Phoenix Affirmations #10

10. Claiming the sacredness of both our minds and our hearts, recognizing that faith and science, doubt and belief serve the pursuit of truth;
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If you haven't seen one of these before, the Phoenix Affirmations are a group of 12 ideas that help to define progressive Christianity.

Number 10 is one that still makes the news from time to time. The most recent thing I've seen about it was when Bill Nye, the Science Guy was booed at a lecture in Waco Texas. Nye had pointed out the fallacy of a strictly literalist interpretation of the Bible. He quoted Genesis 1:16 which reads, "God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars." Then pointed out that the moon isn't actually a light, merely a reflector of the sun's light. This angered several audience members who booed and some even walked out.

I'm not aware of any church that actually teaches that the moon generates its own light, but Nye's point is a good one. He's essentially saying that it's not a good practice to try and deduce the rules of physics from the study of scripture. That's the kind of thinking that caused Galileo trouble for saying the earth orbits the sun, and Charles Darwin trouble for suggesting that life evolved over time rather than being simultaneously created.

While there have been, and still are, some scientists who tout their discoveries as proof that God does not exist, they have always been a minority. Most physicists, biologists, geologists, etc. have no interest in trying to disprove God; they simply want to understand the natural world as best they are able. In their studies they have opened up insights about the universe that fill us with wonder and awe.

That's not something that people of faith should feel threatened by, and many of us are not. We understand that scripture deals with the 'who' of creation, and is not particularly concerned with the 'how'. Science, on the other hand, is not competent to say anything much about God, but is ideally suited for looking at the 'how' of creation.

Science vs. religion is an old argument, but it's one that has never made sense. Human beings have been given several very useful tools to understand the world. Some questions are best answered with scientific thought and others by faith. It's not a case of one approach being right and the other wrong. Both are essential parts of being human and we should fund ways to cultivate both in our lives.

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." Albert Einstein

Phoenix Affirmations #9

9. Basing our lives on the faith that, in Christ, all things are made new, and that we, and all people, are loved beyond our wildest imagination – for eternity;

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It's been a while since I did one of these. If you're coming across this late, the Phoenix Affirmations are a collection of statements that attempt to define what progressive Christianity is. I've been going through them one by one so my comments on 1-8 can be found earlier on the blog, or there is a study guide here.

This is a simple affirmation: God loves people.

That's an interesting statement as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does. It doesn't say any of these things:
- God loves some people, but hates others.
- God loves all people, but loves some more than others.
- God loves good people, but has a different attitude toward bad people.
- God loves believers, but has a different attitude toward non-believers.

You can find Christians who believe any of these statements. You can even find passages in the bible to support them. There are a lot of rules about what a person has to do or not do in order to be acceptable in God's sight. But the overwhelming motion of scripture is that God will break any of these rules out of love for us.

The Old Testament prophets are not considered a very 'touchy-feely' group of people. They appeared at a time when Israel was fragmented into two kingdoms, Israel, and the southern kingdom of Judah. This is a time when there was a great deal of social injustice as the wealthy and powerful took advantage of the poor and helpless. This was also a time when the people, and even the leaders, were attracted to worshipping the gods of the neighboring nations.

The prophets challenged both of these things. They told the people that, if things didn't change, God would turn away from them for all time and their enemies would overcome them. The people didn't stop and their enemies did overcome them. The Assyrian Empire destroyed the kingdom of Israel and its people were lost to history. The kingdom of Judah struggled on for a time before it was overwhelmed by the Babylonian Empire.

The message of the prophets--the word of God--had been that this would be the end. God had promised that it was over and the honor of God depended on keeping his word. Yet, as the people lived in exile, a new message came to them. God still loved them, God was always with them, and there was still hope for the future. The love of God was so great that it was willing to do things that broke the rules. God was willing to set aside his honor for the sake of love.

You see something similar in the life of Jesus. The scribes and Pharisees believed in the idea that God loved some people (those who were ritually clean and kept the Law of Moses), but not others (foreigners, people who didn't keep ritually clean, the mentally and physically ill or handicapped, etc). But Jesus reached out to these people, touching, teaching, welcoming. His whole life, and his death and resurrection for that matter, were about tearing down the barriers that kept people form a faithful relationship with God or loving relationships with each other.

God loves people--not some people, but all people.

