Faith Exploration

Walter Brueggemann at Elmhurst College March 15th

2011-03-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Our “Faith Journey” group goes on a “field trip” on March 15^th to Elmhurst College to be part of one of their “Still Speaking: Conversations on Faith” presentations. This one features scholar and teacher Walter Brueggemann and EC president S. Alan Ray. We’ll circulate some e-mails among the group to see if we want to car pool, and we’ll open the invitation to others in the church family. Below is the very brief blurb the College distributed about the evening.

STILL SPEAKING: CONVERSATIONS ON FAITH

A Conversation on Evil with Elmhurst College President S. Alan Ray
Walter Brueggemann, Elmhurst College Class of 1955, is widely acknowledged as the foremost Christian scholar of the Hebrew Bible. No scripture scholar in America sells more books or informs more sermons. Jane Fisler-Hoffman, of the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ, is a former student of Brueggemann’s. “When we pastors are at our best,” she says, “we do what he does—wrestle with the Word, look at the world around us, and put the two together in a way that touches lives.”

Special Appearance
Tuesday, March 15, 7:00 p.m.
The Frick Center, Founders Lounge

One Student's Hope

2011-01-25T14:16:00.001-08:00

Henri J.M. Nouwen once asked his college students to describe what they meant by “hope.” One of his students wrote this…

I hope I will always be for each person what that person needs me to be.

I hope that each person’s death will diminish me, but fear of my own will never diminish my joy of life.

I hope that my love for those whom I like will never lessen my love for those whom I do not.

I hope than another person’s love for me will never be a measure of my love for that other.

I hope that every person will accept me as I am, but that I never will.

I hope that I will always ask forgiveness from others, but will never need to be asked for my own.

I hope that I will always recognize my limitations, but that I will construct none.

I hope that love will always be my goal, but that love will never be my idol.

I hope that every person will always have hope.

William Stringfellow

2011-01-12T15:44:00.001-08:00

There is a small picture frame on my desk at church with this thought from lawyer and theologian William Stringfellow that might “set the table” a bit for our conversation next Tuesday. The emphases are mine…

“The most obstinate misconception associated with the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that the Gospel is welcome in this world. This conviction – endemic among church folk – persists that, if problems of misapprehension are overcome, and the gospel is heard on its own integrity, the Gospel will be found attractive to people, become popular, and a success of some sort. The idea is curious and ironic because it is bluntly contradicted in scripture and in the experience of the continuing biblical witness in history.”

Hope to see you Tuesday.

The Digital Story of the Nativity

2010-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this, you should. It is very cute... Merry Christmas!

Bottom Line Non-Negotiables

2010-12-21T09:59:00.001-08:00

They come out of the woodwork this time of year even more than they do at Easter-time. They come challenging me to change their minds about the “magical” (their word, not mine) things, or the “superstitious” (again, their word, not mine) things about Christianity. As modern or post-modern people, they simply cannot reconcile their knowledge of how the universe works with what they think are the “bottom-line, non negotiable” about all sorts of things – the inerrancy of the bible, the virgin birth, how the bible says one thing one place and a completely contrary and other thing in another, and all the rest. It’s as if they are yearning to be convinced that they have it all wrong, that the bible really should be read literally, that the virgin birth can be reconciled with everything else we know about higher mammals reproducing, and how the bible is, as a piece of literature, a difficult but interesting cohesive and consistent whole. And they are disappointed when I am not smart enough to do that.

Mostly, I cannot do that because these things that they think are non-negotiables are very negotiable to me. Now, if they would only ask me what my bottom line about all this religious stuff is, what my non-negotiables were, they would likely be surprised by my answers, because they have little or nothing to do with miracles or biblical inerrancy or any of the other stuff that we get into arguments about.

I can think of 4 “non-negotiables,” and none of them have anything to do with:

-this or that style of worship,

-this or that style of study programs,

-this or that style of architecture, organizational schemes, dress codes, political affinity tradition, custom, culture, denomination,

-old hymns, new hymns, hi-tech, low-tech, intellectual distance, touchy-feely intimacy

Rather, at least today, for me those 4 “bottom line” things are:

1) Jesus is an embodiment of God. Somehow, through Jesus, God comes from beyond time and space to show us how it’s done. I have no idea how that happens, and it doesn’t really matter to me.

2) To be Christian is to be open and willing to be an embodiment of God like Jesus. To be like Jesus doesn’t mean dressing like him, eating like him, wandering from town to town like him; it doesn’t mean not listening to hard rock music and not dancing and not standing up for what you think. To be like Jesus means to try to be an embodiment of God, and that means to care for others with integrity, honesty, and true compassion.

3) To be a Christian, I have to know intimately the story of Jesus, because the beginning place for every interaction is the goal to be like Jesus. And that means that I need to know more about the story than Christmas, Easter, and the occasional platitude that excuses my non-Christian behavior while condemning yours.

4) To be a Christian is to embrace the notion that God loves me unconditionally, just as I am. God loves you unconditionally, just as you are. I am, and you are, therefore, freed from having to prove myself to me to you, or to anyone, and am liberated to love even those who seem most unlovable to me and you.

Much of the time, the stuff we pick fights about (miracles, the suspensions of the laws of physics, the often prejudicial ways very pious people often behave, literal or figurative reading of the bible and tradition, etc.) help us avoid the things that matter most. And today, 4 days before Christmas, these 4 things are at the heart of what matters for me.

A

2010-12-03T07:56:00.001-08:00

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

"A." A little child shall lead them. A little child. Not Jesus, supposed son of Joseph, son of Mary, son of God. Not the Messiah. A little child shall lead them. The realm of God's shalom, God's wholeness, justice and peace is to be ushered in by a little child. At least here, the poetry points not to a specific little one in the Davidic line; it simply hints at a little child. And one more thing: the Hebrew word Isaiah uses for child, năh'-ar, just like the English word "child", is genderless. The poetry doesn't say, "the little male child;" it says, "a little child."

Now you might think that I'm making a very big deal about a very little word. But I think the simple truth is that you and I have been conditioned by a lifetime of Advents and Christmases to read the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures as God-sanctioned, Nostradamus-like prognostications of Jesus. The problem is that while understanding Jesus in the light of these prophecies helps us get a full picture of how Jesus' contemporaries understood him, to understand the poetry as beginning and ending in Jesus misses the point.

The point is that the poetry says "a little child," and that while Jesus is everything that we say he is, and more, Jesus is not God's only chosen one. God has not finished acting in history, and God is not finished with chosen ones and promised ones, little boy and little girl chosen ones, little boy and little girl promised ones. A little child.

The prophet's poetry is not about predestination, where in some corner of God's heaven there's a book with a script for every child's life in it. The prophet's poetry does suggest something about our self-disciplined predisposition toward the little ones who at every level people our lives. What if our predisposition toward every child – regardless of wealth or lack of it or beauty or lack of it or parentage or circumstance or Wexler scale scores – included the notion that each child begins life as a little child imagined by the prophet. What if we decided that we would see and embrace each little child –

Ä the babies we baptize with some regularity,

Ä the well-scrubbed little faces lit up with their holiday programs,

Ä the hollow little hungry faces that stare at us from the site of the famine du jour,

Ä the babies whose births we await with both joyful anticipation and great fear and trembling –

as if that child were a promised one and chosen one of God?

What if you and I took seriously the notion that we were to be stewards of God's gifts to us, and that God's highest priority were the compassionate, impassioned care of God's promised and chosen little ones? What if you and I behaved as if each child we encountered – again, regardless of wealth, or lack of it, or beauty, or lack of it, or parentage, or circumstance, or Wexler scale scores – was one of God's highest priorities? Even when they won't stop crying. Even when they are stubborn. Even when they remind us of us at our very worst. What if we determined that we would be in relationship with each child we encounter as if she or he were a chosen, promised one from God?

If we did, the day would certainly come when no longer would one American child die every 53 minutes from the effects of poverty. If we did, the day would certainly come when no longer would 14 million American children live below the poverty line. ( see the latest report from the Children's Defense Fund on "The State of America's Children" at http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-of-americas-children-2010-report.html) If we did, the day would certainly come when we realize that taking only adequate care of the children among us is less expensive than taking care of their broken adult lives to be.

God's little boy and little girl chosen and promised ones don't decide when or where to be born. They don't decide where to call home. They don't choose their family's religion. They do not chose their parents' irresponsibility. The greatest temptation is to assume that all I'm called to do is take care of my own. The greatest truth is that all of God's little boy and little girl chosen and promised ones are my own. And your own.

U2 "Yahweh"

2010-11-17T18:09:00.001-08:00

Our reading material for our next Faith Journey gathering (Tuesday January 18th, 6:30 PM at First Church of Lombard) mentions U2's song Yahweh. Here's a video of U2 performing the song at a 2007 concert in Chicago. Lyrics below...

Take these shoes, click clacking down some dead end street

Take these shoes and make them fit.

Take this shirt, polyester white trask made in nowhere

Take this shirt and make it clean, clean

Take this soul, stranded in some skin and bones

Take this soul and make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh still I'm waiting for the dawn.

Take these hands, teach them what to carry

Take these hands, don't make a fist, no

Take this mouth, so quick to criticize

Take this mouth, give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh, still I'm waiting for the dawn.

Still waiathing for the dawn, the sun is coming up

The sun is coming up on the ocean

His love is like a drop in the ocean

Yahweh, Yahweh always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh why the dark before the dawn?

Take this city, a city should be shining on a hill

Take this city, if it be your will

What no man can own, no man can take

Take this heart

And make it brave.

God's Reign/Realm/Kingdom... and Frederick Buechner

2010-10-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't really expect any other 1,900 year old literary collection to reflect the cultural sensitivities of a completely foreign contemporary setting, but that's exactly what many of us do with the Bible. We are surprised and sometimes taken aback when we expect the Bible to express itself one way, and what it really says is something strikingly different.

Case in point. Many contemporary thinkers and church people are uncomfortable with the phrase "kingdom of God." Some are uncomfortable with the "male-ness," the "assumed patriarchy" of something called a "king-dom." Those who pay attention to these kinds of concerns have attempted to alleviate that tension by translating male terms for monarchs and monarchies with non-gender-specific words (eg. "Sovereign" for "King," "realm" or "reign" for "kingdom" and the like. That makes some old favorite hymns a little difficult to sing ("Lead on, eternal sovereign" doesn't roll off the tongue for many as does "lead on, o king eternal), but it kind of lets folks at least talk about what the Bible means when it mentions it.

Another way to approach the whole "kingdom of God" discussion is the way author Frederick Buechner does in his remarkable little book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, published the year I graduated from college. In Wishful Thinking Buechner offers brief essays on a number of very common but often misunderstood and confusing personalities and ideas in a way that makes them accessible. Here's what he writes about "The Kingdom of God:"

"It's not a place, of course, but a condition. Kingship might be a better word. 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,' Jesus prayed. The two are in apposition.

"Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God's kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even as this moment, the kingdom has already come.

"Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will at this moment are at best half-baked and half-hearted. the kingdom is still a long way off, to be more precise and theological.

"As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Thing Itself -- the kingship of the king official at last and all the world his coronation. It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom. It's like finding something you hated to lose and though you'd never find again -- an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you thought you'd never find again is you."

Notes from Marcus Borg

2010-10-08T19:13:00.000-07:00

When Marcus Borg wrote The Heart of Christianity, he was interviewed by Deborah Caldwell for Beliefnet. In addition to recommending that website to you (www.beliefnet.com), I found this interview fascinating, and very relevant to our conversation in a couple of weeks (Tuesday, October 19, 6:30 PM at First Church).

Why Be Christian? (from www.beliefnet.com)

Interview by Deborah Caldwell

In renowned Jesus scholar Marcus Borg's latest book, The Heart of Christianity, he responds to an audience of readers who, over the years, have asked him about the essence of their faith. How, they ask, can Christianity be relevant in a time of ever-expanding historical and scientific knowledge? In a conversation with Deborah Caldwell, Borg answers that question, touching on the afterlife, living in a multi-cultural society, the meaning of salvation, and being born again.

You say that Christianity in North America and Europe is going through a paradigm change-that a new vision of how to be Christian is emerging. What is it and why is it happening?

Broadly speaking, there are two different visions of Christianity in North America today. The earlier vision is the product of the last few hundred years, especially the last 150 years. This earlier vision of Christianity is literalistic in its understanding of the Bible, absolutist in its understanding of the ethical teachings of the Bible, and exclusivist--meaning Christianity is the only way.

That's the vision of Christianity that the majority of us grew up with, whether we are mainline Protestant, Catholic, or conservative Protestant. But that way of seeing Christianity has become unpersuasive to millions of people--who can't be literalists or absolutists or exclusivists. But now there is an emerging vision, an emerging paradigm.

The conflict between these two paradigms can be seen in many different places. In the second half of the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century we saw conflict over evolution. Thirty years ago the conflict was over ordination of women in mainline denominations, and of course today we see the conflict about gays and lesbians in the church. For Protestants, the two visions have everything to do with biblical authority. The earlier vision sees the Bible as divine product with a divine guarantee to be true. The emerging vision sees the Bible as a human historical product, the product of two ancient communities [Judaism and Christianity]. It tells us what they thought, not what God thinks.

My book has almost an evangelistic purpose--to show that Christianity makes persuasive and compelling sense, that the intellectual stumbling blocks that many people experience with Christianity are unnecessary and artificial and largely the creation of the last few hundred years. I'm persuaded that Christianity, rightly understood, makes sense--and so do Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And they make very much the same kind of sense.

You say the original way of seeing Christianity has become untenable for a lot of people. How do you know this?

Mainline denominations have seen a membership decline of roughly 40% over the last 35 years. But most of the people leaving mainline denominations have not joined more conservative churches. They've simply dropped out. Presumably, a major reason many of them dropped out is that the form of Christianity they learned growing up ceased to make compelling sense to them. If it had made sense, they still would be in the church.

Another example: The vast majority of Americans, according to polls taken in 2002, cannot be religious exclusivists. Only 18% of people surveyed in two different polls taken in 2002 said yes to "My religion is the only true religion." Another example: In a Gallup poll taken in 1963, 65% of the sample were biblical literalists. By 2001 that figure had gone down to 21%.

But hasn't this issue of the paradigm shift, how to make Christianity relevant, been going on for at least 35 years? What is different now?

The shift has been going on in seminaries for over a century. It actually began a couple hundred years ago, but then it was a tiny circle of theological elites. Maybe in the last 10-15 years it's become a major grassroots movement among the laity. If you look at the number of religious bestsellers on the New York Times list, all of them reflect the emerging paradigm, with the exception of the Left Behind series.

No Faith Journey meeting September 28

2010-09-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

We're having a little trouble getting our gatherings scheduled, so we're wondering if either the 3rd Monday or 3rd Tuesdays would work better for folks. Could you e-mail me at rhatfield@firstchurchoflombard.org and let me know, and then, hopefully, we'll get things rolling again in October.

Thanks for your patience.

Martin Marty

2010-09-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

For decades, one of historian Martin Marty’s greatest gifts is his ability to drill down through the cultural foolishness of the day and get down to brass tacks about what’s going on around us. I’ve mentioned his weekly e-newsletter Sightings before. This is what arrived in my inbox yesterday. It speaks for itself.

Sightings 9/13/2010

Franklin Graham on Islam and Violence

-- Martin E. Marty

Aestas horribilis, Queen Elizabeth might call the summer just past, or those who care about civility in religious discourse and interfaith relations might judge it to have been. While Sightings took August off, forces, agencies, and voices of prejudice and, frankly, hate-mongering, did not. “Protest mosques,” “Restore America,” “Burn Qur’ans” and many more are keywords in our internet memory. One set of these keywords is so illuminating and nearly normative that it merits comment before we enter a new but not necessarily more promising season. I refer to the pronouncements of evangelist Franklin Graham on Muslim genetics, competition for souls, Islam as killer, and scriptures.

