George Hermanson

All That We Are

2009-11-06T10:06:46-08:00

November 15, 2009
Richmond United Church
Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost 2009

Ruth 3:1-5 and 4:13-17
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Mark 12:38-44
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson

Next week I have organized an event on Transforming Theology for Church and Society. In reading the material, clearly we must as a church develop a faith that address our world of “I am spiritual but not religious.” We are moving into is the age of Spirit where there is “no standardized theology, no single pattern of governance, no uniform liturgy, and no common accepted Scripture.” It is a time where all our faith statements are our best approximation, based on reason, a critical reading of the bible, and reconstructing our theology. This is a time of both excitement and chaos, of energy and closing down, of jumping into the future or seeking of comfort zones of the past. It is a time to take courage, to be bold in our faith, to claim new understandings of God that will guide us into the unknown future. Research indicates a healthy congregation includes study and worship life. It was found that a deep spirituality and open hospitality were the values that grounded them. This deep spirituality and hospitality was nurtured by the ministers, and lived by the people of the church.

The church that thrives builds on our tradition of being an open and inclusive church, with a variety of opinions and lack of orthodoxy as our defining identity. This is a struggle, for many want to set limits. What defines healthy churches is their sense and practice of hospitality. What was clear is that if we wish to grow we need to work on a spirituality that reflects the character of God. This character is one of Grace - to welcome in those at the edge. This character is one of compassionate / justice, that is to care for all, including our natural world so that all are included in our abundance.

This week we have some marvellous texts that pick up this theme of hospitality and compassionate justice. They are about giving all that we are and have. They are about the meaning of sacrifice.

To get this we have to first begin negatively - what sacrifice is not. It is not an offering to appease some negative force that demands blood sacrifice or we are not saved. God’s grace is free and offered to all and we do not need to earn it.

Sacrifice is not for our own sake. Listen to the phrase “look at what I have sacrificed for you.” The phrase tells us it was not a real sacrifice, it was to own the other, to create a debt to be repaid.

Sacrifice is done out of freedom for the sake of the other or the greater good. We do it for transformation. It is done out freedom, out of a desire to make this world a better place, thus I place myself in danger for the sake of others. Sacrifice does not seek reward. It seeks to help the kingdom of God be a reality on earth as it is in heaven.

Next week is Remembrance Day. There we remembered those who died for us. In their freedom they went off to maintain freedom. It was not out of the blood or battle that the transformation came, but out their sacrifice we learned what was important-freedom for all. Sacrifice does not demand death, though death may come when we face the evils of the world. Death does not redeem the world, for God has redeemed the earth.

So turning to Ruth. You need to know that the social safety net was the care of widows and orphans. Sons had to take care of the widow - no ifs or buts. Now if you had no son then the family of your husband had to take you into their blanket protection.

For compassionate / justice to happen Ruth has to go Boas and has sex with him - she claims the blanket protection that had not been offered. She risks all through how she claimed protection. She risks all for the sake of her mother-in-law. There is more. Ruth is of another tribe and nationality and under the law was an outcast. Here is a story of inclusion, of hospitality to the stranger as well as to the widow. The story changes the understanding of Israel’s narrative. Now its role is to redeem the stranger. As well, Ruth is the grandmother of David. Out of that which was foreign comes the great hero David. That transforms the meaning of being chosen. Her sacrifice creates a new religious understanding where hospitality includes all of creation in God’s blanket protection.

Ruth offered herself - all that she had because she had experienced the hospitality of God.

Turning to Mark, clearly those at the edge of society are the ones Jesus has compassion. Scribes are those in his society that are hired for their skills. They have taken too much pride in themselves. This is shown by how they treat the poor. They are learned so they know the tradition and the torah. So it should be a no brainer for them - they have read Ruth - Torah is the care of those at the edge of society. Hence the judgment. It is a self judgement which we have experienced when we say: “we know better.”

To help us "know better" we have the story of the widow who gives all. It is the metaphor of one who has prayed “just as I am.” She knows the blanket protection of God. She says, “here I am, all of me.” Nothing is held back. Out of her fullness she gives her abundance and that is compared to “out of their surplus.”

This is a spiritual problem. It is a decision to give all of oneself to God - to know what is most important is our God relationship. That demands sacrifice - a giving up and over to the lure of God. When that happens then our hospitality is expanded. There is no us and them. All are in God’s protective blanket.

The widow offered herself - all that she had because she had experienced the hospitality of God.

