Common Ways – and One Uncommon Way – to Handle Conflict

Posted on January 6, 2018 by salooper57

The beginning of a new year can serve as a catalyst for dealing with old problems, including long-standing relational conflicts. Every family – every person – experiences conflict. Two people are all that it takes to set the stage and for the drama to begin. When it was just Adam and Eve, with no ex-boyfriends, girlfriends, or mothers-in-law, they probably argued over whether to go with the trim-fit fig leaf or the loose-fit sycamore.

Everyone experiences conflict, and we all have our own ways of responding to it. One way is with anger. The psychologist Neil Warren, who founded eHarmony, identified four common ways people express anger in conflict. Some people blow up, and there are shrapnel wounds all around. One never has to guess what is wrong with this kind of person. When the top of his head comes off you can see what is on his mind. He erupts like a volcano, and you know what’s bothering him.

There are other people who don’t blow up; they burn up. They don’t explode, they smolder. If asked, they will probably say that nothing is wrong. They even tell themselves that nothing is wrong. As far as externals go, everything is cool. But there is internal combustion going on, and it is eating them up. If nothing changes, their insides will eventually turn to ash.

Then there are people who pout. Their weapon in conflict is not explosive anger, but corrosive guilt. They suffer terribly, and yet, oddly enough, it is everyone else who is miserable. A good example is the older brother in Jesus’s famous parable of the prodigal son. He is conspicuously missing from the family celebration, demanding attention by his absence, and yet spurning it when it is given. His father asks him to join the others, but he lays on the guilt: “You give him, the bad son, a party. You never gave me a stupid party. You always loved him best.”

The fourth way people deal angrily with conflict is with payback, frequently delivered on the deferred payment plan. They slowly torture their victims, using words to injure, but often under the guise of humor. They won’t admit they’re angry, but they won’t be satisfied until they see their victims squirm – again and again.

The way conflict is handled can intensify it rather than quell it. The initial disagreement, handled appropriately, might have been resolved with relative ease but, dealt with in the wrong way, ratchets up the anger. One sees this often in troubled, long-term relationships, both at home and at work. The principals in the conflict can provide a long and specific list of complaints, but can’t remember where the trouble started.

At this point, a good counselor can be helpful. He or she can clarify the steps needed to resolve the conflict. But knowing the steps will not help much if the desire for a better relationship is missing. I have asked people point-blank, “Do you want a better relationship?” only to hear the response, “Yes, but…” followed by a list of accusations. Until the emphasis is on the “yes” and not on the accusations, real progress will be rare.

In conflict, people become profoundly adversarial, even when they compromise, concede, or withdraw. It’s been my experience, both as an observer and a participant in conflict, that the most important and most difficult step in healing a relationship is to stop thinking of the other person as the enemy and instead think of the unresolved issue as the enemy.

If people can do this, the conflict will often be resolved very quickly. But who can do this – who can think of the person who has injured (or is injuring) them as anything but an adversary? It is not what normal people do.

Perhaps not, but it is what spiritual people do. When I have had the privilege of seeing it happen, there has always been a spiritual dynamic present. The people who love enemies and do good to them, as Jesus instructed his followers to do, are conscious of God’s presence and confident of his help. Because God is real to them, they can risk being vulnerable to others.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 1/6/2017

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Prequels and Sequels: Christmas in Retrospect

Posted on January 5, 2018 by salooper57

“You better watch out, you better not cry; Better not pout, I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is comin’ to town. He’s making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice. Santa Claus is comin’ to town  He sees you when you’re sleepin’. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”[1]

If that isn’t the most blatant example of propaganda ever, I don’t know what is. It is mind-control – plain and simple. St. Nicholas could sue for libel. St. Paul would decry it as a theology of works. Yet it plays on a thousand radio stations every December, and parents have it on their iTunes and Apple Music playlists. And when their kids start to act up, they just remind them that Santa is watching. Mind control. You ask me how I know this? I know this because that’s what my mother did. If my brother and I were getting a little rambunctious, it was: “Are you on the naughty or nice list right now?” When we were supposed to be sleeping but were instead goofing around, we were reminded that “Santa is watching.”

And my dad made things worse by putting candy canes on our window sills – it never occurred to us that they were the same candy canes he gave away in the barbershop at Christmastime – and made us think that Santa had been spying on us, peeking us through the windows. That’s creepy, isn’t it? A peeping Santa. I mean, how was a five-year-old supposed to think about that? I can remember going outside when I was little, and tracking Santa’s big boots – which were, suspiciously, size 10 and ½, just like my dad’s – with my pop gun at the ready. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I caught up with hi, but I was hot on his trail. And then I lost him when his boot prints looped back around the house and became confused in the myriad of other prints around our back porch. He was clever!

