Notes From My Knapsack 3-31-16

Notes From My Knapsack 3-31-16

Jeff Gill

 

Seeking a Human Scale

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Spring is a time of possibilities that seem nearly unlimited: this is the year I will go to . . . we will travel . . . my garage will get cleaned . . . losing those pounds . . . finishing that deck.

 

It's only when you get into some of those projects, like painting or gardening or other home improvement areas, that you realize you needed to order those seeds earlier, you should have started sooner to prep the ground and clear the area, or that you just don't have any idea what it is you're getting into.

 

For many families, it's time for the final decision on college, and the realization that, in the end, you pick one. One. You're going to . . . a place. The options can't really be kept open past May 1.

 

We have limits, we do. And even in cinematic universes, we get the drama of characters like Iron Man and Captain America, Batman and yes, even Superman realizing that they have limits. What can be done, how you can do it, the amount you can accomplish.

 

Talking to a colleague in ministry during Holy Week, the lead-in to Easter, we found ourselves discussing what made for a "human scale" in life. As things get bigger, do they get more or less humane?

 

Corner groceries that were rare when I was a kid are no more; here in Granville I still hear about Blackstone's and other storefront grocery options. Today, even Ross Market is referred to as a "small grocery."

 

Sometimes I find myself needing to go to a big box retail to look for a product, and face that long row of stacked shelving, and feel my breath getting short, my heart rate elevating. Where is what I'm looking for? How many types of this stuff are there, anyhow, and what was it I was looking for, anyhow? Choice is liberating in some ways, but oppressing in others.

 

In a different role I play, I'm in pretty much every high school and middle school across Licking County (and not a few elementaries). I hear administrators and teachers talk about the challenges they face, and what parents are pushing for.

 

The general expectation is that a high school today needs to be one of about a thousand students, and anything short of that will be deficient, in tools and technologies, classes and culture to allow young people to gain and grow as they should to prepare for college. A thousand students, about 250 per class year.

 

My mother graduated with a class of about two dozen, my dad not much larger. They went on to college, they seem to have been and still are alert and aware and connected to a larger world. Of course, in the 1950s computers were a government project and foreign languages were often Latin and maybe French, or Spanish. Yes, I know, times change. But does human scale change?

 

Then I think about my wife's graduating class from her high school, which was larger than all of my son's high school and most of the middle school thrown in. She's a pretty humane individual. And we both went to a massive land-grant university, lived in immense dormitories, came out with our love of the everyday and our appreciation of individuals intact.

 

What is a human scale? How large an assembly, an institution is too much, or is small not as aspirational as I like to think? Or is the nature of human scale a both-and proposition, where we need to keep the parts as well as the whole in our field of view?

 

We need close, personal community to know us, and help us be known; large gatherings can take us out of our comfortable assumptions, and empower our individual abilities when taken together. Human scale may be, may have to be, both vast, and solitary; like most scales, it seeks a balance.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him where you find human scale at work at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-26-16

Faith Works 3-26-16

Jeff Gill

 

Three questions about God

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If you have beliefs about God, and try to explain them to someone else, you're talking about apologetics.

 

These last few columns were spurred by reading a book by the distinguished preacher and pastor Tim Keller, "The Reason for God." Tim does not just have a reason, he has many reasons, and some cogent reasoning for why belief in God, and a particular way of understanding who God is, can be called reasonable. Pastor Keller is doing apologetics, in the classical sense of the term.

 

But it also made me realize that in most situations where I'm asked to give an account for the faith that is in me, when I need to explain how my beliefs in and about God are what moves me, I don't have either the time for a book-length discussion, or the ability to hand over a volume and say "read that, then we'll talk."

 

So I started to ask myself "how do you do apologetics, on horseback, parson?" And I realized I tend to boil it down to three questions.

