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Faith vs. Dogma

By / October 13, 2022

I have a kind of convergence of thought going on lately as I consider various questions.  As I process, I’m realizing a lot struggle people are having today is one of faith vs. dogma.  Young people my kids’ ages leave home and leave the church.  People who have been a part of the church their whole lives suffer through a pandemic never to return.  In a different vein, long-standing friendships are severed over politics or a stance on some social issue.  And it strikes me – churched or unchurched, we are living in dogmatic times.

I take issue with Merriam-Webster here.  I don’t equate dogma with doctrine.  I think rather we can approach doctrine faithfully or dogmatically.  And I think it’s critical to understand what’s at stake.  When we approach doctrine dogmatically, we shut down questions.  When we approach doctrine faithfully, we invite questions.  Faith breathes.  Dogma suffocates.  Faith moves.  Dogma sits.  Faith lives.  Dogma calcifies.  Faith is hard.  Dogma is easy.  Paradoxically, faith anchors.  Dogma is easily dislodged.

As I said, questions are catalyzing these thoughts.  Some of my questions I’m almost afraid to voice out loud because, as I said before, these are dogmatic times.  If you ask a thoughtful question, dogma oversimplifies difficulties and questions why you would raise such a question.  You can find yourself on the outside of a group you have a long-standing relationship with – you can find yourself shunned.   But that doesn’t stop the questions – and here is where I think the issue is….

I can answer my kids’ questions with dogma, giving them easy answers to complex questions.  I can question them as to why they would even bring up some questions, shutting down discussion and imposing a false peace – but that’s just what it would be – a false peace.  If the dogma doesn’t make sense to them (and dogma rarely does) the questions don’t go away.  And when they’re out from under my roof living far away from the church of their youth, they’ll look for answers to those questions somewhere other than the places they received dogmatic answers.  They’ll leave the church.

We can answer our brothers and sisters with dogma.  And when a pandemic comes and they can’t be together with the saints, they’ll go somewhere else when they can finally get out.  Maybe to a volleyball league or the Lion’s Club.

If we are going to survive… no…. let’s aim higher than that…if we are going to thrive, we’d better answer questions with faith.  Faith will wrestle.  Faith will deal with ambiguity.  Faith will breathe.  Faith will give life.

Okay.  So, I addressed the church issue.  I want to be clear.  We live in dogmatic times.  Have I said that?  It’s not just in the church where dogma exists.  It’s not even primarily in the church.  It’s out in the world too – neck-deep in spades as evidenced in a cancel culture that can only work in a dogmatic world.  Our political and social discourse is full of poorly supported dogma.  Do you hear what I am saying?  The world has always been dogmatic.  But unlike the church, it can’t be any different because it doesn’t have faith.  And this is our in.  Faith breathes.  Faith lives.  We may be excoriated for expressing ideas that fall outside the current dogmatic sphere, but we should be brave enough to do it.  Because as the mob does its worst and gives us up for dead, a few will linger.  And wonder.  And as our faith animates us and we, like Paul, get up off the ground and walk again, that wonder will turn into questions.  And they have then started down the path of faith.

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Monarchs

By / October 11, 2022

They don’t think of us at all of course, that’s just my wild overdeveloped right brain’s idea.  I’m talking about monarch butterflies.  You know them, don’t you?  Those orange with black striped powerhouses that migrate some 3,000 miles to Mexico from all over the country only to return in the spring from whence they came.  (Monarchs deserve words like “whence” I think.) 

Here at the Harrill household we’re a little crazy for monarchs.  We’ve torn up turf and planted a decidedly small meadow, complete with milkweed, the favored food of the caterpillars.  We’ve tagged the migrators for scientific research groups dedicated to monarch preservation.  My youngest has put splints on a couple of wounded-winged monarchs and watched them flutter off for parts unknown.  We’ve collected the caterpillars to protect them from predators at their vulnerable metamorphosis stage of chrysalis formation and released them when they hatch.  We do all this – but they don’t give us a second thought.  Not at all.  They just fly off to Mexico unaware that some of them owe us their very lives.

