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Posts from the ‘Jesus’ Category

Feb 27

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Our Despair Might Say More About Us Than it Does About Reality

As I’ve mentioned before, over the last six years or so, I have devoted my sermons between Epiphany and Lent to questions of faith asked by members of our congregation. These can range from questions about specific biblical texts, to theological issues, to how faith intersects with this or that social issue. Sometimes I get only a few questions, sometimes I get so many that I have to extend the series. It’s a series that I find both enjoyable and challenging. The preacher always tends to approach the task with his or her own questions buzzing in the background. It’s always fascinating to take what’s on other people’s minds as my starting point. Read more

Feb 5

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“Is Your Eye Evil Because I Am Good?”

I’ve written before about how Jesus’ parables sound different at different stages of one’s life. The story of the lost son, for example, is a story that seems to contain almost the whole of human failure and frustration, hope and longing, love, and desire. I have at various points in my life identified with the recklessly destructive younger son, the self-righteous older brother, and the heartsick father. I doubt I’m terribly unique in this. The story sounds different at forty-eight than it did at twenty-two. It’s the kind of story that can keep one company for a lifetime, opening new truths, unlocking new understandings, making sense of some of the terrain covered along the way. Read more

Jan 3

7 Comments

In Search of a Mea Culpa

So, Harvard president Claudine Gay has resigned. This has felt inevitable pretty much from the moment she and two of her Ivy League colleagues couldn’t bring themselves to offer an unambiguous response to the question of whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment in the wake of October 7. It felt like even more of a foregone conclusion after evidence of multiple instances of plagiarism in her published work began to surface. Read more

Dec 31

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The Year of Our Lord

Today marks the last day of the year of our Lord 2023. Usually, this time of year has me scrambling some nostalgic year-end-ish kind of post together. I’ll often check my statistics from the last year, highlight the five most read posts, and write a short blurb about each. I’ll say thanks for reading and hope that all of this might give this little blog a bit of a bump in views as one year ends and another begins. Read more

Dec 25

The Gift Too Great to Make Sense Of

What can I give him, poor as I am? What indeed: for God today has recreated the world and refashioned you and me in his own image. God today has burst open the frontiers of all possible and imaginable experience and come among us. The Maker of all reaches out his hand and touches [us]. And for that reaching out there is no exchange, there is no fit return that we can make. God’s pure, causeless, gratuitous love can have no answer, except some faint fumbling echo of that very gratuity and pointlessness itself; the gift too great to make sense of.

— Rowan Williams, from a sermon called “Christmas Gifts” in Open to Judgment

Image source.

Dec 15

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A Soul’s Worth

Last year around this time, I wrote a short piece on my first Christmas at the jail, about how Christmas carols sound different surrounded by plastic and concrete than they do in candle-lit church sanctuaries, about how lines like “And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low” or “For sinners here, the silent Word is pleading” seem somehow more urgent or pressing or something here. The familiar words come crashing into the ugliness of the human condition from out there in “abstract theology land” with startling force. Read more

Nov 28

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Disneyland

I had barely walked through the door of my office at the jail when a guard showed up. “There’s an inmate who’s been trying to get a hold of a chaplain since Saturday. His kid is in on life support at the hospital. He wants to talk to someone. We suggested “Health Care,” but he wasn’t interested, so…” I gulped. Said I would “take care of it,” whatever that could possibly mean. I leafed quickly through some of the requests that had trickled in over the weekend and noticed two from this poor guy. I’ll call him Terry. Could someone please come see me… pray for me… pray for my son? My heart heaved a little. Read more

Nov 21

6 Comments

All Are Welcome?

“So, I’m getting out tomorrow… and, well, I think I’d like to stay connected, or, you know, kinda figure I need to stay with church and stuff… I dunno, do you have any advice or suggestions?” The guy sitting across from me in bleak, concrete interview room at the jail struggled to make eye contact, shifted around constantly. He had a cut over his eye and had limped noticeably as he walked into the room. He had been semi-regular in my bible studies over the last year or so. He rarely said much, but when he did it was measured and thoughtful. I told him I was happy to hear that he was getting out. He didn’t seem as happy for himself as I was for him. Read more

Nov 16

8 Comments

Tell Me About Your Relationship with Jesus

This was the surprising invitation put to Australian musician Nick Cave on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast recently. Not exactly the sort of thing one expects to hear in a forum typically devoted to the nuts and bolts of music production. But Cave does talk about God rather a lot, so I guess fair game. There was some knowing chuckling and qualifying and maybe a bit of embarrassed hedging. It’s such a retrograde, naïve, provincial question, after all. Who talks about their “relationship with Jesus” anymore, other than perhaps a few benighted yokels from the Bible belt? Right? Read more

Nov 14

5 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany: Wars and Rumours

I sat down in my study this morning in a bit of a state, a bunch of things belligerently crashing around in my head. So, I decided to try to give them some shape. Or at least to let them out. It gets crowded and unruly in there.

