Thank you to Kirsten Wagenius, a colleague with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA’s Graduate & Faculty Ministries, for sharing “ONE HOLY WEEK: an Easter journey from palms to persecution to praise” with the Emerging Scholars Network!
Lent 2019
The One Thing Needful (Lent 2019)
Here, then, is the clue to our erratic life patterns, our inconstancy, our unfaithfulness, our stupid inability to distinguish between fashion and faith: we don’t rise up early and listen to God. We don’t daily find a time apart from the crowd, a time of silence and solitude, for preparing for the day’s journey. “A very original man,” says Garry Wills, “must shape his life, make a schedule that allows him to reflect, and study, and create.”
Jeremiah had a defined priority: persistently rising early, he listened to God, then spoke and acted what he heard. It was not because there were no other options open to him. It was not because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He had chosen what Jesus called “the one thing needful” — listening, attentively and believingly, to God.”
The mark of a certain kind of genius is the ability and energy to keep returning to the same task relentlessly, imaginatively, curiously, for a lifetime. Never give up and go on to something else; never get distracted and be diverted to something else. . . . The same thing over and over, and yet it is never the same thing, for each venture is resplendent with dazzling creativity. – Eugene H. Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best (InterVarsity Press, 1983, 118-9).
Science Corner: Subtraction by Addition
Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park was in the science news last week, which caught my eye because I had recently read Sean B. Carroll’s The Serengeti Rules. (Scientist/authors are rare, and yet biologist Sean B. Carroll must distinguish himself from physicist Sean Carroll.) Gorongosa features in the book as one of several locations where large-scale ecological experiments have been conducted under resource management initiatives. The general question is how to achieve a thriving ecosystem with a complete food web in national parks, managed lakes & streams, and other natural resources. In Gorongosa, one of the specific issues is how to keep antelopes and other herbivores from overgrazing. The current research examines whether predator cues such as sounds and smells are sufficient to keep the antelope away from targeted grasslands, or if actual predators and actual predation are necessary.
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Living Mid-Story (Lent 2019)
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” – Jeremiah 1:5
Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah. . . .
We are known before we know. This realization has a practical result: no longer do we run here and there, panicked and anxious, searching for the answers to life. Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather, we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops. If we use our ego as the center from which to plot the geometry of our lives, we will live eccentrically. . . .
If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God.
My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.
Jeremiah’s life didn’t start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s salvation didn’t start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s truth didn’t start with Jeremiah. He entered the world in which the essential parts of his existence were already ancient history. So do we.  – Eugene H. Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best (InterVarsity Press, 1983, 37-8).
Science Corner: Lent 2019
As my church background does not have a strong Lenten tradition, I decided to take a look at what Pope Francis has written about Lent in his annual messages for this season. Since he is a scientist and a theologian, I thought he would be a good point of reference. While the sermons are not primarily focused on science, a few themes related to science did emerge within a broader discussion of love, charity and compassion and other facets of the Gospel.
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