Thursday, March 31, E minus 21

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.

Oh Yeah? Here’s the new Jesus, not a victim but a martyr – and I don’t like this model any more than the original! ‘For our sake’ hauls in vicarious stuff and blood atonement from Anselm on - the degeneration of our faith!

Yeah! Thank God for a version of crucifixion that was not pointless, but purposeful. This Jesus suffered death, like us, and didn’t just wear a body while knowing that his spirit would float off untouched. Dead and buried.

Instead of deriding some suicidal Jesus who seeks a futile martyrdom, why not savour his purposive passion, deeper than subjective intention, yet greater than a random inevitability? Come on, repeat the phrases, ‘for our sake’, and ‘suffered death’, and ‘buried’. What does that mean to you?

Certainly this clause appeals to the romantic versions of Jesus as the intentional subject - let’s not dismiss the role of that construction of passion. Whether he meant it, it meant this. We’re still stuck with asking what ‘for our sake’ conveys. How did Jesus’ death change my situation?

Instead of dismissing some psychologized Jesus, how about affirming this elaboration of an understanding of the passion and crucifixion as making a difference? Some stuff doesn’t just happen, but matters. This creative transformation of the older version tries to capture this meaningfulness.

Objectifying the crucifixion as inevitable or systemic, rather than subjective and intentional, reduces Jesus to just another victim of tyranny, a member of a class rather than sui generis, in a class of his own. What’s your take?

Instead, imagine a model of atonement beyond trivial blood payoff, which still offers an ‘at-one-ment’ to humanity and divinity in our generation. Does Jesus’ death matter for you and for me? How, according to you? Read more...

Wednesday March 30, E minus 22

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.

Oh Yeah? Here’s the touch-down Jesus, the alien visitation, tourist from heaven – you buy that? Buy that, and the whole virgin birth is beyond recovery – will you insist that I swallow the whole package deal?

Yeah! Thank God for a Jesus who is not just a guy, who both ‘comes from’ and ‘goes to’ some other dimension of time and space better and beyond the here and now – but in between, fully inhabited the ‘here-and-now’.

Instead of caricaturing an inhuman apparition Jesus, perhaps this expression of incarnation can transform your vision of a historical figure to refocus on the ultimate implications of his life and work. Try saying it a few times, about Jesus: came down, became incarnate, made man…

Certainly this formulation fights low claims for Jesus – higher claims, too. He’s more than a nice guy – but less than an archetype and imaginary ideal and fantasy figure. This won’t let you off the hook with ‘Christ of faith’ - you’ve got to make the connection to Jesus, human son of Mary.

Instead of resisting only the low Christology, how about resisting the spiritualizing tendency to keep Jesus floating above and beyond anything relevant to our life? This creative transformation of the Apostles Creed in the Nicene Creed survived for a reason – can you imagine what it was?

Ideologies making too much or too little of Jesus, at their root, set us up for subsequent failures of the gospel. You claim too much, and you can’t back your claims. You claim too little, and you lose to competition.

Instead, imagine a model of Jesus inextricable from origins or incarnation, who can’t be dismissed as too much or too little… Read more...

Tuesday, March 29, E minus 23

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.

Oh Yeah? Here we go piling up words, shoring up a patriarchal hierarchy that puts the Lord after the Almighty, and disenfranchises any competition. Those stacks of paired terms make Jesus way bigger - no compromise with the possibility that he was a great teacher, prophet – fighting words!

Yeah! Yes, this sure elaborates a Trinitarian position, and denies that Jesus was just a guy, albeit a good one. We may not have adequate metaphysics, but we can see that Jesus Christ is identified with God the Creator in a way different in kind, not just degree, from ourselves.

Instead of seeing esoteric ontological arguments, perhaps this elegant amplification of affirmations of Jesus Christ should be applauded as lifting Christ up, and not defending him or caging him. Repeating the cadences can make you begin to wonder at the meaning of the too-familiar name.

Certainly part of this repetition is about rejecting alternatives that try to reduce Jesus to a ‘great teacher’ or ‘one of the prophets’. Here’s a rejection of our easy sleazy evasions of 21st century ‘interfaith’ dialogue which is really subordinated to secular presumptions.

Instead of stopping there, why not wrestle with the implications of a ‘high Christology’ that makes Jesus more than the smartest guy in the room? Maybe people died for this alternative because it’s important! God, light, truth, not created, something else, ‘begotten’, identified as God. So what?

Reductions of Jesus to a good guy at their root leave room for a dismissal of the gospel as a relative good. They are products and supporters of modernism, even when they claim reactionary fury against our times. It’s an easy way out -be a Unitarian, or a Bahai – but don’t claim Christianity!

Instead, imagine a model of Jesus as something more – a face of God, from the beginning, and to the end – not just another has-been. Read more...

Monday, March 28, E minus 24

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

Oh, Yeah? This really makes things worse. Adding ‘one’ doesn’t fix the appearance of 3 gods. Adding ‘the Almighty’ heads us to the unbiblical dogma of omnipotence. Adding ‘of all that is, seen and unseen’ just piles up redundant words without adding anything. What’s the point?

Yeah! There must be a point. ‘One God’ was basic to the Shema – keep watching for the ‘one word’ in the rest of this creed. It’s about unity connecting diversity. ‘Almighty’ responds to claims of divine beings and forces with subordination, as does claiming the unseen dimensions.

Instead of seeing a polarizing defensive game of piling up words like walls, perhaps this development should be respected for its succinct contributions and we might wonder at how these are lyrical poetry, not debating points or technical legalism. At least repeat the rhythmical meter a couple of times.

Certainly a patriarchal omnipotent divinity reflects an imperial agenda, at its worst a tyrannical suppression of alternatives. The sins of anarchic social Darwinism offer their own tyrannies, familiar to us now, as to the boys at Nicaea. Warring gods can wreak havoc, as can strong godless humans.

Instead of simply dismissing this as a projection and justification of imperial political, social, and economic models, perhaps this development should be explored as a cultural and religious fence to excessive claims by the emperor or the empire. They are penultimate to the one God, maker of all.

Dualisms, Manichaean or otherwise, at there root imagine a competing creative source, and battles of light and dark, good and evil, this world and another world, are not simply apocalyptic – they are psychotic. You can’t integrate or comprehend – just disintegrate and apprehend the mess.

Instead, imagine a model of God that allows for apocalyptic stuff, but only within an arena ultimately created by one God, creator of all. I’ll take it. Will you? Read more...

3rd Sunday of Lent, March 27

At worship at 9am ‘Almost Church’ and 10:30am ‘Church’, and at study after ’Church’, we finished a week on the theme ‘Thinking Theologically’, continuing Lent study of ‘Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength’, or as Living the Questions videos put it: ‘Dream. Think. Be. Do.’

Now, we begin a week on the theme ‘Creative Transformation’, with study groups Wednesday at 2pm, Thursday at 7:30pm, worship next Sunday and study after ‘Church’. Daily reflections are based on the first half of the Nicene Creed, adding words to reduce available interpretations!

Nicene Creed (1)

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

Read more...

Saturday, March 26, E minus 25

and the life everlasting.

Oh, Yeah? So bread for today, pie in the sky when you die. Everlasting life is the promised payoff for a narrow inhibited life now, eh? Do we have to postpone all gratification to the sweet hereafter?

Yeah! Participation in the life everlasting begins now, or at least in baptism. Believing, belonging, and behaving has to do with that life beyond mortality. That’s the bottom line of the creed and of my faith – this life is that life.

Experience of the life everlasting drives lots of us. We don’t think there’s anything, life or death or principalities or powers, or height nor depth nor anything else – that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Reason about life beyond this mortal span and time and space is our most challenging reach into the supernatural. But even in utilitarian ethics, are you keeping score by quarterly reports, or a longer horizon of payoffs?

Scripture on life everlasting is copious enough - since folks often turn to the book we trust and dust at the point where they are ‘cramming for their finals’ – it’s certainly all about the life beyond our lives.

Tradition about life everlasting takes us into the cosmologies of heaven and hell and purgatory, the judgment day and St Peter at the gates with a book – but also takes us to the liturgy of participation in sacred time and space.

What, in the end, is your hope? What do you participate in that is beyond your mortal span? What do you anticipate upon your death? Is it some ‘light at the end of a tunnel’, ‘spark of light floating from the body’?

I try to participate in that great ‘life everlasting’ – God knows I’ve ushered lots of folks across the threshold from this life to that one, and I hope they’ve found a footfall on the other side – and will welcome me home…

Take a moment today, to revisit your own hope – not only your hope of heaven, but also the continuity of this life and that one… Read more...

Friday, March 25, E minus 26

the resurrection of the body;

Oh, Yeah? Here we go again with the living dead. Haven’t you seen any movies of the undead? Wouldn’t it be crowded on this earth? What body and what wounds would we carry into this vision?

Yeah? I am embodied now, and can’t imagine my ‘self’ without my peculiar embodiment with gender and flaws and gifts – can you? There is a great leap here to say that Jesus’ resurrection speaks to our ultimate life.

Experience is the core of this conversation. Your aches and pains, menstruation and gestation, growth and aging, make you who you are. Are you really just some spark of light ‘wearing’ a body? Can I spilt you in two?

Reason will demand that IF there is a supernatural life beyond this time and space, and IF your Jesus claims cross that boundary, that THEN you will have to construct a narrative for your own body, soul and spirit. Start now.

