Pelican Anglican

Treasures in Heaven

2012-02-22T16:25:00.000-06:00

Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. (Matt. 6:20)

Everybody knows that Lent is a time of reflection, repentance, prayer, study, fasting and almsgiving. But why do we do this? The Episcopal answer is often, “Because we’ve always done it that way.”

So, let’s ask another question. Why do we keep doing this? Or more precisely, what’s the point?

In today’s Gospel (Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21), Jesus warns us not to treat these spiritual practices like a Spiritual Rewards Program.

Some credit card companies encourage customers to use their cards by offering rewards points. With each purchase you accumulate points that can be exchanged for flights or hotel rooms or cash once you have reached a minimum threshold of accumulated points.

Karel Ooms' "De Verboden Lectuur"

You use the card in order to get something you want in return. Jesus clearly warns us against praying or almsgiving to win the praise of other people as if our spiritual practices were a kind of spiritual rewards program.

This is hardly news. We all know that Jesus is not interested in phony piety. Your heart has to be in the right place.

Going to church on Sunday to impress your boss or to please your girlfriend misses the central point.

Giving alms to the poor all the while thinking that your social position or material comforts or career success makes you better than them is equally misguided.

Doing the right thing morally, or making a habit of pious spiritual practices, so that other people will think highly of us or so that we can get ahead socially or politically or even economically is a waste of our time.

Jesus is more than uninterested. To borrow a phrase from Anne Lamott, “It makes Jesus want to drink gin right out of the cat dish.”

What some people seem to miss is that Jesus is not interested in a spiritual rewards program at all. Even with God.

Jesus says, “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” (Matt. 6:20) But he does not mean, “Score some points with God.”

Contagious Love

2012-02-13T10:24:00.000-06:00

We all want to matter. There is no despair greater than having the sense that the world simply would not notice your absence.

Come to think of it, I suspect we would all rather say that the world would be better off without us than to say that our presence or absence would make no significant difference to the world.

At least we would have made a mark, even if it were an evil mark—a sort of moral graffiti—on the planet. We have the sense that to leave no mark at all is to be worthless.

Gabriel Metsu's "The Sick Child"

That’s probably why so many of us want to do something that matters.

We prize some kinds of jobs over others because they seem to make a difference or leave a mark.

We want to leave some enduring legacy like artwork or writing or architecture that validates our days on the planet.

We seek to win awards or advance in our career or win rave reviews because that acknowledgment assures us that we matter.

In fact, God has created us to do something that matters. But we get all confused when we think that what we do is what makes us matter.

On the contrary, what Jesus does is what makes us matter. And that is one of the chief lessons that Jesus teaches us when he heals the leper that we meet in today’s Gospel. (Mark 1:40-45)

Soaring Lessons

2012-02-06T06:37:00.000-06:00

Anne Lamott tells the story of riding a ski lift. She intended to get off at the intermediate slope, but failed to recognize the jump-off until the lift had moved on.

Lamott decided to leap from the moving lift from a height of five or six feet. She did not soar like an eagle. She flapped to a crash-landing. To her relief, most people pretended not to notice, and she waved away the few who came over to sympathize. Then the nausea hit.

As she stood there on the verge of passing out, she prayed for Jesus to help her. This is what she says:

I don’t know how long I stood there with my hand clamped to my mouth, only my poles and a frayed, consignment-store faith to support me. All I knew was that help is always on the way, a hundred percent of the time… I know that when I call out, God will be near, and hear and help eventually. Of course, it is the “eventually” that throws one into despair. (Grace (Eventually), pp. 17-18)

At one point or another something inside each of us has called out for help. Maybe it was just a momentary lapse in our usual calm, like when we realize that we can’t see our toddler on the beach or discover that we’ve had food in our teeth through an entire interview or get really bad news.

Hughes Merle's A Beggar Woman

Help! Help! Help! We feel it in our gut before we even think it. Life has taught us for the most part never to say it out loud. Calling out for help betrays the awful secret that we are not as composed and in control as we pretend, as we assume everyone else is, as we fear that God expects us to be before He decides that He’ll invite us to dinner.

In a way, calling for help is the beginning of faith. We discover that God was already on the way before the first butterfly took flight in our stomach.

And there are times when that help comes with miraculous speed. The threat or the challenge dissolves as quickly as it came. Jesus turns on his Nightlight of the World and banishes the shadow that has us cowering under the covers.

But sometimes, Jesus comes to our help eventually. Adversity or sorrow or conflict or suffering endure. It can feel as if God is not listening or does not care or maybe cannot help after all.

Lamott has it right. The spiritual challenge in relying on God hits home when we experience firsthand that he comes to help eventually. How do we follow Jesus in the meantime? In between the cry for help and God’s rescue?

Teaching Jesus

2012-01-30T10:29:00.000-06:00

Teachers have made a remarkable difference in my life. Listing just the influential ones would create a tiresomely long list. Each of them broadened my vision or cracked open some protective shell I had constructed or smoothed the hard edges they found when I came to them.

It seems to me that God placed these men and women in my life to shape me in ways that I could not imagine, to point me to a path I could never have found on my own, to encourage me to dream of things bigger than myself, and to inspire me to surrender myself to the life offered to me by grace.

As grateful as I am for these teachers, I am quick to say that Jesus is my chief Teacher. He is of course my Savior, my Lord, and even my Friend. But being a follower of Jesus also means sitting at the feet of Jesus as our Rabbi.

Tintoretto, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha

Mark tells us that Jesus wowed them at the local synagogue. The crowds buzzed about his teaching. “They were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.” (Mark 1:22)

And yet, Mark provides no record of the words he spoke. Instead, we read that Jesus exorcised an unclean spirit from a man present in the synagogue that day. (Mark 1:23-26) I suggest that this is no oversight. Instead, Mark recorded the most important element of Jesus’ teaching that day: his authority.

Jesus demonstrated the power of the Word of God—the power of his teaching—through that exorcism. His word released the man from the demonic shadow cast over his life. Jesus’ word has power. It transforms the faithful hearer.

Does God Change His Mind?

2012-01-23T05:21:00.000-06:00

When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it. (Jonah 3:10)

We human beings change our minds from time to time.

Sometimes, that is a very good thing. Over time we grow in knowledge and wisdom. Our perspectives broaden and we learn new things. We admit that we were once wrong or at least uninformed in our previous opinions. It’s a sign of maturation.

For instance, I know people who once believed that black people are inferior to white people. They now acknowledge how narrow their perspective was.

By contrast, changing your mind can also signal a character defect. Some people choose one thing and then its alternative and switch back yet again. I’ll buy the blue sweater, no the brown, no the blue. They are simply indecisive.

Gustav Dore's Jonah Preaching Repentance

In this political season we are quick to denounce people who change their minds for political advantage. We call them flip-floppers. They strike us as untrustworthy.

People change their mind. But many of us pull up short when we hear that God could change his mind.

We believe God is the perfect judge of humankind because God’s knowledge and goodness are themselves flawless and infinite. He is our rock and our salvation because his steadfast love for us is unrelenting.

Saying that God changes his mind makes him sound unreliable.

We say that God loves us unconditionally. Could God change his mind and not love us anymore?

God has set down moral laws. Could God change his mind about what is right and what is wrong?

God judges our eternal destiny. Could God make a mistake and reward and punish the wrong people for the wrong reason?

Above all, God promises to redeem those who love him. Might God decide to break that promise?

And yet here it is plain as day in the Book of Jonah: God changed his mind. In fact, understanding how it is that God changes his mind helps us to understand how reliably just, loving and good God really is.

So let’s turn to Jonah to examine more carefully what it means to say that God changes his mind.

Jesus and Religion

2012-01-17T09:55:00.000-06:00

There have been a number of studies about why young people are leaving the church or just staying away from church. As it turns out, Jesus is very attractive to many of them. Religion, well, not so much.

For example, there’s a YouTube video making its rounds on Facebook called, “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.”

As the title suggests, the video starts with a very common theme: Some people who say that they believe in Jesus don’t act like it. Eventually, the man who produced the video—Jefferson Bethke (or Bball1989)—will have to admit that he is actually a member of the club he is criticizing. Let me be the first to welcome him.

But Jefferson’s more fundamental point is worth serious consideration and calls for an honest response. His point is this. Just because you are religious does not mean that you are following Jesus.

Rembrandt's Driving the Money Changers from the Temple

Jefferson is right to point out that Jesus only uses harsh words for the religious leaders of his day. Much of what Jesus had to say about the religious organization of the Temple was critical.

Like many of his contemporaries, Jefferson concludes from this that Jesus came to abolish religion. Even though Jefferson says he loves the church at one point in his monologue, it’s pretty clear that he has nothing positive to say about organized religion, and that he means something like church when he says that Jesus came to abolish religion.

Jefferson is confusing two things: a kind of religious attitude on the one hand and faith communities on the other hand. Jesus did come, among other things, to abolish a certain religious posture. But he also came to establish a certain kind of faith community.

As we will see, today’s Gospel (John 1:43-51) helps us understand how to follow Jesus as an individual, but that we cannot do it alone. We have to do it as part of a faith community. Following Jesus is a group project. But first, let’s get clear about that religious attitude that Jesus came to abolish.

What Does It Mean to Be a Christian?

2012-01-09T07:29:00.001-06:00

I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. (Mark 1:8)

Jesus makes a remarkable claim on our lives. He wants us to completely identify with him. In other words, if someone asks you who you are, he wants you to say first and most fundamentally, “I am a Christian.”

But, what does it mean to be a Christian? Sometimes people get so hung up on being Christian that they forget Jesus. They think it means voting a certain way or reading the Bible a certain way or saying who goes to hell and who goes to heaven or rejecting the very idea of heaven and hell altogether.

Here’s what Jesus says it means: follow me. Or to put it terms of today’s Gospel, baptism with the Holy Spirit.

Paolo Veronese's "The Baptism of Christ"

Apparently, some people still settle for John’s baptism of repentance, even though John explicitly said that his baptism was just preliminary. Let’s look first at John’s baptism, and that will help us to see more clearly what it means to follow Jesus by contrast.

It puzzles some people that John the Baptist drew such large crowds by preaching about repentance. As a culture, we equate freedom from feelings of remorse with psychological health.

But I suspect that our attitude toward those feelings only betrays the struggle that so many of us continue to have. Besides, John was not inviting people to feel lousy about themselves. He was offering a way to deal with the remorse they already felt.

Remorse plays an important role in our lives. It helps us to correct course. In other words, remorse is a feeling we have about the errors of our past. The point of this feeling is to motivate us to move into the future in a new way.

Remorse is a powerful motivator precisely because it is the felt reality that the past is more than spilt milk or water under the bridge. Remorse reveals that, in some very real sense, what we have done—both good and ill—sticks with us. And the harm we have done can burden us, even imprison us, in the past.

Star Gazing

2012-01-05T09:31:00.004-06:00

When I was a young boy, my mother and I would lie on a blanket in the back yard and watch the stars come out on summer evenings. She would tell me stories about growing up in Austria and the beauty of the Alps.

As I gazed up at the stars, my mind travelled to far away places. Even at such a young age I knew that we lived paycheck to paycheck. It never occurred to me that I would one day actually visit such places. They were beyond the reach of my family’s resources, but the wings of my imagination were not clipped by the constraints of our material circumstances. The stars themselves seemed to encourage me to dream.

Vincent Van Gogh, "Starry Night over the Rhone"

The night sky, and the stars in particular, have ever since had the power to shake me loose from the bonds of my daily habits of thinking about and perceiving my world and to dream about what might be.

By the bright and sometimes harsh light of day the world seems set in predictable patterns that demand resignation or mete out disappointment. But when the stars gleam from the night sky they dust the earth with mystery. There is more to life than meets the eye. Our worldly limitations do not constrain God’s surprising, infinitely generous grace.

Getting to the Bottom of Things

2011-12-28T08:09:00.002-06:00

In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)

As a younger man, I served on a philosophy faculty. And although I enjoyed research and teaching advanced classes, my real love was teaching introductory classes.

Especially freshmen entered those classrooms with a willingness to engage big questions that get to the very bottom of things. They weren’t being flip or ironic when they asked, “What is the meaning of life?”

It was thrilling to watch their eyes light up with discovery and hope and bold vision.

