Does Science Prove That All Reality Is Subjective?

Does Science Prove That All Reality Is Subjective?

I am no kind of scientist. I’m even less of a mathematician. I haven’t had a science class since I was a college undergraduate in the late 1960s, and I haven’t had a math class since the early 1960s when I was a sophomore in high school. So I certainly don’t claim any understanding at all of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. I see programs about it on TV. I see chalk boards covered with mathematical formulas that mean absolutely nothing to me. I am no kind of scientist or mathematician, but I find quantum mechanics absolutely fascinating. I suppose I’m fascinated with it because even the scientists who claim to understand it say it makes no sense. They say you know how a subatomic particle is moving or where it is but not both, or something like that. They say a subatomic particle doesn’t take an actual shape until we observe it. When we’re not observing it it’s just an amorphous mass of probabilities, or something like that. Quantum mechanics is so bizarre that I even have a book in my bookcase with the wonderful title Alice in Quantumland. The scientists say quantum mechanics explains reality at unimaginably small sizes. They say Einstein’s theories of general and special relatively explain reality at very large sizes. Then they confess that no one has ever successfully put quantum mechanics and relativity together into a unified theory that explains all of reality. I don’t understand it, but I find it all quite fascinating.

Then there’s something called “quantum entanglement.” I’ve seen a program about it from PBS’s Nova series. I’ve actually seen that program twice in an attempt better to understand it. Here’s what I got out of it. Albert Einstein figured out mathematically that in quantum theory something affecting one entangled quantum particle must simultaneously affect another quantum particle entangled with it regardless of how far apart they are. Einstein thought his discovery proved that there was something wrong with quantum theory because what came to be called quantum entanglement just makes no sense. Einstein, despite being the great genius that he was, wanted things to make sense; so he never quite accepted quantum mechanics. The quantum scientists couldn’t find anything wrong with Einstein’s math and the prediction it made, but of course science doesn’t accept much of anything that it can’t prove through experimentation. They couldn’t prove quantum entanglement experimentally, so the concept sort of got forgotten for quite a while.

Then back in the 1960s some scientists at the University of California at Berkeley rediscovered older papers on quantum entanglement and set out to prove or disprove it experimentally. Their experiment, the specifics of which I don’t understand but which don’t much matter here, seemed to prove that quantum entanglement was real. There remained, however, the possibility that some unaccounted for variable had gotten into their experiment an influenced the results. Finally to prove quantum entanglement scientists has to come up with a way of demonstrating it that eliminated that possibility. Eventually some scientists led by a physicist from the University of Vienna did just that using two telescopes on the Canary Islands to capture light from two separate quasars billions of light years away that couldn’t possibly have been altered as part of the experiment. They showed that quantum entanglement is real. When we observe one entangled particle, thereby giving it shape, its entangled particle takes the same shape at precisely the same instant though they are physically unconnected with each other. I don’t understand it. It makes no sense, but I have to admit that it’s immensely fascinating.

One of the scientists on that Nova show, trying to explain quantum entanglement, said that it is as if space and time disappeared. I take that to mean that what we perceive as space and time, as distance between objects and a period to time that it would take anything to move between them, at the quantum level doesn’t exist except in our perception of it. We perceive it, but it has no objective reality outside of our perception of it. We set up an experiment that has quantum particles located at what appears to us to be a distance. To them they aren’t at a distance at all. Space disappears. Time between an effect on one and the effect on another disappears. We perceive them, but they aren’t objectively there.

And of course all of that makes absolutely no sense. Or does it? Quantum entanglement suggests to me that science may be proving through experimentation what I have long maintained on the basis of my understanding of how we sentient beings are created and function in the world. In my book Liberating Christianity, I put it this way:

Because we humans perceive the world from a center that we call our self, because as humans we have no other way of being in the world, all we can know is what we perceive, what we experience. Whether anything beyond that is real, we simply cannot know.[1]

And:

Because as humans all we have is our perception, our experience of things, all reality is subjective and experiential. The only reality that we humans can know is subjective, experiential reality. Reality is subjective for me because I experience it. I know what I experience through my senses. I cannot know that my senses do not deceive me. Indeed, I know that sometimes they do.[2]

When we stop to think about the matter, which of course we rarely if ever do, these conclusions, that all we humans have is our perception or experience of things and that therefore our reality is necessarily subjective and experiential, seem unavoidable to me.

Perhaps another reference to Liberating Christianity will help here. I trust you’ll excuse me the faux pas of quoting myself again.

Perhaps you’ve seen the movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves. In that movie computers have taken over the world. They have enslaved all humans so they can use the electrical current every human body produces to run themselves. The humans, however, or at least most of them, don’t know that they live in little pods hooked up to machines feeding the computers because from birth the computers have manipulated their consciousness, their perception, so that they perceive what we would call a normal human existence. They have homes and families. They have jobs. They live the way we live, except they really don’t. They only perceive that life, they experience it, and so, to them, it is real. The movie shows us that their perceived life is in fact objectively unreal. The point that we have to come to terms with is that we cannot know that the same thing isn’t happening to us! All we have is our perception, our experience of reality, and our perception and experience are what make ‘reality’ ‘real’ for us.[3]

Some of the conclusions that necessarily flow from this understanding are troubling. I don’t do a very good job of wrestling with them in Liberating Christianity, and I won’t tackle them here. The point for now is that those troubling conclusions do not make the understanding any less unavoidable. Perception and experience are all we have. Therefore reality is for us unavoidably subjective.

