LitBit: Preaching is to lead us to the Supper as to the visible Word and then invite us to turn in faith toward the famine in the rest of the world – begging for and signing God’s great relief in the prayers of intercession, in the collection, and in the sending.
Gordon Lathrop, The pastor, p67.
LitBit: In the Eucharist, the pastor stands at the table and gives thanks, proclaiming how this food and all food comes from God, proclaiming the mystery of God now using this food to give us life through Jesus Christ, begging the Spirit to form us in the sharing of food.
Gordon Lathrop, The pastor, p71.
LitBit: The Eucharist reminds us of the need for honest repentance – of the need to confront our capacity to betray and forget the gift we have been given. And that is why the Eucharist is not, in Christian practice, a reward for good behaviour; it is the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self-enclosure and self-absorption, our pride and our forgetfulness.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.52f
LitBit: [The Eucharist] is, as some modern Christian thinkers have said, what makes the Church what it really is. For that short time, when we gather as God’s guest at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.58
LitBit: Sometimes, after receiving Holy Communion, as I look around a congregation, large or small, I have a sensation I can only sum up as this is it – this is the moment when people see one another and the world properly: when they are filled with the Holy Spirit and when they are equipped to go and do God’s work. It may last only a few seconds but there it is. It has happened and it happens again and again. And what is the appropriate response? …thanksgiving.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.58
LitBit: The Eucharist reminds us of the need for honest repentance – of the need to confront our capacity to betray and forget the gift we have been given. And that is why the Eucharist is not, in Christian practice, a reward for good behaviour; it is the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self-enclosure and self-absorption, our pride and our forgetfulness.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.52f
“instead of that picture of the Bible as a book held in the hands of a solitary reader alone in a room, have in your mind another kind of picture, one in which somebody is proclaiming God’s story to a gathering of diverse people – and all of them asking themselves, and asking one another, ‘How do we find ourselves in this? How are we going to be renewed together by this reading?’ Because when that happens, the Bible is an essential source, as well as a sign, of the Christian life”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.39
“…reading the Bible is about listening to God in Jesus – which is what Christians ought to be doing in all circumstances anyway. It is letting the Holy Spirit bring you inside the story of how God related to the ancient Israelites and the first Christian believers – letting the Holy Spirit bring you inside that story so that you recognize it as your story.”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.36
“…when you see a group of baptized people listening to the Bible in public worship, you realize that Bible-reading is an essential part of the Christian life because Christian life is a listening life. Christians are people who expect to be addressed by God.”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.21
LitBit: The Congregation is the embodiment in one place of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, worshipping, witnessing and serving as a fellowship of the Spirit in Christ. Its members meet regularly to hear God’s Word, to celebrate the sacraments, to build one another up in love, to share in the wider responsibilities of the Church, and to serve the world.
The Basis of Union