An Active Waiting

July 10, 2019

“From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.” - Jürgen Moltmann

That which we believe about the future has deeply formative power over the present. And it is, therefore, why Christians, whose faith is utterly forward looking, must embody a posture of hope, seeking too manifest that which is to come. To live in the present with our vision fixed firmly on the future means that we take up two distinct postures: waiting and hastening.

The Posture of Waiting

This waiting is not a passive waiting but is an active waiting that embodies the coming hope in the present, it is an active expectation of the arrival of Jesus and the consummation of the inaugurated Kingdom of God. Because we live in light of the now-and-not-yet Kingdom of God, to wait always means not conforming to this world of injustice and violence. Rather, active waiting builds for the Kingdom of God, now. It means resisting the threats and seductions of the present, and failing to conform to the failures of our present day.

The Posture of Hastening

To hasten is to live from the future, to anticipate and bring about - to the best of our abilities - the coming reality of the Kingdom of God. It is to live from the “end.” Naturally, therefore, we work for justice, preach the arrival of the Kingdom of God, bring hope to the broken. All of this work is our calling, because in doing this work we partner with God in bringing about the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, may we be instruments of your hope
Where there is hatred, let us bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
And may we go in the light and hope of your impending return. Amen.

Jesus and Disruption

April 22, 2019

Matthew 17.14-27

14 When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him. 15 “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. 16 I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.”

17 “You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” 18 Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed at that moment.

19 Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”

20 He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

22 When they came together in Galilee, he said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. 23 They will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised to life.” And the disciples were filled with grief.

24 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”

25 “Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

26 “From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. 27 “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

Here is a sermon I preached almost a year ago about Jesus’ disruption of the normal scripts that give shape to our lives. It is a disruption toward a surprising hope that animates our involvement in the world around us. Augustine once wrote, “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” This is the posture of the Jesus follower, a living in protest to the failings of the hope Jesus has for this world.

Our prayer is for the disruption of our complacency in things less than the resurrection hope of the world. The disruption of our apathetic response to the work of Jesus.

5 Quotes from MLK's - "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution"

January 20, 2019

As a student of theology and ethics, MLK Day is a sort of sacred day. I usually do two things, every MLK Day: first, I read through King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and secondly, I set aside time for deep reflection on what it means to animate our faith in light of current social issues and repent for my own failure to embody Jesus’ vision for the Kingdom of God here-and-now.

It has been said that “many who quote him now would have hated him then”, and I think there is a lot of truth to that critique.

The Opposite of Hate: Practicing Love in a Hostile World

August 20, 2018

In 1949, shortly after the atrocities of the Holocaust and the Second World War, George Orwell published his increasingly classic novel, 1984. The book is a dystopian novel that imagines Orwell’s native Britain as the fictional Oceania that has been taken over by a tyrannical political regime that governs through emotional manipulation. Individual thinking is a crime against the state, citizens are under constant surveillance and through propaganda, misinformation, and state sponsored hate against a mysterious “other,” Oceania is stabilized.

How do we reverse this? How do followers of Jesus live and embody an alternative way that refuses to be consumed by this hate. The above sermon is my attempt at offering a way forward.

Willard Wednesdays - Rigorous Consistency

July 5, 2018

We must clearly understand that there is a rigorous consistency in the human self and its actions. This is one of the things we are most inclined to deceive ourselves about. If I do evil, I am the kind of person who does evil; if I do good, I am the kind of person who does good (1 John 3:7-10). Actions are not impositions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with.