Scripture provides limited resources, from Ezekiel 37 to Elijah taken up to Corinthians and Thessalonians, to finally Revelation. What to you make of those competing cosmologies?

Tradition offered temporal models, ‘pie in the sky when we die’, and cosmological models, ‘heaven above, and hell below’ - and lots of pastoral and pietist reflections on ‘meeting again in the sweet bye-and-bye’.

This peculiar special doctrine challenges our end-of-life ethics, and our funerary practices. If we really believe in a spark of light floating from the body it wore, then our care for terminally ill or dead bodies may change.

I have gained increasing appreciation for the assertion over the decades. Perhaps a funeral is the wrong time to make the intellectual case – but what is our hope, and how to we construe or imagine what comes next?

Take a moment today, to wonder privately what is at stake with ‘resurrection of the body’ instead of ‘immortality of the soul’. I have. Read more...

Thursday, March 24, E minus 27

the forgiveness of sins

Oh, Yeah? Forgive and forget, eh? How about Hitler? Yesterday, we’re talking about saints, and I said I hadn’t met any yet without feet of clay – so what’s the point of this – who forgives whom, for what?

Yeah! We could do with less blaming and more confessing in this chat. You’ve got to name the sin, repent or change, to get to reconciliation in my tradition – neither a free ride, nor mandatory minimum sentences!

Experience of guilt and shame – and of anger and blame – is a deep well of sources for reflection on this doctrine. Go ahead: things thought, said, or done, or not thought, or said, or done….

Reason operates in ethics and jurisprudence, and there’s a big profitable industry in ‘Christian ethics’ – not to mention the mix of politics and religion. Possibly, our best contribution to a wider world is this ‘forgiveness of sins’.

Scripture is a powerful set of texts that refuse to whitewash our own saints, or to confuse freedom with license. Psalms sing of the experience of injustice, prophets rail against it – gospel promises grace, not judgment.

Tradition may distract us with partisan claims about ‘going directly to God’, but the traditions of confessing to those we grieve and also to third parties appear in 12-step programs and not only in Roman Catholic practice!

The ancient story is of persecution of the church, and purists who said that those who had flinched, particularly in leadership, were not worthy of being part of the continuing church. We chose to affirm ‘forgiveness of sins’…

The current story is of barbarian moral illiteracy. Some would prefer licence, ‘anything goes’. Others cling to legalism: minimum sentences and law-and-order family values Christianity. I choose the third road…

My sin – and our sin in a rich first world – could relish this promise! Read more...

Wednesday, March 23, E minus 28

the communion of saints;

Oh Yeah? I can’t think of many saints – heroes all have clay feet in the end. Saints are just the ‘hall of fame’ for the institutional church, powerful men and good girls. Who could claim that everybody in the church is a saint? Maybe these are just the ones safely off in heaven already?

Yeah! Please surround me with a host of witnesses, a community of those who show what we might yet become as originally intended and ultimately promised. Even the Vatican has reservations about some of the figures once called ‘saints’ – but at least they try to celebrate possibilities.

Experience claims around the communion of saints seem to centre on feeling surrounded by a host of witnesses, heavenly choirs, guardians, or an invisible community better than our actual ones. People speak of one or more who have died, but still feel in relationship with them. Do you?

Reason might appeal to models of genius among the communion of saints, but virtue and artistry can also be idealized, in an exercise of seeking an apotheosis or ultimate example of what we want to affirm and celebrate, organizing myriad specifics in taxonomies of values inextricable from facts.

Scripture provides some ancient imagery of the saints in light. Prophets like Isaiah and Daniel relish the hope, amid current exile or diaspora. Paul wrestles with his wider communion a lot – and Revelation develops the apocalyptic vision with more elaboration. We now belong with them then.

Tradition claims saints as patrons for local congregations and churches, and the pastoral offices of care for the sick and dying, and rituals of death, bring us more often than academics and bureaucrats to the piety of sharing the communion of saints from our small corners.

Saintliness: gift or achievement, given or chosen, for a few or for all? Limited to the holy catholic church – or all humanity of any age and place? Privately, today, do you dare to imagine such a communion of saints? Does it appeal to you to share with a crowd that is bigger, older, deeper? Read more...

Tuesday, March 22, E minus 29

the holy catholic Church;

Oh Yeah? After all the bad press about the Roman Catholic Church lately – why would we believe in it? The church is not one, but many factions, and that’s another scandal. It’s not that holy – not as much eastern faiths appear to be, and spiritual-but-not-religious people claim to be.

Yeah! I want to believe in a singular, holy, catholic church, as an image against which to measure the claims of each of the many churches. I can live with unrealized aspirations, admitted failings, reach exceeding grasp, more than some organization that seeks too little, and claims too much.

Experience of being part of something beyond myself is pretty basic to religious faith. With whom can you say ‘we’? What memory and hope can you share? What purposes and projects can we contribute together? How is all this invisible stuff known, if not with and through others in ‘church’?

Reason demands that we work with the one and the many, with unity and diversity. Discipling ourselves as members of one body provokes us to test hypothetical generalizations and specific applications, in endless cycles of trial and error. Theology was once known as the ‘queen’ of the sciences.

Scripture is a collection of ‘our’ books. We identify with the genealogical stories of Genesis, the history of Israel, the psalms of the temple. We claim that language in the common era as our sister Abrahamic faiths do in this Common Era. Christian scripture retells the earliest church, and our hope.

Tradition is all about trying to be one, holy, catholic, and church. Why would you reinvent the wheel from nothing, if somebody had already tried? Patterns of predictable, preventable unholy divisions – and unholy alliances – bear retelling as cautionary tales and guides. Weigh it in the balance.

This ‘Church’ of the creed is both more, and less, than the churches, and more and less holy and catholic than what we the ones we experience. Take some time today to imagine this ‘holy catholic church’ again. Read more...

Monday, March 21, E minus 30

I believe in the Holy Ghost

Oh, Yeah? How is this Caspar the Friendly Ghost, a Halloween figure in a sheet, related to the other God-stuff? Is this a third God, on top of a Father and Son, or just another name for the same ubiquitous spirit that all us ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ folks feel warm and fuzzy about?

Yeah! Sure, this is the rest of a ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’ Trinitarian view of God. Do you like if better as ‘Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer’, ‘Mother, Friend, Comforter’, or ‘Source of Life, Living Word, Bond of Love’? The recent ‘Song of Faith’ of our church listed those as alternatives…

Experience of God is often informed and expressed in the language of the Holy Ghost or Spirit. People feel inspired, gifted, comforted, led, taught, or guided. They liken it to the flow of wind or water, in small and great ways, familiar and strange experience of reality and their place in it.

Reason about God often relies on talk of the Spirit, as divine presence in teaching and learning, gifts of intelligence and speech. Intercessory prayer is not simply abdication to God, but active exploration of how the Spirit might work in and through us and others to serve fullness of life.

Scripture expresses ancient wisdom of the spirit – in fact, Wisdom is often capitalized in translations of Hebrew writings. The feminine gender words for Spirit at and through Creation and crisis, breath and wind, invite a balance to divine imagery. Gospels and letters develop distinct Spirit talk.

Tradition, including these creeds, elaborates the ideas of a ‘third person of the Trinity’. Language of worship, prayer, and in particular lyrics to and descriptions of music, invoke the active presence of God in these terms. Generations have sorted out patterns of excess and misconstruction, too!

Don’t simply reject – or take for granted – your caricature of the Holy Ghost as cartoon or conventional wisdom. Spin around the ‘quadrilateral’ a bit, and get more familiar with this ‘person’ of God today. We’ll be back to her. Read more...

Sunday March 20 - Second Sunday in Lent

At worship at 9am ‘Almost Church’ and 10:30am ‘Church’, and at study after ’Church’, we finished a week on the theme ‘Your Jesus and Mine’, continuing Lent study of ‘Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength’, or as Living the Questions videos put it: ‘Dream. Think. Be. Do.’

Now, we begin a week on the theme ‘Thinking Theologically’, with study groups Wednesday at 2pm, Thursday at 7:30pm, worship next Sunday and study after ‘Church’. Daily reflections are based on the second half of the Apostles Creed, the ‘laundry list’ of the Spirit and human destiny:

Apostles’ Creed (2)

I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic Church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting

Oh, yeah? Isn’t theology the opposite of thinking? People use ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ talk and admit it’s not like ‘knowing’. They quote slogans or leaders instead of thinking for themselves. They claim the Lord or the Spirit told them. They quote verses of the bible as if they were whole arguments.

Yeah! We do think differently, and balance and privilege different authority claims than do other subcultures like academics or bureaucrats or technocrats or entertainment producers. There’s plenty of overlap in our language – and some crucial contributions we shouldn’t give up to fit in!

John Wesley spoke of balancing four key authorities in theological thinking, often summarized as the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’:
1. Experience – yep, your own feeling and spiritual gifts
2. Reason – logical making of sense and sharing semantics
3. Scripture – comparing the canon of others’ experiences of God
4. Tradition – a congregation, community, and wider movement
Try it, as you think your way through this deceptively succinct list this week.

Conveniently, for this Lent project, the Apostles Creed ends with a list of six things in which we are to believe, with little elaboration. Let’s take some time in the six days of this week, before next Sunday, to let those affirmations roll around on our tongues, whether they stick in our throats or minds, choke or confuse us.

We are invited to think by such succinct and open affirmations. More elaborate formulations in later creeds will limit the available interpretations, but this older enumeration invites us to imagine what they might mean, and what might be wrong with the available alternatives. Take time to wonder!

Initially, these six affirmation may offend you less than last week’s set of Christological assertions. They are, however, no less subversive of the platitudes of modernity, or of denials of ontology, metaphysics, or mortality.

I do expect that we are losing readers and participants in this Lenten reflection daily. I am warned that this is no way to maximize church growth. I’d rather chew solid food with you few than suckle many with sugar water only... Read more...

Saturday, March 19, E minus 31

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Oh, Yeah? Here we go - not only judgment, guilt, and threats by God – now you’re talking Jesus coming back to some apocalyptic bloodbath? This is the whacko millenarian scenario of Waco Texas, isn’t it?

Yeah! Our worldview has a beginning and end, beyond my birth or death. It’s a moral universe, where choices have consequences, near and far, and history has a beginning and an end. Welcome to Blake and Milton!

Yesterday, I argued in favour of the metaphors of Jesus sharing a transcendent perspective with God, ‘on high’ in a moral universe, with experience of having been incarnate, mortal, Will he just sit back to ‘tsk’?

What if God intervened in history again? What if the natural ‘normal’ was challenged again by the supernatural measures of God’s truth, goodness, and beauty? How would posterity be reassessed, and the living fare?

Did you ever play musical chairs as a child? When the music stops, there are more children than chairs? How do you play the game, knowing the rules? How would you play if the music never stops?

This could be read as threat – or as promise. It’s possibly a clue to your own conscience if you read it as the former. Who would find the image of judgment of the quick and the dead promising? Why not us?

Why does the stock market market swing up or down? Is it on realized facts or on anticipated possibilities? It can over-react, or be unresponsive – the actions are driven by hypotheses, not be experienced consequences!

Why might we reposition ourselves morally, as individuals and collectively? Must it only be after the fact? Can it never be based on a what-if scenario of what I called ‘come-uppance’ yesterday? Do you not fear any judgment?

And again, surely this was, and is, and will be good news for somebody – why not you, and why not us? That should haunt us a bit... Read more...

Friday, March 18 - E minus 32

the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

Oh, Yeah? Maybe his spirit floated out of his body, like anybody’s does – but does his body stand up, then float up, and end up in the sky with God? And just when we get to the happily ever after – what’s with the judgment?

Yeah! That was then, the suffer death and burial stuff – this is now – imagine a ‘post-resurrection Jesus’ and what’s at stake in the continuity with a historical Jesus and the one now with God – for us. Here’s one take.

Must you insist on dismissing some pre-modern or medieval cosmology of a three-tiered universe? How about imagining a 4th or 5th dimension, beyond our time and space continuum – and access to it? He is there, eh?

God without judgment is a bssis of tyranny. We can get away with murder! This is tough for liberals – or more honestly, for privileged winners: what if actions had ultimate consequences? What if Jesus in the end takes sides?

Come-uppance is a term of popular theology, God’s ‘preferential option for the poor’. A moral universe demands such outcomes, that the victim becomes the victor, in some dimension, or consequences hurt, in the end.

For those of us in first world minority privilege, this is not good news. Breaking outside our short-term utilitarian moral calculus, what if there is some ultimate right and wrong, in heaven, measured by Jesus with God?

Does the spatial metaphor really still bother you, since the NASA space program hasn’t found facticity in the claims for heavenly hosts? Surely NASA has helped us imagine, with the image of our blue planet from space

The same Jesus who was incarnate in history, born of Mary, is the cosmic Christ with the view from on high. There’s a judge with legitimacy, who has ‘been there’ and ‘done that’ – and yet transcends penultimate frames!

The rest of the article goes here. Read more...

Thursday March 17 - E minus 33 - St Patrick's Day

was crucified, dead, and buried;
he descended into hell;

Oh, Yeah? Maybe he was killed – or maybe it’s all a legendary story. Surely I don’t have to buy some side trip to regions below the earth, adopting some supernatural vision of hell below us in the bowels of earth!

Yeah! The passion and mortality of a flesh and blood Jesus messes with a spiritualized version of Jesus. Say Jesus didn’t just wear and shed a body, without pain – but shared our mortality, from injustice to death and burial. What might that mean when you walk in the valley of the shadow in turn?

The assertion of Jesus’ descent into hell is less familiar to us. It doesn’t just answer ‘what was Jesus doing for three days from Good Friday to Easter Sunday!’ It ‘s more connected to the preceding line of the creed, affirming that there’s nowhere you can go that he hasn’t been.

One old affirmation is ‘what was not assumed, was not redeemed’. If Jesus didn’t take on embodiment and mortality, than he’s just a tourist and actor, appearing to share our injustice, mortality and bodily decay – but with a ticket to heaven in his back pocket all along.

Another is that the whole universe is made right, justified, by Jesus. It’s not just the good people or Christians, but the world of evil and sin and death, and those who live in those darker places. Otherwise we risk a dualism, with a realm of the demonic beyond God – and a domesticated church.

Is this whole movement just for nice girls and good boys? Liberal modern theology evades and avoids talk of evil and death, in favour of progress from good to better. When you stand on the edges, the margins, the boundary regions, it’s not enough to face the abyss with just optimism.

Ephesians is the scripture source for this cosmic vision of Jesus swooping through hell and gathering all up in his parade – even the unloved and apparently unlovable criminals and denizens of hell. Perhaps, even us. Read more...

Wednesday, March 16, E minus 34

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,

Oh, Yeah? We refuse to suspend our basic modern science here, about the birds and bees, and where babies come from. Immaculate conception, and perpetual virginity of Mary, are dogmas of celibate men scared of sex! Must we acquiesce to the supernatural, to be Christian?

Yeah! Why can’t the creator, divinity, the principle countering entropy in the whole universe, moving in and through the interstices of matter, beyond our comprehension, also suspend or interrupt our hypotheses of normality? How coherent or comprehensive is your ontology and metaphysical model?

Suspend your enlightened disenchantment of the universe a moment, and wonder what pre-modern people meant here. If Jesus is only Son of God, distinguishable from us as children of God, yet fully human, sharing our mortality, then how does that get said? Jesus is ‘conceived by the Spirit’.

The meaning may not be denial of sexuality, but affirmation of woman as fit and able to bear divinity without a man. Mary is ‘theotokos’, mother of God, and popular piety has run with that for centuries, outside our subculture. Elaborations of the ‘how’ are recent reactions to modernity’s challenges.

We’re so focused on the mechanics of Jesus’ conception – though not enough to relish the art of two millennia about Jesus as an infant – that we avoid and evade what’s being affirmed about Jesus’s divinity and humanity, and what that might imply about our aspirations, divine and human.

What if ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’ does not refer to one day’s trial, but to a human life situated in a historical context? Birthed by a real Mary, Jesus lived in a real time and place. To live is to suffer. To love is to suffer. Mortality is suffering. There’s a perspective unfamiliar to us!

Wonder again about Jesus today, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. Ask ‘not whether, but so what’ Read more...

Tuesday, March 15, E minus 35

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;

Oh, Yeah? I can buy Jesus as a great teacher – but aren’t we all children of God? This is patriarchy, a boy child of a man god. Worse, it confuses the one god stuff – is Jesus god, or not? Isn’t it all for everybody?

Yeah! That’s some great set of signifiers. How human, how divine, is your Jesus? What does ‘son’ mean – and ‘Lord’? If we deny polytheism, and hierarchies of subordinate gods – what’s this Jesus stuff?

What we make of Jesus is pretty basic to this religious conversation. Too little, and he’s just a nice guy. A bit more, and he’s some Arian demi-God. Tune it up, and God is revealing God-self to us through incarnation.

‘Only’ is not an accidental claim. There is some claim here that Jesus is not just another child of God – not just another prophet. We don’t get to cop out with Bahai and Muslim friends to limit Jesus to a great prophet.

Can you begin to imagine God, creator, revealing or manifesting God-self in a new way? What if God from the beginning is God incarnate and also God making us and ours all that we were made to be and meant to be?

If God was for ‘all’ or for ‘them’, then what is a revelation that is ‘our’ Lord? Sure, a God for everybody is consistent with scientistic universalism – and God for them lets us remain separate from religious fanatic – but ‘our’?

Does this particular revelation, manifestation, and person of God necessarily exclude, contradict, or deny other religious takes on God? If it has any meaning, it challenges some alternatives – complements others.

As you try to echo this line of a creed, why does it stick in your throat? Is your Jesus smaller than this one? Is you own sense of yourself bigger than this, or small than this? Or to you deny the subordination of Jesus as Son?

So few words – and so much at stake. Settle with it now…. Read more...

Monday, March 14 - E minus 36

I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth.

Oh Yeah? ‘Theism’, a belief in God out there, is passé – read the United Church Observer magazine! The only thing worse is patriarchy and hierarchy a male God suppressing the feminine. Furthermore, Darwin was right, and creationism wrong. This creed is not our worldview – is it?

Yeah! How about pan-en-theism, God beyond and through all creation? Imagine the value of a challenge to other fatalistic powers-that-be tyranny! Sing to a creating parent, divinity birthing humanity, free to employ evolutionary process, but beyond control by any technological tyranny.

