Fear and Trembling

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
June 26, 2011



The text before us today is familiar to most of us.  We heard the story in Sunday school about how faithful Abraham was for being willing to sacrifice his only son because God had told him to.  I have endured classes in which we were told about how, in the ancient world, having a son is the only way to provide for your own retirement.  Your sons preserve your family, your clan, your property and they provide for you when you cannot provide for yourself..... and for all of those reasons, Abraham was really a very obedient and faithful man.

The apostle Paul even waxes eloquently about Abraham as does the author of Hebrews.  But still, my friends, this is a story about a guy who heard voices telling him to kill his son and he very nearly did it.  I wouldn't read this story in church because, even though this one ends well.... Assuming that Isaac was ever able to sleep at night again, we all know that this story doesn't always end well.

Genesis has this story of Abraham coming right up to the point of killing Isaac and not going through with it, but if you kept going to Bible study until you got to the book of Judges and you find the story of Jephtha, who made a pledge to sacrifice a member of his own household if God would give him victory in battle and so, having defeated his enemy, Jephtha goes home and sacrifices his daughter and we're supposed to see that as a sign of faithfulness.

Call me a rebel, but I don't think that any voices you hear or any religious vow you take which involves killing your children really deserves our serious consideration.

I would dismiss the story of Abraham and Isaac from our lectionary readings except for one thing, or, more accurately, except for one person.  In the hands and mind of that great Danish philosopher, the story of Abraham becomes the inspiration behind Kierkegaard's greatest work, "Fear and Trembling," in which he articulates the only phrase most people ever hear about Kierkegaard which is his famous "leap of faith."

Of course, reading Kierkegaard with some knowledge of his personal life, I am inclined to assume that he uses the story of Abraham as a metaphor for the great sacrifice he had made in his own life.

Kierkegaard had fallen in love with the beautiful young Danish woman, Regine Olson.  Though Kierkegaard was never much to look at, he applied his giant brain to the task of studying Regine's every aspect, every like and dislike so that when he approached her he knew how to make himself irresistible to her.

He loved her and she loved him and they were engaged to be married when Kierkegaard began to wonder if he should go through with the plan to marry and become a parish pastor.  He was disgusted by the shallowness of the church of his day.


He was profoundly disappointed with how people in general were always willing to just go along with the majority opinion, lacking either the courage or integrity to think for themselves and to be willing to suffer the consequences of being devoted to the truth.

He became convinced that it was his true calling to be a writer, a philosophical gadfly, who challenged the whole of society and not just a small parish.  He was willing to make himself into a social pariah in order to push the world to dismiss the shallow ways of an entirely conformist religion but he was not willing to make Regine suffer along with him.

Kierkegaard never had a son to sacrifice but he sacrificed his love for Regine, breaking off the engagement with her in order to protect her from the public derision and hostility that he felt that he had to embrace.  It was a decision about which he would never be entirely sure.  He wrote books about his indecision and, in fact, later thought that he made a terrible mistake and returned to Copenhagen to ask her to forgive him and to marry him, only to discover that she had married someone else.

The loss of Regine became the life obsession of one of the modern world's greatest intellects, locking him into a dark depression that both fueled his incredibly prolific life of writing and brought about a very early death, dying at the age of 43.




Some folks have, through the years, been tricked by hearing pithy Kierkegaard quotes in sermons and they have actually gone out and bought one of his books only to discover that he is nearly impossible to understand.  He combines a nearly comprehensive knowledge of Bible, history and literature with social commentary from the late 19th century Western newspapers in such a way that without professional help, most of us would do about as well trying to read a phone book in Chinese as to read Kierkegaard in English.

But I have stuck with him, slowly working my way through the parts that I can grasp and I have done so for one reason and that is because of his relentless criticism of the church coupled with his completely unattainable demand that we be better Christians.

I have known, I have felt it in my gut, from the time that I was a teenager, that the church was not was it was supposed to be.  I struggled during my teen years with the expectation that I would have to register for the draft and fight in Vietnam and I knew that there was just something morally wrong with our country's involvement in that war.  I went to church every week, usually two or three times a week, and I never heard anything mentioned about national morality and the war.

But I read collections of letters from prison of war protesters, the people who refused to serve in a war that they believed to be immoral.  What they said looked like what I was reading in the Bible a whole lot more than what I was hearing in our worship services and Bible studies.

I knew that the people who were killed during a peaceful protest at Kent State were right, and the people who shot them were wrong but it was never mentioned in my church.  I knew that our segregated little town in Kentucky was filled with racism and I knew when Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered that it was wrong, but the only think I heard about it in church was jocular congratulations based on the speculation that James Earl Ray was one of my cousins.

