Drifting with God

The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32)

In yesterday's post (here), I returned to a point that I've made before, namely that by the grace of God and under the guidance of the Spirit we are generally, if slowly and painfully, headed in the direction of the Kingdom of God, that future time of peace, compassion, and love.  One problem with this point of view is the role of God in our "drift toward the Kingdom."  There is a very fine line to walk here, and it is all too easy to stray into the territory that lies on either side of the line.  On the one side, there is the traditional view of God reinforced by Newtonian physics that God is control of everything.  On the other, lies the also long-cherished viewpoint that God set things in motion and has left it to us to sort things out.  God as the all-powerful manager is one choice, and God as the absentee landlord is the other.

Each of these choices is a flawed one.  God as manager necessarily is the root cause of evil.  The absentee God doesn't really even fit the bill of divinity, and one can argue is equally as responsible for evil, if through negligence.  The struggle is, of course, to discover a third way of seeing God's place in the scheme of things in light of our Judeo-Christian trust in a loving creator God.  For Christians, the "Christ-event" strongly reinforces our sense that God is "in essence" loving and just.  God is the forgiving, embracing father in the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).  It is repugnant to Christian sensibilities to associate the God we see in Christ with the origins and potency of evil.  It is also all but impossible for faithful Christians, as well as Jews, to believe that God leaves us to our own devices.  The whole point of the Bible is that God is involved in human affairs, intimately so.

There is a tension, then, inherent in our understanding of God in light of the scriptures.  God's love is in tension with God's power.

But that isn't quite right.  What is in tension is our human perceptions of God's love and God's power.  For the most part, our doctrines concerning the deity are but mirrors reflecting our own struggles, joys, fears, and understanding.  God as constructed by our theologians is a human construction however close to the biblical texts.  The substance that lies beneath these human constructions is a double intuition.  We look at the universe and we experience an awe that intuitively tells us that there is "something" that is the source of this amazingly constructed reality we inhabit.  There is a Creator—could be a force, could be a divine being, could be a "something" beyond our ken.  But there is "something" that is the source of all of this.  That's the first intuition.  It is intellectual at heart.

The second intuition is "spiritual".  It has to do with our human spirit.  We sense, we intuit a "something" that is profoundly present in our lives.  It inspires us to pray, to worship, to doubt, and to discover trust.  This Presence works in, through, and with us in a way that neither violates our freedom or leaves us to our own devices.  Indeed, it remains obscure apparently so that we are free to do all of the good and the evil things we do while remaining an intuited presence that grounds us in the good, sets us in the direction of the Kingdom, and gives us a push now and again along the way.

In the end, there is no one satisfactory answer to any of this, which is why we are people of faith.  We can't put matters of the spirit or the Spirit under a microscope and resolve these questions by the application of the scientific method.  But we can and must remain self-critical of our struggle to make sense of That which is not commonsensical.

Slowly Drifting Toward the Kingdom

It is, admittedly, a painfully slow drift toward a more peaceful world, but there is evidence (as I've written before here) that the human race is evolving in that direction.  It is not clear if it is actually another piece of that evidence or not, but a recent opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune entitled, "American football industry is on its deathbed," by John Kass has certainly gotten its share of attention. Kass argues that a combination of factors related to the inherent violence of the sport will lead to its extinction.  One factor is the many lawsuits against schools, colleges, and professional teams.  Former players and their families are suing for the physical pain and hurt caused by the game.  The other main factor is parents.  Kass argues that more and more parents are keeping their kids out of football because they know how dangerous it is for them.  He writes, "In cultural terms, parents who send their 10-year-olds to play football might as well hold up signs saying they'd like to give their children cigarettes and whiskey."  Lawsuits will "overwhelm" the game even as there are fewer and fewer young athletes taking part in it.

OK, maybe Kass is overstating the case.  In the absence of a good deal of research, who is to say?  But, if you do a Google search on the question, "Is football in decline?", you come up with a good deal of opinions out there supporting the idea that it is either in decline or about to change radically because of the findings of medical science about the physical consequences involved in playing football. One of the first hits on my search list was, "The Coming Decline of American Football," which makes some of the same points Kass makes.

The Kingdom is not going to come in some great cataclysmic event, whatever the rapture crowd believes.  It is coming, in fact, through the quiet work of the Spirit working through many ways and means in concert with humanity itself.  As this debate over American rules football suggests, we no longer value violence in the way our race once did, or at least we no longer value it to the degree we once did.  And in spite of the headlines, nations and individuals are less given to resorting to violence to get what we want.  We have a long, long, very long way to go, but slowly we are drifting toward the Kingdom.  Amen.

The New Same Old Wild & Woolly Western Frontier

When I was a small boy, sitting on the leading edge of the baby boom, television helped to shape my imagination, which 60 years ago meant especially the heroes of TV westerns.  There was Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the "Lone Ranger,"  and then a little later the iconic TV series, "Gunsmoke."  In these an countless other TV and movie westerns, young boys saw exemplified what it meant to be a real American man—tough and fair, caring and quick on the draw, law-abiding and above the law when the law wasn't fair, sociable and a rugged individualist—good with a gun but a reluctant warrior at best.  These cowboy heroes "did their own thing," but they did it for the good of frontier society and for true justice, which was something usually distinguished from "the law."

So, recently, I became aware of a new TV series on Syfy, the supposedly science fiction network that shows more silliness than science fiction but occasionally does justice to its name.  The series is "Defiance," which is set in a time in the near future when the Earth has been invaded by a host of alien species and accidentally terraformed in ways that have transformed it into a new,  largely dangerous world.  The hero is Joshua Nolan, the "Chief Lawkeeper" of the multi-racial enclave of Defiance, which stands on what used to be St. Louis.  The Gateway Arch, battered but still standing, is the visual icon of the new civilization Defiance is seeking to build out of the chaos of the post Pale Wars wreck of a world Earth has become.  Josh Nolan is the new Matt Dillion, tougher and more cynical, but still dedicated to justice.  Strip away the high tech, space and aliens veneer, and what we have is a trendy remake of the same old cowboy and western genre.  Indeed, both the new-fangled scifi drama and the old-fashioned cowboy shoot-'em-up dramas seem to draw on far older visions of chivalry, which takes us back to the frontiers of post-Roman, Dark Ages Europe.

One thing that stands out in all of this is how secular, how un-religious, these modern traditions in myth-making are.  Religion sometimes appears but mostly as a sideshow.  The heroes never pray.  They don't lead singing in church. The role of the church as one of the chief civilizing agencies of the real frontier is seldom portrayed, and in more recent TV series religion is more often represented negatively than positively.  Certain social values are portrayed, including the importance of weaponry as the only thing that keeps the bad guys at bay, but spiritual values are seldom to be seen. (One notable exception is the Hallmark Channel TV movie series, "Love Comes Softly," which is a Christian counter-cultural reworking of the cowboy genre).

Our race has a long way to go yet, and one can only pray that the Earth survives the trip we are on.  And we can only pray that eventually the values that define the Kingdom will find their way into the center of our thinking and acting because if they don't it is not likely that the Earth will survive us or us the progressive destruction of the Earth.  Matt Dillion and Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise are fine as far as they go, but it is not far enough. Their way is not the way of wisdom nor of the future we are created to discover.  It is not the way of the Kingdom.

Pray for Your Enemies - How Come?

"But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you..." (Matthew 5:44, NRSV)

In the larger passage in which this injunction is contained, Matthew 5:43-48, Jesus taught his disciples that they must pray for their enemies in order to gain the reward of becoming something like God.  He did not explain exactly what that means, which leaves us with some "running room" in our understanding and application of the command itself.

So, why love and pray for our enemies?  Basically, as long as our enemies remain our enemies they own us.  They have our attention and dominate our emotional state.  They infect us with feelings of disgust, anger, hatred, and fear.  They have an internal power over us that can easily turn us into what we think they are.  To allow someone to be our enemy is to give them great power over us.  The same is true even for those that we merely don't like or irritate us—to the extent that we let them get to us, to that extent they own us.

Praying for our enemies, if done with integrity, takes the poison out of us and allows us to be at peace with ourselves.  It also opens the door to the possibility of being at peace with them as well—depending on factors that we don't have control over.  The scales fall from our eyes.  Our hearts are less encased in ugly feelings.  As God is love, so we drift in the direction of love.  As God lies at the heart of peace, so we sink slowly into the realm of peace.  We enable the prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." Yes, this is easier said than done, but it remains doable, and our own peace of mind depends on our being able to love and pray for our enemies.  And, no, we don't have to become naive or overlook seriously bad behaviors, it is just that we no longer let all of that own us and destroy our own sense of inner peace.

And "enemies" here need not mean individuals.  It can also mean an addiction, for example, which for millions and millions of people is their greatest enemy.  It can mean the poisons implanted in us by an abusive relationship, which itself is over.  It can mean our prejudices against another race or class of people.

Learning to See

Acts 3:1-10 tells the story of Peter, John, and a crippled beggar.  The two apostles were going into the Temple in Jerusalem to pray when they came across the beggar sitting at one of the temple gates.  He saw them and hoped for some spare change.  They saw him and saw the possibility of a miracle.  The axial moment in the story is in verses 4 and 5 (NRSV): "Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, 'Look at us.' And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them."

Peter and John looked at the beggar closely.  Before Jesus and before the resurrection, what they likely would have been was a pitiful excuse for a human being that God was punishing for his sins.  They would not have seen the person but instead a category, "sinner".  After Jesus and after the resurrection, they saw the person.  It did not matter that this person saw in them a potential source of gain, a "mark" as it were.  In fact, that is a key point of the story.  Peter and John could see things that the beggar did not see, and when they healed him they gave him back more than a new set of feet and legs to walk on. They also gave him a new set of eyes to see with.

That is one of the things that the gracious gift of faith in our Christian tradition gives to the the faithful.  It instills in them a new way of seeing.  In the U.S., then, the person of faith sees a person of color and sees the person.  She sees a Muslim and sees the person.  He sees a woman and sees the person.  We see individuals who practice "alternative life styles" and see the individual.  In the eyes of his society, the beggar was not worthy of healing, forgiveness, or anything more than the passing glance needed to put a coin in his hand.  Peter and John, however, saw him in the light of Jesus and the resurrection.  They saw him.  Amen.

The Bible: What it Says & What it Teaches

It is part of our human nature that we tend to see what we are trained to see and want to see.  Just as our eyes tend not to see things that don't move, so our minds tend to overlook what is not obvious to our training and inclinations.  Thus, the Bible is filled with passages that support the role of good works in faith, but Protestant eyes have long been trained to read past them and, instead, notce those passages that support the idea of grace alone.  The works-righteousness passages lie hidden in the weeds while the grace alone ones stand out like lone trees on the prairie.

Failing to see the implications of a passage or a verse in the Bible because it is obscured by the reader's values, attitudes, training, and beliefs is nothing new.  Titus 2 provides an example.  Reading from N. T. Wright's translation of the New Testament, The Kingdom New Testament, Titus 2:5 instructs young wives to be submissive to their husbands, and 2:9 enjoins slaves to be submissive to their masters.  Since ancient times down to the near-present Christians lived in hierarchical and patriarchal societies, and they took note of the obvious message found in these two verses.  They undergirded hierarchical and patriarchal values and attitudes. In antebellum America, slave owners used this and other biblical passages to justify chattel slavery and all of the actions they took to suppress resistance to it.  Even today, some Christian groups intentionally treat women as second-class members because of what "the Bible says."

Meanwhile hidden away in the weeds is Titus 2:11, which Wright translates as stating, "God's saving grace, you see, appeared for all people."  For women as well as men.  For slaves as well as masters.  God's saving grace was already egalitarian in the age of the early church, and it has remained so in the face of the values, attitudes, and behaviors of societies that reject the very idea of social equality.  The Bible "says" women should submit to men and (black) slaves to their (white) masters, but it also says that Christ's sacrifice and God's love is equally for women and slaves.  The disturbing questions raised by verse 11 lays there in the weeds waiting patiently to be noticed—namely, if God in Christ sees no essential difference between slaves and masters, women and men, then how can we as humans claim that one is greater than the other?  How can we in all good conscience place them in marital or economic bondage?  If we then look to the example of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who persistently defied social conventions for the sake of the folks at the margins of society—if we look to his example, we find ourselves rejecting the "commonsense" attitudes, values, and behaviors of societies that turns people into second-class categories—woman, slave, colored, gay, not us.

Suddenly, we notice that there is more to the prairie than that lone tree that seems so obvious.  In the grass, there is another kind of life.  We discover, amazingly, that the Bible "says" women and slaves are second-class types of people, but it teaches that they are not—not in the eyes of God.

The Biology of the Golden Rule

Back in February, Prof. Paul J. Zak, Claremont Graduate University, posted an article entitled, "Why it pays to be nice," in which he discusses research he has done into the neurochemical oxytocin (ox-ee-TOE-sin).  He has found that when we do something nice for another person oxytocin is released in the brain of that person, which causes her or him to have a pleasant experience and want to return the kind deed. He calls this process, "a mechanism for reciprocating nice with nice" and observes that it, "is exactly what highly social creatures like us need to remain part of our social groups." He claims to have verified these findings repeatedly and argues that best business practices rely on it; he concludes that, "Even more than simply money, my experiments show that those who release the most oxytocin are more satisfied with their lives. Why? They have better relationships of all types: romantic, friendships, families, and they even share more money with strangers in our laboratory tasks. We simply like being around people who treat us well (and don't brag about it). A little dose of nice goes a long way."

Zak also writes, "Think about how revolutionary this finding is: we have a chemical in our brains that is released when someone – even a stranger – treats us well, and this chemical motivates us to treat them well in return. This is the biological basis for the Golden Rule: do to others what you would like done in return. The Golden Rule exists in every culture on the planet, so it must have deep biological roots."

Oxytocin is not proof that there is no God because those of us who believe that evolution itself is divinely driven can easily argue that the presence and role of this chemical reflects God's creative will for us as a race.  Oxytocin also does not prove there is a God for the skeptic can just as easily point out that it is produced as part of an entirely natural process and is what one would expect to find in a social animal.  My point is a different one and a recurring theme of this blog: the findings of science frequently "make sense" to those who believe in a Creator God who initiated and remains present in cosmic and Terran ("earthly") evolutionary processes.  We don't look to science to provide "evidences" of God, but at the same time in the findings of science we find described a universe and a natural world compatible with the One that is at once Beyond and Present.  Amen.

More Than a Metaphor

For Paul, the Resurrection was no metaphor; it was the power of God.  And when he spoke of Jesus as raised from the dead, he meant Jesus alive and at large in the world not as some shimmering ideal of human goodness or the achieving power of hopeful thought but as the very power of life itself.

Frederick Buechner,

Listening to Your Life, p.  100

Sweet Caroline - Remembering

On April 16th, stadiums around major league baseball played the theme song of Fenway Park, Boston, "Sweet Caroline," in memory of those who died, were injured, and are impacted by the bombing of the Boston Marathon.  They played it to stand with the people of Boston and to make the point that when one part of our nation hurts, we all hurt.  In that spirit, below, is Neil Diamonds classic rendition of Sweet Caroline.  Amen.

A Measure of Church Health - Seven

In a recent posting entitled, "Eight Diagnostic Questions for a Church's Health," Dr. Chuck Lawless of the Billy Graham School of Missions & Evangelism lays down what amounts to a set of standards by which churches can measure themselves.  If they measure up to the standards, they are healthy. Sixth on his list of questions is:

"Does the church have a strategic plan for future growth? One reason the Enemy so readily succeeds in attacking churches is because he is often a better planner (Eph. 6:11) than most church leaders are. He methodically and strategically attacks the church while most churches operate from Sunday to Sunday. We are not prepared for his attacks. In the same way, most churches would not be prepared for significant growth if God were to grant it. What would the church do if God sent a genuine awakening? Does the church have a vision around which their plans-including facility, staffing, and programming-are developed?"

Once again, I don't want to get lost in a contrarian critique of Lawless' dualistic spiritual warfare perspective.  There is a more important point here, and we should read "through" the devil stuff to it.  The question for mainline churches is whether or not they pursue an agenda that will lead to the "genuine awakening" envisioned by Lawless.  I've already made the point in previous postings in this series that mainline churches need to work on such things as faith-development and faith-sharing.  We need to balance our enviable record in social outreach with an increased emphasis on teaching, practicing, and sharing spiritually—the life of faith.  We need to promote a healthy, vital small group life in our churches, one that will encourage members to share in deeper relationships built on their shared faith in Christ.  Thus, the pressing questions for us are these: are working on developing a deeper faith in our congregation?  Are we prepared for the possibility that the Spirit might superintend efforts in that direction?  Do we have a vision for growing in faith?  Are we pursuing it?  Are we ready for it to make a difference in the life of the church?  These are the questions for us today.