Feb 13
Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall return.
These words have been spoken in churches around the world this Ash Wednesday and will be spoken later today in our own church. These words are a call to ponder our mortality, to examine our souls and repent for our sins, to begin the slow march to the cross of Christ and to the new life of resurrection on the other side. Read more
I watched part of the Grammy Awards last night. The decision-making process was a tortuous one. I had serious reservations about the worthiness of the Grammys to occupy my Sunday evening time due to, a) the overhyped, oversexed, undertalented spectacle it seems to have become; and b) the fact that I was far from convinced that I needed to spend over a third of the next few hours subjecting myself to mindless advertising. As it happens, the stasis produced by a fairly exhausting weekend full of church activities won out over my myriad principled objections to watching the Grammys. The best laid plans, and all that. Read more
A couple of conversations this week have me thinking about fairness. The first was a kind of prolonged lament about the unfairness of life. This person had the (mostly justified) impression that life had treated them profoundly unkindly and this unhappy fact coloured how they interpreted virtually everything else they encountered in daily life. The second conversation occurred with a friend over supper last night. His daughter had been learning about the importance of fairness in school, about how everyone needed to be treated exactly equally. “Why tell them this?” he asked as we were getting supper on the table. “Life isn’t fair—the sooner they learn this the better!” Indeed. Read more
If the heart of “meaning” is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story with all its oddity and ambivalence, becomes open to interpretation in terms of God’s saving work. Once we have stopped drawing a distinction between “compromising” activities and spheres (the family, the state, the individual body, or psyche) and “pure” realities (the soul, the intelligible world), the spiritual life becomes a much more complex, demanding, and far-reaching matter. “Spirituality” becomes far more than a science of interpreting exceptional private experiences; it must now touch every area of human experience, the public and the social, the painful, negative; even pathological byways of the mind, the moral and relational world. And the goal of a Christian life becomes not enlightenment but wholeness—an acceptance of this complicated and muddled bundle of experiences as a possible theater for God’s creative work.
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge
Like hundreds of millions of my fellow humans, I spent part of Sunday watching the Super Bowl. I don’t particularly care for American football (I prefer the real version, where they don’t wear armour and stop for a break every 10 seconds or so), but we were invited to someone’s place to watch the game, and there was to be good food and good people present, so off I went. And, leaving aside the mind-numbing tedium of so much advertising and hype and endless time outs (some unexpected) and the bizarre pre- mid- , and post-game commentary about how God may or may not have been involved in the outcome, it was a pretty good game. Read more
So, this one has been making the rounds in the social media universe… Apparently, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has “defeated” the world’s leading atheist evangelist Richard Dawkins in a recent debate at Cambridge University. Quite handily, in fact—324 votes to 136. The resolution under discussion was “religion has no place in the 21st century.” Apparently it still does. Rowan Williams has saved the 21st century… or at least the day. We can all take a deep breath and relax. Religion will be around for a while.
Sometimes I’m afraid of God when I read the Bible.
The statement came from my son after he had spent a bit of time wandering around in the delights of Genesis 19 for an assignment. It’s quite the passage. You have a guy voluntarily sending out his daughters to get raped in order to avoid the apparently more odious prospect of having the men of his town sodomize a couple of angels who had paid him a visit, you have people being struck blind and being turned into salt, you have God raining down sulfur and fire in judgment of the Sodom and Gomorrah, you have two young women getting their dad plastered in order to have sex with him and produce children, and generally an overall scene of depravity and sex and violence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. Well, maybe not. But still, it’s not exactly PG material. Read more
I spent my day off this week at the ski hill ninety minutes or so west of town. I skied a decent amount growing up, but once our kids arrived and I decided to back to school, skiing wasn’t really much of an option any more. It’s not a cheap sport, obviously, and certainly beyond the reach of a student trying to juggle studies with work and a young family. I don’t think I skied more than a handful of times during the first decade or so of my kids’ life. Read more
The denomination in which I serve—Mennonite Church Canada—is currently asking its congregations to engage in a lengthy and challenging process of facing challenging difficult ethical issues of our day (issues around human sexuality, religious pluralism, pacifism, environmental concerns, etc.) head on and discerning together what the Spirit seems to be saying to us regarding how we are to respond as followers of Jesus. The “Being a Faithful Church” process is an attempt to put hands and feet to our theology. Mennonites affirm, among other things, the importance of community, the priesthood of all believers, the inappropriateness of hierarchical power structures and modes of relating to one another, and freedom of the Spirit to lead us into deeper and truer understandings of Scripture. The “Being a Faithful Church” process is an (ambitious!) opportunity for churches to demonstrate that we actually we believe what we say we do. Read more