Joseph Wright of Darby, "A Philosopher..."

That was a different time. And although I know of many young people who still sincerely wrestle with what makes their life significant and what greater purpose their lives might serve, I am also seeing something else.

Cynicism has become the mark of sophistication. Scoffing at the idea that life has a larger meaning seems more intellectually respectable than searching for some source of meaning beyond ourselves.

For many people today, there is no bottom at the bottom of things.

God Shows Up

2011-12-26T09:15:00.001-06:00

Over one million people visit Bethlehem each year. Many of them travel thousands of miles to see the birthplace of Jesus. You could say that Jesus put Bethlehem on the map, figuratively speaking. Just because he was born there, Bethlehem is a major tourist attraction.

If he had been born in Nazareth or Jerusalem or Bunkie, Bethlehem would be fly-over territory. Aside from Jesus showing up there, there’s not much about Bethlehem that will draw the crowds.

And yet Jesus was drawn there. That’s where God himself decided to be born. He even announced his intentions through the prophets. Like parents today who choose the birthing place for their babies, God already had in mind where his baby boy would be born.

William Ladd Taylor's "The Nativity"

Now you might think that God being God and all, he would want his son born in a significant spot. Maybe a place of palatial splendor like Rome or at least a place that could offer some dazzling show tunes for the occasion like Vegas.

But there was nothing about Bethlehem to recommend it. No Olympic Nativity Planning Committee would give Bethlehem a second look. Highway planners would not have even given Bethlehem its own exit ramp.

Face it! Bethlehem was a dump: the sort of place people dream of leaving when they grow up. Bethlehem was so plain and ordinary that outsiders usually ignored it.

And it was among those ordinary, quiet, dark streets that the King of Kings came into this world. God’s choice of birthplace tells us everything about who God is and how who he is makes our lives infinitely and eternally significant. Because God is who he is, our lives matter. We count.

Let’s turn to the story of Jesus’ birth to explain how this is so.

Life is More than You Can Make It

2011-12-19T06:42:00.002-06:00

For nothing will be impossible with God. (Luke 1:37)

I’ll bet you’ve heard the saying, “Life is what you make it.” It appears to mean a couple of things.

For some people it’s a motivational saying. Work hard. Seize every opportunity. The quality of your life results from how effectively you use your wits, the initiative you take, and how hard you work. So get busy!

By contrast, some people use it for encouragement in hard times. In the midst of adversity or uncertainty or setbacks, we can decide what attitude to take. We can be optimistic or anxious, confident or fearful. We can feel deprived of what we do not have or content with what we do have. So adjust your attitude!

Henry Ossawa Tanner's "The Annunciation"

Getting busy and adjusting our attitude have their place. But they only go so far. That is because these are purely human approaches to life. Life is only what we make of it, according to this point of view.

However, God never intended for our life to be only what we could make of it. He created us to make something of us and to make something of this world of his through us.

God intends to do humanly impossible things through mere human beings like you and me. And that is just what the story of the Virgin Birth teaches us. We’re going to get to that story in just a moment. But first I want to talk to you about why this is crucial for a happy life right here on planet earth.

More than Following the Leader

2011-12-12T08:39:00.001-06:00

Do not quench the Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 5:19)

In the children’s game Follow the Leader, you simply mimic what the leader does until it’s your turn to be the leader. It’s all external stuff.

You wave your hands or stand on one foot or stick your finger in your ear when the leader does it. Your view of the world or other people or yourself doesn’t change a bit.

Phillis Miller's "Floral Road to Emmaus"

Following Jesus does mean that your external behavior will probably change. You might grow a bit more patient or forgiving or generous. But this external change arises from something that’s been happening on the inside.

The Holy Spirit resides in the heart of every believer. And that is why the Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians, “ Do not quench the Spirit.” In other words, do not extinguish the Spirit.

Paul uses the common image of fire to talk about the Holy Spirit. That image tells a great deal about the work of the Spirit:

Fire refines. It turns ore into precious metal.

The Spirit refines us. It shapes us more nearly into the image of God.

Fire illuminates. The Spirit shows us Jesus and he illuminates the path in front of us.

To use a churchy word, the Holy Spirit sanctifies us. In his letter to the Romans, Paul strikes this theme with these words:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

In other words, following Jesus means submitting ourselves to the refining work of the Holy Spirit every day. And the Holy Spirit helps us to do basically one thing: get over ourselves.

Watch Where You're Going

2011-12-05T10:38:00.001-06:00

Even if they are fools, they shall not go astray. (Isaiah 35:8b)

I saw Santa last night. And take it from me, Santa could use a driving tip or two. At least this particular Santa needs a drivers’ ed. refresher course.

He was behind the wheel of an older, large sedan. Something like a Crown Victoria. Of course I didn’t realize that it was Santa at first. I approached him from behind on a local four-lane road. He was lumbering along at about 15 miles per hour below the speed limit. The car wove erratically back and forth over the line dividing the lanes on our side of the street.

Vincent van Gogh's "The Road Menders"

As I slipped past him we all recognized the long, flowing white hair, a real beard, and a fire engine red shirt. We also saw Santa steering with his elbows while texting. My wife Joy quipped, “Well, it is an especially busy time of year for him.”

With considerably less humor I thought, “Watch where you’re going.” It was only then that I realized that I had gotten an Advent message. Watch where you’re going! Only, the Advent meaning of the phrase has a Gospel twist.

Connecting the Dots

2011-11-29T07:58:00.001-06:00

Making sense of your life is like playing one of those connect-the-dots games.

You know the kind I’m talking about. On a sheet in front of you (sometimes on a kid’s menu at a family friendly restaurant) you see what looks like a meaningless jumble of numbered points.

By connecting the dots with a pencil in the correct sequence a picture slowly emerges: a clown, a car or some other familiar object.

The picture is in there, but you have to connect the dots to see it.

M. C. Escher's "Drawing Hands"

At one point or another we all want to connect the dots of our life. We want life to make sense. And so we look back on how our life has unfolded up to this point and we connect the dots, usually by telling the story of our own lives.

We might tell it to ourselves. We might share it with a friend or a counselor. But we connect the dots into a story with a sense of direction, an ending that explains everything that has happened by connecting the dots as the road that leads to here and now.

There’s just one problem. We can only connect the dots by looking backward. We live life forward. You cannot connect the dots in the future.

To do anything at all, to take the next step in life, we have to believe that all the dots we’re about to write will somehow be connected. You have to trust in something, in someone, to connect those dots.

Under Your Skin

2011-11-21T09:04:00.001-06:00

When we talk about someone getting under our skin, we generally mean that the person annoys us. But it’s not just a passing annoyance.

We use that idiom only when the effect another person has on us lingers. We find it hard to shake. We catch ourselves thinking about the person even when he or she is not there. And we have trouble changing the mental channel.

They’re like what people call an earworm today: a song that goes through your head that you just can’t get rid of.

That’s why Cole Porter used this phrase for his classic pop tune “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” He was telling us about being helplessly, hopelessly in love.

Dorothea Lange's White Angel Bread Line

Only it’s a longing, not an annoyance, that has taken root in the crooner’s heart. Listen to these lyrics:

I’ve got you under my skin/ I’ve got you deep in the heart of me/ So deep in my heart that you’re really part of me.

And then the song goes on:

I’d sacrifice anything come what might/ For the sake of havin’ you near

When we talk about faith in Jesus Christ, or even about loving Christ, we don’t usually talk in these terms. But that is just what Jesus himself commands. We are to make God our pearl of great price, our hidden treasure, our ultimate desire. This is what Paul means when he teaches us that salvation comes by faith alone, not by works.

Just when we settle in to the idea that salvation is not a human achievement, we encounter a reading like this one:

Sex and Power

2011-11-16T08:45:00.001-06:00

The sexual abuse scandal swirling around Penn State has drawn massive media attention. Members of the Penn State community have been joined by many of us in a mixture of revulsion, shock, anger and sadness.

Former coach Jerry Sandusky stands accused of sexually molesting boys who participated in The Second Mile program, a program designed to provide children with help and hope. He has been indicted on 40 counts of molestation.

Not only did he use Penn State athletic facilities to commit the abuse with which he is charged, but his actions were reported to the university chain of command. No one from the administration contacted the appropriate authorities, and the University took no official action for about a decade.

Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women

Only now that these allegations have come to light has the Board removed the President and the beloved coach Joe Paterno for failing to respond appropriately to Sandusky’s abuse of the boys under his care.

For the record, Jerry Sandusky denies these charges. In fact he did so on national television in a phone interview with Bob Costas. There is a detailed Grand Jury indictment containing the lurid details of the allegations and the evidence presented about them.

Our system of justice requires a presumption of innocence before a trial is held and a verdict is passed. However, in moral community we can form an unofficial opinion prior to the results of a trial. For that matter, we may assign guilt informally even when the technical process of legal proceedings cannot arrive at that conclusion. For instance, I am not held to the verdict of “not guilty” in a hiring decision when I know that someone escaped punishment only due to a technicality.

However, let’s set aside for a moment Sandusky’s and Penn State’s culpability and ponder the lessons cases like this teach us. They tell us a great deal about sex and power.

Impending Joy

2011-11-14T11:20:00.001-06:00

Some parables are about grace. Others are about the kingdom. The Parable of the Talents is a judgment parable. (Matthew 25:14-30)

Granted, Jesus does begin the immediately preceding parable by saying, “The kingdom of heaven will be like,” but this parable is defined by the master’s response to his slaves’ work when he returns.

So this parable is about judgment. Final judgment. You know, Judgment Day kind of final judgment.

This is not one of our favorite subjects, unless maybe we’re talking about judging somebody that we don’t like.

Closeup of Rembrandt's Parable of the Talents

Our aversion to God’s judgment arises largely from a misunderstanding. The word “judgment” has become for us a synonym for “condemnation” and “rejection.” We associate judgment talk with warnings about impending doom.

Contrary to our ingrained assumptions about judgment, Jesus teaches us something very different in today’s Gospel. At the very moment of judgment he says, “Enter into the joy of your master.”

When we believe in God’s judgment we look for impending joy, not impending doom. Let’s look closely at the Parable of the Talents, and it will teach us about judgment and true joy.

Upward Mobility

2011-11-09T11:56:00.001-06:00

In the film “As Good as It Gets,” Melvin Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) is a wildly successful author of romance novels. He also happens to despise people. His disdain for other people combines with a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder to make him miserable and lonely.

He falls in love with the young waitress Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt). His love for her drives him to be a better man. Still some distance from mental health, he bursts into his therapist’s waiting room demanding medication. He scans the room filled with equally miserable souls and shouts, “What if this is good as it gets!”

I remembered this film when I read two news articles recently. From their own perspectives, authors from Time and from National Review Online both reflected on the state of the American Dream. That dream, they say, involves the idea of upward mobility. And they say that this dream seems to be fading.

Andrew Wyeth's Benny's Scarecrow

In other words, Americans have believed that tomorrow promises a better day. You might be down on your luck today, but hard work and perseverance lead to improved life circumstances.

My mother and grandparents came to this country through Ellis Island from Austria following the ravages of World War Two. They believed that they could make a better life for their children and grandchildren in this New World. America was the land of opportunity.

Now, people across the political spectrum are wondering along with Melvin Udall, “Is this as good as it gets?” Members of the Tea Party and participants in Occupy Wall Street alike fear that equal opportunity is becoming a thing of the past. They identify different causes and they reach for different solutions, but conservatives and progressives alike seem to be suffering the same frustration and disappointment.

It really boils down to the loss of hope. We Americans have been motivated to persevere through times of trial and deprivation and disappointment precisely because we believed that we could make a better future for ourselves. Now some people doubt this.

Is God Wrathful?

2011-11-07T10:08:00.002-06:00

A shocking video has gone viral on YouTube in the past week. A hidden camera captures Texas Judge William Adams repeatedly striking his fifteen-year-old, cerebral palsy stricken daughter Hillary with a belt.

As she resists he grows angrier and angrier, curses in the crudest way, strikes her on various parts of her body, and threatens to hit her in the face with his belt if she doesn’t lie down on the bed to be struck on the behind. Apparently, the Judge was punishing Hillary for illegally downloading video games.

