Kevin Looper preaches from Mark 4 and 5, with insights into who Jesus is and what he is like. In the heart-pounding adventure of the turbulent night at sea and in the heart-stopping horror story centered around the tombs, Kevin points out the startling insight that the disciples (in the first story) and the demons (in the second) were afraid of Jesus and that Jesus was afraid of nothing!
Listen and enjoy, and build your faith!
“Do you have a religious preference?” That is what the nurse asked after leading me to the exam room where I was to meet the doctor. There were other questions I wasn’t expecting, questions health care professionals ask nowadays, like: “Do you feel safe in your own home?” But it was the question about religious preference that struck me.
It sounded so odd. “Do you have a religious preference?” as if religion was sold at Baskin-Robbins and comes in thirty-one flavors. Maybe I should have asked her to put down the religious flavor of the month.
I know we live in a religiously diverse culture where it is no longer possible – and never was appropriate – to assume everyone is a Christian. To do so belittles people of other faiths and lessens the value of one’s own. I wasn’t taken aback by the question itself but by the way it was phrased.
Can you imagine people debating which religion is best the way they debate which ice cream is best? “I can’t believe you like vanilla. It’s so boring.” “You’re one to speak. All you ever get is chocolate. Why don’t you try something different, like butter pecan?” Only it would be, “Why do you like Christianity? That is so yesterday. Buddhism is what’s hot now.” “Buddhism? You’ve got to be kidding. How can you like that?”
I find it hard to understand people who think of their religious faith as a mere preference, whether they identify as a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, or a Scientologist. I’d much rather spend time with an atheist who believes he is right than a Christian who doesn’t really care.
Most of the religions I know something about – and there are many more I know next to nothing about – were founded by people who believed they were right and others were wrong. The idea that all religions are equally true can only be held by people who: (1) believe in many gods, like the ancient Greeks; (2) believe in no gods, like the modern atheist; or (3) no longer believe in objective truth. Since very few people in our country believe in many gods, and only a small percentage believe in no gods, it is the loss of belief in objective truth that is driving the changes we are seeing.
To say that Islam is true for you and Christianity is true for me and atheism is true for her, is to rob the concept of truth of its meaning. I suspect when people say things like that, they really mean that Islam or Christianity or atheism works for them, which is quite a different thing from saying it is true.
In “God in the Dock,” the great twentieth century English thinker C. S. Lewis complained “The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort.”
As if religion were an ice cream flavor. Or maybe a health food.
If Lewis found it difficult 70 years ago to get people to think it terms of truth, what would he find now, when our computers have drop-down menus, our gas stations have five varieties of fuels, and a choice of options is a cultural requirement? Personal preference is in the ascendancy, truth has passed its prime.
Consider the debate on climate change. While there are people on both sides of the debate who want to talk truth, most skip that step and go straight to the consequences. The consequences may be dire but people don’t change their behavior over the threat of consequences. They change because they’ve become convinced of the truth.
All this brings me back to the nurse and her question, “Do you have a religious preference?” I answered simply: “Christian,” but I wish I’d said, “I don’t have a preference but I do have a strong conviction.” I believe in Jesus because I am convinced he spoke truth; because I am convinced he is true. I know of no other reason to believe.
First published by Gatehouse Media
People read about God’s wrath in the Bible, hear how Jesus died in our place, and bore our sins, and conclude that an angry God just had to punish someone and Jesus (who is not angry) didn’t want it to be us. So, he deflected the blow and took the punishment. People don’t usually put it that crudely but that is how many people understand what happened.
This summary of the good news sounds a lot like bad news, but because there is truth mixed in with the falsehood, people swallow it whole. The worst part of it may be the heretical way it separates the Father and the Son into a kind of good cop/bad cop team. Instead of seeing a Father who is determined to rescue his children, we get a God who is determined to hurt them. Instead of the biblical understanding that sin is ruining us, we get a God who will ruin us. Fortunately for us, the Son, who in nicer than his Father, intervenes. Otherwise, we’d all be toast.
That is heresy. The Son is not the good cop and the Father the bad cop because they are both good and neither one is a cop. This teaching does one of the greatest disservices possible: it makes it almost impossible for a person to fully trust the God and Father of Jesus. How can you trust someone who only yesterday wanted to destroy you?
