The Little Friar

George Rouault, "Jesus will be in agony, even to the end of the world" Holy Week is more than a memorial.  It's a time of participation.  We celebrate Holy Week as a way of participating in the great story of Jesus' rejection, suffering, and death.  We are among the crowd that cheers and waves palm branches when Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey.  We are with Jesus when he shares his last meal with his friends.  We share in their astonishment when our Lord stoops down to wash our feet and tells us to do likewise.  The next day we join our voices to the crowd that cries out, "Crucify him!"  And we are there when Jesus takes up the cross and lays down his life for the ones who have rejected him. That's what makes Holy Week such a momentous experience of the Church Year for me.  This is more than simply recounting events all those years ago -- this is my participation in those very events, as I follow Jesus all the way to the cross. ...

The atmosphere that brisk November day drew people in. They came looking for something to eat, but they wanted something more, too. I'd be lifting a box of food, in the noise and bustle of the crowd that day in the fellowship hall, when a grieving woman, a lonely immigrant, a sick man – all in succession – came up to me to ask, “Will you pray for me?” It was obvious my function that day. I was the pastor, and I was dressed like the pastor – with a clerical collar – so I wore the “target” for all those who needed, food sure, but prayer too. So each time I took a deep breath, and prayed with those who asked. Ed, a filthy white guy who was out of work and had his hungry wife and three kids in the car, begging for help. One of our town's most insane and drug-addicted visitors ranted, in no particular sequence, all of the things she needed for prayer. “I can't do this much longer, preacher, please ask God to help me.” Despite all the hysteria, I make the ...

Today is Palm and Passion Sunday, and in most churches -- at least those that follow the Revised Common Lectionary -- we will hear the gospel text from Mark 11.1-11 . A friend and I were talking the other day about preaching that text.  And I have a confession to make:  I hardly ever preach on Palm and Passion Sunday.  So preaching from Mark 11 isn't something I'd be thinking about today.  Normally, I allow the text to do its own preaching today, so I always fashion a dramatic reading of one of the gospel texts -- and since this is the year of Mark, we'd read from Mark 11.1-11, but we'd continue through, with selections from chapters 11, 12, 13, and pick up at 14.1 all the through 15.47.  Hearing the Story unfold, on its own terms, is heart-wrenching and formative, in a way that no preaching can do. So I don't normally preach on Palm and Passion Sunday.  It's that rare Sunday of the Church Year, in fact, that I resist preaching. The Story itself do...

Folks who are on the cusp of the Christian faith will often ask me what I think it takes to get them over the hurdle, to actually believe Jesus.  My answer is pretty simple:  Pray the Lord's Prayer and love your enemies.  That seems like such a shock of advice that it often goes unheeded -- and rebutted.  "No, I mean, how to do you intellectually get all this figured out." That's just it, you don't. Aristotle, at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics , observes that moral action doesn't arise from deliberation.  In order to think clearly about virtue, one must first already have a virtuous disposition formed by good habits.  Aristotle drily remarks that the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing.  You become virtuous -- and thus able to understand virtue -- by acting virtuously .  Nobody ever reasoned their way into right living. Same is true for discipleship. You can follo...

the smallest intake of beauty breaks me carrying me, always, to the edge of love I cannot breathe when overtaken by birdsong or captured by the play of a child or arrested by the chance meeting with flowers standing vigil at death

Michael Christie's If I Fall, If I Die is a coming of age story about an 11-year-old son of a mother suffering from mental illness, from severe agoraphobia.  Diane has returned with Will to her childhood home in Thunder Bay, Ontario, by way of Toronto, where she was a celebrated filmmaker.  Her mental instability slowly increases in intensity, showing itself first beginning with a fear of driving, snowballing into a fear of being driven in a cab, on public transportation and then into full blown agoraphobia.  She never leaves the house, and doesn't allow her son Will to either.  Everything they need to survive can be delivered, with Will expertly signing his mother's name to the wide number of checks for the delivery men.  Diane is becoming increasingly dependent upon her "Relaxation Sessions", unable to leave even her room on many days, leaving Will to figure out life from an 11-year-old perspec...

