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Posts from the ‘Easter’ Category

Apr 1

If Christ Has Not Been Raised — Pity Us All

I spent the morning after the triumph of life over death reading about the triumph of death over life.

Well, that sounds a little more dramatic than it actually was. What I was in fact reading was a fairly ordinary little book by David Webster called Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy. It’s hard to imagine a book with a subtitle that catchy being almost a complete waste of time, but it was. I was really looking forward to reading Dispirited after hearing an interview with Webster on the radio (he made some intriguing comments about contemporary spirituality and how it perpetuates selfishness, individualism, consumerism, etc.), but the book turned out to be a rather poorly written, sloppily edited collection of loosely connected rants against the increasing prominence of the (admittedly irritating) “I’m spiritual but not religious” claim.  Read more

Mar 27

Thy Kingdom Come

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Mat. 6:10).
   
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;  nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20-21).

 

Some reflections on the Wednesday before the Friday and the Sunday that changed the world… Read more

Apr 8

The New Beginning Has Already Been Made

The resurrection message burst through the frontiers and was universal: Christ has been raised not as an individual but as Israel’s messiah, as the Son of man of the nations, as humanity’s ‘new Adam’, and as “the first-born of all creation”…. The risen Christ pulls Adam with his right hand and Eve with his left, and with them draws the whole of humanity out of he world of death into the transfigured world of eternal life. His new beginning in his end is the beginning of God’s new world in the passing away of this one. Whether this world will come to an end, and whatever that end may be, the Christian hope says: God’s future has already begun. With Christ’s resurrection from the catastrophe of Golgotha the new beginning has already been made, a beginning which will never again pass away.

— Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning

Apr 6

21 Comments

Good Friday: For the Badness and the Sadness

What does this have to do with me? These were the decidedly impious words that kept rattling around my cranium as I drove around town running errands after a local Good Friday service this morning. It had been a meaningful service—beautiful music, considerable time spent hearing Scripture, a dramatic portrayal of Jesus’ betrayal, “trial,” and crucifixion—but for some reason, the events we remembered this morning seemed light years away from my own life and experience.

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Apr 6

3 Comments

Which World is the Real World?

You should take a few minutes (or hours) to read Kim Fabricius’s Good Friday sermon “Wackos” posted over at Faith and Theology today. His final paragraph is lodged in my gut as I head off to church this morning: Read more

Apr 2

13 Comments

“Jesus Doesn’t Want You to Love Him For What You Can Get Out of Him” (and Other Pious-Sounding Non-Starters)

Monday is my Sabbath and one of the things I usually do at some point in the day is walk the dog and listen to a sermon on my iPod. I listen to sermons from friends of mine at other churches or more “famous” preachers whose sermons are available via podcast. I look forward to these walks and these sermons. It’s nice to listen instead of speak, and I almost invariably come back from my walks having received something good for the day and the week ahead.

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Apr 27

34 Comments

God, Risk, and Evil

Last night, we had a drama group performing at our church (unenviably, on the same night as game seven of the Canucks/Blackhawks series!). Through a series of sketches, the group skillfully and humorously walked us through the basic contours of the biblical narrative—creation, fall, redemption—climaxing, of course, with the resurrection and the hope of new creation. One of the ideas that stood out to me during the dialogue in an early scene which depicted God deliberating with one of his angels about what and how to create, was that in creating human beings, God took a risk. Read more

Apr 22

8 Comments

How God Gets What God Wants

An interesting quote for Good Friday, from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?:

[T]he cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us.  This is all validated by God raising this crucified victim from the dead, not by dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had, at last, paid the divine price for our sin.  Rather, it showed the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.

Apr 19

39 Comments

Right and Wrong

This morning I came across an interesting lecture over at TED Talks by journalist, author, and “wrongologist” (apparently there is such a thing!) Kathryn Schulz called “On Being Wrong.” If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth checking out. Read more

Apr 7

2 Comments

(How) Is God in Control?

