Thursday, September 10, 2015

We are Legion, Reprise the Second: World Suicide Prevention Day

(Today, September 10, is World Suicide Awareness and Prevention Day.  What follows is an unedited re-post of an intensely personal installment from the weeklong "We Are Legion" series of blog posts from 2013.  This is not the first time my personal testimony of my mental illness has served as a re-post, and if you are new to this blog, this account of mine will give you much insight into where I come from in my personal journey of faith, theology, and understanding of the self.

 This post was written in the wake of the suicide of Pastor Rick Warren's son Matthew, who was the same age as me, and at the time, that realization brought back intense memories of my own original diagnosis of major clinical depression when, over months of my own protestations, my parents finally made me see a psychiatrist.

 That wasn't the end of things, though--I still struggled mightily while in the care of my psychiatrist.  I still formulated suicide plans, abused the sleeping aids I was prescribed, and in many ways acted as though I was unloved, when in fact I wasn't--I was in truth very much loved, just not by myself.

Even when you feel completely, utterly unloved, God still loves you.  Please, always, always remember that. Don't be afraid to seek help if you need it.  I continue to strive to be an open book about my history of mental illness in a deliberate effort to reduce the stigma which surrounds it, and to ultimately help lead others to the healing and wholeness that comes with  care, love, and treatment--an end that I believe to be entirely godly in every sense of the term.  -E.A.)

Trigger word warning: suicide (obviously).

 Beginning at the age of 14, I began having increasingly frequent thoughts of suicide.  I became socially withdrawn, flunked out of advanced algebra, and by the time I graduated, I had been suspended from school twice for fighting.

After months of refusing, I eventually caved to my parents' wish to take me to see a psychiatrist.  He was able to immediately diagnose me with major clinical depression, and he put me on a regimen of antidepressants that I have continued in some form or fashion to this day.  Today, I am medicated and I am well, but I still remember how much I underachieved during my teenage years.

I remember it because even on medication, those episodes still return in minor forms.  Depression is like any chronic disease--I cannot be cured of it, I can only manage it.  I will likely be medicated for the rest of my life.

And I'm okay with that.  That's the way it has to be in order for me to function.

But it also isn't something that, for obvious reasons, I ordinarily share with people.

I'm writing about it right now, though, because Matthew Warren, the youngest son of Rick Warren (yes, that Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback and Purpose-Driven Life fame, and whom (full disclosure) I have occasionally criticized on the blog) killed himself this weekend after a lifelong battle with mental illness.

Matthew was twenty-seven years old.

It is how old I am.

Believe me, it hit home.  Please pray for Matthew's family, biological and church alike.

I worry that people sometimes rush to judge a suicide because of our own Christian orthodoxy that it constitutes a grave sin.  And I understand the logic behind that--I forget who said it, but suicide is our way of telling God, "Screw you, you can't fire me.  I quit."

We aren't supposed to quit on God.

But if we take a step back, and remember that depression is a mental illness, suicide becomes apparent as the result of terminal depression.  Roughly 3.5% of people in the United States who have depression eventually will commit suicide.  If we were to see depression as the disease that it is, it would be like saying that 3.5% of all cases of this disease become terminal.

Depression is not a moral failing.

It sounds simple, but I'm going to repeat it: Depression. Is. Not. A. Moral. Failing.

It is a disease.

I have always understood why folks might call depression a "demon," as though another's personal demon might be addiction or substance abuse, but I have recently begun to shy away from the urge to do that.  My depression isn't a demon, and the minute I say that it is, I am saying that having it is somehow wrong or somehow a moral weakness of mine.

And it isn't.

Because of how we normally associate demons with evil, saying someone's mental illness is a demon of their's implies an evil within that person which the person may or may not have control over.

And that's harmful.  It puts an unfair burden on the person suffering from mental illness, and it lends an inauthentic identity to the disease itself.

My depression is not a demon I have to be exorcised of, it is a disease I have to live with.

But for however long well-meaning people still put the words "depression" or "mental illness" in the same breath as words like "demon," we're going to have people engaging in extremely private battles with their illnesses and, in some cases, ultimately losing.

Read through the statement Rick Warren made again (in the CNN link above).  He wrote, in part, "But only those closest knew that he (Matthew) struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts."

I'm not suggesting that making personal struggles with mental illness more public is the way to go--as a PK (pastor's kid), Matthew likely already had more burdens growing up than your average boy.  And it is saddening that, based on Rick's statement, Matthew had been receiving treatment and it had ultimately failed.

What I am suggesting, though, is that maybe people might one day feel more free to explain their depression to people if they wish, rather than suffering mostly in private.

After all, a big part of what helps heal a person is the other people around them--medical staff, family, friends, and fellow patients.

In Mark 5, the Gerasene Demoniac confronts Jesus and the demon says, through the possessed man, "We are Legion, for we are many."

Far too often, the inverse is true of the people who suffer from these so-called "demons:" We are depressed, and so we are lonely.  And it is so for this man, the demoniac--he has gone into self-imposed exile in a graveyard, surrounded only by the dead.

