“…[It] was quite enough to offend Jesus’ opponents that he excluded no-one from [his company at table].…  To understand what Jesus was doing in eating with ‘sinners’, it is important to realize that in the east, even today, to invite a man to a meal was an honour.  It was an offer of peace, trust, brotherhood and forgiveness; in short, sharing a table meant sharing life…. In Judaism in particular, table-fellowship means fellowship before God, for the eating a piece of broken bread by everyone who shares in the meal brings out the fact that they all have a share in the blessing which the master of the house had spoken over the unbroken bread.  Thus Jesus’ meals with the publicans and sinners, too, are not only events on a social level, not only an expression of his unusual humanity and social generosity and his sympathy with those who were despised, but had an even deeper significance.  They are an expression of the mission and message of Jesus (Mark 2.17), eschatological meals, anticipatory celebrations of the feat in the end-time (Matt 8.11 par.), in which the community of the saints is already being represented  (Mark 2.19).  The inclusion of sinners in the community of salvation, achieved in table-fellowship, is the most meaningful expression of the message of the redeeming love of God.”

~Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pp. 115-16

We cannot abolish all inequalities, nor even (because of the diversity of creation) attempt to.  It is inequality of privilege we should seek to abolish, in order to create equality of opportunity.  For millions of people are unable to develop their human potential.  This Christians see to be the real scandal.  It is not only an offense to human beings, since they are frustrated and unfulfilled, but also to their Creator who bestowed his gifts on them to be developed and used in service, not to be wasted.

So says the late, great John R.W. Stott (1921-2011), one of Evangelicalism’s most clearheaded, conscientious, and articulate spokesmen, and one of InterVarsity’s greatest alumni.  Stott is well known among evangelicals as a gifted Bible teacher and for his straightforward, commonsense approach to applying Scripture to the Christian life.  What is sometimes forgotten about Stott is that his no nonsense approach to Biblical Christianity led him to be deeply concerned and engaged with issues of social and economic injustice.  His landmark book, Human Rights & Human Wrongs, lays out a sweeping agenda for Christian social engagement in the twenty-first century, dealing with issues of war, the environment, global poverty, and human rights violations.  For Stott the biblical gospel speaks to all of these issues and cannot be reduced to a message about a private spiritual transaction between individuals and God.

Support us by buying the book here!

In chapter 7 of that book, Stott tackles the issue of the gross economic inequality between the First world and the Third.  Drawing principally upon Paul’s case to the Corinthians for collecting aid for the hungry in famine-struck Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 8:8-15), Stott argues that Paul means what he says when he tells the Corinthians that the goal of the collection is “that there might be equality (isotes)” and that this concurs with the Bible’s teaching on economic justice generally.  He sums up the economic and moral theology of 2 Corinthians 8 as follows:

(1) God has provided enough for everybody’s need (adequate resources in sun and rain, earth, air, and water); (2) any great disparity between affluence and want, wealth and poverty, is unacceptable to him; (3) when a situation of serious disparity arises, it ought to be corrected by an adjustment, in order to secure “equality” or “justice”; (4) the Christian motive for desiring such “justice” is “grace,” loving generosity, as in the case of Jesus Christ who, though rich, became poor, so that through his poverty we might become rich; (5) we are to follow his example in this, and so prove the genuineness of our love.

Global economic equality is, obviously, a staggeringly audacious goal given the vastness of the disparity between the First World and the Third and the complexity of the issues involved.  ”Our temptation is to use the complexity of macro-economics as an excuse to do nothing,” Stott observes.  But doing nothing is not an option for the serious Christian. “We need to pray that God will call more of his people to develop new international economic policies, work for political solutions, and give their lives in the field of Third World development, practical philanthropy, and evangelism.”  But this necessary attention to macro-level political and economic solutions needs to be paired with a commitment to living more simply and to generous charitable giving:

We should be thankful for the good things God has given us, but also remember the biblical principles of unity (we are one human family) and equality.  Then we shall give generously to both world development and world evangelization.  Our personal commitment to a simpler lifestyle will not of course solve the world’s economic problems.  But it will be an important symbol of Christian obedience, of solidarity with the poor, and of our share in the grace of Jesus Christ which induced him to empty himself and take the form of a servant.

Because we believe the leaders of tomorrow are the students of today, InterVarsity works in our nation’s leading universities precisely to develop the world changers and policy makers necessary to heal our broken global economy which has trapped more than a billion people in dire poverty.  HOPE International works on the ground in the developing world to help individuals and families in the to break free of the cycle of poverty by supporting their efforts to build sustainable and profitable businesses and farms through microfinance.  You can be a part of both of these efforts by supporting the Share HOPE Project, our holistic, grassroots effort to fight poverty from top to bottom.  Join us and become a Share HOPE Sustainer today.

Part of the reason there is some question about this is that much of the substance of Matthew 5-7 can be found in the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 6 and most of the rest can be found scattered throughout Luke’s Gospel in other places.  You can see the basic data helpfully outlined here.  Taken together these data give the impression that in the Sermon on the Mount Matthew has presented sayings and teachings of Jesus which were actually spoken in various and sundry times, places, and circumstances as though Jesus said all of these things at once in a single, extended discourse perched upon a Galilean hilltop.  In other words, the Sermon on the Mount was not a historical event as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was but rather is a product of Matthew’s editing, piecing together, and remixing clips, quotes, and sound-bytes from all over the place in Jesus’s teaching career into the hit single we have all come to know and love.

Such an assessment is a commonplace of modern historical-critical Biblical scholarship.  But it would be a mistake to chalk such critical assessments up to biblical scholars’ alleged latent atheism,  ”methodological naturalism,” or anti-traditionalism, for the great Reformer John Calvin said more or less the same thing in his Commentary on Matthew, Mark and Luke.  First, Calvin has no time or folks who try to explain away the relevant data by saying Matthew 5-7 and Luke 6 are two different sermons given on separate occasions.  He writes,

Those who think that Christ’s sermon, which is here related, is different from the sermon contained in the sixth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, rest their opinion on a very light and frivolous argument….

The Gospel writers were not trying to give you precise, straightforward, chronologically ordered history, says Calvin.  Rather, he writes:

 [The] design of both Evangelists was to collect into one place the leading points of the doctrine of Christ, which related to a devout and holy life.

Their purpose, in other words was more catechetical than historical and the Sermons were constructed not so much to recount what was said in a specific place and time but rather to distill the core of Jesus’s teachings.  That they give us the gist of what Jesus generally taught is sufficient.  Thus chronological precision is irrelevant here:

Although Luke had previously mentioned a plain, he does not observe the immediate succession of events in the history, but passes from miracles to doctrine, without pointing out either time or place: just as Matthew takes no notice of the time, but only mentions the place. It is probable, that this discourse was not delivered until Christ had chosen the twelve [in Matthew the Sermon occurs before the Twelve are called]: but in attending to the order of time, which I saw that the Spirit of God had disregarded, I did not wish to be too precise.

Note that last line: It was “the Spirit of God” which “had disregarded” “the order of time.”  For Calvin the divine inspiration of the Gospels is not in question but is rather assumed.  What is in question is not whether the Spirit guided the Evangelists but rather how the Spirit guided them and what the Spirit saw fit to lead them to write.  Calvin looks at the critical data of the biblical text and allows that to inform his understanding of the Spirit’s priorities rather than letting his preconceptions about what the Spirit supposedly ought to care about dictate how he deals with the text.  Thus, Calvin looks at the Sermon(s) on the Mount/Plain and concludes that, apparently the Spirit doesn’t care too much about chronology or historical detail.  This, he says, is the Bible that God saw fit to give us, and that should be good enough:

Pious and modest readers ought to be satisfied with having a brief summary of the doctrine of Christ placed before their eyes, collected out of his many and various discourses, the first of which was that in which he spoke to his disciples about true happiness.

We’ve seen Calvin’s keen critical eye at work before regarding the authorship of 2 Peter and regarding the scientific accuracy of Genesis 1.  My purpose in drawing our attention to these features of Calvin’s thought is to remind folks that such historical-critical observations (whether these observations in particular or such observations in principle) are not contrary to the Protestant tradition but are, in fact, very much a part of it.

