exploring worship, theology, music, preaching, and faith. and sometimes, good food at cool dives.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Samford University Commencement Invocation
And so, today, we thank you for the knowledge and wisdom that all of us have gained from Samford University. We especially thank you for the ways that knowledge and wisdom have changed this graduating class, and we ask that you would help them use that knowledge and wisdom to live even more fully.
Here, this class has sought and found answers, but as its members go into the world, prompt them to ask new questions. Here, this class has analyzed humanity and the cosmos down to the smallest cells and particles; as its members go into the world, may their observations cause others to stand in awe at the connectedness of all of life. At Samford, this class has philosophized and debated and learned systems of politics and justice; as its members go into the world, O God, make them troubled by injustice, and use them to further national and international peace. God, here this class has sung and danced and drawn and built and gained skills in computational sciences; as its members go into the world use their imaginations to display the mystery of your creation and reach out with acts of kindness that don’t really compute. Here, this class has forged deep friendships; as its members go into the world, may they use these friendships to extend hospitality to the strangers and outcasts they meet.
—The middle paragraph adapted from an invocation given by Gail Stearns, Dean of the Wallace All Faiths Chapel, Chapman University.
… for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.
matthew 25
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart. Amen.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. Amen.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. Amen.
May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.
A Franciscan Blessing
To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God’s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ’s corpus verum, they resist the state’s ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture. Hardly anything remains to be said about imagination as a theological force. Except to note that clearly the need for Eucharistic imagination in the United States is very different from the need for it in abusive contexts … It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny lively communal imagination that resists mindless humanity of despairing conformity … Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in quite a parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.
Walter Brueggemann | Prophetic Imagination
“Give Us Rest” from Crowder Band
“Crowder’s Give Us Rest sounds exactly as a “final album” should. It is a Mount Everest of worship rock albums, never to be topped. For over a decade, David Crowder created some of the most creatively inspired worship music in the world, and now he deserves his rest.”
from an album review in Christianity Today
O
–O–by John Petrenka
In the realm of nothingness
there are no boundaries.
Circumferences do not exist,
there is no middle.
Horizons are broad,
never reached.
The stillness frightens
yet calmness abides.
Unheard—harmonic sounds
linger, echo-like,
sensed as an undertow
in an ocean’s depth
—a Siren’s call.
In the realm of nothingness
there are no boundaries,
It is a birthing place.
Parker Palmer on Autumn
“Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life. If I try to ‘make’ a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colorless as well. But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colorful, fruitful and whole.”
But again one might ask whether we are to pray by words or deeds and what need there is for prayer, if God already nows what is needful for us. But it is because the act of prayer clarifies and purges our heart and makes it more capable of receiving the divine gifts that are poured out for us in the spirit. God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one: but we are not always read to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things. For in prayer there occurs a turning of the heart to he who is always ready to give if we will but take what he gives: and in that turning is the purification of the inner eye when the things we crave in the temporal world are shut out; so that the vision of the pure heart can bear the pure light that shines divinely without setting or wavering: and not only bear it, but abide in it; not only without difficulty, but even with unspeakable joy, with which the blessed life is truly and genuinely brought to fulfillment.
Augustine, On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 2.3.14
In an age when, through athletics and diet and the intensity of exercise, we have rediscovered our physical bodies, we have neglected the “body” of our christianity. Liturgy [the form of our faith, or loosely—worship] is the sensuality of the Christian experience, the muscle of our mysticism. And we have treated it with all the regard we would pay to a huge, pastel marshmallow.
Anthony Ugolnik, Eastern Orthodox Priest
Lightness has a call that’s hard to hear
While studying at Fuller Theological Seminary, I often attended All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California. I learned much from this congregation, and I still listen to sermons preached in worship at All Saints. I am especially grateful for last week’s sermon from Rev. Susan Russell, “Lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” You can hear the entire sermon here, and I’ve transcribed a very small part of it below.
I take issue with the good news of God’s love and justice and compassion being high-jacked by the insatiable hunger of darkness called fear and anxiety and exceptionalism. I take issue with those who are so convinced that they have sole possession of the capital T Truth that they miss the capital F Fact that we are all part of the same human family. My brothers and sisters, Jesus calls us to be better than that. He calls us not to create a club that takes care of its own, but a community that reaches out to the world …
