13 August 2010
New Lutheran Quote of the Day
So God makes mockery of our death with all the abounding gifts of beauty and strength that He showers on us. Our life is in His hand. The whole of our life is in God's hand, even to old age. The lessening of strength in old age is to us, therefore, not just the pathetic relic of a vigorous youth that we miserably covet. The flower, indeed, is gone, the plant shrivels, but soon the seed will fall into the ground. From the seed comes resurrection, a new life untouched by sin, entirely free of every anxiety, for it is a life entirely to God. We are one with the lilies not only in that we must die but also that we are the creatures of God, fellow creatures with Christ. Our Lord takes our brother creature, the lily, and bids us learn how to grow, to live, and to die. Therefore, consider God's lilies. Amen. -- Dr. Norman Nagel, Selected Sermons, pp. 216, 217.
I wonder what it would take to more widely market/advertize/publish this stuff.
ReplyDeleteIt puts any of the famous "so called christian" authors to shame.
Dr. Nagel's advisory ("Our Lord takes our brother creature, the lily, and bids us learn how to grow, to live, and to die. Therefore, consider God's lilies. Amen.") is echoed, if with a less forceful confidence and with a dependence anchored more on syllogism than by a cross-focused faith, from an entirely unexpected source viz., literature's greatest detective:
ReplyDelete"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers." -- Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Naval Treaty (emphasis supplied)
By the way, it may not be widely appreciated, but Mr. Holmes gave short shrift to the Copernican theory of cosmology. Thus always, then, to those who mock Symbols with trumped up blasts against magnets and the influences of garlic juice. The irksome blarings are irrelevant to more solid, vital and far-reaching truths.