What Defines Us

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

The news each day gives us a bothersome excursion into all the problems afflicting our community. We learn what is not going right in our nation’s capital. We are troubled by the failures in our institutions, the corruption, and the tragedies. We hear about the latest diseases, and the latest criminal behavior.

At work, we face a new pile of problems to resolve. Our children have their various crises that need our attention, whether a dentist’s visit or a problem with their homework, or something even more severe.

Friends assail us with their troubles, our family, immediate and more distant, demands our attention. Each day brings us new tribulations. As Eliphaz in the book of Job commented, “human beings are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7)

Without end, it seems that everything is always a mess in the world, in our nation, in our institutions and in our lives. We seem never to get a break. There are always more problems than time, ability, or money will allow us to solve. Every day, we are told how much we should be ashamed and disgusted with everything and everyone.

But, if we stop to look around, if we peek over the stack of papers on our desks, if we peer beyond the news we watch or read, if we stand up and look around our living room and gaze past our bills, we might notice that the darkness is not really closing in. The percentage of time we spend each day on our problems might not be so high as it feels.

On average, an American spends about 8 hours out of the 24 each day just sleeping. Another 4 hours is then consumed watching television. Already, that takes up half our day—and half of our lives. We then are at work eight hours a day, but only five days a week; and we perhaps spend another half hour to an hour on the road in our cars each of those five days. Then there’s the time we spend eating three meals a day, the time we spend shopping—and all the time we spend surfing the internet, or playing Angry Birds on our cellphones. Some of us spend time reading books, visiting with friends and family just for the fun of it, going to church, and volunteering for various charitable causes. We might attend a sporting event, visit the gym to do some exercise, or maybe spend a weekend camping or hiking. We go to the movies or a concert every so often, or maybe visit a museum. And most days our cars are working, the plumbing is in one piece, and we are neither ill nor at a funeral. I suspect that most of our time is not consumed by emotional or physical pain—or even breaking a sweat.

But the small amount of trouble in our lives, or the small amount of trouble we hear about going on around us, too often becomes what defines our lives.

And there is a good reason for this: we are programmed by our very natures as living creatures to focus on what is amiss. We have an itch, we scratch; we’re uncomfortable, we shift our position in our seats. We’re tired, we sleep. Our bladders are full, we do what we need to solve the problem. We’re hungry, we eat. The problem, the mistake, is not to fix that which is wrong; our mistake is to define our lives, our families, our institutions, our nations by that which is wrong. Lives, families, and institutions are far more than what is not perfect in them.

But we can’t help it after all. We notice everything that is wrong: the black spot on a sea of white is what will catch our eye. We overlook all that is right in the world and our attention is seized by that which is out of place. In a sense, that is commendable. We need to fix what is out of place, to repair what is broken, to salve what is painful. But the mistake we make is to define our existence by what is wrong, to overlook and take for granted everything that is good. We miss so much joy in our fixation on the problems. We are wrong to define, to judge, to criticize and condemn our whole lives, families, and institutions on the basis that they are less than perfect.

We need to solve our problems without imagining we are failures because we have problems, because we have not yet achieved perfection, because we have not solved every fault. We need to solve our problems, but we must not think that we deserve no praise, that we cannot relax, that we cannot have some fun, that we cannot feel pride or satisfaction in who and what we are, because all our problems are not yet gone.

We need to solve our problems, but to focus only on problems, to only criticize, to only condemn, is to become a neurotic drudge, a self-righteous prude, an unpleasant and bothersome nag. We are no longer fun to be around. And it’s so unnecessary.

We need to solve our problems, but if all we see are our problems, then we are not really seeing our lives, our families, our institutions, or our nations at all. And we are no longer really living.

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Extraordinary Claims

Posted on May 21, 2012 by

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” So said Carl Sagan. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put these words in the mouth of his character, Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

Many people believe in extraordinary things. Take UFOs for instance. “UFO” is simply an abbreviation for “Unidentified Flying Object” Most people, when they use the word, don’t use it for an airplane they don’t recognize. Instead, when people say “UFO” they mean “alien space craft.”

Most scientists are very skeptical about the existence of UFO’s. How come?

Jerry Pournelle, the noted science fiction author, has enjoyed an interesting life. He has a PhD, he’s worked in politics, and he’s worked in the defense industry for Boeing and had a rather high security clearance. He does not believe in UFO’s. He’d like to, of course. Most scientists and most science fiction writers would love nothing more than to find real live aliens. But Jerry Pournelle relates an interesting story that illustrates his reasons for skepticism.

During the Cold War there were reports of UFOs in Chile and Peru witnessed by thousands. And there was even a government conspiracy and cover-up related to the incident.
There are treaties in place that stipulate that no nation may place weapons in orbit and no nation may build or test orbital bombardment systems. This was also generally interpreted to exclude what’s known as fractional orbital bombardment systems, abbreviated with the acronym, FOBS. What is an FOBS? An FOBS is a weapon that is launched into Earth orbit, but is then de-orbited and made to re-enter the atmosphere before it makes a complete circuit around the globe. The Soviets thought they could launch a missile into orbit, swing it around the South Pole and then deorbit it so it came at the US from our southern border and thus avoid all our early warning systems which were watching for Soviet missile launches from the north. One day they decided to develop and test their system, despite the treaties, and they had their dummy missiles re-enter the atmosphere over South America. They hoped no one would notice.

