Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

“Of Things Not Seen”

Dear Church,

I have to admit—I’ve really, really loved our time going through the book of Revelation so far!  It’s an exciting book to try to understand and decode, especially because, paradoxically, we were never meant to understand it as Gentiles!

That does mean, though, that I do spend a lot of time trying to prove (in a sense) the commentary that I am making upon the text.  I have to take care that my explanation and interpretation do not turn into dogma or, worse, attempts to prove the unprovable.

Because that is what faith is, in the end, right?  The unprovable?  That almost mystical boundary where proof stops and hope begins?

The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard is famous for his notion of us as Christians needing to take a leap of faith—that is, ultimately, reason and logic have their day but can only take us so far because there is so much more to God’s nature and creation that we still do not understand and that we must place our trust in the unseen in order to live as Christians.

Or, as the Bible puts it elegantly and simply in Hebrews 11, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen.” (NRSV)

It can be a tough thing to wrap our minds around, the idea that no matter how much we want to, we cannot simply prove God’s existence through a simple equation or a series of proofs.  Instead, God’s existence is indeed all about faith, and about the vision to see God’s presence all around you.  This is a lesson that I find myself continually learning throughout this sermon series!

Where has God’s presence been in your life that perhaps might remain unseen to you?  What have you hoped for in the past, without realizing that it was there the whole time?

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Eric

Some Thoughts on American Exceptionalism

Full disclosure: I have a lot of strong feelings about the openness of America as a nation of immigrants and about the call that many people feel to national service.  I am a third-generation American whose family immigrated here as refugees fleeing a genocide, my grandfather and aunt both served in the armed forces, and my uncle Albert was KIA in World War II.

As you can probably guess by the above paragraph, I think America is pretty nifty sometimes.  Considering the xenophobia that existed (and exists to this day—just look at all the countries getting fined for racism at this year’s European Championships) in many European countries, my family immigrating here made sense, even though they did encounter racism here after arriving.  And after going on mission to Mexico and Africa, I try very hard to not take for granted the advantage I unfairly received for no other reason than being born into the First World.

At the same time, man, we can sometimes suck, too.

Making the viral rounds of the internet is a clip from Aaron Sorkin’s show The Newsroom, which features, among other acting talent, the venerable Jeff Daniels, who, when asked in a symposium why America is the best country on earth, eventually explodes and rattles off an array of statistics, albeit in some cases with questionable degrees of accuracy.  But the CIA World Factbook does note that despite all of our economic and civic advantages, we Americans rank:

50^th in life expectancy

48^th in infant mortality

180^th in income inequality (per the Gini coefficient where a higher # means more inequality)

…and despite all of this, we are 2^nd in our amount of health care spending as a percentage of our GDP, behind only Malta.

Daniels’s character then notes that we lead the world in three categories:

Number of incarcerated persons per capita

Number of adults who believe in angels (this one I’m proud of)

Defense spending

If we really want to be the city on a hill that Jesus alludes to in Matthew 5:14, and that John Winthrop preached to the pilgrims, well, we’ve got a long, long way to go.

We can say that America is a God-ordained nation all we want, but there is nothing in Scripture to directly support that belief.  Even if there were, the Big Guy’s stamp of approval doesn’t seem to have kept us from turning in subpar performances on a number of issues, including two that Jesus emphasized—healing the sick (see above statistics on life expectancy and infant mortality) and caring for the poor (see above statistics on income inequality and incarceration).  And given the amount of money we are spending on, say, health care, we seem to be doing that subpar job rather inefficiently as well.

What we are left with instead is the need to acknowledge that Christianity is NOT exclusively American.  It was born in a time and place not our own, and to try to make it exclusively our own is an exercise in vanity, and to make it a part of American exceptionalism is Biblically inaccurate.

It’s good to be patriotic.  My proudest day as a college student (aside from graduation) was representing the United States’ National Parliamentary Debate Association in a public debate against the Irish national debate team at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado (please be praying for all of the Colorado residents who have lost their homes and livelihoods in the recent wildfires).

