The Little Friar

He had never felt that ministry -- or God -- was about making things happy.  He'd long felt that the heart of ministry -- and the heart of God -- is about making things beautiful, even when they can't be happy. --from Samuel Wells & Marcia A. Owen's Living Without Enemies   + + +  It's awesome, though it shouldn't be surprising, that God still speaks to the Church through the scriptures; that the Gospel stories, written so long ago, address contemporary issues and troubling questions. Take Luke 13.1-9. A number of Galileans offering sacrifice at the Temple had been murdered by the local Roman police. (Pilate was a particularly petulant and pitiless prefect.) In another, unrelated incident in south Jerusalem, a building, the Tower of Siloam, had collapsed, crushing to death 18 people. Don't events like these happen all the time? Does a week go by when, somewhere, there hasn't been a mass murder, or a gas-explosion or a house-fir...

Someone asked me today about Matthew 17 and the exorcism Jesus performs after descending the mountain after his transfiguration (17.14-18): When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him.  "Lord, have mercy on my son," he said.  "He has seizures and is suffering greatly.  He often falls into the fire or into the water.  I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him." "You unbelieving and perverse generation," Jesus replied, "how long shall I stay with you?  How long shall I put up with you?  Bring the boy here to me."  Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed at that moment. He was puzzling over Jesus' initial response to the father.  "You unbelieving and perverse generation how long shall I stay with you?  How long shall I put up with you?" Rather than being moved by compassion Jesus seems upset and irritated.  But why?  And with whom? Though Jesu...

Randy Southern's 52 Uncommon Dates:  A Couple's Adventure Guide for Praying, Playing, and Staying Together is a book I was excited to get into my hands.  After all, any book purporting to deal with the way Christian couples relate to one another that has an Introduction written by Gary Chapman simply must be a good book. The book itself claims to be a guide for developing a "prayerful and playful connection" in a way that feels natural for couples to schedule and relate to real life. And, let's be honest.  Most couples need that sort of support and mentoring. So to find a guide that focuses each date around Scripture (even when the verse chosen is sometimes chosen in a rather random way) and contains conversation starters for each date, it's not a small gift to Christians in relationships -- particularly those married.  I particularly found those conversation starters to be wonderful -- they help to open up the lines of communication in creative and ...

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity ... that was a quality God's image carried with it ... when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate.  Hate was just a failure of imagination. -- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Jackie Bledsoe's The 7 Rings of Marriage:  Your Model for a Lasting and Fulfilling Marriage explores, in detail, each stage of marriage & cleverly named them as the following:  Engagement Ring (Foundation), Wedding Ring (Commitment), DiscoveRing, PerseveRing, RestoRing, ProspeRing, and MentoRing.  He gives detailed examples from his own marriage at every ring, showcasing the good, the bad, and the ugly. That makes The 7 Rings of Marriage a breath of fresh air, because none of us are alone in the struggles to create and maintain a Christian marriage.  This is a book filled with gracious hope, that looks at the various ways in which a real couple creates a life together for each of those "rings". There are moments of raw, heavy emotion here; coupled with light-hearted humor sprinkled throughout.  Bledsoe's passion for marriage jumps off from every page, and he's not just passionate about his own marriage.  Bledsoe wants to change every Christian ...

Matthew 9.38 is often used as a call for evangelism.  "Ask the Lord of the harvest", Jesus says, "to send out workers into his harvest field".  The message folks take from this passage is to go out into a lost world (the harvest field) to win souls (harvest) for the Kingdom. This morning I was reading this passage and the fuller context caught my attention.  From Matthew 9.35-38: Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.   When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.  Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." Notice what Jesus is feeling prior to his comment about sending workers into the harvest field: "When he saw the ...

On the kerfuffle over the Pope's recent comments that seem directed at Donald Trump : Christian is both an adjective and a noun.  As an adjective, its antonym is un-Christian.  As a noun, its antonym is non-Christian.  Trump seems to have misunderstood that simple grammar lesson.  The Holy Father, however, understands that since it's both an adjective and a noun, it can be used in a variety of ways. The sad thing is that many Christians (among whom I'd sometimes count myself) are un -Christian.  It's not a direct attack on their intellectual commitments to the Christian faith, but on their actions.

Max Lucado's The Gift for All People:  Thoughts on God's Great Grace is a beautiful collection of short essays and inspirational stories that look to the foundations of the Christian faith.  They're brought together from selected passages of a number of Lucado's other books, so the material itself isn't all that new.  But the essays themselves are geared toward non-believers who may be hearing the Gospel for the first time. While Lucado writes that he hopes even seasoned Christians will take comfort in a book that reminds us of the basics of faith, this selection is a marvelous devotional on the very heart of the Christian faith:  "God's great grace". "Leaving the Porch Light On" (pp. 99-100) is my favorite.  There, Lucado writes that God is "the housewife in search of the lost coin":  Even though she has nine other coins in her possession, she will not rest until s he locates the tenth.  God is "waiting for you...

