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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Jul 21

10 Comments

Course Correction

There are times, even amidst the gloriously lazy days of bright sunny mid-summer, when it’s difficult not to despair of being human. I was sitting with friends at various points yesterday, enjoying casual conversation, catching up on the news, on current events, on stuff going on in people’s lives… At least three different times we came to a point in the conversation where someone said something like, “Ok, this is getting depressing. We need to find something else to talk about.” Read more

Jul 19

14 Comments

Why Do You Call Me Good?

When I was a kid, I was often puzzled by the way Jesus responded to people in the gospels. From callously telling someone to “let the dead bury their own dead” to calling a Samaritan woman a “dog” to saying that he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword, Jesus often seemed a bit obnoxious (at worst) and enigmatic (at best). Read more

Jul 14

6 Comments

Long Way Home

I did a very embarrassing thing this morning. I purchased Def Leppard’s latest album. This is not the sort of thing that any self-respecting human being of the twenty-first century ought to admit to, I know. A quick glance at my recent purchases in iTunes reveals a much more acceptable (I hope) repertoire: The Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, Basia Bulat, Radiohead, Of Monsters and Men. This is probably a more accurate gauge of where my musical tastes have drifted over the years. Def Leppard is the paradigmatic example of the unimaginative late twentieth century glam rock that was the soundtrack of my small-town high school experience. They were big hair, big power chords, soaring engineered harmonies, and mawkish power-ballad-y lyrics about love biting or breathless paeans to endlessly getting rocked or adrenalized or something. In response to the screaming query from 1988’s massive hit “Armageddon It”—Are you getting it?—I can only reply, “Yes, yes, apparently I really am a-getting it.” Or I just got it, at any rate.  Read more

Jul 11

3 Comments

Sky

I spent thirteen or so hours this past week driving under the summer prairie sky. Saskatoon was the location of our Mennonite national church’s biennial gathering which I combined with a visit with my brother and his family. It’s a long drive and very flat. It’s the kind of drive that is easy to dread, particularly in winter months when the roads are bad and the landscape is bleak. It’s a drive I’ve done often enough but it’s not one that I’ve ever particularly relished. This time, however, the sky almost literally took my breath away. Golden yellow canola beside wavy green barley fields stretched out under this vast canopy of pillowy cloud and brilliant blue. Or, when the weather turned, spectacular scenes of dark, brooding masses of cloud. The sky seemed alive. Even when it looked threatening and portended fierce rain, it was a kind of strange comfort. It was the kind of sky that puts you in your place. There was a vast unchangeableness about it. It seemed the kind of sky that nothing could go wrong under. Read more

Jul 4

6 Comments

The Way Through

I was talking recently with a friend about the upcoming Mennonite Church Canada Assembly in Saskatoon that I will be departing for tomorrow morning. Like many denominations, ours is wrestling with some familiar trends (aging, shrinking congregations and the institutional challenges that go along with this) and predictable issues (same-sex marriage, how to respond to our nation’s history of colonial attitudes and actions towards indigenous people, among others). And, like many (all?) denominations who live and move in the twenty-first century western world, we do not agree on how best to negotiate these trends and issues. On top of all this, our polity is of a radically congregational nature, so every major decision comes with years of consultation and clarification and feedback and response. And, at the end of all that, we usually come to the unremarkable conclusion that—surprise!—we have a wide range of opinions on a wide range of issues. Read more

Jun 18

11 Comments

On the Occasion of Your Fifteenth Birthday

A rambling letter to my fifteen-year-old twins “composed” (i.e., dictated to myself on my phone) during a morning walk on this the day of their birth.

 ——

Hi kids,

I apologize if this seems overdramatic or sentimental or nauseating or whatever. It’s been fifteen years since we brought you two beautiful little creatures home from the hospital and a lot of weird things can happen to adults’ brains over the course of fifteen years, especially when they’ve been fundamentally altered by a love as irrational as that of the love that a parent has for a child. I hope you can indulge me a little. Read more

May 31

4 Comments

Forty Years

As far as numbers go, there are few weightier ones in Scripture than forty. The rains pound down on poor Noah and his floating zoo for forty days and forty nights. Moses spends the same period of time on the top of a cloud-enshrouded mountain and emerges with an impressive pair of stone tablets for his trouble. Upon returning from his Sinai sojourn, the same Moses spends forty days and forty nights interceding for his miserable flock that had descended into idolatry in his absence. The Israelite people as a whole spend forty years traipsing around the wilderness being trained in what leaving Egypt and trusting God actually looks like. Moses sends an intrepid band of explorers to scout out the land of Canaan for, yes, forty days. Jonah (reluctantly) tells the Ninevites that they have forty days to smarten up before some smiting comes their way. And then, of course, we arrive at Jesus who spends forty days and forty nights in the desert in an undoing and redoing of Israel’s wilderness (mis)adventures. Read more

May 25

25 Comments

On Falling Short and Stumbling Home

A few years ago, I was asked how long I had been a pastor. I forget how long it was precisely, but it must have been somewhere in the window between two and three years. I told my questioner this and their response was darkly humorous: “Oh, so long enough to disappoint some people.” Indeed. Read more

May 20

2 Comments

Message Seen

One of the features of many private messaging apps (i.e., Facebook Messenger) that inspires my unending loathing is the “seen” notification that shows up in the chat box when you have read someone’s message. Or the “message read” indicator that shows up in Messages for iPhone. These little intrusions of forced dialogic transparency are irritants of a very high order indeed.  Read more

