Scots Church Adelaide

Tom Sutcliffe in The Guardian

Yet something has changed radically and cannot be restored by traditional services, hymn-singing, or resolute assertive preaching. A very large number of people today, many of them members of Christian churches, some of them Anglican priests, do not believe in the afterlife, heaven, or hell. When I die I may alarmingly discover that death is not the end. I am not an atheist, but I am agnostic about eternity. St Paul felt the promise of an afterlife made all the difference, but I incline to David Jenkins's teaching about the resurrection. Why would God, or we ourselves, benefit from our eternity? For me, much of the doctrinal edifice developed during the decades and early centuries after the crucifixion has crumbled. One life is enough for most, too much for some.

I believe God to be a powerful, dangerous, potentially crucial idea. God exists in the minds of millions of human beings. Perhaps he put himself there. Nobody can wholly agree (save in worked-out, traditional religious positions) who he is or what he or she wants. But that's the whole point. Nobody owns God. God is the discourse of our existence....

I continue to be profoundly attracted to the teaching and person of Jesus, and try to follow him as a "living lord" in my own way. He constantly provokes and challenges, as he did in his lifetime. He is, in that sense, risen again – and even sometimes, through his spirit, clearly leading our church which is his resurrection body....

We Christians can only show how our religion adds up through the way we live our lives, and through such interpretations of theological or biblical ideas as ring true. The Bible and Qur'an are there, like Shakespeare and like the theories of science, for human nourishment and freedom – not to imprison us. What matters is what we can believe to be truth. That is what sets us free. Belief systems and doctrines are not an end but a profound means. The command to love what is good and to love your neighbour promotes ideas that are not easy to reconcile. That, nevertheless, is the essence of communion.

Read on >>>> 

Andrew Browne in The Guardian called thie  article How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America in the Atlantic Monthly "long and chilling." It is. Read to remember and refocus compassion. >>>>

At home, if I say to my son “Did you use the last of the grated cheese and not put it on the shopping list?”, his reply is most likely to be “You can’t prove that!” And, of course, unless I or someone else was watching at the time, I can’t. If there was cheese in the fridge fifteen minutes before and he was the only one in the kitchen, it’s highly probable that he was the person responsible. If it’s been several days since I last saw cheese in the fridge, any member of the family except the puppy could have done it, but he is the most likely person because he uses the most grated cheese and is more prone than his sister to not put things on the shopping list. His father is also not so good at putting things on the list, but doesn’t use grated cheese except under extreme duress.

This illustration is at the centre of a short comment by my Uniting Church colleague Judy Redman. It's down to earth, and neatly expresses the reality of study about Jesus. I also like it because we've had problems with grated cheese in our house, too.  Read on >>>>

In answer to this question, Richard Beck says, "When I make these claims I tend to face howls of protest and a long list of modern sins: The Holocaust, WWI, WW2, Rwanda."

It is not popular to think we are making progress, according to Beck. He has an embedded TED talk (On The Myth of Violence) by Steven Pinker, by no means a "Pollyanna," who says that contrary to our popular perceptions the world is less violent!

Beck also quotes an essay on Moral Progress by Jonathon Ree.  Ree says in part

But pessimists too can be guilty of narcissistic bad faith. If you want to be admired for moral perspicacity, all you need do is cultivate a habit of indignation and dismay: if you can see vice where others find nothing but virtue, or degeneracy where they see improvement, or corruption where they see probity, you can become a Person of Principle at no cost to yourself, while everyone else will look like a tiresome Trimmer, an exasperating Polyanna or an impermeable Pangloss. “Men are fond of murmuring,” as Voltaire once put it; “there is a pleasure in complaining,” he said, and “we delight in viewing only evil and exaggerating it.”

I know people who are uncritically cynical of any sense of human progress. Much of this cynicism is based around ideas of a 'fallen humanity.' We don't need that doctrine to form our own cynicism; there is plenty of evil to use as 'evidence.'

Despite Beck's experience, there are plenty of folk who just know we are progressing and that this is our natural state. I would think that is our popular understanding of things in Australia. We have moments of doubt, and even of grave reservation, but basically we think things are progressing 'upwards.'

In both cases, I suspect we have deeply held perceptions about whether people are progressing morally, and that few of us have critically assessed our perceptions.

Clearly, if we wish to answer the question about moral progress we need to do some quantitative measurement of things like violence. This would not only include the obvious violence of war and massacre, but the less obvious, and even hidden violence of various social structures. We would need to investigate the effects of non-physical violence.

