Blog Archives
Call and Response: Excerpt from Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises
In December, Mossy Creek Press released my new book, Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises. I have been so gratified by the readers’ enthusiastic responses. From time to time, I want to share a few excerpts with readers. Since we are in the Lenten Season, I share this prayer, found on page 48:
A Prayer for the Beginning of Lent
Based on Psalm 42:8-11
As a Baptist kid in the South, I had never heard of Lent, but I understood “call and response” instinctively. Someone sings and you sing back to them. In southern gospel, it was often something the basses and altos did, little descants under the melody, like a man and woman when they really speak and hear each other’s hearts. That’s the Lenten journey to me—get quiet, listen and when you finally pick up the song, sing back. You really have to train your ear to hear it.
“By day the LORD commands his steadfast love and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?” As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?” Why are you cast down, O my soul and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” Psalm 42:8-11 NRSV
Lenten Series: The Seven Deadly Sins
We welcome a stellar series of speakers to lead us during the season of Lent at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church this year as we study “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Each week on Tuesday at noon, we will have a different guest teacher leading us in Bible study on the traditional deadly sins and tal
k to us about the power of the gospel to help us as we struggle against them in our lives. Last Wednesday evening, I led off with a presentation on gluttony (following a Baptist Wednesday night dinner and as part of the Ash Wednesday Communion!).
This week we continue with Dr. Ron DelBene. Ron is an Episcopal priest, spiritual director, writer, and gifted speaker. He has been a major influence in my own spiritual life and I look forward to his words of wisdom about greed. A light meal follows after and the public is welcome to attend with us. Hope tto see y0u there!
2600 Vestavia Drive
Birmingham, Alabama 35216
979-5920 http://www.vhbc.com
Our new book: Encountering God in the Prayers of Others
Encountering God in the Prayers of Others is
our latest collective effort. It springs from experience
in our spiritual lives of prayers
composed by others that have “spoken” to us.
The Trinity group is a self-named group of friends, all Ph.D. grads
CONTRIBUTORS Paul Basden, R. LaMon Brown, Brad Creed, Gary Furr, Fisher Humphreys, Dwight A. Moody, Richard Francis Wilson
in theology or closely related fields who have chosen to journey together theologically for 25 years. The group was initiated by our teacher-friend Fisher Humphreys. It includes missionaries, pastors, college and seminary professors and a chaplaincy supervisor.
Through the years, we have created a space, meeting once or twice a year for multiple days, to have intellectual, spiritual and theological freedom to read, study, comment, question and debate any subject together that interested or troubled us. The glory of such freedom has enhanced all of our lives.
One of our founders, Philip, died six years ago this March. He was the first close friend some of us had lost, and he was in so many ways a force and center of our group. His loss was enormous, but we carried on. That experience, of walking with a friend to his grave, literally in my own case, was profound. And it mirrors what happens in the theological journey—it is always, inevitably, personal at the same time that we seek the loftiest and most universal of vantage points from which to do theology. Read the rest of this entry