Unfortunately, those re-entering dummy warheads were seen by those tens of thousands of people in Peru and Chile, making it impossible to simply dismiss all the reports as hallucinations. So the KGB quickly concocted an explanation. They spread UFO stories and even made up tales of aliens being spotted.

Meanwhile, our government didn’t want the Soviets to know just how much we knew about their experiments. So the CIA did nothing to counter the Soviet rumors. Thus, the test was covered up by both the Soviets and the Americans, each for their own reasons, but with the same result: people believed they had seen “real” UFO’s.

So, when people report they have seen “UFO’s” or been abducted by aliens, or find crop circles, or mutilated cattle, most scientists are going to first consider mundane explanations for what people are reporting. Occam’s razor is an important principle for science: the idea that given a variety of competing theories to explain something, the simplest theory that covers all the facts is more likely to be correct than a more complicated theory. A corollary to Occam’s razor is that a mundane explanation is more likely to be correct than an extraordinary one.

Although science fiction authors and scientists would love it if aliens showed up, they know the odds are against it. First, the universe is extraordinarily large. Even if there are billions of inhabited planets, which is quite probable, the distances between the worlds is so large that getting from planet to planet is beyond any current or projected technology. Star Trek notwithstanding, not only don’t we have the engineering needed to travel between the stars, we don’t even have a theory that would make it possible. To go faster than the speed of light requires overcoming some very well-established physical laws that tell us it’s impossible.

Even given some breakthrough allowing travel between the stars in a reasonable time frame, there are billions of stars—400 billion just in this galaxy—and billions of habitable planets. Space travel is expensive and hard, even for the basic sort of travel we do now just in our solar system. So any space faring civilization is unlikely to have large numbers of starships, and the frequency of travel is not likely to be large, either. So what are the odds that anyone would visit our particular planet even once, let alone the dozens of times every year they would have to if all the UFO reports are of extraterrestrial origin?

While I suppose it is possible that some UFOs are actual alien visitations, more mundane explanations seem preferable at this point.

Posted in Science, Science Fiction, Space | Leave a comment

Counting Blessings

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

There is an old song that I haven’t heard sung in a very long while. Written by Johnson Oatman, Jr., it was published in 1897. The copyright on the song expired decades ago. It begins this way:

When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

On first reading, and upon first hearing the song sung, many may be tempted to simply roll their eyes and think that it’s shallow and simplistic. After all, when something horrible happens in life, it’s very difficult to think about anything else except whatever is paining us. And perhaps, in extreme circumstances, the song may not be a whole lot of comfort.

But.

The point of the song is not to imagine that somehow our problems don’t exist; rather, it is designed to help us put our circumstances into a larger perspective. It is designed to force us to take a more realistic look at our lives.

So, for instance, one January a couple years ago, I developed pink eye. My right eye suddenly turned red and sore. It was very annoying, especially after two of my three daughters had just recently came down with some sort of virus. Though neither of them developed pink eye, I couldn’t help but suspect that I had simply gotten what they had and for whatever reason, it was my eye that was displaying nasty symptoms.

At the same time, I’d been working on the never ending bathroom remodel in my house. I had finally got all the electrical work done, did the drywall and painting, installed the new linen cabinet and vanity, attached the sink and even attached the new faucet. The new toilet was in and functioning. But getting the sink and faucet plumbed was not yet done: the old pipes that were under the sink were completely wrong for the new sink, besides being so old that they were falling apart as I touched then. I was going to have to rip them out and put in new ones: an additional bit of work that I had not anticipated needing to do.

Meanwhile, my computer at the time was intermittently giving me the “blue screen of death” so I had to order a new one to replace it—but it hadn’t arrived yet. And I was working on the last third of a book, which had a rapidly approaching deadline. On top of that, my agent had yet to have found a buyer for my next book, though he remained hopeful.

And the new winter quarter of teaching Hebrew and theology classes had begun that very night.

Oh, and although I’d gotten the Christmas decorations taken down and the tree disposed of, I had yet to box up the ornaments and get them put back away in the garage. And my garage was a mess and really needed to be cleaned out. Still does, in fact.

Such are the ordinary sorts of stresses that pile on us as we go about our days: the stresses of work, projects and fixes that need to be done around the house, piles of stuff that need to be attended to, minor illnesses in ourselves, our children, our spouses. It’s like the drip, drip, drip of a leaky faucet that never goes away and there are times that the multitude of little, ordinary things get to the place that they overwhelm us, making us want to run away and hide from it all—except that wherever we went to hide, it would probably need repairs. We feel like we don’t have enough time, enough energy, enough desire to get it all done.

And yet, if we stop a moment and try to think about the positive things in our lives—admittedly hard when we feel snowed under by all the things we need to do that are pelting us like drops of water in a storm—we may discover that “counting our blessings” can help us put the multiple, but minor stresses of our lives into better perspective. If we have a lot to do at work, at least we have a job. If one our kids has a cold and our wife forgot her lunch for work and needs us to drive it over to her, at least we can be thankful we have a family.

We can take comfort in the fact that we even have the things that are annoying us: when the cable goes out and I have to wait between noon and three for the cable guy to come out, well, at least I have cable in the first place. TV and cable are rather marvelous bits of technology that most of the time we take for granted. When I was a kid, we had three black and white channels that arrived fuzzy. I may have had problems with the plumbing, but hey, a hundred years ago, most people would be using an outhouse and boiling water on a wood stove so they could sponge bathe once a week.

