Quotes

I am presently reading Practice Resurrection by Eugene Peterson (an author who always challenges me) and Peterson just quoted the following statement from Annie Dillard:

Why do people  in churches seem like cheerful  brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … On the whole I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

Reminds me of much of what Mark Buchanan says in Your God is too Safe. The real God of the Bible (YHWH) is not a god to be handled. He is not the god that works things out for your life and guarantees that the harvest will be good this year as long as you know the correct religious rituals. He is not the god who is always on your side of an issue and against your enemy. He is the One Who says “follow me” and then leads us into worlds that we would have never gone to on our own. He is the God Who we need to wear a hard hat around because He often needs to destroy some part of our lives and world, before He builds something much better. He is the God Who says that we only find true life when we loose our life in Him. To quote Mr. Beaver from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

May you and I remember to wear our crash helmets when we approach the true God, and may you and I both run away from images of Him that aren’t this dangerous.

While working on Sunday’s sermon I ran across the following quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. What is weak shall become strong through God, and what dies shall live.

I was challenged by it, liked it, and thought I would incorporate it into Sunday’s message. I do however hate attributing things to secondary sources so I thought I would go find the original source and look at the context of the quote. I found it in a collection of Bonhoeffer’s writings from 1928-31. I think the context makes the quote even better. Unfortunately it is rather long to share on a Sunday evening so I am, therefore, posting it here on the blog.

Ethics and religion and church all go in this direction: from the human to God. Christ, however, speaks only and exclusively of the line from God to human beings, not of some human path to God, but only of God’s own path to humans. Hence it is also fundamentally wrong to seek a new morality in Christianity. In actual practice, Christ offered hardly any ethical prescriptions not already attested among his contemporary Jewish rabbis or even in pagan literature. The essence of Christianity is found in its message about the sovereign God to whom alone, above the entire world, all honor is due; it is a message about the eternally other, the God removed from the world who from the primal ground of his being has loving compassion for those who render honor to him alone, the God who traverses the path to human beings in order to find there vessels of that honor precisely where human beings are nothing, where they fall silent, where they give space to God alone.

Here the light of eternity falls upon that which is eternally disregarded, the eternally insignificant, the weak, ignoble, unknown, the least of these, the oppressed and despised: here that light radiates out over the houses of the prostitutes and tax collectors . . . here that light pours out from eternity upon the working, toiling, sinning masses. The message of grace travels over the dull sultriness of the big cities but remains standing before the houses of those who spiritually speaking are satisfied, knowing, and possessing. It pronounces upon the death of people and nations its eternal: I have loved you from eternity; stay with me, and you will live. Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. What is weak shall become strong through God, and what dies shall live. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Essence of Christianity.” In Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008. pp. 354-55.

I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that you have created in me this your image, so that I can remember you, think about you and love you. But it is so worn away by sins, so smudged over by the smoke of sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do unless you renew and reform it. I do not even try, Lord, to rise up to your heights, because my intellect does not measure up to that task; but I do want to understand in some small measure your truth, which my heart believes in and loved. Nor do I seek to understand so that I can believe, but rather I believe so that I can understand. For I believe this too, that “unless I believe I shall not understand

Anselm, Proslogion, Chapter 1.