The Internet Monk Archives

Another Look: The IM Interview with Chaplain Mike (1)

Note from CM: Before I started writing for Internet Monk, Michael Spencer asked me to do an interview about Evangelicals and Pastoral Care for the Dying. I’m working on some upcoming posts about using the Bible in ministry and pastoral care, and in preparation I thought it might be good to revisit this seminal discussion.

• • •

Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity), Van Gogh

THE INTERVIEW (part 1)

Tell us a little about yourself, your journey as a Christian and your current ministry.

I grew up in the Midwest, in a moral, Protestant home, attending United Methodist churches. During my senior year in high school, after a move across the country that shook my foundations, I had a spiritual awakening and responded to an altar call in a Southern Baptist church, where I was re-baptized. I went to Lancaster Bible College in Pennsylvania. There, I became convinced of a call to enter the pastoral ministry. My wife and I were married after graduation, and our first congregation met in one of those historic, quaint, white steepled churches in Vermont, and there the people taught me much more about how to be a pastor than I taught them about Jesus.

After five years, we moved back to Chicago to go to seminary at Trinity in Deerfield. I was studying under some of the finest teachers in the world, pastoring a small church, our children were being born, and we had many wonderful friends supporting and encouraging us. However, there came a point after I graduated that I felt I needed some mentoring and more experience on a church staff. We also were trying to determine where we would put down roots as a family. So, when the opportunity came, we packed up and moved to Indianapolis. Here I served in a non-denominational church as the associate pastor with an emphasis on worship and music, but I also did a lot of pastoral care, teaching, and leading mission trips. Then I became the senior pastor in a sister congregation. After a rather difficult experience there, God opened up the opportunity to serve as a chaplain in a hospice program. Soon it will be five years since that journey began.

God used many past experiences to prepare and equip me for this work. In Vermont, our small church was a parish church. Because we were the only congregation in the village, I visited the sick and did funerals for all kinds of people, including complete strangers who’d had vacation homes in the mountains and wanted to be laid to rest there. We also had a significant population of older folks and shut-ins that I learned to love visiting. That was also true in the other churches where I served — I just seemed to connect well with the senior citizens. Also, while in seminary, I took my first CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) course, and was introduced to the inner workings of the hospital and how to serve patients. Since then, I have always appreciated the strong connection between medical and spiritual care.

I consider my grandmother to be one of my greatest examples for ministry. After my grandpa died rather early in life, she devoted much of her adult life to caring for her elderly neighbors, friends, and fellow parishioners. Her simple and faithful service showed me what it means to be the salt of the earth.

I have always believed that pastoral ministry is about prayer, proclamation, and people-work. As my favorite pastoral author, Eugene Peterson, says, it is not about “running a church.” Frankly, I am appalled at how these perspectives have gotten turned around in today’s church, and how little attention is given to foundational ministries like pastoral visitation. It is a forgotten art.

That is why I am glad to be in a position now where personal work can be my primary focus. Every day I visit individuals and families in their homes, in extended-care facilities, and in hospitals. My job is to enter their worlds, befriend them, show them kindness, listen to them, answer their questions when I can, and provide various kinds of spiritual support that may help them find peace at the end of life. I have often imagined that Jesus’ earthly ministry must have been like this, as he went from village to village and house to house, engaging people in their own settings, exhibiting compassion, providing healing, giving hope.

Another reason I love my job is that I work with a team of skilled and compassionate professionals who all do their parts to serve our patients and families with regard to their medical needs, psycho-social needs, personal care needs, and, after a death, needs associated with the grieving process. Hospice is a wholistic service, covering body, soul, and spirit, and respecting the processes involved in the final season of life and beyond.

1. I first thought of this interview when it occurred to me that evangelicals don’t seem to have anything close to the resources of other traditions when it comes to pastoral care of the dying? Am I right?

In my experience, most people and churches in the evangelical world have their focus on fellowship and activism. The kind of work I do doesn’t fit the model very well.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had an evangelical friend or pastor ask me, with a sour look on his face, “Do you really like doing that?” They recognize that caring for those who are seriously ill and suffering is a part of life, but it’s a part they would rather avoid and deal with only when absolutely necessary. Not a regular part of the mission, you might say.

They know how to put people on the prayer chain. They know how to make a meal and bring it to a family that is going through a hard time. If there is something active they can do, like get a list together of folks to help the family with errands or cleaning house, etc., they might be able to organize some practical assistance. These things can be quite helpful, and should not be looked down upon. However, beyond that, there’s not much in the paradigm, especially if you’re talking about pastoral visitation. And we haven’t even talked about ministering to dying people who are outside the church, which is not even on the radar of most pastors or congregations.

It certainly was not an emphasis in my education. We had few pastoral care courses in my evangelical Bible College and seminary. Nor is it emphasized in churches. I don’t know many evangelical churches that have programs like the Stephen Ministry for equipping believers in caring ministry. The more pervasive model seems to be that churches will support a parachurch ministry and expect the work to be done by them. It’s not really part of the church’s mission.

With regard to care for the dying, most pastors and people have not been taught that it is a good use of their time, that it is Christ-like and genuinely helpful, to simply sit with people, actively listen to their feelings, and not feel like you have to give “answers” or put the situation in an understandable theological framework so that folks might know the divine “reason” behind what is happening. Evangelicals don’t usually have a great deal of good language with which to pray for these folks, either, and it may be the rarest of things to find an evangelical worship service (or even funeral service) that contains rubrics for lament or recognition of grief and loss.

Don’t get me started on mega-church pastoral care. From what I’ve seen, it’s virtually non-existent.

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on evangelicals alone here. Other traditions have more experience and better tools for being pastorally present with people, but that doesn’t mean it always happens. Mainline pastors often drop the ball here too. I’ve seen many a Roman Catholic priest do a perfunctory anointing of the sick and never really connect personally with the family. One can read the most beautiful prayer from the Book of Common Prayer without feeling or expressing any empathy whatsoever. Nevertheless, I have found that pastors and parishioners in the older traditions at least understand that this is one of the things the church and her ministers should be doing.

Ultimately, in my view, this is another area where the church (at least in the white, suburban culture with which I am most familiar) has become conformed to the death-denying, suffering-averse, productivity-centered world we live in. How is sitting with the dying gonna help build my church?

2. Is a significant part of this deficit because of evangelicals’ lack of liturgical resources?

That lack certainly doesn’t help. When most of our prayers begin, “Lord, we just want to thank you for” – it signals that we might suffer from a lack of language to appropriately relate to life’s awesome mysteries. Purely spontaneous prayer doesn’t work because we simply don’t have words when we are in a situation that overwhelms us.

But why do we rely on that? After all, we claim to be Bible-believing people. No book on earth contains human expressions of sorrow, pain, anguish, grief, disappointment, anger, guilt, loneliness, or fear like the Bible. We just have to read it! But because we haven’t really internalized the Scriptures, we don’t know how to be human, we don’t know how to pray as real people dealing with real life before a real God.

Walter Brueggemann writes about “the formfulness of grief.“ One thing we learn from Scripture is that, in the chaos of suffering, we need a sense of clarity and direction in the midst of our disorientation. So, we lament. The lament form gives us a pattern by which we may express our grief, contemplate our faith, and make a way through the wilderness of suffering. We usually don’t have the words. We are too overcome. It hurts too much to talk. Appropriate liturgies give us profound words to speak when we can’t, words that in turn speak to us, give us perspective, and help us survive.

3. Do evangelicals have a model of a “good death” or does their theology move them in the direction of asking God for miracles?

Coming to grips with the terminality of a loved one is a process for everyone, not just evangelicals. The difficulty of the process also varies depending on the situation. Losing my 90 year-old grandmother is sad, but I probably would not suffer undue shock or dismay, especially if her death followed a normal course. I would be happy that she had lived a long life. I would rejoice in memories of what we shared in life together. I would be grateful that she was able to be comfortable and peaceful, with her pain and symptoms managed well at the time of her passing. Most of us would probably call that a “good death.” We would be concerned and sad, we would offer prayers for her and the family, but I doubt if we would be calling all-night prayer meetings asking God to intervene.

However, a young person, a woman in the prime of her life, a robust middle-aged man, a person who is not at peace with God or others — in such cases the diagnosis of a terminal condition throws us all out of whack. And it should. The question then becomes: What are our options at that point? I’m not sure there is a single “evangelical theology” that speaks to the situation.

Those whose tradition emphasizes miracles, divine intervention, and healing would likely view the situation as absolutely NOT God’s will and would marshal all their resources to fight the devil they blame for the person’s illness. Others would be more stoic and submissive. Some might emphasize trying to understand what is happening, looking for “reasons” to satisfy the Christian perspective. Most all people will bounce up and down on a roller-coaster process of anticipatory grief, needing someone to be with them for support and encouragement all along the way.

In my view, that is the bottom line. No matter where people are with regard to their specific reactions to end of life issues, no matter their theology or conditioned response to tragedy or loss, they need support. They need a calm, reasonable, caring human friend to sit with them, who is available to listen and support them. I have sat with families that have all kinds of reactions, and my approach has been fairly consistent — BE THERE. Period. Trust the process, rely on the active presence of God, and walk down the road with them.

6th Sunday after Trinity: Pic & Cantata of the Week

Early July Evening. Photo by David Cornwell

(Click on picture for larger image)

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Today we feature Bach’s quintessential “Lutheran” cantata, “Es ist das Heil uns kommen her,” (Salvation has come to us, BWV 9).

The gossamer sound of the opening movement disguises the fact that this cantata is the locus classicus of Lutheran fervor in all of Bach’s work, the clearest expression in cantata form of the composer’s lifelong identification with the founder of his denomination. The ‘story’ of this cantata is Luther’s story, so familiar to Bach, a progress from utter despair to hope for salvation which forms the heart of so many cantata-dramas and must have had personal resonance for the composer.

• John Harbison

We present two wondrous pieces from this cantata today. First, the opening chorus, and second, the soprano/alto duet of which one singer of this cantata said, “At first I thought it was the most beautiful duet I’d ever sung, but the more I sing it, our parts together, it feels very important and permanent.”

These are the more “positive” movements of the cantata, reveling in having been justified by faith in Christ. The other pieces between focus on human inability to keep the Law and our need for Someone to save us.

Soli Deo Gloria!

•

It is our salvation come here to us,
full of grace and pure goodness.
Deeds can never help,
they cannot protect us.
Faith beholds Jesus Christ,
He has done enough for us all,
He has become the Intercessor.

•

Lord, you behold, instead of good works,
the heart’s strength of faith,
only faith do You receive.
Only faith justifies,
all else appears too meager
to be able to help us.

• • •

Photo by David Cornwell at Flickr.

The IM Saturday Brunch: July 22, 2017 — Summer Pleasures Edition

THE INTERNET MONK SATURDAY BRUNCH

”It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”

SUMMER PLEASURES

Today around the Brunch table, I’d like to have a discussion about the good ol’ summertime. Though I’m more of an autumn aficionado, summer carries pleasures that are wondrous and fair. And today, I’d like to ask us to participate in a conversation about some of our favorite summer pleasures. At the end, I’ve posted some summer music for your enjoyment.

So, let’s begin. Going around the table, share your own personal answers to these questions or to others that come to mind, if you like.

• • •

SUMMER FOOD AND DRINK

What foods do you especially enjoy in the summer months? Do you have some favorite recipes or ways of preparing those foods that you’d like to pass along? Charcoal grill or gas? In your part of the world, what’s coming out of your gardens and showing up at your farm stands these days that you can’t resist?

Also, do you have some special drinks that you enjoy in the summer? How do you fix your iced tea? Lemonade? Do you have favorite summer beers, wines, cocktails?

Does your church or other churches in your area hold any special meals for the congregation and/or community? What’s the hottest item at the potluck?

Baseball fans: who’s got the best ballpark food and fare?

• • •

SUMMER ACTIVITIES

What kinds of things do you like to do in the summertime that you normally don’t do other times of the year? What do you enjoy doing with your family? your friends? by yourself?

Does your community hold any special summer events that you like to participate in? Is the place where you live a good place for walking? biking? Do you have well tended parks people enjoy in the summer? Do you have access to outdoor concerts? art fairs? county or state fairs?

Do you have a front porch? a deck? Do you make good use of them in the summer? How?

Any special hobbies or avocations you give special attention to in the summertime?

Does your church or another local ministry have special summer activities, service projects, mission trips, or other activities in which you like to participate?

• • •

SUMMER READING

Do you make a “summer reading” list? What kinds of books do you like to read in the summer?

If you made a list this year, what are some of the books on it? How are you progressing?

Can you give us a quick summary of something you’re reading this summer (doesn’t have to be a book) that has been satisfying and enjoyable to you?

• • •

SUMMER TRAVELS

In many places, summer is the season for travels and vacations. What was your most memorable summer vacation?

Are you going on any trips this summer? If so, tell us about them.

Do you have some favorite places that you return to time and again? Mountains, woods, or beach? Famous landmarks or out of the way places? City or country? Any good state parks or recreation areas in your neck of the woods that you enjoy in the summer?

Are you a camper? Tent, pop-up, or full-scale RV? Or is your idea of camping a nice hotel room with a view of the woods and the lake?

Do you like to drive when you take these trips? Fly? Train? Boat? Bus? Do you enjoy cruising? Where have you been and where would you like to go?

• • •

SUMMER MUSIC

What music says “summertime” to you? Are there particular artists, albums, songs, or works that complement the summer spirit in your heart?

What’s on your playlist this summer? Anything new that you are enjoying this summer?

Below, I present some of my favorite summer music from the classical, jazz, and pop genres. I hope you will enjoy them and experience a bit of whatever “summer” means to you in listening to them.

SUMMERY CLASSICS:

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart

I enjoy light and carefree classics in the summer. Summer to me is Mozart and Vivaldi, serenades and dances, pops concerts, water music and fireworks. Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik is a serenade, which means it was written to be played outdoors at times in parks and public gathering places. This piece is so popular and well known that I thought I’d put up a specialized example of it. Here is a delightful guitar version of the allegro movement by Amicus Trio:

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Rodeo, Copland

Summer music in America is not complete without Aaron Copland. Here is “Saturday Night Waltz,” one of four Dance Episodes from Rodeo. This is quintessential summer in the American West.

•

Une barque sur l’ocean, Ravel

Finally, here is a perfect piano piece by Ravel for relaxing on a starlit evening, overlooking ocean waves at the shore.

• • •

SUMMERY JAZZ

Summertime (Gershwin), Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald

One of the most covered songs in history is Gershwin’s Summertime. For you today, we can’t do much better than the rendition by this duo that pretty much defined jazz and popular music in the 20th century for many people.

•

The Girl from Ipanema, Getz/Gilbero

This familiar beach song is from one of the most notable jazz albums in my lifetime. The album won the 1965 Grammy Awards for Best Album of the Year, Best Jazz Instrumental Album – Individual or Group, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. This was the first time a jazz album received Album of the Year, and it was the only one to win the award until 2008. This song, “The Girl from Ipanema,” also won the award for Record of the Year in 1965. This was the sound of summer when I was growing up.

•

Stella by Starlight, Miles Davis

Summer is also the time for steamy, starlight nights, and who better to catch that vibe than Miles Davis and the musicians who would produce what many consider the greatest jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue. “Stella by Starlight” is included on some of the later editions of that record. One jazz publication placed this song in the top ten jazz standards of all time.

•

Beat 70, Pat Metheny

Pat Metheny is my favorite contemporary jazz musician. And much of his music, with its Brazilian influences, exudes summertime freedom and joy. Here is one of those songs, “Beat 70,” from the album, “Letter from Home.”

• • •

SUMMERY POP SOUNDS:

Goodbye Soleil, Phoenix

I’m not going to begin to roll out all the pop music that is suitable for summer. I mean, just start with the Beach Boys and go from there, right? So, instead, I’ll give you my pick for this year’s best summer album. It’s by the French band Phoenix, and it’s called “Ti Amo.” Here’s the Rolling Stone review.

The band’s press release said of this record that it represents “our European, Latin roots, a fantasized version of Italy”, and that the songs focus on “simple, pure emotions: love, desire, lust, and innocence”. Guitarist Laurent Brancowitz commented that the album recalls “summer and Italian discos.” Shimmering synth sounds, airy melodies, and infectious, happy beats make this the perfect summer album when riding down the road, wind in your hair.

Here is Phoenix’s video for the song, “Goodbye Soleil,” which captures perfectly the playfulness of a European holiday at the shore.

Happy summer!

Friday with Michael Spencer: Some “Culture” Quotes

Note from CM: In the light of another wave of evangelical culture war angst regarding the LGBTQ discussion, I thought a few direct and common sense thoughts from Michael Spencer might be in order today.

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Picking and Choosing the Sins We Hate

Where I live, our community is ravaged by poverty. Visible poverty is everywhere, much of it of the kind that would shock and sicken the typical suburban adult. There is a plague of meth and other drugs. Federal drug enforcement has the former mayor of our county seat under lock and key. We have DEA in the air half the year. Domestic abuse, incest, fraud, stealing: they are all rampant and we all drive past them every day. We see some of the problems up close in the lives and families of our students.

But when Tim Hardaway [a public sports celebrity at the time] says, “I hate gays,” it strikes a chord in many Christians, because we hate homosexuality in a way we don’t hate poverty, racism, the neglect of children, government corruption, and the violence that surrounds us. We’ve allowed ourselves to feel the hatred of one sin that offends us, while we’ve thrown the blanket of denial and minimizing over our true character.

• Tim Hardaway and the Sin We Love to Hate

• • •

The Virtue of Minding Your Own Business

I don’t like the way this subject [of LGBTQ matters] pulls itself apart, and I definitely don’t like the way Christians rush to predictable camps. I am like a lot of evangelicals in saying that I have very few questions about what the Bible teaches on the subject of sexuality. But I also have very few questions on the subject of how the Bible counsels me to view the sin of another person. In fact, I believe the Bible gives us a much unheeded admonition in this matter:

Don’t be a busy-body. Mind your own business. Tend to your own concerns. Don’t be shocked at the world. Don’t so condemn the world that it doesn’t look like you aren’t a human being yourself. Follow Christ yourself first, and be less concerned about how someone else is not following him.

…In other words, you can believe everything the Bible says on this subject, but the real question is how do you live next to, work with, serve and relate to the gay persons in your life?

So now I’m going to make someone really mad, but I don’t care: While you are allowed to have your convictions on the morality of human conduct, you are to keep your nose out of your neighbor’s business. What your neighbor is doing may be immoral, but it’s not your problem and it’s not your responsibility. “Love your neighbor as yourself” does not have fine print giving you permission to be a moral policeman in the bedrooms of people whose choices about sex differ from yours and mine.

…I don’t have to accept or endorse anything to be his friend, neighbor or fellow human being. I don’t have to oppose everything a homosexual does in life to say I believe the Bible is clear on this subject. But what he does, in his life, and how he lives before God is not my business. I respect his right to live before God and his own conscience. I am not (normally) called to violate the sanctity of another person’s moral competency, especially if their behavior is outside of my immediate family and children, and isn’t illegal.

• The Nosey Evangelical Neighborhood

• • •

“Culture War” Christianity Betrays Spiritual Emptiness

I am suggesting, therefore, that the increasing interest in the culture war among evangelicals is not an example of a reinvigorated evangelicalism remaking its culture. Instead, I believe the intense focus by evangelicals on political and cultural issues is evidence of a spiritually empty and unformed evangelicalism being led by short-sighted leaders toward a mistaken version of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The Culture War makes sense to Christians who have little or no idea how to be Christians in this culture except to oppose liberals and fight for a conservative political and social agenda- an agenda often less than completely examined in the light of scripture, reason, tradition and experience. Those evangelicals- like Greg Boyd- who have challenged or broken the identification with the political right can testify to how they are immediately viewed. Dissenting evangelicals are labeled as pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro- Democrat instantly. The rhetoric of the culture warriors is relentless in associating dissenting evangelicals of every kind with the issues of abortion and homosexuality. No one could be blamed for believing that evangelicalism was a modestly spiritual movement with the goal of banning abortion and gay marriage.

• • •

2 Suggestions about the Role of Christians in the Culture

My first suggestion is that evangelicals find ways to take the posture of servants, rather than victims, within culture. We are paying a price for the culture war rhetoric that has been embraced by the church. Many of our fellow Americans are convinced that we are a militant movement with the goal of political domination. They hear us speaking of them as the enemy. We need to reverse this, and confess that God has put us here to be witnesses and servants in any way that promotes the gospel.

The second suggestion is that we take another look at culture and realize it is not identical with all the negative connotations of “world.” Ed Stetzer has reminded us that culture is the house our neighbors live in, and the rhetoric of burning down a house rarely accomplishes very much. A stronger belief in common grace, a more consistent look for common ground, and a frequent celebration of our common humanity could all be helpful in living as strangers, but not enemies, with those in our surrounding culture.

• Evangelical Anxieties 6: Culture

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science. A review of the book by Mike “Science Mike” McHargue. Part 3.

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

• Part 3

• • •

For 2 years Mike maintained a façade that he was still a Christian. Why did he do that? Both Christian and atheist might be tempted to view Mike contemptuously for his cowardly duplicity. But is such a harsh judgement really just or humane? I think not. And here’s why. In Mike’s sub-culture and society there is no provision for honest questioning. His whole life was bound up in family, extended family, friends, co-workers, and church. The benefits of an evangelical faith is that the church becomes community, and in a very real sense, extended family. That, in and of itself, is a good thing. The problem is that evangelical-ism (and maybe Protestantism as a whole) is an ideology. Please note I’m stressing the –ism part of this equation. So the down-side of this is that rather than being just a community of people gathered around a person—(Jesus said he would build his ecclesia, his group of people. What is different about this group of people from other groups of people? They are his group of people; they belong to HIM and he belongs to them.) –they become a community of ideas.

This propensity for having the most important aspect of one’s “spiritual” life be the thoughts in one’s mind is an outgrowth of modernity. Its roots go back to movement away from classical thought to the rise of nominalism . As Father Stephen Freeman says :

In our modern notion of the world what matters is ideas, thoughts and feelings. Ideas, thoughts and feelings are the stuff that makes up what we call relationships. Thus, to have a relationship with God is to have ideas, thoughts and feelings about God. You cannot have a relationship with an object, other than having some special affection for it. The sentiment is the thing.

This nominalism was an inevitable consequence of the Protestant Reformation as well. Since Luther and the other reformers were now separated from the visible church, they had to re-conceive what it meant to be part of the “body of Christ”. Which lead to the concept of the “invisible universal church” which only exists as an idea.

What now assumed most importance was ortho-doxy, right belief, rather than ortho-praxy, right practice. If you’ve hung around in Southern Baptist circles any length of time, you heard stories of how someone who lived a “good” life, didn’t practice wrong-doing, tried to live right… maybe was even a religious church-going praying person (i.e. Roman Catholic)… died and went to hell because they didn’t believe the right beliefs. Because you can do all the good works in the world, but if you don’t have the right ideas about God, you are condemned. Doesn’t the Bible say:

Ephesians 2:8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.

So as Mike began to have questions about his beliefs there was no way he could discuss them with anyone in his church because to do so was to break fellowship. If you have fellowship around a set of ideas then to dissent from those ideas is, quite literally, to dis-fellowship or excommunicate one’s self. Especially in American evangelicalism, the tendency is to both over-intellectualize and over-individualize the faith; i.e. “I’ve accepted Jesus into my heart as my personal lord and savior.” Again from Father Freeman :

Thinking is among the most misleading things in the modern world, or, to be more precise, thinking about thinking is misleading. For a culture that puts such a great emphasis on materiality, our thinking about thought is decidedly spooky. The philosophy underlying our strangely-constructed modernity is called nominalism (of which there are many formal varieties). Its imaginary construct of the world consists of decidedly separate objects, united only by our thinking about them. There are things, and then are thoughts about things. But the thoughts have nothing to do with the things, except in our heads.

The result is the strange contradiction of living in a world we conceive of as sheer material, while only truly valuing thoughts, ideas and feelings that we conceive of as existing in our heads. I have described this in numerous articles and a book as the “two-storey universe.” We are certain of the material world, and though we only value the world of ideas and feelings, we’re not so sure that they really exist. We are indeed a troubled mind.

Mike’s other problem is endemic to Western Protestant Christianity since the modern project; and that is conceiving of God as a hypothesis of nature. Every atheist I have interacted with makes this assumption. That is why Richard Dawkins said, “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. That is why Lawrence Kraus wrote a book called “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing”, why Stephen Hawking can exult that a fluctuation in a quantum vacuum explains the creation of the universe, and why Laplace said in a reply to Napoleon, who had asked why he hadn’t mentioned God in his book on astronomy, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” This conception gave rise to “A Watchmaker God” and the whole Intelligent Design movement. The problem is that such a God is not really God but a demiurge; and there is no empirical evidence for a demiurge. Such a God does not exist.

But to those brined in the liquor of fundamentalism and Biblicism, proving that hypothesis becomes the motive behind all scientific apologetics. God of the Gaps IS the answer. It is the reason behind the rise of the distinctly modernist Young Earth Creationism movement. Father Freeman, once more :

In many ways, the answer to this question is an explanation of classical Protestant thought and the religious belief of contemporary Christians. For as Christianity began the journey away from its classical roots and into the world as imagined by modernity, what was required was a version of Christian theology that itself was disenchanted and devoid of mystery. The allegory of creation was replaced by a literalist view of the world, and all solutions were pressed into a psychological mode. Metaphysics became metapsychology – nothing more than our thoughts about the world and God’s thoughts about the world. Ideas and sentiment became the new faerie.

To help himself deal with the dual life he was now leading, Mike took to hanging out on atheist internet chat boards. There he could get the intellectual validation he was seeking. One atheist wrote him:

But let’s look at things with new eyes. Was the sunrise any less beautiful today just because it won’t be around forever? Is the time with your family worthless because you’ll die one day? Is life any less of a gift just because it’s a result of physics? So God gave you meaning. Do you still care about the needy? Do you still want to be a good father? Then do those things, make them your life’s purpose. You don’t need some God to tell you to be good—you can be good on your own. And isn’t that more meaningful? To love and to make the world a better place because you choose to? You don’t need God to make a purpose for your life. You can make a purpose for your own life—any purpose you choose. There’s no angry man in the sky to smite you for making the wrong choice, and no savior to bail you out if you screw it up. You get one life, one shot to find every beautiful sight, to help others, and to enjoy the odd series of events that allow a bag of organic molecules to know they exist. Don’t waste it.

Although Mike’s adoption of secular humanism helped salvage the bits and pieces of his former faith, he still wondered if he really needed to stay camouflaged forever. Was there a way to admit to what he believed while holding on to his family and friends? So he posted on an open reddit forum, softening his language to say he was a Christian on the verge of atheism, in case someone figured out who was posting. As he read the replies he noticed a distinct trend. Atheists tended to be empathetic. Many told him to keep his faith, if that made him happy. The Christians were not as gracious as a group. A few were kind and helpful, but most were vicious. They told him he would burn in hell; that he was going to destroy his family, he was shocked and surprised by the intensity of their anger. But that was all the data he needed to know that he had to keep hiding. He could be himself online, but in person he had to maintain the façade, or everyone would turn on him.

Of course, the one person who knew Mike the best was eventually going to catch on; his wife. At first she was angry, then she tried to evangelize him, then she considered leaving him because, to her, his atheism was putting their children in danger of eternal damnation. Finally, she agreed that Mike needed to keep this secret; an agreement she kept for all of week before she told Mike’s mother. Mom confronted him one night and the conversation went about as you would expect it to. Evangelistic pleading and apologetic arguments and finally the realization that she wasn’t going to change his mind. And so her parting shot: “Michael, I am going to pray that God will move so powerfully in your life that you can’t deny it’s Him. So you’d better just hold on.” Mike said:

Some skeptics are offended when people offer to pray for them. I never was. Sure, sometimes, “I’ll pray for you” is a passive-aggressive quip. But more often, when someone says she’ll pray for you, she’s truly saying, “I care for you deeply, and I think about you a lot. I’m going to ask the most powerful force in the universe to help you.”

Even if there’s no God at all, if a believer prays for you, it means she cares. So I thanked Mom for caring, even though I felt bad for her. Miracles did not really occur. I knew her prayer would not be answered.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for misplaced confidence.

Now usually, in stories like this, Mike’s unbelief would gradually leak out to his church and friends; like his wife and mother some would, at first, be sympathetic and try to evangelize and apologize. But eventually the coldness and distance would set in; and even if the church didn’t directly ask him to leave, the shunning would realize its effect, and drive him off.

However, this is not the usual story. It was not Mike’s descent into unbelief and atheism, but the manner of his re-ascent to faith that drove the wedge between him and his former church friends. His re-ascent did not fit the “script”. But that is a story for next time.

Ordinary Time Bible Study: Philippians – Friends in the Gospel (5)

Ordinary Time Bible Study
Philippians: Friends in the Gospel
Study Five

Note: When passages are quoted at the beginning of new sections, I will be using The Message translation because of its conversational, friendly tone. You can compare this version with others, as well as have access to Gordon Fee’s commentary, at Bible Gateway.

✥

Paul’s primary concern for the church in Philippi, as he will exhort them in 2:2, is that their love may abound [yet] more and more. Love is such a common word to us that it is easy to miss Paul’s concern. Following the lead of the Septuagint, his use of love first of all points to the character of God, and to God’s actions toward his people based on that character. God’s love is demonstrated especially in his forbearance and kindness (1 Cor 13:4), manifested ultimately in the death of Christ for his enemies (Rom 5:6-8).

Thus the primary connotation of love is not “affection,” as in the preceding phrase about Christ (Phil 1:8), but rather a sober kind of love that places high value on a person and actively seeks that person’s benefit. This is what Paul now prays will abound ( be present in an abundant way) yet more and more among the Philippian believers. The rest of the prayer, after all, emphasizes love not as affection but as behavior, behavior that is both pure (stemming from right motives) and blameless (lacking offense).

