Maybe I Don’t Hate “Jesus Take the Wheel” Anymore

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. 
--Luke 5:4-6 NRSV

My family and I were watching a movie this week when Carrie Underwood popped up on the screen in a cameo role. My sons vaguely know the former American Idol winner and country music superstar from the musical introductions to Sunday night NFL games. They are too young to understand what a big deal American Idol was in its early seasons. I remember when Underwood won American Idol and received a record contract. Her first single was “Jesus Take the Wheel.” I thought, “Oh boy, what a dumb song title,” and I rolled my eyes at its overt sappiness.

I can’t really say why, maybe it’s middle age or maybe I’ve experienced one to many moments of feeling helpless in the years since the song came out, but I don’t hate the song anymore. It’s still sappy and more than a bit manipulative in its use of Jesus to get a song on Country radio, but I can relate to the character in the song who hits some black ice, loses control of her car and realizes her lack of control is a good metaphor for her life. I’m pretty sure anyone who hasn’t hit a moment when they’ve done all they know to do only to realize it’s not enough just hasn’t lived long enough yet.

I listened to a minister friend of mine’s sermon from last Sunday where he preached on the story in Luke 5 where Jesus enables his soon-to-be disciples to catch a miraculous number of fish. When Jesus tells them here to put out their fishing nets, Peter replies they’ve been fishing all night and have caught nothing. Jesus tells them to try it again on the other side of the boat, and when they do the nets are full. My friend interpreted the story as a metaphor for all the ways we exhaust ourselves trying to do things with little to show for our effort. When we finally humble ourselves and try it Jesus’ way the results are far different. When we say, “Jesus, take the wheel. . . er. . . the fishing net,” we have a better outcome.

Is there a place in your life where you have exhausted yourself trying to do things under your own power, because you have resisted admitting you have no control over that situation? As Christians in America, we have been taught that faith is about a set of beliefs rather than faith is about the practice of trusting God. We understand faith as only an intellectual pursuit—a checklist of things we say we believe that have no real bearing on our lives. I confess that I often act as a “functional atheist”—as if God were not a real part of my life. I am surprised each time I reach the end of my own ability and effort only to discover what is beyond my control.

The Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Brown Taylor writes the following about her spiritual journey:

“I…arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so.”

In other words, “Jesus, take the wheel” or the fishing net or the parenting or the job hunting or the healing or the (insert your anxiety here).

As a minister, I’ve learned how rarely I truly trust God with my life. Despite preaching about it for a couple decades, I’m not great at actually doing it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised then to see that church folks, even the most faithful ones, aren’t very good at it either. It’s no wonder church leaders and the most ardent volunteers exhaust themselves trying to do church, because they are doing it by their own power, their own skills, their own best ideas instead of trusting God with the wheel or the budget or (insert local church crisis here).

Whether in the church or in my personal life, I’ve had plenty of experiences where I feel like I’m fishing all night without much to show for it. How about you?

Grace and Peace,
Chase

Prayer Won’t Make the Chiefs Win a Second Super Bowl

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  
--Matthew 7:7 NRSV

I am in the business of prayer. In every setting where others know I am a minister, I am asked to pray. I lead corporate prayer in worship. I pray with people whom I meet with and visit. I offer up prayers for others throughout my day. One might think I know more about prayer than I do, since I’m doing it all the time. Yet, when it comes to praying, I feel like a tightrope walker without a net. I know so little of how it works, if it works, when it works and why it doesn’t work or at least seems not to work. So much about it is a mystery to me.

As with a lot of language about God, it is easier for me to say what I believe it is not than it is for me to say what I believe prayer actually is or does. For example, I do not believe prayer is a mechanical transaction where we say the magic words and then what we pray for happens. Prayer is not a purchase via Amazon Prime where the 1-click-purchase button makes a product in a vast warehouse begin its journey to my door step within two days and my credit card is automatically charged. Jeff Bezos may control much of our economy, but he hasn’t figured out how to make prayers act like monthly refills of laundry detergent.

I also don’t believe that prayer is only a process of changing the one who prays, although I know plenty who do. No doubt, praying does change the one who prays. It can operate much in the same way as meditation bringing centering, mindfulness and inner peace. The act of praying brings intention to changing one’s own behavior for the better, such as achieving more patience, less anxiety and more awareness of others. In some ways, measuring a change in one’s self is the easiest way to discern that prayer works. I don’t believe, however, that prayer is simply a closed circuit within a person. If prayer affects nothing outside of oneself, it seems like something else is going on, however good it may be.

I don’t believe God is like a genie who exists to grant our wishes. I suppose God could have a purpose for us finding a parking spot close to a store or an interest in us making it through an intersection before a light changes, but in general, I would assume God has bigger concerns elsewhere in the universe. And no, as much as Patrick Mahomes’ passing ability seems like a supernatural occurrence every time he connects with Hill or Kelce, I don’t think God is going to fix it so the Chiefs automatically win a second Super Bowl.

I don’t believe God controls everything making prayer unnecessary. I do believe that God is always at work in our world, in ways we often fail to recognize, but there’s a whole lot of awful stuff happening in this world that I don’t want to lay at God’s feet. If God causes pandemics, school shootings and cancer diagnoses and God could have prevented them but just willy-nilly chose not to do so, then God is amoral if not immoral and therefore unworthy of love and worship. God may allow awful things to happen, but my faith in God being first and foremost a loving God prevents me from believing God allows terrible things to occur without some other worse thing making the terrible things we see a necessity. Call it free will or what you like, but I am still placing my bets that God allows the chaos still present in this world to exist because of a higher purpose unknown to us.