We become lonely through a variety of ways, which has been in part the thrust of this weeklong blog series: we divide up one another.  I wrote about how we divide up the church, and then about how we divide up God's word.

We need not, should not, and cannot divide up ourselves.

For depression is, for better and for worse, not a demon.  It is a disease.

And like many other diseases, it can kill.  Even, sometimes, with treatment.

But also like many other diseases, it can be whipped.  It is possible.

If you are depressed, please, please, please do not be afraid to seek help.  Your family practice doctor can almost certainly refer you to a psychiatrist or psychologist, and many churches and pastors should also be able to refer you to mental health specialists.

If you are actively considering suicide, there are hotlines you can call.  The National Suicide Prevent Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.  It is toll-free and staffed 24/7.

We are Legion, sneered the Gerasene Demoniac, for we are many.

But we--the people who see and understand and live with mental illness every day--we are legion too, for we are many.

And with help, we can be the many who control our illnesses, instead of letting them control us.

So do not be afraid to seek help.  It is there for you if you ask for it.

My hope and prayer is that if I, and others like me, can be more open and courageous about mental illness, you--whoever you are--might feel courageous enough to make that life-saving request.

Yours in Christ, from someone who cares for you,
Eric

Dedicated to the men and women I met during my brief time as the intern chaplain of the inpatient psychiatric ward of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.  I still remember seeing the scars on your wrists and your necks.  I still remember listening to your stories.  I still remember hearing your fear.  And I hope and pray that that fear has, like our time together, receded into the sea of years-ago memories.
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

In Which I Get Fan Mail From Racist Trolls

Yesterday, as a part of the #ImAChristianBut hashtag on Twitter, I wrote the following tweet:


 It has been retweeted 40-some times as of this afternoon, and it was humbling and heartening to see people responding to a sentiment that I deeply felt: that we as a church have really tried to whitewash our pasts in a lot of ways, ways that ignore how we profited from both the slave trade and segregation, and how we tried to demonize, terrorize, and even kill those who worked to end those institutions.

That exposure hasn't come without garnering some flotsam from the trolls under the bridge:

Now...did you notice how "your race" got inserted into the conversation in that second tweet?  This will be a recurring phenomenon:

Then another interloper just comes out and says it:
The assumption, based on my tweet, apparently, is that I'm African-American.

Which, of course, I am not, a fact that can be ascertained by a simple search of this blog, a link to which exists on my Twitter page.  Simply searching the term "race" returns, on hits 2, 3, and 4, posts in which I refer to myself explicitly as white or Caucasian.  Go ahead, feel free to try it--the search function is on the toolbar to the right.

Personally, if someone mistakes my race or ethnicity, my first instinct is to gently correct them--it happens all the time because I'm part of a relatively small ethnic group (Armenians), and my complexion is outwardly ambiguous enough that I have gotten mistaken (sometimes in a hostile way) for Jewish, Latino, Italian, Arab, and even East Asian.

But then I went back and looked at some of the names they were calling me: Viper.  Snake.

Also, fraud:

Scumbag:

Complete idiot:

And loser:

We'll set aside for a moment that name-calling isn't terribly Christian, but even as these insults came after I corrected them to tell them I in fact identify as white, there are people out there who thought it was okay to call (who they thought was) a black man they have never met and knew nothing about except for a lone, single, and frankly not very radical tweet, names like "viper" and "snake."

I cannot begin to imagine the racist abuse the leaders of African-American churches, #BlackLivesMatter, and other black-led organizations working for reconciliation must endure on a regular basis.  I was on the receiving end of it this once and it was appalling to me, even as I strove as best I could to parry it with facts, wit, and humor (I could have blocked them, but honestly, that's a measure of last resort for me, and I have had to do that once already today, so I wasn't feeling it again).

Again, just to reiterate for emphasis--I'm white.  And this is what I was on the receiving end of from people who thought I was black.  What on earth could possibly lead someone to think these insults were okay to say to someone we do not know at all, much less someone who does not look like us, except for prejudice?

So...if you thought that racism only comes to earth in the form of a terrorist gunman who takes the lives of nine African-American souls in their church, think again.  We still act horribly to each other in any number of ways, and this is but one.

So, can we begin to admit that there really is a problem with prejudice among believers to this day?

Can we begin to stand up to the racist, racially-charged, and prejudiced things we hear and see people say?

And can we, for God's sake, stop trying to shout down people of color and their allies for wanting what we have had for centuries: the privilege to live and breathe free in the United States of America?

Because I still have hope that we as believers and Jesus followers are still capable of building some small semblance of the kingdom of heaven in this little world of ours.

I still have hope that we can in fact do what my original tweet asked us to do, to be more honest about our past, as painful and sordid with the sins of slavery and segregation as that past may be.

And I still have hope that the closer to God each of us will forever be for having done so.

It is a hope I have, y'all.  I'd just as soon not jettison it now.

#BlackLivesMatter.

Longview, Washington
September 8, 2015

Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, September 6, 2015

This Week's Sermon: "Ezekiel: 30 Years"

Ezekiel 1:1-4

In the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, I was with the exiles at the Chebar River when the heavens opened and I saw visions of God.

 2 (It happened on the fifth day of the month, in the fifth year after King Jehoiachin’s deportation. 

 3 The Lord’s word burst in on the priest Ezekiel, Buzi’s son, in the land of Babylon at the Chebar River. There the Lord’s power overcame him.) 

  4 As I watched, suddenly a driving storm came out of the north, a great cloud flashing fire, with brightness all around. At its center, in the middle of the fire, there was something like gleaming amber.

(Common English Bible)
“From 40 Days to 84 Years: Waiting on God’s Word,” Week Two

I remember reading the news of it on my computer and subsequently spending the next week sitting at a table in front of the student cafeteria at my college, soliciting donations for the Red Cross. 

I remember it actually entering my dreams, of one in particular where I was flying through the storm until I finally reached its center, the eye of the hurricane.

And I remember the stories of how brokenhearted the people themselves who were most affected felt, of how they felt like a nation of 49 other states had left them to rot in stadiums and trailers.

It was August 29, 2005, ten years ago plus one week, and Hurricane Katrina had just decimated New Orleans, Louisiana.  And in reading the “where are things now” stories this past week, ten years later, I felt that great sense of brokenheartedness and disappointment seep into my soul once more like a sponge.

And it was then that I was reminded that the axiom “time heals all wounds” is oftentimes a load of hooey.  Time heals minor wounds, it’s a peroxide for scrapes and skinned arms and legs.  It doesn’t measure up to the lacerations that need stitches to tie them back together.

But it is precisely that sort of gaping wound that I felt still existed in the ten-year-old wake of Katrina.  And it is precisely that sort of aching wound the propels the prophet Ezekiel into ministry.

This is a new sermon series, just in time for the fall season of school years and football seasons alike starting, and that’s in fact very important for us to remember right now.  This series is really about the passage of time and the effect that this passage can have upon our faith.  It was grown, in fact, out of an idea from one of our elders, Alisha Hayes, whose seed of a suggestion that she made to me for a sermon on having to wait for God to speak grew into a full-blown six-week series, and the thrust of that series simply is: what about people who sometimes have to wait years, even decades, to understand God’s will for their lives?  What about them?  And what happens when God finally acts in our lives, always on a divine timetable rather than our own human timetable?  And why do some of God’s favorites, even figures as revered as Abraham and Moses, have to wait as long as 75 or 80 years before God reached out them and called them by name?

Last week, we began this series by talking about one of those two chaps—Abraham—and we’ll continue this series next week by talking about the other—Moses.  But for today, we’re going to be talking about a lesser-known figure in the Hebrew Bible, but still one of great consequence who wrote one of the three long books of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible: the prophet Ezekiel.

The prophet’s own name gives some glimpse into how he survives the existential agony—some would say madness, but we’ll get to that in a bit—the prophet is plainly in.  El, as many of you know, is a shortened form of the Hebrew word Elohim, which means “God,” or “Lord.”  Ezek comes from the Hebrew hazaq, which means “strong,” or “strengthen,” or “fasten.”  Ezekiel’s name translates, then, into “God strengthens/will strengthen.”  When Ezekiel begins the entire accounting of his prophecies with the words, “while I was among the exiles,” you know that strength is needed.

The exiles Ezekiel is referring to in his introduction are the Judeans who were exiled from Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, though Ezekiel refers to the exile as that of King Jehoiachin, the last legitimate king of Judah—after Nebuchadnezzar first invaded Jerusalem, he deposed Jehoicahin and replaced him with a puppet king, Zedekiah, before invading once more in 586 BCE and turning Judah fully into a Babylonian slave state.

The Babylonian exile is one of three events that the Hebrew Bible really centers itself around, with the other two being the exodus out of Egypt under Moses and the unification of Israel as a single kingdom under David and his son Solomon.  Almost everything else that takes place in the Hebrew Bible, except for the events in the book of Genesis, is documented under the immense shadow of these three watershed events, each roughly 400 years apart, from the Exodus circa 1400 BCE to the reigns of David and Solomon circa 1000 to 920 BCE to the previously mentioned Babylonian exile.

Ezekiel, though, is cut from a very different cloth than any of those Biblical heroes: Moses is an entirely reluctant savior whereas David is an overlooked one.  And Solomon’s defining characteristic is his wisdom, whereas Ezekiel’s is most likely his sheer outlandishness—this is a fellow who, shortly into his prophetic ministry, actually eats a holy scroll and says it tastes sweet to him, like honey.  He goes for shock value, not necessarily calm erudition.  He’s more the random person you see in the street corner holding up a sign saying that the world is going to end rather than an ordinary church pastor, seminary professor, or any other member of any institutionalized religion.

Ezekiel, in other words, is a prophet on the margins.  That’s who he is.  And when the earliest of the Hebrew Bible prophets, Isaiah, happened to be a prophet in the royal court of multiple kings, this is no small distinction to make.  Isaiah is in the palaces—though it will end up costing him his life, when the reign of King Manasseh rolls around—but Ezekiel is in the streets.

Put a different way, Ezekiel was in the heart of New Orleans when the hurricane warnings of Katrina began coming in.  He went into exile just like thousands of New Orleans citizens as Katrina, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, utterly demolished his beloved home city.

Or, Ezekiel could right now be in the masses of refugees, literally washing up on our shores like that little boy's body that made all of the news stories, after their homes were likewise heart-wrenchingly taken from them.

But as Ezekiel writes, that is also how the word of the Lord arrived to him as well, after thirty years of living, five of them in exile: God’s word “burst in” upon him and “overcame” him.  The Word didn’t walk up and politely tap Ezekiel on the shoulder and hold out a hand, no, it swept over him the way the Psalmist says that God cascades over him in the 42nd Psalm.

Being called by God is very much an immersion.  It is, in a way, why it is appropriate that we then baptize by immersion: somebody is signaling that God has spoken out to them by choosing to be quite literally immersed in water…sometimes of uncomfortably cold temperatures!

Does that mean that God’s word shone out to somebody as, say, New Orleans itself was immersed by Hurricane Katrina, or Japan was by its tsunami in 2011?  I think so.  Not because God uses natural disasters, or “driving storms,” as Ezekiel says, as tools of wrath—that’s a beastly, ghastly theology—but because those disasters are what necessitate soul-sized heroes in the first place.

Think about it: Moses would have had no need to be a savior if the Israelites were not already enslaved in Egypt.

Ezekiel would have no need to be a prophet if the Judeans were not already in exile in Babylon.

And Jesus Christ Himself would likewise have had no need to be a savior—THE Savior—had Israel not been enslaved to the Romans, the Jewish religious leadership enslaved to Pontius Pilate, and humanity itself enslaved to sin.

When everything is copacetic, we do not think of ourselves as needing a Nietzschian ubermensch, an ultimate person capable of saving us when we are unable to save ourselves, because what on earth could we possibly need saving from?

It is only when our backs are against the proverbial wall that we realize who, and what, we truly need.  And until we really begin to understand that, it's difficult to put ourselves in another person's shoes...and that's what the saying is, right?  Walk a mile in someone else's shoes?

 But...what if that person doesn't have any shoes to begin with?

It was five years—longer than I have been here as your pastor—into the exile before God came to Ezekiel, and it was thirty years that Ezekiel was alive before receiving that divine word.  A lot has changed in just five years, never mind thirty--we still had troops in Iraq, the World Cup had just been played in South Africa rather than Brazil, and Law & Order was still on the air!

Yet even then, it would be another forty-some years before Israel would finally be delivered, not by Ezekiel, but by a non-Israelite: the Persian king Cyrus the Great.  So stretch your mind back to the year 1970, and that is how long the Israelites have waited their saving.  Think of how much has changed since then.

 That's the kind of waiting on God we are talking about with this sermon series.

So the waiting on God will in fact continue for Ezekiel and his flock, even as he fills chapter after chapter of Biblical verse with his vivid and enervating prophecies.

As it shall continue for each of us, even as we live out our lives in the comforts and securities of our own homes and vocations.

Because, in truth, however comfortable and secure we may be, there will remain in each of us, for as long as we continue to be alive, at least part of us that will forever long to be closer to God, to not be so far in exile from our creator.

And so to the closing of that exile I will soon send you forth, and pray that you, like the saints who have come before you, will one day ultimately and truly find.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
September 6, 2015
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

A Few Words on Kim Davis, Same-Sex Marriage Licenses, and Being Born "Anothen"

I almost relocated to Kentucky for my first call out of seminary.  During my search-and-call process, three different churches took a significant interest in calling me: one, of course, is the one I serve now, FCC Longview here in Washington state.  The other two were located in Kentucky, the epicenter of our historic roots in the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801.

While I wouldn't trade my opportunity to return to my beloved Pacific Northwest for anything, it would be fascinating for me to be living in Kentucky now, as it is making a different sort of history at present over in Rowan County, the home of county clerk Kim Davis.  She is not the only county clerk to refuse to issue marriage licenses in the wake of the universal legalization of same-sex marriage by the US Supreme Court this past June, but she, along with fellow marriage license-denying county clerk Casey Davis (no relation) has received probably the most ink.

I have little interest in rehashing the back-and-forth argument of allowing for religious conscience versus a publicly elected official having to do their job, because the law is pretty much settled on that one in favor of the latter: the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Davis's appeal, and she and her entire staff have been summoned for a court date tomorrow to potentially be charged with contempt.

Nor do I really have that much interest in waving the reality that Davis has been married four times and divorced three times as evidence of her hypocrisy, because (a) I don't get to judge the contexts or reasons for those marriages and divorces, nor should I be able to, (b) I have happily officiated--and thus explicitly approved of--the weddings of people who have been previously divorced myself, and (c) that fact alone actually ignores the larger issue in her hypocrisy: that it is tinged with a very specific sort of religious duplicity that ignores one's past in order to discriminate in the present.

