God Is Very Fond of You

The central truth of my childhood and teenage religion was: God is unpleasable. Not that God’s standards were unreasonable. Given all the spiritual aids available to us—the Bible, the writings of Ellen White, the fellowship of the church, prayer, and above all, the powerful working of the Holy Spirit—perfection was obviously possible. But try as I might, I just couldn’t achieve it. My failures displeased God.

Of course, I knew God “loved” me. It’s just that I annoyed him. Embarrassed him. In his role as judge, once probation closed, it would be his job to condemn me.

I knew all the Bible verses that urged obedience and held up perfection as God’s ideal for humanity. How could you argue with that?

The central truth of my adult religion is: God is very fond of me and you.

God the Unpleasable came from my view of myself as a son. Given my bungling, I could not imagine how my father or my Father could be pleased with my performance.

God the Happy One comes from my view of myself as a father. Given my delight in my own children—children who like their father are imperfect—surely the Father of All Love delights even more in his children.

Of course, God’s ideals are exalted. But those ideals are not minimum standards we must reach in order to earn his favor. They are the goals toward which we live. All the while we are bungling toward those ideals, the Heavenly Father is overflowing with affectionate regard for us. For me. For you. And for the people who listen to you preach.

So the next time you have a microphone, tell them: God is very fond of you.

More on the Dirt God

I'm reading a book, Autobiography of a Yogi. It is the first book I've ever read about Hindu spirituality. I am surprised by the points of contact and agreement I find in the book. I am also struck with its emphatic claim that the human story reaches its ultimate end when humans transcend the body and all other material reality.

The Christmas story presents a radically different conception of spirituality: The story of God reaches its climax in God becoming incarnate. God the Spirit reaches "perfection" in uniting with human flesh. At least that is one apparent meaning of the hymns of Revelation 4 and 5.

For Christians, ultimate spiritual life for humans is realized through employing our bodies in service and worship and in knowing ourselves (including our bodies) as beloved by God and others.

For Jesus people, dirt and "spirit" are not opposites. They are not competitors or opponents. Dirt and spirit are complementary elements of a glorious whole. To switch metaphors: You don't "elevate" water by separating it into hydrogen and oxygen. One element is not better than the other. One is not "more essential" to the identity and service of water than the other.

So to be fully human--to live the ideal for which we were created--dirt and spirit cooperate. Changing diapers, having sex, eating food, shoveling snow, painting pictures, crafting stories, cleaning toilets--these are at the very heart of spiritual life. They are spiritual life, for those who are attuned to the purposes of God.

God became dirt in Bethlehem. The story of Christmas is a wonderful invitation to us who naturally dirt to become "divine" through love, worship and service. [I use "divine" here in the sense it is used in Orthodox theology to describe ultimate human development.]

Merry Christmas

Stop US Torture

Torture is morally reprehensible. Our nation ought to unambiguously condemn it and refrain from doing it. Unfortunately during the last eight years people in high positions have not only tolerated it, but encouraged it.

Monte Sahlin has a post on the Spectrum website about action to stop US torture of detainees. You can do something (albeit a very meager something) to stop it by signing a petition urging Mr. Obama to sign an executive order countermanding torture once he's inaugurated as president.

To read Monte's post and to find the petition go to:

http://www.spectrummagazine.org/blog/2008/12/17/adventist_action_against_torture.

Talking about righteousness and theology is worthless unless it leads to action. Please act today.

Preaching without Enthusiasm: And the Dirt-God Showed Up

It was time to preach my Christmas sermon, to give voice to the solar center of the Christian planetary system. It was only the second Sabbath in December, but the third week was our annual Christmas play. The fourth week fell after Christmas, and a young seminarian home for the holidays was scheduled to preach. So December 13 was my time to give voice to central story of our faith, the story of Immanuel, “God here.”

I’m a gospels-centric preacher. Given the choice to preach from the Synoptics or Romans or Revelation or Genesis, I’ll choose the gospels every time. For the last four weeks, I had been preaching through the Book of Revelation (see divinefairytale.blogspot.com) to counteract some of the crazy stuff my members were getting from various Adventist doomsayers. I should have been glad for the chance to again focus our attention on the story that gives meaning to all the other stories we tell, the ultimate mother lode of Christian theology and philosophy. Instead, I dreaded trying to come up with a fresh approach to the familiar story.

