Creatio Ex Nihilo

A Christmas Rant: What Are We Waiting For?

This Christmas, I have reached an important conclusion.  The conclusion is this; Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime” is the most likely the worst Christmas song ever.  What makes it so bad is the fact that Paul wrote it.  What do I mean by that?  This is the man who wrote “Hey Jude”.  He wrote “Let it Be”.  He wrote “Yesterday”.  How could the same person write  “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime”?

 It would be like meeting Michelangelo and asking him, “What’s that over there in the hallway?”

“Why, that’s my statue of David,” he would answer.

“It’s beautiful. And what’s up above us?”

“That’s my ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” he says.

“Amazing.  What is that hanging on the wall over there?” you would ask.

“I call that dogs playing pool with Elvis on black velvet.”

Artists have ups and downs in their careers.  They have high points and low points.  The same is true of celebrities.  We’ve certainly seen that in the news the past few weeks.  During the low points, the key is to turn your image around.

I am neither a celebrity nor a public relations expert, but I think I know the secret to boosting the sagging career of a celebrity.  It’s simple.  Say or do something offensive.  Insult an ethnic or racial group, a city or a religion.  Have an affair. Get in trouble with the law.  Take a look at some recent examples; Kanye West, Michael Richards, David Letterman, or Chris Brown.  It’s not so much the insult or misdeed that will boost your career.  It’s the apology.

A Christmas Rant: You Better Watch Out!

As children, many of my generation grew up in a time when our mothers stayed at home while our father’s worked.  So it usually fell to our moms to watch us and care for us after school.  It was a great time, back when you could just wander your neighborhood, playing with friends or riding your bike to explore new ares of your block.  You could be on your own until dinner time.  Every once and a while though, the afternoon didn’t go so well.  Sometimes we would get in trouble, maybe a fight with a friend or an experimentation with scissors and hair.  When we were older, perhaps we went from  playing with our GI Joe’s to burning our GI Joe’s.  For all its innocence, it was a time when getting in trouble was always just around the corner.

 When that trouble came, our moms were not so happy.  Usually our misdeeds would happen late in the afternoon while dinner was being prepared.  After a long day of housework and now cooking, our moms had little patience and even less time for discipline.  Usually, our infractions led to us being sent to our room by a now frazzled mother.  That was bad enough, but what put fear in our hearts was when our mothers said those magic words, “Wait till your father gets home.”

That was the worst.  What was Dad going to do?  For some people, those words were just Mom’s way of putting off dealing with the problem and were usually followed by a perplexed Dad coming home and wondering what was going on.  In other households, those words still evoke terror, especially among those who grew up with physical abuse.   “Wait till your father gets home” was a just a euphemism for “Dad’s going to knock the crap out of you.”

Unfortunately, many of us think of God in that same way.  We turn God into the abusive father who is going to come home and kick the crap out of us.  When someone says, “God is coming” or “Jesus is coming back again,” we think, “Well that can’t be good.”  It sounds eerily like “wait till your father gets home” all over again. We have learned to associate the coming of God with destruction, violence, and revenge.  At the same time, we are told that this wrathful God coming into the world is good news.   “How can that be?” we wonder.

All I Want Is Everything

A few months ago, a Facebook friend of mine posted a video of a new invention that caught my eye.  It was a promotional piece about a new water-powered jet pack.  Take a look. 

Isn’t that cool? If you’re at all like me, after seeing it the first thought that occurs to you is, “I’ve got to get one of those!’  Think for a moment how strange that idea is.  When you got up this morning, you weren’t thinking about a jet pack.  Chance are, you have never even thought about getting one.  So why do you all of a sudden want one?

I think it’s because you now know it exists.  Sure, it costs $128,000, but it’s out there and it’s available for the taking.  Now most likely, you’ll leave here today and not give the jet pack a second thought.  You won’t start saving your money for one or go to your bank tomorrow morning to apply for a jet pack loan.

Unless…

Unless other people you know start buying jet packs.  What if the people next door get one?  What if the price comes down, and a family you know that makes less money than yours, or is less educated buys one?  Wouldn’t that mean that you deserve a jet pack too?  Previously, the jet pack was just theoretical and you probably didn’t give it much thought. But now, not only do you want a jet pack, you NEED one - and as soon as possible! 

Our desires are often not incarnated until we see our neighbors possessions.  When our neighbors have things that we don’t, it awakens something in us, a sense that we want that too.  We may even feel we deserve it or are entitled to it.

That awakened desire to have what others have is called coveting.  In this, the last of the Ten Commandments, God prohibits it.  A person who seeks to live life God’s way, does not covet.  We should not take things that are not rightfully ours.  Not only that, we are not even to want them.

How can we possibly live up to such a high standard?  What’s so bad about coveting?  As long as you don’t actually act on those bad desires, what’s the big deal?

False Witness: Too Much to Bear

I think there is no greater sin in a legal system than when an innocent person is falsely declared guilty and suffers the consequences.  In recent years, the news has been full of stories of men exonerated by new evidence, usually DNA, and released from jail.  Sometimes they have been imprisoned for decades and have been unjustly deprived of the most productive years of their lives.  When we hear those stories, we sympathize with that falsely imprisoned person.  We get angry.  “How in the world was such a mistake made, in this country?” we wonder.  What evidence condemned this person to a life of false imprisonment and wasted potential?

Frequently, we discover that the deciding factor in finding the person guilty was the testimony of a witness.  Just as frequently, we discover that the testimony given by the witness in the trial was untrue.  A witness gave false testimony on the stand.  Sometimes that false testimony is due to prejudice, or self-interest, or personal gain (they were paid off), or being threatened.  Sometimes it’s just a case  of ignorance or the witness being mistaken, but giving their testimony with a false sense of certainty.  Either way, when we hear stories of people being wrongly imprisoned because of false testimony, it makes our blood boil.  We think, if we were the newly released prisoner, the first thing we would do is find that false witness and wring his neck.

What kind of person, lies on the witness stand, knowing they will ruin the life of another?  Who is capable of such cruelty and injustice?

Actually, you and I are.

How can that be?  Most likely, few of us have ever had to put our hand on a Bible in court and swear to tell the truth.  If we did, it wasn’t in some life and death murder case it was just something minor like, oh just say, a divorce.  Even so, I doubt many of us have ever lied in a court of law and had it result in an innocent person going to prison for life or being executed.

True, yet every day, you and I bear false witness against our neighbors.  Our false witness imprisons people in cells of ostracism, of pain, of falsehoods and misinformation.  Like the cases of men who waste their life in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, our false testimonies can ruin the life of another, sometimes for years.  Sometimes it even kills them.

It can start while we are still young.  We hear an unflattering rumor about someone at school and in order to fit in, we repeat it.  It may or may not be true.  We don’t know and we don’t care.  We just want to fit in.  Chances are we forget about that rumor the next day.  However, I can almost guarantee you, the person about whom we said it, has not forgotten it.  In fact, not only does that misinformation follow them around the next day, it may follow them around through their entire time at school.  Years, even decades later, we may have long forgotten that rumor, but they remember the pain it caused them for the rest of their life.  They remember what it was like to go through school falsely labelled the slut, the thief, the crazy kid, or the cheat. (Interestingly all people with whom Jesus hung out.)

Add to This List: Phrases We Don't Say Often Enough

I've been thinking lately about phrases we rarely hear and perhaps should say more often to make the world a better place:

• Sorry, I misjudged you.
  
• You go first.
  
• I could be wrong.
  
• I probably took that wrong way.
  
• Would you like some of my stuff?
  
• I don’t need to buy that right now.
  
• I’d like to understand better what you believe.
  
• That's just my opinion, it's not as if God told me to think it.

That's just for starters.  Have any you would like to add?

Grand Theft Theo

It was the summer after eight grade and my good friend Stephen and I were exploring the brand new K-Mart - the centerpiece of the new Wayne Hills Mall.  For some unexplained reason we found ourselves in the outdoor sports section when Stephen eyed a fishing lure hanging on a display rack.  

“I’m taking that,” he said.

“Huh,” I asked, quite puzzled.

“Go to the end of the aisle and keep a lookout,” he told me.

“A lookout?”  What were we Alias Smith and Jones here?  It’s a K-Mart.

So I walked uncomfortably to the end of the aisle and pretended to be “looking out” for something.  Meanwhile, Stephen stealthily slipped the fishing lure under his jacket.  He rushed up behind me and said, “Come on!  Let’s get out of here!”

As we hurried to the front of the store, suddenly lights flashed and sirens blared all through the store.  Oh no, I thought, “the jig is up.”  (I don’t even know what a jig is, but that’s what everyone in movies always said in these situations.)  We looked around in a panic.  Blue lights were flashing everywhere.  Yet we were just standing at the front of the store alone.  It took a few moments for it to sink in that we had not triggered an alarm.  It was just another one of K-Mart’s infamous Blue Light Specials.

We breathed a deep sigh of relief and made our way to the door.  There we were met by the store manager, who asked to see what was in Stephen’s jacket.  He sheepishly unzipped his sweatshirt, revealing the fishing lure, tucked against his side.  The manager left me at the door and took Stephen away to the back office, where he called Stephen’s father to come in for a little talk.  Believe when you’re a fourteen year old boy and someone calls your father for a littele talk about you - it’s never good.

As I look back at this story of Stephen stealing the fishing lure, it brings back a lot of different emotions - nostalgia, regret, but most of all, puzzlement.  Puzzlement for this one simple reason: Stephen didn’t fish.  He got into all this trouble for stealing a one dollar fishing lure, which he would never use. 

Why is it that we humans have such difficulty resisting the temptation to take what isn’t rightfully ours?  Sometimes it’s for the meaningless adrenaline rush.  Sometimes it’s because of our indoctrination to never pass up the chance to get something for nothing.  Oh, but that’s not stealing, is it? It’s the reason we can’t help but pick a twenty dollar bill we see laying on the floor, even in a crowded room where it’s rightful owner is probably nearby.  It’s an opportunity for personal gain that’s too good to pass up.  So we put our ethics on hold and grab what we can while the grabbing is good.  It’s the same attitude that often fuels the sin of adultery which we discussed last week.  For many people, especially men, sex can be like money found on the ground.  It doesn’t come along often and it’s too good to pass up. It only makes sense to grab it at any opportunity.

The Felix Unger Principle Strikes Again!

A few weeks ago, I edited and appeared in this video for the TransFORM, a network to help form new missional faith communities. Apparently, the comment I make, "For many of our people we are their last stop on the way out of Christianity", has created a stir in some circles. So allow me to clarify for those who drew a false conclusion I had not anticipated.  

Many of the people who come to our church are giving Christianity one last shot. If this doesn't work, they tell me, they're giving up on the whole idea of God. Some have had bad experiences in church, some have been hurt by Christians, experienced tragedy in life or have deep theological questions that they do not feel comfortable asking in other faith communities.  For many of them, Vision is the place where they rediscover God and Jesus.

Contrary to the wrong assumptions made by commenters on other blogs, Vision does not happily usher them out of Christianity and celebrate it. Vision's calling is to introduce them to a love of God through Jesus Christ so that they would stay and become fully committed followers of Jesus. Sometimes God works and that happens, sometimes it doesn't, but it's a risk worth taking.

I find it disappointing that in an eagerness to condemn, our critics jumped to a false conclusion. As my wife Pam always advises, perhaps it would be wise to heed the advice of St. Felix of Unger...

It's Not All About Sex

In Ocean City NY, it is against the law to slurp your soup.  In Greene NY, it’s illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalks during a concert. In New York State, women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business. Also in our state, while riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.

Obviously, such laws are relics of a previous era.  They were written in a time of travel by horseback and predate the age of computers, or even electricity for that matter.  We can safely ignore them without fear of slipping into some downward spiral of immorality.  “First it starts with wearing hats indoors and before you know it horses are tied improperly!”

Some suggest that the Ten Commandments are further examples of such outdated rules.  Which is curious since few people advocate stealing, lying and murder as admirable behavior.  When proposals are made that we have moved beyond the laws on these famous stone tablets, there is usually one commandment in particular the proposer has in mind.  It is this one, “You shall not commit adultery.”  In fact CNN founder Ted Turner suggested just such an update to the Decalogue a decade ago.

After all, we live in an era of friends with benefits, websites to hook us up with others seeking affairs, and our old standby, the one night stand.  How can we be expected to follow such an ancient rule?  Hasn’t the world changed?  Hasn’t there been a paradigm shift in sexual mores?  Don’t we live in a generation, the likes of which no one has seen before? 

Ah, but we talked about that a couple of weeks ago. The commandment to honor our parents is God’s corrective for generational narcissism, the belief that our generation is somehow special or unprecedented.  As we will see, these Ten Commandments, or ten utterances of God are not just a random list of rules.  Instead, I believe they inherently all build one another.  When it comes to these principles for living, our generation is not so special.  God’s same ethical imperatives that applied to our ancestors also apply to us.  In fact, they apply even more so to us.

How can that be, we wonder? Aren’t these rules merely cultural artifacts from a world that no longer exists?  For instance, in a place like ancient Israel, how did you define adultery in a society where men had more than one wife?  Ever wonder that?  I did.  Although I don’t recommend asking it in Sunday School as a young child. I rarely hear preachers from the Religious Right ask that question. 

Death by Humiliation - by Pam Heatley

Today, I'm featuring a guest post by Pam Heatley, who founded Vision with me eight years ago and is our Director of Ministry.  She preached this sermon on Sunday.

I was driving in my car a family friend who comes here to church.  She told me (sort of in a half joking way) that since we’ve been doing the 10 Commandments she realizes that so far she broken the first 5 we’ve talked about.   But the consolation for her she said,  “was that we’re getting to Thou Shalt Not Kill soon right?  “At that’s good – because I know I don’t do that one.”

Some of you may be feeling the same way.  How many of you have been arrested for murder lately?  No one.  Whew!  Ok then, finish your coffee and we can all go home!

Oh how I wish I could tell you that.  I wish I could say this is the easy commandment.  The one you can emotionally skip over and tell yourself you don’t have to worry about because there “ain’t no way I’m killing somebody”. Well, don’t relax so fast.   The problem for us is that this commandment is about much more than we think it is.  Even if we stick with the literal meaning of this commandment you’ll find endless debates over what constitutes murder and what is justifiable killing.  For many of us even those things seem far away and removed to many of us.  So I’m not even going to go there today.

I want to talk about the part of this commandment that effects everyone of us, the part of this commandment that’s going to leave everyone of us saying, “Uh oh, I do that one too” because we all do.

Behind every murder is a thought.  A thought that can sometimes lead to the literal murder of someone but more often lead to just plain hurting each other.    You know it’s possible to kill a person in little tiny ways by chipping away at their self-esteem, trust, joy, sense of worth, security and sense of self.

Maybe you’re saying “When have I ever done that?”   We all have times in our lives when we let our anger rule us or when we let those things that emerge from our anger like resentment, jealousy, competition or even our self-centered drive to survive entice us to treat each other without dignity. When we do that, we compromise the chance that the person we hurt can have the abundant life that God wants for them.  In other words, we take a life and we commit murder.

Yes, I am saying that a hand gesture at a car that is annoying you is just as bad as murder, because it comes from the same place, anger.  That does not diminish the act of murder in any way, but it does increase our understanding that everything we do has the potential to chip a way at someone’s soul.   I believe there is a real death that occurs in people whenever we speak unkindly about them, throw thoughtless insults at them.  Or make little digs in our conversations with them, often disguised as humor.

The Sabbath Question - by Bob Scott

Today, I'm featuring a guest post by Bob Scott.  Bob preached this sermon last week while I was away.  He is the Director of Trinity Institute at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, a good friend, and was one of the members of our core team when Vision began.

Did anybody stop off on the way to church this morning? Maybe you went by the grocery store to pick up food for later. Did anybody stop at the liquor store? You don’t need to raise your hands. A few years ago you couldn’t have done that. At one time most stores, and until recently all liquor stores, had to close on Sundays because of Blue Laws. These laws started with the Puritans in the 17^th century. Over the years every state passed blue laws forbidding things like playing baseball or changing wagon wheels on Sunday. In Massachusetts holding hands on Sunday was against the law. In some states you could sell hammers but not nails on the Sabbath.

And there lies the rub. The laws were to protect the Sabbath, specifically the Christian Sabbath, since the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday. In the 20^th century people sued to overturn Blue Laws. The Supreme Court decided they were constitutional, because while they began for religious reasons, they now had other value, such as guaranteeing workers a day off or decreasing public drunkenness. Recently, though, many of the laws have been disappearing, mostly for economic reasons. Why shouldn’t a liquor store owner make money on Sunday? Today a lot of states forbid car sales on Sundays, and people are asking whether we can afford that when car companies are hurting.

Now, since we’re in church and we’re studying the commandment to honor the Sabbath, you might expect a pitch for reinstating the Blue Laws. And in fact, a study by professors at MIT and Notre Dame found that in states where selling liquor on Sundays is legalized, church attendance and giving go down noticeably and use of alcohol and drugs goes up, particularly among youth, and particularly among youth who are religious.

And yet, churches aren’t always big supporters of Blue Laws. In 1920 the New York Times reported that the rector of Trinity Church Wall Street, which as some of you know is where I work, preached a sermon saying that the return of the Puritan Sabbath, which was being advocated by a group called The Lord’s Day Alliance, would “injure religion.” Instead of outlawing sports, he said, pastors should be playing them. Why? Because “God is near in our joys also,” he said. The problem with a legally enforced Sabbath is that it takes the joy out of a day that according to the Jewish Hassidim “should be anticipated like a bride.”

For several weeks we’ve been reading the Ten Commandments. Number four is “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Sabbath is from the Hebrew “Shabbat,” which means “to cease” or “to rest.” It was understood as a time to stop our labor. That’s what the Blue Laws were getting at – don’t do business, don’t play games. Cease.

Video Highlights of Christianity 21

Here's the highlight video I shot and edited from Christianity 21.  I know it has been posted elsewhere, but I just wanted it to have a home on my blog.  Many thanks to the wonderful speakers, and to Tony and Doug for producing the event.

The Least Generation

Let me tell you about a generation living during a pivotal time in history, a time of change and new ideas.  A time of new technology making the world a smaller more connected planet.  A time of questioning old belief systems, religions and the supernatural.  Financial turmoil.  A rise in socialist ideas about the economy.  New forms of art.  The passing away of old racial divisions.  The blurring of the line between black music and white music.  Rethinking long-held concepts about sexuality, about what constituted a family and parental authority.  A generation living through one of the most important times in human history.

What generation am I describing?  Some of you, especially the teens, may assume I am talking about our children, the Millennial Generation, Gen Y, or whatever term demographic studies call them now.  Some of you, perhaps some Baby Boomers, assume I am describing the 1960’s and all the social upheaval of that era.  Those of you from the WWII era probably thought I was talking about you, what Tom Brokaw termed “The Greatest Generation”. In fact, I was describing the generation that lived through the 1920’s, the generation of my grandparents and great-grandparents.  The time of jazz music, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Red Scares, and the stock market crash.  

Unless you know history well, or lived through that time, you probably didn’t make those associations.  Instead, you associated the cultural phenomena I described with the experience of your own generation.  That is to be expected since we are all guilty of what Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann calls “one generation narcissism” and think nothing important happened in history until we showed up on its stage.  Every generation believes they are living in a time of cultural, technological, artistic and political revolution the likes of which the world has never seen.  In a sense, they are correct.  Each generation does face challenges that are unique and in some way unprecedented.  Each generation’s character is shaped by new influences.  Yet when we wrongly imagine that those who came before us have nothing to teach us, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past.

Last weekend, Pam and I attended the Christianity 21 conference in Minneapolis during which twenty-one women speakers explored faith in the 21st century.  One of them, Diana Butler Bass, a church historian, said, “People who really know history … are people who are not afraid of change…because we’ve seen it all before.”  A connection to those who came before us provides us with the wisdom to deal with the challenges of the present.

How do we have that connection with the past?  Is it soley through watching the History Channel or academic study?  As we have seen these past few weeks, the God of the Ten Commandments is not some abstract concept but a God who acts in history, not in vague generalities but with great specificity.  The God of Mt Sinai comes to people in very personal ways.  So it should come as no surprise that in order connect us with our past, God comes to us through one of the most personal of relationships, that of parent and child.

As we continue our study of the Ten Commandments, we come to this the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother that you may long endure on the land your God gives you.”   Now some of you may have difficulty with this commandment.  Perhaps you have a parent or parents that were neglectful, even abusive.  Some of you have parents who did not and not honor you.  This commandment does not endorse such behavior.   Nevertheless, we can’t be afraid to lift up the values of parenting and family just because so many people have been hurt by their family.  In fact we need to speak up even louder to say that’s not the way  a family is supposed to be.  This commandment invites us to rethink parenting, to be the kind of parents God calls us to be and not shrink back from being so.  How can we do that?

A few things we must note about how this commandment is phrased.  First, we are told to honor our parents.  Not blindly obey, or excuse abusive behavior.  The Hebrew word for honor is a softer gentler word.  Bruggemann describes honor as a more “delicate transactive maneuver whereby both parties grow in dignity through the process.”  Think of God’s family, the Trinity, where the members honor one another without dominating one another.  Honoring our parents is not an excuse for parents to beat down their children either physically or verbally.  Since history teaches us that we have seen it all before, we can surmise ha there were inadequate and abusive parents in ancient Israel.  God was certainly not endorsing that sort of parenting in that time and surely is not endorsing it in our on time. It is not the divinely-ordained endorsement of the old parental rationalization “because I said so.”  Instead it is yielding our wills and sometimes even narcissism to those who came before us.  It is realizing that our parents, whether they were good or bad parents, may have something to teach us.