Egon Schiele's Agony

The episode occurred several years ago. Now in her twenties, Hillary released the video for reasons of her own and Judge Adams insists that he was simply disciplining his daughter. Texas law allows for corporal punishment and there is some doubt that charges will be brought over the incident.

I am the first to admit that even accurate videos can lie. After all, they give us only a slice of life. And who among us wants any of our worst moments captured on YouTube? Nevertheless, Judge Adams looked furious and out of control. And watching him made me wonder if some Christians think of God’s wrath along the lines of this ghastly video clip.

If God’s wrath looked like a violent outburst of destructive temper, I would be the first to say that there is no room for wrath in the doctrine of God. But I have always remembered something that my Systematic Theology professor once said to us long ago. God’s wrath is what God’s love looks like to a sinner.

The Confederate Flag and the Bible

2011-11-04T09:51:00.002-05:00

The Caddo Commission voted 11 to 1 yesterday to remove the Confederate Flag from the Caddo Parish Courthouse Square. Debates about the flag’s presence have played themselves out over the years in various places in the South.

Those who have grown up in other regions of the United States tend to view the flag’s presence as a sign of lingering racism. After all, the Confederate flag represents to African-Americans the history not only of slavery but of racial oppression well after the Civil War came to a close.

Some Southerners resist removing the flag, insisting that it stands as a symbol of cultural heritage. They see in the flag a visible sign of the distinctiveness of a region that continues to emphasize manners and gentility.

A different point of view came to me from an Irish friend who served with me on a college faculty. He told me that he felt at home in the South because we Southerners understood what it was to live in a conquered nation.

Jesus and the Bible

2011-10-31T08:09:00.000-05:00

Fleming Rutledge recently responded to a Marcus Borg lecture on her blog Generous Orthodoxy. Here is a sample of what she said.

Last night at a gathering, Marcus Borg said (twice), “Jesus trumps the Bible.”

This is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing for a scholar and leader in the church to say. It can’t be said often enough: we have no access to knowledge of Jesus except through the Bible and its interpretation. There is no record of him outside the Bible until years after his death. The only way to understanding who he was is through the witness of the New Testament apostles. Therefore to suggest that he “trumps the Bible” is to suggest that we can cut loose from the Scriptures and construct a Jesus according to the perspectives of our own time. It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a “historical Jesus” or “real Jesus” apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them.

Take a look at the whole post at Generous Orthodoxy. It's well worth the read.

Resonating

2011-10-28T15:29:00.004-05:00

That resonates with me.

I’ve said it. You’ve probably said it. It’s a reasonably common phrase. We seem to mean that something we read or hear rings true to us. It has personal meaning.

We would never say that a mathematical formula expressing a chaotic system or a medical diagnosis resonates with us. That is because we expect truths like that to be objective. Mostly we reserve that phrase for subjective or personal matters.

I can say that about a film or a poem or maybe even an impassioned speech. The image of “resonance” implies that my soul echoes or reverberates with the thing I’m hearing or seeing. I am somehow moved inwardly. Or more often, I'm simply saying that the thing reflects what I already believe.

Sometimes the Bible resonates with me. Sometimes, not so much. Holy Scripture has the capacity to move us and speak to our own experiences of life. But if Scripture’s only authority were to resonate with my life, then it wouldn’t be much of an authority at all.

In fact, how I happen to respond to Scripture would be the measure of its truth. If I experienced dissonance between the words of the Bible and my assumptions, values and behavior patterns, I would reject those words in favor of what my personal experience and preferences taught me.

But the power of Scripture lies precisely in the kind of truth it offers. When we read faithfully God speaks from its pages. The dissonance we experience leads us to reflect honestly on our own life and our own assumptions. The power of the Word is the power to change our lives, to make us more than we already are.

(The image above is Caravaggio's Narcissus found at this link.)

Earthly Good

2011-10-25T10:47:00.000-05:00

Lately I have been discussing the idea of being heavenly-minded, and I have suggested that to do any earthly good you have to be heavenly-minded.

My colleague The Rev. Chuck Alley pointed out that plenty of non-believing people do all sorts of earthly good and that I needed to clarify what I mean by “earthly good.” Otherwise, my argument never gets out of the starting gate. He is exactly right, so that is just what I will do.

What do I mean by “earthly good” when I say that we can do no earthly good unless we are heavenly-minded? For starters I have to admit that I am indulging in some playful hyperbole.

There is no denying that very earthly-minded people have accomplished many technological and scientific goods. The late Steve Jobs is a prime example. Without the slightest belief in an afterlife he gave us a universe of electronic devices that have changed how we manage and exchange information.

Similarly, researchers have advanced cures for disease, engineered drought-resistant crops, and invented safety devices that have saved thousands of workers from injury and death.

But to get at what I mean by earthly good I want to underscore the shortcomings of these technological and scientific goods. While using an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook Pro enhances my productivity, thousands of children remain unable to afford simple tools for learning like pens and paper.

Approval Rating

2011-10-24T09:37:00.001-05:00

We are all familiar with Gallup’s Presidential Approval Rating. Every day Gallup polls a sample of Americans to measure what people think of the president’s job performance.

Imagine for a moment that Gallup provided for each of us a Personal Approval Rating. Every day. On the Web. What would you do with that?

Would you ignore it? Race to it every day to see how you’re doing? Plan the day to get better results tomorrow? Change your name and move to a desert island?

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-19T09:48:00.001-05:00

One of the common criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon is that the protestors lack a clear goal. Civil Rights Protests and Antiwar Protests aim with single-minded focus at the one thing for which we have named them. By contrast, the very name “Occupy Wall Street” forces us to ask a second question. What are you hoping to achieve by doing this?

It is inaccurate to say that the participants of OWS don’t know what they want. On the contrary, they want a number of things. The confusion, frustration and (in some circles) contempt felt by some observers arises from the fact that there is no exhaustive list of demands or definitive purpose voiced by a centrally recognized authority for the OWS crowd.

OWS has thus far presented no clear set of solutions for the problems that set them in motion, in part because they have not yet clearly articulated those problems. Whether they ever will clearly articulate them and offer workable solutions with a single voice remains to be seen.

Since I am obviously writing this from a church office, I am not an active participant of OWS. I am occupying my chair, not Wall Street. I am an observer at once sympathetic and critical and wary. My observations have been filtered by media coverage drawn largely from the web.

In other words, I am probably the real 99% that OWS claims to represent. I am somewhere else, so at certain points I would like for the OWS crowd to at least ask my permission before claiming to represent me.

With that disclaimer made, here is where I am sympathetic.

Earth Shaking

2011-10-17T10:20:00.001-05:00

We are not here by accident. Even though followers of Jesus are heavenly-minded, God does not intend for us to bide our time on this earth until something better—the afterlife—comes along.

Our belief in heaven also means that God has placed us in this world to do something significant. Followers of Jesus believe that God wants to do something earth shaking with our lives.

When God created the earth, it was good. Our sin has cracked it. Turned it upside down. God is not the kind who walks off and leaves what he started. So, instead of abandoning his creation, God sets about redeeming it.

His work of redemption begins in the Cross of Jesus Christ. He will complete that work when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead and to make a new heaven and a new earth.

In the meantime, here we are. We live in a fractured, upside down world. And God has something for us to do. He wants to shake things up on this earth, and he means to work through his Son’s followers. We can be God’s earth-shaking instruments in two ways.

Heaven Matters

2011-10-12T09:01:00.001-05:00

Heaven matters. You can take this one of two ways.

That brief phrase could mean that heaven plays a significant role in our lives.

Or, you could read “heaven matters” to be equivalent to “heavenly matters.” For example, you could say something like this. Today we will clear up some heaven matters and tomorrow we will turn to family matters.

I mean to imply both: heaven is significant for the Christian life and there are some things about heaven that we need to get clear about.

We Christians believe in life after this life. Our belief in heaven shapes how we live here on earth.

In other words, believing in heaven makes a difference in our day-to-day decisions, our value systems, how we vote, whom we marry, our parenting strategies, and our career path. At least, that is what believing in heaven is supposed to do.

Our view of heavenly matters—how we understand heaven—shapes the specific choices we make and the life course we follow.

For instance, some church-going Christians make no distinction between the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul. So, they misconstrue heaven as solely an escape from the trials and tribulations of all things earthly. From this perspective, heaven matters on earth because we want to get there and not go to hell. Earth is the moral arena in which our eternal destiny is decided. But on this view heaven offers little incentive to make earth itself a better place. The point is to escape to a heavenly destination.

As I said, the phrase “heaven matters” can mean two things. What is heaven like? And what difference does that make to life on earth? I intend both.

Small Steps on a Long Road

2011-10-10T08:48:00.000-05:00

And they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!" (Exodus 32:8b)

Being a Christian means following Jesus. But that might not mean quite what you think. Sure, it means that we believe the Bible, adhere to the Creed, and worship in the way that he taught. But it means more than this, something deeper and more fundamental.

Being a Christian means that we are wanderers on this earth—sojourners—having Jesus as our guide. And so the lesson of the Israelites wandering in the desert is especially helpful to us

The Israelites spent 40 years following God’s servant Moses in the desert. To get to the Promised Land from the Red Sea takes about three weeks. So going from Point A to Point B does not explain the duration of their time in the Sinai wilderness.

They did not need that time to get to where they were going. They needed that time to become who God meant them to be.

They were becoming the People of God. As we will see, Jesus leads us through this life not only that we will reach our heavenly home. He uses our time following him on this earth to make us who God means us to be: the Children of God.

So let’s turn first to the Israelites, and then we will return to how Christ is guiding us to be who God means us to be.

In one respect of course the Israelites were already the people of God. They were the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their DNA was right.

And for that matter, God was already committed to them. He made a covenant with Abraham and all his offspring. He had promised centuries before to bring Abraham’s offspring to a land of their own and to bless them to be a blessing to the whole world.

But their hearts and their minds were not right. That’s because there is more to being the People of God than DNA and God’s commitment.

The Israelites needed to learn who God is in order to learn his ways and to commit themselves to him.

And even though God is their Father, they have been in captivity and learned the ways of their captives. Ways contrary to their Father’s ways. So they have some things to unlearn. This will prove to be key in understanding the episode with the Golden Calf.

Leaving Failure Behind

2011-10-04T11:51:00.000-05:00

Here is some excellent advice from The Very Rev. Kevin Martin:

“I have since learned to eliminate failure from my vocabulary as a leader. Leadership is about being effective and the best way to become more effective is to see your work not about success or failure, but about effectiveness. If I see all my experiences as an opportunity to learn, then no matter what I face, or what happens, if I learn from it, I will grow as God’s intended leader.”

His post is intended for church leaders but applies to us all. If this advice catches your eye, read the whole post at Kevin on Congregations.

Eye Opening

2011-10-03T09:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we need help to see things for what they really are. New information or a different vantage point can shed light on people and events. They are eye openers.

The Psalmist tells us that God’s law is an eye opener. The commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.” (Ps. 19:8b; ESV) We don’t usually think of the law in these terms. The law is a set of rules or directions. Or, the law is the standard by which God measures our righteousness or unrighteousness. But an eye opener? Yes, the law opens our eyes to God's love for us.

To get at the Psalmist’s meaning, let’s draw a parallel between Natural Law and Moral Law (granting that the Psalmist himself would never have drawn an analogy like this).

Knowing the laws of nature helps us to see the ordinary events around as a function of rational principles. What might look like utter chaos to an untrained eye is the expression of a complex order for someone who knows Chaos Theory.

Physics, Meteorology, and Seismology allow us to predict the future course of planets, next week’s weather, and even impending earthquakes. Our knowledge of Natural Law opens our eyes to the patterns of nature and sometimes helps us to live more securely and effectively on this planet.

We can launch spacecraft to distant planets and land probes on them to gather data. Hurricanes pose an enormous threat but weather forecasts can warn us to get out of their path. Tsunami warning systems at least provide the promise of minimizing the human destruction of tidal waves.

By analogy, the Moral Law opens our eyes to our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. But here is where the analogy ends. Natural Laws tell us how things will be. Moral Law tells us how things ought to be. Each kind of law sheds light on our lives. They are eye openers. But Moral Law helps us to see the course that human freedom has charted.

