Pastor's Page
From Steve
February 1, 2012
We're being asked by Nashville CARES if we can deliver to more clients in our Food Support program for people Acute, Chronic, and Terminal diseases (ACTS). Several volunteers from our church pick up food staple packs to deliver each month here in Murfreesboro and we're looking for some more volunteers. See me for more info.
February 1, 2012
What does Middle Tennessee Medical Center have planned for its future in Murfreesboro? What are the challenges facing local healthcare? How has and will new federal laws change your healthcare availability and affordability? Come this Sunday to meet and hear the CEO of Middle Tennessee Medical Center, Gordon Ferguson, address out class at 9:30 AM.
January 30, 2012
- It's not their fault, but your minister didn't learn everything they needed to be a pastor in Seminary. Like doctors leaving medical school, clergy need a time to do their "residency" and learn to practice in the field what they've learned in the classroom. Actually, that theological education NEVER stops...so give your minister permission to not be perfect and to always be learning.
- Every pastor must learn to "choose their guilt". So will you. There is always more to do than there is time to do it. Every minister must come to terms with an inherent guilt around what he or she did not do today. Too often that means their own family gets the leftovers. By the way, this is a dilemma for all of us regardless our vocation.
- Be kind if you have a criticism. Healthy clergy welcome constructive criticism. Everyone abhors petty nitpicking. Make sure you engage in the former and not the latter.
- Please have some realistic expectations for the pastor's family. How many ways can we say this? Please give your minister's family an extra measure of grace.
- Please err on the side of generosity. I'm not just talking about money, though I am talking about money. I also mean be generous with your attention, your questions, your interest, your ability to remember my mother's name, your laughter, your food, your jokes, your invitations to ball games, your LIFE
- Your pastor loves you, but he/she may or may not like you. Just like in your family; there are days when your spouse/child/parent loves you, but is frustrated by you or wondering what they did to deserve you. That ambivalence is part of being human. Own it and expect it.
- Your comfort is not your pastor's primary concern. Hope you know this. If not, read the Bible and remind yourself why your church exists in the first place. Trying to be priest (comforting the afflicted) and prophet (afflicting the comfortable) to the same people is confusing, messy, and an invitation to misunderstandings.
January 28, 2012
Daytrippers in February will be on Tuesday the 28th at 9:00 AM. We'll head to the Goodwill Megastore on Berry Road for a shopalooza! And then, for lunch, back to the 'Boro to try out the Sandwich Factory across the Cracker Barrel off Old Fort pkwy. Home of the Chocolate Covered Bacon!
January 28, 2012
I'd heard of washing salad, but not washing salad “dressing.” But that's what I was doing at the sink in the workroom of GreenHouse Ministries Wednesday morning. I'd started out breaking down boxes, but then had to start shifting green beans to shelves to make room on the floor for more boxes, and then we started to run out of trash can space so I was going to empty the big trash cans, but there was a box full of 12 pint bottles of Ranch Salad dressing. Why was this being thrown away? The box said EXP: 1/30/2013. That was over a year away. Then, sniff, sniff, hmmm, that old rotten mayonnaise smell. And the box was kind of soft. I opened it: ranch dressing everywhere. The box had been dropped, the lid of one jar had popped off at high pressure, and there was ranch dressing EVERYWHERE inside that box. Every other bottle had it all over, though the other bottles were fine. So I took all the bottles out and rinsed them off in a little warm water, and, good to go. Saved 11 bottles of salad dressing for 11 more clients of the food security program at GreenHouse. After that it was back to shifting green beans from milk cartons to shelves, so we could walk through the hall without tripping on our way to stock bags for customers.
I'm kind of new as a volunteer at GreenHouse, so I'm never sure what I might be doing when I get there. I'm willing to do whatever I can, which leaves me out of bicycle repair, which is what Gunther Prehn is good at. They receive lots of broken bikes that are repaired and then given to people who can't afford a car but are healthy enough to ride a bike. They help people with toiletries, paper goods, baby food and supplies, and clothing of all kinds. As well as literacy classes, GED tutoring, Computer training, and a variety of kinds of counseling. Greenhouse is not a place for endless handouts, however. They keep meticulous records of individuals and families they've helped in a variety of ways, and at a certain point, to continue to receive food you have to start working. It may be doing what I was doing today, or it may be any number of things that need doing. What would you like to do? Email me for more info. Steven.odom@gmail.com
January 25, 2012
The future has always simultaneously worried and fascinated most. In addition to our concerns over this worldly affairs, how to pay for the kids' college, how to afford the mortgage, how to afford retirement, will I get that promotion, now some have added a frisson of worry about a fast approaching date this year because some disaster mongers have bruited about the notion of an end of the world because an ancient carved in stone calendar from the Mayan civilization runs out in December of 2012.
Tie this to our popular near addiction to prophecy of the last days, and you have the makings, at least, of a remunerative minor industry, even though not much of an increase in godly knowledge.
Because of the pattern of what's called “pre-millennial dispensationalism” has been imprinted on our habits of Bible interpretation, many see what the Bible teaches as a story with all the tell-tale attributes of a Hollywood blockbuster. (Oh wait, I guess they already made the movie.)
But Christian beliefs about “end times” have fluctuated radically over the centuries as have interpretive schemes for understanding the book of Revelation and Daniel, the gospel of Mark and the letter to the Thessalonians. There have been ways of understanding the prophetic/apocalyptic sections of the Bible different from those propounded by by Tim LaHaye and his mega best sellers of the Left Behind series, though never put into such compelling form as his series of novels that purport to give an accurate picture of the last times, as accurate as fiction might make it, that is. Starting in March, we'll take a look at all of this, on Sunday mornings at 9:30 AM in my Sunday School class: the history of apocalyptic movements, modern day attempts to line out for us what exactly is going to happen, and a careful and faithful effort to read and understand those prophetic texts that dominate the discussion of end times theology, i.e., Revelation, Daniel, the Gospels, I Thessalonians, and others. I will say that I put no stock in Mayan Calendars, and not much more in mass market novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. But we'll ask what can be learned about the future from the scriptures, what do they intend to teach us, why are some of the most popular ways of looking at prophetic texts misguided, what kind of effects do our presumptions about the end times have on the way we live out our lives as faithful disciples and other questions. What is Anti-Christ? What is the Rapture? Is it in the Bible at all? What is Pre-millennial, Post-millennial, A-Millennial? And what is the Millennium? Who or what is “the beast?” You have your own questions, and please bring them with you. I hope you'll join me as we learn together.
January 23, 2012
The Sunday Evening Class, "God's Battalions," will not meet on February 5.
January 16, 2012
Many have seen the "Why I hate Religion, but love Jesus" video that's gone viral. I've got some problems with his thinking (and not too keen on the poetry, but never mind). Here's a good response to the theology from a Mennonite, at the Mennonite Weekly Review. ~smo
The 'I hate religion but love Jesus' approach (and YouTube video) is simplistic, unbiblical and dangerous
By Tim NeufeldTo all my friends who have been disillusioned by church, have been hurt by organized Christianity or have given up on religion, please don’t jump on the “I hate religion” bandwagon.
Within the last few days, a video by Jefferson Bethke called “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” has been viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube. That’s quite stunning. Comments on Facebook about this video show countless people identify with the sentiment that “religion is bad” and “Jesus is good.” I have numerous friends who have been judged, ostracized or treated unfairly by the church. I understand the pain that can come from these experiences.
Personally, I have been confronted, (read more) Other responses, here, and here.
January 8, 2012
I wrote last week about the local controversy over whether Islam can be considered a "religion." (DNJ, Jan. 1) The other main reason for the charge that Islam is NOT a religion is the development and spread of Islamism, or "radical Islam" in the last 40 years. Since we in the West began really paying attention to Islam in the last decade or so, many have commented on the absence of any notion of the separation of "church and state" in majority Islam countries. There are many reasons for this, none of them simple.
By analogy with Moses, the lawgiver of Israel, Mohammed was both the political leader of his followers and their religious leader at the same time. Israel, however, was called as a specific ethnos, a people linked by ancestry and given a promised land. Israel did not begin with an outward oriented mission to bring the world into "submission" (Islam). It was more centripetal than centrifugal.
Islam, by contrast, exploded outward in political/military conquest into the power vacuum of the "burnt-over" district between the exhausted empires of Sassanid Persia (greater Iran) and the Byzantine Roman Empire (Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, North Africa and the Levant). Very soon after Mohammed's hegira (migration with followers) to Medina in 622 AD (Year One in the Islamic calendar) he was the leader of a united Medina, having militarily defeated the Jews of Medina and conquered the remaining pagan Arabs of the city.
Because it arose as a unitary ideology, there was never a significant time in those early centuries during which Islam was practiced as a minority religion in conflict with the ruling government. In fairness, we need to remember that this was the universal experience in antiquity before the rise of Christianity. Religion was always coterminous with a people and its national identity. Islam expanded outward, first to Mecca, and then up the Arabian peninsula, defeating Byzantine and Persian armies in major battles, both within the first 10 years after Mohammed's death.
Contrast this with the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who were Jews. Jews had been accustomed to living under Roman domination for the previous 150 years, and under Greek, Persian and Babylonian rule for the 500 years before that. The subsequent Jewish/Roman relationship was not a happy one, and in 70 AD and 135 AD there were uprisings followed by swift and efficient Roman suppressions. Early Christians, small in number, were powerless politically and oriented in a different direction than Mohammed's first followers. Jesus had already rejected the political/military route that many had expected him to follow and this set the tone for at least the next 250 years of church history, during which time Christianity doctrinally became what it is today.
There was much mixing of government, religion, church and state after the time of Emperor Theodosius (381 AD), but the foundational documents (e.g., the New Testament) came from the earlier period of minority status, and seeded Jesus' ideas regarding the role of faith and worldly power ("my kingdom is not of this world"; "give to Caesar that which is Caesar's") into modern, Western thinking about religion and politics. At the time of the rise of Islam, however, Christianity was entirely identified with the ruling government of Rome, now based in Constantinople. This close-knit arrangement with church and state gradually dissolved as a result of the Reformation of the 16th century, the religious conflicts of the 17th century and the American founding of the 18th century.
So though it must be acknowledged that the kind of thinking about religion and politics that's been normative in Islamic writings for centuries is foreign to what we're now familiar with, just because a religion is very different from what we're accustomed to does not mean it's not a religion. Many Christians are very familiar, after all, with preachers opining that Christianity is "not a religion at all, but a relationship." In such cases, religion is often denigrated by Christian thinkers as what humanity does to try to reach God on its own, which would fit the way I, and many Christians, think about Islam and other religions.
In Japan, for example, the vast majority of people who take part in Shinto rituals also practice Buddhist ancestor worship. In our world, a Southern Baptist would never ask a Catholic priest to come perform an infant baptism. We don't "get" Japanese religious practices, just like we don't "get" Islamic political/religious attitudes. This is just another example of how unfamiliar religions don't always fit the default pattern of American ideas of religion.
Believe me, the last thing Americans want is somebody "defining" what a religion is, because the court of last appeal is always the government and it is not in the interest of any religious people to have the government involved in that. Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism are, of course, religions, just as Islam, with its complicated political/military history and, for some, distasteful, ideology is a religion, and therefore covered under our Constitution's First Amendment protections.
The secular nation-state, economically liberal, religiously tolerant, democratically governed, was designed from its beginning to tame competing religious ideologies (Catholic/Protestant and Protestant/Protestant) with freedom, expansion of personal property rights, property ownership and access to political power. If given the chance, the modern secular state will do the same with Islam of whatever form or forms. If Islam cannot adapt to that, it will probably meet the same unhappy fate bar-Kochba's Jewish followers met in 135 AD, when they decided that God would fight for them against the Roman legions of the Emperor Hadrian. He did not.
January 1, 2012
One aspect of our local controversy regarding the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has been the accusation, made both in court and the media, that Islam is NOT a religion. I write in favor of the notion that Islam IS a religion because religious people, and those who value freedom, should never want the state involved in defining what religion is.
Religion is a big, diverse "thing" and is defined in a variety of ways. On Wikipedia it says, "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and world views that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values." The Concise OED says it is "Action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please a divine ruling power; the exercise or practice or rites or observances implying this." The above definitions derive from observations of generations of scholars seeking to categorize types of belief or behavior. Islam obviously fits both of these definitions.
But, of course, those making the accusation against Islam can, and probably have, read these same definitions. Since, on the face of it, Islam fits those definitions, what exactly are the plaintiffs in this lawsuit against the county trying to say?
Naturally, there are reasons the charge is made, and while there is some substance to these ideas, they are in the end not adequate to support the accusation and not helpful to any side of the ongoing multi-sided debate.
The first of the two reasons we'll look at is the well-known link to what's informally called Shariah, the Islamic system of jurisprudence. At the foundation of Islam are laws promulgated by Mohammed and his successors, mostly found in the Quran. As Islam grew and developed, Shariah followed as a form of binding interpretation of those laws and the subsequent authoritative traditions (the sunna).
The public face of Islam in pluralistic countries of more than one prominent religion (France, UK, Nigeria) tends to be at the intersection of Muslims attempting to follow both Shariah law and the jurisprudence of the country they live in, such as conflicts with having driver's license photos made with veiled faces for women (the niqab). What are perceived as essential Islamic practices appear to be at odds with the law of the land, giving rise to the notion that the totalizing tendencies of Islam disqualify it from being called a religion.
Interestingly, it is to a certain degree the Judeo-Christian origin of Islam, which is seen in Islam's radical monotheism ("There is no God but God"), that leads Islamic religious leaders to demand, and usually obtain, publicly anyway, monolithic adherence to Islamic law in those countries where Islam dominates. This was standard practice in the 7th century.
If anything, however, these collisions in pluralistic societies are more a measure of the short amount of time that Islam has been constrained to interact with modern secular states, which tolerate a dizzying variety of religious belief, while at the same time observing carefully codified restrictions on certain religious practices (think polygamy). Ironically, the tolerant pluralism of most Western democracies which have accepted Muslims as immigrants is one precondition for this collision with Shariah.
This makes Islam feel to American Christians like a totalitarian system of coercion that covers all facets of life. Therefore, since it doesn't fit our current understanding of "religion," which is closely tied to how the church has navigated the church/state divide in our secular republic, Islam is deemed NOT a religion.
Part two will deal with how the political/military origins of Islam affect the argument.