Category: Christian Spirituality

  It’s one of my pet peeves, and I hear Christians say it all the time, usually with an air of superiority. “We shouldn’t be surprised things are getting so bad. The only thing that’s going to fix it is Jesus coming back.” We say it about politics. About cultural trends. About R-rated movies. About…

  The Beatitudes, so familiar and easy to gloss over, are breathtaking when we see them clearly. Far from just a disjointed list of niceties, these kingdom blessings encompass the gospel according to Jesus. The kingdom of God is here, and so we are transformed by the grace of God–and the whole world with us.…

The gospel is a comedy in the classic literary sense: it ends with a wedding and turns expectations on their heads along the way. It’s often said that the people of Jesus’s time expected the Messiah to come in military power, overthrow Rome, and rule Israel from a literal throne in Jerusalem. That is surely…

The last of the Beatitude blessings is the longest and in some ways the most perplexing. To quote it in the beautiful King James: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all…

Discovering the gospel in the heart of the Beatitudes, made me read the whole list very differently. Rather than a disjointed list of random blessings, the Beatitudes are a journey. They take us from our starting point (impoverished, broken, grieving, afflicted), gift us outrageously, and pass through the gospel to what we become: pure, peacemakers,…

From the beginning, the Beatitudes have been full of outsized blessings. You have nothing? I’ll give you a kingdom. Alone in your grief? God himself will come alongside you. Struggling against oppression and injustice? Take heart; you will inherit the earth. But perhaps none is so outsized, so outlandish as this: “Blessed are the pure…

I will never forget the awful, sick feeling that came over me the day I watched someone in my life get what she deserved. She was a bitter, judgmental, hypercritical person. She’d brought negativity and pain into so many lives. She never really had time or grace for others. That day, I watched it come…

Several years ago I was supposed to speak at a women’s conference here in Ontario on the Beatitudes and the kingdom of God. The idea was “seeing yourself through a kingdom lens.” I’d suggested that topic in part because it was specific but still broad enough for me to develop my talk over time, as…

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” This last of the “negative beatitudes” once more blesses those who are in an unblessed state. Being hungry and thirsty is not good. I have often read this as, “Blessed are those who are starving, who are famished for things to…

Christians often say “meekness isn’t weakness; it’s power under control” (a definition I think we owe to the early twentieth-century Olympic runner and missionary Eric Liddell) and take pains to point out that being meek is not the same thing as being a doormat. But the fact is there’s a reason people in the world…