Gal 3.28

For it is no longer possible for you to be Jew or Greek, slave or free, 'male and female', for all are one and the same in Christ Jesus

I love this verse. It teaches that if we belong to Christ, everything is radically different. Everything has been transformed. Our identity is shaped by our belonging to Christ and anything else like race, nationality, economic status, gender, etc is nullified, its put to death through the cross. It's a verse that shapes and informs my understanding of what it means to be the church. Where we are tempted to describe who's in and who's out, who's important and who's unimportant, these words to the Galatians, say there are no boundaries in the church, apart from belonging to Christ. As Douglas Campbell says,

'... this is an undeniably radical approach. Everything that we might normally nominate as important to our identities, or even to our well-being, has been displaced in this account of the impact of Christ to the periphery: matters of ethnicity, language, land, geography, and race; of class, education, status, income, and occupation; of gender and family, male or female, and parent or child. All of these distinctions are no longer of central relevance to what we are. What matters is the new reality, sonship, which is obtained in Christ.'

I find myself returning again and again to this verse. It's written on my brain (and hopefully on my heart) as a reminder that belonging to Christ calls us out of and beyond those distinctions which (although in themselves are not negative) can so often divide and separate us from one another (and so also from God).

living out scripture

As a means to seeing this blog continue in some form, I've had an idea.

In The Shape of Living, David Ford writes

... be alert for some key passages of the bible to inhabit in a special way. Hans Urs von Balthasar has said that often a saint's whole life can be seen as living out just one verse of scripture. One rich verse or story can be essential to our vocation, as we come back to it year after year, and find further dimensions to it. The great words, verses and passages of scripture and the liturgy are like houses which, as we study, pray, suffer and love, are made habitable with our own furnishings, pictures, meals and children ...'

So I'd like to invite you to post that verse or story of scripture which is important to you, which you find yourself re-visiting time after time ... (you can make it two or three, if you can't reduce it to one!). If you put the scripture reference as the title, that would be cool.

imagination

imagination n the ability of the mind to be creative of resourceful; the process of imagining

"the key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination so that we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work" (Brueggeman, Interpretation and Obedience)

This blog seeks to do imaginative work - to reflect upon the arts - music, film, drama, painting, poetry, fiction, essays - and attempt to transcend our unimaginative culture. Or to be readers of the arts, of culture - to think deeply or speak thoughtfully.