{"id":25946,"date":"2025-10-12T09:19:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T13:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=25946"},"modified":"2025-10-13T09:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:42:07","slug":"25946","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=25946","title":{"rendered":"Prophetic Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin\u2019 (Lyric Video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fS7aBrBUaFU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Brian McLaren emphasizes knowing and following Jesus as a prophet:\u202f<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many Christians have tried to understand Jesus primarily through his spiritual descendants by asking, \u201cWhat did Paul say about Jesus? What did Augustine say about Jesus? What did John Calvin or John Wesley say about Jesus?\u201d If we only try to understand Jesus through what people said&nbsp;<em>after&nbsp;<\/em>his lifetime, we will miss how much more we could understand about Jesus by seeing him in the context of those who came&nbsp;<em>before&nbsp;<\/em>him\u2014in the story of his ancestors and his spiritual lineage. <strong>Jesus waits to be rediscovered in the context of his history and story. <\/strong>Growing up as a Jew, Jesus enters the ancestral lineage of the patriarchs and matriarchs\u2014Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel. But Jesus also enters through a spiritual lineage of prophets and prophetesses beginning with Moses, the first biblical prophet\u2026.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He begins his public ministry with a prophetic proclamation [see Luke 4:14\u201330]. He acts like a prophet by doing all kinds of bizarre public demonstrations. Like the prophets, Jesus offers warnings and promises, blessings and woes. He also loves to quote prophets, especially Isaiah and Hosea&#8230;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Unfortunately, this rich prophetic understanding of Jesus became minimized in the Christian tradition. Instead, we talked almost exclusively about Jesus as the Son of God, &#8230; the savior from original sin, and the sacrificial lamb. We minimized his work and life as a prophet.<strong> We are free to understand Jesus as more than a prophet, but we should never understand him as less.<\/strong> His prophetic tradition should form the core and the baseline of our understanding of Jesus.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we take Jesus seriously as a prophet, we take his incarnation seriously, because Jesus comes into a particular historical situation. As part of a society, he had to grapple with politics and economics. The crucifixion makes sense because prophets\u2019 lives don\u2019t usually end well. Very few have a comfortable retirement. His prophetic identity also <strong>requires us to take the story of the resurrection seriously as a prophetic demonstration and affirmation that the work of the prophet must continue even after he is executed and buried.<\/strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>If we let Jesus as prophet be eclipsed by other understandings, Jesus is reduced, and so are we.<\/strong> Jesus wants his followers to become like him\u2026. He says, \u201cMy movement is a prophetic movement. <strong>If you join my movement, you\u2019re in that line of work, including its hazards.\u201d&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we take Jesus seriously as prophet, it will help us in our multi-faith conversations because other religions take the role of prophet seriously. Muslims love and revere Jesus as a prophet. <strong>When we think about the white patriarchy and white supremacy that are so deeply embedded in many forms of Christianity, we realize that the revolutionary contributions of Black, eco, feminist, womanist, and liberation theologies take Jesus\u2019 life and work as a prophet more seriously.<\/strong> When we can reclaim the understanding of Jesus as prophet and let that revolutionize us, we can rediscover prophets in today\u2019s world.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Jesus the Prophet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>In a homily Father Richard describes the tension between priestly and prophetic tasks\u2014both necessary for healthy religion:\u202f<\/em>\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are two great strains of spiritual teachers in Judaism, and I think, if the truth is told, in all religions. There\u2019s the priestly strain that holds the system together by repeating the tradition. The one we\u2019re less familiar with is the prophetic strain, because that one hasn\u2019t been quite as accepted. Prophets are critical of the very system that the priests maintain.\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we have both, we have a certain kind of wholeness or integrity. If we just have priests, we keep repeating the party line and everything is about loyalty, conformity, and following the rules\u2014and that looks like religion. But <strong>if we have the priest&nbsp;<em>and&nbsp;<\/em>the prophet, we have a system constantly refining itself and correcting itself&nbsp;<em>from within<\/em>. <\/strong>Those two strains very seldom come together. We see it in Moses, who both gathers Israel, and yet is the most critical of his own people. We see it again in Jesus, who loves his people and his Jewish religion, but is lethally critical of hypocrisy and illusion and deceit (see Matthew 23; Luke 11:37\u201312:3).\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Choctaw elder and Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston considers how Jesus invited others to share in his prophetic vision:<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus \u2026 saw a vision that became an invitation for people to claim a new identity, to enter into a new sense of community.\u2026 Jesus offered the promise of justice, healing, and redemption.\u2026 Jesus became the prophetic teacher of a spiritual renewal for the poor and the oppressed\u2026. Jesus was more than just the recipient of a vision or the messenger of a vision. What sets Jesus apart is that he brought the elements of his vision quest together in a way that no one else had ever done\u2026.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis is my body,\u201d he told them. \u201cThis is my blood.\u201d For him, the culmination of his vision was not just the messiahship of believing in him as a prophet. Through the Eucharist, Jesus was not just offering people a chance to see his vision, but to become a part of it by becoming a part of him. [1]&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Richard honors the role of prophets in religious systems:\u202f<\/em>\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <strong>only way evil can succeed is to disguise itself as good.<\/strong> And <strong>one of the best disguises for evil is religion.<\/strong> Someone can be racist, be against the poor, hate immigrants, and be totally concerned about making money and being a materialist but still go to church each Sunday and be \u201cjustified\u201d in the eyes of religion.\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those are the things that prophets point out, so prophets aren\u2019t nearly as popular as priests. <strong>Priests keep repeating the party line, but prophets do both: they put together the best of the conservative with the best of the liberal<\/strong>, to use contemporary language. They <strong>honor the tradition,\u202fand\u202fthey also say what\u2019s phony about the tradition. That\u2019s what fully spiritually mature people can do.\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Addiction as Idolatry<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Things We Worship Instead of God  <\/h3>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">by Mark Longhurst<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>We are all addicted to something.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some of us struggle, or know people who struggle, with devastating addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex, or gambling. But even for those of us untouched by substance abuse, addiction reaches much deeper. It hides in our habits of thought and behavior, in our compulsions to control, perform, or prove ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Psychologist and spiritual writer Gerald May <strong>defined addiction as \u201ca state of compulsion, obsession, or preoccupation that enslaves a person\u2019s will and desire.\u201d<\/strong> That line gets to the heart of it. Addiction is not only about substances; it\u2019s about the ways we <strong>become attached to whatever promises relief, affirmation, or control.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For about half of my life, I\u2019ve been addicted to caffeine. It\u2019s one of the socially accepted addictions\u2014alongside sugar, chocolate, and nicotine. I started drinking thick, black German coffee at fourteen, eager to prove my maturity. I was suffering from undiagnosed depression and discovered that caffeine gave me the energy I couldn\u2019t summon on my own. So I drank six or seven cups a day. I would walk into the Black Forest (where my boarding school was located) with a thermos, find a quiet place to sit, pull out my self-serious existentialist novel, and finish the whole thing. My brain needed\u2014and still needs, if I\u2019m honest\u2014that jolt to keep going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it\u2019s not just me. We are all addicted in some way. Our desires and wills are compulsive, obsessed, and preoccupied\u2014attached to habits of behavior and thought that enslave us. Some of us are addicted to caffeine or chocolate, some to hidden fantasies, email, our phones, or television. <strong>Most of us are addicted to ways of thinking:<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"> being right, being in control, being successful, being loved, being needed, even helping others.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And our addictions don\u2019t stop at the individual level. We can see how the United States is addicted to white supremacy and fights fiercely to reject and attack the inherent diversity that defines us. We can see how the United States is addicted to fossil fuels, which connects to our addiction to war and the increasingly desperate craving to remain a global empire.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From a spiritual perspective,<strong> addiction is idolatry: worshiping something other than God.<\/strong> When we attach ultimate desire to anything finite, whether a person, a substance, a nation, or an ideology, we place our trust in what cannot sustain us. As the apostle Paul writes in Romans 1, we turn away from God when we \u201cworship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul\u2019s insight echoes the first commandment given through Moses: \u201cYou shall have no other gods before me.\u201d Yet even as Moses descended from the mountain, the Israelites had enlisted Aaron to craft a golden calf. That story in Exodus is timeless. <strong>Golden calves are a symbol of the human tendency to orient our trust toward what we can see\u2014something shiny, attainable, or seemingly secure.<\/strong> <strong>When we direct our longing toward what is not Infinite Love, we treat something other than God as god. Addiction, then, is misplaced worship.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s why the third of the Twelve Steps reads:&nbsp;<em>\u201cMade a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.\u201d<\/em>&nbsp;AA founder Bill Wilson understood that sobriety requires a spiritual change of course in one\u2019s will and desire. And that is true not only for alcoholics; it is true for everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul had a word for our universal addictive tendencies:&nbsp;<em>sin.&nbsp;<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know that word makes many people uneasy, and often for good reason. For folks hurt by religion, we can easily use different words. I live only a stone\u2019s throw from the church where Jonathan Edwards preached \u201cSinners in the Hands of an Angry God.\u201d This category of sin has often been wielded as a weapon of fear. <strong>But understood rightly, sin is simply the truth of our condition: our woundedness, our misaligned desires, our addictions. Naming sin is not self-hatred or a way of avoiding our inherent divine image within; it\u2019s just truth-telling\u2014and as Jesus said, \u201cthe truth shall set you free.\u201d<\/strong>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Romans 7, Paul captures our inner struggle:&nbsp;<em>I do what I do not want to do; I intend to do the right thing, but my intentions fall flat.<\/em>&nbsp;I grabbed the bottle after five years of sobriety. I lashed out at someone I love. I meant to seek the other\u2019s good, but couldn\u2019t control my reaction. There is something in each of us that fails to live up to our own standards and is misaligned with Love.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Romans 7 builds on the argument Paul makes earlier:&nbsp;<em>all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.<\/em>&nbsp;It\u2019s a brilliant rhetorical reversal. In Romans 1, Paul seems to play into stereotypes about Gentiles as immoral outsiders and he lists their supposed vices in a kind of moral crescendo. It\u2019s an over-the-top list: Gentiles are guilty of envy, murder, deceit, craftiness, malice, covetousness, gossip, slandering, God-hatred, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, inventing evil, rebelling against parents, heartlessness, ruthlessness. On and on. But then, in chapter 2, he turns the tables:<strong>&nbsp;<em>\u201cYou have no excuse when you judge others, for in passing judgment you condemn yourself.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You Gentiles who think you\u2019re upright. You Jewish believers confident in divine favor. You modern Christians convinced God is on your nation\u2019s side. You conservatives so certain that others are damned, and you liberals so certain that others are ignorant\u2014all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. As Jesus reminds us in Matthew\u2019s Gospel, we first must remove the plank from our own eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Transformation begins only when we face the truth of our situation. <\/strong>The first of the Twelve Steps says:&nbsp;<em>\u201cWe admitted we were powerless over alcohol\u2014that our lives had become unmanageable.\u201d<\/em>&nbsp;We resist this kind of conversion at every turn. Paul himself needed a blinding encounter with Christ before he could release his violent certainty.<strong> Most of us need a crisis\u2014a death, a diagnosis, a collapse, a reckoning\u2014to wake us to the truth of life\u2019s unmanageability. <\/strong>We just won\u2019t let go, it seems, unless something forces us to.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Prayer, then, becomes a recovery practice: a way of detaching from our attachments.<\/strong> <\/span>Detachment doesn\u2019t mean aloofness or indifference. It means learning to witness our obsessions and slowly reorder our desires toward God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Contemplative prayer is a <strong>daily humiliation for the aggrandized ego.<\/strong> When we sit in silence, even for two minutes, the first thing we notice is that we are&nbsp;<em>not<\/em> silent. Our minds teem with opinions and judgments:&nbsp;<em>I need to do that thing later. What does that person think of me? That other person is really annoying me. I look pretty good today. Do I look pretty good today?<\/em>&nbsp;<strong>Anything to avoid resting in the grace-filled enoughness of God\u2019s love<\/strong>.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>In prayer we throw our addicted selves onto the mercy of God. We confess our powerlessness and acknowledge that our lives have become unmanageable. As the ancient Christians prayed:&nbsp;<em>Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner<\/em><\/strong><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brian McLaren emphasizes knowing and following Jesus as a prophet:\u202f&nbsp; Many Christians have tried to understand Jesus primarily through his spiritual descendants by asking, \u201cWhat did Paul say about Jesus? What did Augustine say about Jesus? What did John Calvin or John Wesley say about Jesus?\u201d If we only try to understand Jesus through what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25946"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25946"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25966,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25946\/revisions\/25966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}