He must increase (Sunday Reflections for July 24, 2011)

Last week via Facebook another pastor directed my attention to a Huffington Post article, “Why I'm Not a 'Fan' of Jesus.” It was by a Pastor Kyle Idleman, identified as the “teaching pastor” of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, supposedly the fifth largest in the country. The article apparently summarizes a recent book/DVD he authored.

Idleman’s basic point is a familiar one and not without value: being a “fan” of Jesus is not the same as being a follower of Jesus. He observes that while three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christians, it’s pretty hard to tell that from their behavior or the state of our society. With all these Christians around, he asks, why are there so many hungry, homeless, with inadequate health care, etc.

One explanation for this discrepancy Idleman found in learning about a new kind of vegetarian, called a “flexitarian.” They don’t eat meat—usually. One woman interviewed said she considers herself a vegetarian but admits she likes—and occasionally eats—bacon. In Idlemans’ view that really means she isn’t a vegetarian whatever she might think of herself. Similarly, Idleman says that people claiming to be Christian, but living in ways that hardly show it, are not followers of Jesus but fans of Jesus.

The word fan is most simply defined as, an enthusiastic admirer. And I think Jesus has a lot of fans these days. Some fans may even get dressed up for church on Sunday and make their ringtone a worship song. They like being associated with Jesus. Fans want to be close enough to Jesus to get the benefits, but not so close that it requires anything from them. They want a no-strings-attached relationship with Jesus. So a fan says, I like Jesus but don't ask me to serve the poor. I like Jesus, but I'm not going to give my money to people who are in need. I like Jesus, but don't ask me to forgive the person who hurt me. I like Jesus, but don't talk to me about money or sex that's off limits. Fans like Jesus just fine, but they don't want to give up the bacon.

I understand and in some ways share Pastor Idleman’s frustration but I think he is barking up the wrong tree. Unfortunately he is engaging in a favorite activity of clergy and other church authorities going all the way back to St Paul: blaming the victim. The über-Christians who naturally end up in the church’s hierarchy are always complaining about the lack of commitment and understanding of the folks in the pews. Why don’t they get it? Why aren’t they as faithful and devoted as I am? Whining and scolding is a fine art in the church.

I give Idleman credit that he doesn’t follow the usual path of complaining about people’s lack of support for the church and its activities: Why don’t they give more? Why don’t they worship more often? Why don’t they witness and evangelize? Jesus spoke little about such things. Rather, like Jesus, Idleman focuses on people’s social behavior. Where are the fruits of their faith and commitment?

While Idleman’s approach is truer to the teaching of Jesus it isn’t going to have any better result. The reason is because he hasn’t identified the problem, which goes all the way back to the beginning. Regardless of what was said about the Christian life, over the centuries most people have equated being a Christian with belonging to an organization. Or in the words of an admittedly oversimplified yet basically true assessment: While Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom, what we got was the church.

Jesus’ message was that the reign of God was coming into the world in a new way, right now. It may be that he expected that to include some dramatic divine intervention in world affairs. In any case, he does not seem to have made any provision for an organized movement to come after him. Any “church talk” from Jesus was almost certainly put on his lips later by the gospel writers. And while in the gospels Jesus does make radical statements about disciples needing to deny themselves and take up their crosses (as Idleman says), Jesus also tells people not to follow him but go back to their homes and live out their new experiences of God’s grace.

In any case, out of the confusion following Jesus’ death came the church. First it was small and informal as we see in Paul’s letters but it quickly became a highly structured, hierarchical and authoritarian organization. And while there was always some presentation of the gospel and the call to a new ways of life, nonetheless what most people heard as it spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond was: Join the church and be saved.

The Reformation attempted to put a new emphasis on Christian lifestyle and personal transformation over against merely belonging to the church. Yet Protestant churches still required baptism and retained a simplified congregational structure. Thus being a Christian still meant receiving sacraments and “going” to church. Even for “born again” Evangelicals this could become as perfunctory as for any Roman Catholic.

Pastor Idleman’s push to transform Christians from being fans to followers seems like another trip around an old and well-worn track. Would he say that among the 20,000 that supposedly show up at his church each week, there are only followers and no fans? I doubt even he would make that claim.

Idleman is right, along with so many others, that we are in the midst of a religious and spiritual crisis. It is a crisis of purpose and identity, not for the church, but for Christianity. Shortly before his death Dietrich Bonheoffer, who decried the lack of commitment of German Christians, wrote enigmatically of the need for a “religionless Christianity.” He saw that the church had become an obstacle rather than the means to Germany’s spiritual renewal.

While there are exceptions like Pastor Idleman’s megachurch, overall church Christianity is in decline in the developed world. Belonging to an organization simply doesn’t meet people’s spiritual needs anymore. Yet what recent biblical scholarship has made clear is, that isn’t what Jesus was about anyway.

If people are genuinely going to become followers rather than fans of Jesus, they’re going to have to relearn who Jesus actually was. So far, as Bonheoffer, Kierkegaard, and many others concluded, the church has been mostly an obstacle to that reeducation. Encountering this ancient Jesus and a kingdom-centered Christianity, the church would be forced into the role of John the Baptist who admitted honestly, “He must increase and I must decrease.”

From Jesus to Christ and back again (Sunday Reflections for July 17, 2011)

(I am at last posting again. I have a several Reflections articles I need to catch up on but I thought I should start with the most recent first. Watch for more to come!)

FRONTLINE is PBS’s premier documentary news program. So it probably seemed odd back in the late 1990s when it broadcast a 4-hour series about Jesus and the early church. From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians (which a group of us watched last month) really did report news, however, as well as tell history.

The news was of the cumulative results of decades of scholarly research into that subject, and which was just then coming to a culmination. (When I was in seminary in the early 80s this scholarship was beginning to trickle in.) What had been found really was something new about the earliest years of the Jesus movement, but it wasn’t the kind of sudden discovery that might happen in a laboratory.

The study of ancient documents and archeological findings often takes many years to bear fruit. For example, shortly after World War II two ancient collections of documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library were found in the Middle East. Once they saw them, scholars knew immediately they were of immense importance. Yet it literally took nearly a half-century of study (and even physical reconstruction) to genuinely understand them. Many scholars did not even live long enough to fully appreciate what they were studying, and that study still goes on.

The question that scholars have been trying to answer is, Who was Jesus and what was the movement launched in his name about? Just asking the question shows we are in a different world from our ancestors. For centuries and generations the answer to that question had been found by looking at the church’s creeds. But that had stopped being satisfactory or adequate well over a century ago.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars began looking at the Bible with new honesty. Among other things, they had come to realize that the creeds smoothed over a much more complex reality about Christianity’s origins. The four gospels, as well as Paul, each had distinctly different understandings of Jesus. They also came to realize that figuring out where the historical Jesus was in the midst of this was much more difficult than anyone had imagined. Some concluded that such a task was impossible.

As From Jesus to Christ reports, what needs to be said first is that nothing new has been found that can be traced back directly to Jesus himself. We still have no physical evidence of him or of anything he did or said. It’s almost certain he never wrote anything. In fact, it could be said we have taken a step backwards because most scholars now doubt we even have anything genuine from his followers or disciples, either.

And this is unlikely to change. Scholars and archaeologists have literally gone over Jesus’ Palestinian homeland with a fine tooth comb. More important than their thoroughness, however, is the realization of how amorphous Jesus’ life and ministry truly was. He just didn’t leave much of a footprint—and probably couldn’t have if he wanted to.

During his lifetime the number of people he interacted with or even knew he existed was probably very small. The “crowds” the gospels report him attracting are almost certainly exaggerative ways of conveying how important Jesus had become for the early church years later. In fact, the evidence for Jesus’ historical life is so thin and ambiguous that there are some who have concluded he didn’t exist at all.

That’s probably going too far. Yet it is true we are unlikely to ever have a very clear or accurate picture of him. This is due both to lack of evidence but also because his own ideas were so quickly mixed together with those of other spiritual leaders and movements of the time, Paul and the gospel writers being the most well known examples.

What seems to be the case is that Jesus was a genuine social catalyst. He was a spark which found an ample supply of human kindling. Scholars now have a much better understanding of Jesus’ world and it is evident it was ripe for change: spiritual, religious, social, economic, political. At the same time, however, that world wasn’t as ready for change as Jesus hoped and envisioned. The new “kingdom of God” of justice and equality he believed he was inaugurating was certainly more than those in positions of authority would tolerate.

His death by execution then was no surprise. What was (and still is) a surprise was that Jesus didn’t then disappear into the dust of history. And perhaps that was the genius of his vagueness and ambiguity. He said just enough to enflame people’s imaginations and give them a vision and hope of a better world. Yet his message was open enough to interpretation that many different and even conflicting people and movements could rally around him.

Thus from the start, the movement and church that followed Jesus’ death was fractious, conflicted, and marvelously chaotic. No one then or since knew what Jesus was really up to. And we will never know. All we have are the bubbling ideas that erupted from him and those around him, and which have challenged every generation since to hope and work for a better world.

Over the centuries countless church authorities have thought it their job to reign in this disorderly mess and get it under control. It’s now clear, however, that the man who upset the tables in the temple believed that such holy chaos is often the only way God’s will ever gets done. The religious chaos afflicting the church today may well be just what Jesus would have hoped for, or even ignited himself.

Time to lose some Passion (Sunday Reflections for April 17, 2011)

Recently Michael Rinehart, an ELCA synod bishop from Texas, was discussing on his blog liturgical and preaching issues related to Palm/Passion Sunday. It seems to him that the trend is swinging back toward this day focusing exclusively on the gospel accounts of Jesus’ Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem. The Passion story then is reserved exclusively for Good Friday.

I don’t know if his perception of a trend is accurate but he seems to think this is a good idea. I believe he is correct in saying that this change occurred when attendance at Good Friday services had declined significantly. Growing up I only remember Palm Sunday but by the time I got to seminary the transition to Passion Sunday was all the rage.

I embraced the change (to the dismay of the senior pastor I worked with) and especially enjoyed the dramatic reading in parts of the full Passion narrative (usually replacing the sermon because of its length). For me, the high point (for lack of a better term) was always the moment when the congregation (taking the role of the crowd) shouted out, “Crucify him!” in response to Pilate’s offer of mercy.

Well, that was then. As the years have passed, my enthusiasm for all that has waned considerably. While I still appreciate the drama, I have found myself asking, “But what’s the point?”--not just what's the point of it liturgically, but also what is the point of the story?

Perhaps my attitude began to change when I served as interim pastor of a congregation in Omaha. We had a lay parish assistant who I respected a lot. She surprised me when she said she wouldn’t be at the Good Friday service (she attended nearly everything). “The story is just too sad,” she said. This was someone who probably could have explained Luther’s theology of the cross as well as many pastors, but for her the Passion story itself was just too much.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, biblical scholarship of the past two centuries has significantly challenged the traditional understanding of the events surrounding Jesus’ death. Basically scholars tell us we really just don’t know much about what happened. We do know, however, that a lot of what the gospels’ passion narratives say is unlikely and sometimes preposterous. In many places the gospel accounts contradict each other so obviously they can’t each be right; some of their reports then have to be wrong.

It’s now nearly certain that none of the gospel writers were eye witnesses to the events they report. (Mark, the earliest gospel, was written at least forty years after Jesus’ death.) Did they have eye witnesses as sources? We don’t know but that also seems unlikely. And what’s hard for us to understand is that they very likely didn’t care, either. Telling the message, the “good news” about Jesus, was their priority rather than historical accuracy, which is our modern concern.

In all likelihood, much of the detail in the gospels’ stories of Jesus’ last week was inspired by the writers’ Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Thus, rather than biblical prophecy fulfilled by the events of Holy Week, this scripture was the primary source for the gospel writers’ passion stories. They created a narrative with material from their scriptural tradition, which conveyed the meaning and importance of Jesus’ death rather than its history, which probably no one knew.

The question for us is whether the meaning and importance they saw (and the gospels themselves have differing views) is what we would now see or value. To me, there are at least two major problems for us today, and both contribute to the overwrought nature of the gospels’ telling of the passion story.

The first is the anti-Judaism present to some degree in each of the gospels, especially in the Passion stories. This problem has been recognized for a long time and, particularly since the Holocaust, various attempts have been made to remedy it.

Biblical scholarship has cast doubt on what role, if any, Jewish religious authorities would have had in Jesus’ death. Even the gospels strain to come up with a plausible connection, primarily because their own accounts of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee give them little to work with. It is much more likely that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities, probably because he did something which made them consider him a threat to public order. The table-turning incident in the temple is one possibility.

So why the hostility to Judaism in the gospels? Because they were written at the time of the split between church and synagogue. Divorces can be angry, messy affairs and this one certainly was. That most Jews did not embrace Jesus as the Christ became an awkward embarrassment for the early church. If Jesus really was the Jewish messiah, then why did most Jews not accept him? Thus began the meme of the messiah’s rejection by his own people, portrayed most dramatically in his Jerusalem trial.

The second problem is the theological interpretation of Jesus’ death. Again, the gospels have somewhat differing views on this (as does Paul). Yet they all agree that Jesus’ death was somehow necessary in God’s plan of salvation. Jesus’ death was a sacrifice for humanity’s sin like the animal sacrifices made in the temple.

Today I’m not sure this is even understandable by modern people. More importantly, however, it makes God appear as some kind of ancient bloodthirsty ogre. While some fundamentalists still revel in this image, most people find it repulsive and just bizarre. There is a lot of anger in the Bible but today we can recognize that much of it is our own anger and frustration projected on God.

The obvious rebuttal to that portrayal is, of course, Jesus himself. This supposed divine need for justice and judgment that sent Jesus to the cross is most noticeably absent in Jesus’ own teaching and human interactions. Forgiveness and compassion is the heart of his life and ministry. As this has been rediscovered in recent years, Jesus’ death has been reframed as the ultimate act of that compassion and selflessness. Jesus’ death is saving for us by vividly portraying and leading us to the life of love that is our human calling. God is not “satisfied” by Jesus’ death but heartbroken.

Can the gospels’ Passion narratives be saved? The disinterest in Good Friday and the resistance to imposing the Passion on Palm Sunday are pretty strong indications of how average Christians feel. I think we need to pay attention. The image of the cross is certainly important and powerful and should not be lost. Ironically, however, the stories that for centuries have swirled around it are now preventing us from seeing it. Somehow the church has to find a way to clear the air.

All hell (Sunday Reflections for April 10, 2011)

This coming week will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. As we all remember from our history lessons, the conflict began on April 12, 1861 with the bombardment by Confederate forces of Ft. Sumter, located on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The conflict would end almost exactly four years later on April 9, 1865 with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House, a few hundred miles north in Virginia. Symbolically, however, the war’s last shot came a few days later on April 13, with the tragic and pointless assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

I visited Charleston for the first time the week after Christmas. It’s a lovely and fascinating historical tourist Mecca, with buildings dating back to the 1600s. There’s little evidence now of the wreck it became at the end of the war as a result of the fighting prior to its capture by Sherman’s army. I saw Ft. Sumter but did not take the boat ride out to it. I did tour Ft Moultrie, however. Built during the American Revolution, Ft Moultrie had been evacuated by Federal forces for the more defensible but unfinished Ft Sumter. It was used by Confederates in the bombardment and saw service off-and-on until World War II.

Cleaned-up and tourist friendly, most historic sites have a bit of a Disneyland feel to them. The exception in Charleston came when we stumbled upon the old slave market building. It looked like any other building on any other block, as it was probably viewed at the time. It was just another business establishment, like the butcher, stable or dry goods store. It just happened that the business here was the buying and selling of human beings. Walking through the simple building and looking at the displays I couldn’t help thinking this was America’s Auschwitz.

Last week over five nights, PBS rebroadcast the award-winning, blockbuster documentary, The Civil War, by Ken Burns. It’s so easy now to forget the scale of the conflict and the resulting destruction of people and property. Over 600,000 died; more than in all the rest of American wars combined. Millions more were wounded, many with life-long injuries, especially the loss of arms and legs.

With the exception of Gettysburg (in Pennsylvania), all the major fighting was in Southern or Border States and the region was devastated. The Burns documentary was possible because the Civil War was the first major war anywhere to be photographed. Mostly taken after the fighting was over, the pictures are not much different from those of World War I or II: blocks of burned-out buildings, torn up railroad tracks, soldiers’ bodies lying in open fields or trenches, living soldiers exhausted and hollow-eyed, dazed refugees, and emaciated prisoners.

Famously Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman summed up the conflict saying, “War is all hell.” Unlike the early romanticized expectations of most civilians and politicians, many of the commanders on both sides knew what a protracted horror the war would be. Historians now see the American Civil War as anticipating the carnage of the world wars of the next century. The trenches of Verdun were foreshadowed at Petersburg and Grant’s nine-month siege. Concentration camps had their roots in places like Andersonville, whose commander was executed after one of the first war crimes trials. His defense: I was just following orders.

The Civil War was also one of the first “people’s wars,” which therefore required ongoing popular support. There is little doubt, for example, that the North would have ended the conflict had Lincoln not been re-elected in 1864, as looked very likely through most of that year. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta that September seemed to turn the tide, however, convincing enough voters that victory was in sight.

Nonetheless, the official explanations of the conflict by political leaders on both sides shifted as it went on: preserving the Union or defending states’ rights, abolishing slavery or defending slavery. Different people saw different purposes in the war, which showed that the war had really taken on a life of its own.

In both the North and South, many saw the war as a religious crusade: God was on their side. For the North, Julie Ward Howe summed up the sentiment in her stirring Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yet the religious potential for horror was also shown in the pre-war attacks of John Brown, who today would be labeled a terrorist or even jihadist.

Lincoln’s view was different. He had no known religious affiliation and rarely attended worship, yet he frequently quoted scripture in his speeches and framed events in theological terms. As he saw it, the war was God’s judgment on the entire nation. The whole country had practiced or tolerated slavery, and the conflict was the result of a moral breakdown across the board. There would be no winners in this war. Its conclusion, however, would bring the possibility of reconciliation and rebirth.

Lincoln, like many of the war’s generals, saw that war really solved nothing. It was a necessary evil. The real work, and the real chance for a better society and better lives for its people, would come after the fighting was over. After it had gotten it out of its system, the country could get back to its true purpose of being a commonwealth, a place of life and opportunity for all. War, on the other hand, was always and could never be anything other than “all hell.”

Rewriting Holy Week (Sunday Reflections for April 3, 2011)

In two weeks we begin Holy Week, the church’s observance of the death of Jesus. Various events recounted in the gospels will be commemorated at services during the week, including Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, his last supper with his disciples, his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, his trial before the priests and Pilate, and his crucifixion.

Most Christians, as well as many people outside the church, will regard all this as the remembrance of historical occurrences. They would likely be surprised, and perhaps dismayed, to learn that most biblical scholars today (excluding fundamentalists, of course) regard little if any of it that way. “You mean someone made this all up?” a person might ask. Well, many people were likely involved but, basically, yes.

What we might call “scientific” biblical scholarship has been going on for a little over two centuries. Throughout this time most of these scholars have felt at least some restraint reporting their findings out of fear of how they would be received within the church. One result is that their work increasingly went “underground.” Scholars discussed their work among themselves but only a small portion leaked out to the general public.

After about World War II, critical biblical scholarship became standard fare in seminaries and theology schools. Nonetheless, pastors-in-training were usually directed to keep most of this to themselves or intuitively knew to do so. The bizarre result was that pastors became the only trained professionals I know of who were encouraged NOT to use a significant portion of their education in carrying out their work. Why this wasn’t recognized for decades as a sign that the church was in serious distress, I still haven’t figured out. I’m not sure it is yet today.

Much has changed in the church over the past 200 years and finally we may be able to tolerate some biblical honesty. The biggest change is that most people in the Western world will not pass through the doors of a church at all during Holy Week, nor on Easter for that matter. The culture’s emotional attachment to these stories is significantly weaker that it once was. Frankly, not many people even know these stories anymore except in vague outline. This may, however, give the church some much needed freedom and fresh air.

As we discussed at this past week’s “Living the Questions” video session, the biggest problem with reconstructing the life of Jesus is that we simply have so little reliable information. The earliest writings after Jesus’ death are the letters of Paul, and for reasons still not understood, he tells us little if anything about the historic Jesus. The canonical gospels were written from 40-80 years after Jesus (some scholars would argue for even later dates) and are not eye-witness accounts. In fact, it is entirely possible we have nothing in writing from anyone who actually knew or even saw Jesus.