“He knows if you’ve been bad or good.” Bad or good, that was the question at Christmas time. Get in a fight with your brother, even when you didn’t start it, and your mother was saying: “He knows if you’ve been bad or good.” It was paralyzing. For the month before Christmas, we couldn’t get away with a thing.

But listen: Bad or good is not the issue, and Christmas is not a tool to make children grow up into responsible citizens and reliable tax payers. Christmas is more than you or I realize.

I’m sure many of you have gone to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi in the past week or so. (And before you ask me what I thought of it, I haven’t seen it yet. You know, I’m more of a Star Trek guy, but that’s probably because the resident adviser in my dorm almost ordered me to go and see the first Star Wars movie. He kept telling me (and everybody else), “There is a guy in the movie that looks exactly like Looper. Exactly. You’ll know him when you see him. His name is Chewy.” (My hair and beard were a little longer back then.)

If you’re a Star Wars fan, you know the story now in theaters is part of a much grander narrative. Even that first movie I went to see in the ’70s was part of a much bigger story, though most of us didn’t realize it at the time. It had a backstory – a prequel – and would have a fore-story – a sequel.

That’s the way it is with Christmas. It is a satisfying story in itself – this tale of an unwed mother and an ostracized family, of an angel messenger and noble shepherds. We can enjoy it without knowing the rest of the story – or even knowing there is a rest of the story. We can enjoy it, but we can’t really understand it, not until we know how Christmas fits into the larger narrative. Christmas has a prequel and a sequel, and we’ll only understand it within the context of the larger story of what God is doing in the world. What makes this story different from all others is that we are not merely viewers; we are participants. This story is interactive: we have a role.

What is the prequel to the Christmas story? It would take more time than we have available to give much detail – you can get a lot of it from the Old Testament – but I’ll summarize. The backstory is that a superior intelligence created carbon-based, physical-spiritual hybrid beings and placed them on a planet – as it turns out, our planet. The creator designed these beings to be a race of godlike and loving protectors and rulers of creation.

Unlike the other creatures he designed, the Creator engineered the humans with a high degree of autonomy: they can make choices, formulate plans, and carry them out, as they see fit. This autonomy was a key part of the design. Humans were the glory of the creation.

But as the story progresses, the nascent humans are co-opted by a dark power and drawn away from their creator and the result is disastrous. The spiritual part of humans, who were designed as physical-spiritual hybrids, underwent catastrophic failure. Without the spiritual component, humans became like other animals, only more intelligent. Chaos ensued: injustice, greed, hatred, and foolishness invaded human society.

The creator, though, does not give up on his human creatures. He rather communicates with the humans that are capable of interacting with him. There is no undoing the damage done by human rebellion, no going back, but the Creator plans to take humanity forward. He immediately sets in motion a plan to right what has gone wrong and restore humanity’s spiritual life. He begins shaping a millennia-long lineage chain among his human creatures. Within that lineage, he promotes a particular culture, and superintends a specific genetic line. He does this over a period of thousands of years. His plan is to enter humanity himself through the line he has prepared, in order to save humanity from the rebellion and restore its damaged spiritual function. That’s the metanarrative into which Christmas fits.

Once we are aware of the prequel, we realize that Christmas is not a stand-alone story about the birth of a beautiful child under trying circumstances. It is the story of a rescue, the story of an invasion. It is a bittersweet story, because when the creator entered his creation through the line he had spent thousands of years preparing, his creatures did not know him. So St. John writes, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him” (John 1:10). Not only did they not recognize him, they did not accept him: “He came to His own,” the line and the people he had been preparing for millennia, “and His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11).

Of course, in the tale we know as the Christmas story, there is all kinds of excitement: there is a tyrannical ruler who serves an Empire which is under the sway of the original dark power. As soon as the tyrant becomes aware that the Empire has been infiltrated, he makes an attempt on the creator’s life. There are bad guys aplenty in this story, but there are also friends and unexpected allies. There are covert messages. There is a dramatic escape.

But here is the thing we need to understand about Christmas: It is the middle of the story, not the beginning nor the end. And it is full of surprises. Instead of the creator going to war against the rebels, as we might expect, he goes to war for them. He could have impressed them with his vast power, or intimidated them with threats of punishment, or appealed to them on the basis of their greed or selfishness – the same old story of the ways of power in the world. But he did none of those things. His sights were set something more radical than conformity to a set of rules: He was out to change humanity from the inside; to change us from the inside.

To that end, the creator lived among humans as a human, modeling for them the life he makes possible and instructing them in how to live it. But they needed more than instruction. They needed the kind of life they had lost and didn’t even know was missing. To make that possible, the creator had to give his life on their behalf. He did this by dying and rising again. That is the climax of the story, and you can read about in the New Testament Gospels.

It is the climax of the story, but it is not the end of the story. The story continued on, as chronicled in the book known as The Acts of the Apostles. And the same story is going on still, and still being chronicled. (Remember what St. John wrote: “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.” And what’s recorded there will no doubt include the heroics and bravery and extraordinary faith of God’s people in this generation. We are a part of the story now, and have a role to play in it.

Think of it! We’re in the same story as Mary, only at a different point in the plot. What happened to Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the magi – that’s the prequel to our part of the story. But while ours is a sequel, it is not the final installment. That is still to come, when the king who came comes again; this time, not a baby, but a hero; not in weakness, but in strength; not in poverty, but in glory.

And that final installment of that story is the beginning of the great story that goes on forever, in which each chapter is better than the last (Lewis). We join the heroes of the faith – Abraham and Moses, David and Jeremiah, Mary and Joseph, Paul and Timothy, and many others we don’t yet know. And we join them because of God’s grace delivered through the baby, the man, the king.

Preached on Christmas Eve at Lockwood Church, Coldwater, MI

[1]  Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Coots

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Why Do New Year’s Resolutions Fail?

Posted on December 30, 2017 by salooper57

People who make New Year’s resolutions overwhelmingly fail to keep them. Dan Diamond, writing in Forbes, reports that researchers at the University of Scranton found that only 8 percent of people actually keep their resolutions. A failure rate that exceeds 90 percent can only be considered catastrophic.

Presumably, people who make New Year’s resolutions really want to keep them. It’s not like anyone is holding a gun to their heads. So why do nine out of ten of us fail to do what we ourselves have chosen to do?

Experts have offered valuable suggestions. They explain that our expectations are too often unrealistic. We bite off more than we can chew. Additionally, they say our resolutions fail because we do not plan to succeed. We have a goal, but no strategy for achieving it. Or our New Year’s resolutions die from starvation: we neglect to feed them with the necessary time and money they need to survive, believing our good intentions are enough to carry them through.

The reasons for failure can be summarized under three headings: vision, intention, and means. These terms come from Dallas Willard’s insightful book, “The Renovation of the Heart,” which is a helpful resource on how people change, written from a Christian perspective. Failures in these areas will usually lead to fruitless – and soon-forgotten – resolutions.

Vision is foundational to success. A while back, a friend told me that he would like to learn a difficult (for Westerners) foreign language. I asked him how learning that language would improve his life and benefit him in the future. He gave a predictable reply – it would help him in his work – and we moved on to other things. When we met again a month later, I asked him what he had decided about learning the language. He wisely responded that he had given it up for now. I was glad: his vision at this point in his life was inadequate to sustain his desire.

We keep resolutions when we have envisioned the benefits that will accrue to us and desire them more than the life we are currently living. When we have seen our future in this light, keeping resolutions is not difficult because the resolutions keep us. If we constantly struggle to keep a grip on our resolutions, it could be that no compelling vision of the future has gripped us.

When failure is caused by lack of vision, it is necessary to spend time praying, researching, and thinking about what our future could be. Distraction is the danger here. It prevents people from envisioning the future God has for them, and resolving to attain it.

The second main reason people fail to keep resolutions falls under the heading “Intention.” They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the road unpaved by intentions is even worse; it leads nowhere. At least the road to hell has interchanges that lead in the other direction.

When our failure to keep resolutions is caused by a lack of intention, it is important to state what we want to achieve in specific terms. We must decide to do it, and share that decision with others. Willard writes about people who “may have wished that what they supposedly intend would happen, and perhaps they even wanted to do it (or for it to be done); but they did not decide to do it, and their intention—which well may have begun to develop—aborted and never really formed.”

The third primary reason for failure falls under the heading of “Means.” When vision and intention are in place, the means will usually become apparent. Still, it can be helpful to identify the thoughts, feelings, habits and relationships that might prevent us from keeping our resolution. When this has been thoughtfully done, a strategy can be developed for dealing with obstacles. This will clarify the “means” for keeping our resolve.

