Creatio Ex Nihilo

Mythbusters: This Is Not A Test

What’s the point of religion?  To make us behave?  To make us better people? To give religious leaders power? Some would say that religion, and Christianity in particular, is all about where we go when we die.  The primary purpose of Jesus, they would say, is to give us a way to get into heaven and to avoid going to hell.   For them, the church’s main motivation to invite others to be Christians is to save them from eternal punishment and instead provide a path to an utopian disembodied afterlife. 

Recently, I took part in a pastor’s network about church growth.  For many churches, particularly small ones, growth is a controversial topic.  Some people don’t want their church to grow.  They want it to stay small so that they know everyone and feel comfortable.  Some people want their church to stay small so they can have power and control over others, especially the pastor.  During one of our sessions, we explored the reasons why a church must grow.  For one thing, it was Jesus’ command for the church to grow, to go and make more disciples.  For another, the biblical record about the early church is one of growth and the biblical authors continually celebrate that growth in writings such as the Book of Acts.

As many of you know, I am a firm proponent of growing churches, especially this one.  My rationale for this comes principally from those reasons I just mentioned, as well as a few others that I’ll get to later.  However, some of my colleagues in this network had other motivations that I did share with them.  Like many of the Christians I mentioned earlier, they believed the primary reason to grow the church is to save people - specifically to save them from hell.  Providing people an escape from this horrible fate is the main reason they believe Jesus came and why it is so important for churches to preach the gospel to the world. 

I would argue that such an outlook comes very close to claiming that the church is really saving people from is God - an angry wrathful God, or at the very least, from that God’s harsh eternal verdicts.  Is that really the Good News we are proclaiming?  Is that the Good News Jesus proclaimed?

Taking it a step further, many Christians also believe that in order to be a real Christian, you must believe in a literal hell as a place with literal fire - otherwise God will send you there.  Conversely, it seems that the only people who believe in hell are the ones who are sure they are not going there.  I’ve yet to meet someone who claims, “I believe in hell and I’m sure that is where I will spend eternity.”  The fact that for many people, hell always functions only as the fate of others, should clue us in that we may need to rethink our beliefs and attitudes about it.

Mythbusters: Easter Blowout

 If you have ever had kids in a soccer program, you know there’s nothing worse than watching your kid’s team face a mismatched opponent.  Your kid’s team just stands there while her opponents repeatedly kick the ball into the goal with ease.  Sometimes it is so painful to watch, that both parents and kids alike can’t wait until the game is over.  Just blow the whistle and put us out of our misery, we think.  Our middle child, Tara, has played for several years on a travel soccer team.  A couple of years ago, they had an undefeated season, so they were often on the other side of many mismatched games. 

Interestingly, the travel league had something called the “slaughter rule” which prohibited a team from getting more than a seven point lead.  Once a team was ahead by seven points, they were not allowed to score any more.  If they did, they would be hit with a $50 fine.   Tara’s team played a few games that undefeated season during which this rule was put into effect.  In fact, during one of them, a teammate of hers accidentally kicked the ball into her opponent’s goal and triggered the $50 fine.

Now some might say such rules are inappropriate. Although it’s a rule designed to keep the losing team from being humiliated, many people feel that losing and even being humiliated are part and parcel of playing a sport.  Learning to deal with losing is to be expected and in fact, one of the life lessons that competitive sports teaches.

I’m not sure on which side Jesus would come down in such an argument about kids’ sports, but I do know that when it comes to the conflict between God and Evil, Jesus does not follow the slaughter rule.  He mercilessly runs up the score against the forces of evil, injustice and even death.  On Easter morning, it is this decisive victory of Jesus that we celebrate. 

The meaning of Easter cannot be captured in just one phrase or metaphor. There are images we use to convey the Easter message; rebirth, renewal, a new beginning.  Nothing wrong with those images but we may be unfamiliar with some other ones from the Bible.  The apostle Paul said, “Jesus must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet and the last enemy is death.”  The comforting images of rebirth and renewal fail to capture that aggressive nature of the resurrection of which Paul writes.  If there is one thing for certain in this universe, it is that very living thing, including you and I, will eventually die.  Hate to ruin your Easter, but hopefully that’s not a news flash to you.  To suggest that such a process is reversible is to overthrow everything we know about the natural world.  To claim that Jesus has risen from the dead is a radical challenge to reality and to the powers of this world.  Death has always been the ultimate weapon, for governments both good and bad, for armies, for terrorists, for criminals and for stalkers and pedophiles.  If Jesus defeated death, it’s more than just a good Sunday morning for Jesus.  It means all those sources of evil in our world have been disarmed.