It's this last point, which involves some pretty deep stuff, such as the nature of who God is and questions of why God allows undeserved suffering, that hits at the heart of the question of whether or not prayer works. In my experience, one never arrives at truly satisfactory answers to these questions but at best one can only find answers one can live with. When one has discarded all the bad solutions for the question of why God seems to act sometimes and not others, the few solutions left are enough to get by on or they are not. Most days the answers I’ve come up with are enough for me, but truth be told some days are so bad these answers are not enough. I’m always mistrustful of people who think they have such deep mysteries, like the ones surrounding prayer, figured out.

A big reason I believe prayer does work is because I accept that there are more variables in the mix than just my prayers and God. There is a whole planet of people acting with free will, making good and bad choices, and the consequences of those choices may linger for generations to come. Also, we exist in a present moment affected by the choices of people who lived generations, if not centuries and millennia, before we even drew our first breaths. If human free will is real, then God has to work within and without a whole lot more human actions than just my single prayer.

I just read an essay on prayer that addresses this point by the excellent scholar ofthe Old Testament/Hebrew Bible Terrence Fretheim, who died last year. Fretheim notes occasions in scripture where human prayers seem to change God’s mind—a startling thought, if such human language can apply to the creator of the universe. He also offers a great example of how our prayers are one part of a massive matrix of human activity:

An analogy may be suggested: human sinfulness has occasioned numerous instances of the misuse of the environment. Some of that misuse (e.g., pesticides) has caused cancer in human beings and devastated animal populations. Human beings may be forgiven by God for their sin, but the effects of their sinfulness will continue to wreak havoc beyond the act of forgiveness. We confess that in response to prayer God is at work in these effects, struggling to bring about positive results in and through human (and other) agents. It is not a question as to whether God wills good in the situation. The issue is God’s relational commitments that may entail self-limiting ways of responding to evil and its effects in the world. Anti-God factors may be powerfully present and shape the future in negative ways, even for God.

I have many Christian friends for whom talk of God’s “self-limiting ways” amounts to blasphemy. They would argue that since God is omnipotent, God Can do anything at any time. I wouldn’t disagree with that point in theory, but I would assert, along with Fretheim, that God has for whatever reason given human beings freedom and freedom is often misused. God works in response to our less than good choices and actions at a level of complexity that boggles the mind considering all the choices and actions of all the people who live now and have ever lived before.

If anything, the idea of God working in response to and in the midst of the multitude of human actions and choices means that your and my prayers matter greatly. The more we connect with God, align ourselves with God’s purposes and make space for God to work through us and our prayers the less resistance there is to God’s ongoing works of love and goodness. We can never know for sure or by how much, but our prayers for ourselves, for others and for our world may be just the wiggle room God needs to work in a given situation or life. I have often heard the metaphor of a small crack of light shining into a dark room enabling a person to see as a description of God’s love and light shining into a painful situation. Our prayers may just be the small crack for God’s light to shine through.

Grace and Peace,
Chase

Are You a Good Loser?

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 
--Matthew 5:42-44 NRSV

In the Peeples’ household, my wife and I have taught our sons from a young age to be a good sport when they lose a game. After board games, tossing bean bags in cornhole games and countless hours of video games, we have insisted our sons shake hands. The winner must tell the loser “good game” and the loser must tell the winner “congratulations.” In that simple exchange, our hope is that these two brothers might remember there are things greater at stake than who won or lost a game—their own integrity and their relationship.

I can remember a decade ago when then KC Chiefs head coach Todd Haley refused to shake the hand of then Denver Broncos coach Josh McDaniels after the Broncos utterly destroyed the Chiefs by a score of 49-29. My sons who were 7 and 4 at the time pointed at the screen and were horrified an adult—coach of their favorite team no less—refused to shake hands as they had been taught to do. Haley was not known for his self-control, and in his defense it was Josh McDaniels who was on staff with the Patriots before and after this event. Haley made a general apology to the media the next day and said if he had it to do over, he would shake McDaniels’ hand. I have no idea if he ever apologized to McDaniels in person. It was a teaching moment for my sons that they still remember. How one reacts when you lose reveals one’s character.

I have been thinking about what it means to be a good loser this week as I have watched the events surrounding the inauguration of a new president. As has been well-documented by now, President Trump did not stay for the inauguration of now President Biden, choosing instead to fly to Florida the morning of Inauguration Day. It should be noted that Trump is in both good and bad company. Three other presidents chose not to attend the inauguration of the men who beat them in what were bitter elections. He is joined by the admirable presidents John Adams, who refused to attend the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams, who refused to attend the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, and the not-so-admirable Andrew Johnson, who refused to attend the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant. Yet, most U.S. presidents have chosen to attend the inaugurations of successors, even presidents who only served one term and had to watch the person to whom they lost the election take the oath of office. The reason this is important is that something greater than a single election is at stake—the symbolism of a peaceful transfer of power in our republic, a thing not to be taken for granted of which we were reminded by the insurrectionist riot that took place two weeks ago.

To his credit, Trump apparently did continue a tradition begun by Ronald Reagan and continued in recent decades by succeeding presidents—leaving a personal letter for the incoming president on the Oval Office desk. Trump’s letter to Biden hasn’t been made public yet, but previous letters have been made known. My favorite one is the letter George H. W. Bush left for the man who defeated him in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton. In that letter, the senior President Bush wrote, “You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.” What a classy thing to write! After a bitter election, the defeated president was able to remember that there was something greater at stake—the success of our nation, the fate of the United States and the nation’s influence throughout the world. He understood the moment was about far more than himself.