One thing every resolution-maker should know is that will-power alone will not sustain a resolution. Will-power is more like an ignition switch than the engine it starts. Will-power can get us going, but the engine that will keep us going runs on vision, intention, and means.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/30/2017

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A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups

Posted on December 23, 2017 by salooper57

Most Christmas story books are for kids. They either tell a story that has almost nothing to do with the first Christmas – think, A Christmas Carol, for example, or Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer – or they whitewash the first Christmas and give it a G-Rating. It’s not that there is anything wrong with that – I appreciate having a kid-friendly introduction to Christmas to read to our young grandchildren. But if that is all grown-ups know about Christmas, they’ve missed the point of the story.

In kid’s Christmas books and conventional artistic representations, the first Christmas features fluffy white sheep, clean, fat cows, and humble-looking shepherds, all sanitized. We can’t smell the cows or the sheep (or the shepherds, for that matter), but you can be sure that Joseph and Mary could.

Popular depictions of that night routinely feature a sweet-faced angel hovering in the sky above, proclaiming good news of great joy to the shepherds. And, indeed, that is what the angel proclaimed, but the shepherds had a very different take on his message than we do. We hear the angelic message as the good news that a lovely baby has been born or that good triumphs over evil or, perhaps, that our souls will be saved. These ideas are true, but they would not have occurred to the astonished shepherds.

They heard the angel’s message the way a French Resistance fighter would have heard the news of D-Day: the battle had been joined, and liberation was at hand. Had you tried to talk to them in the language of contemporary children’s Christmas books, about the animals and the stable and the sweet, quiet baby, they would have been confused, chagrined even. They would have asked, “What are you talking about?” For the most part, we don’t see what they saw.

It’s not because the battle motif is hidden in the Christmas story; it is not. For anyone with eyes to see it, it is unmistakable. We just don’t have eyes to see it. We have been taught to think that the Christmas story is either all about a baby, and his birth in the most trying of circumstances, or all about us, and getting our souls into heaven.

Where is the evidence of this battle motif? Start with the annunciation, in which the angel tells Mary that her son will take the throne – held at the time by a usurper in the employ of a foreign power – and reign as king. In the first century Roman province of Judea, talk like that could get a person killed. And when the usurper heard that talk, people were killed. He sent troops to assassinate the child-king and devastate the village where he lived. The same kind of tactic has been employed by tyrants in our own day.

Also in the Christmas narrative, the priest Zechariah applauds the arrival of the one who will bring “salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us…” Zechariah was expecting a war of liberation.

When the Evangelist Luke tells the story of Jesus’s birth, he sets it up by describing a census and tax initiative undertaken by Israel’s hated Roman oppressors. He writes of Caesar’s decree, and references the Syrian procurator who ruled Judea on behalf of the occupational government.

Luke doesn’t mention the angel’s sweet face. He rather writes about the terrified onlookers. As the angel announces the birth of the long-awaited Messiah King, he is flanked by “a great company of the heavenly host.” The word translated “host” is simply the Greek word for “army.” The shepherds would have assumed that the angelic army was an invasion force, and that military operations had begun.

Of course, they were mistaken. The angelic army, arrayed in glory, was not the invasion force. The little baby, wrapped in swaddling, was. Still, the war had begun, but it was not a conventional war. What was being contested was not land but people’s hearts. What was at stake was not the future of Palestine, but the future of the human race. And the secret weapon was love, “wrapped in swaddling and lying in a manger.”

Christmas is not only a reminder that God loves us, it is a reminder that we are at war: a war that will be won by love; a war in which we must take sides.

 

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e-Christianity and the e-Christians it Produces

Posted on December 16, 2017 by salooper57

Work schedule getting in the way of church? Don’t like the preacher? Out too late on Saturday night and unable to get up for Sunday service?

No worries. There’s always e-Church. You can do church online: stream services, listen to sermons, give your offering, even join a Bible study or discipleship group. And you can do it all in the comfort of your own home, while lounging around in your pajamas.

Long before there was e-Church on your phone, tablet or computer, there were preachers on the radio and television. Religious radio broadcasting began in the 1920s, and is today the second leading format in the U.S., second only to country music. Television evangelists gained immense popularity in the ’80 and ’90s. There are now approximately 1,500 religious television and radio stations in the U.S., broadcasting thousands of hours of programming each week.

With the advent of the internet, religious broadcast options, and the dissemination of religious teaching, skyrocketed. This is a positive development in many ways, but it is not without its dangers. There is trouble in e-Church.

One of the most disturbing things about e-Church is that it allows people to drop out of Christian community while believing they are doing everything they need to do to please God and grow spiritually. If they have a conflict with a fellow-church member, they can leave without resolving issues or reconciling, which is clearly contrary to biblical teaching. It’s not that the electronic church promotes such behavior, but it does enable it.