And it makes me think (because unlike monarchs I can) – how much do I think about what God has done for me?  Paul says this – “For in Him we live, move, and have our being.”  Simply put, we don’t exist without Him.  And yet, do I think about it?  Do I look at every breath as a grace given me from Him?  Do I go about my day consciously thinking of how He animates me?  Do I, in this existence of mine, place my whole self in relation to Him?  In the final analysis, I’m convinced God works for the attention He deserves from us every day.  Today, He even used monarchs… even though they didn’t think of me at all….

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Avoiding the Kool-Aid

By / September 23, 2022

Avoiding the Kool-Aid

This may be a little heavy.  I don’t think so much in words as I do in pictures and images – and of late my thoughts are an avalanche of cognitive dissonance.  Maybe you’re there too – that feeling you get when something is totally different from your expectations and experiences.  These days, I wonder sometimes if I even understand anything the world throws at me – I find it all quite bizarre.  The latest bizarre episode comes (circuitously) from someone who used to go to church and has stopped.  “Yeah, been there, done that, I’m just not drinking the Kool-Aid anymore.”  Exact words.  To one of her former sisters in Christ.  Huh?

Forget about the insulting implication.  We can expect that from non-believers.  It hurts more, however, when it comes from someone we were close to in the church, when they place us in the same category as a crazy suicidal cult group where over 900 people died for their unquestioning allegiance to a charismatic lunatic.  Sure, it’s hyperbolic and of course they are doing some major self-justifying.  But it makes me think – what was her faith built on?

I’m not sure.  But I suspect a lot of Christians look for easy answers.  They want to put their thinking on autopilot so they don’t have to wrestle so much with how God wants them to live in this world.  The problem with that is when not worked, spiritual muscles atrophy – and when harder questions come, these folks aren’t ready to deal with them.  And today, there are a lot of hard questions – and the easy answers are coming from a pathological world that would have us walk in its well-worn paths.  God answers our questions within the context of the cross – a decidedly hard set of answers requiring sacrifice, endurance, faith, and a kind of love so cosmically mind-bending the world can’t even see it.  We need to avoid those paths of least resistance wherever we find them because in the end, that’s where real destruction comes from.

Einstein purportedly asked, “Are they crazy, or am I?”  I’ve asked that.  But what I’ve found is, the peace I have, the joy I have, the love I’m capable of (and all-to-often imperfectly do) – all these things have all been forged in the pain of the cross – plain foolishness to the world, but rock-solid truth proven over time as I daily discover new ways to love God and my neighbors more perfectly.  Even to those who think I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid….

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The Measure of God’s Blessings

By / September 23, 2022
blessing in disguise

The Measure of God’s Blessings

Pretty exciting times at the Harrill homestead this week!  Whereas we had received maybe an inch of rain from mid-June to September 4th in total, Monday we measured 2 ¾ inches in a nice, steady, soaking rain.  My wife and I have strained the well this summer watering trees, flowers, and vegetables, all in the attempt to keep some things alive.  I honestly can’t remember such a dry summer.  We’ve seen close to 90% probabilities of rain three days out fizzle to absolutely nothing on the expected day all summer long.  Anyone in the Northeast knows what we are talking about.

Weather always makes me think.  Consider – we’ve watched the radar as a storm cell barreled down on us only to fall apart right before it reached us.  We’ve seen others veer off to the south or north in accurate examples of “scattered storms.”  But the most infuriating one we saw was a three county-long line of a storm far from being anything like scattered literally falling to pieces a mile to the west and then reforming about a mile to the east with nothing we could do about it.  Our rain gauge got a little damp.  Rain gauge.  Hmmmm….

You see, we know God controls the weather as He sends His rain on the just and unjust.  Now, we’ve prayed for rain.  And it seems like the rain and the gauge is like some sort of all-to-accurate metaphor.  And so, as I have contemplated my parched earth, my attitude towards the reasons for my parched earth, and…. Well, anyway, I wonder – are we in the habit of putting out rain gauges to measure God’s blessings in our lives?  I don’t mean like in the old song “Count Your Blessings,” but more like, “Okay God, it’s time for me to do a cost-benefit analysis of my life with you.”  Or, “I’m looking for some very specific things from you and I’m going to see if you come through for me in the ways I expect.”  And it strikes me (as I trip over the gas can I haven’t had to fill for my mower all summer) – any kind of ingratitude I exhibit for anything God does means I’m looking at the wrong things in the wrong places.

Didn’t Jesus say His blessings are immeasurable?  Are not God’s greatest gifts free?  Doesn’t our ingratitude stem mostly from our wrong-headed transactional ways of thinking or our inability to see what God is doing in our lives?  Really, is there anything I’ve done at all that is worth all God has done for me?  We all know the answers to these questions, but we sure tend to forget.

So.  Thank you God for the rain – but thank you more for the reminders this summer of the true blessings we have in you!

These are the passages I had in mind when writing this….

Malachi 3:10

Luke 6:38

Romans 3:23-24

Did you catch the hidden blessing in the drought??

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Race Against Horses

By / September 8, 2022

“If running against men has wearied you, how will you race against horses?”

I can’t think of anyone who had a tougher job than Jeremiah.  In his day he saw the last good king of Judah die in a senseless battle God had tried to warn him away from.  From that point, the land of Judah was eaten away by her enemy over the course of twenty plus years until she was completely destroyed.  Jeremiah was given the task of preaching unpopular sermons of repentance and surrender and was verbally and physically assaulted.  We would forgive him if he complained a bit.  He complains a bit.  God answers one of those complaints in Jeremiah 12:5 – “Look, if you can’t handle racing against people, how are you going to race against horses?”  And it strikes me – God expected him to race with horses….

Well, sort of, there is precedent.  But what He really expected was for Jeremiah to do what He told him to do and leave the consequences to Him.  Jeremiah was complaining that God was taking too long in His justice.  Not that Jeremiah wanted to see his country destroyed necessarily, but he was tired of preaching and seeing the people look at him like he had two heads.  “Just a second, Jeremiah, you say we’ve got to stop doing what we’re doing and if we don’t we’ll be sorry – but nothing – n-o-t-h-i-n-g will happen!  You’re a fraud!  And a stupid dangerous one at that!”

I get it.  When we stand up for what is right, say for example, speaking the truth in love or calling sin, “sin” or preaching whole-hearted allegiance to God and people say we are haters or ignorant of how the world works or alarmists, we can get caught up in the “No, I’m not,” “Yes, you are” game.  And we can turn to God and say, “Can I get a little help here?  Just a little sign from you to them so they can know I’m not crazy?” and God, being God and not working on our timetable, is justified in saying, “You are getting distracted.  You’ve said what I needed you to say, if they won’t listen, move on, I’ll take care of this.  Don’t worry if they think you’re crazy, I know you and that’s all that matters.  You go run with the horses over there and tear it up while I deal with this in my own patient and hopeful time.”  In other words, keep at God’s business.  Do what God wants you to do.  If there is widespread repentance, great!  If only a few listen, God has won a few.  If no one listens, at least we are His.

I think we are in an age of exhaustion.  The information age is relentless in bombarding folks with useless information that distracts from God’s voice.  More people than ever seem to believe the ends justify the means.  Talk of civility is ridiculed and entire bridges of communication have been nuked to make way for the highways of vitriol and spite and the world tries to funnel us to those roads.  But this is not the time to give up on God’s ways.  Nor is it time to sit down and cry.  This is the time to speak God’s love, truth, justice, mercy and holiness to a world that very well may hear all of what we say as a foreign language.  But there are always some who will strain to hear.  There are always some that, because we didn’t give up doing and saying the right things, will tune their ears to God’s language and become fluent.  So, let’s not lose heart – let’s race with the horses.

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Do I Need the Church?

By / September 8, 2022
church

“Do I need the church?”  Hmmm…. If you start feeling uncomfortable about what I have here I beg you to stick with me a while.  I don’t intend to beat anyone up.  I am mindful of Isaiah’s words in prophesying that Jesus does not break bruised reeds or snuff out smoldering wicks and I think a lot of us fit in those categories.  But I recently read something I think I was supposed to agree with but found I didn’t.  It put high emphasis on the need for the church, stating how being away from it will adversely affect your relationship with God.  That part I agree with.  What I took issue with was the other part of the idea, which was when you cut the church out of the deal you can still be a Christian.  The more God teaches me about the church the more I see this as dead wrong.

Now, a lot of this is attitudinal.  I know a lot of people who for reasons beyond their control cannot make it to the gathering of believers.  We call certain people our “shut-ins” because they can’t leave their houses.  Others have jobs on Sunday that are their only means of support.  Still others may live debilitatingly far from other believers.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book Life Together, astutely points out that none of us is guaranteed a body of believers in which to belong – but that’s not really our problem is it?  The real problem is when by God’s grace we are given a body to meet with and we decide, “Nah, it’s not important.”

Consider – no letter in the New Testament is written outside of the context of a church.  You are thinking “Philemon.”  Go ahead, take a look.  Paul wrote him a letter, v. 1… and to the church meeting in “your home” v. 2.  The two to Timothy and to Titus are chock-full of church matters.  Of course, we have to take God’s word personally – but it is equally imperative (and widely overlooked, dismissed, and fought against) we take it communally.

The fact is, most of what God calls us to is impossible outside the context of the church.  How are we to demonstrate our love to our brothers and sisters if we never see them?  How can all people know we are Christians by our love if we never associate with them?  How can we demonstrate Jesus’ power in destroying dividing walls of hostility if we never set foot inside the walls where our brothers and sisters are?  How can we show the most excellent way of love if we have no one to show Jesus’ radical love to?  “Yeah, but I don’t really have anything in common with or even get along with anyone at church.”  That’s the point!  Jesus Christ is our unifying factor, forming us into one body, teaching us to love each other deeply from the heart!  So, if we call ourselves Christians but purposefully stay away from the church, not only do we obliterate our witness of God’s power in the world (and to the principalities and powers in the heavenly realms), we also stand on incredibly shaky ground, testing the limits of what it means to be a Christian.

Please understand, I don’t mean to be harsh.  It’s just simply too easy to slip into the world’s ways of thinking without even meaning to.  So we need to be clear about what God thinks about the church and strive to help as many as possible understand that.  God help and bless us all….

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In God’s Presence

By / August 22, 2022
cherubim
Good day at North Penn this morning, this is the final lesson from the book of James titled “In God’s Presence.”  The idea is tied to the idea of wisdom vs. foolishness, God’s world view vs. the world’s world view, and double mindedness vs. singleness of purpose.  Outline under the video.
  In God’s Presence James 5:13-20 Our relationship to God….
  • In the bad….
    • James 1:2; 2:6; 5:1-7
  • In the good….
    • Exodus 15:1-18, 21
    • Luke 1:46-56, 68-79
  • In sickness….
    • Miraculous – II Kings 4:8-37; Luke 8:40-56; Acts 3:1-10
    • Other – II Kings 20:7; I Timothy 5:23
    • The fellowship comes to the sick – Matthew 18:20
  • From sin….
    • Confession = accountability – v. 16
    • The need to call others back – v. 19-20
Prayer….
  • Two world views
    • James 1:5-7
    • James 4:2-3
    • Example of Elijah
 
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The Bride of Christ

By / August 18, 2022

Most summers find me working one week at Camp Manatawny, a Christian camp out in Douglassville, PA.  On one evening devotional this past summer our speaker asked us to turn to the person to our right and say one good think about our church.  We did.  He spoke a little longer and then asked us to turn to the person on the left and say one bad thing about our church.  As we turned to the left and took a breath to express the bad and the ugly, our speaker loudly commanded, “Stop!” and then said “Who gave you the right to criticize the bride of Christ?”  It was a beautiful piece of rhetoric with a fantastic slap.

