Sublime

Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. The pastor will sometimes be like the old fish in Wallace’s parable, regularly asking us, “How’s the water?” Eventually we learn: “Oh, this is water.”

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.”

What is infectiously appealing about Jesus is that he likes to celebrate. He is consistently meeting people not at the altar but at table, whether as host, guest, or the body and blood to be consumed (as

a contrast life aimed at communion.

No person, whoever he or she is or wherever he or she lives, is denied the grasp of God’s heart. We are cherished by God, hunted by God, redeemed by God. And having experienced this, we are reminded that we are called to be bearers of God’s love and truth, and, as bearers, we are to bring that love and truth into our culture, where there exist the

The Soul of Money

So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without Him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do