My disappointment deepened as I became a young pastor and discovered the seamy underbelly of trivial church turf battles... the petty, humiliating competition for power and recognition all in denial of the stated goal of actually somehow becoming heroes, or, as Kierkegaard described it, a knight of faith.

Kierkegaard writes:

"This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool... the official worship of God...is, ..., a counterfeit, a forgery."

We joyfully celebrate here, in our little church, the fact that we have been liberated from the irrational and sometimes mental persecution of evangelical religion.  We have rejected magic and superstition along with dogma, neurotic guilt and manipulation by fear.

But I am concerned, in our escape from guilt, fear and superstition, that we sometimes give ourselves permission to assume that we are now connoisseurs or philosophers of faith.  Our religion is no longer a life commitment but it is something that is complimentary.  Our church is life enhancing more than it is life changing.

And that drives me back into reading Kierkegaard.  We are not a progressive church because we have less faith but because we have more faith.  We have not set aside doctrinal religion with its guilt and fear so that we could become a bunch of atheists with rituals.

The leap of faith that Kierkegaard talks about is not an abandonment of reason in order to believe that which is inherently unworthy of belief.  The leap is to abandon all reservations, to let go of the rope and to dive into the life of faith, no matter what it costs you..... a beloved son, or your beloved Regine.

From time to time I get a call from a church member who wants me to take them to the emergency room.  Two or three nights a year, I sit in the waiting room at one of our grand hospitals and wait, with someone who thinks their child's arm may be broken.... With a man who is afraid that he may have poisoned himself.... With someone whose chest pains have become breathtaking.... And we wait.... Quietly, patiently... at first.  Families pile up in the chairs, children become restless... there is always quiet weeping of the suffering and the afraid.

Many people give up and go home.  Preferring to suffer in the privacy of their home rather than suffer the indignity of being looked at by the empty and indifferent eyes of an over worked nurse who tells you again that the doctor will get to you.

Why are the emergency rooms the slowest form of medical care on earth?  Why are they chronically understaffed?  Why do the many sit in agony and silence, trapped in the indifference of a health care delivery system that knows very well that this scenario will be repeated again tonight, and tomorrow night and the next night?  Why?  Because the patients are afraid to complain and the people who are not in the waiting room do not care about the people who are.

That scenario has become a metaphor for our modern society.  Those who are in pain are afraid to speak up for themselves and those who are not in pain don't care.  That is what Kierkegaard saw when he looked at the church... a gathering of people in fear and trembling, sitting in a hospital emergency room waiting area.

For most of us, to be believers in a radical spirituality which advocates for both peace and justice, for bread for the hungry and a change in the economic system which creates a few wealthy by keeping the many without bread.... To be the prophets in a society that cannot seem to control its own appetite for violence, prejudice and exploitation.... Then we have to be willing to take a leap out of safety and obscurity and into the light.... A light in the darkness that is sometimes lit by burning martyrs rather than a spotlight on a stage.

We can choose to keep silence out of fear of the consequences or we can choose to live as though the truth were more important than any possible consequences.

What would you do, what would you say, who would you be if you were no longer afraid of what people would say.... About what your mother would think.... What would your faith lead you to stand up for if you were not concerned about how the neighbors would talk about you?

My suggestion is that we give up being afraid.  I just don't think that we can stand idly by anymore.

The Second Creation Story

Community Christian Church

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

June 19, 2011    Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
3Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
6And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." 7So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
9And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
14And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. 16God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars. 17God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
20And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." 21So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
24And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so. 25God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
26Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
29God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.
31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
4These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 

           
I must beg forgiveness for even bringing this up on a weekend when my friend, Jeanmarie, is in town, but I have to tell you a quick story about a bad dating experience I had many years ago, fifteen years....twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred years ago.

Honestly, my daughter was very young and I went out a couple of times with a woman who was also a single parent with a young child.  On our second date she brought up the subject of marriage.... She brought the subject up in a way that made it very clear that it was not a hypothetical conversation.

This is one of those moments when the very evolutionary forces of "fight or flight" kick in for a man and I began listing all of the reasons why I believed that we would not be getting married.  She replied, "Oh no, we will be getting married and we'll have two children together."

Further conversation revealed that she had come upon this very important piece of information through the services of a psychic whom she had employed to investigate our relationship.

Now, that sounds funny when you just say it like that here in this place filled with generally cynical intellectual types but in her world view, a psychic is a perfectly reliable source of useful information.  So, though I know that preachers should always be careful about telling personal stories in public, I mention this one as an illustration of how people can have a communication problem.  In this instance, I was approaching our relationship from a rational and analytical perspective and she was totally crazy.... You see how that can be a problem.

We were two people, seated together at the old Clary's restaurant, on a particular night, many years ago, but we saw and interpreted that objective reality in totally different ways.

And that, I would offer, is why getting people of different religious traditions to agree on a single interpretation of any passage of scripture remains very difficult.  If you read scripture analytically, it reveals a particular world view and if you read as if it is a book of magic, it seems to mean something else altogether.

The first book in the Bible, Genesis, contains two creation stories.  They are very different in nature.  One is a sort of theological poem and the other comes in the form of a narrative replete with anthropomorphic images of God waiting until the cool of the evening to take a walk, a conversation with a snake and trees with magical powers.  That the two stories are very different is not surprising when you realize that even though they are pressed up against one another in chapter 1 and chapter 2 of the same book, they were written in different countries and in different times.  There is as much difference between the creation narrative we read today and the Garden of Eden text which follows as there is between this morning's edition of the NewsLeader and the works of William Shakespeare.... Shakespeare wrote plays in another country 400 years ago and the Garden of Eden story which follows the creation narrative we read today was about 400 years older than Genesis 1.

Though the two accounts differ in almost every way, from the order in which the world came into being and the ways the accounts are told what they share in common is that neither was ever intended to be an account of either history or science.  If you read this narrative at face value and construct a world view based on creation as it is described here, what you see looks something like this:

http://biologos.org/uploads/static-content/OTcosmos.jpg

As people in the 5th century BCE believed, Genesis describes the creation of a flat earth which rests upon pillars which hold the earth up out of the waters of the deep.... Don't ask what those pillars are resting on because the only answer from the ancient world was something like the back of a giant sea turtle..... very unsatisfactory.

You heard Jill reading about a firmament in the heavens which is like a large solid mixing bowl turned upside down over the flat earth.  Windows in the firmament sometimes allowed water to flow through as rain.  The sun, stars and moon were affixed to the firmament and they moved through the heavens as the bowl was moved by the hand of God.

Bill Maher is fond of saying that the Bible was written by ancient dessert dwelling nomads who didn't know where the sun goes at night.  As rude as that sounds, what we have to acknowledge is that this account was written by ancient Jewish slaves in Babylon who, did not know where the sun goes at night.

Jeanmarie teaches cellular biology in a university in Oklahoma where she is surrounded by people who are desperately afraid that she might try to convince her Phd science students to believe in evolution and not in a literal interpretation of this description of a flat earth covered by a solid dome..... which is part of why scientists in Oklahoma can often be found driving great distances to date someone who is not from Oklahoma.... But I digress.

It is difficult to imagine that anytime since Columbus sailed from Spain to the new world that anyone would try to take the Genesis account literally.

And yet the debate, to call it that, rages on.  But it is something like trying to reason with someone who thinks that a psychic is a good source of information.  There is no real conversation taking place between these two opposing world views which often feel like trying to reason with a crazy person.

There are times when we simply have to accept that we are not speaking the same language as some of our religious peers.  There is no science in the Bible for exactly the same reason that there are no phone numbers in the Bible.... It wasn't written for that purpose and so there is no reasonable Biblical debate about evolution or creationism, we just don't need to try to reason with the flat earth society.  

So, when we have jete'd back from the edge of the cliff over looking crazy town, and we come back to this account written by Jewish slaves living in antiquity in Babylon, what does it actually have to say?

On the face of it, Genesis gives us an account of God entering the chaos of the universe and bringing order into it and blessing each aspect of it, calling the day and the night, the earth and the sky, the waters and all of earth's inhabitants "good."  And that, as it stands, is an assuring testimony.  Not that Mecca and Jerusalem are the holy land but all of the earth is holy and precious to God.  Not that one religion is better than another but all people are made in God's image.

But I would like to go a bit further with this text and suggest that what we have here is like hearing one side of a conversation, like listening to a person seated at the table next to you talking on their cell phone.

For many years Old Testament scholars have been convinced that the creation account in Genesis 1 is a Hebrew response or, you could say, a correction of the Babylonian creation myth that is known as the Enuma Elis.

The two accounts have a lot of similarities in their assumptions about a flat earth, a firmament and the pillars in the waters of the deep but they have a fundamental theological difference.  The Babylonian account says that the earth was formed, not by a single God who created and blessed the creation in the process, but rather the Enuma Elis tells us about a violent creation coming about through a battle among the gods.

