So I lived a week...in one of those delightful vernal periods when doctrines which have hitherto been only buried seeds begin actually to come up - like snowdrops or crocuses.and I felt a kinship.
"I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but not before, we may go to him in love and trust and joy. But, speaking frankly, to long for the transcendent when you are in your wife’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and it is certainly not what God expects of us.
We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If he pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. For then we should spoil that bliss by our presumption and arrogance; we should be letting our religious fantasies run riot and refusing to be satisfied with what he gives. Once a man has found God in his earthly bliss and has thanked him for it, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to remind himself that these earthly pleasures are only transitory, and that it is good for him to accustom himself to the idea of eternity….
I am sure we honor God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behavior and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive towards the blessings of life, and therefore equally insensitive towards pain."
To procrastinate and prevaricate simply because you are afraid of erring...seems to me almost to run counter to love. To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions out of faith and love.In the middle of trying to carefully weave my way through decision-making, attempting to take into account all of the philosophies that are informing my thinking has been pretty crippling. Here, Bonhoeffer reminds me that LOVE is the goal, and (I add) since I know I am probably not going to get it perfect, even if I reflect on a topic for decades...why not put love at the forefront, pray, think and then take action...then assess, and take more action...then assess again, etc. I am trying to make that my new Mode of Operation.
A worldview is...the story of the world that operates at the root of a person's life.And
We cannot help but participate in the worldview of our particular culture and generation. But the gospel changes the way we look at everything. We are to look at everything...and decide (a) what to keep as good, (b) what to reject as just too distorted, and (c) what to revise, rename, and reshape with the gospel.Very helpful thoughts for me. I have realized for a while now that I can't "get out" of my own worldview, and that participating at some level in the worldview around me is impossible to escape.
"There is NOTHING, nada, not one-single-thing, not one-single-action, no intention, no inclination or smallest glimmer of our most minute desire that recommends us to God. I’ll even up the ante one further: I actually believe that the very BEST things we’ve ever done – the most pious, most religious, most holy, most selfless act of obedience, with the purest motives we could possibly muster on the best days, if rightly accounted for, would be in the debit column of our lives, NOT the credit column."
"My work is really about producing thoughtful Christian faithfulness. If you start to think carefully about how you eat, how you spend time, how you think about place, all those things some people may think you’re trying to achieve salvation by works. So my sense is that people with that kind of tendency, not just in the PCA, accept conventional ways of living from secular culture because they regard the effort to think thoughtfully and live deliberately as a kind of semi-Pelagianism. And the idea that living deliberately is semi-Pelagian just baffles me. Because when you don’t, you end up living in accordance with a very post-Christian, and in significant ways, anti-Christian culture."
"British sociologist Anthony Giddens has commented on the rise of what he calls “pure relationships.” A “pure relationship” is one in which “the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship as such can deliver.” A pure relationship has no external anchors or supports, but depends entirely on the commitment of the two who enter the relationship.
Today, for example, we distinguish friendships from working relationships and family relations, thinking of a friend “specifically as someone with whom one has a relationship unprompted by anything other than the rewards that the relationship provides."
In recent decades, marriage has increasingly come to be seen as a pure relationship, one that is “initiated for, and kept going for as long as it delivers emotional satisfaction." This is not, of course, how marriage was understood in earlier centuries: “Marriage was a contract, often initiate by parents or relatives rather than by the marital partners themselves," and in the Church, marriage was seen as having a “sacramental” character, even when it was not technically understood as a sacrament.
The dangers go even deeper, however, since American Christians often regard their relationship with God on the model of “pure relationship.” When an Evangelical speaks of a “personal relationship with Jesus,” he’s not talking about a liturgically and catechetically formed relationship, surrounded by the supports of fellow believers, rituals, signs, and texts. He’s talking about self-standing, free-floating, pure relationship, one made all the more unstable by the fact that one of the parties is not visible."
A bumper sticker frequently seen on the cars of people who think they are being good witnesses for the Lord proclaim, “God is my copilot.” These well-meaning folk must be totally ignorant of the actual chain of command on commercial or military aircraft. The copilot is second in command!
At least, I hope they are merely ignorant of what a blasphemous sentiment they are broadcasting, and not just being more honest than the average professing Christian today. For the whole tendency of our sinful nature, reinforced by every influence of our contemporary culture, is to resume command. We want to keep Christ as Savior; we want his help in our daily problems; but we want to fly the ship. This demotion of Christ from captain to second officer happens subtly. It is not always visible to other (at least if we don’t advertise it on our bumpers). But its effects are disastrously real.
One of my greatest fears for American Christianity in our day as it flies along with God as its copilot is not that it won’t continue to grow in numbers, resources, and influence, but, but that it will-and God will look at us and say, “So what?” we had better turn the controls over to the Lord Jesus and become the copilots ourselves; otherwise, we may spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves on the comfort of the seats in the cabin and the speed at which we are able to move, only to discover at the Day of Judgment that we’ve just been flying around in circles.
"The church of today lives in an ethically debilitating climate. Where did we go wrong? Was it the urbane self-centeredness of Peale's Power of Positive Thinking and its therapeutic successors? Was it the liberal, civic-club mentality of the heirs to the Social Gospel? Now we waver between TV triumphalism with its Madison Avenue values or live-and-let-live pluralism which urges open-mindedness as the supreme virtue. And so a recent series of radio sermons on "the Protestant Hour" urged us to "Be Good to Yourself." This was followed by an even more innocuous series on 'Christianity as Conflict Management." Whatever the gospel means, we tell ourselves, it could not mean death. Love, divine or human, could never exact something so costly. After all, our culture is at least vestigially Christian and isn't that enough?
"(Christ's) message is not the simple one of (John) the Baptist, 'Be clean.' Jesus' word is more painful - 'Be killed.'
"...We may come singing "Just as I Am," but we will not stay by being our same old selves. The needs of the world are too great, the suffering and pain too extensive, the lures of the world too seductive for us to begin to change the world unless we are changed, unless conversion of life and morals becomes our pattern. The status quo is too alluring. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the six-thirty news, our institutions, theologies, and politics. The only way we shall break its hold on us is to be transferred to another dominion, to be cut loose from our old certainties, to be thrust under the flood and then pulled forth fresh and new-born. Baptism takes us there."Christ, by His birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension has made a way for us to enter into the Kingdom of His Father. Do we joyfully and gratefully, but from a distance, so to speak, accept His wonderful gift.
Entering into Relational Rather Than Chronological Time
We are all too familiar with chronology (chronos), the time we can measure and monitor. We note the passing of time in moments and events, hastening or lamenting time's movement.
There is another kind of time talked about in the Bible, however: kairos. This is time experienced relationally, rather than sequentially. Kairos is time as an eternal moment, a divine appointment, a dynamic encounter.
It recognizes that the fruitfulness of our life is more appropriately measured by the quality of our relationships than by the amount of activities we can cram into our moments.
For six days we are often seduced into defining our worth by our works. The Sabbath reminds us that our worth is given to us by God. We belong to God, and by the Spirit of Christ we belong to one another. For Jewish families, the Sabbath is a day of feasting on good food and delighting in good relationships. Even the poorest family will scrimp and save so that the Sabbath meal will be the best of the week. Seated as guests at every Sabbath table will be strangers, aliens and those with no place to go.
Therefore, the Sabbath is a day to enjoy intimate relationships.
How can a same-sex union do this? It can not, by it's very nature!
How can a same-sex union accomplish this? It can not, by it's very nature!
How can a same-sex union accomplish this? It can not, by it's very nature there is no weaker vessel to be honored.I'm sure this will stir up controversy. Stir away!
My dad taught mentally handicapped teenagers for several years, so on this particular day, he walked in the door about 4:30, and start sniffing. The air was rich with the aroma of the baked raspberry pastry. He smiled, and kissed my mother.“A saint is a little Christ. The connection between the beauty of the saints and the beauty of Christ is the connection between the original and the image.
And one of the most powerful ways to become a saint is simply to see the beauty of God.
In heaven, we’ll all be saints.
People often ask the question, “Will we be able to sin in heaven?”
And the answer is obviously, “No”
And then their next question is, “Oh, well then God must take away our free will.”
“No.”
“Well if we have free will, we’ll be able to sin, because free will is always a choice”
And the answer is “Yes.”
“Well then, why won’t we?”
And the answer is “The Beauty of God.”
In the Beatific Vision, we will see the beauty of God so clearly, so overwhelmingly that it will be impossible to sin.
Why does anybody sin? Why does the thief steal money? Because he sees that money can buy attractive things. The dirty pieces of paper aren't attractive. The dirty pieces of paper can buy things that satisfy his desires and are attractive to him.
He wouldn't steal cockroaches. He’d steal gold.
But in heaven, we’ll see that sin is like the cockroach, because we’ll see that God is the real gold. So the vision of the beauty of God makes it impossible to sin.
The more we can get that (vision) here, the more close to sanctity we are.
