Advent Sayings Quotes

Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac.

When asking God for direction, ask Him to give you ears to hear it and the will and strength to follow it. Say, “God show me what to do and enable me to do it.

The missionaries find it opportune to remind the masses that long before the advent of European colonialism the great African empires were disrupted by the Arab invasion. There is no hesitation in saying that it was the Arab occupation which paved the way for European colonialism; Arab imperialism commonly spoken of, and the cultural imperialism of Islam is condemned.

When we would say 'No way,' he would say, 'My way.' Then the ones who doubted would scramble to salvage the blessing. And the one who gave it would savor the surprise.

Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses. Flood waters await us in our avenues. Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche Over unprotected villages. The sky slips low and grey and threatening. We question ourselves. What have we done to so affront nature? We worry God. Are you there? Are you there really? Does the covenant you made with us still hold? Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters, Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air. The world is encouraged to come away from rancor, Come the way of friendship. It is the Glad Season. Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner. Flood waters recede into memory. Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us As we make our way to higher ground. Hope is born again in the faces of children It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets. Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things, Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors. In our joy, we think we hear a whisper. At first it is too soft. Then only half heard. We listen carefully as it gathers strength. We hear a sweetness. The word is Peace. It is loud now. It is louder. Louder than the explosion of bombs. We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence. It is what we have hungered for. Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace. A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies. Security for our beloveds and their beloveds. We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas. We beckon this good season to wait a while with us. We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come. Peace. Come and fill us and our world with your majesty. We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian, Implore you, to stay a while with us. So we may learn by your shimmering light How to look beyond complexion and see community. It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time. On this platform of peace, we can create a language To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other. At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ Into the great religions of the world. We jubilate the precious advent of trust. We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope. All the earth's tribes loosen their voices To celebrate the promise of Peace. We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers, Look heavenward and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation. Peace, My Brother. Peace, My Sister. Peace, My Soul.

Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

Offer me?" A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. "Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports." How does that make Britain great?" "Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!" I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing. "The second," she went on, "is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptions, the Today Program and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!" "Oh," I said, feeling that something was expected. "Oh" was enough. "And lastly, we have the NHS!" "This is an NHS service?" I asked incredulously. "I didn't say that, I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.

Shad whistled an airless tune. “Remember, if I need to accidentally-on-purpose kill the dastard, you only have to say the word.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

There are no known non-biblical references to a historical Jesus by any historian or other writer of the time during and shortly after Jesus's purported advent. As Barbara G. Walker says, 'No literate person of his own time mentioned him in any known writing.' Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE)—alive at the purported time of Jesus, and one of the wealthiest and best connected citizens of the Empire—makes no mention of Christ, Christians or Christianity in his voluminous writings. Nor do any of the dozens of other historians and writers who flourished during the first one to two centuries of the common era.

Advent falls in winter, at the end of the year, in the dark and cold, but its focus is on the coming of light and life, when the Ancient of Days becomes a young child and says, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Perhaps only poetry can help us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of these paradoxes.

If thou dost continually draw thine impulse, thy life, the whole of thy being from the Holy Spirit, without whom thou canst do nothing; and if thou dost live in close communion with Christ, there will be no fear of thy having a dry heart. He who lives without prayer—he who lives with little prayer—he who seldom reads the Word—he who seldom looks up to heaven for a fresh influence from on high—he will be the man whose heart will become dry and barren; but he who calls in secret on his God—who spends much time in holy retirement—who delights to meditate on the words of the Most High—whose soul is given up to Christ—who delights in his fullness, rejoices in his all-sufficiency, prays for his second coming, and delights in the thought of his glorious advent—such a man, I say, must have an overflowing heart; and as his heart is, such will his life be. It will be a full life; it will be a life that will speak from the sepulcher, and wake the echoes of the future. "Keep thine heart with all diligence," and entreat the Holy Spirit to keep it full; for, otherwise, the issues of thy life will be feeble, shallow, and superficial; and thou mayest as well not have lived at all.

Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both. This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before. There is one simplication at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way…. The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.

an understatement ranked right up there with saying that a beaver might have a little trouble building a dam in the middle of a typhoon.

For two days, Shad had rehearsed what to say to his friend and former captain, the argument that would make Xiaolang help him instead of tie him up and ship him back to Garth.

Author Glennon Doyle Melton wrote, “Every time we open our mouths and speak, we are either saying let their be light or let their be darkness.

Thus says the Lord: the meaning of Christmas is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed. The fears that the few good things that make you happy are slipping through your fingers, and the frustrations that the bad things you hate about yourself or your situation can’t be changed—these fears and these frustrations are what Christmas came to destroy. It is God’s message of hope this Advent that what is good need never be lost and what is bad can be changed.

Come now, let us argue it out,      says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet,       they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson,      they shall become like wool. Isaiah 1:18

In John 3:16, Jesus teaches us that the God who exists loves. Let that sink in. The God who absolutely is. Loves. He loves. Of all the things you might say about God, be sure to say this: he loves.

FLEISCHMANN: Since the days of Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis the interpretation of dreams has played a big role in Austria[n life]. What is your attitude to all that? BERNHARD: I’ve never spent enough time reading Freud to say anything intelligent about him. Freud has had no effect whatsoever on dreams, or on the interpretation of dreams. Of course psychoanalysis is nothing new. Freud didn’t discover it; it had of course always been around before. It just wasn’t practiced on such a fashionably huge scale, and in such million-fold, money-grubbing forms, as it has been now for decades, and as it won’t be for much longer. Because even in America, as I know, it’s fallen so far out of fashion that they just lay people out on the celebrated couch and scoop their psychological guts out with a spoon. FLEISCHMANN: I take it then that psychoanalysis is not a means gaining knowledge for you? BERNHARD: Well, no; for me it’s never been that kind of thing. I think of Freud simply as a good writer, and whenever I’ve read something of his, I’ve always gotten the feeling of having read the work of an extraordinary, magnificent writer. I’m no competent judge of his medical qualifications, and as for what’s known as psychoanalysis, I’ve personally always tended to think of it as nonsense or as a middle-aged man’s hobby-horse that turned into an old man’s hobby-horse. But Freud’s fame is well-deserved, because of course he was a genuinely great, extraordinary personality. There’s no denying that. One of the few great personalities who had a beard and was great despite his beardiness. FLEISCHMANN: Do you have something against beards? BERNHARD: No. But the majority of people call people who have a long beard or the longest possible beard great personalities and suppose that the longer one’s beard is, the greater the personality one is. Freud’s beard was relatively long, but too pointy; that was typical of him. Perhaps it was the typical Freudian trait, the pointy beard. It’s possible.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This saying, which is found in a broad variety of lands, does not arise from the brash worldly wisdom of an incorrigible. It instead reveals deep Christian insight.

