Pastor's Messages from Prints of Peace
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There are 68 Messages in 9 pages and your are on page number 4

A House Where Love Can Dwell
My Roman Catholic mother-in-law is a story teller. She also likes jokes. A few years ago she told me this old standard: St. Peter gives a tour of heaven to the new arrivals. In one section, outside one area, he cautions everyone to only whisper and be as quiet as they possibly can. One person asks in a whisper voice why this is necessary. St. Peter whispers back, ‘This is where the Catholics are and they think they are here by themselves.’
In some shape or form you can tell this joke by inserting any denomination. It is best to do it with your own.

I grew up in an area where Protestants were the majority by far, in part because for the 100 years following the Reformation there were no Roman Catholics, and it wasn’t until 1807 that the Catholic church was granted the same legal status as the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. There were some Catholics when I was growing up, but not many, and contact – at least for me – was minimal. When it happened, it was mostly on family holidays while visiting old churches and monasteries. Often simply through experiencing Roman Catholic worship. While there were no theological discussions, my experience of Catholic worship never let me doubt that we worshipped the same God.
Other protestant denominations were generally considered sects: that is sectarian, splitters, fringe groups.
I remember few ecumenical experiences with them. Not all of them were positive. I remember being told that I couldn’t possibly be a Christian because I ‘didn’t know the day I had given my life to Jesus’. I knew this was absurd and it didn’t intimidate me. I remember a few similar experiences. In this I learnt that for many the exterior shape of our faith determines whether we can have fellowship.
But there were positive experiences too. Those were in discussing our faith, sharing what we believed was most important, how we thought our faith should impact our life. And there were the times that our prayer together was deeply meaningful and when we prayed together our unity in Christ seemed accomplished.
I have few experiences with Orthodox Christians. Once a year my home congregation hosted the exile Russian Orthodox Church conducting a service for other exiles. I remember attending and being moved by liturgy and ritual.

All those experiences are experiences of my youth. Since then, our understanding and perception of the world has changed. We experience the world as more secular and as a result have begun to move closer toward each other, allowing history and theological differences to keep us apart only so far. We work together in ministries and jointly address societal issues (e.g. homelessness, addictions, poverty). Then there is inter-marriage. For many people the most common experience of other Christians is when a family member marries a Christian from another denomination. That brings opportunities and challenges. Opportunities when we understand our own tradition, challenges when we don’t.

I have always experienced divisions between Christians as tragic, because division is not part of God’s design. I have always experienced meaningful communion (i.e. fellowship) as a blessing and as sign of God’s presence in our midst. The One who has reconciled us to him, longs to reconcile us to each other.

The word ecumenism has Greek and Latin roots and refers to the inhabited world, and, like the word economy has its roots in the Greek word ‘oikos’ for house. Therefore, the assumption of the ecumenical movement is that all Christian live in the same house, the house that the Lord has built. A prayer from St. John Chrysostom employs this image for how we live together as church:

Let us build a house where all are named,
their songs and visions heard
and loved and treasured, taught and claimed
as words within the Word.
Built of tears and cries and laughter,
prayers of faith and songs of grace.
Let this house proclaim from floor to rafter:
all are welcome in this place.(1)

Ecumenism is mandated to us because Christ prays for our unity, the unity of the church. (Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. John 17:11) It is also mandated through our experience of an increasingly secular and materialistic world. Further, it is required for our service in the world where our cooperation not only makes for better witness but also for more effective service. We need each other.

Of course, not all of that is easy, not all is possible. Too often do we speak for others instead of allowing them to speak for themselves. This risk is greater for denominations constituting majorities and is an obstacle for meaningful unity. There is also an apathy about sharing our faith with those of other denominations. I can only guess the origin of such apathy: Perhaps we simply take the church as we know it to be normative and view all other expressions as aberration. That may be our real challenge.

We may also misunderstand what ecumenism is about. It is not about becoming the same, it is not about giving up our identity but as we learn to understand the traditions of others we learn to understand better our own tradition. Ecumenism is about understanding that Christ’s body has many members, and that all those members contribute important functions, that the blessings of the many parts multiply the blessings of the whole. That takes some deliberate effort.

2008 is the 100th anniversary of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. While its origin is the prayer of Jesus that his disciples may be one, the week’s beginning is traced to the Anglican Paul Wattson in 1908. The week is oriented around the festivals of St. Peter and of St. Paul at the end of January.

It is a gift to be able to pray together and it is a gift that the Church has been praying together for the last 100 years! I hope that many of you will participate in as many services as you can, especially when we host the service on January 21!

Yours,

Pastor Christoph




Ecumenical Numbers:

Locally, the Christian family consists of Anabaptist (Mennonite, Baptist, etc.), Charismatic (Pentecostal, Vineyard, etc), Reformed (Reformed, Calvinist, Presbyterian), Roman Catholics, United Church, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Orthodox Christians, in about that order.

Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion Catholics; 340 million Orthodox; 230 million Calvinists, Reformed, and Presbyterian; 129 million Pentecostals; 85 million Lutherans; 85 million Methodists, 77 million Anglicans; 4.5 million Mennonites; and another 375 million Christians of other Protestant denominations.


WEEK OF PRAYER FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY
THE CENTENNIAL YEAR CELEBRATION in Abbotsford, BC
January 20/08 to January 27/08

“PRAY WITHOUT CEASING” (Thessalonians 5:17)

Days, Times, Locations:

Jan. 20/08 * St. Matthew’s Anglican * 2010 Guilford Dr.* 7:00 p.m.

Jan. 21/08 * Peace Lutheran * 2029 Ware St. * 12:15 p.m.

Jan.22/08 * Calvin Presbyterian * 2597 Bourquin Cr. East *12:15 p.m.

Jan.23/08 * Trinity Memorial United *33737 George Ferguson Way *12:15 p.m.

Jan.24/08 * St. Ann’s Catholic * 33333 Mayfair Ave.* 12:15 p.m.

Jan.25/08 * Trinity Christian Reformed *3215 Trethewey St.*12:15 p.m.

Jan.26/08 * Immanuel Fellowship Baptist * 2950 Blue Jay St.* 8:30 a.m.
**Breakfast provided (by donation), served by Psalm 23 Society. Registration requested.

Jan.27/08 * Highland Community Church *3130 McMillan Rd. * 8:00 p.m. *Taize service





(1) Let us build a house where love can dwell
and all can safely live.
A place where saints and children tell
how hearts learn to forgive.
Built of hopes and dreams and visions,
rock of faith and vault of grace;
here the love of Christ shall end divisions:
all are welcome in this place.

Let us build a house where prophets speak,
and words are strong and true.
Where all God’s children dare to seek
to dream God’s reign anew.
Here the cross shall stand as witness
and as symbol of God’s grace;
here as one we claim the faith of Jesus;
all are welcome in this place.

Let us build a house where love is found
in water, wine and wheat;
a banquet hall on holy ground,
where peace and justice meet.
Here the love of God, through Jesus,
is revealed in time and space,
as we share in Christ the feast that frees us;
all are welcome in this place.

Let us build a house where hands will reach
beyond the wood and stone,
to heal and strengthen, serve and teach,
and live the Word they’ve known.
Here the outcast and the stranger
bears the image of God’s face;
let us bring and end to fear and danger:
all are welcome in this place.

Let us build a house where all are named,
their songs and visions heard
and loved and treasured, taught and claimed
as words within the Word.
Built of tears and cries and laughter,
prayers of faith and songs of grace.
Let this house proclaim from floor to rafter:
all are welcome in this place.

Homilies on First Corinthians, St. John Chrysostom, 4th century, paraphrased by Marty Haugen (1994 by GIA Publications, Inc.)



Posted by Christoph Reiners on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 at 20:25

Joy to the WHOLE world

When I was just about to enter seminary, a pastor told me about a clergy friend of his who had decorated his congregation’s Christmas tree in this fashion: All ornaments were crowded in the top third of the tree, the bottom two-thirds were left bare. It must have made for an odd looking tree, accompanied by a morality lesson for the congregation on Christmas Eve. The strangely decorated tree was to represent the world in which relatively few live in abundance while the majority lives in want. I had some sympathy for the act back then, but rest assured, you won’t find our tree looking like that this Christmas.
No doubt, Christmas in the Western hemisphere revels in materialistic excesses, but there is also a moral inclination to spread good cheer to those less fortunate. It is often secularly reasoned, many may not know the origin of the phrase “good will and peace toward all”, it is still disproportionate compared to our spending on ourselves, but it happens all the same. That it happens we should celebrate.

