Language is not primarily informational but revelatory. The Holy Scriptures give witness to a living voice sounding variously as Father, Son and Spirit, addressing us personally and involving us personally as participants. This text is not words to be studies in the quiet preserves of a library, but a voice to be believed and loved and adored in workplace and playground, on the streets and in the kitchen. Receptivity is required.
One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed.
Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All “word of God” vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God-it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship-it deepens.
We live most days and most of the hours of those days in a world permeated with the making and purchasing of idols.
The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.
Rather, our eyes have become lazy, our attention spans atrophied. Our self-preoccupation had reduced us to tunnel vision.
Our beloved country is being attacked and we must be loyal to it; in times of crisis it is not right to criticize your leaders. It is disloyal, an act of treachery.” Using jingoist language is far easier than taking responsibility for righteousness in the nation. Far easier to shout patriotic slogans than to work patriotically for justice.
The gospel doesn’t impose a way of life on us from without and tell us that we have to live up to it. It creates a new life within and then encourages and directs us to the living out of it.
When we read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday’s newspaper.’12.
The mark of a certain kind of genius is the ability and energy to keep returning to the same task relentlessly, imaginatively, curiously, for a lifetime. Never give up and go on to something else; never get distracted and be diverted to something else.
God’s great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be.
The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.
Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity.
The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for a kingdom. A LONG OBEDIENCE.
The core message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, but the setting for this is most often in the ordinariness of our lives. The new life takes place in the place and person of our present. It is not a means by which God solves problems. God creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.
The devil does some of his best work behind stained glass.
Any understanding of God that doesn’t take into account God’s silence is a half truth – in effect, a cruel distortion – and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us.
This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is.
There is no living the life of faith, whether by prophet or person, without some kind of sustaining vision like this. At some deep level we need to be convinced, and in some way or other we need periodic reminders, that no words are mere words. In particular, God’s words are not mere words. They are promises that lead to fulfillments. God performs what he announces. God does what he says.