Shows / What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
These are challenging times for the church, and especially for those responsible for a congregation. Ronald P. Byars, a former pastor, teacher, and now pew-sitter, reflects on how the varied “languages” of faith most effectively reach the faithful and the unfaithful in times both unfavorable and favorable. Byars served as pastor of congregations in Fremont, Allen Park, Okemos, and Birmingham, Michigan; and in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1999 he joined the faculty of Union Presbyterian Seminary in…
Episodes
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Anxiety, Deception, and Idolatry
Authoritarianism manipulates people’s fears and anxieties. It promises a redemption that is not in human hands to give.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Doctrine
Doctrine needs to be pondered over a lifetime. One reflects on it as one grows and changes, with the various seasons and experiences of life providing a series…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Real Presence
While it might give information, the sermon is not about giving information. It’s meant to be more like an encounter. The sermon drawn from the text can become…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
What motivates people to worship?
No matter how threatening the times, worship always centers us in a framework of hope.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Liturgical Essentials: Bath, Book, Meal, and Attentiveness to the poor.
When the apostle Paul met with the leaders of the Jerusalem church and received their blessing and acknowledgement of his calling to minister to the Gentiles…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
You can baptize with sand.
Those responsible for planning and leading worship need to know a little more than that!
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Embracing Ritual
Recognized or not, ritual is basic to human life, not something primitive to be left behind as we learn to live more and more in our reasoning heads.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Spiritual death
Sometimes it feels embarrassing even to say the word “God” seriously in certain circles.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The cultural authority once granted to the church has been withdrawn.
To prioritize trying to save our institutional life at any cost is a worthless endeavor if it leads us to be embarrassed by the very faith that God called the…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Atheist?
Archbishop William Temple said that, “If you have a false idea of God, the more religious you are, the worse it is for you—it were better for you to be an…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
We have a soul-sickness problem that manifests as a language problem.
Maybe the church can rejuvenate its mission in the world by majoring for a while in careful listening. It may be that what the world needs most is a people…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The power of Evil.
Jesus’ confrontation with demonic powers has been validated, his struggle vindicated. The written story of Jesus’ ascension makes use of naive images that…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Basic values require a sound foundation.
For people of faith, the foundation lies in our perception of who God is.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The Holy Trinity
The Muslims have my sympathy. Those who find themselves hung up on the arithmetic of one and three have my sympathy. The atheists have my sympathy. But the God…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Why the church?
The church is nothing less than a priestly community whose purpose is to represent, as best as it can, something of God’s deep interest in the welfare of the…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Doubt doesn’t have to be cynical.
I’d like to think that Thomas is using doubt as a tool with which to dig deeper. Doubt plays a role for people who work in any serious discipline. It can serve…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The kingdom of God is about justice, but justice is elusive in history and often thwarted.
Anyone who preaches, or listens to sermons, has discovered that the text for last Sunday’s sermon and the one for this Sunday’s sermon may seem to point in…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
A traveling Bible study for some whose faith has been shaken.
The authoritative voice one may learn to discern in Scripture is often drowned out by the sheer abundance and volume of other voices. But it hasn’t gone…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
“’In the afterlife,’ Maud May told me, ‘God’s got a lot of explaining to do.’”
God, viewed cross-wise, reveals God’s self not as relating to the world in dominating power, but rather as a God become present to the world in weakness, in…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The eucharistic prayer in the newer service books highlights the central affirmations of the Christian gospel.
Praying the Great Thanksgiving at Communion led me, over time, to reflect more deeply about eschatology, about which seminarians learn a little and then try to…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The anticipation of heaven’s refuge did not reject the hope of a cosmic redemption, but gradually pushed it to one side.
“In scripture’s images of a heavenly banquet, we are led to a big-picture redemption, a cosmic resurrection, a transfiguration of heaven and earth, where God’s…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Adam and Eve had persuaded themselves that God might not be playing fair with them.
Adam and Eve did what’s so easy to do: They followed their impulses, naively abandoned their trust as though trust were just a trick meant to deceive them. So…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Faith is, in some sense, always a mystery.
“It does not take much exposure to religious extremism to find oneself sufficiently repelled as to want to distance ourselves, to shake the dust off our feet…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus.
“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus. The Holy Spirit speaks to the church; and we find ourselves rejecting some ideas…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Why Does Love So Often Elude Us?
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Disenchantments
“Growing up is, very often at least, a series of disenchantments.” As childhood gives way to adolescence, and adolescence to young adulthood, we’ve got to…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Judgment and Love go Hand in Hand
It’s easy to critique other tribes, other nations; but the prophets did what wasn’t expected and isn’t easy.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
An Easter Visitor
He told me that it made no sense for me to be preaching about the resurrection to this young, well-educated congregation.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought it Would Be
It was almost as though I had begun to hear a divine voice speaking to me in, under, and between the written words.
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of All Nature. . .
Austin Farrer argued that “while theologians of the late Middle Ages primarily looked in the scriptures for propositions and modern theologians have looked…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Walking on Water
One of the persistent questions about the New Testament is what to make of the stories that describe Jesus doing things that require the reader to suspend…
- What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith
Preach the Hard Texts
Sitting in that space between scripture and the tumble of the world, it seems the most rewarding sermons tend to be on the most difficult texts. Perhaps they…