Faith Questions
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 7, 2010
Job 21:7-16; Luke 6:1-5

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 6:1-5 • One sabbath while Jesus was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked some heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands, and ate them. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” Jesus answered, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions?” Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

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.

As I am fond of saying every year, "Faith Questions" is not simply a description of what it is we are answering. "Faith questions" is itself a sentence, a statement. Faith questions. A lively meaningful faith is not afraid to ask difficult questions and to wrestle with complex issues as they relate to our understandings of God and what we believe.

5:00 p.m. Service

Q: In much of the Bible, God intervenes when people are doing something wrong or against his will. It seems like right now we're messing things up pretty bad, from continued wars and social injustice to the environment. Why doesn't God intervene now?

A: There's one particular school of thought about that that I like very much. One theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, has talked about the "wrath of God". The wrath of God is understood in a biblical model where we see the people do something and then there is a consequence to it. The people are unfaithful and so for a time God "gives them over into the hand of" the Moabites, or they will be conquered, or they will go into captivity in Babylon. We talked last fall about the flood as the consequence of the sinfulness of humanity. Moltmann says that the way he understands the wrath of God is the way in which God refrains from intervention for the purposes of allowing the consequences of our wrongfulness to come back upon us. That is, we are seeing the consequences of social injustice. We are seeing the consequences of relying too much on material things. We are seeing the consequences of environmental degradation. They are all around us. And they affect us. And so we we understand that God's wrath can be not only a rod of punishment but similar to the way a parent, who has caught their child smoking, will let them smoke the entire pack of cigarettes. When that happens you get really, really ill and you understand very keenly the consequences of that behavior. And in many ways, Moltmann's understanding of the wrath of God is in that sense: withholding intervention to protect us from the consequences of our actions and allowing those consequences to come upon us.

Now, that being said, we might ask why God doesn't do things in a more dramatic fashion as recorded in the scriptures. And I think it's important to remember that the scriptures are a theological reflection on the things that have happened, and how the authors chose to see those things as evidence of God working in the world in ways that were both rewarding and punishing. That being said, they, too, never saw it quite so simply, that all you needed to do was pray for relief and you would obtain it, or ask for justice and you would obtain it. There were those times, as Job himself points out, where we don't understand why the "wicked live on, reach old age, and grow mighty in power." So there has always been an aspect of mystery to it as well.

Q: Why doesn't God just make things a lot more obvious? We'd still have free will, just better informed free will.

A: I really believe that our free will is connected to our understanding of God. And that faith for us in not so much a foregone conclusion. That faith is never a foregone conclusion. Faith is a choice, it's something we choose. We choose to see the world as a world in the hands of a loving God. And that this is a conscious effort that we make in order to frame the way that we relate to God and one another. That is, I could look at the same evidence as someone else, and we could see two very, very different things. One might see an event as nothing but random chance, and the other as under the guidance of God. I think that there's no real objective difference between those events. Now, I think what this questioner wants is for there to be an objective, measurable difference so as to be able to say, "Yeah, that was clearly God. But if any of us were confronted with the reality of God, would any of us really have a choice but to believe and trust in that God?

To me, God seeks to be in relationship with us and that requires that we be completely free. That we are able to choose. That we are able to make that response and turn to God in a meaningful way. Whereas, were any hard evidence to come around, it would obviate the need for us to take a leap of faith.

There was a TV show that I liked very much. [Okay, it was Battlestar Galactica] and there was a conversation in that show that summarizes this understanding perfectly. One character [Athena] had betrayed another [Adama] and there was a long history of reconcilation between the two of them, and in the end [Adama] was entrusting [Athena] with an important task. Athena asks, "How do you know you can trust me?" And Adama replies, "I don't. That's what trust is." That's what faith is. Faith is trust. It's not about knowing. It's about trusting. It's about saying 'In spite of my doubt, I am choosing to trust. And that I think is the core of a meaningful and powerful faith.

Q: In the Bible, God is very upset when people worship other gods. What does this mean in practical terms? What if a person has trouble with the term "god" but is comfortable with another term (say Tahweh, from your sermon "She," the universe, etc.)-- is this worshiping other gods? How does anyone know the real God, since if someone asked three ministers who were trained at the same school they would still have slightly different views?

A: When the Bible talks about idolatry, about worshiping other gods, it is not talking about worshiping other conceptions of God, per se. If it is, we're in trouble, because ain't none of us worshiping the same God when it comes to that. Each of us has a different understanding of what God is, and if all of life is just one huge theology exam, if all of this is about getting all the answers to these questions perfectly right, and understanding exactly who God is, we're sunk. Because, number one, we don't have the capacity to answer that question! All I can do is point you to who God is. I can't define God in any perfect and comprehensive way. My brain is only this big. I can't do that. So, our faith is not about having a perfectly accurate understanding, theologically, of God's central nature.

In the bible when it talks about worshiping other gods, it means very much the other gods of the ancient Near East, whose names we know: Marduk, Shamash, Asherah, Molech, Baal, El. Involved in the worshiping of these other gods was a worshiping of the idols that represented them. And whenever you had a system that worshiped idols, you had a culture that embraced salvation by some material means. It put its trust in some material object. And when people did that religiously, it wasn't long before they put all their trust in material things. In money, power, status. It wasn't long before you began to see great social injustices show up in society. Any time idolatry was on the rise, justice was on the decline. When God commands worship of God alone, God is not saying "according to this theological definition by which you understand me" but is commanding the people to worship that which is transcendent above all. That we understand to be the God that we know and proclaim. It's not so much about the fine tuning of what name you give God. It's much more about where are you putting your trust? In the source of all life? Are you putting your trust in the source of all hope? Of all our being? The only source that can bring our redemption and salvation. Or are you putting your trust in something else? And so, idolatry for us today is not so much about what we call God as it is about the God we understand and where we are putting our trust instead. Are we putting our trust in material things or in the one who created us and in whom we find the grounding of our being?

Q: What have been the greatest benefits of Christian faith in your life personally?

A: The greatest benefit of Christian faith is hope. I don't know if you've noticed, but the world can be a crappy place sometimes. The world is full of a lot of brokenness. Full of a lot of things that are not the way they ought to be. For me, my faith helps me to see those thing--as I said before faith is a choice to see the world through lenses--and for me it's through the lens of hope. And so I don't look out upon a world in which there are untold thousands homeless in Haiti and say "Well, that's just the way the world is." I don't look out at a world in which women are oppressed and treated as second-class citizens and say, "Well, that's the way the world is." I don't look at a system that is not providing justice for all its citizens and say, "Well, that's the way the world is." To me, that is not the way the world is meant to be. And that's not the world that God will bring about into our midst. It is not the world we saw a glimpse of on that Easter morning. When Christ rises from the dead, we understand that all bets are off. We understand that all the things we had assumed were the way the world was--full of sin, power, violence, and death that ruled the world, suddenly we know that none of it is true. It's God, love, life, and mercy that rule. And when you see the world that way, you can look out at a broken world and still have hope. Because we know this world is in the process of being redeemed, in the process of being remade. And will be renewed, restored. And so, for me, the most powerful thing that our Christian faith can give us is hope. It conquers all the fear, all the anxiety, it conquers everything. It allows us to love one another, to build community, allows us to get up in the morning and go about the difficult work that we have ahead of us.

Q: In your opinion, when is the most appropriate time to get baptized?

A: There's no "appropriate" time. We understand that God's grace is available to everyone. In the Methodist/Wesleyan tradition, God's grace is available not only to those who know what's going on. So it's not simply a question of whether you understand the sacrament of baptism. It's not whether you are able to articulate a deep Christian faith. You can be a six-month old child and be baptized. We don't limit baptism based on age because we don't think the baptism has anything to do with us. Baptism is about what God is doing. The baptism is about God claiming you. God putting God's mark upon you, not the other way around. That can happen when you're six. It can happen when you're sixty. So, I don't know that there's an appropriate time to be baptized. Whenever your parents get around to it, whenever you want to do it.

But I want to affirm the idea of infant baptism, because nothing shows God's grace more than baptizing a child who can't possibly have done anything to merit that. A child cannot possibly have been a good enough person, or a faithful enough person, or a pious enough person, or a theologically correct enough person to warrant getting baptized by God. And yet, we baptize, because we say God claims this child even so. Baptism, for one not already baptized, is an intensely personal choice and should be left to the movement of the spirit within. But I do believe that it is an important thing for the church to affirm the baptism of the young as a sign of God's unmerited grace for us.

Q: How can someone be a Christian in a multifaith world? How can a person be a Christian when they feel funny because they might make someone else feel uncomfortable or upset?

A: Pretty soon we'll have no choice. We need to be Christians in a multi-faith world. Let me tell you a little story about this community of which you are a part. Eight years ago, this attendance today would have been the attendance on a regular Sunday--this [Superbowl Sunday] 15 or so. We were a very small community. We were known then as the "Protestant Community". There was a lot of debate and questioning about the nature of the community. People didn't really know the community or what we were about. And they found they knew even less about what the word "Protestant" meant. What does that mean? What does that term mean if it can define anyone from a Southern Baptist to an Episcopalian? And so when we became a full-time ministry under the United Methodist church's direction, we renamed the community to be the "United Methodist-Protestant Community".

A couple of very interesting things happened. We didn't lose any of our Lutherans, or Baptists, or Episcopalians, or Presbyterians, or Disciples, or Congregationalists. We even picked up a couple of Catholics. We got a whole bunch of folks when we became the United Methodist-Protestant Community. And I think it was because people knew where we stood. They knew what that name meant. They knew that there was a tradition there. That there was something behind it. And they also knew that that we were not about to insist that they needed to be United Methodist. That they needed to think in a certain way or act in a certain way. But what was clear was that when the community embraced a tradition and claimed its own identity, it grew. It began to have an impact on this campus. Today, I am very proud about how many people know about this community on campus, how many people talk about this community, how many people have said positive and affirming things about the kind of witness and ministry that we can do.

Therefore, if you are a Christian, be a Christian! Don't be afraid. Claim that name! Proclaim it. It doesn't mean you've got to beat people over the head with the Bible. You can be authentically who you are. When you are authentically who you are, you will speak with more power than when you were afraid of claiming an identity. When you stand up and say, "I'm a Christian, and this is what I believe..." but are still able to interact with other people with openness, and strength, and love, then all kinds of possibilities open up.

I am sure [most] of you have friends from different faiths who I sure do not doubt the commitment in your heart as Christians. And I am sure, because I know the character of the people in this sanctuary, that they're not in danger of being assaulted by religion because of that. I think there is a very important way that we can be Christians and do Christianity through our whole selves. If we limit sharing our faith to basically evangelizing people in ways that say, "Look, it's about time you accepted what I say and agreed with me" as opposed to living the Gospel, as opposed to living in such a way that people understand what Jesus was talking about when he talked about love and grace, and mercy and forgiveness. If we live our ways in the most authentic Christian way possible, I think we'll see two things. We'll get a lot more people who are willing to engage with us. Once we know who we are, we will be more comfortable being engaged with other people. And second, we will see that we will have an effect upon the world, if only through that sure and steady witness.

Other religions aren't going away, folks. Number one, there are far too many people in India for that to happen, and secondly, we're going to have to learn how to be authentically who we are--and unafraid of who we are--and at the same time open, willing to listen, willing to love those who are not of our tradition. I think that's important to say. We are in a world right now filled with people of many different faiths and we don't have to say that we agree. It is alright to say, 'You believe that, I believe something else. And what I believe is important to me and not just arbitrary.' But we don't have to make [belief alone] the thing that defines us. Wesley said, "Though we may not all think alike, may we not all love alike?" There's so much we can do with people of different faiths, as we maintain our own faith and our own proclamation. We get too hung up on the differences and we miss the opportunities to work together, to love together, and to be in ministry for the good of all together.

7:00 P.M. Service

Q: If free will exists while God is still all-knowing, how can he still "have a plan for us" if we can so easily make the choice to just not follow it? Does that make it possible to defy God's will for our lives?

A: It absolutely does. In the following way. Imagine if you were a parent. You would have a plan for your children, that they would grow up, that they would be happy, that they would find some fulfillment in their life and in their work, that they would perhaps have a family of their own. They might not do any of those things. In the same way, God has a plan for us, but it's not quite the same as saying that God has picked out your tie for Monday morning, or that God has intended that you should engage in this work or that work alone. Because, I believe that God's will is about the broad strokes. God's will for us is pretty straightforward.

I am reminded of a time I was once walking home and ran into some students [in front of the Berkshire Apartments] and they were talking about this situation they were having. One guy had just broken up with his girlfriend who had insisted that them being together was God's will. And he said, "To me, God's will is pretty straightforward. God's will is that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. [This is Micah 6:8:] "He has told you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, live mercy, and walk humbly with your God." God's will for us is in the broad strokes. God's will for us is that we would love one another. God's will for us is that we would be in right relationship with one another. And so, we can do that as piano tuners or theologians, as contractors or as school teachers. So, I don't believe that there's any one plan in those details. I think God wants us to be free. God wants us to respond out of love and exercise our own free will. And so if God's will is that we love one another and do justice and mercy and walk in humble relationship with God, do we defy God's will. All the time. Part of what it means to be human is to be free and without that actual freedom we cannot truly be in a loving relationship with God.

Would any of you, if given the opportunity, compel someone to love you, knowing full well that that love was not from that person's own heart, but was merely wrought by a love potion? No. You would want someone to love you freely and wholly. In order for that love to be genuine, it must be free. And so God has a will for us in that God has a desire regarding us, but God does not compel us toward any behavior or toward any one aspect of life, but seeks that we would respond out of love and grace.

Q: Hebrews 6: 4-6, NIV "It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace."
   I feel that I have fallen away from God. I have openly rejected him, denying his benevolence, his glory, and eventually even his existence. I know now that I was foolish, and that in my anger I truly did crucify my Lord all over again. Am I truly without hope for repentance and reconciliation? How do I go on from here?

A: The answer is this: no, the questioner is not without hope.

Here is an important thing to understand: The Bible speaks with many different voices, many theological voices, many perspectives. And the author of Hebrews had a particular perspective in that he understood--as many ancient Christians did--that once you were saved, if you lost that salvation, you could not get it back. In fact, one of the reasons that the Emperor Constantine was not baptized until his deathbed--something done very frequently in those days--because on your deathbed, your chances for sinning after your baptism were relatively slight. You couldn't get into that much trouble and lose the blessing that you had.

Now, from another theological perspective, one that is no less ancient, we see time and time again where humanity falls short of God's grace, of God's will; they sin, they fall into wrong relationship; and over and over and over and over again God open's up God's arms wide and invites us back. It happened in the stories we looked at last semester, with Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David. It happened to the whole nation of Israel, who felt that they had so broken the covenant with God that they were cast into exile. But God calls them back. I do not believe that God's mercy is a one time only deal. I do not believe that God's mercy is a sale that ends when the weekend is over. God's mercy is everlasting. God's mercy is infinite. God always seeks us to come back.

I understand where the perspective of the author of Hebrews is coming from. For the author of Hebrews, the transformation of a Christian is so profound that it is a changing experience and you are a fundamentally different person. But there are not many Christians who experience their Christian faith in that way. There was a radio preacher I once heard answering his mail as I was driving through a barren stretch of Pennsylvania where I could pick up only one station. And he read a letter that asked, "Pastor, how do I know if I've been saved?" And he replied, "If you're still sinning, then you haven't been saved." That's a pretty high bar. And I can understand that if you felt that you had gotten to that state of perfection, to lose it would feel catastrophic. But, Methodism's founder John Wesley understood that God's grace was everlasting. There may be backsliding, we may slip, we may stumble on that track toward perfection in love. But God is always there, always seeking reconciliation, always welcoming us back. That radical message of the Prodigal Son, where [the father] welcomes back the son who had given away everything, represents the God we believe in. A God who always welcomes us back with open arms.

Q: Can you talk about faith and mental illness?

A: I am not sure where the questioner is going with this one, so I'll guess.

We are broken in many ways. Some of us are broken physically, in that we injuries of the flesh, physical disabilities. Some are limited by birth or accident. Some are afflicted emotionally, some are afflicted in their mental well-being. But none of these brokennesses alienates us from God. None of them separates us from God. God seeks to be in relationship with all of us. Some might say that suffering from a mental illness might impair one's own ability to believe, or impair one's ability to feel whole on a fundamental level. We often talk about our spiritual well-being as if our spirit were our mind, or our conscious self. So that when we think differently, or feel differently, and we can't quite muster up the joy or belief or whatever it is that we see in others, and we believe that it's the result of some brokenness within us, then we feel some how less able to be people of faith because of it. But in reality there should be no more anxiety about mental illness than there is about broken knee. A broken knee might prevent you from kneeling at the altar rail, but it doesn't prevent you from kneeling in your heart. In the same way that there are all kind so mental illnesses that a person might have that do not prevent them from being a person of faith in a profound way. Because I've got news for you, folks: ain't none of us not broken in some way. We are all hurting. We all suffer something. And so, if this questioner is wondering how they might be able to be in a place of faith or what faith has to say about mental illness, I would say it says the same thing about all sickness: that God seeks to be our healing and that God welcomes us as we are, broken and hurting and in need of being made whole.

Q: How can there be truth to more than one faith tradition when they often flat-out contradict one another?

A: We get some version of this question every year. It depends on what you mean by "truth". If you say truth is, for example, affirming that it was Isaac who was sacrificed (or nearly so) on that altar by Abraham and not Ishmael, then you have three religions, Christianity and Judaism on the one side, and Islam on the other, that will disagree. One is true and the other is not. If you say that truth lies in affirming certain theological ideas about God or certain understandings of the afterlife, then yes, you will point to those things [as areas of contradiction or conflict.]

Now, it may be that we as a community will say "here is what we affirm to be true" and that that will be irreconcilable with some other religious tradition. But to say that that other religion does not contain truth of any sort would be a bit parochial. The ancients used to say that "truth does not oppose truth". There are things that we do agree on among different religions. And the amount of flat-out contradiction is up for debate. There are some things we would affirm as Christians that other religions won't. We're going to have to get used to that. But there are things, deep theological touchstones that we can embrace. We are not going to agree with our Jewish brothers and sisters on the messiahship of Jesus. That's a non-negotiable for us--Jesus is the Messiah (in case you were wondering). They're not going to buy that [although the Muslims do]. Can we not affirm other truths that we find in Judaism: that God is one and is the Lord of the whole creation? That God is in covenant relationship with God's people? That God seeks the people to live out their faith in an active way? Are these not truths in Judaism that we can affirm? Do we need to be in 100% agreement to be able to embrace one another? So, there are truths and then there is Truth, with a capital 'T'. I don't know that any of us has Truth with a capital 'T'--perhaps this is a little humility that we should embrace. We are all struggling, seeking to discern the ineffable God whom we cannot comprehend. And our religions are our expressions of that understanding but they are themselves not the truth. They point toward it, but they are not the embodiment of all truth. And so we are required to embrace a little bit of humility, and in the meantime, again, to follow Welsey's advice, "Though we may not all think alike, may we not all love alike?" And so, I would say that our challenge lies in helping to see the broader truths that we all share, even as we all respectfully disagree over particular truths we continue to affirm.

Q: How can we be generous, kind, forgiving, and faithful Christians without being walked all over by people who want to take advantage of us?

A: The Gospel does not require you to be a doormat. But I think a lot people have that perception of what Christian faith requires of us. This whole 'turn the other cheek' business seems like caving in to the one who oppresses you. But part of that is an impoverished understanding of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness was, long before it was a theological term, forgiveness was an economic term: debt forgiveness. Loan forgiveness. Something I pray for each and every one of you. And when someone forgave a loan or a debt, they were not saying, 'It's okay, I guess you didn't really owe me the money.' They said, "You owe me this money, but I choose to forgive this debt. I am letting it go." Think of it that way. The person who gets to forgive is the creditor, not the debtor. It's the one with all the power. Forgiveness comes from a place of strength. It says: your conduct toward me, your sinfulness to me cannot define me. What you did, the injury you caused me, I will not allow to define who I am, and so I am letting it go. Forgiveness, my friends, comes from strength and not from weakness. If it comes from weakness, it's not really forgiveness. If someone has made you forgive them, that's not really forgiving them. No, forgiveness is one of the most powerful things a person can do, because it's so transformative. Those parables that Jesus tells about a person forgiven a debt of a tremendous amount of money, outlines the joy they are to feel. Imagine having all your debts cancelled--what would that do? How would that transform your life? Forgiveness does not come from a place of weakness, it comes from a place of justice. You have wronged me, you have done the wrong thing and I hold you to account, but I am letting it go. I am choosing not to exercise what I rightfully could. I am choosing to to let that go. And in that moment is power.

There is a beautiful and wonderful scene in Schindler's List, where Schindler and the commandant of the concentration camp are having a drunken conversation over schnapps. Schindler is trying desperately to get this man to act more humanely toward the Jewish prisoners in this camp. And Schindler says, "You know what real power is, it's not in having the right to kill a man, it's in having the right to kill and not doing it." He uses the illustration of the Caesars, before whom would be brought some poor humble wretch, some man who's committed a crime, who is nothing and Caesar would say, "I pardon you." "That," said Schindler, "was power." Ultimately it was not a power that this commandant could embrace. But Schindler was right. Forgiveness and mercy are powerful. They are not the tools of the weak. They are the tools of the strong, because they claim for the forgiver the right to define for one's own self the relationship with the other, and not to be defined by anger, violence, or vengeance. That is where I think we need to come to an understanding of what forgiveness really is.

Q: Titus 1:2 tells us that God cannot lie. The Bible, which is the divine word of God, contains many out and out contradictions (examples include the two creation accounts in Genesis and the conflicting accounts of the death of Judas)-- how are we as believers to reconcile these contradictions?
    If the writers of the Bible were in error, why would God allow that? If some portions are metaphorical, how are we to know them? If differing interpretations are equally valid, how is the Word divine-- that is, how is it irrefutably true?
   Every answer I've heard to this question boils down to something like "God's ways are mysterious. Have more faith." If so, then why call God good, if His goodness is not ours?

A: A pastor of mine used to say, "There's truth in the Bible and there are facts in the Bible and the two ought not be confused." When we speak of the Holy Scriptures as divinely inspired, we mean that in the word of the text we encounter God. But the text itself is not God. As Christians, we define God's being as a Trinity--Father, Son, and Spirit--but also Father, Word, and Spirit. The Son of God is often referred to as the Eternal Word of God. We believe that that Eternal Word of God became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We say that Jesus Christ is the "Word of God made flesh." The Incarnate Word of God, about whom many words in the Word of God, the Bible, were written. And then here, in church, we have our bulletins [and hymnals] upon which are many words, the liturgy that we use to celebrate the Word of God we proclaim, that points to the Incarnate Word, that points to the Eternal Word of God. But the "Word of God" is that Eternal Word in Christ. It is not the book. The book points to that Word. Just as the liturgy points to the book, the book points to the Incarnate Word, that points to the Eternal Word. It is that Eternal Word of God that we believe to be perfect and loving and true.

God's Spirit inspired many to write down their experiences: their experiences of God as the people Israel, their experiences of Christ as the early church. And they did so as human beings, free, fallible human beings. They wrote down an understanding of the world as they knew it: flat with a dome over the top. They wrote down an understanding of the weather cycle as they understood it. They wrote down understandings of many things as they understood it. And were we to write scripture today about God we would write it with a cosmology that no doubt 300 years from now they would prove completely wrong. But it would be no less true. Because it is in those stories, in those narratives that we encounter that living Word, that Eternal Word, that speaks to us. It is not in the wording, in the historical accuracy of the narrative. It is in the fact that for 2,000 years of Christian tradition, and a 1,000 years of Jewish tradition before that, that the people of God have said, "This is our story and when we read this story we know we encounter God." That is how the Bible is inspired: the inspiration of the holy scriptures is not only in the writing of it, it's in the receiving of it. There are many books of the Bible that didn't make it in. Read them, you'll know why. They don't inspire. When you read them, you say, this isn't the God I know. The Bible did not drop out of heaven unaltered and unabridged. It reflects the people's experience of God so that when other people read it they were able to say: yes, this is the God that we know. And that is work of the Spirit. That is inspiration as well. That is why the scriptures remain authoritative [even when we might question some aspect of history or science] because this is our story, this is our history, this tells our record of encountering the divine, with all the messiness that any family history would have. All the ways that we would go about it, that is what this wonderful and amazing book has preserved for us. But whatever we might find in its pages does not impugn the nature of God, nor does it call into question God's goodness and truth. It might sometimes make it harder to discern, but that's only if we're looking no further than the words on the page, and not looking deeper into the meaning that lies behind them.

Q: My friend is an evangelical Christian. She talks about Jesus as though he were her best friend, and seems to have a very pure and simple faith. I, on the other hand, struggle more with my faith on intellectual and spiritual levels. I still believe, but my friend often unintentionally makes me feel as though my faith is inferior when compared with the strength of hers. What can I do to combat this feeling?

A: God is revealed to us in many ways. And different Christians have different places of intersection with Christian faith. For some, there is a very, very intense personal relationship that takes place. We refer to this broadly as the "evangelical" side of Christian faith, that intense personal relationship with God that people have. Some people encounter faith intellectually. For some people, faith is a reasoning of the mind, a beauty to the created order, the workings of the universe and science. And it is there they encounter divinity. Other people, a number of whom are in this community, encounter God through service, through helping one another, through working for justice, they experience God most profoundly. [Others encounter faith as wrestling with great questions and embracing mystery and doubt.] We are, all of us, different in our temperaments. We are, all of us, different in the ways we encounter God. And no one way is better than any other. St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that we all have many gifts and that we are all part of one body: "If the foot would say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?" (1 Corinthians 12:15-17) In the same way, we need Christians for whom faith is that powerful emotional experience to fire us up, to get that fire burning deep in our bellies. We need Christians for whom our faith intersects on the intellectual level, to make the elegant reasoned arguments for the community of faith. We need Christians who will engage their hands and their feet for the work of the Kingdom. We need Christians who will campaign for justice. [We need Christians who will wrestle with mystery and wonder to keep us humble and grounded.] We need all those experiences of God to be part of the body of Christ, and no one way is better than another.

And so I would recommend to this person that they not feel as if they are lacking something, but look to where it is they already encounter God and to explore that. And to explore the deep richness that lies within that understanding of God.

There were some in Wesley's day who argued that you had a conversion and it was a powerful, instantaneous experience. And there were others who argued that it was a long, gradual process of growing awareness, [where one could not say when one came to faith, but knows it was over a certain period.] Sometimes that's the way it works for us. It's not always showy. There are also subtle, constant ways of faith. Each of them has power and validity. Each of them has meaning, and no one should feel, that because they lack someone else's experience, that they are not equally a part of this Christian community.

This is an important task. The most important part is that you not just simply take my word for it. If you've asked a question, and I've answered it, don't just simply say, "Well, that settles it." Keep asking. Keep wrestling. Ours is a thinking person's faith. We're not afraid that if you open your mind to something and an idea should come in that the whole house of cards comes collapsing down. God gave us brains for a reason--God expects us to use them. And so I encourage you to keep asking these questions of faith. To wrestle. To explore, research. To talk to other pastors, to talk with one another. There is so much wisdom in this place. And so I want to thank you for respecting me and honoring me with your questions and I hope that you will continue to honor this community by continuing to ask them in the future.