There is a lot more I could share about my own opinions about President Trump and the policies of his administration, just as I could write about my criticisms of particular policies and actions of each of the preceding presidents in my lifetime, but I’m particularly thinking about what this moment says to me and you. When you and I lose, how do we respond? Maybe we aren’t a defeated president, but many of us know what it is to lose out on a promotion, a job we were going for, a position in a volunteer organization we hoped to hold like the PTA or some other civic group or even in a game of golf or pick up basketball. How we act when we lose says a lot about our character.

Do we allow the stakes of the moment to become the exaggerated stakes of life and death? Do we allow our own feelings of low self-worth to spew out of us onto the other by demonizing them and belittling their accomplishments? Do we let jealousy, envy and covetousness twist our insides until we seek to undermine the one whom we lost out to? In short, do we forget the basic truth that each person involved—loser and winner—is a person created by God and therefore a person of worth? Do we forget there is more at stake than the loss itself—the success of an organization or place of business, the sustainability of relationships and the state of our own souls?

Our culture does not reward losers. A quick internet search for quotations about losers will turn up all kind of responses from Vince Lombardi, Knut Rockne, Paul Newman and every other kind of star in sports, business and entertainment declaring there is no such thing as a good loser. Yet, from a certain point of view, Jesus Christ was a loser. During his ministry, he faced constant opposition, was continually misunderstood, his closest followers ended up abandoning him, and he was killed with common criminals. Sure, we know how the story ends with the resurrection and exaltation of Christ, but by everyday earthly standards Christ first a loser.

As Christians, we trust that the end of our stories is also known. Whatever failures and losses we face in this life do not have the last word on our value or on the fulfillment of God’s purposes for each of us and for all of creation. This truth is why Jesus taught us to love our enemies—not just our moral enemies or enemies who seek to do us harm, but also the people we view as enemies because they won something that we wished to win. There are greater things at stake than the accomplishments of this life, than our trophies, awards, promotions and elections. Our relationships, the common good of all people, and the character of our very souls all matter much more to God than our defeats.

Muhammad Ali wasn’t a Christian, but I believe he understood this truth. He is quoted as saying after the first time he lost a bout, “I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life.” May we live out the words of Jesus and the words of Muhammed Ali, for the sake of ourselves and all the people who believe in us, because no less than the God of all creation also believes in you and me.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

Why Christians Should Trust Science

Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.
--1 Corinthians 14:20 NIV

In high school I was in the play Inherit the Wind. Unfortunately, I did not have the part of the Matthew Harrison Brady or Henry Drummond, the two legal heavyweights debating the legality of teaching evolution. My role was a combination of three different roles: hot dog vendor, Eskimo Pie vendor and a juror. The juror had no lines, and the hot dog vendor and Eskimo Pie vendor had only one line each. As I sat through hours of play practice waiting for my few lines, I practically memorized the arguments for and against the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The play was based on the real life so called “Scopes Monkey Trial” which happened in 1925 in Dayton, TN. The simplistic religious beliefs of the town minister in the play were easy to poke holes in, and I assumed such beliefs were confined to an earlier age. I didn’t realize back in high school that the debates between science and Christian fundamentalism in the early 20^th century would resurface later in my life.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist, but my minister father and my schoolteacher mother valued education. I was taught by them to try and read the Bible with an eye towards its historical context which was different than our own. They also taught to be suspicious of Christians who refused to accept modern science. I never felt much of a personal conflict in regards to balancing the claims of science and the claims of faith. The conflict between science and faith never seemed like an either/or proposition to me.

As I went to college, seminary and graduate school, I learned there were deep streams within Christianity of valuing reason and the best science of a particular age. You wouldn’t know it from the arguments of the most visible purveyors of the faith in our culture. Much of the animosity towards science in Christianity came after the Enlightenment and the rise of modern scientific study. Fundamentalisms of every religion developed as an antagonistic response to science and modernism. Christian fundamentalism flared up brightly in the early 20^th century, such as in the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” but after public debacles that hurt their cause more than it helped, fundamentalism eschewed the public eye. With the rise of the Religious Right at the end of the 1970’s, old fights were new again, as Christian fundamentalists sought control of political offices to reinstate prayer in schools, ban the teaching of evolution and more activities hostile to science. These critics of modern science and the use of reason seemed ignorant of Christian tradition valuing both.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have always been better at using the media than their more open-minded counterparts. With the rise of the internet, it seems Christian ignorance has spread ever wider. In many circles today, to be Christian equals rejecting science, reason and critical inquiry—at least all kinds that do not support its own worldview. Some of us may scoff at the Creation Museum in Kentucky with its life size Noah’s ark (complete with cargo holds to contain dinosaurs!) but for many American Christians this is an acceptable view of history.

