Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Redeemer Devotions - May 31, 2011

Adventures... in Hope - Redeemer Devotions 
More on disposition and the Christian community -"Let the Bones Dance" by Marcia W. Mount Shoop.
  
Dispositions mark our particularity, our inheritance, and our hopes for who we are and for who we can be. Our habits and our decisions partner with our dispositions to condition  and characterize us. Our practices are the friends of our dispositions - companionable and challenging.
Christian communities and believers are the Body of Christ in the world. We flesh out God's love for the world, the hope that defeats all despair, the healing that outlasts all suffering, and the mystery of "God with us." WE flesh out this state of redemption as it already exists and as it is yet to be. Redemption helps to in-form our dispositions in this new embodied situation of grace and to work to be better than who we are. But it can be profoundly difficult to really know ourselves and our distortions, especially when they become a way of life. Fear, polarizing stances on social issues, unapologetic individualism and materialism, comfortable homogeneity, valorized guilt, stasis, rigidity, and quest for someone to blame for our problems are just some of the distortions that  find a home to the disembodied ethos that characterizes much of mainline Protestantism. 
  

 

 "Redemption helps to inform our dispositions" - it is literally the power that can make the day into something quite different from how we would go about the things we must do. On first reading of this piece it reminded me of 'having my eyes lifted up' to see things again. That is a vitally important way to think of redemption. It is already the power of life that takes us on a ride that we would not necessarily take on our own. There are so many things that attempt to rob us of this truth about our God who takes our lives and breathes into them a life that is contrary to the prevailing power and winds of the day. When we do not embody this breath, we become less than we can be as the community of the followers of Jesus. Too many forces and themes of the day can win us over and direct us in ways that are not informed by the power of life that is our redemption.

  

Connection: It would be a good exercise to try to name or at least describe the forces and powers that have the power to move us away having redemption help to shape our dispositions in life. I'm sure we each could come up with few. Add onto that, the ones that others can help us see. At least then, we might be able to see the difference between being shaped by the culture and being shaped by the grace of our God.

 

Gather us as one, O God. Help us to know the power of life that is leading us and help us to return to you alone when we find it so easy to follow other powers of the day. Amen.

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