Awestruck

Such an approach fits neatly into a broader, largely unquestioned paradigm of living that we will call the quid pro quo mindset. I will give something to you if you give something to me. I will love you if you love me back. I will forgive you if you forgive me. I will ___________ as long as you do the same.

The expected result of quid pro quo living is balance and harmony. Everyone does something for everyone else in equal measure and there is much rejoicing.

A closer look at quid pro quo, though, leads not to the expected balance in our relationships. Instead, we withhold generosity while waiting on others to give to us first. And when everyone assumes this same posture, frustration sets in. Over time, this frustration crystallizes into jade - creating an unbalanced quality of being.

Frozen in this state, we wait for all others to make the first move towards us. And if that move is not in our favor, our internal angst drives us to label it as on offense - whether real or not.

Quid pro quo demands that any offense be met with defense, and so we do the only thing we know how. We strike back, whether passively or aggressively, or some combination of both.

And when we strike back, they strike back, and on and on it goes, creating an unthinkable, undesirable, unsustainable way to live - a decaying orbit destined to burn us all out.

And yet, there is another way. The way of peace. Love. Balance. And it comes not by taking an eye for an eye, but by turning the other cheek.

Source Scripture

Matthew

Matthew 5:38-42; Luke 6:29-30

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Extras

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For Further Contemplation

Leviticus 19:18; Proverbs 20:22; 1 Samuel 24

Recommended Reading

Unoffendableby Brant Hansen

Commitment. We all have our various means of desiring to change, choosing a path of transformation, and then mustering the will to follow-through.

Often we turn to ritual, contract, or other form of pledge that marks the moment our new journey begins to assert that we will, in fact, do what we say we will do. We make New Year's resolutions, buy gym memberships, or announce our goal to family and friends to hold us accountable.

This longstanding approach - longing for change, choosing a methodology, and then attempting to seal the commitment - is fraught with tenuous threads that cannot hold the weight of our convictions.

Transformation rarely occurs without first immersing ourselves - our souls - in truth. We first listen. We drink deeply of the divine until truth overwhelms us within, prompting action without as in inherent by-product.

Today we take a journey backwards from our written, verbal, and internal vows that we will change until we arrive at the wellspring of transformation. From here, we can journey back to the surface, taking with us the boon that eliminates the need for empty promises and giving us - and others - the real power we need for change.

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:33-37

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Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist  (Apple I Spotify)

Recommended Reading

The Hidden Order of Intimacy by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Trending: trading the transcendent for the trivial.

This is the essence of idolatry - to embrace a deflated form of or wholesale alternative to divine love in a futile attempt to satisfy the inner longings of the soul.

And when the idol doesn’t deliver, our thirst drives us to double down. We either increase our obeisance or turn to another and settle for whatever fleeting hint of satisfaction we can find before we are back where we started.

Parched. Desperate. Bereft.

So pervasive is this paradigm that it permeates our entire purpose and everyday practice.

We trade transcendent truth for trivial trinkets. We exchange the presence of the God for the study of God, leaving the landscape of our souls littered with crumbling idols of dogma. And eventually, when all conceivable idols fashioned in the image of God fail to satisfy, we abandon all hope in God altogether and wander even further into the desert.

And in that desert, as we encounter other divine beings created in the image of God like ourselves - we create idols of them as well. 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in our pursuit of a husband or wife to share a lifetime of love.

Rather than embrace the presence of the divine one created in God's image, we spend years developing an idol that potential candidates must conform to. And when they don't - we send them away, whether literally or metaphorically. We cancel them. We disassemble the relationship with them in favor of maintaining the relationship we have with the idol.

Today, we will seek to escape this paradigm, casting aside our idols so that we may instead embrace the divine God of the Universe himself, along with the one he brings to us in the relationship of marriage.

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:27-32; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:18

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Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist  (Apple I Spotify)

Read Malachi 2:10-16. How does this Old Testament passage, written 400 years earlier than the Sermon on the Mount, compare to Jesus' words?

Read Leviticus 18, a chapter devoted exclusively to the Old Testament law concerning sexual practices. One verse seems totally out of place - which is it? How does this verse regarding idolatry relate to verse preceding it?

Read Mark 10:1-12. What was the motive for the Pharisees asking Jesus this question? What motive did the disciples have for following up Jesus' response with their own questions privately?

If you have suffered loss due to divorce, there is hope. Read Psalm 147:3. What is God's attitude toward you? What does he intend to do for you?

Anger is like fire. Under control, it can bring much-needed warmth to a cold environment or form a backfire to stop the spread of a raging wildfire.  But out of control, the smallest of sparks can ignite an inferno that races to consume and destroy. Controlling anger is not, as we might often assume, merely the exercise of withholding caustic words or violent deeds. Containing the anger within the confines of the body does not bring it under control - it suppresses. Compresses. Distresses.

Left in this state, we smolder.  And the resulting pressure requires release. It will either build a backdraft that explodes when someone or something opens the door, or it will seep out at regular intervals in a period - or even a lifetime - of passive aggression.

Some of us, without even knowing, live in a perpetual state of anger - like the coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that has been burning underground since 1962. And in this state, everyone - and everything - agitates us. Or, more destructively, we find ourselves wondering we explode at the slightest provocation.

Today, we will take a fresh look at unsettled anger - how to determine if we need to extinguish it, or build a good fire that helps others. And, in most cases, we learn how to avoid creating the drought conditions in the soul that allow it to burn uncontrollably in the first place.

