Kansas and United Methodist Politics

“I anticipated we were going to have a grueling debate..., but it’s been far worse than I even thought it could have been. I think it truly has poisoned the ability...to deal with other major issues on the table.”

Could be a quote from General Conference, couldn't it? Instead it was from Kansas House Minority Leader Paul Davis from Lawrence. He was talking about the debate in the Kansas Legislature over redistricting, the process where new voting boundaries are drawn. After a 99 day session (that was only supposed to be 90 days long) the Senate and House never agreed to a plan and now the courts will decide the boundaries. This was such a mess it made the budget process (which included sending two budget bills to the Governor's desk including one widely expected to result in a deficit in the billions by 2018) reasonable.

Such is the state of Kansas politics, where "conservative" Republicans and "moderate" Republicans fight for dominance and Democrats are mostly irrelevant. If you're not from Kansas you may not know that this traditional Republican stronghold has not historically been run by what we think of as today's Republican party. Kansans get along. Kansans believe in reasonably conservative fiscal constraint and somewhat libertarian social norms. Kansas has been on the right side of history in a large number of movements. It's a great place that now is being torn apart by extremes that have now "poisoned the ability" to deal with the real issues of governance.

Sound familiar? The "think and let think" state is no longer acting like itself. Just like the "think and let think" denomination that I'm pretty sure is the largest protestant group in the state. As I said in my last post, the United Methodist Church has indeed given in to the culture. We have become just as combative, polarized, and intolerant of different beliefs as the Kansas State Legislature.

Giving In

In the debate on homosexuality at General Conference, one delegate commented that altering our denomination's position would be caving in to society. The Church should not accept society's standards, but stand with God even when opposed to societal norms. It's a common argument. I absolutely agree with the premise (that we should always stand with God) and I absolutely agree that we have violated the premise. I disagree with the way in which we have gone astray.

While following General Conference on twitter I made the mistake of engaging someone with whom I disagreed. He said we had different religions. I said we may have different opinions, but we are still all Christians. He responded "'Christian' is a term in the hist of religions designating a particular one. Too many differences to be the 'same.'" Really? Not only can we not share the same denomination, but we can't even share the same religion? This is from someone who describes himself includes "writer, speaker, and church consultant, ... draws upon 30 years of professional experience as a Methodist minister..."

Then there's Mark Tooley, president of IRD. What I love about Mr. Tooley is that you never have to guess where he stands. He writes "United Methodist liberals always assumed their church would follow American culture on sexual permissiveness, just as the church had followed on so much else across the 20th century, starting with divorce and contraception. They always consoled themselves, "If not this time, then next time!" Sounding like deterministic Marxist Hegelians, they believed history sided with sexual inclusion." Really? Marxist Hegelians? I would hope he could at least call on a deterministic theologian instead of two atheists.

Yes, we have given in to societal norms. We are as brutal to each other, as argumentative, as unfair and unforgiving, as any political race.  We must "win" each point for our "side" no matter what the means are. We have so given in to the polarization that we face in society that we could only narrowly pass a petition that included a scriptural reference to God's irresistible love. Really? What happened to "in essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty and in all things charity"? What happened to "if your heart is as my heart take my hand"? Are we really so divided that we have to resort to ad hominem attacks and name-calling?

Our problem as a denomination is not with our stance on homosexuality. Our problem is that we value our position over our relationship. I tell couples in premarital counseling that sometimes it's more important to stay in relationship than to be right. Disagreements have to be talked out, but the relationship has to take priority over whether you "win" the argument. Otherwise it doesn't really matter if you win the argument or not. I'm hopeful that the #dreamumc effort some younger adults are beginning may be part of the solution. I'm hopeful that we can find ways to engage each other, learn from each other, and grow with each other instead of just hurting each other. If we can't our relationship may not be salvageable. But don't get me started on our issues with divorce...

A Brief Reflection on General Conference

The United Methodist Church's General Conference finishes their work in Tampa tomorrow. General Conference gathers clergy and laity from around the world to set our denominational direction for the next four years. I'm grateful for the commitment the delegates have all made, but disappointed by many of the decisions. First and foremost is the decision to retain our current lanuage that hurts the LGBT community and those of us seeking full inclusion.

The most discussed statement that the UMC makes is in paragraph 161.f. of the Social Principles, which states "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers the practice incompatible with Christian teaching." Roughly 60 percent of the delegates voted to retain this language. That means that roughly 40 percent want to see change. We are not of one mind. As a denomination, we have not yet found a way to include language acknowledging our differences in theology and biblical interpretation.

This continues to be frustrating and painful. I am grateful, though, that historically the Social Principles have been a guide to conversation and not a binding document. As a United Methodist Pastor I will uphold those parts of church law that I am obligated to uphold. But in those areas, like the Social Principles, where the words are not binding I will follow what I believe is God's will. Despite the outcome of this vote, St. Paul's will continue to be a place where conversation is welcome. We will also be a place that continues to live out our welcome statement, "We welcome all people, regardless of gender, race, age, cultural or religious heritage, ethnic background, sexual orientation, economic circumstances family configuration or difference of ability." You will always be included in our part of the Body of Christ, whoever you are. You will always be loved and encouraged to love. I hope you will join me in praying for the greater church and that St. Paul's can be an agent of change not only in our community but in the worldwide church.

Forsaken?

If you want to listen to the whole Bart Ehrman audio that I shared in today's sermon, here it is. It's about 15 minutes long. Ehrman is very articulate on the subject, but below is the question I would pose to him from the sermon:

So here’s my question: Why? He starts by saying that suffering is a problem. He is so sure that suffering is a problem that he makes fun of his students who don’t understand that it’s a problem. But I want to take the students’ side for a minute. Why is suffering a problem? If the history of the universe were compressed into 24 hours, the whole existence of humanity would be a fraction of a second. Our life spans would be impossibly small to even measure. So why does suffering really matter? Why do the images of 9/11 or Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti or the tornado in Joplin bother us? Why do they seem wrong? And as hard as it is for us to avoid suffering, why would he or any of us give ourselves the additional burden of only being happy if other people are happy too?

As Christians, we have a problem explaining suffering. I certainly can’t explain it all to you. I don’t understand it myself. We will all have a lot of questions for God some day. But there is an equally challenging question for those who don’t believe. They can’t explain why we should care.
When tragedy strikes we say, “this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.” That’s why suffering is a problem – because we know in the deepest places in our heart that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. But where did that knowledge come from? We struggle with why suffering exists, but for the atheist the question is why do we struggle with the question of suffering in the first place.

Here's how Timothy Keller puts it in his book The Reason for God: "The nonbeliever in God doesn't have a good basis for being outraged at injustice, which...was the reason for objecting to God in the first place. If you are sure that this natural world is unjust and filled with evil, you are assuming the reality of some extra-natural (or supernatural) standard by which to make your judgment."

So what do you think? How would you answer the problem of suffering? What about the problem of why we can call something evil or unjust if there is no God?

Christians Behaving Badly

If you are a Christian, I hope that you’ll be able to acknowledge that sometimes we do stupid, harmful, even evil things. Over the course of 200 years Christians killed approximately one million people in the Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition killed, tortured, or exiled as many as another 350,000. We have conducted witch hunts, we have hurt people by encouraging them to only pray for a medical cure instead of seeing a doctor, we have ruined lives by running people down instead of building them up, we have at times neglected our responsibility to care for the environment assuming God will take care of it.

We are responsible for tragedy all across the globe. The critics are right. We are hypocrites. All
too often we say one thing and do another. We could respond to the critics by pointing out that it’s not just Christians who are responsible for tragedy in the world. That is unquestionably true. Sociologist Rudolph Rummel estimates that in the 20th century approximately 262 million people were killed by genocide. 76 million of those were in communist China. 62 million were from the Soviet Union. Those were both officially atheistic countries at the time. Rummel concludes that the best predictor of genocide is the concentration of power. “He says absolute power kills absolutely.” Sociologically, it’s pretty clear that people who want an excuse to kill or abuse will find an excuse. If it’s not religion it will be something else.

