Yes, I know we all have favorite books of the Bible to which we turn in a pinch and to which we return often. And yours may not be the book of Psalms.  But I’m going to dare say that you’re going to need this friend whether you’re drawn to him or not.

Pastoring is an immersion in the human–your own and others.

Jesus immersed himself in humanity by virtue of being born a human, by virtue of his stepping into the waters of baptism–a baptism of repentance for sinners, no less–and by making friends with the book of Psalms.

The psalms are an exploration of what it means to be a human being before God: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and everything in between.  Angry human, fearful human, crowing human, vulnerable human, righteous human, thankful human,  sinful human, happy human, complaining human, praising human.  Because God wants to be near all of it, and it’s a good thing that he does, because it’s the only way the likes of us will ever be near God.

But you, as a pastor, will be tempted to be other than what you are.  You will be tempted to be what your are supposed to be before God, or what your fellow believers want you to be before God.  Which means that you will often be missing from God, hiding behind one of these personas.

The psalms, over time, will break you of that habit.  When you wish to be refined, a psalm will be vulgar–in it’s brazen hostility toward others, for example, or in its willingness to complain loudly.  Most of the time, the psalms will be more human than you are, or wish to be before God.

I spent a great deal of time arguing with the psalms and the tone they adopt, but I’ve given that up mostly and just accept the reality that they represent me better than I might wish to be represented.  It’s a humbling thing to realize that you need to enter the prayers of someone else to learn how to be yourself.

Over time, the psalms train us to accept our humanity as God apparently does. Which means they train us, over time, to accept people as they are, including ourselves.  And they lead us into the posture that Jesus had toward us fellow human beings: sympathy.

If we can only learn to be our human selves before God as the psalmists learned to be their human selves before God, we can begin to maintain a non-anxious presence before God.  We can learn to accept ourselves, in other words.  And there’s no maintaining an non-anxious presence before others without that.

I’ve found a wonderful way to cozy up to the psalms.  It’s called The Paraclete Psalter.  O my goodness, stop, drop and buy this thing.  It’s only thirteen bucks on Amazon– thin and leather bound, too.  It’s the product of an ecumenical community called The Jesus Community—survivors [Yes! Survivors!] of the Jesus movement that began in the late 1960’s.  When you can find a group, an organized group of Jesus freaks who have survived the turmoil that we baby boomers imposed on the Jesus movement, you know you have found something worth noticing.  These men and women have been praying the psalms daily for a long time and the psalms have become embedded in their spirituality, and this Psalter [collection of psalms] is the by-product.

I’ve been using this for the past month instead of The Divine Hours–the most accessible form of fixed hour prayer available.  I’ll go back to using The Divine Hours, but I’ll also return to this Psalter for a month at a time–or who knows, maybe I’ll just stick with it and The Divine Hours.

There’s just something about pausing to use these prayers of the insistently-human-before-God through the day, when you’re actually going about your can’t-be-anything-but-human business, that makes you realize God might want to be near this mess.

Step back from the trees to see the forest. The chart of global population looks like a hockey stick.  Many of you were born when the population of the earth was 6 billion and by the time you die it will be 9 billion.

Layer over this, the rate of technological change.  The speed of computing doubles every 18 months.

Or hear the witness of an old guy. When I started out as a pastor, I had to respond to three forms of communication: face to face conversation, land-line telephone conversations (before answering machines were commonplace–so no one could leave a message), and letters delivered by the U.S. Postal Service five days a week.  Yes, in my lifetime.

Now we have to keep track of communications from all of the above plus cell phones on our person, email, and text messages  (not to mention Facebook and the rest.)  Imagine how peaceful your life would be if you didn’t have to deal with phone messages, cell phones, and e-mail.  I remember sitting in my office thirty years ago, having completed all of my tasks and wondering what to do next.  I kid you not, I actually that experience now and again.

With the increased communication comes increased activity between and among people and increased expectations–all of which adds enormous anxiety to the system.

Thirty years ago, most Christianity was practiced within the context of relatively old institutions.  Doctrine was relatively static and institutionally defined. Clergy were trained in institutionally coherent seminaries and pastors were people who managed relatively well defined and stable systems.

All that has changed as we have entered the post-denominational era.  Church institutions have weakened enormously, placing much greater pressure on local churches to deal with virtually all of the big issues.

I entered pastoral ministry at the beginning of the post-denominational era, without seminary training or a solid institutional framework.  The church I pastored had to figure out the big issues more or less on its own.

And there were big issues to resolve.  The church that began in my living room in the 1970’s was composed exclusively of people under the age of 25.  Few were married.  None had been divorced.  We expected that every marriage would be lifelong and there was no reason a Christian would need to get divorced.  I realize how naive that sounds.  But it means that we had to decide ourselves, with the Bible, and the Spirit, and reason, and experience (which was, for along time, in short supply) how to respond to divorce and remarriage.

We had to process the tsunami of the feminism (it was a movement back then) and decide whether the pastorate should remain a men-only club or not.  And we had to engage this almost exclusively within the resources of the local church.

Now we face issues just as controversial as these (f you’re a young pastor, you probably can’t imagine that these old issues were controversial.) But we have to do so with more anxiety in the system than we had back then, owing to the unrelenting pace of change. To simply engage these issues–ask open-ended questions, for example–raises the collective blood pressure.

Think about it: There was no Religious Right or its equivalent when I got into pastoring.  Evangelicals elected Jimmy Carter, a pro-choice Democrat.  No one identified Christianity with one political party.   No a.m. talk shows organized around politics, no cable news networks, nothing like the news-entertainment-radical political brew that saturates the airwaves today. Oh, and no Internet access either.  No forwarded emails from prophetic ministries before Presidential elections pronouncing prophetic curses on those who don’t toe some party line.

Edwin Friedman, in A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, says that pastors and rabbis are facing incredible levels of anxiety within their congregations because we live in an age of anxiety.  The system is saturated with anxiety.

To lead in such a time requires leaders who can maintain a non-anxious presence in an anxious system.

Let that sink in, young pastor.

The key to leadership in an age of anxiety goes deeper than anything you can ever learn in a book on leadership methods. It goes beyond any data driven decisions you can generate.  It goes beyond leadership techniques, or organizational models.

It presses into the sanctuary of your inner life: your capacity to be at peace in a swirl of turmoil.

More on this in future posts….

We call it the Richter Scale and it measures the movement of the ground beneath our feet. Beneath our feet is a kind of jigsaw puzzle: pieces or plates that fit together.  As the pieces move (slowly, imperceptibly) tension builds where the edges meet.   From time to time, friction fails and there’s a little shift, a minor rearrangement.  Or sometimes a major rearrangement.   You do know that the Americas used to be connected to Africa in a much larger land mass and that mountains are forming all the time mainly beneath the ocean waves.

Such movements create anxiety for land dwellers.  It’s well known that various animals change their behavior just before an earthquake.  They can sense the pent up pressure about to release, so they ready themselves for the rearrrangement.  Once the needle on the Richter Scale is rocking and rolling, the anxiety of the land dwellers goes through the roof, often because the roof itself is shaking.

Reformations are scary, because the idea that the terra is firma is a comforting fiction that we don’t let go of without a fight.

If you happen to be part of the Vineyard movement, you ought to understand this already.  Things call themselves movements when they recognize changes in process. The Protestant Reformation that took place 500 years ago and rearranged our dance floor had some defects.  Miracles, signs and wonders, subjective experience, and the agent of same–the Holy Spirit himself–were suspect.   At the beginning of the 20th century (see how long these things take?) the tension hit a breaking point and the Pentecostal earthquake of 1906 hit Los Angeles (there were earlier quakes elsewhere building up to this one.) The impact of that rearrangement took 70 years or so to reach most evangelicals.  They called it “the third wave,”  but it wasn’t a wave that rolled through an ocean–it rolled over a landscape in fits and starts.

Beneath it were subterranean gyrations in theology.  The theology of the  kingdom of God didn’t play a prominent role in the Protestant Reformation, though it is a major theme in the Bible.  The reformers were focused on Paul–Romans and Galatians, in particular–and Paul didn’t use the phrase “kingdom of God” much, so it lay hidden from their view.   John Wimber, who studied under George Eldon Ladd at Fuller Theological seminary, who in turn picked up the scent of the kingdom of God from Oscar Cullman and Albert Schweitzer brought this theological development, brewing for decades and decades in the academy to the surface.   The gospels came into their own as the teaching documents of the church, having been largely ignored by the Reformers of old.

