What is faith?

Certainty. Someone said, “I’m always certain. I’m just not always right.” My personality is not given to quite so much such certainty; I often doubt myself. But I know people like this very well, especially men. I think testosterone gives men an edge in that department. I mean, maybe. At least I think so. J

Janey took me to Prime Time (yes, she is finally eligible. I still have a few months), and we were handed a Christmas quiz to see what we really knew about the details of the Christmas story. It asked what myrrh is, and whether frankincense is a perfume. It asked what the innkeeper said to Mary and Joseph, and how many angels spoke to the shepherds. Most of us were pretty sure about our answers, and most of us got quite a few wrong. Here’s the one I shouldn’t have got wrong: “How did Mary and Joseph travel.” Answer: we don’t know. The Bible doesn’t mention the faithful donkey Nestor (named after a Greek king and advisor to Menelaus in the Trojan War, no less. Not very likely name for a Hebrew donkey carting a poor, pregnant woman), any more that it mentions innkeepers, snow, or three wisemen. Where do we get the donkey from? Since very early days, 145AD, when people were still around who had been taught by the apostles, one of the apocryphal gospels, supposedly written by James, mentions Joseph saddling a donkey for his journey to Bethlehem. Since then, Nestor has been there in all the pictures, steadily plodding along toward a star-lit stable.

What was interesting to me was my own certainty that there was a donkey, when there wasn’t, and the surprise of people as they realized that the answers they had ticked off so quickly were not right, after all, despite their certainty.

I’m so glad that certainty doesn’t determine truth. Because with the person I’m married to, I’d always be wrong. And many women would be wrong all the time, because we tend to be more tentative in our declarations, more attune to the other person’s take. And some preachers speak as if certainty itself were the path to truth. We recently disagreed with a friend on a matter, and after a discussion about it, he said he would think about it and get back to us. Later, he said that he had prayed about the matter and now was even more certain than before. As if the certainty itself were proof of something. A biblical teacher I respect says this is an evangelical form of idolatry: to trust that your own certainty is assurance of anything.

A preacher we know said that he took a class from a very wise Biblical scholar named N T Wright, who is one of the foremost evangelical teachers of our day. He’s written books like Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense and  Paul and the Faithfulness of God and many more. To introduce his class, he challenged his students to question and challenge everything and anything he taught. “Because a third of the time, I’ll be wrong,” he said, “and your questions will be clues about where I need to keep researching.” I think women would have felt comfortable in his class. Maybe.

One thing that modernity does to us all is take away our certainty and force us to choose Jesus by faith. It no longer lets us take for granted that we (or our country or our children) will walk in our parents’ faith. We now have to choose for ourselves whom we will trust. We can no longer go on someone else’s certainty. This new freedom is frightening. What if we choose wrong?

And to those who are certain, everyone else looks stupid. I mean, “Come on! A blind person could see this is true.” But this kind of language disrespects the intelligence of the person choosing differently. It is not obvious to them, and our certainty alone is not convincing. And neither our certainty nor their doubt changes what is actually true in the end. There is one Truth. It is not a list. It is not a set of propositions. It is a Person from whom all truth emanates, for “all truth is God’s truth.” We choose Him. We have our doubts. Our grave questions. Faith means, not certainty, but hanging on in the midst of uncertainty.

Posada

If I were in Mexico, I would be hearing about posadas in the neighborhood, and I would be planning one at church. Posada means “lodging.” During a neighborhood posada, groups of people walk in a procession through the street to your home, singing songs about how Jesus and his family found no room at the inn. The home offering the posada opens the home to Jesus for his birth day and provides food and drinks to the singing visitors. This would be the Mexican version of caroling. Remember that? Does anyone carol anymore? I miss that tradition! But if the tradition of caroling is gone, the tradition of Christians opening their hearts to families in need is still strong. I am proud of the way Canadians, both Christian and non, have responded to the call of the UNHCR and the Canadian government to welcome Syrian refugee families needing a posada this Christmas.

Carmen Lomas Garza

Today Janey and I listened to a two-hour information session on how to sponsor Syrian refugees in Canada. I learned that the countries around Syria, especially Turkey, have been bearing the brunt of supporting millions of Syrian refugees, but the burden is too great, and the vast numbers are more than these countries can handle. It’s the greatest refugee crisis of our time. The UN is not only running out of food, having to cut refugee rations in half,  but they have also seen that the sheer numbers in these neighboring countries is starting to destabilize the region because no one can provide social services for so many. The UN has requested other countries to help take some of the burden off Syria's neighbors by resettling large numbers in their own countries. Canada has responded by accepting thousands. It’s really a drop in the bucket, but it helps. As the Canadian government brings over these people, it will be up to groups, communities, and neighbors to help these Syrians integrate into life in Canada. Not only do these families face a new culture, a new language, and winter, they also bring their own troubles. Some of them arrive with PTSD and other health issues. What a way to start. Janey and I are part of a group that is sponsoring Syrian families, and we are hoping to be involved in a group from our church, too.

The first family the group is sponsoring arrives Thursday! The leader thought we had until the New Year! And the papers for the apartment are not yet signed, and it has not a stick of furnishing. We aren’t ready! The guy on the MCC informational video, Moses (appropriate name), said one sponsorship group found out their family was arriving in a few days and called him up to plead, “Can’t you tell the family to wait?” His answer was, “This is a protection program. If we tell that family to wait, whom are we protecting?” Whom are we protecting? We are never ready for a crisis, are we? I’m sure that inn keeper would have loved to help out that woman rubbing her heavy belly and trying to keep from groaning out loud with the birth pangs, but he had a crisis on his hands, too, with so many people coming into town, and she should have called ahead and made a reservation like all the other responsible folk traveling at such a busy time. I mean, where were her own people?

Diego Rivera mural

I think that a posada is not something we do—clean the house and cook the food and plan the date to welcome expected, familiar guests—but an attitude we hold all year long, a willingness to fit a few more guests at the table, to blow up the air mattress on short notice, to welcome the family in need that is not coming on schedule. I think God works on us all year to teach us this attitude, but it’s an inconvenient lesson. All of us are that innkeeper sometimes (God is working on that), but I’m glad to be a part of Canada’s posada this Christmas.

P.S. If you would like to help a Syrian refugee family resettle in St. Catharines, let me know. If you are already involved in a group doing this, let me know; we can put our heads together.

Albrecht Dürer

Decisions, decisions

Today I am back at the hospital again (first time since I finished radiation) to get a bone density scan. For the next five years I will take a daily estrogen blocker that will starve any hidden cancer cells that could feed off it, but will also leach the calcium from my bones. The scan will give me a baseline to measure the change.  I wonder and wonder, should I really take this pill? What difference does it really make? It’s my choice to pop that pill every morning—is it worth the side effects? How would I know?

The hospital staff are well organized, and I rarely have to wait long, but just in case, I always carry a book, usually a nonfiction make-you-think kind of book. I save the novels for home. My current novel is The Light Between Oceans about an Australian lighthouse keeper and his wife who find a baby in a boat washed ashore on their lonely island and have choices to make. My current non-fiction book is about how modernity gives us so many, many choices that we never had before, including my choice to leach my bones. The question is, what does this much decision-making do to us as a society? How do we handle it?

I listened to a TED talk by Sheen Iyengar about how too many choices in the grocery store paralyze shoppers, especially if the choices are not categorized: GMO-free, gluten-free, fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free, etc. You’d think having more choices would be freeing, life-giving, but in fact, it’s not. Having too many choices paralyzes us. We procrastinate, or we ask someone else to choose for us (a consumer reporter, or a reviewer, or a tradition, or a preacher), or we close our eyes and point and come away with something we don’t really like, because who has the time to research everything? As a society, having too many choices does not make us happier. There are those classic titles out there: Erich Fromm’s The Escape from Freedom and Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that we are “condemned to freedom,” reminding us of the agony of choice. As our world changes more and more rapidly, we are confronted with more and more choices society never offered us before. Some of these choices seem appalling, like the child who chose to have his penis removed at age five, or the government that gives thirteen-year olds the choice to sell sex. To keep from being overwhelmed, we find short cuts to help us manage our choices. World views, faiths, institutions, traditions, leaders—all of these help us pick and choose.

And it is very hard for us to understand those that modernity has not touched so deeply, and who have far less choices than we do. For them, some things are not chosen, but are simply “just the way things are” (like being born Canadian), and when someone loosens such anchors by switching them suddenly into choices, they feel threatened, untethered, and lost, like refugees in their own homes. Moving from ancient syncretistic religions into evangelical Christianity is like this, or moving from folk Islam to Christianity.  They don’t think of their religion as a choice they have made, but an identity they have been given at birth, like an ethnicity or nationality. They are cultural Christians. Cultural Muslims. They have never consciously chosen their religious identity any more than we chose the color of our passports. It simply “is.”

Which is why when missionaries show up telling a different story about the world and the path to God, these people react. We are undermining “the way things are.” When we lived in Yuvinani, a local Mixtec policeman brought us into the town hall to question us. “Where are your papers?” He asked. “Who sent you?” When we insisted we were not representing an organization, the man said, disgusted, “You are like goats without a tether. You have no owners. You should go home.”

Home, indeed. For us, Jesus is our home, anywhere. We have chosen Him and we follow Him. But not everyone even sees this as a real choice. And when pre-modernists (like the Mixtecs) reject us, or worse, harm us, as they did Juan Mercenario, the first Metlatonoc Mixtec martyr (others have followed), we might think they are choosing against Christ. Maybe. But maybe they are protecting their identity, keeping the ground from shifting beneath their feet. When the Romans and the Jews connived together to kill Jesus, he said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.” Part of what they were doing was protecting their identity—the status quo. We all do this, right or wrong. It’s a knee-jerk reaction.

So many of our choices are blind, done in the dark, and we don’t know it, or we are being led by others who don’t know any better than we do (my doctor’s don’t know whether I should stop my estrogen blocker. Nor do they understand what arthritis really is. It’s all a mystery, even in these modern times). It’s not just Roman or Mixtec assassins that Jesus was forgiving when he made that cry to his Father. Jesus, “the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” He leads us all into choice and freedom. We’re terrible at these things on our own because even as His followers, “we don’t know what we are doing.” We all have so far to go. Let us remember that and keep listening.

Acts revisited Part II

I am busy helping Janey put up Christmas decorations while breathing in the pine scent of a fresh-cut tree. There are colored lights around the windows, and three stockings hang from the mantle. I assume we’ll have a crèche, maybe even a Moravian putz. Unfortunately, when I was trying to figure out the correct spelling, I found putz comes up as Yiddish for “stupid person.”  I have a collection of nativity scenes myself, sleeping peacefully in a box in Mexico. There, images of saints are a big deal. There’s a shop in my town with a sign out front saying, “We dress saints,” which, for this season, would include the “child God,” or baby Jesus, that is often dressed specifically for local culture, an “incarnation” of sorts.  Young women are warned that if they don’t marry, they will be the ones left “dressing saints.” Many Mexicans believe that the images have spiritual power in them, and that if you care for them, handle them, or give them gifts, the power rubs off on you. This is not a belief evangelicals share, although sometimes we come close by turning other things into power objects: our own emotions, our own emphaticness, our own time spent praying, or our own lists of doctrines and rights and wrongs. We trust in these things to ward off evil and lead us to goodness. The temptation to idolatry for us as evangelicals is far more insidious.

Among the Mixtecs I know, Jesus is often no more than a statue, and not the most important one. But I have witnessed what happens when Jesus comes off the wall and changes people’s lives. My last post was about a martyr who brought his Mixtec village to Jesus: Juan Mercenario. Those who came to Jesus through his witness formed the first evangelical church in that language group.

And this baby church decided to change some things about the way people in Yuvinani lived—decided these things on its own, with little input from outsiders, with little knowledge of Scripture, but full of  the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. The church decided to stop drinking alcohol because alcoholism was a terrible problem in town, resulting in much domestic violence and brawls. One of the Christian wives has a scar across her head, where her drunken father had slashed her with a machete. The church decided that abandoning alcohol would help their families. The church decided to stop requiring money for their daughters when they were given (or sold, as they labeled it), as brides, because they felt this would bring more honor to their daughters. The church decided to stop charging interest on loans because, in the mountains, interest rates ran between 50 to 100% per month, and many ill things came from the desperation caused by great debt. The church decided to call five men as leaders of the church, all respected family men with proven leadership skills. These men would share responsibility for the church, rotating the preaching role every year. They chose a pluralistic model because it was in keeping with the traditional Mixtec model practiced in their village.

What I want to point out is how close this story is to the story of the early church in Acts. A charismatic leader stood up in a public place and called people to repentance and faith in Jesus. People, hearing the Good News in their own tongue for the very first time, were moved to respond. They made a public commitment that same day. The church took immediate steps to care for one another in sacrificial ways. The Holy Spirit took hold of their hearts and minds, and this showed immediately in their actions.

Like the early church in Acts, this church payed for stepping outside cultural traditions. People around them felt threatened by the believers’ new way of living and tried to shut them down by killing their leaders. Within the year, John was dead, the church’s first martyr. The murmurers hired an assassin, who stepped out from behind a truck in the middle of the day and shot John, on his way to a hardware store in the market town to buy supplies for building a house for the baby church.  Soon afterward, another leader was killed. Some of the new believers walked away from the church in fear after these deaths. But most stayed. Today more and more people are coming to know Christ in this culture. Jesus has come down off the wall, off the cross, out of the manger, out of the grave, and lives there among them, not as a figure to be dressed and handled but as their and our Emmanuel to be loved and served.

Acts revisited Part I

Today Robert is on his way to Yuvinani, a remote Mixtec village some of you have visited with us. It is a special place on God’s map because here, Metlatonoc Mixtecs responded to Jesus, as a group, for the first time. They had known his name for hundreds of years, but he had meant nothing more than one more statue in the line-up of saints along the church wall. Other statues were far more powerful. Now Jesus was coming off the wall and into their lives.

I wish I could have been there, but if I had, my presence would have ruined the moment as any outsider would have ruined it. (Kind of like that experiment with the cat, checking whether cats have feeding rituals. And so it seemed to the scientist that they did, for every time the scientist gave the cat food, it turned round and round and massaged the bars with its tail and rubbed its cheek against the cage. Come to find out, when the food appeared without a scientist attached, the cat got up and ate with no nonsense at all. It was the Experimenter the cat was celebrating, not the food.) So I wish I could have been a fly on the wall, or closer still, a flea on the dog in the town square where Juan Mercenario preached his first sermon and brought just about the entire village population to Christ. Now it’s been 25 years, but the people still tell the story.

The Mixtecs of Yuvinani had boarded buses along with thousands of other Indians from southern Mexico to work in the vegetable fields of northern Mexico, where we had met them. One of the migrant workers was named Philip, and while he was away, working, he met Evangelical Christians. He was impressed with their singing, their joy, and their claims of knowing Jesus who saved them and healed them. Philip did not speak much Spanish, still doesn’t, but somehow from the songs and fervor of these Hispanic Christians, Philip became convinced of the love of Jesus and His power to forgive and heal. He gave his heart to Jesus, who immediately healed him from alcohol addiction and filled him with the joy of knowing he had a heavenly Father and a heavenly home, a new hope he’d never known was possible. Philip came back to Yuninani and started working on his extended family. For two years, no one responded.

But his brother-in-law John was listening. John was a political figure, the mover and shaker in town. He was innovative and charismatic, a Type A figure that led the town. When he gave his life to Jesus, he did it in a big way. He used the town’s public sound system to gather everyone on the town square for a meeting. There he preached this sermon. In Mixtec: “You all know how far away we all are from God. We are on a road taking us very far from God. We need to turn back. We need to start walking back toward God. I have discovered that Jesus, the one who died on a cross and came to life again, can forgive us and put us back on the right path. This man heals and forgives and listens to us when we pray. Let us commit together to find someone who will tell us more about Jesus and help us understand what He says in His Word. Here is a sheet of paper for us to sign. Form a line now, and put your name or your “X” on the paper if you want in.”

I have somewhat transliterated Juan’s sermon, and I was not there, but this is his story as it is passed down by the people who came to Christ that day. Most of the village signed that paper. But throughout the evening, the murmurs started, “You know this means no more money from selling alcohol.” “You know this means a break with the Catholic authorities.” “You know this means a break with those who consult the spirits.” “This is a break with all our traditions.” “This cannot be.”

By the morning, half of the community had repented of their signatures, but the rest stayed firm as the first church ever to be born in all the Mixtec mountains of Guerrero.  I wonder if it’s only once in a community’s history you can preach Juan’s sermon and see the Gospel take hold like it did that day. Do we miss the opportunity for cultures to hear it straight, hear it in their own tongue, hear it in a way that makes disciples, and starts churches, and transforms communities forever?

Chemo chairs, sore thumbs, Mixtecs, and atheists

I’ve started my music lessons at the hospital and am now playing a “jumping flea.” The ukulele. Also known as a machete. We are five in the group, all cancer patients, and I am the youngest and the only one who can read the chord charts. I have learned C, G7, and F, and can play Feliz Navidad, my least favorite song of all time. Janey says I should be able to play something called Tip-toeing through the Tulips or at least Tiny Tim (since my car is named after him) but I have to admit these are both beyond me. I flip through the binder and find Oh Chanukuh, Jingle Bells, and Ring of Fire. For one reason or another, none of these work for me. I am a ukulele player  with nothing to play.

Straight from the ukulele lesson, Janey and I hop in the car and drive across town to her yoga class. They are doing figures like Three-legged Dog, Tree, and Warrior,  and I am just trying to not fall over, an obvious beginner. You are supposed to pick a spot to concentrate on while you balance, and one girl concentrates on a spot on the back of the girl in front of her, and when the girl in front wobbles, the girl concentrating falls right over, and everyone agrees there is a lesson in this. The lights are off. You could fall asleep in this class if you aren’t concentrating on not falling over. The class ends with Jeremiah 29:11, “I know the plans I have for you.” Cool thought, God carving out good plans right out of the deadwood we’ve been handed. He’s assuming we are moving to a better place.

swarming robots

And I think about how much of my life is about learning. Monday night I had gone to BSF with Janey (a bunch of women I know go to this). They are studying Revelation, and I was impressed with the background details (For example: those locust swarms. They can cover 460 square miles, the size of Los Angeles. Can you imagine a swarm like that in the distance coming at you?) We looked at how John borrows details from Joel to describe “the Day of the Lord.” My BSF study notes added, “when the biblical writers used the term 'day,' they were referring to a period of time that could be of any length.” Hmm. And here I thought BSF was a relatively conservative, orthodox organization (insert smiley face).

swarming Mexican locusts

And I think about how little opportunity the Mixtec women I know have to sit in a Bible class ( I don’t know one woman who reads Metlatonoc Mixtec) or a literature class or a music class or any class. They learn all kinds of things, but their learning is almost all experiential. They learn by doing. This is so much harder.

I like learning, except when it entails learning hard things experientially by sitting in a chemo chair or massaging sore knuckles. I want to learn. Except when it’s tough because it requires changes that cost me. Ukulele. Yoga. Locust swarms. These are classes I can afford. But those “plans of God…” I’m not so sure about those.

Janey laughs at me because I can do my BSF homework in half an hour, reading, underlining, processing. No sweat. I’ve studied the book before. Preached a series on it, in fact. Meanwhile, she might take an hour and a half to do one day’s lesson because she’s more thorough, and it’s less familiar. But when we walk into her Yoga class, she’s the pro, doing that Three-legged dog thing that I’m not even allowed by the teacher to even try. I’m the beginner there. She has so many “intelligences” I lack.

We are all at such different levels in all our various classes, and it’s often not the academic subjects (like Bible Study), that are the most profitable for helping us learn. Sometimes it’s the shop classes, or the cancer classes, or the be-a-good-neighbor classes, or the JUST SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!!  classes that do us the most good. And most of all, it’s the fact that we are at different levels that does us the most good. Even that is a lesson. So I want to stay open. I want to listen. I want to learn. Today I talked to an atheist. It was fascinating. God taught me through an atheist! Irony, irony. I love that about God. Atheists don’t threaten Him one bit. “I know the plans I have for you.” Take me there, God. Even through chemo chairs, sore thumbs, Mixtecs, and atheists.

Amazing grace

Sunday night, Janey and I drove Philip and Robert to the airport in Toronto and then made it back to St Catharines just in time for my concert: Amazing Grace. I had friends there, some of them waving wildly in the back of a very full auditorium just in case I didn’t notice them there. I noticed. It made it easier to say goodbye to my family as they took off, knowing I was going to sing my heart out in an hour. We just about blasted out the stained glass windows, I think. THIS IS AMAZING GRACE!!!

Part of the exhilaration is the performance itself, the adrenaline, the concentration, the pay-off from hours of practice, the wall of sound (as the director puts it) that comes out as if the choir were one rich multi-faceted voice, and not many. But part of it is because…how many times do you get to shout out what is central to your whole life, what defines you and gives you meaning and richness and joy? How many times do you get to sing with your entire being that your life is governed and freed by grace? It’s the one time in your day when your high emotion matches your faithful reason. For once, you get to say (sing) exactly what you mean! THIS IS AMAZING GRACE!!!

And today I thought, as I prayed, how thankful I am for prayer, whether it’s spoken, written down in a notebook, whispered mentally, or sung out at the top of your lungs. I am so glad there are no rules. I’m glad we can think short prayers throughout the day or give thanks over meals, or “do devos,” or gather for communal prayer like the ancients did or my Indian friends still do. I’m glad for such freedom. I remember how a Mixtec friend of ours met Jesus for the first time in a migrant camp and introduced Him to his family with this prayer: “Lord Jesus, good morning. My name is Regino. I am well. Beside me here is my wife, Betina, and these are my children, Alberto, Mauricio, and Jose. We live here in this Camp “El Niño. Bless us.” How many of us say “Good morning to God?” The Mixtecs do not grow up having access to God through prayer. Only priests and shamans pray, and these prayers are rituals, inaccessible to laymen. Regino was speaking to Almighty God for the first time in his life: a heady thing.

And I thought how glad I am that Jesus taught us to pray, not to a distant God with an unpronounceable name but to our Father. And he kept things so short and simple. “May your way come to us—your kingdom, your will—because You are good and trustworthy and honorable.” We learn that it is ok (though painful) to adjust our ways to God instead of trying to manipulate the powers of the earth so that they adjust to us. This is the definition of animism, which the Mixtecs and most of the world are now, and which all humans are by default. We are constantly trying to find ways to manipulate the world to fit us. I am so glad God has revealed Himself to be a God to whom it is safe and worthy to adjust, though it cost us everything, including our selfishness.

I am glad that Jesus not only taught his disciples to pray (they knew that he knew how), but he showed them, too, getting up on random dark mornings to talk to Dad. Oh, what did he say? What did they say to one another? We were not meant to know because our own time with Dad is just as precious, and there are no rules. There are no rules. He is teaching us to pray.

THIS IS AMAZING GRACE!!!