The Relentless God

We've been working through a five-part sermon series on the Five Points of Calvinism.   (Now there's a hot topic for a California audience!!)   Actually, it's been a really intriguing experience, and the theater's been pin-drop quiet through much of the series, except for the time when the theater accidentally started to play their canned music just as I was picking up steam on Limited Atonement.   But, I digress.

Here's what I love about this whole area: it gives us the chance to see the Relentless God who pursues his people even before they start seeking him.   Our "personal relationships" with Jesus Christ are not deals we've brokered after careful comparison shopping in the spiritual version of QVC, they are love stories in which a jilted God turns around and seeks out the very loved ones who'd just hurt him.

It all goes back to Eden, really.   That haunting call echoing across God's freshly-ruined creation:  "Adam--where are you!?"   Now Adam and Eve ultimately had to choose whether to accept the grace that God was offering, but I find it stunning to realize that our whole history of salvation was based on God turning around first.

He's relentless, and that's one of the things I love most about the Reformed faith.

How about you?  Have you ever been pursued by that relentless God?

Stupid! (Old Fart on Fixie)

I'm preaching a sermon series on the five points of Calvinism.  It's called "A Big God".  The point being that even though we have free will and ultimately we decide to choose or reject God's grace for us, we still need God far more than we realize we do.  In fact we even need him to help us to be able to choose him.  Furthermore we simply need Him to be involved in every area of our lives, because without him...well who knows what we might do?

Some folks don't like a God who's that big or that involved.  He seems controlling.  They'd rather make their own decisions and deal with their own problems.

Well, I intended to write this blog post about that series.  But I'm going to tell you a little story instead.

Our oldest son John is into fixed gear bicycles.  Fixies, they call them.  Basically they're regular road bikes without special gears or the ability to coast.  Or brakes.  (The no-brakes thing is a key element in this story.)  Because John wouldn't be riding his bike this summer he let me store it in our garage.  Or ride it.

Riding a fixed gear bicycle is a lot different than riding a regular bike.  You never realize how handy it is to coast until you can't.  You swing a leg over the bike and push off and those pedals start going.  If you get your feet situated right you pedal right along with them.  But if you don't, you've got nothing to stand on:  those pedals just kind of push you around until you get settled on the seat or the top bar or whatever part of the bike you land on while you're trying to match your feet to the pedals.

Riding a fixie isn't hard once you get going.  At least on straight roads where there are no cars or other obstacles to avoid.  You just ride straight and steady and when you want to slow down you start resisting the pedals a little bit, and then a little bit more and then finally you slow down enough that you can step off the thing.   However it's a lot harder if you have to stop suddenly.   The really good fixie riders know how to lock up the back wheel into a really cool skid and they stop that way.  Then they go buy a new tire, I guess.  But I'm not a really good fixie rider, so I can't skid.  I just kind of slow down gradually.   Riders like me need to be really careful.   I also made one little change to John's bike:  I took his toe clips off.  As scary as it was to be riding a bike that kept trying to take charge, the last thing I wanted was to have my feet strapped to those pedals.  I'd probably hurt myself, I figured.

I commute by bike a lot, so I took John's fixie to my office.  On the way I worked really hard to resist the pedals at every intersection.  By the time I got to work my legs felt like jelly, but I think I looked really cool.  I mean, how many 40-something pastors ride fixies to work?

There's a big overpass right by our office.  My commute takes me over it, and then back again on my way home.    My mind was pretty absorbed as I left my office that day, probably thinking about deep spiritual things or the emails I hadn't returned.  As my thoughts whirled, my legs churned up and over that overpass, heading down the other side.  I'd ridden that climb so often I could do it without thinking.

Which was exactly what I did.  Shortly after cresting the incline the high-pressure racing tires started rolling faster and faster.   That was usually the place where I squeezed the brakes on my commuter bike. Right about then that must have I started thinking again, as my brain suddenly realized that I had no brakes.  I immediately started doing the resist-the-pedals thing, but after a couple strokes the pedals started going too fast for my feet to keep up with them.

(Right about now in the story my son starts doing the dad thing:  "Oh no...I can't believe you...What were you thinking?"  Just ignore him and listen to the story.)

Apparently those toe clips really serve a purpose on a fixie.  I guess they make it a lot easier to slow a bike down because you can resist all the way around the pedal stroke, both pulling and pushing.   If you don't have toe clips pretty quickly the pedals get a away from your feet and it's darn near impossible to get them back.

I had an idea:  I would lift my feet and let the pedals slap the bottom of them as they spun by.   Picture several people rapidly hitting the bottoms of your feet with golf clubs while you're riding a zip line.  Didn't really work for me either.  And the unnerving thing was that I was still gaining speed.

One little detail I didn't tell you is that there is a traffic light right at the bottom of this downhill.  In fact, it never really occurred to me how stupid of a place that was for an intersection, but there it was.  The street was packed with cars from all directions.  And there comes this pastor flying down the hill with his feet lifted up off the pedals.  I swerved out into the lane and easily kept up with all the cars.  This should be interesting, I figured.

I'm not much of a gambler, but I quickly figured the chances of catching that light on a green were about 50-50.  I feared what might happen if I crashed into a truck or a tree or something.  But what I feared even more was crumpling the gorgeous new frame my son had bought when he built the bike last winter.  As I continued to accelerate I began to brainstorm just what I might do if the light turned red and I was faced with a delivery truck crossing my path.  Try though I might, I really couldn't come up with any good ideas.

And then I saw it.  I've seen a lot of beautiful sights in my life:  sunsets, mountain ranges, rocky coasts--but I don't think I've ever seen something as beautiful as that green traffic light shining over my intersection from hell.  It's viridescent sphere of hope boldly marking the path that I could take as I careened past the other more-conventional commuters.

In a moment it was done.  I'd reached level ground, the pedals slowed and eventually accepted my feet again and my pulse slowed to something a little closer to normal.   It was like waking from a bad dream.

Like I told you, originally I was going to write a blog post about why I find such comfort in the Reformed understand of a sovereign God who manages even mundane events in our universe.  There are those who bristle at the idea of a controlling God who would try to micro-manage the world we live in.   They'd prefer to think that they could do just fine on their own.   We're not stupid, they would insist.

I would beg to differ.

Shooting Straight: What Christians Don't Seem to Get About Prop. 8

Once again, we’ve got Prop 8 back in the news.  For those of you who aren’t from our fair state of California Prop 8 refers to a ballot initiative and constitutional amendment limiting marriage to the traditional 1 man/1 woman format.   This week we had one more step in the continuing trench warfare as activists on each side continue to slug it out. 

I’m not quick to jump on a soap-box to make pronouncements on political issues.   As a Jesus-following pastor, frankly, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.  But at the same time, I cringe as much as anyone else when I see the collateral damage that we continue to inflict on each other in the name of personal rights.  Here are four things I wish we in the church would take more seriously.

1.  Just because the Bible speaks to an issue doesn’t mean that we should make a law to enforce it.    I’ve heard my red-state brethren frequently echo the claim that we’re “A Christian Nation”.  News flash--we aren’t.  As I recall from Civics class, we’re not supposed to have a government endorsed religious perspective.  What we ARE supposed to be is a place where Christians can be Christians without legal recriminations while their Muslim neighbors can be Muslims with the same freedom.   If the Muslims in my community tried to pass an initiative outlawing pork, I’d rightly complain. 

2. Just because a personal belief comes from my religious perspective doesn’t make it politically irrelevant.

For a variety of strange reasons we have become very religio-phobic in our country, perhaps especially here in the Golden State.  OK, I made that word up, but I’m referring to our paranoia about expressing and defending the validity of our spiritual points of view.  Somehow we’ve developed this underlying assumption that our spiritual perspectives are like digestive problems:  ideally people shouldn’t have them, but if they do they ought to at least avoid talking about them in polite company.

The fact is, everyone has a spiritual worldview.  Even the people who claim that we shouldn’t have spiritual worldviews are themselves expressing their particular view on the Bigger Picture of our existence.  The thing that matters is what we do with those perspectives. My devout Muslim friends have strong convictions about right and wrong that are not shared by my devout Mormon friends, who in turn have moral convictions that contrast markedly from the convictions that I hold dear.   While it’d be offensive if one of us tried to pressure the others into adopting our worldview, it’d also seem pretty weird if we tried to pretend that we didn’t really care about these things.  We do.

And following from that, there’s nothing wrong with any of us voting on issues based on what we believe to be true.  Last I checked democracy was supposed to be about people voting based on their personal convictions.   If a lot of Muslims want to speak strongly on a pork-rights issue, they should be able to do that.  And if they get out-voted, they shouldn’t complain about that.  After all, they’ve had their say.  It’s a democracy.  And so if a lot of folks have religious viewpoints that lead to convictions about whether marriage should include same-gender couples, there’s nothing wrong with them voting their conscience. 

3. The Christian church needs to recognize that it has VERY little credibility in the gay rights issue, and that’s a problem.

Here’s an ugly truth.  One of the reasons why the Christian church has such a hard time putting its foot down when it comes to gay rights issues is that that foot seems to be perforated with bullet holes.  When it comes to gay rights we’ve shot ourselves in the foot so often that we’ve got very little appendage left with which to stomp.

Our challenge, of course, is that the Bible simply does have a few passages that make it  pretty clear that homosexual unions are not what God originally had in mind. Based on this handful of verses we have all too often voiced outrage towards anyone from the gay community who shows signs of…well, being from the gay community.  At the same time we quickly breeze over the page after page after page of scriptures that speak about caring for the poor or forgiving those who have hurt us.   Actually the Bible seems to treat gossips with the kind of scandal we assign to gays.   We, on the other hand, typically accept gossiping as normal, even entertaining—after all, some people just seem to be born that way, right?  And as for gays, well…

So here’s an off-the-wall idea:  what would happen if the church quietly agreed to treat gay people the same way as, say, we treat people who have been divorced? After all, both “lifestyles” represent major patterns that are presented in scripture as something less than God’s ideal.  Both seem increasingly common and both generally seem to be life-long irreversible situations that usually prove to bring a lot of trauma into the lives of those involved.   

I have a lot of people in my life whose lives are marked by divorce.  And while I’m not ready to say that those divorces represent God’s best for my loved ones (even if they might not agree), I still cringe with them in their pain and rejoice with them as they move on…still divorced.  I do that not because I’ve decided that divorce is good, but because there’s a sort of biblical rock/paper/scissors by which I need to determine what is and isn’t worth losing relationships over.  It’d be a shame for me to lose really dear friends because of a shadow in their past, just as it’d be a shame for them to reject me on the basis of some other kind of shadow they might find in my past. 

What if the church learned to approach GLBT folks in much the same way? Obviously many who don’t share our perspective on the authority of scripture wouldn’t necessarily agree with our position, but it could allow us to stop having all these rallies at which we chant ugly things about each other.

Well, we  haven’t.  OK…let me be a little more candid than that.  I haven’t.  I, and a lot of others in the church, have been all too willing put GLBT folks into some separate category of people who somehow need to be “fixed” before we who happen to be broken differently can accept them.  The thing I love about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it allows someone like me to discover the many layers of my brokenness while at the same time being shocked at a God who loves me in ways I didn’t even realize I needed.  Seems to me that there ought to be a lot of room for GLBT friends in that community of broken healing.  Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be happening very much.  And that, I believe, is a problem that extends far beyond this issue.  

4. There are some important underlying questions that few people seem to be asking.

Underlying this whole Prop 8 discussion I see a bigger question that has been getting very little air time.  How DO we figure out how to define marriage?   If “because the Bible says so” isn’t a credible grounds for a nation’s views on marriage, what exactly is? 

Is it simply a matter of passing fashion?  Gay marriages seem much more popular than they were a century ago, so we’re trying to change things so we can do those kinds of marriages.   What if polygamists managed to grow in numbers over the next century—would we someday decide that may having multiple husbands wasn’t so bad after all?  Or what about adults and children?  Cats and dogs? If marriage based strictly on a popular vote then there is no principle that might prevent us from someday embracing any of those aberrations. 

On Wednesday Judge Walker pointed to the lack of a “rational basis” for showing why gay unions shouldn’t be considered genuine marriages.   I believe the problem runs deeper than that.  Beyond simple popularity, I don’t think we have a rational basis for considering any union to be a real marriage.  And so we fight. 

I still have this crazy idea that the followers of Jesus Christ might help our communities develop a “rational basis” for this kind of long-term issue. 

Unfortunately that seems to be the one thing in this issue that the church doesn’t get...uh, straight.

The Unfairness of God

I don’t think the Prodigal Son’s older brother gets a fair shake. 

In Luke 15 Jesus tells a story about a father with two sons.  The younger son proves to be a scoundrel, eventually imploding into a scandal that gutted the family’s net worth.   The older brother held his ground, remaining at home, pouring himself into the family business.  It’s safe to say that without him the place would have fallen apart.

If you’ve read the parable you know, of course, that this loser brother comes home, repents and is welcomed back with the family’s best bottle of Dom Perignon. The old father seems to forget all about the disgrace and wasted inheritance and simply throws his arms around the filthy shoulders of his homeless son.  The older brother sees his father cave completely on his boundaries and he stomps outside.  “This jerk has undone everything we’ve worked for and you slaughter the fatted calf!  I’ve slaved for you all these years and you’ve never even offered me a goat to barbecue with my friends!”

He has a point.  What good is it to work your gluteus maximus off when your slacker brother gets a better reward that you do?   Doesn’t all your work even matter? 

I’ve felt that way at times.  I’m dedicated my entire adult life to serving faithfully as a pastor, to being the best husband and dad that I possibly can…surely that’s got to count for something, right?  Certainly God could cut me a break on some of the struggles of life.  Yet there are all too many times when God seems to miss some great opportunities to make my life easier.  

At times like that, I find the older brother’s complaint feels pretty natural:  “Look, I’ve slaved for you all these years, and you’ve never even given me a goat (or break on car repairs, or a sudden surge in church attendance or some other fantasy come to life)!

When it comes right down to it, God has a strange sense of fairness.  The grace that led the father to welcome his runaway son is the same grace that leads him to offer a place in his family to spiritually-confused people like you and me who often have little clue just what He’s done for us.  And it’s the same grace that leads him to stoop to use quirky, sin-tainted folks like me to announce his good news to others who need it as badly as I do.

The point:  I thank God that He’s not fair.  His unfairness is our only chance. 

The issue for me is not really unfairness:  it keeps getting easier for me to see how much I benefit from God’s unfairness.  The issue for me is usually control.   I wish God would exercise his unfairness in a way that would conform more closely to my expectations.   I often wish He would work out his lavish grace in a way that would match what I happen to have on my Christmas list right now.

How about you—what does it take for you to settle into God’s grace?

Good for Nothing

Grace can really mess with your head if you if you take it too seriously.   A little grace is good: it gives a reason why Jesus had to die on the cross and a place to turn for comfort when we fail.  

But if you pursue grace much further than that it can really start to mess with your head.    After all, what good is there from going to church every Sunday if God is going to grant the same salvation to someone who loves Him but loves the Sunday paper even more?  What's the benefit of resisting the urge to cheat on your exams or even on your spouse when God's only going shower the same forgiveness on every repentant liar who comes groveling back to him when the regrets start to hit? 

If you allow too much grace into your life it starts to erode things.  Pretty soon even fine upstanding church-folks (like you and me)  find we don’t have a leg to stand on.  Things start to crumble.

And. from the Bible's point of view, that's probably good.  In the book of Romans the Apostle Paul is pretty clear on the fact that everyone is going to crumble towards something.  He calls it being “slaves” either to sin or slaves to God.  Keeping our distance from grace means keeping our distance from God.  Some of God’s greatest blessings come when He leads us to crumble before Him, whether we want to or not, as the seedlings of His new life begin to shoot through the dirt in our hearts.

If being good is really good for nothing, then most of us probably don't have a leg to stand on.  But then again, maybe we don't need a leg to stand on.  

The gospel of Jesus Christ has always been based on the outrageous idea that God loves us more than we can, uh...stand.  We want to put our best foot forward to make a good impression in heaven's eyes, but God seems to have arranged things so we never really get the chance to get that best foot in the door.  Instead He reaches out to draw us...with a nail-scarred hand.  The church of Jesus Christ has always been a haven of people who limp in without a leg to stand on.  That's why I seem to fit in, for instance.

When was the last time you felt crazy-loved by God?

Ever hate your job?

( Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less, Part 3)

Success is a critical part of the good life for us.  Everybody knows that, right? 

Granted in a 3^rd world, more primitive setting people might not worry about this quite a much.  When you’re living in a hut in some jungle or desert wasteland all you want to do is survive, but most of us educated people living in what we might call developed countries aim for more than that.  We don’t want to merely have lived.  We want to have really lived. 

Our language reflects that:  we want to “live it up”.   We look at wealthy, successful people and marvel:  “wow, they really know how to live”.   “Man, that’s the life,” we may conclude as we watch them enjoy the fruits of their success.  We sum all this up by expressing our desire to “get a life”.

The writer of Ecclesiastes looks at all this “getting a life” and once again pushes back against it.   In Eccl. 2 he describes all he achieved:  “I undertook great projects…I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me…yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;  nothing was gained under the sun.” 

Once again the writer of Ecclesiastes questions the real value of something whose benefit we would generally take to be self-evident.  Of course it’s good to be successful, right?   We might say.  Ecclesiastes challenges that—really?

This leads us, once again, to ask “why?”.   Exactly why do we assume it would be so good to be successful in life?  Is it because the things we accomplish really matter so much in the universe?   Do we really think the world will be a much better place because we sold more widgets than anyone else in our region?

Imagine this:  imagine you’re talking with someone from Haiti who’s about your age.   Let’s say that that person slept in the street last night because their shack was of course destroyed in the earthquake a while back.  Or maybe they’ve been putting out a heroic  effort to carve out a life for themselves in one of the relocation camps.  Now picture yourself trying to explain to that person just why it was so critical that you accomplish whatever ambitions you were pursuing this past week.  Why it was so important that you landed that overtime pay, or nailed this meeting or get this promotion.  Try and explain to someone who’s had to give up a child because he couldn’t scrounge up enough food to feed her just why your career is worth the sleep you lose over it. 

Chances are the stress we have from our careers, or lack of them, isn’t really the point.   The point is usually something bigger, deeper than making or selling more widgets than anyone else in the company.

The underlying point usually has little to do with widgets and more to do with significance.  We want to be remarkable, and we’re afraid we’ll only turn out to be ordinary.

That longing for significance is actually a good thing.  It comes from something very important that God hard-wired into each of us—the innate sense that we were created for a purpose.   God designed us with an ache to accomplish things that haven’t been accomplished yet.  That’s not the problem.

The difficulty, though, comes when we begin to think that our personal career plans will really touch this.  The disappointing reality is that many of our career successes tend to have a pretty short shelf life.  It feels great to finally land a job after you’ve been unemployed, but before you know it that job becomes…a job.  It feels great to get the widget sales award for the month, but then the very next month they turn around and give it to someone else and you have to go back to climbing the ladder.   It feels great to be recognized with a promotion or with some new perk, but before long that promotion becomes the new normal and you find you have to aim still higher in order to really feel like you’re somebody.  You stake out your kingdom in the widget world, only to discover that someone else’s kingdom is being staked out right over top of your boundaries. 

Ecclesiastes puts it this way:   “So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun.  For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it.  This too is meaningless and a great misfortune (Eccl. 2:20-21).”

In contrast, the Sermon on the Mount talks about pursuing someone else’s dreams.  “Seek first (God’s) kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt. 6:33).   A passage like this is based on the underlying story line of the Bible:  a good creation was ruined by human rebellion (Gen 1-3) just as we were warned.  God loved us, however, enough that he was willing to do whatever it took to reclaim not only us but also the entire creation he had designed for us.  To do that he carved out his original people, Israel, and through them he crept into our world to position himself to suffer for us so that we could live with him.  In doing this he would not only be able to provide forgiveness for our sins, but also bring a renewal to our entire creation.  

The Bible refers to this cosmic clean-up as the Kingdom of Christ.   And, more amazing still, he invites you and me to participate in this amazing venture with him.  To have our sins forgiven and our lives healed.  To spread the word of this unfolding wonder, to starts homes that mirror his grace, to create great art and make scientific discoveries and…yes, even to make widgets in a way that can make this world a better place.  Each of us has the opportunity to step into a custom-created role into this marvelous plan. 

When we begin to realize that God may have specifically called us to make our widgets or to teach our students or to serve our customers (or even write our blogs or preach our sermons) we find that this changes everything.  Suddenly the shelf life factor becomes a non-issue.  The work that you and I do, or the dreams that you and I may pursue take on an eternal significance.  These things that we do each day prove to be far more than simply ways to pay bills or to keep busy.  Somehow, in some way, the career dreams that he has planted in our hearts are part of his eternal career dream for his entire creation.

We’re not just selling this month’s widgets or working today’s shift at the plant or teaching this week’s lesson plans.  Somehow, whether we can see it yet or not, the work that God has given us to do will be a part of that eternal Someday when heaven will come down to earth and Christ will wipe every tear from our eyes (Rev. 21). 

Our work, then, becomes meaningful.

But why, then, does it still seem so hard to get out of bed in the morning?   Why doesn’t this eternal-significance-thing give us a spring in our step causing us to head off to work with a spring in our step?

More often that not the problem lies with management—who’s in charge?   Not necessarily, who has the corner office, but who’s interests are really at stake in your career or mine?  Typically we’re actually serving ourselves while we pretend to work for someone else.  We agree to show up for work because we anticipate something that will further our purposes:  a paycheck, a chance for recognition or advancement.  In short, we work for our bosses because we think they can help us serve ourselves.  We naively think that our human bosses can provide us with perks that will last only a short time.

Silly, huh?   Like they say, if you work for yourself this way it only means that you have an idiot for a boss.

On the other hand, God has a way of using our job dissatisfaction to lead us to work for someone else.  To put our career aspirations under new management.  Someone who’s strategic plan can assure us that we’ll be part of something eternal.

The book of Ecclesiastes is a strange book.  It questions everything we consider to be self-evident and it proposes ideas that couldn’t seem more foreign to upwardly-mobile people like us.

The book of Ecclesiastes can be irritating.  It has a way of poking in the places where we already hurt.  The steady refrain of “Meaningless!” has a way of echoing around the hallways of our empty dreams and frustrating fantasies.   It can drive you crazy.

Or it can drive you to Him.  To reach out for the one who reaches back with nail-scarred hands, and who offers not only a way to escape death but also to find a life.  To find wholeness and joy and significance.   The chance to pour ourselves into something that will really mean something for a long, long time.

Works for me.

Given the chance, would you choose to become rich?

(Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less Part 2)

Our society requires greed.

If it weren’t for greed most ordinary citizens would never dream  of participating in our so-called reality shows.   Without greed no one would pay attention to the ads on TV which pay for those shows, because no one would really care about buying new and improved versions of products they’d already bought the year before.  Without greed most pro athletes would get real jobs when their knees started to give out, because without greed most sane individuals would never allow themselves to get clobbered by an defensive lineman just for money.  You have to really want money to do that kind of stuff.  And without the desire to get rich quick there’d be almost nothing on TV between midnight and 4 a.m.

When it comes right down to it, capitalism is really nothing more than structured greed.  Capitalism is based on the fact that if you can make a little bit better widget than your company made last year people will shell out their hard-earned money to get a new one and show it off to their neighbors.  That, of course, will be good for the widget companies, who will post a nice profit from all those widgets.  That will prompt them to create even more, new-and-improved widgets and to advertise them aggressively to entice people to buy their new ones.  These new widgets 2.0 will only feed the cycle more. 

Consumers will realize, of course, that they will need a lot of money to keep buying each year’s widget upgrades, so they will work hard at their jobs in order to bring home as much money as they can in order to buy more widgets, which will keep the widget companies busy creating even more widgets with even more exciting features. 

If we all decided that we were tired of buying new widgets, it could all grind to a stop.  That, in fact, is what starts to happen in a recession.  That scares the tar out of corporate executives.

Our society runs on greed.  The pursuit of wealth is what keeps it all going.  That fact is, if you or I click on the word “wealth” or maybe “treasure” pictures start to pop up on our screen showing what our idea of treasure might look like.   Maybe it’s a big house, a cool car or a TV screen the size of Connecticut.

The most important thing to realize, though, is that the benefits of wealth are considered self-evident.  It’s not like most people have paused to reflect and eventually concluded that a feverish attempt to accumulate possessions might be the right lifestyle for them.  Instead we just assume that that’s what we need to do.  Once the benefits of wealth seem self-evident our critical thinking grinds to a halt.

That’s why the book of Ecclesiastes stops us in our tracks.   The Old Testament pushes back on some of our assumptions.   What if money didn’t necessarily make us happier?

“I have seen another evil under the sun, and it weighs heavily on men:  God gives a man wealth, possessions and honor, so that he lacks nothing his heart desires, but God does not enable him to enjoy them…This is meaningless.” (Eccl. 6:1,2)

This brings us back to the same question we asked in Part 1.  Why exactly would we want to have a lot of money?    (I know, that’s a silly question because everyone knows that being rich is better than being poor, etc. etc. but I’m the one writing the blog so humor me.)   Is life a game where the one who dies with the most toys wins?   What really is the benefit of having more money than other people we know?   What is the itch that we hope can be scratched with our wealth?   These questions take on an increasing relevance during a time of financial struggles.   Do we want the possessions?   Is the object of the game to have a big of a net worth number as possible?  If not, what does really matter?

Let me ask you a question:  suppose if you could have everything you were aiming for but without actually owning those things?   Let’s say you had a wealthy relative or friend who might loan you his vacation home or private jet, or might take you shopping for that new outfit you’d seen or might make sure that your home entertainment system was state-of-the-art.  Would that do it?    Through his generosity you ended up with everything you might want, but none of it was really yours, and you had no long-term promises that your standard of living would continue. 

I suspect most of us would find this scenario less than satisfying.   While taking the Lear to the South of France would be lovely (don’t get me wrong!) in the long run there’d still be something missing if everything came as a favor.  Part of the appeal of wealth comes from things that can’t necessarily be bought with money, but might seem to come along with the influx of cash.  Self-reliance.  Freedom.  The security from having a substantial margin with which we can face whatever surprises might come our way. 

In short, part of the appeal of money is that we can buy stuff.  But the larger, deeper appeal of money comes from our impressions that with enough money in the bank we could know that we could be OK, no matter what life might bring our way.  Money brings security and freedom.   That seems obvious, doesn’t it?  That’s  what we’re really looking for from our net worth. 

Well, Ecclesiastes would push back on that.  As John Ortberg says, life is a board game and when the game is done all our playing pieces go back in the box.  It all goes back in the box.   In fact, I’m not so sure that having a lot of money guarantees much happiness during this life right now.   A quick glance at the tabloid covers at my local grocery story would suggest that there are a lot of people who have far more money than I do but seem to be having a lot less fun.  I’m not sure I’d trade places with Brad and Angelina, even when their marital struggles seem to be having a calm period.

The fact is we clutch to our money like drowning people clinging to bricks.  Any fool can see that those bricks are really going to help us much, but when we’re feeling frightened and needy we’ll reach for whatever anyone tells us to grab. 

Here the Sermon on the Mount breaks in a completely counter-intuitive direction.   “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in a steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in a steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The point:  Christ is the only treasure that will really satisfy the needs that lurk behind our credit card bills and bank statements. 

(Ding!  Cliché alert goes off.   Of course Christ is our treasure...duh!) 

But wait a minute.  What might we need to rearrange to get to the point where if we clicked on the word “treasure” up would pop a picture of Jesus?   That might take a little doing.  It’s not hard to picture Jesus as the forgiver of our sins, or maybe the personal body-guard in times of risk.  But to think of Jesus as our treasure seems like a bit of a reach, doesn’t it?   Take your pick:  Jesus or a big screen TV?   Which would you relentlessly pursue, your savior or your Lexus?

This raises the question of what Jesus is really good for, anyway, doesn’t it?  Of course he’s the one who gets us RSVP’d for heaven but beyond that does he really make that big of a difference.

Here’s where the Sermon on the Mount starts to really get serious.  Not only does it question the myth that our “treasures on earth” will really do it for us in the long run, it also points towards the ultimate satisfaction that comes from looking to Christ for the things we might want from our wealth.

Think about it:  all the things that we might hope for from our wealth—like security, freedom, a sense of being special, knowing that we’ll be taken care of in the future—those are the things that Jesus promises to provide us beyond whatever we might be able to ask or imagine.  Jesus may or may not provide us with huge houses and fabulous luxury cars, but any fool can see those status symbols aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.  Money can buy you a car, put gas in the tank, and bring you back to the garage of your beautiful house, but it can’t get you real friends to visit, or joy as you travel and it certainly can’t give you peace in your heart as you finish the day in your beautiful home.  In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to show that wealth can actually pull you backwards in those categories. 

While Jesus never promises an upper-class lifestyle, he does promise to provide us all the things that we might think and upper-class lifestyle might bring us.  The stuff we really ache for is the stuff he died for:  peace, joy, love and a settled sense of security that can let us sleep like a baby at night.

“Store up for yourselves treasure…”

So what does it take to start investing in that kind of treasure?

First of all, we need to learn to grieve.  We need to grieve the illusions we so easily cling to, the silly ideas we have about how deeply satisfied we’d be if we could pay all our bills on time.   (see Part 1)

Secondly, we need to recognize the reality check that our recession can provide.  The money pressures we feel from a struggling economy can help us discover some basic truths.  The fact is if I think money could solve my problems then I have problems that money could never solve. 

Thirdly, we need to practice imagining real wealth.  I’m working on this one the most in my own life.  I’m developing my ability to imagine myself being fabulously wealthy with the people in my life and the experiences God’s led me to discover.  He’s given me an astonishing windfall with the eternal purpose that He’s woven right into the story of my life.  And He’s grounded all these luxuries on a promise that’s a solid as Romans 8:28, guaranteeing that He’ll be working for good in everything because of His love for me.

Well, there you have it; my get-rich-quick scheme.

Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less (Part 1)

I've been reading from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes lately, in fact I'm been doing a sermon series on it.  Fascinating book.  Strange book.  Dark, even.  (Perfect for us Calvinist types.)

The book of Ecclesiastes is brought to you by the word Meaningless and by the concept of Futility, (“Undermining life dreams since Genesis 3”). The opening words of the book: “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. And then, in case we hadn’t gotten the point: “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” You get the point.

In its opening chapters the book of Ecclesiastes seems to offer very little hope, but by the time you reach the close of the book you find…well, very little hope.  We’re pretty much reminded that life is short and death is inevitable. Not the kind of passage that a guy like Joel Osteen usually dwells on.  Actually most of us who spend time in the pulpit usually clear a wide berth around this part of scripture. 

But the book of Ecclesiastes has something genuinely life-giving to offer.  It provides a healthy dose of skepticism in an age of naïveté.  It’s amazing how easily intelligent folks like ourselves can find ourselves falling for some flimsy myths about what really matters in life.   If all we follow are the ads on TV we’ll spend the better part of our lives straining after things that, while they might give us whiter teeth or better hair color, don’t really do anything to make our lives richer or more satisfying.  Ecclesiastes pushes back against all this silliness, offering a reality check. 

I find it helpful to pair the book of Ecclesiastes with something like the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew.  They make a great combination:  Ecclesiastes shows us what doesn’t really matter and the Sermon on the Mount points us towards what does.

Ecclesiastes 2 walks us through the author’s mid-life explorations.   Solomon (or whoever wrote the book from Solomon’s perspective) traces for us all the various places he’d looked in his search for something meaningful.   The chapter reads like the California experience:  food, sex, money, accomplishments, fame:  he tries it all and finds that each of these comforts leaves him with a nagging sense of emptiness.   Nothing really seems to scratch the itch.

Now most of the people who would ever bother to read Ecclesiastes would quickly agree with this assessment.  Of COURSE those kinds of things aren’t really going to satisfy, and OF COURSE only God can really meet the needs of our deepest hearts, etc. etc. etc.  We know that those are the right answers, of course.

And yet, most of us Bible-readers spend just as much energy pursuing these things as anyone else:  we want bigger TVs as much as anyone else, and we churn with many of the same sexual fantasies everyone else does, and we knock ourselves out trying to get ahead with the same fervor as the materialist down the street.  We just take a break from it all to go to church on Sunday.   OK…on most Sundays, at least.  The fact is most of us church-going folks take our upgrades just as seriously as anyone else. 

What do you think God thinks of our “pursuit of happiness”?   Some might suggest that God just scowls down on our little pleasures, like the dour couple in Grant Woods’ American Gothic.  The rest of us snicker, because surely God isn’t that Puritan, but it’s a bit of a nervous snicker as we’re not entirely convinced in the matter.

So what DOES God actually think of our pursuit of pleasure?

It’s at right about this point that our discussion usually takes a sharp right turn into questions of morality.   Is it OK to do this or drink that or watch this?   We try to figure out the rules so we can know which pleasures are all right and which we should feel guilty about.   Once we figure out the rules we go for it.

But there’s a bigger, deeper issue that lurks underneath these questions of morality.   We need to learn to ask why these pleasures are so important to us.  On the one hand, the answer is obvious.  By definition pleasures are…well, pleasurable.  If we didn’t enjoy them they wouldn’t be pleasures.

Sometimes our pleasures are merely a matter of entertainment.  “Oh..that sounds fun…”  But sometimes we pursue pleasures not simply to enjoy, but also to compensate. We can begin to feel like we need our pleasures.   We end up rummaging for pleasures like teenage boys rummaging through the fridge before dinner: “I need something…I’m starving!” 

There are telltale signs that can sometimes show when this is happening.   One sign is irritation.  When part of our world begins to collapse because we have been denied a pleasure that’s a pretty good sign that there’s more going on than mere enjoyment.  Another sign is a growing pressure to compromise scriptural standards.   When we start to feel like we have to bend the Bible’s teachings on our enjoyment of pleasures because we need food or TV or alcohol or sex—that’s also a pretty good sign that something is out of balance.

So what does God think of our pursuit of pleasure?   Here’s where the Sermon on the Mount can serve as a sequel to the book of Ecclesiastes.  The one leads to the other.

The Sermon on the Mount addresses the issue of pleasure from a completely different point of view.  Matthew 5 begins with what we know as the Beatitudes.  In Mt 5:4 we read:  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Now frankly…this sounds pretty stupid.  Blessed are those who grieve, who are unhappy, because they will be happy.   (This is one of those passages that are probably important for other people to take seriously, but certainly not us.)   After all, why would you ever want to encourage someone to mourn? 

 

That’s a good question, actually.   Why would you?

Lurking behind passages like this is the dark reality that many of the desires that we have in life often prove to be frustrating and unsatisfying.  All too often when we get what we want we discover that that wasn’t what we had really wanted.  It might have been good, but it wasn’t it.  You’re convinced that you’re dream vacation would make all the difference in your life, but when you actually got the chance to take it you discovered that when you returned home you were still just the same old you, but with a suntan.  You couldn’t wait to get the new job or the new spouse or to start your family or send your kids out, but once those things happened you soon realized that your life still felt exactly the same as before except you were surrounded by different people.

Here’s something else:  often the more fiercely we pursue these pleasures the more disappointed we end up in the end.  Ask the college student whose week of spring break debauchery left him feeling both cheap and broke a week later.   Ask the young mom who was convinced that getting rid of the guy she married would do it, and she now wakes up each day realizing the havoc she has caused for so many people.  Ask the parent who watches his children grow and leave the house as near strangers to him, and he suddenly discovers the true cost of all those evening meetings and business trips that it took to build his career.   Often the more fiercely we pursue our pleasures the more fierce our disappointment when those delights don’t prove to be it. 

There’s a word for that kind of disappointment.  Do you know what it is?   Mourning.   Blessed are those who discover what doesn’t really satisfy, because they can then begin to find what really is it.

