Make it a clean fight, every morning. 07729056452
Mk7v1-2 Jesus comes for the great unwashed. In an culture of cleanfreaks and the rise of allergies, Jesus comes for the great unwashed. In a city of quarantine and social exclusion, Jesus comes for the great unwashed. At a time of drought and water metering, Jesus comes for the great unwashed. And so now, I can kneel before the king and say I'm clean. I'm clean.
Mk7v3-4 On being unclean. Before we get to the legalism here, let's stay a while with the phenomenology of being-unclean, the what-it-is-like to experience oneself as literally unclean, dirty, disgusting, vile, untouchable. This is the phenomenology of shame. Shame is so bodily, it is located in my clumsiness and my bodily fluids, my stained, ruptured, falling apart, unhygienic, unloveable mess. But Jesus. But. Jesus.
Mk7v5-6 'Traditions of the elders..' that bland clique wearing itself thin creating ceremonial certification so onerous as to be self-defeating.. aren't we, don't we, how can we but.. What older elder am I aging into? Superstitous hypocrisy smelted in the kiln of insecurity, and naive notions of self-salvation will make of me a grisly elder, these badges just look cooler on me while I'm yet young.
Mk7v7-8 'The basic word 'I-Thou' can only be spoken with one's whole being. The basic word 'I-It' can never be spoken with one's whole being.' - Buber. Only God-as-Thou can take & transform all of me in unexpected ways. God is always excess & inbreaking, if I remember 2Co3v12-18 to turn, with unveiled face, to the first & final face-to-face, which changes everything.
Mk7v9-10 Who wittingly makes of themselves a career hypocrite? Surely noone. It is an entrenchment unconsciously and indirectly arrived at. So they must be shown. They must be told both vision and interpretation - and forcefully. Their deft duplicity must be peeled like a plaster and laid out infront of them. "You have a fine way.." So the force of Jesus: dripping with irony, scathing lashings of white hot indignence. "..of rejecting the commandment.." Legal mind seeks loop hole. Pathological religion is tightly meshed with sentimentality, pride and good intentions - so the woven opacity of our tedious codes regulations and certification. "Whoever reviles father or mother.." Timely. Jesus permits no relaxation of previous intergenerationality. God give us grace wisdom patience, for us and a culture who has no idea how to but legally work around the duty and joy of being parented.
Mk7v11-12 One owes a debt of gratitude & service to one's parents. What does this look like for me?
Mk7v13-14 "make void" Perfection qua perfection is unperfected by addition, to add laws to the Law is to declare the Law incomplete, negating its good-and-perfectness and slighting the Law-giver. Adding obligations is a profitable enterprise for the priests of culture and one with no self-limiting restraint, so tumourous over-regulation blooms in the superstitious atmosphere of post-christendom. And its all skubalon Ph3v8 and its all filthy rags Is64v6.
Mk7v15-16 Jesus states an irreducibility, Jesus was not a scientific materialist nor a power structuralist. If you're defiled by what comes out of you but not by what goes into you, it means that you're more than what goes into you, you are more than the sum of your parts, you are more than an inevitability. You have some interiority, spirit, freedom, even if it has been downtrodden or twisted. This is the spark that may choose sin, or choose life.
Mk7v17-18 Sin is real. Like crude oil on an albatross' wing, like vomit on a bus stop.. Where does it all come from? If you were tasked with filtering the water of the world's aquarium, where would you place the filters? Pharisee vegetarians smoking tar-lite decaffs vote a scuba suit mode of filtration-in: the monadistic exit strategy of utopian bubble cars hoverboarding an inch off the corruption of evil-out-there. But I know the evil-in-here, it is in me. I am an effluent bilge pump, churning death, spewing sickly treacle tar over tundra. Who will filter me? My stream of consciousness is acid rain, no catalytic converter is going to cleanse me. I need a new engine. Hydrogen maybe.
Mk7v19-20 All foods are fit for eating, all old testament laws have been abolished-by-fulfilment - Mt22v36-40: all the law & the prophets come down to these: love God, love your neighbour. We are no longer under any law, it is what comes out of us that makes us clean. What is 'in us' that makes us clean? Christ, of course - Jn13v8 unless you let Christ wash you clean. What does clean look like? Jn13v34-35 love one another. Oh, Jn15v10 v12 v17 love one another. In case you're not listening Rm13v9 Gal5v14 - Jesus says there is only one command now: love one another. In case you're not listening Rm13v9 Gal5v14. Any law outside this one fails to take Jesus seriously. This is my command, says the Christ: love one another. Eph2v15 He came to abolish all old commands, that we might be united. Any other laws outside of the love command (which is wide and deep) fails to take Jesus seriously, when it comes to food or anything else. This is my command, says the Christ: love one another.
