Presby-Musings

I was five years old when I learned a valuable lesson about confession and forgiveness--a lesson I have never forgotten to this day.  Can I tell you that at five years old, I was a straight up theologian?   Seriously.  By the time I was five I had heard scores of sermons, endured countless altar calls in the little Baptist church we attended, and because of this I knew one unalterable fact:  If I sincerely asked God to forgive me---no matter what I had done---God would forgive me.   So on that fateful day in the grocery store when I was--to coin a very Southern term--acting a fool, and my mom, who is the most patient human being on the planet told me I was getting a whooping when I got home... I decided that the only thing left to me was to bring it to God.  I found a spot by a stack of canned beans and started to pray.  The fact that I can recall that I was praying by a stack of canned beans is beyond me.  Of all of the details of th...

This is the second week of daily devotions reflecting on the sermon series that I'm currently preaching, "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  This week we are reflecting on what it means to recognize the Holy Spirit working, moving, creating and inspiring in the world around us.   Every Sunday at the traditional worship service of my church we read as part of our liturgy an "Affirmation of Faith."  Typically, we rotate between three different historic "creeds" of the Church: The Apostle's Creed, The Nicene Creed and the French Reformed Creed (which we use mostly on Sundays when we celebrate communion).   Each creed is a bit different in language and form, but not that dissimilar in substance.  They all affirm the same basic Christian beliefs about God, the church, sacraments and community.  And each contains very distinct language affirming the Christian belief in the Trinity.  The Trinity is one of the most mysterious and cha...

I just finished reading N.T. Wright 's short treatise For All The Saints ? Remembering the Christian Departed , which is a distilled version of his larger, academic work The Resurrection of the Son of God. Both works deal with what Wright believes is a "mismatch between what the earliest Christians believed about life after death--and what many ordinary Christians seem to believe on the subject today." If you've got a week to kill, then by all means pick up the Resurrection of the Son of God  and commence reading.  When Wright says it's "academic" he isn't kidding around.  But if you would like to visit his basic arguments about what the New Testament and early Christian tradition have to say about what happens to us when we die, then For All The Saints?  is more than adequate. For All The Saints? addresses particular controversies within the Anglican Communion surrounding the doctrine of Purgatory and also the inclusion of All Souls Day w...