A Fresh Perspective

Last Sunday the Revised Common Lectionary reading from the epistles was Romans 8:12-25. I picked it up at 8:9. I wanted to share with my congregation the importance of having a mystic vision. I began my sermon by saying: “I would describe what we just read as part of a mystic vision. I believe Paul was a Jewish mystic. What I mean by that is that he put a priority on direct experience of God. Mystical awareness is an awareness of the Divine pervading all reality that is generated through direct encounter with God. Later in this letter at the conclusion of a section where Paul expounds on redemptive history he exclaims, “For from God and through God and to God are all things" (11:36). That is a mystic vision of reality. He didn’t get this simply through the Hebrew Scriptures, though there are hints of it there, but he came to this through his own direct experience of the Divine.” I think most Christians today have very inadequate conceptions of God, which make it dif...

The Shawshank Redemption is at the top of my all-time great movies list. It is punctuated with great lines and saturated with rich spiritual symbolism. The warden, Samuel Norton, is an icon of toxic Christianity. The warden presents himself as a socially respectable, church-going, Bible-quoting Christian. It becomes clear, however, from the moment he appears in the story that his Christianity is in name only. His faith has holes in it larger than the one Andy Dufrense chiseled through his cell wall. When Andy and the other prisoners first stand before the warden, immediately the warden’s self-righteousness dominates the scene. When one of the prisoners asks, “When do we eat?” the warden has him beaten. Holding out a Bible, he says to the captives, “Trust in the Lord, but your ass is mine.” Contrast the scene above with the one in Luke 4 where Jesus, in the synagogue at Nazareth , applies Isaiah 61 to his understanding of his mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is up...

Prejudice disguises itself as holiness when passages such as Romans 1:26-27 are employed to clobber LGBTQ persons. The text reads as follows: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” Here is the problem with turning Paul into an anti-gay proponent: Paul, along with most ancient moralists, would have regarded same sex relations as an expression of excessive or exploitive sexual behavior by heterosexuals. It is not likely that he would have had any understanding at all of same sex attraction as a sexual orientation set early in life. Paul’s knowing about sexual orientation is about as likely as his knowing of atoms and electrons as basic elements of our universe. He would have be...

The church I pastor  ( Immanuel Baptist Church, Frankfort, KY )  is affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group that broke away from the fundamentalist dominated Southern Baptist Convention in 1991. Cecil Sherman was the first Executive Coordinator of CBF and I distinctly remember the story he told to a small group of pastors that met with him in 1992 who were in much prayer and thought about leading their churches out of the SBC to be part of the new organization (CBF does not call itself a denomination, but it clearly functions as one). Dr. Sherman told us that he was part of a group called “the Peace Committee” formed at the height of the controversy, which (in theory) was to be a safe place where moderates and conservatives could try to work out some of their differences and coexist. Sherman made, I thought, a generous offer. He said to the conservatives, “Let the moderates have Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and one other sc...

Whenever I engage in conversation with people I meet for the first time I try to avoid being asked the question, “What do you do for a living?” But if I am asked I say, “I am a minister.” Generally, the one who asks then inquires, “What denomination?” or “What kind of church?” Here is where I always have to clarify, depending on the most recent news headline involving Christian leaders: “I am a Baptist minister, but I am not a science-denying Baptist minister who think that dinosaurs lived alongside humans a few thousand years ago.” What a strange irony that a 30-foot-long fossil of an Allosaurus will be on display at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky where Museum founder, Ken Ham, recently debated science educator Bill Nye. Ken Ham and his colleague s think it defends the book of Genesis and supplies evidence of Noah’s flood. Good grief! Unfortunately, this is real life, not a Charlie Brown cartoon. According to a recent survey  by the Associated Press, 77% ...

In order to appropriate this passage appropriately it’s important to note that this passage is set in a larger context of persecution and end-time expectation where Jesus sends out his disciples as sheep among wolves to proclaim the imminent fulfillment of the kingdom of God . The early disciples believed that Jesus would most likely come   within their lifetime to bring an end to this present age and usher in God’s future kingdom. They also believed that the time leading up to that decisive moment would be marked by great suffering and tribulation, particularly from powers opposed to the kingdom. The early Christians inherited this apocalyptic outlook from Palestinian Judaism. They reworked it, of course, in light of their belief in Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Of course, looking back from our point in history we know they were mistaken about the apocalyptic schematics. Still, some of us haven’t learned much from it, because we still cook up these prophetic timetables, even mo...

If you have learned anything from me about interpreting Scripture over the years, I hope you have learned that you can take the stories in the early chapters of Genesis seriously without taking them literally. One does not have to deny science or evolution to take these creation stories seriously. And you don’t even have to be a liberal or a progressive like me to do that, you can be an evangelical, though the statistics don’t fair well for evangelicals. According to a recent survey by the Associated Press, 77% of people who claim to be born again or evangelical say they have little or no confidence that the universe began 13.8 years ago with a big bang. And 76% of evangelicals doubt that life on earth, including human beings, evolved through a process of natural selection. Now, the interesting thing, or rather the sad thing is that evangelical professors in evangelical universities and seminaries know better. Darrel Falk, a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene Univer...