God and Hamilton

I refer not only to the musical - which was released as a movie today by Disney Plus - but also to a book Kevin Cloud, who is a pastor, church planter, and author. He earned an M.Div. from Nazarene Theological Seminary. He has planted four successful churches in the Kansas City area and currently serves as the director of spiritual life at the Culture House, an arts conservatory in Olathe, Kansas. His site is  www.godandhamilton.com. 

With his permission, I am publishing his article as an intro to his book.
________________________________

Redemption

The musical Hamilton resonates with me more than any piece of art I have ever experienced, primarily because it teems with the most important themes of my life. Engaging these themes of grace, shame, forgiveness, and surrender through Hamilton’s story encourages, inspires, and transforms me. But above all other themes, Hamilton’s story resonates with me because, ultimately, it tells a story that I desperately need to experience–a story of redemption.

When I take an honest assessment of my life, I see brokenness everywhere. I live with mixed motives, impure thoughts, and selfish actions. When I look at the world around me, more so today than ever, it appears to be constantly assaulted by the forces of brokenness. Death, terrorism, poverty, and divisiveness seem to win the day. My own life, and the world that we all live in, both share an acute desperation for redemption.

Hamilton moves people because it reminds us of this possibility. Interestingly, Hamilton is not the driving force behind this redemption, but rather his loving, faithful, and determined wife, Eliza. She takes the brokenness from his life and makes it beautiful.

The greatest source of pain and brokenness in Hamilton’s life originated from his status as an orphan, 

a reality that haunted him throughout his life. Hamilton, like most orphans, surely grew up feeling abandoned, unwanted, and unloved, hounded by loneliness and inadequacy.

I read an article written by an orphan named David, who experienced a deep sense of abandonment and rejection, feelings he struggled with into his late fifties. Another girl whose parents died wrote that orphans grow up rarely feeling special or loved. They wear secondhand clothes, play with used toys, and rarely celebrate their birthdays. Many orphans don’t even know the date of their birthday.
I can imagine heartbreaking conversations where Hamilton shared his pain and suffering from being an orphan with Eliza. I can also imagine Eliza, as any loving spouse would, feeling a deep sense of empathy about Hamilton’s struggles as an orphan. Hamilton’s brokenness must have become her brokenness, as she carried his burden with her husband. After Hamilton’s death, and after she healed from her grief, Eliza took that hurt, suffering, and brokenness, and gave everything she could to redeem it, to make it new.

After Alexander died, grief overwhelmed Eliza. In his biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow writes, “For Eliza Hamilton, the collapse of her world was total, overwhelming, and remorseless. Within three years, she had had to cope with four close deaths: her eldest son, her sister Peggy, her mother, and her husband, not to mention the mental breakdown of her eldest daughter.” Chernow shares that immediately after the death of Hamilton, Eliza invited Gouverneur Morris, a close family friend, into the room, then “burst into tears, told him he was the best friend her husband had, begged him to join her in prayers for her own death, and then to be a father for her children.”
Eliza, in this moment, found herself completely overwhelmed by brokenness and death. She couldn’t even begin to imagine redemption. But in time, God would give her faith to see the possibility of redemption out of the brokenness. Eventually, she would take Hamilton’s broken pieces and make them beautiful.

Eliza slowly recovered from her grief, finding solace in her faith in God. “Suffering from the ‘irreparable loss of a most amiable and affectionate husband,’ she prayed for ‘the mercies of the divine being in whose dispensations’ all Christians should acquiesce,” writes Chernow. Her faith helped her to recover from the devastating loss and begin to imagine a new life.

Hamilton himself had encouraged her to remember her faith before his death. In his letter he wrote the night before his duel with Aaron Burr, he reminded Eliza, “The consolations of religion, my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.”
As Eliza slowly recovered from her grief, she discovered a new calling. She partnered with a small group of women to found the first private orphanage in New York City. Her Hamilton had suffered as an orphan his entire life; now she would work to alleviate the suffering of others who faced the same struggle.

Orphans during this era faced a brutal reality, with no good options available to them. Many orphans lived on the streets in gangs, fighting a daily battle to survive. The tenement housing district was grossly overpopulated and overrun with abhorrent living conditions. Almshouses or indentured servitude provided shelter and food for a life of hard labor and a loss of freedom, but oftentimes created structures that abused vulnerable children.

For twenty-seven years, Eliza worked tirelessly, providing orphans a hopeful alternative. Chernow writes, “She oversaw every aspect of the orphanage work. She raised money, leased properties, visited almshouses, investigated complaints, and solicited donations of coal, shoes, and Bibles.” Eliza believed that God himself had given her this calling, “My maker has pointed out this duty to me and has given me the ability and inclination to perform it.”

The work challenged her greatly and oftentimes operated dangerously low on resources. Eliza once committed to never turning away a child, whether they possessed a dime in the treasury or not. In 1813, the orphanage account fell to $60 while caring for the needs of ninety children. Yet despite these ongoing challenges, Eliza believed in God’s provision and faithfully continued her work. In doing so, she offered redemption to these children who otherwise faced a hopeless existence.
The end of Miranda’s musical beautifully illustrates Eliza redeeming Hamilton’s brokenness. The scene captures one of the most powerful artistic representations of redemption I’ve ever witnessed. The final song features Eliza singing about the different ways she honored her husband’s legacy. She considered the orphanage her crowning achievement in this pursuit. She sings about how she helped hundreds of orphans in the city, and how she sees her husband in each child that she serves. The musical ends with a brilliant white spotlight shining on Eliza as she smiles, her face radiating joy as the theatre fades to black.

The way we become agents of redemption here and now is simple but hard: we love. Eliza made Hamilton’s brokenness beautiful for hundreds of orphans by loving them in tangible ways. She threw herself into this work out of her love for her husband, and her love of God. Chernow writes, “Perhaps nothing expressed her affection for Hamilton more tenderly than her efforts on behalf of orphans. . . . Surely some extra dimension of religious fervor had entered into Eliza’s feelings toward her husband because of his boyhood.”

The work she pioneered continues to this day. The organization Eliza created more than two hundred years ago still exists, now called Graham Windham. The people of Graham Windham continue to live out Eliza’s legacy, tirelessly working on behalf of poor children and families in New York City. The families they serve live in New York City’s most severely distressed neighborhoods, ninety-five percent of whom live at or below the poverty line.

Jess Dannhauser, the current president and CEO of Graham Windham, sees their work as a continuation of Eliza’s legacy. Experiencing the musical Hamilton moved him deeply. “When Eliza sings that she sees Alexander in the eyes of these orphans, I see that as her saying these kids have great potential inside of them. That spirit is what animates our work today.”

Kimberly Hardy Watson, Graham Windham’s chief operating officer, agrees: “I find myself often wondering, what would Eliza think about what we are doing today? If she and the other cofounders had a clear understanding of what they endeavored for children, are we keeping to that promise? Are we being good stewards of that vision?” More than two hundred years after Eliza initiated this project, the brokenness continues to be made beautiful.

The cast of Hamilton participates in the work of Graham Windham. Some of the cast members participate as pen pals with children from Graham Windham. Phillipa Soo and Morgan Marcell created “The Eliza Project,” with a mission to “use the arts as a means of expression, as an outlet for personal experience, and to uplift the creative spirit.” Soo recruits other cast members to join her in teaching kids at Graham Windham acting, dance, and rap. These actors continue to tell Eliza’s story of redemption, not only on the stage, but also in their tangible acts of love for these children.

Adapted from God and Hamilton. Copyright © 2018 by Kevin Cloud. Published by Deep River Books, Sisters, Oregon. Used by Permission. 

Ash Wednesday 2020

The story is told of Sean O'Flannery, a lad who moved to Boston from Dublin. Coming home from school one day he went into an ice cream shop and told the jerk behind the counter (the soda jerk) "One scoop of yer best chocolate ice cream in four dishes!"

Soda jerks get strange requests, so he set four dishes with one scoop each in front of Sean. Sean took a spoon of one, held it before his face and loudly announced, "This is me beloved cousin eating ice cream back in the old country!" He ate the ice cream and took a spoonful from another scoop, "This is me dear friend Kelly eating ice cream back in me homeland!" The third dish he said was his favorite uncle, Finian, eating ice cream back home.

Sean raised the last scoop and said, "And this dish is for me!"

This practice went on for several months until one evening as the soda jerk was filling the four dishes Sean stopped him and said quietly, "Only three dishes today, please."

The soda jerk asked, "Did you suffer a loss and that is why you only want three scoops?"

"Heaven's no!" protested Sean O'Flannery. "It's Lent now, and I've given up ice cream!"

The word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word, “lencten,” meaning Spring, the season in which Easter occurs. The forty days before Easter constitute the Lenten season, but the forty-day count does not include Sundays. All Sundays celebrate the resurrection, and so are excluded from the forty days count. The forty days duration is drawn from the length of time Jesus spent in prayer and fasting in the wilderness before he set out on his three-year ministry.

Matthew 4.1-4: 

1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

As originally conceived by the church long ago, the Lenten sacrifice was instituted as a “means of penitential preparation and preparation for baptism, which in the early church customarily took place on Easter Sunday.”

The tradition of fasting during Lent is an early one, originally done between Good Friday and Easter morning, the forty hours that Jesus was in the tomb. Christians would partake of no food or drink at all during that time. The fast was extended to the forty days before Easter sometime between 300 and 325, and changed so that food could be eaten only when evening had come.

The idea behind the fast was to imitate Christ. In addition to fasting, Christians would devote themselves to making prayer a faithful habit. So “prayer and fasting” have been closely linked for a long time.

And that brings me, by a rather circuitous route, to chocolate.

Chocolate is an absolutely unessential food, nutritionally speaking. We eat chocolate for no reason other than it is pleasurable. Since denial of the flesh is a prominent theme of Lent, rejection of chocolate in Lent is often offered as the Lenten sacrifice, particularly by people who wish to diet anyway.

But the Lenten season is also a time we ponder and wonder about the love of God. God’s love knows no bounds or limits and was so strong that not even the prospect of cruel death could deter Jesus from his redemptive mission. While we deny the pleasures of life during Lent, Jesus denied his life itself for the sake of his love for us.

Perhaps that fact could put a different spin on our concepts of giving something up for Lent. The Lenten sacrifice is best oriented toward that which most blocks our spiritual growth. It is each to ask ourselves, “What is it that most keeps me from Christ-likeness?” If that thing is chocolate, then it is appropriate to give up chocolate for Lent. But if something else is your greatest obstacle in being more Christlike, then giving up chocolate is a spiritually pointless exercise.

The question is this: “What is the one thing that most hinders my Christian growth into the person whom God wants me to be?” The answer may not be easy, but it will always involve self-denial. We think that following Christ is hard because to obey Christ we must first disobey ourselves, and it is disobeying ourselves that makes us think following Christ is hard.

But Jesus said his yoke is easy, his burden is light. We just have to get over ourselves to do it.

As Robert Mulholland put it, “Jesus is not talking about giving up candy for Lent. He is calling for the abandonment of our entire, pervasive, deeply entrenched matrix of self-referenced being.”

If we focus on that between now and Easter Day, then we have a chance to become more mature in Christian faith and practice. It may be a habit that is out of true with Christian character that needs to be overcome for further growth. Or it may be a thing undone which must be done for deeper development to occur. The Lenten idea is for our habits to change enough in the next few weeks so that we can continue at a higher level of discipleship after Easter. The Lenten season and the Lenten sacrifice are not the points in and of themselves, the whole life of discipleship is.

Focusing on the one big thing is not the only Lenten discipline that would be helpful for spiritual development. Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, insisted that the only thing that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian are how we use our time and money. So, for the period of Lent I would suggest focusing on those two things in addition to whatever one big spiritual obstacle you might have. Some suggestions:

• Tithe all your income until Easter. 
• Devote yourself to prayer daily and attending worship every Sunday. If you are traveling, say on business or spring break, then worship wherever you are.
• Read the Bible each day. 
• Call someone you love and let them know. 
• Ask people who live alone to join you for lunch or whether you can visit them. 
• Become involved in Christian ministries.
• Re-establish or reinforce important relationships in your life.

Spiritually speaking, it is not enough to simply excise sin or personal vices from our lives. We have to replace vice with virtue. Thus, simply giving up something like chocolate for Lent is simply silly if we are only counting the days when we can start doing it again. That’s a game, not a spiritual discipline.

Lent should be a period of joyful, God-directed introspection into how we may be further united with Christ in godly love. If we make Lent into a severe, joyless, self-justifying exercise in self-denial, we have missed the point. Jesus sternly admonished teachers of the religious law and the Pharisees not to practice the letter of the law while neglecting “the more important matters of justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matt 23:23).

