The Gospel in 10 Words or Less

Someone I follow on Twitter put out a challenge to sum up the gospel in 10 words or less.

It got me thinking. Here's my try. What's yours? What is the good news in a sentence?

In Christ God reconciles me with God, neighbor, and myself.

Leggo My Ego

Thanks to all of you for keeping things interesting around here. I'm distracted by sunshine and gardening and Little League, but I want to provide you with a link to scientists and other intellectuals participating in the "does God exist" debate.

Currently I'm reading Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth." Its foundational premise is not new, but it is free from the usual jargon and esoterica: put simply, we are not our minds; we are not our ideas or thoughts. We exist apart from our egos. Freedom from sin/attachment begins in observing the mind as separate and in nurturing love/egolessness. Tolle seems to have struck a chord for gazillions of people: the longing to transcend the hollowness of materialism as well as the tribalism and loopy claims of religion. Or that is how I see it, at least. Please weigh in if you have read the book.

(MTH and others, feel free to ignore the One Campaign button. Whether or not poverty is eternal is simply unknowable. I think fighting it is worthwhile, but of course there are many ways to do that, locally and globally. Currently the victims of natural disasters in Burma and China can really use our help.

Wrestling with God

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to her friend, Val Tarico , who is a former fundamentalist, a psychologist, an author, and a knowledgable, compassionate force of nature. Enjoy this letter by Dr. Tarico:

Recently a fellow traveler asked me how he could explain to his children the changes that he is going through. I realized, as I wrote out some thoughts for him, that I had never shared these same thoughts with my own family members who have grieved and feared for my soul. If they could understand the following, perhaps they might worry less:

One of the most central themes of Judaism and then Christianity is an ongoing hunger, a quest to understand God more deeply and completely. For over 3000 years, our spiritual ancestors have been working hard to figure out answers to life’s most important questions: What is good? What is real (often framed as what is God)? And how can we live in moral community with each other?

Each generation of our ancestors received a package of handed down answers to these questions. This package contained the very best answers their ancestors had to these questions. But those answers were always imperfect. They had bits of timeless wisdom and insights, but they also had bits of culture and superstition that had somehow gotten God’s name on them. In order to grow, our ancestors took these received traditions and asked: What here is mere human construction, what is superstition, and what are my very best judgments about the divine realities that lie beyond the human piece?

The first Hebrew scholars, the writers of the Torah or Pentateuch did this. They sifted through the earlier religions of the Akkadians and Sumerians. They kept parts (some of which are in the Bible to this day), and other parts they discarded as mere culture, superstition or even idolatry.


In the New Testament, the same thing happened. In the gospels, Jesus says that the Law has become an idol in itself. What is an idol? An idol is a something man-made, something that seeks to represent or articulate god-ness and thus to provide a glimpse of that Ultimate Reality. But then, the object itself gets given the attributes of divinity: perfection and completeness, and it becomes the object of absolute devotion.

Instead of simply accepting the old package of answers, the writers of the gospels offered a new understanding of God and goodness. They didn’t throw away everything; in fact they kept quite a bit from the earlier Hebrew religion and from the religions that surrounded them. But they took responsibility to sort through it. They gathered the pieces that that seemed truly wise and sacred to them, and they told a new story about our relationship to God and to each other.

During the Protestant Reformation this process happened again in a very big way. Even thought Martin Luther and John Calvin had some horrible bigoted and violent ideas, in their own context, they genuinely were trying to cleanse Christianity of what they saw as accumulated superstitions, things like worshiping saints and relics, paying indulgences, the absolute authority of the Pope, and the church putting God’s name on the political structure that kept kings and nobles at the top with other people serving them. They scraped away these superstitions, until they got back to a set of religious agreements that had been made a long time before, in the 4th Century when the church decided what writings would go in the Bible and what the creeds would be. Then they stopped there, thinking they had found the most true understanding of God.

But inquiry continued both outside of Christianity and inside. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, scientific learning mushroomed with discoveries in fields as diverse as linguistics, anthropology, psychiatry, physics, and biology. By the beginning of the 20th century, with all this new information about ourselves and the world around us, many Christian theologians said, “We need to rethink our understanding of the Bible, Jesus, and the Christian faith.” A new phase of Reformation was born. This generation decided that they should examine every bit of Christianity for signs of human fingerprints. They went way back and opened up even the agreements that had been made by those Church councils of the 4th century. the ones who decided what would be in the Bible. They even began looking at other religions with new eyes and seeing bits of wisdom there.

When this happened, some people fought back in defense of the fundamental doctrines that had dominated Christianity for almost 1500 years, the doctrines that are laid out in the creeds: one god in three persons, original sin and universal sin, the virgin birth, the unique divinity of Jesus, cleansing of sin through blood sacrifice, salvation through right belief, a literal resurrection, a literal heaven and hell. A series of pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals" said that these beliefs were absolute and off limits to questions. From the title of these pamphlets we get the word "fundamentalism." The fundamentalists said, “If you don’t believe these things, then you can’t call yourself a Christian and besides you are going to hell.” They said that their kind of Christianity was the most true because it was the closest to the religion of our ancestors.