And it’s good to do things that uphold our democracy.  I believe immensely in civic engagement—I happily vote, pay taxes, follow the news, research candidates, and would serve on a jury if summoned.  As my AP government teacher wrote to me at my high school graduation, “The highest calling of any American is that of citizen.”

None that means that God wants me to be patriotic, though.  God wants me to be just, and righteous, and loving—characteristics that God may have in abundance, but that I still sometimes lack, and characteristics that our country (and, it should be noted, our church as well) sometimes struggles with.  America, for all its strengths, still has significant flaws to be worked on.

And it is, I pray, far better to be truthful about our flaws than to turn a blind eye to them in the name of superficial patriotism.

We can be exceptional.  But we’re not the best.  Not yet, anyways.

Let us have the humility and openness to other nations and cultures to affirm that reality.

Have a safe and happy Fourth of July, dear readers.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Caesar Nero"

Revelation 13:11-18


^"11 Then I saw another beast coming up from the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it was speaking like a dragon. ¹² It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence. It also makes the earth and those who live in it worship the first beast, whose fatal wound was healed. ¹³ It does great signs so that it even makes fire come down from heaven to earth in the presence of the people. ¹⁴ It deceives those who live on earth by the signs that it was allowed to do in the presence of the beast. It told those who live on earth to make an image for the beast who had been wounded by the sword and yet came to life again. ¹⁵ It was allowed to give breath to the beast’s image so that the beast’s image would even speak and cause anyone who didn’t worship the beast’s image to be put to death. ¹⁶ It forces everyone—the small and great, the rich and poor, the free and slaves—to have a mark put on their right hand or on their forehead. ¹⁷ It will not allow anyone to make a purchase or sell anything unless the person has the mark with the beast’s name or the number of its name.¹⁸ This calls for wisdom. Let the one who understands calculate the beast’s number, for it’s a human being’s number. Its number is six hundred sixty-six." (CEB)


“The Greatest Movie Never Made: The Book of Revelation,” Week Five

My granddad on my mom’s side of the family is the most dynamic gift-giver I've ever known.  He gave me my first telescope as a kid, he made a wooden chest that houses tons of my books and doubles as a comfortable bench, and one Christmas, he gave his bald grandson several coupons for Rogaine.

But the Rogaine savings that I never cashed in on wasn’t the most memorable gift he ever gave me.  I also used to receive from him pamphlets from a televangelist he listened to devotedly named Jack Van Impe, who was and is extremely concerned with Revelation and the End Times he claims it depicts.  And in these pamphlets were offers for many a product that would prove useful, such as an instructional DVD to leave behind to my heathen relatives after I’ve been raptured, or another DVD that wonders if the world will end with the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012.  Also available is a DVD on the mark of the beast, which is plugged thusly:

"The prophesied Mark of the Beast - could it be administered today?

Could the global ID system described in Scripture as the "Mark of the Beast" be waiting in the wings right now?

Are you and your family prepared for the coming one-world government and the rise of the antichrist and his world religious dictator?

Does the system exist for a universal mark?

Will the antichrist and a global religious leader demand that the mark be administered in the very near future?

What sinister organizations have taken root in Belgium, Brussels (sic), the possible seat of the coming one-world government?

This video gives you the answers you need, now!

Get the truth and prepare yourself and your family for the future!"

I realize that I may be setting a dangerous precedent for myself, by implicitly ridiculing of a colleague in ministry from the proverbial pulpit, but I do worry that he makes the mistake that so many of our predecessors in ministry have, and that is the mistake of thinking that John’s vision applies directly to their life, and not to John’s life.  For the two are very, very different.

Today marks the fifth week of our summer sermon series.  After all, summer is the season of blockbuster movies about superheroes or thrilling heists or action-packed military exploits, and at first glance, the Bible wouldn’t seem to stack up well to such epic storytelling.  Yet, enter the book of Revelation.  After decades of subjugation by Rome, which included the sacking of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple in the year 70 CE, Saint John writes this final letter of the Bible from his lonely exile on the Greek island of Patmos some roughly twenty years later.  His letter is a vivid, harrowing vision of what the future may hold in store for God’s people, and it has often been misinterpreted by Christians since, often in, frankly, wholly incorrect ways.  I can’t promise you the right answers in this sermon series, but I can promise you a lot of interesting questions to debate during our fellowship time after worship is over! 