When a lawyer asked Jesus, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

That is the whole point of spiritual growth and spiritual discipline, and hence the whole point of Lent: love. We are to be living ambassadors from God to one another and the world at large in Christ’s name. Christ was crucified, buried and raised from the dead for our sake and the sake of the whole world. Let us rededicate ourselves to being Christ’s ambassadors. It’s Lent, after all; it’s all about love, you see, Lent is all about love.

The Methodists' coming punishment of God

Just after New Year’s Day there was national and regional news coverage announcing, “United Methodist Church Announces Proposal to Split Over Gay Marriage” (NPR), or similar headlines.

Why did this become suddenly worthy of such large-scale coverage? That the church has been wrestling with homosexuality since at least 1972 is no secret. Accurate headlines would read, "United Methodist Church leaders agree to catch up to fact that the UMC is already splitting over gay rights."

The UMC is the America’s second-largest Protestant denomination with about 7.5 million US members, and about that many around the world, with the largest foreign numbers in Africa.

The massive coverage of the latest split proposal, called “Protocol of Reconciliation & Grace Through Separation,” does not really break much new ground. There were already a few breakup plans proposed and on the table several months ago.

So, what is the situation now, what comes next, and what after that?

“Status quo” is Latin for “the mess we’re in” 

In fact, nothing has been decided and no actual actions have been taken to split the UMC. That a split is nearly certain to come before this summer is not much in doubt. But what the details will be no one can predict.

The UMC’s only body that can determine policy denomination-wide is the General Conference. Presided over by bishops, who can speak to issues but may not vote, the GC convenes once per four years and does not exist in between. It will convene again on May 5. The “gay issue” will certainly be the priority matter. Voting delegates come from the church’s conferences, which is what the UMC calls dioceses. The number of delegates is fixed; how many come from each conference is based on their membership number. Delegates per conference must be both laity and clergy.

So, what will the fight be about?

The present canon law of the UMC, called the Book of Discipline, says this:

• ¶ 304.3: The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Therefore self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be certified as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve in The United Methodist Church. View full statement.

• ¶ 341.6: Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.

This has been the policy for many years. However, a special, called General Conference in February 2019 added mandatory penalties for violations and prohibited giving …

… United Methodist funds to any gay caucus or group, or otherwise use such funds to promote the acceptance of homosexuality or violate the expressed commitment of The UMC "not to reject or condemn lesbian and gay members and friends."

That GC also adopted means by which churches that could not abide by these provisions could withdraw from the UMC while retaining possession of their real estate and buildings. Some did, but not many.

Instead, the vast majority of progressives remained in the UMC to continue the fight. This caused two major consequences:

1. Traditionalists rebelled against the never-ending infighting and started to leave the UMC individually, causing a significant decline in attendance and collections. This was amplified by the relatively smaller number of progressive Methodists who made the same choice. Progressive churches (in aggregate) sharply dropped paying their apportionments (denominational dues) in protest. Only two months after the special GC, The Hill reported, "Liberal Methodist churches withholding dues after denomination vote to ban LGBT-inclusive practices." Presently, the denomination and its congregations are financially tenuous.
    
2. While traditionalists patted themselves on the back for winning, progressives redoubled to orient on the election of delegates to this May’s GC. As a result, it is generally acknowledged that the majority of American delegates elected are clearly progressive.

Long before the “Protocol” was released on Jan. 3, clergy from one end of the spectrum to the other had concluded that some sort of split of the UMC was not merely inevitable, it was desirable.

That the new changes to the Discipline formally provided for churches to withdraw was simply dismissed by UM progressives. They were determined that the UMC itself would become fully progressive, not some church splintered from it.

The near horizon

The preplanned media campaign to maximize exposure of the Protocol with the imprimatur of the Council of Bishops succeeded. True, the Protocol is not even on the agenda for this May’s General Conference, although there are ways it can be added. Even so, that it was released by the COB in an obviously pre-planned, coordinated national media campaign for maximum coverage, compels pulpit pastors like me to understand a sobering fact: We may not be interested in the Protocol, but the Protocol is very interested in us.

