Faith Questions (2011)
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 6, 2011
Job 7:17-21; Luke 2:41-52
Job 7:17-21 • “What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.”
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 web 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.
“Faith Questions” is not simply a description of what it is we are answering here: questions of faith. But “Faith Questions” is a statement of what faith does: faith questions. It is an important part of our faith to do so. We hear Job asking difficult questions, struggling to understand the situation he’s found himself in. We hear Jesus asking questions of the teachers of the law in the Temple, looking for greater understanding and we are told at the end of Luke’s passage that he grew ‘in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor’. It is an essential part of our faith to ask these questions, and so without further ado, here is Carolyn with the first question…
5:00 SERVICE
Is there original sin? If so, does the soul of an unborn child go to hell? If not, then does the soul of an unborn child go to heaven or is it just “recycled” because it never got the chance to live and choose God or not?
This question involves a number of different questions. The first is about original sin, and so we’ll start with that. In Methodism, we believe that there is original sin, but not original guilt. In the Catholic tradition, it is believed that because of the sin of Adam and Eve we are, all of us, born not only with the consequences of that sin—which are death, illness, decay—we are also born with the guilt of that sin as if you yourself had committed it. In the Protestant tradition, and in the Wesleyan tradition of which we are a part, we do not view a person as being born with the guilt of original sin. We do understand a person being born with the consequences of original sin (death, disease, decay as we understand these as theological consequences, not as a biological explanation for death and disease), but that is also because Wesley saw all sin as sickness (as opposed to crime), all sin as brokenness from which we needed to be healed. So the question of unborn babies’ souls going to hell would not really line up with that understanding.
The question also presupposes the pre-existence of the soul, that we have a soul somewhere in heaven that then is given to us when we’re born or conceived. We don’t necessarily affirm the idea of the pre-existence of the soul, that would make the soul immortal and therefore equal to God. What we believe is that each of us has (or is) a soul and that we generally don’t have pre-birth consequences of that belief. In terms of what happens if an unborn child should die, we can understand that as something that God is capable of taking care of.
How does free will function? If free will is based on our decisions, then it is therefore predetermined by our environment. If not, then is it random? Wouldn’t that make the decision meaningless?
The question asks “Do we really have free will?” It’s an interesting question because if we don’t really have free will and only think we have free will, I am not sure what the difference is from our point of view. We still think we’re making choices and so the responsibility still fall on us. I do believe that we are given free will. And I believe that we are given freewill because I believe it is a necessary consequence of a loving God. We might have found ourselves tempted from time to time to wish for a potion that could make someone love us. But we also know that that wouldn’t be genuine—it wouldn’t be real relationship, because we would have compelled someone to love us. We would not be in a free relationship with someone who was there freely. An essential part in seeking to love, an essential part of seeking to be in loving relationship, is to set the other person free.
I believe that if God is love and God is a loving God, then we must be given free will, else we could not be in anything other than a pre-programmed relationship with God for good or for ill. We’d be nothing more than “Sims” in a giant game of “SimUniverse”. We wouldn’t be free agents able to be in genuine relationship. I also believe that we lack perspective to know all circumstances that inform our choices: whether I am predisposed to make a choice by environment or upbringing, genetics or who-knows-what. But all of it, the whole world is a free and dynamic system that we are a part of, and that we should act in every moment as if we have that freedom and make those choices. And to be serious about making them, rather than abrogating them based on some idea that we’re not in control of the decisions we make.
I have a friend who is a fundamentalist atheist who was very upset at the idea that a Christian can believe in a God that is good if that God allows any evil (also called suffering by said friend) in the world he creates. If I say that human beings have a responsibility to the creation, he says that we, as God’s creation, are God’s responsibility, and that by leaving us with the potential for evil, he’s effectively leaving children with Draino to drink. If I say that it’s for the sake of free will, he counters that God then should have created a universe where it was logically possible to have a spectrum of choices that are all good. But at the heart of all this, I think this person wants to know why we suffer and why there is so much evil in the world. What do you think? And how can I respond to him compassionately without becoming a loud, frustrated debater?
