You are accustomed now to all the liturgical changes we have made over the course of this last year. You must now be exhorted to remember the point of all such orders of worship. The fact that you know the order of events frees you to concentrate on worshiping the Lord Himself, just as learning …
The Bedlam of the Elites
“There is no one single elite in America. Hence, there is no definable establishment to be oppressed by and to rebel against. Everybody can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus. You can be an X Games celebrity and appear on ESPN2, or an atonal jazz demigod and be celebrated in obscure music magazines. You …
Looking Beyond
“When Isaiah cries out that we are to behold our God, he does so in a way that does not encourage us to start looking under the furniture. This is not altered in the slightest by his use of an image taken from the created order. Yet even here, each single image, however wonderful, if …
Palm Sunday 2006
Introduction: We are seeking to recover a Christian sense of time, and in some sense this means a recovery of the Church year. But though we are seeking to escape a secularized calendar, we must never forget that we got this secular calendar (in part) because of a reaction away from the problem of “saints …
If One’s Good, Two Must Be Better
“Though Realtor Mom likes Wal-Mart, it’s the price club that really gets her heart racing, because price clubs are Wal-mart on acid. Here you can get laundry detergent in 41-pound tubs, 30-pound bags of frozen Tater Tots, frozen waffles in 60-serving boxes, and packages of 1,500 Q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs since there’s cotton …
Flesh That Reveals the Father
“The majesty of biblical poetry always lifts our thoughts up. Biblical poetic expression is incarnational, which means that there is a body of ‘flesh,’ but it is a body which reveals the Father. Idolatrous poetic expression reveals nothing from above, and spends its energy in rearranging matter down here below. Idolatrous images of the divine …
Wealth Thrown Away
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 84 “Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment” (Prov. 13:23). The point of this proverb is that the poor frequently have far more wealth available to them than …
Freedom? What Freedom?
Most Christians do not have a problem in acknowledging God’s sovereign control over every aspect of the physical creation. Not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father, and He know the numbers of atoms that make up the planet Jupiter. We will consequently spend our time here considering the two areas that …
Cloth Ratios
“[In] America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the square inches in the girls’ outfits shrinks and shrinks. The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.” [David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 56]
A Theological Tin Ear
“Human language is necessarily inadequate whenever men speak about God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. But there is creaturely inadequacy, a holy limitation, revealed in virtually every word of Scripture, and then there is an impudent inadequancy. The thing which differentiates the two is not the element of anthropomorphic images (which are …