I am back from my month-long reading sabbatical and grateful for the time granted me by my congregation for time for reading, reflection, and a little bit of relaxation as well. In future blogs I want to focus on how some of my reading is shaping my on-going missional engagement, but I realize that I was in the midst of a 4 or 5 part blog on living centered in Jesus – but I am sure some of my thoughts generated from this sabbatical will find their way into my comments.
I mentioned in a previous blog that “to be missional is to have Christ Jesus as the center of our purpose, focus, and direction (heart), to have Jesus as the center for our spirituality and meaning making in our lives (soul), to have Jesus as the center for all our living and in all what we do (strength), and to have Jesus as the center for our thinking and speaking (mind).”
To be missional is to have Christ Jesus as the center of our purpose, focus, and direction
I relate this perspective to loving God with all our heart.
What or who we place at the center of our lives has a way of shaping everything else that we are and do. If Christ is compartmentalized in our life, then he serves whatever we have placed at the center. This language of loving God with all our heart is language of worship and it is in a worshipful attitude that we need to explore what it means for Jesus being the center of our purpose, our focus, our direction in life.
Another voice in this exploration comes from one of the books I read during my sabbatical – Walter Brueggemann’s Praying the Psalms. He talks about the Psalms as being disorienting and reorienting. The Psalms challenge our old orientations in which we rely upon ourselves, we trust in ourselves and as a result see the difficulties or vanity of life all around us. This challenging of our old orientations is mean to disorient us, to knock us off of what we hold as centers in our lives in order to see the inability for such centers to sustain us as human beings. In response, the Psalms reorient us to a new center – a center that is God, trust in God, reliance upon God – the One who alone is God (YHWH) – who alone can lead us in ways that shape us to be who we were created to be.
When something or someone else besides Jesus is the center of our lives, our lives will continue to be disoriented – we will come face to face with life’s struggles and not know how to get passed them in a healthy way. In centering our lives in Jesus our lives are reoriented to the things of God and around the things of God. Our lives are reoriented to notice what God notices, to see what God sees, to see what God is doing, to hear what God is saying. In our lives being centered in Jesus, all of who we are and what we do is reoriented around the purposes of God – which guides the living of our lives in radically different ways, than when something else has been the center.
Being missional is more than being about the task of engaging in mission, or being incarnational – it is first and foremost about loving God with all our heart. Such a loving is founded upon a reorientation of our lives that only happens as we are rooted and centered in Jesus Christ.
May we live in such a way that we are always open to the reorienting love in God shaping and directing our living.
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Roland, thanks for these reflections. I'm continually struck by the way we as Christians (and me as an individual) include Jesus in our lives and use him (or our distorted visions of him) to support and legitimate the agendas and ideologies that really stand at the center of our lives. We/I need constant reminders like this that Jesus needs to be at the center, conforming us to his image.
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