If you happened to have read the project description for this website: http://rjr.richardross.annaerossi.com/?page_id=27, you might have noticed that I think history plays a critical role in shaping the religious world of believers. To start with Christians believe that God entered into history in the person of Jesus the Christ. But history by its very nature is about the concrete and the changing. So one of the goals of this website will be to bring the concrete history, as best we can come to know it, into our concrete lives as best we can live them.
Let me offer one small example of this history. The example is in the second sentence in the paragraph above. In that sentence, I could have written “in the Person of Jesus Christ” but instead I wrote, “in the person of Jesus the Christ.” It is encountering these small, and sometimes quite significant, changes that reveal the shape of our world. Jesus began his public ministry, and only over time, that is in history, was identified with “the Christ,” the Anointed One, a title. This title had a whole range of meanings, which had their origin in the Jewish Scripture and were alive at the time of Jesus and immediately afterward. Some of the concrete meanings of this title were identified with Jesus and others were not. Over time his very name was changed to Jesus Christ. And we who follow him have been named “Christians” ever since.
As you read the previous paragraph and because of the world shaped by your concrete living, you could have had a wide range of responses to it. “Of course.” “What is the author talking about?” “I didn’t know that.” “So what?” Or “What difference does that make?” Etc. And these responses are merely intellectual. You also could have experienced a whole range of feelings. Your feelings may have been welcoming feelings, hostile feelings, uneasy feelings. Only you know what feelings you had. To identify the feelings you actually had, either you would had to have paid attention to them as you were reading the words or you would have to recall them now. But feelings are tricky, sometimes we have feelings that we don’t attend to or don’t even want to acknowledge. This is our lot . . . To confront the Christian scripture is this paying attention in wonderment being led forward in our decisions.
Week by week we will be challenged to rise to the level of our times; to become historically attuned to who we are as Christians and to the world in which are invited to live that call; to learn as Jesus did, not to do our own will but to do the will of the Father; and like Jesus to discern the Father’s will in the concrete circumstances of our life. It wasn’t an accident that in the only prayer Jesus taught us we are asked to pray very clearly, “your will be done . . .” Now the context in which we are to do the will of the Father is in the promotion of the Kingdom [Reign] of God.
Keep in mind through it all that God loves us, wants us, each and every one of us. And in his wisdom has created each and everyone of us in the history of the very world in which we concretely live out our lives. And through it all God will continuously invite us to rise to the level of our times.
I can guarantee you that I will invite you to think, the rest is up to you.