That’s why the Sermon on the Mount provides such a great sequel to Ecclesiastes.   If Ecclesiastes helps us discover what doesn’t satisfy, the Sermon on the Mount points us towards what really does.   Read Matthew 6:  “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth where thieves can steal and  moth and rust destroy.   Instead store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Jesus’ point is clear:  we’re going to inevitably pursue someone’s kingdom, whether our own carnal interests or His eternal cause.    But only one Kingdom will prove to be it.  

So what might this grieving look like for you?   Here are three things that I’m finding helpful:

Become a skeptic.    I’m slowly learning to be a bit cynical towards things that probably won’t satisfy in the long run.  The ads on TV that broadly hint that if I buy a certain product I’ll become popular or sexy or envied by all my friends.  The stray desires that suggest that if my car were classy enough or my home were impressive enough that then I could really enjoy things.  Ecclesiastes helps me learn to roll my eyes at some of the ads I see on TV.

Identify our underlying needs.  I may know what I want, but do I know what I really want?  I may be reaching for more of those chocolate chip cookies, but what I’m really hungering for is some comfort because I’m frightened or tired.  It may seem like I really want to upgrade my car stereo or my TV or my backyard, but what I really want is simply to feel impressive. 

Finally, I need to learn to claim good gifts from God.  God may or may not want me to upgrade my landscaping or get a bigger TV, but he does want me to feel loved, to feel important and to know that it’s good to be me.   I’m finding that I often sell him short when it comes to many of these underlying needs.

Every once in a while, though, I have these flashes of clarity where I’ll realize that the stuff I fantasize about wouldn’t really do it anyway, and it will hit me again how much I long to be filled with God’s best for me.   When that happens God grins, shows me His best, and I discover that I’ve been comforted.

Hmm...just like He said.

Easter: Finding the Remote

(Part 2 of a series).
I sometimes wonder if one of the most significant inventions of the 20^th century was the TV remote. 

I remember “back in the day” when my little brothers and I would have to get up off the couch and manually walk across the room and clunk our way around the dial when it was time to watch Hogan’s Heroes, or maybe C.H.I.P’s.   Once the show started it was, like, “Sssshhh….”  if my mom tried to say anything, because we didn’t want to miss anything important.

Today everything is different, thanks to this little device.  Not only do husbands and wives have an entirely new collection of arguments to engage in, (give me that remote!) but the very way we watch TV or movies has changed.  Did you know that this little guy can even pause live TV?   That’s right.  Jack Bauer can be right in the middle of tracking down some bad guys with their stolen uranium rods, and he has to stop when we tell him to!  Uh…hold it right there, Jack, I gotta go to the bathroom.  ("Chloe--I'll call you back.")  And if something else comes up, Jack will just stay there holding his cell phone while we take care of whatever we might have considered more important than an impending nuclear disaster.  Then, when we give the word he’s off again saving the Big Apple for all America.   (Bhmh-bhmh!).

You see, for the first time in history, this little device has snapped the unyielding one-step-at-a-time link between the events in a story.  Our stories don’t have to unfold one scene after another in steady succession.  Now we have the liberty to st…..      (click remote)

                                      (click remote again)              …op for as long as we want before resuming the story.  We can even jump back to the beginning to pick up a clue we might have missed or even jump to the end of a pre-recorded show. 

You know, this can really mess things up if we’re not careful.  You can get an entirely wrong idea of what’s going on in a story.   Back to our buddy Jack Bauer—if one of my sons pauses the show just as Jack is having some terrible things being done to him with jumper cables it’s going to look really bad.  Every time I walk through the family room there he is getting beat up.  Again.  WOW…sucks to be him…   Eventually my impression of Jack Bauer may begin to change.  Every time I see him he’s getting hammered on something awful.   I’ll eventually start to figure that he must be some kind of wimp, unable to take care of himself in the big bad world of international terrorism. I may even start losing my faith in our buddy Jack.   Man, he’s washed up.  He’s done for.

Now, if you ever watch the show 24 you know that that’s not really true.  Jack Bauer is actually awesome.  Terrorists quake at the sound of his name.  In fact, Jack pretty much died not too long ago, but even that couldn’t stop him.  Before you could say “conspiracy” he'd be back, ready to rock on completely with some brand new components. 

But here’s the thing—if I got stuck halfway through the story, I wouldn’t know any of that.  I’d miss it completely.  I’d never see that through some blend of courage and cleverness Jack would not only get out of his latest difficulty, but he’d actually get the best of the guy who at one time seemed to have him licked.   And I’d never discover the fact that the bad guy wasn’t really such a big deal after all.  He may have looked like a big scary bad guy, but he was really nothing more than a bully with a funny accent.  No big deal.

But wow…if I hit “pause” at the wrong place I could miss all that.  

The same thing can happen if we hit "pause" before we get to Easter.  If we stop the action after Satan's infiltration of Eden, or the struggles of the nation of Israel, or the exile years, or--worse yet--Gethsemane or the crucifixion outside Jerusalem.  The Bad Guy looks pretty powerful as God stands there apparently dumb-founded by the treachery wrought by His people.

But if I can remember to his "play" again I can see where the story goes from there.  A tomb broken open on Easter morning, followers drawn back together, the church bursting to life on Pentecost Sunday, and the Roman Empire turned upside down.  Eventually Revelations gives us a fast-forward look at Christ's second coming: "I will wipe away every tear from their eyes."  The bad guy is gone.

I need Easter.  It gives me a chance to hit "play" again.

Now where was that remote?

Easter: The Last Laugh

(Part 1 of a series.)

The hardest part of Good Friday is probably the most obvious--the story ends in death.  Christ’s death.  His final screams of agony, the nervous scrambling of those huddled in the darkness around those torture poles, they all lead up to that one awful moment when Jesus “gave up his spirit”.  Finally, after all this, it was finished.  And then…nothing.  Nothing but a grotesque corpse to be taken away for grieving.

What goes through your mind when you’re one of Jesus’ loved ones, seeing that battered corpse released from that cross?   What do you cling to as you receive it, wrap it and start to figure out what to do for a tomb?  Do you try to think about the better days?  About the times you had together?  Or does the cruel fact of the silent corpse in front of you simply mock any memory you might try to pull up?

There’s a really weird kind of emptiness that comes after death, isn’t there?  We’ve all felt the chill of that emptiness—losing parents, loved ones, friends.  It leaves a silence that can seem deafening, its silent thunder triggering an avalanche of things we wish would do or re-do or un-do one more time.  Death is just so…permanent.  That’s why we fear it so much.   That’s why we try not to even think about it.  Death looms like a cloud bank on each of our horizons.

Death has this way of mocking us, like the way coming term papers can taunt even the best day of spring break.   Death mocks life.

But here’s the thing.  Jesus’ death was the death of death.  

He broke death, taking its worst only to come back out the other side a few days later.  The permanence of death was shattered.  In its place hope could appear.  That awful silence of the cemetery broken by the rumble of an earthquake and a rush of angels’ wings.  And on Sunday we’ll celebrate how the story comes out.

So here’s the thing:  death mocks life.  But Easter mocks death.

Ha!!

Evangelism--Offending People for Jesus

Most of us cringe at the prospect of evangelism.  While it’s necessary, of course, it still feels like we’re getting pressured to offend people for Jesus.  Here in Northern CA the idea of encouraging someone else to convert to your religious views feels like the verbal equivalent of the Crusades. 

Yet…we’re supposed to just do it, aren’t we?   Isn’t that what God tells us?

I’m increasingly convinced that much of our evangelistic anxiety comes from a pretty basic misunderstanding that we make when it comes to sharing our faith.   We tend to think of evangelism as something prescriptive.  A person is being prescriptive when he or she is urging someone else to do something.  That’s why a doctor will prescribe a particular treatment for an ailment a patient may have, perhaps even writing a prescription.    We typically think of evangelism in this way:  evangelism is the process through which we exhort our friends and neighbors to adopt our spiritual views.   Most people, at least where I live, don’t seem to appreciate this prescriptive approach to spiritual matters.  They don’t request Amway sales calls, either.

But another alternative can be found in what we could call descriptive evangelism.  A person is being descriptive when he or she is simply describing an experience they’d had.  When friends tell you how much they enjoyed a new movie that’s come out or how they loved the new Thai restaurant they tried last night, they are being descriptive about what they’d experienced.  You can’t argue with that.

So what if we thought about evangelism in those terms? Prescriptive evangelism would then describe an effort to convince someone else to change their spiritual beliefs at your urging.  (“Turn or burn!”)  All too often, you’d be simply asking for a fight.  On the other hand a descriptive approach to evangelism could avoid that tension by simply presenting what you or I have already experienced.  Telling someone about the peace or joy you’ve discovered, or how prayer has brought noticeable changes in your life would both be examples of descriptive evangelism. 

The beauty of descriptive evangelism is that it’s virtually argument-proof, when done correctly.  It’s impossible to argue with someone’s personal experience—they’re simply telling you what happened to them.  It’d be silly to try to convince your friends that they actually hated that movie or that they really thought the new restaurant’s food was terrible. You wouldn’t know; you weren’t even there!

Evangelism, viewed this way, would focus primarily on simply not hiding the good things that God had been doing in our lives?  And at this point a lot of scriptures would begin making more sense.  Just imagine if we asked God to create opportunities to “let our gentleness be evident to all” as Paul wrote the Philippians?   Or what if we prepared ourselves to “give an answer” to explain the hope we have as Peter wrote in his first epistle?    What if we simply stopped hiding the lamp of Christ’s love, taking it out from under whatever bowl we’d hidden it as Jesus himself challenged us?

That’d be a lot easier.  People wouldn’t need to brace themselves against us.  In fact, they’d probably start to get curious:  “what do you mean, you’re at peace in the middle of all this stress? “  “You just prayed about this, and now you’re getting these lucky breaks?”   

Question for you: if you were transparent about what you’ve experienced with God, what would other people see?

Getting What You Want

Sometimes it’s not good to get what you ask for.

As a boy, a friend of mine loved to visit his big sister at the deli where she worked.  Sometimes she’d fix him a treat; one day it was a bagel with cream cheese.  He loved it.  On his next visit, hoping for the same treat, he asked his sister for “a bagel with sour cream”.  She looked at him quizzically and began to suggest that perhaps he meant cream cheese, but he was quite insistent on his order.  Eventually she toasted a bagel, topped it with sour cream and handed it to him.  His face scrunched into a grimace as he suddenly realized his mistake.  Humbled, he asked for a bagel with cream cheese.  

Sometimes getting what we ask for isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  We insist that we want sour cream on our life’s bagels, only to finally get our request and discover that that wasn’t really what we wanted.  Sometimes getting what we’re asking for can leave a sour taste in our mouths.

The Bible is full of examples of people with gagging on their sour cream.  Just ask Jacob, scurrying into the night having snagged the birthright he’d never use. Or Samson, blind (literally) in his pursuit of Philistine pleasures. Or just ask David, finally having enjoyed the friend’s wife he’d been longing for.  Perhaps you can tell similar stories from your life:  times when you tried to force a pleasure or an achievement or make a purchase even though others questioned whether your choice was wise. 

God created us to be hungry--but for things that only He can satisfy.  What have you been hungry for lately?

The Faith of Atheists

I could never be an atheist. It would take way too much faith.

To be fair, I’ve really got to respect people who are so deeply committed to their faith position, even if I don’t happen to buy their viewpoint myself. We can all learn from each other, I figure. And besides, it’s inspiring to see someone stake their entire worldview, and even their whole lifestyle, around something that can’t be proven. You’ve got to admit there’s something pretty bold about shaking your fist in the face of millennia of human common sense. That just inspires me. It’s pretty gutsy, actually.

Most atheists I know would never brag about it, of course—which I also respect—but it’s not hard to see how their worldview is based solidly on the kind of faith that can never be proven. After all, how can you prove nothing? How on earth could anybody ever check to make sure that God really wasn’t there? Ultimately it comes down to their faith that they won’t find themselves in line at some Pearly Gates or shocked to discover that they’ve been reincarnated as some lower life form. Like anyone else, they’ve made their faith commitments.

Throughout recorded history civilization after civilization has succumbed to the obvious common-sense assumption that someone or something Greater Than Us was responsible for life in our universe. Granted, folks had a hard time agreeing on just who or what that “Greater Than Us” actually was. While some subscribed to Jehovah, others signed on for Baal or Allah, or the Buddha or the Great Pumpkin or whatever other local deity they chose. But no matter what brand name people happened to choose, virtually everyone agreed that there was someone or something out there--from tribes in Africa to the great civilizations in the Middle East or Asia, to the rise of Judaism and Christianity, countered by the celtic religions in Europe and all the various brands of eastern religion now featured. (And don’t even get me started on the whole pantheon of gods that the Greeks and Romans developed. Personally, I can never keep them all straight.) But the fact is that until the Enlightenment suddenly sprang up a few generations back, everyone just took it as obvious that someone or something was behind the wonders of our world.

And that makes sense to me. All I have to do is spend an evening up in the Sierras gaping at the infinite fog of starlight that has exploded in our little corner of the galaxy and I quickly slide into the assumption that this could not have happened by accident. Call it peer pressure if you want—I’ll admit there probably is something reassuring about knowing that for untold centuries of human civilization everyone has come to the same conclusion that I have. But regardless, I just think it would be hard to be an atheist outdoors.

But that’s why I can appreciate the courage of the staunch minority who in the past few generations have decided to march to a different non-drummer. Recently, as seen from the span of human history, a few bold thinkers have theorized that all those galaxies and constellations have somehow appeared by accident. They point proudly to the theory of evolution as a kingpin in their worldview. I’m no scientist, but my understanding of that theory is that we’re all somehow mutants, having morphed from the first glops of seaweed that washed up on a beach somewhere. Maybe other folks can understand some of these fine points, but I have a hard time grasping this. I’ve known a few mutants in my day (hey, I’ve watched cartoons just like anybody else) and I have a hard time seeing how the continually mutating offspring of the first mutants could result in something like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You ask me, bass guitar licks like Flea’s don’t just happen.

Maybe my problem is with science. Maybe I should put more willing to put my faith in science as a way to figure these things out. But I figure: the best science of the day got us the Flat Earth theory. Then a little bit later the new-and-improved best science of the day got us the Round Earth theory. (Note: at the time of this writing the earth was still round). I just keep looking for someone to take responsibility for that Big Bang. That much noise, somebody had to hear something!

And maybe I’m just a little too common-sense about it all. I suppose any academic discipline can have a bad century now and then. Who knows? Maybe all the pieces did line up just right to enable sea scum to somehow produce Michael Jordan’s dunk shot or whatever magic there is that makes my laptop here come to life when I turn it on.

