I just wanted to say how excited I am about Collective Church's first ever Christmas Eve service.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
Little Hope Was Arson
There are people who I have failed as a pastor. And, without a doubt, I will fail more people before I’m done. This is a hard truth I have been trying to reconcile myself with, but I don’t like it.
I recently watched a new documentary called Little Hope Was Arson. The film begins as a true crime story revolving around a serial arson investigation in which the arsonists were targeting churches. The story takes place in East Texas (Tyler, Athens, Lindale, Canton, etc.) in 2010. The first church to burn was Little Hope Baptist Church (which is kind of a hilarious name for a church) in Canton, which also inspired the film’s title.
I have been to all of these towns, but I somehow missed this whole story when it was in the news four years ago. So as I am a Texan and love true crime stories and am a pastor, this film had me hooked from the start.
When the citizens of these towns learn that the church fires were done by serial arsonists, the initial reaction is exactly what you would expect: People wanted blood. You have quotes from citizens saying things like “God may forgive whoever did this, but that doesn’t mean I will.” Lots of people were interested in seeing the perpetrators dead. One of the FBI investigators has one of my favorite quotes in the film while discussing how citizens began trying to figure out who was behind the fires. He says, “This is Texas, so yes… they were armed.”
People wanted to protect their church buildings, and they were willing to kill in order to do this. Righteous indignation flowed through the communities.
Eventually, the perpetrators—Jason Bourque and Daniel McAllister—were caught and put on trial. Much of Little Hope Was Arson explores the backstories of these two young men, raising the obvious question: Why did they want to burn churches?
Without getting into too much detail, we learn that each of the boys had experienced a certain amount of pain in their own lives and—justified or not—they blamed God and the Church for much of their struggles.
There is a lot to be gained from watching this film. First of all, we learn to see the perpetrators of these crimes as human, and we get to know their families, which also serves to humanize them. But also—as a pastor—Little Hope Was Arson served as a very real reminder to me that I have a huge responsibility to the families who call me their pastor. Some people attend our services, and they are at a very low point in their lives. I must constantly ask myself and the other leaders in our church: Are we providing a safe place for these people?
Am I interested in controlling/manipulating/exploiting people in order to build my own empire, or am I tuned into the needs of the people who entrust me with their Sunday mornings?
I think about this a lot. It’s why I responded so strongly Elizabeth Esther’s book Girl at the End of the World and why I get so upset when I hear about people who have been mistreated by pastors.
There is a scene toward the end of Little Hope Was Arson in which the pastor of one of the burned churches says to the two young men who set the fire: “We are sorry. Please forgive us.”
How powerful is that?
There are some pastors who do unbelievable damage to lots and lots of people, and when they are confronted about it, they defend themselves by saying, “I’m under attack by Satan,” or “I’m being persecuted by Atheists” (this has also been Kirk Cameron’s explanation for why his new movie is the lowest rated film on IMDB’s website). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen pastors do enormous amounts of damage to people and then completely fail to take responsibility for the wounds they have inflicted.
That’s why it’s so powerful when a pastor looks at the two young men who burned his church to the ground and says, “Please forgive us”—because this kind of humility is not in our nature.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have failed people, and I will certainly fail people again. I am human, and there are lots of moments every day when I feel like I have no idea what I am doing. I am trying to learn and improve and serve the people of my church as best I can, but sometimes I am just going to fail. I only hope I have the courage that this pastor in the film had when he said, “Please forgive us.”
Little Hope Was Arson is currently available On Demand and in theaters in select cities
"Deliver Us from Evil" (The Lord's Prayer, Part 6)
This is the final part in my series on Jesus' prayer in Matthew 6 (a.k.a., "The Lord's Prayer").
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
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As Jesus wraps up his iconic prayer in Matthew 6, the last thing he says is this:
“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13).
The final word of Jesus’ prayer—how Jesus advises his followers to pray—has to do with being led and delivered.
It seems that this is where Jesus’ prayer has been headed all along. Each of us is on a path, and that path could lead toward something dark and destruction (“temptation”/”the evil one”), or it could lead toward some kind of deliverance.
If you track back through all of the phrases in this prayer, you will find this kind of trajectory: Jesus prays that 1) God’s reputation would be beloved, 2) the reality of this beloved God would collide with our world, 3) that we—all people—would have our daily needs met, and 4) that people would be reconciled with one another. And what happens if all of these things come to pass? We will find ourselves on a better kind of path—the kind of path that leads to deliverance and resurrection.
Every day, in a thousand different ways, we make choices that inform our paths. When I choose to be generous or kind or hopeful, I am choosing a path. Likewise, when I choose to be entitled, childish, self-centered, or greedy, I am choosing a different path.
Jesus’ prayer acknowledges that we are all on a path. There is the path that we were created to travel—the path that leads to life and joy and love and hope. And then there is another path that leads to something darker and more destructive.
One path is full of life, and the other path is littered with death.
So Jesus invites us to pray that we would find the better path. We are invited to choose a path in which we (in the words of the apostle Paul) “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).
So may our prayers hone our desires to find our true paths.
May we overcome evil with good.
"Forgive Us Our Debts" (The Lord's Prayer, Part 5)
This post is the fifth part of an ongoing series on The Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
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I think forgiveness is one of the most challenging concepts we find in the Bible (or anywhere else, for that matter). When I forgive someone, it feels like I’m letting them off the hook for something they should be held accountable for or excusing the behavior. To forgive can feel like ignoring something that should not be ignored.
Last year I wrote a two-part blog series on what forgiveness is and is not, so I won’t revisit all of that material again. However, the idea itself demands to be discussed, if only because it shows up in Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 6.
After Jesus prays that God will “give us today our daily bread,” he goes on to say, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).
There is an episode of the TV show Louie starring Louis C.K. in which Louie is harassed and bullied by some teenagers in a pizza place. He feels angry and humiliated, and he does something that lots of people have probably fantasized about doing: He follows one of the teenagers back to his house to confront him. Louie knocks on the door, and the teen’s father answers. Louie tells the father what his son had done to him earlier that night, and the father is furious. He calls his son into the living room, who emerges a second later, shocked to see Louie in his house. Suddenly, the father harshly slaps his teenage son across the face and begins to loudly berate the boy. All of a sudden, the teenager—who earlier had been the bully—was now the victim. It now becomes apparent that the son is simply growing up to be like his father.
In the course of an hour, this teenager was both the aggressor and the victim.
When it comes to forgiveness, there are moments when we need to forgive others as well as moments when we need to be forgiven, and sometimes those moments sit right next to each other.
When Jesus prays, he says, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
Jesus invites us to realize how hard it is to forgive and to realize how hard it is to know that we need to ask for forgiveness.
Perhaps Jesus is pointing out that forgiveness is like a conduit—it travels to us and from us on the same highway. And if we block forgiveness from one direction (either by refusing to forgive someone or by refusing to acknowledge that we need forgiveness), we block it from the other direction as well. If my soul is open to the idea of forgiveness, I have to be aware of both sides of it.
Like I’ve said before, forgiveness is not pretending that someone else’s actions didn’t affect you the way that they did, and forgiveness certainly is not always reconciling and pretending that everything is okay. Forgiveness is not allowing ourselves to be placed in harm’s way over and over again at the mercy of a toxic person. You don’t have to give someone permission to hurt you again.
Rather, forgiveness is the act of releasing the other person from our anger and our need to see them feel the same pain that they caused us.
It is choosing to not allow the anger and pain to win and to free ourselves from the burden of thinking about our offender as a monster or a villain in our own story.
I need to do this for other people, and I need other people to do this for me.
There have been times when I needed to forgive people, and there have been times when I have needed forgiveness. This is true of every human being. Nobody is always the offender or the offended. We switch roles all the time. The highway runs in both directions.
So may we forgive, and may we understand our own need to be forgiven.
May you remember the humanity of others, and may they remember yours as well.
"Our Daily Bread" (The Lord's Prayer, Part 4)
This post is the fourth part in an ongoing series on The Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6.
