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Posts from the ‘Jesus’ Category

May 24

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You Say You Want a Revolution?

I’ve been a part of a number of interesting and often painful conversations over the last few days, many of which relate—directly or indirectly—to the problem of evil and whether or not there is a coherent way to think about and respond to this from a Christian perspective. These subjects of these conversations have covered a head-spinningly wide range—from  the reality of war and poverty to systemic injustices to painful realities of everyday life and relationships. In every conversation, old, old questions lurk in the shadows: “How can God allow this? How can I believe that God is good and loves his children in light of ____? What am I supposed to do, as a person of faith, in light of all this evil?” Read more

May 21

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How God Feels in This World

In around a month or so, it will be one year since we packed up and left Vancouver Island and returned to our roots in southern Alberta. For the entirety of this time, Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing has been sitting on or around the shelf beside my favourite reading chair.  The book was a parting gift from a dear saint in our previous church—a woman whose spirituality was thick and deep and broad, and from whom I learned a great deal over the course of my three years on the Island.  She said it was a book that had impacted her like few others. I accepted her gift with gratitude and no small amount of curiosity. Read more

May 11

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Vengeance is (Not) Mine

We have a tendency to want to create a God in our own image who we can then emulate.

These were the words of Perry Yoder, professor emeritus of the newly renamed Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, at a theological studies conference put on by Mennonite Church Alberta that I have been attending in Calgary over the past few days. We have been talking a lot about how we read the Bible—about the presuppositions that inform our interpretations, about how our various traditions dispose us toward certain possibilities, about what to do about seemingly irreconcilable texts, and myriad other issues around reading and understanding Scripture. Including, as the quote alludes to, the constant temptation to read Scripture with an eye toward the God we expect (or would prefer) to find.  Read more

May 9

9 Comments

“God Does Not Depend on You”

Over the course of the five years or so that I have been maintaining this blog, it has been interesting to observe which topics spark conversation and which do not. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that if there is one topic or theme that has tended to generate the most comments and/or traffic over the lifespan of this blog, it would be something related to doubt—whether the role doubt plays (or can play or ought to play) in the life of faith or the role doubt has played in the rejection of faith. Read more

May 7

Do Not Fear

Yesterday presented me with two opportunities to share some reflections and experiences from my recent trip to Colombia—a morning sermon at the church I grew up in, and an evening presentation at a local fundraiser for the work of MCC. Wherever we went in Colombia and whoever we spoke with, we would ask some variation of, “so what would you have us say to people back in Canada?” Almost without exception we would hear something along these lines: “Just tell our stories. It is important for us to know that our stories are heard.” The more I have thought about the sights and sounds and stories we encountered in Colombia, the more I have been struck by what an enormous privilege and a solemn responsibility it is to be entrusted with a story.   Read more

Apr 10

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On Faith and Failure

A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation with a group of seniors where we reflected upon the question, “Have you ever seen or personally experienced the failure of faith?” A loaded question, if ever there was one. What does it even mean for faith to fail? We may have had some difficulties answering that question, but we certainly found no shortage of things to talk about! We talked about the experience of the absence of God, about the perceived inadequacy of faith in the face of imminent death, about faith’s failure to overcome fear and doubt, about faith’s inability to meet this or that intellectual challenge, about the slow drift away from the convictions of one’s childhood. It was a fascinating, if at times dispiriting conversation. Read more

Apr 8

The New Beginning Has Already Been Made

The resurrection message burst through the frontiers and was universal: Christ has been raised not as an individual but as Israel’s messiah, as the Son of man of the nations, as humanity’s ‘new Adam’, and as “the first-born of all creation”…. The risen Christ pulls Adam with his right hand and Eve with his left, and with them draws the whole of humanity out of he world of death into the transfigured world of eternal life. His new beginning in his end is the beginning of God’s new world in the passing away of this one. Whether this world will come to an end, and whatever that end may be, the Christian hope says: God’s future has already begun. With Christ’s resurrection from the catastrophe of Golgotha the new beginning has already been made, a beginning which will never again pass away.

— Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning

Apr 6

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Good Friday: For the Badness and the Sadness

What does this have to do with me? These were the decidedly impious words that kept rattling around my cranium as I drove around town running errands after a local Good Friday service this morning. It had been a meaningful service—beautiful music, considerable time spent hearing Scripture, a dramatic portrayal of Jesus’ betrayal, “trial,” and crucifixion—but for some reason, the events we remembered this morning seemed light years away from my own life and experience.

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Apr 6

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Which World is the Real World?