What we perceive as reality when it comes to quantum entanglement is unavoidably subjective too. We perceive distance between two entangled quantum particles. The particles don’t. We’ve set up an experiment that includes placing our detection devices for the particles some significant distance apart. The particles couldn’t care less. To them, as the scientist on the Nova program said, it is as if space and time didn’t exist.

That reality of quantum entanglement seems to me to support my contention that all reality is for us experiential and subjective. I don’t of course need science to prove my contention. I am convinced that it remains valid even if science has nothing to say about it, and I don’t think science could ever disprove it. We aren’t talking about scientific truth here. Still, I find it fascinating that this odd, counterintuitive, nonsensical conclusion of quantum mechanics, a conclusion that even the great Albert Einstein could not accept (though his contemporary and co-Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr could and did), fits so neatly with my understanding of the nature of reality. We perceive space between entangled quanta. They don’t. So is space real? To us yes. To them no. Actually, it all makes perfect if perfectly counterintuitive sense.

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon 2008, p. 202.

[2] Id., p. 203.

[3] Id. pp. 203-204.

Living in the Parched Places

Living in the Parched Places

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Scripture: Jeremiah17:5-8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The prophet Jeremiah is a fascinating character. He’s known as the “Gloomy Prophet,” and for good reason. He lived and prophesied in Jerusalem during the final Babylonian siege of that city in 586 BCE. It’s actually quite amazing that he wasn’t killed, not by the Babylonians but by his own people. He kept telling them that they should capitulate to the Babylonians. He said resistance was futile and that their defeat by the Babylonians was God’s punishment of them for their faithlessness. Some of his fellow residents of Jerusalem wanted him killed. The king didn’t kill him, but he locked him up in a guardhouse; and once he got thrown into a dry cistern. Yet he survived the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. The conquering Babylonians of course quite liked him. Eventually he went to Egypt, and as far as we know died there. Jeremiah can be bleak reading. He foresaw nothing good happening. He foretold defeat and destruction. He turned out to be right of course, but no one wanted to hear him in his day. He’s not a lot of fun for us to hear in our day either.

Yet for all Jeremiah’s doom and gloom there are passages in the book that bears his name that truly express profound truth. Jeremiah 17:5-8 is one of them. That text, which may or may not actually be from the prophet Jeremiah (probably not) says: “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals…, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” And: “They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness….” But: “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water.” The text here gives us a sharp juxtaposition  of two radically different ways of being. Trust in God, here called the Lord, that is, Yahweh, and you will live and thrive. Trust in mere humans, and you’ll live in the parched places, that is, places that are dried up and bereft of lifegiving water.

The text of course uses simile here. It uses images from the ancient Middle East—deserts with no water and life-sustaining places with water. It may be that those images spoke more powerfully in the ancient world of the text than they do to us, but those images still speak to a crucial dynamic of life among us. They speak to the distinction between life focused on the material and life focused on the spiritual. In our world today untold numbers of people suffer because they have lost their connection with the spiritual dimension of existence. They live only in and for the material. So many people live that way that they aren’t the only ones who suffer from it. Indeed the whole world suffers because so many modern people have lost touch with the spiritual. Let me explain.

Our dominant Euro-centered white American culture is the most materialistic culture the world has ever seen. And I mean materialistic in two senses. First, I mean what most Americans would mean by the term. Materialistic in this sense means valuing the accumulation of material things above all else. We may not hear the phrase “keeping up with Joneses” like I did when I was young decades ago, but we white Americans are still powerfully ensnared by the allure of physical possessions. One good way to see what’s going on in a culture is to look at its advertising, and in our advertising today we primarily see two things. We see a fear of illness and death in the way the big pharmaceutical companies pitch prescription drugs not to medical providers but to us lay people. That aspect of our culture too is a consequence of our loss of connection with the spiritual, but my focus here is on the other aspect of our culture that we see reflected in our advertising, namely, our preoccupation with material possessions.

I mean, just look at what TV advertising says to us. Buy this  car and your life will be perfect (in part because you’ll drive on roads with no traffic). Order a house full of new furniture from this online outfit so that you’ll look like a success and impress neighbors and family. Buy this insurance to “protect” your possessions, never mind that insurance may protect the monetary value of possessions but does nothing to protect the possessions themselves. Buy stuff at Walmart so you can save money and buy more stuff, and never mind the social and economic consequences of Walmart’s policies. Vacation at this immensely expensive resort to you’ll be young and beautiful. The examples could go on and on.

Folks, that way lie the parched places of which Jeremiah speaks. Some of us have learned that material possessions can never truly satisfy our souls. We buy something hoping it will make us feel better. Maybe it does for a time, but the feeling doesn’t last. So we buy more and more and more. Perhaps we go hopelessly into high-interest credit card debt to do it. And it’s never enough. Countless Americans have followed that path into the parched places of alcoholism, drug addiction, broken relationships, depression, and even suicide.

