theeffect church

We are a church community of imperfect people working together to find spiritual transformation, that is theeffect of God's love.

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Jesus said that the bread was his body and wine a new covenant in his blood, but how we understand the word covenant has everything to do with how we understand communion. We've understood it as a contract, but for early followers, it was a last will.

https://t.co/ajFiVm1djv

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Ancient Hebrews imagined God’s presence as a pillar of cloud, right herenow among them, but without form that could be pinpointed or represented. And they were forbidden to try. They knew God is always in the cloud. A cloud of mystery and probability.

https://t.co/8StQ3kbQdK

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

If God is forgiveness, then God doesn’t forgive. Forgiveness is the essence of the field of God’s presence. Enter the field, enter forgiveness. There is no prerequisite for forgiveness. No contrition, confession, penance required.

https://t.co/IfYlduTo9R

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

God doesn’t forgive; God exists as indivisible restoration to the oneness we call forgiveness. We aren’t forgiven as an act God performs or not, we simply walk into the freedom from victimization that is God’s presence. Or not.

https://t.co/5Gpr6UPEZo

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

We say sin leads to separation, but sin is separation itself. Any act that leads to separation is sinful, but to focus on behavior, on symptom, is to lose sight of the cause—our separation anxiety. The Good News is any sense of separation is illusion.

https://t.co/X3MYzmlTlD

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

In Aramaic, taba and bisha, good and evil, are not legal terms, they are relational--literally, ripe and unripe. To see good/evil as a continuum of functionality is a first step into the flow of life, away from constant judging, objectifying, separating.

https://t.co/QijbwzZHj4

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Jesus never told his friends to worship him. He told them to follow him…his Way of living and seeing. To follow Jesus is to actively emulate his Way of becoming attuned to an experience of God’s presence directly, from inside out.

https://t.co/pLfWpxtEO0

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

The Hebrew mind couldn’t conceive of father without mother. Both necessary, complementary, a paradox that must never be resolved. God is the eternal oscillation between father and mother, and only in the oscillation do we find the perfect parent.

https://t.co/4hKsFyPwtx

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Jesus’ sayings are always code switching between micro and macro, mercy and justice, bringing what love requires to each moment in whatever context. God’s love is not just. Its mercy unbalances the scales of justice in favor of each of us.

https://t.co/7TOxw4OjUK

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Kingdom-heaven-God, is herenow, embedded in the field through which we walk. If we’re waiting for something, we won’t see it. Jesus is trying to show us it’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you think at all.

https://t.co/rX58ktVI5p

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

We think of salvation as an event, a moment when God bestows acceptance, but scriptures show the experience of Jesus’ followers as gradually becoming ready to see that salvation is not given at all. It is experienced, realized, remembered...

https://t.co/qTXXh51DA4

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Christians agree that Jesus lives, but not how…physically, spiritually, collectively, some way we can’t imagine? Ultimately, it’s a matter of faith, but where can we go for guidance to meaning?

Of course, the gospels show us just where to look.

https://t.co/wu6KyMLMFo

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Begging Jesus to save us misses the whole point of salvation. Salvation isn’t given or bestowed. It is experienced…or not. Jesus’ person and message is an invitation to follow the Way of experiencing the truth, the liberation that salvation is.

https://t.co/TxbEu7lr6B

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Until we can poke our heads above the waterline of our egoic selves, we’re only ever seeing the inside of our eyelids, nothing of the real. We can’t see the air; fish can’t see the water.

Hopefully our odds are better than theirs.

https://t.co/wej8qguNLr

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Early followers of Jesus understood that his Way of spiritual formation was about subtraction not addition—that there is nothing to acquire, no kingdom out there to make us whole. Everything is already within. Our minds are all that block this truth.

https://t.co/xfIjFF0bua

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Within every physical task is an eternal task always pointing to connection. True meaning is found in that connection and nowhere else, and addressing that connection is to never let the hard work of change eclipse the radical acceptance of right now.

https://t.co/6BMZq6OPdI

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

We take nature for granted—dimly aware of it turning in the background. But when nature becomes intense enough, it calls attention to itself. Should we have to be called with circumstance intense enough to break us open like desert seeds waiting for rain?

https://t.co/erTPfkERFB

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Lent is about deprivation, yes, but not as penance in search of reward…as the only means by which we can realize agendaless love. We don’t ascend to this love, perform for it or suffer for it. As William Butler Yeats wrote, we wither into the truth.

https://t.co/KcpWHfccEU

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Sixty years ago, a famous theologian said that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all. Rational belief will not sustain us. Only the personal experience of the enchanted reality of God’s presence can do that.

https://t.co/0YZghdy1Y0

[theeffect church @theeffectorg]

Kingdom is never closed, never withheld—always now, always available. God doesn’t admit us or not. God is eternally open. God’s presence is kingdom itself. We admit ourselves whenever we’re ready to experience it.

https://t.co/eq38S9DETT