The rings of grief: Job and Eliphaz

Job 4:1-9

There’s a splendid chart I came across at some point in my life that looks something like this...

 It’s titled “Ring Theory.” There’s an inner circle, small, confined, and then several rings growing further and further out. In the inner circle is the aggrieved or afflicted. This is the person who is affected primarily by a loss. Then a step further out is significant others, parents, siblings and the like. Then a step further is true friends. A step further is colleagues. The last ring is lookie loos, which I think is Australian for people who slow down their cars to check out accidents or something like that. In this chart comfort goes in and on the bottom are the words dump OUT with arrows pointing away.

            The purpose of this chart is to demonstrate the appropriate way that we are to deal with grief in the case of any profound loss—maybe a death or maybe a personal loss of some other kind. The appropriate way to address all grief is inside-out, starting with those most closely affected and moving outward. This might seem obvious, but in subtle ways people do not get this. The principle is that those closest to the loss—a spouse, parents, maybe children—get to share their grief with ALL those further out. And the next ring gets to share their grief with friends and neighbors further out in the circle and so on. But nobody gets to share their grief in the other direction. No true friend gets to lay their emotional burdens on the family; no acquaintance or stranger gets to use an event as an excuse to dump their own issues on friends or family members. We’ve all seen this happen. If you haven’t it might be because you’re the person who does it.

            This is why I’m always nervous opening up the mic at funerals to whomever may come up. Most people who get up to talk at a funeral—90% at least—do a great job of honoring the person who died and they express emotions appropriately without laying their emotional burdens on those closer to the situation, but there’s sometimes that person who stands up and who, for whatever reason, lacks the emotional intelligence to understand on which ring they are standing. It’s a friend or acquaintance who plays up their emotions over those closer to the loss, or it’s even a close friend or extended family member who feels the need to tell the family how they should be feeling.

The one where I get off on a law-gospel kick because it's Romans and I can't help it

 Romans 1:1-17 

“I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish,” says Paul.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

            I have this working thesis about human behavior that we’re OK with admitting we are indebted, but only when we are indebted to people who we like, who inspire us, and who make us look good. And I think this is because we are reflective creatures and we are always crafting stories in our head about who we are and where we fit into the universe, and, when we do that, we decide that if we owe anybody anything at all it is only to people we like and people who improve the story I’m telling. So I owe my teachers, I owe my parents, I owe my pastor, I owe reputable community members A, B, and C. I don’t owe anything to the people who disrespected me, or who were mean to me, or the people who scared me. They owe me (absolutely!) but I don’t owe them a thing.

Paul is that rare breed of person who doesn’t think this way. He doesn’t care to sift through the people that he owes and tell tales of the wise and the prosperous; he owes them all—wise and foolish—and to understand why this is the case = we need to understand Paul, a person who made that dramatic change from killer to preacher. Paul understands that tabulating who owes him is folly compared to the impossible debts he has run up himself. He may have been familiar with that parable Jesus told in Matthew’s Gospel about the slave with the massive debt, freed by his master, who then went out and held a pittance of that debt against another slave down the line. Or if Paul wasn’t familiar he at least got the gist of it from his life experience. Unlike the slave from the parable, Paul understands that he is forgiven such a ridiculous debt that doing his own accounting of others’ debts is just stupid. Paul comes to the radical realization that he cannot be righteous because of the things he has done; that even his ardent beliefs originate not in some good part of his soul still remaining but that they are given to him by God, lest his belief itself become a good work that gets in the way of faith. Instead, Paul comes to understand that he is completely dependent on the grace of God for the salvation that is the only thing that matters.

7 signs you're doing Christianity wrong

It's hard to be a Christian sometimes in this aggravating world that sometimes spits in the face of what you believe. I get that. I struggle, too, with how to live and love God in the best way that I can. I also read what other Christians write, listen to what other Christians say, and reflect on my own presuppositions about the faith, which has led me to this: there are some terrible ways to show your Christian faith and the internet has basically blown all of them up for the world to see.

So, here it is: a non-definitive list of signs that you're not doing this whole "being a Christian" thing very well. I hope it helps.

Seven signs you're doing Christianity wrong

Lutherans are weird

Scripture: Revelation 20:11-15

Being a Lutheran is a strange thing. If you are one you probably know this. We have potlucks and sing German and northern-Europeans hymns; we meet in church buildings with hard-backed pews; we revel in the good ol’ days when confirmation was tougher than school and nobody—and I mean, nobody—dared approach the pastor to ask how he was doing (and it was always a “he”). This is our heritage. It’s very strange, but so are we. Ours is a story of hard work and piety, which is also strange come to think of it, since Lutherans then turn around and preach that nothing we do makes any difference for our salvation.

Weird.

Lutherans live life straddling a barbed-wire fence between grace and good works. Life is much easier if you camp on one side of the fence or the other. One side of the fence is for those who like to demonstrate their faithfulness through action. For these folks, what they do and say defines who they are, demonstrating that they are good people—good Christians. The other side of the fence is for those who believe that God loves them just the way they are, who believe absolutely nothing is required of them, especially when it comes to God’s love and salvation. 99% of the world lives on either side of that fence of good works and grace, but Lutherans are just a little slow. We go out of our way, mind you, to sit on top of the barbed wire, straddling both sides. Culturally we are a people of hard work; theologically we are a people all about grace.

