Dan's Marinations

Last week Pope Francis set the religious world abuzz by commenting that he didn't like the traditional phrasing for the Lord's Prayer, known in Catholic circles as the "Our Father."  He took issue with the phrase "lead us not into temptation."  He strongly preferred a new adaptation of the prayer adopted by French bishops that reads,   “et ne nous laisse pas entrer in tentation.”  This translates into English as "let us not enter temptation."  The Pope's comments about what is certainly the most famous prayer recorded in scripture center on what is implied in the version that most of us recite in our worship services each week.  If we pray "lead us not into temptation," does that not imply that God can and does at times lead us into temptation?  Pope Francis' strong preference for the new version adopted for use in French churches results from its use of more passive wording, removing the thorny question of whether God does in fac

A few months ago I preached a series of sermons on spiritual urban legends.  Some of these are sayings that are assumed to be from the Bible, but really aren't, such as "God helps those who help themselves."  Others, like "God needed another angel," "Heaven gained another angel" are simply spiritual sounding cliches that at best are untrue and at worst are devastating.  If I preach another series of sermons on this topic, certainly another spiritual urban legend to take to the woodshed would be the well-worn and over-done cliche, "Christianity is relationship not religion." Bloggers, preachers, and writers frequently say that Christianity is not a religion, but is a relationship.  One blogger wrote this:   " Religions are man made, and are based on trying to get to God through rules and regulations and works."  Compared to this definition of religion our faith is a genuine relationship with the person Jesus Christ.  Our faith is i

Of Racism and Hate... In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville this past weekend much has been posted on social media about what happened up there.  One comment in particular caught my attention.  One of my good friends from high school had posted a thoughtful response to Charlottesville, and that led to many, many comments and what was, by Facebook standards, a reasoned conversation in the many comments that it engendered.  Even where the posters didn't agree, their comments to each other were remarkably restrained and civil.  One comment caught my attention:  "we do not have a racism problem in this county." I know the county of which he speaks and, unfortunately, unless the residents there have overcome original sin it, like every other county in the country, has some degree of racism.  I've seen it and heard it.  As a white male born in the South, there is some racism present that I would not recognize because I haven't been the target of it.  We are

In the past month I've been doing a series of sermons on urban legends, spiritual myths.  Each week I have taken apart a common cliche that Christians use, that is commonly held to be true and even scriptural, but which is anything but Biblical or Christian.  I planned out the sermons several months ago, but hesitated about it right up until the last.  Am I ever glad I didn't second-guess myself out of doing them!  These sermons have been great fun to prepare and have sparked me to think about something larger within Christendom and American culture. The first four sermons took on the following sayings that are very commonly accepted, but which are not Biblical:  "God needed another angel," "Everything happens for a reason," "God won't give you more than you can handle," and "God helps those who help themselves."  None of them are in the Bible, and to one degree or another represent wretched theology. They represent an attempt to un