A Mind At Play

When I was a wee bairn, I watched Sesame Street almost daily. Cookie Monster was my favorite character. I identified with the little blue muncher, probably because we shared an unhealthy obsession with Chips Ahoy. One of my other favorite features on the show was the “One of These Things is Not Like the Others” segment. Remember the catchy song?

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

They’d show four things, and one of the things would be different: three letters and a number, three circles and a square, you get the idea. Your job was to pick out the thing that didn’t belong with the others.

A few days ago, I was reading this story about a Southern Baptist church in Georgia that is probably going to be removed from fellowship because the Church appointed the pastor’s wife as a co-pastor. The story reminded me of a “One of These Things is Not Like the Others” moment I had a few years ago.

The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention was preparing to fire some missionaries because they refused to sign a statement affirming the Baptist Faith and Message. I was discussing the situation via e-mail with a former IMB trustee, and I asked her what were the non-negotiable doctrines that a person must believe in order to qualify as a missionary. Her response:

1. The Deity of Christ
2. The Resurrection of Christ
3. The Work of the Holy Spirit
4. Not allowing women as pastors

Now when you just read that list, you likely had one of two reactions: you either said, “Yep, that’s about right,” or, like me, you had a baroo moment. Think the little dog looking into the gramophone and tilting his head in the old RCA “His Master’s Voice” logo. I think my brain actually locked up for a second when I read the last item in the list.

There is certainly room for different opinions on the proper role of women in the church. Both the Complementarians and Egalitarians have good arguments. Where you come down on the issue depends on who you think has the best arguments. (FWIW, I think the Egalitarians make the stronger case, and the associate pastor at the church I attend is a woman). But putting “not allowing women as pastors” in that list of non-negotiable doctrines is a perfect example of “one of these things isn’t like the other.” It’s also symptomatic of the “Gospel plus something” expansion of “essential doctrine” happening all over the evangelical church in America. This “Gospel plus” approach is, I believe, the main reason why the SBC (among many evangelical groups) is declining in membership. People don’t need “Gospel plus some other rules we made up”; they just need Gospel, period. As long as churches continue to exclude people from membership and service over non-essential issues, those churches will continue to decline. Unfortunately, they may also drive some people away from Christianity permanently in the process. Being always right carries a high price.

Recommended Reading

The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters
I Believe: Exploring the Apostle’s Creed
Two Views on Women in Ministry
Ten Things I Learned Wrong From a Conservative Church

My recent post “Thoughts on Starting a New (Christian) Life” has generated a lot of good comments and discussion. A couple of commenters have shared some thoughts and asked some questions that I think deserve a longer and more thoughtful response than a reply to a comment would allow, so I’ll be addressing those comments in posts over the next couple of days.

Clarke Beasley wrote:

Did Jesus hold to a literal view of the creation account? (Mark 10:6)

Impossible to tell from the given passage. Jesus references a passage from scripture (Gen 1:27), and talks about the theological meaning of that passage in the context of marriage:

That only humans are designated “male and female” indicates that both genders are included in the image of God, and both are essential to fully articulate our humanity—hence the twofold blessing-instruction to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and rule. Genderedness is God’s good gift, and its abuse is a serious affront to the holiness of God, whose image humanity, as male and female, bears. (Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament , G. Beale and D. Carson)

The point Jesus makes only depends on the fact that God created human beings male and female, not how he created them. Nothing in the passage requires that Jesus held a literal view of the creation account.

If you require science to affirm Biblical doctrine (a problem in and of itself according to Habbakuk 2:4 and Romans 1:17.)

It has nothing to do with requiring science to affirm a Biblical doctrine. But we can, and do, use the knowledge that science provides to clarify our understanding of the Bible. See my response to quartet man below for further explication.

Both the passages you quote refer to living by faith, something all Christians agree that we are called to do. But faith doesn’t mean turning off our brains or denying knowledge gained outside of faith, especially when that knowledge can helpfully inform our interpretation of scripture.

you might study Chuck Missler’s series on Genesis. Be ready to invest some time, he takes 9 one hour sessions to go through creation week explaining how the passages relate to the latest in cosmological science.

I’ve looked over his material before. His understanding of science is, to be charitable, a bit shaky. It would sound good to someone who didn’t know much about cosmology or astronomy, but wouldn’t get past a second-year major in those subjects. And he starts from a mistaken premise: that the creation accounts in Genesis were written as literal, observational, scientific accounts, as if a 20th century western Christian had written them for a 20th century western audience. It’s a common mistake, one that I have been guilty of making myself. To properly understand the Bible (or any historical writing) we have to put ourselves into the time and context of the original author and audience, not bring them forward to ours. Only when we have determined what the text meant to them can we attempt to bridge the gap of time and culture to understand what it means for us. (Gordon Fee & Doug Stuart’s book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth is an invaluable guide in learning how read and interpret the Bible in this way.)

From Quartet Man:

Human science can be faulty. What seems logical and true can be refuted and changed in the future as we learn and understand more. At one point science said the world was flat. I believe I will trust God on the issue of creation.

I used to see the matter as “God’s word” vs. “science”, but that is a misunderstanding. It’s not God’s Infallible Word against Fallible Science; it’s fallible human interpretations of God’s word against fallible science. Yes, science is sometimes wrong, but so are our interpretations of the Bible.

The most famous example is the Church’s (Protestant and Catholic) insistence that the Bible clearly teaches that the earth is the center of the solar system and that the sun and all the other planets revolve around it. It was science that showed the error of that interpretation of scripture. I believe that science has shown us a similar error in interpreting Genesis literally.

Of course, the idea that the Genesis creation accounts shouldn’t be understood literally predates modern science by many centuries. St. Augustine argued for a non-literal reading of Genesis in his 5th century work The Literal Meaning of Genesis. In that same book, he makes the following statement about how Christians should relate to contemporary science:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7]. (Emphasis mine.)

Augustine’s words are probably more pertinent today than when he first wrote them 1500 years ago. My primary concern in the supposed science vs. the Bible conflict is that well meaning and sincere (but mistaken) Christians do exactly what Augustine describes in this passage and drive people away from Christianity for no good reason. Unfortunately, I know that it happens because I have personally seen it happen, and the damage done by the anti-Science Christian can be difficult if not impossible to undo. We’re not supposed to be imposing a science orthodoxy test to allow people to come to (or stay in) the Church. We’re not supposed to be putting up a “proper science” fence around the Cross. We’re supposed to be welcoming people into the Kingdom with the open arms of Jesus.

Thinking about the Lord’s Prayer walking out of church this morning, and this bit from comedian Dara O’Briain sprang unbidden to mind. The whole thing cracks me up every time, especially the difference between the Protestant and Catholic Lord’s Prayer. And he’s really spot on about the hymns…

My recent post “Thoughts on Starting a New (Christian) Life” has generated a lot of good comments and discussion. A couple of commenters have shared some thoughts and asked some questions that I think deserve a longer and more thoughtful response than a reply to a comment would allow, so I’ll be addressing those comments in posts over the next couple of days.

Clark Beasley asks:

How do you square Christianity, (even emergent, post-modern, the Bible is a metaphysical poem, let’s make up doctrine as we go brand of Christianity,) with Obama’s horrific and infanticidal opposition to the Born Alive Protection Act?

A fair question, and one I’ve been asked many times. I have a two-part answer.

First, I don’t necessarily agree with every position that Obama takes. I thought that of the two candidates Obama would make the better president, as his concerns and priorities aligned more closely with mine. A candidate’s stand on a single issue does not make or break that candidate for me. Some Christians use a candidate’s stand on abortion as a litmus test. I fully support their right to choose a candidate based on whatever criteria they think appropriate. It’s a problem, though, when such people believe that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a bad Christian or not a Christian at all.

Second, I don’t think that abortion is a political issue; it’s a spiritual issue. If abortion were outlawed tomorrow, the number of abortions performed would drop maybe a few percentage points. Illegal abortions would always be available in the U.S., and a person seeking a lawful abortion could take a short trip to a country (Canada) where abortions were still legal. No prohibition law has ever worked. As long as you have demand for a service, there will be a supply. The only way to end abortion (or drug abuse or prostitution or any other such problem) is through eliminating demand. The only way to eliminate demand is through a change of heart. The only way to truly change a heart is the Gospel.

Or, as John MacArthur put it in his excellent sermon “The Christian’s Responsibility in a Pagan Society” (Part 1 & Part 2)

I hear a lot of talk today about the church impacting culture. Coming back from Atlanta where I went to the Christian Booksellers Convention this week I read a couple of books on the plane, both of them had to do with confronting our culture, effecting and impacting our culture. But frankly, folks, that’s not our goal. That is not our goal. It sounds like a noble goal and I’m sure there are people who can see certain noble aspects of it and there may be some. But our goal is not to impact our culture by changing their moral values. Our goal is not to impact our culture by creating traditional values, family values through legislation or judicial process. Our goal is not to make sure that the United States of America adheres to a national policy that equates to biblical morality. That is not our goal. We are not involved in altering social morality. We are not involved in upgrading cultural conduct. We are interested in people becoming saved. That is our only agenda. If we’re going to change our culture we’re going to change it from the inside out.

(Full disclosure: Clarke Beasely and I kind of grew up together, and we both attended Pensacola Christian School. I left after 8th grade, while Clarke went on to graduate from Pensacola Christian College. Since Clarke drank the PCS Kool-Aid longer than I did, it’ll probably take a few more years for him to get his head screwed back on straight. )

Dover Beach is one of my favorite poems. I committed it to memory long ago, but it was brought to mind recently by the fighting over healthcare reform. “Where ignorant armies clash by night” seems to be a never ending refrain in my life: fundamentalism, literalism, anti-evolutionism, anti-intellectualism, anti-catholicism, ad infinitum. Those who fancy themselves faith’s staunchest defenders are, ironically, those who contribute most to its loss.

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Harry Emerson Fosdick preached his famous sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win” in 1922. I disagree with a few things he says in this sermon, but I think Fosdick puts his finger squarely on the cardinal sin of fundamentalism in this passage:

As I plead thus for an intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty-loving church, I am, of course, thinking primarily about this new generation. We have boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools, and because we love them we may well wonder about the church which will be waiting to receive them. Now, the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of the new generation is an intolerant church. Ministers often bewail the fact that young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their lives. But this is easily explicable.

Science treats a young man’s mind as though it were really important. A scientist says to a young man, “Here is the universe challenging our investigation. Here are the truths which we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an intellectual adventure for the truth.” Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, “Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results.”

My friends, nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation, the divine purposes for humankind, life everlasting. But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation to these sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant church.

This passage describes with stunning and, dare I say prophetic, accuracy the approach to thinking, questioning, and learning I was taught while attending a fundamentalist Independent Baptist Christian school. It was only safe to read books by good fundamentalist authors. We were instructed to stay away from books, magazines, and any other media that might expose us to ideas inimical to fundamentalism. In Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis states:

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

The same can be said for the young man who wished to remain a sound fundamentalist. Thought, except within certain narrow parameters, is discouraged. Far too many of my classmates were driven away from Christianity completely by this narrow minded and anti-intellectual attitude.

Things hadn’t changed much in the 72 years between Fosdick’s sermon and the release of Mark Noll’s award winning book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. At the very beginning of the book Noll states his thesis:

The scandal of the Evangelical mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind.

In an article written for the tenth anniversary of the book’s publication, Noll didn’t find many reasons to change his evaluation of the lack of an evangelical mind. 1922-2004: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Why worry about the lack of a fundamentalist/Evangelical mind? Because the anti-intellectualism of evangelicalism drives people away from Christianity, or keeps them from considering Christianity in the first place. We don’t serve a God that requires us to be idiots. We serve a God who says:

Come now, let us reason together. (Isaiah 1.18 ESV)

and

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. (Romans 12.2 ESV)

God doesn’t ask us to leave our brains at the church door. Fundamentalists and many Evangelicals do. This is a state of affairs that is beneficial to no one and puts up a fence around the cross. It puts a condition – deny your God given intellect – on receiving unconditional grace.

What can reasonable Christians do to remedy this situation. Two things:

1. If you encounter a Christian that dismisses learning and reason, attempt to gently instruct them (2 Tim 2:24-26) that what they’re doing is not Biblical and is driving people away from Christianity.

2. If you hear a non-Christian talk about how anti-intellectual Christians are, don’t be afraid to stand up and say, “I’m a Christian. Not all Christians are like that, and turning off our brains is not a demand that God makes of us.”

Recommended reading about learning and the life of the mind as a Christian responsibility:

• Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul
• Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life As a Christian Calling
• The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

I was skimming through Chick Publications’s recent KJV-Only book Look What’s Missing when I read this:

When it comes down to it, I don’t want lies, whether accurately quoted or paraphrased. I just want to have in my hands the words that God said, that God himself promised to preserve.

When I read that passage, a great honkin’ big, world champeen, gold medal winning irony struck me: KJV-only Christians look at the Bible in the same way that Muslims look at the Qur’an.

Muslims believe that the earthly Qur’an is a copy of the book (kitaab) in Heaven written by God in Arabic and verbally dictated to Muhammed by the angel Gabriel. Muslim belief says that the Qur’an cannot be translated for this reason. Any rendering of the Qur’an in another language is called and “interpretation.”

Likewise, many KJV-only advocates believe that the King James Bible contains the exact English words spoken by God. Any Bible that deviates from those exact words is a “perversion” of God’s words.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

(BTW, the best single book on the King James Only movement, in my opinion, is James White’s The King James Only Controversy.)

It’s been close to a year since I left the church I had attended for 17 years. That parting also marked my parting with conservative Evangelical Christianity after 35 years, with which I’d been involved since I was 5 years old. (Others still in Evangelicalism have documented its current problems, so I won’t open that particular can of worms).

I attended a fundamentalist, King James only, independent baptist school, from Kindergarten through 8th grade. I attended conservative Baptist churches all through childhood, my teenage years, college, and my adult life. That was the only world I knew, and I spent most of that time thinking that Christians outside of that world were lesser Christians if they were Christian at all.

It’s amazing how much reading the Bible for yourself can open your mind. As I studied the Bible, read more about the history of the Church and Christianity, and prayed and meditated on what I’d learned, I became more and more dissatisfied and disillusioned with the tradition in which I had lived for so long: the legalism, the anti-intellectualism, the politicizing of Christianity (good Christians are Republicans, you know), the heavy emphasis on sin and law and little emphasis on grace, the focus on all the things Christians aren’t supposed to do and little focus on what Christians are supposed to do, i.e. love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.

The last couple of years I spent at my former church were particularly trying for me. Lest you think I was one of those church members that just showed up on Sunday and parked it in a pew, here’s some of the things I did at that church:

• Sound engineer for Sunday morning services, Christmas, and easter programs for 17 years
• Prayer room volunteer
• Taught an adult sunday school class
• Taught multiple sunday night discipleship training classes
• Led a reading group
• Led a FAITH evangelism team

In short, I was involved. But as the years passed I had more an more conflicts with other church members. A few examples:

• The college class at my Church put on a “Creation vs. Evolution” seminar. (I’ll let you guess which side they came down on). In the Q&A session after the first class I asked some very hard questions, questions the college students were unable to answer. I suggested that just maybe Genesis 1 and 2 were not meant to be literal, scientific accounts of creation. The next week they brought in a guy who taught an adult Sunday school class at the church. After the class session he proceeded to grill me for 45 minutes on whether I was really saved or not.

• I taught a 16 week Sunday school class on the book of Revelation. It went over really well, and the minister of education agreed that it would make a good Sunday night discipleship training class. At the fourth session of that Sunday night class, someone in the class, apropos of what I don’t remember, stated that he didn’t see how anyone could “believe in evolution.” I replied that I thought that the scientific evidence was pretty strong for evolution, that Christians held many differing views on the subject, and that it wasn’t an issue on which someone’s salvation depended. A couple of people in the class asked me respectful questions, which I answered, then steered the discussion back to Revelation. I didn’t think anything else about it until I got a call from the minister of education the next day saying that he needed to meet with me. Some members of my class had gone to the pastor and complained about what I said about evolution. (The complainers didn’t come directly to me, as Jesus commanded – Mat 18:15. Funny thing, that). I had a good discussion with the pastor, we agreed to disagree on the topic, and that was that. Except that half of my class didn’t show up for the last four sessions. (And it was the younger half of the class. The older, 55 and up, group stayed. Go figure). One of the students in that class wouldn’t even meet my gaze when we passed in the hallway at church after that.

