The Adolescent Squabble of Science vs. Religion

One of the books that I have been looking forward to reading for some time is Marilynne Robinson’s recent collection of essays called When I Was a Child I Read Books.  Happily, a little brown package arrived in the mail today!  I have enjoyed Robinson’s fiction immensely (Gilead and Home obviously come to mind), but haven’t had a chance to read her nonfiction just yet.  I am very glad for the opportunity to correct this regrettable deficiency.

How God Feels in This World

In around a month or so, it will be one year since we packed up and left Vancouver Island and returned to our roots in southern Alberta. For the entirety of this time, Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing has been sitting on or around the shelf beside my favourite reading chair.  The book was a parting gift from a dear saint in our previous church—a woman whose spirituality was thick and deep and broad, and from whom I learned a great deal over the course of my three years on the Island.  She said it was a book that had impacted her like few others. I accepted her gift with gratitude and no small amount of curiosity.

The Judge

Like most churches, we occasionally receive requests for money from people in our community. I suspect I am not alone when I say that I have come to dread these calls. It’s not that I don’t think that the church should help people in need, or that I resent the “intrusion” on my time or anything like that. I am simply growing increasingly uncomfortable with my role as the judge of the “worthiness” or “legitimacy” of this or that request for assistance.

Vengeance is (Not) Mine

We have a tendency to want to create a God in our own image who we can then emulate.

These were the words of Perry Yoder, professor emeritus of the newly renamed Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, IN, at a theological studies conference put on by Mennonite Church Alberta that I have been attending in Calgary over the past few days.  We have been talking a lot about how we read the Bible—about the presuppositions that inform our interpretations, about how our various traditions dispose us toward certain possibilities, about what to do about seemingly irreconcilable texts, and myriad other issues around reading and understanding Scripture.  Including, as the quote alludes to, the constant temptation to read Scripture with an eye toward the God we expect (or would prefer) to find. 

“God Does Not Depend on You”

Over the course of the five years or so that I have been maintaining this blog, it has been interesting to observe which topics spark conversation and which do not.  If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that if there is one topic or theme that has tended to generate the most comments and/or traffic over the lifespan of this blog, it would be something related to doubt—whether the role doubt plays (or can play or ought to play) in the life of faith or the role doubt has played in the rejection of faith.

Do Not Fear

Yesterday presented me with two opportunities to share some reflections and experiences from my recent trip to Colombia—a morning sermon at the church I grew up in, and an evening presentation at a local fundraiser for the work of MCC.  Wherever we went in Colombia and whoever we spoke with, we would ask some variation of, “so what would you have us say to people back in Canada?”  Almost without exception we would hear something along these lines: “Just tell our stories.  It is important for us to know that our stories are heard.”  The more I have thought about the sights and sounds and stories we encountered in Colombia, the more I have been struck by what an enormous privilege and a solemn responsibility it is to be entrusted with a story.  

Rain

It is a rainy May day here in southern Alberta.  Actually, it’s been raining for the past few days.  On my few ventures out of the house this week (I’m spending most of my time sequestered at home battling some kind of a parasite that hitched a ride home from Colombia with me), I have heard the predictable complaints about the weather, the predictable “hopefully we’ll see the sun today” remarks.  I usually smile and nod, but inside I am always thinking, “hopefully not!”

Faith Does Not Wait

I haven’t been writing much over the past week or so due mainly to the demands of settling back into “real” life after my trip to Colombia, as well as dealing with a persistent bug that seems to have followed me home from South America.  Even though being sick is no fun, there are blessings here too, for I have had found myself with much more time for reading than normal!  One of the books that I have been reading over the past week or so, as I continue to reflect upon and process what I saw and learned in Colombia, is Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.  Here’s a quote I am mulling over today as I think about the reality of five million internally displaced people in Colombia:

“Make Sure You Talk About the Laughter as Well the Tears”

Well, after a long and exhausting day of travel yesterday that began at around 9:30 pm on Monday night in Bogotá, Colombia and ended at around 2:30 yesterday afternoon back in southern Alberta, I am finally sitting at my desk with an opportunity to begin the process of synthesizing, analyzing, or somehow responding to what I have seen and heard and experienced over the last ten days or so.  

