In the Roman Catholic tradition, the Jesuits are the intellectual leaders. To be a Jesuit, you are required to have a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) is some field. It used to be that you had to have 3 doctorates to be a Jesuit. Even the Jesuits are lowering the bar, thank the Lord! :-)
Patrick McCormick, professor of Christian ethics at the Jesuit run Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, (a place I visited twice in one week this summer...the campus is extremely beautiful) has written an article titled, "Message in a bottle...while poor nations are struggling with scarce water supplies, Americans are spending billions a year on something that is plentiful and practically free."
He wrote this article in response to a book titled, "BottlemaniaL How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It," by Elizabeth Royte. She says that in the 1970's marketers for Perrier began to persuade Americans that bottled water was classier and tastier than plain old tap water, leading millions of upscale consumers to shop for a private brand of drinking water. By 1987 the average American was drinking more than 5 gallons of bottled water a year, and by 2006 the number had jumped to more than 25 gallons.
Today, Royte says, in a country where more than 89% of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name brand waters and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, customers buy about 1 billion bottles of water each week. Americans spend more on bottled water than on milk, beer, or coffee. Believe it or not!
This is an obvious problem for many reasons:
1. Bottled water is no cleaner or safer than tap water. More than 40% of bottled water brands are drawn from municipal reservoirs or taps.
2. It takes 17 million barrels of oil a year to produce all of the plastic bottles. This does not include the oil needed to fuel the trucks for delivery.
3. The environmental impact of discarded plastic bottles that are not recycled!
There are more issues around bottled water...I'll get into those next week.
But for now, does Christianity have anything to say about the current reality of bottled water?
The Scripture says, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is within it." (Psalm 24:1)
Is there a place of intersection between the current reality of our bottled water industry and the current reality of Sacred Scripture?
Oh, by the way, I am going back to the tap....I hope you will too.
Blessings,
Jeff
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
The Mystery of Suffering and Pain
Some of you know that I really like the writings of Ron Rohlheiser, who is president of a seminary, in San Antonio. Tell me what you think.
How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? Perhaps that is the most difficult religious question of all time. Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? In a famous book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein asks how it is even possible for a Jew to believe in God after the holocaust. How can we believe in God in the face of God's seeming inaction in the face of suffering and evil?There have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those who are suffering. There have also been many attempts at offering some kind of acceptable theoretical explanation.For example, Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People), writing as a Jewish rabbi, tries to answer the question by defending God's love and goodness at the expense of his power. Essentially, God would help us if He could, Kushner believes, but God isn't all-powerful. Innocent suffering exists not because God cannot stop it. Inside of Christian theology, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, and Teilhard de Chardin, among others, have written insightful books on this question. Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God's respect for it. God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it. That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not. We see a powerful illustration of this in Jesus' reaction to the death of Lazarus. In essence, this is how the Gospels tell that story: The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that "the man you love" is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died!" Basically her question is: "Where were you? Why didn't you come and heal him?" Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way. Martha then goes and calls her sister, Mary. When Mary arrives she repeats the identical words to Jesus that Martha had spoken: "If you had been here my brother would not have died!" However, coming out of Mary's mouth, these words mean something else, something deeper. Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God's seeming absence. Her query ("Where were you when my brother died?") asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone's brother dies?But, curiously, Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: "Where have you put him?" And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples' helplessness and pain. Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead.And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.The lesson in both these deaths and raisings might be put this way: The God we believe in doesn't necessarily intervene and rescue us from suffering and death (although we are invited to pray for that). Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards. God's seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer.And I do not say this glibly. I know too many people who have been hurt, brutally and unfairly, in ways that make it difficult for them to accept that there is an all-powerful God who cares. But sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha - shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God's seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God's embrace.
