Hell Fire at Christmas!

24 12 2012

by Brian Walsh

For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Is. 9.6)

You’re already humming the tune, aren’t you?

“For unto us a child is born,
unto us, a son is given,
unto us, a son is given …”

That Handel had some good chops and knew how to fill a tune with enough hooks to reel in everyone in the hall.

There are many verses that capture the heart of Christmas,
but this is surely one of the most evocative,
a verse that fills us with hope that somehow in the birth of this child,
all of our deepest longings will find fulfillment;
that in the birth of this child world authority shifts
from the forces of darkness,
from the powers of foolishness, idolatry, oppression and violence
to one who will embody wisdom,
bear the authority of the Creator God of blessing,
be to us a loving father,
and bring peace in his wake. Read the rest of this entry »


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At a loss for words

15 12 2012

by Brian Walsh

[I had written this piece before the horrific news came out of Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. As President Obama spoke about the loss of twenty children and eight adults it was clear that as profound as his words were, it was his tears that spoke most clearly. We find ourselves at a loss for words. The point of this Advent reflection, is that God is also at a loss for words.]

I make my living with words.

That’s really what I do.
I speak.
I write.
I talk.

If God has given me a gift, it is the gift of words,
or as my Irish fore-fathers would have put it,
the gift of the gab.

I like to talk, and I remember as a kid,
and right up through my early years as a graduate student,
thinking that if only I could just shut up once in a while,
then my foot would not so permanently reside in my mouth.  Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Advent, Brian Walsh, Reflection, Romans, Sermon, Wine Before Breakfast

Advent Ache, Advent Hope

10 12 2012

by Brian Walsh

My daughters think that I hate shopping. They are mostly right.

Not all shopping, but certainly the kind of shopping that might take me into a mall. Indeed, my overwhelming bodily experience in a mall is an overheated irritation that gives birth to a grumpy exhaustion. My body literally starts to ache if I’m in the shopping mode too long. And too long is something like five minutes.

Actually, I can start to feel that overheated irritation and soreness just looking at a store these days.

That is one kind of bodily soreness.

But there are other kinds.

A few hours splitting and stacking wood can leave me sore.
Harvesting vegetables for a morning can leave me with aches and pains in various parts of my body.
So can hauling water for the animals or walking back and forth across a field as I’m trying to repair an electric fence.
Indeed, while I’m never ‘sore’ after a couple days of teaching, preaching and pastoral care on campus, there is an exhaustion that I can feel – especially at the end of a busy semester.

But there is something deeply fulfilling and even gratifying about this kind of soreness, this kind of tiredness. Read the rest of this entry »


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“Keening for the Dawn” … again

6 12 2012


(further Advent reflections on Steve Bell’s title cut from his new album, Keening for the Dawn: Christmastide)

by Brian Walsh

I’m still struck by the keening.
Keening for the dawn.
What could that mean?

We keen in the face of death.
Keening is an act of mourning,
a cry of anguish in the face of irreparable loss.

Yet Steve Bell would have us “keening for the dawn,”
and he will lead us to imagine that such keening
is what Advent is all about.

You see, “keening” is a very special sort of “waiting.”
This is a waiting for vindication.
This is a waiting for justice.
But most profoundly, this is a waiting for resurrection. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Advent, Brian Walsh, Music

Keening for the Dawn: Welcome to Advent

3 12 2012

A (beginning) Review of Steve Bell’s new cd, Keening for Dawn: Christmastide (Signpost Music, 2012).

by Brian Walsh

I have a confession.

I hate Christmas music. And it isn’t just the overly jolly Santa Claus stuff that puts me off. No, it is even the Christmas carols when they start showing up in every store that I enter from the middle of October until December 25. Maybe it is the incongruity of these carols showing up in the midst of a consumer frenzy, and maybe it is their close proximity to the secular Christmas songs, but I admit that secular Christmas celebrations have destroyed most of the season for me.

So it should come as no surprise that I generally hate Christmas albums as well. I know, I know, anyone who knows me will immediately bring to mind Bruce Cockburn’s wonderful Christmas album of a few years ago. That was an exception.

Now let me add one more confession. I generally don’t like contemporary Christian music. For me, this is a genre that comes off as too sweet, too pretty, and doesn’t have enough grit to it.

So when Canadian Christian singer/songwriter Steve Bell came out with a Christmas album this year, I knew that this was going to be a hard sell for me. I deeply respect Bell’s artistry. He is a guitarist that should be ranked amongst the best in the country. And his stature as a songwriter has gained him wide respect across this country. He also graciously headlined the show that we had a year ago to launch Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination.

