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Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.
– N. T. Wright
In The Second Mountain, David Brooks observes the inescapable fact that we all grow up in one moral ecology or another. Our moral ecology is the system of beliefs and behaviors that are often based in collective responses to big problems in a specific cultural moment. Recovering what is good, true, and beautiful often depends on identifying our current moral ecology and courageously asking, “Where have we gone astray, and how might we uncover the path forward to recover life in our age?”
Brooks describes the pattern like this: “It usually starts with a subculture. A small group of creative individuals finds the current moral ecology oppressive and alienating. So they go back in history and update an old moral ecology that seems to provide a better way to live…”
Were we to allow Jesus’ words to interrogate us, we may find ourselves asking courageous but uncomfortable questions: What do I need to unlearn? How is my current moral ecology getting in the way of seeing Jesus and his Kingdom as it really is? And how can I see Jesus and his Kingdom more clearly?
Often at first pass we see things not as they truly are, but only as we are. However, if we are willing, our distorted vision need not be the final verdict. If we will give our consent, Jesus and his disruptive Word can address and heal our blindness. His words and teaching can liberate us from our inherited, unconscious, or entrenched perspectives and deliver us into a new life and expanded vision. By his grace and transformative power, we can, in time, begin to see things more and more as they really are.
Join Cherie and me as we risk questioning our current moral ecology in light of the way of Jesus, opening ourselves to his interrogation so that our impoverished vision of his gospel of the Kingdom may be exchanged for a greater vision ablaze in Resurrection Light.
For the Kingdom,
I recommend a deep dive into these books we referenced:
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