Tom

“We are so blind that we run to God with physical ailments and needs, but for illnesses of the soul we run away from God and are determined not to return until we are cured—as if there were two gods, one to help the body and one to aid the soul, or as if we ourselves could take care of spiritual needs, although they are greater than the physical. This is really a devilish bit of advice and counsel.”
― Martin Luther

“In order to put to death our works and the [old] Adam, God hangs around our necks many unpleasant burdens that make us angry, much suffering that tries our patience, and finally death and the world’s contempt. By doing these things, God is simply trying to expunge our anger, impatience, and turmoil and replace them with his work, that is, with his peace. As Isaiah says in chapter 28: “God undertakes a strange work” in order to arrive at his proper work.q What does this mean? He means that God sends us suffering and turmoil in order to teach us patience and peace. God permits us to die in order to make us alive until each person is so peaceful and quiet that it does not matter whether things go well or poorly, whether one lives or dies, is honored or dishonored. At that point, God alone dwells there and human works are no more. This is what it means to keep the Sabbath rest and make it holy in the right way. Here there is no human control, delight, or sorrow at all. Instead, God alone leads each human being, and nothing is present but divine delight, joy, and peace along with all the other works and virtues.”
― Martin Luther, A Treatise on Good Works

“The gospel calls us to believe in Jesus Christ, to belong to the Church and to build for the kingdom. If we perform that role properly, we will walk in the way of the cross, and build – right under Caesar’s nose! – things that challenge the edifices of totalitarian regimes, that show forth the beauty of God’s new creation, that demonstrate that there is a different way to be human, liberated from the lusts of pleasure and power, attaining a genuine human life by conforming to the image of the Son of God.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

“Over time, the active verbs of the Shema-recite,
walk, talk, lie down, rise, bind, fix, write, all in the service of love-become too much for us to imagine, let alone perform.
Our search for superpowers has created many of the most pressing problems of our time.

The defining mental activity of our time is scrolling
Our capacities of attention, memory, and concentration are diminishing; to compensate, we toggle back and forth between infinite feeds of news, posts, images, episodes - taking shallow hits of trivia, humor, and outrage to make up for the depths of learning, joy, and genuine lament
that now feel beyond our reach.

The defining illness of our time is metabolic syndrome, the chronic combination of high weight, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar that is the hallmark of an inactive life. Our strength is atrophying and our waistline expanding, and to compensate, we turn to the superpowers of the supermarket with the aisles of salt and fat convincing our bodies’ reward systems, one bite at a time, that we have never been better in our life.

The defining emotional challenge of our time is anxiety, the fear of what might be instead of the courageous pursuit of what could be. Once, we lived with allness of heart, with a boldness of quest that was too in love with the good to call off the pursuit when we encountered risk. Now we live as voyeurs, pursuing shadowy vestiges of what we desire from behind the one-way mirror of a screen, invulnerable but alone.

And, of course, the soul is the plane of human ex-
istence that our technological age neglects most of all. Jesus asked whether it was worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing one's soul. But in the era of superpowers, we have not only lost a great deal of our souls-we have lost much of the world as well. We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are both at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast, mysterious cosmos, anchored in a rich reality beyond ourselves. We have lost our souls without even gaining the world.

So it is no wonder that the defining condition of our time is a sense of loneliness and alienation.

For if human flourishing requires us to love with all
our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens
When nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?”
― Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World