Not Of This World

Read Part 2 here . Tomorrow is the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, so this Saturday I went to a seminar on the history of the Reformation at my friend's church. I was anticipating a talk, but instead we watched a documentary series with breaks for discussion. The Reformation kicked off on October 31st, 1517, when Martin Luther famously posted his 95 theses , a list of topics of debate that had been bothering him. One of the primary things he questioned was the practice of selling Indulgences. An Indulgence was a piece of paper you could buy from the church that said that the Pope had forgiven your sins. The construction of many great cathedrals was funded by the selling of these Indulgences--which were like a shortcut around other, less pleasant or more time-consuming, types of penance practiced by the Church at the time. And Indulgences were not just a side act either; they were being mass produced. When the printing press was invented, the first doc...

I recently read a post on a parenting blog where the author suggested a "through the tunnel" approach to hard times. They told the story of how their child left their favourite stuffed toy behind somewhere, and when bedtime came and the child realized their toy was missing, the kid lost it. He cried and screamed and wailed. It's natural to want to calm such a child down--to suggest sleeping with another toy, to bribe them with reading an extra bedtime story, even to drive back and retrieve the toy. But this author suggested something else. They sat with the child, holding them, letting them cry it out. They acknowledged the child's distress, and let the child work through it. After a little while, the child calmed down and began suggesting their own solutions--maybe I could sleep with these two other toys, they said, and could I have an extra bedtime story? The author talked about how we shouldn't teach our kids not to avoid pain, but to work through it. I ...

I started watching this new show on Netflix called The Good Place  about a woman who accidentally ends up in Heaven. There, she is matched with her soulmate, who happens to be a professor of ethics, and she convinces him to secretly teach her ethics so she can learn to be good enough to 'earn' her place in Heaven, so that she won't get kicked out. As I'm watching it, I'm half expecting the punchline to be that everyone  is there by accident and hiding it, because some of the people there are just so selfish and self-absorbed. I mean, if you raised millions of dollars for charity, but you only did it to get back at your sister, are you really one of the top best people in the world? At the Alpha Course* one week, one of the questions we discussed was, what does sin mean to me?  I took a really long time to come up with an answer, because I was trying to think what it actually  means to me, deep down inside, and not just what I had been taught. I think sin is no...

Nothing makes me so angry, hurt, and confused as when I see people getting hurt by the Church. And yet it happens over and over again, several times a day. I see leaders in the Church, who hold prominent positions of influence, saying damaging and hurtful things, and I also see people who I know personally, and who I once respected, also, saying and posting such things. Sometimes it is a call to fear the other, or a call to arms, or a crazy jump from the Ontario sex ed curriculum to the legalization of pedophilia. But I also see the other side. On the one end, I know people who are Christian, but experience serious social anxiety at the thought of going to church. On the other end, I know people who have been convinced by their experiences that all religions are evil, who struggle to hold themselves together even when just sitting at the sidelines of a conversation about faith. Meanwhile, LGBTQ youth are disproportionately homeless or suicidal, Muslim men and women are fleeing 'Chr...

The other day, at the Alpha Course , we were discussing what we would ask if we could ask Jesus one question. I had a lot of trouble coming up with a good question, for some reason. Someone suggested that they would ask about the problem of evil, that is, why there is evil in the world. And, while I don't deny that that is a very good and unsolved question, I don't think that is a question I would ask, if I am honest. It doesn't really bother me that much. Don't get me wrong. Evil  bothers me a great deal. But the idea that evil and a perfect God can co-exist for some reason doesn't bother me. I see the logical problem. How can a perfectly loving and all-powerful God allow evil to exist? Either He must not be perfect or He must not be all-powerful. But the wrench in that logic is the free will of imperfect beings--namely, us. Would a perfect God allow His people to have free will? I think so. Just ask Catalonia if they're feeling loved  by their prim...