The Little Friar

Since 1995, the one consistent practice in my praying has been to read the psalms through -- all the way through, all 150 -- every 30 days.  By my accounting, that's 228 times, or 34,200 psalms.   In all that time, there's one thing I've learnt about reading the Psalms:   They're dangerous .   I consider myself biblically literate.  I've read through the Bible, from cover to cover, every year since 1985.  I've preached from most of the Bible, at cover to cover, in massive chucks, every three years since getting my license to preach in 1994.  By my accounting, that's a lot of reading the Bible.  But nothing -- nothing!  -- prepared me for living biblically more than reading the psalms in such a concerted, disciplined way.  Basically, the sum of the matter is this.  The psalms are dangerous.  Let me put it this way.  If you were an oppressor, you would ban the reading of the psalms.  You'd burn them.  You wou...

We've now passed the half-way mark in Lent.  I find myself, these days, becoming increasingly reflective on my faith -- its positive practice -- to such an extent that I'm highlighting lately in everyday conversations why I still care to call myself Christian .  So, let me lay it out as plainly as I can.  1.   I believe . Not I know.  Not I think.  Not I feel.  Not I understand.  But I believe.  When I'm in darkness, when I don't know the way, when every step is uncertain, I walk.  I live not by what I know or feel but by a trust that proves itself only after each new step is safely taken.  Living Christianly is a daring thing.  Because discipleship really is dangerous.  I have to commit to following Jesus, to walking the Way, before feeling and thinking are even possible.  2.   In God the Father, almighty, creator of heaven and earth .  I don't believe in magic or manipulation.  Not in divine powers th...

I blog here.  A lot.  We've arrived at  Laetare Sunday in Lent.  It's also called Refreshment Sunday.  In the middle of Lent, Laetere Sunday is the Sunday in the midst of all our reflection and penitence when we focus on the joys of following Jesus.  So this blog, today, is meant not only to offer some of what I'm thinking about this Lent (I gave up gossiping and judgmentalism, after all, and took up the disciplines of humility), but also to reflect of the one joy that brings comfort to me these days.  I preach and teach and write and counsel.  A lot.  My vocation as a minister in the Church is at the very heart of who I am.  But in all my writing, preaching and teaching and counseling.  In all my praying and reflecting.  It all -- everything!  -- comes down to one thing.   None of it is about me.  It's not about me.  It's about him.  It's about Jesus.  That's all I've ever wanted to say as a minis...

Hobby Lobby is one, but it's certainly not the only one.  I've seen several of these old curiosities lately:  Businesses that tout themselves as a "Christian business". Just look at their marketing pieces.  The talk about "h onoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles", or something like it.   The reason I mention these so-called "Christian businesses" isn't to weigh in on contraception or homosexuality.  I actually am not even concerned here with that category mistake known as "corporate personhood".  Those are smoke and mirrors to the real issue that's been bugging me for the past month.   I'm out today to make a rather bold claim for a guy who lives in the Bible Belt:   There's no such thing as a "Christian business", and it's a good thing too.  Whether it's Hobby Lobby or the local used car dealer, the idea of operating a "Christian busin...

Jesus once said rather curiously:  "You will know them by their fruit" (Matthew 7.20). I've been thinking much about this recently.   We would have expected him to say, "You'll know them by their orthodoxy, their doctrines, their interpretations of texts, their fidelity to creeds.  You'll know them by the company they keep or how they baptize".  But that's not  what he said.  Jesus, here, used the metaphor of trees in talking about Christians.   In thinking through this idea, I've been confronted by images of Christians who have all the right words.  They mention "God" often enough.  They talk about being Christians who operate their businesses in Christian ways.  They use their faith as marketing tools in business models to cuddle up with the Christian community.  They rely on all the right words to convince folks they have all the right fruits.  But fruits are tricky things.   A fruit is more than just an outward act. ...

It began with Caesar Augustus.  It began with  the Mongol conquest of Asia, the Bantu migration in Central Africa.  It continued with the rise of the Aztec and Inca kingdoms in the Americas, the British Empire and the now-current American and Chinese century.   It's the moral and spiritual compass of the US.  No one ever talks about it -- least of all Christians.  We made an investment in its outcome a long time ago.  For us, it started with Constantine, it continued in the Medieval Synthesis.  It grew arms and legs with Luther's support of the nobility.  Luther's "two kingdom" theology.  The American insistence that our "civil religion" is biblical religion.  It continues in our "culture wars":  The binaries of right-left, inherited from the Enlightenment, from modernity.  The moral and spiritual compass points in just one direction -- for conservatives and  liberals alike:  Death.   At the end of every bat...

A pastor friend of mine called the other day to ask for my prayers.  He had been part of a youth confirmation weekend, in which the culminating event was an evangelistic rally.   We all know the sort.  Confess your sins, humble yourselves, and believe the gospel.   That  sort of rally.  Thing is, one of the youths, as a product of said rally, reached a spiritual crisis.  She saw herself as a sinner -- specifically an "unclean" girl because of sex -- who was a victim of sex abuse by an older teen, not in the group.   So that got me to thinking.   How do we resolve the theological dilemma of "taking up the cross" for victims? What does  kenosis, humility and "taking up the cross" look like for a person in locations of abuse and oppression? Since "descending" to a place of "lower status" presupposes that the person is "high status" and on the top.  Thus, to be a Christian in these locations is to let go of and to empty oneself of...

In reading the Church Fathers for 20 years, I've come across a number of theological oddities that never make it into textbooks.  I've often thought of writing a series of reflections on some of those oddities.   Today, I want to begin with John Chrysostom.  I began reading Chrysostom in 1996.  I was perticularly intrigued by his idea of "perfecting love".  It's something that influenced Wesley.  And so became the fodder for one of my master's theses.   But today I want to talk about something different.  Today I want to look at his notion of " the poison Eucharist ".  Chrysostom  described Christ's descent into hell as a kind of poison eucharist.  When Christ died, his body descended into the ground.  Death ingested his body like food.  But this was no ordinary food.  It was a fatal poison.  It brought on violent stomach cramps, worse (Chrysostom assures us) than the agony of a woman in labor.  Death could ...

There's a bit in the Lord's Prayer -- "thy kingdom come, and thy will be done, on earth, even as it is in heaven" -- that adds nearly all  the fuel for my theological imagination.  It's that line alone that makes me sure God is interested in far more than getting me to heaven when I die.   This extended quote expresses beautifully why that is.  "What frightens and frees us simultaneously about this new and alien kingdom of God which Jesus preached and told of is the simple fact that it is God's and not our own.  That is a dark menace to the complacency and contentment of those who flourish under the kingdoms of this world; a shining vision of release and new beginnings to the victims of the present order; and perhaps also a mocking rebuke to the programs, projects, and pride of those who hope to create a new order by themselves.  It is tragic, therefore, that a gospel which promises justice, love and peace only by insisting that these are God's own gi...