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Oct 3

4 Comments

Faith is Homesickness

I’ve mentioned this before here, but one of the first books I tend to reach for when the well of inspiration is running dry and Sunday is approaching distressingly quickly is Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark. It’s a risky endeavour, to be sure, for reading Buechner’s sermons can either be an experience of inspiration and wonder at the sheer beauty of words and of the skill and poetic brilliance of a finely crafted sermon or one enormous exercise in crashing, at breakneck speed, back down to earth from whatever modest heights I had previously been pleased to imagine I occupied. I usually console myself by imagining that I am only reading the “greatest hits.” Even Buechner must have preached a few lousy, or at least ordinary sermons, even if I haven’t come across one yet… Right? Read more

Oct 1

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Be Still

Last week, I was driving somewhere and listening to a podcast about religion and spirituality in Canada. The topic of conversation was the “crazy busy” lives that many of us lead, what this says about us, how it affects our spiritual lives, etc. I was listening to this podcast on my way from a meeting to the hospital after spending a good chunk of a morning I had hoped would include some sermon prep time responding to nearly thirty emails. Once I was done at the hospital, the rest of my day would include racing back for my son’s volleyball game, then taking him and my daughter back into the city where she would go to swim club and my son and I would race to the in-laws for a quick supper. After that, I would drop my son off for guitar lessons a bit early so I would have time to pick my daughter up from swim club and get her something to eat before guitar lessons ended. Then, at around 8:00, we would be home. My wife might be home, but she wasn’t sure what time the meeting that began after her full work day ended would be done. The theme of the podcast that day was, um, a little ironic. Read more

Sep 26

5 Comments

(Un)kindness

I watched the kids play at recess today. I was waiting to pick up my daughter for a dentist appointment, and I was a few minutes early. So I just sat and watched. I noticed a girl, off to the side, standing by the corner of the building, all by herself. Around the corner, other kids were laughing, playing, kicking/throwing balls, wrestling, goofing around. She just stood there, looking at her feet. Playing with the string on her hoodie. Every once in a while she would peer around the corner at the other kids, and then she would quickly duck back, look away, back down to her feet. The bell rang. She waited until all the other kids had left, before slowly making her way toward the door. She never stopped looking at her shoes. It was an utterly ordinary scene. And it broke my heart. Read more

Sep 25

6 Comments

Speaking Personally

This morning’s tour through the aggregator yielded a couple of pieces that gently admonished self-indulgent blogger-types for their propensity to write about blogging. Nothing too serious, just a kind of slap on the wrist for those prone to indulging their already hyperactive narcissistic tendencies by making oblique (or explicit) reference to their popularity and influence (or bemoaning their lack of popularity and influence), or who commemorate blogging “anniversaries,” milestone posts and comments, or who just generally seem to assume that their blog is quite a bit more important to the world than it really is. Read more

Sep 23

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How Can They Believe?

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Romans 10:14) 

I remember sitting in church listening to missionary reports as a kid. I remember all kinds of stories and images of people and places that my young small town prairie self could barely get his head around. It all sounded so exotic. Barely comprehensible, even. I remember reading stories from one of our missionaries in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Stories of snakes and crude village huts and people who looked and sounded nothing like any people I had ever seen or heard—people with strange and (probably evil) beliefs that we were, thankfully, sending (white) people to correct. I doubt any of these missionary presentations and stories passed by without some reference to the passage in Romans quoted above. Read more

Sep 20

7 Comments

Why Is It Good to Be Free? (Gil Dueck)

As I vaguely alluded to in my previous post, freedom has been in the news here in Canada with Québec’s proposed “secular charter” and all of the commotion this is stirring up. Freedom from religion? Freedom for or of religion? Whose freedoms win? How do we prioritize?  Of course, these questions extend far beyond the boundaries of Québec cultural and political realities. They are alive and well wherever we turn in our increasingly globalized, post-Christian world.  

I started to write a post about some of these themes, but then came across this piece that my brother Gil wrote a few years back. Not being able to improve upon this, I am reposting it here. His challenge to critically evaluate our love affair with freedom is a timely one, as is his reminder that, for the Christian, love, not freedom, is and has always been our true north. Read more

Sep 18

6 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

I’m sitting here on a grey, rainy Wednesday morning thinking that it’s high time I wrote something here.  It’s been over five days of silence on this blog, which, if the social media experts are to be believed, is a virtual eternity fraught with all kinds of weighty perils.  I am surely running the risk that readers will look elsewhere, that traffic will decline, that my “brand” will suffer, that I will fail to “build upon momentum” or any number of other hazards that come with blogging too infrequently.

So, right.  Time to write.   There are certainly no shortage of potential topics. Read more

Sep 13

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How Much More

There was an unpleasant episode in our house this week. It was a predictable enough story: kids getting used to the back to school routine and coping with new demands, new classmates, new courses, etc. after a long, lazy, largely obligation-free summer, parents attempting to manage the suddenly frantic pace of life with school and sports and the demands of work and church, and unexpected expenses popping up everywhere… In short, life… And into this maelstrom of exhaustion and frenetic activity and inattentiveness/insensitivity to the needs of one another, it doesn’t take much of a spark to light a big, ugly fire, replete with misunderstanding, yelling, name-calling, slammed doors, stunned silence, and tears. Read more

Sep 11

3 Comments

The Banner

Every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death. The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy

——

I’ve written a lot of posts about death here over the years. Usually these are reflections upon the pain and the longing that accompany death, or about what the existence of death and our reaction to its inevitability might say about what it means to be human or about the nature of God and God’s promise. Or these posts represent a personal encounter with death—they are reflections about what it’s like to walk with people through death, or the experience of grief, or whatever. Read more

