Luke 12:32-40
August 15, 2010
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.
But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.
Do you know who Millard Fuller was? He died last year, but before he died he made a tremendous impact on the world. He spent his life giving, which was a direct contrast to his early life, which he spent obtaining. As a child he grew up as a kid who loved money. From the earliest ages he had a gift for making money. His gift surfaced when he was six years old. Fuller wanted a pig, so his father bought him one. He built a little pen in the back yard and taught Millard how to set up a bookkeeping system to understand cost and profits. Millard scrupulously kept a record of everything it cost to feed and keep the pig, and after he had fattened the pig up a bit, he sold the pig for a profit. Millard was hooked. He loved making that profit. He moved on to raising and selling chickens, and he made a profit from them, too. As his profits increased, so did his appetite for larger projects. He bought and sold rabbits, and made a profit there. He and his father bought and sold cattle, and they made a profit in that business, too.
By high school, Millard was an entrepreneur. He was a member of Junior Achievement and had his own little company that manufactured mops and house number signs. By college, Millard was beginning to bring in larger and larger profits. His college roommate, Morris Dees (whose story is equally inspiring – he is the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that fights racism), and he sold birthday cakes that parents could have delivered to their college children. They also sold advertising on desk blotters, holly wreaths through the mail, doormats, trash-can holders, and lamps made out of cypress. They invested their profits in real estate and owned half a city block and a small trailer park. As law students at the University of Alabama in the early 1960s, they were making $50,000 a year. By age 28, Fuller was a millionaire. Who wouldn’t be happy to be in his shoes? He was living the American dream. He had everything we say should make us happy: money, homes, cars, a wife and kids. So, why did he feel like his life was falling apart?
The problem is that Millard Fuller had become so focused on achieving and acquiring that his life had become horribly unbalanced. At a time when he should have been reveling in how great his life was, he turned around to find that his wife had left him. He was alone. She left because she had everything she could possibly want, except a husband, and that was all she really wanted in the first place. Facing the possibility that he would lose his family, Fuller realized he had to do something to get his life back in balance. After talking to a pastor in New York, and engaging in deep discussions with his life with his wife, they decided they should follow Jesus’ advice to the rich young man – to sell everything and give it to the poor so that they could follow God (Matthew 19: 16-30). They began to give their money away and got involved in a Christian ministry called Koinonia Partners.
From that point onward, his marriage and his life began to improve as they centered their lives more in God and God’s work. In 1973, they and their four children moved to Zaire, Africa to help build modest housing for low-income families. Their project became so successful that they decided they were being called by God to apply this idea worldwide. They moved back to Georgia in 1976 and created the housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity. This is an organization that builds affordable, safe, and reliable housing for low-income families. Since its inception, Habitat for Humanity has built homes for over 60,000 families in more than 1400 American cities and in 57 countries around the world. This is an organization that cuts across denominational, religious, and national boundaries. Among the volunteers are former presidents, senators, congressmen and congresswomen, executives, and people from every walk of life.
Today, Millard Fuller receives a salary of only $52,000. The focus of his life is on serving God by serving the poor. As he says, “I feel that I am close to God, and I think I am pleasing God. I know that my heart’s desire is to express love in a way that touches people. Providing a home for people who need a place to live is an incredible way to touch people” (adapted from Biography Magazine, July 1998).
The inspiring lesson of Fuller’s life isn’t necessarily that we should sell everything and start an organization that builds homes for poorer people. The lesson is that a life lived focused on getting and acquisition is a life wasted. But a life lived focused on giving and generosity is a life blessed.
I'm not sure why, but I think that when it comes to trying to live out our faith, many Christians don't necessarily make the connection between generosity and being ready for God. We think about qualities such as love, believing in Christ, and having faith, but not necessarily about the ongoing call to being generous. And we certainly don’t connect generosity as preparation for death, but our passage makes that connection. In our passage Jesus begins with a call to give, and then follows it up by teaching us that we have to be ready because our lives can end at any moment: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.”
If today was your last day, would you be set? Would you be ready? How would God judge you? Would God say to you that you did a great job of being generous in your life, giving of your time, money, and of compassion?
We get opportunities to give all the time, not only opportunities to give money, but also to give time, because both embody love and compassion. In fact, that’s what giving is all about. Many people believe that they love, but for love to be real it has to be evidenced in our actions, and being generous is the height of loving behavior. It’s this call to generosity that makes giving so central to the church. You know, one of the complaints I’ve heard from people in our culture over the years is that “all the church wants is our money. Every time you are turn around there’s a collection.” It’s not just other people complain about the church’s focus on giving. I used to say the same thing all the time when I was younger. I used to complain that the church was all about money and not about God. But that was when I was young and before I returned to the church in my twenties. I’ve learned a bit since then about the nature of churches. What I’ve discovered is that, yes, we are guilty of wanting people’s money. But there’s a reason. The reason is that our church and any church is a weigh station for giving. The whole nature of the church is to give. We receive as a way of channeling people’s generosity.
Think about every part of the Calvin Presbyterian Church. Everything we do is related to giving. Start with the staff. Take me out of the equation for a moment. Every staff member in this church is committed to giving. Bruce Smith, our music and youth director, doesn’t take his pay, sit home, and say, “Wow! This is great. I get to get paid for hanging out at home listening to cds.” He lives his life giving. If you come to the church or track him down almost any hour of the afternoon or evening, you’ll find him talking with youth, working with musicians and singers, or doing something to make others’ lives better. Look at Toni Schlemmer, our associate music director and drama director. She spends so much of her off time giving voice lessons, or directing plays both here and outside of Calvin Church. And she rarely gets paid to direct the plays outside of Calvin Church. Steve Polley, our pastor of pastoral care, spends his week giving his time to visit people. Connie Frierson, our program director is tired this morning because she’s just partied out. She had a party at her house on Thursday evening for fifty women of the church, just so they could have an opportunity to come together and get to know each other. Then, on Friday evening, she had sixty singles over to her house for a get-to-know-you as part of our singles ministry. I could go on because everyone on our staff lives a life of giving.
We collect money from members and others to give even more. We offer worship services every Sunday to help improve people’s lives and help them grow closer to God. We give a tremendous amount of money to giving organizations beyond our walls, such as the Pittsburgh Project, VOICe, the Samaritan Counseling Center, Habitat for Humanity, the mission projects of the Presbyterian Church (USA), supporting Janet Guyer—our missionary in Southern Africa—Carrie Baker’s trip to South Africa this summer, Project Hope, SERRV, the Ladle and the Hearth soup kitchen in Ambridge, and so much more. Our building is a place of giving, and our upkeep of it helps with that giving. We do Christian education on Sunday morning for so many children and adults, and we have over 45 adults volunteering their time and efforts for no pay in order to teach these children. We have committees set up to reach out and help, all staffed by volunteers. Being generous to Calvin Church means giving to a giving place. Despite what cynics think, churches don’t want money because they are moneygrubbers. They want money to give away and make a bigger and bigger difference in the world.
It’s not just in and to church that we’re called to give. We’re called to be giving in all of life, even when it’s a pain and it’s not planned. Sometimes we’re at our most generous when we want to do anything but give. Let me give you an example of a giving time when it made sense to do something else.
Six years ago, while on vacation in the Boston area with Diane and the kids, I had to make a choice to either give or to do what I wanted to do—and I wasn’t gravitating towards giving. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and Diane was taking our kids and my cousin’s kids swimming in our hotel’s swimming pool. I decided that it was a fine time for me to take my walk, but I was told to not be gone too long because we had dinner plans. So I mapped out my four-mile route, put on my hat and t-shirt, clipped headphones onto my ears, drove to the starting areas, parked my car in the local Starbuck’s, and set out on my walk.
I had only walked about three blocks when I saw a young, African-American woman walking toward me. It was obvious she wanted to talk with me. I kind of avoided her gaze because I was worried that she wanted to sell me something. She was persistent, though. Despite my downcast eyes, she walked up to me and asked, “Excuse me, can you tell me where Powell Street is?” I told her that I really didn’t know the area all that well and that she needed to give me some landmarks. “It’s near Shaw’s Supermarket on Nahatan Street.” I told her that I knew where that was, but that it was over two-and-a-half miles away. “Oh my,” she replied. “I’m supposed to be at work there at three o’clock, and it’s almost three now. When I got off the bus, the driver told me to just walk down Nahatan Street, and I kept walking but couldn’t find it.”
Now, you need to understand that giving this woman a ride to her job was not part of my plan, so I had to make a decision. Do I tell her that I’m sorry she won’t make it, or do I give her a ride? I really wanted to walk. I really wanted to do my own thing. I really wanted to stick with my plans. Finally, I broke down and said, “You know, you’ll never make it. Let me give you a ride.”
As we walked, both of us were nervous. She didn’t know me. For all she knew I could be dangerous, and I didn’t know if her request for me to help was only a con. As we walked I talked with her. “What’s your new job?” I asked. She said, “I’m a children’s caseworker at a home for troubled youth. I just started the job two days ago.” I asked her if child-care was her background. “Oh no. Actually, I’ve been trained to be a political and a community activist, but I really like to work with kids and thought this would be a good job. I work with kids in my church and really love it.”
“You go to church?” I asked. “Yes, I go to the Holiness Temple in Roxborough.” I said, “That’s interesting. You don’t know this, but I’m a pastor.” She looked at me in my hat and t-shirt and said, “Are you really?” “Yeah, believe it or not. I normally dress differently, but I’m on vacation.” She said, “This is amazing. When I saw you, I had just been praying to God to bring me someone to help me, and look what God did. God brought me a pastor.” I laughed. We continued to talk all the way to her job. As she got out I said, “Remember this the next time you have doubts about whether God answers your prayers.” She said, “I already know that God answers my prayers! Let’s both remember it.”
I didn't really want to give my time, but in the end giving her my time got me more prepared for God. What gets us ready for God's kingdom is generosity because generosity is an act of sacrificial love, and it connects us with God's way of life. The Bible emphasizes the idea of tithing for this very reason. The whole idea of tithing is that we become aware of how much God has given us, of how everything is a gift from God, so we give back 10% of all that God gives us back to God for God to give to others. Giving is the nature of God, and God wants it to become our nature. God gives everything to us for free, and the whole idea of Christ coming into the world was the idea that God came in Christ to teach us. And we didn’t have to do anything to deserve it. The idea of Christ dying on the cross is that he gave up his own life willingly so that in the end we could be given even more—the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Ultimately, Christianity teaches that the more we give, the more we are given. The more we share, the more we become prepared. Giving transforms our souls because the nature of God is generosity
Do you want to really experience God in your life? Do you want to really know God in your life? Begin with becoming as generous as you can, and you'll discover something wonderful.
Amen.
Forming a Passionate Faith: 1. Getting Ready
Luke 12:22-31
August 8, 2010
He said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Our passage reminds me so clearly of something that happened back in 1993. It was a time when I, and a bunch of other people, had to decide whether to let go of our worries and trust God, or hold onto our worries and let go of God.
At the time I had been ordained already for four years, and about three months earlier I had made the decision to quit working as a pastor so that I could devote myself full-time to finishing my Ph.D. at Duquesne University. The program I was studying in was really the one program, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, that Duquesne University was known for all over the world. It brought a lot of prestige to the university, and we were all very proud to study there. The students came from all over the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, representing many different denominations and traditions. All had come to Pittsburgh to study in the area of spirituality.
There was one major problem with the institute. If you look at the other graduate programs at Duquesne University, especially the MBA program and the law school, they generated money. Typically the alumni of those programs gave back a lot of money to the school after graduation, especially those that ended up in high-income careers. And Duquesne was interested in programs that generated revenues. Unfortunately, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, since it was educating mostly priests, pastors, and religious sisters and brothers, didn’t produce high-income graduates. Graduates of the MBA and law school contributed thousands and millions to Duquesne. Graduates of the Institute of Formative Spirituality contributed hundreds. From the school’s perspective, the decision was easy no matter how much prestige the institute gave them. They decided to discontinue the program in order to expand the pharmacy program.
We had heard rumors that the program was in peril, and then one week we were all invited to a meeting with a dean. Most of the students were there, and the meeting began awkwardly as the dean was introduced. Standing slowly, and beginning with words of thanks and appreciation for all we had done, and the value the program had had for Duquesne for many years, he then told us that the program was in peril and that the program was going to close down in the next few years. Basically, classes would end by 1995, and the Ph.D. students would be given till 1997 to finish their dissertations.
The students, whose anxieties were now leading to anger, peppered him with questions: “How can you do this to us? We’ve all made so many sacrifices. What are we supposed to do? How do we make plans for ourselves? What good is a master or doctoral degree from a program that doesn’t exist? Why didn’t you tell us this could happen when we applied.” The dean tried his best to answer everyone, but it was obvious that this was a hostile crowd.
The reaction we all had was a natural one. We had made all sorts of plans for our future. We had spent thousands of dollars on tuition, books, and the rest. And we had committed countless hours to study and prayer. What was it all for? How dare they ruin all our carefully laid plans?
Then God broke into the meeting. Keith Barron, one of our professors, stood up and said something that has stuck in my mind ever since. He stood before us and said, “You know, this is where your faith gets tested. You’re all worried, but I want you to listen to this passage of scripture.” He then read our passage for today: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…” Afterwards, he said, “God is going to take care of everything. God didn’t lead you here to then let you down. God had a purpose for you in bringing you here, and God still does. So don’t get consumed by worries. Just trust that God will take care of you.”
Keith was 100% right. In the end, God did take care of us. Eventually, they did close the program, but everyone in the program received their degrees and are now making a difference in the world. Keith had been right. In the end everything worked out for everyone. We worried so much, though, because all our plans looked like they were about to crumble.
I learned a big lesson that day. I learned that if you really want God in your life, you have to lay a foundation for God, and calm surrender is the key. The degree to which we surrender our worry and let God in is the extent to which God can work in our lives to do wonderful things.
Let me shift gears for a moment because I want to talk about letting go of worry in a different way. You wouldn’t know this about me, but I’m an expert fire-maker, and I’ve learned that building a fire is much like building a passion for God. I am an excellent fire-maker. Building proper fires is so important to me that I’ve told my wife, Diane, that I have only one demand when it comes to buying a home. It must have a natural fireplace. No gas jets or artificial logs for me. I want a fireplace where I can build it, stoke it, and grow it. In fact, one reason we moved to where we live now is that it is a place surrounded by woods. I love to cut down dead wood and trees, chop them up, and burn them in our outdoor fire pit.
I learned how to build fires as a teen in summer camp. I was sent every year for eight weeks to a camp in New Hampshire, and one of the tasks we had to learn was how to build a fire. We were taught how to build one using only one match, and after we succeeded, we then had to learn how to build it in the rain, which mean huddling under a poncho while a counselor sprayed a hose over us. What I learned is that to build a good fire, you have to start with very small kindling and build up from there.
