Wizards Wanted

In today’s reading in the One Year Bible, we encounter God’s severe instructions about “wizardry.” We are not to respect nor heed the words of a wizard, or anyone who claims to channel a familiar spirit. Such people are to be cast out of the community.

A hundred years ago, many of the great minds of Europe and America were caught up in the antics of spiritualists. They enjoyed parties where mediums raised tables and introduced the participants to automatic handwriting. Departed loved ones spoke through these mediums with convincing displays of protoplasm and blinking lights.

Most of it was fraud, some of it was not.

The scriptures make it clear that this is a boundary that a believer must not cross. Either God invites a person into the spiritual world or one must not go.

All through history, people have been trying to be “spiritual.” God doesn’t want us to be “spiritual.” He wants us to be mortals. Trying to be “spiritual” doesn’t usually turn out well. People trying too hard to become “spiritual” become either unhinged or demonic.

The Bible teaches that true spirituality works the other way: spiritual things become material.

The Word becomes flesh.

Man does not ascend up into heaven, as we learn from the story of the tower of Babel; God descends into the earth, as we learn in St. John 1:1-16.

When we try to conjure a “word” from God, we usually get into trouble. God sends a word to us – in a book.

God is as interested as we are in healing the ancient divisions between time and eternity, Heaven and Earth; and spirit and matter. However, we can’t repair the bridge from this side. Every time we try, we mess up. So God says, “Stop trying to be wizards. No soothsaying. No reading tea leaves, broken buzzard bones or frog entrails. Stop gazing into crystal balls, preparing horoscopes or puking up protoplasm in the form of dead uncles.

In other words, "Stop trying to get to me. I am coming to you. I know the way and how to get there. Just wait for me."

Christians believe that God did that when he “became incarnate.” What that word means is that God not only “took on” flesh, as a man might put on a coat, but that He truly became a man.

We call this belief the doctrine of the incarnation, a word which means “en-flesh-ment.”

Many of the other great world religions view our belief in the incarnation as disrespectful of God; perhaps even blasphemous. Muslims and Jews particularly find this doctrine repulsive. Although, as Karen Armstrong points out in her History of God, Jews and Muslims have had to propose different solutions to the same theological problem we face: how does God, being wholly spiritual, interact with a material world? (Both Jews and Muslims have come to see their sacred scripture as the solution to that problem.)

Most religions don’t believe that God does interact with matter. Some of them teach that we must learn how to shed our material existence. Others adopt some form of shamanism, where specially gifted “spiritual” people go into trance and run messages back and forth between our world and the other one.

Christians however, believe that the incarnation is an example of supreme intimacy between God and His people. We believe that God made Himself vulnerable to us, because He wanted to have a relationship with us. Therefore, for Christians, the incarnation is an overwhelming demonstration of God’s love. It tells us that God wanted so much for us to know Him that He laid aside His dignity and power to become one of us.

Listen to Robert Barron’s wonderful phrase that I used in an earlier blog:

“In His great leap out of Himself, God discloses, super-abundantly and overwhelmingly who He is.”

Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer once said, “I have no God whether in heaven or in earth, and I know of none, outside the flesh that lies in the bosom of the Virgin Mary. For elsewhere God is utterly incomprehensible but comprehensible only in the flesh of Christ alone.” (Quoted by Donald G. Boesch, in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1, p 127, Harper & Row, 1978)

The doctrine of the incarnation addresses the question: “who exactly is Jesus?” It is not a simple answer, though. Other than our doctrine of the godhead, the incarnation may be the most difficult Christian teaching to express and understand. Christians believe that Jesus is fully God; fully Man; and fully God and fully Man at the same time.

Jesus was a great religious teacher, much like other great religious teachers in many ways. However, unlike the others, Jesus became a bridge for us to God; a bridge made from his own flesh. After his death, Christ resurrected and ascended into heaven. This means that there is now a man (resurrected and glorified) sitting on Heaven’s throne. This Man, the risen Christ, intercedes for us and saves us.

Therefore, to Christians, the material body of Jesus is as important to us as His Spirit. We do not believe that he discarded his body even after the incarnation, as though it were “a thing” of no further use.

As the Nicene Creed puts it, “for us and our salvation He came down from Heaven and became a Man.

The incarnation continues.

God is no longer just a Spirit; He has flesh like us.

That fact has changed the universe.

We don’t need a good wizard. A shaman would be a poor substitute for what we already have.

We have God.

God with us.

God in us.

God for us.

Happy Birthday!

To all the world’s Methodists, Wesleyans, Pentecostals and Charismatics – take note: today is your birthday!

On today’s date, in 1784, John Wesley chartered the Methodist Church, setting into motion the form of Protestant Christianity that would gradually evolve into a very substantial portion of the word’s churches.

Our faith has been shifting and evolving in that way since the very beginning.

That’s why in today’s Bible reading (One Year Bible), the Old Testament and New Testament passages seem to be yelling at each other.

The Leviticus passage (Chapter 15) talks about how people become “unclean.” A man becomes unclean who has an orgasm – you have to destroy any clay pot he happens to touch, for example. A woman becomes unclean in her menstrual cycle. They both have to bathe, offer pigeons; do all sorts of things to become clean.

In the New Testament passage, Jesus says in essence, 'forget all of that. You don’t have to do the ritual hand washing. You guys keep focusing on all that stuff, but you forget about developing godly character. '

Out of such apparent contradictions between the two covenants, defining their relationship to one another, and applying such ancient instructions to modern life, come all the denominations and divisions of Christendom. Gather three Christians together, open up the Bible, and you will get five opinions, two systematic theologies and at least one new revelation that has been previously hidden from all humanity since the foundations of the earth.

What do we do with all of this?

Well, for one thing, we can laugh!

We all know that Jesus saved us and that He gives us new life as we follow Him.

We also know that we each interpret how that works in very different ways.

And, more often than not, we fuss about it.

However, at the core of our faith we find not only unity; but also diversity that remains committed to community.

This is true even within God Himself.

Although the doctrines of the godhead were developed slowly, the central ideas were already present in the Old Testament.

Consider Proverbs, chapter 8. Listen as Wisdom speaks.

22“ The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,

Before His works of old have been established from everlasting,

From the beginning, before there was ever an earth …

27 When He prepared the heavens, I was there,

When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,

When He marked out the foundations of the earth,

30 Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;

And I was daily His delight,

Rejoicing always before Him,

31 Rejoicing in His inhabited world,

And my delight was with the sons of men.

(Proverbs 8:22-31, New King James Version)


The way that Proverbs uses the concept of “Wisdom” is very close to how the Greeks used the concept of “logos.” The opening words of St. John’s gospel takes advantage of this similarity to create a bridge between Greek and Hebrew thought. That’s how John introduces Christ to the non-Hebrew world.

Christ was with and was God, he says.

St Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) was one of Christianity’s most influential thinkers. In his Confessions (which every Christian should read), St. Augustine says that that as a pagan philosopher he had often read about the Logos. Therefore, he didn’t find St. John’s words as out of the ordinary at first. Then, he says, “I read these startling words: “The Word (Logos) became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

For Christians, these opening words of St. John’s gospel are some of the most precious words of the New Testament. However, that same passage has provoked much of the intense discussion that divided early Christians and which still can provoke a lot of passionate disagreement.

Why is that?

Presenting Christ as the “Logos,” or even as the “Wisdom” of God, forced Jewish Christians to stretch their understanding about God.

If Christ had indeed existed “in the beginning,” if he truly was with and yet was God, then they had to find some new way of comprehending their faith.

By using the word “Logos,” St. John set the stage for Christians to understand and worship Christ, not only as the Son of David or as the Jewish Messiah, but, as in the words of the Nicene Creed, the “eternally begotten Son of God.”

Christians through the ages have meditated on the opening of John’s gospel, trying to comprehend what he was really saying about Christ.

Robert Barron, in his book Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (Crossroads publishers, New York, 1996) says that in Christ, God “leaped out of Himself.” (p.49)

Wow! That’s it!

The Nicene Creed calls Jesus “very God of very God.” The Nicene statement is much more formal and precise than Barron, but “leaping out of Himself” – what a phrase!

God leaping out of Himself means He keeps surprising us.

Once we learned how to keep our bodies clean and to respect and manage our sexuality, he told us to stop obsessing about ritual hand washing. Once we settled down to a few centuries of tradition and protocol, he sent Martin Luther. Once we thought through the implications about justification by faith, he sent Wesley to remind us that faith ought to be changing our lives.

Anglicanism leapt out of Catholicism. Methodism leapt out of Anglicanism. Pentecostalism leapt out of Methodism. Charismatics leapt and leapt and leapt. We have no idea what will happen when they stop leaping.

It's kind of a madness, I guess, all this leaping.

Like the madness of a kindergarten or a high school dance.

Not nearly as nice and orderly as an old folks home.

On the other hand, there not much procreation in an old folks home.

So happy birthday to father John Wesley and all his unruly kids.

Keep leaping.

Is The World Really Flat?

On this date in 1632, Galileo published a paper that would shake the foundations of the Western World: The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

The paper asserted that the earth moves around the sun. The earth was not, after all, the center of the universe.

It would be difficult for us to imagine how terrifying this discovery was for Christendom. Of course, most people, burdened by everyday life, didn’t even hear about the discovery. It would take centuries for the news to seriously affect the faith of most believers.

We have long since adjusted to Galileo and routinely read passages that speak of the sun moving or not moving metaphorically. Even conservative fundamentalists do not argue with Galileo now.

In the early twentieth century, two other discoveries slowly became challenges to our traditional view of the universe. Again, most believers still give these discoveries little thought. However, as their implications move from the intellectual community into our everyday awareness, Christians must make adjustments. They must decide: what stories and phrases in scripture are absolute and literal; what are metaphorical ways of expressing spiritual truths?

The theories of relativity and the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics are even more disturbing than Galileo. They call into doubt our ability to accurately grasp the nature of reality.

The early Christians faced similar difficulties as they took their Hebrew views into the Greco-Roman world.

In my last blog, I wrote about how the Apostle John explained both the Hebrew view of creation and the incarnation of Christ to his Greek-speaking audience. He used one very important Greek word: Logos.

The word “logos” was familiar to educated people in the first century.

Though we usually translate “logos” as “word,” we could also translate it as “reason,” “blueprint,” or, depending on the context, a number of other words and phrases.

By the time of Christ, the Greek philosophers had so refined and expanded the meaning of the word that it had come to mean something like “the organizing principle of the cosmos.”

In our earlier discussion about Plato’s view of form and substance, I mentioned how John used Plato’s idea of logos as the form of forms, the blueprint of all blueprints.

By the 1st century, Greek intellectuals were describing the logos as the link between matter and spirit.

After all, the Greeks wondered, “how could – indeed, how would – God, a spiritual being without flesh or material substance of any kind, create a material world? Then, once He had created it, how or why would he interact with it?

We might rephrase their ancient question using a modern metaphor: what sort of interface connects matter and spirit? What allows them to interact?

Plato and others taught that the “logos” was the connection between matter and spirit. Logos allowed form and substance to interact.

In other words, the Greeks believed that the organizing principle that gave the universe its meaning and form was itself divine. Logos was the womb of all material substance.

That is important because John is not the only writer in the New Testament to make use of this concept.

The Writer of the Hebrews, for one, uses this same vocabulary. Whenever we encounter in the New Testament words like “true,” “shadow,” “real”, “form” or “substance,” we are viewing the universe through the lenses of platonic thought (the teachings of Plato’s followers).

We should not over emphasize the platonic elements in the New Testament however. The New Testament writers made use of Greek philosophical language but they rarely gave the terms they borrowed, the same meanings as pagan philosophers. John was only using a Greek word that he thought would communicate the gospel. He knew that his Greek audience would not understand Hebrew concepts as he had learned them from his ancestors.

We don’t question the Apostle John’s faithfulness to the Word of God. However, he was taking a big risk and one that opened up centuries of conflict within the church.

Galileo was a believer and it troubled him to upset the faith of his friends.

He was also a scientist. He had seen what he had seen. He could only determine that the accustomed way of reading scripture was inadequate for the present.

It’s something to think about today, over one hundred years after Einstein and Max Planck.

Last year, my daughter wrote a blog about Galileo that you might find interesting. In it, she talks about the gift and fear of knowledge such as Galileo wielded.

http://beatriceblount.blogspot.com/2009/07/nostradamus-ii-limitations-of-shared.html

Deuteronomy Dullard

In today’s Old Testament reading (One Year Bible), we plow through more priestly instruction. It goes on and on until our brain is numb.

Boil this.

Wear that.

Eat bread.

Can you imagine explaining all of this to an unbelieving friend?

(Do you have any unbelieving friends?)

Let’s say that you have asked someone from Japan to read the Bible with you. They agree to do it. Now you are excited. But then you get to Deuteronomy. They want to know why they should keep reading about fat, oil, leaven and foreskins.

What are you going to say?

Many of the Bible writers were aware of the difficulty in presenting spiritual knowledge to practical people. This is especially true of the New Testament writers.

Each of the four gospel writers – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – tells the story of Christ in slightly different ways and for different reasons.

The Apostle John begins his story by referring to the first words of Genesis. He wants his readers to understand that Jesus’ life did not begin in Bethlehem. To John, Jesus was with and was God, “in the beginning.”

John chooses his words carefully. He uses the phrase, “in the beginning,” not only to introduce Christ to his Greek audience; but to prepare them to understand the Hebrew Scriptures. After all, now that they were believers, they would need to understand the sacred writings of Christians and Jews.

John wanted to build a “bridge” between Greek and Hebrew words and ideas so that his Greek speaking converts could cross over into the world of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures.

John had a problem common for Christian missionaries throughout history: how to introduce concepts that are alien to the people to whom they wish to communicate.

Don Richardson had that problem. He became a missionary to New Guinea in the mid twentieth century. He learned the language of the tribe where he lived and told the people about Christ.

They loved the story! In fact, they repeatedly asked him to tell again. However, he soon discovered to his dismay that to these people, the hero of the story was Judas!

In that Stone Age culture, the people esteemed cunning. Their heroes were people who could outwit rivals by gaining their trust in order to destroy them. The folk tales in that tribe were about cunning people. The way they interpreted the gospel story was around Judas. Anyone capable of deceiving the Son of God was obviously someone to reckon with.

Richardson was devastated.

So far he only succeeded in making a hero of his Lord’s betrayer.

In time, the people among whom he was living began preparing for war. He watched as the warriors each side approached one another. Then, just before the warriors engaged, one warrior came running. He had a baby in his arms. Behind him was a woman, weeping. The other warriors constrained her. As the warrior with the child arrived at the battle line, the chief of the tribe among whom Richardson lived went forward to receive the child.

After this interchange, all the warriors turned and walked away from the battle.

Richardson soon discovered that this baby would be called the “peace child.” The child would grow up among the enemies of his people. Nonetheless, these “enemies” would treat this child with the highest possible honor. As long as he lived, there would be peace between the two peoples.

The peace child held the peoples together.

He guaranteed the peace.

As the son of a chief, he was literally a “prince of peace.”

When Richardson asked the people what would happen if anyone were to harm the peace child, the men gasped.

“This cannot be done,” they told him.

No one ever mistreats a peace child.

The next time Richardson told the story of Jesus he told it like this: our ancestors were once in a war with God. They became the allies of God’s greatest enemy. God was about to go to war against our ancestors but then sent his peace child to the earth.

Then the leaders of the world killed God’s peace child.

The tribal people became terrified when they heard this. They wept and beat themselves. They asked how long it would be before God was coming to destroy everyone for having done such a terrible thing.

Richardson told the tribal people that God had decided to forgive anyone who would simply ask Him for forgiveness and learn to love his peace child.

The tribe’s concept of “peace child” became a conceptual bridge over which the gospel could move into a new culture.

This is exactly what St. John did in his gospel. He chose a concept that Greeks would readily understand and used it to create a bridge between Greeks and Hebrews.

The word he chose was “logos.’

Plato and other thinkers had refined to make it mean something like a “cosmic blueprint,” “divine reason,” “word of the Creator.” The apostle John used this word to connect to the Hebrew use of the word “wisdom,” as presented for example in the Book of Proverbs, chapter eight.

In that passage, Wisdom says, “I was with God’ I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.”

For the apostle John, these wisdom passages become the eternal Word, waiting for the moment of incarnation in Bethlehem. This eternal Word is also Plato’s Logos, creation’s blueprint, who became flesh and dwells among us, the only begotten of the Father.

As we read through the Bible, we will watch the covenant people struggle again and again to translate spiritual concepts from one culture to the next and from one generation to the next. It is always controversial, always messy and always necessary.

Now good luck with that Japanese friend of yours!

It appears that you will have to learn something about His world if you ever hope to explain what foreskins have to do with anything. And, you might also have to learn a bit more about your own faith too!

Jefferson Killed A Cow

In 1801 on today’s date, Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the United States by the House of Representatives. The election had been tied for six days between Aaron Burr and Jefferson and the House had voted thirty-six times without arriving at a majority vote. The young nation was in deep trouble because peaceful transference of power is so crucial to our constitutional form of government. Finally, a majority decided that it was preferable to vote for someone they didn’t like rather than to endanger the unity of the nation. Alexander Hamilton, the father of our economic system, helped move the congressman to a healthy conclusion.

Three years later, Aaron Burr fatally shot Hamilton.

Democracy is a messy business!

