The Way Home

According to Nicholas Eberhardt, writing in the Wall Street Journal, entitlement transfers from the government to individuals have grown by 72 percent since 1960, and that is after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

Entitlement spending now comprises two-thirds of the federal budget. Half of all American households currently receive income from the government in entitlement payouts. The government owes, in the form of its entitlement commitments, approximately $7,200 for every man, woman and child living in the United States.

But it would be a mistake to think that the poor and the elderly – the recipients of Medicaid and Medicare, of welfare benefits and Social Security checks – necessarily have an “entitlement complex.” It would be an even bigger mistake to think they were the only ones.

Entitlement thinking is pervasive in our culture. Both corporate CEOs and the Occupy Wall Street protestors who despise them are vulnerable to its infection. The entitlement mentality has poisoned middle-class trade unions. It has corrupted IRS officials. Our nation’s entitlement obligations threaten to disable the economy, but that’s not the worst of it (in spite of what fiscal conservatives say). It’s the mindset of entitlement that’s killing us. And we’re all tainted by it.

And not just us. Entitlement thinking is found on the other side of the Atlantic too. So the Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks of “a culture of entitlement” in London. And his is just one of many voices sounding the alarm in the West.

Let me add my voice to that chorus, though I will leave others to address the economic impact of entitlements and point the way out of the fiscal morass in which we find ourselves. My concern is with the debilitating spiritual consequences of entitlement thinking.

For one thing, it makes entering the spiritual life problematic. A rich spiritual life is predicated upon God’s grace, not upon my rights. The very idea that I deserve salvation makes it impossible for me to receive it. In Jesus’ story, it is the publican (not the “Republican,” just to be clear) who goes home justified. Unlike the Pharisee, who looks down on him, he knows he doesn’t deserve God’s favor. Yet he’s the one who receives it.

The entitlement mindset makes gratitude, which is such a vital part of the spiritual life, impossible. There is no spiritual health apart from gratitude, but there is no gratitude in the entitlement mindset. How can I be grateful for what I believe is mine by right? Moses long ago warned: “When you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down … and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God.” That is how the entitlement mindset works.

Entitlement thinking also leaves a person unprepared for the difficulties of life. Jesus warned, “In this world, you will have trouble.” It is guaranteed. Yet when a person who feels entitled to comfort, health or happiness encounters hardship, it threatens to undo him. Adversity leaves him angry and disillusioned, but it cannot make him strong, for the entitled are not capable of perseverance.

The entitlement mindset discourages personal effort, without which there is no spiritual growth. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote that a rich spiritual life is only found in “vigorous, universal obedience … in watchfulness and painfulness, in denying ourselves, and taking up our cross daily; as well as in earnest prayer…”

Spiritual joy is found in sacrifice, but that is not a place the entitlement mindset cares to go. A person who feels entitled stands ready to sacrifice others to his cause – even his spiritual cause – but he will not sacrifice himself. Yet, ironically, apart from such sacrifice spiritual growth and joy are not possible.

Published first in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, Saturday, October26, 2013

I was out before dawn one morning this week. There were patches of fog along the ground, but the stars were magnificent against a moonless ebony sky. I climbed into the car and set out to meet fellow pastors at a prayer retreat about an hour away.

I drove west on the state route, setting my cruise control at the speed limit and enjoying a Bach harpsichord concerto, followed by a Michael Gungor Band album. I took pleasure in juxtaposing their very different musical styles – would they be able to enjoy each other?

It wasn’t long before I had a car following hard on my back bumper – someone, I suppose, hurrying to work in the next town. Then it was two cars, then three. Soon I was leading a parade. It wasn’t long before a pickup from somewhere in the back of the line came flying around us. Almost immediately another car followed his example.

It’s not like I wasn’t driving the speed limit. Even so, some cars passed through the fog while others formed an impatient procession behind me, probably cursing the dotard at the front of the line, who was going to make them all late for work.

