THE NEED FOR SPEED

"The preacher was driving so fast, the speedometer was playing “Nearer My God To Thee.” (author unknown)

When I was seventeen I had a green-and-white 1957 Ford V-8.  The speedometer topped out at “120 mph,” so of course I had to see if it could really do that. Finding a stretch of road straight and long enough in the Black Hills posed a challenge, but I found one, and it did. (I wonder how many otherwise conventional young lives have been cut short by just such one-time shenanigans.) My younger brother reminds me that I once boasted, “I can take any curve in the hills at twice the posted speed!”

I was no rebel with or without a cause. I was a seventeen-year-old-boy with one of the most powerful machines on the planet at my feet and fingertips. (Other former seventeen-year-old boys will no doubt relate.) And my purpose here is not to engage in nostalgic braggadocio, but to acknowledge with relief that I made it through that period, and to observe that I abandoned my seventeen-year-old approach to driving… about three years ago.

That’s when I got the letter from the insurance company. The letter—in the cold language of cost-benefit analysis used by the company to determine if it was in their best interest to continue to carry me as a client—basically said, “Enough already!” And I got the message.

I want to be clear that I have not been a willfully reckless speedster or that guy who rushes to weave in front of you and then cuts you off. I have never been a road-rager. (I am a gentle preacher, dear reader.) It is just that, for the last fifty years, I have consistently pushed the meaning of “limit” in “speed limit.” (Again, I have no doubt that other former seventeen-year-olds will relate.) The driving record that the insurance letter kindly pointed out to me consisted of one too many speeding citations in a defined period of time, plus a couple of self-caused fender-benders involving only my car (claims that, in hindsight, I should probably never have submitted to the insurance company for payment). Oh, and the incident with the Christmas tree. The company seemed to have no interest in my lucid and exculpatory explanations. “Enough already.”

I am reluctant to acknowledge it, but it’s possible that the behavior-altering message got through in part because some of those seventeen-year-old fires have been damped down by actual maturity. (Okay, “aging.”) I simply no longer have the need to speed. In addition, the letter spoke to the theologian in me: In my tradition, Martin Luther explains that one of the uses of “the law” is as “a norm of conduct, freely accepted by those in whom the grace of God works for good.”  The insurance company—like a speed limit—is not interested in spoiling my fun, but in assuring that life—for me and everyone with whom I share the road—will be “good.”

(To the seventeen-year-olds and future seventeen-year-olds who are dear to us, perhaps we could do a better job of connecting this life-affirming explanation of the “spirit of the law” to the letter of the law. Like that parental line that can be honestly applied in so many situations: “If we didn’t love you, we wouldn’t care what you did.”)*

Coincidentally about the same time that I heard from my insurance company, I had a Zen-like vision that I have found helpful and that I reflect on surprisingly often: A car pulling into the flow of traffic is like a twig falling into a stream. It is not in a race with the other twigs. You go with the flow.

And I’ve developed two mantras that are effective for me—

The ride of the gentle preacher today--a sweet Subaru 4-

cylinder. But I sometimes wish I had put that '57 Ford up

on blocks in a shed somewhere. (Don't we all.)

that I actually use: One is, “When I’m in a hurry, that’s when I slow down.” The other is, “Let the other guy have the ticket.” That last one is not very Christian, I know. But it works for me.

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* Studies of brain development suggest that, regarding issues like driving, sex, and war-fighting, we aren't equipped to make rational decisions--to "know what we're doing"--until about age 25, as discussed further here.

GRANDPA, WHAT...? GRANDPA, WHY...?

Lego's wonderfully articulated Shelob.
How did she become "evil?"

A little child shall lead them…

I find, alas, that I am in substantial agreement with the old saw, “There’s nothing more boring than other people’s grandchildren or vacation photos.” (There are exceptions, of course. Your grandchildren, for example, are certainly not boring. But I draw the line at your vacation pics.) So I will be neither offended nor surprised if – when I tell you that this essay is inspired by my grandson, Sam – you click off immediately as you stifle a yawn. But let me make this attempt to stay your hand: In what follows, I write not about how cute and clever Sam is, but about how I am both moved and startled by the thinking, the philosophy, the ethics, and – yes – the theology of a four-and-three-quarter year-old. Any four-and-three-quarter year-old. Including, I am glad to acknowledge, your grandkid.

Years ago I was in the middle of, “The body of Christ given for…” when another four-year-old, at the communion rail with his mother, interrupted me with a hoarse stage whisper, “Psst, Pastor Dick… when was God born and who were God’s mom and dad?” At one level, of course, this is standard, precious, out-of-the-mouths-of-babes fare, but at a deeper level (what I mean by being “startled”), these guileless questions and pronouncements elicit from me not an indulgent grandfatherly chuckle but an open-mouthed, pondering silence. Now, as a sixty-five-year-old theologian, I have an approach to this four-year-old’s question (I’ve even blogged about it for grown-ups, and will again), but I don’t exactly have an answer. (By golly, when was God born…?) It is a question asked by Aristotle and Aquinas, it is “What was there before there was something?” It is a question explored by Jim Holt in his new book, Why Does the World Exist? It is a question misunderstood by Richard Dawkins, and it is a question that drives philosophers, scientists, and theologians together as they stare into the light and into the darkness. It is the question of a four-year-old. Startling.

It seems that after four years of college, four years of seminary, countless hours of reading and advanced study, and thirty-five years in the ministry, I might have had a readier answer than I did to Sam’s question, from his child’s safety seat in the back of the car, “Grandpa, what does God do?” (Sam’s emphasis was on “do.”) My thoughtful formulation of an answer took too long. As I started to say, “Well…,” Sam was on to, “Look, there’s a loader!”

Sam is too young to have read The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or to have seen Star Wars, but he knows the essential stories because his dad is a Star Wars nerd and his YA literature-specialist Auntie Anna is a Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter geek, as is his pastor-friend Mike. They are his resources for learning the plots and the characters. But mostly he knows these stories because of Legos. Not only does Lego make intricate, multi-piece plastic kits of such esoterica as Gandalf’s fireworks cart, Harry Potter’s potions classroom, and Anakin’s pod racer; it also produces on-line video versions of the stories. (These sometimes veer too close to parody for an old Tolkien fan like grandpa: Ronald McDonald as part of the Fellowship of the Ring sneaking into Mordor?!)

Sam mostly tells me about these stories. He tells me which starfighter is piloted by Luke Skywalker, he tells me which Lego figure is Hermione, he tells me how Samwise picks up Frodo’s sword to fight off Shelob. But he also asks me. And what he mostly asks are questions like, “Why are the Orcs bad?” “What made Voldemort be bad?” “Did Smaug have a mom and dad?” I talk about how people sometimes turn to a bad life because they were mistreated by grownups or they didn’t grow up knowing they were loved, which is why your mommy and daddy love you so much…; I try to squeeze in an answer before Sam is distracted by the passing garbage truck. And then there’s, “Grandpa, what made Shelob evil?” Ah, “evil,” there it is. Good and Evil. I think I have a systematic theology textbook here somewhere…

Sam likes his children’s songs CDs. He said to me, “Grandpa, one of my songs says that Pharaoh’s army got drownded” (the old spiritual). “Yes,” I say, “there was that time when the water rose up and drowned the whole army….” “No, Grandpa,” says Sam, “God made the waters rise up and drown them.”  He doesn’t say it, but I feel the implied follow-up, “Tell me about a God who would drown a whole army, Grandpa.”

I am reminded of the description of the Bible as “not so much a great answer book as a great question book.” The Bible’s questions are our questions. Of course I have answers, or approaches to answers, for these questions, based on the classic Lutheran combination of faith and reason. And I look forward not so much to answering all of Sam’s questions in black and white as to continuing the conversation with him as he grows. And of course I’ll tell him I have questions of my own. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”

It would be good if more adults could live with the uncertainty of the Apostle Paul (“Now we see as through a clouded glass...” why should we think we’ll know it all?) And in Lutheran theology, all questions (and doubts) take us to Jesus and the cross. Sam loved learning about Jesus at Vacation Bible School this summer. He talked about Jesus so much that at one point I decided to seize on a teachable moment. In response to a little misbehavior, I said, “You know, Sam, Jesus teaches us that we should treat other people the way we would like to be treated.” Sam glared rather harshly at me and said, “Jesus teaches us nothing. He’s dead on the cross.” I was reduced to that open-mouthed silence for a few seconds. Then I realized that Sam’s response was a combination of the oppositional stage he is in (Sam, time to take a bath. “No, Grandpa, time for you to take a bath!”) and the idea he came away with from Bible School: Jesus is dead on the cross right now; at Easter he will come back alive.

My grandson the religious skeptic. May God grant us many years of conversation. Because I realize that not only are the Bible’s questions my questions. Sam’s questions are my questions.

