Understanding the sacred...

Sometimes people outside the faith have a better grasp on the holiness and "otherness" of God than those of us who think about it everyday. Russell D. Moore, Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, posts some thoughts from Barbara Ehrenreich over at Mere Comments.

Networking with Jesus

Occasionally one finds an atheist who knows blasphemy when she sees it. Barbara Ehrenreich...writes in her latest book, Bait and Switch the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream about attending "undercover" a Christian ministry for job-seekers in Georgia. She writes of the charismatic speaker encouraging the unemployed seekers to learn how to network. "And who should be our first networking target?" the motivational speaker queries. "The Lord."

Now we've all seen this kind of trivialization of the apostolic faith. But what struck me was the way in which this atheist feminist materialist took special offense at blasphemy against a God she doesn't even believe exists. Writes Ehrenreich: I'm sorry, this is too much for me. I endured the Norcross Fellowship Lunch as an atheist, but now, at the Mt. Paran Church of God, I discover that I am a believer, and what I believe is this: if the Lord exists, if there is some conscious being whose thought the universe is, some great spinner of galaxies, hurler of meteors, creator and extinguisher of species, if some such being should manifest itself, you do not 'network' with it any more than you would light a cigarette on the burning bush.

I hope Ms. Ehrenreich will not be offended if I say "Amen."

We need to keep our ears open. Sometimes we get so close to how we practice our faith that we can't see that we've missed something. In an amazing twist of grace God often uses an outside perspective to serve as a prophetic voice.