Monthly Archives: August 2009

Seven Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection

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James Sire uses a book to answer the question Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? He might also titled it Why I Believe Christianity Is True.  This work offers an apologia for faith and a rationale for being Christian.

In Part 1 he explores the reasons we believe anything.  I believe X because… my parents believed it… my priest told me so…  the Bible says it’s so… my society believes it… because it’s true. The responses he offers come from a survey of college students.  He makes a helpful distinction between causes of belief and reasons for belief. Sire’s preferred reason is this:  I believe X because it offers the best explanation for the tough issues of life.

In Part 2 Sire explains why he believes Christianity gives the ‘best explanation.’  He discusses the reliability of the Gospels and the problem of evil.  The heart of the matter for him is Jesus:

For a long time it has been my fascination with Jesus — his character, the brilliance and wisdom of his teaching, the depth of his compassion, the endlessness of his grace in forgiving sin — that has kept me in the faith.

For Sire, the resurrection validates Jesus.  He sees seven reasons to believe the resurrection happened:

  1. The disciples and early followers of Jesus believed he was resurrected.
  2. The tomb was empty.
  3. The testimony of women.
  4. New Testament accounts of Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection.
  5. The transformed lives of the disciples.
  6. Jesus became understood in highly exalted terms immediately after the resurrection.
  7. Continuity and coherence between the resurrection and the entirety of Jesus’ life.

Of these reasons, Nos. 2, 3, and 7 sway me most.  It comes down to how much credibility you give the gospel testimony to the resurrection, and opinions on that differ widely, even in the church.

Anyone who disagrees with Sire’s presentation will still benefit from walking along with him, and perhaps his quest will prompt them to explore their own reasons for what they believe.

Blind Wonder Cat

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Gwen Cooper adopted a blind kitten who lost its eyes because of an infection. She wrote about what happened next in Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat.

From the Monitor’s review:

She took the kitten home and named him Homer, rightly assuming that life with him would be a type of odyssey. But little could she have imagined the character that she would encounter behind Homer’s odd, eyeless facade.  The little cat (he never grew to be more than 3 pounds) turned out to be a daredevil, a spitfire, and a passionate lover. Homer, who of course had no way of knowing that he was blind, simply assumed it was normal to navigate fearlessly in the dark, lunge five feet into the air to capture flies in his mouth, and hurl himself onto the top shelves of closets for entertainment. He also assumed it was normal to enthusiastically befriend all he met, in addition to becoming an eager, adoring, gallant beau to Cooper.

Our orange tabby Jane isn’t blind, but she’s fearless too.  We call her Mordor, Destroyer of Worlds.  We could learn something from cats about what is normal and how to navigate in the dark.

The Song Remains the Same

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E. suffered from Alzheimer’s for nine years before she died early Tuesday morning.  At her memorial service today, the chaplain noted even after her mind and memory disappeared, her songs remained with her.  She kept singing. 

So it was fitting for J., who is a dementia sufferer himself, to sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness at her service.  His songs have remained too, as God has remained faithful to him. 

Sitting in our white pews, we in the congregation sang For All the Saints.  One line caught me:

We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.

We are feeble, and we struggle — whether we’ve lost our minds or only think we have.  And I wonder, what is it in us that will shine?  Maybe there’s a particle of light lodged in us that will grow up one day to burn like a hot sun.

Death Can’t Tell Time

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I’ve spent a lot of time lately with death, or with almost-death.  I don’t want to get morbid or philosophical, or even squeamish at how messy the process is. 

I only want to say one thing:  death is an inconvenient bastard.

Either he gets to the tree too early, when the fruit is still green, or he dawdles in late as it rots on the ground.  He doesn’t read the seasons well. 

Death at the right time is a friend, as they say, but I’m convinced he can’t tell time, so he tends to come too late or too soon.

Adrian College In August

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Adrian College, a small Methodist school, rededicated a garden honoring Arlene and Mickey Phelps, two beloved members of the college community.  President Jeff Docking spoke at the ceremony and said he looks out on the garden from his office every day.  You can read more about the Phelps Garden here.

phelps garden

It was a lovely day, cool for August.  I took this picture of the college chapel too.  It’s a popular place for weddings.

adrian college chapel

Adrian College began 150 years ago as an abolitionist school, and the chaplain’s office continues that tradition today by supporting the Not For Sale campaign.

Four Marks of a Good Pastor

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At Theolog, Bob Cornwall asks what makes a good pastor, in particular whether seminary training is essential

Jesus was relatively uneducated, as were most of his disciples and many of the great saints of history. In certain pockets of the church, a growing number of voices suggest that a seminary education is not only unnecessary but even detrimental to effective ministry. Just to make sure we get the message, a shelf-load of books detail all the important things that a minister won’t learn in seminary.

What they neglect to mention is that courses in Bible, theology and church history (my specialty) are very important, if not essential, to effective ministry. It’s upon these courses that we build our understanding of the practical sides of ministry.

Pastors should study the Bible, theology and church history, but whether a seminary course best does this is an open issue.  I can’t answer that question anymore.  (My ambivalence about seminary probably arises here.  My recent studies in preaching at Christian Theological Seminary were invaluable.)

Beyond this, I see four things that make a good pastor:

+  a connection to Christ sustained by prayer

+  credibility, honesty and basic trustworthiness

+  a capacity for affirming relationships

+  competence in preaching and worship

I left out calling because any vocation can be a calling, and all believers can serve as priests to one another.

So these four marks are essential — the rest will work itself out.

Robert Wright’s Small God

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In a New York Times essay, Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God, says religion and science can stop feuding if each is willing to change.

Religion must modify its idea of God to one compatible with evolution.  God dropped the ‘algorithm of natural selection’ into the pond and stepped back to let it work out its own logic.  Such a deity can comport with science.

Science, on its part, can admit the processes of natural selection may logically lead to a ‘higher purpose’ written into the structure of nature itself.

In his quest for harmony, though, it appears to me religion travels farther than science.  Wright’s evolved idea of God is really 18th century Deism.  At the end of the essay his preference for science peeks out:

Of course, religion doesn’t have a monopoly on awe and inspiration. The story that science tells, the story of nature, is awesome, and some people get plenty of inspiration from it, without needing the religious kind. What’s more, science has its own role to play in knitting the world together. The scientific enterprise has long been on the frontiers of international community, fostering an inclusive, cosmopolitan ethic — the kind of ethic that any religion worthy of this moment in history must also foster.

So I don’t know.  Wright’s God seems small and unsuitable for worship.  He makes me wonder if, in spite of intentions to do justice to science and religion, at the end of the day you lie down with one or the other.

His essay is worth reading.  Let me know what you think.

All I Need To Know About Salvation, I Learned From My Dog

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jazz

We walk our dog on Broad Street past Second Baptist Church, and along the way someone often asks, “What kind of dog is he?”

“She’s a rescue dog,” we say.  “Her name is Jazz.  She’s part Basenji, with lots of other things mixed in.  They picked her up off the streets of New Orleans after Katrina, and later we adopted her.”  We’re a little proud of Jazz’s celebrity status as a Katrina survivor.

The vets at the animal shelter who examined her concluded she was a street dog even before the hurricane.  We have given her her first permanent home.  She enjoys less freedom now than before the storm, but she doesn’t have to sleep in alleys anymore or scrounge for scraps in dumpsters.  She sleeps on a soft, dry bed, eats twice a day and soaks up lots of love.  We call her the love sponge.

I’d never heard the term ‘rescue dog’ before Jazz came into our lives.  She was rescued, saved, and her story has taught me about salvation, about being saved.

My church doesn’t talk about salvation — that’s for Baptists and Pentecostals.  The language of ‘being saved’ makes us uneasy, and our theology makes salvation unnecessary anyway.  Since God’s love embraces everyone, the danger of being lost threatens no one.  No one needs rescue.

But Jazz’s story tells me something different, and it illustrates a basic theme in the New Testament.  The lost are truly lost, wandering the streets ‘without hope and without God in the world,’ until love finds them, rescues them and brings them home.

When children in the foster care system are adopted and find a permanent placement, they call it their forever home.  My wife and I gave Jazz a forever home, and in a far larger sense, God provides us a forever home in Christ.  We’re not God’s children automatically by birth or nature, says St Paul, but by the grace of adoption.

We once were lost, but now we’re found.  Then we become love sponges.

Is Blogging Narcissistic?

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David Lewicki, a Presbyterian pastor in New York City, pulls back the curtain on a secret of blogging.

But blogging, for me, has never been about exposing myself. Rather, it has always been a careful process of hiding as much as I reveal. It’s not an unselfconscious medium at all–every blog I write is carefully crafted to show a certain highly self-conscious personae. They’re written to look casual, offhand, spur-of-the-moment. But I labor over them, going back to change pieces; editing; correcting; improving. Until it is–or is it until I am–just right.

Bloggers hide as much as they reveal.  This is true.  I censor my blog and leave much of me out.  It’s like having guests over for dinner — they only see the rooms in the house you want them to see, which you clean like a fiend beforehand.  So on my blog I only put presentable things out on the table.  I don’t edit as much as Lewicki does — I smooth out the writing a little and watch the verbs.

In the movie Julie & Julia, Julie’s husband in a fit of frustration labels her blogging narcissistic.  As Lewicki notes, though, narcissism in blogging can be an illusion, and the persona ‘artificial.’  Personal blogs speak in the first person, but as Thoreau observes, in all writing ‘it is the first person that is speaking.’

The Confucian Middle Way

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Harvard scholar Anne Wu believes China and the United States can benefit from a ‘Confucian Middle Way’ as they relate to one another and work together in this century:

To use the middle way essentially means that Washington and Beijing should not be too optimistic, or even too pessimistic, about their relations. Nor should they overestimate their joint capacity in shaping the world order. Instead, they should value collaboration, but also prepare for deviations. The guiding principle of this middle way is to always solve problems in a peaceful, mutually respectful, and pragmatic manner.

Ancient Western philosophers also counseled a ‘not too much and not too little’ approach to life.  East meets West in this.  It’s a modest way of thinking that holds promise for how any business or organization operates.

When churches say their mission is ‘the transformation of the world,’ my eyes glaze over.  There’s too much muchness to it.  But neither should the goal be simply to keep the lights on and the doors open — that’s not enough.

Churches and other organizations need modest, specific goals, which they work toward in a peaceful, pragmatic way. The Confucian Middle Way.

ADDED:  Link corrected.

Fields of Gazing Grain

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Another funeral yesterday, the third in a week. An 86-year-old woman died in Roseville.  In the language of the Bible she was ‘gathered to her people,’ four generations of them. Her granddaughter gave the eulogy. My homily offered Emily Dickinson:

We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Last fall when I submitted this blog to the CCblogs network, the administrator likened my writing to Emily Dickinson. The comparison flattered me.  I love her brevity and imagery, and perhaps a bit of this style seeps into my writing.

I am full of funerals now.  And gazing grain is in my mind today — the fields of corn that crowd the roads outside of town.  They watch me when I pass them in the car — I know it.

But Donuts Taste Good, and They Stop Crime

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morning fresh bakeries

Over at Theolog, Richard Kauffman reviews The End of Overeating by David Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  Americans are too fat, and Kessler blames the food and restaurant industry.

The food industry has learned what it is that humans like and will come back for more of: food larded with inordinate amounts of fat, sugar and salt. Kessler is particularly enlightening when he goes into a restaurant like Chili’s and tears down items on the menu. In many cases they’re made of multiple layers of fat, sugar and salt, what people in the food industry call the “three points of the compass.” When Kessler asks one food industry representative if the industry intentionally makes food to be high in “hedonic value,” the representative replies, “Oh absolutely. We try to bring as much of that into the equation as possible.”

We like fat, sugar and salt — that’s news?  Apparently, no one knew this before.  And I’m shocked to learn restaurants want to make their food tasty.

Solutions Kessler pushes for our obesity include a ‘truth campaign’ on what we eat and more monitoring and regulation of food marketing, presumably by the government.

I’m fat.  Less fat than at the beginning of the summer, but still fat.  The chief reason I’m fat?  I love Morning Fresh Bakeries.  They make the best donuts in the history of donuts.  They begin cooking at 5 o’clock in the evening and work all through the night preparing, packaging and delivering donuts so that we who need them are well supplied in the morning.  They make cakes too and delicious oatmeal raisin cookies.  All these things contain fat and sugar — that makes them taste good.

No need for a ‘truth campaign’ here.  No one needs to monitor and regulate Morning Fresh Bakeries to make me less fat.  The truth is, I need to monitor how often I go there and practice self-restraint.  I’ve been doing that this summer, and a few pounds have come off.

I’m grateful for the good things government does — funding health care for the elderly or keeping terrorists from blowing up bridges.  I’m glad for food labels mandated by the FDA.  But I resist the idea, implicit in Kessler’s approach, that if a problem afflicts me, it must mean a malevolent industry has duped me and a government regulator must rescue me.  It’s patronizing.  I know where the produce section is at the grocery store — I ought to go there more often.

I shared the drift of this post with my wife, a great lover of public radio, and she says she’s heard David Kessler on the Diane Rehm show.  She suggests I be more sympathetic to him — he has a compelling personal story of weight loss.  “We have his book,” she says.  …Shoot.  Now I’ll have to educate myself.  And I was having such fun in my ignorance and indignation.  It’ll be a tough sell, though, if he tries to convince me donuts and their makers are evil.

