“To promise to abide by this legislation, so inimical to God, would mean forsaking the gospel and turning away from God s law. This is why Christians have a choice to make, either to trade in their loyalty to God for freedom from persecution, or to remain true to Christ and consequently run the risk of persecution.”
“The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.”
“To listen to others quiets and disciplines the mind to listen to God.”
“My choices, it seemed, were to be branded a sinner and live my life alone; to abandon my faith, the one thing I held most dear in the entire world; or to lie to everyone, pretend I was straight, and forget about it all.”
“I want to remind pastors and leaders that we do not own the church—God does. We aren t called to serve the church from a place of fear with our primary focus on protecting our boundaries. We are called to fling wide the doors, to invite to the banquet those on the margins, those who will challenge our comfort and our aversion to getting our hands dirty. Announcing the kingdom is risky business. When our experience of church becomes so predictable and so controlled, one has to wonder how far we ve strayed from the calling to be ambassadors of reconciliation to those far beyond the walls of the church.”
“Unfortunately, some churches are now so worried about being arrogant and unbending like certain other Christians that they fail to stand for anything at all. They hang question marks over all the major doctrines of the faith or throw them out entirely. Bit by bit, they lose the things that set them apart as Christians.”
“God s truth! one side shouts. More loving! comes the response. God s truth! More loving! God s truth! More loving! But there shouldn t be a clash between God s truth and More loving. In the Bible, Truth and Love are two sides of the same coin. You can t have one without the other. God s Truth is all about God s Love for us and the Love we ought to have for one another. We are being untrue to that Truth if we treat people unlovingly. And we are missing out on the full extent of that Love if we try to divorce it from Ultimate Truth.”
“The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don t have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual mental state. We do not have to apply will pressure. To be sure, like basketball or football, it is something that requires a lot of practice--its rhythms do not come naturally except to those who have been rehearsing them for years. On some Sundays the soul will indeed battle to even pay attention. In the normal course of worship, we do not have to conjure up feelings or a devotional mood; we are not required to perform the liturgy flawlessly. Such anxious effort... blind us to what is really going on. We do have to show up, and we cannot leave early. But if we will dwell there, remain in place, wait patiently, Jesus will show up.”
“The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality... The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us... But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we re not paying attention.”
“You will go far in the Church. I have no desire to go far. My only ambition is to be a good priest. You will be that, of course. Nevertheless, you will go higher. And do you know why?” “Why?” “Because,” said Orselli, “you are not afraid of worldliness. I do not mean that you are worldly. Far from it. But you have a talent for being all things to all men.”
“Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement. Tarshish, not Nineveh, was the destination. The moment we did that, we started thinking wrongly, for the vocation of pastor has to do with living out the implications of the word of God in community, not sailing off into the exotic seas of religion in search of fame and fortune.”
“The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.”
“Love is a heart smile.”
“Kilometa mbili na ushei kidogo kutoka katika sanamu la Yesu Mtoto liitwalo Niñopa, katika Kanisa la Parokia ya Manispaa ya Xochimilco ( Sochimiliko ) la Iglesia de San Bernardino de Siena, Mexico City, kulikuwa na nyumba ndogo ya siri ( safe house ) ya Kolonia Santita iliyojengwa bila uzio wa ukuta au seng’enge isipokuwa miti iliyopandwa kuizunguka bila mpangilio wowote. Ndani ya nyumba hiyo Mpelelezi Maarufu Duniani John Murphy alikuwa akiteswa na magaidi kumi na mbili; waliokuwa wakiendelea kushangaa jinsi alivyookoka katika ajali ya ndege iliyoua watu zaidi ya mia tatu huko Uholanzi, na jinsi alivyoweza kuingia katika ofisi ya siri ya Panthera Tigrisi, kitu kilichomchanganya akili Tigrisi na makompade wote wa Kolonia Santita duniani kote. Bila Mtoto wa Rais wa Meksiko Debbie Patrocinio Abrego, na mwanasesere wa nyoka wa Mtoto wa Mwanasheria Mkuu wa Serikali Lisa Madrazo Graciano, John Murphy angeanguka.”
“A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone s skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?”
“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”
“It will have to be Jem. He s impossible to hate. Even that devil cat likes him.”