If Christianity is going to survive, it must reject the false dichotomy between faith and science. I appreciate the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ explanation of how the two are really pursuing different things. To put faith and science in opposition to one another is to misunderstand both. Sacks writes, “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” 

Similarly, in an interview, Adam Gopnik shares that even Darwin understood this difference. Gopnik says, “You can be completely committed to a rational, if you like, material explanation of existence, of why — how we got here, without being committed to a reductive account of our own experience. You can believe that there’s a completely rational account of how we got here but that you can never fully rationalize what we feel here.”  He goes on to say, "The greatest philosopher of science in the 20th century, Karl Popper, always said that the realm of science was small and distinct; that there was a huge realm of human experience that would never be susceptible to scientific explanation. Now, that didn’t mean that it could be instantly subsumed in the supernatural but that there were realms of what, for lack of a better word — you can call it spiritual experience or numinous experience or irrational experience or simply the experience of sensibility; all the things that are summed up in Christmas carols and songs and poems and novels and spirituals and all the other ways we have of organizing our experience — that those things aren’t contradictory. And again, that’s central to Darwin’s sense of human existence, and I think it’s central to any person’s."

One of the big reasons younger generations of Americans are rejecting organized religion is because they are asked to choose between a science-less religion and a religion-less science. If those are the only two choices, the latter seems like a more honest course of action. Christians who are faithful and who value science must be more visible and more vocal if Christianity is to survive.

In navigating the contours of my own faith and the use of reason and science, I have always appreciated the simple elegance of John Wesley’s thoughts on the matter. He promoted theological reflection via scripture, faith tradition, reason and experience, what is called “Wesley’s Quadrilateral.” In his Sermon #70, which is titled “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered,” Wesley takes on those who value reason too little and those who value reason too much. (He takes as his scripture 1 Corinthians 14:20 which is printed above.) It’s a nice argument that explains the important things reason can do for us and the important things reason cannot do for us. He finds a middle way between an ignorant faith on one hand and a reductionistic non-faith on the other. When it comes to Christians who don’t value reason, Wesley has the following words to say:

When therefore you despise or depreciate reason, you must not imagine you are doing God service: Least of all, are you promoting the cause of God when you are endeavouring to exclude reason out of religion. Unless you wilfully shut your eyes, you cannot but see of what service it is both in laying the foundation of true religion, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, and in raising the superstructure. You see it directs us in every point both of faith and practice: It guides us with regard to every branch both of inward and outward holiness. 

In other words, a healthy Christian faith is one that employs reason. Of course, there are things in a Christian’s experience and their beliefs which are outside the bounds of what science can ascertain, such as eternal life, divine revelation, etc., but a responsible faith uses the mind along with the heart. I’ve often heard more open-minded churches say, “Here at our church, you don’t have to check your brain at the door.” That is reassuring to hear, but it’s a wonder any Christian ever thought such a step was necessary.

Today when denial of science literally has lethal consequences—e.g. refusal to believe in the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines—we need Christians who will set aside internet conspiracy theories and science nightmares found in sensational movies and TV shows. We need Christians who will trust the advances of science while realizing that science cannot possess all the knowledge of what makes life worth living. If people of faith refuse to trust the advances of science, then the consequences will be not only fatal for Christianity but also for the lives of people like you and me.

Grace and Peace,
Chase 

The Stories We Tell Matter

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. --Philippians 4:8 NRSV

The stories we tell matter. 

Recent studies in neurology, psychology and other fields demonstrate that we are wired to respond to stories over facts and figures. Have you ever noticed that in their marketing charities and nonprofits will often tell the story of a single person, child or animal in need? Studies show that statistics about how big a need exists in society actually decrease giving. Our brains see numbers of people who are homeless, children who are hungry, and animals without shelter and we make an unconscious calculation that the need exceeds our ability to do anything about it. If they tell the story of one person, child or animal however, giving increases, because our brains see a need we can meet. Furthermore, a story of an individual is something we can identify with and empathize with, while numbers remain an abstraction. A good story has power.

After the January 6 Capitol riot, many people (myself included) are bewildered by the news of people motivated by QAnon conspiracy theories. Despite the lack of evidence to support such ideas and much evidence to the contrary, people really believe there is a Satanic pedophile ring run by government officials, Bill Gates is injecting tracking chips via COVID vaccines and the presidential election was stolen. Although some adherents of these ideas may be mentally ill, most are not. Despite the facts, they are caught up in a story of good vs. evil which places them in the role of heroes conquering evildoers. As crazy as the stories may seem to people who don’t believe them, the stories make sense to their adherents and provide a cohesive narrative in a confusing world.

The stories told by QAnon may be bonkers, but the desire of humans to use stories to find meaning, establish a worldview and establish values is as old as our species. I was fascinated by an article by Wiliam J. Bernstein, neurologist, historian and financial theorist, titled “What if the Stories We Tell Happen to Be Conspiracy Theories?” I’m not a neurologist or a historian, so I have to take Bernstein’s research at his word but his points make sense to me. He says that mass delusions of the QAnon kind are not new, not limited to our culture and apparently have always been a part of human experience. He writes “we are condemned to navigate the Space Age world with Stone Age minds; because of this inherent biological anachronism, [humanity] is the ape that imitates, tells stories, and morally condemns others.”

Humans imitate one another, and imitation enabled our species to thrive and spread. Some human in the past was the first to make a spear, blowgun or kayak and other humans imitated that one. Rather than each ancient human having to make a new discovery on their own, they merely imitated one another and the spread of tools, traditions and knowledge enabled our survival. We are wired to imitate one another, and that pull is often stronger than reason. It turns out your parents were right to worry about which friends you hung out with as a teenager.

Humans tell stories to make sense of the world, teach behaviors that ensure survival and ensure cohesion of the group. Our ancient forebears were not using geometry to hunt bison, molecular biology to discern which plants were poisonous or statistical analysis to grasp the spread of a contagion. Instead they told stories and the stories helped them to survive.

Finally, humans make moral judgments about others. They imitated one another and told stories about their own tribe, but when they encountered different tribes they judged as wrong, immoral or ungodly, traditions and stories which were not their own. This ensured their tribe survived when they encountered other tribes which could be competition or a threat. Demonizing the other tribe also made it easy to destroy them.

We evolved to be storytelling creatures, so the kind of stories and the messages we take from  stories matter greatly. From the parables of Jesus to the fables of Aesop to the stories of George Washington’s childhood (“I shall not tell a lie. . .”) help us to know who we are. The stories we tell and the ones we do not tell (the stories of native Americans, African Americans, women, etc.) shape us. When school children are taught the Civil War was about states’ rights rather than about slavery and other misleading stories of “the Lost Cause” mythology of the South, their understanding of racism, history and politics is shaped by them. When the story of the United States’ westward expansion is one only of cowboys, gold miners and wagon trains, while the stories of Native Americans, broken treaties and ethnic cleansing is omitted, identity culture and politics are molded.

Yet stories can also be a powerful force for social reform and liberation. The writer and social critic Rebecca Solnit cites the #MeToo movement as an example of the positive power of storytelling.

“Silence and shame are contagious; so are courage and speech. Even now, when women begin to speak of their experience, others step forward to bolster the earlier speaker and to share their own experience. A brick is knocked loose, another one; a dam breaks, the waters rush forth.”

She goes on to describe how our stories contain the power to do ourselves and others great harm or to offer help and healing.

“We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

People of faith know the power of stories. Each religious tradition has its own stories. As Christians, we experience the power of the stories we tell of God creating order out of chaos, Jesus being born in Bethlehem, Jesus hanging around with tax collectors and prostitutes, and Christ rising from the dead. We may have different interpretations of what these stories mean and even whether they actually happened the way the Bible depicts them, but those stories shape who we are, who we imitate and our judgments about others different from us. How those stories are told, who tells them and what lessons we learn from them matter greatly.

Christian stories about the End Times became enmeshed in QAnon conspiracies to motivate the rioters at the Capitol last week. As we honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr. this coming week, we remember the stories of Christianity inspired him and other Civil Rights leaders to risk death for the cause of racial justice. The stories are in the same book, but who tells them and for what purpose make all the difference in the world.

As we move through 2021, may we commit ourselves to telling stories that liberate, that value diversity, acknowledge the inherent worth of every person, that reveal the truth about people whose voices have been silenced and cherish the natural world and its resources.

The stories we tell matter.

Grace and Peace,
Chase

Christian Apocalyptic Conspiracy Theories and QAnon

Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour.
--1 John 2:18 NRSV

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the QAnon conspiracies that apparently motivated many of the rioters who attacked the Capitol building a week ago. These conspiracy theories include ideas that Democrats are running a pedophile ring and imprisoning children out of a local pizza restaurant in Washington D.C., the COVID-19 vaccine is a way for the government to implant tracking microchips into the American population and other outlandish ideas running the gambit from JFK still being alive to 5G cell phone service being mind control. The rioters included many who identify as evangelical Christians and reporters quoted many who believed Donald Trump was predicted in the Bible. The talk of spiritual warfare, including ideas of fighting against a secret cabal of Satanists, brings back a lot of memories for me. I grew up hearing similar kinds of conspiracy theories long before QAnon showed up. I heard them all the time in Bible studies about the apocalyptic writings in the Bible, such as Revelation, Daniel and other passages.

My Southern Baptist minister father and my preacher’s wife mother didn’t believe in stuff like the Rapture, the Antichrist, and the Mark of the Beast, but my father served in churches full of people who did. Whether it was at youth camp, revival services or Bible studies, I heard a steady stream of conspiracies about the government, communists, the United Nations, barcodes on groceries and more. The Antichrist could be anyone from the latest Soviet leader to Ronald Reagan (each of his names has 6 letters which equals 666!). George Bush Sr.’s statement about a “New World Order” after the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired countless books about the United Nations imposing a one-world government like the Babylon mentioned in Revelation. I remember when ATM machines first became popular hearing people seriously ask if their PIN numbers were the Mark of the Beast.

In the 1980’s, the so called “Satanic panic” occurred when all across the nation people who saw Christian counselors “recovered” what they thought were repressed memories of being sexually abused by rings of Satanists. In Christian bookstores and on TV shows like Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, people spoke of “recovered” memories of rings of Satanists sacrificing babies. I recall reading a book called Satan’s Underground written by a woman who claimed to have been a victim of what became known as “Satanic Ritual Abuse.” I can also remember reading The Satan Seller by a leading Christian speaker named Mike Warnke who claimed to be a reformed Satanist. (The authors of both books were exposed as frauds in the early 1990’s.) An immensely popular fiction book in evangelical circles was called This Present Darkness. It told the tale of a literal battle between angels and demons in a small town where ordinary Christians were how God’s forces defeated their fellow townspeople who were possessed by evil spirits. I recall feeling like demons were behind every bush after reading it. Once the “Satanic panic” was proved to be untrue, experts label it an event of “mass hysteria” or “moral panic.’

By the time I went to a Baptist college where most of the student body believed similar stuff like this, I began to see that my parents’ cautions about buying into such beliefs were valid. Through more grounded Christian mentors and caring religion professors, I let go of all such preoccupations with Christian apocalyptic conspiracy theories. So, I missed a whole new round of apocalyptic fads which reached mainstream popularity.

In the 1990’s, the first Gulf War prompted a new round of speculation, best-selling books and videos claiming Saddam Hussein was the Antichrist. They looked an awful lot like claims about the Ayatollah Khomeini a decade earlier. Later on, the same claims would be made about Osama bin Laden. Sexual puritan turned apocalyptic expert Tim LaHaye and the fiction writer Jerry Jenkins published the Left Behind series of New York Times best-selling books which recycled the same conspiracies about a one world government, an Antichrist who made use of the United Nations, the Rapture, etc. but capitalized on anxieties regarding the year 2000.

Speaking of the year 2000, fears about the so called “millenniumbug” folded neatly into evangelical fears about societal collapse and what now are called “preppers” held trade shows full of survival goods at evangelical churches as the 20^th century counted down to zero. 9-11 and the events afterward led to yet another round of the same evangelical conspiracy theories. I have friends who bought gold to prepare for the coming economic collapse and End Times. For all I know, they made a good bet given the 2008 financial crisis.

The rise of the internet and social media just seems to have kicked these evangelical apocalyptic conspiracies into overdrive. Sociologists are calling QAnon a ‘digital cult” because of its hold on people. Yet, much of the language used—spiritual warfare, combating rings of Satanists who abduct and sexually assault children, fighting against globalists, etc. all sounds familiar to me. The roots of this stuff, of course, go back deep in American history back through McCarthyism, Henry Ford spreading the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the apocalyptic imagery used by the Ku Klux Klan and more. There is a deep fascination within White Protestant American Christianity for apocalyptic conspiracies.

Psychiatrists and sociologists point out motives forbelieving in conspiracy theories. Motives include everything from Dissociative Identity Disorder, cu ltural anxiety, simple low self-esteem or just the need to feel important. Experts note that conspiracy theories are prevalent on the fringes of both the political left and the political right, but the political right seems to be enjoying a flurry of such thinking in recent years.

To me, it seems the seeds planted by the Religious Right in the late 1970’s have finally sprouted. The toxic mix of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics that has been a part of political life since then has always included a steady stream of apocalyptic beliefs which reduce the complexities of the modern world to dualistic good and evil. The problem with this thinking, of course, is that when your political adversary becomes an agent of Satan there is no room for compromise. The basic humanity of someone is lost if they are in league with the embodiment of evil. One cannot do anything other than destroy someone who seeks to destroy the world as you know it.

We saw some of the inevitable consequences of such thinking last week at the Capitol building. Even a willing purveyor of such apocalyptic evangelical Christianity like Mike Pence can find himself instantly put on the list of Satanic enemies to be destroyed. When one plays with the fire of this kind of religious fervor, they will inevitably get burned.

What I came to see on my own religious journey is that if one holds to a belief system that includes evangelical apocalyptic conspiracies, it becomes difficult to do much of anything Jesus taught. One cannot pray for and love one’s enemies if one is fighting a spiritual war to destroy the enemies of God. One cannot turn the other cheek or walk the extra mile when the Antichrist is the one hitting you or asking you to carry their rucksack. One cannot forgive someone if they are a part of Satan’s army. This is why conspiracy theories wrapped in the mantle of Christianity, whether it’s anti-communism or QAnon, always end up being something antithetical to Christianity. 

A belief system devoid of love can never be called Christian.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

God is Still Creating Out of Chaos

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
--Genesis 1:1-3 NRSV

It has been difficult for me to read the news since last week’s attack on the Capitol Building. As more videos of the riot are distributed by the media, more disturbing images are revealed, such as a rioter beating a capitol police officer with an American flag even though many of the rioters claimed to be pro-police, a display honoring the great Civil Rights hero and congressman JohnLewis destroyed, and rioters chanting “Hang Pence!” The most disturbing images are the people who declare they are breaking into the Capitol building as apart of their Christian duty. What is this madness which has overtaken these people?

This morning in the midst of my feelings of outrage, denial and sadness, I have felt like God has been trying to tell me something. I encountered three things which together have offered me hope. I’m passing them on to you in hopes they do the same for you.

1.      A quotation from Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is no stranger to contemplating dystopian societies sprouting up in the United States. After all, she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments. I tried reading her ecological disaster Oryx and Crake trilogy and made it all the way to halfway through the third book, but I had to stop reading just because it was such a miserable view of the future that it sent my existing anxiety over climate change skyrocketing.

This morning, I came across a quotation from the author which seemed to speak about our current political crisis: “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.” Many declared upon seeing the riot in the Capitol Building that it seemed like something that only happened in developing countries and they never thought it would happen here. Well, it has happened here, and it will continue to happen here unless our culture can reject violent extremists who operate out of a mixture of white supremacy, absolutist religion and delusional conspiracy theories. Simply shrugging and ignoring the potential danger of our times is not enough, but how do we find hope to do more than that in the face of such destructive insanity?

2.      A Sermon from Rev. Holly McKissick

Even though I am serving at Park Hill Christina Church, I am a member of Peace Christian Church in Kansas City. I don’t get to worship with them, but I watch their services each week. In Sunday’s sermon, Rev. Holly McKissick preached from Genesis 1 and spoke about what God did at Creation according to the original Hebrew text. The English NRSV translation says before God created the heavens and the earth, “the earth was a formless void.” The words “formless void” are better translated to mean “wild and wasteful” or perhaps “chaos and waste.” God isn’t pictured as creating from nothing but rather as creating order from chaos. God continues to create—to bring order from chaos, and this is good news indeed as we wrestle with the images of chaos we have witnessed since last Wednesday.