What I know is that when a congregation shows hospitality it becomes a force for renewal. When we are welcoming of those different from ourselves we transform reality. When we practice spiritual disciplines, worship deeply, then our horizon is broadened and expanded.

God has judged all as worthy. God is a God of abundance - more than enough. When pray deeply we are filled so we can live the abundant life where we can, offering all of who we are for the kingdom’s sake. When we explore our faith deeply we invite others to this expansive and expanding journey of transformation - of ourselves, others and the world.

George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com

Seeing Jesus - Knowing God

2009-10-23T13:42:04-07:00

October 25, 2009
St. Paul's United Church, Richmond, ON
Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost 2009

Job 42:1-6
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Mark 10:46-52
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson

As I prepared, a new book by Harvey Cox caught my eye. It is called, The Future of Faith. He says that there is a “profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.” His first book, in 1965, was The Secular City. It asked how the church was to be, when the church was being pushed to the margins of life. Not all that he said then turned out to be true. In later works, he prepared us for the saying - “I am spiritual not religious” - as the world the church must respond to.

The other thing that caught my eye was a review of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. It quotes her opening sentence:

We are talking far to much about God these days, and what we say is often facile.

She is disappointed that the hard core atheists refuse to debate any Christians other than conservative fundamentalists. She comments:

In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion out to be readily accessible to anybody.

And that people on

both sides of the public debate assume that everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine personality , who created the world and everything in it.

They look perplexed if we suggest that God might have other, different attributes.

What is at stake is how we understand God. Most of the time we don’t talk about what God is really like at all, because we know. Most of the time religious folk are able to live inside the view of God that they learned as children and it sustains them throughout their entire life. But that comfort zone is disappearing.

We are in a time of great potential because people actually struggle with questions about where and who is God, for them and their children. We are in a time when there are new and exciting insights about the nature of God and how God is related to all of creation.

Cox defined our immediate past as time of the age of belief. This is a time of orthodoxy and not much room for pluralistic views. This is where statements of faith are important and taken literally, even as one might reject them. This is what many outside the church criticize or reject, that there is one true explanation. The church is seen as propositional - accept this idea or you are a sinner, there is only one way to understand our faith statements.

What we are moving into is the age of Spirit where there is “no standardized theology, no single pattern of governance, no uniform liturgy, and no common accepted Scripture.” It is a time where all our faith statements are our best approximation, based on reason, a critical reading of the bible, and reconstructing our theology. Thus this is a time of both excitement and chaos, of energy and closing down, of jumping into the future or seeking of comfort zones of the past. It is a time to take courage, to be bold in our faith, to claim new understandings of God that will guide us into the unknown future.

Both our passages this morning are dramatic descriptions of new understandings of God. In each text an old understanding is deconstructed and a new vision is elaborated in its stead. This is the experience of epiphany - a word which literally means showing or manifestation. In God’s appearance to Job, in Jesus' encounter with blind Bartimaeus - each of these passages are epiphanies: first hand accounts of seeing and experiencing God differently.

After 40 chapters of suffering, of feeling abandoned by everyone, including God, and getting bad unsympathetic advice from his friends and his wife, Job finally gets his answer when God appears in overwhelming beauty and majesty. God poses a series of rhetorical questions - questions to which there can be no reply because the answer is so obvious. Nevertheless, our Job is no slouch, and he knows a good thing when he sees it. So he’s not about to let what has become a real conversation with God disappear. So he responds with his description of his epiphany, ending with the phrase that has unfortunately come into our religious vocabulary as “worm theology.”

Now I have to say something about that self description as a worm. It has come down to us a prescriptive, as a measure of our guilt and unworthiness. That is not how Job meant it. He was being descriptive - trying to describe for us something of his experience of the awe and wonder he felt in God’s presence. And he says that human beings are to God as worms are to human beings. It’s not a moral judgement. Trying to comprehend God is like a worm trying to comprehend a human. Job knows something about God’s nature that is new and astonishing. What is affirmed is: God is a God that desires relationship with us, and is continuously seeking us out of God’s boundless love and compassion.

Bartimaeus is blind, is outside his religious and social community. He is an outcast. It is an audacious act for him to speak to anyone. He should be an invisible nobody that we can toss spare change to without disrupting our thoughts or routine. Yet Mark makes that impossible, first by having him speak directly to Jesus, and secondly by using his personal name.

He claims equality; his right to address another person. He may be physically blind, but he is spiritually sighted. Bartimaeus, just on hearing Jesus’ voice, has insight - he sees the Christ, the messiah in Jesus. He sees the kingdom of God through Jesus.

In daring to call out to Jesus, Bartimaeus initiates a theological transformation which Jesus acknowledges and continues by telling him to stand up and come over - to take his place as a full human being. The physical healing of Bartimaeus sight is a metaphor for his restoration to a transformed community. He truly belongs to God and God’s kingdom. Seeing Jesus was to know God in a new way.

To have a God-encounter requires that we go through a Job-like experience. It can be a dark night of the soul experience. We have to get to the point where old constructs, old ideas, the structures of our faith that were so familiar and comfortable that they fit us like our favourite faded blue jeans - become so unsatisfactory that we can’t hold onto them anymore. This is the experience of doubt: doubt in our faith, ourselves, our God. Doubt helps us see what in the faith of the past has become tasteless, even frustrating. It helps us grow spiritually. The experience of epiphany will be ours. In the words of the mystics and sages of our faith, God must become void and emptiness, then enemy, before God can again be friend.

When God feels distant this is our clue that we are yearning for something deeper, yearning for God, for communion with God, for a closer encounter with God. God is luring us to deeper reality: God breaking down the old inadequate religious words and images.

This is an exciting time then for the church. For a church that is open to the deep struggles that we all experience, not only open but welcomes such exploration, will be attractive to those who are spiritual but not religious.

Our search for God is a like a musical experience. It is felt and like music it comes through practice and participation in music. It is to know not only the notes but to let the notes rise into harmony and intensity. Like music the knowledge of God is never fully attained. It is knowledge that always leads to a kind of unknowing.

In that moment we have an epiphany, a new insight into the beauty of God. God becomes friend and lover. Sometimes we can experience it as a mystical, transcendent encounter. Other times our experience is through the relationships that we have, the tender mercy we feel for others, and that they show to us.

In our moments of insight, we see, we join that movement to bring harmony and justice to all.

George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com

The Ottawa Citizen; Sunday, October 11, 2009 page B1-B2. Douglas Todd, Religion & Ethics Editor, Vancouver Sun.

Attitude of Gratitutde, Year B, Thanksgiving

2009-10-10T10:29:06-07:00

October 11, 2009
St. Paul's United Church, Richmond, ON
Thanksgiving Sunday

Psalm 126
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Joel 2:21-27
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Matthew 6:25-33
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson

We have dressed the church this morning to remind us of the beauty of the earth, life that is given by soil and care. We dress up to remind ourselves of what is important. When we go out for a special occasion our clothes reflect the meaning of the event.

Our texts reflect giving thanks and rejoicing. I especially like the passage from the prophet Joel. He writes after a period of difficulty and stress. His sense of well-being and thanksgiving is so great that he includes the soil and the animals as well as human beings in the rejoicing. It resonates for us, I think, living as we do where Autumn just bursts with exuberant colour and richness. We can say with Joel that in our coloured leaves and vivid blue skies all of creation gives joyful thanks to the Creator.

Joel has a `whole earth’ view of God’s care. God is intimately involved with all of creation - with plants and animals, even the rocky substance of the planet itself. God is connected, related to the whole world. And all are called to give thanks to God and rejoice in God’s graciousness and bounty.

Jesus doubtless has these images in mind in this saying recorded in Matthew’s gospel. His reference to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are images embedded in our collective memory. They conjure up phrases from the Old Testament, words that assure us that God’s care for all creatures including ourselves, still continues.

Jesus, however, is different. He makes his statement during a time of extreme difficulty. He tells people not to worry at a time when there is plenty to worry about. And that worry is called the Roman Empire.

When Jesus uses the phrase “kingdom of God,” a phrase which is central to his theology and which he uses all the time, he’s not just making a nice poetic allusion. He’s making a political statement, and a challenging one a that. When Jesus uses Kingdom of God, he is always contrasting it with the kingdom everyone experiences everyday - the Empire of Rome.

Living in the kingdom of Rome was no picnic. The Roman Legion was everywhere and, by law, could force you to carry their packs. You could be conscripted to work on building projects - amphitheaters or roads without compensation. They could take a portion of your crops and tax you to the point of destitution. In fact, most people in the Roman Empire - probably 80 to 90% were one meal away from starvation.

