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Posts from the ‘Hope’ Category

Apr 1

If Christ Has Not Been Raised — Pity Us All

I spent the morning after the triumph of life over death reading about the triumph of death over life.

Well, that sounds a little more dramatic than it actually was. What I was in fact reading was a fairly ordinary little book by David Webster called Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy. It’s hard to imagine a book with a subtitle that catchy being almost a complete waste of time, but it was. I was really looking forward to reading Dispirited after hearing an interview with Webster on the radio (he made some intriguing comments about contemporary spirituality and how it perpetuates selfishness, individualism, consumerism, etc.), but the book turned out to be a rather poorly written, sloppily edited collection of loosely connected rants against the increasing prominence of the (admittedly irritating) “I’m spiritual but not religious” claim.  Read more

Mar 27

Thy Kingdom Come

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Mat. 6:10).
   
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;  nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20-21).

 

Some reflections on the Wednesday before the Friday and the Sunday that changed the world… Read more

Mar 22

2 Comments

The Final Test

I am scrambling to gather a few odds and ends from my office before heading out of town for a weekend conference.  Downstairs is the mingling of voices and the tinkling of spoons and plates and coffee mugs as a group of people gather for Friday morning coffee and conversation.  I look out my window as a few latecomers straggle in.  One dear couple catches my eye.  There was a stroke years ago that has changed their reality in irreversible ways.  I watch them share a smile as he gently helps his wife out of the vehicle, into the wheelchair, and down the snowy path toward the church.  All around there is the hum of traffic and industry, all of this frantic busyness hurrying by unaware of this simple, unobserved, holy moment—this “ordinary” scene in an extraordinary story that is simultaneously awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, and profoundly hope-filled.  I feel like I should take my shoes off.  Or something. Read more

Mar 14

3 Comments

The Cultivation of Regret

Do you ever wonder about what might have been? What if I had taken that job? What if I had moved to that city or stayed in that city? What if I had pursued that relationship? What if I had put my kids in that school? What if I had encouraged that friendship, chosen that church, made that crucial decision at that crucial moment? How would my life have been different? What painful pitfalls might have I avoided? What pleasures and surprises might I have missed out on? What doors may have closed never to open again? What have I missed out on by virtue of choosing what I have chosen when I have chosen it? Read more

Mar 12

1 Comment

An Odd Prescription

I have, over the last few months, had the privilege of regular interaction with a couple of young men who (independently) came to our church inquiring about baptism. In their own words, both know “next to nothing” about Christianity. They don’t know much about history or theology, the have read little more than a scant few verses in the Bible, they aren’t much interested in the latest controversial issues in the church, and (gasp!) don’t find my sermons terribly memorable. But they want to get baptized. They don’t know much about Jesus, but they want to come to him, to sign up to follow, even though they don’t have much of an idea what they are getting into.

(Come to think of it, how many of us really do?) Read more

Mar 11

17 Comments

Going to Church

Often when I get up in front of the congregation I am a part of on Sunday morning, I will silently wonder why each person has come to church that morning. Did they come hungering for an encounter with the living God? Out of grim duty or rusty habit? For their kids’ sake? To worship? To hang out with friends? Because there were rumours of a soup lunch afterward?  There are likely as many different reasons (or combinations of reasons) as there are people in the pews on a given Sunday. One Sunday a number of years ago, I began the service by saying, “I’m not sure what brought you here today…” but before I could finish the sentence, a middle-aged man with a penchant for loudly and delightedly answering any and all rhetorical questions posed from the front blurted out, “The bus!!” Like I said, many responses… Read more

Mar 7

6 Comments

Bleached Upon the Shore

One does not typically expect to encounter theological inspiration at a church finance meeting. Well, I suppose some might, but I do not number myself among such strange creatures. For most of this week’s church business meeting, things proceeded according to the script. There were facts and figures and updates and PowerPoint slides and motions and seconders to motions and questions and clarifications and dialogue and decisions and then we were done.

Read more

Mar 1

12 Comments

On Disappointment

There aren’t many good radio stations in the city I live in. Like, roughly zero. But for a few glorious moments this morning the heavens opened, the clouds parted, and a shaft of wondrous auditory light suffused my little Volkswagen Jetta as I flitted about, running errands on a windswept prairie day. U2’s “One” was playing on the radio. It’s probably my favourite song. Ever. I hadn’t heard it for months, maybe even a year. And here it was! On a crappy Lethbridge radio station that ordinarily dispenses a nauseating combination of top-40 pop trash and mid-eighties light rock (think Katy Perry and Chicago back to back)! Such rapture, such undeserved grace! It was almost more than I could bear. Read more

Feb 27

13 Comments

For Our Own Good

Should human beings have the right to eat, drink, and spend ourselves into oblivion without the state getting involved? Should the government be allowed to save us from our own toxic habits and risky, stupid, shortsighted behaviour in the interest of the public good? Will nothing short of legislative intervention save us from a future of morbidly obese, substance dependent video game addicts, mired in a mountain of unnavigable debt? Have we, the citizens of the brave, new twenty-first century world, come to the point where we require protection from ourselves? Read more

Feb 20

20 Comments

A Boy on the Street

I saw a boy today. Ten or eleven years old probably—about the age of my own son. He was walking alone along the side of a busy road. He was skinny. His jaw protruded out, an under bite full of crooked yellowish teeth, and his greasy hair was sticking out in all kinds of different directions. His eyes looked vacant. He had a thin, tattered summer jacket on, zipper wide open revealing a lime green stretched out t-shirt that hung almost down to his knees. His pants were too big for him, his shoes hardly up to the task of navigating the slushy dirty city streets. He looked cold. Read more

Feb 19

10 Comments

Who Sees Clearly?

The problem of evil is frequently cited as one of the most powerful arguments against religious faith. The existence of suffering, whether on the micro or macro level is seen as evidence against the existence of a benevolent and powerful deity. And yet, the empirical data around suffering and religious faith stubbornly refuses to fit into this view of how and why human beings believe what they believe about the world. Religious faith seems to be the highest in contexts where suffering is the greatest. Read more

Feb 13

Dust

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

Feb 8

4 Comments

Is God Fair?

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

Feb 7

1 Comment

Wholeness… And Acceptance

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

Feb 4

1 Comment

A Place for Religion

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.

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Jan 26

Waiting Room

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

Jan 16

2 Comments

It Hurts

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

Jan 12

6 Comments

“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

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