It is this sentiment that the BandAid song “Do they know it’s Christmas?” appealed to, while reminding us of the need of the rest of the world. The song made a claim that Christmas was for the whole world, for everyone, not just for us. However, not surprisingly, the song did not describe Christmas in theological terms.

I don’t know when to date the beginning of individualism (was it Luther’s question of how he could be found righteous in the eyes of God, or did individualism not set in until the enlightenment?), but I am inclined to say that it is as old as the rebellion of Adam and Eve in their desire to be like God. Their act of rebellion destroyed the intimate community they had and perceived God as an opponent instead of their loving creator.
Christmas always appears juxtaposed between personal happiness and charity. One being an expression of individualism, the other remembering that we are not alone.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis. (1) I first encountered Rauschenbusch through his many translations of revival hymns like “I need thee every hour” and “What a friend we have in Jesus” into his native German. These hymns speak of Jesus our Saviour with intimate love.

Rauschenbusch (an American Baptist pastor with Lutheran roots) began his first pastorate in 1886. Eleven years of ministering to an immigrant church in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood left him grimly aware of the toll that exploitation, unemployment, unsanitary housing, and alcoholism took on working-class people.
What especially appalled Rauschenbusch was ‘the treatment of people as a thing to produce more things’, while a consumer ethic substituted envy and resentment for solidarity and fellow feeling. “The ostentation of the overfull purses of the predatory rich lures all society into the worship of false gods.”
The alienation the industrialized world brought upon us was reinforced through religious individualism that had left the faithful shorn of spiritual and communal support.(2)

Lutherans come from a different perspective. However, there are points of convergence. We have always been uncomfortable with a focus on personal conversion and religious individualism. Not because Lutherans don’t believe in conversion but because the emphasis on the individual often appears to eclipse God’s grace that makes it happen.

As we enter Advent and celebrate Christmas, it is my wish that we can recover the joy and dimension of what it means that Jesus came not just for me, not even just for me and my family, but for the whole world. All of it and everyone. Such realization and opening up will make our joy complete.

Yours,
Pastor Christoph


(1) Casey Nelson Blake writes that Rauschenbusch’s book revived the proud tradition of the American jeremiad to confront readers with the unsettling, indeed shocking gospel of Jesus and his early followers. A middle-class church grown lazy and comfortable, indifferent to social evil as it called upon individual sinners to repent, stood condemned by the very creed it professed to uphold. Even as he underscored that “Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type”- ….. -Rauschenbusch believed Jesus’ teachings were a desperately needed corrective to modern complacency.
In: New Century, Same Crisis, Walter Rauschenbusch & the Social Gospel by Casey Nelson Blake, Commonweal October 26, 2007 / Volume CXXXIV, Number 18, pages 19-22
(2) ibid.
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Monday, December 03, 2007 at 10:31

Left behind OR Visited from on high?

As I am reading Sunday’s Gospel text as part of my sermon preparation, I remembered a piece I wrote five years ago for our Prints of Peace newsletter. It seems appropriate to post it below. For the record, the focus of next Sunday's Gospel is on expecting our Lord's coming and being alert. It is NOT about 'the rapture' (which lacks any biblical foundation).


