What Church Is

As many of y'all probably know by now, the congregation I pastor, First Christian Church in Longview, was broken into and vandalized earlier this week.  I won't go into all of the details here; you can read about it in this article from our local paper, The Daily News.  In a nutshell, the damage was limited to our sanctuary, kitchen, and restrooms, no suspects have been named, and we fully intend to hold worship at 11:00 on Sunday morning as we always do.

In the meanwhile, I have been in regular contact with the Longview Police, our insurance agency, and local media.  I have every expectation that this will be, in the end, but a speed bump in the path of our work together as a community of faith.

Because, in the end, that's what's important: the community.  When I entered into Search and Call (the denominational job-finding process), I wrote in my minister's profile that I did think there was such a thing as "the church"--only people who are acting Christian.  And Lord, have people who are acting Christian come forward to show us grace and compassion and kindness.

To whoever desecrated our sacred spaces: I hope and pray that you will be caught, and if not caught come forward, not only so that you might receive due process and justice, but also so that I can put a name and a face to you.  I do not want you to be an anonymous demon, a phantom haunting my thoughts and fears.  I want you to be a person, a human being with a heart and a soul, because it is much, much harder to stay angry at a person than at an anonymous boogeyman.  And I'm over being angry.  I want to forgive.

To my friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors who have reached out to offer and give help, prayers, support, materials, and financial resources: THANK YOU.  I said words to this effect in the above-linked article, but they bear repeating: events like these are extraordinary, even if they happen, sadly, all the time.  They are extraordinary because they both are caused by and provoke extraordinary actions from others.  It was extraordinarily bad that someone(s) decided, for whatever reason, to desecrate a historic church sanctuary.  But it was extraordinarily good to see the reactions it spurred--good for my faith, good for my congregants' peaces of mind, and good for the work of the Gospel of Jesus Christ at large.

That is what church is: people acting Christian.  And to all of you who are being Christian on our behalf:  from the bottom of my heart and from the depths of my soul, thank you.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

“More Mince Pies!”

A television show I was using this year as part of my Sunday School class earlier this year is the British sitcom “Rev.,” which depicts a Church of England priest’s misadventures in ministry in the heart of inner-city London.  The show’s holiday special culminates in, naturally, the Christmas Eve service, where, utterly stressed out by all the demands of the holiday season, the priest has a bit of a mental breakdown, singing about his crazy schedule to the tune of the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  The comic meltdown is complete when he then transitions into an ode about how many mince pies he has to obtain for the holiday parties, with the repeated refrain of “Mince pies, mince pies, more mince pies!”

It’s illustrative of the other side of the holidays, isn’t it?  On the surface level, the holidays are full of joy and fellowship and celebration, but scratch below that surface, and they can sometimes be sources of great stress.  Can I afford all of the presents I want to give this year?  Will I have enough time and energy to throw another holiday party?  What if there aren’t enough mince pies?!

In moments like those, I have found it helpful to reflect on the actual circumstances of Jesus’ birth.  As Luke tells it, nothing about Jesus’ birth happened in a stress-free or orderly way.  Mary and Joseph were traveling—suggesting that they probably didn’t anticipate that Jesus would be born right then—and when they did try to find a place for Mary to safely give birth, they found no shelter, only a barn.

And yet, out of that string of miscues, a savior is born!

What a wonderful example for us in the midst of our own Christmas obligations.

A very merry and safe Christmas to you and yours this holiday season!

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Eric

A Dab of Bible for Turkey Day

"Be rooted and built up in Him, be established in faith, and overflow with thanksgiving just as you were taught." -Colossians 2:7 (CEB)

A happy and safe thanksgiving to you and yours, my fellow adherents. :)

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Head, Meet Desk

Okay,  I lied when I said there'd be no posts until next week.

Well,  I didn't lie.  I didn't know it'd be a lie when I wrote it.

I wasn't planning on writing any blog entries this week, since I basically have only a three-day workweek to work with.

But that was before this.

And perhaps I shouldn't be writing, because what Franklin Graham says in that CNN article sent me oozing into an absolute fury.

But holy ****, I want to scream right now.  But I'm in my office, so I won't.

Look.

I absolutely believe that people have a right to think what they want.  Even if it repulses me, it's your God-given right to think that the world is flat, or that one gender is inherently inferior to another, or that the Kansas Jayhawks won't win the NCAA tournament this year (kidding on this one).

But those views should cause you to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

And what Franklin Graham says here, in part, is so at odds with what I believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be that I honestly am wondering where God is in Graham's ministry:

Graham thinks preachers should speak out on social issues like abortion or gay marriage, but not on economic ones. “When it comes to the taxes - whether you should tax the wealthy more or the poor more, I’m not into that,” he said. “Let the politicians worry about that.”

There are a lot of issues I have with this statement, but there are two HUGE ones.

Let's start with that last bit--the "let the politicians worry about that" part.

That is something that should probably never come out of a pastor's mouth.  Why?

It isn't because politicians are distrustful or double-minded or deceitful or any of those things--some surely are, but some also definitely are not.

It's that saying certain things belong only to the political leaders usually doesn't end well.

In Jesus' time, the politicians--such as they were--were the Pharisees, the legal experts who not-so-secretly colluded with the Roman empire to subjugate the Israelite people.

And Jesus' ministry was all about challenging the things that were previously left for the "politicians" to worry about--things like how to interpret the law, how to offer sacrifice, and ultimately, how to have a right relationship with God.

Jesus changed the world precisely because He didn't let the politicians of His day "worry about that."

But the other issue I have is that a Christian MUST be "into" how we treat the rich vis-a-vis the poor.

The Gospels--indeed, the entire Bible--is full to the point of overflowing on what society should do for the poor and expect from the wealthy.  To offer but a few examples:

"Oppressing the poor to get rich and giving to the wealthy leads only to poverty." -Proverbs 22:16

"Doom to those who pronounce wicked decrees and keep writing harmful laws to deprive the needy of their rights and to rob the poor among my people of justice; to make widows their loot and to steal from orphans." -Isaiah 10:1-2

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me.  He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." -Luke 4:18-19

"Tell people who are rich at this time not to become egotistical and not to place their hope on their finances, which are uncertain.  Instead, they need to hope in God, who richly provides everything for our enjoyment.  Tell them to do good, to be rich in the good things they do, to be generous, and to share with others."  -1 Timothy 6:17-18

"Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat.  What if one of you said, "Go in peace!  Stay warm!  Have a nice meal!"?  What good is it if you don't actually give them what their body needs?" -James 2:15-16

(All quotes are from the Common English Bible translation.)

The above assortment of Scripture was not chosen haphazardly by me.  I selected from two different genres of Old Testament Scripture--the "wisdom" literature (Proverbs, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, etc) and the "prophetic" literature (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc).  I selected from the Gospels, from Paul, and from a New Testament letter not by Paul.

And I did this to make a point: good news for the poor is not the mission of a few renegade writers of the Bible.  It is the mission of the Bible itself.

And it hurts me in a major, major way to see fellow Christians  undercut that mission by saying, in effect, "my job is not to worry about those people."

My call, for as long as God wills it, is to worry for the poor--the poor in spiritual resources as well as the poor in economic resources.

And the day I reduce that mission to an either-or proposition rather than a both-and proposition is the day I need to hang up my alb for good.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Shall Never Cease"

(A programming note: I likely will not be blogging this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, but I will be back with new entries next week.  Have a safe and happy holiday, y'all! -E.A.)

Genesis 8:13-22

"13 In Noah’s six hundred first year, on the first day of the first month, the waters dried up from the earth. Noah removed the ark’s hatch and saw that the surface of the fertile land had dried up. 14 In the second month, on the seventeenth day, the earth was dry. 

15 God spoke to Noah, 16 “Go out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. 17 Bring out with you all the animals of every kind—birds, livestock, everything crawling on the ground—so that they may populate the earth, be fertile, and multiply on the earth.” 18 So Noah went out of the ark with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals, all the livestock, all the birds, and everything crawling on the ground, came out of the ark by their families.  

20 Noah built an altar to the Lord. He took some of the clean large animals and some of the clean birds, and placed entirely burned offerings on the altar. 21 The Lord smelled the pleasing scent, and the Lord thought to himself, I will not curse the fertile land anymore because of human beings since the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth. I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done. 22 As long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and hot, summer and autumn, day and night will not cease." (CEB)

What’s Asked in Worship Stays in Worship: Banned Questions About the Bible, Week Four: Is There a Scriptural Basis for Changing God’s Mind?

It was the day after the election two weeks ago.  I was driving at eight in the morning to meet a fellow colleague for coffee and fellowship.  And I saw it arching up from the center of town: one of the clearest, most beautiful rainbows I had seen since I moved here over a year ago.

(Yes, you’d think with how often it rains here, I’d see more rainbows.  I thought so, too.)

It was an appropriate symbol for that day—it was a sign of happiness and celebration if the electorate went your way, and if they didn’t, well, if you know the story of Noah and the Ark and how it ends—which is the part we just read together (the covenant continues for a whole other chapter, which is where the rainbow comes in, but I wanted to include the poetry of chapter 8)—then you’ll know that rainbows are also divine signs that the world isn’t going to end after all!

And ESPECIALLY after an election, keeping that sort of perspective is pretty clutch, I think.

This is the conclusion of a four-week sermon series that has taken us up to the week of Thanksgiving.  Thematically, this new series does a lot, I think, to build upon our previous sermon series, “They Like Jesus, But Not The Church.”  That previous series was based on peoples’ impressions of us that they are sometimes afraid to share, and this series is based largely on peoples’ questions for us that they—or even we—are sometimes afraid to ask, perhaps because church is seen sometimes as a place not to ask questions, only to receive answers.  But, in order to receive the right answers to begin with, we must start by asking the right questions.  And one of my fundamental, non-negotiable beliefs about what church is, and what church should be, is that we must be in the business of encouraging people to ask the right questions, the tough questions.  Not the clichés, not the easy answers that you can recite the same way a child recites their favorite McDonald’s order.  So for this and the following three weeks, we’ll be looking at some of those big theological questions, guided by the book “Banned Questions about the Bible,” which is edited by Disciples journalist and blogger Christian Piatt.  We began with the question, “Is there a right or wrong way to read the Bible?”  The questions then got even tougher: “How can God be all-loving yet allows people to be thrown into hell?”  This was followed last week by, “Why doesn’t God intervene in a disaster?”  And finally, today, we end the series with another deep, potentially provocative question: “Is there a Scriptural basis for changing God’s mind?”

This is one partial response to that query in Banned Questions About the Bible:

"Traditional theology is troubled by this notion of God’s mind-changing, for this means that God is not all-knowing.  The traditional view maintains that God’s mind is immovable and thus interprets these texts anthropomorphically—that is, the writers “humanize” God in order to understand God’s mysterious actions.  In other words, from our finite human perspective, it seems as though God changes God's mind.

Some nontraditional approaches have either rejected or redefined divine all-knowing…after all, “I am that I am” can also be translated “I will be what I will be.”  As such, the future is unknown, even to God.

Among Evangelicals, there’s “open theism.”  Open theists assert that God is all knowing: God knows all that exists.  But since the future doesn’t exist, God doesn’t know the future and is “open” to it.

Are we then at the mercy of an unpredictable God?  …Two things should be highlighted:

1.      When God (seemingly) changes God's mind, it’s always on the side of mercy.

2.      God never changes God's mind about the promises God has made."

Let’s unpack both of those ideas for a minute.

The first idea—that whenever God might change his mind, it’s always on the side of mercy—is pretty straightforward.  And it’s one that is all throughout Scripture.  The first promise that God makes to someone is, in fact, a promise of mercy—after Cain murders his brother Abel and is sent into exile east of Eden by God, Cain objects.  He says that going off alone like that, as a fugitive or an outlaw, is a death sentence, because he’ll be vulnerable to anyone else who simply wished to harm or kill him.  In essence, he is saying that by exiling him, God has sentenced him to death.

It’s the same logic we use today—you know, not walking by ourselves after dark, carrying our cell phones, that sort of thing.  It’s basic safety in a world that isn’t always so hospitable.

And God says, “Not so!  For anyone who harms you will suffer far greater punishment.”  But it doesn’t even come to that, God marks Cain so that those who see him know that he is protected by God and will let him be.  And so God spares Cain’s life, when God had no reason to.  God’s first promise to a human being is one of mercy, and it sets the trend for the rest of Scripture: when God does shift in His decisions, it is always in one direction, not the other.  It is for mercy.

But let’s talk about the second one for a minute.  Because it’s what necessitates the first point.

God is a vibrant, active, and dynamic deity in the Bible—He is not simply a statue, a golden Buddha whose belly you rub (likely shallowly and superstitiously, if you’re not actually Buddhist) for good luck.  In fact, honestly, I think that is partly why there is the commandment of not making any graven image to God—it cements God; it puts Him in only one place, when God is a moving, creative, vital, awe-inspiring deity…and we choose to worship around this carved rock instead?  God rightly and understandably tells us to pass on that sort of worship.

But this also means that God goes back and forth in how He interacts with us.  Part of the reason I think we struggle with parts of the Bible is because of how human God does appear in them—that He is capable of anger, and sadness, and things that we would just as soon not want to associate with a powerful deity.

But Lord, in the story of Noah and the Ark, does God appear human.

He pulls a complete 180—he goes from seeing the world we have made saying, “I regret that I have made them” to promising Noah, “never again” will God curse us because of who we are.  Never again will something so destructive and violent as the flood ever, EVER happen.

That’s a promise we like to tell ourselves, and tell other people.

After an atrocity like the Holocaust, we said, “Never again.”  But then genocide happened in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur.

After slavery, we said, “Never again,” yet thousands of God’s children are trafficked into sex slavery across the world every year.

We make the “Never again” promise and usually fail to keep it.  But God doesn’t.  He won’t make promises to us that He cannot keep.

And so when God says to Noah, “For as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease.”

And the Bible is, then, a wonderful, amazing, incredible collection of accounts of God doing exactly that—of moving heaven and earth to make sure that we still have a chance to live and to love and to be the children of God we were made to be.

God saves His children from slavery in Egypt, from oppression under the Philistines, from exile into Babylon, and then, and then, He saves us from ourselves by offering us His only Son.

God moves and works and changes in all of this precisely so that one reality will never cease: the reality that tomorrow will always come, that we will always have a future, and that hatred will never have the final word.

And so while God may change His mind, it is so that other things, more important things than the divine ego shall never cease.  God needs to be right, but that need not be at humanity’s expense.

Yet, it is not merely seedtime and harvest that never ceases, it is not merely cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night that never cease.

It is so that God’s love and mercy and redemption for each and every one of us shall never cease!

And following God’s example as Christians means that our own love and mercy and redemption for one another shall never cease.  It means that our burden, crazy as it is, to actually offer people hope and grace and salvation shall never cease.  And what a wonderful burden it is!  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 18, 2012

Christians Don't Have To Be Cheesy

I was at a regional meeting recently (one of many that I have to be at, between the various hats I wear for the Northwest region of the Disciples) when a fellow was telling a story about another person who had come to them at a reception for this-or-that and said, "You didn't come here alone, did you?"

He replied, "No, actually, I did come here alone."

