Marginal Christianity

I interrupt my ongoing series on joy for this not-unrelated poem titled “Ash Wednesday” by the late Brian Doyle. It’s not T. S. Eliot but it has a point worth hearing today. “Here’s your Ash Wednesday story. A mother carries her tiny daughter With her as she gets ashed and the Girl, curious and wriggly, squirms Into the path of the priest’s thumb Just as the finger is about to arrive On the mother’s forehead, and the Ashes go right in the kid’s left eye. She starts to cry, and there’s a split Second as the priest and the mother Gawk, and then they both burst out Laughing. The kid is too little to be Offended, and the line moves along, But this stays with me; not the ashy Eye as much as the instant when all Could have been pain and awkward But instead it led to mutual giggling. We are born of dust and star-scatter And unto this we shall return, this is The Law, but meantime, by God, we Can laugh our asses off. What a gift, You know? Let us snicker while we...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflection “After Ten Years,” written for Hans von Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer’s close friend and confidant, and Major General Hans Oster, a German military officer involved in the resistance against the Nazi regime, reports on what happens to human decency, courage, and wisdom when a political culture disintegrates. Of even more importance, for Bonhoeffer, Bethge, and the church, the ten years he reflects on are years in which the whole edifice of Christendom, the church-state symbiosis regnant in the West for more than a thousand years, came crashing down around their feet. Bonhoeffer’s reflections, then also attest to a failed church culture that assimilated so fully with the large culture that Bonhoeffer indicted it in these damning words: “Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world” ...

Lent: Call to an Altared/Altered Life Ash Wednesday Romans 12:1-2 12  1-2  So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.   (The Message) Lent is a time in the church year when we walk with Jesus to the cross. It is a season in which we learn that God is a God who cries – for his wayward and rebellious people, for his soon to be crucified Son, for his suffering creation....

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 The God of the Book of the Twelve – Hosea (2) Ash Wednesday           Lent begins with Ash Wednesday’s great call to national repentance from the Book of the Twelve in Joel 2. We will get to Joel 2 in time but we will not start there in our reflections. We will start where everything Christian starts – with God. More particularly, with YHWH, the covenant, personal, familial God of Israel.           Everything, I mean everything, in life begins with and is colored by who we believe God to be. In 1995 Joan Osborne released her hit song “One of Us.” In it she asked two questions:           - If God had a name what would it be? -If God had a face what would it look like? Is God personal and can we know God, these are the questions whose answers determine in large measure the tenor and texture of o...

What is Ash Wednesday?   What is Ash Wednesday? For most of my life, I didn’t ask this question, nor did I care about the answer. I, along, with most evangelical Christians in America, didn’t give Ash Wednesday a thought. But then, in 2004, Ash Wednesday loomed large in American Protestant consciousness. Why? Because on that day Mel Gibson released what was to become his epic blockbuster, The Passion of the Christ . For the first time in history, the phrase “Ash Wednesday” was on the lips of millions of evangelical Christians, not just Catholics and other “high church ” Protestants, as we anticipated the official release of The Passion . Every since 2004, many who never wondered about Ash Wednesday have been asking: What is Ash Wednesday? How do we observe it? Why should we observe it? I grew up with only a vague notion of Ash Wednesday. To me, it was some Catholic holy day that I, as an evangelical Protestant, didn’t have to worry about, thanks be to God. In my view , all o...

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Ragan Sutterfield No Comments »  I’m not very good at feasting. That’s not to say I can’t put down a few drinks or eat a lot of rich food. I’m not very good at feasting because I’m not very good at fasting, and I’m even worse at ordinary, everyday eating. Feasting is an art in contrast. We can’t have steak every night or a big bowl of ice cream (at least we shouldn’t). Steak is special because it is not an everyday meal; it is expensive because it is limited (there are only a few steaks per cow.) Ice cream is special because, like cigars, it’s okay to have one every now and then. But as an every-day affair it will kill you. Still, too often I want steak on Tuesday and ice cream on Wednesday, and while there is a great deal worth celebrating, too much special makes nothing special. On Tuesday we celebrate Mardi Gras, also known as Fat Tuesday. It is a day to feast, but it only makes sense if we follow it by the fast of Ash Wednesday. Without As...