And my pink eye was easily curable. A hundred years ago I might have just gone blind. And so it goes.

Johnson Oatman, Jr., the songwriter, lived a mostly ordinary life. He was licensed to preach in Methodist churches, but his primary career was in the mercantile business and later as an administrator of a large insurance company in New Jersey. He was married, with three daughters. Born in 1856, he died in 1922. During the course of his life, he wrote more than 5000 hymns, of which “Count your Blessings” is but one.

Posted in Religion, Theology | Leave a comment

Telling God No

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

In Genesis 22 we read that “God tested Abraham.” This test consisted of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son and his only heir.

Those of us who grew up in church are familiar with the story and probably don’t think much about it. If asked, we will mouth happy platitudes to “interpret” the event. But the whole episode is very puzzling to new readers of the Bible. It makes no sense to them that God should ask such an outrageous thing of Abraham—something so outrageous, in fact, that it contradicts God’s nature and even explicit denunciations elsewhere in the Bible of the very thing God tells Abraham to do. Jeremiah quotes God in Jeremiah 7:31: “They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind.”

If a father in our congregation announced that God had appeared to him and ordered him to kill his son in order to demonstrate his obedience to God, it is unlikely we would pat him on the back and say, “sounds like a good idea. Do what God tells you.” Instead, we would be very quick to yell, “are you nuts?” and to tell the father he hadn’t heard from God at all. If we saw something on TV about some father doing such a dastardly thing, we’d call him a loon and hope that he spent the rest of his life in jail, at the very least.

So what in the world is going on in Genesis 22 with Abraham and God? Just because it’s in the Bible, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be shocked or appalled.

Of course, in the end, God prevented Abraham from going through with his crime (which perhaps is a clue to what is really going on). But the whole episode remains unsavory and bizarre. Many commentators have attempted to explain that the near-sacrifice is a picture of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. The ram that Abraham sacrifices in the end instead of Isaac is said to be symbolic of Jesus’ death in place of humanity. But I’m not entirely satisfied that this explanation removes the creepiness factor from the episode: that an old man was instructed by his God to kill his son and that he was willing to do it.

The author of Hebrews comments on the event, explaining that it demonstrated Abraham’s faith, since Abraham believed that a dead Isaac could always be raised back to life by God (see Hebrews 11:17-19). James 2:21 comments that Abraham was considered righteous for offering his son.

Neither passage, however, really tries to explain why God would ask him to do something so completely at odds with everything we know about God’s character, and that even Abraham knew about God (consider that the prohibition on murder predates Abraham as reflected in the story of Cain and Abel and the institution of a death penalty for murder in Genesis 9, following the Flood). No passage in the Bible suggests that offering up one’s children as burnt offerings is a positive family value. In fact, the Bible is rather consistent in arguing against human sacrifice. Murder is consistently presented as a bad thing.

So what to do?

One key thing to notice about the Bible: it does not always present activities that we are supposed to emulate, or events that we are supposed to like. Often, the stories told are designed for the opposite: to serve as warnings, or to upset us so that we will behave differently. For instance, in the book of Judges when Jephtha actually follows through and sacrifices his only daughter as a burnt offering, the reader is supposed to be horrified. In the same way, the reader should be shocked when Lot in Genesis, and the unnamed Levite of Judges, offer their daughters or concubine to be raped by mobs.

In the New Testament, we are told that the Law was humanity’s schoolmaster (Galatians 3:24-25 KJV). And here in Genesis 22 we are told explicitly that “God tested Abraham.” The question that has entered my head recently is a simple one.

Did Abraham actually pass God’s test?

That’s a slightly different question than whether he demonstrated his faith (which was the concern of the New Testament passages).

So, did Abraham give God the answer he was looking for when he told him to go sacrifice his son? Or was it rather that God was testing him to see if he had gotten past his cultural predisposition to sacrifice offspring, a common enough practice in the land he had come from and especially the one that he was then living in.
Was God, in fact, hoping Abraham would say, “Um, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

God might then have asked Abraham “why not,” and gotten the further response, “because killing one’s offspring is a heinous idea.” Based on what we see about God’s attitude regarding human sacrifice, it does not seem unreasonable to me that God might have been hoping for such a response from Abraham. Certainly his faith in God and his obedience were commendable, just as Jephtha’s willingness to keep his word was commendable. But sometimes following the rules may simply not be the right thing to do.

After all, we do have other examples of people in the Bible “disobeying” God or “talking back to him”—and it was considered the proper response. Take Moses as an example. After the Israelites make the golden calves and run amuck, God tells Moses to stand aside so he can slaughter them all. Moses tells God not to do it. He asks God to spare the people (see Exodus 32:9-14). Moses told God no, and God was okay with that.

God adapted himself to Abraham’s response to the test with Isaac: “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (Genesis 22:12) That does not mean that Abraham had responded precisely the way God wanted, anymore than Moses’ objections to God’s command to rescue the Israelites from Egypt was what God was really looking for (see Exodus 3). But God adapted to Moses: he overcame each of Moses’ objectives. He adjusted to them: he even appointed Aaron to act as spokesperson.
Why didn’t God upbraid Abraham for making the wrong choice with Isaac if it was the wrong choice? Why didn’t he tell Abraham, “you shouldn’t have tried to do that?” Well, God did stop him from performing the sacrifice. He did substitute a ram. Then he acknowledged Abraham’s faith and his obedience, much as a good teacher might acknowledge a student’s valiant, but misguided attempts at an answer and choose to point out what’s positive in his effort, even in the midst of overall failure. The fact that God didn’t allow Abraham to actually sacrifice his son is an indication that Abraham’s choice was not really God’s purpose in this exercise. If we are to assume that God always achieves his will, then the ultimate outcome of events perhaps serves as a clue to what God’s actual purpose was in the first place.

God’s plan was for Isaac to be the heir. We’re told that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness. Yet after that, he takes Hagar and has Ishmael by her. Later, he wishes to God that Ishmael could be the heir. And yet, despite all that, it will still be Isaac. Abraham is never explicitly condemned in the Bible for Hagar and Ishmael; and yet God passes them by and focuses on Isaac. He adapts to what Abraham has done, which he did out of faith that God would fulfill his promise of an heir, misguided as his choices actually were.

But why would God ask of his servants a thing that he doesn’t actually want them to do? To elicit the response that he got in the case of Moses when he told him to step aside and let him slaughter the Israelites for their sin: to see that his servant has understood the lessons previously taught and that the lesson is so firmly ingrained, that even opposition from God himself is not going to shatter the belief. Consider the impact, then of these words from the Deuteronomy:

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. (Deuteronomy 13:1-3)

And very similar words from Paul:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel….even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! (Galatians 1:6-8)

God wants to know if the people believe what they believe simply because of who told them, or if they are completely convinced. If you change what you think simply because someone tells you to change it, then did you ever actually believe it? For most of us today, if God tried to tell us to sacrifice a child, we’d tell him no. We have learned the lesson that Abraham (and the human race of that era) still hadn’t gotten: killing children is wrong. Since then, the human race has grown in grace and knowledge thanks to a patient God.

The story of Balaam and the donkey reflects the same thing we see in God’s testing of Abraham. God tells Balaam not to go and curse the people of Israel. (Numbers 22:12). But when Balak continues to beg, Balaam tells the men Balak has sent that he won’t disobey God, but, “Now stay here tonight as the others did, and I will find out what else the LORD will tell me.”
So that night, God tells him, “Since these men have come to summon you, go with them, but do only what I tell you.” (Numbers 22:20) Which contradicts God’s original command not to go (see 22:12 again).

So, Balaam leaves with the messengers of Balak. And what happens? Numbers 22:22: “But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the LORD stood in the road to oppose him.” What follows is the story of Balaam’s donkey. God had told Balaam not to go; Balaam wanted to go: he wanted the money being offered. So God told him, “Go.” His response then should have been, “Um, no, I’ll do what you told me to begin with.” But God wanted to see if he was firmly committed to not cursing the Israelites; the incident with the donkey did keep him from later mouthing a curse. But Balaam’s failure to tell God no at that point nearly got him killed.

Most modern readers of the Old Testament are troubled by the command God issues to the people of Israel to wipe out the Canaanites (see Deuteronomy 20:16-17). God had ordered the Israelites to commit genocide against another people. But today we believe genocide is evil, especially after some of the horrors of the twentieth century. Wholesale slaughter of women and children also seems contrary to the biblical concept expressed elsewhere that fathers are not to be punished for the crimes of their children, and children must not suffer for the crimes of their parents (see Deuteronomy 24:16). Then there’s the obvious general biblical principle of loving one’s enemies (see Leviticus 19:18). God’s order to the Israelites to wipe out women and children, as well as all the men, is hard to justify when examined in light of the rest of the Bible.

Again, all sorts of “explanations” have been offered by theologians to try to soften the impact of God’s command against the Canaanites. But given that the Israelites failed to ever completely carry out the order (just as Abraham failed to sacrifice Isaac), and given that we even have examples of condemned Canaanites repenting and joining with Israel (as for instance the Gibeonites in Joshua 9 and Ruth, a Moabite—notice the attitude against the Moabites in Deuteronomy 23:3-6, and yet Ruth becomes ancestor of both David and Jesus)—I think perhaps the order to exterminate Canaanites is like the tests that were presented to Abraham and Moses: to disagree with God and instead do what is right.

Admittedly that sounds odd. But perhaps God wanted his people to stand up on their own two feet, use the brains God had given them—and express the love that he’d tried to teach them. God hoped that his people would learn to make the right choices themselves, rather than needing rules and orders.

At Nuremburg, several of the Nazis gave as an excuse for their crimes that they were merely “following orders.” Perhaps God does not think that’s a valid excuse any more than the judges at Nuremburg did and he wanted his people to learn that lesson as soon as possible—even when He’s the one giving the orders.

But what are we to do with James 1:13 which tells us that “God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone”? Wouldn’t God be tempting Abraham with evil by asking him to sacrifice Isaac? Regardless of the response God wanted from Abraham, James creates a problem, at least on the surface.

But in context, James is speaking about our day to day temptations, whether to eat too much or to sleep with our neighbor. But there are different sorts of tests that God does bring, that don’t fall into James’ category. For instance, in Deuteronomy 8:2, Moses reminds the people, “Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.” Likewise, when suffering comes to us, we must decide: do we turn to God or away from God? Our faith is constantly being tested (see James 1:2-3).

We live by faith, not by sight. We are saved by grace, not by keeping rules. Paul writes that “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6)

People like rules and regulations. They want everything simple, black and white, no thinking required. But that’s the essence of worldliness, according to Paul in Colossians 2. Rules are important for children (notice how they react if you try to alter a rule in a familiar game), and for humanity when it was in its childhood. But we’re adults now. Perhaps God expects us to think for ourselves: we have been trained; we know that loving God and loving people is what it all comes down to. We can see the old tests. And now the Holy Spirit indwells us. If we see people in the Bible behaving in ways that makes us cringe—well, that’s probably the point.

The center of the Bible, the interpretive guide and tool is to “love God, and to love people” (see Matthew 22:36-40, Romans 13:9-10, Galatians 5:13-14). Those are the commands of God we have been asked to obey. Interpretations of God’s words that lead to a contradiction with those commands are necessarily wrong.

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Learning Theology from my Daughter

Posted on May 13, 2012 by

Sometimes things do not turn out quite the way I expect them to. I’m an adult, with an advanced degree from one of the finest universities in the world. I’ve been teaching college level courses in ancient languages, theology and the Bible for more than twenty years. I’m a professional theologian and write books and essays. I like to think of myself as rational, with a practical and realistic view of the world. Most of the time I’m right about what I think and say. I study the Bible on a daily basis and I believe that God hears our prayers. I’m an ordained deacon and an adult Sunday School teacher.

Yes indeed. Ask me something about God and I can give you an answer.

But my youngest daughter was able to show me that I still don’t know much at all and that maybe a child’s faith is more important than I’ll ever understand.

A few years ago, when she was eleven years old, one of the elderly women in our church took seriously ill. My daughter knew her well, because we picked her up each Sunday to bring her to church. At 83, she was no longer able to drive herself. The State of California did not make this determination. After totaling two cars in a few months’ time, she had finally agreed with her friends that she should give up driving. We suspect this had more to do with the fact that she simply didn’t have a car anymore than anything else. So at 80, she had stopped driving. But she had not let her inability to drive slow her down. A school teacher in her younger years, she continued tutoring troubled children on a weekly basis, using the local bus service to get to her appointments. It was not uncommon to see her huffing about town with her walker, sometimes for blocks, in order to get from a bus stop to the homes of those she was trying to help.

When we got the phone call that she had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance, we were told that she was in very serious condition. After hanging up the phone, we very carefully explained to my daughter what we’d learned. With equanimity, she took in the news that our elderly friend was desperately ill.

“She most likely had a heart attack,” I told her softly.

“So is she going to get better?” My little daughter looked up at me with her big blue eyes.

“Probably not. She’s 83 years old and she’s in the hospital now.”

“We should pray for her.”

“Okay.” I frowned.

My daughter bowed her head. “Dear God, please help her to get well soon and come home from the hospital. Amen.”

I tried explaining to my daughter again just how unlikely it was that such an elderly person would get better, but she went out happily to play in the front yard, convinced that she would be just fine now.

“She’s going to be dead by morning,” I told my wife, who nodded in agreement.

But come the next morning, this 83 year old woman was not dead. In fact, she was much better. It turned out that it wasn’t a heart attack after all: it was her gall bladder.
A few weeks later, after the surgery to take it out, she recovered and was moved to a nursing care facility. “No one gets out of places like that,” I commented to my wife again. “Those are just Heaven’s waiting rooms.”

But my daughter kept praying and kept insisting to me that “She will be just fine.”

Sure enough, a month later our elderly friend left the nursing home and moved in with her son, as spry as ever. Years later, she’s still doing well.

“God answered my prayer, didn’t he daddy?” asked my daughter. Her very surprised theologian father couldn’t help but agree. Perhaps it’s no wonder Jesus used children to illustrate what real faith was all about—instead of middle-aged theologians.

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Chronocentrism

Posted on May 11, 2012 by

We’ve probably all heard of “Eurocentrism” or “ethnocentrism,” the affliction of those who believe that the way things are in their own neighborhood must be the way things are everywhere. We talk to our neighbors and colleagues, our workmates, our social circle, and then imagine that “everyone” thinks and lives and faces the same sorts of problems that we do; that “everyone” shares our political philosophy, our religious beliefs, and our attitudes—and that anyone who thinks differently must be either stupid or evil and are but a tiny fringe of the population: certainly not like “everyone.”

Tom Standage in The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers described chronocentrism as “the egotism that one’s own generation is poised on the very cusp of history.” Chronocentrism exists in those who imagine that their own time, their own era, is the norm against which all else must be judged—or worse, that the way things are now is how they have always been.

It afflicts those who don’t know history in the sense of actually paying attention to what was going on, those who know nothing more than the names of rulers and generals and the dates of battles. Chronocentrism is, like ethnocentrism, usually an unconscious approach to life: it is taking everything for granted without even realizing that’s what you’re doing.

Our children can no more imagine a time without color television, five hundred channels, and microwaves than we can imagine a time without antibiotics and fast food. And they don’t even think about it. We don’t comprehend a world where most people were peasants, without rights or freedom, who spent most of their time worrying about whether they would eat today. We don’t think about our lives at all. Our lives, our reality, is unexamined for the most part.

Obesity in the middle ages wasn’t a problem for anyone. Starvation was.

For thousands of years, if a person anytime in human history before the middle of the twentieth century got a cut on their finger, there was a very real probability that they would die from infection. Conjunctivitis blinded millions—something that a few eye drops cures easily today. If you were nearsighted, had astigmatism, or were farsighted, well you just had to live with it: there were no eyeglasses, contacts or surgery to correct it. You were unlikely to have any teeth in your head by the time you were forty—if you were lucky enough to live so long.

You probably barely noticed the lice, fleas, and other multi-legged creatures that shared your dwelling, clothes, and body.

Cholera, tuberculosis and any number of other easily curable or preventable illnesses slaughtered thousands, if not millions, every year. Only one out of four children lived beyond the age of five. Women regularly died in childbirth and spent most of their brief lives pregnant. And they did what their fathers or husbands or brothers told them to do, or else.

You worshipped what the king told you to worship. You were lucky if you even knew how to read, let alone actually had ever been to school in your life. You didn’t even know what the word “vote” meant. The only news you heard was neighborhood gossip.

Civility was when it wasn’t really all that out of the ordinary that the Vice President of the United States shot and killed the former Secretary of the Treasurer in a duel. After Pearl Harbor, concern for civil rights meant you felt bad that you’d beaten up a Chinese gentleman you’d mistaken for being Japanese.

Those who long for the good old days, who believe that today is worse than yesterday, suffer from chronocentrism. They believe that the problems they face must be worse than the problems anyone else has ever faced before. Today’s crisis must of necessity be the most horrible thing that has ever happened: because it is the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me.

A five year old who stubs his toe knows that his pain is the worst pain that the world has ever known. He is starving to death, because the potato chips are gone and there is nothing else in the house to eat—despite a pantry and refrigerator stuffed to overflowing with other edibles.

Those who suffer chronocentrism have the understanding of children when it comes to the world as it was, is, and could be.

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Post Easter Thoughts

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

It’s been a few weeks since Easter and I’ve been thinking. Each year at Easter, it has become common for television shows and newsmagazines to produce reports about the founder of the Christian religion. One of the latest in this tradition was a program on the Discovery Channel a few years back, produced by the director who brought us the movies Titanic and Avatar. In James Cameron’s view at the time, the tomb of Jesus and his family had been discovered. And so he brought out for our viewing pleasure the bone boxes of Jesus, his father and his mother—not to mention those of his wife and son.

For those of us who are Christians, we think his effort was akin to the con artist trying to convince the rube visiting New York for the first time that not only is he talking to the owner of the Brooklyn Bridge, but said owner is in desperate straights and wants to unload the property forthwith for only the current contents of his wallet. Or perhaps what we saw from Cameron that year was more like the carnival barker who is trying to convince us to peer behind the curtain—for a minimal charge—to see the bearded lady.

After two thousand years, Christians do not believe it is likely that the dead body of Jesus is going to be produced. After all, if that were going to happen, it would have been done a long time ago by people far more motivated than a Hollywood director looking to make some pocket change.

For the Roman government in Palestine during the first century AD–and for the leaders of the religious establishment in ancient Israel–the fact that a dangerous lunatic was not still dead—or that at least his followers were pretending that he wasn’t—was a monumental disaster. If the rebel leader had managed to escape his death sentence—or if his most ardent compatriots were able to convince the rabble that it was so—then the government’s goal of quashing a rebellion had failed miserably. Jesus’ rotting carcass was worth a fortune to the ancient tyranny. Unfortunately, they could not produce it and had to instead pay off some soldiers to claim that his body had been stolen, reducing the controversy to a “he said”, “she said” argument. Certainly far less than ideal for the Romans trying to crush a rebellion.

For Hollywood producers two thousand years after the event, it is easy to speculate that the whole Easter shenanigan was a hoax. After all, fooling people is most of what Hollywood is all about. Unfortunately, such Hollywood presentations fail to understand the political setting or the popular expectations of first century Palestine.

In the time of Jesus, the Jewish people believed themselves oppressed by a wicked foreign tyranny: the Roman Empire. Their greatest desire, the focus of all their hopes, was that God would intervene and rescue them again, just as he had, in times past, rescued them from Egyptian bondage. Many Jews had joined the ranks of the Zealots: ancient terrorists who took every opportunity to kill Romans and those Jews they had decided were collaborators. Meanwhile, around the countryside, pretenders arose claiming to be the chosen ones of God, who would lead an armed rebellion to throw off the shackles of the Romans. Called “messiahs” they took on the mantle of ancient Judges like Gideon or Samson, whom God had raised up in antiquity to rescue his people from their enemies. Time and again, the Romans had been forced to send soldiers against such “messiahs” slaughtering their followers and then arresting and executing their leaders. Jesus and his disciples were simply this sort of problem as far as the Romans were concerned. And by executing Jesus, they had solved the problem the same way they had solved all the others before him.

Christians therefore believe an improbable thing: that Jesus actually was God’s Christ (the Greek form of the Hebrew word Messiah) and that his purpose was not to free his people from political bondage, but rather to free them spiritually: to save them from their iniquity. But that is not the most improbable thing that Christians believe. They further believe that Jesus did not stay dead, but that God raised him back to life only three days after his execution.

And Christians have always been well aware of just how unlikely that is. Paul himself, the great apostle, reminded a church in the Greek city of Corinth that Christianity is built on this singular improbability. He wrote, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” (1 Corinthians 15:14-19)

So, each year at Easter, Christians remember that Jesus did not stay dead. And somehow, for nearly two thousand years, Christianity has managed to endure, despite how improbable its foundation. On that first Easter, and on subsequent ones, the highly motivated Roman government and religious establishment could not overcome the inconvenient reality that the tomb of Jesus was, in fact, empty.

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Time

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

The first six verses of Ecclesiastes chapter three state:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Most people know these words, not from reading the Bible, but from their appearance in a song by the Byrds that hit number one on the charts in late 1965. Peter Seeger adapted the words nearly verbatim from the King James Version of Ecclesiastes 3:1-6, rearranging them only slightly to make them work better in the song.