• Gordon Fee

• • •

PHILIPPIANS 1:9-11

So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.

Having greeted and given thanks for his friends in Philippi, Paul prays for them. Once again, Paul is following the standard form of a friendship letter, but filling it with Jesus-shaped content.

In his prayer, Paul focuses on the one main thing we should pray for one another: that God’s love will fill us and overflow to others through our lives. As the Apostle’s prayer puts it…

That we and our friends will be people of love.
That we will be people of overflowing love.
That we will exhibit that love more and more in our lives and relationships.
That the love we practice will be wise and understanding.
That we will practice love in discerning ways that will help us choose the best ways of benefiting others in our lives.
That the love we show will plant seeds of new creation in the world around us, and ultimately produce a harvest of lives, relationships, and situations put right in the age to come.

Peterson’s idiomatic translation puts it in simple, vivid terms:

That we will love much.
That we will love well.
That we will love sincerely and intelligently.
That our love will be fruitful, making Jesus attractive to all.

The rest, my friends, is application.

How, specifically, to practice this love is contextual to your life and mine, to our own personalities and histories and experiences, to the relationships we have, to the communities in which we find ourselves, to the seasons of life and situations in which we live at the moment.

I can’t tell you how to do that. Nor you me. But we can pray for each other like this.

I think someone once said it well: all we need is (this kind of) love.

• • •

Ordinary Time Bible Study
Philippians – Friends in the Gospel

The More Things Change…

The More Things Change…

300 years ago this week…

One of my favorite pieces of classical music has an interesting political background. In fact, it’s an early 18th century example of a politician using the “media” to advance his own popularity and diss his opponent.

Tom Huizenga told the story yesterday on NPR’s program, All Things Considered.

So what do you do if you’re a recently crowned Head of State and you’re already facing opposition—even from within your own family? One answer is optics. Make a big, public splash; throw a lavish party with A-list musical entertainment. That’s just what happened in London – 300 years ago today.

In July, 1717, King George I of England was feeling heat from an opposing political faction gathering around his son, the Prince of Wales. The King must have thought: “How can I turn the spotlight back on me?” What about a boating party along the Thames? With an orchestra!

The King’s boating blowout gave birth to a smash hit – Water Music, composed by George Frideric Handel for his majesty’s royal ride up the Thames.

“This was a new thing,” says conductor Nicholas McGegan, “to have quite such elegant and organized music in a barge towing behind the royal one, where the King sat with his two mistresses and watched the world go by.”

Here’s a description of what that day was like:

On 17 July 1717, Water Music premiered on a royal barge travelling from Whitehall Palace to Chelsea. At 8pm, the King and his companions boarded a royal barge propelled by the rising tide. The City of London provided a larger barge for about fifty musicians, who played Water Music until midnight with only one break when the king went ashore at Chelsea. The king loved the piece so much that he demanded it be played at least three times during the trip. It is said that on this night the Thames was filled with boats and the banks were packed with Londoners desperately wanting to listen to Handel’s performance.

Knowing this background will not harm my enjoyment of Handel’s Water Music. In fact, I think it will bring a knowing smile to my face when I think that even some of the world’s most beautiful music was commissioned and played by flawed humans for less than the noblest of purposes. It is so like us.

Can’t you just picture the fawning crowds? The proud, beaming king and his court waving to the throngs and delighting in his clever marketing coup? Can’t you just hear the jubilant strains of “Alla Hornpipe” resounding over the water, thrilling the people and swelling their hearts with patriotic fervor?

Media-savvy ain’t nothin’ new, huh?

• • •

Daniel Grothe: Eugene and Me — What I Learned from the Man Behind The Message

Note from CM: Thanks to our friend Daniel Grothe for sending me this. He is the Associate Senior Pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs and blogs at Edging into the Mysteries. You all know that Eugene Peterson is my most beloved pastoral hero and mentor, and I appreciate this piece from another who has learned to relish Peterson’s voice and wisdom. In my opinion, the silly kerfuffle that occurred last week says more about the state of social media and the relentless evangelical rumor/opinion mill than about Pastor Peterson. I also recommend the article by Pete Enns linked on the IM Bulletin Board for a more sane perspective.

• • •

Author’s Preface: Eugene Peterson, the acclaimed writer, poet, pastor, and translator of The Message Bible, has been the topic of conversation the last couple days. If you have not heard anything and would like a quick summary, his literary agency has a short statement here. So, I thought I would take a moment to tell you about the Eugene Peterson that I have come to know and love. This will be a three-part series, and I’ll cover a range of topics, including his recent comments critiquing megachurches with some of my conversations with him in years past that will broaden the conversation.

Eugene and Me, Part 1

Nearly eleven years ago, life changed for me. I had been on staff at New Life Church for a year-and-a-half when suddenly we lost our pastor due to a moral failure. Lisa and I were in our mid-twenties and she was pregnant with our first child. We had moved away from both of our families and friends, and now this. It was a moment of great sadness for so many people. Thirteen months later on a snowy Sunday morning, a young man stormed onto our campus with an assault rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition and killed two beautiful sisters in our parking lot before storming into our church building where he was confronted and took his own life.

As a church, it felt like we had nothing left. As a young pastor, I was spent.

One sleepy Monday morning, I walked into a Goodwill Industries store. When I go I always have to scan the used book aisle to see if someone got rid of a gem, and that day was no different. A particular book on the shelf just wanted me to find it. It was the only one I could see.

The Contemplative Pastor.

I had never heard of it, but I saw Peterson’s name on the spine. I think that’s the guy who translated The Message Bible. So I grabbed it for $.99. When I say that book changed my life, I’m not exaggerating. I had seen my parents live the pastoral vocation beautifully in front of me, but I had never before seen it articulated like this on the page. The day I finished the book is the day I wrote a letter to thank this perfect stranger who was awakening in me a fresh imagination for my work.

But I didn’t know anything about Eugene—how old he was, what he was like, or where he lived. That meant I would need to send my letter to his publisher, which I did. “If you could get this to Mr. Peterson, I would be grateful. But if you can’t, I understand.” In my letter, I thanked him for his writing and asked him if I could spend a day with him discussing our shared vocation.

Truth be told, I expected that would be the end of it.

Then one day I came home from work. I went to the mailbox. Just like I did every other day. But this day was different because there it was, the white envelope—I have it sitting in front of me on the table as I type this—with my name handwritten in the most distinct cursive. You know, the cursive a grandparent uses because they were educated in a different era, and they cared about such things. That cursive. When I looked in the top left corner of my envelope, I saw “E Peterson, Lakeside, Montana.”

Time stopped.

“Dear Daniel, Yes, I would be willing to spend a day with you here in Montana. But not so fast.”

But not so fast.

He went on: “I think it would be better if you spent some time thinking about what is involved. Why don’t you take some time to reflect on what ‘pastor’ exactly means to you. And what ‘church’ means to you. Write a couple of pages on each, pastor and church, and send them to me.”

As I’ve reflected over the last nine years of interacting with Eugene Peterson, I’ve come to think of those four words as some of the most important words ever spoken to me.

But not so fast.

Speed is one of the gods that reigns among the American pantheon. We want what we want, and we want it now. Get rich overnight. Lose weight overnight. Fix your ailing church overnight. You name it, the formula for fast is being sold by someone. Amazon Prime is the natural result of such a society, and I admit that I love Amazon Prime. But that impatience has seeped into the life of faith. We are in trouble when we start thinking a mature life in Christ comes quickly.

Eugene has become an icon of faithful presence in a world that runs on adrenaline.

Pastoral ministry is slow work. Pastoral work is inter-generational work, dedicating a young girl to the Lord one week and burying her great-grandparents the next. Pastoral work is work that takes a lifetime. Stay in one place for as long as the Lord will let you, pour your life into the people in front of you, and watch the Kingdom come. And when I get tempted to take shortcuts, I hear Eugene: not so fast.

The world we live in celebrates a lot of flashy things while hidden faithfulness is often overlooked. Eugene is a man who lived and wrote in virtual obscurity until The Message erupted onto the scene. “It only took Eugene Peterson 65 years to become an overnight success.” That’s what I’ve told all my friends. Have you ever heard of Bel Air, Maryland? Exactly. I hadn’t either until Eugene told me he pastored there for 29 years. His book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction has become the epigraph for his life and it has become the goal for many of his readers.

As one looks around the American landscape of local church ministry, it is difficult to find people who have been in it for the long haul, whose love for God and his church is still vibrant, whose familial relationships are still intact, and who are full of innocence and joy. Eugene and Jan Peterson are two people who meet this description.

Some people this week have been frustrated with Eugene for what they see as a sloppy interview and/or a muddled retraction. I can understand that. I’m guessing Eugene and his publicists were thinking this would be a routine interview for his final book before riding off into the sunset. But it wasn’t easy. And he’s slowing down. He’s almost 85. This is how life works, people.

Grandparents make their children and grandchildren possible. They carry them, pray for them, cover them in their weakest and most vulnerable moments, and see them through into seasons of fullness. Eugene has done that for so many of us. But while grandparents make children and grandchildren possible, there comes a moment when the roles are reversed and children and grandchildren must carry their grandparents. That is where we are right now.

Eugene has spent the last 60 years taking care of other people. Now it’s our turn to honor and take care of him.

5th Sunday after Trinity: Pic & Cantata of the Week

Golden Hour, Fall River, Massachusetts 2017

(Click on picture for larger image)

• • •

Today, we present an aria from one of Bach’s cantatas for Trinity 5: “Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden” (Behold I will send out many fishers, BWV 88).

Schweitzer captures the setting of this aria: “”In the 1st mvt Bach sees before him the Lake of Gennesareth, on the banks of which Jesus, in fulfillment of a certain passage in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 16:16) calls His disciples to be fishers of men.”

In painting this vision musically, Bach first speaks of God’s searching love with rolling rhythms reminiscent of fishermen out on a lake. Then, in the second part of this tone poem, Bach portrays hunters, galloping through the forest to the accompaniment of hunting horns.

This vivid piece reminds us of the God who sent Jesus to “seek and save that which is lost,” and of the joyous calling we share as his followers: to bear Spirit-empowered witness of his Lordship, love, and salvation to the ends of the earth.

Behold, I will send out many fishers, says the Lord,
which shall fish for them.
And afterwards I will send out many hunters,
who shall pursue them upon all the mountains
and all the hills and in all the rocky crevices.

• Text from Jeremiah 16:16

Saturday Brunch, July 15, 2017

Hello, friends, and welcome to the weekend. Ready for some brunch?

7 Reasons Why Brunch Is The Best — **Pull up a chair!**

I think we should start with some light fare, move to more substantial offerings, and end with some sweetness. What do you think? [Actually, that question is entirely rhetorical. The post is already written, and you can’t do one thing about it. Unless retro-causality it true. See below.]

Did you know there is an annual Comedy Wildlife Photography competition? The 2017 contest is still-ongoing, but here are a few entries so far, along with some past winners:

Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards Shortlist — **Camo Level 1,000**

Highly Commended — **Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive**

Bronze Runner-up “Nearly Got It” — **“Nearly got it”**

**How to tell if your new friend is a real jerk**

**Seeing his chance, the vampire salmon went for the jugular.**

**“A THREE putt! I’ll show you what I think of this stupid course!”**

Speaking of animals, this Labrador rides a horse better than I do:

Oh, be still my soul! Paul Lalonde, writer of the apocalyptic adventure film “Left Behind,” took to Facebook Sunday for a major announcement:

“So, it’s finally done. It took almost two years, and a roller coaster ride that I can’t even begin to describe. But we have finally put all the pieces into place to do the ‘Left Behind’ series the way it should be done. Not everyone knew it, but we have always been “handcuffed” on the Left Behind film rights, because we only had access to books 1 and 2 in the series…Now, I have officially acquired the movie rights to the entire ‘Left Behind’ series. All 16 books!”

Updating Disney? UK-based graphic artist Tom Ward feels a picture is worth a thousand words in commentating on today’s world. So he re-imagines Disney stories if they were told in 2017.

Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, you know what fidget spinners are. But did you know they illustrate the trinity? At least, that is what some Roman Catholic priests are conveying in their homily. Of course, this practice has its detractors. One thinker with the unfortunate name of Toy Adams condemns the Trinity-as-spinner analogy on a theological basis (“not to be a heresy hunter, but heresy is serious,”). “To compare the Trinity to a fidget spinner (as with the shamrock) is to commit the heresy of partialism, for it undercuts the full divinity of each person, so as to indicate that each are only one part of a three part God…The Trinity is a glorious mystery. Let’s let that be enough.”

Your thoughts? Helpful, heresy, or something in-between?

The above reminded me of this video:

Well, this is depressing: Within three decades sexual intercourse will no longer be necessary to conceive a child. Instead, parents will choose from a range of embryos made with their DNA in a laboratory, a Stanford professor claims.

Hank Greely, who directs Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and Biosciences, believes that although the reproductive technology already exists to create life outside of the womb, over time the process will become less expensive, as Quartz reported Saturday.

Greely believes that parents will also be able to select the hair and eye color for their children, and eventually even more complex traits like intelligence. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to say this embryo will get a 1550 on its two-part SAT. But, this embryo has a 60 percent chance of being in the top half, this embryo has a 13 percent chance of being in the top 10 percent — I think that’s really possible.”

Greely dismisses concerns that this will only increase class divisions, as the wealthy make their super-babies. He argues the health savings will allow the process to be free, at least in the first world. So, it will only solidify international inequality? What could go wrong?

And this is disconcerting: A study by a university in the U.K. has found that contraceptive pills, cleaning products and other household items flushed down household drains are turning male fish transgender. Male river fish are displaying feminized traits and even producing eggs, the study led by Professor Charles Tyler of the University of Exeter found, according to The Telegraph. Some fish have reduced sperm quality and display less aggressive and competitive behaviour, making them less likely to breed. The tests involved in the study showed that as much as 20 percent of freshwater fish at 50 different sites in the U.K. had higher feminine characteristics.

Imgur has an interesting infographic: The Differences in How Americans say Things:

Gallup recently released a new poll regarding American’s belief regarding creation. Surprised?

Well, this headline is interesting: Basic Assumptions Of Physics Might Require The Future To Influence The Past. In a new paper published in Proceedings of The Royal Society A, two physicists have lent new theoretical support for the argument that, if certain reasonable-sounding assumptions are made, then quantum theory must be retrocausal. Retrocausality means that, when an experimenter chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle, that decision can influence the properties of that particle (or another particle) in the past, even before the experimenter made their choice. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.

The background to this is the idea of quantum entanglement, that is, two particles somehow becoming entangled together. Quantum physics suggests that two so-called entangled particles can maintain a special connection—even at a large distance—such that if one is measured, that instantly tells an experimenter what measuring the other particle will show. Einstein disliked the notion that objects can share a mysterious connection across any distance of space. He famously called it, “spooky action at a distance”, and scientists have spent the past 50 years trying to make sure that their results showing this quantum effect could not have been caused by more intuitive explanations. Earlier this year, physicists revisited and revised the famous Bell experiments of 1964 and closed off one of the major loopholes. Quantum entanglement seems very weird indeed, but also true.

Unless…unless one assumes that retro-causality is possible.

In the original tests, physicists assumed that retrocausal influences could not happen. Consequently, in order to explain their observations that distant particles seem to immediately know what measurement is being made on the other, the only viable explanation was action-at-a-distance. That is, the particles are somehow influencing each other even when separated by large distances, in ways that cannot be explained by any known mechanism. But by allowing for the possibility that the measurement setting for one particle can retrocausally influence the behavior of the other particle, there is no need for action-at-a-distance—only retrocausal influence.

The above reminds me [yes I know its quite a different context] of some suggestive quotes from C. S. Lewis.

“Son,’he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
The Great Divorce

“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Again, I know this is a completely different context. But I have a question for you. Why can’t retro-causality in a broad sense, the idea that the future can influence the past, be at least conceptually feasible? And don’t tell me, “Well, that’s just not how time works.” I did my master’s thesis on the interaction between God and time [more specifically, on the question of whether an atemporal being could also be an agent in a temporal universe], and I learned one thing: No-one really understands time.

Wanna watch the rants of Alex Jones put into an Indie folk song? Of course you do.

Eugene Petersen was interviewed this week, and his answers about the state of the church are interesting.

I think there’s a whole part of the Christian church which operates out of fear. It’s a negative kind of gospel, which I think is quite contrary to the Gospel that Jesus brought to us. I’m not happy with that.

I do feel like pastors are not doing their job. Look at what’s going on in the church, at least in my Presbyterian church. It has a consumer mentality. It’s about what we can sell and how we can attract people to come to church.

I think the thing that’s most disturbing is the megachurch because megachurches are not churches. My feeling is that when you’re a pastor, you know the people’s names. When 5,000 people come into the church, you don’t know anybody’s name. I don’t think you can be a pastor with just a bunch of anonymous people out there. In the megachurch, well, there’s no relationship with anybody. I think the nature of the church is relational. If you don’t know these people that you’re praying with and talking with and listening to, what do you have? I feel pretty strongly about that.

Now, there’s a lot of innovation in the church, and overall, I can’t say I’m disheartened. I’m just upset by the fad-ism of the megachurch, but I just don’t think they’re churches. They’re entertainment places.

And finally, we end with the sweet. Or at least bitter-sweet. Sarah Cummins is a 25 year old pharmacy student at Purdue. Today was supposed to be the day she had dreamed of: her wedding day. She and her fiance Logan Araujo had been planning a dream wedding for two years — a $30,000 extravaganza. They had worked overtimes and weekends to make it happen.

A week ago, she called it off (she prefers not to say why), and both were left with broken hearts and a nonrefundable contract for a venue and a plated dinner for 170 guests Saturday night at the Ritz Charles in Carmel. What to do?

Throw a dinner for the homeless!

Late this afternoon around 150 people from Indianapolis homeless shelters will be driven to the Ritz, where they will share a meal with Sarah and her mother. On the menu are bourbon-glazed meatballs, goat cheese and roasted garlic bruschetta, chicken breast with artichokes and Chardonnay cream sauce and, yes, wedding cake.

Sarah, may your tribe increase.