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Posts from the ‘Hope’ Category

May 27

A Series of Rebirths

Apologies for the lack of original posts over the last little while. It’s a pretty busy time of year for me, and the creative well is starting to run dry. On the positive side, I continue to come across memorable and thought-provoking writing to pass along. This morning I read an excellent reflection by Gordon Atkinson (aka, “Real Live Preacher”) on what it means to be self-aware, born again, and always growing. Here’s a quote from his post called “Born Again… and Again… and Again”: Read more

May 26

3 Comments

A Colony of Heaven in the Country of Death

So, why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death… an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, lethal injection, and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life.

Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection

May 21

The Breaking of Silence

Someday I will probably tire of quoting the poetic and profound words of Frederick Buechner (indeed, it may even be that you have already tired of reading them!).  But for me, that day hasn’t come yet. This morning I read this passage on prayer, taken from a sermon called “The Breaking of Silence” in The Magnificent Defeat, this morning: Read more

May 12

9 Comments

The Only Question That Matters

I’m still mulling over some of the excellent lectures I heard last week at Regent College’s Pastors Conference on Science and Faith. One lecture, in particular, focused on the “new atheists” (who are increasingly becoming, well, not new) and their often simplistic misunderstandings of the scope of science, the relationship between science and faith and the roles both play in our consideration and adoption of world-views (incidentally, I noticed today that David Bentley Hart has another wonderfully entertaining and insightful critique of the new atheism up over at First Things). The basic idea in the lecture (delivered by Denis Alexander) was familiar enough: just because science can explain one level of reality very well, it is not thereby equipped to explain or even suited to address every level of reality. All that was very good, if relatively standard stuff. Read more

May 11

1 Comment

Everybody’s Hurting

A good friend of mine is in the habit of periodically sending me an envelope full of Starbucks/iTunes cards that he collects from week to week.  A couple of weeks ago Jakob Dylan’s “Everybody’s Hurting” came in the mail.  It is a haunting and beautiful song, both lyrically and musically.  It is rich in biblical imagery and speaks powerfully to the brokenness of our world and the profound longing of the human condition.  Some of the lines in this song truly take my breath away and have reduced me to tears (maybe I’m turning all mushy and sentimental in my old age).   Each line in this song could probably inspire a sermon!  I’ve had the rest of Women and Country in the headphones as I write this post and I can tell that this album is going to be getting regular play in the iPod for a long time. Read more

May 1

10 Comments

Superlatives

The past two days were spent at the annual provincial conference of the churches in our denomination.  There was a mood of celebration and excitement.  We heard a lot of reports about what people were doing for God, how God was leading and directing this or that ministry, how/why our churches should give to the work of God.  It was a weird combination of refreshing and exhausting. Read more

Apr 18

2 Comments

You, Beyond Our Weary Selves

You God, Lord and Sovereign,
you God, lover and partner.
You are God of all our possibilities.
You preside over all our comings and goings,
all our wealth and all our poverty,
all our sickness and all our health,
all our despair and all our hope,
all our living and all our dying.
And we are grateful.

You are God of all our impossibilities.
You have presided over the emancipations
and healings of our mothers and fathers;
you have presided over the wondrous transformations in our own lives.
You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that
we imagine to be closed.
And we are grateful.

So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us,
that we might yet be the whole among the blind who see and
the dead who are raised;
that we may yet witness your will for peace,
your vision for justice,
your vetoing all our killing fields.

At the outset of this day,
we place our lives in your strong hands.
Before the end of this day,
do newness among us in the very places where
we are tired in fear,
we are exhausted in guilt,
we are spent in anxiety.

Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus.

Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People

Apr 6

11 Comments

Garbage and Flowers: A Post-Easter Reflection

So another Easter has come and gone and I’ve been reflecting on themes of “new life” and “resurrection.” Every Easter we hear words like these proclaimed in churches and we do our best to embrace the hope of the risen Christ. This past Sunday, I was the one proclaiming these words. But do they mean anything? Do they point to anything substantive about what actually has happened, what can happen now, and what will happen in the future? Are words like “resurrection” and “new life” just Christian catch-phrases that are in practice little more than a thinly religious veneer over ordinary concepts like self-help, fresh starts, and second chances? Read more

Apr 4

Hope in Person

“Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.” That remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say…. [T]he prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined in the new Jerusalem. Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we only have images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising still. And the intermediate hope—the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day—are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong.