We are so weird.

The Bible: Absolute or Conceptual... or can both be faithful?

First off, I should probably begin by saying this will be nowhere near comprehensive. For a comprehensive reading on the topic of the Bible start with reading the actual thing (crazy, I know) and then move on to everything that has been written about it in the last 2000 years. That should tide you through lunchtime.

The astounding thing I suppose is that Christians still haven't got this whole Bible thing figured out, or at the very least we absolutely do not agree on it. Take this tweet:

Now, let me begin by saying I love that Rachel Held Evans retweeted this without comment. She just put it out there for us to decide. Evans has been in the news lately because of a piece she did for CNN on "Why millenials are leaving the church." Check out the article. It was good, if not exactly earth-shattering. What has been more interesting has been the response: Mainline Protestants hypocritically tooting their horns at the evangelical exodus from the church, others who have engaged Evans' speculation thoughtfully and on point, and then things like the above from within evangelical circles calling out Evans for being unbiblical--or something to that effect.

The surprising theology of happiness

Text: Revelation 3:14-22

            There is a famous 1978 study on the relativity of happiness in which a trio of psychologists set out to discover whether people become happier after they win the lottery. They tested their hypothesis by assessing the happiness of people who win the lottery over time and comparing it with a control group as well as a group of people who lost a limb as the result of an accident. That’s right, the main contrast in this study was between lottery winners and amputees. This research has been repeated a couple of times since with near identical results.

            On the surface this seems like an awfully strange experiment. Not all of us may buy into the idea that money brings happiness but I bet most of us would think: “It can’t hurt!” Either way, given the choice between winning the lottery or losing a limb I’m going to guess we would all make the same choice. And at first the study agreed with our gut instincts. Immediately after winning the lottery people are happier! Surprise, surprise.

The problem is that it doesn’t last.

Creation, the Physical and the Spiritual

Adapted from a devotion for the WELCA Cluster Gathering at Red River Lutheran Church

Saturday, September 29, 2012

1 Corinthians 15:42-49

42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. ⁴³It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. ⁴⁴It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. ⁴⁷The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. ⁴⁸As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Martin Luther loved to talk about the Old Adam--that sinful hanger-on in our lives in this world. This was how he talked about the already-but-not-yet nature of our redemption. It is also an introduction into his idea that we are simultaneously sinner and saint. The Old Adam is our sinful self; the new creation is the side of us drowned in the waters of baptism and raised a new creation. As Luther wrote in the Large Catechism, "These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man."

This is another way to talk about our dualism as creatures both physical and spiritual. However, the language of physical and spiritual is largely misunderstood in our world. The passage above from 1 Corinthians resonates with the modern understanding of the separation of body and spirit (or soul). It's fairly common to think about the body as bad and the spirit as good; that the body is the corrupted part of us that awaits its spiritual redemption when our physical life is over. However, this is a misguided understanding of the whole of the biblical picture, and I believe it is a profound misreading of 1 Corinthians. We are indelibly both: physical and spiritual; bodies and spirits; sinners and saints. I turn to Wendell Berry: 

"I would like to purge my own mind and language of such terms as ‘spiritual,’ ‘physical,’ ‘metaphysical,’ and ‘transcendental’—all of which imply that Creation is divided into ‘levels’ that can readily be peeled apart and judged by human beings. I believe that the Creation is one continuous fabric comprehending simultaneously what we mean by ‘spirit’ and what we mean by ‘matter.’” (“Health is Membership,” 1994).

We have this problem since the fall from Garden of Eden. We think very poorly of our bodies in large part because we think of them as vessels of pleasure whose usefulness will wear out over time. Moreover we consider the pleasure itself to be a sign of sin, and we act as if the only way to control our brokenness is to subdue our physical to the spiritual. This is a hollow dualism. To disconnect our physical selves from our spiritual selves is to perform a lobotomy on our souls.

As Christians we proclaim a bodily resurrection—these bodies but changed. The ultimate physical nature of things will be revealed when the spiritual and the physical are understood as one; only then will the Old Adam dissipate in the face of our true physical/spiritual nature. Our bodies will be demonstrated, finally, to be both spiritual and physical; not one, not the other. This is counter-cultural but it is at the heart of the scriptural witness to resurrection. Matthew Dickerson writes:

"The biblical Christian account of eternal life does not correspond to the popular image of disembodied spirits hovering on clouds. Rather, the Christian idea of eternal life is once again that of embodiment: a life of both body and spirit. The body is important.

Put another way, Christian teaching about the death of the mortal body does not promise that the soul will go to heaven. Rather, the Christian hope given in the Bible is that heaven will come to earth, and the individual will be given a new body—or, perhaps, will be resurrected in a new body. That is, both the created earth and our bodies will be renewed or restored.” (The Mind and the Machine, Brazos Press, 2011)

Shoshone Base Camp--Prichard, Idaho, 2005

We do ourselves a disservice when we divide ourselves into separate natures. We are not souls trapped in bodies. The body isn't sin and the spirit divine. We are one fabric, as Wendell Berry wrote; in fact, all of creation is one fabric. Paul tells us in his letter to the church at Rome that "the whole creation has been groaning in labor 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" (Romans 8:22-23). Dualism does not mean that we are separate parts but in fact that we are wholly one in Christ, redeemed in every facet of our being. Our distinctions between the physical and the spiritual are finally just perceptions of a reality beyond our grasp.