Genetics first: There is no need to repeat Graham’s bizarre charge that Islam is passed through the genes of a father to a son. Scholars of Islam find that idea nowhere in its teachings. Conversion-expert Graham should understand that one becomes a Muslim the way the born-again in Graham’s tradition become Christian: by making a profession of faith and a commitment through word and action. We won’t go into the political dimension of this issue with reference to Graham’s subject, the President of the United States, because, as long-time readers know, Sightings does not “do” Presidents.

Competition for souls, second: Graham’s work is often positioned along lines crossed in Africa, where Muslims kill Christians and Christians kill Muslims. There is little point in going into “Who fired first?” or “Who killed most?” In religion-based warfare, there is never really a first and a second; there are only debates about first and second. Graham has chosen to attempt conversion in the second most tense area known to the two faith communities. Without doubt, there is ugliness and murder, but we picture militant Muslims speaking of Christians the way Graham speaks of Muslims. Call it a draw. (By the way, “the undersigned” is a Christian who sees a place for evangelism.)

Islam as killer of Christians, third: Graham has repeatedly charged this year that Islam, which he frequently calls “a very wicked and evil religion” is mandated to kill, and that it kills. He does not qualify his remarks, as the word “very” suggests and even though he is often cautioned about the possible lethal consequences for Christians and Muslims if things get more heated. Historians have no difficulty finding Muslims in killing modes. The problem is that historians also find Christians in killing modes, from most years of Christendom, when the sword advanced Christianity, down into our own time. Think of the Christian justifications in World War I. Think Christian killing Christian in Rwanda, Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

Fourth, scriptures: It is easy to find passages in the Qur’an and other classic Muslim texts in which Allah’s people may or should kill to advance God’s cause. Isolating these chunks of the Qur’an which are by now most familiar to Americans calls for overlooking Islam’s many peace-promoting texts. And it also means overlooking parallel biblical texts. There are far more pictures in the biblical texts of a warrior God licensing and, yes, commanding “omnicide,” the killing of men and women and children who stand in the path of God’s people. Yes, all that was long ago. Now, you will never (at least I never) find Jews or Christians who think that killing people of another faith is a scriptured mandate for them.

Let’s hope and work for a less horrifying autumn.

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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As If

2010-09-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

Last week a friend reminded me of a commencement address delivered 5 years ago by David Foster Wallace in which he talks about the most valuable gift of a good education is the ability to make responsible and reasoned choices about what to think about. To introduce his point, he tells two goofy little stories.

The first: "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the !@#$ is water?"

The second: "There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: 'Look, it's not like I don't have actual reaons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, "O God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me."' And now in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. 'Well then, you must believe now,' he says, 'After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. 'No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.'"

After which, Wallace says:

"Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere...do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Ples there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogamatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a cloase-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

35 years ago...

2010-08-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

35 years ago today was a very hot Saturday, at least in Metamora, Illinois. My childhood friend, Dan, and I found some locals (including Peggy's kid sister, Becky, who was already at her tender age the best athlete among all those gathering that day) and played softball for a couple of hours, during which one of us unleashed a wild throw and dented the aluminum siding on Peggy's Mom and Dad's house (to this day, Becky insists it was my wild throw, but she threw so much harder than I). We got mildly sunburned, went back to the hotel to clean up and get ready for the evening's activities. Peggy had picked out brown tuxedos (brown was fashionable in August of 1975 - or so she said), so best man Dan and 4 friends from Eden Seminary - Gregg, Jim, Dave, and Greg - and I put them on and headed to the Christian Union Church in beautiful downtown Metamora.

I spent a lot of energy that late afternoon and early evening trying to appear unflustered, and the only person I was fooling, I'm sure, was me. Another friend started singing, Henry Nieschlag began playing the processional, and I spent the longest 2 minutes of my life trying not to pass out and wondering if Peggy was going to pull a runaway bride thing while a parade of sisters and women friends cascaded in ahead of her.

I knew it even then when I was young and kind of cocky - I knew I was "marrying up," and that Peggy was totally out of my league, and that I was so nuts about her that I would have simply been vaporized had she decided to not be with me. Convincing her to marry me, given what I felt was a calling and she called my "chosen profession" was no simple task. To this day I'm not completely sure whether I finally convinced her or if I just wore her down, but she didn't run (though she kind of tried to at the last minute -- seriously, Mr. Nieschlag was in the middle of the processional when she told her dad she couldn't go through with it and he said, "oh yes you will" and the rest is, as they say, history).

I am not making any of that up - even the brown tuxes! That Saturday 35 years ago, I was the luckiest guy on the planet. Still am today.

A Little Research Project

2010-08-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a little research project for anyone who wants a head start on what we're talking about in church this Sunday, or who has nothing better to do with the last week before Labor Day.

For this project, you will need a copy of the Gospel of Luke (doesn't matter which version), a piece of paper, a pencil, and, if you're lousy at math, a calculator, slide rule, abacus or really smart young person to help you with the numbers.

The basic premise of the project is that thing we've talked about over and over again about reading the bible that requires no great knowledge of ancient languages and cultures, but only a grasp of simple arithmetic. That premise: if a piece of biblical literature repeats itself over and over again, or it the characters in that piece of biblical literature do the same things over and over again, we can be certain that the writer is not trying to bore us to tears, but rather trying to make sure that we understand how important something is.

To begin, sit down and read the Gospel of Luke in one sitting (it will take you no longer than 20 minutes if you choose to not be distracted.) Then, answer these questions (correct answers are below... read Luke, and don't cheat!)

1) How many chapters are there in the Gospel of Luke?

2) How many of those chapters deal with the trial and crucifixion of Jesus?

3) How many of them deal with the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus?

4) How many of them deal with Jesus' family tree?

5) Take the answer to #1, and subtract the answer to #2, #3, and #4. What do you get?

6) What very common human activity appears in the Gospel of Luke the same number of times as the answer to # 5?

7) What do you suppose the Gospel writer is trying to tell us?

Don't Peek!!
S
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D
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f
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a
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s
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1) 24
2) 3
3) 2
4) 1
5) 24 - 3 - 2 -1 = 18
6) Eating, feasting, sharing a meal, being fed. 18 times in 18 chapters; if you count all 24 chapters, that's 75% of the Gospel of Luke that include something about being at someone's house for dinner, or eating together or observing a feast, or feeding hungry people.
7) What do you think?

Required Reading

2010-07-30T09:25:00.001-07:00

Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, has written a book entitled War, about his time as an embedded reporter with soldiers in Afghanistan. In War, Junger turns his attention to the reality of combat—the fear, the honor and the trust among men in an extreme situation whose survival depends on their absolute commitment to one another. War is an on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15 month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. Junger does not have a political axe to grind; he simply, and I think stunningly, reports what combat is really like, and how it really affects those in harm’s way.

Junger and his colleague Tim Hetherington have also made a full-length documentary entitled Restrepo; it is shot completely on site at an outpost in the Korengal Valley named for a platoon medic who was killed in action.

Warning: the language is often (usually?) pretty rough, but I’m guessing it has to be to be accurate. I think War should be required reading (and, perhaps Restrepo should be required viewing) for anyone in public office, and for anyone who wants to have a serious conversation about the personal and communal dynamics of armed conflict and for anyone who is sick and tired of empty political posturing on all sides.

If you want a flavor of this material, go to Junger’s website: www.sebastianjunger.org.

Obedience or Discipleship?

2010-07-26T16:52:00.001-07:00

When you come north off the Lewis and Clark Bridges over the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers and turn toward what’s left of downtown Alton, Illinois, before you get to the square where one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was held in 1858, if you look up the hill near where my brother-in-law’s furniture store used to be, you’ll see a huge, 93 foot high white granite column, topped by a 17 feet tall bronze statue of “Winged Victory,” a structure called “The Lovejoy Monument.” It marks the burial place of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the son of a minister in our United Church of Christ predecessor family, the Congregationalists, who was born in 1802 in Albion, Maine. As an adult Lovejoy served the College Avenue Presbyterian Church in Alton, which he helped establish as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and where, much less significantly, I, 140 years later, served my first ever seminary internship.

Lovejoy was more widely known, and reviled, as the editor and publisher of first The St. Louis Observer and then The Alton Observer, abolitionist newspapers calling for an immediate end to the institution of slavery and even more immediate emancipation of all current slaves. On November 7^th, 1837, a mob unhappy with Lovejoy’s abolitionist newspaper, broke into his house, destroyed his 4^th printing press (three other presses had already been destroyed and thrown into the Mississippi by the same or similar mobs) and shot Lovejoy 5 times, killing him, and earning him the title of “the first casualty of the Civil War,” though that conflict wouldn’t start until 14 years later, and making my home town a symbol of the backwater ignorance and mob violence that was typical of the pro slavery mentality outside of the deep, deep South.

When word of Lovejoy’s murder reached the east, followers of firebrand abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, one of Lovejoy’s influences and mentors, were grief stricken and enraged. One of them, Wendell Phillips, a 26 year-old, born-to-privilege Harvard educated lawyer, launched a remarkable career that included tireless advocacy for abolition and emancipation, and, after the Civil War, an even less mainstream advocacy for the rights of Native Americans that continued until his death in 1864.

When responding to Lovejoy’s death, Phillips said something that I think informs not only that old and still resolving conflict, but also the whole nature of how discipleship is something far beyond obedience:

To be as good as, as faithful as our [forebears], we must be better. We must do

more. Imitation, obedience, are not discipleship.

Some think that the way to be a faithful person is to obey God, to follow a list of rules and regs and rituals that others before us of have used, thinking that the best way, or perhaps the easiest way to get things right is to things exactly the way they have always been done.

We in the church have a long record of requesting and settling for obedience, developing lists of minimum requirements for all sorts of things ranging from attendance and participation and financial support to determine whether or not people can worship with us or have communion with us or share our life with us. So the church has promised from time to time heaven and eternity of bliss for those who keep the rules, and eternal damnation for those who break the rules, while at the same time singing Amazing Grace and saying that all those decisions belong to God.

But what if Jesus does not call us to obedience? What if Jesus calls us instead to discipleship?

“Aren’t they the same thing?” you may ask.

Well, though they often, maybe even usually result in the same behavior, obedience and discipleship are not the same thing.

Obedience is easy.

Discipleship is hard.

Obedience is observable, measurable, and it’s easy to tell when you’re being obedient and when you’re not.

Discipleship is tougher, more demanding, requiring both energy and thought.

Obedience may be nothing more than a response to a suggestion or an accommodation that would be easier to just do than to think about.

Discipleship requires constant examination of motives, constant communication,

Obedience does not even require a relationship with the one being obeyed. Someone makes a suggestion, request, or demand, and you do it, and then “poof!” you are done, whether or not you know the one being obeyed.

Discipleship implies, no, discipleship requires a relationship that needs on-going commitment, intention, and attention.

Obedience is easy.

Discipleship is hard.

No Faith Journey Meeting on July 27th

2010-07-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

Schedule conflicts abound for Tuesday evening, so we are going to postpone our next gathering until Tuesday, August 24th. Sorry for any inconvenience.

The More Things Change...

2010-07-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

When I was 5, if you asked me who Jesus was, I’d tell you that he was the spooky guy in two places in my great grandmother’s living room. On one side of the room was a painting of the last judgment, with people standing next to their 1938 Plymouth on top of Hoover Dam, watching all the dead bodies flying up out of the cemetery to meet Jesus up in the clouds. On the other side of the room was Jesus’ face in a weird concave piece of china or pottery or something; this Jesus had a face with eerie eyes that would follow you wherever you were.

When I was 5, that’s who Jesus was. When I was 5, God was a close personal friend of Pastor Todd at the Evangelical and Reformed Church, someone my Gramps and my Daddy would call upon in times of upset and disaster, like losing a fish or hammering a thumb, and the “great and good” guy we intoned at mealtime, and the one we asked our “soul to keep” at bedtime, even though I hadn’t a clue about what that meant and I had absolutely no desire “die before I wake.”

When I was 5, good little boys didn’t talk like Gramps and Daddy did when they lost a fish or hammered their hand. And when I was 5, the whole point of church seemed to be to learn how to live so that if I died (which I had no intention of doing) that God wouldn’t let me burn in hell, but would take me to heaven to live with him and the guy whose eyes wouldn’t stop watching me in my great-grandmother’s living room. When I was 5, Mrs. Kramer, my Sunday School teacher, said that the most important thing was “love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

When I was 19, if you asked me who Jesus was, I’d tell you that he lived a long time ago, and that he was like a cross between a medicine man and a flower child who did marvelous things that no one understood, who always made the people in authority uncomfortable, and who was killed by the people in authority just to keep his mouth shut and their thumb on the people. When I was 19, Jesus was the peacenik revolutionary who was misunderstood and oppressed and who did great things in spite of it, and who ended up getting killed for it, just like all the really good people, like Medgar Evers and Dr. King and RFK and all the rest.

When I was 19, that’s who Jesus was. When I was 19, God was remote, distant, OK but irrelevant, someone I more than occasionally enjoined like my Gramps and my father before me. A “watchmaker” God was the way Thomas Jefferson and John Locke talked about it, and, rational college man that I was, that seemed to be the only thing that held up under critical examination.

When I was 19, all people with lots of money were evil and all people who were poor were victims of oppression. And when I was 19, the whole point of church seemed to be to work for a day the oppressed got their chance to be in charge, and that the church was remarkably backwards in catching on to that. When I was 19, the most important thing, it seemed to me was to “love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Now nearly four decades since I was 19, if you ask me who Jesus is, I’ll tell you that Jesus is the model for faithful living, that his way of making himself available and his way of giving himself away is what John’s gospel means when it says that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.” I’ll tell you that God is the creative, loving energy behind and in and beyond everything that is, that God is in the “seeking and finding” business, that God makes God known to us in so many ways, but mostly in glimpses—of a child whose life we can touch, of a person on the “edges” of life struggling with what comes next, of a celebration of new life and new hope, of a person who needs help. I’ll tell you that, while God doesn’t revel in some of the petty ways we hurt each other, God doesn’t give up on us, either, and I’ll tell you that if you want to know God, you ought to pay close attention to Jesus. I’ll tell you that that’s what I think it means to understand that Jesus lived and died so that we might have life. I’ll tell you that I don’t think it’s all as mystical and mysterious or as rigid and unyielding as some of us have been told. And I’ll tell you that I don’t think Jesus or God have any ego problems that need constant stroking by people purporting to be faithful, and that the biggest deal is not whether or not we make an intellectual and verbal declaration of how Jesus is our Lord and Savior and then go on and do any fool thing we want with our lives, but that we take Jesus seriously enough to live and love the way he showed us.

Because, you see, whether at 5, or 19, or 119, the heart of the whole matter is what Mrs. Kramer, my Sunday School teacher, said that Jesus said that the most important thing was “love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Regina Spektor and Foxhole Theology

2010-06-30T15:36:00.001-07:00

The old saying that “there are no atheists in a foxhole” is echoed cleverly in Regina Spektor’s song “Laughing with God.” Click on the screen to see her perform the piece, the lyrics of which are written below.

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one's laughing at God when it's gotten real late and their kid's not back from that party yet

No one laughs at God when their airplane starts to uncontrollably shake
No one's laughing at God when they see the one they love hand in hand with someone else and they hope that they're mistaken
No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door and they say "We've got some bad news, sir,"
No one's laughing at God when there's a famine, fire or flood

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they're about to choke

God can be funny
When told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one's laughing at God when they've lost all they got and they don't know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize that the last sight they'll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one's laughing at God when they're saying their goodbyes

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they're about to choke

God can be funny
When told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war

No one's laughing at God in a hospital
No one's laughing at God in a war

No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor

No one's laughing at God
No one's laughing at God
No one's laughing at God
We're all laughing with God

Peggy's Dad

2010-04-22T08:04:00.001-07:00

Most of you know we lost Peggy’s Dad late last month. The most accurate description of Walter Laitas is that he was a good and decent man, committed to his family and his students (he was a history teacher and coach) and his community. He was 88, did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it up until the last couple of weeks of his life, and died at home with people he loved with him when he passed. He asked that I say something at his memorial service, and what follows is what I wrote…

He never talked about it much except to those who were really close to him, and then, until recent times, he only talked about it when those closest to him dragged it out of him. But it is safe to say that it’s pretty remarkable that Walt Laitas even made it through his childhood, let alone lived the full life of his 4 score and 8 years. In those days when Warren Harding was president before Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (I tell you this because Walter the history teacher would have told you this), and when Eastern European immigrants flooded Central Illinois to work the fields and the mines, life was very tough, tougher than most of us could imagine, and no one would have been surprised really when Walt reached adulthood had he been angry, narrow-minded, bitter, defensive and resentful. The very quiet, understated miracle at the beginning of this big, old boy’s life is that he lived through those nearly unspeakably difficult young years and was exactly none of those things.

When Walt was 14 years old, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a piece called The Crack Up, wrote this: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Anyone who ever had him as a teacher knows that Walt was the poster-child for Fitzgerald’s notion of that kind of first-rate intelligence. When he wasn’t busy pranking his students and colleagues, Walt would often strut into his classroom arguing a fine point of history or government from a point of view diametrically opposed to the point of view he had presented just the day before. Walter could hold forth on almost anything from the stoic Seneca to Howard Stern, from the uniqueness of Lincoln to the muddled reality of the Middle East, and, when he was at his sharpest, he could argue the value or the danger of their ideas and approaches, pretty much reveling in advocating for whatever was the opposite of whatever you were advocating.

So after a childhood filled with enough tragedy to destroy the sturdiest of souls, through a stint in an orphanage and some time working the camps and in college, Walt did what so many committed young men did in those days and went off to war. When Sgt. Laitas came home from the war, he married his best girl, became an Illinois State Redbird football legend, finished school, looked around for a teaching gig where he could remain a Redbird (I made that part up!), came to Metamora, and went about the business of raising his family and directly and indirectly shaping this town’s young people for more than 40 years, of course as a teacher and coach, but even more as a good and determined and decent man. His first rate intelligence, able to function while holding two or three or ten opposing ideas in his head at the same time, paled in comparison to the good and determined and decent man that he was.

For whatever this is worth, I think that in the last analysis God doesn’t really care all that much how we talk about life, about how we shape our verbal expressions of the most meaningful and important stuff. I think Scripture and tradition suggest that God really does care about what we do with the lives we are given. So it is no little thing to remember and celebrate a good man and his good life that by all arguments could have been, maybe should have been, something other than that. And it is no little thing the marvel at the legion of good people who are the good people they are precisely because they had the good fortune to know him and be shaped by him. When it is all said and done, when the great debates of the age are matters for the history books, when the trauma of present movements and moments are little more than arcane data deep in a Google search, when the critical turning points in our lives are little more than turned pages, what really matters is whether or not we embrace and share the love God gives us to share with each other. And, of course in his own key, embrace and share that love he did.

You and I know that there are as many Walt stories out there as there are stars in the sky, and it will be a long time before those stories fade out of our memories. And whether the story is about his affection for birds, or leading an entire classroom of students – another teacher’s students – out of their classroom so that their teacher would enter a completely empty room, or about photographs strategically placed on classroom maps, or about Walt suggesting a more aggressive passing attack not to Coach Ryan but to Coach Ryan’s parents, or – I guess it’s safe to tell now – about how Walt secretly shot the raccoon that died the next day in the Peterson’s yard, what all the stories reflect is our genuine love for Walt, and our inability to really imagine a world without him. But the best Walt story of all is the one that continues to unfold in those legions of people whose lives he touched and shaped, in the lives of the Laitas girls and we tiny band of mildly overwhelmed brothers who tag along with them, the stories that unfold in the lives of Elisa and Jason and Keith and Sarah and Matt and Jenell and Scott and Kelsey and Katelyn and Michael and Teri, and in their little ones already and one day soon to be among us.

In his own way, and of course in his own key, Walt was a hero to those of us lucky to get close enough to him. A hero proved, as Katherine Bates wrote in America the Beautiful, in liberating strife, but more than that; a hero proved in a good, determined, and decent life that even death cannot take from us.

Social Justice

2010-03-17T13:57:00.001-07:00

Marty E Marty is an emeritus professor of church history at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Among the many and varied things he continues to do, Dr. Marty writes a weekly column called Sightings. It is a commentary on the interaction between church and culture, and Marty’s articles appear in my e-mail every Monday morning. This week’s column was his response to the latest nonsense from Glenn Beck about “social justice.” If you find it interesting, and would like to take advantage of the free subscription, use this link https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/info/sightings

Social Justice

— Martin E. Marty

Are 68.1 million Americans connected with a Communist front movement? Yes, if they are Roman Catholic. Are another 20 million citizens listening to “coded” Nazi messages? Yes, if they are mainline Protestant. Are tens of millions more in danger of being part of a similarly coded Fascist front? Yes, if they are in a growing wing of Evangelicalism; and yes, if they keep hearing social justice messages in thousands of African-American congregations. Those four “yeses” pick up on oft-repeated accusations by Fox News host Glenn Beck. They provoked the least underreported public religion news of the week, which appeared in the March 12th New York Times as well as “all over the internet.”

The fact that Mr. Beck charms millions of devotees tells more about the sad state of truth-telling and the high state of lie-receiving than civil citizens should want to hear. The broadcaster has picked up an ally in folk like Jerry Falwell, Jr. and a few other fundamentalists on the right who have been at least as condemnatory as he. Their most cited biblical passage is from the gospels, where Jesus announces that his kingdom is not of his world; therefore they conclude that Christians should avoid political life. A test of ironies: Quick, now, can you think of any element in American religion which has been more publicly engaged in recent politicking than these “not-of-this-world” dwellers in glass houses?

Where should they direct the stones they must throw? And how should they follow through? Mr. Beck knows: Leave any church which talks about, supports, or “does” works of justice beyond what an individual or a church charity can do. “Leave!” “Run!” Do it fast, he says, because of the way things are going. He might as well be wearing a beard, a robe, and a sign: “THE END IS NEAR.” Before that end, these “social justice” churches might at least fling some pebbles back while they seek consistency. Ask: Would all the Christians and the churches which accept any benefits of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, tax exemption and other such programs cut them off tomorrow? They all involve the government and all were backed by “social and economics minded” leaders and followers in churches, often against the odds raised and symbolized by the Glenn Becks of their past.

Sightings likes to be fair and to see more than one side of things as it does its observing and commenting. So let it be noted that some sane and serious Christians also think that believers should pay no attention to public order, structures, circumstances, and possibilities. “Don’t talk justice! Just be just!” “Don’t support programs which support widows and orphans, just share your bread and coat and cold water with your innocently needy neighbor.” Thereafter do the math: It will become obvious that the limits on the individual responses to need at their highest won’t meet needs if reckoned at their lowest.

Biblical verses wisely do remind readers, “Put not your trust in princes.” That usually means governments; “princes” in the media, banking, punditry, universities, and, yes, churches demand scrutiny, and their programs deserve careful evaluation, as well. But those who say that you have taken care of biblical injunctions if you simply keep government out of everything face biblical reminders with which they have to contend: The Hebrew prophets all dealt with “nations,” and the apostle Paul, writing to people suffering under Nero, also said that civil “authority…is God’s servant for your good (Romans 13:4). Paul even goes so far in 13:6 to urge believers to “pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants.” Come on, Paul, don’t press your luck in Beck’s world!

For a Limited Time...

2010-03-11T07:35:00.001-08:00

Just came across this today. It may too “new age” to be of interest, but I thought I’d throw it out there just in case.

John Shelby Spong is participating in a free teleseminar series called “Sacred Awakenings.” There is a different presenter every day during Lent (yes it is ok to jump in in the middle) from all sorts of different religious and spiritual traditions. If you’re interested in exploring this, go to this link, http://sacredawakeningseries.com/BishopSpong , and follow the instructions.

That's What God Is Like

2010-03-10T08:17:00.001-08:00

I’m hoping we all know about the United Church of Christ’s “StillSpeaking Daily Devotional” that can be delivered to our e-mail inbox every morning. Each day a United Church of Christ writer offers a brief reflection and prayer, in much the same pattern used by popular daily devotional booklets. Their pieces are thoughtful and provocative and, I think, quite useful. You can subscribe for free by going to http://www.ucc.org/. The daily piece is also available on Facebook and Twitter.

Here is today’s piece, written by Ron Buford, who, among other things, was team leader for the StillSpeaking campaign when it began.

That's What God is Like

Excerpt from Luke 13:18-2

"Jesus said therefore, 'What is the kingdom of God like? And to what should I compare it?'"

Reflection by Ron Buford

In Luke 13 (read entire chapter), Jesus mocks human superstition and proneness to conspiracy theories about God when Pilate kills a couple of Galileans in the temple, or when a tower falls in Jerusalem, killing eighteen people. Jesus asks, "Did these things happen because these people were greater sinners than others?"

Jesus aims to un-twist our primitive God-mischaracterization in which God avenges, bending laws of the universe just to "get us" for some secret choice we now regret or about which we have doubts. Mistakes may have natural consequences, but God has nothing to do with them. This teaching we learned is false. Sickness, accidents, natural disasters, and Murphy's Law come with randomness despite anything we may have done . . . and they always feel unfair.

Jesus invites us to think of God's city as our dwelling place with God, where all God's children have yeast to make life's dough rise, double and triple . . . and, after waiting a while, produce enough to share. Imagine the smell and taste of fresh daily bread, kneaded by our hands, infused with the yeast of God's grace, shared among many. That's what God is like.

Transforming the barren places of God's city, with vision and patience, God's children plant God's seeds. And those seeds, after waiting a while, become mighty shade trees -- sheltering people, nesting birds singing . . . because that's what God is like.

Prayer

Gracious God, thank you for your Good News and grace, made known to us in the life and teaching of Jesus, freeing us from doubt, guilt, and condemnation about the past. Please grant us the daily bread of your mercy -- bread to share with all who love us as well as those who sin against us, and others who just make our lives yucky sometimes . . . because that's what our Divine Parent God is like. Amen.

Stars

2010-02-28T07:18:00.001-08:00

If you were in worship at First Church this morning, you got all this already… some “star data” and a true story…

On the clearest of nights, if you’re at least 10 miles away from any source of light like streetlights and cars and lit up houses, and if your vision is relatively good, and depending on the time of the year, you can see anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 stars in the sky. The closest one to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, which means that the light we’d see tonight from that star was generated by that star about Thanksgiving, 2005. The brightest star in the night sky, the North Star, or Polaris, is 2,527,808,910,468,952 (2 quadrillion, 527 trillion, 808 billion, 910 million, 468 thousand, 952) miles, or 430 light years away, which means the light we’d see tonight from that North Star was generated about the time Sir Francis Drake was wrapping up his circumnavigation of the globe. The farthest star we’d see on our really clear night isn’t really a star at all, but a galaxy, Andromeda, and it looks like a star because it is so far away, all of its stars look as if they are all one star. It’s 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda is, or something like 14,696,563, 432,959,020,000 (14 quintillion, 696 quadrillion, 563 trillion, 432 billion, 959 million, 20 thousand) miles, which means the light we’d see tonight from the Andromeda galaxy was generated about the beginning of the Proterozoic Era, when the continents became stable and oxygen started to saturate the atmosphere. The star that is farthest from us but still in our own Milky Way Galaxy that we’d see tonight is only about 23.5 quadrillion miles, or 4,000 light years away, which means the light we’d see tonight was generated a couple of centuries before Father Abraham’s vision in Genesis 15.

About the time the 12^th brightest star in tonight’s sky, Altair, was generating the light we'd see in tonight’s perfectly clear night sky (that’s about 17 years ago), we had a group of youth community young people staying at the Powder Horn Ski Resort on the western slopes of the Rockies. The last night we were at Powder Horn was a gloriously clear night, and after our worship time several of us sat outside as far away from any earth light as we could and just looked up. Several of the young people with us said they had never seen as many stars. Shooting stars darted across the night sky like fireworks, and one of them said something about how the light we were seeing at that moment was generated long in the past. Then one of the boys, one of the rowdy, always-hard-to-keep-down-on-the-farm-always-knows-much-much-more-than-anyone-else boys who we loved to be around but whom we always had to keep kind of a tight leash on, got up and started to wander off into the dark. Somebody called his name, and he just kept walking, so I went off after him. When I caught up with him, he was sobbing. Shoulders heaving, struggling to catch his breath sobbing.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“The stars,” he said, ‘the stars. The stars might not even be there, and we’re still seeing them. That’s how it’s gonna be for us, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

And then I heard one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard, from the mouth of that frightened, distraught boy…

“You’re always telling us, Rob that we have a lot of life to live. Well, we don’t! We don’t have very long, maybe 90 years if we’re lucky. I’m already 16. I only have like 70 some years left. It’s like the stars! When I’m dead, people will still see me. Well, maybe they won’t see me, but they will still be affected by me, by the person I am. They won’t know me, they won’t love me, but they will still see me. And I want them to see me at my best, not as the jerk I am most of the time. I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk. I want them to see me how I really am.”

“I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk! I don’t want to be a jerk anymore.”

More on "Fearing Not"

2010-02-10T10:12:00.001-08:00

Jim Collins is a leadership and organizational leader who wrote among other things the leadership development books Good to Great and Built to Last. Though a huge proponent of changing processes (he calls them "mechanisms") and being responsive and embracing new technologies, he argues that the whole "change or die" emphasis prevalent in so many organizations is wrong-headed in at least two ways. In addition to not wanting to change for the sake of change, Collins argues that fear can set things in morion, can get people moving, but almost never results in healthy change. In short, fear is a lousy motivator.

In an article in Inc. a dozen years ago, Collins used this story as an example:

Picture the great composer Beethoven struggling to write a perfect Fifth Symphony that will stand the test of time. He starts with a simple theme. Discards it. Starts again. Revises it. Finally settles upon the famous "fate motive" (Da Da Da Dommmmm!). Inverts it. Extends it. Rends, amends, and dissects it. All in the context of a primal thematic struggle: that of light versus dark, hope versus despair, major versus minor. With great discipline he holds back the trombones, the piccolo, and the contrabassoon until their triumphal entry on the downbeat of movement four, when the forces of life and hope blast forth to obliterate the forces of angst and despair once and for all...

Now imagine asking Beethoven during his toil to perfect the Fifth Symphony, "Ludwig, why are you working so hard? Your First Symphony has established you as one of the most popular and successful composers of the day. Your Third Symphony, Eroica, will stand as one of the great cutting-edge creations of all time, having shattered the constraints of the classical style. You've already earned your place in the history books. Why do you continue to push yourself?"

Can you picture Beethoven responding, "Why push myself? Because if I don't write a better symphony, then someone else will. The competition is fierce, and if I don't improve, I'll be pummeled by those feisty foreign upstarts. Change or die. Innovate or self-destruct. Eat lunch or be lunch. It's not that I really want to reinvent and perfect my work; it's just that in this world, only the paranoid survive..."

The next time you encounter..."Change or die,"... remember the words of Royal Robbins, the great rock climber who pioneered ascents of Yosemite's big walls: "The point is not to avoid death - if you want to do that, simply stay on the ground. The point is to reach the top, and then to keep on climbing."

