The Little Friar

It's October 31st.  That means three things.  (1) It's my birthday; I'm old.  (2) It's All Saints Day -- my second favorite day of the Church Year.  (3) It's Halloween.  Halloween is always an interesting day for Christians.  We're never quite sure whether to celebrate it or not.  I usually field a few questions every year.  So in an effort to take my response to that questions public, I want to say here that I'm a Christian and  I support Halloween.   I support Halloween for two reasons.  Spiritually and psychologically, I think Halloween accomplishes two things on a particular day that our culture otherwise glosses over.   Firstly, I support Halloween because it brings us face-to-face with human frailty and mortality.   Halloween allows us to collectively process our eventual death and mortality.  The graveyards, corpses, blood, skeletons, and coffins of Halloween allow us, on a yearly basis, to confront our physica...

Sometimes there are passages in the Bible that come to dominate our imaginations that we return to them again and again for fodder in thinking about being Christian.  1 Corithians 12.21-25 is one of those passages for me.  The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!"  And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!"  On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor.  And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment.  But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.  I want to focus on that last phrase "that there should be no division in the body".  The Greek word for division is  schisma , where we get...

The most important thing to being Christian -- which also makes it the strangest to most folks -- is living the gospel as if it were true.  I try to live my life in such a way that the story of Jesus becomes my own story.  If you want to talk about my life's successes, you should -- in the end -- be unable to tell it without telling the good news of God's reconciliation of the world in Jesus Christ.  Thing is, that story isn't a success story. It's a story of failures.   In the end, Jesus' story -- and therefore my story -- is about  one who loses in a way that is eloquent and beautiful because it has a consistent integrity with the sublime vision of scripture.  It is called  grace . Living this story is about becoming a beautiful failure. 

Kendra and I celebrated our Christian marriage yesterday.  It is but the first celebration of daily celebrations hereafter, but I want to offer some reflections of lessons I've learnt along the way to that celebration yesterday.  Christian marriage not only creates a new family -- it unites already existing ones.  Sometimes those families come with burdens that push up against the very boundaries of being Christian  in ways we -- or at least I  -- never appreciated until the past few weeks.  First, I must say I'm a Christian.  That confession shapes and molds -- is shaped and molded by -- a number of practices, not just intellectual affirmations.  Among those practices is the practice of reconciliation .  "God was in Christ, reconciling  the world to himself" (2 Corithians 5.17).  The practice of reconciliation is extending the graceful forgiveness, respect of an for the Other, kindness and humility toward those who despise and abus...

I hear quite a bit of talk about karma  these days, from all different sorts of Christians.  Karma , of course, is the notion that the Universe (or God, or Satan, or someone cosmic) keeps score.  That for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.  It's a kind of "eye for an eye" logic writ rather large.  In karma, we think folks get what they have coming to them.  Somehow -- eventually -- so the logic goes -- folks who've been cruel or mean or unloving will find their cruelty coming back to roost.  In karma, atonement is written into the universe as a spiritual law of investment and return.  It's a moral calculus of accounting that says pain is reaped by those, ultimately, who inflict it.  Thing is, my moral and theological imagination is honed by Jesus and the Scriptures.  So I'm not so sure  karma  really is the law of the universe.  The word I hear isn't karma but  grace.  Grace  turns karma o...

Yesterday, another school shooting.  Over the weekend, a 2-year-old girl shot herself.  Both of these break my heart.  They also call for a little prophetic truth-telling.  Of course, folks will say, "That's just the way the world is".  But I'm not so sure.  For starters, even if "that's the way the world is" today, I'm not willing to resign myself to tomorrow, too.  Other than car accidents, more children are killed by guns than anything else.  One child/teen dies every three hours.  7 die every day.  That's 50 in a week.  From gun violence. Over the past 50 years, we've lost three times more children to gun deaths (160,000) than those who've died in war (Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq:  52,820).   It doesn't have to be this way.  Actually, "the world"  doesn't work this way.  In one year, gun violence accounted for 27 deaths in Australia, 59 in England, 60 in Spain, 160 in Canada, and ... 10,177 in the US....

Yesterday, with news that an agreement between Congressional leaders and the President had been reached to end the partial government shutdown and raise the debt limit, someone asked me a question:  "Who do you think was/is the greatest American president and why?" My gut response was quick:  "That all depends on what you call great ". That's my gut response because I'm a Christian.  I believe in telling the truth.  And in my tradition -- the tradition of Old Testament prophets and Jesus, the tradition of Christian prophets like John and Paul -- there's a very different definition of great  when it comes to politics.  Prophets challenge the economic and political powers-that-be, particularly those that bring oppression and destruction.  How often our culture wants to pervert the book of Revelation and ignore its connection of economic power with idolatry.  A connection that includes a specific political challenge:  Jesus is lord, not Rome. ...

Bonhoeffer's sermon on marriage is a particularly beautiful selection that requires folks to think theologically  about Christian  marriage.  This morning -- as I head into two marriages in as many weeks (and one of them, my own!) -- I begin reflecting on what it means to talk about Christian marriage. Of course, it's easy to respond with trite, romantic concepts that reflect the culture more than they do my faith.  That's the one thing I want to avoid.  Instead, I want to offer a fresh reading of the NT that refocuses marriage away from the "order of creation" theme that Bonhoeffer used in his Ethics  and toward the biblical notion of grace.  In other words, I want to ground marriage in Jesus, not in nature.  Covenant, not in procreation.   And I want to begin in an odd place:  We  Christians need to recover our identity as  Gentiles.   This is important for a few different reasons.  First, this recovery ...

The Bible , I think, is shorthand for a series of practices.  It isn't simply "a text".  This comes as a bit of a shock to lots of folks, so it normally requires unpacking.  Let me lay out some of the contours of my thinking about biblical inspiration in order to open up a conversation.  In short, I think the Bible is that set of canonical textual, oral, practical practices created by and constitutive of the community of God's people.  It's a text accessible in much the same way that Shakespeare is most accessible to trained actors -- training in other Christian practices associated with the Bible brings meaning to disciples (students).  It requires those other practices which then make the Bible intelligible -- practices like prayer, communal discernment, preaching, communion, service, etc.  Lots of us think the Bible is a book that we can simply pick up, and in which we can read God's message to us, whoever this "we" might be.  But I maintain...

Most of us remember David Wilkinson's 2000 book on The Prayer of Jabez:  Breaking through to the Blessed Life.  In it, Wilkinson focused on the prayer of Jabez from 1 Chronicles --  "Bless me, and enlarge my territory" -- in a prosperity gospel direction.  You pray the "prayer of Jabez" so that God might bring you success and good things in life -- the expansion of your "territory". That's not how I read that prayer at all.  First, here's the prayer from 1 Chronicles 4.9-10: Now Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, "Because I bore him in pain." And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, "Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!" So God granted him what he requested. I focus less in that prosperity way and more on the intended result -- "that I may ...

I was talking this morning with a friend about Jesus' second Greatest Commandment ("Love your neighbor as yourself").  Particularly, a friend asked a question about it in relation to self-esteem.  Generally, her interpretation of what Jesus said rings widely true in the Church these says:  You  have to love yourself  first , and  then , once you love yourself, you can love your neighbor.  In this formulation, self-love functions as a prerequisite for the love of others.  And you often hear it described as a two-stage process: Stage One:  Love yourself Stage Two:  Love others In one sense, I agree with this.  It's hard to really love others if you've got a catastrophically bad self-esteem.  In those cases what looks like love might actually be, underneath, a fearful, servile dependency.  So in that sense, I get it. But, I don't think this is what Jesus is saying.  I don't think Jesus has this very recent, Western psych...

In over 2000 verses, the Bible has a lot to say about poverty.  Almost every page of the Bible speaks about God's heart for the poor.  His concern for the marginalized.  His compassion for the oppressed.  His call for justice.  In order to ignore those texts, you literally end up with a Bible that would fall apart.  Here's just one representative sample from 1 John 3.17-18:  " If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?  Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth".  I could just as easily quote Deuteronomy 10.18, 14.28-29; 15.7-8, 11; Joshua 1.14-15; 1 Samuel 2.7-8; Nehemiah 9.27; Job 5.15-16; 24.5; Psalm 9.9, 18; 12.5; 17.14; 22.26; 35.10 ... You get the idea.  So to hear Christians attack and blame the poor for their poverty is a very odd thing.   Last night, yet again, that's exactly what I heard.  ...