It is in this context that Jesus uses the phrase “Kingdom of God”. Jesus explicitly contrasts God’s empire with the Empire of Rome. The Empire of Rome is based on an economy of scarcity, exclusion and coercion. The Empire of God, on the other hand, is based on abundance, inclusion and boundless, persuasive love. Jesus constantly invites his hearers to live in God’s kingdom - and not just in some distant future, in an afterlife, or some kind of heaven - but in the here and now. Jesus claims that God’s kingdom is present in everyday reality. He invites people to participate in that reality, to live in God’s kingdom, right now. He invites us to live in God’s realm of abundance and joy and by so doing make it actual in our ordinary world.

You can imagine the reaction this would have had in early Jesus’ communities in the Roman Empire. In a world where nearly everyone was starving, the followers of Jesus shared what they had with each other and lived out of an attitude of gratitude and hospitality. In a world where everyone was worried about the future, about the authorities, about being swept up in the next purge, Jesus’ followers were instructed to live without worries about the precariousness of their situation. While life in the Roman Empire led one to be suspicious and fearful of everyone outside one’s own immediate circle, Jesus’ followers were instructed to be open and accepting of others, to care for them and, in fact, to love them.

Like Jesus himself, Jesus’ followers stuck out in the Roman Empire because they did not let the worries of daily life, or the agenda of Rome determine their behaviour or how they would live. Their behaviour and living was in response to the lure of God and God’s realm of peace, justice and beauty. They lived an attitude of gratitude; giving thanks for the life and beauty that surrounded them.

I think this is the power of these images Jesus used. They turned around those who had no hope into those who affirmed life. Those without community created communities of support. They healed the sick, fed one another and, despite the darkness of the empire, became a beacon of light that we still feel today.

The images dealt with attitudes. The power of an attitude to guide us. Think of not to worry for tomorrow for today has enough of its own worries. Common sense that we ought to deal with what is in front of us rather than to given to excessive worry about the future. If we take care of today's issues the future is taken care of. Note how the war on terror actually has created more terror. What motivated was not how do we bring all to the table but to break the world into them - demons and us. Excessive fear can lead to fortress mentality. Fear creates fear.

Thanksgiving is an attitude toward life where the truth about reality is, despite the negativity we experience, love is real. Goodness and beauty do really underpin our experience.

Alanis Morissette’s song “Thank U” speaks to our situation:

Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence

I like that there are negative things in her list. Its about having an attitude of gratitude which cannot be deterred by negative circumstances. We, like them, are called to live out of the abundance and security of God’s kingdom.

We can be continually thankful because we know the deep truth about reality is that love is real. We are called to live a life of beauty, generosity and inclusion so as to make God’s kingdom a reality in our everyday life. Goodness and beauty underpin and support our lives. By living out of thanksgiving, generosity and beauty we transform our world into God’s realm, God’s shalom, God’s paradise.

In times of stress and distress we need to sing again. To find that basic drive where we are in harmony with God who is in harmony with all of reality. To let that feeling of God fill us, lift us, direct us so we are the people who go out singing Amen. And to know that such singing is for the betterment of world. To know that paradise is real and it is here - Amen.

George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com

Not Being Perfect, Year B, October 4, 2009, Pentecost 18

2009-10-02T13:38:21-07:00

October 4, 2009
St. Paul's United Church, Richmond, ON
18th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

Hebrews 1:1-4 and 2:5-12
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Mark 10:2-16
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson

Asking questions is important. We learn by asking questions. We test ideas and actions by asking questions. Yet not all questioning does that. For there is another type of question, where insight is not looked for. It is to challenge the speaker. The challenge comes with a hidden agenda. One of the response I have to such a question is, “What is the statement that you want to make?” For the question comes out of settled worldview, a sense this is how it is and I want to trap you with the question. It is not asked with sincerity but with “I am going to get you.”

Jesus’ encounter about divorce illustrates such a question. He is being tested to see if he is an authentic teacher. There is no sense of, “I want to learn,” in the question. It is clear from how Jesus responded that he understands the question as a trap.

Mark also has an agenda. There was an issue of whether Jesus was an authentic teacher. Mark wants to answer that question.

The issue is how do we know this person is from God? How is God reflected in the words and actions of this person? To answer, Mark uses the templates of his time. He uses the different understandings of the religious communities of how one would recognize this person as a prophet. Did the teachings fit with Moses? Is it Elijah? Part of the problem with such questions is it freezes the ongoing experience in past and fixed moments. Both Hebrews and Mark are suggesting a dynamic nature of God. There is more than one way of speaking about God and tradition is emerging, changing not fixed.