Now there’s a reassessment of the writings of Paul going on.  (Actually, it too has been going on for decades, but it just now reaching the surface of the local church.)  Maybe Luther and Calvin (Luther in particular) didn’t read Paul as well as Paul deserves to be read.  Maybe they didn’t get it all right back then.  Part right, but not all right.   N.T. Wright is advancing what has been called a new perspective on Paul but Wright would claim that it’s a recovered old perspective, just one that was missed by the Reformers of old.  As if there’s important Bible study still to be done.

We know more about the Bible than we used to.  We can read the Bible with a greater understanding of the questions being asked to which the Bible was the answer, rather than forcing the Bible to answer questions that we have, just because we have them.

The gospels, the kingdom of God, the Holy Spirit, Paul, justification–gosh when you add it all up, it’s shaping up to be another massive reformation.  We’re in the middle of a slow but powerful earthquake.  The ground beneath our feet is shaking.

Mostly what we have to show for it right now, though, is anxiety.

There’s great anxiety in the system right now and there will be the for the rest of your lifetime, young pastor, as this earthquake, this Next Reformation unfolds, erupts, takes hold, and then, eventually quiets down for a time until the next one is due.

Learn to live with it or find a different line of work.

Because we’re lazy; because we’re frightened by earthquakes and want to assure ourselves that it won’t happen where we live; and because there is a power of evil at work in the world who wants to cover up his/its real work.

We’re lazy. We prefer simple answers that we can grasp easily that seem to explain everything. This devil pact is a doozy on that front: why is Haiti in such a mess?  Because it was founded on a pact with the devil. What could be simpler? What could require less mental effort to grasp?

And we’re afraid.  To be going about your business one moment only to have the ground beneath your feet give way the next is a terrifying prospect.  If it could happen there, it could happen here. Fortunately, there’s a reason it happened there: a pact was made with the devil by the nation’s founders.  Our nation, by contrast, had a solid foundation. We’ve got The American Patriot’s Study Bible to prove it.  I kid you not.  Read it and learn how the second amendment was rooted in the book of Genesis.

And because there is a power of evil who likes nothing more than to cover up evil.  Haiti was subjected to the most brutal, cruel slavery by a Christian nation, France.  After the slaves overthrew the French, the developed nations of the time, ours included, made sure that Haiti paid reparations to their French oppressors, for about a hundred years–a crushing debt.   This is all conveniently obscured by the story of some Haitian slaves making a pact with the devil.

And lets not forget our hankering for cheap thrills. How thrilling it is to be let in on a secret.  Most people have a very difficult time explaining why these horrific things happen: an earthquake that costs 150,000 lives (and counting) and leaves a nation devastated.  Ah, but we have a juicy tidbit of insider information: the founders of Haiti made a pact with the devil in a back room somewhere on January 1, 1804, or whenever it wasn’t.

Don’t fall for this stuff.

Instead, do something immediately to help the Haitian people.  For starters, figure out how much money you make in a single day’s work, and give that amount to an organization involved in bringing relief to Haiti.  If you make 100,000 a year that’s, what? $400.  If you make 25,000 a year, it’s $100.

There is a universal gesture when confronted with staggering tragedy: we cover our mouths.  This is wisdom at work:  there are no explanations for these things.  The Bible bears witness to the reality of evil. The Bible reveals humans engaged in a struggle with evil.   The Bible, amazingly, reveals a God both sovereign over evil and affected, touched, bruised, bloodied by it himself.  The one thing the Bible doesn’t try to do when it comes to evil is explain it.  Neither should we.

The Bible is a book of the history of nations, in it’s own way. One particular nation, Israel, destined to produce the seed of blessing for all nations, Yeshua, from the line of Judah, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, to whom a promise was given.  The book of Genesis is a book of inspired history.  The writers, whoever they may have been, moved by the Spirit to discern the key themes and motifs of our inter-generational connections.  Envy, rivalry, hatred between and among brothers being a powerful theme.  Written in a way to help us draw our own conclusions, not have some preacher reduce it all to a factoid. We read Genesis and wonder if we’re not  in the mess we’re owing to the way we treat each other and our grudge holding nature.  Hatred begets hatred, violence begets violence, and it takes an inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven to reverse the trend.  The Holy Spirit who inspired the book, moves between its pages and its readers of many generations, whispering its meaning.

What do we even know of Haiti’s history?  A French colony that was a cash cow for the colonial power: producing sugar for the tea of the wealthy on the backs of brutal slavery. A slavery so severe, the local slaves couldn’t replenish their numbers by reproduction (contrast Israel’s multiplication in Egypt under slavery–so it must have been more brutal than that.)  Leading to a new import: African human beings brought in to work the sugar cane fields of what would become Haiti.

A violent uprising of the slaves, overthrowing their white masters, the first successful slave uprising leading to national independence.  A threatening turn of events for the United States of America which had it’s own slaves and wasn’t too keen on violent uprisings even though it had one of it’s own at it’s birth.  It took 60 years before we recognized Haiti’s independence; Abe Lincoln was the man who finally did it.  But in the meantime, the people of Haiti were forced by the Western powers to pay reparations to their former masters, the French, even while laboring under a trade embargo.  U.S. troops sent in to quell violence and to enforce the repayment of the debt.  Yes, the debt that former slaves were paying their former masters–as reparation.

And on it goes.  So which of these facts of history do we select to explain an earthquake?  And which earthquake in which country?

I don’t have a clue.  My grasp of Haiti’s history is minimal.  Laughably inept.

Let us in the face of our ignorance of history remain silent in a time of tragedy.  Silent about causes and effects of earthquakes whose proximate cause at least is geologic.  The ground beneath our feet is shifting sand, as the hymn reminds us.  Our rock is not the one beneath our feet.

As Rich Nathan wrote recently in an Ohio op-ed piece, in the face of tragedy, we should shut up and find a way to help.  We should take a lesson from Job’s comforters, whose words were only more pain for their suffering friend.

The biblical witness corresponds to the witness of biology. Darwin saw in nature a struggle for existence pitting members of each species against each other in a never-ending competition for limited resources.  So this rival thing is pretty primal.

Could it be that our task in this world is to let God be God, to accept his freedom to chose, to prefer, to favor whom or what he will, and let rivalry be crucified among us?  Crucifixion happens between a rock and a hard place.

Oh it would be easy to let God’s choice continue to inflame our rivalry as it inflamed Cain’s jealousy of Abel, which turned murderous, as envy will. (Pilate said that the chief priest handed Jesus over to him “out of envy.”)  Why is it that God’s chosen people, whoever they understand themselves to be, seem to feel that they must reinforce his choice (as if it weren’t enough) by asserting their superiority over their fellows?

Or it would be easy to deny God the freedom to choose, to favor, to prefer.  Turn him into the equal opportunity, even-steven, everybody-gets-the-same- from-this-god God.  A banal god who is equally removed from everyone, so as not to give anyone the idea that they are chosen.

But no, we’re between the rock and the hard place of a God who insists on his freedom to choose, to favor, to prefer and the call, the command, the non-negotiable requirement of this same God to love our brothers and neighbors, to treat them as brothers and neighbors, not rivals, to put their own interests, even,  above our own.

I don’t see any way to pull that off without a crucifixion and a resurrection, do you?

A young couple approached me after church and said, you probably don’t remember us, but you saved our marriage.

Say what?  Yes, we came to talk to you after church about six years ago when we were newly married. My 57 year old memory started kicking in.  They were a very young couple, married after a very short courtship and they were in the ugly process of tearing themselves apart when I sat down with them in my office.  You said two things to us that turned us around.

So what were the two things, I asked–just to see if they were blowing smoke.  First, you told us that we were being really hard on each other and we needed to know that there is a line that two people can cross and once you cross it there’s no turning back. But the line isn’t labeled.  You only find out that you’ve crossed when you find that you can’t get back. You told us that you thought we were really close to that line.  That scared us, and we needed to be scared because what we were doing to each other was dangerous. And we stopped right then and there.   We stopped being so hard on each other like that because we didn’t want to cross that line.  Until you told us, we didn’t even know there was one.

So what was the second thing?  You said you thought we were still just getting to know each other when we got married and needed to give each other some space to build more trust. And so we did that and now we know each other a lot better.

The thing is, they were beaming.  They were obviously deeply in love with each other and sincerely grateful for the counsel.

I wanted to stop, drop and thank the Lord that he allowed me to part of their story.  That he allowed me to be a pastor.

But here’s my point young pastor: what did I do immediately after that conversation?  I had another conversation, and another–you know what it’s like after church.  It was the Christmas program–my head was spinning as it always does when we do something like that.  Lots of people to catch and thank.  And then get ready for Christmas week.

But now I am older pastor and I realized how precious was the encounter I’d just had.  This was encouragement from heaven for me.  This couple waited behind, went out of their way to talk to me.  God had them go out of their way to talk to me. And I had better bother to listen to what they had to say.

I told my daughter without using names. And my wife.  And Donnell Wyche, our associate pastor.  I’ll tell my son, who is also a pastor next time I see him.  Why?  Because we need to capture encouragement any way we can.  One way to do that is to tell others–chosen others, not anyone.  People who appreciate what a gift it is to learn that one one does makes a difference every now and then.

This couple lives in another state and were just in for a visit.

It reminded me that our job as pastors is not defined by our own congregations.  Our commitment is to the kingdom of God.  People come and people go, especially in a high-transit town like Ann Arbor.  We are a way station for many who are passing through this University town on their way to whatever is next.

Did they put a check in the offering plate that morning?  Probably not.  They have their own church to support back home, one would hope.

Right. So, young pastor,  were you called to create the largest, most successful church possible?  Or were you called to be a pastor, an under-shepherd, a sheep dog for the master, a go-fer for the King of the Universe?  The same one who told Peter, “Feed my sheep.”

Do what you need to do to hold on to the encouragement that comes your way. Don’t let it roll off your back.  Don’t let it slip into the abyss while your brain laser locks on whatever negative thought it’s been obsessed with lately.

Gifts like this have a purpose: to get you through your day, your week, your year, your life.   Help them do their job.

This was my response when it first dawned on me back in 2006 that climate change may in fact be real and a serious global problem.  What a test of humanity!  In order to address a global threat like climate change we have to learn how to cooperate with each other on a global scale–not something the human race is very good at.  We have to look out, not only for our own interest, but also the interests of others–again not a skill we have mastered yet.

To pass a test like this might require us to fall at the feet of a merciful and powerful God in ways we haven’t even begun to consider.  If ever the world had a need for a Higher Power it’s now.

And it’s a test for the American church, especially the most vibrant part of it: evangelicalism.  To whom much is given much will be required.

But many of us don’t take to well to internal critique.  We’ve been embroiled in a culture war for the past thirty years in which we have fine tuned the skills of critiquing those we perceive to be outsiders.

We bristle when we hear our own tribe attacked.

Take for example, this broadside leveled against Christianity:

“When we look at the track record of priests and temples, pastors and churches, missionaries and missions, it is obvious that religion in all its forms, including most emphatically Christianity, is a perpetual breeding ground for violence, abuse, superstition, war, discrimination, tyranny, and pride. Religion and spirituality is a bottomless pit breeding illusion, deceit, and oppression.”

Gosh, when you’ve got people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, the new and revived atheists lambasting Christianity like that, you tend to get a little defensive.

But this quote is from the author of the wildly popular biblical translation-paraphrase, The Message.  Eugene Peterson says this is why God tests the church from time to time, because we embrace things that have nothing to do with God as though they are the gospel.

Judgment begins with the household of God, said Peter, the disciple of Jesus, the master of internal critique.  We shouldn’t be afraid of it.   Better now than later.

Climate change is a test because it requires us to wrestle with something we American evangelicals, thanks to our recent fundamentalist roots, have deep suspicions about: mainstream science. Without science, there is no way to know whether the climate is changing and why and what it might mean.  But we don’t get along very well with mainstream science because in our view it is dominated by the cultural elites who hold our faith in a kind of polite contempt.   So we tend to trust those who distrust any scientific consensus.

Climate change is a test because it suggests that maybe the American dream, based on cheap fossil fuel energy, could be the world’s nightmare if we don’t begin to find other sources of cheap energy.  And we have embraced the American dream as if it were the Kingdom of God dream.

Climate change is a test, because it bids us to care, really care, about future generations, at a time when we are really focused on the present and the eternal.  We care a great deal about our own fortunes and we care about life after death, but this other biblical concern–for the well being of future generations, is something we haven’t been focused on much.

Climate change is a test because it puts us in the uncomfortable position of considering the deliberations of an organization we deeply distrust: the United Nations.

And climate change is a test because it forces us to use the “s” word and we don’t like the “s” word, except when it doesn’t require any real “s”.

Sacrifice. Climate change might call for sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future.  It might call for sacrifices in our lifetstyle.  It might call us to sacrifice conveniences we enjoy. And we like to talk about sacrifice (especially if the talk is safely theological) more than we like to do it.  Even the most rabid environmentalists don’t like the word sacrifice because they know full well it doesn’t poll well.