The first week was an introduction to how we are meant to read Revelation—and that is with the humility and knowledge that we are not John, and cannot understand his mind.  In week two, we began going through the actual vision itself, and we started in a familiar, heartwarming place with Heaven itself.  Then we began to delve into the realm of demons and dragons and wars between Heaven and Hell with the appearances of the iconic four horsemen of the apocalypse and the dragon that is cast out of Heaven by Michael the Archangel.  And today, we tackle perhaps the most famous image in the entirety of Revelation—the heavy metal band Iron Maiden even entitled a song and an album after it—the number of the beast.

It is important to remember that the beast of this passage and the dragon of chapter 12 are different entities.  John is very clear—the dragon represents Satan, The Adversary, and the beast’s number is the number of a person…which has created perhaps the worst opportunity for Christians to play detective in the entirety of Scripture—which person is John referring to here?

I am not kidding when I say it is a horrific opportunity to play detective, as there has been built an entire cottage industry around trying to interpret the number of the beast as it relates to figures throughout history.  The medieval Pope Innocent III said that the Prophet Muhammad was the beast.  Early Protestant reformers, plus some Protestants and Seventh-Day Adventists today, believe the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church is the beast.  All of these misinterpretations carry a powerful common denominator: the belief by the interpreter that their time, their era, was the most important in history, and so naturally, Revelation would be fulfilled in their lifetime.  It's almost a kind of vanity--that you hope your generation will be so important as to see the Second Coming!

What those exact same interpreters—including interpreters today—forget, however, is that John had the exact same hope—that he might one day see his vision carried out and fulfilled!  So, instead, when we look to John’s own contemporaries—a particular candidate stands out.

Ancient Hebrew used a numerical scheme called gematria, in which every letter corresponded with a number—like how a decoder ring you find in your cereal box works, or how you might pass a note to a friend in class—A is 1, B is 2, etc.  In gematria, you can assign value to words—including names—by adding up the numerical value of each letter of that word or name.

The first Roman emperor to systematically persecute Christians was Nero.  Or, as he was referred to by title, Caesar Nero—much as we refer to a monarch as “King So-and-So.”  In the Greek in which John is writing to us, Nero’s name and title is Kaisar Neron—kappa, alpha, iota, sigma, alpha, rho, and nu, epsilon, rho, omicron, and nu.  Transliterated into Hebrew, those letters become qoph, samekh, resh, and nun, vav, resh, and nun.  Each of those Hebrew letters, if you were to add up their numerical values, equals six hundred and sixty-six.  Put simply, the number of the beast is the number of the name and title of Caesar Nero.

This does us little good now, though, until we remember what else Nero was known for—the fire of Rome, on which he blamed the Christians and thus became that first emperor to systematically persecute the faith—while that fire was occurring, as the saying goes, Nero fiddled away.

And as the mainline church suffers from slow but steady dwindling, we, too, are fiddling away.  
Metaphorically, we are like the beast.  We’ve been wounded by the sword of systematic decline, yet somehow, we have also been allowed to live.  But we live dwarfed in the shadow of what we once were, and of what might have been—and nowhere is this more true than here in the Pacific Northwest, with some of the largest numbers of unchurched folks in the country.  Consider:

We’re getting smaller.  The National Council of Churches, the flagship organization of mainline Protestantism and until last winter, headed by a Disciples pastor, Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, employed roughly 400 staffers during its peak in the 1960s.  Today, it employs about 20.

We’re getting older.  In 1998, the average age of a mainline pastor was 48.  In 2009, it was 55.

We’re getting less diverse.  Hispanic persons represent 16% of the American populace, and Asian-Americans, 4%.  They represent 6% and 2% of mainline Protestants, respectively.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  We have fiddled while our church has burned.

We enjoy the exact same worship Sunday after Sunday so much that we may forget how that worship looks to the first-time visitor who has never before graced our doors.

We may resist change to the point that beneficial, even necessary, ideas and changes are sacrificed upon the altar of  “Well, this is the way we’ve always done it.”

We expend so much energy propping up the institution that we become like the titan Atlas, who is bent down under the weight of the world, except we are under the weight of all our buildings.

But we have one thing that Nero never had—we know when, deep down, we aren’t at the top of our game.  We know how to reach for humility, we know how to be humble, even when might absolutely break us emotionally to do so, because sometimes, simply, it is the right thing to do.

And this is such a moment for us, because for many, many people who look upon the church with distrust, it is not out of any active sense of loathing—trust me, they don’t hate us—it is that we have done a subpar job of communicating the Good News of Jesus Christ in ways that resonate with them, in ways that make them feel included and understood.  How human of us!

After all…in the end, we as Christians are simply human.  And the number of the beast is indeed a human number.  Literally, it is Nero’s.  Metaphorically, it the number of us all.  And in the many challenges that the 21^st-century church faces, our number has in fact been called. 

Let us respond, then, with enthusiasm, and with vigor, and most of all, with love. 

By the grace of God, may it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

July 1, 2012


(Author's Note: The statistics used in this sermon are from the Barna Group and can be found here.)

Days Off and Your Pastor: The Need for More Sundays Away

Over a lunch of fajitas and salsa, I recently made a comment in passing to a colleague and friend about how my contract with FCC allows me to take a Sunday off every quarter (that is, three months) in addition to my four weeks of vacation time (four weeks per year is generally the standard for clergy).

His response?

“Man, I need to hire your agent!” (As though I had Scott Boras reppin’ me at the negotiating table.)

My response?

“Dude…I didn’t even suggest it.  It was my congregation’s idea.”

And it was.  I didn’t even ask for that to be put into my contract.

The thing is…in terms of my own personal self-care, that clause is possibly the most important one in my contract—in part because the contract template given to our churches by the denomination does not, to its serious discredit, include days off or sick time (but both of which I am allowed under FCC's personnel handbook).

And unlike vacation, which tends to be lopsided for pastors (we take a lot of it in the summer, maybe a week in the winter that overlaps with part of the holiday season), the Sundays off are quarterly—I accrue them every three months, which ensures me eight Sundays off per year, which averages out to once every six or seven weeks (6.5 to be exact).

Why is this important?

For me—and, I imagine, many of my colleagues—seven weeks is about the breaking point for us when it comes to the quality of our preaching.  Minute for minute, no other task of our jobs is as spiritually demanding and draining as preaching, and after a time, we reach a point of diminishing returns, when we are no longer at our best and need to ride the pine for a Sunday.

Think of almost any sport—the starters get a rest at some point in the game via timeouts, halftime, substitutions, etc.  Why should it be any different for senior/solo pastors?

Now…it doesn’t *always* work that way.  When I first arrived here last fall, I preached eight Sundays in a row without a break—that went okay for the most part.  But after Ash Wednesday this year, I preached eleven Sundays in a row, and I could feel the fatigue after the seventh or eighth Sunday…and so could my congregants—more than one asked me in April when I would next be allowing myself a Sunday off.  I made a promise to myself never to go that long preaching without a break again.

I am currently midway through a nine-week uninterrupted stretch of preaching, but the good news is that beginning in August, I will not go more than six weeks without a break until, I believe, February of 2013, which I am very grateful for.

Pastors are well-documented workaholics (a Duke Divinity School study concluded that a typical full-time Protestant pastor works an average of 50 hours per week).  This is in no small part due to the fact that our work never ceases.  The myth is that we all we do is give a sermon every week, maybe teach a couple of classes, and then get all of this vacation time.  The reality is that there is always next week’s sermon to be written, there is always another Sunday School or Bible Study curriculum to prepare, there is always another family in need of pastoral care, there is always another mission to support, and there is always the NEXT BIG THING™ to envision.

But giving your pastor a Sunday off every season, in addition to his/her regular vacation time, can create a healthier spiritual leader and, by extension, a healthier congregation.  Having seen this mechanism in action, and having endured some rough weeks in a vocation that I love, I firmly believe in it.

Question: What mechanisms for self-care for your pastors (or for yourself, if you are a pastor) have worked best in your experience?

Yours in Christ,

Eric

Batter...er, Bible Up!

(Author’s Note—this post was inspired by a comment on my Facebook page by Zack Frazier, one of my friends from my days as a college debater. –E.A.)

After a week of super-duper serious posts (!) about orthodoxy, statements of faith, and the Fortnight for Freedom, it’s probably time to lighten the mood here just a little bit…

Hence, combining the Bible and baseball. Sure, Marx might say that religion is the opiate of the people, but I think sports fill that role more so now than ever. So, feel free to indulge in a little feel-good humor as I take you around the baseball diamond of the nine translations of Scripture that I currently own. After noting that I had eight hard copy translations, I realized I only needed one more to suit up a (admittedly fictitious, and probably slightly demented) baseball team…enter the electronic version of the King James Version that I keep on my iPad!

So here we go…I give you Eric’s starting lineup for his team of Bible translations…

(And yes, this will be almost as geeky as you are expecting it to be.)

Catcher: New Revised Standard Version 

The catcher often acts as a sort of field captain for a baseball team—they’re not only calling the pitches, they also make adjustments, decide when to visit the mound, and do all of that from a unique vantage point—they are the only ones who can see the entire field of play from their position. The NRSV is, then, the field captain of my own Bible baseball team. For many years, it was my default translation, and still is when it comes to study Bibles. It does a lot of the heavy lifting that other translations aren’t always up for, and it has a prominent place on my shelf for that.

First Base: Common English Bible

Whether it is because of a single, walk, balk, hit-by-pitch, or a dropped third strike, first base is the base that hitters most frequently end up at from the plate. And the CEB is the translation I now most frequently end up at in my own study. It has become my default general-purpose translation, and I don’t think more than a couple days ever go by without me consulting it.

Second Base: Today’s New International Version 

The second base was (still is? Heck if I know…) known as the pivot spot because of the second baseman’s role in double plays hit to the shortstop. The TNIV pivots better than any other translation I’ve seen (except possibly The Voice, which I am not yet terribly familiar with). Its roots are in the conservative, evangelically-leaning New International Version, but the TNIV brought with it a fresh interpretation that includes gender-inclusive language and sensitivity to the ways the church has used Scripture to justify anti-Semitism. Sadly, the 2011 refresh of the NIV rendered the TNIV obsolete, but I still keep a copy of the TNIV around.

Third Base: New King James Version 

Third base, aka the hot corner, typically fields some of the hardest-hit grounders and liners in the game. I have to think that in the same way, the NKJV, as the go-to translation for The Gideons, fields some hard-hitting questions and situations from people who encounter it as a sort of first contact with Scripture in a long time. It isn’t my favored translation by any means, but it has its place in this lineup.

Shortstop: Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh 

The shortstop is the defensive player you expect to make the dazzling, highlight-reel plays—think Derek Jeter, Ozzie Smith, or (closer to home) Alcides Escobar. They are dynamic players capable of changing the gamestate on a whim. Similarly, the JPS’s Tanakh translation (which is Old Testament only) has the same ability to, whether by its translation or its excellent academic commentary, cause me to completely rethink my earlier conceptions of a particular Bible verse or passage. A dynamic translation indeed!

Left Field: Revised Standard Version 

The old (the full Protestant canon was published in 1952) RSV earns its spot in left field more for some of the crazier reactions it garnered than for its own characteristics, which have long since been eclipsed by the NRSV and, to an extent, the CEB. A number of hardline Christians accused the RSV of denying doctrinal issues such as the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, and in one particular case, an American pastor actually burned a copy of the RSV from the pulpit, saying that it was from the devil. For taking one for the team against the more fringe elements of my religion, the RSV is my starting left fielder. 

Center Field: New International Version (2011 edition)

 Before 2011, there was no way I would put the NIV in center field, where so much ground has to be covered. Before 2011, the NIV seemed like simply a niche translation for someone like me—a translation that definitely lets its very evangelical roots shine through in some questionable translation decision—but it was (and is) still an extremely popular translation nonetheless. But in 2011, the NIV was updated to include a number of changes that addressed some of my biggest concerns with it (see the TNIV’s entry at 2B as well), and as a result, the amount of ground that the NIV has covered in its nearly 40 years of existence makes it well-suited for its task today, and for the task of playing center field in this lineup of the bizarre.

Right Field (har har har): New American Standard Bible 

By trotting out the RSV to start in left field, poetic justice and irony demands that I start the NASB in right field, since it was (is) in many ways a conservative response to the RSV. It is more literal than just about any interpretation I’ve come across, and takes the word-for-word translation philosophy to the extreme, where only a hard throw across the diamond will do to make the play…such is the life in right field.

Designated Hitter: King James Version 

The granddaddy of them all. Like venerable players nearing the end of their careers, the KJV is a perfect candidate for the DH slot because of its niche via its high-flowing prose and poetry…it isn’t always the best for everyday use anymore, especially given its many translation inaccuracies, but sometimes, if you wanna hit one out of the park with a beautiful swing, the KJV is exactly the translation for that one moment.

You'll notice that there is no pitcher on this team.  That is because  I do not want to run the risk of losing any of my translations for a year of rehab after having Tommy John surgery.

And that's my lineup!

How do your perceptions of different Bible translations stack up?  Do sports and spirituality mix well for you?  (And if not, can I help change that? =) )

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Michael's Lament"

Revelation 12:7-12

7 Then there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, 8 but they did not prevail, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. 9 So the great dragon was thrown down. The old snake, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, was thrown down to the earth; and his angels were thrown down with him. 10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say, “Now the salvation and power and kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ have come. The accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them day and night before our God, has been thrown down. 11 They gained the victory over him on account of the blood of the Lamb and the word of their witness. Love for their own lives didn’t make them afraid to die. 12 Therefore, rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them. But oh! The horror for the earth and sea! The devil has come down to you with great rage, for he knows that he only has a short time.” (CEB)

“The Greatest Movie Never Made: The Book of Revelation,” Week Four

            It was one of those stories that began, as many stories that go viral do, in isolation—in the social isolation that comes with being ostracized and bullied.  The 68-year-old grandmother who still worked as a bus monitor felt the abuse pile up from her students—the profanity, the physical threats, and easily the most jarring, the taunts about her eldest son who had committed suicide.  Somehow, the entire ten-minute tirade from this group of teenage boys made it to YouTube, putting on full display not only their viciousness, but this woman’s humiliation.  I could never imagine how much I would want, if I were in her place, to be as the woman who brackets this story in Revelation—the woman in danger from the dragon who is given wings, that I could escape…not even from the dragon but from myself, that nobody, nobody might see me in my humiliation.  But…as it turns out, that is often when Heaven makes its next move.

Today marks the fourth week of our summer sermon series.  After all, summer is the season of blockbuster movies about superheroes or thrilling heists or action-packed military exploits, and at first glance, the Bible wouldn’t seem to stack up well to such epic storytelling.  Jesus preached a lot of turning the other cheek, the rest of the New Testament are a bunch of letters, and the stories of the conquest under Joshua, or of the wars with the Philistines under Saul and David, are far off in the deep recesses of the past, documented vividly in the Old Testament, but still a thousand or so years before Christ.  So, enter the book of Revelation.  After decades of subjugation by Rome, which included the sacking of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple in the year 70 CE, Saint John writes this final letter of the Bible from his lonely exile on the Greek island of Patmos some roughly twenty years later.  His letter is a vivid, harrowing vision of what the future may hold in store for God’s people, and it has often been misinterpreted by Christians since, often in, frankly, wholly incorrect ways.  I can’t promise you the right answers in this sermon series, but I can promise you a lot of interesting questions to debate during our fellowship time after worship is over! 

The first week was mostly a crash course introduction to how exactly we are meant to read Revelation to begin with—and that is with the humility and knowledge that we are not John himself, and could not begin to understand his mind—and in week two, we began going through his actual vision, and we started in a familiar, heartwarming place: the thought of Heaven itself, with angels gathered to worship around God’s throne.  Then last week, we began to delve into the realm of demons and dragons and wars between Heaven and Hell with the appearance of the iconic four horsemen of the apocalypse, which represented the first great threats in John’s vision.

            This week, the new villain at hand is a familiar one—the dragon, representing Satan, whom Michael casts out of paradise in this famous story of the war between Heaven and Hell in Revelation 12.  It is no accident that we have arrived at this story on week four—the exact middle of our sermon series—because this is also roughly the middle of the book of Revelation, and by all accounts this story represents a significant turning point in the entire book because it depicts the first true defeat that evil is dealt in John’s vision thus far.

            But it is only a partial victory, as is clearly evinced by the heavenly voice that is heard in verses 10-12, proclaiming a victory for Heaven, and salvation, and the power and kingdom of God, but not for those of us stuck on earth!  No, in verse 9, the dragon is thrown not into hell, but into earth, and in verse 12, the heavens get to rejoice, lucky them, but woe to those of us still muddling along in this broken and fragmented world, because now we’re stuck with this thing called evil that we may not know how to resist, whether because we are too afraid to, or because we struggle to define it.  Either way, the result is the same—evil overpowers our own weakness.

            That’s the heart of the voice’s lament in verse 12, though…Heaven knew how to resist evil, but we still do not…or, at least, not all the time.  Or even most of the time.  Yes, we try to say please and thank you.  But if that’s all there is, then we’re members not of the Christian Church, we’re members of the Church of Be Nice and Chew With Your Mouth Closed.  Being able to recognize wrong and to resist it without becoming wrong ourselves, that’s a lot less superficial.  And that’s why, theoretically, the church should still be in business—to teach that!

            But if I am completely honest with all of you, I worry that the church indulges in wrong as well, much as we should not, much as we must not.  It’s easy to demonize other groups of people when we say I’m right, you’re wrong.  It’s easy because it has always been quicker to rally people when you give them a bogeyman to be afraid of, not a Savior to be inspired by.  But when we pastors reach for that, we begin preaching by the power of fear, not the power of faith.

            The paralyzing nature of evil itself, and of the fear it indulges, can be summed up in the name of the devil that John uses in verse 9—Satan.  That name first appears in the opening chapters of the book of Job, where God hands Job over to the power of this same creature, Satan, and in Job, the Hebrew “ha satan” literally means “the adversary,” or “the accuser.”  And so Job, in order that his faith be proved, basically gets hung out to dry by God—God lets The Adversary do whatever to Job, just so long as Job’s life is spared (though, it should be noted, not the lives of Job’s family).  Job’s livelihood is put to a screeching halt—he loses everything because of the nature of evil—and God’s own hands are tied by the wager He made with The Adversary.  It isn’t just that evil is destructive in Job’s case, it is that it is paralyzing as well.

            And I have to admit…I felt like, when reading through this text over…and over…that we had all become Job, that we have all been hung out to dry by God because God’s done His own housecleaning—He’s cast Satan out of Heaven, but then Satan just picks up and moves next door.  It’s like, as a little kid, when your parents tell you to clean your room, you just sweep it all under the bed instead.  Out of sight, out of mind, right?  It makes it feel like Heaven is in denial!

            Except that verse 12 means we know that’s not the case—in that half-verse of lament, Heaven knows exactly what it has sentenced Earth to by sending The Adversary to our backyard.  So what, exactly, is God’s excuse?  My short answer to that question is: we may never know.

            The long answer is that perhaps we are left, then, with the unenviable task of discerning what we believe to be evil, what we believe to be good, and what we believe, in true Goldilocks fashion, to be in the middle in a world full of shades of gray in addition to the black and the white.  But perhaps the better goal is not to identify certain things as good or as evil, but to identify how evil itself is formed, just like how goodness is formed.  And this is the best I’ve got for you:

            Evil exists because, to borrow from the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard, its roots come from our own refusals to be ourselves—to be good people, to be loving Christians.  When we refuse to be ourselves by reaching for selfishness, we are modeling not the God who made us, but The Adversary, because he too has chosen not to be himself—he has chosen to no longer be the angel God created him as.  We as Christians are called to model the love of Jesus, and when we stop doing that, we indulge that darker side that exists within each of us.  And when enough of us choose to do that, we begin to see things like wars, massacres, evils so widespread, and sins so massive that they could understandably completely obliterate your faith in one another.  And other times, that sort of hurt and wrongdoing happens close to home, yet sometimes, occasionally, with a different end result.