Mk7v21-22 My heart is a cauldron, kettling and conniving a fantastic diversity of pernicious distortion. Jesus lists a few ~ as food for thought.. [1] Sex: (ESV) Sensuality and Sexual Immorality and Adultery - all make this hit list of 13 sins. What is the sexiness of sex? The question is fraught territory, well-worn ground, littered with the landmines of cliche and over-compensation. Christianity is prone to bland overstrictures of legitimate permissible sex via prohibitionist behavioural modification, while culture is equally bland in a preoccupation with safe sex and responsible family planning.. Neither category is really worth getting out of bed for, neither approach an excellence of poetry or practicality. Is Jesus' theology of sex any better? Maybe. I am struck this morning by the notion that sex is a symptom. While culture has worked hard to amoralise sexuality to the morally inert domain of the body only, Christianity subtly has followed, where it preaches a naughtiness of sex via don't-touch-what-you-don't-have versions of negatively-defined religiouse emphases of external chastity ~ it makes of sex a something-you-put-into-your-body-that-defiles. Sex-as-a-symptom, the good or bad fruit of a relative heart condition demands to know what is in that heart from which the best sexuality emerges? The heart which is full of Christ, attuned to a universe of convenant, assymetry, fecundity, submission, eternity, responsibility.. What sort of sex follows from that heart? [2] Thought Crimes: Envy, Pride, Folly and 'An Evil Eye' (KJV) The symptomatic understanding of these is also instructive. They key is that Jesus is going upstream. Don't just buy ethical, consume less. Don't just consume less, covet less. Don't just covet less, consider your heart motives and sufficiencies, guarding you heart, patrolling your mind, opening every room in your mental house to Christ's inhabitation. [3] Things we can all agree on: Murder, Theft, Deceit. There are laws for these ones.. but even then, Jesus's "murder" also covers character assassination and verbal abuse Mt5v22. Where do these sins come from? Why does my heart feel so bad? Where does all the yearning come from? Oh. God.
Mk7v23-24 Evil inside. I read in Moltmann this morning that Christ died for both the godforsaken & the godless. For those who experience suffering as God's abandonment, & those who's sin is the act of turning away from God, of godlessness. & we live in both actions & experiences, sinners & sinned against, evil inside & out. But 'the event of the cross...is the point where God is found most deeply & evidently to be with us, the godless & the godforsaken.'
Mk7v25-26 The God who hides himself is, willfully, not very good at hiding (v24). Like an elephant in the room of requirement. Jesus will be found, like a city on a hill, like a bolt from the blue for the broken breaks out for the outsiders and outliers who outcry is loud - and this Greek, Syrophonecean, Woman comes triply from the outer reaches of outer otherness. See how Jesus inverts notions domestic spatiality and repurposes 'home' from a space of private respite to a polemic public political space. Mt8v20 Jesus is intentionally and adeptly homeless, when he goes into a home, it is to turn it inside-out, to bring the outsider-in. Is God hiding? Is God hiding in your house? Who's in?
Mk7v27-28 This morning's Mothering Sunday hero, the grace-getter, the mother heart who recognises that there's more-than enough on the table. The crumbs of eternity, yes, I love it, especially after reading yesterday about William Lane Craig's distinction between actual infinity & potential infinity: potential infinity is numerical, accumulating towards a never-reached limit. Actual infinity is complete & so its parts are equal to its whole. It's parts are equal to it's whole, like a crumb of eternity is equal to eternity. Descartes got it, Hume didn't. God is not numerical, the Christ is not numerical, grace is not numerical. Grace is a universe inside a pinprick, yes. Like an embryo inside a waiting womb. It requires the kind of fantasy Madeline L'Engle told us about to get to this Truth? This sounds like the old magic, & I believe it. Lord, help my unbelief.
Mk7v29-30 'For this statement..' Something in what she says and how she says it indicates that she gets it. She gets grace and so she gets grace, as it were. The audacity and humour of her rapport, as much as her sense of the infinite-personal, are constitutive of her faith. Infinite-personal love and grace: God is love, but He is not a love machine. God is just, but He is not democratic - His elect are not elected. God loves you, but I'm His favourite. God loves me so specifically, with a taylor-made love that is incomparable, non-transferrable and irreducible. The one analogue we have for the love God gives is in marriage's exclusive selection of the One, that highly-favouring singling-out. Infinite and exclusive, and totally without scale. So 'crumbs' or loaves are meaningless measures (just as our sins are as meaningless to scale as motes and beams). God's grace is hilariously infinite, what is a crumb of infinity? Religione's myth of scarcity is blind to the explosive power of crumbs and mustard seeds, it has us fighting over trivial cleanlinesses and bureaucratic fair distributions, it presumes an impersonal God's finite provision and so cannot compute a justice of variety. 'and the demon gone..' - Miracles constitute a broadside to religione's calculations. Consider how this Syrophoenician inclusion should affect our immigration policy. Consider where we will get the resource for it. So speak your prayers with audacity and humour.