I’m not a believer in God-Father tyranny models of how my universe works. However, I’m with G.K. Chesterton: ‘The person who doesn’t believe in something doesn’t believe in nothing - they’ll believe in anything!’ What gods have you given traction here, in your smug sophistication?

Imagine the alternatives, of ethnic national gods who create peoples from the soil of their nations, and oppose the sub-human spawn of other gods. Imagine ideological and impersonal gods of party and market, who reduce us all to believers or pawns, controllers or ciphers. God save me from it all!

What if there is only one ground of being, one way of making sense, one ultimate in the midst of many penultimate claims to our allegiance and identity? What if cancer, and capitalism, and communism, are penultimate and subordinate powers-that-be, claiming too much, delivering too little?

What if my narcissism is unmasked as illusion? Perhaps I am not the author of my own destiny alone. Perhaps there is a balance between providence and prudence. What if I am a creature, not a self-made man? Imagine something bigger than us, deeper than us, older, better than us….

What’s wider, deeper, more comprehensive than the tyranny currently claiming your life? What’s bigger than the market, or fuller than science? Is everything reduced to consumer choice in your worldview? Imagine... Read more...

Sunday March 13 - First Sunday in Lent

At worship at 9am ‘Almost Church’ and 10:30am ‘Church’, and at study after ’Church’, we finished a week on the theme ‘Faith is a Journey’, beginning a Lent study based on ‘Love God with all your heart, mind, soul. strength’, or as Living the Questions videos put it: Dream. Think. Be. Do.

Now, we begin a week on the theme ‘Your Jesus and Mine’, with study groups Wednesday at 2pm, Thursday at 7:30pm, worship next Sunday and study after ‘Church’. Daily reflections are based on the first half of the Apostles Creed, the bulk of which makes affirmations about Jesus:

Apostles Creed (1)


I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth.


And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
he descended into hell;
the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Legend has it that the apostles wrote this creed ten days after Jesus’ ascension, on the eve of Pentecost. Hippolytus’ version in the form of 3 baptism questions was in use by 215CE. Changes continued for centuries – this English version echoes the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Luther’s Smaller Catechism divides the creed into three parts, on creation, redemption, and sanctification, for confirmation catechism use. Today, just jot down which line(s) roll easy off your tongue. Which stick in your throat? Let’s see if any of that changes at all through this season! Read more...

Saturday, March 12 - E minus 37

‘Behaving’ is the third leg I’m offering to keep some support and balance through this Lenten exercise or reflecting through three church creeds. Risking action without knowing it all or communal support if familiar. Everybody using a computer knows about trial and error. So with faith.

‘Praxis’ or ‘orthopraxy’ are words for how church is how we act together. Liberation theologians in Latin America coined the word fifty years ago, from a Marxist materialist understanding of the dialectic between action and reflection. Gutierrez spoke of a ‘hermeneutical circle’ of trial and error.

What do you do with others, that you could not do alone – or that is better together? Singing and dancing, our metaphors for the past couple of days, are more fun with others. Celebration and service, worship and care, are communal acts, not just individuals’ ideas. How do you share your faith?

We are perhaps too good at this corner of things, in our activists subculture of programs and projects, budgets and buildings. We take justifiable pride in our movement in how we help others, and do it better together than we could do it alone. What examples can you name?

Oh Yeah? One of our worst insults in this subculture is to say that somebody ‘talks the talk, but doesn’t walk the walk’. We call that hypocrisy. Yeah! I’m happy to admit that there is a gap between my aspirations and ideals and my practice in action. That dissonance keeps me moving.

Oh Yeah? ‘Behaving’ for people whose faith derailed when they left Sunday School suggests being nice girls and good boys, and minding our language and doing as we are told by imperfect people. Yeah! It matters how you ‘walk the walk’, and freedom has become licence in our secular world.

Can you begin to recognize how to Do with all your strength some behaving that expresses and informs your faith, in trial and error, this Lent? What actions will you change in this season, and with whom will you do them? How will you participate in this experiment with others? Read more...

Friday March 11 - E minus 38

‘Belonging’ is the second leg of our metaphorical stool this week. I claim we are part of something bigger, older, deeper, wiser, and more beautiful, when we imagine and think ourselves in relationship to faith traditions. That’s partly our choice – and partly given or chosen for us.

The guy who is now Pope wrote “Living With the Church” thirty years ago. He said ‘our identity is built of all our identifications’. Instead of an atomized individual consumer off to choose her identity, or a statistic of the proletarian masses defined by material circumstance, it’s a dance.

Think about some of your identifications: family of origin, household now, places you’ve lived, jobs you’ve done, how you’ve voted. Compare those identifications to your love/hate affections and resistances to religious congregations, neighbours, denominations – who and whose are you?

