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Posts from the ‘Jesus’ Category

May 23

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We Start and Stop with Jesus… At Least We Should

Over the course of the month of May, the MennoNerds blogging collective that I am a part of has been reflecting upon how “Anabaptist distinctives” impact our thinking and living in the world.  A while back, fellow MennoNerd, Tyler Tully wrote a piece called What are Anabaptists? where he outlined three core Anabaptist convictions:

  • The centrality of Jesus above all things
  • The essential community/free church of confessing, baptized disciples
  • The prophetic and non-violent witness of God’s peace.

The challenge subsequently went out for all of us to write our own blog post on how these three convictions influence our own faith and practice. Read more

May 13

2 Comments

Letter to a Younger Me

A couple of recent things have me reflecting on the nature and shape of pastoral ministry today. First, I spent last week at a Pastors Conference in Vancouver where the theme was “Cultivating Christ-Like Persons of Character & Faithful Ethical Action.” It was good to be reminded of the central importance of character and virtue and the life-giving habits of prayer, solitude, worship, and Scripture in this weird and wonderful vocation called “pastor.”

The second was an email from a younger colleague in another part of the country wondering if it would be ok if they referenced some of our earlier correspondence in a sermon they were preparing. Having little recollection of the specifics of this correspondence, I proceeded to dig it up for a fresh look. It was interesting reading indeed! This person was in the first months of pastoral ministry and was seeking advice/wisdom from those a bit farther down the road.  They framed this request in the form of a very interesting question for me:

If you could write yourself a brief letter (one or two paragraphs) and place it on your desk three years ago as you started on this journey called vocational ministry, and reading this letter was very first thing you did on that first day three years ago, what would you write?

Read more

May 8

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Purveyors of Unused Truths

I’ve been spending the week worshipping, learning, walking, sitting in silence, and reconnecting with old friends as I attend a Pastors’ Conference in Vancouver.

[Pastors conference? How did I end up at one of these? When I was younger, the mention of such an event would have evoked images of smiley, hyper-enthusiastic white men walking around with oversized cell-phones holstered in their belts, stalking the halls, greedily “networking” with others and/or triumphantly relaying stories of spiritual conquest and adventure… Happily, I have been disabused of such misconceptions at this and previous conferences 🙂 . It’s been a good and refreshing week thus far.]

Of course one of the problems with these events is that there’s far too much information to take in and process adequately, but one sentence from a few days ago has lodged itself in my brain and refuses to disappear. It was spoken by a psychologist in the context of a talk about some of the problematic areas of being a pastor. Here’s what he said:

All too frequently, pastors can become purveyors of unused truths.

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May 1

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Rust-Coloured

From a journal reflection, after visiting someone with dementia.

 ——

Why aren’t we happier? Why can’t we be content, even amidst such relative wealth and comfort? Why do we always feel like we are being evaluated? Why are we always trying to prove ourselves to others, to ourselves, to God? Why can’t we just be? Read more

Apr 25

2 Comments

Behind Closed Doors

There was this fight, you see, with all the wicked words dripping with sarcasm and spite, all the refusals to understand, all the tiny, incremental decisions to hurt and refusals to love in the ways that love actually matters. It was ugly, as fights tend to be, and it ended with the slamming of doors.

These closed doors, they speak so loudly and abrasively. They speak of hurt and stubbornness and ignorance and regret. They divide and they separate, closing us off from each other, ruling out possibility. They mock us as we stare blankly, angrily at them, willing them to open, wishing there was a rewind button, wishing words could be unsaid and actions could be undone. Read more

Apr 23

11 Comments

Religious Professionals

I was driving my son to guitar lessons the other day, trying to keep up while he talked a mile a minute. I was only half listening (shameful, I know), but in one of his stories I caught the word “priest.” This isn’t a word he uses often, and my curiosity was piqued. I’m always curious about how my son understands the weird and wonderful contours of the church/religion-land that his dad happens to inhabit. I think my world is a bit of an oddity to him. He knows that I read books and talk to (and at) people, that I busily bang away on my laptop, writing sermons, writing articles, writing, writing, writing. But I sometimes think he wishes I had a more respectable job. Like building things or selling things or fixing things or growing things… things you can see and touch in the real world. Or teaching zombie apocalypse preparedness courses. You know, something useful. Read more

Apr 21

Realism, Interrupted

Sometime between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, I happened upon an interesting article called “Abandon (Nearly) All Hope” by Simon Critchley over at the New York Times philosophy blog. As the title might indicate, the author has little use for hope—at least in the way that it is conceptualized and applied in popular discourse. Hope is useful for little else than selling things to uncritical consumers or manipulating people into believing in all kinds of fanciful things for which there is no evidence. Critchley advocates Thucydides and Nietzsche as more worthy examples to emulate than the sellers of hope that we flock to by default. These thinkers understood that hope is for the weak and the easily manipulable, not for clear-thinking pragmatists. They understood that any meagre hopes we might be justified in embracing must be realistic. Read more

Apr 17

2 Comments

Three Times

So we have arrived at the Thursday before the Friday before the Sunday that changed the world. One of this morning’s readings in the prayer-book I use was the scene where Jesus is sentenced to death in the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Luke. It is, of course, a sad scene. The light of the world is handed over to the greedy and murderous hands of an angry mob. The Son of God gives himself away to those who don’t know what they are doing. Read more

Apr 16

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The Resurrection of Jesus (Gil Dueck)

I read the following words this morning on a Christian publication’s Facebook feed:

Easter is a notorious time for skeptics to launch attacks on Christianity. Christians should be ready to respond to skeptical arguments.

I confess that the way this is worded makes my skin crawl. “Calling all Christians, the skeptics are coming! Easter is nearly upon us, and it’s time to roll up our sleeves and defend the resurrection!” I’m sure Jesus would be so pleased.  

Having (grouchily) said that, I have always taken the words of 1 Peter 3:15-16 very seriously: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” We tend to major on the “always be prepared” part and minor on the “with gentleness and respect” part, but that’s probably another blog post for another time.

At any rate, because Easter is a time where these questions tend to come up, and because the resurrection is the reason for the hope that I have, and NOT because I think Christians should be arming themselves for fiery combat with the skeptical hordes at the gate, I submit to you the following piece on the resurrection that was written by my brother Gil a few years back. It is important, in these lightly informed and noisy times, to at least make sure we know what we’re talking about when we defend or attack the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Read more

Apr 11

17 Comments

You Don’t Know What It’s Like

One day, three conversations.

1. I’m at a function where my job is to give a short devotional and prayer before the meal. Pastor-y stuff. You know. I’m trying to be witty, disarming, light. I make some throwaway comment about how I know we’re all hungry and that the soup smells good, but please won’t you just spare 5 minutes or so for the presence to descend? I do my thing. Appreciative smiles, all around. Let’s eat. Read more

Apr 9

2 Comments

One Body, For All the Wrong

I sometimes think of strange things on the way to work. Today is April 8, 2014. Yesterday it was 20 degrees Celsius here in southern Alberta. This morning it is snowing. This seemed somehow wrong to me as I was driving down the highway this morning. Yesterday the window was open. Today the defrost is on and there is snow on the hood of my car. Yes, this is very wrong indeed.

As I was pondering the deep and mysterious wrongness of southern Alberta weather patterns, I began to wonder about other wrong things in our world. I began to wonder about how many things are said, each day, in our communities, cities, nations, and world, that are wrong. How many factual errors? How much sloppy and inaccurate reporting? How many people pronouncing upon things they know little about? How much of noisy chatter in Internet-land is simply misinformed and incorrect? How are we able to wade through all this wrongness and still function?   Read more

Apr 2

10 Comments

All That Life Threatens to Steal

I read an article this week about the death of handwriting and how a whole generation of kids will grow up with bad to nonexistent penmanship skills due to the proliferation of technological devices that they master before their tenth birthday. I read another one about how we retain far more of what we write when use pen and paper rather than laptop and tablets. And then I read yet another article about how wireless technology was giving us cancer and generally rotting our brains. Feeling appropriately despondent about the state of our wired and technologically dependent world, I said to myself, “very well then, pen to paper it is.” My handwriting, as you will see, is truly abysmal (I’m old enough that I can’t even blame the Internet for my inadequacies), but hopefully it is legible nonetheless. Believe it or not, this is the result of me writing extra slowly.

