Love Believes All Things: A Christmas Sermon in Verse

The Ministry of Friendship

I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord. Phil. 4:2

The real work of the spiritual life is not done on mountaintops or monasteries, but on the road in the company of our friends.

The biographies of these two women, Eudias (“Prosperous Journey”) and Syntyche (“With Fate”), are lost to history, but Paul’s personal reference to them is one we all can identify with. Friends fall out – and friends forgive – and it is in that dance that we do most of the work of the spiritual life.

Jacquie and I just returned from a quick visit to our friends, Duane and Ida, in Rochester NY, and we are preparing for our friends, Jim and Cathy – and their dog, Henry – to stay with us for a few days before they return to Key West. Jim and Cathy have been friends for more than a decade and we actually shared a house with them for about 18 months. Duane and Ida have been friends for almost four decades and they have seen us grow from young parents starting new careers to grandparents thinking about retirement.

We have other folks we like and admire and whom we have known for years – even decades – and we connect with Christmas cards, and now, on Facebook, but these four friends seem to be in a different class entirely.

Last summer, I picked a passage from Lewis Smedes’ book, Caring and Commitment to be read in our worship services. He has this meditation on friendship:

Not even mutual admiration is, by itself, enough to keep a friendship alive that long. For one thing, we discover that even people we admire have feet of clay. The best of us is flawed. Our flaws show through eventually; we disappoint our friends, and sometimes their disappointment hurts enough to wound our friendship.

Besides even friends who admire each other a lot drift apart when one of them moves to another part of the country. If I do not see my friend for five years and do not stay in close touch, our friendship is likely to die of malnutrition.

I feel a good deal of melancholy when I think of it, but it is true that we cannot count on mutual admiration to make friendships last forever, any more than we can expect friendships to last because friends like each other or are useful to each other. If friendships like these do last a lifetime, it is probably because they are more than friendships of affection or usefulness, or admiration. Most likely, they are held together because the friends are committed to each other.

Commitment over the long haul is the key and there is a great difference between the people who have made those kinds of commitments and those who haven’t.

In this community where people live rooted for generations, I often do funerals for people who are mourned by friends they have had since grade school.

A real friendship takes time and energy. The actor, Peter Ustinov, once wrote: "Your friends are not always the people you like best, more likely they are the people that got there first."  He then goes on to say that we may meet people along the way whom we like better, but we decide we just can’t fit more friends into our busy lives.

The same can be said for spouses, of course.

Emily Dickenson put it this way:

The Soul selects her own Society--
Then--shuts the Door--
To her divine Majority--Present no more--

Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing--
At her low Gate--
Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat--

I've known her--from an ample nation--
Choose One--
Then--close the Valves of her attention--
Like Stone.

Israel pondered this mystery of choosing. God does it, too. Although God may be like Mrs. Baker, my wife’s 3rd grade teacher, who convinced every kid in her class that he or she was the teacher’s favorite.

The point is that we choose friends. We choose a spouse. We choose people with whom we will walk through life. We choose to stick with these people through all their ups and downs and, miracle of miracles, they choose to stick wth us.

All it takes is a lifetime of forgiving and being forgiven; a lifetime of searching for the truth about what makes that other person tick and a lifetime of letting go of that question. 

When Life doesn’t seem to be Worth Living

Since I’m not a professional counselor, I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I’ve talked to who were actively thinking about killing themselves. On the other hand, hardly a month goes by when I don’t have a serious conversation with someone who really can’t get very excited about being alive.

If Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “most people live lives of quiet desperation” is accurate, then that may explain why I have so many of these conversations.

It’s relatively easy to understand why some people may feel this way.

• They feel like they are serving a life sentence in a prison created by their disabilities.
• They maybe lonely – and not always because they didn’t reach out to people. It’s amazing how many people simply lose all their friends and relatives and are literally the “last leaf” on what was once a very fruitful tree.
• They may be in considerable physical or emotional pain.
• They may have failed at what they considered their most important life task so much that there is little hope of redeeming their lives.
• They may be facing death anyway, and getting it over with quickly may be more appealing than prolonging the process.

Some of these people may suffer from depression, but the truth is that the objective circumstances of many lives really are depressing.

Before you decide to jump off a bridge just from reading this, let me say that the good news is that many people have worked through these kinds of situations and have much to teach us.

One of them, believe it or not, was the Apostle Paul. He spent the last few months of his life – maybe up to two years – under house arrest in Rome. If the chronology of his letters goes the way most scholars think, Paul enjoyed many of the comforts of modern day politicians who are sent to federal prison for defrauding the public of millions of dollars. The difference is that Paul hadn’t done anything wrong and he had to pay for his incarceration out of his own pocket. But Paul enjoyed many visitors and a wide correspondence, at first.

The New Testament says nothing about Paul’s death, but tradition says that he was beheaded by order of the Emperor. At any rate, it looks like, as time ran out – so did Paul’s friends.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians was almost certainly written during this period of imprisonment – maybe when the executioner’s shadow was hanging over him. The tone of most of the letter is pretty joyful, but at the beginning the joy seems a little forced. Paul is experiencing all of the things I listed above that make people, if not suicidal, at least willing to consider the advantages of dying. This may be especially true of people who actually believe in life after death.

