Grounded in Abraham

Genesis 17:1-8,15-22 

I have this really beat up Bible that for me has a hugely long story to it. It’s nothing all that special really; it’s not like the Bible stopped a bullet. It’s just a Bible with binding wrapped in duct tape, watermarked pages with curled edges, highlighter and pen marks obscuring things. It’s a Bible that looks probably like Bibles should by the time they are retired to dusty shelves.

 I purchased this particular Bible along with my first school books my first week of college. It lived with me through those college years. Then, it went with me to camp a couple different summers where it was beaten up in every way imaginable by the elements, rambunctious kids and my own propensity for leaving it places it shouldn’t have been. This last week I pulled this old Bible out, having left my newer, crisper Bible at home, and I realized something new about the "old" Bible. My old Bible smells.

It's not a bad smell. In fact, it smells like camp--like northern Idaho. I don’t know if it’s the Ponderosa Pine, Lake Coeur d’Alene or something else, but for me the smell of these pages is indistinguishable from Idaho.

Maybe you’ve heard it said before that smell is our sense tied most directly to memory. We've all had smells that cross our paths and cause our minds to drift to a point in time long ago. This Bible does that me. It is  a touch point to a past that has long since gone away. All I need to do is open the pages and memories flood over me whether I want them to or not.

Now, I can't fault you if you don't see the immediate connections to Abraham, so let me help.

Abraham is a story about telos. Telos is a Greek word which means something like "ultimate purpose.: Up until the Abraham there was no telos to the Biblical story and without a telos there was no arc to history. You see, in order for there to be history there needs to be a reason to remember; there needs to be a goal and groundedness. History is not only recounting things that have happened but placing events into the arc and narrative of a purposeful life. For a long time after the Garden of Eden, people wandered over the face of the earth without a telos. We have stories about Cain and Abel, Noah and his sons, the builders of Babel—all of which lack a sense of ultimate purpose. If you’d never heard the story of the Bible before and you started reading in Genesis 1 by the time you would have come to Abraham you would be wondering what God is doing with these people.

There is no redemption until Abraham. Until Abraham there is no purpose-driven life. Life requires a telos; the ground of which is set when God promises Abraham, #1: the land, and #2: descendents.

Still, I’m assuming it’s not exactly clear what my Bible has to do with that.

Well, here goes...

My old Bible recalls experiences that ground me. In the same way, the promise of land and offspring from God to Abraham ground the Biblical story. Ever since we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, the path that we human beings walked was one of landlessness, without a telos. Abraham changes things or, rather, God changes things through Abraham. We have a purpose; a reason to remember. Our memories recall some part of a greater purpose; our lives mean something not just to us but to the history of the world.

You see, from the moment Abraham was given the land, we were given a place in this world and a reason to remember it. You cannot own the land, but you can be a steward of it. It can—and it will—live in your memory. While it may be our sense of smell that triggers memories, those memories reside in particular places in our memory. You can sell the land that you grew up on, but part of you will continue to live there. That can be a sad and difficult thing, or it can be a moment to experience the widening of our roots; it can in fact be joyful.

Each of us has places we hold dear; places with memories we will never forget. The promise God makes to Abraham is one that is evident every day of our lives. Our places matter. Our world matters. There’s a purpose behind all of creation that drives this life forward. We are not merely people who live on the land; we are people of the land. Adam, the first man, is from the Hebrew “out of the ground.” There’s a reason our memories remain so powerful and it’s not so that we are tortured by our past. We are creatures who remember, because memory and history remind us of our telos. God is redeeming this whole world. He’s been at it since the time of Abraham, and just as surely as Sarah was going to give birth to Isaac, so are we in the labor pains of the new creation, so that whenever anything is lost it will be found again, and when death comes life will have the last word.

5 Things Christians should say

One of the latest trends in the mainline Christian blogosphere is to point out things that Christians shouldn't say: for a well-contrived example see here, or for a worse example see here. There's some good catharsis in pointing out the downright silly things that some people say in the name of Christ, but as with many things it is much easier to tear down than to build up. It's easier to suggest what we shouldn't say but harder to put forward positive suggestions. The danger is that we get to point where we're scared to say anything at all.