Second, I mean materialistic in its philosophical sense, which is even more profound than the term’s economic meaning. Philosophical materialism is the conviction that only the material, the physical, is real. Philosophical materialism has its origins in the rationalism of the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution that was a big part of it. Enlightenment thinkers thought that human reason could solve all problems. It can’t, but the Enlightenment’s reliance on it led to a humanistic rationalism that has no room for the spiritual. Science deals with the material and only the material. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe science was offering up one fantastic discovery after another about the physical world and indeed about the whole physical universe. Science claimed, and claims, to prove its conclusions through observation and experimentation. Science is such a powerful tool for explaining physical reality (not that it has or perhaps ever will answer all questions about that reality, but never mind) that much of western European culture concluded that only that which can be established through science is real. Hence philosophical materialism.

Philosophical materialism is perfectly rational. It makes sense. After all, all we can see or touch is physical. Problem is, philosophical materialism denies a whole realm of existence. It denies an ocean of human experience around the world and across the ages. Yet even many Americans who self-identify as Christian, Jewish, or of some other faith are probably in their heart of hearts philosophical materialists. Certainly all or at least most secular humanists and all atheists are philosophical materialists.

That way too lie the parched places of which Jeremiah speaks. That way lie the parched places because to be fully human is to long for connection with something greater than ourselves, with something transcendent, with something infinite. To be fully human includes striving for connection with that which is beyond us. It is to know at a deep level of our being that there must be and indeed that there is more to reality than this material world. To be fully human is to seek the depth dimension of reality, the reality behind reality, the more in everything that is. To deny that there is more, to deny the depth dimension of all that is, is to deny a core part of what it is to be human. It is to deny our true selves; and when we deny our true selves we shrivel up, maybe not physically but psychologically and spiritually.

When we wake up to who we really are, when we recognize the truth that most humans of every time and place have recognized, that there is a spiritual dimension of reality, that is, that God is real, we come alive, or at least we can. We become who we are meant to be, or at least we can. When we tend our relationship with God we blossom We see the world in new and lifegiving ways. We become like Jeremiah’s tree planted by water, or at least we can. We don’t have to live in the parched places of materialism. We can live in the lushness of life with God. So let’s get on with it, shall we? Amen.

Concluding Remarks From a Critique of the 2018 UCC Manual on Ministry

Concluding Remarks From a Critique of the 2018 UCC Manual on Ministry

In late 2018 a national entity of the United Church of Christ known as MESA (Ministerial Excellence, Support, and Accountability) issued a new Manual on Ministry. For several decades at least the UCC has used an older Manual on Ministry as a guide for authorization of ministry in the denomination. In the UCC authorization for ministry is handled not nationally but regionally by Committees on Ministry of the regional bodies known as Associations. Each Association is autonomous, and the Manual on Ministry that comes out of the denomination's national offices is not mandatory for any of them. Nonetheless, most if not all of them have used the Manual on Ministry that the new one seeks to supersede as their guide for making decisions on authorization issues of numerous sorts.

I serve on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, a Conference (a larger regional body) that also functions as an Association, that is, I did when I first posted this piece. I have been studying the new Manual on Ministry, at first in earlier draft forms, for well over a year. When MESA issued what it considers to be its final version of the Manual, I spent a good deal of time with it. I have written a rather long critique of that Manual that concludes that I cannot support my Conference adopting it as our guide on ministerial authorization. I present here a slightly edited version of my Concluding Remarks from that critique.

Before I get to stating my major remarks from that critique, I need to explain some background. For a long time the UCC has had three forms of ministerial authorization. They are ordination, licensing, and commissioning. All three of them are established in the Constitution and Bylaws of the United Church of Christ. In its earlier drafts of the new Manual, MESA reduced the forms of authorization essentially to one, ordination. MESA clearly would do away with licensing and commissioning altogether if it could. Objections from UCC people to that reduction led MESA to include in the new Manual something called Lay Ministerial Standing, a type of authorization that corresponds closely with what we used to call licensing. The new Manual has nothing that corresponds to what we called commissioning. Licensing and Lay Ministerial Standing are both intended to apply when a particular ministerial setting, usually a local church of the denomination, cannot for whatever reason call an ordained person to fill a ministerial opening. Commissioning was a type of authorization for ministry in which the UCC has an interest and wishes to support but that does not fit the traditional definition of an ordainable call. It has been granted to spiritual directors, for example. Our Pacific Northwest Conference has commissioned a woman to a national ministry related to the Our Whole Lives curriculum, the UCC’s study program on human sexuality.

We used to define an ordainable call as primarily a ministry that involved word and sacrament. That is, a person was ordained, with a couple of minor exceptions, only to a ministerial position in which the ordained person would preach and teach the word of God and preside at the UCC’s two sacraments, baptism and Eucharist. Eligibility for ordination used to require that the candidate have received an M.Div. degree from an accredited seminary. Some years ago the denomination’s General Synod, it’s national gathering, created something called alternative paths to ordination that sought to authorize ordination of persons without an accredited M.Div., but getting an M.Div. was still the primary way in which a person became eligible for ordination.

The new Manual replaces licensing with Lay Ministerial Standing. That’s not what this kind of authorization is called in the denomination’s Constitution and Bylaws, but MESA mostly ignores that reality. MESA clearly wants to do away with commissioning. Yet because commissioning too is established in the UCC Constitution and Bylaws it can’t write it out of the denomination’s practice altogether. The new Manual mentions both licensing and commissioning but says that new licenses and commissions are not expected after 2018. MESA wants us to replace licensing with Lay Ministerial Standing and to replace commissioning with ordination.

