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28 August, 2003 
finally had a few moments to read. that means it’s time for another “deep thought” by Soren Kierkegaard. a collection of journal entries gathered by Perry D LeFevre in The Prayers of Kierkegaard:
I wish to make people aware so that they do not squander and dissipate their lives.
I have chosen to serve the truth…to raise the price [of Christianity] and if possible to whisper to every individual what the demands could be.
My whole life is an epigram calculated to make people aware.
My very humble work is: to make people aware. I admit that I dare not do anything more - yet I am a cry of alarm.
My task is: to make room that God may come, not authoritatively but through suffering.
kierkegaard’s life was devoted to discovering and embodying the purpose which God gave him, namely: to make the christianity of the new testament known, to hold the Christ and His message up that is would stand in stark contrast to the opiate of the state’s religion.
what i find most interesting is the methodology chosen by kierkegaard. rather than set himself up as an authority, one to be followed and modeled, he made himself the fool. convinced that the weigh, the truth, the inherant life of the Gospel itself was sufficient in and of itself to carry itself to men and women, kierkegaard actively sought to destroy any weight that he himself might bring to the Message he gave. and so the reader is presented with a dilemma: before you stands a fool, a rabble-rouser, a man not worth listening to; but the Word he speaks, the Message he gives, the Truth he tells compels. it stands on its own. it is strong enough to overcome the follishness of its bearer. and this dilemma - one kierkegaard sought to engender - is precisely what forces a man to wrestle with the Gospel and make the truth his own.
is it so different today? the Gospel invades a woman’s life as so much foolishness, yet it compels her to stand up and take notice. it is this very paradox that forces the woman to engage the Message, to deal with the issue in the depth’s of her soul. are we - those who purport to be ministers and ambassadors of Christ and His Gospel - then not doing a disservice to the Truth we bear when we come in authority, all slick and polished? do we not rob It of the power contained in this paradox?
yesterday’s reading @ sacred space covered Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees as “whitewashed tombs.” might we best serve him by living as “ramshackle hospitals,” run down when viewed from the street, yet radiating life and healing thru the broken doors and boarded up windows, life and healing that compels the sick to engage with the Message?
