Tamed Cynic
Newsletter (Digital)
Ever since conscripted church attendance led to a surprising and converting encounter with the Risen Christ, Jesus has gleefully afflicted me with the right kind of nightmares and continues to tame my stubborn cynicism. Or should I say, Jesus is giving me different things about which to be cynical. After all, if Jesus is Lord and his grace without any ifs ands or buts, meanwhile the world knows it not, then my friend Stan the Man is dead-on right.
Just about everything else is bullshit.
This is a space where I attempt to sort out all that chaff from the wheat. I write and reflect on matters that matter, and nothing matters more to me than the improbable promise of God’s unconditional pardon, grace not for the good but for the ungodly. I try to write with the good humor, winsome cynicism, and no-BS hopefulness that befits a life of faith in a world that insists on acting as though Jesus is dead.
I’m an irreverent reverend with one wife and one congregation. Only one of them deserves someone like me. I have two sons. I’m the author of a few books. I host a podcast (we’re a big deal), and I have incurable cancer, which means I’m as terminal as you, dear reader.
Also, I like pickles.
As an Enneagram 8, I have no shortage of opinions or scarcity of words with which to express them. This explains why I’ve been blogging for a decade and decided to move that discipline over to this space.
It also accounts for why sarcasm is my love language. Source
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesAn Unspoken Sermon on the Spirit
If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber. Our youngest son received word this week that he was being deployed to the Middle East on Tuesday so my wife and I grabbed last minute tickets to El Paso to spend the weekend with him. Here are notes I’d sketched by midweek before we made plans to travel. John 14.16-24 Just after he anoints David, the shepherd-boy, as king, the prophet Samuel speaks a correlative judgment to Saul, the former-yet-still-king.
The Words Which Will Win are the Good Words
If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber. The opposite of a word of the LORD is not falsehood but conditionality The theologian Stanley Hauerwas preached for me on Christ the King Sunday nearly seven years ago. I stood next to Stanley in the narthex after the worship service. After most of the congregation had petered out of the pews, a parishioner sidled up to Hauerwas. He motioned for his children to proceed into the fellowship Hall ahead of him.
"God gave to American Christendom no reformation of the church of Jesus Christ from the word of God."
If you appreciate my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Do it! Here is our final conversation on Bonhoeffer’s essay “Protestantism Without Reformation.” Below are the closing two paragraphs that I find particularly convicting. Next, we will discuss Bonhoeffer’s 1937 sermon from the Emergency Pastors’ Seminary at Finkewalde, “Preaching in an Evil Age.” Look for it and the link soon. “God did not grant a Reformation to American Christendom.
"Jacob is the father of faith because prayer is the most elementary act of obedience."
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The Most Portable Person of the Trinity
If you appreciate my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. John 14.11-15 Sometime in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s, fellow authors took the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor to a dinner party in New York City. At some point during the high society supper, the table talk turned to the sacraments— Eucharist and Baptism. An avowed Christian, Flannery O’Connor’s orthodoxy made her a curiosity among the self-styled enlightened guests.
We Would See Jesus
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"The freedom of the church is not where it has possibilities."
Jason Micheli Stick around here and I’ll use words as best as I know how to help you give a damn about the God who, in Jesus Christ, no longer gives any damns. Stick around here and I’ll use words as best as I know how to help you give a damn about the God who, in Jesus Christ, no longer gives any damns.
"You May Say Today"
If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber. This is an unpublished sermon preached by Robert Jenson on March 29, 1995 on Isaiah 12.1-6, which I found in the collection at the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton last month. Here again is an instance of Jenson’s maxim, doubling as a method, that theology proves itself in the pulpit, or it has not yet proven itself at all.
Protestantism Without Reformation
If you appreciate my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Hi Friends, Just a reminder that our Monday Night Live sessions will resume tonight at 7:00 EST. You can join us with this link. We will spend tonight and next week (possibly longer— we’ll see how far we get) discussing Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “Protestantism Without Reformation.” Published after his death, Bonhoeffer completed this essay upon his return to Germany in 1939 from his second visit to the United States.
The Prayers God Always Answers
If you appreciate my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.