You are invited to join me in a daily reading / reflection this Advent season.
“For Such A Time As This: An Emergency Devotional” by Hanna Reichel is available in paperback, Kindle, and Audible. I will be reading it and then posting a reflection on some aspect of it every morning from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
I have been reading the same two books every December for the past 15 years and so I wanted to change it up this year. Here is the reading / posting schedule if you would like to follow along:
Advent 2025 Reading Schedule
DateChapter
Nov 26 1
Nov 27 2
Nov 28 3
Nov 29 4
Nov 30 5
Dec 1 6
Dec 2 7
Dec 3 8
Dec 4 9
Dec 5 10
Dec 6 11
Dec 7 12
Dec 8 13
Dec 9 14
Dec 10 15
Dec 11 16
Dec 12 17
Dec 13 18
Dec 14 19
Dec 15 20
Dec 16 21
Dec 17 22
Dec 18 23
Dec 19 24
Dec 20 25
Dec 21 26
Dec 22 27
Dec 23 28
Dec 24 End
In case that isn’t what you are looking for, I will also be going through “Shadow & Light: A Journey Into Advent” by Tsh Oxenreider with my congregation. It starts this Sunday (the first of Advent) and is laid out in a classic and easy to follow format. It comes is a beautiful hardcover or an audio book.
I also wanted to mention that Wipf &Stock publishers is offering the book that I wrote with Randy Woodley “Decolonizing Evangelicalism” at 50% off with the code CONFSHIP and free Media Mail shipping.
I hope that you will join me in the Advent conversation – this season is a chance to change up our routines, to get out of a rut, and to stimulate new thoughts ahead of the new year.
We live in a state where the Legislature is considering a bill to make Bible reading mandatory in public school. I know that there are lots of concerns about this endeavor and the critics have been quite vocal in their opposition.
My question is, if they do pass this legislation and require Bible verses to be read by students each day: what Bible verses should be on the list.
Let’s admit that there are lots of Bible passages that are questionable for younger audiences and there are also some ‘texts of terror’ that we would want to avoid for fear that could (and have) traumatized people and caused real harm. We can make a list of those later.
My hope is to build a catalogue of passages – SO THAT – should the legislation pass, we could present a ready to go list of constructive suggestions about the verses in the Bible that WOULD be good for our young people to engage.
What is your favorite Bible verse?
What passage do you find edifying?
Where have you found inspiration or motivation?
What are the ‘foundational’ passages that come to mind?
Let us know and we will add them to the growing list.
This morning I will be chatting with Tripp about preaching through the book of Daniel with the theme of resilience and resistance. You can tune into the live stream here:
It is going to be interesting because I have not preached from the book of Daniel in almost 20 years when I was an Evangelical and I truly believed in biblical prophecy.
A lot has changed since then – including the hermeneutical lens through which I read scripture and specifically how it relates to dating the writing of the text. I had also never even heard of the concept of ‘Liturature of the Opressed’.
If you are interested, you can see the first 4 sermons in the series on the Twin Falls UMC YouTube channel.
I was honored to chat with Carson Pue on the ‘Mentored Podcast’ that Carson and my father started. It was a wonderful way to process some of my grief and to celebrate my dad’s legacy and impact.
After listening to it myself, I realized that I am healed up enough to begin again with the project that I had started before my father’s memorial. Look for new episodes to start rolling out after Christmas.
We began reading the Gospel of Mark last week as a congregation and one of the commitments that we have made is to stop and turn to any reference in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.
NT Wright has a classic analogy that alludes to Shakespearean plays … but I have an updated analogy about Taylor Swift lyrics that I hope is helpful.
Check out the video and let me know your thoughts.
Taylor Swift lyrics are better than Shakespeare for this analogy.
I am intrigued when someone accuses me of being a liberal. What that tells me is that they only have two options in their mind, and I am clearly not conservative. They have no larger framework to understand that what I am actually outside of their spectrum all together (social constructivist).
What is helpful to understand is that our contemporary political ‘spectrum’ is actually a very small slice of a much bigger historical spectrum.
We live in the shadow of the Enlightenment which prioritized the individual. We are all, basically, at this point individualist – unless we come from a culture that is more communal or familial in its orientation.
What we call ‘conservative’ is a actually conservative individualists (which is a type of liberalism) and what we call ‘liberal’ is just a slightly more liberal individualist. We speak in a sort of shorthand: ‘conservatives’ are really conservative liberals and ‘liberals’ are liberal-liberals.
I always encourage people, when given an either/or binary of options, to find a third alternative to help clarify the skewed picture. In this case you might think of Libertarians. Libertarians, however, are actually extreme individualists and in sense are just radical liberals.
What I would want people to see is that a better alternative is more of a Communitarian approach that understands both the interdependent nature of our social fabric and the way that we are all enscripted (or conscripted) into a society with its expectations, behaviors, language, practices, beliefs, and narratives.
Now to be clear, I am very concerned about the embedded hierarchies, and specifically, patriarchy, built into communitarianism but I still think that it is a better option than the atomized individual that is plaguing every aspect of our culture right now.
What I am interested in is a radical democracy – not this thing we have now of representative democracy where our law-makers are beholden to special interest lobbies and big money. No, I actually want people to have equity (if not equality) in the system and for then to have actual say in their communities, workplaces, and institutions.
What may surprise you is that this politic actually comes from my theology – specifically my ecclesiology. I view Pentecost as the decentering and democratization of God’s presence in the world. My view of the church is an empowerment model of mutuality, participation, and accountability.
Anyway, back the subject at hand. When we don’t know that all of our political options and arguments are actually centered on an individualism that foreign to the world of our sacred scriptures and then we try to import and impose our liberal (be they conservative, liberal, or radical) expectations on them, we will always be unsatisfied and impotent. We are trying to manipulate the variables in a equation that does not have any of the givens we are looking for and have learned to count on. It is just not there.
This anachronism (from the Bible) and amnesia (from the Enlightenment) leaves us in wasteland of polarization and arguments that are irreconcilable because they are inherently incompatible. This is why no election result this fall will fix what ails us – the cancer that plagues us in individualism which is baked into the bread of our system whether you fall on the conservative, liberal, centrist, or radical wings of that spectrum.
Moving toward a communal understanding, or communitarian approach, which prioritizes cooperation, compromise, mutuality, collaboration, and gifting (grace) is the only hope we have of getting out of this cultural morass.
Sometimes people will try to correct a swearing friend by pointing out that Christ is not Jesus’ last name. Those who employ this gentle chide may not understand exactly how theologically important their little quip is.
Christology is one of those topic where my initial excitement is quite high and then it drops rapidly the more I get into it. The first 10 minutes of the ride or fantastic but the longer it goes on The less enjoyable and helpful I find it. In baking, the more you need the dough the less appetizing it gets.
Part of the difficulty in the situation is the binary categorization that has come to us throughout history.
Divine/Human
Jesus/Christ
Unique/Particular
Type/Degree
High/Low
From Above/From Below
Having said that, Christology is another epic topic that, like atonement and baptism before it, has everything that we are looking in our journey though these ABC’s of theology: the perspectives are diverse, the topic is inherently multifaceted, different views have developed over time, many of those view has changed or adapted over time, and there is contemporary work being done on the subject. Christology can also be contention.
When people ask me what I believe about Jesus I try to say something like:
Jesus was a unique human. Jesus was fully human in the way that we all are human with one slight difference that makes him special. Like many of us, Jesus was open to the presence of God in his life. Jesus, however, was open to God’s presence in his life to a degree that only a few other humans have ever been. This meant that God’s presence in his life began to actually form his character and allowed him to say something that not many others can: “I and the father are one – if you have seen me you have seen the father” (John 14:9).
What makes Jesus truly unique however was not this openness – for other exemplars have been this open to what God was calling them to be – what makes Jesus unique is what God called him to be: messiah for the whole world.
This approach recognizes that Jesus was unique in human history in that:
Jesus shows us something unique about God
God was present with Jesus in a unique way that comprised Jesus’ identity and character.
It avoids the dangerous temptation to say that Jesus was not fully human, only appeared human, or was a different kind of human. It also allows us to embrace Jesus as a model for full-humanity (to the Nth degree) and openness to God’s calling in our own lives.
At some point we will have to address the evolution from Jesus’ religion to a religion about Jesus. That is a tricky and complicated conversation, but I have seen it bear good fruit for those who are will to wrestle with it.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 