I am my favorite subject.

Last Sunday we spent the morning talking about ourselves.

Over coffee and bagels we told stories about the churches we’ve attended.  We talked  about the good things, bad things, right things, and wrong things they taught us.  With neither fear nor judgment, we delved into the past.

After all, how can we know where we’re going if we haven’t explored where we’ve been?

Stories were told.  We giggled and cringed, sighed and cried at the journey that has brought us each to CCfB.  But time was short and the janitor needed to put up the tables, so we packed our boxes and left before there was really time to finish.

But maybe this is a good forum to continue the discussion.  If you couldn’t be with us on Sunday – or even if you were at CCfB and would like to reflect a little further – share a few sentences of your story with us.  Choose one (or two… or three) of the sentences below and complete it by telling us how the church you were raised in formed your current views about God, yourself, and your world:

My church taught me that God is…

My church taught me that I am…

My church taught me that people are…

if you’d like 5 bonus points, reflect on your answers to the top three questions and use that info to answer: “Because of this, I now need my church to…”

-b

on God the Great Physician and Jesus the Healer

Hi everyone,

Last week I was moved to blog about the thoughts generated by our worship service at CCfB over at my personal blog, rudetruth (named thus as a paraphrase from an Emerson quote, in case anyone’s wondering).  As we’re keeping up the blog here (and, BTW, any CCfB person out there who’d like to contribute from time to time, just say the word) I thought I’d re-post it here.

Check in from time to time to see what’s happening, what’s coming up on our calendar, what just happened, and what we thought about it.

***

Yesterday [last week], one of CCfB’s longtime members spoke to us on the topic of vocation: specifically, the challenges of integrating his Christian faith and daily work. He is a physician, as is his wife. He spoke personally and candidly, and it was riveting. Stories of turning of machines; of saying the words, “I’m so sorry” to families in waiting room; of confronting the dilemmas of social injustice in treating the uninsured and the homeless; of struggling to resist the pressure to treat sick bodies rather than sick people.

As he spoke I thought of Jesus’ healing miracles, and how Jesus must have confronted these same challenges and pressures in his ministry. So many people pressing in, demanding help. So many unsolvable problems. So much to do, and only a finite opportunity and limited options. No wonder Jesus withdrew to mountains to pray, and climbed into boats to get away from the crowds. And yet, the stories of miraculous healings demonstrate above all that Jesus never neglected to deal with people holistically: body and soul and spirit. My own theological preoccupation with embodiment has led me to think of the healing stories as emphasizing the importance of the body–which is true–and yet, the testimony from this physician reminded me that in the profession of healing there is a danger of reductionism that many fall into, and the struggle is to keep oneself open to the reality that these material bodies are people, with emotions, families, goals, fears.

And never has the metaphor of God as the Great Physician been more meaningful to me. What was once a purely intellectualized theological grasp of that metaphor has been enriched with this glimpse into what being a physician really means.