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Showing posts with label Grace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grace. Show all posts

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Gustavo Gutiérrez dies aged 96



The Rev. Dr. Gustavo Gutiérrez is regarded as the father of liberation theology. I remember Gutiérrez giving a lecture series which I attended many years ago. He was wise, insightful, and had a sense of humour. He reminded me a lot of the president of our seminary, the Rev. Dr. William Hordern, like Hordern he had a strong theology of grace. For more on Gutiérrez, read the following tribute here.


Thursday, August 22, 2013

God's true nature and activity

This morning's devotional and prayer-time centred around Psalm 103. The words have always been among my favourite in the Hebrew Bible. In verse 8, over against so many folks who think that the First Testament promotes only a war God of punishment, hellfire and brimstone; the psalmist declares the true nature of God vis-a-vis how God has been present and active in the psalmist's life and in the lives of the Israelites: "The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." The psalmist goes on to give us a dose of reality concerning our mortality too, by contrasting the grass and flower, the latter of which is beautiful, yet very short lived; and the everlasting nature of God in verses 15-17. So appreciate and make the most of your flourishing today and rely on God's steadfast love to be all-sufficient and everlasting to carry you into the future.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

A brief prayer: The radiance of light

May the radiance of your light, O Christ, that bathes these trees and shrubs with life bathe me with life today.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

A short, short story

Elias offers a prayer at the wall in Jerusalem for his people, especially the ones who live in daily fear of yet another bomb in the living room and children dead. 
   Abdulla throws rocks at the IDF soldiers who clear a path for a bulldozer to destroy his olive grove. He prays to his God too, that his enemy would be defeated and pushed into the Mediterranean. 
   A Coptic priest, named Joseph, prays for the safety of his parishioners, as their non-Coptic neighbours become increasingly suspicious by the day with the escalating conflict between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood.
   Jews and Christians living for centuries in Arab nations are being ethnically cleansed and wonder what to do and where to go. Meanwhile, the Western media ignores them.
   All over Africa, Asia, and Latin America the little people like Lee and Kim, Seti and Ette, Jose and Maria are homeless and jobless thanks to large Western corporations developing natural resources for sheer profit, without any thought of the environment or the well-being of the peoples of these nations. 
   In the Western world, citizens like Harry and Janet continue to take their democratic freedoms for granted, shop til they drop, and buy cheap condos in warm and exotic places for the winter.  They can do this because they pay the least amount of money for groceries and clothing that come from nations that exploit their workers in sweat shops and slave labour agricultural estates owned by billionaires. 
   Meanwhile God continues to shed tears of sorrow at a world divided and falling apart, ignoring his love and super-abundant grace that envelopes the universe.