Religious art isn't just kicks. It’s not just aesthetics.
It’s a powerful aid to attaining the ultimate meaning of human life: to be a saint.
I love that line of Leon Bloy, 19th century French Catholic writer, 'In the end, there is only one tragedy, not to have been a saint.' And beauty is a very powerful aid to that.”
*Psa 27:4 One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.(KJV)
*2Co 3:18 But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.(KJV)
"Several years ago, I was engaged in a public debate with a Protestant minister. The event was held at a Protestant church before a mixed audience of Catholics and Protestants. At one point in the debate, during the cross-examination section, my Protestant opponent posed this question to me:
"Can you give me one example of a tradition that's outside the Bible and is necessary for Christians?" He sat back with a smile, confident that I would not be able to answer his question.
"Yes, I can," I said. "It's right here." At that I dropped my Bible on the table in front of him with a thump.
No one in the audience moved.
My opponent blinked, apparently unsure what to say in response.
I explained: "The Canon of the New Testament is a tradition, a Catholic tradition, that you as a Protestant follow." I continued, "the books that belong in the Bible, and in particular the New Testament are part of Tradition. And you accept that Tradition and follow it, otherwise you would have no bible - you simply would have no way of knowing what the Bible is unless you accepted the Tradition of the canon."This quote was found in a book I picked up at McKay's: Why Is That in Tradition? by Patrick Madrid. It has been interesting reading.
"...the God who saves us and the God who judges us is one God. We are not, even, condemned by his severity and redeemed by his compassion; what judges us is what redeems us, the love of God. What is it that will break our hearts on judgement day? Is it not the vision, suddenly unrolled, of how he has loved the friends we have neglected, of how he has loved us, and we have not loved him in return; how when we came before his alter, he gave us himself, and we gave him half-penitence's, or resolutions too weak to commit our wills? But while love thus judges us by being what it is, the same love redeems us by effecting what it does. Love shares flesh and blood with us in this present world, that the eyes which look us through at last may find in us a better substance than our vanity..."
Possible Answers to Prayer
"Your petitions—though they continue to bearjust the one signature—have been duly recorded.Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertententertainment value—nonetheless serveto bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneatha burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly moreconspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick,the suffering, the needy poor is sometimesrecognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackinglyrighteous indignation toward the manywhose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehendhow near I am, with what fervor I adoreprecisely these, the several who rouse your passions."
"The Early Church described the family as the “domestic church.” This meant that it was not just a sociological unit. Rather, the family was created to play a specific role in God’s plan of salvation.
"Thus, the family is deeply associated with the Church in both its nature and structure. In the Old Testament, the family was so central that without it, there simply was no covenant. In the New Testament, the family reached its proper fulfillment in Christ. The family became the place where the Holy Spirit works out the salvation of each member and provided stability and structure for life’s journey.
"The baptized family is the first place where the essential teachings in catechesis, prayer, and morality are carried out to help in the conversion and development of growing Christians.
"Because the Christian family is the Church in miniature, it also shares the nature of Christ. It has a priestly, prophetic, and kingly dimension to it. The family offers Christ and intercedes for its own members and those around it (priestly); the family is a sign of Christ’s love and faithfulness to a world that is enmeshed in the culture of death (prophetic); and the family serves its own members and those around it sacrificially (kingly).
"By participating in the saving and redemptive nature of the Church, the family is profoundly rooted in the Church’s mission. The family has truly become a little church, or as it is better known, a domestic church."
"This book is theological bricolage and lurches at many points toward a form of theological haiku. I have come to think, however that this is all for the good, for the effect I hope for is the effect of haiku. At its best, haiku glances at the familiar from an awkward angle; it presents what we normally approach straight-on from the side or underneath or inside out and helps us to see it, in a flash, as something wholly new."And from Chapter 1
"Christianity is biblical religion disemboweled and emasculated by (voluntary) intellectualization and/or privatization.
"Christianity is not merely a haphazard embrace of the values and practices of the modern world. Worldliness in that sense has plagued the Church since Corinth and will be a temptation to the end of time. Christianity is institutionalized worldliness, worldliness accepted in principle, worldliness not at the margins but at the center, worldliness built into the foundation.
"Christianity is worldliness that has become so much our second nature that we call it piety."Well, he is obviously being intentionally provocative. It reminds me of the title that some of my friends have been reading lately, "Pagan Christianity", though obviously it won't follow the same lines with a chapter entitled "For Constantine". Or maybe it will, from an oblique angle.
the morning paper
harbinger of good and ill
--I step over it
