Quotes about Presence

As C. S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.3

God's kingdom is coming in and through the work of Jesus, not by taking people away from this world but by transforming things within this world, bringing the sphere of earth into the presence, and under the rule, of heaven itself.

He is himself the Temple, the physical place on earth where the Shekinah has come to take up residence.

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

This was something new. They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a "religion" nor a "political power," but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human.

Because we live between ascension and appearing, joined to Jesus Christ by the Spirit but still awaiting his final coming and presence, we can be both properly humble and properly confident.

How, then, can the Temple be cleansed so that humans, with the polluting smell of death upon them, can nevertheless come into God's Presence? The answer supplied by the levitical rituals is that the sacrificial blood is the sign of God-given life, a life more powerful than death, a life therefore that purifies both sanctuary and worshipper.

Israel's god dwelt (in principle; and he would do so again) in the Temple; his tabernacling presence ('Shekinah') functioned as had the pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness. He revealed himself and his will through Torah; for some rabbis at least, when one studied Torah it was as though one was in the Temple itself.

God put Jesus forth, Paul seems to be saying, as the place where heaven and earth overlapped, the place where the loving Presence of the one God and the faithful obedience of the true human being would meet and merge and be realized in space, time, and matter.

Jesus is the 'Word' of God. Jesus is the Wisdom through which the world was made. Jesus is, in some senses, the new Torah. And, in a move which has stupendous consequences, Jesus is the true Shekinah, the true presence of the one true God, the truth of which the Jerusalem Temple was simply a foretaste.9

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

I wasn't in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it.