NOTHING DOING

Much of the argument made by the so-called new atheists is actually against the church and religion; they ironically offer little material proof of the non-existence of God. (Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great would more accurately have been titled Religion is Not Great.) I am sympathetic: The history of religion and the church is rife with one screw-up after another, and includes some very despicable characters. But no matter how much the Dawkins-Hitchens crew shares my antipathy for “religion,” this gives them no more evidence that there is no god than I have that there is.[1]  Richard Dawkins is straightforward enough to title one of the chapters in his God Delusion, “Why There Almost Certainly is No God” (emphasis mine). I don’t think Dawkins et al. realize the degree to which people of faith harbor doubts of our own. (“Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief.”) This is why I prefer the word “faith;” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated, “Jesus didn’t come to make us religious.” You want a slam on religion? Read the Bible! But don’t let the misbehavior and hypocrisy of the folks you find there distract you from the question of whether there is a god.[2]

I agree with Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary biologist and science writer (and agnostic) who, in his book Rocks of Ages proposes that faith and science are not opponents but partners in the search for truth.  Some on both sides, however, insist on turning the conversation into an argument, and the red herring at the center of the debate is evolution.  For the person of science to say, “Evolution proves there is no god,” or the religious creationist to warn, “We must not subscribe to evolution, because if it were true it would prove there is no god,” are equally ignorant statements. Evolution is simply a theory of organic development (and a fine one) and does not touch on the primal questions of the existence of god, or creation out of nothing.

Gould the scientist taught that, by definition, science is unable to have the final word about ultimate matters of meaning, purpose, and “what was there before…?” According to Gould, “Why is there something and not nothing?” and “What was there before there was something?” are not scientific questions. Science can only work with “something.”

But in a recent book, A Universe From Nothing, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss claims to prove that quantum mechanics can, in fact, cross the bridge between nothing and something, and answer the age-old question purely scientifically. In reading his thesis, however, it turns out that what Krauss means by “nothing” is more like “nothing much.” In a clever and elegant New York Times Book Review article, the philosopher David Albert muses:

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: …Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? The laws of relativistic quantum field theories (on which Krauss bases his case for an “eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world”)… have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place.

I have often wondered why most cosmologists are apparently so incurious about the meaning of “nothing” and the question of “what was there before…?” It is often, to use an over-used phrase, the elephant in the room. I’m impressed that David Albert has tackled the elephant.

Krauss, by the way, protests that his philosophical and religious critics have co-opted the meaning of nothing. He takes issue with the fact that they apparently intend it to mean “nothing.”

In an essay entitled The Origin of the Universe, the theoretical physicist (and self-described atheist) Victor Weisskopf provides an intricate description of the instant of the primal explosion – the “Big Bang” – using mathematics and the quantum mechanics vocabulary of energy fluctuations, false vacuums, and inflation. Then he concludes,

We now come to the more philosophical question: What existed before the primal bang? …The origin of the universe can be talked about not only in scientific terms, but also in poetic and spiritual language, an approach that is complementary to the scientific one…. A remarkable musical description of the primal bang is found at the beginning of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. A choir of angels sings darkly and softly, “And God said, ‘Let there be Light’.” The entire choir and the orchestra burst into a fortissimo C-major chord with  “And there was Light.” There cannot be a more beautiful and impressive artistic rendition of the beginning of everything.

I agree with Weisskoppf that this is poetry – poetry that is not an opponent but a partner with science in the search for truth. Why is there something rather than nothing? And what was there before there was something? The questions remain.

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[1] Even-Steven

[2] The use of “God” in this conversation is not a reference to the Judeo-Christian divinity, but to an uncreated, infinite, non-material force or being that brought everything that is – material, energy, time – into existence. I am, of course, interested in Christianity but this is not an essay on my personal faith, and it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

BUT WILL THE PERSONNEL COMMITTEE WRITE "READ MORE" ON MY REVIEW?

"After every sermon the preacher should fall on his knees and ask God to forgive him for what he's just done." ~Martin Luther

Although I believe in legitimate accountability (church council, etc.), I long ago quit looking nervously over my shoulder and came to the conclusion that if I feel OK about what I’m doing, I am not so concerned about what Mrs. McGillicuddy thinks.  Another way to put that is to say that I am my own best (or worst) critic (with, I repeat, the added seasoning of accountability).

As such – although I actually do feel pretty good about the work I do in this calling – I have a litany of shortcomings that would probably be longer than any list that my worst enemy could come up with.