His purpose in writing the song was as a plea for world peace, a not unworthy goal. However, the biblical passage from which he adapted the words is not about world peace. Instead, Solomon, the traditional author of Eccelsiastes was making a philosophical argument about the futility of existence: stuff simply happens to people, without discernible pattern or purpose. As the writer of Ecclesiastes elsewhere states, “time and chance happen to all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

It is easy to become discouraged by the words of Ecclesiastes. However, despair is not really the point of the biblical author. The familiar words suggest a more positive and useful thought: that there is an opportune moment for accmplishment. That while today might not work out for you, there may come a tomorrow that will. And choices must be made now in how the hours of our lives get spent.

For instance, while you’re driving down the interstate is not the time to take a nap. But when you’re home after a long day, perhaps a nap might be just the thing you need. Maybe putting off the preparation of dinner by a half hour would be best choice. Just find out what time it is for you and act accordingly.

As an author, my time is largely my own. As with anyone who works from home, one of the biggest difficulties I face is apportioning my day. Too easy it is to get to supper time and discover that all I accomplished was reading the newspaper and organizing the drawers in my desk. While there may be a time and place for doing both, when I have a novel that is waiting to be finished, or an article I should be researching, achieving another high score on Angry Birds is not a good use of my work day.

Each day I am granted twenty-four hours. I have seven days in a week. Five of those are necessarily, and thankfully, given over for work. Since I work from home, I do not have to devote any of those hours to commuting since it takes me mere seconds to stumble from my bedroom to my office—even if I take the long way through my kitchen to snag a cup of coffee. Likewise, there’s no travel time involved in getting my lunch, and there are no co-workers to interrupt me with requests. The phone rarely rings, except for the occasional telemarketer convinced that I am in desperate need of handing over money for something I don’t need or want. Thankfully, caller ID means I can ignore him or her altogether.

A bigger danger for those who are self-employed, however, is not underwork or wasting time with Angry Birds. Quite the opposite. The biggest danger is never being off the clock, since there is no clock to punch. When does work begin and end when you live in your place of business? During some periods when I was under deadline, I would work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

So I have to remind myself of Solomon’s words. There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven. Work is a good thing, but it’s not always time for that.

In my own life, and in the lives of those around me, I find a lack of balance, a lack of finding seasons for everything one of the greatest dangers. Time for reflection, for entertainment, for family and friends, is no less necessary than time for work. Being productive is not just about being able to point to things I’ve done that made me money.

On occasion, it really is a time to rack up another high score on Angry Birds.

Posted in Bible, Quotes, Theology, Writing | 1 Comment

A Time of Peace

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

When we watch the news on television tonight, we are likely to think that the world is sliding into oblivion, that the future is certainly dark, and that things not only are getting worse, but have always been getting worse.

We’d be wrong to think this, however, despite all the news to the contrary.

How can that be?

The evidence we collect from what we watch on television or read in the newspaper is merely anecdotal. And there is a problem with anecdotal evidence. It’s insufficient for drawing accurate conclusions.

Let me give you an example of misinterpreting evidence. While my wife was in college she worked with autistic adults in a residential care facility. One day, one of the residents came out of the bathroom holding an empty bottle of saline tablets. He had a fetish for small bottles. When my wife asked him about the bottle, he at first told her that he had eaten the tablets. Then he changed his story and announced that he had dumped them down the toilet.

Not wanting to take a chance, she transported him to the emergency room, where the doctor gave him syrup of ipecac, to induce vomiting. He had to drink a glass of water after taking the syrup. After drinking the water, he vomited.

After the second time of taking the syrup of ipecac, my wife gave him another glass of water. He told her, “No, I don’t want more water. That’s making me throw up.”
The technical term for this is false causa, pro causa: imagining that something is responsible for a result merely because it preceded the other. It was the syrup of ipecac that caused the vomiting, not the water, but my wife’s client didn’t know better. He was drawing the wrong conclusion from insufficient evidence.

Just because you were robbed, doesn’t mean that there are more robberies than there used to be. Just because you read about an insane person shooting up a school this morning, doesn’t mean that such violence is on the rise. One has to look at the population and world as a whole to be able to tell whether such violence is trending up or down.

And when one looks at the actual statistics, the actual data of crime, war, and overall violence—reality is radically different from the perception that the news gives us. The water is not making us throw up. Oddly enough, the world today is a much more peaceful and a much more orderly and crime free place than it used to be. In fact, peace is more widespread than it has ever been before in the history of the world.

Steven Pinker recently published a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes. Whether Pinker is correct in his estimation regarding the causes of declining violence, he nevertheless demonstrates the statistical reality which seems at odds with what “everybody knows.”

The percentages of those suffering from crime, war and general violence has consistently declined since the time of the Middle-Ages. Even with two world wars in the twentieth century, with million slaughtered, percentage-wise, the twentieth century was actually less violent than the Middle-Ages. Our major cities today suffer less from crime than they did even a hundred years ago. There are fewer wars, less bloodshed, less overall suffering in the world today than ever before, at least based on the percentages.

The world is not getting worse and worse. It is getting better and better.

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Symptoms of Love

Posted on May 7, 2012 by

I sometimes wonder if anyone knows what love is.