God is...

2010-02-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

Paul Tillich talked about the limitations of language and the transcendence of the holy when he wrote about "the God above the God of theism." That is to say, whatever God is, God is more than our best description of God. For centuries we have argued some (a lot?!) about which image is better, what symbol set makes most sense rather than seeing what we can learn from images and symbol sets that don't necessarily make sense to us.

In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola encouraged his young Jesuit novices to begin their search for spiritual truth to begin with this exercise. Prompted by one's spiritual director, the novice was instructed to complete as many "God is..." statements as could be corroborated by "scripture or experience." The novice would then create the "God is..." list --

God is love.
God is peace.
God is justice.
God is light.
God is ruler.
God is truth.--
God is... --

and then proceed to the mentor for direction. The spiritual director would listen warmly, intently, patiently as the novice would read one by one the "God is..." list and explain each individual statement. The mentor would press the novice through each rationale to the place where the novice would say "God is not only love, or peace, or light," or whatever.

"What then, my son, is God?" Almost invariable the novice would revisit his list, and his "not only list" and then move to a place of great exasperation and blurt out "God is...God!"

"Precisely," the mentor would reply. "God is God."

Notes on Trusting and Not Being Afraid

2010-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

Imagine that you cannot swim. You are one of three people in a canoe that capsizes in the deep water, and you are the only one of the three that cannot swim. In the literal and figurative swirl of things, you see the two swimmers moving in on you, trying to rescue you. Can you in your wildest imagination picture yourself lying quietly in the water, all the while reassuring yourself by saying to yourself, "This, too, shall pass. I'll stay still and quiet and my friends will rescue me." Not likely.

Or, can you imagine your non-swimming self, in the midst of groping and gasping frantically for air and aid, coldly calculating, "Now, let me think; if I can get into position so I can push my friends' heads under water, I'll be able to keep my head up." I don't think so.

But anyone who has survived a life-saving class will tell you, you could very well, all pumped-up with adrenaline and with your life in the balance, automatically, instinctively try to compensate for your impending drowning by "oppressing" those who are only trying to save you.

In Psychoanalysis and Religion Erich Fromm tried to explain the dilemma of being human:

"Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the harmony which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made humanity into the freak of the universe. People are part of nature, subject to nature's laws and unable to change them, yet people transcend the rest of nature. People are set apart while being part of; we are homeless, yet chained to the home we share with all creatures. We are driven to overcome this inner split, for another kind of harmony which can life the curse by which we are separated from nature, from other people, from ourselves and from God. The human capacity for self-transcendence is both our glory and our agony. We are guilty not so much of trying to play God as we are guilty of not knowing how to be human. Simply hubris (arrogance) is the mask that fear wears."

I think we have missed the point for centuries, at least since the early Middle Ages. Classical theology argues that at the heart of our sinful brokenness is that we all strive too much, and that striving is ultimately our effort to try to dismiss God and be in charge of our own universe, and that that the ultimate idolatry to which you and I are inevitable predisposed. But all that misses the real human drama.

I think it's more like this: we have a sense that things aren't as they should be, and we try, like the non-swimmer adrift in the threatening waters, to use anything and anyone to compensate for whatever is wrong, and that at the source of all our idolatries is our inability to trust. And because we do not trust, we puff up with hubris and vainly attempt to mask our fears.

What if we are not so much bad or sinful or wanton or reckless or damned or doomed as we are crippled by our lack of trust. We are the non-swimmer in the deep water; we can see the shore, but we fear we will never be able to reach it. It is as if we have been cast into the deep, and we are afraid -- of drowning, of dying, of the possibility that our lives mean nothing and that we are all alone. And, even worse, we are easily convinced that we deserve to be that way.

Remember the woman who, having been caught in adultery, was brought to Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees? There, in the presence of the a mob who viewed themselves as legally and morally bound to stone this woman to death, Jesus invites any among them who have not sinned to take the first shot at her. And by doing so, Jesus shows love and mercy not only to the woman who was a stone's throw away from her last breath; he showed love and mercy to those lining up to pelt her as well. Jesus knew that they, and we, are not so much crooked as we are crippled, and that we need to be freed of our fear in order to trust the promises of God.

What Do You Want Your Religion/Your Faith/God to Do For You?

2010-01-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

We are going to wander around a bit to get to the point (I know, I know, what's new about that?!), so hang in there with me.

I just finished reading Steven Levitt's and Stephen Dubnar's book Superfreakonomics, and enjoyed having my thinking provoked by it as much or even more than their earlier book, Freakonomics. In a fascinating discussion of the omnipresent conversations about climate change/global warming, they cite an article by a classically educated journalist who, among other things, became the mayor of London, Boris Johnson:

"Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful." (Boris Johnson, " We've Lost Our Fear of Hellfire, But Put Climate Change in Its Place, The Telegraph, 2006)

And then I revisited the "pre-reading" handout about "The Myth of Redemptive Violence" for our next Faith Journey gathering (January 26th, 6:30 PM, Room 1 -- if you haven't joined us, or haven't joined us for a while, why don't you?) that starts by citing something that Walter Brueggemann says in our Living the Questions videos:

"We are going to deal theologically with the problem of violence forever because it is intrinsic to our inheritance. The question for God for all of us who follow this God is is whether we can resist that stuff that is intrinsically present in our existence."

So all of that got me thinking about the question "What do I want my religion/my faith/ God to do for me?

Do I have an inherited, intrinsic need to be reminded of my imperfection? Do I want to be reminded how I do not measure up (the whole guilt and self-loathing thing?) Do I really yearn for an never-known and only barely imagined pre-existent perfect world from which, through no real fault of my own, I have fallen? Do I want God to reinforce the notion that I am somehow chosen because all those others are somehow so obviously not chosen? Do I want God to bless me and mine and by blessing me and mine, give me leave to not worry about you and yours, or more correctly, to not worry about them and theirs?

Or...

Do I want to be reminded from time to time that I am inherently, intrinsically self-interested, and so is my culture, and do I want to be reminded and invited and empowered to recognize God as the one who continually calls me away from that "intrinsically present inheritance" and toward the power and promise of love? Do I want to remember and revisit and recommit to the model for that kind of movement that Jesus continually, and sometimes surprisingly, offers? Do I want to be comforted and strengthened for the journey from intrinsic, inherent (and all too often violent?)self-interest to redemptive agape?

Hmmm.

Luke 1

2009-12-15T07:59:00.001-08:00

My favorite part of all the parts of the Christmas stories in the bible...

These two couldn't have been any different if they had tried. Though related by marriage, you’d think that Mary and Zechariah have little use for each other.

Zechariah, the priest, is an important man in the political and religious life of his people.

Mary is “poor relation,” a simple, back water cousin who’s enchanted with Zechariah’s wife and the trappings of the big city, who celebrates her cousin’s good fortune and tolerates the “airs” Zechariah seems to emit everywhere he goes.

It seems as if Mary and Zechariah are night and day, oil and water, fire and ice.

She’s poor; he’s wealthy.

She’s so very young; he’s very old (“getting on in years” is Luke’s gentle way of talking about it).

She’s an insignificant, undervalued girl (females weren’t on top of many social heaps there and then); he’s a high-profile, public arena guy who, at least in his own mind and the minds of his close friends, is quite indispensable.

They’re as different as different could be – still, in the story that Luke tells, they are there when the curtain comes up on the drama of the incarnation of God’s love in time in the person of God’s long Promised One.

Look at how differently they respond to the messages that come to them from God. Prominent, religious, important Zechariah hesitates, stumbles, argues, cajoles – he doubts and questions the wisdom and the purpose of God, to say nothing of his uneasiness, fear, and sense of impropriety at the notion that he and his long-barren Elizabeth could be parents at the same time they are approaching their dotage. Never mind the great things Gabriel says their new boy has in store. Never mind the mind and will of God that transcends history and moves in ways too marvelous for our minds to always comprehend. Never mind that for Elizabeth, at least in cultural terms, a child will be a blessing, for barren women are even less valued than young virginal ones in those ridiculous times. Never mind how anyone else would benefit from this great gift of a son. All that matters to Zechariah is that his life of importance and comfort will be disrupted. Old Zechariah just doesn’t think it’s fair that he’s going to be burdened with this gift of God’s Providence. “How shall I know this?” he demands of his messenger, who then strikes Zechariah dumb, as if to say, “if a priest (of all people) can’t be open to the message of God for all people, then maybe he ought not speak!” Unless Zechariah can come to grips with the reality of God’s goodness, God’s graciousness, Zechariah will never utter another word. So here’s old Zechariah, too caught up with himself and his importance and his comfort and the way things are and been able to believe that God is ready with a song of good news of great joy for all the people. Poor, ancient, dumb-struck holy man Zechariah, condemned to silence for his inability and unwillingness to see past what has always been.

Later, same chapter, same angel, pretty similar message, different recipient. Gabriel tells Mary she’s pregnant, and after a brief moment of confusion because this announced pregnancy doesn’t happen the way pregnancies happen, Mary does not resist the angel’s message; instead of fighting it, she simply offers her self : “Here am I, the servant of the Lord: let it be with me according to your word.” Mary, with nothing to tie her down, no conflicting investments of money, time, or prestige, responds in way that seems unimaginable for an unwed mother in her time and place.

A glorious thing happens when Mary offers her self, and the baby in Elizabeth’s womb jumps for joy – Mary sings a song. (Get it? Recalcitrant, resistive, stubborn Zechariah is struck dumb – open, welcoming, embracing Mary sings.) In the face of what most would call a bleak condition, in the apparent poverty of her life, in the hustled, harried confusion of her recent past, Mary embraces God’s gift and sings a song of praise. In the midst of all that seems to be wrong with life and with the world, Mary sings a song praising God for what will happen to her. Mary sings a new song of good news of great joy, and Zechariah sits dumb-struck in the temple.

Without a whole lot of reflection at first blush, if asked who we were most like, Mary or Zechariah, we would likely say “Mary” because that is who we would rather be – open and receptive to the good news, ready to embrace how God’s working among us and to leap and sing for joy. But I think that you and I know that you and I are mostly more like Zechariah, dumb-struck at the risky, blind leaps of faith to which God calls us every day of our lives. And that’s too bad, because there is so much we miss, sitting alone in the dark, dumb struck.

But this part of the story doesn't end there. The time comes for Zechariah’s son to be born, and he is. On the 8^th day of his little life, when the rite of circumcision is to be performed and child is to be named, people in Zechariah’s family get all exercised because Elizabeth doesn’t want to use the old family name. She insists that her son be given a new name – like when Sarah, the old barren wife of father Abraham named her son “laughter (“Yitzak,” “Isaac”) because she had laughed at the prospect of giving birth at her advanced age. Or like with Hannah, the old, barren woman who gave birth to the first great prophet, named her son “listen to God” (“Shem uel” , “Samuel”) because listening to God is a prophet’s primary job. Elizabeth, the old, barren woman who gives them this gift of a son, insists that her boy be named “God is gracious” (“John”). The argument rages until somehow Zechariah gets someone to hand him a writing tablet, on which, from his silence, his nine-month exile from the realm of talking, Zechariah affirms what God wanted him to affirm from the beginning. He scribbles “His name is ‘John,’” following orders to be sure, but also as if to say “the son born to me in my old age is a gracious gift from a gracious God.”

And then another marvelous thing happens; at that moment, Zechariah’s tongue is freed, and that first thing that comes out of his mouth is (you guessed it!) a song reminiscent of the song of Elizabeth’s young cousin. Mary sings the Magnificat, and Zechariah sings a Benedictus. So the one who took the blind lead of faith and the one who was frightened speechless of the jump both begin the story by singing songs of good news of great joy for all the people.

Just like the angels do only 9 verses later.

Reminder...

2009-12-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

We will not meet on the 4th Tuesday in December (December 22nd), but will meet in January on Tuesday, January 26th at 6:30 PM in Room 1

Borrowed Air -- For Thanksgiving

2009-11-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

In preparation for Thanksgiving a week from today, I have Thomas Troeger's homage to the old hymnThis is My Father's World running through my head. In his poem, Troeger, who is the J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School and an ordained clergy person in both the Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches, centers of the "nature" theme of Maltbie Babcock's poem (the guy who wrote This Is My Father's World), while at the same time recalling James 1:17, a pretty perfect text, as far as I'm concerned, for Thanksgiving: "Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of light."

Try this:

Sing a verse of This is My Father's World in your head (or out loud if you want!), and then sing Troeger's poem Borrowed Air" to the same melody, and see if it doesn't evoke something more than turkey and football (both good things!) for this Thanksgiving.

This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres
This is my Father's world, I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees and skies and seas, His hands the wonders wrought.

Each breath is borrowed air, not ours to keep and own;
And all our breaths as one declare what wisdom long has known.
To live is to receive and answer back with praise
To what our minds cannot conceive, the Source of all our days.

The sea flows in our veins, the dust of stars is spun
To form the coiled encoded skeins by which our cells are run.
To live is to receive and answer back with praise
To what our minds cannot conceive, the Source of all our days.

From earth and sea and dust arise yet greater things,
The wonders born of love and trust, a grateful heart that sings.
To live is to receive and answer back with praise
To what our minds cannot conceive, the Source of all our days.

And when our death draws near and tries to dim our song,
Our parting prayers will make it clear to whom we still belong.
To live is to receive and answer back with praise
To what our minds cannot conceive, the Source of all our days

(Borrowed Air (C) 2002, Oxford University Press)

From a Different Angle

2009-11-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

Delwin Brown is dean emeritus of Pacific School of Religion and former professor of Christian Theology at Iliff School of Theology. A Methodist layperson and the author of many books and articles, Brown published What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? just last year. In a chapter that deals with evil and suffering that he titles "Sin: Failing and Hiding" Brown summarizes the discussion with these bullet points:

Modern discussions of sin have not been very useful. Sin-talk has been anti-world, anti-sex, anti-female, anti-pleasure, and opposed to equality and self-affirmation, just to mention a few of its drawbacks.

In classical Christian theology, sin takes two forms, pride and sensuality. Already our hackles are raised! We are all very supportive of pride, and why should anyone think sensuality is a sin?

By "pride" the tradition meant excessive self-regard in relation to others, assuming for oneself more than that which one is entitled. ""Sensuality" meant the opposite failure, thinking of oneself less highly than one ought to think.

Viewed in terms of the two great commandments, sin is loving too much or loving too little any part of the inter-connected web of life, from God to all of those whom God loves and in whom God is incarnate.

The more insightful Christian traditions ask, "Why is our failure to love as we ought so persistent and pervasive?" The answer it gives has to do with self-deceptions, hiding the truth from ourselves.

Sin is not simply the failure to love properly. It is that failure, accompanied by the pretense that we have loved as we should. We hide our failure, even from ourselves!

The doctrine of "original sin" is not a denial of human goodness, and it is not about sex. It is about layers of evil -- racism, sexism, consumerism, egotism, etc. --structured into our existence. We begin our lives in the midst of these.

Christian tradition "suspects" that we rather happily acquiesce to the evil structures in which we find ourselves. Our failings build into unjust and self-serving structures....and we find them to be quite comfortable!

from Delwin Brown, What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? A Guide for the Searching, the Open, and the Curious (New York: Seabury Books, 2008).

Evil, Suffering, and A Loving God

2009-10-31T18:41:00.000-07:00

The theme of our November conversation will be one about these irreconcilable things that people of faith struggle with all the time. For me, there is no one who has addressed the dilemma more clearly (even if he offers absolutely no satisfactory answer) than Frederick Buechner. From his little book Wishful Thinking:

God is all powerful.
God is all good.
Terrible things happen

You can reconcile any two of these propositions with each other, but you can’t reconcile all three. The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There are numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality of evil itself, they are none of them worth very much. When a child is raped and tortured, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants us to love him, we must be free to love and thus to rape and murder a child if we take a notion to.

