“Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.”—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

From the essay, “Seminarians,” by Martin Marty in the most recent Sightings:

We historians are not given the gift of foreseeing, but as for seeing – as in Sightings – I learned long ago to look at trends and signs that don’t fit headlines or on cable. Thus, decades ago, while many chroniclers thought that “death of God” theology was a cosmic challenge, it occurred to some of us that “high-rise apartments and the long weekend” would do more to assault the world of Sunday Schools, church attendance, and the parish as a center of communal life. Today those trends continue, and the higher-rising of apartments and the longer-yet weekend keep playing their part. Forget the current “new atheism,” so readily reported on as an assault. Notice instead patterns of leisure like Sunday marathons and soccer, patterns of work in which 24/7 job demands increase, and now, of course, “the economic crash” that colors all prospects.

Yesterday, I listened again to Krista Tippet’s interview with Jaroslav Pelikan on Speaking of Faith: The Need for Creeds. Later in the day, I did some reading of Pelikan on the internet. Two quotations of his have been ringing in my ears. The first I found on numerous pages:

If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.

The second quotation comes from the Speaking of Faith interview. As Pelikan and Tippet discussed the Maasai Creed, he refers to the important feedback loop evangelism creates. As we reach out and express the Christian story in ways that make sense to different cultures, we find that we understand new aspects and see new angles of the story.

[I]t is not enough to Christianize Africa. We have to Africanize Christianity.

Unpacking the riches in these two quotations could take a lifetime.

In an excerpt from The Joyful Christian, C.S. Lewis aptly describes the necessity of both personal experience and doctrine in the Christian life. He shows the connection between the two. As someone who has encountered God in the study of Christian beliefs, I face the regular challenge to remember that knowing things about God is not the same thing as knowing God. To read about doctrine is not the same thing as encountering the real God. On the other hand, I appreciate Lewis’ description of doctrine as the amalgamation of lots of peoples’ real encounters with God. Anyway, here is Lewis:

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real, to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But the map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you or I are likely to get on our own way are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

From Saturday’s Denver Post:

That tens of thousands of people came to a Weld County farm on Saturday to collect free potatoes, carrots and leeks could be one of the most palpable signs of a depressed economy.

The Miller family, which owns 600 acres of farmland outside Platteville, decided to hold a free food day because they had tens of thousands of pounds of extra produce at the end of their fall festival. Any day now, a deep freeze would ruin it, so the family let people come to the farm today to collect what they could haul.

They expected between 5,000 and 10,000 — but instead found themselves inundated with cars and people with buckets and wagons and barrels ready to harvest whatever was available. They estimated the crowd at more than 40,000 people.

“Overwhelmed is putting it mildly,” said farm owner Chris Miller. “People obviously need food.”

Leviticus 23.22 says, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” (NRSV)

I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

(HT: The Writer’s Almanac)

On the back of Stanely Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s new book, Living Gently in a Violent World, I came across this pull-quote from Amos Yong and I love it.

Church takes time, patience, gentleness, vulnerability, friendship, hospitality, mutuality and peaceableness. In other words, church takes practice.

On July 3, 2008, the Fresno Bee ran an article about kids of different faiths using their time and money to help others. The story, “Good Guys,” by Ron Orozco highlights, amongst other kids, my nephew Joshua.

They are doing a lot of good things for others, driven by loved ones setting good examples—and by their faith.

Joshua, Shriya, Patrick, Alexandra and Faisal come from homes practicing Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism or Islam. And despite other differences, the world’s religions share common teachings on caring for and helping others, particularly the disadvantaged….

Joshua Watson, 5, earns quarters for feeding the family’s dogs, Leia and Lucy, and the cat, Mazie, and for helping in grandmother Pam Watson’s tomato garden at their Clovis home. But he never spends anything.

“He’s a good little boy,” Watson says.

Instead, he puts the quarters in paper rolls and donates them every Sunday at Quail Lake Community Church in Clovis, an evangelical congregation where he and his grandmother worship.

The quarters always go to Littlest Angels, a ministry that collects or buys new clothing, caps, booties, blankets and accessories for newborns who might not otherwise receive them. Joshua will enter kindergarten at Quail Lake Elementary School in August.

“He’s thinking outside of the box so early,” says Kim Espinosa, the church’s Littlest Angels coordinator. “He can become a warrior for God.”

There are a couple of reasons motivating Joshua. His grandmother saves money and gives it at church. He also listens to church members attending a weekly Bible study in their home and talking about the New Testament book of James 2, which is about faith and deeds.

Joshua also is aware of a family tragedy. His mother lost a baby girl in the seventh month of pregnancy. Pam Watson says: “He talks a lot about having a sister, Emily, in heaven.”

This story reminds me of the work Interfaith Youth Core does. Most religions have service for others at the core of their ethical practices. IFYC asks can greater religious cooperation occur around that shared value of service? Can we learn more about our faith and the faiths of others as we serve people who need help? The kids in Orozco’s story aren’t in discussion groups together, but I hope that this early service shapes them profoundly and creates an appreciation that other religions also value service. I hope that my nephew doesn’t just learn that Christians are called to help others, but that other religions call their members to service, and that he can learn to work alongside those religions in helping newborns, the sick, the hungry, and creation.

Rick Meigs at The Blind Beggar initiated a synchroblog on “What is Missional?” Busyness kept me from signing up, but I’ve enjoyed reading the answers others have posted. Though I’m not participating, I thought I’d offer the following quotation from Darrell L. Guder’s book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church regarding the good news of God’s mission in the world. Guder is something of a founding-father in contemporary missional discussions.

Through the particular encounter of God with Israel, the good news that God is loving and purposeful enters into human history and becomes knowable. Apart from such a particular history, Christianity has no universal message to proclaim. The Bible is not a collection of universal ideas cloaked in a particular culture. Universal ideas cannot be the good news that the concrete testimony of a particular people at a particular time can well be, if their witness is credible. Such universal ideas are merely the product of human imagination and creativity. Christian witness is not the interpretation of philosophy but the continuation of the event of God’s self-disclosure in human history. The historical experience of God is the surprising result of God’s initiation, God’s desire to speak and be heard. That surprise continues to define the concrete history of the world, and of the mission community within the world which is called to be the witness to God’s goodness, the “gospel of God.” God’s mission is good news because it is historical: it has been historical from the beginning and continues to be the history that defines our hope. We encounter God within that same history as God makes us part of salvation history for the sake of the world he loves. (29-30)

Over at Mere Mission, Todd Hiestand asks what the announcements in our church bulletins can tell us about how missional our congregations are.

Are all your announcements about things internal? While I’m a believer that discipleship and community life stuff is important for the mission of a local body, if all of the activities, programs, etc are pointed inward, this might be a good indication that the church needs to take some intentional steps outside itself.

This is a good question, in my opinion. If bulletins tell us what is happening in the life of a congregation from week to week, I think they can give us a sense of where our focus lies. This would be a challenging and life-giving experiment for many churches, I imagine.