While this might seem surprising, it really isn’t. As I told awhile ago, I recently read the new biography of Cleopatra, who lived about a generation before Jesus (she knew Herod the Great and it was the Roman Emperor Augustus who defeated her and Mark Antony). At the beginning of the book, the author laments how fragmentary are the sources for Cleopatra’s life. At the high point of her reign, Cleopatra was one of the most powerful persons in the world. Her life intertwined with the greatest of Rome’s rulers, yet no one at the time wrote an account of her life. The information we do have is written many years later, almost all by people attempting to discredit her. Indeed, reconstructing the life of any historically significant person of antiquity is almost impossible in detail and often difficult in even broad outline.

The difficulty in reconstructing the life of Jesus isn’t surprising then, given that he was a virtual social nonentity. Scholars today agree that Jesus came from the furthest margins of society: a Jewish peasant who lived in the backwater of a backwater: the region of Galilee on the fringe of Rome’s despised province of Judea. To observers of the time, Jesus would have been one of “a dime-a-dozen” wandering mystics, teachers, holy men, and miracle workers common to the region and the time. If Cleopatra could barely get her story told, Jesus didn’t stand a chance.

Which, in brief, is the main reason the biblical events of Holy Week are now seen as literary fiction. The basic plot is certainly plausible. For whatever reason, Jesus may have gone to Jerusalem (perhaps for the first time in his life), gotten himself in trouble by creating a commotion (in the temple?), which then led to his arrest and execution. But someone as insignificant as Jesus would never have rated the tumult or attention depicted in the gospels.

The details of that story are now viewed as the product of early church evangelists and writers. Their source, rather than eye witnesses, was primarily the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Following a long and respected religious tradition, its stories were used to provide the interpretive framework for this new religious event, the life and death of Jesus the Christ.

Whatever its cause, Jesus’ arrest would have led to a minimal legal proceeding followed by a quick execution. It certainly wouldn’t have rated a hearing before the Roman governor. Public crucifixions were literally almost everyday occurrences. It would have been normal if repulsive to pass rotting bodies hanging on crosses as one entered Jerusalem. This was ancient state terrorism and crowd control. Most victims were not buried because wild animals and the elements quickly disposed of the bodies.

Nor is it clear that Jewish authorities would have ever been involved given that Jesus did little if anything to merit their intervention. Calling yourself the messiah (if Jesus even did that) might get you labeled as crazy but it wasn’t a capital offense. And Jesus almost certainly did not call himself the son of God. That was an identity given him after his death by the early church, to contest the Roman emperor’s claim to that title.

As we read a novel or watch a movie, most of us easily enter the story as if it is real, and temporarily suspend our awareness that what is being depicted is the creation of the writer or director. The same is true for our hearing of the Holy Week narratives. Nonetheless, it is likely that the gospel writers and early church knew nothing about the events surrounding Jesus’ death. What is hinted at in the gospels themselves may have been truer than we realize: Jesus may well have died alone and abandoned—and unnoticed.

The earliest years of the church after Jesus’ death are essentially a blank slate. We know next to nothing about them. What we can surmise, though, is that some of his followers had experiences which convinced them that Jesus was yet alive (and the first of these may well have been women). “I have seen the Lord.” He lived now in God’s heavenly realm, yet somehow his Spirit also remained with his disciples on earth. As the church spread, and after most of his original followers had died, the story of Jesus was fleshed out, not to reconstruct the chain of events, but for evangelistic proclamation purposes.

For us a narrative like Holy Week now hides as much as it reveals. We are distracted by its over-the-top dramatics and flagrant anti-Semitism. Biblical scholars are helping us regain some perspective, shifting our attention from his death to his life as what is most important for us today. Yet this is something that perhaps even Mark, the earliest gospel, understood. For at its very end the angel at the tomb directs the women to go back to Galilee, the place of Jesus’ life and ministry. “There you will see him.”

Bell's hell (Sunday Reflections for March 27, 2011)

I talked in my sermon a couple weeks ago about the current tempest in the evangelical teapot. The dustup is over a new book by Rob Bell, an evangelical pastor of a megachurch in Grand Rapids. Bell is considered a leader in the “emerging Christianity” movement which has been popular with many younger evangelicals, as well as some mainline Christians.

In the book, Love Wins, Bell continues to push the envelope of traditional Christian doctrine and theology. What has created controversy this time is his questioning of the meaning and reality of hell. The latest wrinkle is a story picked up by multiple news outlets. It seems a young Methodist pastor posted an article endorsing Bell’s book and this proved the last straw for his church’s members. As a result his rural North Carolina congregation fired him. They didn’t want a pastor who wasn’t a firm believer in hell.

In its summary of Bell’s book, the news story says:

Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell. "This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."

In a video introducing the book,

[Bell] describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: "Reality check: He's in hell." "Gandhi's in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?" Bell asks in the video.

Bell is right in seeing that the Gandhi example goes to the heart of the dark side of the black-and-white nature of evangelicalism. Historically, of course, most of Christianity has tended in this direction at one time or another. “Who’s in and who’s out” is a question the church has often obsessed over and sometimes wielded like a club (as the Methodist pastor rediscovered).

Personally it’s hard for me to take any of this very seriously as I can’t remember ever accepting the idea of hell as a literal place. Indeed most of mainline Christianity has treated hell as a metaphor for a long time. I remember a seminary professor saying thirty years ago, with a wry smile, that while he might believe there was a hell, he didn’t have to believe anyone was in it.

