| Sunday was a truly “Spirit filled” closing for Trinity Lutheran – Warren. While closings always have a certain amount of sadness built in, this congregation did everything right (in my opinion). Their process leading up to the service, the communication preparing people for the event, the worship service, and even the plans following its closing … all reminders that God is good – all the time … including those “down and out” times in which Jesus re-defines the term into his way of working. Yet, even then, it remains tough stuff. I am reading a very interesting book, “Who is Government?” (Michael Lewis, 2025). In the middle of the chapter “The Number” I found a great quote about WW II. “Allied planes were coming back from raids over German-occupied Europe riddled with bullet holes. The damage was concentrated on their wings and fuselages. There was no evidence of damage to engines. Repair efforts were therefore directed toward wings and fuselages because that was obvious where the main damage was being sustained. Abraham Wald, a statistician, arrived from Columbia University, looked at the evidence and said not so fast. The planes with the Swiss cheese damage to their wings and fuselages – those were the ones making it home. They were seeing no planes with damaged engines because those aircraft weren’t making it home. Conclusion: Don’t reinforce the planes where you saw bullet holes, reinforce where you didn’t.” (pp. 105-106) I wonder how tough it was for Wald to challenge the conventional wisdom of the experts? And then there is another book that I have referenced before … “How the Light Shines through” (Chad Lakies, 2024) … I find this to be some great stuff (but kinda tough, too): “When we get to know another person well and perhaps care deeply about them, we might begin to wonder why our convictions are right as opposed to theirs. And perhaps the other person is experiencing the same thing as they get to know and care about us. Cross pressure is what we experience when we responsibly recognize that the other person is not simply a fool for believing as they do, yet at the same time, we have no method for adjudicating between the opposing views to which we are each committed. At best, we’re only able to ask, ‘Why my way and not theirs?’ The unsettledness of that question is what we mean when we say that believing is difficult, and that the beliefs we do adhere to feel fragile. “In other words, Taylor’s sense of secular (Charles Taylor, “A Secular Age”, 304), the sense of implausibility, has much more to do with our experience in everyday life than it has to do with merely adhering to a set of propositions that constitute a religious belief system, like Christianity, Bahai, or Taoism. We’re not speaking of a rational deliberation between competing beliefs, as if we can just follow where the evidence leads. No one becomes a follower of Jesus like that, just as no one comes to believe other things in that way. “A simple way to understand how we come to have beliefs is that beliefs actually have us. We are captive to them. Consider an ailment like the common cold or headache. We would usually say, ‘I have a headache’ or ‘I have a cold.’ But it’s more accurate to say that they have us. We are in their grip until they relent. The role of beliefs in our lives is similar. Beliefs have us, and to the extent that this is true, Taylor’s reflection on implausibility, cross pressure, and the fragility of belief means our sustained attention. “If we are to do ministry in a secular age, proclaiming the Good News of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ, we must reckon with the fact that the Gospel is not just a set of propositions that a person adheres to or can rationally defend. Yes, they are believable in a rational way, that is, Christian doctrine has internal coherence – it all hangs together in a way that makes sense. It is a story of everything, after all. But there is more to it than that. The believability (or plausibility) of the Good News also comes from the fact that the people who believe it live their lives in a way that reflects that they take Christian claims to be the truth about the way things are. To the extent that one claims to be a Christian but lives otherwise, to observers this makes Christian belief implausible. “Now, of course, Christians argue that none of us rationally deliberate to choose our beliefs when it comes to faith in Jesus. Belief is not a choice. As we have said, belief has us. This is quite fitting with Christian teaching, since we confess that faith is a gift given by the Holy Spirit. Yet Scripture and the history of the early church strongly testify to the fact that the Holy Spirit uses the living witness of believers to bring others to faith. The holiness codes of the Old Testament that set God’s people apart, the instructions for households in talking about the faith, the exhortations of the New Testament that focus on faithful living in the midst of persecution – these all point to our living witness as a powerful tool in the hands of God to generate faith and nurture it throughout life.” (pp. 60-61) What I find particularly tough about this is that we are so sure that we are right and that those opposed to us are wrong, conversations (if they actually do take place) and postings end up taking the shape of debates and arguments. The focus is upon either being understood or gaining submission! “What,” I wonder, “happened to Steven Covey’s 7 Habits?” Is it possible that we are the ones who are making these times tougher than they need to be? Those who lived through WW II lived through a lot of tough stuff. Many congregations today are living through tough stuff. The political situation in our country and world presents us with a whole lot of tough stuff. I guess it all adds up to the fact that life in this world if tough … “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15.57) for, in reality, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6.12) My prayer is simply that our “tough enough” Savior, Jesus, will “tough it out” with you and me through it all. |
Tough Stuff
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