Christian Science solves the problem of evil by saying that it does not exist except as an illusion of mortal mind. Buddhism solves in terms of reincarnation and an inexorable law of cause and effect whereby the raped child is merely reaping the consequences of evil deeds it committed in another life.

Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene – not even this – but that God can turn it to good.

The Power of Intention

2009-10-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

From two popular thinkers/writers...

First. psychologist/spiritual director/NPR-pledge-time-television host Wayne Dyer talks about “the power of intention,” defining intention as something that emanates from God, something that more traditional theology calls “the will of God.”

Second, Peruvian Carlos Castaneda, in the voice of his fictional Yaqui shaman Don Juan, writes:

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which the shamans call intent[ion], and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to inten[ion] by a connecting link.

I wonder if it is safe for us to assume that we are living a life in consonance, in sync, with “intention” when we find ourselves embracing and visualizing creativity and kindness and love and beauty and growth and plenty and openness to newness.

If that’s the case, then “sin” might well be described as being “closed off,” separated, quarantined, and isolated from creativity and kindness and love and beauty and growth and plenty and openness to newness, reminiscent of how Martin Luther described the essence of sin: "das Herz drehte ganz sich innen auf sich” – "the heart all curved in on itself.”.

Rather than looking at faithfulness as following a list of inviolable rules, the suggestion is that a life that follows Jesus not because it has to but because it wants to will be one that turns its attention and its intention, away from itself and toward others. That life will be the life that is most rewarding and most “in rhythm” with the “intention,” or the “will” of God.

It seems to me that so much of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels are all about two affirmations about the “power of intention” that are peculiar to Jesus and his followers. The first is that even though Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, forgives us and loves us, Jesus, and if Jesus, God, has very lofty expectations for those of us who want to follow him. One of those lofty expectations is that we will live not solely or even primarily for our own good, but also and most of all for others. Another is that, even though Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, forgives us and loves us, Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, holds us accountable, and that there are consequences for our behavior.

But maybe not at all like Dante’s Inferno or eternal punishment or anything of the sort, but consequences here and now. The consequences of being “all turned in on ourselves,” and away from “the power of intention,” – our callousness toward the needs of others, our insensitivity to the most vulnerable among us, our automatic embrace of officially sanctioned violence as the best tool for solving disputes among groups of people, tribes, nations, our inability to let go of “the fears that long have bound us,” our continuing insistence that there are different “kinds” of people and some are better and some are worse and some are loved more by God and some are despised – all of that is its own punishment. The bottom line is that when we insist on being “all turned in ourselves” it is impossible for us to approach what God intends for us. Turned inward, toward isolation, our lives are diminished, our relationship with God becomes nostalgic and imaginary and non-existent, and we deny the unity that the power of intention assumes.

God and Dog, by Wendy Francisco

2009-10-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

Think Luke 15.

Oh, go ahead, look it up, and read those three parables, especially the last one.

No, no one is saying that God is a dog (go to http://www.godanddog.org/ and look in the left hand frame for the link "The thought behind the God and dog lyrics). It's just another parable. And while it's not likely to be a staple of some divinity school curriculum, I like it any way, particularly the lines:

"They would stay with me all day, I'm the one who walks away.
But both of them just wait for me, And dance at my return with glee."

and

"And in my human frailty, I can't match their love for me."

Agape, Jesus, and Church

2009-10-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

It is pretty clear, at least to me. that Jesus never imagines anything that resembles at all what today we call “church.” Except for three quick “bleeps,” Jesus never even says “church,” and when he does, he probably only means something like “your neighbors.” That’s what the Greek word the New Testament uses for “church,” “ecclesia,” means when it shows up in places other than the New Testament, and it shows up in the Gospels only in Matthew when Jesus tells Peter that he’s the “Rock” on which he’ll build his “ecclesia” and when Jesus tells his followers that when there’s a dispute among them to take it to the “ecclesia.”

But Jesus in the Gospels says nothing about church. No institutional guidebook. No “best practices” handbook. Nothing about structure or discipline or clergy or lay or fund-raising or ministry or pastoral care or youth or outreach or denominations. Jesus never files an annual report, officiates at a funeral, performs a wedding, makes a hospital visit, intuitively responds to some unreported need, or brings covered dishes for a potluck. Jesus never envisions a Sunday School, a Woman’s Fellowship, a church bowling league, a church choir, a capital fund drive, or an entire academic discipline called “church architecture.” Jesus never sits on a committee, creates a budget, fills out a pledge card, or leads a stewardship drive.

In the Gospels Jesus tells us nothing at all about “church,” and people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches need to lighten up a little bit about our notions that we are most closely in line with God’s plan for church. The truth is that we people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches have been making this whole church thing up out of whole cloth ever since the first Monday after the first Easter.

Except for one thing. Though Jesus tells us nothing about church, Jesus models a faithful life of agape, a life that always finds itself giving itself away. Jesus invites his disciples and all within earshot and, across the ages, he invites you and me to join him in living this agape life. What Jesus imagines and models is an agape community, gathered not so much to meet its own needs, but to find ever more creative ways to give it self, to give ourselves, away.

And that’s it. That’s all Jesus gives us about church. No rules, guidelines or “if you’re going to be a church, then you’re going to have to do thus and so.” Just the imagination and modeling of an agape life, of a community formed so that it can gratefully give itself away.

Is God Love?

2009-10-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert! The Gospel text for this Sunday is the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus asking what he needs for eternal life. Before Jesus delivers the punchline that is clearly both truthful and at the same time emotionally devastating to the young man, Mark says this simple, and simply profound, thing about Jesus: "Jesus, looking at him, loved him."

Near the end of his fascinating survey titled The Evolution of God, Robert Wright talks about the nature of this love, and suggests a simple mental exercise when trying to answer the question "Is God Love?

Love, you might say is, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other.

Sometimes love, in the course of leading to this moral truth, fosters more mundane truths. Suppose you are a parent and you (a) watch someone else's toddler misbehave, and then (b) watch your own toddler do the same. Your predicted reactions, respectively, are (a) "what a brat!" and (b) "That's what happens when she skips her nap." Now (b) is often a correct explanation whereas (a) -- the "brat reaction -- isn't even an explanation. So, in this case, love leads toward truth. So too when a parent sees her child show off and concludes that the grandstanding is grounded in insecurity....Love at its best brings a truer apprehension of the other, an empathetic understanding that converges on the moral truth of respect, even reverence, for the other...

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat at physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love's organic association with truth -- by the fact, indeed that at times these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine.

Then again, you might not say that. The point is that you wouldn't have to be crazy to say it.
(from Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, 2009)

Restoring Relationships Requires Relinquishing Righteous Rigidity

2009-09-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

Over and over and over again in the Gospels Jesus hints, cajoles, teases, lectures, and otherwise encourages his followers to grasp one simple, but simply confounding basic premise:

to be able to love we have to have a sense of being forgiven.

In order for me to accept you as you are, I need to realize that God accepts me in my imperfection and brokenness. When we are so rigid about our perceptions of righteousness, no matter how in tune those perceptions may be with our covenantal history as Christians, we are quite unlikely to believe that God is anymore tolerant of us than we are of others. The most common misreading of Jesus has always been a misreading of God’s love as something that is earned by rigidly righteous behavior; the irony is that Jesus spends his entire ministry among us telling us that God’s love is poured out in spite of and because of our propensity for imperfection and brokenness, and not as “compensation” for “correct living.”

To be even more blunt about it, it may just be that those of us who are so rigid about our righteousness are simply deceiving ourselves; psychoanalysts will contend that rigidity comes not from an inability to deal with the “deviant” behavior of others, but from a refusal to recognize that even the most righteous among us harbor thoughts and fantasies that we would never admit to because they are so unrighteous.

The nagging sense of urgency we feel about some things in our lives has been explained, confronted, analyzed, dissected, overhauled, bemoaned, and celebrated, but it has never left us. Even the most arrogant among us are accompanied by a sense of dread that has been called insecurity, or a lack of sense of self-worth, or a fear or death, or the immaturity or fallenness of humanity, and no amount of psychotherapy or Tony Robbins or Dale Carnegie or “correct theology” or libraries full of self-help books seems able to shake it. So we become rigid about our righteousness, effectively denying to ourselves and anybody else that we are, too, are broken and in need of repair. We find all that hard to admit, so we find it difficult to believe that others whose are seem less concerned than we about the correctness of things deserve forgiveness.

We talk about this a lot with one another. Jesus' focus on forgiveness is not primarily about the person being forgiven, but for the one doing the forgiving. About whom do you carry that ancient anger? What ancient hurt do you carry around, do you revisit on at least a daily basis? What great things could you do with all the emotional and spiritual and physical energy you have invested in nurturing those angers and hurts? What if you and I would think of those great things instead of worrying about whether or not we let someone off the hook? Jesus' focus on forgiveness is not primarily about the person being forgiven, but for the one doing the forgiving.

So it kind of follows that when we are so rigid about our righteousness that we cannot be open to the notion that God forgives broken ones, even broken ones like us, we are also unable to share God’s love in any meaningful way. Though we may do all the “righteous things” connected with what loving people “ought” to do, we’ll still be utterly incapable of understanding a love that gives itself away.

And if we don't get our imaginations wrapped around the idea that we are indeed forgiven, and therefore can't get past our own notions of righteous rigidity, we often find ourselves unwilling to forgive, unwilling to be forgiven, wondering how all those others got all the goodies of life, and how we’ve been left standing with nothing more than our uneasy smugness.

On Seeking Security Rather Than Truth

2009-08-27T07:27:00.000-07:00

In his weekly, free, e-mail question and answer post, John Shelby Spong responds to a lengthy question from a man from Norway, that wonders why the church, and especially clergy types in the church, are often so resistant to new insights and ideas. Among the things Bishop Spong says (the emphases are mine:

"We need to understand the role organized religion plays in the lives of most people. It is part of the human security system. Most people seek security, not truth, in their religious pilgrimage. The trouble with security is that it never lasts. In the words of the poet James Russell Lowell, "Time makes ancient good uncouth." Yet we continue to make idols out of yesterday's consensus. This is true in science, as Niels Bohr discovered when Albert Einstein could not embrace quantum weirdness. It is true in politics and was quite visible when both the Roosevelt revolution on the left and the Reagan revolution on the right disturbed the status quo. It is also true in religion when we constantly define religious truth as unchanging, infallible, inerrant or external. It is the nature of self-conscious human life to be insecure. Religion, when it seeks security or peace of mind, is actually violating our humanity. So religion and religious leaders will always be conservative, resistant to change and highly critical of those who have new insights or who walk to the beat of a different drummer.

As we mentioned in previous posts, Bishop Spong publishes a free weekly e-mail newsletter, as well as another online weekly reflection on one topic or another that you have to pay for to get. You may view them and subscribe to them by going to http://www.johnshelbyspong.com/. If you want the free e-mail newsletter, be careful to follow the instructions and links carefully to get the free stuff instead of the paid subscription.

Pop Quiz

2009-08-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Joerg Rieger is Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology. In the early summer issue of The Progressive Christian, he presents a reflection on"power and religion" in the form of a multiple choice quiz. Rieger seems to suggest that when important questions about "what would Jesus do?" are rephrased as something like "what would Jesus be doing right now given the choice?" the whole enterprise gets more challenging and interesting. He says that multiple answers are possible in some cases, and not in others. For each question, he offers a hint from the Gospels.

What are Jesus’ interests?
1. Attends the annual meeting of American liturgists.
2. Attends the annual meeting of American Working Class Studies and take the side of workers.
3. Attends a self-help workshop.
4. Attends an inspirational seminar for investors.

Matthew 25: 31-46

What is Jesus’ view on economics?
1. Supports the free market economy, because “capitalism is here to stay” (Margaret Thatcher).
2. Addresses economic inequalities by promoting welfare.
3. Promotes an economy in which each is treated according to their needs and abilities.
4. Only shows interest in economic matters that affect the church.
Matthew 20: 1-16

What does Jesus think about human rights?
1. Declares the primacy of property rights.
2. Supports the rights of “the least of these” against the rights of the status quo.
3. Rejects the idea of rights altogether since they are “modern liberal inventions” (according to some contemporary ethicists and theologians).
Luke 13: 10-17

What is Jesus’ view on worship?
1. Seeks alternative power and truth wherever it can be found and “worships in spirit and truth.”
2. Worships with hands raised up in the air.
3. Worships sitting in a pew.
4. Makes sure never to miss the one hour on Sunday morning since this is the main event that connects us to God.
John 4: 23; Mark 7: 1-8

What does Jesus think about politics?
1. Votes Republican because of family values.
2. Votes Democrat because of a concern for welfare and health care.
3. Votes, but keeps working for the “kingdom of God and its justice,” which is neither owned by Democrats or Republicans.
4. Doesn’t vote because heaven is more important than earth.
5. Leaves the business of politics to the First Person of the Trinity who enjoys power play.
Matthew 6:33; Mark 3: 31-35

What does Jesus think about culture?
1. Prefers highbrow because this is where people truly care about culture.
2. Prefers lowbrow because it is livelier and more fun.
3. Prefers cultural expressions that follow the beat of a different drummer and dares to be different, rather than aiming at popularity or sales figures.
4. Goes with current opinion about what’s cool so as to be more relevant and to attract more followers.
Mark 12: 38-40

How does Jesus feel about religion?
1. Defends religion in general because it is human nature.
2. Rejects religion because it is too human.
3. Prefers theism because we need an omnipotent universal deity in order to save “Western Civilization.”
4. Evaluates religion according to what difference it makes in real life and whether or not it contributes to the kingdom of God.
Luke 4: 16-21

(From The Progressive Christian, Volume 183, Issue 4, p. 21-22)

"If God is For Us..." (Notes on the end of Romans 8)

2009-08-12T07:04:00.000-07:00

Fear not.

The New Testament's most consistent invitation is "Fear Not." Sometimes it's translated "Do not be afraid."

If the TV coverage of the health care debate isn't enough to convince you that we live in fear, maybe the massive e-mails suggesting that our entire western civilization is tanking because Muslims are having more babies than white Europeans might. We are always being encouraged to be afraid... of reactionaries or communists, of fundamentalists or atheists, of identity theft or depressive personal isolation, of countless other things

In his book Lifesigns Father Henri Nouwen wrote:

We are a fearful people...It often seems that fear has invaded every part of our being to such a degree that we no longer know what a life without our fear would feel like...There always seems to be something to fear: something within us or around us, something close or far away, something visible or invisible, something in ourselves, in others, or in God. There never seems to be a totally fear-free moment.

Echoing Nouwen, Lewis Thomas:

We are,perhaps uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.

I wonder if the Jungians and Paul Tillich weren't right about fear. Tillich said that all fear came down to fear of non-being. The Jungians say that every fear is a fear of death. Both argue that no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape that kind of "existential anxiety."

Which brings us to what I think (not everybody thinks this, but I do) is the most important paragraph in all of Paul's letters. Though Paul would never say "existential anxiety" (the word "existential" wasn't even made up until the 20th century), he seems to know that "fear and trembling" that we just can't seem to shake. He tries to address these most often non-rational anxieties with a rational argument that might not always convince, but can, to use Tillich's metaphor, "here and there, now and then" can comfort and maybe inspire to move beyond them without ever being completely free of them...

What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us...Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril of sword?...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

What Does the Bible Say About ...?

2009-08-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

In their neat little book, The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture, Jim Hill and Rand Cheadle try to argue that ideologues and provocateurs of every ilk have always used the Bible as a "proof-text" for their political, moral, or philosophical positions. They cite literally dozens of themes, ranging from slavery to pacifism to demonstrate that people on every side of every issue have appropriated and accommodated the Bible to "authorize" and explain their point of view.

Of course, they are correct. But they leave the most basic question unanswered:

"What does the Bible really say about issue X, or Y, or Z?

For almost all the issues, the answer is, "not much." In order to get a sense of how a biblical writer might respond to, say, an inquiry about a woman's proper role in family, church, and society, you'd have to cobble together a wide range of opinions, stories, anecdotes and admonitions, and depending on whether you were already an ardent feminist or a stolid traditionalist, you'd be thrilled or appalled by what you found.

But the way we generally tend to do it is just the opposite. We are already the ardent feminist or the stolid traditionalist (take any issue and think up people on opposite ends for complementary metaphors), and we appropriate what we like and dismiss, or worse, explain away what we don't like.

For example, there is no denying that during the millennium and a half that material was being collected, edited, and canonized into what we now call the Bible, the world in which all that collecting, editing and canonizing was being done was a patriarchal word. It is ludicrous to deny that, but many do. It is similarly absurd to say that God simply had these or other intentions for these old texts, so it only goes to follow that some rotten so-and-so or some group of rotten so-and-so's got hold of the texts the way God intended them to be and out and out changed them for the sole purpose of perpetuating a misogynous patriarchy, or any other thing that we now find offensive or difficult.

It comes down, at least for me, to whom you choose to listen when you read the Bible. If the Bible says one thing one place about issue x, y, or z, to whom do you choose to listen? Who is most authoritative? The oldest text? Moses? The prophets? Paul? Jesus?

For me, the answer is Jesus. Yes, I know that there is controversy and discussion about what Jesus really said, or maybe said, or maybe didn't say, and I think that conversation is crucial. All that being said, believing that there are few if any uniform "positions" about virtually everything except loving God and caring for the broken, lost, and poor, focusing on what the Bible says Jesus says has been the most helpful thing for me, at least as far as personal ethics and behavior are concerned.

Historical Context

2009-07-20T10:40:00.001-07:00

John Dominic Crossan likes to say that "if we can get the first century right (the time of Jesus and the disciples and Paul), we'll get the 21st century right." It kind of goes to follow that for us to get the first century right, we ought to have a sense of its historical context. Hence this compilation, which at worst may bore you to tears, but at best might help set some of that context. Most of the dates are pretty solid, though there is some scholarly conversation about the precision of some of them. This is close enough, I think, for our purposes.

Call the timeline "Earliest Christianity in its Roman Context," or anything else you'd like to call it.

BCE
753 Traditional date for the founding of the village of Rome

74 Herod the Great is born

64 Pompey captures Jerusalem

63 (or when Rome was just under 700 years old, 2.5 times as old as the USA) Octavian is born, and adopted by his uncle, Julius Caesar

58 The First Triumverate is formed by Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar

49 Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, Ptolemy queen of Egypt, conceive a child. Two years later, Cleopatra moves into Julius Caesar’s estate in Rome

45 Julius Caesar defeats Pompey and becomes the first dictator of Rome.

44 Julius Caesar is assassinated (by order of the Roman Senate). The Second Triumverate of Octavian, Lepidus, and Octavian's brother-in-law, Marc Antony, takes charge of the dispersed Roman military machine. Antipater (Herod’s father) sends money to Rome to help support the assassination and overthrow

43 Antipater is poisoned by “locals,” power struggle in Palestine ensues

42 Marc Antony hooks up with Cleopatra, Julius Caesar's old flame. They move in together, combine their armies and navies, and eventually flee to Egypt.

37 Herod the Great begins his “reign;” called “King,” he is, actually, like his father, a “regent” Ruler, put in office and kept there by the Roman authorities. Herod oversees the most successful government supported construction efforts in that region since the pyramids

33 The triumvirate dissolves; Lepidus is disgraced and forced from office, and Antony and Octavian become enemies.

31 Octavian defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Octavian is named Caesar, and takes the name Augustus, and begins the longest reign of any Roman before or since, a 45 year span known ironically as the Pax Romana

30 While under siege from forces loyal to Octavian, Antony, mistakenly believing that Cleopatra had already committed suicide, falls on his own sword. Followers take Antony to Cleopatra’s hiding place, where, according to legend, he dies in Cleopatra’s arms, who soon after actually does commit suicide.

6 (5? 4?) Jesus of Nazareth is born (how is it that Jesus is born “BC”? Most likely a calendar fluke from the time of Pope Gregory centuries later)

4 Herod the Great dies

CE
6 (7? 8?) Saul (who later becomes Paul) is born

14 Caesar Augustus dies. Monuments to him at his tomb and elsewhere, constructed during the last years of his life celebrate the “Gospel” of his life, and declare him to be, among other things, Divine, the Son of God, God, God from God, Prince of Peace, Lord, Redeemer, and Savior of the World. Tiberius, Augustus’ stepson, becomes emperor.

26 (27?) Jesus of Nazareth begins his public ministry. Pontius Pilate becomes Prefect of Judea

29 (30?) Jesus is executed

32 – 37 Paul moves from being a “persecutor” of Jewish followers of Jesus to a follower of Jesus. Paul’s own letters suggest a gradual transformation (hence the date range) while Luke, in the book of Acts, describes a more immediate transformation

36 Pontius Pilate is removed from his office in Judea

37 Gaius, also known as Caligula, becomes emperor

41 Claudius becomes emperor

48 The “Apostolic Assembly” described in Acts and mentioned by Paul takes place in Jerusalem

49 Paul lives for a year in Corinth. Claudius expels all Jews (including Jewish Christians) from the city of Rome.

51 Paul’s earliest surviving letter, I Thessalonians, is written

52 Paul begins a 3-year stay in Ephesus.

54 Paul writes a small portion of what we know call “II Corinthians” (6:14-7:1). Nero becomes emperor when Claudius dies, and opens the way to welcome Jews (including Jewish Christians) back into the city.

55-56 The rest of what we now call II Corinthians and the letters compiled into what we now call I Corinthians, are written. Paul travels to Macedonia and Achaia

56 Paul’s letter to the Romans is written. In the spring, Paul returns to Jerusalem and is arrested.

58 The letter to the Galatians is written. Paul is imprisoned in different cities, and eventually
ends up in Rome

59 Letters to the Philippians and to Philemon are written.

62 Paul is executed in Rome. Earliest possible date for I Peter.

64 Nero “fiddles while Rome burns,” and much of the city is destroyed. Tradition holds that both Peter and Paul are executed as part of the government’s response.

66 The letter to the Colossians is most likely written. A long and bloody series of revolts erupt in Judea

68 The letter to the Ephesians is most likely written

69 Called the “Year of the 4 Emperors”. Nero and others are expelled from Rome by Vespasian, who becomes emperor, transferring power to a new imperial family

70 The temple in Jerusalem is destroyed, and Jews are expelled from Palestine. Also the earliest possible date for the Gospel of Mark

79 Mount Vesuvius erupts. Vespasian dies, Titus becomes emperor

80 The earliest possible date for the Gospel of Matthew. Approximate date for letter to the Hebrews

81 Titus dies, Domitian becomes emperor

85 (90?) The earliest possible date for the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts

90 Approximate date for James, II Peter, and Jude. First Christian bishop of Rome takes office

95 (100?) Earliest possible date for I John, II John, and III John

96 Nerva becomes emperor

98 Trajan becomes emperor

105 (110?) The Gospel of John is written

110 The Revelation is written

117 Hadrian becomes emperor

128 (130) Earliest probable dates for I and II Timothy, Titus

132 Three year revolt in Jerusalem begins when Rome builds a colony and a temple in Jerusalem

What's In a Name (or Title)?

2009-07-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

At the core of the argument that our Living the Questions scholars make about the radical nature of the earliest Christian movement is this notion: Roman authorities in the time of Jesus saw as a probable and potentially potent threat, any claim of authority that seemed to deviate from the authority and power of the emperor. And because the followers of Jesus, beginning with the Apostle Paul (remember, Paul is dead for almost a decade by the time the earliest "Gospel" is written) and running through the next couple centuries, described Jesus with the same language as the Romans described particularly Augustus, but to some degree, all of the emperors from Augustus through at least Hadrian (about 170 years worth of emperors), the followers of Jesus were almost by definition seen as threats to the rule of law.

Augustus, who was born 6 decades before Jesus and died while Jesus was a teenager, had these things written on his tombs and monuments. The titles of the pieces were "The Acts of Augustus (compare to what Luke called the second half of his writing, "The Acts of the Apostles") and they said they were carved in stone (literally) to share the "Gospel" or "good news" (the same word used for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) of the mighty deeds of the Emperor, who was said to have been born of a virgin mother and sired by a Roman god, and who was called Divine, the Son of God, God, very God from very God, Prince of Peace, Lord, Redeemer, and Savior of the World. All these names, these titles which seem second nature to 2 millenia worth of Christians were all first used for Augustus especially, but also for virtually all of the other emperors in the first couple of centuries of the Christian movement.

By taking on those names, those titles, it's pretty easy to imagine why the Roman authorities saw at least the earliest Christian communities as seditious and trouble makers, and why for so long, at least when times were troubled, individuals and individual communities of Christians were seen as defiant, oppositional, and enemies of the state.

Paul and the Surprising Diversity of the Earliest Churches

2009-07-02T15:03:00.001-07:00

Four years ago I spent a few days with a group of people studying with John Dominic Crossan, focussed on the work of the apostle Paul. We talked a lot about much of what Crossan talks about in our Living the Questions videos, but in greater depth and detail.

For me, the most revealing new learning came from work that Crossan did with archeologist Jonathan Reed, detailed in two different books, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, and In Search of Paul: How Jesus' Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom. These books offer fascinating details about the actual historical sites associated with the earliest Christian communities including this one.

Outside of Palestine itself, in the "diaspora," or "dispersion," synagogues from the middle first century, many of which served as primary gathering places for the teachings of Jesus to be shared, often listed the names of those who contributed to the construction of the buildings on pillars and walls. Crossan and Reed conclude that a careful look at the names suggests that only about 50% of them were Jewish by birth, 3 or 4% were converts to Judaism, and 46 to 47% of were people called "God-worshippers," Gentiles who had not fully or formally converted to Judaism, but who met regularly and worshipped in the synagogues. The author of the Gospel of Luke, Crossan contends, was one of these "God-worshippers," as were many of those the Apostle Paul led to call themselves "Christians."

This suggests two things to me. First, the often bitter struggle between Paul's approach to following Jesus and the Jerusalem Church's approach, is likely about much more than whether a new Jesus follower, in order to be a true follower, had to become a Jew first, and may be a continuation of the purity arguments that Jesus had with the Pharisees and others.

Second, all this suggests that the earliest Christian communities, at least outside Jerusalem, were more diverse, more cosmopolitan, less poverty-stricken, less primitively superstitious, less dogmatic, and less exclusionary that we had previously believed.

Just for fun (and maybe for further edification)

2009-06-24T12:46:00.001-07:00

I'm in New Orleans on Mission Trip with our Youth Community, and our groups are heading back to the University of New Orleans after their very hot Wednesday. Quickly, while they're wandering in and getting cleaned up, I thought I might try to direct any of you to a "just for fun" quiz that, when you complete it, will provide you with a pretty comprehensive outline of the conclusions(so far) of the scholars who have worked together on the "Jesus Seminar."

Go to www.westarinstitute.org . At the upper left of your screen you'll see a graphic about the Jesus Seminar. Just below it will be a link inviting you to take a biblical literacy quiz. Click it, take the quiz (it's not tough -- even I did pretty well!), check your results, and then keep clicking to find a really thorough summary of this group's conclusions about all manner of things.

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

2009-06-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

Marcus Borg is one of the primary contributors to our on-going Living the Questions conversations; much of what he shares in those conversations is outlined in in his very compact little book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. As he tries to answer the question "What Manner of Man was Jesus?" Borg suggests, these "impressions" of Jesus...

"Jesus' verbal gifts were remarkable. His language was most often metaphorical, poetic, and imaginative, filled with memorable short sayings and compelling short stories. He was clearly exceptionally intelligent...In contemporary terms, he was gifted as both a right-brain and left-brain thinker...

"He used dramatic public actions. He ate meals with untouchables, which not only generated criticism but also symbolized his alternative vision of human community... There was a radical social and political edge to his mission and activity. He challenged the social order of his day and indicted the elites who dominated it. He had a clever tongue, which could playfully or sarcastically indict the powerful and proper...

"He was a remarkable healer: more healing stories are told about him than about anybody else in the Jewish tradition...There must have been something quite compelling about him. He also attracted enemies, especially among the rich and powerful.

"And finally, he was young, his life was sort, and his public activity was brief. He lived only into his early thirties, and his public activity lasted perhaps as little as a year (according to the synoptic gospels) or as much as three or four years (according to John). The founders of the worlds' other major religious traditions lived long lives and were active for decades. It is exceptional that so much came forth from such a brief life.
(from Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, p. 30-31)

The Book of Jesus

2009-06-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

Ten or twelve years ago Calvin Miller edited a volume he titled The Book of Jesus: A Treasury of the Greatest Stories and Writings about Christ. The book doesn't pretend to be a scholarly argument and has no real interpretive agenda; rather it is a collection of pieces ranging from "one-liners" to fairly complete essays and reflections from about 200 different contributors. Some date to the earliest days of the church (for example, the Gospels and the Roman/Jewish historian, Josephus), others from the Conciliar Age (eg. Augustine and Anselm), and still others from the rest of the centuries "CE". Some of the writers are the "usual suspects" for such a volume, (the aforementioned, the reformers, contemporary or nearly contemporary voices like Fred Buechner, Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen, Desmond Tutu), while others are surprising because they were or are not Christians (like Gandhi and Sholem Asch) or because you wouldn't expect them to have anything to say about the subject (like Charles Dickens or Christopher Columbus.)

The volume makes no great or profound argument about Jesus, but it does provide a wide range of diverse voices that have given voice to how a pretty remarkable group of people. They range from things that claim to be historical accounts (like Josephus: "...about this time lived Jesus, a wiseman, if it is proper to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, -- a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him many of the Jews and many of the Greeks"), to contemplative poetry (like Thomas Merton's The Flight into Egypt -- "Go Child of God, upon the singing desert, Where, with eyes of lame, The roaring lion keeps thy road from harm"), to comedic retellings of parables (like Robert Farrar Capon take on the laborers in the vineyard -- "There was a man who owned a vineyard. His operation was not on the scale of E&J Gallo, but it was quite respectable: let's put him in the Robert Mondovi class....").

We have a couple of copies floating around here if any of you want to borrow it. Again, no profound conclusions, just lots of info from lots of people.

Living, Working, Thinking, Growing in the Gray Area

2009-05-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Marilyn McEntyre is a fellow at the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont College who writes in the June, 2009 edition of Sojourners Magazine" an article she titles, "How to Read the Bible (Hint: The Gray Area is Holy Ground). Her discussion focuses not so much on the content of the biblical narratives, poems, speeches, songs, letters and visions, but on our approach to them. "How we read," she suggests, is immensely consequential."

McEntyre asserts that three basic questions are "useful" in approaching scripture, as well as other things written and read: (1) What does this text invite you to do? (2) What does this text require of you? (3) What will this text not let you do?

This is a wonderfully rich little article that I would encourage you all to read in its entirety. You can read it online at:
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0906&article=how-to-read-the-bible

If "double-clicking" this link doesn't work for you, you can copy and paste it into your browser.

The Stories We've Come to Believe About Ourselves

2009-05-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Thomas Harris and the old "Transactional Analysis" school of psychotherapy used to talk about the "tapes" we play in our heads, reminders of both positive and negative things we think we have learned about ourselves. The "TA" folks talked about the voices of parents and teachers and mentors and ancient friends and enemies that continually insinuate themselves into our own self understanding. Theologians and scholars focused on religion (no, they are not always the same thing -- more on that another time.) don't talk about "tapes;" they talk about "myth." In this context, "myth" does not refer to something "fictional." Theologian and author Thomas Moore explains:

..."myth" doesn't mean falsehood; it refers to the the narrative that gives us an imagination of self and life, allowing us to live meaningfully and purposefully. A life-defining myth is not usually conscious to the people who are living it...We just assume our myth is mere fact, and our explanations for things the simple truth. We don't usually reflect deeply enough to understand that the world we see all around us is highly filtered by the myth in which we believe. (Thomas Moore, "Religion," in Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century, Marianne Williamson, editor, p. 299)

We have cultural, national, and personal "myths," "stories we have come to believe about ourselves." Regarding your personal journey, what is "the story you have come to believe about yourself?" Not only the "biographical data" details about where you were born, where you grew up, what you did/do for a living, who you married, who you divorced, the number and names of your kids and grandkids, but also the "screenplay" that plays in your head as you watch yourself living your life. What are those core principles around which you almost unconsciously organize your life? Not only the "noble" stuff, but the secret, not-so-pretty, uncomfortable stuff that you'd just as soon not fess up to. Who are the people who have shaped you into the person you are? Not only the loved ones and mentors and teachers and models, but the ones who have betrayed, hurt, disappointed and abandoned you. How do those principles, those people, along with your "biography," continue to act as "filters" through which you view and understand the world?

Paradise Outgrown

2009-05-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Harold Kushner (not the Rabbi Lawrence Kushner about whom we wrote a month ago, but , rather, the Rabbi Kushner famous for When Bad Things Happen To Good People) has written half a dozen or so very helpful little books. In one of them, How Good Do We Have to Be? this Rabbi Kushner suggests a completely different kind of reading of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

You know the story itself without looking – God tells Adam and Eve that they can have anything in the garden, except that they are not allowed to eat fruit (Genesis never says “apple,” by the way) from one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Well, this serpent seduces Eve, Eve eats some of the forbidden fruit, gets Adam to eat some, too, and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, they both realize they are naked and create the first ever foliage-based fashion statement so they can cover their boy and girl parts. And then, that evening when God is taking God’s nighttime stroll in the garden, Adam and Eve hide. But God, being God and all, finds them, and they start spinning excuses and blaming each other and whatever else comes to mind. And then God punishes them and tosses them out of the garden, and burdens them with the hard realities of life – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and the prospect of death.

And you know without thinking about it the classical response to this old story; all sorts of goofy stuff have become essentially articles of faith for entirely too many. A priori, women are to be regarded as sources of evil, vessels of sin and seduction. No matter what, this tradition says, disobedience and sin are carved into our genetic code (well, maybe not carved into our genetic code, because then they’d have to admit there was something to science and all that). God wants us to be perfect, but because of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience, and because of what God does to Adam and Eve afterward, we can never be perfect. And when we are less than perfect, God will punish us. Talk about your “lose-lose” situation!

In How Good Do We Have to Be? Rabbi Kushner dismisses this traditional interpretation by first understanding the story as being “true” without being “historical.” And then he suggests that John Milton and others missed the point of the story. It is not about “Paradise Lost.” It is about “Paradise Outgrown.” “I see Eve,” he says, “as being terribly brave as she eats the fruit. She is not frivolous, disobedient or easily seduced, as later interpreters have insisted on describing her. She is boldly crossing the boundary into the unknown, venturing to discover what lies beyond the limits of animal existence, and reaching back to bring Adam after her…. Eve has given her descendants more than existence; she has given us life”

Rabbi Kushner argues in his very gentle, very sardonic way, that the act of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the commitment to the complexity of human existence and that, because of this complexity, God simply would never expect perfection from us. He says that may of the things we have traditionally called “punishment” – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and even death – are actually gifts of being truly and completely who we are supposed to be: “Work, intimacy, parenthood, a sense of mortality, the knowledge of good and evil – aren’t those precisely the things that separate us from the animal kingdom? Those are the sources of creativity, the things that make us human. They may be painful, but it is the sort of pain that leads to growth.”

And then he goes on to say that religion should not be “the carping voice of condemnation telling us that the normal is sinful and the well-intentioned mistake is an unforgivable transgression that will damn us forever.” Instead he says that it should be something like “the voice that says, ‘ I will guide you through this minefield of difficult choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.’”

Two things. One, from John Dominic Crossan who says this about the importance of knowing the original context of the Gospels: “ I am convinced that when we get the first century (that is when Jesus lived and the Gospels were written), we will get the 21st century right." Two, from the remarkable professor of world religions Mircea Eliade, who always argued that the purpose of creation stories in any culture has to do with what he called regressus ad originem, or "returning to the origins" to remind the culture of who they were/are intended to be. How would it change how we see ourselves if we could embrace Rabbi Kushner’s notion that the stories of the Garden of Eden had more to do with moving from animal to human, from infantilism to adulthood, than the angry, wrathful, fear-laden interpretations many of us were taught were the “God’s honest truth?”

Spring, Creation Stories, Albert Eintstein and Chief Seattle

2009-05-06T08:25:00.001-07:00

FINALLY it seems to be spring! That, and the fact that our next face-to-face discussion on May 26th will focus on "Stories of Creation," has reminded me of things written by two very different, very great men.

The first is from Albert Einstein, who was arguing in 1945 (25 years before the first "Earth Day," so the argument can be made that he was a little in front of the curve) that caring for the created order was not a pleasant option but an absolute necessity:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. The human being experiences him[or her]self, his [or her] thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his [or her] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

The second, from Chief Seattle, in a letter to President Franklin Pierce in 1854, urging a different perspective on western expansion:

"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes whatever land he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He does not care. His fathers’ graves and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind a desert…

"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we would have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If they spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

"One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover – our God is the same God. You may think now that you own him as you wish to own the land; but you cannot. God is the God of all creation, and God’s compassion is equal for the red and the white. This earth is precious to God, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator. The white, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than all the other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste."

I think, I hope, we are finally starting to get it.

Tikkun Olam

2009-05-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Mishnah is the first important collection of the works of rabbinic Judaism, and dates to the 200's of the Common Era. It is a profound and complicated, highly studied and debated and beloved collection of insights and debates that date all the way back to the destruction of the Temple in 70 of the Common Era. The Mishnah is the first place where the phrase (and the concept) of tikkun olam (Hebrew for "healing" or "repairing the world") appears in written form. Since then tikkun olam refers to the idea that among the tasks of the faithful if the repairing of our broken world. In modern times tikkun olam has become largely synonymous with the notion of social action and the pursuit of social justice.

In the 1500's, Rabbi Issac Luria was perhaps the most energized and widely followed teacher of Kabbalah, a term identified with a wide range of Jewish mystical practices (see press stories of Kabbalah's resurgence among celebrities). He talked about tikkun olam this way...

God formed the world by forming vessels of light to hold the Divine Light. But as God poured the Light into the vessels, the vessels were not able to contain it, and they shattered, and tumbled down throughout all creation. Thus, this world consists of an infinite number of shards of the original vessels that still have trapped sparks of the Divine Light. The great and noble task of humanity has to do with helping God free and unite this imprisoned and scattered Light, and, in the process, restoring the shattered world.

Do I think that Rabbi Isaac expected his students (or us) to consider take that teaching "literally?" Of course not. Do I think his imagery can help us get our imaginations around the notion of a very widespread Divine Presence occupying the same "reality" as a hurting and broken world?

You bet.

John Shelby Spong

2009-04-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sprinkled throughout our Living the Questions" conversations is input from Bishop John Shelby Spong,. Here's how "his people" describe him and his work:

John Shelbly Spong,whose books have sold more than a million copies, was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years before his retirement in 2001. His admirers acclaim him as a teaching bishop who makes contemporary theology accessible to the ordinary layperson — he's considered the champion of an inclusive faith by many, both inside and outside the Christian church. In one of his recent books, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Discover the God of Love (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005), this visionary thinker seeks to introduce readers to a proper way to engage the holy book of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

A committed Christian who has spent a lifetime studying the Bible and whose life has been deeply shaped by it, Bishop Spong says he was not interested in Bible bashing. "I come to this interpretive task not as an enemy of Christianity," he says. "I am not even a disillusioned former Christian, as some of my scholar-friends identify themselves. I am a believer who knows and loves the Bible deeply. But I also recognize that parts of it have been used to undergird prejudices and to mask violence."

A visiting lecturer at Harvard and at universities and churches worldwide, Bishop Spong delivers more than 200 public lectures each year to standing-room-only crowds. His bestselling books include Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, A New Christianity for a New World, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and Here I Stand.
Bishop Spong's extensive media appearances include a profile segment on 60 Minutes as well as appearances on Good Morning America, Fox News Live, Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, The O'Reilly Factor, William F. Buckley's Firing Line, and Extra. Bishop Spong and his wife, Christine Mary Spong, have five children and six grandchildren. They live in New Jersey.

Bishop Spong publishes a free weekly e-mail newsletter, as well as another online weekly reflection on one topic or another that you have to pay for to get. You may view them and subscribe to them by going to http://www.johnshelbyspong.com/. If you want the free e-mail newsletter, be careful to follow the instructions and links carefully to get the free stuff instead of the paid subscription.

I don't completely agree with every conclusion Bishop Spong comes to, but I do agree with most of them, and I do think that his voice is an important one in our on-going conversation.

Shuffling the Deck

2009-04-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

I'm writing from Tower Hill Camp, where our two confirmation classes and some members of our High School Youth Community have headed off to the Warren Dunes, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Part of what happens on this retreat is that members of our 2nd year group work hard at writing "statements of faith." We push them to try to think "theologically" (kind of like the theme of our next gathering on April 28th), and to articulate some of what they think and feel about what most of us would call "religious" ideas.

In a lecture he called "An Ocean of God: The Innerconnectedness of all Being," Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, in response to a question about the vitality and viability of the world’s great religions, suggests:

“Imagine that there are an arbitrarily finite number of great religious ideas:
o you gotta worry about what happens when you die…
o you gotta worry about how to make atonement…
o you gotta worry about experiencing love…
o you gotta be aware of the presence of the Creator…
…fill in the list of holy ideas that every religion should have.

“[Now, for the sake of discussion,] let’s say there are 52 of them, 52, like a deck of cards. All religions are playing with a full deck. They all have all the cards. The only real difference among the religions, in my hunch,” posits Rabbi Kushner, “is the way the deck is stacked.

“If you are an orthodox Christian,” he continues, “the first card is perhaps you’re guilty and you’re going to need a lot of help right away. Jews have that card, too,” Kushner jokes, “it comes up at number 10. For Jews the top card is, What does God want now?’ Christians have that card in there, too, somewhere.”

It seems to me that you and I in our day and time and place have all those things at our disposal, that we, too, are playing with a full deck of great religious ideas. Our card game has fewer rules than some others, and, in our game, sometimes the rules change as the nature of the game and the participants in the game change, and the game itself changes to reflect and embrace new participants, rather than forcing new participants into rigid rules that reflect the realities of another day and time and place. I think our great theological task has always been to determine how that deck of great religious ideas is to be stacked. If pressed I'd argue that Jesus' instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself" is the "card" that should sit at the top of our "deck."

If the Gospels are any indication, Jesus spent very little time and energy engaging in great theological debate. While in conversation with scholars and religious bureaucrats, they talked about ancient traditions and rules and regulations, and Jesus talked about attitude and behavior. In the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, someone presses him to be more precise than “Love your neighbor as yourself” by asking the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Rather than citing chapter and verse, Jesus tells a story that reflects attitude and behavior. A man on the Jericho road is mugged, beaten left for dead. A public official and a religious muckety-muck pass by the victim, and, for one reason or another leave him there in his suffering. Then a man deemed “unworthy,” a man labeled “outcast” because of the accident of his birth happens by, binds up the victim, carts him off to a place where he can be cared for, and arranges to pay for any future care the victim may need.

“Who was a neighbor to that poor man?” Jesus asks, already knowing there is only one answer, and knowing that they know there is only one answer, and knowing that the theological debate intended to justify their relatively cold and distant and superior attitude. When they mumble, “The man who helped him,” Jesus simply says, “Go and do likewise.”

So, it seems to me, Jesus suggests that the top card in the deck may well be “love your neighbor as yourself…go and do likewise."

More Multilingual (sort of)

2009-04-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Science. Evolution. Calculus. Physics. Quantum Mechanics.
God. Religion. Miracles, Theology. Philosophy.

The common opinion in our culture seems to be that these two lists are mutually exclusive, that they contradict each other, that you can't make a case for the one of the lists without denying the insight, wisdom, and potential of the other. Needless to say, I think that common opinion is off the mark.

In later editions of his classic book Creation Versus Chaos, renowned Biblical scholar Bernard Anderson talks about religious language and scientific language, and suggests that all our squabbles about incompatibility between the lists is that we try to make the two languages say the same thing about whatever issue is at hand. He says:

Religious language cannot be converted into scientific language any more than poetry can be reduced to prose. .. Scientific language...can hardly be equated with religious language that deals with who the Creator is and what the Creator's intent is. Nevertheless, these languages intersect at points of common cosmological interest. Therefore, when the scientist and the theologian meet, neither should claim to be "king of the mountain." They should be able to enter into dialogue as friends who stand humbly before the mysteries of creation.

In short, Anderson argues what Fermi Lab/University of Chicago physicist Leon Lederman and what the ancient mystics of every culture and religion and faith have long suggested, that the differences between the so-called "objective" stuff like our first list and the more "subjective" stuff like the second have to do more with language and metaphor than with the nature or goal of the pursuit. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians who convincingly postulate the origins of a still growing universe seek the same truth as the hospital chaplain who quietly listens as a family aches through the agony of waiting for someone they love to die. A "unified theory" eludes "objective" observers as cleverly as a decent proof for the existence of God has always eluded philosophers and theologians. The only real difference is vocabulary and symbol-sets.

Anderson suggests that we all are engaged in a quest to come to some understanding about three intertwined mysteries, the mystery of originations (where did it all come from?), the mystery of order (how does it all hold together and make sense?), and the mystery of the emergence of life (where did we come from? why are we here?). All of us search for a Great Unknown which we, at some level, think we already know a little bit.

The mathematicians and physicists and chemists and biologists and historians and sociologists and psychologists and philosophers and theologians exhaust the "toolboxes" of their disciplines and are still left with the nagging questions of creation and order and purpose. On better days these questions don't nag so much because we are somehow satisfied with our place in the order of things, and credit good luck, random chance, or the grace of God. On not-so-better days, they nag with persistence, and we're so unhappy with our place in the order of things, and we blame things like misfortune, wrong place at the wrong time, shallow gene pool, or the judgment of, or worse, abandonment by God (Psalm 22).

No matter the discipline, we discover that the homework load stays pretty substantial if we choose to keep on questioning. And there comes a time, as Thomas Aquinas suggested almost 800 years ago, when language, metaphor, commonly held knowledge is inadequate to describe an experience or phenomenon. Then and there we all find our ideas and theories and postulates coming up a bit short.

Multilingual

2009-04-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, I spent a week of vacation working for Peggy's company. I've done this every year for the last 15 or 16 years. Her company manages a trade show for people who do trade shows, and part of the experience is a certification program for people in the industry. That program includes a pretty broad range of classes and seminars for trade show folks, and my job is to get seminar materials are where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there, to make that room sets are correct, and that the seminar presenters are happy with everything before they begin.

One day a group of students from Northern Arizona University joined us for a "behind the scenes" look at how the show and program come together, and the small group that was with me included a freshman from China, a sophomore from China by way of a university in the Netherlands, and 3 others from the Netherlands, all of whom found their way to NAU as part of one international studies program or another.

