Words for Reflection

We need to face the truth of the limits of our perceptions and look again at who Jesus is revealing Himself to be.  Jesus' words are an invitation to contemplation, a call to awareness.  His admonition is the gentle but powerful reminder that a great deal of the work we do as we follow Him along the Way is to keep opening our eyes and ears to the truth of who He is.  He can never be exhaustively described by us.  There is always more about Him to discover.  The ingredients of mystery and humility are part of what fuels our journey with Him.

David Rohrer, The Sacred Wilderness of Pastoral Ministry

 

Premodernism asserted that there was an objective truth that could be known by those who had the skill to see it.  Modernism objected that truth was relative, that different people saw truth differently according to their own situations.  Postmodernism insists that there is no truth at all, that whatever truth there might be must be created by each person, for any larger claims to truth are in reality disguised bids for power.  The meta-narrative of the Christian community compassionately demonstrates that Jesus is the Truth, an objective Truth who can be known.  We know Him only partially, but because we know Him we do not have to try to create truth for ourselves.  Furthermore, His truth is not oppressive, for as Mark Schwehn emphasizes,

     For Christianity, the quest for truth is bound up inextricably with discipleship, and therefore the  

     shape of power is for them always cruciform...So long as Christians remember that, for disciples,

     power is not dominion but obedience, faithfulness, and suffering servanthood, they can rightly

     claim an integral connection between truth and power.

The Christian story we offer to our neighbors introduces them to Jesus, the Truth, who brings healing to postmodernists' fractured souls.

Marva Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time

 

Order of Worship, April 28 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church



 

 

 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not a gospel of growth.  It sets our eyes on a development more complete than any that can be conceived by a psychology confined within the limits of nature.

Paul Tournier,  A Place for You

Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. 

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Christianity entered history as a new world order, or rather a new social dimension.  From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a "doctrine," but exactly a "community." There was not only a "Message" to be proclaimed and delivered, and "Good News" to be declared.  There was precisely a New Community,distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited.  Indeed, "fellowship" (koinonia) was the basic category of Christian existence. 

Georges Florovsky, quoted in A Peculiar People (Rodney Clapp) 

We can no more learn what it means to be a Christian simply by attending to Scripture than we can learn to be Texan by reading about the history of Texas.  Rather, we learn that story, like the way we learn the story of Texas, by caring for the tombstones of the saints.  It is from them, as we see what the story of Jesus has done to their own stories, that we begin to understand what that story requires and means.  For the truth of the story we find in the gospels is finally known only through the kind of lives it produces.  If such lives are absent than no amount of hermeneutical theory or manipulation can make those texts meaningful.  

Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today

Order of Worship, January 16 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church