I became aware of my trust in God when I was thirteen, during an overnight with the daughter of our church’s minister. We weren’t in the same school, but that year her dad taught our confirmation class and we became friends. We had turned the lights out—her mother had asked us to—but, as usual, we continued talking. Eventually, the conversation took a turn when one of us asked, “What if God didn’t exist?” My memory is that two things happened... Read more
This is the third in a series of posts where I re-imagine Jesus’ five big sermons as TED Talks, in which he Educates people in God’s new Design for a world that runs on the Technology called love. This post is an interpretive paraphrase of Matthew 13. ————————————— I often get asked: Since parables are so easy to misunderstand, why do I use them so much? Why risk being misunderstood? Here’s the thing: I’m not interested in being understood by everybody; I am interested in being engaged by the few... Read more
Mysteries and Mending Somewhere in the ancient, mystic trinity you get three as a magic number. -Three is a Magic Number, School House Rock I cannot explain the Trinity to my satisfaction. I try. I think I understand it, best as a finite human mind can, but I cannot explain it, out loud, in words. As a child, the best illustration I ever heard was the egg analogy. The Trinity is like an egg, the lady at the front of... Read more
Death is seen as “the power of the devil” in our lives. And one reason—perhaps even the primary reason—for Christ’s death on the cross was to rob the devil of this power. The reason Christ appeared was to free those who, in the words of Hebrews 2:15, “were all their lives enslaved to the fear of death.” -Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death We are excited to announce that this Wednesday at 11:00 am central, Patheos’s Teaching Nonviolent Atonement channel will host a... Read more
As a Christian pastor, I’ve officiated at hundreds of weddings – many between people of different faiths. Many of them started out their relationships without concerning themselves too much about their religious differences. It’s only as marriage becomes imminent that one or the other of the pair wakes up to the fact that this difference might matter. The groom marrying a Christian suddenly feels the urge to practice actively the Judaism that had been little more than a cultural artifact... Read more
NOTE: In my first post on the Cross, I mentioned that people who face suffering attempt to draw a picture of God on a connect-the-dot page with no numbers, just words like sin, love, grace, justice…. Unfortunately, it’s never quite right. God comes across either all-powerful and uncaring, or all-loving and impotent. This is the problem of theodicy. On the radio, a young college student described how a tornado ripped into her dorm room while she and her friends huddled in... Read more
A year ago — March 13, 2013 – Pope Francis officially became Pope. Since then he has fascinated the world. He didn’t don the snazzy red shoes and fancy papal attire. He chose a humble apartment rather than the posh papal palace. He washed the feet of women in prison. He touched folks that others did not want to touch, like a man with a disfigured face, making headline news around the world. He has put the margins in the... Read more
This is the second in a series of posts where I re-imagine Jesus’ five big sermons as TED Talks, in which he Educates people in God’s new Design for a world that runs on the Technology called love. This post is an interpretive paraphrase of Matthew 10. Last week, we talked about God’s new design for human communities. Today we get into how we’re going to make it happen. Here’s our strategy: We’re going to love the wrong people. That’s it. Whatever culture/community you’re in, it holds together because of shared... Read more
“The Trinity comes now near to the promised realization of Its intention. It comes, as It said It would. And What we saw and feared in the image of Father, What we saw and embraced as Savior-Brother, we now know as Spirit and cling to as Advocate, even as It has said of Itself from our beginning. Now, without need of image or flesh, It comes, and we receive It, as in the last of creation’s ages.” — Phyllis Tickle,... Read more
Week 2: Giving Up Piling On, and a Recipe “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life–the life God is sending one day by day” what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination” – CS Lewis I excel at waiting for my “real life” to... Read more
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