Schopenhauer’s Shout in the Dark

Wonderful Mercy Church

Schopenhauer’s Shout in the Dark

September 15, 2024 • Graeme Sellers • James 1:17–25

Salvation is about how to live well; it about how to be who you truly are; it is about how to live in love with God and with life in this world. When we don’t know the light of the sacred is deep in us, when we do not see that we are created to participate in the life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in us, when we think that by rationality alone we can apprehend ultimate truth, then life looks a lot like Schopenhauer describes. For him, life is a game of three-card monte in which we are tricked into hoping for something we’ll never realize, a place we’ll never get to, a way of being we’ll never experience.

Little Baby Jesus: Menace to Society

December 22, 2024 • Graeme Sellers

Had Jesus merely been a teacher, then there's nothing for the world to worry about. If he commissioned us to be the guardians of one interesting philosophical perspective among many, then Christianity is just another option at the buffet of ideas. The worst-case scenario is that there may be a little intellectual difference of opinion. But if he’s more, if he is who he says he is, from the very being of God with all attendant authority, that’s a different matter altogether. That’s when he becomes a threat to every established human institution: political, economic, educational, religious.

The Wrong People are Alright with God

December 15, 2024 • Graeme Sellers

All the wrong people are alright with God. This is a crucial truth, though few in our religious God-Clubs will receive it—it is a holy surprise we do not wholly approve of. God’s inviting people to the party that religious folk don’t include on their guest lists, and this makes us nervous. Why? Because, as George MacDonald says in his sermon on justice, we “yield the idea of the Ancient of Days, ‘the glad creator,’ and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical martinet of a God.”

Hear. Believe. Become.

December 8, 2024 • Graeme Sellers

Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that every one of us has a hidden side of our being that is in touch with God. Which is to say, we are made for relationship with God and are engineered to hear God’s voice. The truest thing about us is that light of the sacred is deep within us, and the most natural thing in the world is for children to recognize voice of their parents. Barth expands on this, observing that "this inward word of God contains that which moves us and that which unsettles us, that which delights us and that which distresses us." That's because the voice of God makes a claim on us; it tells us we are not our own. It speaks to our deepest longings while calling us out of ourselves into depths of life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.