I don't always know how to say the things I want to say, even as I feel that accurate language is increasingly critical in these discussions, so I'm hardly the final or preeminent authority on things Christians should say. Nevertheless, I want to at least lead the conversation in that direction. I have some ideas of where to begin. I hope this is not the final word but just the beginning.

5 Things Christians should say

#1: My beliefs matter

I suppose it's possible to hear this as a rejoinder against the beliefs of others, but that is baggage that is implicit nowhere in the statement. It's only when we suggest that our beliefs matter over and against others that we run into trouble. My beliefs matter and so do yours. That's the start to a legitimate conversation. It doesn't put a value judgment on others while at the same time lifting up the value of what I hold dear. On some level, being a Christian is a life-or-death identity. That we can follow Christ and not have it impact every facet of our life may be the surest form of blasphemy. For that reason, the conversation has to begin with the gravity of faith. My beliefs matter--not more than yours, I can't answer that--but to me, yes, they matter dearly.

#2: The greatest power in the world is self-sacrifice


At the heart of the Gospel is this very simple ideology. This is made specific in Christ (which is appropriate since a philosophy alone without a lived reality has no saving power), but unfortunately even the person of Jesus is nowadays an arena of conflict. So, instead of arguing about historical aspects of Jesus--which tend to come down to matters of faith--one practical place to start is with the ultimate value of self-sacrifice. Jesus is crucial (pun intended) to our faith because we believe that he is the son of God. However, my experience is that most people already know that; they might not believe it but they at least know that it is an intrinsic matter of faith to Christians everywhere. What they don't understand is why we would believe that simply on the testimony of the Gospels. They couldn't tell you a single difference between Christian philosophy and Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. It all seems the same. No doubt people have all kinds of reasons for their Christian faith so to sum it up as a matter of philosophy is no doubt oversimplifying and in most cases wrong, but I want to suggest that behind all the glitz and glamour there is a simple notion of self-sacrifice that pervades Christianity. It is not unique to the Christian faith, but Christianity more than any other religion or philosophy demonstrates how a reality drenched in altruism can look and impact the lives of believers. Self-sacrifice is the one power that the world does not understand.

#3: God will redeem all of creation

There's plenty in the Bible about those who will inherit the Kingdom of God and those that won't, which feeds directly into the who's in and who's out debates that make a mockery of the promise of salvation. Yet, for every instance where the Bible seems concerned with "individual salvation" there are countless examples of God moving toward fixing the whole picture; e.g. Romans 8:22-23, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies."

This is not to say that it is unimportant that Christ died for you specifically--in fact, it is somewhere near the heart of the faith--but it is also important that salvation is not only a one way street between you and God distinct from the tree of life from which you were conceived. Whether you want to admit it or not we are all tangled in a web of inter-relationship that extends from our physical self into the lives of others and the natural world. We are impacted both positively and negatively by those who have gone before; not to mention those who have taught and influenced us from birth up through today. We are also impacted by the weather and disease, astronomical features, technological innovation and pollution. The idea that God's redemption stops at the outer edge of my soul is ultimately limiting because it denies the relationships that make me who I am. This wider view of salvation also keeps us from asking impossibly banal questions like, "What happens to a villager in Africa who dies never hearing the Gospel?" We desperately need an expansive vision of God's saving grace that nonetheless refrains from falling into the trap of sweeping generalizations and instead offers redemption that we can experience in our person. Salvation must be both specific and wide-reaching.

#4: Truth is Jesus

Our world is undergoing a philosophical clash perhaps greater than any the past three hundred years. The actors in the debate are modernists and postmodernists, and the nature of the conflict is truth. Modernism asks "What is true?" to which postmodernism replies, "There is no absolute truth." End of discussion. Postmodernists in particular have a problem with the idea of overarching narratives describing the nature of reality, so it should be little surprise that they have a problem with Jesus making the radical claim that he is "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6). Catering to a postmodern world tends to bring Christians down an ever-widening tunnel toward meaninglessness. If a person has decided that there is nothing knit into the fabric of creation that unites our stories, then there really is not much more to say. In the face of nihilism Christians ought to stand up and own truth. What is truth? Not a concept, but a person. What is true? Jesus. Not just in some historical sense but as the very fabric of creation. You see, as Christians we don't simply believe that Jesus is real, but rather we believe something more fascinating and more foundational than that: we believe that Jesus is the key to everything--truly the way to God, the ultimate truth, and in fact life itself. It's a big thing. Seriously. When we talk about truth like it's only a list of historical happenings we limit Jesus. He is truth; the very groundwork of everything we experience in this life. Let's own that.

#5: Tell me about yourself

With all of the above said, it behooves us to remember to listen. I believe we should hold strongly to the convictions we have as if they are the most important things in the universe, but that is no excuse to assert my beliefs as if my point of view is the only one that matters. Listening is a lost art. I find that when I'm confronted with people with whom I disagree--even strongly disagree--I learn far more by listening than I ever do from walking away or talking over them. It's not that they bring me over to their point of view--from my experience that is rare--but I tend to find the reasons why I believe the way that I do in their arguments to the contrary. It's much easier to surround myself with like-minded ideologues who puff me up in the assurance that I know what I'm talking about, but this same crowd tends to discourage critical thinking. How will I ever dive deeper if I know I'm already right? My hope is that you think that you're wrong... or at least acknowledge the possibility. It will not lead you away from faith nearly as often as it will lead you deeper into it. That is a promise.

Our youth are not Babel-ers

One language. One people. One focus. The Tower of Babel starts out sounding like a kind of utopia: everybody working together for a common goal. It seems like an image of the Kingdom of God.

We like the idea of unity. We like coming together to get things done. The idea that we can create something great as a single unified people impacts our politics, our social movements and certainly our churches. Take the Olympics. A couple weeks from now the Summer Olympics will be starting up in London with some 190 countries and thousands of athletes. The event, as always, will be described as a great unifier. We come from one world with one distinct goal in mind. For the Olympics it's to win a medal or simply to represent your country. For political and social movements it may be some concept of world peace. For everyone, it is something bigger than ourselves that achieves greater meaning because of unity of purpose.

There's nothing wrong with world peace or for that matter the idea that we should be a united people, but there is something wrong with the Babel picture. We might not be able to quite put our fingers on it at first because the Babel builders share some of our misconceptions. Our idea of unity is so often not about lifting up the lowly, bringing justice for the oppressed, hope for the hopeless, or peace to the war-torn. Our idealism of unity does not match our expressions of it. We have a Babel problem. We want to climb a tower to heaven to demonstrate our righteousness. We want, in short, to be God.

This might seem like quite a leap, so allow me to illustrate with an example courtesy of our youth. Fifteen of our young people just returned yesterday from a mission trip to Cortez, Colorado where we spent a week working in one of the poorest areas of the United States. Over the course of our time there we encountered heartbreaking situations: kids whose only meal is from the church once a day, homes that looked more like dilapidated trailers, and people impacted by violence, absent families and inadequate education. This was, in every way, a long way from the experiences we have on a daily basis here in the northwest corner of Minnesota.

I found myself wondering what unity looks like in light of that trip and the Tower of Babel. What does it mean to be united with people whose life experiences are so drastically different from our own? What does unity look like between the youth of Kittson County and the kids we met in Cortez?

With hugely apparent social and cultural divides, let me start with what unity does not look like. True unity is not the Tower of Babel. You see, the Tower of Babel starts out looking like a story about uniting together for a common purpose; the exact kind of story that speaks to our inner idealism, but unity without a deeper purpose is finally just shallow. Babel unity looks like trying to become like God--perhaps the shallowest of any endeavor. It is unity in name only, not in purpose.

Babel demonstrates that there is a difference between unity and group-think. To say that we are united does not mean that we think the same way, act the same way, speak the same languages, or have the same or similar life experiences. If so, then our youth and the kids of Cortez would have no hope for unity; a chasm separates our life experience and theirs. But if unity is more than group-think, if it's more than believing the same things or speaking the same language--in short, if unity not only tolerates disagreement but embraces it--then we can be united with people who bear no resemblance to us.

What I saw this past week taught me that this kind of unity is not only possible, in fact it is necessary to embrace one another across those things that divide us. Our youth walked in to a situation they could not have been prepared for and they did the most remarkable of things: they treated kids who looked and sounded nothing like them as if they were the most important people in their lives. They showed love without regard for their own well-being or for what they would get out of it. Our youth had no Babel problem--they had no God complex. Maybe this is why Jesus was adamant that to enter the kingdom of heaven we  would have to become like children. We have to give up our desires for the sake of someone else, and that is something that children excel at far better than the rest of us.

One example: One day at snack time before the kids returned home one of our youth had a young girl on his lap as she was eating her sandwich. The girl was five years old, though she looked more like three and seemed half-likely to be blown away by the first swift breeze. It was obvious enough that she was going without food on a regular basis. So it was important for her, more than anyone else, to have that snack--a peanut butter and jelly sandwich--before heading home. But something remarkable happened during that snack time, something that just doesn't square with our innate sense of self-preservation. That girl, closer to starvation than is fathomable in the developed world, turned to our young man and said, "I'm really hungry but you can have some if you want."

That is the kingdom of God. That is what Jesus would have us see in one another. It looks nothing like Babel, because it is selfless, its intentions are pure. True power is not found in reaching for God. It is not achieved by building a towering city to heaven. It is not becoming more like God. It is not even about doing what is right. True power is giving up your desires for the sake of somebody else, even when your desires are for something as basic as food that would otherwise leave you starving.

This kind of power also flows both ways. Everybody who has ever done mission work knows that often the most profound change happens not in the communities we go into but in us when we depart. That is grace in action. It is why Jesus puts such a high price on humility. It's not about us. It's never been about us. Sometimes it's only when we head off to a strange and distant place that this message is brought home. Our own towers of Babel suddenly start to look just a little self-righteous, and it changes us.

Against Cheating

There are few things in the world I hate more than cheating. I should probably state that forthright. If you cheat, you deserve the punishment that you get. It doesn't matter if you're cheating on your taxes, cheating on your spouse, or cheating on a test; cheating is one of my ultimate pet peeves. Allow me to diverge a bit in order to explain why.

This discussion has to start with how we value personal achievement. Our culture suggests that the most important things in school are grades and test results--particularly ACTs and SATs. The college selection process bears that out, and in some ways this makes a lot of sense. Objective, quantifiable results are much easier to judge en masse than subjective things like letters of recommendation. Those subjective items are often used only to break a tie when the objective results are equitable.

But this doesn't stop in college. We've been trained to achieve quantifiable results and that is precisely how we measure our worth. Work productivity is  measured in ones and zeroes--or dollars and cents. Those who labor count their worth in hours and minutes. Many people have a threshold to exceed, a goal to make. Whether it's in the workplace or in the gym, we often judge ourselves by personal bests, and always seek better, faster results. Games like chess have a numerical rating system. Play better and achieve a higher rating. That's the goal.

However, this obsession with tangible, numerical results has a sinister side.

We're willing to do anything to get those little edges. It starts out with cutting corners. In chess, for example, players may care more for winning than for learning. They may inhibit long-term gains for the sake of short-term successes. Does this sound like a student who works hard for a grade but doesn't care to retain any knowledge?

I thought so.

In the manufacturing world this approach leads to products of lesser standards that can be sold cheaper. It is the principle of "Walmart-ization." It's also cheating ourselves of achieving great things. Each of us can remember the kid in elementary school who was always cheating in gym class. "No, I wasn't tackled. My knee never hit the ground!" It's the same kid who was always claiming he wasn't hit by the dodge ball, the same kid who would claim that he caught the ball that clearly bounced before he could get his hands under it, and often it was the same kid who would look over others' shoulders in class.

We hated that kid, but worse still each of us had moments where we became that kid. I can remember sneaking answers on spelling tests in elementary school because I hated not being perfect. I was learning the great American tradition of cheating.

There have been two sports stories in the news lately that have brought this to mind for me in very different ways. The first happened last week when Joel Peralta, a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays, was ejected from a game for having pine tar inside his glove. For those unfamiliar, pine tar gives the pitcher a sticky grip, which allows for the ball to spin more on release, adding extra movement to pitches. Pine tar is one of several explicitly illegal substances for a pitcher to have on his person when he pitches. So, when the umpires went to inspect Peralta and found he was using the substance he was removed from the game (and later suspended by Major League Baseball). End of story, right? Well, not exactly.

Enter: this clip. The guys you hear whining are television commentators for the Rays, obviously infuriated, but at what? Were they upset that their pitcher had the audacity to cheat? Were they upset that the wool had been pulled over their eyes? Hardly. Their anger was toward the opposing manager, who broke one of baseball's "unwritten" rules and tattled on an opposing player. Now, the thing about unwritten rules is that they are, well, unwritten. The high and mighty attitude that the Rays commentators took is a clear indication of the cheating culture that believes we can do anything we want to gain a little edge, so long as it fits in the "unwritten" rules. Drive five miles an hour over the speed limit? It's an unwritten rule you won't be pulled over. Ask a cop who pulls over somebody going four miles over the speed limit, and they will tell you that the drivers are often indignant that they're doing nothing wrong. They are following an unwritten rule.

Besides being obnoxious, the Rays commentators are also blatantly wrong. Davey Johnson (the opposing team's manager in the Peralta ejection) had every right and, indeed, responsibility to aid his team in winning. Those are the written details of his contract to manage. If he believed Peralta was violating a written rule of the game then he was obligated to follow up on it. Written rules trump unwritten rules, because written rules have been agreed upon by all parties. Cheating is failing to follow a written rule, not an unwritten one. This may seem obvious, but in fact many people in baseball do not believe this. Amazingly, the Rays commentators and manager Joe Maddon were more concerned with who ratted them out than with the actual incident of cheating. They attempted to confuse the issue by leveling blame on Johnson and the Nats coaching staff for violating an unwritten rule of the game. Let me state this plainly: Maddon and the Rays commentators need to be told they are unequivocally wrong. Justifying cheating by attacking the opponent for pointing it out is the true cowardly move.

The second news story is the USADA allegations against Lance Armstrong. This is a complicated issue for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is important to point out that  Armstrong has never failed a drug test as far as we know (conspiracy theories notwithstanding). Secondly, the reality is that Armstrong probably did cheat in an era where a large portion of the peloton (a cycling word for the racers in the pro field) was doing just that. And thirdly, the USADA is hardly blameless in all of this. They seem more interested in condemnation than truth-seeking. A disdain for cheating does not mean we have a witch hunt whenever suspicions are aroused; instead, it means that we seek the truth without wavering. The USADA seems to have no such agenda.

If Armstrong cheated he deserves to have his titles taken away, but unlike Peralta there has been no clear burden of proof leveled against him. Cycling has been a more corrupt sport even than baseball, though just like baseball it has gone a long way to cleaning itself up in the last decade. Again, as in baseball, there have been significant ramifications from doping. The careers of clean athletes have been cut short because of the cheaters. Peoples' livelihoods have suffered. In a sense, cycling has been a microcosm of the cheating mentality in the larger world.

However, we don't solve these problems by making Armstrong a pariah for the doping age in cycling just as Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire are for the doping age in baseball. The significant difference is that nothing has been proven in the case of Armstrong, and the USADA has gone out of its way to subject him to these allegations without releasing any additional evidence. Did Lance cheat? Probably. And in the end it is no real justification that "everyone was doing it." But the burden of proof remains on the accusers, and unlike Peralta there is as yet no proof to speak of.

So what can we learn? Firstly, I wish it were simple enough to say "Don't cheat." You shouldn't, but you have to realize that on your own. The single greatest effect of cheating is that you are minimizing your own accomplishments; you are selling yourself short in a misguided attempt to look better than you are. If you are not proud enough of the true you to face an accurate reflection of yourself then you are already well along the dark path toward self-pity.

My advice is this: Don't sell yourself short by cutting corners. If you're a runner add a couple seconds to your total; don't take them off. If you're a fisherman don't add weight to your fish. If you're a student take pride in the grade you got, not the grade you deserved (they happen to be the same thing anyway). In this life you will have countless opportunities to puff up your chest and follow the "unwritten" rules. Don't. The harder road is the road more worth traveling, because the fruits of your labor on that road will always taste sweeter.

The Christian's guide to fallacy: Episode 1

This series has been a long time coming (and when I say series I mean 1, 2, 7 or 25 posts... I don't know how many, it depends on how many of you read this and suggest that you like it). As a pastor, I cannot tell you how often I hear poor reasoning in my line of work. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that somebody who works frequently at the intersection of religious beliefs and politics in a culture full of internet trolls would run into senseless arguments. However, I am astounded at how often those involved in these conflicts neglect to point out the error in their opponent's argument, instead devolving into petty insults or stammering uncontrollably.

It struck me, finally, that we aren't very well trained in responding to a fallacious argument. We don't know on what grounds something doesn't make sense; we just know we don't like it. So here's my hope with this blog series: I want to demonstrate commonly used fallacies through the lens of arguments I hear directed towards Christians, from Christians or between Christians. These are, in short, the kinds of arguments I hear on a daily basis. In fact, all of them are a version of an argument I have heard at least once. This is one part theology, one part epistemology and one part just plain fun.
NOTE: Definitions for fallacies are taken from several sources, including Wikipedia and Cal-Fullerton.

Fallacious Statement #1: "When the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America passed a resolution allowing homosexual clergy, God sent a tornado to knock the cross off the church across the block."

Response- That is post hoc ergo proctor hoc: Since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one. Please notice that illogical arguments often tend to be bad theology. They assume not only what God does but how to interpret God's will. Is it possible that God acts through the weather to send us a message? Yes, but short of divine explanation we cannot by measure of reason determine what that message is. Remember, the disciples were as close to Jesus as anyone and they never managed to understand what he meant by his parables. Who are you to think you know better? As a pastor at my home church pointed out, maybe God was upset that Central Lutheran wasn't tithing enough.

Fallacious Statement #2: "There are so few youth in church anymore. I am so sad that young people don't believe in God."

Response- That is a hasty generalization, which involves making a hasty conclusion without considering all of the variables. Another, inverse example of this would be: "Young people have such stronger faith than the older folks."

Fallacious statement #3: "I can believe whatever I want because all beliefs are equally valid."

Response- That is an appeal to ignorance, because the statement asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false. This is an awfully tricky one because it rolls both ways. A Christian could say --and we sometimes do--that the burden of proof is on the atheist, which would be equally fallacious. Rather, the key word here is whatever. Not all things are equally true simply because they have yet to be proven false. The triviality of a thing plays an important role, as in Russell's teapot.

Fallacious statement #4: "Either your church is traditional and conservative, in which case you are ignorant and hateful; or your church is free-thinking and liberal, in which case you are no different from an NGO and you don't actually believe anything."

Response- This is a false dilemma (black-and-white or either/or fallacy), which implies that one of two outcomes is inevitable, often citing both as having negative consequences.

Bible Story--Our Story: A Homiletic Intro to the Narrative Lectionary

This Sunday we begin a narrative lectionary that takes us from Genesis through the Gospels and the early church in Acts over the course of the church year. This is achieved by following the whole arc of the biblical narrative rather than piecemeal thematic lessons, as the standard Revised Common Lectionary does. For this reason, this is a bit of an unusual sermon, because the point is neither didactic nor philosophical--at least in its ultimate purpose. Rather, it is an open door into the story; it is an attempt to nudge the congregation into buying into the biblical story as their own. I hope it keeps that door open.

Text: Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17; 3:1-8

Seven days after starting this whole business of creating the universe and understandably tired, God makes an amateur parenting error, which may be excused in part because this is after all the first time God has been a parent. God tells Adam and Eve that they are free to do anything and everything they want... with one exception. As every parent—or in my case, ex-camp counselor—knows, the one way to be absolutely certain of a given outcome is to tell your kids: You can do anything you want except… one thing. God fell right into the trap. 

In the Garden of Eden the guidelines were pretty lax. Adam and Eve could do whatever they pleased with the exception of one very big rule: Don’t eat the fruit of that tree. It’s a strange rule, really. I mean: why have a tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the first place? Why allow for temptation? The simple solution would be to set the tree outside of the garden, make it impossible to reach. The possibility of eating the fruit seems a cruel oversight on God’s part. 

But this does tell us something about God. From the very beginning of the human story we learn that God wants us to experience this life for ourselves. It’s not that God wants us to know good and evil, but God is willing to allow us that choice. He didn’t want us to take the fruit from that tree, but he did not deny us the possibility of going for it. God didn’t stand in our way and stop us from experiencing the thrills and spills of life out here in the “real world.” 

And what’s more, from the very beginning of the human story we learn something fundamental about us: we will reject God’s promises. Given the choice between passivity in the garden and curiosity for the fruit we will take the fruit every time. It is what makes us wonderful and horrible creatures. We are explorers by our very nature; curious and infinitely inventive. There is something profoundly fascinating in human beings. We are hopeful and courageous even when faced with a world lacking hope. All of this is to be commended. It’s not often enough that we take a good long look at the human condition and remark on the miraculousness of it all. We are a piece of work. 

Yet, in talking up our good points a cloud hovers over us. There is something not quite right. Our mortality outs us. God’s warning will become true when Cain strikes down Abel. From the moment we take that fruit, death creeps into the picture. It is a woeful problem with the human condition: it does not last. Even our precious knowledge, our ability to learn, how we advance technologically and have become great by the standards of every temporal creature in the history of the universe, every thing we learn and know is tamed by our mortality and our inadequacy in managing the resources entrusted to us. For all the knowledge and wisdom we possess we only prolong our physical existence by a meager few years, and we never save ourselves in any meaningful sense. We’re magnificent creatures, knowledgeable enough to come to the realization that we can’t fix everything. In fact, we tend to only make it worse. 

We have only ourselves to blame. We take that fruit off of the tree at every opportunity.

This message is a far cry from your standard high school and college graduation speech fare, which tries to tell you that that you are special and wonderful and you are going to change the world. There is some truth in that, though it is a half-truth. You are special and in many ways you will and do change the world, but ultimately you deserve very little of the credit. I am reminded of Yoda in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back when he explains the force to Luke by saying, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”

That is just the problem. We are more than this crude matter, but every time we take the fruit—every time we use our knowledge to justify ourselves—we become trapped in our humanity, because the fruit of knowledge leads us down an infinite road whose only exit is the realization that knowledge alone cannot save us. The only exit from the pursuit of knowledge is the one that leads to Christ. The reason Jesus had to come was not only because some guy named Adam and some woman named Eve ate a fruit off of a tree in the far distant past; the reason Jesus had to come is because we eat the same stinking fruit every day. It is the fruit of self-sufficiency; it is the ego that grows inside of us, and without Jesus it will eat us alive.

The Garden of Eden points out something that should be rather obvious about all of us as human creatures: we are flawed. As far as I know, none of us are going out and shooting 20-under par on the golf course, curing cancer on our lunch break and then writing a symphony before bed. So none of us live up to the expectations set for us when we grasp for that fruit. If the expectations of the tree of knowledge sound patently unfair it is because they are. We were never meant to eat from it; we bring this upon ourselves.

Thankfully, as stories go this is not the end. We have more to the tale than the first four chapters of Genesis. It’s only the beginning. There’s a long road ahead, but the story is worth the price of admission. It’s worth the ups and downs, the meandering in the desert and all the various missteps along the way. The Biblical story is our story, as much as it was ever the story of those who lived long ago. May you begin to see this story as your own. May we remember that a good story requires crisis in the beginning for catharsis in the end.

That’s the biblical story and it's our story.

Temet nosce: A model of self-care for people who work too much

"Remind me not to invest in your company," said my dad to my brother.

My brother, Isaac, works for Northern Tool + Equipment, which is a store that sells basically what you would expect from the name. Isaac works in the business end of Northern Tool and he was explaining how the staff do not allow him (or any of their fellows employees) to work late. They also cut short Fridays--sometimes making it a 5 or 6 hour day. This is a somewhat unusual thing in the working world.

My dad's response, though somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is also a classic comment of the Protestant work ethic that drives Americans to work weeks exceeding 60 or 70 hours. We take pride in the virtue of hard work. But we sometimes, wrongly I believe, equate hard work with long work. I want to point out firstly that my brother's company is not suggesting that quality of work isn't important; in fact, it is quite the opposite. They are strongly suggesting that there needs to be a balance for the best work to be done. Quality of work is not achieved by quantity of hours; instead it is based on the focus, intensity and care taken in the time it takes to get the work done. Product may develop slower but you will get a better product in the end from a well-rested, well-cared-for workforce. That, at least, is the principle behind this model of vocational self-care.

This is particularly apt for pastors, because we work at the intersection of two groups that have a tough time walking away: the self-employed and the service sector. In some sense, pastors are employed (called) by their congregations or their church councils or their larger church bodies, but in the day to day workings of our vocations we are often left to decide how long and how hard we want to do this gig. We also tend to have a bit of a messiah-complex common to those in the service sector, who have most often entered into their particular vocations in order to help people and to make the world a better place. This is a never-ending job and many in these careers treat it as such, never truly walking away from the job.

But we do ourselves a real disservice when we fail to recharge. I could work 70 hours every week. I absolutely could. I don't, because I have enough self-awareness and a spouse who would bash me over the head for doing it, but it is easy enough to drift in that direction. Above the door in my office is a variation on an ancient Latin aphorism that reads simply, "Temet nosce" or "Know thyself." To know yourself is the first step in treating your vocation with the respect and dignity it deserves, which is often to step away from it and recover.

I don't judge my weeks by the hours I work; that simply doesn't work for the kind of vocation I have. I've heard it said that most jobs are task-oriented with relationships embedded; pastors' vocations are relationship-oriented with tasks embedded. For us, counting hours is a challenge. So are boundaries. When I meet a member at the grocery store in one sense I'm not working any more than they are, but in another sense my every word and action is as their pastor. In that way I am very much on the job.

A couple of months after starting my work as pastor I developed a metric to chart my "stresses" and "rests." For the mathematically-challenged, this may not be for you, but I hope you can still see the use in it. It was difficult to tangibly measure what I do, but I think this comes close. I score points for working in the morning, afternoon, or evening, and I also score points for additional stressors: working early or late, funerals and weddings, sudden deaths, short lunches, long drives, leading worship, and having multiple meetings. These are all weighted based on how much of a stress they are to me (each pastor's stresses would inevitably look different). Then, I tally my "rests," which include long lunch breaks, work-outs, and family time; I subtract my rests from my stressors and get a composite score. Any single day could have a score from 0 to... well, a lot. Each week I tally the daily scores and get a composite for the week. If I'm being healthy, I'm in the 8-10.5 range, but I've been as badly over-working as a 14. I've been told by pastor friends who have checked out this same metric that they score well over 16 on a regular basis. This, my friends, is not good.

A sample week of "normal working" for me

All of this is merely to say that it is hard to find balance. I appreciate places like Northern Tool for valuing that. I hope more workplaces do. I should say I have felt nothing but encouragement in this regard from the congregations I serve. Nobody complains when I leave work at 3 in the afternoon to take a long bike ride, go for a run, or get in a round of golf. They know I need it more days than not. Honestly, I rarely stay in the office until 5 because my production wanes more and more and my vocation becomes less and less relational for the sake of greater and more bland tasks. I'd rather re-charge, and I think my congregation would rather I re-charge as well. I already have a job that is difficult to turn off. Why would I spend more time in intentional stress than is necessary?

Why would any of us?