Saturday Night Theologian
31 January 2010

Jeremiah 1:4-10 (first published 1 February 2004)

When the Academy Award nominees were announced this week, Keisha Castle-Hughes received a nomination for best actress in a leading role for her portrayal of Pai in Whale Rider. Keisha is the youngest person ever to receive that honor. Even more astounding is the fact that this was her very first role in a movie. In the movie, Pai is born into a family of Maori chiefs; the only problem is that she's a girl, and chiefs are always men. Nevertheless, she is determined to learn what it means to be a chief, and over the course of the movie she wins the admiration of her town and of the person she admires most, her grandfather. Although she is young, she understands her people's need for a common purpose better than anyone else. In many ways, she is a prophet to her people. Jeremiah was young when he had his first encounter with God. He resisted that call, because he believed that his youth and inexperience disqualified him from service. Age neither qualifies nor disqualifies a person from serving God. The Bible is full of instances of God using the very young and the very old to achieve the divine purpose. Certainly experience is a valuable commodity, but the divine compulsion is equally important, if not more so. Those of us who are adults frequently look down our noses at the young, dismissing their critiques of our message and our culture. The examples of both Jeremiah and Pai remind us that the young sometimes have a more acute understanding of God and God's will than more senior members of a community. Perhaps the reason is that young people tend to be more tuned into the present, while the older we get, the more likely we are to live in the past. If so, we need to remember the words of Jesus: "God is not a God of the dead, but of the living." When young people talk, we need to listen especially carefully to see if God is speaking through them. It's very possible that that's exactly what's happening.

Psalm 71:1-6 (first published 1 February 2004)

According to paleoanthropologists, modern human beings first entered the continent of Europe about 35,000 years ago. Within a couple of thousand years they had spread throughout Europe, seeing such natural wonders as the Alps for the first time. As the millennia passed, features of the land changed. The great ice sheet that covered much of the continent melted, flora and fauna adapted to their new surroundings or became extinct, and humans moved further north. A little over 5,000 years ago a lone hunter traversing the Alps froze to death, and his body was discovered in 1991 by hikers. His clothes show the extent to which humans have changed over time, yet to the hikers, to Otzi the Ice Man, and to the earliest humans in Europe, the Alps looked pretty much the same. When the psalmist describes God as a rock of refuge, perhaps he had in mind a particularly striking mountain in the land of Israel. As wars raged and empires rose and fell, the mountain stayed the same, just as God stays the same. The world today is changing faster than ever before. Technologies that are commonplace today--the World Wide Web, cell phones, DVDs, laptop computers--were not available thirty years ago. Whereas the typical American man often worked in one job for his entire career a few decades ago, men and women today change jobs--and even careers--several times during their working lives. In the midst of all this change, where can we find stability? The simple answer is God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That's partially right, but also partially wrong. Our understanding of God certainly changes over time, and it's right that it should. Our spiritual forebears held ideas of God that we today reject, such as the necessity of women being subordinate to men, the legitimacy of slavery, the divine right of kings, or God as male rather than female. We can't confuse our understanding of God with the reality of God. It is that reality that is our rock and refuge, not our conceptualization of God. It is appropriate for God's children to question the conceptual constructs of our predecessors, or even of our younger selves. Doing so reminds us that all who seek God will not have the same ideas about God. However, we can all cling with certainty to the idea that God is our refuge, a rock that never changes. In a maddeningly evolving world, there's comfort in that thought.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

We had a discussion in our Sunday School class a couple of weeks ago on how to define religion. It's not as easy as it sounds. One possible definition is that religion has to do with faith in a supreme being or beings, but if so, then many forms of Buddhism are excluded, and almost everyone sees Buddhism as a religion. If we view religion as a set of beliefs and values, then ethical atheists would be included, and most people--including especially atheists!--don't see atheism as a religion. Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until his death in 2006, had a widely cited definition of religion: religion is "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." The problem with this definition is that it's broad enough to include patriotism, which, although it shares many commonalities with religion, ought to be distinguished. Regardless of the weaknesses of all these definitions of religion, they all include the idea that religion is based on faith of some sort. That faith is part of any religious system seems apparent, and it is reflected in the common parlance, which often refers to a particular religion as a faith. Legitimate as that might be, maybe it's part of the problem with religion that it's more often identified with faith than with love. Paul says, "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of them is love." All three are important, but love is the one that is most focused on the current world. Faith, or trust, is directed toward God and is rooted in past experiences of faithfulness. Hope points to a future expectation of God's beneficence. Love is directed toward God, to be sure, but also toward other people in the present. It is love that stirs people to give money to Haiti's earthquake victims, to give up one's free time to feed the homeless, or to sit with a sick or dying friend. When James offers a definition of religion, it is this: "to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." This definition is pragmatic, just as love is pragmatic. Too often we equate love with feelings. Someone is "in love" with someone else if there are strong feelings involved. Neither Paul nor James sees love in that way. For them, love is eminently practical, and it expresses itself in concrete acts of compassion and mercy. When people get riled up because of religion, when they want to kill on the basis of religion, it is because they are too focused on differences in belief. Love can overcome such differences. When we hear the phrase "religious extremist," we tend to think of a person who perpetrates violence on those he disagrees with. Imagine a world filled with religious extremists whose focus wasn't on killing those with whom they disagreed but on passionately, pragmatically loving those in need. That would truly be the greatest thing.

Luke 4:21-30 (first published 1 February 2004)

"Physician, heal yourself!" No, this is not advice for presidential contender Howard Dean (though it could be!) but a proverb that Jesus said that the residents of Nazareth were muttering among themselves concerning him. People seem to have a love-hate relationship with their fellow citizens. On the one hand, voters can often be counted on to vote for a "favorite son" (or daughter) candidate. On the other hand, people often don't want to hear the advice of those who are close at hand. Do you know what the definition of an expert is? Someone from out of town. I remember an occasion in a former job where a couple of bigwigs asked the advice of their staff concerning a particular technology matter. The staff replied with sound advice, but the executives weren't convinced, so they decided to fly outside consultants in to address the issue. The consultants met for two days, discussed the issues with executives and staff, and talked among themselves for several hours. The results? You guessed it: they agreed completely with the advice that the staff had originally given! One could argue that the primary problem with this scenario is that we don't trust those we know to give good advice. That may be, but I think an equally important issue is that we're far too gullible in accepting the word of outside experts (so-called). Don't get me wrong; it's often important to get the advice of outside consultants, especially when they have expertise that local people don't have. However, we need to be cautious about accepting the word of people with whom we have no long-term relationship as gospel truth. Whether advice comes from those close to us or from outsiders, we need to learn to make critical judgments on our own. Why are many fundamentalist churches with authoritarian leaders growing? Because too many people are happy to be told what to believe, because it relieves them of having to think for themselves. As progressive Christians, we need to resist the temptation to do the same from our own perspective. The people to whom we minister need to hear our advice, but they also need to learn how to exercise their own critical thinking skills to evaluate the advice that we offer in the light of their own context and understanding. We should be open to prophets who arise from our midst, as well as those from other places. At the same time, we must feel free to use our best judgment concerning the advice we hear from others. Sometimes we'll make the wrong decisions, but we'll do so as free moral agents, doing our best to follow our understanding of God.