Mar 27
Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Mat. 6:10).
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20-21).
Some reflections on the Wednesday before the Friday and the Sunday that changed the world… Read more
I am scrambling to gather a few odds and ends from my office before heading out of town for a weekend conference. Downstairs is the mingling of voices and the tinkling of spoons and plates and coffee mugs as a group of people gather for Friday morning coffee and conversation. I look out my window as a few latecomers straggle in. One dear couple catches my eye. There was a stroke years ago that has changed their reality in irreversible ways. I watch them share a smile as he gently helps his wife out of the vehicle, into the wheelchair, and down the snowy path toward the church. All around there is the hum of traffic and industry, all of this frantic busyness hurrying by unaware of this simple, unobserved, holy moment—this “ordinary” scene in an extraordinary story that is simultaneously awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, and profoundly hope-filled. I feel like I should take my shoes off. Or something. Read more
One hears a lot, these days, about the virtues of doubt. There is much talk about creating space for doubt, encouraging doubt, dignifying doubt, about how doubt is preferable to the illusory certainties of faith, about how doubt can even be an important part of faith. We have doubts about whether or not there is a God, whether freedom is real and meaningful, about the possibility of things like absolute truth and objective value. This is all fine, as far as it goes. It is good to acknowledge that we don’t know as much as we think we know or as much as we would like to know. I think that at its best, a willingness to live with doubt can engender a humility and patience with others that is quite obviously preferable to the wearisome alternatives that we are all too familiar with.
Do you ever wonder about what might have been? What if I had taken that job? What if I had moved to that city or stayed in that city? What if I had pursued that relationship? What if I had put my kids in that school? What if I had encouraged that friendship, chosen that church, made that crucial decision at that crucial moment? How would my life have been different? What painful pitfalls might have I avoided? What pleasures and surprises might I have missed out on? What doors may have closed never to open again? What have I missed out on by virtue of choosing what I have chosen when I have chosen it? Read more
I have, over the last few months, had the privilege of regular interaction with a couple of young men who (independently) came to our church inquiring about baptism. In their own words, both know “next to nothing” about Christianity. They don’t know much about history or theology, the have read little more than a scant few verses in the Bible, they aren’t much interested in the latest controversial issues in the church, and (gasp!) don’t find my sermons terribly memorable. But they want to get baptized. They don’t know much about Jesus, but they want to come to him, to sign up to follow, even though they don’t have much of an idea what they are getting into.
(Come to think of it, how many of us really do?) Read more
Often when I get up in front of the congregation I am a part of on Sunday morning, I will silently wonder why each person has come to church that morning. Did they come hungering for an encounter with the living God? Out of grim duty or rusty habit? For their kids’ sake? To worship? To hang out with friends? Because there were rumours of a soup lunch afterward? There are likely as many different reasons (or combinations of reasons) as there are people in the pews on a given Sunday. One Sunday a number of years ago, I began the service by saying, “I’m not sure what brought you here today…” but before I could finish the sentence, a middle-aged man with a penchant for loudly and delightedly answering any and all rhetorical questions posed from the front blurted out, “The bus!!” Like I said, many responses… Read more
A few stray strands from the week that was that I am trying to connect on a glorious hoar-frosted Friday morning….
One of the cool traditions that our church is a part of is what is called “Lenten lunches.” Every Thursday throughout Lent, a different church in our city opens its doors to sisters and brothers from other denominations for a short devotional, followed by a simple lunch of soup and bread. Yesterday, I was at a table with a few other pastors and the conversation inevitably turned to the demands of ministry, the sometimes seemingly endless meetings, the overwhelming needs of people that we are so often powerless to meet, the importance of boundaries, etc. There was plenty of knowing nodding and mm-hmming. But then there was a pause… and a comment from an Anglican minister: “But isn’t the invitation to Christ on some level an invitation to die?” Read more
One does not typically expect to encounter theological inspiration at a church finance meeting. Well, I suppose some might, but I do not number myself among such strange creatures. For most of this week’s church business meeting, things proceeded according to the script. There were facts and figures and updates and PowerPoint slides and motions and seconders to motions and questions and clarifications and dialogue and decisions and then we were done.