So is faith.

If you are reading through the One Year Bible, you must have been troubled by all the blood and guts of today’s passage (Leviticus 4 & 5). I mean, the priest is supposed to hack up a cow, do something with its guts, and sprinkle blood on the incense – yuck! What’s that all about?

It’s about making the effects of human sin visible. It a picture of what our sin does to our soul, our family and friends and to our community.

King David once prayed, “Against you and you only have I sinned, O Lord.”

It’s a beautiful prayer but it’s not true. We don’t sin merely against the Lord. The blood and guts spatters over everyone around us and spreads yuck over our descendants, sometimes for generations to come. God wanted us to acknowledge that. David’s observation was false.

The Old Testament is full of mess because we’re full of mess. Even when we follow the Lord, we make a mess. It takes a lot of grace and forgiveness to keep us functioning at any level.

A few years ago, a friend in the music business asked me to listen to a song that he felt was about to become a big hit. His intuition proved correct, though I did not know that at the time. I just found myself surprised, irritated and moved by the lyrics: “what if God were one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on a bus, finding his way home”?

Christians wince at the phrase “slob like one of us’” but perhaps we wince because we are looking through rose colored glasses at the incarnation of God. We can hardly bear to think that Jesus, our Savior, was a man in every respect, sometimes hungry and frustrated, that he defecated and grew weary. We have often deified the humanity of Christ out of our reverence and respect for Him. However, in so doing we blunt the power and wonder of the incarnation. For the heart of our faith is that one day God became a common man, like one that a person could conceivably mistake as a “stranger on a bus finding his way home.”

When we consider God as Son, we are getting very intimate with God. This is the God who “walks with me and talks with me and tells me that I am His own,” as the hymn writer put it.

Jesus entered the mess. He didn’t try to heal the mess from the outside. He came into the mess with us. He allowed the gunk to splatter on Him.

Our faith is not a pristine, edited, flawless thing. We have doubts. We sin. We come to wrong conclusions about other believers. We make bad decisions. We fall in love with erroneous ideas. We are stubborn. We are loyal to denominations because grandpa belonged. We screw up. We sing hymns that don’t make any sense.

One proof of the divine origin of our faith is that it survives our stupidity! It does this generation after generation.

So far, our nation has done the same thing. The vice president of the country shot a political rival because he was ticked that he didn’t get to be president.

Thomas Jefferson, who many believed would wreck the constitution and destroy the nation, turned out to actually do a pretty good job.

When we learn that life is messy and we roll with it, things turn out!

It’s the perfectionism and pride that kills us.

Only God is perfect and even He was willing to enter into imperfection for us.

It’s a lot better than going to church to see a cow hacked up!

Old Testament YouTube

On this date in 2005, YouTube launched into service.

Today, five years later, Facebook is projected to reach 400 million users.

Four hundred million people is a larger social entity than most nations.

Already, it is difficult to imagine a world without YouTube and Facebook.

Add Google to that picture.

Now add the Internet.

Now add personal computers.

All these advances have occurred in less than one generation.

When I was an adolescent in South America, it took as long as three months to get a letter from our family in the United States. From time to time we would phone a relative, but it required taking a trip to downtown Quito, waiting for a time slot for the limited cable capacity, then yelling for several minutes hoping that most of what had been said would be heard.

The world has changed, and changed and changed again.

So what do we do with faith in a God who “changes not?”

Most of us believe that we are free to change certain elements of our worship and church structure. After all, we’ve been doing that all along. Otherwise, we would all worship like the Greek Orthodox. (Although one could argue that the Orthodox merely froze their changes at an earlier date than the rest of us (about 400 AD).

We are left with the agreement that some things ought to change and other things ought not to change but divided about what sorts of things change or remain the same.

We Christians can get downright testy when we think someone is deliberately tampering with our faith. We also have a tendency to sanctify the cultural idiosyncrasies of some particular bygone era. In fact, our differences are often about which historical era was the 'sanctified' one.

Certainly, we must honor the Christians of the past. Therefore, we should preserve their contributions. On the other hand, however saintly they may have been, our spiritual ancestors were not right about everything.

That is certainly the case about traditional gender roles.

Opinions about gender roles, like much of what we call “common sense,” are based on the accepted practices of the particular people, in a particular time that lived within a particular culture.

As we discussed in another blog, a Bible translator or theologian must carefully, prayerfully, and honorably separate what the Bible claims to be unchangeable truth from things that relate to his or her own specific cultural.

That can be difficult to do.

In the matter of God’s “gender,” we must recognize that both male and female human beings are made in God’s image and likeness. We can infer then that both maleness and femaleness have their origin in God. This means that God transcends gender. Even so, for His own reasons, God usually chose to refer to Himself as male. We must respect God’s choice in this. However, we should not make more of this issue than the Bible itself does.

How do we navigate societal change while remaining true to our spiritual foundations?

In today’s Old Testament reading from the One Year Bible, God instructs the priests about their vestments. Priests wore certain things and not other things when leading worship. Nowhere in the New Testament did God say, “Forget about all that stuff.” In fact, the worship patterns that St. John the Revelator reports seeing in heaven are pretty much the same as what God instructed in the Old Testament. The Orthodox Christians believe that this is a pattern for all times. We lack permission to change or adapt that pattern in any way.

Society does what it wants; the church remains the same.

Interesting, isn’t it? What we call “conservative Christianity” in this country, when compared to the Orthodox, are unbelievably liberal and innovative. We make changes in how we worship all the time.

Should we?

Why?

What are the fruit of these changes? Do we experience awe in our worship less than the Orthodox?

More?

Does it matter?

What does matter: doctrine, worship, behavior, fellowship, service? What matters the most?

Can we substitute fellowship over a cup of coffee for wine in a formal communion service? How about grape juice, since we have already made that shift?

Having ancient/future faith is about recognizing that we must honor our roots. We are stewards of a heritage. Like St. Paul, we are giving “that which we have received.”