For a couple of seconds, I wondered what I would have heard if we were able to go on, but only for a couple because I already know what I would have heard – I’ve heard it before.  “Our church is too….” “Our leadership doesn’t….” “Our singing is….” “Our preacher is….”  Our services are….”  “We don’t have….”  It’s all there.

We think we’re justified.  After all, most of the letters in the Bible are addressing problems and Revelation chapters two and three have plenty of criticism.  But the one doing the criticizing in Revelation is Christ Himself.  And Paul is doing something a bit different and it strikes me – that difference is in what we too often do by bringing the church down on the one hand instead of placing ourselves squarely within the church and working on the church’s improvement on the other.  If we are the bride of Christ, it makes sense to collectively look at ourselves in the mirror and fix what needs fixing.  Christ’s warnings in Revelation are instructive, as are Paul’s admonitions.

But we must set ourselves solidly in the church.  We must see our brothers and sisters in the church as part of our own body.  And it seems to me if I focus and work on the plenty in me that needs fixing instead of something else I may have very little control over, I’m going a long way towards making the bride of Christ that much more beautiful.

Let me finish on a slightly different track.  Over the past couple of years, a lot of people have left the church.  Some have tried to come back and have been discouraged by the change in their own church’s makeup and dynamic.  Others have tired of the vigorous interaction with other parts of the body that mold and shape us into Christ’s likeness.  Still others have swapped the transforming power of the church for activities.  Despite all this, the church is still the bride of Christ.  She is still the most beautiful thing on earth, teaching us love, humility, righteousness, holiness, service and…well, every good thing God intends for us.  And she is totally worth our attention.  After all, Christ gives her all of His.

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Patience in James 5

By / August 18, 2022

The theme of James 5:7-12 is patience and James exhorts us to have patience in the face of persecution and difficulty.  The outline on patience in James 5 is under the video.  God bless!

Patience

James 5:7-12

Patient with what?

  • Context is injustice – 5:1-6
  • Keep the focus where it belongs, don’t take your hardships out on each other – v. 9
  • God will make it right – v. 7, 8

Three illustrations….

  • The farmer – Psalm 126:5-6
  • Prophets – Jeremiah 38
  • Job – Ezekiel 14:14-20

Do not swear….

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Growing Up Spiritually

By / August 11, 2022
Spiritual maturity

The picture above is of my old toybox my dad made for me before my memory of it.  It’s pretty big, and I could fit all my toys in it as a child.  I remember sitting in front of it one day, thinking of all my toys, how much I loved them and loved playing with them when I was overcome with a sense of dread.  Old people didn’t play with toys.  They didn’t have a toybox.  I couldn’t imagine life without my toys and wondered what exactly happened to people when they grew up that they just lost interest in such important things!

Skip forward to a few decades and I’m sitting in my classroom with one of my 16-year-old students.  He was asking me about Drake.  I was impressed he knew what a male duck was.  It was a minute or so when we realized we were having a breakdown in communication.  He was talking about the rapper.  I had no idea there was a rapper named Drake.  Only partly to himself he said, “Wow.  I don’t ever want to get old.”

But we do, don’t we?  And as we do, we put away our toys and move on, with very little regret and fuss.  But how about spiritually?

Think about it!  Wasn’t a big problem in the Corinthian church really a refusal to grow up spiritually (I Corinthians 3:2)?  God had given them gifts and they were completely enamored with some of them over others, particularly speaking in tongues.  They were treating them like their own personal toys and wanted to show off like second-graders in show-and-tell!  They were metaphorically pushing and shoving each other around, treating worship like a school playground, while quite literally talking over one another.  Paul, like an exceptionally patient parent, walks them through the proper use of the gifts and then says they need to focus on something far more important, something that will never pass away, and that is love.  And then he lays it on the line – “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

And it strikes me – how can we be sure we are growing up spiritually?  Paul would say we can tell when we no longer are concerned about our position or glory.  We can tell when we extend grace to those around us and see the best in our brothers and sisters.  We can tell when we chose the way that builds others up rather than puffs ourselves up.  We can tell when we stand firmly in what remains after all the chaff is blown away.  And all of this is the way of love….

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

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