Comments Widget

In my own emergence
of faith I was introduced to
Brian McLaren's writings.


My first read: A New Kind of Christian, set me on a path of discovery, of a fresh expression
of what has always been there.

McLaren mentioned 
NT Wright's influence on his
own story.


I looked up Bishop Tom Wright. His site has many lectures in text worth reading. 


At Easter, his sermons were especially powerful, as he talked resurrection. Here's three:


http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/EasterMorning2010.htm


http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/EasterVigil09.htm


http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/EasterDay08.htm


Wright notes in his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church:


  "The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future.


These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…).

They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom." 


also,


"The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it." 


and then,


 "We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle
of the old one."


— N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church