Dale M. Coulter, associate professor of historical theology at Regent University, observed in First Things, that

... the Protocol does not allow local churches or conferences to remain neutral any longer. In its current configuration, the Protocol requires that a choice be made—even if that choice is not to vote and thus remain in the post-separation UMC after the dust settles. The fight will now be taken to the local level.

The Protocol simply torpedoes what might have remained of the center. The center, or what was left of it, now no longer exists. When the president of the Council of Bishops is a Protocol signatory and its first appearance is on the COB's web site, the idea that there remains sort of centrist path is shredded. It is reasonable to assume that this is the outcome preferred by a clear majority, perhaps all, of the UM's bishops. Even if some bishops think there should still be a middle way, their peers just shut them down. (Although the Council of Bishops formally endorsed a centrist plan for the UMC at the February special General Conference, which was promptly rejected by both left and right.)

That means that pastors' shepherding of congregations will be challenging, to say the least. Each pastors will have to choose a side while still pastoring all the people of the church, and the people will be choosing their side, too. Most congregations' members by far will not be unified with one another. I have known, for example, members who hold the traditionalist position but who also have homosexual immediate-family members. For them, the issue is very personal. And that puts ministers right here:

The reason is that congregants will fall into three basic groups of response:

1. Those who will leave the church because the pastor chose the "wrong" position,
    
2. Those who will leave the church because the pastor would not announce his/her position,
    
3. And those who feel so deeply rooted that they are not going to leave their church no matter what, or who simply want this whole issue to just go away - until a very progressive or very traditionalist pastor takes the pulpit in their church. Then, to borrow Robert Heinlein's metaphor, they will hoist the Jolly Roger.

Which is to say, we ministers (but not only us) are being presented with a Star Trek Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario, for which this Forbes article is useful in understanding in trying to maintain ethical leadership. It explains, among other things,

A crucial feature of good ethical decision-making in the real world is understanding the limits of your powers. You try to make choices that bring lots of good consequences and minimal bad ones, that fulfill your obligations to everyone to whom you have obligations (including yourself) — but you’re doing it in a complicated world where you must make your choices on the basis of imperfect information, and where other people are doing things that may impose constraints on your options. Ethics cannot require us to be omniscient or omnipotent. This means that sometimes even the most creative and optimistic ethical decision-maker has to face a situation where none of the available choices or outcomes are very good.

Even allowing for all that, the Protocol's basic premise that traditionalists and progressives must divorce one another is not disputed. The Protocol likely will be added to the handful of "split up" proposals already on the General Conference's agenda. For sure, no one expects “the mess we’re in” to continue post-GC.

A safe assumption is that at least two Methodist denominations will arise from this May's GC. One will be progressive/liberal and the other orthodox/traditionalist/conservative. What the actual names will be who knows, but theologically and ideologically that’s how they will be. There could be other denominations, too.

It must be recognized that individual churches will get to choose. If My Town UMC's conference votes to be in the progressive church but MTUMC's members are mostly traditionalist, then MTUMC's members will be able to vote to join another denomination. But they will still lose some members when they do. Likewise if a progressive congregation votes to leave a traditionalist conference. Not all the sheep will follow. Shrinkage is inevitable.

And then what? There will be no Promised Land for either faction.

My predictions? First, whether there will be two, three, or thirty American denominations to come out of the months ahead, the total number of all their members combined will be less - I predict significantly less - than the number in the American UMC today.

And that means, as night follows day, that both or all new denominations will be significantly down-funded from now. Staffs at the denominational, conference, and local-church level will diminish and there will be significant downward pressure on salaries from top to bottom. That means that pastors and staff who can retire will do so and those who cannot yet retire but have other options will take them. The already-over bureaucratic structure of today's UMC will not collapse, exactly, but it will shrink and probably a lot.

As for the two main denominations, let's start here: Traditionalists will fall into conflicts of their own.

A long-service colleague I know personally and greatly respect wrote of a difficulty arising from the UMC’s traditionalists forming their own denomination:

I think you're going to have a hard time defining "traditional" and arriving at a definition people are comfortable with. For some, "traditional" means Southern Baptist; for others, "traditional" means "traditional United Methodist," and still others, it means more conservative Methodist (like Nazarenes or Wesleyan Church). Some rural churches are going to have a hard time going with the conservative Wesleyan Covenant Association  because of the Nicene Creed (which is "too Catholic" for many rural UM churches, in particular: “one holy and apostolic church” and “one baptism for the remission of sins”). 