Eric Gill, "The Carrying of the Cross", 1926 I know some evangelical churches are beginning to practice Lent -- particularly Ash Wednesday and "giving up" something.  But the practice that makes Lent for me -- the sine qua non of Lent -- is the practice of the Stations of the Cross. I didn't grow up in high-church liturgical environments.  My first exposure to The Stations of the Cross came as a seminary student, and it was eye-opening.  I found it profoundly moving.  And disconcerting.  I remember feeling shaken when the service ended with Jesus dead and laid in the tomb.  Ending on that somber note was extraordinarily powerful and profound.  I'd never been to a church service that ended in such darkness.  And then we did it again.   And again.  And again.  Each Friday of Lent my classmates and I would walk to Duke Chapel and go through the Stations of the Cross. That repeated practice of visiting and walking the way o...

In thinking about verbs that bring love to be more tangible, here's the list I've come up with tonight: Listen Speak Give Pray Answer Share Enjoy Trust Forgive Promise

John Thompson's Jesus, Bread, and Chocolate: Crafting a Handmade Faith in a Mass-Market World is a book you don't want to miss.  From artisan bread-making, coffee roasting, chocolatiers, micro-breweries, farmers markets, and indie musicians, Thompson's new book is a call to leave the "mass marketing" world and embracing the care, time and attention responsible for making local economies.  And all as a matter of the Christian faith. Because, as Thompson rightly insists, there's a connection to be made between faith and chocolate. Brewing has a long history in the Church.  Bread is at the heart of a liturgical and ritual life together.  If Jesus is "the Bread of Life", why, Thompson asks, are we Christians so comfortable eating such mass-produced, and unhealthy, bread in our own lives?  Thompson -- himself a part of Indie music for decades -- also insists that hand-crafted music is a matter of faith, too. And interwoven throughout all this good ...

Randal Pelton's Preaching with Accuracy:  Finding Christ-Centered Big Ideas for Biblical Preaching is a real gift for preachers and hope for the Church.  In it, Pelton presents a method for finding "the Christ-centered big idea" of the biblical text and fashioning a theological sermon for the congregation, week-in and week-out. That's because preaching is one of two foci around which the Church gathers every Lord's Day -- text and table.  This book helps recover expository preaching after decades of its neglect in the face of more "topical" sermons.  Chapter 1 highlights the ways in which that neglect happened in the Church's recent past, only to go forward in outlining a particular way of reading the biblical text that focuses on "the big idea" (i.e., Christocentric idea) from Chapter 2 to Chapter 5. But it's the "Canonical Interpretation" in Chapter 6 that's the most exciting.  There, Pelton rightly calls preacher...

Those of us who spend any time at all in Church know that the saints are real scoundrels.  We could never venerate a faultless person, though we could fault a blameless person.  We churchy folk tolerate the ignorance of the heathen about the morality of the saints.  We are quite content to let them believe the saints to have been impeccable moral exemplars.  But when someone in the Church misunderstands the sanctity of the saints and demands faultless perfection, then we sharpen our quills.  It is for this reason that John Wesley -- lover of perfection that he was -- found himself appalled upon reading the work of Rev'd Conyers Middleton.  Middleton presumed that it was meaningful to point out that the saintly fathers of the Church occasionally demonstrated questionable behavior and opinion (and he deplored the accounts of their miracles).  It takes a perfectionist like Wesley to identify someone who does not have a proper appreciation ...

The politics of the Kingdom, if we pay close attention to Jesus, has a very distinctive feel.  To quote the maxim of Stan Hauerwas: The church does not have a social ethic.  The church is a social ethic. Encapsulated within that little maxim is a fundamental Anabaptist confession: The social and political witness of Christians is simply to be the Church. When Christians begin talking about politics, I think that's where we have to begin.  Just be the Church.  Being the Church is political engagement.  This imperative distinguishes the Church from conservative and liberal/progressive Christian politics, which can be tempted by theocratic impulses and, thus, contaminated by Constantinianism and the temptations of Empire. Being the Church -- really being the the Church -- is a political intervention, the Church is a counter-politics to the politics of the State.  Which means that to think politically in the Church is to think locally , focusin...