About 226 million people in the U.S. self-identify as Christians, yet 160 million of them will not be in church this Sunday. Or the following Sunday. Or the one after that. Tens of millions of Christians simply do not go to church. They consider it an option they can take or leave, and many have chosen the latter.

Where did they get this idea? Certainly not from the Bible. Nor does it come from the saints or well-known Christian teachers. John Wesley, the Anglican priest who founded Methodism, said point-blank: “The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.” He was right. In the third century, St. Cyprian put it this way: “Outside the church there is no salvation.”

This, of course, does not mean that church attendance is necessary to salvation, but neither does it permit us to think of the church as one option among many. God’s plan from the very beginning has been to build a church, not merely enlist individuals. This means that Christians must be in community, if they are to fulfill God’s plans for them.

One doesn’t need to look far to see the reasons for this. God wants flesh and blood Christians, not merely digital ones. The spiritual transformation he intends takes place on multiple dimensions, including: the will, the mind and emotions, and the body. It is in the context of committed relationships that the various facets of human personality are transformed; that is, in the church. That this can take place in the digital world is not at all clear.

A recent study at Harvard compared brain activity during digital and face to face encounters. Researchers learned that the part of the brain that is active when one sits with a distraught friend – the part linked to compassion – is not active when one receives a Facebook message from a distraught friend. The digital encounter, while very valuable, simply does not do the same thing in us or for us.

The many commands and principles expressed in the Bible are fleshed out in community. For example: St. Paul famously urged Christians to present their bodies to God as living sacrifices and to be transformed by the renewal of their minds. This does not simply happen as we think. People are not just brains in jars of flesh. Nor does it happen because we add an emoticon to our Facebook message.

Spiritual growth and transformation happen, as the apostle himself makes perfectly clear, in the context of community, in the gritty give-and-take of love in an imperfect church. The body is offered, and the mind renewed, through service to God and his church. The e-church is a useful tool in such service, but a poor substitute

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/16/2017.

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Increasingly Irreligious America (It’s Not All Bad)

Posted on December 9, 2017 by salooper57

Two Muslim men once came to our Sunday worship service. The morning’s Scripture text, from the Book of Genesis, featured the story of Abraham’s visit to Egypt. Muslims revere Abraham and regard him as one of the special messengers God sent humanity. Something I said in the sermon offended our guests, who got up noisily and stormed out.

I talked to one of the men afterwards, and set up a time to meet at a local restaurant. Each of us brought along a friend and we discussed our faith perspectives. At one point in the conversation, my new acquaintance stated that everyone born in the U.S. is a Christian, unless born to parents from another religion. From his perspective, if you were born in the U.S. to parents who were not Jews or Muslims, you are a Christian.

Likewise, he said a person born in a Muslim country to Muslim parents is a Muslim. He added that he or she may not be a good Muslim, but that was irrelevant. Good or bad, he or she was a Muslim.

I told him the Bible teaches that people are not Christians by birth but by second birth, by conversion from one state to another. I pointed him to texts like John 3, where Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” and Acts 2, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.”

But the idea that race or lineage does not automatically make a person a Christian was not something he grasped. As far as he was concerned, if you were born in the U.S. and are not something else, you are a Christian.

From what I can tell, his viewpoint is broadly shared. Most Americans believe themselves to be Christians, even though many rarely or never attend church, don’t know even the basic doctrines of the faith, and have never been baptized. Of the founder of the faith, they know little. They cannot articulate what he taught and have never even considered the possibility of acting on his instructions. The idea that a Christian will – or at least should – do what Jesus taught is to them completely novel.

Many Americans can only loosely be called Christians, even those who self-identify as such (about seven out of ten people). This makes any genuine entrance into the Christian faith more difficult: why enter when you are already in? It also makes understanding who Jesus really is, and practicing what he taught, seem entirely optional.

In recent years, there has been an upswing in people who do not identify with any religious group. Sociologists sometimes refer to them as “nones” because of their response to the question about religious affiliation on the census. Many people, especially parents of “nones,” view this trend with apprehension, but I think it is, overall, a positive step. Most of these people never were Christians by any objective biblical or historical standard, but didn’t know it. They assumed, like my Muslim friend, that they must be Christian because they were born in America and were not Jews or Muslims.

Acknowledging that they are not Christians is a first, critical step. Though this can be extremely painful, both for the person and for friends and family members looking on, it is necessary.

For most people, the next step is to realize the faith they have rejected is only a caricature of the real thing. They were right to discard it. They are like the woman who says she dislikes crab but has only tasted the ground fish meat and other body parts – “crab-stick,” as it is commonly called – that is sold in supermarkets.

Eventually, people must be introduced to the real thing – to Jesus himself and his teaching. Many will be surprised by what Jesus is really like, what he taught, and the kind of life he makes available to those who trust him. Surprised and, I think, eager to learn more.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/9/2017

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America Needs a Workable Sexual Ethic

Posted on December 2, 2017 by salooper57

Not Matt Lauer too. I liked Matt Lauer. He seemed like a down-to-earth guy, someone who enjoyed his work and was good at it. Unlike some of the people on television, I never felt like Matt Lauer thought he was better or more important than his viewers.

Let’s remember that the accusations of sexual harassment against Mr. Lauer are just that: accusations. They have not been proved and in our legal system a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. That would have been an easier presumption to maintain if Lauer had not been the latest link on a long, fast-growing chain of powerful people who have been accused of immoral and even illegal sexual conduct.

In the past, the nation has been willing to overlook such accusations. The careers of Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Donald Trump were not destroyed by their accusers. But since the revelations concerning Harvey Weinstein opened the floodgates, that seems to be changing – at least for now. Powerful men are losing their jobs and watching their careers and legacy dissolve before their eyes.

When I say powerful men, I am aware that women have also been accused. But let’s face it: the vast majority of accusations have been levelled against men: Charlie Rose, Glenn Thrush, Jeffrey Tambor, Al Franken, Roy Moore, Louis C. K., Steven Seagal, Kevin Spacey, George H. W. Bush, John Conyers, and a host of others.

Several times during this flood of revelations, I have thought of the poem “Man in Space” by contemporary American poet Billy Collins. In it he explains why women in science fiction movies “are always standing in a semicircle, with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks.” The reason, of course, is men.

What can we learn from the deluge of allegations? That men are evil? That power corrupts? That there is a dangerous imbalance of power between the genders?

We may need to relearn these old lessons, but we must also come to grips with America’s need of a workable sexual ethic based on a healthy view of sexuality. Such a view is profoundly absent in the culture at large, where sexual pleasure has been elevated to an ultimate good. Hollywood and the advertising industry are culpable in propagating this lie, and the consequences are everywhere evident.

The Bible and, based on it, Christianity, provides a healthy view of sexuality, but we are so far down the rabbit hole that even Christians are largely unaware of it. The Christian view is not a return to Victorian era ethics but an advance to an ethic based on love and respect for God and people, a love and respect constructed on a foundation of genuine spirituality. As Dallas Willard put it: “The human body becomes the primary source of pleasure for the person who does not live honestly and interactively with God, and also the primary source of terror, torture, and death.” Our culture is painfully aware of the need to build a new sexual ethic, but it is largely unware of the need for a foundation to support it.

There is another lesson to learn from this, one that has implications for Christians. The idea that cultural necessity trumps God’s standards of morality – that we must, for example, elect a Roy Moore, even though he may have committed horrendous acts because we can’t afford to lose the Senate – is profoundly unchristian. Didn’t St. Paul demolish the idea that we must “do evil that good may result”? Didn’t he warn that evil can only be overcome by good, and not by doing further evil?

The idea that a political agenda is more important than right and wrong is, as David Brooks has pointed out, a form of idolatry. Whenever a person places trust in some form of power (the Democratic or Republican parties, for example) above trust in God; whenever a person is willing to sacrifice to that power, especially when it is his or her moral integrity that is being sacrificed; whenever a person acts on the idea that ultimate good can come from secondary means, he or she is committing idolatry.

The final words of St. John’s first letter remain disconcertingly apropos for our age: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/2/2017

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Find Your Place in the Divine Comedy

Posted on November 18, 2017 by salooper57

Christians sometimes say that it is important to “think biblically.” That is, in fact, the title of a book by a well-known American Christian leader. But how does one do that? Does one try to fill one’s thoughts with passages of Scripture? Or does thinking biblically have to do with remembering and referring to biblical teaching on all the various subjects that come up during the week? Or is it really about making decisions that conform to biblical doctrines or commands?

Thinking biblically probably involves all these things, but it also goes beyond them. One can routinely refer to biblical passages and even use Bible verses in the decision-making process and still fail to think biblically. Worse, one can use Bible verses to support decisions that are antithetical to biblical thought.

For example, people used biblical verses to support slavery in Europe and America. People have used biblical passages to support polygamy. When Jesus was teaching in Israel, people felt justified in opposing him because of their convictions about Bible texts.

I have occasionally been asked to view teaching videos and provide a critique. The teacher relies exclusively on the Bible, I have been told. Yes, the teacher referred to Bible verses constantly, but many of those verses were lifted out of their context to support a point of view. Further, the teacher disregarded important passages that did not fit the argument being promulgated. The teaching turned out to be counter-biblical despite the profligate use of Bible verses.

Biblical thinking does not start with using the Bible to support a doctrinal or ethical position. The truth is, if one comes to the Bible looking for support for a previously assumed position, he or she will probably find it. Such an approach, which has been all too familiar in Christian history, has been disastrous. The Holocaust, one must never forget, happened in a “Christian country” where some of the world’s best biblical scholars and theologians lived and worked.

Making decisions that are consistent with biblical teaching is of course important, but that is where biblical thinking leads, not where it begins. People who try to begin there will fail to make biblically-coherent decisions because they have got things in the wrong order. Biblical thinking does not try to force the Bible into our story but rather brings our lives into the Bible’s story, that is, the God’s.

Seeing oneself and one’s world as an ongoing part of the biblical narrative is the first step toward biblical thinking. To do so obliges a person to ask, “Where are we in God’s story?” It requires a person to accept the fact that he or she is not the story’s protagonist but is in a supporting role.

But there are other stories, competing narratives, which make this first step toward biblical thinking difficult. In the West, and particularly in America, there is another narrative that is told, a ubiquitous tale about the autonomy of self-made individuals. It is a story about freedom and self-actualization and the removal of limits. In this narrative a person makes not only his own way but his own self. People do not discover their purpose in life; they create it.

This narrative, which is always playing loudly in the background of our lives, can temporarily drown out the biblical narrative. Worse yet, it – the very short story of contemporary life – can be mistaken for the one true story of the world. Giving credence to its tale of autonomy and self-creation has led moderns and post-moderns to the irrational belief that they can shape the world to suit their fancies. It has undermined the concept of the common good, exacerbated the loneliness of twenty-first century American life, and led to confusion over gender identity and healthy sexual expression – for a start.

The cure for these troubles is not found in marshaling Bible verses but in entering the biblical story and submitting to one’s place in it. It is a great and exciting story, a Divine Comedy, where good triumphs over evil and love outlasts hate. Within this story the Bible makes sense and its truths shine like a lamp to our feet and a light for our path.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/18/2017

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If I Could Change One Thing, It Would Be Me

Posted on November 11, 2017 by salooper57

My wife and I recently traveled to Texas to visit our son and daughter-in-law and to do a little hiking in the Hill Country. For many weeks before our trip, I researched flights, car rentals, lodging and hiking trails. I usually did this at night, when I was already tired, which might explain some of the trouble we had on our travels.

I booked our flight flights on Southwest and kicked in the extra money to be in the first group of borders. (Southwest does not assign seats but does arrange boarding order.) On our way to the airport, we stopped at Ikea to pick up some shelving for our other son and daughter-in-law, who had checked inventory online to make sure we wouldn’t waste our time.

But the inventory list was off, and we were unable to get all the shelves that were needed. By the time we left Ikea, I was getting anxious about the time. The airport wasn’t far, but finding off-site parking and getting a shuttle took time. Getting through security was delayed. For some reason, TSA agents always seem to choose me to search, and it happened again: “I’m just going to slip my hand beneath the waistband of your pants…” (“You’re going to do what?”)

We hadn’t eaten, but I thought we would have time to grab a quick bite at McDonald’s. I was wrong. Our flight had been changed to a different gate, and by the time we got there the early boarding group, of which we were supposed to be part, had already boarded. My hopes for an exit seat and a little extra room for my six-foot-four frame were dashed.

That wasn’t the worst part. I used to get a stabbing pain – like an icepick right through the eye – a few minutes into the descent. Though it only lasted for thirty seconds or so, it would bring tears to my eyes. I hadn’t had that pain since I underwent surgery to straighten my nose five or six years ago – until this trip. This time the icepick went right between my eyes.

When we got to Texas, I discovered I had booked our rental car at the wrong airport. I asked the agent if we could change airports, and he said, “Sure. Just let me calculate the cost.” Instead of $248, the cost would now be $798. So, we grabbed a shuttle back to the airport, hopped aboard a taxi, and $65 dollars and about an hour later were at the right car rental place.

By the time we started the forty-five-minute drive to our hotel it was 11 PM. Unfortunately, our GPS couldn’t find the hotel, and neither could we. Nor could anyone else – I asked three people. Our forty-five-minute drive took an hour-and-a-half.

