Sabbath

It is no use claiming "I don't need to rest this week and therefore will not keep the sabbath" - our lives are so interconnected that we inevitably involve others in our work whether we intend to or not. Sabbath-keeping is elemental kindness. Sabbath-keeping is commanded to preserve the image of God in our neighbours so that we see then as they are, not as we need them or want them.
Working the Angles, p.71.

Happy birthday to me!

Just noticed I have been blogging for a year. And thanks to Dickie Mint who talked me into it (at least the blog didn't cost anything...)

Outrage & Blasphemy (prayer)

Most of the people we meet, inside and outside the church, think prayers are harmless but necessary starting pistols that shoot blanks and get things going. They suppose that the "real action", as they call it, is in the "things going" - projects and conversations, plans and performances. It is an outrage and a blasphemy when pastors adjust their practice of prayer to accommodate these inanities.

Working the Angles, p46

World perspective

One gets an impression that because of the numerical strength of Africa's church, Africans Christians can be equal partners with their Western counterparts. But we cannot pretend that the power of America does not exist. There is a new desire to learn from one another, but how deep does the learning go? I have a hard time getting a serious answer when I ask American churches what they have learned from their African "partnerships." Perhaps instead of spending $2.5 million on a building, they scale it down to $2.3 million. But they're still constructing baptismal fonts that automatically adjust the temperature! In a world where millions of Christians have no clean water, how much has been learned here?

Emmanuel Katongole

Prophets, prayers, psalms

Pastors who imitate the preaching and moral action of the prophets without also imitating the prophets' deep praying and worship so evident in the Psalms are an embarrassment to the faith and an encumbrance to the church.

Working the Angles, p40.

Giving cemeteries the vote

What is the most important pastoral act for maintaining your identity? GK Chesterton said that tradition is the only true democracy because it means giving a vote to your ancestors. If we count only the votes of those who happen to be on their feet at the moment, we are letting a small minority make the decision, and a not very distinguished minority at that. Chesterton argued for extending the franchise to the cemeteries. When we do that, the ballots naming "prayer" come in with an overwhelming majority. For the majority of Christian centuries most pastors have been convinced that prayer is the central and essential act for maintaining the essential shape of the ministry in which they were ordained.

Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, p26

Peterson's triangle

Most of what we see in a triangle is lines. the lines come in various proportions to each other but what determines the proportions and the shape of the whole are the angles...

Working the angles is what gives shape and integrity to the daily work of pastors and priests. if we get the angles right it is a simple matter to draw in the lines. But if we are careless or dismiss the angles, no matter how long or straight we draw the lines we will not have a triangle, a pastoral ministry.

Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, p5.

Peterson: sinner church and pastor

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does His work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor's responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.

Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, p2.

Prayer: the delight of God

The reason our hope is a pleasure to God is because it shows that all our joy comes from the bounty of His grace. And the reason our prayers are a pleasure to God is because they express this God-exalting hope. It is a precious thing beyond words - especially in the hour of death - that we have a God whose nature is such that what pleases Him is not our work for Him but our need of Him....

The most wonderful thing about the Bible is that it reveals a God who satisfies His appetite for joy by answering prayers. he has no deficiency in Himself that he needs to fill up, so He gets His satisfaction by magnifying the glory of His riches by filling up the deficiencies of people who pray.

John Piper, The Pleasures of God, p.215-216 (commenting on Proverbs 15:8)

Life in commuter suburbia

Incomprehensible Worship

In his sermon "The Divine Being," medieval mystic Meister Eckhart quotes Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Gregory the Great, and the Bible to remind his listeners about a commonplace of Christian theology. At one point, he sums it up by saying:

To know him really is to know him as unknowable … . God is something which is in no sense to be reached or grasped … . God's worth and God's perfection cannot be put into words. When I say man, I have in my mind human nature. When I say gray, I have in my mind the grayness of gray. When I say God, I have in my mind neither God's majesty nor his perfection.

In other words, God is anything but "meaningful," "understandable," or "intelligible." And worship, if it is authentic worship of the biblical God, will, at some level, remain incomprehensible. Worship that enables us to encounter the living God should leave worshippers a bit stupefied; they should leave their pews, pump the minister's hand, and enthusiastically blurt out, "I didn't understand large portions of the service. Thank you!"

As noted, our desire for worship that is "understandable" is, well, understandable for evangelistic reasons. But there is a less seemly side of this desire: It's sometimes about worshipping a God we can control. Just as we furiously pursue some line of study in order to "master" a subject, so we are tempted to pursue God in an attempt to master him. As A. W. Tozer put it in Knowledge of the Holy:

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get him where we can use him, or at least know where he is when we need him. We want a God we can in some measure control. We need the feeling of security that comes from knowing what God is like.

Mark Galli

Nouwen: theological leadership

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.

In the Name of Jesus, p.68