pat loughery

A quote from my listening today:

“Bearing God’s image into the world isn’t just a fact, but a vocation. It means being called to reflect into the world the creative and redemptive love of God. It means being made for (look at this in Genesis 1 sometime) relationship, stewardship and worship (or to put it more flippantly or vividly, for sex, gardening and god). Human beings know in their bones that they’re made for each other; you don’t have to tell people that. Human beings know in their bones that they are to look after and shape this world. You don’t have to tell them that. Human beings know in their bones that they’re made to worship someone that they resemble, but like Israel with her vocation, we humans get it wrong – we worship other gods; we start to reflect their likeness instead. We distort our vocation to stewardship into the will for power, treating GOd’s world as either a gold mine or an ash tray. And we distort our calling to beautiful, creative, healing, many-sided relationships into exploitation and abuse […]”

– N. T. Wright, from the “Jesus and the World’s True Light” MP3 downloadable from the N. T. Wright page, around 21:00 into the selection.