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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Jul 31

God’s Odd Way of Loving Us

One of the best parts of spending a bit of time in British Columbia each summer is the opportunity to reconnect with the many dear people whose lives we were once embedded in—at least in a more concrete way. It is so often a delight to discover the twists and turns people’s lives have taken, how their kids have grown, the new opportunities they are exploring, etc. It is a privilege to see how the goodness of God traces its way through the many stories we have been privileged to be a part of.

But, as always, there are other stories, too. Stories of relational breakdown, job difficulties, children who have gotten themselves into a bad place. And death. Always stories of death.  Read more

Jul 22

7 Comments

A Birth and a Death

I have a birth and a death on my mind today, and the madness it reveals about who we are and what we value as a culture.

Kate Middleton will have her baby today if the frantic newspaper headlines are to be believed. The “royal baby watch” has been ongoing for a while now, with armies of reporters and tweeters and live bloggers standing at the ready to be the first to break the news to our greedy eyes and ears. The time has now come, apparently. The world waits in voracious expectancy. The long-awaited child draws near, and we can barely contain our excitement. Read more

Jul 17

5 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

A few reflections on unrelated themes for a Wednesday morning…

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I was having a conversation with a person this morning who has been navigating the murky waters of trying to discern the best treatment options for a health concern. One doctor recommends this, one recommends that, one tries to push pills, one recommends “natural” treatments, one article says this, another article says that. Often, the opinions are wildly contradictory.  How do you make a good decision in the face of such divergent viewpoints—especially when the purveyors of this or that position almost invariably stand to profit, directly or indirectly, from your agreeing with them?

Who do you trust when everyone has a vested interest in convincing you that they are right? Read more

Jul 16

4 Comments

Fragments from the Valley of the Shadow

This post is part of a MennoNerds Synchro-Blog on the topic of Death, Loss, Pain and Grief, July 14-30, 2013. Check out our page on MennoNerds.com to see all the other posts in this series. 

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As I was reflecting upon what and how I might contribute to this Synchro-Blog, it occurred to me to do some snooping around in my own archives.  I discovered that I have actually written a fair amount on death over the years.  What follows is a compilation of three posts from the past.  The first was written after the death of a friend and is a personal expression of the pain of loss.  The second is a reflection on death in the context of the pastoral vocation, written after being called upon to do a memorial service at the outset of my new role.  The third is simply a quote about death that I have grown to love and deeply appreciate over the years.   Read more

Jul 12

19 Comments

“I Pray For You Every Day”

I’ve written a number of times here before about some the difficulties I have with prayer (here, for example). I am convinced that prayer is a crucial part of how God works in and through us for the salvation of the world. And yet the questions abound. How does prayer work? Does prayer work? How can we tell? Is God influence-able? Is God reactive? Does God need prayer? How can God “listen” to so many different (often wildly contradictory) prayers at once? What does it even mean to say that the God of the universe “listens?”  Read more

Jul 10

Try a Little Selfishness

To the astonishment of precisely no one, the latest round of surveys from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life have painted a picture of an increasingly irreligious America. A full one-third of Americans under the age of thirty have no religious affiliation, apparently. And given that America is still more “religious” than most other parts of the Western world, I think we can safely assume that the situation would be even bleaker elsewhere.

What is at least mildly surprising is that when asked whether having “more people who are not religious” is a good thing, a bad thing, or doesn’t matter, a majority of people said it was bad. So, I suppose if one were to somewhat cynically summarize this latest round of findings, it might go something like this: “We don’t really have much use for religion ourselves, but gosh we sure wish more of the people we have to live with did.” Read more

Jul 8

21 Comments

“How Do We Know That God is Real and Zombies Aren’t?”

What if we just made God up?

The question came not from a despairing parishioner or a reader of my blog or an inquisitive university student at a trendy coffee shop. No, the question came from my twelve-year-old son at a sushi joint last weekend while drumming on the table with his chopsticks in between green tea and California rolls. Read more

Jun 27

10 Comments

Why (I) Bother?

I have always been a lousy sleeper and I lay awake at night a lot. This proves to be fertile space for all manner of thoughts to flit in and out of my brain, some good and useful, many not so much. I think about my kids and their future. I think about philosophy. I think about soccer. I think about people who are suffering. I think about the meaning of life. I think about the many people who I have been blessed to know and who are a part of my life. I think how we end up in the places we do, doing the things we do and about what the point of it all is. Read more

Jun 26

4 Comments

On Heretics and “Heroic Feats of Cognitive Dissonance”

I’ve been spending some time in the first two chapters of Genesis over the last few weeks as we make our way into a summer worship series on creation. And one cannot read very far in the literature about the first two chapters of the bible without at some point encountering the predictable, tendentious battles between evolutionary naturalism and creation, science and religion, etc. It seems to me that those who get the most excited about these issues often quite badly misunderstand either the nature of science or the nature of religion. Or both. And this tends to lead to a considerable amount of heat and not a great deal of light being generated in public discourse on this issue.  Read more

Jun 25

2 Comments

We Are What We Love

Along with a dozen or so other books, Jamie Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom has been languishing unopened on a dusty, lonely corner of my desk for the past few months. I decided to finally carve out a bit of time for reading this morning and was very glad that I did. Based on the first fifty or so odd pages of this first volume in Smith’s “Cultural Liturgies” project, I would say that this is a book that every Christian educator and pastor ought to read. The fundamental question that Smith places before us is this: Are human beings defined by what we think and believe or by what we love and desire? And, perhaps even more importantly, how ought our answer to this question inform our practices of worship and education? Read more

Jun 20

2 Comments

A Silent Thunder

This has been a week of some pretty spectacular spring weather in our neck of the woods. Violent thunderstorms, torrential rains, hail, wind… virtually every night has witnessed the pyrotechnics of heaven. Today there are declarations of states of emergency, flood warnings, and evacuations across southern AB. It’s been a pretty incredible few days.

