Thomas G. Long > Quotes

“We show hospitality to strangers not merely because they need it, but because we need it, too. The stranger at the door is the living symbol and memory that we are all strangers here. This is not our house, our table, our food, our lodging; this is God's house and table and food and lodging. We were pilgrims and wanderers, aliens and strangers, even enemies of God, but we, too, were welcomed into this place. To show hospitality to the stranger is, as Gordon Lathrop has observed, to say, "We are beggars here together. Grace will surprise us both.”
― Thomas G. Long, Beyond the Worship Wars

“The move from text to sermon is a move from beholding to attesting, from seeing to saying, from listening to telling, from perceiving to testifying, from being a witness to bearing witness.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“I. Getting the Text in View A. Select the text B. Reconsider where the text begins and ends C. Establish a reliable translation of the text  II. Getting Introduced to the Text D. Read the text for basic understanding E. Place the text in its larger context III. Attending to the Text F. Listen attentively to the text IV. Testing What Is Heard in the Text G. Explore the text historically H. Explore the literary character of the text  I. Explore the text theologically  J. Check the text in the commentaries  V. Moving toward the Sermon K. State the claim of the text upon the hearers (including the preacher) A”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“A couple you do not recognize - visitors, strangers - come to the door. How are you to view these people and what is your responsibility towards them? ... To assume that these visitors are really like you, that there are no real difference between you and them, and that the highest goal possible is that you and the other members of your congregation will become intimate friends with them and invite them into the private spaces of your life.”
― Thomas G. Long, Beyond the Worship Wars

“Why biblical texts? Because biblical texts have the power to release what Brueggemann calls a “counter-imagination,” a way of seeing the world that is an alternative to the consumerist, militaristic, death-obsessed imagination of the culture.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“Throughout its history, the church has discovered that when it goes to the Scripture in openness and trust, it finds itself uniquely addressed there by God and its identity as the people of God shaped by that encounter.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“The preacher, not the commentator, is the one sent by these people at this moment to this text, and, therefore, only the preacher truly knows the full range of questions to ask.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“Exegesis can help us in many ways, but it finally cannot do what is most important: tell us what this text wishes to say on this occasion to our congregation. The preacher must decide this, and it is a risky and exciting decision. Getting”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“One could always count on Baal for a religious experience, but not so Yahweh.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“Questioning a text is a creative, imaginative activity—something like brainstorming.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“use the Bible critically.”9”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“Part of the ethic of Christian worship is giving up the idea that every sermon, every prayer, every hymn must be focused upon me and my needs. Sometimes hearing the gospel actually means "overhearing" the gospel being spoken directly to others whose circumstances are unlike our own.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“church has discovered that when it goes to the Scripture in faith, it finds itself encountered by Christ in ways that serve as the keys for understanding its encounters with Christ everywhere else.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“To use the popular phrase, a church is “a hospital for sinners,” but that is not all it is. A church is also a community of faith where people come to offer their commitment, energy, and intelligence for the mission of Jesus Christ. The gospel beckons, “Come unto to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens,” but it also says that disciples of Jesus are called to “take up their cross and follow me.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“Knowing that we come to Scripture from and within a theological tradition reminds us that entirely new ground is not being broken. The church has been to this text before—many times—and a theological tradition is, in part, the church’s memory of past encounters with this and other biblical texts. A theologically informed interpreter of Scripture enters the text guided by a map drawn and refined by those who have come to this place before. Coming to a text from a theological tradition, the”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“action. We must discover the patterns, customs, and even the habits around which they organize their lives. If we look at them and see only our own reflection, we do not know them. If we look at them and see only an “other,” an object of our scrutiny, we do not know them. Only when we know who they are with us can we claim really to know them. An exegetical process introduces us to the text. It provides some crucial biographical information, and it even discloses some of the text’s secrets. It is up to the preacher, then, to bring the life of the congregation into the text’s presence, to dwell there long and prayerfully, and to discern the reality of this text as it is with us. This is eventful. Something happens between text and people: a claim is made, a voice is heard, a textual will is exerted, and the sermon will be a bearing witness to this event. As the final step in the exegetical process, the preacher throws the first cord across the gap between text and sermon by describing the text’s claim upon the hearers, including the preacher. We are ready to move on to the creation of the sermon itself only when we can finish the following sentence: “In relation”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“The critical question is whether preachers are supposed to help people “find their stories in the Bible” or are supposed to call the hearers, as George Lindbeck has suggested, to “make the story of the Bible their story.”45”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“The scriptures begin not with a set of principles or proverbs but with the voice of a narrator, a storyteller: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:1–2), and they end with a worshipful cry for the story of God to move to its next, dramatic chapter: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). The Bible contains diverse literary forms and genres, but they are all enclosed in a grand narrative parenthesis. To the eye of faith, to be human is to be a creature, and to be a creature is to be enmeshed in the story of creation. A major theme in the theology of baptism, to name another place of narrative investment, is that through baptism Christians are gathered up into the identity of Jesus Christ, which means at least in part that we now see our lives in the shape and pattern of the story of Jesus. Jesus is, as Hebrews puts it, the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). He has blazed the trail ahead of us, and his story is now our story.”
― Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope

“The problem with all this (Kubler-Ross 5 stages of grief) is that there is no solid evidence that these theories about grief's stages are true. In fact, the evidence we do have, says Konigsberg, points to grief as unpredictable, wild and undomesticated in its form and intensity. It breaks like a storm over us and then calms, seemingly without reason. With the possible exception of deeply pathological grief, attempts to manage grief therapeutically are largely useless--and may harm people more than they help them.”
― Thomas G. Long

“it models the primary way in which the church comes to know God’s will.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“ritual reenactment of how the church comes to know who it is, who God is, and what God calls it to be. How does the church find guidance from God? It prayerfully goes to Scripture and then wrestles with the meaning of what it finds there. Biblical preaching models this way of knowing. Biblical”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“To be baptized is a sign that everything we are – work and play, personality and character, commitments and passions, family and ethnicity – is gathered up and given shape and definition by our identity as one of God's own children.”
― Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral

“Perhaps the best way, then, to read the tough language in Matthew that all sin and all sinners will be burned up in the fire of God’s judgment is to understand it as a graphic expression of what is ultimately a glad, confident, and hopeful promise that nothing that mars God’s goodness will endure. There is no cancer, no killing virus, no Alzheimer’s, no plague, no child abuse, no tyranny, no cruelty, no oppression, no lynching, no placing of children in cages, no homelessness, no tragic tears, no suffocating loneliness, no torture, no death in the kingdom of heaven. God and God’s kingdom will be revealed to be all that truly exists, all-consuming, and nothing outside of it will have any reality at all. All that has destroyed and maimed and oppressed and polluted creation and the human prospect will be burned away like straw.”
― Thomas G. Long, Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God

“God does not always move us when we desire to be moved, and everything that moves us deeply is not God.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“The old American revival hymn wonders about Jesus, “You ask me how I know He lives?” The hymn’s answer breathes the claustrophobic air of American piety, “He lives within my heart.”7 A small space indeed for the Lord of all time and space. With our democratic and individualistic impulses, our entrepreneurial instincts, our revivalist past, and our current psychotherapeutic preoccupations, it is small wonder that the more inward, the more “sincere” Christian faith is deemed to be, the more we tend to prize it.”
― Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope

“The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitation.”
― Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope

“What was it—I ask myself—that first vexed them into contemplations?”
― Thomas G. Long, The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care

“But we do not do this task of rebuilding our life narratives alone. In the wilderness of grief, God provides narrative manna--just enough shape and meaning to keep us walking--and sends the Comforter, who knits together the raveled sould and refuses to leave us orphaned. Sometimes the bereaved say they are looking for closure, but in the Christian faith we do not see closure so much as we pray that all of our lost loves will be gathered into that great unending story fashioned by God's grace.”
― Thomas G. Long, The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care

“Preaching is biblical whenever the preacher allows a text from the Bible to serve as the leading force in shaping the content and purpose of the sermon. More”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching

“Exegesis produces its best results when it is carried out in the context of the living faith of the Christian community, which is directed toward the salvation of the entire world.”11 That is also why many biblical scholars and teachers”
― Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching