Category Archives: LitBits – Commentary

LitBit Commentary – Gordon Lathrop on the Eucharist 1

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

…the meal that we keep, in its intensity and focus, its staple food and festive drink, its ceremonial welcome of a wide circle, might suggest that we are consuming magical food, food of the angels, a heavenly banquet, food that will grant us immortality. Then we hear the content of the feast: “the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, given for you.” A specific, real death is proclaimed, and if “immortality” is given, then this is a new kind of freedom from death, coming in a world-affirming, bounded, palpable, and mortal way, here.

From Gordon Lathrop, The pastor: a spirituality, p.4

 

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – Gordon Lathrop on Baptism 2

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

The basic baptismal paradoxes include these: here, in this bath, we are united with the weak and foolish One who is God’s very wisdom and strength; so, here we are put to death in order to live; here we are identified with the death of Christ in order to be raised with him; here our dry bones take on flesh and are made to breathe with the Spirit; here we are washed in a purity bath that makes us dirtier — that is, here we are joined to Christ who is joined with all the unclean ones of the world. For Christians, life in vocation always involves immersion in these paradoxes.

From Gordon Lathrop, The pastor: a spirituality, p.17

 

 

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – The language of worship

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

Perhaps the largest challenge for the language of worship is that one set of words…needs somehow to embrace, express, and elicit the worship of a whole group of people. From the perspective of a worshiper, public worship always involves using words that come from someone else. One skill for worshipers to hone is the skill of “learning to mean the words that someone else gives us,” whether those are the words of a songwriter or prayer leader. This skill requires a unique mix of humility (submitting ourselves to words given to us by the community of faith), grace (willingness to offer the benefit of the doubt when those words may not have been well chosen), and intention (actually to appropriate those words as our own).

The Worship Sourcebook (alt)

 

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – James Torrance on Worship 4

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

“Under the pressures of our culture, and of theological controversy, are we not in danger of losing that living centre – of forgetting that the real agent in the life of the Church is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ?  Then our worship becomes in practice Unitarian and Pelagian, simply what we, religious people, do.”

James Torrance, Worship, Community and the triune God of Grace, p.107

 

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – John Zizioulas on the Eucharist

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

“In the Eucharist we can find all the dimensions of communion: God communicates himself to us, we enter into communion with him, the participants of the sacrament enter into communion with one another, and creation as a whole enters through man into communion with God. All this takes place in Christ and the Spirit, who brings the last days into history and offers to the world a foretaste of the Kingdom.”
John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church

 

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – Alexander Schmemann on Prayer

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

We pray in Christ, and he, through his Holy Spirit, prays in us, who are gathered in his name. “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Galatians 4.6). We can add nothing to this prayer, but according to his will, according to his love, we have become members of his body, we are one with him and have participation in his protection and intercession for the world.

Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, p.54

 

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on grace 1

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

“The gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent, but it will tell us we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.  That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves – to accept what we have been, so that all of it can be transformed.  It is a more authentic desire because more comprehensive, turning away from the illusory attraction of an innocence that cannot be recovered unless the world is unmade.  Grace will remake but not undo.”

Rowan Williams, Resurrection, p.89

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on the Eucharist 13

Posted on by

LitBits Logo - 2

“Celebrating the Eucharist not only reminds us that we are invited to be guests; it also reminds us that we are given the freedom to invite others to be guests as well. We have experienced the hospitality of God in Christ; our lives are therefore set free to be hospitable… Being in the neighbourhood of Jesus is sharing Jesus’ freedom to invite – to make our lives and our communities places of welcome for those most deeply in need of solidarity, of fellowship.”

Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.46f

How to use LitBit Features and Commentaries.

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - Commentary
« Older Entries Recent Entries »