Our daughter belongs to a swim club, and swim clubs mean—hooray!—fundraising. Bingo, specifically. I have discovered that one of the (very few) benefits of spending five hours at the Bingo hall on a Thursday evening is the opportunity to catch up on a bit of reading (I was the “pay runner” last week, which meant that I basically sat around waiting for people to yell, “Bingo!” before springing enthusiastically into action). Last Thursday, I brought along a book that had regrettably slipped to the bottom of the veritable mountain of unread books on my desk—Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? Read more
There aren’t many good radio stations in the city I live in. Like, roughly zero. But for a few glorious moments this morning the heavens opened, the clouds parted, and a shaft of wondrous auditory light suffused my little Volkswagen Jetta as I flitted about, running errands on a windswept prairie day. U2’s “One” was playing on the radio. It’s probably my favourite song. Ever. I hadn’t heard it for months, maybe even a year. And here it was! On a crappy Lethbridge radio station that ordinarily dispenses a nauseating combination of top-40 pop trash and mid-eighties light rock (think Katy Perry and Chicago back to back)! Such rapture, such undeserved grace! It was almost more than I could bear. Read more
Should human beings have the right to eat, drink, and spend ourselves into oblivion without the state getting involved? Should the government be allowed to save us from our own toxic habits and risky, stupid, shortsighted behaviour in the interest of the public good? Will nothing short of legislative intervention save us from a future of morbidly obese, substance dependent video game addicts, mired in a mountain of unnavigable debt? Have we, the citizens of the brave, new twenty-first century world, come to the point where we require protection from ourselves? Read more
I saw a boy today. Ten or eleven years old probably—about the age of my own son. He was walking alone along the side of a busy road. He was skinny. His jaw protruded out, an under bite full of crooked yellowish teeth, and his greasy hair was sticking out in all kinds of different directions. His eyes looked vacant. He had a thin, tattered summer jacket on, zipper wide open revealing a lime green stretched out t-shirt that hung almost down to his knees. His pants were too big for him, his shoes hardly up to the task of navigating the slushy dirty city streets. He looked cold. Read more
The problem of evil is frequently cited as one of the most powerful arguments against religious faith. The existence of suffering, whether on the micro or macro level is seen as evidence against the existence of a benevolent and powerful deity. And yet, the empirical data around suffering and religious faith stubbornly refuses to fit into this view of how and why human beings believe what they believe about the world. Religious faith seems to be the highest in contexts where suffering is the greatest. Read more
I have been spending some time with Dostoevsky this afternoon, rereading the famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter from The Brothers Karamazov as I prepare for this week’s sermon on the temptation of Christ from Luke 4:1-13. In it, Ivan Karamazov asks his brother, Alyosha, to imagine that Jesus has reappeared in medieval Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. The people recognize him, they rush toward him to embrace him, he even raises a little girl from the dead. But, despite seeing all this, the Grand Inquisitor arrests Jesus, and begins a lengthy interrogation. “Why have you come to get in our way?” he asks, “For you have come to get in our way and you yourself know it.” Read more
Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall return.
These words have been spoken in churches around the world this Ash Wednesday and will be spoken later today in our own church. These words are a call to ponder our mortality, to examine our souls and repent for our sins, to begin the slow march to the cross of Christ and to the new life of resurrection on the other side. Read more
I watched part of the Grammy Awards last night. The decision-making process was a tortuous one. I had serious reservations about the worthiness of the Grammys to occupy my Sunday evening time due to, a) the overhyped, oversexed, undertalented spectacle it seems to have become; and b) the fact that I was far from convinced that I needed to spend over a third of the next few hours subjecting myself to mindless advertising. As it happens, the stasis produced by a fairly exhausting weekend full of church activities won out over my myriad principled objections to watching the Grammys. The best laid plans, and all that. Read more
A couple of conversations this week have me thinking about fairness. The first was a kind of prolonged lament about the unfairness of life. This person had the (mostly justified) impression that life had treated them profoundly unkindly and this unhappy fact coloured how they interpreted virtually everything else they encountered in daily life. The second conversation occurred with a friend over supper last night. His daughter had been learning about the importance of fairness in school, about how everyone needed to be treated exactly equally. “Why tell them this?” he asked as we were getting supper on the table. “Life isn’t fair—the sooner they learn this the better!” Indeed. Read more
If the heart of “meaning” is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story with all its oddity and ambivalence, becomes open to interpretation in terms of God’s saving work. Once we have stopped drawing a distinction between “compromising” activities and spheres (the family, the state, the individual body, or psyche) and “pure” realities (the soul, the intelligible world), the spiritual life becomes a much more complex, demanding, and far-reaching matter. “Spirituality” becomes far more than a science of interpreting exceptional private experiences; it must now touch every area of human experience, the public and the social, the painful, negative; even pathological byways of the mind, the moral and relational world. And the goal of a Christian life becomes not enlightenment but wholeness—an acceptance of this complicated and muddled bundle of experiences as a possible theater for God’s creative work.
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge
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