Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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These special holidays give rise to various liturgical calendars that suggest we should mark our days not only with the cycles of the moon and seasons, but also with occasions to tell our children the stories of our faith community's past so that this past will have a future, and so that our ancient way and its practices will be rediscovered and renewed every year.
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The popular and domesticated Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be replaced with a more radical, saving, and, I believe, real Jesus.
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Something deep in our conscience tells us that hostility is part of the problem to be overcome in the world, not the means by which problems will be overcome. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure.
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The romance of Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can ever capture in words.
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Being able to know and feel what Karl knows and feels… that no matter what, I am God’s, and God is mine… that we have a connection; we have a relationship. Faith in your life brings God in your life.
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I’m sure I am wrong about many things, although I’m not sure exactly which things I’m wrong about. I’m even sure I’m wrong about what I think I’m right about in at least some cases.
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When any sector of the church stops learning, God simply overflows the structures that are in the way and works outside them with those willing to learn.
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Community has become a buzzword in the church in recent years. Overbusy individuals hope they can cram it into their overstuffed schedules like their membership to a health and fitness club which they never have time to use. Churches hope they can conjure it with candles, programs, or training videos. Anabaptists know that community is far more costly than that: one cannot add it to anything, rather one must begin with it in order to enter it, practice it, and preserve it. They realize that community involves proximity, and that proximity involves land, and that our ties to one another can never be separated from our ties to the land, the watershed, the local economy in which we live. They have an instinct about the deep ties between community and sexuality, community and freedom, community and economics. I suspect that Anabaptists know more than they know that they know in this regard, and I hope we all can learn from them before they forget.
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Comfort and power can become great enemies of true spirituality, which explains why we often say that the prophets come not only to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.
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Spiritual Practices are not for know-it-alls. Practices are for those who feel the need for change, growth, development, learning. Practices are for disciples.
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So we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.
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The only viable response to religious hostility is love, empathy, compassion, understanding—not more hostility. What could be more pathetic than a hostile fight against hostility?
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In an age of religious violence like ours, people care much less about what you believe, and much more about whether you will kill for what you believe. So if you haven’t figured out what you’re going to do with passages like Deuteronomy 7 and 1 Samuel 15 and Psalms 137:9, you still have some important work to do.3 If you haven’t grappled with these passages and others like them, your Bible is like a loaded gun and your theology is like a license to kill. You have to find a way to disarm your faith as a potential instrument of hate and convert it into an instrument of love.4 You have to convert Christianity from a warrior religion to a reconciling religion. Otherwise, your neighbors around this seminary will tolerate you the way they might tolerate a chemical plant that could at any moment blow up and kill them all.
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One might conclude that these were a few rogue rotten Spanish apples, acting in opposition to their faith. But notice the religious motivation for the cruelty described by Bartolomé: They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!”…They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive
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When a culture needs wise spiritual guidance the most, all it gets from religious leaders is anxious condemnation and critique, along with a big dose of nostalgia for the lost golden age of the good old days.
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Even though Pope Urban VIII reversed the pronouncements of his predecessors by declaring slavery unacceptable in the mid-seventeenth century, the vast majority of Protestant Christians in America considered slavery and white supremacy to be absolutely consistent with “biblical” Christianity. It would take American Protestants over a hundred years to make slavery history. Even then, they would find ways to cleverly camouflage the old Doctrine of Discovery and its white supremacist scaffolding under distinctly American terms like Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, terms still celebrated in many sectors of US society today.
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Jesus called disciples so He could send them out as apostles. They were called together to learn so they could be sent out to teach and serve.
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God is not the tribal deity of one group of “chosen” people. God is not for us and against all others. God is for us and for them, too. God loves everyone everywhere, no exceptions.
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I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization.
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To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighbor means recognizing that there are ultimately no strangers. . . . Everybody is my neighbor! . . . Everybody is my brother! . . . There are no isolated monads wounded on the other side of the street! . . . We're all connected.
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Our relationships with God go through similar phases sometimes. We aren’t comfortable with each other. The conversation doesn’t flow as well. We aren’t sure we can trust as before — or we aren’t sure we can be trusted as before. At those tough times, I have learned that there is a lot to be said for just hanging in there. For keeping on going to church. For saying your prayers. For keeping the communication lines open. For sustaining your relationship on pure, stubborn commitment when all the warm feelings of affection seem gone forever. That kind of willpower, I am learning, is one of the purest forms of faith — a kind of faith you just don’t develop until you are forced to, when your relationship with God seems to have gone bad. Sometimes faith means believing that doubt is just a stage, a rotten mood that will pass, and that in time, by the grace of God, you will get over it, and be old friends again in a new, deeper way.
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Can you imagine Jesus saying, “Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that’s why! And if you don’t believe, then you’re going straight to hell!” But isn’t that how we present him through our slogans?
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When physical genocide ran its course, cultural genocide followed, reflected in the “compassionate” counsel of Captain Richard Henry Pratt: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
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Surely many courageous Christians spoke out against the savagery of their so-called civilized fellow Christians? And surely many compassionate Christians spoke out for the humanity of the so-called savages? Sadly, very, very few actually did, notable among them a Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas.