Mosaic Church Quotes

There is good even in church people. You find it hard to believe, right? Jesus never shut the door on religious people. He just made sure that they understand He was that door, and not their deeds and tasks. Some of us, even I, need to be reminded of this. This being understood, the people of the church are like broken pieces of glass fixed into beautiful mosaic to reflect Jesus. The picture is beautiful, but the pieces do indeed still have sharp edges that can cut.

The gospel Paul preached destroyed racism (“neither Jew no Greek”), economic classism (“slave nor free”), and gender inequality (“no male and female”). The local church should be a mosaic that the world looks at and says, “So that’s what heaven looks like.

Members brought books, precious objects, and records of creature history to the city and purchased an island in the lagoon from the Catholic Church: Isola della Stella (Island of Stars). On it were monastic buildings that were converted to suit the Congregation's purposes. ..the vast, ancient monastery library, filled with books, papers, and papyri;...This council chamber, with its stunning frescoes, mosaics, vaulted ceiling, and gallery where the most precious records are kept, embodies the Congregation's power.

From there Ari took her to the church which marked the place of the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes a short distance from Capernaum. The floor of the church held a Byzantine mosaic depicting cormorants and herons and ducks and other wild birds which still inhabited the lake. And then they moved on to the Mount of Beatitudes to a little chapel on the hill where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. These were His words spoken from this place. As she

So what was the Synagogue of Satan? You might be surprised to find out there are two types of the Synagogue of Satan. They are the ones that “say they are Jews but are not.” The Synagogue of Satan always tries to say that the church has replaced Israel. This was done in two ways.   Judaizing Christians – Legalism/Ebionites The Judaizers said that since the church has replaced Israel, the church has to observe the Mosaic Law. We call this “legalism” or “Judaising.” This type insisted that believers must be circumcised, not eat pork, and keep the Sabbath. Paul, in Titus 1:10-11, stated that people who teach this kind of theology “must be silenced!” These are the ones that forced the formation of the first Jerusalem Council, recorded in Acts 15, to create a decree that the Mosaic Law has nothing to do with salvation.   Replacement Theology By the third century the Jewish form of legalism had long vanished. All that was left was Replacement Theology.

Suffering, sin, and evil are no longer located in God's will, but are understood as arising within a finite, open, developmental, and future-oriented creation. They are dealt with by the power of God's love revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God's answer to the problem of woundedness and wickedness is not to show us now or in the eschaton how they fit into God's design or mosaic, but to show us how God overcomes the brokenness and maliciousness of the creation now and in the eschaton through the redemptive power of the cross and resurrection. Divine power is rethought as the suffering and transforming power of Jesus' cross and resurrection, not as the omnipotent power of the timeless will of God. Incarnation, instead of immutability, defines God's will and way. God is the suffering and transforming God.

the Pope said, ‘Whoever meets Jesus Christ meets Judaism.’ Karol Wojtyla, who was once Bishop of Krakow and helped Jews during the Holocaust, described Judaism as Christianity’s older brother and Christianity as an offshoot of the trunk of King David. He said that it was time that the Catholic Church recognised its responsibility in fostering the anti-Semitism which had made the Holocaust possible, and urged reconciliation between Catholics and Jews.

Today we place lots of emphasis on increasing racial diversity in our churches. That’s a good thing. It’s needed. But there’s more to having a genuinely mosaic church than just racial and socioeconomic diversity. We also have to learn to work through the passionate and mutually exclusive opinions that we have in the realms of politics, theology, and ministry priorities. The world is watching to see if our modern-day Simon the Zealots and Matthew the tax collectors can learn to get along for the sake of the Lord Jesus. If not, we shouldn’t be surprised if it no longer listens to us. Jesus warned us that people would have a hard time believing that he was the Son of God and that we were his followers if we couldn’t get along. Whenever we fail to play nice in the sandbox, we give people on the outside good reason to write us off, shake their heads in disgust, and ask, “What kind of Father would have a family like that?”1 BEARING WITH ONE ANOTHER To create and maintain the kind of unity that exalts Jesus as Lord of all, we have to learn what it means to genuinely bear with one another. I fear that for lots of Christians today, bearing with one another is nothing more than a cliché, a verse to be memorized but not a command to obey.2 By definition, bearing with one another is an act of selfless obedience. It means dying to self and overlooking things I’d rather not overlook. It means working out real and deep differences and disagreements. It means offering to others the same grace, mercy, and patience when they are dead wrong as Jesus offers to me when I’m dead wrong. As I’ve said before, I’m not talking about overlooking heresy, embracing a different gospel, or ignoring high-handed sin. But I am talking about agreeing to disagree on matters of substance and things we feel passionate about. If we overlook only the little stuff, we aren’t bearing with one another. We’re just showing common courtesy.

