Tuesday Tome - Being Christian

This little book is so accessible and yet so deep. While a theologian, Rowan Williams writes with a pastor's heart and in a style of writing that is as lovely to read as it is easy to understand. I will be recommending this book often and giving copies to new and renewing Christians.

There are four chapters in the book: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, and Prayer. I'll share a short quotation from each.

On Baptism:
"Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of the baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don't go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!" (p. 6)

On Bible:
"As Christians read the Bible, the story converges on Jesus. The full meaning of what has gone before is laid bare in Jesus. The agenda for what follows is set in Jesus...

"Here in the story of Jesus, is the story in which we see what an unequivocal obedience and love look like. Here is the story where we see a response to God so full of integrity, so whole, that it reflects perfectly the act of God that draws it out. Here is the story in which the speaking of God and the responding of human beings are bound together inseparably. And so if the whole Bible is about the speaking of God and the responding of human beings, then of course it is by looking at the story of Jesus, the luminous centre, that we discover how to read the rest of it. Jesus, living, dying, raised from the dead, breathing his Spirit on his Church – it is in his light that you read the rest of the Bible." (pp. 34, 35)

On Eucharist:
"So as we give thanks over bread and wine in the presence of the Lord we are – with him and in him – seeking to make that connection between the world and God, between human experience and the divine and eternal Giver. And that means that we begin to look differently at the world around us. If in every corner of experience God the Giver is still at work, then in every object we see and handle, in every situation we encounter, God the Giver is present and our reaction is shaped by this." (p. 49)

On Prayer:
"It seems that all Christian reflection, all theology worth the name, began as people realized that because of Jesus Christ they could talk to God in a different way. It was the new experience of Christian prayer that got people thinking, 'If Jesus somehow makes it possible for us to talk to God in a new way, then surely there are things we ought to be saying and believing about Jesus.' And so the great exploratory business of theology began to unfold.

"That newness of prayer is expressed most vividly by St. Paul in Romans 8 and Galatians 4. 'God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father"' (Galatians 4.6). The new way we talk to God is as Father, and that is the work of the Spirit of Jesus. And of course it is the prayer recorded of Jesus himself, the night before his death (Mark 14.36). So, for the Christian, to pray – before all else – is to let Jesus' prayer happen in you. And the prayer that Jesus himself taught his disciples expresses this very clearly: 'Our Father.' We begin by expressing the confidence that we stand where Jesus stands and we can say what Jesus says." (pp. 61-62)