On the other hand, we are responsible to communicate the gospel in a way that it will actually be received. However faithful to the past we may be, it doesn’t matter much if no one understands it enough to actually accept it. If we adapt the faith so much that it becomes something that Christ does not recognize, then we fail our mission to take the gospel to the world. If we are so faithful to the past forms that we fail to communicate the gospel, we also fail.

In an age of Facebook and Youtube, we are no longer making beautiful illuminated manuscripts that take years to complete. However, the Word is going out to the nations in most of the world’s languages. Every day we text people all over the world. Our ancestors – even our grandparents - would have been stunned by this development.

We stretch back...into the past. We stretch forward...to our descendants.

Ancient/future; it can feel like it stretches us to the breaking point.

But it doesn’t. It just makes us good communicators of the good news. And, perhaps, it makes us respectful of the differences among us. After all, the differences allow us to maintain what comes to us from the past, even as we adapt ourselves to a world that those who gave us our heritage could have never imagined.

Kyrie Eleison

Christos Eleison

Darwin at Church

Abraham Lincoln was born on this date, in 1809.

Charles Darwin was too.

Each of them fundamentally changed the world.

Both of them, later in life, were amazed that they had been thrust into prominence and had wielded such influence.

I would love to honor our sixteenth president in this blog. My admiration for him is beyond my power to express.

I want to say a word about Darwin.

I am not a biologist and am unqualified to say much about his reflections of the natural world. I can comment on his impact on the social world.

The word “evolution” has so altered our social landscape that the expectation that things will always change and mutate over time is deeply ingrained in all parts of Western Culture. We think of change as healthy and natural now.

That’s new.

Most cultures have believed stability to be the mark of societal health. Confucian Chinese culture, for example, felt that way. Centuries of stable, secure, unaltered class and social values seemed to be the way things ought to work. The alternative was “revolution,” which meant, “turning over.” The old guard was out; the new guard was in.

Then came Darwin. He proposed an alternative to both “revolution,” and “immutability,” (not changing.)

Even conservatives believe in “evolution,” in this sense. In fact, many American conservatives believe in a Social Darwinism, in which the economically fit survive as the financially unfit gradually fall through the cracks.

It’s no one’s fault and no one’s responsibility, just the way nature (the unseen hand) works.

Through the writing of Ann Rand, these notions have become the new core ideology of American libertarianism. Its interesting to watch American Christians rage against Darwin’s ideas as applied to biology but then defend his ideas ferociously when applied to economics. But I digress.

American Christians believe in evolution as applied to church life as well.

Conservatives apply the principle of evolution to worship and thus keep changing worship to reflect culture.

Liberals apply the principle of evolution to theology.

That’s why some people insist that we must use feminine language in reference to God, for example. Society requires it and theology ought to evolve to reflect that requirement.

There is no fixed point. There is no immutable truth. Thing – all things – just evolve.

Here is one reason (other than the fact that God Himself used masculine terms to revel himself) why believers through the ages have been reluctant to use feminine language in reference to God. Through history, when people have spoken of God in the feminine, they have tended to drift into a sensual, pantheistic, fertility worship.

(Pantheism is the idea that the earth is God’s body, and that everything that exists is a part of God. Hence “Goddess” spirituality seems to encourage an earth religion, which leads to a sexualized spirituality without ethical demands. Through the centuries, Christian and Jewish thinkers have seen this as a dangerous seduction that leads us away from God’s Word."

That redefines God. It makes human beings the judge about how God should be understood rather than accepting God as He reveals Himself.

For all these reasons, orthodox Christians conclude, together with the saints throughout history, that we should reject the current fad of so-called “gender inclusive language,” where the nature of God is concerned.

This is not, or at least should not be, a political or social decision. We form theology out of godly fear. We resist any potential for heresy, especially in those matters that lie at the core of our faith: God’s revelation of Himself to humankind.

The practical challenge facing Christians now regarding so-called gender inclusive language is how to remain orthodox without being reactionary.

Bible translators should feel free to be gender neutral in English where the original languages are gender neutral. The older English translations of the Bible often translated gender neutral words from the original Greek and Hebrew into gender specific words. They did not do this on purpose; they were merely reflecting the culture (and language) of their times. Also, we must remember that until fairly recently, the words “men” or “mankind” were used to include both men and women. Nowadays, that practice becoming rare. Society evolved.

When modern Bible translators attempt to respond to linguistic evolution, it does not necessarily mean that they have a “liberal bias” (although, unfortunately, that sometimes is the case.) Sometimes, they are just trying to keep the Bible fresh for each generation.

The bottom line is, we must be faithful to Word of God. However, we should not be reluctant to change language that has become discriminatory.

Words change. (Just think of how the word “queer” has changed.)

To insist on freezing language in print after the meaning has changed on the street, is foolish. This does injustice to God’s word, which was not even written in English. The point in Bible translation is to make the Word of God clear to those who read it in languages other than Hebrew and Greek.

Fidelity to God’s Word comes first, then the needs of contemporary comprehension.

In our Old Testament reading today, Moses came down with tablets from God.

I now read the words on those tablets on paper, and in another language than the one in which they were written.

Things evolved.

But not everything.

Not the main thing.

Naked In Amsterdam

On this date in 1535, five Anabaptists ran naked through the streets of Amsterdam.

Naked Anabaptists is an alarming term. I suppose Anabaptists get naked like anyone else, but since the only modern Anabaptists I know are Amish, the picture in my head is disturbing.

Also, notice the date. It’s cold in Amsterdam on February 10th. Very cold. Very, very cold. Naked is not a good idea.

Whose idea was it to go naked in Amsterdam in February?

I guarantee you it wasn’t a woman’s idea. Women just don’t decide to run naked through the streets to protest heresy.

The women Anabaptist might even told the guys this was not a good idea.

“But Fredrick. You’ll freeze your … self!”

They didn’t listen and so five Anabaptists ran naked through the streets of Amsterdam.

Pitiful.

Religious history would have been far different had the women not been locked out of the decision-making process. Now, I’ve seen my share of nutty women spiritual leaders too, so men don’t have a monopoly on religious stupidity. Still. Women see things from a different perspective and usually, we make better decisions when women and men share their different perspectives before acting.

We should have adjusted our thinking about women’s role in the church for centuries. For most of Christian history, the church has been much more chauvinistic than the apostles ever were.

That brings me to an interesting topic.

People are increasingly using feminine terms when referring to God.

Well, why not?

The Bible certainly uses feminine metaphors for God. God created male and female in “His own image and likeness.” Obviously then, women as well as men bear God’s image. Therefore, some facet of God’s essential nature is expressed through women that does not get expressed through men.

So why can’t we call God “Mother”?

Let’s begin here: the Bible is much more than a human document.

Were the Bible merely a human document, we could freely edit it to reflect the evolving sensitivities of culture.

Women have often been harmed by male domination, even in the church. Through much of history, a father or husband could beat a woman in his household without answering to anyone. A man could approve or disapprove his daughter’s choice of husbands. He had control over any income the women of the family might make.

Most of us no longer believe that such male domination is acceptable. Naturally enough, some people believe that addressing God as “Father” reinforces our old culture habit of male domination. (The formal term for that cultural habit is patriarchy.) Many people argue that by calling God “Mother” or escaping from the dilemma altogether by calling God “Parent,” we can avoid the dangers of patriarchy.

These arguments are appealing to many. As new generations become the teachers and pastors of the faith, they will appeal to even more people than they do today. Furthermore, these opinions are often stated in all sincerity by sincere and capable people.

One more thing: the arguments about using gender inclusive language in relation to God are not as Biblically weak as some conservatives claim.

Nonetheless, we do not have the authority to edit Holy Scripture, not even for what we think is a good cause.

Theology that develops from an orthodox view of the Bible is formed by the belief that God inspired its writers to reveals Him as God wished to be revealed.

Even the most conservative believer will agree that God “as He really is,” is beyond all gender distinction. Nonetheless, God “as He reveals Himself” in Scripture is nearly always masculine.

The orthodox believer must ask, “Should we speak of God other than in the ways He speaks of Himself?”

It depends on one’s view of the Bible.

Is the Bible the product of fallible human beings? Did its writers give us a divinely inspired message that was unfortunately distorted by their own cultural biases?

Or, is the Bible, though certainly a product of human minds and hands, inspired in such a way that its message is divinely protected from error?

Christians who are more liberal, (they would prefer the word “progressive”) tend to give the first answer.

More conservative Christians, (they would, or should prefer the word “orthodox") give the second one.

It is a question every Christians has to settle for himself or herself.

I am an orthodox Evangelical Christian. Although I am a fallible human being and therefore realize that my interpretation of the Bible is doubtlessly flawed, I believe that God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture comes to us as He intended.

I do not believe we have the right to edit Divine revelation, however noble our reasons.

For these and other reasons I will address in later blogs, I do not call God My Mother and don’t believe any Christian should do so.

Nonetheless, I wish a woman had been present that morning in Amsterdam when five Anabaptists got carried away at the prayer service and thought that God was telling them to run naked through the street. One of their mothers, sisters, daughters or wives would surely had stopped that idea dead in its tracks by simply bursting our in uncontrolled laughter.

Or, perhaps, a woman would have asked them to take out the trash first.

National Debt

On today’s date, The United States Congress asked President Roosevelt to place Japanese - Americans in special camps for the duration for the war. The action was taken in the heat of conflict after the Japanese surprise attack on the American naval fleet in Hawaii. We now look back at the human suffering that these camps caused to Americans of Asian ancestry, and we shake our heads in disbelief.

We also tend to understate events like these, especially when they are caused by those on “our side.” American history is full of accomplishments of which we can be proud. It is also full of situations that cause us shame. We live in an era in which the political left seems to focus on all the shameful things we have done and ignore the good we have accomplished. The political right tends to do the opposite: focus on the good and ignore all the wicked things we have done.

It is the nature of a person (and of a people) to airbrush their history in ways that allow them to ignore those parts of character, attitude and behavior that would make them feel shame.

What German wants to talk about the holocaust?

What American wants to discuss slavery?

What Turk wants to discuss the Armenian genocide?

Nations tend to downplay the shameful parts of their story as they teach children the myths of their tribe.

The result is often a skewed view of oneself and nation. One goes about his life causing pain and distress to others, oblivious of the effects of his actions and attitudes on those around him.

Here is an old African proverb that says this well: no one knows when his own breath stinks.

When one knows that his own breath stinks, he can do something about it. As long as he refuses to hear any report about what his life looks like from the outside, he just continues on living inside the story that he manufactures to protect his own ego.

This is true for nations as well as for individuals.

Other people notice when we do not take responsibility for our own actions. Others expect us to notice our own shortcomings and to ask for forgiveness. We expect it of others too.

Nations remember the injustices committed against them long after the perpetrators want to “put it behind us.” However, it is not the prerogative of the abuser to set the statue of limitations on grief and anger experienced by the abuser. The abused decides when the issue has been settled and may be put in the past.

The story of scripture is that God is offended at our rebellion against Him. He wants to forgive us but he also wants us to acknowledge our offence. In the long account of God revealing His Word to humanity, God records everything: good and bad. Nothing is airbrushed from the account.

I've heard a little story about a boy who came home from Sunday school class, disturbed about the bloody wars in the Old Testament. He went to his Dad, who was sitting in an armchair reading the paper.

“Dad, why was God so mad at those people?” the little boy asked

“Well,” the father replied, “I don’t know. I guess that was before God became a Christian.”

Well, that’s not the right answer!

The apostle John tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His only son. God forgives. The wars and suffering are about the consequences of sin.

