At Christmas, we remember again for the first time that God became a human being. God became a someone who could be touched and smelled, heard and seen. God became tangible. Tangible. What could be more tangible than needing to be burped and have your diaper changed? Almighty Creator is nursed in the arms of a teenage girl. Her betrothed …
It’s “Ordinary Time” according to the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, but in our neighbourhoods it’s a new year! We start school in a new grade, sign up and get involved in new programs and activities, and get involved in sports teams, music lessons, and clubs. We transition out of summer and increasingly find ourselves caught up in all the busyness of …
We continue where we left off in my last post discussing Jeremiah 29, focusing particularly on God’s call to faithful presence in the places He sends us. It’s striking and, indeed, disturbing to realize that exile was God’s doing. Some would say God was punishing the Israelites for their lack of faith and obedience, that He was addressing their rebellion and …
Lately, I have been learning a lot about what it means for a community to be a healthy or “abundant” and the importance of community for personal and communal well-being (for this education I am indebted to John McKnight and Peter Block, namely their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods). How do you imagine an abundant, …
Our culture has once again begun to realize the significance of the local, of place, of being rooted. In contrast, Enlightenment thinkers subsumed particular “place” to universal “space.” At least this is the argument made by phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger, who believed that Truth could be revealed only by carefully attending to the things and people nearest to us. The …
In Luke Ten’s paradigmatic text followers of Jesus are instructed to “Remain in the same house…” The work of the church is not a “bait and hook” strategy, a onetime service project, short term mission or volunteer opportunity in a space. We’re being sent to a place, to become part of the very fabric of the neighbourhood; to take up …
Have you ever tried to retell a funny story or joke, only to have it fall flat as a pancake the second time around? When you add two thousand years between the telling, this is especially likely to happen. The parables of Jesus come from a distant time, an unfamiliar place, a completely different culture than the ones in which …
“… for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people.” (Matthew 2:6, Micah 5:2) Shepherd my people? In light of the rulers and ‘kingdoms’ of Jesus’ day and ours, this sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet, a shepherd was the ideal of kingship according to Old Testament writers (e.g. Psalm 78, 2 Samuel 5:2). God’s …
When modern Western Christianity asks important questions, the voice and concerns of the church often dominate the conversation. For instance, questions about leadership might be phrased this way: “What does leadership in the church look like?”1 There is another starting place other than the church. We can frame our inquiries with two questions: The Theological Question: “Who is God?” The …
In Jesus’ day, the religious had turned God’s guidelines into fences. You had to wear, do your hair, eat your lunch, wash your hands their way— or else: you were on the wrong side of the fence. The sign on the fence read: NO UNDESIRABLES! There was a long list of those who were, well, undesirable. Many things could make …