You should take a few minutes (or hours) to read Kim Fabricius’s Good Friday sermon “Wackos” posted over at Faith and Theology today. His final paragraph is lodged in my gut as I head off to church this morning: Read more

Apr 2

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“Jesus Doesn’t Want You to Love Him For What You Can Get Out of Him” (and Other Pious-Sounding Non-Starters)

Monday is my Sabbath and one of the things I usually do at some point in the day is walk the dog and listen to a sermon on my iPod. I listen to sermons from friends of mine at other churches or more “famous” preachers whose sermons are available via podcast. I look forward to these walks and these sermons. It’s nice to listen instead of speak, and I almost invariably come back from my walks having received something good for the day and the week ahead.

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Mar 27

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Delight in This?

Part of last weekend was spent in Calgary at a provincial gathering of Mennonite churches and organizations where our time together was focused upon the theme of “Delighting in Scripture.” It’s a very pious sounding theme, isn’t it? Good Christians are supposed to love the Bible, aren’t they? It sounds like something we should all be doing all of the time. It calls to mind impressions I had in my childhood that if you were a follower of Jesus, you couldn’t wait to read your Bible and eagerly did so whenever the opportunity presented itself.

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Mar 7

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Life

It’s mid-afternoon and it’s been one of those scattered, disjointed days.  Office equipment malfunctioning, the seemingly constant pinging of email, several conversations about how to do this or that better, and what the church ought to consider doing, and what a healthy church looks like, and not getting my sermon done, and thinking ahead to a funeral for a friend tomorrow, and how are we going to get the kids to their various activities tonight, and don’t forget to stop at the bank, and remember to call so-and-so about such-and such, and, and, and…. Read more

Feb 28

15 Comments

The Truth

Most Sundays, at around 11:30 am, I get up behind a sturdy wooden pulpit, take a deep breath, and speak the first of the two thousand words or so that comprise my sermon. Every time I do this, the irony that a big part of my vocation involves speaking—out loud!—strikes me. As someone who has always been shy, always struggled with stuttering and speaking too quickly, it is a strange and exhilarating and terrifying indeed to speak in front of other human beings on a regular basis. Jeremiah’s words of protest to God have always rung true for me: “Ah Lord God! Truly, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy” (Jer 1:6). And yet, I speak.  Read more

Feb 22

4 Comments

Ashes, Ashes

I led my first ever Ash Wednesday service today. Actually, scratch that. I participated in my first Ash Wednesday service today. My Mennonite Brethren background was decidedly low church and we didn’t really observe Lent or Advent or the Christian year in general. It was Christmas and Easter and that was about it. Everything else was high-church or “liturgical” (as if we weren’t!) or some other negative/unnecessary  practice. And even though in recent years many churches in the Anabaptist tradition have moved toward embracing the Christian calendar, I still had never actually attended an Ash Wednesday service.

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Feb 21

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The Life and the Light

Two services in the next six days, combined with a quick jaunt to Saskatchewan to see family in between will likely mean a rather light week on this blog. I did, however, want to throw up a quote that I came across a while back that I’ve been thinking about as we head into the season of Lent.

This past Sunday was Transfiguration Sunday where the divinity of Jesus is revealed to a handful of frightened and bewildered disciples on the top of a mountain. During Lent and Holy Week we reflect upon the simultaneously horrific, beautiful, and unexpected manner in which this divinity is expressed. Read more

Feb 15

3 Comments

The Crucial Question

Over at the Mennonite Weekly Review’s “The World Together” blog, writer and activist Bert Newton has written a really thought-provoking piece on “the crucial question” when it comes to religion. So many debates and conversations on the nature of religion and irreligion focus on “belief in God” or its absence. Newton helpfully probes the common assumption that this is the central question, and asks us to ask harder and more honest questions about how and why we invest in the formation and maintenance of the views we hold about the world.

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Feb 3

58 Comments

“Masculine” Christianity?

Apparently John Piper has, in a recent address delivered at a pastors conference, added his voice to Mark Driscoll’s in advocating a more “masculine Christianity.” Driscoll, of course, created his latest storm of controversy in an interview with British radio host Justin Brierley a few weeks back, when he said, among other things, that there were no good Bible teachers in the UK, and that the reason that churches were struggling was because they were led by women. The implication was that if churches across the pond would just “man up” and start letting men lead, and stop wallowing in effeminate religion, the “results” (i.e., more churches that look like Driscoll’s ) would come. An interesting theory, to be sure—a little light on context and cultural awareness, and, well, reason, but there you go. Muscular, manly Christianity is, apparently, the cure for what ails the church. Read more

Feb 2

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Who Am I?

Once a month or so, a delightful young woman from our church hosts a seniors coffee hour on Thursday mornings in our church basement. She is here from Germany on a one year volunteer assignment, and these times that she organizes for some of our older and wiser saints have become a real highlight for me. We play games, sing songs, enjoy conversation, and, of course, we eat. What would a gathering at a Mennonite church be without food, after all?! Read more

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