Girls Just Wanna Have Fun! (They Just - a - wanna)

I'm having a hard time these days.

See - I am someone who does everything from the point of view of how wonderful life is.

I have been accused of Pollyanna thinking, and I do understand that. I do admit that even my own life is harder than I tell myself. After all, I have problems with my kids, I have health issues, I have failed relationships and I have suffered loss.

The thing is, Cyndi Lauper really got to me, and I think girls (and boys) just want to have fun.

Can I defend this theologically? No. Can I defend this sociologically? No.

My only possible defense is two lesser used biblical lines - Moses says to the people of Israel when they are almost done wandering around in the desert - I put before you this day life or death... Choose life; while Jesus has this whole I came so that you might have abundant life bit (Deuteronomy 30 and John 10 - just in case you want to fact check me)

But the thing is - I think we are supposed to look for the good in life - and we are supposed to soak up the sunshine, the sunsets, the moments that make life worth living - and relax and let go of the negativity which would kill our mood.

But, as I said, I am having a hard time.

I see so much negativity. So much hate. So much pain. And I see people reveling in it.

I see religious folks saying that treating others as "less than" is appropriate and right. I see boomers attacking millenials and vice versa. I see entire systems of leadership devolving to grudge matches.

And yet, day after day, week after week, I write columns, and articles, and sermons trying to point us towards the good. 

And there are days I do not know how to justify it. If I write a column on winter tourism telling you to take in the ice caves on a hiking trail - or if I interview Dave Gunning and convince you to go to his concert - am I just promoting escapism from the real, painful, world we should immerse ourselves in?

If I preach a sermon and tell you that there are glimmers of good breaking through the cracks of a broken world am I just pulling the wool over your eyes?

A friend posted a question on the Facebook asking if Satan was beyond saving. It was not a metaphor - it was a religious question by someone who studies these things. And that led me down a rabbit hole of wondering about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

What is bad? What is good? How do you tell?

And is it pollyanna to say - we should be looking at how to enjoy ourselves in the midst of it all?

Just some pondering for all y'all.

My Way or the Highway?

The New Year has dawned.

Poets through the centuries have penned sonnets and limerick's galore as well as everything in between capturing the mood, the hope, the expectation, that a new year can bring. 

For every rhyming couplet of hope there is also an exposition of danger. Writers and thinkers over the aeons have also put word to the dangers each year is fraught with from Isaiah in the older religious writings, through Nostradamus and his predictions, right up to Gary on twitter who posted that the world is on fire. 

The Rabbinical way of engaging the world has always appealed to me. Whenever I have asked a Rabbi a serious question about anything they are quick to answer and make no bones about it. But then they are also quick to change their mind...

"Rabbi Jones, I killed this guy..."
"Killing is forbidden by the laws of God, it is a sin to take away the life that God has given."
"I know...."
"On the other hand..." the Rabbi continues, "tell me about this man you killed - perhaps death was too good for him..."

I think it is incredible that most deep thought can hold opposing viewpoints. On the one hand killing is always wrong - on the other, some people need killing... (just in case you have never met me - I do not think anyone deserves killing - I am using an extreme example because this is the way of it. No matter how outside the norm a question is to a Rabbi, they will still be able to consider the other side, and I love them for that)

Now

I see everyone posting New Years Resolutions. I see all the New Years Blessings and Well Wishes.

And I agree with each and every one. We are all on a journey to fulfillment that winds its way through different valleys and over different mountain peaks for each individual. And the idea of a new start during the change of a year, or a decade, is amazing.

I also see that Australia is on fire. The United States, or some part of it, just risked another world war by illegally taking out half of Baghdad, people are still not listening to Greta Thunberg the way they should be, and believe it or not, before dawn on New Year's Eve 15 people had been shot to death by strangers in different locations in the United States. 

Hope and Fear, Joy and Pain. Not to wax too eloquent, but one wonders if they are merely sides of the same coin?

I wonder if we started embracing this idea that there are many, many, many sides to everything if we would find our lot in life easier to bear?

It might be hard for us. We live in an age of extreme polarization. Wherever we look someone is yelling to us that we either see the world as black and white or we are the enemy.

Don't believe them.

And perhaps in this one act of rebellion, where we move away from believing we ever have the definitive answer for anything, we would find it to be enough to tip the balance of 2020 to being a place where we can find joy and pain and be okay with both.

There is literally no highway. There is literally no my way. All ways are paths to the centre. All ways spiral in and out of reality, of usefulness, of destination. All ways are valid for the person in the moment they are in.... It is all they know.

And yet... there is so much more....

May this be the year that we discover new paths and are okay with the fact that they are still not the right ones to be on...

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 

In the Beginning... Was the WAY

Before the church councils, before the church fathers, before the Gospel writers, there was a creed that was the central tenet of belief for the fledgling group of followers mourning the loss of Jesus.

"Jesus is Lord!"

That is it. That's all. No Trinitarian formulations, no doctrine of salvation... just a claim that at the centre of all we are and all we think is Jesus. 

Now, scholars and folks will tell you that this had serious overtones and repercussions. "Lord" (Kurios in Greek and Adonai in Hebrew) was a term of social understanding given to one who is your better. But at its core it simply means ruler. 

One of the main problems was that the Roman Emperor at the time, Octavian, carried the title Augustus, a fancy religious term for Lord. In other words - the Emperor was Lord, not Jesus - or vice versa depending on where you stand. 

Most agree however, that whether you said this for political or religious reasons, the point of Jesus is Lord is that you give yourself completely over to the teachings and examples of this guru and become someone who owes everything and does everything for Jesus. 

I occasionally find myself pausing to wonder if 2,000 years of interpretation and development within the church did not lead us astray from everything Jesus stood for. But to say it less dramatically, I wonder if we are too often putting our thought and emphasis on the wrong thing.

The "Church" is an institution. The Creeds are interpretation. The priests are intermediaries. And we are a hundred steps away from being actual followers of Jesus. 

Even - and I mean this in the best possible way - even if we could determine what Jesus actually meant without it going through the filter of Paul, and the church, and all of those writings and sermons.... Even then - would most of us who attend or work for a denomination of this global network of institutions be able to say we are following Jesus? 

I had a professor once, and I cannot remember who or where or when, sorry, who told us that the original title for the movement that came about after Jesus was "The Way" The people of the Way were the people who followed the example of Jesus.

And in the early church they took this stuff seriously. They gave away their possessions, they decided not to get married or buy property, they lived together and shared everything in a good socialist way - knowing that this brought them closer to being able to live like Jesus... who was, by all accounts, a wandering, poor, itinerant preacher and teacher. 

Now, none of this is new thought - I want to make that clear. Some of the best minds of recent years within the Christian Thought Factory have written and dissected the idea of Empire and how Jesus lived in opposition to it.

But as a progressive who is trying to make their way in the dying days of ecclesial empire, I think about this at a much more practical level.

How far away am I from living and thinking like Jesus. How would I reclaim the original intent of the faith which was much more of a social reform movement than anything else? How do I lead a congregation in a way that actually honours what Jesus was trying to get across and does not just build on the last millennium or two of Christian Empire building.

First off - I no longer like to use the word Christian. I think we should go back to People of the Way.

Secondly - I think the focus of worship and work within existing church structures should change to be about social justice as the main path to spiritual enlightenment. Or, to be more direct, love and loving everyone should be the main path to spiritual enlightenment.

But mostly I think we need to let go of all the division and fighting that happens in the modern church as we struggle to take our last gasp before going under. We need to understand that almost everything we fight about is made up, an interpretation, or at best, our opinion.

Whether you are left, right, up or down in your own thinking, we can all agree that Jesus basic answer to every question was "love everybody"

how about we focus on that for a while? 

Pronouns, God, and Laziness

Some of the things I do in church and services go unnoticed.

For example, I never use pronouns for God. I try very very hard to not say he, his, her, him, she etc.

Now, a basic reason for this is I am very, very sure that God is not a person. After all, that would be creating something in our own image - and it would be arrogant to think that of all life in the universe, the supreme form of life is just like me.

In reality, however, my reason is deeper and fundamentally different. It is not that I do not think God has genitalia. It is that I do not think God has agency. This is why I do not consider myself a theist.

A key portion of theism is the idea that "God interacts in the affairs of men" (to put it in the old fashioned sexist way) and most people see that and immediately get their hackles up about the idea of it being only "men"... while my hackles go up because of the idea of "interacts".

Again, my problem is deeper than the traditional surface problem.

Here is where it falls down for most people. If God pulls the strings why is there bad? Why do saints get cancer? Why are children abused? etc. etc. etc. Which in and of itself is a compelling argument against a God who controls everything?

But I suggest the original reason we dreamt up omnipotence (all powerfulness) was laziness, pure and simple. And not just wanting to sleep in laziness, but a deep-down flaw in human nature that makes us look for the easy way out of the hardest circumstances.

In other words, instead of doing the hard work of understanding reality and our place in it - we pass the buck and throw our hands into the air saying only God knows why things like this happen.

If you think that you do not pass the buck consider if these sorts of words have ever passed your lips - "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" "It will all become known when we get to heaven" "this must be according to God's plan" "Ours is not to reason why" "Leave it at the foot of the cross" or even "have faith"

Not only are these patently untrue statements - but they are cop-outs.

Hear me out, God is not a person who is doing things actively, God is a power that we can tap in to.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The problem with statements like the above is that we give up our agency and make it about whether or not God is going to do it.

I have seen some worst-case scenarios for this - a colleague who believed if God wanted us to get to the retreat then God would somehow figure out a way to fill the tank with Gas. (that way ended up being me paying for gas) or a parent who lets their child die because God must have willed it and medicine is for the unfaithful.

But on a less harsh tact, the problem could be as simple as saying that God must want me to be lonely or else someone would show up at my doorstep with flowers in hand.