But the Father and the Son are of one mind. The Son hates sin every bit as much as the Father, and the Father loves sinners every bit as much as the Son. What the Son says, the Father also says. What the Father does, the Son also does. (Remember John 5:19: Whatever the Father does the Son also does.”) There is not and can never be, as St. Anselm put it, any division in the godhead. Or, as Jesus put it: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Why should people bother to pray? For many people, both religious and irreligious, this question does not seem to have a satisfactory answer. They still pray when desperate – who doesn’t? – but even then, they can’t see the sense in it. If God already knows everything that is going to happen, if he has already decided what he is going to do, our prayers are irrelevant.
I recently corresponded with an intelligent man who has concluded that “Christian belief is illogical.” One of the reasons for this is that the Christian God “exists outside of time” and so has always known what will occur in every moment within time, effectively making what we call free will impossible. And if free will is impossible, how can the Christian God hold people responsible for their actions and beliefs?
I think there are answers to these questions, or at least there are reasons to question the validity of the questions, but one can immediately see how this understanding of God would undermine prayer. If “what will be, will be,” praying is an exercise in futility.
One way Christians have responded to this problem is to say, “We don’t pray to change what is going to happen but to change ourselves,” but this answer seems quite inadequate. If nothing changes because of our prayers, then, perforce, the person praying does not change either. If prayer can change the person praying, then it can change other things too.
The biblical writers and the people whose stories they told saw other problems to prayer but not this one. They took for granted that their prayers made a difference. If they prayed, something would (or at least, might) happen that would not happen if they did not pray.
Perhaps they were just more naïve than we are. They didn’t have an Einstein or a Bertrand Russell confusing them about the nature of time and God’s relationship to it. The term “confusing” is not ill-chosen. There is still no general agreement on the nature of time either in Einstein’s field of theoretical physics nor in Russell’s field of philosophy. Indeed, Russell and his Cambridge colleague J.M.E. McTaggart could not even agree on whether there is such a thing as time.
So when we say that prayer is a problem because God “already” knows what is going to happen we are not treading on solid ground. We do not understand the words we are using, including the word “time,” nor do we understand God’s relation to it. This remains one of the deepest mysteries of existence.
It is better to come at the problem of prayer from the perspective that God created a world that was good, as the first chapter of Genesis says repeatedly, but not complete. For the good work of creation to reach its fulfillment, God made creatures capable of interacting with him, and one of the ways in which these creatures interact with God is through prayer.
If we approach prayer from the perspective that God created a world with space in it, a world in which either one thing or another can happen while remaining within God’s overall plan, this particular problem of prayer goes away. In fact, we begin to see that this arrangement is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of God’s intentions for a mature humanity.
If we approach this problem of prayer from a richly biblical perspective, that God has made room in the universe for our prayers to change things, it goes away. But other obstacles remain.
Two of the biggest are, to put it baldly, God and us. God’s will and his ways will always be an obstacle to prayer for the person who does not know God or share his interests. But to the person who is getting to know God (who is “growing in the knowledge of God,” to borrow St. Paul language), God’s will and ways become an invitation to pray.
Prayer, for such people, becomes an adventure and seeing answers to prayer – sometimes quite remarkable – a source of joy. This is precisely the life God planned for us and the one Jesus taught his followers to expect: “…my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name … and your joy will be complete.”
First published by Gatehouse Media.
The answer to the question in the title is: Because I want to. I’ve wanted to for decades. When I was younger, I often dreamed I was flying. In my dream, I would jump in the air and just float, at will, over the neighborhood, the city, the countryside. Sometimes when I got into bed at night I would hope for that dream.
But that is flying, not falling, which is presumably what happens when one steps out of an airplane. However, a friend who solo-dives once told me skydivers don’t feel like they’re falling; they feel like they’re flying – Superman-like. That, he said, is why they wear altimeters: they need to be reminded that they are heading to earth and need to pull the cord.
I was going to jump about five years and wanted to use the jump as a fundraiser for Beginnings Care for Life – a remarkable non-profit in our community. I even asked area pastors to join me and raise money for their favorite charities but none thought that “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane” was a smart idea.
Just before paying for my dive, I discovered the outfit that would take me up had a terrible reputation, so I gave up on the idea. A year or two ago, a friend at church. Jeanette Dembski, did a tandem dive for her 80th birthday and I told her that I’d always wanted to do that. Earlier this year, she told me she was going to jump again and asked if I’d be interested in joining her. I said yes without hesitation.
So, here I am again, scheduled to jump on September 15. I still want to use the jump to benefit others – the babies and children in our community, along with their parents. If you’d like to know more about Beginnings Care for Life, check out their website at http://www.beginningscare.com/. If you’d like to assist them in their good work by supporting my jump, go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/jumping-for-beginnings-care. All gifts, minus the 3% fee gofundme charges, go directly to Beginnings Care for Life.
I’ll write a post-jump post and try to put into words what it is like to step out into the air at 14,000 feet. I’m hoping it feels more like flying than falling.
Jesus taught his students that God is good and kind and loving. He’s better than we ever dreamed! But what about when things go sideways? Is he still good, kind, and loving when the thing we most fear happens? And what are we supposed to do then?
Before listening to this sermon, it would be good to read Mark 14:32-42. But take off your shoes before reading: you’ll be on holy ground.
I still remember where we were when our oldest son took his first steps. He was a year old, give or take a few days. We were in a cabin in northwestern Ontario. Joel had been pulling himself up and standing for a few weeks, but while we were there, he took his first steps. He got one solid step in, followed by a two-step Lindy Hop, and then crashed to the floor.
We all cheered. You’d have thought he’d won the Nobel Prize. Instead, he took three wobbly steps. Three wobbly steps, but full of promise. We knew this was just the beginning.
One can imagine the same scenario with a different outcome. We’re in the cabin. One-year-old Joel is standing up with his hands on the sofa, and I’m urging him to come to me. I say, “Come on, son. You can do it. Come on.” He turns toward me. He lifts and extends his foot. We all hold our breath. He shifts his weight – he’s taken his first step! He then quickly takes another and another, then goes crashing down in a heap.
And that’s when I say: “That’s all you got? What’s the matter with you? I give you a year, and all you can give me is three lousy steps! You are such a disappointment to me.”
Some people think God is like the critical, impossible-to-please me in the second scenario. No matter what we do, he thinks, “That’s all you got? You’re such a disappointment to me.” But the God of the Bible is not looking for opportunities to criticize but to reward.
What we think when we think of God matters. People frequently think of God as the Great Faultfinder in the Sky and themselves as big disappointments. Jesus, however, revealed a Father who is eager to celebrate his children’s first faltering steps and to reward them. He knows those first steps are just the beginning.
Jesus pictures God as a Father who is on the lookout for opportunities to reward his children. God is like a mother who walks into the kitchen after being out in the garden and finds that her eight-year-old has opened a cake mix, cracked eggs, and is proceeding to bake a cake. The five-year-old is holding a cracked egg in her hand. There is egg on the floor, on the refrigerator, and on the kids. There is more cake mix on the counter than there is in the bowl. The kitchen is a disaster.
When the eight-year-old sees mom, he says, “We’re making you a birthday cake!” (even though her birthday is six months away). Mom looks around at the devastation that was her kitchen, wonders whether she needs to call FEMA, and then says, “That is so nice! What do you say we finish making the cake, clean up a little, and then go out for ice cream as a reward?” Mom celebrates and rewards the intent, not the result.
That is a God-like moment. We think God is set on getting things done perfectly and that we, in our frailty and foolishness, are messing up his plan. But our thinking is confused. God is not intent on getting things done; he is intent on getting people done. We think God’s goal must be something like toppling dictators or ending abortion or stopping human trafficking when his real goal is to change people – including dictators, abortion providers, and human traffickers … and you and me.
God is intent on getting people done – in the words of St. James: “finished and whole, not lacking anything.” We think he is concerned with the global economy or the fractured moral state of the West or at least with the makeup of the Supreme Court – and he is – but those things are secondary. God knows the global economy and the Supreme Court are temporary while people are eternal. He knows that lasting change doesn’t happen in polling stations or federal courtrooms; it happens in people. So his goal is to transform people into the likeness of the one true Human: Jesus.
Ideas matter. The idea that God is our Father in heaven, not our Faultfinder there, matters. It is a liberating thought, full of hope and promise.
First published by Gatehouse Media
Young marrieds Jim and Jane Flynn were swimming in Lake George in New York state. When Jim got out of the water, he realized his wedding ring had slipped off and was somewhere at the bottom of the lake. Jane continued to wear her ring but Jim’s was lost.