To which the other person said, "No, you came here with two other people.  I see God on your right, and Jesus on your left."

I know that line was meant to be endearing, and I don't mean to besmirch that core sentiment.  But off in the back row, a congregant I was at the meeting with and I both rolled our eyes at how cheesy it came off as.  It felt like a Christian pick-up line, to take the place of, I don't know, "Are you from Tennessee?  Because you're the only ten I see!"

Oy.

And after over two decades of going to church--basically my entire conscious life--I see that sort of cheesiness everywhere I look now.

The way pastors (and I am occasionally guilty of this) overuse alliteration.  Or rhyming words.  Or acronyms.

The way we hijack pop culture references.  The Gatorade slogan ("Is it in you?") is almost too easy, the lowest of low-hanging fruit...so, enter the t-shirts that say, "Jesus: Is He In You?"  And believe me, there is plenty more where that came from.

Or the way that, honestly, just about any praise song written before the late 1990s can be boiled down, as Benyamin Cohen notes in his excellent book My Jesus Year, into one of three themes: I-love-Jesus, Jesus-loves-me, or I'm-not-worthy-of-His-love.

On face, none of those things are bad.  And I would be loathe to mock anything that brought a person closer to God and to Jesus Christ.

So I'm really not trying to be a crank here.  But...as Paul would say, all things in moderation, y'know?

We don't need gimmicks.  We certainly don't need to OD on them.

Jesus' message of love and grace and mercy can, and should, be enough in and of itself.

And when you can engage people with that love...I have seen truly amazing things happen.

And those things happen not because of our gimmicks, but because of our authenticity.

Say what you will about the goodness or lack thereof of people, but I think we're pretty good at discerning gimmickry from the genuine article.

And no amount of cheesiness can make up for the feeling of coming to a church--perhaps for the first time--and simply feeling loved there.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Beneath the Neon Signs

With the switch last week from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time, it starts getting dark here in the Pacific Northwest early.  REALLY early.  As in, it's already dark by 5:00 pm early, and it's not even Thanksgiving yet (as an aside, I recall being told that this was one reason why the Twilight films were shot in part in nearby Kalama--lots of darkness!).

It's one of the very few things I struggle with in living here.  Part of my emotional depression--which I was diagnosed with 12 years ago and manage very easily with medication and doctor visits--is a bit of seasonal depression: I'm simply more melancholic and lethargic during the winter.

I take steps to mitigate it--I have one of those lightboxes that is meant to emulate sunlight, and I try to be outside on days when it isn't rainy, but it's still not fun.

So I grin and bear it and drive home at night in a darkness that is illuminated only by the headlights of cars, streetlamps, and the neon signs of businesses and establishments.

And it makes me wonder if part of my seasonal depression is, in part, spiritual in nature.

Not the whole holiday season--I've never gotten depressed in the winter because of the holidays, though many do--but because of what light means, both metaphorically and Biblically, to me in my theology.

John writes that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

In Genesis, light is the very first thing that God creates, and the very first thing that God pronounces as good.

And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls us to be lights to the world.

Sunlight is...for lack of a better term...selfless light.  The sun shines because that is what it does.  It serves no other purpose but to give off heat and light.

The lights that shine at night do so for necessity, or a specific reason--the neon lights of businesses to show us that they are open, to stop by and spend money on whatever it is they are hawking.

It isn't selfless.  There's a specific reason for that light.  It's artificial and self-serving.

I miss the selfless light in the dark of winter, because I've come to realize that I associate it with God Himself.

And without it, I am forced to search for God's presence elsewhere in my life.

And even as a pastor, that is sometimes not easy!

Where does God show up in your life, and what makes you feel closer or further away from God in the everyday trappings of your routine?

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "The Aurochs' Story"

Habakkuk 1:1-3 and 3:17-19

The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.

Lord, how long will I call for help and you not listen? I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you don’t deliver us. Why do you show me injustice and look at anguish so that devastation and violence are before me? There is strife, and conflict abounds.

3:17-19:

Though the fig tree doesn’t bloom, and there’s no produce on the vine; though the olive crop withers, and the fields don’t provide food; though the sheep is cut off from the pen, and there is no cattle in the stalls; I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will rejoice in the God of my deliverance. The Lord God is my strength. He will set my feet like the deer. He will let me walk upon the heights.

To the director, with stringed instruments. (CEB)

“What’s Asked in Worship Stays in Worship: Banned Questions About the Bible,” Week Three: Why Doesn’t God Intervene in a Disaster?

The aurochs’ story began as the brainchild of one woman, and of a single one-act play.

Because any disaster, any sort of crisis, puts us into preservation mode, concerned with damage control.  “How can I preserve what I have left?” we ask ourselves.

It is what many are asking themselves after having everything destroyed by Hurricane Sandy just a few short weeks ago, or those who lost everything in the High Park fires in Colorado.

The last time a hurricane caused such damage to us, it devastated New Orleans.  You say the words, “Hurricane Katrina,” and instantly, everybody knows what you’re referring to.

And it is in such a situation that the aurochs appear, for a little girl in this one-act play that would eventually become a movie.

She lives in the Louisiana bayou, outside the protection of the levees of New Orleans.  And a hurricane is fast approaching.

At school, she is learning about the way our prehistoric ancestors did art—by cave paintings.  They painted depictions of these extinct—but real—animals called aurochs.  She is taught that the cave people wanted to preserve something of their life…so they painted it into the earth.

In a small child’s mind, though, what once lived but is now extinct becomes the stuff of fairy tale and folklore, of myth and of magic.

And so as the storm bears down on her impoverished, unprotected home, she sees not just rain or thunderclouds coming for her, but these beasts of lore, coming as a herd to hurt her, to consume her.  Until the storm comes.  And in her imagination, they protect her instead.  And she survives.

It is, in my entire life, one of the most creative and moving ways to depict divine intervention.  Why would divine, mythical creatures be there for her in her need?  Because she dreamed it so.

This is a four-week sermon series that takes us up to the week of Thanksgiving.  Thematically, this new series does a lot, I think, to build upon our previous sermon series, “They Like Jesus, But Not The Church.”  That previous series was based on peoples’ impressions of us that they are sometimes afraid to share, and this series is based largely on peoples’ questions for us that they—or even we—are sometimes afraid to ask, perhaps because church is seen sometimes as a place not to ask questions, only to receive answers.  But, in order to receive the right answers to begin with, we must start by asking the right questions.  And one of my fundamental, non-negotiable beliefs about what church is, and what church should be, is that we must be in the business of encouraging people to ask the right questions, the tough questions.  Not the clichés, not the easy answers that you can recite the same way a child recites their favorite McDonald’s order.  So for this and the following three weeks, we’ll be looking at some of those big theological questions, guided by the book “Banned Questions about the Bible,” which is edited by Disciples journalist and blogger Christian Piatt.  We began with the question, “Is there a right or wrong way to read the Bible?”  Last week, the questions got even tougher: “How can God be all-loving yet allows people to be thrown into hell?”  And today, the questions don’t let up, as the theme for this week’s message is: “Why doesn’t God intervene in a disaster?”

As Christian Piatt writes in “Banned Questions about the Bible,” in part:

I remember how repulsed and angry I felt when I heard preachers claiming that the catastrophic floods in New Orleans were a consequence of the city’s immoral living practices.  It seemed such a medieval, judgmental way of thinking, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But on a much smaller, more benign scale, many of us do something similar on a regular basis without knowing it.  Ever heard someone say something like, “everything happens for a reason?”… (But) some things are simply senseless, meaning human logic can’t untangle them.  But that’s just it: we get tripped up when we try to apply human reasons to God.  In doing that, it seems we’re trying to stuff God into a pretty small box.

That’s a profound truth—trying to apply human reasons to God usually gets us nowhere—and it’s one that God has to teach us over and over and over again in Scripture.  God puts it in black and white language to Moses, saying, “My ways are not your ways.”  Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “You weigh (or judge) by human standards, but I judge no person.”

But nowhere else—save maybe for Jonah—is there an entire book of Scripture devoted almost entirely to that singular lesson: that what we want and what God wants are seldom the same thing.  As the old saying goes, “When God wants to punish us, He answers our prayers.”

And so enter Habakkuk.  We really know very little about the prophet himself, except that his career, like those of many of the Old Testament prophets, coincided with the rise of the Chaldean dynasty, the dynasty of Babylonian kings who would go on to conquer Judah, and that singular event alone would be enough to cause the prophet’s concern, worry, and fear, and not without reason—the Babylonian invasion and subsequent exile from the Holy Land would set the Israelites back decades compared to their surrounding kingdoms.

We don’t quite have an equivalent situation to point to—unlike the Israelites, we live in a superpower country, about as protected as one can be, thanks to the veterans who are honored on this day.

Instead, probably the closest equivalent is, in fact, a natural disaster, because it can cause death and destruction and loss of faith, but just like Habakkuk, foreshadowing the coming of the Babylonians and the destruction they would wreak, so too do we now receive advance warning—weeks in advance—of many natural disasters.  We have “seasons” for tornados and hurricanes, we can detect tremors along the Pacific Ocean fault lines and predict tsunamis, and while we have not mastered nature, we at least have some inkling of when to get out of its way.

But just because we can flee such destruction doesn’t make it feel right.  We cast about for answers still, which leads some of us to say that such disaster is divine punishment upon us for, I don’t know, dancing or R-rated movies or the Giants sweeping the World Series.  I tend not to buy into that, and neither does Habakkuk.

Because you can boil the entire argument between Habakkuk and God into one single question, “Is such destruction ever fair?”  And God, in His own way, gives Habakkuk, in chapter two of this three-chapter dialogue, his answer: that this doesn’t make God any less present, or any less sovereign, and that, as one of my commentators put it: “…in his own way and at the proper time, he will deal with the wicked(ness).  In the meantime—in fact, at all times—the righteous shall live by their faith, a persistent, patient, and tenacious adherence to the instructions and promises of God.”

Again, there’s that little notion poking its head out—in God’s own way, and in God’s good time.  But if God is meant to be steadfast in this story, Habbakuk is, like almost all other Biblical heroes, entirely dynamic.  Just as Moses and Paul were murderers in search of redemption when called by God, just as David was an adulterer and Jacob a liar, Habakkuk is still called by God despite his doubts, despite being defined by his angst more than probably any other prophet save, again, for Jonah.  God calls Habakkuk regardless, and reminds him as God has for so many of His servants, that as the writer Graham Greene put it, we cannot “conceive the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”  In other words—we cannot comprehend God’s own being.

But, why the change of heart?  How can Habakkuk go from sort of the before guy to the after guy--you know, the late-night infomercials hawking weight loss or spray-on hair--the before and after guys.  This is what we're seeing from Habakkuk.  He goes from screaming at God in anger and frustration, “How long must I cry out before you listen?  How long must I cry out before you save?” to, quite literally singing for joy—note that the book ends with the instruction, “to the music leader.”  From screaming to singing, from anger to ecstasy, Habakkuk’s transformation defies description.  And it is, because like a little girl, conjured up by a dramatist in an obscure one-act play, Habakkuk dreamed it so.

Because what Habakkuk receives isn’t simply an answer—it’s a vision.  Chapter three begins with him actually envisioning the God who has just answered his prayers of anger and frustration.  It makes his faith in God complete once more, even if his idea of God, like ours, never will be.  This is the Zen part of it all—it made Habakkuk secure in the incompleteness of his own notions of divinity, and that security is why he can now praise God even in the worst of times and the most calamitous of natural disasters back then—a famine.

And so it is not that Habakkuk’s God actively creates punishment and destruction…it is that God is present in it.  Habakkuk had begun this book so distraught he wasn’t even demanding intervention anymore—he needed to know that God would listen, and that God would speak, and that God would uplift before we even cross that bridge of intervention.

And God did all those things.  It was enough for Habakkuk.  It was enough for his faith that causes him to tread, as he sings, upon great, great heights.  Let that be enough for us as well.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 11, 2012

The 2012 Election: A Mystical Post-Mortem

Full disclosure: this post may not make much sense.  It certainly doesn't to me.

Just this Sunday, in my youth and young adults Sunday School class, I was talking about how I felt called by God even if I hadn't ever heard his voice speak in my ears in perfect King's English.

I have had God experiences.  I have felt the light and heat of the Holy Spirit.

Last night was different.

Like I conveyed to David, another pastor buddy of mine, over coffee this morning, I didn't get everything I wanted last night.  Not everyone I voted for won, and ballot measures passed that I ended up not voting for (and the entire state of Washington began singing "Puff, the Magic Dragon").

But I got the big one.  I was excited to vote for then-Senator Obama in 2008, and I voted for his re-elect in 2012.  I stayed up late enough to catch his acceptance speech (the time change hasn't been kind to me), which gave me gooseflesh.  What began as a speech morphed into what felt like a sermon (in the best sense) when he began talking about how our rights come with responsibilties, chief among them love and charity, duty and patriotism.

Selfishly, I had the hubris to think about how I wished I could move people that greatly and deeply and powerfully.  I thought about my own preaching and what I could make it sound like.

I went to bed and couldn't sleep.  I was too tired to move, too wired to sleep.

But with eyes closed, I saw light dancing across my eyelids.

Earlier that day, in our daytime Bible study, I told a story about how people see God's approval of things in the world--that in the American Civil War, after the Confederacy defeated the Union at Fredricksburg, some southern pastors saw the aurora borealis that followed in the night as proof that God Himself was celebrating a Confederate victory.

I like to think that I thought no such thing...which is good, as they turned out to be the reflection of fireworks going off somewhere outside.  I could hear the popping sound from my apartment.

But the light got my attention.

Before a voice--and it wasn't entirely my own, it had forced its way in--said "You are not Barack Obama." (to which every reader of this post replies, "DUH!")

It was all over in about ten seconds.

Now, I get why people say that when you talk to God, it's prayer, but when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia.  I've never been mystical myself, nor have my God experiences EVER involved divine dictation.  It may be hubris that I even wonder if that was God, and that God felt the need to tell me such a blatantly self-evident truth.

But if God was calling me to humility, it makes perfect sense.  Despite my intentions as a pastor, what I want is definitely not always what God wants.  God's ways are not my ways.  I needed that wake-up call.

And isn't that sort of the trap we fall into with politics?  Thinking our ways are God's ways, and that God is a Republican or a Democrat?

One question I have always wrestled with was how God could make room for me and my prayers when I had to think there were--and are--far bigger things on His plate.  Starvation and famine.  Poverty and homelessness.  Terminal illness and injury.  War and violence.  And I dare to ask for my God's attention?

But...if God took those ten seconds out from being with the victims of Hurricane Sandy, or with the people of Syria, to send me a message, to make a point, and then return to where He is most needed...maybe it makes sense.  God appears in a moment of need, then goes to where He is needed next.  And surely, God was needed here to offer guidance, assurance, and wisdom to us as we chose our leaders.

None of this means that God isn't present sometimes...but that maybe sometimes, He drops stronger hints than at other times that He is, in fact, here.

If this reads like someone still trying to make sense of a historic night, well, that would be part of it.

But this is also a someone who has no doubt at all that God was present in it.  For me.

For you.

For everyone.

There's grace in that.  I'm sure of it.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

2012 Presidential Election: Electoral Map and Other Thoughts

Like I did on my old blog in 2008, I'm making my nonpartisan prediction of how the Presidential race will shake out, which you can alternately nod your head or laugh at.  You can find it here:

2012 Presidential Election: Electoral Map

Basically, I have President Obama winning the Electoral College vote 277-261.  The states break down like this:

Obama states: Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine.

Romney states: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, New Hampshire.

How do y'all think it will turn out?

A few other scattershot thoughts from me on the election--most of which I promise is minimally partisan:

A colleague and buddy of mine in town reminded me this about the election: "No matter what happens, God is in control."  There's some real truth in that.

It's very meaningful to me that, for the third election in a row, we have a demographically uncommon candidate, and the first election where we have two demographically uncommon candidates--an African-American and a Mormon.  In 2004, Senator John Kerry was only the third Roman Catholic to run as the nominee of a major ticket (after Democrats Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960), and of course, President Obama ran in 2008, so you'd have to go back to the Bush/Gore race of 2000 for the last time both major candidates were WASPs.  I wonder what--and who--2016 might bring outside of the WASP mold.

One of the reasons I am most glad that the election is almost over is because, hopefully, we'll be done with old white men feeling the inexplicable need to pontificate publicly on rape-induced pregnancies.

If President Obama is re-elected, I'll bet anyone who reads this a coffee at Zojo's (sorry if you're not here in Longview!) that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg tenders her resignation from the Supreme Court by this time in 2013.

"And God spaketh unto America, and proclaimed, 'You shall vote straight party ticket in every election...'" said the Bible, never.

And if you haven't yet voted and are able to do so, please vote!  It's important...as my high school AP Government teacher taught me, the highest calling of any American is that of citizen!

Yours in Christ,

Eric

This Week's Sermon: "From the Inside"

Acts 4:36-5:10

36 Joseph, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (that is, “one who encourages”), was a Levite from Cyprus. 37 He owned a field, sold it, brought the money, and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles.

 However, a man named Ananias, along with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s knowledge, he withheld some of the proceeds from the sale. He brought the rest and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. 3 Peter asked, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has influenced you to lie to the Holy Spirit by withholding some of the proceeds from the sale of your land? 4 Wasn’t that property yours to keep? After you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with whatever you wanted? What made you think of such a thing? You haven’t lied to other people but to God!” 5 When Ananias heard these words, he dropped dead. Everyone who heard this conversation was terrified. 6 Some young men stood up, wrapped up his body, carried him out, and buried him. 7 About three hours later, his wife entered, but she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, did you and your husband receive this price for the field?” She responded, “Yes, that’s the amount.” 9 He replied, “How could you scheme with each other to challenge the Lord’s Spirit? Look! The feet of those who buried your husband are at the door. They will carry you out too.” 10 At that very moment, she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men entered and found her dead, they carried her out and buried her with her husband.  (CEB)

“What’s Asked in Worship Stays in Worship: Banned Questions About the Bible,” Week Two: How can God be All-Loving Yet Allows People to be Thrown Into Hell?

It’s an old fable that many of you probably know, but it’s still a good one…

A young seminary student comes up to his (or her) theology professor, “What exactly is hell?”

(Assume that the professor doesn’t do a double-take at this point at this student being admitted to seminary having apparently never contemplated the idea of an afterlife. ;-) )

The professor patiently explains, “It’s like sitting with everybody else on both sides of a table that goes on in both directions forever.  Everyone is hungry to the point of being famished.  And on that table is the favorite food of every single person there.  They reach for their favorite food and pick it up, but when they move to put it in their mouths, they realize that their elbows are locked up, and so despite how hungry they are, they are never able to partake.”

The student, who, like yours truly, thinks largely with his stomach, agreed.  “Yes, of course, that would be hell.  But then, what would be heaven?”

(Again, suspension of disbelief that this student got into seminary!)

And so the professor patiently explains, “It’s like sitting with everybody else on both sides of a table that goes on in both directions forever.  Everyone is hungry to the point of being famished.  And on that table is the favorite food of every single person there.  They reach for their favorite food and pick it up, but when they move to put it in their mouths, they realize that their elbows are locked up, and so despite how hungry they are, they are never able to partake.”

This time, the student does a double-take.  “Wait,” the student says, “that’s exactly the same as how you described hell.  So what’s the difference?”

The professor leaned back and smiled.  He (or she) said, “In heaven, the people reach not for their favorite food, but for the favorite food of the person sitting across from them.  And they feed one another.”

This is a four-week sermon series that takes us up to the week of Thanksgiving.  Thematically, this new series does a lot, I think, to build upon our previous sermon series, “They Like Jesus, But Not The Church.”  That previous series was based on peoples’ impressions of us that they are sometimes afraid to share, and this series is based largely on peoples’ questions for us that they—or even we—are sometimes afraid to ask, perhaps because church is seen sometimes as a place not to ask questions, only to receive answers.  But, in order to receive the right answers to begin with, we must start by asking the right questions.  And one of my fundamental, non-negotiable beliefs about what church is, and what church should be, is that we must be in the business of encouraging people to ask the right questions, the tough questions.  Not the clichés, not the easy answers that you can recite the same way a child recites their favorite McDonald’s order.  So for this and the following three weeks, we’ll be looking at some of those big theological questions, guided by the book “Banned Questions about the Bible,” which is edited by Disciples journalist and blogger Christian Piatt.  Last week, we began with the question, “Is there a right or wrong way to read the Bible?”  This week, the question gets even tougher: “How can God be all-loving yet allows people to be thrown into hell?”

A response in “Banned Questions About the Bible” puts it this way, in part:

(I)t’s hell when we reject God by living like we were made in the image of something other than the Love revealed in Jesus (1 John 4:9-12).  Tolstoy wrote, “Where love is, God is also.”  It’s equally true to say, “Where love is not—that’s hell.”…Hell is what happens when we willingly decide to collaborate with the dehumanizing forces of violence, injustice, and misery that will be no more when love is “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

It is a testament to how difficult this question is that oftentimes, before we even ask how one goes to heaven or to hell, we have to define what each exactly is, and to make those definitions understandable to ourselves and to each other.

It’s a task even Jesus struggled with, communicating exactly what hell is like to other people.  He would point to Gehenna—the valley just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem where people would burn their trash—as a metaphor for what hell is, which is partly where we get our notion of “hellfire.”  But what I  think Jesus may have been saying is that being in hell is like being told you’re trash, worthy only of being destroyed slowly and painfully.

Regardless of what hell is, exactly—though we’ll return to that question in a bit—it’s something we don’t want.  Yep, I studied religion for four years in college and three years in seminary and that’s what I got for you—we don’t want to go to hell.  Anyone could give this sermon!

Kidding aside, anyone could—that’s the whole point.  If heaven is so universal that everyone wants it, hell is likewise so universal that everyone wants to avoid it.  Which then necessitates the second question, after what heaven and hell are, how can we go to heaven and not to hell?

There is probably no other question that is at the root of more splits and schisms within Christianity than that question, because it’s one of the big ones, right up there with “How can I love the way that Jesus loved,” or “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?”

Which is why stories like these, the story of Ananias and Sapphira, scare us so much.  Worshiping a god who strikes people dead for giving only a partial tithe?  Pass.  I’ll take my 10% to a competing religion with a warmer, fuzzier god, thank you very much.

At its core, though, the story should not be so shocking.  Does the punishment fit the crime?  No, not at all.  But the moral of the story isn’t that lying to a holy man gets you struck dead on the spot, for that would miss the forest for the trees.  No, the moral is that the way, perhaps the only way, to sadden God is to demonstrate through your actions that you are simply not at all interested in having a right and loving relationship with Him and with all of His children.

Today, in the church calendar, is All Saints Sunday, the day many churches set aside for remembrances of the people we have loved and lost to their passing into heaven.  And there are many such people connected to our congregation—I’ve performed four funerals in the past year, all for either former members or relatives of members.

And unless that person was a real son-of-a-gun, we want to, we have to, think of them as being in heaven.  We may walk around thinking that we are members of this exclusive club, the club of salvation, but when push comes to shove, we often want as many people included in the club as we can.  Especially if we care about them.  And since we ought to care about everyone…well, you do the math.

Yet it doesn’t always work like that.  Universal salvation is great, but does that mean that, say, Adolf Hitler is in heaven?  Or that Osama bin Laden is in heaven?  Honestly, I hope not, because I think that their actions while they were alive showed they had no interest in loving others.

But I also believe, in the vein of the great C.S. Lewis, that such sentences are usually reversible.  In his novel, “The Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis’s narrator dreams that he can move between heaven and hell almost at will after death, and can choose to live in either, so that even if someone starts outside of heaven, it is always possible to join.

Jesus says in the Gospel of John that judgment does not happen until the final day—it does not happen when we die.  Which means that if a good person dies with a desire to reach heaven, I absolutely, 100% believe that they’ll make it there.

But that also means we have the choice to be in hell.  And by that, I don’t mean eternal fire and brimstone.  To me, hell is, quite simply, being separated from God.  It’s what Jesus experienced on the cross when He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forgotten me?”  It isn’t being tortured or inflicted with pain from the outside, it’s the pain of nothingness and of loneliness.

But like I said, that loneliness, that nothingness and emptiness…it’s always reversible.

God’s love and grace is always possible, whether we feel near to Him or as far away as possible, whether we are alive or dead.

All we have to do is want it.  We show we want it in our actions, in how we treat one another.

And that has absolutely nothing to do with anything we might associate with as God’s anger, or wrath, or punishment, or anything of that sort.  As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Character is destiny.”  And as C.S. Lewis wrote—in one of his greatest lines ever—“The gates of hell are locked only from the inside.”

It is up to us to respond to a God who embraces us in love.  May we have the courage to do so.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 4, 2012

Letters to the Editor: The Conversation Continues

My apologies for the belated post--I waited to see if more letters would arrive to The Daily News on Referendum 74, either responses to our letter, or letters from other clergy.

Lo and behold, there were both!

You can find a response to our letter here (the fifth letter on the webpage).

And, you can find a letter from a neighboring United Church of Christ pastor weighing in here (the fourth letter on the webpage).

What do you think of what was said?

What do you wish had been said that wasn't?

Yours in Christ,
Eric