Category: General

“Christianity is just a bunch of rules.” This is a common refrain from people who have left the church or never joined. Perhaps they grew up in a church that had a legalistic mindset. Perhaps their parents used God as a threat to get them to behave. Perhaps they have never been to a church but are turned off by what they see in the media. Or, worst of all, perhaps they were cast out from a church because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Fortunately, that has not been my experience, and I hope to be one small voice working to change people’s minds about what Christianity can be.

When I was young, I don’t recall having strict rules with consequences. Well, maybe a handful of times. For the most part, my parents simply set expectations, and periodically reminded us of them. I remember riding in the car with my parents in the front and siblings in the back seat with me. Things were starting to get a little wild, with us picking on each other. My mom reached back and snapped her fingers. There was no threat—ever, that I recall—just a reminder that we were expected to behave properly. If we did, then the car trip would go well. If not, it wouldn’t.

I’ve been reading through the Bible, trying to read the whole thing in a year. (March was a little rough, so I’ll have to circle back to some chapters.) The Pentateuch, and especially Numbers, is a lot like one of those car trips. The Israelites got hungry, so God had to give them food. They got thirsty, so God had to give them water. The Israelites started grumbling, so God had to remind them all of God’s sovereignty. For forty years, the Israelites kept misbehaving. Occasionally there were severe consequences. Mostly, though, God kept reminding them that if they would behave, good things would happen; if they would not behave, bad things would happen.

But through it all, God loved them. God and Moses both got angry and frustrated, sometimes with one another and often with the Israelites. But always, they reconciled.

Easter is a time when we remember the great reconciliation. For hundreds of years, the Israelites kept failing to live up to God’s expectations. God kept sending prophets to remind them, which would sometimes work for a little while, but never for long. They kept thinking that they needed to “do church” correctly: to follow all of the rules, to make the proper sacrifices, to separate themselves from the Gentiles, and so forth. They thought in doing so, they would earn God’s favor, in a transactional arrangement.

⁶ “With what shall I come before the Lord,
    and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
⁷ Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
⁸ He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:6-8

God did not desire Israel’s sacrifices, any more than my parents wanted me to buy them gifts. God simply wanted Israel to live up to their potential, to meet God’s expectations.

God’s love is unconditional. We use the word “Father” to remind us that God is like the most perfect parent. Does a perfect parent throw their child out when they break some rule? No. A perfect parent is more like the father of the Prodigal Son: as soon as he saw his son approaching, the father ran out to meet him, to embrace him, to welcome him back. God doesn’t require a payment of any sort, but expects us to behave like the beautiful children we are. God expects us to love one another, to serve one another, to correct injustices, to comfort the afflicted, to free the prisoner. God desires not sacrifice, but love.

Christianity is not a book of rules. It is a loving relationship with the source of all existence. We cannot earn God’s love, no matter how hard we try, and we cannot earn God’s hate, no matter how hard we try. Let us strive to meet God’s expectations of us:

³¹ When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. ³² If God has been glorified in him,^[a] God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. ³³ Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ ³⁴ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵ By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

John 13:31-35

I listen to audiobooks while I run, drive, and do other mindless tasks. I listened to two audiobooks recently that form a nice pair: Calling Bullshit, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, and Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Bergstrom & West are academics; Gladwell is a journalist but, in this book, draws pretty heavily on technical research.

Bullshit is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

Definition by Bergstrom & West

Our brains have evolved to interpret the world in a certain way. Some people exploit our inability to correctly decipher information for amusement; others, for more nefarious purposes; still others fall for their own bullshit. For example, there are some students who will present graphs that purport to show some interesting phenomenon that they discovered. In reality, the phenomenon is just noise that looks interesting because they have zoomed way in. I mean, there isn’t really a difference between 0.9 and 0.899999, but if those are the only two points you have, you can draw a line and extrapolate a trend.

The most egregious cases relate to politics. Some people will take a survey or research result WAY out of context. Others simply make stuff up that has a certain truthiness. As I often say, 48.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Suppose I tell you that 447k global COVID cases were reported yesterday. Is that good or bad? Well, there are 7.8 billion people in the world, so that’s less than one case per 20,000 people. Put that way, it sounds OK. Or I could tell you that it’s less than 1/3 of the peak daily report. True, but that peak only happened on one day and appears to be a reporting artifact. Or I could tell you that it’s the same as we had on October 21. Or I could tell you that the cumulative case count is 113M. That’s 1.5% of the global population! All of these different ways of looking at the situation are objectively true, but posed differently.

So if you’re writing about the success of vaccines and asserting that we should get back to normal, you can note how far the case rate has fallen. If you’re writing about the danger COVID faces, you can note the cumulative case count—a number that can only increase. Humans are bad at contextualizing numbers, so maybe you provide a graphic—but again, different scales tell different stories. If you only show the case rate for 2021, you will tell a different story than if you include all of 2020. (You can play with these perspectives yourself on the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 Dashboard.)

Why does bullshit deceive so many people? In Gladwell’s book, he describes truth-default theory. We are biased to assume people are telling the truth. Depending on the situation, it takes an almost overwhelming amount of evidence for you to think someone is deceiving you. A prime example Gladwell gives is Bernie Madoff. It took years for people to finally accept the possibility that he was a fraud. In retrospect, there were red flags all over the place, but nobody could conceive of someone being that big a fraud.

The only way we can make sense of a world awash in bullshit is to choose who to trust. Once you have chosen your sources, truth-default takes over. Usually, your chosen sources will be people who are similar to you: similar ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic class, religious and/or political allegiance, and so forth. We set aside whatever defenses we have against outsiders and fully believe whatever an insider tells us. Thus we become susceptible to con artists, from Bernie Madoff to Jayson Blair to Steve Bannon.

One alternative is to trust nobody. Gladwell gives a couple of examples—an analyst who identified Madoff years before everyone else; police officers. But that’s no way to live. Without trust, our society breaks down. Without trust, we end up afraid of the world. Extreme cases end up recluses, unable to leave home because of their fears.

The other alternative is to trust in God. No human is fully honest—we are all sinners. Jesus is the way we can know God, and through God we can know the Truth.

⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷ If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” … ¹⁵ “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. ¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. ¹⁷ This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

John 14, selected verses

We cannot know whether a person is being honest with us. All we can do is love one another, and trust that God will be with us. We may be deceived from time to time, but that is the price of love. I believe that if we send out love, we will receive love in return. Maybe the Madoffs of the world will take advantage of us, but we will still have abundant life, a life full of love.

This week, serious allegations were brought against a colleague who I trusted and respected. I will not link to the stories about them, so as not to pile on. However, they started me thinking about our public and private personas and the nature of evil.

At almost the same time, RZIM (Ravi Zacharias International Ministries) released a statement about an investigative report. Ravi Zacharias was a towering figure in the evangelical world, a leading author of apologetics, and the founder of an influential ministry. In 2017, an allegation of sexual misconduct was made against him, which he categorically denied. In May 2020, Zacharias passed away. Shortly thereafter, three women came forward with additional sexual misconduct allegations. The report, performed by independent investigators, largely supported the allegations.

This comes just less than a year after Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche International, was similarly reported to have had coercive sexual relationships. Apparently, he followed in the footsteps of his mentor, Rev. Thomas Philippe, also a sexual predator.

So what are we to make of all of this? There are many explanations, which are certainly not mutually exclusive. One is that these men worked hard in public to do what they felt was God’s will in order to atone for sinful private lives. Although all three would have rejected the theology of “works salvation,” that is, earning your way into heaven, they may have felt that public good works would somehow relieve their guilt over private sinfulness.

Another possibility is that they sought positions of religious authority in order to exploit women. Supposedly, Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks and said, “Because that’s where the money is.” Why did Zacharias become a co-owner of spas? Because they had vulnerable women working as massage therapists. Why did Vanier and Philippe serve as spiritual counselors to vulnerable women? So they could manipulate them into sexual relationships.

Yet another possibility is that their positions of religious authority made them susceptible to temptation and to the efforts of the powers of evil in this world to corrupt them. Evil is a strange thing. Whether there are actual demons who corrupt people or not, clearly, evil is real. It leads people to all kinds of terrible actions and provides them with excuses. Perhaps Vanier and Philippe believed that their improper relationships were actually helping the women they victimized in some way. Perhaps all three felt their public good works earned them the right to a little private “fun.”

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

These episodes reveal the struggle we all have. We all have divine goodness within us. We have all been corrupted by the evil of this world. We each must struggle each day to focus on the leading of the Holy Spirit, to be the person that God wants us to be.

⁵ This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶ If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; ⁷ but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸ If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰ If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

1 John 1:5-10

God is light. God is truth. God’s light reveals our sins. We can choose to hide from this truth, ignoring God’s divine judgment upon us. The longer we do so, though, the darker our lives become, full of self-deceit. If we turn to God, though, and allow God’s divine judgment, it is followed immediately by mercy, grace, and peace. The process may be painful, but in the end, the burden is lifted and we are welcomed into God’s kingdom of peace and fellowship.

I believe in universal salvation. I believe that Zacharias, Vanier, and Philippe are, or will be, in God’s eternal kingdom. However, ultimate salvation does not deny the need for justice before reconciliation. If there is a Hell, it is the place where the dross of our sinful lives is burned away, leaving us only the beauty of God’s image so that we may enter God’s eternal presence in joy.

Ultimate salvation similarly does not deny the need for earthly reconciliation. Whatever happened or happens to these three men, there are many women that they have hurt, whose lives have been permanently changed, who have fallen out of fellowship with their Christian siblings through no fault of their own. We owe it to them all to reveal the truth of the sins that were committed against them, and to work towards a world in which nobody will be victimized in this way again.

Recently, Phelps County Focus ran an excellent article about Marie Allen. Marie is the Lead Pastor of the Vineyard in Rolla, and has been a major factor behind the success of The Mission. She is retiring from the Mission’s board of directors so that, among other things, she can focus on the Vineyard’s next big thing. But she leaves it in excellent hands. The incoming board president, Sean Harris, has a different skill set that is perhaps better suited to the next phase of the Mission’s evolution. The executive director, Ashley Brooks, is incredible and keeps things humming along as she pushes to increase the impact that the Mission has on our community and on individuals who are in need.

Ashley has been the executive director for just over three years. I have been serving lunch on Fridays for just under three years, having started just after Easter in 2018. Sometimes I think, Wow, it’s been three years already! Sometimes I think, Geez, it’s only been three years?

The nature of this form of ministry or service is that people burn out, move on, or just find other priorities. It’s hard to see people who are in such dire need all the time and not hurt for them. It also gets frustrating seeing people go through the same downward spirals, due to mental health issues or addiction or whatever. So I understand the burnout effect. Volunteers also have their own lives and own issues. Some fade away because they have health problems, or their work schedule changes, or their family needs them. Some move to a different part of the country—particularly students, who are by nature temporary residents. The pandemic has accelerated some of this churn, as many of The Mission’s volunteers are in a demographic that is highly susceptible to serious illness from COVID-19.

A volunteer organization like The Mission—or a church, scout troop, 4-H club, etc.—always needs to be building up, or else it will decay away. The same is true of any organization. In any given year, some fraction of employees will leave almost any large business, including a university. If you do not replace them, you will soon discover that you are unable to fulfill the objectives of the organization.

I worry that we, as a nation, are seeing the effects of failing to keep building. At some point in my lifetime, organizations of all kinds decided it was OK to just get gray. They failed to bring in another generation to carry on the work. Look at our political leaders: President Biden is 78; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is 70; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 78; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 80. Among Congress’s senior leaders, only Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader, age 56, is below normal retirement age. Dr. Anthony Fauci, age 80, has been the director of NIAID since 1984 (37 years). I say this not to cast aspersions on any individuals, nor to say that someone’s age impairs their ability to contribute to society. But someday, Biden, Schumer, McConnell, Pelosi, and Fauci will be unable to continue. That’s a given. Who has been groomed to carry on the work?

One possibility is that the work itself changes. I have been reading a lot about church development lately. This is probably the first time ever that there has been such an emphasis on remote participation in the life of a congregation. If church leaders continue to do things as they have always been done, congregations will die. Instead, church leaders need to address the current cultural moment. We are a society splintered as never before, but with the same yearning for connection. “Institutions” are devalued, in favor of autonomy and freedom of conscience. If we do not bring in new people with new ideas and new ways of being in community, we will fail to be relevant. The message doesn’t change—the kingdom of God is at hand!—but the methods we use to spread that message and the impact of that message on each person’s life must change.

The instructor for my class on preaching implores us to “live the story, know the story, craft the story, and tell the story.” The story is that the kingdom of God is at hand, and we are tasked with making it real in the lives of all people. Let us keep building that kingdom, by spreading the message in new ways to new people and welcoming them all to share in God’s love.

Last night, I picked up groceries from Walmart. I love it: my family and I can put things in the cart over the course of the week, and then place an order that I just pick up. The Walmart associates who do the shopping are pretty good about finding substitutions, and the ones who load the groceries in my car are always friendly and helpful. Walmart saw a need a few years ago, then ramped up their service as the pandemic restrictions further drove people to avoid in-person shopping.

There’s no doubt that my relationship with Walmart, though, is purely transactional. If they didn’t believe they were making just as much money with this system as they do with in-person shopping, I have no doubt that they would end it, setting aside all their platitudes about the safety of their customers.

I have used the same bank branch since we moved to Rolla, although they were previously Bank of America and are now First State Community Bank. When I walk in, Liz, the manager of their main operations, always welcomes me by name. (My beard makes me recognizable, even with a mask on.) Charlie, the loan officer that helped us with our new house construction, asks me how the house is, how my wife is doing, and so forth. I feel like the people there truly care about my well-being. When I need something that’s a bit out of the ordinary, they’re always helpful. I’ve seen the way they treat other customers, too—kind and caring. But at the end of the day, the services they provide are tied to the profit I produce for their branch. They care because they’re good people, but also because their relationship with me brought them additional business—the construction loan—that would otherwise have gone to a different bank.

My relationship with my employer is a bit different. Missouri S&T certainly has people for whom the entire relationship is transactional. For them, though, the relationship is always on the surface and always in jeopardy. One way to get a raise (here or elsewhere) is to get an offer from outside. Good department chairs, deans, and other administrators, though, will stay ahead of that, because once an employee starts seriously considering an offer from a different company or university, they already have one foot out the door. It’s much better to foster a deeper relationship, a feeling that the person is valued as a part of the campus community. Some administrators use that deeper relationship to exploit the vulnerable, but smart and successful campus leaders know that people will work harder and contribute more to the campus mission if they believe they are genuinely valued.

In some religious circles, an individual’s relationship with God is reduced to a transaction. One form that takes is the “sinner’s prayer”: say the right words that affirm your belief in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and you’re saved. Done. Other religious groups believe in more of a works-based salvation. My limited understanding of LDS beliefs indicates that it falls into this category. Their third Article of Faith is, “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” (emphasis added)

One group of relationships that isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, transactional is family. No matter what I do or where I go, I know that I am unconditionally loved by my parents and my siblings. I hope that my kids know that they are also unconditionally loved. Familial bonds can be strained and even broken, as all human relationships are breakable. Still, they are not transactional in the way that my relationship with Missouri S&T is. My wife and I didn’t become parents so that our kids could give us something or do something for us; we became parents because our love for each other made us want to share that love. I have no illusions—neither of my kids has any intention of living in Rolla, or even in Missouri, where they could take care of us as we age. That’s OK. Loving someone means that you want the best for them, not that you want them to do something for you.

⁴⁶ While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. ⁴⁷ Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” ⁴⁸ But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” ⁴⁹ And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ⁵⁰ For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Matthew 12:46-50

Here, Jesus implies a works-based religion: do the will of God and you will be part of God’s family. However, we need to consider this in light of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. There, Jesus described a man who rejected his family. He asked for his inheritance early, essentially saying, “Father, you’re dead to me.” This is pretty much the essence of a transactional relationship. The son is saying that he doesn’t care about the father as a person, but only as a source of wealth. Later, though, he “came to himself” and returned to his father, fearing the worst and hoping only to be treated like a hired hand instead of as part of the family. But when he returned, his father welcomed him back as an honored son.

