I’ve got some prophetic fire that I need to let out so I’m going to try to do so in a way that doesn’t compromise my office as a pastor. I am sick and tired of seeing people abuse the word “Biblical” by attaching it to causes and ideas that have nothing to do with the Bible. The spiritual lava started building up started last month when I was sitting in a meeting at church. We had sent out spies... Read more
It’s very easy to write a mediocre sermon about forgiveness. I’m already halfway down the road of doing it. The scripture text for this week seemed an obvious choice for “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It’s the parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18:21-35. It’s about a servant who owes his master thousands of dollars but has his debt forgiven only to go and throw a fellow servant in debtor’s prison for... Read more
The second chapter of Beauty Will Save the World is about rediscovering the concept of wonder. Brian Zahnd writes: “We wonder at two things–the beautiful and the mysterious. A life stripped of beauty and mystery is a life barren of wonder, and a life without wonder is a kind of deep poverty” (33). Zahnd thinks that the greatest wonder of all is Jesus’ incarnation: the claim that “the Logos, the Word, the Idea, the Reason, the Reflection, the Meditation, the... Read more
The title of Brian Zahnd’s brand new book Beauty Will Save the World is taken from a quote in Fyodor Dostoyevski’s novel The Idiot. Zahnd’s book is a prophetic call to turn away from the ugliness that evangelical Christianity has acquired in the last thirty years due to the loud, angry people who claim to represent us; our consequent identification in the public sphere as an anti-intellectual, xenophobic, populist partisan voting bloc; and our canned, formulaic theology that has produced... Read more
Sermon preached at Burke UMC LifeSign service 1/28/2012 Text: Exodus 16 I’ve got a daily bread problem. 35 pounds of it to be precise. So I’m not sure I have any business asking God for more daily bread. When I was in college and had much higher metabolism, I used to go picnicking in the Virginia mountains with a loaf of round sourdough bread, a block of cheese, and a block of salami. That was daily bread. But now that... Read more
The latest blogosphere controversy involving Mark Driscoll concerns the church discipline practices at his church Mars Hill. Matthew Paul Turner shared on his blog this week the story of a young man named “Andrew” who confessed to a sexual impropriety and was asked to sign a discipline contract as part of his penance. When Andrew refused to sign the contract and opted to leave the church instead, his sin was disclosed on an intra-church website with the instructions that Mars... Read more
My prayer life sucks! There, I admitted it. I don’t pray nearly enough. I even forget to pray for the people who I say I’m going to pray for. Some days I’ll be walking along and remember that I told somebody I was going to pray for them, so I kind of think about their situation for a moment and say “Lord, have mercy,” in my head, which doesn’t seem like it “counts” because I didn’t sit down and talk... Read more
I’m worried about our country. A few years ago, I read a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt that described the century of ideological groundwork which set the stage for the Third Reich in Germany. If it’s silly to compare our country today to Germany in the 1920’s, that’s because we don’t have millions of displaced Eastern European refugees and the 30% unemployment rate that created enough desperation and messianic need to clear the way for Hitler’s... Read more
Any of you who have read my blog before know that I place a lot of value in vulnerability. I believe that the basic need we have as human beings is to be part of a community where we can be vulnerable. Because we engage in sinful behaviors we are ashamed of, we turn into defensive, self-justifying people who cannot experience the intimacy we were created for. Christ’s vulnerability on the cross makes it possible for us to be vulnerable... Read more
Latest development in the love/hate religion/Jesus controversy: Catholic priest rapper Father Pontifex has a banging, Biblically grounded, lyrically tight response to the wildly viralized “I hate religion but love Jesus” video that I responded to last week. I don’t think it’s one side vs. another. It’s an important conversation that’s happening in a format that young adults can relate to, so for that I praise God! I wish I could rap! (more…) Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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