The 2011-12 school year is coming to a close.  Please pray for us as we prepare for the coming year.

What’s happening?

• Through the summer we will continue our Bible studies for the Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF) and for the faculty and staff at Meredith College.
• I will continue meeting one-on-one with some of our students throughout the summer as we prepare for next year.
• The GCF continues to regularly serve our community and to connect the gospel to our lives, our scholarship, and our professions at our monthly Food for Thought Dinners.
• I am developing an exciting new partnership with HOPE International  to simultaneously renew the university here and to fight poverty in the developing world.
• Our first annual public symposium at NC State: Biblical Faith in an Age of Science was a great success!  We are already looking forward to next year’s symposium which will focus on matters of food, faith, agriculture, and economy.
• I have been asked to help coordinate the Southeast Region’s staff conference this summer.  Please pray for me as I carry out these duties.
• October 26-27^th, the Duke, UNC, and NCSU GCFs will hold a joint retreat focusing on faith, study, career, and calling, with special guest, Steven Garber, author of the The Fabric of Faithfulness.

Things to pray for…

• That we would raise the necessary financial support to be able to continue this vital ministry next year and beyond.
• That God would bless our new student outreach efforts this coming summer and fall.
• That God would guide InterVarsity and Faculty Commons as we try to develop a sustainable and fruitful ministry model for the Faculty Christian Fellowship at NC State.

Greetings all,

Where to begin?  This has been an amazing whirlwind of a year and God has blessed our work so much.  Thank you for being a part of our ministry to the leaders of our universities.  Your prayers, friendship, encouraging words and generous support have done more than you know. 

This has been a challenging year as I have been learning the ins and outs of ministering to grad students and faculty: the rhythms of the academic year, the specific spiritual challenges associated with the different stages of grad school and getting tenure, the intellectual and spiritual challenges connected with being a Christian scholar, the bureaucracies of the university, and, of course, the normal challenges of life—illnesses and injuries, love and loss, stress and fatigue, loneliness and lostness—which students and faculty face as much as anyone else.

On April 12^th we hosted well over a hundred students, faculty, and members of the Raleigh community for our first annual symposium, Biblical Faith in an Age of Science.  Our speakers, Peter Enns of Eastern University, Sujin Pak of Duke Divinity School, and Greg Reeves of NC State, were fantastic and the video of the event has been viewed over 200 times in just the first ten days after being posted on my website, resurrectingraleigh.com!

I am very excited to tell you that I have been developing a partnership between the Christian microfinance ministry HOPE International and the GFM here at NC State and Meredith to work together to simultaneously renew the university here and to fight poverty in the developing world.  We are pledging to match dollar-for-dollar every donation made through the share HOPE project to our work here in Raleigh’s universities with financial support for HOPE International microenterprise projects in developing world countries like Rwanda, the Dominican Republic, and Kenya.  This way your donation supports two ministries, doubles its impact, renews the university and alleviates poverty, changes culture and changes the lives.  You can learn more about our new initiative, the share HOPE project here.

Our ministry to faculty is poised to expand next year as I will continue leading Bible studies for the faculty and staff at Meredith College and as I continue to develop a fruitful partnership with Campus Crusade’s Faculty Commons at NC State.  Our hope is to develop a robust faculty ministry that will develop a greater sense of community and collegiality amongst Triangle Christian faculty and that works with the complicated rhythms of the academic year.

October 26-27^th, the Duke, UNC, and NCSU GCFs will hold a joint retreat focusing on faith, study, career, and calling, with special guest, Steven Garber, author of the The Fabric of Faithfulness and director of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture.

Finally, as we move into the summer most of our regular activities will continue, as grad students and faculty do not really leave as undergrads do, but we will be focusing more on planning ahead to receive the incoming wave of new students and faculty next fall.  Please pray for us in this exciting season of preparation.  In the meantime you can follow us on my blog: http://resurrectingraleigh.com/

Thank you again for all of your support!

David

Long story made short, Mobley, professor of Christian Bible at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, takes us on a lighthearted (but well-considered) jaunt through seven “backstories” of the Hebrew Bible:

1. The Backstory of Creation: God has subdued chaos, just barely.
2. The Backstory of Torah: God has given humans an instruction manual for life on planet Earth so they can partner with God in the management of chaos.
3. The Backstory of the Former Prophets: God has enacted the tough love of moral cause and effect in order to reward fidelity to the instruction manual and to support management of the chaos.
4. The Backstory of the Latter Prophets: God enlists the prophets to mediate this dynamic partnership upon which the health of creation depends.
5. The Backstory of the Psalms: Through praise humans release energy that augments God;s management of chaos; through lament humans report on the quality of God’s management of chaos.
6. The Backstory of the Wisdom Literature: Here and there, humans catch glimpses of the divine design for chaos management; living according to these insights is another expression of the partnership.
7. The Backstory of Apocalyptic: There are times when chaos gains the upper hand and humans in partnership with God can only hope that God is able, as in the beginning, to subdue chaos.

Each chapter fleshes out the internal logic driving a segment of the Tanakh, explaining both its background and also the basic elements and dynamics of  the segment’s constitutive literary genres.

Most of what Mobley says here is going to be old news for anyone with much formal education in or much familiarity with Biblical scholarship.  But Mobley’s unique contribution lies in the fact that he knows how to turn a good phrase and how to quickly, deftly and humorously portray in a few paragraphs of lively prose difficult matters and themes which typically take lesser writers (though not necessarily a lesser scholars) pages and pages of dusty jargon to communicate.  I would recommend this book to anyone teaching an introductory course to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/Tanakh.  A course pairing this book with Jack Miles’ God: A Biography and using the Jewish Study Bible would, I think, be both illuminating and a hoot for anyone involved.

In any case, I heartily, heartily recommend this book to both teachers and students alike, whether in the university or in a local church, because in whatever context you’re engaging the text of Scripture we need savvy, witty, and clear-headed voices like Mobley’s to help us do so winsomely and well.

“Thanks for the letter,” says Jonathan Merritt, “but the choices between standing for life and standing for social justice, between upholding traditional Christian marriage and caring for creation are false choices.  We have to speak and live prophetically on all these fronts, which means being uncomfortable in either party.”  

What do you think?

That Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures,
And that he was buried,
and that he was raised on the third day
according to the Scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Twice the creed affirms that the good news of Jesus’s death and resurrection was kata tas graphas, was “in accordance with” or “according to the Scriptures.”  This little phrase constitutes the earliest Christian confession concerning sacred Scripture and I would suggest that it is also the most central.

It must be noted that, in spite of widespread disagreement within the Church on the nature, contents, and interpretation of Scripture, no ecumenical council saw fit to make a definitive, binding confessional statement on the Bible with the sole exception of this little phrase, kata tas graphas, which is lifted directly from 1 Cor 15 and given place in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.

To paint with a very broad brush, it was not until the Reformation that the Church began anxiously wringing her hands about getting “the doctrine of Scripture” (whatever that is) “right” (whatever that means).  Prior to that time there had always been (as, in fact, there still is) a variety of views, interpretations, conceptualizations, and enumerations of the Scriptures within the Church and generally speaking, Christians were not out to excommunicate one another over their differences on these matters.  From the very beginning you had the Alexandrians insisting upon the necessity of spiritual and allegorical readings of the Scriptures over against the Antiochenes insisting that interpretations ought to stick as close to the original sense as possible.  Permutations of these disputes have persisted through antiquity, through the Medieval period, through the Renaissance and Reformation, all the way to our own day.

But the Church recognized early on that there were limits to what one could say about Scripture without undermining the gospel.  For instance, there were limits to what could be counted as Scripture.  So, according to the ancient (proto-?) Orthodox Church, the Gospel of Thomas is out, but Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul’s letters have to be in (2 Peter, 1 Clement, the Didache, and Revelation, however, are another matter).  Similarly, pace Marcion, you cannot just pitch the Old Testament–those books are sacred Scripture too and are vital to speaking the gospel aright. (Whether or not that Old Testament should include the Wisdom of Solomon or 1 & 2 Maccabees, however, is another matter.)  Pace Tatian, you need to have all four Gospels precisely as four Gospels–at the end of the day, a harmonization of them just won’t do.  Pace the Gnostics, however you interpret the Scriptures, your interpretation had better fit with the gospel that the Church had historically received (i.e., with the “rule of faith,” the regula fidei).  These were the basic theological parameters established by the early Church around the Scriptures, but within these parameters there was quite a lot of latitude for play and exploration.