I thought about the people following me and wondered why they were in such a rush. Some probably left too late to get to a job they despise but can’t afford to lose. After staying up the night before to watch a show they didn’t care about, they set their alarms for the last possible moment, and woke to the hurry and dash. And tomorrow they’ll do it all over again.

In reading through the Gospels I’ve noticed something worth contemplating: though Jesus was on a mission to save the world, he never seemed to be in a hurry. There was a rhythm to his life, and he lived within it, and even the emergencies of life could not force him out of it.

Various religious traditions, as well as contemporary non-religious self-help programs, speak of the possibility of living in the moment in ways that free a person from anxiety and enable him to enjoy and appreciate life. But to live in the moment one must be anchored to the eternal, just as, for the musician, to improvise well one must be grounded in the score.

Again, Jesus provides an excellent example of this. He handled both emergencies and opportunities – not to mention the daily grind – from a position of stability, firmly balanced between eternity and the present moment. He could fully experience the joys and sorrows of the present without anxiety because he was firmly connected to the eternal. He was rooted.

This is precisely what most of us in contemporary society lack. We are not rooted in eternity or even in the past; we are instead carried along by the social fads of the day or the urgent demands of personal desire. Our modern economy is, in fact, conditioned on this sad reality.

In such a state we are easily manipulated by the demands of other people’s desires as well as our own. We are vulnerable to deception and easily swallow the false advertising of the day. St. Paul described people in this condition as spiritual “infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.”

Paradoxically, we can only live fully in the moment when we are connected to something outside the moment. Until we know we are being held, we will never really be able to let go and experience life in its abundance. Not knowing that, we rush through life, grasping at anything that promises – even falsely – to meet our needs.

Carl Jung said, “Hurry is not of the devil; it is the devil.” I’m not sure I understand what he meant by that, but I suppose Jung saw hurry as injurious to the spirit. Yet perhaps it is not just that hurry injures the spirit, but that an injured spirit cannot help but hurry. If that is so, help will not come merely from slowing down, but from reaching up and connecting to the eternal.

Published first in the Coldwater Daily Reporter, 10/12/2013

Though Billy Graham was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1992, he kept up a rigorous schedule through the next decade. But since his final evangelistic crusade in 2005 he has been keeping a low profile. He retired to his home in the mountains of western North Carolina and has made few public appearances since his wife Ruth died in 2007.

Now at almost 95 years of age, the “Pastor to Presidents” is out with a new book titled, “The Reason for My Hope.” Graham recently spoke about himself and his book in an interview with Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine that he founded sixty years ago.

            When asked about the title of his book, Graham responded that he felt burdened to write a book that addressed the issue of ‘easy believism,’ which he described as an “epidemic.” It’s an interesting subject for the evangelist to address, and especially since critics have argued that Graham himself has contributed to the problem. The data suggest that most of the people who respond to the invitation at a Billy Graham crusade do not go on to participate in a local church.

            But Graham denounces any kind of faith that doesn’t impact one’s life. “It should not be surprising,” he writes, “if people believe easily in a God who makes no demands, but this is not the God of the Bible.”

            Likewise, “Satan has cleverly misled people by whispering that they can believe in Jesus Christ without being changed, but this is the Devil’s lie.”

            Graham hopes that people reading his book will “comprehend the privilege and responsibility of living the Christian life.” He writes, “When Jesus becomes our Master, we set aside our way and walk his way. It is not always easy but enormously productive and challenging, because those who follow him become shining lights in a very dark world.”

            Mr. Graham is surely right to warn his readers against “easy believism.” When it comes to any matter that requires faith – whether Christianity, another religion or atheism itself – “easy believism” is frequently a mere preliminary to “easy leavism.”

            One might object that belief is never easy, but that probably depends on whether one is thinking of the unbeliever’s initial entrance into belief or the believer’s intention to continue in it.

            For some people, entering into faith does not seem difficult. They already have profound respect for people – parents, friends and teachers, among others – who believe. They admire the quality of their intellects and trust their judgments. “If he believes it,” they say, “so do I.”

            For other people, belief is a challenge. They know and respect intelligent and thoughtful people who believe, but they know equally intelligent and thoughtful people who do not. They realize that a completely objective assessment of the data is not possible and, since belief has not forced itself on them, they know they must choose what to believe.

            But however easy one finds entry into belief, sustaining belief is another matter. As C. S. Lewis once pointed out, it is a mistake to assume “that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it shows up.” This, he notes, would be so only if “the human mind is completely ruled by reason,” which, of course, it is not.

            In “Mere Christianity” Lewis notes that even after becoming a Christian, there are times when “the whole thing looks very improbable.” But he also admits that when he was an atheist, there were times when Christianity “looked terribly probable.” Faith, he concluded, “is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of changing moods.”

            But “holding on” requires more than mere intellectual assent to a proposition. Intellectual assent will fail unless one acts in a manner that is consistent with the proposition. Another way of putting it – in the wise words of the old gospel song – is that one must “trust and obey.”

Published first in the Coldwater Daily Reporter, 10/19/2013

A recent analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the suicide rate in the U.S. increased dramatically from 2008 to 2010. CBS news reports that the rate has jumped by almost 50 percent for people in their fifties since 1999. During the same time period there was a sixty percent rise for women between ages 60 and 64.

This comes at a time when the suicide rate among current and former military personnel has skyrocketed, prompting President Obama to describe it as an “epidemic.” CNN reported in September that as many as 22 veterans take their lives every day.

As disturbing as these statistics are, the reality is probably worse than they suggest. Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has published research on rising suicide rates, has publicly stated that the statistics are “vastly underreported.”

Experts point to the 2008 economic downturn to explain this disturbing trend. But while there certainly seems to be a correlation, people do not take their lives because they’ve lost a job or even because they’ve lost their retirement savings. They take their lives because they’ve lost their hope. We are in the midst of an epidemic of hopelessness.

Hopelessness is not primarily an economic condition. It is a spiritual one. It is not caused by instability in the stock market but by despair in the soul. And the conditions are right for hopelessness to spread across Western Society.

Aldous Huxley, best known for his novel “Brave New World,” once wrote, “Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape . . . is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.” Seeing the same reality, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, after achieving enormous popularity and amassing great wealth, went through a long period of despair. He asked, “Why do I live?” The answer he got, while lacking the technical terms employed by today’s specialists in the physical sciences, is for all intents and purposes the same answer: “In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth.”

The world Tolstoy described – the same world described in updated language by Stephen Hawking and others – is a purely material world, a world void of spirit and therefore void of God. In such a world hopelessness is pandemic for its residents are, as St. Paul put it, “without hope and without God in the world.”

In a world like this – where meaning is not resident but transient – hopelessness spreads faster than a cold virus in a kindergarten classroom. People who don’t even know they’ve caught it nevertheless suffer its devastating consequences. It’s true they don’t say to themselves, “I live in an existentially meaningless world.” What they say is, “I just can’t take it anymore.”

A significant reversal of the trend toward despair will not happen because of an upturn in the economy but because of a return to God and a realistically spiritual worldview. For if we are spiritual beings – as Jesus taught and the great religious teachers and philosophers believed – then ignoring the spiritual will have serious consequences, chief of which is despair.

Recognizing and accepting the fact that we are spiritual beings living in a spiritual world is the only lasting cure for hopelessness. Life must have meaning; slogans and catchphrases, which are the currency of communication in a meaningless world, will never do.

Jesus invited us into a world ruled by a good and loving God, and is prepared to help us learn how to live and thrive in it. We enter this world through our confidence in him, which the Bible calls faith. And those who enter it leave hopelessness at the door.

Published first in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 10/5/2013

Writing in the August 13 edition of The Atlantic, Luke Epplin asks, “Must every kids’ movie reinforce the cult of self-esteem?” Epplin bemoans the formulaic sameness of kids’ animated films in which, time and again, the protagonists must “surmount their biggest fears –and believe that their greatness comes from within.”

