Sunday Comes Every Week
by thefallencleric on Aug.06, 2010, under CHURCH, GOD
I haven’t put up a new post in a very long time. Even as it sit typing this one now, I’m doing it to avoid getting down to business with prepping a sermon for Sunday.
That’s right, 3:29 on Friday and still no sermon. Nothing even started. To every person in every church on every Sunday morning who feels like they don’t want to be there, know this — the man (or woman) up front is often fighting the same battles. We get discouraged too. We get exhausted. We feel we have nothing to say, nothing to share, and nothing to give. We often feel the tension between what we profess and how we live.
But Sunday comes every week and none of the above will suffice for not having something ready to say. And nothing should. One of the best (though not one of the funnest) things about being a pastor is that we are reminded, by necessity, that sometimes the best we can do is simply show up.
I understand not wanting to get up and go to church. I understand staying up too late on a Saturday and just wanting to sleep in, or not wanting to be around a big group of people in the morning. I understand struggling with prayer. I understand being in a place in your life where, sometimes, for long periods of time, you don’t even care, and feeling like no one could ever identify with how bad you feel or how hopeless things seem. Every pastor understands those things. Some might not admit it. Some might prefer to let you think they are super-human, but that just means that they’re one day going to have farther to fall.
Sunday comes every week. And there’s a fine line between being a hypocrite on one hand, and simply acknowledging on the other that with the spiritual life — as with so many things — showing up is more than half the battle. So I’ll sit here right now writing about how hard this is going to be. After I stop writing this post I’ll probably still spend several more hours agonizing over what I’m going to say and how I’ll say it. But I promise you that between now and Sunday, I will write a sermon. And when I get up there Sunday morning, it’s not going to sound like I’m phoning it in — like I just threw some drivel together because I didn’t care. If you come to be encouraged, you might find encouragement. If you come to be challenged, you might be challenged. If you come simply because your husband or wife dragged your sorry butt-end out of bed and you’re not looking for anything at all, well — know that on some days the only difference between us is that getting up there and being prepared is what I get paid for.
But the thing is — that doesn’t for one second mean I don’t mean every word I say, that it’s not full of truth. All it means is that the messenger sometimes struggles not to get lost before the message reaches you. Actually, the message is all the more powerful in contrast to the frailty and weakness of the messenger.
The passage below is adapted from plural to singular.
2 Corinthians 4:7-9; 16-18 (MSG)
7 If you only look at me, you might well miss the brightness. I carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pot of my ordinary life. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with me.
8 As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that I’m not much to look at. I’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but I’m not demoralized (at least not right now!); I’m not sure what to do, 9 but I know that God knows what to do; I’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left my side; I’ve been thrown down, but I haven’t broken.
16 So I’m not giving up. How could I! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on me, on the inside, where God is making new life, [I know that] not a day goes by without his unfolding grace.
17 These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for [all of] us.
18 There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.
That’s a future promise, but this is present reality. Here and now, times are tough. Hearts break, people live without love. Many rarely know joy. We struggle to let others know us and even harder to let them love us. We run out of money, life loses its gloss, and we grind out some of our hours by sheer resolve and force of will. That is part of life in a broken world. Parts of all of our lives, of all of our days, are broken. Even Sundays find themselves among the broken pieces of the world and we can be sure that — on those days too — we will sometimes feel the loneliness and pain, or the apathy, of our brokenness.
Still, Sunday comes every week. We show up not because life is perfect. We show up not because we are not broken or bleeding. We show up not because we are good. No, we show up because life is full of struggle. We often show up broken and bloody. We show up not because we are good, but because we need to be reminded that God is good.
It’s the farthest thing from hypocrisy, my friends. No one knows when you’re at church how much you had to overcome just to get there that day, how many excuses you had to shoot in the head and lay to rest, how much apathy or fear or suspicion you had to wade through. No one knows, that is, except God.
I hope to see you Sunday, to shake your hand, look you in the eye, and exchange a knowing glance with you. If that happens, I’ll know you read this post, and you’ll know that I may have more in common with you than you had ever imagined. Showing up is more than half the battle.
ADDENDUM
It is now 10:11 pm. The sermon is finished. I am exhausted, having sat here for the past seven hours either procrastinating, writing, or both. But I love what I have here, and am excited about sharing it Sunday. I may be tired, I may not even want to get up Sunday morning, but once I get up there and spread my notes out, I’ll be engaged. No phoning it in. We don’t have to want to do things, but we might as well do well whatever we have chosen to do.
Out of touch atheism?
by thefallencleric on Jun.24, 2010, under GOD
I’ve spent some time today on the Godless Wonder blog. It’s a blog written by an atheist, dealing with atheism. There are quotes from various personalities denying the existence of God, cartoons making fun of religious believers, and snippets from news articles about religious foibles and idiocy.
I had two primary feelings about this blog. First, I think a lot of atheists are kind of out of touch with modern religious belief. Read about atheism and you’ll read about believers who disdain science, who don’t believe in evolution, who hate gays and possibly even approve of violence against them, who insist that women stay home pregnant all the time, who homeschool their children, and who take every single word of the Bible literally.
I know people and churches exist that might fit that description, but the majority of believers I know would not. The other day I was talking to an atheist friend of mine who said that the only reason the church exists it to exert power over people. I thought, “Wow, that’s a pretty sweeping generalization.” I told him I have spent my life in the church, either as an attender or a worker, and during that time I have met very few people who I believed were really interested in exerting power over people. Most are sincere and kind and really want to see people’s lives be better. I find it hard to understand how he can make such a sweeping generalization about the church with any certainty, as he associates with few church people and is not a church attender himself. He probably believes my opposition to his opinion comes from having been brainwashed by a malevolent religious institution.
But the fact is that the church is changing. The church that preaches hellfire and brimstone, the primitive, hateful, vengeful God, is disappearing, as it should. Even so, it’s not like this is the first time in the history of Christianity that we’ve ever not been neanderthals. The church has been a powerful force for good at various times in history. That does not excuse the evil the church has done, but the fact remains. The atheist blogs and websites that target the kind of believers I described above are actually referring to fewer and fewer churches and believers every day.
Which leads to my second reaction to the Godless Wonder website: Worry. The critics of religion are true believers — in atheism. Many Christians struggle with moments of doubt and openly deal with the contradictions created by their belief system. Most atheist websites I have seen feature writers who are positive that all Christians of every kind are stupid, dangerous, and malignant to society. They include few, if any, questions about the problems posed for individuals and humanity by an atheistic belief system. I fear this is because it hasn’t even occurred to them that it’s a legimtate perspective that there ARE any such problems. Just like fundamentalist Christians explain the unexplainable by invoking God, atheists tend to do the same thing by invoking evolution, time, and chance.
Life is a highway. And there is a ditch of closed-minded dogmatism on both sides. Atheists (at least most of the atheists who are publishing blogs and websites that I’ve seen) fail to realize they emerged from one ditch merely to fall into the other. At my church we don’t claim to know all the answers or have everything right. Meanwhile, atheists arrogantly deride us, maintaining that they are right and we are wrong, and that this is so self-evident we are idiots for not agreeing with them. Isn’t that exactly the kind of intolerance they accuse us of?
It’s almost like atheism, or naturalism, has become the modern-day Phariseeism, where you have a group of people who are so certain that their beliefs are true that they can’t even begin to consider other points of view. Why would they do that? They wouldn’t, after all, want to be idiots like us crackpot believers.
Originally posted 2007-04-25 19:37:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
On Deciding…
by thefallencleric on Jun.24, 2010, under ADVICE
We live in a world dominated by feelings. That wouldn’t be much of a problem, except that this feeling-dominated world thinks it’s rational. A feeling-dominated world that thinks it’s rational demeans the opinions of religious people because they are “irrational,” but it demeans those opinions for irrational reasons. Feeling-dominated people do not know how to think. Their feelings do not inform them when they (feelings) are not adequate for guiding a decision. Feelings nearly always disguise themselves as rationality.
Things are not as they are because suddenly millions of people decided to abandon rationality and embrace emotion as the standard on which to base decisions. Most would not even recognize that this is the state of things. But we are the society G.K. Chesterton warned us about in chapter 3 of Orthodoxy, which is entitled The Suicide of Thought.
For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own…
This skepticism about the mind and thinking began in our universities and students learned it from professors and then went out to become “culture creators” — those working in the fields of science, philosophy, literature, the arts, and other fields concerned with the nature of reality. “The revolution” occurred in this country in the 1960′s and 1970′s. It was during that time that “the thought that stops thought” became dominant. Once philosophers accepted the possibility that the human mind cannot accurately comprehend reality, it was a very quick step to complete subjectivism. If I cannot comprehend reality, then reality is for me whatever I experience it (or feel it) to be. Decisions therefore cannot be based on any objective reality, but only on my subjective experiences and feelings. I can have one “truth” for me, and you can have another totally opposite “truth” for you. Both can be true, because truth is individual. There is no truth that applies equally to everyone at all times and in all places. This philosophical thinking (that has probably already alienated most of my readers) produced our current ways of thinking and making moral decisions in America. And in my opinion, that is not a good thing.
