It’s the End of the World as we know it and I feel fine!

Ever notice how things can get twisted and changed as people share stories over time?  We used to play a game where one person would whisper a secret message to the person next to them who would then repeat it to the person beside them until it went all around the circle.  No matter how carefully we listened, the message that was received at the end had very little to do with the message that was started.  For some reason human communication can get bent and twisted out of the original intent.  So we shouldn’t be too surprised that scripture gets twisted into hurtful interpretations that are unrecognizable to the original authors.  How do we deal with scripture like this that have been used to distort and damage what Christianity is about?

Jesse Zink, in his book Faithful, Creative, Hopeful shares the story of a congregation that is preparing a Good Friday joint service that would rather go to a big sale than attend their special worship.  Zink says it’s not that the minister is a failure, but that the Christian faith has been defeated by today’s culture.  Bill McKibben wrote an article in last week’s Guardian, describing how progressive protestant Christian has been distorted by mainstream culture to the point that US politicians use scripture abusively to support their oppressive laws, and I quote:

“relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs…[which] is like a restaurant critic who has visited a steakhouse, noted that it has creamed spinach on the menu, and declared confidently that it is a vegetarian eatery.”

Scripture gets twisted like this and Christianity gets twisted like this  into an excuse to bully people who care for others, who are compassionate for outsiders, for the vulnerable and for the powerless.  How many times have we heard people say, “I can’t stand organized religion” because they have experienced twisted uses of scriptures to justify toxic abuses of power.  Power over how people lead their lives, power over legislation that appears on the surface of it to be harmless but isn’t.  All supposedly justified in the name of Christianity but without the compassion and empathy that Jesus taught his disciples to show towards folks less fortunate than themselves.

A case of scripture that often gets twisted beyond recognition is this passage in Matthew.  It refers back to the Noah Story.  You know, the one that has generated all kinds of songs and art like the Irish Rovers singing about ‘green alligators and long-necked geese’ and completely ignoring the tragedy and destruction the Flood story implies.  This is not a cutesy story about animals on an overcrowded floating barn with the chaos of keeping the lions fed and the rabbits from taking over.  This is about heartbreaking tragedy where people are swept up off in a tidal wave of destruction.  Once we see a painting of the people left off the ark, it’s hard to think of Noah as cute.  And here’s the thing.  The Matthew passage doesn’t sound like the persons taken up are raptured into Heaven, it sounds ambiguous.  The ones that are taken, are they taken by the flood waters, sparing the ones left behind? It’s hard to tell.  Yet there has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of books and movies taking this single passage out of context into a bizarre faith that has people sure they are entitled to special treatment from God.  They proudly put bumper stickers on their car saying, “In case of the Rapture, this vehicle will be driverless” because they know how the end times are going to work in their favor.  It’s nasty and cynical and snobbish.  The opposite of what Jesus taught.

Our Song of Faith, a document in the form of poetry that tries to put into words our best understanding of the United Church’s ideas says that “Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era. God calls us to be doers of the word and not hearers only... The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.”

All too often it may feel like we have been defeated by toxic Christian teachings that drown out our understandings of following the teachings of Jesus.  All too often it seems like the only Christians we hear about get into the news because they own palaces or private jets or are condemning immigrants or abortion or inflicting the Lord’s Prayer on every school-aged child regardless of what faith they may have.  But when we look at the scriptures as a whole, it seems certain that we are being called not to twist them to allow us to judge our neighbors!  It does not give us permission to oppress others with laws that lock people up.  Scripture instead invites us to live decent lives, sober lives, empathetic and dare I say woke lives.  Lives that recognize God at work in our neighbors, God at work in us to see and call out hatred while inviting God to heal our hearts and minds so we can focus on what is truly important.

Not when or where the end times will come but why and how we love ourselves and love our neighbors and love God.  That way, whenever God shows up in our lives, to take us or to leave us behind, we will be ready. Now is the hour for us to wake up and live honorable lives.  That way, whenever the end times come, we will be ready for God who comes in love. May it be so for us all.

Lost In the Details

There’s a congregation in the states that had someone ask, “What was the hardest time this congregation ever faced?” The consultant, knowing that the church was established before the Boston Tea Party, thought it might be in the American Revolution when the British shot the minister’s wife.  Or maybe it was something that happened in the civil war, or in the World Wars, or the Spanish Flu, or even the Covid pandemic.  “Nope, sir, the hardest day was when we were flimflammed back in the 1860’s by our new minister. He said that the end times were near so we all sold our farms and put on white robes to go wait on a high hill for Jesus to take us to Heaven.  The hardest part of that was going back down the hill to buy our places back.”  Seems silly, but it happens again and again in the news.  It happened again this September and October, thanks to an enthusiastic TikTok pastor.  He was so convincing that people fretted about how they would find a way to get their pets raptured with them.  The shame and embarrassment they felt after the dates passed was as intense as it was back in the 1860’s.