Our task… is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Mar 21

13 Comments

On Prayer

A couple of memorable quotes on prayer I came across today, from two very different sources: Read more

Feb 26

23 Comments

The Crap Circle

Controversy around the nature of the atonement continues to bubble beneath the surface in some corners of the Canadian MB Conference. Specifically, some have problems with a book by MBBS professor Mark Baker and Joel Green that questions the primacy of penal substitution and seeks to recover other important biblical metaphors that address what the cross accomplishes and why and how. Some think Baker’s understanding of the atonement ignores (or at least minimizes) God’s wrath and denies the fact that Jesus died as a substitute for our sins. There have been charges of heresy, and plenty of misunderstanding and miscommunication throughout the discussion. Read more

Feb 23

1 Comment

Exile

I read very few novels during the six years I was in formal studies—there was too much required reading for my courses and, when combined with the ordinary demands of small kids and everyday life, there wasn’t much time (or energy!) left for reading fiction. One of the joys of seeing my university and grad school days receding in the mirror has been the ability to start reading novels again. It’s nice to be able to read a book without the expectation of evaluating it and demonstrating comprehension looming large in the background. Read more

Feb 16

3 Comments

Rapt for Lent

The season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday tomorrow, and over the last week I have been overhearing the customary discussions about who is giving up what for the period of pre-Easter preparation. I have given up things for Lent in the past and have occasionally even found the process to have the effect of sharpening my focus and preparing me for Easter.  But more often than not, it has degenerated into somewhat of a duty that, while undertaken with the best of intentions, fizzled out well before Good Friday arrived. Read more

Feb 8

8 Comments

A Ragged Garment

Last night I was talking with a group of young adults about things like doubt and honesty and childlike-ness and the role these things (and others) played in the development and preservation of a mature faith.  Frederick Buechner, in a discussion of one of his former professors, has this to say in Listening to Your Life: Read more

Feb 5

40 Comments

Living With the Bible

I’m always curious to observe how people view the Bible, both inside and outside of the church. There are often very interesting assumptions at work about what it means to “take the Bible seriously” or about how Christians view (or ought to view) the Bible. Everyone thinks they have a good understanding of what it means to “believe in the Bible” (or, more often to disbelieve in the Bible) whether this understanding comes from inside or outside of the Christian fold. Read more

Jan 25

6 Comments

Oh, Happiness

For at least the last decade or so, I’ve been fairly sour on the contemporary Christian music thing.  The reasons for this are many and varied (and likely very predictable as well), but probably not worth getting into here.  Whether it is merited or not, I tend to view the whole American evangelical empire and all of the products it spawns with suspicion if not outright cynicism. Read more

Jan 22

22 Comments

Prayer: You Place a Reservoir Within My Heart

Perhaps surprisingly, given my occupation and the fact that one of my main (and most rewarding) tasks on any given Sunday is leading our congregation in prayer, I often find prayer difficult. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes I am paralyzed by the relative insignificance of my own needs when compared by the suffering others are facing (this week has been an especially difficult one for prayer, given the situation in Haiti). Sometimes I don’t know what to pray for. Sometimes I don’t know what prayer accomplishes—in my own life and character and for those I pray for. Sometimes I am simply lazy and undisciplined. Sometimes the silence of heaven wearies me. Read more

Jan 20

14 Comments

In Every Arrival, a Leavetaking

I promise to return to less morbid topics shortly, but after returning from my grandfather’s funeral, hearing of the passing of a member of our congregation’s mother, and continuing to watch the ongoing crisis in Haiti unfold, death is on my mind.  I believe it was C.S. Lewis who once said that the ability (and burden) of being aware of and anticipating our own deaths is uniquely human.  Regardless of how we may feel about it, death is something we have to learn to live with. Read more

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