Relating to Union with Christ
44 ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν· ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑμῶν καὶ προσεύχεσθε ὑπὲρ τῶν διωκόντων ὑμᾶς, 45 ὅπως γένησθε υἱοὶ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς - Love your enemies and pray on behalf of those who persecute you, that you might be sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:44-45a, author's translation)The phrase "love your enemies" is certainly ...
I came across an interesting entry in The Anglican Tradition: a Handbook of Sources edited by G. R. Evans that caught my eye this morning while I was reading. A little water is customarily added to the wine during the consecration of the elements (BCP, 404). But why? How has this come to us and what is it attempting to ...
Mark 5:24-34 (ESV)
24 ... And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. 25 And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, 26 and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. 27 She ...
Translation
12 Take care, [a] brothers and sisters, so that there will not be in any of you an evil faithless heart by which to fall away [b] from the living God, 13 but encourage one another every day [c] as long as the day is still called Today, [d] so that none [e] from among you become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we become participants ...
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here ...
Why do you spend moneydoes not satisfyeat what is gooddelight yourselves in rich food, so that you may liveBlessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfiedCome, buy wine and milk without money and without pricethat which does not satisfy.thirst for righteousness will be satisfiedseek the Lord while he may be found.Whydo you spend your ...
1What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were buried therefore with him ...
Translation
16 For surely he did not take hold of [1] the angels, but he took hold of the seed of Abraham to make it his own.Commentary[1] ????????????? to take hold of, grasp, catch. When followed by a genitive, as is the case here, it can entail the idea of taking hold violently of something or someone, in order to make ...
It occured to me this morning, while observing fellow parishoners receiving Holy Communion, that there seemed to be a distinct impression from the Reformation in the distribution of the elements. It is my understanding that in the period prior to the Reformation churches celebrated the Eucharist generally once a year and when it was celebrated laity received only the bread, ...
For those who enjoy context, our scripture readings this morning at St. John's were Acts 1:1-14; Psalm 47; 1 Peter 4:12-19; and John 17:1-11. ]now HT: St. John's Episcopal ...
28After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), "I thirst." 29A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, "It is finished," and ...
3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, 4 rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash ...
17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.12And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who ...
9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in ...
The many forms of theosophy, anthroposophy, and other variations of the New Age spirituality still offer a potent and heady mix to those seeking a spiritually more exotic than what they think they know as the traditional Christian Faith. ... The Church will always have to contend with those who falsely claim to offer a more "spiritual" approach. And its ...
I thank God that he has given us literature, which stokes the imagination and even returns refreshing fervor and dimension to theology. The Inclings met again last night and continued our study of Dante together, by reading chapter XI "The Paradiso" from The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams, who is stylistically quite different from Dorothy Sayers and every bit ...
Vibrant Sanctified LifeGod in his mercies gave us in Christ Jesus a new mind a new set of desires that are beyond what we could imagine before. Paul is urging us on here to that greater immeasurable Christian imagination. Now why do I put it like that?
Lewis put it something like this:Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises ...
The Mercies of God as the Basis for Sanctification and Paul's UrgingPaul had written to the church at Rome. That church had some life in it in its own right. He was hashing out some of the main points of the Gospel for them and he turns to urge these good Christian people towards their created purpose. In ...
When Paul pens Romans 12:1-2, he has in mind the unspeakable, immeasurable wonder of what is ours in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the man that has already experienced resurrection and brings that life giving purpose from the future into this world here and now.
We who are in Christ, who is himself the image of God in whom the likeness of ...
One of the most brutal sermons and Sunday school lesson for which I have had to prepare is for 1 John 3:11-18. I am confronted with a hollow sounding words that my lips seek to circumscribe as the arid and the acrid exhaust past them. I have found these lyrics as a wet salve caking in the fissures of my ...