In The Girl in the Road , Monica Byrne crafts a gorgeous future world where big business has perfected "wave energy", the solution to the global energy crisis and a death knell for the West's economic hegemony.  Set in India in the 2060s, The Girl in the Road attests to the gracefulness and power of technology.  For example, her main character majors in "nano and comp lit", and the novel's most dazzling passages take their beauty from the interactions between humans and their innovations.  Bryne writes with a literary gift to beguile with her scenery.  So The Girl in the Road is a real literary treat. But it also asks an important moral question:  What happens after we save the world? And it's the answer to this question that makes The Girl in the Road a real literary treat.  While the book is probably classified as "science fiction", there's not one collective bad guy to be found -- no Big Brother or rogue virus. Instead, th...

Christoph Blumhardt's Everyone Belongs to God:  Discovering the Hidden Christ is an original book in an age that needs to hear this pastor's message.  To be honest, it's a book that's hard to characterize, just like Blumhardt himself, because this book depicts a Kingdom that's bigger than anything we might dare or imagine.  Readers won't find a particular theology here, because Blumhardt is a prophet who talks less about God and more speaking on behalf of the God we know in Jesus Christ.  And his message is this:  The Risen Christ draws all of humanity to himself.  Regardless of the distinctives we use to distinguish ourselves over-against others, Jesus breaks down those walls.  To confess the Risen Christ, Blumhardt insists, is to proclaim the good news to all the world.  Distinctions are obliterated.  That's why the book begins with a quote on the flyleaf from Paul:  "Here, there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcise...

This morning, for lots of reasons, I found myself praying Canticle 14 from The Book of Common Prayer, otherwise known to Anglicans as "The Prayer of Manasseh" from the Apocrypha. This is a prayer lots of Protestants never pray, precisely because it's "not in the Bible" for lots of them.  But it's a beautiful prayer, and one that I find myself returning to again and again. We do know, from 2 Chronicles 33.18-19, about the prayer: The other events of Manasseh's reign, including his prayer to his God and the words the seers spoke to him in the name of the Lord, the God of Israel, are written in the annals of the kings of Israel.  His prayer and how God was moved by his entreaty, as well as all his sins and unfaithfulness, and the sites where he built high places and set up Asherah poles and idols before he humbled himself -- all these are written in the records of the seers. Both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles record that Manasseh was one of the m...

Andrew Schmutzer & David Howard Jr's Psalms:  Language for All Seasons of the Soul brings together some of the academic research on the psalms with devotional writing.  It's a real gift for biblical studies as well as for spirituality.  I come from a tradition that reads the Psalms through, every month, as part of daily prayer.  We also regularly chant the Psalms in worship.  So the Psalms have played an integral and primary role in training my own prayer language. This collection has eighteen highly-esteemed biblical scholars to share perspectives on the way we faithfully read the Psalms, and how those same Psalms influence and shape our prayers and worship.  The Psalms highlights the theological, literary, and canonical shape of the book in an accessible way for pastors and Sunday School teachers. The book itself is divided into five parts.  Part I highlights the way the Psalms have been studied in academia in recent years.  It sets ...

Preaching is a powerful theological act of the Church.  It's so powerful precisely because preaching is that moment when the living Word captures the imagination of the congregation, using stories to unfold the Truth alive in Jesus Christ.  So many important things circle around the act of telling those stories in the Church. So John Walsh's Art of Storytelling:  Easy Steps to Presenting an Unforgettable Story is an important book for preachers.  This book is really written to those who wish to perform stories in public (for example at a library for children or as a Sunday School lesson), but Walsh makes it accessible to a variety of others by guiding readers through portions of the book that non-storytellers can skip.   The last section of the book gives specifics for applying his steps and principles to telling Bible stories.  Walsh's storytelling abilities prove themselves throughout the pages of the book as he illustrates what he teaches....

Recently, I posted an article that highlighted the return of firing squads (in Utah) to all the ways Americans can now officially be killed by the state for "punishment" for crimes committed.  That article discusses " a bill that would allow the state to execute prisoners on death row by firing squad in the event the appropriate drugs for a lethal injection cannot be obtained".   In my response to the article, I said: "Man's inhumanity to man", as Robert Burns put it, is the very gist of those curses from Genesis. I'm hardly surprised at the anger and the violence, because we humans have always been good at this sort of thing. ISIS learned it from us, to be honest . (America created so many crises in the Middle East since the 50s that those chickens were bound to come home to roost.) Cain killed Abel. We kill one another. Whether it's the atrocities committed by Americans (anyone who thinks we haven't, I only respond wi...

If the people I encounter on a daily basis are any indication -- and I think they're at least some indicator of this -- we Americans are fairly sure we've figured out who "the monsters" in the world might be. Take Mohammed Emwazi, for example. You may know him better as "Jihadi John", the guy who beheads innocent civilians and aid workers in the cause of a global Caliphate.  But I could just as easily name the "bad guy of the day" -- the one who's made headlines because of his barbarity toward children as a pedophile or the most recent drug-dealer who's moved in on the local neighborhood. This is a tired, old label, but it still persists.  Any person who commit some atrocity that seems out-of-bounds for what "civil" society might tolerate is the next "monster". It's tired because the label doesn't really say much, other than we're looking for a way of getting ourselves off the hook.  We need a way t...

Bill Delvaux's Divided:  When the Head and Heart Don't Agree is a book premised on some simple idea:  That the love of God with one's head is the same love of God with one's heart.  What our culture so easily divides -- in this case, what we believe in our hearts from what we believe in our heads -- genuine discipleship with Jesus bridges and unites.  Divided is another of Thomas Nelson's Refraction Series, but since I had such a wonderful time with the other volumes, I was excited to dive into this book. And I wasn't disappointed. There are no Christians I don't who don't struggle with this radical division.  Regularly, in spiritual direction and in pastoral counseling, the division of head and heart pops up.  The problem is such a web of issues that it's rather intricate a web to untangle.  But in his 190 pages, Delvaux has accomplished a pastoral task that must not go unnoticed and unappreciated in the Church. Here, he not only diagnoses...

Mike Aquilina and James Papandrea are both authors for whom I've had a long-standing respect.  Aquilina's The Mass of Early Christians is a modern classic in liturgical studies, and Papandrea's Reading the Early Church Fathers and Trinity 101 are books I regularly reference and recommend to students.  So their new book, Seven Revolutions:  How Christianity Changed the World and Can Change It Again was a must-read on my lists, and I was overjoyed to receive my copy.  Both are excellent writers who have a way of weaving the narratives of the Church's history into tales that you don't want to put down.  Seven Revolutions is yet another of those weavings.  I read the book in one sitting. In Seven Practices Aquilina and Papandrea illustrate the ways in which early Christians set about revolutionizing the Roman world.  In fact, the narratives they weave demonstrate all the ways the Church shaped Western civilization in the last few centuries of the...

The genealogy of Jesus found in Matthew 1 lists five women.  And as many have pointed out before, these women are interesting in that they are either Gentiles or are implicated in sexual scandals.  Thus, in the highlighting these women Jesus' genealogy tells a tale of grace But there is another women in this story, one not mentioned directly, and her story is also a story of grace. In Genesis 29 we get the love story of Jacob and Rachel.  And it seems to have been love at first sight.  Upon seeing Rachel Jacob kisses her and weeps aloud (29.11).  We're told that Rachel had "a lovely figure and was beautiful" (29.17).  And the text just directly comes out and says in 29.18:  "Jacob was in love with Rachel". So, basically, this is the first recorded "love story" (as our culture would conceive of a "love story") in the Bible. It's all very, very romantic . This would, so far, make a great Lifetime movie.  Or Disney, for ...

Steven Case's Father Dark:  A Novel is perhaps the most unique Christian fiction I've ever read.  It's creative theology mixed with rich characterization.  Padi and Miss Roberta were particularly convincing and made the novel a real joy to read, because they bring the struggles of urban life to real life, and mix them with elements of intriguing fantasy.  Father Michael Dark is the priest I aspire to be in my own ministry, both down-to-earth and non-judgmental.  And while the mysterious "dark angel" tries to stop the drug-dealers and pimps, he isn't innocent either -- he has a secret of his own. Ultimately, Father Dark is a novel that asks us to take seriously the simple fact of our faith:  That God's love is unconditional and open to all .  In this novel, God often shows up in ways and in people that might remain unsuspected to the Church that hasn't developed the imaginative vision to see God at work in the world.  That imaginative vision...

Perhaps the most difficult argument to deflate these days is that Islam is, by its nature, essentially violent/militant.  I hear this so regularly from Americans that I have to wonder if it's not a matter of selective memory (Americans, in case we've forgotten, can be pretty violent and militant, too).  But it's perhaps the most difficult argument to reject precisely because there are images flashed at us on a regular basis (twenty-four hour news cycles will do that to a person) like this: The problem here, of course, is that the folks making this argument are Americans first, and Christians second.  Which is to say, they've forgotten the Apocalypse of John from the end of the New Testament.  What I hear most often from American Christians who see these images:  It just doesn't seem right!  Those twenty-one orange-clad Egyptian Copts herded out on the beaches of Libya to be beheaded by practitioners of a repugnant ideology ... and it's impossible t...

Andrew William Smith is perhaps best known for his blog, Beat is Beatitude , that's now been collected into a book by the same title:  Beat is Beatitude:  Poems, Prayers & Preaching .  The book is a unique blend of Jesus and Jack Kerouac.  It's an intense collection of poems that bring together biblical faith, hope and love, and express them in a way that confronts placid Christianity and American politics.  Which is to say:  This is not a book to miss. But let me quickly add:  Beat is Beatitude is a challenging book.  The meditations here aren't for the faint-of-heart, because in them the reader is challenged to hear Jesus is fresh and refreshing ways.  The book will at once bring the reader beyond its pages to see the downtrodden and forgotten in the world through Jesus' own eyes.  This is a book that does more than just allow Christians to see these often forgotten and unnoticed -- it also gives them a voice. And that voice...

Andre Rabe's Desire Found Me is a unique book.  Steeped in Rene Girard's "Mimetic Theory", it's nothing short of a theological exploration of what it means to confess faith in the trinue God by telling the human and biblical story up to and including the life and death of Jesus in a way that incorporates and makes sense of the groundbreaking insights of Girard.  But it's not a systematic mimetic theology -- not in the least.  Given the broad scope of Desire Found Me , it can't possibly hope to answer all the questions posed by dogmatic theology.  Instead, Desire Found Me provides a deep spiritual theology of what it means to be human and divine, and the relationship between the two. Rabe's mission is to take these foundational ideas of Girard's and weave them into a Trinitarian theology in a way that makes sense to the casual reader.  I would say he has done that job very well.  The overall thrust of  Desire Found Me is described in t...

Bren Hughes' Heaven's Muscle:  Unleashing the Power of the Spirit Within You is an easy-to-read part spiritual memoir, part spiritual wisdom that highlights what being a true Christ-follower is all about.  In it, Hughes outlines how to move from a deadening religiosity toward a life revitalized by the Holy Spirit. In the opening chapter, Hughes addresses what he calls "the spirit of religion" -- a legalistic spirit that keeps us from following the Holy Spirit.  In that way, Heaven's Muscle is a book much like the classics by Walter Wink or William Stringfellow.  But it's the chapters that follow that are the real gems.  Hughes writes about the biblical basis for the work of the Holy Spirit in a way that makes the Christian spiritual life come alive with vitality.  And he connects that vitality to the depth spirituality of baptism itself.  For the strongest of "heaven's muscles", though, one needs love.  Love is the essence of what this life...

R.K. Kline's Faraway:  A Suburban Boy's Story as a Victim of Sex Trafficking is one memoir you shouldn't miss in 2015.  It recounts Kevin's life in the mid-1970s American suburbia as a sex trafficked teenage gay youth.  Faraway is at times intense, at times sad, but always a page-turner.  This is the story of how a young man is groomed for sex trafficking in the American heartland -- not the typical narrative of sex trafficking that the Church often hears.  But Faraway is more than a story of grief and suffering.  It's also a celebration of friendship and salvation -- of Stevie and Squirrel -- who are agents of reconciliation, demonstrating yet again that God is always at work in the world, in those moments and places where darkness seem to have the most say.  So that's why I found Faraway so gripping that I couldn't put it down. We're so accustomed to hearing of sex trafficking of young women.  This is a book that corrects that bias...