A Fellow Blogger on Loving Your Neighbor

2011-09-30T10:58:00.000-05:00

From time to time I will post an excerpt from a fellow blogger's writing and post a link. That's what I'm doing today. I found an interesting post entitled "Not in My Sandbox." Check out this excerpt.

So here's a point of order: Love your neighbor does not mean be a doormat. The full commandment is love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself. Life is about balancing that trifecta. We don't love our neighbor by constantly subjecting ourselves to our neighbor's hurtful behavior towards us. We are simply engaged in the emotional equivalent of constantly poking ourselves in the eye when we do that.

If you like this, check out the whole post at Dirty Sexy Ministry.

Inside and Out

2011-09-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

Ask people on the street what they want out of life and you are likely to hear many of them say, “I just want to be happy.” With a little digging you could get most of them to tell you what they mean. A rewarding job. Career advancement. A loving spouse. Healthy, successful children. A nice home. Good health.

The specifics of any individual’s list will vary, but most of these lists will have one thing in common. They describe external circumstances. People always and everywhere pursue happiness.

In the contemporary West we are especially likely to believe that the inner conditions associated with happiness—contentment, tranquility and joy—result from achieving some set of external circumstances.

Given this prevailing view of happiness, it is no wonder that so many people find it hard to grasp how a loving God could allow good people to experience so much disappointment, failure, frustration and even heartache. God designed us to pursue happiness. So he must either leave the pursuit of happiness up to us or he doles out happiness capriciously.

God wants us to be happy. Right? If this means that God wants to give us external conditions that will give us our desired internal life, then the answer is “no.” God does not define happiness in this way.

Who Will Be Your God?

2011-09-26T10:10:00.000-05:00

If all you knew about Christianity came from popular culture, you might think that all we think about is stamping out sin.

It’s as if we only care about ridding our lives of bad things. To be honest, some Christians seem to have that misconception, too.

Now, it’s true that God gives us the moral law and that we are responsible for obeying it. But the core of following Jesus is not about ridding ourselves of bad things. It’s learning to give up good things.

It can be difficult to give up destructive and self-destructive habits. But even more difficult than that is to give up good things. Our desire to hold on to good things is our greatest stumbling block to receiving the best.

That’s because clinging to good things turns them into idols and turns God into our butler. Let me explain by turning to the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert.

What Happened to Sin?

2011-09-21T09:46:00.001-05:00

A seminary professor with years of parish experience once told me—in fact, he once told a classroom full of seminarians—that nobody is interested in hearing about sin anymore. As sermon themes go, it’s a non-starter. Sermons that work, he continued, focus on human problems like loneliness and fear of failure or on our duty to pursue social justice.

He may not have meant this, but the point I took away was that sin is passé as a sermon theme. And at one level I completely agree.

Progressive preachers focus elsewhere for theological reasons.

Popular evangelical preachers like Joel Osteen rarely mention sin in their sermons, although perhaps for pastoral or evangelistic reasons.

And as for me, the central message of any sermon should focus on the Good News: God’s love for us justifies our lives in the Cross of Christ. Sin is simply the Bad News that the Good News addresses.

So what has happened to sin in at least one spectrum of sermons? It has not actually disappeared. Some preachers have redefined and renamed sin. While this theological revision has an initial popular appeal, its enduring effect is negative. I’ll explain what I mean by starting with a brief working definition of sin.

Disciples and Ambassadors

2011-09-15T17:10:00.001-05:00

This is the final post in the series on how God answers prayer.

God answers our prayers. But if he simply granted the prayers we actually offer, we might say to Him what St. Teresa of Avila told him when she fell from her donkey into the mud: “If this is the way you treat your followers no wonder you have so few of them!”

As I explained in the previous post in this series, our prayers are always imperfect. We are finite, so we pray in ignorance of the big picture that only God can see. In addition to that, we are fallen. Sometimes our prayers arise from disordered desires and misguided motives.

God hears our needs and our yearning for our highest good clearly and compassionately. His response to our prayers hears through the garbled message we send him to the true petition we only dimly comprehend.

But there is more still to consider when we say that God answers our prayers.

In addition to being finite and being fallen, we are followers: followers of Jesus Christ.

Speaking and Hearing

2011-09-14T08:06:00.000-05:00

This is the third post in a series about how God answers prayer.

I grew up with a speech impediment. Born with a cleft palate, I was physically incapable of making the “s” sound.

The repair required two surgeries, but I received only one of those in my infancy. When I was in my early twenties, a surgeon completed the repair and I uttered normal speech for the first time.

Years of garbled speech gave me various challenges, but it also provided me with an illustration for prayer. When I spoke, most people had difficulty understanding me. I could not make myself clear.

Some found it difficult to relate to me, because it is awkward to be forever asking someone to repeat himself. (My rough edges didn’t help much either, to be honest.)

But there were people who had a knack for understanding me with apparently no extra effort. They could hear through what I garbled to the meaning I wanted to convey.

That is the analogy I want to convey. Our prayers are garbled speech. We cannot make ourselves clear. God can and does respond to our meaning even when we fail to make our own message clear.

Mistaken Identity

2011-09-07T10:30:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series about how God answers prayer.

Jesus makes bold claims about prayer. Whenever his followers pray together about something his Father will do what they have asked.

In other words, God answers prayer. Jesus put it this way:

If two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. (Matthew 18:19)

And yet, many of us can report disappointment that our prayers go unanswered.

Surely prayers have ascended from the ranks of the unemployed and the homeless, the abused and the sick. Relationships have crumbled and workplaces have remained toxic despite a barrage of faithful prayer. Churches pray every week—even every day—for peace and good harvests, and yet wars and famine still ravage the planet.

How can we reconcile our experience of disappointment with Jesus’ bold promise?

Let’s begin by taking Jesus at his word. God answers our prayers. Not by saying “yes” sometimes and “no” other times. When two or three of Jesus’ disciples agree in prayer, God grants their petition.

And let’s dismiss right now the idea that Jesus was only talking to the hyper-faithful among his followers. He was talking to disciples who routinely misunderstood him, said embarrassingly stupid things, and eventually abandoned him at his time of greatest need for their friendship. (Mark 8:14-17; 9:33-34; 14:50)

Okay. This means that God is answering your prayers and my prayers even when it doesn’t seem like it. The problem lies in how we see things, not in what God is doing in our lives.

There is something distorting and obscuring our vision. Our most basic problem is a case of mistaken identity. We have misconstrued who we are and what our purpose is in this life. As a result, we misunderstand who God is and the role that prayer plays in our relationship with God.

So, who do we think we are and why do we think we are here?

Does Prayer Work?

2011-09-06T08:49:00.000-05:00

This is the first post in a series about how God answers prayer.

Jesus himself instructs us to pray. Moreover, he promises that, when we gather together as a body, the Father will answer our prayers. He says:

If two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. (Matthew 18:19)

Jesus tells us that he is the Truth and that we can stake our very life on his promises. (John 14:6; 5:24-27; 6:40)

Just as Jesus promised, many of us have experienced answered prayers.

And yet, we have probably all experienced unanswered prayers, too. And it can make us doubt Jesus’ words about prayer.

This poses a serious problem.

If we can’t believe him about prayer, then why should we believe him about the forgiveness of our sins or the hope of eternal life? If he could be mistaken or lie about one thing, what he says about other things could be just as unreliable.

Marrying for Money

2011-09-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

Have I married God for his money? Rupert Murdoch got me thinking about this.

The media magnate Rupert Murdoch has received his own share of media attention recently. News agencies were shocked, simply shocked, that Murdoch’s employees would gather news at the expense of a public figure’s privacy.

Most of us in the general public gave passing notice to the news scandal. But we were absolutely riveted to the screen by Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng Murdoch. At hearings investigating Murdoch, a protestor leapt from the crowd to hit Murdoch with a cream pie.

His wife—a former Chinese volleyball star—leapt from her own seat and spiked the guy in the forehead before he could pie her husband. What a woman!

I know absolutely nothing about Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch’s relationship (although I was deeply touched by her loyalty and her athleticism). Nevertheless, I heard plenty of idle speculation about what this beautiful young woman was doing with an octogenarian.

It’s not fair, but the consensus in some circles was money (followed closely by power). Even though I don’t actually hold this view, it got me thinking about the tone associated with this speculation. There was an air of condescension about it.

Getting Direction

2011-08-29T07:31:00.000-05:00

Faith is what we believe. But it is also what we do. If we really believe in God, we will seek to follow God’s will.

That’s not to say that we are faithless when we stray from God’s will. We will struggle with sins and doubts as we grow in faith. And we will be growing as long as we live.

What I’m getting at is that being a disciple means following God’s direction for our life

Lots of people are principled. They follow a code of ethics or adhere to a philosophy of life.

Christian discipleship is different. We don’t follow a code. We follow a person. We follow Jesus Christ, and we believe that he gives us direction for our life. Not just general principles to guide us, but specific guidance and even commands for the ordinary conduct of our daily lives.

And what an advantage this is!

You see, you follow a code or a set of principles because it’s the right thing or it gives you the highest probability of success. We follow Jesus because he’s in this life with us and for us, he knows us personally and knows the path for us to take to arrive that the infinite good that he wants for us.

So let’s get clear about how involved God gets in the details and specifics of our daily lives and how we can know what it is that God wants us to do.

Too Earthly Minded to Do Earthly Good

2011-08-25T13:01:00.000-05:00

God’s chief desire for us is more than happiness. Our earthly comfort and security and sense of fulfillment are gifts from God, but they are not what he wants most for us.

In fact, for the sake of our eternal relationship with Him and with all of His children, God is willing to make us unhappy. Regret, frustration, heartache and even pain can be God’s instruments for the redemption of our lives.

His infinitely good plan for us is the fathomless joy of seamless relationship with him. But this is possible only when we refuse to substitute something else for God.

When we pursue happiness as our highest purpose, we end up relating to God only as an instrument to get what we want. And what we want in that case is the earthly goods. If we could get them without God, that would be fine.

It’s like what Jesus said to the crowds that chased him down to make him king after he fed them with the miraculous multiplication of the loaves:

Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. (John 6:26-27)

In other words, “You don’t want me. You only want the stuff I can give you.”

Having God fully and having perfect fellowship with his children will not happen in this life. God has set us on a pilgrimage toward the life after this life that only Jesus Christ can give us.

We tend to lose sight of our true destination and to suffer the miserable disappointment that inevitably follows by asking earth to be heaven. God can will our unhappiness precisely because it is the cure for this spiritual shortsightedness.

That’s what I suggested in my previous post. And now I imagine some of my readers saying something like this:

“Don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good.”

More Than Happiness

2011-08-24T11:03:00.000-05:00

God wants us to be happy. Right?

Well, actually, no. Now, this doesn’t mean that God wants us to be miserable. He wants more than happiness for us. Not less.

Nevertheless, God can and does will disappointment and failure and frustration and even heartache for us for the sake of the good that He desires for us.

In other words, for the sake of something greater, God’s Will for us can be that we will be unhappy.

This doesn’t sound like a loving God. Does it?

And yet, the paradox is that God’s willingness for us to be unhappy is actually proof of His unquenchable love for us.

God's Big Love

2011-08-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

“God is love.” This is not just a foundational principle of the Christian faith. It’s the basic assumption of what you might call American civic spirituality. In other words, it’s what people who say they believe in God but profess no specific faith are likely to say about God.

Christians are committed to forming our thoughts about God from his own self-revelation in the Bible, but the truth is many of us don’t do our biblical homework.

So what we end up with is culture’s vague notion that God is love. It goes something like this

God feels deep affection for us.

He doesn’t make moral demands on us, except maybe the moral demand not to make moral demands on anybody else.

He never judges us.

If we’re lucky or we’re good or we’re talented, he might help us out in a jam or even give us some swell gifts, but he’s not all that involved.

He means well, but he’s largely ineffectual.

This God doesn’t give us hope and joy, because we can’t really rely on him for much of anything. Let’s remind ourselves about the real God, the only God who can really be our Savior.

Mercy Wins

2011-08-18T11:20:00.002-05:00

People are still talking about Rob Bell’s book Love Wins. This is a remarkably good thing. While I think many of Bell’s arguments remain undeveloped and I disagree with what are at least his apparent sympathies with universalism, let’s give credit where credit is due.

Bell’s winsome style is captivating. His pastoral sense of the concerns of spiritual people (as opposed to religious people; whatever that distinction really means) is spot on.

We all want to be loved and accepted.

We cannot bear the thought that we would be rejected for the flaws and faults we know we have.

We are appalled by the idea that people we love or respect or admire might be condemned to perdition.

We live in a multicultural world and sense correctly that we must find a way to live peaceably and respectfully with people who do not share our religious beliefs.

As a result, he has thousands upon thousands of people talking about the nature of God, eternal life, and justice.

Among the problems I have with Bell is his starting point.

Waiting for Bossypants

2011-08-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

My wife Joy has been reading Bossypants, Tina Fey’s recent memoir about being a media boss. I have no intention of reading the book, even though Tina Fey generally cracks me up.

And yet, that is one great title. Bossypants. It still makes me chuckle. It has given me a new nickname for my wife (said in jest, really). And it’s got me thinking about the will of God.

Is God a sort of celestial Bossypants?

And if Christian discipleship is all about following God’s will, does that mean that we should look for direction from Bossypants before we do anything?

Looking for a spouse? Wait for word from Bossypants!

Thinking of buying a house? Wait for Bossypants!

Considering a career change? Wait for Bossypants!

I’m reminded of a parishioner at a church I served years ago. He came to me again and again saying that he wanted to serve God. But he wasn’t going to do anything until he heard God’s will. He insisted on hearing God’s specific direction for his life before engaging in a ministry. The waiting had not ended by the time I left to serve another congregation.

I kept thinking about Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s two characters Estragon and Vladimir spend the entire play waiting for Godot (or God) convinced that he is drawing near. He never comes. They never do anything.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for following God’s will. That’s not to say that I always find that easy or comfortable or perfectly clear. For that matter, my own need for regular repentance testifies to the fact that I miss the mark more often that I like to admit.

But what does it mean to follow God’s will? How do you do it?

Life and Death and Life

2011-08-12T12:58:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow at St. Mark’s Cathedral we will lay to rest Chief Petty Officer Robert Reeves, 32 years old. Rob was a Navy SEAL and among those who died in the downing of the Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan last week.

At the age of 90, the renowned Church of England priest and evangelical leader John Stott died quietly, surrounded by friends and listening to Handel’s Messiah, on July 27.

Just four days earlier the remarkably talented, addiction-afflicted singer Amy Winehouse died in her home for still undetermined causes. She was only 27.

Pondering death probably seems unnecessarily gloomy to some. And it certainly would be a morose exercise if the point were to wallow in sorrow or to flee in fear. But I want us to think about death for an entirely different reason. As Christians, a realistic acknowledgement of death can be the beginning of new life and inextinguishable hope.

Funerals are often called, at least in this part of the United States, a celebration of life. Eulogists will recount stories from childhood, remind us of admirable character traits, and highlight accomplishments. In essence, we say that the person we love but see no longer lived a commendable life.

This is fine and good as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

Talents and Glory

2011-08-09T11:25:00.001-05:00

“I hate it when you say that!” That’s what my oldest son Andrew told me when he was still in High School.

My offending remark was none of the following:

Clean your room!

Curfew is midnight!

Mow the lawn!

Wait until marriage for sex!

Instead, I said this: “I’m so proud of you! You have so much potential!”

“I hate it when you say that!”

“You don’t want me to be proud of you?”

“No! I hate that whole you’ve got potential thing. It’s a set up. If I don’t achieve something great I’m a loser.”

Oh.

Longing and Contentment

2011-08-08T10:27:00.000-05:00

Lots of people have been talking about heaven and hell lately. Rob Bell deserves some credit for this. Whether or not you agree with his thoughts in Love Wins, you have to admit that he’s stirred up a lively conversation.

Mark Galli responded with God Wins. Francis Chan chimed in with Erasing Hell. And this just skims the surface of book publication activity. There have been even more blog posts, magazine articles, radio stories, and television interviews.

While Rob Bell showers his readers with scores of provocative questions in his book, the question at the center of much of this conversation is this: Can a loving God condemn anyone to perdition?

I’ve discussed this question and related questions in an earlier series. While there’s still much left to be said about all of this, I want to point out an unintended result—at least for some of us—of the revived interest in heaven and hell.

It is finally dawning on people that their nagging dissatisfaction with their lives is that they’ve wanted this life to be what it can never be.

Let me explain by quoting Kevin DeYoung:

Love, Romance and Redemption

2011-07-22T10:40:00.000-05:00

Countless people are looking for love. Our deep, understandable need has created a growth industry.

Books promise to show us how to make people to fall in love with you, how to avoid falling in love with a jerk, how to find your soul mate, and how to escape love that hurts.

We’ve seen a proliferation of online dating services.

There’s eHarmony, match.com, chemistry.com, perfectmatch.com, and spark.com to name just a few of the apparently helpful, reputable ones.

They promise that you’ll find someone special in six months. Long-lasting relationships are their goal. Some of these sites even offer relationship advice from “recognized experts.”

I am not a scoffer at any of this. Well, maybe I do roll my eyes about a couple of book titles and cringe at the seamier dating services. But loneliness is very real and terribly painful. God never meant for us to be alone. (Genesis 2:18)

The absence of affection, companionship, support and respect from other people drains our lives of joy. Our problem is not our desire for such things. It’s what we want the love of a good man or a good woman to do for us.

Running from Empty

2011-07-19T10:30:00.000-05:00

Carmakers must assume that drivers tend to run on empty. That’s why they install warning lights and tones to alert us when we need to refill our gas tanks.

Running on empty is a popular metaphor for the hectic pace that so many of us keep in our daily lives. Studies tell us that sleep deprivation has reached epidemic levels. The once common family meal has nearly disappeared because everyone’s schedule is too full to sit and eat with each other.

Many people report feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. All the time.

But I’ve started to think that our deep issue is not that we are running on empty. Many of us are running from empty.

We want our lives to be significant. We yearn to matter. We are desperate for approval, success and affirmation. Some experience a vague emptiness. Others feel burdened by their faults. Still others remain haunted by past failures and humiliations.

We just don’t want it all to have been in vain when we look back at the end of the race.

And so we run from empty. We chase a romantic other, a fulfilling career, social status, thrilling experiences, and material possessions.

Some say that we are trying to fill the God shaped hole in our hearts. And I suppose that this is true in some cases. But I’ve come to suspect that most of us are just running from emptiness.

This is the place where you’ll expect me to say that finding God will fix this. Well, you’re wrong. In time our relationship with Jesus Christ will fill our emptiness, but entering into relationship with God will not immediately fix us.

Weeds

2011-07-14T10:12:00.001-05:00

The Casey Anthony trial attracted a nearly obsessive level of media (and viewer) attention. Obsession turned to outrage when the jury handed down the not-guilty verdict, even as some began to wonder about our habit of rushing to judgment in such public cases.

No one should wonder at the interest the Anthony trial drew.

The horror of an innocent child’s death. The sad and lurid charges that Casey made against her father. The spectacle of a mother lying on the stand for her apparently sinister daughter.

Casey’s decadent party spree while her daughter was missing. The oddly detached affect of the defendant herself as she sat day after day in the courtroom.

You can’t make this stuff up and it’s nearly impossible to avert your eyes. It’s like a grisly wreck on the highway. Before you know it you’ve slowed down to catch a glimpse of the carnage.

It all brought to mind a word that seems to have mostly fallen from use these days: wickedness. There is wickedness in the world. Terrible wickedness.

Whether Casey Anthony murdered her daughter in the ways asserted by the prosecution or not, we’re left with a vivid reminder that people do this sort of thing. Daily.

Where is God in that?

Dreams and Ladders

2011-07-11T05:13:00.000-05:00

Our dreams tell us volumes about who we are. I don’t mean the dramas unfolded by our unconscious mind while we sleep. Instead, I have in mind what motivational speakers and graduation keynoters call our dreams.

They tell us to pursue our dreams. Life without a dream is empty, they say.

What they mean by “dream” gives us an insight into what we take life to be. And it’s killing us.

In these cases, “dream” is a synonym for “aspiration.” We are taught again and again to set our sights high.

It is true. God wants us to have a bold vision for our lives. His concern for us is never that we shoot too high. We repeatedly frustrate him by shooting too low.

Ironically, it is our so-called dreams that lead us to shoot depressingly low. That’s because so many of us dream of ladders. We dream of ladders that we must climb.

Underlying all of these dreams is that we are not enough. We are somehow empty and yearn to be filled. We fancy that when we get to the top of that ladder we will finally be somebody, complete, fulfilled.

Good Soil

2011-07-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus compares spreading the word about the Kingdom of God to scattering seeds. The kingdom, like any seed, will take root only when it lands on good soil.

Here’s the parable without Jesus’ explanation:

A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. (Matt. 13:3-8; see 13:18-23 for Jesus’ explanation)

Gardeners talk about soil. Good soil contains nutrients, the right pH level, and the kind of texture that allows plants to take root. Poor soil lacks at least one or maybe all of these qualities.

Good soil gives us fruit and vegetables and flowers. Experienced gardeners know how to amend even poor soil so that it too will promote plant growth.

For us non-gardeners, soil is just a synonym for dirt. Not for a gardener! Soil is for growing. Dirt is just what you get on your clothes or your kids track through the house.

In other words, dirt is a mess. Don’t bother planting in it. Just clean it up. At least, that’s how we look at it. God apparently sees things differently. Lucky for us!

Are We Happy Yet?

2011-07-06T09:13:00.000-05:00

A life devoted to the pursuit of happiness ends in sorrow.

Maybe this sounds pessimistic or cynical or even unpatriotic. After all, the Declaration of Independence frames our freedom precisely in terms of our inherent right to pursue happiness.

Let me be clear. We desire happiness by God’s own design. Happiness is a good that God himself wants us to enjoy. But happiness is a by-product of our chief end: righteousness.

As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matt. 6:33) Happiness results from our pursuit of the kingdom of God. Not the other way around.

If we seek righteousness, happiness will follow. If we seek happiness, we will inevitably sacrifice righteousness and unwittingly forfeit happiness.

By now you’re probably thinking that this all hinges on what I mean by “happiness” and just what “seeking the kingdom of God” means.

Let’s start with happiness.

More than Self-Esteem

2011-06-29T08:55:00.000-05:00

Parents want their children to be happy. That’s why there is so much emphasis on self-esteem in child-rearing literature. Experts (and charlatans) advise us to affirm our children relentlessly.

But this emphasis on self-esteem misses the deeper point and the ultimate path to an abiding joy and peace.

We all need affirmation. There is nothing weak or psychologically damaged about our yearning for assurance that the world is better off with us in it. That we are missed in our absence. That our contribution to this life is significant.

God created us to need affirmation. In fact, God created us so that we have to receive the affirmation we crave from some source beyond ourselves.

Please do not hear this to mean that God created us to suffer chronically low self-esteem. On the contrary, God created us so that he can permeate us with a joy and peace that show self-esteem to be the pale simulacrum of happiness that it really is.

Love and Marriage

2011-06-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

The Marriage Equality Bill became law in New York just a few days ago.

Same-sex couples will now exchange vows in both civil and religious ceremonies. Their relationships receive the same recognition—at least by the state (and by some religious traditions)—that heterosexual couples have always received.

Predictably, some celebrate this as moral progress in the area of equal rights and others lament the passage of this legislation as a step toward increased social confusion. In a now stale attempt at humor, some wags have asked: Do Gays and Lesbians really know what they’re getting themselves into?

It’s a lame joke. But it’s the right question. Except that it should be asked of everyone. Do we really have a workable, coherent concept of marriage? With respect to marriage, do we really know what we’re getting into?

Child Sacrifice

2011-06-23T10:39:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you just have to wonder what God was thinking. For reasons of his own he decided to hand helpless infants over to parents.

The parental mission: to teach these infants what it means to be a human being. To show them what life is most fundamentally about. To model how to live a significant, meaningful life.

That’s why one thing scares parents above all else. Parenting.

Failure at parenting threatens to be catastrophic. And that’s why we find various forms of hyperactive parenting.

Self-righteous Tiger Moms mercilessly demand the highest level of performance from their children. Fun, friendship and play are completely expendable.

Overly involved Helicopter Parents hover over every aspect of their children’s lives to insure self-esteem and success.