The question of divorce suggests this dynamic nature of God, that the incarnation of God is always in this moment and evolving. Now how do I get to this? That is a good question.

Jesus recognizes there is a statement behind the question. He knows the questioners have the answer. “What did Moses say?” An honest exchange would have begun with, “This is the tradition, what do you say?” Jesus gets them to show their cards.

Embedded in the question is a view of the perfect answer. We have solved the human issue conclusively. Just follow the rules. I see the exchange as challenging that view for Jesus pushes the listeners into a new understanding. In the old view there were exceptions. A man could divorce a woman but a woman had no power to do that. The answer Jesus gives demands a rethinking of what was taken as a perfect and absolute standard. It is almost saying, “Committed relationships trump truth."

Still, the response could be read as an absolute standard. However, I read it as there is no absolute standard, but that we are called upon to expand our understandings of how we are to live together. It is to base our experience on the idea of who we are. We are relational. Our identity is not self contained but is created by relationships. It makes us ask good questions: how to be one body yet deal with the imperfections that make us human. The question is, how are we to be faithful to one another in times of change and adversity? How are we to be faithful to our relational reality, to our environment and other people when we live in a world that has broken the unity and moved us into ‘me first’?

Jesus offers a new view of equality in the idea of one flesh. We are joined in relationships and this means our views must exhibit that reality. In one sense the response is, "How do we live with one another and respect the views of one another?" It is to say we have intrinsic worth and taking seriously the other as having such value. In this our experience is made more beautiful. It is to see we are, metaphorically, one flesh. We are one with others. We are one with nature. The response rejects the view that nature is different from us and others are different. For the response says we are one flesh.

In a world where we bicker, pout, and get hurt we seek ways of being a community where we honour differences and are one body. We worry about people who leave the church, as we should, but we never learn that they leave for a host of reasons. Often it is a search for the perfect community. Well, there is no such a community. We are an imperfect community and that is good. For perfect communities have it all figured out and their questions are based on that. They seek to find how one is out of step, they seek the perfect standard without understanding that standards are evolving and what is crucial is to begin with one flesh. We are in this together and together we will continue to work on how we shall be a community that accepts tensions and seek to find a solution. Those solutions will not be one size fits all, but good answers they lead to better questions.

Now this may seem like a big job. There are clues in the passage about being like a child. Children were disposable in the culture of the time. Yet here in the text the child is blessed. Jesus again challenges. He doesn’t play by the rules.

What is honoured by the blessing of the child is an honouring of the those who had no place, were of no value. This questions how we value others. How we value the natural world. Their value is intrinsic not us giving value. This changes how we relate.

In the idea of one flesh are two insights that will aid us in our journey. The first is we find our unity in God. It is the love of God is relational. It stretches across time and space and is found in many voices, yet is of one source. There are a thousand names for God.

God is on the move. Our experience of God evolves and changes and grows. The consistency is the love or aim of God. From the edge of reality, in the imperfections of experience, in those who are the edge and vulnerable comes the love of God.

The dream of God is for unity and diversity. This God is not an unmoved distant ideal who only speaks through lofty phrases which leave your heart cold. This God is not a ruthless moralist who seeks to punish everyone for all their wrongs.

This is the dream of a relational God. A God who seeks to be in relationship with us.
This is a God who knows each of us intimately.
This is a God who cares for all of us passionately. *

We are one flesh with this God for God is in us and in this world, loving it into new realities. There is a unity in this love. We are reminded of this unity and diversity in the table, this world wide communion Sunday.

George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com

* Thanks to James Murray

Instructions For The Community, Year B, September 27, 2009, Pentecost 17

2009-09-26T14:12:29-07:00

September 27, 2009
St. Paul's United Church, Richmond, ON
17th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

Mark 9:38-50
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Click here for an easy to print or email Adobe PDF version of this post.

The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson

One of the issues we face in a multi-religious world is how to accept others as having insight into the nature of reality. Do other religions have truth? Is often how the question is posed. Then there are other voices that are not religious, do they have some truth? Do those outside the religious community have important insights we ought to pay attention to? Do other religions have something to teach us? Do other voices tell us something important?

In our world some want to reject that which is different. We have a tendency to say the opposite, no matter what the subject, and with no interest in the facts, and it is widespread. A well known talk show host provided an illustration of this very thing recently. They make their living by attacking those they disagree with, as if “nothing good can come out of Nazareth” ... or the United Church.

These questions about who is on our side are ones we share with those to whom Mark was writing. The background is a whole series of who is correct, who is the best disciple? Mark gathers up some sayings of Jesus to push the community into a wider and more inclusive view of the world.

It is also helpful to know that Mark writes after the destruction of the temple, around 70 C.E. Further, there were different Jesus movements and different Christ communities. That is, there were several different understandings of the experiences people had of Jesus, and different ways his teachings were used.

This is the background for "for and against." We know that not everyone was in the same group. Different groups had developed. In the face of oppression there was a danger that fear would create limiting boundaries.

As well, there was a danger of super orthodoxy - “here is our tradition and it is the only understanding that is possible - we have true doctrine.”

So here was a whole unknown group healing in the name of Jesus. Mark connects this back to Jesus’ openness and inclusiveness. Jesus had pushed the boundaries of inclusion so that the least were the criteria of inclusion. It was an attitude or a world view of openness to those who look after the common good.

Even if they don’t have the same name, caring for the common good makes them part of God’s kingdom. "Though we held everyone to be our opponents except those on our side, you counted everybody as your adherent who was not against you." This is Cicero - Roman statesman, orator, writer - writing about Caesar in the first century before Christ. Jesus' attitude rejects "us versus them," for all are part of God’s kingdom. A radical viewpoint that challenges our tendency to make enemies and then demonize them.

The early church, and we still today, worried about what is correct belief. One of the dangers of religion is extreme orthodoxy - cutting out those whose beliefs just don’t match ours.

It is true we need to judge what are authentic ideas, healing ideas. Also, it is important to hear those who criticize us, for we learn by listening to their concerns, even if we think them inadequate.

The metaphor of fire remind us that all of us need some purification. This comes in testing our words and actions in the mix of ideas and actions around us. Making good steel means removing imperfections.

Reading back from this primitive metallurgy, the sayings of cutting of the hand and plucking the eye out make metaphorical sense. Remember, those who were marred or had an incomplete body were abhorrent in society. To be blind meant one was a complete outsider - a sinner. Yet here one is called to deform one's body. Another reminder of inclusion.

The kingdom of God asks us to be aware of what values we have and if those values lead to destruction get rid of them. Cut off what holds back our passion for the good.

So it is to examine oneself for healthy and unhealthy ideas. It is a call to the examined life as the way of kingdom living. We can do that by examining what we hold to be true and if that idea leads to inclusion and openness.

Now this openness is not lacking in discrimination. Like it is said, the person can be so open his brains fall out. Belief needs reason. If an idea appears to be unreasonable than drop it. Faith needs reason. We need to ask hard questions of our value systems to see if they bring life or death.

This is why we need to ask questions from God’s perspective. In James we have a way of testing ideas. It flows from action to statement. We judge truth by the good it produces. So the way to judge is to see if the ideas lead to a more healthy and inclusive community, where those at the edge and risk are taken care of. Practice tells us what we believe. Good beliefs will always lead to inclusive and healing actions.

One of the common attitudes is that we can spilt actions from what we believe. "It really comes down to personal choice," Is how it is often formed.

When we say this belongs to me without any outside influence, it raises the question of who owns a resource. These are value questions. Personal choice is always based on a value or moral assumption. In an interrelated world we are always having an impact on others. In the ecological world we are asked to look at the size of our footprint as it affects other life forms.

We cannot escape reflection upon, and application of, our belief - our value - system. It is crucial for our life together. Our very existence is dependent on our praxis - which is good belief and good actions informing each other.

The job of faith is begins in introspection. This helps rid ourselves of ideas that lead to death. Reason helps. What we produce in action tests our belief. We move out of introspection, apply our beliefs as an offering to the world - to say here are ideas that will heal the common good. We have tested them. Try them out.

This is said with humbleness, for there are many voices which are not in our tradition asking for the same thing. Ultimate judgment is God’s domain and responsibility. All that is asked of us is to open our table of hospitality so the world is fed.

When we dialogue with those who are different we are all better for that. We test the ideas of others by how they add to our shared care of this world. When we see those who are different from us acting in ways that heal the common good, we can make common cause with them.

We are judged and they are judge by how our beliefs issue in care of the world. It is, then, how we live that tells us the truth about our statements. Did what you do make this person, this context better? In the end that is all that is asked of us.

George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com