The writer of the Hebrews has pain in good perspective. He does not counsel the avoidance of pain but rather that strategic embrace of learning’s good pain that produces enduring character.
Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
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The writer of this sermonic piece knows that faith can be told as a story.
Though faith can be approached analytically, definitionally, abstractly, its gleam emerges best through the stories of the faithful. Men and women act in ways that defy this world’s logic. They refuse to hedge their bets. They put all their eggs in just one basket. They toss caution to the wind, throwing themselves into action both noble and self-sacrificing because the gravity of their lives pivots not on the fragile shelf of self-preservation but rather on the bedrock of divine promise. Continue Reading »
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One of the New Testament’s most haunting lines is a simple affirmation about what is worthy of our fear:
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10.31)
For the careful reader, all manner of presumption falls victim to such clarity. Grace, we are told in the magisterial tractate that is the ‘letter to the Hebrews’, is no pretext for the kind of falling back that betrays a rescuing, empowering God whose purposes for his followers lean forward. Continue Reading »
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Ezekiel is perhaps the biblical anthology’s oddest prophet.
His written legacy combines the close-order attention to form and process that is common to the priest he was. Yet priestly conviction becomes combined to occasionally weird effect with the apocalyptic tendency to receive messages from God when the heavens are opened. Continue Reading »
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Christian faith hinges upon the relationship between God and humankind. Specifically, it discerns in the person of Jesus Christ a mystery that probes at the edges of monotheistic conviction while fully embracing it. Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human, a conviction sketched out in the New Testament but requiring centuries before its formulation in more or less classical form in the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition.
Christians do well to call this a ‘mystery’, not because it is antithetical to careful reasoning but because it is deeply paradoxical. Continue Reading »
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It took many listenings-through of this fine 1994 recording before it dawned on me what Amy Grant was getting up to here. She has produces a whimsical but ultimately very serious ode to enduring love between a man and a woman. I had somehow missed the thread that joins these tracks together into a coherent statement, touching upon love’s beginning, love’s apparent end, and love’s stubborn rebirth.
Now it seems obvious. Continue Reading »
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When biblical prophets and seers look to the future that lies still over their horizon, they peer though a wide lens. The scope and scale become vast.
As the Ancient of Days appears in the book of Daniel’s seventh chapter, we are told that:
A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.
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The Johannine letters obsess over a matter that seems a point of detail to readers intoxicated with the idea that action rather than ideas are the important thing. Jesus’ ‘coming in the flesh’ is stated over and over as a deadly serious litmus test by which true believers may be discerned over against those who traffic in lies. Continue Reading »
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It is so often this way when the Lord or his messenger confronts a prophet-to-be in the biblical literature. The chosen mortal quakes in fear, falls upon his face, confesses that he’s nothing but a child, trembles in awe of the messenger and his Sender. One recognizes a familar pattern, a classifiable response. It is usually this way when heaven and earth mingle, the men and women at the seam of these two realities suffering the almost unspeakable angst that accompanies the unsought terror of standing at the juncture. Continue Reading »
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There’s a reason why all those drug store compilations with the breathless titles (‘Most Relaxing Classical Music Ever!) sell year after year. The pre-Classical baroque style really is relaxing. Continue Reading »
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Canter Bridge 