What I’m Reading 04/11/2008

A Conservative Christian Environmental Blog – ‘Cause the World’s Not Ours to Mess Up [Ps 24:1] – Annotated

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• Churches that maintain the status quo will be lukewarm rather than hot or cold! – post by umjeremy

• A dead body, you see, will take on the temperature of its environment. Such was the case with the church at Laodicea.

  – from Don McGee’s “Laodicea, Assuming Room Temperature”

bethquick.com: The Pastor as Prophet – Annotated

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• I’ve been thinking a lot about the pastor as prophet. Are pastors prophets? Two comments to consider:

  In Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “I am not surprised that most prophets are itinerants . . . I think the real clue to the tameness of a preacher is the difficulty one finds in telling unpleasant truths to people who one has learned to love . . . Once personal contact is established you are very prone to temper your wind to the shorn sheep. It is certainly difficult to be human and honest at the same time. I’m not surprised that most budding prophets are tamed in time to become harmless parish priests.”

  In contrast (of sorts), Rev. Grace Imathiu, preaching at the 2007 Festival of Homiletics on Ezekiel’s call, asked, “How does a priest function when they are stripped of traditions, robes, when being a priest is more than just keeping the status quo? A priest in exile is a priest without safety of liturgy, office, family, class. That priest is Ezekiel. Whenever there is a crisis in the life of a priest, there is the opportunity for God to break in and the priest to be transformed into a prophet.”