After the thrilling success of my book Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration on Kickstarter, I’ve decided to tackle the next lesser-festival/homiletical-impossibility, namely the Ascension! ...
Read moreTransfiguration Kickstarter launches today!
Hip hip hooray! It’s my first Kickstarter today!
I wrote this book in a white hot fury. The process started out leisurely enough, even lethargically, from my running out of ideas for preaching on Trasnfiguration Sunday after only four years back in the pulpit.
I thought, there has to be more to it than I’m seeing.
And then I thought, if I’m having trouble preaching on this annual festival after only four years, surely others are in the same quandary!
So I started poking around, and finding stuff… surprising stuff… intriguing stuff… astounding stuff.
Then, in a characteristic burst of hysterical energy, I abruptly decided to write a book whose title I chose before I’d written any of its contents: Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration. I just liked the sound of it. I figured I could come up with seven ways.
I probably could have come up with seventeen, to be honest. The threads of connection spiraled out from the Transfiguration to weave their way around one thing after another. Before long I felt like a detective! Tracking one clue after another, trying to find the solution.
The solution to what, exactly? Though the Transfiguration raises all kinds of interesting questions, the two that provoked me most were:
What can it possibly mean for the eternal and everlasting Son of God to change? “Transfiguration” comes from Latin for “metamorphosis” in Greek. You could also say it in English as “transformation.” That’s a pretty significant claim to make about someone who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. How can Jesus change?
What does the Transfiguration tell us that Resurrection doesn’t? At first I took the Transfiguration to be a sneak peek or preview of the Resurrection. But the more I looked into it, the less convinced I became. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all go out of their way to describe the transfigured Jesus very differently from the risen Jesus. Something else is going on here. But if so… what?
I chased my way around the entire canon of Scripture in pursuit of these questions, kicking up a lot more questions in the process. I delved into the Greek and even into the Hebrew. I read up on ancient Hellenistic notions of metamorphosed gods and humans. I found cheesy spiritual self-help manuals (Transfigure Yourself in Forty Days! OK, not quite that bad, but bad enough) and patristic sermons on the Transfiguration.
And I found the answer to both questions. The answers are not only extremely satisfying—they also opened up a whole new perspective on Scripture, and on Jesus himself, that I hadn’t ever seen before.
I hope by now you are unbearably intrigued and dying to learn more! If so, please head on over to my Kickstarter page! You’ll find a number of different ways to get the book, and a lot more detail about it as well. Your support means the world to me, and it shows that you want to see more creative, illuminating, surprising, and engaging theology in the world and for the church!
Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar
I am very pleased to announce the publication of Nenilava, the Prophetess of Madagascar: Her Life and the Ongoing Revival She Inspired from Wipf & Stock. Please head right over to the W&S site to get your copy!
And, to whet your appetite, here’s the Preface I wrote for the book:
I first became aware of Madagascar during my childhood through photos of its strange and wondrous animals, and not, like the generation after me, through a Disney movie of the same name that has nothing whatsoever to do with the island nation.
Many, many years after my first glimpses of lemurs and chameleons, in 2013, I met my first Malagasy in person, Toromaree Mananato. She was a participant in the annual Studying Luther in Wittenberg seminar that I have taught every November since 2009 with Theodor Dieter, my colleague at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France. Toromaree was present at the behest of the Malagasy Lutheran Church (MLC), where she was serving as the national secretary of the women’s association (and soon to be vice-general secretary of the MLC). When she told me where she was from, I mentioned the animal pictures I’d seen and how I’d always thought Madagascar would be an interesting place to visit. She said, without skipping a beat, “OK! I’ll invite you!” Three days later I had a letter from Rakoto Endor Modeste, president of the MLC, asking me to come and teach a weeklong course at the Lutheran Graduate School of Theology in Ivory, Fianarantsoa…
Read moreLutheran Saints #21: Nenilava
Young Volohavana kept having dreams—powerful, moving dreams—but she could not understand them. Nothing in her small farming village along the southeastern coast of Madagascar could explain what she was seeing.
The dreams started when she was ten. A tall man placed her in a basin of water and washed her feet. After drying them, he rocked her gently to sleep. In another dream, he caught her in a net and then led her up to heaven. In yet another, he brought her to a church and up into the pulpit. He preached and told her that one day she would do the same.
Sometimes the dreams ceased altogether but then, during the day, she would hear a voice calling her name. At first she thought it was her parents, but they denied it and worried she might be losing her mind. She sensed somehow that the voice of the divine was calling out to her, but she didn’t know how to draw nearer to God. She gave up playing with other children and sat alone under a tree, weeping for want of God’s presence.
It wasn’t only the lack of God that troubled Volohavana. Her father Malady was a diviner with a widespread reputation. For pay he would consult with spirits through his oracle and offer wealth, zebus, children—whatever the heart desired. But Volohavana was not impressed. She doubted the power of the spirits; she mocked her father’s work, sometimes even in front of clients.
Worse yet, as her marriageable age came and went, she refused all the many qualified suitors asking for her hand. In desperation Malady turned again to his oracle, but this time the spirits gave him a very different kind of answer. “A superior Spirit, a God supreme dwells in her, and causes her indifference toward marriage,” they told him. “You, you are a slave, but Volahavana is a queen”…
Read moreTo Baptize or Not to Baptize; or, How a Lutheran Comes to Commit Casuistry
Upon reading To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy, more than one person has told me, “This is an excellent work of casuistry.” Not exactly the words to warm the heart of a Lutheran theologian. But they meant it as the sincerest of compliments.
And they’re right—in a sense. “Casuistry” is mostly a dirty word inside religious circles and out. It connotes the very worst of all legal and bureaucratic systems: reductionistic, narrow-minded, and inhuman. It binds the innocent in twisty cords of corruption and lets the wicked off the hook on a technicality.
But in fact “casuistry” shares a common Latin etymological root with “case,” as in “case study,” a time-honored strategy for moral discernment. At its best, casuistry is simply case studies, examining the wide and intriguing array of situations that we human beings get ourselves into, and thinking through the possible responses and options that arise as a result.
In that sense, To Baptize or Not to Baptize is chock full of casuistry, as it narrates forty-nine different baptismal situations calling for pastoral discernment. There may well be more…
Read moreTransgenre Theology
Early Lutheran transgenre theology: depicting the distinction between law and gospel visually.
You may have misread the title of this post. Take a second look just to be sure.
I’m fascinated by and obsessed with genre, which is not necessarily the most flattering moniker in the literary world.
“Genre fiction” is dismissed as formulaic, literarily subpar, and morally questionable to boot. Passive tools of the powers-that-be drug themselves with one escapist fantasy after another, whether it’s romance, Western, or sci-fi—or so the accusation goes.
Ursula K. LeGuin taught me to reverse my suspicion toward such suspicion of genre fiction, and enough disappointed dabblings in literary fiction have taught me that there’s more than one way to drug a populace. It’s the sniffy writers of beautiful sentences devoid of meaning or plot who are most likely to claim that their work can’t be classified; it’s beyond genre, so they say.
While I do like to read all kinds of things, I’m not especially devoted to any one genre. If it’s a good story, well told and well written, I’m game. The real reason I’ve become a genre devotee is because of the epistemology it unlocked for me…
Read moreThe New Samizdat
Samizdat is a sexy word borrowed from Russian, as its foreign-to-English consonant cluster zd unmistakably signals. But its literal translation renders a very unsexy, even dopey, notion in the anglophone world: self-publishing.
I can hear your cringe. “Self-publishing” is a polite euphemism for “vanity publishing,” which means 1) you are such a terrible writer you couldn’t persuade even the newest, poorest, most-desperate-to-prove-herself New York literary agent to shop your manuscript around, and therefore 2) you shelled out several thousand bucks to a parasitic scammer who feeds off fragile egos and probably has a brother in the bail bond business, with the result that 3) you can hold your own hardcover, yes, but with such unbelievably lousy cover art and an unforgivable font, not to mention the too-thick, stark-white, badly laid-out pages within, that only your mom and a handful of friends highly susceptible to guilt trips are going to buy it. But they sure aren’t gonna read it. (Well, maybe your mom will.)
The funny thing is, the samizdat’s endearing virtue was precisely its shoddy production quality…
Read moreA Reasonably Quick Guide to Spiritual Gifts/Charismata
For Pentecostals, a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit entails a bestowal of divine gifts of new powers and abilities. They are personally enriching, to be sure, but their primary purpose is the building-up of the church, both through missional outreach and congregational edification. The most common term to describe these gifts is charismata (singular: charisma), a transliteration of the Greek term that Paul uses for divine gifts.
Paul appears to have invented the term “charisma” himself. It has virtually no counterpart in any other Greek literature of his period or before. It derives from the Greek word charis, which means “grace,” so charismata can be understood to mean “graced-things.” You can also see the word charis hiding in one of the terms for the Lord’s Supper: eucharist, which has the more specific meaning of “thanksgiving”…
Read moreBiblioppression: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Library
Last summer I moved about 1400 books westward across the Atlantic Ocean and nearly half of America to my new home in St. Paul, Minnesota, after managing to shed about two hundred deemed extraneous. The first thing we did on arrival, before we had bedrooms or beds or any idea where our summer clothes were, was to build a bookshelf the entire length of the hallway at my in-laws’, whose home we have been gradually colonizing...
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