A Fresh Perspective

These two commands on which hang all the law and the prophets are inseparably connected. In fact, to love one’s neighbor as one’s self is to love God, because God is in the neighbor. We are all God’s offspring. We all bear God’s image, no matter how imperfect or marred that image in us is, and we all are alive because God’s Spirit gives us life. Imagine how it grieves God when God suffers God’s children hating and devouring one another. The writer of 1 John puts it this way, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” So we cannot sever these two commands. They go hand-in-hand. The power of love is the power of God. It is the power of the Holy Spirit. And there is no greater transforming power in the universe. I love that scene in the mov...

The sacred storywriter tells us that Moses prays, “Show me your ways, so that I may know you.” This is, I believe, the universal longing of the human heart. One ancient interpreter of the faith said, “The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in God.”   Of course, not everyone would identify this existential angst, this missing element in our lives as a longing for God. In fact, it’s usually disguised as something else. We might think that the something that is missing is something in our marriage or our vocational career or in our friendships. We might think of something physical or material or emotional – rather than spiritual. And I’m sure there are things missing in those areas of our lives, because none of us have it all together do we? So I am not suggesting that every need, every longing, every bit of angst we experience is spiritual. But all these other longings and needs are echoes of our greatest need of all, which is spiritual. It is the need to consciously c...

There is no way to prove this, but I suspect that no scripture has been read as often as Psalm 23. I can’t prove this either, but if there was a way of accessing all my comments and messages that I have delivered at funeral and celebration of life services over the years, I would wager that I read Psalm 23 at some point in the liturgy, either in the service itself or at the graveside in every one of those services. But let’s not relegate this text to funeral services. It is a passage for pilgrims of all types at all stages of our journey, not just in the final one. It’s a witness to the presence of God through all of life. The passage begins with a statement that many have aspired to, but few, if any, have actually attained.  Really, I think this whole Psalm sets forth spiritual realities in their ideal form, that we never experience fully, but experience in varying degrees. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Have you ever came to the place in your spiritual life...

This parable is found in all three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew, as usual, adds to it some details that give it a particular flavor unique to Matthew. In its original setting in Jesus’ ministry, it is likely Jesus tells a shorter form of this parable in anticipation of his death. He has already been rejected by the religious leaders who are now plotting a way to get rid of him. In the narrative Jesus tells this parable after he stages a protest in the Temple overturning the tables of the money changers. That prophetic act of Jesus sealed his fate. Now it’s just a matter of time. The parable is based on Isaiah’s song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5. This passage in Isaiah 5 is called by the prophet a love song. In that love song the owner and caretaker of the land diligently prepares and plants a vineyard with tender-loving care. But instead of producing good fruit, it yields sour grapes. And so the caretaker decides to let it be. The result is that the vineyard g...

A pastor I know tells about a Bible study group in a church that he served a number of years ago that decided to study the book of Jonah. Well, this group got hung up on the whale scene. They read the story not as a parable, but as a historical narrative. And they concluded that Jonah must have been swallowed by a sea grouper because a whale’s mouth is not large enough to ingest a human. They were so excited about their discovery they even asked their pastor to make an announcement to the church about their findings. Well, the pastor was able to get around it by telling them that he didn’t want to take credit for their research, and they should find some other way to share their conclusions. I have no doubt those folks probably missed the whole point of the story. I don’t know why some religious folks have such a hard time accepting that fiction and parable and metaphorical narratives are better conveyers of spiritual truth than history. What I am about to say I hope will not soun...

My article for Baptist News Global this month focused on the importance of reading the Bible critically as well as spiritually, and I used this text as an example. The reason it’s so important to read a text critically is that it helps to prevent us from spiritually misusing and misapplying the text. The stories and teachings of Jesus in the Gospels and the stories about Jesus in the Gospels did not drop down out of heaven on the wings of angels. Before these stories were ever written down by a   Gospel writer they were told and retold and retold. Scholars call this the oral tradition. These stories were passed down by word of mouth decades before they written. I’m sure you can imagine how these stories were altered and changed in the process of retelling them. Some details would have been omitted while others would have been added. And then the Gospel writers themselves who brought these stories together in a cohesive narrative around the framework of Jesus’ ministry also made ch...