sacrifice?

And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.

Romans 12:1 (NLT)

I have been thinking about the word “sacrifice”. It carries baggage within theological circles – it is often connected to “death”. But what if we define it as a surrender of a lesser good for a greater good? So, in other words, define it in terms of “love” rather than “death”.

So the above, which I have always found a very interesting verse to ponder, would become something like:

Let your bodies be a living and holy surrender of love to God.

But I am no theologian!!!

infinite chasm

Today would have been Soren Kierkegaard’s 209th birthday. I feel very close to him as a person (he was, by all reports, awake, somehow confusing and confused, and intense) and I really enjoy his writings. I am no Kierkegaardian as that would be betraying Kierkegaard. But I find his thought upbuilding and challenging, and always pointing beyond itself to the Absolute Paradox.

So since it is his birthday, I thought I would share a large quote from Practice in Christianity. It is one of his later books and maybe shows a more mature vision of Christianity.

So happy birthday, SK, and thanks for keeping me alive with your writings.

There is, namely, an infinite chasmic difference between God and man, and therefore it became clear in the situation of contemporaneity that to become a Christian (to be transformed into likeness with God) is, humanly speaking, an even greater torment and misery and pain than the greatest human torment, and in addition a crime in the eyes of one’s contemporaries. And so it will always prove to be if becoming a Christian truly comes to mean becoming contemporary with Christ. And if becoming a Christian does not come to mean this, then all this talk about becoming a Christian is futility and fancy and vanity, and in part blasphemy and sin against the Second Commandment of the Law and sin against the Holy Spirit.

In relation to the absolute, there is only one time, the present; for the person who is not contemporary with the absolute, it does not exist at all. And since Christ is the absolute it is easy to see that in relation to him there is only one situation, the situation of contemporaneity; the three, the seven, the fifteen, the seventeen, the eighteen hundred years make no difference at all; they do not change him, but neither do they reveal who he was, for who he is is revealed only to faith.

Christ is no play-actor, if I may say it this soberly; neither is he a merely historical person, since as the paradox he is an extremely unhistorical person. But this is the difference between poetry and actuality: contemporaneity. The difference between poetry and history is surely this, that history is what actually happened, whereas poetry is the possible, the imagined, the poetized. But that which has actually happened (the past) is still not, except in a certain sense (namely, in contrast to poetry), the actual. The qualification that is lacking—which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all religiousness is—for you. The past is not actuality—for me. Only the contemporary is actuality for me. That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality—for you. Thus every human being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living—and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history.

Practice in Christianity, Hong 63-64

dreams?

I have vivid dreams. When I wake I am never sure if it was a dream or something that really happened. Sometimes that confusion can last for a couple of days and I have to remind myself that it was not real but a dream.

I have often wondered about the meaning of these dreams. Are they signs from the Holy Spirit? Or simply a physical reaction to chemicals in my brain?

Well, I am not the only person who has wondered about the topic! I have been reading Richard Rolle’s The Form of Living. It is less rule than a guide to anchorite ascetics. Rolle discusses dreams – “our enemy will not allow us to relax when we are asleep”. Yes, sometimes they are from God but often they are simply neurotransmitters firing in your brain.

Maybe it is living basically alone that means I have vivid dreams? Or maybe it is the way that God has made me? But I have found Rolle helpful – move on and trust Jesus.