One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :). Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more

Apr 6

11 Comments

Garbage and Flowers: A Post-Easter Reflection

So another Easter has come and gone and I’ve been reflecting on themes of “new life” and “resurrection.” Every Easter we hear words like these proclaimed in churches and we do our best to embrace the hope of the risen Christ. This past Sunday, I was the one proclaiming these words. But do they mean anything? Do they point to anything substantive about what actually has happened, what can happen now, and what will happen in the future? Are words like “resurrection” and “new life” just Christian catch-phrases that are in practice little more than a thinly religious veneer over ordinary concepts like self-help, fresh starts, and second chances? Read more

Apr 4

Hope in Person

“Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.” That remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say…. [T]he prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined in the new Jerusalem. Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we only have images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising still. And the intermediate hope—the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day—are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong.

Our task… is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Apr 13

4 Comments

The Way God is Made

Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep.  The Bible instead speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. We do not go on living beyond the grave because that’s how we are made. Rather, we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place, because that is the way God is made.

All the major Christian creeds affirm belief in resurrection of the body. In other words, they affirm the belief that what God in spite of everything prizes enough to bring back to life is not just some disembodied echo of human beings but a new and revised version of all the things which made them the particular human beings they were and which they need something like a body to express: their personality, the way they looked, the sound of their voices, their peculiar capacity for creating and loving, in some sense their faces.

The idea of the immortality of the soul is based on the experience of humanity’s indomitable spirit. The idea of the resurrection of the body is based on the experience of God’s unspeakable love.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

Apr 11

Waiting

To be a Christian means to be an optimist because we know what happened on the third day. We know that it worked, that Jesus’ leap of faith was not in vain. His trust was not in vain, and the Father raised him up. He trusted enough to outstare the darkness, to outstare the void, to wait upon the resurrection of the third day, not to try to create his own but to wait upon the resurrection of God. Good Friday inevitably comes into every life. So does Holy Saturday. What is given to God is always returned transformed. That is the eternal third day that we forever await.

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations

Apr 10

8 Comments

The Offense of the Cross

I was reading a bit in 1 Corinthians 1 this Good Friday morning and was once again struck by the conclusion of the chapter, Paul’s famous description of the “foolishness” of the cross.  Paul describes Christ crucified as a “stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.”  I wonder if this is not sometimes also the case for those of us who “are being saved.”  Do we, too, stumble over the idea of a crucified king or do we just turn it into another kind of “Christian wisdom?”  Does God’s wisdom seem, at times, like foolishness even to those of us who have come to believe in the saving power of what was accomplished at that first Easter? Read more

Mar 24

5 Comments

I Wish Jesus Didn’t Have to Die

Last Thursday I took my kids with me to our church’s Maundy Thursday service. I wasn’t really sure how they would react.  It is, after all, a fairly somber and dark service, whose purpose is to lead its participants through the fearful events of Jesus’ final days. I had some reservations about even exposing a couple of impressionable six-year-olds to the full weight of the Easter story, but my apprehension intensified when they informed me, after watching a steady stream of volunteers moving to the front to read the selected Scripture readings, that they wanted to read one too. Read more

Mar 23

An Easter Quote

[T]hough the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more than bring people to the questions faced by Thomas, Paul, and Peter, the questions of faith, hope, and love. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work, maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won’t rely on the candles anymore, not because we don’t believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by a larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home. All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Mar 17

4 Comments

Signs of Life

Anyone who is a parent of small children will have first-hand experience of the sheer volume of clutter that can be accumulated by the simple presence of little people in the house. With each passing day, the mountain of “stuff” seems to get bigger and bigger and when you’re living in a limited amount of space this stuff can get, well, pretty annoying. Half-finished drawings, completed and uncompleted assignments from school, innumerable stuffed animals, little cars, hockey sticks, crayons, gum and candy wrappers, jewelry, dolls, music papers, books… on and on the list goes. And as exhausting as it is to catalogue this endless collection of items that somehow find their way into our house, it’s even more frustrating to be faced with it at the end of a long day when the kids are finally in bed. Read more

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