Say to the next generation again and again: God is truthful; God keeps his word; God does not lie; God can be trusted! That’s one blessing of Advent. Receive it as a wonderful Christmas gift, and give it to as many people as you can.

Do we think that peace on earth comes from Caesar or Christ? Do we think it comes through violent victory or nonviolent justice? Advent, like Lent, is about a choice of how to live personally and individually, nationally and internationally.

Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes,and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born, and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?

The four-week period of Advent before Christmas—and the six-week period of Lent before Easter—are times of penance and life change for Christians. In our book The Last Week, we suggested that Lent was a penance time for having been in the wrong procession and a preparation time for moving over to the right one by Palm Sunday. That day’s violent procession of the horse-mounted Pilate and his soldiers was contrasted with the nonviolent procession of the donkey-mounted Jesus and his companions. We asked: in which procession would we have walked then and in which do we walk now?

and an even more welcome one for the scrounging Scrooge. He loved the sound of the bell; it heralded the advent of more money. ‘Every time a bell rings, my money angel spreads his wings,’ he would laugh to himself, making a mockery of the sweet children’s saying about angels receiving their wings.

A SAVIOR IS BORN Psalm 8:9 (ESV) O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!   REFLECTION On this night, shepherds were doing what they always did, keeping an eye on Bethlehem’s sheep through the night. But everything was about to change, as heaven opened and the angel of the Lord appeared to them and declared that Jesus had been born nearby. What irony. The sheep these shepherds were raising would be sacrificed just a few miles down the road on Jerusalem’s altar. Yet the shepherds themselves could not enter the temple to worship even if they wanted to. Because of their profession, they were ceremonially unclean. They were outcasts in the very worship that their hands made possible. Yet, God chose the shepherds to receive the greatest news ever heard. God came to them because He knew the shepherds couldn’t make it to church. What does that say about the Gospel? What does it say about you? This magnificent night says that grace meets you where you are, and saves you while you cannot do a thing to save yourself. Tonight, celebrate that Christ has come. Not to a mansion, but a manger. Not to the high and mighty, but to the guys on the lowest rung of the spiritual ladder. And celebrate that God’s grace finds you wherever you are this Christmas and shows you the way upwards to the arms of Almighty God. MEDITATION FOR CHRISTMAS EVE

We should think of others not as objects to be used, or annoying people in the way of realizing our projects, but rather as those whom we are called to serve. Instead of saying, “Why is this annoying person in my way?” we should ask, “What opportunity for evangelization has presented itself?” Has God put this person in your life precisely for this purpose? Reflect: How are evangelization and love connected?

Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you,[215] said the Angel to Mary. It is the nearness of God which makes the Virgin rejoice. And the nearness of the Messiah will make the unborn Baptist show forth his joy in the womb of Elizabeth.[216] And the Angel will say to the shepherds: Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day a Saviour ...[217] Joy is to possess Jesus; unhappiness is to lose him.

If you believe in Christ and in his advent, it is the highest praise and thanks to God to be holy. If you recognize, love, and magnify his grace and work in you, and cast aside and condemn self and the works of self, then you are a Christian. We say: “I believe in the holy Christian church, the communion of saints.” Do you desire to be a part of the holy Christian church and communion of saints, you must also be holy as she is, yet not of yourself but through Christ alone in whom all are holy.

It is only after we have been enabled to say, “Be it unto me according to your Word,” that we can accept the paradoxes of Christianity. Christ comes to live with us, bringing an incredible promise of God’s love, but never are we promised that there will be no pain, no suffering, no death, but rather that these very griefs are the road to love and eternal life. In Advent we prepare for the coming of all Love, that love which will redeem all the brokenness, wrongness, hardnesses of heart which have afflicted us.

Tom has been having a difficult patch, and we meet at the church of IKEA as often as possible, because it is equidistant from our houses and always cheers us up. Yesterday I asked, 'In your depression, and with so many people having such a hard time, where is Advent?' He tried to wiggle out of it by saying, 'You Protestants and your little questions!' Then, when pushed, he said: 'Faith is a decision. Do we believe we are ultimately doomed and fucked and there's no way out? Or that God and goodness make a difference? There is heaven, community, and hope - and hope that there is life beyond the grave.' 'But Tom, at the same time, the grave is very real, dark and cold and lonely.' 'Advent is not for the naive. Because in spite of the dark and cold, we see light - you look up, or you make light, with candles, or with strands of lightbulbs on trees. And you give light. Beauty helps, in art and nature and faces. Friends help. Solidarity helps. If you ask me, when people return phone calls, it's about as good as it gets. And who knows beyond that.

The words of prophecy were fulfilled: “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?’ for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” 609 Many who professed to love the Saviour, declared that they had no opposition to the doctrine of the second advent; they merely objected to the definite time. But God's all-seeing eye read their hearts. They did not wish to hear of Christ's coming to judge the world in righteousness. They had been unfaithful servants, their works would not bear the inspection of the heart-searching God, and they feared to meet their Lord. Like the Jews at the time of Christ's first advent, they were not prepared to welcome Jesus. They not only refused to listen to the plain arguments from the Bible, but ridiculed those who were looking for the Lord. Satan and his angels exulted, and flung the taunt in the face of Christ and holy angels, that His professed people had so little love for Him that they did not desire His appearing.

So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said `no.' I did not think that I had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil. I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child. In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity, concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn of joy." "Mixed joy," said the Bishop. "You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there." "You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath." "Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity.

deep inside the smoldering stump of Israel, a remnant of life was rising to push back the darkness and break through the crust of the desolation of the people of God to find the light of day. Though they struggled to see it, God loved them. He loved them with an everlasting, unfailing love. Salvation was coming, and when all was said and done, “He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. ” (Rev 21:3-4) “Behold,” he says, “I am making all things new.

JANUARY 3 A Necessary Daily Exercise Why is it that my thoughts wander so quickly from God’s word, and that in my hour of need the needed word is often not there? Do I forget to eat and drink and sleep? Then why do I forget God’s word? Because I still can’t say what the psalmist says: “I will delight in your statutes” (Ps. 119:16). I don’t forget the things in which I take delight. Forgetting or not forgetting is a matter not of the mind but of the whole person, of the heart. I never forget what body and soul depend upon. The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour. Only love protects against forgetting.

