The least observed of the major days in the Christian calendar is Ascension Day. Coming 40 days after Easter, it lands on a Thursday which doesn’t fit well with our Sunday-centered worship rhythm. And that […]
Category: Theology
Creation is my church
“Nature is my church.” “I feel close to God when hiking the mountains.” In my work as a hospital chaplain, I’ve heard those and similar statements hundreds of times. Sometimes they’re excuses for skipping out […]
A better dad than I am
Like all dads, I make my fair share of mistakes. I try my best with my kids, but I am quite far from perfect. But despite my imperfect parenting, I think I’m a pretty good […]
In the morning & in the mourning
Almost every night for the past two and a half years, I put my Dad to bed. We did the same thing every night. After visiting with one another for a while, it’d be bedtime. […]
Revenge!
Of all the superhero movies churned out over the last two decades, the ones arising from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have dominated. And the centerpiece of those movies is a band of characters who call […]
The King and the chaos that beats us like pounding waves
As a kid, I grew up near Los Angeles in California. The beaches were spectacular and inviting. Every year, I got an equally spectacular sunburn since sunscreen was a fairly new fangled idea at the […]
1 Peter 4 (a rendering)
Since even the anointed king of the world suffered physically, you need to prepare yourself for the same and think like he did. Going the way of suffering like that means you’ve chosen not to […]
1 Peter 3
Thinking and acting in the same way, wives don’t fight with your husbands. Not-fighting is the key to “winning.” And the goal here is that unbelieving husbands would be won over. It’s your beautiful and […]
1 Peter 2 (a rendering)
So take a look inside yourselves and toss out everything with a hint of malice, deception, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. All of it. Babies are satisfied by one and only one thing: milk. Be like […]
1 Peter 1 (a rendering)
From Peter, specially sent by Jesus the anointed king of the world. To God’s hand-picked people. Even though you are aliens and exiles scattered all over the place (Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia), God […]
Are white evangelical Christians racist?
I was raised in a very conservative Christian church. I remember at one point in the early 1980s my Dad saying he embraced the term Fundamentalist. The term has changed a lot since then and […]
The necessary violence of God
I like me the idea of pacifism and especially a nonviolent God. But human pacifism is impossible with a nonviolent God. Too many people have a theology centered on a God who cannot cause pain. […]
Why pray? 33 reasons why I pray
A friend recently asked the question, “Why do we pray?” I’m not sure what was behind the question, but I decided to take it seriously. If we’re honest, there are times when praying feels […]
Even here — Psalm 57 and the unexpected presence of God
Some corners of culture, some places, some people seem both godless and god-forsaken. Some parts of our lives feel either fenced-off from God or ignored by our Maker. A quick look at the news or […]
Psalm 99 & the King of the World
Kings and queens don’t mean much to us today. The British royal family makes the news from time to time, but it’s usually because of their clothing styles and romantic escapades. They are almost completely […]
Re-meeting Jesus with 20 teenagers
I spent three weeks this summer studying the Gospel of Mark with 20 teenagers. They were a great group and our conversations, as we meditated on every word and story in Mark, led to some […]
Taylor Swift’s False God
I have three teenagers and we listen to a lot of music. I also coach high school volleyball and lead a discipleship training program for teens. I am around teen culture a lot. I don’t […]
Psalm 115
A rendering of Psalm 115, which considers the truth that we become like the “God” we worship, so we’d better worship the loving and powerful God and not some lifeless “God” of our own creation.
Does God break his promises?
Sometimes life comes crashing down around our ears and the very things we were sure God wanted for our lives and for the world lay in rubbled ruin around us. A mission trip long prayed […]
The Throne
As a kid, I grew up watching the Emmy-winning TV show All in the Family. In it, the family patriarch Archie Bunker attempts to rule his household during the late 1960s and early 1970s era where […]
Living and praying as Image of God
Where does human value come from? What makes us so special? We assume the world belongs to us and is here for us to do with as we will. And so we eat whatever we […]
Uncensored prayer
I’m a heretic. There are things I believe about God which are wrong. But they’re wrong in all the right ways. You’re a heretic, too. There are things that are true about God which are […]
Seven reasons why I’m a conservationist
When I was growing up, environmentalists were the enemy. They loved the earth and hated God. At least, that’s what I was told. It wasn’t totally untrue, because somehow there had come to be a […]
Practice freedom
Slavery is easy. I don’t mean that life as a slave is easy. I mean it’s easy to live as a slave. We do it all the time. Lots of us. Freedom requires practice. It […]
God’s tattoos
I don’t have any tattoos (yet). But I’ve thought about it. The cost and the pain have held me back. But even more than that is the permanence of tattoos. They become a part of […]
Worship is a dance
Worship is a dance. And so too is theology. From our perspective, both of them have Jesus in the middle. But the reality, if we could step back a bit further, is surprising. I like […]
Faith works — how faith values work & keeps it from becoming slavery
I find it ironic when someone claims others are #badbible readers while doing bad Bible reading themselves. The Facebook post below is a case in point. The writer is obviously quoting Jesus from Matt. 11:28 […]
Live love. Love life.
If God had a hobby, what would it be? Painting by number? Going to as many Dave Matthews Band concerts as possible? Racing monster trucks? We have a sense from the Bible that God is […]
Bodies — why we struggle with them and what God is doing about it
When my Mom had a massive stroke 27 years ago that left her body significantly handicapped, I was left with a question that was new to me but had been asked for thousands of years […]
3 reasons why “going to church” is still important
Going to church is becoming less and less of a basic Christian practice, making our discipleship anemic. For years, I have heard people say, “We don’t go to church; we are the church.” In one way, that’s […]
Sin kills
We had finished dinner and were sitting at the table talking about a passage I had read from the Bible. It was a fairly bloody passage about the different kinds of sacrifices God had commanded […]
If the church isn’t a community, it’s nothing
The church exists to be a sign of the breaking in of the kingdom of God into a world of torn apart relationships. The church does not exist to sing songs; to listen to sermons; to […]
Sitting down for the national anthem & other prophetic actions
During these slow days before the NFL and college football regular seasons get rolling, sports news has been filled with Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback. It’s not because he’s been putting up stellar preseason […]
Rediscovering hope in a hopeless culture
We live in one of the most hopeless, now-oriented cultures in human history. We can hardly look past today, much less the next election without shaking our heads. Our imaginations are filled with dystopian, future-shock […]
You are a theologian
If you’ve ever prayed or said anything about God, you are a theologian. Writing books and having PhDs has nothing to do with it. Rather, engaging with God has everything to do with it. Having […]
The devil’s #1 tool is …
I fall into all kinds of temptations. Most of them are pretty obvious and lack creativity. Lust. Envy. Sloth. Pride. The typical seven deadly sin stuff. It’s all pretty dull and garden variety. We all […]
13 reasons why King Saul wasn't as bad as Sunday school teachers make him out to be
I have spent much of my life thanking my old Sunday School teachers for introducing me to the Scriptures and to Jesus. But I have also spent much of my adult life undoing poorly interpreted […]
God is furious (in his love for us)
God is not boring as many have made him out to be. Far too often, how we represent God and his love for us could not be more milquetoast, tepid, and nauseating. Saccharine and sentimentalist […]
Evil is real — the Gospel according to Harry Potter, part 2
My kids were too little to read and take in the Harry Potter books when they were being written and released, so my wife and I waited for, bought, and read aloud to one another each […]
"Magic" is everywhere — The Gospel according to Harry Potter, part 1
I have been reading and rereading the Harry Potter books since J.K. Rowling started publishing them. I can’t say I got my copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone the day it was released, but […]
Smaller, weaker, dumber
What happens to the country when you have a mediocre leader? What happens when the country is in the middle of a war and he sends the army home? When the only people left to […]
Oneness: God's vision for marriage & for the whole world
I’ve seen too much pain in the gender wars in the church, too much using the Scriptures as a weapon. As a result, I came to avoid passages like Eph. 5:22-33. It was only when […]
Theology for everyday life
Too often there is a disconnect between what we believe and how we live. There’s Sunday worship and there’s the rest of life. We know there ought to be a connection between the two. In […]
What does the Holy Spirit do?
What would the Christian life look like without the Holy Spirit? To answer that question, I ask an oddly similar one: What would the world look like without Garfield the cat? Personally, I’ve never liked the […]
From Bible reading to Bible living
Followers of Jesus have always had a sense that our Bible reading ought to lead to a change in the way we live our lives. We are followers, after all, and following has action at […]
How we know God
The only way to know God is to live in his love and to share it with others. This is how the Scriptures put it: Beloved, let us love one another, for love comes from […]
Listening to MLK with my daughter
Like everyone else, I’m grateful for a 3-day weekend, thanks to Martin Luther King Day observance. It has given me the chance to take my daughter to a volleyball tournament, where she is playing teams from […]
How to teach theology
Seth Godin is one of my favorite bloggers. His brief and poignant observations are generally right on the money. This past week, Seth posted on “How to teach science.” But reading the post, I quickly […]
God hides nothing
Keep looking. You’ll see him!
Weakness is the way
As I grow older, I am becoming more and more aware of my weaknesses, my limitations, my inabilities. My eyes are growing worse. It’s harder for me to stay in shape. I forget things easily. My […]
Christmas — God "for" us & "with" us
Christmas changes everything. It upends everything we think about God. And even more than that, it offers a completely different way of experiencing God. For in one event, it shows us that God is both […]
Destroying the "wall of hostility" — multiculturalism & the kingdom of God
It’s only in the past few years that Hollywood has finally become truly multicultural, with entire casts featuring lead and supporting actors who aren’t mostly white. And what’s been so great is that it hasn’t […]
The problem with inventing your own God
I was heading to Orlando for a conference and had made preparations with friends there to have someone pick me up at the airport. I’d never met the picker-upper, so I sent not just my […]
What lies do I believe about God?
I believe a lot things about God. I have two theological degrees and a library of several thousand theological books. And yet when it comes down to the way I live, I find my theology […]
Unforgiven
I love the Lord’s Prayer — except for one phrase. There’s one line in it that trips me up. It’s the second half of “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” I rely […]
A wider view of the Fall leads to a deeper engagement in mission
For most of my life, I viewed the primary thing wrong in the world as sin, particularly a brokenness in our individual human relationships with God. The most important thing, then, was to get people […]
Erotic spirituality — the good, the bad, and the ugly of combining faith and sexuality
What is the relationship between sexuality and spirituality? In many ways, sexuality has become its own spirituality. And in the process, it has coopted church music and biblical language to articulate it. Ray Charles has […]
Dealing with fear by living in love
I am far less rational than I like to think I am. In all kinds of small and large ways, fear keeps me from doing small things that I might like to do and large […]
Do you know your God?
Just a couple weeks after I became a pastor, my family and I were invited over to dinner by a family in our new church. Things seemed to be going well until I was asked a […]
The cross & the empty tomb — bringing love and power together
The cross of Jesus is the love of God in action. The empty tomb of Jesus is the power of God in action. The problem with human love is that it lacks the power to […]
Errors about Creation = Errors about God
“Any error about creation also leads to an error about God.” -Thomas Aquinas If God is the Creator, then thinking badly about and acting badly toward his creation is directly related with thinking badly about […]
A trinitarian view of being human that corrects our either/or approaches
I was reading an excellent article, nodding all the way, until I got to the point where the author made a distinction between two types of people and then sided with one of them. From […]
Is humanity redeemable? Snowpiercer vs. Jesus
Occasionally, a movie will stick with me for weeks and months afterward. Sometimes, it’s a movie like Frozen with its tenacious “Let It Go” song, which won’t do what it suggests. Then there are movies of […]