Wild Goose has been an interesting phenomenon so far. The theme of this years’s festival has been “re-membering the body.” To this end, there have been several random people going around passing out cards inviting us to engage in random acts of hospitality like sharing food with strangers. But it’s such a hard thing to transcend the well-trod paradigm of American culture where we sit in our lawn chairs as a crowd of individuals who aren’t making any effort to... Read more
When people want to take potshots at emergent Christianity, an easy bullseye to tag is its alleged lack of racial diversity. There’s nothing that progressive white Christians agonize over more and bust more radical Jesus jukes about than the lack of racial diversity in our movements. What’s obnoxious is when racial diversity is pursued for contrived, self-legitimating purposes rather than as a genuinely pragmatic collaboration between communities like the kind taking place in North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement. So what... Read more
Ephesians 2:8-9 is a passage I have often turned to for a tight summary of the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works so that no one may boast.” What I love about these two verses is that they explain why we need to be saved by faith and not works: so that... Read more
Two years ago, I decided to give myself a challenge as I was starting out this blog. I decided to blog my way through the longest, and what I assumed to be the most boring psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119. Boy was I surprised at what I found there! It’s basically a love song about God’s law. I thought it was nothing more than a giant sycophantic gesture. But it was my time of reading this psalm during my... Read more
In my second semester of Biblical Greek in seminary, I discovered John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not seize it.” I had to translate it for my homework. What immediately drew my attention was the verb in the second clause which the NRSV translates as “overcome” and the NIV translates as “comprehend.” It was reflecting on the intersection between these two translations that gave John 1:5 the meaning that it has for me. (more…) Read more
I’ve often told the story of how I discovered the verse that became the basis for the title of this website. It was the summer of 2008 and I had been working at a summer camp in east Durham. The lectionary gospel readings I had heard over the previous months included Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7, both of which involve Jesus quoting Hosea 6:6, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.” I had been tossing this phrase around in my mind, trying... Read more
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In seminary, I learned to think of truth as a symphony rather than a single voice or instrument. The goal is not to get everyone to play the exact same note with the exact same instrument; the goal is to enter into harmony with each others’ instruments so that we can become God’s song. It’s not the absolute relativism of playing our own autonomous songs; that would be a disastrous cacophony of sound. Rather, we are all playing our own... Read more
David Koyzis’s recent First Things article, “Millennial Religion and the Sovereign Self,” disses the way that “millennials” purportedly want the trappings of ancient-feeling church without submitting to the authority of the hierarchy of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The author writes that “attending Mass and living as a Catholic is a matter of obedience, not merely of soaking up a ‘high-church’ atmosphere with ancient roots while continuing to live as one wishes and following whatever agenda seems most congenial to... Read more
I’m three years older than Rachel Held Evans, so I really have no business speaking on behalf of millennials since I’m pretty solidly in Generation X. Labels of generations are silly anyway. I just chose the title to get hits; I have no idea what millennials think. But I saw an interesting juxtaposition of articles today that made me wonder why in the world anyone graduating from college right now would want to go into ordained ministry. Cynthia Astle reflected... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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