As a Christian, I would suggest Jesus' critique of imperial systems that we find articulated by the gospel authors is one helpful measure by which we might begin an analysis of measuring violence and evil as opposed to compassion and good.  That is not the only method or standard by which we will be influenced. It’s in determining that measure we meet an obvious problem. How do we agree on a measure?

In another article, Beck says, 

It is one of the most puzzling facts of life that intelligent people can so often disagree on important issues.

For instance, I think there are great minds who are Democrats and who are Republicans. And the issues dividing them will not boil down to either IQ or quality of argument. In spite of intelligence and sound reasoning differences and disagreements will persist.

He has reached

the tentative conclusion that much of life simply boils down to aesthetics. We find ourselves attracted and drawn to some things while being repelled and revolted by other things.

At the end of this post he says

Much of this is likely to be overstated and problematic. It is primarily offered as a sketch...

but

Let me conclude with why I think the ugly/beautiful frame is better than a more traditional good/bad or righteous/unrighteous frame.

If we frame life as good/right vs. bad/wrong we are easily tricked into thinking our current stance is True and in no need of correction. I mean, if you are right and they are wrong why listen to them? But ugly/beautiful builds in some slack. I'm not expressing the Truth, I'm expressing how things appear to me. And you are expressing yourself. I think this starts the conversation off on a better foot. We are more likely to tolerate our disagreements and work to appreciate the perspective--an aesthetic term--of the Other. Rather than arguing with people we begin, as we do with all aesthetic learning, with issues of appreciation. The good/bad and the right/wrong frames are zerosum conversations. But ugly/beautiful allows me to start with the aesthetic question: Can you appreciate where I am coming from? The ugly/beautiful frame calls us into perspective-taking and empathy in a way other categories cannot.

To read on:

Beck’s Link to Pinker etc is here.
Jonathon Ree's essay is here.
Beck's post Ugly: Part 2, Spirituality as aesthetics is here.

We love to blame the victim.  It was their fault. We do this because it makes us safe.  The universe is not random. God is not arbitrary. They deserved it! Blaming the victim means we will blame even ourselves, to protect God.  To my mind, the whole enterprise of theodicy has been undermined by a determination to keep God off the hook. If there really is an all powerful God, an outsider would be excused for thinking that God has made a rather poor effort in constructing this world. It is wasteful, vicious, capricious, and horrifyingly cruel and unfair. But rather than deal with that, many churches come down to saying, “It’s our fault. We deserved it.”  The theology may be more subtle, we’ll talk about sin, but this is its essence. We will victimise even ourselves to keep our imagining of God safe.

Whatever else is happening in the reading this week, Jesus says, “It’s not their fault.” Read on >>>>

Gordon Atkinson at Real Live Preacher:

Several people have asked me how it felt not preaching the first Sunday after I left Covenant. I took to it like a duck to water. Apparently - and this was a surprise to me - most people do not have sermons to deliver each week.... Read on >>>>

The page also links to one of Gordon's Foy stories, about the way Foy writes his sermons.  I can't vouch for how many people are quite like Foy, but we all have our own little quirks.  Read on >>>>

From the reflection this week:

Jesus laments over the tragedy of Jerusalem who will not listen. Unless Jerusalem repents and listens, ‘its house is left to it.’ This means, I think, that it will live its life in some way removed from the presence of God until it again welcomes those who bring the message of God.  (Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord is a quotation of Psalm 118, which was used as a welcoming song to pilgrims. (Fitzmyer Luke Vol 2 p 1037).

We inherit strong traditions of a vengeful God from the Hebrew scriptures.  Even Jesus is still presented in this light in many churches.  In the reading this week, it should be clear what Jesus is about.  Casting out demons and performing cures, he is on the side of the small person against the powers that oppress and destroy. In response, one such power wishes to destroy him.  This is not someone bringing us a picture of a vengeful God.  This is someone who laments over us.

I want to reflect on this at length, because our inherited reading and understanding of this text, and ones like it, is to see the closed door as a ticket to hell. We do this in contradiction of all the love Jesus demonstrates.

Read on >>>>

For Toby with love >>>>.
Is suicide a sin, or a last mercy? >>>> 
And then there are the words of Jennifer Hecht:

So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear. Hear me out....

Hecht is writing in the Boston Globe.  Read on >>>>

Tanveer Ahmend comments on the statistics and other aspects of suicide in the Sydney Morning Herald >>>>