Another time, perhaps, I’ll go after myself about missed hospital calls, repetitive stewardship sermons, or failed attempts to ignite a passion for the faith in a fourteen-year-old confirmation student. Today my confession is that, over the course of thirty-five years of ministry, I have not done enough reading.

I want you, friend, to understand that I am, in fact, a reader. But my reading is exhibit A of the proof of the old adage: “That which is urgent but not important drives out that which is important but not urgent.” And of course I use “urgent” somewhat loosely. For good or ill, reading and study take a second place to staff meetings, council meetings, writing newsletter articles, pastoral counseling, teaching confirmation, hospital calling, emergency visits, etc. All of which I readily accept as part of the job description of my call, some of which are urgent, all of which are important, but none of which are more important than regular reading and study.

I cast this as a “confession” because it’s my own fault. I’m not blaming my parish or its people. (Not even Mrs. McGillicuddy.) Years ago, through the example of an enlightened mentor, I was freed from any sense of guilt about letting people know that I was “wasting time” reading a book.  The object of my confession is a combination of a haphazard discipline of my time and the actual busy-ness of the calling.

Four categories of reading come to mind as being essential to what I do:

• The general reading required of anyone who seeks to be a literate and informed citizen: newspapers, various magazines, book reviews, etc. (Who was it that said, “The preacher should prepare a sermon with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other?”)

• The artful and literary writing of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – both the recognized “classics” and the new stuff. One of my homiletical heroes, the Scottish preacher James S. Stewart, of the 1940s-60s, laced his engaging sermons with references to Shakespeare and to other poets and writers of both ancient and modern times.  (This raises another issue: The reading of the person in the pew. I know that I hark back, perhaps in vain, to a time when to be educated meant that one would be acquainted with the Bible and with Shakespeare.)

• Regular engagement with theological writing (again, both ancient and modern) and professional journals in the fields of theology and practical ministry.

• The Bible. I agree with a colleague of mine who once said, “I can’t preach on this text until I discover how it changes me.” This means – no matter how many times I’ve read it before – reading and re-reading this book that is the basis of much of our civilization and our understanding of the world. From a standpoint of faith, I belong to a community that considers it to be “the word of God,” not as some kind of magical tome, but as a record of God’s covenantal and reconciled relationship with us. Faith, the Apostle Paul says, is a gift of the the Holy Spirit; it is the Spirit and the Word(s) that bring the message of this book alive, again and again.

Our ivory tower seminary professors suggest twenty hours a week be devoted to reading and study for the weekly sermon. But my “ivory tower” chide isn’t fair – I agree with the professors. It is a goal that is in keeping with what I am called to do as a “minister of word and sacrament.”  OK, some weeks it may dip to fifteen… or ten, but I’m going to keep trying. Regular reading is what allows the preacher, when invited to preach, to use that old saw, “I’ve been preparing for this all my life.”

IF I HAD A HAMMER...

Prosper the work of our hands, O God; prosper our handiwork. ~Psalm 90

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soul Craft - a book that convincingly makes the case that the work of our hands demands and reflects as much intelligence as that of our heads - reminded me, a Christian minister, that I serve a Lord whose story is tied up with the carpenter's trade, and that the first preachers of the gospel were fishermen and a tentmaker.

Ironically, the president of my seminary used to advise graduating seniors that if we had any useful skills we should not let our parishioners know about them, allowing ourselves to be thought of as helpless as babes, laboring piously in our studies with holy books as our only tools. Because of my aptitudinal deficits, this assignment has, unfortunately, been only too easy for me to fulfill.

My brother-in-law, a fellow Lutheran pastor, is, however, a skilled woodworker who has built custom homes, crafted a bed as a gift for each of his children, and patiently instructed me in the use of the scribe, the miter saw, and various wood finishes as we've worked together to build the cabin we share. (When our children were little, whenever I embarked upon a home improvement project they would chant, “Call Uncle Jeff!”)

The cabin has been and continues to be a labor of love (there’s no other way to put it) and, along with our other preacher brother-in-law who, as an old farm boy is handy in all kinds of ways, we have built it in a series of retreats that are a hearty organic mix of theology and sawdust.

I love discussing theology with these my brothers, but it's a much richer conversation when we’ve put down our hammers or saws or paintbrushes and we're sitting in a half-finished kitchen sharing a break from honest labor over a thermos of coffee.

“It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals.” (Anaxagoras, 5th century B.C.)

Anaxagoras quoted by Mathew B. Crawford in Shop Class As Soul Craft, Penguin Press, 2009.