Faith Works 7-17-21

Faith Works 7-17-21

Jeff Gill

Everything's not fine, but not so bad either

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For a few weeks, I've been asking some questions as a person of faith, with a worldview shaped by what church people call "Scripture and tradition," about whether or not things are as bad as you might think.

If you've been reading my reflections for any time at all, you know I have a running issue with the fact that, for many so-called opinion purveyors, worry and concern and anxiety and even fear are how they earn their income.

Nervous people don't change the channel. If you're shocked or provoked by "this weird trick" or what "you won't believe" you are more likely to click the link, turn the page, continue on into the story, read the second page of the three page mailer with a postage-paid return envelope. Getting people worked up into a state is how fundraisers and direct mail goobers and not a few media outlets pay the bills. So there is a huge bias towards bad news and dread invoking possibilities.

My long-time favorite example is how most people have been convinced by implication and innuendo that high school graduation rates have fallen over the last half century, when the opposite is the case. And the general case is made by quotations from antiquity on down, and by antiquity I mean written in cuneiform on clay tablets, about how the younger generation is ruder, more in a hurry, and less respectful of their elders than has ever been true. So we have a general tendency to believe these gloomy scenarios.

While I think education and opportunity and possibilities are better for more people today than at any point in U.S. history, I don't think we live in the Beloved Community promised for the end of the age. We're a long way from being as good and as happy as we could be, as I believe God wants us to be. And much of our misery is self-inflicted, which is why I hate seeing government and politics giving us more ways to make ourselves miserable. I can be convinced by many libertarian arguments, to be honest, but while I don't want to see many things made illegal, I dread the apparently inevitable advent of legal weed, online gambling, or even expanded access to fireworks let alone firearms. 

Where I think one's faith can be most helpful, and what faith communities can do when lobbying the legislature is of no avail, is to teach . . . truth. And while I get most of the email and other communications from interest groups that any minister sees, telling us how to define truth in terms of political issues and partisan candidacies, I reserve the right to define truth separately from the spirit of the age I live in, even when it's a sensibility I might agree with.

Truth, in scripture, is a simple matter of cause and effect, action and reaction. And I frame it less often than some might wish as morality as I do stewardship. Truth is that if I drop a hammer, it will land on my big toe. Yes, I've seen the video, there are exceptions: if I'm on the space station, if there's a really high wind, et cetera. But in general, Scripture & tradition are reliable as norms, and dropping a hammer means something's gonna land hard. So rather than tossing a hammer to one side, I set it down, with care, watching out for people and property.

Likewise, sex. Folks, we can talk this one to death but the reality is the spirit of our age spent decades trying to convince us all that if we could have more sex more freely we'd be happier. Forty years of pastoral counseling and I'm pretty clear that hypothesis has been disproven. The Bible teaches that sexual intimacy is fire, a flame that can spread easily and burn indiscriminately. It needs a hearth, a safe setting, a secure environment to be a blessing and not a bane.

Fireworks, sexuality, it's all a question of good stewardship to me as a preacher. There's little enough we can legislate or regulate if we don't have more individuals committed to the stewardship of the time and resources and gifts God has given us, to use with care what blesses us with the good of others in mind.

If there's anything wrong in our world today, it's not so much the lack of things as it is having more of a sense of enough. I hope to conclude with a word about "enoughness" next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if there's a good way to to know how much is enough, he'd be happy to hear it from you. Tell him how you set boundaries and practice stewardship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.