Question to measure your faith journey

Evaluation is always good. Every program and activity needs to have a means by which it determines its progress. Usually in the church the two major criteria are money and members. Did the giving increase and did you have more members seem to be the easiest and most common criteria for measuring the faithful journey of a church.

But I would like to suggest five other questions which I think are more appropriate to ask about our life together in faith.

a. Has your attendance at church, has the worship where you go, have the materials you have been using for your devotional life, pushed you deeper into the mystery, the wonder and the majesty of God? Has that journey into the deeper wonder, amazement and holiness of God created as many questions for you as it has given you answers. God is the one in the Scripture that so often asks tough questions instead of giving simple answers. In Genesis God asks,"Where is your brother?" He asks Job, " Where were you when I created Leviathan?" The deeper we move into the love, forgiveness and mercy of God, the more our categories of justice and fairness disappear, leaving only questions.

b. Has you faithfulness in religious devotion given you a new freedom from all the petty little rules that life keeps trying to make us follow. "A man's indifference to minor matter is the measure of his real faith in Jesus Christ as the Savior." The more you find your life sustained and rooted in the wonder of Jesus Christ the less concerned and bound you are to all the little gods of life, like race, family, country, economics, and power. Jesus had a remarkable freedom from all of the laws the Sadducees and Pharisees kept want to bind him with. He met with a Samaritan woman at mid-day, he enjoyed children, he ate lunch with Zaccheus; he ate with sinners, he let a prostitute bath his feet with perfume. Our growth in Christ ought to be moving us more and more into a freedom from all other little petty gods and their rules

c. Has your participation in worship and your own devotional life expanded the circle of your compassion? If you are more and more coming closer and closer to God, are you sharing more and more of his love for all creation? Are you praying now for more people than you prayed for five years ago? If the love of God is moving through you more and more, are you sharing his love for more and more of his creation?

d. As that love of God for all creation begins to dominate your life and your vision of life, do you find yourself a little more able to consider the possibility that some of those "other people" just may be able to be forgiven by God? As you get carried along by the power of the Holy Spirit are you finding more tolerance for other people? more able to think of excuses and explanations for their sins in the same way you think of them for you own sins?

e. The last is a money question, but it is not whether your church has more, but whether or not you have discovered that you are more generous with what you have now that you were four years ago? Do you trust more that God's blessings will continue and that you can be more responsive and more generous with what you have? As we become rooted in the greatness of God, we become confident that God will bring fresh blessings new every morning and we don't have to hoard or grab more blessings than we need. There is no dying with the most toys in the Kingdom of God. A living and vibrant faith should be helping to make us more generous towards those who need our help.

These are some questions I would use to tell if the places I have been going and then things I have been doing as a disciple are really helping me move in the direction of God's love.

Whose Calendar?

Tomorrow will be Father's Day in the USA. For most children it presents a problem because they have no idea what to get their father, and they probably don't have enough money to get anything he wants that he does not have. I always felt badly about birthdays and Father's Day because I had already bought myself anything I wanted that was under $25.00. I also knew that they did not have even that much usually to buy me something. So Father's Day was a problem. It is a problem for lots of other people as well because some of us fathers are not very nice people, and some children do not even get to know their fathers.

But Father's Day, Mother's Day, 4th of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Valentine Day, and the list goes on are a problem for the faithful preacher and his congregation. How much do you let the civil calendar influence the life and teachings of the Christian community? How much authority do you give to the civil, commercial, and popular culture to determine the agenda of the worship experience of the People of God?

One of the very first meetings of a Commission on Ministry I attended as a new member of Presbytery was a real shocker to me. An older minister made the statement that he never found preaching very hard. He summarized it quickly: New Years - talk about new beginnings, Valentine Day - love, Spring - new life; Mother's Day - Mothers; Father's day - Fathers, 4th of July - loyalty; Labor Day - hard work. And he said you just have to say nice things about all of them and people love it.

And somehow the fact that he had never even come close to anything in the Bible or dealt with the question of sin, the necessity of forgiveness, the need for grace, the mystery of the Divine, the reality of doubt, the questions of why is there something and not nothing, what is the meaning of life, where do we go when we die, and the list goes on. He was happy. It was easy. The Congregation, he said, was happy, so what was the problem?

It was the adoption of the liturgical calendar and the lectionary in Presbyterian circles to try to combat the older gentleman's preaching program. It was an effort to substitute the calendar of the Church for the commercial calendar of the culture. So it is interesting in some places to hear and read the cry coming from younger preachers that we need to get away from the lectionary and become "more relevant" in our preaching. Which for them means more along the lines of the cultural calendar.

I can only speak for myself, but the congregation and the preacher who spends time talking about the dates on the secular calendar is a congregation and preacher I would stay away from. We are called to be in the world, but not of it. What better way to be "not of it" than to have our own agenda and our own calendar which moves to a whole different time frame?

NO EVIDENCE FOR IT

As I understand the Republican economy philosophy which they practiced under Reagan and Bush and would like to keep or increase, the idea is that you cut taxes on corporations and businesses, that would give them more profits and they would invest in new technology, they would hire new people, they would produce more products. You cut taxes on capital gains, dividends and the income of the wealth so that they would have more to invest in businesses, they would have more to buy more big ticket items, and they would hire more people to help them. That is how I have understood the philosophy. Give the rich people who are supposed to be the wiser and more productive members of society, as judged by their success in making money, and they will stimulate the economy.

The problems is that I do not see any evidence that it has worked as designed. How can you cut taxes to corporations when the 400 largest corporations in this country do not currently pay taxes? How can you claim that cutting taxes to businesses will create more jobs

when we were losing 700,000 jobs a month when President Bush left office? How can you can claim that these large corporations and businesses will benefit the country when the major financial institutions nearly destroyed the country with their speculations?

There is even less evidence that tax cuts for the very rich are invested in society and by that investment enrich the community. Trickle down was supposed to mean that the rich would get tax cuts and they would invest and the rest of society would be lifted up by the increased economic activity. The evidence, recognized by all sides, is that in the last ten to twenty years the rich have simply gotten richer, obtained and kept more and more of the wealth and the middle and lower classes have gotten poorer. The middle class is disappearing. We seem to be moving towards a 1 or 2 percent of the populations having 98% of the wealth of thee country and the 98% of the people living with 2% of the wealth. The way trickle down economy has always been presented this is not supposed to be the results.

The evidence does not seem to support the idea that making the rich richer will make the poor richer as well. It is a failed idea. It is an idea that is not consistent with the philosophy of democracy with its concern for all people to share the benefits equally. It is an economic theory that is contrary to most religious traditions of concern for all people and especially the needy and the poor. It is certainly not fulfilling the call for a shared economic sacrifice in these rough times. As a people we can do better than this.