Mk7v31-32 Apt after this evening's reminder on the city, yes. Jesus goes to the Decapolis, the ten cities, sites of human potential unleashed, sites of refuge & sites of spiritual searching. & he is confronted with brokenness. 'And they begged Jesus to put his hand on him.' And London. Begs Jesus. To put His hand on us.
Mk7v33-34 Ephphatha occurs only here. Such a breathy word, he sighs, blowing like a rushing wind. Ephphatha: be opened! His is an open-source ministry, co-coding collaborating a wiki world of participatory supernaturalism. Open to all. And so he shows his working, spitting slow parables imitatable: the christian life is an open book exam. He looks up to an open heaven, calling out an opening in the clouds. Heaven leaks out, heaven is open for business.
Mk7v35-36 The commentaries note that the word for 'speech impediment' used by Mark here is the rare word 'mogilalos', used in Is35v5-6 - 'the blind will be able to see, and the deaf will hear. The lame will leap & dance, & those who cannot speak will be able to shout for joy.' Mark noting Jesus as the fulfillment of this Is35 prophecy, & my hearts swells to continue: v7 'Streams of water will flow through the desert; the burning sand will become a lake, & dry land will be filled with springs.' This healing speaks to our spiritual unseeing unhearing unspeaking, and reminds that Jesus first speaks our speech, our sight, our understanding. Our ability to recognise Jesus is dependent on prevenient grace, and this is a great picture of it. Apparently the liturgy for infant baptism used to include this cry - 'Ephphatha!' Seeing hearing speaking is grace-given all the way down, so be opened,
receive.
Mk7v37 All things. In him and through him, all things. Done well, all things. Will I not surely give you, all things. Like 'All the things you said..' (OvalHouse til March 28th goo.gl/5dDmMc), how are all your things, all the, small things? As the plane screams down, how was and is your comprehensive spirituality? How is your doing? How is it done? Excellently executed? Mark's crowd stands astounded. That same power lives in you, for the doing-well of every thing. 'Well' measured by miracles? Well, indeed.
Mk7v17-18 Sin is real. Like crude oil on an albatross' wing, like vomit on a bus stop.. Where does it all come from? If you were tasked with filtering the water of the world's aquarium, where would you place the filters? Pharisee vegetarians smoking tar-lite decaffs vote a scuba suit mode of filtration-in: the monadistic exit strategy of utopian bubble cars hoverboarding an inch off the corruption of evil-out-there. But I know the evil-in-here, it is in me. I am an effluent bilge pump, churning death, spewing sickly treacle tar over tundra. Who will filter me? My stream of consciousness is acid rain, no catalytic converter is going to cleanse me. I need a new engine. Hydrogen maybe.
Mk7v19-20 All foods are fit for eating, all old testament laws have been abolished-by-fulfilment - Mt22v36-40: all the law & the prophets come down to these: love God, love your neighbour. We are no longer under any law, it is what comes out of us that makes us clean. What is 'in us' that makes us clean? Christ, of course - Jn13v8 unless you let Christ wash you clean. What does clean look like? Jn13v34-35 love one another. Oh, Jn15v10 v12 v17 love one another. In case you're not listening Rm13v9 Gal5v14 - Jesus says there is only one command now: love one another. In case you're not listening Rm13v9 Gal5v14. Any law outside this one fails to take Jesus seriously. This is my command, says the Christ: love one another. Eph2v15 He came to abolish all old commands, that we might be united. Any other laws outside of the love command (which is wide and deep) fails to take Jesus seriously, when it comes to food or anything else. This is my command, says the Christ: love one another.
Mk7v21-22 My heart is a cauldron, kettling and conniving a fantastic diversity of pernicious distortion. Jesus lists a few ~ as food for thought.. [1] Sex: (ESV) Sensuality and Sexual Immorality and Adultery - all make this hit list of 13 sins. What is the sexiness of sex? The question is fraught territory, well-worn ground, littered with the landmines of cliche and over-compensation. Christianity is prone to bland overstrictures of legitimate permissible sex via prohibitionist behavioural modification, while culture is equally bland in a preoccupation with safe sex and responsible family planning.. Neither category is really worth getting out of bed for, neither approach an excellence of poetry or practicality. Is Jesus' theology of sex any better? Maybe. I am struck this morning by the notion that sex is a symptom. While culture has worked hard to amoralise sexuality to the morally inert domain of the body only, Christianity subtly has followed, where it preaches a naughtiness of sex via don't-touch-what-you-don't-have versions of negatively-defined religiouse emphases of external chastity ~ it makes of sex a something-you-put-into-your-body-that-defiles. Sex-as-a-symptom, the good or bad fruit of a relative heart condition demands to know what is in that heart from which the best sexuality emerges? The heart which is full of Christ, attuned to a universe of convenant, assymetry, fecundity, submission, eternity, responsibility.. What sort of sex follows from that heart? [2] Thought Crimes: Envy, Pride, Folly and 'An Evil Eye' (KJV) The symptomatic understanding of these is also instructive. They key is that Jesus is going upstream. Don't just buy ethical, consume less. Don't just consume less, covet less. Don't just covet less, consider your heart motives and sufficiencies, guarding you heart, patrolling your mind, opening every room in your mental house to Christ's inhabitation. [3] Things we can all agree on: Murder, Theft, Deceit. There are laws for these ones.. but even then, Jesus's "murder" also covers character assassination and verbal abuse Mt5v22. Where do these sins come from? Why does my heart feel so bad? Where does all the yearning come from? Oh. God.
