The Decemberists perform "The Mariner's Revenge Song"
at The Fillmore in Charlotte, NC, April 9, 2015 (photo by Steve Harmon)
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Christian thinking about the world we live in and God’s
goals for it wrestles with a tension. What God envisions for the world is
already being made manifest in the Easter reality of Jesus’ resurrection from
the dead and in the body of his church that strives to incarnate this reality
in the world. But this reality does not yet fully embrace this world, as even a
glance at it confirms.
In the art form of popular music, the Irish
rock band U2 renders this tension well. By faith we believe that through
Christ what ought to be is already here. But it’s plain to see that the world
around us is not yet that, so we still haven’t
found what we’re looking for.
That’s not any easy tension to maintain. An over-emphasis on
the “already” of the Christian life—what theologians call an “overly-realized
eschatology”—can blind us to its “not-yetness,” the unfinished nature of God’s
work with us, with the church, with the world. But an over-emphasis on the
present “not-yetness” of the world can blind us to the things that ought to be
that are already all around us—what 18th-century French Jesuit
spiritual writer Jean Pierre de
Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment.”
Also
in the art form of popular music, a song from the new album by Portland, Oregon
folk-rock band The Decemberists
renders well what it means to savor the sacrament of the present moment in the
midst of all the things in the world that ought not to be....(read the full post at Baptist News Global Perspectives)
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