Posted by j on February 06, 2003 at 10:05:23:
Wow - this has been heinous week! Sorry about posting this so late...
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Opening discussion:
Mark 4:30 - 32
Discussing the mustard seed...
"Have you ever looked at a seed and wondered what it might become?"
** What is the seed?
John 12:24 (Jesus speaking) "...except a corn [seed] of wheat fall into to ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit..."
There is a life "force" that exists within the seed that instinctively desires to branch out.
All that is necessary is food (nutrients in the soil) and sun energy.
The seed "casing" is like a coffin - it is refuse. The seed is dead and then reborn.
Our failures become the dying seed (of sorts...). Life is "one failure after another" of dead seeds (evidenced by the seed casings) -- these failures or "deaths" become the germination of the seeds... hence, the Kingdom of Heaven.
Story of Gideon and the 300 soldiers.
Judges 7:15 - 23 - Gideon's army destroyed the pitchers (clay pots) and blew the trumpets. In those times, there would only be one trumpet and one torch per 200 - 300 men. When the Midianies heard the trumpets and saw the torches all around, they assumed there were tens of thousands of men. The pitchers are analogous to the seed casing and the torches is the potential life that lies dead within the seed.
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** nomos (no' mos - long 'o') : Order to live by (our values, relationships). [As I understand it] The nomos is everything that we have defined or structured as our perspective of our life.
** nomizing : producing or incorporating something into your order.
** a-nomic : without or missing an order.
Humans (and in a sense, all mammals) are "order-producing." Even a person with no money or home will try to create order - finding a shopping cart and filling it with "meaningful" items.
This order extends over many levels:
- Physical
- hopes and dreams
- right and wrong
- etc.
The framework we create to map or "contain" this order is our nomos. It reflects (and is reflected in) our philosophies, morals, decisions. Psychologically, we need a "religion" to help us handle when our nomos is broken.
For example, when a family loses a child in an accident, the nomos is shattered: the child is physically missed, the parents' hopes and dreams for the child are eradicated, and even their core understanding of why things work is shaken.
Religion offers people a nomos that is higher than the "common sense" world around us. It provides a "wisdom higher than our wisdom" and a "purpose higher than our purpose."
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Mark 4:36 - 41 - Jesus and the disciples crossing the sea are overcome by a storm.
The disciples (specifically the fishermen) have experienced these storms before and knew the danger they were in. Everyone was pitching in to help keep the ship afloat, and they couldn't believe Jesus was sleepinig in the middle of it. When He came out and rebuked the storm and the sea, everything became calm. When this happened, the disciples stopped fearing for their lives (i.e. the imminent danger of the storm), and were terrified of Jesus. It was at this moment that they understood that He was something more than they could conceive. He was not "human."
Their nomos was shattered.
We want God to be real without shattering our nomos. It is our nomos that creates our "comfort zone."
The problem is, if He really is transcendent, and we want a true perception of Him... he MUST destroy our order. The real changes in our lives occur only within definitive nomos-shattering events.
How do we find/percieve/recognize God?
C.S. Lewis: "If I find in myself a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy... the most likely explanation is that I was made for another world."
Be attentive to things that come from this other place.
Chronicle experiences that show light. Chronicle means to remember and revisit an event -- in the same sense that the stories of God were passed down and remembered by stories.
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