• Got called into a meeting with the associate pastor because someone had seen me drinking a beer (horrors!) with my hot wings at a local restaurant. The complainant didn’t come directly to me (again), but they thought such behavior was inappropriate for someone who was a Sunday school teacher at our church.

• Got called into a meeting with the associate pastor because of a “Believers for Barack” bumper sticker on my car. (Full disclosure: I had voted for the Republican candidate for President in every election since I was old enough to vote. George W. disappointed me over the last couple of years of his term, and I was not happy with the Republican presidential ticket. Of the choices available, I thought Obama would make the better president.) Anyway, some church members took offense at my bumper sticker and went to the associate pastor to complain. (Again, didn’t come to me directly, as commanded by Jesus. See a pattern here?) One complainant was so incensed he jabbed a finger in the associate pastor’s chest and angrily exclaimed, “no person who supports that man should be allowed to teach in this church! What are you going to do about it!” The associate pastor was very nice about it and just wanted to let me know what some people were saying about me. I told him to please tell those people that I would be happy to talk with them, and he said he’d relay that message. I’ll let you guess how many people called me.

In all of the above incidents the pastor and associate pastor were very gracious to me. They never gave me an ultimatum and never condemned me. They offered suggestions and allowed us to charitably agree to disagree where needed. I have no complaints about how they treated me.

Except.

In my conversations with them, the issue of whether I was right or wrong, whether my accusers were right or wrong, whether what I was doing was biblical or not, or what was best for the Kingdom was rarely if ever brought up. Their primary concern was always, “how does your behavior reflect on this Church.” The concern was not that I had a reputation as a good Christian; it was that that my behavior reflected the image that the Church wanted to project to the community. That attitude always disturbed and saddened me.

(Over the years I had a number of people tell me, when they found out what church I attended, that I and my wife didn’t seem like “that church’s” kind of people. I think I finally came to understand what they meant).

The last couple of incidents occurred near the end of 2008. I was turning forty in a couple of months, so, probably like most people nearing that age, I was taking stock of my life. I was thinking about where I had been and where I was going in my career, my marriage, and my religious life. I was very happy with my job and my marriage, but in thinking about my religious life, one phrase kept coming up over and over again in my mind. It was from one of the Lethal Weapon movies. The situation is getting a bit heated as it does in those movies, and Murtaugh (played by Danny Glover) says:

I’m getting to old for this sh*t.

I mean, seriously! I’m almost forty and I’m still having to look over my shoulder to see who’s going to see me having a beer or glass of wine with my dinner. To worry about who’s going to think I’m not a Christian (or at least a bad Christian) because of the bumper sticker on my car. To worry about who’s going to see me going into an R-rated movie? To have to worry about someone thinking I’m going to hell because I actually learned some science, actually studied the Bible, and know that Genesis isn’t a science textbook. To have to worry about whose opprobrium I would incur because I didn’t behave like they thought a Christian ought to behave.

No. Not any more. I was done with living like that.

I’m sure that some well-meaning Christian will whine, “What about your witness?” Those things I mentioned above have jack squat to do with my witness. My witness is not to other Christians who want to enforce man-made, legalistic rules and call them “proper Christian behavior.” My “witness” is to all the unbelievers out there who need Christ’s love and God’s grace, and don’t need a set of asinine and unnecessary rules to follow. They don’t care what bumper sticker I have on my car or what I drink with my dinner. They only care that I show them Jesus and share the Gospel by loving them as Christ loved me.

