Dec 22
Well, I’m up to my ears in Christmas Eve and Sunday sermon preparation this week, and after that we’re off to Alberta to visit family until early January so the posting might be a little sparse around here for a while. In the meantime, I thought I would share another memorable quote from Frederick Buechner. This comes from Whistling in the Dark: Read more
There was a memorial service at our church yesterday and as is often the case at these events, one of the songs that rang out was “Amazing Grace.” It’s a song that people love to sing—a song that touches us on a deep and personal level. For a variety of reasons, it is a very appropriate song to sing during times of mourning and remembering. Read more
The fourth and final entry in my discussion of Philip Clayton’s Transforming Christian Theology (parts one, two, and three). Read more
Advent is about waiting for the God who comes. There is no more central conviction to the Christian faith that we worship and follow a God who has come, who continues to come, and who will come. At the same time, there is probably also no more central experience to a life of following Christ in the in-between time—the time between his first and second Advents—than waiting. Christ has come. Christ is coming. But still, we wait. Read more
Nov 27
It’s been a while since Frederick Buechner made an appearance around here, so I thought today would be as good a day as any to correct this. I can think of few whose words I would rather have rattling around my brain going into a weekend—especially a weekend where we celebrate the first Sunday of Advent and begin preparing for the arrival of the baby who would shape the course of history. This is from Wishful Thinking: Read more
On to part two of my discussion of Philip Clayton’s Transforming Christian Theology (part one here). Read more
On Sunday I preached from Revelation 21:1-6—a passage that I would guess is among the more well-known and well-loved in all of Scripture. It speaks of a new heaven and a new earth where the old order of things has passed away. No more tears, no more death, no more pain… It is a world that seems too good to be true. It is a world that scarcely resembles the reality that Revelation’s first hearers/readers were familiar with. Or that we are familiar with. For as long as it has been around, there has been a disjunction between this text and the lived reality of those who read it, hear it, and hope for what it promises. Read more
I spent the latter half of last week at a Canadian Mennonite Brethren study conference in Saskatoon, SK where the topic under discussion was what it means to “confess Jesus” in a pluralistic world. It was a good conference on many levels. If provided a chance to see my brother and many other friends (old and new) from around Canada, to listen to intellectually stimulating lectures, and participate in many interesting conversations. All in all, it was four days very well spent. Read more
This morning I was involved in a conversation about “consumer-driven” models of church. Especially in a cultural context where churches find themselves competing for “market-share” with other churches, it becomes quite easy for churches to come to see themselves as “service-providers” in some form or another. People come to us to have their “religious” needs met and we are expected to accommodate them by providing a package that is uplifting, inspiring, intellectually stimulating, or some other desirable adjective along with a whole host of articulated and unarticulated social needs. If we don’t meet these needs appropriately or enthusiastically or sensitively or “relevantly” enough, well, there’s a whole host of other churches that will (or will claim to). That’s what churches are for, after all. Read more
Vancouver Island is not a place known for being a hotbed of some of the “culture wars” that take place south of the border. As far as I’ve been able to tell in one year, it is a very post-Christian environment with a whole bunch of eclectic spiritualities from quasi-paganism to charismatic Christianity to the garden variety unreflective secularism that you see anywhere else in the modern west. Having said all that, I’ve been surprised to notice that the “fish wars” seem to have a small but noticeable presence over here. Read more
I was thinking about the conversation taking place around my previous post as I continued to get acquainted with William Willimon this morning. The conversation is around the proper Christian approach to suffering. How should we suffer? How should we view it? Is it an unwelcome intruder into the very essence of reality? The divinely appointed means through which Christians demonstrate their allegiance to Jesus? A strategy for effective Christian leadership? I think most of us who have been touched by the Suffering Servant have some sense that suffering ought to somehow be different for us even if we’re not sure what that looks like. I don’t know many people who actually desire or welcome pain but I think we intuitively sense that Jesus somehow changes how we look at (or ought to look at) suffering even if we aren’t always very good at articulating how. Read more
From the “sobering quotes” file, comes this morning’s offering from Richard Rohr: Read more
Most of us who have been Christians for a little while or a long while have moments where we wonder if we really are right about this whole God business. Some days it seems like nothing could be more obvious than that there is God out there guiding and sustaining the cosmos; on others, it seems like the remotest of possibilities.
Near the end of Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner quotes a character from a George MacDonald novel who has this to say about this question of questions: Read more
As a parent of young children, I often wonder about how much of the pain and brutality of the world we ought to expose our kids to—which conversations do they need to be absent from, which books and films could they do without exposure to, and when it is appropriate to let them in on the secret that the world can sometimes be kind of a nasty place (I suspect it’s quite often not as much of a “secret” to them as we might like to think). There can be a fine line between helping your children see that the world is a safe enough place to love and learn and grow and not shielding from the reality of a messed-up world in desperate need of compassionate, committed, and resourceful people to make it better. Read more
I finished Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today a few weeks ago, but I still find myself returning to it from time to time. It’s a thought-provoking book—one that I would highly recommend reading. Especially interesting was his chapter on “Christian pluralism.” Ever since I was a kid, I remember wondering how/if God could justly condemn those who didn’t make an explicit verbal profession of (the correct version of) faith in Jesus when so many throughout history have never even heard of Jesus (which is what I was told, by various people at various times). That sure seemed, well, immoral and for some time it was a significant stumbling block for me. Read more
This morning our church was privileged to have a guest speaker to deliver the sermon—my twin brother Gil. Unsurprisingly (and completely unbiasedly), I thought it was a great sermon. Gil was preaching on John 4 and the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. There’s a lot going on in this passage, but Gil zeroed in on the two mountains that the woman queried Jesus about: Read more
A quick look at the calendar shows that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of a very happy day in my life—the completion of my thesis. This is probably one of those anniversaries that will remain significant in my mind only, but I figured it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the subject matter I spent sixteen months of my life reading/writing about. I’ve continued to follow the exploits of folks like Dawkins and Hitchens over the last year as well as those who “defend the faith” against them. Mostly, the tone and the content of the discussions have seemed fairly belligerent, sterile, and unhelpful to me. The same old arguments, the same old defenses. People on both sides simply dig in their heels, talk a little louder (or more condescendingly), and try to prove who’s really the smartest. All in all, it’s not very inspiring stuff. On this level, I do not miss the debate. Read more
Jun 13
Related to the previous post about what makes a life “full” or “good, I came across this fantastic (and sobering—be sure to read the last sentence at least twice!) quote from Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today about love as a way of life: Read more
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