Skipping Church

I skipped church today.  Yes, I am on vacation and had no official responsibilities, and therefore my truancy is justifiable. But still it feels strange. I know that millions of people stay home from worship every Sunday and do not feel the least bit uncomfortable with it. For them attending worship would feel strange. Even many Christians regularly miss worship on little more than a whim and don’t give it a second thought.

But not me. Even during the year that I was out of ministry, I never missed a Sunday. I was a faithful pew-warmer even when I wasn’t in the pulpit. I have even made it a point to find a place to worship while on the road traveling long distances. I have had very interesting experiences visiting churches right off highway exits. But not this Sunday. This Sunday I was on vacation in Maine, and I chose the beach over the pew.

I was amazed at how many people were not going to church with me. I should not have been surprised. I have read the statistics on church attendance, especially in New England. But it still took me aback to see all these Sabbath-breakers in the flesh. And I am one of them.

Are these the ones who say, “I can worship God just as well in nature as in church?” Are these the people that the megachurches cater to? The “seekers” who are diligently searching for God?  I don’t think so. I think my fellow church-skippers were not giving a single thought to the Creator. They were busy building sand castles, deepening their tans, and cooling off in the surf.

As for me, I skipped church because I was tired. I needed to get away from church, if only for one Sunday. It didn’t stop me from thinking about God. Even while spending Sunday morning under a beach umbrella, I was reading a book on Christian apologetics and sharing theological insights with my wife. But every once in a while - every twenty or thirty years or so - skipping church just feels like the right thing to do.  

Struggling with God

Call me Israel. For I have wrestled with God. In Genesis Jacob wrestled with God all night and persevered until he received God’s blessing. In the morning God changed Jacob’s name to Israel, which means “one who wrestles with God.”

I chose this Biblical passage as the text for the first sermon I ever preached. I expounded it to a tiny congregation in rural Kentucky in 1974 while a seminarian. I have returned to this passage many times in the past thirty-eight years. I have proclaimed this scripture from other pulpits since then, each time approaching it differently. I am still wrestling.

I have struggled with faith, ministry, and theology all my life. Many times I almost quit. Recently I did quit ministry for more than a year. I assumed Christianity would get easier the more I studied the Bible and theology, and the more I matured in my faith. But in fact the struggle has become more difficult. My struggle has been compounded by sharing the struggles of my parishioners for so many years.

I have seen good people struggle through very difficult situations. People struggle to hold onto their faith – to believe and trust God in times of crisis. As their pastor I am there to share their pain, help them, and give them words of encouragement and hope. But many of these faithful Christians tell me that they experience no answer from God to their earnest prayers at such times. For many Christians God does not seem to be present when He is needed most.

Furthermore the problem of evil and suffering bothers me more than it used to. Maybe it is because I have seen evil firsthand. Child abuse, teen suicides, elder suicides, murder, good people facing deep depression worse than death. In one of my churches, four of our Sunday School children were shot in the head by the angry boyfriend of the mother. Conducting that multiple funeral changed my life.

If I had known that these shootings were going to happen, I would have done everything humanly possible to prevent it. God knew; God is omniscient. Yet He did not stop it. If I had been present in that apartment I would fought the man to stop those murders, risking my own life to do so. I would have killed him if necessary. God was present; God is omnipresent and omnipotent. Yet God choose not to act.

My experience with evil is insignificant compared to the experience of the parents of millions of infants who die of hunger, violence or disease each year. My familiarity with evil pales in comparison to the experience of Elie Wiesel. Listen to his description of arriving at the Birkenau Nazi concentration camp:

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

I know the standard answers to the problem of theodicy. I have quoted them to hurting people a thousand times: “All things work together for good to them that love God…” Sorry, I don’t see the good that justifies such evil. Then there is the answer of “free will.” I could tolerate a little less free will for the perpetrators of evil if there was less suffering for the most vulnerable and innocent.

Many people quote this paraphrase of scripture: “God never gives us more than we can bear.”  Sorry, I don’t buy it. I have seen too many people given more than they can bear. The apologetic “ace in the hole” is that God’s reasons for allowing such evil and suffering are beyond our understanding; therefore we should just have faith.

That argument silenced Job, but it doesn’t stop my questioning. I need to know why, even if I can’t understand it fully. Throw me a bone, Lord. I have been struggling for a long time over this, and the night is far spent. But for now I will keep wrestling in the dark hoping that God will bless me with some tidbit of insight. Any answer is better than bad answers or no answer at all.

– Art is “Jacob Wrestling the Angel” by Karen Laub-Novak

Praying on Memorial Day

I am often asked to pray at public events. It is an occupational hazard. I am the official pray-er at community functions. Town meetings, school board meetings, graduations, baccalaureate services, public dinners, weddings, funerals - you name it. If the preacher is in attendance he is asked to pray.

Not that I mind it. It is a wonderful opportunity to usher people into the presence of God. I even get to do some disguised preaching. Those who would never sit in a pew and listen to a sermon will unintentionally hear a message in a prayer.

One of the most solemn occasions I am asked to pray is at Memorial Day ceremonies. There is a reverence surrounding these ceremonies that is absent at other times. It has to do with the atmosphere of sacrifice that permeates the service.

It is not too often that we can truthfully say that something is “a matter of life or death.” This is one of those times. Especially these days when we are in the midst of the longest war that America has ever fought.

I heard one young soldier say that when he came home from Afghanistan he tried to talk to his old school buddies about the war. Some of them were surprised to hear that our country was still fighting there. Afghanistan has become a forgotten war before it is even over. That is why I am honored to pray at Memorial Day services. It is my way of making sure their service is not forgotten.

It does not matter whether we think the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf or Vietnam were good foreign policy. All that matters is that these men and women put their lives on the line.  Many thousands gave their lives. Thousands more are continuing to give each day as they live with the physical and emotional wounds of war.

To pray is the least I can do. As my congregation knows, I do not pray for them only once a year on Memorial Day. I pray for soldiers  every Sunday morning in my pastoral prayer. I want to make sure that no one in my congregation ever forgets the great sacrifice given by so many.

Meeting Myself

I met Marshall Davis last Saturday night. I am not kidding. I went to hear a speaker in Madison, New Hampshire. A young man and I both drove up to the wrong location looking for the same program. We eventually found the correct building, and were greeted by one of the organizers of the event. 

She asked my name and I replied, “Marshall.” The young man said his name was Marshall also. What a coincidence. I asked him his last name. He replied, “Davis.” “You are kidding me!” I said. He wasn’t. We were the first Marshall Davis that either of us had ever met. There were only 30 people at the event, and two were Marshall Davis. I was glad we were not asked to wear name tags. 

I felt like I was looking at myself forty years younger, like I was in some type of time travel movie. I wanted to tell him that when I was his age I had as much hair on my head as he does now, but I didn’t have the heart. I wanted to tell him to take care of his teeth or he will be missing a few by my age, and root canals and dental implants aren’t fun. But I didn’t want to scare him. 

I wonder what he thought of me? I doubt that he thought he was meeting an older version of himself. “No,” he would think, “I will never become that bald or heavy … or wrinkled!” You just wait, Marshall Davis! Time has a way of doing things that you would never imagine!

The really strange thing is that when the program began, the speaker talked about our sense of personal identity. His main point concerned the illusory nature of the self. It felt like God was hitting me over the head with a message. “Listen up, Marshall Davis! Get this lesson through your hard heart!”

I did not talk much more with my namesake. He was a college student, and soon some of his college friends showed up. He spent the next few minutes before the program began chatting with them. Perhaps he had enough of Marshall Davis. Sometimes I feel the same way.

It was fun to meet myself. I looked good. I seemed happy and healthy. I hope Marshall Davis has a good, long and blessed life. I hope he meets the love of his life, and has a long happy marriage, as I have. I hope his spiritual quest results in knowing Truth intimately, as mine has. I hope he has a fulfilling career, and children and grandchildren. And I hope that forty years from now he meets Marshall Davis  ... again. 

Grandfatherly Thoughts

I am starting to get used to this. Grandfatherhood, that is. We have three grandchildren; the youngest is just two weeks old. They are all boys, and all bear the names of Hebrew prophets - Noah, Jonah, Elijah. We call them the OTG - the Old Testament Gang.


The three year-old calls me Gandpa and my wife Gamma. (He can’t yet say his Rs.) The one and a half year-old calls me something similar, but it is hard to make out exactly what. 


While I was driving the other day I waited while an elderly man slowly crossed the parking lot that I was trying to exit. “Come on, Grandpa!” I mumbled impatiently under my breath. Then I realized that I was a grandpa too! I quickly changed my tune . “Take all the time you want, great-grandpa. One day I will be you, God willing.”

As I look at my newborn grandson - so small - just seven pounds, I contemplate the incarnations that we go through in life. Our bodies grow, change and age. I read somewhere that every cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years. That means that physically we are entirely new persons many times during our lives.

I have been through eight bodily reincarnations since my birth, and I am halfway through my ninth. When contemplating this phenomenon, it is clear that I am not my bodies. They come and go, yet I remain. Neither am I my beliefs - whether political, social, ethical, or religious. I have changed those so many times I have lost count.

Neither are we are our personalities. Those are not permanent either. The thoughts, emotions, preferences, and memories that make up our personalities are dependent on the health of our brains, as any family of an Alzheimer's patient knows.


Yet I have always had the sense that I am me, even though my self-understanding has changed. But if I am not my body, my beliefs, or my personality, then who am I? Am I just the fleeting illusion of a self created by the firing of brain synapses. If that is true, then I will perish when my brain dies.


If I am more than the illusion of a self, then I must be what remains when all that is temporary passes away. I must be what is permanent. I am who I was before my body was born and who I will be when my body is dead. 


I held my newest grandson minutes after he was born. Who is he? His name means “The Lord is God.” Who was he a year earlier? Who will he be a hundred years from now? I look into his eyes and see the answer. This is who I was, and am, and will be - the image of God - created to reflect God on earth and for all eternity.

The Dangers of Neo-Atheism

I love atheists. That might seem to be a strange thing for a Christian pastor to say, but that is the way I feel. I have read many of the best selling books by the New Atheists. They force me to examine my deepest convictions and assumptions in a way that religious books do not. They make me a better Christian. I read the eSkeptic newsletter published weekly by Skeptic magazine. I love atheism’s attitude of “prove it to me” and their unwillingness to accept things simply on tradition.
  

Religious people can learn a lot from atheists. Too often we religious folks are too gullible and accepting of ideas that ought to be rejected outright as foolishness. Perhaps it is my scientific education in college that bends me in this direction. I was a geology major before I was a religion major. I dated rocks in terms of millions of years while I was still a teenager. Young earth creationism never made much sense to me. For me religion always needs to be held in the context of scientific fact. 


Therefore it was with distress that I followed the news coverage of the Reason Rally that took place recently in Washington, DC. On April 2, twenty thousand representatives of twenty atheist, secular and humanist organizations gathered in our nation’s capital, purportedly to celebrate reason. 


But it didn’t seem like reason. It seemed more like an unreasonable attack on religion. The rally host Paul Provenza said in his opening announcement: “We're not here today to bash anyone's religion… but, hey, if it happens it happens.” There were placards proclaiming animosity toward religious people. One placard read, “Obama isn’t trying to destroy religion... I am!” Another read, “So many Christians, so few lions.”


In his address to the crowd, atheist writer Richard Dawkins said that religious beliefs “should be challenged and ridiculed with contempt.” He singled out Roman Catholicism and its doctrines for special scorn, saying, "Mock them, ridicule them in public." 


This type of attitude doesn’t sound like reason to me. It sounds more like the French Revolution, which used a guillotine to fill the streets with the blood of tens of thousands of people in the name of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” The French Revolution established a Cult of Reason which advocated anti-clerical violence in the name of Enlightenment rationalism. Although I do not expect a similar Reign of Terror to sweep America, the rhetoric is too similar to ignore. 


The New Atheism movement seems to have become an Anti-theism movement. Their books bear such titles as “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” and “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.“ Other titles include “God Hates You. Hate Him Back” and “The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture.” 


These writers and groups are not content with presenting atheism as a viable alternative to religious worldviews. They publicly disparage religion and openly proclaim their desire to eliminate it. It is not too strong to say that this is anti-religious bigotry. Do you think I am exaggerating or over-reacting? Just substitute the names of other maligned groups in the titles of their books and judge for yourself.


Imagine if there were bestsellers with titles like “Israel is Not Great: How Jews Poison Everything” or “Blacks Hate You. Hate Them Back” or “The Gay Virus: How Homosexuality Infects Our Lives and Our Culture.” What if there was a rally where placards read, “So many blacks, so few lynchings?” What if the organizer of a rally proclaimed, “We're not here today to bash anyone's race but, hey, if it happens it happens.”


If such racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic books were to hit the bestseller lists, or such remarks were made at a rally in Washington, there would be public outrage. But these Neo-Atheist books are reviewed respectfully in America's newspapers. There is a growing anti-religious sentiment in this country which utilizes uncivil rhetoric.


Religion is so widespread and so strong in this country that there is no real threat from nonbelievers - at least not at the present time. But it is disheartening to hear the democratic values of religious freedom and tolerance attacked. Sure, atheists should have the right to gather in public and present their views. But they must remember that in the First Amendment the right to religious freedom is listed before freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. 


Religious liberty is among the most precious values that we have in this nation. But for it to persist, it needs to be defended in the streets and in the pulpits and not just in our country’s founding documents. This value used to be the special concern of the early Baptists and Quakers. Where are their voices now? 


Confronting anti-religious prejudice in the American atheist movement is not without its price. Those who question the motives of the Reason Rally are labeled as “anti-atheist bigots” and Nazis, as evidenced in one  blog entitled “Media Distortions of the Reason Rally.” This atheist blogger goes on to say that one should not judge the whole rally by the “bottom 10%” who voice hateful comments. But that argument is hard to swallow when the “bottom 10%” are the leaders!


America has fought hard for its civil liberties, and they must not be compromised by coddling groups that espouse intolerance. Philosophical atheism is an honorable school of thought and needs to be respected as such. But when it degenerates into anti-religious bigotry, then it needs to be challenged as forcefully as one would challenge any other form of prejudice. 


It is clear that politicians, journalists and academics have no stomach for advocating this particular human right, so let the churches once again be the champions of religious liberty, tolerance, and civility in public discourse..

The Hunger Games

I read the book before I knew I was too old. It was only when I was through with the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy that I found out that it was “young adult fiction.” I guess I must be young at heart because I loved it. In my opinion it is much more profound than most of the “old adult fiction” I have read recently.

I am always looking for interesting books to read. As a pastor I try to keep in touch with what mainstream society is reading and thinking. So I regularly peruse the best-seller lists and buy books that linger in the top ten. (The exception to that rule is the romance novels. Sorry, I can’t bring myself to read this so-called “mommy porn.”)

Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books have been on the USA Today Best Seller list for over two years. Today they hold the top three slots. They are science fiction, a genre that I enjoy. More specifically they are set in a dystopian future, like the Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. So I downloaded it onto my Kindle and started reading. I could not stop reading until I was finished with all three novels.

For those who are unfamiliar with the books, they take place in the not-too-distant future in North America. The United States has been destroyed by an apocalyptic event and replaced with Panem, with its Capitol in the Rocky Mountains.  The continent is divided into twelve districts, one of which was later destroyed for its rebellion against the state.

To keep the districts under its thumb, the Capitol annually requires each district to choose two teenagers to fight to the death in the televised Hunger Games, an event which is a believable hybrid of the TV show Survivor and the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome.

I will tell you why I like the books. First of all they are a scathing critique of American popular culture and politics. The painted coiffed residents of the Capitol are too reminiscent of the cultural elite of our nation. I felt like I was watching the Oscars!

The economy of Panem is easily recognizable as the class warfare decried by Occupy movement - the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent. The government of Panem is the oligarchy of American politics. It is the Demopublican party of the USA, which sends its young men and women to die in war as a way to keep itself in power.

The heroine of the novels is a sixteen year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen. She is the perfect heroine for our time because she is not perfect. She is a deeply flawed and wounded person; in other words she is real. She is deeply spiritually connected with nature; she regularly escapes the prison of her urban ghetto to hunt in the forests of the former West Virginia.

Most important she is willing to lay down her life. At the Reaping (where the tributes from each district are chosen by lot) Katniss volunteers to take the place of her younger sister Prim. She is Christ at Gabbatha, the one who saves another by taking her place. Later at the end of the Game, she offers her life again, showing this was no fleeting emotional outburst, but the core of her character.

And she is a warrior.  This is a theme that is missing from much of Christianity today. I was reacquainted with it when I read John Bunyan’s book “The Holy War,” a book just as profound as his more well-known Pilgrim’s Progress. She fights! But she sees that the true fight is not against the flesh and blood of the other tributes in the arena, but against the principalities and powers operating behind the scenes.

This is a deeply spiritual book, even though I do not know if the author is traditionally religious. There are other important themes as well. I will only mention one. There is the secondary theme of the power of art to transform and save. True art is practiced by the hero Peeta versus the faux art of the culture. It is redeeming art, which is deeply connected to Nature, the human soul and the power of love.

That is all I have room to say here. You will have to read the books for yourself. But I warn you. They are revolutionary. If the youth of our nation are inspired by books like these, the future will not be like our present.