Sep 30
Hassan is short, slight, quiet. He says little as he approaches the counter at the soup kitchen. He’s wearing black pants, black hoodie, and a black hat pulled down over his ears. He smiles, almost shyly, as I give him his plate, but does not hold eye contact for long. He takes his food to a table where he sits, alone, and eats his lunch. Read more
There are times when I despair at the possibility of human communication. In the last few weeks, this despair has often been triggered by opening up my computer each morning and discovering a fresh stream of vitriol and righteous indignation associated with a piece I recently wrote about Christian discourse around the Syrian refugee crisis that generated a fair amount of heat (and considerably less light, I fear). So many angry people that seem so resourcefully determined to interpret my words in such bewildering ways. The picture of me forlornly sitting, chin in hands with a furrowed brow peering confusedly at my computer screen is probably the enduring image that my family will remember from the past few weeks. Read more
I spent part of today listening to good stories. Our church hosted the AGM of MCC Alberta and, not surprisingly, much of the conversation throughout the day centered around the work that MCC is presently doing with the Syrian refugee crisis.
But we also heard stories of what MCC has done for other groups of people in other parts of the world. Saulo Padilla, an immigration educator with MCC USA shared of his own refugee journey from Guatemala to Canada, and the many twists and turns that his story has taken along the way. And he made one comment that has stuck with me throughout the day. Read more
In light of the (barely believable) response to my previous post, I thought I would throw up one more feeble attempt to clarify a few things. I continue to be astonished at both the volume and the content of responses this post has generated. It seems to me that many people have simply misunderstood what the post was trying to do. Perhaps the title was too inflammatory and put people instantly on the defensive. Perhaps I just found the “angry” corner of the Internet. I don’t know.
But, in an attempt to be as clear as I possibly can, here’s the “move” that the title—“I’m sorry, Christian, but you don’t get to make that move”—is referring to.
In sum, if you have no interest in Jesus or his teachings, then you can splash around the hysteria, the fear, and, all the anti-[insert threatening people group/category here] rhetoric you want.
I have a bone to pick with Christians this morning. Not all Christians. Not even the majority of Christians in my (limited) circles. Not by a long shot. No, my concern is with a smaller subset of Christians that tend to make a disproportionate amount of noise. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of conversations with Christian people about the Syrian refugee crisis. I’ve observed a lot of reaction and response from Christian people online. And I’ve noticed some of these Christian brothers and sisters buying into the fear and the hysteria that attempts to convince us that we need to keep our nation’s doors resolutely closed to refugees from this part of the world. Read more
After a week that has been dominated by work on our local refugee project, I finally sat down this morning to spend some focused time with the lectionary texts for Sunday morning. The passage I had agreed to preach on was Isaiah 50:4-9a, one of the famous “servant songs,” that contains these words:
I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.
The news continues to be dominated by the Syrian refugee crisis. And, given our little church’s efforts (along with other churches and groups in our community) toward bringing a few families to Lethbridge, my time is increasingly being dominated by the same. I have found myself doing very odd things this week—things like speaking about our project on radio programs and being interviewed by television and newspaper reporters. Yesterday’s foray into the media world reminded me that there’s a reason why I prefer writing to speaking. You get a bit more time to think and measure your responses when you can hide behind a screen! Read more
Sep 5
It’s been quite a week. The photo. The frantically updating news stories, the backtracking when the facts turned out to be less factual than we hoped, the politicking, the mud-slinging, the blaming and shaming and holier-than-thou-ing. The frenzied recirculating of the same articles from the same sources by click happy, guilt-ridden technophiles. The endless liking and sharing that we reflexively do when we don’t know what else to do. The [shudder] piled up blog posts from anyone with an hour to kill and an opinion or two. Read more
I have a long list of tasks that require my attention this afternoon, but like many others no doubt, my mind keeps drifting back to an image of a little boy on a Turkish beach. A little boy who, along with his brother and mother and father set out on an unsteady boat toward an unsteady future. A little boy who, along with his brother and mother, never made it to his destination. It shouldn’t take a picture like this to move us all, I know. There are horrible things happening around the world every day. And the image of a little life cruelly cut short should never be used as click bait.
But that picture… Christ Almighty, that picture! Read more
Every day, it seems, the refugee crisis in Europe worsens. Every day, the headlines that jump out at me when I open my computer in the morning are grim and foreboding. Last week it was capsized boats and trucks on the side of the road. This morning, it’s a train station in Budapest where police are preventing thousands of migrants from boarding trains bound for Germany. And tomorrow? Next week, month, year? Who knows? Read more
I stared at the headline for a while in mute silence: “Austrian police say up to 50 migrants’ bodies found in truck.” It’s the kind of headline that you read and think, “Whatever awful realities will unfold underneath those words, they surely shouldn’t be nicely filed there on the side bar of a website, right underneath news of Celine Dion returning to perform in Las Vegas or Apple’s latest “media event” or the latest round of lies promises being served up by Canadian politicians on the election trail today. They shouldn’t be nicely filed anywhere. Read more
It was probably one of those Internet memes that flits about the ether, and gradually enters the aggregate stream of quotes and pop inspiration that we collectively contribute to and maintain. This one, however, had the ring of truth to it. I don’t know the source, but it was something to the effect of:
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Read more
Yesterday’s worship service at our church was based on the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery in John 8:2-11. It’s one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture (I reflected on it recently here). It’s one of those texts where you feel like the main task of preaching is to simply say as little as possible by way of “explanation,” to simply get out of the way and let Mercy do its work. The story is the sermon. It is a concrete embodiment of Jesus’ words elsewhere in the gospels (borrowed from the prophet Hosea), “Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13).
So, yesterday my words about the passage itself were relatively few. I did, however, attempt something of a remix of the story as an invitation to the communion table later in the service. A number of people have since asked about this, so I thought I would throw it up a lightly edited version of it here. Read more
A clergy friend and I were talking over coffee yesterday about how being in this line of work is something of a magnet for human pain. As soon as people find out you’re a pastor or a priest, they will often begin to rehearse their own private litany of suffering or their grievances against the church or their most recent existential crisis or whatever. Read more
Two pictures popped up on my computer this afternoon.
The first was of the two families from Syria that will be coming to Lethbridge as part of a refugee sponsorship initiative that our church is a part of. No names, just a picture of nine pictures on a table. Nine precious people currently living as refugees in Lebanon, far from home, waiting for their claims to be processed. Nine people whose city and country lies in ruins. Nine people who can probably never go home. Nine faces in nine photographs laid out on a brown table. What have those nine faces seen, I wonder? What hopes do those nine faces have for their future? What might those nine faces make of a place like Lethbridge, AB, Canada? I imagine speaking with them, of playing with their kids, of becoming their friends. But these nine faces still seem a world away. Read more
It was thirty-six degrees Celsius around these parts yesterday, which, for many Canadians used to considerably more chilly climes, means a general experience of sticky, sweaty unbearableness that makes us despair of life itself. Well, that’s probably a bit dramatic. The heat is clearly going to my head.
At any rate, I had grand plans last night to do something virtuous like read a book or play a game with the kids or something. But I fought the heat and the heat won. I ended up collapsing into the couch after supper, and after aimlessly drifting around Netflix on my laptop for a few minutes, I settled on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). I had seen a previous film of his (2008’s Biutiful) and I had a vague sense that Birdman had won a bunch of awards. Plus, all that aimless drifting around Netflix was getting tiring in the heat. Read more
Gretta Vosper has been making headlines for a while now. She’s the pastor of West Hill United Church in Toronto. She also claims to be an atheist. According to a recent article at Vice News, Vosper realized back in 2001 that the idea of a supernatural being who intervened in the affairs of the world was a very silly thing to believe. She has, nevertheless, been soldiering on in her church for the last decade and a half in the service of the more worthy and “progressive” concerns that she feels the church ought to be about. Read more
Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time will know that one of my enduring interests is the way that we use technology and how the technology that we use shapes and forms us as human beings. A quick foray into my archives will probably yield a handful of very similar articles bemoaning the fact that social media is degrading the state of cultural discourse and turning us all into the equivalent of self-absorbed toddlers chasing after the next shiny thing to click and share. There will also, I suspect (hope?), be no shortage of frank admissions that I am undoubtedly guilty of the sins that I decry. I have a blog, after all. And I, too, am on Facebook, scrolling, staring, clicking, sharing, drearily contributing to the noise. Such are the contradictions made possible by our brave new digital world. Read more
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Rumblings 