Mine and Yours

Saturday night the wife came home raving about the sermon Vicar Richard delivered.  Here is his sermon-connect summary.  

 

Romans 12:3-8 “Mine and Yours”

Generous living is not about sharing what is MINE with others.  Generous living begins as we stand before God and confess, “God, all I have is YOURS.  The only thing I confess to be MINE is my sin.”  God has given us time, resources, and abilities to enjoy, to care for our families, and to love the world around us – all in the Name of Jesus.  I dare not call anything in my possession MINE since it is all GIFT from the Lord.    

This is not easy for me.  Actually it’s impossible because of that thing I must claim as MINE (sin).  But here is the Good News.  Christ came to us when we were dead in our sin.  He reached out, took hold of my sin and yours – took it upon himself and said, “That is MINE!”  Then he took his perfect holy life, his very own name, and applied it to us and said, “This is YOURS!” “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.” Isaiah 43:1b

Atheism

Buechner again.... always making you think with a twist of the artistic....

A true atheist is one who is willing to face the full consequences of what it means to say there is no God.

To say there is no God means among other things that there are no absolute standards. For instance, if you are an atheist who believes with all your heart that murder is wrong and you run into somebody else who believes with all her heart that murder isn't wrong as long as she can get away with it, there is no absolute standard by which it can be shown that one view is better than the other, just as there is no absolute standard by which it can be shown that vanilla is better than chocolate.

If you are an atheist who says that murder is wrong because it works against the good of society in general, then you are saying that the good of society in general is gooder than the good of the murderer in particular, and, having thrown out all absolute standards, you can't say that. All you can say is that vanilla is better than chocolate because you like it better and so do most of your friends.
If you say, "In the absence of absolute standards, I declare that murder is wrong in the name of common sense" then you have simply made common sense your absolute standard. What is in accord with common sense is right and what isn't is wrong.
What is American is right and what is un-American is wrong. What is ethical is right and what is unethical is wrong. What works is right and what doesn't work is wrong. These all bring God back under different names: nationalism, ethics, pragmatism. To be a true atheist is to acknowledge no rule except the rule of thumb.
Thus many an atheist is a believer without knowing it, just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't. So it goes.

Lots of the time atheism isn't bad fun. I do what seems right to me and you do what seems right to you, and if we come into conflict with each other, society has human judges to invoke human laws and arbitrate between us. Who needs a Divine Judge and a Cosmic Law? We can learn to live in lower case.

Except sometimes. Sometimes it's almost as hard to believe God doesn't exist as to believe he does. I don't mean a baby's smile, which is probably gas. I don't mean the beauty of nature, which is always soon followed by the indifferent cruelty and ugliness of nature. I mean an atheist is about as likely as anybody else to walk into a newsstand someday and pick up a copy of the National Enquirer or some such paper. On the front page is a picture of a dead child. The bare back is covered with welts. The eyes are swollen shut. Both arms are broken. The full story is on page three if you have the stomach for it.

To be consistent with the atheistic creed, the atheist can say no more than that to beat a child to death is wrong with a small w. Wrong because it is cruel, ugly, inhuman, pointless, illegal, and makes the gorge rise. But what is apt to rise along with the gorge is the suspicion that it is wrong also with a capital W — the suspicion that the law that has been broken here is not just a human law, but a law as immutable as the law of gravity, one by which even if there were no children in the universe and no grown-ups to beat them, it would be written into the very fabric of reality itself that such an act is wrong.

The atheist holds the tabloid in hand and asks the question, "Why should such things happen?" Atheism can reply only, "Why shouldn't such things happen?" But the atheist keeps on asking.

What makes it hard to be an atheist is the feeling you sometimes get in the pit of your stomach that there must be after all, mad as it seems, an absolute good in terms of which such an act as this can be denounced as absolutely evil. Thus the problem of good is a major stumbling block for atheism, just as the problem of evil is a major stumbling block for religious faith. Both must learn how to live with their doubts.

A true atheist takes human freedom very seriously. With no God to point the way, humans must find their own way. With no God to save the world, humans must save their own world if it's going to be saved. They must save it from themselves, if nothing else. A true atheist does not dance on the grave of God.

The laughter of faith in God is like Abraham's laughter when God says his ninety-year-old wife is in a family way. The laughter of faith in no-God is heard in Sartre's story "The Wall": A man is threatened with death if he doesn't betray the whereabouts of his friend to the enemy. The man refuses to do this and sends the enemy on a wild goose chase to a place where he knows his friend isn't. By chance it turns out to be the very place where his friend is. The friend is captured and executed and the man given his freedom. Sartre ends the story by saying that the man laughed till he cried.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Careful with your life?

This Buechner quote was actually taken from my emailed Plough Press devotion for yesterday.

Frederick Buechner:

Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back, “Drive carefully: the life you save may be your own.” That is the wisdom of men in a nutshell. What God says, on the other hand, is, “The life you save is the life you lose.” In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself; and only a life given away for love’s sake is a life worth living. To bring this point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of men’s wisdom, he was a perfect fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring not under a cross but a delusion.