Paul himself seems only to see this in part--his words in 1 Corinthians crash into the words from Romans--so I think we're excused for still wrestling with the implications today. But don't be confused, this is imminently important for how we live. The spiritual and the physical have never been more dissected and separated in any time in history than they are today. I believe we have a calling to point out this divorce and to reclaim our wholeness.

This is neither the start nor the finish, but it's a piece of the puzzle. 

Joseph, the Pit, and Inception

Text: Genesis 37:12-28

           Do you have a younger sibling? Or are you the youngest child in a family? 

Those of you who are older siblings know what I know, which is that this Joseph story was most definitely written by a younger sibling. See, I have a younger brother, so I can imagine what I would feel if he came up to my parents and I one day and said, “Oh, by the way, I had a dream last night, and you were all bowing to me, because—well—I’m going to rule over you.” That would not have gone over well. I can imagine how much worse it would be for eleven brothers—ten of them older—who actually have quite a bit to gain from their father’s favoritism. We older siblings know that if this story was written by one of us Joseph would not have amounted to much.

            What to do with Joseph…

            This is a hard topic for me—perhaps it is for all older siblings—because Joseph earned none of this, and as an older brother I am tempted to play the “That’s not fair!” card on this one. Joseph was the epitome of the spoiled brat, feasting on the riches of his father through no merit of his own. Unlike other Biblical heroes—David, for example—he had no Goliath moment of character. All we know about Joseph is a couple of dreams and, worse still, his exuberance in sharing those dreams with his family. Not only is he brash and arrogant, he is completely unaware of the effect his brashness is likely to have. He is walking on thin ice.

            These dreams are the thing that sets Joseph apart. Analysis and interpretation of dreams has been around since at least the time of Joseph and probably for as long as human beings have dreamt. We have a fascination with this aspect of our subconscious. Are we telling ourselves something? Is something outside of us giving us wisdom? What do dreams mean?

            I can imagine that if I were preaching this sermon sixty years ago I would have talked about Sigmund Freud and his interpretation of dreams, or if I was preaching this forty years ago I would have talked about Carl Jung and his revisions of Freud’s psychology of dreaming, but since this is 2012 I will ditch the psychology and instead interpret Joseph’s dreaming through the only lens that a 26-year-old guy knows—the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception.

For those of you unfamiliar, Inception is a film about invading a person's dream and planting an idea that will ultimately change the course of their lives. One of the questions that the movie raises is: What emotion is so powerful to plant an idea deep enough for it to take hold? Is it personal gain or fear perhaps? No, none of those things emotions will do. The person dreaming rejects these as unrealistic bases for a new idea. Instead, the only emotion that sticks is catharsis. Catharsis combines both reconciliation and forgiveness, which are the only emotions powerful enough to make a person change his course.

            So what does any of this have to do with Joseph?

In these early dreams, Joseph interprets from a point of self-interest. We don’t know if it is God or Joseph’s self-conscious desires that are causing him to dream these dreams, but regardless of their source Joseph sees them as visions of his own future glory. Nobody can mistake his reasons for sharing the dreams with his family. He is setting himself above his clan, but in so doing he is misreading the situation. The vision at the heart of those dreams is one of leadership, but in his excitement to share what he has seen Joseph shows he is not yet fit to be a leader. First, he must fall. Then, there will be the possibility of catharsis before he rises to the place he will one day stand.

            There’s that old saying that pride comes before a fall. That saying may very well originate here, as Joseph quite literally falls into the pit, albeit with a forceful nudge from his brothers. It’s not that his brothers are justified in their actions, though in their situation I probably would have been right there shoving little Joey (I can’t tell you how often I would have sold my brother to some passing Ishmaelites if the opportunity arose). Joseph doesn’t have a voice in this part of the story. We don’t know exactly what is going through his head, but I can imagine this is not what he expected. The dreams of greatness he had were portents of a future beyond his grasp. This was going to be much harder than he could have imagined. It was going to be much harder for the entire family. God had a trajectory in mind for Israel, but it took them much farther astray than anybody could have predicted.

            We have this problem with God’s will. For one, most of us don’t have dreams that depict what the future will hold, or if we do they are muddled visions of a reality we cannot yet discern. There is a real debate among Christians as to whether God has everything planned and whether we have any control over the future. Well, Joseph teaches us quite a lot about what God’s plan looks like. It is never fully crafted, or at the very least it appears to us only dimly. It is never without our input—both positive and negative. God’s plan is not intended for our ill, though ill may come of our response to it. Finally, God’s plan is God’s and not ours.

