"Faith is not a matter of certainty but of courage...Nothing important can be imposed by coercion."
-- Catherine Keller
"Faith is not a matter of certainty but of courage...Nothing important can be imposed by coercion."
-- Catherine Keller
"Popular Lent is too occupied with guilt and repentance...Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God's future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present..."
--Walter Brueggemann (A Way Not Our Own)
"The only way to make rapid progress along the path of divine love is to remain very little and put all our trust in God."
--Therese of Lisieux
"God's affection for you runs deep
...and you will never be forsaken."
---Jonathan Foster
Love is patient and kind
Love is never jealous
It does not brag or boast
It is not puffed up or big-headed.
Love does not act in shameful ways
Nor does it care only about itself
It is not hot-headed
Nor does it keep track of wrongs done to it.
Love is not happy with lies and injustice
But truth makes its heart glad.
Love keeps walking even when carrying a heavy load
Love keeps trusting
Never loses hope
stands firm in hard times.
The road of love has no end.
I Corinthians 13:4-8. (First Nations Version)
"Above all, trust in the slow work of God...
It is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through stages of instability...
...and that it may take a very long time."
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"...we are called to depart, to trust the new life, and to find space and energy for a life of full shalom, to live apart from the system of pharaoh. This story has many futures..." (Exodus 8:16-18)
--Walter Brueggemann (A Way Not Our Own)
"The crescendo of the New Testament is the statement in 1st John that GOD IS LOVE.
...the mystery of God is the excess of divine love, so you need not fear what you don't know and understand..."
--Eberhard Jungel
"We are being chased by God's powerful love...
Lent is a time to quit running, to let ourselves be caught and embraced in love, like a sheep with safe pasture...
(Our life) is to be an embrace but that entails being caught by God."
---Walter Brueggemann in A Way Other Than Our Own
This will be the last of a series from Shane Hipps' book, Selling Water By the River.
In the chapter about gardening Hipps contrasts the special treatment that the famous Mona Lisa painting receives (encasement in a temperature controlled glass box and security guards, etc) and the treatment that a good gardener gives to plants in a botanical garden. These are both very different kinds of jobs.I've become aware over the years that we who claim to be the most ardent Christians are some of the most anxious of people, fearful of making mistakes or wrong decisions or of not believing the right doctrines or not being spiritual enough, etc, etc. In the chapter on "touching the stove" in Selling Water by the River, Shane Hipps says the following:
"Those of us raised in Christianity often live with a lot of fear. Fear that we are doing it wrong (whatever 'it' is). Fear that some unfamiliar idea might hurt us. Fear that God may not like who we are, or what we've done, or what we think. Fear that a particular interpretation of the Bible is hurting the Bible or even God. Fear that we, or others, might be offending God, who apparently has quite fragile feelings and a hair-triggered temper. Some religious people are even afraid that other people are not frightened enough."In his chapter about "wind and sails" in Selling Water by the River, Shane Hipps shows how Jesus went out of His way to disregard the boundaries that religion had established. In His first miracle of turning water into wine Jesus "sets the stage for his way of operating in the world. It frames his entire ministry."
In this miracle what's astonishing is not only that Jesus changed the chemical composition from one liquid to another but that he flagrantly broke the ceremonial rules which insisted that wine not be put into vessels that were dedicated for ceremonial washing. This is exactly what Jesus did - he had the servants use the jars that were for ceremonial cleansing rather than use the empty wine jars. By doing this, he was mixing wine and water thereby defiling both and causing the people to be unclean.In the second chapter of the book, Selling Water by the River, Hipps talks about the lenses through which we read scripture and life:
In the coming weeks I will share quotes from parts of Shane Hipps' book, Selling Water by the River, "a book about the life Jesus promised and the religion that gets in the way".
This book had a significant influence on my early years of unlearning and relearning and reworking much of what I was raised to believe about God and Jesus and Christianity.
The summary on the book jacket says of this book: "Work, sex, ice cream, religion - they all promise fulfillment. But what they deliver is fleeting...We want something that lasts, that doesn't rise and fall with the fate of the stock market. Jesus understood this quest. He came to show us that peace is possible in this life, not just the next one. Yet Christianity, the very religion that claims Jesus as its own, has often built the biggest barriers to him and the life he promised.""Faith is not a matter of certainty but of courage...Nothing important can be imposed by coercion." ...