The Little Friar

As a pastor, one of my favorite parables of Jesus was the parable of the sower found in Matthew 13.  And Robert Capon's Kingdom, Grace, Judgment:  Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus is perhaps the best commentary on those parables.  My pastoral imagination was shaped by the way in which Capon interpreted the parable. Extravagance.  Without caution, the sower throws the seed wherever it may fall.  Extravagance is the only word that I can think of to describe the scene of the sower.  Slinging the seed without caution, without calculation. There is an extravagance in that act.  Regardless of the soil, the seed is sown.  The seed doesn't always take root.  Yet, the sower casts the seed in anticipation of the harvest.  Extravagance is a good word. Grace is a good word as well.   Unmerited gift.  Like that sower of the seed, God's "seed" is cast wherever it might fall, regardless of the soil it ...

Lee Eclov's Pastoral Graces:  Reflections on the Care of Souls is one of those rare books for pastors in a world of books written for pastors.  It actually holds those of us who are exhausted shepherds accountable for our shepherding.  Not leading.  Not preaching.  Not administration.  But sheperding, caring and counseling as pastors. "Pastors, like all believers, are agents of grace", maintains Eclov.  And that statement is itself a simple summary of Pastoral Graces .  And Eclov should know.  His experience as a pastor spans 30 years.  Eclov insists on a classic insight -- as old as Tennent's "Danger of an Unconverted Ministry":  That pastors must learn to grapple with the new-found supernatural gifts of God, to grow in the process of dispensing grace of God even as they are receiving grace, and to practice grace giving in the communities in which they minister.  The best kind of story is how pastors tell of God's grace...

I've fielded this question often enough over the past few days, that I should go on record here with my response.  And in order to give my response, let me begin with a story.  On Sunday April 21, 1912,  Karl Barth preached a sermon entitled "On the Sinking of the Titanic ".  The "official" text of the sermon is Psalm 103.15-17, but the actual text of the sermon -- in terms of its homiletical focus -- is something else entirely.  Those who know me, understand why I'm tempted to lambast Barth's text.  And why I would be uncomfortable with this sermon in toto .  But before I go ripping his sermon to shreds, some historical context.  In the spring of 1912, Barth had been out of seminary for about a year and was about a year from getting married.  This is clearly not the Barth of his 1919 Romans commentary and he's decades away from his mature, voluminous, magisterial theological Church  Dogmatics  which remained unfinished when he...