Thirty-nine years later, a woman snorkeling in Lake George spotted something shiny on the bottom. She at first thought it must be a bottle cap, but when she retrieved it, she found it was an engraved wedding ring, with the anniversary date inscribed on the inside. After some research, she found Jim and Jane and returned the ring to them. How surprised and delighted they were to find it again! Jim now sleeps with it under his pillow.
To have the cherished thing returned after a long absence is a cause for celebration. That is just what Jesus says in Luke 15, only there we discover that we are the cherished thing! God cherishes us and wants us to be with him, no matter how long ago we hit bottom. Luke 15 shows us it is never too late to come home.
I’ve had my share of discussions with people who identify as atheists. I respect them, for the most part. There have been a few whose anger damaged both the rationality of their argument and the mutual respect that would have made our discussion profitable. But anger and flawed reasoning are hardly unique to atheists.
Most people I’ve met who identify as atheists do so not because reason has compelled them but because experience has led them to believe the God presented in the Bible is unlikely to exist. That experience is generally characterized by two realities that are impossible to ignore: first, the overwhelming present-ness of physical things, coupled with the underwhelming present-ness of spiritual things; and, second, the undeniable presence of evil, expressed as suffering.
The first of these two realities raises the question: Why is God, if he exists, not more obvious? I’ve heard the question put like this: If God requires people to believe in him in order to go to heaven, why doesn’t he help them believe by giving them a sign? Why doesn’t he write across the sky, in neon colors, “I am here”? A God who demands people believe in him or be destroyed, yet offers them no help to believe, must be evil and malicious.
The second issue, the presence of evil, raises a closely related question: If God exists and is the all-powerful and all-good being Christians claim he is, why doesn’t he do something about suffering? Why do babies die and children starve? Why do the strong abuse the weak and get away with it? Why do earthquakes demolish churches filled with worshipers? A good God wouldn’t allow people to suffer like this, so there must not be a God or, if there is, he must not be good.
It should be noted that people who reason like this are not starting from a neutral position between belief and unbelief. They haven’t “passed go” but they’re still trying to collect their 200 dollars. They have ignored the principal arguments for the existence of a creator (for example, Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” argument, refined by Aquinas and others) and are arguing against the existence of God on secondary grounds.
It should be admitted, though, that those secondary grounds are very real and troubling. But it is not just atheists who find them so; believers do too. It might surprise some atheists to learn that these troubling questions were asked by believers long before they made their way into the atheist’s playbook. They are, in fact, ensconced in the pages of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.
The biblical Job, for example, agonizes over his suffering and is angry that God has not done something to stop it. The biblical psalmists repeatedly and bitterly ask God why he hasn’t shown up on the scene. In a poem of overwhelming pathos –a messianic psalm, at that – the author cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” Jesus quoted these words from the cross.
These questions turn some people into atheists, but the thinkers mentioned above prove it is possible to grapple with them from within a framework of faith. The atheists are right to ask them, but they ought to know that the same questions have been asked for thousands of years and answers other than “God does not exist” have been found.
Approach these questions with the assumption that God does not exist, and there are simply no answers. But approach them from the perspective that God not only exists but that he has good purposes in mind for his creation and intends to develop humanity into a race of glorious, free, wise, and loving beings, then answers become available.
If this summary of God’s purpose is accurate, the next question is: “Given this, what are we to make of the hiddenness of God and the conspicuousness of evil?” And the answer – a biblical one, at that – is: God makes his hiddenness and even human suffering to serve his objective of developing a society of all-embracing love and goodness in which he and humans live together in joyful community.
That is what God has been up to.
First published in Gatehouse Media
Many countries have a national coat of arms, often featuring magnificent beasts and birds, like the majestic lion and the soaring eagle. They carefully chose such images to convey the idea that their people are courageous and strong.
The Australian coat of arms also features two animals: The emu, a graceless bird that can’t even fly, and a kangaroo. Courage and strength are hardly the first things one thinks of when seeing the comical-looking emu and kangaroo. Why did Australia choose those two animals?
Because they share a common characteristic with which the Australians identify: Both the emu and the kangaroo can only move forward, not back. The emu’s three-toed foot causes it to fall if it tries to go backwards, and the kangaroo is prevented from moving backwards by its large tail.
People who are baptized have chosen the emu and the kangaroo for their coat of arms. They are going forward with Christ. They have made their decision, and they will not go back!
This sermon investigates the relationship between the church and the kingdom of God, particularly as it relates to baptism.
The Way Home 