Colombia!

Late last year, someone involved with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) here in Alberta approached me about the possibility of taking part in a “pastors learning tour” to Colombia in the spring of 2012.  Initially, I was a little hesitant.  I didn’t really have the resources to consider international travel and I wasn’t sure about the security situation in Colombia.  I was, of course, very interested in the opportunity to travel and learn more about a country I know little about, but still, the trip seemed like a bit of a longshot to me when I was first made aware of it.

On Faith and Failure

A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation with a group of seniors where we reflected upon the question, “Have you ever seen or personally experienced the failure of faith?”  A loaded question, if ever there was one.  What does it even mean for faith to fail?  We may have had some difficulties answering that question, but we certainly found no shortage of things to talk about!  We talked about the experience of the absence of God, about the perceived inadequacy of faith in the face of imminent death, about faith’s failure to overcome fear and doubt, about faith’s inability to meet this or that intellectual challenge, about the slow drift away from the convictions of one’s childhood.  It was a fascinating, if at times dispiriting conversation.

The New Beginning Has Already Been Made

The resurrection message burst through the frontiers and was universal: Christ has been raised not as an individual but as Israel’s messiah, as the Son of man of the nations, as humanity’s ‘new Adam’, and as “the first-born of all creation”…. The risen Christ pulls Adam with his right hand and Eve with his left, and with them draws the whole of humanity out of he world of death into the transfigured world of eternal life.  His new beginning in his end is the beginning of God’s new world in the passing away of this one.  Whether this world will come to an end, and whatever that end may be, the Christian hope says: God’s future has already begun.  With Christ’s resurrection from the catastrophe of Golgotha the new beginning has already been made, a beginning which will never again pass away.

Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning

Good Friday: For the Badness and the Sadness

What does this have to do with me? These were the decidedly impious words that kept rattling around my cranium as I drove around town running errands after a local Good Friday service this morning. It had been a meaningful service—beautiful music, considerable time spent hearing Scripture, a dramatic portrayal of Jesus’ betrayal, “trial,” and crucifixion—but for some reason, the events we remembered this morning seemed light years away from my own life and experience.

Which World is the Real World?

You should take a few minutes (or hours) to read Kim Fabricius’s Good Friday sermon “Wackos” posted over at Faith and Theology today.  His final paragraph is lodged in my gut as I head off to church this morning:

“Jesus Doesn’t Want You to Love Him For What You Can Get Out of Him” (and Other Pious-Sounding Non-Starters)

Monday is my Sabbath and one of the things I usually do at some point in the day is walk the dog and listen to a sermon on my iPod. I listen to sermons from friends of mine at other churches or more “famous” preachers whose sermons are available via podcast. I look forward to these walks and these sermons. It’s nice to listen instead of speak, and I almost invariably come back from my walks having received something good for the day and the week ahead.

In Spite Of

I’ve been critical of Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God here and there over the last little while (see here, for example), but the book does contain some memorable and insightful passages as well.  One must give credit where credit is due.  The themes of this quote, for example, struck me as fitting well with the words of Václav Havel in my previous post:

It is an Orientation of the Spirit

Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to preach at another church in our area. The text I chose was Jeremiah 31:31-34—the promise made to weary exiles of a new day coming, of a new covenant written not on tablets of stone but on human hearts. It’s a beautiful passage, and an intoxicating hope—the hope of forgiveness, and of the goodness we were made for, flowing out of us naturally and joyfully rather than inconsistently and partially as it is now. No more conflicted selves acting out of mixed motives. No more failure and frustration. It is a passage that speaks of a permanent and indissoluble connection between the heart of God and the heart of his people.

Delight in This?

Part of last weekend was spent in Calgary at a provincial gathering of Mennonite churches and organizations where our time together was focused upon the theme of “Delighting in Scripture.” It’s a very pious sounding theme, isn’t it? Good Christians are supposed to love the Bible, aren’t they? It sounds like something we should all be doing all of the time. It calls to mind impressions I had in my childhood that if you were a follower of Jesus, you couldn’t wait to read your Bible and eagerly did so whenever the opportunity presented itself.