The kingdom is finally to be identified as the Lord Jesus himself. When we say “Come, Lord Jesus” on this Christmas Day, we are preferring his Lordship to any other loyalty system or any other final frame of reference. If Jesus is Lord, than Caesar is not! If Jesus is Lord, then the economy and stock market are not! If Jesus is Lord, then my house and possessions, family and job are not! If Jesus is Lord, than I am not! That multileveled implication was obvious to first-century members of the Roman Empire because the phrase “Caesar is Lord” was the empire’s loyalty test and political bumper sticker. They, and others, knew they had changed “parties” when they welcomed Jesus as Lord instead of the Roman emperor as their savior.

[the idea that history arises in phases] is not what Marxism teaches. To say that capitalism can be drawn on for an improved future is not to imply that it exists for that reason. Nor does socialism follow necessarily from it. It is not to suggest that the crimes of capitalism are justified by the advent of socialism. Nor is it to claim that capitalism was bound to emerge. Modes of production do not arise necessarily. It is not as though they are linked to all previous stages by some internal logic. No stage of the process exists for the sake of the others. History for Marx is not moving in any particular direction. Capitalism can be used to build socialism, but there's no sense in which the whole historical process is secretly laboring towards the goal.

While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness. One of the weaknesses of the Western medical approach is that we have made the physician the only authority, with the patient too often a mere recipient of the treatment or cure. People are deprived of the opportunity to become truly responsible. None of us are to be blamed if we succumb to illness and death. Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims. Mind and body links have to be seen not only for our understanding of illness but also for our understanding of health. Dr. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatric faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mindbody interface in disease. “Trying to identify and to answer the question of stress,” he said to me in an interview, “is more likely to lead to health than ignoring the question.” In healing, every bit of information, every piece of the truth, may be crucial. If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool. And here we confront the inadequacy of language. Even to speak about links between mind and body is to imply that two discrete entities are somehow connected to each other. Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body. The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things. Not even in the West is mind-body thinking completely new. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates quotes a Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.” You cannot split mind from body, said Socrates—nearly two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!

And of course, the empire, in its refusal of the things that make for peace, generates a society of hostility, aggression, greed, conflict, and violence. The wonder of Jesus’ peacemaking is what he does in specific cases as freighted signs that break the power of the anti-peace empire. His grief over the city is an awareness that some of his own local Jewish contemporaries had been seduced and bewitched by the force of empire. It is no wonder that when he stood before the Roman governor, Pilate had no categories through which to understand him, because, as he is remembered as saying, “My kingdom is not from this world” (John 18:36), that is, not derived from fearful aggression. As the confrontation ends with a discussion about the truth, the imperial governor is left bewildered because he cannot understand a way of truth that contradicts the power of the empire.

It is almost impossible to imagine such a world today: one without books or calendars or accounts, never mind the Internet, one in which nothing has ever been documented and all the information that can be possessed is held in the minds of a few. But literacy has emerged only in the past five or six thousand years, and for most of human history this was how knowledge was stored and communicated. The advent of writing is often seen as one of the watershed developments in human history, and it can be argued that the presence or absence of writing shapes cultures in fundamental ways—some would even say it shapes consciousness itself. But even if that is too great a claim, it is certainly true that the ability to document what is known changes the way knowledge is constructed, including the kinds of information that can be transmitted and the shape that information takes.

There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

Church Fathers on the End Times The Church Fathers taught pre-millennialism in the first three centuries. Here are the pre-millennial teachings from the Fathers in their order:   1.        The Roman Empire would split in two. (This took place in AD 395.) 2.        The Roman Empire would fall apart. (This took place in AD 476.) 3.        Out of what was the Roman Empire, ten nations would spring up. These are the ten toes/horns of Daniel’s prophecies. 4.        A literal demon-possessed man, called the Antichrist, will ascend to power. 5.        The Antichrist’s name, if spelled out in Greek, will add up to 666. 6.        The Antichrist will sign a peace treaty between the Jews in Israel and the local non-believers there. This treaty will last seven years. 7.        This seven-year treaty is the last seven years of the “sets of sevens” prophecy in Daniel 9. 8.        At the end of the seven years, Jesus will return to earth, destroy the Antichrist, and establish reign of peace that will last for a literal 1000 years. 9.        They wrote they were taught these things by the apostles. They also wrote that anyone who rises up in the church and begins to say any of these things are symbolic, are immature Christians that can’t rightly divide the word of God, and should not be listened too. (Today these beliefs are included in the doctrines of most of, but not all of, the Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches!)   Here are some of the references from the early church fathers on the End Times:   “After the resurrection of the dead, Jesus will personally reign for 1000 years. He was taught this by the apostle John himself.” Papias Fragment 6   “The man of Sin, spoken of by Daniel, will rule two (three) times and a half, before the Second Advent… There will be a literal 1000 year reign of Christ… The man of apostasy, who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us, the believers.” Justin Martyr Dialogue 32,81,110

On this side of eternity, Christmas is still a promise. Yes, the Savior has come, and with him peace on earth, but the story is not finished. Yes, there is peace in our hearts, but we long for peace in our world. Every Christmas is still a “turning of the page” until Jesus returns. Every December 25 marks another year that draws us closer to the fulfillment of the ages, that draws us closer to . . . home. When we realize that Jesus is the answer to our deepest longing, even Christmas longings, each Advent brings us closer to his glorious return to earth. When we see him as he is, King of kings and Lord of lords, that will be “Christmas” indeed! Talk about giving Christmas gifts! Just think of this abundance . . . You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. (1 Cor. 1:7) And carols? You’re about to hear singing like you’ve never heard before. Listen . . . Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” (Rev. 19:6, nasb) Christmas choirs? Never was there a choir like the one about to be assembled . . . They held harps given them by God and sang . . . the song of the Lamb: “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.” (Rev. 15:2–3) True, Main Street in your town may be beautifully decorated for the season, but picture this . . . The twelve gates [of the city] were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass. (Rev. 21:21) Oh, and yes, we love the glow of candles on a cold winter’s night and the twinkling of Christmas lights in the dark, but can you imagine this? There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:5) Heaven is about to happen. The celebration is about to burst on the scene. We stand tiptoe at the edge of eternity, ready to step into the new heaven and the new earth. And I can hardly wait.

The lowly God-man is the scandal of pious people and of people in general. This scandal is his historical ambiguity. The most incomprehensible thing for the pious is this man’s claim that he is not only a pious human being but also the son of God. Whence his authority: “But I say to you” (Matt. 5:22) and “Your sins are forgiven” (Matt. 9:2). If Jesus’ nature had been deified, this claim would have been accepted. If he had given signs, as was demanded of him, they would have believed him. But at the point where it really mattered, he held back. And that created the scandal. Yet everything depends on this fact. If he had answered the Christ question addressed to him through a miracle, then the statement would no longer be true that he became a human being like us, for then there would have been an exception at the decisive point…. If Christ had documented himself with miracles, we would naturally believe, but then Christ would not be our salvation, for then there would not be faith in the God who became human, but only the recognition of an alleged supernatural fact. But that is not faith…. Only when I forgo visible proof, do I believe in God.

Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small; all is balanced in necessity: frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn; each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “T hey shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23 ESV). This is perhaps our oldest Christmas carol. Historians say its roots go back to the 8th century. In its earliest form, it was a “plain song” or a chant and the monks sang it a cappella. It was sung or chanted in Latin during the seven days leading up to Christmas. Translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851, we sing it to the tune “Veni, Emmanuel,” a 15th-century melody. Many churches sing it early in the Advent season because of its plaintive tone of expectant waiting. Traditionally Advent centers on the Old Testament preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will establish his kingdom on the earth. When the words form a prayer that Christ will come and “ransom captive Israel,” we ought to remember the long years of Babylonian captivity. Each verse of this carol features a different Old Testament name or title of the coming Messiah: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” “O come, Thou Wisdom from on high.” “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse.” “O come, Thou Day-spring.” “O come, Thou Key of David.” “O come, Thou Lord of Might.” “O come, Desire of Nations.” This carol assumes a high level of biblical literacy. That fact might argue against singing it today because so many churchgoers don’t have any idea what “Day-spring” means or they think Jesse refers to a wrestler or maybe to a reality TV star. But that argument works both ways. We ought to sing this carol and we ought to use it as a teaching tool. Sing it—and explain it! We can see the Jewish roots of this carol in the refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. But Israel’s Messiah is also our Savior and Lord. What Israel was waiting for turns out to be the long-expected Jesus. So this carol rightly belongs to us as well. The first verse suggests the longing of the Jewish people waiting for Messiah to come: O come, O come, Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appears The second verse pictures Christ redeeming us from hell and death: O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan’s tyranny From depths of Hell Thy people save And give them victory o’er the grave This verse reminds us only Christ can take us home to heaven: O come, Thou Key of David, come, And open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. Let’s listen as Selah captures the Jewish flavor of this carol. Lord, we pray today for all those lost in the darkness of sin. We pray for those who feel there is no hope. May the light of Jesus shine in their hearts today. Amen.

But, of course, in real life, in the outside world, women do not have equality. They have been judged inferior to men -Adam's rib, his helpmate- with no soul of their own. This has been so since the beginning of Western civilization. Women may have been potent characters in plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, but in classical Greek life, women were not allowed to leave their houses (except to go to the well or on certain feast days). Their names on all legal documents appear as "the daughter of so and so" or "the wife of so and so", They had almost no rights -"She is my goods, my chattels", as Petruchio says of Kate two thousand years later (Taming of the Shrew,3.2,220). And with the advent of Christianity we began the debate as to whether women had souls in their own right or whether they were an "add-on" to their husbands and fathers. What is clear is that the mother of Jesus had to be both a virgin and totally lacking in sexual desire. And she is the model for all women. By the time we get to Shakespeare's era, a widow would automatically inherit a third of her husband's possessions if he died (but those possessions became her new husband's if she remarried). Women probably had souls (but it was still being debated), and a woman was a monarch. But in neither classical Greece nor Elizabethan England could a woman portray a woman onstage [...]

We were here And our memories are as dear to us as every slow motion moment or held breath So remember every instance before death Every first kiss, first dance, near miss, last chance, yes, no, maybe so Let us go the distance once more Let us remember all the moments that were and were not Like the point is something we can get and what we can get is what we got Because all we have are the times between the moments we connect each dot So live and remember Burn like an ember capable of starting fires Like each moment inspires the next Like memories are the context we put ourselves in So that life becomes the next of kin we need to notify in case of a big bang or Extinction level event Let now be our advent Let us live like we meant it Let us burn like we mean it Because this world doesn't give a shit if we end in a train wreck or a car crash If our story ends with a dot or dash If we were dust or ash Because all we were is all we’ll be And all we are is the in-between of so far, so good So forget every would, could, or should not Forget remembering how we forgot Live like a plot twist exists now and in memory Because we burn bright Our light leaves scars on the sun Let no one say we will be undone by time's passing The memories we are amassing will stand as testament That somehow we bent minds around the concept That we see others within ourselves That self-knowledge can't be found on bookshelves So who we are has no bearing on how we appear Look directly into every mirror Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story And our story starts: "We were here."

It is in full unity with Himself that He is also – and especially and above all – in Christ, that he becomes a creature, man, flesh, that He enters into our being in contradiction, that He takes upon Himself its consequences. If we think that this is impossible it is because our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human – far too human. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and perverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea about God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to constitute them in the light of the fact that He does this. We may believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be the “Wholly Other.” But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ. We cannot make them the standard by which to measure what God can or cannot do, or the basis of the judgement that in doing this He brings Himself into self-contradiction. By doing this God proves to us that He can do it, that to do it is within His nature. And He Himself to be more great and rich and sovereign than we had ever imagined. And our ideas of His nature must be guided by this, and not vice versa.

Friday of the Third Week of Advent Isaiah 56:1–3a, 6–8; John 5:33–36 The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. —John 5:36 A Bias Toward Action Jesus says, “I am not asking you to just believe my words, look at my actions, or the ‘works that I do.’ ” Actions speak for themselves, whereas words we can argue about on a theoretical level. The longer I have tried to follow Jesus, the more I can really say that I no longer believe in Jesus. I know Jesus. I know him because I have often taken his advice, taken his risks, and it always proves itself to be true! Afterward we do not believe, we know. Jesus is not telling us to believe unbelievable things, as if that would somehow please God. He is much more saying to us, “Try this,” and you will see for yourself that it is true. But that initial trying is always a leap of faith into some kind of action or practice. The Scriptures very clearly teach what we call today a “bias toward action.” It is not just belief systems or dogmas and doctrines, as we have often made it. The Word of God is telling us very clearly that if you do not do it, you, in fact, do not believe it and have not heard it. The only way that we become convinced of our own sense of power, dignity and the power of God is by actually doing it—by crossing a line, a line that has a certain degree of non-sensicalness and unprovability to it—and that’s why we call it faith. In the crossing of that line, and acting in a new way based on what we believe the kingdom values are, then and only then, can we hear in a new way and really believe what we say we believe in the first place. In the years ahead I see Christianity moving from mere belief systems to an invitation to “practices” whereby we then realize things on a new level. (Jesuits call them “exercises,” Methodists call them “methods,” Gandhi called them “experiments with truth.”)

It will perhaps be asked how I am able to extend the compresence of bodies to minds, and whether I do not do so through a turning back upon myself which restores projection or introjection. ls it not within myself that I learn that an "Empfindbarkeit" and sensorial fields presuppose a consciousness or a mind? But in the first place this objection assumes that another person can be mind for me in exactly the same sense as I am for myself, and after аll nothing is less certain—others' thought is never wholly a thought for us. Furthermore, this objection would imply that the problem here is to constitute a different mind, whereas the one who is constituting is as yet only animate flesh himself; nothing prevents us from reserving for the stage when he will speak and listen the advent of another person who also speaks and listens. But above all this objection would ignore the very thing that Husserl wanted to say; that is, that there is no constituting of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man. By the effect of a singular eloquence of the visible body, Einfühlung goes from body to mind . When a different behavior or exploring body appears to me through a first "intentional encroachment," it is the man as a whole who is given to me with all the possibilities (whatever they may be ) that I have in my presence to myself in my incarnate being, the unimpeachable attestation. I shall never in all strictness be able to think the other person's thought. I can think that he thinks; I can construct, behind this mannequin, a presence to self modeled on my own; but it is still my self that I put in it, and it is then that there really is 'introjection.' On the other hand, I know unquestionably that that man over there sees, that my sensible world is also his, because I am present at his seeing, it is visible in his eyes' grasp of the scene. And when I say I see that he sees, there is no longer here (as there is in "I think that he thinks" ) the interlocking of two propositions... If the other person is to exist for me, he must do so to begin with in an order beneath the order of thought. For my perceptual opening to the world, which is more dispossession than possession, claims no monopoly of being and institutes no death struggle of consciousness. My perceived world and the half-disclosed things before me have in their thickness what it takes to supply more than one sensible subject with "states of consciousness"; they have the right to many other witnesses besides me. When a comportment is sketched out in this world which already goes beyond me, this is only one more dimension in primordial being, which comprises them all... The other person is not impossible, because the sensible thing is open. The other person becomes actual when a different comportment and a different gaze take possession of my things. And this articulation of a different corporeality in my world is itself effected without introjection; because my sensible existents—through their aspect, configuration, and camal texture—were already bringing about the miracle of things which are things by the fact that they are offered to a body, and were already making my corporeality a proof of being. Man can create the alter ego which "thought " cannot create, because he is outside himself i n the world and because outside himself in the world and because one ek-stasis is compossible vnth other ek-stases. And that possibility is fulfilled in perception as vinculum of brute being and a body. The whole riddle of Einfühlung lies in its initial, "esthesiological" phase; and it is solved there because it is a perception. He who "posits" the other man is a perceiving subject, the other person's body is a perceived thing, and the other person himself is "posited" as "perceiving. " It is never a matter of anything but co-perception.

These seemingly unimportant details set up a sharp contrast between our celebrations at Christmas and the true conditions of the Messiah’s entry into our world. Most of us would be in a complete panic if we had to birth a baby in such conditions. But none of this was an accident. These conditions were God’s plan. They announce to us that the Messiah came not to be served but to serve (Matt. 20: 28). Since he came to rescue sufferers, it was essential that he suffer too. And his suffering wasn’t reserved for the cross; it started the moment he was born. Everything he suffered was on our behalf. He would suffer but not lose his way. He would suffer and not quit and walk away. He would suffer and not grow bitter and angry. He would suffer and not respond with vengeance. He would suffer without thinking, desiring, saying, or doing even one wrong thing. He exposed himself to our world, to live as we could not live, so that as the righteous One, he could pay the penalty for our sin and give us not only peace with God, but a ticket to a future where suffering would be no more.

Confession also means confessing to an assignment. "Who are you?" The austere figure of John the Baptist stands there and says: "I am the one crying in the wilderness." Confession means proclaiming, praising and really spreading the word.

the Christmas story is the worst news ever. I’m going to ask you to humbly open your heart to this second part, the bad news part of the Christmas story. God has to invade our world in the person of Jesus because there was simply no other way. And why was there no other way? Prepare for the bad news. There was no other way because our big problem in life is not familial or historical or societal or political or relational or ecclesiastical or financial. The biggest, darkest thing that all of us have to face, and that somehow, someway influences everything we think, say, and do, isn’t outside us; it’s inside. If you had none of the above problems in your life, you would still be in grave danger, because of the danger you are to yourself. If the only thing human beings needed were a little external tweaking of their life circumstances, then the coming of Jesus to earth wouldn’t make any sense. But if the greatest danger to all of us lives inside us and not outside us, then the radical intervention of the incarnation of Jesus is our only hope.

You know the offer still stands. If ever you need anyone to talk to my door is always open. Hell, we could even really go town and grab a drink after work one night. Just say the word and I’ll arrange it.

The gifts are intensifiers of desire for Christ himself in much the same way that fasting is. When you give a gift to Christ like this, it's a way of saying something like this: The joy that I pursue is not the hope of getting rich with things from you. I have not come to you for your things but for yourself. And this desire I now intensify and demonstrate by giving up things in the hope of enjoying you more, not the things. By giving to you what you do not need and what I might enjoy, I am saying more earnestly and more authentically, "You are my treasure, not these things." I think that's what it means to worship God with gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

When people say those things to me, I look at them and say, “What do you mean, retire?” A person doesn’t retire from the work of God. You may change the direction of your labor, but you don’t ever, ever stop seeking to be faithful to God. I had a friend who was a missionary. He was in his eighties, he was infirm, and he couldn’t do any physical work anymore. But he said to me, “I can still labor eight hours a day.” I asked him, “What do you do?” He said, “I pray. That’s all I can do.” He wasn’t retired.

The knights in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur say to one another, ‘Let us take the adventure that God sends us,’ recognizing that the God in whom we live and move and have our being may come and meet us when and where he pleases, and any door we open may be the door to the ‘chapel perilous’.

Traditionally, both Lent and Advent are penitential seasons—not times of overflowing celebrations. This is not something we have sought to cultivate at all, even though we do observe a basic church calendar, made up of what the Reformers called the five evangelical feast days. Our reluctance to adopt this kind of penitential approach to these seasons of the year is not caused by ignorance of the practice. It is a deliberate attempt to lean in the other direction. I want to present three arguments for a rejection of this practice of extended penitential observance. First, if we were to adopt this practice, we would be in worse shape than our Old Covenant brethren, who had to afflict their souls only one day out of the year. Why would the time of anticipation of salvation be so liturgically celebratory, while the times of fulfilled salvation be so liturgically glum? Instead of establishing a sense of longing, it will tend to do the reverse. Second, each penitential season keeps getting interrupted with our weekly Easters. Many who relate exciting movies they have seen to others are careful to avoid “spoilers.” Well, these feasts we have, according to God’s ordinance every seven days, spoil the penitential mood. And last, what gospel is implicitly preached by the practice of drawing out the process of repentance and forgiveness? It is a false gospel. Now I am not saying that fellow Christians who observe their church year in this way are preaching a false gospel, but I am saying that lex orandi lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of faith, and over time, this liturgical practice will speak very loudly to our descendants. If we have the opportunity to speak to our descendants, and we do, then I want to tell them that the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Talking about the abolition movement, even with my kids, I’ve noticed when we’re playing my little boy says, “Okay, well, if you’re bad, you’ll go to jail.” And he’s three and a half years old. So he is thinking bad = jail. This also applies to most people. So the idea of prison abolition must be a very hard one to advocate for. Where do you start? And how to you advocate for prison abolition versus prison reform? The history of the very institution of the prison is a history of reform. Foucault points this out. Reform doesn’t come after the advent of the prison; it accompanies the birth of the prison. So prison reform has always only created better prisons. In the process of creating better prisons, more people are brought under the surveillance of the correctional and law enforcement networks. The question you raise reveals the extent to which the site of the jail or prison is not only material and objective but it’s ideological and psychic as well. We internalize this notion of a place to put bad people. That’s precisely one of the reasons why we have to imagine the abolitionist movement as addressing those ideological and psychic issues as well. Not just the process of removing the material institutions or facilities.

Just send them to prison. Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence. In many ways you can say that the institution feeds on that violence and reproduces it so that when the person is released he or she is probably worse. So how does one persuade people to think differently? That’s a question of organizing. In the United States, the abolitionist movement emerged around the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Quakers were very much a part of the emergence of the idea that we should consider abolishing imprisonment. The Quakers were present at the advent of the prison in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were the ones who originally thought the prison was a humane alternative to then-existing forms of punishment because it would allow people to be rehabilitated.

History will bear me out when I say that it is a misnomer to talk of Muslim rule when describing the political order in India prior to the advent of the British.

The second main argument to support the idea that simple living enhances our capacity for pleasure is that it encourages us to attend to and appreciate the inexhaustible wealth of interesting, beautiful, marvelous, and thought-provoking phenomena continually presented to us by the everyday world that is close at hand. As Emerson says: “Things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.”47 Here, as elsewhere, Emerson elegantly articulates the theory, but it is his friend Thoreau who really puts it into practice. Walden is, among other things, a celebration of the unexotic and a demonstration that the overlooked wonders of the commonplace can be a source of profound pleasure readily available to all. This idea is hardly unique to Emerson and Thoreau, of course, and, like most of the ideas we are considering, it goes back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius reflects that “anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure,” from the jaws of animals to the “distinct beauty of old age in men and women.”48 “Even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charms, its own attractiveness,” he observes, citing as an example the way loaves split open on top when baking.49 With respect to the natural world, celebrating the ordinary has been a staple of literature and art at least since the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote three separate poems in praise of the lesser celandine, a common wildflower; painters like van Gogh discover whole worlds of beauty and significance in a pair of peasant boots; many of the finest poems crafted by poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney take as their subject the most mundane objects, activities, or events and find in these something worth lingering over and commemorating in verse: a singing thrush, a snowy woods, a fish, some chilled plums, a patch of mint. Of course, artists have also celebrated the extraordinary, the exotic, and the magnificent. Homer gushes over the splendors of Menelaus’s palace; Gauguin left his home country to seek inspiration in the more exotic environment of Tahiti; Handel composed pieces to accompany momentous ceremonial occasions. Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace

In 1900, Max Planck, a critic of Boltzmann’s science for nearly two decades, published papers that hinted at a change of heart. Even more unexpectedly he seemed to be saying that Boltzmann’s statistical methods might have relevance far beyond thermodynamics. This reluctant conversion was forced upon Planck by the advent of a new technology—the electric light bulb. In these electric current flows through a filament, warming it and making it glow. This focused scientific minds on investigating the precise relationship between heat and light.

Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it’s safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)

What keeps you from giving now? Isn't the poor person there? Aren't your own warehouses full? Isn't the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry person is dying now, the naked person is freezing now, the person in debt is beaten now-and you want to wait until tomorrow? "I'm not doing any harm," you say. "I just want to keep what I own, that's all." You own! You are like someone who sits down in a theater and keeps everyone else away, saying that what is there for everyone's use is your own...If everyone took only what they needed and gave the rest to those in need, there would be no such thing as rich and poor. After all, didn't you come into life naked, and won't you return naked to the earth? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person with no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help. —Basil, fourth century.

With the advent of the 1960s, things changed. “Kids were getting busted on all sides of us,” George says. “The cops even bought a pot-sniffing dog. They’d walk around the streets at night, and he’d bark when he smelled the fumes. Then they’d crash in. It was unconstitutional, of course, but up here anybody who mentions the Constitution is regarded as a Communist.* We kept our mouths shut, and I bought all sorts of tricky locks and designed some cute gimmicks of my own.” George may be, for all I know, the inventor of the self-destruct stash box; at least he designed one model. Nobody who breaks down their doors – knock or “no-knock” – will ever find tangible evidence. ~•~

The sinful woman chose joy in the alabaster jar. In return her story is a precious example to us all. I can think of no greater gift this Christmas season than to hear Him say, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.

To my shame, I let out a pain-filled yip that was part Pomeranian and part five-year-old girl. Although, I guess I could say I howled like a shape-shifting girl who sometimes morphs into a Pomeranian. There. I made that noise. That’s more manly.

It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

Dorn smiled, cynically and without warmth. ‘You see, there’s your old problem. You never see any fault in Him. You never push back. You never stop, think, say to yourself – is that sensible?’ He pressed his great, calloused hands together. ‘And now you have this conundrum, the greatest of your existence. You were created to be the embodiment of His will, but we can no longer discover what that is. You are His voice, but He is silent. Can you think for yourself now, captain-general? That is what’s required.

