Robert Farrar Capon Quotes
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The bread and the pastry, the cheeses and wine, and the sugar go into the Supper of the lamb because we do. It is our love that brings the city home. It is I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.
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What is good is difficult, and what is difficult is rare.
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The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.
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At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.
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The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis.
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Perhaps you see, therefore, why I think taste must come before nutrition? Our infatuation for the quasi-scientific has left us easy marks for con men and tin fiddle manufacturers.
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The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn't seem like much to you, you're right: it isn't. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It's not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death.
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If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter.
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With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.
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Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with... Give us pasta with a hundred fillings.
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...we are saved by Christ alone who raises us from the dead - from the absolution of our death. We come before him at the judgement with no handwriting whatsoever against us. It's simply cheating to say you believe that and then renege on it by postulating some list of extra-rotten crimes for which Christ has to send you to hell. He, the universal Redeemer, is the only judge; as far as he's concerned, the only mandatory sentence is to life and life abundant.
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Grace cannot prevail...until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.
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Do you seriously envision St. Paul or Calvin or Luther opening bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before the service? Luther at least would turn over in his grave.
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The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church.
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The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes, that she has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our songs, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch.
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We are not saved by what Jesus taught, and we are certainly not saved by what we understand Jesus to have taught. We are saved by Jesus Himself.
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Only miracle is plain; it is in the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory.
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...there is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom?
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If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.
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He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing.
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Your stew, so long deferred, stands finally extra causas. Greet it as your fellow creature. It is as deliciously unnecessary as you are.
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Christianity is NOT a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however - the Good News of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over - period.
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One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world
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Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.
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However much we hate the law, we are more afraid of grace
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Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness.
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... the proper self-knowledge and self-love of every created thing is ipso facto a participation in the knowledge and love of God. The entire universe moves by desire for the Highest Good simply because every part of it loves what God loves - namely, its own being.
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A lost sheep is, for all practical purposes a dead sheep. It is the admission that we are dead in our sins---that we have no power of ourselves either to save ourselves or to convince anyone else that we are worth saving. It is the recognition that our whole life is out of our hands and that if we ever live again, our life will be entirely the gift of some gracious shepherd. God finds us the desert of death (not in the garden of improvement) and in the power of Jesus' resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home.
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... the divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't.
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Salvation is a gift given, not a bargain struck.
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