We are all welcome in God’s kingdom, or as some would have it, in God’s kin-dom, God’s family. When we do God’s will, we are a part of that family. When we don’t, well, we’re still part of the family, just a bit estranged. I once saw home defined as the place where they can’t turn you away. Some people don’t have that sort of home in their human family, but we all have that sort of home in our holy family. Come home.

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A few program notes. As you may know, I am an elder at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. I am spearheading an effort to resume our Fired Up! informal worship service in an online-only format. I post a video weekly on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, and then encourage people to discuss the scripture in our Facebook Group. Come join us!

I am also an organizer of LGBTQ+ Rolla, which exists to advance the LGBTQ+ community in Rolla and Phelps county. We have a website and a Facebook Group. If you are LGBTQ+ or an ally and live around here, come join us!

According to a 2016 psychological study, an effective apology has six components:

1. an expression of regret for the offense
2. an explanation of why the violation occurred
3. an acknowledgment of responsibility for the offense
4. a declaration of repentance
5. an offer of trust repair
6. a request for forgiveness

The authors studied apologies that comprised just one of these six components, three of the six in various combinations, or all six. They found that all six components were needed for a truly effective apology. Three components were particularly important:

• An Explanation for why the violation may have occurred, which is an effort by the violator to affect the victim’s sense‐making about the violation in a way that might make the violation seem more understandable, less intentional, or less dissonance‐creating to the victim.
• An Offer of Repair, which may restore the tangible or economic damage that occurred as a result of the violation.
• An Acknowledgement of Responsibility, in which the violator assumes responsibility for having created the violation, hence limiting the number of alternative explanations for why the violation occurred.

Over the past ten days, many of us have been wondering what the path forward is. On January 6, 2021, a rally led by President Trump evolved into a riot, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol while Congress was debating challenges to the Electoral College votes from Arizona. Details are still coming into view, but a few facts are clear:

• There was a portion of the crowd who arrived at the rally intending to attack the Capitol. They had plans, weapons, and other equipment needed for such an attack.
• Prior to the rally, President Trump and his allies spent months saying first that the election would be stolen, then that the election had been stolen. They stated clearly that it was incumbent on Trump’s supporters to “STOP THE STEAL.”
• In encouraging people to attend the rally, Trump tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
• Multiple speakers at the rally used language about violence. From the full transcript of Trump’s remarks, “We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” Rudy Giuliani said, “But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat.”

While Trump himself did not participate in the violence, he bears some culpability for encouraging his supporters. So do his allies like Giuliani, and so do members of Congress like Senator Josh Hawley (who unfortunately represents my state).

There have been calls from Republicans for “unity.” “It is past time for all of us to try to heal our country and move forward,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. The question is, how best to achieve this healing? For guidance, let’s look at the apology steps listed above. I have seen no indication from President Trump, or any of his close allies, of ANY of the six steps.

The two predominant approaches to wrongdoing are retributive and restorative justice. Retributive justice is most familiar to us, and comes down from the ancient law of Moses and Code of Hammurabi: an eye for an eye. In modern jurisprudence, crimes are committed against the state. Criminal cases are always brought on behalf of “the people.” Offenders are punished, both as retribution and deterrence. In restorative justice, the emphasis is on restoring what was lost, both the actual loss (e.g., the value of something stolen) and the loss of harmony in the community. Restorative justice is a relatively new concept in Western law, though it was prevalent in pre-modern societies such as among Native Americans.

The most widely known example of restorative justice is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, 1996-2003. This commission was instrumental in the transition from apartheid to legal equality for all races. I had the privilege of seeing F. W. de Klerk speak on campus a few years ago. He was the transition leader, the last white president of South Africa. He spoke at length about the importance of both aspects of the TRC: truth first, reconciliation second. There is no hope for peace without both. To the extent that the TRC failed to achieve all of its objectives, the failures were primarily in the lack of truth: offenders concealing some aspects of their crimes in order to receive unearned amnesty.

