For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George June 23, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

Loving People
Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez challenges us: “So you say you love the poor. Name them.” A name is a good place to start, a meal is better, and life together is even better than that. Real love requires knowing, listening, understanding. It cannot be foisted on people from a distance.

Gregory Boyle says, “The measure of our compassion lies not in our service to others but in our willingness to see ourselves connected to them.” Love is not something that you can do to another. It is something you do with them.

Roses
RosesEveryone now and again wonders about those questions that have no readyanswers:
first cause, God’s existence, what happens when the curtain goes down and nothing stops it,
not kissing,not going to the mall, not the SuperBowl.
“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning. “Do you have the answers?
And if you do, would you tell me?”
The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”they said.
“But as you can see, we arejust now entirely busy being roses.”
Mary Oliver.

Something More
My dad was an artist who made his living near New York City. He painted the portraits of wealthy people and often commented on the subtleties of fine art. One day he told me that if I looked closely at the paintings of the great masters, I would see all the colors of the spectrum in every square inch. This is what gives a portrait its richness and its depth. It’s also the thing that distinguishes the work of a genius from that of an amateur.
After a while, I began to wonder whether our lives are like a portrait being painted by a renaissance artist. If our eyes are too close to the canvas, we might be confused by its complexity and wonder, “What crazy person would put every color of the spectrum in every square inch?” Our souls will focus on disappointing things and we will ask a lot of haunting questions that seem to have no answer. Most importantly, we won’t be able to make sense of the entire work of art because we are too close to the pain.

If we never experience the rude disappointments of life, it is nearly impossible for us to have the richness and depth that a masterful artist seeks to create. We will offer only trite and shallow ‘answers’ to a world that yearns for something more. Someone once said that fundamentalism is to faith what paint-by-numbers is to the Renaissance. It presents a portrait of the divine that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It oversimplifies the complex. Augustine said it another way, “If you can comprehend it, it is not God.”

If it were possible to have our souls painted by a renaissance artist, strange colors in strange places would appear on the canvas – each one emblematic of the events that broke us and deepened us. The richness and depth of our portraits would be reflective of a faith that has matured. It is not a paint-by-number faith. It doesn’t expect easy answers. It’s not intellectually lazy. It longs to uncover deeper and deeper layers of truth. It never attempts to domesticate God. It is wonder-struck by the mysteries that surround us. All these things bear witness to the genius of a divine painter who is still at work in us.
Will Kautz

Resurrection Hope
May God grant for each of us,
If our world has died in the night,
That we may see the first day of a new creation,
A new heaven and new earth.
Because on this day God walks again in the garden,
Not in the cool of the evening but of the dawn.
This, is our resurrection hope.
Duane W.H. Arnold

Grace is Greater than Sin
Celebrating grace is not endorsing, much less condoning, error. On the contrary, celebrating grace is holy acknowledgment of the doctrinal truth that grace is greater than our error (or sin).
Some do not believe, it seems, this truth.
“Who is a God LIKE YOU?”
The prophet places the question squarely in the context of the character of the God of Israel,
“who is a God like you,
PARDONING INIQUITY
and passing over transgression …
because he delights in showing mercy …
you will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea”
(Micah 7.18-19).
Bobby Valentine

Gospel
While the gospel is a message, it cannot be confined to messages. While the gospel is the truth, it cannot be captured by a series of propositional truths. Before the gospel is anything else, the gospel is God. Gospel means “good news,” and the good news is God. The good news is not that God loves us. The good news is that God is love. The good news is not that Jesus saves. It is that Jesus is himself salvation.
J D Walt

View from the Front Porch
A highlight of our 60th wedding anniversary celebration was having all of our children and their spouses with us. A rarity which we treasure.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 16, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

The Unknown
We have been granted the capacity for constant transcendence, as an antidote, but frequently reject that capacity, because using it means voluntarily exposing ourselves to the unknown. We run away because we are afraid of the unknown…
Jordon Peterson

“When psalmist or prophet calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or behold how the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unspoken tradition which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers; it is spiritual nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments—they are sacraments.”
Sir George Adam Smith

Some might need to hug a cow:
You may have heard of goat yoga, but cow hugging?
It’s one of the more popular activities at The Gentle Barn and involves just that, hugging a cow.
The Gentle Barn is a nonprofit that provides sanctuary for abused animals, which in turn play a role in therapy sessions for humans going through tough times.
Ellie Laks, who founded The Gentle Barn in 1999, discussed the organization’s unique approach to healing during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
“Sometimes humans are going through hard times where they don’t want to talk,” Laks said. “They don’t want to be vulnerable. They don’t want to be open. Or sometimes there are just are no words because you’re in too much pain.”

Voting Reform
Rep. Don Young’s death after nearly five decades in Congress has sparked perhaps the strangest congressional race in America, the Washington Post’s Dan Zak reports from Alaska. Recent voting reforms in the state mean that Alaskans are set to cast “four votes, using two methods, over three time periods, in two races, for the same seat” —

Wrong about Something
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that everything and everyone will, at some point, be wrong about something very significant. It doesn’t matter where your politics are, what your country is, what your personal beliefs or risk tolerances are—at some point in the last three years, you and I were wrong about something. And, in many cases, horribly wrong. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that you and I will be horribly wrong about something again.
You would think this would humble people a little bit and encourage them to withhold judgment about things. But it appears to have done the opposite instead.

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But I’d like to add to Hanlon’s Razor something I’ll call Manson’s Addendum: “…and pretty much everything you see or read is some degree of stupidity.”
But as the world becomes highly polarized and angrier and disinformation spreads in every direction, I think the ability to reserve moral judgment and be slow to draw conclusions may become the next critical new skill necessary to survive in the Twitter-driven world.
Mark Manson

JOY
Tonight I sit by a campfire with my husband. The JOY of the evening is the opportunity to spend a little time away from life. As always, the veil of sadness is present as the realization that the last time I went camping all of my children were not only alive; they were all with us.
Upon arrival, my mind instinctively felt the need to holler out to the kids to go gather firewood. In a fraction of a second I remembered our children are not with us; those days are gone. So, off I went to complete the task previously done by my children.
I walked through the woods gathering firewood; leaves crunching and twigs snapping with every step. In the silence of nature my mind could literally hear, with great clarity, the voices of my children as they sounded when we were last together; together as a complete family. “Hey, Mom! I found a good one!” “Mooooommmm! He took my stick!”
Beautiful memories representing the dichotomy of JOY and grief. Do I choose to focus on the JOY or or do i choose to focus on the grief? The answer is both. I cling to both for one without the other leaves a void. Grief without JOY is devastating. JOY without grief hollow. A healthy mix of the two affords a broken heart the opportunity to live a beautiful life despite the pain.
Tonight I sit by the fire; I choose to savor the past AND the present. Me, my husband, grief, and JOY. The four of us sitting by a campfire, drinking wine from Solo cups, hanging out, loving life, reminiscing, and making new memories every chance we get.
Melissa Gabehart

Spirit of the Age
…the spirit of the age works through highly functional impatient activism with the attitude, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” In contrast, the Spirit of Jesus works through deeply submitted atunement with the adage, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” It so often takes the posture of standing there, or kneeling there, to even begin to comprehend the transcendent interpolation taking place, and what it might mean. Let’s remember on the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter wanted to hurry and build three tabernacles. Meanwhile, the voice of God said simply and incisively, “This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him!”
J D Walt

Now I know what the problem is…
“Pretty soon it will be women preachers, social justice, then racism, then [critical race theory], then victimization because the world is a ball and chain, and when you’re hooked, it will take you to the bottom. They hate the truth,” John MacArthur

In case you didn’t know…
a New York court ruled on Tuesday that elephants are not people. At issue was whether Happy, in captivity at the Bronx Zoo for more than four decades, could be released to a sanctuary through a habeas corpus proceeding. “Because the writ of habeas corpus is intended to protect the liberty right of human beings to be free of unlawful confinement,” Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote for the majority, “it has no applicability to … a nonhuman animal who is not a ‘person’ subjected to illegal detention.”

Once upon a time, our problem was guilt:
the feeling that you have made a mistake, with reference to something forbidden. This was felt as a stain on one’s character…[Today] the dichotomy of the forbidden and the allowed has been replaced with an axis of the possible and the impossible. The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in something like Kilowatt hours–the raw capacity to make things happen. With this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to weariness–weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
Matthew Crawford

Who’s Leaving the Church the Most?
Single evangelical women, according to the sources used by Katie Gaddini, book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia UP, 2022). Single evangelical women are leaving the white church more than any demographic.
If women make up 55-60% of the evangelical church, what does their leaving of the church say about the future of the church?
Scot McKnight

Worship & Lament
As I reflected on the way my church worshipped, its emphasis, its tone, its expectations, its expressed hopes, I suddenly understood clearly that there was no room in our liturgy and worship for sadness, brokenness and questioning. We had much space for love, joy, praise, and supplica- tion, but it seemed that we viewed acknowledgement of sadness and the tragic brokenness of our world as almost tantamount to faithlessness. As a result, when tragedy hit: either directly at home or at a slight distance as in the Omagh bombing, we had no idea what to do with it or how to formulate our concerns… It was clear that we had few resources to enable us to resist the evil caused by such outrageous suffering as was inflicted on the people of Omagh on that terrible day. So we closed our eyes and worshipped God, or at least those aspects of God that brought us more comfort and relief.
Swinton, Raging with Compassion, pp. 92-93.

View from the Front Porch
The image is from a section of the 1950 census of my neighborhood on the TVA reservation where we lived. Shared by a friend on FB it was interesting, particularly the notation of the husbands as head. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Stained Beauty- Sexual Abuse and the Church – when Church gets it right

George June 15, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

At the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Anaheim this week (June 14-15), delegates to the meeting, known as messengers, will grapple with the massive report released in May detailing the SBC’s Executive Committee mishandling of sexual abuse allegations in the convention.

Various segments of SBC have begun to speak out regarding what the SBC response should be. You can read three HERE and HERE and HERE. As illustrated by those examples there is a broad spectrum of ideas about what the response should be. Every Christian should be praying for the SBC Annual meeting.

Thankfully, today it is reported the SBC messengers voted in favor of reforms to address the Guidepost report. That is not the end but a first step.

As for all other Christian churches and/or denomination, each WILL inevitably respond to the very public SBC crisis.. The question is: What will those responses look like? I fear, for many, there will be silence, refusing to acknowledge any peril to their church and /or denomination.
Contrary to apathy in non-SBC churches, there appears to be significant awareness and passion in the public arena, including news and social media. A consensus of “no surprise here” predominates.. Reading the comments from a NY Times article on the SBC crisis is revealing and troubling. Here is one example:

Southern Baptists are perhaps the least Christian of any of the numerous Christian cults that infect our country. Their leaders are mostly misogynistic men who hold racist views and disparage Catholics and Jews. The leadership believes fear is the best way to keep their congregations in line and every service I ever attended was infected with fear and constant judgmental behavior. While they constantly judge others, the leadership holds itself above accountability because it absolutely believes it knows better than you. I [A] lack of humility, self-inquiry and self-awareness was palpable.
Darren, Oregon
May 23 NYT

You can read what people ( NYT commenters) think about SBC and Christian churches, HERE. It doesn’t appear commentators distinguish between SBC and Christian churches in general. Like it or not, the stain is not confined to SBC. The Church’s witness is at stake.

There will be concern about the risk of SBC crisis becoming an “issue” that detracts from mission, but, the depth and breath of the scandal trumps that concern. Red flags in the SBC report are myriad. Responsible leadership, informed about the SBC crisis will digest and assess the information and identify implications for their own context. It is an opportunity for self-examination.

SBC is a fire in the community that threatens the neighborhood. The first response is to recognize there is a problem, alert those in danger and take necessary actions to avoid being consumed by the conflagration. The fire is not the problem but it cannot be ignored.

Among the NYT comments was this anomaly:

Jesus attacked the hypocrisy and selfish, deceptive hearts of many of the religious leaders of his day. But he also found himself the object of false accusations from secular, political and religious groups. Through it all he consistently preached the most important commandment, to Love God with our heart and mind and to Love others as ourselves. But he also said he did not come to a healthy people, but to the sick. Those sick with evil and sin in our lives… all our lives. To all he offers grace and forgiveness for those who repent and accept his gift of amazing grace. He then calls those who have received that grace to walk forward in obedience to this most important commandment.
As a long time member of the SBC I join many others in calling the Church to repent where we have failed to exemplify his Gospel, and where we have failed to hold our leaders and one another to this standard. I’m saddened for the lives that have been hurt through all of this. There is no room for abuse of any kind in the Gospel. We should proactively initiate and accept reproof, and correction. Follow Jesus’s direction to repent, and seek to grow in our ability to Love him and Love others. Let him teach us to become men and women of God, complete, equipped for every good work. Then with integrity do that good work so that others may see God in us, and not us. He is perfect, we are not. [emphasis mine]
REPNAH
Huntsville ALMay 23

“If you’re brought up Jewish, don’t assume that you can lean back in the arms of your religion and take it easy, feeling smug because you’re an insider to God’s revelation, a connoisseur of the best things of God, informed on the latest doctrines! I have a special word of caution for you who are sure that you have it all together yourselves and, because you know God’s revealed Word inside and out, feel qualified to guide others through their blind alleys and dark nights and confused emotions to God. While you are guiding others, who is going to guide you? I’m quite serious. While preaching “Don’t steal!” are you going to rob people blind? Who would suspect you? The same with adultery. The same with idolatry. You can get by with almost anything if you front it with eloquent talk about God and his law. The line from Scripture, “It’s because of you Jews that the outsiders frown on God,” shows it’s an old problem that isn’t going to go away.”
Romans 2:17-24 MSG

“Let the church who is innocent condemn SBC.”

The next post: “the problem “

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 9, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

This is “grey cat”. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, I look at her.

Absolutes
So many theological systems are built on “absolutes”. That is, all questions must be answered. The answers, in the main, are binary. They are “yes” and “no”. We tend to speak of faith in Christ as a “commitment”, made once and then acted upon throughout life. Yet, in our lives, we all carry questions. We all carry the “Why?” that Christ cries out in the Passion. Yet, most theological systems leave little, if any, room for that question.
Duane Arnold

Reasons
It’s a strange paradox. When everything is permitted, when everyone has a “reason” to do something, we act as if that lessens their responsibility for their actions, when it should mean the opposite. The sociological obsession with root causes saps the importance of agency. Monsters become nothing more than “products of their environments” and hence victims, too. We have a twisted and deformed view that monstrous acts are justified if the monster’s feelings of victimization are justified or simply “understandable.” Jonathan Haidt

Real solutions
…we could do everything right with schools, red flag laws, etc., there’s still the obviously possibility that a person determined to murder large numbers of people will have the determination to work around those obstacles. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth making it harder for murderers to succeed, but maybe the real solution has little to do with putting bigger rocks in better places in the river. Maybe the problem is the river itself.
Learning the life of others, that is, learning to love them, opens us up in ways that expand us into more fully developed persons. In that we realize our own complicities as we learn the experiences of others.
Scot McKnight

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.” ? Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Confidence in the Church
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Tim Alberta – Atlantic

Poets
(not the people who make rhymes) are discerners of newness, people who fashion images for hopes that have not yet become visible, who sense the deep undertow of life and welcome it, who present to us images of reality which are expectant and expansive, who are content to receive what they do not understand arnd to rely on that which they cannot control. It is the gift of breaking out of symmetrical language and symmetrical expectations into a context
where hopes get actualized in surprising and even ragged ways.
Walter Brueggermann

Rules
Rules don’t work. Of course, they are necessary and they have value, but if they are all we have, we don’t have much. Rules can protect us from ourselves and each other. They can create some semblance of external order, but they do not change people. Rules can govern human behavior, but they have no power to order the affairs of our minds and hearts.

