This post is an adapted version of a sermon I shared at Paradox Church in Redlands, California, on April 30, 2022. The video recording can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/jLKL5yOWHjY or on Paradox Church’s website.
I shared a similar version to a largely Seventh-day Adventist audience for Adventist Today’s Sabbath Seminar. (Access the video recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtvlpv_7Qw)
Read MoreMy wife and I married on a Thursday night one May. Although the timing was strange (right in the middle of spring semester of my senior undergraduate year), the concluding line in our vows was not. It was a famous quotation from a Bible passage this is not uncommon in modern weddings: “Where you go I will go. Where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people. And your god, my god. And may God forbid anything coming in between this commitment we are making today…”
Read MoreI set out 2016 with the hope of reading more than I had in previous years. I've always been a reader, but something happens in the middle of early parenthood that slides out leisure/entertainment reading time. Add in the constant draw of Facebook, electronic gadgets, home projects, work projects, and reading gets pushed to the back burner pretty quick. At least that's what it looks like in my house. My hope for 2016 was that I would reignite the reader bug I had caught back in high school. This happened to some degree, but perhaps not as much as I'd initially dreamed.
My initial thought was that I would complete "a book per week". This didn't pan out although I did log quite a number of them including some classics (two by Hemingway in a single year !).
Around the end of fall, I finished Eric Metaxas' ostensibly monumental work on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I am neither a Bonhoeffer expert nor terribly familiar with the work of Metaxas. Just about all that I knew of the famous German was that despite his commitment to non-violence, he never-the-less attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler during WWII. All I knew of Metaxas was that he was a historian.
I went into it a rather blank slate.
The following were among my reactions:
1. Surprise. In a very real sense, I felt dwarfed by the scope and life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This was a human being of considerable substance; far more complex, knowledgeable, committed, and remarkable than I appre...
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