Pastor's Notes

I worry about people who seem to have no curiosity about life or the world. Perhaps better put, I might say,” I am curious about them”. So many seem to take things at face value, learn about life, what’s right, what’s wrong, and acquire values at an early age and never look back to even wonder about them, let alone question any.

Curiosity killed the cat, it is often said. Perhaps. But you and I are not felines. We have a different ability to think, ponder, question, and make moral decisions. Curiosity is not what kills us, more often it can be what moves us forward.

Had the earliest humans not had curiosity, you and I might still be living in unheated caves eating raw foods. Curiosity questions as to might be a better way of doing something. Might we be able to improve our shelter, our eating, our life?

Science at its root is basic curiosity. Can we create a vaccine for COVID? How might we do so? What is needed? We look at the stars and planets at night. There is Mars! Can we get to it? How? What might it be like? What might we learn from the trip and from the landing that could help us here on earth? What is needed to get us there?

So many benefits you and I enjoy in life is the result of someone’s curiosity. We live longer because some have questioned and searched for ways to improve diet and health. Science is so curious, in fact, that it questions itself and, at times, learns through further curiosity, it has to correct itself.

You may remember Alice in Wonderland, seeing everything so new and different saying she was “Curiouser and Curiouser”. Most of us as we mature learn a great deal. Much of what we learn, however, is often how little we know; that is how much more there is to know even about even those things which we do seem to have knowledge.

Faith is an arena where too often curiosity is mistrusted if not downright prohibited. “We know it all, so leave it alone” seems to be the stance of too many in the Christian Faith. Don’t question a thing! Without such question we would not have had a Reformation. Without such question you and I, though Christians, would be refraining from pork and following Old Testament laws to the T.

The Biblical world is not our world at least in terms of lifestyle and choices available. Technology alone separates us greatly from the days of Jesus, and before Jesus, the days of, say, Moses. How do people of the Bible live today? Curiosity is a great partner in figuring this out. We can begin with the word, “how”, a word of curiosity.

We do not begin or work through any of this alone. True, some bright folks often stand out with new ideas. For those ideas to work, however, a following, that is others, need to think these ideas through, decide they make sense, and then go along. Again, the Reformation is an excellent example. The Reformation was not just about Luther, Calvin, and other leaders. Much of an entire continent bought into it.

Curiosity is not only a gift for individuals. It is granted to communities and entire faiths. Can we be curious together and navigate into both our present and our future, knowing both present and future belong to God? Do we have faith enough, that is do we trust God and God’s grace enough, to question and explore? While many may think faith ends with curiosity, curiosity may just be faith’s beginning and faith’s proving grounds.

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.