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.