Tag: faith

The Long Journey Home

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized5 Comments

One of the highlights of my college experience was Spring Break 2002, when I got to spend 10 days in Romania on a student mission trip. While there, we led evangelistic services in churches and cultural halls, visited orphanages and psychiatric hospitals, played and prayed with the people who lived there, and handed out packages of gifts prepared by volunteers through an organization called Samaritan’s Purse.

The trip was sponsored by the church I attended at the time: a non-denominational charismatic church in western North Carolina. Our pastors told us they had seen some pretty amazing things happen on these trips in the past, especially as they were praying for sick people. The Bible calls them ‘signs and wonders’ while most modern people refer to them as ‘miracles’. They told us the kinds of stories we had only read about in the Bible: blind people suddenly being able to see for the first time, injured people throwing their crutches up into the air and then dancing home.

I thought to myself, “Hey, that’s something I want to see!” I wanted to have direct, personal experience with the kinds of phenomena I had only read about in the Bible. But then it didn’t happen. I watched, I waited, I prayed, but it still didn’t happen.

When I go back and read my personal journal from that week, I’m kind of embarrassed at how obsessed I was with the idea of witnessing a miracle. It’s pretty much all I wrote about, even though I was on the other side of the world, leaving my home country and seeing real poverty for the first time, hearing another language, meeting people whose lives were very different from my own. I got to drive around the back corners of post-Communist, Eastern Europe, far off the beaten-path carved out for tourists. I woke up to the sound of Orthodox monks chanting in a church across the lake from the hotel where we stayed in Bucharest. I got to spend St. Patrick’s Day in Vienna, visiting a Gothic cathedral and drinking really good, dark beer with a bunch of singing old men in a hole-in-the-wall pub that had first opened its doors in 1435… decades before Native Americans discovered Christopher Columbus lost at sea.

I met a Baptist family in the city of Galati, who had transformed their home into a refuge for young men who had been turned out of the orphanage on their 18th birthday with no educational or occupational prospects for the future. This family welcomed these guys into their home, helped them learn enough to get a job, and incorporated them into the life of their church. This same family welcomed us as well and put out a delicious spread of hors d’oeuvres for our group of loud, whiny, and tired American college students who had driven in from several hours away and hadn’t had much to eat that day. We sang Amazing Grace together around that table, in English and Romanian… I think that moment the closest to heaven I’ll ever get in this life.

I even flew over the Alps, for crying out loud, the ALPS: one of the most majestic mountain ranges in the world. If it was miracles that I wanted to see, I was surrounded by them; I just didn’t have the eyes to recognize it the time. I was too obsessed with a particular idea of a miracle as a supernatural event that violates the normal laws of physics or biology. What I think I was looking for during that week was some kind of absolute assurance for my faith. I wanted to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is real and God loves me.

I think a lot of people are looking for that kind of absolute assurance these days. I think it’s one of the main reasons why people get caught up in cults or other kinds of religious fundamentalism. There is so much to be uncertain about in this life; they just want something to hold onto, so they look for it in paranormal phenomena, mystical experiences, sacred texts like the Bible or the Qur’an, theological systems like Calvinism, religious institutions like the church, or authoritative leaders like the Pope or David Koresh.

Faith is hard. It’s a long journey home. Just like Moses and the Israelites leaving Egypt and traveling to the Promised Land through the barren wilderness, it’s a winding journey that takes a lifetime.

People naturally look for something to hold onto in that journey. We’re looking for something to help us keep going when the going gets tough, which is why we so often stumble into problems like cults, fanaticism, and fundamentalism. We’re looking for something concrete that we can put our faith in, some kind of absolute assurance that God is with us and will be faithful to love us all the way home.

That was the inner need that drove the Israelites in the book of Exodus to build a Golden Calf. They had already experienced God’s presence and power in their lives: God had already led them, by the hand of Moses, out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, and into the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.

But now they were at a crossroads, camped out at the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses had disappeared over a month ago in a thunderstorm at the top of the mountain and, by Moses’ own orders, they weren’t even allowed to send a rescue mission to go look for them. After 40 days with no contact, they didn’t know if he was alive or dead.

So they said to Aaron, Moses’ brother, “Hey, we’ve been patient but enough is enough. We need to face the fact that Moses is probably never coming back. So, we want you to take command and the first thing we need you to do for us is give us some kind of absolute assurance, something we can believe in, something we can hold onto while we make this long, hard journey to the Promised Land.

So Aaron did what he could, given the circumstances. Someone in my profession might say that he was just trying to be a good pastor and meet his people’s spiritual needs. He took up an offering of gold, the very best they had to offer, and melted it down. Then he constructed the image of the Golden Calf from it and presented it to the people saying, “Here! This is your absolute assurance that we will make it to where we’re going… These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

And the people were delighted. They were unified, inspired, and motivated. Even Moses, with all his signs and wonders, hadn’t been able to give them something so clear and concrete. This was a God they could understand; this was something they could look to in the hard times, not some mysterious presence that could never be seen or touched. This was their “blessed assurance.”

The problem is that it was all a lie. In the eyes of God, their assurance, their absolute certainty, was nothing more than an idol: a graven image, made by human hands, to which they were bowing down in place of God.

God gives us many things, but certainty isn’t one of them. Absolute certainty, especially when it comes to the divine mystery, is idolatry. As it says in the Ten Commandments:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.

God had no desire to fit inside any box that can be made by human hands, be it a literal box, a statue, a building, an institution, a book, a theological system, or any other Golden Calf we can imagine with our minds and construct with our hands. The basic motivation behind religious fundamentalism, whether it leads people to fly airplanes into buildings or picket funerals with offensive signs, is idolatry. These people, who often have the loudest voices calling others back to “worship the one, true God,” are the very same people who have bowed their knee to a graven image: a god who fits inside of a box, a god we can wrap our heads around, a god we can see and touch, and ultimately a false god who is not worthy of our worship.

Whether the format is Pagan, Muslim, or even Christian, any God we can fully understand is unworthy of our worship.

But this divine mystery doesn’t leave us much to hold onto. Once again, we find ourselves with the Israelites: camped out at the foot of Mount Sinai, facing a long and difficult journey that we don’t expect to complete in this lifetime. We need something to hold onto. We need some kind of assurance, even if it isn’t absolute assurance. And Moses (who is not dead) knows this about us. And so he pleads with God on our behalf.

In today’s reading, God gives Moses two things: a mission and a promise. The mission is simple: “Bring up this people.” God wants Moses to guide his people home, to the Promised Land (which is always referred to as ‘up’ in Israelite geography). And God’s promise to Moses is this: “I know you by name, and you have found favor in my sight.”

These are good words, powerful words, and they reflect the truth of God’s reality and God’s disposition toward Moses and the people. But Moses follows with a very reasonable concern: what might be an appropriate alternative to the Golden Calf? What kind of assurance can we, as God’s people, hold onto in this journey? Moses says, “Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight.”

He’s saying, in essence, “God, I believe that what you’re telling me is true, but how will I know?”

God replies, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

And again Moses puts the question to God, “But how will I know?” He says, “For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us?”

And God repeats again the very first thing he said to Moses, “You have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”

And Moses says, “Okay, God. Show me… Show me your glory, I pray.”

And God says, “I will do the very thing that you have asked… I will make all my goodness pass before you.”

“But,” God says, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” God gives Moses what he asks for, but also doesn’t give it. God’s face, the fullness of divine mystery, is too big for anyone to handle. We can’t wrap our minds around it… our heads would explode. Moses has asked the impossible: he simply can’t see God’s face. But that doesn’t mean he gets nothing.

Moses has a direct experience of God, just not the one he asked for. God says, “I will make all my goodness pass before you… See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

Moses doesn’t get to see God’s face, but he does get to see God’s back. He has an experience, just not the one he asked for. It’s something less than the full experience of divine glory (which he couldn’t handle anyway).

Moses seeing God’s back reminds me of a parable that originated somewhere on the Indian subcontinent and is told and retold in many different religious traditions:

Six blind men decide to find out what an ‘elephant’ is, so they set out to examine one by feel. One touches the trunk and says, “An elephant is like a great snake.” Another touches an ear and says, “An elephant is like a great flap of leather.” Another touches the side and says, “An elephant is like a great wall.” Another touches a leg and says, “An elephant is like a great pillar.” Another touches the skull and says, “An elephant is like a great boulder.” And the last one grabs the tail and says, “An elephant is like a great rope.”

Now, which one has it right? All of them. And which one has it wrong? All of them. Each blind man is having some kind of true experience of an elephant, but none of them is experiencing the full reality of ‘elephant-ness’.

Just as it was for these six blind men and the elephant, and as it was for Moses seeing God’s back and not God’s face, so it is with us and our experience with God.

Just like Moses on the mountain, God’s back is all we get to see in this life. The only thing that spiritual experiences, the Sacraments, the Bible, theology, and church can do is, when they are at their best, express God’s reflected glory in an indirect and incomplete way. These things are all good as means to an end, but they are not ends in themselves. They point us to God, but they cannot replace God.

There is no such thing as absolute assurance or certainty in this life. We cannot see the face of God, but only the back. Faith does not come with a money-back guarantee, there is always a risk. We will always have to take that ‘leap of faith’ in order to believe.

When we do (take that leap), it changes the way we see the world. The brilliant physicist Albert Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Through the eyes of a faith that dares to risk believing, everything becomes a miracle. The whole universe is able to reflect the glory of God’s back. Everything can be a metaphor for God.

In church, we tend to use the most well-known biblical image for God, “Our Father,” but did you know that the Bible also refers to God as a Mother? Also in the Bible:

  • God is honored as a king, yet humble as a shepherd;
  • God is powerful as a warrior and weak as a baby;
  • God is bright as light, yet ‘cloaked in darkness’;
  • God is one and God is three;
  • God is a rock, God is the wind, God is a river, God is a fire, and God is a star.

All of these are valid, biblical images for God, but none of them captures the fullness of the divine mystery. To paraphrase Rev. Forrest Church, “God is present in each of these things, but is also greater than all of these things.”

Anything and everything communicates something of God to us. Not the fullness, but a part; not the face, but the back.

Can we see it? Do we choose to see it with the eyes of faith?

If we let them, all things can point us back to God, their Source. In order to see it, we must trust (have faith) in the promise, God’s word to Moses: “I know you by name, and you have found favor in my sight.” In other words, “I’m here, I’m with you, and I love you.”

This is all the assurance we have in this life. Indeed, it’s all we need for the long journey home.

God Is With Us (in the little things)

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Do you ever get scared?  I get scared sometimes.  I get scared of all kinds of things:

What if I get sick?  What if we run out of money?  What if I lose my job?  What if my marriage falls apart?  What if something happens to one of my kids?

What if this election doesn’t turn out the way I think it should?  What if the stock market crashes again?  What if essential relief and education programs get their funding cut by policy makers?

We live lives surrounded by fear.  The famous philosopher (and sometimes crankyperson) David Hume once went on a rant about all the things in this world that scare us.  First, he said, there are our natural enemies: those things that threaten our physical existence (i.e. predators, disasters, diseases).  Then there are our societal enemies: tyranny, oppression, injustice, inequality, violent rebellion.  Next you have our internal enemies: guilt, shame, fear.  Finally, as if all that weren’t enough, we have our own imaginary enemies that we make up ourselves: superstitions, taboos, mythical monsters.

Surrounded by so many enemies and things to be scared of on all sides, life hardly seems worth living, says Hume.  Why then do we go on?  Why don’t we just end it all?  Well, says Hume, because we’re scared of that too.  Death is the ultimate enemy to fear because no one knows for sure what lies on the other side of it.  And so, because we are ultimately afraid of death, Hume says, “We are terrified, not bribed, into the continuance of our existence.”

Now, this is a pretty dark portrayal of reality (David Hume was kind of famous for that), but I think he has a point in noticing that we live our lives surrounded by fear.  There’s always something to be worried about or afraid of.  This is the way it’s always been.

Way back in the 8th century BCE, there was a Jewish king named Ahaz who had a lot to be scared of.  His reign had been fraught with constant conflict.  Two of his enemies, the Ephraimites and the Arameans, had joined forces and were threatening to lay siege to the city of Jerusalem.  Ahaz was understandably scared out of his gourd.  The most sensible thing he could think of to do was to seek out support from a bigger, meaner bully down the block.  Back then, the biggest, meanest kid in town was the Assyrian Empire.

This, by the way, is the same rationale that leads some people, especially teenagers and young adults, to join gangs: they’re looking to garner a sense of safety when they feel like no one else cares about them.  But, as is so often the case with these kinds of things, there is a hefty price to pay and very little safety after all.  In King Ahaz’s case, he and his people would pay dearly for whatever protection they received from Assyria.  Having sacrificed freedom for security, they were no longer in charge of their own house.  The people of Judah paid tribute to the Assyrians and owed them allegiance, even to the point of worshiping Assyrian deities in the place of the Jewish God.  Because of fear, Ahaz lost sight of who he was and what he was supposed to stand for in the world. 

It didn’t have to be this way.  Isaiah the prophet, who was a pretty insightful dude, saw the bad end coming and tried to warn Ahaz.  He said, “These troubles are only temporary.  It’s not worth selling your soul in order to ensure your survival.  Have a little faith!”  He pointed to a pregnant woman and said, “You see this young woman?  By the time her baby grows up and is old enough to walk and talk, these conflicts will be nothing more than a distant memory.  Look at this woman and remember her.  Let her baby be a sign to you that God is with you, therefore you don’t need to be afraid.”

This was a powerful message.  And it’s one that has endured for thousands of years, even though its intended audience didn’t listen to a word of it.  Isaiah told Ahaz to look for God, not in grandiose displays of power or guarantees of success, but in the little things of this world.  The sign of God’s presence was that little baby, whose name would be Immanuel, which is Hebrew for “God is with us.”

Over seven hundred years after Isaiah first spoke these words, the early Christians would look back at them and say, “Hey, you know what?  Isaiah’s prophecy kind of reminds us of Jesus!  He wasn’t very powerful or successful by this world’s standards, but when we looked at him, we got that hunch that maybe “God is with us.”  Besides, Jesus taught us to look for God in the little things as well: in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, in farmers sowing seeds and bakers baking bread. Jesus got us looking at all those little things in life that most people never pay attention to.  Because of him, we know that God is with us, just like Isaiah tried to tell Ahaz with that little boy Immanuel.”

I love that.  God is with us in the little things.  As we live our lives, surrounded and overwhelmed by fear, we often forget to pay attention to those little, everyday signs that God is with us.  Like Ahaz, we can sometimes be quick to lose sight of who we are and what’s really important, especially when we’re afraid.  It’s in those moments of overwhelming anxiety that we most need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and look… really look at ourselves, our lives, and our world.  We need to pay attention to those little things, the things we’re too busy for, the boring, ordinary things that happen every day, the things that don’t seem all that important: babies, bread, birds, flowers, seeds… because those places are the places where God meets us.

There may be no grandiose sign, no light from heaven, no singing angels.  There will be no guarantees of security or success.  Just the little things, little signs of Immanuel, that God is with us.  All we are promised from these encounters is a renewed perspective on who we are what life is all about.  The strength we find in these encounters is the strength to stand by our core values and central beliefs, come what may.  God is with us in the little things of this world to remind us that some things in life are more important than success or survival, therefore we don’t need to live in fear.  Fear is not the foundation of reality.  Deeper than fear, deeper still than the natural, societal, internal, and imaginary enemies who surround us on every side, at the very heart of reality, we have a friend who is always with us… a love that will not let us go.  My esteemed, late colleague, the Rev. Fred Rogers (host of the children’s TV show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood) said it best:

“I believe that at the center of the universe there dwells a loving spirit who longs for all that’s best in all of creation, a spirit who knows the great potential of each planet as well as each person, and little by little will love us into being more than we ever dreamed possible. That loving spirit would rather die than give up on any one of us.”

With a God like this on our side, what do we have to be afraid of?

Immanuel, God is with us, even (especially) in the little things.  This is the message that Isaiah tried to deliver to King Ahaz, although Ahaz wasn’t willing to hear it.  This is the message we are meant to take with us from the Christmas season.  The question for us is: are we willing to listen?

Immanuel, God is with us.  Do not be afraid.

(Reblog) How Becoming A Good Christian Made Me A Bad Person

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Reblogged from Prodigal Magazine:

Becoming a good Christian made me a bad listener. Where I used to be unsure of myself and my ideas about the world, I suddenly felt like I had a platform, a right, even an obligation to share my ideas with everyone. I was a child of God, after all, and the vision was becoming clearer day by day. There was a sense of urgency to communicate truth before we “ran out” of time.

Instead of listening to people and their stories, I ran right over the top of them. I took my words and ideas and even my intellect and used it like a blunt object I could smack over the top of their heads. God had given me the authority, I assumed, now that I was a part of his club. I thought I was doing everyone a favor.

What I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t my responsibility to save anyone.

Click here to read the full article

alt/theism

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments
Image by Rennett Stowe. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
Image by Rennett Stowe. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

Reblogged from CNN:

How many ways are there to disbelieve in God?

At least six, according to a new study.

Two researchers at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga found that atheists and agnostics run the range from vocally anti-religious activists to nonbelievers who still observe some religious traditions.

“The main observation is that nonbelief is an ontologically diverse community,” write doctoral student Christopher Silver and undergraduate student Thomas Coleman.

Click here to read the full article

I had fun with this study because, although I don’t ascribe the label atheist to myself, I am not a theist in the classical sense.  For those who may not be familiar with the terms: Classical Theism refers to belief in an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and personal deity who is responsible for the creation of the universe, exists separately from it, and interferes with its normal operations at least occasionally.  Depending on who you ask, the God of classical theism might also be defined as omnipresent, immutable (unchanging) and/or impassable (incapable of feeling or suffering).

I really like a conversational strategy adopted by Unitarian Universalist minister John Buehrens: whenever someone says, “I don’t believe in God,” Buehrens responds, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.”  Most of the time, he says, he is able to say that he doesn’t believe in that God either.  Likewise with me: if the classical theist concept of divinity is the only legitimate definition of the word God, then I would be forced to classify myself as an atheist.  For various reasons, I reject outright the ideas of immutability, impassability, and separateness from the universe.  I radically redefine concepts of omnipotence, omniscience, creativity, and personality in ways that would make them nearly unrecognizable to a classical theist.  For reasons that I admit are not entirely rational, I continue to accept the quality of benevolence as central to my understanding of the idea of God.

There are two thinkers with whom I tend to resonate when it comes to talking about God.  The first is philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich who famously declared that God is not “a being” but “Being Itself” or “the Ground of Being”.  This is also vaguely reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas who said (not in so many words) that God does not “exist” but “is existence”.  In more recent years, Forrest Church (another Unitarian Universalist) wrote in his book The Cathedral of the World, “God is not God’s name.  God is our name for that which is greater than all, yet present in each.”

Like most atheists, I have no trouble acknowledging that God is a mythical concept devised by human minds in a particular cultural milieu.  I utterly reject the hypothesis that there is actually an “old man in the sky” who created the world, controls everything, and condemns earth to destruction and the majority of humanity to eternal postmortem torture as punishment for various moral and dogmatic infractions.  If that’s who God must be, then you can call me an atheist.

When it comes to the six types of atheists, I might be classified somewhere between a 3 (seeker-agnostic) and a 6 (ritual atheist).

Regarding the 3 (seeker-agnostic) the article says this:

This group is made up of people who are unsure about the existence of a God but keep an open mind and recognize the limits of human knowledge and experience.

Silver and Coleman describe this group as people who regularly question their own beliefs and “do not hold a firm ideological position.”

That doesn’t mean this group is confused, the researchers say. They just embrace uncertainty.

Regarding the 6 (ritual atheist) the article says:

They don’t believe in God, they don’t associate with religion, and they tend to believe there is no afterlife, but the sixth type of nonbeliever still finds useful the teachings of some religious traditions.

“They see these as more or less philosophical teachings of how to live life and achieve happiness than a path to transcendental liberation,” Silver and Coleman wrote. “For example, these individuals may participate in specific rituals, ceremonies, musical opportunities, meditation, yoga classes, or holiday traditions.”

For many of these nonbelievers, their adherence to ritual may stem from family traditions. For others, its a personal connection to, or respect for, the “profound symbolism” inherent within religious rituals, beliefs and ceremonies, according the researchers.

If I had to classify myself as an atheist, based on my rejection of classical theism, it would probably look like some combination of these two categories.  However, I don’t consider myself an atheist because even a combination of these recently expanded ideas is still too dogmatically confining for me.

So here I am: neither a classical theist nor an atheist.  If there is a widely acknowledged category that most closely describes the place where I live, it would be panentheism (God exists within the universe and the universe exists within God).  Unlike pantheism (God is the universe and the universe is God), panentheism leaves more room for mystery and transcendence beyond the realm of time/space/matter/energy.

However, because I like to challenge conventional labels and make up new words, I’ve been playing with the term alt/theism as a description for where I’m at.  Don’t read too much into it or get your torches and pitchforks ready, this is just pure fun with words.

For me, as an alt/theist, faith in God is based on a meta-rational “hunch” about the mysteries of existence, connection, personality, and harmony.  My hunch (which I cannot prove as fact but cannot reject as possbility) is that each of these experienced realities is derivative from some larger source or whole that can never be fully understood or explained by human reason.  To this mystery, the language of my Christian tradition attaches the name God.  My only hope in the quest for understanding is to approach the very tip of reason’s precipice and peer over the edge into the ongoing mystery with my eyes, ears, heart, mind, and mouth hanging open in wonder.

(Reblog) Belief Is the Least Part of Faith

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Once again, T.M. Luhrmann has managed to fascinate the imagination and highlight the complicated nature of our postmodern religious landscape.

Reblogged from the NY Times:

Not all members of deeply theologically conservative churches — churches that seem to have such clear-cut rules about how people should behave and what they should believe — have made up their minds about whether God exists or how God exists. In a charismatic evangelical church I studied, people often made comments that suggested they had complicated ideas about God’s realness. One devout woman said in a prayer group one evening: “I don’t believe it, but I’m sticking to it. That’s my definition of faith.”

It was a flippant, off-the-cuff remark, but also a modern-day version of Pascal’s wager: in the face of her uncertainty about God’s existence, she decided that she was better off behaving as if God were real. She chose to foreground the practical issue of how to experience the world as if she was loved by a loving God and to put to one side her intellectual puzzling over whether and in what way the invisible agent was really there.

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

Click here to read the full article

Three Obligations I Have as a Faith Blogger (re-blog)

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Spot.  On.

Reblogged from Alise…Write!

Today I’m standing with my atheist writing friends and saying that questions and criticisms should be allowed, even of things that I hold dear. And while this may not do much to help those who have been imprisoned for those questions or criticisms, it may begin to blur some of the battle lines that are drawn between our communities.

Click here to read the full article…

The Arc of the Universe

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Image

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

They say growing up is hard to do.  And I think they’re right.  Because growing up involves change and kids generally like to have a regular, predictable routine.  I remember one time when life interrupted my routine and I had to adjust to a new way of doing things.  It happened at the beginning of fifth grade.  I was having a hard time adjusting to my new classroom, my new teacher, and more challenging homework assignments.

When I finally had all I thought I could handle, I made an appointment to see the school guidance counselor, Mr. Arnold.  I walked into his office with my mind made up.  I had a plan.  I thought I already knew the solution to my problem, so I told him: “Mr. Arnold, this fifth grade stuff is too hard.  I don’t like my teacher, I can’t keep up with the material, and I’m just not happy here.  I’m obviously not ready for this.  I think I just need to back to fourth grade.”