The next morning, we discovered the liftgate on the rental car didn’t work – the car I rented so we would have room for family to ride. And when it started misting, it became clear the washer fluid reservoir was dry.

So, pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I was tired and frustrated, and already fretting about returning the rental car on our trip home. But the return trip could not have gone better. The rental car company charged less than expected. A taxi was already at the facility, as if waiting for us, and charged just a little more than half the fare of the first cab. When we arrived at the airport, we discovered we had TSA pre-clearance – don’t know why, but we weren’t complaining. Though we were the 29th and 30th people in line, respectively, we somehow got first row seats – the most leg room on the plane. There were no icepicks on the way home, and the plane touched down about a half-hour before our ETA.

If I could change one thing about this experience, it wouldn’t be the rental car or the icepick pain, it would be … me. I would relax. “Each day has enough trouble of its own,” Jesus reminded us, and isn’t it true? Yet he managed to move through the world in a relaxed and confident manner, though the troubles he faced were bigger than rental cars and thirty-second pains. I hope to learn from him to do the same.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/11/17

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Which Bible Translation Should I Use?

Posted on November 10, 2017 by salooper57

Church members often ask pastors the same questions again and again. One of the more frequent ones, with a preamble, goes something like this: “Pastor, I need to get a new Bible. What would you recommend?”

It’s no wonder people ask. There is a dizzying variety of English translations of the Bible on the market. Look up a passage on biblegateway.com and you will have over 50 different English versions to choose from. Adding to the confusions is the fact that many of the versions come in a variety of packages: study bibles, teen Bibles, children’s Bible, men’s Bibles, Women’s Bibles, and more. There are coloring book Bibles, single women’s Bibles, “tween” Bibles, military Bibles, men’s Bible, Catholic Bibles – the list goes on ad absurdum. Christian Book Distributors offers almost 13,000 products under their “Bibles” category.

Most Bible versions fall somewhere on a spectrum between what is known as dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence translations. What that means, simply put, is that some versions try to translate thought for thought (dynamic equivalence) while others try to translate word for word (formal equivalence). In dynamic equivalence translations, the translators seek to provide the English reader with an experience like that which a first century reader would have had.

Perhaps the best of the dynamic equivalence translations is the immensely popular New International Version. The translation committee, comprised of notable scholars, writes in the preface, “The first concern of the translators has continued to be the accuracy of the translation and its faithfulness to the intended meaning of the biblical writers. This has moved the translators to go beyond a formal word-for-word rendering of the original texts.”

Note that it is the Bible writer’s meaning the translators were going for. This is the NIV’s strength, but also its weakness, since the writer’s meaning is not always obvious and, thus, interpretation and not merely translation is required. But since interpretation is sometimes debatable – famously so in some passages – the reader must hope that the scholar’s interpretive skills are as good as his or her translation skills.

On the other end of the spectrum, the formal equivalence approach to translation, one finds the New American Standard Bible. Because this translation attempts to translate words rather than thoughts (though in a word order that makes sense to English readers), the NASB is a much more wooden translation.

This is the NASB’s weakness, but also its strength. It is more likely than the NIV to include conjunctions and connecting particles, and to follow the original language in its multiplication of subordinate clauses. Though this makes for clumsy English, the translated sentence is truer to the original writer’s style and linguistic thought pattern.

It should be said that all major translations fit somewhere on a spectrum between dynamic and formal equivalence. The NASB must interpret the writer’s intent at times, just like a dynamic equivalence translation, while the NIV will translate most words and phrases just like a formal equivalence translation.

So, one kind of translation attempts to be truer to the writer’s thought, while the other tries to remains truer to the reader’s understanding. How does one choose?

My recommendation would be that one not choose and instead purchase both a good dynamic equivalence translation like the NIV or the NLT along with a good formal equivalence translation, like the NASB or the ESV, and consult both.

What about the King James or Authorized Version? Does it have a place? I think it does. The King James is without question the greatest work of literature in the English language. The Psalms sing in the King James like in no other translation. But the King James, published in 1611, did not have access to many of the oldest biblical manuscripts that archeologists later uncovered. Though the King James should have an honored place on the bookshelf, it should not, for this reason, be one’s only translation.

As important as translation work is, even the best translations will do no good if they are not read. Even the worst translations will do some good when they are read by people who really want to know God and do his will. The best choice a person can make when it comes to the Bible is to pick it up and read it.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/4/2017

P.S. After reading this column, a friend wrote that whenever his former pastor was asked which translation is best, he would answer: “The one you will obey.” That about sums it up.

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