Chapter 1 - Simeon

Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.   It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Christ.

You can find all kinds of people in this town: beggars and thieves, clergy and pilgrims, businessmen and buyers.  But we need to find one of the rarer denizens of this place -- those who seek the face of God.  Over there, by the well, is such a man.  Sir!  May we have a word with you?

Only a word?  I would welcome more than one.  Few people actually seek out my company.  Please, sit here with me and let us talk.  I understand you seek the essence of faith.

Well... yes.  How did you know?

I’m not exactly sure about the how ... of anything.  I just hear His voice.  Is it not enough?

That’s what we came to ask.  Is that enough for you?

Oh, yes!  For me it is all I need.  I am not a great or wise man.  Or even one of any real responsibility.  Those kind of people do not have time to merely sit and listen to God.  They have so much to do and so many people to direct.  I have no need to find reason or portent for the comings and goings of humanity.  I am just old.  I have seen much and am rarely surprised by anything man would do.  There is only one thing I must see.  One thing I have been promised...

...and that would be?

THE promise!  The hope of Israel.  For some divine reason, I may not go to Abraham’s bosom until I have seen the Messiah, Son of God.  That I should be allowed that glory is too much for me to fathom, but the Lord sees it as necessary to the fulfillment of his purpose.

And this is the basis of your great faith.

Great?  You call my faith great?  You are most generous.  I am just an old man who has no more options but to believe God.  That, my friend, is faith:  to see God as your only option.

Prologue: Finding Faith in the Corners of Life

            Faith is the fountainhead of courage.  With faith we can move mountains, split seas and do impossible things. We please God with faith, Faith defines great and women, like Abraham and the Virgin Mary.

            Faith, in turn comes from the ability to see something that seems more real than reality itself.  With that kind of vision you are willing to sacrifice personal comfort and even safety in the name of what you see.  Our ability to see like that is fed by our willingness to exercise and grow our faith.

            True vision, however, rarely comes from within because internal vision is often selfish and lacks perspective. King Saul allowed internal vision to overshadow the vision God had given him.  It made his faith weak and, when he most needed it, his vision was not substantial enough to base his faith on.  Without faith, courage was no where to be found in him.  Internal vision is therefore flawed.  True vision is a gift from external sources.  With true vision you have something that builds faith.

            So we can see where faith comes from and what it is for, but what does real faith look like?  Is real faith always strong, courageous and unyielding to temptation and tribulation. No, that’s not real faith.  That’s ideal faith -- the faith we build in our imaginations that becomes legends.  There is a difference between ideal faith and real faith. 

            Real faith has many faces that we may not readily recognize... unless we look in a mirror.  We see real faith flit by in sermons and personal Bible study.  We know these faces in the back of our minds, but they seem to be peripheral to what we are really looking for.  And what are we looking for?  Real faith.  Faith with skin on it.  Faith we can identify in ourselves.

            I’ve sought out a few of these casual acquaintances to ask them about their faith; to see it in its reality, its beauty...and its zits.   In the coming weeks, I'll introduce them to you and share my conversations with them.

Becoming unmuted

Last night I was at a home church run by an old friend.  He talked briefly about Zechariah, John's father and Jesus' uncle and his being driven mute by Gabriel for a lack of faith (John 1).  My friend warned of complacency muting our own example. and of not believing that our service to God was worth His involvement.
That actually hit home for me.  I was reminded as he talked of a book I wrote many years ago about marginal characters in the Gospel story.  I spent the better part of two years on the project and when I finished, I made a CD backup, filed it and promptly left it alone, never making the effort to publish it for a number of spoken reasons that seemed logical. The real reason that I thought it was unpublishable.
And so I've really thought nothing of it for almost a decade, until last night.
For a variety of reasons I have kept what God has given me under an upturned basket, sharing it only with a select few.  My friend's admonition have given me a new push to do something.  And with the wonders of social media, allowing so much crap to be published at no cost, I have no excuse.  So starting next week. I will serialize the book in this blog.  If it does anything for you, let me know.  If you think it could be appropriate for any of your friends, let them know and share the link.  It doesn't matter if you start at the beginning, middle or end.  Each chapter stands on its own.  Here's hoping that it meets you at the right time.

What are we anyway?

A few people have asked me in the past few weeks, since I started talking about the "Christian nature" of the US: If we aren't Christian, then what are we?  So I've been thinking about it.  And I've discovered we are a nation of two separate identities.  Schizophrenic your might say.

On the one hand, we are a nation built on offense.  The pilgrims came here because their home nation was an offense to their religious sensibilities.  They build their community on perceived offenses within their community, which cause other communities to be founded.  Over the centuries we have made offense a profitable endeavor.  We have entire broadcast networks dedicated to being offended (EIB, MSNBC, Fox News).  Our political process is run by the two percent majority on either end of the spectrum that is constantly offended by anyone who doesn't agree with them (yes, I mean Nancy Pelosi and Joe Wilson).  We are offended by coaches of our favorite teams, by minorities, by educational standards, by other religions, by the other drivers on the roads and even by members of our families.  And we hold on to those offenses until the turn into hateful grudges.  Offense is at the very root of our politics and religion.

On the other hand, we are a nation built on the concept of reconciliation and the premise of the second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc.) chance.  The pilgrims had worn out their welcome in their homeland and an adopted land.  They came here for a fresh start and a chance to build something they could believe in.  The Revolutionary War for Independence was based, originally, on various offenses committed on the American colonies by Britain, but the war began only after several attempts at reconciliation were rebuffed.  The war itself was, in fact, an act of reconciliation.

"How the heck can war be reconcilation?" I can hear you say.

Reconcilation is merely the redefinition of a relationship.  It follows forgiveness (and I'll get into that later) but it does not replace forgiveness.  It establishes a baseline for a continued relationship after an offense.  While the colonies worked hard prior to the war to resolve their differences with the homeland, they entered into a wartime footing when it became apparent that England was not going to change how it treated the colonies.  The Declaration of Independence did not fire the first shot, the British did that themselves when they refused to accept the terms of reconciliation... at first.  Much later they were forced to.  Today, the US and the United Kingdom enjoy one of the closest national relationships in the world.  We are closer to England than we are Mexico and Canada.  And, as a nation, we take pride in that relationship.  It is a hallmark of who we are.

I the US, it is possible to screw up in business, marriage, parenthood, crime, politics (remember Richard Nixon was out of politics altogether before his second run at President... and he's still a hero in China) and still be able to come back for a do-over.  In my travels in Europe, that is the primary good quality of America that is recognized universally.

Offense and reconciliation are the yin and yang of America.  Whichever we seem to be is whatever we tend to feed.

We are a nation based on offense. Pilgrims came here because their nation was an offense to their religious sensibilities. We have whole broadcast systems dedicated to being offended. We have industries built to Medicate us from the depression caused by unresolved offense.

Digging deeper into our religious roots

I've received a lot of personal response to my last post on whether the US is a Christian Nation (it's not), most of it positive, and even the negative has been civil, which I appreciate.  Most of those that disagree go back further in the nation's history to the Puritan immigrants who landed in New England.  My understanding of the nature of the Puritan settlements doesn't change my opinion.  I can agree that the Puritans were a religious people, but not necessarily Christian in nature.
We've all heard that the Puritans fled England because "religious persecution" but that persecution was instigated by the Puritans' persecution of anyone who wasn't of their mindset.  Yes, the Puritans were fundamentalists who had decided that everyone but them was destined for Hell.  Even today that ends to piss people off.  
Of course, it is also not true that the Puritans fled England.  It was more like they were invited to leave.  there was a great deal of rejoicing in English government when they left because they no long had to spend resources protecting them from the angry mobs that wanted to do them in.  The Puritans just wore out any goodwill that might have existed for them in their home country.  So they left... for Holland.
Yep, the Puritans actually took up residence in the land of wooden shoes and windmills for a decade where they continued to push their legalistic beliefs on the Dutch.  Their new countrymen didn't really complain much (the Dutch are a quiet bunch) because they were an extremely tolerant society.  And that really ticked off the Puritans.  After 11 years, they decided that the influence of tolerance was infecting their children.  They needed to go elsewhere, and quick.  But they couldn't go back the England... especially because England didn't want them.  
So with the help of both Dutch and English government officials, the Mayflower became made available for the Dutch Puritans and those that had remained in England to take them to the New World.
What is really strange about this is that one of the leaders of this group, Roger Williams, preached against what he called  the "enforced unformity of religion" in the Church of England, and when they established themselves in the American colonies, they did exactly the same thing.  
When I look at our society today, I can see that tradition in spades.  Everyone is absolutely sure that there way is the right way.  We have entire broadcast networks dedicated to one view of the world over another.  If you want to say that America is a religious nation, then I can completely agree with you.  It's hard to find someone who isn't religious about something, even if it's being religious against religion.  That is what is both very right and very wrong about America.
But if you want this nation to be considered Christian, then you are going to have to abandon a strong focus on whether something is a sin or if something is sinful.  For this nation to become Christian we are going to have to agree that Jesus Christ died to eliminate sin past, present and future.  It's not about who is wrong or right.  It's about who God loves.  And He loves us all, no matter what.  He paid too high a price to have that fact adulterated.

If not a Christian nation, then what?

Last week I wrote about the myth of the US as a Christian nation based on the religious beliefs of the founding fathers. Since I debunked that idea I've been considering what the founders actually gave us, and I have good news, bad news and, depending on your position, really bad news.

The good news is that what they gave us is a tradition of intolerance for intolerance. Say what you want about the Enlightenment, it opened up a lot of doors for discussion. you could believe practically anything you want and talk about it openly. And they did. Without TV and movies, entertainment often consisted of attending lectures on unpopular subjects. Easy access to printing technology (the internet of the 17th to early 20th centuries) made it possible for the most fringe elements of society to get their opinion out. Everyone had an opportunity to freely state what was on their mind.

The bad news is that, while they fully embraced freedom of speech, they didn't much care for the idea of freedom of responsibility for what you say. If you said something unpopular and got a lot of flack for it...even the occasional punch in the nose to the extreme response of a challenge to a duel, well that's what you get. The freedom to be angry at someone for what they said was as acceptable as the freedom to say it.

Today, we don't much like the idea of having to take any kind of flack for what we say. Conservatives were appalled when Democrat congressmen booed George Bush during a state of the union address (which included Nancy Pelosi), and liberals got all huffy (including Nancy Pelosi) when a lone congressman catcalled Barack Obama. But rude reactions to a president are well in keeping with the tradition of our founders. We like to call for a "return to civility" but there never was any when it came to opinion in this country. The only thing that is different now is we are calling for punishment for anyone who disagrees with us.

When I stated last week that the founders of this country were, by and large, not Christian, I did not mean to imply that we religious people in this country are not following their example. One of the primary products of the Age of Enlightenment was the complete abandonment of the doctrine of grace that came out of the Reformation.

"Enlightened" people of the 17th and 18th centuries were all about personal accomplishment and achieving good works. They were not into forgiveness. Washington, Jefferson and Adams took grudges to the grave and it gnawed on them to their deathbed. Alexander Hamilton died in a duel because he could not forgive Aaron Burr.

That's the really bad news is that most Christians in the US, be they liberal or conservative, still follow that example. We talk about grace as a good thing, but don't cross us, especially politically. And for heavens sake, make sure you toe the line in conversation in church. There is no intolerance for intolerance and there is no grace for the "sinner" in our midst.

And that's something we all need to work on

The "christian nation" hoax

I'm about to make a lot of people unhappy.

I was reading a post of a pastor in Miami this morning who made the common assertion that this is a "Christian Nation" historically. He used, as proof, certain quotes from John Adams who he asserts was a serious Christian. That's what got me curious.

I believe the definition of Christian is those who publicly asserts that Jesus Christ is a personal saviour: that he is God incarnate, that he was born in human form, was fully God and fully human, died for sin and rose from the grave in three days. Let me also state that I believe in the doctrine of the Trinity and believe it is crucial, though you won't go to hell if you don't believe that. That is an orthodox belief for most Christians in the United States. John Adams is pretty much my favorite president so I know a few things about him. I know for a fact John Adams doesn't meet that definition of Christian. The first six Presidents of the United States did not meet that criteria. They all denied the deity of Christ (without which there was no sacrifice for sin) and the Trinity. George Washington, Adams' son John Quincy, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe were all deists. Five of the six attended Episcopal churches that welcomed that particular position and Adams, himself, was a Unitarian. The first US President to make a public declaration of Christ as saviour was Andrew Jackson, followed by his successor, Martin Van Buren.

In all of the 43 men who have held the office, only 22 have made such a declaration. Ten presidents made outright statements that they were deists. The rest, including Lincoln, FDR, Gerald Ford and George HW Bush never made a definitive statement. Oh, yes, President Obama has outright said on several occasions that he has "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

To say outright that Christian principals are the basis of our country is incorrect. That Christian principles have greatly influenced the development of our country is correct, but at the same time, philosophies that deny the deity of Christ have also had a profound effect throughout the entire history of this country.

I'm saying this because I have something else to share pretty soon, but I just wanted to take the "Christian Nation" argument off the table. The US is not a Christian nation.