Faith Questions
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 1, 2009
Job 21:7-16; Luke 2:41-52

Job 21:7-16 Why do the wicked live on, reach old age, and grow mighty in power? Their children are established in their presence, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. Their bull breeds without fail; their cow calves and never miscarries. They send out their little ones like a flock, and their children dance around. They sing to the tambourine and the lyre, and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol. They say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We do not desire to know your ways. What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’ Is not their prosperity indeed their own achievement? The plans of the wicked are repugnant to me.  

Luke 2:41-52 Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart.
And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.

Questions were submitted anonymously via e-mail or note card and read by a designated reader during services. The chaplain had to answer the questions without having seen them before. Remarks in brackets are editorial comments that did not occur during the service, but serve to supplement or correct things said in the original answer.

5:00 p.m. Service

Q: How can it be that God knows everything, past, present, and future, and yet humanity still has free will?

A: God is not bound in the same sense of time as we are. If we were to picture our lives as a whole continuum from beginning to end we who are in it can only see one way as if its behind us as if we are looking at time backward at what has happened but we cannot see what is ahead. But God is not bound by our sense of time God rather, stands outside of our time as so to God, what is to us merely an unknown by one dimension that we can see, it is an entire span of our lives that God encounters all at once. So it's not as if God has foreknowledge of what we will do it only seems that way from our perspective. From our perspective one who can see around the corner has a greater knowledge than we. But it's not as if God has planned out the choices that you and I will make. In fact God is surprised by the choices that we make--it's just that God is surprised by the choices we make all at once, so to speak. That God sees the total sum of history, of cosmic history all in one instant. With God time is an eternal now. And only we who are moving through it lack have the ability to see what is around the bend. But when we come around the bend our choices are just as real. Our choices are just as meaningful. The fact that God has foreknowledge does not limit our ability because the perspective of foreknowledge is shaped by an ability to see. It's not as if God is only with us in the now and has special knowledge of the future. God sees time as one. And it seems like I'm punting on this, but it's really a question of perspective. No different than when we can see someone coming down the road and they can't see us and we can see around the bend and they can't. Its merely perspective, they are still free as they move along. [And it bears noting that in any event, God's foreknowledge does not necessarily imply God's control of the situation. We remain free.]

Q: How do I know how much of our faith is vital and from God and how much is created by humans?

A: It's a difficult and complex question because the only way we know our faith is the way it's been revealed through humanity. On very rare occasions, do the heavens open up and instructions come down. That is, our faith is one that we discern as we collectively experience our connection with God. And so when it comes to looking at the elements of our faith we need to apply all of the tools of our reason, of our tradition, all the tools of our reflection on the spirit of God to discern what truly is of God. The church has come up with different answers in different times in history. There was a time when women were not allowed in leadership positions in the church, andthere would be those who said that was of God and should not be changed. And yet the entire church together discerned something. Discerned a deep movement of God's spirit that in fact it was really just a human rule and that we understand that God rules from something deeper than that. So the short answer is: there is no short and easy way to know that. The question requires an ongoing process of reflection, of discernment. Guided into the promptings of the Spirit, as it nudges us in directions in perhaps we thought we were not ready to go. Or that it holds us in places in which we feel firm and solid. But the question of what it is, of human origin and what part is divine, that we wrestle. Of course there are things that are obviously human, the clothing is human--this robe is Roman, we got it from the 4th century. The certain fundamental truths--those are ones we need to constantly need to be in dialogue with, and reflect on. It's not an easy question, and I think it is important that the church always be in discernment to be careful on insisting that it be on a human element. We get into a lot more trouble when we start insisting on own traditions and our own doctrines as if they were handed down from God directly.

Q: In the book of Leviticus, there are a string of paragraphs about things that Christians should and should not do, including rules about women's "cleanliness" during menstruation, having homosexual relationships, etc. This doesn't seem to be supported by the New Testament...so how are we supposed to take this information from the Old Testament in concert with the New Testament?

A: You'll be happy to know that according to Saint Paul, that none of you, unless there are any Jews in the room, are bound by those laws. The understanding from the book of Leviticus is that Leviticus is part of what is called the 'holiness' code and the holiness code is what was meant to separate the people of Israel apart from their neighbors. It was a code that meant to help the Israelites distinguish themselves from among the peoples. There were a number of peoples in the ancient world who were the Israelites' neighbors. We know that among a number of things they liked to do was to eat pork, have child sacrifices. We know that they had some pretty interesting sexual rituals in some of their worship. And many of the rules of the book of Leviticus were designed for this kind of holiness, this kind of purity to be a people apart. Now, we could say, perhaps those rules only apply to the people of Israel and they don't apply to us. Perhaps you could say those rules were meant to distinguish those people from all the people around them and doing those things today would not necessarily distinguish us from the people around us. We might come up with other things to do. But part of it also is that there is a holiness code that dealt with issues of entering into God's presence. The ancients had a different understanding about holiness and the power of life. The ancient Israelites believed that within the blood itself, the life force of the human being and that's sometimes why it's called the life blood. That within the blood is literally the power of life itself and if you were in your menstrual cycle and you were issuing blood, that was seen as a kind of "signal interference" that was almost too powerful spiritually for you to come into the sanctuary. So it was not a judgment upon women, it was rather a recognition that women were evidencing this tremendous power and that that power might interfere with that power in the sanctuary. When we go to the Cherokee nation, women who are on their menstrual cycles are not aloud to go into the sweat lodge because they believe that the healing spirits that will come to the lodge will see the woman on her "moon time" as they say, and would believe that there is no need for them to be so great is the power the woman would have. So that there is an understanding that there are certain levels of sanctity and holiness and power that are lost to us we don't understand the context of these things. But at the same time it is not that we can simply lift up the Old Testament and chuck it out, and say that we don't need to follow it anymore because we're Christians. But it is again one of those processes that we need to use discernment, where we need to look at what was the context of such a commandment? What was it meant to produce in the person of faith. Was it merely a ritual rule? A cultural rule? Was it a moral or ethical one? Does it have ongoing significance for us today? So I don't think the answer is simply we have to follow all the 613 commandments of the Torah like Orthodox Jews might do. Nor is it simply that Christians can ignore the Hebrew scriptures. What is required is a constant process of discernment, for how those commandments reveal to us the nature of God, how they continue to speak of God's purposes for us and how we might understand them in our own day and age.

Q: If Adam and Eve were the first man and woman to be on earth, how did their son marry and have children after killing his brother?

A: This might be one of those passages of the scriptures that you should not take as a biological record of the origins of the human race. The author of Genesis is concerned with begingings, is concerned with understanding the beginnings of the human race, but the author of genesis is not a scientist nor does he pretend to be. The author of Genesis is trying to explain what humanity's relationship is to God. Made in the image of God, formed out of the dust of the earth and breathed into with the breath of life, And from the very beginning sinful, making mistakes right off the bat, in need of redemption, in need of God's grace. In fact in the second generation we get into murder. The whole story is one in which we are presented a portrait of humanity. In fact the name Adam itself is simply the Hebrew word for a human being. It's the word for humanity. Eve is simply the Hebrew word for that which is living or the mother of the living. They are highly symbolic names that are meant to give us a context of understanding of who we are. And so Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel... Cain finds a wife and it's never told to us where or how because the author doesn't find it that important. What is important is Cain's relationship to Abel, God's relationship to Cain and the whole cycle that that starts of our rebelliousness and of our need for reconciliation with God and one another. Anbd so the first chapters of Genesis are a beautiful and true story of our relationship to God, of our origins as children of God. But I think we lose the power of those stories when we focus too much on the genealogical records of the biological descendants of the human race.

Q: How can there be only one way to redemption when people each have different experiences with religion and Christianity? For instance, if I was born and raised Christian and my friend only learned about Christianity when she was fifteen or so, is there some kind of difference?

A: Oscar Romero, the great and late bishop of El Salvador, said that Christianity is not some set of truths to be believed or principles to be understood, or even of rituals and rites to be performed. He said that's distasteful. Christianity, he said, is Christ. There is one way of salvation for us as Christians, because that way of salvation is Christ himself, its not really about our experience of it. We keep falling into this trap. We keep thinking that if we say enough prayers, if we offer enough penance, if we buy enough indulgences then perhaps we can achieve salvation. Then Martin Luther comes along and says its not about what you do, it's about God's grace. We then we protestants say it must be about what you believe, so then we come up with a whole bunch of things that we need to believe to be saved. But it's not about what we believe; it's not even really about what we experience because what it is about is about Christ. Christ is the one who saves us, not we ourselves. If my experience is different than yours, if my encounter with Christ is different from yours apparently so is Matthew from Mark's from Luke's from John's. When you read those four gospels you get four different experiences of Christ and yet they are all considered to be gospel, they are all considered to be a presentation of the Christ we know. And so it is not really about the quality of our encounter of Christ it is about the one whom we meet when we do. And that one loves us, that one shares grace with us and pardons us and invites us into relationship with God, reconciling us to God from all that divides us.

Q: Many charismatic churches put a large emphasis on spiritual gifts, especially speaking in tongues. Is there Biblical evidence to support the manifestation of speaking in tongues in today's church? If so, in what context?

A: There is Biblical evidence for that. The second chapter of Acts actually its speaks of the disciples having received the Holy Spirit at Pentacost and speaking in tongues. Now the scripture is not necessarily clear as to what that means because at once people from all over the world can understand the disciples and at the same time they conclude that the disciples must be drunk because they can't figure out what they are doing. So perhaps it is some powerful experience where people are given to understand and perhaps it is the phenomenon called glossolalia which is speaking in tongues, a mystical language communicating with God. So there is evidence of it. Paul himself even writes of speaking in tongues in his letters when he castigates his congregation for boasting. He says you think you can speak tongues, I can speak in tongues better than all of you. Its not about that. So speaking in tongues is one way that certain Christian traditions have and continue to experience God. It is not a universal thing across the whole Christian faith. There are many Christian denominations for whom those spiritual gifts are merely a glimpse of the kingdom, not the kingdom itself. And in other traditions they will say you cannot fully be a Christian unless you have immersed yourself in the Spirit to such a degree that you have experienced gifts like speaking in tongues. It is a reminder that our Christian faith is a diverse one. Our Christian faith cannot simply be summed up by saying here is what Christianity looks like. Go worship with the Catholics or Lutherans, the Methodists or the Baptists, Pentecostals or the Quakers or the Mennonites. You cannot simply sum up Christianity with one tradition. It's too diverse, it's too rich, it's too wondrous for that. We all have something to learn from the other traditions. We all have something to learn from one another and what Pentecostals remind us is that there is a power in Christian faith that changes us that gives us the abilities to do things we would otherwise not have done. That's what speaking in tongues is about. On the other side of the aisle some of us who would call ourselves mainline sometimes become a little too mundane about the power of our faith. And so our Pentecostal brothers and sisters remind us of that and we have scriptural support for it.

Q: Does spiritual warfare exist? Should the church still be praying to bind spirits and cast out demons?

A: Yes, but what we mean by that depends on the believer. There are believers for whom the presence of demons is a reality. There are believers for whom they are a metaphor. I don't believe it is our place to say which is true because as the earlier question noted, we all encounter our faith differently, in fact we understand that we experience God in different and powerful ways and that some experience spiritual warfare as a real and vital power. As a constant battle with demonic and angelic forces. There are others for whom those are all simply metaphor. And I think what our task is is to discern simply how best we can, in whatever way we frame it, embolden the believer and to shore up the believer. If someone came into my office and said they were be afflicted by demons, my response would not be to say there is no such things as demons. My response would be to understand how they felt in relationship to that. How they were feeling afflicted and in what manner I may be able to help. And I think that is the more important question there. Spiritual warfare is as real as we believe it to be. Like many other things in our tradition.

Q: Is there any biblical reason as to why people would raise their hands during worship?

A: There are little clues in the liturgy, certain things that suggest you raise your hands in the ancient temple. The mode of prayer was not head bowed and hands clasped but was standing with arms out, that was the ancient mode in the temple in Jerusalem. I'm not sure that there is biblical language specifically for that. [After looking through the Psalms--Ancient Israel's prayer book--we find references like: Psalm. 28:2 "Hear the voice of my supplication, as I cry to you for help, as I lift up my hands toward your most holy sanctuary" and "Psalm 63:4 "So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name."] But also, in communion, when I say lift up your hearts, there are those who believe that that was the pastor's cue to the congregation to stand, to lift up their hearts in praise. So if you are talking about raising your hands in the middle of singing a praise song or something like that, I don't know that there is a specific direction for that, but I don't know that that is anything that has not been part of our tradition for a very long time as well.

The important part about this process that you understand that my answers are not the definitive answers. You should keep asking these questions from more people than just me. That you should constantly be testing your faith, probing those areas of mystery, probing those places that are growth edges that you don't understand. It is a constant process and it should happen not just while you are Christians in college but your whole lives long. I really believe that the unexamined faith is not worth believing and so I thank you for submitting those questions, for being willing to be a part of this dialogue and I encourage you to keep asking them your whole lives long.

7:00 Service

Q: Sometimes I get on a religious kick and cannot get enough. Other times religion gets too religious and drowns or burns me, and I run away and hide. Why is religion sometimes more appealing than others, and what can I do to keep my interest in it? Why should I adhere to a religion instead of being simply spiritual?

A: If you want to tick a pastor off, tell her that you're really spiritual but not religious. That drives us crazy. Because spirituality, as popularly understood, really means, "I want to do my own thing" . I have my own way of believing. I want to believe in something more but I don't want to necessarily tie it in to anyone else's understanding of what that means. "Religion" tends to be more communal, and involves itself with tradition. That's one thing about "spirituality" versus "religion" is that religion does tend to have aspects of community that are involved. But as to the broader question of why is it that there are times when a religion is appealing or not appealing, why does it take hold or not... Our life of faith is like any other aspect of our lives. We are constantly growing and changing. And sometimes what happens is that we grow in a direction that our faith is not ready for. And what I mean by that is something Paul talks about in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians. Paul gives that famous hymn on love: "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal..." In the middle of that passage he says:<

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (1 Cor. 13:11)

There is an understanding that our faith--even our understanding of God--has to grow with us. It has to be dynamic enough to adapt to who we are and what we are looking at at that time. I think sometimes what happens is that we start off with one model of faith, and it's very enthusiastic for a certain period of time. And then we grow in a different direction and it's almost as if our faith has been left behind. I think that's exactly why we need to work at keeping our faith vital and fresh. Working at keeping our interaction with religion not as just a bunch of things to do or precepts to be believed, but a way of life that is able to grow with us, that is as dynamic as all the other aspects of our lives are. So I think that the reason a person might come and go in faith is that the faith itself is ill-fitting at times.
   I also want to say this, and this is something that even those of us who are doing this professionally still go through. There are different times in your life when God seems very, very close and others when God seems very, very far away. When the power of our faith seems palpable, and other times when it seems simply to be a hope. There are different ways that we relate to faith. It's a very natural and expected thing. It's why we have a multiplicity of witnesses in scripture about our faith. It's why we have the different Gospels and the different portraits of Jesus they present. It's because at different times of life those different portraits speak to us. There are times when we want that powerful Jesus of the Gospel of John. And others when we want the very human Jesus of the Gospel of Mark. And our faith is a dynamic and a diverse one. Part of the trick of keeping your interest in your faith alive is in allowing it to be that way, allowing it to roll with the punches. Allowing it to adapt itself to new experiences, new understandings, and to grow organically with you as you change.

