Your Blog Steward

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Omaha, Nebraska, United States
I am more and more convinced that most congregations die from a staggering lack of imagination. Let's change that. Let's imagine a creative future with God and each other together. Drop me a line on email or leave a comment if you have thoughts on God, Jesus, congregations, the church or whatever.... I look forward to our conversations.

Monday, March 10, 2008

On Rabbit Ears and Dinner Guests

Someone noticed what looks like "rabbit ears" over my head in the picture at the left. At first, we thought about cropping those out, but I wanted to write a blog about that photo...so we kept it in. The "ears" are part of the poster that announces the centennial of Edvard Grieg's death, the Norwegian composer, and the upcoming events commemorating his work and music. In and of itself this is not so much, except that the picture was taken outside of Grieghallen in Bergen, Norway...
You see, if this internet stuff is really going to catch on, then places like Bergen, Norway and Bismarck, ND, USA have some kind of relationship, even if it's not how we usually think of relationships. If you think of Prairie Table as a real table that has real people around it...well, that's what we do in Bismarck (usually at a bar)...But there's another way in which the "table" is the globe itself, the great world upon which we walk. In that way, the folks in Bergen, the folks in Bismarck, you reading this wherever you are...we're all at the prairie table. This is what makes the internet such a difficult "place" to be...time means very little (you can read this whenever you want, and we'd still be in "conversation" even if I was asleep when you wrote it)...place, of couse, is irrelevant...and the Christian Church has always assumed those preogatives to be of God, not humanity. Time and Eternity...Historicity and Omnipresence...this was how you know the difference between the divine and the human. The internet seems to challenge those ideas...

Second topic this month: dinner guests...Who to invite to dinner, or, more problematically, who not to invite for dinner? Who do you invite to dinner? Have you ever wondered why people invited Jesus to dinner? You know, many of the more strict Pharisees thought Jesus shouldn't eat dinner with the kinds of folks he ate dinner with...but why did they invite him to dinner? When you invite someone to dinner..why? For me, it's usually to catch up with friendships...so was Jesus a friend to the folks?...Sometimes I invite people to dinner to get to know them...this seems to be the most logical reason people invited Jesus to dinner...I suppose the question for us is: would we invite Jesus to dinner? Comment away!