I wrote the following reflection sitting in a dumpy coffee shop with an old notebook after visiting a dear saint walking through the fog and sadness of the valley of the shadow. Read more

Mar 27

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Broken Along the Way

I had planned to be in Edmonton today for the seventh and final national event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, but a combination of an unexpectedly clogged schedule and yet another batch of bad weather in the winter that refuses to die means that I am, instead, watching the events on my laptop on this snowy spring morning.  The opening ceremonies are taking place right now—the prayers, the speeches, the parade of dignitaries across the stage.  It’s all very good, but the audio’s not great, so my mind is drifting.

Read more

Mar 24

4 Comments

A Gift is for Giving

This past weekend, we were privileged to have Cheryl Bear from the Nadleh Whut’en First Nation community in northern British Columbia as a special guest here in Lethbridge at both our Mennonite Church Alberta Annual Assembly on Friday and Saturday, and at our morning worship service on Sunday.  The timing of the event was significant here in Alberta, as the Truth and Reconciliation’s final national event will be taking place in Edmonton this week (Mar 27-30).  Cheryl is gifted musician and storyteller, and it was delightful to both hear from and get to know her over these short few days.

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Mar 13

2 Comments

Love Finds Us

Lent is a time when we talk often about “wilderness experiences”—about times when things are hard, when God seems absent, when we seem disoriented or stressed or lonely or bored or anxious or whatever. “The wilderness” becomes a kind of placeholder for an experience or set of experiences that happen to us. A season we must endure or grow through, a challenge we must rise to, a test we must pass, a necessary part of the journey of faith.

I think this is mostly an appropriate way to use wilderness language. Mostly.  Read more

Mar 4

1 Comment

Hope is a Condition of Your Soul

Fear. Of nothingness. Of dying. Of failure. Of change. It is of different degrees, but it all comes from one source, which is the isolated self, the self willfully held apart from God. There are three ways you can deal with this fear. You can simply refuse to acknowledge it, dulling your concerns with alcohol or entertainment or exercise or even a sort of virtuous busyness, adding your own energies to the white noise of anxiety that this culture we have created seems to use as fuel. This is despair, but it is a quiet despair, and bearable for many years. By the time that great grinding wheel of the world rolls over you for good, you will be too eroded to notice. 

Or, if you are strong in the way that the world is strong, you can strap yourself into life and give yourself over to a kind of furious resistance that may very well carry you through your travails, may bring you great success and seem to the world triumphant, perhaps even heroic. But if it is merely your will that you are asserting, then you will develop a carapace around your soul, the soul that God is trying to refine, and one day you will return to dust inside that shell that you have made.

There is another way. It is the way of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading for release from his fate, abandoned by God. It is something you cannot learn as a kind of lesson simply from reading the text. Christ teaches by example, true, but he lives with us, lives in us, through imagination and experience. It is through all these trials in our own lives, these fears however small, that we come close to Christ, if we can learn to say, with him, “not my will, Lord, but yours.” This is in no way resignation, for Christ still had to act. We all have to act, whether it’s against the fears of our daily life or against the fear that life itself is in danger of being destroyed. And when we act in the will of God, we express hope in its purest and most powerful form, for hope, as Václav Havel has said, is a condition of your soul, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Hope is what Christ had in the garden, though he had no reason for it in terms of events, and hope is what he has right now, in the garden of our own griefs.

— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

Feb 28

2 Comments

Safe at the Foot of the Fuzzy Cross

Lord teach us to pray (Luke 11:1).

Like the disciples, I often have no idea how to pray. I don’t know what to ask for, I don’t know how long to keep asking, I don’t know if I am doing it right, I don’t know how it all really works. That doesn’t sound very pastoral, I know. What can I say? I suppose I am, at least, in decent (or at least populous) company when I say that prayer is often very hard for me. Read more

Feb 25

5 Comments

The Receptionist and the Messenger

There are times when it feels like to be a pastor is to be the receptionist at a walk-in clinic where the doctor is never in. The sick and the wounded, the weary and confused, the angry and exhausted—in they stumble, speaking of bodies that are breaking down, of loved ones who are dying, of relationships that stagger under the weight of too many cumulative breaks and fissures to possibly think of mending, of doubts born of too much suffering and silence. In they come, assuming that the receptionist has some kind of special access to the doctor, to the healing they want and need. Read more

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