A Fresh Perspective

There is a great story in the book, Report to Greco , by Nikos Kazantzakis. When Nikos was young, his mother was very religious; she went to mass everyday. His father was anti-religious; sort of bitter toward religion, and Nikos was torn. When he was 19 years old he decided to spend the summer at a monastery located on one of the mountains in Greece . At this monastery there was a famous old monk called Father Makarios.  One day, Nikos asked Father Makarios, “Father Makarios, do you still wrestle with the Devil?” Father Makarios said, “No. I use to wrestle with the Devil all the time. But now I have grown old and tired, and the Devil has grown old and tired with me. So I leave him alone and he leaves me alone.” Nikos asked, “Then life is easy now?” Father Makarios responded, “Oh no. Life is much harder now. For now I wrestle with God.” Nikos exclaimed, “You wrestle with God and hope to win?” “No,” said Father Makarios, “I wrestle with God and hope to loose.”  These t...

The Cross at the Center (Mark 9:2-13; OT reading, 2 Kings 2:1-12) Thomas Tewell, the Pastor of Fifth Ave. Presbyterian Church in NY City, tells about visiting a large church in another part of the world. He said it was a great worship experience and he was blessed by the service, but as he looked around, on the inside, outside, in their church literature, he couldn’t find a cross. Afterwards, he went to see one of the pastors. He said, “I love your worship, I love what’s going on here. But I’m missing the cross. Is there a cross in here anywhere?” The pastor whispered to him, “The cross doesn’t market well in this culture, so we don’t say a lot about it.” That evening Pastor Tewell wrote in his journal, “Am I into marketing or ministry?” In the conversation down the mountain Jesus links mystical experience to costly discipleship. This brief glimpse of glory on the mountain of transfiguration is inseparably connected to Jesus’ suffering and death . In Luke’s version, the subje...

In Mark’s Gospel a leper comes to Jesus begging, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” The text says, “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’” The alternate reading says that Jesus was “moved with anger” (Mark 1:40-41).   This is an example of a variant in the manuscript tradition. We do not possess a single original manuscript of the New Testament (this is true of the Hebrew Bible as well). We have copies—copies of copies. The vast majority of manuscripts date from the ninth century and later. A smaller group of manuscripts date earlier. A few generally considered very reliable date from the fourth to the sixth centuries. We have a few papyrus manuscripts that date even earlier that contain portions of the New Testament, but many of these show evidence of having been copied without the greatest care.  It is the work of textual scholars to compare these manuscripts, rate their comparative value, ...

In The Last Battle , the final volume of The Chronicles of Narnia , there is a delightful scene toward the end of the story. A group of dwarfs sit huddled together in a tight little knot thinking they are in a pitch black, smelly hole of a stable when in reality they are out in the midst of an endless grassy green countryside with sun shining and blue sky overhead. Lucy, the most tenderhearted of the Narnian children, feels compassion for them. She tries to reason with them. Then frustrated, she cries, “It isn’t dark, you poor stupid Dwarfs. Can’t you see? Look up! Look round! Can’t you see the sky and the trees and the flowers!” But all they can see is pitch black darkness.  Aslan, the Christ figure, is there with them, but they can’t see him. When Aslan offers them the finest food, they think they are eating spoiled meat scraps and sour turnips. When he offers them the choicest wine, they mistake it for ditch water.  How did the Dwarfs become so blind? The dwarfs ha...

I believe there are three foundational characteristics of transformative Christianity. One is inclusiveness . Christianity that is unhealthy and toxic (and can be destructive and deadly) is always dualistic. It divides the world between “us” and “them.” Obviously, in order to explain one’s own faith or position some differentiation and categorization is necessary, but this is vastly different than saying that only members of one’s group or faith possess the truth or are accepted by God.  Inclusive Christianity does not believe that all roads lead to God or that all beliefs are equally valid. But it does contend that God will travel many different roads to get to us, and that truth is truth wherever it may be found.  The basic difference is this: Christians entrenched within exclusive Christianity insist that those outside their group must believe what they believe or relate to God the way they relate to God in order to become God’s children. Inclusive Christianity beg...

There are several passages in the New Testament that describe Christian salvation in terms of before-and-after. One such text, Titus 3:4–7, was featured in the Common Lectionary reading for Christmas Eve and Day. The contrasts in these texts are perhaps a bit overdrawn, but they are nevertheless real, and they highlight what the early Christians primarily meant when they spoke of God’s salvation.  Christian salvation means, according to these before-and-after texts, that in Christ and through Christ, we Christians are liberated from negative attitudes and behaviors that are destructive to relationships, communities, and our own souls, as we learn new ways of relating to one another in grace, kindness, and love patterned after Christ. This process of transformation is Christian salvation, not just the result of it.  Christian salvation is not something separate from Christian discipleship . It’s all one piece. Incorrectly, Christian discipleship has been understood by ...

Gospel scholars tell us that Mary’s canticle of praise (the Magnificat) was most likely a song or prayer used in early Jewish Christian worship. It is a song or prayer of longing that envisions a dramatic reversal : “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (1:51–53). . The overthrow of the wealthy does not come about through the rising up of the oppressed in revolution, but through the advent of a lowly, humble child, who is born in humility, if not poverty, and who, throughout his ministry, demonstrated what Gospel scholars call a preferential option for the poor. When he defined his ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth , he declared that his mission was to bring good news to the poor and set the oppressed free (Luke 4:18–19). When he said that he had come to declare “the acc...