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The evangelical aversion to praying composed prayers—even the Lord’s Prayer!—is revealing. What it exposes is our modern arrogance.
if prayer is spiritual formation and not God-management, then we cannot depend on our self to pray properly.
Not only do we not make any progress, we actually harden our heart. To consistently pray in a wrong way reinforces a wrong spiritual formation.
Yes, we can use it as an outline for prayer. I do that. But we should also pray it as a complete prayer.
Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we can be sure we have prayed well and that we have taken another step in the journey toward becoming a properly formed human being.
The first believers didn’t just devote themselves to prayer in an abstract sense, rather they devoted themselves to the prayers.
We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express.
A Liturgy for Morning Prayer
People who try contemplation without first being properly formed in prayer just end up thinking their same old thoughts and calling them Jesus! Prayer that reinforces our egocentric tendencies is entirely counterproductive.
Everything about God tends toward love.
Christian enlightenment is not about rationalism, it’s about love. You don’t really know a thing until you love it. You don’t really know people until you love them.
Prayer is not about persuading God to do our bidding, prayer is about coming to see the world through God’s eyes of love.
Scripture is that disappointment is never the end of the story—not for those who believe God.
Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life by Adrian House.
contemporary revivalism fails to engage the wider culture in any meaningful way and in the end it just wears people out.
G.K. Chesterton’s slim volume, Saint Francis of Assisi.
Julian of Norwich and John of the Cross.
“Everywhere Paul went there were riots.” Well, perhaps. But the riots weren’t Paul’s doing or desire.
The church is not a special interest group that has to make its demands known. We don’t have to “fight for our rights” anymore than Jesus did. We don’t have to mimic the noise of special-interest anger. We can be an alternative of quietness and trust.
The ultimate imitation of Christ is to patiently absorb sin and offer pardon in the name of love. This is grace.
as the church has become a powerful institution, a consort with kings and queens, a confidante of presidents and prime ministers, our dispensing of grace has become distorted. We show grace to the institutions of systemic sin while condemning the individual sinner. It should be the other way around.
We enthusiastically endorse the systems of greed that run Wall Street while condemning personal greed in the life of the individual working for the minimum wage.
What both wanted was a conventional king on a throne of political power.
What people STILL want!
Christendom is dead. But Christ is alive!
It is only our false hopes that are being disappointed in the death of Christendom.
it may not be that our age is as much secular as it is simply post-Christendom. The church in the West is finally coming out from under the long shadow of Constantine and we’re trying to figure out what comes next.
Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine.
Feasts and banquets are Jesus’ most common metaphor for the kingdom of God.
Kinda makes that tired image of “eternal worship service” fade a little when you realize that…thank goodness
Jesus was clearly willing to share the table with anyone who would come to him.
No strings, no expectations, just love. Everything else came later, but just like the Pharisees we still feel like it needs to be the focus BEFORE we can share table, life with people who aren’t like us
Jesus relocated the holy of holies from a veiled chamber reserved for a solitary high priest, to a shared table to which all are invited.
Holiness was something to be protected from the profane. But Jesus changed all of that.
When the unclean touched Jesus, Jesus was not made unclean, rather the unclean were made whole.
The church would do well to think of itself, not so much as a kind of temple, but as a kind of table.
Jesus is king, he came to be king, king is what Messiah means. So why does Jesus slip away from the crowd when they want to make him king? The issue is force. The crowd wanted to “take him by force and make him king.” At the center of the crowd’s concept of kingship was violent force. They wanted to force Jesus to be their forceful king so he could lead their forces in an uprising of violent force against the Romans. This was antithetical to the kind of king Jesus came to be.
Christ’s kingdom is built upon co-suffering love, not violent force.
This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won’t be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee that those we call “us” will have what we call “ours.”
Jesus was constantly teaching people not to worry about scarcity, but to trust in God.
Any understanding of salvation that doesn’t lead us to love God’s creation is far more Gnostic than Christian.
Our perfect fear casts out all love.
Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, St. Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Søren Kierkegaard, George MacDonald, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, Frederick Buechner, Eugene Peterson, Walter Brueggemann, Wendell Berry, Kalistos Ware, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rohr, N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Miroslav Volf, David Bentley Hart,
within Christian cultures that have confused faith with certitude, it’s almost impossible for leaders to make any significant change, which means there is little or no freedom to really grow.
Sunday after Sunday we are made to feel good about belonging to those who are on the right side of all things religious and political.
We need the whole church to help us enter into the fullness of Christ.
We meet all kinds of people along life’s journey, like we did on the Jesus Trail. Christians of every stripe. Jews and Muslims. Palestinians and Israelis. Believers and unbelievers. If we have the common ground of a shared faith, that’s wonderful. If not, we enjoy the common ground of our shared humanity. There’s always common ground if we are willing to find it.
the narrow way leads to broad acceptance.
Of others, not so much by others