The second aspect of TRC, reconciliation, depends upon repentance, the fourth component of an apology listed above. “Repentance” is commonly taken to mean a confession of wrongdoing, but actually means a turning: turning away from wrong actions, turning towards right actions. Repentance is essential for a community.

¹⁵ “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. ¹⁶ But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. ¹⁷ If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Matthew 18:15-17

Jesus counsels us to first confront an offender in private, then with witnesses, and then before the whole community. If they still will not repent, they are to be expelled for the good of the community. The message doesn’t end there, though:

²¹ Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” ²² Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

Matthew 18:21-22

Jesus calls us to repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. If a person sins against the community, our goal is to restore them to full status, full membership in the kingdom of God. If the person truly repents, they are to be welcomed back with total forgiveness, no matter how often they sin. But if they will not repent, they are to be excluded for the good of the community.

So what are we to do with President Trump and his supporters? I am willing to forgive them, despite their attack on democratic norms and the very foundation of our republic. However, there must be true repentance first. There must be all six components of an apology: only after fulfilling all of their obligations to restore what they have broken are they to be welcomed back as full participants in society. As long as they continue to assert that the election was stolen, that they were right to threaten our political stability, and that their words were unrelated to the violent actions taken on January 6, they are not ready to be forgiven. Until they declare unequivocally that they support our duly-elected new president, Joe Biden, and take actions to prevent future undemocratic acts, their calls for unity are simply attempts to avoid the bright light of Truth that must precede Reconciliation.

Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher and author of the bestseller The Power of Now. In his work, he quotes from many traditions. Just as in Stillness Is the Key, a book I wrote about recently, Tolle makes the point that all traditions ultimately teach the same thing: live in the present.

¹⁴ Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵ and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Mark 1:14-15

I often reference Jesus’s mission statement in Luke 4:18-19. That was his statement about what he would do, what we should do, and what the kingdom of God would be like. But Jesus’s fundamental message was this: The kingdom of God has come near, or is at hand. What is this kingdom?

At the time, the Jewish people were being brutally oppressed by the Roman Empire. A significant faction believed that a Messiah would come to vanquish the Romans and establish a new kingdom on earth similar to David’s kingdom. Israel would be restored to its ancient glory, with no sovereign but God.

That wasn’t Jesus’s message. Instead, he preached that the kingdom of God is here, right here, close to us, waiting for us to reach out and join it.

The kingdom of God is not in the past. What’s past is gone forever. Each moment flies by, never to be seen again. Some good and some bad happened in that past; we should learn from both and make ourselves, individually and collectively, better now because of our experiences. But we cannot change the past. No amount of wishing things had gone differently, or claiming “that’s not what I meant,” can make the past any better or any worse.

The kingdom of God is not in the future. It is not some promise that will only come true when we die, or when Jesus returns, or when the right politicians are elected. As Yogi Berra once said, “Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.” We cannot know what is coming. Remember when 2019 ended and we thought 2020 would be better? How wrong we were! Maybe we’ll be right about 2021 being better than 2020; I won’t make any predictions either way, after such a rocky start.

The kingdom of God is here and now. It is in what Tolle calls “the eternal Present.”

It’s in you. It’s in me.

It’s in us, when we come together with open hearts.

Our nation has had a rough year or so, what with the impeachment and COVID-19 and the failed insurrection. The days ahead are looking grim, too, with likely another impeachment and a pandemic that will get worse before it gets better and a growing number of believers in conspiracy theories. All we have is today; indeed, all we have is right now.

What will you do to experience God’s kingdom Now?

Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? I have, in a way. A few days ago, I went through an annual planning exercise from Monk Manual, You Are Here. The principle behind the Monk Manual is that who we are and what we do are intimately linked. If you are not intentional about what you do, it’s easy to look back on a day, a week, or a life wasted. The Monk Manual is a planner, but not in the conventional sense. Each day, you not only plan your most important tasks, but also identify what you are grateful for and ways you can give. Then at the end of the day, you identify your highlights, when you were at your best, and ways you can improve tomorrow. There is a weekly aspect to the process, and a monthly, and now an annual.