A white van parked in front of Morning Fresh Bakeries last week.  It had this bumper sticker:  Fat People Are Harder to Kidnap.  So donuts lower the crime rate — one of their benefits to society.  I do love them.  Only now, I love them less often.

I Am Not a Kneeler

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My wife and I joined hundreds who packed the Presbyterian church Saturday for a memorial service.  Tommy, a 23-year-old man, died August 5th in a motorcycle accident in Ohio.  His best friends, six young men in black shirts, offered tearful tributes to him, and two others with guitars sang a Garth Brooks song, ‘The Dance.’

Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I’d of had to miss the dance

We sat in the back row toward the center, grateful to have arrived early enough to get a seat.  A woman with short blond hair took the pew in front of us.  She dipped her knee in the aisle before entering the row, and once seated she knelt down to pray with her arms on the pew in front of her.  ‘Probably Catholic,’ I thought.  There were no kneelers in the pews, so her knees rested on the floor.  While she knelt in prayer, I counted the 57 organ pipes on the chancel wall.

The last time I knelt in church was at a wedding two years ago.  The groom came from an African family, many of whom joined him for the service wearing colorful robes.  The African women sallied forward and danced around the bride and groom in a circle of jubilation.  At the end of the service the pastor asked everyone to kneel as he prayed for the new couple.  He prayed a long time — I remember how hard the floor felt beneath my knees.

My faith has not accustomed me to kneel.  I bought a kneeler from the IHM Sisters in Monroe in an attempt to take up the practice, but it sits abandoned now in our  basement.  When I knelt on it, it seemed I was playing with someone else’s furniture, like a clown jumping on the sofa.  I was also too self-conscious.   ‘I’m kneeling now’ ran like a refrain through my head.

I see no problem with a theology of kneeling.  In the Bible people come to  Jesus on their knees and ask for help (Mk 1.40).  But experience has shown me I am not a kneeler — one of many ways I am liturgically challenged. I must approach God in other ways.

When Your Funeral Falls On Your Birthday

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bean field

Yesterday I officiated at a memorial service at the Wellsville United Methodist Church, a small congregation in a white clapboard building surrounded by soybean fields.  (Lenawee County boasts some of the richest farmland in the country.)  This church ordinarily sees 30 on a Sunday morning, but for this service the crowd filled the sanctuary and spilled out into adjoining rooms, with clumps of folks standing in the parking lot.

The woman who died had a large family.  She would have turned 45 this day as they gathered for her memorial service.  On a table near the altar sat her picture, two roses and a plaster imprint of a tiny right hand, made when she was in kindergarten.  Her sister spoke in her memory, her hands quivering as she read from yellow sheets of paper.  Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine concluded the service.  Afterward a funeral meal in the basement included roast pork, cheesy potatoes and creamy green beans — good comfort food.

It’s unusual for a funeral to fall on a person’s birthday, but fitting since birth and death are part of the processes of life.  My wife and I don’t care to live long, but we hope to die on the same day so neither will have to live without the other.  Not likely, true, but perhaps the universe will smile and allow it.

How To Get the News

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I recommend the Christian Science Monitor’s new weekly magazine. When their daily edition ended publication last spring, I felt sad as another newspaper folded, especially one that had earned my respect over the last 20 years. I haven’t read it continuously in that time, but whenever I looked again through the Monitor’s window on the world my admiration returned.

This new magazine continues the style of substantive national and global stories with a human touch.  I even like the size of the pages, larger than a typical news magazine.

With their appetite for ratings, round-the-clock TV news shows tend to sensationalize stories, and instantaneous video from across the world doesn’t necessarily enhance my understanding of events — rather, it gives me an illusion of being there when I’m not.  I need time and distance to gain perspective, and a weekly news magazine suits this requirement well.

I visit the Monitor’s online site each day too and blog on its stories (as I did yesterday). I like the strategy of a weekly magazine coupled with a regularly updated web presence. But of the two the magazine feels more grounded and perennial. Perhaps the difference is I can feel it in the tactile experience of turning pages, which rest on the night table next to my bed, not on an electronic server.

The Monitor has quickly become my favorite magazine.  Subscribe here.

Apparently, Planets Run Into One Another

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At least, from time to time they do.  You’d think there was enough extra space in an infinite universe for this not to happen, but it does.  And when there’s a large enough size difference, the big planets pulverize the tiny ones.

It must have been one bodacious crunch — akin to the moon and Mercury racing to occupy the same spot at more than 22,300 miles an hour.

The story of a collision between nascent planets is written in a disk of dust around a star 100 light-years away, according to an international team of astronomers formally reporting the results in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. A plain-English version appears here.

The dust surrounds a 12-million-year-old star labeled HD172555.

Dust.  The little planet couldn’t get out of the way of the big dude and became dust.  I hope some behemoth isn’t bearing down on our planet right now.

Actually, the article goes on to say planets in our solar system bear evidence of past colisions:

Mercury’s current surface is thought to represent lower layers of what originally was a heftier planet. Venus spins backward compared with other planets. Mars is more heavily cratered in its southern hemisphere than in its northern hemisphere. Uranus got knocked on its side — spinning almost as if it had an east pole and west pole, rather than a north pole and south pole.

Poor Uranus.  Not only is it saddled with a most unfortunate name, but it’s all lopsided too because some big mean planet knocked it over.

All these cosmic collisions make my little life seem remarkably calm and uneventful, even on days when I seem to spin backward.

Health Care Reform On a Napkin

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For those of us who like short and simple, Peter Grier has sifted President Obama’s health care reform down to four points you can write on a napkin.

+ Health Insurance:  You’d have to have it.
+ But the Feds might help you pay for it. 
+ Your employer might have to help out. 
+ Uncle Sam might get into the insurance business. 

The direction of this plan is acceptable — it builds on what we have and seeks to improve it.  It’s more evolution than revolution.

Small government conservatives oppose it, but government outgrew small long ago.  I don’t object to them, though — a democracy needs an opposition party to keep the ruling party honest.

Repeated use of the word reform in this context catches my attention.  The Protestant reformers reformed the church according to scripture, and Catholic reformers according to scripture and tradition.  Today’s health care reformers want to make it available to all, a good goal.

Reform never achieves as much as it advertises — it runs up against the futility built into the structure of things (Rom. 8.20).  But it can achieve something, and this is my hope.

Give me the plan on a napkin, though, so I can understand.

ADDED:  David Lewicki has a thoughtful post on the difficult relationship between theology and health care proposals.  Check it out.

I Was a Male Stripper

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wall switches

Over the winter a pipe burst in the church lounge — water ruined the carpet, and steam damaged the wallpaper.  It took time for the insurance settlement to settle, but once that happened work on the room has progressed.

Last week a crew of volunteers from the congregation began to remove the damaged wallpaper in anticipation of painting.  I assisted them Monday morning.

The secret to stripping off old wallpaper, I learned, is liberal application of fabric softener cut with warm water.  Two spray bottles applied the blue, milky mix, and soon the paper came off.  I must have a gift for this task, other workers said, as huge swaths of the stuff practically fell off the walls into my hands.  (Earlier work had been more laborious.)  Since I’d never peeled wallpaper before, my coworkers concluded this must be one of my hidden talents.

“I should add stripper to my resume,” I said.

“You could be a male stripper — they make more money.”

“I’ll write my autobiography, I Was a Male Stripper.”

Thus my career as a male stripper began at church on a Monday morning.  I’m following the example of the Apostle Paul, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”  Or at least save a lounge.

Nine Blogs

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Nine blogs have joined the CCblogs network I belong to:

Michael K. Marsh, an Episcopal priest in Texas, takes the name Interrupting the Silence from Thomas Keating. Michael seeks “to stand at the intersection of Episcopal breadth and Orthodox depth.”

Along with reflections on spirituality and prayer, Washington State’s Dianna Woolley posts original poetry and collage work. She blogs at Mind Sieve under the name Sunrise Sister.

Virginia’s Jeff Harlow is a United Methodist pastor, university instructor and nonprofit consultant. Unpacking Ideas offers “a self-indulgent conversation about incarnation, grace, and transformational leadership.”

Rachel Hackenberg is a United Church of Christ minister in Pennsylvania. Her blog, Faith and Water, includes a lot of biblical reflections and poetry.

A Minister’s Life is by David Lewicki, a Presbyterian pastor in New York. He includes a wide variety of personal reflections, photographs and interesting links and commentary.

Writer and retired pastor Roger Lovette blogs at Head and Heart. His major concern is “how to do my little part to make the human family what God intended.”

Liberal Christian Commentary is a lectionary blog by West Virginia’s Sea Raven. A consultant for worship, music and the arts, Sea’s primary interest is in creation spirituality.

Josiah Norton is a writer and photographer based in Minneapolis. His blog is called The Phoenix Renovatio, after the early Christian use of the phoenix as a symbol of resurrection.

Page Shelton is a retired Presbyterian pastor. His blog, Salt and Light, focuses on the contrast between “cultural religion” and the biblical witness.

There’s a lot of good religious writing on the Internet, and these sites are examples.  Check them out.