There are two implications for us. The first is that we ought to love others as God does. We ought to love others as ourselves, without judgment or splitting humanity into several categories. We ought to simply love.

The second is to remember that, no matter what, God loves us. No matter how bad we may feel about ourselves and the things happening in our lives, God still loves us and longs to heal the broken parts of our lives.

Isaiah said it better than I can so I'll close this with a favorite passage:

"Can a mother forget the infant at her breast,
walk away from the baby she bore?
But even if mothers forget,
I'd never forget you—never.
Look, I've written your names on the backs of my hands. (Isaiah 49:15-16)

Statisticians and Islam

"There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians."

The quote is attributed to Mark Twain (or sometimes to Benjamin Disraeli) and expresses the fact that numbers can be put to all kinds of uses. While statistics can be used responsibly, all too often they are used to confuse, frighten or manipulate.

Case in point, this showed up in my e-mail recently.



The movie, complete with scary music, warns that a declining birthrate in Europe and the U.S. and the current rate of immigration will transform Europe in the near future into a series of nations with Muslim majorities. This is an extremely dubious claim (as the good folks at Snopes.com demonstrate in this article, and it's followed by even more bizarre assertions such as this:

"By 2027, 1 in 5 Frenchmen will be a Muslim. In just 39 years, France will be an Islamic republic."

When you stop to think about it, this doesn't make much sense. Even in the unlikely event that France was to gain a Muslim majority, that would not make it an Islamic Republic. There are a few states in the world right now, including Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Mauritania that call themselves that. Most Islamic majority nations use different forms of government and some, like Turkey, have completely secular governments.

The video implies that all Muslims are to be feared, that they are out to overrun the western world and do away with Christianity. You can tell it's reaching when it quotes Muammar al-Gaddafi to make the point. He doesn't speak for all Muslims or even all Libyans by any stretch of the imagination. He's a publicity hungry petty dictator known for making unreliable grand statements.

Muslims are no more a single group, united in their opinions than Christians are. They are part of a diverse world religion with some fanatics but a majority of decent, ordinary people. While there are certainly changes coming in the world (aren't they always?) and challenges to face learning to live with each other (again, this is nothing new) the kind of paranoid fear the video promotes is not going to help anyone.

Phoenix Affirmations #8

8. Walking humbly with God, acknowledging our own shortcomings while honestly seeking to understand and call forth the best in others, including those who consider us their enemies;
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This one seems simple (though anytime I say that I end out writing more). The first part of the affirmation grows out of a familiar scripture:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)

Humility has a bit of a bad rap in our culture, which is largely the fault of Christian preaching. In an attempt to avoid destructive pride, some teach that we should go through life thinking of ourselves as loathsome, worthless sinners who can accomplish nothing good.

That is messed up thinking, and a far cry from true humility.

I ran across a great insight in the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER years ago. It said that the person who believes they are useless, worthless and ruins every thing they touch is suffering from pride as much the egotist. Both are completely unrealistic, and thoroughly self-centered ways of viewing life. Whether we try to put ourselves above everyone else, or beneath them, we're shutting ourselves away from any kind of healthy and loving relationships.

True humility takes down the barriers that false self-images raise up. Humility comes when you see yourself as you are, with all of your virtues and flaws. It comes when you understand that you are human, just like everyone else and it frees you to love others without judgment.

Which brings us to the second part of the Affirmation. This one is also based in a well-loved scripture.

You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. (Matthew 5:43-47)

Loving a stranger is hard work, let alone loving an enemy. Freud once wrote that love should be confined for those people we consider worthy (I need to blog about that quote someday. For now, I'll just say the man had issues.)

Freud's idea fits with what seems the most common sense approach. We love people when we're going to get something out of it. Loving those who don't love you is a waste of energy, and loving those who hate you is just asking for trouble.

But that assumption doesn't take the power of love seriously. I read several years ago about a young man who, driving drunk, had killed a family's teenaged daughter. No one would have blamed the family if they had hated him and petitioned the court for the harshest possible sentence. Instead they got to know him, visited him in jail, pleaded for leniency in his sentencing, and took him in when he was released from prison. His life was changed by the power of their forgiveness. and so were the lives of the family. They said that reaching out as they did helped to make their daughter's death bearable.

Loving others, strangers, enemies, is the hardest challenge that God puts before us. It is difficult and dangerous, but it is also the only thing that can transform the world.

Aaargh!

