Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

I don’t mind when people say that to me. After all, December is the season of Holidays! There is a reason that Christians celebrate this high holy feast in December, but it might not be what you think.

So here is a quick rundown so you can see just how chock full of religious significance this month is. On

The Buddhists celebrate Bodhi day on December 6^th, the day when Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment while sitting under a Bodhi Tree.

December 21^st is the Pagan and Wiccan celebration of Yule, the shortest day of the year and traditionally when the sun child was reborn.

The solstice is also celebrated in the Chinese Festival Dongzhi, the Hopi festival of Soyal, and the Persian Zoroastrian festival of Yalda.

December begins with Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights and ends with Hogmanay, the Scottish Festival of the New Year.

Christians celebrate Christmas because it is the day when the Ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia, the return of the Sun.

Even the Secular Humanists celebrate Christmas as some sort of festival of the best of human nature.

All in all Happy Holidays seems like a very appropriate response to all of this. I have in fact left a few out. And there are some like the Hindu Diwali or the Muslim Eid-al Fitr that occur on different calendars than ours and so sometimes happen in December and sometimes not.

These people who stand up and fight for putting Christ back in Christmas are seeing the trees instead of the forest.

What is really happening here is a very human reaction to the dark. We all remember it from when we were kids and the lights went off... we need assurance that they will go on again. Well, the world gets colder and darker, and then, one day, the light comes back on... and we celebrate.

Freud and Jung would have called it something buried in our subconscious, a human reaction to bad things by believing in good things.

So think about winter festivals as times of hope. Things can get better. Life will return. Goodness will triumph... this is the root message of every festival. And, in case you did not recognize it, the main message of Jesus.

I realize that some people feel a sort of empirical triumphalism about Christianity and want the entire world to convert. I do not personally feel there is any reason for this, but I am not really trying to focus there. Instead I am trying to say that this is a time of year we should celebrate with each other.

There is literally no one who does not celebrate something in December. Now that Christmas has been so fully embraced by the secular world and is seen as a sort of Charles Dickens ode to the goodness of people, everyone celebrates.

What is not to like about new life? What is not to like about turning the corner and the days getting longer? 

What is not to like about gift giving and feasting and celebrating?

Don’t get me wrong, I actually love winter and it has become so short these days that we really have nothing to complain about. But I also think that human beings should celebrate whenever possible. I think it makes us better people to be able to look on the bright side or to be able to see darkness and say, you know what, let’s have a party anyway.

It is after all what Canadians do best.

So I love that all of the holidays coincide with the darkest days and the colder weather. It really feels right to me. And if anyone wants to say Happy Holidays I will just assume they mean them all.

On Sin and Love

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript

Recently a young gay man has featured in the Fredericton news for claiming to have been dismissed from a church job because of his sexuality. It sure sounds like he was right, and beyond that, it sounds like why he was really let go has to do with fear of homosexuality.

It is hard to know, I think the journalists covering it are trying to be impartial, but to be fair, it is a heated issue, everyone is self-protective, and most issues in life are not black and white.

What I want to argue against is the whole “hate the sin, love the sinner” attitude that a lot of people seem to adopt as a strategy. As you might expect, I disagree with it.

First and foremost, If you are really arguing from a biblical perspective, or more importantly a literalist interpretation of believing the Bible is the absolute truth, where do you find it ever saying such a nonsensical statement.

The closest I can find would be in Matthew where Jesus is supposed to have told us to love our enemies… but it says nothing about sin, and it does not say our enemies are sinful… quite the opposite, it says they are fellow humans worthy of love.

Even if you take a proof text that includes most of the words of the phrase: “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” which we find in Paul’s letter to the church of Rome (12:9) it is surely a stretch to say this has anything to do with other people’s actions.

Far to the opposite point of view, Jesus says quite explicitly to the gathered mob, “whichever of you is without sin, go ahead, cast the first stone and kill this woman” when an adulterer is confronted.

Have you ever tried to make a list of what is sinful according to the Bible? I guarantee you are included, no matter who you are. After all, it is sinful to eat lobster, and to wear cotton/rayon blends. It is sinful to charge interest on a loan and to turn your lights on during the Sabbath. The list goes on and on and in fact includes something for everyone.

The whole point of Jesus’ little diatribe was that he knew there was not one person who could cast the stone, nor could any of us. My point being, we are all sinners so that is a whole lot of hatred going on if we truly believe that all of this is a sin.

But more important is cultural context. Do you know why it is a sin to eat a lobster? Because the Israelites lived in the desert, that is the only reason. I once ordered a bowl of seafood chowder in the rain forest of Guatemala. I knew better, but I was tired of chicken and corn tortillas for every meal. I was sick for a week. If you have no refrigeration, and live in the hot, hot sun, stay away from seafood. In fact, to keep you alive, I am going to make that a religious rule, voila, it is a sin to eat lobster.

God, Moses, Jesus, none of them have anything against eating lobster, it was just a rule that made sense 4000 years ago.

Same as the whole Fish on Friday idea of the Catholic Church; it was a petition to the Pope by almost bankrupt fishermen that got that onto the religious books.

Sorry, I don’t mean to make anyone mad, but use common sense, when we decide that actions are sinful, we truly are picking and choosing what we dislike from the Bible. All of us do it, we focus on what we want and forget about the rest.

I wager that there is not a single thing that God actually finds sinful except not loving each other. In fact, when asked to boil it all down, Jesus said, love yourself, love God, love everyone else… do this and you are fine… and guess what… I can do that while being in love with a man, eating lobster, in my mixed fabric shirt.

Heaven and the Banquet

I knew a guy who once told me that if he could ask someone one question, he could get a handle on their religion. That one question was, what do you think happens after you die?

It is a pretty good question to be sure; sort of like an ultimate what do you think religion is about question. There are those who think that we get some sort of ultimate reward in the afterlife for our good deeds in this life. There are those that think we just get another different type of life, hopefully reunited with family and friends. There are those that think we are reincarnated and come back to try to get it right in this life. There are those who think nothing happens, we go into the ground and rot. And there is everything in between.

You see, it is a good question because it affects everything about how we live. Why are we doing things in this life? Is it so as to earn a reward? Is it because we realize life is short and we want to make it the best we can? Is it so that we do not come back as a slug?

You get the idea. It is a simple question in a sense and it affects our entire belief structure. Now, before we go further you should know that whether you are United, Catholic, Baptist, Muslim or a Secular Humanist the person who you find sitting next to you does not believe the same thing as you.

We are all different when it comes to life after death and that is because there is absolutely nothing that can be known 100 percent about what happens. Each generation has come up with ideas that reflect what they think perfection looks like… so the Vikings thought heaven would be endless glorious battle in which no one dies and everyone parties during the night. Poor peasants who had nothing imagined a world with streets paved with gold. Lonely people want to be reunited with all their loved ones…

But all of these ideas are simply that, ideas we have about what perfection would be like

I just got back from a monumental road trip with three young children to Walt Disney World. I have been to Disney more times than a lot of people, it was a family favourite and my father owns a house in Florida. For me, Disney World is the ultimate vacation. I love the fantasy of it all, I love the architecture and the way it is laid out… I go there again and again. But I know lots of people who do not like it at all, they think it is crowded and fake seeming, overwhelming and childish.

The exact same place could be described a thousand ways by a thousand guests. And the description, as well as our relation to it, changes depending on whether or not we like it. So too our conception of the afterlife is just that, our conception, what brings us joy, what we aim at.

Jesus once told a parable about banquets, and about how we should be humble and think very hard about who we invite and why. I think that he was making exactly this point about how different people have different things going on their lives, different beliefs and different needs… but we cannot think that we are better than them, and we cannot think that we are right.

As I get older and wiser I have come to realize that at one time or another I have been wrong about just about everything. Luckily I have been right a bit too… but mostly wrong. We need to be open to that, we need to realize that we cannot judge people on their beliefs, and we need to start accepting that the reasons behind what we do and think are important. But more importantly, they tell us more about who we are than about God or faith. 

Complaining

So how about this weather huh? If I hear one more person complain that it is too hot I am going to lose it. It was too cold a few months ago, and it is too wet, or too dry, or too meh no matter what day it is. It seems that there is nothing more normal than complaining about the weather.

In general, even, complaining seems to be taking over as the normal way of being. I do not know how many of you are on Social Media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter; but I have noticed a sharp rise in the amount of complaining people do. If it is not the weather someone is complaining about work, or about the behaviour of friends, or the government.

Some of these complaints, even all of these complaints, may be valid. By that I mean to say that the particulars may be true, that the weather may be hot or that your friends may have acted dumb… but the real question is what is it doing to you to complain all the time.

Taking a global look at it the Bible starts with this story of the creation of plants, animals, sun moon and stars, even human beings; and each time the thing is made, they are declared to be “good.” So from this perspective everything that is part of the created order is good already, so who are we to complain about it?

But even more so, I see the entire ministry of Jesus as being about bringing abundant life to people. It was about teaching us to live in a loving grateful way that realized just how blessed we are.  In fact he would take the people that most people felt were outsiders and remind them that their lives had value – he would look at the rich people and remind them to feel blessed.

And he taught it is simple traditional ways too, saying grace before a meal, or praying at the end of the day to say thank you.

See, I really feel that attitude is everything when it comes to life. I suspect that part of what Sunday school, church, the Bible, Jesus and the whole lot of them were trying to instill in me was an attitude shift… one towards good news, towards gratefulness, towards love, towards happiness.

One of the traditional mantras of Buddhism is that all of life is suffering. You may have heard that before. But the thing is we westerners take that the wrong way. Sure, life is suffering because there is always pain… but the idea of Buddhism is to rise above the suffering, to detach one’s self from the suffering, and to come to know peace.

I see religious teaching whether we are talking Islamic, Buddhist, or Christian as being a sort of “yes, but” reaction to the world. Yes, there are always going to be things wrong, but there are always going to be second chances, and things that make up for it.

And again, what matters is attitude. David played music and danced when he was happy, Jesus went to parties and ate and drank with friends over good conversation, the apostles went out fishing together when they were bored. All of them seized the opportunities to get the best out of the situation, and they had fun, they enjoyed life, and lived it.

At one point Jesus says, so the record says, “I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly.” So the real question is how are you celebrating the abundance of your life?

Parables

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript

What is a parable? What are they for?

This week I am at a series of lectures on the parables by two scholars.  Bernard Brandon Scott is up from the United States, changing our perception of the Biblical Parables and Alyda Faber is helping us explore parables in modern film.

Here is a quick talking point for you to consider:  the movement Jesus was part of used parables to shock people, to make them think differently, to upset them and make them laugh.

Some couple of thousand years later, we have heard those parables so many times that we do not hear them in any way close to the way they were intended. Not only that, but the church has softened the edges, has taken away the humour, has made them so they hardly affect us at all except to think they are like proverbs, words of wisdom...

But they are not.

A parable is supposed to be a trap door in a much travelled sidewalk.

And I guess the thing is we are so familiar with some of these stories that we have lost the impact. I mean, whether you go to church or not you are probably familiar with the Good Samaritan and you probably understand it to mean that we are supposed to take care of everyone.

What would it mean of the story was not meant that way at all? What would it have to say to shock you and make you think about life differently? 

Remember the parable of prodigal son. A father had two sons, the younger of whom was unhappy with life on the farm and asked for the inheritance early only to waste it on bad decisions and partying. When the money ran out he took a chance and decided to ask to come home and was welcomed graciously.

In British Columbia there was a father who owned a farm, became quite wealthy and had two sons. One used the money and did good things in the community, became quite well known and made a difference. The younger son was Robert Pickton and murdered countless women, burying their bodies on the farm.

There is a parable in there, is there not?

One of the things that may be hampering the church in our era is the fact that we seem irrelevant. People think we are simply peddling information that they can get other places better, or we are so old fashioned that we do not matter in a technological modern world.

And we have done this to ourselves. We have never come to terms with who we were meant to be... The troublemakers, the sarcastic background commentators, the ones who looked at the government, the scientists, the bankers, the leaders and said...  "Yeah right..."

Maybe we need to be telling new stories, shocking people by holding up the familiar and the modern and asking, is it still true... Should Robert Pickton  be forgiven?

So this is a call to reclaim the use of parables, not as familiar Internet memes, but as rebellious interjection, shocking stories that change people. When we learn to tell it that way again, we will make a difference.

Happiness

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - May 11 2013

All of my life has been a search for happiness.

That may sound simple enough, and true enough, that is covers most of us, right? I mean who of us does not want to be happy?

I even categorize this as the chief aim of my religious quest. I feel that Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly. And that means sucking the marrow out of life. So I have tried to always be eating in new restaurants, always travelling, always setting off on new adventures in search of happiness.

I pretty much have felt that this was the meaning of life.

Then someone wisely said to me, in one of those glum moments when I was feeling sorry for myself, that I am never going to find it.

“What?” I screamed, “of course I will, how dare you tell me I cannot be happy!” to which the reply came, but when these things make you happy, what happens when they stop?

When… they… stop? What happens when the lobster dinner is over, when the sun has set on the beach, when the night in the hotel is over, when the basketball game ends? Do you feel happy? And the answer, for me, honestly, is that I do not. I was happy while doing it, but that feeling is tied to the activity, to the action, to the moment.

Maybe you all know this. I feel like I should have got it long before I did. But the point of life is abundance; it is fulfillment; it is joy… which is not the same as happiness.

In the very first pages of the Bible we are reading about the concept of joy. God makes all these things, so the story goes, and each creation brings a sense of joy, of completeness. At the end of the day, with the feet up on the coffee table, God says, “This is good!”

So much so that morning brings a chance to do it all again!

When Jesus was talking about Abundant Life, I now understand that he was not talking about hang gliding and beach vacations. He was talking about a sense of joy and fulfillment that lasts. One of the main reasons I go to church is that I have always thought the teachings of religion, the ideas Jesus had on living, would make me happy. Turns out I was right, but wrong in so many ways.

So here is the secret… what we need to do is to turn it around, things do not bring happiness, we need to find happiness in things.

Just do not tell the advertising people this. There are billions of dollars being spent to convince you that happiness is found in a new car, a new rug, a new flavour of chocolate bar…

Well, what if it is the other way around. If you go looking for happiness, for joy, in everything you do, you will find it. This is approach I am working on. So I go for a walk in the sunshine and look for birds singing, I sit and stare at the falling rain and listen to the music, I eat a meal and taste every bite…

In other words, I am convinced that the world, as God said, is GOOD! And I go trying to find the good in everything. It is not easy, and there are certainly days and things that happen that bring back the depression I constantly fight against.

But I am no longer looking for the one thing that will finally make me happy. I realize nothing ever will. Happiness is something I was created with, and I need first to find it within me. 

Maybe we all can.

New Life

I have some colleagues who claim a bump in attendance this Easter.

Not the regular, more people than every other Sunday except Christmas Eve; but rather, more people than last Easter. I do not know if this is a phenomenon that is repeated in other United Churches or even other denominations this year; but it does give one cause to think.

Someone claimed that the media attention given to the new Pope points to a similar conclusion… are people getting interested in religion again?

I knew a man, a minister, who has been one for a very long time. In fact, of clergy I have heard of he has been doing it the longest, and he pointed out that in his lifetime there have been cycles, up and down; from the relatively non-religious days before the Second World War, through the religious days of the 1950’s, The loss of authority and religious belief of the 60’s etc… up and down.

He is not alone in this belief, in fact, experts agree that there are larger cycles as well. Some, like Karen Armstrong, argue for massive 500 year cycles, or perhaps even longer. The reality they point to is the fact that we are a people who move through our beliefs.

Humans come to know a truth, then we think about it long and hard and abandon it, then we realize we are living without a part of ourselves and embrace it. That is just who we are.

The thing is, all of the 1900’s, all of these relatively small changes we saw over the last 100 years, are all part of a larger cycle of change that we are in the midst of which is only half way done. Take our side of the religious coin alone, and think about Christianity over the last 4000 years.

First there was this belief that there was a god for everything, sheep and farming, rains and sunshine. Then, somewhere, there was this period of religious and social upheaval that led to monotheism, the belief that there was one, all powerful, God who controlled everything. That lasted for a few generations and along came another period of upheaval and change which eventually brought about Jesus and the idea that God is not distant and all powerful but relational and here with us. Then at the turn of the last century this began to change again.

It started changing with the industrial revolution, it changed when more people moved to cities than lived in the country, it changed when we published books, started scientific inquiry and built computers… it has been changing for a while….

Sorry to wax so philosophical, but I am fresh off a month of thinking about what Easter means to us here in the modern scientific skeptical age. It is hard to figure that out, because we truly do live in an age of not yet… the religion that was the cornerstone of our great, great, grandparents; that led to the idea that Christians would conquer and convert the world, that was sure life here had meaning because it would continue in heaven… that religion has been dying a slow death for a hundred years. And here we are a decade into the next hundred and we truly have no idea what it will be like 5, 10, 100 years down the road.

I write these columns to make people think. And for so long I have been hearing about the death of the church; I have been hearing that people are not religious anymore and that the ideas we hold are quaint. But that is not true. We are just changing.

Some people hate it and are holding on with clenched teeth to the traditions. Some people are afraid and do not know what to do. Some people are exploring what needs to change and what makes sense today.

So perhaps things are coming around. Perhaps we are on the other side of the current age of lack of faith and things really are going to start growing again.

Whatever the case, I write these columns in the hopes that you will join the last group, those who want to think about what next. Those that want to work at making sense of what we have been handed. Easter is about new life and I believe there is new life for the religions of the world, for the faithful… I just don’t know what it will look like.

Lying Has Real Consequences

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - January 26th 2013

{as an aside I want to point out that what I publish on this site are the articles before they go through the editing process at the paper - it is possible that some things have changed in the print version...}

There is a phrase I never heard until I moved to New Brunswick. I am not sure if it was made up here, or if other people just believe it and do not say it out loud, “It is better to ask forgiveness than to get permission.”

I do not know where people got the idea that this is true, but it clearly is not. In no moral universe is it okay to do whatever you think is best and then hope everyone will forgive you.

In fact, quite the opposite is true; one should be doing almost everything out in the open, and for the good of the community, not for your own ends.

I guess this is part of what bothers me about Lance Armstrong. I don’t care if he is sorry. I don’t care if he is contrite. I don’t care if he confesses. I care that he cheated and lied.

See, when I was growing up we had a thing called consequences. I know it is out of vogue now, what with the millennial generation and generation Y thinking they are the most important on the planet; what with the era of self-entitlement we live in; what with the impunity we see everyone from politicians to movie stars act with, but once upon a time you did the right thing, or else.

And you did not need religious or moral reasons; you actually were afraid of letting people down. It actually meant something when your parents said they were disappointed in you. When someone punished you, taking away privileges, or god forbid, taking you out back to get a switch, you pretty much figured you deserved it.

So what happened to us? Did we get stupid? Bill Clinton has an affair and says he is sorry. Stephen Harper changes his mind on most election promises and says he is sorry. Lance Armstrong rigs athletics for decades and says he is sorry. And we say, well, people will be people; and we back them up.

Oprah Winfrey thinks Lance Armstrong is still a hero. That is an actual headline. Why? What is heroic about using drugs to compete and then lying about it?

I know even the Roman Catholics have slacked off the rules of confession, sin, and the whole nine yards; but once upon a time it seemed to me they had a pretty good system worked out that made a lot of sense. You could sin, you could do bad things, up to a point, and be forgiven if you were honestly sorry. Of course, that meant admitting you were wrong to a priest and then doing penance, or paying the consequences for your sins.

The catch was you had to be truly sorry, you had to be truly honest, and you had to pay for it. On top of that, in the good old days, there were deadly sins; which is to say there were things you could do that there was no way to say you were sorry for, that you had to work really hard to overcome: these so called Capitol Sins: Lust, Greed, Gluttony  Envy, Pride, Sloth and Wrath were seen to be the root of all other sins, and so, soul destroying.

As an aside I would wager Lance is guilty of at least three of these.

So no, going on Oprah and saying you are sorry does not cut it.

But more to the point, for the rest of us as well, doing what we want to do and then saying we are sorry does not cut it either. There is no possible time when it is better to ask forgiveness than to never have done anything wrong at all.

In fact, there is something really wrong with a culture that thinks act first and think of the consequences later is a good way to go. We need to really look at what we are doing to ourselves and the values we are engendering in the kids we are bringing up. We need to start saying that there are serious consequences for making the wrong choice.

And if Lance is guilty of anything, he is guilty of proving me wrong and showing to the world that almost anything is all right if we say we are sorry. I am afraid of where all this leads.