What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith

I object for both political and religious reasons.

When it comes to authority, you know it when you see it.

Stories about meals point to God’s divine action.

Explaining the dance is not a substitute for joining in the dance 

The ultimate future belongs to God.

Community is a gift of grace.

Faith is a judgment “in the light of a truth that cannot be proven.”

I hadn’t expected to become a believer and certainly didn’t expect or experience a dramatic or ecstatic moment.

He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

“We know of none whom God has wholly and exclusively abandoned to himself.  . .only of One who was lost. This One is Jesus Christ.” – Karl Barth 

The Reformer John Calvin spoke of scripture as God’s “baby talk.” It’s not written just for intellectuals or experts.

Only by improvising, juxtaposing one image alongside another, do we have any chance of glimpsing the enormous grandeur of God.

We may spend a lifetime wrestling with the creeds, challenging them and being challenged by them, while growing into them.

From early times, baptism was often likened to a new birth.

There’s something about a cemetery that focuses the mind.

Jesus embraces the pain without passing it on.

Jesus turns the old status systems upside down.

The American funeral, as Tom Long has so ably pointed out, has undergone a process of transformation in recent years to the point that it has become more and more remote from a Christian approach to life or death.

“Then, people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29).

Grace is amazing!

In worship, I see further out than I can see anywhere else.

Evil is subtle, alluring, always in disguise, and shrewd.

The Christian faith is a healing movement.

Becoming fluent in the “grammar of the gospel.”

There are some things that can’t be understood by reasoned explanations alone.

Surely we don’t expect parents to perjure themselves in public!

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. . .”

God's “Word” is God reaching out to us who bring nothing to the table but our questions. 

Matthew gathers biblical images to fashion something that’s less a piece of journalism and more like a hymn of praise.

The very familiarity of it dulls our capacity to recognize how radical the story is.

God’s business is about lifting up the lowly.

In Christ, God has offered a foretaste of a healed creation.

What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend?

The journey reshapes the traveler.

The problem comes when accumulating resources becomes a kind of competitive game, where there can only be a few winners and a lot of losers. A vicious problem when the game turns into winner-take-all. The “art of the deal,” you know? I win. You lose. “So it goes. So it goes.”

As the prophet Jeremiah put it, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

One day, without even knowing it, someone becomes Christ to us.

Legitimate self-interest easily gets swollen out of its proper proportions. Judgment isn’t an antiquated notion that needs to be put on the shelf. The words “Judgment and Grace” stand alone. The rest is commentary.

Maybe it’s not just about how to get to heaven.

The deceased was wakened when he heard his own name.

In the shedding of tears there is healing.

Capturing the imagination in a multisensory fashion, to orient our love and our longing.

Jesus did not say. “Think this in remembrance of me” or “Feel this” or “Do this if you have time,” or “Make this really ‘special’,” but simply “Do this.” Just do it. Do this unrelenting testimony to the great homecoming banquet, the “renewal of all things.”

The apostle Paul describes the Eucharist at work in three dimensions: past, present, and future. It turns to the past “On the night when he was betrayed.” It embraces the present: “Do this. . .” It looks to the ultimate future, “until he comes.”

Jesus attracted a lot of people who thought joining his parade might elevate their status. There were enough of them that Jesus felt that it was his duty to let them know where he was headed, and where they would be headed if they should sign on.

Authoritarianism manipulates people’s fears and anxieties. It promises a redemption that is not in human hands to give. 

Doctrine needs to be pondered over a lifetime. One reflects on it as one grows and changes, with the various seasons and experiences of life providing a series of new perspectives, each one possibly revealing an insight not accessible earlier

While it might give information, the sermon is not about giving information. It’s meant to be more like an encounter. The sermon drawn from the text can become a sacramental vessel by which the Christ revealed in scripture becomes manifest among us.

No matter how threatening the times, worship always centers us in a framework of hope.

When the apostle Paul met with the leaders of the Jerusalem church and received their blessing and acknowledgement of his calling to minister to the Gentiles, Paul recalled that, “They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do” (Gal 2:10).