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Saturday, September 27, 2014

Quips, Quotes, & Questions 9-27-14

I suppose I should not try to look for a theme in the words that came my way this week. Nevertheless, there does seem to be several different streams that touch on how to shed the distractions that keep us from focusing primarily on Christ. Take some time to let these rattle around inside your head and heart.

God insists that He set up His throne in the heart, and reign in it, without a rival. If we keep Him from His right, it will not matter by what competitor.
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)

The cross for the first time revealed God in terms of
weakness and lowliness and suffering; even, humanly speaking,
of absurdity. He was seen thenceforth in the image of the most
timid, most gentle and most vulnerable of all living
creatures--a lamb. Agnus Dei! [The Lamb of God!]
    ... Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)

Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false
belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.
    ... Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996)

We all want to turn away from anything that reveals the failure, pain, sickness and death beneath the brightly painted surface of our ordered lives. Civilization is, at least in part, about pretending that things are better than they are. We all want to be in a happy place, where everyone is nice and good and can fend for themselves. We shun our own weakness and the weakness of others. We refuse to listen to the cry of the needy. How easy it is to fall into the illusion of a beautiful world when we have lost trust in our capacity to make of our broken world a place that can become more beautiful.
Jean Vanier

“Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:18-19

Really excellent essay on our tendency to want to leave, rather than remain and build a community of stability where we are.

I did not intend my creatures to make themselves servants and slaves to the world’s pleasures. They owe their first love to me. Everything else they should love and possess, as I told you, not as if they owned it but as something lent them.
Catherine of Siena

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
(Ephesians 4:11-13)

Two years later, do not relent in praying for our brother in prison, Pastor Saeed Abedini, in Iran.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Quips, Quotes & Questions 9-20-14

“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both.” 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

(These words are especially poignant as we seek to build missional community on Santa Barbara's Westside, since Spring 2013)

To thee, O God, we turn for peace; but grant us, too, the blessed assurance that nothing shall deprive us of that peace, neither ourselves, nor our foolish, earthly desires, nor my wild longings, nor the anxious cravings of my heart. 
Søren Kierkegaard, 1813-1855

“When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in totally nonviolent struggle for justice.”
Cesar Chavez

“We can do not great things, only small things with great love. What is important is not how much you do, but how much love you put into doing it.”
Mother Teresa

You hollow us out, God, so that we may carry you, and you endlessly fill us only to be emptied again. Make smooth our inward spaces and sturdy, that we may hold you with less resistance and bear you with deeper grace.
Jan Richardson

Thou wilt never be spiritually minded and godly unless thou art silent concerning other men's matters and take full heed to thyself.
Thomas a Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, 1380-1471

“The Good News of the resurrection is not that we shall die and go home with him, but that he is risen and comes home with us, bringing all his hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, prisoner brothers with him.”
Clarence Jordan

And from the sublime to the ridiculous. My friend Nancy sent me this:

"From a non-cat person.  This is good.  Turn the sound off so you don't have to hear the giggling in the background and it's even better."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quMsDiGd0Ho

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Quips, Questions and Quotes 9-6-14

Words from the week...


If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice
of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more
from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.
    ... Johannes Tauler (ca. 1300-1361)

Jesus came to bring the good news to the poor, not to those who serve the poor! 
I think we can only truly experience the presence of God, meet Jesus, 
receive the good news, in and through our own poverty, 
because the kingdom of God belongs to the poor, 
the poor in spirit, the poor who are crying out for love.
Jean Vanier

Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love
It seems easier to be God than to love God, 
easier to control people than to love people, 
easier to own life than to love life.
Henri J. M. Nouwen

Not one of us yet knows how to pray. All we have done has only been pottering and guessing and experimenting... God cares not for the length of our prayers, or the number of our prayers, or the beauty of our prayers, or the place of our prayers; but it is the faith in them that tells -- believing that prayer soars higher than the lark ever sang, plunges deeper than diving-bell ever sank, darts quicker than lightning ever flashed. Though we have used only the back of this weapon instead of the edge, what marvels have been wrought! If saved, we are all the captives of some earnest prayer.
    ... Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902)

Fascinating article on Asian-American ethnic identity in the Christian church (or lack thereof)


Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this. Your sermon ... lasts but an hour or two -- your life preaches all week. If Satan can only make you a covetous minister, or a lover of pleasure, or a lover of praise, or a lover of good eating, he has ruined your ministry for ever. Give yourself to prayer, ... and get your texts, your thoughts, your words, from God.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne, 1813-1843

Humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it is thinking of ourselves less. 
C. S. Lewis

Christ seeks from us deeds not words. Devotion to him is in the first place not sentimental but practical. If the Christian faith has no power to restore or recreate the human will, leading one to deeds of unselfish service, then it stands self-condemned.
C.F. Andrews