Among the unexpected pleasures of a full weekend at home alone with the kids, which included the usual worship service preparation, our church’s AGM, as well as basketball games and swimming trials, and hosting a friend for night who was stopping in on his way back to British Columbia, was a 3 am trip to the local Emergency Room to deal with a dislocated toe that my son sustained at an all-nighter at the church. Great. Just what the, ahem, doctor ordered. Read more
Apparently Mark Driscoll has opened his mouth (or his Twitter account) again—this time about the recent US presidential inauguration ceremony and what it says about the state of Barack Obama’s (lack of) belief—and in so doing has managed to make a lot of people either very happy or very angry. The tweets and retweets are flying around the internet, as well as the obligatory “responses” where Christian commentators devote a great number of words to either praising or condemning Mr. Driscoll for his, a) thoroughly orthodox and courageous clarity; or b) narrow-minded judgmental rigidity. It’s all very inspiring fare, to be sure. Read more
I had an interesting conversation over lunch about the genealogy of human beliefs and behaviour. Why do we do and believe the things we do and believe, whether about God or anything else? Is it because we have coolly surveyed all of the options and exercised our unimpeded freedom to decide what is true and good? Or are we locked into certain options before we are ever born by virtue of some combination of the time, place, and family background into which we were born? Am I a follower of Jesus because I have freely chosen this, or because I was born in the back half of the twentieth century in an ostensibly “Christian nation” into a family of Christians? Is my identity chosen? Given to me? Both? Neither? Read more
Last night I participated in a local ecumenical service marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It was only the second such service that I have been a part of, but these are already becoming a highlight on the calendar for me. It is a beautiful thing to see Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, Salvation Army and United Church folks, and Mennonites worshipping the same God, together. Happily, last night’s service was quite a bit fuller than anticipated with people spilling out into the hallways of the small chapel at the local United Church. It was a very good night. Read more
I know a man who is watching his wife die. Slowly. Dementia. It hurts to hear him tell the story of how she once was, how she is now, hurts to hear about how on “good” days she recognizes who he is and doesn’t ignore or get angry at him. It hurts to think about how what is looms large and menacing over what was, always lurking, always threatening to steal life and joy from the past, robbing even memories of their sustaining power. “She can’t speak anymore,” he says, “so we have to communicate without words. Sometimes she squeezes my hand.” Read more
It is a dangerously humbling thing to read a book on preaching by Frederick Buechner the day before preaching. The man possesses an imagination and a gift for words that never ceases to impress and inspire me. Perhaps more importantly, he has a way of speaking about the gospel to everyone from doubters and cynics to believers and those trying to believe, and everyone in between—and all in such a way that makes both faith and its object seem plausible and possible, maybe even real and true. Reading Buechner is good for the soul. He convinces me that I am not crazy to believe or to write and speak about this crazy story week after week. Read more
I spent part of this afternoon at a local rally for the “Idle No More” movement. It was one of many such rallies taking place across Canada today as Canadian PM Stephen Harper is meeting with First Nations leaders in Ottawa, ostensibly to address concerns about legislation and the honouring of treaties signed long ago. Read more
I have spent a good chunk of this week reading. About controversial topics. Online. This is a very dangerous and probably not very bright thing to do. I am not naïve enough to think that there was once an idyllic time where people consistently and patiently reasoned calmly with one another about issues of deep import, but I also know that while the internet has certainly made human discourse possible on a much broader level that at any other point in human history, it has almost certainly not improved the quality of said discourse. Pick your issue and you will almost certainly find that you can quite literally drown in information and opinions, much of it mean-spirited, polarizing, intemperate, and simplistic. Read more
Today I came across an interesting article on “suffering fools” written last week by David Brooks in the New York Times. The article is about if or how we relate to those who are “beneath” us, whether in intelligence, skill, social status or whatever. Brooks traces the origins of the term “suffering fools gladly” to William Tyndale’s 1534 translation of the Bible. In Tyndale’s translation of Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians, Paul criticizes the Corinthian believers for being too gullible, for embracing erroneous teaching too easily—for “suffering fools gladly” while seeing themselves as wise. Read more
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