The Monk Manual is very much in the spirit of Atomic Habits, which I believe I have written about before. The principle of Atomic Habits is that goals are less important than the habits you develop that make you the kind of person who achieves those goals. Teams don’t win championships because they want to—every team wants to. They win because they develop the daily practices that turn them into a championship-caliber team.

In a similar vein, I am listening to an audiobook, Stillness Is the Key, by Ryan Holiday. Holiday writes that basically all philosophical and religious traditions—Buddhism, Christianity, Stoicism, etc.—emphasize stillness of mind, body, and spirit. Stillness is not the same as inaction. It is thinking deeply, loving deeply, and living simply.

As John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” If you don’t pay attention, your days slip away. Wisdom and joy come from living intentionally. Develop a routine that includes habits of mind, body, and spirit that will make you a better person.

The “You Are Here” exercise results in four “doing” goals and four “being” goals. That’s about right: achieving more than four things in a year requires too much division of focus. These are big goals; of course, there may be little tasks or goals along the way. For example, one of my “doing” goals is to re-start the grant-advise-publish cycle in my research program. That means I need to write multiple proposals, get one or more funded, advise several students through graduation, recruit one or more new graduate students, and get their work published. Lots of tasks, lots of intermediate goals, all building towards one overarching goal.

“Being” goals require attention to daily disciplines. For example, one of my goals is to be Spirit-led. That won’t just happen. I need to cultivate my mind and spirit to be attuned to the leading of the Holy Spirit. How? By introducing spiritual disciplines and by feeling for the Spirit’s feedback as I try things.

The challenge, as with all New Year’s resolutions, is to keep going. Starting is easy; maintaining is hard. A recent nugget of wisdom from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, was, “The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. Don’t swim upstream.” Clear’s insight about developing a habit is to make it easy, make it obvious, and make it rewarding. I am working hard to identify not only what I will do, but when, where, and how. For example, I have started meditating, but not on my own—with Headspace, an app that has guided meditations and daily reminders. The why also matters. My larger goals will keep me motivated to stick with the habit on those hard days, when I’m tired, stressed, or busy.

I know that some of my new practices won’t stick, but I don’t know which ones. Part of the Monk Manual philosophy and approach is to be reflective, always evaluating what is working and what isn’t. We have just ended a year in which everyone’s daily routine changed, perhaps several times. I expect such changes to continue. My life is strongly driven by the academic calendar, so I know that what I’m able to do this week will be harder in a couple weeks when classes begin. So be it. The important thing is to “just keep swimming,” as Dory said. Some changes are beyond my control, so I’ll just adapt.

What are your plans for 2021? How will you end 2021 as a better person than you are today?

As you may know, I am the advisor for Common Call Campus Ministry. Below is the message I shared with them earlier today.

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Merry Christmas! This has been quite a year and quite a semester, one unlike any other. I would like to share just a few thoughts with you.

The start of a new year is often a time of reflection and planning. As the pandemic rages on, such reflection and planning takes on special meaning. Now is a time to consider what is really important to you. A friend of mine, who has three kids each in multiple sports and other activities, commented that this pandemic has meant a time to rest. Her evenings are no longer crammed with running to this practice and that game. When the restrictions ease, her family will need to decide which activities to add back in. Perhaps you have had the same experience: lots of activities have been canceled; when they come back, which ones really matter?

I can’t tell you what to choose, or even how to choose. But I believe that God leads each of us to the right decisions, if we pay attention and listen closely. That means spending time in prayer and contemplation, but also trying things and feeling which ones bring life and joy. I would also assert that connections to other people are fundamental, whether to a significant other with whom you spend your life, or to your family, or friends, or colleagues, or community.

One method for finding your path is the daily examen. This is a spiritual practice linked to the Jesuits, but used in many Christian traditions. A form of this is built into the Monk Manual, a life planner that I use.

The turning of the year is also a good time to add spiritual practices to your life. Daily examen, other daily prayer, daily devotions, or daily scripture study. Weekly worship, weekly sabbath-keeping, or weekly service. Please prayerfully consider what you might add to your life that would bring you closer to God. In the past, I have used the Bible in One Year app. This year, I think I will use a different approach to reading the Bible in a year created by a fellow Presbyterian and published by Westminster John Knox Press. If reading the WHOLE Bible is too heavy a lift for you, perhaps a shorter daily reading such as UKirk Daily is more appropriate. (UKirk is the college ministry arm of the Presbyterian Church (USA).) It has a psalm and New Testament reading each day, with a prayer. It is targeted at college students and young adults.

Perhaps also you might like to change your reading habits. Patheos has a number of blogs organized into channels; I subscribe to the Progressive Christian daily update. I recently discovered RELEVANT, an online magazine about Christianity that targets 20- and 30-somethings. If you are interested in politics, I highly recommend The Flip Side, which presents both left-leaning and right-leaning opinions culled from many publications about a particular topic each day. If you’re looking for productivity and life management tips, I highly recommend James Clear’s 3-2-1 Thursday, “Working to deliver the most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web.”

Whatever you do, I wish you a better 2021 than 2020 has been. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

At a recent Common Call meeting, we discussed ideas from this blog post that contrasts conservative and progressive perspectives on the Gospel. The underlying questions are: Can there be communal sin without personal sin? If so, can there be communal reconciliation without individual repentance?

When I was young, my dad gave me a sound piece of advice: Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a big one. The specific context was career-related, but I think it applies more broadly, including to communal sin. Let’s consider the exploitative conditions that undergird Walmart’s business model. I may claim that I am opposed to the maltreatment of workers in China, or the use of underpaid undocumented immigrants in agriculture, or Walmart’s business practices that destroy smaller businesses. But at the end of the day, I decide every week to buy groceries at Walmart because they’re cheaper, they have everything I want to buy, and their service is excellent. So do millions of other Americans. In principle, I could choose not to shop there, but that would have little to no impact on Walmart, so out of self-interest, I decide—today—to accept the moral compromise.

A similar dynamic plays out in racial segregation of neighborhoods and schools. In many (most? all?) large cities, predominantly Black neighborhoods still exist for historical reasons. Sinful actions were taken in the past that established them, and now a series of individual decisions perpetuate them. Such neighborhoods tend to be poorer and with worse schools. A parent would be foolish to choose to live in a neighborhood with bad schools if they could afford to live in a neighborhood with good schools. And so, the status quo remains, or more often, the gap grows.

I think the answer to my first question above is yes. I did not create the conditions that lead to profoundly different educational outcomes between races, nor did my parents or their parents. I did benefit from them, though. So the second question is still open. Do I need to repent of our nation’s collective history? Does everyone else?

There are certainly cases of such communal and individual repentance. The example that springs to mind is South Africa. In order to transition away from apartheid, they had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. South Africans needed to acknowledge their historical sins, collective and individual, in order to live together.

As I was mulling over the conclusions from the Common Call discussion, I helped record this week’s worship service at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Something in Rev. Lou Ellen Hartley’s sermon struck me. Just as there are communal sins, there are communal fruits of the Spirit.

¹⁹ The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰ idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹ and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. ²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. ²⁴ Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵ Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. ²⁶ Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

Galatians 5:19-26

Just as each one of us bears some responsibility for the sins of our community, nation, world, and species, each one of us can be a part of the Kingdom of God and enjoy the fruits of the Spirit. It is not just an individual who has love; a community can show love, to each other and to outsiders. Just as structures of sin can be established and perpetuated, structures of kindness and goodness can be established and perpetuated. As James Clear said in a recent email newsletter, “The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. Don’t swim upstream.” The right kind of community structures make it easy to show love, kindness, and goodness, living in peace without taxing your self-control.

When Sam and I visited Grinnell, we had lunch in their cafeteria. It’s the kind of place where you pay at the front door, then go through the serving area to get to the seating area that surrounds it. The serving area itself is all-you-can-eat. When you’re done, there are several exits. While we were eating, we saw two young women come into the seating area, set down their phones, IDs, and keys, and go back around the corner to get their food. That’s trust. That’s a sign of a community where people watch out for each other, where people care about each other.

The pandemic has torn a lot of communities and organizations apart. As we rebuild, let us seek to build structures that exhibit the fruits of the Spirit, so we may individually experience the peace and joy that comes from loving one another.