How to respond without becoming loud, frustrated debater is definitely the harder part of the question. I really do believe this all comes back to the free will thing. I believe that the universe itself is free, not just us—it’s not just our choices that are free. The universe itself is free. It operates on a fundamental level using quantum mechanics which can’t even be observed without giving you headaches. It operates in a dynamic, complex interrelated system. The whole thing is free. I think what you have to understand is this: which is the greater value? Is ensuring good and happy results or is it ensuring a system grounded in love and freedom the greater value?
I think the situation is analogous to a parent who would seek to protect a child from all evil and harm. A parent can do that if they lock their child up and never let them outside to get sick, never let them interact with people who might hurt them. They can structure their world in such a way that no evil can befall them. But that’s not how we raise our children. That’s not how we were raised. At some point our parents let us go out the door, knowing full well we were going to get hurt. Knowing full well we might hurt other people. But having the greater love for us to be the people that we are called to be and to be the people we would be as the result of our choices and our responses. And having the freedom to do so. I do think it’s a painful thing, but I also think that part of it is that the brokenness that we cause—the choices that we make that hurt ourselves and others—don’t just grieve us. They grieve God as well.
This is why I believe the parental imagery for God is so important. It’s a model we can really understand. What it would be like for someone who would wish only good for us, but loves us too much to compel us to that behavior, knowing full well all the consequences that will bring? All the pain that we’ll have? But understanding that it’s for our betterment that we are free as opposed to just being slaves with only a limited range of options.
The free will part comes back in that we have real choice not simply a choice only among good options. But real choice to do good or to do evil. And in those choices we make our way. And we also suffer our consequences.
You’ve answered what it means for God to love, but what does it mean when the Bible says God hates something? What does it mean for God to hate?
This is one of those times where we need to realize that the Bible was not written in English. In Hebrew the words love (ahavah) and hate (sana) do mean ‘to love’ and ‘to hate’, but they also mean ‘to prefer’ and ‘to reject’. When it is said “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau” (Mal. 1:2-3) there is no hateful animus that God is confessing to. God is not saying, “I could not stand Esau!” It’s saying, “I chose Jacob, but I did not choose Esau.” We see ‘love’ and ‘hate’ used that way throughout the scriptures. So when God says God hates something, what is being said is “I reject that–it is not the way I choose.” But it is not filled with the darkness of the human heart that we like to think ‘hate’ means.
Our guests from Westboro Baptist Church a few weeks ago who tried to share their message with us on the street corner have an understanding of God and hate that is very visceral, very personal, and a very human hate, but it is not the kind of hate that the Biblical God expresses. In fact, that biblical God, time and time again, speaks of love for all creation. And God even says things like “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…” (Amos 5:21) and we don’t understand this to mean that God hated the religious observance of the Israelites, but is saying: “That’s not what I prefer. I prefer that you do justice.” We have to read these things in their context and understand that the overarching theme is always one of love and that when God is presented in these ways (with words of hate) we need to understand them in their context and their culture.
Romans 13 tells everyone to be “subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God establishes”. Does this mean that God not only approves of, but established every governing authority, including those who commit(ed) mass atrocities? Furthermore, does this mean that we are just supposed to sit down and let every governing authority do whatever they want, simply because God wants them in that position? (if God didn’t want them in that position, why would God establish their authority?)
Here’s another thing that’s important to remember about the Bible: not only was the Bible not written in English, but it is not written with one voice. We speak of the Bible as the word of God because we believe that God is communicated through it. But it would be a mistake to understand the Bible as being written from one theological perspectives. Some of my colleagues, when they talk about ‘Biblical theology’, argue that that’s an oxymoron. They say there is no ‘biblical theology’, no one theology found in the Bible. There are many.
So, what we understand about this statement about governing authorities is this: that’s what Paul said in Romans. Paul, who was himself a Roman citizen, and who was writing in the late 50′s and early 60′s when things were going relatively well for Christians in the Roman Empire, has a very different attitude about whether the Roman Empire and powers like it are God-ordained than the author of the book of Revelation who compared the Empire to the Great Beast that Satan has unleashed upon the world. In the Old Testament, we see language that suggest that God has ordained the Davidic monarchy and the line of kings descendant from David and will guarantee a king on the throne of Israel forever. And yet when the monarchy is founded, we see Samuel the prophet relaying a message of what a tyrant this king will be and how Israel’s having a king is their turning their backs on God. So, what we see is that there are many different views as to the relationship between the powers of the world and God’s power.
We can get bogged down in deciding whether God is on the side of this government or supporting that regime, when we should be holding all governments accountable to the commandments for justice, compassion, and righteousness. I don’t think that the Biblical witness speaks with one voice, telling us that we have to submit to that which is unjust. Certainly the Confessing Movement in Nazi Germany did not do that. They did not conceded that all governments had authority from God, they saw that it was their duty to resist the Nazi regime. Christians have done that from time immemorial, from the very beginning of our faith we resisted Roman oppression non-violently. And we have resisted oppression throughout our history. And so I do not believe that Christian faith requires us to submit to unjust, tyrannical systems. In fact, it was the Confessing Church in the middle of the Holocaust who declared that “unquestioning obedience to the state was not compatible with Christian faith.” There have been many who have not understood Christian duty as requiring subjection to the governing authorities as St. Paul’s rather optimistic and hopeful opinion of the Romans would advise.
How has Christianity traditionally addressed faith claims outside of the Christian church?
Outside of the Christian church we have… well, let’s be honest about how we have addressed them inside the Christian church: usually by demonizing and branding each other as heretics. So, when we can’t even really get around one way of thinking within the church, we have not been terribly charitable about people outside the church, historically speaking. In fact, the phrase “Jews, Turks, and Infidels” was used as the catch-all phrase to describe people outside of proper Christian faith.
Lately, of course, with more encounters with other religions, there has been much more of a sense of how it is that other faiths might have something to say and that there’s something to listen to. Part of this, I believe, also comes from a certain perspective that we Wesleyans have when we speak of God’s grace operating in three ways. The first way was way that grace operates is “preveniently”, that grace “comes before”: before you have any inkling of your need for God, God has come into your life, to prompt you, to turn you, to reach you. And we believe that that grace is made everywhere available to everyone at every time. And so that our missionaries now understand that they don’t go to another country to bring them Jesus, they go to help them to discover where Jesus already is in their midst. And that may involve the belief systems they already share. That may involve religious truths from different traditions.
Historically, we have not necessarily related well, but I also think that that was a function of the fact that we didn’t do that with each other. As we have come to a greater ecumenical movement, and as we have seen the consequences of inter-religious violence, that has been one of those tests that has helped us, that has helped us to clarify our own thinking about what God’s purposes would be. Would God approve of this kind of violence between religions or should our task be to help each other to see how we have something in common? Also, given that we maintain that all human beings are created in the image of God, our first effort should always be not to demonize or to ‘other’ someone else, but to encounter them as a fellow child of God and from there to build some common understanding.
I know that God tells us to remain chaste until marriage, but I still can’t help but wonder what sort of sin someone commits when they have premarital sex. What is the purpose of this rule and is it as important to follow as the other Christian principles?
This is another one of those things that “ain’t necessarily so” when you read the Bible. There’s no prohibition for premarital sex per se in the Bible. Women are expected to be virginal, largely so that they can be married to someone and that man will have the assumption that children produced from the marriage are his. In the Bible there is prostitution and use of prostitutes [e.g., Judah] and all kinds of different things going on.
I will say this: the church has often gotten its attitude on sexuality completely screwed up. We have made sexuality the sin of our age. The expression of sexuality and different understandings of sexuality—we seem to focus an inordinate amount on these sins. And so, part of the problem is that there are a great many Christians who feel oppressed by their own sexuality, their own sexual history, feeling that some how this has—more than anything else—broken relationship with God. I don’t know that that’s the case. Now, it’s with great fear and trembling that I stand in a pulpit and say —well, I’m not going to say “Anything goes!” folks—but I will say that sexuality is something that we misunderstand and we don’t study well. [The church's official position is that only sex within the marriage bond can be clearly affirmed. But, to its credit, the United Methodist Church admits that the gift of sexuality is not something fully understood and calls for continued reflection and study on this gift of God.]
Sexuality is powerful thing. Sexuality is a powerful force; it is the mechanism by which human life is created. That’s not insignificant. The bonds that are forged through sex are not insignificant bonds. Two people can go into a sexual relationship thinking ‘Oh, this will just be casual’ and suddenly there is drama, because sexuality brings with it power. And so, first and foremost, we need to understand that our sexuality is something to be protected and and guarded and respected.
But it is not something to be idolized to the point where we say that “All instances of sexuality prior to this point are not okay and all instances after this point are.” That would be the imposition of a rigid legalism that doesn’t always hold up. People can be very committed and loving in their relationships without that piece of paper and that public ceremony. And people can be in a marital relationship and have abusive, oppressive sexual relationships, too. What we should focus on is healthy, empowered, responsible sexuality, not simply categorizing it into “premarital” or “marital” as if somehow marriage is simply a license to have sex. Marriage is more than that. It has to be more than that in order to succeed. Once we get our head out of the sand as a church about human sexuality and start dealing with it honestly, then perhaps we can start to model a more responsible, healthier sexuality that will not leave people like the questioner wondering if they’re somehow lost or cut off from God if they’ve had premarital sex. In any event, people should always be met with grace, and not with judgment.
How does repentance work?
This is one of my favorite things to talk about. Because repentance is always understood as throwing yourself on the ground and groveling and begging God to forgive you and that if you do it right or often enough or well enough, then God will forgive you. Except that that’s not the Biblical model at all. The Biblical model of repentance is that God forgives you first. God extends forgiveness first. Repentance means ‘turning around’, in fact the Hebrew word for repentance is teshuvah, built on the verb shuv ‘to turn’.
Imagine this scenario (those of you who’ve had my class will recognize this): You’ve had a relationship with someone and you’ve done something to hurt the other person and they’re so angry that you turn around and run the other direction out of fear of the pain you’ve just caused that person. And as you get down the block, you hear their voice calling out, “I forgive you. Turn around and come back.”
That “turning around” is what repentance is. That turning around is embracing the reality of forgiveness and coming back into relationship. The Greek word for repentance—metanoia—means a transformation of mind; a complete change that we work in ourselves. But I want to be very clear: God’s forgiveness comes first. We do not earn God’s forgiveness. If we did, there wouldn’t be anything called grace. We believe in a God of grace who is always seeking us. Who is always coming after us, always pursuing us, calling out to us to turn around, to repent. But forgiveness has come first. That invitation was always there and given to us by a God of love and grace.
7:00 SERVICE
Q:What role do you believe questioning plays in faith? Does faith motivate or stifle free inquiry? What determines whether it does one or the other?
I would say that the same thing that determines that in the context of religion determines that pretty much everywhere. And that’s the difference between fear and love. If you are essentially a person who is afraid, if your life is dominated by fear, then you are going to want your faith to give you the one thing that you cannot find anywhere else: certainty. And so you will look for your faith to be immutable and unchanging and ever the same as you understand it to be. So that will quash any free inquiry. If you live at a time when the church teaches you “X” and someone else comes along and says “It might be Y”, you need that to be “X”, because if that becomes unsure then the whole thing comes apart.
If, however, your faith really is a faith, and by that I mean a “trust”, if your faith is a sign of relationship with God and that you trust in God, your love of God admits that you cannot know everything, then you are open to the possibilities of a much wider world. And you can trust, and know that our grasp of the world as we know it is constantly in flux and ever changing. And that’s part of the grand design. That is part of the way that we are built and the world is ordered. And so you have no fear of free inquiry, in fact you look for it. You relish it as yet another way to explore the creation which we inhabit. To explore this universe that God has created. By what mechanism? Let’s figure that out. How does the universe work? Let’s look that up. Let’s explore it. These are things we should not be afraid of.
But to the extent that people’s faith is grounded in fear—and that happens in the political realm, the cultural realm, you see that everywhere—where fear dominates there is a closing in and an unwillingness to see beyond our own borders. And that can stand in the way of free inquiry.
Quite a few people talk about their close relationship with God, but I don’t feel like I have that and I’m not sure if it is something I can achieve. Does this mean I’m not truly a Christian?
The personal connection to God is an essential part of the “Evangelical tradition”. The evangelical tradition, of which Methodism is a part, stresses that personal connection, that personal knowledge of God’s saving activity in your life. We don’t stress it to the exclusion of all other expressions. It may be that people experience that connection in different ways. Some people have a very profound personal relationship with God such that when they talk about God, it’s as though they’re talking about any other person they know in their life. Someone they’ve just had lunch with or take a class with. Other people talk about God in somewhat more transcendent terms, where they see God in nature around them in the experiences of wonder that they have. It’s not quite as “personalized” as it is for some others but that doesn’t make it any less personal.
We sometimes worry about how we go out and get this relationship. God comes to us in the ways we are best able to relate to God. For some people, God may be in the mystery and wonder of mathematics. They may see God in music. They may see God in relationships and community that they have with one another. All of these ways are personal ways. What’s important is that the questioner understand is that there is no one way to do Christianity. There’s no one set of expectations that every Christian is expected to have, to have this exact feeling. Or that bright moment of conversion. Some people have a more gradual experience of God’s grace in their lives. People have different ways of encountering the divine. So, I would encourage the questioner not to fret overmuch about whether their personal relationship looks like those that their friends may have, but to understand that in their own way they have an ability to connect with God and share in a relationship with God in a way that is more meaningful for them.
I noticed that every time communion is served at AU, a specific liturgy is followed, even in smaller, intimate settings (like Healing Service). At my home church we only followed a communion liturgy during formal, traditional worship, but during small, informal settings it was much more “free formed”. So I was wondering if there is any reason (other than tradition) that we always follow the same liturgy for communion. On a communion related note, why do Methodists do communion the way Methodists do communion? (with grape juice and through intinction)
On the first note, there’s a pretty pragmatic answer: we just haven’t had the time to plan using all the different communion liturgies and that’s on me. I know the traditional one by heart and so that’s the one that’s easiest to do. I am happy to do some other liturgies (though some are shaking their heads here in the sanctuary). Here’s one thing about the traditional liturgy: the liturgy is the traditional one for good reason. The traditional liturgy says things in a way that is time tested. That doesn’t mean we should be locked into it and actually I’d be more than willing to explore some other ways of looking at it. There are some essential parts of the communion liturgy: describing the saving acts of God, describing the institution of the sacrament by Jesus—why it is we are here, how was it that Christ gathered his disciples together and offered this meal, and then how it is we invoke the Spirit to come, to make the bread and wine be for us the body and blood of Christ, and fill us and to move us out into the world. Beyond that, the way we go about doing that is pretty much open for more discussion than it might have seemed.
As to why Methodists do communion the way they do… Intinction (dipping the bread into the cup) is actually not a universal United Methodist thing. That’s how many of the churches do it. When I was a kid, we all got cubes of Wonder Bread. The United Methodist Women would go down into the basement and cut up the loaf of bread into these little cubes that were put on a tray. The congregation came forward two pews at a time and knelt at the altar rail and they passed along a tray of the Wonder Bread and a tray of little shot glasses of grape juice and we all took them. The pastor would say a few words and we’d all go back to our seats then the next two pews would come forward. I can tell you that the congregation of 500 that I worship at on Sunday mornings does communion faster than my childhood church did because the larger congregation uses the method of intinction. Intinction is the faster method. It’s also older and is the method used among the Orthodox.
As to why we drink grape juice… That has little to do with Methodism per se, and has to do with the Temperance Movement. The turn of the 20th Century saw Methodists working for temperance against alcohol abuse. A Methodist layman named Welch invented a method for pasteurizing grape juice so that it would not ferment and turn into wine and he gave it away free to churches that were willing to use it instead of wine. The Methodist Church, among others, did that. To this day it remains a legacy of that temperance church. Some of our sister churches, specifically the Presbyterian, serve grape juice so that alcoholics can participate in communion without having to taste alcohol. Because we are an ecumenical congregation here, we offer both wine and grape juice in our communion. Grape juice is largely a function of American history. If you were to go to a Methodist service in England they would use wine.
I’m not sure if this really fits under the heading of faith questions, but do you have a good, short response — serious or snarky — to variations on the theme of religious being intellectually backward (or, as the sentiment often appears, atheists and agnostics being more intelligent or more sophisticated thinkers)? Such comments are not particularly threatening to either my faith or my intellect, but it would be nice to have a ready answer to such idiocy.
It’s important to remember that most of the questions that are asked by atheists—these purported “faith shattering” questions of great intellectual rigor—were asked already by people within the church. The church has known intellectual giants: St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhöffer. Isaac Newton was a believer in God and he invented physics as we know it. Some very, very smart people have been in the bounds of faith. In fact, one of the great intellectual traditions—Scholasticism, the great intellectual tradition of the church for centuries—was built around the idea that “faith seeks understanding”. It was the result of intellectual giants like Anselm, Aquinas, and others and used rigorous philosophy to examine their faith, to test it, to explore it. [So here's your good, short response:] Only someone who doesn’t know anything about history would say that [atheists and agnostics are more intelligent or more sophisticated thinkers]. Only someone who had no idea that Christians have been asking these questions for thousands of years. And not just Christians: in the Jewish tradition there is Maimonides, a giant among giants intellectually and philosophically. In the Islamic tradition as well—ibn Sina and ibn-Rushd. It’s just not historically accurate to say that people of faith and intellectuals are incompatible, because for so long the intellectuals were the people of faith, and were expected to be in the people of faith. Something has happened recently in our culture where we have separated the two and it’s important, as Charles Wesley said, “to unite the pair so long disjoin’d, knowledge and vital piety.”
What books etc would you recommend (and are accessable) for someone interesting in exploring: United Methodism, Christianity, or Faith.
The United Methodist Church actually publishes a very nice little handbook that sums up the basics of of our tradition, and there are a number of other helpful publications as well. There’s a wonderful biography of John Wesley called The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning. There’s another fine book called “Wesley and the People Called Methodists” that describes our history from the Wesley brothers to the present. It’s accessible, easy to read, and entertaining and so those would be good places to start. The member’s handbook is a small paperback book, we have some downstairs and can get more if we need to, is a very nice introduction not only to Methodism but to Christian faith in general.
The bible talks a lot about doing things with a pure heart not just going through the motions. Matthew 25:31-46 talks about how we will be judged by if we have helped Jesus by helping the least among us. In life this doesn’t seem to work out all the time. Sometimes I give/serve/help with a cheerful heart and sometimes just to make people stop complaining. I don’t know anyone who can help others all the time. Does my service still count if it is not from a cheerful heart? And what happens when sometimes I don’t give/serve/help even though I could because I am tired of being asked/discouraged/just grumpy and not wanting to share anymore of myself? [This question is a conflation of two separate submitted questions.]
We’ll take the “pure heart” question first. A ‘pure heart’ means an undivided heart. It doesn’t mean a ‘happy heart’ or a joyful heart. What’s fascinating is that the Bible is not as concerned with internal states as we are. The Bible doesn’t care about how we feel. The Bible’s not interested in us having the right attitude: it’s about doing the right things. The heart is actually the seat of reason in the Bible, not the seat of emotion. So, a ‘pure heart’ is a focused mind, focused on God not divided among different things. Not compartmentalizing God but endeavoring to focus on God with everything that we do.
Now, we’re not strictly speaking capable of doing all the good that can be done. We’re capable of doing all the good that we can do. Part of our understanding of our own ministries is a certain humility to know what are the things I can do and what are the things I can’t. I’m intrigued by the phrasing “Does my service still count?” because we’re not racking up frequent flyer miles. We’re not trying to amass credits toward heaven. We understand salvation as a gift of God through the free gift of God. Will it count? Absolutely it will count! If it makes a difference in someone’s life. If it touches someone’s heart in that moment. It doesn’t really matter whether you intended to, on some level. You can be in a miserable, grumpy mood and you still give someone on the street some money, or make eye contact with them and say ‘hello’. You don’t know how that could affect somebody.
In fact, I’m sure you’ve all had that experience where you said something off-handed and not even really paying attention, and someone comes up to you and says, “You know that thing you said to me? That was really meaningful to me. Thank you for that.” And you’re thinking, ‘What did I even say?’ God is capable of using us—broken, distracted, grumpy—and accomplish great good through it. How we do that is that we have that purity of heart to be God-minded at all times and do the best that we can. We’re not perfect. We’re not going to be the saintly figures we lift up. Because, I don’t even think the saintly figures we lift up were the saintly figures we lift up. They also experienced great moments of frustration and doubt and so on. Our task is to reflect the love and grace that we have received as best we can and trust that it will have a ripple effect in the world that we may not even realize and the we will probably underestimate.
I am lost lacking any direction or hope. All I see is a dark abyss. Where exactly is God in my life?
I want to say this and I don’t want it to sound trite, because it’s important. I sincerely believe that God is in those dark places. We sometimes think that when we’re lost and we’re hurting that we’re the furthest from God. But we’re a tradition that looks upon the cross and sees Christ upon the cross, and we know that it is precisely in those moments that God is there. Our sorrow and our suffering and our anxiety and our doubt are not places that exist in some other reality and God is in the happy-happy universe such that people who suffer are somehow cut off from God’s reality and presence.
I would encourage people who struggle with darkness and doubt to read the Psalms. The Psalms aren’t all wonderful “the Lord is my shepherd” and “let every thing praise the Lord”. The Psalms have some darkness in them, too. The Psalms have a lot of pain. And what you understand as you read them is that these are people of faith expressing their anger at God, their pain, and their alienation, and yet there is a relationship there. A sense that we are still in relationship with God even though we are in this tremendous place of pain and darkness. [The Biblical God is not removed from our sufferings, but knows them and suffers them with us.]
Sometimes Christians need to allow themselves to realize that being a Christian doesn’t mean that you’re going to be happy and that you’re going to have all the answers. If it does, I might as well hang it up right now because I don’t have all the answers myself. When we give ourselves permission to realize that we can still be—and are still—in relationship even in the darkest depths, then something can work a change in us. It says in the Psalms: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol (into the grave), you are there.” (Psalm 139:7-8) Even in the pit, God is there. That may not be easy for us to see, but sometimes the knowledge that God is there allows us to open our minds to that idea and to change our own expectations of ourselves and to encounter God in a new way.
I’m rather fond of an episode of The West Wing where one of the characters explains why he stopped attending church. He explains that when he started reading the Bible in-depth, he began to doubt his faith, being unwilling to believe that death was the punishment for working on the Sabbath, or committing adultery, yet no penalty for slavery. How do we maintain our faith in God and the Bible when its writings condone actions that we know to be contrary to our modern understandings of what is acceptable in our society?
It is a very important thing to understand that the Bible contains the Word of God and also contains many words. The two should not be confused with one another. The Word of God is an eternal truth that is communicated to us through the words of the text. We as Christians also believe that that Word of God is also communicated to us through the person of Jesus of Nazareth, that he was the Word made flesh. And that Word is not always the same as all the words of the text. There are things in the Bible that owe themselves to a very, very human influence. There is a lot of culture, and history, and ancient understandings of the world enshrined in the Bible. The ancients thought the world was flat, covered by a dome of sky. We know better. The ancients thought of women as property and so sexual acts that decreased the marketability of your virginal daughter were forbidden. They allowed for people to serve as indentured servants and slaves. All kinds of things that they believed are reflected in the pages of the book that they produced.
But also reflected in that same book is an understanding of eternal covenant with God, the goodness of the created world in which we live. It doesn’t matter that the world they thought they lived in was a domed, flat world. They understood that it was God’s and that it was good. That’s the Word of God. It doesn’t matter what they thought human societal relationships should look like. They understood that above them all stood God and God calling the people into covenant. The important task for the Christian is to understand how much time, culture, and language have shaped the text of the Bible. By understanding that better, we can see what parts are the consequences of that culture, and are limited by time and place, and what parts speak with eternal truth.
It’s interesting that the mentioned character in The West Wing grew up in faith, reads the Bible and falls from faith. There have been people of no faith who read the Bible and come to faith. So, something is going on on that book. There’s some power, some Word that is spoken in that text that speaks to people in their deep longing to know their place in the universe, how they matter, and what it all means. There are a lot of details in the Bible—as a former pastor of mine used to say, “There is truth in the Bible and there are facts in the Bible and the two ought not be confused.” When we read the text, in the right mind and guided by the Spirit, it will speak to us in a way that a mere telling of a story involving broken people will not. I encourage the questioner to look at the text as a living document that reflects the experience of the people, but also to know that it reflects a greater thing. It is enshrined in human experience and human language but at the core of it is mystery and profound wonder.
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I encourage you to keep asking questions. Ours is a faith that is unafraid to ask tough questions. And don’t even just take my word for it on the things that were said here today. Test my answers with your own continued inquiry. It is the responsibility of every Christian to take our faith seriously enough to question it. And by so doing, we will, like Jesus, grow “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”
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