The earth, according to the Babylonians, was formed from the slain body of the evil and chaotic dragon, Tiamat, and that human beings were formed from the blood of Tiamat.  Now, if you were to believe that people were made from the blood of an evil dragon, that would explain a lot of human characteristics which we don't like to talk about.  The Babylonians were realistic and practical in their theology.... The world is full of suffering and evil and people produce a lot of that suffering and evil so the body and blood of a dragon theory explains a lot about why life is so hard.

But even as slaves in a foreign land, the Jews produced a version of the creation that contradicted those dire beliefs.  They affirmed that the universe was chaotic, a void, without form or shape.
The Hebrew word for this chaos, "tehom" even sounds like that Babylonian name for the dragon, "Tiamat." But rather than a battle with the dragon, the Hebrew story tells us that God.... Literally, God's breath.... The ruach elohim, entered the chaos and brought about a good earth, and good animals and good people.... Which, if you think about it, accounts for a lot of what we experience in life... because just like we can see the world through the eyes of the Babylonians because life can be ridiculously hard and people can be just awful, we can also affirm this Hebrew account because the world can be beautiful and magical and people can be loving and forgiving and generous and wonderful.

The two accounts remind me of an image which is much older than either the Babylonian or the Hebrew creation narrative.  The psychology scholar, Karl Jung, noted that virtually every civilization on earth has an image of a dragon even though no such creature has ever existed.

Jung suggested that the dragon is a creation of the human psyche... a kind of symbol of human potential.  A dragon is a worm that can fly.  Deep within each of us there is an awareness that we can be a real snake in the grass and we are simultaneously aware that, if we try, we can rise above our base instincts and we can soar.  That the image of the dragon is so prevalent both in ancient societies and in the tattoo parlors of the present day is a point of significant importance.  At the deepest level of our primeval awareness we know that we could be absolute monsters or we could become angels.

I know from my old homiletics professors that really great sermons only have one unavoidable point but I've broken several homiletical rules today, so I'm going to run with it.  I have two points I really want you to leave with here today:  The first is that the bible and no other holy text is or was ever intended to be a science text book and anyone who tries to insist otherwise is doing a violence to scripture and to science.

My second point is that the creation narrative in Genesis is a spiritual story, a story best understood when read along side the other creation narratives of the ancient world.  Taken together they form the yen and yang of our spiritual self-understanding.  Lots of religious voices want you to feel like a worm, like a hopeless sinner and this text wants you to understand that the earth you walk on is a good earth, the air you breath is good, as is the sun and moon which warm you and light your way.  And you..... you..... you are made in the image of almighty God.  The earth is good and you either are or could be holy, the choice is yours.

For the Common Good

Community Christian Church      
Roger Ray, Pastor        
June 12, 2011    Pentecost

1 Corinthians 12:4-13            
4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

I had a friend in my church in Louisville who married a beautiful young woman who, after visiting a few Sundays, decided that she preferred going to the Catholic Church, which, seemed to me was pretty much her business.  But my friend hated the Catholic Church and couldn't stop talking about it.  They are the only couple I have ever known about whom it can be fairly said that they divorced because of religious differences.

What made him hate the Catholic Church so much was not really a theological issue though he tried and tried to make it sound like one.  My parishioner was a capitalist in meanest sense of the word.  He liked his nice house and his luxury car.  He wore more jewelry than any man I have ever seen other than Mr. T and he obsessed about making money.

However, he believed that the church should be poor. 

His wife attended one of those old European styled cathedrals with heavy marble pillars and gold plated altar ware.  It drove him crazy that the Catholic Church had amassed so much wealth and, he would say, their members are often so very poor.

Of course, if he were really very concerned about the poor he could have done quite a bit himself by restraining his own spending and being a bit more generous but, over the years, what I realized was not that he was so offended that there was gold on the altar of his wife's church but that the gold was not on his wrist or fingers.

You hear this kind of complaint from Americans a lot when they travel in Central America or in the more impoverished areas of Europe.  In America, we tend to believe that personal wealth is a goal but public wealth is just a waste of money.

I have a friend in Paris who is a physician.  She does not own a car and she lives in a fairly small, one bedroom apartment and she has no desire to move her practice to the United States where she could own several cars and live in a big house.  You can look out her living room window and see a part of the Eifel Tower.  She can walk or ride her bike past some of the most beautiful bridges, towers, statues and fountains in the whole world.  For her, and for a lot of Europeans and Latin Americans, the obscenity is in hoarding great personal wealth while letting the public live without the blessing of great art and beauty.

