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Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Wednesday, March 16, 2016

We are all Pharisees

“That stuff Jesus warned us to beware of, the yeast of the Pharisees, is so infectious today in the camps of both liberals and conservatives. Conservatives stand up and thank God that they are not like the homosexuals, the Muslims, the liberals. Liberals stand up and thank God that they are not like the war makers, the yuppies, the conservatives. It is a similar self-righteousness, just with different definitions of evildoing. It can paralyze us in judgment and guilt and rob us of life. Rather than separating ourselves from everyone we consider impure, maybe we are better off just beating our chests and praying that God would be merciful enough to save us from this present ugliness and to make our lives so beautiful that people cannot resist that mercy.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
______________________________________________________________

We are all...... (fill in the blank here)

This trope (think literary, rhetorical device) as a nice fill in the blank quality to it.
This of a group, or a person you admire
or a one that has been treated poorly, unjustly

and just add the name into the equation

Kennedy did it way back in 1963
“Ich bin ein Berliner”

More recently people have cried
“We are all Hokies” after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007)
“We are all Malala”
“We are all Palestinians”

This is good

This identification with the oppressed
The captive,
The hungry
The violated

but sometimes
all too often in fact
we identify mostly
with ourselves

our view
our needs
our theology
our ideology
our righteousness

it is all about us
and never about them

and in those moments
we create a dichotomy

us and them
good and bad
in and out
Children of Grace, Children of Judgement

And we judge
All of us, conservatives and liberals alike
We judge
We are superior, they inferior

and in those moments we can say
we need to say
we need to understand and own

that we are all Pharisees
(in our own way)

and this too is good
#weareallpharisees
for it means we see ourselves honestly,
that we believe in grace
and,

that we are willing
willing to allow God “to save us from this present ugliness
and to make our lives so beautiful that people
cannot resist that mercy.”

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