Conservative Christians and Creationism

For many a conservative Christian, the road ahead is frightening and painful. For me, a life-long Christian and a Presbyterian pastor for 40 years, it's sad beyond description how the conservative churches in this country have failed. Rather than equipping their members to live well in the world - being the salt of the earth - they have vilified the world, creating one enemy after the other, offering, not enlightenment for their congregations, but shelter from the world - Plato's cave comes to mind. In recent years, home-schooling has provided an additional haven for them and their children.

Yet they learned an important lesson from liberals - social activism, and one of their pieces: take charge of school boards.

It's terribly important that liberals pay attention. Our track record on civil rights reminds me that organization is critical, and perhaps we've got to go to work and be sure that we have the right people on our school boards. We can write and talk all we want, but if we're not represented on our school boards, our voice is meaningless.

Hopefully, Mr. Harris and what is happening in Texas will energize liberals around the nation to take a close look at their school boards, and, if needed, throw some hats into the ring and seek election.

To read more about Mr. Harris and Connecticut, check out Michael Zimmerman's fine article in Huffington Post.

The Small Promises of God

Been thinking a lot about Genesis 15, since I preached from it Feb. 28.

Been thinking about the small promises of God - God promises Abram a bleak 400 years of slavery for his descendants, and though God will rescue them at the right time and bring them to the land, there's no promise here of bliss, but only of life.

Abram, at least, is promised a long life and a peaceable death.

God's promises are small, but real ... more real than all the bloated, artificial, self-seeking, egotistical, manipulative, fear-driven, promises of our world - buy this, get this, do this, be like this, and you will ... (fill in the blank).

Been also wondering why Christians have bloated the promises of God.

Pop christian music is particularly bloated ...

TV preachers are pretty bloated, too ... and hungry for our money.

How many good and decent preachers have stood in a pulpit, compelled (by what forces?) to offer bloated promises, "If only we give our life to Christ - then, by golly, our teeth will whiten, we'll lose weight, popularity issues will be resolved, employment and promotion will come our way, parking places will magically appear while our godless neighbors have to circle the block endlessly, like some bizarre scene out of Dante's Purgatory ... while others die in freeway crashes and airplane accidents, our guardian angel will shelter us. Our kids will grow up to be successful; we'll live in a beautiful home in the right part of town. We'll be free of illness, and if you should get sick (silly me!), Jesus will heal you. And, then, when we die, off to heaven we go. All we need to do is ...."
What is up with this?

Are not the real promises of God good enough?

Grace Around the Edges - The Rev. Dr. Frank Alton

The following message was given Sunday, January 31, 2010, at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Los Angeles, CA, by the pastor, the Rev. Dr. Frank Alton. It's one of the best messages I've read, and with Frank's permission, I'm sharing it with you today. Read and be blessed!

Grace around the edges
Jer. 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30

Don’t you hate it when people tell you an uncomfortable truth and you know they are right? I do. I’m reminded how much I hate it every time I go to my peer supervision group. Last Sunday I was in Oakland for one of four annual sessions of peer supervision. About a dozen leaders of multicultural institutions work with consultants to learn to be better leaders. I have come to love the group. But I remember how threatened I was during my first few years attending the group. From day one I was confronted by some of my blind spots in leadership. It was painful to have to face them. But I kept going back because I had learned the cost of quitting. You see, I’d experienced something similar when I took some acting classes right before I joined this group. I found the feedback there intolerable. I felt so vulnerable having to access scary parts of myself and put them on stage for all to see. I quit the acting classes before I had a breakthrough. I didn’t want that to happen again, so I hung in with peer supervision until the breakthrough.

Last week Elizabeth spoke to the first half of today’s Gospel lesson – Jesus’ sermon to those gathered in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. Jesus returned as a young adult to the village that helped raise him - not just his mother and brothers and sisters but also the neighbors who had kept him when his mother was sick, and the shopkeepers who had let him run errands for them, the old men who had leaned on their sticks in the heat of the day and told him stories that made his hair stand on end. He was their son too, so of course he went home to them, wanting to give them the best of what he had to offer. The people of Nazareth had heard reports of the great things Jesus did over in Capernaum. He gave them a dramatic message from Isaiah.

Today we read the second half of the story. Jesus pushed the sermon to the edge and got push back from the townspeople who literally pushed him to the edge of town. Jesus confronted his former neighbors with the uncomfortable truth that the least expected people often respond to God more than the expected ones and God in turn responds to them; and the most irritating truth of all: that everybody loses when we fail to love our enemy. Why is that? Well, the enemy loses because we block God’s work in their life; we lose because we miss the insight into God’s grace that we gain when we see God transform the very ones we call enemy. We turn people who are different from us into enemies because we don’t understand their behavior so we’re not sure we can control it. That makes us afraid – afraid of anyone who lives on or beyond the edge of our known world. I refer to the ones Jesus cited in Isaiah’s text - the poor, prisoners, the blind and (we could add) the mentally challenged, people from other cultures, immigrants, etc.

The people of Nazareth tried to get rid of the truth by killing the messenger. Can you blame them? Doesn’t it make you angry when someone tries to get you to reason with your enemy? Just when I’m really enjoying being angry with an enemy, someone comes along and suggests that my enemy is partly right. Oooh, that makes my blood boil. I want someone who says, “Yeah, and can you believe how they…?” That makes me feel better about my anger. I don’t want someone to say, “Well, have you looked at it from their side?” That is the last thing I want to hear when I’m angry.

And we do the same thing with God. As religious people we want God to oppose our enemies as much as we do. We want God to protect us from them rather than push us toward them. When we’re honest we admit that we’d rather have God bring vengeance on our enemies than reconcile us with them. That’s why the people of Nazareth were already a little edgy after Jesus’ reading of the Isaiah passage. They knew their Bibles, and they knew Jesus had left out a key phrase in the Isaiah scroll. The final verse didn’t end after, “to proclaim the year of God’s favor.” It went on to read, “And the day of vengeance of our God.” In their minds one could not come without the other. God’s favor for Israel was tied up with God’s vengeance on Israel’s enemies. Their enemies would finally get what’s coming to them. That’s what they waited for.

But Jesus’ vision went beyond Isaiah’s vision. Clearly Jesus had left out that final phrase intentionally. And he couldn’t just leave it at that. He had to make sure people understood the new level of inclusiveness that was central to his message. He understood that in order for “the year of God’s favor” to mean anything it had to include enemies as well as friends. So he went on to tell two stories from the people’s sacred history: the story of the nameless widow of Zarephath who was about to die of starvation, and the story of Naaman the Syrian general who was a leper and. Both were foreigners and both were healed or saved by prophets of Israel.

In the time of the prophet Elijah there was a famine in Israel and in the surrounding lands. During that time there were many poor, starving widows in Israel who needed food. Elijah was sent to the land of Sidon north of Israel where he met a widow who was down to her last scrap of food. She was going to prepare it for her son and herself before they died. Elijah told her not to be afraid and the three of them had enough meal and oil until the famine ended. The crowd in the synagogue started mumbling to each other: "Is he saying God likes Gentiles better than Jews?”

Jesus recalls another story, this one from the time of Elisha. There were many sick lepers in Israel during that time; they received no cure. Instead Elisha cured a leper named Naaman who happened to be the General of the army of one of Israel’s enemies. It turned out that Naaman’s wife had an Israeli slave girl who told her mistress that the prophet Elisha could heal her husband of his leprosy. The general told this to the king of Syria, who sent a letter to the king of Israel. When the king of Israel read the letter he tore his clothes because he feared that Syria was trying to provoke a war. Elisha intervened, healed Naaman & Naaman worshipped Israel’s God.

When people feel “on edge” the last thing they want to hear is a message that invites them to go closer to the edge. The people in Nazareth were living the same reality as the rest of Israel: they were a colony of Rome. Rome was their enemy. They were awaiting a Messiah who was going to liberate them from Rome. What kind of Messiah shows up & announces the day of the Lord's favor without also bringing the day of vengeance that was promised so long ago? When Jesus reminded them that during previous times of crisis, God seemed to favor their enemies they were incensed. One commentator writes, "Anger and violence are the last defense of those who are made to face the truth embedded in their own tradition." (Fred Craddock)
Rabbi Ed Friedman has written a lot about how families and societies mature. One life principle he has discovered is that “there is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.” (A Failure of Nerve, p. 202) Applied to families this means that families that are stuck show a low capacity for enduring pain. To the extent that we are motivated to get on with life, we seem to be able to tolerate more pain; in other words, our threshold for pain increases.

Jesus seems to have understood the same thing. He knew that he would provoke more pain by telling the stories he told. But he went ahead and told them because he knew that he had to raise people’s threshold for pain in order to help them mature beyond love for their own tribe to love for “the other.” We don't like being told that our enemies are God's friends. Yet no matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries. God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way. The big lie the world tells us is that the universe is connected by trade agreements, electronic banking, computer networks, shipping lanes, & the seeking of profit — nothing else. Whereas the truth of God is that all creation is one holy web of relationships, and gifts meant for all; creation vibrates with the pain of all its parts because its true destiny is joy.

Mature people understand that “we should expect to be challenged and upset by the truth, by the people sent to yank our chains and upset our equilibrium so we do not confuse our own ideas about God with God." (Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by another Way) In the scriptures of all the great religions, Christianity no exception, we see that God is defined precisely as “Other”, as what’s beyond imagination, as outside the realm of the familiar. This is what scripture means when it calls God “Holy”; “Holy”, not because of some moral quality but because of God’s otherness and difference from us. In the Bible, revelation from God is understood to come mostly through the stranger, the foreigner, the unexpected, the unfamiliar, in what’s different, in the surprise. That’s why the scriptures insist on the importance of welcoming strangers: since God is Other, strangers, among all others, are the most likely to be carrying God’s revelation.

This is a difficult message to hear today. We’re being overwhelmed by otherness. Nothing’s safe for long. More than any previous generation, we’re being stretched beyond what’s familiar. That is both painful and disorienting. It’s not easy to have our boundaries, values, and ideas under constant redefinition, especially when we believe in eternal truths. Yesterday at the Presbytery meeting we were discussing the deep chasm that exists among Presbyterians about what biblical truth is. One person stood up to tell us how many people had called her because they were confused by the different messages people found in the same Bible. She was calling us to have a unified message. The problem is we’re not there yet. We live in times where we experience the truth as muddy water. We can’t just clean up the water. That’s not going to happen soon. People need to be equipped to live with the muddiness. We’ve never grasped truth deeply enough. We have it in small pieces. That’s why we call it a mystery. The painful truth is that a lot of the pieces we still need to fill out those mysteries lie precisely in what’s foreign to us, in what’s other, strange, and different. That’s what Jesus was saying.

Rabbi Friedman notes that chronically anxious families will seek out those professionals who promise the most comfort, who help them avoid or reduce their pain as quickly as possible, not those who offer the most opportunities for maturation by encouraging them to endure their pain in order to move toward higher goals. The latter group is offering grace around the edges.

I believe that’s what President Obama tried to offer in his State of the Union address last week. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I was deeply inspired by it. The whole time I was listening I knew that the pundits would start tearing it apart as soon as it was finished. And I was not disappointed. Only one commentator I heard spoke positively about the address, and he got roundly criticized for saying that Obama sounded almost post-racist. Is it no longer appropriate for Presidents to try to inspire hope in the nation? Is it inherently naïve to hold out the challenge to live up to our best selves rather than our usual selves? Have we lowered our standards so far that we consider it naïve to continue to call for bipartisanship after a year of seeing it fail? I, for one, was inspired by the vision our President set forth, by the confessional tone of his acknowledgment of failure, and by his willingness to speak uncomfortable truth instead of sweeping it under the rug.

I was pleased that a series of email reflections that I received from colleagues who are pastors of other churches spoke in these tones in response to some short-term wins for progressives in the Presbytery yesterday. The “wins” were that a proposal to split the church along theological lines was rejected and Brian Symonds was advanced to candidacy on his way to ordination. My wise colleagues realize that it is never a true victory when one side wins a particular vote. Pastor after pastor committed to work with those who proposed the way to split the church without a divorce, in order to seek mutual understanding and unity with those who felt like they lost.

So the question I would like you to walk away with today is: Who is the hardest “other” for you to incorporate into your circle? It’s easy to criticize those who have trouble accepting the ones you easily accept. But it doesn’t help to focus on the one that other people call enemy. That only serves to make us feel self-righteous because we don’t consider that enemy an enemy. The only way Jesus’ invitation to love our enemy will heal us is if it taps into the pain of facing the one we call enemy. Let us pray for the power to do that.

A New Year and Mainline Hopes

Everything is up for grabs at the start of the 10th year of the 21st Century.

Not unlike the years surrounding Calvin's tumultuous and creative life. At any point in time, it was impossible to predict how the next ten years would unfold in Geneva. Yet Calvin wrote prodigiously and hopefully, anchored in God's sovereignty and with a passion for the person in the pew, so to speak.

As I begin the year and look back over my 40 years of ordained ministry, I turn to the future of mainline denominations with hope for our emergence from a "dark" period of time. Or was it so dark?

One man's darkness may be another man's light.

The last 40 years have seen us RECOVER from the supreme success we enjoyed after WW2 and during much of the 20th Century; we built our megachurches all across the landscape in American cities - talk about 24/7, with incredible programs, jammed worship services, gymnasiums and full-service ministries. Our pulpits were manned by princes, our seminaries were guided by theologians of immense ability, missions were expanding and especially after WW2, thousands of new congregations sprung up in the growing American suburbs, many of which became the second generation megachurch.

Yet in the midst of this, there remained small town and rural churches, places of energy and pastoral strength, but with huge shifts in American population, the disappearance of many of them was inevitable.

Our first generation of megachurches in the cities have clearly suffered huge transitions, and many of them are long gone, tough there are plenty of remarkable exceptions - e.g. Fourth Church in Chicago. And in our older suburbs, where so much of the post WW2 growth occurred, changing cultural patterns and the aging of the inner-ring suburbs have shrunk many of our second-generation megachurches, and many have closed their doors.

During this period of time, new forms of worship and music emerged, inaugurating what came to be known as the worship wars, and bloody they were, but out of the noise and smoke emerged a third generation of megachurches, beginning with Schuller's Chrystral Cathedral, a hybrid of sorts, of mainline and independent trajectories. Then came Willow Creek and Saddleback, and the rest of is history. All across America, the emergence of flagship megachurches - stripped down buildings, 24/7 small groups, high-tech worship, preaching that was both biblical and pastoral. Yet thousands of smaller congregations continued their work, though overshadowed by the media exposure of the large churches.

And there emerged, during this period of time, a truism: Conservative churches are growing and liberal churches are shrinking.

The problem with a truism is that it’s always a half-truth; it surely reflects a pattern, but some took that pattern as if it were the absolute and final blessing of God, and they became legends in their own time, if not their own minds. And the growth and creativity in other settings was ignored, if not ridiculed.

What with America's fascination with "leadership" and growth, folks forgot that church growth is largely the result of two factors: God's grace and location.

Stats in the last few years are beginning to reveal cracks in the truism; conservative churches are experiencing what the mainliners experienced 50 years as the tides turned. Their ranks are rife with debate, if not full-out rancor, with plenty of heresy trials underway, moral failures (nothing new there, but a reminder that everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time, even the superstars of the megachurch stages - pulpits, of course, no longer used), and slight declines in attendance – is this small change preface to the larger changes that occur inevitably in the shifting sands of time?

The megachurch and its success has stilted its creativity. Look at a 25-year old video and one shot last Sunday, and there is no difference: the clergy wear jeans and shirts pulled out, use high-tech tools, and preach pretty much the same message, and for many these days, the message has become a pop-psychology mix of personal triumphalism infused with Old Testament stories and a lot of Pauline materials.

The vaunted success of the "conservative" church is no longer a sure bet, and the churches that hung their heads in shame over their lack of or negligible growth are beginning to emerge from the shadows only to discover their worth, and that God is in their ranks as well, doing mighty things.

It's too early to tell, but the truism that propped up the pride of some (yes, it was pride, wasn't it?) and caused thousands of good pastors and fine congregations to hang their heads in shame and exhaustingly chase after every new program that came down the pike from the publishing houses or was touted at the megachurch teaching seminars, is clearly shifting. And sadly, thousands of congregants bought the truism and blamed their pastors, their denominations, their seminaries when the "thousands didn't show up,” even as the truism pitted enthusiastic pastors against their congregants, charging them with lack of vision and willingness.

But new images and ideas are emerging! The culture wars are subsiding. Mainline congregations, battered and bruised, are recovering, and books like "Christianity for the Rest of Us" by Diana Butler Bass are a part of the reconstitution of the mainline church.

Things are a-changin' ... God does that; lest we build our towers to the heavens, God comes down and confuses our language, spreading us out to the world.

All of us are learning, and perhaps we're learning how to bless one another, help one another. Megachurches are grappling with Barna-type studies that reveal embarrassing failures in their efforts to make disciples and nurture their own children into the faith.

Mainliners are catching their breath and regaining their confidence.

Sure, the church as I knew it when I was ordained at the First Presbyterian Church in Holland, Michigan, is long gone, but new energy is emerging all over the place, and we will find new ways of being Presbyterian, connectional and missional. Leaner, for sure; but not meaner. Humbler and contrite, as we discover God's grace anew.

I think the next ten years will be very good for the mainline churches, and the megachurches, too - as we learn how to humbly love one another and appreciate our respective visions and ministries.

After all, we’re all in this together … for the glory of God!

Peggy Noonan: Look Ahead Stoicism—and Optimism - WSJ.com

Peggy Noonan: Look Ahead Stoicism—and Optimism - WSJ.com

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Farewell

A friend from long ago has left the PCUSA for the EPC, along with his congregation.

I sent a note wishing him well, in the hope that he will find peace in the EPC and be able to serve the Christ he knows in a manner consistent with the how the Spirit has shaped his soul.

Needless to say, I'm saddened by his decision and sympathetic with all the emotions.

Perhaps like a divorce, there's the temptation on the part of the one leaving to eliminate ambiguity and doubt - to justify the leaving and ease the conscience by an over-simplification: that God is the cause of this and the leaving is right, and the one left behind had it coming.

And for the one left behind, the same process tempts: to vilify and damn.

All such efforts fail to grasp the complexity of a divorce - and both must eventually face their own frailties and faults. There are no innocents abroad; all alike are sinners, saved by grace.

But Paul and Barnabas are helpful - they reached an impasse beyond human management, and apparently even beyond that of God, and before they did further harm to one another, they decided to go their separate ways.

I've always been thankful that the Book of Acts records this tragic, and oh-so-human, event.

It happens! And continues to happen throughout history, in church and in marriage, and virtually every other form of human relationship - there is a tragic element in our souls. Our love for one another can never quite rise all that high, and we mostly thrive on like-loving-like.

Maybe that's the point of confession, but tragic or not, life goes on. Barnabas mostly disappears from the text; Paul proceeds to center-stage.

Was Paul right? Was Barnabas right?

Like most such questions, it's the wrong question to ask.

They had a deep and bitter disagreement about Mark. Barnabas wanted to forgive and include him; Paul couldn't forget Mark's desertion of them.

And so it goes.

I think it's time for us to admit our tragic character - that on the question of ordination for GLBT persons, we are unable to find a compromise: either we do, or we don't. There can be no half-way covenant on this one, or so it appears.

So, like Paul and Barnabas, we go our separate ways, before we do any more harm to one another, and who knows what life lies on the other side of the divide?

As much as my friend longs for the day when the debate is finished and he and his congregation can get on with the work of God as they see it, so I long for the day when I and the churches I've served can get on with our work, too - including the full acceptance and ordination of GLBT persons.

This issue has shaped most of my ministry (40 years this coming January) and has consumed enormous amounts of energy and money - all of which could have been spent more effectively on the ministries to which Jesus calls us.

I wish my friend well, and I'm sure he wishes the same for me.

It's time for us to get on with the work of Christ!

Until the next chapter, the next issue, the next whatever ... until Christ returns and brings the final healing for body and soul.

Ordaining Lisa Larges

San Francisco Presbytery votes to ordain Lisa Larges, though it'll be on hold for awhile because of legal wrangling.

I'm relieved to hear this, and hats off to SF and to Lisa.

Though for some in our ranks, this can mean nothing but sorrow.

Where and how shall we work it out?

That we can have unity only when we have diversity is the nature of unity. Without diversity, all we would have is uniformity, and uniformity requires very little of us.

Our Lord recognizes this when he admonishes us to love "our enemies" - a pivotal reminder that only love can create unity, with the subtext - that uniformity is no big deal in the kingdom of God. Even tax collectors and such enjoy that.

So, how do we love "our enemies."

I put the phrase in quotes, because I think there's a slight chance of some tongue-in-cheek here - those whom we might otherwise label as "enemy" may turn out to be something quite different when and if we open our hearts to them in love.

Love discovers things that suspicion and fear will never see.

Love is more than tolerance, then. Love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1).

It is our sinful instincts to huddle with like-minded. We all do it, and it's fun.

But at that point, as cozy as we might be, we're no different than the world and we can offer to the world nothing more than what the world already knows - the power of a gated community.

Our gift to the world, if, indeed, we have one, is more than our theology, but our way of life. Yes, our theology counts, but I think our way of life counts just as much, because faith comes by hearing, but it's our good works that enable someone to give glory to God (Matthew 5:16).

We've done rather well, I suppose, in the theology department, and putting all of our apples in that basket, we've forgotten the power of ethical witness, and, if anything, we've engaged in all the dirty back-biting and squabbling found in the local PTA or some condominium association (my apologies to both).

What does love mean?

And what does it mean for me to love my GLBT friends and to support their efforts for ordination?

And what does it mean for me to love a colleague who opposes that ordination with the same passion I muster for it's promotion?

Big questions ...

Any answers out there?