God is Angry

God is angry with our defiances, blasphemies and idolatries; angry with the way we treat our neighbors; angry with the way we treat the poor, the alien and the marginalized; angry with the way we treat our enemies. Far from ignoring or indulging such lovelessness God deplores it, and this is no irrational, evanescent or intemperate fury. It is the deliberate, measured, judicious response of God to our collective revolt against his rule, and to the systemic injustice which marks human society. We may pretend that our denials of the rights of our fellow human beings, our abuse of the other creatures with whom we share the planet, and our spoilation of our common habitat, are but peccadillos: only small, trivial sins. But in God’s eyes, the earth is filled with violence (Gen. 6:11), and it appalls him.

–Donald Macleod

The Love of God Implies His Wrath

British scholar Tony Lane explains that “the love of God implies his wrath. Without his wrath God simply does not love in the sense that the Bible portrays his love.” God’s love is not sentimental; it is holy. It is tender, but not squishy. It involves not only compassion, kindness, and mercy beyond measure (what the New Testament calls grace) but also indignation against injustice and unremitting opposition to all that is evil.

– Timothy George (full article here)

A Lenten Collect

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

-The Book of Common Prayer

Far Too Easily Pleased

The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

–C.S. Lewis

The Deep Rest of Chastity

“Air and Fire”

From my wife and household and fields
that I have so carefully come to in my time
I enter the craziness of travel,
the reckless elements of air and fire.
Having risen up from my native land,
I find myself smiled at by beautiful women,
making me long for a whole life
to devote to each one, making love to her
in some house, in some way of sleeping
and waking I would make only for her.
And all over the country I find myself
falling in love with houses, woods, and farms
that I will never set foot in.
My eyes go wandering through America,
two wayfaring brothers, resting in silence
against the forbidden gates. O what if
an angel came to me, and said,
“Go free of what you have done. Take
what you want.” The atoms of blood
and brain and bone strain apart
at the thought. What I am is the way home.
Like rest after a sleepless night,
my old love comes on me in midair.
—Wendell Berry

Satisfied and Yet Never Glutted

This feast is an eternal feast. You be not invited to feast daintily for once, and then [return] to your old beggarly famished condition you were in before; but this royal provision is to be your perpetual entertainment. You may live upon such food forever and ever. You shall enter into the house of God, and you shall go no more out. You have been hungry and thirsty in times past, but if you come to this gospel feast you shall hunger nor thirst no more. Revelation 7:16, “They shall hunger no more, nor thirst any more.” John 6:35, “He that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” At God’s right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There you may always eat and drink, and always be satisfied and yet never be glutted. You may eat and drink abundantly and never be in danger of excesses.

– Jonathan Edwards

“Lay Off Me, I’m Starving”

Eat Well Then

We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot… Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts–for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem.

Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He make all things new. Our Last Home will be home indeed.

– Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb

Eating and Drinking…A Lot

For Jesus “feast” was not just a “metaphor” for the kingdom. As Jesus announced the feast of the kingdom, He also brought it into reality through His own feasting. Unlike many theologians, He did not come preaching an ideology, promoting ideas, or teaching moral maxims. He came teaching about the feast of the kingdom, and he came feasting in the kingdom. Jesus did not go around merely talking about eating and drinking; he went around eating and drinking. A lot.

–Peter Leithart

Nothing to Die For

In the world sloth calls itself tolerance; but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of every other sin and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for.

–Dorothy Sayers