Feb 13
Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall return.
These words have been spoken in churches around the world this Ash Wednesday and will be spoken later today in our own church. These words are a call to ponder our mortality, to examine our souls and repent for our sins, to begin the slow march to the cross of Christ and to the new life of resurrection on the other side. Read more
A couple of conversations this week have me thinking about fairness. The first was a kind of prolonged lament about the unfairness of life. This person had the (mostly justified) impression that life had treated them profoundly unkindly and this unhappy fact coloured how they interpreted virtually everything else they encountered in daily life. The second conversation occurred with a friend over supper last night. His daughter had been learning about the importance of fairness in school, about how everyone needed to be treated exactly equally. “Why tell them this?” he asked as we were getting supper on the table. “Life isn’t fair—the sooner they learn this the better!” Indeed. Read more
If the heart of “meaning” is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story with all its oddity and ambivalence, becomes open to interpretation in terms of God’s saving work. Once we have stopped drawing a distinction between “compromising” activities and spheres (the family, the state, the individual body, or psyche) and “pure” realities (the soul, the intelligible world), the spiritual life becomes a much more complex, demanding, and far-reaching matter. “Spirituality” becomes far more than a science of interpreting exceptional private experiences; it must now touch every area of human experience, the public and the social, the painful, negative; even pathological byways of the mind, the moral and relational world. And the goal of a Christian life becomes not enlightenment but wholeness—an acceptance of this complicated and muddled bundle of experiences as a possible theater for God’s creative work.
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge
So, this one has been making the rounds in the social media universe… Apparently, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has “defeated” the world’s leading atheist evangelist Richard Dawkins in a recent debate at Cambridge University. Quite handily, in fact—324 votes to 136. The resolution under discussion was “religion has no place in the 21st century.” Apparently it still does. Rowan Williams has saved the 21st century… or at least the day. We can all take a deep breath and relax. Religion will be around for a while.
Among the unexpected pleasures of a full weekend at home alone with the kids, which included the usual worship service preparation, our church’s AGM, as well as basketball games and swimming trials, and hosting a friend for night who was stopping in on his way back to British Columbia, was a 3 am trip to the local Emergency Room to deal with a dislocated toe that my son sustained at an all-nighter at the church. Great. Just what the, ahem, doctor ordered. Read more
I know a man who is watching his wife die. Slowly. Dementia. It hurts to hear him tell the story of how she once was, how she is now, hurts to hear about how on “good” days she recognizes who he is and doesn’t ignore or get angry at him. It hurts to think about how what is looms large and menacing over what was, always lurking, always threatening to steal life and joy from the past, robbing even memories of their sustaining power. “She can’t speak anymore,” he says, “so we have to communicate without words. Sometimes she squeezes my hand.” Read more
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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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…
 | inquisitivelypinkcd4… on Hagar |
| inquisitivelypinkcd4… on Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined… |
 | Ryan on Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined… |
| inquisitivelypinkcd4… on Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined… |
| inquisitivelypinkcd4… on Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined… |
Rumblings 