Q: What do you think the future of Christianity will look like, forty years from now?

A: Honestly, that all depends on you. It's been said that Christianity is no more than one generation away from extinction at any moment in its history. Christianity will thrive or it will fail depending on how each generation chooses to pick up the mantle and to make Christianity real and powerful in their midst. Christianity has three ways it could go. First, It could vanish from the earth altogether. Second, it could embrace a new sense of call and a new sense of mission. To look at the world and see what the needs of the world are in this day and age. "To serve the present age" as the old hymn "A Charge to Keep I Have" says. And to respond dynamically to those challenges. To proclaim the Gospel in a new way for a new time. The third option is that it doesn't go away, but it doesn't go anywhere either. It stays as as 'dead sect'. John Wesley himself said, "I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power." What happens is that it is upon us to claim that power, to renew our commitment to the Gospel, to renew our commitment to sharing the transformative power of that message in a new way, for a new time, in new circumstances. If we do that, Christianity can resurge, it can be a wondrous, open, diverse, inclusive, powerful, life-changing force in the world. Or, it can be a dead sect, full of empty ritual, full of endless theological and doctrinal battles, without any power, without changing anyone's life. That really depends on us as to which it will be. The vision I have, what I would hope, would be the former, but to prevent us from being the latter depends on all of us.

Q: I Corinthians 14:34 talks about how women should remain silent and in submission in churches. This is the basis for which many churches today remain strongly patriarchal and discrimination against women is prominent. Other verses talk about wives submitting to their husbands; still others talk about the need for women to wear head coverings in church. There are churches that still abide by these principles. How can this attitude be relevant in today's society? If Paul's teachings were the foundation of the church and if the Bible is divinely inspired, why would this be included? How can you justify this kind of attitude toward women? Can you contradict it without taking away the holy inspiration of the entire Bible?

A: There's a lot of questions in that question! Here's one way of looking at it: that question has a lot of presumptions built into it. The first presumption is that we understand the inspiriation of scripture to mean a certain thing. That when we say that the Bible is divinely inspired is that what that means in effect, is that each of the scribes who wrote the Bible grabbed a pen and inclined their ear to the heavens and started taking dictation. That's one relatively popular understanding of what it means to be the "inspired word of God." If we understand the inspiration not in the composition but in the reflection on the text, and even in the compilation of the scriptures, a dynamic process that happens with in the church, then we can engage the text honestly, and we can look at the texts and see what they say on their face and what they mean.
  Now, one of the other presumptions in there is that Christianity is based upon the writings of Paul. That is not so. Paul is influential, but Paul is not the first Christian. Paul doesn't even come along until Christianity's been going on for at least 15 years. So, the idea that we have to listen to Paul in every respect is not necessarily sound. Because Paul himself admits that there are things that he says that are his opinions and there are things that he says that are "of the Lord". It's our task to discern where Paul is speaking and where Paul is speaking on behalf of Christ.
  Now that particular passage in scripture is an interesting one because what you discover when you look at 1 Corinthians 14 is that when you lift out that section, if you take it away, the verses before it and after it flow together very, very well. Many scholars believe that that text was put in later by a later scribe. There are different manuscript traditions where that text floats around. It's not always in the same place in the ancient manuscripts. This passage is probably what we call a "scribal emendation"--it came in later. It was probably just someone's marginal notes as commentary, and a later scribe copied it as if it were part of the original text. Now, that being said: so what? It's still in the New Testament. We still have to deal with it, no matter how it got there. And here is where we need to engage in a process of serious discernment. Because there are things in the Bible that owe themselves to revelation of the Spirit and the heart of God. And there are things that are in the Bible that are reflective of culture and time and place. We need to be sensitive to what those things are. We need to understand what the cultural context is of a statement like that. Some have argued that the verse was meant to instruct women to stop talking during church. Others thought it meant that a certain attitude of prayer should be adopted. What is important for us is that the church has discerned the movement of the Spirit and understood that whatever that passage means, it does not mean women should not be active in leadership in the church. Nor does it mean that they should not be allowed to read or to proclaim the Gospel. That whatever that text might mean, we have listened to the broader movement of the spirit in our hearts and come to the conclusion that what God wants is the inclusion of all people regardless of sex. That God wants all to be in leadership in the church. So I think there is a way to maintain an affirmation of the inspired nature of the scriptures by understanding what we mean by that. There is a way we can avoid having to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because we can contextualize. We can make serious discernment. We can do more than say we're going to ignore the ones we don't like. We can really seek to understand what the commandments and the proscriptions are that we have trouble with. And to try to adjust them to the modern age, to see how, in light of our reflection, those truths still hold up--or don't.

Q: Many people say that God speaks to them. What does that sound like? How can I know that God is speaking to me? Many times I try but all I hear is my own voice and thoughts. I have faith in God and his work in my life but would like to be able to hear him more clearly. Have you experienced difficulty in this area? Am I looking in the wrong places (perhaps expecting a voice when it is something else)?

A: I'm gonna give you an example from my own life. When I was 29, about to turn 30, I was going through a major time of discernment. My life felt like it had hit a major rut and I didn't know what to do with my life. I felt like every day was in and out sameness. One of the pastors, the minister of education, at the church I attended here in Washington, asked me if I was interested in going to seminary. I told her that was a ridiculous idea. I told her I had a job. A career. I had enough student loans. I didn't need more. Well I mentioned this fact to the minister of missions at Foundry and mentioned that the other pastor was trying to talk me into going to seminary, and she said, "Oh, good. We were wondering when someone was going to say something to you." I began to suspect a conspiracy but was not any more convinced. I talked to my friends and said, "They're trying to talk me into going to seminary at my church," and my friends all said, "That's what you should do!" Now, my friends were mostly Jewish at this time and so this was kind of confusing to me, but it didn't convince me any more. The more people I talked to, the more people I encountered who thought this was a good idea. In fact, I was the only one who didn't think it was a good idea. And in the end, when I was really grappling with this and went to talk to the senior pastor and the pastor of the parish at the same church, and said that I was struggling with this and this idea kept coming back and I didn't know how to get rid of it, they told me to listen to my own heart and what it was I felt I was being called to do. And it was only in that moment that I realized that I was feeling a call to ministry. Now, what was interesting was that God had been speaking to me the whole time. God had spoken through the clergy of my church, through the witness of my friends. God had even spoken through the stirrings of my own heart. God did not come out and speak in a loud thunderous (usually male) voice. It was not the kind of thing you see in the movies. There was no parting of the heavens. There was just this constant incessant movement of the spirit. And it was only when I opened myself up to it that it seemed suddenly and absolutely right.
  But there needs to be a willingness to hear--and hear in ways that we don't always pick up on. God can speak to us. This shaped my "ecclesiology"--my understanding of the church--very strongly. God speaks to us through the community. It was that community that told me what I needed to be doing. That community that affirmed me, and continued to affirm me. God speaks to us in those ways. Rarely is it, and rarely would I trust, honestly, if someone were to claim a direct revelation that had not been confirmed by anybody else. When God speaks, God speaks through the people. The movement of the spirit works in such a way that it can be affirmed by those around us. Affirmed in our experience, in our hearts, and in our understanding.
  So the questioner wants to know what God sounds like. God sounds like the person in the pew next to you sometimes. God sounds like the community. God sounds like the movement of your own heart. And I think that if this person's having a hard time discerning what's their own heart and what's of God, they should share that with others and see how it resonates. If it is of God, it will catch fire, and there will be meaning there.

Q: Knowing what we do about the huge solar system we are a part of, and the billions of stars in our galaxy, and the infinite number of galaxies that we have not even begun to discover, how does the Bible explain why God loves us, human beings, above all else?

A: We have no explanation for that. In fact that is the mystery of grace. Why should God be paying attention to us at all? [As Psalm 8 asks, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" (Psalm 8:4) We are upright walking primates, around the third planet of a third rate star in the backwater section of a galaxy on the fringes. We do not earn the attention that God gives us, there is nothing about our situation that demands notice. The fact that we came along in the last sliver of geological history on this planet means that if you were to look at the history of the earth, we would be the footnote. We do not warrant that kind of cosmic attention. But we get it anyway. Because that's what God is about. God's grace is not about what you and I deserve. God's grace is not about the things we accomplish or how significant we are. It is about the fact that God--out of God's own generosity and freedom and love--chooses to love us. It's astounding. Do you understand the power behind that? In the span of time we are nothing, and yet the immortal God loves each and every one of you. Each and every one of us. That God knows your name. That God knows all the days of your life. That God is in relationship with you. That is an awesome and powerful mystery. I do not know why it should be that way, but that is the God we proclaim. And yes, given the vastness of the cosmos, it becomes more mysterious every single day we learn about the creation. And for me that only increases the power, and the wonder, and the awesomeness of the Gospel. That we really are off in the corner and God knows us and God loves us.

Q: I come from a two religion family. My mom is Christian, which is how I was raised, and my dad is Jewish. As a kid, I received a little bit of Judaism, mostly the culture, although we always 'celebrate' Chanukah. Now in college I'm trying to find out more about the other side, my Jewish heritage. I don't think I'll ever convert or anything, but is this kind of exploration okay? Does the Bible say anything about religious exploration?

A: The Bible says very little about religious exploration. The concept would have been somewhat unheard of. But, it is most certainly okay. There is nothing that Judaism has within it that is a threat to Christians. Why should there be? We came out of Judaism. All the great ideas we had were Jewish before they were Christian. The distinction for us is in the person of Jesus--we believe him to be the fulfillment of the hopes of the Jewish people. Something that the Jewish people do not agree with us on. That's okay. [For more on this particular point, click here.] But there is nothing about exploring the Jewish tradition that would not enrich the life of a Christian, in fact, I encourage you all to do it, whether you have a Jewish parent or not. There is nothing that can enliven your own faith as much as exploring other faiths. Seeing a mirror to your own. Holding up certain presuppositions that you've always had. Discovering what your assumptions are. And those things force us to examine our own Christian faith and to explore it. The exploration of other religious traditions is a wonderful idea. And if anything it helps us to explore our own faith. I know, myself, in college, I really came to understand Christianity better the more I learned about my Jewish roommates' religion. When I first learned the symbols of the Passover--and it suddenly became clear to me that that's where we got the Eucharist from--I was thrilled. Because no one had ever explained to me the Eucharist before in quite that way and suddenly it all made sense. Just as the Children of Israel sacrificed a lamb and placed its blood on their doorposts so that they would be saved from death, so too are Christians, with the blood of the Lamb, are saved from eternal death. There's power in learning that. Helps us understand where we come from. I would encourage this person to explore Judaism as a way of deepening their own faith.

Q: I have struggled with doubts about my faith for a while now. I understand that doubt is a part of faith. But I don't feel like God is real anymore. It's isolating and scary. What do I do when I can't pray, when I can't find connection to God?
Q: I believe that God unconditionally loves all human beings and that all human beings have merit. And I believe that means that we should recognize the inherent value of every person in our interactions with one other. But I struggle with how to embrace God's unconditional love in my own life. What should that look like?
Q: How do you suggest a person pray when they have serious doubts about the existence of God and feel like they don't know how to pray anymore?

A: John Wesley himself once struggled greatly with wondering whether he was reconciled to God. In fact, John Wesley's entire theological struggle was in wanting to know if he was reconciled to God and needing to know for sure that that was the case. And he couldn't get that sense of assurance. No matter what he tried he couldn't do it. He struggled and he just wanted that faith. He asked Peter Boehler, one of his Moravian colleagues what to do. And Boehler said, "Preach faith until you have faith; then by faith you will continue to preach faith." What he meant by that was that there are some times we need to dive right into what it means to be a person of faith, even if we're having a hard time grasping it. There are some times when we know what being a faithful person looks like, but we can't quite get there to believe it. The advice is: do it anyway. If you know that a person of faith trusts in God and God's grace and lives out a life of compassion for others--do that. If you can't believe it, do it. And as you do it, you live into the faith you seek to claim. As you live out faith, you live into it. And then you come to know it on a deeper, more fundamental level. "Preach faith until you have faith; then by faith you will continue to preach faith." It's a recognition that there are times when we will have doubts and we will feel God is far from us. But that is not the time to turn away. That is the time to dive right in. It is a strategy of audacity. When things seem to be going against you, fight even harder. Go even more directly right into it. Run into it and embrace it head on.
  I think too often we feel that our faith has something to do with what we think and what we believe. It has everything to do with God. And if we continue to act out of trust in God, even when we aren't sure what that means, we discover that God is able to do things with us that we would never have expected. Wesley himself found that at a prayer meeting that he didn't want to go to, that he didn't expect to get anything out of, that he was attending almost out of obligation, he allowed himself to be open to the movement of the spirit. He was going through the motions, but in so doing, he heard a word of Grace preached to him and it began his entire conversion, his entire ministry that would spawn Methodism. Sometimes we dive right in even when we're not sure why and we find that there is power in the journey. There is power in the doing that leads us into the knowing.

Q: Does each denomination within the Christian faith have equal validity? If there is a variety of Christian thought, what's to say that other religions aren't equally valid in their understanding of who God is and what our position as humans is to God?

A: Well, as you know. There is only one true church--The United Methodist Church. Actually, United Methodists have never said that. We have never claimed to be the "one true church", nor do we have the sole claim on Truth. That makes us unique in Christian history. Part of our theology is that God is known in a variety of ways. Wesley himself believed that all the differences that make up denominations were merely matters of "opinion". [He would say in his sermon "The Catholic Spirit":

We must both act as each is fully persuaded in his own mind. Hold you fast that which you believe is most acceptable to God, and I will do the same. I believe the Episcopal form of church government to be scriptural and apostolical. If you think the Presbyterian or Independent is better, think so still, and act accordingly. I believe infants ought to be baptized; and that this may be done either by dipping or sprinkling. If you are otherwise persuaded, be so still, and follow your own persuasion. ... I have no desire to dispute with you one moment upon any of the preceding heads. Let all these smaller points stand aside.]

All these other matters are matters of opinion. What is at the core is sharing the love of God and love of neighbor. To Wesley, those were the core. That was it. Can we apply that to the interreligious sphere and say the same of other religions? Personally I believe that we can. Because I don't believe that it's our religions that save us. It's God who saves us. And God will not be told by us where God can work, and through whom, and in what system. We do not get to say "God, you can't possibly be in that religion. They don't even have potlucks like we do." We do not get to dictate to God where God can go. In fact, in our religious belief in the Methodist tradition, we believe in a grace that is called "Prevenient", a grace that "goes before" us, that is everywhere available, to everyone at every time. That means that right now, Christ is in the most remote parts of Africa and Asia where no Christian missionary has ever been. Christ is there already. Working already. Through the people there. Already. It is not our place to tell God where God can go. And so, I would say that among Christians, our differences are matters of opinion. And on the matter of different religions, God is the God of the whole world--not just of the ones with the Nicene Creed. Not just of the ones who worship in a certain way. And so I would say that God is able to operate in all those places. Our task as Christians is not to judge others on the basis of their religion, but first to share the love of God and love of neighbor with all whom we meet.

I encourage you not to take my word as the final word. Continue to ask questions. Let this be a part of your life in faith: continually asking, stretching your understanding, challenging your presumptions and assumptions. And always to keep your faith healthy and vibrant and fresh, so that it can grow with you and go with you all the days of your life. Amen.