Theology That Bites Back
“Ordinarily, reading sermons is like listening to an echo. The words there, but the personal intonation is gone out of them and there is an unreality about it all . . . In general it is true that the sermon which is good to preach is poor to read and the sermon which is good to read is poor to preach.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 91
“One wine might be selected because it would go well with the beef, and another chosen because it complemented the pasta. Marijuana goes with (recalling Cheech and Chong) Oreos and mustard”
Devoured by Cannabis, p 31
“Never allow yourself to feel equal to your work”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 88
“If the use of wine was sinful and problematic , then it would have been really problematic for Jesus to have made 160 gallons of it”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 26
[Concerning Ps. 104:14-15] “And lest anyone’s heart leap for joy because it mentions herbs ‘for the service of man,’ it is talking about your salad, and not about your stash.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 25
“Take, for instance, the matter of preaching old sermons. It is not good. A new sermon, fresh from the brain, has always a life in it which an old sermon, though better in itself, must lack . . . the main objection which the people have to the preaching of old sermons is in the impression that it gives them of unfaithfulness and idleness”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 86
“The book of Proverbs is given to all God’s people. And the word that mean ‘to speak a proverb’ is also a word that mean ‘to rule.’ Learning to live in accordance with the proverbs God gave us is preparation for dominion”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 24
“What these people have in common is that they are all engaged in a hedonistic pursuit of sensual pleasure. They all want to get laid and loaded. The name of the game is sensory overload. Now if I were looking for a place to shelve ‘stoned out of his gourd,” would I be more likely to put it after joy and before peace, or after excess of wine and before revelling?”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 20
“The man is not doing his best . . . he writes his sermons on Saturday nights. That last I could the crowning disgrace of a man’s ministry. It is dishonest. It is giving but the last flicker of the week as it sinks in its socket, to those who, simply to talk about it as a bargain, have paid for the full light burning at its brightest. And yet men boast of it. They tell you in how short time they write their sermons, and when you hear them preach you only wonder that it took so long”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, pp. 84-85
“Sins are like grapes, they come in bunches . . . Sins tend to cluster, and when you go down into the middle of that crowd, you are more likely to find a pot dealer there than, say, if you were at a quilting bee.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 20
