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Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

Apr 4

Hope in Person

“Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.” That remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say…. [T]he prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined in the new Jerusalem. Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we only have images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising still. And the intermediate hope—the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day—are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong.

Our task… is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Mar 31

A World Addressed

From Walter Brueggemann’s Prayers for a Privileged People, in the midst of a week where dreams, possibilities, and disequilibrium are on our minds—in the midst of a week where we are reminded of God’s strange and beautiful address: Read more

Mar 25

11 Comments

Wright on Authenticity and Virtue

I haven’t forgotten about my series on The Naked Anabaptist and plan on returning to it shortly, but in the meantime here’s a few quotes that struck me this week from N.T. Wright’s new book on Christian virtue called After You Believe: Read more

Mar 21

13 Comments

On Prayer

A couple of memorable quotes on prayer I came across today, from two very different sources: Read more

Feb 15

9 Comments

Swept to Big Purposes

Like many, I have been watching the 2010 Vancouver Olympics off and on for the last several days. Much as I would like to pretend otherwise, I have found myself to be a bit of a sucker for a euphoric flag raising ceremony or a powerful biographical vignette or an emotive speech or any of the other carefully crafted media productions intended to produce some kind of transcendent sense of being Canadian. It’s been unsettling to see how manipulable I am! Medals won by people I do not know in events I have virtually no interest in outside of two weeks every four years suddenly have the capacity to make me feel like an important part of a grand and momentous red and white wave of fulfillment, meaning, and purpose. Read more

Feb 8

8 Comments

A Ragged Garment

Last night I was talking with a group of young adults about things like doubt and honesty and childlike-ness and the role these things (and others) played in the development and preservation of a mature faith.  Frederick Buechner, in a discussion of one of his former professors, has this to say in Listening to Your Life: Read more

Jan 27

21 Comments

A World Suffused with Value

Spending parts of the last few days writing an article about atheism has given me the opportunity to revisit some of the notes and quotes I accumulated during my thesis research a few years ago. Discussions about the relationship between the discoveries of science and the claims of faith seem to occur quite regularly, both on this blog and in my everyday conversations. This quote from John Polkinghorne’s Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context isolates an important dimension of the conversation, in my view: Read more

Jan 20

14 Comments

In Every Arrival, a Leavetaking

I promise to return to less morbid topics shortly, but after returning from my grandfather’s funeral, hearing of the passing of a member of our congregation’s mother, and continuing to watch the ongoing crisis in Haiti unfold, death is on my mind.  I believe it was C.S. Lewis who once said that the ability (and burden) of being aware of and anticipating our own deaths is uniquely human.  Regardless of how we may feel about it, death is something we have to learn to live with. Read more

Jan 15

39 Comments

Our Portion is Charity

Like many, no doubt, my heart has been heavy and my prayers have seemed hollow for the country of Haiti this week.  Words seem so small and insignificant in the face of such devastation and pain, but I was glad to have come across these, written by David Bentley Hart after the 2004 tsunami, this morning: Read more

Jan 13

11 Comments

Sing

My grandfather died this morning. On one level, his death came as a mercy and was not accompanied by the shock and tragedy that so often accompany a loved one’s passing. But on another level, my grandfather’s death—like all deaths—is a shock and it is tragic. We wear death very poorly, as human beings. We try to ignore it, sanitize it, romanticize it, keep it arms length, or any number of other strategies, but we’re never very successful. Read more

Jan 8

12 Comments

The Small Ways

The first weeks of January are often times full of big plans, big promises, big expectations, and big dreams. It was good to be reminded by Walter Brueggemann this morning of the significance of “smallness” in God’s economy. This is from Prayers for a Privileged People: Read more

Jan 6

5 Comments

Googled Out

Well, we’re sitting here in the Calgary airport waiting to catch a plane back home and I’m continuing to make my way through Douglas Coupland’s JPod.  I’ve been meaning to get acquainted with Coupland’s work for some time now and the Christmas holidays have provided the perfect opportunity.  JPod follows the (fairly pathetic) lives of a bunch of twenty-something computer programmers who work for a gaming company as they traverse the dreary landscape of postmodernity.  So far, it’s been an interesting read full of memorable passages. Read more

Dec 31

10 Comments

Life

Last year I began the New Year with a quote from Frederick Buechner so why break with tradition?  This one seems appropriate given some of the discussion that took place around my previous post.   It is from an entry called “Life” and comes from Wishful Thinking: Read more

Dec 22

2 Comments

Christmas is Grace

Well, I’m up to my ears in Christmas Eve and Sunday sermon preparation this week, and after that we’re off to Alberta to visit family until early January so the posting might be a little sparse around here for a while. In the meantime, I thought I would share another memorable quote from Frederick Buechner. This comes from Whistling in the Dark: Read more

Nov 27

38 Comments

True History

It’s been a while since Frederick Buechner made an appearance around here, so I thought today would be as good a day as any to correct this.  I can think of few whose words I would rather have rattling around my brain going into a weekend—especially a weekend where we celebrate the first Sunday of Advent and begin preparing for the arrival of the baby who would shape the course of history.  This is from Wishful Thinking: Read more

Nov 19

17 Comments

All Together

Around here, Thursdays are the day where a good deal of the work of preparing the Sunday morning service begins. I am always amazed to see the sheer diversity of the people who come through our doors on any given Sunday. I am equally amazed to discover the potpourri of needs, hopes, joys, fears, longings, frustrations, and anxieties that accompany them. Of course it is impossible to craft a service with the specific intention of meeting every perceived or real individual need that might show up on a Sunday morning. Yet one of the mysteries of the church is that when we gather together somehow our individual stories can find their place within the broader story of God and the story of his church—that by simply being together to pray, to sing, to hear from Scripture, and to share our lives, our needs just might end up getting met (however oddly or unexpectedly) along the way. Read more

Nov 3

42 Comments

A Disjunctive Prayer

On Sunday I preached from Revelation 21:1-6—a passage that I would guess is among the more well-known and well-loved in all of Scripture. It  speaks of a new heaven and a new earth where the old order of things has passed away. No more tears, no more death, no more pain… It is a world that seems too good to be true. It is a world that scarcely resembles the reality that Revelation’s first hearers/readers were familiar with. Or that we are familiar with. For as long as it has been around, there has been a disjunction between this text and the lived reality of those who read it, hear it, and hope for what it promises. Read more

Oct 27

3 Comments

Doxology

When I first came across this quote I thought it was overstated and simplistic, but the longer I think about it the more I think Ron Rolheiser is gesturing toward an important truth here.  From “The Power of Praying a Doxology” in Northern Lights: Read more

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