Mk7v23-24 Evil inside. I read in Moltmann this morning that Christ died for both the godforsaken & the godless. For those who experience suffering as God's abandonment, & those who's sin is the act of turning away from God, of godlessness. & we live in both actions & experiences, sinners & sinned against, evil inside & out. But 'the event of the cross...is the point where God is found most deeply & evidently to be with us, the godless & the godforsaken.'
Mk7v25-26 The God who hides himself is, willfully, not very good at hiding (v24). Like an elephant in the room of requirement. Jesus will be found, like a city on a hill, like a bolt from the blue for the broken breaks out for the outsiders and outliers who outcry is loud - and this Greek, Syrophonecean, Woman comes triply from the outer reaches of outer otherness. See how Jesus inverts notions domestic spatiality and repurposes 'home' from a space of private respite to a polemic public political space. Mt8v20 Jesus is intentionally and adeptly homeless, when he goes into a home, it is to turn it inside-out, to bring the outsider-in. Is God hiding? Is God hiding in your house? Who's in?
Mk7v27-28 This morning's Mothering Sunday hero, the grace-getter, the mother heart who recognises that there's more-than enough on the table. The crumbs of eternity, yes, I love it, especially after reading yesterday about William Lane Craig's distinction between actual infinity & potential infinity: potential infinity is numerical, accumulating towards a never-reached limit. Actual infinity is complete & so its parts are equal to its whole. It's parts are equal to it's whole, like a crumb of eternity is equal to eternity. Descartes got it, Hume didn't. God is not numerical, the Christ is not numerical, grace is not numerical. Grace is a universe inside a pinprick, yes. Like an embryo inside a waiting womb. It requires the kind of fantasy Madeline L'Engle told us about to get to this Truth? This sounds like the old magic, & I believe it. Lord, help my unbelief.
Mk7v31-32 Apt after this evening's reminder on the city, yes. Jesus goes to the Decapolis, the ten cities, sites of human potential unleashed, sites of refuge & sites of spiritual searching. & he is confronted with brokenness. 'And they begged Jesus to put his hand on him.' And London. Begs Jesus. To put His hand on us.
Mk7v33-34 Ephphatha occurs only here. Such a breathy word, he sighs, blowing like a rushing wind. Ephphatha: be opened! His is an open-source ministry, co-coding collaborating a wiki world of participatory supernaturalism. Open to all. And so he shows his working, spitting slow parables imitatable: the christian life is an open book exam. He looks up to an open heaven, calling out an opening in the clouds. Heaven leaks out, heaven is open for business.
Mk7v35-36 The commentaries note that the word for 'speech impediment' used by Mark here is the rare word 'mogilalos', used in Is35v5-6 - 'the blind will be able to see, and the deaf will hear. The lame will leap & dance, & those who cannot speak will be able to shout for joy.' Mark noting Jesus as the fulfillment of this Is35 prophecy, & my hearts swells to continue: v7 'Streams of water will flow through the desert; the burning sand will become a lake, & dry land will be filled with springs.' This healing speaks to our spiritual unseeing unhearing unspeaking, and reminds that Jesus first speaks our speech, our sight, our understanding. Our ability to recognise Jesus is dependent on prevenient grace, and this is a great picture of it. Apparently the liturgy for infant baptism used to include this cry - 'Ephphatha!' Seeing hearing speaking is grace-given all the way down, so be opened,
receive.
Mk7v37 All things. In him and through him, all things. Done well, all things. Will I not surely give you, all things. Like 'All the things you said..' (OvalHouse til March 28th goo.gl/5dDmMc), how are all your things, all the, small things? As the plane screams down, how was and is your comprehensive spirituality? How is your doing? How is it done? Excellently executed? Mark's crowd stands astounded. That same power lives in you, for the doing-well of every thing. 'Well' measured by miracles? Well, indeed.