Many people can’t build adequate fires because they start out too big. They put large logs over newspaper, and then wonder why the fire fizzles. To build a good fire you have to patiently start small. If you use crumpled newspaper as a base (at camp I had to use pine needles), you start by putting a layer of really small twigs—the smaller the better—atop the paper. Once the fire gets going, you place finger sized twigs on top. Once that starts to burn, you build around it log cabin structure (some like to build teepee styled structures, but I like to build it cabin-style) using twigs the width of our wrist. Then, as that begins to burn, you place normal sized logs atop the cabin structure, topping it all off with a roof of larger logs. There are small variations on this, but basically if you do it this way, you eventually get a roaring fire. To keep it going, you have to stoke it and put new logs on, while maintaining that cabin structure, to some extent.
Becoming available to God, and building a passion for God, is very similar to building a fire. If we are going to really build a passion for God, a passion that really allows God deeply into our lives, we have to start small by giving God our small worries. I think that most people try to start too big, and that’s why their faith struggles. They wait until they are facing a major crisis, and then try to give it to God, but they can’t. The faith needed for that is too big. When issues are that big, our worry and anxiety become so big that we have a hard time letting go and letting God. The key is building our faith like a fire, which means learning to let go of our worries and turning them over to God by starting with the small worries of life. Nothing’s too small. Learn to give over the little things. Then build up. Start giving God the bigger things. Pretty soon, you can learn to give over to God the big things in life, and they don’t come back.
The secret of our passage is that when we learn to live life by doing our part, but then giving God our worries and the responsibility for the results, life gets better. We discover how to live anxiety-free lives that build God-full lives.
When I think of people who started small in giving their anxieties to God, which resulted in being able to give God worries in the big things of life, I think of one of my faith heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the sad things about remembering him and his work is that many people today forget that he was a pastor. They see him as a Civil Rights leader, but they fail to recognize how much his faith and Christianity shaped him to do what he did. He was shaped by his Christian upbringing. He was shaped by Scripture. He was shaped by great Christian writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Tolstoy. He was shaped by Gandhi and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Without these influences, he never would have led such a great movement that changed this country in radical ways.
What most people don’t know is that King’s part in this movement almost ended as it was beginning because of his anxieties. He didn’t want to lead this movement. In fact, he was reluctant to even go to Montgomery, Alabama. He first became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to get out from under the shadow of his father, Martin Luther King, Sr. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a powerful and popular preacher in Atlanta, and Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to go somewhere else to find his own voice and his own ministry. Montgomery was far enough away culturally and geographically for him to do that.
He became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement slowly by getting involved in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, boarded a bus and refused to walk to the back of the bus after being ordered to do so by the white driver. In those days, blacks were forced to sit at the back of the bus. The response of the driver and others led the black community to initiate a bus boycott. In looking for a leader, the other pastors and civic leaders chose King. Still, he was reluctant. The main reason he ascended to the leadership was that he was young, just in his late twenties, and he was willing to say yes to organizing things. An older, wiser pastor would have said “no.” King really didn’t know what he was in for. Over time, the death threats against his life grew, and they made him nervous. He realized that at any moment, he could be taken from his wife and toddler daughter, or they could be taken from him, through violence. He became fearful and doubtful. Should he continue? Was it fair to his wife and family?
It was as he struggled with his anxieties that he sought God’s voice and call in prayer. Let me share with you what he says in his book, Stride toward Freedom, about how he heard God in prayer. On one particular night, he received a death threat on the phone from a stranger saying, “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” This threat was different from all the others. It somehow seemed more like a promise than a threat. King struggled to sleep that night. He says, “I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’
“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” He had found his call through prayer.
What made this prayer and his experience so profound was that a week later a bomb was thrown onto the porch of his home, almost killing his wife and child. Instead of being gripped by fear, King became more resolute. He felt God’s presence in his life, telling him that God would be with him no matter what. He heard God’s call, and this call made it possible for him to follow God not matter how difficult and dangerous the task ahead was. King had been struggling to give his worries to God in much smaller things all along. In just following a call to be a pastor, he was giving anxieties over to God. So when it was time to give something big, like whether to stay in the movement or not, he had built up the ability to give over those worries. And in experiencing God as he gave over his worries, he was able to let go and let God throughout the rest of the movement. Many people have reported that in the last six months of his life, before being shot in Memphis, he spoke openly about his acceptance that he would probably be assassinated soon. And they remarked that he never seemed to be afraid. He had learned the secret of our passage. King had a passion for God, and the true kindling for it was his surrender to God of all his worries.
If you want to really form a passion for God in your life—if you really want to experience God in your life—it begins with surrendering you worries. It’s never easy to do this, and the moment we give God our worries, we generally get them right back. It’s what I call worry echoes. We give our worries to God, and then they come right back to us. But if we keep giving them over, like an echo, they will diminish. Also, when I say we surrender our worries I don’t say that we sit back and do nothing. We do. We do our part, but surrendering our worries lets God do God’s part.
For today, learning to let go of your worries is enough. Come back next week and we’ll learn more about how to build a passion for God that makes a real difference in life.
Amen.
August 8, 2010
He said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Our passage reminds me so clearly of something that happened back in 1993. It was a time when I, and a bunch of other people, had to decide whether to let go of our worries and trust God, or hold onto our worries and let go of God.
At the time I had been ordained already for four years, and about three months earlier I had made the decision to quit working as a pastor so that I could devote myself full-time to finishing my Ph.D. at Duquesne University. The program I was studying in was really the one program, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, that Duquesne University was known for all over the world. It brought a lot of prestige to the university, and we were all very proud to study there. The students came from all over the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, representing many different denominations and traditions. All had come to Pittsburgh to study in the area of spirituality.
There was one major problem with the institute. If you look at the other graduate programs at Duquesne University, especially the MBA program and the law school, they generated money. Typically the alumni of those programs gave back a lot of money to the school after graduation, especially those that ended up in high-income careers. And Duquesne was interested in programs that generated revenues. Unfortunately, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, since it was educating mostly priests, pastors, and religious sisters and brothers, didn’t produce high-income graduates. Graduates of the MBA and law school contributed thousands and millions to Duquesne. Graduates of the Institute of Formative Spirituality contributed hundreds. From the school’s perspective, the decision was easy no matter how much prestige the institute gave them. They decided to discontinue the program in order to expand the pharmacy program.
We had heard rumors that the program was in peril, and then one week we were all invited to a meeting with a dean. Most of the students were there, and the meeting began awkwardly as the dean was introduced. Standing slowly, and beginning with words of thanks and appreciation for all we had done, and the value the program had had for Duquesne for many years, he then told us that the program was in peril and that the program was going to close down in the next few years. Basically, classes would end by 1995, and the Ph.D. students would be given till 1997 to finish their dissertations.
The students, whose anxieties were now leading to anger, peppered him with questions: “How can you do this to us? We’ve all made so many sacrifices. What are we supposed to do? How do we make plans for ourselves? What good is a master or doctoral degree from a program that doesn’t exist? Why didn’t you tell us this could happen when we applied.” The dean tried his best to answer everyone, but it was obvious that this was a hostile crowd.
The reaction we all had was a natural one. We had made all sorts of plans for our future. We had spent thousands of dollars on tuition, books, and the rest. And we had committed countless hours to study and prayer. What was it all for? How dare they ruin all our carefully laid plans?
Then God broke into the meeting. Keith Barron, one of our professors, stood up and said something that has stuck in my mind ever since. He stood before us and said, “You know, this is where your faith gets tested. You’re all worried, but I want you to listen to this passage of scripture.” He then read our passage for today: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…” Afterwards, he said, “God is going to take care of everything. God didn’t lead you here to then let you down. God had a purpose for you in bringing you here, and God still does. So don’t get consumed by worries. Just trust that God will take care of you.”
Keith was 100% right. In the end, God did take care of us. Eventually, they did close the program, but everyone in the program received their degrees and are now making a difference in the world. Keith had been right. In the end everything worked out for everyone. We worried so much, though, because all our plans looked like they were about to crumble.
I learned a big lesson that day. I learned that if you really want God in your life, you have to lay a foundation for God, and calm surrender is the key. The degree to which we surrender our worry and let God in is the extent to which God can work in our lives to do wonderful things.
Let me shift gears for a moment because I want to talk about letting go of worry in a different way. You wouldn’t know this about me, but I’m an expert fire-maker, and I’ve learned that building a fire is much like building a passion for God. I am an excellent fire-maker. Building proper fires is so important to me that I’ve told my wife, Diane, that I have only one demand when it comes to buying a home. It must have a natural fireplace. No gas jets or artificial logs for me. I want a fireplace where I can build it, stoke it, and grow it. In fact, one reason we moved to where we live now is that it is a place surrounded by woods. I love to cut down dead wood and trees, chop them up, and burn them in our outdoor fire pit.
I learned how to build fires as a teen in summer camp. I was sent every year for eight weeks to a camp in New Hampshire, and one of the tasks we had to learn was how to build a fire. We were taught how to build one using only one match, and after we succeeded, we then had to learn how to build it in the rain, which mean huddling under a poncho while a counselor sprayed a hose over us. What I learned is that to build a good fire, you have to start with very small kindling and build up from there.
Many people can’t build adequate fires because they start out too big. They put large logs over newspaper, and then wonder why the fire fizzles. To build a good fire you have to patiently start small. If you use crumpled newspaper as a base (at camp I had to use pine needles), you start by putting a layer of really small twigs—the smaller the better—atop the paper. Once the fire gets going, you place finger sized twigs on top. Once that starts to burn, you build around it log cabin structure (some like to build teepee styled structures, but I like to build it cabin-style) using twigs the width of our wrist. Then, as that begins to burn, you place normal sized logs atop the cabin structure, topping it all off with a roof of larger logs. There are small variations on this, but basically if you do it this way, you eventually get a roaring fire. To keep it going, you have to stoke it and put new logs on, while maintaining that cabin structure, to some extent.
Becoming available to God, and building a passion for God, is very similar to building a fire. If we are going to really build a passion for God, a passion that really allows God deeply into our lives, we have to start small by giving God our small worries. I think that most people try to start too big, and that’s why their faith struggles. They wait until they are facing a major crisis, and then try to give it to God, but they can’t. The faith needed for that is too big. When issues are that big, our worry and anxiety become so big that we have a hard time letting go and letting God. The key is building our faith like a fire, which means learning to let go of our worries and turning them over to God by starting with the small worries of life. Nothing’s too small. Learn to give over the little things. Then build up. Start giving God the bigger things. Pretty soon, you can learn to give over to God the big things in life, and they don’t come back.
The secret of our passage is that when we learn to live life by doing our part, but then giving God our worries and the responsibility for the results, life gets better. We discover how to live anxiety-free lives that build God-full lives.
When I think of people who started small in giving their anxieties to God, which resulted in being able to give God worries in the big things of life, I think of one of my faith heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the sad things about remembering him and his work is that many people today forget that he was a pastor. They see him as a Civil Rights leader, but they fail to recognize how much his faith and Christianity shaped him to do what he did. He was shaped by his Christian upbringing. He was shaped by Scripture. He was shaped by great Christian writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Tolstoy. He was shaped by Gandhi and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Without these influences, he never would have led such a great movement that changed this country in radical ways.
What most people don’t know is that King’s part in this movement almost ended as it was beginning because of his anxieties. He didn’t want to lead this movement. In fact, he was reluctant to even go to Montgomery, Alabama. He first became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to get out from under the shadow of his father, Martin Luther King, Sr. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a powerful and popular preacher in Atlanta, and Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to go somewhere else to find his own voice and his own ministry. Montgomery was far enough away culturally and geographically for him to do that.
He became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement slowly by getting involved in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, boarded a bus and refused to walk to the back of the bus after being ordered to do so by the white driver. In those days, blacks were forced to sit at the back of the bus. The response of the driver and others led the black community to initiate a bus boycott. In looking for a leader, the other pastors and civic leaders chose King. Still, he was reluctant. The main reason he ascended to the leadership was that he was young, just in his late twenties, and he was willing to say yes to organizing things. An older, wiser pastor would have said “no.” King really didn’t know what he was in for. Over time, the death threats against his life grew, and they made him nervous. He realized that at any moment, he could be taken from his wife and toddler daughter, or they could be taken from him, through violence. He became fearful and doubtful. Should he continue? Was it fair to his wife and family?
It was as he struggled with his anxieties that he sought God’s voice and call in prayer. Let me share with you what he says in his book, Stride toward Freedom, about how he heard God in prayer. On one particular night, he received a death threat on the phone from a stranger saying, “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” This threat was different from all the others. It somehow seemed more like a promise than a threat. King struggled to sleep that night. He says, “I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’
“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” He had found his call through prayer.
What made this prayer and his experience so profound was that a week later a bomb was thrown onto the porch of his home, almost killing his wife and child. Instead of being gripped by fear, King became more resolute. He felt God’s presence in his life, telling him that God would be with him no matter what. He heard God’s call, and this call made it possible for him to follow God not matter how difficult and dangerous the task ahead was. King had been struggling to give his worries to God in much smaller things all along. In just following a call to be a pastor, he was giving anxieties over to God. So when it was time to give something big, like whether to stay in the movement or not, he had built up the ability to give over those worries. And in experiencing God as he gave over his worries, he was able to let go and let God throughout the rest of the movement. Many people have reported that in the last six months of his life, before being shot in Memphis, he spoke openly about his acceptance that he would probably be assassinated soon. And they remarked that he never seemed to be afraid. He had learned the secret of our passage. King had a passion for God, and the true kindling for it was his surrender to God of all his worries.
If you want to really form a passion for God in your life—if you really want to experience God in your life—it begins with surrendering you worries. It’s never easy to do this, and the moment we give God our worries, we generally get them right back. It’s what I call worry echoes. We give our worries to God, and then they come right back to us. But if we keep giving them over, like an echo, they will diminish. Also, when I say we surrender our worries I don’t say that we sit back and do nothing. We do. We do our part, but surrendering our worries lets God do God’s part.
For today, learning to let go of your worries is enough. Come back next week and we’ll learn more about how to build a passion for God that makes a real difference in life.
Amen.
Are We Really a Christian Nation? Part 2: The Founding Fathers' Faith
Luke 12:49-59
July 18, 2010
‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’
He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
‘And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? Thus, when you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case, or you may be dragged before the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.’
Back in 2003 I had an experience in a local church that raised my hackles. In July of that year I took a short sabbatical to write part of my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. As I often do when I’m on vacation, or not at Calvin Church on a Sunday, I’ll visit another church, just to see what others do. That particular Sunday, the Sunday of the 4th of July weekend, I decided to visit a large, non-denominational evangelical church. The service was quite a production, with red, white, and blue everywhere. In the front of the church, which was set up like an auditorium, had a stage with a band, along with two large PowerPoint screens on the right and left of the stage. The screens had film clips of waving American flags, and every once in a while a picture of a bald eagle would replace the clip.
Everyone was welcomed to the service, and then we stood and started singing “America the Beautiful,” with some modifications. After each verse, the band would stop playing and an actor in period costume would walk to the front of the stage and talk to the audience. The first one was an actor dressed as Thomas Jefferson, then next one dressed as Abigail Adams, and a third one dressed as Ben Franklin. Each one pretty much said the same thing, with minor variations. Basically what they said was this, “When I helped found this country, I founded it in faith. I founded it on the words of the Bible. This is the Word I founded the country in. This is the Word I believe in. And this is the word I stake my life on.”
