Leonard Sweet Quotes

My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.

What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.

The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.

In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!

DEAR DI­ARY You are greater than the Bible And the Con­fer­ence of the Birds And the Up­an­ishads All put to­geth­er You are more se­vere Than the Scrip­tures And Ham­mura­bi’s Code More dan­ger­ous than Luther’s pa­per Nailed to the Cathe­dral door You are sweet­er Than the Song of Songs Might­ier by far Than the Epic of Gil­gamesh And braver Than the Sagas of Ice­land I bow my head in grat­itude To the ones who give their lives To keep the se­cret The dai­ly se­cret Un­der lock and key Dear Di­ary I mean no dis­re­spect But you are more sub­lime Than any Sa­cred Text Some­times just a list Of my events Is holi­er than the Bill of Rights And more in­tense

You came to me this morning And you handled me like meat You’d have to be a man to know How good that feels, how sweet

How sweet time feels when it’s too late

Can you imagine doing ministry the last five hundred years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do books’? Can you imagine doing ministry in the next five years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do Facebook’?

A Kite is a Victim A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls gentle enough to call you master, strong enough to call you fool; because it lives like a desperate trained falcon in the high sweet air, and you can always haul it down to tame it in your drawer. A kite is a fish you have already caught in a pool where no fish come, so you play him carefully and long, and hope he won't give up, or the wind die down. A kite is the last poem you've written so you give it to the wind, but you don't let it go until someone finds you something else to do. A kite is a contract of glory that must be made with the sun, so you make friends with the field the river and the wind, then you pray the whole cold night before, under the travelling cordless moon, to make you worthy and lyric and pure. Gift You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me There are some men There are some men who should have mountains to bear their names through time Grave markers are not high enough or green and sons go far away to lose the fist their father’s hand will always seem I had a friend he lived and died in mighty silence and with dignity left no book son or lover to mourn. Nor is this a mourning song but only a naming of this mountain on which I walk fragrant, dark and softly white under the pale of mist I name this mountain after him. -Believe nothing of me Except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own. I did not see any cities burn, I heard no promises of endless night, I felt your beauty more closely than my own. Promise me that I will return.- -When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want to summon the eyes and hidden mouths of stone and light and water to testify against you.- Song I almost went to bed without remembering the four white violets I put in the button-hole of your green sweater and how i kissed you then and you kissed me shy as though I'd never been your lover -Reach into the vineyard of arteries for my heart. Eat the fruit of ignorance and share with me the mist and fragrance of dying.-

A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls gentle enough to call you master, strong enough to call you fool; because it lives like a desperate trained falcon in the high sweet air, and you can always haul it down to tame it in your drawer. A kite is a fish you have already caught in a pool where no fish come, so you play him carefully and long, and hope he won't give up, or the wind die down. A kite is the last poem you've written so you give it to the wind, but you don't let it go until someone finds you something else to do.

We bless others naturally through our strengths. But we bless others supernaturally through our weaknesses.

God does not ask if we are able. God asks if we are available.” And the weakness we offer him, he turns into a strength.

The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life, meditation perceives it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it.

At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.

When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents' room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction. When the heart grins at itself, the world is destroyed. And I am found alone with the husks and the shells. Then the dangerous moment comes: I am too great to ask for help. I have other hopes. I legislate from the fortress of my disappointments, with a set jaw. Overthrow this even terror with a sweet remembrance: when I was with you, when my soul delighted you, when I was what you wanted. My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terror for one who remembers the Name.

If you aren’t smelling awful smells sometimes, then you’re not where Jesus is.

We don’t preach the Scriptures; we let the Scriptures preach through us as they point to Christ.

Authentic evangelism is lifting up the veil of what God is up to and manifesting the image of God in the world we are in.

Christians have become passive spectators in worship rather than active participants. By and large, we come to church to “watch the show” rather than to engage and participate.

On the Greek island of Hydra there are no cars. You have to travel by donkey or walk. If you go up the hill from the harbor and walk the ancient paved pathways you will enter a square of sorts and find a tavern called Douskos. If you sit there under the tree, pick up a battered guitar and sing sweetly to the cat, they will kick you out. They’ve had enough of that sort of thing already at Douskos. Stop there if you can. I did. I had to. Leonard and Joni wanted some private time.

For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home.

I understand God’s patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how He can be so patient with the pious. —GEORGE MACDONALD

You are what you pay attention to. No attention, no life. Everything comes to life when you pay attention to

Anyone who doesn’t need company is either greater than a man, and is a God, or lesser than a man, and is a beast.17 —Aristotle, as quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas

The essential element of Christian truth is that the risen Christ is not something you mimic but someone you manifest.

I have no idea where I am going. . . . But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

Jesus called his disciples to “follow me,” but he didn’t tell them where they were going.

To please God, to be pleasing to God, is to “walk with Light,” to walk with God in joy, praise, holiness, and humility as image-bearers of the Light.

Twenty-first-century people hear and learn differently than most churches communicate.

To come to the table is to learn to be our real selves—not some construct conceived by someone else, but who God made us to be.

If you’ve never bled, you have no material for preaching. If when you’re finished preaching you’re not finished, spent, wiped out — if you haven’t “given blood” — you haven’t really preached.9

To a Young Nun This undemanding love that our staggered births have purchased for us — You in your generation, I in mine. I am not the one you are looking for. You are not the one I've stopped looking for. How sweetly time disposes of us as we go arm in arm over the Bridge of Details: Your turn to chop. My turn to cook. Your turn to die for love. My turn to resurrect.

Disciples of Jesus do not mimic Jesus; we manifest him. We are personators of Christ, not impersonators. Christ’s presence in our lives is more “thereness” than “likeness,” more “withness” than “whatness.” Jesus made our creation in the imago Dei more “spit” than “image” (as in “spit ‘n’ image”).

We don’t need to travel to find Christ. Christ has already traveled to find us. God is not the one whose back is turned. It is we who, for whatever reason, get our backs up or don’t turn back to God.

Jesus Christ is the rest of God. He is, as N. T. Wright has put it, “the fulfillment of the sabbath.”114 By taking Christ as our rest, we cease from our labors just as God did from His.115 Christianity, therefore, begins not with a do, but with a done—“It is finished!”116 We enter into God’s rest, and we labor from there.

The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving.

We all need the pendulum swing of snatching spaces of solitude and serving tables of sociability. In fact, the more plugged in and connected we are, the more we need to unplug and disconnect. A world of presence needs a time of absence.

Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If you can get that table out of doors, so the sun can kiss the skin—if as you dine together you can also provide help for others—then, according to Myerson, you’ve won the lottery of life.[36]

Theologian Leonard Sweet suggests that there might actually be something less than faithful about an uncritical posture toward Scripture. In Jewish culture, he notes, "it's an act of reverence to ask questions of the story. The Jews are confident that the story is strong enough to be tried and tested.

Someday we’re going to live in St. Leonard’s and get away from all this.” “Oh, sure,” said Alan easily. The chili was simmering and he was leaning beside the sink, arms crossed over his thin chest, watching Nick work. “When I win the lottery. Or when we start selling your body to rich old ladies.” “If we start selling my body to rich old ladies now,” Nick said, “can I quit school?” “No,” Alan answered with a sidelong smile, warm as a whispered secret. “You’ll be glad you finished school one day. Aristotle said education is bitter, but its fruits are sweet.” Nick rolled his eyes. “Aristotle can bite me.

The end product of biblical Christianity is a person—not a book, not a building, not a set of principles or a system of ethics—but one person in two natures (divine/human) with four ministries (prophet/priest/king/sage) and four biographies (the Gospels). But those four biographies don’t tell the whole story. Every bit of Scripture is part of the same great story of that one person and that one story’s plotline of creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation.

The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving. Martin Luther was right. Theology is table talk.[38] Jesus didn’t sell the food of his Father. He issued invitations to the table. In fact, Jesus’ favorite image for the kingdom of God is a banquet where everyone is sitting around a table.

Put another way, Jesus is God’s perfect pitch—the divine tuning fork to the eternal. Every tuning fork needs to be struck to be heard. The striking of the eternal, unchanging tuning fork of heaven took place when a young virgin gave birth to God’s only Son in an obscure village in first-century Israel. It struck again on a never-forgotten Friday, with the pounding of six-inch nails. The fork struck a third time—on the third day—when a meek and lowly Nazarene split a tomb wide open and came forth in resurrection life. Heaven’s

The devil ought not to be in our line of vision but in our shadow.

The church needs to be so clear about its identity as the body of Christ that everything it does generates a gravitational pull toward the heart.

The greatest task of a human being, your greatest mission in life? To find and sing your own song … to the glory of God.

Bleed with us.

disciples are not copiers of Christ but continuing incarnations of Jesus’ life and love.

One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.

Have your breakfasts all alone. Share lunch with your best friends. Invite your enemy to dinner. Nelson Mandela

Philip Yancey was dead-on when he said that some Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.79

Preaching is the primary means whereby the miracle of Cana continues, as Jesus turns our life from water — tasteless, colorless, odorless — into homemade vintage wine, known for its vibrant flavor, vivid sparkle, and alluring aroma.

Under the covers we danced the good, slow dance, and she let loose with that laugh I loved so much, the one as sweet and happy as the song of a bird. And I did not care to remember then that even the most predatory of birds, the shrike, can sing.

If we could shrink the Earth’s 5.7 billion population to a village of one hundred people, the resulting profile would look like this:        Sixty Asians, fourteen Africans, twelve Europeans, eight Latin Americans, five from the United States and Canada, and one from New Zealand or Australia.        Eighty-two would be nonwhite.        Sixty-seven would be non-Christian.        Thirty-two percent of the entire world’s wealth would be in the hands of five people.        All five people would be citizens of the United States.        Sixty-seven would be unable to read.        Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. Thirty-three would be without access to a safe water supply.        Eighty would live in substandard housing. Thirty-nine would lack access to improved sanitation. Twenty-four would not have electricity.        Only one would have a college education.30

You want to find your life? Then lose it," Jesus said. Lose it on others. Do you want to "manifest" something? Then manifest Christ, the fullness of the Spirit. Jesus is in the self-transcending, not the self-fulfilling, business."--Pope John Paul ll's word as written in The Jesus Manifesto

If we were to make the table the most sacred object of furniture in every home, in every church, in every community, our faith would quickly regain its power, and our world would quickly become a better place. The table is the place where identity is born—the place where the story of our lives is retold, re-minded, and relived.

Some preachers need a travel agent to handle all the guilt trips they put on God’s people. But there is a big difference between putting a guilt trip on Christians and unveiling Christ to them. When Christ is presented in power, the Spirit of God will undoubtedly convict those who are walking in contradiction to their new nature.

A Kite is a Victim" A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls gentle enough to call you master, strong enough to call you fool; because it lives like a desperate trained falcon in the high sweet air, and you can always haul it down to tame it in your drawer. A kite is a fish you have already caught in a pool where no fish come, so you play him carefully and long, and hope he won’t give up, or the wind die down. A kite is the last poem you’ve written, so you give it to the wind, but you don’t let it go until someone finds you something else to do. A kite is a contract of glory that must be made with the sun, so make friends with the field the river and the wind, then you pray the whole cold night before, under the travelling cordless moon, to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

Every crisis raises relational issues: Will you try it and handle it yourself? Will you find a new partner? Or will you and Jesus tackle the crisis together? In tackling the stuff of life together, you’ll see that your relationship with God will deepen. In pondering Christ, you find that you are in fact living His life, and God is living yours. Christ in you and you in Christ. God doesn’t lead you through phases or steps.

Believe me, you have too many practices already. What is needed is rather a progressive inner simplification. Too many people identify spiritual prowess with being perpetually busy heaping meditation upon meditation, prayer upon prayer, reading upon reading instead of learning from the simple souls the great secret of knowing how, from time to time, to hold yourself back a little in peace and silence, attentive before God.5

It will place a high value on communal life, more open leadership structures, and the contribution of all the people of God. It will be radical in its attempts to embrace biblical mandates for the life of locally based faith communities without feeling as though it has to reconstruct the first-century church in every detail. We believe the missional church will be adventurous, playful, and surprising. Leonard Sweet has borrowed the term “chaordic” to describe the missional church’s inclination toward chaos and improvisation within the constraints of broadly held biblical values. It will gather for sensual-experiential-participatory worship and be deeply concerned for matters of justice-seeking and mercy-bringing. It will strive for a type of unity-in-diversity as it celebrates individual differences and values uniqueness, while also placing a high premium on community.

Someone once challenged me: “I bet I can tell you the whole Old Testament and New Testament in six sentences—three for each.” “You’re on!” I said. He started with the Old Testament: “‘They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!’” My friend went on. “Now here’s the New Testament in three sentences: ‘I love you! I forgive you! Let’s eat!’” Jean Leclerc offers the best definition of the gospel you’ll ever hear: “Jesus ate good food with bad people.

Answers I began two hundred hours of continuous reading in the twelve hours that remained before examinations. Melvin Bloom my roommate flipped the pages of his textbook in a sweet continuous trance. Reviewing the term's work was his pleasure. He went to sleep early. While he slept I bent into the night reading eating Benzedrine smoking cigarettes. Shrieking dwarfs charged across my notes. Crabs asked me questions. Melvin flipped a page blinked flipped another. He effected the same flipping and blinking with no textbook during examinations. For every question answers marched down his optical nerve neck arm and out onto his paper where they stopped in impeccable parade. I'd look at my paper oily scratched by ratlike misery and I'd think of Melvin Bloom. I would think Oh God what is going to happen to me.

The war was lost The treaty signed I was not caught I crossed the line I was not caught Though many tried I live among you Well-disguised I had to leave My life behind I dug some graves You'll never find The story's told With facts and lies I had a name But never mind Never mind Never mind The war was lost The treaty signed There's Truth that lives And Truth that dies I don't know which So never mind (...السلام و السلام) Your victory Was so complete Some among you Thought to keep A record of Our little lives The clothes we wore Our spoons our knives The games of luck Our soldiers played The stones we cut The songs we made Our law of peace Which understands A husband leads A wife commands And all of these Expressions of the Sweet indifference Some called love The high indifference Some call fate But we had names More intimate Names so deep And names so true They're blood to me They're dust to you There is no need And this survives There's Truth that lives And Truth that dies Never mind Never mind I leave the life I left behind There's Truth that lives And Truth that dies I don't know which So never mind (...السلام و السلام) I could not kill The way you kill I could not hate I tried, I failed You turned me in At least you tried You side with them whom You despise This was your heart This swarm of flies This was once your mouth This bowl of lies You serve them well I'm not surprised You're of their kin You're of their kind Never mind Never mind I had to leave my Life behind The story's told With facts and lies You own the world So never mind Never mind Never mind I live the life I left behind I live it full I live it wide Through layers of time You can't divide My woman's here My children too Their graves are safe From ghosts like you In places deep With roots entwined I live the life I left behind The war was lost The treaty signed I was not caught Across the line I was not caught Though many tried I live among you Well-disguised

You can't up-up-and-away in creativity and innovation without spending down-on-the-ground time in the muck and the mire.

The more we are the Presence of Christ for others, the more present we are for Christ to speak to us.

For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe that “Unless I believe, I shall not understand.” —ANSELM OF CANTERBURY1

There is within you a yearning for the divine that nothing else can satisfy.

What counts in evangelism is not cognition, but recognition. Can

But because we don’t trust Jesus to do what He says He will do, or believe that He is who He says He is, or have not caught a glimpse of His infinite glory, we sit at drawing boards and draw up programs and methods and draft strategies that we hope might bring people to Christ. But Jesus could not have been clearer: the only begotten Son of God4 is the draw.

Charles Spurgeon underscored this point, saying, “For every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business is, when you get to a text, to say, ‘Now what is the road to Christ?’ . . . I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it.”51

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. —G. K. Chesterton12

The first word God speaks to human beings in the Bible—God’s very first commandment—is “Eat freely” (Genesis 2:16, NASB). The last words out of God’s mouth in the Bible—his final command? “Drink freely” (see Revelation 22:17).

Jesus makes us get rid of life as agenda and take up life as adventure. —Leonard Sweet

In the coming days, grief would crash over me like storm-tossed ocean waves. I grieved the loss of the young woman I had been. I grieved the loss of my carefree life. I feared that pain would now be my constant companion. I grieved the baby I lost, the one from my imagination who never existed. I grieved for what this sweet baby would never have—a normal life, a normal childhood. I grieved the end of our perfect story.

Oil that was drilled in Texas or Saudi Arabia, by contrast, was known as “sweet” crude because it had very low sulfur content. This made it a lot cheaper and easier to process—you didn’t need coker towers to take the sulfur out. So many of America’s oil refineries sprang up around the Gulf Coast because that’s where sweet crude was imported and processed. Very few firms wanted to install the kind of expensive equipment that ran at Pine Bend, but Great Northern had done so. When Paulson took over, Pine Bend was one of very fewer buyers in the upper Midwest that offered to buy Canadian crude. Because there were so few buyers, the Canadian crude piled up—there was an excess of supply. This meant that prices dropped. Koch could buy the sour oil at a price that was significantly lower than oil prices elsewhere in the United States. But the cheap Canadian crude was only half of the equation. When Koch turned around to sell the gasoline it made at Pine Bend, it sold that gasoline into a midwestern region where there were very few other refineries, causing supplies to be relatively tight and prices high. This made the economics of Pine Bend almost too good to be true.

Jesus didn't choose the primacy of the powers of religion/politics or the powers of the individual; He chose a third way---His indwelling presence experienced and displayed through a community of followers who embody the kingdom of God in their corporate life together.

If sign and image are central to the New Testament, then it has to be read as a kind of narrative poetry. In the Scripture, we encounter types and symbols and emblems of transfiguration, and that is how the early Church, which created the New Testament, understood its own creation.

Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful healer who communicated in signs, images, and gestures. Therefore, to understand Jesus and the Scriptures, we need to train ourselves and others not to exegete more words but to exegete images.

The currency of the gospel of religion is fear and imposition. The currency of the gospel of Christ is love and invitation.

a person who is fully occupied with Christ, who knows Him well, and who is in touch with Him through daily fellowship can boldly say, “Christ is all I need. You can strip everything else away from me, and I would still be left with Christ. Take away my gifts and my ministry; take away signs and wonders; take away the sense of His presence; take away my ability to read; and take away every spiritual and religious pursuit I have, and I will still have Christ. And in having Him, I have everything.

Christians have made the gospel about so many things—things other than Christ. But Jesus Christ is the gravitational pull that brings everything together and gives it meaning. Without Him, all things lose their value. They are but detached pieces floating around in space. That includes your life.1

Of the three traditional ways of making a living — mud, blood, and grease — preaching involves all three: the mud pies of creativity, the blood bank of living in the Word, and the grease pit of hard work and dirty hands.

Can the church stop its puny, hack dreams of trying to "make a difference in the world" and start dreaming God-sized dreams of making the world different? Can the church invent and prevent, redeem and redream, this postmodern future? -Leonard Sweet (Soul Tsunami)

Postmoderns are not less interested in religion than ever before. Indeed, they are exploring new religious experiences like never before. The church has simply given them a less interesting religion than ever before. Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic

We are what we do with our attention.”64

As science turns toward the realm of the Spirit to understand the physical universe, Space, Matter, Time are more prone to induce reverence than arrogance among scientists, who are sounding more like Isaiah in the temple than Isaac Newton under the apple tree.

Everything that surrounds you can give you something.51 —Hungarian photographer André Kertész

Haddon Robinson once said, “I have come closer to being bored out of the Christian faith than being reasoned out of it. I think we underestimate the deadly gas of boredom. It is not only the death of communication, but the death of life and hope.

People around the world drink more coffee than any other drink besides water: four hundred billion cups a year.

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The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

Followership is not an easy path, and Jesus never pretended otherwise.

preachertainment”?

True love frees us, and at the same time it binds us:

To know the gospel . . . to really know the gospel . . . is to know him who is the good news.

Whatever God calls you to do, it’s going to be bigger than you are.

Followership starts with Jesus, stays with Jesus, goes with Jesus, and ends with Jesus.

Truth is both reason and revelation—and both can surprise us.