3.      A quotation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Just before I heard Holly McKissick’s sermon, I happened to read a quotation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu who heroically worked to overturn the racist apartheid government in South Africa. In his book God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, he writes the following:

“Dear Child of God, I write these words because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair, and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end. I want to share with you my faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed. There is no such thing as a totally hopeless case. Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine. God created order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, and God can do so always, can do so now—in our personal lives and in our lives as nations, globally… Indeed, God is transforming the world now—through us—because God loves us.”

Perhaps you can see why I felt God was trying to offer me some hope when you connect the words of Desmond Tutu with Holly McKisseck’s sermon. Together they form a positive response to Margaret Atwood’s warning.

These are fearful times that ask a greater response from us than apathetic shrugs or merely posting angry comments on social media. We must mend the torn fabric of our culture and to renew a vision of the common good that includes people of all races, religions, political views, sexual orientations, gender identities, nationalities and economic classes. We have to work for a civic culture that embraces the inherent worth of each person rather than the few who manipulate our political and economic systems to advance their own hubris. But how do we do it?

The answer, for Christians at least, should be trusting that God is still creating out of chaos. Creation was not a one-time event but an ongoing process. We join in that process wherever we find it in our lives. A clue for where to look lies in searching for people who humbly go about bringing order out of chaos.

In her sermon Sunday, Holly McKissick concluded by saying she wanted to know the names of people in the videos of the Capital Building last Wednesday—not the names of the rioters, but the names of the janitors and other staff at the Capitol who cleaned up the mess left behind. (Perhaps you saw the pictures and video of Rep. Andrew Kim, the son of immigrants to the U.S., who stayed late into the night to clean up the Capitol along with the custodial staff.) These humble and unknown workers went aboutcleaning up the awful mess left behind by the rioters. Many of them who picked up racist banners and emblems are African American—I can’t imagine what they must have thought. I also can’t think of a better image of God’s creation-work than these unsung workers who brought order out of chaos.

Margaret Atwood is correct; chaos can erupt anywhere under the right circumstances. When it does, we must respond by becoming a part of God’s ongoing creation -work in the world.

Grace and Peace,
Chase

 

Epiphany: a Time of Light and Shadow

 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”
--Matthew 2:16-18 NIV

In 2014, I went to Israel and Palestine on a Holy Land tour with a good friend and fellow minister. It was an amazing trip and a joy to visit places I had read about in the Bible all of my life. The town where Jesus was born was near the top of my list of must-see sites. I was excited to see in person what I had always heard about on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, Bethlehem ended up being one of the least enjoyable experiences on the trip.

On the day we traveled to the Church of the Nativity and St. Catherine’s Church (the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches built side by side over the site where tradition says Christ was born), it was packed with tourists. The holy site was filled with hundreds of Russian pilgrims whom our guide explained came down on cheap day trips to Bethlehem. The crowd jostled with one another to get down into the caves below the churches which contained chapels built centuries ago. I recall being crammed into the small space with dozens of pilgrims each trying to touch a silver star inlaid on the ground marking where Jesus was said to have been born. It did not in any way feel like the calm and peaceful manger depicted in Christmas carols.

Apparently in the scrum of pilgrims, I had walked right past without noticing an altar set up to honor “the Holy Innocents,” the boys of Bethlehem who were two years old and younger killed by King Herod as depicted in Matthew 2. The murdered children of Bethlehem are a part of the Christmas story that does not get read at Christmas Eve services. Just as I hurried on past the commemoration of these killed children on my trip to Bethlehem without seeing it, so also do we usually hurry through the Christmas stories in the Gospels without realizing all was not heavenly light and angelic choruses around Jesus’ birth. The shadow of a violent ruler lingers over the events of the nativity. A reason I like the tradition of celebrating Epiphany a couple of weeks after Christmas is it allows time to reflect upon this horrible part of the Christmas story. 

Historians generally tend to doubt that Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem’s children really happened, because there is no mention of it outside of Matthew’s Gospel. Even so, from what we know of Herod he was ruthless in dealing with threats to his power and carried out similar bloody killings which are well-documented. The killing of children to eliminate a rival claimant to the throne fits what we know of Herod from sources outside the Bible. 

Bible scholars argue that one of Matthew’s intentions with his Gospel is to present Jesus as a new Moses who reinterprets the Law in his Sermon on the Mount just as Moses received the Torah on Mt. Sinai in Exodus. They see the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem and the holy family’s flight to Egypt as a deliberate parallel of Pharaoh killing Hebrew infants in the Exodus story and Moses’ later flight into the wilderness. Whether one chooses to believe the massacre depicted in Matthew 2 actually happened or not, countless innocents have been killed not only in the times of the Bible but also in every time down through history until the present. We live in a violent world.

This story of terror is an important part of the Christmas story, because it acknowledges that Christ entered into a world of pain and violence. From Jesus’ birth through his bloody execution on a cross on to the violent persecutions faced by the early church, the story of Jesus does not ignore the violence of our world. The light of Christ, the promise of Emanuel that God is with us, shines into a world of shadow filled with forces opposed to God’s reign of love. The Gospel presents the scandalous idea that God’s power made present in the weakness of a newborn child was greater than the power of the despots and dictators of Jesus’ day and every day.

