Time, the Universe and Everything

Wendell Berry on the theory of the Big Bang as the origin of the universe:

1. What banged?

2. Before banging how did it get there?

3. When it got there where was it?

      -Leavings (2010)

I have to confess, I am a bigger fan of poetry than of science, but I'm curious and I find scientific inquiry to be a fascinating field.  But I guess I have enough of an "outside" perspective on the world of science to notice when science rather glaringly ceases to be science.  Such was the case as I watched a show about Stephen Hawking and his opinions about the universe on the science channel last evening.  Hawking is a brilliant mind and a remarkable story.  He has pushed the envelope of human knowledge while being confined to a wheelchair for over 50 years and slowly losing his capacity for movement, speech and nearly everything but the smallest movements of his eye. The fact that he is alive and functioning is a wonder of science and technology.
I do not question Hawking's credibility as a scientist, or as a genius.  I do question his credibility as a theologian, which apparently is his latest field of endeavor.  Quite frankly, he's not very good at it.
Hawking claims that he has disproved the existence of God by determining that the big bang could have taken place by the random appearance in nothingness of something, that then exploded and formed the universe as we know it.  He speculates that since, we think, time ceases to exist in a black hole, black holes somehow give us a glimpse into what there was before there was something and ergo before there was something there was no time.  The Science channel says there is very sophisticated mathematical proof of this fact, that we probably can't understand.
I have no doubt that there is sophisticated mathematical proof, and I am sure that I probably can't understand it.  I am willing to accept that, in the nothingness of a black hole, there is no time, not just that time stops, but that it doesn't exist.  I've watched Dr. Who for a really long time, I get it, the universe is amazing.  I will even cede the point that time began with the big bang (yeah, I'll give you the whole theory), but then Hawking makes a leap of faith that is rather mysterious for a man of science: the absence of time before the big bang means there is no god...
Really?
That's an interesting correlation to draw.  He said something like, there was no time for God to create the universe.  Okay... hmmm.
The first thing is that Hawking seems to have discovered a very old theological debate: the chain of causation/ first cause inquiry.  I hate to burst the bubble of such an eminent mind, but a bunch of primitive folks who still thought the earth was flat have pretty much put that to bed as a serious challenge to the existence of God.  Subsequently the search for God as a sort of "first cause" has generally been found to be rather bad theology, because it assumes that God exists in the same physical universe that we do, which indeed would make it rather difficult for God to create said universe.
I'm not going to just shout, "TRANSCENDENCE!" and disappear back inside my faith bubble though.  I am going to note that my introduction to systematic theology course included a rather in depth look at the idea of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing.  The definition of nothing being rather a tricky proposition, because we in fact are something, our universe, even the vast empty space and the mysterious blackness of black holes, is in fact something.  Because we really have no way of defining absolute nothingness, we can only really come to the edge of the void and see that which we do not understand.  Some people look into the void and say, "Aha! That proves there is nothing there!  Look at all that nothing!  There can't possibly be something there!" That, apparently, is what Hawking has done.  He has got his wheelchair to the edge of the void and sees nothing, and refuses to admit the possibility of something that he doesn't see.
The problem with that approach is not found in theology, but in science.  Science is constantly pushing the edge of the void farther and farther back.  Einstein uncovered a reality that pushed the edge of the void significantly farther back than Newtonian physics had thought possible, and now quantum physics is challenging the "edge" that Einstein set.
I am of the opinion (and that is honestly what it is, an opinion), that no matter how far we push back the boundary of the void, the only thing that will always remain unknowable is God.  God is outside time, because God is the author of time.  Proving that time had a beginning is not to disprove God.
I have long found that no matter how much we may try to challenge faith, human beings are inherently wired to put our faith in something.  People like Hawking and Richard Dawkins want to say that they put their faith in science.  If that were true they would not be Atheists, who say there is absolutely no God, no transcendence.  If you want to put your faith in science, you cannot say that something does not exist, you can only describe things that are observable and measurable within the bounds of time and space, which is what science, by definition, does.
True scientists should leave the mystery of God well enough alone, unless they want to try their hand at theology.  If so, they ought to go take at least an introductory course in systematic theology so they don't end up sounding like a fool or a megalomaniac.

Confronting the Bigness

You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.

-Jesus, John 12:8 NIV

Within hours of reading the text for Sunday, which includes the above comment, I had some poor people sitting in my office asking for help.  Not a surprising event for the pastor of a church.  I know for a fact that they are making the rounds to the local churches trying to get the help they need, and I know they've got big problems, bigger problems than I can fix.

What I try to do is find out how to help, without just shoving some cash in their hand and sending them on their way.  In this case, we could pay for a couple nights in a motel, to postpone homelessness.  I can maybe point them in the direction of agencies that have the resources to help them, but I have no idea if they will truly qualify or if they will even follow through.  I have no idea if they're telling me the truth.  I have no idea if their situation is as dire as it sounds, or if their efforts to pull themselves up are in earnest.

But they are pretty surely poor, and pretty surely down on their luck, and pretty likely to stay that way.

We gave them two days.  Depending on your point of view, it's either just a drop in a dry well, or just enough to see them through the desert, they seemed to think the latter.

Confronting poverty is a discouraging experience, even when you can help a little, you never feel like you've really done any good, because the problem is quite simply enormous.

When Jesus said, "you will always have the poor among you," he knew what he was saying.  The world is just like that, the reality of limited resources mingles with bad luck and bad decisions, and stirs around in societal and economic systems and some people always seem to get drowned in the stormy seas.

I wish I had one of those "silver and gold I have none, but what I have I give to you," moments where I could just fix the problem, but I didn't.  I just paid their motel bill until Thursday, and I will pray for them.

Even if I gave them all the money in the Good Samaritan Fund, they'd still be poor, they'd still be on the bottom of the whirlpool with the weight of inequity and generations of poverty pressing them down.

Maybe they were grifters, maybe they were taking advantage of the charity of the church, maybe they will just move on down the street and repeat their story and someone else will give them some more.

So be it.

They are the poor, honest or not.  They may not be noble, but they will always be with us.

My only hope and prayer is that, in some way, I faithfully represented Christ to them.  Maybe the other churches they visit will do the same.  Maybe through all those people being a little like Jesus, they will make it through another week of hard times.

Confessions of a Consumer

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ode to W.H. Auden

I've always known there was a lot more to life than things.
I've never considered myself much of a materialist, but lately I have had to come to grips with the reality that I just have way too much stuff.  Not only stuff, but services, some of which go with the stuff, some of which are stand alone things.  Michele was talking about her grandfather this morning; how he would pay cash for almost everything (even cars, which is hard for me to imagine) and probably didn't even have a credit card.
I considered the fact that tomorrow morning I am going to speak with an accountant because, with a mortgage and taxes and all sorts of new, complicated financial realities, I feel ill equipped to cope.  I need professional help in dealing with the money I make and spend and what I owe to the government.  being a grown up is hard a lot of the time.
I started thinking about how much money we spend in a month, I didn't want to, I just did.
I started thinking about how a good chunk of the money goes simply to try and buy some sense of security for all the stuff I own: health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, now homeowners insurance.
Insurance didn't used to be a thing that your average, ordinary person had.  These days it would be stupid and in some cases illegal to do without it.
Probably because we have so much stuff that we "can't live without."
I also "can't live without" a cell phone, high speed internet and 400 TV channels (with HD), even though, for most of my life I lived without all those things (funny how necessity just seems to creep up on you).  I realized that I send more dollars to Verizon every month than people in some parts of the world earn in a year, and that doesn't make me feel very good. We are decidedly middle of the road when it comes to material wealth.  We don't just throw money around and we try to live within our means, but because I live in a nation that consumes way more than a decent share of the world's resources on a per-capita level, I know I need to periodically take stock of what I have in order to get some perspective.
That perspective can be sobering, and depressing.
It doesn't do any good to feel guilty about it (but I do anyway).
I begin to see that when Jesus told that rich young ruler to give away everything he had, he wasn't just being a jerk, he was trying to save that guy from his stuff.  Stuff can get a good strong grip on you, and it doesn't like to let go.  That man didn't have to give away everything in order to follow Jesus, he needed to give away everything in order to be free from a trap.
Before Michele starts to hyperventilate, I'm not planning on selling everything and dropping out of society.  Sometimes you just need to contemplate the possibility of such a radical step, and think about how much you want and what you actually need.  The thing is, most of the time, you get those two categories terribly, inextricably confused.
In a few months, I am going to be walking away from most of my stuff, at least for a week or so.  I am very much looking forward to that.  But I have already started to make a list of things I need for my walk on the Camino de Santiago.  Believe me, the irony of buying fancy gear to take on pilgrimage is not lost on me, but somehow or other, I can't help myself.  I NEED those new boots, I NEED those fancy hiking pants with zip off legs, I need a solar charger for my cell phone... dear LORD please have mercy on this sinner.

Now There Were Some Present...

Sometimes an idea overflows what will fit in a sermon.
So this morning, I've got my sermon in the book and ready for tomorrow, but there's this little snip from the Gospel lesson that is stuck in my craw.  Some of what sticks probably isn't going to make it into the sermon, this blog is like the deleted scenes on a DVD.
The inciting incident in Luke 13: 1-9 is the fact that the Romans had "mingled the blood" of some Galileans with their sacrifices to their pagan gods.  This probably means that they had put some captured revolutionaries to death in a religious rite.  The Romans had a reputation for this sort of terror, not only killing people but making a statement while doing so, kind of like Kevin Spacey's character in Seven, but on a much larger scale.  As a matter of fact, crucifixion was their favorite form of brutal, humiliating execution, but they probably got bored with that sometimes.  Also, being pagans, human sacrifice holds a certain grim promise of favor with blood thirsty deities.
Luke 13 begins with "some" people telling Jesus about Pilate and the Romans, probably expecting that he would get a good righteous head of steam and start really laying into the Roman Empire.  There are always "some" people who really seem to enjoy hearing about how the wrath of God is finally going to come down on "the world," meaning all those other humans who are not us.
Jesus does rather the opposite.  Instead of railing against those wicked Romans, he starts talking about how being slaughtered by Rome or having a tower collapse on your head is really not a sign that God is angry with you.  Things like this are going to happen, it's just how the fallen world works.
Jesus somehow manages to turn the whole conversation around on those "some" who were present, telling them that THEY should repent.
Now, this is not the kind of thing that wrath of God types usually enjoy very much.  The next time someone starts talking to you about how the world is really going down the tubes, how morals are shot, how God has forsaken us because we (insert favorite categorical moral failing here).  Try telling them that none of that really matters and what really needs to happen is that they need to repent of making God as fickle, stupid and narrow-minded as they are.  Yeah, because that's what Jesus did.  I don't imagine he made too many new friends that day.
I suppose it goes right along with the whole: take the log out of your own eye, before worrying about the speck in your neighbor's eye, dynamic.  However, this seems to kick it up a notch.  Jesus seems to accept that Rome will always be around.  He equates Pilate's brutality to the random tragedy of a tower collapsing.  He calls people to see a reality where God can help us all rise above that sort of mess.
The idea that, if you're faithful, God will be "on your side," is attractive, but it's ultimately an idol.  The reality of this world is that bad stuff happens to good people, the rain falls on the fields of the just and the unjust alike.  The reality of this world is that deranged people walk into elementary schools and start shooting, they fly planes into buildings, they kill their own children.  We might cry out to God for justice, but we need to learn to see how clearly, firmly and infuriatingly God refuses to take vengeance.  Instead God takes his place with the victims.  We find God under the rubble of the collapsed towers, we find the blood of Christ poured out on a Roman cross.
Strangely enough, I find that much more comforting and useful in dealing with the reality of the world, than the vain hope that someday God is going to stand up to all the bullies and dictators and put an end to all the tragedy in the world.  I find much more hope in the reality that God wants to be known by me, than in the ultimately pagan presumption that I can figure God out.  I can trust a God who loves me much more fully than I can trust a God who is only concerned with winning some cosmic duel with evil and chaos.

Maybe some of that will make it in the sermon after all.

Missio Dei

Many will see, and fear and put their trust in the Lord. -Psalm 40: 3b

I am putting together an order of service for my installation as the Teaching Elder at Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church.  It is my second installation.  The first was almost ten years ago in Plumville, but that seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  It is more difficult this time around, which is weird, because things like this usually get easier, but being a Pastor is a peculiar thing.  I know a lot more about what I am getting into this time around, but that actually makes picking the pieces of the service more difficult.

Fresh out of seminary, ministry was a great unknown, and I had visions of the great call stories of the Hebrew Scriptures: Abraham, Moses, David and Isaiah.  I felt the call of the Disciples and Saul's encounter on the Damascus road resonating in my soul, but as I really considered the rich variety of scripture to use in the service on March 10, 2013, I realized that none of that has very much to do with what I am really about as a Pastor.

What I have come to realize over the past ten years is that very little of this calling has to do with voices from heaven, burning bushes and visions of seraphim.  Mostly it involves confronting your own brokenness and still having the audacity to get up and preach the Word to the congregation.  Mostly it involves the constant awareness of how much God can do with the little bit that you can actually give.  Mostly it involves looking down fully expecting to see a miry pit and seeing instead a solid rock.

So, yeah, Psalm 40 is going to be the first scripture reading, I'm not sticking it off in the corner like we do with Psalms so often, I'm giving it the place it deserves.  It's going to be there instead of Moses, Elijah or Isaiah, it's going to be the prelude to the Gospel, because it is the story of my life and my ministry.

Psalm 40 was the first scripture I read after my own Damascus road encounter.  Why? Simple, because U2 sang it as a rock song (no pun intended).  I would like to tell you that my journey of faith is always intentional and well organized, but most of the time it's not.  Most of the time I just stub my toe on what God is trying to do and then do my best to act like I meant to do it.  It started with reading a Psalm, not because I was so in tune to the Spirit that I knew just where to turn, but because I thought U2 was awesome and I remembered that they sang 40 on Under a Blood Red Sky.  Deep spirituality right there.

But as it turns out, Psalm 40 is a pretty good description of my journey, my ministry and my life.  It acknowledges that I am nowhere without the Lord.  In this dance with the Spirit that we call ordained ministry, I mostly just try not to trip over my own feet.

Heavy is the Head that wears the Mitre

So Benedict XVI is going back to being just plain old Joseph Ratzinger.  The Bishop of Rome is resigning, which hasn't happened much and hasn't happened at all in a very long time.  I don't know why, as a protestant, I care about this, but I do.
Maybe it's because I'm a Church history geek.  Maybe it's because no matter whether we are Catholic, Orthodox or protestant, Calvinist, Anabaptist or Arminian, we are all part of the Body of Christ.  Maybe it's just because I hate to see a pastor get burnt out, no matter how big his hat is.
Benedict was filling some big shoes.  John Paul II was a beloved figure, even as a protestant, I liked him.  He preached and worked for justice in the world, and he walked the walk, he forgave a man who shot him.  Karol Wojtyla faithfully occupied the Holy See until he went to be part of the church triumphant.
It seemed to me that Ratzinger was a substantial change in direction from his predecessor.  He was known as a conservative, a rigorous theologian and defender of the faith.  Even physically he did not appear as benevolent as JPII.
It is interesting that this man, who had a reputation for being carved out of rock, is the first Pope to resign in over half a millennium.  Reading his statement, I think he's doing the right thing.  He's doing something that takes guts: walking away because you know you can't cut it.  Knowing your weaknesses is a sign of a really mature personality.  For someone with the drive and determination to climb the hierarchy and become the successor of St. Peter, walking away can't have been easy.
It seems to me that Benedict's biggest problem, other than not being cute and cuddly like JPII, was that he is a symbol of a way of being church that has long since passed and gone.  The Roman Catholic church still moves vitally in the world, but it doesn't seem to be because of the institution with it's pomp and circumstance.  Rather, it seems that the grass roots of the church are managing to go on into the future, despite the aging, gold encrusted white males that come and go as Bishops, Cardinals and Pope.
We protestants, particularly American Protestants should take heed.  We have become a little too dependent on figureheads of late, whether it is Billy Graham or Rick Warren, Jerry Falwell or Rob Bell, Christianity does not thrive well with anyone at the head other than Christ himself.
Benedict was far less of a cult of personality than his predecessor, but maybe that is a fairly good legacy to leave with.  Maybe he clears the way for the Church to recover it's mission and do something really radical, like pick a non-European or maybe even someone who isn't going to be ready for a nursing home in five years.  Big dreams, I know.
All the same best wishes and prayers go out to @pontifex, for the ministry he did with the time he was given.

Settling in

And you may say to yourself "Well, how did I get here?"

The Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

I am sitting in my new office. My first sermon for Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church is written and ready for tomorrow.  I am slowly getting my life in the new place put in order.

But it's still a little hard to wrap my mind around.

Less than a week ago I was in Pennsylvania, where I had lived and worked for ten years.

No matter how good and right your reasons are, moving still puts something out of joint.

One of my long term goals is to establish healthy patterns in life and so I'm trying to start out that way.

This whole week has been like watching one of those computer animated sequences where something flies apart and then snaps back together.  I don't know when the feeling of being whirled around is going to stop for more than a few moments, but this is one of those moments.
It's a breezy, sunny Saturday morning in Southern Maryland.  I know that somewhere to the north people are digging out after a big old blizzard, but the world of snow and ice seems rather far removed, but it wouldn't have last Saturday, and I guess that's what's strange, that so much has changed in such a short time.  It's not just the weather either, it's a whole different feeling to life.
It's been rather a long time since I did something new, because mostly, I don't like new.
New things can bedazzle you with their shininess, but they haven't stood the test of time.  I think of all the things we threw away in the process of moving.  All the junk we had accumulated, all the stuff that weighed us down, that we really didn't need.
Life gets like that sometimes, you just start to take on baggage, whether you want to or not, and before too long you start to feel smothered.  But you're comfortable with your baggage, you're attached to your stuff, it seems rather hard to let go.  Then you land in a new world and it's got some challenges to be sure, and maybe they're not that different than the old challenges, but you've left some baggage behind, you've gotten rid of some of the clutter and you feel different.
For any of the Plumville/Atwood folks who might read this, you are not the clutter or the baggage, what I'm talking about here is a spiritual condition that crept up on me.  It was my fault, and it probably made me less effective as your Pastor.  It has actually taken the move for me to see it clearly.
Here's to new beginnings.