There was a time in my life when I was much more open to such a radical call than I am today. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff for laborers deserve their food. You received without payment give without payment. And it was to other radical young men-likely teenagers-that he gave these instructions, now recorded in Matthew 10:Īs you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. With that paradigm shift in mind, I invite you to consider if Jesus’s ‘standard operating procedure’ could be seen in some sense as emerging from what Jung called the “first half of life.” After all, most historians speculate that Jesus would have been around age twenty-seven to thirty when he was killed. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) called this transition the “ second half of life.” He said, “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.” And from the perspective of midlife, I hope to continue seeing things differently for quite a few decades to come!īut more than merely acquiring new perspectives over the years, developmental theorists postulate that there is often at least one significant turning point that can happen in midlife. I suspect some of you can relate to seeing the world differently now than you once did. I was thirty-two when I preach my last sermon from that pulpit in Louisiana. In summer 2003, I was twenty-five years old and fresh out of seminary.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |