The Little Friar

Scripture:    Mark 5:21-43 As I read this passage from Mark, Jesus' deep love for others stands out. The woman was suffering. She knew if she could just touch Jesus she would be healed. Immediately after touching him, she was freed from her suffering. Jesus said, "Daughter, your faith has healed you." These two healing stories show us that Jesus' heart is for healing things that seem impossible to heal. Today, we are called to connect and love others. Through faith we can spread the word of God by our actions. How so? Reread the promise in verse 36; what does it say? Jesus is bringing us together in the church to have us be Jesus' hands and feet and show others his deep love. Jesus shows us, by healing these two people, that this is part of who and why we are. Prayer:  Dear God, help me to do your work with my hands. I know it will not be easy, but give me the strength to go beyond my comfort zone and be the light of Jesus for others. Amen.

After nearly two years of writing a devotional for the local newspaper, I finally realized I could share those here, as well.  So, starting today, I'll post my "Good News" devotional that I write for the paper here. I've placed today's beneath the fold.

Bonhoeffer in prison -- second from the right in this photo. O God, early in the morning I cry to you. Help me to pray and gather my thoughts to you, I cannot do it alone. In me it is dark, but with you there is light; I am lonely, but you do not desert me; My courage fails me, but with you there is help; I am restless, but with you there is peace; in me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience; I do not understand your ways, but you know the way for me. Father in Heaven praise and thanks be to you for the night. This prayer has come to my mind more than once this week.

Rachel Held Evans' Inspired:  Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again is a book I've longed to read for a long time.  In it, Evans admits having gone through a phase -- much like I did about a decade ago -- where she realized that the Bible was not as cohesive as many of us would like it to be and struggling to decide what that left her with.  Through her wrestling and questions, she returns to scripture with a different view:  "These questions loosened my grip on the text and gave me permission to love the Bible for what it is, not what I want it to be". This permission, in turn, gives Evans the space to read a deeper story than one she had been taught to read.  "When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it's not -- static, perspicacious, certain, absolute -- then you're free to revel in what it is:  living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic". I had grown into a fundamenta...

Steve Bloem's The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness: A Guide for Training and Reference is an amazingly accessible help for pastors and other church leaders, who are typically the front line of daily ministry to and with those whose lives have been affected by mental illness.  Bloem, out of his years of practice in Christian counseling, offers a richly textured, deeply grounded introduction to the various mental disorders that affect human thriving.  Here, readers are not only introduced to the basics of any number of mental disorders, but also to the types of treatment options and referral responsibilities of pastors. He treats the question of medications for each individual illness, and offers a holistic Christian theology for bringing the treatment of mental illness into conversation with pastoral wisdom and Christian spiritual practice.  Perhaps the most important gift Bloem's book gives to pastors:  A helpful stress scale for measuring how much stress the...

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...

John Glynn's now-classic Commentary and Reference Survey has been a standard for students, pastors and professors who have desired to create a library from among the best resources available.  So I was excited to see what an updated version, Best Bible Books:  New Testament Resources , might offer.  And, again, I wasn't disappointed. These scholars (Glynn, Burer, Bock, and others) have shifted through commentaries, references, and specialized studies, of all the major categories in New Testament studies.  Like most collections of this sort, there are doubtless descriptions and choices with which readers will disagree, but what I love about this resource is their refusal to prioritize particular commentary sets or authors.  That shows that each individual work was evaluated on its own merits.  Their judgments are logical, and their evaluations are fair.  This is the kind of book that pastors will wear out in years to come, and is a particularly...

Dudley Delffs' The Faith of Dolly Parton:  Lessons from Her Life to Lift Your Heart is a book I didn't expect to enjoy.  Delffs weaves his own spiritual journey together with the wit and wisdom of Dolly Parton about God and faith and life.  And in the end, this book is at once gracious, funny, and spiritually edifying. I grew up in Sevier County, so Dolly Parton was a name built into the fabric of my childhood.  I attended Sevier County High -- Dolly's alma mater -- at a time when Parton had begun supporting graduates with a college scholarship.  So I've known of Parton's faith and its importance in his life and work for as long as I can remember.  Delffs' book brings a lot of the anecdotes I've heard over that lifetime into a coherent story about the difference faith makes. _______________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

In last night's news: Putting Romans 13 forward, as if it were a clear manifestation of all the ways in which Christians relate to the state government, clearly misunderstands Paul.  But, more importantly, it ignores the overwhelming way in which Christian discipleship shapes political life. If you're going to read Romans 13, you also have to read Revelation 13. Romans 13, specifically, sends chills down my spine when read in the way Jeff Sessions, and so many others in this current American administration, want me to read it.  This text has been used over the centuries to justify every conceivable kind of oppression and tyranny.  It has also been used to stifle criticism of the powers that be and to resist any effort at reform.  This passage has been quoted at Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King.  To people who hang around Jesus, to quote the Bible in the way Jeff Sessions quotes the Bible seems repressive. And it should. But it hasn't al...

Steve Daughtery's Experiments in Honesty:  Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth is a must-read!  This collections of brief chapters is a full meditation that will challenge you to see and live God's compassion and kindness in every moment -- big and small -- in life.  His writing is also one of those humble meditations on what it's like to live honestly before God and others. We all know what it's like to live dishonestly.  The shame, the hurt, the anger that masks honest humility.  But Daughtery's Experiments in Honesty will challenge those with the words of the Gospel, the Good News that God is on our side, that God is kind and honest towards us.  That God's kindness and honesty enables our own.  Readers won't find any Bible or brow beating here.  They'll only find the kindness of the God of the Gospel. _____________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review her...

Theodore Richards' The Great Re-Imagining:  Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse is nothing short of a spiritual examin of our culture's zeitgeist .  He turns the white-light of honesty on our society, exposing those darkest corners we never really examine.  And he does so in a way that readers will find riveting. The Great Re-Imagining gives us digest-able chapters that weave together history and philosophy, sociology and religion, in a way that helps us reexamine what it means to say "This is the end of the world".  And in that end, Richards finds a new vision for humanity's future.   Written with creativity and rich spiritual wisdom, The Great Re-Imagining is a book with its time, for our time. ________________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Kevin Cloud's God and Hamilton:  Spiritual Themes from the Life of Alexander Hamilton & the Broadway Musical He Inspired explores often-overlooked spiritual themes to both the life of Alexander Hamilton as well as the runaway Broadway musical hit.  My wife and I have both enjoyed the musical for quite some time, but we both only know Hamilton's own life story as a result of reading after our exposure to his biography through the musical.  So Cloud's treatment of that biography, in the context of its own historical time, with all its connections to traditional Christian faith in the eighteenth century, is a genuine treat.  In his personal life, Hamilton experienced both remarkable accomplishments and heartbreaking failure.  He grew from a poor, orphan kid from the Caribbean to one of the most powerful men in the new nation.  Hamilton was a Christian who wrote hymns in his early life and married Eliza Schuyler, an extraordinary woman from a wealth...

Terry Patten's A New Republic of the Heart:  An Ethos for Revolutionaries brings Patten's wisdom as a life-long activist into conversation with his desire for a social fabric of the developed world by valuing unconditional love and seeking a happiness to which all humans are entitled. What is most important to me in the book is Patten's vision of an integral activism on behalf of both nature and culture.  Western culture has, for some time, treated the natural world with the destructive inconsideration that has resulted in deadly "climate change".  But instead of shrinking in front of some dystopian account, Patten insists something quite different:  " In these times, if we have the opportunity to live extraordinarily meaningful lives, I feel we have an obligation to do so. If the measure of a human life is its chance to have significance that extends beyond itself, then we've hit the jackpot. We are alive at game time on the planet, when everyth...

Gary Thomas' Devotions for Sacred Parenting is precisely what it would seem to be on first glance:  A year's worth of weekly devotions with the idea of sacred parenting as its theme.  Thomas integrates the Scriptures with classic Christian literature to write about such topics as having patience, passing down our faith to our children, divorce, and priorities. It accompanies Thomas' Sacred Parenting book, and in that way what you find here are timely reflections on the nature of Christian parenting. I cannot recommend it highly enough. ______________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

This line from James 2.10 always seems to catch the eye of those American Christians who enjoy being legalists:  "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it".  They envision a god is a nit-picky moral bean counter when it came to evaluating our sins and slip ups. But in the larger context of James 2, I'm not so sure that’s quite right: My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism.  Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in.  If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, "Here's a good seat for you," but say to the poor man, "You stand there" or "Sit on the floor by my feet", have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers and sisters:  Has not God chosen those who are ...

I spent the better part of my academic career studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- his theology in its context, with the hopes of articulating a peace-making theology for the twenty-first century.  I never intended that study to become pastorally relevant in our own historical context.  But it's proven to be. Today I made the claim that modern America looks nearly identical to Weimar Germany. For those who don't understand the comparison, first some background. The Weimar Republic was the short-lived experiment in German democracy between the great wars of the 20th century.  It emerged from Germany's loss in World War I, and was brought to a crashing end by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.  The Weimar period was marked by political, economic, and social instability, and intense cultural creativity as well as decadence.  Weimar was time in which the center didn't hold, and extremism took over the imaginations of many Germans, especially the young. ...

Plough Publishing has given us another gift in their "Spiritual Guides" series:  Simon Weil's Love in the Void:  Where God Finds Us . In this spiritually-rich and philosophically-deep collection of essays, Simon Weil offers us reflections on a range of topics -- love, beauty, suffering and idolatry.  Weil is sadly unknown by large portions of the Christian world.  She studied and taught philosophy in Le Puy-en-Velay, France, where she was also politically active, writing for union movements and the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War.  And the introductory essay in this collection is invaluable for understanding the context of the reflections that compose the bulk of Love in the Void . My favorite essay Weil essay will always be "The Love of God and Affliction".  To find it included here enriches the volume as a whole.  But every reader will find much here.  Love in the Void is a beautiful introduction to Weil's spiritual philosophy. ...

Plough Publishing's The Scandal of Redemption is a collection of radio addresses, interspersed with personal journals, from Archbishop Oscar Romero, in the couple of years leading up to his death. It's a very short, slender introduction to a powerful priest of the Church, who continues to challenge the Body of Christ in the world.  For Romero, " a saint is nothing else than the full realization of a life according to the design of God".  This collection brings the spiritual depth of that life, focused on peace-making and a love for the poor, that echo Jesus' own words.  In that way, Romero is nothing other than a modern-day Lukan evangelist.   Romero's preaching is centered on Jesus, on those who follow Jesus to love the poor and oppressed, and to work against the Powers that dehumanize human thriving.  It is a powerful witness of the scandal of God's redemption against those Powers. The Scandal of Redemption is a deep spiritual reading that is off...

John Dickerson's Hope of Nations:  Standing Strong in a Post-Truth, Post-Christian World is written as a call to hope for Christians -- who themselves are the only hope for the world, according to Dickerson -- in a world of shifting moral values and social and cultural collapse.  Dickerson doubtless has one important view of the current Western climate.  He sees the world spinning out of control, and that without the Christian faith, all may well be lost. But is it? What's lost are the powers of control by Christians who have had a tremendous impact on the way Western culture began and developed.  That control, of course, brought with it certain objective, verifiable ways of articulate the world in moral terms.  Now that fewer folks are Christian, though, the objective foundations of this Western outlook have been shaken.  What Dickerson fails to appreciate is the place that faith has always held in the Christian worldview.  There was hardly e...

CS Lewis once remarked : True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. When it comes to humility I think a lot of Christians tend to work with the wrong idea. The idea that many seem to have is that humility involves thinking less about yourself, to have a negative or even morbid self-concept. Justification for this sort of thing comes from texts like Philippians 2.3: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Humility, it seems, is considering others as "better" than yourself. And if others are better than you it stands to reason that you are "worse".  Humility, in this view, is having that sort of morbid self-concept:  Others are "better" than me. But is that what Paul is saying in Philippians 2.3? The word translated as “better” in this text is hyperechontas from the root hyperecho . The word (in various forms) occurs only four other times in t...