Peripatetic Pastor

Category: Biblical Reflections

  • GO AND SEE: A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

    The church we attend in Tucson, St. Philip’s in the Hills (don’t you love church names with directions in them), includes in its weekly worship schedule a choral evensong service. The short service, based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and almost entirely sung by one of St Philip’s choirs, attracts only a handful…

  • THEOSIS: AN ADVENT MEDITATION

    Since all God’s divine power has been given to us, the power of life and godly living, through knowing the one who called us by [or “to”] his own glory and virtue [and] through which we have been given weighty and majestic promises that through these you may become participants in the nature of divinity,…

  • LIVING SMALL

    Sadness settled over many of us like a Bellingham fog. We were gathered with friends last Tuesday when the votes began to come in from the eastern part of the US. It quickly became apparent that disaster was in the making. We talked a while about what it meant, about why people voted the way…

  • SPIRITUAL ADULTHOOD

    I should have called a recent blog piece, “The Way of Doubt.” Instead, I called it, “The Quest for a Moral Center, Part 1”— a title simultaneously drab and misleading. The piece was not about finding a moral center but about doubt: how doubt often leads in the direction of renewed faith. Doubt, I suggested,…

  • THE QUEST FOR A MORAL CENTER, PART 2

    It’s been a while. Since my last post, I have spent a couple of weeks in Pennsylvania and Michigan, catching up with family and old friends. In that time, I continued to think about identity. What does it mean to be Christian? To be Reformed? To be Christian Reformed? To be, in any true sense,…

  • THE QUEST FOR A MORAL CENTER: PART 1

    IDENTITY There are moments—and questions—for which the blog format does not well serve the purposes that I and perhaps you have for it. The topic that I raise in this post may be one such.  Lately I’ve been thinking about identity. Who we are in the deepest sense. How we form identity. What’s makes for…

  • THE SUBTLETY OF STORY: NOTES ON READING THE BIBLE

    The story of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-22) is a marvel of concise storytelling. In the space of just 13 verses, it satirizes not just one ancient holy place but two. It speaks hope and purpose to the scattered people of God. It lays out in brief a theology of election. It allows Jacob to make…

  • INSIGHT AND IDOLATRY

    For the last long while in this blogspace, I have mostly had my nose to the proverbial grindstone, sharpening my responses to decisions made by recent Christian Reformed synods—synods which adopted for human sexuality a punitively rightwing version of church teaching. In doing so, these synods have purposely excluded churches and church leaders who differ…

  • SEEING WHAT’S THERE: THE NEED FOR THEOLOGICAL RECONSIDERATION

    When a few years ago I set out to read some of the great writers of the American West, I started with Wallace Stegner. It turned out to be a good choice. The first Stegner I read, Angle of Repose (1971), was a revelation. In the book, 1972 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Stegner adopts…

  • THE FUNDAMENTALIST IMPULSE: WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT HUMAN SEXUALITY V

    Fundamentalism is not about fundamentals. It’s about drawing lines. Where the line gets drawn is dictated by cultural developments. Fundamentalists often claim that they represent what has been the historic stance of the church, but this is not true. Fundamentalism is as much a product of the culture as is whatever fundamentalism opposes.  In this…