Perhaps the Lord’s most touching was the one we call the prodigal son (St. Luke 15). Jesus told that story because he wanted us to know just how eager God is to forgive us.

A father had two sons, Jesus said. One day the youngest asked his father for his share of the inheritance. The father sorrowfully granted the request. Then the boy went to a far country and spent all his inheritance on parties.

When the money was spent and the boy had to support himself, he found a job feeding pigs.

One day the wayward son got hungry. He started eating carob pods he had been feeding to the pigs. That was then he came to himself.

Most of us know that feeling: “coming to ourselves,” realizing that we have been doing something stupid.

“I will go to my father,” the boy decided.

On his way to his father’s house, the son rehearsed his speech.

“I’ll say to him, ‘father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am not worthy to be your son. I will be content to be a hired hand.”

Jesus was not the first person to tell this story. People had been telling it for many generations already. However, the ending of the story had gone something like this: “and so the son told his father that he was unworthy to be a son but would be glad to be his hired hand. But the father sorrowfully said, ‘I have but one son who has been faithful. My other son died. And then the prodigal son walked away forever.”

The story was told to teach children responsibility.

Jesus surprisingly gave this ending: “When the father saw his son from a long way off, he ran to meet him and wept and put his own ring on his finger and said to his servant, “go kill a fattened calf and prepare a feast, for my son that was dead is alive again.”

Why did Jesus risk ruining a good moral story? Because He felt that it was more important to tell us about our Heavenly Father’s willingness to forgive us. He watches “from afar off,” waiting for us to make a move toward repentance. He is ready to forgive us. He is slow to anger, full of compassion, and not willing that any should perish.

That is the Father that Jesus taught us to worship.

Today’s reading in the One Year Bible contains Psalm 31:

“Have mercy on me Lord, for I am in distress. I am dying of grief; my years are shortened from sorrow.”

The Psalmist goes on to pray, “Sin has drained my strength.”

After several lines about his sorrow and distress, the Psalmist says,” in your unfailing love, rescue me.”

We have a God who responds to repentance. When individuals and nations repent, he turns his face toward them. He doesn’t hold grudges.

Nations and individuals that desire God’s favor must not only shout against the injustices of others; they must repent of their own injustices.

First, of course, they have to notice those injustices and feel the shame of regret.

Workin' In A Coal Mine

I always took it for granted that my father would provide for us.

Dad always worked. He worked in coal fields and on riverboats. He once worked on a garbage truck.

Dad didn’t settle for those difficult jobs because he was not smart or because he lacked ambition or pride. My father is an intelligent and resourceful man. He was ordained into Christian ministry. He didn’t like working on a garbage truck.

Dad did jobs that were distasteful to him because he had a responsibility to care for his family. In his day, such dedication was the norm. People believed then that fatherhood required sacrifice.

I am not one of those people who believe that everything new is bad and that everything old was good.

The good old days were not always that great.

However, when it comes to the way we think about fathering, it seems we have lost a great deal since my father’s day. Even though it was sometimes used as an excuse for abuse, I believe that the traditional view of fatherhood was good and biblical. Today’s children are poorer from society having discarded the notion of father as a provider and defender.

Fatherhood certainly cost God something. St. John says that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. (John 3:16) His heart was broken for us. He came to our defense. He sacrificed Himself to liberate us from the power of evil. That's what fatherhood is about. When we call God “our Father,” we bring to mind His loving provision for us. If we are fathers, worshipping a Father like our God should teach us what sort of father we should be.

Parenthood costs. It means that sometimes the right thing to do is to turn down career advancement because such a step will take too much time away from our children. It means that we should urge our churches to stop segregating their children from their parents. It means accepting personal inconvenience for our children’s sake.

We learn such things when we worship God as Father.

We have already reached the place in our One Year Bible readings when the Old Testament stories have given way to endless instructions about how to live life. Yesterday, we read the BIG TEN RULES FOR LIVING. Now we are into days and weeks of reading in which the application of God’s rules to everyday life becomes, well, boring.

Boredom is a decision though. It takes courage to pay attention to tedious instructions. Courage is that attribute of character that carries a person through situations from which he would rather flee. Fear, distaste, humiliation or boredom can cause a person to flee an important task before the work is accomplished. Sometimes, we must judge our own reaction to things and decide to override our own emotions. Doing that is called courage. We read the text because God wants us to know how to live and we will not do that by avoiding everything in life that is not to our momentary liking.

Providing for another person is a great responsibility. There will be days and perhaps weeks, when the job seems thankless and without reward. In such times, one must “gird up the loins of his mind,” as the King James Bible put it, and just “keep on keeping on.”

Those of us who had fathers who did this have a good experience with trust. We can believe that a man can endure all sorts of things to keep us warm, clean, educated and fed.

It helps us believe that a God who teaches us to call Him Father, might mean it when He says, “How can I forget you? Can a nursing mother forget her child? I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. You are mine.”

If such a God notices every sparrow that falls, I can be sure that He knows my needs before I even ask.

The Day The Music Died

On this day in 1959, American music icons Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. Richardson, all died with their pilot in a plane crash.

In 1971, Don McClean released his lament about that “Day the Music Died.”

His song is full of references to music and political issues of the times but the last verse is the one that always grabs my heart. He begins this verse with a word about Janis Joplin and her tragic life, but turns quickly to express the greatest loss of Western culture – the death of the three men he admires most, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The song expresses, in other words, the sense of ICHABOD (The Glory of the Lord has departed) that now haunts Western culture.


I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away

I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play

And in the streets the children screamed
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast

The day the music died
And they were singin'

Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my chevy to the levy
But the levy was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die


McClean aches from his loss. However, Western culture’s loss of God has a simple cause: our refusal to accept God’s instructions.

In today’s reading (One Year Bible), Proverbs 6:20 says, “My son, obey your father’s commands and don’t neglect your mother’s instructions. Keep their words always in your heart. Tie them around your neck. When you walk, their counsel will lead you.”

The “music” has died in our culture because we have abandoned the source of music. We are left with despair, discord and cacophony.

One of the things that drive people nuts when they call God “Father,” is the rules He imposes on His followers.

Many fathers have abused their role of protector, defender and provider. Many, if not most modern people, no longer believe that a father even has a right to govern a household.

The reasons for this great societal change are complex.

We have not changed our ideas about fathers because all the world’s fathers were authority-hungry, wife-beating Neanderthal beasts, as some “liberals” charge. Nor have we changed our ideas about fatherhood because all the world’s children and wives suddenly became authority-hating, free thinking anarchists as many “conservatives” charge.

Economic changes in the world system have had as much to do with our shift in ideas about fatherhood as anything else.

(Of course, covering that subject would require a book, not a blog.)

In this short reflection, I am not trying to defend the “right” of fatherhood. I am trying to understand what the Bible means when it speaks about a father’s responsibility to His house. We must understand that if we are to receive anything the Bible teaches about God as a Father.

I meet people all the time who were abused by their fathers.

The very authority I am trying to defend here has abused them.

That is sad.

A father’s authority and strength should be a great comfort to his children. Children should experience a father’s strength of character as a security. They should know He will fight for them against an intruder, give his life for them if necessary. They should know that he will never abandon them, even when life gets difficult. They should know that his rules are never given to stroke his own ego but to develop then into responsible, healthy and self-governing adults.

That is the Biblical picture of a godly father.

It is certainly the sort of father that God wants to be to us.

God’s people are a family, a very large family. This family is so large that it became a nation. The Bible speaks of both Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church this way, as a “holy nation.”

We call the father of our covenant nation – this “nation” whose God is the Lord -- king. In fact, He is the King of Kings, the Father of all fathers. St. Paul says as much in the Epistle to the Ephesians.

Furthermore, God is a loving father. However, He is not always “nice,” because “nice” is not always “good.”

God rules. He doesn’t rule because He likes to boss people around. God rules because He wants to redeem us. He wants to grow us up.

As I mentioned in my last blog, God is not a constitutional monarch; the sort of king who wears beautiful regal robes and presides over lovely ceremonies.

Our king rules His kingdom in goodness, truth and beauty. When we accept Him as our King, these qualities of His kingdom began to rule, reshape and finally transform us.

It was tragic that Buddy Holly and the others died on that plane, but the Father, Son and Holy Ghost didn’t take a train for the coast.

Every day, millions of people bow their knee and began their day be saying,

“Our Father which art in Heaven, Hollowed be Thy name.”

In Praise of Monarchy

If you worship the God of the Bible, you must come to grips with a difficult idea for modern people.

God is a lawgiver King.

Kings are pretty rare these days. The remaining ones tend to be well behaved and show up to do ceremonial things. They don’t threaten anyone. And for God’s sake, they don’t really try to rule.

God is not a modern, constitutional monarch. He rules. In fact, his law is one of His “tools” to transform us into His companions. He gives us law to help us live quality lives.

This lawgiver King is the sort of king who thinks, acts, and rules like a good father. People who submit to His law discover that it brings health and joy to the human heart. Over the long haul, even if it sometimes “cramps our style” in the short run, it lifts us into a new kind of life.

King David said, “the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, more to be desired are they than gold.”

Today I may want to tell a lie, especially if I want to get off the hook for something. That’s natural behavior and If I can get away with it, who cares?

God cares. He tells me to stop.

It’s one of His Big Ten, "DON’T LIE!”

So, if I decide to tell the truth instead of lying, I may learn to face the consequences of my actions. I might even mature into an adult. (Some people do become adults, although some of us are quite old when that happens.)

If I tell the truth again tomorrow and the next day, I may began to strengthen my inclination toward veracity. I may actually develop a habit for truth-telling.

It’s a much better way to live than being a liar!

Another one of God’s famous ten laws says, “THOU SHALT TAKE A DAY OFF EVERY WEEK AND DO NOTHING”.

Can you imagine that people managed to turn this law into a burden?

By the times Jesus had arrived on the earth, there were books and books of instructions about what the Sabbath really meant; how to keep from breaking it and therefore ticking God off and so forth.

What a shame!

God just wanted us to “cool our jets” once a week. He wanted us to think about something besides survival. He wanted us to stay healthy.

If I take a day and do nothing but reflect on my life, read a book, or take a walk, and I do this every week, after several years I am going to be a different man than the workaholic I would have otherwise been. I may learn to enjoy my own company. Perhaps I will even learn to enjoy my family and friends. At long last, I may learn to delight being with God.

God gives us His law to show us a better way to live.

God doesn’t make up rules because He gets off on bossing people around. He gives rules to bring blessing and joy to the human family.

His law teaches us about a better life – a life submitted to the ways and purposes of God.

The children of Abraham received this law and promised to obey it. Alas, their intentions were good but their ability to carry out those intentions were flawed. It took them a long time to figure that out.

That’s the back story to why we have a New Testament. God law is good but we are not.

Christ came to transform us so we would delight in God’s law and live by that law simply because it was in the sincere desire of our new nature to do so.

That is the idea behind the reading in the One Year Bible this week where Jesus tells the Jews: “The Kingdom of God is taken from you and given to another.”

Of course, the kingdom we have is open to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. Most of us have discovered by now that we don’t do any better keeping the law than the Jews did.

Nonetheless, the law is good and reaching for its high standards and failing is still better by far than not having those standards.

Today is the feast of St. Brigid. She was an early Irish Christian who converted from Druidism. When she discovered the good news about Christ, she was delighted to acknowledge Him as king. Like all of Ireland, her life was utterly transformed.

In 1968 on today’s date, Vince Lombardi resigned as coach of the Green Bay Packers. His laws and coaching skills are legendary. The players were delighted to accept his authority because they knew they would become different after exposure to Lombardi’s training.

That’s what Brigid discovered, 1500 years ago today.

He’s a good King!