Theology Tuesday

Pastor Derek is away for a few days but will return with a brand new blog next week. Stay tuned!

Courage, cher cœur  Well. This is what it looks like right before you fall.  Stumblin’ around, you been guessing your direction, next step, you can't see at all.  Mac Miller, Circles                        They had come to the edge of moonless and starless night.  How long this voyage into the darkness lasted, nobody knew. We’re going round and round in circles.  We shall never get out, never get out!’   - C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia     Mac Miller’s posthumous album Circles, has to be the album of 2020 because it is so good in a year that is just so bad. Mercy. If I can’t convince you to put Miller on heavy rotation, you may catch the same what-are-we going-to-do-and-how-are-we-going-to-handle-this by reading a little C.S. Lewis. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third and, I think, best installment of the seven-part Narnia series, we find a ragtag ship’s ...

I’ve been part of an out-rigging canoe club for almost a year now. Not since my college rugby days have I cared so much, tried so hard and dreamt so frequently about a sport --including watching the Detroit Pistons win their first title and Ben Johnson winning Olympic gold, becoming the fastest man in the world (at least for that incredible 48 hrs before the scandal broke). But back to the OC club. One of the things on which I’m working as I learn this sport, and the list is long, is to keep my head up. I hear it every time I’m in the boat- keep your head up! But why? I’m not steering. It's often dark and keeping my head down helps me focus, keeps me in it as I try to put all the aspects of a single stroke together. Isn’t that what we tell each other- just keep your head down and do the work? Lean in and get it done, right? It’s how we work hard. All my reasons for keeping my head down were overruled by a teammate explaining that my head down meant I was pushing the boat down...

Conversion is the starting point of every spiritual journey.   It involves a break with the life lived up to that point; it is a prerequisite for entering the kingdom.           Gustavo Gutierrez, We Drink From Our Own Wells Conversion story #6 Thanks to the whitest sounding professor at my seminary, Calvin Augustine Pater, I was introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from Birmingham jail. Prof. Pater, known as being somewhat (perhaps entirely) erratic, argued convincingly to some, sympathetically to most, that King’s letter should be included in the New Testament canon.  The importance of that seminary debate hit home for me when I read Jonathan Rieder’s book Gospel of Freedom, an in-depth examination of King’s letter, published on the 50th anniversary of the original prison epistle.  Unlike in seminary, when I encountered King’s letter, this second time I was a pastor at a large city church, the kind of church and...

I begin my now Tuesday tradition of a blog unsure of what to say and how to navigate the chaos where we find ourselves. Still in the grips of a pandemic, we are now also in the waves of protest following the wake of another grievous and grave injustice against a black man, George Floyd, whose unjust killing has placed his name on every heart.  We are all so weary, so scared, so tired, so uncertain. How weary and uncertain we are depends on your city and the color of your skin. Oh, this amazing country that is yet burdened, in places hardened, with the scourge of racism. Lord in your mercy. As we face this racial tension and work through the turmoil together, and only together are we going to work through this, I want to lift up a word that we may overlook. I am writing as a Presbyterian pastor to many members of the St. Andrews-Covenant church family.  Another way to say this is that I am writing as a Protestant to other Protestants. There it is--baked into not only ou...

Vino veritas. It’s an old adage that means ‘in wine there is truth’, or at least in a few glasses of wine there is a kind of truth.  It may not be with a capital T, but certainly with wine you might be more inclined to get it off your chest, speak what is on your mind, and reveal what is in your heart at that moment.  Out of 150 psalms, there are about 50 known as lament psalms, sometimes called complaint psalms.  I think of them as the bitching and complaining psalms, and maybe we could also think of them as the wine psalms as they say things that we wouldn’t normally say or hear or think -at least not out loud or on social media (there are filters on pictures for a reason!). When you ask these 50 psalms how they are doing, they flout the too much information rule and let it all out: Oh I cry all day but God does not answer; The waters have come up to my neck I sink deep in the mire  I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched;  my eyes grow ...

But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I see this prayer from Julian of Norwich several times a week during our quarantine days. It’s beautiful, poignant, and comforting. Not buying it? I don’t blame you.  I wake up every morning thinking I’ve had the worst dreams, but the news reminds me I am very much awake and very much concerned for us all. How exactly to pray a prayer like all things shall be well? That doesn’t sound like Norwich as much as an ostrich with a head buried deep in the sand.  Does it help to know that these words came to Julian on what she thought was her deathbed at only 30 years of age?  She had lived through several bouts of the black plague and watched her country be ravaged by the peasants’ revolt. Life in the 1300s was far from what we can recognize, even in these difficult days of Covid-19.  What makes this prayer valuable to me is that Julian felt she was quoting these words not cre...