The repeated refrain of Bell’s evangelical critics is that he ignores God’s righteousness. The article summarizes a Baptist theologian’s assessment that “Bell errs in a conception of a loving God that leaves out the divine attributes of justice and holiness.” Ironically this rarely seems to be a concern of Jesus (as in Sunday’s Gospel story from John of the woman at the well). Rather, Bell’s critics sound much more like the Pharisees with whom Jesus so often jousts.

Probably the best takedown of those concerned for God’s justice, however, is the book of Jonah. After his detour with the fish, Johan finally goes to Nineveh to preach as God had asked him. When the city almost instantaneously repents, Jonah goes off into the wilderness to sulk, wanting to die. When God asks him what his problem is, Jonah complains that this is exactly what he knew would happen. The evil Ninevites would repent and get off the hook, “for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”

Hell - Deriec Bouts 15th c.

This has been the secret fear of righteous Christians all along: that the God of Jesus really is a big softy. In their distaste for evil and evil-doers, they want to see some hellfire and brimstone. They don’t want to belong to a club that lets everyone in. Isn’t part of the pleasure of heaven knowing that you didn’t end up in hell like those “other” people? What value is a prize if everyone gets it? Does the carrot really work if there isn’t also a big stick as a threatening alternative?

This debate goes to the heart of Christianity, of the Bible, and of religion generally. Indeed, it is a debate within the Bible itself, as the book of Jonah and Jesus’ arguments with the Pharisees show. Many clearly want a God whose primarily role is to establish and enforce the rules. Historically this has been the god of official state religions, which then sanctioned the king as god’s earthly representative. It was his divinely authorized job to keep order and punish law breakers.

This, however, seems nothing like the God of Jesus. He is the one the church calls the Son of God just like Israel’s ancient kings, yet as we will see again in a few weeks rides into Jerusalem not on a war horse but on a donkey. He is the one who turns away an angry justice-seeking crowd with the disarming words, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” He is the one who looks on those who have hung him on a cross and says, “God forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.”

In one of my favorite movie lines, Groucho Marx says with typical self-deprecating irony, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” Somehow I have the same feeling about the heaven imagined by those who so fervently believe in hell. That’s a club I don’t think I would want to belong to.

"But God was not in the earthquake" (Sunday Reflections for March 20, 2011)

"But God was not in the earthquake..." 1 Kings 19:11

There has been one remarkable thing about the theological reaction to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan: there hasn’t been any. The one exception I’m aware of was Glen Beck’s vague observation on-air that “perhaps” God was trying to tell the world something, like it needs to change its ways. Apparently even Beck realized how vacuous this sounded and dropped the subject.

A catastrophe of this magnitude begs for some kind of interpretation. In the past, such events inevitably led to sermons and theological treatises on the ways of Almighty God and humanity’s weakness and sinfulness. This time by implication, the theological silence is rendering a different judgment: God had nothing to do with it.

Today in our world of instant communication, we are aware of natural and human-made disasters within minutes of their occurring. We’re also aware of more of them, prompting some to mistakenly think such events are happening at an increased rate. Scientific evidence doesn’t support that, however. Rather, the ballooning human population just means people are more often impacted by such events.

Science has given us an awesome but also disturbing picture of our world. As beautiful and bountiful as the earth is, it can also be amazingly and capriciously violent. Or at least so it seems to us, for on a global scale such events are barely a ripple. The Japanese earthquake was one of the strongest ever measured yet it caused the world’s rotation to increase by only a fraction of a second and changed its axis by a fraction of a degree.

Understood in the context of the earth’s geological history, all this is barely a hiccup. And yet it is just these “hiccups,” multiplied over hundreds of millions of years, which have made the planet what it is today. We marvel at the beauty and scale of the Rocky Mountains yet they didn’t get that way by being modeled out of Play Doh. They are the result of countless instances of just the kind of violent moving and shaking northern Japan experienced.

And this is true of most of our world’s features. We can multiply the examples endlessly. Meteorologists are beginning to understand how hurricanes keep the world’s atmosphere in balance. The Gulf of Mexico is likely the result of an enormous meteor or asteroid collision. Indeed, we probably are only here now because of that “catastrophe,” which was the likely cause of the huge “die-off” that wiped out the dinosaurs and 90% of the rest of animal life. It was the dinosaurs’ untimely exit which allowed the mammals to come to dominate the planet.

In 1755 a huge earthquake and tsunami nearly destroyed the city of Lisbon, Portugal. For Europe, at least, many historians view it as the turning point of Christianity’s cultural domination for it was an event that left theologians speechless. They had no explanation for it because Lisbon was seen as a beautiful and truly Christian city. If any place was deserving of God’s blessing and protection, it was Lisbon. Clearly, it didn’t get. Instead, the event came to be viewed as a confirmation of the new Enlightenment understanding that the world operated according to natural laws rather than divine ones.

God didn’t cause the Lisbon earthquake or the most recent one in Japan. Nor does God cause any other natural phenomenon which we humans may judge to be disasters because we were in the way when they occurred. All of them are simply part of the natural rhythm of events on our churning and heaving planet.

In our last Lent midweek "Living the Questions" video, it was suggested that we need to get rid of the notion of God as “almighty.” Events like these underscore that idea. It isn’t helpful, it isn’t (as the video correctly says) biblical, and experience just says it can’t be true. Life is full of events that are beyond anyone’s control. Most of them are benign and we hardly notice them. Occasionally they are beneficial and sometimes they are catastrophic. Where God enters the picture is in challenging us to decide how to react. If we are blessed at such moments, how will we use that blessing? When disaster strikes, how will we respond to our own needs or to those of others? These are often the crucial moments that define our character and who we are as human beings.

As much as science has done for us, it is highly unlikely we will ever tame our planetary home. Nor for that matter should we, according to what science has shown us. These natural churnings are essential for what has made the earth the planet that it is. Science can help us learn how to better co-exist with our planet’s shakes and rolls. Wisdom should cause us to heed their warnings and counsel. Compassion is what should move us to aid whoever suffers in such disasters wherever our knowledge and wisdom haven’t been enough.

Youthful enthusiasm (Sunday Reflections for March 13, 2011)

A couple church colleagues of mine recently linked enthusiastically to a blog post by the Episcopal Bishop of Arizona, Rev. Kirk Smith. Bishop Smith says that he is frequently asked what can be done to get more young people to come to church. In response, he quotes from the post of a young woman, Tamie Fields Harkins, who used to be a college chaplain in his diocese. In the post she gives a 20-point “fool-proof plan” for attracting young people to church.

I like many of her ideas but on one major issue I think she is dead wrong. I’ll come to that at the end, though. Here is Ms. Harkins’ plan for your reflection:

1. Be genuine. Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, if you are not already intrinsically trendy or hip. If you are a 90-year-old woman who enjoys crocheting and listens to Beethoven, by God be proud of it.

2. Stop pretending you have a rock band.

3. Stop arguing about whether gay people are okay, fully human, or whatever else. Seriously. Stop it.

4. Stop arguing about whether women are okay, fully human, or are capable of being in a position of leadership.

5. Stop looking for the "objective truth" in Scripture.

6. Start looking for the beautiful truth in Scripture.

7. Actually read the Scriptures. If you are Episcopalian, go buy a Bible and read it. Start in Genesis, it's pretty cool. You can skip some of the other boring parts in the Bible. Remember though that almost every book of the Bible has some really funky stuff in it. Remember to keep #5 and #6 in mind though. If you are evangelical, you may need to stop reading the Bible for about 10 years. Don't worry: during those 10 years you can work on putting these other steps into practice.

8. Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism, consumerism, and the rate at which children are dying worldwide of preventable, treatable diseases. Put all the energy you formerly spent worrying about the legit-ness of gay people into figuring out ways to do some good in these areas.

9. Do not shy away from lighting candles, silence, incense, laughter, really good food, and extraordinary music. By "extraordinary music" I mean genuine music. Soulful music. Well-written, well-composed music. Original music. Four-part harmony music. Funky retro organ music. Hymns. Taize chants. Bluegrass. Steel guitar. Humming. Gospel. We are the church; we have an uber-rich history of amazing music. Remember this.

10. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

11. Learn how to sit with people who are dying.

12. Feast as much as possible. Cardboard communion wafers are a feast in symbol only. Humans cannot live on symbols alone. Remember this.

13. Notice visitors, smile genuinely at them, include them in conversations, but do not overwhelm them.

14. Be vulnerable.

15. Stop worrying about getting young people into the church. Stop worrying about marketing strategies. Take a deep breath. If there is a God, that God isn't going to die even if there are no more Christians at all.

16. Figure out who is suffering in your community. Go be with them.

17. Remind yourself that you don't have to take God to anyone. God is already with everyone. So, rather than taking the approach that you need to take the truth out to people who need it, adopt the approach that you need to go find the truth that others have and you are missing. Go be evangelized.

18. Put some time and care and energy into creating a beautiful space for worship and being-together. But shy away from building campaigns, parking lot expansions, and what-have-you.

19. Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7. Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.

20. Listen to God (to Wisdom, to Love) more than you speak your opinions.

In conclusion, Harkins says, “This is a fool-proof plan. If you do it, I guarantee that you will attract young people to your church. And lots of other kinds of people too. The end.”

Well, this may be Harkins way of saying that she is presenting this “plan” at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. In short, she is urging the church to resist the temptation to “faddishness” and following what secular culture says is popular. She is telling the church: Be honest. Be who you are and don’t try to be something else just because you think that’s what other people want you to be. Also, get rid of some baggage the church has accumulated over the years (e.g. prejudice towards women and gays, biblical literalism) which isn’t intrinsic to Christianity and has now become an impediment to its true mission.

So I would agree that doing most if not all these things would make a church better. I don’t think there is any guarantee it would make a church grow, however. Again, Harkins may be more aware of this than she lets on. But for argument’s sake, at face value her plan has one major flaw, which is a common one in the church. It makes the assumption that church is inherently and obviously attractive.

In this way of thinking, the church’s main problem is execution. It has a really good “product” but falls down in quality control and/or marketing. If the church would just be the church, people would come flocking in. Uh, no. For a young adult already inclined to joining a church, these ideas could well attract him or her to a congregation using them rather than to another. Unfortunatley, however, the reality is that church is just not something most young adults are looking for. A congregation could fulfill every one of Harkin’s points but many would still say, “That’s great but I’m just not interested.”

If you’ve read me before you may recognize this as another example of “buggy-whip” thinking. “If sales are falling then we just need to improve our quality or marketing,” this attitude says. It ignores the possibility that people just don’t need or want buggy-whips anymore, no matter how good they are.

Notice, however, that I am not criticizing Harkins’ proposals. Most of them are spot on, I think, and would indeed lead to a more genuine and healthy congregational life. For better or for worse, however, congregational life itself is simply appealing to fewer and fewer people. So by all means, I think congregations should adopt Harkins’ plan if it appeals to them. But do it for yourselves, to improve your mission and the quality of your life-in-community. Just don’t do it to refill your empty pews. That’s something you probably have no control over.

The Maccabeats are back for Purim

With thanks and/or apologies to Pink: Raise your glass!



If you missed it, be sure to watch their Hanukkah song "Candlelight."

Lessons from a funeral (Sunday Reflections for March 6, 2011)

A funeral this past week provided me with an interesting view of “religion in America.”

A little while ago one of our members called to ask me to visit someone dying of cancer. She was his daughter’s mother-in-law and I said I would be glad to. Over the course of a few visits in hospital and then in hospice I got to know Lynne and other members of her family. She was already seriously ill so my interactions with her were limited. Nonetheless, I found Lynne and the rest of the family very enjoyable. My attention to them seemed genuinely appreciated, including conducting Lynne’s funeral.

Lynne had some church involvement in her past and considered herself Christian but had not had any affiliation with a church for quite awhile. This seemed true for most of the rest of the family, with the exception of a daughter and her husband who were very committed evangelicals. From the size of the crowd at the funeral home it was obvious Lynne had many friends who would genuinely miss her. It was repeated again and again what a kind and gracious person she was. She was a good person, who had lived a good life, which ended too soon.

I appreciated the opportunity to meet Lynne and members of her family, who obviously shared many of her fine qualities. I was glad to be of help to them in a difficult time of need. I have done similar things many times before and they are always rewarding experiences for me. Nonetheless, on almost every occasion I find myself wondering at some point what it is I’m doing. Officially I represent the church but that’s not really the capacity I’m exercising, since these are not church members I’m dealing with.

No, I’ve come to understand that I am there as a kind of generic “God- or spirit-person.” In such situations, I guide and assist people through life transitions that we recognize as spiritual events, which include things like birth, marriage, personal crisis, as well as death. On such occasions neither they nor I assume any particular religious beliefs or commitment. We relate to each other simply on the basis of our common humanity. I’m brought in because I have some training and experience in these things and—since I’ve thought about them more than most people do—presumably have something worthwhile to say at such times.

What’s become obvious today is that this is where most people are at in regards to their spiritual life and needs. As we discussed this week at our first “Living the Questions” video session, we all now understand our life as a journey, which is an inherently spiritual idea. Observing this, British theologian Don Cupitt has said that a “religion of everyday life” is rapidly replacing the old traditional religions in the modern world. (He has done some fascinating studies to show how often the word “life” is now used in everyday speech where “God” used to be, e.g. “Right now I’m just going wherever life takes me.” You’d be surprised how easy it is to come up with more examples.)

What has yet to find a place in this religion of everyday life, of course, is the church. What role does this global institution with two thousand years of history, and more tradition than any person could possibly understand or appreciate, have to play anymore? With such a religion and spirituality, why would people belong to an organization with rules, budgets, buildings and staff?

As I talk to people about belonging to the church I hear very similar responses. Most people consider themselves spiritual, believers in God (however they understand that), religious even, and often even identify with a particular denomination. When pressed, many say that they would like to go to church, that it would be a good idea, but they are just too busy or just doesn’t fit into their life right now.

I take such responses as sincere and honest. What it says to me is that church has simply dropped down people’s priority lists. People only have so much time and have certain things they want to do with that time. If we arbitrarily say that there are 20 significant things we can do in our daily life (family, work, sleep, eating, exercise, friends, entertainment, etc.), then on average church is about #23 on people’s lists. Belonging to a church, worshiping regularly, participating in its other activities, and supporting it financially—people just find themselves asking, “Why?”

As I said, I didn’t get to know Lynne very well but this church question came to mind as I thought of her. All indications are that she was a good and lovely person. She had many friends and belonged to a variety of organizations. She was surrounded and supported by a loving family, especially during her struggle with cancer. As a pastor, I was invited into her life at its end as a sort of spiritual adviser. Though I think I could have been of more help if I had been there sooner, she certainly seemed to end her life with peace, maturity and grace.

Her story is not uncommon: a good person with a real spiritual life, who does not “belong” to the church, yet has occasional need or desire for what we might describe as “religious services.” Frankly, I think this is becoming the norm but the church is having greatly difficulty adjusting to this situation or even accepting this new role. With its history and tradition, the church can’t imagine itself except as a great, divinely instituted organization, wrapped up somehow in the fate of the world. I’m afraid those days are long gone and never to return.

People’s lives today are remarkably free and, consequently, remarkably complicated. Navigating this journey called life is at the essence of spirituality, and we all seek help and guidance for it. Most of us appreciate ritual markings of special moments in that journey: birth, entering adulthood, marriage, death. In this there is a real opportunity for the church to redefine itself and be of genuine value in people’s lives. The question is whether the church can see this, not as a comedown from past glory, but as a new way to continue to enrich people’s lives and make the world a better place.