The Horror of Easter

Twilight, HBO’s True Blood, Anne Rice’s Lestat character; we are obsessed with vampires and those who come back from the dead.  Although seldom mentioned, we Christians have the best “vampire” story of all, except in our tale, in a typical Jesus plot twist, the guy does not come back from the dead to drink our blood.  Instead, we drink his. Easter is scary, although I did not always realize it.

When I was growing up, Easter was my favorite religious holiday. For me, Easter was the only Sunday on which I heard a remotely cheerful hymn, Christ the Lord is Risen Today.  It was a day of sunshine, rabbits, white suits and fresh air.  I loved when it came late in the year.  In particular I remember Easter 1976, not so much for the zany days of Gerald Ford, my 45 of Bohemian Rhapsody or a can of Pepsi Lite, but for a week in April when temperatures in New Jersey climbed to an unseasonable ninety degrees.  It was a brief preview of my favorite summer of all time.  For me, it cemented the image of Easter as a happy and upbeat day on the church calendar.

That was also the year I was at the height of my born-againess.  Although only an eighth grader, I had figured out everything about Christianity a couple of summers before at an altar call. I had finished reading the entire Bible in a year.  I kept lists of friends and family members that needed saving. It was all so simple, straightforward and sunny like Easter.

Little did I know I was just a few weeks away from meeting a cool kid from LA on the Asbury Park boardwalk, my first beer, an obsession with Corvettes, and a fascination with newly top-heavy girls with Farrah Fawcett-like hair flips.  The list of friends to save would have to wait.

Within a couple of years, Easter fell in early March on a cold and rainy Sunday.   My friends and I spent the afternoon standing in a driveway, kicking pebbles.  The sunny-ness of Easter was gone.  Perhaps that too was a preview.

Lately, I have been thinking, Easter is not sunny and happy.  Easter is a little creepy and frankly, weird.  It is a day when we celebrate a body coming out of a grave. I saw Poltergeist. I don’t want any dead person bursting through my kitchen floor, not even Jesus. Coming back from the grave is generally not a good thing.  Yet we Christians claim that it is.

Mythbusters: Conspiracy Theory

 Back in the early nineties, I was creating medical videos and traveled extensively every other weekend.  The video crews who traveled with me were subjected to what became known as “The Don Heatley Assassination Tour.”  Our trips earned this name because whenever we were in a city where a Presidential assassination took place, I always dragged the crew to see its location.  Once, when in Washington DC taping Newt Gingrich, I rushed the crew to pack up our equipment quickly so we could make it to Ford’s Theater before it closed.  I didn’t limit the tour to just successful assassinations.  Failed attempts were on my tour map too.  So we also made time to drive by the hotel where John Hinckley shot President Reagan.

Of course, when it comes to assassinations, JFK’s is the big one.   JFK was killed when I was a year old so growing up, it was always one of the defining events that shaped my reality.  Even as a child, I sensed that even the most stable of symbols and institutions were vulnerable to random bullets, illegal break-ins or scandals. Every election or inauguration, it seemed there was a collective cultural disappointment that the each new president was not JFK.  As I moved into my teen years, I became fascinated with books and articles about the conspiracy theories around his death.  My father had saved Life magazines from 1963.  Taking a magnifying glass, I would examine the pictures in them, scanning the grassy knoll for any shadow that might be construed as a sniper.  Over time, I became convinced that there had to be vast conspiracy behind this tragic event.  It couldn’t be the work of a lone crazed gunman.  That was too random and meaningless.

So when my video crew traveled to Dallas, I just had to get to Dealey Plaza.  We spent over an hour just walking around in the Zapruder landscape. Right away, I experienced a phenomena that is common when visiting places in person which one has previously only seen on TV.  And that is that places always look bigger on television.  If you have ever gone to the taping of TV show and sat in the studio audience, you’ve experienced this.  The set always looks much smaller than it does when you see it on your screen at home.  Dealey Plaza is no exception.  Standing there on the sidewalk, right beside the big “X” in the road that marks the spot Kennedy was hit, everything appeared much smaller than I had imagined.

I looked over my shoulder up to the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository and it too was much closer than I had pictured.  I thought about all the books I had read and all the documentaries I watched claiming how impossible it would have been for Oswald to fire accurately, and suddenly those claims didn’t seem so credible.  As looked back to the “X” and up to the window again, I thought to myself, “You know what?  I think even I could make that shot.”