I think it must have been the same for Martin Luther when he finally came to despair because he couldn’t keep all the man-made rules the Church had invented and told him he had to follow. He’d had enough, and he realized that not only was it impossible to keep all those rules, but that he didn’t have to!. That we all stand as sinners before the cross of Christ with no hope but the blood of Jesus and the Grace of God. That our job is not to be man-pleasers but God-pleasers.

“Too old for this sh*t.” Damn straight, Murtaugh.

Am I angry about all this. Yeah, maybe just a little. But darn it, I think it’s a justified anger. For all the years that Law was emphasized and Grace was minimized. For all the years that I was made to feel like I wasn’t a “good Christian” unless I followed somebody’s “rules of good behavior.” For all the years I was taught it was more important what other Christians thought about me than how well I was following Jesus’s commandments. Yeah, I think I’m allowed a little righteous anger, and maybe a little sadness for all those people who turned away or were turned away from Christianity because they weren’t offered simply love and grace but grace plus rules and regulations.

I hold no grudges, and I still love the people at my old church. I’m thankful for the good things I learned from them over the years and the good relationships I had, and still have, with some of the church members. But I couldn’t live in that environment any more.

I moved to a Lutheran church a little shy of a year ago. I’ve probably grown more there in the past year than I have in the past 10, and I’ve learned what grace really means and what it means to live under grace. But I’ve gone on long enough, and that’s a story for another time.

From my, sadly very large, file of stories about Christians that give a bad name to Christianity:

Classic post on The Internet Monk titled “What Are Some Christians Thinking When They Justify Rudeness With Religion”. A group of 6 soi-disant Christians enters a restaurant on a Sunday and promptly proceeds to tell the waitress that they won’t be giving her a tip because they don’t believe in people working on Sundays. One wonders how such concern allowed them to go out to a restaurant on a Sunday where they were sure to find people, well, working.

But it gets worse. See this comment, where someone relates a story of how a “Christian” woman actually removed a tip someone else had left on the table because, and I quote, “We don’t bless heathens with God’s money.”

As St. Augustine said, “Lord, save us from your followers!”

There are two ways I can look at the present and the future: the Biblical way:

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. – Matthew 6:34

or the not Biblical way, summed up by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters:

To be sure, the Enemy (God) wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

The past is past and the future may not come. The only time I have to think and act is right now. The Lord’s Prayer says, “Give us today our daily bread.” Not what we need for tomorrow, next week, or next year, but what we need in this moment.

I didn’t come to understand and practice this bit of wisdom until I completed a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course and started my own regular meditation practice.

Here’s a song by Marillion that I often listen to when I’m driving to work in the morning. It helps me cultivate a mindful attitude toward the new day.

Happiness is the Road
(listen here)

The greatest blessing that we have
Is the dawn of each new day
A chance to finish what we started
And made a mess of yesterday
As day comes out of night
A chance to get it right
A chance to start again
A chance to get it right

The people here
Full of love and comfortable in themselves
Not scared to let go
No fear round here

I met this man
In Utrecht Netherlands
He was a doctor of the body and the soul
He said to me:
Man, there’s a book you have to read.
I feel your pain. It makes me cry
But these tears are yours – not mine.

You’re focussing on all of your bad yesterdays
The worry lines are getting deeper every day
And deep inside you
No surprise – there’s a crisis!
You might have been to blame
But you can’t go on this way
Must I watch and pray?

While you torture yourself with what’s behind ya
Torture yourself with what awaits ya
Draggin’ that guilt and regret inside ya
Anxious of the goals that always evade ya

Your mind will find a way to be unkind to you somehow
But all we really have is happening to us right now

HAPPINESS IS THE ROAD

And each baby..
A human sunrise
Each baby – a human sunrise..

Look around you
Feel your soul inside you
Look inside you
Feel the life course through you
The life that’s giving In every thing that’s living
The plants and the trees
The birds and the bees
And apes like you and me

HAPPINESS IS THE ROAD

You’re a slave to your mind
But you are not your mind
You are not your pain
Say it again
You are not your pain
Say it again
You are not your pain

Happiness aint at the end of the road
Happiness aint at the end of the road
Happiness IS the road
The road

HAPPINESS IS THE ROAD