Trusted People Trust People

Recently the award winning preacher (and my lovely wife), preached about how it is that it is only when one feels loved that one can then love another person. Her example was the Beauty and the Beast story in which the Beast was only able to love the Beauty when the Beauty showed loved toward him. 

While you can listen to the entire sermon here, and I hope you do, the overarching point was that it is only when one feels loved that one can love another. An abused child will have a difficult time sharing love to others since that child had not experienced love themselves. This is what the power behind the message that "we love because God first loved us." We are able to love the enemy because we have felt loved. We can only trust when we have felt trusted.

When we were in seminary there was the pastoral care line that says,  "hurt people, hurt people". That has proven itself to be true to me. Those who are abused tend to become abusers. Those who are wounded tend to act in a way that wound others. To build on that, "trusted people, trust people" and "loved people, love people" and "forgiven people, forgive people". This is the Good News of God in Christ. You are trusted, you are loved you are forgiven which then gives you the ability to trust, love and forgive others. 

God: The Grudge Bearer

"Why does God hold a grudge?" She asked after the class read a portion of Exodus 34. 

"What do you mean?" Asked another in the class. 

She replied, "We just read in Exodus 34, ‘the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’" 

The class was silent. Everyone wondering how it could be that Jesus commands us to forgive seventy time seven but God is allowed to hold a grudge for a few generations. 

"I guess that is the difference between God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament. There is more grudge holding by God before Jesus." One of the voices stated with confidence while overlooking the supersessionism that often clouds our Christian responses. 

We often forget that the Bible is a product of the human experience and a response to evolving Hanuka consciousness. The Bible is a text in tension with itself because human consciousness is less like a light switch and more like a dimmer switch. 

I would submit that God is not holding a grudge but in fact this is a new understanding of God that is very good news to the people of the time. 

In the time of Moses, time was thought to be a circle. What happened in this life happened before and will happen again. History repeats itself and so if you messed up, then is was in part because your parents messed up, and your children will mess up because of your mistake. Therefore mistakes live forever.

It is in this world that understanding of God shifts and the consequences of a mistake are limited to a few generations. Perhaps not the most forgiving news to our ears, in the days of this original insight, this was liberating. There was end in sight for your mistakes and you were not haunted forever by your family's past. Understanding time shifts from a "circle" that repeats to a "line" that moves forward and progresses. 

As human consciousness has continued to move forward and our understanding of God has grown, it seems crazy today that God would hold a grudge for a few generations. But as dramatic as it is for us to move from holding a grudge for a few generations to forgiving seventy times seven, so too is it dramatic for us to move from mistakes haunting us forever to  only a few generations.

If you cannot forgive seventy times seven, then can you at least put a time limit your grudge or will you hold it forever? 

Worship: The Anti-Selfie

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So it turns out so far in 2015, there have been 12 deaths resulting from selfie mishaps while there have only been 8 deaths resulting in shark attacks. 

We can roll our eyes at the selfie and think that those who take them are a narcissistic bunch. Maybe that is true, but the way I see it, the selfie is less an expression of narcissism and more an expression of how we in the Western part of the world value the individual.

In the U.S.A., the emphasis on the individual has entered into the mainstream debate almost every time you encounter the news.

• Does an individual have the right to take a gun anywhere they want to, even in places where guns had historically been banned?

• Does an individual have a right to privacy?

• Does an individual have the right to refuse a public office if part of the public office violates the individual’s beliefs?

We see the rights of the individual taken to extreme examples when people walk up to celebrities and take selfies with them, without the permission of the celebrity.

In 2006 TIME Magazine declared that the person of the year was “You”.

The rise of the individual has also brought with it a great number of goods. Women’s suffrage, Voting Rights Act of 1965, freedom to choose where and how to worship, social integration, and personal responsibility are just a few ways we are indebted to individualism.

I am not saying that individualism is good or bad, but rather that if we think that the youngest generations are selfish, entitled or freeloaders because they are somehow inferior as a people we may be missing a critical point here. These expressions of the individual may not reflect a narcissistic generation but a generation that has only expanded on the values of individualism they inherited.

And perhaps because individualism is a dominant value of our time is why we worship.

At the core, worship is the anti-selfie. Corporate worship is one of the last places in the world that is designed to de-center us from our own lives

Everything in worship is a de-centering practice. For instance:

• you follow a script that you did not write

• you are invited to sing - in public - when you might not normally do so

• you do not get to choose the words in the creeds

• you do not get to choose who preaches

• you do not get to choose where every dollar we give goes to

• you don’t get to choose how God will speak to us or what God will say

And perhaps because worship is the “anti-selfie” we see a number of people of all ages who do not like worship. Even the very idea of liking worship still places the the emphasis on personal preferences and not on de-centering oneself.

The very act of corporate worship is counter-cultural in the days of individualism because corporate worship forces us to step down off our individual throne from an hour and de-center ourselves.