​I couldn’t be bothered with generosity of spirit the other day. I was busy rehearsing a sermon.
 
That’s how it goes sometimes. You have to talk about the love and grace of the Origin and Redeemer of the cosmos in a couple hours. So when my friend sends me a nice thought via text—“I just saw a bumper sticker that said ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.’”—what was I going to do? Reflect on it with new eyes? Allow myself to be moved that my friend would think to share a little spiritual gem with me that morning? Enjoy the profound realization that we are not alone in this spiritual journey? That there are travel partners on the road with us?
 
Not this bona fide saint and sinner, specializing in sinner. No no no. The snotty, know-it-all words that spilled onto my iPhone keyboard were “St. Francis was an aphorism machine.”

You’ll forgive the beggar if he’s turned a bit cynical about people. A lifetime of paralysis will do that to a person (Acts 3:1-10).
 
Or maybe cynical isn’t even the right word. He’s been at this so long, it would be more accurate to say that he’s a realist. He doesn’t hold the resentment of a true cynic, not at this stage. He’s grown very realistic about the economy of guilt. He knows his place, and it is what it is. He knows that few motivators are as reliable as guilt. And by the same token, few are as limited. Guilt is almost always worth a shekel or two, never much more than that. You can’t get from guilt to respect or to honor. There is no progression from guilt to love, certainly not to friendship.

​My freshman year at Colorado State University, I lived in the dorms with my best friend from high school. There are some pros and cons to living with a lifelong friend your first year of college. One pro is that it puts you in a rare position of personal security versus the other new younglings, who are frantically (and sometimes literally) grasping at each other for a place to fit in these new unchartered waters. One con is that lifelong friends tend to develop a shared sense of humor with a frequency and wavelength, which, they forget, diverges more and more from the norm over time.       
 
Back then, we were into a form of practical joking which frequently took the shape of informal social experiments. One day, we thought it might be a lark to take out a piece of paper and write the names of about half of our dorm floor-mates on a list, leave the other half off, and then post it to the outside of our door (about 25 of 50 people in total). No labels. No contextual clues as to the what the list meant (and, in fact, it meant nothing).

The epistle of First John is deceptive. It lulls you into a false sense of security with some very beige sentences. If you're not paying attention, it might even lead you to believe that he is just talking about the same stodgy old platitudes that you would expect of, say, an aging Evangelical tv preacher or one of those self-styled, pan-denominational aunts, who never seem to tire of generic moralisms and conservative protestant party lines.  
 
Example A: “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him.”
(K, great. But how do you define sin and how do we know when we’ve been born of God? What happens if I'm born of God, and it takes for a bit, but then I sin a couple times?)

[The Lord spoke to Isaiah]
Shout out, do not hold back!
    Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people that children are dying!
    Announce to this “one nation under God” their sins.
I’m to understand that day after day they seek me
    and delight to know my ways,
as if they were truly a “Christian” nation
    and did not forsake the way of their God;
they presume that their judgments are my righteous judgments,
    they claim to be close to God.
They say, “Look, we pray to open up House proceedings. Do you not see?
    We place our hands on Bibles, do you not notice?”

​Masculinity is a good thing.
 
Toxic masculinity has become the single biggest threat to all complex life on this planet.
 
We should talk about that.
 
I almost feel like, if you’re not already nodding your head, and I still have to define “toxic masculinity,” then I’ve already lost you. But here is the shortlist of its symptoms:

• uncontrolled or arbitrary aggression,
• projection of that aggression onto the world, informing one’s social and political beliefs,
  
• chronic insecurity leading to obsessive “strutting” of one’s own capacity for violence, the fear or paranoia that everyone is out to get me or us (meaning one’s own family, nation, culture, racial group, etc.), resulting in an ethic of constant arms race and preparedness to resort to violence,

​Jared Witt   l   January 4, 2017