Blessings of grace and peace to you,
Jeff
How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? Perhaps that is the most difficult religious question of all time. Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? In a famous book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein asks how it is even possible for a Jew to believe in God after the holocaust. How can we believe in God in the face of God's seeming inaction in the face of suffering and evil?There have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those who are suffering. There have also been many attempts at offering some kind of acceptable theoretical explanation.For example, Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People), writing as a Jewish rabbi, tries to answer the question by defending God's love and goodness at the expense of his power. Essentially, God would help us if He could, Kushner believes, but God isn't all-powerful. Innocent suffering exists not because God cannot stop it. Inside of Christian theology, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, and Teilhard de Chardin, among others, have written insightful books on this question. Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God's respect for it. God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it. That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not. We see a powerful illustration of this in Jesus' reaction to the death of Lazarus. In essence, this is how the Gospels tell that story: The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that "the man you love" is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died!" Basically her question is: "Where were you? Why didn't you come and heal him?" Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way. Martha then goes and calls her sister, Mary. When Mary arrives she repeats the identical words to Jesus that Martha had spoken: "If you had been here my brother would not have died!" However, coming out of Mary's mouth, these words mean something else, something deeper. Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God's seeming absence. Her query ("Where were you when my brother died?") asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone's brother dies?But, curiously, Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: "Where have you put him?" And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples' helplessness and pain. Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead.And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.The lesson in both these deaths and raisings might be put this way: The God we believe in doesn't necessarily intervene and rescue us from suffering and death (although we are invited to pray for that). Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards. God's seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer.And I do not say this glibly. I know too many people who have been hurt, brutally and unfairly, in ways that make it difficult for them to accept that there is an all-powerful God who cares. But sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha - shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God's seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God's embrace.
Blessings of grace and peace to you,
Jeff
Monday, September 8, 2008
Bishop Willimon's Blog
Finally, I am blogging again! :-)
I read a lot of different blogs. I receive this blog from Bishop Willimon every Monday.
What are your thoughts about his blog?
Do you agree or not?
TEACHING CHURCH
Early Methodism was organized by Wesley and Asbury on the basis of a series of questions. Wesley believed that the leader led by putting two questions to the church, and the church lived by responding to the leader’s questions.
Don’t you find it significant that the key questions with which Methodism’s first conferences opened were these three: 1. What to teach? 2. How to teach; and 3. What to do; that is how to regulate our doctrine, discipline and practice (Doctrine and Disciplines, 1798, Pg. 18). Notice the very first question – What to teach? Wesley was convinced that Christians must be intellectual equipped to follow Jesus. The demands of discipleship are too great not to have the whole person engaged by the claims of Christ including a person’s intellect. Wesley believed that preachers were primarily guardians of doctrine. They not only preached in such a way that won people to Christ, but to make sure they were winning people to Christ!
This past year I have had a number of experiences as bishop that have confirmed my sense that Wesley was right. The day we spent at ClearBranch pondering the Methodist Christian way of believing, including the follow-up sessions in numerous churches, the Conference-wide discussions on War and the War in Iraq, as well as the teaching experiences I have had in dozens of Alabama churches, have all convinced me that Methodist people want to be taught. They long to grow in their faith. They expect their church to offer meetings whereby they grow as disciples.
The Wesley movement was distinguished principally by its determination not only to win people for Christ but also to grow people into Christ. Notice that our Conference mission statement explicitly states our intention to “Grow More Disciples” for Jesus Christ. A primary way we grow in our faith is by continuing to be informed about our faith, to explore the richness of Christian believing and to learn more about Jesus and his way.
I am therefore impressed that any growing must also be a teaching congregation, where the chief teacher is the pastor. In congregations that are successful in reaching new disciples, the need for teaching and Christian formation is even greater. We not only want to reach people for Christ we want to teach people for Christ. Every pastor ought to be able to identify a setting, other than the pulpit, in which that pastor is teaching people for Christ.
Woe to any pastor or congregation that gets preoccupied with merely caring for the congregation, managing and maintaining the organizational machinery of the congregation and neglect the duty to teach the faith.
One of the most appealing aspects of the younger generation that we are trying to reach is that they appear to have a wonderfully “teachable spirit.” They realize that they have not been well informed about the faith, and they appear to be grateful to, and attracted to a church that takes the teaching office seriously.
What to teach – the substance of the Christian faith, its most important convictions – how to teach – how to let the Holy Spirit energize a new generation of disciples – note that this comes before any of our righteous work, our regulative responsibilities and our organizational forms.
Someone has said that the primary work of leadership is asking the right questions. It is up to the leader to ask good questions; and it up to the congregation to give appropriate answers. Thank you Wesley and Asbury for teaching us to ask the right questions!
William H. Willimon
Jeff's response....Bishop Willimon is a profound writer. He makes me think. He stretches me in a lot of ways. I am grateful for that. But, as important as the content of his blog is for the living of our days, at the end of the day, I am not saved by what I know. I am saved because I am known. I am not saved because my doctrine is exactly right. I am saved because God's grace is greater than all my sin. Bishop Willimon seems to be focused on institutional preservation. I have very little interest in preserving the institution for the sake of job security for bishops or clergy. I am not motivated to serve the institution. I wake up with joy and excitement because of the privilege of serving the people of God and trust that the Spirit of the Living God will lead me to the right people at the right time in the right way to serve in the right spirit and right relationship with God and with all of God's people is all that matters as far as I am concerned. Amazingly, the people to whom I am led really don't care how much I know...they want to know how much I care!
One final thought...since I am on a roll :-).... some of the people that are closest to God are not intellectually able to articulate anything about God or the revelation of God in and through the person of Jesus Christ. I rejoice that I am known by God in Christ. I don't lean on my own understanding about the Christian faith very much at all...On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand! Pax, Jeff
I read a lot of different blogs. I receive this blog from Bishop Willimon every Monday.
What are your thoughts about his blog?
Do you agree or not?
TEACHING CHURCH
Early Methodism was organized by Wesley and Asbury on the basis of a series of questions. Wesley believed that the leader led by putting two questions to the church, and the church lived by responding to the leader’s questions.
Don’t you find it significant that the key questions with which Methodism’s first conferences opened were these three: 1. What to teach? 2. How to teach; and 3. What to do; that is how to regulate our doctrine, discipline and practice (Doctrine and Disciplines, 1798, Pg. 18). Notice the very first question – What to teach? Wesley was convinced that Christians must be intellectual equipped to follow Jesus. The demands of discipleship are too great not to have the whole person engaged by the claims of Christ including a person’s intellect. Wesley believed that preachers were primarily guardians of doctrine. They not only preached in such a way that won people to Christ, but to make sure they were winning people to Christ!
This past year I have had a number of experiences as bishop that have confirmed my sense that Wesley was right. The day we spent at ClearBranch pondering the Methodist Christian way of believing, including the follow-up sessions in numerous churches, the Conference-wide discussions on War and the War in Iraq, as well as the teaching experiences I have had in dozens of Alabama churches, have all convinced me that Methodist people want to be taught. They long to grow in their faith. They expect their church to offer meetings whereby they grow as disciples.
The Wesley movement was distinguished principally by its determination not only to win people for Christ but also to grow people into Christ. Notice that our Conference mission statement explicitly states our intention to “Grow More Disciples” for Jesus Christ. A primary way we grow in our faith is by continuing to be informed about our faith, to explore the richness of Christian believing and to learn more about Jesus and his way.
I am therefore impressed that any growing must also be a teaching congregation, where the chief teacher is the pastor. In congregations that are successful in reaching new disciples, the need for teaching and Christian formation is even greater. We not only want to reach people for Christ we want to teach people for Christ. Every pastor ought to be able to identify a setting, other than the pulpit, in which that pastor is teaching people for Christ.
Woe to any pastor or congregation that gets preoccupied with merely caring for the congregation, managing and maintaining the organizational machinery of the congregation and neglect the duty to teach the faith.
One of the most appealing aspects of the younger generation that we are trying to reach is that they appear to have a wonderfully “teachable spirit.” They realize that they have not been well informed about the faith, and they appear to be grateful to, and attracted to a church that takes the teaching office seriously.
What to teach – the substance of the Christian faith, its most important convictions – how to teach – how to let the Holy Spirit energize a new generation of disciples – note that this comes before any of our righteous work, our regulative responsibilities and our organizational forms.
Someone has said that the primary work of leadership is asking the right questions. It is up to the leader to ask good questions; and it up to the congregation to give appropriate answers. Thank you Wesley and Asbury for teaching us to ask the right questions!
William H. Willimon
Jeff's response....Bishop Willimon is a profound writer. He makes me think. He stretches me in a lot of ways. I am grateful for that. But, as important as the content of his blog is for the living of our days, at the end of the day, I am not saved by what I know. I am saved because I am known. I am not saved because my doctrine is exactly right. I am saved because God's grace is greater than all my sin. Bishop Willimon seems to be focused on institutional preservation. I have very little interest in preserving the institution for the sake of job security for bishops or clergy. I am not motivated to serve the institution. I wake up with joy and excitement because of the privilege of serving the people of God and trust that the Spirit of the Living God will lead me to the right people at the right time in the right way to serve in the right spirit and right relationship with God and with all of God's people is all that matters as far as I am concerned. Amazingly, the people to whom I am led really don't care how much I know...they want to know how much I care!
One final thought...since I am on a roll :-).... some of the people that are closest to God are not intellectually able to articulate anything about God or the revelation of God in and through the person of Jesus Christ. I rejoice that I am known by God in Christ. I don't lean on my own understanding about the Christian faith very much at all...On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand! Pax, Jeff
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