This week many of us are shaken by the images of a violent mob overtaking our nation’s Capitol Building. Only this morning did I read a message from a woman in one of the former churches I served who fled Nazi Germany as a child. She expressed terror at this week’s events which paralleled what she remembered from her youth. It is a time to be concerned for our country and to empathize with the many people around the world for whom similar events are commonplace in their countries. We have much work to do as a nation to repair our shared pursuit of the common good.

For Christians looking for hope in anxious times, the story of the killing of Bethlehem's children in Matthew 2 occurring at the same time as the epiphany of God’s presence in Christ remind us that Christianity is not a fantastical escape from reality but a means of existing inside a reality which is sometimes terror-filled. Herod died and remains a relatively minor figure in history, but Jesus Christ endured. So also, every despot and dictator throughout history has also died and their empires which seemed eternal crumbled in time. So also will those who practice violence and terror in our day pass away. Their actions may cause terrible consequences in our present, but they will not endure. We remember that as important as a responsible and just government may be, our ultimate security is found in the God who created us and who does not abandon us. The light of Epiphany shining in the murderous shadows of Jesus’ day still shines in our day. The God we trust goes with us even when our paths take us into the shadow of death.

Grace and Peace, Chase

After the Assault on the U.S. Capitol, How Do We Be Church Together?

 I wrote the following to the members of Park Hill Christian Church, Disciples of Christ in Kansas City, MO where I am serving as Interim Minister on January 7, 2021, the day after the U.S. Capitol Building was stormed by supporters of President Donald Trump.

After the Assault on the U.S. Capitol, How Do We Be Church Together?

I am still in shock from seeing the images of rioters, inspired by our nation’s president, storming the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday. The sight of people dishonoring a symbol of American democracy shatters my understanding of where we are as a country. As your Interim Minister, I feel it is important to denounce yesterday’s events but also to attempt to answer the question “How do we be church together in times like these?” Here are my thoughts submitted to you in humility.

We commit to diversity of thought and belief

At a time where everything is reduced to partisan worldviews, our culture has few spaces where people of different political ideologies can exist together in community. Churches should be spaces where love of neighbor allows for free exchange of ideas and respectful disagreement, but sadly large swaths of Christianity are merely extensions of political parties. As a church we can honor our obligations as Christians to participate in the public sphere without demonizing people with whom we disagree. As we engage in politics, we must commit to making sure our foremost allegiance is to Christ who taught us to love even our enemies. Church should be a place where Democrats, Republicans and Independents can find enough common ground to worship God and serve our communities together.

We commit to humility in our search for truth

In an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” Christians have an obligation to not only seek out truth but also to remain humble enough to remember we may always be wrong. We must commit ourselves to taking in media perspectives from more than one political point of view while acknowledging the biases of those who claim to be objective but are merely partisan mouthpieces. We must refuse to spread on social media and email lies, half-truths, misrepresentations, and misleading images. We must reject conspiracy theories that claim to offer secret truth for an enlightened few. We must remember that God calls us to be people of integrity and of humility in all our relationships.

We commit to accountability

God calls us to be a part of a church, because of the human tendency towards self-delusion. A faith community enables us to hear the wisdom of others with different perspectives and to consider the consequences of our beliefs and actions. We lovingly hold one another accountable when our conceptions of God end up hurting other people and when our sense of what is right causes more harm than good. As a faith community, we also have a role in expecting accountability in our community, state and nation. Setting aside partisanship, Christians have a role in calling leaders of all parties to work for the common good rather than their own political or financial gain.

We commit to reject idolatry

Perhaps the most disturbing picture I saw yesterday showed that amidst the Confederate flags and signs bearing slogans of QAnon there was a sign declaring “Jesus Saves.” How can such a declaration exist amidst violent extremists? A reporter from The Atlantic, walked with the mob headed to the capital yesterday and heard members of the group equating faith in Trump with faith in God. How can this be? As Christians, we are commanded to love God above all other loves and taught that equating anyone or anything with God is idolatry. As a church, we must guard ourselves against any attempt by politicians of any party to usurp the majesty and honor due only to God.

We commit to confronting the sin of White supremacy

The original sin of America is slavery and the resulting sins of white supremacy and white nationalism. Some in the mob whostormed the capitol building wore Nazi insignias and anti-Semitic slogans. They are the natural outgrowth of ideologies that view White people as the sole heirs of American freedom. Not only must we as Christians condemn extremists in the public eye but we must do the hard work of educating ourselves about and repenting from behaviors and beliefs that are the products of White supremacy rather than the inclusive Gospel of Christ. We do so not out of mere political correctness but out of devotion to God who demands justice for all.

We commit to love

As Christians we are called to love God and neighbor. So, whatever our political and religious beliefs, as Christians we must always view our thoughts, words and actions through the lens of love. Do our thoughts, words and actions align with the sacrificial love demonstrated by Jesus Christ? Do we listen to and respect others different from ourselves in the same way we expect to be listened to and respected? If Christ is present even inside of people with whom we disagree or consider our enemies—which is what the Gospel teaches—then the love we offer to or withhold from others is the same as the love offered to or withheld from Christ.

We commit to being a movement for wholeness

In our time, it is much easier to “unfriend,” “unfollow,” and disconnect from others we disagree with than it is to remain in relationship with them. The Christian Church, Disciples of Christ claims to be “a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.” As a church, we can commit to the hard work of making our bonds of fellowship stronger rather than mirroring a culture that promotes isolation and division. Our connections in Christ are countercultural behaviors that our culture will not reward, but our God honors our efforts at healing and wholeness.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples