The Little Friar

Robert Morris' Truly Free:  Breaking the Snares that So Easily Entangle attempts to answer some important questions:  If Christians are supposed to find freedom in Christ, why does life continue to feel so burdened down?  Why do some Christians continue to deal with the same sin? Morris begins where any good spiritual theology begins -- with the goodness of God known in Jesus Christ.  That brings Morris to deal with issues that we don't talk about so often in the modern world -- questions like the demonic and its activity.  But unlike so many poorly developed theologies of the demonic, Morris turns to the stories of the gospels in an attempt to highlight how really enchanted our world is for Christians.  And he does this by speaking words of grace to our world. In the remaining chapters, Truly Free looks at those specific "snares" that are such a part of Christian living in our world:  Pride, bitterness, greed, lust and the snares of the mind...

Trisha Yearwood's Trisha's Table:  My Feel-Good Favorites for a Balanced Diet is one of those spate of recipe books produced by television chefs -- in this case, also a famous Country Music artist -- capitalizing on the demands of an increasingly health-conscious world.  In her third cookbook, Yearwood has given us a book where the emphasis is squarely on lighter options. While Yearwood herself notes she's no nutritionist,this collection relies more heavily on fresh produce and less sugar.  That means some recipes that follow the trend -- like kale chips, raw power balls, and quinoa burgers.  But most of the recipes in this volume show more invention than I've seen in lots of other cookbooks of this variety -- things like a sweet potato salad with Greek yogurt and angel-hair pasta with avocado pesto. Yearwood here takes a decidedly more contemporary approach than in her previous books.  There are plenty of full-on indulgences for her "20 percent" d...

My friend Angela asked that I write a bit about what Christians might have to say to the issue of suicide.  I'm going to go about this in two ways:  First, I want to lay out a bit of the theology behind what we Christians have had to say historically.  Then, I want to tell the story of how I as a pastor handled a suicide's funeral, in an effort to chart a course for a conversation about how Christians might think about suicide into the future. First, the history. Let's be honest here:  Suicide is confusing for Christians.  Although historically, Christians have thought that Scripture is clear in its disapproval, the few instances of suicide in Scripture make this case far less clear. Must we necessarily believe that those who have taken their own life in order to end suffering are somehow damned to eternal torment?  Not if you give Scripture a clear reading. Of the seven or so suicides reported in Scripture, most familiar are Saul, Samson, and Ju...

My friend John asked that I offer some reflections on those prayers that seem to cross theological and denominational lines:  What I call "just" prayers. As I've discerned these types of prayers, they're perhaps one of the most consistent prayer practices in America.  You know the sort, I'm sure.  "Lord, I just want you to ..."  "God, we just need ..."  "Jesus, if you would just ..." What these prayers actually do, of course, is affix an adjective -- just -- that essentially minimizes the very petition of the prayer.  So the question left to ask is:  Why would we want to minimize God's activity in the world?  Why diminish the very thing we're asking God to do? That simple qualifier, while probably nothing more than a verbal "filler" -- allowing our mouths to get ahead of our hearts and brains in prayer -- betrays a false humility.  We think it makes God's response more special or meaningful.  But in rea...

David Wilkinson's When I Pray What Does God Do? deals with some weighty questions that are at the heart of Christian faith in the twenty-first century:  What happens when we pray?  Does God always answer?  Why does it sometimes feel like he doesn't?  Scientific developments and daily encounters with the pain of unanswered prayer can leave us wondering what to make of the whole topic. Wilkinson -- a scientist and a theologian -- explores these thorny issues, sharing his insights and struggles as he engages with scientific questions, biblical examples, and his own, sometimes painful, experiences of answered and unanswered prayer. Sadly, so many folks I know treat their prayers as if they're quarters to be entered into the great Universal Soda Machine -- when pressing the right buttons, they expect to receive what they're asking for.  In our prayer lives, we reduce God to a remote doting figure.  Wilkerson, though, will have none of it.  He highlight...