After last night’s storm—which was the most violent one of the week, by far—I heard someone remark about how this kind of weather is evidence of the power and glory of God. I somewhat sullenly bit my tongue. Perhaps it was because I spent part of last night trying to stem the tide of water that was flowing into my basement bedroom and scrambling to rearrange furniture. Perhaps it was because I spent another, much later part of last night teetering on a rickety ladder, trying to unclog my eaves troughs with frozen fingers in the blinding rain and darkness split open by periodic flashes of lightning. Perhaps it was because all this rain is wreaking havoc with my soccer season! Whatever the reasons, there were many things going through my mind during the storm last night, but mouthing paeans to the God of creation for his wondrous displays of power and glory was not among them. I was mostly just wishing someone would turn off the tap. Read more

Jun 18

19 Comments

Seeing the Light

Based on my own entirely unscientific observations, it seems that there is a burgeoning market for “recovering pastor who saw the godless light” stories these days. The genre is familiar enough by now, right? Fundamentalist pastor grows up in the church, uncritically swallows the whole religious package, devotes x number of years to serving as pastor in [insert small Bible belt American town here], gradually begins to have doubts, finally has the courage to leave his (it’s almost always a “he” so far) faith behind, is persecuted, scorned and rejected by his townsfolk and former parishioners still imprisoned by the shackles of fantasy and indoctrination he has so recently (and heroically) shed, and eventually staggers into the warm and compassionate embrace of this or that atheist group devoted to helping recovering clergy. And then, for the triumphant finale, our hero embarks on a life of spreading the good news of atheist liberation on [insert motivational speaking tour here] amassing inspiring (de)conversion narratives of other clergy that he has “helped” along the way. It’s not a bad gig if you can get it. Read more

Jun 14

5 Comments

On Loss and Life

This morning I am grimly staring in the mirror at a large red scab that is rapidly moving toward full bloom almost directly in the middle of my forehead. An uncomfortable reminder, this, of the previous evening’s activities when, instead of making contact with the soccer ball as I had intended, I rather abruptly introduced my forehead to an opponent’s skull. This ugly scab seems somehow uglier as I reflect upon the game itself. Up 2-1 in the second half, then conceding three goals in about 10 minutes to lose 4-2—two of said goals almost entirely due to giveaways by the guy with the blotchy red forehead.

Sigh. Read more

Jun 13

15 Comments

You Don’t Want to Make God Look Bad… Do You?

This one comes from the “if you can’t say anything nice—or at least morally/theologically coherent—then don’t say anything at all” file. It seems John Piper has expanded his repertoire from terrifying adults about God to terrifying children about God.  I’ve come across a number of references this morning to a recent children’s story that Piper told.  Here it is (h/t: Internet Monk).

Brace yourself. Read more

Jun 6

10 Comments

The Way We Walk

I went for a walk at lunch today.  A frustrating morning… needed to clear my head, to think, to pray.

I often walk on a weedy red shale path alongside an irrigation canal that snakes behind our church on the outskirts of town.    There’s not much of a view to speak of.   Some farmland, an agricultural research facility, a big motor sports dealership, a meat processing plant off in the distance.  Off in the other direction I can hear the hum of machinery and industry where a new hotel going up across the highway.

But in the spring and the summer, there is water in the canal.  And I like to walk by water. Read more

Jun 5

4 Comments

A Fine Mess

Back in my university days I took an undergraduate philosophy course on the problem of evil. We had been through most of the well-rehearsed responses to the question of how evil can co-exist with an all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing God. Each had their problems, of course. “But what happens if we just say that God is limited?” our professor asked, with evident glee. What if God’s kinda just making it up as he goes along? What if God’s a bit of a selfish jerk who isn’t nearly as concerned with human misery as we are? Or, what if he’s a nice enough guy, but he just can’t do much about evil? What if he’s doing the best he can with what he has to work with? What if he’s learning as he goes, just like the rest of us? Read more

Jun 3

6 Comments

On “The Glory of Preaching”

I spent part of this week reading a book about preaching.  It had an impressive sounding title that included the words “the glory of preaching.”  I bought it on the recommendation of someone from my grad school days who had spent  ten minutes or so listening to me going on and on about my what an unobvious choice I was for the vocation of “pastor.”  Zero homiletics courses, zero counseling courses, a whole string of academic classes on systematic theology, philosophy, postmodern theory, etc., an almost pathological fear of public speaking, a history of fast-talking, stuttering, introversion, etc.  “All in all, not the most obvious candidate to be behind a pulpit on Sunday morning,” I nervously half-joked.  “You should buy this book,” she said.  “It will be a great help to you.”  Read more

May 30

8 Comments

Be Kind to Each Other

I listened to the story of a gay man yesterday. It was a story both tragic and tragically typical. It was a story of knowing he was “different” from his very earliest memories, of being mocked and ridiculed throughout his school years, a story of confusion, anger, and pain, a story of desperately trying to come to terms with an identity that just didn’t fit, a story of a string of unsatisfying relationships, a story of isolation and deep loneliness that persists to the present day.

It was also, of course, a story in which the church played a role. I wish I could say that it was a positive role—that the community that bears the name of the Friend of Sinners had provided a place of refuge and peace for this person… I wish I could say that. But I can’t. We all know that this isn’t how the story usually goes. We know that “rejection” and “guilt” and “judgment” and “fear” and “misunderstanding” are among the words that appear at this point in the story. Read more

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