So what about this little phrase in this little creed, kata tas graphas?  The graphas, the Scriptures in view are Israel’s Scriptures, not the New Testament (which at the time of this creed’s composition did not yet exist).  The creed then insists that the surprising claim that Israel’s messiah was none other than Jesus of Nazareth, a man shamefully executed and unexpectedly resurrected, does not, in fact, break with Israel’s story but rather fits it like a glove.  This, I would suggest, is the most fundamental of Christian convictions about Israel’s Scriptures.  We find this claim writ large across the New Testament in various and sundry ways.  For Matthew, Jesus is the “fulfillment” of Israel’s Scriptures.  For Luke, Jesus is the climax of Israel’s story.  For John, if you understand the Scriptures, you’ll understand Jesus.  For Paul, “the point of the Torah is Christ.”

For my part, then, to put first things first on the question of what to make of sacred Scripture is to insist upon the correctness of the ancient Christian conviction–to which the New Testament writers give voice–that Jesus is, in fact, Israel’s Messiah and that His death and resurrection were in some mysterious, counter-intuitive way in accordance with Israel’s Scriptures.  

Irenaeus and Origen and Augustine and Jerome and Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and Erasmus differed with one another on many questions about how to conceive of Scripture and Scripture’s role in the Church.  But on this much they were all in agreement.  In other words, this is about as close to what “mere Christianity” says about the Bible as you’re likely to get.

So while there is, of course, much more to be said about sacred Scripture, this, I think, comes first.  We may disagree on the genre of this or that book.  But that is, at best, secondary.  We may disagree on questions of who wrote which books when.  But those are, at best, secondary.  We may conceive of Scripture’s divine inspiration differently.  But that is, at best, secondary.  We may disagree about the usefulness or application of terms like “inerrancy” or “infallibility” or “authority.”  But that is, at best, secondary.  We may disagree on what is the best method for interpreting Scripture, or on how Scripture is to be related to the Church’s tradition or to the sciences.  But those are, at best, secondary matters.  These matters are, of course, important.  But they are, nevertheless, secondary.  And here, as elsewhere, I think that if you get the first things right, and put the first things first, you probably won’t go too far wrong.

 Capable Flesh

The tender flesh itself
will be found one day
—quite surprisingly—
to be capable of receiving,
and yes, full
capable of embracing
the searing energies of God.
Go figure.  Fear not.
For even at its beginning
the humble clay received
God’s art, whereby
one part became the eye
and another the ear, and yet
another the impetuous hand.
Therefore, the flesh
is not to be excluded
from the wisdom and the power
that now and ever animates
all things.  His life-giving
agency is made perfect,
we are told, in weakness—
made perfect in the flesh.

~St. Irenaeus (c. 125-c. 210),
adapted and translated by Scott Cairns &
as cited in Barbara Brown Taylor’s
An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010)

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to out pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. (Teaching a Stone to Talk, pp. 52-53)

There Annie Dillard succinctly captures one of the profoundest paradoxes of contemporary Church life: that week by week we drowsily summon the God who shouted Job down out of the tempest, and blithely invoke Him who toppled Pharaoh’s empire with wave after wave of catastrophe.  We glibly propose to encounter the King of kings who could wither a tree with a glance and who cracked Death itself in two as though we were taking a trip to the post office.

The contradiction between the extraordinary claims we make about the God we worship and the lackadaisical, flip, or trite ways in which we engage in our worship of Him betrays a fact about us that is both too obvious to need saying and to difficult to bear saying:

Hardly any of us believes a word of Christianity anymore.

What ever can I mean?  Do we not say the Creed?  Have I not accepted Jesus Christ as my very own personal Lord and Savior?  Can I not check all of the necessary doctrinal boxes?  Yes, yes, yes.  That’s all very well.  But in our bones we believe something else entirely.

In a way this problem’s as old as the hills.  It’s pretty clear from Paul’s letters, particularly to the Corinthians, that the earliest Gentile Christians were still more or less pagan in their basic instincts, religious reflexes, and spiritual sensibilities and that Paul was in a bit of an uphill battle trying to get them to be full-blooded Christians.  The same can surely be said for the ancient Christian missionaries who first took the gospel to woad-painted barbarians in Britannia and to the Germanic tribes of the north.  Whatever they might have said they believed upon converting to Christianity, their knee-jerk reactions to and perceptions of the world were still fundamentally those of animists and superstitious polytheists.

What we today have not yet reckoned with is the fact that we are in an analogous position.  Through the (largely positive!) influence of modern technology, economy, medicine, industry, popular entertainment and more, Modernity has profoundly determined how we instinctively engage our world.  Whether you call it our “social imaginary,” our “metaphysical dream,” our “plausibility structures,” or (altogether unsatisfactorily) our “worldview” we are all bent to feel that the Invisible Hand of the Market is more real than the strong arm of God, that medicine is more real than miracle, that facts–empirical, quantifiable phenomena–are more real than values, intentions, and universal truths (to say nothing of apocalyptic visions and ancient wisdom).

Whereas Paul had to swim upstream in an overtly pagan pre-Christian society, we have not yet awakened to the fact that we are awash with an implicitly pagan post-Christian society and that we, unlike Paul, have been more or less obliviously going with the flow.  Ironies abound here.  Many mainline churches that retain traditional forms of worship–having long-ago intellectualized the faith but according to Modernity’s rules–inadvertently eviscerated the Christian tradition’s truth claims and so evacuated that worship of its meaning–all of which was a preamble to the evacuation of their pews.  Evangelicalism, however, with our sometimes latent, sometimes overt anti-intellectualism (about which we are frequently in denial) passively absorbed more of modern American culture than we realized, a fact clearly illustrated in that our ceaseless endeavors to update our worship have resulted in our worship ever more closely approximating a Justin Bieber concert.  In both cases the Church has become complicit with, co-opted by, and conformed to the assumptions, instincts, habits, evaluations, and perceptions of Modernity and it is high time we woke up.

Our worship ever more closely approximates a Justin Bieber concert.

Woke up to what?  Woke up to the fact that the gospel is metaphysical TNT that, if lit by a moment’s attention, will explode the cultural assumptions we have so flaccidly absorbed.  That “invisible hand of the Market” upon which we lean belongs to the false de facto deity Mammon, with whom YHWH, the God of terrible aspect, the God of wind and fire, who rides upon the clouds and strides across the churning sea will in no wise share His rightful worship.  ”The Economy” which abandons well over a billion people to grinding poverty and upon which we look as an impersonal force is but the aggregate of our dealings with one another, for which we will one day have to give an account.  The weekly prayers of the people are more fundamentally in tune with the Healer of all flesh than all of the medical technologies upon which we rely.

This is not an argument for passing out signal flares in church.  But it is an argument for worship that will reeducate our post-Christian sensibilities and that will get the gospel into our marrow.  As to the specifics of what that would look like, well, that will have to wait for another post (or series of posts!).  But I will say this: This is not the first time that the Church has needed such a fundamental reeducation, and there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel when there are some pretty darn good wheels ready to hand.

Let the reader understand.

Lord, You have always given
bread for the coming day;
and though I am poor,
today I believe.

Lord, You have always given
strength for the coming day;
and though I am weak,
today I believe.

Lord, You have always given
peace for the coming day;
and though I am anxious of heart,
today I believe.

Lord, You have always kept me
safe in trials;
and now, tried as I am,
today I believe.
Lord, You have always marked
the road for the coming day;
and though it may be hidden,
today I believe.

Lord, You have always lightened
this darkness of mine;
and though the night is here,
today I believe.

Lord, You have always spoken
when time was ripe;
and though you be silent now,
today I believe.

~from Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community (New York: HarperOne, 2002), pp. 22-23