Newman: faith

Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Meditation:
    To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.
    —Titus 1:15 (NIV)
Quotation:
    Faith is illuminative, not operative; it does not force obedience, though it increases responsibility; it heightens guilt, but it does not prevent sin. The will is the source of action.
    ... John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Lectures on certain difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church, London: Burns & Lambert, 1850, p. 236 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, correct my will, that I might not sin against You. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Trueblood: contents of the church

Monday, June 6, 2011
    Commemoration of Ini Kopuria, Founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood, 1945
Meditation:
    While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”
    On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
    —Matthew 9:10-13 (NIV)
Quotation:
    The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners.
    ... Elton Trueblood (1900-1994), The Incendiary Fellowship, New York: Harper, 1967, p. 39 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, I must be counted among the sinners who need Jesus. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Smith: the feasts and the fasts

Sunday, June 5, 2011
    Feast of Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton, Archbishop of Mainz, Apostle of Germany, Martyr, 754
Meditation:
    My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?
    —James 2:1-5 (NIV)
Quotation:
    The observances of the Church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well kept, upon the whole, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.
    ... Sydney Smith (1771-1845), quoted in A Sketch of the Life and Times of the Rev. Sydney Smith, Stuart Johnson Reid, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1884, p. 127-128 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, I am rich, and I am ashamed of my attitude—deliver me from the sin of discrimination. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Pascal: the God-shaped gap

Saturday, June 4, 2011
Meditation:
    “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.”
    —Amos 8:11-12 (NIV)
Quotation:
    What does this desire and this inability of ours proclaim to us but that there was once in man a genuine happiness, of which nothing now survives but the mark and the empty outline; and this he vainly tries to fill from everything that lies around him, seeking from things that are not there the help that he does not get from those that are present? Yet they are quite incapable of filling the gap, because this infinite gulf can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object—that is, God, Himself. He alone is man’s veritable good, and since man has deserted Him it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature that has not been capable of taking His place for man: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he has lost the true good, everything can equally appear to him as such—even his own destruction, though that is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature.
    ... Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées (Thoughts) [1660], P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, #425, p. 138-139 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You desire to feed Your people. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Newbolt: unhelpful controversy

Friday, June 3, 2011
    Feast of Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, Teacher, 1910
    Commemoration of Martyrs of Uganda, 1886 & 1978
Meditation:
    I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing.
    —1 Timothy 2:8 (NIV)
Quotation:
    Let us guard with all our might against lapsing into mere controversialists, unless God has given us special talents in that way, which we can use with fear and trembling as given us for the special defence of truth and of the Church. As we follow Him after the day of disputation up the slope of the Mount of Olives, and watch there, in the blood-red glow of sunset, and the purple of the deepening gloom, and the blackness of approaching night, Jerusalem with its individual history and palpitating heart of religious frenzy, melting into the judgment of a world, and the crash of falling kingdoms, and the winding up of final doom, how little all the controversy has become, in the face of a world’s sin and a world’s judgment! Jesus Christ was the Truth; and as the Truth, He met and laid low controversy.
    ... W. C. E. Newbolt (1844-1930), Speculum Sacerdotum, London: Longmans, Green, 1894, p. 188 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, unite Your people's factions. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Temple: the Ascension

Thursday, June 2, 2011
    Ascension
Meditation:
    Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
    —John 20:17 (NIV)
Quotation:
    In the days of His earthly ministry, only those could speak to him who came where He was. If He was in Galilee, men could not find Him in Jerusalem; if He was in Jerusalem, men could not find Him in Galilee. But His Ascension means that He is perfectly united with God; we are with Him wherever we are present to God; and that is everywhere and always. Because He is “in Heaven” He is everywhere on earth: because He is ascended, He is here now. Our devotion is not to hold us by the empty tomb; it must lift up our hearts to heaven so that we too “in heart and mind thither ascend and with Him continually dwell;” * it must also send us forth into the world to do His will; and these are not two things, but one.
    * from the collect for Ascension, Book of Common Prayer, 1662, 1928
    ... William Temple (1881-1944), Readings in St. John’s Gospel, London: Macmillan, 1939, 1952, p. 382 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, Your are continually present with Your people. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Denney: faith and history

Wednesday, June 1, 2011
    Feast of Justin, Martyr at Rome, c.165
    Commemoration of Angela de Merici, Founder of the Institute of St. Ursula, 1540
Meditation:
    [Jesus:] “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning.”
    —John 15:26-27 (NIV)
Quotation:
    When a man was chosen to take the place of Judas, and to be associated with the eleven as a witness of the Resurrection, he was chosen from the men ‘who have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto the day that He was received up from us’. The criticism which would have us believe that from the Resurrection onward the Jesus of history was practically displaced by an ideal Christ of faith is beside the mark. The Christ of faith was the Jesus of history, and no one was regarded as qualified to bear witness to the Christ unless he had had the fullest opportunity of knowing Jesus.
    ... James Denney (1856-1917), Jesus and the Gospel: Christianity justified in the mind of Christ, New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908, p. 14 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, Your witness have spoken to the ages. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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