Sermon Audio (5.25.14) - Jeremiah 31

Sermon Audio (5.25.14) – Jeremiah 31

Our good friend Gideon Tsang joined us this week to preach words of redemption from Jeremiah 31.

The quotes that Gideon shared:

“We discover our true selves in love.” — Thomas Merton
“We have forgotten that we belong to each other.” — Mother Teresa
“Our frightened selves want only for the gathered to like us, to agree with us, or be intimidated by us. I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what he finds there. Delights in it, in fact. Maybe, He makes a beeline to the outcasts and chooses, in them, to go where love has not yet arrived. His ways aren’t our ways, but they sure could be. We have grown accustomed to think that loving as God does is hard. We think it’s about moral strain and obligation. We presume it requires a spiritual muscularity of which we are not capable, a layering of burden on top of sacrifice, with a side order of guilt.” — Gregory Boyle
“No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there … We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.” — Thomas Merton
“Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn’t point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.” — Jurgen Moltmann