ppadmin – Page 169 – Prayer & Politiks

Ellen F. Davis

In our culture, mysticism is sadly misunderstood and maligned as disconnected with reality: impractical at best and dangerously irresponsible at worst. Even those who may admire mysticism often regard it as the special capacity of a few spiritually gifted people, almost all of whom lived in the Middle Ages. . . . Mysticism is not an escape from reality, but the opposite. It is a prayerful penetration of reality. — Ellen F. Davis

The doxologies of ancient Israel, the lyrical soaring of Paul’s Epistles, and the regular amazement evoked by the deeds and teaching of Jesus all converge in the stunning affirmation that the world is other than we had taken it to be, because the world is the venue for God’s reign.

Ken Sehested

Violence is a form of evangelism for the Devil. It’s claim is that there is no Sovereign other than the the one who, currently, aims the business end of the barrel and sets the terms of the market’s beneficiaries.

Stanley Hauerwas

. . . if we as Christians are to reclaim the political theology required by the truthfulness of Christian convictions, we will need to begin by doing theology unapologetically. . . . [I]f my analysis is . . . close to being right, it should make clear that a commitment to Christian nonviolence is the presumption necessary for the church reassert its political significance.

James Alison

You want to know what YHWH looks like? Here, like this executive criminal [Jesus] who occupied the place of pain and shame and death so that you longer need fear it and, no longer fearing it, need no longer put anyone else there ever again, but might yourself start to live as if death were not.

Anglican Archbishop David Crawley

The church is always at its worst when it’s running government. It’s at its next worst when it’s collaborating with government—especially collaborating in an uncritical ways as it did with the [aboriginal] residential schools. It’s at its best and most powerful when it’s resisting government. Its role is to be interrogative in a modern way.

Ken Sehested

According to the U.S. Supreme Court (Lynch v. Donnelly, 1984), the traditional courthouse nativity scene displayed at Christmas has become "a passive symbol." In a 1984 case upholding a 40-year-old tradition in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, of erecting a city-sponsored Christmas display (which included Santa Claus), Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that it "engenders a friendly community spirit" and "serves the commercial interests" of the merchants. Without intending to, Chief Justice Burger delivered in those words a prophecy as clear and as excruciating as any in Scripture. The birth of the Messiah, which so terrorized Herod, has in our day become a passive symbol, one that serves our culture's commercial interests.

Charles Elliott

[T]he demand for radical love of God is indistinguishable from the radical love of those who have no claim on us. So prayer comes to focus on that vortex: where freedom to give and receive the abundance of God’s love spills over into, comprehends, includes, becomes the essence of the splendour of love of the vulnerable and the dispossessed.