Faith, Hope, and Love

I found a passage by Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian of the 20th century, that I really liked. He said that nothing of any lasting significant value could be achieved by a person in a single life time. So we are always living and working in faith that what we do will matter enough that somebody else will continue it. There was a woman dedicated to helping convicts who were released from prison. She was the founder of an organization. She worked on it for many years. Then someone told her that she really need to turn it loose. To step away and to see if other people valued it enough to keep it going. Because if it was not important enough for others to continue it was not going to last past her working years. We have to work and live in faith.

Niebuhr said that nothing we do of moral significance makes sense within the immediate context of history. So we always have to act in hope. That is, in the midst of the swirling ambiguities of the immediate situation, the proper moral action may not always be visible or may not look like the right thing to do. I have never flown a plane but I have read that in the higher altitudes you have to trust your instruments because your senses cannot tell you where you are or what you need to do. There are moral questions where all your feelings and desires may not tell you what is right and so you have to make moral decision on principles and hope they are good. Faith, hope.

There is nothing of importance or value that we can do alone. One person can make a world of difference: Dr. King, Gandhi, Mandela, but none of them worked alone. They inspired and recruited others. They gave brought people together. They showed us how to work together. Nothing can be done alone and so in the end we have to work in love of others. Love is the equally valuing the contribution of others as much as we value what we do. So in order to achieve what is our heart's desire we have to work with others and so work in love.

Faith, hope and love. St. Paul was right. These three.

Free Will?

There is a line in one of John Pine's song, I heard it on a Jimmy Buffet, Encore,download, about this being a "big old goofy world." And that line came back to me as I read the headline in the newspaper, "College message to parents, Leave, Already." The article talked about the "hover parents," the Velcro parents, the super attentive parent, the ones who have to talk with the children three or four times a day. The colleges have begun to create special ways to separate the freshmen from their parents. It is a big old goofy world.

The old preacher I worked with right out of seminary told me that his parents gave him a suitcase and told him to pack what he wanted. Then he got on a train in his home town and headed off to college. That was all the attention he got. I remember in the 60's when we took my older sister to college. We drove down in the station wagon. We carried her stuff inside, and then we got back in the car and drove home.

When I took my sons to college, there was a three day orientation for students and parents, and I remember thinking why in the world do I need orientation, but they had these sessions about separation anxiety and homesickness on the part of the parents. At one college they began by playing the Beatles song about Leaving Home. I kept thinking I was missing something. I was happy they were in college. It had been something we were planning. It was the next step towards their independence. I don't think I ever called either one of my sons unless there was a specific need.

Apparently the parental desire to help children and to be involved in their lives is so strong that colleges are having to figure out ways to pry the parents out of the lives of the incoming freshmen.

It makes you have to stop and think about the amazing patience and power of God to step back and to allow us as human beings the freedom to live boldly or to mess up. A lot of the evil in the world is a result of our messing up, and yet God's patience continues to work to keep creation within boundaries and to allow us to make our choices. It is something apparently that parental love in many places is having a hard time doing. Colleges are saying that they think that parents need to step back and let their children develop their own identity, make their own decisions, to become independent people. The stepping back part God has done pretty well. Most of the time with God we would like to see God more involved. It is a big old goofy world.

Standing Firm amid the Shaking

There is a passage near the end of the book called Hebrews in the New Testament that talks about a "whole lot of shaking going on." It celebrates the shaking. It tells those who hear the letter to remember what the shaking means. "Yet once again I will shake not the earth alone, but the heavens also. These words "once again --and only once -- imply that the shaking of these created things means their removal, and then what is not shaken will remain. The kingdom we are given is unshakable. Let us therefore give thanks to God.... for God is a devouring fire."

These are comforting works to me. They encourage me not to worry too much about all the turmoil and the agitation that always seems to be going on. It means that I try not to "preserve and protect too much" The whole talk about "passing on things to future generations" and "maintaining things" of value sounds like a lot of frightened talk and a whole lot of lack of faith in the God of the Future. I would think that we might be a little more interested in the shaking so that we, in fact, might discover what will be left standing. It does not sound like it is my job to protect or hold on to those things that are unshakable. It is merely to let go of the things that are shaking and watch what falls.

The image of "God is a devouring fire" with visions of those forest fires in Southern California is not an image that would fit the modern talk about God. There is lots of talk about God refining us and purifying us. There is the laundry image of God washing us and making us clean. There is a judge that pronounces us innocence, a miscarriage of justice if there ever was one. There are other images but the image of God as a raging fire burning all that is around it is not a very loving and comforting image. We want the teddy bear God and the "best friend" God.

Both of these images forces us to acknowledge that there is a massive amount of stuff that is going to have to be cleared away and destroyed before we find ourselves in the presence of the Holy One.

Came to bring a Sword

There has been posted on Facebook an essay by a preacher who claims that part of the reason for ministers' leaving the ministry, for depression and emotional burn-out is the fact that most congregations want their pastors to preach positive, happy, entertaining sermons. That members move from church to church looking for a minister who will not challenge their convictions, will not preach against some of their habits, will confirm their prejudices and political positions and will do all this positive and happy stuff in an entertaining and pleasant way. The article was an editorial in one of the New York papers. But there have been plenty of other evidence that the "feel good, prosperity, self-centered full potential" movement has come to be the standard by which all preaching in local congregations is judged. I do not know a preacher who has not had a member comment that he would really like to leave church of Sunday morning feeling good, happy and positive. Congregations have been known to remove the Confession of Sin from their service because it made people feel bad.

It is no wonder that passages like "You must not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son's wife against her mother-in-law, and a man will find his enemies under his own roof."(Matthew 10:34-35) do not get preached very often. Passages like these seem to indicate that Jesus did not come to make us all feel happy, positive, and self-confident. The challenge is to force us to look at ourselves and make some very deep and difficult decisions. "Did you ever have to make up your mind? Pick up on one and let the other ones ride? None of them easy, none of them kind? Did you ever have to make up your mind?"

It is not possible to have it all. There is the parable about the man who sold all of his little pearls for the one pearl of great price. We are presented in the Good News a choice, a decision, a hard decision. Either to live in the hope that this is God's creation and world and God will bring it to fulfillment and bring his purposes about (and it is not something we can go out and accomplish)and to live as a citizen of that kingdom now even if it is not yet a reality or to live as if this is our one chance and we had better grab all the gusto now and to hell with everybody else and anything else.

To present that choice to a congregation who wants to think very little, feel very good, and to live contentedly in the culture they live in is a tremendous risk and a rare thing. So if you leave worship and feel angry and disturbed by what you heard, look up, rejoice and be glad, perhaps your redemption is drawing nigh.

Again

The other day it happened again. I went to a funeral and after the family and others had said all kinds of nice things about the woman, the minister got up and told about his conversations with the woman about death and eternity. He wanted to assure us that the woman was ready to meet her Lord and that she was comfortable in her faith in the resurrection. Then he asked "Are you?" The old "used the funeral to push evangelism" trick. This minister was much smoother at it than others I have heard, but rough or smooth it is manipulative and offensive to me. Just give thanks for the deceased, trust her to the goodness of God and go home. Those in attendance will get the question if they are ready for it.

Jesus says we are to be ready to give a defense for the faith that is in us, but he does not say we are to push it on those who do not ask us about it.

The last straw?

I think of myself as rather progressive. I mean around my town they think I am a radical liberal. I think I am a moderate Christian, but nevertheless, I was surprised by my own reaction. I have no problem with the projection of hymn words up on the wall in worship. I have seen organists take a computer onto the console and have the music scrolled for them to play on the computer. It saves carrying all those books. I am one who scripts all my public presentations. I am trying more and more to get free from just reading the script, but I have almost nothing in my leading of public gatherings unscripted. So I have no problem with people having their message written down.

But when the speaker carried his Apple Laptop into the podium, opened up and began to read his comments from his computer screen, something in me was displeased. I have no logic for it. I realize that it is totally inconsistent, but still something in me was not happy with that arrangement. You can tell me that most public speakers have computer tell a prompters at conventions and meetings. And I do not know what the difference for me is. But to have his head half hidden behind an Apple laptop just did not rub me the right way.

There is a part of me that hates being one of those who always opposes the new thing. And I cannot tell you what my problem with a speaker reading from his computer instead of a typed page, but I did not like it.

So we are all walking contradictions; partly truth and partly fiction. And I just saw myself in pieces again.

It is not that easy to do.

It is one of those things that we are all told we should be able to do, but it is one of the hardest things there is to do. When you make a mistake, we are told to step up and acknowledge it and apologize. When we are not able to do a job, we need to speak up so that those in charge can get someone who can do the job. When we hurt a person's feelings we are encourage to ask forgiveness. That social transaction is often urged, frequently spoken about, and often described as a straight forward doable thing.

But it has to be one of the hardest things that people are asked to do. There is a recent example of a person in a leadership role who has not fulfilled her duties for the first half of this year. The leader of the group has been trying for a month to get with her to talk about the failures and to encourage her to step aside. The hope was a resignation so that the group could get on with its business. The conversation has not taken place and the person has refused to communicate with the group leader. Phone calls, emails, facebook messages have all failed to get the person to talk to the group leader. There is no salary, no job on the line, there is only the difficulty for the person to admit the failure to perform. But apparently she just can not do it.

The small struggle of that person reminds me of why the whole act of confession, repentance and new direction so often talked about within the Christian community, frequently talked about as being so simple, so easy, so quick is really such a major, difficult and radical thing. To admit failure, to confess it, to change and act differently, is an incredible act of self-sacrifice and self-humbling. We ought to celebrate and applaud that kind of admission, acceptance and confess a lot more because it is a lot more difficult to do.