In this E-pistle
Welcome, 2007
Simply Christian, a first take

Welcome, 2007. Maybe it’s just the turn of another page on the calendar, but there is something about the new year with its resolutions and clean slate that gets us thinking.

A few weeks ago I was with a group of pastors who were talking about pastoral care in some of the toughest situations of life. “Sometimes all you can say is, ‘I don’t know why,’” one of my friends said. We talked about that for awhile and all agreed. “I don’t know” is often a wise answer. There are mysteries we will never solve this side of the new heaven and the new earth. But then one of the pastors said this – and he was right – “Yes, often we don’t know why but the sentence does not end there. We may not know why, but we do know God and we know that he has promised never to leave us nor forsake us.”

I don’t know what will come my way in 2007, and certainly not what will come your way. But I do know that God will neither leave us nor forsake us. I’m ready for the new year.

Last night Becky, Alanna and I spend a couple of delightful hours browsing the shelves at Borders Books. Among the titles I brought home is Simply Christian: Why Christianity Make Sense by N.T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham and one of the world’s most engaging theologians.

I’ve just begun the book and I like it already. It is an apologetic of sorts, but not one of those tired proof of God or scientific evidence that shows why the atheists and the evolutionists are wrong. It’s more modest and more real than that. Wright doesn’t argue for a proof of the Gospel (which doesn’t exist), but for the sensibility of the Gospel. He suggests that there are four human longings, echoes of a voice, he calls them, that are satisfied in the person of Christ. Wright offers a longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, our hunger for relationships, and the love of beauty as common human experiences and then he shows how in Jesus “we recognize the voice whose echoes we have heard.”

Wright recently spoke at Georgetown University and you may hear his address here. This is a 50-minute presentation, but well worth the investment of time.

Christianity is not a matter of evidence that demands a verdict or cases that can be proved by logic. But, as Wright suggests, it simply makes sense.

More on the book later.