The great New Testament theologian C.H. Dodd once noted that all the resurrection accounts included several features. In each Jesus greeted His followers with ‘Peace,’ ‘Shalom,’ as a result of which any doubts about his identity vanished. Then He sent them on a mission to all the nations of the earth. Both had to do with the Kingdom which had just dawned: the Prince of Peace had come and now He would gather the nations in His victorious train (see especially Daniel 7). What are the implications of these consistent themes? As we shall see, the first is personal and the second corporate. We kno ..read more

In eight and a half days, a rare solar eclipse will cut a path across Texas, with Dallas a good place to see it. Thousands of astronomical tourists and not a few scientists will make their way here. Public service announcement- make sure your glasses as legit, as there seem to be a black market in bogus knock offs.  It is strange to speak of seeing an eclipse since by its very nature it is a not seeing, of the sun, in whose light we see everything else.  An eclipse was to the ancients a portent of the activity of the divine. However, I admit that it may seem a particularly inapt exam ..read more

At the beginning of an essay by the late great missiologist Andrew Walls, he notes how different expressions of the Christian life have been so diverse as, probably, to have made it hard for them to recognize each other as kin: the Jerusalem Church, a Celtic saint standing in the freezing water of a stream, a Mass in the high middle ages, 19th century evangelicals gathered in Albert Hall, and a contemporary African Spirit church. This came to my mind while on retreat at a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico (for which time Steph and I are grateful). The common life of that tradition has been c ..read more

Piensen conmigo sobre el llamado de ser un padre o una madre. Usted se ha acostumbrado a dirigir y a proteger a sus niños. Ahora ellos son adolescentes y adultos jóvenes. Tienen sus ideas. Necesitan decidir sobre sus vidas. Usted está listo o lista para bloquear los hechos destructivos, pero vas a necesitar dejar que traten de decidir por sí mismos, sea que ganen o fracasen.  ¡El padre sabio permite libertad, simultáneamente continúa enseñando con sabiduría! Evidentemente Dios es similar, pero mucho más sabio que nosotros, ¡Él es el autor de toda la sabiduría!  Se relaciona con la pr ..read more

I am helping with a catechetical project, one of whose topics, ‘the prophets,’ fell into my basket. To jog my memory I read The Message of the Prophets by Gerhard von Rad (which, by the way, is an excellent book). While I didn’t set out to read it as a Lenten spiritual discipline, it turned out to be that!  We come up against things over which we have no control, and we resist! It frustrates us, especially that particularly American part of us which would make a plan to set about changing whatever needs to be fixed. But sometimes it can’t be fixed. Sometimes you can’t get there from here ..read more

      I had the pleasure of offering a presentation on this topic last week at the historic Church of the Advent in Boston. Here I will give you a precis of the talk. This is valuable not least because of the strong Anglo-Catholic history of our own diocese. We think of the high church movement pertaining to liturgical, spiritual and doctrinal renewal. But at its origins it was also a missionary movement. Its story, however, cannot be told without saying something about its counterpart, the evangelical revival. While sometimes they competed, they also goaded each othe ..read more

Sermon for Lent 1 preached at Grace Community, Plano, and translated into Farsi and Arabic Last time I preached here, I mentioned chess, which, I learned had a very clear Persian connection! I want to start this sermon with another one, though more obscure.  A little more than a century after the death and resurrection of Jesus, there was a disciple of His who died in Adiabene, which was a northern province of Persia. His name was Tatian. He was faithful, though some of ideas were seen by some as extreme, for example about fasting. But he did ask a very reasonable question- why have four ..read more

Sometimes the deepest questions are both obvious and surprising at the same time. The very first question for the early Christians was this: how could God’s chosen be the crucified, since this was an accursed kind of death?  They weren’t expecting that, for the most part. They worked it out by listening again to the books that we call ‘the Old Testament,’ though they were simply ‘the bible,’ since the book we call the New Testament were only beginning to be written.  But wait a minute. The good news about Jesus were new. And their proclamation of grace was different than the holy wor ..read more

Thirty years ago, I read an article about some youth groups of liberal Presbyterian Churches in the bay area. The teenagers stumbled upon the Jesus Prayer, silent devotion, lectio divina, and icons. Youth group meetings got very quiet. The parents became worried- was this some kind of cult the kids had gotten into? Suddenly traditional Christian prayer had an edge of rebellion, which only made it more appealing!  And, even in that simpler age tech-wise, the young people came to enjoy the silence.  Similarly I have heard of Catholic youth groups saying the Rosary as they meet  in ..read more

Dear brothers and sisters, A year ago I taught a course on Anglicanism at Truett/Baylor. I thought that I would post from time to time parts of lectures for that course. Here is one that deals with the prelude to the Reformation, and the roots of our thinking of ourselves as both catholic and reformed. Peace +GRS In this talk I want to set him in the context of the late medieval period for the  Anglicanism of the Reformation period. Here we are borrowing from the perspective of scholars like Heiko Oberman and Stephen Ozment, for whom the break between late medieval and reformation is not ..read more