            I cannot imagine that God, being God and not subject to constraints like time and space, looks at the world like we do. When Joseph dreams these dreams they are visions of a future—yes—but not one that can come to be without the active participation of Joseph, his brothers and his father. Man plans and God laughs—not because God knows every little action that’s going to follow but because God’s view is much wider; ours is one-dimensional. Like Joseph, we interpret things in terms of personal gain. Joseph knew nothing of how to be a leader to his brothers until he was rejected and cast into the pit.

I hope it doesn’t take that kind of betrayal for you to understand your purpose in this life, but some of you have already been down into that pit. You have already had awful things happen to you—some, like Joseph, at the hands of family. You have to fall in order to rise.

            The Joseph story is a story lived out again and again in our lives. First we are prideful and exuberant, then we get shot down; then—slowly and after much backsliding—we discover our purpose in this world. Almost universally, that place in life looks nothing like we imagined it. When his family finally does bow to Joseph it is not in the place or manner he would have supposed. He becomes a leader in Egypt but finally wants nothing more than catharsis for those years gone by.

            We don’t know what we want. That is our fundamental flaw. We think we know—we think we want simple things: money, time, a person or a thing. We think if we have those things then we will be happy, but when we have it all we discover we want more. Soon, we are numb to life, unable to care for the good or the bad. The worst life is the life that no longer values catharsis; the life that learns no lessons from loss; the life that does not care. Catharsis requires loss, then a turning, and finally redemption. It requires falling into the pit. It requires looking deep within ourselves to find the essence of our humanity and turning around. It requires forgiveness.

            May you forgive as you are forgiven; may you find catharsis for all your hurt; and may God lead you in paths you would not have imagined.

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.

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.

The church and marriage, part II

A couple of weeks ago I posted on Roger Williams and the origins of the separation of church and state in America, and in the weeks since this subject has come up more and more as various state amendments have entered the news cycle. Apparently gay marriage is a pretty big deal to a lot of people (who knew?), so it's time to do this all over again from a different perspective. Last time I was concerned about statements the church was making in regards to civil law--both for and against such amendments. This time I want to speak more specifically about the difficulties the church faces when it enters the realm of legalizing morality.

I can imagine one of the disciples--let's say Thomas--hopping in a time machine and speeding almost two thousand years into the future and discovering the world as we see it today. After admiring the remarkable advancements in technology, medicine, the arts and the incredible societal stability we have achieved I'm sure Thomas would be interested in our churches. What, dear friends, are our churches talking about?

Firstly, we talk about Jesus. Well, that's good!

And what are we telling people that Jesus is concerned about? Sex.

Wait, what?

Didn't you know, Thomas? Jesus was really concerned about sex, especially gay sex, and very especially the sanctity of marriage.

Uh... I really don't think...

Shut up, Thomas. I'm telling you about Jesus.
...
If we were to judge by the amount of news coverage and Google hits Leviticus 20:13 gets we may very well conclude that this is very near to the heart of Christianity. According to Rachel Evans, in her blog post "How to win a culture war and lose a generation", 91 percent of non-Christian 16-29 year old young adults' first reaction when asked to describe the church is "anti-homosexual."

Uh oh.

Seriously, if that doesn't make your head spin then you should really go and read that ol' Great Commission one more time (which I assure you is much closer to the heart of the Gospel than Leviticus 20:13). Seriously, people of God, do you not see the problem with what you are doing?

I'm going to spend exactly one paragraph talking about theology here, so if you're not interested continue on. But for the rest of you.... There is this belief among some Christians, largely in America, that the world must be improved gradually through whatever means in order to usher in the reign of Christ. It's called postmillenialism. The idea of a one thousand year waiting period for the coming of the Messiah seems to have everything to do with Revelation 20, but in fact it has more to do with people who care entirely too much about the end of the world and not very much about their neighbors staring them in the face. This allows them to climb their ethical high hills and look down upon all the meager sinners below and condemn them one after another, usually with a single verse of scripture, and usually ignoring the large log-like structure embedded in their own eye.

I can imagine Jesus muttering under his breath, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see', your sin remains" (John 9:41) over and over again.

So here's where we stand, fellow members of the body of Christ. We have essentially gone back in time to find ourselves with the Puritans of 16th and 17th century America in our attempt to institute a theocracy wherein the government enacts the will of God for the sake of the ethical betterment of us all. Sounds great! Well, except for the fact that the people deciding the will of God look decidedly human, and governments that have functioned in the name of God have committed some of history's worst atrocities with seemingly meager rewards.

This is why the church should take its hands off of civil legislation. These bills that make same-sex marriage illegal are abhorrent not because of their theology but because theology is a justification for their existence in the first place. Should our morals govern how we legislate? Absolutely. But Roger Williams understood--and we should remember today--that these morals should never extend over the liberties and freedoms of others.

A final word of appeal to anybody who reads the above and thinks I am some liberal, rainbow-wearing, gay rights activist who is relativizing scripture to my own ends. I claim none of those things. Instead, I am a person who has seen enough people of integrity whose only crime is loving a person in such a way that is deemed "unnatural" by a few passages of scripture. I have spent enough time with them to realize that they are not faking it; they are not somehow denying their true identities and forsaking God's will for their sexuality (as if such a thing exists). The guilt they sometimes feel seems to come from without and not from within--a product of a society that holds to some sexual ideal. Instead, their love seems to me to be the most natural kind. It is simply who they are. And if that very basic premise is true then I can have no ethical qualm against them. And if it's not true then we still have no legal claim against them.

