Sep 14
It’s been a while since Walter Brueggemann made an appearance around here, so I thought I would share another one of his prayers as I sit down to begin another work week. I came across this prayer from Prayers for a Privileged People during last week’s service preparations. Among other things, it seems to me a good reminder of the continual process of disorientation and reorientation that is inherent in the life of faith: Read more
Sep 3
A couple of loosely connected thought, links, and quotes for a Friday morning…
A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent new collaborative blog called Wondering Fair (a number of contributors are alumni from Regent College). Interesting and engaging topics, good writing, nice accessible look and feel… definitely worth adding to your reader. Due to my ongoing interest in how technology shapes us as human beings, I was particularly drawn to David Benson’s post on why he doesn’t own a mobile phone. His summary hits the nail on the head, in my view: Read more
A lot of my reading for this week’s sermon has been focused on Sabbath—how to keep it, why it ought to be kept, what prevents us from keeping it, etc. Whatever else a consistent and deliberate observation of Sabbath might protect us from, I think that our societal addiction/enslavement to technology would be high on the list. A couple of articles I’ve come across over the last few days from the New York Times’s “Your Brain on Computers” series (see here and here, for example) have simply reinforced my sense that one of the things that the inhabitant of twenty-first century postmodernity is most desperately in need of is unplugging. Read more
Some more wonderfully insightful stuff from Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. This passage concludes a discussion of the highly politicized history of translating the Bible into English: Read more
Ordinarily, I am entrusted with the task of preaching once per month but because of summer holidays and staff vacations I find myself in middle of preparing three consecutive sermons. I am enjoying the opportunity, but I am also gaining an appreciation for those whose regular task is weekly preaching! As I sit down this morning to begin preparing for next Sunday, a couple of quotes that came through my inbox last week are bouncing around in my head. Read more
After a couple of weeks away from home on vacation where I tried to limit my reading to novels, I picked up Samir Selmanovic’s It’s Really All About God again this morning. As I’ve alluded to before, it’s a bit of a rambling and not altogether coherent apologia for a kind of “let’s just embrace mystery and all get along” approach to the challenges of the religious plurality that currently characterizes many parts of our increasingly globalized world. So far, the book strikes me as a commendable enough practical approach to living peacefully with those who do not share our beliefs, but one that tends to wander too frequently into confusing a practical political and social strategy for a coherent philosophical/theological worldview. Read more
Today, a friend passed along a couple of sourceless yet memorable quotes about conversion and the idea that being a Christian is about Jesus being our “personal” saviour (I’ve reflected a bit on the language of “personal relationships” with Jesus before here). Given that Mennonite Brethren issues have been on the menu here over the last little while, and given that the early MB’s were very interested (perhaps at little too interested?) with issues of personal conversion and assurance of salvation, I thought these would be worth passing along: Read more
Well, I’ve spent the last three or so days driving to Alberta and back and consequently have had little time for blogging. I have, however, managed to squeeze a bit of reading in here and there on my travels, and as always the odd quote seems to leap off the page and lodge itself in my brain. Here’s an intriguing one from Samir Selmanovic’s confused, confusing, and mostly forgettable foray into religious pluralism but not really religious pluralism called It’s Really All About God:
Faith is an exercise in having high expectations of God.
Thoughts?
I am in the middle of preparing a sermon on Psalm 125 for this Sunday. Psalm 125 is part of the Psalms of Ascent, songs that the Israelites would sing on their yearly pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the holy festivals. It is a psalm that celebrates the God who “surrounds” his people, the God in whom security and goodness are found. Just as the mountains wrap around the city of Jerusalem, giving it security and strength, so the Lord is all around his people. It is a Psalm of confidence, security, and hope. Read more
Last night at our young adults group we talked about, among other things, the frequently encountered view that Christianity is a strange relic of the past, that has nothing useful to say to us in the present, no normative force or existential/moral relevance in a world that has “grown up.” It is a well-rehearsed and often repeated story: once upon a time, primitive people thought there was objective meaning in the cosmos, we now know this to be false, and our only course of action is to salvage what personal meaning we can from the scrap heap of a random and chaotic universe. Read more
Jun 11
I’ve spent a bit of time ferrying back and forth to the mainland this week which has given me the chance to finally dive into Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. This is my first exposure to Lamott, but those who have read her will know that she comes up with some fairly memorable (and sometimes deliciously irreverent!) lines. I came across this one sometime around 1:00 am on the ferry last night:
Grace… is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
It seems like every time I walk into a bookstore these days there are a handful of new books on the shelf, confidently explaining how science has shown this or that religious understanding of the world to be unfounded, misguided, false, naive, etc. The obvious response to such claims—and one that is frequently made—is to question just how it is that science could “prove” or disprove anything about an overall worldview within which science is located. Read more
This past weekend we made the trip down the island to visit Sidney Booktown. We had heard from a number of people over the last two years that this was a necessary outing for newcomers to Vancouver Island, so we finally decided to check it out. Despite the cloudy, cool conditions, it was a great way to spend the afternoon. Sidney is a delightful little seaside town with a whole bunch of really cool bookstores and coffee shops. If it wasn’t for a couple of eight year-olds whose tolerance for leisurely bookstore browsing has limits, I could have spent all day there! Read more
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
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
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
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
Because of a couple of conferences and a retreat over the last few weeks, I have spent a lot more time on ferries, sky-trains, buses, etc, than usual. Happily, this gave me the opportunity to dive into a few new books. If you’re like me, you often don’t feel very “saintly”—which is why we all need periodic reminders like this one from Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection: Read more
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