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September 29 - November 3, 2017
Psalm 131 nurtures: a quality of calm confidence and quiet strength that knows the difference between unruly arrogance and faithful aspiration, knows how to discriminate between infantile dependency and childlike trust, and chooses to aspire and to trust—
The most religious places in the world, as a matter of fact, are not churches but battlefields and mental hospitals.
What most Christians do is come to church, a place that is fairly safe and moderately predictable.
obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that is rooted in historical fact and reaches into a promised hope.
The history of the ark was, for the Hebrews, a kind of theological handbook. It provided an account of the presence of God among the people. Its history showed the importance of having God with you and the danger of trying to use God or carry him around.
Christians tramp well-worn paths: obedience has a history.
history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims.
we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors.
Biblical history is a good memory for what doesn’t work.
Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, starting over.
For obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion, it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises.
Obedience is fulfilled by hope.
Light—radiant light!—pervades Scripture and creation as a sign of God’s presence.
Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not confined to it.
If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them.
What we require is obedience—the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which.
Great little line on obedience
But they are members all the same, whether they like it or not, whether they acknowledge it or not.
For God never makes private, secret salvation deals with people. His relationships with us are personal, true; intimate, yes; but private, no. We are a family in Christ.
No Christian is an on...
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the fact that we are a family of faith does not mean we are o...
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If God is my Father, then this is my family.
Scripture knows nothing of the solitary Christian.
God never works with individuals in isolation, but always with people in community.
But if living in community is necessary and desirable, it is also enormously difficult.
Christians are a community of people who are visibly together at worship but who remain in relationship through the week in witness and service.
a great definon of community
Another common way to avoid community is to turn the church into an institution.
When we see the other as God’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected.
What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”
He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation.
The alpine dew communicates a sense of morning freshness, a feeling of fertility, a clean anticipation of growth.
an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith.
We refuse to predict our brother’s behavior, our sister’s growth. Each person in the community is unique; each is specially loved and ...
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They are new persons each morning, endless in their possibilities.
The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates fresh and expectant newness. Oil and dew. The two things that make life together delightful.
Where relationships are warm and expectancies fresh, we are already beginning to enjoy the life together that will be completed in our life everlasting.
The way of discipleship that begins in an act of repentance (tēshubah) concludes in a life of praise
God stands—he is foundational and dependable; God stoops—he kneels to our level and meets us where we are; God stays—he sticks with us through hard times and good, sharing his life with us in grace and peace.
We respond with that which we have received. We participate in the process that God has initiated and continues.
by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.
don’t feel like worshiping; therefore I will go to church and put myself in the way of worship.”
Humphrey Bogart once defined a professional as a person who “did a better job when he didn’t feel like it.”
Feelings don’t run the show. There is a reality deeper than our feelings. Live by that.
He never took himself seriously and always took God seriously, and therefore he was full of cheerfulness, exuberant with blessing.
Because he refused to take himself seriously and decided to take God seriously, Barth burdened neither himself nor those around him with the gloomy, heavy seriousness of ambition or pride or sin or self-righteousness. Instead, the lifting up of hands, the brightness of blessing.
Blessing is at the end of the road. And that which is at the end of the road influences everything that takes place along the road.
For if a pastor is not in touch with joy, it will be difficult to teach or preach convincingly that the news is good.
“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”
Best of all, we don’t have to wait until we get to the end of the road before we enjoy what is at the end of the road.
Phyllis McGinley, Saint-Watching (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 13-14.
