"I saw the spirit descend and remaining upon him" - so speaks John the baptizer to his circle of followers about his baptism of Jesus. It is from this circle of John’s followers that Jesus drew his first disciples. In our reading from the Book of Acts this morning, we hear of an encounter between the …
Our Totalitarian Lives
I stand in awe of Karl Barth (1886-1968), generally acknowledged as the greatest theologian of the 20th century and one of the greatest of all time. My awe is not simply at his theological depth and understanding of Scripture; I'm awed at the sheer quantity of what he wrote and published. His greatest contribution to …
The Real War on Christmas
There is a Buddhist saying, “If you meet Buddha, kill him.” Weird? Clearly, the saying is meant to warn against idols, against illusions, against deceptions. We are easily deceived, easily fall into our own wishful thinking and illusions, and easily can turn everything and everyone into an idol. Every year, we kill the Christ …
A Vulnerable God
Christmas is the celebration of God’s vulnerability. It was the birth of a vulnerable baby that constituted God’s great plan for the redemption of human beings. So don’t turn God into a macho god, a warrior god, an imperial god! Immanuel = "God with us" in Hebrew. Jesus is a wonderful name, it has …
An Ill-Mannered Jesus
More than 200 newspapers carry the advice column of Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners. I was curious to see if Miss Manners could help Jesus with some dinner etiquette, so I did aa quick Google search. In August of this year, someone asked Miss Manners for advice: DEAR MISS MANNERS: I find …
Cruciform Love
A few weeks ago I had told of a woman we met in October at the island of Hydra in Greece. She had just returned from Latin America and vowed never to return. She was turned off by the proliferation of crucifixes. Everywhere she went in Latin America there were crucifixes, and she wanted no …
Powers and Principalities Then and Now
Jesus encountered constant opposition and criticism for breaking sabbath rules and the taboos of society. In the healing of the woman in Luke 10:10-17, the synagogue leader could not tolerate Jesus healing on the sabbath. He was following the biblical rules that clearly prohibited work on the sabbath. Jesus responded that healing was not …
Blind Spots
Chapter numbers were introduced into the Gospels about a thousand years after they were written. So I like to think of Luke 17:20-19:10 as comprising one unit in the Gospel of Luke, and ignore the division into chapters. This section is the culmination of Jesus' trip to Jerusalem and his fateful encounter with the …
The Logos of Advent
Advent is a time of rich liturgical and popular traditions in the western churches, especially in the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches. But it is a much undeveloped liturgical time in the eastern churches, where it is primarily observed as a fasting season, probably thanks to the disproportionate influence of monastics in the evolution …
The Cross is not a political slogan
Living in Montreal and two other Canadian cities in the 1970s I became aware of the politics that ruled the Greek Orthodox churches in Canada. As a matter of fact, it came to the point, at least in Montreal, that the Hellenic Community administration that governed all the Greek churches of Montreal was split along …
Ancient Answers 