With it being Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, we preached on justice as our sermon series topic this weekend. For my text, I used Isaiah 58, where Isaiah confronts the people of Israel for fasting without justice. God’s people have often pursued devotional practices that “honor” God not only to the exclusion of treating other people justly but as a means of legitimating their lack of justice. I often call this pitting love of God against love of neighbor. As... Read more
I’m one of the “pod-rishioners” of the popular Michigan pastor Greg Boyd. One thing I love about Greg is his earnestness in wrestling with aspects of the way the gospel has been framed that bother him. He’s very open about the fact that it’s often inconclusive wrestling. A lot of times I agree with him on the problem he’s identified but differ on the solution. One such occasion was several weeks ago in his sermon “Does God play favorites?” Greg... Read more
I‘m not going to argue whether or not you should forgive Lance Armstrong or not for taking steroids and lying about it. To me, it’s a farce of the age of celebrity that we would even be asking ourselves that question anyway. It’s comical to read the online comments from people who are angry enough to use ALL-CAPS at some guy they will never know for doing things that had nothing to do with them. Because I’m a pastor, I... Read more
Some of you know that I hate living in suburgatory. I love the friends that I’ve made over the past two and a half years, I love my church, and I especially love my small group. But I hate suburgatory. I’m not sure how much is my own personal projection and how much is the actual ambiance of the suburbs. Anyway, I’m trying to process why spending the past three days in a spiritual retreat center in the middle of... Read more
I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s The Ascent to Truth while on retreat here at Richmond Hill. It’s an attempt to explain Christian mysticism largely looking at the writings of St. John of the Cross. I just started reading a chapter about the university environment in Salamanca, Spain in the 1560’s when St. John attended school there. Merton describes a battle over scripture in Catholicism resulting from the Reformation crisis between the conservative “scholastic” faction and the progressive “scriptural” faction. (more…) Read more
On many movie DVD’s, there is an option to watch the film with a running commentary from the director and the actors. It usually gets pretty obnoxious to listen to. I’m probably just not hipster enough. I often feel like we’re watching the “with commentary” version of the film whenever we read the story of Eden in Genesis 2-3, because the actual words of the text are usually drowned out by the background noise of the Reformers reading Augustine reading... Read more
I had an interesting twitter conversation today with a Christian feminist blogger named Dianna Anderson about lust. Rachel Held Evans had tweeted a link from Anderson with the quote, “Lust is not about sexuality, but about power and control.” I wrote to Anderson to express some disagreement, because power and control are volitional words, and it isn’t honest to my first-hand experience as a man to describe lust as a willed act. Anderson wanted to make a distinction between sexual... Read more
I just read a chapter in Adam Kotsko’s Politics of Redemption which engages feminist critiques of the cross. One aspect of the feminist theology I have encountered that makes me squirm as an evangelical is its willingness to toss out pieces of the Biblical canon if they seem to promote misogyny. I am willing to read the Bible with the same liberationist agenda that Jesus and Paul both had, but I consider myself bound to the epistemic foundation of canonical... Read more
When the outrage industrial complex tried to make Jeremiah Wright into the bogeyman who would take down the 2008 candidacy of Barack Obama, I had just read a couple of books by Wright’s main influence, black liberation theologian James Cone. It was incredibly frustrating to see liberation theology being paraded as some kind of scary crypto-Marxist plot by people who had never had any direct exposure to it. I feel similarly frustrated by the drama that caused Louie Giglio to... Read more
The second testimony I wanted to engage claims that religious people are “too hooked on truth.” By this, the author means: “They all tell you exactly how things are, with absolute certainty. Almost like only their version of reality is the truth.” An immediate edit I would make is to remove the “almost like” from the second line. Many Christians are “absolutely certain” that they know “exactly how everything is.” (more…) Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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