Listening to each person speak made me squirm. I wanted to shout out to all the people, “Listen, people, you aren’t sheep. What they’re telling you isn’t true! They’re manipulating you!” I was irritated. Does it seem somewhat odd and perhaps heretical that I would want to scream this. What’s wrong with what the actors said? Didn’t Jefferson, Adams (well,… John Adams; I’m not sure what role Abigail had), and Franklin found the country on the Christian faith, and wasn’t the Bible central to their lives? The answers? No, they didn’t,… at least not in the way suggested by these actors, and yes it was.
As the well-known U. S. Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” This church was creating their own facts. Unfortunately, too few Americans today understand the faith of our Founding Fathers enough to know the difference between fact and opinion.
The fact is that the faith of the Founding Fathers was very much like that of the original colonists. They did not all share the same faith. In fact, they did not all share the same belief that they were Christian. Some didn’t really consider themselves Christian at all. Others saw themselves as Christians, but others as less than Christian. What makes it even more complicated is that many Founding Fathers adopted a faith that wasn’t completely Christian in the way we consider a faith to be Christian. And the funny thing today is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin, are often considered by modern evangelicals to be Christian, despite the fact that if these three were alive today, they would be considered heretics by those same evangelicals. Why? Because Thomas Jefferson, the Adamses, and Ben Franklin weren’t necessarily Christian. Let me share with you what they believed.
Thomas Jefferson’s Faith:
Jefferson was officially an Anglican, and when he worshiped, he worshiped in an Anglican church, but that doesn’t mean that he accepted Anglican beliefs. In fact, Jefferson’s theology and beliefs were much closer to Deist and Unitarian than to Christian. He did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, God incarnate, or the Messiah. Instead, he believed that Jesus was a great teacher of moral and philosophical truth. He believed that Jesus was the greatest teacher ever, but he did not believe in any of the miracles the gospels report. So Jefferson would not have believed in the virgin birth, the healings, feeding of the 5000, or the resurrection. The foundation of Jefferson’s belief was in the power of reason. He believed that true religion was one of reason rather than of revelation. That’s different from us. We believe that through Christ, and the writers of the Bible, God’s will and truth have been revealed. Jefferson believed that God’s will could only be reasoned out and that scripture was the work of flawed men who probably messed up God’s truth. As a result of his uncertainty about religion and its impact on reason, he founded the University of Virginia to be a college that was intentionally not affiliated with any church. If Jefferson were among us today, would we consider Jefferson to be a Christian?
Looking at how Jefferson treated the Bible, it’s hard to believe so. Jefferson struggled so much with the gospels, he decided to do something about it. He took several copies of the Bible, and using a razor blade, cut out every miracle story or part that he thought improbable. Then he rearranged them all so that they read in chronological order, creating one super-rational version of the Gospel. To get a sense of what this might of have done to the Bible, he took out whole segments, such as half of Mark 4, 6, 7, 8, as well as all of Mark 5 and 9. Is that the act of a Christian? I’m not pointing this out as a way of denigrating Jefferson. I think that he was one of the greatest men to ever live, and I do believe that in his own way he was a man of faith. I just don’t know that he was Christian, and if he wasn’t, can we say that he founded the nation as a Christian nation?
Benjamin Franklin’s Faith:
Like Jefferson, Franklin’s faith and belief were much closer to Deist and Unitarian than Christian, although he hid it better. Has raised as a Puritan, but later became an Anglican, despite rejecting most of Christian doctrine and belief, other than a belief in God and God’s providence. His theology and beliefs were much closer to Deist than to Christian, believing that God’s truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. He rarely disclosed his own personal beliefs, but when it came to Jesus he mainly saw him as a great moral teacher whose teachings had been corrupted by centuries of interpretation. He attended worship regularly at Christ Church in Philadelphia, but was reluctant to commit to any one religious view. According to John Adams, Franklin, ever the diplomat, was so good at hiding his own beliefs that Presbyterians thought he was one of them, Anglicans one of them, Congregationalists one of them, and Unitarians one of them. If he were with us today, would we consider Franklin to have been a Christian?
John Adams’ Faith:
Adams was raised as a Congregationalist, but later became Unitarian, rejecting most of Christian doctrine and belief, other than a belief in the essential goodness of God’s creation. His theology and beliefs were a combination of Deist and Unitarian. He tended to characterize it as a belief in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
He did not believe that God intervened in life, and he rejected the Trinity, but did believe in life after death. This is very different from what we Christians believe in. We believe that God does intervene in life, which is why we pray for healing and other concerns. And we believe in the Trinity, although I know that many of us struggle with that concept. Again, knowing what we know about Adams, can we say he was a Christian? In his case it’s easy to say that he answer is “no” because he was a Unitarian. Unitarians, while emerging out of the Christian faith, is not Christian faith.
So, getting back to our overall question, if we are going to say we are a Christian nation, are we sure the Founding Fathers were Christian? Certainly many of them were. In fact, a fair number were Presbyterian and Anglican pastors. But looking at the most influential, there’s a real question. Add in George Washington, who refused to take communion in worship, and James Madison (the principle writer of the U.S. constitution) who had strong Deist leanings, can we say that any of the most influential founding fathers were Christian as we define Christianity?
One thing also is clear. If you delve into their beliefs, they were clearly in favor of not making this a Christian nation. Many of the Founding Fathers had a deep, deep suspicion of the State and Church. Why? Because they knew that in Europe pastors were paid by the state when they served in state churches. And each country had a declared state religion. In England it was the Anglican Church. In Scotland the Presbyterian Church. In France, Italy, and Spain the Roman Catholic Church. In Norway and Sweden the Lutheran Church. And in these countries the state paid the salaries of pastors. So the Founding Fathers’ question was whether these pastors served the state or God. Also, they had seen how the establishment of one state religion led to the oppression of others, and they cherished the American colonial experiment of free exercise of religion. They believed in this idea so much that the very first amendment to the U. S. Constitution was a very simple, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” You see what their very first concern was? It was that the government should not establish a religion, or get in the way of people’s freedom of religion.
So, now that I spoke last week about the colonists’ faith and today about the Founding Fathers’ faith, what do I believe? While I am a Christian, and while I believe that life without faith and God becomes increasingly selfish and hollow, I also recognize that a true faith only comes with a choice, not compulsion. To declare our country to be a Christian nation, and to enforce it with some sort of governmental backing, would actually lead away from what we really want. You see, true faith only forms when it is done through free choice. Having the state enforce religion doesn’t lead to free faith chosen by choice. It actually has the effect of pushing people away from religion and faith by pushing them to do what they don’t want to do. For instance, growing up I went to a private elementary school where psalm reading, hymn singing, and prayer were part of our every morning assembly. I hated it. It started the process of turning me off to religion that culminated in my leaving the church at age fifteen. For some reason, going to church as a child didn’t have the same impact. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I knew that it was the appropriate place for prayer.
My point is that when we talk about things like putting prayer into our schools, be careful what we wish for. We are asking the government to enforce what we are called to do. It doesn’t necessarily lead to free choice of religion. One of the things we do at Calvin Church is to teach prayer, scripture, and the practice of faith, but we do it in a way that we hope leads to a mature, free choice when teens become adults. Sometimes it doesn’t, which is sad. But we recognize that people are free to reject what we offer. For good or for bad, we don’t run after people who reject the church, mainly because we want this to be a place of choice, not a place that has to convince people to be here.
Think of your own faith. What have you believed because it was forced on you? I’m not just talking about religious beliefs. I’m talking about political or any other kinds of beliefs. Do you believe what you believe because someone, especially the government, said that you must do or believe this? Again, this is my problem with both the topics of school prayer and Ten Commandments in courthouses. I believe that if we are asking the government to step in and intervene on our behalf, we’ve become lazy. I am very much like the Founding Fathers. I don’t want the state enforcing my faith. I’m wary of it because I don’t think they’d do a good job of it. I think we’re better at it.
Also, if schools did enforce school prayer, who would be leading it? What kind of Christian prayer would it be? Would it be an evangelical one emphasizing who is saved and who isn’t? A Roman Catholic one, praying for the pope and the area bishops? Would it be a Pentecostal one, asking God to give everyone the gift of tongues? Would it be a Presbyterian one? Would it be a Mormon one? Or would it be a Deist, Unitarian one? Not all Christianity is alike, so which Christian prayer would it be?
Also, when I hear people say that we are a Christian nation I get nervous because I know historically what happens when governments establish and support particular religions. I look at the state of religion in Europe, and it is abysmal. Something like 30% of all Americans go to church on Sunday mornings. Not a great percentage, until you compare it to Europe, where between 3% and 5% go to church on Sunday mornings. That’s the impact of state religions. Back in 1996 Diane and I visited Scotland. While sitting in a pub attached to the inn we were staying in, I had a conversation with a man stopping by for a drink after work. Eventually he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Presbyterian pastor. He pushed back slowly and cocked his head. Then said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a pastor before. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who’s gone to church before.” Surprised, I asked him, “Don’t people go to church here?” He said, “I’m not sure, but I don’t know of anyone. I’ve only seen the insides of churches on television, myself. I’ve never been in one.”
I believe that the U.S. is the most religious nation in the world because of our freedom. But take away that freedom and would we be that religious?
With all this said, I don’t want to leave the impression that I therefore believe that religion and faith should be kept out of politics and government. While I don’t believe that the state should establish religion, I do believe that religious thought should absolutely be part of our political establishment. This is the second half of the First Amendment. I don’t want the state to establish religion, but I do absolutely want the free exercise of religion (including atheism, which is a religion, since it is a practice regarding the place of God and religion in life) in all spheres of American life, including politics. This is very much in keeping with the Founding Fathers’ beliefs. They may not all have been Christian, but they were all religious, and they brought their beliefs, practices, and faith into the public sphere. Jefferson may have been a Deist, but those Deist beliefs shaped the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and his presidency. Who knows what Washington was, but he brought his faith into his command of the American Army. Madison was officially an Anglican, who was trained under the Presbyterian John Witherspoon at Princeton. You may not know this, but part of the model for the U. S. government is based on the Presbyterian system of checks and balances. We always balance laity and clergy in our church, both locally and at higher levels. We have equal levels of clergy and elders at higher levels of government of our church, and in times of dispute all clergy (and elders, when applicable) are guaranteed a fair jury trial. In the U.S. government the president is checked and balanced by Congress and the judiciary in much the same way.
Ultimately, I believe that we are not a Christian nation, but we are a nation of Christians, living in a country that was founded on Christian ideals. This country is richer when our Christian faith is brought into our governing, and poorer when people try to bring government into our faith. I am very much like the Founding Fathers.
Each of us is free to believe that we are a Christian nation, but I think we have to be careful about getting what we wish for; because the Christianity we might get in our nation may not be the Christianity we believe in.
Amen.
July 18, 2010
‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’
He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
‘And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? Thus, when you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case, or you may be dragged before the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.’
Back in 2003 I had an experience in a local church that raised my hackles. In July of that year I took a short sabbatical to write part of my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. As I often do when I’m on vacation, or not at Calvin Church on a Sunday, I’ll visit another church, just to see what others do. That particular Sunday, the Sunday of the 4th of July weekend, I decided to visit a large, non-denominational evangelical church. The service was quite a production, with red, white, and blue everywhere. In the front of the church, which was set up like an auditorium, had a stage with a band, along with two large PowerPoint screens on the right and left of the stage. The screens had film clips of waving American flags, and every once in a while a picture of a bald eagle would replace the clip.
Everyone was welcomed to the service, and then we stood and started singing “America the Beautiful,” with some modifications. After each verse, the band would stop playing and an actor in period costume would walk to the front of the stage and talk to the audience. The first one was an actor dressed as Thomas Jefferson, then next one dressed as Abigail Adams, and a third one dressed as Ben Franklin. Each one pretty much said the same thing, with minor variations. Basically what they said was this, “When I helped found this country, I founded it in faith. I founded it on the words of the Bible. This is the Word I founded the country in. This is the Word I believe in. And this is the word I stake my life on.”
Listening to each person speak made me squirm. I wanted to shout out to all the people, “Listen, people, you aren’t sheep. What they’re telling you isn’t true! They’re manipulating you!” I was irritated. Does it seem somewhat odd and perhaps heretical that I would want to scream this. What’s wrong with what the actors said? Didn’t Jefferson, Adams (well,… John Adams; I’m not sure what role Abigail had), and Franklin found the country on the Christian faith, and wasn’t the Bible central to their lives? The answers? No, they didn’t,… at least not in the way suggested by these actors, and yes it was.
As the well-known U. S. Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” This church was creating their own facts. Unfortunately, too few Americans today understand the faith of our Founding Fathers enough to know the difference between fact and opinion.
The fact is that the faith of the Founding Fathers was very much like that of the original colonists. They did not all share the same faith. In fact, they did not all share the same belief that they were Christian. Some didn’t really consider themselves Christian at all. Others saw themselves as Christians, but others as less than Christian. What makes it even more complicated is that many Founding Fathers adopted a faith that wasn’t completely Christian in the way we consider a faith to be Christian. And the funny thing today is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin, are often considered by modern evangelicals to be Christian, despite the fact that if these three were alive today, they would be considered heretics by those same evangelicals. Why? Because Thomas Jefferson, the Adamses, and Ben Franklin weren’t necessarily Christian. Let me share with you what they believed.
Thomas Jefferson’s Faith:
Jefferson was officially an Anglican, and when he worshiped, he worshiped in an Anglican church, but that doesn’t mean that he accepted Anglican beliefs. In fact, Jefferson’s theology and beliefs were much closer to Deist and Unitarian than to Christian. He did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, God incarnate, or the Messiah. Instead, he believed that Jesus was a great teacher of moral and philosophical truth. He believed that Jesus was the greatest teacher ever, but he did not believe in any of the miracles the gospels report. So Jefferson would not have believed in the virgin birth, the healings, feeding of the 5000, or the resurrection. The foundation of Jefferson’s belief was in the power of reason. He believed that true religion was one of reason rather than of revelation. That’s different from us. We believe that through Christ, and the writers of the Bible, God’s will and truth have been revealed. Jefferson believed that God’s will could only be reasoned out and that scripture was the work of flawed men who probably messed up God’s truth. As a result of his uncertainty about religion and its impact on reason, he founded the University of Virginia to be a college that was intentionally not affiliated with any church. If Jefferson were among us today, would we consider Jefferson to be a Christian?
Looking at how Jefferson treated the Bible, it’s hard to believe so. Jefferson struggled so much with the gospels, he decided to do something about it. He took several copies of the Bible, and using a razor blade, cut out every miracle story or part that he thought improbable. Then he rearranged them all so that they read in chronological order, creating one super-rational version of the Gospel. To get a sense of what this might of have done to the Bible, he took out whole segments, such as half of Mark 4, 6, 7, 8, as well as all of Mark 5 and 9. Is that the act of a Christian? I’m not pointing this out as a way of denigrating Jefferson. I think that he was one of the greatest men to ever live, and I do believe that in his own way he was a man of faith. I just don’t know that he was Christian, and if he wasn’t, can we say that he founded the nation as a Christian nation?
