“Your boasting is not good.” So opens today’s Epistle. Boasting—or pride—is the fundamental human problem. So we must be told, even on Easter, “Your boasting is not good.” The broader context is a scandal in the Corinthian church. But the problem of pride, of boasting, is universal….
Read MoreA four year-old boy climbed the steps to see his sick grandmother. She was in great pain, and soon to die. The little boy said, “Don’t worry, Grandma. You are going to be with Jesus.”
That little boy was James Edwin Shaw, who would not want this sermon to be about him. But we have to say a little….
Read MoreIn the Bill & Hillary Clinton Airpot in Little Rock, Arkansas, a large sign advertises a local church, with the slogan Expect an Experience. That captures perfectly the American religion: Emotivism. Faith means experiencing happiness. Big Evangelicalism equates faith with success, prosperity, health. If you lead a good life, good things will come to you. One slogan puts it this way: “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The first part is true. But God’s plan for the disciples of Jesus might not be what the world calls “wonderful.” Bonhoeffer’s famous saying is more accurate: “When God calls a man, He bids him come and die.” Faith will not eliminate tribulations in your life. Afflictions come to the faithful to strengthen their faith further. Whom the Lord loves, He chastens….
Read MoreEaster is about a risen body. If that isn’t true, then everything really is meaningless. But the words, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”, those words were spoken to people who then saw the Lord Jesus risen in His body….
Read MoreThe T in LGBTQIA+ has overwhelmed all the other letters. The T, of course, is for transgender. Transgenderism rejects biological reality, the givenness of creation. There is also another T, another trans, that is somewhat less known: Transhumanism. Transhumanism, at the risk of oversimplifying, proposes joining technology to humans for the purpose of enhancing and lengthening life. For many, this includes a goal of achieving immortality.
Both of these contemporary trans movements seek to address real human problems: dysphoria, discomfort, disability, dissolution, death. There is something wrong with us. There is something wrong with the world. A trans movement seeks to change the problem. That’s what trans means: change. It can also mean cross, like to cross a barrier or a distance. Hence, transportation. Or, transformation.
These contemporary trans movements, like others that have come before (such as Transcendentalism), are all doomed to fail, because they have the wrong starting point….
Read MoreWhat is happening in Jesus? The Narrator—God Himself—the One who made the world entered the world. It was His world, but gone wrong. It became filled with snakes, and death, and tears. He becomes one of us in the womb of a virgin. He does nothing wrong, but is accused of everything. And He suffers everything – every indignity, every humiliation, every pain. Along the way He begins reshaping creation. Storms are quieted, flows of blood cease. He rescues children, sets prostitutes on a new path, flips the tables on religious peddlers. Meeting Him, thieves confess, extortioners make restitution. He gives vision to the blind, He calls a corpse from its tomb.
He comes before corrupt priests and cowardly politicians, and submits to their judgment. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. The insurrectionist goes free, and the Lord of Life is executed. Where’s the justice in that?
Read MoreWhen a child is adopted, he gets a new family and also a new story, the family’s story, with its history, and hardships, and heroes.
You who are baptized learn the story, your story. It’s the story of all mankind. But the unbaptized, and those who have wandered away from their baptism, have forgotten the story, the family history. Some have even developed competing stories, a falsified account. It is as though they came upon a beautiful mosaic, depicting with glittering tiles the image of a king. With malice they rearrange those tiles into the image of a fox.
Read MoreIn the hour of darkness—when your career is collapsing; when your marriage is on the ropes; when you come face to face with the ugliness of your sin; when the stench of death cannot be sanitized by the wretched sterility of hospital antiseptic—when in the hour of darkness you despair, you don’t need a concept or a philosophy. A platitude won’t help. An ethic is worst of all, for the accuser gleefully reminds us that we have failed.
The supposed comfort of a nebulous better place I find revolting. Who are you to say there is a better place, and that my loved one is in it, or that I will go there? How do you know?
Leave me alone, incompetent comforter! I need a Lord, a real redeemer who is actually mine, who is coming for me!
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