Yesterday I wrote a post on why I go to church and asked you to reflect on the same. I said, in sum, that I go because the good news of God’s abundant and abiding love of all of us is difficult to hold on to and believe in the face of a difficult and challenging life for more than about seven days in a row. I said, in short, that by week’s end I am desperate for another chance to hear the almost-too-good-to-be-true news of God’s love and grace. And then I referenced a video of portions of a sermon from Pope Francis in which he talks about a similar sense of desperation, but from the point of view of the sinner’s need to receive...

I’ve asked this question at least once in a sermon in every church I’ve served. Why do we go to Church? I think it’s an incredibly important question right now because there are, quite frankly, so many other options on a Sunday morning – far more than when I was a kid and multiples more than when my parents were children. Consider: you might want instead to sleep in, or catch up on some work, or go shopping, or meet a friend for coffee at Starbucks, or run through some email, or read the paper (online or the old paper and ink variety), or go to your kid’s soccer match or hockey game, or see what you missed this week on your...

On this, St. Patrick’s Day, I think it’s worth recalling that St. Patrick is known not only for converting Ireland to Christianity, and not only for banishing all the snakes from Ireland, but also for being a major advocate and defender of the Doctrine of the Trinity. Which, when you think about just how difficult a feat that really is, may be the most stunning element of Patrick’s resume. For how do we explain or even understand that God is one God, indivisible, and yet also three persons, distinct in identity? When I was a child, my Mom tried to help me understand the Trinity by comparing it to water. Although H2-O is one...

Lent is a time of self-denial and sacrifice. These aren’t terribly popular words in our culture. They seem to many today part of a dark and dingy past when religious superstition dominated all. But what of the rampant self-indulgence that governs today? Is the ability to eat, drink, spend, or have sex whenever you want to – which seem to be the goals lifted by most television programs I see – really an expression of freedom, let alone dignity or meaning? What is strength is you cannot govern yourself? What is wealth if you go to bed each night fearful that you do not have enough? What is power if you are constantly driven by the need...

The following video is a follow-up to the one I posted last Friday on Forgiveness and Happiness. What I found interesting – and initially almost kept me from posting it – is that it’s barely about forgiveness. In the video, Justin, the host of Soul Pancake’s Science of Happiness series, asks one of the participants if he wants to take the exercise from the experiment – delivering to a mirror the words of forgiveness he’d prepared for his sister – one step further by actually calling her. As he does, you’ll realize it’s not so much that she’s done something wrong, but that he feels bad for being far away and regrets...

Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian faith, and this is never more apparent than during Lent. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, we necessarily reflect on the cross and its relationship to forgiveness. Jesus, we say, quoting Scripture, died for our sins, but exactly what that means can vary from tradition to tradition or, indeed, from Christian to Christian. When I was working on Making Sense of the Cross, I was struck by some of the contested views of the relationship between the cross and forgiveness. The substitutionary theory of atonement, for instance, suggests that the cross is the mechanism by which forgiveness is even...