The Little Friar

Romans 6 repeatedly blows my mind. "Surely you know that when were baptized into union with Christ Jesus, we were baptized into union with his death.  By our baptism, then, we were buried with him and shared his death" (6.3-4a). Right there it is.  In the Bible.  I'm not making it up.  To be baptized with Jesus Christ is to die.  It's to die a certain kind of death -- death with Christ .  And it's to be buried a certain kind of burial -- buried with Christ .  But if that is so, it means that, appearances notwithstanding, in baptism our deaths are now behind us.  Which, in turn, means, that we are released from our obsession with death, our fear of death, our denial of death, all of which speaks of our enslavement to death -- from which baptism frees us.  For not only is death now behind us, above all life is now ahead of us.  But again, a very specific kind of life:  It is life in Christ .   For as Paul continues:...

A quote from Bonhoeffer's Ethics : The miracle of Christ's resurrection has overturned the idolization of death that rules among us.  Where death is final, fear of it combines with defiance.  Where death is final, earthly life is all or nothing.  Defiant striving for earthly eternities goes together with a careless playing with life, anxious affirmation of life with an indifferent contempt for life.  Nothing betrays the idolization of death more clearly than when an era claims to build for eternity, and yet life in that era is worth nothing, when big words are spoken about a new humanity, a new world, a new society that will be created, and all this newness consists only in the annihilation of existing life.  The radicality of this Yes and No to earthly life reveals that only death counts.  To rake in everything or to throw away everything, this is the attitude of one who believes fanatically in death.

I have a confession to make:  I love talking to dead people.  This is why today is one of the most spiritual days in the Church's calendar to me.  Just beneath the Easter Triduum -- Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday -- sits the "November triduum" of All Hallows' Eve, All Saints', All Souls'. I love talking to dead people.   Some years ago, as part of my ordination process, I was asked to pick three important spiritual writers who shaped me.  I responded:  "Julian of Norwich, Augustine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer".  "Can't you pick someone living ?", the interviewer asked.  "I went to Duke Divinity.  They are  still living", I said.  He looked at me oddly but carried on.  I love talking to dead people.   Which explains why I'm fascinated to visit cemeteries.  I read them like I read books.  I learn from them.   I enjoy visiting cemeteries because I feel like I need to converse with the dead.  I find ...

I regularly pray for the dead, especially for the damned.  As one who's known tragedy that includes the death of those  who would be counted among their ranks, it seems the most natural thing to do.  After all, I take God to be bigger, more powerful, than anything death might be.  So I deny the theological power of things like moral luck.   But it's not strange to have folks hear those prayers for the dead and damned and object:  What's the point?   Once someone has died their fate is fixed forever, they say -- praying for them will make no difference.  Really? Christians have long seen the righteous praying for the damned, with the result that the latter were rescued from hell. I offer as evidence: 1.  The  Apocalypse of Peter , probably from Alexandria in Egypt about 135 AD.  In this text, which some early church leaders considered divinely inspired, sinners endure a period of suffering in the afterlife but will ultimately a...

It's no secret that I'm writing a book on preaching grace and "the principalities and powers".   One of the most important lessons I've taken away from thinking through this set of theological ideas took hold the fall of 1995.  I'd gone to Duke Divinity primarily to decide if I had the intellectual and spiritual courage to commit to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Which is another way of saying, I went to Duke to study with Fred Herzog.  Fred was a warm, gentle, kind sort of person.  He was a man who embodied the academic discipline -- no doubt! -- but also  the love of Christ for everyone he met, especially the poor.  Fred was a man who lived by what he said about Jesus.  But that fall, Fred died.  The course of my studies changed dramatically.  And I was left, that Monday morning, to confront evil.  If the truth of Fred's life meant anything, I thought that evening as I prayed the Evening Prayer office, it meant that  the ...

Some years ago, as a pastor, I was called upon to give Ann a Christian burial.   I'd gotten to know her only months before.  So I needed to talk to friends and family, to get a picture of her life.  Ann, you see, had committed suicide.   This is Ann's story, and what she taught me.  Ann's father deserted her when she was 3.  Her mother filled his void with a number of temporary replacements.  But they always saw Ann as "under foot".  She was discarded.  Passed around family members, shuffled from town to town, school to school.  She made acquaintances.  No friends.  Not enough stability.  So at 17, she created her own stability.  She latched onto the first man who'd give her attention.  She married young, and poorly.  He abandoned her eventually, with four kids, no job, no home, no money.  Her dreams withered.  She survived as best she could.  Bad jobs, followed by worse ones.  Abusive bo...

" In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within, one's own death, the free death of daily dying with Jesus Christ.  Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will.  Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live within us.  Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without.  Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ.  Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, 'It is finished.'"  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"[God] knows the Nothingness.  He knows that which he did not elect or will as the creator.  He know Chaos and its terror.  He knows its advantage over his creature.  He knows how inevitably it imperils his creature.  Yet he is Lord over that which imperils his creature.  Against him, the Nothingness has no power of its own.  And he has sworn faithfulness to his threatened creature.  In creating it he has covenanted himself with it in solidarity.  He would rather let himself be injured and humiliated in making the assault and repulse of Nothingness his own concern than leave his creature alone in this affliction.  He deploys all his glory in the work of his deepest condescension.  He intervenes in the struggle between Nothingness and the creature as if he were not God but himself a weak and threatened and vulnerable creature.  This is how God himself comes on the scene." -- Karl Barth,  Church Dogmatics  III/3, p. 358...

Sigmund Freud once wrote that the only feeling that doesn't lie is  anxiety .  This is a hard thing for us to hear, because few feelings terrify us more than anxiety.  Anxiety disrupts our carefully constructed and managed zones of comfort and serves to remind is that there's a world beyond the edges of our noses.  In other words, anxiety is the way way we're affected by the reality we can't change, the things that just won't go away.   That's why it's so hard to repress anxiety.  Sure, we medicate it, attempt to hide it.  But it's still there.  We can pretend it's not there.  That's one of the luxuries of modern life.   If we don't like seeing tragedy, just change the channel.  If we don't like hearing about all the deaths in the world, there's XM Radio.  If you don't like all that talk you hear in church about sin, repentance and following Jesus, you can always stay home and watch Joel Osteen and feel much better about y...

Speaking about death  and dying  is a problem for Christians these days.  "What a way to go" is a phrase I heard several times yesterday.  And it seems odd to me.  Death is all around us.  Not that we don't try to beat it -- by ignoring it.  We do.  We belittle it.  We joke about death.  Like WC Fields, we'd love to find "a loophole" to the Great Judgment and Equalizer that is death.  But there isn't.  I know why we Christians do it.  Because we're what I call " practical atheists ".   We joke about death.  Some of the funniest stories I've ever heard are funeral anecdotes recounted by the drivers of hearses on the way to and from the funeral home.  People have  always  joked about death, because people have always  feared  death, and jokes and laughter are a way of whistling in the dark on the way to Hamlet's "undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns".  But thing...

Clayton Lockett was convicted in 1999 of the murder of Stephanie Neiman.  Lockett was also convicted of the violent rape of Neiman's friend.  Both of them had disturbed Lockett, who'd broken into Neiman's home in a robbery.  According to the prosecution, Neiman had been buried alive and left to die.   Lockett's "botched" execution in Oklahoma last night has sparked the American debate over the death penalty.  This post is not  about coming down on one side or another of that debate.  Nor is it an attempt to defend Lockett.   Instead, I want to reflect theologically  on the death penalty.  I do intend to present a stark theological account for Christians  against the death penalty.  I opened with the storied facts of Lockett's conviction.  But let's be honest, for we Christians there's no way those facts can cover over the sheer, bloody horror.  I'm not recounting the plot of a novel or some movie.  This isn't CSI...

1.  Some years ago, among the examinations of postulants for ordination, I interviewed a young lady, a seminary graduate (!) who confessed doubts about the resurrection of Jesus.  When I pressed her -- But what'll you preach on Easter Sunday? for starters -- she admitted that "resurrection" is a theological category that doesn't make sense.  It isn't "logical".  And I have to admit, on one level I agree.  Me issuing forth theological musings about the resurrection will have every Christian poet rolling over in their graves.  The mysterious demands open mouthed, gaping astonishment, then doxology, then  theo logic.  Forgive me, great poets, where I trespass here.  2.  The best apologetic for the resurrection is Law & Order  or Perry Mason .  The gospel authors invite gospel witnesses to take a public stand,  elicit their testimonies, cross-examine them, explain away any inconsistencies or contradictions, dismiss the cou...