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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

May 31

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Mar 25

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The Things Jesus Doesn’t Do For Us

We often hear a steady stream of words about what Jesus “did for us” around this time of year, around this stage of Holy Week. Last night, at our church’s Maundy Thursday service, we shared a simple meal together and walked through the familiar story from Jesus’ arrest to crucifixion. We do the same thing each year, and each year something new stands out to me. This year, I was struck the things that Jesus didn’t do for us as he walked the tortuous path to Calvary. Read more

Mar 21

12 Comments

Set the Table

Why do we eat soup during Lent? The question from a church member caught me a bit off guard as I was scrambling to get a few things together for a soup and bread Lenten lunch that our church was hosting last week. I don’t remember exactly how I responded. I think I vaguely gestured toward Lent being a season for embracing self-discipline and simplicity. “The general idea,” I said, “is that we choose not to eat as much or the same as we might during other times of the year as a way of remembering that we do not live on bread alone—to acknowledge, even in the context of abundance, that our deepest hunger is for God.” I pointed to the idea that fasting is a way of acknowledging that there is an unfinished quality to our world and to our human experience—that things are not yet as they should be, that we are not yet as we should be.  Read more

Feb 22

14 Comments

The Sacred Art of Departing

“You know, in Germany there are hordes of young Syrian men raping German women.” The statement hovered in the air menacingly. I suspected that I was in for an interesting encounter as I watched him stride determinedly toward me after I gave a presentation on the Syrian refugee crisis at a local church recently. His jaw was set and his brow was furrowed. I was not expecting congratulations or affirmation for the work that I had spent the last half hour or so describing, but I wasn’t expecting anything quite this stark either. It wasn’t a question or even a potential opening to a conversation. It was a crude challenge thrown down. Or a dare. Or a provocation. You have all your nice words about Jesus and love and welcoming the stranger… Well, what do you say about this?! Read more

Feb 18

1 Comment

On Erring

To err is human, Alexander Pope famously said in his Essay on Criticism. Yes, it certainly is. And the more experience I have with this being human business, the more evidence I am afforded of this unpleasant truth. Read more

Feb 9

9 Comments

When No One is Watching

Often when people find out that I’m a pastor for the first time, they will gradually, at some point in the conversation, summon the requisite courage or boldness or curiosity to ask some version of the question, So what do you actually do all day? I will usually “um” and “ah” and “well, you see” for a while, before settling on things like sermons, worship preparation, writing, visiting folks, various administrative tasks, and whittling away at the ever-present mountain of email that is the bane of twenty-first century existence among the joyful privileges of participating in the Lord’s work. [Ahem] I don’t very often get to say things like, Well, this week, I’m actually spending a bit of time with an international journalist who is in town working on a story about our community’s responses to the Syrian refugee crisis. Like, roughly never. Read more

Jan 19

3 Comments

Life of the Party

When we think of the kingdom of God come near, we often think of Jesus’ acts of healing and deliverance and justice for the oppressed. We think of the deaf hearing, the mute speaking, the lame walking, the dead rising. We think of the powerful and the arrogant being brought down low and the lowly being raised up. When we read the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching, we’re used to Jesus arriving on the scene to declare that God’s kingdom is about all that is wrong in the world beginning to be made right.

We’re perhaps not as used to the kingdom of God being the announcement of party! Read more

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