Sin, Peace, Truth, Joy, Life, Love

"It is a sin to think that you are capable of naming your own sin. You are only able to know your sin by being told by another." Stanley Hauerwas.

"When we think our brother or sister has sinned against us, such an affront is not against us but against the whole community." 

"It is an unpleasant fact that most of our lives are governed more by our hates and dislikes than by our love. I seldom know what I really want but I know what or whom I deeply dislike or even hate."

"Jesus brings not a peace of rest but a peace of truth. Just as love without truth cannot help but be a curse, so peace without truthfulness cannot help but be deadly." Learning to Love the Enemy, Stanley Hauerwas on Matthew 18.

Are you a Christian? "If you are a Christian you should be joyful in a way that people find attractive. It's not like I go around saying, 'Oh, you got to be like me,' but that people should think, 'Gee I wonder what makes them tick.'"

"Gentleness is crucial for friendship."

"Sin is a theological achievement. You only know it on your way out of it. So the idea you need to be convinced you're a sinner in order to come to salvation is getting it backwards. By being saved in Christ you then are able to have some information of what it means to be a sinner. That's the school of discipleship for short. The tents made sin too interesting. It's exactly that Christians are saved from the narcissistic fascination with our sin."

Christianity is an ongoing training in dying early. America is the most powerful country and she thrives on fear. We are a society that rarely acknowledges death before it happens.

The idea that America is a Christian nation is a destructive one.

Conflict is at the very heart of being a truthful community.

Caesar wants it all. God has it all. It is very dangerous 

Abundant Life (Jn 10:10b): Jesus is the love that can never be used up. To be given life by Jesus is to have our lives overwhelmed by his life.

To be overwhelmed by his life we discover that our lives are intertwined in a manner that I cannot make sense of my life without the lives of others, most of whom are dead. The stark alternative of life today is one of quiet desperate loneliness. We live at a modern time that we call freedom.

How would you ever know what you were doing when you promised life long monogamous fidelity? You never get the children you want.

The life abundant Jesus makes possible is to be made participants in God's good story of us through creation. Through redemption. We are sheep. We do not get to choose our shepherd. Our very existence is a gift. We do not get to choose our gift.