I had a couple of requests for something I shared in my sermon on Sunday and I thought there might be more people

To summarize the careful study of Roberta Bondi, Christian love (agape) is not so much an emotion or a feeling, as it is a intentionally cultivated disposition, a deep attitude of the heart, a whole way of  being, feeling, seeing, and understanding that looks out for the well-being of the other, even when doing so goes against our own self-interest. [1]

[1] I gleaned this from two of her books: To Love as God Loves and To Pray and to Love.

I wanted to share this quote with each and every one of you:

In a Christian community everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. It will be well, therefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that [they] may know in hours of doubt that [they], too, [are] not useless and unusable. Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of the fellowship. — Dietrich Bonheffer [1]

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1954), 73.

I don’t think anything in the quote below is original, but it is such an excellent summary that I wanted to share it with you. Here, the word “mystery” refers not to a crime to be solved but rather to something beyond human understanding and comprehension (at least in this life).

Suffering is a mystery that causes anguish to many Christians. It seems to call the love of God into question. The suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary does not explain suffering. It does, however, reveal that God himself is willing and able to allow himself to be subject to all the pain and suffering that his creation experiences. We are not talking of a God who stands far off from his world, aloof and distant from its problems. We are dealing with a loving God who has entered into our human situation, who became human and lived among us as one of us. We know a God who, in his love for us, determined to experience firsthand what it is like to be frail, mortal and human, to suffer and to die. We cannot explain suffering, but we can say that in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, God took it upon himself to follow this way. God became the “man of suffering” so that we can enter into the mystery of death and resurrection. — Alister McGrath [1]

[1]  Alister McGrath, I Believe: Exploring the Apostles’ Creed (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1991), 66.

N. T. Wright—like many who have gone before him—makes the point that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not something to be fitted into an existing worldview but rather something to upend and remake the way we see the world.

People come to believe this [the truth of the resurrection], not necessarily because we can fully understand it (we can’t) but because once you get that straight you can understand all sorts of other things. Believe in Jesus’s resurrection, and we can make sense of God, of the world, of ourselves. Or rather, with this in place we discover that God has (so to speak) made sense of us. Sorted us out. Cleaned us up, dusted us down, turned us inside out. Made genuine humans of us. That’s what the message of the crucified and risen Jesus has always done. That’s what it still does. [1]

[1] N. T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017), 54.

According to Merriam-Websters, to “fob off” means “to put off with a trick, excuse, or inferior substitute.” [1] I looked it up because of this quote from N. T. Wright:

The good news is that the one true God has now taken charge of the world, in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection. The ancient hopes have indeed been fulfilled, but in a way nobody imagined. God’s plan to put the world right has finally been launched. He has grasped the world in a new way, to sort it out and fill it with his glory and justice, as he always promised. But he has done so in a way beyond the wildest dreams of prophecy. The ancient sickness [sin] that had crippled the whole world, and humans with it, has been cured at last, so that new life can rise up in its place. Life has come to life and is pouring out like a mighty river into the world, in the form of a new power, the power of love. The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now. This is the Christian gospel. Do not allow yourself to be fobbed off with anything less. [2]

Let us claim the entirety of God’s salvation and not settle for anything less.

[1] “fob off,” Merriam-Webster, accessed December 16, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com.

[2] 1. N. T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017), 56.

Words to remember from a mature John Wesley: “I have often repented of judging too severely, but very seldom of being too merciful.” [1]

[1] John Wesley to Robert Carr Brackenbury (London, England, October 20, 1787).

“If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.” — Harriet Tubman [1]

[1] Harriet Tubman as quoted in David P. Gushee and Colin Holtz, Moral Leadership for a Divided Age: Fourteen People Who Dared to Change Our World (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, a Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2018), Kindle, 105.

This Sunday, I’m preaching on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. As I think about what I want to say, my mind keeps coming back to this quote from Alessandro Solzhenitsyn:

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an unuprooted small corner of evil.” [1]

[1] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, vol. 2 (New York, NY: Harper Perinnial, 2007).

A good word from Frederick Buechner:

“The final secret, I think, is this: that the words ‘You shall love the Lord your God’ become in the end less a command than a promise. And the promise is that, yes, on the weary feat of faith and the fragile wings of hope, we will come to love [God] at last as from the first [God] has loved us.” [1]

“Less a command than a promise.” Let us pray it will be so.

[1] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1984), 45.