NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

I heard some stories lately and they went like this…. A while ago while we were at a group home celebrating a communion service with the residents, one of the consecrated wafers fell on the floor.  No one knew what to do, and so we looked to the priest for guidance. “Throw it outside on the ground,” he said.  “Let the animals eat it.” A choir member noticed a wafer had fallen into the hot air register and wondered aloud, “What should we do about that?” One chancel guild lady was talking to another before an adult education class, and I overheard her saying in a worried tone, “I’m always afraid I’ll get the bles wafers mixed up with the unblest.” My immediate reaction to all of these stories was, “Does it really matter?” That was enough to start me thinking… The words of the Eucharistic prayer are not magical, nor does being said by a clergy-person make them so. The wafers and wine, over which they are said, do not have special properties. In...

 Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus never met face to face, but if they have done so in another dimension, the meeting might well have gone something like this.... Jesus: “I’m so glad to finally get a chance to talk to you.  The two of us have a lot in common! We both have other people telling our story – as if they caught it all on camera.  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, all say they are telling my story – but they [whoever they really were] wrote many years after you wrote to your churches, and they can’t agree on what to say. Your problem is a little different, what you wrote in your letter to the churches in Galatia about your conversion experience is very different from what Luke wrote about that experience of yours in his book ‘The Acts of the Apostles’.  Even your actions following the experience are different! And what about your problem with Peter about following the food laws of my people? Obviously, from your writing you had never heard of Peter...

“And they almost got away with it!” This phrase was used passionately  and often by John Dominic Crossan as he lectured on “What happened between Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday” at College Street United Church in Toronto early in April of this year. He said he likes to think of the supper held on the Thursday night as being a celebration. The demonstrations of the entrance to Jerusalem riding on a donkey and the cleansing of the temple were over. Because of the mood of the crowds in Jerusalem the authorities hadn't moved against Jesus. ( “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.” Matthew 26: 5 ) Had they really gotten away with it? We all know how the story ended. We are all aware of how it has been understood over the intervening years. But what would it have looked like had Jesus and the disciples actually gotten away with it? Imagine if the events of Good Friday had never happened. Imagine if that little group of friends had returned ...

‘Precious Moments Christianity’  Theologian Roger Olson uses that term to describe many current churches.  They "specialize in comforting the afflicted and present the gospel as all calm, fitness and light with no conviction or accountability". On the official website for Precious Moments, it says “It started with a man who had a gift and vision to share love and life’s unforgettable moments with the world.” On that website you can find porcelain figurines commemorating the ‘high points’ of a Christian life; things like baptism, Christmas, communion and  a series called chapel exclusives. I’m sure we all have pictures in our mind of a baby being baptized at the font, of a child at the communion rail, or of the sanctuary glowing with candles on Christmas Eve. These are indeed ‘precious moments’ in our Christian journey, moments we will relive over and over in our memories. The problem, according to the quote from Olsen above, is when this type of mo...

Clarke was reading my latest blog on his iPad at the kitchen window this past week and I was anxiously waiting for his comments…if any.   It was taking an awfully long time!   Finally he said, “I can’t concentrate. That squirrel keeps interrupting me!” Now ‘that squirrel’ was on the other side of the closed window. However given that the sun was shining and the temperature was hovering just under the freezing point, three squirrels, thinking it was Spring, were playing chase, darting up to the window and away. Jokingly, I said, “I could write a blog about this!” and then I began to think….. “How often do extraneous things divert us from doing what we plan? How often do we stop doing something for just an instant, never to take it up again? How often does that momentary distraction take us away from our path?”I suspect it has happened to all of us from time to time.  One of the best know cases of being distracted, is when Jesus, in the story of Martha and Mary [L...

I was saying to a friend the other day how I had always had trouble backing up in a car until I learned to trust in and use my mirrors, when she started to laugh… and then told me this story of her own. “A good many years ago when cars only had two mirrors, the rear-view one and the one on the left, she was driving along the road, checking in the rear mirror from time to time as we all do, to see what the traffic was like behind her, when that mirror fell off, landing on the floor of the car. Her immediate feeling was that a ‘window had closed’ in her world!” Her reaction was so vivid and so strong that she still remembers to this day exactly what it felt like way back then, still remembers that feeling of loss, the shock of losing something that was there only seconds earlier. If you have ever questioned the theology of your childhood, as I have, you can relate to this feeling of things not being the same, of a window closing in your life. There is just that kind of ...

Earlier this month, when the lease on our current vehicle was at an end, we leased a new car. One of the best things about a new car, for me, is ‘that new car smell’. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that THIS new car lacked ‘that new car smell’! How could that be???  And so the first week went.  Then one day, the temperature outside rose from the -25 it had been to 0 and above. That was the first miracle. And the second one was that suddenly that wonderful ‘new car smell’ was evident! YEAH!!! AND it lasted for all of 48 hours before the temperatures plummeted again. I’m guessing we never acquired a new car during the winter months before, or it we did, it was a different kind of winter from this year’s. Well, this happened coincidentally near the beginning of Lent and so I was also hearing the story of the temptation of Jesus for 40 days in the wilderness (Luke 4:1-13).  This got me thinking about my own ‘wilderness experiences’. ...