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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Dec 31

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2015 in Review

Another year draws to a close and so it’s time for one of those year-end posts that everyone loves so much (I assume, at least—for what else could account for their prevalence out there in the blogosphere?! Surely not the pretentiousness of bloggers!). As I surveyed this year’s top five, I observed a few trends: 1) Readers seem to like posts with long clunky titles (it also helps if the word “five” makes an appearance); 2) Being sarcastic and mildly confrontational seem to help; and 3) Scratching around at the things that we find most threatening—whether it’s the nature of faith or the future of the church or assumptions about our own identities and about our obligation to those we see as “other” and frightening— seems to quite reliably stir the proverbial pot.

So, I shall dutifully soldier into 2016 in search of ever longer titles and more sarcasm-drenched posts about the things that we find most unsettling. Or not. At any rate, here are the top five posts of 2015 along with a brief description of each. Read more

Dec 29

6 Comments

The Thing That Matters Most

Last summer, on a sticky, oppressively hot Wednesday afternoon in New York City, I lost my fourteen year-old son. My son isn’t easy to lose—he’s 6’5 and nearly 200 pounds—so this will probably require a bit of a story. Read more

Dec 28

7 Comments

Child, Why Have You Treated Us Like This?

Child, why have you treated us like this?

The exasperated question falls from Mary’s lips after discovering Jesus in the temple after they had spent the past three days looking for him. And once the relief at finding Jesus sets in, Mary’s thoughts turn to rebuke.

How could you be so thoughtless?! How could you not think of us?!

Child, why have you treated us like this? Read more

Dec 24

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Approach the Manger

I posted this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s God is in the Manger last year around this time.  I may just make this an annual tradition. I have need, at any rate, to relocate myself each year amongst the “questionable figures” who “cannot get their fill of this miracle and want to live entirely by the mercy of God.” Read more

Dec 21

8 Comments

In God’s Company

I consumed two pieces of media before breakfast today. I was unable to sleep and stumbled downstairs ridiculously early for a day off with the kids on Christmas holidays. I plugged in the Christmas tree, made a pot of coffee, and settled into the wonderful pre-dawn stillness of the darkest day of the year. Read more

Dec 17

4 Comments

Remember Me

Sometimes, when I find it hard to pray, when faith, hope, and love are threatening to dry up, I zero in on a handful of desperate pleas from a handful of desperate people who come across Jesus in the gospels. A hated tax collector in the temple, for example. Have mercy on me, a sinner. A thoroughly befuddled Peter after Jesus had spoken strange words about “eating his flesh” and “drinking his blood.” Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. A leper on a hillside. If you are willing, you can make me clean. A blind beggar on the road to Jericho. I want to see. Read more

Dec 10

2 Comments

Real People Do Really Bad Things

The internet is a very interesting laboratory within which to observe the human animal. This is particularly true when bad things happen in our world. And it is especially true when it comes to really, really bad things—cataclysmic things that shake us to the core. Like a series of coordinated attacks in the city of Paris on a pleasant fall evening or a murderous rampage at a California Christmas party. When these bad things happen, a familiar move is often made, particularly online. People flood on to social media and make statements like: Real ____ would never do that! Read more

Dec 8

9 Comments

Frightening Light

The “rising sun” came unexpectedly and unobtrusively upon those living in darkness. It was a very small light in a very ordinary place. A baby. Of all things. A baby boy. Which didn’t seem very impressive or bright or hopeful.

But the light shone. And the darkness was very displeased. Read more

Dec 3

6 Comments

Who Can Endure the Day of His Coming?

Among the lectionary readings for this, the second week of Advent, is Malachi 3:1-4. I don’t think this text will find its way into my sermon this week, but it’s been finding its way into my mind this afternoon. The prophet speaks of a messenger who will come to the people of Israel—people who had been hungry for a word from God to vindicate and bless his people. The assumption seems to be that this coming is anticipated with joy and eager expectation.

But when the messenger comes, there’s an awkward and unpleasant surprise. Read more

Dec 1

4 Comments

“I’m a Person with No Address”

I was sitting in a hospital room this morning with a dear old saint whose last few years have involved being shuffled from home to home, to the hospital and back again, and whose next destination is unclear. At one point, this person looked at me with a mixture of sadness, resignation, and nearly defeated longing and said, “I’m a person with no address.” Read more

Nov 26

2 Comments

Still There

Each year around this time, I look out my office window on a wintry late afternoon and morosely note to myself how early it is getting dark these days. This is one of the delights of living in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. Sixteen hours of frigid darkness a day. Hooray. Read more

Nov 16

18 Comments

You Have Heard it Said… But I Say to You

So, terror remains on everyone’s minds. Paris, of course. But also Beirut, Baghdad, Kenya, and the countless other less glamorous places in the world, places deemed unworthy of inspiring memes and hashtags or temporary profile pictures or any of the other ways that we express our compassion and outrage and brand ourselves appropriately during dark and fearful times.

This is the world we live in. Read more

Nov 13

Fridays

For many people, Fridays are the days when their spirits begin to lift. The drudgery of the workweek is almost done and a weekend full of freedom and promise beckons. TGIF and all that.  For me, Fridays often feel, well, exactly the opposite of that. I have noticed that on many Fridays a heaviness of sorts will just descend upon me. The reasons for this are myriad, but, having performed a cursory inventory on this Friday, the following seem consistently to rise to the top of the list. Read more

Nov 5

7 Comments

Fight Song

I got into the car this morning in a bit of a surly mood. A few things hadn’t gone as I had anticipated the previous day, I had received an unwelcome email that morning, and I was behind on sermon prep. Again. I stabbed the key into the ignition only to be greeted by the ear-splitting strains of the local top 40 station that my wife and daughter were, evidently, listening to on the way home from their evening activities last night. The part of the song that I was forcibly subjected to heard before frantically locating the combination of knobs that could lower the volume and/or change the station went something like, This is my fight song, take back my life song…  Read more

Nov 2

4 Comments

All the Goodness in the World

We are bargain hunters, all of us. We make bargains with God, with reality or the cosmos or karma or whatever. We are convinced someone or something out there is keeping score, that our lives are like a bet we are daily making that the things we do are somehow a reliable indicator of the things we will get. Read more

Oct 30

4 Comments

The Task of Love

I’ve been thinking about doubt over the past few days. It started when I read a recent piece over at Pete Enns’ blog about a pastor who confessed his doubts about the existence of God in front of his congregation. It continued when a friend pointed me in the direction of The Liturgists podcast, and particularly the episodes where the host (Michael Gungor) and co-host (Mike McHargue, or “Science Mike”) discussed their de-conversion and reconversion narratives. Especially interesting was the shape of the faith that was eventually returned to. Gone was the black and white faith of their evangelical upbringings. In its place was a postmodern faith more comfortable with grey, increasingly open to mystery, and less certain about the doctrinal content of orthodox Christianity.

Even more interesting were the “axioms about faith” that Science Mike had come up with as the “scaffolding” for this new approach to faith. Read more

Oct 16

2 Comments

Be Happy

It usually takes about five or six days. When one of my wife or I am traveling, this tends to be the threshold beyond which I start to feel strangely disoriented or unsettled or somehow, I don’t know, adrift. When I am the one at home—as is the case now, while my wife visits friends in Germany—this tends to be around the time when the kids have begun to peer dejectedly into the refrigerator, sadly pondering the prospects of another evening of dad’s “cooking.” The pets have started to wander around the house full of confused longing, being generally accustomed to warmer treatment than they tend to receive from me. It’s as if the entire house senses that things are not as they should be. Read more

Oct 14

5 Comments

Paperwork

I hate paperwork at the best of times. I hate filling out forms, grinding through the interminable bureaucratic labyrinths that seem to be part and parcel of modern life. Sign this waiver. Check that box. File this form. Send that release. Print it for your records. On and on it goes. Paperwork is slow death.

I hate paperwork even more today. Read more

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