Limitations

Discussing applying Scripture to our lives...in relation to Elisha' s words in 2 Kings 4: Let her alone, for she is in bitter distress, and Yahweh has hidden it from me and has not told me.

We could also focus on Elisha's situation as analogous to ours. We are not prophets like Elisha was. (At least I'm not - I don't receive direct divine revelation as he did.) But simply in our non-technical position as the Lord's servants, don't we know something of the same limitations? Aren't there scores of times when folks seek us out for advice in their dilemmas, and we have to so much as say, 'The Lord has hidden it from me and has not told me'? I hate being so deficient in wisdom, so baffled about what to make of people's twisted problems, but Elisha's situation is a comfort to me. Does it not suggest that I don't have to give 'the answer' to everyone's perplexity? I don't have to take on the impossible burden of playing God and tell people what 'God is doing' or 'saying' in their trouble. God has not called me - nor gifted me - to have the solution for everyone's quandaries. What a relief it is finally to realize that. What a weight it lifts from ministry! In fact, we get in trouble when we fail to see our limitations.

From The Word Became Fresh, by Ralph Dale Davis, pages 107-8

Keeping us sane

More people are exploited and abused in the cause of religion than in any other way. Sex, money, and
power all take a backseat to religion as a source of evil. Religion is the most dangerous energy source known to humankind.
The moment a person (or government or religion or organization) is convinced that God is either ordering or sanctioning a cause or project, anything goes. The history, worldwide, of religion-fueled hate, killing, and oppression is staggering. The biblical prophets are in the front line of those doing something about it.
The biblical prophets continue to be the most powerful and effective voices ever heard on this earth for keeping religion honest, humble, and compassionate. Prophets sniff out injustice, especially injustice that is dressed up in religious garb. They sniff it out a mile away. Prophets see through hypocrisy, especially hypocrisy that assumes a religious pose. Prophets are not impressed by position or power or authority. They aren’t taken in by numbers, size, or appearances of success.
They pay little attention to what men and women say about God or do for God. They listen to God and rigorously test all human language and action against what they hear. Among these prophets, Amos towers as defender of the downtrodden poor and accuser of the powerful rich who use God’s name to legitimize their sin.
None of us can be trusted in this business. If we pray and worship God and associate with others who likewise pray and worship God, we absolutely must keep company with these biblical prophets. We are required to submit all our words and acts to their passionate scrutiny to prevent the perversion of our religion into something self-serving. A spiritual life that doesn’t give a large place to the prophet-articulated justice will end up making us worse instead of better, separating us from God’s ways instead of drawing us into them.

From The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language: introduction to the Book of Amos, by Eugene Peterson. 

More noise than holiness

If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos. To a nation filled with intense religious fervor, the Hebrew prophet Amos said: You are not the holy people you imagine yourselves to be. Though the land is filled with festivals and assemblies, with songs and melodies, and with so much pious talk, these are not sounds and sights that are pleasing to the Lord. "Take away from me the noise of your congregations," Amos says, "you who have turned justice into poison."

Charles Marsh

"God and Country" in The Boston Globe (July 8, 2007)

The idea of Being

It is an oddity that a notice in an Italian street should read not that so and so was born or died in this particular house but that: ‘While walking down this street lost in thought, Antonio Rosmini conceived the “Idea of Being”, which became the foundation of his philosophical system.’

Rosmini himself wrote about it: At the age of 18 I was walking alone wrapt in thought along the street called Terra, which as you know lies between the tower and the bridge over the Leno; and while various thoughts were going through my mind, I noticed that the explanation of a mental concept is to be found in a wider concept, and this wider concept in one of a still wider application; and thus ascending from concept to concept I found that I arrived at the most universal of all ideas, being; and when I tried to take away the idea of being, I found I had nothing left.

I thus became persuaded that the idea of being is the ultimate in every concept, the principle of all thought. The conviction that I had found a truth gave my soul serenity and joy, and I gave praise to the Father of light. 

From pages 43/4 of John Michael Hill's biography of Antonio Rosmini: Persecuted Prophet. 

Spiritual Numbness

The prophet must speak with passion because the community is in a coma. Or to shift the metaphor, we are numb. To be numb is to be without passion; it is the absence of pathos; it is apathy. We are so numb that we don't even realise what has happened to us. Our numbness denies us of a spiritually renewed imagination. We are numb, we don't notice the perverse abnormality of affluence. We are numb to the precariousness of our times, numb to the danger of the earth, to the pain of the poor, to the impossibility of our present affluent lifestyles. We are numb to our own pain, and we want to remain numb to the pain of homosexuals in our communities and to the victims of abuse and incest. And, yes, we are numbed out by the irrelevance of the church to our present cultural malaise.

Brian Walsh in Subversive Christianity

Self, and Chaucer

I have been talking, penwise, all this about my ugly self.  Is it not strange that in the Christian law we can offer to God the most deformed and diseased thing we have got - ourselves?  I have had a most strange, delightful feeling lately - when disgusted with my own selfishness - of just giving away the self to God - throwing it off me up to heaven - to be forgotten and grow clean, without my smearing it all over with trying to wash out the spot.  

This evening I could relish nothing but a poem of Chaucer's.  We really have never surpassed him.  He was a non-dramatic Shakespeare - not un-dramatic.  There is no greater delight in Coleridge or Keats at hearing the nightingale than old Chaucer manifests.  The man of genius may not be a prophet but he is a prophecy: he forestalls what it will take ages to bring round for the many; but theirs it will be one day.

Two extracts from a letter written by George MacDonald to his wife on March 7th, 1861. Quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife, by Greville MacDonald, pages 326/7