Sep 10

16 Comments

Joel Osteen, Cosmo Magazine, and the Life You’ve Always (Never) Wanted

I was wandering around a bookstore with my daughter the other day and eventually found myself in the “new and hot” section. There was the usual mix—a massive Ken Follett novel, biographies of Steve Jobs and Neil Young, the most recent fruits of Dan Brown’s fertile imagination, a book about global economics, and… yes, that’s right, the latest offering from Joel Osteen! Of course. Whatever would we do if we didn’t have Joel Osteen and his beautiful white teeth beaming down upon us from the bookshelves every year or so imploring us to become the people we were meant to be, urging us on in the quest to become as happy and rich and trim and successful and fulfilled as Jesus wants us to be? Read more

Sep 6

It’s (Too) Easy for Me to Be Offended By the Bible

I’ve been thinking about Richard Beck’s piece from yesterday about how being offended by the Bible seems to be the unique province of educated, liberal folks, and about how those “on the margins” seem not to be nearly as scandalized—even by the really nasty parts. I’ve been thinking about this in no small measure due to the fact that our church has spent a bit of time in “nasty” texts in our preaching and worship this summer (Leviticus and Joshua, for example), and I have, on occasion, found myself almost apologizing for the Bible, almost assuming people will be offended by it. I know that people in our church struggle with the Bible. I struggle with the Bible. It this merely a function of my/our social location? Read more

Sep 5

Ten Things I Really Like About My Church

Occasionally, I get accused of being a glass-half-empty kind of guy. I don’t know where this comes from, but I will have to take others’ word for it 🙂 .

So, in an attempt to combat this persistent myth, and because it’s early September and everyone is just staggering into fall schedules and routines, and because there is the usual anxiety and apprehension about what the upcoming (academic) year will hold, and because I’ve noticed that pastors (myself included) tend to feel a bit of pressure around this time of year to “start with a bang” and make a good impression on newcomers when secretly we’re just hoping we can keep it all together with what we’re already doing, and because—well, yes, it’s true, because it’s way easier for me to focus on negatives than positives—I thought I would do something completely out of character and do a bit of bragging about the little church that I am a part of. Read more

Sep 3

35 Comments

It’s (Too) Easy for Me to Say I’m a Pacifist

Like so many others, Syria has been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve read dozens of articulate and well-reasoned arguments against any kind of military intervention. I’ve read many passionate and biblically sound anti-war-pleas from people whose views I deeply respect. I spent a good chunk of the prayer time during worship last Sunday praying for peace in Syria, praying that no more lives would be sacrificed on the altars of power, ideology, economics and religion. I know that this is what I am supposed to do and say and read and pray as a Mennonite, as a pastor. But it has all felt, I don’t know, a bit hollow. Read more

Aug 30

4 Comments

“You Do Not Leave Us Alone”

Many of my days begin with a bit of time spent in an Anabaptist prayer-book called Take Our Moments and Our Days. During this morning’s prayers, my mind was scattered and I was finding it difficult to concentrate, to focus, to pray.

One line caught my attention, as countless others sailed by unnoticed:

You do not leave us alone. Read more

Aug 28

5 Comments

God’s Country

We had such an amazing trip… such an amazing part of the world. It’s God’s country.

I don’t even remember what part of the world the person who recently told me this was talking about. The Okanagan Valley, maybe? Vancouver Island? Hawaii? It was somewhere lush and green and fertile, no doubt, somewhere where the temperatures are usually pleasant, where the breezes are welcome, where there are hills and valleys and mountains, somewhere where there is plenty of natural beauty to spare, where it doesn’t have to be forcibly wrenched out of the plain, the mundane, the not-so-obvious. It was somewhere without dust and wind and mile upon mile of flat, featureless land. It was somewhere with more green than brown, more warm than cold. It was somewhere else.  Read more

Aug 27

1 Comment

Extraordinarily Ordinary

There is nothing more ordinary than suffering.

There is nothing more extraordinary than suffering.

Both of these statements are true.

For me, this has at times felt like the summer of pain, of hard stories. Perhaps it is simply because I am getting older as are the people in my orbit, and as we get older bad things start happening more regularly. Marriages begin to fall apart, mid-life crises make their obligatory appearance, kids go terrifyingly astray, words like “cancer” and “Alzheimer’s” and “Parkinson’s” start forcing their way into conversations, soul-shattering tragedy pops its head around the corner from time to time… Life takes its toll. Read more

Aug 22

8 Comments

Up and Down

My infallible WordPress stats counter tells me that this blog recently passed the 700 posts and 8000 comments mark. We had a little party, WordPress and I, which consisted mainly of the WordPress minions showering me with randomly generated congratulations and what I imagine were intended to be inspirational quotes. I’m not too proud to admit that I choked up a little. So touching, that WordPress would take the time…

At any rate, the passing of this momentous milestone means—that’s right, you guessed it!—it’s time for another tortured, myopic reflection upon the nature of blogging where I predictably vacillate between self-congratulation and self-flagellation and various other points in between. If you’ve seen this movie before, please feel free to ignore the following and put your next ten minutes or so to more profitable use elsewhere.

Seriously.

Still here? Ok, well on with the show, such as it is… Read more

Aug 20

12 Comments

Finding Our Place

If you’ve been around this blog for any length of time, you will know that I am a big fan of Frederick Buechner. I admire the way he writes, the way he pries open a space for faith in a cultural context often characterized by skepticism, doubt, and even hostility to God. His book of sermons, Secrets in the Dark, is often one of the first places I turn when I am feeling like the well is dry and the inspiration just isn’t coming.

Having said that, I have always had a bit of an ambiguous relationship with what is perhaps one of Buechner’s most famous quotes: Read more

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