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141 " When the Scriptures are read in the context of gathered worship, they are, in a sense, enacted at the same time. "
― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
142 " Scripture also functions as something like the constitution of the baptismal city. "
143 " we should emphasize that the narrative of Scripture is a primary fund for the Christian imagination. "
144 " The tangible display and performance of the gospel in the Lord’s Supper is a deeply affecting practice. "
145 " First, lest we pass too quickly over the mundane and obvious, we should appreciate that the stuff of the Lord’s Supper—the “elements” as they’re sometimes called—are rather ho-hum stuff: bread and wine, staples of any daily diet in many parts of the world and across history. "
146 " These are not naturally occurring phenomena; they are the fruit of culture, the products of human making. In blessing the bread and giving thanks for it, Jesus not only hallows the stuff of the earth, but he also hallows the stuff of our hands. "
147 " For every week that we celebrate the Eucharist is another week that the kingdom and its feast have not yet fully arrived. "
148 " The Eucharist is our model of the eschatological order, a microcosm of the way things really ought to be.”[105] Thus it is a normative meal: by showing us a foretaste of how things ought to be, the practice of the Lord’s Supper carries norms in it, and these norms constitute both a basis of critique for the present order, as well as hints as to how the church should order itself as a polis that is "
149 " The eucharistic feast is a tiny normative picture of the justice that characterizes the coming kingdom of God, where none go hungry because of poverty or alienated labor "
150 " The Supper is a gracious communion with a forgiving God; but it is also a supper we eat with one another, and that too will require forgiveness. "
151 " First, with apologies for repeating the obvious, it is worth noting that the practice of Christian worship takes up and involves something mundane, common, and even “dirty” (as in “filthy lucre”): the nitty-gritty reality of money. "
152 " Rather, the offering is an expression of gratitude. It is a symbolic but concrete indication that the “commerce” between God and humanity is not a contract but a covenant, which traffics not in commodities but gifts. "
153 " hoping to find a language for death. In his hands, the language of death is democratic — which makes good sense since death is quite impartial (talk about e pluribus unum!). "
― James K.A. Smith , How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
154 " Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years. "
― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
155 " Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest.9 "
156 " This is why Luther and Calvin still understood themselves to be “catholics.” While they might have been railing against the abuses of Roman Catholicism, they also understood themselves to be heirs of the catholic, universal, orthodox faith. In fact, I think we can best understand the Reformation as an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic. So, in a way that might be surprising, to be Reformed is to be catholic. Traditionally "
― James K.A. Smith , Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition
157 " too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary. "
158 " One of the functions of Revelation [or of worship] was to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and influential as their intellectual convictions. It recognizes the way a dominant culture, with its images and ideals, constructs the world for us, so that we perceive and respond to the world in its terms. Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology. "
― James K.A. Smith , Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology
159 " Unlike sermon-centric congregations that profess “high views of Scripture” but leave the reading of the Bible to the preacher’s whim and circumscribe it within “sermon time,” in catholic Christian worship the Bible isn’t just the focus of preaching; it is the lexicon of the entire service of worship. "
160 " Worship again and again interrupts the course of the world. Through worship the Christian community testifies that the world is not on its own. And this also means that it is not kept alive by politics, as the business of politics, which knows no Sabbath, would have us believe. "