Benjamin Franklin’s Faith:
Like Jefferson, Franklin’s faith and belief were much closer to Deist and Unitarian than Christian, although he hid it better. Has raised as a Puritan, but later became an Anglican, despite rejecting most of Christian doctrine and belief, other than a belief in God and God’s providence. His theology and beliefs were much closer to Deist than to Christian, believing that God’s truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. He rarely disclosed his own personal beliefs, but when it came to Jesus he mainly saw him as a great moral teacher whose teachings had been corrupted by centuries of interpretation. He attended worship regularly at Christ Church in Philadelphia, but was reluctant to commit to any one religious view. According to John Adams, Franklin, ever the diplomat, was so good at hiding his own beliefs that Presbyterians thought he was one of them, Anglicans one of them, Congregationalists one of them, and Unitarians one of them. If he were with us today, would we consider Franklin to have been a Christian?
John Adams’ Faith:
Adams was raised as a Congregationalist, but later became Unitarian, rejecting most of Christian doctrine and belief, other than a belief in the essential goodness of God’s creation. His theology and beliefs were a combination of Deist and Unitarian. He tended to characterize it as a belief in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
He did not believe that God intervened in life, and he rejected the Trinity, but did believe in life after death. This is very different from what we Christians believe in. We believe that God does intervene in life, which is why we pray for healing and other concerns. And we believe in the Trinity, although I know that many of us struggle with that concept. Again, knowing what we know about Adams, can we say he was a Christian? In his case it’s easy to say that he answer is “no” because he was a Unitarian. Unitarians, while emerging out of the Christian faith, is not Christian faith.
So, getting back to our overall question, if we are going to say we are a Christian nation, are we sure the Founding Fathers were Christian? Certainly many of them were. In fact, a fair number were Presbyterian and Anglican pastors. But looking at the most influential, there’s a real question. Add in George Washington, who refused to take communion in worship, and James Madison (the principle writer of the U.S. constitution) who had strong Deist leanings, can we say that any of the most influential founding fathers were Christian as we define Christianity?
One thing also is clear. If you delve into their beliefs, they were clearly in favor of not making this a Christian nation. Many of the Founding Fathers had a deep, deep suspicion of the State and Church. Why? Because they knew that in Europe pastors were paid by the state when they served in state churches. And each country had a declared state religion. In England it was the Anglican Church. In Scotland the Presbyterian Church. In France, Italy, and Spain the Roman Catholic Church. In Norway and Sweden the Lutheran Church. And in these countries the state paid the salaries of pastors. So the Founding Fathers’ question was whether these pastors served the state or God. Also, they had seen how the establishment of one state religion led to the oppression of others, and they cherished the American colonial experiment of free exercise of religion. They believed in this idea so much that the very first amendment to the U. S. Constitution was a very simple, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” You see what their very first concern was? It was that the government should not establish a religion, or get in the way of people’s freedom of religion.
So, now that I spoke last week about the colonists’ faith and today about the Founding Fathers’ faith, what do I believe? While I am a Christian, and while I believe that life without faith and God becomes increasingly selfish and hollow, I also recognize that a true faith only comes with a choice, not compulsion. To declare our country to be a Christian nation, and to enforce it with some sort of governmental backing, would actually lead away from what we really want. You see, true faith only forms when it is done through free choice. Having the state enforce religion doesn’t lead to free faith chosen by choice. It actually has the effect of pushing people away from religion and faith by pushing them to do what they don’t want to do. For instance, growing up I went to a private elementary school where psalm reading, hymn singing, and prayer were part of our every morning assembly. I hated it. It started the process of turning me off to religion that culminated in my leaving the church at age fifteen. For some reason, going to church as a child didn’t have the same impact. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I knew that it was the appropriate place for prayer.
My point is that when we talk about things like putting prayer into our schools, be careful what we wish for. We are asking the government to enforce what we are called to do. It doesn’t necessarily lead to free choice of religion. One of the things we do at Calvin Church is to teach prayer, scripture, and the practice of faith, but we do it in a way that we hope leads to a mature, free choice when teens become adults. Sometimes it doesn’t, which is sad. But we recognize that people are free to reject what we offer. For good or for bad, we don’t run after people who reject the church, mainly because we want this to be a place of choice, not a place that has to convince people to be here.
Think of your own faith. What have you believed because it was forced on you? I’m not just talking about religious beliefs. I’m talking about political or any other kinds of beliefs. Do you believe what you believe because someone, especially the government, said that you must do or believe this? Again, this is my problem with both the topics of school prayer and Ten Commandments in courthouses. I believe that if we are asking the government to step in and intervene on our behalf, we’ve become lazy. I am very much like the Founding Fathers. I don’t want the state enforcing my faith. I’m wary of it because I don’t think they’d do a good job of it. I think we’re better at it.
Also, if schools did enforce school prayer, who would be leading it? What kind of Christian prayer would it be? Would it be an evangelical one emphasizing who is saved and who isn’t? A Roman Catholic one, praying for the pope and the area bishops? Would it be a Pentecostal one, asking God to give everyone the gift of tongues? Would it be a Presbyterian one? Would it be a Mormon one? Or would it be a Deist, Unitarian one? Not all Christianity is alike, so which Christian prayer would it be?
Also, when I hear people say that we are a Christian nation I get nervous because I know historically what happens when governments establish and support particular religions. I look at the state of religion in Europe, and it is abysmal. Something like 30% of all Americans go to church on Sunday mornings. Not a great percentage, until you compare it to Europe, where between 3% and 5% go to church on Sunday mornings. That’s the impact of state religions. Back in 1996 Diane and I visited Scotland. While sitting in a pub attached to the inn we were staying in, I had a conversation with a man stopping by for a drink after work. Eventually he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Presbyterian pastor. He pushed back slowly and cocked his head. Then said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a pastor before. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who’s gone to church before.” Surprised, I asked him, “Don’t people go to church here?” He said, “I’m not sure, but I don’t know of anyone. I’ve only seen the insides of churches on television, myself. I’ve never been in one.”
I believe that the U.S. is the most religious nation in the world because of our freedom. But take away that freedom and would we be that religious?
With all this said, I don’t want to leave the impression that I therefore believe that religion and faith should be kept out of politics and government. While I don’t believe that the state should establish religion, I do believe that religious thought should absolutely be part of our political establishment. This is the second half of the First Amendment. I don’t want the state to establish religion, but I do absolutely want the free exercise of religion (including atheism, which is a religion, since it is a practice regarding the place of God and religion in life) in all spheres of American life, including politics. This is very much in keeping with the Founding Fathers’ beliefs. They may not all have been Christian, but they were all religious, and they brought their beliefs, practices, and faith into the public sphere. Jefferson may have been a Deist, but those Deist beliefs shaped the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and his presidency. Who knows what Washington was, but he brought his faith into his command of the American Army. Madison was officially an Anglican, who was trained under the Presbyterian John Witherspoon at Princeton. You may not know this, but part of the model for the U. S. government is based on the Presbyterian system of checks and balances. We always balance laity and clergy in our church, both locally and at higher levels. We have equal levels of clergy and elders at higher levels of government of our church, and in times of dispute all clergy (and elders, when applicable) are guaranteed a fair jury trial. In the U.S. government the president is checked and balanced by Congress and the judiciary in much the same way.
Ultimately, I believe that we are not a Christian nation, but we are a nation of Christians, living in a country that was founded on Christian ideals. This country is richer when our Christian faith is brought into our governing, and poorer when people try to bring government into our faith. I am very much like the Founding Fathers.
Each of us is free to believe that we are a Christian nation, but I think we have to be careful about getting what we wish for; because the Christianity we might get in our nation may not be the Christianity we believe in.
Amen.
Are We Really a Christian Nation? Part 1: The Colonists' Faith
Luke 8:4-15
When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.’ As he said this, he called out, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’
Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that “looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.”
‘Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.
So,… are we a Christian nation or not? Over the past year I’ve had two conversations on the topic with two people with very strong opinions. The first person was an evangelical Christian who attends a large, non-denominational church. He was very adamant that the United States is a Christian nation. He stated emphatically that this country was settled by Christian colonists, practicing a Christian faith, with Christian beliefs guiding their government, and therefore the government should promote the Christian faith since we are a Christian nation. I think it surprised him when I told him that I completely disagreed with him, and that I believed we were not founded as a Christian nation. It surprised him because in his mind (and maybe yours) Christian pastors are supposed to believe and teach that this is a Christian nation.
About a month later I had a similar conversation with an atheist. She said emphatically that we are not a Christian nation, that this country was founded by people who had a problem with Christianity and wanted religion left out of politics. She then said that she believed that there should be freedom of religion, but that all religion should be kept out of the public sphere. She was telling me this because she saw me as an “enlightened” Christian, one whom she believed would agree with her. I said to her that I completely disagreed with her, and that I believed that Christian faith is part-and-parcel of our nations’ make-up. To leave Christianity out of the public sphere would go completely against what the founders believed.
So right now you’re wondering if I’m some sort of strange waffler. Most wafflers agree with whoever is speaking to them. I seem strange because I was disagreeing with both. Why? The answer is that I’ve spent a lot of time studying American Christian history, and I know that both of them were misrepresenting it. Most of us have studied American history, and we’ve learned certain facts, such as that this country was settled by people escaping religious persecution, and that in this country we believe in a wall separating church and state. But these facts only scratch the surface of what really took place. And some of them are wrong.
I disagreed with both because both were holding onto simplistic understandings of the settling and founding of this country, and I refused to be simplistic. Unfortunately, we modern Americans don’t seem to be able to hold onto any ideas that don’t fit onto a bumper sticker, and it is easier to say we either are or are not a Christian nation than to dig into the truth. The result is that we say that we either are or are not a Christian nation, when the reality is that what we are is more complex than this. So, this morning I want to give you a very Presbyterian sermon on the whole question of whether or not we are a Christian nation.
What does that mean, that it will be Presbyterian? I saw a recent promotion for the Presbyterian Church that said, “I’m proud to be a Presbyterian because we don’t have to check our heads at the door.” I’m not sure that will be a catchy enough phrase to get people to join our churches, but I think it’s true. We Presbyterians believe in thinking our way through faith, and so this morning I want you to think. I’m going to talk about the colonization of this country and its impact on us as a nation, but at the end I’m not going to tell you how to think. I’m simply going to invite you to think. And the question I’m going to ask at the end is this: “Knowing what you know now, are we really a Christian nation?”
To help you think through this I want to take you through the colonization of America and see if you know it as well as many of us think we do. For instance, answer this question: We are a nation founded by people trying to escape religious persecution—true or false? Whichever way you answered, you were only 50% right. If you understand the role of religion in the colonization of America you’ll see why. I want to look at the four great migrations into America, and talk about how they influenced our nation, and especially our thinking about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I’m basing my talk on David Hackett Fischer’s incredible book, Albion’s Seed. I don’t expect you to read it, unless you are really interested in history. He is known at the foremost expert on American colonization. His book is over 1000 pages long, but it is fascinating. He says that there were four main migrations that influenced American thought. There were other migrations, to be sure, but they didn’t have a foundational impact.
To understand the role of religion among the colonists, you have to start with understanding England itself in the 1600s. It was not a very peaceful place. Most Americans know that we had a civil war in the 1860s, but most don’t know that England went through a civil war in the early 1600s. The power kept passing between Anglicans (those who cherished the king and followed the Church of England), Catholics (those who cherished the king but followed the Roman Catholic Church), and Congregationalists (those who had little use for the king nor the Anglican or Catholic churches, and followed a Calvinist form of religion). Whichever group was in power typically oppressed the other two. This is the context that led to the first big migration to America, which was the Puritan migration into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritans were from a soil-poor area of England called East Anglia. It was comprised of Norfolk and Suffolk counties, mainly, along with several other counties. It was on the eastern coast of England, and the people who lived there were very independent and communal. They were Calvinists, following the religious reforms of the Swiss Reformation of the 1500s. They were a thorn in the king’s side, as well as the Anglicans and the Catholics. They did manage to secure power in England for a decade or more under Oliver Cromwell, but their rule was austere and violent. Why did the king allow the Puritans to set up a colony in Massachusetts? Because he wanted to get rid of them, and they wanted to escape their religious persecution in England.
The Puritans set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was comprised of what is today Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, with the hope that it would become a model Christian society. John Winthrop, in delivering a sermon to Puritan colonists in 1630 as they prepared to disembark in Salem bay, said that he hoped Massachusetts would become a “city set upon a hill” (based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5) that would become a model to the world. Since then, many Americans have declared that our whole country was founded as this city on a hill.
For the Puritans, their faith was everything. They saw no disconnect between faith and the rest of life. We often think of them as being very austere and rigid, although this wasn’t quite true. It is true that they dressed in a very reserved and modest way, wearing simple linen and wool clothing. Women always had their heads covered, and their dresses revealed no wrists, legs, or chest. The men were dark clothing that similarly covered their whole bodies. There was no showiness about their dress. Also, they believed in hard work, but that the produce of their work should be shared. It is also true that to be a Puritan meant to conform. Everyone dressed the same, spoke the same, and shared virtually the same beliefs. There was little tolerance for dispute. Also, to become fully part of the community, whether church or village, a person had to be born-again. It wasn’t enough, though, to say that you had had a born-again experience. You had to have your experience in public in a way that others could witness to.
Still, it’s not as though everything about them was rigid and austere. Community and family was everything for them. They were known as very loving and devoted parents. And they were known for offering a very free and inclusive democratic government. For example, they were the original creators of the town hall meeting, in which everyone in the community could have a voice. Their community emphasis was also demonstrated in the fact that there were very few poor among them. The community always looked out for the poor. If you were poor in a Puritan community, you would be invited to live with a family, for as long as the rest of your life. Widows and widowers were taken in by local families, and children whose parents died were quickly adopted by family or neighbors. The wealthy among them saw it as their duty to share their wealth, and held very little of it for themselves. You can see this tradition still in Massachusetts in its nickname, “Taxachusetts.” The willingness of people to pay higher taxes to care for the community was natural outgrowth of Puritan culture. To sum up the basic sense of Puritan culture, we can say that:
• They were very salvation oriented (who’s saved and who isn’t), with each person expected to live a pure (Puritan), godly life, adhere to Calvinist doctrine, and have a publicly demonstrated conversion experience. They were extremely intolerant of different Christian ideas, and especially denominations. They did not consider Christians of other faiths to be Christian. They were an abomination. In fact, if you were found to be practicing another faith in the colony—being a Quaker, Anglican, or Presbyterian—you were often forced to walk to another colony, while your head and arms were locked in a stock. As you walked from village to village, you would be spat on, garbage would be thrown on you, and children would hit you with sticks. On rare occasions, you would be hanged.
• They were very community and family oriented, with an emphasis on conformity of dress, belief, and behavior.
• They believed in using force and social pressure to enforce religious belief.
• They believed in the equality of all people, and that what distinguishes people is the nature of their work, not their rank in society. There was little social hierarchy, with each person’s voice being considered important.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Puritans?
The next major migration to American was night-and-day when compared to the Puritans. These were the Anglican Cavaliers who settled into Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. They were not looking to escape religious persecution because, for the most part, they were in the religious majority. The Cavaliers were the second, third, fourth, and fifth sons of wealthy noblemen from the south of England. Their fathers owned large estates, estates that would be willed to the eldest son upon their deaths. The other sons were given money to make their way in the world. Many came to the colonies to create their own estates and plantations to rival their father’s.
The cavaliers dress was very different from Puritan dress. They dressed in fine silks and cottons. Their hear was long, and they wore swords by their sides. They were Anglican in their faith, and while the church was important to most of them, their faith was consigned mostly to Sunday mornings. The rest of the week they lived and did as they pleased. In many ways their religion was the accumulation of wealth. They were not in the colonies seeking religious freedom. They were seeking economic opportunity, with a goal of becoming rich. To summarize Anglican Cavalier life, we can say that:
• They believed that the universe was created with a natural hierarchy, of which we all are a part and have a natural rank. They believed that this ranking was ordained by God. So in the church there would be God, the king, the archbishop, the bishop, the priests, and then the laity. In secular society there was the king, the nobility, middle-class, servants, and then slaves. To them, all people have a duty to conform to their rank, and to not desire to rise above it. Understanding their view of community, and the Puritan one, you can see why slavery thrived in the south, but never took on in Massachusetts. The Puritans saw Africans as equal, but the Anglican Cavaliers saw them as naturally inferior, and put on this earth to be slaves. As a result, it’s easy to understand why people in the South couldn’t understand what the problem with slavery was, and some today still look down on African-Americans.
• They believed in the use of force, especially to enforce their hierarchy. As a result, they were highly intolerant of any other denomination and forced Puritan and Quaker settlements out of the colony. They weren’t as violent in doing so as the Puritans, but the tolerated no other beliefs and denominations.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Anglican Cavaliers?
The next migration was radically different from the other two. This was the Quaker migration that settled into New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Quakers were a religiously persecuted people from central England. Their faith was very different from Puritans and Anglicans. They were very anti-institutional, believing that everyone could go to God directly without the help of pastor or priest. They also believed in peace and unity, equality, and the validity of other faiths (even if they saw their own as being preeminent).
The Quakers in the colonies, led by William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania (which originally included Delaware and parts of what is now New Jersey), wanted to create a land of religious liberty. And so he not only invited Quakers to come to Pennsylvania, but also Anglicans and Presbyterians, Lutherans and German Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, Harmonites (who settled in our town of Harmony), the Scotch-Irish (whom we’ll talk about later), Jews, and even Muslims. Penn believed he was creating a grand Christian experiment, one that was diametrically opposed to the Puritan one. He was creating a colony on a hill, but one that included all who followed the Christian faith or a religion. He might have seen the Quakers as foremost among all Christians, but he saw all Christians as basically equivalent. This was far from how the Puritans and Anglicans saw things. They each saw themselves as true Christians, and all other faiths as false. The Quakers of Pennsylvania wanted to create a colony that would reflect their religious beliefs:
• The equality of everyone;
• Always seeking peace and unity in society;
• Pursuing religious freedom and social pluralism;
• Being community-oriented, but with a strong sense of personal expressions.
In many ways I see myself as a product of Pennsylvania. I believe in these same values, but I know that I live among many Christians who see only themselves as true Christians, and all others as false. Knowing all this about Penn, the Quakers, and the founding of Pennsylvania, it’s no accident that the signing of the Declaration of Independence took place in Philadelphia. That document would have a hard time finding the same kind of communal support in either the New England or Southern colonies. It’s also no accident that Pennsylvania had the most signers of the Declaration of Independence than any other colony.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Quakers?
The final major migration to shape American thought was the Scotch-Irish settlement first into Pennsylvania (the only colony that would invite and have them), and then down the spine of the Appalachians. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call them Scotch-Irish because many of them really weren’t Scottish. They really should have been called borderlanders. They came from the borderlands between Scotland and England. These were people who owed allegiance neither to Scotland and England. For centuries they were caught in a vice. When England would attack Scotland, they would demand allegiance from these people, but if they lost the battle, the Scottish would come onto their lands and kill the people there for supporting the English. If the Scottish attacked the English, they would demand the support of the borderlanders. If they lost, the English would then come and kill them. They were caught in a perpetual vice, so they created their own clan system of familial connection and support. When either the Scottish or the English would demand allegiance, these families would gather together and tell each army that not only would they not align with them, but whenever the army passed they would attack them from the rear. These were a fiercely independent and violent people who learned to be self-reliant and to take care of self and family first.
Many of these borderland folk were sent to Northern Ireland when Scotland and England joined to create Great Britain. Despite the peace between Scotland and Ireland, these folks remained violent and disruptive, so it made sense to exile them. From there they moved to the colonies in America. These people were unlike any other to come to America. They were built for the frontier, not the cities. They were uncultivated, and had their own ways that were extremely different from the educated Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers. They cursed, they got drunk, they spat, and they fought. The women’s dresses revealed ankles and wrists, and sometimes even cleavage. Even the tolerant Quakers were uncomfortable with them, and encouraged them to move to frontier to places like,… Western Pennsylvania.
The legacy of the Scotch-Irish is still with us. These people were not seeking religious freedom. They already felt they had it. In the independence of the borderlands they had formed their own Christian churches. It is said that they often went into the frontier armed with a Bible and an axe. They felt no allegiance to any church, and if they disagreed among their own churches, they were quick to split. I’m convinced that what’s at the root of all our arguing in the Presbyterian Church is our Scotch-Irish roots. We’ve been arguing and splitting for centuries. In each new era we find new things to fight and split about, but it’s in our DNA, it seems, to fight. If you really want to understand the Scotch-Irish temperament, look to the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 19th century. Do you know what they were fighting about? Neither do I, nor does anyone else. They were feuding because they were Scotch-Irish.
So how did these folk influence the faith of our country? They were the first libertarians. They believed in their own independence, their own freedom, and their right to do what they wanted. They didn’t want to pay taxes, and they didn’t want the government interfering in their lives. From a political perspective, these are the forebears of the NRA, the Libertarians, and even the Tea Party. Their influence on American faith is that they were the first to be spiritual but not religious. They may have gone to church, but often not together. Each individual person or family saw themselves as the real Christians, and all others as pale imitations. And they justified whatever they did on those grounds. They could find biblical justification for anything. Does that sound familiar today?
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Scotch-Irish?
The problem with calling ourselves a Christian nation is that if we look at our roots, there was no consistent Christianity to say what was universally Christian. If we are a Christian nation, which version are we? We can’t be all because they aren’t all compatible with each other. The independence of the Scotch-Irish conflicts with the communal focus of the Puritans. The intolerance of the Puritans and Anglicans conflicts with the tolerance of the Quakers. So which Christianity are we as a nation?
Next week I want to look at the faith of the founding fathers, because it was just as complex and varied as that of the colonists. Until then I want you to reflect on this question: knowing what you know now, would you say that we are a Christian nation?
Amen.
When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.’ As he said this, he called out, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’
Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that “looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.”
‘Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.
So,… are we a Christian nation or not? Over the past year I’ve had two conversations on the topic with two people with very strong opinions. The first person was an evangelical Christian who attends a large, non-denominational church. He was very adamant that the United States is a Christian nation. He stated emphatically that this country was settled by Christian colonists, practicing a Christian faith, with Christian beliefs guiding their government, and therefore the government should promote the Christian faith since we are a Christian nation. I think it surprised him when I told him that I completely disagreed with him, and that I believed we were not founded as a Christian nation. It surprised him because in his mind (and maybe yours) Christian pastors are supposed to believe and teach that this is a Christian nation.
About a month later I had a similar conversation with an atheist. She said emphatically that we are not a Christian nation, that this country was founded by people who had a problem with Christianity and wanted religion left out of politics. She then said that she believed that there should be freedom of religion, but that all religion should be kept out of the public sphere. She was telling me this because she saw me as an “enlightened” Christian, one whom she believed would agree with her. I said to her that I completely disagreed with her, and that I believed that Christian faith is part-and-parcel of our nations’ make-up. To leave Christianity out of the public sphere would go completely against what the founders believed.
So right now you’re wondering if I’m some sort of strange waffler. Most wafflers agree with whoever is speaking to them. I seem strange because I was disagreeing with both. Why? The answer is that I’ve spent a lot of time studying American Christian history, and I know that both of them were misrepresenting it. Most of us have studied American history, and we’ve learned certain facts, such as that this country was settled by people escaping religious persecution, and that in this country we believe in a wall separating church and state. But these facts only scratch the surface of what really took place. And some of them are wrong.
I disagreed with both because both were holding onto simplistic understandings of the settling and founding of this country, and I refused to be simplistic. Unfortunately, we modern Americans don’t seem to be able to hold onto any ideas that don’t fit onto a bumper sticker, and it is easier to say we either are or are not a Christian nation than to dig into the truth. The result is that we say that we either are or are not a Christian nation, when the reality is that what we are is more complex than this. So, this morning I want to give you a very Presbyterian sermon on the whole question of whether or not we are a Christian nation.
What does that mean, that it will be Presbyterian? I saw a recent promotion for the Presbyterian Church that said, “I’m proud to be a Presbyterian because we don’t have to check our heads at the door.” I’m not sure that will be a catchy enough phrase to get people to join our churches, but I think it’s true. We Presbyterians believe in thinking our way through faith, and so this morning I want you to think. I’m going to talk about the colonization of this country and its impact on us as a nation, but at the end I’m not going to tell you how to think. I’m simply going to invite you to think. And the question I’m going to ask at the end is this: “Knowing what you know now, are we really a Christian nation?”
To help you think through this I want to take you through the colonization of America and see if you know it as well as many of us think we do. For instance, answer this question: We are a nation founded by people trying to escape religious persecution—true or false? Whichever way you answered, you were only 50% right. If you understand the role of religion in the colonization of America you’ll see why. I want to look at the four great migrations into America, and talk about how they influenced our nation, and especially our thinking about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I’m basing my talk on David Hackett Fischer’s incredible book, Albion’s Seed. I don’t expect you to read it, unless you are really interested in history. He is known at the foremost expert on American colonization. His book is over 1000 pages long, but it is fascinating. He says that there were four main migrations that influenced American thought. There were other migrations, to be sure, but they didn’t have a foundational impact.
To understand the role of religion among the colonists, you have to start with understanding England itself in the 1600s. It was not a very peaceful place. Most Americans know that we had a civil war in the 1860s, but most don’t know that England went through a civil war in the early 1600s. The power kept passing between Anglicans (those who cherished the king and followed the Church of England), Catholics (those who cherished the king but followed the Roman Catholic Church), and Congregationalists (those who had little use for the king nor the Anglican or Catholic churches, and followed a Calvinist form of religion). Whichever group was in power typically oppressed the other two. This is the context that led to the first big migration to America, which was the Puritan migration into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritans were from a soil-poor area of England called East Anglia. It was comprised of Norfolk and Suffolk counties, mainly, along with several other counties. It was on the eastern coast of England, and the people who lived there were very independent and communal. They were Calvinists, following the religious reforms of the Swiss Reformation of the 1500s. They were a thorn in the king’s side, as well as the Anglicans and the Catholics. They did manage to secure power in England for a decade or more under Oliver Cromwell, but their rule was austere and violent. Why did the king allow the Puritans to set up a colony in Massachusetts? Because he wanted to get rid of them, and they wanted to escape their religious persecution in England.
The Puritans set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was comprised of what is today Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, with the hope that it would become a model Christian society. John Winthrop, in delivering a sermon to Puritan colonists in 1630 as they prepared to disembark in Salem bay, said that he hoped Massachusetts would become a “city set upon a hill” (based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5) that would become a model to the world. Since then, many Americans have declared that our whole country was founded as this city on a hill.
For the Puritans, their faith was everything. They saw no disconnect between faith and the rest of life. We often think of them as being very austere and rigid, although this wasn’t quite true. It is true that they dressed in a very reserved and modest way, wearing simple linen and wool clothing. Women always had their heads covered, and their dresses revealed no wrists, legs, or chest. The men were dark clothing that similarly covered their whole bodies. There was no showiness about their dress. Also, they believed in hard work, but that the produce of their work should be shared. It is also true that to be a Puritan meant to conform. Everyone dressed the same, spoke the same, and shared virtually the same beliefs. There was little tolerance for dispute. Also, to become fully part of the community, whether church or village, a person had to be born-again. It wasn’t enough, though, to say that you had had a born-again experience. You had to have your experience in public in a way that others could witness to.
Still, it’s not as though everything about them was rigid and austere. Community and family was everything for them. They were known as very loving and devoted parents. And they were known for offering a very free and inclusive democratic government. For example, they were the original creators of the town hall meeting, in which everyone in the community could have a voice. Their community emphasis was also demonstrated in the fact that there were very few poor among them. The community always looked out for the poor. If you were poor in a Puritan community, you would be invited to live with a family, for as long as the rest of your life. Widows and widowers were taken in by local families, and children whose parents died were quickly adopted by family or neighbors. The wealthy among them saw it as their duty to share their wealth, and held very little of it for themselves. You can see this tradition still in Massachusetts in its nickname, “Taxachusetts.” The willingness of people to pay higher taxes to care for the community was natural outgrowth of Puritan culture. To sum up the basic sense of Puritan culture, we can say that:
• They were very salvation oriented (who’s saved and who isn’t), with each person expected to live a pure (Puritan), godly life, adhere to Calvinist doctrine, and have a publicly demonstrated conversion experience. They were extremely intolerant of different Christian ideas, and especially denominations. They did not consider Christians of other faiths to be Christian. They were an abomination. In fact, if you were found to be practicing another faith in the colony—being a Quaker, Anglican, or Presbyterian—you were often forced to walk to another colony, while your head and arms were locked in a stock. As you walked from village to village, you would be spat on, garbage would be thrown on you, and children would hit you with sticks. On rare occasions, you would be hanged.
• They were very community and family oriented, with an emphasis on conformity of dress, belief, and behavior.
• They believed in using force and social pressure to enforce religious belief.
• They believed in the equality of all people, and that what distinguishes people is the nature of their work, not their rank in society. There was little social hierarchy, with each person’s voice being considered important.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Puritans?
The next major migration to American was night-and-day when compared to the Puritans. These were the Anglican Cavaliers who settled into Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. They were not looking to escape religious persecution because, for the most part, they were in the religious majority. The Cavaliers were the second, third, fourth, and fifth sons of wealthy noblemen from the south of England. Their fathers owned large estates, estates that would be willed to the eldest son upon their deaths. The other sons were given money to make their way in the world. Many came to the colonies to create their own estates and plantations to rival their father’s.
The cavaliers dress was very different from Puritan dress. They dressed in fine silks and cottons. Their hear was long, and they wore swords by their sides. They were Anglican in their faith, and while the church was important to most of them, their faith was consigned mostly to Sunday mornings. The rest of the week they lived and did as they pleased. In many ways their religion was the accumulation of wealth. They were not in the colonies seeking religious freedom. They were seeking economic opportunity, with a goal of becoming rich. To summarize Anglican Cavalier life, we can say that:
• They believed that the universe was created with a natural hierarchy, of which we all are a part and have a natural rank. They believed that this ranking was ordained by God. So in the church there would be God, the king, the archbishop, the bishop, the priests, and then the laity. In secular society there was the king, the nobility, middle-class, servants, and then slaves. To them, all people have a duty to conform to their rank, and to not desire to rise above it. Understanding their view of community, and the Puritan one, you can see why slavery thrived in the south, but never took on in Massachusetts. The Puritans saw Africans as equal, but the Anglican Cavaliers saw them as naturally inferior, and put on this earth to be slaves. As a result, it’s easy to understand why people in the South couldn’t understand what the problem with slavery was, and some today still look down on African-Americans.
• They believed in the use of force, especially to enforce their hierarchy. As a result, they were highly intolerant of any other denomination and forced Puritan and Quaker settlements out of the colony. They weren’t as violent in doing so as the Puritans, but the tolerated no other beliefs and denominations.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Anglican Cavaliers?
The next migration was radically different from the other two. This was the Quaker migration that settled into New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Quakers were a religiously persecuted people from central England. Their faith was very different from Puritans and Anglicans. They were very anti-institutional, believing that everyone could go to God directly without the help of pastor or priest. They also believed in peace and unity, equality, and the validity of other faiths (even if they saw their own as being preeminent).
The Quakers in the colonies, led by William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania (which originally included Delaware and parts of what is now New Jersey), wanted to create a land of religious liberty. And so he not only invited Quakers to come to Pennsylvania, but also Anglicans and Presbyterians, Lutherans and German Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, Harmonites (who settled in our town of Harmony), the Scotch-Irish (whom we’ll talk about later), Jews, and even Muslims. Penn believed he was creating a grand Christian experiment, one that was diametrically opposed to the Puritan one. He was creating a colony on a hill, but one that included all who followed the Christian faith or a religion. He might have seen the Quakers as foremost among all Christians, but he saw all Christians as basically equivalent. This was far from how the Puritans and Anglicans saw things. They each saw themselves as true Christians, and all other faiths as false. The Quakers of Pennsylvania wanted to create a colony that would reflect their religious beliefs:
• The equality of everyone;
• Always seeking peace and unity in society;
• Pursuing religious freedom and social pluralism;
• Being community-oriented, but with a strong sense of personal expressions.
In many ways I see myself as a product of Pennsylvania. I believe in these same values, but I know that I live among many Christians who see only themselves as true Christians, and all others as false. Knowing all this about Penn, the Quakers, and the founding of Pennsylvania, it’s no accident that the signing of the Declaration of Independence took place in Philadelphia. That document would have a hard time finding the same kind of communal support in either the New England or Southern colonies. It’s also no accident that Pennsylvania had the most signers of the Declaration of Independence than any other colony.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Quakers?
The final major migration to shape American thought was the Scotch-Irish settlement first into Pennsylvania (the only colony that would invite and have them), and then down the spine of the Appalachians. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call them Scotch-Irish because many of them really weren’t Scottish. They really should have been called borderlanders. They came from the borderlands between Scotland and England. These were people who owed allegiance neither to Scotland and England. For centuries they were caught in a vice. When England would attack Scotland, they would demand allegiance from these people, but if they lost the battle, the Scottish would come onto their lands and kill the people there for supporting the English. If the Scottish attacked the English, they would demand the support of the borderlanders. If they lost, the English would then come and kill them. They were caught in a perpetual vice, so they created their own clan system of familial connection and support. When either the Scottish or the English would demand allegiance, these families would gather together and tell each army that not only would they not align with them, but whenever the army passed they would attack them from the rear. These were a fiercely independent and violent people who learned to be self-reliant and to take care of self and family first.
Many of these borderland folk were sent to Northern Ireland when Scotland and England joined to create Great Britain. Despite the peace between Scotland and Ireland, these folks remained violent and disruptive, so it made sense to exile them. From there they moved to the colonies in America. These people were unlike any other to come to America. They were built for the frontier, not the cities. They were uncultivated, and had their own ways that were extremely different from the educated Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers. They cursed, they got drunk, they spat, and they fought. The women’s dresses revealed ankles and wrists, and sometimes even cleavage. Even the tolerant Quakers were uncomfortable with them, and encouraged them to move to frontier to places like,… Western Pennsylvania.
The legacy of the Scotch-Irish is still with us. These people were not seeking religious freedom. They already felt they had it. In the independence of the borderlands they had formed their own Christian churches. It is said that they often went into the frontier armed with a Bible and an axe. They felt no allegiance to any church, and if they disagreed among their own churches, they were quick to split. I’m convinced that what’s at the root of all our arguing in the Presbyterian Church is our Scotch-Irish roots. We’ve been arguing and splitting for centuries. In each new era we find new things to fight and split about, but it’s in our DNA, it seems, to fight. If you really want to understand the Scotch-Irish temperament, look to the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 19th century. Do you know what they were fighting about? Neither do I, nor does anyone else. They were feuding because they were Scotch-Irish.
So how did these folk influence the faith of our country? They were the first libertarians. They believed in their own independence, their own freedom, and their right to do what they wanted. They didn’t want to pay taxes, and they didn’t want the government interfering in their lives. From a political perspective, these are the forebears of the NRA, the Libertarians, and even the Tea Party. Their influence on American faith is that they were the first to be spiritual but not religious. They may have gone to church, but often not together. Each individual person or family saw themselves as the real Christians, and all others as pale imitations. And they justified whatever they did on those grounds. They could find biblical justification for anything. Does that sound familiar today?
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Scotch-Irish?
The problem with calling ourselves a Christian nation is that if we look at our roots, there was no consistent Christianity to say what was universally Christian. If we are a Christian nation, which version are we? We can’t be all because they aren’t all compatible with each other. The independence of the Scotch-Irish conflicts with the communal focus of the Puritans. The intolerance of the Puritans and Anglicans conflicts with the tolerance of the Quakers. So which Christianity are we as a nation?
Next week I want to look at the faith of the founding fathers, because it was just as complex and varied as that of the colonists. Until then I want you to reflect on this question: knowing what you know now, would you say that we are a Christian nation?
Amen.
Overcoming Darkness: Cultivating Fruits
Galatians 5:13-25
June 27, 2010
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
Nan Durny has a story to tell, and I feel very, very privileged to share her story with you this morning. If you don’t know Nan, she’s Calvin Church’s clerk of session. Her husband, Peter, is an elder and the co-chair of our Personnel and Finance Committee.
I want to take you back to the spring and summer of 1996, which was when the lights went out in Nan’s life. Prior to February of 1996, Nan had been married to the love of her life, David Emerick. Nan had met David when they were both teens. She was from Evans City, he was from Ambridge, and they met at the Dairy Queen in Cranberry when their two group of friends started talking. When Nan’s friends left the Dairy Queen, Dave and his friends followed, and from there their romance blossomed. It wasn’t too long before they were married, and then had kids—first Nick, who is now attending Penn State, and then Kayla, who is at West Chester University.
As Nan has said, they were living the American dream. They had two beautiful kids, and they had both designed and built their own house. David was 34, Nan was 33, and life seemed great. During the summer of 1995, though, David started feeling ill. He was having stomach pains. At first they diagnosed it as ulcers, and put him on medication, but that didn’t seem to help. Then they suspected that he might have some sort of intestinal autoimmune disease such as Crohn’s Disease. So they put him on prednisone, and that did the trick. He felt better than he had in a year. Once again, life seemed great, until right around Thanksgiving. Dave came downstairs to talk to Nan and said that he felt terrible. He was all white and was physically shaking. They went to the doctor and took a CAT scan of his abdomen, where the doctors discovered that his liver looked like Swiss cheese. There was cancer everywhere. They also detected a walnut sized tumor on his colon, which was the original site of the cancer. The doctors were grim. They told Nan and Dave to get their affairs in order and to spend as much time as possible with their children because Dave only had about two months to live.
In front of their children they tried their best to act as though everything was normal. Dave immersed himself in spending time with Kayla, Nick, and Nan. There was very little hope. Despite all their efforts to hold on, Dave died in February, 1996, little more than two months after his diagnosis.
There was one point right before Dave died in which Nan felt truly hopeless. She had been working so hard to hold it all together in front of others, to be strong and cheerful in the face of it all, but it was getting harder. She was in the shower one morning and began sobbing. She was overwhelmed by everything that was going on—not only Dave’s impending death, but also with how she would pay the bills, how she would raise children alone, and how she would cope. In the midst of her sobbing she heard a voice. It was a genderless voice that seemed to be both inside and outside of her at the same time. It had an amazing clarity, and she could feel LOVE in that voice that let her know that she was loved more than she could ever know. The voice said, “I am here with you. I cannot heal David. That’s not what’s meant to be, but I will be with you and him. Pray for strength and know that I will be with you no matter what.” Nan felt a deep, deep warmth and peace that filled her body and soul. She knew that she could make it.
After Dave died, Nan tried to hold onto a sense of normalcy, but it was hard. What was hardest was going to worship on Easter after Dave died. Looking around at all the couples with young families was hard. Nan felt alone. It became harder each week to go to church because of the pain she felt, and because of her increasing sense of isolation. So she stopped going to church. And she began to question whether God even existed. Now, you might be tempted to think to yourself, “But didn’t she hear God’s voice? Shouldn’t that sustain her?” A lot of people who hear God’s voice have a hard time holding onto it when they are in deep grief and pain. It’s not that they forget. It’s that the grief is so much louder than the memory of God’s voice.
The Rev. Dr. Steve Polley, who is now our parish associate for pastoral care, had that same position in the church in Cranberry at the time. He noticed that she hadn’t been to church in a while, so he visited her that summer. The exchanged some small talk for a while, and Steve asked her how she was. She said that she was okay. He paused and said, “No, how are you really?” Nan paused for a bit, and said, “I’m angry! I’m angry at my situation, I’m angry that Dave died, and I’m angry at God for letting this happen!” Steve, in his infinite wisdom, said, “That’s okay, Nan. God knows you’re angry, and it’s okay to be angry at God. God knows that you have a lot to be angry about, but God’s still going to love you and be with you. That’s what church is for. It’s supposed to be a place where you can work out your anger with God.”
That wasn’t the response Nan was expecting. It made her feel better, and she felt more hopeful after he left. In fact, he helped her to remember the voice she had heard in the shower months before. Going back to church on a regular basis she slowly started feeling better, even if the grief never really left her. She also started attending a young widows group and a grief support group, which is where she eventually met Peter Durny, whose own wife, Mary Ann, had died from cancer almost a year earlier after a five-year struggle. They started dating, but it wasn’t easy. Both felt guilty about dating. Were they dishonoring Dave and Mary Ann by dating, let alone falling in love? Is this what their spouses would want? Both struggled
Then one night Nan had a dream. It was the kind of dream I mentioned several weeks ago when I told you the story of one of my classmates from high school whose son had died. That woman, Kelley, had had a dream in which she was with God and was given the answer to all the questions she had about the universe, life, death, and beyond. Nan had that same dream, and just like Kelley, she woke up not remembering the answers, but knowing that God was with her. She told Peter about her dream, and amazingly he said to her, “I know,… I had the exact same dream last night.” They were married that same year and came to Calvin Church after moving to Zelienople.
Nan had definitely experienced both darkness and God’s presence. The fact is that for a long time Nan teetered on the edge of a cliff that many of us teeter on in life. It’s a cliff that overlooks the abyss of darkness. When we stand there we sometimes have the ability to gain perspective on what really matters in life, and adjust our lives accordingly; but just as often people slip and fall into the abyss, and struggle to get out.
What makes the abyss of darkness so hard in is that it is a place of despair in which people lose hope. So often, when people go through traumatic difficulties—the death of someone close, a divorce, an illness, loss of a job—they become despairing. Many people only have compassion for those who have had a loved one die, but going through a divorce can lead us just as deeply into despair because there still is a death—the death of a relationship. I have great compassion, rather than judgment, for people of divorce, both spouses and children, because often the judgment of others deepens their despair. We also can feel despair when we lose a job, especially in our work environment of today. People can become hopeless, wondering if they’ll ever get another job.
This despair can lead us into what Paul calls, “the works of the flesh,” which are “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” These acts are all symptoms of the problem, not the problem. They are symptoms of people feeling like they are trapped in darkness, and who engage in these works of the flesh trying to get relief from their pain. They get drunk, or enter serial relationships, or get into fights as a way of trying to relieve the darkness of despair, not realizing that their actions actually lead them deeper into despair. Their pursuit of the relief of pain actually causes more pain.
There is a way out of all this, and Paul talks about it in our passage. The way out is by being led by the Spirit, but to be led by the Spirit we have to be open to the Spirit, which is hard to do from the bottom of the abyss. When we are at the bottom, we often feel too hopeless to become open to God. But Nan became open to God. She became open to being led by the Spirit, and it made all the difference. It took a while, and some prompting from God’s hands and feet—Steve Polley—but she did it.
The secret of overcoming darkness is to actively seek the light that the Spirit offers—to trust in what’s possible, not what’s in the past. This is hard stuff, because, as I said last week, negativity and despair have their own energy and allure, and it’s easy to give ourselves over to the energies of anger, cynicism, skepticism, and despair. And the more we give ourselves over to that power, the more it isolates us from God by building a moat around our lives.
I do realize that in talking about Nan hearing God’s voice this morning, and often in other stories I’ve told, it can cause frustration in us because most of us don’t hear God’s voice at all. What I’ve noticed is that the people who hear God’s voice tend to have certain attributes that open them to God. Either they are in despair and God responds to them through the gift of speaking to them, or they live lives in which they intentionally cultivate a listening heart and mind. In other words, they are dedicated to daily practices that open them to God—they pray every day, read scripture or spiritual books on a regular basis, and actively listen for God’s voice in their minds, in what they are reading, in what other people say, and the like. They are intentional, and it opens them to sensing and hearing the Spirit.
If we are willing to open up to the Spirit, and to be intentional in trusting that God has something better in store, we plant seeds of fruit that get us out of the bottom. Paul talks about these seeds. He says that they are “ love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” When we become intentionally open to God’s Spirit, these seeds grow in our lives and transform our lives. They move us from darkness to light.
There is a way out of darkness, but it requires looking up, not down. It requires looking for what’s good, not what’s bad. It requires looking for what’s possible, not what’s in the past.
Amen.
June 27, 2010
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
Nan Durny has a story to tell, and I feel very, very privileged to share her story with you this morning. If you don’t know Nan, she’s Calvin Church’s clerk of session. Her husband, Peter, is an elder and the co-chair of our Personnel and Finance Committee.