The thought that there is monolithic understanding within the “factions” is at best a myth. I can see some annual conferences considering becoming autonomous and continue what they’ve been doing for the most part. Unlike being a citizen of a country, Methodists have a convicted-but-voluntary relationship with their church.

That is exactly why a traditional denomination will be mired in bickering about a whole host of matters other than homosexuality. I have already seen a thread on a conservative UM page trying to demand that the pastors in the coming traditionalist denomination be permitted to use only two approved translations of the Bible. And whaddya know, they justified it by declaring that progressives just hate those versions! Well, QED, right?

The UM Right has been defining itself mainly by its opposition to the UM Left. Once the divorce is finalized, then what? They do not yet know and it will be conflict-riven to find out. It will splinter the traditionalists' merely-apparent monolith a lot. Purity codes inherent in religious conservatism will be fought over and will be their own source of energetic dissension. Unity there will not be.

This will further cause church members to vote with their feet, accelerating the decline of Methodism in America. The Baptists, however, will probably be very grateful. And then there was this posted by a friend I have known since before the internet:

Went to a Catholic funeral. At the supper I mentioned how beautiful their church was.
The answer was, "Beautiful yes, but it takes a lot of money for upkeep. We couldn't afford it if it were not for all the Protestants that are converting."

That will continue.

This is not to say that the progressive UM church will be all unicorns and rainbows.

Progressives, whether religious or political, simply must have an enemy. There is always an oppressor who must be subdued, always and -ism to be overcome, always a class war that must be fought.

So, after a fully-progressive UM church is formed there will be a period of sweetness and light, and then the in-fighting will begin, then the purges will begin. The only way forward will be ever-more leftward (see: Democrat party). No one will count the casualties because Leftism has never cared about casualties, either literal or figurative. The Left has its own purity codes, too, and enforces them at least as vigorously as the Right does.

As has always happened when the Left attains power, a self-appointed revolutionary vanguard will cement its position and focus primarily on retaining control. The Progressive UM church will become effectively a social-justice-driven political party that uses religious language. In fact, it will become heavily active in actual politics and pastors' involvement in approved political causes will greatly determine their appointments. Bishops who do not go along will be sidelined and new bishops will be chosen for political reliability. It will truly become a church of Leftism. And one thing to remember about the religious Left is this:

[T]he liberal church – evangelical or mainline denomination – isn’t as liberal as they think they are. They are no more committed to diversity than the people they claim are the bigots. Diversity only works for them when it works for them. Otherwise, they are unwilling to even consider any thoughts, arguments or wisdom that [others] have to offer. It is unthinkable.

Leftism only works for Leftists when it works for Leftists. Others simply get shut out or shut down.

Where do we find God here?

I would love to bring this to an encouraging close. Yet I can only in part because the future of Methodism of the “United” legacy is dim. In our history since our founding in the Christmas Conference of 1784, there have been quite a number of splits. The only one approaching the scale of what is coming this year was a full schism in 1844 over slavery. But slavery was ended and the two denominations reunited in 1939. The coming schism will be permanent. After all, homosexuality is not going to simply be ended like slavery was.

As a minister, I know that God never withdraws his grace and guidance. Jesus' resurrection never becomes less efficacious. But I also remember this:

And that we will get good and hard.

If you think I am overstating all of this, for either side, I only reply, wait and see. Because you ain't seen nothing yet.

The outcome will resemble this, only it will not be funny.

Your long read of the day

What is going on with mass shootings? Lessons from past solved problems.

Read the whole thing.

Also these two essays that complement one another:

No-One's Life Matters. That's Why There Are Mass Shootings

America’s Nervous Breakdown.

And another: The crisis of American loneliness

Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?

Well, yes, as it turns out, and an enormous number across the scientific disciplines do. Some of them explain why.

The Resurrection is certainly an extraordinary claim. However—although extremely unlikely based on our experience so far—the probability of such an event also cannot be demonstrated to be zero. Regarding the Resurrection of Jesus, no evidence to the contrary—such as an identified body—exists. As a supernatural, one-off, historical phenomena, we cannot expect the Resurrection to be definitively confirmed or denied by any specific scientific test. This does not, however, negate other evidence that supports the plausibility of the Resurrection as a real event embedded within a true gospel story. This evidence includes but is not limited to: records of eyewitness accounts, peculiarities of the Bible compared to other historical or religious texts, and of course personal experience. When considered individually, this evidence is not overwhelmingly compelling but cumulatively converges upon plausibility.