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." --Thomas a Kempis, from The Imitation of Christ

I'm sick and tired -- this is me in full rant mode ... I'm sick and tired of Christians who give atheists and agnostics a bad rap. Not because some of my friends are atheists and agnostics -- though they are.  But because I'm proud to be an atheist.  As, of course, were the first Christians, who had the term flung at them by their pagan neighbors because they didn't have a cult -- i.e. a priesthood -- and because they refused to acknowledge the deity of the emperor (which doesn't seem to present a problem to lots of American Christians these days). There are plenty of gods in which I disbelieve.  And there are plenty of other things about God of which I cannot be certain.  So count me among the atheists and agnostics about whom some Christians are willing to rant. I started at a young age -- it was in high school -- reading Nietzsche.  And there's one thing about Nietzsche (and all the other atheists and agnostics I know):  They have their reason...

Alicia Britt Chole's 40 Days of Decrease:  A Different Kind of Hunger, a Different Kind of Fast is a devotional designed specifically for Lent.  The book itself is sectioned according to 40 days of devotional Scripture readings from the Gospel of John, along with rich spiritual reflections on the sorts of "fastings" that demand more attention for Christians living in our own culture. The "fasts" here aren't your usual fasts -- chocolate, meat, internet -- but instead focus on attitudes and practices that flood modern life.  Things like regrets, avoidance, isolation, stinginess, denial.  That makes 40 Days of Decrease all the more important for 2016. The rich material on the nature of Lent, particularly for those from Christian traditions which have normally not made this season before a part of their own spiritual practice, is not to be missed, either. In all, 40 Days of Decrease is a powerful spiritual resource.  It's an amazing gift for the Ch...

Alistair Begg's Lasting Love:  How to Avoid Martial Failure is one of those books on Christian marriage that has been around for a while (I first read this book in 1997 at seminary), but it's been re-released by Moody Publishing in 2015. Begg tackles some important biblical questions about the nature of marriage:  How to prepare (chapter 2) and what dangers to avoid ("Pulling Weeds" and "Planting Hedges" -- chapters 6 & 7 are the most important in the book!).  It's one of the more accessible books about marriage, easy to read and straightforward.  Lasting Love also contains the stories of real life marriages, so it's not filled with fluff. But I do wish the material in this re-release had been updated.  The bibliography doesn't contain anything after 1996 -- and there's been so much done on Christian marriage in those twenty years.  In particular, I wish Begg had interacted more with writers like Gary Thomas and Timothy Keller.  W...

Ashleigh Slater's Team Us:  Marriage Together deals with the real life of a heavy word -- marriage .  In our culture, marriage is mostly a word that conjures up negative images and we've all heard the horror stories of that "life lived together" the end in tragedy.  That's why some of my closest friends run the other way at the sheer mention of the word.  Or why others are fighting and trying their best to maintain a vital marriage. Not many folks, though, want to share the real stories of real marriages, especially not the loses and weakest points.  That's what makes Slater's Team Us an important book.  She doesn't shy away from sharing the ups and downs of marriage -- the kinks she and her husband Ted had to work through during the first few years of marriage, the financial obstacles and victories, and example after example of how working together as a team instead of against one another is far more beneficial. When you're married, yo...

Bearing Witness:  Stories of Martyrdom and Costly Discipleship is a collection of brief biographies that is part of the Bearing Witness Stories Project, a collaborative project of Anabaptists that continues the tradition of telling the stories of costly discipleship that began with Thieleman van Braght's 1685 collection of martyr stories, Martyrs Mirror . While Martyrs Mirror remains inspiring and relevant for the stories of Christian discipleship, it doesn't include the testimonies of the Anabaptists who have also suffered for their faith in the years since 1685.  That's what makes Bearing Witness such an important collection.  When I first read this collection, my immediate response was one of being driven to prayer in thanksgiving.  These stories tell the life of faithful discipleship from the Church's earliest days (Stephen, Polycarp, etc.) to the stories of those of the Radical Reformation (John Hus, William Tyndale, etc.).  But there are more mod...

Eberhard Arnold's The Prayer God Answers , with a response essay by Richard Foster, is a brief modern spiritual classic.  In it, Arnold, in his pastoral style, explores some key spiritual concepts:  What should Christians pray for?  Why does it seem God hasn't answered my prayer?  Arnold begins with Jesus' own prayer, and highlights how Jesus' prayer life is nurtured in relationship with God and others.  This biblical vision of the nature and practice of prayer is at once personal, but exposes the cultural lie that makes prayer individual.  Instead, Arnold rightly insists that Christian prayer is fundamentally the most social and corporate act we can do -- that praying connects us as humans to one another and to God. That relational view of prayer exposes some of the obstacles Christians experience in prayer, but it also answers an important question that I hear often:  Does God really hear us?  And it informs the biblical vision that prayer i...

The words. These tell the story of our curse. The mark of Cain upon our foreheads. Hell never was our punishment. Dust you are to dust you shall return. We were severed from life . Death , this is our punishment. The ash. Burnt black residual of fire, sign of lamentation and grief for all that we have torn in the world and left bleeding. Dawn of turning and advent of conversion. Repent! Cries a voice in the wilderness. Make your crooked heart straight. The kingdom of God is near. The sign. Etched upon our skin by the church to contradict all that must die. Emblem of paradox. Intersection of life and death. Mark of unexpected and surprising grace. Life after death , this is our destination.

I first read William Gurnall's Puritan classic, The Christian in Complete Armour in college.  Gurnall was rector of St Peter and St Paul's Church, Lavenham in Suffolk and offered the classic text as a series of regular lessons on Ephesians 6.10-20 as a pastor.  Initially offered in three volumes, published between 1655 and 1662, The Christian in Complete Armour went on to become an English spiritual classic, and was praised by folks like Richard Baxter (whose own Reformed Pastor has had such an impact on my ministry) and John Newton (author of the hymn, "Amazing Grace", and abolitionist, whose two books by his bedside were the Bible and this collection of lectures).  The great English preacher JH Spurgeon called The Christian in Complete Armour "peerless and priceless; every line full of wisdom.  The book has been preached over scores of times and is, in our judgment, the best thought-breeder in all our library". So it's hard for me to over-emp...

Gary Chapman and Harold Myra's Married and Still Loving It:  The Joys and Challenges of the Second Half is a book filled with wisdom for those couples who've been married for years -- the ones where children have gone off to college.  At least on the surface. But after having read just a few pages in, I knew that perception wasn't quite right.  Because Married and Still Loving It has wisdom for couples who've been together just a few years (Kendra and I have been married only three) or those who've been married a decade or more. Chapman and Myra may share stories of couples whose life together is entering that "second half", but the experiences highlighted in those stories will be familiar to any couple of any age.  Here, they discuss some of the most important lessons married couples still need to learn.  Lessons like: "Meeting in the middle":  Many of us are married to our polar opposites.  (I'm speaking from experience, here.) ...

Ideas that have struck me recently: How similar Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison is to Augustine's Confessions :  The posture of the Psalms; the delight in music; the significance of friendship; the search for a faith with intellectual integrity; the relentless self-investigation with its implacable observations -- the vanity of sincerity, the opacity of motivation, the hopeless instability of the ego, the macular degeneration of the mind's eye -- and its inexorable conclusion: the futility of the whole introspective project; and, finally, the longing for the cor quietum , the "I am Thine". On whether it's a sad or happy thought that now may be the best time of your life:  Either may be true, but it's rather melancholy a thought that you won't realize which is true until that moment has already passed.  Maybe this is why the Preacher's wisdom is the richest wisdom of the Old Testament. Intellectuals inevitably believe that th...

Eddie Glaude's Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul explores America's "original sin":  The Founding Fathers saw fit to weave slavery right into the very fabric of the nation via the Constitution.  Unfortunately, inequality between black and white has somehow persisted way past emancipation, despite pronouncements by political pundits that the election of the first black President had issued in a promising, post-racial era. That fundamental American belief that "all people are created equal" was subverted from the very start, says Glaude.  And in Democracy in Black he indicts a malingering white supremacy that he sees as standing between blacks and the proverbial American Dream. Instead of improving race relations, the author believes that Barack Obama's ascension to the presidency has only served to embolden bigots.   As proof, he points to "the increase in explicit racism" reflected in "the deaths of ...

Judah Smith's Jesus is For You:  Stories of God's Relentless Love is an amazing, beautiful little devotional that is a nourishment for weary souls.  It's just the book I needed lately, precisely because Smith focuses on God's grace in Jesus Christ that extends to everyone in the very darkest, most obscure moments of our lives, those moments just when we're sure that God can't possibly be for us. This, in fact, is the kind of devotional that you end up handing out to friends, simply because it's message is that powerful.  In between these 1-3 page passages are quotes from Judah Smith and Bible verses -- set on beautiful photography.  It is broken out into three parts:  "Jesus Is...," "Jesus Gives...," and "Jesus Is There When..."  Made of a durable hardback binding, this is a devotional that will continue to nourish those weary souls for years to come. __________________ Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this ...