It would have been helpful (Psalm 39:2) if David had felt able to tell us the sort of thing he was fearful he might say in the presence of someone with no profession of faith. We can, of course, try to guess. We have all heard Christians speak in such a carelessly confident way about dying that their testimony sounded glib and brash, failing to take into account the solemnity of death, or that in the majority of cases it comes as an unwelcome intruder into a life we are loathe to leave. Again, have we not heard Christians speak of death – or pray for someone seriously ill – as if death was the very worst thing that could possibly happen (whereas the truth is that for a Christian, considered solely as an individual, setting aside relationships and responsibilities, to die is the very best thing that can happen)! David discovered that the ending of earthly life and the advent of death was, putting it mildly, a hurdle to be faced, and a task to be prepared for. First, be careful what we say – and maybe best say nothing. Dying without being afraid is one of the pearls of great price of being a Christian, so be careful, in the words of Jesus, not to cast this pearl before swine. A calm and unanxious demeanour could well speak louder than words. And, secondly, David certainly does tell us how we can go about cultivating this – in the threefold directive implied in 39:7–8. As ever that great old song ‘Turn your eyes upon Jesus’ strikes the essential note – or as David put it: ‘my hope is in you’. Are you in the prime of life? Are you in the later years when death waits round the corner? Are you, by divine sovereign appointment, in a terminal illness? Whatever: turn your eyes on Jesus and keep them fixed there. Beyond this, we must take up Paul’s motto – to have a conscience void of offence towards God and man always (Acts 24:16), for is that not what David is saying in Psalm 39:8? Yes, of course, all our sins were anticipated at Calvary and covered there, but what was done once and for all on the Cross becomes real all over again in our experience as we obey the divine command that all men everywhere should repent (Acts 17:30). The third strand in a ‘good death’ is the repute among others that we leave behind – a ‘savour of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing’ (2 Cor. 2:15, niv).

It’s not as simple as saying that ‘while the terminology is new, the experiences are not.’ The advent of new terminology can genuinely shift how we think about gender, as well as what names we give to our experiences. But it’s also not straightforwardly true to say that the word ‘trans’ has no history before sexology. Literary scholar Joseph Gamble has recently discovered that the 17th century writer Thomas Brown used the prefix ‘trans’ and the word ‘transition’ to refer to the spontaneous sex changes of hares as early as 1646 and even coined the adjective ‘transfeminated’ to refer to a body that has transformed from what we think of as ‘female’ to what we think of as ‘male.’ So the prefix ‘trans’ was clearly relevant to thinking about gender-malleability long before Hirschfeld leveraged it to refer to his patients he saw at his Institute for Sexual Science.

Diana Adams is more interested in seeing increased social protections for alternative families. While same-sex marriage was an important victory for gay rights and opened up a cultural conversation about the definition of marriage and love, she says, we shouldn't forget that the movement was also "a queer critique of the nuclear family and traditional monogamous sexuality." The same is true of monogamy's insurgents. Rather than "cram people into the institution of marriage," she says, "we ultimately want to get the government out of the business of deciding whether you get tax benefits, health insurance, and immigration status based on whom you're having sex with." Her thoughts remind me of the late psychologist and gay activist Michael Shernoff, who reflected critically on the shift "from gay men radically transforming American society" to gay men "assimilating into it in conservative and hetero-normative ways." He lauded consensual nonmonogamy as a "vibrant, normative, healthy part" of the gay community, and expressed concern that the advent of gay marriage might consign this "venerable, multigenerational tradition" to the category of adultery. "Couples who succesfully negotiate sexual nonexclusivity," he wrote, "are, whether or not they are conscious of it, being genuinely subversive, in one of the most constructive ways possible...by challenging the patriarchial notion that there is only one "proper" and "legitimate" (hetero-normative) way that loving relationships should and need to be conducted" Monogamy was once a subject that was never even discussed in the therapist's office, but today as a matter of course I ask every couple, What is your monogamy agreement? Marriage without virginity was once inconceivable. So, too, sex without marriage.

The great force! Few of us relate it with the dark, Many with the world unknown, A realm that erases every mark, Of every seed that in the farm of life was sown, Life fears it and hides at a place called nowhere, Yet it chases it and seeks it, Because its domain is everywhere, And life ultimately before it does submit, It rules over priests, emperors and paupers alike, A force that expects complete submission, It is not a feeling visceral that you may like, Because it enters every domain without any permission, Some say it even rules over time and its every moment, And it is not vindictive at all, Because even without the Sun its shadow is permanent, It has existed since the world witnessed the great fall, Its appearance is not due to serendipity, Because it is the final destiny of everything, It is an experience, felt just for a brevity, It appears from nothing and disappears into nothing, A force before which all kneel, Many incriminate it because it robs them entirely, Throughout one's life it seems unreal and in a moment becomes real, It leaves all sentimental and teary, It is death, the force all living shall experience one day, I wonder why flowers and butterflies do not dread it, I saw it capture and wilt a beautiful flower today, Yet the drooping and dead flower smiled as the hope of next Summer in its fading petals lit, Because death can wilt a summer flower, but it can't keep the Summer from returning again, It can kill a man and a woman, but it can never kill life’s spirit, Without life what shall it kill again and again, So you may despise it, but without it who shall renew life, if not it? There maybe no foreboding feeling about its arrival, But then it is the same about Summer’s advent too, Maybe life and death travel together for life’s continuous revival, And whose act is it who knows, because when a newly married couple says “We do!” We shower them with dead flowers, beautiful flowers, Who killed them, who hurled them, who ended their lives? Just for the sake of prolonging the romance of two lovers, I guess that is how death in mysterious ways strives, Killing all eventually but never taking the blame, So let me too pluck a beautiful rose and gift it to my beautiful lady, All for the sake of love and in the love’s name, Let me love her today and love her everyday, Because who knows when the dark force might strike, A rose too feels happier in her hands, Because it knows it makes her smile and in this act they are alike, Spreading happiness even in death forsaken lands, That is where all beautiful flowers go when they wilt here, To the land where there is everlasting Summer, And every form of beauty always looks the same everywhere, They go there to impart it colours and shades warmer, So when the flower fades and falls, Let us not blame death and curse it, Because it is the only way to climb and cross few walls, For it too ultimately before the mighty will of the Universe does submit!

put that theory into practice. I believe that by ‘waiting on the Word’, in every sense of that phrase, waiting on the true Logos, the meaning behind all meanings, and attending closely to the way that meaning is imaginatively bodied forth in poetry, we can begin to unfold a little more of the mystery of our faith, to unpack and open out the contents of those technical words, Incarnation and Atonement. It is my conviction that to do theology well we must bring the poets to the table along with the theologians, and listen carefully to what they say.

What’s the point of quantity for quantity’s sake? Far better to aim for quality. The same critique that’s been made so many times since the industrial revolution and the advent of mass production. Saying ‘We should all make lots of friends’ is basically the same as saying ‘We should try to be the kind of people who don’t cause any friction and can more or less get along with everyone.

Thus says the Lord: the meaning of Christmas is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed. The fears that the few good things that make you happy are slipping through your fingers, and the frustrations that the bad things you hate about yourself or your situation can’t be changed—these fears and these frustrations are what Christmas came to destroy. It is God’s message of hope this Advent that what is good need never be lost and what is bad can be changed. The Devil works to take the good and bring the bad. And Jesus came to destroy the works of the Devil.

