fifteen points for the reflection paper:

1. to be Christian requires exile and absence from the world.
2. xian's origin is one of obliquneess,
3. but also deliberately choosing to engage in any number of scriptual traditions
   
4. one cannot be forced, this choice is about our autonomy
   
5. choosing to engage in these traditions means to (in the best of our limited human understanding) discern the will and nature of god
   
6. there is a tension then between a profound personal realtionship and a seeking of the communal, a tension that can be seen in many of the parables (inc. lazarus, the good samaratian, the fisherman, loaves and fishes, the widows mite, and others)
   
7. this tension is often contained wihtin calls towards liberation and justice.
8. there is something profoundly problematic in calling people who are marginazlized, who have their exile thrust upon them, to be exiled again, exiled by choice...the isolation of them marginialised, while absent from the gospels is often mirrored in the traditions of the church (Bruggerans DWEM comments, but also from Coakley: "
   "Where the question of gender then insidiously inserts itself into this scholarly divide is in the willingness... to construe forms of 'weakness,' 'passivity' or 'vulnerability' (all traditionally demerits for the male, but manifestly present in Jesus' passion) as either normatively human or even revelatorily divine...if Jesus' 'vulnerability' is a primary narrative given, rather than a philosophical embarrassment to explain away, then precisely the question is raised whether 'vulnerability' need be seen as a female weakness rather than a...human strength." (Power and Submission, find the page number)
   
9. all of this tension, this paradoxical desire for a liberating christ for a people in exile, considering that those who seek or need liberation are contained by the church, is constrained by how we construct narratives of autonomy.
   
10. to construct narratives, to treat t he parables as examples of right living, is required as a missional preacher, is required as a way of speaking about christ, at least w/i the euro-american proddie tradition, or even w/ i the anglican corpus.
    
11. how does working against interpertation, and against applicaiton (as dally requires of us), sontag: Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling...(against interpertation, online source, find dead tree)
12. or to put it simply, how does one choose exile?
13. which dramas are enacted, which roles are to be played, which narratives are engaged with, or how does one know that the exillic desires of YHWH, of moving away from the world, are the correct ones? (call of the fisherman)
    
14. Bruggerman page 64--the call towards god is one of liberation, against those that contain and break us,
15. How are we included and excluceded from the multivalent narratives of history (cf Cone)
    
16. how do we rewrite the narrative of history
    
17. how do w emantain our own narratives while doing the above work
    
18. can these questions be answered, or is this something that is found in the wandering of the desert, the abandonment of our own purposes and a seeking of the divine (bruggerman's woodwork metaphor, or dally's idea of metaonia, that we are converted thru attempts at remaking ourselves.)