Deus Misereatur

  Long before "The Chosen," or "The Passion of the Christ," or "Jesus Christ, Superstar," or "Godspell" there was "The Man Born to be King" by Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers was commissioned to pen 12 radio plays on the life of Christ to be reenacted on BBC Radio in 1941, in the heat of the Second World War. Recently Kathryn Wehr, creative author and scholar, has compiled a new, 420-page paperback including all twelve plays, with writer's notes, scripture references and more in "The Man Born to be King: Wade Annotated Edition". The work is a slow read, which in this case is a good thing. It is packed with background details, the history of the work, the adversity Sayers received early on, footnotes, commentary, and more. Dorothy L. Sayers, a contemporary of C.S. Lewis, and one who corresponded with him, was quite the woman. Theological, thoughtful, literary, astute, and at times, a bit saucy. She penned numerous short stories, ...

A couple of perceptive quotations I was reminded of recently.               “It is not true at all that dogma is “hopelessly irrelevant” to the life and thought of the average man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that it is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is wholly irrelevant to chatter about “Christian principles”” (Dorothy Sayers...

One of the rich enjoyments I have as a pastor who prepares sermons week-in-and-week-out, is that I reap far more than I have time to give out. Much of what I receive may be useful later, but hopefully it is at work on me and in me now. If so, then Paul’s admonition to Timothy will be alive and well through and in me: “Meditate on these things; give yourself entirely to them, that your progress may be evident to all” (1 Timothy 4.15.). So, thoughtfully, and prayerfully rummaging through my readings for this Sunday’s sermon, I tripped over something by Dorothy Sayers (a Christian writer contemporary with C.S. Lewis). It caught me up short and forced me to read it again. “The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth . In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, ...