The Past as Present - On Essential Agreement

This post is more United Church of Canada than some - but should perhaps allow anyone to think about the relationship we have to the thinking of the past...

In explanation - when one is ordained into ministry in the United Church, we make a promise, backed up by people who have examined us, that we are in essential agreement with the recorded faith position of the church.

In our case that is taken to be the four positions we have taken: The 20 Articles of Faith (1925), The Statement of Faith (1940), the New Creed (1968) and the Song of Faith (2006)

It is interesting that if you take the last and read it - our faith is very poetic, very accessible, and very much based on the idea of human development towards the good. It seems, tilted, towards a modern way of thinking.

If you start the other way around and read the 1925 version is it like the King James Bible - jarring in its use of words we no longer use in phrases we no longer use. The tilt in this case is towards the power of God. God did things, in fact, everything, and we respond.

But like it or not, if you sit down and read carefully the "words" of all of these positions, carefully trying to weed out the poetic voice, they are, to quote the church, in essential agreement with each other.

You, as an average reader, would not want to do that, trust me. But in fact, the 20 articles are a bit repetitive, and thus with each version it gets shorter.... but almost nothing changes.

in 1940 We added the idea that God made us to be in "loving" relationship - not just relationship, while we admitted that Jesus, though God, also lived the perfect human life.

in 1968 we added the tag line, "to live with respect in Creation" which was pretty much the first time we officially suggested the idea of respect, or relationship with the created world around us.

and in 2006 God became less the old man in the sky, adjectives like Mother were added. The other major thing that I can see is that it says Jesus was put to death by the people... in other words, we are to blame. Where before it was stated as being more part of God's original plan.

But when we say essential agreement we are basically saying this:

We believe there is one God, who somehow exists in three: Creator, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Who is active in the world and in the heart of people. Who gives us free choice to turn away from the path, but who has planned out the path. Adam and Eve sinned and all of us have that kernel of sin within us, but God calls us and redeems us. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, came to earth and taught us how to be more faithful before being executed. By being executed as an innocent Jesus paid off our debt and saved us. Believe that and try hard to allow the Holy Spirit to work within you and you will be judged good after death and live forever with God, if not, you will be cast out.

Now, as you can imagine, there is more. It defines ministry, and church, and right action, and so much more... but "essential agreement" does not boil down to the nitty gritty, it boils down to the core of what is being said. Which is as above. Yes, yes, I know if you are a theologian you are going to say I did not express some stuff well enough, or deep enough, ok, it is more complicated than that, I agree.

NOW

In the United Church we have come under scrutiny of late because the fact is, clergy have, for some time, defined essentially pretty loosely.

I believe there is good and bad - so if you want to define it with personalities, ok. Let's call "Good" "God" 

(I made that up - but you get the point - do you, essentially agree with the above... there is a lot of wiggle room.)

It is being argued that the wiggle room did not include the modern post-theistic, radical progressive views that are held by many on one side of our church. And to be honest, I think they have a point. The reworking of those 20 articles over the last 100 years never touched the core belief. We have to admit that the United Church, for all of its social justice and left leaning history has stayed true to what it said it believed in 1925. We just say it in modern ways.

Which leads to a big problem.

And here is how I see the problem. The problem is that the faith statement of the United Church is bound to an antique way of understanding science, sociology, psychology and culture.

It is not the church that has moved - it is the world that has moved.

And somewhere along the way we forgot to write into our faith the belief that everything changes. In fact, we wrote the opposite - saying that things like God, the church, Jesus... are forever the same. Unchanging, immutable, etc.

But... no.  Galileo famously came up hard against the church when he claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun and not vice versa. They put him in jail and let him rot as a heretic. To be honest, the church did not care about celestial mechanics at all. Whether it is a circle or an ellipse, that meteors might seem to disappear and come back... who cares. What matters is that God is from Earth and therefore Earth is the centre of everything. That is what Galileo denied.

And we know he was right.

And because, eventually (in reality it took 350 years and the church only admitted he was right in 1992) we came to see that he was right, societal understanding changed. God was up/out there and not on earth. But we were still the favourites.

The reason people do not come to church these days, I think, has a lot to do with how far we have moved in our cultural understanding such that being in essential agreement with those 20 articles seems somehow wrong.

In basic ways, why would God only save the Jews? Why would the Messiah only come and save the western world? How do Buddha and Mohammed fit in? What "plan" are we talking about? The world certainly does not seem to be getting better and better every year? What do you mean prayers are answered? Most of us suffer greatly despite asking for help repeatedly... And on and on we could go.

You see, even the Bible, which is a record of peoples thoughts about God over 1000 years or so, portrays God as being so radically different at different times, that a lot of people assume the God of the Old Testament was a whole other person.

So when Jesus taught, he taught a radically different way of seeing holiness and humanity than that which had come before.... Which makes me wonder.... if someone comes along now... are they not also going to radically alter the way we see holiness and humanity?

Was it not the pharisees and the sadduccees, those we now consider the enemies of truth, but who were at the time, the church, who tried to stop Jesus from saying new and heretical things?

Maybe, just maybe, the essential agreement we should be adhering to is agreement to the statement:

WE CANNOT SEEM TO GET HOW TO BE GOOD - WE NEED TO KEEP TRYING NEW WAYS TO EXPLAIN IT 

Daisies Pushing Through

Today is 9/11. The first 9/11 I have been in full-time ministry for quite some time.

The original 9/11 was a bit of a problem for me. See, I was a young Turk, second pastoral charge, South Shore Suburban Montreal, meteoric career path, doing graduate studies, and I had a lot of answers.

I also had a parishioner, who worked in the Twin Towers, who had married the love of her life that summer. A Jewish guy from New York who seemed really cool and they seemed perfect together.

They died. Horrifically. Their death certificates said they were murdered. I sat with the family for weeks while they waited for news. More weeks while they confronted the inevitable. Then we set down to plan the largest funeral of my life.

Two years before this the worst funeral I did was for a young teenager, whose friends had stolen his clothes while he was in the river swimming with them. He was too embarrassed to get out, and they watched him drown.

9/11 was when I stopped believing in God.

9/11 was when I became an A/Theist

I gave up graduate school. I left Quebec. I left my wife. I left the church. Eventually.

Nothing was ever the same after that because I knew I was a fraud. I was a fraud because I told people that God loved them, that God had a plan, that History unfolded according to some predetermined but ultimately glorious outcome.

That outcome, it turns out, is hatred and death.

And God? God does nothing.

I am a master theologian. I studied ethics with Gregory Baum, Systematics with Doug Hall, Reformation History with Ed Furcha. If I had of written my Theses I would have ended up with five university degrees in Systematic Theology and Religious Studies instead of the three I have now.

And in one fell swoop, thousands of years of the greatest thought on the nature and essence of God meant nothing to me. My experience. My feelings. My mind told me there was no old man in the clouds who could make things better. If there was, he would.

18 years later and I am back in the pulpit.

And I believe in God.

And I am an Athiest.

But it took me a long time, a lot of reading, and a lot of feeling to put Humpty back together again.

Atheism got a lot of press for a while with the Christopher Hutchins of the world, and then the Greta Vosper debacle in the United Church of Canada. I read all that too.

I know that most people should have looked this up before if they follow any of this stuff - but Atheism does not mean "does not believe in God" it means "against theism"

And theism is a belief in the existence of one God, as the creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

Which is nonsense. There is no old man in the sky deciding who lives and dies. That idea is just untenable. And causes nothing but problems. For example, if we pray hard enough to our god, then he will listen and vanquish our enemies. Or I am cured of my cancer because God loves me. But Billy over there dies from the same surgery because of... what? God hates him?

We are a people of stories - that is what defines us - and throughout history, we have told stories where God is on our side, because it makes us feel better, and because we wanted something.

We created God in our image because it was the best that we could do. But we have had thousands of years of history and development and thought and grace and love and hate and it should have taught us how to move past this.

To me God is the collective spirit of Good in the universe, perhaps drawn from the living organic creatures in the same way we name Gaia the collective spirit of or energy from the planet.

People said of Greta Vosper, how can an atheist remain a minister. Well, the simple answer is that theism is a small part of our understanding of what God is or could be, and not subscribing to theism does not mean that one does not subscribe to the idea of divinity, of God(s), of the spiritual, or the magical.

So I am back in full time because, I guess, the thing of it is, I still believe in the idea of goodness and that we need to actively work at being good, helping each other to love, and spreading the message of hope.

I have a social media presence. I just need to turn on my computer to feel bad about the world. But we still have a role to play by being followers of Jesus, who basically wanted us to enjoy life and love abundantly.

That is what 9/11 did to me. It made me into the person Jesus would have loved to drink with.