What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith

Sometimes it feels embarrassing even to say the word “God” seriously in certain circles.  

To prioritize trying to save our institutional life at any cost is a worthless endeavor if it leads us to be embarrassed by the very faith that God called the church into being to preserve and advance.

Archbishop William Temple said that, “If you have a false idea of God, the more religious you are, the worse it is for you—it were better for you to be an atheist.” We’re living in times when, given all the options in play, it might be that to be an atheist may be the better choice.

Maybe the church can rejuvenate its mission in the world by majoring for a while in careful listening. It may be that what the world needs most is a people dedicated to hearing.

Jesus’ confrontation with demonic powers has been validated, his struggle vindicated. The written story of Jesus’ ascension makes use of naive images that serve a purpose so long as we don’t get hung up on aerodynamic details.

For people of faith, the foundation lies in our perception of who God is.

The Muslims have my sympathy. Those who find themselves hung up on the arithmetic of one and three have my sympathy. The atheists have my sympathy. But the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lays claim to something else: my heart, and soul, and mind. 

The church is nothing less than a priestly community whose purpose is to represent, as best as it can, something of God’s deep interest in the welfare of the whole human family.

I’d like to think that Thomas is using doubt as a tool with which to dig deeper. Doubt plays a role for people who work in any serious discipline. It can serve to test what we think we know. 

Anyone who preaches, or listens to sermons, has discovered that the text for last Sunday’s sermon and the one for this Sunday’s sermon may seem to point in opposite directions. Last Sunday’s text: grace. This Sunday’s: Judgment. Human beings tend to be uncomfortable with ambiguity. . . .

The authoritative voice one may learn to discern in Scripture is often drowned out by the sheer abundance and volume of other voices. But it hasn’t gone silent. Jesus’ voice always does the same thing: clears some things up; unsettles others. If you pay attention, Jesus’ voice, interpreting Scripture, wakes you up.

God, viewed cross-wise, reveals God’s self not as relating to the world in dominating power, but rather as a God become present to the world in weakness, in vulnerability, in sharing the all-too-familiar status of victim.

Praying the Great Thanksgiving at Communion led me, over time, to reflect more deeply about eschatology, about which seminarians learn a little and then try to forget lest they be mistaken for fanatics!

“In scripture’s images of a heavenly banquet, we are led to a big-picture redemption, a cosmic resurrection, a transfiguration of heaven and earth, where God’s expansive generosity will be realized in the reign of Christ, whose embrace reaches to me and mine, but not only to me and mine!”

Adam and Eve did what’s so easy to do: They followed their impulses, naively abandoned their trust as though trust were just a trick meant to deceive them. So, they reached out for that one off-limits thing that would prove to be, sooner or later, a terrible blend of heaven and hell.

“It does not take much exposure to religious extremism to find oneself sufficiently repelled as to want to distance ourselves, to shake the dust off our feet, to stalk off and leave it all to those Christians who seem to have kidnapped the God we thought we knew.”   

“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus.    The Holy Spirit speaks to the church; and we find ourselves rejecting some ideas that seemed like sure-enough certainties for centuries. The divine right of kings, trashed. Slavery, discarded; race-based privilege no longer credible. Male domination, rejected. Caste systems, overruled. Disdain for those who don’t fit...

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom 7:15b, 19)

“Growing up is, very often at least, a series of disenchantments.” As childhood gives way to adolescence, and adolescence to young adulthood, we’ve got to figure out what to do with that early naiveté. 

It’s easy to critique other tribes, other nations; but the prophets did what wasn’t expected and isn’t easy.

He told me that it made no sense for me to be preaching about the resurrection to this young, well-educated congregation.

It was almost as though I had begun to hear a divine voice speaking to me in, under, and between the written words.

Austin Farrer argued that “while theologians of the late Middle Ages primarily looked in the scriptures for propositions and modern theologians have looked there to sort out what is historical, we should be looking for images.”

One of the persistent questions about the New Testament is what to make of the stories that describe Jesus doing things that require the reader to suspend disbelief.

Sitting in that space between scripture and the tumble of the world, it seems the most rewarding sermons tend to be on the most difficult texts. Perhaps they are most often the most rewarding because they require the deepest dives into the text, the most artful wrestling of how to perceive and understand these things, both in themselves and in how they might touch the lives of people in contempora...