But it just seems like a long shot to me. Buying into that would take a lot more faith that I seem to have. Rumor has it some guy in Ohio dumped 10,000 dominoes off the roof of a school gymnasium and they randomly formed a perfect version of the Mona Lisa, including getting the smile just right. Call me a skeptic, but I have a hard time with that one, too.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m judging my atheist friends. Most of them are really good people who are genuinely sincere about what they believe. And maybe their faith in science can do for modern medicine what Mother Teresa’s faith did for the poor of Calcutta. What’s not to like about that?

But having said that I also don’t like it when atheists get all fundamentalist on me. Maybe I’m not as smart as they are with their fancy theories about everything, but I can’t help but feel judged when they smile kindly at the fact that I still don’t “get it”. Call me crazy, but I still say the emperor has no clothes.

What I would like to see would be an open-minded kind of dialogue about all of our different kinds of faith. I'm not talking about some kind of evangelistic shoot-out where anybody’s trying to convince me that I should have faith in whatever scientific theories they’re betting the farm on. I’d just thing it’d be interesting to learn from the faith stories of some atheists who’ve been at it a while. How does it feel put your faith in a minority viewpoint? How do you shore up your faith when you have those inevitable moments when you can’t help but wonder whether you may have been put here for a reason? How do you begin to explain your trust in something you could never prove?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something simple here. But whenever I look for something that would offer a reason to have faith in atheism, all I find is…

…nothing.

In Trouble

Been reading the New Testament book of I Peter lately…part of a sermon series Stan and I are working through here at The Gathering.  Great book, especially for those times when don’t seem to be going like you’d hoped.  The epistle is all about trouble, which is why it can make for good reading during a recession. 

A word about trouble:  there’s a big difference between having troubles and being in trouble.    Having troubles is pretty normal:  you get a bad grade in school, you come down with the flu, you get a flat tire driving home from work.  Most troubles, while annoying, can be fixed pretty easily.  You pull out your spare tire, figure out how the crazy jack works, and make the switch.  Before too long you’re on your way, remembering to wash your hands when you get to your destination.  

Most troubles aren’t really so hard to deal with.

But when you begin to get too many of those troubles it starts to affect your worldview.  You begin to get the sense that everything in your life is starting to fall apart.  You  suspect that even if you were to fix one or two of the problems in front of you there would be two or three other problems that would creep up on you from another side.   You find a sense of futility begins to hang over your efforts—even if you fixed one of your problems you’d still face so many others that it’d hardly make a difference. 

An eerie realization begins to well up inside you:  it’s not that you simply have troubles, you realize that you are now in trouble.   Your struggles have claimed your worldview. 

That’s when you start losing hope.  Hope is the force field that fends off a sense of futility.  When you lose hope, despair slowly seeps into your heart. 

Let’s face it;  many of us today are losing hope, no matter what our current President’s campaign slogan might have suggested. 

The economy is a big part of that, of course.  Not too long ago it seemed like everyone had a lot of money.  In my neighborhood everyone was spending re-fi money freely as our homes quickly doubled in value.  Anyone who wanted a job could find one.  Now today all that has changed, and doesn’t appear to be changing back any time soon.  But our troubles extend beyond the economy:  what are we going to do about health care?  About the incessant conflicts in the Middle East or in Africa?   And what good is it to avoid losing your home if you don’t really like the people you have to share it with?

Many of us know that sinking feeling that comes when you realize that you are in trouble and probably not likely to escape it in the near future.  Our hope shrivels under those conditions.

The epistle of I Peter was written to people who felt much like that.  The letter was probably written around the early 60’s A.D. by Peter, who probably wrote it from the city of Rome.  In any case, the letter was certainly written in the shadow of Rome, as the threat of Roman persecution looms over the epistle from the not-to-distant future.  The letter was written around the time of the Emperor Nero, under whose persecution Peter eventually lost his life. 

To put it simply:  if you were a Christ-follower in the time of Nero you were in trouble. 

As Christians today we face resistance.  Look at the nerve touched by the recent Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad where his mom simply acknowledged that she loves her son.   But that kind of resistance is really pretty minor in the broader scheme of things.

 First-century Christians faced a whole series of very real troubles.  Troubles from Rome, whose leaders figured that they were atheists, with the way they bristled against worshipping the emperor or his pantheon of gods in favor of this curious invisible non-god they claimed to follow.  From the Jews, who resented being grouped by the Romans in the same atheist group, and did what they could to purge their communities of these aberrant Christ-followers.  And often from their families, since in their day the head of a family determined the religious perspective for everyone.  For a person to begin following Christ in defiance of their family was often taken as a rejection of that family.  Family leaders were known to go to extreme measures to keep their pagan family members in the fold, and following Christ often meant losing one’s family. 

Peter was writing to people who not only had troubles, they were in trouble.   No matter where they turned there were forces arrayed that could destroy everything their lives had been based on.  You can easily become paranoid in a situation like that…except that in your case the threats you face are definitely real.   

So Peter opens his letter to these down-and-outs with a boisterous cheer for the “living hope” that they could share together.  (Look at I Peter 1:3-12 sometime).   Notice, though, that Peter is not even pretending that this hope will protect them from suffering.   No, he candidly acknowledges that suffering is coming their way.  Instead he points to something that transcends their suffering.  As big as their troubles might seem, Peter points them to something bigger.    A “living hope”, an un-depreciated “inheritance”, and the snug security that comes from being “shielded” by God’s power during turbulent times.  Peter then offers a very different perspective on their suffering:  instead of being a setback, he interprets suffering as a force that can “purify” the faith through which we ultimately connect to Christ and all these blessings. 

What Peter is doing is offering a contrasting worldview.  Here’s what a worldview is:  everyone has a center to their world, something around which everything else inevitably orbits.  In the first century it may have been Nero or the power of Rome or the all-star team of Greek and Roman gods that needed to be appeased.  Today our worldviews may be a little more difficult to identify, but we still always have something at the center.  It may be a conventional religion of some sort or it may be something less clearly defined.   It may be finances, or recreation or physical beauty or romance or maybe even the right to view oneself as “a pretty good person”.  In any case there is something at the center of each person’s world.  And in the face of insurmountable forces that could easily destroy every other form of security, Peter points his friends toward something unchanging.  He invites his friends to stomp down with abandon on a foundation that even Nero can’t shake.   He’s not trying to promise that painful things won’t happen; he’s helping them discover something that will still stand firm, even if those bad things might happen.  

So how do you tell what’s really at the center of your worldview?   Ask yourself this:  what would effectively end your life if you were to lose it?  Each of us undoubtedly has blessings in our lives about which we care passionately and for which we would grieve deeply were we to ever lose them.  But there is usually one set of blessings which would ultimately prove to be a deal-breaker for each person.  Deep in our hearts we know that if we were ever to lose our (family, middle-class-wealth, good looks, professional success, etc.) we just couldn’t go on.  Life would prove to be pointless if that central blessing were taken away.

What would that “deal-breaker” be for you?  Peter invites us to dare to imagine something big enough to tower over any other dream we might pursue or any other potential loss we might face.   He invites us to look to Christ and ask Him to fill us with the kind of living hope that comes only when you’re solidly based on something that even a recession can’t take away.

“Got hope?”