Big Question #1: Evolution

This year in Confirmation we are talking about big questions. Each week through the winter and spring the students bring their big questions and we have conversations around the running list of really good thoughts and ideas they are wondering about. I do my best to give my answer. Sometimes I preface what I say by adding this is what I believe, or this is my best guess; other times I preface responses by saying this is what Martin Luther said or this is what the Lutheran confessions teach. These are hard questions for a reason: To presume I have some nicely-packaged answer is foolish, though still to say nothing to these questions is to let the loudest voices win the day. So, we tarry on and do our best to address what we may, understanding that this must be done humbly with an awareness that we are not God and, moreover, we don't get to tell God how things are.

With that said, I am going to be writing a long-form response to ten of the very best questions raised by our Confirmation students and posting it to my blog on a regular basis. Each time I will attempt to address first of all what the question is and secondly how, as a Christian, as a pastor, and as a human being I approach these questions. Hopefully, that sets the stage well enough. So, off we go...

Question #1: Can a Christian believe in evolution?

Not you. God.

Job 38:1-11

Not you, Job. God. Not you, Job. God.

This whole Job story has been leading up to a foundational question. “Where were you, Job, when the foundations of the earth were being laid?”

No, really, where were you? Because it sounds like you have all this figured out. It sounds like you think that God is unapproachable and vast and unknowable and that, on the one hand, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away without reason, but, on the other hand, God should look favorably on the righteous. Who are you, Job, that you know these things?

See, the book of Job makes an interesting turn if you thought that this was going to be a book about a moral, upright character showing us how to be good, pious, devoted God-followers. We’ve been told since the beginning that Job is a faithful person; how he is unlike all other people in the world in that he truly puts God first. He goes out of his way to assure he does nothing contrary to God’s will. So, it’s easy to assume that this book was going to tell us about how Job responded to the Satan-caused suffering by being a model of faith—one which we could try to emulate.

That’s where we thought this was going, because, like Job’s friends or, to some extent, Job himself, we are looking for answers to our own questions. Not God’s. Ours.

A failure of creativity

Luke 2:1-20

Human beings tend to have a failure of creativity. It is not remotely the same thing as being too conservative or too liberal, or too young or too old; in fact, part of the issue itself is our tendency to create simple categories for things and for people. No, a failure of creativity is much more significant than that. It’s maybe best illustrated with a few examples.

            The priests and the lawyers who one day met the grown Jesus had a failure of creativity. Hamstrung to their narrow interpretations of the law they were not open to the possibilities that emerged when God came down to earth. Herod also lacked creativity. It was he who ordered the execution of the children of Bethlehem, imagining only one way to be a king, which was to overthrow the kingdoms already established. For the first time with Herod we see what the opposite of creativity is, and that is fear. Fear that manifests itself in prejudice, anger, and hate.

            Creativity is always pitted against fear. This is why, in that most creative of nights when the Son of God entered the world, the angels appear to the shepherds with a word, “Fear not!” Do not be afraid because it is the natural tendency in such times, but rather be open to the presence of God, which will seem scary—very scary, indeed—until you come to understand the depths to which you need this. For Jesus, anything was possible—he was creativity-incarnate; the only time when creator and creation became utterly and indistinguishably one—which is why grace is so utterly astounding. Jesus could have done anything, become anything, achieved anything, and the life he chose above all others was a life directed toward the cross. God chose creativity through death, not apart from it.

The Punctuation of Life

Today I was reading Aviya Kushner's book, The Grammar of God, when I was hit by a rather small thing that I think makes a rather big difference. She was talking about periods. Full stops. Ends of sentences. This paragraph is full of them.

Specifically, she was talking about the way English Bible translations tend to render Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 as separate entities. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void." Period. Full stop. While Jewish translations, echoing longstanding midrash on the Hebrew, sometimes connect the two verses: "When God began to create heaven and earth--the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light" (Jewish Publication Society translation).

This is fascinating for purposes of understanding how grammatical constructs influence our ideas about God, and I commend Kushner's book to everybody's attention for that reason, but there is another reason I am intrigued by this, namely: How we imagine rests and breaks is part and parcel of how we live.

Some people live lives that are run-on sentences, continually moving on to the next thing, never spending more than a comma here or there. Others live from one period to the next; in short, purposeful bursts. I imagine what we consider busy lives to be like this. Every idea must be succinct and, above all, certain. There is no time for waste. So I think it's no surprise that some of the most American of biblical translations start, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Period.

Creation? Done. Orderly. Simple.

I see a lot of fruitless arguments between those who live run-on sentence lives and those who live period lives. For all their effort, they might as well be speaking Hebrew and English back and forth. And it's not as straightforward as suggesting that some people want to keep things simple and others want to dig deeper, because this is not so much about the depth of understanding as it is the culture in which that understanding is lived. A person can know a great deal and prefer to use that depth to come to a full stop conclusion; another is very happy combining ideas into a nexus that seems, to the full-stop person, unnecessarily vague.

The trick doesn't seem to be so much choosing between the two as it is acknowledging that the two exist and figuring out how to meet one another in translation.

I have more thoughts on this, but I have to get back to reading. Maybe another day.

How to read the Bible (courtesy of Genesis 1 and 2)

Genesis 2:4b-24

There are so many different ways to go here with the creation story that it’s hard to pick just one direction. So I’m going to fall back on what I do with this story when teaching Confirmation because I’m sure a few of you could use a refresher back to those days. Creation always comes up when we’re in our Old Testament year, obviously, since it’s the only sensible place a person can start when it comes to the Bible, but it also comes up in our 9^th grade capstone year a couple times when we talk about Heaven, Hell, and New Creation, when we talk about God, the Land, and the Environment, and maybe most importantly when we talk about the Word of God.

            These shouldn’t really be heated verses. Clearly the world was created, surely there was some kind of order to it, and human beings today are this wonderfully complex latest movement in the creation process. But because of how these chapters are read scientists get set against Christians and creationists against just about everybody. We use this chapter in Confirmation to talk about how we read the Bible and why that matters. So, on this Rally Sunday, with new programs starting up and the school year underway, I imagine few better times to talk about how Lutherans read the Bible than today.

            Of course, in saying this I should point out that individual Lutherans read the Bible in all sorts of ways. Moreover, I can’t even say that all Lutheran churches read the Bible in the same way. The Missouri Synod reads it differently than the ELCA, which reads it differently than the LCMC and NALC and all those other initialed churches. If you read the creation stories differently than how I’m talking about today I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m just saying that you might be unorthodox (which some of you would see as a compliment anyway). Today I simply want to illustrate that what many Christians believe to be orthodox (or traditional) is not necessarily what has been orthodox in the Christian church for far longer than they’d imagine.

            Here’s what I mean: When we discuss Genesis 1 and 2 in Confirmation I open up by asking the students how many stories there are of the creation of the world in the Bible. This is universally met by blank stares just like yours right now. For most people it never occurs to them that there could be more than one creation story, because our overriding understanding of Genesis is that it is to be read like a history book. A history book would distill creation to a single unified story by way of retelling, to the best of historian’s knowledge, the way that things happened. No historian worth his or her salt is going to put two accounts side by side with completely different details. But that’s exactly what Genesis does! In fact, it’s the first thing that Genesis does! Immediately after giving us our traditional six day creation with God resting on the seventh day, the book turns to a second account of the creation with things occurring in a completely different order and less emphasis on the chronology but more on the importance of humanity.

On dust and bodily living

Scripture: Matthew 18:1-9

We are people who live in bodies, who move in bodies and experience life through senses that are embodied, and Ash Wednesday is a day to talk about embodied-ness in all its inadequacy. It’s a day to say “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” and to mean it—not only as a potentially depressing reminder of our mortality but also as the foretaste to a promise. You are dust, but dust chosen by God.

            When we talk about bodies in the church it tends to make people uncomfortable, because we all have bodily hang-ups. We can all pretend we have the perfect personality (which we don’t) or the perfect sense of humor (which we don’t), and we can try to fake having the perfect family (which is fooling nobody), but our bodies? We can’t even fool ourselves into thinking those are all that great. Even those among us who might feel they look pretty good, or who train their body to be an athlete, even they need only wait a year or two, a decade or two, and it will start to fall apart. Time makes all of our bodies out for what they really are. You are dust, and to dust you will return. It’s a promise; even if it’s not a very good one.

            So, on the one hand we’re uncomfortable with our bodies because they aren’t as great as we could imagine them being, whether you want to be more attractive or whether you’re just unhealthy and only want to be healthy again. And, on the other hand, we are also uncomfortable with our bodies because we have a tremendous capacity toward bodily guilt. When the typical person thinks about sin they don’t think about it as an orientation away from God. Most people think of sin as a bodily thing; that they have bodily urges that they should act on or not act on, that they have feelings that they can’t control. Even if most of the language of sin that we use in church is about sin in its universal sense, the way we feel sinful is usually in the core of our bodies—again, one might say, in our “embodied-ness.”

Stories, not numbers, on this Christmas Eve

Scripture: Luke 2:1-20

After our Christmas concert at Grace last Sunday afternoon one of the high-schoolers said something to me that has been on my mind this week, and since I have a pulpit and a congregation I’m going to think through it with all of you. She said, “There must be a lot of pressure on you to say something on Christmas Eve that will make all those people come back to church during the rest of the year.”

You can tell a young person said that because she still believes that I have actual power and influence and stuff. It’s cute.

The reason I’m beginning tonight’s sermon with that quote is not to make some of you uncomfortable—well, maybe it’s partially to make some of you uncomfortable—but primarily I want to address it because this attitude that our success or failure as a church is determined by butts in the seats just doesn’t work. Numbers tell a story, just not a very deep one. It’s not data but people that matter, and I worry about some of you not because of the percentage of Sundays you show up in church but because, if I don’t see you very often, I don’t know your story. And I don’t know who does. Do your families? Do you? And I don’t know how the Christmas story matters within the story that is your life. Does it?

And it was "good": A meditation for Good Friday

Scripture: John 19:31-42

            There is no more strangely paradoxical day in our Christian calendar than this Friday that we call “good.” Etymologists will tell you it’s good because it is a lasting vestige of the Old English; a word that once meant “holy.” So, this is “Holy Friday”—and I suppose that makes it more palatable. But I’m thankful that modern English (and the modern church) have held on to this antiquated name, because there is something decidedly good about it. While 99.9% of our lives are spent hiding from death, on this one day death is called “good.” On just this day we admit that maybe death isn’t the end of the world at all—maybe it’s precisely what this world needs.

            “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” says 1 Corinthians 15:26, which happens to have been picked up by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series and is partly why I have it on the tip of my tongue all the time. Well, tonight is the celebration of the beginning of the end of death. It’s not done yet, but death is in its last phase; it’s just barely holding on. But there’s also a sour side to this Good Friday. If what came out of Jesus’ death was good, it was still us that put him to death; it was still human beings in our glorious imperfection. We can’t get away from that. And sure, the last enemy to be destroyed is death, but that also means that death is going to outlast other enemies: poverty, war, prejudice, disdain. It’s awfully nice to know that death is in its own death throes, but it’s less nice to know that it’s still going to outlast us.

This is a sermon on dualism, but I don't use the word so I think we're OK

Scripture: John 6:35-59

            The Jewish leaders in John’s Gospel remind me of those characters from the old Scooby Doo cartoons who nonchalantly appear at the beginning of each episode, but since there are only ever one, or at most two, new characters introduced in an episode it becomes painfully obvious who the bad guy is going to be in the end. Like any good Scooby Doo villain, I can imagine the Jewish temple leaders shaking their head at the end of the Gospel and saying, “And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling Jesus.” (For those of you who think I use too many current pop culture references, understand that everybody in high school has absolutely zero idea what I’m talking about right now)

“The Jews,” as John frequently calls the group of temple leaders who interrogate Jesus, are never going to accept anything divine about Jesus—it’s just not going to happen. He’s going to keep telling them things like “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the light of the world,” or, as we heard with Nicodemus a few weeks back, “I am the Son of Man.” Sorry to ruin the end of the story if you’ve never read John’s Gospel, but “the Jews” are never going to get it. They’re always going to despise that meddling Jesus. And it’s for reasons like the reading we have today.

Why I'm an agrarian (sort of) and what that means

I remember the first hiking trip I ever went on. Actually, it was the second if you count the trip my parents took to the Boundary Waters a few months before I was born, but for some reason that doesn't count. Post-natal, my first hiking trip wasn't until I was in eighth grade and my family went with my aunt, uncle and cousins to the Beartooth Mountains of southern Montana.

I was smitten.

I've always loved the outdoors--fishing, skiing, swimming; all the things that kids do. When I was introduced to camping overnight in a remote, lightly traveled wilderness... well... the rest was history. I found myself in love with nature, and it's a love I carry forward today in many of the same hobbies: fishing, backpacking, canoeing, cycling, running, swimming, and just enjoying the views wherever they may come.

This love of the outdoors led naturally into a passion for what we might term "environmental causes." In college this was a huge thing for me. I worked for Lutherhaven Ministries one summer as a camp counselor and then came back as an off-site trip leader, which was a fantastic synthesis of my passions for God and  the outdoors. Camp reenforced many of my ideologies, and I returned to school passionate for several causes. Like any good environmentalist I despised all the things that led to global warming and I was into organic stuff and all sorts of things. I listened to statistics and became interested in things like the "world hunger problem." I had made the seamless transition from outdoor-lover to environmentalist and I assumed that's where I'd stay.

But I didn't. In fact, I really didn't stay in that camp very long at all, because one day not long after college I came across agrarianism care of Wendell Berry. When I found Berry I realized the nascent doubts I had about these causes. It's not that I felt lied to (full disclosure: I still think global warming, fossil fuel dependency, and world hunger are problems), but I realized that what environmentalism lacked was a coherent vision for improving the situation that didn't involve legislation and buying green foods--both of which felt like cop outs to me. This is because environmentalism is an "-ism" and as such it is concerned with solving for form rather than dealing with the particulars of a local environment. I'll let Berry explain:

Photo credit: Dan Carraco

A typical example of industrial heroism is to found in the present rush of experts to "solve the problem of world hunger"--which is rarely defined except as a "world problem" known, in industrial heroic jargon, as "the world food problematique." As is characteristic of industrial heroism, the professed intention here is entirely salutary: nobody should starve. The trouble is that "world hunger" is not a problem that can be solved by a "world solution." Except in a very limited sense, it is not an industrial problem, and industrial attempts to solve it--such as the "Green Revolution" and "Food for Peace"--have often had grotesque and destructive results. "The problem with world hunger" cannot be solved until it is understood and dealt with by local people as a multitude of local problems of ecology, agriculture, and culture. (Wendell Berry, "The Gift of Good Land")

An Ironic Sermon/Blog Post about the Cheapness of Words

Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-11

            There are many things in life we never fail to undervalue. Among them are natural things—plants and animals; rain and snow—that we take for granted, and then there are personality traits—faithfulness and humility—things that we enjoy in other people but rarely repay in kind—and finally there is something closer to our essence as human beings that we also tend to minimize: our words. One of the great casualties of this busy world with all our talking heads, tomes of print literature, and innumerable websites is the thoughtful word. There are fewer and fewer poets, even as there are more and more bloggers. There are fewer great wordsmiths, even as there are more text messages composed each day than all messages in any format in any year prior to the 20^th century. Anaphorisms like “Talk is cheap” and “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me” are common and accepted.

            In the 21^st century you can say anything and find an audience. The more controversial, the better. The less time you spend considering other opinions, the more response you will get. When it comes to words we have made thoughtfulness and clarity expendable and too often consider the measure of an author her volume and provocativeness. Thoughtfulness doesn’t sell very well anymore, and so all words are cheapened; a casualty of our race to the lowest common denominator.

The power of the "certain place" in fishing, hunting, and worship

Scripture: Genesis 28:10-17

            “Jacob left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set” (Gen 28:10-11).

            When I go fishing there are many things that go into the best kind of fishing spot. We look for rock piles or weed lines or drop offs or saddles between islands—those kinds of things—and we do this because certain species will relate to these features of the lake at certain times. This is what separates an angler who knows what they’re doing from a person who’s out to have a few beers under the guise of fishing. The same principles hold for hunting or wildlife viewing. The good angler or hunter or photographer looks in certain places at certain times with certain conditions, because that’s where the fish or the deer or the wildlife are likely to be.

            This is so commonplace for anglers and hunters that we often fail to consider why the fish or the deer are there in the first place. What is it about this place that attracts them again and again? Probably it has something to do with food and shelter, or something biological that triggers them to return to that spot for mating or spawning purposes. Many of the same fish—and many of the same deer—visit many of the same places again and again so, naturally, it pays to look in those spots first.

New beginnings, nervousness, and God's proclamation that it's all good.

Scripture: Genesis 1:1-2:4a

             

            Last week I preached on the end, so where better to start with this week than the beginning (especially appropriate because this time of year is the beginning of a lot of things: a school year, Sunday School and Confirmation, choirs, sports seasons, you name it)? So, even as the seasons change, the harvest moves forward and the leaves start to turn, this is still very much a time for new beginnings. That can be good news and also bad news, because, even as we are excited by new things, we—human beings—just happen to also be really terrible at new beginnings. Even in the most subtly new situation we revert to our six-year-old self waiting for the bus on the first day of school. Even those of us who love going to school get nervous on the first day; and it's the same thing with a first day on the job, first day of parenthood, first day of retirement. For that matter, it's the same our first time driving a car; first time on a plane; first time ziplining; first time riding a bike; first time holding a baby. Every expert in every field had a first time, though by the time we consider them an expert they have honed their skills and made it look like they have been doing this forever. Of course they haven’t, and, depending on the difficulty of their area of expertise, they were probably darn nervous their first time. This is life.