All of this is to say that Thomas would take a good look around and probably shed a tear. When you see Jesus and proclaim "my Lord and my God" certain things just don't matter anymore.

Evolution in Confirmation

Last week at the close of Confirmation I played a game with the kids called "Evolution" that I didn't think much about until, upon hearing the name of the game, a couple of the students said "Oh... we don't believe in that," which kind of stunned me. So, this week we began Confirmation talking about--what else?--evolution, particularly regarding how we might treat science and religion. The conversation was enlightening for me--if perhaps no one else.

It's not that I didn't know there were plenty of people in the church that mistrust science and the theory of evolution specifically, but I just didn't know how widespread it was among these kids. These are children of generally very well-educated parents, who fall (again generally) left of center politically. And these are people who have elected, for one reason or another, to be part of a church with a strong Lutheran theology that values, among other things, education and service of the neighbor. These are not your stereotypical backwards country folk--not at all. And yet, I would guess the majority of the fourteen Confirmation students came in with the impression that you could not trust evolution because of their Christian faith.

The most enlightening comment of all came when one boy said, "I don't believe in evolution." I turned over the giant flip pad on which I was writing and wrote "Believe" in big letters and underlined it. What do you mean by saying you don't believe in evolution? I asked. Is science something in which we have faith? I'm not even certain how one could have faith in a systematic means of experimentation. Science doesn't work off of faith; it bases itself on the scientific method. It is indifferent to matters of belief or opinion. Prove something to be true under closed and repeated experimentation then we can talk, science says.

Our conversation veered eventually to the place where these conversations tend to go--Genesis 1. Although, perhaps the insight that got the most reaction from the group was when I told them that there are in fact two creation accounts--the one we all know in Genesis 1 and then a second in Genesis 2. This information, more than anything else, seemed to get the students to think, and I hope that they thought something like this, "If there are two creation stories, then maybe the purpose of both isn't to tell us the particulars of how God created the world. Maybe instead the purpose was to tell us why life came to be."

For all their bickering, science and faith need each other. I realize that might sound a bit of an overstatement, but I don't think so. We live in a world where you can't get away from technological advancement, where new and better things rule the markets, and where the markets determine in very concrete ways how we live our lives. However, markets are volatile partners with both science and faith. Scientific discovery is valued only when it produces something of economic gain to the system (hence the reason why NASA is on the verge of disappearing from relevancy). Faith is valued only when it provides social service and order to the universe of its constituents. Social stability is key to furthering the economy.

And so, both science and faith are increasingly marginalized. I understand that it often does not feel this way, especially to the scientists among us who see the church as a force constantly opposed to their cause. However, I think we need to draw an important distinction here between faith and church leadership, which is so often led astray by political and personal motivations. God is invoked in the public sphere far more often to give credence to political standing than as an article of faith, and so, advocates for a scientific worldview are forced into a position of arguing against large personalities with opinions that are often obviously wrong. So, scientific and religious leadership trade barbs over issues that are on the surface about protecting their respective causes--scientists seeking to demonstrate the absurdity in the church's rejection of very obvious theories to any observant human being, and religious leaders seeking to hold on to the hardline interpretations of the faith since giving an inch looks like giving up the game entirely--but in reality both have left their respective fields of expertise beyond to enter the fray.

The scientific method, as I understand it, exists to prove prevailing theories wrong. When science talks about theories it is not in the sense that most of us use the word in daily life. A scientific theory is the dominant epistemological result of myriad experiments that have tried to prove it wrong. You can't prove a thing right, but you can prove it wrong. For example, a scientific theory is that the earth orbits around the sun. Is this also a fact? Definitely. But science doesn't work by calling it fact, because that would preclude the possibility for further experimentation. In this way, science remains constantly open-minded. Perhaps we don't correctly understand the particulars of gravity and that orbit, or perhaps (stranger yet) we have everything backwards and the sun does revolve around the earth and all the experimentation has been based on faulty perspective (OK, unlikely, but I'm just saying...). So when scientists get caught up in arguments about faith, they turn to evolution, creation and the miraculous and explain that these demonstrate the absurdity of religious beliefs. But in doing so they've made a logical leap that is not at all in line with scientific reasoning. They can demonstrate rather convincingly the idea of natural selection, and so they can then extrapolate evolution and discount a seven-day creation. This is all well and good, but then the politics take over and too often from those experiments the subject becomes the falsity of faith. Science can faithfully (pun intended) take no such leap.

Faith, on the other hand, has no business rejecting concrete means of explaining the "how" of the world's creation or evolution. Religious leaders, again playing the political game under the guise of protecting their flocks from worldly interpretations, have tied faith into very particular, historical understandings of Biblical texts. Instead of reading Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 and wondering if perhaps scripture itself is telling us that it has no one historical purpose in mind with telling us about creation, too many religious leaders want to hold on to the historicity to the cost of their general credibility. In these moments, they fail at doing theology. The slippery slope to faithlessness and godlessness is a falsity that too many leaders cling to on both sides of the science-faith divide.

So here's the problem, people of faith and people of science, you have created a divide that tells my Confirmation kids that they have to choose sides. They need to believe in God or the scientific method. They need to reject their science teachers or their pastors out of hand. They need to defend every inch of their territory against any possibility that incredibility seeps in. And in doing so, they have partitioned their lives into black and white, right and wrong, true and false, faithful and unfaithful--lines that do nobody any good.

Congrats. You have done this.

Now, let's start untangling this mess.

The Dark Church Rises: A sermon on Jesus and the temple

A sermon preached today on John 2:13-22

We make a series of assumptions when we read the story of Jesus throwing the moneychangers and the other merchants out of the temple. #1) we assume that Jesus must hate the market. That’s not exactly true. He just didn’t want it in the temple. #2) we assume that the modern-day equivalent of the temple is our church building, which leads to #3, which is that we moralize the story and make it into rules about what can and cannot happen in the church building. Our big assumptions are built on the premise that our church building is the temple. In this way we make the same assumption as the Jewish temple leaders. However, the temple, as Jesus tries to tell the temple leaders, is Jesus himself. He is going to die and rise in three days; not the temple building.

The moral of the story is not to keep the building holy. The moral of the story is get rid of the impediments to seeing Jesus in the building! Yes, if you are putting monetary gain before God then you have things backwards, but not because the church building is somehow more worthy of reverence; we don’t worship the building, we worship Jesus Christ.

The question this text is begging is “Do our buildings and history matter more to us than Jesus.”

I’m a history person. I minored in it in undergrad, and American history is one of my favorite subjects to read. So, naturally, I understand it is critical that we learn from the past in order that we might build upon the work of those who have gone before. This is what the church should do. But somewhere along the line we began to value our history and tradition with far more reverence than we should. We began to think that the most important thing for the church was to leave a legacy, so that in 100 or 200 years somebody would read our names in a book. Our mission became about legacy rather than proclamation.

A bishop I know once visited a church that was struggling to survive financially and he asked what they would like people to say about their church. A lady stood up and said, “We want people to say that we were good and that we were here a long time.” That’s not a mission statement, the bishop said, that’s an epitaph.

This is a challenge facing every church in every mainline denomination. We have a history that is so important to us that—like the Jews in the temple—we risk losing the centrality of Jesus Christ. It’s not that we’re selling trinkets out in the halls; instead, we are living out traditions that matter more to us than our mission to spread the gospel.

The metaphor for the church that keeps coming back to me is that of a forest. A healthy forest has some old growth and some new growth; it has portions that have burned recently and other portions that have not seen fire in as long as anybody can remember. A healthy forest is rich in diversity and embraces the death of some of its parts because death is the only way to bring about new life.

Like churches, forests are also chronically mismanaged. For example, it was the standing position of the US Forest Service up through around the time of World War II to fight all wildfires that affected forest land. This was a policy borne out of the notion that fire threatened life; first the forests, then the animals and plants, and finally us. The forest service was ruthlessly efficient at putting out fires, because few people stopped to ask the question, “Could fire be a good thing?”

As it turns out, fire can be good. Forests had survived for millions of years without humans keeping them from burning, and in fact most forests depend on burning every once in a while for new growth to appear. Fire destroys but then it brings new life. It’s not simply the case that life will triumph one way or another. The US Forest Service discovered in the 50’s and 60’s that forests filled with old trees were effectively dying because there was no vitality to the life of the forest. Moreover, when there was a fire all those old stands of trees and deadfall created blazes of a size previously unfathomable. The old trees were gorgeous and impressive things, but when the old trees were all that there was the whole forest burned.

Christianity in America is filled with old trees. If we’re not careful, we are going to reach a point where the whole framework of American Christianity is going to be so saturated with our culture of self-sufficiency and greed that the traditions as we know them are going to burn to the ground. Now, when I say old trees please don’t hear old people. What I mean by old trees are churches that are always looking inward and backward—churches where you hear more about traditions than about faith. It’s a great thing to value history, just as it’s a great thing to value a tree. But there comes a point when we are no longer capable of doing anything presently because we are so handicapped by our past. When that happens, we risk letting it all burn: the past, the present and ultimately the future. If there’s no vitality in the church today; then there will be nobody tomorrow to remember how it had been.

Forests teach us that vitality requires death. And as Lutherans, we should already know this, because it is the same thing we hear in our baptism. We are drowned in the waters before we rise again. But—now here’s the challenging part—your baptism is not just a piece of history. It is a living promise made to you every day of your life. When the Holy Spirit was given to you in baptism you were put to death before you ever could rise. We live in an extreme makeover culture that wants to make every imperfection better. Baptism is the opposite of an extreme makeover; it is death and resurrection.  We need to remember that every day of our lives. We need to throw off the pretension of self-importance we carry with us, and that requires experiencing our baptism every day—dying to ourselves so that we can live with Christ.

This week somebody told me that death is hard. But I think that’s wrong. Death is easy; dying is hard. Because dying is holding out the hope for an extreme makeover; death is accepting that all we have left is resurrection.