We started talking about the different languages they all spoke. All of these young people were fluent in more languages than I; one of them, 19 years old, is working on her 5th language! We had an extensive conversation about how really knowing another language opens up different ways for us to perceive things, and more comprehensive understanding of other cultures and worldviews. Knowing different ways to say things, and to think about and through things, we agreed, made our worldviews more inclusive.

We are, I think, frequently seduced by the idea that there is only one "correct" way to look at things -- politics, economics, God stuff. Part of our journeying together is the attempt to allow ourselves (or maybe to push ourselves) to learn new "languages" and think about all of those "correct" things in different and challenging ways.

The Bible Tells Me So

2009-03-21T06:31:00.001-07:00

The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture by Jim Hill and Rand Cheadle was published a dozen years ago. In a nutshell, their thesis is that ideologues and provocateurs of every ilk have always used the Bible as a "proof-text" for their political, moral, or philosophical positions. They city dozens of themes ranging from slavery to pacifism to demonstrate that people on every side of every issue have attempted to appropriate the Bible to help both authorize and explain their point of view. And, of course, they are correct.

But they leave the most basic question unanswered, probably because there is no real way to answer it. That question? What does the Bible really say about issue x, y, and z?

For most every issues the answer is "not much." In order to get a sense of how a biblical writer might respond, say, to an inquiry about a woman's proper role in family and society, you would have to collage together a wide range of opinions, stories, anecdotes and admonitions, and depending on whether you were Rush Limbaugh or Nancy Pelosi, you would be thrilled or appalled by what you found. But our approach is most often just the opposite. We are already either Limbaugh or Pelosi or somewhere between on the spectrum, and we appropriate what we like and dismiss, or worse, try to explain away what we don't like. For example, there is no denying that during the millennium and a half that biblical materials were being collected, edited, translated and canonized (great comment, Steven!), the world, particularly in the west, was a patriarchal world. To deny that is ludicrous, but many do.

So who do we listen to when it comes to all these different strands and threads and attitudes in the Bible? When the Bible can't seem to agree with itself, which voice to we believe to be most authoritative? Paul? The prophets? Moses? Jesus?

For me, the answer is Jesus. And, of course, much of what is attributed to Jesus is the work of editors and the like, but that's why the work of the people we're studying with on this journey is so important. Focusing on the Jesus part (Becky, the whole "red-letter" thing) seems to be the most dependable to me as far as ethics and community and personal behavior are concerned.

Top Ten Things

2009-03-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

The next time our group gathers face to face (Tuesday, March 24^th, 6:30 – 8 PM in Room 1 at First Church of Lombard) the focus of the presentation will be, essentially, on a different set of “lenses” through which we look at and relate to scripture. Some of us around the table have been working at this with uneven success for a long, long time.

5 or 6 years ago I led a 5 week bible study I called The Top 10 Things You Should Know About Reading, Understanding, and Finding Meaning in the Bible, making it very apparent that I do not have an alternate career path as a headline writer. The idea for the study was that we would shamelessly steal David Letterman’s signature bit, and over the 5 weeks we would “countdown” a “Top Ten List” of thing those of us who want to take the bible seriously without taking it literally could keep in mind to help us with that endeavor. Remember, this is all my stuff, titrated down from who knows how many teachers and books and lectures and papers and random ideas. That means, it is where I have “settled” on this stuff at this stage in my “journey,” and that the more I think about it as time goes along, the more likely the possibility that I will continue to change my mind a little here and there. Here, summarized and with only a little commentary is that list.

10. Even the newest material in the Bible is very, very, very old.

The “newest” material in the Bible (the very late pieces of the New Testament) are 1,875 years old (give or take a decade, and the oldest is more than 3,000 years old. And when you think of the utter lack of communication technology one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five years ago (doesn’t it seem longer when you “spell out” the numbers?), particularly when compared to the present, it isn’t all that tough to imagine that the material there as being “normative” without necessarily being “historical.”

9. You can’t make an apple taste like a T-Bone, and won’t “get” the Bible when you try to make it be something it’s not.

There are all sorts of things we say the Bible is out of respect or deference to it that become quite challenging when and if we look at them closely. We get into trouble when we try to make an apple taste like a T-Bone, when we try to make the Bible be something it’s not. Five pairs of “is/is not” things about the Bible, at least as I am continuing to learn it

The Bible is a collection of 66 books written by different authors, mostly about their experiences of or their ancestors’ memories of “the Holy” (God). The Bible is not a single book written from only one perspective that tells only one point of view about God.

The Bible is a source that describes how ancient people thought about the important things in their lives. The Bible is not a “science book” with objective, dependent on reliable data descriptions of unfathomable phenomena.

The Bible is a collection of writings, letters, stories, songs, and memories that span more than 2,000 years. The Bible is not a “history book” that describes in chronological order the historical details about the events it describes.

The Bible is a source that reveals how faithful people in antiquity responded to what they perceived to be God’s will for their lives in their day and time. The Bibl is not a “law and rule book” designed to instruct people how to act and think in every possible imaginable circumstance.

The Bible is what faithful people have come to call “God’s Word” because it is among our most important and revealing tools helping us understand how God relates to us, and vice-versa, The Bible is not the only possible way God can communicate God’s will to faithful people, nor the only source of God’s comfort, guidance, and strength.

8. Everything in the Bible came from someone, somewhere – nothing in the Bible simply “appeared” in a vacuum.

There is not one thing in the Bible that wasn’t created, remembered, written, and then treasured in one context or another. That context is everything. The greater our understanding of the context of any given piece, the deeper our understanding of what is being communicated

7. Always ask this question: “Why is this (story/song/memory/et.al.) in the Bible?

The material in the Bible is certainly not the only remaining literature from that 2,300 year period during which the Bible was compiled and then canonized. So it’s important to ask not only why any given text is remembered and treasured enough to “make the cut” for the Bible, but also to ask who was doing the remembering and treasuring and arguing for its inclusion.

6. Songs are songs, stories are stories, memories are memories, visions are visions; things make much more sense when we know what they are.

Material in the Bible always makes more sense when we let it speak for itself, and not try to turn it into something it’s not (I know this sounds a lot like number 9 above, but this is more about individual texts than about the Bible as a whole). Example one: biblical prophets were not so much “fortune tellers” as they were people of discernment. Their poetry is not so much “predictive” as it is “indicative,” meaning that rarely if ever are the visions Nostradamus-like prognostications, and that their “timbre” is more like a riff on “logical consequences” (“Thus says the Lord: if you keep up this nonsense, things will not end well for you” rather than “Thus says the Lord: on the 3^rd of April 2010, your favorite baseball team will begin an undefeated season.”) . Example two: the Apocalypse of John (the Book of Revelation) is not at all a prediction of end times, but rather a dramatic and symbolic portrayal of the evil and corruption of empire gone mad, the paralysis of faithful people, and the ever-present love of God. Example three: Jesus’ parable of the last judgment in Matthew 25: 31-46 (sheep and goats, right and left hand, paradise and punishment, caring for the least of these). It is a parable, a story to make a point not so much about how the Son of Man in all his glory will be given barnyard duty, but the kind of attention, intention, and response expected of those who claim to be followers. Things are much clearer when we accept them for what they are.

5. Repetition = importance

When the Bible says something again and again and again, and then says it again, it is probably a pretty big deal.

4. The Bible was originally written in either Hebrew (Old Testament) or Greek (New Testament), and every translation in every other language has its own “agenda.”

There are over 500 different English translations or paraphrases of the Bible. Were I a better linguist and student of antiquity, even the translation I came up with be colored by my theological, philosophical, sociological and ideological biases. That’s why the “best” translations are done by teams of learned scholars who are in relatively constant dialogue during the translating process. I most consistently use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible because I respect the scholarship of its teams of translators. Still, even with my limited knowledge of the original languages, I find words and phrases that I would have most certainly translated differently. If you want an interesting discussion of biblical translations, visit Rev. Ken Collins’ website at http://www.kencollins.com/.

3. A “critical” approach to Bible reading doesn’t mean you’re “picking the Bible apart;” it means you’re being thoughtful and reflective and open to new learning about something you think you have always known.

“Critical” as in “developing a critique,” as in “reading for understanding,” or as in “reading to learn something new about the piece or about yourself or both. Not “critical” as in “you never fold the towels the way I want you to fold the towels.”

2. Not everything written, said, or taught about the Bible, even if it sells well, actually “gets it.”

Bookstores, libraries, universities are loaded with all sorts of things written about the Bible. And some of the most literate, well-written stuff misses all the important stuff. If it doesn’t take great notice of context, if it declares that every English word you read is inerrant, if it doesn’t invite you into further conversation with and exploration of the text, then the piece, no matter how attractive, well-written, or famously endorsed on the back cover, simply doesn’t get it.

1. What’s “holy” about the “Holy Bible” is not the book itself, but the God it reveals and remembers and teaches.

Enough said.

A. J. Jacobs and The Year of Living Biblically

2009-03-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

A.J. Jacobs is a funny and provocative writer. Much of his stuff has appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine and he's been a frequent contributor to Weekend Edition on NPR. In his book The Know-It All, Jacobs chronicled his determination to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. In The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, Jacobs, who grew up in a very secular family (he says he's Jewish in much the same way as The Olive Garden is Italian) tells the often funny, often compelling story of his effort to live an entire calendar year following the Bible as literally as possible. It is a great read! And he treats his subject matter with great respect and his quest to understand and follow the Bible as literally as possible is both hilarious and eye-opening.

How do we take these ancient texts, stories, songs, memories, prophecies seriously without declaring that they are completely historical accounts? How can we take the "goal" of certain ritual behaviors seriously without embracing the cultural practice? If I think it's ok to eat a well-cooked pork chop (there's a rule against that), or if I simply don't like to iron and therefore buy and wear mostly cotton shirts with just a bit of polyester thrown in so I don't have to (there's a rule against wearing clothes of mixed fabrics), what keeps me from ignoring the rule about "loving the LORD my God with all my heart and mind and soul and strength?"

And if we are free to pick and choose (obviously I think we are, at least to some extent) just what are our criteria for picking and choosing? My guess it has something to do with "loving the LORD my God with all my heart and mind and soul and strength and my neighbor as myself," but that's my guess. What's yours?

Here is a link to a brief (15 minutes or so) presentation Jacobs gave about his year of living biblically. Depending on your computer system, you may have to cut and paste the link into your browser. Watching and listening is well worth your time.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically.html

Getting Over Ourselves

2009-03-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

Thomas Moore (not Thomas "one- O" More, who wrote Utopia and had his head removed by King Henry VIII) is a former monk and a former psychology professor, and the author of more than a dozen well received books about the relationship between what most of us would call something like "psychological" or "emotional" wholeness or wellness and what most of us would call "spiritual" wholeness or wellness. In his 2002 book The Soul's Religion: Cultivating a Profoundly Spiritual Way of Life, he argues (pretty persuasively, I think) that if we can just get over ourselves (my phrase -- he would more likely say something like "breaking through the anxiety of the ego") we have an opportunity to approach something that could best be described by the word "holy."

To get the whole argument, you really should read the book, or anything else that he has written (some of which you can find at careofthesoul.net), but here are some "bullets" from The Soul's Religion to hopefully get our juices flowing:

...We become most who we are when we allow the spirit to dismember us, unsettling our plans and understandings, remaking us from our very foundations.

...one of the many definitions of"religion"..."a constructive means for being open to the influence of mystery."

...Avoiding life in the name of pure spirit may look like religion, but it is defense against God...God is to be found in the thick of life, or not at all.

...God is as much in the mess as in the beauty.

...Religion in general is the most intelligent and least rational way of making sense of life.

...I don't want my intuition to eclipse other kinds of intelligence, but to compliment them. In matters of meaning and values, though, I put more faith in the nonrational. Nonrational is not the same as irrational.

...You can't get it perfect every time, but you can certainly be intelligent and inspired simultaneously.

...Personally, I am wary of mass enthusiasms

(from The Soul's Religion: Cultivating a Profoundly Spiritual Way of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2002)

More about "the journey"

2009-02-26T08:14:00.000-08:00

I have a friend and colleague who serves our United Church of Christ on the national level who has expressed his discomfort with the images of "pilgrimage" and "journey." He says he thinks it gives a blank check of sorts to those who are afraid of commitment, those who think that setting measurable goals is too "limiting," and those who are simply uninterested in getting things done.
Sometimes (his argument would be "most times") when people talk about "my experience" or "my pilgrimage" or "my journey" people may well be saying "I'm in process," or "I'm not willing to make a commitment," or "I simply don't really want to think about these things in any depth or detail."

I almost completely disagree with him about this. Like Yvette Flunder argued in the video we watched the other night, I think God's intention for and relationship with us become clearer and deeper as we imagine God being with us "on the way," and as we relinquish our need to defend at all costs our long-held ideas about how things should be, and where things should go, and how things should ultimately turn out.

None of that means that our behavior, or thinking, or prayer is aimless, goal-less, willy-nilly or non-intentional. Quite the opposite is true. Long ago, in his little book Intimacy, Father Henri Nouwen shared this from one his college students that talks about a different kind of destination for the kind of journey we'll be talking about:

I hope that I will always be for each person what that person needs me to be.
I hope that each person's death diminishes me, but fear of my own will never diminish my life.
I hope that my love for those I like will never lessen my love for those whom I do not.
I hope that another person's love for me will never be a measure of my love for that other.
I hope that every person will accept me as I am, but that I never will.
I hope that I will always ask forgiveness from others, but will never need to be asked for my own.
I hope that I will always recognize my limitations, but that I will construct none.
I hope that loving will always be my goal, but that love will never be my idol.
I hope that every person will always have hope.

Getting Ready for Session One

2009-02-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

Here is something to jump-start our thinking for our first session next Tuesday...

The focus of this session is to try to think about a faithful life as more like a journey than a destination. The introduction to Living the Questions puts it this way:

People know that at its core, Christianity has something good to offer the human race. At the same time, many have a sense that they are alone in being a "thinking" Christian, and that "savaging" Christianity is a hopeless task...On any authentic spiritual journey, asking the hard questions is not only permitted, but necessary! What we learn along the way through difficulties and disequilibrium, mistakes and challenges, discoveries and unlearnings, is the the process is what's important. The unanswerable questions asked in the company of fellow seekers along the way become a central part of the process of the deepening quest, the broadening understanding, and the journey beyond our otherwise limited horizons. (from An Invitation to Journey, Living the Questions, (c) 2007)

Starting the Journey

2009-02-18T12:26:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the blog for our new faith exploration journey!

Here's how our group is going to work.

First, those of us in the area covenant together to meet face to face once a month, on the 4th Tuesday of each month, beginning on February 24, 2009. We'll start at 6:30 PM, and end at 8 PM. Each gathering will include a "check in" time to get us started, acquainted, and back in touch with one another, an "input time" that will focus mostly on a new "Living the Questions" series that we'll partner with some Bible study and other tools, and a "journaling" assignment designed to keep us engaged with our journey between our meeting times.

Second, we also covenant together to check in on this site at least weekly. The discussion here will be aimed at continuing and enhancing our conversation between meetings. I will post something (a biblical reflection, some ideas for further thought, or some other related item) at least once a week to attempt to keep the fires burning, and the rest of the group is free to comment, either in response to what's posted, or what we took away from our last meeting, or our reaction to what someone else has posted. Everyone is free, of course, to post nothing at all, but we have all agreed to check in at least once a week to see what others are thinking. At our meeting on the 24th, we'll show everyone how this will work.

There are a few folks from our church family who are at some distance but who want to be part of the conversation. Our intention is to invite them to share the experience with us as much as they can.

Looking forward to sharing this journey with you!

Rob