 

First, to someone puzzled as to why anyone would build their life around "an old man in a long white beard making you play harps forever when you die" (not what I believe in, exactly, but nevermind), I start with the question "do you believe there is a god of some sort?" I use lower-case there intentionally, because I'm not wanting (yet) to debate what kind of Divine Person we're talking about, but just to start with a basic issue: do you believe that beyond the here and now, from creation to a time beyond the time we know ourselves, there is an entity who is far beyond our everyday existence? Or "God." If someone's quite certain there's no such animal, and that life is all we know because it's all that's ever knowable, we're off onto a different conversation altogether (and another column series, perhaps).

 

But that's actually quite rare. Most people, in most of the world, believe in something, even a some One who is godlike, if not God per se. Okay then.

 

Second, I ask if you think this one we will call God is still actively involved in the world. There are not a few who believe some sort of Creator made and moved everything to the point of existence as we know it, but once the merry-go-round was turning, that Being jumped off. Deism, some call it, a Divine Watchmaker who set the cosmos spinning after winding it up, and has laid it aside until some future time . . . but this cosmic watchmaker isn't constantly fiddling with the works.

 

Again, when asked directly, most people leave room in their beliefs, whether unspoken and unreflected-upon, or even in careful consideration, for some form of God or the angels of God to be directly interacting with creation. God is not done, God is still creating and creative, God's not finished with me, or you, yet.

 

Which comes around to my third and mostly final question. If you believe there is a God, and that God is still interactive with creation, do you believe that God is caring and even loving in that relationship, or do you think God is capricious, cruel even, playing like a child with toy soldiers and plastic action figures on a landscape of scripted presumption? Do you believe that God is just messing with us most days, or that God loves us?

 

Tomorrow is Easter. It is, beyond question, the holiest day of the year for Christians. Yes, Christmas is a big deal, and the Incarnation – God coming into the world as Jesus – is significant, but we don't schedule our worship each week onto the day of the week Christ was born. That's why the Sabbath was shifted to "the first day of the week" by the early church from the last day: because it was on a Sunday morning that the women came to the tomb and found it empty, when Mary Magdalene learned that Jesus was alive.

 

Saturday is a day of anticipation, of expectation, of holy waiting. In some church traditions, tonight is a vigil when new members join the faith; in others, we get up early to re-enact what was going on in that return to the garden, the tomb, to tend a beloved but dead body.

 

What we really celebrate, on Easter and each Sunday, is that God is, God is at work, and God loves us. Jesus rose so that we might know that those three statements, those answers to three questions, are true, true, true.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes in God. Okay, not surprising. Tell him about what you do and don't believe at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-19-16

Faith Works 3-19-16

Jeff Gill

 

Next question, new considerations

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So we were talking about apologetics.

 

More particularly, a category of Christian theology referred to as apologetics, laying out some of the most common responses to arguments against faith in God and belief in religious propositions.

 

I was moved to consider this subject after reading a pretty solid, and lengthy volume by the distinguished preacher and pastor Tim Keller, "The Reason for God." It's a good read for those interested in a book-length treatment, but for many, it's hitting a tack with a sledgehammer.

 

Which is why I thought it might be interesting for us to break the whole subject down into three questions -- first: is there a God? Or more personally: do you believe in God? In the existence of a someone who is above and beyond our own human limitations?

 

And in fact, the overwhelming majority do, even if in a variety of constructions. But I'm not here to argue with your depiction or understanding of God so much as to move on to what is my second "apologetics" question: do you believe God, as you understand that person, is still involved in creation, in this world we live in?

 

The structure of belief called "Deism" that was very common in the century of our nation's founding was an Enlightenment era framework for a Cosmic Being who was our Creator, and the Author of Laws through which the world found its own being . . . but this form of God was described often as a sort of "Divine Watchmaker."

 

This watchmaker model and metaphor basically argued that God, or a god, may well have created the world and how it works, but this Entity was no longer involved in creation. The cosmos was built and wound up and set to working, and in the times and seasons we know, the watchmaker is not involved in any sort of ongoing, day to day basis.

