Grains of Sand

Possibly the best half-hour you spend today: The Reverend Dr Richard Lischer delivers a sermon entitled “God’s Faculty” (All Saints) at Duke University Chapel. The sermon is at 29 minutes into this video

DR RICHARD LISCHER, Lutheran Pastor and Professor of Preaching at Duke University, speaks in a marvellous sermon for All Saints’ Day of his first sight of the Cathedral at Chartres, France, “shimmering in the morning mist and looking as though it had come straight down from Heaven – triumphant, beautiful, transcendent”.

And of the first church he served as pastor, that “does not appear to be descended from Heaven, but rather its worn red bricks appear to grow up out of the soil … and I’m here to tell ya – it does not shimmer in the morning mist.”

The sibling churches are a parable: “The Church above that lives by sight and the Church below that struggles by faith. Yet not two churches but one Church. In the Church…