But it was a ‘Christmas’ album that he sent me, and that already had a number of strikes against it. So, to honour the gift, I listened to the whole album in one sitting and was immediately blown away. Or perhaps it would be better to say that a close listen to “Keening for the Dawn” was an experience that I found deeply moving, indeed, deeply healing. Read the rest of this entry »


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Urban Remixed Presents: Room at the Table, An Evening with Jamie Howison

19 11 2012


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Categories : Church, Eucharist, Events, Mission, Music, Toronto, Uncategorized, Urban Ministry

Sarah Polley’s “Stories we Tell,” St. Paul and Father Abraham

1 11 2012

by Brian Walsh

Sarah Polley’s recently released documentary “Stories We Tell” is a deeply personal exploration into the stories that are at the foundation of a family’s identity and sense of home. The story is Sarah Polley’s own.

The joke had been running in the family for years that little Sarah looked so different from her siblings that she really wasn’t the offspring of her father. Just a joke, right? Well, as a young woman this wonderful Canadian actor and director went looking for the truth. Spoiler alert! Her dad isn’t her dad.

Now this would be a terrible shock to anyone and would raise profound questions about one’s own identity. You have spent all of your life thinking one thing about who you are and who your father is and now everything is changed. Or is it? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Brian Walsh, Reflection, Romans, Toronto, Uncategorized, Wine Before Breakfast

Dance me to the End of Love

15 10 2012

by Brian Walsh

(On Sunday, October 14, the Wine Before Breakfast community came together with the Church of the Redeemer in Toronto for an evening of wine, bread and prayer with the music and poetry of Leonard Cohen. The church was full of folks from various places and communities, all drawn to the spiritual depth of Cohen’s art. The WBB Band, co-directed by Dave Krause and Deb Whelan performed “Dance me to the End of Love,” “Show me the Place,” “Everybody Knows,” “Ain’t no Cure for Love,” “If it be your Will,” “Coming Back to You,” “Come Healing,” and “Lover Lover Lover.” The texts for the evening were Amos 5.6-15 and Mark 10.17-31. This is the meditation that I offered in response to the poetic and prophetic visions of Amos, Jesus and Leonard Cohen)

I.

They seem to go together.
Delight and devastation.

They seem to go together.
An artistic richness that strips you to your very soul.

The poet brings together words and rhythms that are so compelling,
so beautiful and so alluring,
and yet, these words disclose our deepest failures,
betrayals and delusions.

I knew that this was such a poet.

I knew from the first time I heard him that here was a man
who had dwelt in the traditions of our people,
who had drunk deeply at the well of the great poets of Israel,
who had sat with the wise men and learned their wisdom,
who had meditated upon Torah,
who had taken on the mantle of the prophet.

I knew it from the way his words conformed to the forms of the wise,
and I knew it from the way in which he would bend and break those forms,
often to mirror the very brokenness that he was portraying
… again, with words that would delight and devastate. Read the rest of this entry »


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Empire, Idolatry and Homosexuality: Romans 1.18-32 revisited

2 10 2012

by Brian Walsh

(a sermon preached at Wine Before Breakfast on October 2, 2012)

Let’s be clear about something from the start this morning.

No one in this room – not one person, I am willing to wager – actually believes everything that St. Paul wrote in this passage to the churches in Rome.

There may be someone in this room who believes that the death penalty is the just punishment for murder.

But if we believed that the death penalty was in store for insolence, well there wouldn’t be many adolescent children left, now would there.

And how about haughtiness, boasting, gossiping and being rebellious to your parents?

Or let’s take covetousness. I mean we’ve got a culture and an economy that is founded on covetousness. Without covetousness, without greed, without consumptive desire, our whole economy would collapse.  As the character Gordon Gekko so memorably put it in the film Wall Street, “greed is good.”

You get my point. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Brian Walsh, Community, Romans, Sermon, Sexuality, Wine Before Breakfast

“Clobber Texts”

30 09 2012

by Brian Walsh

They’ve come to be known as the “clobber texts.”

You know the one’s I’m talking about.

Those six texts – count them, there are six! ‑ that purportedly are about homosexuality.

Six texts in the whole Bible.

I don’t know, but somehow the more than 2000 texts in the Bible that address poverty and justice just seem to outweigh these six texts.

So when I meet the “God hates faggots” crowd with their self-righteous hatred, I’ve got to admit that I get pretty pissed off.
Read the rest of this entry »


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