            For there is an epilogue to the story of the bullied bus monitor.  An online campaign was set up to raise funds for her to be able to take a vacation, and it, like the clip of the bullying itself, also went viral.  The original goal was to raise $5,000.  As of Friday afternoon, it had raised over $500,000.  But perhaps more importantly, a number of the teenagers who bullied her have now emotionally, publicly—and in some cases, on national television—apologized to her, and swore never to do something like that again.

            We still know, deep down, the right thing to do…at least more often than not.  May that be enough to keep us following Jesus Christ.  After all, he and The Adversary do have one thing in common—they were both sent from heaven to earth.  And the choice to act like either of them remains ours.  Let us choose wisely.  Let us choose lovingly.  Let us choose to be Christ-like.  By the grace of God, may it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

June 24, 2012

A Fortnight for Frivolity

I promise I’m not trying to become a single-issue blogger.

Really.

Pinky swear.

But the US Catholic Bishops’ alliteration-happy “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign begins today. And even though I’ve got posts lined up for next week on Bible translations as a baseball team (that is, which translation would play which position) and on pastoral self-care…I can’t let this one go just yet.

So, God, forgive me.

And dear readers, forgive me even more.

Okay.

Sometimes, little things annoy me, like the taste of dental floss, or the word ‘cumquat.’

I used to think that people saying, “Christianity is under attack in America!” like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling was one such little thing that annoyed me.

Then the bishops started saying it. And conservative Protestant pastors started saying it. And now how I long for the days when someone saying, “Christianity is under attack in America!” was but a little thing that annoyed me.

Look. If you want to know what Christianity under attack REALLY looks like, visit North Korea. Or China. Or Sudan. Or the 3rd –century Roman Empire. But not here.

What makes this so galling is that the bishops KNOW this. In discussing their “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty” statement, their Fortnight for Freedom point man Rev. William Lori, the Archbishop of Baltimore, recognized “that our religious freedom problems in the U.S. pale in comparison to those problems abroad.”

In other words, they know it—they know that saying that we Christians are being attacked or persecuted in America right now is the height of frivolity—we’re ironically using our freedoms of speech and religion to say that our freedoms of speech and religion are being oppressed, and in doing so, we trivialize legitimate and profound instances of persecution of Christians today.

Which leaves me to worry that the bishops are simply ginning up a perception of being persecuted rather than, you know, actually being persecuted. 

And when church leaders become too heavy-handed like this in their political involvements (like sponsoring the Fortnight for Freedom), the church suffers. As scholar and editor Margaret Steinfels puts it, “Many Catholics, younger ones in particular, are put off in a serious way by religious leaders involving themselves directly in politics, such as telling us how to vote.”

This hits home for me in a big way—literally. Two weeks ago, a rally was held at the Civic Center in the heart of Longview to “assert that the president (Obama) and secular culture are attacking Christianity itself.”  I mean, sure, but in the same way that you attack someone in a pillow fight.  It might be jarring initially, but the damage is hardly permanent.

Now, no doubt parts of secular culture mock us to no end (see also: South Park, Richard Dawkins, and the goofy Darwin fish). But also no doubt, we sometimes deserve that mocking for pulling tone-deaf stunts like this.

There are REAL problems in the world that the Bible is explicit that we as Christians are called to solve. That the government wants my insurance company to cover Disciples employees’ contraception doesn’t even begin to make it to the top of that list.

Bishops, everyone...please take a step back. See the whole picture. There are far bigger problems that we as a church face. Poverty. Starvation and malnutrition. Homelessness. Violence. Not to mention all of the instances of persecution of Christians in the countries I listed above.

Why aren’t you dedicating a fortnight to campaign with the same fervor against any of those?

Yours in Christ,
Eric