Archive for category: News

Just finished watching one of the latest episodes of “Ted Lasso,” the Apple+ series about a fictional former Wichita State Football coach hired to coach the Richmond, England soccer team by an owner who hires Ted to fail so she can get rid of the team. But much to Richmond’s owner’s surprise, Ted, played by Shawnee Mission West graduate Jason Sudeikis, has a downhome wisdom & self-deprecating humor that wins the owner’s and players’ affections though not many actual games.

In this episode the owner’s father passes away when the discussion in Coach Ted’s office turns to the question of the owner’s father destiny: Heaven or Hell. Ever the chatty sage, Ted chimes in, “You know growing up, I used to believe that if you did good things, you went to heaven. You did bad things, you went to hell. Nowadays I know we all just do both.”

The last sentence in Ted’s statement\stopped me in my tracks. “Did Ted just say what I think he said?” Not the first two sentences about what he used to believe about the destiny of those who do good things or bad things. It was when he added, “Nowadays, I know we all just do both.” I had to rewind the episode to make sure I heard him right.

Because when Ted says, “we all do both,” he introduced an ambiguity we all know deep-down is true. No one is all good or all bad, though we may wonder about some people, who are either heavenly saints or hellish sinners. But what does God do when each of us stands at the Pearly Gates and know good-and-well our lives are a mixed bag of good and evil, though hopefully more good than evil? Ted’s comment opens a can of worms.

Now, anyone who believes what Ted says he used to believe comes by this honestly. The Book of the Deuteronomy provides us with Exhibit A of the idea that good will be rewarded and evil punished. It’s a very attractive attitude, because it’s simple, straightforward, and easy to grasp….until we consider how many bad people prosper and get away with murder, while good people suffer We may even know someone who was abused others who walked away with unmerited rewards. Is life really a meritocracy as Deuteronomy apparently supposes?

Believe it or not the Old Testament wisdom story of Job offers a very different way of thinking than Deuteronomy’s “works-righteousness” model. Job has done everything right. He is a paragon of righteousness but soon after the book begins, he’s dumped on with all kinds of calamity. His children die, he loses the farm, his flesh breaks out in boils and his wife and friends turn against him, insisting he must have done something wrong to have the devil heap so much tragedy upon him. It’s only when Job dresses down God at the end of the book (Chs. 38-42) that Job realizes compared to God’s righteousness and grandeur, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on for declaring his virtue.

The author of the Book of Job’s perspective on why and when bad things happen to good people is considered by some biblical scholars as an intentional repudiation of Deuteronomy’s simplistic code of rewards & punishments. Ted’s 3rd sentence, admitting “we all do both,” echoes Job’s willingness to argue how often the good get punished while bad folks prosper. The final word on the subject falls from Jesus’s lips when he says in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” This is Job’s perspective.

The question is how to resolve this conflict in biblical and popular perspectives?

Over the course of René’s and my lifetime, our family, friends, and parishioners to whom we’ve ministered have seen enough tragedy to make this question of what happens to them and to each of us when we die an urgent question. Not insignificant is how do we get through our grief and losses and remain whole, healthy people. René has often said, “If it weren’t for our Christian faith and friends, we couldn’t have made it through this.” We’ve literally been through the fires and tried to help others through their fires.

But I want to point out a couple of things that may be helpful: First, Ted Lasso is right. “We all do both” good and evil and I mean “all.” This makes Christ’s redemptive act of dying on the cross inclusive of all persons. I don’t mean Jesus’s death was some act of “substitutionary atonement” so we can take for granted God’s love and live as we damn well, please. I mean Jesus’s death demonstrates how deeply God loves us and how much God is love. It’s in this light that Jesus’s use of the word “Them” in his plea, “God forgive them. They don’t know what they do.” “Them” includes all of us, all of humankind, and all of creation of every generation! The cross is a sign of the depth and breadth of God’s compassion.

But this doesn’t mean God has to accept the evil in us in whatever incarnation our life takes in the life-to-come. That evil, to quote Shakespeare and Marc Antony’s funeral oration in “Julius Caesar” is best “interred with our bones.” It’s this kind of understanding philosopher Alfred North Whitehead captures when he writes, “Nothing beautiful is lost to God.” Or as Paul says, “Whatever is pure or excellent, think on these things.” In the life-to-come God receives what God desires while discarding what God doesn’t need or desire.

As I see it, for what it’s worth, the popular mistake much of popular Christianity has made is to assume God accepts us lock, stock and barrel—wholesale—good and evil, ugly and beautiful in the next life. We’re speculating here, and so though this classic understanding of the life-to-come may be true, my faith suggests otherwise.

Consider the scripture’s agricultural allusion to separating the wheat and the chaff in the harvest. Up until a couple of centuries ago, wheat was harvested using a hand thresher. The person threshing would toss the wheat and the chaff in the air. The thresher captured the heavier wheat, but the wind captured the chaff. The chaff would literally “inherit the wind.”

The metaphor is simple. Chaff is whatever is evil and unnecessary in us and in our world for our relationship to God and to one another. These are the parts of our lives God has no need of. We may think of our physical bodies in this way, though Paul alludes in Corinthians to a “spiritual body” he never clearly defines. But there has to be something to what Paul is saying. The resurrection stories in John speak of Mary and the disciples touching Jesus’ crucified hands and side. Something persists, but what? We likely will never know until we die.

So, what might happen when we die? No one can know for sure.

But here’s my hunch, again based upon Whitehead and this metaphor of wheat and chaff: Whatever is beautiful in us God will grasp and keep in God’s everlastingness. It is wheat. Whatever is ugly in us and in our world, God will let go of and will be lost, like the chaff. It will inherit the wind.

I’ve been asked this question: Will we keep our identity and know who we are in the next life? My answer, again purely speculative, is that we will not lose our identity. Yet, in the end, our identity won’t finally matter. I believe when we die and stand before the presence of God, we will be so humbled and overwhelmed with God’s divinity and majesty and beauty, our identity will appear irrelevant. We will become a part of God’s own divinity, being, & wonder. As the song says, “Our God is an awesome God,” and God is! We will understand it all when we die.

Indeed, what John the Baptist said early in the gospels will also be true for us, “One is coming after me the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” John expresses what our encounter with God may be like: an experience of glory intermingled with a depth of humility (not humiliation, but humility) we probably have never experienced before. And what a day that will be “when death and pain and mourning will be no more.”

Of course, heaven can wait; but death need no longer control us or cause us to fear because of the glory that awaits us—even as the evil we have done is lost and gone forever!

Literally, for now, Rick

One thing we don’t expect from the scriptures is humor—not “Ha! Ha! Humor” we think of, but humor, nonetheless. Sometimes the humor is obvious: Like a scene in the Old Testament right out of an episode of the old sitcom “Mr. Ed,” the talking horse. Except this time, it’s a donkey who scolds the military leader Balaam for disobeying God’s insistence for Balaam not to co-operate with the Moabites. Or when Jonah pouts because he’s pissed-off at God for making him go to the City of Nineveh and demand their repentance. When the Ninevites repent, Jonah sulks because he’d hoped God would nuke them and wipe them off the face of the earth!

But more often the humor is subtler and ironic: Like when the devil quotes scripture while tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Who knew the devil knew the Bible? Sometimes the church’s adversaries know our playbook better than we do!

The pinnacle of humor occurs in John’s Gospel when the Roman Prelate Pilate asks Jesus “What is truth?” It’s a question John believes the faithful should be asking, not their enemy! The question is John’s way of needling 2 sets of his listeners: the Docetists, who believe they have an exclusive app no one else has to buddy up with God, and the “Antinomians,” who believe their freedom in Christ sets them above all law, including God’s!

Know anyone like the Docetists and Antinomians these days?

Certainly no one person or group has a corner on the truth, like the Docetists assumed they did. If they do, they’ve committed the mother of all the 7 deadly sins: Pride!

Furthermore, we’re all troubled and bewildered by the mess and polarization we see in our country today. Anyone who isn’t confused & depressed, these days isn’t paying attention.
We wonder how can this be happening in this land we love?

I can’t pretend to know the answer, though, of course I have my ideas. Yet, I know neither I nor anyone else can capture all the nuances & complexities of our troubles.

Still, I wonder if we aren’t witnessing a period in contemporary history when two ways of interpreting the truth, of defining how we know what we know, and answering Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” aren’t colliding and leaving us all feeling angry and befuddled.

One way is modern, fixed, and thoroughly nostalgic, enough so those who typify this mindset are willing to rewrite history to their liking and deny any reality they find inconvenient. This way is binary. It divides life into black and white, with no gray. In James Fowler’s classic book “(The Six) Stages of Faith,” folks who follow this initial way of knowing are stuck at Level 3 of a possible 6 levels—in which spirituality is reduced to division between good and evil, heaven or hell, true or false, with me or against me. These folks embrace disinformation.

In this fixed worldview of life is a zero-sum game. There are only winners & losers. This view has left a widening gap between rich (the winners) and poor (definitely, the losers).

Ironically (one form of humor is irony) is how many on the American Religious Right fit the worst aspects of modernism without knowing it. When I say “modern” here I mean that movement which began with the Renaissance when seeds of the belief that humankind can solve any problem no matter how challenging or complex, were planted. Anyone who even hints that they know all the answers is guilty of modernism’s worst instincts.

Of course, the Christian Right might reply, their belief in Jesus is sufficient even if they mean science-be-damned or deny that God might do a new thing (like be revealed in and through scientific or medical progress). But their faith assumes life should be a narrow, closed moral system, despite the fact Jesus once said, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but my Father in heaven.” This is not to say churches and supporters of evangelical churches never experience blessing nor ever offer blessing to the world. Undoubtedly, they do.

But beyond the realm of the spiritual, the Christian Right is leaving a questionable cultural influence, or should I say “sinfluence” damaging to our nation in this volatile time.

More ironic, the Christian Right is replicating modernism’s (and liberalism’s) greatest mistake of acting as if faith is static and not dynamic and need never change. The great classic liberals of the late 19th century: Marx, Freud, & theologian von Harnack, were overly optimistic that humankind could solve any problem without any need of God. Truth, as often defined by both ultraconservatives and ultraliberals, functions in a closed system, when again, God might be up to a new thing! Believing God can do a new thing suggests an open, not a closed system! “New occasions DO teach new duties,” as poet James Russell Lowell said after the Civil War.

The death of this kind of prideful hubris began with the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, followed by World War II. These events called into question modernism and classic liberalism’s hope in humanity’s ability to solve any problem be it scientific, cultural, or spiritual.

But there is a second answer for understanding “What is truth?” It is the post-modern understanding, held often, though not exclusively by younger generations. Post-modernism has many attractive attributes: It is fluid instead of fixed. It is more comfortable with ambiguity than our more highly anxious and insecure alternative group. This makes the post-modern perspective more adaptive to change in an era of rapid technological and cultural change. Postmodernism’s hallmark is its willingness to advance gender, racial & ethnic diversity.

But postmodernism also comes with its own set of problems. For one, it says there are no absolutes, and, therefore, only marginal recognition of a need for God, whom philosopher Charles Hartshorne in his book The Divine Relativity, says is the only absolute in creation. But in post-modernism everything is relative. There is only ambiguity and no certainty. In this sense post-modernism is also guilty of the same hubris of modernism. It avers, “We don’t need God!” We can figure it all out ourselves. There is no place for the transcendent. Postmodernism is both iconoclastic of eternal values, and idolatrous of penultimate values.

This is at the core of the Christian Right’s nostalgia for “MAGA” and disdain for anything that hints of liberalism and socialism (though our nation’s founders—fully capitalists—set the American Constitution as the acme of a social democratic document).

While I present these two colliding forces at work in polarization, both perspectives have their strengths and their weaknesses if I have accurately represented them. Thing is: Jesus likely never intended to bestow upon us an ideology but a spiritual relationship; a loving relationship between ourselves and God and a loving relationship between each of us and our neighbor.

The apostle Paul gives us this criterion for adjudicating all kinds of conflict in his First Letter to his multiple-polarized Corinthian community. He said, “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries & all knowledge, & if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” He is talking about what IS absolute, relevant, and ultimate here: God’s unconditional love.

We are living in one of the most negative times in all human history, in a post-truth world. These times are marked by several words starting with the letter or sound “N.” Nihilism: Nothing has meaning. Nominalism: Words mean nothing or only what each person says they mean. Narcissism: No one counts except me, unless I say they do. And Gnosticism with its silent “G:” Only I know the truth and no one else. These philosophies may help explain our times, but they are all empty, vacuous, and wanting as cornerstones for building our spiritual house on.

But the apostle Paul is right! There really is only one thing that ultimately matters in life, in faith, in family, in culture, among all nations, and in all the world: LOVE!

Blessings! Rick

The Shawnee Community Board is looking for volunteers to fill the following roles on the 2022 Board. The time commitment for the positions below are 1-2 hours per month for monthly Board meetings and other meetings as needed. Each of the positions below are 1 year commitments.

• Vice Moderator

• Secretary

• HR Chair

We are also looking for individuals to serve as Elders. Elders are 3 year terms.

If you are interested in serving in one of these positions or if you have questions, please contact Jeanie Botkin at jeanie.botkin@yahoo.com, Ken Montgomery at montgomery3678@outlook.com or Merle Parks at parks_m@sbcglobal.net.

Where were you on 9/11 when the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon were attacked by Osama bin Laden’s Al Queda?

I’m sure we all remember where we were forty years ago when we learned a plane had attacked the North Tower only to be followed up by a second crash of a passenger jet into the South Tower along with the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of the jet in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

I was mowing the front yard of our house in Omaha when René came running out to tell me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center that fateful Tuesday morning. At first, I misunderstood, thinking it was a small plane. A few months earlier a small plane had crashed into an apartment building in New York City. But this made the videotaped crashing of the jet only more startling. Not long thereafter, as smoke billowed from the first tower, cameras showed the second plane crashing into the second tower.

For me, it had a similar impact to the moment I was between classes my sophomore year in high school when hallways were abuzz with the news President Kennedy had been shot and killed. Some moments are so terrible you just don’t forget them and where you were and what you were doing at the time. For those of us who were alive to see them, awful tragedies like 9/11 and the Kennedy Assassination are written indelibly upon our hearts and our memories.

Two weeks ago, René and I watched the TV special “Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11,” composed mostly of videotaped recordings of survivors of 9/11. The recordings were made in the Spring of 2002 soon after the tragedy and again with the same survivors 20 years later. In both sets of tapes, the survivors spoke of their immediate response & 20 years later how their lives had been shaped by 911 in the intervening years.

It’s well-worth the two-hour investment of time listening to their stories, though it isn’t easy to watch. Your heart can’t help but ache for the persons making the recordings, nearly all of whom lost best friends and loved ones. Your heart breaks for those who died within moments of the planes crashing into the buildings and when the World Trade Center skyscrapers and one-wing of the Pentagon came tumbling down. Your heart sinks for those First Responders rushing in to help as many people as they could, only to die a few moments later or from cancer years later due to their exposure to the toxic ash filling all of Lower Manhattan that day.

9/11 came as close as any such a tragedy in approximating Hell on earth. Some rightly believe that, despite all Americans coming together immediately after 9/11, the tragedy helped catalyze the paralyzing polarization we’re all experiencing in our country today. The U.S. also received the condolences of nations across the earth, though the second Iraq War changed this.

But listening to the survivors of 9/11, including the families who lost loved ones in Shanksville, served to underscore two takeaways from that and other losses we have all experienced in our lives. Both of these takeaways are positive:

First, even as the survivors shared their pain and the haunting questions that plagued them—one woman telling of her “survivor’s guilt” since she was able to make it to safety when so many of her co-workers did not—they all attested that while they know they will never get over their horrifying memories of being there on 9/11, they have gotten through their grief. Those dreadful moments put into deeper perspective for them what they hold as most precious in their lives: their closest relationships.

A widower spoke of losing his wife at the Pentagon and how overwhelmed he felt at first knowing he would have to rear his young son and daughter alone. The evidence of the difference his and his deceased wife’s love for them made unfolded as his son years later graduated from Harvard and his daughter launched out in a respected professional career. Though his wife wasn’t there to behold her children’s success, her surviving husband said he could see the imprint her life had made on them. People really do get through their grief without discarding the memories, mostly good, but, yes, some bad.

The second positive takeaway is the revelation that resurrection really happens to ordinary people, however devastated their lives became for a while. Spiritual transformations were universal among all the survivors. A commercial airline pilot and a Navy Reservist told of being called up soon after 9/11, to serve in Iraq. He went most reluctantly under orders and initially isolated himself from others because of his scars from that terrible day.

But then he discovered how warm and caring everyone was toward him and one another. His life was transformed while in Iraq by people from that part of the world, who embraced him as a brother and as a friend. He returned home after his stint in Iraq and, like many other survivors, dedicated himself to his community and making others’ lives better.

Can we, under the weight of whatever grief lies heavy on our hearts, be transformed too? Is there a symbolic 9/11, or even the actual 9/11, causing us grief and pain? Is there really a message of resurrection awaiting our hearing and embrace?

Though geophysical in nature, but not as broadly and humanly tragic, another day is etched in René’s and my memory. It was May 18, 1980. It was our daughter Erica’s second birthday. It was also the day Mt. St. Helens in southwest Washington State, erupted and killed 57 people, including a cantankerous old man named Harry Randall Truman (obviously not the president) and a vulcanologist named David A. Johnston.

The Johnston Visitor Center, 3 miles from the cone of the mountain, is named after him. Johnston took his position to observe & study Mt. St. Helen’s eruption only to be killed by the vaporizing speed and heat of its eruption, toppling and killing everything and everyone in a 4- mile radius from the volcano’s epicenter. Ash up to 6 to 12 inches deep completely covered much of northern Oregon and all of eastern Washington as the plume reached thousands of feet high.

Twenty-five years later in the summer of 2005 René and I visited Mt. St. Helens. We toured the Johnston Center and hiked some of the trails within a mile or so of the volcano, now mostly dormant but safe to approach. We discovered alder trees, often among the first species to grow in a devastated area, growing and multiplying. They and other vegetation grew along rivulets left by the eruption. We also hiked around Spirit Lake near the volcano’s core. Naturalists believed the lake had died, only to discover to their amazement that the lake and new fish had made a comeback!

René and I were captured by the miracle before our eyes and beneath our feet.
In March 2018 we returned to Mt. St. Helens, where spruce and pine trees now fill the once deadened valley below. If we hadn’t known to look for the crater, Mt. St. Helens today would look like just any other mountain. But it isn’t. It is a miracle of God’s re-creative abilities.

So, whenever we are tempted to give into death without the promise of resurrection and wherever we are tempted to despair of the future without the hope of the new thing God may be doing, may we remember 9/11’s undaunted survivors, a volcano that took life but is in the long term giving even more life back, and our church, where God’s Spirit continues to whisper our names and whose fire never goes out. For then we will be well, and all will be well!

Even in this season of loss and confusion
Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed!
Rick

A few years ago, when our grandson Finn was “graduating” from pre-school to kindergarten he, along with the other pre-K kids, were asked that typical question adults ask youngsters, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Not unexpectedly, some of the kids said they wanted to be teachers or doctors or astronauts or some other career. But when Finn answered he surprised everyone by saying, “I want to grow up to be kind.”

While I was proud of his answer, I was also caught off-guard by it. I never thought of anyone ever answering this question without thinking of some career they might pursue. I’d always assumed the question only had to do with our profession or job. But Finn has always had a way of thinking outside the box. He was far more interested in what he might BEcome than what he might DO with his life, important as that is.

And doing rather than being has nearly always taken precedence in our society. If you’re like me, I regularly keep a “To Do List,” which I update almost daily. But Finn made me think that maybe I need to start another kind of list, a “To Be List.”

All of us, especially us overachievers, base our identity more upon what we accomplish than who we are. One of the first questions any of us asks strangers is what they “do for a living.” But we don’t inquire “Who are you?” for fear we might cross a line and be intrusive.

When I was in divinity school, I took a class on small groups when the teacher gave us a list of questions. The way we answered these questions indicated whether each of us were “Task Oriented” or “Maintenance Oriented.” By “Maintenance” our instructor meant cultivating relationships and caring for those in our group, while “Task Oriented” had to do with personal achievement. My results showed I was far more “Task Oriented” than “Maintenance Oriented.”

I know I came by my task orientation honestly. Like lots of people born in the first half or so of the 20th century, I grew up in a family that practiced and preached “The Protestant Work Ethic.” Like a lot of Boomers my parents often called me “lazy,” though I thought I was just being a kid. Even the apostle Paul mentions “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

But even I could one-up most Protestants, because of my last name. Names have power and my surname Jensen, pronounced “Yensen” in Denmark, transliterated into English is Jameson, or “Son of James.” But it means “Son of Work.” Remember it’s the Letter of James in the New Testament is which gave us the verse, “Faith without works is dead.” My surname left its impact on me. I spent all my education and ministry working on average of 55 to 65 hours a week and often more. I developed a reputation for being a work-a-holic, an affliction I fear I unintentionally passed onto my kids.

But lately, I’ve found myself needing less doing time and more spiritual and contemplative time. The subject of this article is a result of starting to take more “sabbath time.” Like Finn, I’ve been trying to think outside the box. What if, I’ve reflected, I made a “To Be List,” not just a “To Do List?” What might a “To Be List” look like?

Some ideas I’ve come up with include: How about BEing more perceptive and aware of God’s presence?” Or how about BEing more balanced about how I view both my strengths and weaknesses and embrace how my weaknesses might be God’s opportunity to fill me with God’s strength? How about BEing more honest about my vices and virtues? Or how about BEING a better friend and focus more on the quality of my relationships with my family, friends, colleagues and parishioners than crossing out what I need to do with my day?

Honestly, it’s a whole lot easier and more efficient to talk about “To Do Lists.” Many tasks can be completed quickly. But BEING more than DOING, especially taking care of my relationships, takes far more investment in energy and time.

So, what about you? What would be on your “To BE List?”

We live in an obsessively task-oriented culture. Some of us turn our task-orientation into unhealthy perfectionism. We can set too high of expectation for others too. A lot of times we can go around with a chip on our shoulder and demand of others, “What have you DONE for me lately?”.

Not that our “To Do Lists” are unimportant and not that we wouldn’t do well to add a third kind of list, a “NOT to BE List.” I don’t want to be unhappy or greedy or gluttonous, or…you get the point. All of us, like Hamlet, can find ourselves asking “To be or not to be? That is the question,” and then take the time to figure out how we want to be and not be and what God wants us to be and not be!

But on this week following Labor Day, when we can pause and give thanks that we can DO and not just BE, we may need to re-examine our identities as both children of God and fellow laborers for God’s kingdom and kindom.

You know how we all love babies? And yet, babies don’t do much of anything except eat, sleep, fill their pants, and cry. But we love them anyway just because they are. I think this is how God loves us too: just because we are.

We also don’t ask retirees to work themselves into the grave, quite literally. Entitlements like Social Security and Medicare developed in 1935 and 1965 respectively were created to care for those at a stage of life when our bodies slow down. In fact, President Johnson signed Medicare into law on July 30, 1965, in Independence, MO, to honor the originator of the idea, President Truman, who created the idea of Medicare in 1945. Senior adulthood in retirement almost forces BEING questions upon us over DOING questions, though many senior adults remain very productive and active contributors to society.

Yet, it’s important for us to remember we ARE all human BEINGS, not just human DOINGS and often slaves to high performance and perfectionism. This is the reason taking time for spiritual reflection and meditation is appropriate and necessary in every stage of life, but especially when we are older. Otherwise, we can wake up one day and wonder if we ARE the kind of person both God and we want to BE!

What a Day of Reckoning it can turn into when all we have left in life is listing what we accomplished and regretting what we did not. It can feel like there never was any there “there” in our souls, whose health we neglected all along the way.

May we all take time to take a deep breath and just BE!
Rick