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Paul Kingsnorth is quickly taking up residence in my category of “people who I’ll read anything they write and listen to anything they say.” I’m sure he’ll be delighted to learn this—it’s a very exclusive category. His 2021 article “The Cross and the Machine” is one of my favourite conversion stories ever. His path has wound through the bored religious apathy of childhood, a more determined atheism in young adulthood, a deep love of ecology and environmental activism, Zen Buddhism, Wiccan paganism, and pretty much anything else he could take for a spin. Read more

Oct 25

8 Comments

On Polarization

I have always been a peacemaker of sorts. Whenever I take one of those Enneagram or Myers Briggs or DISC tests (which I find to be of dubious value, truth be told), I usually land in whatever category they have for peacemaker-ish people. The positive spin on this is that I genuinely do long for peace — between people, families, churches, nations, etc. The less positive spin is that I just hate conflict, like to be liked, and prefer being comfortable to wading into the discomfort of generative conflict. It’s not particularly flattering to admit this, but, well, the truth isn’t always flattering. Read more

Sep 12

22 Comments

Men Without Fingers

I’ll never forget the first time it happened. One of my tasks at the jail is to connect with inmates seeking one-on-one meetings. Sometimes these are people who won’t (or can’t) come to the regular chapels, so I’ve never met them before. When I introduce myself, I always try to very deliberately make eye contact, refer to them by name, and shake their hands. So much of life in jail is impersonal and dehumanizing. Any little gesture to counter this feels worth it to me. And so, I was very consciously looking this man in the eye when we shook hands. But something felt off. I looked down and was shocked to discover that he only had two out of ten fingers. I was shaking a palm and a few stumps. Read more

Aug 22

6 Comments

Yay, I Love That Guy!

Should the world love and admire Christians? In a recent blog post, Richard Beck, professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University in Texas, shared something that he said to his students in a lecture last semester:

I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’

Read more

Jun 29

5 Comments

“I Don’t Feel Like God Loves Me”

We only had twenty minutes for bible study at the jail recently. A code had been called (usually an altercation or medical emergency) which means nobody moves until it’s cleared up. So, the guys were forty minutes late arriving. They were restless, a little annoyed, distracted. What to do in twenty minutes? Read more

Jun 20

6 Comments

Our Sense of Self

I recently received an email from someone who had concerns about various SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) initiatives being implemented in the school system where they worked. This person had strong convictions on the matter but expressed something bordering on helplessness when it comes to how to wade into an arena where it seems like there are landmines all around, where it seems virtually impossible to have a sane and respectful conversation that does not immediately descend into polarized tribalism and overheated rhetoric. “Well, join the club” I felt like saying. Read more

Apr 21

14 Comments

An Act of (Active) Love

Something I’ve learned over a decade and a half of pastoral ministry, is that people interpret and cope with their suffering in very different and very personal ways. Some cannot tolerate the idea that God could play any causal role whatsoever in their pain. God is their co-sufferer, labouring to bring goodness out evil, redemption out of brokenness. God is the salve, not the source. Others, take refuge in a highly specific and highly personal conception of God’s role in orchestrating the events of this world. Their torments come directly from the hand of a meticulously sovereign God whose will, while sometimes inscrutable, is always done. And then there are others—most of us, I suspect—who find ourselves somewhere between these two poles. Read more

Apr 19

9 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

A morning tour through the news left a few itches that seemed to need scratching. And it’s been a while since a Miscellany post, so…

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Let’s begin in with the latest instalment of the “We’re losing our religion in the west but we still seem to weirdly miss it” category (surely R.E.M. must be getting tired of their song title being used for articles like this?). The image of a Gothic-style Catholic Church being turned into a skate-park pretty much sums it up. Six thousand to ten thousand churches close and/or are repurposed along these lines every year in America (it would likely be similar story in Canada). Church membership and attendance is falling off a cliff. We still like the idea of God or the divine or some kind of cosmic energy or… something. We can’t really tolerate the idea that there’s nothing beyond. We’re spiritual but not religious. So we like to tell ourselves, at any rate. Read more

Apr 5

5 Comments

Bleed into One

People sometimes ask me what I would have been if not a pastor. A number of options leap to mind, but I often joke that my first choice would have been “rock star.” I have always loved the energy and the emotion, the raw driving power of music, the euphoria of the crowd. It transports me. It always has. Alas, I have no real musical talent, which I’m guessing would have proved a difficult obstacle to overcome. I picked up the bass guitar a bit in my twenties and blundered uninspiringly along for a while, but that was the extent of it. Also, I probably would have needed hair to be a decent rock star. So, you know, the odds were always against me. Read more

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