But if we really believe in Jesus we should be better than that. When Peter cut off the ear of the person arresting Jesus, here’s what Jesus did:

Jesus commanded Peter “Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” Then the detachment of soldiers with its commander and the Jewish officials arrested Jesus. They bound him and brought him first to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year.

Peter’s inclination was to defend Jesus violently. Jesus preferred to be arrested and killed. He lived out the command to turn the other cheek. He wouldn’t allow his followers to attack even if it cost him his life. That’s who we are supposed to follow. If a Christian is one who follows Christ then every time we stop following, every time we do something different than Jesus would want us to do, in that moment we stop being a Christian. Our life of faith is like a never-ending pendulum between faith and doubt, following Christ’s will and our will, listening to God and listening to others. In one moment we follow precisely and in the next moment we fail. We are hypocrites. I think that makes us no better or worse than anyone else. It’s evidence that we need a Savior.

Sci Fi

Can we believe in Science and God? Of course we can! People do it every day, scientists and theologians alike. But many don't. Take Sam Harris, for example. I showed the last 2:30 of a video of him talking about religion in worship today. Here's what came next in the message:



Harris is arguing against what’s called “the God of the gaps”. Historically, when we haven’t understood how something could happen we say God must have done it. Now science is filling in the gaps. We didn’t understand how life could emerge from nonlife, so we said God did it. We didn’t understand how the universe could be created from nothing, so we said God did it. Now we know better, so Harris says we don’t need God.


Robert Green Ingersoll agreed. In a book titled Orthodoxy, Ingersoll said, “This century will be called Darwin’s century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of
Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity.”

Like Harris, Ingersoll is saying that science will fill all the gaps in our knowledge and we will gradually see that we have no need for God. But Ingersoll said it first. His book predicting the end of faith was published in 1880. I still know some orthodox Christians who are pretty good thinkers. And some pretty good thinkers who aren’t entirely orthodox, but who we would all
consider to be Christians. One of those good thinkers was C.S. Lewis. Lewis was born ten years after Orthodoxy was published. He was an atheist for many years before coming to faith. After
converting, he became an impressive defender of Christianity and a pretty decent philosopher. One of the important lessons he left us is the idea of “chronological snobbery.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the fact that we know more now than we used to doesn’t mean we are always right today. After all, today is tomorrow’s yesterday. If we were wrong then, we can be wrong now...


Religion only loses the argument to science when we pit them against each other. The purpose
of God and faith is not to explain the gaps in knowledge. It was a mistake to ever postulate a “God of the gaps.” Faith in God gives us purpose and meaning and right and wrong – things that are entirely different than what science exists to do.

I believe in the Bible. I believe Jesus when he says in John 8:32 that the truth will set you
free. I believe that is most important when speaking of spiritual truths, but I believe it in regard to all truth. As people of faith we don’t have to be afraid of truth no matter what form it takes.
Today, physics’ greatest challenge is to take every force and every particle that exists and
combine then into what’s called a “theory of everything.” One of the leading candidates for that theory of everything is called string theory. It says that underneath every particle and force are infinitesimally small strings that vibrate in different ways forming everything we know. In it’s latest versions, string theory says the universe has 11 or even 12 dimensions of space and time.
Michio Kaku, one of the pioneers in the field, describes the particles around us as notes played on the strings, physics as the laws of harmony that you can write on the strings, chemistry as the melody, and the universe around us as the symphony of vibrating strings. We and everything around us are, in a sense, cosmic music.

It is an elegant, beautiful theory. But in the end, who cares? What difference does it make? We
may have a theory of everything, but why does anything matter? Music is beautiful only in the eye of the composer and the beholder. Without a composer, music is never written. Without a beholder, music doesn’t matter. If physics and chemistry or the harmony and melody that the notes of matter are written on, if creation itself is a great symphony, then God is the composer, the one who makes the music possible. Our worship of God is our giving thanks to the one who makes the music possible and the life of a saint is a virtuoso performance of the notes we’ve been given to play. May we enjoy the music with each day that God gives us.

