Both Sides

Considering how much time and attention people put into the products they market, I suspect that it was no accident.  The people who put together Sara Evans' cd called "Born to Fly" must have put them back to back intentionally.

There are two songs that speak volumes about the human heart. There comes up quickly on the album the song, "I could not ask for more."  "lying here with you, listening to the rain, smiling just to see the smile upon you face, these are the moments I thank God that I'm alive, I've found all I've waited for, and I could not ask for more. "  There other verses that repeat the same contentment and satisfaction with life. Life is good, and she is happy, and there is nothing more that is needed.

Until you get to the very next song which is "Something more."   "Just as soon as I get what I want I get unsatisfied. Good is good but could be better. I keep looking for something more.... I keep looking for something more, I always wonder what's on the other side of the number two door, I keep looking for something more."  A dissatisfaction with whatever you have, a restlessness for what you do not have.

Such is the constant condition of our lives. There are great moments when we thank God we are alive, and are content with life. But they do not last long because there is this other part of us that is always looking for something more.

They both speak to the reality of the spiritual dimension within us. That there are moments when we feel and know that we owe a word of gratitude and thanks to something or someone for what we have is more than we deserve. And there is that restlessness of the heart that Augustine and so many others suggest is a restlessness of the human heart to be filled with the presence and power of God.  There is a God size hole in the human life that makes us always discontent with all that is here on earth.

Oh, My, things fall apart!

On Easter Sunday in the New York Times the columnist Ross Douthat had a column entitled "Divided by God." He suggest that in the 1960's there was a religious core center that acted as one of the bonds that held society together. We were all primarily mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. Now the country as a whole is much more religiously fluid, with more church-switching, more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith. We are more and more a nation that is increasingly nondenominational and post-denominational. We are more and more "spiritual, but not religious." He calls us now a nation of heretics in which more people still want to claim the adjective Christian but want to give to that title their own definitions of the faith. Nobody can agree on what even the most basic definitions of what the Christian faith is all about. His conclusion is "The religious common ground has all but disappeared."

I suspect that is what has fueled so much of the fear and anxiety of the society today. There is a recognition that there is a dissolving of some of the bonds that held us together as a society, and people are very frightened about what might happen to us. There appears all these groups that are desperately fighting to put things back the way they were. Somebody says it all started to fall apart when they took prayer out of schools. Others say it started to crumble when gays came out of the closet. Some look at all the decisions that say government cannot support Christian calendar. No Christmas decorations in public places. No prayers that end in "Jesus' name."

When you add to this dissolving of the religious center, the dramatic changes in the economic world, where whole industries and manufacturing is now replaced with service industries, when you add the increasing number of other cultures and other ethnic groups coming into the country, the dramatic push of Jews and Muslims into places like the Bible Belt South, when you see what has been your whole way of life suddenly crumbling into pieces and you have no conception of what might replace it, you do become very frightened, very aggressive in trying to hold on to what you have, very angry at those who continue to push the programs and the trends that are threatening your little picture of life.

For me that is the great thing about the Christian faith. It has gone through these kinds of times before. The Early Church face many of the same kind of challenges. Augustine saw the collapse of the Roman Empire as a sad thing, and yet continued to believe that God would bring in a different and better way. The Reformation period saw very little religious unity and the complete reorganization of society, and yet Luther and Calvin were convince that all was in the hands of the great providence of God's love. I still think that at the core of the Christian faith is the unchanging conviction that things are never what they used to be, they are not what they are going to be, and thank God they are still in God's love. There is no fear in the changes because God is leading us always by His spirit into new trues and new ways. Rather than fight to preserve the old consensus which had a lot of problems and left out a lot of people, it would be a lot more faithful to try to help build a new social contract.

A Word of Encouragement

The Christian Century had a page story about "killer churches." They are the churches which have internal conflicts or dysfunctional members who chew up pastors and spit them out about every two years. Denominations and Bishops just keep sending preachers into the "lion's den."

On the other hand, there are constant articles on how congregations can help the minister in his work with them. There are good suggestions: pray for them, encourage them to take time away, volunteer for some of the work, and others.

But last Sunday there was a stream of people who came by and said the same thing and I was tremendously encouraged. They did not tell me what a great sermon I had. They did not say they liked the joke. What they talked about was the impact of the whole service. Almost to the person they talked about the whole worship experience. That was truly a blessing to me.

I would encourage members to consider encouraging your ministers by taking note and commenting on the whole service. I understand that for Protestant Christians the Sermon is the center point, but from my own experiences I know that much consideration goes into picking the hymns, that there may be hours spent composing or finding an appropriate confession of sin. The last Ernest Campbell who preached at Riverside Church in New York once said he spent a day on his pastoral prayers. Those of us who do write out our prayers put in as much time on the prayers per page as we do on the sermon.

Announcements need to be communicated to the congregation, but the fewer there are and the less time they take in the service the better the chance that the worship will be focused and appropriate.

If you want to give a word of encouragement to your pastor commend him on the other parts of the service as well as the sermon.

Fairness

I have been thinking a lot about how we look at life and how we evaluate it. Seems to me that we are constantly making a judgment about it on the basis of the present condition. Something like those jokes about the bar being only a foot wide, boo, ah, but 200 yards long. Yeah. We got a good health report, life is good. We got a bill from the IRS, life sucks.

Of course, there is really no way to know about how life is until the end. Because events keep happening which might change the verdict. But I also think that there is a kind of narrowness about our judgments. The woman who gets lung cancer was bitterly complaining that life is not fair because she had done none of the things that are associated with lung cancer. No smoking. No second hand smoke. She had eaten all the right foods to reduce your risk of cancer. Had not lived in an environment that was supposed to have cancer causing elements. Life was not fair. As if that was something horrible. It only happened to her.

But she was not thinking about the fact that she lived in a place where there was tremendous medical resources to help her. That there were women all over the world who had lung cancer who did not have access to treatment. That is not necessarily fair either. She certainly was not looking at the fact that she lived in a house that was twenty times larger than the homes of most of the people in the world. That was not fair either. But the unfairness of that is not a problem for her.

Life is not fair. But there are a whole lot more "unfairnesses" that are in our favor as citizens of the USA than there are against us. We do not really have much of a leg to stand on when we run into one of the unfairness and feel like complaining. Life is not fair and nobody should ever try to explain that it is. In fact the last great message of the Christian story is that God is unfair and unjust. His forgiveness does not seem to be given just to those who deserve it. Life is not fair. That CEO's get paid 400 times what a school teacher gets paid is not fair or just, but it is. But the school teacher gets paid way more than the field worker in Nepal. The field worker workers physically harder than either one of them. But what happen to Jesus was not fair on Friday and what happens to us in God's forgiveness is not fair either. But most of us do not complain about that.