Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 10

Only the gospel of John recounts the crowd’s reaction to the miraculous abundance of food that they had received: ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world’ (John 6.14). This sign revealed the truth about Christ. It was a sign of love: an authoritative and compassionate love that responds to human need; a self-giving and sacrificial love, shown in Christ’s actions of giving thanks, which point to the Last Supper (John 6.47-51); and an overflowingly abundant love, as the baskets of leftovers were gathered and counted, ‘so that nothing may be lost’ (John 6.12).

This love reminds us that the book is not primarily about abstract ideas and controversies, but about all of us and the many ways we live in love and faith with hope. It is about our lives and passions, our struggles and delights – the everyday substance of our lives. Crucially, for many it is about pain and suffering, sometimes made more acute by the church. Engagement with this project will be more costly for some than others, especially LGBTI+ people, and so it is an invitation to exercise utmost kindness and patience as we seek truth together, all the while listening deeply to one another’s experiences and convictions.

This book is trying to create a space for us all to rediscover the compassionate, self-giving and abundant love of Christ in and among us as we learn together. It is about being led deeper into the truth about the God we encounter in Scripture: the God who has spoken in love to our broken world in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; the God who, in renewing all things (Matthew 19.28), is calling us to the hope in which we were saved, a hope for what we do not yet see, but wait for with patience. It is about proclaiming the kingdom of God and making Christ known in the world he came by grace to save and bring to fulness of life.

We hope you will accept the invitation to read this book, explore the accompanying resources that can be found on the Living in Love and Faith website (www.churchofengland.org/LLF) and make use of the Living in Love and Faith Course.

Here are some suggestions to help you begin.

• Whenever possible, consider studying the book together with people who have different convictions and experiences from your own, using the Living in Love and Faith Course together to help you to engage lovingly, sensitively, generously and respectfully with one other.

• Wherever you choose to enter the book, make sure you cover the whole route of the learning journey that it takes you on, which might mean going back to parts that you skipped.

• Be prayerfully open to learning from understandings and perspectives that differ from your own, even when this is uncomfortable.

• Be active in your reading: engage with the Bible verses that are referred to, use the Living in Love and Faith Course and read the lived experience stories – the Encounters – that can be found in between each Part of the book.

• Listen to your own inner responses – intellectual, emotional, spiritual – to what you are reading and become aware of how they might be shaping your understanding.

• Read prayerfully and expectantly in love and faith with hope. Why not pray the following prayer each time you meet with others to learn together?

O Holy Spirit,

Giver of light and life,

Impart to us thoughts higher than our own thoughts,

and prayers better than our own prayers,

and powers beyond our own powers,

that we may spend and be spent

in the ways of love and goodness,

after the perfect image

of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Amen.

from Daily Prayer (1941) edited by Eric Milner-White and G.W. Briggs

Eternal God and Father,

you create and redeem us

by the power of your love:

guide and strengthen us by your Spirit,

that we may give ourselves

in love and service

to one another and to you;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Common Worship Daily Prayer