People often identify themselves as being either rule followers or rule breakers, and both with equal degrees of pride. We do not need rules. What we need is a Ruler. The lordship of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with following the rules and everything to do with following the Ruler.
JD Walt

Only in Mississippi
..one of his [Michael Guest] campaign pitches is truly something we haven’t heard before—a proposal to provide “newlyweds with a $20,000 wedding gift, paid back if the couple divorces.” Who says Republicans never come up with new ideas?

You can’t successfully deconstruct, then reconstruct your faith by listening to the same voices that put you in crisis in the first place…listen to what other orthodox believers think outside your tradition…you may not be persuaded, but you will be informed…
Phoenix Preacher

San Francisco
I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.
Wondering what the church might learn from San Francisco ?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

Fighting for the Kingdom
For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life.
Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/

View from the Front Porch
The front porch came alive last week preparing for a celebration of our 60th Wedding Anniversary. All our children were here and many other family and friends. It was a beautiful event and we are still reveling in the afterglow. So much to be thankful for.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Stained Beauty – Sexual Abuse & the Church- when Church gets it Right.

George June 7, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

The Body of Christ is beautiful; “when the church gets it right, she is beautiful. When the church gets it right—when we fulfill the intentions of our Lord Christ and His character is revealed through us—”
(John Stumbo – A Stained Beauty

The past week was an emotional roller coaster. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas continues to weigh heavy on my heart. The Guidepost SBC report is gut wrenching. There may be some tendency to discount media reports as overstatements or secular critics gloating over the moral and ethical failures of the SBC. I an currently reading the entire report and have found no reason to mitigate any criticisms. The depth and breath of the SBC Executive Committee’s malfeasance defies understanding.

If there was any encouragement in the SBC report, it was the story how the investigation came about.

For three minutes last summer, a call to investigate how Southern Baptist leaders have dealt with sexual abuse was dead in the water.
Then a little-known denominational bylaw and a pastor from Indiana saved it.
“I just had to do it,” said Todd Benkert, pastor of Oak Creek Community Church in Mishawaka, Ind. “It was me or nobody.”
About 15 minutes into a morning business session at the Southern Baptist Convention’s June 2021 annual meeting in Nashville, Southern Baptist leaders announced that a motion to set up an independent sex abuse investigation was being tabled.
Because the motion dealt with the internal workings of an SBC entity — in this case, the denomination’s Nashville-based Executive Committee — denominational officials, relying on bylaw 26 of the SBC’s constitution, decided to refer the motion to that entity.
In other words, the Executive Committee would be put in charge of investigating itself.
Then-President J.D. Greear was ready to move on when Benkert stood up at a microphone with a motion of his own, based on another section of bylaw 26.
“I would like the opportunity to make a motion to overrule the Committee on Order of Business at the appropriate time,” he said.
Benkert’s motion was met with applause. Then a second and, then, almost all of the 15,000 local church delegates, known as messengers, raised their yellow voting cards in the air — far more than the two-thirds majority needed to overrule the committee.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/27/how-apocalyptic-southern-baptist-report-almost-didnt-happen/

Hopefully my previous posts raised your awareness. I recommend these two podcasts that speak powerfully to the SBC crisis and the problem of sexual abuse in the church. The SBC information is not “tweetable”, it requires intentional time and effort.

SBC’s response is yet to be determined and will shape the future of its 14,000 churches and 14 million members. Their response will have profound impact on the reputation of the Christian church for outsiders.

Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church.

To be honest, I have come to understand that my concern about sexual abuse in the church is not shared by many. Not to say they don’t care about sexual abuse, but it is more like our concern for starving children in Africa, terrible but thank God we are blessed— where can I send money?

It is my hope the information shared in this post and previous posts will somehow penetrate the shield we have erected to protect our idealized view of church. Confronted with the truth that the local church is very fragile, the SBC crisis can be a catalyst for self-examination and response in our own context.

Despite the negative impact of the SBC crisis, there is an opportunity to demonstrate the beauty of the church in our response and raise confidence in the Church.
The next few posts will address what I believe that response should look like.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY