May 2009 Archives

Paul's pivotal life experience is referred to as the Calling of Paul or the Damascus Road Experience--the day Jesus confronted Paul. Luke recorded the original incident in Acts 9:

The next prayer we'll investigate is straightforward enough, but the action the apostles took seems curious to us. Shortly after Jesus "was taken up and disappeared in a cloud" (Acts 1:9, technically called the Ascension), and some time before Pentecost, Peter persuaded the other disciples to replace Judas Iscariot, to return their number to twelve.

Peter quoted Psalm 109:8: "Give him a short life, and give his job to somebody else." He went on to explain that the replacement needed to have been a part of the Jesus Movement from the beginning at Jesus' baptism, through the years of Jesus' ministry, to Jesus' resurrection from the dead and his ascension. The criteria seemed to have narrowed the choices down to two: Joseph Barsabbas, also called Justus, and Matthias. The disciples all apparently agree with Peter on the criteria, because they prayed,

You, O God, know every one of us inside and out. Make plain which of these two men you choose to take the place in this ministry and leadership that Judas threw away in order to go his own way. (Acts 1:24-25)

Probably the biggest religion story of the past couple weeks has been the saga of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy from northern Minnesota who is dying of Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Yes, he's dying, unless he gets chemo. With chemo, there's a 90% survival rate. Without chemo, less than 10%.

After one round of chemo this Spring, Hauser refused to go back. At some point he and his mother -- and possibly other members of his family -- "converted" to Nemenhah, an online Native American "religion" that advotes homeopathic recipes of roots and herbs to treat illness. Daniel claimed to be a Nemenhah shaman, then it turned out that Nemenhahites (?) age 13 or older are automatically shamans. The Hausers are in no sense Indian.

When Daniel refused chemo, his doctor took him to court. Daniel defended himself with a first-person statement that I'm highly doubtful that he wrote himself. When the judge ordered Daniel to resume chemo, he and his mother fled to California, seduced by a sleazy lawyer to promptly ditched them. They were then flown back by a Hollywood movie producer, and yesterday, Daniel showed up for chemo at a hospital in Minneapolis.

I can hardly imagine a person praying during his torture and execution. I find it even more difficult to imagine that person praying for his executors. But Jesus was no ordinary person.

He loved people to the end, and he prayed that his Father would forgive the people who killed him.

What an extraordinary accomplishment!

In The New Christians, I wrote a section chastising liberals for censoring the Bible in the Revised Common Lectionary. Although liberals often criticize conservatives for cherrypicking Bible verses, liberals do just the same thing when they leave verses out of what they preach on Sunday (a practice that one doesn't find with evangelicals). I wrote,

...A beautiful and provocative Psalm, to be sure, and a reading that's slated for one of the most important days in the church calendar, Pentecost, in all three years of the lectionary cycle. But strangely, the lectionary calls for this reading: "Psalm 104:24-34, 35b." In other words, the preacher is instructed to excise the line, "But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more."

This happens over and over in the lectionary: Sunday morning Bible readings are purged of their unsavory--some might say "politically incorrect"--content. This dubious practice raises the obvious question: How does it serve the faithful who sit in congregations across America? The answer: it doesn't. Instead, this practice is an injustice both to the Bible and to those who place their trust in the Bible's words. It assumes that average Christians can't handle all that the Bible has to offer, or worse, that preachers can't manage the prickly parts of the text.

Well, it seems that at least one preacher feels the same way that I do.

Near the beginning of Solomon's reign, he does what we hope any ruler would do. In 1 Kings 3, he asks God for wisdom. After Solomon marries his queen, he travels to Gibeon to worship at the shrine (before the...

Some years after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt and after Joshua took them into the land that God had promised Abram, Israel was led by a series of judges. Moses picked the first judges, people who...

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Last week, I ran some excerpts of a book I've written on the ancient practice of lectio divina. This week, I'll be posting excerpts from another book called Ask Seek Knock, in which I wrote about how we can use...

Praying the Bible Intro - lectio divina - reading - meditating - praying - contemplating Writing about contemplation is strange. It's weird because the fourth step of lectio divina is so unlike our everyday activities. The first three steps of...

Do you think that Christian leaders who publicly support same sex marriage, gay rights, etc., should be pushed out of the closet?Last fall, I publicly affirmed gay marriage as a Christian and biblically virtuous lifestyle. Of course, not all Christians...

Praying the Bible Intro - lectio divina - reading - meditating - praying - contemplating In the movie The Apostle, Robert Duvall plays Sonny, a preacher-evangelist who has made a few mistakes in his life, one of them a big...

Praying the BibleIntro - lectio divina - reading - meditating - praying - contemplatingDepending on what version of the Bible you use, the word meditate appears about fifteen times in the Old Testament. (It's not used at all in the...

Praying the Bible Intro - lectio divina - reading - meditating - praying - contemplating One of the best meals I've ever had was in an upscale restaurant, Daniel's Bistro, in New York City. My entrée was called the DB...

Praying the Bible Intro - lectio divina - reading - meditating - praying - contemplating Though dates differ, Guigo II lived from about 1115 to 1198. His official title was the Ninth Prior of the Grand Chartreuse of Carthusians. That's...

Recently, Stanley Fish wrote about the problems with the way the liberal intelligentsia thinks about religion vs. science -- or reason vs. faith. He was, of course, slaughtered in the comment section of his NYTimes blog by, um, the liberal...

Praying the Bible Intro - lectio divina - reading - meditating - praying - contemplating For the last couple weeks, I've written some ecclesial and theological provocations. For the next couple weeks I'm going to focus on spirituality -- namely,...

Next fall, Doug and I are hosting a learning party in the Twin Cities for people who love Christ, love Christianity, and are interested in the future. The two of us have been given the microphone a lot in the...

I'm going to close out this week's topic by looking back to the history of the church -- the very early church -- to gain a bit more perspective on ordination.I'm currently writing a little book reflecting on the Didache...

I've faithfully read your comments, and John's post, and here are my rejoinders-by-bullet-point:Ontological Shibboleth: I've been accused of creating a straw man in suggesting that denominational ordination tends to grant ontological superiority to those in the clergy caste. I agree...

In light of the recent ordination discussion here, I'm reposting an ordination sermon that I preached for a friend in 2005. Looking forward to your comments.Last weekend, I preached at the ordination service of a friend. I thought it was...

John,Here's the continuation of my response to your blog post and my petition asking Adam to consider withdrawing from the ordination process in the PC(USA).5) You write,What historians know but Tony doesn't seem to understand is that he is following...

I've got a bunch of people upset at me for encouraging my friend, Adam Walker-Cleaveland, to forsake the ordination process of the Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination. I even went so far as to post an online petition to attempt to...

"I Took It as a Sign"Someone sent a band to my house,And it started playingAt five in the morning.I took this as a signGod wanted me to sing!Then the moon joined inAnd a few of the tenor-voiced stars,And the earth...

Over at Internet Monk, Michael Bell has run the latest Pew data through his Batcomputer, and it spit out a very cool graph, showing where people switch when they switch.Money quote from Michael's analysis:Evangelicals are at best currently treading water....

My friend, Adam Walker-Cleaveland, has once again been thwarted in his attempt to be ordained as a "minister of word and sacrament" in the Presbyterian Church (USA). First it was because his presbytery in Idaho objected that he asked his...

At JoPa Productions we know how important leader networks and informal blog communities are for those working on new and emerging ways of Christianity. And, we know how important face-to-face meetings are in the development of these communities. So, we...

That's the question that I tweeted yesterday. And then last night, before her talk, I introduced her by reading the tweets that came in. A couple people have asked me to post them, so here they are:As much as she...

If you are reading this in an RSS reader, please click on the post.See what I had to do there? Because if you, like me, read all of your blogs in an RSS reader, then you only see the headline...

I've long admired Stanley Fish, and I've written about my reliance on his fantastic book of essays, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Fish is a leading postmodern literary critic and occasional commentator on...

Apparently, Paul Gauguin, in a dispute over a prostitute....

Last week, I spent time with some new friends in Canada. Most of them were church leaders in the United Church of Canada, the result of a denominational merger in 1925. The United Church is unabashedly liberal in its social...

For some reason, and unbeknowst to me, the "Subscribe" box vanished from this blog a few weeks ago.  I asked the Bnet editors to put it back, which they did. And now I've discovered, thanks to some friendly tweeters, that...

The Dallas Morning News pioneered the Sunday "Religion" section in daily newspapers, launching it in 1994. They were quickly emulated by newspapers around the country, including my hometown newspaper, the StarTribune, which established a more politically-correct sounding "Faith and Values"...