People fall in love, get married, and then, at some point, a sizeable percentage of them start having an affair with someone else. Sadly we see spouses not just divorcing, but sometimes committing violence against one another. Parents abuse their children. Children attack their parents. Friendships shatter. Churches split. How does love turn into hate?

Paul of course, gave us a definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13. We may be familiar with this passage, so familiar in fact that we no longer hear the symptoms of love. Perhaps we need to listen a little harder.

Love is Patient

I have three daughters, all adopted out of foster care. My youngest was born addicted to crack cocaine, besides being prenatally exposed to methamphetamine and alcohol. When she arrived in our home five days after her birth, she was still going through withdrawal and suffered uncontrollable tremors. A consequence of her drug exposure is that she now suffers from severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: ADHD for short. Among other problems, this means that she has trouble thinking about the consequences of her actions. If the mood strikes her, she does it. “I have scissors, the cat has hair. What can I do about that? Hmm.” So she has required a lot more effort and to raise and discipline than our other two daughters.

But we have kept her around. How come? Because we love her. From the moment she came into our home, we sought out the best therapy for her.

The point, of course, is that love is willing to stick with a person, to wait however long is necessary, to do whatever needs to be done in order to solve the problem, for however long it might take. Why is that? Because the person is the object of my affections, and because that person and his or her welfare is vital to me.

Do you collect your paycheck at the end of every day of work? No, you get it at the end of the week, or the end of every two weeks, or maybe at the end of the month. Do you say “to heck with it” because you don’t get paid at the end of every day? No, you happily wait; you’re patient, because that paycheck is worth the wait, worth the process.

How long you are willing to wait for something is dependent upon how important it is to you.

Love Does Not Boast

Boasting is a consequence of feeling inadequate, of not feeling accepted by the one you love. During a new relationship, one tries to impress the new guy or gal, especially during the “in love” phase.

The more the insecurity, the more the need to start listing one’s accomplishments and attributes. But when one is comfortable, one doesn’t need to show off. That’s why a husband doesn’t feel the need to put on fancy clothes and cologne and suck in his gut when he is with his wife of twenty years.

Love is comfortable.

Love Is Not Easily Angered and Keeps No Record of Wrongs

This comes from the fact that you’re focused on the other person. Anger arises from the failure of expectations being met. You expected your loved one to remember your birthday. He didn’t. So now you’re angry.

Peter asked Jesus, how often he should forgive his brother when he sinned against him? Seven times? No, said Jesus. Seventy times seven times. Does that mean that now I keep track? “Oops, that was four hundred ninety times, so now I won’t talk to you anymore.”

Jesus point was that you shouldn’t be keeping track. In fact, you shouldn’t even think about it. It shouldn’t matter to you because the performance of the person you love has nothing to do with the fact that you love him or her.

Remember: God loved us while we were unlovely, while we were his enemies, while we were actively opposed to him. He loved us when we had done nothing to make ourselves loveable. And that’s what true love is: it is unrequited and no longer depends for its existence on the behavior of the other person. The love is there, regardless, even in the face of hatred and opposition.

Love simply can’t remember that the beloved ever did anything wrong.

Love Always Protects

When something bad happens to one we love, we automatically want to do what we can to help. We read stories of the father who drowns trying to save his daughter from the raging river; or mothers running into burning buildings to save their children. Our best friend’s car dies on the freeway and he calls us at two in the morning and we think nothing of going out there to help, even if he is a hundred miles away.

One day my youngest daughter—the one with ADHD—was running through the house, chasing after our dog. My wife warned her to stop running in the house. But she didn’t obey and wound up smacking into the aquarium. She cut open her head and bled profusely. But I didn’t stand over her and comment, “Well, you got what you deserved, now suffer the consequences.” I did not leave her bleeding on the floor. Instead, my wife and I scooped her up and we took her to the emergency room, where she got stitches.

We help those we love, no matter what.

Love Always Trusts and Always Hopes

This can look like stupidity, as when a wife trusts her husband even though he is cheating on her. But that is how love is. It is not willing to believe anything but what is best about the other person.

I got a phone call from a friend once that I always remember with humor. She had a question about a Christmas present for my wife Ruth. Part way into the conversation, she told me that a couple of weeks earlier she had given a card to her husband to mail to my mom. But just that very afternoon, she had found it buried under some papers on his desk. She was very annoyed, and told me that she’d mail it herself now. Then she asked, “Why do I always do that? Why do I always think he’ll do something I ask him to do and of course he never does? Why don’t I learn?” Admittedly, her husband tends to be a bit absentminded. I simply told her, “Because that’s the nature of love. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that ‘Love always hopes’ and so you can’t help but always think that he’ll do what he’s been asked to do.”

She laughed and commented that love is kind of stupid, then.

I’m glad that God loves us with that kind of love. True love does make us stupid, but it’s a good kind of stupid.

Love Always Perseveres

Love cannot end, it does not die. This of course is a great comfort as we think of our relationship with God. But it also affects how we relate to others. Love is not dependent upon performance; it simply exists and cannot be stopped.

…for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love;
rivers cannot wash it away.
If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love,
it would be utterly scorned. (Song of Songs 8:6b-7)

If someone ordered you at gunpoint to stop loving your daughter, would you be able to comply?

Love is something that God does through us. In order to have the sort of love that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13, we need to be comfortable with the fact that God loves us and that we are complete and whole in him. I suspect that if we don’t understand the unconditional nature of God’s love for us, it will be hard for us—maybe impossible—to give back that kind of love to him, or to anyone else.

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