Friday, July 22, 2011

Being a jerk

A lot of Jesus' sayings will make you feel better if you apply them to your life. But the single most comforting thing Jesus said is this:

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

In other words, if people are mad at you because you're telling them the truth, you should be happy...because THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!


If you don't recognize this, it means I'm old.


 This is helpful for any Christian. If people are angry with you and attacking you because you're telling them about Jesus, that means you're blessed! Logically, the more angry you make people, the more blessed you are. So if everyone is mad at you all the time, that means you're just about as blessed as someone can get! Right?

There's no question that this theme appears through the whole Bible. Almost everyone in the Bible who tries to deliver a real message from God to people ends up getting in trouble with their neighbors and friends. Meanwhile, the false prophets who tell everyone that life is going to be just great--they're the ones who get fame and fortune. There are a few exceptions, but most of the time, people who tell their friends and neighbors about God get laughed at, thrown in pits, and occasionally killed. So when Jesus says that people who get persecuted are blessed, he's on to something.

Those of us who are trying to follow Jesus really do need to be careful about being too respectable. I've noticed that preachers--whether they're liberal or conservative--tend to preach their most hard-hitting sermons about sins that are going on outside the church. Liberals preach about social justice to people who already believe that we should take care of the poor. Conservatives preach about sex and drugs to people who already believe that they should be faithful to their spouses and never drink. None of it really challenges the people in the church...and so preachers can pretty easily avoid persecution. Wherever you are, you'll find that when you really challenge people to change their lives, you'll make a lot of people mad. So what Jesus says is clearly true.

But at the same time, we're supposed to be changing lives--all of us, not just the preachers. When we tell people about Jesus, the point isn't to make people mad, it's to encourage them to turn to Jesus. If you're only making people mad, then you're not really being persecuted for "Jesus' sake." Persecution is supposed to be a side effect of real ministry--not the only effect of real ministry. So while we shouldn't be afraid of upsetting people, we always need to make sure that we're reaching people at the same time.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

For my friend...

A couple of months ago I got started on a conversation about God with one of my friends which got dropped into the middle of a Facebook thread. She's an atheist, and she raised a question that goes back more than 2000 years, to a guy named Epicurus. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who decided that most of what people thought about "the gods" was ridiculous. He upset a lot of people, and so most of his works have been lost. I'm not going to quote him, but I think this is a decent way of saying what he thought:

If you pray to the gods, you're acting like the gods needs your help to find out what you want. If you make some kind of sacrifice to a god you're acting like the god can be bribed into doing what you want. That's  really disrespectful. We can't do anything to hurt or help a god and it's egotistical to think that anyone who's actually a god is going to spend time rewarding and punishing us for what we do on this planet.

What do you think? I'm going to share my own response to this in a couple days--but I'm also going to write some much more down-to-earth stuff.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Starting a conversation


Blogging is one of those things that I've been meaning to get around to doing for a long time. Before I was a preacher, I never imagined that anyone would want to read my thoughts about life. But now, people show up every week and listen to me talk for 15 minutes--that's about 1800 words, way longer than any blog post. When I put it that way, it's a little surprising to find out that anyone ever listens to any sermon, ever...so when someone tells me "I enjoyed your sermon," it's positively astonishing! A blog entry is a lot shorter than a sermon, and you can read it instead of listening to it. So I figured, why not?

But when I actually sat down to write something, I find myself stopping. I get what you'd call "writer's block." It's one thing to talk to one person, or even to write an article for our church newsletter or our small-town newspaper.  But blogging--putting something on the Internet--stopped me in my tracks. And it took a lot of reflection before I could see why. It's not putting ideas out there for strangers that's scary...it's putting ideas out there for friends; all my friends at once. See, whatever label you would put on someone, I can tell you about the time I've spent with someone who uses it: from fundamentalist Christian to pagan to atheist, pinko to Tea Partier to apathetic, all the way out to weird labels like transhumanist, Rennie, and Evangelical Lutheran. They don't talk to each other in person, but they can all find this online. So I imagine all those different people and try to write something that everyone can "get."

That's probably not possible...but it isn't necessary either, is it? Because this doesn't have to be about Pastor Alan sharing wisdom; it's supposed to be about us...a lot of people who have nothing in common except a belief that truth is better than deception. So while I'll be writing here no matter what the rest of you do, I really hope that we will have some real discussions—not debates in the usual Internet sense, but exchanges where people with different ways of looking at the world see each others' perspectives, and their own, a little more clearly. Let's see what happens next.