From Anatevka With Love (When Tradition Trumps Jesus)
“Tradition. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as…as a fiddler on the roof!”
Biblical Meditations
Nine Reasons To Read Obituaries
Like most with gray hair, I spend most mornings reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee. Yes, an actual newspaper tossed in my driveway. News I must unwrap, not turn on, scroll through, or scan. There is something nostalgic about catching up to yesterday’s news, and washing the black residue from your fingertips. Although, a Keurig microbrewed my coffee so I’m selectively old-fashioned. One reason I appreciate an actual newspaper is the […]
Jesus, The Feminist
A woman beds her father-in-law and then blackmails him when she becomes pregnant. A prostitute conspires with two Israeli spies to ambush her town. A widowed woman dolls herself up to catch a man, her disenfranchised mother-in-law’s idea to stay solvent. A woman commits adultery with a king while her husband is deployed in the king’s war. A small town’s finest church-going teenager mysteriously gets pregnant out of wedlock and no one knows who […]
The Faith That Saves (Part 2)
(Re)read Part 1. Imagine walking on railroad tracks with a friend. You see a faint light growing larger and conclude a train barrels toward you. You and your friend begin to argue about what sort of train it is. You’re sure it’s a coal train from Pittsburgh. Your friend insists its a passenger train from Chicago. You argue your experiences with trains makes you a better trainspotter. He argues he has read everything about […]
The Faith That Saves (Part 1)
Calvinists and nonCalvinists have fought about the origin of saving faith for centuries. Calvinists insist God grants saving faith to the elect at the moment of conversion. NonCalvinists insist God has granted everyone the ability to believe the gospel and must be rightly persuaded. No one has any ability or everyone has some ability. Important distinctions, to be sure. But have we missed the forest for the trees? While we skirmish on the periphery the enemy […]
Hold Your Heterosexuality Loosely
“But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they did not weep; and those who rejoice, as though they did not rejoice; and those who buy, as though they did not possess; and those who use the world, as though they did not make full use of […]
Grace for the Greedy
With rock star status Jesus was flanked by thousands (literally, “the myriads”) as he meandered through the Palestinian countryside (Lk 12.1). Folks stumbled over each other for a glimpse, nugget or even piece of Jesus. It never got to his head. Not one to waste an audience, Jesus introduced his disciples to Greed 101. Luke just told us Jesus was Public Enemy #1 to the self-righteous religious snots (11.53-54). It […]
God’s Love, Actually
The prophets spilled no small amount of ink clarifying God’s posture toward his people. Had God given up on saving a people for himself (Hos 4.6)? Could God actually overlook or forgive his people’s rebellion against him (Mic 6.9-16)? Will God sit idly by while pagan nations run roughshod over the people he claims to love (Hab 1.13)? Can we reconcile God’s apparent displeasure with his promise of eternal love toward […]
Toppling the Social Media Baals
Like the God who made us, we humans are incessant communicators. We will use anything to talk to each other: scratches on a cave wall, reeds dipped in plant dye, Dixie cups and a long string, mechanical arms stamping letters on paper, or digital pixels bouncing off satellites into mobile devices for social media. God communicates so naturally his image-bearers would do so. Social media is not inherently evil any more than the […]
Smith, Keynes, Marx & Jesus Walk Into a Bar
“The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good” (Gordon Gekko). Capitalism, liberalism and socialism are competing economic/political/social philosophies but they share the same inherent bane. Wherever one lands on the spectrum neither philosophy can assuage the very thing that cripples economies: greed. Adam Smith (capitalism), John Maynard Keynes (liberalism) and Karl Marx (socialism) might be mortal political enemies but they all attempted to […]