A Sermon Somewhere: Towns Named Bliss That Are Less Than

*This post is the latest in an ongoing series where I try to find sermons hiding behind life’s monotony.  .  .and fail miserably.

Yesterday I drove a 26 foot long moving truck packed with the vast majority of my life’s belongings across southern Idaho to northern Utah.

There is much theological reflection that happens during life’s transitions.  The irony of moving on Ash Wednesday was not lost on me.  The words “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” seemed a fitting summary of the junk packed U-Haul.  Also, the underlying reality of why I left one ministry assignment for another seemed particularly poignant.  I heard from God and after hearing from God there was no way to not obey though I pleaded for a different message.  Still, as I pulled out of that wonderful town in Eastern Oregon, I could not help but pray, “God please give me the love for the new congregation that you gave me for the old.”  But sustained and prayerful theological reflection soon gave way to more frivolous meanderings as the miles racked up on the odometer.

Now I grew up in Idaho and absolutely love the state.  It is a wonderful state full of mountains and lakes and rivers and hot springs and trees and all kinds of good creation.  But southern Idaho, the part along I-84, is the exception that proves the rule.  You can see the mountains in the distance, little molehills popping up on the horizon with some white still on them.  But you have to squint and focus really hard to see that.  And when you are driving a massive 26 foot long truck with your life’s possessions in it, turning your head left and squinting is not a good idea.

So you stare at the road ahead and try not to think about how brown and flat the terrain is and how straight the road ahead lies.  If John the Baptist was sent to make the paths straight, he did a fine good job in southern Idaho.

There are a few towns out there to break up the monotony, though not many.  By some historical joke people named these towns things like, “Bliss” and “Paradise” and “Eden.”

Like most devout Christians, I have a picture in my head of what Eden looks like and that picture does not include a gas station in the middle of sagebrush.  Yet there Eden, ID is, a truckstop and some sagebrush with a few singlewide trailers around it.  Bliss and Paradise are not much better off.

To be fair, I have read Well`s “The Jungle” and I know how bad city life was at the time people were immigrating out west.  I also know my fair deal about the Oregon Trail (mostly from the awesome video game) and about how bad the journey was.  So I can totally understand that after Grandma starved to death in a Chicago slum and Timmy died of cholera in southern Wyoming how a wonderful family arrived in the sagebrush of southern Idaho and were fooled into thinking, “we just found Paradise.”  Still, you think future generations would have changed the name.

Yet I suppose there is a larger statement here about the human capactity for love.  After all somewhere in the not to distant past there was a person or a family who saw that sagebrush in that desert and fell in love with it.  Nobody anywhere else would love that sagebrush so much to call it bliss, but to that family, it was.

It kind of reminds me of a wonderful verse in Job.  It is towards the end, when God is having God`s say and it is not a pleasant conversation.  God is asking Job a series of questions meant to humiliate Job and in the middle of the questioning God suddenly blurts out, “I make it rain in the desert!”  Nothing grows in the desert.  It is an absolute waste to water it.  Yet our God loves deserts and waters them anyway.

Perhaps there is a God given capacity in us humans to love deserts as well and maybe Bliss and Eden are a testimony to that.

Or maybe I just drove way too many miles yesterday and am not caffeinated enough today.  Either way, there is probably a sermon in there somewhere.

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Christian Fundamentalism Part 4: What is the Harm Cont.

This post is the last in a four part series based off of my very real interactions with Christian fundamentalists.  You can read posts one, two and three here and here and here.

Yesterday I wrote about the Fundamentalists’ view of Scripture and why I disagree with their claim that “Scripture is God.”  Today I want to talk more practically about the ways the fundamentalists I know read Scripture.   Truth is, I can get over their view of Scripture, as long as they read it, which many do.  But as I conversed with the most ardent of Fundamentalists, I discovered they don’t just believe Scripture is inerrant, they also believe that 1950s, “traditional” America was the best expression of the Kingdom of God.  So their reading of Scripture tends to read 1950’s American culture into the text, rather than hearing the text speak to the new things God is doing in the 21^st century.

This wouldn’t be so bad if fundamentalists understood the 1950s.  They paint pictures of “traditional American values” with white picket fences and families getting along and the husband as the head and spiritual leader of the family that watches wholesome television and follows the laws of a just government that legislated Christianity by mandating prayer in schools.  Then they proof text this picture with shady exegesis and angry homiletics that insist we need to return to God and God’s white picket fences.

To be sure, some of that picture is desirable but if you study the 1950s or the 1940s, 1930s, or even the 1800s or way back to the founding of America you will find “traditional America” only ever existed on a billboard selling Coca-Cola.  The truth is that the 1950’s were an incredibly evil time in the United States.  It is true that fathers were the heads of the family but all that meant was the government and church fully supported spouse and child abuse.  In that decade thousands of black people were killed by sheer prejudice (source).  People who were not crazy could be locked up in a mental institution without trial and the government taxed 87% of the top earners’ incomes (source).  The teen pregnancy rate was higher that it has ever been (source).  The average age of death was still hovering right around 60 (source).  In sum, the 1950s were only a glorious decade for white, middle class men between the ages of 20-50.  And if you go further back in time from there the picture just gets worse.

To be sure, I do long for a day of white picket fences and happy families living in peaceful homes but that day is likely to be in the future because you won’t find it in the past, especially in the United States.

This brings me to the greatest harm perpetuated by fundamentalists.  They are overwhelmingly pessimistic.  By painting such a beautiful picture, then placing that picture in the past, they argue that God will only destroy us as we move into the future.  This cynicism has led to deep obsession on the doom and gloom in Revelation, which has furthered the bitterness and pessimism that refuses to see God doing anything good in the world.

In contrast, when I read all 1,189 chapters of Scripture I am overwhelmed with optimism.  In our Great Book God has a way of bringing about peace and love and good for, through and in all the good and all the bad.  I cling to the claims in Job where God says, “I make it rain in the desert” (Job 38:26).  Jesus picks up on this in the Sermon on the Mount where he says, “God makes it rain on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).  A God like that fills me with hope for the world to come because we serve a God who pours out blessings for anybody and everybody to pick them up.

So I reject the fundamentalist claim that every step away from 1959 is a step towards the horrid end times.  Instead I long for the day that is coming when Jesus will return and establish his reign on earth as it is in heaven.  On that day I will probably join hands with my crazy fundamentalist cousins and sing the songs of praise, knowing that despite their inquisitions, cynical pessimism and misplaced dogma God still used them to feed hungry people, clothe the naked and house the homeless.  That is a crazy powerful and crazy loving God.  Come, Lord Jesus.