You would need to draw a very big map of the world in order to make Port William visible upon it. In the actual scale of a state highway map, Port William would be smaller than the dot that locates it. In the eyes of the powers that be, we Port Williamites live and move and have our being within a black period about the size of the one that ends a sentence. It would be a considerable overstatement to say that before making their decisions the leaders of the world do not consult the citizens of Port William. Thousands of leaders of our state and nation, entire administrations, corporate board meetings, university sessions, synods and councils of the church have come and gone without hearing or pronouncing the name of Port William. And how many such invisible, nameless, powerless little places are there in this world? All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.

Sermon On the Mount: "You have heard it said of old..." "Jesus was referring to the 'letter of the Mosaic law' of the OT then went on to illustrate that He embodied the fulfillment of that 'law' and that now we may walk in the 'Law of the Spirit' thereby realizing the 'liberty' He came to 'engift' us with. We therefore are no longer subject to judgement but rather Grace as we 'abide' in Him. Additionally, the 'early church' fathers of which Paul was the first are what God intended the Ecclesia to be developed and built upon". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

But this raises the question of what happens when the mosaic of faith shatters into a thousand, a million jagged pieces. When the quest for common good devolves into bespoke kindness designed to advance a particular cause for a particular person. Or when citizens forsake all the news that’s fit to print for only the news they want to hear. All of these amount to a challenge to efforts at collective action. And from climate change to rising inequality, the enormous challenges that we face demand collective action and a new shared way of thinking about the accretion and use of power.

The unChristian faith is distressing. So is our culture. Yet to see spiritual resurgence among Mosaics and Busters, I hope our response to this observation is like that of the recipients of Paul’s letter. I hope we put aside casual forms of Christianity, piercing the antagonism of our peers with service and sacrifice. We may think the answer to the perception of our being unChristian is for outsiders to understand our faith. The church is not effective when it calls outsiders to live virtuously, which is never really possible apart from regeneration through Christ anyway. The reprieve from our deep-seated image problem comes when Christ followers become more faithful to a God who has redeemed us and more concerned about a hostile culture in need of the same redemption. 4

There's a widespread misconception that biblical literalism is facile and mindless, but the doctrine I was introduced to at Moody was every bit as complicated and arcane as Marxist theory or post-structuralism.... In many ways, Christian literalism is even more complicated than liberal brands of theology because it involves the sticky task of reconciling the overlay myth—the story of redemption—with a wildly inconsistent body of scripture. This requires consummate parsing of Old Testament commands, distinguishing between the universal (e.g., thou shalt not kill) from those particular to the Mosaic law that are no longer relevant after the death of Christ (e.g., a sexually violated woman must marry her rapist). It requires making the elaborate case that the Song of Solomon, a book of Hebrew erotica that managed to wangle its way into the canon, is a metaphor about Christ's love for the church, and that the starkly nihilistic book of Ecclesiastes is a representation of the hopelessness of life without God.

Heresy, in these remote days, always springs from a Jewish or Mosaic root. The false teachers are always teachers of the Law, advocating the Sabbath, circumcision, and other rites. But they do not teach only the Law, and are not to be confounded with the good scribes of Jerusalem, and their Pharisee disciples, absorbed in the canonical Law and its commentaries. They are real theologians, who taking advantage of the comparative indifference of their co-religionists to all but the worship of the Law, devote themselves to doctrinal speculation. And they did not stop there. To the already sufficiently minute observances of the Mosaic Law they added a very definite asceticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, and abstinence from wine. Those amongst them who accepted Christianity, combined with the new doctrines of the Gospel their "Jewish fables," and tried to impose them, together with their austere rule of life, upon new converts. They were, in fact, Judaizing gnostics, who in the primitive churches heralded the inroads of philosophic Gnosticism.