Relentlessly protective Lawnmower Parents seek to mow down every obstacle to their child’s happiness and to smooth out every bump they may encounter.

At various points these parents might feel like killing their kids, but they wouldn’t dream of it. One thing we know for sure is that you don’t kill your children. You give them every advantage you can and do everything in your power to protect them.

Right?

And then we read God’s most notorious piece of parenting advice. God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac:

He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you." (Genesis 22:2)

What was God thinking?

The Lion, the Lamb and the War to End All Wars

2011-06-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

This is the final post in the series on Good and Evil

“The war to end all wars” became a popular catchphrase to describe World War I. Woodrow Wilson did not coin the phrase, but he did use it in his war speech to congress in 1917.

In Wilson’s view, America would not be entering the war merely to defeat a human enemy, a rival nation state. He called America to arms to "vindicate principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power.”

Wilson understood that a vision of the world order and of the status of human beings in that order was at stake. His vision was to establish a just and peaceful order that would prevent the kind of violence seen on the European battlefields once and for all.

As we all know, less than two decades later Europe erupted again in an orgy of violence with the rise of Nazism. Conflicts of various scope and in various parts of the world have raged ever since. Wars, it seem, simply refuse to die.

Christians understand that Wilson was right to see that principles more powerful than passing national interest and political advantage underlie every war.

Some believe that his vision to end all war was flawed only by his use of force and insist that the lesson to be learned is that war can never end war. Only pacifist commitment can end war.

Scripture leads us to draw a different conclusion. Even just wars do not attain final victory. No human action can eradicate evil as such. That’s because we do not wage war against humans only. Satan, or evil if you wish, wages war against us. In the face of one loss, evil regroups and presses on a new front.

It Takes One to Know One

2011-06-14T13:31:00.000-05:00

This is the fourth post in a series on Good and Evil.
Our aversion to hypocrisy paints us into a moral corner.
Just ask Baby Boomer parents who made all the wrong choices about sex and drugs how they feel about setting very different rules for their own children.
Many Boomer parents report feeling very uneasy about warning their own kids away from behaviors that they happily performed at the time but now regret.
They feel like hypocrites.
This phenomenon reminds me of childhood name-calling strategies. If someone called you a geek or a sissy, you dropped the hypocrisy bomb. “It takes one to know one!”
From this perspective, if you have even the slightest hint of the shortcoming you notice in someone else, you have no right to say anything. You have no room to talk. And if you do open your mouth, you’ve committed what seems to rank today as the only unforgivable sin: hypocrisy.
When it comes to judging and responding to evil, some think that Jesus taught precisely that lesson. The oft-quoted passaged is this:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3)
In other words, some say we have no right to criticize or judge someone else until our own house is completely in order.
Read more »

Deliver Us from Evil

2011-06-11T08:28:00.000-05:00

This is the third post in a series on Good and Evil.

Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace.

Following his teaching and example, Christians seek to settle conflict in non-violent ways as a matter of principle. Non-violence is our first choice and we pursue it well beyond the point at which others might wonder at our sanity.

Conflict often occurs between two good and reasonable parties whose points of view differ. Violence is never in order here. In fact, well-managed, respectful conflict of this sort can arrive at new insights and deepened relationships.

But sometimes conflict results from evil.

In the previous post in this series I tried to make the point that evil is the anti-peace. Evil is utter resistance to God’s order of things. God designed the universe to hang together like a Luminous Web, to borrow a Barbara Brown Taylor title.

There is only God’s order. Any divergence from that order or alteration of that order becomes destructive and debases the life God intends for us.

Promising a more just or more lucrative or more pleasurable or more vaguely free order, evil merely tears apart the threads that hold together what God intends to be a peaceable kingdom.

Christians are called to resist evil. And as a last resort, we may use violent means to stop the destructive forces of evil.

Spiritual Posture

2011-06-08T13:11:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series on Good and Evil.

Can Christians kill bad guys? Can we even say that there are bad guys? Or to frame the question in a more precise way: may Christians, following Christian principles, legitimately use violence to stop evil?

It’s an old question. Reasonable responses range from unconditional pacifism to just war theory. When a team of Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden, Christian commentators voiced opinions along most of this spectrum.

Before wading into the fray about how Christians should respond to evil, I need to say something about good and evil themselves. What are good and evil? How does one distinguish the one from the other?

This is where you might expect me to say something about moral law and divine justice. Well, that will come in due time.

First, I want to talk about posture.

As odd as it may sound, our physical posture provides a helpful metaphor for understanding our spiritual posture. And good and evil are matters of spiritual posture.

Weeds among the Wheat

2011-06-03T08:02:00.000-05:00

This is the first post in a series on Good and Evil.

There is good. There is evil. Really.

And it’s not that simple. Really.

Some people insist that a bright line separates good and evil. There is a war going on between two opposing forces. People stand on one side or another of that line.

For instance, I once presided at the funeral of a murdered police officer. During his remarks, the Chief of Police said that there are good people and evil people and that police officers form the barrier protecting us good people from unimaginably malevolent forces.

Progressive and postmodern intellectuals usually view this sort of talk as unsophisticated. They classify it as black and white thinking.

Life, they believe, is composed of various shades of grey. Good and evil are labels arising from fear of difference and a desire to control. Moral reasoning is a tool of oppression and marginalization.

An enlightened mind is Beyond Good and Evil, to borrow the title of the postmodern prophet Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous work.

While many Christian individuals sincerely believe some variation on these two extreme views of good and evil, it’s not what Jesus taught.

Faith and Delight

2011-06-01T08:29:00.001-05:00

This is the final post in the series on Faith and Doubt.

Nobody wants to be, well, a nobody. We want our lives to count for something.

Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, we need some sense that the world bears our mark and is a better place as a result. Otherwise, maybe we would be better off never having been born.

At some very primal level we believe that our very existence has to be justified.

Despite all the talk we hear about the intrinsic value of every person and all that we might say about the inherent dignity of every human being, we all recoil at the prospect of becoming insignificant.

You might expect me at this point to say that we should free ourselves of this desire for justification. That it reveals low self-esteem or even self-loathing.

Not at all!

Our lives must be justified or we really are insignificant. If our lives are not justified, in the end it will all have been for nothing. Worse than nothing.

This very human desire for justification is not our most basic problem. Instead, it is our response to this genuine need that leads us again and again to emptiness and heartache.

Idol Doubt

2011-05-25T09:49:00.000-05:00

This is the fourth post in a series on faith and doubt.

Doubt comes in several varieties.

A sound, critical thinker develops the habit of withholding judgment until sufficient evidence can be gathered.
Those of us who recognize the limits of a finite mind admit that many matters about God invite and even require serious intellectual reflection but will remain mysteries in the end.
In our relationships, we trust others to do what they’ve promised or to act according to character. There are no guarantees about this, so when we act on this trust we take a risk. At various points we might feel this risk very keenly.

None of these kinds of doubt undermine faith.

We may wrestle with each other over fine points of theology without worrying that one or the other of us is rejecting God.

Admitting that we don’t really understand how God can be one and three at the same time doesn’t mean that we’ve failed a test required for salvation. It just means we can’t understand a mystery exhaustively.

And there is nothing unfaithful about our awareness that trust involves risk. On the contrary, to paraphrase Mr. Beaver from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Jesus never claimed that following him was safe. But he promises that it is good.

There is, however, another form of doubt. This form of doubt is toxic to our relationship with God. In the final analysis, it’s a species of idolatry and serves the corrosive illusion that we can justify our own existence.

Fool's Doubt

2011-05-20T10:57:00.000-05:00

This is the third post in a series on faith and doubt.

Christians don’t ponder the relationship between faith and doubt out of idle curiosity. We believe that faith is crucial to our salvation. Many of us have been taught that doubt is the enemy of faith and leads to our condemnation.

Some kinds of doubt reside at the very heart of faith.

Finite minds wrestling with infinite mysteries must live with a measure of intellectual uncertainty. For instance, God is Triune. Providing a final, precise conceptual expression of the Trinity remains beyond our mental reach.

Faith also involves trusting that God will be by our side and on our side no matter what may come. Acting on this trust today is inherently risky, because we cannot know what tomorrow brings with any certainty. Faith means taking God at his word, and that can sometimes leave a lump in our throat.

There is nothing damning about these kinds of doubts.

However, there appears to be a kind of doubt that places us outside the embrace of God’s redemptive grace.

Saving Faith

2011-05-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series on Faith and Doubt.

Being right can feel good. Dangerously good. Down right addictive. I should know. I’m a recovering rightaholic.

My pursuit of being right left jagged relationships in my wake and gave me plenty of wicked emotional hangovers. If faith were one more excursion into the land of being right I would have to pass. But it isn’t, and that’s what I want to make clear in this post.

Jesus saves us through our faith. Our faith does not save us. We’ll come back to this in a bit, but first let’s clear up a common misconception about faith and it’s relationship with doubt.

Getting Good News

2011-05-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

This is the first post in a series on Faith and Doubt.

Christianity is not a religion. It’s Good News. Everything I will say about faith, doubt and salvation in this series will hinge on this distinction. I borrow it from Timothy Keller (with minor revision).

So let’s outline the distinction between religion and Good News.

Religion tells us what to do to win God’s approval or to draw closer to God or to accomplish God’s purposes on earth. Codes of moral conduct, instructions for worship and programs for social action tell us what we have to do in order to get right with God.

Good news is, well, news. It reports to us what God has done for us already. On the Cross God extends unwarranted mercy. The news is that we don’t have to do a thing to justify our existence. God has already done that.

Religion sets us on the path of moral and spiritual achievement.

Good News frees us from the burden of measuring up through our achievements. Jesus accepts us as his followers when we recognize that we need him and we rely on him to come through for us.

Being More

2011-05-10T11:13:00.000-05:00

This is the final post in the series on desire and discipleship.

At the very beginning of this series I said that desire is the third rail of the soul.

Our power to accomplish things and to make a contribution in life derives from our passions. Along with this motive power also comes the danger of spiritual electrocution.

Our desires drive us to one of two destinations: larger life or destruction.

My suggestion has been simple. Desire is about “more.” Getting on the right track toward larger life and avoiding destruction involves getting “more” right.

Some people assume that getting “more” right involves finding the key to contentment. So writers often tell us how to experience “enough” and how to avoid having a sense of deprivation.

You’ve probably heard folksy proverbs like this.

The key to happiness is not to have what you want but to want what you have. Or this: don’t try to fill the God-shaped hole in your heart with things that can’t fill it.

Writers have warned us to avoid temptations to pursue destructive objects of desire and to learn to keep our desires within reasonable limits.

All of this is good advice as far as it goes. But there’s a paradox that this kind of advice routinely ignores.

Bait and Switch

2011-05-05T14:54:00.002-05:00

This is the fourth post on desire and discipleship.

Every morning at breakfast I sat staring at the back of the cereal box. I was looking the picture of a WWI biplane sweeping through the air. The pilot’s scarf streaming behind him. Guns blazing.

For just three box tops a genuine replica of a WWI warplane could be mine. My five-year-old heart was set.

I doggedly worked my way through three boxes of cereal that I absolutely hated (and no one else would touch.). Well, strictly speaking, I poured out several bowls of cereal when nobody was looking.

But my desire to have that plane drove me relentlessly.

I daydreamed endlessly about being that pilot. Bursting through the clouds. Descending furiously on a numerically superior foe. Narrowly winning harrowing dogfights with superior skill and courage.

Finally, I collected the required box tops and mailed them off to the cereal company. After what seemed like decades, the package finally arrived. Inside was a gray plastic plane with a wingspan of at most two inches.

This was not what I had in mind.

Cravings

2011-05-03T10:10:00.000-05:00

This is the third post in a series on desire and following Jesus.

Enough is enough. Except when it’s not. We can want more when we have enough. This is one way that desire can lead us down the rabbit hole.

We’ve all wanted the occasional second piece of cake or the extra helping of meatloaf. And while acknowledging healthy limits of food and drink (and exercise and work and I Love Lucy episodes) can present a challenge, this post is not about moderation and proper portion.

It’s about the insanity that sets in when “more” becomes your life’s purpose.

We can want more precisely because we are getting what we wanted. Let me put that another way, getting the very thing we’ve been chasing can compel us to want it all the more desperately.

Daily Bread

2011-04-28T10:18:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series on desire and following Jesus.

If you struggle with knowing when to say when, don’t expect your desires to be any help. That’s not their job. Desire is all about “more.” That’s how we end up regretting the second piece of pecan pie at Thanksgiving.

Don’t blame your desires when you find yourself wanting something that you know is bad for you. Their job is just to want more. Assessing health or quality or helpfulness is above their pay grade. If you’ve ever had a hangover I need say no more.

Nothing reveals the nature of desire more clearly than standing at the refrigerator, door open, scanning the contents for something to eat. You don’t know what you want. You just want something. After devouring several things you realize you didn’t want any of it. You’re not satisfied. You want more.

2011-04-26T08:47:00.003-05:00

This is the first post in a series on desire and following Jesus.

Desire. It’s the third rail of the soul.

On subways the third rail provides electricity to power the train. The voltage in the third rail far exceeds household current. Touching it can result in electrocution.

By analogy, desire provides the energy for our vitality or the fuel for our destruction.

Guarding Your Heart

2011-04-20T08:13:00.002-05:00

This is the third post in a series on how following Jesus transforms our relationships.

My wife Joy and I spent our first year of marriage in Germany. I had received a grant to research my dissertation at the Ruhr University and she enrolled in German studies there.

We committed to speak only German in public. Joy is very studious. She thought this was a great way to learn to speak German like a native.

I was a newlywed. Since speaking only German in public would be quite a strain, it seemed the perfect strategy to spend lots of private time at home with my new bride. I didn’t actually have speaking in mind, if you get my drift…

Joy became a German translator, interpreter, and teacher.

Apparently all that time speaking in public wasn’t such a strain for her after all.

At any rate, we became friends with several students from China while we were there, as there was an exchange program between the Ruhr University and Tongji University. Some of them were fascinated by our Christian faith.

One woman in particular pressed us about love. “You say you love everybody. How can that be? You can’t love everybody! You love your family. Close friends. You can’t love everybody.”

Learning to Talk

2011-04-13T10:45:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series on how following Jesus transforms our relationships.

Sometimes we just don’t know what to say or how to say it. For fear of saying the wrong thing we say nothing at all.

Sitting quietly with a grieving friend, waiting patiently for a loved one to find his own words in times of confusion, and even holding our tongue in response to an insult can be a powerful, healing gift.

And yet silence can also be corrosive, since it can be taken as indifference, collusion with evil, or acceptance of behaviors that grind us into dust. Most of us have missed the opportunity to utter a healing or reconciling or boundary-drawing word when it was really needed:

It breaks my heart to see you so hurt (or lonely or afraid or ashamed).

I’m sorry. I was wrong.

That’s just not how I see things.

Don’t do that again. Ever.

Telling the Truth in Love

2011-04-11T08:30:00.000-05:00

This is the first post in a series on how following Jesus transforms our relationships.

Relationships are a gift. God puts people in our lives to love and to love us.

Relationships are an achievement. They take work.

We want to be with each other. And yet we also step on each other’s toes and get under each other’s skin.

Angels, Demons and the Return of the King

2011-04-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

This is the last post in a series on relying on God in a messy world.

Jesus knew how to stay on message. Here’s the sound bite version: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

His parables and sermons convey what the kingdom of God is like. But Jesus wasn’t interested in telling us about some distant place to which we might escape some day.

That’s why he refused to rely on words alone to get his point across. Jesus healed the sick, cast out demons, walked on water, calmed storms, died on a cross, and rose from the dead.

The Good News is that God is reasserting his authority in this messy world we inhabit. And he’s doing it in his Son Jesus Christ.

What sort of authority is God reasserting? Why would God need to reassert anything? And if he is in fact reasserting his authority, what’s taking so long? Let’s take these questions one at a time.

Does God Plan to Break Your Heart?

2011-04-01T10:49:00.000-05:00

This is the third post in a series about relying on God in a messy world.

God runs a tight ship. At least, that’s what the opening scenes of “The Adjustment Bureau” suggest.

We never get to see God (or the Chairman, as he’s called in the movie). But we do get to watch his angels at work.

Dressed like characters from AMC’s series “Madmen,” they busy themselves with keeping God’s plan on track. They make minor adjustments in our lives when chance or a wayward choice threatens to send God’s infinitely intricate plan off the rails.

These midlevel angelic executives don’t turn to major catastrophes or eye-popping miracles to steer events along the divine path.

They make small adjustments that produce cosmic ripple effects. Spilled cups of coffee and dropped cell phone calls serve to nudge events back on track.

The plot turns on a love story.

David Norris (played by Matt Damon) and Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) are irresistibly drawn to each other.

Unfortunately for them, their relationship is contrary to God’s plan. The story that unfolds pits the freedom of the lovers to choose to spend their lives together against God’s plan (and influence) to keep them apart.

No spoilers here. If you want to know how it turns out, go see the movie.

But for those of us looking to rely on God in our daily lives, the question these filmmakers pose is one we should consider carefully.

Does God plan to break your heart?

Learning to Be Free

2011-03-29T10:44:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series about relying on God in a messy world.

God doesn’t push us around. And yet he rules the universe.

God is reliable. But things often don’t work out even when we’re counting on God with all our heart.

Preachers and theologians and philosophers have given us a mountain range of sermons, essays, articles and books to explain why good things happen to bad people.

As I said in the previous post, most of these preachers and authors try to reconcile God’s goodness with suffering.

Some say that God didn’t cause the suffering or couldn’t prevent it. He’s good, but not as powerful as advertised. He’s really nice, but maybe not so reliable.

Others say that the all-powerful God was justified in causing the suffering because the sufferers had it coming.

God’s got mojo and he’s good in a fierce, anxiety-producing kind of way. He’s so prickly that relying on him might make you feel a little too vulnerable.

Both of these theological strategies seem devoted to getting God off the hook.

I’m not very interested in that.

Most people I know, when they’re really in the thick of what life throws at us, don’t care that much about it either.

When your child is sick, your job is on the line, your marriage is on the rocks, your teenager is hooked on heroin, your parent drifts in and out of the fog of Alzheimer’s, the utility bill is due and the money is gone.

When you’re exhausted from chauffeuring your kids for the thousandth time, sick of thinking you’re too fat or too thin or too old, so lonely in a crowded room you find yourself fighting back tears.

When you really want that promotion, that project at work to be a homerun, that college acceptance, that girl to marry you, that guy to marry somebody else, just not to say the wrong thing on your first date.

Can you rely on God?

It’s really not enough that he’s watching and that he cares. I am not interested in being a character in one of God’s soap operas.

Can I count on him to come through for me? Every time!

Plans, Blueprints and Chessboards

2011-03-26T07:15:00.000-05:00

This is the first post in a series about relying on God in a messy world.

God gets involved. He’s not just a spectator, even a passionate one. God is by our side and has our back.

The Creator of heaven and earth, the author of oceans and galaxies, the mover of tides and tectonic plates knows the number of hairs on your head and grieves when a sparrow falls.

Even more astonishingly, we Christians say that God is out in front of us. He guards us and guides us. He has a vision for our lives that only he can bring to reality when we rely upon him.

Christians sometimes describe God’s involvement in our lives by saying that God has a plan and that his will governs the universe. Theologians call this the Sovereignty of God.

And then rotten things happen. Natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and droughts cause terrible human suffering.

Some interpret these natural disasters as God’s punishments for sin.

Love's Invitation

2011-03-23T08:53:00.000-05:00

This is the sixth and final post in a series on heaven, hell, and the relentless love of God.

Do you have to believe in Jesus Christ to go to heaven?

To frame this in a slightly different way, will those who die without faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior inherit eternal torment in hell?

Who Does Jesus Save?

2011-03-21T08:21:00.001-05:00

This is the fifth post in a series on heaven, hell and the relentless love of God.

It’s hard for many of us to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the doctrine that he would condemn millions of people to eternal torment in hell.

Mind you, we also want justice. God should hold Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot accountable. That goes for unrepentant rapists and murderers, too.

But do you have to believe in Jesus to avoid eternal punishment?

I mean, what about good people like Gandhi? He was a Hindu.

Weren’t there non-Christian children who died in the earthquake and tsunami in Japan? Do they spend eternity devoured by flames because they grew up being taught the wrong religious beliefs?

There Goes the Neighborhood

2011-03-17T08:03:00.000-05:00

This is the fourth post in a series on heaven, hell, and the relentless love of God.

Years ago I pitched in with a prison ministry called Kairos. Several of us would bring guitars into the prison to lead music during worship for inmates.

Their favorite song? “I’ll Fly Away”

I’m not making this up.

My guess is that the inmates liked this line: Like a bird from prison bars has flown, I'll fly away. It was their little joke on their guards.

“I’ll Fly Away” is actually about going to heaven. It’s right there in the first line. Some glad morning when this life is o'er, I'll fly away.

And that’s just how lots of people think about heaven. It’s someplace you go after this life is over. You leave this place for another, different place that is infinitely better.

Most people don’t say much about the plumbing of the new place, really. It’s just better. And, oh, did I mention that it’s someplace other than this?

There are, however, entrance requirements.

Living a good life, repenting your sins, believing in Jesus. Get these on the resume! It’s how you get in.

The only problem with this model is that it’s not what the Bible actually says.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

2011-03-14T08:47:00.000-05:00

This is the third post in the series on heaven, hell, and the relentless love of God.

Sometimes I completely lose track of time. Without quite realizing it, I’ve lost myself in something I love to do.

Talking to good friends. Looking at the night sky or the early morning light. Listening to the tide roll in at the beach.

Frederick Buechner wrote somewhere that forgetting ourselves this way is a glimpse of eternity. After all, Jesus teaches us that to lose our life for his sake is to gain it.

By their very nature such glimpses are fleeting. We know that we’ve been caught up in eternity only in retrospect, once the experience is past.

These brief glimpses into eternity can leave in their wake a persistent longing for something more than our everyday postures of self-preservation and self-absorption. Maybe these glimpses highlight for us an ever-present longing for the holy too often crowded out by our daily life’s busyness.

Our soul is the eternal part of ourselves. When the body dies, our soul will depart and await in our Lord’s nearer presence for the final resurrection. Then we will be given a new body, a resurrection body. (1 Corinthians 15:35-44)

As Buechner suggests, God seems to have designed the soul to long for and to catch glimpses of eternity. Additionally, Jesus teaches that the soul accumulates habits: habits suited for eternity.

As I said, glimpses are fleeting. Habits, by contrast, endure.

The habits we form suit us for eternal citizenship. Depending upon the sorts of habits we form, we prepare ourselves for residency in either heaven or hell.

God's Big Gamble

2011-03-10T06:21:00.004-06:00

This is the second post in a series on heaven, hell and God’s love.

We spend a great deal of time trying to measure up.

Teachers begin grading our work when we’re children. At some point we all became aware of something called a “permanent record.”

Coaches decide how much playing time we get, admissions officers determine our college acceptance, and employers hire, promote, and fire us. We strain to prove that we deserve to be on that field, on that campus, and in that office.

Standards have their place. They hold us accountable and can help us to improve our performance. There is nothing wrong with dispensing rewards for measuring up to a standard.

Love—genuine love—is not a reward for measuring up. It is a free gift freely given.

This is why so many people wonder why a loving God could condemn anyone to hell. They understand heaven and hell as reward and punishment. God measures us according to a moral standard and then dispenses judgment. Those who measure up go to heaven. God sends the misfits and slackers to hell.

What the Hell?

2011-03-06T15:37:00.001-06:00

This is the first post in a series on Heaven, Hell, and God’s relentless love.

Would a loving God send millions of people—even one person—to eternal torment?

Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins has stirred up a storm of controversy about heaven and hell. At least, his promotional materials have kickstarted debate among Christians.

You see, the book doesn’t come out until the end of this month.

This prepublication buzz suggests that Bell has touched a nerve. Heaven and hell probably do not occupy our minds as we go about our daily rounds of work, school, carpool, shopping, chores, and volunteer work.

Nevertheless, the concepts of heaven and hell brush up against our deepest longings and our most enduring fears. Bell is a keen observer of things human. His new book’s title—Love Wins—gets our attention precisely because it touches on these desires and anxieties.

We want to be loved. We want to give love. And yet, the evidence suggests that we humans tend to foul up this love thing with depressing regularity.

Will we ever get this right?

Will the Kids Be Okay?

2011-03-03T07:53:00.002-06:00

This is the final post in the series on hope overcoming fear.

Our oldest son Andrew is now 22.

He bench presses over 300 pounds and serves as a Navy Corpsman for the United States Marines. Along with his Marine pals on deployment he has unflinchingly eaten things that I pay an exterminator to kill and that I call animal control to capture. He does not need a firearm to be a dangerous weapon.

And I worry about him.

False Hope and the Real Deal

2011-02-28T09:40:00.000-06:00

This is the third post in a series on overcoming fear with hope.

Each Friday after work Natalie drove 90 miles to visit her boyfriend. This made her mother a little jumpy. Natalie was only nineteen and an only child. However, it was the return trip that drove her mother’s blood pressure through the roof.

Natalie never started the Sunday ride home before midnight. Her mother endured weekly visions of highway carnage until Natalie walked in the door as Sunday turned to Monday.

Natalie came to see me about what she saw as her mother’s unreasonable behavior.

She said something like this: “I don’t know what she’s all upset about. I believe in Jesus. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”

Apparently Natalie had missed that bit about Christian martyrs in her history lessons.

The Big Lie

2011-02-26T08:07:00.000-06:00

This is the second post in a series on overcoming fear with hope.

Hope overcomes fear. Holy Scripture teaches us this repeatedly, and it’s what I’m getting at in these next few posts.

Notice that I said that hope overcomes fear. Hope and fear are not mutually exclusive. They can and do wrestle with each other for ascendency in our hearts and minds.

Our constant exposure to the self-help industry may lead you to expect me to offer you a list of things to do in your life that will conquer fear or nurture the hope within in you. You will either be relieved or disappointed to hear that I’m not going there.

These posts belong to the helpless-self genre, not on the self-help shelves at Barnes and Noble.

Don’t get me wrong. There are spiritual disciplines that will help us to become increasingly hopeful people. Nevertheless, it’s important to see even these disciplines as ways of developing our relationship with our Maker and our Redeemer. He provides the help that we need.

A fruitful first step is to ask a question so obvious that we may fail to ask it at all. Why are we so susceptible to fear in the first place?

Fear and Hope

2011-02-24T07:27:00.000-06:00

This is the first in a series of posts on overcoming fear with hope.

On my (nearly) daily walks with my wife, I see a sign that puzzles me. It’s a graphic, actually. The sign consists of a black silhouette of a squatting dog doing his business. A white “NO!” is emblazoned across the doggy silhouette’s middle.

What puzzles me about this is that the sign is posted inside a fence. Dog walkers would have to throw Fido over the fence and then climb in after him to soil this particular plot of land.

It is clear that I’m missing something.

We erect signs offering directions, providing warnings, and issuing commands only because we want to avert a likely occurrence.

“Do Not Enter” and “No Trespassing” signs generally appear where people have entered or trespassed, or at least where people are likely to do so. I challenge you to find one in the middle of the Sahara.

This is why the various forms of “Fear Not!” found in the Scriptures make a great deal of sense.

We find opportunities to be afraid or to worry all around us:

It's Not the Same

2011-02-21T07:42:00.002-06:00

This is the final post in a series on forgiveness.

“It’s just not the same.”

Maybe you’ve said it about an old friendship or even a marriage. You and someone you love went through a tough time. The relationship dissolved or came very close to it.

Over time, you’ve been able to patch things up, but the ease and transparency of your former conversations is now a memory. Neither of you impulsively picks up the phone for a chat or enthusiastically thinks about what you might do together next. There’s effort where once was you felt drawn by desire.

When we forgive someone else we free ourselves from the burden of resentment and bitterness about old wounds. But our forgiveness does not restore relationships.

If you have ever mourned a lost or diminished relationship, you have discovered that forgiveness alone is not sufficient. Jesus certainly teaches us to forgive, and it bears much good fruit when we do.

Nevertheless, God created us for relationship: relationship with him and relationship with each other.

Repeat Offenders

2011-02-19T07:42:00.001-06:00

This is the fourth in a series of posts on forgiveness.

In the criminal justice system repeat offenders face harsher punishment. Previous convictions and imprisonment have failed to produce any change in the criminal’s behavior.

We can’t see another person’s heart. And Jesus taught us very clearly to steer clear of judging the state of someone else’s soul.

Nevertheless, we can see from someone’s pattern of behavior that he or she is committed to a certain way of life. To use churchy language, you can tell when somebody is unrepentant.

It’s difficult to say which is more galling.

Some people continue to hurt others in precisely the same ways after saying, “I’m sorry.” Repeatedly.

Others keep dishing out insult and injury without the slightest hint of remorse.

Surely people like this don’t deserve our forgiveness!

Contrary to what many people suggest about what Christians teach, this is exactly right. They do not deserve forgiveness.

No one deserves forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a free gift, not a reward for contrition or an acknowledgement of adequate amends. Forgiveness is an act of mercy.

Forgiving Again....And Again

2011-02-16T08:23:00.000-06:00

This is the third post in a series on forgiveness.

A friend of mine is a recovering alcoholic. He has been sober for nearly three decades. Much of what he has told me about his journey toward sobriety helps me to understand the spiritual life and forgiveness in particular.

My friend said to me, “I had no problem stopping drinking. I just couldn’t stay stopped.” In the early days of recovery, my friend would stop drinking for a period of time and then relapse.

The periods he would spend on the wagon varied. Sometimes it was only days. A few times it was months. Then he would drink. He couldn’t stay stopped.

Now he’s sober. Today. He’s been sober today for nearly thirty years. But he always remembers that today’s spiritual work belongs to today.

There’s an important parallel here about forgiveness. Sometimes we forgive, but we can't stay forgiving.

It's Not Okay

2011-02-14T09:12:00.000-06:00

Second post in a series on forgiveness

Beverly loved children and kittens. She had a fondness for sweets and routinely overspent for gifts on Christmas and birthdays. Meals were an occasion for her to pour lavish affection on family and friends in the form of rich comfort food.

That’s why her bitter rants could catch me off guard. More than a decade after the divorce, any reminder of her ex-husband sent Beverly into an enraged recitation of the litany of his cruelties and vices.

If I mentioned trying to forgive her ex, her response was almost always the same: “I can forgive, but I can’t forget.”

Forgive-Me-Nots

2011-02-11T15:55:00.000-06:00

Forgiveness is a tall order. Wading through life gives us all plenty of opportunity to forgive others and to need that same forgiveness ourselves.

And yet with all this practice we routinely have trouble getting this forgiveness business right.

More people come to me for help in forgiving someone who has injured them than any other pastoral issue. So the next few posts will offer some reflections on forgiveness.

The Christian starting place is not a commandment that we learn to forgive. And it is certainly not a biblical how-to for the forgiveness process.

Jesus taught us to approach life as people who have fouled things up and who know the joy and the relief of God’s extravagant mercy.

Notice that my claim is that Jesus taught us this. I didn’t suggest that all Christians have gotten our minds around it.

Here’s one reason I say this.

“I know that God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself.” More people have said this to me than I like to count.

Joined at the Hip

2011-02-09T09:12:00.000-06:00

Sex.

Christians don’t talk about sex. We argue about it. Loudly. We make headlines. And we convince just about everybody that we have nothing helpful to say about sex to anybody.

What a shame!

Sex is important stuff. It’s powerful and life-shaping. You would think that a religion that claims to make sense of all of life would have something crucial to say about sex.

As it turns out, Jesus himself gives us the definitive teaching about sex.

In our rush to define the permissibility of the who, the what, the when and the where of physical sex acts, we’ve been too busy to linger for long on something more basic. Jesus teaches us about why God made us sexual beings in the first place.

Anger Mismanagement

2011-02-07T08:59:00.001-06:00

Someone else’s (or our very own) contemptuous stare, cutting remarks, lethal coldness, sudden outburst, or cruel joke leaves everyone in a room appalled and makes everybody in the office or the family walk on egg shells.

That’s anger. It breaks relationships and dismantles people.

Some list anger as a deadly sin. Others insist that it’s a natural emotion requiring honest, appropriate expression.

This is a largely semantic argument that boils down to the kind of question every intro philosophy student learns to ask. What do you mean by anger?

This is what we all experience. Some things make our blood pressure rise. That is entirely appropriate in some cases. Cruelty to a child deserves indignation. Disagreements about what movie to watch….not so much.

That emotion we call anger can arise in the face of injustice and simply as a result of our own bruised ego. Knowing and acknowledging the difference takes most of us some work. Well, maybe a lot of work.

So let’s be clear here. I have no quarrel with perfectly justifiable, appropriately expressed anger. I’m just aware that it can be awfully difficult to know when I’m perfectly justified and quite a challenge to express powerful emotions of any kind in an appropriate way.

The really striking thing about anger is its ability to hijack us.

Salt and Light

2011-02-04T09:12:00.001-06:00

Mark and Lottie (not their real names) had tied the knot more than 50 years ago.

Their lives were laced together by years of raising children, enduring financial challenges, enjoying material successes, doting on grandchildren, and simply passing days together in the common rounds of meals and chores and holidays and vacations.

And then Lottie died. The cancer came unexpectedly. It all happened so quickly. Everything changed for Mark. The lights went out.

Mark sank lower and lower into sadness as the weeks passed. He spoke with me repeatedly about his loneliness and his sadness. He did what people call “grief work.” No light broke through the clouds for him.

One day my wife Joy (this is her real name) asked Mark to participate in our Youth-sponsored talent show at church. She knew that Mark was an amateur dancer.

Before Lottie had died, Mark used to go to the local elementary schools and teach the children about buck dancing, square dancing and tap dancing. Since her death, Mark hadn’t thought the first thing about dancing.

To my complete surprise, Mark agreed to do his dancing and teaching routine for the talent show.

Hurry Up and Be Patient

2011-02-02T08:01:00.001-06:00

Nothing incites my impatience quite like being told to be patient. In the list of helpful hints for the spiritually weary, the phrase “Be patient!” ranks somewhere near the bottom.

Anxiously striving to be patient seems somehow to miss the point.

And yet, patience is an important part of following Christ in ordinary, daily living. We get tangled up about patience (and joy and love kindness and peace and gentleness) because we think of it as an achievement we have to attain.

A Salty Gospel

2011-01-31T16:17:00.001-06:00

Salt, strictly speaking, remains salt. It doesn’t lose its saltiness like someone loses his hair or a tan fades when summer gives way to fall and then winter. Salt loses its kick when it’s adulterated.

Mixing salt with something else diminishes its ability to season and to preserve food. Adulterated salt performs like the inferior generic medications my doctor keeps warning me about. It looks like it should be lowering my blood pressure, but it doesn’t deliver.

Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.” (Matthew 5:13)

He expects his followers to be salty by spreading a Salty Gospel.

Jesus sends his disciples into the world to make disciples with the Gospel. And it’s a salty Gospel. It’s piquant, provocative. The Gospel of Jesus Christ makes ears perk, nostrils flare, and hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

It goes something like this.

Does God Care If It Hurts?

2011-01-30T20:20:00.001-06:00

Bad things happen. Really bad things.

We human beings do wretched things to one another. Nature hands out human suffering indiscriminately. Misery follows in the wake of droughts, famines, earthquakes, and tidal waves for the young and for the old, for the kind and for the vicious.

Tragedy, loss, and senseless suffering can grind faith to dust. For instance, a friend I’ll call Jill was a bright, accomplished academic who attended a mainline Protestant congregation.

Her only son lived on the West Coast and had enjoyed a meteoric rise in his career. Jill received the call one night that her son was dead. After work he took a dive into his back yard pool, struck the bottom, broke his neck and drowned.

Jill went on working, filling her life with more projects, more committees, and more community boards.

It would be wrong to say that Jill was joyless or cold. Quite to the contrary, she was caring and enjoyed a good laugh. But to those who knew her, she always seemed to be pushing a rock up a hill.

Several years after her son’s death, Jill told me that she respected my faith. Even so, she just couldn’t bring herself to believe in a God that would allow so much suffering. She didn’t say it, but I sense that she felt only an emptiness where she thought God should be.

Those of us who persevere in faith come to grips with suffering and sorrow in various ways.