Matthew Smith

“Jesus says, “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Lk 22:27). Jesus’ question isn’t a trick. The one sitting at the table is more important than the servant who serves. Jesus is not encouraging a Christian leader to call himself a servant but still stand up at the front, to be thanked by everyone, and to be honored. In the picture Jesus gives, the servant is not honored, not thanked, perhaps not even acknowledged. All too often “servant leadership” today is a euphemism. A true servant leader ensures the recipients of the gifts know the servant leader is just the broker, not the patron. In Jesus’ story, the servant is Jesus, highlighting his role as our broker. As we imitate him, Christlike brokers use their skills, ability, and gifts to benefit others, without seeking to be repaid honor or gifts in kind, as if they were the patron. This is what Christ means by being a servant leader, a broker. It means taking the servant’s status, those who aren’t being honored when they serve.”
― E Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”
― Annie Dillard

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Peace means far more than the opposite of war.”
― Fred Rogers