Hope, Faith, Entertainment, and Discipleship

I don’t know about you, but I occasionally enjoy a movie with a decent amount of collateral damage. Special effects have advanced to such a degree that it is hard to tell fiction and reality apart. I am fascinated with some of the effects that Hollywood is capable of. Yet even more appealing in such films is that they usually present a very simple world: Good overcomes evil, and violence is the acceptable means to reach that goal. There are none of the usual moral dilemmas, like telling our children that violence is not capable of solving real issues (that what we sow we will reap - Gal.6:7; that who takes the sword will perish by it- Matthew 26:52). Watching a movie that views reality in such broad strokes of black and white can be quite relaxing after a long day of work in our complex world. Don’t get me wrong, I like other movies too. I certainly like movies that carry a message, that describe relationships, that deal with difficult subjects. But collateral damage movies (and romantic movies) don’t engage us in the same way.
At the same time we complain that there is nothing decent on TV and that the entertainment industry has its share in the deterioration of moral standards and societal values. We want Christian programming, of which there are some truly wonderful examples, yet they are just a few.
However, there may be an inherent contradiction here. A few years ago the communications theorist Neil Postman wrote that modern media is not able to convey and facilitate serious discourse, but that since the nature of our modern media is entertainment, any “Christian” or “religious” attempt would, albeit unwillingly, necessarily trivialize the message.
One such phenomenon of Christian entertainment is the so-called “Left-Behind” series. These books have been remarkably successful, and have had several spin-offs, one of them the filming of the books. A Boeing 747 is crossing the Atlantic, en route to London. All the seats are taken. Suddenly, a flight attendant storms into the cockpit to report that dozens of passengers have disappeared, only their clothes and personal belongings witness that they were once there. A woman in economy class screams hysterically for her vanished husband. The pilot radios ahead to London and is told that he will not be able to land there because many pilots have also vanished, many planes have crashed, and many of the air traffic controllers have disappeared as well. This is the movie’s depiction of the rapture.
Clearly, these events are fiction and did not happen. However, some read these books as if they were a history book in which the future was recorded.

Dr. Harry Maier, Lutheran pastor and professor for New Testament at the Vancouver School of Theology, believes that the “Left Behind Series” has little to do with the biblical Book of Revelation but much more with the creation of a consumerist Christian subculture. In economic terms the series has been extremely successful with more than 40 million books sold, movies, children’s books and other merchandising. However, Dr. Maier remarks that the series does not appear to have had life-changing effects on its forty million readers, as one might expect of something that focuses all its attention on the end of the world as we know it. Since such serious and intentional change is not visible, it appears that the series is in fact only entertainment.

The “Left Behind” series is a dangerous form of Christian escapism because it presents itself as biblical prophesy. Movies like “Armageddon” and “Independence Day” are less likely to evoke such misunderstanding because they don’t present themselves as carrying biblical truth. Certainly, they too carry some problematic assumptions, but they don’t pretend to be anything other than Hollywood fiction with some great special effects.

When we think about our longing for a better world, for God’s Kingdom breaking in, we need to remember that the Bible is a testimony to our God’s involvement with humanity, it is not some schedule for the apocalypse. Remember that Jesus reminds us in the Gospel of Mark (13:32) that “nobody knows neither time nor hour.” Christians believe that God came into the world because God loves the world. The “Left Behind” series portrays the rapture not as the welcoming of our Lord but as an abandoning of the world which God loves so much that he gave his only son Jesus. “Beam me up, Scotty!” is not an expression of Christian hope. Christian hope expresses itself not in the turning away from our neighbour but in the love and care of our neighbour.

Continue to enjoy a relaxing night at the movies, but remember who you are: a disciple of Jesus Christ, concerned not only about your personal salvation but the salvation of the world, driven by God’s love. Remember that “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17)

Yours, Pastor Christoph
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 10:33

Accomplishments and Expectations

My grandmother once, upon my statement that Catholics were Christians too, answered: “Of course, we have Jesus, and they have Mary.”
Reformation Sunday at times was an occasion to pull out old stereotypes instead of celebrating the gift of God’s grace. Luther had rediscovered God’s grace and had claimed it. That we can claim it too was Luther’s gift to the world, although, really, it is God’s gift.
When you consider that the core of Luther’s discovery is God’s grace in Jesus, there is really nothing to boast about, as Luther himself freely admitted when he claimed to be a beggar before God.
But it is an interesting thought that on the day when we celebrate the historic origins of the Lutheran Church we would stand here with empty hands instead of a long list of accomplishments.
I spent some time at a death bed recently. I wondered to myself how it is that the grace of God seems so clear to us when we have nothing, when everything falls away. One might think that the opposite were true. When things go well we see this as evidence of God’s presence, when things go downhill as God’s absence. My conclusion was that we’ve always been completely dependent on God, it is how we came into the world and how we will leave it; just for a few years in between we can pretend that it is not so. Job says: “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (1:21)
I don’t want to suggest that there are not trials of faith, that we would not have doubts or that life and faith would always be easy to understand. That is also true as the Book of Job testifies.
Recently, we heard Jesus tell his disciples the story of a widow who persistently bothers an unjust judge until finally the judge grants her justice. The story begins with an exhortation to pray always and ends with the question whether at his return Jesus will find faith on earth. (Luke 18:1-8)
Faith is to expect everything from God. If we boast of our tradition and accomplishments, our intellectual insights, our fine worship, our great institutions, our long lists of theologians and musicians, we are not going to expect much from God because we’re too occupied with our own accomplishments. Faith is to know that we are as dependent as the widow. Faith is to know that we can expect everything from God because God is our everything.

Yours,

Pastor Christoph
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Monday, November 05, 2007 at 08:20

Witness and Prayer


If someone asked you to explain the Christian faith to them as you understand it, what would you say? Where would you begin?
Would you begin with teachings, or with the life of Jesus? Would you speak autobiographically or would you explain the catechism? Would you talk about who Jesus is to you?
The theologian Stanley Hauerwas addresses this question in a 1991 article for the Christian Century.(1) He says, “I am sometimes confronted by people who are not Christians but who say they want to know about Christianity. This is an … occupational hazard for theologians around a university, because it is assumed that … we must really know something about Christianity.”

Increasingly we are in a position where people know little or nothing about Christianity and mistake sound bites they hear from the media for an accurate picture of the whole of Christianity (i.e. ‘all Christians dispute the theory of evolution’, etc.). The problem with such sound bites is not only they are merely snapshots depicting some fringe group and therefore distort the picture, they also usually focus on either doctrine or morality. Therefore, if someone were to take their information about the Christian faith from mass media, he or she would obtain a picture that either focuses solely on morality (e.g. abortion, sexuality, family values, etc) or on someone’s theological convictions that are disconnected from the heart of the Gospel (e.g. evolution).

I sometimes wonder whether the church can blame the media for our own disconnect between theological convictions and behaviour. How is it that we often see our faith so much as convictions and propositions about God and world? How is it that some see the Christian faith primarily as a set of rules guiding our moral behaviour?

Hauerwas gives an interesting answer to the question of how to explain the faith to people who are not Christians but want to learn more about it. He says, “After many years of vain attempts to ‘explain’ God as trinity, I now say, ‘Well, to begin with, we Christians have been taught to pray, 'Our father, who art in heaven. . .’ I then suggest that a good place to begin to understand what we Christians are about, is to join me in that prayer.
For to learn to pray is no easy matter but requires much training, not unlike learning to lay brick. It does no one any good to believe in God, at least the God we find in Jesus of Nazareth, if they have not learned to pray. To learn to pray means we must acquire humility not as something we try to do, but as commensurate with the practice of prayer. In short, we do not believe in God, become humble and then learn to pray, but in learning to pray we humbly discover we cannot do other than believe in God.”

Hauerwas invites people to pray, to enter into the practice of faith. He implies that we cannot prove God to others but that only God will show Godself to us. In praying we are re-shaped by God and our faith becomes an organic part of all we are and do.
That’s why we need to pray. Where do we pray and where do we learn to pray? In community.
I have often said that I believe that the church does not pray enough. I invite you to join me in prayer every Wednesday morning from 11-12 in the sanctuary.

Yours,

Pastor Christoph


(1) Stanley Hauerwas in The Christian Century, October 1, 1991, pp. 881-884. The complete article is worth reading and can be found here: Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 at 13:06

What we do matters
(published on the Religion Page of the Abbotsford News, 22 September 2007)


Follow my train of thought for a minute, even if you may not share some of the assumptions:

Twenty years ago we were told about climate change but decided not to do anything about it, citing a need for more evidence. Twenty years have passed(1), the hypothesis of climate change is scientifically well studied and assumed as fact by most. But now, at least some say that it is too late to do anything abut it, so we go on as before.

To me, our dealing with climate change is the metaphor for living in denial, refusing to accept consequences, refusing to understand causal relationships, instead choosing the easiest path that requires the least effort. This, I suppose, is human nature.

All this stands in conflict with the assumption that we actually want to make sacrifices in our life because we know that it is through sacrifices that our life receives meaning.

So why do we do things? Is our motivation always utilitarian, always focussed on results? Therefore, when we think something is (or may be) futile we don't invest ourselves? Is our moral behaviour then not guided by the maxim 'the end justifies the means'? And, is that really the way we want to live? For deep down, I believe, we want to do what is right and true and don't want to have our agenda set by some short-term goals and/or an attitude of 'nothing's going to make a difference anyway'.

That is what is so beautiful about the ethic of Jesus. He did things for the right reason, he lived for the right reason, he died for the right reason. It would have been easier not to go down that road, to have made compromises along the way. But by living and dying in this way, he was in touch with humanity and he was in touch with God. When Christians are called to 'take up the cross' they are called to enter into Jesus' suffering and death in order to rise with him. It is about learning from Jesus, staying close to Jesus, emulating Jesus. Yet it is not our doing that gives us life but in the things we do and why we do them we show to whom we belong. We live with our eyes wide open, but sometimes the purpose we see lies beneath the surface. We are guided by what is holy, true, and in the spirit of Jesus. It is part of being faithful, in touch with God and in touch with humanity. In this sense our life matters deeply, even when others may tell us that it won't make a difference. However, following Jesus always makes a difference. I invite you to come along.

Yours,

Pastor Christoph


(1) For more detail on the history of climate change see The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart. Spencer R. Weart is Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland, USA. Originally trained as a physicist, he is now a noted historian specializing in the history of modern physics and geophysics.
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Monday, September 24, 2007 at 10:01

Evangelism?

In my role as pastor I don’t get to defend the Christian faith very often, it’s more common that I explain it. That’s because we (who are here) already believe in God through Christ. We have questions, deep and peripheral, existential and marginal, but we know ourselves in God’s embrace, part of God’s Kingdom.

We visited Barkerville again this summer. Every year the Anglican diocese sends a seminarian to hold services at St. Saviours’ Church and to interact with the public. When we spoke, he expressed some regret that it was so museum-like. I don’t blame him. Last year we asked the seminarian if he ever did sermons for the three daily offices. He replied that at first he did, but quickly realized that too many tourists thought his preaching to be just another ‘act’, taking the liberty to walk in and out at will. He then restricted sermons to the Sunday and the weekly evening Eucharists.
Still, I would think it an opportunity to communicate some basics of our faith to the many people who know little or nothing of our God.

The primary times in parish ministry when we reach beyond ‘the flock’ are weddings and funerals.
The church is so used to preaching to the converted, that even when its audience is wider, it has trouble shifting gears. Many of the religion columns in our local papers are a prime example.

The church has long known that her chief evangelists are average Christians going about their life with faithfulness. You are on the front lines of ministry. You meet many who do not know anything about our God, are disillusioned with the church, or who in the plurality of beliefs just do not know what and who to believe in.

A friend of mine told me that recently their daughter asked whether an uncle of hers believed in God. The mother answered, “Well Uncle Tim grew up in the church but he doesn’t go to church now. Why don’t you ask him.” So she did. The uncle responded to the little girl, “Which God?,” to which the girl replied, “The God of all.”
That little girl has a good Sunday School teacher.
In her naïveté, she ignored the undercurrent of cynicism in the question that implied that there are so many gods that it renders any particular kind of faith irrelevant. Instead, she steadfastly professed the God she knows, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God she believes in and the God she knows believes in her.

To me, this is a marvellous example of evangelism: To unashamedly speak of our God without being proselytizing or apologetic. I pray that we can all speak like this.

In a novel I was reading this summer (Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, 2004 Farrar, Straus and Giroux [New York, NY]) the main character is an aging minister who looks back on his life and ministry. In a paragraph about his relationship with his agnostic brother he states, “In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer.” In other words, God is too profound to be trapped in our arguments. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that a God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
So all we have is that beautiful and simple witness of the little girl. We believe in the God who believes in us, the God of all. That is what gives our life direction and meaning, that is what we are not afraid to share. In fact, it is what our heart compels us to share.

Yours,

Pastor Christoph
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Tuesday, September 04, 2007 at 14:19

Naivete or Faith
Gullible or Believing


The CBC reported on July 23rd ("As it Happens", part 2) on a computer research project that had as much to do with social behaviour as it did with information technology.
Dr. Mark Jacobson is Associate Professor of Informatics at Indiana University. He and a colleague were in charge of the “Phishing Experiment.”
Phishing is a term for e-mail fraud where you receive an e-mail that looks like it comes from a reputable source, asking you for sensitive information and directing you to a phoney website that has the appearance of a legitimate one. There you are requested to enter your information which will then be used to pillage your bank account or to charge purchases to your credit card.
From time to time we receive all kinds of questionable e-mail offering anything from Valium to Viagra, including (of course) the Nigerian money scam, as well as phoney e-bay or paypal account update requests. Years ago I even received an invitation to become a minister (“be ordained for only $20.00 and you could officiate at your family and friend’s special occasions ...”). I really loved that one!...

The Indiana University team proceeded in this way: They scraped common social networking sites to gather information on who knows whom. They then sent e-mails to the people about whom they had gleaned information, making their e-mail appear as if they came from these persons’ friends and acquaintances. The content of the e-mail directed them to a site which appeared to be some business (although unbeknownst to them, it was hosted by the university).
What was being researched was not simply technology but people’s judgement and vulnerability to such attacks. The researchers had estimated a “success rate” of approximately 25% but were surprised that a whole 72% of targeted individuals provided them with the requested information.

This leaves us wondering why people are so gullible. Why are people not more careful?
I happen to be ‘blessed’ with an extra portion of paranoia and you will never find my house unlocked. Nevertheless, at times I have fallen for scams. I remember one time when I was in North America for the first time. I travelled the US by Greyhound, all by myself, on a tiny budget. I remember being conned out of $50.00 simply because I was tired of distrusting people. The whole thing was so transparent that the only explanation I have for having fallen for it was that I was tired of always having my guard up. I just wanted to trust someone. While I was conned, I did choose to trust.
That is pretty much the same as the assumption that people will believe what they want to believe. When my father had an affair, my mother was the last person to find out, in part because she wanted to believe that everything was OK.
The same is true where gossip is concerned. Many of us tend to believe the unpleasant things we are told about someone, even when this is inconsistent with the way we know the person. We choose what we believe.
In the phishing experiment, 72% of people chose to believe that the e-mail requesting certain information had come from their friends.

Sometimes in Hollywood movies (to mind come “The Polar Express”, and “Serenity”) we are told that the worst thing that can happen is not to believe anything but that the content of our belief is irrelevant, just as long as we believe. Naturally, I always cringe at such scenes. I want to get up and say, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not true. There’s all kinds of deeply unhealthy beliefs out there.” What is postulated is commonly is called tolerance, even though it actually is indifference. It could also be interpreted as spirituality without religion, or as smorgasbord religion where religion is completely personalized and we pick and choose according to our needs. Such faith will mostly remain in the realm of general convictions, would have little (if any) community dimension, and (because it is so focussed on needs) would score low on discerning eternal truths and encountering the living God.

For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires... This warning from 2 Timothy 4 rings true for our time also.
We choose what we believe. Yet we do not choose arbitrarily. It’s not simply an expression of personal freedom. It’s an answer. We love God because God loved us first (1 John 4:19). We choose God because God chose us first. God chose us to be part of his church, his people, his subversive band of disciples.

Maybe you have wondered why we recite the creed in worship. Speaking the creed is an act of adoration, when we speak it we pray. We also speak it because it identifies certain parameters of what we believe and more importantly who we believe in.
What we believe and who we believe in matters. It is not just for us to choose, it is for us to receive. I am not advocating belief in doctrines, morality, or the Bible. Although, those are all important. I am advocating a faith that is personal and communal, that is biblical and contextual, that is traditional and open to the new things God is about to do (Isaiah 43). Through us.

Yours,

Pastor Christoph
Posted by Christoph Reiners on Sunday, August 05, 2007 at 07:51

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