In these moments during Christmas Mass when we breathe the air of liturgy, the true colors of Christmas come out. This is what liturgy is meant to do. These songs we are singing, these symbols all around us, these prayers we say, these believing people we are with, all express the heart of Christmas . . . That God would love us so, that God would want to be loved so by us (for who could not love this baby), that God would rescue us from our worst, or the worst that others have done to us . . .’ – Bishop Ken Untener

Sometimes we need a “divine disruption” so God can speak to us. When Christ came to this sad world, God sent the angels to say, “Pay attention. Something big is happening here!” If our greatest need had been education, God would have sent a teacher. If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent a banker. If our greatest need had been advice, God would have sent a counselor. If our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent an entertainer. But since our greatest need was forgiveness, God sent a Savior. His name is Jesus. He is Christ the Lord, the Son of God who came from heaven to earth. Are

Hesiod’s comments, though certainly a product of a mindset that stretches back millennia, are undoubtedly misogynistic since he says that Philotes and Apate belong to Aphrodite and all women. This point of view is hardly surprising; after all, it was Hesiod who first documented the myth of Pandora, she who unleashed all evil on the world. In fact, prior to the creation of “woman”, humans did not know death. So, on the advent of woman’s entrance into the world, Hesiod writes that deceitful words and death accompanied her too.[49]

While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness. One of the weaknesses of the Western medical approach is that we have made the physician the only authority, with the patient too often a mere recipient of the treatment or cure. People are deprived of the opportunity to become truly responsible. None of us are to be blamed if we succumb to illness and death. Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims. Mind and body links have to be seen not only for our understanding of illness but also for our understanding of health. Dr. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatric faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mindbody interface in disease. “Trying to identify and to answer the question of stress,” he said to me in an interview, “is more likely to lead to health than ignoring the question.” In healing, every bit of information, every piece of the truth, may be crucial. If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool. And here we confront the inadequacy of language. Even to speak about links between mind and body is to imply that two discrete entities are somehow connected to each other. Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body. The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things. Not even in the West is mind-body thinking completely new. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates quotes a Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.” You cannot split mind from body, said Socrates—nearly two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!

For the Lord, taking dust from the earth, moulded man; and it was upon his behalf that all the dispensation of the Lord’s advent took place. He had Himself, therefore, flesh and blood, recapitulating in Himself not a certain other, but that original handiwork of the Father, seeking out that thing which had perished. And for this cause the apostle, in the Epistle to the Colossians, says, “And though ye were formerly alienated, and enemies to His knowledge by evil works, yet now ye have been reconciled in the body of His flesh, through His death, to present yourselves holy and chaste, and without fault in His sight.” He says, “Ye have been reconciled in the body of His flesh,” because the righteous flesh has reconciled that flesh which was being kept under bondage in sin, and brought it into friendship with God.

the Lord did not say that both the Father and the Son could not be known at all (in totum), for in that case His advent would have been superfluous. For why did He come hither? Was it that He should say to us, “Never mind seeking after God; for He is unknown, and ye shall not find Him;” as also the disciples of Valentinus falsely declare that Christ said to their AEons? But this is indeed vain. For the Lord taught us that no man is capable of knowing God, unless he be taught of God; that is, that God cannot be known without God: but that this is the express will of the Father, that God should be known. For they shall know Him to whomsoever the Son has revealed Him.

With the advent of literacy and other skills for acquiring, retaining, and sharing information, knowledge is now far more evenly distributed and widely available. It’s time we stopped behaving like submissive prehistoric tribe members and started questioning some of the things our leaders say.

We Seventh-day Adventists are great at dreaming up new plans and programs. Too often we’re driven by finding a plan that will, as we like to say, “finish the work.” Jesus hasn’t come back as we think He should have. In one way or another we’re to blame, so we need to hit on the answer—we need one more program, the one program that will wrap it up, and then we’ll see Jesus coming in the clouds.

Jesus was about wholeness, ours and others’, and so must we be. His sayings about maiming and blinding cannot be understood literally; they must be seen in the “kingdom” sense—meaning that any practice or habit that injures another has no place in the life of the citizen of the kingdom of heaven.

Camille, what happened to you must surely have been the very best thing that could possibly have happened. ... I wonder if the advent of Anna into your life was in its way as much of a blessing as her advent into mine has been. Two very different men, saying essentially the same thing—that the greatest catastrophe of her life was perhaps also its greatest blessing.

My other realization was that when I look back on my life as a performing songwriter, among all my regrets, all the moments of embarrassment and shame from having blabbered too much from the stage, not once have I regretted proclaiming the gospel of Christ. It is only those times when I have strayed from that one luminous subject that I’ve wished I had said less. No man, when he comes to die, will ever say, “I spoke too much of the grace of God.” Let Satan accuse me of that. I welcome it.

It is not that the Word of God is threatening us with fire and brimstone, but rather it is saying that goodness is its own reward and evil is its own punishment. If we do the truth and live connected in the world as it really is, we will be blessed and grace can flow, and the consolation will follow from the confrontation with the Big Picture. If we create a false world of separateness and egocentricity, it will not work and we will suffer the consequences even now. In Catholic theology we call this our tradition of “natural law.” In short, we are not punished for our sins, but by our sins!

Jesus is not telling us to believe unbelievable things, as if that would somehow please God. He is much more saying to us, “Try this,” and you will see for yourself that it is true. But that initial trying is always a leap of faith into some kind of action or practice.

Existence might well have had some attraction before the advent of noise — let us say, before the neolithic age. When will he come, the man who can rid us of all men?

What if, Paxton questioned, the Adventist church’s teaching about justification contradicts this central emphasis of the Reformation? What if there is a fundamental difference between the Adventist teaching on justification and that of the Reformers? If Adventist teaching about justification—a doctrine crucial to the Protestant Reformers—contradicted that of the Reformation itself, how can Adventists then logically claim to be a continuation of the work of the Reformers? How can they say they are in continuity with the Protestant Reformation? This was the question Paxton insistently posed.

I am here, God says. I am here. I shave myself down to a tiny child so that I can be here with you.

Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, “Will the real God please stand up?

What you and I need is usually not a brand-new teaching. Brand-new truths are probably not truths. What we need are reminders about the greatness of the old truths. We need someone to say an old truth in a fresh way. Or sometimes, just to say it.

By putting our focus on giving to others and meeting their very real needs, we can battle the greed in our hearts. Christmas is a season not of getting, but of giving, because at Christmas we are celebrating that God is the most generous and outrageous Giver in the universe. After all, he gave us his Son. Proverbs says, “Some people are always greedy for more, but the godly love to give!” (Proverbs 21:26). To pour ourselves into becoming outrageous givers is to pursue becoming more like God. God turns greedy, grasping, fearful hoarders into generous, honest, cheerful givers.