Source: Listening to Your Life

Anorexiea

 Buechner makes some really valid and interesting connections about anorexia...

Nothing for breakfast. A diet soda for lunch. Maybe a little lettuce with low-calorie dressing for supper. Or once in a while, when everybody has gone to bed, a binge on ice cream, which you get rid of in the bathroom later. Relentless exercise. Obsession with food, cooking great quantities of it for everybody except yourself. In time you come to look like a victim of Dachau — the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, the marionette arms and calfless legs. If you are a woman, you stop menstruating. If you are told your life itself is in jeopardy, it makes no difference, because not even dying is as fearsome as getting fat, a view that the combined industries of fashion, dietetic food, and advertising all endorse. In every respect but this, you may be as sane as everybody else. In this, you are mad as a hatter.

Anorexia seems to be a modern disease, but old phrases like pining away and wasting away suggest it may have been around unnamed for a long time. Nobody seems to know what it's all about, though there are endless theories. Young anorexics want to strike free of parental control, they say, and where does it assume a more elemental form than in "Take a bite for Mummy, a bite for Daddy"? So that is where they draw the battle line. The more desperately they are urged to eat, the more desperately they resist. Their bodies are their last citadel, and they are prepared to defend them literally to the death. Yet on the other side of it, of course, they desperately need Mummy and Daddy and are scared stiff of the very independence they are fighting to achieve.

The craving to be free and independent. The craving to be taken care of and safe. The magic of the sickness is that it meets both these cravings at once. By not eating you take your stand against the world that is telling you what to do. By not eating you make your body so much smaller, lighter, weaker that in effect it becomes a child's body again, and the world flocks to your rescue. Is something like this at the heart of it? Most anorexics are young women. Feeling that a male-dominated world has given them no models for what full womanhood means, do they believe that the golden key to that Wonderland garden is to make themselves as little as Alice had to in order to pass through the tiny curtained door? Who can say for sure?

But at least one thing is sure. By starving themselves, anorexics are speaking symbolically, and by trying above all else to make them start eating again, their families are in their own fashion speaking back the same way. Far beneath the issue of food there are, on both sides, unspoken issues of love, trust, fear, loss, separation. Father and mother, brother and sister, they are all of them afflicted together, acting out in pantomime a complex, subterranean drama whose nature they are at best only dimly aware of. And so, one way or another, are we all.

"So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members one of one another," says the author of Ephesians (4:25), and that is the heart of the matter.

"I need you." "I need to be myself." "I am afraid." "I am angry." "I am in pain." "Hear me." "Help me." "Let me try to help you." "Let us love one another." If we would only speak the truth to one another — parents and children, friends and enemies, husbands and wives, strangers and lovers — we would no longer have to act out our deepest feelings in symbols that none of us understand.

In our sickness, stubbornness, pride, we starve ourselves for what we hunger for above all else. "Speaking the truth in love" is another phrase from Ephesians (4:15). It is the only cure for the anorexia that afflicts us all.

- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Anger

I really could have sworn that I've posted this before but seeing that I can't find it, I'll just post it.  Evocative words from Buechner about the reality of anger.....

 

Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Algebraic Preaching

This is a really good reminder for those of us who inflict our words on others :)

x + y = z. I f you know the value of one of the letters, you know something. If you know the value of two, you can probably figure out the whole thing. If you don't know the value of any, you don't know much.

Preachers tend to forget this. "Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and be saved from your sins," or something like that, has meaning and power and relevance only if the congregation has some notion of what, humanly speaking, sin is, or being saved is, or who Jesus is, or what accepting him involves. If preachers make no attempt to flesh out these words in terms of everyday human experience (maybe even their own) but simply repeat with variations the same old formulas week after week, then the congregation might just as well spend Sunday morning at home with the funnies.

The blood atonement. The communion of saints. The Holy Ghost. If people's understanding of theological phrases goes little deeper than their dictionary or catechetical definitions, then to believe in them has just about as much effect on their lives as to believe that Columbus discovered America in 1492 or E = mc².

Coming home from church one snowy day, Emerson wrote, "The snow was real but the preacher spectral." In other words, nothing he heard from the pulpit suggested that the preacher was a human being more or less like everybody else with the same dark secrets and high hopes, the same doubts and passions, the same weaknesses and strengths. Undoubtedly he preached on matters like sin and salvation but without ever alluding to the wretched, lost moments or the glad, liberating moments of his own life or anybody else's.

There is perhaps no better proof for the existence of God than that year after year the whole God enterprise survives despite the way the professionally godly promote it. If there are people who remain unconvinced, let them tune in their TVs to almost any of the big-time pulpit pounders almost any Sunday morning of the year.

- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Ha Ha... I just noticed that the number of my posts has declined by half every year for the last four...  guess I'd better get on it ...