May 11

3 Comments

The Mark We Are Meant to Leave

I have had some version of the same conversation a number of times over the past few weeks (over the years, I’ve learned to pay attention to this phenomenon—it seems to be God’s preferred means of provoking me). The conversations have all been, in some form or another, about the question of how a life is measured. Sometimes the issue has been named explicitly, other times we have danced around it more peripherally. But each conversation, in its own way, whether through an anxiety saturated with loss or with the exhilarated joy of hard-won wisdom, has been probing this question of questions: How do we measure a human life? How do I measure my life? Read more

May 9

4 Comments

Lake of Fire

I read an article a few days ago… one of those articles that asked people what they liked or didn’t like about the church… what they expected or didn’t expect from their pastors… what they wished for more of… or less of…. Some of the words that came up frequently were words like “honesty” and “authenticity.” Ok, then. Well, in that light…

When I was younger, I imagined that people who inhabited the “pastor” role had some specific set of skills that made them uniquely suited to sift through the wreckage of human pain that they encountered. I imagined that they strode confidently into rooms where people were coping with tragedy and death and doubt and loss and grief and crushing pain and anger and fear armed with just the right words for the job, just the right bible verses, just the right insight into when to give someone a hug and when to give them space, just the right prayers, just the right ability to project just the right combination of warmth and decisiveness and spiritual authority (whatever that might mean), just the right combination of attitudes and attributes to make bad situations somehow better.

And then I became a pastor. Read more

May 6

2 Comments

We Talk Crazy Talk

One day I will probably need to offer to pay for my kids’ therapy given the number of times that I have used them and the stories and conversations they inhabit as fodder for my writing and speaking. I can imagine the script already: It was literally like we could barely open our mouths about anything God-ish without dad pouncing all over it and subjecting it to tortuous analysis in some sermon or on his blog or something. It was like he was always waiting for us to produce some “moment” that he could exploit for his own ends. It was kinda pathetic, really. And they would be right. Mostly. In my meager defense, I would say that I have always tried to look at everyday life as the raw material through which God speaks and, well, my kids just happen be involved in most of the days of my everyday life. Not much of an excuse, I know. It’s all I got. Read more

May 4

4 Comments

Church Matters

I spent a good chunk of this morning in an online discussion about the future of Mennonite Church Canada with a handful of other young-ish pastors from across the nation. It was interesting to be invited as I tend to be less suited to thinking on my feet at meetings or committees or focus groups than I am to writing blog posts where I can hedge my bets and endlessly qualify every statement and default to lame attempts at self-protective humour. I mostly agreed to participate in this converstation because I was frankly giddy at the prospect of being located in the “young-ish” category of something. Read more

Apr 28

2 Comments

Cheap Words

Well, they’re native, so….

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had half a dozen or so conversations where some version of the phrase above was used to “explain” or set the table for an explanation of some undesirable situation or turn of events. Often, the conversations have been with Christians. Always, the comment was presented as if it were utterly uncontroversial and unproblematic. As if that one word—“native”—said all that needed to be said. As if it were self-evident that the topic under discussion could quickly be summed up by whatever cluster of negative associations they happened to be able to squeeze into those six little letters. N-a-t-i-v-e. Read more

Apr 21

3 Comments

The Shape of Our Caring

On September 2, 2015, the body of a five-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi was photographed face down on a Turkish beach. This one image seemed to capture the world’s attention and galvanize efforts to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis. The crisis itself wasn’t new—it had been a growing reality for at least three years prior to that photo. Alan Kurdi wasn’t the only five-year-old boy to die in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean—he was and is, sadly, one of many. In many ways, Alan Kurdi’s story was tragically ordinary in a world where tragedy is ordinary. But it became extraordinary in the response to that one image. Read more

Apr 14

12 Comments

A Good Christian

Most of us who fall into the “Christian” category of humanity walk around with at least some conception of a “good Christian” in our heads. It might not be a very good conception. It might not be very clear or coherent or compelling in any way. It might even be downright repellent to many, inside or outside of the Christian camp. It might be a fire-breathing, red-faced white Republican for whom Christian faith seems to mean a long list of things to be against, sprinkled with a generous dose of syrupy personal piety, muscular Americana, and unbridled capitalism. Or something else. Lets hope.  Read more

Apr 7

3 Comments

Pardon is Your Name

I come across many people who have difficulty forgiving. Sometimes, the challenge is to forgive others. Parents, children, spouses, siblings, friends. Sometimes it’s institutions, structures, powers and principalities, the weight of history with its myriad injustices. Sometimes it’s a ghost, an illusory entity created to bear the burden of real and imagined grievances. Sometimes it’s God. At least as often the problem is forgiving ourselves—the people we were, the people we are, the people we are daily failing to become. We live in a world where wrong is so often done, a world where forgiveness is not easily mined out of the mountains of wrongdoing that build up over time. Read more

Mar 29

7 Comments

This Ridiculous Story

Easter is a ridiculous thing. Come to think of it, there is a ridiculous quality to so much of what we as Christians claim.

Christmas—God-in-flesh, born in a feed trough to a teenaged peasant girl. Ridiculous.

The Sermon on the Mount—an idealistic approach to life if ever there was one, a recipe for little more than getting taken advantage of and abused. Naively ridiculous.

Palm Sunday—the “triumphal entry” of a king… on a pitiful little donkey… talking about peace. Laughably ridiculous.

Maundy Thursday—a master who washes feet. Weirdly ridiculous.

Good Friday—a self-proclaimed Messiah, executed like a common criminal, going out with hardly a whimper. Pitifully ridiculous

And now, Easter— the defeat of death, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:19-26? Well, “ridiculous” barely seems to cover it. Read more

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