Grace is to touch the ground
the cursed soon to be bound
in a garden full of choking thistles
starving beneath the grafted canopy
that is connected resurrected reconciling
without the plow, the solid ground stifling
broke alone by dying lonely mustard seeds
cracking the violent root of jesse proceeds

then in sudden clamped lip silence
we if only for the shortest glimpse
in that seed-like part of a moment
see the first man that is eternally
Him, whose flesh has not and will not rot
as he holds the universe together with a thought

I just wanted to point you guys to Derek Webb's and Sandra McCracken's new EP "Amperstand". It is full of the still Fall and winter tones that don't make you sing in a world that is not always bright and sunny. Derek Webb's free album "Mockingbird" was really a album that gave me hope at a point in my life when all other christian music sounded like it was lying about the reality I was living in. "Amperstand" has the same effect on me talking about love. So whether you spent Valentines day with with your beloved or you spent it waiting for him/her or you spent it deepening you love for lady wisdom I hope you enjoy the CD.

Strong Silent Square jawed brother’s four tears
drop filled with words for a mother’s many years.

She did the bulletin board.
Sharing the divine with those who saw
Pictures of presidents and turkeys
by birthdays, snow and fall leaves
It was consecrated
She actually prayed for a bulletin board
She was God’s workmanship
It was a good work prepared beforehand
It was her gift
It was one of the reasons she was called
The angels in heaven are struck in awe
God filled with pride smiled at his daughter

She died in her chair
She died in her throne
brown ribbed fabric
wooden recliner handle
Where the king’s daughter sat
Where she watched over the battles
On a little extra padding
With a plywood tray for writing
She knew that she was adopted
She knows her fathers war

She sat queen of the world.
In the books on the day stand
In her beautiful script on cheap paper
In the letters from her Lord father
The words around her escape our world around her
Her prayers realize the new creation conquest
She claims victory from that chair
That is where she would have wanted to die.
Not in bed, but in battle
With her feet on the ground, hands folded and her eyes facing forward.
Past the wall barriers to the kingdom coming

Can you see the kingdom is coming in prisons, through children and through bulletin boards?

In this the season of the incarnation I was meditating on how humiliating it is. That God not bound by space or time by whom and for whom the world was created and is maintained in existence. He came to the earth as a man.
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, He shit.

He shit. He had dirty diapers. He was born in a stable no less surrounded by animal refuse. The foul smell of sulfur and partially digested grain. Think of everyday Jesus wiped his ass for us and every time he washed shit from his disciples feet. Immanuel, Christ with us was about glory in the middle of shit.
This is one of the most important Christological points
Jesus is the god that shit for us.
I have found that the best I can do doesn't mean shit. We can love our brother all we can and it is still shit, full of a thousand ulterior motives. I don’t think you should mind my language it is tame compared to Isaiah, who called the best we could do menstrual rags.
What people call the gospel or good news is Jesus was born knee deep in shit lived a life wading through shit. He came out the other side clean. A pearl cast to swine or a diamond in the shitter, but if we love him and more than the world he will make us new. If we see him and follow him he will make us clean.
But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as shit so that I may gain Christ.

I pray that you make my shit not stink

But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place. For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things? For we are not like many, peddling the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, we speak in Christ in the sight of God.

Thank you for your miracle humility of incarnation.
May we never make you a sterile clean God
May we be a people who are not afraid of shit

"Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit and enjoy the influences of each"
Henry David Thoreau

I resolve to never let the anticipation of solstice or equinox waste God's gifts of life.

Our only offering to god thankfulness otherwise known as a broken and contrite spirit practicaly synonymous with our very bodies, can only exist in the eternal instant between past and future.

remember pain in extremities
not the epicenter that spills out
warm delayed breaking shockwaves
not physical, invisible, lost in closed eyes
perception drugged without chemicals
just memories but real memories
history in my bones awoke
skeletal aching locking joints of
Love
the repetition of seasons in persons
their changing weather does not change
me
I do not see I just feel it
In constant again, no sting
the bruise I must press to use my hands
slaves use nimbly arthritic fingers
work Their Work unnumbed by wine
bond servants should know
wounds
master’s
their own
a tree, sticks and stones
beat down unbroken bones

The blood of cov’nant breach on hands that won’t
release the devoted, white knuckled grip
of disguises covering bare pilgrim threads,
our wedding dress and sacred sandal dust
be strong and very courageous echoes
through vic’try and conquest in spoils of war
A bar of gold and some silver glitter
Through Eyes passing the messages deeper
Amongst Traitor whispers against kings edicts
Where slave volition battles over hands
between Trojan flesh and child prince behind
Walls of self, blurred by the sublimation
Of who We are already but not yet
We melt and plead, the cov’nant forsaken
To destroy us in your promised presence
Impossible but by our transgression
Gouge eyes, Sever limbs, and search the tent to
Purge the camp, accepting the condemned
Condemning Abraham’s son with many stones
Defining true and untrue sons, by birth
Reconciles title with identity
pauper princes need not fear what to pack
As we enter his rest just remember
Gilgal stones in the valley of Achen

“and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it’”
Why?
Why were not the first words to Adam and Eve “Be good and no one will get hurt”? Maybe it was because he had bigger plans for the world than lists of things not to do. It seems to me that God’s first command was just a continuation of his frame of thought. All through Genesis God took simple raw things and from them made complex beautiful creations. They made light then water then land then painted giant balls of burning gas in the sky then vegetation then animals with diverse beauty and amazing complexity. Then using the raw dirt he had created earlier they created man in their own image of God. It is only natural from there that a God imaged man would follow the same pattern. One of the reasons that God’s creation was very good was in man he placed the divine spark of his authority and creativity. That man would take the raw materials of creation and make greater and greater beauty. After the fall the rest of redemptive history is a crescendo of God’s reconciliation of all things to himself.
Genesis the place where all good theologies start. It is amazing how good preaching can open your heart with a passage you have read a thousand times. That is what Tim Keller did for me this week.
faithandwork.mp3
click on the icon above to play audio.

These ideas hit me so much stronger as I was reminded that ruling and subduing was followed by putting Adam in the garden to cultivate it. The metaphor of a garden and cultivation has such a profound effect on my soul. The message was a bridge from my strong attraction to the simplest most honest of all professions (living off the land to be distinct from industrial agriculture) and my God given responsibility and desire to serve my brother man..

In order to entice you to listen I will leave you with a quote.
“People get converted so that we can have a new heaven and a new earth”

I am sure many of you have heard of him, but if not I will introduce you to Tim Keller. Tim Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan, New York. Over the past several months I have been devouring every thing that I can get by him because of how he talks about Christianity outside the Sunday.

This Second link is where he has convinced a rural cave man like me to move into the City. It discusses the Christian rural retreat.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/may/1.36.html