In the Advent/Christmas season, let me encourage you to learn how to wait. I know we don’t want to do that.
The Social Implications of Salvation
October 4, 2022 by
The Christian’s aim, Rauschenbusch believed, was not to pass through an evil world in safety, leaving the world’s evil unshaken; rather, it was to seek a moral and religious transformation of humanity in all of its social relations.
Formations 08.04.2019: What Is the Problem?
July 28, 2019 by
Nehemiah continues the themes that thread through Joshua. Where earlier Israelites had rejoiced at the failure of Gilead’s walls, these exiles returning to Jerusalem mourn at the sight of the city’s walls in ruin.
Formations 07.21.2019: God’s Promises
July 14, 2019 by
Like the story of Jericho, Joshua’s speech demands responsibility, creativity, and humility. There are too many layers for anything less. Here, Joshua speaks of God.
Formations 07.07.2019: The Battle of Jericho
June 30, 2019 by
At this year’s Tony awards, the musical Hadestown won the award for best new musical. It retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as if it took place in some kind of depression-era, post-apocalyptic company town.
Formations 06.23.2019: The Kingdom Has Come
June 16, 2019 by
The novel Slaughterhouse-Five offers two stories about Billy Pilgrim’s life. In the first, Kurt Vonnegut tells of Pilgrim’s, and his own, experience as a soldier in World War II.
Formations 06.09.2019: “I Will Send the Spirit”
June 2, 2019 by
In the 1992 song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen offered these now classic words: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” The insight comes lyrically through the acknowledgment of liminal spaces—birdsong in the morning or peacetime between war.
Formations 04.28.2019: Witnesses to the Resurrection
April 21, 2019 by
I’ve noticed that Easter brings my attention to the place I call home. Often, it has been the geography of my particular neighborhood.
Formations 04.14.2019: The King Is Coming
April 7, 2019 by
When early December rolled around with the Christmas parade, it happened that our marching band hung around the Church of the Nazarene.
Formations 03.31.2019: A Living Sacrifice
March 24, 2019 by
The poet Donald Hall, in a documentary for The Atlantic, describes aging as “a ceremony of losses.”
Formations 03.17.2019: Freedom from the Law
March 10, 2019 by
Paul held the torah in high regard. In this week’s passage, he affirms, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.
Formations 03.03.2019: A New Way of Life
February 24, 2019 by
My clothes wear out predictably. Holes form over the left knee and under the right elbow. The heels of my shoes wear down at the outer corner.
Formations 02.17.2019: You Shall Be Holy
February 10, 2019 by
This week’s text raises our attention to holiness. In the process, I’ve noticed two questions I’ve been struggling with lately—who are we, and what does it mean? As Moses relays these codes for holiness, he begins with identity.
Formations 02.03.2019: The Giving of the Law
January 27, 2019 by
The windows in my apartment face southeast. This doesn’t matter except that we’ve started keeping the blinds open in the kitchen. While I make coffee, I’ve begun noticing the sun’s rising—fiery fields degrading into sky.
Formations 01.20.2018: Reading Openly
January 13, 2019 by
After a month of holiday traveling, it is the banquet table that I notice most readily in the passage. I’ve sat around at least four family tables this month, and I’ve remembered some others I’ve known. One was my grandparent’s dining room table in Mobile.
Formations 01.06.2019: Jesus Is Baptized
December 30, 2018 by
At the time of writing, forecasts indicate that the rain out my parents’ window will continue for another week. I tend to take overcast wintry weather in stride, but this is bad news, at least for my drive home to Macon. Mark, however, proclaims good news and its beginning (v. 1).
Formations 12.23.2018: Rhythm Saved the World
December 16, 2018 by
The fourth Sunday of Advent, less than a few days before Christmas—It’s a time when I often turn from the prophetic hopes of Israel to a single family gathered around a manger. But Paul raises a vision of Christmas that is more cosmic than it is common.
Formations 12.9.2018: From the Wasteland
December 2, 2018 by
For this second Sunday of Advent, I’ll admit that part of my preference for this season is religious cover for my Scrooge-like demeanor. It persists most of the year, but November and December throw it into particular relief. Needless to say, this year I’ve surprised myself and have willfully listened to Christmas music before Thanksgiving.
Formations 11.25.2018: You are Witnesses
November 18, 2018 by
So far, Ruth and Naomi and Boaz and their commitments to family have anchored this story. This week we remember that their stories, like all of ours, take place within a community. This last chapter expands the scope of that community.
Formations 11.11.2018: Kindness
November 4, 2018 by
This week we’ll ask how we can practice kindness. We will do so when unkindness seems inescapable, even to those who can escape it most of the time. We’ve seen in the past week eleven worshipers murdered in a synagogue. We’ve heard political leaders call migrants fleeing violence invaders and enemies ridden with disease.
Formations 10.28.2018: Reward
October 21, 2018 by
When Jesus tells a story about masters and slaves, we hope that its promises about God’s kingdom will add up within us. But I’ve noticed more conflict than promise in this story. There is the punishment faced by the last slave.
Formations 10.14.2018: Seeing God’s Favor
October 7, 2018 by
I’ve not seen it, but I’ve heard the stories. On some days in the summer, rising tides and east-facing winds push poorly oxygenated water toward the eastern edge of Mobile Bay. With it come the crab and flounder, and the shallow waters are overrun with all manner of food.
Formations 09.30.2018: Rust Will Be Evidence
September 23, 2018 by
The cut in Red Mountain, finished for the expressway in 1971, might tell Birmingham’s stories between layers where rusted hematite meets our vision. My mom drove me through this cut many times, between downtown and the suburbs I grew up in, to visit my dad at his office or to pick up my sister from dance classes.
Formations 09.16.2018: Words of Wisdom
September 9, 2018 by
My grandmother Joan taught me, as she did with all of her grandchildren, to pay attention to language. She had been an elementary-school teacher, so she taught us with sharp, repeated, and mostly frustrating questions.
Formations 09.02.2018: To the Twelve Tribes in the Dispersion
August 26, 2018 by
In the past week, my fiancée and I have spent more time than normal going through addresses. We’ve separated city, state, and zip codes from street addresses. When we saw unit numbers, we moved them to another column on the spreadsheet.
Formations 08.19.2018: The Days Drew Near
August 12, 2018 by
The stroke is rehearsed and memorized on a four-count cycle. So it is that Norman Maclean notes the metronome’s preeminent place in learning to cast a fly rod. Downbeats and backbeats directed him.
Formations 08.05.2018: Our Daily Bread
July 29, 2018 by
Studs Terkel, in the early seventies, interviewed a number of workers ranging from farmworkers to baseball players, proofreaders to gravediggers, actors to hair stylists. From these laborers, Terkel observed a twofold purpose in human labor. “It is,” he says, “about a search… for daily meaning as well as daily bread.”
Formations 07.22.2018: Inheriting Fruits
July 15, 2018 by
When Israel comes into the land, they are to tell the stories of ancestors who went down to Egypt. There, their ancestors became great, and then they were enslaved. And they will remember God, who heard their cries and led them through the wilderness into a land where they would learn freedom.
Formations 07.08.2018: Eating in Worship
July 1, 2018 by
When the Bible says, “Break down their altars, smash their pillars, burn their sacred poles with fire, and hew down the idols of their gods, and thus blot out their name from their places,” what do you do (v. 3)?
Formations 06.24.2018: Finding Guidance Together
June 17, 2018 by
When the scroll shows up in the temple’s renovation, it is taken to the prophet Huldah. And she offers a vision of what it means for Judah and its king, Josiah. She also addresses a question that has risen again and again: how are words and work related to each other, to God, and to humanity?
Formations 06.10.2018: Disruption on the Road
June 3, 2018 by
In front of the National Civil Rights Museum, on the corner of Mulberry and Butler in Memphis, Jacqueline Smith has stood for over thirty years. From this corner, the former tenant and employee of the Lorraine Hotel has called people to boycott the museum.
Formations 05.27.2018: Live by the Spirit
May 20, 2018 by
Unlike many friends and most of my family, I don’t consider myself a news junkie. Mostly, I limit my news intake to one podcast each morning. I trust it to tell me what I need to know…
Formations 05.20.2018: The Common Spirit
May 6, 2018 by
A few weeks back, driving home from work, the truck in front of me kicked up rainbows from the leftover rainwater. I’d seen rainbows cast by sprinklers over St. Augustine but never by tires against asphalt. Then we crossed the first hill, my angle of view changed, and the rainbows disappeared.
Formations 04.29.2018: The Traveled Gospel
April 22, 2018 by
The other night I washed dishes while listening to a Tift Merritt concert. After the silverware but before the plates, I dried my hands to check the YouTube description. It included the standard information—record label, band members, and producer.
Formations 04.15.2018: Acts of Encouragement
April 8, 2018 by
The most triumphant moment of the musical Dear Evan Hansen might come after Evan starts a club to remember Connor Murphy, a classmate who had recently killed himself. In the Connor Project’s first assembly, Evan imagines a community of encouragement.
Formations 04.01.2018: Signs and Wonders
March 25, 2018 by
The sign told the Vestavia Hills Lutheran Church, “you are now entering the mission field.” And so it proclaimed that the nations began in my neighborhood at the top of the mountain where Shades Crest Road crossed US-31. Four blocks from the house I grew up in, that sign bent from use was posted cattycorner to the whitewashed-concrete replica of Sybil Temple.
Formations 03.18.2018: An Inheritance of Eternal Life
March 11, 2018 by
I’ve been thinking a lot about inheritance lately, particularly the people who remain to sort through what’s left behind. And it seems that while this work permits us to remember joy and laughter and tenderness, it requires us to acknowledge that some things, including life and its relationships, get broken.
Formations 03.04.2018: Jesus Shows Compassion
February 25, 2018 by
My granddad died well before I was born. What I have of him has been given secondhand—ties and desk ornaments, pictures and stories. Among the easily believed and even the photographed, some stories are harder to accept. One of these is a healing story.
Formations 02.18.2018: Run the Race
February 11, 2018 by
For the writer of Hebrews, rest best describes the promise given to Abraham and subsequent generations. So the vision for Israelite society in the promised land rested in sabbath. Likewise, Christian communities would be guided by a commitment to rest. But this writer also understood that the promise did not come into fullness immediately.
Formations 02.04.2018: Living in Tensions
January 28, 2018 by
It’s not uncommon that I steal books from my grandfather’s coffee table. He goes ahead and tells me to take what I want, so it isn’t really stealing. Over the years, he has made sure to send me home with books that have been meaningful for him.
Formations 01.21.2018: Unexpected News
January 14, 2018 by
Our story this week begins as one ends. Naaman, mighty warrior that he was, filled his house with wealth and servants taken from raids in Israel. And yet, despite this resolved story of victory, success, and stability, he still suffered from leprosy.
Formations 01.07.2018: The Suffering Servant
December 31, 2017 by
Lately I’ve been reading about Bartolomé de las Casas. A sixteenth-century Dominican friar, Las Casas is best remembered for his protests against the dominant forms of Spanish colonial and evangelical activity—the wars of the conquest and the encomienda system.
Formations 12.24.2017: A Song of Joy and Sorrow
December 17, 2017 by
Because I live a few blocks from a hospital, ambulance sirens, and the occasional helicopter, form one pitch in that harmony of creation I hear. For what they signal—coming help and immediate danger—these sounds are above all interruptions demanding drivers to make way.
Formations 12.10.2017: Improvising on a Common Theme
December 3, 2017 by
The first standard I ever learned was the Sonny Rollins composition “Oleo.” As a drummer, this didn’t require much more than learning to sing the melody. But my friends, who played trombone and guitar, really had to know it. To solo, they had to understand how every note fit, or didn’t fit, into each chord.
Formations 11.26.2017: Innocence, Guilt, and Technicalities
November 19, 2017 by
The first time I heard Les Misérables, I was fifteen or sixteen. My mother had picked me up from school. Somewhere between learning it was her favorite musical and the grocery store, I asked her what it was all about. She began with the bishop.
Formations 11.12.2017: What We Stand For
November 5, 2017 by
Alexander Hamilton, at least as played by Lin-Manuel Miranda, asks Aaron Burr early in their relationship, “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what will you fall for?” This tension between principle and calculated ambition defines Hamilton and Burr’s relationship through the remainder of Hamilton.
Formations 10.29.2017: Call and Response
October 22, 2017 by
It’s a simple record with only voices and a few percussion instruments that begins when Jenkins gives the group of children accompanying her these instructions: Many of you, I’m sure, have played the game follow the leader. Well, you can play the same kind of game in song and sound. Here’s how we play it.
Formations 10.15.2017: No Longer
October 8, 2017 by
In 2015, John Legend and Common’s song “Glory,” written for the movie Selma, won an Oscar for the best original song. That same year, I worked for Passport camps, an ecumenical youth camp, and every night this was one of many songs that helped us to prepare for worship. As I read this week’s passage and tried to start making sense of Paul’s vision of belonging and freedom in Christ, this song returned to me.