 

To argue that God is still directly, personally involved in the world as we know it from day to day opens up the biggest challenge in the entire field of apologetics, particularly Christian apologetics (at least as I see the landscape of debate on all this). It's known by the technical term "theodicy," and it means this: how can a God as you define such a one, be good and just as yet still allow everything from "nature red in tooth and claw" to the death of innocents. Charles Darwin wrestled with this concern in the form of the question as to how one could believe "that a benificent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae (species of wasp) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." This is a strong question, even as many of his biographers note that Darwin was probably speaking indirectly in those questions about the painful death of his beloved young daughter, Annie at age ten, a much more personal challenge in theodicy.

 

There are many responses to this question, but Darwin still puts his finger on the problem of too quickly saying "why, yes, God is still regularly intervening and active and involved in caring for and protecting those who worship." If so, ask many, why does God not intervene and care for the helpless? How does a directly engaged God allow victims to suffer at the hands of evil, let alone through simple illness and chronic disease?

 

But there is another problem indeed in suggesting that God is so detached and dispassionate as to "wind up" creation and then step back and watch the automatons and music boxes and spinning ballerinas rotate until the mechanism finally winds down. Which is harder to account for, a God who creates but then only observes, or a God who is involved in creation but not always where and how we (part of creation as we are) would expect? It is not a simple question, but the latter is one I can work with, and am working with.

 

Which is why I can say to an inquirer: first, I believe that the world and everything in it points me to a one I call God, the Source and Savior of what has been made, and second, I believe that this God I honor and worship is still at work in creation, for reasons I but imperfectly understand.

 

This simple apologetic does not automatically answer every question, but it does give me a secure place to stand as we discuss these questions as they arise.

 

Curious about the last question in the three-part series, as I see this discussion resolving? Yep, come back next week!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes in God. Okay, not surprising. Tell him about what you do and don't believe at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 3-17-16

Notes From My Knapsack 3-17-16

Jeff Gill

 

Spring in our valley

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With the fevers of the primary season past, the patient, the body politic, can now be assessed for any lasting illness or ongoing syndromes. Are we well and truly sick, or just dealing with a touch of the electoral influenza?

 

Any patient, on reaching a certain level of recovery, will hear that exercise is best for the limbs, the heart, the body as a whole. So the best response to these last few weeks of heated in-house online overly-obsessed scenario-chewing anxiety is to get outside, under a clear blue sky.

 

This being Ohio, it's more likely to be slate grey and drizzling, but no matter. Let's get out there and stroll. Saunter, even.

 

The vistas across the hills and valleys will soon be limited, in ways we can only appreciate when they're lost to us, like so many things. The slope of ground and slightly hidden structures are going to be covered over with a blanket of green, curtains and draperies of foliage that is what we're used to thinking of as normal even though it's really only true for six or seven months at most of our year.

 

The leaves return the distant viewscape to mere glimmers after dark, of where homes are seated on hilltops and across ravines. Even as they shroud, they soften, returning the curves of the earth to the spiky and irregular terrain of wintertime.

 

Peepers are singing out, snowdrops have blossomed, daffodils are stabbing their green spades up through the mulch into the sunlight, a sort of reverse excavation into the warmth of the air.

 

Buds are popping along the branches and limbs all around the trees over sidewalks and driveways, with infant leaves ready to poke through and unfurl. Some trees have long lost all their dried brown leaves from last year, and a few await the pressure of new growth to push them off the branch and onto the ground. Non-native grasses and long-established shrubs are shedding buff and grey debris as greenish-gold sprouts and shoots are pushing through.

 

I've started to see great blue herons slowly flap their way across my intersecting path below, their distinctive profiles lifting my heart obscurely. Do they settle down into a sort of hibernation through the cold months, stay active if largely invisible, or do they migrate? I should look that up. The buzzards are here year-round, with the pickings good on the blacktop; robins may over-winter but the last few I've seen seem to have arrived from the south, disgruntled with the cold when it surges back for a night or two. Crows have never gone anywhere, or so it seems to me. Sparrows are starting to show up in the spindly forsythia behind my house.

 

Bugs are appearing, in my home, on my windshield. Bees I am familiar with are humming insistently within their hives, and there are no doubt other such colonies (yellow jackets, hornets, wasps) vibrating into new life. Mosquitos and deerflies can take all the time they want.

 

And the numbers of runners, joggers, bicyclists, simple strolling fellow walkers: their tribe is on the increase. The paths and byways have been largely lonely for months, but now they're nearly what you could amusedly call crowded. But the crowding is not much, and the added population a sign of health. In those bodies, and in the body politic generally.

 

Let's stay active, outside, observing, and above all talking to each other. Even if it's just a hello on the bike path.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County. Tell him about the spring sights you've seen at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-12-16

Faith Works 3-12-16

Jeff Gill

 

Some questions to consider

___

 

Recently I finished reading a book of Christian apologetics.

 

Hey, you relax your way, I'll relax mine.

 

It was Tim Keller's "The Reason for God," and I don't want anything I'm going to say sound like a criticism, because it's a fine and fascinating book. Keller is a preacher and pastor in Manhattan who has written a number of volumes, but this one is intended to reply to some of the more common doubts and challenges he has heard over the years he's ministered in New York City.

 

That's, in a nutshell, what is meant by "apologetics." Today that word sounds like it stands for someone making an apology, which is not quite what's intended in this context. When Paul is defending the reasons for his faith in Jesus Christ in Acts 26, before some intelligent Greek leaders, the word used for what the Apostle was doing is a rhetorical category for an explanation and rebuttal. It's the same root word as what we use to refer to "an apology" today, but then it was a method of systematically responding to an intellectual challenge.

 

Ever since, there has been a category of Christian theology referred to as apologetics, laying out some of the most common arguments against faith in God and belief in religious propositions, and explaining an effective response.

 

Keller's book is wise and thoughtful; many of you might have heard of if not read C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity," also a work of apologetics; the title comes from a 17^th century British cleric and author, Richard Baxter, who not only proposed in his apologetic writings the character of a "mere Christian" but also popularized a phrase to calm denominational storms of his day: "in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity." That pithy statement is found within one of Baxter's more than 200 books – now there's a writer!

 

All of these writings are well worth your time if you are feeling the need to go deeper, and consider in detail certain intellectual and logical claims and counter-claims. But I have to say that in pastoral work, the heart of what's being asked of me by those wrestling with the claims of faith boils down to three questions.

 

First: is there a God? It's a fairly simple question, which can be broken down in detail, but for most of us, it's a question of do you, or don't you think there is a someone or something greater than our own awareness and understanding? You may say "god" or "gods" (or "spirits" or "beings"), but the first question is: do you believe there is . . . Someone, beyond our own human limitations and finite expectations?

 

Some step out of the conversation here. Their faith, if you will, is in the senses and material forms, and when the chemical fires in a human body go out, there is nothing more. And when the Sun flares its last, that is all. Well, okay.

 

But that's a pretty uncommon perspective, I've found. Even a number of people who will say early in a conversation "I'm an atheist, I don't believe in a god" will note a little further on that "of course, I think there could be something larger, greater, I don't know, but this isn't all." Okay then, I'd say you're at least open to the idea that there's someone, some One out there we could refer to as God.

 

And in this country, at least, survey data show that of those who self-identify as "atheist" about one in five prays (6% say they pray every day), and only about 14% of those who claim that label would argue that a person who chooses to pray can't call themselves an atheist.

 

I say all of this not to mock, but at least to point out that our labels don't tell the whole story. A solidly materialist atheist might say these others are confused about the difference between atheist and agnostic, which might be so, but I'm just trying to stay on one simple question, without making it too complicated: do you believe in God?

 

Curious about the other two questions? Yep, come back the next two weeks!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes in God. Okay, not surprising. Tell him about what you do and don't believe at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.