2 Wonderful Prayers for "Inward Peace"

Prayers for Inward Peace

26. Grant us grace to rest from sinful deeds and thoughts, to surrender ourselves wholly unto thee, and to keep our souls still before thee like a still lake, so that the beams of thy grace may be mirrored therein, and may kindle in our hearts the glow of faith, and love, and prayer. May we, through such stillness and hope, find strength and gladness in thee, O God, now and forevermore. Amen.

27. O God, who art the source of all true peace and joy, grant us so perfectly to do thy will that we may find both that inward peace which the world can neither give nor take away, and that pure joy which shall make radiant all our duty and our toil. Amen.

These are from the UU "Red Hymnal" Additional Prayers and Collects section p. 140. The "Red Hymnal" is also known as Hymns of the Spirit With Services and has 2 title pages, Services of Religion for use in the Churches of The Free Spirit and Hymns of the Spirit for use in the Free Churches of America. It is copyright 1937 by The Beacon Press and was a combined hymnal for the pre-consolidation Unitarian and Universalist churches in the US. It remained in print until sometime in the last 10 years when the 1981 press run sold out.

Climate Change

This is the first of two week six discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education. (The second discussion doesn't fit this format well.)

Apply the elements of critical thinking from Chapter 8: description, analysis, framing a view, judgment, and response, to propose a denominational policy for addressing the tension between climate change science and the needs of people from traditional coal producing areas.

This example is really about two seperate, but related issues. One issue is that human activities are producing climate change and if we want to keep the earth livable, we need to make changes, particularly in how we produce and consume energy. The other issue is about how we as a country treat the people in traditional coal producing areas. I lived on the edge of coal country when I was a kid and even in the 1970's the supply of high quality, reasonably accessible coal to mine in the US was running out. The industry was having to switch to mining in more dangerous mines (and mining has never been anything but very dangerous), mining lower quality coal that didn't work for some things (particularly industrial use), and mining in ways that are more expensive and more destructive to the environment. All of these factors were already leading to a reduction in coal mining and a search for alternatives. The news about climate change has only sped up something that was already happening. The concern Don Perdue expresses in the New York Times - "There is widespread bitterness about the country taking our coal for all these years when it needed us, and then simply saying goodbye." - is not just about climate change. We asked generations of Americans to sacrifice their bodies and lives in coal mines to run the industry and utilities of this country so others could profit and now are leaving those people and those areas with less than they started with. We need to be realistic that the era of King Coal is over, while also treating the people left behind with equity and compassion. 

As far as a denominational policy, since there are two issues, there are two paths that need to be taken, but they can be related. We as a denomination can determine that we will prioritize using renewable energy - whether that means putting in our own solar panels, buying renewable, encouraging our municipal systems to invest in solar, wind, and water power, or providing loans for community members to put in solar. We should also focus on reducing our energy needs, and helping our communities reduce energy needs. As far as supporting people in coal producing areas, we can provide scholarships and particularly practical assistance to people from those areas to train to do other work. Practical assistance is an area where even the poorest congregations can help - for example, helping people who are first generation college students know what to do to apply and thrive in college (this could be done remotely) and welcoming and supporting individuals and families who may be in the area to study or complete internships. We can also prioritize purchasing needed items from new industries in coal producing areas - this might include things like solar panels, meeting both goals at once. 

Church

This is the first of two week five discussion questions from my Spring 2022 courseMaking Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What role has the church played in your life? How would you respond to the young person who asks, “Do I have to belong to a church to be a Christian?”

One of my early memories is my dedication. It was Christmas Eve and I was 5 or 6. In our church at the time, part of dedication is the adult members of the church pledging to be there for the child growing up and I remember being impressed that all these adults cared for me. My family weren't always regular church goers, but whenever we went, I still felt part of the community. As an adult, I worked weekends and started attending my denominations church by mail and joined a then 'experimental' mailing list, which became a very active small group for almost 20 years, and several of us are still in contact. Even when I started getting weekends off, I found such satisfaction in my small group that I continued with that church. More recently I joined an online church start and we have an amazing community via Discord, with an almost daily . I am also part of my mom's regional small group from the denomination I grew up in, at 52, I'm the baby. They meet once a month and that's the weekend I usually visit her. I love hearing from my elders and I'm trying to get one of my mom's friends to write her autobiography, because she has had some amazing experiences, particularly around the UU denomination, her father was a groundbreaking minister and as a result she got to meet all sorts of people who came to visit him, she also went to Europe after World War 2 with the Universalist Service Committee to work in a refugee camp. I love my church families and they have helped me and my family through a lot of rough times.

However, as valuable as my church community has been to me, if asked whether you have to belong to a church to be a Christian, my response would be no. While my church experience has been almost uniformly good, I know not everyone is that lucky. In fact, I know many people for whom church has been a source of pain or even spiritual abuse. It's easy to say, well, those are just bad churches, but I think it's important that we as Christians take more responsibility for such things and acknowledge that church is not always a healthy experience and that every church has the possibility of being a bad experience for someone. All it takes is one leader behaving badly or even looking away when members treat others badly to do damage. As I said, my church experiences have been good, but I refused to attend youth group in high school and if I went to church, went to the regular services after being bullied in Sunday School as a middle schooler and not feeling like I had any other options to avoid it. In the UUA, youth group is actually older than our denomination, because the two main denominations that consolidated had a combined youth group for decades. While attending church as a teen and college student opened opportunities for me (I was co-director of social concerns for our church and teaching adult Religious Education at 19 or 20), not attending youth group also closed some. If I had just quit participating at all, it would have closed more. (Ironically, I'm the only person from my middle-school Sunday School class who still has ties to the UU church.) For people whose experiences are mostly bad, finding a better church may be too painful or they may need to heal first. However, Brown is right, the community that we participate in does influence who we are. I think it is necessary to have a spiritual community to be a Christian, but what that community is can vary. It might be a church, it might be a small group, it might be a Bible study. It may be in person, by phone, on Zoom or Google Meet or in some sort of social media. It might be extremely interactive or only slightly (in her later years, my grandmother's main spiritual community was being part, with some of her in-person friends of a large group of listeners to a radio Bible study.) What the community is is unimportant, that it is community is what matters.

Brown on Sin and Salvation

This is the first of two week four discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What insights from this week’s readings (Stone and Duke, Ch 6, "The Human Condition" and Brown, Chs 6, "Sin" and 7 "Salvation") were most helpful or inspiring for you? What aspects, if any, where troubling or challenging for you?

I found Brown's discussion of sin to be very useful and on target with my experiences. He points out pride is "excessive self-regard in relation to others" and taking more than your fair share. "Sensuality" is not about taking excessive joy in things of the body, but rather thinking less of yourself than yourself than you should. Traditional definitions of sensuality mean that you have to do some fancy footwork somewhere to draw a line between appreciating God's good creation with our bodies and senses and viewing sensuality as a sin, the fact that this avoids that problem is a mark in its favor that doesn't depend on the fact that defining sin in this way might make me personally less of a sinner. (One of my Bible school professors taught than when you read something and it feels difficult and you just want to dismiss it, you should sit with that idea for a while and think about whether it's wrong or you're wrong; but I think it's just as or more important to sit with things that just sound good and align with our prejudices for a while too.) While it is easy to come up with examples of people who harm others because they think they deserve more, I was also reminded of kids I saw in the 90's who had been taught that their self-esteem was so important they had trouble doing any self-reflection that wasn't positive because they hadn't had that experience. This isn't to say that they'd never been told they were bad or wrong, but they had only been taught to look at what in their life they were doing well, never what they could improve or were unhappy with. (That's also setting kids up for failure.) And I certainly know plenty of people who never ask for what they need and always give to others. As I think about this, I'm having trouble thinking of examples of things that don't fit this framework, which I think is a good sign. Most of us, of course, fall in the middle, sometimes taking too much, sometimes not taking enough. I have previously heard the definition that sin is "falling short" and I like that definition, but I think this one has more depth.

I wanted to write about the discussion in Brown about the problem of our not doing what we should, which is similar to "falling short", but mostly, I've sat with the fact that I need to think about that more for almost a week now and don't actually have anything to verbalize. I've finally settled on putting a note on my calendar to read it again in month, because I feel like there is more there for me.

I also have some concern with Brown's discussion of salvation. I very much like it. I tend to want to agree with it, but I have reservations because it is very rational and I think we lose something important about Christianity when we ignore the transcendent too much. (This definitely goes the other way too, we lose something important when we forget the practical parts of Christianity.)

 

Salvation

This is the second of two week four discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

Compare and contrast the Trimble's experience (Stone and Duke, Chapter 5) of “re-finding” themselves to that of Zacchaeus’ experience of salvation? How do these experiences relate or not relate to your life?

So, I'm not sure we are comparing apples to apples here. If you read the story of Zacchaeus' interaction with Jesus in the CEB translation (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2019%3A1-10&version=CEB), the verbs use the present tense when Zacchaeus talks about giving to the poor and paying back those he wrongs four-fold. So the story perhaps is not that of Zacchaeus' salvation, but Jesus's public acknowledgement that he already is. (And the notes in The Jewish Annotated New Testament point this way as well.) Read this way, the story goes like this:

Jesus is coming to town, and Zacchaeus is excited about the opportunity to see him. (And this excitement itself may be a sign of the fact that Zacchaeus is already saved.) Because he is short and the crowds are large, Zacchaeus finds a tree to climb for a good view. Jesus sees Zacchaeus in the crowd, recognizes him and speaks to him. (Again, Jesus recognizing Zacchaeus may also be a sign that Zacchaeus is already saved.) The crowd, not Jesus, identifies Zacchaeus as a sinner. Zacchaeus defends himself, explaining why he believes he is not a sinner. Jesus acknowledges this and tells the crowd that he (Salvation) is there because Zacchaeus is already a member of the community. In this reading, Zacchaeus was only lost because the community wasn't including him.

The Trimble story, on the other hand, is fairly straight forward. People find something that helps them and isn't (obviously) in conflict with their faith and they attribute it to being a necessary or important tool for faith for everyone. Sometimes, whatever it is that is actually a helpful tool for some people. (I'm reminded of the planner fad - a planner can help me do my daily prayer and bible reading along with my other daily tasks, one of my friends finds it essential for staying on track with that, other people may find it useful for their secular life only, or not useful at all.) Sometimes, it's pretty much unrelated - I've seen this happen with diets, workout plans, even business opportunities, but self-help books and programs are super common sources of this type of confusion.  I think we even do this with things we would all agree are part of Christian life. I think we'd agree that things like church attendance, Bible reading and study, and prayer are all tools for being Christian, but we can get caught up in the details of doing those things instead of loving our neighbor, loving God, forgiving, ...

I think the main difference between these two situations, regardless of whether we interpret Zacchaeus' experience as salvation in that moment or acknowledgement of existing salvation, is that Zacchaeus' salvation involves action. He does more than the average person to make sure he sees Jesus. He gives generously to charity. He makes amends in a concrete way. The Trimbles' renewal is about attitude. The only actions they mention are holding hands and giving thanks. Zacchaeus' salvation moves him to do differently. The Trimbles are only thinking differently.

I think this lines up with my own life. When I really change my mind about something, it almost always somehow results in changed behavior. It might not be as drastic or impressive as Zacchaeus' behavior, but there is a difference over time. For beliefs I'm serious about, I can point at behaviors I do as a result (and sometimes, honestly, places I know I fall short in changing behavior to line up with new beliefs - behavioral changes are hard sometimes, you can't just believe them into being or we wouldn't have problems like addiction.)

God's Nature, Will, Power, Presence, and Activity

For purposes of this blog, I almost left this in draft forever mode, because I'm not happy with it but had to finish something to turn in. But in the end, I decided to hit post because there is value in doing the best we can today.

This is the second of two week three discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What is your understanding of God’s nature, will, power, presence, and activity in the world? 