Gary Smith and David Howard's Interpreting the Prophetic Books:  An Exegetical Handbook is a well-written and -arranged introduction to the various issues in interpreting the prophetic books of the Old Testament.  Chapter 1 covers style, genre and parallelism, etc.  The author's illustrations of parallelism in the Prophets is well done.   Chapter 2 provides good brief notes on each book, including major the themes.  Historical setting for each prophet is brought out in chapter three. Conservative dates are adhered to, which is reassuring (Joel is considered pre-exilic; Obadiah as exilic). Chapter 4 covers all the "Interpretive Issues".  I am particularly impressed with Smith and Howard's discussion of the differences between "literal" and "figurative" interpretation, and they present a balanced view of the differences between conditionally near and far prophecy.  But perhaps the best parts of the entire book are found between pages 13...

I've resisted saying anything about what I think about yesterday's decision from the Supreme Court about gay marriage. That's because I don't have a desire to promote bad theology. Most of we Christians have allowed our culture to set the terms of this discussion.  And I've been refusing to participate in the dialogue precisely for that reason.  But too many folks have been demanding that I'm missing a pastoral opportunity by that refusal.  So let me lay out my problems here, in hopes that we Christians can recast the way we talk about our practices, like marriage, on more positive footing, rather than simply reacting to the terms already created by our culture. In his memoir Denial:  My Twenty-Five Years Without a Soul , the gay journalist Jonathan Rauch says that there once existed a frightened young man tortured with the certainty that there was no place in the world for the love he experienced.  That man was Rauch, and there was no home for hi...

I remember singing this song as a child.  As a child, I remember hearing a lot about "inviting Jesus into [my] heart".  About saying "the Sinner's Prayer" and hearing, at Sunday School, all those warnings about what would happen if we didn't have Jesus in our hearts. Now, I find all that language rather jarring. I know now that that language is just too thin. I'm rather disillusioned about the capacities of my heart.  It simply isn't all that spacious enough a place to accommodate a guy like Jesus.  Or, more accurately, it's not a place he'd want to take up residence. When I think of my heart as a house for Jesus, I now see it in a rather different way than I saw it as a child:  To start with, it's far too small.  If Jesus is going to live here, there will have to be extensions.  And it's all looking pretty rundown.  The roof leaks.  Mold is growing on the walls.  The front door is hanging off its hinges.  There are...

1.  The doctrine of penal substitution is a theory -- or, better, a model -- of the atonement, an extended metaphor that narrates how God reconciled the world to himself in Christ.  It is one model, but it is not the only model.  Indeed, without radical recalibration, it is a theologically repugnant model with potentially vicious and disastrous social and political implications .  For now, however, the point is this: while the church dogmatically defined its Christology at the Council of Chalcedon (451), it left its soteriology underdetermined.  Therefore penal substitution -- or any other doctrine of the atonement -- should not be deployed as a litmus test of faith.  Stan Hauerwas says, "If you need a theory to worship Christ, worship your f---ing theory!" (edited for content). 2.  The doctrine of penal substitution finds its classical expression in the theology of John Calvin , and its definitive form in the theology of Charles Hodge...

1.  Barth's question is the question that plagues what theologians (whether more should or should not be said?) say about angels:  "How are we to steer a way… between the far too interesting mythology of the ancients and the far too uninteresting demythologisation of most of the moderns?" ( Church Dogmatics III.3, p. 369). 2.  As a theologian, I love angels.  And I love theologians who have something to say about angels.  Because, to be honest, so few modern theologians know what to say. 3.  That's because angels, I think, present to us the barrier that all theological epistemology encounters:  How can we know what to say?  Angels are as inaccessible as God himself, so angels present yet another of those moments when, in front of mystery, theologians are left gaping for language in a way that the Spirit then transforms into prayer. 4.  Angels, quite simply, don't fit into our world.  It's clear from the biblical narratives th...

You must understand this, my beloved:  let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.  Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.  For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.  But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act -- they will be blessed in their doing. If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.  Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in t...