If the Mona Lisa was owned by a private collector it might be seen by a dozen people a year.  Where it stands in the Louvre it is available to people from all over the world to come and to enjoy..... and, perhaps the word "enjoy" is not at all the right word to use here.  We are inspired by great art.... Our lives are changed when we are exposed to beauty, our souls can be filled with awe and we can then become better and more capable people as a result.

If Barry Stacy took all of his talent and went home and played keyboards, drums, accordions and flutes in a house all by himself, the quality of the music might be the same but the qualitative affect on the world would be reduced to nearly nothing.  When Sean and Barry have finished some of the pieces they do, I often feel remorse that we did not have a thousand people here to hear it.... It seems a shame that only 70 or 80 people were here to experience something so beautiful, so profound, so inspiring but still, don't you see how enriched our lives are by the fact that they are here and they work so hard to find meaningful music to present in our community?

Today is Pentecost in the western Christian calendar.  This is the day in which we celebrate the birth of the Christian Church by the miraculous events described in the second chapter of Acts about how the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples who were in hiding in Jerusalem.

A companion reading to that text is Acts is this lesson we read today from 1st Corinthians in which Paul is trying to explain the nature of the Holy Spirit to a church he had founded but which has, apparently, begun to stray from Paul's teachings.

Paul moves along at a pretty good clip in this letter.  We can assume that most of the contents of the letter would be a reminder to the Corinthian church folk of things which Paul had said in greater detail when he lived among them.  For us, it might move along a little too fast.  There is a lot of material in that paragraph to talk about but I want to pay particular attention to verse seven.

Paul is telling this church that every one of them.... Male or female, Jew or Greek, have been given a gift by the Holy Spirit.  That is affirming in and of itself.  No one should feel that they are worthless.  No one should assume that the work of the church is for more talented people, more educated people, better, more saintly people.  Everyone has been given a gift, the apostle says.  But it is that qualifier at the end of verse seven which catches my attention.....the apostle says that every one of us has been given a talent, a gift, a manifestation of the Spirit.... For the common good.

We had a Catholic bishop in Kentucky whom I once heard speaking while I was on retreat at the Gethsemane Monastery.  He was talking about a time when he was working in a leper colony in Viet Nam.  He was the priest for about 200 people who lived in a village where everyone was afflicted with the horrible distorting disease of leprosy.  Many had simply been dropped off there as children by family members who were afraid of them and who could not bear to look at their faces which were often bereft of noses, ears and lips.

The bishop talked about being on a flight back to the United States when his work in Vietnam was finished.  During the long flight a remarkably beautiful young flight attendant eventually came and sat next to him.  She introduced herself as being a lapsed Catholic but she said that she was getting tired of just flying around the world and wanted to settle down to do something meaningful with her life.  She said that she had not gone to college and didn't really have any job skills so and she wondered if the priest might have any suggestions.

He told her that of all of the gifts that God gives to people, that God gets less return from the gift of beauty than from any other.  God gives some few people amazing beautiful faces and all God gets back is a wrinkled up memory.  The flight attendant was simultaneously intrigued and insulted but she asked the priest, "What would God have me do with my beauty."

And the priest said, "I work among a people who never see beauty.  They are trapped and isolated by a disfiguring disease that is so horrible that they never even see the faces of their own family members."  He said, "If you are willing, I can send you there to work in my old village where just the sight of your smile will lift the burden in the lives of many people."

It was a huge idea, too much to swallow all at once but she asked for the priest's name and number in the states and she promised to think about what he had said.

A couple of years later, long after he had forgotten about the conversation, he did get a call and the young woman said, "If your offer still stands, I think that I am ready now."  He made the arrangements and a few weeks later the flight attendant was living in the leper colony as a teacher.

More than a year passed before the priest was able to go back to Viet Nam but when he did he found his old acquaintance there surrounded by adoring children.  And she told the priest, "I don't know what they see when they look at me, but I know that I have seen the face of God in their faces and I don't know how to thank you for helping me to find my way here."

Now, with that in mind, let's look again at the first three verses of this pericope we have from Paul's letter today:

4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

You may recall an article I published in the newspaper a month or so ago in which I brought up this matter of being a good person.  If you think that you are a good person, shouldn't you be able to tell us what you are good for?

I don't know if Paul is right about this but he is published in the Bible and that beats any publication you or I have ever made it into.

He says that every single one of us has been given a gift which is not for our own pleasure or profit but that we each have been given a gift which we are suppose to use for the common good.  You have something in you which you owe to everyone else, a debt to be paid, an obligation to be fulfilled.  You have a talent, a skill, an ability to do something for other people which, if you take the apostle at face value, you have no right to keep to yourself.

Your spirituality may be personal but it cannot be private.  If you don't know what your gift is, then I can only implore you to try to get it figured out because we all have a leper colony somewhere waiting to be enriched by your smile.

Does God Control the Wind?

Community Christian Church
June 5, 2011



Dr. Charles Hedrick:
The answer given by the Bible and orthodox Christian theology is an unequivocal, yes!  God directs the affairs of human history and regulates the course of the natural world--although Jesus did once say that the "the wind blows where it wants to" (John 3:7)--suggesting that there is no control over the natural order.  In the light of the devastating tornado in Joplin, this question about the wind is really about "theodicy," or in the language of faith: why does God do what s/he does?  Or, how is God evidenced, if at all, in the natural world?  Here is the question simply stated: was the tornado in Joplin "an act of God" or a "natural disaster"?  Who destroyed 25% of Joplin, killed 132 people, and caused millions of dollars in property damage, God or Mother Nature?  


Those of us who consider ourselves people of faith and at the same time post-enlightenment human beings, who tend to think of the world in scientific categories rather than theological categories, simply reject out of hand the notion that God is responsible for the disaster in Joplin.  But, quite frankly, we have difficulty explaining how God is related, if at all, to the natural world.  


This difficulty is caused by the excesses of nature--of which the Force 5 winds in Joplin are but one instance.  Nature is both benign and deadly.  On the one hand, it blesses us with its bounties of field and orchard, but on the other hand, it is "red in tooth and claw."  Nature has always been dangerous, capricious, and ethically blind.  In recent memory Mother Nature, or God, destroyed New Orleans by flood, caused massive loss of life in Indonesia and Japan by earthquake and tsunami, and massive loss of life by earthquakes in Russia, China, Haiti, and by tornados and winds in Alabama, and Georgia--and now in Joplin, Missouri.  It is not possible in a single sentence to enumerate all the "natural disasters," or "acts of God," occurring in recent memory.  


Nature does not reflect the character of a God I would care to associate myself with--assuming it is true that God controls nature.


Such aberrations in the regularly occurring benign cycles of nature pose the greatest challenge to both the traditional understanding of God and to the traditional Christian and Jewish belief that God personally regulates nature.  Such disasters have always played the Devil (so to speak) with the belief that the Judeo Christian God, who by most accounts is gracious, controls nature.  If God controls nature and such unconscionable disasters occur, how can God be considered "good"?  On the other hand, if Mother Nature regulates the world, disasters make better sense.  Mother Nature is ethically blind, and in a natural disaster the righteous suffering along with the wicked is understandable.  Mother Nature is the real culprit here.  But this solution leaves unanswered how God is related to the world.  Traditional answers are simply inadequate.

Dr. Roger Ray:
One of my daughter's friends recently posted on FaceBook page that she was "not lucky" but rather, she is "blessed."  This fairly common and seemingly benign religious sentiment prompted me to try to exploit it as a teachable moment.  I asked her why God loved her so much that He made her smart and beautiful, healthy and relatively wealthy and why then God hates most of the other young people in the world in our cities' crumbling ghettoes, in Africa and South America and most of Asia.

She took the question as being a huge insult and insisted that she was only wanting to give credit where credit is due but she totally rejected the other side of that coin, which is what, I believe, you are asking us to come clean on.... That if God blesses some with good fortune, doesn't God similarly curse many others?  How can we applaud God for the healing of one cancer patient and not decry the death of another?  Or, in our own neighboring community's recent disaster, how do we pray in thanksgiving for those who were spared without demanding an explanation for those who were killed?

This is, as you know Dr. Hedrick, the central question in the book of Job.  If God is good, why is there so much suffering?  The question is asked through 48 chapters but never really answered.  I hope you are more satisfied by my responses today!

As one who has now twice toured the destruction in Joplin and as one who has seen, up close, the disastrous consequences of Hurricane Katrina in the USA and Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua, and I have seen the violent poverty of Palestine, Africa, Central and South America and our own American urban blight and in Appalachia, I can only conclude that God is not in charge of either nature or human history.
I would be remiss in this exchange not to recount the story Ellie Wiesel recorded of a rabbinic trial held in Auschwitz.  Three rabbis formed the judiciary and they brought charges against God for not showing up to end the holocaust against the Jews.  The trial went on for several days and everyone was allowed to speak to the charges.  Wiesel noted that not a single prisoner spoke in defense of God and, in the end; the presiding rabbi pronounced that God was guilty of crimes against nature and against humanity.  Following the pronouncement there was a long silence and then the same rabbi called everyone to join him in evening prayers.

I will not defend the classic monotheistic paradox of thanking God for good fortune and exonerating God for calamities of nature and of human will.  And yet, like the rabbis at Auschwitz, I am still compelled to worship and to seek out a relationship with God.  Not so much because I believe that speaking to God will change any specific aspect of human history but because drawing near to the God to whom we ascribe goodness, compassion, life and generosity changes me, and us, and we change the world.

Dr. Hedrick:
I think we agree. For some reason God has abandoned the world of nature to itself.  Things pretty much run themselves without oversight by powers higher than the natural order of the universe.  In many ways the thought is frightening, but nonetheless if we are honest, it appears to accord with our experience.  We must make our way in the universe with no help except from ourselves.  If we insist that God is good, then we must logically conclude that for some reason the natural world is, or has become, impervious to God.  The one area of our experience that seems to be pervious to divine initiatives is our human state--as flawed as it may be.


The Bible is the one ancient collection of writings that has most influenced our Judeo-Christian culture.  It reflects many religious ideas of questionable value, but in the ancient Book entitled First Kings is found an idea that may have some relevance for our exchange.  The prophet Elijah had fled from Queen Jezebel, who wanted to take his life.  For 40 days and 40 nights he put as much space between him and Jezebel as he could, and finally took refuge in a cave on Mount Horeb.


The word of the Lord came to him!  In those days people apparently believed that God communicated audibly.  In our day, however, the audible voice of God has fallen silent, and usually we institutionalize people who claim to hear audible voices coming from out of nowhere.  God asked, "What are you doing in this cave, Elijah?"  Elijah complained that he was the only faithful Israelite left in the land, and now his life was threatened.  So God told him to go to the front of the cave:

And behold the Lord passed by!  A great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord--but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake--but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire--but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a still, small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)    

God was not in the forces of nature, but apparently was in the still, small voice.


The human species has shown itself throughout its existence to be incurably religious.  The question is: will we grow out of our religious attitudes as our species matures, or is our propensity to religion of some sort indelibly imprinted in our genes?  I do not know!  But there is no question that the human psyche has demonstrated itself to be pervious to divine initiatives, which we think come from outside ourselves.  For good or ill, we claim to experience divinity.  Often the divine communication, if such it be, is clearly garbled.  Here is the difficulty: there is as much of us as there is of the divine in the communication.


Our problem is the sorting of the wheat and the chaff.

Dr. Ray:
This may be the point at which I must respectfully disagree though I do so with more than a little self-doubt.  I would not say that God has abandoned the universe to the mere forces of nature.  The larger question the two us seem to try to wrestle to the ground fairly regularly is more about the nature of God.  Does the God whom we confess to believe exists, exist in the form of a self conscious intellect with a particular will or do we tend to think of God in a more Buddhist sense of a collective good will so that a little of god is in each of us but nowhere is there a whole and intact entity that decides that it would be good to make it rain in Missouri and make the sun shine in California today.

Clearly, the world is not universally "good" and so I do not believe that God is a sentient entity possessing both omniscience and omnipotence.  But it is not enough for me to say that god is a concept under which we gather good and loving concepts.  With some fear and trepidation of stepping a bit too closely in the direction of the "intelligent design" folks, I am unwilling to give up on the notion of God existing with both self-awareness and creative power so that God may enter into history and affect the outcomes of events.  Where I draw the line is when any mere mortal pretends to be able to either dictate or influence God's entry into human events or even to assume that they can point and say accurately that "God did this" or "Didn't do that."

Two people are diagnosed with terminal cases of cancer, one dies quickly and the other survives for many years.  Is that God?  Is that nature?  Is that medicine?  I plead with spiritual people to take a humble position on these things and accept that we cannot trace God's footprints through history but I would not philosophically deny God the right or the ability to mix it up with us at will.

I do not wish to belittle the tragic natural disaster in Joplin by discussing the event in any flippant way.  With all respect, I would argue that it is impossible to believe that God caused the tornado to smite Joplin.  If, however, I may speak meaningfully of an act of God, I would say that the thousands of well meaning people flowing into Joplin to give aid to the victims and survivors is a godly act, acts inspired by a loving, compassionate and generous Deity.

The fact that we must live with uncertainty and that we must always question our too comfortable beliefs, always, as you say, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, is why religious communities will continue to exist.  We gather in faith communities to learn, challenge, correct and encourage one another to live out the values which we believe to be near to the heart of God.

Dr. Hedrick:
There is still an elephant in the room!  Let me rephrase: "God has abandoned direct hands-on management of the natural world.  It runs itself with no direct divine oversight."  One must affirm something like that to avoid making God responsible for Nature's disastrous excesses.  People of faith usually separate the problem of Nature's excess from the idea that a benevolent God is running the world in two ways.  One way is to avoid calling them "acts of God" but rather "natural disasters," which is a way of affirming that God is not responsible--but without bothering to address the nature of God directly.  The other way is to appeal to human finitude: "The ways of God are beyond human comprehension," which is a way of admitting that God was responsible for the disaster but appealing to the idea that somehow the disaster fits into a divine plan.


I do not think the idea that God is integral to human existence is easily separated from the idea of God's relationship to the universe.  If God is related in some way to us, we must also acknowledge that God in some way is related to the natural world.  If we describe how God is related to one, we must also be willing to describe how God is related to the other--in order to be intellectually honest.


You use the word "exist" to describe God, which is a way of bringing God into the world of time and space.  I have given up the use of that expression and simply say "God is."  To claim that God "exists" in a world of time and space is to attribute "creatureliness" to God.  To say God "exists" raises the question: Where?  Converting God into Creature-Who-Wills makes God pervious to the same ailments that afflict us:  mutability and decay.  Rather, God is outside, over, and around the world of human decay and renewal.  God does not exist like we do!


However, God is clearly within the world of time and space in our human consciousness, or, to put it another way, in the fertile concept "God"--a concept that seems to endemic to the human condition.  If I may use your word, our concepts of God "inspire" human beings to sacrificial humanitarian acts, but also to acts most would regard as unconscionable--both done in God's name!  


I respectfully disagree:  "the thousands of well-meaning people flowing into Joplin to give aid to the victims and survivors" is not an "act of God," but an act of average people "inspired" by a particular concept of God.  Construing their acts as "godly" is your hermeneutic--the Westboro Baptist Church folk regard their acts as "godly," as do all folk who name God as sanction for their behavior.  As I said: our problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff.


Without a spin, Mother Nature's--or God's, destructive footprints in history are easily seen.  What the concept "God" inspires in us positively, however, is more difficult to see.  Those things are mostly personal, unknown, and usually unsung.

Dr. Ray:
I appreciate the distinction you are making between saying that "God exists" and that "God is."  But, with all due respect to our former president, it does rather depend on what the definition of "is" is.  If we ask, "Does the color blue exist?"  Then we can certainly say that we have seen blue in the sky, in the ocean, in a corpulent cleric's eyes and elsewhere but we would not claim that there is a singular being which is, by character and nature, THE blue.  When we say that "God is" it remains to be said whether or not the word "God" is used to describe our concept of ethical values, good intentions and the places, things and experiences that we regard to be most dear to us or does the word "God" describe an entity which might actually prefer good over evil or perhaps even might prefer red carpet in here over our current purple and pink carpets.

I realize that we have come to the end of our public conversation but it seems to me that when you say that both thousands of volunteers streaming into to aid victims in Joplin and the Westborough Baptist Church members coming to condemn Joplin might be seen as "acts of God" from different perspectives, it leaves me to suspect that your view of God's "is-ness" is as a term under which we gather those things and ideas which we personally hold to be sacred but that there is not a sentient entity who prefers love and charity to judgment and hostility.  And this may be where we continue to disagree.

While I dismiss any anthropomorphic or sectarian descriptions of God, i.e., God is neither male nor female, nor is there a Jewish deity, a Muslim god or a Buddhist god, but that we are all striving to describe our sense of the "Thou."  And saying that, I would like to add that while I agree that you cannot defend a notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing and simultaneously all-loving and good deity because the world contains a lot of undisputed evil.  What seems to be absolutely necessary to sacrifice from this trinity is the notion of being all-powerful.  That's disturbing to many religious folks but it is basically the answer offered by Rabbi Kushner and others who prefer to say that God weeps with us in our sorrows but does not cause them and cannot always prevent them.  In many ways I think our essential problem here is monotheism.

The ancient polytheistic religions did a better job of accounting for both good and bad in the universe by describing both good and bad gods.

However, the other side of your argument about the limitations of human understanding is not quite so easy to dismiss.

I regularly affirm the comedian, Bill Maher's, observation that "I believe in God and yet I don't think that anyone on earth knows as much about God as my dog knows about how I balance my checkbook."  It could be, as you have suggested, that humans are simply "hard wired" for religion but both through a priori awareness and personal experience, the existence of the Holy who is both external and yet eminent seems to be persistently persuasive.  We cannot know, we cannot prove, we cannot accurately describe, manipulate or control and yet neither can we persuasively deny and therefore, we continue to have faith.