They call it ‘the Protestant heresy’, our temptation to distinguish ourselves from others, in sectarian division. Ultimately we may be praying “it’s you and me, God – and I’m not so sure about you!” Catholicity is about association across diversity. What is it that unites you with the ‘other’?

Yesterday, I suggested a metaphor of ‘song’ for talk among us of believing. Today, try out ‘dance’ as the metaphor for our ‘belonging’ relationships. Dissolving our individuality in a collective identity is not our way of being. Oppositional adversarial antagonism toward others is exhausting. Dance!

Creeds are verbal affirmations that used to express and inform belonging. Those who could assent to a creed were ‘us’, those challenging a creed were ‘them’. People imagine a fence, with sheep in a field. I prefer the image of a free flock choosing how close to come to a salt lick or spring.

Can you begin to dance somehow to ‘Be’ with all your ‘soul ‘among others through this Lent season? Is your dance with the faith community more of a tango, a slamming into a mosh pit at a concert, a slow dance entwined in embrace, a square dance? What playlist is making your neighbour sway? Read more...

Thursday March 10, E minus 39

We teach children that any religious faith is like a three-legged stool with “believing, belonging, and behaving” legs. If you don’t have all three, or if one is much shorter than the others, or much longer, it won’t serve as well. Today, Friday, and Saturday, check out each leg of your faith in turn.

Oh yeah? We’re pretty good at kicking the ‘believing’ leg out from under us. Derision of straw opponents by Hitchens or Dawkins bestselling books justifies secularism after the fact. Yeah! In the end, it’s easier to say what you’re not, or ‘post’, than what we do think, and affirm together. Let’s try.

This Lent project emphasizes the ‘believing’ leg. The language is now pejorative: indoctrination, dogma, orthodoxy, creeds are bad words in our culture. Whether we redeem the language, or not – don’t lose contact with your belonging and behaving legs – we’ll touch them the next two days.

‘Orthodoxy’ actually means praising in concert. Doxology is not about assent to propositional truth, as much as about singing something that expresses and informs our shared celebrations, and passions. After all our centuries of ‘creeds’, our church’s latest effort is ‘A Song of Faith’.

Can we get on the same page, or sing from the same hymnbook, either literally or metaphorically, anymore? Oh Yeah? Most of us choke on the old diction in patriarchal lyrics about blood atonement. Yeah! My father is not alone is saying we keep coming for the music, sharing the songs.

Poetry is one way past the glib liberal modern enlightenment reduction of everything to factual truth claims. So is science, built on hypotheses and theories, not simply atomized data, or as Thomas Kuhn popularized the way we think, ‘paradigms’ which can ‘shift’. Think harder, not less!

Can you conceive or construe some ways to ‘Think’ with all your ‘mind’ through this Lent season? Can you remember one hymn verse that sticks in your throat – and one you can still sing with gusto today? Those might be clues to the ‘cutting edges’ of how you are thinking theologically. Read more...

Ash Wednesday, E minus 40

'Faith is a Journey' … Oh Yeah? Yeah!

Every journey starts with a first step, and continues with the next step. Today is the first of the 40 days of Lent, ‘E minus 40’, and people around the globe are giving something up, taking something on, and learning something, in modern versions of fasting, prayer, and catechism.

If ‘Faith is a Journey’, as our study theme asserts this week, reflect on where you’re coming from, and what your one next step might be. Few of us are fundamentalists who cling to arrived at a truth of a few slogans. Some of us may have been wandering in circles for a while, though!

Many of us, in our middling ages and middling classes, can name an Egypt we left, a tradition of restricted roles and inflexible order. Have we arrived in a Promised Land of milk and honey, or just an oasis of relative affluence and freedom? Are we still defining ourselves by adolescent rebellion?

Fasting, or ‘giving something up’, is a first discipling in Lent. Oh yeah? Sounds like more guilt and rejection of physical pleasures to some of us. Yeah! It can also be a reminder of solidarity with those without, as our Muslim neighbours remind us through Ramadan. It may be time to try it!

Prayer, repentance or penitence is a second discipling in Lent. Oh, yeah? More guilt, negativity and reinforcement of negative self-image, some say. Yeah! Comparing where we’re at to where we came from and where we want to go can help correct course, and the company we keep on the way.

Learning, meditating, or catechism is a third discipling in Lent. Oh yeah? Authoritarian indoctrination of passive pious people will not work for us. Yeah! We’ve learned how to learn in other parts of our lives, since we stopped learning faith stuff at age 11 or 15. Get oriented again on the way!

Jot down a next step – not a goal or objective – just one next step today:

I might fast today by:
I might pray today by:
I might learn today by:
Read more...