My first thought on reading this prompt was "Wow, that's asking A LOT!" On further thought, my reaction is just to say "I don't know." And while I actually am going to try to answer to the best of my current thought and ability, I think it's important to sit with that "I don't know" a bit. Out of those things, I only need to know a subset of two of them. I need to know that God's nature is fundamentally good  and I need to know God's will to the extent that it is a factor in my actions. I address the bit about God needing to be good to be relevant more in my reflection paper, but in general, if we don't believe God is good (or I guess powerful and evil), I think God is or should be irrelevant in our lives. Once we determine God is relevant, I think actions (living in accord with or doing God's will) are more important than theory. I do believe loving God (or anyone) should inspire me to want to get to know them better, but as Christians, I think sometimes we use following that desire (and plain old human curiosity) as an excuse to avoid the hard parts of doing what loving God calls us to do. Similarly, I think eschatology is often used in the same way, it's not that we shouldn't study these things, but we should study them because our love of God and love of the Bible make us want to know more, not because the study is more interesting to us than other less fun parts of our Christian walk. I also think theory can help us act or know how to act. I also think that "I don't know" is an underrated answer to a lot of these questions or any question about God.

Because I think it's the most important of these, I'm going to start with God's will. I believe Micah 6:8, "Only to do justice; And to love goodness; And to walk modestly with your God;" (JPS85), is a good start on God's will.  I think it is also God's will that we love God with everything we've got and love our neighbor as ourself.  As I talked about last week, I think forgiveness is part of God's will, both for us to forgive and for God to forgive us. I know that people often say that things like praise and worship, prayer, or Bible study is God's will. I haven't seen any arguments for that that are particularly compelling. I think those are things that (hopefully) help us do God's will, but I think they are more means than ends. I'm aware I'm leaving open a lot of questions in terms of the big picture of why God created the cosmos in the first place, but I am content to leave those as open questions, in part because as I discuss with God's nature, I think it's beyond human understanding. But also, I don't find a lot of mystery in having a desire to create. If humans are made in God's image, it's not surprising that God too would have an impulse to create. I do not think God has everything planned out in advance and we are only puppets acting on God's will, nor do I think our having free will (which I both think is overrated and a doubtful assumption) is a valid explanation for, well, really anything, but especially not any real or perceived shortcomings in any of the factors we are discussing here.

I think God's nature is beyond human understanding. I believe there will be a future time, which I refer to as the next life, where that will change, but in the meantime, my understanding is by definition going to be incomplete and approximate and I'm mostly content with that. I also think that we (different people) can hold different (incomplete) understandings of God's nature, possibly even seemingly incompatible understandings of God's nature and they can both be right. Just as we read that the Gospels are different witnesses' views of Jesus and we can learn from that, we should also be able to learn from differences in how we each see God's nature, rather than insist that we must all think the same way. (That's not to say there can't be false views, but disagreements don't necessarily imply falsehood.) I do believe that God is good and God works from a place of love (or as my grandma's favorite Bible verse puts it, God is love.) I think my friend's pastor puts it well when he says "It's not 'everything that God does is good', but 'God uses everything for good.'" When I was a child, my neighbor showed my sister and I her white carnations and told us that you will never find an all white carnation, they always have a little bit of red or another color hidden underneath (or even obvious) and that this is a message from God that nothing is or can be perfect. I've always taken a lot of comfort in that. I think perhaps, it may also be a message that applies to God. God is also not perfect (and by extension not all powerful or maybe power and perfection are unrelated.) Or maybe something about perfection breaks the universe. 

I do believe God is active in the world in some way. I'm not entirely sure how. I found the approach discussed in Brown that God is moving along with us, changed by us as we are changed by God, all living in relationship together, to be compelling. I also subscribe to the embedded theology that God does change in relationship to God's experience with us, because I fairly regularly point to the places in and around the story of Noah where God regrets or thinks better of past behavior and acts as a result. I need to think more about how this affects other beliefs. For instance, I think it conflicts with the "official" story of why it is completely acceptable for my international, multi-time zone church to do communion on Zoom (which involves the timelessness of God.) I'm not actually personally invested in that, because my personal theology of sacraments is that meaning and intention are more important than anything else and that for communion in particular we should probably either be doing more often and more casually (every time we eat - splitting the stable of the meal and sharing it with everyone around us) or only rarely and even more formally (to make it more meaningful.) However, as part of the church council I'm invested in having something that works for our congregation and doesn't make life overly difficult for our volunteer, bi-vocational minister.

I do think that when God intervenes in the world it is more likely to be small promptings than large flashy miracles. Maybe the age of miracles is over or maybe they just weren't that effective and God has learned better. I don't think prayer prompts God to act as much as it acts as a support of one another and prompts us to act as the people of God.

I'm sure I've left some things out here, because again, it's a big question.

Jesus

This is the first of two week three discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What do you believe about Jesus and how does this affect your life?

The most important thing I believe about Jesus is that trying to follow his example, the words and deeds that we know about, makes me a better human being. This would be true regardless of anything else about him: He could be no more (less) the child of God than I am. He could be only mortal and not divine. He could be just a prophet, (as one of my dearest high school friends, a devout Muslim believes.) He could have stayed dead. I would still be better at the essential task of being human for following him. That doesn't mean that I don't believe in the parts that "transcend materialistic views of reality", to quote the CUA statement of beliefs, it's just that they aren't necessary for a lot of what I think is important about Jesus and how Jesus affects my day to day life. Jesus modeled a way of living and preached a society where we treat each other justly and was so committed to it that he was willing to die rather than break his principles. All of that is compelling in an of itself. But then, beyond that, we have the supernatural parts that add emphasis in ways I know I haven't fully explored yet. In a recent week's commentary in Wil Gafney's Year W lectionary, she says "Each of Jesus's miracles is an epiphany."(p. 63) She's talking about how his miracles link him back to prior miraculous events and the prophets involved. I'm thinking that they are also epiphanies as to how we should be in the world. Jesus can create something from nothing, he uses it to feed hungry people. A lot of the resurrections and healings that we see Jesus committing (and several of the ones they remind us of) are about propping up the community. In my Bible study this week we were looking at the story of Tabitha using Gafney's Year W and the Women's Bible Commentary (2nd and 3rd editions). This isn't a Jesus miracle, it's Peter following in Jesus's footsteps. At first glance, Tabitha is important because she's a disciple and she's bankrolling things. It's easy to say, well, she's important because she's the financial support. But then you look in more detail and Tabitha is supporting the widows of the community who are the mourners and supporters of those who are grieving, which is time is everyone. There are whole layers of community support where Tabitha is central. That's who gets restored to the community.

Unlike a lot of my friends, I wasn't raised with an embedded theology of hell and damnation, although as an American, I was certainly raised in a society where theologically suspect images that owe more to Dante than the Bible are everywhere and places queer kids are likely to hang out are going to be targeted by people preaching that they will go to that hell. And I've seen that death can be a friend or a comforter as much as something to be feared. My personal thoughts about the end of this life are not fear, with or without a promise of a better life ahead. So, to me, Jesus's resurrection to give his community hope and pointers to continue is more compelling than the fact that he has defeated death. That's not to say those things aren't important to my / our / the community, I think they really are. It's that that is not where I ever needed to be restored to community. 

What I do find more personally compelling (and more difficult) than the idea that through Jesus death has been overcome, is the promise of radical forgiveness. I take seriously Jesus's words that we should forgive as we have been forgiven and his actions in doing the same. (One can argue that this is Jesus defying sin for and with us, I don't generally find that a useful label, even if I generally think it's true.) I strive (and fail) to forgive for more than trivial things, but Jesus's example shines through as how to do that.

A bit of an aside, I think that one of the reasons we don't bring people into community - and I would include things like the fact that there are people sleeping on the streets of my town and we, as a community, seem to think that's not worth changing our ways in order to change, has to do with forgiveness (and also sin as Brown talks about it, thinking too much or little of ourselves). On a group level, when we don't take care of people in our community, it means either we think too much of ourselves and think we deserve to have more than they do or it means that we can't forgive them if they are given something that we have to work for. (It gets a little more complicated on an individual level as we interact with the constraints of the group.)