This Christmas, praying for a shared Jerusalem
In some Christian traditions, people reflect, pray, and enter into joyful anticipation during the season of Advent. As we focus on themes of hope, peace, love, and joy, we often invoke images of the land of the Bible alongside treasured stories that recount the barriers to—and celebration of—Jesus’ birth.This Christmas season, we have many reasons to pray for peace in the Holy Land, whose present reality exists far from such an ideal.
Walter Rauschenbusch and our time
Though Baptists in every age can benefit from Rauschenbusch’s theology of the kingdom, I believe his thought concerning the church contains the most fruitful paths for contemporary Baptists. The church is still afflicted by an individualism that has made us vulnerable to the acids of consumerism that would leave us unable to discern our prophetic ministry in the world.
Bethlehem: metaphor for a complicated mess
This Christmas when I sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” I’m going to be thinking of the song and the town as a metaphor for seemingly unsolvable situations in my life and in the lives of people I know and care about.
Holidays: well-practiced tradition, present reality, and future hope
We celebrate holidays because they are a sign and a foretaste of a future realities marked by resurrection, love, and the New Heavens and the New Earth. But that leaves us needing to live into those future promises here and now. We can live lives of joy, tending to the small plants of hope planted during our holiday festivities. This is the work between celebrations: living into the realities of the present by nurturing lives and communities that bear fruit we will harvest, ferment, and drink in celebration the next time the holiday season comes round.
The ethical dilemma of playing “Mary, Did You Know?”
The question we should be asking, and singing, is not “Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day rule the nations?” Instead, we should ask why Mary would not be welcome in many pulpits, and why other women whom God has called, remain excluded from the pulpits and leadership of so many churches.