My blog today is simple: just two quotes, both wise I think,
that I hope you will reflect on and then leave a comment about what comes to
mind.
Both remind us of truths that are often forgotten today in
the church, if not heatedly refuted. Both are vital, for the health of our
spirituality and for what the watching world sees in us concerning our faith.
To believe both and try to live accordingly will perhaps result in criticism
from fellow Christians. To believe both and live accordingly is to go against
the flow—to resist the most common thought forms and dominant practices
embraced by the wider evangelical community. So it takes courage to do so, and
care that we don’t slide into a smug pride that we aren’t like all the rest.
What is at stake is the gospel.
“We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what
they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by
showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to
know the source of it.” (Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water
: Reflections on Faith and Art; page 122.)
: Reflections on Faith and Art; page 122.)
“To identify the church as the sole locus of God's
redemptive concern is badly to misunderstand the scheme of salvation. Indeed,
it is to invert it. God wants the whole world back, not just a selection of
human beings. And he wants it back not to bask in the eternal adoration of the
redeemed saints, as per the vision offered at the end of Dante’s Paradiso and in countless lesser
depictions of heaven, but to enjoy the give-and-take of shalom with all his
creatures and among them as well. To repeat, therefore: the church performs its
distinctive redemptive calling within, and in the service of, the general call
of God upon humanity to be stewards of the whole earth God loves.” (John
Stackhouse, Making the Best of It
:
Following Christ in the Real World, p. 237. Thanks to my friend Steve
Froehlich for this one.)
:
Following Christ in the Real World, p. 237. Thanks to my friend Steve
Froehlich for this one.)
I look forward to reading your reflections and reactions in
the comments you leave.
I watched this film with my best friend and wife, Margie, and felt we were celebrating good things the entire time. Celebrating what Christians call God’s "common grace," the amazing goodness he richly spreads throughout creation for our enjoyment. Goodness experienced in relationships, sex, food and wine, and finding a sense of calling in the myriad diversions and distractions of life.
Directed by Nora Ephron from her own screenplay, Julie and Julia is an honest look at joy and disappointment in the ordinary ups and downs of life. Meryl Street plays Julia Child, the larger than life brashly endearing woman who single-handedly transformed how America cooked when she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. Her love of food and love for her husband, Paul Child, played wonderfully by Stanley Tucci is simply infectious. In 2002 a young woman, bored with her corporate cubicle, decided to cook through Child’s cookbook in a year (524 recipes in 365 days) and blog the experience. Julie Powell’s (played by Amy Adams) blog later was published as Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2007).
I’ve always loved the opening to the Christian Story, where God not only calls the universe into existence in a riot of beauty, but then creates beings in his likeness to share his appreciation of all that is good. “The Lord God,” the Scriptures record, placed his newly formed creatures “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Keeping it involved tenderly caring for it as the Lord’s, and therefore precious. Working it can be translated “cultivating it,” a term that is related to human culture. And so, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, to this day we find fulfillment in cultivating the whole continuum of life and culture, whether land, relationships, or meals, finding in our obedience a whisper of the shalom God intended for us.
Julie and Julia is a celebration of this reality. Of the graciousness of grace, of how loving marriages (not perfect ones), a love of good food shared in meaningful community, and finding a sense of significance and calling all lead to glimpses of delight too good to be missed.