As a pastor I speak all the time with people who are in a frightening position. They are charged with the responsibility of making rational decisions for their lives (doing what is “best”), and yet have almost no understanding of how feelings and rationality are different and how they guide us in different ways. The reason this is frightening is because decisions have consequences. This is one of the ways we know there is an objective reality that exists outside our own minds! Dallas Willard says that reality is best understood as what you run into when you make a wrong decision. In other words, every decision we make will have consequences (or, just as real, benefits) in the real world.
So what does a person mean when he says, “I’m deciding…” or “I’m trying to make a decision”? I would like to assume he means that he’s bringing rational thoughts to bear on a set of circumstances that he is seeking to understand better and will ultimately be required to act on. But this isn’t what most people mean when they say, “I’m deciding.” What most people mean is, “I’m trying to figure out how I feel about this.”
I spoke with a person today in this very position. She has to make a difficult decision that is going to create huge ripples in her life, no matter what she decides. Her problem is not that she’s having a hard time deciding — that would be expected given the gravity and difficulty of the decision. Her problem is that she keeps thinking she has decided when she in fact has not. She keeps mistaking “feeling” for “deciding.” She will say, “I have decided that this is what I’m going to do,” but what she actually means is, “This is how I feel.” And of course, since it’s a difficult decision, and feelings change frequently, she often feels differently within the hour. And then she gets confused and says, “What’s happening here? I thought I had decided this, but I guess not.”
She is expecting her decision to be reflected in her feelings. She thinks that deciding something will make her feel a certain way. When her “decision” doesn’t have a permanent effect on her feelings, she figures she must have not really decided at all. My friend is doing the right thing in making up her mind — in just deciding what is best and going for it. The problem is that a couple hours later, when her feelings are no longer on board, she mistakes her changed feelings for a changed decision. She says, “I had decided this, but now I’m not so sure.” What she should be saying is, “I decided this. I felt it at the time and I don’t feel it now, but either way, here’s what I’m going to do.”
Feelings do not have power to control our decisions unless we let them. And to allow feelings to control decisions is extremely foolish and begging for trouble. After all, we often feel things we should not feel: attraction to people other than our spouse; petty jealousies; unjustified anger; regrets over things we can’t change; self-deprecation, etc. These feelings are normal, but they are not rational — i.e., they are not in our best interests. If we go around acting on these feelings all the time, we will mess up our lives and the lives of many others in the process. In other words, we feel irrational feelings, but should not actually act on them.
My friend keeps getting the cart before the horse, and allowing her feelings to control her. She wakes up feeling a certain way and calls it a decision. Two hours later she’s feeling differently and so believes she must not have decided anything at all. And as long as she doesn’t understand the difference between feeling and deciding, this will in fact be true.
This is because the main way we know we have decided something is that we stop deciding. I may have deep anxiety over whether or not to purchase a certain vehicle, but at some point I make a decision. Once the decision is made, my feelings may continue waffling, but I follow through with whatever course of action I have decided on. I stop deciding. I choose to act regardless of what I may feel. If I base my decision on feelings, I stand a good chance of deciding wrongly. I also stand a good chance of deciding one way right now and then a different way 30 minutes from now when my feelings change. And of course my feelings WILL change.
One reason I’m struggling to decide in the first place is because my feelings keep changing! There is only one hope for me to get out of the way of my swinging feelings as they attempt to bat me every which way, and that is to make a decision and then stick to it, come what may.
Let’s suppose that a man is having deep anxiety about whether to propose to a woman. And let’s suppose that ultimately he decides to go ahead and do it. And let’s suppose that she says yes, but the next day he begins to have anxiety again. Was a decision actually made? Yes. Feelings do not have real consequences, but decisions do. This man is now engaged to be married not because he felt like getting engaged, but because he decided to propose and make it happen! The question is when he begins having anxiety, what does he do with it? He’s engaged and having anxiety. He was having this same anxiety yesterday, before he was engaged. Is he now to assume that his anxiety is a sign that he should not have proposed? Of course not, because if he assumes that and breaks off the engagement, it’s only a matter of time until the pendulum will swing back the other way and he will again feel calm and assured about being engaged. Only now his potential bride may not share his enthusiasm. His best bet is to stay the course, unless new evidence can be brought forward showing that his decision to propose was premature or foolish.
