Metanoia

Oliver O'Donovan: If ethics are to be evangelical....

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If ethics are to be evangelical, they...have to speak of God at work within us, applying and confirming God's act in Christ for us.  We have to show that the redeemed creation does not merely confront us moral agents, but includes us and enables us to participate in it.

--Oliver O'Donovan in Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics

Ross Douthat: Celebration of the Passion or Self-Grooming?

"Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming." I never expected to read this in a publication like the New York Times, but Ross Douthat gave a glimpse of his own faith in a review of a recent Commonweal article by Luke Timothy Johnson.

George Herbert: Man

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Since then, my God, thou hast

So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,

That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit;

That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,

And both thy servants be.

-- George Herbert from "Man" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Figs, Bread, and Manure

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A sermon on Luke 13:1-9 preached by the Reverend Craig David Uffman at St. Anne's Church in Warsaw, Indiana on the third Sunday in Lent, 2010.

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Jean Vanier: To accept the risk of personal consciousness

 

To accept the risk of personal consciousness and growth to inner freedom can be painful; it is never easy to follow the light of oneself when others do not seem to agree.  Communities can tend to close in upon themselves.  But belonging should always be a means to personal becoming.  It is accepting the risk of dying to aggressiveness and rivalry in order to discover a new freedom and a new fecundity - a new way of giving life to others, to be in "one body" with them.

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

Is Your Work Profane?

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Is your work profane?

Most of us yearn for a sense of fullness in our lives, a sense of flourishing in which two things are present. First, we’ve a sense that we’ve been delivered from those moments of confusion, melancholy, distance, and even isolation that sometimes make us feel utterly lost and alone in the wilderness. Second, in spite of the dailiness of life, we feel connected and moving towards a time in which all things are given eternal meaning, a destiny in which we rest in truth, beauty, justice, and joy.

Right now, we Christians only glimpse this our destiny in a fragmentary way, darkly, as through a mirror. But those glimpses are immensely important; they sustain us and direct us in our journey towards joy. And the name we give to such moments - and to the places and habits where we regularly encounter this fullness to which we are called - is “sacred.”  Sacred is the name for our windows to the holy. 

Wendell Berry: Again I resume the long lesson...

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Again I resume the long

lesson: how small a thing

can be pleasing, how little

in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind

and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc

the woods this morning is

almost unnaturally still.

Through stalled air, unshadowed

light, a few leaves fall

of their own weight.

The sky

is gray.  It begins in mist

almost at the ground

and rises forever.  The trees

rise in silence almost

natural, but not quite,

almost eternal, but

not quite.

What more did I

think I wanted?  Here is

what has always been.

Here is what will always

be.  Even in me,

the Maker of all this

returns in rest, even

to the slightest of His works,

a yellow leaf slowly 

falling, and is pleased.

-- Wendell Berry in Given: Poems

Oliver O'Donovan: On 'Authority'

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The term, ‘authority’ warns us that when redemption is present to us it does not encounter a vacuum. It exercises an authority over an existing reality. It encounters an apparent structure of order which is presented within the world, criticizing it and transforming it. It brings true reality to bear upon the appearances of reality which our world (that segment of the whole which shares our moment in history with us) presents to us. The effect of this is twofold: our world is judged, and it is recreated. The unreality of its existing coherence and continuity is exposed; and there is introduced a new series of events which present a truer coherence and continuity.

--Oliver O'Donovan in Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics

What Fools Say in Their Hearts

In our secular age, it's common to encounter ideologies that masquerade as enlightenment. What's fascinating is that the enlightened of every age announce to the world their elect status in the same way.  They have been given the gnostic secret that it's all a sham: there is no God.  It's time for all to escape the sham in which we live by trusting the newfound wisdom of the new elect.

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One wonders what they would do if they discovered as well that the psalmist took the measure of such enlightened folk three millenia ago: “Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God” (Ps 14:1/53:1). Evidently the new discovery that there is no God is not so new after all.  Indeed, the agnosticism of today is but a pale imitation of that which Paul encountered at the Areopagus in Athens.  Fortunately, he helped the intelligentsia of his day name the god they did not know:

Freedom

A sermon on 2 Corinthians 3:18 and Luke 9:28-36

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