Important thoughts on faith from Gary Glutting.

One of my jobs as a teacher of bright, mostly Catholic undergraduates is to get them thinking about why they hold their religious beliefs.  It’s easy enough to spark discussion about the problem of evil (“Can you really read the newspaper everyday and continue to believe in an all-perfect God?”) or about the diversity of religious beliefs (“If you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, don’t you think you’d be a Muslim?”).  Inevitably, however, the discussion starts to fizzle when someone raises a hand and says (sometimes ardently, sometimes smugly) “But aren’t you forgetting about faith?”

That seems to be enough for most students.  The trump card has been played, and they — or at least the many who find religion more a comfort than a burden — happily remember that believing means never having to explain why.

I myself, the product of a dozen years of intellectually self-confident Jesuit education, have little sympathy with the “it’s just faith” response.  “How can you say that?” I reply.  “You wouldn’t buy a used car just because you had faith in what the salesperson told you.  Why would you take on faith far more important claims about your eternal salvation?”  And, in fact, most of my students do see their faith not as an intellectually blind leap but as grounded in evidence and argument.

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Eugene Peterson on scripture’s power:

“Exegesis is an act of love. It loves the one who speaks the words enough to want to get words right. It respects the words enough to use every means we have to get the words right. Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what he says. It follows that we bring the leisure and attention of lovers to this text, cherishing every comma and semicolon, relishing the oddness of this preposition, delighting in the surprising placement of this noun. Lovers don’t take a quick look, get a ‘message’ or a ‘meaning,’ and then run off and talk endlessly with their friends about how they feel.”

“We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God’s image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomforting book. Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach. You can’t reduce this book to what you can handle; you can’t domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with. You can’t make it your toy poodle, trained to respond to your commands.”

Since the Immigration Act of 1965, the diversity of religion in America has expanded from conversations about Protestant, Catholic and Jewish teachings to basic tenets of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism (not to mention Baha’i et al). It’s important, in my estimation for religious leaders and careful observers of American culture (after all, one cannot understand America if religion is removed from consideration) to have a vocabulary to discuss this changing landscape in a way that honors one’s own tradition and carefully attempts to understand and interact with the diverse religious landscape that makes up many of our suburban and urban centers. Here are some books I’ve read recently that might sharpen your understanding of Christianity’s place in this emerging conversation.

1. Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy in America. Full of hilarious anecdotes and solid research, Prothero challenges the dumbing down of faith in American culture critiquing both the right and the left.

2. Gary Commins’ Becoming Bridges. An interesting read on what it looks like for a church to develop a mission that is exclusively targeted towards diversity. While I think Commins goes places I would not (interpreting scripture) I think his voice is important and insightful.

3. Robert Wuthnow’s The Challenge of Religious Diversity in America. The most ardent sociologist on American Religion, Wuthnow raises important theological and practical questions regarding the diversity within liberal, moderate, and conservative Christianity in the U.S.

4.  Matlin’s How to Be a Perfect Stranger. A how-to (or how-not-to) guide for engaging diverse communities of faith.

5. Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith. My favorite on the list, Tippett writes with the keen eye of a journalist and a poetic sense of a novelist. This book comes out of her work on public radio.

6. Religion in American Public Life. A collection of essays that engages persons of diverse faiths on the subject of faith in the public sphere.

Thankfully, rigid fundamentalism and naive liberalism have been exposed over the last several decades as lacking any real power. Because the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of religious expression/practice, it is incumbent upon religious leaders and thinkers to enter into this conversation in ways that represent the heart of Christian faith.

I’m a loyal KU fan. But, life prevents us opportunities to be flexible. Like this, for instance (compliments of my good friend John Pleasant). Bill Self has some work to do, Coach K is on the recruiting trail early. The note reads, “Lucas: Always try your best, Coach K.”

UPDATE: Following the sermon/teaching Sunday @ Otter Creek Church on the role of mysticism and the Spirit in the life of deep spirituality . . .

I had lunch with a friend recently who told me he’d never experienced sleep paralysis prior to me talking about it. This is one of the danger about talking publicly about very mysterious things. Once you set it in motion, like a cat, you can’t quite predict what will go down. A few others have e-mailed me with stories of strange dreams. Of course, the important question is always, “How does this experience square with the God of scripture and God’s purposes in the world.”

My favorite line came from another friend who, in reflecting upon the teaching, said, “I’m simply waiting for one guy to step up, say God gave him a dream, and that he’s going to marry the girl that no one else is dying to marry.” That is, in his experience, guys strangely have dreams about the girls everyone else would love to date/marry too. One of the signs that the revelation/dream is of God is if it dares you to take a risk and do something uncomfortable.

I distinctly remember living in a house in Antioch (East Nashville) during grad school. It was two or three o’clock in the morning. I woke up but could not move. I was completely paralyzed. The harder I tried, the worse it got. I tried moving my hands, they would not budge. I tried moving my legs, nothing. It felt like someone had placed invisible bags of cement upon every part of me except my face. Now, I understand that there’s a medical diagnosis for this: hypnopompic paralysis. Sleep experts tells us that the average person (I’ve never met an average person) will experience this paralysis at least once or twice in one’s life. What made this experience unusual for me is that during this temporary paralysis I heard a voice, not audibly, but a real voice saying, “Don’t doubt. Why do you doubt?”

There you are. This is as charismatic as I get.

I also should share with you the dream that Kara had several years back that spooked me. December of 2004—Kara and I had only been married a short time. We were living in Nashville but back in Michigan visiting our family for Christmas. During the middle of the night Kara awoke and told me she’d just had a dream about being in a strange land, in a building, with huge tidal waves coming over the building. She said she felt like it was so real it was actually happening. I listened, probably fell asleep I was listening so hard.

I rose early the next morning, a Sunday, to preach at a local church. On the way, I stopped at a convenience store to buy the local paper. Behind the counter was a television, set to CNN, covering the disastrous Tsunami that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve known Kara for almost ten years now. She’s had one dream the entire time I’ve known her about tidal waves and it happens to be the same time that the global village experienced loss and grief a hundred fold what we Americans experienced on September 11, 2001.

Some of you can relate. You’ve had dreams that feel more real than real life. You’ve had dreams that you were fighting in war and you woke up with a sore back from carrying such a heavy backpack. Or, you’ve had a dream in which a boyfriend or spouse betrayed in the worst way and your heart was still inside you though shattered into a million jagged pieces. Others of you can tell stories about recurring dreams that you’ve had since elementary school (1 out of 2 usually involves a clown but these are not dreams these are often nightmares). You know who you are. And there are more of you than most of you think.

Before you dismiss me , I would humbly remind you that dreams play a significant role in the lives of God’s servants in our holy scriptures. Dreams changed the life of the shadiest character in Genesis, Jacob. Dreams helped him to see himself for not only who he’d become but who God wanted him to be. Dreams got Joseph in trouble but they also gave Joseph an opportunity to move the cellar to the penthouse; from obscurity to the national stage (even if he was a bit arrogant about it). When God wanted communicate his most important message to a sorted, odd-couple regarding the entrance of the divine Jesus into the human plot, he did not send an official entourage, fax, memo, e-mail or Skype conference call. Nope, God sent a dream.

What I’m getting at is not necessarily dreams but what lies behind. What’s unseen is more real than what is seen? The spiritual world is just as vital to our experience of being human as the physical world that I can measure, memorize, and massage.

Acts contains an edict most of us would rather not listen to when Peter, quoting Joel, says your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams,” (Acts 2: 17).

Paul wrote, in the middle of one of his more well-known expositions on the power of love, “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known,” (I Cor. 13:8-13).

The writer of Hebrews claims, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for,” (Hebrews 11:1-2).

Jesus himself, speaking about the work of the Spirit, once told a preacher that, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit,” (John 3:8).

Mystic Speak. It’s all over The Story.