It never fails! After preaching a sermon or teaching a class, I run across a book or an article that I wish I’d had in preparing for that sermon or class. And such is the case with an article in the July 13 edition of The Christian Century that I just got to. In it, Michael L. Lindvall (pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in NYC) speaks about God’s good stuff, “Living in a Material World.”
So let me quote Michael, as a follow-up to my last posting “More than a Consumer.” He writes:
“… what I believe scripture witnesses to is a theology that understands the incarnation as the definitive sign, in one time and place, of the ever-presence of the Living God within God’s good material creation…
The soul danger lies in the insatiable longing to acquire new things one after another, more and more things, as if the getting of them somehow proves our worth in comparison with others, as if the having of them can fill the emptiness. It’s this insatiable drive to acquire stuff rather than the stuff itself that’s the problem.
The attempt to stuff more and more stuff into that unfilled place in our souls that only God can fill becomes, of course, idolatry – making what God made into god.”
Well put, Michael!
Tags: Christian, Church, gratitude, living faithfully, Presbyterian, religion, sociology