I have many objections to the new Manual on Ministry. It is badly written and edited. I point out some of those flaws in my larger critique of the Manual. It makes some unfounded theological assumptions about the faith of  all ordained people in the denomination. I point that error out in my longer critique too. Here I will discuss only my two major objections to the new Manual on Ministry. They are:

First, in my opinion the new Manual on Ministry's handling of the ordainability of a call is woefully inadequate. It represents a major departure from traditional UCC practice. Its discussion of ordainability is vague at best, but it clearly greatly expands the nature of an ordainable call beyond ordainability’s traditional definition. Ministry of word and sacrament, the traditional markers of an ordainable call, are mentioned in the manual’s discussion, but they are only small parts of much broader considerations with regard to a call’s ordainability.

The only reason I can see for this broadening of the definition of ordainability is the manual’s dismissal of commissioning as a type of authorized ministry. As I said, in its handling of licensing and commissioning the new MoM runs afoul of the UCC Constitution and Bylaws, which specifically provide for those types of authorization. Its (mis)handling of ordainability is one of the new manual’s major faults. It along with its dismissal of other types of authorization (other than Lay Ministerial Standing) are a major reason why I do not support our Conference accepting it as our standard for authorization.

Second, there’s how the manual handles ordainability of persons. In the past a person obtaining an accredited M.Div. degree was the major and preferred way for a person to satisfy most of the criteria for ordination. The new manual makes no mention of an M.Div. degree, not even as one path to ordination. It does mention seminaries in its discussion of theological education, but the manual’s clear intent is to make what we used to call alternative paths to ordination the primary path to ordination.

The manual calls for COMs to assess eligibility for ordination by evaluating a person’s qualifications by holding them up to the Marks of Faithful and Effective Authorized Ministers. Those Marks list a large number (although not as large as the first edition of the Marks) of characteristics and abilities a “faithful and effective” authorized minister should possess. The manual is vague at best as to how a Committee on Ministry is supposed to do that. It says nothing about how many Marks a person must satisfy or about how a Committee on Ministry is to assess a person against the Marks. The manual’s provisions with regard to the Marks are vague at best.

Assessment against the Marks is simply no substitute for seminary education. Yes, I know. Seminary education is immensely expensive. Seminaries are closing, so there are fewer local or regional options for seminary education. Nonetheless, I believe the seminary experience to be irreplaceable. I cannot imagine being as prepared as I was for ordained ministry without my seminary experience at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry. The learning I received in the classes, the interactions I had with faculty and fellow students, the field work I did with corresponding classes at school, all of these things formed me for ministry in ways I would not have been without them. Similar seminary experiences have formed women and men for professional ministry for a very long time.

Going to seminary is inconvenient for many people, but then it has always been inconvenient for many people, and it cannot be denied that the cost of seminary has created a crisis in seminary education. I am convinced however that the UCC would be much better advised to develop ways of making seminary more affordable through tuition assistance or subsidies to our seminaries than we are to abandon seminary education as the primary path to ordination. Because the new Manual on Ministry does precisely that, abandon seminary education as the primary path to ordination, I cannot support our Conference adopting it as our guide for ministerial authorization.

The Reluctant Prophet

The Reluctant Prophet

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

Scripture: Exodus 3:1-4:17 Isaiah 6:1-8, Jeremiah 1:4-10

What is a prophet? We’ve all heard of such a thing, haven’t we? There are prophets mostly in the Old Testament. Some of them have books named after them—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Micah, and others. We’ve heard of them, but do we really know what a prophet is? Frankly, I don’t think so. See, prophet today has come to mean someone who predicts the future. If we say someone has been prophetic we probably mean that she or he has correctly predicted some future event. Maybe we even think that that’s what those Old Testament prophets were mostly about. Jeremiah, for example, prophesied that the Babylonians would conquer Jerusalem and Judah. The Babylonians did precisely that. So Jeremiah is a prophet because he predicted that that would happen. Right? Well no actually, not right. Correctly predicting the future is not what those Old Testament prophets, or any true prophets for that matter, are primarily about. We can get a glimpse of what they are primarily about by looking at how three of the greatest of those Old Testament prophets tried so hard to get out of God’s call to them to become prophets. We’ll look at the call stories of Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. I think those stories will tell us a lot about what it really means to be a prophet.

I’ll start with Moses. In chapter 3 of Exodus Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep out in the Sinai desert. He comes to Mt. Sinai, except that Exodus here calls it Mount Horeb. Same thing. Just why Moses would drive his father-in-law’s sheep deep into the desert of Sinai isn’t clear, but never mind. Moses sees a bush that is burning but is not burned up. Weird, right? Moses goes over to check it out. Then things get even weirder for poor old Moses. God speaks to him out of the burning bush. Moses, God says, go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. I can easily imagine a standup comedian having fun with that one. I imagine that comedian having Moses say “Yeah. Sure. Right. You’re kidding right? You can’t be serious. Knock off the practical joke. There’s no way I’m going to Pharaoh to tell him to let your people go or anything else for the matter.” Actually all Exodus has Moses say is “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Exodus 3:11 Maybe Moses was thinking I can’t go to Egypt. I killed an Egyptian who was abusing Hebrew slaves and had to flee the place. See Exodus 2:11-15. If I go back they’ll arrest me for murder and execute me. Or maybe he just didn’t think he was up to the task somehow. Whatever. Moses tries to get out of God’s call to him by minimizing himself: “Who am I…?” God’s having none of it. So Moses tries again. What am I to say if the Israelites there ask me the name of the God who supposedly sent me? That’s when the divine name if revealed: I am who I am, or simply I am. God still isn’t having any of Moses’ attempts to get out of this go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go business. So Moses tries again. I’ve never been eloquent, he says. I am slow of speech he says. God brushes this attempt of Moses’ off with assurances that God will help him speak. Or that God will send Moses’ brother Aaron with him and Aaron can do the talking. Eventually Moses gives up and accepts God’s call to be the prophet who would bring the Israelites out of Egypt.

