kar0ling

“Don’t be afraid” ( Luke 2:10 ). The angel of the Lord spoke those words to the marginalized and forgotten of society in occupied territory. Their lives were full of hardship and threats, but unexpected supernatural visitors were something else. When an ordinary winter’s night safeguarding obstinate animals is rent by divine light and a loud voice, there’s good reason to tremble. Hard after the assurance follows news that drives out fear: “good news of great joy that will be for all people” ( Luke 2:10 ). That this announcement was given directly to the shepherds may have been as exciting as the news itself. When has a herald ever come specifically and exclusively to them? Maybe this baby born in Bethlehem will actually be the Prince of Peace that was promised ( Isaiah 9:6 ). Maybe this really is the coming of the Sovereign Lord who will care for people as tenderly as these men care for the sheep in their flock ( Isaiah 40:11 ). Could it be God’s favour rests on them ( Lu...

"Oh God! I didn't study enough for this test, but please, just bring the answers to mind; let me get a good mark." I know it isn't good theology, but I've done it plenty of times. Take two: "Lord, that paper I wrote is not very inspired. Please let me get a good mark." Post-submission rewording? That's not going to happen. Pre-prayer, you say; that's the ticket. You need to pray before/as you write the assignment. But is it any less manipulative to ask God to just make me brilliant? Wait, before we turn God into a homework genie, let's try out a different set of lenses on this. What am I praying for? What do I hope is going to happen? Maybe homework prayer is an admission of my need for help. What if it stems not from desperation, but a sense of my smallness within the vastness of the world and possibilities of ideas? Maybe what I'm saying is not "God, drop words into my brain to make me sound smart," but "I am...

When I entered the conference, atonement debate was a still hot potato, but the lobbing of it had settled, and, for the most part, the various camps were simply tucking in to supper, relishing their own spuds and ignoring whatever strange-to-heretical garnishes others chose to digest. And after all, we were johnny-come-latelys to the debate; discussion of a plethora of models of atonement had been vigorous in the wider Christian world for some time before we warmed up the topic.  With ears now attuned to this word "atonement," I pick up threads of it everywhere, slowly weaving an eclectic tapestry in shades of openness, variety, possibility, imagination, and reconciliation. The promise of hopefulness, I believe, is what ties them all together. Isn't that what salvation brings? A hope that in spite of our fallenness, we are loved? A hope that in spite of our failures, we have a purpose? A hope that in the end, all the pain and wretchedness will somehow work out all rig...

Perhaps not unusually, I approach cliche, pithy reversed sayings with mingled delight and disgust. Oh, how felicitously memorable, how strikingly apt, those aphorisms, like "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care," and "God doesn't call the qualified, he qualifies the called." One can't be on Facebook long before stumbling across one. But they're just so irritatingly pat, so simplistically tidy. And then there's identity. I was about to speculate maybe it's just evangelicals -- and Mennonites (yes, those are overlapping categories, but they also have distinctions) -- who are so obsessed with hammering it out, but then I recalled the number of times a character fervently declares "I'm a surgeon!" or "I'm a cop!" on Grey's Anatomy and Rookie Blue (yes, my tastes in TV lean strongly toward the soapy), so it seems a desperate need to define our identity and a pathological insecurity ...

I met Jesus in Israel-Palestine a few years ago. I found him not in the rocky, desert ground he trod, nor in the ancient stones of the towns and cities he visited; not in the subterranean grotto in the Church of the Nativity, nor in the mammoth Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encompassing the traditional site of his death and resurrection. No, I met him in the lives of Palestinians who incarnate his spirit, in humble, passionate people who are convinced that love is the only way. I met Jesus in people who spoke like this: “We need to be soaked in the love of Christ. Love is not a hug and a kiss. Love is to seek the life of the other that the cost of one’s own.” --Labib Madanat, coordinator of the Palestinian and Israeli Bible Societies “Love is not an opportunity to overlook justice. Love is an opportunity to pursue justice…. [But] we want to resist any form of evil with the heart and mind of Jesus Christ.… There is no love without justice. And there is no true justice without lov...