God asks lots of questions throughout Scripture. Some questions are answered, but most hang in the air, begging for a response. His first question, “Where are you?” sets the tone for all of the ones that follow.

God doesn’t ask “Where are you?” because he has misplaced the man and the woman. More than gathering information, he is offering an invitation. God’s questions invite relationship.

FTLOL is a compendium of internet goodness that stretches from the profane to the sublime. However, this week’s is entirely sublime. RIP, Wendell.

This world lost some cultural heavyweights recently: Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Wendell Berry. The first two are household names, the third should be.

Wendell Berry was a farmer, but we know him because of what he has written. He wrote poetry, novels, and essays. His novels were often set in an imaginary place called Port William. Even though imaginary, Port William comes off real in the deepest sense. He wrote poetry that was beautiful but deceptively simple. And his essays range from ecology and farming, to business and religion, to the economy and how to care for sheep. Key to each was his understanding that we are all tied together through the land as we encounter our fellow humans.

A nice personal reflection that includes WB’s poem, “The Wild Farmer Liberation Front.”

This is my favorite WB poem. — from Sabbaths 2000

This is not my favorite but it has been burned into my brain since my first reading. — the Vacation

One Substacker rightly pointed out the irony of so many people reading about Wendell Berry’s passing via social-media. I wonder what he thought of the fact that many came to know him because of the internet. Here is an old essay where he explains his reasons for rejecting ubiquitous technology. It is old, but never more timely. — Why I am not going to computer

Theologian Ben Myers talks about that one time . . . in Maryland. — On Almost Meeting Wendell Berry

A true culture warrior, WB inspires those of us who call Jesus Lord, to live what we believe. From Karen Swallow-Prior. – Wendell Berry’s Radical Lesson for Christians

Fidelity, a collection of Wendell Berry’s short stories, includes “Pray Without Ceasing.” James McMurtry has put that short story into song and it’s almost as good. (Nota bene: James McMurtry is the son of the great novelist Larry McMurtry, famous for Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, among others.)

Wendell Berry is from Kentucky and

Malcolm Guite is from Great Britain. You’ve not heard Kentucky poetry till you’ve heard it in an English accent. Guite reads some of Berry’s “Sabbath Poems.” — Sabbath Poems as they were meant to be heard

This is a very partial list of his work, but I enthusiastically recommend them all. Share your favorites in the comments!

Jayber Crow - Is he a barber, a pastor, a prophet, a husband?

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community - essays from the 90s that are just as prescient today. In my favorite quote from the book, WB says sarcastically , “Anything that cannot be weighed, counted, or measured does not exist.” (From “The Joy of Sales Resistance”)

Fidelity - Short stories about murder, driving old pickups, and burying a friend the way he would want.

Entries - Wendell Berry is a poet for people who love poetry and those who don’t. Entries includes “The Vacation,” as well as poetry about marriage, life in the country, and home.

The Hidden Wound - A white man from Kentucky tries, imperfectly, to address the painful reality of racism.

Kelly Chewning delivers a great message on an important part of Matthew’s Gospel. (Matt 18:15-20) As subjects of the Kingdom of God we belong to Christ, therefore, we belong to each other. Life in the Kingdom of God carries with it responsibility to those with us.

‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ - Matt 16:23

Jesus’ words must be really disorienting. He isn’t being easy on Peter. He’s not holding back. He is using the strongest of language here because Peter cannot afford to get this wrong about Jesus, and neither can we.

Jesus will suffer and die. (And be resurrected.) When Peter tells Jesus, in essence, “you can’t die, don’t go to the cross, avoid the suffering,” he is not just being compassionate toward the Lord whom he loves. He is calling into question the congruence between Jesus as the Son of God and Jesus as the one who suffers for our sake. Jesus won’t have it because it creates a division in who Jesus essentially is.

Peter didn’t tuck and run after Jesus’ harsh words because he realized that the wound of being called Satan was worth the healing that comes from knowing Jesus as he truly is, not as we want him to be.

When Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is, Peter, the one with all the good lines, says confidently, “You are the Messiah!” With that statement, Peter, and by extension all of us, receive our identities. We tell Jesus who he is; he tells us who we are. (Gratefully, Jesus is telling us who we are, “beloved,” “made in the image of God,” etc., long before we have a clue who he is.)

We believe in Jesus because he has been passed down to us through those who have gone before, not because we can historically reconstruct every detail of his life.

This passing down is the holy tradition, the living tradition of the Christian faith. Jaroslav Pelikan has said,

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”

When Jesus goes out of Jewish territory, he has in mind the hope of reaching those whom God has not forgotten. And reading the story from Matthew parabolically, with an eye for what’s going on beyond and behind this one encounter, frees us to hear God’s word to the “Canaanite” woman and all of us.

Peter swings from hero-level faithfulness to getting called a name by Jesus, again. In this instance, Jesus calls him “little-faith.” Is Jesus being mean? Or does the look on his face and the tone of his voice reveal this to be an affectionate nickname?

After hearing the bad news that John the Baptist was beheaded at Herod’s banquet, Jesus throws a banquet of his own, complete with miracles, teaching, and food. Jesus gives God what he has and what the crowd has, and God multiplies it. In this excellent sermon, Kelly Chewning helps us ask the question: Can we trust that what God has for us is enough?

Decades after his death, another Brit who uses initials for his official name carried on a conversation that C.S. Lewis had begun with his imaginary friend, Malcolm. N.T. Wright, New Testament scholar and theological auteur, wrote,

“… love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton.” - Surprised by Hope

Love and prayer go together. We pray for those we love; and we pray to the one we love above all. Yet this expression of love does not always come easily. Wright’s words are a nice summation for Lewis.

If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of many other behaviours which now appear as duties. If I loved my neighbour as myself, most of the actions which are now my moral duty would flow out of me as spontaneously as from a lark or fragrance from a flower. Why is this not so yet? Well, we know, don’t we? Aristotle has taught us that delight is the “bloom” on an unimpeded activity. But the very activities for which we were created are, while we live on earth, variously impeded: by evil in ourselves or in others. Not to practise them is to abandon our humanity. To practise them spontaneously and delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of duty, the whole specifically moral realm.

Duty is not a bad thing, but it can degenerate into legalism. We can use the language of “doing our duty” to manipulat. It can become a weapon we wield against one another and even ourselves.

The simple act of showing up is an act of love. Showing up in prayer, showing up in friendship, showing up when it’s just easier not to. Are moments like that duty? Maybe. But they are also foretastes of the kind of love which N.T. Wright describes as our destiny.

And in those moments of duty, or just showing up, God speaks. Often by surprise, he speaks in places and through faces that we wouldn’t anticipate. God delights in a holy ambush.

I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling contend with the greatest discinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. In feeling there is so much that is really not ours—so much that comes from wealth and health or from the last book read. (or podcast?) One thing seems certain. It is no good angling for the rich moments. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite effect. Doesn’t Charles Williams say somewhere that “the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else”?

‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; 46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

The Gospel is not the news that we can receive Jesus Christ into our lives; the Gospel is the news that Jesus Christ has received us into his! He has gone out to find us. He has paid big money, all the money that he has, to find us. I can’t get over the old Michael Card song that says, “He cannot love us more, and he will not love us less.”

But can you hear that message? Or does that story need to haunt you a little bit? Does it need to sit in the back of your mind for a while, let it sink in, let it seep in, through the corners of your imagination.

Sometimes we have to sit with the parables, meditate on them, ruminate over them. But more often, we need to sit in the parables so that they will work on us.