By her own account, about four years ago, Davis attended church about four years ago at the behest of her dying mother-in-law and subsequently seemed to have had a genuine God experience, saying, "There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God. I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage."

Her Liberty Counsel attorney Matthew Staver, in the same WaPo article linked in the previous paragraph, is quoted as saying, "It’s something that happened in her past…She was 180 degrees changed."

Here's the thing about our pasts, though: we are indeed forgiven.  But the world, and God, does not forget.  Paul did not forget his own murderous past even after he experienced the presence of Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus, writing to the Galatians in 1:13, "You have heard of my previous life in Judaism, how severely I harassed God's church and tried to destroy it."  Jesus did not forget Simon Peter's thrice-spoken denial of Him during the Passion, asking Peter three times (one for each denial) "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" in John 21.  And while God, through the prophet Elijah, forgave the wicked king Ahab for his framing and murdering of the innocent vineyard keeper Naboth in 2 Kings 9, God still executed punishment for Ahab's sin, only it was upon Ahab's son rather than Ahab himself.

To say that anyone--God, Christ, our neighbors, or even as much as we wish, ourselves--truly forgets our pasts is a fantasy.  Which is why using the "She was 180 degrees changed" line, like Staver does in defense of Davis, is a total cop-out, a get-out-of-jail-free card.  It isn't that I--or anyone else, for that matter--has any right to doubt the authenticity of her conversion, it's that her conversion does not erase the consequences of whatever her previous actions have brought about.

Put another way, to return to the Biblical examples I cited earlier: Paul's conversion was genuine, but it did not bring Stephen, the disciple stoned to death as Paul approved in Acts 7-8, back to life.  Ahab's repentance was likewise seen as authentic, but it did not bring Naboth back from the dead, nor did it preclude God's own prerogative to enact punishment.

Our greatest sins, no matter how far in our pasts they may be, rarely get entirely erased.  Our historical treatment of African-American or American Indians will never be really erased, nor can they be or should they be.  And sometimes, our own personal or individual sins do not fade away into the ether, much as we might long and wish for them to.  To say that they do does, I believe, in fact cheapen the entire idea of forgiveness, because if something can indeed be entirely blotted out, then there is no need for forgiveness, no great import placed on seeking it, and no necessity for reconciliation.  To say our sins can in fact be wiped entirely out is to say that, in the end, reconciliation doesn't matter as much as confession, which has never, ever, been the case in Christianity.

I see it all the time--I've seen former single mothers harshly judge other single moms as morally corrupted, I've seen recovering addicts refer to active addicts in utterly cruel and dehumanizing terms, and for f***'s sake, the child-molesting, adultery-committing Josh Duggar and his family spoke of gay, lesbian, and trans people as sexual predators, never mind that he eventually found himself in more need of forgiveness for his religious hypocrisy than they did.

And so in the case of Kim Davis, she may well be a new person and born again (or "anothen," in the Greek from John 3, where Jesus first uses that term when talking to Nicodemus), but that does not negate the consequences of her previous marriages and divorces, and one of those present consequences is the real and genuine hurt that same-sex couples who are her constituents are feeling at being denied something they have never had but once but that she has partaken of repeatedly.

This is the danger of our faith becoming too individualistic--we are apt to see our own sinfulness and darkness only as it relates to our personal relationships: with God, with our family, and with our immediate friends.  What we tend to be blinded to is our sinfulness and darkness as it connects to our wider relations, to humanity itself.

I speak from personal experience.  I sometimes have a hard time forgiving people, even people close to me, because of how hard it really is sometimes.  But that does not diminish the necessity that I must eventually do it, because my faith, and Kim Davis's faith, demands nothing less of us.

Kim Davis needs to see how her past darkness connects to the neighbors, citizens, and constituents she is refusing to serve.  Her eyes need to be opened, like one of the many blinded people whom Jesus healed, to how the effects of what she has been previously forgiven for are still very much present, and how her unwillingness to forgive and reconcile with people whose relationships she disagrees with is in fact hurting her.

And she needs to do it now, and not just because she is on the brink of being fined or arrested.  She needs to because as Jesus preaches in Luke 6:37, as we forgive others, we are ourselves forgiven, and in Matthew 6:14-15, Jesus goes even further: our own forgiveness from God hinges on our forgiveness of others.  If we do not forgive others, God will not forgive us.  Davis seems to think that her personal God experience led to her being forgiven by God, but if she does not forgive her constituents for what she sees as a sin (same-sex relations) and treat them the same as any of her other constituents, then how exactly has she been forgiven?

In other words, her own forgiveness that she so, so treasures may well be at stake.  And I have no doubt that she does indeed see this issue before her as one of monumental spiritual proportions.

But I do not think she does not see it that way for the correct reasons.

Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.  That is the reason all of this matters.  We need forgiveness.  Whether we admit it or not, we crave it and desire it because it is what brings peace to our very souls.  Confession alone is not enough, we must have reconciliation as well, and for that, forgiveness is an absolute necessity.

My hope and prayer for Kim Davis is that she can begin to see how her own forgiveness, and mine, and every Christian's, is inextricably tied up into our forgiveness of others.

And if she is indeed forgiven and chooses to live that forgiveness out, she will do the right and principled thing, which is to either begin issuing marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples, or resign her position as Rowan County Clerk.

Vancouver, Washington
Septcember 2, 2015.

Image courtesy of azcapitoltimes.com
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, August 31, 2015

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column + New Sermon Series!

September 2015: "Doing The Same Things Differently: A Report From General Assembly"
Dear Church, This past July, I had the joy of representing our congregation at the General Assembly of our Disciples of Christ denomination in Columbus, Ohio. I returned too late in the month to include a report for my August column, so here I am telling you all about it in September!

General Assembly serves several functions: a means for voting representatives (all ordained clergy plus selected non-clergy) to vote on business items for the denomination--much like how we do so at our congregation's annual general meeting every January, an opportunity to present reports from our missionaries in the field or from some of our new church plants, and sometimes simply a chance to catch up with old friends far-flung across the church!

One of the most crucial things that General Assembly provides, though, is the opportunity for pastors to engage in continuing education in order to keep our skills current and up-to-date. As the book of Proverbs states, just as iron sharpens iron, so too does one person sharpen another, and at GA, I had the opportunity to learn from lectures from Disciples seminary professors Frank and Joyce Thomas, United Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton, and even a TED talk from my colleague here in the Northwest region, Liv Gibbons over at Northwest United Protestant Church in Richland.

This GA, though, may be one of the last on its current biannual schedule. For as long as I have been an ordained Disciples pastor (which really isn't very long at all!), the GA has convened every two years, and there was much discussion in Columbus about moving it to every three years in order to make it more cost-efficient for both the denomination and its pastors--and the congregations who send their pastors.

Personally, I think it is a perfectly fine idea, because it will still allow for all of the great aspects of GA I just described to continue, but to do so while adjusting to the reality that, thanks to things like social media and online classes, General Assembly doesn't need to offer some of the services it does as frequently as every two years.

What this means is that we, as a denomination, are learning how to do some of the same things differently. Rather than dump the proverbial baby with the bathwater, we have begun discussing how to make better and more effective this very helpful and meaningful institution of the General Assembly that we already have.

And that is a mentality that *must* filter down into our congregations--including our own here in Longview. We have to always be willing to see where the Holy Spirit is nudging us to make the ways we have of doing things work in better and sometimes newer ways. A church that is stuck in a rut is just like a wheel stuck in a rut--it can only go in one of two directions, and eventually, that direction will need to change.

I continue to hope and pray that we keep our strength as a church that has allowed us to be moved in different directions by the spirit, and as we forge onward to navigate what direction our lovely and storied church community takes together, it remains my privilege to be your pastor throughout your faith journey here at FCC!

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric

 New sermon series: "From 40 Days to 84 Years: Waiting on God's Word"

 September will be a rarity for us compared to recent months--a month devoted entirely to just one sermon series! On August 30, we began this new series with the story of Abraham waiting until he was 75 before figuring so directly into the story of God's word--the Bible--and now, we get to hear from four more people who likewise had to wait many years...in the cases of Moses and Anna, until they were in their eighties! In a time when instant gratification is increasingly the norm, it means that move at higher and higher speeds. Sometimes, that's actually a really, really good thing, like enabling a faster response to a friend or family member in crisis. But it also warps our sense of perspective when we do have to wait for things--and I include myself among such whippersnappers--and especially when we think about just how long people sometimes wait to hear God clearly in their lives. So come out on Sunday and hear the stories of several heroes and heroines in the Bible and of how God ended up working in their lives for the better, even when it took many years!

 I'll see you Sunday,
Pastor Eric

August 30: "Abraham: 75 Years," Genesis 12:1-9
September 6: “Ezekiel: 30 Years," Ezekiel 1:1-4
September 13: “Moses: 80 Years," Exodus 3:1-6, 4:10-12
September 20: “Aeneas: 8 Years,” Acts 9:31-35
September 27: “Anna: 84 Years,” Luke 2:22-24, 36-38
October 4: "Jesus: 40 Days," Luke 4:1-13
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, August 30, 2015

This Week's Sermon: "Abraham: 75 Years"

Genesis 12:1-9

The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse; all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.”

4 Abram left just as the Lord told him, and Lot went with him. Now Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all of their possessions, and those who became members of their household in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the sacred place at Shechem, at the oak of Moreh. The Canaanites lived in the land at that time.

7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I give this land to your descendants,” so Abram built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him. 8 From there he traveled toward the mountains east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and worshipped in the Lord’s name. 9 Then Abram set out toward the arid southern plain, making and breaking camp as he went. (Common English Bible)

“From 40 Days to 84 Years: Waiting on God’s Word,” Week One

They are some of the most historically and scientifically important documents in all of human history, and in order to view and handle them to this day, you have to don special protective clothing and sign a waiver of absolving the paper’s holders—the Bibliotheque National, the National Library, in Paris, France—of any damaging effects to your health as a result of radiation.

Even though these documents themselves are over 100 years old.  Because as it turns out, the isotope radium-226 has a half-life of over 1,600 years.  They’ll be safe to handle around 3500 CE.  To put that in perspective, that's almost as long as Christianity has been the pre-eminent religion in Western European and American tradition after Emperor Constantine made it the state faith nearly 1,700 years ago.

Marie Curie, the famous female pioneer of science and radiology, did her work surrounded by this invisible, dangerous radiation.  She would carry radioactive materials with her, on her person, and store them in her desk drawers, unaware of the danger she was in and how long that danger would remain in place.  All of these practices would be unthinkable now, 1/16th into radium-226’s half-life.

Such is the power of time—that the tools of the trade of one of our great heroes of scientific advancement are still dangerous weapons and will remain that way for another 1,500 or so years.

It kind of puts into perspective our faster-moving, instant gratification mentality of today, yeah?  And that’s what we’ll be talking about today, and throughout this entire six-week sermon series: our need to put our time into perspective and context of God’s far greater and good time.

This is a new sermon series, just in time for the fall season of school years and football seasons alike starting, and that’s in fact very important for us to remember right now, because this series really is about the passage of time and the effect it can have on our faith.  It was grown, in fact, out of an idea from one of our elders, Alisha Hayes, whose seed of a suggestion that she made to me grew into a full-blown six-week series, and that seed simply is: what about people who sometimes have to wait to understand God’s will for their lives?  What happens when God acts in our lives according to a divine timetable rather than our own human timetable?  And why do God’s favorites, even people as revered as Abraham and Moses, have to wait as long as 75 or 80 years before God reached out to them and called them by name?  In fact, that is where we are kicking off this series, with one of those two chaps: father Abraham, the patriarch of patriarchs, forebear to the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also a very human man with some very human failings.

Sounds an awful lot like us, right?  Well, that’s Abraham.  And he still changed the world entirely.

Just not at first.

For the first 75 years of his life, Abraham wasn’t even known as Abraham—his given name was Abram, and only later on in Genesis will God rename him as Abraham, much in the same way that God renames Abraham’s grandson Jacob as Israel much, much later on in Genesis.  The author of Genesis does not say at the outset why Abraham had found favor with God initially, only that God spoke to Abraham to tell him that he would become a blessing—which, first, isn’t that amazing to hear from God?  But second, we are given an inkling of why Abraham might in fact have found favor with God by the fact that he obeys immediately, “just as the Lord told him,” Genesis writes.

And if someone asked you to distill Abraham’s life and faith in following God down to a single word, “obedience” would be a pretty solid answer.  While Abraham balks at some of God’s most wrathful actions—such as when he successfully haggled God down from not destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if Abraham could find fifty righteous people to not destroying the cities if Abraham could find ten righteous people—he is even eventually willing to sacrifice his own son Isaac simply because God instructed him to do so, no matter the agony it must have put him in.

Now, from our perspective, imagine having spent up the first seventy-five years of your life and not felt God’s presence in so profound a way as Abraham just has—that God has, in no small way, felt absent from your life.  Would you be as quick as Abraham is to obey this johnny-come-lately deity in your twilight years?  Might you hit the pause button for just a moment or so and ask “why bother?”

There is a common theme, if you noticed it, of Abraham’s initial travels with his family: he stops to worship and build altars.  Nowadays, the only things we stop our travel for are airline-mandated connections at whatever godforsaken hub airport they shunt us to and trying to combine getting both gas and lunch into one stop, which is why beef jerky is such a great road trip delicacy.  Unless it’s really special, there’s just no room for reverence when we travel through time or across space.

But that isn’t so for Abraham, even as he advances in years, and even as he travels the span of, basically, most of the Mediterranean coast from modern-day Turkey—where the villeage of Haran is believed to have been—past the Mediterranean and all the way down to the Negev, the southernmost desert in modern-day Israel.  He stops for the real stuff, the soul-sized stuff, the worshipful stuff that following God actually entails, and by building altars, in a real, tangible way.

Is that a patience we ourselves can truthfully say that we would exhibit?  After 75 years of waiting, never mind, say, (hypothetically for me), 30?  Or would we just light out there into whatever our divinely-inspired mission was, neglecting altogether to give thanks to the One who called us to it?

Rather, it is because of how long you may have waited to hear the voice of God calling us forth that we should be so inclined to take time to stop and worship God along the way.  If you, like Abraham, waited 75 years for God to speak, what’s another hour to worship God like you are doing now?

Put another way: if, in a world where centuries can come and go and millennia can pass before a scientific pioneer’s defining work becomes once again safe for human touch, then what is another five minutes, or ten, or twenty, to you, o small but wondrous thread in God’s great tapestry of life?

Can we begin to see our world, our lives, and ultimately ourselves from the God’s view of eternity, rather than our own human view of selfishness and conceit.  Abraham took that first step towards understanding the depth and grandeur of God’s eternity when he took that first step from Haran.

Will we do the same with our first steps out of this church building today?  Or will we be forever destined to muddle along in our own fears and insecurities?

That choice, believe it or not, is entirely up to us.  It was up to Abraham to ignore God, and he chose not to, to instead heed the divine voice ringing in his ear, and it is up to us, as followers of the same God that called Abraham, to be those followers and follow suit.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
August 30, 2015
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Why I Stand With AWPPW Local 153

Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces.

 James 5:4 (Common English Bible)

Earlier this month, I drove down to Portland's Pioneer Square to attend and speak at a rally organized by the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers for their local 153--the local that represents the 800 or so workers at the Kapstone mill here in Longview (edit: you can see the beginning of that speech here).  A couple of those workers are members of my flock at FCC, and I wanted to make a visible show of support for their multiyear plight in getting a fair contract with Kapstone ever since their previous contract expired early in 2014.

And now today, as of 3:00 this morning, the workers at the KapStone mill are on strike for the first time in nearly forty years, after first voting to authorize a strike all the way back in December of 2014.

A condensed version of this post is being sent to the local paper, The Daily News, in the form of a letter to the editor, because I want to be clear to my congregants and neighbors on strike that there is religious leadership in the town that has their back in their quest for better working conditions and benefits.

But in an era when clergy still seem more concerned with fighting for so-called religious freedom bills or against same-sex discrimination bans, why is it even important to have Christian leaders call out the corporations that employ their flock?

In part, actually, I think it is important because in pushing so hard for those things I just mentioned--religious freedom bills, the right to still discriminate against same-sex couples, and so on--we pastors have totally missed the plot and what the Bible actually says--repeatedly--about the justice of promptly paying workers fair wages.  But we'll get to that in a moment.

This is personal for me.  My dad, currently a judge on the Kansas state Court of Appeals, had, prior to becoming an appellate judge, represented the interests of labor unions as a lawyer at various Kansas City firms for many years, and as a child at his knee, I learned of the history of labor unions in America, of the great sacrifices--sometimes of life--in order to gain the things we today take for granted, like the 40-hour workweek and time-and-a-half pay for any work above and beyond that.

And those sorts of protections of work hours and wages are basic to not only American principles, but to Biblical principles.  Not only does James, the brother of Jesus, condemn the practice of taking away the wages of one's workers in 5:4 of his letter, he also condemns the practice of the aristocracy twisting and warping the legal system to their own greedy and selfish ends:

Don't the wealthy make life difficult for you?  Aren't they the ones who drag you into court? (2:6, CEB)

Furthermore, the commitment to paying a fair wage to ones workers is not limited to James--the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah and Malachi each wrote on the subject, saying, respectively:

How terrible for Jehoiakim, who builds his house with corruption and his upper chambers with injustice, working his countrymen for nothing, refusing to give them their wages. (Jeremiah 22:13, CEB)

and,

I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against the sorcerers, the adulterers, those swearing falsely, against those who cheat the day laborers out of their wages as well as oppress the widow and the orphan, and against those who brush aside the foreigner and do not revere me, says the Lord of heavenly forces (Malachi 3:5, CEB)

To be clear--this strike isn't simply about wages.  It is an unfair labor practice strike, and those unfair labor practices include those things that Jeremiah and Malachi denounce, the corruption involved in a history of worker safety violations and the injustice inherent in unilaterally imposing a contract rejected by over two-thirds of the local's membership.  And this is to say nothing of the reality that after posting record profits in 2014, KapStone kicked off 2015 by announcing over thirty layoffs in Longview.

Like the Old Testament kings of yore, KapStone and its executive management need to repent and hear the voices of their workers, workers who are being worked for less and less and have been facing, for nearly two years now, a steadfast refusal to give them fair wages, benefits, and working conditions.

This is indeed a Biblical issue, much as we in church like to act as though only matters of personal piety and morality are worthy of preaching on nowadays.  But to do that ignores the larger realities that Scripture teaches us of, including the reality, as Malachi writes, that in addition to the personal immoralities of adultery and lying, those who cheat their workers out of their wages, those who oppress the needy such as the widows and orphans, those who do not welcome others--including foreigners--are not acting in a wa in a way that reveres God.

We ignore the full warning of Malachi--and of Jeremiah to King Jehoiakim, and of James to the early church, entirely at the peril of our own souls' health and wholeness.  We cannot act like our souls are as spiritually enriched as they can or should be simply because we say please and thank you and chew with our mouth closed.  No, God will always demand so much more of us, as well God ought, for a good parent always pushes their children to be the very best versions of themselves.

Thus far, however, the leaders of KapStone have failed that divine mandate.  And so I stand fully, completely, and unambiguously, in support and solidarity with my friends, congregants, and neighbors who make up AWPPW 153 as they begin their strike for a better livelihood for them and, once rippling outward, for us all.

Longview, Washington
August 27, 2015

AWPPW logo image courtesy of thestand.org
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)