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a1d51ec
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Despite our earnest efforts, we couldn't climb all the way up to God. So what did God do? In an amazing act of condescension, on Good Friday, God climbed down to us, became one with us. The story of divine condescension begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. We thought, if there is to be business between us and God, we must somehow get up to God. Then God came down, down to the level of the cross, all the way down to the depths of hel..
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violence
love
crucifixion
divine-condescension
good-friday
incarnation
salvation
cross
jesus-christ
easter
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William H. Willimon |
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bae53ef
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It takes great faith in Easter, particularly faith in the gift of the Holy Spirit, to be honest with our people that we have not a clue to the meaning of some biblical passage, or that we have no sense of a satisfying ending for a sermon, or that we are unsure of precisely what the congregation ought to do after hearing a given text. The most ethically dangerous time within a sermon is toward the end of the sermon, when we move from proclam..
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preaching
sermons
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William H. Willimon |
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7cbee2a
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In some cases, these liberal "progressives" show contempt for their fellow Americans who are lower class, poorly educated, sinking economically--and white. White male privilege is real, but that phrase probably mystifies a fifty-nine-year-old Walmart greeter in southern Ohio. A study by two Princeton researchers shows widespread despair among poor whites that often feeds bigotry, misplaced anger, and the racism that Donald Trump leveraged t..
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William H. Willimon |
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89c8e90
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The gap between white and black education, income, and mortality rates is as wide today as it was forty years ago.6 If you look into a hospital nursery and see a black infant and a white infant, you can predict which baby will die first, which one will make a higher income and have better education, just by the color of the baby's skin. There is no area in American society (education, incarceration, income, preaching, and so on) where racia..
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William H. Willimon |
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c8e0fac
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Epigraph The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American . . . preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the "lynching era," between 1880 and 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the crucifixion of Jesus. . . . As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many Afric..
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William H. Willimon |
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644a83c
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What we don't need is central economic planning or new laws, more taxes or fewer good-paying jobs. What we need is something much more difficult to get than a Porsche--character. We need the sort of character that is able to look at the world and all it has to offer and at certain key moments say simply, "Thank you, but I'm now satisfied." It takes a huge amount of moral stamina to be able to say, "Yes, we could afford it, but we are not go..
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William H. Willimon |
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b50ca26
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Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover-ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation--painful though they may be.
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William H. Willimon |
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7bd71eb
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When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have a tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they would not be promiscuous.
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William H. Willimon |
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969f809
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The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us. In this chapter we will challenge the assumption, so prevalent at least since Constantine, that the church is judged politically by how well or ill the church's presence in the world works to the advantage of the world.
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William H. Willimon |
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a8bef25
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Just let the Pope tell us that our Western middle-class need for uninhibited sexual self-expression is less important to him and the church than the poor of Latin America, and some of our brightest academic ethicists shall attempt to relegate him to the domain of those who are out of it, behind the times.
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William H. Willimon |
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249f66d
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The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.
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William H. Willimon |