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.

An intro to Revelation

Text: Revelation 1

            I’m going to start today with a bit of a warning and a promise: the warning is that this sermon will be more academic than most—and if you’re my wife who thinks that all my sermons are way academic, then this one may be a little too academic. Hence, the promise: I promise that the rest of the summer will not be just like this week. I think that when introducing something as strange to us, as the book of Revelation is, that I should take some time to explain what it is first. So, I hope you bear with me.

            I’m going to guess that some of you are a little uneasy about a summer full of Revelation. This is, after all, one of the books Martin Luther wanted to cut off the end of the Bible (you know, shake your Bible hard enough and hope those pages at the end just fall off). It’s the stuff we’ve given over to those Left Behind authors and doomsday prophets. That’s their area of interest; not ours. I remember a camp counselor friend of mine leading a devotion from Revelation in which he talked about Satan and the forces of darkness and the battle for sinners’ souls and these kinds of things with 8-12 year olds. I wanted to run and hide. These are the typical things you hear about this book, so I can’t blame you if you’re a little worried that you’ve signed up for a summer full of crazy things here at Grace-Red River

A sermon for the high school graduates of 2013

Text: Galatians 4:1-7

This is a message for graduates… and also for the rest of us who really haven’t ever grown up.

There’s nothing quite like starting out a service celebrating the high school graduates of 2013 with scripture telling us that minors are no better than slaves. Yay! Congrats! You are no longer slaves! Not exactly graduation speech material. Now, I know none of our youth can relate to the feeling of being trapped under the repressive regime of parentage. Our young people are never rebellious against authority; they wouldn’t dream of doing anything they wouldn’t want their parents to know about, and since we all have such brilliant, angelic young men and women from such perfectly well-adjusted families, this scripture really doesn’t speak much to us today.

Right…

Sin that unites us: On race, diversity and oneness in Christ

Text: Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29

            After reading through the Galatians reading for this week I felt the need to take Harvard’s Implicit Assessment Test again. The IAT is something I first learned about in Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled Blink. The test is a measurement of our implicit, often subconscious preferences for certain things over other things. This week I took the race IAT, which compares preferences for skin tones, and I did this because I’ve found it to be the toughest to “pass.” The test is on Harvard’s webpage and it takes about five minutes to do. It is basically a sorting test where you put words and faces into categories as fast as possible. There will be light-skinned faces and dark-skinned faces, positive words and negative words. You start by sorting based on faces only; if it’s a light-skinned face you click one letter; if it’s a dark-skinned face you click a different letter, then you sort terms; “joy” would be a good word, “awful” a bad word; “happy” a good word, “evil” a bad word; and so on. Then (and this is where it gets interesting) the light-skinned face and good words go on one side and the dark-skinned face and bad words on the other, and again you sort them as fast as you can. Then, it flips it around so the dark-skinned face is on the side with the positive words and the light-skinned face with the negative words.

            I have taken this test probably fifty times in the last couple years and I have never once come out anything other than favoring lighter skin tones. I say this as a confession but it is one that I share with everybody else I know who has ever taken the test. In Blink, Gladwell wrote that he, too, had a preference for light-skinned faces even though he is half-black. There are certain things—like racial preference—that are just interwoven parts of who we are. You might be wondering why I go through taking this test at all if all it ever does is convict me, but I think the main reason I do it is to remind me that I am not as fair and unbiased as I sometimes think I am. If you happen to think you are a person without biases I challenge you to try it as well; I think it will be an eye-opening experience.

Faith statements--"Correct" faith or honest doubt?

Our 9th-grade confirmation students have to do faith statements before they are confirmed into the church. I think this is a pretty normal thing--I remember having to do it when I was in confirmation, anyway--and it has been the expectation here from long before I arrived. But today, as I'm reading through drafts that these young men and women have written, I confess I'm not sure I know what to do with them.

It seems to me there are two possibilities. One is to have the students learn the "correct" answers by which I mean the answers that are given by the creeds and the confessions of our church. But then what is the point of an individual statement of faith? It reminds me of classes at the seminary with Dr. Steven Paulson who was adamant in his tests that we write what he taught, not what we believe, because--he often said--"I'm scared of what you believe." However, then these aren't really statements of faith. I may as well have them copy off the creeds.

Option two is that I allow the youth to write whatever they want. Maybe they believe in God as we confess in the creeds; maybe they don't. Maybe they think the church is important for their faith; maybe they don't. That's honest. It's also a real indicator of the church, their families and my own failure to get across what we want to teach to the next generation. However, it's also messy. It's messy because of the difficulty in discerning what to share with the congregation, and what not to, when it comes to confessions that are not in line with what our church believes. It would be one thing if these were statements that stayed between myself and the youth, but it's quite another when these are broadcast in our newsletters.

I struggle with this quite a lot. On the one hand I have in my ear the voice of a member who said, "You can't judge a person's opinion." On the other I have the burden of a tradition to carry on. We're going to talk about this today amongst the ninth-graders. Maybe I'll have some better ideas then, but for now I'm just pondering. Feel free to comment and help me along.

Saul, Paul and the advent of grace

Text: Galatians 2:11-21

I’m going to start today by acknowledging something that we pastor-folk don’t acknowledge enough: Paul’s writings are really hard to digest. Partly, this is because they are difficult to put into a context. Just like Easter is hard to put into context. I’m not talking about Easter Sunday; we all know about Easter Sunday—open tomb, resurrection, something about bunnies and eggs; not a problem. I’m talking about the season of Easter—all that stuff that happens between Easter Sunday and the Ascension. That’s when we get stuff like this from Paul’s letter to the Galatians; stuff that sounds right—talking about justification and faith and grace—but most of the time it goes in one ear and out the other. Mostly, we think the story is over after Easter Sunday.

And, in a way, we’re right: the most important part is over. But the trouble is that there are twenty-three books in the Bible after the Gospels—twenty-three books that contain a good chunk of what we believe about Jesus. The fact that it’s hard for us to figure how Galatians fits into the wider story does not mean it is unimportant. So, here’s the cold, hard truth: we’re going to be in Galatians for the next three weeks, so what I’m going to do today is set the stage for the next two weeks. So, your job, next week and two weeks from now, when the person sitting next to you is looking confused, is to tell them, “Oh, you weren’t here last Sunday—here’s what Galatians is about."

Why we rarely go to church: Pascal's Wager for the modern world

A quote passed through my Facebook feed earlier today that read like this, "I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't // Than to live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is."

This is not exactly a new idea. In the 17th century, the mathematician, philosopher and physicist, Blaise Pascal, basically made the same claim, albeit far more philosophically and far less poetically. He argued for God's existence based on the logic of gain and loss in an argument famously known as Pascal's Wager. Here is his logic, quoted from his work, Pensées, first published in 1669.

1. "God is, or He is not"
2. A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
4. You must wager. (It's not optional.)
5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

My philosophy professor in undergrad explained the wager in a chart that looked something like this: