Quotes from Thomas G. Long

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.

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.

The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitation.

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

One could always count on Baal for a religious experience, but not so Yahweh.

God does not always move us when we desire to be moved, and everything that moves us deeply is not God.

What was it—I ask myself—that first vexed them into contemplations?

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.

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.

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

it models the primary way in which the church comes to know God's will.

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.

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.

use the Bible critically."9

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

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.

Questioning a text is a creative, imaginative activity—something like brainstorming.

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

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.