Are You One Of Us Or Not? Communion

In the little tin church in Page the desert sand serves as the floor. Bert Layman , the iron-worker cum preacher who built the church, prays over the rough hewn communion table he has crafted in his own rough hewn image. Grandma Yakashigi, Nakagawasan, Nishikawasan, from Japan are there. Cecil, who baptized me when I was 13, the most gentle of souls, is kneeling up front. Some way Pastor Sheets from the Baptist Church has strayed in – Bert will not be happy. The ordinary folk, the only kind I know, fill the little house of worship.  The journey from dust to dust does not seem so far in this dusty crowd melding into the sand floor. Roy, the local prison guard, comes bearing the emblems and as he bends down he brings me fully awake, I look at Roy who is silent but I hear the question from the emblems: “Paul, are you one of us or not?”[2

[2] The title and ending are from a Fred Chappell novel with a different meaning worked out here.

https://paulandfaithwalking.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/i-am-one-of-you-forever/

Simplistic Morality

"The example of Bonhoeffer indicates that moral insight arises with intellectual depth.  On the other hand, moral inanity was clearly connected to an intellectual banality."

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Quite Fools and Active Fools

"What would you have me do?" he said at last. "You know I did all a father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools. Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one."

- Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace 

Empty Promise

"And what have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not perform!"

- War And Peace. Leo Tolstoy.

Source of Proper Doxology And Praxis

".... the study of Scripture properly results in doxology and praxis -  that is, in praise to God and practical application in the lives of believers."
 
- Richard D. Phillips - Philip Graham Ryken. Editors of Reformed Expository Commentary

A Diverse Church?

" A divided nation needs a united church...... People a lot of times will ask me, "Why do you care about unity?"It's  not that i just want people to come together to sing Kumbaya or hosanna.

I care because, one, my generation is growing up with diversity, the most diverse generation. It's just normal to see diversity. We go to Walmart, we see diversity. We go to the highways, we see diversity.  We go to the mall we see diversity.  We can go to the bars and club and there is diversity.

So how can the ministry of reconciliation of the church not have diversity?"

-Grant Skeldon

Unhappy Faith

"You can tell adult and authentic faith by people's ability to deal with darkness, failure, and nonvalidation of the ego - and buy their quiet but confident joy! Infantile religion insists on certitudes or "light" every step of the way and thus is not very happy."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now. 

Immature Faith Without Reasoning

"Immature religious faith is usually prerational, and has not yet passed through the rings of fire...."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now. 

"God has always been willing to work with a remnant, a critical mass, or what Genesis calls "ten just men.""

- Richard Rohr . The Naked Now 

Small People

"Small people make everything small."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Make It Up - Real Good!

".... if one is going to concoct, 

one must really concoct, 

.... if one is going to expose expose someone, 

one should really expose him." 

-Nikolai Krylenko

Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician

Saving Humanity To Be King?

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." 

H. L. Mencken

Eldership Has Been Erased By Leadership

"I don’t believe any doctrine of Holy Scripture should be neglected or defined out of existence. Yet this is precisely what many churches have done to the doctrine of eldership. Even among churches that claim to practice eldership, the elders have been reduced to temporary church board members, which is quite contrary to the New Testament, apostolic model of pastoral eldership. Although such churches may have an eldership, it is not a biblical eldership." --Alexander Strauch, 1995.

Let God "Wow" People

"If I may put it bluntly and clearly, what is needed is not a stunt, but the action of God that will stun people."

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones

You CAN'T Supress Truth If You Don't Know It

"One can only suppress something of which one has knowledge." 

--Douglas Moo, Commentary on Romans, NIVAC, 2000.

Romans 1:18 (ESV): For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

Breaking The Back Of The Church

"..... all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches for the starving!....

From the distance of a half a century, it is easy to reproach the patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian Church ought not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources might not be available to the Soviet government, and who it was who had driven the Volga into famine....

Bishop Antoine Granovsky, a member of the Central Committee of Pamgol: "The Believers fear that the church valuables may be used for other purposes, more limited and alien to their hearts." .....

The petrograd Metropolitan, Veniamin, was similarly impelled by a mood of trust: "This belongs to God and we will give all of it by ourselves." But forced requisitions were wrong. Let the sacrifice be of our own free will. He, too, wanted verification by the clergy and the believers to watch over the church valuables up to the very moment when they were transformed into bread for the starving..... 

Veniamin announced: "The Orthodox Church he is prepared to give everything to help the starving." It's a sacrilege only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was unnecessary.....

The Metropolitan said: "The heaviest burden is division and enmity. But the time will come when the Russian people will unite. I myself, at the head of the worshippers, will remove the cover [of precious metals and precious stones] from the icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan. I will shed sweet tears on it and give it away."  .....

The newspapers began to howl about the "evil pastors" and "princes of the church," and the representatives of the church were told: "We don't need your donations! And there won't be any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government - and the government will take whatever it considered necessary."  ....

 All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Stamp Our Houts With Seals of Commitment

"The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts. The Lama and the Monk withdraw from society to keep a religious vision bright. Our faith teaches us to stay in the world, but to stamp our hours with seals of commitment. The result is, in a way, a troubled life."

- Herman Wouk.  This is my God. Pulitzer Prize or fiction. Jewish Heritage. 

Pride's Beauty and Elitism

The British Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows cautions that this same dynamic holds true in terms of our motivation for prayer and religious practice. Again, sometimes our motivation has more to do with our own pride than with real faith and generosity. Thus, she writes: "The way we worry about spiritual failure, the inability to pray, distractions, ugly thoughts and temptations we can't get rid of..... it's not because God is defrauded, for he isn't, it's because we are not so beautiful as we would like to be."

"And pride, invariably, brings with it a harsh or condescending judgment on others. We see this later aspect, pride as a harsh or condescending judgment of others, most strongly perhaps in the peroid shortly after first conversion; when young lovers, recent religious converts, and neophytes in service and justice, still caught up in the emotional fervour of the honeymoon, think they alone know how to relate to one another, to Jesus, and to the world. Their fervour is admirable, but their pride and judgement of others invariably spawn and arrogance and elitism. But God and nature conspire together to ensure that the grind of the years will eventually restore humility."

"This side of eternity, we never can fully rid ourselves of our faults. They simply take on new and subtler guises, but they never fully disappear. There are always more moral battles to be fought."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire 

Water Does Not Purify From Evil

Dead Sea scrolls. Reading a translation document of the Qumran community.  The "Manual of Discipline" from the Essene community. speaking of  myriad of ceremonial washings common in the day (not to be equated with Christian Baptism)....

"No one is to go into water in order to attain the purity of holy men. For men cannot be purified except they repent their evil. "

- Manual of Discipline.

Essenes of Qumran.

Body and Soul United

Remarkable statement about ancient world views.

"Nevertheless it is true that the Jew maintained a sense of the unity of being which is not native to us,  ..... The remarkable feature of this is not that the Jew or later Judaism could not distinguish between outer and inner but that he would not separate them when he did understand the distinction."

- G.R. Beasley-Murray.  Baptism in The New Testament 

Put In The Right Place

“As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.” 

~ Henri Nouwen

To Become Presence We Risk Absence.

"Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But that is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince"