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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Jan 12

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“The Tale That is Too Good Not to Be True”

It is a dangerously humbling thing to read a book on preaching by Frederick Buechner the day before preaching.  The man possesses an imagination and a gift for words that never ceases to impress and inspire me.  Perhaps more importantly, he has a way of speaking about the gospel to everyone from doubters and cynics to believers and those trying to believe, and everyone in between—and all in such a way that makes both faith and its object seem plausible and possible, maybe even real and true.  Reading Buechner is good for the soul.  He convinces me that I am not crazy to believe or to write and speak about this crazy story week after week. Read more

Jan 8

On Suffering Fools

Today I came across an interesting article on “suffering fools” written last week by David Brooks in the New York Times. The article is about if or how we relate to those who are “beneath” us, whether in intelligence, skill, social status or whatever. Brooks traces the origins of the term “suffering fools gladly” to William Tyndale’s 1534 translation of the Bible. In Tyndale’s translation of Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians, Paul criticizes the Corinthian believers for being too gullible, for embracing erroneous teaching too easily—for “suffering fools gladly” while seeing themselves as wise. Read more

Jan 7

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Monday Miscellany

It’s Monday morning, the kids are back in school, my Christmas flu finally seems to have released me from its miserable grip. A New Year has begun, and life is back to normal. A couple of miscellaneous topics and ideas for a Monday morning, then. These have very little to do with one another other than that they have been collecting dust either in my brain or in my “drafts” folder over the past little while. If this comes across as a rambling mess, or a series of incoherent rants, well, I blame on the accumulation of weeks worth of flu medication which has undoubtedly scrambled my brain. Read more

Jan 2

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Less is More

“So, did you make any New Years Resolutions?” The question came from my wife last night as I was fitfully settling into the foggy state of half-sleep produced by general holiday fatigue and the accumulation of several days’ worth of sinus medication. “What?  Oh, right… New Years… Um, no, I don’t think so, I can’t think of anything.” Pretty impressive, right? I can assure you that my response was even less inspiring in person than it no doubt seems in print. The adoption of New Years Resolutions quite literally hadn’t even occurred to me. Read more

Dec 25

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Be Near Me Lord Jesus

A busy Christmas Eve is complete. Bundling up with the kids for skating on the pond, a lovely candlelight service at church, a delightful evening full of games and goodies with family, friends, the kids safely tucked into bed, the last presents put under the tree… And now, all is silent as I sit beside the Christmas tree, staring out into the bone chilling early morning darkness, processing a full day indeed. Read more

Dec 23

3 Comments

Desire

It’s been an eventful week in the life of this blog. The post I wrote in response to those seeking to “explain” what happened in Newtown, CT nine days ago received an exponentially higher amount of traffic in a shorter period of time than anything I have written here in six years. Which was kinda cool—what writer doesn’t people to read what they write, after all? And kinda not cool, because, well, I perhaps rather immodestly think that I’ve written better, more interesting stuff than this here before.  Stuff that has received, quite literally, a fraction of the traffic. Such is life in the hold-my-attention-if-you-can-hey-look-something-else-looks-interesting-let’s-click-on-that world of social media. Read more

Dec 21

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I’m Not Ready for Christmas

It is December 21, 2012; four days from the day we celebrate the birth of Christ. The forecast calls for bitter cold and snow, so we may just have a white Christmas this year after a mostly brown and warm December. The malls are teeming with chaotic life and ravenous spending (I survived my one and only foray into the temple to consumerism with the kids last night!). The end of the madness draws nigh. I know this to be so because, aside from the aforementioned evidence, I have also reached my customary level of perplexed irritation at being asked the tired old question, “So, are you ready for Christmas?” Read more

Dec 19

The Kind of World God Has Made

I had to take a short road trip today so, armed with coffee and an iPod well-stocked with podcasts and sermons, I ventured out on a brisk December prairie morning. Given its close proximity to the shootings in Connecticut on Friday, I knew that last Sunday many pastors and preachers would have been wrestling with issues around the problem of evil and suffering. I was curious to hear how others approached it—both from a homiletical as well as a theological perspective. Read more

Dec 17

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How God Deals with Rejection

The world of social media has been all abuzz today with Mike Huckabee’s weekend response to the “Where was God in Connecticut?” question. Huckabee’s “answer” is as familiar as the question to which it responds, and has been sombrely rehearsed by American evangelical types frequently over the past few decades when it comes to these kinds of tragedies. You know it well, don’t you? It goes something like this: “Well, why should we expect God to show up when we have spent the last fifty years systematically removing him from our [insert public institution—usually schools].” Simply put: “Where was God? Well, we kicked him out!”  Read more

Dec 16

3 Comments

Unblind Our Eyes

Today was a rare Sunday morning for me in that I was not responsible for the sermon.  We have many gifted preachers in our small congregation (I am so glad for this!) and we try to use them as often as we can.  So, today I was able to participate in worship in a way that felt different than usual.  There were still a few public duties—I read the gospel text from Luke, I led the congregational prayer—but mostly it was a day for receiving rather giving.  It was a very good morning. Read more

Dec 13

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Merry Meaningless Christmas!

The story of Christmas is little more than one enormous fiction. So I was grimly informed by an essay from a while back that I chanced upon today. Emmanuel, “God with us,” the “humble king” and all that—just pleasant illusions that we entertain ourselves with each year on our naively hopeful and recklessly irresponsible way to the mall to anesthetize our miserable selves with shopping and candy. Read more

Dec 12

2 Comments

Surprise!

My daily prayers throughout the Advent season thus far have been guided by the second volume of Take Our Moments and Our Days, which runs from Advent through to Pentecost. One of the readings for Morning Prayer today was a familiar one from the Gospel of Luke: Read more

Dec 5

8 Comments

All Joy Wants Eternity

Part of this morning’s sermon preparation involved thumbing through Charles Taylor’s magisterial work, A Secular Age. That sounds unbearably pretentious, I know—as if it is my regular practice to consult dense works of philosophy  for my weekly sermons. As soon as I finish with Taylor, I’ll get on with the rest of my weekly tour of really, really smart people who have written really, really long and impressive books that I understand perfectly, and will wonderfully and relevantly and seamlessly synthesize into an easily digestible sermon for Sunday. Sure.
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Dec 3

6 Comments

Nothing New?

I was reading a book recently—I don’t remember exactly when—when, after reading a particular paragraph, I closed the book in irritated frustration. “I’ve read about a hundred paragraphs just like that one,” I thought. I had the same experience on my morning walk today, listening to a sermon. I heard the preacher breathlessly declaring the wondrous significance of some Greek word and what it meant for us today, and thought to myself, “I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard something like that before and it contributes precisely nothing to my understanding of this text.” So many words—in print or out loud—saying the same old things, again and again and again…

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Nov 29

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The Choice is Ours

One commonly hears some version or other of the refrain that faith is difficult here in the twilight of modernity. How can we possibly believe in the God of Christianity in light of modern science? Or in light of an understanding of the history and composition of Scripture? Or in the context of such astonishing religious diversity and all of mutually exclusive truth claims therein? Or given the amount and variety of suffering in our world? Or given how much we know about the sociobiological basis of all of our thinking and believing as human beings? Or _____?

The impression often given is that faith is uniquely improbable or challenging or implausible here in our current cultural moment. All we are left with, it seems, is some vestige of faith as an individually chosen, privately held, subjective  collection of beliefs which may provide psychological comfort or a kind of illusory meaning for our lives, but has little bearing on the real world. Read more

Nov 26

2 Comments

Far From God

Last night as bedtime approached, my daughter was sitting at the kitchen counter casually thumbing through one of those Bibles that has a “Where to Find Help When…” indexes in the front. It’s quite a resource. Whatever your problem—“Sleeplessness” or “Difficulty in Witnessing,” “Tempted to Envy” or “Choosing a Career”—there are 3-5 verses conveniently listed to address it. The Bible as self-help manual, apparently. Or something like that. It’s an approach to Scripture that irritates me, in many ways, and breaks any number of exegetical/hermeneutical principles along the way, but I suppose these things must occasionally do some good. I guess. Read more

Nov 23

14 Comments

Leap

In response to the previous post, Tyler asks a question about why my writing here has shifted away from more philosophical interests and toward more of an emphasis on faith.  I actually haven’t noticed a pronounced shift in my writing, to be honest, but I am not always the most reliable or accurate assessor of myself, so I will happily leave such questions to others.  I provided a long-ish answer to Tyler’s question in the comment thread of the previous post, but I think the shorter answer just walked out of my office door. Read more

Nov 21

38 Comments

Jesus is Weird

Have you ever thought about how utterly weird the Christian message about Jesus is?

The hope of the world, Christians claim, is a crucified Jew who was born of a virgin over two thousand years ago, lived a very peculiar and provocative life, taught and modeled a bizarre mixture of love, compassion, and peace alongside jarring and bewildering words of judgment and warning, was executed by a predictable combination of religious and imperial power while simultaneously paying the price for human sin and absorbing the evil of the whole world, cheated death (so his followers say) by rising from the dead, and claimed, in this whole package, to be the fulfillment of the very old, strange story about a very strange group of people whose mode of relating to God scarcely resembles anything we would recognize or welcome today.

On top of all this, his rag-tag band of followers subsequently tramped all over the known world proclaiming that this Jesus was (presently) alive and well, thank you very much, that his kingdom was at hand, that his church was called to invite all people to follow him, and that he would one day return to as the judge and Lord of history with the keys to eternal life.

Um. Ok. Read more

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