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kennethtanner

1 Jan, 7 tweets, 2 min read

The church marks time by the life of Jesus. Our year began back on Nov 27, as we slowed to wait for the coming of God in the manger and at the end, tuning our hearts to the reality that God is always coming into the world in every moment from the beginning to the end of time.

We are the ones who by frenzy and rush become unaware of his myriad arrivals: in the poor, in the immigrant, in the prisoner, in the sick, in our friends and neighbors, in our chosen family, and in bread and wine on all the tables of the world where sinners gather.

Jesus told us that in this world we would have troubles but not to be afraid because he has overcome “the world”—not his good creation, but the powers that make our life in his good world subject to death.

The sacred year grants us freedom from the expectation that we can save ourselves: new diets, new exercise, all the resolutions (less social media, getting out of debt, etc.), which can be a blessing if pursued with humility but which often become burdens that disappoint us.

Marking time by the life of Christ reminds us that God is human and identifies with us as humans with all of our limitations, the God who loves us precisely as we are and invites every human by grace into the kind of human life he lives and the kind of human death he dies.

Time is a mixed bag. Some days are difficult, others unspeakably painful. The promise is that Jesus is with us until the end of the world and beyond, into the renovation he’s bringing to his creation that will put not only 2020 but the entire reign of death in the rear view.

We who wait with patience for that coming are glad for more time to repent and more to time to practice resurrection as we learn to live by dying. 2021 will bring us time to participate in a new creation whatever hardships this time brings.

All the blessings on you and yours!

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More from @kennethtanner

kennethtanner

@kennethtanner

1 Jan

When God created the visible (and invisible) universe he spoke words—"let there be light"—and things that were not in one moment began to exist in the next. Stars. Planets. Oceans. Mountains. Trees. Animals. Flowers.

All things were breathed into existence by God. Our wisdom says it was the Son by whom the Father spoke all things into being; Christ spoke the things that were not as though they were and they were so. Orchid. Zebra. Maple. Everest. Atlantic. Jupiter. Andromeda. And so on.

Instead of speaking humanity into existence, our wisdom says that God hand-crafted us from clay, breathed life into motionless humanity, invested flesh with his image, and gave us something the rest of creation does not have except metaphorically: the divine capacity of language.

Read 17 tweets

kennethtanner

@kennethtanner

2 Nov 20

BENEDICTION FOR AN ELECTION
A thread of prayers.

May you remember that all politics and all platforms and all legalities and all borders and all leaders are temporary.

May you recall that political movements and boundaries and personalities and programs are here one day and gone the next. All of these are passing away.

May you resist the temptation to place ultimate trust in any person, policy, party, movement, or nation — even a beautiful idea that is embodied by a nation — because there is no nation with an eternal foundation.

Read 20 tweets

kennethtanner

@kennethtanner

30 Oct 20

According to the Larger Westminster Confession, the second commandment rules out even the creation of mental images of God.

What does this mean for children’s Bible storybooks, a television series like “The Chosen,” the sixth century Sinai Pantocrator, or Grünewald’s tortuous Isenheim Altarpiece, all of which present our eyes and imaginations with images of Jesus.

The commandment against “graven images” forbids the human tendency to project or manufacture or imagine gods or objects of worship other than the Living God.

This is not what has happened in the carpenter from Nazareth. He is not made but begotten.

Read 8 tweets

kennethtanner

@kennethtanner

16 Aug 20

You either believe that the end is the arrival of power, or you believe that the end is the arrival of nothing, or you believe that the end is the arrival of love.

A lot of people believe we are waiting for the arrival of nothing. At the end of their physical life the person they were is gone forever, disappearing as quickly as the brain cells die, never to return.

Nihilism is how they see the end of everything and everyone else. Sooner or later it's all going dark. No ultimate justice. No ultimate mercy. No ultimate meaning. Just nothing.

Read 13 tweets

kennethtanner

@kennethtanner

13 Jul 20

The law could never make us moral people. It could only interact with fallen human nature, revealing the places in us where we were no longer participating in love. /a sermon in miniature, a thread

Like a crimson dye that saturates the parts of us participating in death, the murderous parts, the law can only expose the cancers of hate, envy, pride & greed that motivate us, make plain our addiction to bearing false witness, perhaps the besetting sin of present-day Americans.

The law, reacting with fallen human nature, is like those little pink tablets they made us chew as children that reveal where we have not brushed our teeth very well.

Read 21 tweets

kennethtanner

@kennethtanner

16 Apr 20

It is instructive that the core practices of Christian faith cannot be converted to virtuality.

A human cannot be baptized virtually, and the Eucharist (Lord’s Supper) is predicated on an assembly of the body of Christ.

Even what the New Testament describes as preaching, teaching, fellowship, the reading of Scripture, and prayer are not meant to be done in isolation from the personal presence of the community of disciples.

When we happen to be or have to be alone or at home, Christians trust that we do not pray without the communion of saints, nor do we read Scripture apart from the trans-historical community that gives us the scriptures and teaches us how to consume them in communion.

Read 7 tweets

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