What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith

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).

Those responsible for planning and leading worship need to know a little more than that!

Recognized or not, ritual is basic to human life, not something primitive to be left behind as we learn to live more and more in our reasoning heads.

Sometimes it feels embarrassing even to say the word “God” seriously in certain circles. 

To prioritize trying to save our institutional life at any cost is a worthless endeavor if it leads us to be embarrassed by the very faith that God called the church into being to preserve and advance.

Archbishop William Temple said that, “If you have a false idea of God, the more religious you are, the worse it is for you—it were better for you to be an atheist.” We’re living in times when, given all the options in play, it might be that to be an atheist may be the better choice.

Maybe the church can rejuvenate its mission in the world by majoring for a while in careful listening. It may be that what the world needs most is a people dedicated to hearing.

Jesus’ confrontation with demonic powers has been validated, his struggle vindicated. The written story of Jesus’ ascension makes use of naive images that serve a purpose so long as we don’t get hung up on aerodynamic details.

For people of faith, the foundation lies in our perception of who God is.

The Muslims have my sympathy. Those who find themselves hung up on the arithmetic of one and three have my sympathy. The atheists have my sympathy. But the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lays claim to something else: my heart, and soul, and mind. 

The church is nothing less than a priestly community whose purpose is to represent, as best as it can, something of God’s deep interest in the welfare of the whole human family.