Thursday rolled around. I sequestered myself and wrote out another version of the old, old story (thinking of Luke’s introduction: many have undertaken to tell the story). When I was done writing, I had a story with a beginning and end and a bit of plot, but it was nothing to be excited about. I had no sense of a “message from God.” I was going to preach this sermon because that’s my job. I’m paid to stand up on Sabbath morning and tell the story, to voice what “we”–the church--believe. Preaching is not primarily about my story or my faith. So I had a sermon ready–a prosaic recitation featuring angels, Mary, Joseph, some hypothesized helper women, and the shepherds.

Sabbath morning I stood to preach. I began with the Annunciation and suggested it is one thing to believe what an angel has told you. It’s something else altogether to persuade your fiancé it’s the truth. Fortunately another visitation by an angel saves the day. Then there was the trip to Bethlehem. God used taxes to accomplish an essential part of the story. (This was a gentle poke at my members who think the best taxes are none at all.) Then I made up something. If I were Joseph, when Mary went into labor in that stable, I would have dashed out to the inn and begged the inn-keeper’s wife or daughters to come help. Even though the official story says nothing about them, I was sure there had to be some helper women in that stable. Sometimes the most important people are so reliable we fail to notice or mention them. For example, if the mayor of New York City was suddenly incapacitated, it would be weeks before it actually made any difference. But let the garbage men skip two days of trash pickup. It is a catastrophe!

The Christmas story tells us God became dirt. If that wasn’t beneath God, then what makes us think we are above unglamorous, boring service.

We, too, are called to be saviors. Some by changing diapers. Some by research in chemistry or biology that leads to improved well-being for millions.

Whether you are summoned to service by an angel visitor or merely by the “accident” of being born, you are called to join the mission of the Dirt-God, Immanuel.

I was done. The sermon was over. I had told the story with no particular enthusiasm about “the great message” God had given me. No angel choirs had invaded the sanctuary. No shepherds pounded on the door confirming our story. No wise men showed up to pay off the church mortgage.

I walked off the stage into the congregation. People told me what they had gotten from the sermon. Some of what they said I recognized. Some, I didn’t. Some of what they had heard I had intended to say, some had no obvious connection with my intentions.

When everyone was finally gone and the place was quiet, I was aware once more that God had shown up. Not because I had conjured him with my creativity, erudition or piety. I had simply done my job. I told the story. Again.

And the Dirt-God spoke.

Beating the Saints - Or Not

My first sermon, at age fifteen featured "the message to Laodicea. I berated my audience (the congregation I had grown up in), scolding them for their wickedly wimpy commitment to holiness. I had lived with them. I had a teenager's scorn for the compromises they had made with life.

Afterward they offered me kind words, honoring my zeal for God and glossing over my accusations.

My view of preaching has changed. I figure most people come to church painfully aware of their failing. They sit there hoping for hope, thirsting for help.

I could scold the people I preach to. I know them--the husbands and dads with anger problems, the kids and adults who are "using," the women inordinately concerned about decor and decorum, the spendthrifts drowning in frivolously-acquired debt, the fornicators, the pious snobs, unbalanced apocalyticists, the theological nut cases, the blamers and scolds, the doctrinaire Republicans, the chronic users of welfare. I could view their church-going as mere hypocrisy. But when I listen to their stories what I hear is a profound thirst for transformation. They wish they were better. They come to church looking for hope and help.

Maybe they've heard the verse in Isaiah, "You who are thirsty, come." Beating them instead of watering them would be wicked.

So I put my stick away. Plug the holes in my canteen as well as I can, fill it up and step onto the stage to offer hope and help. It's what I would want, if I could sit through a sermon.

What's Going on in the Church?

"John, could we get together this week? I want to find out what's really going on in the church."

The person asking is a friend, a retired military chaplain. Even though he spent most of his professional life serving the spiritual needs of the highly diverse military population, he retains a keen interest in the Adventist system. He figures that I--a current employee and former editor of Adventist Today--have my fingers on the pulse of the denomination.

I don't. And there is an even more significant barrier to our conversation. When Larry says "Church" he means the denominational system--committees, presidents, elections, policies, funding streams, institutions. When I hear "Church," I think of the several hundred people who are in my phone book because of my title, Pastor. People I've done funerals or weddings for. Relatives of church members who once or twice in their lives have needed the services of a clergyman. My wife's horse trainer who feels safer talking to me about "God stuff" than to the priest at the where he's a member. The Church of God pastor working as a hospital chaplain who finds our congregation a safer, sweeter home for his family than the local congregations of his own denomination. The young people who haven't lived here for years, but still count North Hill as their church and me as their pastor when they have need a preacher's word or service.

So, what's going on in the church? Pat's having surgery for cancer today. Gresford, Judith and Tawny are thinking about how to bring the format of our worship service into the third millennium. Dee is planning our late-night Christmas Eve service. Gary and Eric are preparing for baptism. Gary's life is full of problems. Eric's is full of promise. What does baptism mean in those different contexts? Bill wonders how to make sense of "God is love" and the observable "unlove" of the world. Henry is asking what is left to believe in if creation is ancient and the New Testament is not absolutely inerrant. I'm preaching through the book of Revelation, tyring to persuade my congregation it is really about grace and peace instead of doom and plagues. Several women who are relatively new to our congregation are trying to figure out how to break into the cliques of old timers.

What's going on in the church? People are trying to access God's help to deal with alcoholism, marriage, parenting, failing bodies, aging parents, lost jobs, unwanted singleness, depression, in-law troubles, game-addicted children.

I'm paid by the denominational system. My little local community could not exist apart from the institutions and social networks of the denomination. So I owe it respect. But the people in my phone book are so fascinating, so challenging, so all-engrossing that when I'm asked about the church I don't think about Pardon Mwansa, Lowell Cooper, Juan Prestol, Clifford Goldstein, Max Torkelson, Don Schneider, Angel Rodriguez. Instead I see the faces and imagine the stories of a few hundred people near Tacoma, WA.

For me, that's what's going on in the church.

Divine Fairy Tale - One

The Book of Revelation is a divine fairy tale. There's a great king, a noble prince (who rides on a white horse), a beautiful maiden, a great red ravenous dragon and a wicked witch. There's terrible conflict. Evil appears to win. But no worries. The story ends with happily ever after.

Chapter One

The book begins with the blessing: Grace and peace to you. (Note the stark contrast with the message often associated with Revelation: "Watch out! Unimaginable trouble is headed your way.")

Grace and Peace to you. This is the theme of the book. All the mayhem and evil pictured in Revelation is best viewed as evidence that when God speaks of grace and peace, he is not oblivious to the "real world." He speaks grace and peace as bold, almost swaggering contradictions of the "realities" we observe and experience.

The latest news or even our own experience of loss or injustice is not the most authoritative description of reality. Rather, our lives are suffused with the divine intention: Grace and peace. This is the central meaning of Revelation.

This series on Revelation is continued in a separate blog: divinefairytale.blogspot.com

Liberal Adventist Pastor -- What?

I'm a Liberal Adventist Pastor. Which means:

1. I'm happily enmeshed in the glorious, dysfunctional religious family whose demographic center is the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Church is my home, my neighborhood, my tribe, my workplace.

2. I question authority--ecclesiastical authority, religious authority, scientific authority, and even the authority of my own personal experience. Which means it's hard to pin me down. Because what I think today may not be the same as what I thought yesterday or what I'll think tomorrow. I laugh a lot at the pompous declarations of church bureaucrats, liberal religious scholars, conservatives, scientists, Jim Brauer, Richard Dawkins, Clifford Goldstein, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Maxwell. I laugh most heartily and frequently at myself. It seems we humans cannot help pontificating about God or about the impropriety of pontificating about God--which comes to about the same thing. Humans are funny. God must laugh a lot. Not with scorn but with genuine amusement and affection.

3. I have a very high regard for human individuals. In my pastoral practice, my first purpose is to help individuals take the next step in their journey with God. (God made people before he made the Church, so people have priority.)

4. My questioning of all authority (see number 2 above), is balanced by my respect for the community of the church. There is no healthy spiritual life apart from community. Healthy family life is possible only when family members limit themselves for the good of the whole, when they practice the counsel--"in honor preferring one another." This means I respect not only my friends but also those who disagree with me, even those who have sought to have me fired. God speaks through them, too.

5. As someone divinely-called to the pastorate, I am obligated to speak up. But since I question all authority, including the "authority" of my own experience, I don't take my own opinions too seriously. I do take seriously, however, my divine appointment to the pastorate. I was unmistakably called. That calling compels me to speak up. In the tradition of the prophets, I attempt to faithfully voice what I "see." And, as was true of the ancient prophets, sometimes what I see runs contrary to the "received" opinions of the larger community. Anciently and presently it is the community which ultimately rules. But those with a prophetic call are obligated to voice what they see.