It is part of us giving up on our own power and sitting back waiting for someone else to solve the problem. Only on a larger, global, supernatural scale.

So when I write prayers I carefully go through and take out the agency for God and put it back onto us. God grant us the grace to becomes, may we find the grace to... The love of God be with you becomes may God's love work through you. and things like that.

Because I firmly believe that Jesus and the boys who came to help us find spirituality were always about us realizing that the Kingdom of God was within us - that the power of God was within us... etc.

So back to God being the power we can tap into. Let us say that there is no old man in the sky, but let us look to that most visionary of spiritual authorities, George Lucas, who in the original Star Wars trilogy defined God as "The Force" a connection between all living things that we could tap into in order to be more fully who we were meant to be.

That is a god which makes sense. There IS God. It is, however you label it, force, goodness, love, universal harmony - some power base in and behind everything. It is there for us to tap into at any time. But it is not, of itself, doing anything.

So God did not give me cancer, nor did God take cancer away from me. Bad health decisions followed by good science did that. But what is more important is that me facing cancer with humour, empathy, warmth and grace was me tapping into God.

And the only way anyone could know God is by witnessing someone tapping into that strength.

When I view it this way everything falls into place. There is no reason God is or is not doing anything - life is random. How we react to life, however, is the real test of faith and the real place that God is present.

It is not just philosophically true, it makes sense on so many levels, including Jesus' teaching where he said things like when you take care of widows and orphans God is there.

So Marx was right - we use religion to pass the buck - but we do not have to.

Dark Times as Colonialism Dies

Yesterday I listened to an interview on the CBC with author Alexandra Fuller who was brought up by white and English parents in Rhodesia, which has since become Zimbabwe.

Her candour in describing systemic racism and white supremacy as a matter of course was really astonishing. However, in the midst of the interview, she said a casual throwaway line that reverberated in my brain for the last twenty-four hours. She said, "These were the last days of colonial rule, and in the end times, the people hold on the hardest."

It was as if a light bulb went off in my thinking about the modern world.

In the last days of a system - instead of accepting the coming change and working to move carefully and harmoniously into the new world order, we fight tooth and nail against said change and seek to hold ever more tightly to the past.

Wow.

First off, the whole populist political shift in the world all of a sudden makes sense. We know, intuitively, that these are the last days of capitalism and our current economic system. We know that these are the last days of nationalism and independence. We see through travel, global economies, and transnational corporations that, well, everything is changing and what will be remains to be seen.

When I first started to become interested in the church, in religion and the like - I was still in the tail end of the era when we thought everything was set in stone. The '80s were a rich and heady time when everything was working. Systems and institutions had power. Racism and Sexism were being addressed. Life looked good for a few years there before it inevitably fell hard.

As the world tilts on its axis, we are finding ourselves deeper and deeper into shifts where we do not see the outcome. Whether we are talking the move from a goods-based to an information-based society, whether we are talking about the divide and class structures, or whether we are speaking of the climate disaster that will destroy most of what is left - things are changing and the final form of our politics, economy, and even global map seems unwritten.

But then it clicked in terms of church.

We are dying faster than most.

Or, rather, becoming irrelevant in the new system.

At our full power, the church controlled the medical, educational, and perhaps even the political realm. Now we have trouble influencing the crosswalk guard.

(see, this is where it clicked for me - I have for a decade been questioning how the mainline, progressive, left-wing United Church is attracting clergy, leaders, and even congregants who are right-leaning and traditionalist - that simply is not our jam, or was not our jam when I decided to play with the band) 

It only makes sense that what we see in our dying congregation is the last gasp of holding on to something of the past. Ministers are becoming more authoritarian and old fashioned. People are actually talking about heresy and fundamentals and things that would have been laughed out of an annual meeting not that many years ago. Our church who once fought the government for inclusion of LBGQT++ issues now turns inward and fights about the nature of biblical inerrancy or Christological significance.

I have been riding along, wondering who cares, and why, and how we got so off track from the socialist hippy message of loving everyone and sharing that Jesus taught us in kindergarten.

And it really is just fear. It really is just a lack of acceptance that those days are over. It is the hardcore believers in the institution and in the Christian Kingdom refusing to let go and say this is no longer Rhodesia and controlled by the Whites, it is now Zimbabwe and open to everyone getting their say.

(I realize it might not be the best example because Zimbabwe and most of the post-colonial countries had a hard go of it too - but I hope you get the meaning behind the example - the "church" we grew up in is not coming back...)

I think that we are seeing staunch belief in old fashioned religious ways of thinking because we are witnessing the fear of death. And the reality that death leads to resurrection is not good enough for most, because we cannot control the form of resurrection.

What will "faith" look like on the other side of this period of upheaval and change? We cannot know. But it too, like global boundaries, politics, and economic systems, will change. The change will be rapid and continue to be painful.

It could be easier if we let go.

But I admit it is always scary when you need to let go in order to fall into the unknown. It is hard to go with the flow and live in the moment and realize you cannot control tomorrow...

Still... we should try

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.