Long hours spent in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture. This is as true of sacred books as of those poems written in pursuit of courtly or earthly love, or even of language itself. The ancient Mosaic law had accommodated this insight to the disadvantage of the surface layer, of images, while the Roman Catholic Church, akin to the preliterate cultural forms from which it in part arose, allows for the existence of a mystical understanding and experience of these abstractions. The careful scholar cannot but help but become aware of the conflict: when one speaks of the word, or Word, what is one truly speaking of? Who is the architect, man, and---or---a---God? Attempts to apprehend this new reality, these tensions, went initially by the names of philosophy, theology, science. What is it to know deeply? Is knowledge not always a form of power that, taken too far, cannot be turned against itself?

As you pass from outer to inner narthex [in Istanbul’s Church of St. Savior], the doorway is crowned with a magnificent mosaic of Christ Pantokrator…. As in all such Eastern icons, frescoes, or mosaics of Christ, his right hand is raised in an authoritative teaching gesture, with his fingers separated into a twosome and a threesome to command Christian faith in the two natures of Christ and the three persons of the Trinity. As usual, he holds a book in his left hand. But he is not reading the book—it is not even open, but securely closed and tightly clasped. Christ does not read the Bible, the New Testament, or the Gospel. He is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel. That is how we Christians decide between a violent and nonviolent God in the Bible, New Testament, or Gospel. The person, not the book, and the life, not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us.*

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

The same thing could be said of the Bible as a whole. The crucifixion-resurrection, after all, isn’t just one event among many in the life of Jesus. It’s the event to which the whole Old Testament looks forward. From God’s making of animal-skin clothing for Adam and Eve, to the sacrificial system under the Mosaic Law, to the representative suffering of Israel’s king, to Isaiah’s prophecy of a Suffering Servant of the Lord, to Zechariah’s prophecy of a Stricken Shepherd, the Old Testament longs for its fulfillment in a King who would suffer, die, and triumph.

As we are in the Church age, which is an age of grace rather than the theocracy of Mosaic times, we are no longer under the Law as such. Dr. Geisler cogently summarizes these distinctions: “While the basic moral principles, reflective of God’s moral nature, embedded in the theocratic construct of Old Testament Israel, are the same immutable principles expressed in the context of grace for the New Testament church, nevertheless, church-age believers are not under Mosaic Law, which has been fulfilled and passed away.”73 I must briefly acknowledge that some theologians seem to disagree with this description of the relationship between the Law and the Gospel or the Law and grace, at least in a technical sense. Kaiser urges that we reject the idea that the Law ceases to be valid just because Jesus fulfilled its requirements for all believers. The Law itself is still valid, he claims, it’s just that we are empowered to obey it through faith. Kaiser is not arguing that we are saved by obeying the Law, as our salvation is purely from our faith in Christ and His finished work on the cross. He seems to be saying, however, that it still remains the perfect standard for holiness—and who can argue with that? He cites Paul, who asks, “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31).74 As I will discuss further in the next chapter in connection with the New Covenant, we can all acknowledge that God’s Law is perfect because its Maker is perfect. It was never intended, however, to impart life (Gal. 3:21).

Now the Bible tells us that believing Jews continued to circumcise their sons, while graciously not insisting that the Gentiles start circumcising their sons. The debate in the early church was not whether the Jews should stop circumcising their sons; it was whether the Gentiles had to start. The decision of the Jerusalem council was not that individual Gentiles did not have to be circumcised. If circumcision had been required of them, it would have obligated them to live as Jews under the Mosaic law—which included the circumcision of all subsequent generations. Circumcision was not being waived for individual Gentiles; circumcision was being waived for Gentiles and their seed. So the Christian church did not insist that Gentiles circumcise their infants—not because they were infants, but because they were Gentile infants.

The apse of Rome’s Basilica of Santa Pudenziana contains the oldest surviving example of a golden, gemmed cross in mosaic. This church, known up to the sixth century as the Titulus Pudentis, was reconstructed at the end of the fourth century. Its apse mosaic—the earliest extant in any Roman church—was installed during the papacy of Innocent I (402–417).

Plain crosses replaced images of Christ and the saints in other parts of the empire, as in the apse of the Church of the Koimesis of the Virgin at Nicaea, where a cross supplanted a mosaic image of the Virgin.32 After the reaffirmation of the orthodoxy of icons in the ninth century, iconophiles removed the cross and reinstalled an image of the Theotokos holding the Christ child.

For the new covenant apostles, Jew-Gentile unity is pivotal to the early church. It is about more than human relational harmony. Instead, it acknowledges that God’s kingdom purposes are in Christ. He is the last man and the true Israel, the bearer of the Spirit. A Jewish person who clings to the tribal markings of the old covenant acts as though the eschaton has not arrived, as though one were still waiting for the promised seed. Both Jews and Gentiles must instead see their identities not in themselves or in the flesh but in Jesus Christ and in him alone. Jesus is the descendant of Abraham, the one who deserves the throne of David. He is the obedient Israel who inherits the blessings of the Mosaic covenant. He is the propitiation of God’s wrath. He is the firstborn from the dead, the resurrection and the life. Those who are in Christ – whether Jew or Gentile – receive with him all the eschatological blessings that are due to him. In him, they are all, whether Jew or Gentile, sons of God – not only in terms of relationship with the Father but also in terms of promised inheritance (Rom 8:12-17). In Christ, they all – whether Jew or Gentile – are sons of Abraham, the true circumcision, the holy nation, and the household and commonwealth of God (Gal 3:23-4:7; Eph 2-3; Col 2:6-15; 3:3-11; 1 Pet 2:9-10).…

The priest and his desires Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest, Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist, Bound by his sanctum and religion, He tries not to give in to any seduction, Adam and Eve blamed the devil, The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil, He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires, And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires, He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass, But he is distracted and sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass, At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine, And when he stands face to face with a beautiful woman his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’” His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks, He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks, He often touches his cross that he wears always, Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days, He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession, “My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession, Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God? For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd, It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons, In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens, To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book, But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look, I wonder if I shall quit clergy, And adopt this new synergy, I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse, And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips, Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee? Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and Thee? Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me, And without being me, how can I anything else be, Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man, Never to fulfillmy own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan, So let me live with my state and the social taboo, While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.” The Lord smiles at him, “It is your personal battle and it is grim, You desire her, her face, her charming ways, You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days, But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know, So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow, And before you fall too low, Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow, Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses, I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.” Said the Lord in His emphatic voice, And the priest stood up and made the right choice! To love the woman he loved and missed, And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed! Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds 1983 Drama

The priest and his desires Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest, Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist, Bound by his sanctum and religion, He tries hard not to give in to any form of seduction, Adam and Eve blamed the devil, The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil? He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires, And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires, He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass, But he is distracted when he sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass, At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine, And when he comes face to face with a beautiful woman, his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’” His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks, He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks, He often touches his cross that he wears always, Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days, He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession, “My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession, Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God? For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd, It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons, In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens, To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book, But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look, I wonder if I shall quit clergy, And adopt this new synergy? I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse, And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips, Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee? Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and as well Thee? Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me, And without being me, how can I anything else be, Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man, Never to fulfil my own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan, So let me live with my state and the social taboo, While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.” The Lord smiles at him, “It is your personal battle and it is grim, You desire her, her face, her charming ways, You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days, But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know, So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow, And before you fall too low, Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow, Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses, I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.” Said the Lord in His emphatic voice, And the priest stood up and made the right choice! To love the woman he loved and missed, And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed! Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds . 1983 Drama

This is interesting because it means that, although the Church’s policies also built on Mosaic law, the MFP overruled implicit biblical endorsements of levirate, cousin, and polygynous marriage.36

The early church had much more than a collection of social practices upon which they did not reflect carefully. The early church ethics were formed in the context of a Judaism that had thought long and hard about its ethic based on Mosaic law, over against the practices of surrounding cultures. The early church's ethics were a further reflection on how that long history of Jewish ethics had to be rethought in light of Jesus Christ. Rethinking the faith involved an interpretation of authoritative Scripture and a continued use of the Law in ethical matters.

Raised in the Episcopal church, I was once removed from my pew, at age six, because I could not control my weeping. Unbeknownst to anyone, I had been staring at a terrible, glorious stained-glass window of the crucifixion and grieving for the pain Christ must have endured. The arresting mosaic of that forlorn image etched itself indelibly upon me. And yet at some point, I became emotionally and empathically detached.

BY NOW HE COULD HAVE BEEN a cardinal of the Holy Catholic Church, preaching his sermons at assemblies and conferences, a red biretta on his head. With his history of faithful orthodoxy, he had just about paid the necessary dues to be awarded that kind of position. Instead, he’s buried in the basement of the rickety Cathedral of a poor Central American country in the forgotten South, with a bullet in his heart.

And a few days before his death, he said simply, “I hope they will be convinced that it would be a waste of their time. A bishop would die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never perish.

MY LITTLE GRANDSON WAS THE FIRST CHILD that Monseñor Romero baptized and confirmed. “You don’t know me,” I said when I arrived at the church for the ceremony. “I’m the grandmother. I want to tell you that I’m with you, and if I can help you in anyway, I’d like to.” He looked at me. “What is your name?” “Aída Parker de Muyshondt.

Whoever’s got a mole on his forehead is as good as dead!” they shouted. Some people tried to get out, but they locked the doors and looked us over one by one. Finally they found the one they were looking for, the boy with the mole. “Here’s the faggot! I found him!” They grabbed him by his neck as though he were an animal. The boy was putting up a fight and resisting, but they had him outnumbered. “I haven’t done anything!” “You’ve been lucky up ’til now, you church-boy son of a bitch!” They pushed him out of the place, beating him the whole way. Then, they threw him on the ground, and right there in front of everybody, they shot him until he was dead. “You, finish him off!” shouted one. And another shot him right in the heart.

The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn't fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers. She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn't know the name for this is the Prisoner's Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means "show of lights." But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions would not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.

The church began to think they did not have to observe the Mosaic Law, but since it had replaced Israel, it inherited all of her blessings. The prophecies that would have been fulfilled by Israel were now thought to be fulfilled by the church. If it was not possible for the church to fulfill the prophecies, then they were spiritualized away. This doctrine denies that God would bring Israel back in the last days and completely opposes the pre-millennial teaching of the First and Second Century Church Fathers.

Each of us is a unique, well-painted, well-crafted piece of a large mosaic, which when it is completed must spell out “JESUS.

It is generally acknowledged that these very special floors were esteemed not only for their beauty and the richness of the colors and materials (including the priceless purple porphyry marble), but also for their esoteric spirituality. Much has been written about these mosaics by theologians, architects, and even mathematicians. In part, they give any sanctuary a feeling of space, rhythm, and flowing movement. Undoubtedly, they are also a meditational device, similar to the mazes and labyrinths popular in churches in the Middle Ages.

The floor is a fifteenth-century revival of medieval Cosmatesque mosaic style. The Cosmati family developed their unmistakable technique in Rome in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This decorating style was a fantasy of geometric shapes and swirls in cut pieces of colored glass and marble (much of which was “recycled” from pagan Roman palaces and temples). Stunning examples of authentic Cosmati floors and decorations can be found in some of the oldest and most beautiful churches, basilicas, and cloisters in Rome and southern Italy.

According to the World Monuments Fund, “The present state of the church is worrying. Many roof timbers are rotting, and have not been replaced since the 19th century. The rainwater that seeps into the building not only accelerates the rotting of the wood and damages the structural integrity of the building, but also damages the 12th-century wall mosaics and paintings. The influx of water also means that there is an ever-present chance of an electrical fire. If another earthquake were to occur on the scale of the one of 1834, the result would most likely be catastrophic. ... It is hoped that the listing will encourage its preservation, including getting the three custodians of the church – the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church, and the Franciscan order – to work together, which has not happened for hundreds of years. The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority would also have to work together to protect it.

both the Mosaic law and the grace of the new covenant, as both fitted for the times [at which they were given], were bestowed by one and the same God for the benefit of the human race.

for Christians, not every passage in the Bible is equally prescriptive or determinative for a Christian ethical life. Rather, the Old Testament must be read in light of the New, the Mosaic legislation must be read in light of its fulfillment in Christ (Rom 10:4), and so on. The point is simply that one must look for Scripture’s Christological center and read all of its various parts in light of that center. When

There is an even more substantial shift from life under the Mosaic covenant to life under the new covenant.

Sometimes surviving means finding the strength to pick up the remnants of shattered dreams and piece together a mosaic of new ones, a continual work in progress, a constant decision to put one foot in front of the other, to fight against gravity, and keep moving forward.

Discrimination against minority rights was not primarily the work of reactionaries and conservatives. On the contrary, in eastern Europe it was above all the work of modernizing liberals who were trying to create a national community through the actions of the state. For them, the state had to show that its power was above “everyone and everything,” and to override its opponents whether these be the Church, brigands, communists or ethnic minorities. Thus it was entirely consistent for the Romanian Liberal Minister of Education, Constantin Angelescu, to criticize not only minorities but also the Church and provincial administrators in his desire to build up a centralized school system, since “the interests of the State, the interests of the Romanian people, stand above individual interests, be they those of the communities . . . The Romanian State that is ours, all of ours, must be strengthened and . . . this State can only be strengthened by . . . letting the State mold the souls of all its citizens.” Because democracy was about the creation of national communities, it was generally anti-Semitic, or at least more ready to allow anti-Semitism to shape policy—through separate electoral colleges, for example, or entry quotas into the universities and civil-service posts—than old-fashioned royalists had been. In Hungary a 1920 law marked out Jews as a separate race rather than as “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith”; had the country been more democratic, it would probably have been more anti-Semitic still. “All citizens in Poland irrespective of creed and nationality must enjoy equal rights,” the Polish Peasant Party announced in 1935, adding the rider that “the Jews, however, as has been proved, cannot be assimilated and are a consciously alien nation within Poland.” Similar views were evident in Slovakia and Romania. And this was not just an east European problem: such sentiments were on the rise in once ultra-assimilationist France as well, and eventually led to the notorious clause in Vichy’s draft constitution describing the Jews as “a race that conducts itself as a distinct community that resists assimilation.

The New Testament was written as the Age of Pisces was beginning. It was an update of the Mosaic Old Testament. The age was moving from Aries to Pisces. Thus, the Gospels of the New Testament have many fish references. “Jesus” is the Greek version of the Hebrew Joshua. The biblical Joshua was the “sun of nun” (Joshua 1:1). In Hebrew, “Nun” means fish.

In its full splendour, before centuries of spoliation stripped it of its treasures, the interior of Holy Wisdom was a magnificent tumult of gold, silver, porphyry, lapislazuli and polychromatic marbles. It was adorned with immense mosaic icons (added in many cases long after Justinian’s time), and with inlays of semi-precious stone. One of its most remarkable features, however, was the quality of the light that filled the enormous central space of the building – a light not infrequently described as ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’ or ‘mystical’. The peculiar quality of this light resulted from the single most impressive architectural feature of the edifice: the gigantic dome that seemed to ‘hover’ above the nave. The appearance of weightlessness was achieved by constructing a continuous arcade of 40 windows at the base of the dome, above the main oblong structure of the building, making it appear that the dome floated above the church on a ring of light. In fact, the great weight of the dome was supported by four large and elegantly tapered pendentives resting on four large piers and creating four enormous arches. To the east and west of the central dome, lesser semi-domes descend in a kind of cascade.

a large number of the Busters and Mosaics have rarely attended church, if at all. Their question for the established church is, Why should I attend your church when there are so many other things that I could be doing?

Because Stalin lived there, Moscow was the heart of the whole country and the longed-for city of the working masses of the whole world. Soldiers sang songs about Moscow, writers wrote books about it, poets praised it in verse. Films were made about Moscow and fascinating tales told about it. It seemed that deep under its streets, entombed like gigantic moles, long gleaming trains rushed smoothly along and stopped noiselessly at stations decorated with marble and mosaics finer than those in the most beautiful churches.

RESOURCES FOR LEARNING FROM BELIEVERS IN MANY GLOBAL CONTEXTS • Africa Bible Commentary (Adeyemo 2006) • Global Dictionary of Theology: A Resource for the Worldwide Church (Dyrness and Kärkkäinen 2008) • God’s Global Mosaic: What We Can Learn from Christians around the World (Chandler 2000) • Learning about Theology from the Third World (Dyrness 1991) • Theology in the Context of World Christianity (Tennent 2007)

I love the church. I like the waxed candles that remind me people think of people. I love the bouquet of flowers on the altar that a group of grandmas grow in their gardens and pridefully donate every week. I admire the wooden statues of craftsmanship, of a mother staring at you with the kind of pure, loving look I forgot to ask from mine. I like the skinny man nailed to the cross reminding me that people are capable of sacrificial love. I like to stare at the art on the stained-glass windows, of angels, of lambs, and of fruit. I love running my hands over mosaics and tracing the lips of saints. I love the hymns and joy of the choir, who sing regardless if you’re too scared. I love watching the collective sway of bodies subconsciously comforted by their environment after finally saying “Peace be with you.” And most of all, I love being surrounded by people trying. They wear Christ around their neck and squeeze a rosary for dear life, admitting their weaknesses and sins. Tell me, where do you find that? There is an honesty in the church, spilling from kneeling persons, that gives me the hope humans can take care of each other and our planet can be a good one. Where else can I be exposed to the practice of morality on such an emotional level? I love everything about the church—the shiny pews, the smoky incense, the Bible and its purpose – because when all is considered, it makes sense. It is a template of discipline and thoughtfulness. Why call religious people idiots when they’re the few paying attention to their own lives? And there are other ways to be moral of course, but not many ways to practice. I’ve learned that to believe in God doesn’t subtract any life from you. It is additional. It is the world and God. If someone wears a jacket over their shirt, they aren’t naked. They’re double-layered.

Retired missionaries taught us Arts & Crafts each July at Bible Camp: how to glue the kidney, navy, and pinto bean into mosaics, and how to tool the stenciled butterfly on copper sheets they'd cut for us. At night, after hymns, they'd cut the lights and show us slides: wide-spread trees, studded with corsage; saved women tucking T-shirts into wrap-around batiks; a thatched church whitewashed in the equator's light. Above the hum of the projector I could hear the insects flick their heads against the wind screens, aiming for the brightness of that Africa. If Jesus knocks on your heart, be ready to say, "Send me, O Lord, send me," a teacher told us confidentially, doling out her baggies of dried corn. I bent my head, concentrating hard on my tweezers as I glued each colored kernel into a rooster for Mother's kitchen wall. But Jesus noticed me and started to knock. Already saved, I looked for signs to show me what else He would require. At rest hour, I closed my eyes and flipped my Bible open, slid my finger, ouija-like, down the page, and there was His command: Go and do ye likewise— Let the earth and all it contains hear— Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire—. Thursday night, at revival service, I held out through Trust and Obey, Standing on the Promises, Nothing But the Blood, but crumpled on Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling, promising God, cross my heart, I'd witness to Rhodesia. Down the makeshift aisle I walked with the other weeping girls and stood before the little bit of congregation left singing in their metal chairs. The bathhouse that night was silent, young Baptists moving from shower to sink with the stricken look of nuns. Inside a stall, I stripped, slipped my clothes outside the curtain, and turned for the faucet— but there, splayed on the shower's wall, was a luna moth, the eye of its wings fixed on me. It shimmered against the cement block: sherbet-green, plumed, a flamboyant verse lodged in a page of drab ink. I waved my hands to scare it out, but, blinkless, it stayed latched on. It let me move so close my breath stroked the fur on its animal back. One by one the showers cranked dry. The bathhouse door slammed a final time. I pulled my clothes back over my sweat, drew the curtain shut, and walked into a dark pricked by the lightening bugs' inscrutable morse.

The vast churches Constantine built were astonishing. “The decorations really are too marvellous for words,” wrote one awed pilgrim to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “All you can see is gold and jewels and silk . . . the magnificent building itself . . . was decorated with gold, mosaic, and precious marble.” These buildings spoke volumes about where Constantine’s allegiances now lay; they were “sermons in stone” as the modern historian Peter Brown has beautifully described them. This was about architecture—but it was also about intent.8