Getting back to my friend, she would make a decision, but when her feelings changed a few hours later, she would wonder, “Why do I feel this way? I thought I made a decision.” She expected her decision to put a stop to the pendulum swing of emotions. The truth is that decisions don’t stop the pendulum swing, decisions just help us to not be knocked over by our emotions any more. As long as she continued to be knocked over by her emotions, she had not in fact decided anything at all but was basing her “decision” solely on emotion. When we do that, we will ultimately “decide” not based on what is rational and in our best interest, but based on whatever emotion feels strongest, or on the flip of a coin when we get to where we can’t bear to be kicked around by our emotions any longer.
A decision is something that keeps us from acting on the random, irrational, and willy nilly cues we get from our feelings. It’s okay for decisions to be informed by feelings, but decisions should not be based on them. In order to understand this, we must understand what we can reasonably expect from both feelings and decisions.
We can expect our feelings to be a gut-level guide to things that may or may not be best for us. Sometimes we get uncomfortable in situations it’s best we avoid. But we must bring rationality to bear on this, for we often get uncomfortable because of our background, lack of familiarity with certain situations, or even because of skills we lack in dealing appropriately. We should not discount our feelings, but nor should we crown them king. We can be grateful when feelings feel good and enjoy it while it lasts. We can, and should, use those good times to prepare ourselves mentally for the swing, because no good feeling will last forever. I repeat, NO good feeling will last forever. This includes romantic good feelings, physical good feelings, spiritual good feelings, sexual good feelings, financial good feelings, and any other good feeling you can think of. None of them will last forever, so we should enjoy them while they last, and expect that they will eventually pass. Sooner or later, they all do. The one thing we should never do is suspect that, when our feelings change from good to bad, we should reverse a decision we made when things felt better. This is almost always the wrong thing to do, and almost always for the wrong reasons.
What of decisions? What can we expect from them? We can expect decisions to be our guides and things we can base our future on. As I said earlier, it’s okay to take feelings into account when we make decisions, but we should never base decisions on feelings or allow changing feelings to cause us to question whether we made a right decision. Ultimately, we can expect our decisions to serve as containers for our feelings. Nearly twenty years ago I made a decision to marry my wife Christy. That decision has served as a container for a lot of feelings for me since then. Because of that decision I have experienced feelings of love, of desire, of anger and frustration, joy, peace, security, and fear. All those emotions and more have come out of a decision I made to enter into a marriage relationship with Christy. Our decisions guide and direct our emotions and create proper boundaries for them. This is essential, because our emotions don’t know any boundaries. You may be a married man having feelings for a single young girl in your office. You will either make some decisions that will contain those feelings up front, or they will eventually dominate you and ruin your marriage and your life. You may be a middle-aged woman having strong feelings of dissatisfaction with what your life has become. You will either make some decisions about healthy ways you will express and channel that dissatisfaction, or it will eventually dominate you and have potentially disastrous consequences in your life. You may be a young graduate, eager to climb the corporate ladder and make money. You will either make some decisions about healthy ways you will express your desire for success or that desire will overtake your life and lead you down some destructive paths. You may be angry at your neighbor for something he said or did. You need to make some decisions about what to do with that anger or it will eat you up and possibly have far more negative consequences in the life of your neighbor than you intend right now. Decisions are the containers for emotions.
Our decisions are meant to guide and direct our emotions, which have no inherent boundaries and recognize no stopping point. What’s the emotional stopping point for the man who has a crush on this young girl? Sex with her in her apartment or in some hotel — his marriage and family be damned. And then sex with her again and again and again until he gets caught (leaving him devastated), or she cuts off the relationship (leaving him devastated), or some other awful consequence brings it to a close (leaving him devastated). In other words, the emotional stopping point is not to stop. I’ll leave you to work through the rest of my examples and ask that question and answer it on your own for each.
People are in chaos because they allow emotions to control decisions, and allow decisions to be directed and undone by emotions. Until we realize the unique place of both decision and emotion, and allow each to do in our lives what it is meant to do, we can have no firm foundation for living. That’s why religion is essential in human life. Religion does not tell us how to feel, but what to do – in other words, what decisions to make that will serve as containers for healthy emotions throughout life. For example, the Bible tells us to avoid adulterous relationships. If we disregard that we will develop attachments (emotional and/or sexual connections — feelings) to people that have no possible legitimate expression and will cause frustration, resentment, and pain.