I used to think that, too. But now I think I was mistaken. By trying to keep the same beliefs as our ancestors, fundamentalism forced me to betray the very heart of Christianity: the quest to better know and serve a God who is Love and Truth. To keep the traditional beliefs of our ancestors we have to abandon their tradition of spiritual inquiry, of “wrestling with God.” We can accept their answers or we can accept their quest, but we cannot accept both

Now I affirm that the best way to honor the Christian tradition, to honor the writers of the Pentateuch, and the writers of the gospels and the reformers—and ultimately to honor the Ground of Love and Truth-- is to do as they have done. We need to take the set of teachings they handed down to us, their very best efforts to answer life’s most important questions. Then, just like them, we need to continue examining those answers in light of what we know about ourselves and the world around us. For each of us this is a sacred responsibility and a sacred gift, the gift and responsibility of spiritual growth.

It might seem like I have abandoned the path I was on, to love and serve God. But I haven’t. I am still on that very same path, only my understanding of God has grown deeper and wider. That is why the songs and preaching and churches that used to fit for me don’t fit any more. And, in fact, even the word “God” seems terribly humanoid and limiting as a term for the astounding Reality that spiritual and scientific inquiry allow us to glimpse.

I am sorry that my changes have been hurtful and confusing. For a long time, I have known that the answers I had were not quite right. But I didn’t really know how to explain this whole process or how to articulate a better set of answers, so mostly what I talked about was the flaws in the old way of thinking. Now that I have a little better understanding of the journey, I wanted to express that understanding to you who have been upset or worried for me.

Another World (More Worldlies?)

Check out this fascinating article about the discovery of a solar system much like our own. I will never forget seeing my first photos of the earth from outer space as a child. I found them both fascinating and a little freaky, because I could not imagine that its creator would have chosen a tiny little portion of humanity for salvation. Here's an excerpt:

Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light-years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets.

“It looks like a scale model of our solar system,” said Scott Gaudi, an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. Dr. Gaudi led an international team of 69 professional and amateur astronomers who announced the discovery in a news conference with reporters.

Their results are being published Friday in the journal Science. The discovery, they said, means that our solar system may be more typical of planetary systems across the universe than had been thought.

In the newly discovered system, a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun. The star is about half the mass of the Sun.

Neither of the two giant planets is a likely abode for life as we know it. But, Dr. Gaudi said, warm rocky planets — suitable for life — could exist undetected in the inner parts of the system.

“This could be a true solar system analogue,” he said.

Wow! If there is anything that could enlarge our concepts of God and nature, it would be life on another planet. What do you think?

Easter Message

Vance writes:
I just want everyone to know my reason for going to speak at the OALC on Easter. The first is obedience to God. The second is my love for all the people in the OALC.
For the last few weeks God has laid it on my heart to go to the OALC and share my testimony. I kept praying about it and hoping that the feeling would go away. It didn't. I finally obeyed and decided to go to the event center on Easter Sunday. When I begin to share my story, they shut the microphone off. I begin yelling so people could hear me and they started singing to drown me out. Needless to say, I didn't get the chance to finish. So, here is my testimony
(if anybody was there, the wording of this may be different. I knew I would only have a chance to say a few things before I was stopped):

I born, raised, and married while in the OALC. I was pretty happy most of the time but I was never truly at peace. I knew Jesus died for my sins but since we are always sinning we could never really be free. That bugged me. Another thing that bugged me was that the preachers' would say that if anything they said was offensive or wrong that they wanted to know. But, yet, earlier in the same sermon, they would say you were supposed to trust the preachers and NOT question because it is GOD'S WORD. That is a lie because only the Bible is the word of God and we can NOT follow any man on earth. Not Laestadius, not the preachers, not me, not your parents, not the older christians. Jesus Christ is the only one we can follow. When people try to direct us to Christ, we need to compare what they're saying to the word of God. (the Bible) It was also preached on Easter Sunday at OALC, that we need to follow the ones who have the understanding through the Holy Spirit. That's not what Jesus said. "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John 14:6 KJV We will all stand before God on Judgement Day and we can't have excuses of why we put our trust in men. (preachers, elders, Laestadius)
Jesus died to forgive the sins of the whole world, not just the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. When we belive Jesus is our Redeemer, we go to the cross and repent of our sinful ways. We have to get up from the cross as Jesus did and turn from the sin that died with Christ. The resurrected Jesus represents the new life or rebirth in us through the Holy Spirit. Not just the preachers are enlightened to the Truth of the Bible but anyone who desires to know God and follow Him through His son.
For anyone reading this that has fear, doubt, and confusion... Jesus says, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Matt. 7:6-8 KJV
God will never leave nor forsake you! I did not go to the service to condemn anybody but to offer hope. My hope and prayer is that I see all of you in heaven.