Dying is holding on when the usefulness of a thing has passed. So many of our little desires in life are dying and we put them on ventilators, as if hoping to wring every little last bit of life out of them, when we should be putting them to death. You can’t remember—you can’t honor—a thing until it’s gone. It’s why Alzheimer’s is perhaps the cruelest disease. It delays death and in its place we have dying. Many of you know that my grandma recently died after a long progression of Alzheimer’s, and while I am incredibly thankful for all the cards, thoughts and prayers I want you to know this. Death is easy. The dying was hard. Whether it’s a church, your body, your money, your grandma, or a forest, death is not something to fear. Death is a precursor to resurrection. Nothing more.

And if we are afraid to say that, then there’s nothing more to do. Then we’re dying. We’re the old growth, standing tall in the forest, proudly showing for all the world the history embedded in every ring in our trunk. But nobody cares. They’re all old trees, slowly dying; they’re all turned in on themselves. And the fire is coming—one way or another. Eventually, everything turns to dust.

So what do we do? Do we hold on harder to our history and traditions? Do we go the other direction and try to assimilate to the dominant cultural messages of our day?

Neither! Instead we do the most countercultural thing of all. We stare down death; and say, “Is that all you’ve got? Because I have a promise bigger than death; a promise, in fact, that I have experienced when my sinful self was drowned in baptism. It’s done. I have died to sin, and it is with Christ that I rise again.”

To be faithful, every day we must die to ourselves, not as some melancholy ritual but because it is the only thing that will not disappoint us. We will fall short of the glory of God on our own; so it is time that the church of all places stops trying to reach that glory. This is countercultural, and being countercultural is the only hope that our church has.

You see, when a healthy forest burns it just a little death; at the end of our lives when we take our last breath it is just a little death; and when our church looks different than it once had it is just a little death.

And then we rise.

Amen.

Carnegie and Notorious B.I.G. meet Lazarus and the rich man

"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." -Andrew Carnegie, in "Wealth," 1889.

Andrew Carnegie

As I'm reading up for Confirmation today, I ran across this Carnegie quote, which the Here We Stand curriculum uses in its deep prep for the story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31). Taken on its own, this is a remarkable call to the aid of the neighbor. Taken in terms of stories like the one from Luke's 16th chapter this is poignant advice for the eschaton.

Unfortunately, the HWS curriculum goes on to talk about how the ELCA lives into this kind of practice through its many umbrella programs and agencies. Fair enough, but let's try not to make this abhorrently self-aggrandizing now. I don't think Carnegie would pat us on the back for our menial efforts and, to that point, I doubt that Luke would say we have given away nearly enough. But even more infuriating is that the curriculum poses exactly the question that young people have, namely "Does this story mean that all rich and powerful people go to hell?" And then it doesn't even attempt to offer an answer... or better yet a promise. Instead, the apparent goal is to get youth to see that life is unfair but it evens out in the end.

Is that really what Jesus is all about?

In some sense I think you can get this idea from scripture, e.g. "Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain" (Isaiah 40:4), and "‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God'" (Matthew 19:23-24). However, both are rather piecemeal understandings of the promise. Yes, wealth is a detriment to faith; it's not hard to see the reasons why. The more stuff we have, the easier it is to set that stuff up on our altars before God. But God isn't exactly deterred by the stuff we throw in his way. The Matthew snippet above is often given without the oh-so-important exchange that follows:

"When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible'"(Matthew 19:25-26).

The problem with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is that it pushes punishment and reward into the eschaton. This seems, at first, to be a rather fair way to deal with sin in the grand scheme of things. A life full of misdeed equals eternal punishment; a life full of poverty equals eternal life. Everything balances out in the end. And yet, Matthew 19 illustrates that we are all rich... and poor. Few, if any of us, are so easily categorized. This is, by the way, one of the problems with movements like Occupy that suggest we are the 99%. Sure, but you're also the 1% compared to children in Uganda or rice paddy workers in south China. Do you really want to play that game with Jesus?

Wealth as pathology

Perhaps the greatest lie we tell ourselves is that wealth is honorable, and that it is a symbol of security for those we love. In truth, it is a status symbol that speaks a constant word of self-importance that runs contrary to the heart of everything that Jesus is after. Money itself is neutral, but in its accumulation we ascribe meaning to the money itself. At a certain point it goes beyond dollars in your pocket and becomes "wealth."

If you watch the news it should be clear that wealth (and the fame that precedes or follows it) is more pathology than blessing. Whitney Houston is another in a long string of people who "had it all" only to realize that "it all" feels a lot like a crushing weight of depression and purposelessness soothed only by more of the very things that cause the disease. Wealth is a burden not only because it is deserving of far-off punishment, but primarily because it harms our relationships--the things that ultimately matter most to us--today.

So, instead of speaking in terms of ultimate justice, as if God is going to balance the scales in the end so that poor people experience material wealth and rich people experience material poverty, we should heed the words that Jesus gives us immediately before the rich man and Lazarus account:

"The law and the prophets were in effect until John came; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone is constrained to enter" (Luke 16:16, my translation).

The good news of the kingdom is that security blankets are unnecessary; in fact, they are things that must be shed before Christ. In this light, the parable is not so much about the rich man getting what he deserves, as it is a cautionary tale to strip away those things keeping us from fulfillment in both the future and the present.

As the wise prophet, Notorious B.I.G., once said, "Mo' money; mo' problems." In one area at least, he and Carnegie are strikingly alike.

The "Afterlife": An Exercise in Self-Interest

I've been inspired lately by an article in Christianity Today by Russell Moore, entitled A Purpose-Driven Cosmos: Why Jesus Doesn't Promise Us an 'Afterlife'. To my mind, this gets to the heart of the Christian faith in a way that most Christian theologians, for whatever reason, seem incapable of doing. We get so caught up in minutiae that we forget how to sum it all up. If I asked many pastors or other educated Christian believers what the summation of the Gospel is I suspect I would get a lot of answers ranging from "God loves you" to "Jesus Christ died for you" to "Jesus defeated sin" ad infinitum. All of these are true, but is that really the simplest form of the Gospel?

Moore suggest 'no' and I'm finding I agree.

Is it really for you?
 
In the Lutheran tradition, we get caught up in the proclamation of the "for you," which is often couched in phrases like "Jesus Christ died for you" and The body of Christ given for you." In fact, many of us were taught that these are the most important words to get across in proclaiming the Gospel. It was drilled into us that the reason we need to emphasize the individual is to avoid generalities. We were supposed to make the message memorable and above all specific. However, in making the Gospel promise particular we have channeled our inner Nietzsche and conceived it in terms of self-interest.

I can see the point; in fact, until I read Moore's article I was right in that camp. I never stopped to think that in our rush to make the message specific to the individual who hears it we might in fact be distorting the subject of the message itself. Most Christians of any persuasion would probably agree that the Gospel centers on Jesus and is not primarily about us, and yet most Christians would also then go about proclaiming Christ in terms that steer us toward an individual concept of salvation.

Heaven is... not for real?

This is lived out in the way that we talk about death and the "afterlife." If you polled people in the church about what they believe is awaiting them personally after death I believe you would get a pretty universal result across denominations and traditions. Some far-left groups might not believe in any afterlife, while some far-right groups might believe that they will be the only ones in an afterlife; but most everybody else will probably fall into the camp of those who believe that they are heading directly to heaven, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200. End of story.

Now, I'm not dumb enough to ever suggest to a family in the midst of grief over loss that their family member isn't in heaven straight away, but in the relative safety of this blog--and with readers who are hopefully at least a degree removed from that kind of grief--let me be frank: the Christian tradition does not proclaim that death is followed by heaven. The "afterlife" is not a second life at all. Here, Moore says it so much better than I could, so I leave it to him:

Perhaps we dread death less from fear than from boredom, thinking the life to come will be an endless postlude to where the action really happens. This is betrayed in how we speak about the "afterlife": it happens after we've lived our lives. The kingdom, then, is like a high-school reunion in which middle-aged people stand around and remember the "good old days." But Jesus doesn't promise an "afterlife." He promises us life—and that everlasting. Your eternity is no more about looking back to this span of time than your life now is about reflecting on kindergarten. 

So what is life everlasting? It's all about resurrection in Christ, death and new life; not death and heaven. Finally, this takes us back to what should have been our primary proclamation all along, and that is Jesus Christ as the entirety of God's purpose for the universe. Jesus Christ did not come to bring us into some divine postlude. He came to give substance to the shadow that is creation without him. Everything, therefore, is Christ-drenched and therefore on the path to being redeemed and re-made in the end as a creation that is only the logical conclusion to our earlier life. So, it's OK to realize that Jesus Christ died for you, as long as you also realize that this does not make you uniquely special.

True second-article Christianity
 
I know some of my Lutheran friends to whom I recommended Moore's article have found some joy in the line: "For too long, we've called unbelievers to "invite Jesus into your life." Jesus doesn't want to be in your life. Your life's a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life." And for good reason, this is simply a great way to say what should be obvious enough. But I fear that in finding the brilliance in this statement we've excluded ourselves from its implications. This is a direct assault on the for you. Jesus isn't entering your life when you commune; he isn't coming to you in the proclamation of the Gospel. He's calling you into himself; he's calling you into the grand purpose for all of creation. Lutherans are so scared of this kind of language that I'm certain I am raising their blood to a boil. I can hear you thinking, perhaps screaming aloud: Works righteousness! Works righteousness!

Shh... sit down. Be quiet. And listen.

The call language has nothing to do with our ability or capability of actively accepting Christ. Nothing. Faith remains not ours to earn. It is in some sense a gift, though I find the language of gift somewhat unsatisfactory because it suggests again, however implicitly, that is about us. If only we had a metaphor for grace that centers not on our reward but on the one through whom it comes (Ten points to whoever comes up with that one!). Until then, our challenge is a simple one: Stop thinking that the Gospel message is purposed for your benefit. Get over the "afterlife." You won't be able to stop making it about you. Instead, see Jesus again as the "firstborn from the dead" (Colossians 1:18); the new creation manifest; the purpose for the cosmos. That is the promise. The rest is fluff.