It is my opinion that Jesus, because he was God, knew and understood human nature better than any other religious teacher the world has ever known. His teachings were based on this incredible comprehension of people and therefore he was best able to direct us to the decisions and behaviors that will serve as healthy containers and expressions for emotions in our lives. This is true without having said a word about Christ’s death on the cross and our need for a Savior. I believe the person who follows Christ’s teachings will live a better life whether they ever follow Jesus as their forgiver and leader or not. But millions of people who have made that commitment are living chaotic lives because
they do not understand how to make correct decisions for their lives. It is my hope that, at the very least, those who claim to follow the God who conceived and gave birth to reality as we know it will commit themselves to basing decisions for their lives on belief in, and our best understanding of, that reality; not merely on feelings, whims, and ideals.
Originally posted 2007-10-29 19:06:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Seeing People
by thefallencleric on Jun.24, 2010, under REFLECTIONS
The other day a student at the university where I teach said, “I’ll bet you’re extremely confrontive with your clients. You tell it like it is.” Frankly I was surprised by this perception. His reply to my question about it was that I come across as no-nonsense, bold, and business-like.
But he’s right. I do. And he’s also right about my clients. I have no fear. I’m courageous — maybe even outrageous. I’ll say or do anything. I’ll even call them names and insult them. But sooner or later my wife tires of these tirades and I must actually talk to my clients personally.
Humor aside, despite what I may say or think or feel about any given person in the theoretical abstraction of conversation, my perspective changes drastically when I am confronted with real flesh and blood. The truth is that I am mystified by human nature and never stray for long from the central reality of my life. I love human beings. I have never met one that I didn’t find fascinating and have met very few whom I did not find at least somewhat lovable. My capacity to find good in people is boundless, and I find it nearly impossible to consider in an argument that perhaps the other party was at least partially wrong. The more wrong others believe the other party to be, the more I am convinced it was probably all my fault. Something in me rushes to the side of the underdog, even when the underdog is opposing me furiously. I might find this rather noble did it not seem so codependent.
Ultimately, even this seemingly virtuous characteristic is just the way I am. I did not work to cultivate it, it’s just there. I deserve no credit for whatever good is to be found in it. And if that is true, perhaps others deserve no blame for the vices with which they struggle. Certainly there is a difference between dispositions/temperaments and actions/behaviors, but as long as we are comparing positive dispositions to negative ones, the analogy holds. I see good in people, even when there is little to be seen. Others find bad in people when bad is hard to find. Both are temperaments.
This way of seeing things is largely responsible for the essentially non-judgmental posture I take towards others. It truly doesn’t occur to me to believe that occasionally people behave badly because they are evil. I can always find a better explanation. The problem, of course, is that evil is real, and sometimes I fail to see it. And there is no good explanation other than the one that gets to the cause of something. My desire to believe in all people and see the best in them has at times kept me from being as decisive as I needed to be.
Originally posted 2002-02-21 05:32:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
The dumbest quote ever?
by thefallencleric on Jun.24, 2010, under REFLECTIONS
I saw a quote on Twitter today and I think it’s by a guy named Gerry Spence.
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
This stands at the heart of the misunderstandings that are out there about faith. I do not think Newton or the other mostly faith-filled early scientists could ever have been accused of having minds closed by belief. Can belief not inspire wonder? It can, and it does. What is really closed-minded (Christopher Hitchens) is the idea that we must choose between wonder and faith, or, as Hitchens seems to say, intelligence and faith.
Of course there’s a chance that Spence is not closed to the possibility that faith can inspire wonder, but that doesn’t seem to be where he’s going with this. Even the notion that belief itself is what closes minds is suspect. There’s more holes in this than I have time to parse through right now, but I’ll get to it more later.
Originally posted 2009-11-20 18:04:04. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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WELCOME TO THE FALLEN CLERIC!
My name is David Flowers. I am a pastor in Grand Blanc, MI. I have been married since 1988 and have three daughters, born in 1993, 1995, and 1996. I am a licensed professional counselor. I run a small private counseling practice, and also teach part-time at Spring Arbor University in graduate and undergraduate programs in Family Studies and Family Life Education. I write mostly about topics related to God, the church, and counseling, which simply falls under the heading "Advice." I welcome your questions and comments.
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