Predictions that didn't quite work out

In preparation for tomorrow's sermon, Sci Fi, you might check out some of these predictions from the past. See more at wikiquote.org.

Rail travel at high speed is not possible, because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.
- Dr Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859), professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College London.

That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
- Scientific American, January 2, 1909.

Where a calculator like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons.
- Andrew Hamilton, "Brains that Click", Popular Mechanics 91 (3), March 1949, (pp. 162 et
seq.) at p. 258.

With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.
- Business Week, August 2, 1968.

Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.
- Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison's light bulb, 1880.

It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.
- Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1895.

Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.
- Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, 1962.

The ordinary 'horseless carriage' is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.
- Literary Digest, 1899.

Radio has no future.
- Lord Kelvin, Northern Irish mathematician and physicist, former president of the Royal Society, 1897.

Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.
- Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.
- Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1889.

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.
- Pierre Pachet, British surgeon and Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.
- Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888.

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy.
- Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his suggestion to drill for oil in 1859.

The Big Picture

We'll be posting snippets from Sunday's sermons on
Conversations with an Atheist here every Monday. Feel free to share
your thoughts and continue the conversation. If you'd like to hear the whole
sermon, go to the sermon page on our website. Sermons will be posted during the week.



"The fact that every Christian group has their own different belief system is
evidence that religion, or Christianity at least, is man made…Essentially what
it says to me is that none of them understands what God really wants. So how am
I supposed to find faith in what they are offering, when it is clear to me they
don't really know what it is themselves?"

These words from a friend of mine are one common reason given for why some do not
believe in God, the Christian version or otherwise.

One of the great things about the Bible is that it helps put our world in
perspective today. Sometimes we think that we are the first people to struggle
with the big questions of life. We’re not. At the very beginning of
Christianity believers had differences of opinion. As time has gone on the
questions have changed – we don’t argue about whether non-ethnic Jews have to
first become Jewish before they can be Christians like they did in those first
few years, or whether the third person of the Trinity proceeds from the first
person or the first and second person like they did when that question split
the church 1,000 years ago. We argue about different things today, like God’s
view on sexuality and abortion. And we argue about some of the same things
we’ve always argued about like how literally to interpret the Bible. The bottom
line is that it is a simple fact that every group of Christians believes
something different. It’s always been that way, and at our best Christians have
always acknowledged that. Here’s the best proof. By forty years after Jesus’
death there were three popular tellings of his story. They were all similar to
each other, but different in many details. They each took a different approach
in talking about Jesus and you can tell when you read them that they believed
slightly different things about Jesus. In another twenty years or so a fourth
version of the story became well known. Today we call those stories the Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The four gospels in the Bible. If you read
them one after the other you can tell that they are different in many ways, and
yet by the middle of the second century those were far and away the most widely
respected versions of the story.
Our modern sensibility doesn’t like the idea that there can be multiple legitimate
and truthful ways to tell the story of Jesus. Something is either true or it’s not.
At most only one of those four tellings of the story can be true. But this was
not a problem for the first believers, and it doesn’t need to be a problem for
us.

Let me give you a modern example. You know that there is a good sized group of people who believe the universe was literally created in seven days. One way these creationists argue against evolution is to point out that scientists don’t all agree about evolution. That is factually true in the same way that most political ads that we see today are true. It's a true statement, but very misleading. With the exception of a very small handful of scientists, the disagreements are not about whether evolution is true, but about specific applications or mechanisms
within evolutionary theory. They don't question whether humans came from monkeys; they may question which monkeys and how many thousands of years ago.

Scientists agree on the essential components of the theory of evolution. They disagree
about many of the specifics. Christians agree on the essential components of our
faith; we disagree about many of the specifics.

What do you think? What are some of the key places where
Christians disagree? How many of those disagreements are core to the Gospel and
how many are "details?"