I want to take you back to the spring and summer of 1996, which was when the lights went out in Nan’s life. Prior to February of 1996, Nan had been married to the love of her life, David Emerick. Nan had met David when they were both teens. She was from Evans City, he was from Ambridge, and they met at the Dairy Queen in Cranberry when their two group of friends started talking. When Nan’s friends left the Dairy Queen, Dave and his friends followed, and from there their romance blossomed. It wasn’t too long before they were married, and then had kids—first Nick, who is now attending Penn State, and then Kayla, who is at West Chester University.
As Nan has said, they were living the American dream. They had two beautiful kids, and they had both designed and built their own house. David was 34, Nan was 33, and life seemed great. During the summer of 1995, though, David started feeling ill. He was having stomach pains. At first they diagnosed it as ulcers, and put him on medication, but that didn’t seem to help. Then they suspected that he might have some sort of intestinal autoimmune disease such as Crohn’s Disease. So they put him on prednisone, and that did the trick. He felt better than he had in a year. Once again, life seemed great, until right around Thanksgiving. Dave came downstairs to talk to Nan and said that he felt terrible. He was all white and was physically shaking. They went to the doctor and took a CAT scan of his abdomen, where the doctors discovered that his liver looked like Swiss cheese. There was cancer everywhere. They also detected a walnut sized tumor on his colon, which was the original site of the cancer. The doctors were grim. They told Nan and Dave to get their affairs in order and to spend as much time as possible with their children because Dave only had about two months to live.
In front of their children they tried their best to act as though everything was normal. Dave immersed himself in spending time with Kayla, Nick, and Nan. There was very little hope. Despite all their efforts to hold on, Dave died in February, 1996, little more than two months after his diagnosis.
There was one point right before Dave died in which Nan felt truly hopeless. She had been working so hard to hold it all together in front of others, to be strong and cheerful in the face of it all, but it was getting harder. She was in the shower one morning and began sobbing. She was overwhelmed by everything that was going on—not only Dave’s impending death, but also with how she would pay the bills, how she would raise children alone, and how she would cope. In the midst of her sobbing she heard a voice. It was a genderless voice that seemed to be both inside and outside of her at the same time. It had an amazing clarity, and she could feel LOVE in that voice that let her know that she was loved more than she could ever know. The voice said, “I am here with you. I cannot heal David. That’s not what’s meant to be, but I will be with you and him. Pray for strength and know that I will be with you no matter what.” Nan felt a deep, deep warmth and peace that filled her body and soul. She knew that she could make it.
After Dave died, Nan tried to hold onto a sense of normalcy, but it was hard. What was hardest was going to worship on Easter after Dave died. Looking around at all the couples with young families was hard. Nan felt alone. It became harder each week to go to church because of the pain she felt, and because of her increasing sense of isolation. So she stopped going to church. And she began to question whether God even existed. Now, you might be tempted to think to yourself, “But didn’t she hear God’s voice? Shouldn’t that sustain her?” A lot of people who hear God’s voice have a hard time holding onto it when they are in deep grief and pain. It’s not that they forget. It’s that the grief is so much louder than the memory of God’s voice.
The Rev. Dr. Steve Polley, who is now our parish associate for pastoral care, had that same position in the church in Cranberry at the time. He noticed that she hadn’t been to church in a while, so he visited her that summer. The exchanged some small talk for a while, and Steve asked her how she was. She said that she was okay. He paused and said, “No, how are you really?” Nan paused for a bit, and said, “I’m angry! I’m angry at my situation, I’m angry that Dave died, and I’m angry at God for letting this happen!” Steve, in his infinite wisdom, said, “That’s okay, Nan. God knows you’re angry, and it’s okay to be angry at God. God knows that you have a lot to be angry about, but God’s still going to love you and be with you. That’s what church is for. It’s supposed to be a place where you can work out your anger with God.”
That wasn’t the response Nan was expecting. It made her feel better, and she felt more hopeful after he left. In fact, he helped her to remember the voice she had heard in the shower months before. Going back to church on a regular basis she slowly started feeling better, even if the grief never really left her. She also started attending a young widows group and a grief support group, which is where she eventually met Peter Durny, whose own wife, Mary Ann, had died from cancer almost a year earlier after a five-year struggle. They started dating, but it wasn’t easy. Both felt guilty about dating. Were they dishonoring Dave and Mary Ann by dating, let alone falling in love? Is this what their spouses would want? Both struggled
Then one night Nan had a dream. It was the kind of dream I mentioned several weeks ago when I told you the story of one of my classmates from high school whose son had died. That woman, Kelley, had had a dream in which she was with God and was given the answer to all the questions she had about the universe, life, death, and beyond. Nan had that same dream, and just like Kelley, she woke up not remembering the answers, but knowing that God was with her. She told Peter about her dream, and amazingly he said to her, “I know,… I had the exact same dream last night.” They were married that same year and came to Calvin Church after moving to Zelienople.
Nan had definitely experienced both darkness and God’s presence. The fact is that for a long time Nan teetered on the edge of a cliff that many of us teeter on in life. It’s a cliff that overlooks the abyss of darkness. When we stand there we sometimes have the ability to gain perspective on what really matters in life, and adjust our lives accordingly; but just as often people slip and fall into the abyss, and struggle to get out.
What makes the abyss of darkness so hard in is that it is a place of despair in which people lose hope. So often, when people go through traumatic difficulties—the death of someone close, a divorce, an illness, loss of a job—they become despairing. Many people only have compassion for those who have had a loved one die, but going through a divorce can lead us just as deeply into despair because there still is a death—the death of a relationship. I have great compassion, rather than judgment, for people of divorce, both spouses and children, because often the judgment of others deepens their despair. We also can feel despair when we lose a job, especially in our work environment of today. People can become hopeless, wondering if they’ll ever get another job.
This despair can lead us into what Paul calls, “the works of the flesh,” which are “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” These acts are all symptoms of the problem, not the problem. They are symptoms of people feeling like they are trapped in darkness, and who engage in these works of the flesh trying to get relief from their pain. They get drunk, or enter serial relationships, or get into fights as a way of trying to relieve the darkness of despair, not realizing that their actions actually lead them deeper into despair. Their pursuit of the relief of pain actually causes more pain.
There is a way out of all this, and Paul talks about it in our passage. The way out is by being led by the Spirit, but to be led by the Spirit we have to be open to the Spirit, which is hard to do from the bottom of the abyss. When we are at the bottom, we often feel too hopeless to become open to God. But Nan became open to God. She became open to being led by the Spirit, and it made all the difference. It took a while, and some prompting from God’s hands and feet—Steve Polley—but she did it.
The secret of overcoming darkness is to actively seek the light that the Spirit offers—to trust in what’s possible, not what’s in the past. This is hard stuff, because, as I said last week, negativity and despair have their own energy and allure, and it’s easy to give ourselves over to the energies of anger, cynicism, skepticism, and despair. And the more we give ourselves over to that power, the more it isolates us from God by building a moat around our lives.
I do realize that in talking about Nan hearing God’s voice this morning, and often in other stories I’ve told, it can cause frustration in us because most of us don’t hear God’s voice at all. What I’ve noticed is that the people who hear God’s voice tend to have certain attributes that open them to God. Either they are in despair and God responds to them through the gift of speaking to them, or they live lives in which they intentionally cultivate a listening heart and mind. In other words, they are dedicated to daily practices that open them to God—they pray every day, read scripture or spiritual books on a regular basis, and actively listen for God’s voice in their minds, in what they are reading, in what other people say, and the like. They are intentional, and it opens them to sensing and hearing the Spirit.
If we are willing to open up to the Spirit, and to be intentional in trusting that God has something better in store, we plant seeds of fruit that get us out of the bottom. Paul talks about these seeds. He says that they are “ love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” When we become intentionally open to God’s Spirit, these seeds grow in our lives and transform our lives. They move us from darkness to light.
There is a way out of darkness, but it requires looking up, not down. It requires looking for what’s good, not what’s bad. It requires looking for what’s possible, not what’s in the past.
Amen.
Overcoming Darkness: Dealing with Our Demons
Luke 8:26-39
June 20, 2010
Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’— for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
Over the years I’ve noticed an interesting conundrum when it comes to church, and especially church attendance. This isn’t a conundrum that many of you are caught in, but it is one that a significant number are. Here’s the conundrum. The church is meant to be a place for people who are struggling in personal darkness, but often when people go through struggles, they don’t want to go to church. So the very place that is set up to help them is the place they avoid. They avoid it because they don’t want people to see them cry, or they don’t want people to know they are going through difficulty, or they don’t want to have to explain what is going on in their lives. The problem is that these people end up pushing away a possible beacon of light for them. The fact is that the church is made for hurting people, but when people are hurting they often don’t want to be seen in church.
I think that the root cause of this conundrum is an American affliction. All of us Americans have a basic problem, which is that we suffer from a denial of darkness. It afflicts all of us. Americans hate pain and suffering, and we run from it constantly. We take drugs, whether prescription or illegal, to push away our pain. We drink too much alcohol to help us repress the pain. We’ve created a glittering entertainment culture to mask darkness and suffering. And we worship and celebrate the wealthy because they seem to have overcome darkness with glitzy and glamorous homes, cars, possessions, and lives. We do a lot to gloss over the darkness of life.
I really wasn’t aware of how pervasive our denial of darkness was until I had a conversation with five fellow students over lunch one day while I was in graduate school. I was studying for my Ph.D. at Duquesne University, and I was lunching with two white Protestant pastors (one Methodist and the other Episcopalian), and three African men (one a priest from Kenya, one a priest from Uganda, and another an Augustinian friar from Ghana). The three of us Protestants were complaining that on Easter Sunday our churches are packed to the rafters, but we can’t convince people to come on Good Friday. The Africans looked at each other, and then at us with puzzled faces. When we asked why they looked like that, they said, “That’s really odd because in Africa our churches are overflowing on Good Friday, and we can’t get anyone to come on Easter.” We talked about this, and the Africans were the ones that pointed out that in Africa suffering is a constant reality and so they relate to the suffering Christ on the cross. But their experience in the U. S. was that we were a people who can’t deal with suffering, and so we hide from it with our possessions. They pointed out our American affliction, which is a denial of darkness.
This denial is sad because Christianity is mean to be a faith for people struggling with difficulty, darkness, and demons. If you look at the Bible, all of its stories are of people struggling through and overcoming darkness. Abraham was lead by God from the city into the desert, where he struggled. Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery, and then was thrown into prison. Moses, after killing an Egyptian soldier, had to leave his life of pleasure as part of the royal family to live in the desert for forty years, and then came back to lead the Israelites into the desert for forty years. David, despite being anointed as king of Israel, and being celebrated as the slayer of Goliath, had to live as an outlaw in the desert for forty years. The prophets spoke in times of darkness, whether under threat from an invading army or in Babylonian exile. And Jesus, despite teaching people how to find light in their lives, was criticized and attacked for his teachings, and eventually arrested, flogged, and killed for it. Darkness is all through the Bible.
It’s for this reason that I say that Christianity is a faith for people in darkness. In fact, it is the only faith with a religious symbol that’s a symbol of suffering. Think about the symbols of other religions, whether it is the yin-yang symbol of Taoism, the statue of Buddha, the crescent moon and morning star of Islam, or the star of David in Judaism, none are suffering symbols. Our symbol is one that transforms suffering. The cross is a symbol of suffering and execution. The modern-day equivalent would be if we used a hangman’s noose or an electric chair as our religious symbol. Christianity is a faith that embraces the reality of darkness, but also the reality of God’s light transforming that darkness into something else.
The reality of life is that there is a fair amount of darkness, which seems to be part of the way God created the world. But there’s also great beauty and pleasure, which is also how God created it. And I believe that the task of life is to make a choice between whether we’ll let darkness rule our lives, or light.
Hilbert Caesar has lived through tremendous darkness, and through it discovered light. Five years ago Caesar was a master sergeant overseeing a squad in Iraq. He was in charge of a 155 mm mobile howitzer, which is something like a long tank with a huge artillery gun attached. The squad had been mobilized, and while en route, was ambushed as an IED exploded under the howitzer, flipping it over. When Caesar came to, he looked down at his leg, and it was a mangled mess. He knew that his leg would have to be amputated. He spent months in rehab, which were months of darkness, a darkness made worse when he learned that of the ten people in his squad, eight had been killed. He felt responsible, even though he knew that there was nothing different he could have done. He wondered if his life was over. He wondered what woman would ever be interested in a man with only one leg.
Caesar was at a critical junction. It would take very little for his life to plunge into never ending darkness. The fact is that about ¼ of all vets coming back from combat suffer symptoms of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and he was moving in that direction. What is less known, though, is that despite these odds, another ¼ seem to come through trauma like Caesar did, and experience PTGS, which is post-traumatic growth syndrome. About ¼ of all people who undergo traumatic experiences actually sense their lives becoming better because of it. They find that their trauma helps them reprioritize their lives. They become better than they were. Often they grow spiritually, and experience God more intimately in their lives. This is what happened to Caesar.
Despite his darkness, he started talking with other vets who had gone through similar experiences. Together they looked for the positive, rather than dwelling on the negative. He began to pray. He says that he became wiser, richer, more compassionate, and more appreciative of life. He noticed other people more, and said, “I’m the same person, but I’m a different person now.” Caesar left the military, but now works for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs at a job focusing on helping others like him. He went through darkness, and in the midst of it found the light (adapted from an article, “Moving On,” from The Washington Post, December 5, 2005).
It’s hard for many people to make the choice for light over dark. There are lots of reasons, but one I believe in is that there is actually a force for darkness in the world, a force that is incredibly subtle. I believe that there is a demonic darkness that stalks us. Now, I realize that as a good, rational Presbyterian, I’m not supposed to believe in the demonic. And the truth is that for many, many years I didn’t. And that disbelief was supported by my seminary training. The fact is that we never once talked about the demonic in all my years there. In checking with other Presbyterian pastors, it’s hard to find any who were taught anything about the demonic. We just don’t believe in it.
My belief in this power grew while working on my Ph.D., which is odd, since you would think that working on that degree would make me more sophisticated and less likely to believe in stuff such as the demonic. Adrian van Kaam, a professor and Catholic priest, in one of his classes, talked about the demonic. God bless the Catholics. There may be many things we believe that we do or believe better than them, but there are also many things that they believe and do better than us. I believe that the Catholic Church, in many ways, has a much better, and more balanced, understanding of the demonic than we do. Van Kaam taught that the demonic is a force of darkness with one goal in mind: to pull us away from God and divide us against each other and God. But he also taught that this darkness is essentially powerless, except for the power we give it. He said that those kinds of vomit-spewing, body-levitating possessions are extremely, extremely rare. Instead, what the demonic does is to take our negative feelings and fan them to grow them stronger. So, if we are angry about something small, the demonic fans that anger so that it grows and causes us to act on it in destructive ways. The demonic does the same thing with passion, lust, cynicism, skepticism, ambition, and other self-focused emotions. There is nothing wrong with feeling these things, but the demonic fans them so that they take over our lives. And you’ve experienced something like this in others.
Have you ever been with an extremely negative person who starts going off on how bad the government is, kids today are, teachers unions are, big business is, and the like? They start going off, and you feel trapped. Their anger or outrage grows hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, they suck the energy and life right out of you. And you can’t get away. That’s the kind of fanning of the flame the demonic does, and it does it with an eye toward dividing us against each other and God. There’s an energy to negativity, but instead of giving life it sucks life.
Here’s the thing, though, about both darkness and the demonic. Both only have the power we give them. If we let the demonic and darkness fan us, then we will be consumed by both. But we do have a choice in the matter. If we choose to refuse to let darkness grow, and if we choose to seek what’s good rather than what’s dark, we can overcome darkness. While Christianity is a faith that recognizes the reality of darkness, it also recognizes that darkness is a choice, and we can choose to seek God’s light.
The secret to overcoming any darkness is to decide what kind of power we are going to give it. Are we going to let it grow? I’ve learned over the years that what contributes to darkness is a problem that researchers are finding in many people who suffer from depression. They are noticing that many people with depression suffer from chronic rumination. What do I mean by that? Rumination is something that cows do. They have four stomachs, and so have to keep regurgitating what they’ve eaten to chew on it again, and then send it to the next stomach. They chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew, and swallow; and regurgitate, chew and swallow. Many people in darkness do the mental equivalent of this. They start to go into darkness, and then they start thinking negative thoughts associated with it. They might think about mistakes they’ve made, or about actions they didn’t take. Where we might think those thoughts for several hours or a day, they think about them for weeks and months at a time. The thoughts never change. They may berate themselves for decisions in the past, or for their situation in the present. They chronically ruminate, and they can’t break the cycle long enough to see other possibilities.
It’s not just people suffering with depression who do this. Most of us, when in darkness, do this. Rumination, whether depression related or not, creates the opening for darkness to reign. Whatever our situation is, rumination on how bad it is can immerse us and keep us in darkness. But God does offer a light, if we’re willing to take it.
Personally, I’ve had to struggle through chronic rumination for much of my life simply because I’m a pastor. The fact is that pastors get criticized on occasion. We can be criticized for something we say or do, or for something we didn’t say or do. Most of the time people are caring enough to either keep their concerns about this to themselves, or if they do share them, they do so in gentle and caring ways. But occasionally people aren’t very nice about it, and their comments can be devastating. I was devastated by a number of these kinds of comments early in my ministry and it traumatized me so much that for a period of time I wouldn’t answer my phone at the church unless I knew who was calling and why. In my first year in ministry I had received one too many critical phone calls, and I became phone-shy.
There was one particular incident when a woman yelled at me publically in front of fifteen junior high kids on a retreat, and then she met with me in my office the following week and yelled at me again. And she was yelling at me for something I was powerless to prevent. It’s hard to distill this down to a short story, but basically I was overseeing the youth program on a retreat for junior and senior high schoolers, and I was supposed to go up a trail to a campfire to tell stories to the junior highers. The problem was that I was at another campfire with the older teens, and two of them wanted me to leave so they could sneak off into the woods and do things young men and women like to do. I was stuck because all the other adult volunteers had disappeared. I was worried about leaving, but I had no way of telling the junior high adult volunteers I was stuck. When the other adult volunteers finally showed up, I ran up the trail to join the junior highers, but the woman with them had already brought them down the trail, and proceeded to berate me in front of all of them.
I was devastated, and I became somewhat of a recluse for a time, worrying about doing something else I’d be yelled at for. But after a lot of prayer I finally realized that I couldn’t spend my career this way. So I developed a rule. The day that someone berates me or criticizes me, I’m allowed to obsess about it, as long as I’m also praying about it. The second day I’m allowed to pray about it a lot, but only think about it a little. By the third day I have to give it over to God and move on. In other words, I can spend a little time in darkness, but in due time I have to move toward the light.
We do have a choice over whether we will live in darkness or light. There is darkness in the world, and it can be very powerful, but we can make a choice for light. And if you are interested in learning further how, come back next week and I’ll talk about how to make that choice.
Amen
June 20, 2010
Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’— for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
Over the years I’ve noticed an interesting conundrum when it comes to church, and especially church attendance. This isn’t a conundrum that many of you are caught in, but it is one that a significant number are. Here’s the conundrum. The church is meant to be a place for people who are struggling in personal darkness, but often when people go through struggles, they don’t want to go to church. So the very place that is set up to help them is the place they avoid. They avoid it because they don’t want people to see them cry, or they don’t want people to know they are going through difficulty, or they don’t want to have to explain what is going on in their lives. The problem is that these people end up pushing away a possible beacon of light for them. The fact is that the church is made for hurting people, but when people are hurting they often don’t want to be seen in church.
I think that the root cause of this conundrum is an American affliction. All of us Americans have a basic problem, which is that we suffer from a denial of darkness. It afflicts all of us. Americans hate pain and suffering, and we run from it constantly. We take drugs, whether prescription or illegal, to push away our pain. We drink too much alcohol to help us repress the pain. We’ve created a glittering entertainment culture to mask darkness and suffering. And we worship and celebrate the wealthy because they seem to have overcome darkness with glitzy and glamorous homes, cars, possessions, and lives. We do a lot to gloss over the darkness of life.
I really wasn’t aware of how pervasive our denial of darkness was until I had a conversation with five fellow students over lunch one day while I was in graduate school. I was studying for my Ph.D. at Duquesne University, and I was lunching with two white Protestant pastors (one Methodist and the other Episcopalian), and three African men (one a priest from Kenya, one a priest from Uganda, and another an Augustinian friar from Ghana). The three of us Protestants were complaining that on Easter Sunday our churches are packed to the rafters, but we can’t convince people to come on Good Friday. The Africans looked at each other, and then at us with puzzled faces. When we asked why they looked like that, they said, “That’s really odd because in Africa our churches are overflowing on Good Friday, and we can’t get anyone to come on Easter.” We talked about this, and the Africans were the ones that pointed out that in Africa suffering is a constant reality and so they relate to the suffering Christ on the cross. But their experience in the U. S. was that we were a people who can’t deal with suffering, and so we hide from it with our possessions. They pointed out our American affliction, which is a denial of darkness.
This denial is sad because Christianity is mean to be a faith for people struggling with difficulty, darkness, and demons. If you look at the Bible, all of its stories are of people struggling through and overcoming darkness. Abraham was lead by God from the city into the desert, where he struggled. Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery, and then was thrown into prison. Moses, after killing an Egyptian soldier, had to leave his life of pleasure as part of the royal family to live in the desert for forty years, and then came back to lead the Israelites into the desert for forty years. David, despite being anointed as king of Israel, and being celebrated as the slayer of Goliath, had to live as an outlaw in the desert for forty years. The prophets spoke in times of darkness, whether under threat from an invading army or in Babylonian exile. And Jesus, despite teaching people how to find light in their lives, was criticized and attacked for his teachings, and eventually arrested, flogged, and killed for it. Darkness is all through the Bible.
It’s for this reason that I say that Christianity is a faith for people in darkness. In fact, it is the only faith with a religious symbol that’s a symbol of suffering. Think about the symbols of other religions, whether it is the yin-yang symbol of Taoism, the statue of Buddha, the crescent moon and morning star of Islam, or the star of David in Judaism, none are suffering symbols. Our symbol is one that transforms suffering. The cross is a symbol of suffering and execution. The modern-day equivalent would be if we used a hangman’s noose or an electric chair as our religious symbol. Christianity is a faith that embraces the reality of darkness, but also the reality of God’s light transforming that darkness into something else.
The reality of life is that there is a fair amount of darkness, which seems to be part of the way God created the world. But there’s also great beauty and pleasure, which is also how God created it. And I believe that the task of life is to make a choice between whether we’ll let darkness rule our lives, or light.
Hilbert Caesar has lived through tremendous darkness, and through it discovered light. Five years ago Caesar was a master sergeant overseeing a squad in Iraq. He was in charge of a 155 mm mobile howitzer, which is something like a long tank with a huge artillery gun attached. The squad had been mobilized, and while en route, was ambushed as an IED exploded under the howitzer, flipping it over. When Caesar came to, he looked down at his leg, and it was a mangled mess. He knew that his leg would have to be amputated. He spent months in rehab, which were months of darkness, a darkness made worse when he learned that of the ten people in his squad, eight had been killed. He felt responsible, even though he knew that there was nothing different he could have done. He wondered if his life was over. He wondered what woman would ever be interested in a man with only one leg.
Caesar was at a critical junction. It would take very little for his life to plunge into never ending darkness. The fact is that about ¼ of all vets coming back from combat suffer symptoms of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and he was moving in that direction. What is less known, though, is that despite these odds, another ¼ seem to come through trauma like Caesar did, and experience PTGS, which is post-traumatic growth syndrome. About ¼ of all people who undergo traumatic experiences actually sense their lives becoming better because of it. They find that their trauma helps them reprioritize their lives. They become better than they were. Often they grow spiritually, and experience God more intimately in their lives. This is what happened to Caesar.
Despite his darkness, he started talking with other vets who had gone through similar experiences. Together they looked for the positive, rather than dwelling on the negative. He began to pray. He says that he became wiser, richer, more compassionate, and more appreciative of life. He noticed other people more, and said, “I’m the same person, but I’m a different person now.” Caesar left the military, but now works for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs at a job focusing on helping others like him. He went through darkness, and in the midst of it found the light (adapted from an article, “Moving On,” from The Washington Post, December 5, 2005).
It’s hard for many people to make the choice for light over dark. There are lots of reasons, but one I believe in is that there is actually a force for darkness in the world, a force that is incredibly subtle. I believe that there is a demonic darkness that stalks us. Now, I realize that as a good, rational Presbyterian, I’m not supposed to believe in the demonic. And the truth is that for many, many years I didn’t. And that disbelief was supported by my seminary training. The fact is that we never once talked about the demonic in all my years there. In checking with other Presbyterian pastors, it’s hard to find any who were taught anything about the demonic. We just don’t believe in it.
My belief in this power grew while working on my Ph.D., which is odd, since you would think that working on that degree would make me more sophisticated and less likely to believe in stuff such as the demonic. Adrian van Kaam, a professor and Catholic priest, in one of his classes, talked about the demonic. God bless the Catholics. There may be many things we believe that we do or believe better than them, but there are also many things that they believe and do better than us. I believe that the Catholic Church, in many ways, has a much better, and more balanced, understanding of the demonic than we do. Van Kaam taught that the demonic is a force of darkness with one goal in mind: to pull us away from God and divide us against each other and God. But he also taught that this darkness is essentially powerless, except for the power we give it. He said that those kinds of vomit-spewing, body-levitating possessions are extremely, extremely rare. Instead, what the demonic does is to take our negative feelings and fan them to grow them stronger. So, if we are angry about something small, the demonic fans that anger so that it grows and causes us to act on it in destructive ways. The demonic does the same thing with passion, lust, cynicism, skepticism, ambition, and other self-focused emotions. There is nothing wrong with feeling these things, but the demonic fans them so that they take over our lives. And you’ve experienced something like this in others.
Have you ever been with an extremely negative person who starts going off on how bad the government is, kids today are, teachers unions are, big business is, and the like? They start going off, and you feel trapped. Their anger or outrage grows hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, they suck the energy and life right out of you. And you can’t get away. That’s the kind of fanning of the flame the demonic does, and it does it with an eye toward dividing us against each other and God. There’s an energy to negativity, but instead of giving life it sucks life.
Here’s the thing, though, about both darkness and the demonic. Both only have the power we give them. If we let the demonic and darkness fan us, then we will be consumed by both. But we do have a choice in the matter. If we choose to refuse to let darkness grow, and if we choose to seek what’s good rather than what’s dark, we can overcome darkness. While Christianity is a faith that recognizes the reality of darkness, it also recognizes that darkness is a choice, and we can choose to seek God’s light.
The secret to overcoming any darkness is to decide what kind of power we are going to give it. Are we going to let it grow? I’ve learned over the years that what contributes to darkness is a problem that researchers are finding in many people who suffer from depression. They are noticing that many people with depression suffer from chronic rumination. What do I mean by that? Rumination is something that cows do. They have four stomachs, and so have to keep regurgitating what they’ve eaten to chew on it again, and then send it to the next stomach. They chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew, and swallow; and regurgitate, chew and swallow. Many people in darkness do the mental equivalent of this. They start to go into darkness, and then they start thinking negative thoughts associated with it. They might think about mistakes they’ve made, or about actions they didn’t take. Where we might think those thoughts for several hours or a day, they think about them for weeks and months at a time. The thoughts never change. They may berate themselves for decisions in the past, or for their situation in the present. They chronically ruminate, and they can’t break the cycle long enough to see other possibilities.
It’s not just people suffering with depression who do this. Most of us, when in darkness, do this. Rumination, whether depression related or not, creates the opening for darkness to reign. Whatever our situation is, rumination on how bad it is can immerse us and keep us in darkness. But God does offer a light, if we’re willing to take it.
Personally, I’ve had to struggle through chronic rumination for much of my life simply because I’m a pastor. The fact is that pastors get criticized on occasion. We can be criticized for something we say or do, or for something we didn’t say or do. Most of the time people are caring enough to either keep their concerns about this to themselves, or if they do share them, they do so in gentle and caring ways. But occasionally people aren’t very nice about it, and their comments can be devastating. I was devastated by a number of these kinds of comments early in my ministry and it traumatized me so much that for a period of time I wouldn’t answer my phone at the church unless I knew who was calling and why. In my first year in ministry I had received one too many critical phone calls, and I became phone-shy.
There was one particular incident when a woman yelled at me publically in front of fifteen junior high kids on a retreat, and then she met with me in my office the following week and yelled at me again. And she was yelling at me for something I was powerless to prevent. It’s hard to distill this down to a short story, but basically I was overseeing the youth program on a retreat for junior and senior high schoolers, and I was supposed to go up a trail to a campfire to tell stories to the junior highers. The problem was that I was at another campfire with the older teens, and two of them wanted me to leave so they could sneak off into the woods and do things young men and women like to do. I was stuck because all the other adult volunteers had disappeared. I was worried about leaving, but I had no way of telling the junior high adult volunteers I was stuck. When the other adult volunteers finally showed up, I ran up the trail to join the junior highers, but the woman with them had already brought them down the trail, and proceeded to berate me in front of all of them.
I was devastated, and I became somewhat of a recluse for a time, worrying about doing something else I’d be yelled at for. But after a lot of prayer I finally realized that I couldn’t spend my career this way. So I developed a rule. The day that someone berates me or criticizes me, I’m allowed to obsess about it, as long as I’m also praying about it. The second day I’m allowed to pray about it a lot, but only think about it a little. By the third day I have to give it over to God and move on. In other words, I can spend a little time in darkness, but in due time I have to move toward the light.
We do have a choice over whether we will live in darkness or light. There is darkness in the world, and it can be very powerful, but we can make a choice for light. And if you are interested in learning further how, come back next week and I’ll talk about how to make that choice.
Amen
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