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:21-26

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Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist  (Apple I Spotify)

Read 1 John 1. How does this passage relate to today's podcast and help you examine your inward life as it pertains to anger? Where do you see the ministry of reconciliation to God and others? How does hypocrisy sneak into our lives to prevent us from seeing how our refusal to reconcile warps our view of the divine?

Books to Read

Unoffendable by Brant Hansen

The formulation of such questions and the hands-on-hips scrutiny that awaits their answers disclose an underlying, dualistic paradigm that we might call religious meritocracy. 

Do the right thing - earn your way to heaven. If, then. Yes, no. 

Religious meritocracy produces, as its logical conclusion, rigid boundaries with which to declare judgement, excluding those on the outside and self-righteously promoting those on the inside to elevated status. Everything becomes about the boundaries, where all troops are amassed. And yet, in so doing, the interior state becomes entirely devoid of the life with which the boundaries were intended to cradle.

It's easy to fall prey to this paradigm if you take only a cursory glance at sacred Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. The law given to Moses and the message preached by prophets often center on those deeds that, if committed, warrant punishment. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal.  Or else.

And yet, as we will see in today's episode, the sacred rarely emerges from cursory glances, just as the breathtaking experiences of vacation in a beautiful country does not come by walking its borders heal-to-toe all the way around and then returning home.

Today, we cross the threshold of the borders outlined by the letter of the law and go deep into the interior - to the breathtaking Spirit of the Law - that brings life and love to otherwise dead religion.

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:17-20

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Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist  (Apple I Spotify)

Read Romans 8-13. Compare Paul's explanation of living by the Spirit and his religious establishment's failed attempts to find the kingdom of heaven they were looking for.

It is in our nature to be connected with each other. Interwoven. Interdependent. Interlocked in love and community.

And yet this is not our reality. Instead, we are alienated. Separated. Resentful. Mistrustful. In fear and paranoia, we depersonalize. Criticize. Exploit. Avoid.

In this increasingly diseased state, lacking the restorative powers of wholesome social community, the suffering caused by our isolation intensifies - due to our isolation.

It's time to reverse the trend. To heal the wounds. To cure the disease.

Today, in our look back at the previous six episodes, we will surface their underlying theme of creating community and reversing the curse of isolation and the catastrophic toll it has taken from on of us.

Words. Logic. Reason. Argument. Language is the bedrock on which most of us form and defend our framework of belief - the over-arching narrative that governs how we make sense of the world around us.

If something cannot be expressed in words, we think, then it cannot be true. How could it be?

And yet, are not the greatest experiences of our lives those in which we find ourselves… Speechless? When someone we know faces profound grief and loss, do we attempt to console them with logic? Would you prefer a detailed map and well-worded paragraph describing the islands of Hawaii over a personal visit?

Logic, reason, and the scientific method can go only so far in their attempts to penetrate the depths of the human soul. To limit ourselves to only what they offer is to live in the shadows of the fullness of reality. In a growing darkness. Where we crawl about, wondering why we cannot seem to see and experience the true depths of who we are and who we are meant to be. 

What, then, can penetrate this darkness if not reason?

The divine light of truth, demonstrated in the raw, authentic, spiritual form of a narrative. 

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:14-16; Mark 4:21; Luke 8:16; 11:33

Connect

Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

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Essence. This word connotes the wellspring of being - our nature. Often in an attempt to describe such a concept we turn to words like...

Father. The essence of a father is that he has children that he loves, provides for, protects, guides. If we see someone who claims to be a father violating that essence through abuse or abandonment, we feel natural tension. That tension is the distance between what we believe to be the essence of fatherhood and the broken example now before us.

Husband, mother, policeman, priest - all of these possess an inherent essence that, when lost, fill us with disappointment. But when fulfilled, as in an example where a father gives his life to save one of his children, we feel an overwhelming sense of awe.

The alignment between essence and reality matters.

Whether we realize it or not, our essence is divine. Our wellspring is the heart. The soul.  And when we choose to live in alignment with our essence, awe permeates our reality. But when we pollute or dilute our essence to pursue the non-essential, we break faith with the divine and life loses its meaning - for us and for those who know us.

So what word best describes our divine nature? Salt.

We are the salt of the earth...

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:13; Mark 9:49-50; Luke 14:34-35

Connect

Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist  (Apple I Spotify)

The truth hurts, and its wounded often lash out.

When the divine light of truth confronts, all masks and costumes fashioned to conceal it fall away. And in that moment, confronted with the reality of our naked being, we face tough choices: run, fight, or embrace.

Those who run search for a place where they may reacquire the familiar cloaking devices. Those who fight rush the source of the light of truth and attack, hoping that darkness may once again fall. And those who embrace the truth are transformed and experience the divine.

Truth ignites hatred in those entrenched in ego-centered living, because it calls their entire being into question. Truth is a threat to the ego’s way of life, and so the mightiest personal military forces available must be sent out to "protect."

A life founded on the ego's principles resorts to hatred instead of love, lies instead of truth, and insults instead of encouragement.

Today we will face the reality that those of us who speak truth, live rightly, and align ourselves with the divine will inevitably be the victims of enraged, wounded egos. And in that reality can find happiness, because it is an indicator that we are living in the kingdom of heaven.

Conversely, though, if we find ourselves unnoticed. Unchallenged. Unopposed. Unaffected by the egos of the world, then it is a haunting sign that our truth is hidden or corrupt. Our living is weak or off base. And our Jesus is an idol constructed in our own image and not the living, breathing God of the Universe.

So let's see where we stand.

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:10-12; Luke 6:22-23,26

Connect

Twitter: @AwestruckPod Email: [email protected]

Extras

The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist  (Apple I Spotify)