God has wrath. This is not the same thing as the human emotion of anger because men frequently get angry and then do great harm by their anger. It’s a tricky business preaching or teaching about God and wrath because if you’re not careful you can misrepresent God or leave his people (and by that I mean all persons) with the wrong impression. I am grateful for a God who hates murder and greed and abuse and lust and every... Read more
The Cross is our murder of God. This needs to be said first. The Cross is what we do when God shows up. Yet the Cross is, paradoxically, a blessing we invoke on ourselves. Remember the chant of the crowds: “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Here is an unexpected mercy. This God takes the curse right out of our mouths and makes our treacherous breath an infinite blessing. That is the sort of thing this God always does.... Read more
Perhaps you’ve tried to keep a fast this Lent? Perhaps you read somewhere that Lent is about “getting in touch with your guilt” but then you found–with good reason–that self-flagellation is not the healthiest or most effective motivation for spiritual practices. My waitress at the local diner asked me this morning if I really wanted bacon with my eggs as it’s Friday (she knows I’m a pastor in the community). I told her, “I like to keep God guessing about... Read more
When we say “just me and my Bible” we are not Christians but narcissists. Whenever we read the Scriptures, we do not read them alone. They do not belong to us as a personal possession but to the body of Christ, even as they are meant to speak to all persons. We cannot escape the community of interpretation. None of us reads the Bible without a community of interpreters. What do I mean by that? For some, this means our... Read more
I can always tell when someone has no idea what they are talking about when they talk about sinners in the abstract, especially particular kinds of sin. When you have encountered sin and sinners in the real world, walked out redemption amid their brokenness (and your own), the aroma of forgiveness overpowers denunciation. You concern yourself a lot less with where the world and the culture are failing at the moment because you know earth’s destination—and the end of the... Read more
I came out to my car last week and drove to Detroit in silence (about 35 minutes) until I reached the outskirts of Motown. When I turned on the radio the dial had been changed to an all-Christmas format, which is really not my “thing” until well into Advent. I knew immediately who’d changed the channel: my daughter, Juliana. She’d put the same station on a few days earlier to loud protests from her decade-older brother Harrison (who knows it’s... Read more
It’s incredible how often an idea about God replaces in the Christian mind the God revealed in the incarnation, life, miracles, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. In other words, the God revealed in the words and actions of Jesus. Jesus reveals the true God. Whatever the Greeks thought they knew about God (all of the classical attributes, etc., blah, blah, blah), they could only draw a partial sketch and it always ended up looking like fallen... Read more
Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a stranger about God? It’s not really supposed to be done. Or so we’ve been told and so a lot a lot of thoughts—some dark, some brilliant, some silly, some scary—go unspoken and (perhaps more importantly) unheard. Even among family and friends it’s too often considered impolite to talk about religion or politics, especially how we feel about God; or about what convictions we hold or no longer hold. At the... Read more
I talk to people who struggle with belief in God, those raised with faith and those raised with none. So when I say we live in a world where appeals to authority have little meaning in the absence of faith it’s not because I just put down a book or three of postmodern philosophy. It’s unfortunate that in such a world the church spends so much time defending our authorities instead of living and speaking (mostly by example) the good... Read more
Whoever you are you were made in the image and likeness of God, and that image is Jesus Christ, who by his self-giving death reveals for all eternity the character of true Love. You are therefore made in the image and likeness of sacrificial Love—love for all things above yourself, not self-love, is the true meaning and purpose of your life—and you will never know God or yourself, will never see God or experience true humanity until you take up... Read more
Imago Christi
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