Mourning Comfort

When Job lost everything—his children, his livestock, his wealth, his health, literally everything—his wife comforted him by telling him to curse God and die. Yay marriage! Then his best friends told him not to curse God, because it wasn’t God’s fault at all. It was Job’s fault. He must have done something...

Pursuing an Impossible Future

Walter Brueggeman, in The Prophetic Imagination, points out that the defining characteristic of the biblical prophets was not the ability to predict the future, especially not in the Nostradamus-type way that we tend to think of it in modern times. Neither was their role primarily that of acting as the...

Redwood Time and the Kingdom of God

The Coast Redwood is the world’s tallest living organism, with the tallest towering 35 to 38 stories high. From a distance a tree that tall looks long and slender like a basketball player, but in fact the Coast Redwood is massive. At eye-level the trunk can be 27 feet in diameter, the length of two VW...

Abandoning Left/Right Thinking

Everybody should know their place and keep their place. Including God. Right? One of the unfortunate effects of the Enlightenment worldview is that God was kicked upstairs (to borrow N.T. Wright’s wonderful phrase) and we don’t know how to handle it when he comes down and tries to enter into the...

When It’s Hard to Believe in Immanuel

The people who need the most to hear the news of Immanuel—that God is with them, are the people who have the least reason to believe that he is. When you live in relative comfort, it’s easy to believe in Immanuel.  God is with us?  Well, of course he is.  The evidence is all around!  We have life, liberty,...

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