Personally, I choose to believe that not all things worth knowing can be examined through the scientific lens, which makes faith entirely reasonable. 

 Sarah Bodbyl Roehls, research associate/senior scientist specializing in evolutionary biology and education, Michigan State University

Jesus and history

Link.

The summary is yes, Jesus of Nazareth was an actual, historical man. Both Jewish and Roman figures and writers referred to him. As non-Christian historian Bart Ehrman observes, a ...

... collection of snippets from non-Christian sources may not impart much information about the life of Jesus, “but it is useful for realizing that Jesus was known by historians who had reason to look into the matter. No one thought he was made up.”

The ancient attestation of Jesus as a real person far outweigh almost every other ancient figure. As Ehrman has observed elsewhere, Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius was not a real person. Also, the earliest written reference to Alexander the Great dates 400 years after Alexander is said to have lived. Yet no one says Alexander was not real.

However, the earliest writings about Jesus of Nazareth, the letters of the apostles, date beginning less than 20 years after Jesus died during the governorship of Pontius Pilate. And this is the sole figure of ancient time whom skeptics say was fictional.

Here is Prof. Ehrman explaining to a confused atheist why he is wrong in saying that Jesus is a mythical figure.



More here: Five Confounding Facts About Jesus's Resurrection

Why Islam is winning in the West

Briton Jacob Williams explains why he wanted to become a Christian while a student at Oxford but rejected it and converted to Islam instead.

I had plenty of opportunities to engage with orthodox Christians, and I sincerely wanted Christianity to be true. It was clear to me that what the authorities in my world celebrated—the collapse of family life, the slaughter of the unborn, the deterioration of high culture—were, in truth, social evils that followed from the decline of the Church. Christianity seemed the natural alternative to secularity.

But when I entered the chapels and listened to the ministers, the regeneration I sought didn’t happen. Christian voices sounded all too agreeable and compromising. I wanted something stronger, something that didn’t ­bargain with secularism. I found it in Islam.

Read the whole thing. And weep.

Theology for Pete Buttigeig

Link

Here is how I would reply to Buttigeig:

1. By "my creator," I assume you mean God. You are incorrect. God did not create you - nor did God create me. Your mother and your father created you, just as mine did me. I have no issue with your parents. If you do, that's between you and them. Don't drag me into it.

2. You and I were both born into a sinful state. As the Bible says, we were literally born sinful. In me, my inherent sinfulness manifests itself in many different ways, probably 90 percent of so that are common ways that manifest in every person.

3. I am guilty of sexual sin, as is every person on earth. It is unavoidable. For me, my sexual sin was lust for various women to whom I was not married. Sexual lust is a sin even for married men and women. I am thankful that I no longer lust for women to whom I am not married, but I am frank enough to admit that it is possibly not due solely to the work of the Holy Spirit (at my pleading), but also because I am in my mid-60s and have all I can can handle already. Nonetheless, that form of sexual sin is thankfully overcome in me, for which I thank God and give him credit.

4. I am heterosexual. The Bible is clear that human heterosexuality is both intended and endorsed by God. But God does not make a hetero man or woman a hetero adulterer or hetero fornicator. Those are sins that we do on our own. God neither leads us to those things nor shrugs and says, "Oh, well, it's okay because you think you were born that way."

5. You are homosexual. There is not one verse in the Bible that even remotely indicates that homosexuality is either intended or endorsed by God, or that anyone is "born that way," other than the general declaration that all persons are born unavoidably sinful in their being. But that does not make you (or anyone else) "special." It does not mean that your sexual sin is somehow off the books just because you think it should be or want to blame it on God. God does not lead you to have sex with other men. That is something you do on you own. Nor does God simply shrug and say, "Oh, well, it's okay because you think you were born that way."

6. I was, and am, honest enough to admit that my sexual sin was contrary to God's will and God's intentions for humankind. God being my helper, I was able to overcome sinful lust. But I could never have done so if I had dogmatically and selfishly claimed, "I was just born that way."

7. Over to you, Pete.

Why Christian faith is not blind faith