The Little Friar

From Wendell Berry's Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness : Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective 'Christian'.

Today, my tears are shed for Baltimore.  My tears are shed for all those communities who have known such violence and destruction that accompany that violence.  There are so many of them. This morning, Baltimore is part of a tragic American pattern: I weep as Jesus himself wept, and for the same reason: And when Jesus drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, " Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!   But now they are hidden from your eyes.  For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you.  And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation" (Luke 19.41-44). Why did Jesus weep?  Jerusalem had failed to learn "the things that make for peace".  And because Jerusalem had failed to re...

The images tonight are heart-breaking . Baltimore is in chaos , after the funeral today of Freddie Gray.  Gray, of course, died while in police custody on April 19.  Since that time, questions and video have arisen that have led to questions about the context of Gray's death.  Gray's death is another in a long string of deaths of African-Americans and other minorities under questionable circumstances. There's no doubt to my mind that there's a national crisis.  And we have to understand that this crisis isn't created in recent history.  It's a cycle of abuse and oppression, a cultural legacy of racism and violence that names one of America's deepest sins. And like those in the minority communities, I'm skeptical that those of us with the cultural power to change things are really listening, and working for institutional changes that bring reconciliation and forgiveness for that national sin. I've seen so many question whether these riots ...

Rachel Held Evans' Searching for Sunday:  Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church is a theologically astute book that makes you think.  And if you're not searching for a book that leaves you to look at the Body of Christ in fresh ways, it isn't a book for you.  Because the one thing Evans does well -- to reintroduce us to Jesus and to his beloved community -- is accomplished by refusing to give us simple answers.  You won't be told what to think in Searching for Sunday .  Instead, you'll hear a memoir of a love story.  In her own words: In my struggle to find church, I've often felt that if I could just find the right denomination or the right congregation, if I could just become the right person or believe the right things, then my search would be over at last.  But right's got nothing to do with it.  Waiting around for right will leave you waiting around forever.  The church is God saying:  'I'm throwing a banquet, and all the...

Rachel Held Evan's new book, Searching for Sunday , is causing a veritable tempest in the evangelical teapot.  Because she's saying a few things that seem counter-intuitive in church growth circles.  Church growth has nothing whatever to do with getting a hipper worship band.  People aren't looking for more flashy information about Jesus.  They're looking for Jesus.  Let that sink in for a minute. So here are a few of my observations for those who still want to prop up the church growth movement. 1.  Statistics about church attendance really can't tell you much about a congregation's growth.  I'm not saying that statistics are irrelevant, but what they do tell you probably isn't going to be told by keeping an accounting on some software (such as United Methodist pastors are now required to do).  Here's why. If I had a lot of money, I'd bet a sizable amount that I could shift a congregation's attendance statistics simply by making c...

A friend of mine has been tapped to teach a seminar on theodicy in pastoral care and theology next fall, and he's asked me to think through what I believe a seminar like that should include. Theodicy (a.k.a. " the problem of evil ") is one of those theological digressions that take place in nearly every introductory class of theology that I teach.  I once was very reluctant about that.  These days, though, I think it offers the most fertile ground for getting pastors to think theologically, so I find it -- sadly enough -- one of my most exciting topics.  Particular suffering of the sort encountered in pastoral ministry problematizes theology's preference for neat answers.  Any pastor who's ever walked into a hospital room knows this. My classes on theodicy tend to be a mix of Simone Weil , Marilyn McCord Adams , John Hick , James Cone , Sarah Coakley , GK Chesterton , Augustine , Aquinas , and Barth .  A serious theological discussion about theodicy will...

The Rev Dr Will Willimon From Will Willimon's beautiful little book, Calling & Character:  Virtues of the Ordained Life , two quotes that seem especially relevant this week. The first addresses who pastors are.  In light of so many pastors I meet whose personal habits become destructive of their vocation and ministry, there's this: ... when we take upon ourselves his yoke of obedience, his yoke is easy, his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30).  When is a burden light ?  It is when we find our burdensome lives caught up, elevated, borne aloft by something greater than our lives.  Mission gives meaning. Jesus does not come to us to relieve us of all yokes or burdens; rather, he comes offering us a yoke worth wearing, a burden worth bearing.  It is a great gift not to have to make your life mean something, to have your life given significance by the Lord whose cross, when taken up, takes us up as well. Then, in light of conversations I've ha...

1.  Speak less; listen more.  God has a lot to say.  Particularly to those of us who lead, but often lead so hard that we drown out that voice. 2.  Spend less time in front of a mirror and more time being a mirror to others.  God is seen in all our faces.  Even -- and maybe most especially! -- in the faces of our enemies. 3.  If you have doubts about whether God loves you, consider Good Friday.  Bloody, beaten, bruised, and dying with the load of sin, God loves Jesus no less than a father loves his son.  That is the love with which God loves us. 4.  Every one of us has been the victim of oppression.  And every one of us has been the perpetrator of oppression.  We are all capable of being both Shakespeare and Hitler.  God grieves for both sides of us.  God loves all his enemies. 5.  God gave us each unique gifts and talents.  Spend time learning from everyone you meet, and you will lear...

I'm really not sure the source of this image, but when people speak of the "judgment of God" after death, this is the image I have: When we die, the Lord will take take us and sit us on his knee -- and show us what our life was really like.  That's the judgment -- the light shining on all the denied or repressed, the hateful or loveless, or the just plain painful -- all the dark areas -- of our life.  But we're sitting in the Father's lap, his arms around us, lovingly drawing us into himself, such that judgment itself is grace-full, and tears of regret or sorrow become tears of joy.

Paul Angone's All Groan Up:  Searching for Self, Faith and a Freaking Job! is one difficult book to review.  First, it's hard to categorize.  All Groan Up is part personal memoir.  In the book, Angone shares his own struggles and missteps in life, in order to help others avoid those rough patches in the road of life.  But All Groan Up is also part advice column, from a guy who's more your friend or big brother, than a specialist intent on offering yet more advice.  In retrospect, though, All Groan Up is probably best seen as a guidebook for a journey into twentysomething.  There are plenty of heartbreaking, yet hilarious, stories about transitioning from being a frustrated college graduate to a faithful adult. And in that way, this book is must reading for soon-to-be college graduates -- or their parents. Because those folks have lots of questions in life.  And this book is all about answering -- at least tentatively -- those questions...

For the past few days, I've been involved in several conversations about the nature of salvation and the related question about the nature of human free will.  Lots of visions of salvation trade on the idea of "free will".  In fact, entire theologies are built upon its foundation. But I really struggle with it.  In fact, I'm fairly certain that there's no such thing as free will. Perhaps unsurprising, my view of free will is entirely Augustinian.  And that view is wrapped up quite succinctly in his prayer in the Confessions :  "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God".  It's not that we aren't free.  It's just that, with our disordered and broken affections, our freedom doesn't move us forward, doesn't bring us anything but more sorrow and frustration. I've seen this countless times in my own life, and in the lives of parishioners. See, what folks miss when they claim "free will" is a fairly i...

The Rev Dr Will Willimon Retired UMC Bishop Prof at Duke Divinity This extended quote was shared from a friend, and is taken from the February 4, 2013, edition of The Christian Century .  The emphases are mine: My admiration is unbounded for clergy who persist in proclaiming the gospel in the face of the resistance that the world throws at them.  But I found too many clergy who allowed congregational caregiving and maintenance to trump more important acts of ministry, like truth telling and mission leadership.  These tired pastors dash about offering parishioners undisciplined compassion rather than sharp biblical truth.   One pastor led a self-study of her congregation and found that 80 percent of them thought the minister's primary job was to "care for me and my family."  Debilitation is predictable for a kleros with no higher purpose for ministry than servitude to the voracious personal needs of the laos. Most people in mainline churches mee...

