Tag: faith

So What

For all the talk in America now and forever about how spiritually diverse we are as a nation, it seems that many people have been lying to the researchers. Or just maybe have been trying to spare their mother’s feelings and no longer feel they should.

Here are the surprising statistics I found as I was thumbing through my latest The Lutheran magazine (3/2012, p. 8):

  44% told the Baylor University (Waco, TX) Religion Survey that they spend no time seeking out eternal wisdom.
   19% said it was ‘useless to search for meaning.’
   28% told LifeWay that it’s not a ‘major priority’ in my life to find my deeper purpose.

One of the most striking trends in religion statistics in recent decades is the rise of the Nones, people who checked “no religious identity” on the American Religious Identification Survey. The Nones went from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2008. 

So, while America grows increasingly vocal on the edges of the religious landscape, there appear to be lots and lots of people, young and old, who are opting out of the conversation completely. Somehow the core issues of faith like belonging, meaning, forgiveness, renewal, love and compassion, have not been compelling or important enough to draw people toward the discussion.

So what? I’m not very excited about a secular culture. Despite all the problems that religiosity and diversity bring (and I could go on and ON about that), our life in America has been immeasurably enriched, challenged, and improved by the influence of faith on daily life. Just a few examples spring to mind, institutions and events that were driven by religious values: the establishment of colleges, the building and staffing of hospitals and nursing homes, the abolition of slavery, and the provision of food shelves, homeless ministries and chaplaincy to prisons. These are key aspects of American life may or may not ever have happened without people of faith sacrificing and organizing around the life principles of love for the neighbor, and compassion for the sick, poor and suffering.

If those of us who remain connected in some personal way to religious communities need to take anything away from these current statistics, it may be that we need to do a better job speaking, living and working out of our core principles. We may have been doing lots of stuff in the past 25 years, but it doesn’t seem to have captured the imagination of our children, our next door neighbor or the college student across the country. And why should we?  So that these disconnected might have a real chance at hearing why we think faith is central to life in the first place.

That this is not all there is. That Love created the universe. That we’re in this together. That we hurt each other, and yet we can repent, forgive, even start over. That we all belong to God. I don’t want anyone to miss out on this ‘eternal wisdom’ because it saves lives from despair and emptiness. So what? That’s what.

For some interfaith families, the holidays are a juggling act | Minnesota Public Radio News

MPR reporter Eliz. Dunbar gave me a call a couple of weeks back, and asked me to contribute to her story on inter-faith families and the holidays. Glad to help!

For some interfaith families, the holidays are a juggling act | Minnesota Public Radio News

Post Rapture: Why We’re Still Here

           Did you find yourself just a little distracted Saturday night, May 21st around 6:00pm? If you were, you weren’t alone. It was hard to ignore the latest, confident predictions by fundamentalist Christian preacher and Family Radio Network owner Harold Camping about the end of the world. Never mind that he had predicted the same “rapture” of the few faithful, the destruction of the world and the suffering of millions left behind before. And had been wrong, of course.
His predictions, sent around the world via radio, newspaper articles, billboards, internet posts and video links gave him a platform of influence like never before. People persuaded of his insight are said to have sold homes, cashed in pensions, quit jobs and left incredulous families behind to publically warn their neighbors, just like Old Testament prophets of old. The date came and went. But Camping didn’t miss a beat, saying he hadn’t had all the data he needed, the real day for the rapture, he now says, is this October 21st.
Camping isn’t the only source declaring dates of doom recently. Others are focused on the end of a major cycle for the Mayan calendar in 2012, convinced that the ancient civilization had some special insight into space and time. NASA, that great brain trust of space exploration, measurement and science, has been talking about an increase in solar flares next year, and has thousands of people sending in on-line questions, wondering what might happen to everything from communication satellites to the magnetic poles of the earth.
While all the anxiety about the end of the world is as old as developed human cultures, the current anticipation reminds me of several different waves of religious people waiting for the end. I think of some early Christians who sold their belongings and waited on the hills of Rome, believing Jesus literally would return “soon.” A wave of hysteria flew around Europe at the turn of the first millennia, thousands filling cathedrals in fear as the year 999 turned into 1,000 AD. And in the periods of religious revivals from 1800 into the early 20th century known as the 2nd and 3rd Great Awakenings, ignorant, charismatic preachers had hundreds and thousands expecting the rapture at multiple turns of the calendar.
All this religious energy around the judgment of God, the return of Christ, and the mention of a special “rapture” of the faithful in the New Testament is centered in three primary religious perspectives, not shared by most American Christians.
1.     The Bible as Code. In this perspective, only specially gifted preachers can figure out the messages of the Bible. Instead of the Bible as a library of ancient documents written to a culture and people that takes some education, care and patience to understand, the Bible is treated like a codebook for an elite few.
2.     Human beings as Good or Bad. Instead of seeing individual human beings as both good and bad, capable of great imagination as well as petty selfishness, this perspective puts people in one of two camps: in/good; or out/bad.
3.     God as Angry Judge. It takes a certain theology to believe that God has given up on the world, that God is no longer actively holding the world together, and interested in humanity’s future. This theology believes it knows the mind of God, and that God is finished with the world and not only is finished, but is ready to act in violent judgment.
The next time you hear someone telling you they know exactly what the end of days will look like, have compassion on them. They operate with some pretty extreme beliefs about the God and world, convictions that makes living their lives pretty hard. Chances are, that fact alone makes them anxious for God to put an end to everything they know and have them begin anew in paradise. For them, it seems like the only real way out. And that is a sad way to live, don’t you think?

