Missing Something?

It never ceases to amaze me how people can read the Scriptures and find so much to hate.
I'll give you the fact that there's a lot of sex and violence in there.
I see that the depravity of humans in the grip of lust for power, lust for money,
 or just good old fashioned lust can really mess of things.
And I can see why that mess really causes God's nostrils to flare
(a great Hebrew metaphor for being super-ticked off).
But I don't get why people think that God is going to act like a toddler who doesn't get his way and just start breaking stuff.
After all he promised one time (and once is all God usually needs to promise something) that he wouldn't do that again.
The first time just made him feel icky, and God doesn't like to feel icky.
So, for a Holy, Righteous and Loving Creator to somehow give us freedom to mess up,
must have been a pretty hard choice.
Because when things you love get hurt, you get hurt.
Giving people the choice to mess up must have been an incredibly nervous moment for God.
Like that time I gave my son a pocketknife, except a lot more so.
When I read the Bible I think of that.
And I think of all the ways I've messed up and gone against God's will.
And all the times he hasn't smote me into ashes, or gouged out my eyes, or tied me to a rock so vultures could eat my liver over and over again every day for eternity (sorry wrong gods).
And I have a hard time feeling really mad at other broken people who are messing up pretty much the same way I mess up, maybe just with slightly different shades of stupidity.
If I want to be mad, which honestly sometimes I do, I can find all sorts of really good things to hate with a righteous hatred: injustice, poverty, exploitation, greed, arrogance, even hatred itself.
Negative feedback loops can be fun for a minute, as long as you keep an eye on the way out.
And the way out is love.
Love keeps you from turning that righteous indignation on some poor sinner that is every bit as much a child of God as you are.
Another person, in whom God has invested a lifetime of forbearance, forgiveness and grace.
Grace is usually what we miss.
God has been patient for billions of years, working to make you who you are.
Maybe you're not perfect, yet.
But you're here and that's pretty amazing.
Do you think that God is, all of the sudden, just going to give up on you?
That just doesn't make any sense.

The Complexity of Persecution

So I saw this yesterday, and I had this strange feeling of deja vu, like I had seen it somewhere before.  And I probably had, because it was posted in September, but as I read through it, I got this rather too comfortable feeling of being right.  I am regularly alarmed at how many Americans think they are being persecuted, and I'm not just talking about my eight year old daughter.
But I have learned to be suspicious whenever I feel the warm embrace of smarmy self-righteousness, which sort of oozes out of these 10 questions.  I'm not one to write off valid points if they are made in a snarky tone, but the tilt of these question is so obviously against the more conservative forms of religious paranoia my moderate alarm started going off.  Let's be honest, we are all prone to feeling persecuted when we run into people who do not agree with us.  Liberals do it too, and it usually results in some version of "political correctness," which forces us to banish some previously acceptable word into the realm of insensitive language.  This in turn feeds the persecution fantasies of conservatives who remember the good old days when you could call a spade a spade, (I am aware that the word spade was also a derogatory racial term, that is a pointed example (and that was a pun, ain't words great?)).
But all of this really doesn't amount to persecution, and it certainly doesn't amount to religious persecution.   What it amounts to is the fact that the human race has relatively recently emerged from pre-technological feudalism/tribalism, and we're still learning to use our words instead of our sticks and stones.
I'm talking about America here, not elsewhere.  There is enough religious persecution to go around: Christians persecute Muslims when they have the numbers, Muslims persecute Christians when they have the numbers, the Chinese (who always have the numbers) persecute Christians and Buddhists (or perhaps more precisely Tibetans), Jews persecute Palestinians, and pretty much everyone persecutes Jews if given half a chance.
And this is the problem with American people running around shouting persecution: we live in one of the most persecution free countries in the entire world.  Freedom from persecution was a MAJOR issue for the strange chaps in powdered wigs who wrote our constitution.  Primarily because they were doing their thing at the end of almost three centuries of Christians of various sorts persecuting EACH OTHER.  First it was the Catholics persecuting the Protestants, then it was the Protestants persecuting each other.  So a bunch of guys who didn't agree on a whole lot said that the government that they were putting together wasn't going to favor one particular religion, no way, no how, just not gonna happen.
I know it's kind of a bummer when the authority figure doesn't make you feel extra special.  I know it feels like tolerating folks that are different from you is just too much to ask, but let me tell you it doesn't amount to persecution.
I read this morning that a group of Islamic militants attacked a college in Nigeria, killing enough people that if it had happened in America it would be a cause for a national day of grieving, ala Columbine, Sandy Hook or 9-11.  Read that article, because that is what persecution looks like.  The name of the group that committed this atrocity: Boko Haram, which means, "Western education is sinful."
I had a friend in seminary who was from Nigeria, and he asked me to pray for the election that was going on there.  If the Muslim candidate one, it meant that Sharia law would be enacted and Christian communities would be persecuted.  The election narrowly went in favor of a Christian, which meant that there would be no enactment of Sharia law, and that my friend would be able to return to Nigeria and continue to pastor his churches without fear of the government turning against him.
But that does not mean the persecution and the violence ended, if you read the article above, you will see that Boko Haram is displeased with the Christian president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan.  The President is guilty in their eyes of sanctioning excessive force in an attempt to halt the attacks of groups like Boko Haram.  Violence breeds violence, and innocent people usually end up suffering.
Which is why it's really a pretty good idea to not have the government taking sides in matters of religion.  There are enough political and economic reasons for people to hurt each other, why on earth would we need to add God's name to the list of reasons we have to hate others?
Listen humans, we're all guilty of getting itchy trigger fingers around folks who are different from us.  Add a little paranoia and fear into the mix, which too many of our media outlets are only too happy to provide, and you've got a volatile mix.  Our Constitution may not be perfect, but the "establishment clause" is a major step forward in the creation of a "more perfect union."  It gives us a way out of the quagmire of constant violence and reprisal in the name of gods.
The next time you feel persecuted because the ACLU wants the nativity scene off the lawn of the town hall, or because they want to build a mosque down the street from your house, stop.  Stop right there and pray for Nigerians, Sudanese, Israelis and Palestinians, anyone who disagrees with the Taliban, or any non-Muslim living in a place where there is Sharia law.  Pray for the people, and pray for the oppressors, because that's what Jesus told us to do.  Pray that somehow, someway, we humans will find our way out of the violent darkness, see if that doesn't take the edge off of your righteous indignation.