Jessica Thompson's Everyday Grace:  Infusing All Your Relationships with the Love of Jesus is a book that defies description.  And it's destined to become one of the most important books in Christian spirituality for 2015. Everyday Grace defies description as far as Christian books go.  There are any number of books that address counseling, marriage, friendship -- but this book focuses on the place that Jesus must take in all our relationships. And Thompson begins by saying Everyday Grace is anything but another Christian self-help book.  Just because you pick up this book, there are no guarantees that our relationships will flower with the fruit of the Spirit.  As she rightly insists:  "While you may be following all the right steps to a better relationship, it doesn’t mean that your spouse or your friend is" (p. 7).  Counseling and commitment can make a difference, but not every relationship will change. What keeps us from understanding thi...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken 70 years ago, yesterday, on Sunday, the 8th of April, 1945, just as he completed a worship service at Schoenberg prison.  He was hung sometime within the next 24 hours. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906.  As an outstanding student, he became lecturer in theology.  When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer championed the cause of the Confessing Church, the center of Christian resistance of Nazism.  He later organized and led the underground seminary at Finkenwalde for the Confessing Church.  His Life Together (for which I've recently written a study guide) is an account of the Christian community at the seminary that sounds so unlike typical German education, precisely because Bonhoeffer took the faith seriously.  In 1939, his brother-in-law introduced him to a group of educated Germans dedicated to overthrowing Hitler, and in an effort to avoid military service, secured him a place in the Abwehr (the German military intellig...

After watching my wife trapped in an exchange between faculty today, I have a bold thesis to put out there, and then attempt to defend. My thesis is this:  Educational policies are only meant to dehumanize the educational process, and in that way, these same educational policies are demonic. Anyone who's been in higher education for really any amount of time has encountered this truth, even as we as a culture (in higher education) seem unwilling to name it as a Principality and Power.  We've all encountered those professors who seem unwilling to understand the questions asked of them by a student.  We've all encountered those administrators who fail to hear the underlying woe of emails sent to those professors in an effort to have our concerns heard.  We've all been shuffled back and forth between offices, with policies and procedures handed to us, without any real listening taking place.  The tragedy of the student -- for my wife! -- is that those policie...

Reading Scripture is such a startling thing for me. Every year -- you'd think I'd be used to this by now -- I encounter the stories of Easter morning, startled awake by what these stories proclaim. You'd imagine Easter to be the one morning on which everyone is fearless. But Mark -- the oldest Gospel we have -- ends this way in the earliest manuscripts: When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body.  Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?" But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away.  As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are...

Some years ago, as I was reading through Augustine's sermons, I came across this wonderful imagery.  First, the Latin: Exsultavit diabolus quando mortuus est Christus, et ipsa morte Christi est diabolus victus, tanquam in muscipula escam accepit. Gaudebat ad mortem, quasi praepositus mortis. Ad quod gaudebat, inde illi tensum est.  Muscipula diaboli, crux Domini:  esca qua caperetur, mors Domini. Then my translation: The devil rejoiced when Christ died, but by this very death of Christ the devil was defeated and vanquished, as if he had swallowed the bait in a mousetrap.  He rejoiced in Christ's death, like a bailiff (of the prison) of death.  What he rejoiced in was his own undoing.  The cross of the Lord was the devil's mousetrap:  The bait by which he was caught, the Lord's death. Let that imagery sink in for a minute. "The cross is the devil's mousetrap." It sounds so foreign to modern ears.  But it's a beautiful way to think of...

The Isenheim Altarpiece is one of those images I never can shake. Neither could Karl Barth.  Of the piece, he once wrote: The model of the biblical witness in his unity of form is John the Baptist, who stands so notably at midpoint between the Old Testament and the New, between the prophets and the apostles ...  In this connection one might recall John the Baptist in Grünewald's Crucifixion, especially his prodigious index finger.  Could anyone point away from himself more impressively and completely? Today is Good Friday.  So today, this image is back in my theological imagination, for the boney finger that continues to point at Jesus on the cross and insist:  There, this is the salvation of the world. I was reminded of this piece today, as I sat in a meeting with other clergy, who were lamenting the death of the "institutional church".  Mainline denominations, as folks may want to notice, have been on the decline at least since the 1970s. ...

I didn't have high expectations for Jeff Goins' new book, The Art of Work:  A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do .  I've read his other books and genuinely found them nice, but nothing memorable. And as I started The Art of Work , I wasn't too highly impressed.  Lots of folks I see struggle with their life's work.  They struggle with the gap between what really interests us -- where our passions lie, and how we earn a paycheck.  In many instances, we work to pay the bills so that we can pursue our true interest.  Others know their current career path is not their passion, but cannot pinpoint where their true passion lies.  Are we living to work or working to live?  Are we spending our work hours doing something that fulfills us?  Are working at a career that is exactly what we were created to do, or have we pushed our dreams aside to face the reality of a 9 to 5? Those are the questions I expected Goins to address....