My Take: Who owns Jesus? Who owns yoga? – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs

Yes, if purity of faith is what you’re looking for, eventually you will be very – VERY – disappointed. Even the scandalous, unique aspects of faith eventually become part of culture. “All religions are mash-ups,” writes Stephen Prothero, religion scholar at Boston University.
My Take: Who owns Jesus? Who owns yoga? – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs

Go To the Limits of Your Longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.


Rainer Maria Rilke

Book of Hours, I  59

Father’s Day devotion from Pr. Peter Strommen

Peter is currently the Lead Pastor at my former congregation, Shepherd of the Lake Lutheran, Prior Lake, MN,
has written such a beautiful and wise devotion about faith, family and gender, I just have to share. Thanks, Peter. Awesome.

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs044/1102142675015/archive/1103489936318.html

The Two-Faith Marriage

            For thousands of years, people have expected their children to marry within their family faith and culture. Family life, in its largest sense, is easier this way. Marriage partners are easier to find among shared communities like synagogues, mosques, parochial schools or parishes; families know more about each other and often form smoother in-law relationships. Religious rituals bind partners to preceding generations as well as to their future children and to one another. All the thousand small, nearly invisible connections shared faith creates helps to enable more stable marriages and thicker, stronger emotional ties between parents, children, in-laws and the larger religious community.
            It isn’t the distrust of the outside world as much as the desire to sustain the uniqueness of a specific religious worldview that has linked Catholic to Catholic, Jew to Jew, Muslim to Muslim, Hmong to Hmong in marriage for generations. The practical, easier simplicity of shared meanings between spouses hold traditions and expectations in place. And so, for generations, parents have expected their children to partner with people of their faith traditions; this has been especially critical to religions that have relatively small numbers compared to the general population, as Jews are, for example, in the United States.
            So, if a good Jewish young adult woman, whose faith teaches her that mothers are the parent who “passes down” the identity of Jew to the children, should begin to form a long-term relationship with a young adult male Gentile, a non-Jew, the tide of family anxiety may be loud. But now imagine an adult Jewish man planning to marry a Gentile woman: his children would not be considered religiously Jewish. The emotional hew and cry from his extended family may be so loud as to disrupt that planned marriage. While all this anxiety about blood lines and religious identity may be unwelcome and distressing, it’s quite understandable from a cultural point of view. But it doesn’t make it easier to manage this all within your own family. So what’s a “mixed marriage” couple to do?
1.      Understand and respect the family’s loyalty to their faith. While the family comments and distress may be pointed at you, it’s really not about you, personally. It’s about your possible intention of breaking community tradition and expectations.
2.      Take your time. Be sure those thousand small communal connections of the faith become more visible to you and that you try them on for size. They need to fit you, or at least be interesting and acceptable enough to have them become part of your life. What is simply a bother now may become intolerable. And intolerable isn’t good; it will kill a marriage.
3.      Negotiate before you commit. Work out the details of a future family life as much as you can. What is preferable you attend (Sunday service) and what is mandatory (Baptism)? Can you tolerate these agreements for the long run? Are they mutual? Talk them through, and even write them down.

4.      Can you agree to live within this negotiated difference? Expect this topic to never go away, but be a continuing area of adjustment, compromise and some level of sacrifice for the both of you. The larger presence of extended families, religious holidays, rituals, leaders and language will only increase this difference as you have children. Can you both embrace the long-term challenge in a positive, adjusted way?

            The two-faith marriage couple is on the increase across Western culture. And while such unions can appear to weaken a minority faith, sharing traditions can also strengthen the tolerance, appreciation and respect the majority has for minority traditions. It’s not all bad news! But a two-faith marriage is not easy, and is not for the faint of heart. Know what you need to do before you say “I do,” and your years together will much smoother.
           

Easter : As Simply as I Can

I see it this way : God is part of the human experience. Constantly.

I believe that God uniquely joined with the one called Jesus and through him embodied the will and desire of God.  I hear in the NT gospels the constant pull of God toward healing, God’s compassion for all human suffering, and God’s dreams for a more just creation.

When Jesus was executed / crucified, I see the worse of human power brutalizing and silencing truth. God doesn’t answer. Death happens. God allows the silence to speak.

And then God raises Jesus up from death. God heals Jesus even from death itself.

This is the central proclamation of the Christian faith: God is our Creator force whose hallmark is life, healing, and restoration. Along with others of the Christian community, I bear witness to God’s drive to heal and restore the world. I have been healed. Over and over again.

And in death, even then, I will be healed and rise.

These are the central powers of God. And this is what Jesus, the Cross, the silence, and the Resurrection mean to me.

Image: “White Crucifixion,” Marc Chagall, 1938