Then we come to Isaiah. His call story is in chapter 6 of the book with his name. There Isaiah reports having had a vision of being in the throne room of God. It’s a terrifying scene. Flying beasts called seraphs. Smoke. The building shaking. Isaiah is terrified. He says Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, but I’ve seen God. He meant by that “now I’m going to die” because the ancient Israelites believed that no human could see God and live. Isaiah wants none of this immediate contact with God because he considers himself a sinner. That’s what “a man of unclean lips” means. Again, God’s having none of it. God sends one of those seraphs to touch Isaiah’s lips with a hot coal. That, it seems, purified Isaiah of his sin. God says “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah answers: “Here I am. Send me.” He tried to get out of being a prophet, and again God was having none of it. So Isaiah gave in and became one of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets.

Then there’s Jeremiah. He reports God coming to him and saying that before Jeremiah was born God had anointed him to be God’s prophet. Like the other two prophets we’ve looked at, Jeremiah tries to get out of it. He says surely you don’t mean me for “I am only a boy.” And again like with those other two prophets God is having none of it. God says Do not say I’m only a boy. You must do what I tell you to do. And God says that God will be with Jeremiah and will protect him. So like the others Jeremiah gives in and becomes one of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets.

What’s going on here? Why do these guys try so hard to get out of God’s call to them to be prophets? I mean, wouldn’t it be a great honor if God came to you and said be my prophet? After all, being one of God’s prophets is a pretty big deal. Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah lived many, many centuries ago, but we still respect and even revere them as true men of God. We still read the books with their names on them and find some great wisdom there. We think of true prophets as great people, don’t we? So why do these guys try so hard to get out of being a prophet of God?

The answer to that question lies in what it actually means to be God’s prophet. God did not call Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to predict the future. God called them to speak God’s truth to the powers of the world. That’s explicit in the case of Moses. God says Go to Pharaoh and tell him…. Go speak truth to power. It’s less explicit with Isaiah and Jeremiah, but look at what those two actually did. Isaiah went into the northern kingdom of Israel and preached judgment against the kingdom and its rules because of their faithlessness. Jeremiah preached a coming destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians as God’s judgment of the people’s faithlessness. The king didn’t kill Jeremiah, but he locked him up in a guardhouse and threw him into a dry cistern. All three of these great prophets were called to be prophets by speaking God’s truth to power. That’s what they all did. That’s what a prophet really is, someone God has called to speak God’s truth to power.

And no wonder prophets usually try to get out of it. The powers of the world in ancient times didn’t want to hear God’s truth. God’s truth was always a judgment against them. The true prophet calls them out for oppressing people, for worship false gods, for leading immoral lives, for whatever it is that the powers are doing that is wrong. Worldly powers are always doing something wrong, and worldly powers never like to be told they’re doing something wrong. They always fight back. I mean, Pharaoh came after Moses and his people with his whole army. Trust me, being chased by Pharaoh’s army is not where you want to be. Being a true prophet of God is dangerous business. It was dangerous in the ancient world. It got Jesus crucified. It is dangerous business in our world too. It gets people like Saint Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy murdered. It’s gotten lots of other people killed too. That’s why the prophets so often try so hard to get out of being a prophet. Being one might be an honor, but it is an honor that might well get you killed.

But of course if the only truth here were that some true prophets get killed it wouldn’t mean that much to most of us. Most of aren’t MLK, Jr. None of us is Moses. But the truth is that even being a much less prominent prophet than that is dangerous business too. Take being a local church pastor for example. The role of a pastor has traditionally been defined with three ps. The pastor is called to be priest, pastor, and prophet. The priestly role is leading worship and presiding at the sacraments. The pastoral role is caring for the people of the church. Most church people don’t have too much problem with their pastor filling those roles. They may complain about one thing or another, but it is rarely those roles that gets a local church pastor in trouble with her or his congregation. But then there’s the prophetic role. Every pastor is called to speak God’s truth to the congregation, and time and time again pastors get in a world of hurt when they do.

See, people in power don’t much like to hear God’s truth, but far too often the people in the pews don’t either. God’s truth so often contradicts people’s long-held beliefs and prejudices. God’s truth so often challenges them. It upends their world. It threatens to change their lives. People don’t like that. People outside the church don’t like that, but neither do most people in the church. So they accuse the pastor of “preaching politics,” as if the Gospel of Jesus Christ weren’t political. Like people in one church I served, they may go so far as to say “we don’t want the world coming into the church.” Well, the only way a preacher can never say anything political, can never bring the world into the church, is never to preach the full Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is never to be prophetic, and when a pastor isn’t prophetic that pastor is failing to carry out one of his or her primary functions. Truly being prophetic, truly speaking God’s truth, sometimes gets pastors fired. Or maybe it just gives them no choice but to resign. Getting fired or forced to resign of course is nothing like being killed; but it’s no fun, and it can cause significant difficulties in the pastor’s life. So even at the level of a modest local church pastor being a prophet is a dangerous business.

No wonder so many of the great prophets of the Bible tried to hard to get out of it. A lot of us who have experienced a call to pastoral ministry tried to get out of it at first too. I know I did, and I know that many of my colleagues did too. Yet for all that the truth remains: If we mere mortals don’t speak God’s truth to power, or even to the people of our congregations, that truth just won’t get spoken. And just as God would have none of Moses’, Isaiah’s, or Jeremiah’s excuses for avoiding their calling, God will have none of any of us avoiding God’s call to us to speak God’s truth in the world either. Doing so can be exhilarating, but it can also be dangerous. Like those great prophets of scripture we may be reluctant prophets, but we must be prophets none the less. We must speak God’s word of peace and justice to a violent and unjust world. Yes, that’s dangerous. We need to do it anyway. So let’s get on with it. Amen.

With Interpretation

I've been retired from active parish ministry for over a year now. Several times in the past year I have thought that it might be good for me to continue writing sermons even though I would never deliver most of them to any congregation. For all of my years of parish ministry I understood the weekly practice of designing a worship service and writing a sermon to be my primary personal spiritual discipline. Although I don't want to go back into active parish ministry I miss that weekly practice. So I've decided to write sermons again at least from time to time though I will never preach most of them. Here's the first of them:

With Interpretation

Scripture: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Back in the days when I was serving as the pastor of a parish I had this experience more than once. I suspect most every Christian pastor has had it. More than once people said to me that they wanted their scripture straight, by which they would say they meant without interpretation. Just give the words, they said or at least implied. I guess I can respect these good folks and their desire just to have the Bible read to them without somebody trying to explain to them what any particular passage means. I take it that they either want to apply their own interpretation to the text or, more likely, that they don’t think that they interpret the text because the text doesn’t need interpreting. For them any biblical text just says what it says and means what it means, that meaning being obvious to anyone who reads or hears the text. And of course they would understand that the text has only one meaning that is universally true for everyone. I think I get it. People want the Bible to be simple. They want its translations to be perfect and its meaning obvious to everyone.

Well, as easy to understand as that approach to the Bible may be, I’m afraid that we simply can’t accept it. We can’t go along with it. We can’t tell these good but probably biblically uneducated folks that they’re right. That the Bible is simple. That its meaning is obvious. That everything in it means the same thing to everyone everywhere at any time. You see, all that just isn’t true. In this sermon I want to talk about why it isn’t true and what we do about it not being true. And I’ll start with the passage from Nehemiah listed above.

The book of Nehemiah is one of the post-exilic books of the Old Testament. It was written some time around the change from the sixth to the fifth centuries BCE. Many of the Jewish people whom the Babylonians had hauled off to exile in Babylon around the year 586 BCE had returned under the protection of the Persians, who had conquered Babylon in the 530s BCE. Those years after the return from Babylon were not easy ones for these folks. They were poor. They had to appease the Persians and pay them tribute. They had before them the daunting tasks of rebuilding Jerusalem, especially its outer wall that the Babylonians had breached and destroyed. They had to rebuild the temple. Tradition said, and says, that King Solomon had built a temple on a hill in Jerusalem called Zion in the tenth century BCE. The Babylonians destroyed that temple, and the people were determined to build a new one on the same site after they came back from Babylon. Yet they found that they didn’t have the resources to build anything like what Solomon’s temple had been. They complained about how poor and unimposing their new temple was. The prophets who had come before them had said that the time of return would be glorious. It wasn’t. It was hard and discouraging.

The book of Nehemiah sets its story of the reading of the law against that backdrop. It tells of Ezra, whom it describes as both a priest and a scribe, gathering all the people together in a public square and reading a scroll of the law of Moses to them. By the law of Moses it surely means the entire Torah, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. All of those books or at least most of the stories in them existed in one form or another at the time this story is set. Those books were traditionally known as the books of Moses. That’s what Ezra read to the people that day in post-exilic Jerusalem.

And here’s what I think is the most important part of this passage. It says: “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Nehemiah 8:8. Verse 7, which for some reason the Revised Common Lectionary leaves out of the reading for this Sunday, says that a number of named people and the Levites “helped the people to understand the law….” Apparently Nehemiah, who was the governor appointed by the Persians, wanted the people to hear the Torah law, and he got the priest Ezra and perhaps others to read it to them. But they didn’t just read it. They interpreted it. They helped the people understand it. Our text doesn’t tell us how they interpreted the text. We don’t know what these interpreters said to the people about what the text meant. It is however striking and important that our passage stresses how the religious leaders of the day didn’t just read the text to the people and leave it at that. They interpreted. They helped the people understand. Assuming for the moment that they did that well and in good faith, God bless them for it. Clearly we have here the Bible telling us that at least a significant part of the Bible, namely, the law of Moses, needs interpretation if people are to understand it.

That lesson about the Bible, I am convinced, applies to the whole book, not just the Mosaic law found in the Torah. Why is that? Why isn’t the Bible simple? Why does it need all that interpretation that many people today don’t want? There are lots of reasons why that is so. Some of them are quite academic and perhaps hard for people to understand who haven’t studied the matter in some depth. For example, there is a whole science of interpretation called hermeneutics. Today’s hermeneutics says that meaning never resides in a text alone but arises from the encounter of a reader with the text. Because that’s where meaning arises it follows that the meaning of a text, any text, depends to some extent on who’s reading it. If you want to know more about hermeneutics you can read Stop 3 of my Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, 2018. But for now I’ll move on to reasons why the Bible needs interpretation that are perhaps a bit easier to grasp.

The Bible is a collection of ancient texts. Many of its passages go back to oral tradition that is over three thousand years old. It’s newest text is still something like eighteen or nineteen thousand years old. All of the texts of the Bible were written in and for worlds that were very different from ours. We live in a world dominated by science. The worlds of the Bible were all prescientific. We are products of Enlightenment rationalism that reduces truth to fact. The worlds of the Bible were all prerational. That doesn’t mean they were irrational. It means they didn’t see human reason as the source of all knowledge the way most western people have since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe. It means that in the worlds of the Bible people understood better than people today that there is truth that is much deeper than mere factual truth. They understood the power of mythic and symbolic truth much better than most of us do today. Yes, western culture is finally moving beyond its faulty belief that only facts are true, but most western people have a long way to go before they accept that insight and live into its power to transform lives. We moderns tend to communicate truth, or at least try to, by writing directly about what we consider to be truth. We write journalism, or we write essays or books. The worlds of the Bible communicated truth not by writing modern journalism, essays, or books but by telling stories. The people who first heard those stories may or may not have understood them as factually true. The important point is that even if they did understand them as factually true they also understood that they had far deeper truth in them than mere fact. The worlds of the Bible didn’t understand what it is to be human the way we do. They didn’t understand human sexuality the way we do. They didn’t understand the structure of the universe the way we do. The list of differences between the worlds of the Bible and our world could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. Every word in the Bible comes from a world so radically different from ours that understanding even the basics of that world takes a lot of work. Some people today have done that work. Most haven’t.

Which means that most people who read the Bible today commit the error of anachronism. They read the Bible through the lenses of their own culture rather than attempting first of all to understand the Bible on its own terms. That means they often, perhaps usually, misunderstand the Bible. I’ll cite just one important example here. Most people today, both Christians and non-Christians, believe that the Bible condemns homosexuality. That’s because they read verses like Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” as referencing a modern understanding of human sexuality. It doesn’t. It says nothing at all about homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality because in the ancient world from which Leviticus comes people had no such understanding. They assumed that everyone was what we call straight. When we take a verse from that world and bring it into our world as biblical truth we’re elevating an ancient understanding of human sexuality to the level of divine truth. It isn’t, but we can’t understand that it isn’t without the explanation that I just gave. That explanation isn’t apparent on the face of the text. It is interpretation of the text, but it is crucially important if we are to avoid a grave mistake in our use of the Bible.

The author of the ancient book of Nehemiah knew that the Bible needs interpretation. He (the author was certainly a man given the androcentrism of ancient cultures) knew his people could and likely would misunderstand the biblical texts they heard if they heard them without interpretation. Many people today don’t understand that truth. Because they don’t, the Bible gets misused in ways that can be extremely damaging. The way Leviticus 18:22 that I just cited gets used to attack gay people is one example. The way some Christians use Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 as a reason for denying contemporary science is another. The book of Nehemiah has part of the Bible read to the people “with interpretation.” We would to well to follow Nehemiah’s example. Of course there is good interpretation of the Bible and bad interpretation of the Bible. That unfortunate truth is probably unavoidable. Yet the reality of bad interpretation doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t or mustn’t interpret the Bible. We must interpret the Bible, and do it well, if are truly to understand it and use it properly. It contains great wisdom and truth, but only good interpretation can unlock that wisdom and truth for us.

So let’s be done with “I want my Bible straight without interpretation.” It actually isn’t possible to read any text without interpreting it, but even if it were possible ancient documents like those that make up the Bible absolutely need interpreting if we are to avoid misusing them, and misusing them badly. The work of interpretation isn’t easy. Most of us need the assistance of trained professionals to do it well. So be it. May we all do that work well. Amen.

A Word of Warning

A Word of Warning

We live in a frightening time.Around the world fascism is once again on the rise. For decades the major political parties in Germany were the relatively conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the more progressive Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the successor of the old German socialists. Today it is the CDU and something called Alternative for Germany, a neo-fascist party that demonizes immigrants and advocates the supremacy of Germans and German culture. A similar thing has happened in Italy, where neo-fascists win elections and condemn immigrants. Hungary is ruled by a neo-fascist prime minister. So is Turkey. Other nations of central Europe are experiencing similar things. Russia is ruled by a reactionary authoritarian president who has severely restricted freedom of the press and centralized authority in the Kremlin in a way it had not been since the demise of communism in 1991. The list of examples could go on and on.

The same thing is happening here in the United States of America.In 2016 we Americans made the American fascist Donald Trump our president. (For a discussion of how Donald Trump is a fascist see the post "American Fascist" elsewhere on this blog.) In his campaign and in his term as president he has attacked the free press, even calling it the "enemy of the people," using Stalin's term for the people he murdered in enormous numbers. Every fascist has a target population on which he or she blames a country's problems though that target population isn't solely responsible for those problems or may not be responsible for them at all.For today's European fascists that target population is primarily immigrants or refugees from Africa or the Middle East. Trump has perhaps taken his cue from them, for his target population is immigrants coming across our southern border from Mexico or Central America. He has called them all murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and terrorists. Never mind that these is no evidence at all to support those specious claims. Every responsible, knowledgeable person who speaks to conditions on our border with Mexico today says there is no crisis there. The numbers of people coming across that border has been declining steadily for some time now. Under international law every person has a legal right to enter a country of which she is not a citizen to seek asylum. But there being no crisis on our southern border doesn't suit Trump's fascist political purposes, so he insists in the face of all the facts that there is one.

Trump's false attacks on immigrants remind me of something I experienced during the 1957-1958 academic year when I was eleven years old. My family and I lived in Berlin, Germany, that year. My father, a history professor, was doing historical research there that year. We rented rooms in a large apartment from a German woman named Annamarie. She was a widow, her husband having died before we met her. He had been a Nazi. The real thing. A member of the National Socialist Party of Germany. Annamarie still had his party uniform hanging in a closet in the apartment we shared with her. I don't remember how the subject came up. We really never discussed politics with her, but I will never forget the time when she said to us: "Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done." That statement is of course factually false. Nothing had to be done about Germany's Jews. They weren't the problem Hitler made them out to be. Beyond that, it isn't that something "happened" to the Jews under the Nazis. German people like Annamarie or at least her deceased Nazi husband murdered them in their millions. As is so often the case, Annamarie's use of the passive voice in her statement ("what happened to the Jews") was a way of avoiding responsibility for what her nation had done. What the Germans did to the Jews (and not just the Jews but other people like homosexuals and the disabled that they hated as well) wasn't "too bad." It was one of the worst moral outrages of human history. Annamarie, of whom we were otherwise quite fond, like so many other Germans reduced the horrific moral atrocity they had perpetrated to being "too bad what happened to the Jews." There's the banality of evil we hear about coming from the mouth of an otherwise quite pleasant and interesting woman.

I don't mean to suggest that Donald Trump is planning a new Holocaust. I don't believe that. Nonetheless Annamarie's "It's too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done" is nonetheless a real word of warning to us. The way Trump is using immigrants to our country as his target population on which to blame our country's problems is parallel to the way Hitler started the anti-Jewish policies of his government that culminated in the Holocaust. Desperate people fall for fascist lies like these far too easily. Many Americans are desperate today. The world is changing. Indeed, it has changed; and many people experience that change as negative, as disadvantageous to them and as frightening. Those people's feelings may be understandable, but they also make those people easy marks for charlatans like Donald Trump with his lies about a crisis on our southern border.Trump would never have become president if they were not such easy marks.

So take Annamarie's words to my family and me so many decades ago as a warning to us today. When our government tears apart families at the border. When young children die in our custody. When Trump and his Republican allies work to distract us from real solutions to real problems as they do, we can't just sit here, shrug our shoulders, and say "It's too bad what's happening at the southern border, but then something does has to be done." No it doesn't. Not about the nonexistent problem Trump dummies up to whip up his angry and desperate political base and put one over on the rest of us. What Trump is doing isn't just "too bad." It's immoral. It's frightening. He must be stopped, and we must use very legal, nonviolent means available to us to stop him.

A Reflection on the Human Spirit

Some years ago I wrote an autobiography, an act of pure hubris I admit but a very interesting exercise. In it I was talking about visiting the chapel of the monastery at Melk, Austria, one of the most breathtaking example of Rococo art and architecture there is anywhere. After I described that experience I wrote this meditation which I think is worth repeating here. I find it quite profound and powerful. Perhaps you will too.

This is perhaps a place for another meditative diversion. Back in the 1960s when I was living in Germany, during these years of 1964-65 that I'm describing and again in 1968-69, many American students of a liberal mindset objected mightily to the way the Europeans in previous centuries had spent such enormous amounts of money building extravagant churches, palaces, and other public buildings. I get that objection. The money spent on the gilding in the Melk monastery alone would have fed and housed a great many people for a very long time. I get that objection, but I don't share it. In the Bible, when the devil tempts Jesus to abuse his divine power by turning stones into bread only for his own use Jesus demurs, saying “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3. Whether you, dear reader, embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition from which this line comes or not, I think you might concede that it speaks a profound human truth. Human life consists of more than the physical, the material. Human life involves the spiritual, however one understands the concept “spiritual.” You don't have to understand it in any religious sense to see that humans have an innate drive to express beauty, to express profound truth through art, to let their spirits soar in works of beauty that speak to the soul at a level beyond words. To strive toward something higher than mere physical existence, however that something is understood. Yes, buildings like Melk were intended in part to impress, to show off, to show how rich the people building them were; but they were intended for something greater and deeper than that too. They were intended to, and they do, express the soaring and the yearning of the human spirit. They express a faith in something beyond the mere human. They have the power to relieve and even to transform the mundane dreariness of the ordinary life of most people. If the human spirit ever stops soaring, stops creating, stops reaching beyond the ordinary and the material we will have lost a great deal of what it means to be human. Melk, Chartres, Notre Dame, Saint Peter’s, the churches of the Moscow Kremlin, and so many, many other great achievements of the human spirit are testaments to the greatness of humanity. They are expressions of hope and of faith. Human life would be impoverished without them and other great human cultural achievements from different cultures all over the world.