Mission Impossible

Last night as I was sitting in bed I pulled up my Google reader… only to find 88 articles. Last week was a busy week, Fresno to Yuba City to Menlo Park to Bakersfield to San Jose to Oakland and back home. I logged about 1500 miles and didn’t have much time to catch up what was going on in the blogosphere. As I quickly flipped through the blogs, only clicking on those titles that grabbed my attention, I kept asking myself, when do these people find the time to blog? By the time I got to bed I was exhausted. As I came into work this morning I flicked open my Google reader (out of habit)…24 more posts…What on God’s green earth do people do? Really, does anybody do anything anymore or do they just blog?

Feeling insignificant feeding my small blogger complex I thought to myself, “I should blog and contribute to the endless amount of garbage on the web.” But what to blog?

Blogging/writing continually is like Mission Impossible for me. My mission which I have chosen to accept, is not to endlessly pump out my thoughts, but to sort through them in a meaningful way so that I can process the endless loads of crap that I take in. What I have been working through is Stassen and Gushee’s book, Kingdom Ethics. Stassen and Gushee build a Christian Ethic on Jesus’ largest block of teachings in The Sermon on the Mount. As I set off to embark processing and synthesizing my reading of their work I was looking forward to linking in Rachel Even blog Jesus, The Impossible Mentor , and yesterday’s sermon by Humberto Reyes The Mission Impossible, Loving One’s Enemies (Matt 5:43-48).

These three sources posed a question to me, how serious do I, or should I take Jesus’ teachings from the Sermon on the Mont? My conclusion, after 250 pages of reading, Yoder’s Politics of Jesus, Rachel’s reflective blog, and Humberto’s sermon… I should be taking it PRETTY GOSH DARN SERIOUS. With my solid commitment to challenge myself, and without the motivation to blog through my thoughts, I decided to work through my newly found vigor with my wife. As chance would happen, an opportunity had presented itself where I could help my wife work through an issue of loving a difficult person. As I “helped” her discern her actions I soon found myself giving a pious mini sermon on exactly how she was supposed to follow Jesus’ teachings and apply what we had learned that day.

I should have stopped in the middle of my beautiful mini sermon to my wife, but I was on a roll. I was pulling in my reading from class, the sermon we heard that morning, our Bible study, and lastly what I have been learning in Revelation. It was all so brilliantly systematic and solid doctrinally. Everything came together as if I was being led by the Holy Spirit. As I sat in bed patting myself on the back for being the wonderful spiritual leader of our family that I am, I dozed off to sleep in my pious bliss. My last thought was, “God, I am so thankful you made me so smart and that you are tying everything I am learning together so well…” I wish the story could have ended here, however, a couple hours later my alarm signaled the start of my day.

The alarm really signaled that I was off to the races. The rubber was about to hit the road. It wasn’t that long till I was into my day and I realized that my sermon last night was impractical. How could Jesus really expect me to love people who were trying to steal from my company? Had Jesus really dealt with the inspectors that I have to deal with? I instantly started to rationalize and chip away at Jesus teachings. I imagine that I am not the first person to do this. The rationalization process makes Jesus teaching easy…palatable. I mean he couldn’t really want me to wash my enemies feet as he washed Judas’s right?

It all seems to paradoxal, radical, and inconceivable. Then again…if it was easy everyone would be doing it.