#sermons

Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back. ↗

— Harvey Cox

#culturally #discourse #forbidden #forms #last

In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since. ↗

— Robertson Davies

#religion #sermons #business

When the congregation becomes the norm by which sermons are measured, a minister has put a mortgage on his soul. ↗

— Ralph W. Sockman

#congregation #his #measured #minister #mortgage

Grace makes us inwardly RIGHT so we walk outwardly UPRIGHT ↗

— John Paul Warren

#christian #church #faith #gospel #grace

Our hope is that the Lord will intervene in our lives, but if not, we will discover whether our faith is real, or only something we hold onto when it appears to be working for our benefit. ↗

— John Bytheway

#faith

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing. ↗

— Alan Watts

#act #being #beings #changing #delivered

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#act #better #hundred #obedience #one act

The whole Bible is the story of men and women trying to get back to God, to overcome that sin with sacrifices, good works, sermons, prophesy, witnessing, giving all kinds of things. It never worked. ↗

— Keith Miller

#bible #get #giving #god #good

With the requests of some he complied, and has published a discourse, delivered before the Society for recovering drowned persons, which may be justly pronounced one of the most beautiful and interesting sermons in the English language. ↗

— John Strachan

#before #complied #delivered #discourse #drowned

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. ↗

— Theodore Parker

#atheism #barack-obama #justice #martin-luther-king-jr #morality