Luke

Like many pastors, I remember clearly the first sermon I ever preached. It was during my second semester of seminary, and I probably worked on it for 50 hours. Each detail was written and rewritten until I was confident I had produced the greatest theological document by a seminarian in quite some time.

Christians have always been uncomfortable with the Magnificat. Advent takes us places we would rather not go.

When I met Jonah I noticed two things: he was wracked with overwhelming guilt and very much wanted to die, and he knew the Bible.

John the Baptist is an acquired taste, like roquefort. He’s complex. He is an amalgamation of unanswered questions: Is he a zealot acting out the Exodus as a kind of political comedy sketch? Is he the leader of a rival faith community, a serious threat to the fledgeling Jesus movement? Is he a kind of Enkidu figure—a fugitive of our collective consciousness from the epic Gilgamesh—who crawls out of the wilderness, learns our ways well enough and then attempts to wrestle and pin our society to the ground, only to be admired briefly and then destroyed?

Whatever John is, he’s not easy to put on a cracker.

In the Broadway show Book of Mormon, Elder Cunningham faces a problem. In an effort to gird his loins, he rocks out the hit "Man Up."

My grandfather was at his 60th class reunion. During a round of golf with three classmates, one of his friends teed off. After hitting the ball, with his club still in the air, the man said, “Gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me.” Then he fell to the ground, dead.

My grandfather recounted this, adding, “And it was a nice shot.” 

Advent’s scripture passages are about genuine rescue. But I wonder whether we’re sometimes embarrassed to preach about genuine rescue because we are embarrassed to admit we’re having a genuine emergency.

Offering the elements to the unbaptized can be seen as a development and not a revolution, but it is a significant change. Is it a good one?

I used to picture humility as a door I was afraid to open. I never thought of it as an itinerary to holiness.

“People must believe what they can,” writes George MacDonald, “and those who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less.”

Faith is a gift. We don’t produce it ourselves. We receive it. And we certainly can’t brag about having more of it than other people do.

“People must believe what they can,” writes George MacDonald, “and those who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less.”

Faith is a gift. We don’t produce it ourselves. We receive it. And we certainly can’t brag about having more of it than other people do.

“People must believe what they can,” writes George MacDonald, “and those who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less.”

Faith is a gift. We don’t produce it ourselves. We receive it. And we certainly can’t brag about having more of it than other people do.

On Easter Sunday, Jake Tapper interviewed Rick Warren on ABC’s This Week, asking the influential pastor a series of questions on faith and politics. Of particular interest were his comments on soldiers and war (which did not make it into the aired segment but are available here). At the end of the interview, Warren exclaimed, “God hates war, but loves every soldier.”

As a combat veteran, I was impressed by and grateful for Warren’s statement. The Bible makes clear that war is at best a necessary evil--the idea at the core of the just war tradition. And yes: God loves each and every soldier. But I want to look more closely at the latter thought, especially in light of the suicide epidemic that currently afflicts our nation’s veterans and soldiers.