Ancient Word

Living the Word on the Street 

Art by Eric Drooker (Drooker.com)

Reflections upon the Revised Common Lectionary
Sermons, notes, quotes and ideas.  These reflections come from Seedy punters and mobs who seek to live the Word with the Bible in one hand and a mouse in the other.

Resources for Popular Bible Study
Including notes from our popular "How to run a Bible Study that Doesn't Suck" seminar.

Quotes about Bible, Story, Narrative...

I like to think of the bible as a stick of dynamite, sitting in the basement of every church in the location of empire, waiting for those with ‘eyes to see’ to light the fuse. With the tools of literacy, the power of the dominant culture’s dreams about itself can be broken and the power of the story to awaken us from our sleep broken open.

"The churches story will not interpret the world to the world's satisfaction. Hence there is a temptation ( no weaker word will do) for the church to deny her "counter, original, spare, strange" starting point in Abraham and Jesus and to give instead a self account or theology that will seem true to the world on the worlds own present terms. Surely, it will be said, the salvation of the world must rest on some better foundation than tales about an ancient nomad and stories of a Jewish healer? "

I will tell you something about stories, (he said) They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories. Their evil is mighty but it can't stand up to our stories. So they would try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then.

What we see is in large part determined by the stories we tell.

Tim Costello

The theological exploration of biography or the theological reconnaissance of history are apt, and even normative, styles because each is congruent with the definitive New Testament insight and instruction: the Incarnation… biography (and history), any biography and every biography, is inherently theological in the sense that it contains already – literally by virtue of the incarnation – the news of the gospel whether or not anyone discerns that.  We are each one of us parables.

William Stringfellow : A Simplicity of Faith

A dearth of good stories can render us very vulnerable, because it allows us to see ourselves in only a limited number of ways….  So many of our emotional, relational ethical resources have been stripped by a knife edge, performance based society… we need alternative stories to give us different perspectives on events which otherwise have the power to crush us.

Tim Costello

 Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step forward.

Ivan Illich

Inevitably we live out of stories, whether they add up or not, whether they are recognised or implicit.  We cannot avoid it as we all try and put some ‘spin’ on our lives.  The moral question is which story do we choose to make sense of our living, and why we choose it.

Tim Costello