The Little Friar

Over the past few hours, I've been transferring older sermons to a digital format.  Here is a brief selection from out of the past: "No Small Matter" ( Psalm 51 , Matthew 18.15-22 ), Part 1 & Part 2 (also with Eucharist) " Upside Down Christmas " ( Matthew 1.18-25 ) "You Call This a Church" ( John 20.19-31 ), Part 1 & Part 2 (from a pulpit swap with a United Methodist congregation) " The Fish Story " ( John 21:1-14 ) "Cucumbers & the Kingdom" ( John 15.1-11 ), Part 1 & Part 2

More often than not, I sound like a fundamentalist when I'm talking (or writing) about the Bible.  That's because, when you read the Bible with the damned , you find yourself drawn to words like sin , brokenness , and the mercy of God .  It still always comes down to sin and mercy for me .  I've lamented recently about how academics (like me!) tend to rely so heavily on theorists to get our message out -- about how Lacan, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Nietzsche are great for theorists, but lousy for the pastoral need to get folks to read and understand the Bible.  If you're aiming for folks to follow Jesus, it's better to talk Jesus than to talk Lyotard.  I've been watching Pope Francis since his installation, and I have a confession to make:  I like what I see.  I hope he continues on the course he seems to be charting for his papacy.  (Not, of course, that it's a departure from previous Popes, but that he's far more radical -- in the ...

I posted a few days ago some of my reasons for disillusionment in modern American Liberalism.  That reference to labor may have struck some of you as odd or out of the blue.  It came to my mind because I've been reading a lot lately about the labor movement.  Why? Some of my reasons are summarized in this article by Henry Blodget in the Business Insider , "I've Always Hated The Idea Of Labor Unions, But It May Be Time To Reconsider". After noting many of the (very legitimate) problems with labor unions, Blodget brings to our attention a few trends, trends that I'm pretty concerned about. First, income disparity -- the separation between the proverbial 99% and the 1% -- is the greatest it has been in America since the Great Depression.  ( To explore more about these trends you can examine these charts in a separate article by Blodget. ) Second, corporate profits are at an all time high. Third, wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-tim...

Occasionally, I bump into folks who believe that God is masculine.  That the heart of divinity is male. I'm always tempted to remind them of the notion from Gregory Nazianzen , that "God is beyond our notions of Gender".  But, if you're being so literal with "Father" language, resorting to a Church Father in making an argument probably won't go very far. I'm nevertheless struck by how odd it is for folks to be making these arguments.  Among the most "famous" of arguments lately among Evangelicals has been that of John Piper's "masculine Christianity" : ... the fullest flourishing of women and men takes place in churches and families where Christianity has this God-ordained, masculine feel.  For the sake of the glory of women, and for the sake of the security and joy of children, God has made Christianity to have a masculine feel.  He has ordained for the church a masculine ministry. It is, of course, the same arg...

Most of us are probably familiar with Hannah Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil".  The phrase was Arendt's attempt to discern the origins of the Holocaust from the personality of Adolf Eichmann, insights Arendt's summarized in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil . The argument that Arendt makes in that book is that evil isn't dark and deep but is, rather, thin and superficial.  Evil is ordinary people thoughtlessly making a million small choices.  No doubt this account cannot explain all that needs to be explained about evil, but it does explain much, even much about the Holocaust.  The Holocaust couldn't have happened if the German populace hadn't over time gradually consented through seemingly insignificant daily choices .  Laughing nervously, but without objection, to the anti-Semitic joke.  Not shopping at the Jewish store.  Accepting the promotion when the more qualified Jewish person was passed over....

Someone asked this morning:  How do the best teachers get to be good?   If you reject outright the platitude that good teachers are just born good (as I do), then you have a good stake in how you answer this question.  So, let me lay out a response. Inspirational teacher training is a long-term route to making schools and universities more inspiring places.  On the Renaissance philosopher Plutarch's view , after all, the mind's education isn't a vessel that needs filling, but it's a wood that needs igniting.  Fire spreads, so to speak.  So how to set teachers' minds on fire? The answer to this question all depends on who you're asking.  Oftentimes, teachers-in-training will respond with very specific and technical issues:  Teachers need (1) a clear sense of purpose with (2) engaging processes in their chosen curriculum.  What's more, teachers need (3) influence over the politics that make those curricula.  Along with (4) the abili...

I don't typically like to take on politically loaded or controversial "culture war" topics.  The reason I avoid these subjects is because I know that the psychology of moral conviction tends to be operative. The point is:  When the psychology of conviction is in play charitable conversation goes down the toilet and little is accomplished.  I have hopes that this won't happen to this post. But, then again, I could just be a fool. If you haven't noticed, quite a bit of debate has been taking place in various states about abortion.  Take North Carolina, for example.  It's a volatile issue these days.  (Like that hasn't been true since the early 70s?) All else being equal, I'm pro-life .  However, I rarely stand strongly for pro-life platforms because I don't feel that all things generally are equal.  The issue for me isn't a simple binary choice:  Pro-life versus pro-choice.  Abortion is a complicated social phenomena where ma...

I have long argued that Christians should work a whole lot more on kindness than love.  Love, I've argued, is too amorphous and abstract.  Christians have lost the meaning of that word in day to day interactions.  Even worse, some Christians use the word love to justify being harsh and exclusive.  Love becomes doing what is "best" for you and, by the way, you don't get to decide what is best for you.  I do. But it seems to me, when you look at the Christian virtue lists, that kindness comes before love.  So we start small.  Work on kindness first and then graduate on to love.  If you are a thorough-goingly kind person, odds are you have a great shot at becoming a loving person.  But if you skip the lessons of kindness it's very unlikely you'll learn how to love.  It's about baby-steps.  And they start with kindness.  To capture this there's a saying that I share quite a lot:  Kindness is the tutor of love. ...

Some time ago, I posted a few thoughts about the practice of open communion .  To add to that discussion I'd like to share some of the thoughts of Jurgen Moltmann from his book The Church in the Power of the Spirit . In the book, after a theological discussion regarding the Lord's Supper, Moltmann discusses how that theology should "unpack" in the concrete practices of the Lord's Supper within the church. First, the Lord's Table must be central to the worship experience and the Lord's Supper should be practiced at every gathering:  "The fellowship of the table must be central for the assembled congregation, just as much as the proclamation of the gospel ...  [The congregation] will celebrate this fellowship of the table at all its assemblies". Second, the practice will be one of open communion: Because this fellowship comes into being on the basis of Christ's unconditional and prevenient invitation, the fellowship will be an open on...

CS Lewis once remarked : True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. When it comes to humility I think a lot of Christians tend to work with the wrong idea. The idea that many seem to have is that humility involves thinking less about yourself, to have a negative or even morbid self-concept.   Justification for this sort of thing comes from texts like Philippians 2.3: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Humility, it seems, is considering others as "better" than yourself.  And if others are better than you it stands to reason that you are "worse".  Humility, in this view, is having that sort of morbid self-concept:  Others are "better" than me. But is that what Paul is saying in Philippians 2.3? The word translated as "better" in this text is hyperechontas from the root hyperecho .  The word (in vari...

I first read Phyllis Trible's Texts of Terror:  Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives when I was an undergraduate.  In it, Trible reads through four stories of Old Testament women.  But rather than picking your classic Sunday School "heroines" of the faith, Trible reads the stories of women who were subject to neglect, abuse and violence. What's more, from a literary perspective, these women are, as marginal characters, also tossed aside by the Biblical story.  So in reading their stories Trible attempts to give these women a voice.  The four women are: Hagar, the concubine of Abraham who, due to Sarah's jealousy, was sent into the desert with her child to die Tamar, the daughter of David who was raped by her brother The daughter of Jephthah, who was sacrificed because of an oath made by her father And an unnamed woman, a concubine who was gang-raped to death and then dismembered by her husband  These are difficult stories.  And T...

Mark Oppenheimer has a new -- and excellent -- article over at the New Republic .  Take a minute to go over and read it in its entirety.  I'll wait. For a long time, it was a simple argument to make:  Conservatives were the puritans, focusing on moral issues of purity and sanctity, while Liberals were restricting their concerns to issues of harm and justice.  Liberals, so the argument went, care more about things like fairness where conservatives worry more about things like contamination.  And, for the most part, it was correct. I recall in 2004 articulating this position to a friend.  He wanted to make abortion and homosexuality the issues of the Presidential race at the time.  I thought we needed a broader view -- particularly about violence and war.  All of them, I wanted to say, are Christian issues.  It's just a matter of which political stripe one bears as to which drums get beaten loudest. Oppenheimer has turned that argument o...

I've noticed lately an increased propensity we have to name drop.  I'm sure you've been around this sort of behavior.  People sharing, in a seemingly casual but transparently calculated way, how they know so-and-so or how they spent time with so-and-so.  And these so-and-sos aren't bums on the street.  Doesn't work that way.  These so-and-sos are luminaries, celebrities, and big shots.  Names.  Big names.  And the bigger the name the better. This sort of behavior functions as a form of self-justification, a form of works based righteousness.  That is, by attaching my name to a bigger name some of the glow of celebrity rubs off on me leading to a heightened sense of self-esteem, the feeling that I somehow matter more compared to others.  My existence is somehow justified by establishing this connection with a bigger name.  If I know someone the culture deems significant then I must be a bit more significant if I know such people...

I was thinking today of the gospel according to John the Baptist. Specifically, here was John's mission: He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  As is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: "A voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all mankind will see God's salvation.' " (Luke 3.3-6). So John is preaching a message of repentance to "prepare the way of the Lord" in the hearts and minds of the people.  So how were the people to repent and prepare for the Lord? John gets specific: When all the people asked him, "What must we do, then?" he answered, "Anyone who has two tunics must share with the one who has none, and anyo...

As a parish priest and as a college professor on Christian campuses, I'm often asked my opinion as to if "behavior X" is or is not a sin.  Inquiring minds want to know.  And the interest is usually more than philosophical. There have been times -- not as many as you might imagine -- that the "is a sin/isn't a sin" binary judgment is the best way I've found to answer a question.  More often than not, though, life is so complex and the Christian ethical witness is so diverse that -- in so many of those moments -- it's a struggle to give a definitive answer.  In those times -- which, again, is often -- I find the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament to be a better framing than the Protestant worry about escaping the wrath of an angry God . Specifically, some things might not be sinful, but they can be decidedly stupid .  Some things don't make you a bad person, but they can mark you as foolish.  And some things aren't as immoral as they are...

Today I'd like to think a bit about one of the problems regarding how this contrast is made in Revelation.  Specifically, one of the metaphors used to contrast Babylon and New Jerusalem is a Whore/Bride contrast.  In Revelation, Babylon is cast as a whore: One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters.  With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries." Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness.  There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns.  The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls.  She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries.  The name written ...

In thinking over a recent question asked of me as part of an interview -- about why working with abused and neglected children was something I want to do and/or should do, I've thought about my response. Those of us who've worked with children, know about cycles of victimhood and violence , how victims often create more victims. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how abused children grow up into damaged adults who become perpetrators themselves.  Abuse -- emotional, sexual, and physical -- tends to have a generational character.  The sins of the father are tragically visited upon the children, generation after generation. In Mark 9.33 to 10.31 there is a teaching sequence of Jesus' that centers a great deal upon children.  When the disciples ask "Who is the greatest?" Jesus answers this way: Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all." He took a little ...

Gandhi once said: If one does not practice nonviolence in one's personal relations with others and hopes to use it in bigger affairs, one is vastly mistaken. I think this highlights one of the biggest failures of most pacifists:  We have trouble practicing nonviolence in our personal relationships.  Pacifism is too often projected onto the global scale.  The conversation becomes almost exclusively about war between political powers.  And no doubt that's an important conversation.  But it can get a little abstract and philosophical.  And some pacifists can be less than charitable toward others.  I call this big conversation heroic pacifism . Me?  I'm a closet Mennonite.  I don't think a lot about my pacifism.  I probably should, but I spend most of my time attending to my personal relationships, to how I treat people -- my family, people at work, people at church, people in the line at the store, friends who comment on my Fac...