I saw a comment by an old friend named Erik Kniffen but, when I tried to publish it, it disappeared!

I am a techno-dummy. :(

Erik, please comment again.

The Hermeneutics of the Stop Sign

this is something that's been floating around the internet for a few years. Just a bit of background: Hermeneutics is a study of how a text is interpreted. The name comes from Hermes, the messenger fo the Greek gods, and is used to describe an approach that iss meant to help readers get the full meaning from the text.

An exegete is someone who practices exegesis (pronounced like "eggs-a-Jesus") which is a disciplined study of a biblical text.

I'll leave you to figure out the rest of the fancy language for yourselves.
:)

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Suppose you're traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you, the exegete, interpret the stop sign.

1. A post-modernist deconstructs the sign (knocks it over with the car), ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.

2. Similarly, a Marxist refuses to stop because she sees the stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. She concludes that the bourgeois use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers in the east-west road.

3. A serious and educated Catholic rolls through the intersection because he believes he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn't take it too seriously, he doesn't feel obligated to take it too seriously either.

4. An average Catholic (or Orthodox or Coptic or Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever) doesn't bother to read the sign but she'll stop the car if the car in front stops.

5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

6. A seminary-educated evangelical preacher might look up "STOP" in his lexicons of English and discover that it can mean: 1) something that prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing; 2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The main point of his sermon the following Sunday on this text is: When you see a stop sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.

7. An orthodox Jew does one of two things: a) Take another route to work that doesn't have a stop sign so that she doesn't run the risk of disobeying the Law; b) Stop at the sign, say "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast given us thy commandment to stop," wait three seconds according to her watch, and then proceed. Incidentally, the Talmud has the following comments on this passage: Rabbi Meir says: He who does not stop shall not live long. R. Hillel says: Cursed is he who does not count to three before proceeding. R. Simon ben Yudah says: Why three? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. R. ben Isaac says: Because of the three patriarchs. R. Yehuda says: Why bless the Lord at a stop sign? Because it says, "Be still and know that I am God."

8. A scholar from the Jesus Seminar concludes that the passage "STOP" undoubtedly was never uttered by Jesus himself because being the progressive Jew that he was, he would never have wanted to stifle people's progress. Therefore, STOP must be a textual insertion belonging entirely to stage III of the gospel tradition, when the Church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.

9. A New Testament scholar notices that there is no stop sign on Mark street but there is one on Matthew and Luke streets, and concludes that the ones on Luke and Matthew streets are both copied from a sign on a street no one has ever seen, called "Q" street. The scholar has read an excellent 300-page doctoral dissertation on the origin of these stop signs and the differences between stop signs on Matthew and Luke. There is an unfortunate omission in the dissertation, however; it doesn't explain the meaning of the text!

10. A Hebrew Scriptures scholar points out that there are a number of stylistic differences between the first and second half of the passage "STOP." For example, "ST" contains no enclosed areas and five line endings, whereas "OP" contains two enclosed areas and only one line termination. She concludes that the author of the second part is different from the author of the first part and probably lived hundreds of years later. Later scholars determine that the second half is itself actually written by two separate authors because of similar stylistic differences between the "O" and the "P."

11. Another prominent OT scholar notes in his commentary that the stop sign would fit better into the context three streets back. (Unfortunately, he neglects to explain why in his commentary.) Clearly it was moved to its present location by a later redactor. He thus exegetes the intersection as though the sign were not there.

12. Because of the difficulties in interpretation, yet another OT scholar amends the text, changing the "T" to "H". "SHOP" is much easier to understand in context than "STOP" because of the multiplicity of stores in the area. She demonstrates that the textual corruption probably occurred because "SHOP" is so similar to "STOP" on the sign several streets back, that it is a natural mistake for a scribe to make. Thus the sign should be interpreted to announce the existence of a shopping area. If this is true, it could indicate that both meanings are valid, thus making the thrust of the message "STOP (AND) SHOP." She goes shopping.

13. A "prophetic" preacher notices that the square root of the sum of the numeric representations of the letters S-T-O-P (sigma-tau-omicron-pi in the Greek alphabet), multiplied by 40 (the number of testing), and divided by four (the number of the world — north, south, east, and west) equals 666. Therefore, he concludes that stop signs are the dreaded "mark of the beast," a harbinger of divine judgment upon the world, and must be avoided at all costs.