What Are We Missing?

The interweb is a big and sometimes wonderful place.  You find things, other people find things and can share them with you instantly.  I find that having friends who share your interests, particularly in churchy type stuff, is at least as good as subscribing to a magazine (for you younglings, magazines were like paper versions of the internet, that you actually had to buy or have mailed to you).  Some of the sharing is funny, some of it's thought provoking, on occasion it can actually get annoying, but when it works, you really get something to chew on.  A few days ago, I got this:
A Kodak Moment
Like so many things on the web, it has an agenda, and makes a prescription, which is probably at least somewhat helpful, but ultimately leaves you with an advertisement for their church growth strategy.  To which I say, "Meh."
I agree with some of the postulations of the article, I think they have identified some of the barriers to change, and so it's worth a couple minutes to read.
The most important thing that has arisen out of this little blurb-o-blog is a question that has gripped me as the pastor of a congregation in a mainline, postmodern, American, Christian church: What is the equivalent of a digital revolution that we are missing?
I am at least a little bit uncomfortable with the notion that the only problem the church is facing is finding and embracing a new "technology,"  which is why I usually find most church growth/re-vitalization plans somewhat lacking.  They are, at the core, technological solutions: learn something new, do something different, change something about the way you're looking at the picture, change the way you're managing and/or interpreting your data.
A few years ago, I learned about the difference between technical and adaptive problems/solutions.  A technical problem is solved by invention, ingenuity and/or modification of behavior.  Technical problems usually have technical solutions: the car doesn't run because the battery is dead, therefore replace the battery, bam, no existential crisis involved.
Adaptive problems require a new vision, because there is no clear and present solution: a church is facing declining attendance and membership because?  Most often there is not a clear-cut answer.  There is a lot of speculation as to what it might be, maybe even some evidence to support a reason or several reasons, but what inevitably follows is a chain of technical solutions, rather than a concentration on a new vision.
For Kodak the adaptive problem and the technical problem were related.  They needed to embrace a vision where their primary purpose was not selling film, because film was becoming obsolete.  They were already well positioned to market photography in the digital age, but they could not see the forest for the trees.
So the question that I have is whether the relationship between God and humanity, as it has been supported and nurtured in the Christian tradition, is on the road to obsolescence.
You hear ominous signs that perhaps it is:
"I'm not being fed here."
"This style of worship just doesn't do IT for me."
"I've got better things to do with my time."
"I'm already so busy, I just don't have time for church."
And of course, everybody's favorite:
"I'm spiritual but not religious."
Churches, bless their hearts (my favorite southern phrase to express a benighted state of being), are actually trying to adapt to these conditions.  And, like someone struggling to escape from quicksand, are sinking all that much faster.  I have heard it compared, in rather entertaining fashion, to that clingy boyfriend/girlfriend who is having a hard time accepting the reality of a breakup.
It is no secret to anyone who has studied family systems, that differentiated people are more attractive.  This is true to such an extent that dissociated people, who have separated from the system to an extreme, are actually seen as romantic.  That's why the prom queen mysteriously falls for the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks instead of the head of the debate team, or even for the alpha-male captain of the football team.  (Okay, so that's an extreme, Hollywoodish example, but it reflects a real-life phenomenon).  Differentiation is attractive, someone who knows who they are and what they're about is more attractive than someone who is needy and always seeking affirmation.
But differentiation, while it is a desirable personality attribute, must be balanced by some sort of connection.  Enmeshed families can be bad news, but so can dissociated ones.  The shining goal is a system where individuals are free to be themselves and pursue their own good, while voluntarily maintaining a healthy connection to the system.  That is the goal for healthy families and healthy churches.
In other words, we cannot cater to every little personal foible, or enable dysfunction out of codependency and misguided love.  But neither can we simply fold our arms and say, "here we stand, take it or leave it."
This is particularly difficult with the church because we are dealing with matters that people hold very dear.  For instance, we cannot simply "stop making film," because there are some people who will indeed cling to the good old days, the same way people still buy vinyl albums and antique furniture.  There is certainly an aesthetic value to religion that we underestimate at our peril.  Particularly in most established congregations, where the ones who are most invested in the way things used to be, are also the biggest supporters of the church, financially and otherwise.
I'm not shooting for an answer here, because any answer would be a technical fix to an adaptive problem.  I'm raising the question that has been on my mind: what is the "digital revolution" that the church is missing?
Can we get on board or is it too late?  Can we even really identify what it is?

How do you "like" a punch in the gut?

Normally, I would just share it and move on.  There are thousands of things like it on the interweb.  My first reaction is, "yeah, that's pretty powerful." My second reaction is that feeling you get when someone punches you in the gut, and you're totally not expecting it, you can't brace yourself, you can't try to avoid it at all.
There are so many people who battle addictions of various sorts.  What the small caption at the beginning says is really true, "everyone has been affected in one way or another."
I want to like this because it gives hope to people who are struggling through it, and it helps those who may have never understood what addiction is about to see addicts as people who are valuable and unique, who have stories and families and people who love them.
I really am happy for all those hopeful smiles at the end.
The gut-punch is the fact that I know there are some people who never get to flash those smiles.
The reminder is that, while there are many who pull though, and see a brighter day, there are many who do not.  The addict that I cared the most about did not get there.
By now I know that addiction is what survivors of trauma call a trigger for me.  Stories about people battling addiction, even hopeful stories about people who are long into recovery, still shake loose all sorts of unpredictable emotional responses: like feeling gut-punched at something that is supposed to give you hope.
So I can't just "like" this and move on.  I can't just share it without comment, because the reason why I really like this is complicated.
Hope is most valuable when you know that it doesn't always end with knowing smiles.
Hope is most necessary when your not sure if the door is going to open again or the sun is ever going to shine on your face.
Hope is something that pulls you through when it's clear that the battle can easily be lost.
Yeah, sometimes hope does feel like a gut-punch, but I guess it's worth taking.

Picking and Choosing

My admiration for Bill Nye grows and grows.  Last night he was on Realtime with Bill Maher, to talk about, among other things, his recent debate with Ken Ham.  Maher is about as hostile to religion as they come, he is a gleeful atheist who jumps on just about any chance he gets to bash the "superstitions" of religious folks.  Maher was giving Nye every opportunity to bash Ham, but Nye was not taking the bait.  It's a comedy show, he could have indulged and vented some of the frustration that he clearly felt about his evening at the Creation Museum, and nobody would have blamed him.
Then I heard him say that the reason he had gone there and entered into that debate was that he expected to uncover Ham as a charlatan, who is exploiting the seething cauldron of American religion in order to become rich and famous.  It was a nuance that was entirely lost on Maher, who pressed forward in order to mock and scorn the whole notion of faith, but Nye was not on board.
Nye seemed, as usual, thoughtful.  He still fundamentally disagrees with the premise that the earth is only 6000 years old, but I think he understands and consequently has a little more empathy for his fellow humans.  Which illustrates the true value of dialogue, even with people who hold so tightly to dogma they will never let go, regardless of something as trite as "data" or "evidence."
What do you really do with people who feel persecuted by facts?
What can you say to someone who feels that carbon dating and fossil evidence challenges their faith in a Creator God?
Not much more than you can say to cynical atheist like Maher.
I have been crashing into this notion of false certainty a lot lately.  To me it is no more intellectually honest to absolutely deny God's existence than it is to absolutely insist on it and swear that no amount of evidence to the contrary will change your mind.  In both cases, you are really giving into your fear that such evidence exists, and you will suddenly be confronted with it.
I know that I do not take Scripture literally, and I know that almost no one does, including Ken Ham, because I don't know any people with only one eye.  Jesus said, "if your eye causes you to sin pluck it out."  I know my eyes have been deeply complicit in many sinful acts, pretty much on a daily basis, I'm pretty sure Mr. Ham's eyes are also involved in sin of various sorts, yet here we are both with our optic organs in full working order.
I know that there are places where we pick and choose what is sacred communication, and what is stuff to just write off.  Leviticus 19: 9-10 reads as follows: "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of you harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God."  That sounds like a welfare state to me folks, where you purposefully leave some valuable profits aside for those who are living in the margins.  And that's Leviticus, a book with a bad reputation for being all kinds of mean and nasty and calling all sorts of things abominations.
The same chapter says you shouldn't get haircuts, or trim your beard, or get tattoos.  All of which I do or have done.  Yet I do not feel at all in danger of the wrath of God when I go to the Hair Cuttery, or trim my beard, or when I go get ink, not even a little, not even a quiver of remorse or any sense that God is even a little bit upset with me.
I worry if I feel like I'm participating in unjust systems, which I feel like I do a lot more than I would like (Lev. 19: 11-16).  I worry if I'm holding a grudge that I just can't seem to let go of (Lev. 19: 18).
How is it that I can feel so absolutely peaceful about breaking some of the rules in Leviticus 19, while simultaneously thinking that not only I, but our society in general, is really testing God's mercy with our willful disregard for other things that are written there?
The answer is that I have resources for interpretation that come from somewhere besides the book.  I have experience, reason, tradition and indeed I have other parts of Scripture, that tell me what is really important to hold.  We all do.  Because those three other parts of the "Wesleyan Quadrilateral" necessarily vary from person to person, we all have different opinions.  The reason why it's important to approach Scripture with reverence, is that it has the ability to challenge you.  When you stop reading it as a challenge you lose it's power.
It challenges those who grieve to have hope.
It challenges those who would see justice done to have mercy.
It challenges those who are sure of themselves to be humble.
It it doesn't challenge you in some way, put it down, it's not the right time for you to read it.

And the Results...

I admit that I have developed a bit of an addiction.  Don't worry, it's not the unhealthy, ruin your life kind of addiction, it's an addiction to taking those online personality quizzes that tell you what movie character, or rock singer, or animal, or even what drink you would be if you were a drink (I was a glass of fine wine).
It all started pretty innocently with a simple grid that used the Myers-Briggs personality types.  Since I have taken the MB about a dozen times I know my type: INTP, which on that first little made-up chart, meant that I was Gandalf the Grey, from Tolkien's Middle Earth.  Myers-Briggs uses your affinities and preferences to judge your personality type.  You're supposed to answer the questions based on what you want to do, not actually on what you think you would do.  All of the on line tests that I have taken have been similar in nature to those affinity tests: what would you most like to be/do.
As it turns out, my affinities lead me to be like: Gandalf (LOTR), Yoda (Star Wars), Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter), Jareth (The Goblin King played by David Bowie in Labyrinth), Oscar the Grouch (Sesame Street), Jean Luc Picard (Star Trek, The Next Generation), The Undertaker (Old school WWE wrassler), and assorted and sundry other fictional characters.  As it turns out, these are fairly good indicators of my personality type, almost everyone on that list was one of my favorite characters from their particular part of the fictional landscape.
You can also see that I have a certain affinity for sci-fi and fantasy.
Most of the time, when that little box with my results popped up, I was inordinately happy.  Which means, I suppose, that at nearly 40 years of age, I am finally comfortable with who I am.  Either that or I am missing my calling to become a hermit-wizard.
Far more interesting to me than the fact that I should apparently be working on a much more impressive beard than I currently have, is the rather peculiar joy I feel when I get a result that I like.  It makes me happy to think that I am somehow like the characters that I thought were awesome.  I don't take the results too seriously, thus I easily write off the notion that I ought to live in Wyoming based on a 15 question multiple choice quiz.
What I think keeps me coming back to these quizzes is the identification with a good story.  The character quizzes are the ones I really look for, specifically characters in stories that I like (I don't do the Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey quizzes, I really don't want to know).  When I took the Star Trek TNG quiz, I had some trepidation that I was going to end up as Wesley Crusher, and so I was very pleased and relieved to see Captain Picard in my result.  I know that since the quizzes are affinity based, it's highly unlikely that you would ever get a result that you absolutely hated.  But still... who wants to be Draco Malfoy?
I also found it interesting that with the exception of Picard, almost every character I was identified with is a supporting character, mostly a major supporting character, but never the main protagonist.  I don't really want to be Frodo, Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, they're far too whiny and clean shaven for my liking.
Apparently, I would rather be the person who shows up, says or does something cool/useful/important, and gets along on his way without all the tediousness of self-discovery.
Yet in real life I spend my time writing blogs about what character I got on a stupid facebook quiz...
What would Gandalf do about this?

Specialization

The Church, or at least the American Church, is having an identity crisis.  We don't know what we should be.  This manifests itself in many ways from picky disagreements about style and procedure, to misguided pharisaic zeal.  There are many diagnoses of the cause and often those diagnoses are contradictory: lax morality or over-rigid morality, letting go of our roots or clinging too tightly to tradition, not doing enough or trying to do too much, worship that is too dull or worship that tries too hard to entertain.  The problem is that all the diagnoses have a certain validity.
There is a Narcotics Anonymous group that meets in our church social hall once a week.  They are there in force every week, rain or shine, even last night, when the snow was beginning to fall.  And they can fill our parking lot like it's Sunday morning.  It's tempting, as a church, to look at the 12 step programs with a bit of envy, because they seem to be doing something really valuable: saving lives, changing bad habits, helping people cope with addictions.  There is a certain Jesus-ish quality to their gatherings.  There is a very non-judgmental, supportive sort of ethos to support groups.  You could look at these groups and make a presumption that they are doing God's work of helping the people who are broken and suffering, which they do very well.  You could also envy the way they're doing it on an organic level that doesn't require membership, only commitment, that doesn't build up an institution, only a community.  And you can make a pretty good argument that the church ought to be more like that.
Maybe it should.
A similar argument could be made about charitable organizations, if the church is supposed to engage in charitable work, surely there are more efficient ways of going about it.  Imagine what we could do if we just did away with all the messy arguments and developed a single minded focus on charity.
Did I mention we're having an identity crisis?
We live in a world of specialists.  If you go to a doctor and he or she actually finds something wrong with you, the first thing that happens is a referral to a specialist, for your heart, for your kidneys, for your stomach, for your feet etc, etc, etc.
The good old family doctor is just there to point you in the right direction and sort of oversee your care.  He or she has no pretense of being capable of treating your specific problems as well as a specialist.  I know that if I run into someone fighting addiction, as a pastor I refer them to AA or NA or whatever A group happens to fit their needs.
You think I'm about to say that the church should be like the family doctor, but that would just be contributing to the identity crisis.  We've gotten way too comfortable with the therapeutic model, we have become way too adept at comparing ourselves to all sorts of worldly archetypes that flutter around the edges of the deep reality of what the church actually is.  We are prone to classify things based on what they do, and since the church does often dabble in social work, in activism, in psychotherapy (sometimes disguised as spirituality), in education, in entertainment, in community organizing, and in any number of other good and just pre-occupations, we often identify our problems as being caused by not doing one or another of those things as strenuously as we can.
Jesus said we are Salt and Light, and sometimes, in specific circumstances being those things leads us to do things to help people with their trouble.  The straight fact of the matter is that we are always amateurs and dilettantes at those things and we really can't compete with the specialists, nor should we try.  As long as there are specialists to do the sort of work that, for instance, a 12 step program does, why reinvent the wheel?
The identity crisis has appeared as we cede more and more ground to the specialists and fail to refocus on what we should be.  This question of identity has to hammered upon, repeatedly.  Remember, we define things by their function, but what if, as Jesus seemed to indicate that following him is both a matter of who we are, (i.e. my sheep hear my voice), and what we do (i.e. bearing good fruit).
Perhaps the contradictory nature of the diagnosis is a result of the dual nature of our identity.  Other groups don't have to deal with this complexity, and they are able to succeed because of it.  Some would prescribe the same simplicity for the church: just pick a pill.  Take one and get to work doing things to help people.  Take the other and focus yourself on your own spiritual journey.
It is my conviction that true Christian discipleship only happens when you take both.  It gets complicated to be sure, and it's easy to crave the simplicity of a specialist.
It's a lot harder to live with the tension, trying always to find that balanced identity, which is at the core of Christian discipleship.  An identity that is only revealed when we allow God to shape us and lead us.  An identity that allows us to be found because we are lost, that allows us to be forgiven because we are sinners, that allows us to be resurrected because we are dead.  It is an identity that is necessarily in crisis.  As David Bosch pointed out so well in Transforming Mission, the Chinese character for crisis is created by the characters for danger and opportunity together.
Come to think of it, when you look at the history of the Church, indeed the history of God's people as a whole going back to Abraham, there was always this struggle for identity, always this ongoing crisis of trying to figure out who and what we are created to be.
Support groups might help people deal with a crisis of addiction or grief, charities might help people deal with an economic crisis, doctors might help people deal with a medical crisis.  While the church might dip a toe into those waters from time to time, the essential crisis that we deal with is existential: what are we? Who is God? Is there a purpose for all this mess?
There are no experts in these fields, no easy answers or simple steps, there is only faith, hope, love and a bunch of other people wrestling with the same questions.  That's who we are.

Base Defense

One time my Uncle gave me a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition that contained all sorts of correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and the two explorers.  In that correspondence, I found something that puzzled me: they seemed extremely educated and eloquent, they spoke of the advancement of humanity and the causes of justice and democracy, and yet they also spoke of Native Americans and people of African descent with what I can best describe as glib superiority.  They seemed to think that higher level thinking and true scientific inquiry were the sole province of white males such as themselves.
I wondered, in discussing the book with my Uncle, how it was possible to be so enlightened in some regards and yet seem so benighted in others.  He said, "everyone starts from where they are."  In studying history it is important to remember that fact and allow it to shape how we judge certain characters.  I have heard many people opine about the sore lack of intervention in the atrocities of Nazi Germany, yet if you read the information available to people in the late 1930's and early 1940's you will quickly realize that there was very little clear consensus as to what was actually happening.  History is hard to see while it is happening.
Likewise, popular opinions of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. were far from cognizant of the massive historical impact those two would have on race in this country.
In American Football the game plan is drawn up around two important schemes, sometimes called base offense and base defense.  A "base" is the personnel group and their alignment on the field that is the default.  Everything else: blitz packages, trick plays, alternate formations are variations on that base package.  Most of the plays in any game are run from the base, because it's simply to complicated to always be running a different scheme, especially if you want to move fast to keep the opponent off balance.  The Seahawks powerful defense was successful in large part to the fact that they were able to stay in their base defense most of the time.  They didn't have to rely on tricky schemes or complicated coverage patterns, they just trusted that their guys were bigger, faster and stronger than yours.  They played with swagger and confidence, because of that, and it won them a championship.
Base packages are great, when they work, but when someone finds the flaw, they start to break down.  A few years back the "Tampa Two" base package was popular because the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl and the defense had that same ball-hawking, flesh-eating character as Seattle.  "Tampa Two" is basically played with the two safeties deep, helping corners who play bump and run coverage on the wide receivers, which limits the long throws down the field and keeps the action in front of the defensive backfield.  It relies on good pass rush from the front seven and physical play and sure tackling from everyone, but if it's done well it only has a few weaknesses.  The weaknesses are short passes and plays up the middle of the field to tight ends or running backs, namely the things that the "West Coast offense" is based upon.
American football goes through these trends where things change and the competition adapts, which is largely the way our culture works as well.  Right now, some of our base assumptions are changing with regard to sexual orientation.
The reason why I have been going on about football is because of Michael Sam, a defensive lineman for Missouri, who is most likely going to be playing in the NFL come next fall.  Sam just came out.  If, or rather when, Sam is drafted, he will be the first openly gay NFL player in history (there have been others who came out after their playing careers).  The "base package" for professional football is super machismo.  The notion that a homosexual man could thrive in that culture has seemed almost absurd, yet here we are.
It turns out that Sam told his Missou teammates before the season started, and they accepted him, and they put it behind them and played football.  You hear interviews with them talking about how all they care about is what kind of football player he is, not who he loves.  Apparently Sam is the kind of football player most guys want on their team, which means whatever NFL team he ends up playing for is probably going to react pretty much like Missouri.
This is all over Sportscenter, which I watch in the morning while I'm having coffee and getting the kids ready for school.  Which means that my kids hear all this talk about Michael Sam being gay and what a big deal that is, which means that Caitlyn is going to have questions.  Michele groans when she hears stuff like this on the TV when the kids are around, and I admit, I have a momentary thought as well.  But on the other hand, this is a major issue being dealt with in our culture at the moment, and both our kids are going to be exposed to it sooner rather than later.  They have an older cousin who came out a couple of years ago, this is not something we can or should shelter them from.
So the question was: "What is being gay?"  That's pretty easy, without going into the gory details with an eight year old who thinks anybody kissing is pretty gross.  My answer was pretty straightforward: "it's when a man likes other men instead of women, or a woman likes other women instead of men."  Cate gave one of her patented looks, but I knew this wasn't the first she had ever heard of it.  Then she quickly adapted and said, "Okay, but why does it matter if a football player is gay?"
That's a harder question to answer.
But, I gave it a shot.  I explained that it matters because we shouldn't treat people who are gay any differently than people who are straight (yes I explained what straight was), and that they should be able to play football or do any job they're good at regardless of who they love.  In hindsight, it was a lot easier to explain than erectile dysfunction ads, and she quickly seemed to accept it and move on to whatever it was that caught her eight-year-old mind.
The base is changing rapidly.  It's no longer a question of right or wrong it's a question of why it even matters.  I think we are seeing an attitude in younger generations that is going to make homophobia as irrelevant as the wishbone formation.
At no point in the conversation did I feel like I needed to talk about the bible, all I needed to consider is what I want to teach my daughter.  Do I want to teach her to judge people who are different from her?  Or do I want to teach her to love others, no matter what?
Jesus said, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."  Scribes and pharisees were good at following the law down to the last letter, but they were pretty terrible at really creating a just society where people were free to live to the glory of God.  What I think "exceeding their righteousness" means for us is adapting well to the flaws that have been discovered in our base defense.  Legalism falls flat in the face of love, isn't that largely what Jesus showed us?  He said that what he taught and what he did, did not abolish the law but fulfilled it, which means he showed us what it was really good for.  What it was really for was to establish justice, and make it so that we sinful people could somehow live together in peace and mutual respect.  The fulfillment of the law is ethical injunction to love God and one another, so that stoning people is no longer a necessity, so that casting people out for whatever differences they might have is no longer a practice.
That's what I want to teach my kids.  I want to teach them that the reason why we treat everyone with respect and radical love is because Jesus tells us that's the way.  I don't want them to feel separated from the goodness of God's creation because of some human idea about abominations.
So thanks Sportscenter, for your obsessive overexposure of this whole thing, it has helped teach a lesson.
I think that might be grace at work.

One

The celebrations have been duly observed: we had an open house last week, the congregation wore bow ties last Sunday in honor of the first year of my pastorate at Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church.  Today is the actual one year anniversary of my first Sunday in the pulpit here.  Between moving and adjusting, and adapting to a new place, it barely seems like I've blinked and a year has gone by.
Part of the speed is just the phase of life: we're in the midst of raising two school aged kids and things are just hectic.  Older folks tell us, with a bit of warning: it goes by so fast, to which I say "I know," but I don't really know, because you never really understand things until they pass.
I'm going to turn 40 this year, which doesn't really mean much except for messing with my head.  I remember a time when being 40 seemed about as likely as traveling to Jupiter, but here I am.  What that teaches is me is that other ages that seem unlikely are going to be rolling my way, sooner than I expect them.
I have come to see my life in terms of decades, I spent nearly thirty years getting an education, I graduated from Seminary just shy of my 29th birthday, but I would say that I learned a lot more in the ten years that I spent as a pastor in a rural community in Western Pennsylvania than I did in the ten years that I spent in the systems of higher education.  The past ten years have changed me quite a bit, I have learned to be a father and a pastor.  I have learned what grief really is and I have learned to grieve in public; the first thing is inevitable, the second is a rather peculiar skill indeed.
On my thirtieth birthday I didn't want people to make a fuss, but they did anyway.  On my fortieth, I don't think I'll resent the fuss so much, because I have a sense of how important marking the years actually is.  I don't mean that we need a big hullabaloo (hear me Michele), but I understand that birthdays and anniversaries are moments to celebrate, because we are mortal.
Weird.
We celebrate the passage of time, which ultimately can only remind us that we're getting closer to it's end.  It seems to me that those moments where we celebrate are the designated moments for looking back.  The value in designating them as such is so that we can devote more time and energy to looking forward.
Emerson said, "The years teach us much which the days never know."
That is an elegant way of saying what I'm rambling on about.  I think we have been sold the idea of knowledge, but perhaps not so much wisdom.  Wisdom is not just knowing things, wisdom is being able to put those things into use, and understanding the context of what you know, and how one thing affects another.
There has been so much change in the past year, when I think about it too much I get a bit dizzy, but here I am, and here we go, year two.

Where to begin...

I really don't know where to start, but start here.  It's a blog in response to a blog and a response and another blog and a bunch of comments on the first two blogs, or something like that, and it's more than a commentary on how convoluted interweb dialogue can get.

The subject of all of it, at the core, is the church: what it is, and why we go (or don't go).

I grew up as a pastor's kid, and I'm now a pastor myself, which means that I have spent more than my fair share of time in church.  It also means that I am PAINFULLY familiar with how messed up church can be.  I have been in on messy arguments and ugly debates since I was a kid.  I have absolutely no illusions that the church is perfect...

And yet, it's still something.

When I read Miller's initial moment of realization that he doesn't like singing in church, and not because the music was bad, or old and dead, or new and shallow, but just because he doesn't feel connected to God that way, I was sympathetic.  He is not as alone as he thinks.  I know lots of people who love to sing, who love to sing in church, who will hinge their choice of church on the type and quality of the music more than anything else.  But I also know that music can be a divisive factor that sets people against each other and it can be as off-putting to some as it is attractive to others.  This is NOT a referendum on the music or the musicians, it is simply a fact of human nature, and as I read further into Miller's blog and the comments, and the incredibly defensive response, and some other blogs in response to the defensive response, I realized that there is a big problem here.

I like Donald Miller as a writer, I have read several of his books and they have moved me on some level.  I think he generally gets talked about as a "voice" for modern American Christianity, as do Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, but in this case Miller is not a prophetic voice of modern American Christianity, he is a symptom of the flaws in modern American Christianity, perhaps the single biggest flaw: consumerism.

I find myself flopping that term around a lot, and I suppose I need to be intellectually accountable for defining what I mean by it.  This is my personal perspective, not entirely original, but mine all the same.  Consumerism, as it relates to religion, is the quest for a faith community that does what you want.  

There is an innate religious impulse in the human soul, and there is no guarantee that that impulse will lead to God or Jesus, in fact, the biblical narrative seems to indicate that, left to our own devices, we will all eventually run headlong into idolatry of one form or another, which is why, even in the covenant of grace, we still need the law and the prophets to call us back from that entirely interior impulse.

We define right and wrong largely by what works for us, we define terms (as I just did) in a way that suits our perspective.  Our perspective is made up of more assumptions than most of us care to count or even consider.  If we were to carefully evaluate every last feeling and thought, we would be utterly paralyzed, so we take shortcuts, we make leaps of faith, and we build houses on the sand.

We are immensely skillful in justifying our assumptions, even after they have been washed away by the tide.  We can rationalize our selfish desires with all sorts of spiritual and psychological talk: I just don't learn that way, I'm just not being fed, it just doesn't speak to me.  We will completely convince ourselves that surely God wants us to be: happy, fulfilled, blessed, and satisfied, but we're essentially seeking after our own desires, with some language that tries to cover that sin in sanctimonious talk.

What would be better is to admit that they are essentially selfish desires and see where that takes you.  It may not take you back to church, but at least you're not fooling yourself.

Churches in the west are deeply complicit in this aspect of selfishness and sin.  We compete with each other to be the most attractive congregation, we tailor our programs and our liturgy to draw people who are not getting what they want somewhere else.  The sad fact is that most churches grow by attracting people who have become displeased with other churches.  And an even sadder fact is that people, who proclaim faith in Jesus Christ, are simply wandering out on their own.

My question about all this is really: what can we do?

It seems rather intractable.  I think that Jesus' parable about the sheep hearing his voice is applicable, but it can lead to fatalism among church leaders, who basically have many of the same assumptions as the people who leave their communities.  We basically think that we need to cater to religious consumers, honestly I'm not sure we have much of a choice.

I'm sure God has an answer for all this, I'm praying for ears to hear.

Observational Observations

I watched the whole thing.  The whole debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham.  Happily, Bill Nye is every bit the man I thought he was.  Unfortunately, so is Ken Ham.  If you read my post yesterday, you know I had hoped for a debate that would add to and enrich the dialogue between science and religion.
That did not really happen, and it's not Bill Nye's fault.  In fact, @TheScienceGuy practically bent over backwards to be deferential to an obviously partisan audience at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  In my opinion, he was a little too nice to them.  He allowed Ham to repeatedly get away with rhetorical monkey business and hide behind ridiculous cliches.  I think he had decided ahead of time, just not to be the rabid, anti-god, anti-religion character that so many of the young earth creationists expected him to be, and for that I admire him even more now than I did yesterday.
Nye stuck to his guns, and kept hammering at a single premise: "Is Ken Ham's model of young earth creationism viable?"  Meaning specifically can it make predictions about the world we live in, because after all that is the purpose of science in the first place.  It's not just inventing useful things like the MRI, which Ham gleefully and repeatedly pointed out was invented by a young earth creationist.  In fact, that was one place where Ham repeatedly tried to take refuge: the fact that a handful of actual scientists actually do subscribe to young earth creationism, as if that somehow validates the whole mess as a genuine statement of fact.  Henry Ford was a rather outspoken anti-semite and before WWII broke out was known to admire Adolf Hitler, which doesn't mean he was somehow less of an innovator, but it does mean that he was a bit of a whack job.  The argument, that because some people with a Ph.D agree with your craziness does not make it sanity.  If that was the case Scientology would be true.
Ham has fairly clearly painted himself into a corner by insisting on the young earth aspect of creationism.  Let me be clear, I believe that there is a Creator God, who is the Author of all that is, I am not, in any sense a pure scientist.  I believe the Bible is the source of our knowledge of the Creator God, and a vehicle of divine revelation.  But it is not a science textbook.
Every time Ham trotted out his rather obnoxious cliche: "there's a book," I wanted to "tag in" to the argument, because while I defer to my bow-tie-brother on the science stuff, I think Ham needs some straightening out about the Bible, and that's sort of my thing.  Ham even went so far as to say that he understood that the Bible contained different kinds of literature, including poetry, and that obviously we interpret poetry (by which I gather he meant the Psalms) a little differently, than we do prose.  He said he did that.  At which point I was gripping the arms of my chair to keep from yelling at the computer screen: "Genesis 1 IS A FREAKING POEM!"  Seriously, it is.  Obviously, it is.  In Hebrew, it has rhyme and meter and even a few puns.  Even in English, where it has been largely changed to prose, it still has certain elements of verse.  It was also composed, even by the most conservative estimates, sometime after the time of Moses, which means, if you're going to do all the addition of lives and generations that Ham is so fond of in dating the world, that it was actually written at least a THOUSAND YEARS after Adam and Eve, and that's a low estimate.
Which leads me to another annoying cliche that Ham kept tossing out there: we can't really know what happened in the past because "we weren't there."  So I guess Moses or whoever wrote Genesis one, by virtue of not being an eyewitness, really should have just kept their mouth shut.  Or maybe not, because actually we know a lot of stuff that we didn't actually observe.  I wasn't there to watch the Declaration of Independence being signed, but I'm reasonably sure it happened.
Ham is so sure that the Bible should trump scientific observation that he willfully ignores a whole lot, yet as a student of the Scripture, I was painfully aware that he doesn't even understand the book that he's making his ultimate authority as well as a first year seminary student.  He conflated the New and Old Testament, switched hermeneutic principles midstream, he even at one fairly embarrassing juncture, said that Christianity was the only religion that "has a book" that explains how the world was made.  At which point, I gripped the arm of my chair again, because the part that does that, ISN'T EVEN OUR PART OF THE BIBLE!  It was the Torah, a long time before we started calling it the Old Testament.  Not only that, but besides the Jews who wrote it, a whole bunch of Muslims think it's pretty keen too.  Besides all that, almost every culture on the face of the earth has some version of a creation story.  The Aborigines in Ham's native Australia have this amazing story about the Dreamtime, Babylonians had Marduk slaying the giant world creature Tiamat and making everything out of her entrails, Native American Tribes have literally hundreds of origin stories involving different deities, and the stories are fascinating and powerful, and not at all meant to be perceived as scientific truth.
Neither was Genesis 1, it wasn't thought of as scientific truth by the fairly primitive people who first told the story around the fires at the base of Mount Sinai, it was simply a statement of faith and trust in a God who has made us in His image.  I'm fairly certain that Jesus himself, standing in the Jewish tradition that had held Genesis as a sacred account of the covenant between the Creator and creation for thousands of years, didn't read Genesis 1 the way Ham would like us to.  How do I know this?  Because they wrote down what they thought of stuff, some of which made it into other parts of Scripture, some of which came to be called Mishnah, but all of which was painstakingly argued and debated at length.
But the most telling moment of the whole debate for me, came when Ham was asked to respond to an audience question that went something like this: "What if it was proven that the earth was older than 10000 years old?  Would you still believe in God?"
Ham dodged the question, utterly dodged it, refused to even deal with the hypothetical.  In that moment, I knew he had lost, and I felt a little bit bad for him.  Nye had been ever so careful not to attack him, or call his beliefs absurd, he had steadfastly steered the course of scientific observation instead of ad-hominem attack, he had even said, in response to a question about where human consciousness came from: "I don't know."  Nye was not responsible for Ham's biggest failure: his own unwillingness to admit that his perspective might be wrong.
I felt bad for Ken Ham at that moment, even as I was angry with him for being so pig-headed.  I realized that he was literally trapped by his own stubborn insistence on taking the expansive truth about God's creative action and cramming it into his twisted little scheme.  Nye was free, free to say, "I don't know,"  free to enjoy the majesty and the mystery of the universe and actually free to encounter a loving Creator in those things.  Ham was stuck in a benighted state of understanding, which for all his science-ish evidence and concurring Ph.D's is essentially less enlightened than the attitude of the bronze age nomads who originally said the words "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth..." except, you know, in Hebrew, which went something like this:
Berashath bara elohim ath shemayim yath ha-eretz.
Beautiful?  Yes!
True? Yes!
Scientific? Not so much.

Creation in the Balance

Tonight something really interesting is going to happen.  Bill Nye, the Science Guy, fellow bowtie afficianado, is going to debate Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum about the origins of life on this planet.
You know that feeling that you used to get in grade school whenever there was a fight a brewin' between two kids in your class.  It's a mixture of excitement and fear.  I have that now.
Honestly, I'm rooting for the science guy, because I believe that the truth about God's creative power is much bigger than Creation Science wants to allow it to be.  I want science to go on being science so that we, created in the image of God, can always grow in our awareness of the wonder of creation.
Most of all though, I want it to be a fully realized dialogue and debate, I want the two men to be honorable in their rhetoric and consistent in their arguments, but I'm afraid it will degenerate into a simple spouting of dogma.  That's what gives me the fear.
When I say the phrase "spouting of dogma," I know you think I'm just talking about the religious guy, especially since I just basically endorsed Bill Nye as my personal rooting interest.  But I'm not, I am aware that so-called "scientific" positions are rather often as dogmatic as their religious foils.  Especially when it comes to evolution and other things where the body of knowledge that we have accumulated runs into the mystery of what we do not yet know.  When that border is encountered we often have to step out in faith in order to cross it.
There's a poignant scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, there's this moment in a field in the Shire where Sam Gamgee pauses for a moment and reflects that with the next step he takes he will cross a line, a line that exists only in his heart.  With his next step, he will be farther from home than he has ever been.  Sam marks the moment with a bit of a pause for a moment of trepidation.  It's an appropriate thing really, to have a bit of reluctance about blind progress.  Science rarely takes those moments, which is why we need religion and ethics, because they do take those moments.  It's important though that Sam takes the step, progress continues.
I believe that science and religion need each other to keep our society in balance.  There must be something that pulls us forward and there must be something that gives us roots.  Visions of society where one element is lacking are ultimately dystopian.
My hope is that Nye can be respectful of that balance, even as his zeal for science powers a rational presentation of facts.  I also hope that Ham doesn't come across as too backwards and anti-intellectual, because he is representing the Body of Christ.  I'm conscious, as a Presbyterian, that I stand in a particular part of the Body, part that values education, and scientific inquiry as well as the mystery of God.  I am also conscious that many other parts of the body do not have the same perspective as I do, and as part of a connected whole, I should not despise them.
I don't so much want Ham to lose, as I want him to learn, to grow, to open his mind and his heart to a new thing.  I also would like him to engage Nye in a way that will show "The Science Guy" that God is not his adversary.  The worst thing that could happen for all of us is that the two of them would simple construct dogmatic fortresses and hurl insults over the wall.
I'm hoping it will be different, I'm hoping the debate itself may show some signs that the human species is not done evolving.
Here's to hope.

And Furthermore...

Michele said my last post just kind of stopped mid rant.  It never did really "drive home" I suppose, because I got to that part about certainty, because it was Sunday afternoon, my brain was just about toasted, and that seemed like a decent enough insight for one afternoon.  But I also trailed off because I was about to get to something really rather painful that relates to that insight.  Namely that it is an insight, not something I was born knowing; I have learned that in order to save your life you must lose it.  In order to be humble before God you need to stop telling him all of the things you think you know.
At one point, I thought I knew a lot about God, I was flush with knowledge and theological insight, and I thought that being right with God was just being right about God.  I had entirely compartmentalized my experience of God as the sort of character that comes and finds a strung out college student who had been determinedly anesthetizing themselves for months, from the God that I had learned about in Seminary.  I was full of thoughts about covenant, and grace, and revelation, and doctrine, and the historical origins and development of doctrines, and I was trying to apply all those things to the rather peculiar vocation of being a pastor in a small town, and really, if I'm honest, I thought I had it all figured out.
Then my brother died.
And a whole bunch of stuff I thought I knew about God got picked up and put in the blender.
I had spent a lot of time and energy, thinking about and working through this cultural/countercultural dance that Christianity is waltzing through right now.  I had ideas about "biblical" standards, and would engage, a bit too enthusiastically, in debates about homosexuality, or the nature and person of Jesus, or biblical interpretation, and have absolutely no reservations that I might actually be wrong, or not have thought things through, because I had thought them through, or I thought I had thought them through.
The dark night of the soul that was described by John of the Cross was a theory until that moment, then it became undeniably real.  At least in one way: whenever I tried to access the nature of this pain through the lens of intellect, I got nothing, God was entirely absent.  The Deity that had seemed so compelling during my theological education refused to make an appearance.  But I can't say that God was absent, it's just that the God who kept showing up was the rather less impressive God who had sat on the edge of my dorm room bunk with me years ago, before seminary, before being a reverend, before I knew so damn much about everything.  Some of you might know this God, the One who shows up and listens to all your questions and your anger and sits there while you rant and rave without really saying or doing a whole lot.
The dialogue goes something like this:
"Why don't you do something about this?" you ask, perhaps shouting.
"I am doing something," God replies.
"What are  you doing?"
"Sitting here with you."
"Is that it?"
"What else do you want?"

It's rather infuriating... and also the only thing that helps even a little bit.  There are no deep secrets of the universe bandied about.  Doctrine and dogma have absolutely no meaning, the only thing that matters is presence.
I guess I'm kind of thick headed, because I always forget this about God, until something really bad goes down.  I got another reminder when I had to deal with a man killing his wife and little girls.  I had counseled the couple, I had emptied my therapeutic and spiritual toolbox into them, and yes I had prayed, we had prayed together, we were not just doing psychotherapy in a church.  I thought I had done the best I could, but the problem was bigger than me.  I had to come to the conclusion, as I had when Jon died, that sometimes evil wins.
I really expected to stand in front of the casket of those two little girls and utterly lose my faith... it was terrifying because I would then have to climb into a pulpit and be the reverend again.  I shouldn't have worried.  I should have known He would be there.
Not the god of good communication practices and therapeutic counseling.
Not the god of why bad things happen to good people.
Not the god of answers and certainty.
It was the God who will sit at the edge of the void with you and say absolutely nothing.
That is the God who is worth knowing.
That is the God who has saved me from dissolution and destruction.
That is the God who has saved me from being a self-righteous prick.
That is the God who has saved me from thinking I can do it on my own.
That is the God who has saved me from emptiness and futility.
That is the only God I ever want to talk about.

Getting to the bottom, or the beginning, or the whatever

Having kids exposes you to all sorts of things, germs for one, but also the sort of virulent question that sets aside everything you think you know and forces you to actually think.  I was actually thinking about the lines of questioning that kids can get you on when they start thinking about really big ideas.  Questions like, "what was before the earth?"  I can kind of answer that, because I've watched those shows on the discovery channel that talk about how planets are formed, or at least the theory attached to the process.  But since I'm a pastor, I have exposed my children to all sorts of God stuff, and I am also a sort of authority on God stuff, meaning that I've done enough theological explorations that I have essentially stopped asking the really good questions, and contented myself with knowing what people like Karl Barth or John Calvin or Thomas Aquinas thought about things.
Kids mess with that.
"What was before God?"  And you need to know that you can't start giving lectures about the Nicene Creed and the pre-existence of the Trinity.  It's not going to answer their question.  It doesn't really answer that question, it simply states something that we have come to accept as fact, but what if we don't just accept it?
In reading things written by Atheists, I have come to the conclusion that no one has really debunked the notion of God.  Some have, rather compellingly, skewered religion.   They have held up our anthropomorphic idea of God to a certain amount of ridicule, but then again, perhaps the vision that most of us have of God as some sort of cosmic grandfather, who hands out treats if you're good and whuppins if you're bad, is rather laughable.
God runs away from us when we investigate with our scientific tool kits.  When we discover that the world is much older than Genesis would indicate, God can still say, "of course it is, that's just a story."  When we plumb the mysteries of the creation of the universe and think we understand something like the big bang, God can still say, as Wendell Berry has so nicely put it: "What banged, and before it banged where was it?"
That is an inescapable barrier to our knowledge, because even without the ever expanding (and perhaps someday contracting) collection of matter and energy that we know as the universe, there had to be something.  If time had a beginning (and maybe an end), there is still something that we still, rather imprecisely, call infinity, or even less precisely, eternity.
This is stuff you really can't think about too long without your brain telling you to knock it off.  It's not something that can be investigated scientifically, because the only thing we have that qualifies as evidence exists in time and is made up of matter and energy, they are observable, measurable and they make up what we call our experience of the universe.  To claim, as many religions do, there is something outside of that experience is heresy to scientific dogmatism in the same way that saying there is no God is to those who believe.
When we retreat into dogma, our questions go bye-bye, which is bad for religion, but it is fatal for science.  Every time I hear Richard Dawkins or even Stephen Hawking, triumphantly proclaim that they have proven God does not exist, it makes me sad.  Not because I want them to believe the way I believe, but because, in claiming such a thing they have failed as scientists. They have stopped asking questions, and asking questions is what they are always supposed to do.
We religious types need to ask more questions as well.  Certainty is death to a living relationship with our Creator.  There are questions that need to be asked, whether you believe in God or not.  There is a reality to be dealt with, no matter what approach you choose to use.  I like a universe with God in it, better than I like the alternative, therefore I find belief preferable to non-belief.  I feel no tension between believing that we can learn things about reality from Genesis and from Darwin.  Unless you are insisting t hat you absolutely know the answer, asking new question never hurt anyone.