But we’re not alone. God is with us. The Spirit has been, is being, and will be poured out for the asking.  We can do this with a little help from our friend, the friend of sinners. We don’t need to be anxious or afraid. We can walk on water in the middle of storms when it’s him out there in the midst of the storm calling us to step out of the boat and onto the lake.

Come Holy Spirit, soften our hearts, and renew the face of the earth!

I don’t get it. There’s no doubt that carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. That’s undisputed physics.  There’s no doubt that burning oil and coal for energy releases lots of the stuff into the atmosphere and that much of it remains there for centuries.  There’s also little doubt that since we’ve been burning fossil fuels for energy, the average global temperature has been on the rise.

So the basics of climate science is pretty intuitive.

After that, it gets complicated.  Because there are many other factors in a system like the climate: water vapor, sun spots, cloud cover, the list is endless.  And this is what climate scientist study.  They try to take into account all the different factors to determine the probability (certainty is a word scientists don’t like) that the recent warming trend of the last century is due (at least in substantial part) by this human activity.

Hundreds of climate scientists have been working on this from many nations.  They do studies and publish results and bicker and dispute and get lost in the data and come up for air, and generally do what scientists do.  Most of it is eye-glazingly boring to talk about at a party.

I am not qualified to independently verify their results.

But nothing I’ve read or heard or seen makes me think there is a massive conspiracy afoot to dupe the world concerning climate change.

I think the world as a system of vested interests has a very powerful incentive not to accept the science that says climate change is real and we need to do something about it.

I think these interests will continue to provide a very significant ballast that will prevent us from over-reacting to what the science is saying.  I’m putting this mildly.

Talking it Over

I’ve been fortunate to talk personally with many climate scientists at length.  I’ve pummeled them with my questions–mainly things I’ve heard from my fellow Christians who think there is a conspiracy of some sort.  These scientist give very reasonable explanations.

A local friend mine is one of these scientists.  He isn’t an ideologue.  He is one of the most balanced and reasonable human beings I know.  Like me, he knows and loves and respects many people who doubt the science that is his stock and trade.  He calmly answers my questions and makes perfect sense to me.

I have another friend who has worked for the EPA for years.  He’s an engineer.  Actually one of their top technical experts.  He was engineer of the year in the Federal system many years ago. I know this guy as well as I know anyone who isn’t a family member.   He’s not a wild eyed environmentalist.  He has as much personal integrity as anyone I know. I walk with him for about an hour at least once a week. I pummel him with my questions. He answers them to my satisfaction.

He explains to me, for example, how models work.  How a scientist could say, “I tricked  the model” and not mean something nefarious.  I could pass on the explanation he gave me, but your eyes would glaze over.   I’d also be explaining stuff I only know second-hand.

These people are credible witnesses.  I trust their perspective because I know them. They are not on the radio or talking heads on cable television.  They are people I know up close and personal.

On the other hand, the people who object to the climate science–I mean the ones I know personally–as a rule, don’t know as much about the science as these people I’ve mentioned. They are highly intelligent, well informed people, but they are not as close to the science as these others I know.  So I find their doubts about the science less compelling.

The Work of the Holy Spirit

But there’s another factor at work.  More than I’m interested in science, I’m interested in the work of the Holy Spirit.  This has been a long-time pursuit of mine, not a recent enthusiasm.

And the fact is, I experienced a powerful work of the Holy Spirit in my heart some years ago.  I would call it a work of repentance.

I was at a meeting with a bunch of scientists who were concerned about the environment.  I spent a weekend with these scientists and with a bunch of non-scientist Christian leaders, all of them evangelical.  Two groups that had never spent much time together before and whose respective communities tended to distrust each other.

During the meetings, while one of the scientists was speaking, the Spirit fell on me. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.  I felt a swoosh descend from my face to my chest, and my throat tighten and my eyes water.

And I felt sorry, so sorry, sorry like only God can make me feel, for not caring enough about the beautiful, wonderful, sacred creation.

I felt intense sorrow that there has been such a divide, such a cultural gap, such a history of mutual misunderstand between Jesus followers in America and people who would call themselves environmentalists.  It felt to me like I  was sitting on a dividing wall between the two groups, and the wall was falling down, and I was falling with it.

