This Sunday’s readings: Luke 12:49-53

Reflections

Jesus is a divider. He is oil to the world’s vinegar.
~ Julie Hildebrand, blogger

We can only know God well when we know our own sin. And those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him but have only glorified themselves.
~ Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, French mathematician

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. You expect the world to adjust… to the distortion you’ve become.
~ From the film “Deconstructing Harry” (Woody Allen)

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People today don’t think, believe or reckon. They ‘feel like.’ Listen for this phrase and you’ll hear it everywhere. For decades, Americans have been in the process of abandoning both the moral strictures of religion and the Enlightenment quest for universal truth in favor of obsessing over their own internal states and well-being…. This quest to understand and cope with our own feelings and desires — the current term of art is ‘selfcare’ — can lead to what the writer Christopher Lasch called ‘pseudo-self-awareness.’ It can leave us too preoccupied with personal satisfaction to see the world clearly. ‘The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety.’
~ Molly Worthen, UNC Professor, NYT article, “Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’”

How patient should God be? The day of reckoning must come, not because God is too eager to pull the trigger, but because every day of patience in a world of violence means more violence and every postponement of vindication means letting insult accompany injury. “How long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood?” cry out the souls under the altar to the Sovereign Lord (Rev. 6:10). We are uncomfortable with the response which calls on the souls “to rest a little longer until the number should be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed!” (v.11) But the response underlines that God’s patience is costly, not simply for God, but for the innocent. Wanting for the evildoers to reform means letting suffering continue….
Miroslav Volf, Professor of Theology, Yale Divinity

This Sunday’s readings: Mark 10:17-27

Reflections

The falseness of your own hearts, if you look not to them, may undo you.
~ Richard Baxter, 1615-1691, Pastor/Author, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest

To be found is to be exposed. No wonder so many of us are still lost.
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough, Counselor/Author

Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.
~ Iris Murdoch, 1919-1999, Anglo-Irish novelist

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
~ W. C. Fields, 1880-1946

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…what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.
~ Rev. Dr. Ashley Null, Anglican scholar

Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Exploration of Christian Community

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told — and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.
~ Michael Crichton