Fooling with Scripture, Ep 12 -- Fooling with Endings

This week's episode of Fooling with Scripture is brought to you through a partnership with Crossroads United Methodist Church as part of their Faith Beyond Belief: Reclaiming the Art of Christian Practice series.

Each week for the next few weeks we'll be fooling with a text from John's gospel. This week we're looking at John 21:15-19, in which Jesus has a conversation with Peter about restoration, love, service, and change.


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I've already mentioned Dr. Sharon Ringe's wonderful book on John's gospel numerous times; this week I'm also going to mention Gail O'Day's in-depth commentary on John in Volume IX of the New Interpreter's Bible commentary series (Abingdon Press, 1995).

Also referenced this week is the work of William Bridges, best known for his book Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, the 25th anniversary edition of which is available from De Capo Press. Bridges identifies three phases of transition, which he labels “Endings,” “Neutral Zone,” and “New Beginning.” He offers the important insight that transition begins with ending, and that there is a tendency to “fail to discover our need for an ending until we have made most of our necessary external changes” (pg. 11).  By ignoring endings and “the important empty or fallow time” that follows them, we undermine the possibility of a new beginning and a new phase of growth in our lives (pg. 17).

If you're interested in a very concise commentary on this passage, or on any of the other John passages we've been looking at over the past few weeks, you can check out the series of short mind-podcasts I've done for Crossroads UMC as part of their series. These are 5-6 minutes of quick context and content about each week's passage, and I have them organized on my SoundCloud site in a handy playlist:

Fooling with Scripture, Ep 11 -- Fooling with Stewardship, Fooling with Politics

This week's episode of Fooling with Scripture is brought to you through a partnership with Crossroads United Methodist Church as part of their Faith Beyond Belief: Reclaiming the Art of Christian Practice series.

Each week for the next few weeks we'll be fooling with a text from John's gospel. This week we're looking at John 2:1-11, in which Jesus rather famously turns water into wine. But we're going to focus on the character of the steward, and what this character might have to tell us about a particular church word (stewardship) and a particular dirty word (politics).

This week I'm also excited to introduce our new theme song, written by my friend Pat Dupont. You can listen to some more of his music on SoundCloud.

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We're still abiding/staying/dwelling/meno-ing in John's gospel (and if you don't get that joke, you need to go back an episode), so I continue to recommend Sharon Ringe's book on John's gospel: Wisdom's Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (Westminster John Knox, 1999).

Also, if I piqued your interest about this scripture and about the broader implications of the term stewardship, you can check out a previous sermon I gave on this text:



Questions? Comments? Scripture you'd like fooled with? Email me!

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Fooling with Scripture, Ep 10 -- Fooling with Friendship, Fooling with Church Words

The 10th episode of Fooling with Scripture is brought to through a partnership with Crossroads United Methodist Church as part of their Faith Beyond Belief: Reclaiming the Art of Christian Practice series.

The folks at Crossroads invited me to offer the first Sunday morning message for this series as well, so if you're interested in seeing/hearing that, there's a video available on their website. Sermon starts around minute 40 and is about 20 minutes long.


Each week for the next few weeks we'll be fooling with a text from John's gospel. This week we're looking at John 15:7-17 (or so), in which Jesus calls his disciples "friends."

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This whole series, and this episode in particular, is very heavily indebted to a class I took in seminary with Dr. Sharon Ringe. The class as a whole, and her book on friendship in John's gospel, has been hugely influential not only in how I understand John's gospel but in how I understand my faith and ministry as a whole. Check out Wisdom's Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (Westminster John Knox, 1999).

Another hugely influential book, which I quote in this episode, is John Swinton's Resurrecting the Person: Friendship and the Care of People with Mental Health Problems (Abingdon: Nashville, 2000). Here's the full quote of which I share an excerpt, from page 148-149:

Jesus' friendships were always personal, as opposed to instrumental, primarily aimed at regaining the dignity and personhood of those whom society had rejected and depersonalized. Jesus' friendships reached beyond the socially constructed identity of individuals and, in entering into deep and personal relationships of friendship with them, he was able to reveal something of the nature of God and enable the development of a positive sense of personhood based on intrinsic value rather than on personal achievement or outward behavior. Whether he was calling to Zacchaeus, the much hated tax collector, to come down from the tree and eat with him (Luke 19:2) or preparing for his death while communing with his friends (Matthew 26:26) the friendships of Jesus reached beyond social expectations to reclaim the personhood of the other.

This type of friendship is catalytic. Unlike other more instrumental relationships such as those found in counseling and psychotherapy, which set out specifically to do something, it is a form of relationship that acts as a catalyst that enables health and rehumanization simply by being there. Unlike many agents with whom people with mental health problems may come into contact, the task of the Christlike friend is not to do anything for them, but rather to be someone for them -- someone who understands and accepts them as persons; someone who is with and for them in the way that God is also with and for them; someone who reveals the nature of God and the transforming power of the Spirit of Christ in a form that is tangible, accessible, and deeply powerful.  

Finally, I mention hearing the pastors of Highlands Church in Denver give a presentation in which they talked about the "How we do what we do is more important than what we do" principal. You can actually watch/listen to the presentation using Facebook live below, or just check out what the folks at Highlands are up to on their website.

It's been five years and I still need such grace

Five years ago, now. I can hardly believe it.

Five years ago, this month, my parents drove me to Connecticut so I could check myself into the acute ward at Silver Hill Hospital. It was a gamble -- there wasn't a guarantee that there would be a bed free. But I couldn't wait for there to be an opening in the longer-term care house. I didn't think I would make it.

And so I watched the leaves turn in a wire cage, open to the sky, smelling of quiet decay and cigarette smoke, before I finally managed to talk my way out of the cage and across the street into the big white house.

Two weekends ago, I was thinking about that house.

I was sitting in a room on the second floor of the farmhouse at Georgetown University's beautiful retreat center in the Shenandoah. The grounds were thick with fog -- of course, when you're in the mountains, it's not really fog, it's just being in a cloud. A cloud, on a mountain, and a quiet sort of transfiguration.

And I looked out on the grounds, beautifully obscured, all edges softened, and remembered my last day at Silver Hill. How I walked around the house -- the house where I'd learned about radical acceptance, and mindfulness, and interrupting the chain, and riding the wave -- walked around the house in the snow and the fog. Stared at the stream and the pond where I'd watched leaves flow by, disappearing over the small waterfall, imagining them as my thoughts, free to drift away. Peered through the trees, now silently skeletal with winter, to the buildings where I'd learned from newly sober drunks and meth heads and nervous teenagers with body dysmorphia and addictions to painkillers and middle aged women with eating disorders, so many people old before their time or worn ragged by time, honest in their presence and their speech.

If we were a body, we were barely held together by the sinew of desperation, after the collapse of the exoskeletons we'd grown in a world for which we were, somehow, made too fragile.

That was five years ago. I still need such grace.

I am not fixed. Not cured. The sickness that was in my bones, my fragile skeleton that I held so carefully as I walked in the fog on that last day five years ago now, is with me still. I see it out of the corner of my eyes, even on the good days. I hear it in my voice when I tell people how good my life is.

I am not lying to them. My life is good. It is very, very good. I am so grateful for it.

But my skeleton, if stronger now, is still made of the same bones.

Photo by Father Greg Schenden, SJ

And so I sat in the farmhouse in the Shenandoah, and in between beautiful conversations with students I looked out into the fog. Into the cloud. And thought about Silver Hill.

And thought about transfiguration.

And thought about a voice saying, "This is my Beloved Child."

I felt a deep peace, there on the mountain. I'll tell you about what I heard, or didn't hear, in that stillness and silence. Some other day. Some other time.

But today, I will tell you:

It has been five years, now. And I still need such grace.

Fooling with Scripture, Ep 9 -- Word, Words, Words about the Word

The 9th episode of Fooling with Scripture is brought to through a partnership with Crossroads United Methodist Church as part of their Faith Beyond Belief: Reclaiming the Art of Christian Practice series.

Each week for the next few weeks we'll be fooling with a text from John's gospel. We won't go in order through the gospel, but we are starting at the very beginning -- the first 5 verses of the first chapter.

Check it out:



I mention Dr. Sharon Ringe, who was my professor at Wesley and with whom I took a class on John's gospel. If that's intriguing, you can check out her book on John's gospel, Wisdom's Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (Westminster John Knox, 1999).

If the idea of God revealing God's self in a variety of different ways piques your interest, there's plenty to dig into -- that's a very ancient idea. In fact early Christians held to an idea called "the Two Books," in which Scripture was one book/revelation and nature was another. If you really want to geek out, you can check out Dr. Ted Peters, who taught a class on science and theology that I took at Lutheran Theological Seminary, who summarizes different theories of how science and religion interact with each other in his article "Theology and Science: Where Are We?"

Have a question, a comment, or a scripture you'd like fooled with? Send me an email!

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