Faith Challenges: It Ain't All Comfort

Easter is primarily a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. Rather like Christmas being a celebration of Jesus’ birth, however, do we stop to do more than recount the narratives telling us about Jesus' resurrection two millennia ago? Why does Jesus’ resurrection matter? How does it impact us? What do we do with it today? We do well to understand just how life-shattering it was for the disciples to hear Jesus was alive. In one account, the women leave the empty tomb and say nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. In another, they tell the disciples, and Peter and John run to the tomb to check in out. One of them believes, the other is just in shock. We criticize Thomas for not believing the others who have told him of Jesus' eating with them. We overhear the disciples on their road to Emaus not understanding that Jesus was right there with them. These bits of narration are important for much more than the history they impart. They show that were it not for the re...

Back in my conservative Christian high school days, I was confronted with all too many attempts to pit Genesis’ flood narrative against various aspects of science. There were critiques of carbon-dating, uranium-dating, and theories pertaining to evolution in all its aspects. I remember being shown a film attempting to prove that all the animals of earth could have found space in the ark, with calls for speciation to come about after the flood so as to allow for appropriate space. It struck me as investing way too much time and energy into proving that the Bible had to be taken literally, word for word, despite obvious issues as the text’s antiquity reaching back far beyond the introduction of the scientific method and concerns with precision. The existence of other flood narratives around the world was deemed proof that there was a monumental flood that remained entrenched in human conscience on a global scale. Even so, there was no attempt to actually read some of these othe...

I’ve never personally found fundamentalism appealing. I grew up surrounded by by various forms of fundamentalism. My home was pretty free of it, but its head popped up at church, at school, in the larger community, and within extended family. As I have matured, I have been able to note some of why it appeals to so many people. While there is plenty of fundamentalism in Jewish, Muslim, and other faith traditions, my concern and experience lies mainly with Evangelical Christian fundamentalism. Back in high school, my classmates abhorred the rules and regulations fundamentalism handed down to everyone on the school campus. It seemed the most conservative voices called most of the shots. My classmates belonged in large part to families with fundamentalist mindsets. Meanwhile, they were in active rebellion against how that burdened their lives. On questions of religion, theology, and faith, however, I often found myself a lone voice countering many of the underpinnings of fundam...

What would it mean for us to experience revival along our Lenten journey? We have a tendency to equate emotion in a church setting with the “moving of God’s Spirit.” We seem to think that an emotional reaction to music, a sermon, a prayer, or some other element in a church setting points to a special action of the Spirit. The closest we ever come to that in the Hebrew Scriptures is a sense of dread falling upon a group of people. In no case does Scripture link such emotional experiences with a moving of the Spirit. Revival is not tied to emotion. Emotion is not a manifestation of God’s Spirit, presence, or action in our lives. There were bands of ecstatic “prophets” in Ancient Israel. The only mention of them is in regard to Saul losing his mind in an ecstatic trance. The story includes a bit of skepticism, asking, “Is Saul now among the prophets?” Rather than being a staunch servant of Yahweh, Saul turns out to be an obstruction to Yahweh and Yahweh’s purposes. That emotional...

When I was three or four years old, my sisters and I were going to play in the water in our yard. I put on my swim suit, but I refused to go outside without a swim top like my sisters had on. They took one of my Dad’s handkerchiefs and tied it around my chest so I would go outside with them. In NC and AZ, there are bills in the legislature that would make that a felony. When I was in Fifth Grade, my sisters took a dress form that our mother had, dressed it in one of her dresses, and slipped it over me. Then they took make-up and painted my face. We went to the Halloween party at our American school in Recife, where my parents led the costume parade as the headless and two-headed monsters. That bill in the NC legislature would classify that as a felony, as I was wearing make-up and the clothing of the opposite gender while speaking in front of more than two people. When Karen and I were serving as Southern Baptist missionaries in Mexico, I dressed up one day as a fema...

We commonly talk about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as a summary statement of what he taught over the course of his three years of ministry. There is no reason to take this as a sermon he taught in one and only venue. There is no reason to believe this is the only manner in which he related these words and teachings. There is ample reason to see between Matthew’ and Luke’s accounts that variations are as much the product of Jesus having offered this discourse on multiple occasions and in different ways. Over the last three and a half years, you have heard me repeat myself various times on various issues. I have not always used the same words. I have retold some stories with different meanings and applications. I have highlighted certain aspects at times, and emphasized other things on other occasions. Sometimes, my extemporaneous prayers have sounded a lot like how I led public prayer on other occasions. What we are reading here in Matthew chapters 5-7 is a summary of Je...

I’ve never really had trouble with the concept of Jesus’ virgin birth from a standpoint of it being an impossibility for God. I’ve long had issues with the way we often make it a huge issue, as though if Jesus were not born of a virgin, then he could not be God incarnate. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin as passed on biologically through male semen has never made any sense, and does not even take into account that a literal read of Genesis 3 would force an understanding that sin originated with Eve’s disobedience, not Adam’s. Sure, Luke’s story of the nativity begins with a narration underscoring a claim to Mary’s virginity through the time of Jesus’ birth. Mark does not mention Jesus’ birth. John does so only in a roundabout manner, saying only that the “Word became flesh and lived among us.” Matthew offers the only other account of Jesus’ birth in the Scriptures. Despite his quotation from the Septuagint of Isaiah 7:12, Matthew in no way attempts to portray Mary as bein...