Paul says, “For me, living is Christ and dying is gain”.

He goes on to weigh – on the one hand – the advantages of dying “to be with Christ” or to hang on to life because he might still be of some use to someone out there, and he finally concludes that the latter is reason enough to go on living.

What I find helpful in this inner conflict that Paul shares with us is that it uncovers a conflict that many of us have at some time in our lives. It comes down to, “What am I living for?” or “What is the meaning of life in general – and of mine in particular?”

I just read a thoughtful column by Todd May, a professor of Philosophy that wrestles with this question from a secular standpoint.

Dr. May points out that the “meaning” secular society offers us generally boils down to whether we are good consumers or good investors. But, he isn’t sure that a eulogy that says,  “She always found the best bargains” or “He made a fistful of money” is really the description of a well-lived life.  He is not willing to say it’s God who gives life meaning – and I’m OK with that, because too often the pious answers are just intellectual and spiritual laziness.

He also recognizes that “meaningfulness” does not necessarily mean “happiness” or “fulfillment”.   It has to do with whether our life story, as we reflect on it, means anything. Charles Dickens probably comes closest to what he means by “meaningfulness” when he has David Copperfield begin his story by wondering, “Whether I shall be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by someone else.”

I’d like to suggest that Paul offers us a clue to meaningfulness that some of the wisest people I know – or know of – have also discovered for themselves.

A friend of mine once told me that his therapist had said, “If you can’t say ‘no’, you can’t say ‘yes’”.

Maybe this feeling that can sneak up on us – the question about whether life is worth living and whether we even want to go on – is a way to see that life is not non-negotiable. We are not sentenced to life. Paul certainly wasn’t. Whether you buy his conviction that there is a life after death – and that whatever comes next is good – or not, you have to admire his final “yes” to life. He is clearly considering the other alternative – and he rejects it – not because he is afraid to die, but because other people need him to live – even if they can’t communicate with him, they somehow need to know he is there and he is acting courageously. 

The Prince with the Big Nose and Personal Transformation

There is a “factoid” going around about American education. The factoid says, when the performance of American students is compared to the performance of students in other industrialized countries, they come out near the bottom in every area except . . . self-esteem. We lead the world in self-esteem. In other words, Americans may be dumber than dirt, but we feel good about ourselves.

Having spent a lot of time with people who were crippled by their low self-esteem, I have always felt that it doesn’t hurt to help people feel good about themselves. But I’ve recently begun to wonder if positive affirmation is really the path to living your best life now?

In the passage from Romans that I began commenting on last week, Paul talks about transformation. He even uses the word “metamorphosis” in the original Greek to emphasize the radical nature of this transformation, which begins with a “renewing of you mind” (Rom. 12:2).

In the “motivational literature” section of your library, the books will tell you that you need to think of yourself as capable of great things. That may be, but that’s not what Paul says. He says that real transformation comes when we “do not think more highly of ourselves than we ought, but to think with sober judgment”.

The Greek word, translated as “sober judgment” is often contrasted with Greek words for “crazy”. It implies a deeply sane and realistic approach to life. And when we adopt that approach to life, our lives really do change. But it isn’t always easy to get real – especially about ourselves.

This truth is illustrated by a French fairy tale. I invite you to leave this blog and read it yourself, but in case you don’t have time, here is the thumbnail version:

A king overcame the spell of an evil sorcerer in order to win the love of his future wife. The sorcerer then pronounced a curse on the king. The child that would be born to this couple, he said, “will never be happy until he discovers that his nose is too long.”

Well, as curses go, this beats being turned into a frog, or sleeping for 100 years after piercing your finger on a spindle. The king thought, “How would he not know his nose is too long? At the very least, I will tell him as soon as he is able to understand.”

Unfortunately the king died just before his son was born. In many ways, he was a beautiful child. He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s strong jaw, but he had a schnozzle that covered half his face. His mother who did not know of the curse because the sorcerer forced the king to keep it a secret, was taken aback, but her ladies-in-waiting assured her that it was simply a strong Roman nose. All the best people have large strong noses, and his mother began to see it as an asset rather than a liability.

Nevertheless, no one was admitted into the young Prince’s presence who did not have a very large nose – although even the largest didn’t come close to the Prince’s in size. Portraits of his ancestors were “touched up” to emphasize their noses. He was also pointedly taught by his instructors that Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and other heroes all had very large noses. Cleopatra was an object of desire because of her nose.

At the age of 21, the Prince’s mother commissioned paintings of all of the eligible princesses in the lands surrounding their own, so the Prince could make a suitable choice for a wife. The Prince immediately fell in love with one princess, who, although she had a small nose, struck him as the most beautiful one of all.

The Prince set off to win her hand, but as he passed the boundaries of his own country, people began to laugh and point and hold their noses as he passed. He noted that all of them appeared to be nasally challenged compared to the people in his own retinue, and he assumed that they were jealous.

When he arrived at the home of the princess with whom he had fallen in love, the king, her father, welcomed him. The Prince had the resume of a fine potential son-in-law, but the king was taken aback by the size of his nose. He decided to let his daughter make the decision and summoned her, but before she arrived at the throne room, the sorcerer who had cursed the Prince before he was born, kidnapped the Princess and ran off with her.

The king told the Prince that if he could rescue the Princess, he would give her to the Prince as his wife. The Prince rode off in pursuit – a pursuit that was slowed every time he had to stop and ask people if they had seen a sorcerer carrying a princess pass by. Every time he asked for help, people would laugh so hard they could not answer for several minutes. This cost the Prince valuable time and he fell further and further behind.

Finally, unable to follow the track any farther, the Prince was in despair. Right then he met a good fairy who had been a friend of his father’s and who was willing to help. She could not, she said, absolutely defeat the Sorcerer, but she could get the Princess out of his hands by encasing her in crystal. All the Prince needed to do was kiss her hand – the one part of her that was not in crystal and the Princess would be set free to marry him.

The Prince followed the Good Fairy’s directions and found the Princess – encased in crystal, with only one small hand sticking out. He raced to her and bent to kiss her hand, but he could not. His nose got in the way. Turn which ever way he might, the Prince’s lips could not touch the Princess’s hand.  Finally, the Prince said in exasperation, “My nose is too big.” At which point his nose was immediately changed to a normal size, he kissed the Princess’s hand and she was set free.

They not only lived happily ever after, but the Prince turned into an exceptionally fine king because he had such a realistic view of himself and his faults as well as his strengths.

We often don’t see our own “big noses” and how they are getting in our own way, partly because the people who love us try very hard to tell us that our noses really aren’t that big – and besides, a lot of good people have the same characteristic.

However, nothing is as transforming as seeing the truth about ourselves. It may be painful, but in the end, it can be amazingly freeing to own a fault, a habit, or a particular way of looking at life that has been getting in our way.

One way to do this is to listen closely to our “enemies” who, unlike our friends, are often only too happy to tell us the truth about ourselves. Or they may, indeed, be friends who love us enough and have too much integrity, to not tell us the truth. At any rate, this may be why Jesus tells us to love our enemies (Matt. 5:44). 

Get out of Jail Free

This is the first of a series of blogs on personal transformation. 

American Religion – especially American Protestantism - has a strain in it that runs from Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science in 1800's through people like Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller, and Joel Osteen – the latter preaches in a former pro basketball arena in Houston to some 16,000 people each Sunday - besides the ones watching on TV.

That kind of success is the point of this movement that says that God wants us all to be healthy and prosperous. One of the foundational scriptures for this movement is Romans 12.2:

 Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature (Common English Bible).

The "prosperity preachers" can say that the Bible makes it clear that we can change our lives just by thinking about it. 

The prosperity preachers have done us a favor. They have reminded us that we have both a mind and a body and that they interact with each other. They are  correcting the assumption that runs through all of Western Culture that divides mind and body. Indeed, the church that I grew up in taught me that all I had to do was get the right answers on the final Final Exam (aka “the Last Judgment”) and I was in – but woe unto me if I got one wrong.

Thanks, in part to these “positive thinkers” and “prosperity gospel” preachers – and a lot of scientific research – we are all beginning to see that our minds and our bodies really do effect each other for good or ill. If you want to be successful, you really can visualize that BMW, complete with blond in the front seat if you want, and a wallet full of enough cash to actually fill the tank – and you can get it. The power of the human mind to conceive something, then believe something and then achieve something is truly amazing.

This, in fact, is what my Hebrew professor thought the last of the Ten Commandments was about. You remember the one that says, “Thou shalt not covet . . .?”

Most English speakers are told that “covet” means something like “jealous” or “envious”. But the Hebrew word behind it describes this ability that we have to visualize getting something or achieving some kind of goal and then to plan and to make it happen. To catch a cultural wave - it is the SECRET!  .

My Hebrew professor said that the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” probably refers to kidnapping to sell someone into slavery. The Hebrew word that we translate as “steal” probably means something like “manstealing”. 

“Thou shalt not covet” probably comes closest to prohibiting stealing as we usually understand it. That is, it's OK to say, “I'm going to marry that girl!” unless she is already married to someone else. It's OK to decide that you want a BMW unless it's the one parked in your neighbor's garage. The Tenth Commandment recognizes this incredible power that we all have to get what we set our minds on getting. It simply says we can't set our minds on getting those things that belong to our neighbor.

Paul's talk about transformation through the renewing of our minds also recognizes this power. The word “transformed” is the Greek word “metamorphosis” - that's how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. And Paul says our lives can be transformed like that – with the renewing of our minds. “Renewing” translates a Greek word that could be used to describe rehabilitating an old house so that it looks like new.

But Paul isn't saying this so that we can be “successful”. Indeed, his attitude toward the preaching of the Prosperity Gospel preachers would be, “Why would you want to have the fastest wheelchair in the hospital?” “Why would you want to be the Dean of Death Row?” Why would you want to be the editor of the prison newspaper?” Why would you want to be the richest man in the graveyard?”

The point isn't to be the President of the penitentiary, it is to get out of jail. “Success” is all about being conformed to the values of this world. Transformation is about getting out of jail – free.

Next week: The Surprising thing that Transforms Us the Most.

Religion: Like a Rope in the Storm

Before powerful electric lights punched through the rural darkness, farmers in the Upper Midwest would often tie a rope between the house and the barn – especially if they knew a blizzard was coming. There were stories of men and women who had lost their way in whiteouts only to be found frozen a few feet from their front steps when the storm ended.

Our word “ligament” is related to the word “religion”; both of them come from a Latin root meaning “to tie” or “to bind”. So I think it’s legitimate to say that anything we use to keep our bearings in the blizzard of modern life’s challenges and distractions is like that rope the farmers used to follow from the barn to their home – and thus is our religion.

Let’s examine some of the ropes that we use – and that human beings have always used – to find their way through the blizzard of life:

Ritual: Rituals are usually associated with religion and complexity as illustrated by this video. But people who have just lost a loved one or gotten a cancer diagnosis can tell you that sometimes it’s the rituals that get them through the day. Brushing your teeth, feeding the cat, walking the dog, taking out the trash are humble reminders that life goes on. If the ritual is infused with deeper meaning, such as lighting the Sabbath candles or taking communion, people can find an even deeper meaning. Memories of holiday meals and kneeling beside a loved one at the altar rail come flooding back both to hurt  . . . and to heal. But ritual alone can also get in the way of real life, as anyone knows who has ever had to break the news to Mom that you are going to your fiancé’s house for Christmas so you won’t be joining the family for breakfast on Christmas morning.

Rules: Rules help us get back on the path or keep us from losing the way, in the first place. Theists and atheists all have made some decisions about what they will and won’t do even when no one is looking. All of us know the temptation to break those rules. Most of us, looking back, are glad for the times we were true to our sense of morality and are sorry for those times we weren’t. But rules alone can keep us from living a full life, as well. How do we relate to people who have different rules?  (You probably ran into this question the first time you slept over at a friend’s house).  How do we live with ourselves if we have broken our rules? If our rules are “sacred” how can we adapt them to new circumstances? If we chose our own rules, why would we follow them when the going gets tough? And as you can read in last week’s blog, we break our own rules even when there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to do so.

Reason: Since the 18^th century in Western culture, we have used reason as our rope. Indeed, all the others, including rules and rituals have to be “reasonable” if we are going to follow them. Reason works – usually – in the blizzard of life, if we really will sit down and think things through. No matter how much the advertisers and politicians and powerful interests want to snow us, 2 + 2 still equals 4.  And St. Augustine once said if your reading of the Bible says that 2+2 = 5, you need to read the Bible again. But, reason can quickly become rationalization. Few cultures were as “reasonable” as early 20^th century Germany, yet it produced World War II and the Holocaust. Reason can get us through the blizzard or it can be part of the snow.

Tradition: Traditions are contained in religious rituals, but especially in the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, traditions are also contained in sacred texts and the whole history of the interpretation of those texts in theological treatises, sermons, hymns, pious stories, ethical codes and even legal doctrines. Traditions inform rituals. Without a Haggadah, Passover is just a big dinner. Without a cross or an empty tomb, Easter is just a sugar rush. Without the Qur’an , Ramadan is one very long month of fasting. As Tevye will tell you, a fiddler on the roof is able to scrape out a happy tune without breaking his neck because tradition helps him keep his balance. But it is that same tradition that causes Tevye to disown his daughter, Chava, when she decides to marry a Gentile.

Spiritual Experience: Human beings have experiences that can be so vivid that they actually change the direction of their lives. These experiences may become like the bright electric lights that now guide farmers from the barn to the house in the middle of a blizzard. One things traditions do is to give people a way of understanding what has happened to them. Whether they refer back to Moses talking with the burning bush; Jesus in the wilderness; Muhammad in his cave; or the Buddha under the Bo tree, the “Wow! What just happened?” quality of these events can take on meaning and help a person understand that he or she isn’t crazy or alone. Rituals can sometimes be the contexts for such experiences. Isaiah is doing whatever priests do in the Temple when he has his vision. John Wesley was in church when he has his heart-warming experience. Unlike rules, rituals, or even reason and tradition, spiritual experiences never make people feel like crap. They may make people feel VERY humble, but that’s a lot different than feeling long-term shame, and despair, because no matter how humbling the experience may be, you also know – if you have such an experience – that the spiritual world exists in ways you never dreamed and that something or more likely, Someone, cares about you who is a whole lot bigger and more wonderful than you ever imagined.

The problem with spiritual experiences is that they too can be falsified. Any teenager who grew up in an evangelical culture knows the pressure to “be born again” and how much you need to be able to “testify” to meeting the Lord Jesus personally. There is also a very fine line sometimes between these experiences and mental illness.

My own “tradition” within the Christian tradition is Wesleyan and it is part of a larger Anglican tradition that tends to balance out all these “ropes”. The rituals, rules and texts of tradition get balanced against reason and direct spiritual experience. I can check those spiritual experiences against the tradition, and the rituals keep me going when the experiences run dry, and the rules keep me from going over the edge, until I break them, and then the spiritual experiences pull me, one more time, out of the pit of despair. It’s kind of crazy, but it’s my rope. 

Freedom from the Tyranny of Our Own Impulses

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  - Romans 7:15

“I’m going to eat fewer calories”, I say to myself.  Then my left hand reaches out for a chocolate chip cookie. “I’m going to build a better relationship with George”, I say to myself  as my  colleague calls with yet another complaint. Then I say exactly the wrong thing to him one more time.

If you have never done that, don’t bother reading any further. If you recognize yourself in Paul’s confession, maybe you would like to know more about overcoming it.  

It is one thing to say to ourselves, “Do the right thing!” It is another to actually do it. When Paul says in Romans 7 that he sees two laws working at cross-purposes in him, he is not saying that he literally hears voices telling him to do things he knows are wrong. He is not suffering from mental illness. He is talking about a problem that puzzles and frustrates the best of us at times.

Paul sees it as part of the human condition, but he does not see it as a necessary part of the human condition. That’s important, because it is easy for people like me to read this passage from Romans 7 and say, “well, I guess that’s the way I am.  There is nothing I can do about my impulses, so I may as well give in to them. God will forgive me, after all.”

That’s not what Paul is saying. He is like a doctor who looks at an  X-ray and  knows your leg is broken. He also knows how it can be healed. Paul is describing the brokenness of the human spirit when he talks about this inner conflict between what we want to do and we actually do. Sometimes we call it "addiction". Sometimes we experience it as rage or depression or obsession. Always we wonder, like Paul does, why we think and do stuff we know we shouldn't think and do.

Paul says that, if anything, our attempts to “fix” ourselves only seems to make things worse. That may be even more true when the “fix” is religious. The rules and regulations we make to control the “bad” parts of ourselves become even more oppressive if they have the force of the divine behind them. That turns the dysfunctional into "evil" and the inappropriate into "sin".

Paul claims that no one tried harder to follow those rules than he did and he found himself failing continually. So, at the end of his apparent cry of despair at his own actions he says, “Wretched man that I am! who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” (Romans 7:24 NRSV)

OK, great, the answer is Jesus. End of conversation. Roger, go and knock on someone else’s door. The Jesus of piety is way too small to explain what Paul is getting at in his letter to the Romans. The answer to this split and broken personality that many of us experience is not “come down to the front and give your life to Jesus” (although it sometimes IS the answer; I may get to that someday).

Before Paul gets to this description of human brokenness in chapter 7, he describes God's grace in chapter 6. He says grace doesn’t get hung up on judgments of “bad” and “good” because it has bigger fish to fry. It is all about healing the human personality.

Just as people with diseases of the breasts and of the genitals used to literally die of shame because they couldn’t believe that they could find a doctor who would look at those “shameful” parts of their body without prurience or disgust, so we literally die of shame spiritually because we can’t get past our own hang-ups and look at those parts of ourselves that seem to take over our best intentions at the worst possible moments, especially if we have grown up believing that only "bad" or "sinful" people have those kinds of thoughts and feelings and do those nasty things.

In Chapter 6, Paul is saying “Dr. Jesus” is more interested in healing us than judging us and we often encounter Him in the non-judgmental people who come our way. Most clergy and psychotherapists strive for it, but don’t always achieve it. When they do, however, they can have startling results if their deep acceptance of their patient and their passion for healing somehow transfers to the client. Actually this is true of non-professionals as well.

This is not to reduce the work of the Holy Spirit to psychotherapy. Actually, I’d argue that the mysterious power that works in and among and between human beings to help people pull out of addictions, depression, and self-destruction is the work of that which is expressed in the ancient word “hal” from which we derive the words “whole”, “holy”, and “health”.

When someone else accepts us just as we are, then we can begin to accept ourselves. Those who claim to have encountered Jesus as a spiritual being universally report that they feel deeply accepted just as they are. Others may feel accepted just as they are by at least one other person. Either way, people begin to experience “hal”: healing,  wholeness and even holiness.

I know of no better description of this experience than this letter written by a patient to Carl Jung:

“Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and, hand in hand with that, by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be – by doing all this, rare knowledge has come to me, and rare powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that, when we accept things, they overpower us in one way or another. Now that is not true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can define an attitude toward them. So now I intend playing the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow that are forever shifting, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to my idea!”  Gollancz, Victor, Man and God, Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, 1951 p. 236.

The End of the World!!!!!!!

For those who did not grow up in the Evangelical Christian subculture, last week's flurry over the prediction that the world would  end on May 21 just seemed like so much craziness.

For those of us who did grow up in that subculture, it was also craziness, but a craziness we recognized. This humorous 6 minute video  describes what it is like to grow up in a religion built more on the fear that God will have to destroy the world in order to "save" it  than on the faith that Christ is at work among us.   I, too, was worried that Jesus would come before I got to get married and have sex (it was always in that order in the old days). On the other hand, when I was facing an exam that I hadn't studied for, having Jesus bring the world to an end didn't seem like such a bad thing.

It's easy to laugh or shake our heads in disgust at those who believe that being a Christian means you get beamed up just when the world needs you the most, rather than, like Jesus, entering into the world's pain to heal it, but I did learn some beliefs and values from growing up with that apocalyptic expectation that have been very useful to me in handling life:

1. I have never bought into the idea that the current arrangement of power is permanent. Wall Street financiers, the NRA and the New York Yankees may appear invincible. But you never know, even the Cleveland Indians might emerge as the team to beat.
2. I have never been completely surprised by apocalyptic events. On August 11, 2001, most of my extended family stayed at the Marriott at the World Trade Center in New York City - a Saturday night - to celebrate our son Jim's wedding the next day at Hebrew Union College Chapel. I remember standing at the foot of those tall buildings looking up until the tops of the towers were lost in the fog and wondering what could possibly take such buildings down? I knew that they would have to come down someday. So, a month later, I can honestly say that I was shocked - deeply shocked - but not entirely surprised. 
3. I don't believe in Messiahs who don't bring the World-as-We-Know-It to an end. Like everyone else, I weigh the claims of politicians who want to be my President, Senator, Governor, State Rep or Mayor and I admit that I tend to vote for those who say they value peace and human rights and caring for the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. But if, after two and a half years, they haven't closed Guantanamo and the line at the Monday hot meals program at St. Andrews next door is longer than ever,  I am disappointed, but not disillusioned. I don't have illusions about human leaders. The Messiah is the Messiah and politicians, good as they are - and I've had several as parishioners and consider them some of the best people I know - are just people working in the realm of the possible, not creating an ideal. 
4. Even the end of the world is not the end of the world. Jesus said that there would be wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes and famines in various places, but the end is not yet.   I'm not sure what a nuclear holocaust would imply - or a direct hit from an asteroid. It would probably be the end of me - but not necessarily the end of everything. Humbling, but still hopeful. 
5. I may not use a pencil on my calendar, but I am aware that "tomorrow", 'next week", "next year" are myths.  So is the strategic plan that I'm helping our church draw up for 2015. The future is fundamentally unpredictable and it can go either way. Yes, terrorists have blown up skyscrapers, but the Iron Curtain fell down, too. I've often been surprised that other people actually believe that a graph that has headed up or down for months or years can't possibly change direction.
6. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, certainty is. Even most Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants were critical of Mr. Campbell's prediction. In their Bibles, like mine, Jesus says, "No one knows the day nor the hour, not even the Son, but only the Father."  
7. I may not equate Big Government or Big Business or Big Religion with the Antichrist, but I do have a healthy skepticism about the motives of institutions that have some kind of power over my life. I thought everyone did, but I've discovered through the years that there are people who really believe that their employer, their government, their local baseball team or Fox or MSNBC, really have their best interests at heart and they are ready to sacrifice their marriages, their children, their money or their reason to these entities and others who demand from us what only (you may enter the Deity of your choice, but I'll put "Christ" here) has a right to demand.

I really didn't appreciate growing up in a climate of fear in which a thunderstorm or a train whistle in the night might be interpreted as a signal that the world was coming to an end. On the other hand, I do appreciate the fact that when I look at my calendar  everything on it is under the caveat: "If God wills . . . "  and that all the tyrants and all the Masters of the Universe, will someday wind up like Ozymandias in that wonderful little poem by Shelley.

Steerage Voyage or Cruise Ship?

Coming up this Sunday are the words of Jesus, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places." (John 14:2 NRSV)



I know these words by heart because I say them so often at funerals. When I started preaching four decades ago, I used to always use the King James Version’s promise of “many mansions”, because the older members of the congregation always heard the old Revised Version’s “many rooms” as a downward revision of their expectations. “Many dwelling places” is a good translation and works for most people today.

So, how do we read this passage the week after the smartest man in the world has said that heaven is a “fairy tale”?

The way we have always read it - sociologically.

Even the wealthy will nod their heads and have a tear in their eyes when I read these words at a funeral. It is a comfort to believe that Grandpa, age 96, has been transferred to that Great Rest Home in the Sky and has his own - not just a room - a dwelling place. The Lord knows he doesn’t need a mansion anymore. Just a “dwelling place”  - a comfortable suite of rooms with a nice view of the heavenly golf course.

These words were not spoken to comfort the comfortable.

They were spoken to the poor, the battered, and the oppressed. They were spoken to people who saw their lives as a journey to a better place - not just where they could eat pie in the sky and wear their shoes all over God's heaven, but a place where God's will is done on earth and everyone has his or her daily bread. They were spoken to people who saw their life as a journey toward a destination rather than just a cruise.

In his review of The Liner: Retrospect and Renaissance, Timothy Larson says that even if we put a “2” next to the storied name of the Queen Mary, we aren’t recreating the huge ocean-going ferries that got people from New York to London  before airliners became the preferred mode of travel. There is a huge difference between a person who is traveling to a destination and a person who is cruising around for a week and then returning to the same port from which he embarked.

Unless you are 100% Native American (or one of the European or Singaporean readers of this blog), your ancestors came to this country on one of these vessels and I’ll bet most of them did not travel first-class. Passengers in steerage couldn’t wait for the journey to be over. They were looking for that first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, for the Ellis Island gateway to that City whose streets, they had heard whispered, were paved with gold.

So, it wasn’t as good as that, but it was better for most of them than what they had left behind. Those that came in the holds of slave ships didn’t find a Promised Land, but they heard tales about that Land and about how God had called slaves to come to that Land where everyone has shoes and there are no more tears.

If our lives are as comfortable as a cruise ship; if we can get off and tour the markets and see the children begging in the streets and then return to the ship for the buffet and the after-dinner show and if we can stroll back to our comfortable cabin and say to one another, “What could be better than this?” We won’t be able to hear what Jesus is really saying when he says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Some Christians believe those words mean that people have to join their private club to get to heaven. They really mean that the Way to Life and the Truth about Life is that there isn’t any real life on board the cruise ship, because the cruise ship isn’t going anywhere. The Way to Life is to get on the liner that is heading toward that place where justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing spring, and where, even for the poor, there is no more crying, no more pain and no more death.

Room 101 and the Empty Tomb

Even people who never read George Orwell’s 1984, know about Big Brother. He isn’t a person –he’s a system of oppression that uses two-way TV’s to watch you while you watch them in the kitchen, in the living room, at work in and in the bedroom.

Toward the end of the novel the main character, Winston Smith, is held by Big Brother’s minions for treason. Winston is told that he must betray the person he loves most in this world. This love is the one true thing that Winston has experienced. It is his one claim to integrity. So he bravely refuses.

Big Brother’s enforcers tell him that, if he refuses, he will have to go to Room 101.

What is in Room 101? Winston asks.

The thing you hate and fear the most.

Winston is shoved into Room 101 and finds it filled with rats. He was bitten by a rat as a young child.  He has nightmares about rats. Soon he is screaming that he will do anything to escape the rats – including betraying the person he loves.

What is in your personal Room 101? What do you fear the most? My guess is that you can’t even answer that question because most of us are afraid to even think about what scares us the most. As Orwell knew, what we fear the most isn’t the loss of a loved one. What we fear the most are those things that keep us from loving our loved ones. What we fear the most are the kinds of things we would try to avoid even if it meant betraying  the people we love the most.

In the Passion story, Peter betrays Jesus, the person he loves the most,  because he is afraid of being crucified.

I am afraid of being poor - of being drained of my financial and emotional resources - so I keep my distance from people whom I might love, but for whom I don’t want to be responsible.

Jesus tells me that if I care for the sick, the imprisoned, the homeless, the hungry, I will be doing it for Him. (Matthew 25) The trouble is that  I’m not going to risk getting sick or imprisoned or becoming homeless or hungry.

In every relationship that I have that has become estranged I am convinced that the easiest way to fix it is for the other person to change. However, there are those who tell me that it might work if I changed. That would mean facing aspects of my personality that I spend a tremendous amount of time and energy covering up - stuff I'm so ashamed of that I can't even admit that I do those things.

So Room 101 for me contains poverty, suffering, sickness, failure, shame, and death. That’s exactly what the tomb contained. Jesus suffered pain and failure and poverty and shame and loneliness and above all, he was dead. His tomb is Room 101.

The good news of Easter is that the tomb is empty. Jesus has opened it up and nothing is in there. The Risen Christ and all angels say to us: Fear not!

Squirrels Bite Dog To Death

You may have missed this BBC News item about a pack of squirrels attacking a dog in a Russian park. I wonder if this may be linked to the protests and revolutions against dictators in the Middle East? It’s beginning to feel like the whole world is turning upside down.  Those in power are having the tables turned on them, whether their names are Hosni, Muammar or Fido.

Like most Americans, I haven’t felt too much sympathy for Hosni, Muammar and their brethren in other Middle Eastern capitals. But now, I’m not so sure.  

I just read an article about “The Church as Wikipedia”.  Every day, 13 percent of the world’s Internet users consult Wikipedia. We all know that its information can be a little shaky at times, but if we know something is wrong, all we have to do is register and edit the article ourselves.  That’s the way Wikipedia works. Nupedia preceded Wikipedia. Anyone could submit an article for Nupedia, but it had to be vetted by a team of experts. It usually took a very long time for a new article to appear.  Nupedia is no more.

Let’s compare that to a common problem we have in churches. Our youth sing a hymn at a youth conference that is deeply meaningful to them. They come back to their home church and ask their pastor if we can sing that hymn in church next Sunday right after the gospel reading. 

The pastor patiently explains that we can’t sing that hymn because it’s not in our hymnal and it can’t come after the gospel because the organist needs to get to the piano to accompany the choir. And besides, all our hymns for the next 3 months have been chosen already. So, sorry kids; but, hey, keep bringing in those ideas! We want our worship to appeal to all ages, you know!

What if we had an open-source church where anyone and everyone had a say in how things were done and there was no "authority" who had to approve everything? 

A question like that makes me feel more empathy for Hosni, Muammar and especially, Fido.

I’m all for change as long as it doesn’t threaten my authority (and privileges) as a white, male (very important credentials – try getting anything done without them) fully ordained, graduate school accredited senior pastor. And, I admit, I’m getting a little nervous about the way the world is going. 

The church has a great record of holding on to things like the earth-centered universe, the six-day creation of the world, slavery, racism, homophobia, and male privilege. But anyone who has been in a main-line Protestant church for the past few decades knows that we have completely caved in on the first three and there’s been a lot of nibbling around the edges of the rest.

Our only hope is that we can keep our church members from reading their Bibles and from understanding the real meaning of Palm Sunday.  Luckily, our churches are quite attached to the cute parade of kids waving Palm Branches as they march in during the first hymn. Seminary professors have decided that Palm Sunday should become Good Friday, because so many folks use Good Friday to pick up jellybeans for their Easter baskets.

Therefore, no one points out that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was a parody of power.  Pilate would have ridden his warhorse in the same gate (or perhaps was, at that very moment, riding in a different gate) surrounded by soldiers carrying spears. The warhorse, by the way, was the battle tank of the ancient world. They may have been playing martial music. And just as Muammar can still get supporters to cheer for him, I suppose Pilate could, too, especially among those who had an investment in things staying exactly the same.

So Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the back of a little donkey, maybe a jenny with a foal running along beside trying to get a drink of milk (Matt. 21:1-6).  Instead of armor and spears, his poor followers hold up palm fronds and blades of grass. Instead of the “Aves!” for military victors, they cry “Hosanna” and “Hallelujah” - roughly translated as "hurray for God". And what does Jesus do when he arrives in town? He goes to church and turns everything upside down.

 Thankfully, it looks like most people don’t have a clue about what that means, but I worry that squirrels attacking a dog may be a sign that anything can happen.

God and Earthquakes

On November 1, 1755 at about 9:40 AM an earthquake centered near the Azores destroyed about 80% of the buildings in Lisbon,  Portugal.  November 1 is All Saints Day, so most of Lisbon's population was in church when the quake hit. No one knows exactly how many people died in the quake and the subsequent Tsunami and fires, but 20% of the population is a likely estimate.  

Portugal was fortunate that it had a superior Prime Minister, who led the rebuilding of the capital and also wrote to every priest in every town surrounding Lisbon asking at what time the quake hit there and for their descriptions of the strength of the quake. The replies laid out on a map began the science of seismology. And modern seismologists studying these letters estimate that the quake may have been close in power to the one that hit Japan last week.  

Some say the Lisbon quake was also the beginning of Europe's skepticism about God. How could God, at least a good God, allow such a thing to happen to people precisely when they were praying to Him?  

The problem of evil is really two problems: Natural Evil or "Acts of God", as the insurance companies like to call it,  and Human Evil. Both call up the question Jesus asked from the cross, "My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?" .  

A  Rabbi who was an expert on the Holocaust once said that we should not say anything about God that we could not say in the presence of burning children.  I might add that words that can't be uttered on a beach filled with bodies that washed up to shore or in a city bombed by its own nation's planes probably isn't adequate either.  

That leaves  us preachers speechless.  

 In a sense, the Bible is speechless, too.  The one person in the Bible who really engages in a dialogue with God on the problem of evil is Job and he finally says, 

"No one can oppose you, because you have the power to do what you want. You asked why I talk so much when I know so little. I have talked about things that are far beyond my understanding".  (Job 42:2-3; Contemporary English Version (CEV),  © 1995 by American Bible Society)  

Instead of words, the Bible gives us two images. One is in the first chapter of the Bible, in which God creates light and order and life out of chaos. Creation is always taking place on the edge of chaos. There is nothing deader than complete stability.  God appears to work when people and history and geology and biology are in a state of change (Isn't that true in your own life?). So, green shoots begin to appear in the first rain after a forest fire; babies arrive in the delivery room down the street from the funeral home; and democracy (sometimes) rises from the dust of tyranny.  

The other answer is in the image of the empty tomb. The empty tomb is a sign that the most unchangeable thing in the world -  death - is changeable. Not even graves will last forever; to say nothing of dictatorships or continents.  Not everyone will buy that - or certainly not understand it literally.  But, frankly, if death does get the last word, then those who wield the power of death will reign forever and ever.

It's a little scary to live in a changing world. One expert points out that there were large earthquakes around the Pacific a couple of years before the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. If, like me, you have loved ones on the West Coast, you don't want to hear that. But, what's the alternative? A world that is as unchanging as the grave. And, as I just said, the Easter story begins with a tomb that won't stay closed.  

As one of the great preachers of the 20th century once said:  

"The resurrection of Jesus Christ tells all who will listen that they are alive in a place that is itself alive, open at both ends, with the winds of eternity blowing through it." (Scherer, Paul. Love is a Spendthrift. Harper, New York 1961. p. 88)