12 Quotes by C. Andrew Doyle

Jesus turns our inherited notions about God upside down. We discover that we have been a part of religious systems of domination.

The work of an apostle, from the first ones sent out by Jesus to anyone aligned with the reign of peace, is to be God's loving word to every part of the world. Echoing the Word, they are sent out to confront the powers and principalities by rejecting state violence and revolutionary violence, and, instead putting on the armor of peace.

Suffice it to say, the ecclesia, the community of peace, imagined on the Galilean seashore had changed. Like a pebble tossed in a pond with ever expanding ripples, the emergence of Christianity in the urban centers of the Roman Empire forced the Church to adopt new forms and structures for mission and ministry. Jesus’s movement became a thriving principality. At the close of the third century, an organized Church had replaced a disorganized but single-minded community on a mission of peace.

Partnering with God, we cease to see a partitioned world of buffered people. By rejecting this “I get mine you get yours” religion we stop mistaking our faith as a means of compelling others to become something they are not: me. At the very core saying “yes” to God is about becoming a whole of paradoxically interdependent parts.

God’s invitation to vocation also erodes the compartmentalization between our religious and professional lives. In the biblical worldview, the way of peace requires full participation. We cannot claim to be one person in one particular context or set of relations, and then a claim to be a totally different person in another context. There is no such thing as professional holy people. We live complete lives in continuity with God and our vocation is equally operative in every space we inhabit.

Reclaiming neighborliness as part of the communal life is essential to Christ’s vision. No person can live unto themselves. It is simply impossible. But, more importantly the personalization of neighborliness returns authority to the members of the small community the local church serves. Its members start to care for one another again, which taps into the inclusive DNA of the Jesus Movement.

To journey as Abraham and Sarah did is to reject our inclination to protect ourselves by force. In their going--in our going--we embrace our vulnerability and forsake our tribe in order to journey with God and God’s tribe, pronouncing God’s blessing upon the world.

More recently, artists have portrayed the overshadowing of Mary as a kind of sexual ecstasy, but these interpretations say more about us than they do about Luke or Mary. The other modern trend, which is to “demythologize” Mary’s experience by arguing that Luke has derived her calling narrative from those other more monstrous mythologies, misses the point.

Our sense of our own calling must begin with curiosity about how God has called God's people from the very beginning, because the vocations held within the Church are not simply vocations of a "New Testament" kind, but are rooted in the authority of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel.