Pastor's Notes

I don’t remember exactly what age I had reached when, it seemed, everyone began addressing me as “sir”. Sir is not a bad word. It can be a title of respect. The word, Sir, becomes much improved when granted because a king or queen touched one on each shoulder with a sword. No such luck for me!

No, I don’t recall what age I was when it became common for people to use sir when speaking with me. I know it wasn’t age thirty-five. Probably in my late 50’s or early 60’s, I would check out at the grocery, step up to the pharmacy window at Walgreens, or ask a Target sales clerk a question, or someone opening a door say, “After you, sir,” the word sir would be used in reference to me.

There are some gifts of aging. One is the at least seemingly treatment of respect by others with use of some words like sir. Another is the experience gained along the way and the relationships built. Sometimes I find myself surprised at the number of contacts I have made at Arizona State University simply because of my long association with the university and its people. I know whom to call to find answers, and, occasionally, even to get things done.

Some experiences as we age we would rather do without. The longer we live, the more people whom we care about leave us. I remember talking with a 100 year old pastor in one of my congregations, wishing him a happy 100th birthday. He was less happy than us celebrating the birthday to be 100, he told me. Most everyone he had ever cared about was gone. It felt lonely at the top of the age pyramid.

I wonder if God ages? In human numbers, God has been around a long time. “Infinity and beyond”, to use the phrase of Disney’s Buzz Lightyear. Somehow, I don’t think God has aching joints, reduced vision and heart burn. The Christian faith proclaims God became one of us in Jesus and knows what it is like to be us even to the point of suffering and death.

Jesus, however, was in his thirties when he died. Yes, that was getting up there in years back in the day, but still not quite geezerdom. So, does God know what it is like to be us as we become elderly? Does it matter?

Questions like this don’t keep me awake at night, but they do pass through my feeble, aging, mind. We Christians do also proclaim that God works in and through the human flesh of those around us and in and through us. That doesn’t necessarily mean God experiences aging as we do, but it does mean there is no age without God. There is no age that God cannot or does not use us to speak and to act.

You and I will have to leave it at that as we age. We will have to be content with God’s continual and continuing presence throughout life. Content? Actually, what more do we need?

We may not address God as “Sir”, but think of some of the names attributed to God: Lord, Father, Emmanuel, Savior, Comforter, Prince of Peace, and so on. Yes, what more do we need?

Eden is long gone. A land of milk and honey turned out to be a land also with hostile neighbors and less than a homeland where all would be well.

Paradise is a myth. All appearances of Paradise have been at best momentary or illusionary. Therefore wherever humans live, whatever locale is their “paradise” the challenges posed by their imperfect surroundings must be dealt with. Those living near rivers must accommodate for occasional flooding. Those living on earth-quake prone turf must build and live in ways to reduce the damage caused by earthquakes, those in cold places need heat while those in warm climes need cooling and those in tornado allies need a windowless room for retreat.

Author, professor, Jared Diamond wrote a book titled “Collapse”. Professor Diamond visited and researched many places where entire societies once lived, but collapsed, even disappeared. He studied the abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland and various Anasazi settlements in the Southwest where a whole people seemed to disappear. Many other societies from the Roman Empire to Easter Island were researched for this book.

What Professor Diamond discovered is that all of these societies that collapsed, many, across the centuries, had a few things in common. Typically one reason is often given for a society’s collapse, say barbarians sacking Rome, or climate change affecting the Anasazi. Diamond’s research revealed instead a combination of factors at play in the culture’s demise.

The second factor these cultures had in common was their failure to adapt to change. The Norse tried to live in Greenland just as they did in their homeland. Dairy cattle, and farm methods from home, for example, just did not cut it in snow covered, frigid Greenland.

I have seen this with churches, with my hometown area’s economy, and much more. When any group large or small moves forward assuming things will always be the same, their time becomes limited. I have seen this with ideologies as well.

New realities must always be acknowledged and dealt with. Adaptations are a necessity for survival. I marvel, for example, at those opposing electric vehicles who say, “Electric cars will not be the future.” In one sense they are correct. Electric cars actually are the present. Look around. Tesla now sells more cars than Chevrolet. But don’t get too hooked on electric vehicles. Something else will be around technology’s and history’s corners to someday replace them.

Much reluctance to change and a willingness to adapt can stem from a poor theology. God did not create us to be a static creature. Evolution has been the pattern of life since the very first life form began to adapt and evolve. This, apparently, is how God intended God’s creation to be, to survive. It is a very natural condition for humans and for all life forms.

Climate change is a frightening scenario. Yet climate change of one type or another has been with the earth since its beginning. We humans are still here because our predecessors were able to adapt. And so must we.

Adaptation is more than reducing emissions and our carbon footprint. Large companies are here to stay at least for now it would appear. They have contributed much to ecological harm. In some places, however, they have behaved well. We must work with them to incentivize the good behavior while holding them accountable for bad. That is, we must adapt, we need to change our behavior.

It is not only geographic locations that fail to be paradise. It is those in them who fail to be a people worthy of paradise. Human history is, in many ways, a living out, a constant adaptation, of dealing with this very imperfect reality. The Constitution of the United States was written as it was because, “Men are not angels” according to one of its authors, James Madison.

The question with which we must struggle as we move into all futures, is not “Should we change and adapt?” Instead the question is, “How must we change and adapt?”
We must assume life will never be one particular way, however ideal we find life at some moment.

So, what does the Bible say about __? You can fill in that blank with any number or words, issues, causes, and concerns. I heard someone just this morning saying the US is in the Bible and the Bible has a lot to say about our country. Really?
Where might that be?

The truthful answer to many of those filled-in blanks is that the Bible says nothing about some particular concerns of ours. Nuclear energy? Global warming? Even sexual orientation as we now understand it is not in scripture.

The Bible knows nothing about our current understanding of science. The scientific method came along many centuries later. Now, the Bible does know about caring for the earth, it does know about relationships, it does know about human life on this planet. It just doesn’t directly speak to all and every issue of life and living.

The goal of our faith is not to declare of every major issue and concern: Here is the truth. Rather the role of scripture is to teach us how to discern the truth. What biblical principles might apply to some current concern? What does believing and trusting we have a loving and forgiving God have to say to some issues? What does believing and knowing we are to take care of the earth have to say about some of our present hot button topics?

I confess to being a bit tired of hearing too many colleagues over the years complain, “Seminary never taught me about this!” Usually my response is that I never understood my seminary as saying they were going to teach me all I needed to know as a pastor. Instead I understood my seminary education as preparing us to think theologically and biblically for those issues that would pop up in the future; issues in the 1970’s when I attended seminary could not have been anticipated.

What do you know about God from the Bible? What do you know about God’s will for us and the earth and for each other from the Bible? Broad, general principles in some ways, yes, but understandings that can be used when new challenges confront us.

God is good. God is love. God is forgiving. God is concerned about us and all people. God is concerned about this earth. Not bad starting points.

Many times, Christianity is understood as a purely spiritual faith. That is, faith has little or nothing of great importance to do with the material and physical world. To understand the Christian faith in a purely spiritual manner is a dangerous enterprise for both those inside the faith as well as those outside the faith.

Pope Pius XII was pope during much of the reign of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. During his pontificate and long after, including today, many historians and others criticize him for his near silence on the Holocaust and many terrors of the war and of Nazism. He has been accused of being cowardly, political, and, as one with a previous record of anti-Semitic statements, complicit in Holocaust atrocities.

I am not historian enough to have anything greater than an opinion on these charges. I do understand why such things would be said about him. However, as a pastor when I read Pius XII writings and statements, I see a theological failure in his understanding of the Christian faith. There is a reason we do theology in the church. Bad theology can be more than incorrect thinking or even heresy; it can be downright dangerous and deadly.

Pius XII in his writings always seemed to view the Christian faith as something almost purely spiritual. The body did not much matter. It is all about one’s soul in the pursuit of eternal life. Everything else is, at best, secondary. Therefore the spirits of both persecutors and persecuted is what mattered most. What happened to the body, while tragic, was of much lesser importance.

This flies in the face of a God who found it of ultimate importance to come to earth in the very human body of Jesus; a body that would end in pain, torture, and death. This is a God who while coming to God’s people in words of scripture, chooses to address and encounter God’s people more frequently through the embodied words of very human beings. Many times the words themselves matter more because they came forth from a human person in a human body.

Scripture is full of examples of God addressing its readers through prophets, very human persons. In many of those words God criticizes the spirituality of God’s people because they ignored bodily needs like hunger. While not against fasts and proper worship, God seems to find such infuriating when those acts do not result in the care of the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the hungry; those with very human and even bodily needs.

I have written and spoken often and recently about racism. In terms of our Christian faith, I think racism too in part is proliferated through a poor theological lens. Here, however, the issue seems to be the body is too important. It seems the color of one’s skin, the outward covering of the body, is what determines one’s value. Here is where spirituality can speak and proclaim loudly that this bodily difference is irrelevant in terms of one’s worth. Souls have no color. Neither do parts of the body such as brains, hearts or organs.

The gist of this is: the Christian faith is for Christian living; it is for Christian living in this world, now. What we do here now matters not in terms of some eternal reward but in terms of living as God created us to live and desires us to live. This is why the Christian faith isn’t primarily practiced in individual devotion but in community with other persons.

Among other things, every time we are ill, we are reminded the body matters. Such bodily illness greatly affects our spirits and even spiritual life. For that matter, our spirts have often been affected when some other’s body suffers. Christian faith and Christian ministry is not about caring only about souls. It is caring about us; all of us, literally from head to toe. The Christian faith is not only heard and felt; it can be seen. It is alive in this very material world.

Ah, we find ourselves this February meandering toward Lent. We have little side junkets here and there on the road of faith, but eventually we find ourselves with dirty foreheads and our spirits a bit more serious in demeanor.

The Lenten trail ends at the cross with the suffering and death of the one come to bring hope to a people both occupied and oppressed. An innocent one, the only truly innocent one who was to lead these people out of their oppressed circumstances was arrested, tortured, and put to death.

You and I often question why bad things often seem to happen to those whom we deem innocent or good. If we take the gospels seriously, then you and I also need to realize this should not at all surprise us. In fact, we can go so far as to say this is the founding principle of the Christian message. An innocent one, proclaimed God’s Son, was arrested, tortured, and put to death. In First Corinthians Paul writes, “I decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

This is not to criticize our questioning of suffering in this life be it ours or another’s. It is not to classify this or similar questions as whining or being unappreciative. It is instead to put ours and all suffering in perspective. Suffering is very democratic. It happens to all, though admittedly in differing proportions.

Andrew Hodges Hart writes in his book, Knowing Darkness, “The cross of Christ is especially shocking because it’s not a religious answer at all, but a divine answer that is luridly profane in nature. An instrument of torture and capital punishment, reserved for the slaves and dregs of human society, becomes the means of salvation right here ‘under the sun’ – and in fact the sun itself is darkened by it.”
That is, the problem of evil is solved neither by Jesus nor scripture. But it can be lived through and overcome because of the Jesus whom we know through the Bible; the Jesus who lived through, overcame, and lives still among, in, and through those who follow, those also are acquainted with suffering.

Traveling through Lent does not make one a Christian. Neither does it earn points with God or favors in this life. It does not enable us to escape pain and suffering. It might even cause us to engage more pain and suffering. Traveling through Lent can make us more trusting as we trudge along in hope. We trust our suffering is not some judgement on us from God but an unescapable part of living. We hope in Jesus that this will not be life’s final judgement on us. We can get through it, beyond it, and live again.

Don’t be afraid to get your foreheads dirty. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty in service for one another. Don’t fear unclean places. Don’t give up in dark places. A time of cleansing is ahead. Light awaits. Keep trudging.