Well, you can imagine what Mr. Arnold’s response was.  When he finally stopped laughing, he told me in no uncertain terms that returning to the fourth grade was not an option.  Then he introduced me to a new word, one that I’ve carried with me ever since.  To be honest, I think he made it up, but it describes so well what I was doing by asking to go back to fourth grade.  Mr. Arnold’s word was awfulizing.  He said, “You’re awfulizing this situation, and no, you can’t go back to the fourth grade.”  And then he explained what he meant by that:  my ten-year-old self was choosing to see only the negative parts of fifth grade and blowing them out of all rational proportion until I convinced myself that the only solution was to go backwards and stay in my old comfort zone.  By awfulizing the situation, I was basically just giving in to despair and giving up on life.  I was refusing to trust that life had given me enough resilience and adaptability to rise up and meet this new challenge.

Despair can be a powerful sedative.  Awfulizing, while cathartic, is an addictive anesthetic that keeps us from feeling our growing pains.  The upside is that it numbs our pain, but the downside is that it stunts our growth.  Evolution only happens through struggle.  Life has to be pushed past its previously known limits in order to adapt to new environments.

This is never easy.  When it happens in the biosphere, there is always struggle and the imminent risk of failure and death.  When it happens in the struggle for social justice, people stand up against powerful and entrenched institutions, like oppressive regimes, unjust laws, multinational corporations, and long-held beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions.  Change only happens slowly and with great effort.  Activist movements often struggle for generations before they reap a harvest from their labors.  They endure persecution, ostracism, imprisonment, and death.  Many lose hope and give up the fight along the way, but those who persevere become the catalysts for our social and spiritual evolution.  For example, who could have guessed on the night of the Stonewall riots that, within a generation, several countries, the president of the United States, multiple states, and even a few religious institutions would recognize the right to marriage equality?

Change happens slowly, but it does indeed happen.  Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Not many know this, but Dr. King was actually adapting the words of the famous 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.  Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways… But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

These words have been a source of comfort and hope to many in the struggle for justice.  But the question arises, How do we know?  How can one be so sure that this universe is arranged in such a way that we can be sure that right will win out in the end?  Well, the short answer is that we don’t.  Philosophers are quick to point out the naturalistic fallacy, a rule (if you will) of critical thinking which states that one cannot derive an Ought from an Is.  In other words, you cannot logically draw a definitive conclusion about the way things should be based on the way things are.  Take, for example, the following popular label on food and drug products: Contains All Natural Ingredients.  We consumers are supposed to look at that and think that, because the ingredients are all natural, they must therefore be good for you.  But we know that’s not true.  You want to know what else is natural?  Arsenic, Plutonium, and Hydrochloric Acid.  These things contain all natural ingredients as well, but I wouldn’t want to put any of them inside my body!  Just because something is natural doesn’t necessarily make it good.

So, how then can Rev. Parker and Dr. King say that the arc of the universe “bends toward justice”?

Well, I think we can start by looking at the facts.  There are certain things we know about the universe that we would almost certainly label as good.  How about the fact that we are here?  We exist.  Most would accept that fact as both true and good.  How then did this favorable state of affairs come about?

Let me tell you a story: it takes place on a planet where a race of life forms has learned how to extract a vital resource from its environment.  The downside is that the extraction process gives off a toxic gas that poisons the atmosphere.  These life forms, with wanton disregard for anything other than their own immediate needs, willingly pollute the atmosphere of their planet for generation after generation until the air is saturated with poison.  Yet, even then they continued their pollution.  They kept going until the vast majority of life on their planet had been eradicated.

This sounds like a sad beginning to a dystopian science fiction story, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  There’s a lot more science than fiction in this story because it happened right here on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago in what scientists call the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE).  In the GOE, anaerobic cyanobacteria figured out how to extract hydrogen from water molecules.  The poisonous air pollution that resulted from this process was a toxic gas known as oxygen.  We don’t think of oxygen as pollution nowadays because we need it to live and breathe, but there was a time when it caused our planet’s first pollution crisis.  The fact that we are here now, breathing oxygen, is a testament to life’s amazing capacity to endure and adapt.

They say, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”  You could say that’s certainly true in our case, where we now depend on oxygen for our very survival.  We could say that one era’s pollution is another era’s air!

Life is amazing, isn’t it?  The universe has taken almost 14 billion years to produce the people sitting in this room right now.  You and I are sitting here as the end-result of billions of years of evolutionary success.  Of course, we can’t say that it was all good, but I think most of us would agree that something must have gone right along the way!  We’ve gone from single-celled organisms to fish, to dinosaurs, to mammals, to primates, to humans.  We are the heirs of a vast evolutionary inheritance passed down from generations of ancestors leading all the way back to the stars themselves, in whose furnaces the atoms of our bodies were forged.

We’ve come so far, across eons and light years, to sit together in this room today.  That’s quite a pilgrimage!  We’ve overcome so much strain and adversity.  The odds were (exponentially) against us ever getting here in the first place, but we beat the odds.  We are here.  We have overcome.  In the words of Dr. King, we have hewn “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” a precious jewel set into the ring of our being.  Our very existence on this planet is a testimony to hope.

Other ancestors have testified to this hope as well.  I’m thinking primarily of our predecessors in the liberal religious tradition: the Universalists.  They were the great prophets of hope.  They were the first to jettison doctrines of hellfire and damnation from their religion.  They refused to give up on anyone because they believed there is hope for all.  They taught that there is a place for everyone in this world and that all things will eventually come together for good.  Rev. John Murray, one of the founders of Universalism in America, once said, “You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men [and women]. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage.”

Liberal Universalist faith was founded on hope.  We are gathered here this morning as heirs of both the evolutionary and the Universalist legacies of hope.  We have more reason than most to draw strength and courage from this faith.

Sure, we can’t guarantee that any particular struggle for liberty or justice will immediately end in our favor.  No one can promise that.  But it seems, based on our scientific and religious history, that life itself can be trusted.  Life endures.  Life adapts.  Life overcomes.  This tendency seems to be woven into the fabric of the evolutionary process itself.  To put it in human terms, using symbolic language:

When we stand on the side of love, the universe stands with us.

“The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

This assertion, far from being a justification for fatalism and inaction, has the capacity to fill us with hope, strength, and courage.  When Desmond Tutu’s church in South Africa was once invaded and surrounded by a SWAT team during Sunday services, he stopped his sermon, calmly looked around, smiled, and said, “Since you have already lost, I would like to invite you to come and join the winning side.”  At this, the congregation erupted with joy and began dancing… right out into the street where more soldiers were waiting, weapons at the ready.  Not knowing what else to do, they stepped aside and let the dancers pass by unharmed.

Desmond Tutu’s faith that equality and justice would win out over evil in the end was the source of his amazing strength to keep going when the cause itself seemed hopeless.  His faith proved stronger and more enduring than the powers of Apartheid.  The strength of life itself flowed up and out through his heart, mind, and body as he committed his whole self to the evolution of the human spirit and society.

My hope this morning is that you and I might choose to trust life and embrace the faith of Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, and Theodore Parker.  May we come to know and feel the long, gentle arc of the universe, bending inexorably toward justice.  May we draw strength from this hope and rise again to meet the challenges of injustice, trusting that, no matter what happens, life will overcome.

May it be so.

Be blessed and be a blessing.

Vast, beautiful universe says astrophysicist

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Image of a solar flare by NASA

Reblogged from the PC(USA) news feed.

Original post by Erin Cox-Holmes

The universe is so vast that trying to understand it makes our minds melt. So said Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, speaker at the Science and Faith lunch on Thursday (July 5) at the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

An astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Wiseman is the director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It would make sense to conclude that since the universe is so overwhelming, we are small, tiny and insignificant. But, said Wiseman, what we can learn from astrophysics is that we can see the universe tuned for life… (Click here for full article)