Hope you’ve been having a wonderful Advent. I’ve gotten backed up in sharing my sermon podcasts. This one is from two weeks ago. We were looking at Isaiah 2 where it talks about all the nations coming to God’s temple to bend their swords into plowshares. If we’re turning our swords into plowshares, that means renouncing our self-appointed title as gatekeepers of God’s house and becoming groundskeepers instead. If you’d like to receive my sermon podcast automatically each week in... Read more
It’s been wonderful not blogging or surfing social media this week. Lat night, God gave me a song that I’ve had in my head for a good three years and I recorded it. Since it might be a resource for some of you, I felt like He wanted me to interrupt my fast to share it. Its hook is a hybrid between “Look Down,” the opening song of Les Miserables, and “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” I’ve kind of allowed... Read more
Henri Nouwen’s book In The Name of Jesus names three temptations for Christian leaders based upon the three temptations of Christ. One of the temptations is the need to be relevant. Nouwen says that we need to replace the pursuit of relevance with the pursuit of prayer. So that’s what I’m going to do this Advent. I will share my sermon podcasts each week. But beyond that, no blog and no social media. (more…) Read more
My wife and I watched “12 Years A Slave” this weekend. Needless to say, it was a hard movie to watch. As a pastor, what pained me the most were the parts where the slave-master would read self-serving passages out of the Bible to his slaves to put the stamp of God’s word on his authority as a master. I remember reading in Frederick Douglas’s autobiography that the crueler a master was, the more scripture he would quote. It made... Read more
As I was reading several interviews with people standing in line for this year’s Black Friday, it hit me that we’re misdiagnosing Black Friday if we think that it’s merely a reflection of America’s greed. Greedy people don’t need to put the dishes in the sink after a Thanksgiving lunch and rush over to Best Buy. They can be greedy any day of the year and spend as much money as they need doing it. The problem with Black Friday... Read more
It seemed appropriate to write about the word Eucharist since it means “thanksgiving” in Greek. As part of writing my ordination papers recently, I flipped back through Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World, which talks about Eucharist not just in the sense of the church ritual but as a way of life. To Schmemann, it is much more than just “being thankful.” He writes: “”We were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life, of its transformation into... Read more
Dave Ramsey recently posted on his blog a list of 20 things that rich people do that poor people don’t do (the idea being that poor people are to blame for their poverty). Among the list were that rich people write down their goals, read books, make their kids volunteer, teach good daily success habits to their children, etc. Well, I was reading through my dad’s Economist magazine last night and I found a 21st item to put on Dave’s... Read more
Growing up in the church, I would often hear the phrase, “We’re just pilgrims passing through,” usually in response to someone’s passion for changing the world. It means that since this is not our “true home” (heaven is), we shouldn’t worry about what happens to our world other than keeping our family safe. Hebrews 11 talks about the Israelite patriarchs who “confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth” (v. 13), not because they considered earthly life irrelevant... Read more
I had a good discussion yesterday with my pastor covenant group about our discernment process as a church in the wake of the Frank Schaefer trial and controversy. I know that I got a little hot-headed in the debate online so I wanted to offer more circumspect reflections. I believe that each disciple of Jesus Christ not only has the right but actually the duty to contribute to the ongoing living interpretive tradition of our faith. Some Christians think that... Read more
This week, the United Methodist Church put a pastor on trial named Frank Schaefer for officiating at the wedding of his gay son. The judge, retired bishop Al Gwinn, ruled out as inadmissible any defense arguments based on scripture or other sections of the Book of Discipline, reasoning that only “the facts” of what Schaefer did were relevant to determining the verdict. While I understand the rationale and practical limitations that necessitate this approach to justice, I do not think... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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