It's beautiful. Beyonce did good.

This is when I lean down and cup my hands and whisper to my heart in my chest, to where the Holy Spirit lives, "Hey, I'm reading about you."

"We need to appreciate far more than we have been wont to the close interdependence of Christ and the Holy Spirit in the operations of saving grace. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ; the Spirit is the Spirit of the Lord and Christ is the Lord of the Spirit (cf. Rom. 8:9; 11 Cor. 3:18; 1 Pet. 1:11). Christ dwells in us if his Spirit dwells in us, and he dwells in us by the Spirit. Union with Christ is a great mystery."

 - John Murray, Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, Chapter IX “Union with Christ” (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1955), p. 161-173. 

Sometimes I wonder...

what happens to heretics

Sometimes I wonder if we have really exhausted the various heresies we could believe in.  There are so many heresies possible.  I'm in seminary, these are the things I think about.  First let's go over some of the classic heresies:

-gnosticism: Jesus was fully God but not fully human.  He probably didn't even have a body.  Matter and the material world is sinful and bad.

- marcionism: the God of the Old Testament is different than the God of the New Testament.

- montanism: if you die a martyr, you go to heaven.  

But what about all the other heresies out there?  Surely we can be more creative.  

How about some heresies like:

- allieism: warm cornbread that your roommate makes you actually saves you.  the one loophole.

- dinosanctificationism: dinosaurs were also made in the image of God, but they ended up sinning more than we did so God destroyed them during Noah's flood.

- kieslichism: if you eat unicorn poop, you live forever.

why I'm not postmodern anymore:

Because I'm realizing how much it has influenced the way I do ministry with high school and middle school students.  One of the tenants of postmodernism is equality/egalitarianism.  The thought is that trouble starts when people think that they have more truth than others or think that they are better.  Because of this I have unconsciously acted like I was 17 when I was around high schoolers.  Sure, I'd give advice and 

I don't understand communion

...and so I am going to read books like this to figure it out.  The most helpful thought that I've learned so far is that we take communion now to look back to Christ's sacrifice the same way Jews in the Old Testament sacrificed animals to look forward to Christ's sacrifice.  

wish me luck!