The Little Friar

Where I live, remembering and honoring the dead is celebrated annually in May.  Over Memorial Day weekend, families flock to cemeteries, flowers in hand, to decorate the graves of loved ones who have passed.  In many cases out-of-town relatives come in for this ritual.  It's a pretty big deal.  It's also odd to me.  Because we Christians have an entirely different day.  Either on  November 1st or the first Sunday in November, we celebrate All Saints' Day.  In the churches I've served, we remember and name the members of the congregation who have died since All Saints' Day the year before.  So what's the difference? For starters, being Christian is never done alone.  I'm a Christian because I'm a member of the Body of Christ, the Church.  That faith was passed on to me, and it's my responsibility to pass it on to others.  The liturgical acts of remembering each saint by ringing a bell, lighting a candle, or naming help us rememb...

Because I'm most at home behind a pulpit, I spend my mornings reading through advertisements for open ministry posts.  And when one catches my heart, I'll apply.   I also spend a good deal of my time consulting with churches and pastors about ministry.  So I pay particular attention to things like "metrics" -- the way churches and pastors measure themselves, their vitality, their growth.  And I've noticed something over the past decade or so.   The Church  is increasingly taken with corporate metrics of growth and success.   A former student was sharing with me recently of one national church's way of reporting attendance and membership by means of a computer program, focused entirely on numbers . That's a metric.  Ministry is hard work.  That's why I've always been drawn to speaking about pastoral ministry with young ordinands by reading through the prophets -- but particularly Ezekiel 2. The people Ezekiel is being sent to are described, ov...

1.   Four words of Jesus that many Christians don't seem to get: "εγω δε λεγω υμιν ..." (Sermon on the Mount). 2.  " What about you?" he asked them.  "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "Is this another one of your trick questions?" Jesus said, "No, straight up." Peter said, risked, "Hmm ... Don't you mean 'Who is my neighbor?'" God-smacked, Jesus said, "Er, yes, I guess I do" (Mark 8.29ff., Original Autograph) 3.   Some Pharisees and Herodians said to Jesus, "Tell us:  is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?"  But Jesus knew it was a trick question and replied, "Why are you playing mind games with me?  Bring me a coin, and let me look at it."  They handed him one.  He flipped it, and said, "Heads I win, tails you lose."  (Mark 12.15f., Original Autograph) 4.  " One Christian is no Christian", said Church Father, Tertullian.   I respond:  Just the one?  ...

I  wonder what comes into people's minds when they hear the word creation .  If you're a Christian I'm pretty sure that most folks would think of the opening chapter of Genesis, which indeed the Good News Bible entitles "The Story of Creation".  But then when you read Genesis 1, what  then  comes into your mind? If you're American, turns out evolution  comes to mind.  And in light of Pope Francis' recent comments that evolution and the Gospel are not contradictory, maybe it's time I set out (yet again) what I think about all this.   Evolution, of course, is one of those issues that plague Christians in America. Because we invest it with so much crappy science to begin with.   When I say evolution  I do not mean by it some naturalistic positivistic science -- as if nature and science are all that is.  That's crappy science.   And  crappy philosophy.  (Not to mention heretical Christian faith.) The "issue" is so content...

As a Bonhoeffer scholar, the Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand has always intrigued me.  " That damned Hildebrand is the greatest obstacle for National Socialism in Austria.  No one causes more harm", fumed Franz von Papen, the Nazi ambassador to Austria, who proposed to Hitler a plan to assassinate Hitler's public enemy number one.  So I was excited to see this translation of Hildebrand's memoirs and essays that highlight the evils of Nazism and another of those German intellectuals who stood against it.  When Hitler rose to power in 1933, von Hildebrand fled Germany to Austria, where he founded and edited in Vienna the most widely read German language anti-Nazi paper.  For this reason, von Papen called him "the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria". My Battle against Hitler makes an invaluable contribution to the study of the period of Nazi resistance.  Among the papers of von Hildebrand's memoirs, one outline was found titled...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Theses on Youth Work in the Church": 1. Since the days of the youth movement, church youth work has often lacked that element of Christian sobriety that alone might enable it to recognize that the spirit of youth is not the Holy Spirit and that the future of he church is not youth itself but rather the Lord Jesus Christ alone. It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God; it is the task of the church not to capture the youth, but to teach and proclaim the word of God. 2. Our question is not: What is youth and what rights does it have, but rather: What is the church-community and what is the place of youth within it? 3. The church-community includes those on earth whom God’s dominion has torn away from the dominion of death and evil, those who hear the word concerning the establishment of God’s dominion among human beings in Jesus Christ and who obediently assemble around this word in faith. The church-co...

Books and articles on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount abound.  Some are worthwhile, but most you can easily ignore.  So when a friend asked me what books I'd assign if I were teaching a course on the Sermon on the Mount, and why those, I immediately thought of these six:  Three must-reads and three recommended.   Must-reads 1.  Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light:  Living the Sermon on the Mount It's a collection of lectures given in Germany between 1915 and 1935.  Arnold calls decisively for a revolutionary discipleship.  Each chapter speaks to a particular part of the Sermon, and when taken collectively, readers are compelled to action.  For Arnold, the Sermon is rightly not just a new moral code or an ethic but a proclamation that God's Kingdom is here.  Discipleship and community life belong together, because both belong in God's Kingdom of complete love with justice.  2.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer drives...

O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to save us.  Sometimes I'm reminded that I simply don't belong in our culture.   Everyone in the world wants the same thing:  Peace.  But you can't  get it unless, instead of aiming for peace, you aim for God.  Goodness is  something you can possess only by sharing it; as soon as you try to keep it for yourself, you don't have any.  That's Augustine's City of God  in a nutshell.   Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall  is one of the best places I know to read about sex.   And yet it's such an undervalued work among we Christians.  There, Bonhoeffer pits  humans as  imago dei , created in the image of God, bound to and guided by the Creator, against  sicit deus , humans acting as if they were God.   Sicit deus  ignores humankind's inherent limits, doesn't depend on God and acts out of its own resources.  For Bonhoeffer, sexuality expresse...

Unless readers have been living under a rock, the Robertson family is well known and loved by most evangelical Christians in America.  Their $ 400 million empire of duck calls, sweet tea glasses, and other Duck Dynasty-themed goods, now includes The Duck Commander Faith and Family Bible , with notes from Duck Commander Phil Robertson and his eldest son, Al, also an ordained minister.  The Duck Commander Faith and Family Bible features the New King James Version.  It also contains dozens of testimonials and 125 inspirational quotes from Phil.  The Bible itself focuses on the Robertson family's five main values:  Faith, family, fellowship, forgiveness and freedom.  Sadly, however, this Bible falls prey to the same theological pitfalls that normally beset Bibles that focus to particular audiences.  Namely, it divides up the Body of Christ along target audience lines.  This niche-motif Bible is no better than things like The N...

Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium:  The Joy of the Gospel  is a beautiful pastoral vision of the Church catholic that draws upon the work of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and combines Francis' own experiences in order to offer a vision of hope for the Church in dangerous times.  As  Christians have done for millennia, the faithful today must live the Gospel always, everywhere, and radically.  They must rely on the grace of God and relentlessly and sacrificially love with the love of God made known in Christ.  It's that incarnational love of the Other, according to Francis, that will carry the Light of God that is the Church into the dark corners of the world.  Francis points out the spiritually dangerous temptation of lukewarm Christian spiritualities that seek only an individual's salvation.  Such spiritualities result in the closed-in attitudes of many Christians, which in turn underwrite "selfishness and spiritual sloth", "sterile pessimism...

All of us are born.  No exceptions.  Birth brought us alive, kicking and crying, into a world that is vast, complex, damaged, demanding -- and beautiful.  In increments, day-by day, we begin to get the hang of it.  We drink from our mother's breast, go to sleep, and wake up.  One day on waking up we stand upright and amaze everyone with our pedestrian acrobatics.  It isn't long before we're old hands at language, using nouns and verbs with the best of them.  We are growing up.   Jesus used the birth event as a metaphor for another kind of birth:  Becoming alive to God.  Alive to God-alive.  Life vast, complex, damaged, demanding -- and beautiful.  Alive to God's holiness, God's will and kingdom, power, and glory in Jeaus.  There's more to life after birth than mother's milk, sleeping and waking, walking and talking.  There is life in God.  Jesus introduced that birth metaphor in a conversation with rabbi Nic...

Teaching theology classes is some of the most exhilarating things I've ever had the joy of doing.  And teaching Trinity and Christology are why  that's true.   In teaching Christology, I always draw together what I call my "12 grammatical rules".   I mention them here today because much of what I've been reading lately -- on preaching -- has had so much to contribute to thinking about Christian speech, that I think these bear repeating for pastors on occasion.  (This post is really Karl Barth's "fault", since I just finished Dogmatics in Outline  again this month.) Each of these rules are offered here in both a negative and a positive affirmation.  The negative addresses temptations of Christian speaking that don't speak of Jesus Christ biblically.  These are temptations of preaching that preachers must avoid.  The positive is the simple message of the Good News we proclaim.  1.   Not to speak of Christ in any way that sidelines his...

An observation:   Mary, called in the gospel "the mother of Jesus", appears twice in the gospel of John.  At the beginning and at the end.  And in both cases thirst and wine are involved.  The first story is the wedding feast at Cana (John 2.1-10), where Jesus turns water into wine because the wedding hosts had run out.  Jesus initially resists the request saying that his "time has not yet come".  What time is that exactly?  The master of the banquet also makes the observation that the "cheaper" wine comes early and the better wine comes out later. That's all very interesting. We are left leaning into the story wondering when Jesus' "hour" will come and the better wine be poured out.  And wine, along with Mary, does appear again later in the story (John 19.25-35), drawing our attention and forming a connection between the wine of Cana and the blood poured out on the cross.  Is this the time, "the hour" that Jesus was referring t...

My friend Tim and I have been going back and forth lately on why clergy should wear clericals.   Clothing conveys a message.  A business suit says, "Money!"  A police uniform says, "Law!"  A tuxedo says, "Wedding!"  Casual clothing says, "Me!"  Clericals say, "Church!"  Any of those messages might be valid in different contexts, so you have to make sure you are wearing the right clothes for the occasion.  If you wear a business suit in a department store, people will mistake you for the manager.  If you wear a tuxedo to a ball game, they won’t ask you to play.  If you wear a jogging outfit to a fancy restaurant, your clothing says, "I wandered in here by mistake," and the staff will treat you accordingly.  The word  clericals  refers to the special clothing that clergy wear outside of worship services, usually consisting of a white collar on a black shirt (for male clergy) or on a black blouse (for female clergy), combined...