Epplin rattles of a list of films that stick to this theme, including Kung Fu Panda, Ratatouille, Wreck-It Ralph, Monsters University and two recent releases, Turbo and Planes. In DreamWorks’ Turbo, a snail of the same name works in the tomato garden by day but dreams of racing glory each night. In Disney’s latest kid’s-flick, Planes, Dusty the crop-duster longs to ditch the daily grind and win fame by competing in an illustrious around-the-world race.

Both Turbo and Dusty surmount their fears and achieve their dreams by believing in themselves. Epplin writes, “It’s enough for them simply to show up with no experience at the most competitive races, dig deep within themselves, and out-believe their opponents. They are, in many ways, the perfect role models for a generation weaned on instant gratification.”

Epplin believes that American young people have been stunted by a constant diet of this pablum. “Younger generations,” he says, quoting “Generation Me” by Jean Twenge, “simply take it for granted that we should all feel good about ourselves, we are all special, and we all deserve to follow our dreams.” But this leaves out important information and gives “the false impression that the road to self-actualization isn’t arduous and littered with speed bumps.”

Children are urged to believe in themselves when they should be taught to believe in something bigger than themselves. They are told to dig deep when they should be told to work hard, for unless they work hard they won’t find anything, no matter how deep within they dig.

What happens to the young glory seeker after he has dug deep and believed in himself and still turned out to be … ordinary? Will he find a way to be happy and productive or will his disappointment lead to despair? And even if he is successful in achieving his goal, will his success be enough to sustain a healthy self-esteem over a lifetime?

Consider basketball legend Michael Jordan. In an article this year in ESPN Magazine, Wright Thomson says that Michael’s “self-esteem has always been, as he says, ‘tied directly to the game.’” Jordan worked hard and dug deep, and achieved unparalleled success in his sport. But he no longer has “game,” and he’s restless. When he lost basketball he lost himself.

Unless Michael finds a reason other than basketball to value himself, he will be an unhappy man, vulnerable to depression and even despair. But if a healthy self-esteem cannot be founded on stellar achievements, still less on tired clichés, upon what can it be founded?

Value – whether of things or selves – is dependent upon the desirability of that thing or self to another. In other words, a thing’s value lies outside itself and in the desire of another. A company’s stock, for example, only has value if someone wants it. If no one wants it, it is worthless. But what about a person? Does a person have value if no one wants him or her?

It is often argued that humans are intrinsically valuable, but this does not go far enough. The value of a human self, like the value of anything, lies outside itself and in the desire of another. And humans are desired by another. This is the message of religion generally and of Christianity in particular: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”

We are valuable even when other people don’t value us, even when we don’t value ourselves, because God values us. The death of Christ bespeaks the great worth God places on us. He sees more in us than we see in ourselves. Or say rather, seeing a future for us that he intends to create, he invested himself in the reclamation of humanity. That investment makes us priceless. And faith enables us to live in anticipation of the day that investment reaches maturity.

What do Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman have in common – that is, besides talent, good looks, popularity and wealth? They both grew up in strict Christian families, both went through considerable doubt in their adolescence and both eventually abandoned the faith.

Pitt has said that his doubts came early and revolved around the question of fairness: Why should people born into another religion not “have the same shot at heaven” as those born into Christian families? He eventually substituted faith in himself for faith in Christ: “I had faith that I’m capable enough to handle any situation.”

Jackman grew up in church. It was “sort of [his] life out of school.” His friends came from church. His girlfriends came from church. But when he was around 16 or 17, he began to be bothered by the idea that “all these nonbelievers” were “going to hell.” Jackman still believes in some kind of God and in an afterlife. He meditates twice a day for a half-an-hour at a time, but he has discarded his parents’ faith.

Not many people share the kind of talent and wealth that Pitt and Jackman possess, but many people have experienced the same kind of doubt, and were subjected to it at about the same time of life. Struggles like this with doubt are more common that most people realize.

But church leaders rarely talk about it. Perhaps they fear that talking about it will somehow legitimize it, so they remain quiet. It becomes an unwritten law in churches: Never admit you have doubts.

When a teenager has trouble putting together all the information he has haphazardly gathered over his fifteen or so years – he doesn’t, for example, see how God can be loving and still allow his grandfather to die or how God’s justice and the doctrine of judgment he has heard taught can be reconciled – he begins to experience doubts.

At this point, parents sometimes panic. They tell their teenager he mustn’t have doubts. They urge him to put such thoughts out of his mind and toss religious clichés at him. The apprehension of his parents and the silence of the church lead the young doubter to infer that experiencing doubt is a terrible sin.

None of this relieves doubts. If anything, it increases them. Trying to stifle doubts is like throwing water on a grease fire: it doesn’t put out the fire, it merely splashes it in all directions.

What doubters young and old need to know is that doubt is not a sin; or at least that it is not a sin unless it becomes an excuse – an excuse for laziness or self-indulgence. Doubt provides an opportunity for discovery – Pitt’s and Jackman’s doubts could have led them to further discoveries that might have confirmed their faith, had they only kept looking.

Too often people approach this issue with the idea that doubt and belief exist in an either/or relationship: if we doubt we do not believe and if we believe we do not doubt. They see belief as if it were a kind of light switch that is either on or off.

The reality is that in this life belief is always incomplete. There are areas of unformulated doubt, even in the sincere Christian’s life – though he or she is often surprised by them when they appear. Doubt wages guerrilla-style warfare against belief, waylaying the believer at unforeseen moments in unexpected places.

This should not unsettle the believer too much. Even died-in-the-wool-unbelievers experience doubt. The Oxford professor and former atheist Alexander McGrath has written that even in his vehement denials of faith “a still, small voice within me whispered words of doubt.”

When a person is ambushed by doubts he must not resort to evasion, still less must he give in. He must face his doubts, pray and search out the truth. Doubt will eventually subside, faith will grow stronger and he will be more capable of handling doubt the next time it appears.

Unless it is in a novel, a crime drama or on the big screen, Americans don’t care for mystery. Mysteries defy us, and we do not like to be defied. They perplex and confound us, and we would like to remove them from the earth. Mysteries are not practical, and we are such practical people. Mysteries do not make us money – they may even cost us money – and we really like to make money. Give us five steps to our goal. Don’t give us mystery.

One can see this distaste for mystery in the approach the current generation of Christians – particularly we Evangelicals – take to the faith. We have reduced Christianity to a program: three steps to repentance, four steps to effective prayer and five steps to salvation. Today we write practical books like “31 Days to Happiness” or “The Total Money Makeover,” but no one is writing “The Cloud of Unknowing” or, for that matter, reading it.

With their five alliterated points, our writers and preachers suck the mystery out of things. One writer promises to take the mystery out of the Holy Spirit’s work. Another claims to take the mystery out of knowing God’s will. Yet another offers to take the mystery out of prayer. We buy their books and listen to their sermons because our impulse to solve mysteries is rooted in an almost frantic need to control our environment – even to control God,

And it is right here where we run up against a brick wall. Make that a granite wall. The faith – the world, the universe – is full of mystery. You, the reader, are a mystery – a greater mystery than you have yet dreamed. “Philosophers of other ages,” wrote the philosopher Dallas Willard, “used to say that God had hidden from humans the glory of their own soul, that we might not be overwhelmed by pride.”

Mystery is everywhere, but God himself is the biggest mystery of all. No less an authority than the Apostle Paul tells us so. He writes of “knowing” – not solving – “the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2-3). God is not a mystery to be solved. He is a mystery to be adored.

“Mystery” was one of St. Paul’s favorite words. Three out of every four times the word appears in the New Testament, he is the one who uses it. He felt himself surrounded by mystery, and was fascinated by it. He speaks of the “mystery of God,” the mystery of the faith,” “the mystery of Christ,” the mystery “of God’s kingdom,” “of God’s will,” “of the gospel” and “of godliness.”

Paul did not, like some Christian teachers, think it was his job to extinguish all mystery. Such an approach produces narrow-minded people who think that life with God can be explained in four simple laws. Our task is not to explain away the mystery of love, but to adore it. We enter into the mystery of faith the way a man enters the mystery of love for his bride. His goal is not to explicate love but to experience it completely.

The “Five-Points-to-Explain-Everything” approach to Christianity may give people helpful information, but it will not stir their souls. Tell a man that he can master prayer in three easy steps and he will probably not bother – he knows that anything that can be mastered in three steps is not worth mastering.

But tell him that he can spend the rest of his life exploring the mystery of prayer and living its adventure, and you will pique his interest. Call him to change the world by sacrificing himself on the altar of prayer, and you will win your man – if he’s worth winning.

Offer a person five steps to a better Christian life, and he may read them to see if he can learn something. You might possibly catch his attention, but you will not capture his heart. Learning five steps to anything will probably not change a person’s life, but encountering the incomprehensible, awesome and mysterious God certainly will.

The narrative goes like this: The little boy goes to Sunday School each week with his mother, and there he hears stories that stir his young mind. He hears about Adam and Eve, and their great mistake. He hears that their son Cain killed his own brother. He hears that a big fish swallowed a guy named Jonah, only to spit him out on dry land three days later.

The young boy wins prizes for Sunday School attendance and for memorizing Bible verses. When he is eight, he “accepts Jesus into his heart.” During his teenage years he attends the church’s youth group and even serves as its president.

Then at 18 he goes off to college to study English. (He thinks he wants to be a teacher.) But when he leaves college four years later, he no longer calls himself a Christian. He no longer believes in God. He has left all that behind him and now considers Christianity intellectually vacuous.

It’s true that no one actually argued him out of his faith; he was not driven to atheism by compelling arguments. He had begun his journey away from the faith before he knew any arguments, and only found the intellectual support for his departure later. But if reason did not drive him from the faith, what did?

The fact is, nothing drove him from the faith; he drifted from it, carried by the fashionable winds that blow through academia. Because he has since found intellectual support for his position, he likes to think that his decision was purely logical. In reality, he simply went along with the decision some of his professors went along with when they were his age, and for the same reasons.

According to numerous studies, people with high IQs are slightly less likely to be religious. But Jordan Monge, regional director for The Veritas Forum, explains that: “Intelligent people don’t simply reject religion because it’s wrong; they reject it because their social environments lead them to think it’s wrong.”

Monge notes that the sociologist Frank Furerdi, himself an atheist, has warned that in investigating the connection between intelligence and irreligion, “secular researchers are likely to discover what they already suspect, which is a co-relation between their values and high levels of intelligence.” With such a bias in play, “social science research turns into advocacy research.”

When college students hear the narrative repeated – smart kids go off to college and lose their faith – it can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Monge quotes a recollection from the University of Chicago political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, who left the faith for many years, before returning later in life.

In her student days, Bethke Elshtain recalled, “I had slowly but surely inched over to join the company of those who chided those who believed. I decided I was not gullible, like those folks, and if they wanted to cling to wishful thinking, they could certainly do that, but I was at university, after all, where I had learned skepticism, and indeed I had decided that I had become a skeptic myself, joining most of my professors in that designation.”

Bethke-Elshtain did not leave the faith because she decided it was false but because she decided she was not gullible. In conversations with those who have walked away, one often discovers a secondary reason (at least it is represented as such) for their departure. Few are convinced that the faith is untrue. More are convinced that the “faithful” are untrue, or, like Bethke-Elshtain, gullible, or, as is often claimed, hypocritical.

It has been said that Christians are the best evidence that Christianity is true. They are also the best evidence that that Christianity is false. And this is the case whether the person considering Christianity has a high IQ or not.

Published first in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, Saturday, September 7, 2013

Click “From the Pulpit” to find five recent sermons from the Gospel of Luke that have just been added. If you find them helpful, share them with a friend!

Check out the “Music ” page. I’ve posted Dan Hefner’s He’s the Rose and Kevin Looper’s Who’s a God like You? there. (I’ve finally figured out how to post music to the right page. Check it out from time to time.  One of these days – when I get the time and courage – I will post one of my own songs!)