"Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh. A voice crying. A mood. And never more deeply felt than in these troubled months. Advent marks both the exhaustion and the hope of God’s people, when the meaning of our lives is expressed in a weary exhalation of ordinary breath and then a sharp intake of something greater." - Richard Lischer, "Advent is a season of sighs, especially this year," (posted on The Christian Century, December 16, 2020)
The Alpha & the Omega - Rev. Chris Currie | 11.24.24
That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational. - Dorothy Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged"
New Heaven, New City, New Earth - Rev. Vito Baldini
"[I]t is the very transcendence of God - in the ascension of the Son who now reigns from heaven, and in the futurity of the coming kingdom for which we pray - that disciplines and disrupts and haunts our tendency to settle for 'this world.' It is the call of the Son from heaven, and the vision of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven, that pushes back on our illusions that we could figure this all out, that we could bring this about." - James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King