11/30/14
Chris Breslin
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
Advent Resources
Cardiphonia Resources for Advent compiled by Bruce Benedict
God is in the Manger by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Gathering Church Advent Resources compiled by Chris Breslin
Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God by Bobby Gross
Song of the Stars: A Christmas Story by Sally Lloyd-Jones
Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas by Ann Voskamp
Advent Calendar (poem)by Rowan Williams
God With Us edited by Gregory Wolfe
Psalms Resources
Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bibleby Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spiritby Walter Brueggemann
Getting Involved with God by Ellen Davis
Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis
Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer by Eugene Peterson
The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential by N.T. Wright
Sermon Quotations
“Learning to live appropriately between the two ‘comings,’ under the rescuing rule of Jesus and in the power of the Spirit. is what it means to be a Christian.” –N.T. Wright
“If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ…It does not depend, therefore, on whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our heart. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Jesus and his contemporaries would have known the Psalms inside out. Paul would have prayed and sung them from his earliest years. What Jesus believed and understood about his own identity and vocation, and what Paul came to believe and understand about Jesus’ unique achievement, they believed and understood within a psalm-shaped world. That same shaping, remarkably, is open to us today.” –N.T. Wright
“I’M HOPELESS, because I’ve lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I’m not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.
I’M HOPEFUL, because I know that while we still have race issues in America, we enjoy a much different normal than those of our parents and grandparents. I see it in my personal relationships with teammates, friends and mentors. And it’s a beautiful thing.” -Benjamin Watson
“Can you see the suffering Christ in the oppressed, even the ones who aren’t responding perfectly to society’s oppression? Christ doesn’t just suffer for the innocent, the ones who don’t have the energy to fight back, or the ones who perfectly respond to injustice. He suffers for the ones who suffer now and sin in their suffering.
And make no mistake, our God is a God of justice. The young black men who launch Molotov cocktails at the police are misappropriating God’s justice by taking it into their own hands, but the rage they feel is the rage that God feels towards injustice. In a sense, they are imaging forth God’s justice to an unjust world.” –Christina Cleveland