It's easy to get caught up in the details, to play the prediction game.  It’s easy to go skimming through the Bible, picking a verse here and there until we’ve built up a case that has turned our opinion into cold hard fact.  The Sadducees were masters at analyzing scripture.  They knew their bibles inside and out, and these smart Sadducees were the ones with all the power and the wealth in their society.  They were smart men, however, and realized as they listened to Jesus teaching in the temple, that he was gaining a reputation of being smart, authentic in his faith, and convincing to ordinary people.  They watched the scribes and pharisees question Jesus, and they tried to trap Jesus in a question of their own. A question designed to prove that their belief was right and anyone else who believed differently was childish or even ridiculous.  How could there be a resurrection when it would lead to conundrums like the scenario of the woman with seven husbands?

Jesus didn’t get caught up in their details.  He didn’t step into their trap.  He talked not about verses but about relationships.  Not an analysis of marriage, but of how God is in relationship with human beings.  There is no past, present or future when it comes to God and the tribal ancestors.  If the pharisees wanted to get caught up in the details, they could, but that was not what Jesus cared about.

All scripture, according to Jesus, was about loving God with all our hearts and souls, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.  It goes straight to the heart of our faith.  It’s a big ‘why’ question.  Why do we have faith?  Why do we have church?  Because God loves us, and because we need reminders of that love.  You don’t get a bigger why than that. 

All too often we get caught up in the details, the how questions.  How will we get to heaven?  How will we act in Heaven? How will we know when Jesus will come again?  How will we fix the church?  How will we bring in new members.  And often, we come up with solutions to the how questions that don’t consider the bigger why questions.  It’s like when we have a hammer and we assume every problem can be fixed with pounding a nail in.  That’s great when we have a broken bookcase, but when we are having problems with our furnace, a hammer is not going to help.  Switching from how questions to why questions is not easy, but when we know our why, that can change how we fix our real problems.  It pulls us away from details and helps us see the big picture.  And as Jesus showed the Sadducees, the big picture is where God is.  Not in the details of which man is going to end up with a wife.

Churches often get caught up in how questions.  People have been absolutely convinced that bringing in an organ will grow a church.  People quit a church because it dared to bring in an organ, I think this was in a Presbyterian church back in the 1890’s.  Some campaigned to get rid of pews.  Some campaigned to install pews and get rid of chairs.  Some pushed to get PowerPoint into worship, some pushed to get it out.  During the Great Depression, a United Church in Edmonton didn’t want Methodists joining them because they would want a honky-tonk piano for worship, and pianos were only for bars.  Some people thought that using overhead slides would appeal to the youth, back in the 1970’s.  All these are hammer solutions to how questions.  They don’t work.

A big how question many Christians are concerned with is heaven and hell. Reverend Doctor Chuck Currie wrote, “Instead, we need to be more concerned with what happens here on earth. Christianity is a faith for the living. But we treat it as a faith for the dead, even when Jesus taught us to pray that the Kingdom come here on Earth. In spending so much time worrying about what comes after this life, we ignore what is occurring in our world today.”

Paul, too wanted to shift his friends in Thessalonia to shift from worrying about the ‘how’ of the second coming. Instead he goes to the why, “Therefore stand firm. Hold fast to the traditions you received from us, either by word of mouth or by letter.  May our Savior Jesus Christ and our Abba God-who loved us and in mercy gave us eternal consolation and hope- console your hearts and strengthen them for every good work and word.”

May we too learn to start with the why.  The why of growing resilient hearts to strengthen our ability to act with healing and compassion in a world fixated on hammering solutions onto each other.  May we find our hearts consoled and our courage to do good works strengthened by God’s almighty Grace and love. Amen.

The Problem of Hell

Did you know that there are 18 references to Hell in the Bible and 16 of them are in the New Testament?  Heaven, on the other hand, is mentioned 787 times, and is about equally split between the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  Yet many people today spend far more time thinking about hell than heaven.

In fact, for many people, Christianity has been completely rejected because they have only heard that it’s scary.  God is going to consign them to a fiery eternity of pain and suffering.  Comic books about this punishment for non-believers are available for free and try to convert people to faith.  Fear is preached, the end of the world is predicted as it was this week with another rapture date, and woe to anyone who ignores this message.

The parable Jesus told about Lazarus and the rich man was meant not to scare people away from hell.  The stark contrast between Lazarus and the unnamed rich man and the role reversal it implied was a call to compassion.  That call is a core part of what it means to be the United Church.

Photo: Inaugural Service, 10 June 1925, Mutual Street Arena |Flickr

In 1925, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Union churches came together to build a national faith of justice and compassion, not fear of Hell.  They developed a document of beliefs they could agree on.  It was called the Basis of Union.  Of the twenty statements, the only reference to Hell was Article 19, “Of the Resurrection, the Last Judgement, and the Future Life” where it said that ‘the finally impenitent shall go away into eternal punishment and the righteous into life eternal.” It doesn’t even mention Hell by name, or purgatory or even Satan.  The last statement, Article 20, says that “God will have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.  We confidently believe that by His power and grace all His enemies shall finally be overcome, and the kingdoms of this world be made the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ.”

So while tent revivals were happening and people were told about God’s wrath that would punish them with Hell, the United Church was grounding faith in a loving God.  God was seen as compassionate, caring and welcoming all people.  Not a vengeful, angry punisher, rapturing up some while the left behind got punished.  In the book, “The Hell Jesus Never Intended”, Keith Wright says the idea that God condemns us and sentences us to hell, is troubling.  He writes quote:

It’s frightening for many because love that must be bought at the price of a violent death on the Cross hardly sounds like love…the nonviolent God of Jesus becomes a God of unequaled violence, since God not only allegedly demands the blood of the victim who is most precious to him, but holds humanity accountable for a death that God both anticipates and requires… is to paint an awful picture of God, to make God an arbitrary and capricious tyrant.

Given that Jesus taught his disciples to pray using the word ‘Abba’, the Aramaic word for daddy, the idea that God, our loving parent is also fixated on punishing us, stands directly in contrast to God who is the shepherd frantically looking for the lost lamb, the woman seeking high and low for her one missing coin, the mother hen calling her chicks to her, or the Prodigal father, so grateful for his son’s return that he throws his best coat on his son even though the boy is probably coated in pigsty slime!

Since the beginning of the United Church, leaders like our first Moderator George Pigeon, or Louise McKinney from Claresholm Alberta, heard the call not to preach a terrifying God but a reconciling God.  George was the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in 1924, and a professor who worked hard for union.  He tried to persuade all the Presbyterians to join, but 17% of Presbyterians and 10% of Presbyterian clergy voted against union.  George was voted unanimously to be the head of the new denomination and did his best in the two tumultuous years of his term, to settle the many disagreements, hurt feelings, power struggles and turf wars that resulted.  It was complex and heated, but moments of Grace abounded too.  Presbyterian and Methodist seminaries came together peacefully at most theological colleges, and much to many people’s surprise, Newfoundland, who wasn’t even a part of Canada, had all of its methodist churches originally reject Union, but in 1925 they all joined anyways.  Louise McKinney, one of Alberta’s Famous Five women, who had helped women get the vote in 1918, was one of only 5 ladies out of the 350 delegates at the first worship service.  She and other United Church women addressed the struggles of the poor like Lazarus through the Temperance Movement.  They hoped that prohibition would lower family violence and child poverty.  It was both Pigeon and McKinney’s way of addressing the social injustices they saw in their communities, not realizing that causes of poverty and addiction were far more complex than they originally thought. 

That was also the driving force behind residential schools.  Just as Temperance was a simplistic solution to a complex problem, Residential schools also turned out to be simplistic.  One culture assumed it had the God-given right to impose itself onto another singular culture but what was in fact a broad diversity of cultures, languages and spiritual practices.  One General Council Commissioner in Calgary this summer talked about being sent to the most convenient school rather than the closest one; he spoke Haida Gwaii and ended up in Alberta surrounded by Cree children.

When we assume we know best, when we think we have a guaranteed spot in Heaven, we may end up surprised like the rich man.  When we use fear to teach people about God, we may find history judging us harshly.  When we use this parable to inspire us to act justly, we can find the healing that Jesus wanted for us. When we love God like Abba Daddy the way Jesus taught, we can live bold and courageously like George Pigeon and Louise McKinney.  Like them, we may not be perfect, but we are growing in our love of our neighbors and God.  May it be so for us all.