Joanna Weaver's Lazarus Awakening  Finding Your Place in the Heart of God continues the deep biblical study that began in her Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World:  Finding Intimacy with God .  This time, she turns her attention to the relationship between Jesus and Lazarus and examines all the ways in which our lives are stifled -- even dead -- in large and small ways.  As she peels apart the layers of the story of the friendship of Jesus and Lazarus, she reveals the biblical message at the heart of that friendship:  "Only Christ can perform the spiritual CPR we so desperately need".  Jesus calls us out of the deaths of our lives -- just as he called Lazarus. The book -- and the accompanying study guide and DVD -- defines what that friendship between Jesus and his disciples, like Lazarus, looks like.  Weaver constantly keeps one question in front of us, "What kind of friend am I?" and offers tools for evaluating the nature of our frien...

If the elements of the Lord's Supper, bread and wine, represent -- symbolically (Protestants) or actually (Catholics) -- the body and blood of Jesus then we should note that the body and blood of Jesus was given and broken and poured out for us unconditionally , while we were yet sinners.  Isn't that, at root, what the Lord's Supper symbolizes? If so, to exclude "sinners" from the body and blood of Jesus -- his outpouring love -- and reserve it for the "saints" seems to set into motion a legalism that I worry about. The body and blood of Jesus was poured out on Calvary for the whole world as Jesus says "Father forgive them".  That is what is celebrated at the Lord's Supper -- the wild, wasteful love of God poured out upon an unrepentant, ignorant and violent humanity.  You don't put gatekeepers around that.  You don't put Keep Out signs around the sacred wounds of Jesus. Let us not worry about wasting the blood ...

By now, nearly everyone is aware of the horrible violence perpetrated against the congregation at Emanuel AME Church in historic Charleston, South Carolina.  I've seen a few responses to this evil on Facebook that bear some push-back. 1.  This was not an act of " senseless violence ".  Calling the violence "senseless" implies that the shooter has no moral agency.  What occurred on Wednesday night was not "senseless violence" -- it was a cold, calculated, act of racial hatred.  (While I love Anderson Cooper and watch his news program nearly every day, he's really dropped the ball here.) 2.  Some have suggested that the shooter "obviously" suffers from some " mental illness ".  Thing is, mental illness doesn't make us kill one another .  Mental illness demands to be treated with compassion.  When we call this event "senseless violence" or attribute some "mental illness" to the shooter, we blur the ...

The NIV Dad's Devotional Bible , with notes by Robert Wolgemuth, posed so many possibilities when I first saw it in the publisher's book list. This version means to update an earlier (1999) edition, and bring notes from a noted layman, Wolgemuth. Unlike a Study Bible, The NIV Dad's Devotional Bible has complete pages of biblical text with the minimal-style NIV textual notes in the bottom margin. Font size is big enough, although the paper quality is less than it could be -- any notes the reader might add would easily bleed-through. Wolgemuth's "notes" come in the form of 260 daily readings, one for each weekday, inspired by some portion of the previous chapter or two, sometimes more, of reading. The conclusion has a number of other "helps", including a short summary of the main point of each book of the Bible with a focus specifically on its value for a dad. There's also a helpful section of questions kids might ask, with useful helps in a...

Susie Davis' Unafraid:  Trusting God in an Unsafe World is a timely, prophetic word for Christians who find themselves in a world overshadowed by fear.  When she was 14, blooger-turned-author Susie Davis observed a tragic school shooting.  Following that shooting, she became immersed in a personal fear that was fed by a culture of fear. Davis, following that teenage episode, lived with panic attacks, anxiety, and nightmares for years.  As she grew older, her coping mechanisms grew with her:  Larger food portions and developing daily safety patterns. But Davis also discovered the danger that fear itself poses to those of us who follow Jesus.  In her own words -- in words that take my breath at their prophetic honesty:  "Fear won't let the heart settle, even into happy places.  Fear uproots the smallest root and won't let happiness grow."  What she offers in Unafraid are very particular practices for disciples. In our own day, Unfraid...

Andreas Kostenberger and Richard Patterson's For the Love of God's Word:  An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation is an impressive and accessible abridgement of their earlier work, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation .  Kostenberger and Patterson here call a hermeneutical triad that comprises of historical contexts, literary genres, and theological implications.  This edition simplifies so much of Introduction 's contents, but it also reduces by nearly half those items that will be of interest only to masters and doctoral students, making For the Love of God's Word a useful text for undergraduate courses on biblical interpretation.  With clear outlines and suggestions for learning, each chapter is refreshed to be more reader- and user-friendly and easier to reference. This book begins where every text on biblical interpretation should begin:  Humility .  For the Love of God's Word will train a new generation of exegetical amateurs (in the b...

Not so long ago, I was involved in a church's discernment of the future of its ministry, in which this particular congregation envisioned "growth" as its primary mission.  When I pushed back about what sorts of growth they saw God calling them to, the examples I was given had more to do with looking like the larger urban churches that offer unique ministries like a coffee shop.  There's something romantic about that notion of church-done-large.  Instead, I was reminded of a line from RS Williams, an Anglican priest from Wales, who once wrote:  "I was vicar of large things in a small parish". Jesus' parable from Mark 4.26-34 is hardly the story most folks in the Church Growth Movement latch onto when they're envisioning their vocation as congregations. Jesus never said that the Kingdom of God comes through magnificent institutions which have spectacular results.  He doesn't say to the Church:  "You're a great army marching out into...

Jacqueline Suskin's Go Ahead & Like It is a quirky joy of a book.  As a self-help book, Go Ahead & Like It brings together the wisdom of reflecting on life by making lists.  But make no doubt about it, Suskin has given us more than a self-help book. Go Ahead & Like It also trains the imagination to exercise in the world, by doing things like free drawing their favorite cartoon.  By observing the world, and listing those things we "like" about it. I realize, of course, that "liking" things in our day is so passive.  But Go Ahead & Like It is anything but Facebook passivity.  It's a course in self-exploration and self-expression.  The book is filled with so much wonder and awe that I want to continue discovering the beauty in the world on my own. And this book is still more, because the visuals are absolutely breath-taking.  The lists are themselves layered explorations of the world Suskin so likes.  And she's done a mar...

Randy Petersen's The Printer and the Preacher:  Ben Franklin, George Whitefield, and the Surprising Friendship that Invented America is a rare thing.  It is a biography of a friendship.  What's more, this friendship is among the rarest in American history:  That of the devout Great Awakening preacher, George Whitefield, and the Deist, Ben Franklin.  This friendship demonstrates all the wonders of a genuine friendship because both men sustained that friendship despite their extremely different ideas and views.  (A rare thing in our culture.) The Printer and the Preacher is a rare story.  I don't recall having ever heard it before I read Petersen's account.  But what you find here are biographies of each, and a larger narrative of their friendship (complete with letters exchanged between them).  Despite their religious differences, the fiery Calvinist preacher and the deist printer shared some fundamental aspects that made their friendsh...

My spirit is broken this afternoon. I've endured my share of accusations in life; ministers have more than any of us would want to admit.  But this afternoon, the accusations have been much more veiled and come from a fellow minister often enough that I simply grieve at how to respond. "The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (Psalm 51.17).  When to do the will of God means that even my Christian brethren will not understand and I remember that "neither did Jesus' brothers believe in him" (John 7.5) and I bow my head to obey and accept the misunderstanding -- this is my brokenness this afternoon.  When I am misrepresented or deliberately misinterpreted, and I remember that Jesus was falsely accused, but He "held his peace" (Matthew 26.63) ; and I bow my head to accept the accusation without trying to justify myself -- this is my brokenness this afternoon.  When another is pr...

Life, blessing, joy, peace, loving one's enemies and forgiving them -- this is the way of Jesus. Death, limited resources, toil, discord, violence -- this is the Roman way. Now, ask yourself, which is the American way.

Schleiermacher notoriously relegated the Trinity to an appendix in his Christian Faith .  And, since then, folks have been grasping at straws in an attempt to understand why the Trinity matters for Christians.  Barth, on the other hand, began his Church Dogmatics with a recognition that all Christian speech is trinitarian.  That you can't be Christian without speaking trinitarianly about God. So let me lay out how I think the Trinity really matters.  And how the Trinity disciplines Christians speaking about God. As the infinite Source of all things, God totally transcends the creation. Yet God's otherness is not remote from creation.  God's being is also Word -- infinitely self-communicating, infinitely accessible. And God's being is Spirit -- infinitely reaching out, infinitely gathering, infinitely opening creatures to God's self-communication as Word. Because God is the transcendent Source of all creation, no language can fully describe God's real...

Bradley Jersak's A More Christlike God:  A More Beautiful Gospel is a book for which I've waited for a long, long time!  This wonderful book thinks deeply and well about who God is and what God is like -- by pointing repeatedly and always at Jesus Christ.  With all the wisdom of a pastor-theologian, Jersak has written what will become a contemporary classic.  He begins in Part 1 by drawing the contrast between two competing images of God:  Will and love.  In Part 2 he focuses on exploring and expanding the image of God as love in the light of the cross.  Finally, in Part 3 he turns to address how this picture transforms our understanding of a wrathful deity. Part 1 is driven by one key question:  "What is God like?"  So many of us grow up with an image of God as fearful, wrathful, angry -- or as Jersak puts it, "The 'Mighty Smiter'" (pp. 32ff).  There are other false images of God that often pervade:  The doting grandfather...

Ann J. Temkin's Sight in the Sandstorm:  Jesus in His World and Mine is part-memoir, part biblical-narrative.  It's an imaginative retelling of Jesus' story from the New Testament that is mingled with a telling of Temkin's own life story.  In that way, Sight in the Sandstorm is a book about the Christian spiritual life that tells our stories in the only way we can tell our stories -- by telling Jesus' stories, too. Temkin places Jesus in his particular first-century Jewish context, in a way that highlights Jesus' prophetic voice of truth -- the truth about God's love.  The biblical message sounds so clearly in Temkin's writing, that I can close my eyes and imagine hearing and seeing and sensing the stories that often seem so flat on the pages of the New Testament.  Sight in the Sandstorm brings into such clear vision who Jesus is and what Jesus says. But more than simply recounting Jesus' story, Sight in the Sandstorm recounts Temkin's ...

Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead.  Don't be obsessed with getting your own advantage.  Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. -- Paul, from Philippians 2 * * *  I am tired of myself. And not, let me say, in any morbid, psychopathological sense. (And why do we so quickly go there? I've become impatient with the mental health frame and worry. How everything is shadowed by diagnoses and the fear of being mentally ill. Because really, who among us is healthy? Let me be sick for a moment. If that is what this is. Which it isn't.) As I said. I'm tired. Of myself. Not sad. Not depressed. Not suicidal. Not dark. Just tired. Tired of being an ego. Having an ego. I'm tired of filtering everything through myself. What I like. What I agree with. What I don't like. What I don't agree with. Who put me in charge of sifting the world? Myself. Which goes to my point. Why is it my unthought assumption that everything...

Someone I know has this rather annoying habit of asking:  "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I say it's an "annoying" habit, because he asks it with such a degree of regularity because there's a subtext to the question.  The question assumes that my life is largely a compilation of the choices I make. This annoying question is related to that other annoying question I was often asked at school, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  This question, too, has that subtext -- and it's a subtext I knew then -- as now -- wasn't one with which I agreed.  We rarely get to be the "master at the controls" of our life.  Sure, our actions and decisions are a part of our life.  But I'm not as sure they're as big a part as folks who ask this question seem to think. Because let's be honest here:  I never set out to be who I am now.  And I'm pretty sure that whatever the future holds, my role in it is not quit...