Only it was an good falling, not a bad one. It felt like I was falling into the arms of the father in the story Jesus told about those two sons.

No, I am not claiming that the Holy Spirit whispered in my ear to say, “Al Gore is right and Rush Limbaugh is wrong about climate change.”   But what the Spirit did in my heart that day has a big impact on how I respond to the people who care about this issue, and to the scientists I’ve met who are deeply concerned by what their science is telling them.

We need more love to deal with these vexing cultural disputes.  Yes, more science, and more transparency, and more open debate, but also more love.  Of all the things we need more of, love is the one we need more of most.

And it needs to be a particular form of love: God’s breaking-down-dividing-walls love.  The love that broke down the wall between Jew & Gentile, Slave & Free, Male & Female. Love that falls on siblings who have been squabbling for a long time.    Love that tenderizes hearts that have a tendency to get hard.

The big problems we’re facing today around the world–the crushing load of debt, abject poverty, terror, violence, failure to treat human life as sacred, treating God’s creation as if it were expendable–all of these together are going to require massive amounts of a resource that is freely available to us, but only if our hearts are open.   Love.

Come, Holy Spirit, and fill our hearts, and renew the face of the earth.

It took a while to finish Darwin’s classic–the man loved his Beetles!–but I came away charmed by Darwin’s warmth, his respect for critics in what would today be “the Intelligent Design crowd,” and the staggering breadth of his genius.

Clearly, Darwin did not set out to overturn the ruling paradigm of biology–that species were, like God, immutable.  He recognized the power of nature’s selective mechanism with fear and trembling–reluctantly, in much the same way that I came to recognize the power of my rabbi, Jesus.  He knew that this acknowledged mechanism–nature chooses winners and losers in the struggle for life and thus are new species endlessly spawned–would cause him much anguish, as indeed, it did.   He took up the cross of this truth and followed it with grim anticipation of what awaited him.

Those who respect the scientific enterprise often regard the realm of faith as a foreign realm, and wonder why those who live there view scientists as strangers.

Darwin’s Gentle Approach

But Darwin himself models a different approach in Origin, one we could all learn from. He persuades the reader gently, as did the parable teller of old, leading from the known (the transforming power of a breeder’s selective eye) to the unknown (the transforming power of nature’s selective pressure.)  He woos us to the truth he sees by kindness toward those who see things differently.

Darwin, unlike some of his successors, understood the compelling beauty of the notion that God–without the use of any means whatsoever–simply created each species whole and intact from scratch. It was, after all,  his  view for much of his life. And it was the view his dear wife held dearly for the wonder it stirred in her heart.  Darwin understood, it seems, that it is a noble thing to hold nature in awe for whatever reason, and that those who stand in awe before her stand in awe together.

Darwin could refer to nature as a creation without condescension or contempt, even though the particular theory of special creation that he grew up with lost its luster in light of what he learned from careful observation of God’s creation.  He didn’t treat those who didn’t see what he saw as fools, knowing how hard he had to work to see if for himself.

I came away from my encounter with Darwin through his book, aching for his spirit to return to our discourse regarding the origin of species. Year after year, the surveys remain essentially the same.  Half the population rejects the broad outlines of evolutionary science, leaving them suspicious of science in general–dubious now of climate change, the safety of the H1N1 vaccine, and whatever else comes down the pike from the citadels of science.

If only my evangelical colleagues could approach the discourse regarding the origin of species with the spirit of Darwin–so close, in this respect, to the spirit of our master.

If only Darwin’s disciples could learn from their master how to teach their fellows: that respect for one’s listeners helps one to deliver one’s message; that one can be so right sometimes as to be wrong; that truth conveyed requires a mystery beyond all of our command: love–Darwin’s for his fellows, God’s for us, and ours for each other.

[Post Script: A few months ago, I did a post on Darwin's birthday.  It was an apology to the memory of Darwin. If you'd like to sign on the apology, please do.  Mostly it's been signed by Christians who regret the culture war approach so many of us have taken to evolutionary science.  It's also been signed by some biologists who regret the attempt to fight fire with fire and wish to adopt a more respectful approach to matters of faith. Given the vitriol that such posts engender from those who view any effort to reach out across this culture divide as betrayal, I'll not be posting such comments on this blog post or the earlier one.  These kinds of comments can be found anywhere you look on the Internet when the subject comes up.-Ken ]