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A few years ago, there was a massive earthquake in Haiti that made national news for weeks. The body count continued to rise, people were homeless, and families had been torn apart. Practically every international aide organization in the world was coming to lend a hand.
But then there were a few Christian groups who started raising money so that they could airdrop cases of Bibles into Haiti.
Don’t get me wrong; I like Bibles just as much as anybody. I certainly own plenty of them. But the people of Haiti—in that moment—did not need Bibles. They needed food.
Of course, raising this point to the people who were spending thousands of dollars to airdrop the Bibles didn’t see it that way. They would argue that the spiritual needs of people always supersede the physical needs. Why give bread to someone when they really need a Bible?
In Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 6—“the Lord’s Prayer”—Jesus spends the first half engaged in talk about what we might categorize as “spiritual” issues. Jesus prays that God’s reputation will become more well-known in the world and that God’s kingdom would somehow crash into this realm. In the first part of this prayer, there are lots of things that represent big ideas—things way beyond human comprehension.
But then, in verse 11, Jesus prays, “Give us today our daily bread.”
Bread is physical. It doesn’t belong in the same category as those big theological ideas about kingdoms and the name of God. It has to do with where a person’s next meal will come from.
So just to reiterate: Jesus’ prayer begins by dealing with big, spiritual language about things that are so big they could never be measured in a lab. But then it gets very basic and physical: he prays that they would receive their daily bread.
Jesus transitions out of these giant ideas down into whether or not we will receive another meal.
Which takes us back to what the people of Haiti really needed after the earthquake.
Do we need to be aware of the bigger questions of existence and eternity and purpose and the massiveness of all reality? Yes. Jesus prays, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Do we also need to be aware of the smaller, physical, detail-oriented parts of everyday life? Yes. Jesus prays, “Give us today our daily bread.”
So is it good to offer Bibles to people?
Yes.
If they are starving, is it better to offer them food first?
Yes.
Does God care about the big and the small alike?
Yes.
There are moments in our lives when the big questions must be asked, and we believe that God is present in those moments. We also believe that Go is interested in the daily details of everyday life.
There is more to life—the eternal, the massive, that which is beyond comprehension. And then there are the details of life—our next meal, our next doctor’s appointment, our next serious phone call. Is God interested in the big stuff or the little stuff?
Yes.
There is something sacred within the everyday, physical dimensions of life.
When Jesus prays for daily bread, he is acknowledging the sacredness of the small and the physical.
May we do the same.
Five Questions About Interstellar with "Science Mike" McHargue
I went to see Christopher Nolan's new movie Interstellar last Thursday night, and I drove home with a lot of questions. I don't generally scrutinize films based on their real-world scientific merit. For example, my wife and I took our kids to see Big Hero 6 on Saturday, and never once did I find myself asking, "What are the scientific implications of this adolescent boy befriending a balloon-looking robot built by his older brother?"
However, Interstellar spends a lot of time grounding the audience in its reality. That's what most Christopher Nolan movies seem to do--propose that this could possibly happen in our world. Even his Dark Knight trilogy seemed to take the idea of Batman very seriously.
"Science Mike" McHargue
Also, there is a lot of scientific jargon in the film, and most of it seems to be based in something real. So as I sat in my seat for the nearly three hours of the film's running time, I continued to wonder how true-to-life the scientific elements in the movie really are. I consciously thought, "I wish my friend Mike McHargue (known to many as "Science Mike") was sitting here with me so I could tap him on the shoulder and ask, Hey, Mike. Is that real?" (To which he would probably reply, Shhh! I'm watching a movie!)
So I sent Mike a Facebook message and asked him if he could help me with some of my questions about the movie. He replied that lots of people had been asking the same thing, which is not surprising at all. In fact, he's been so bombarded with questions about Interstellar that this week's episode of The Liturgists Podcast (which he co-founded with Michael and Lisa Gungor) will be exclusively devoted to discussing the film.
So I told him that--for the sake of time and not repeating himself too much--I would limit the number of my questions to five and post them on my blog in preparation for the longer discussion on his podcast.
So here is my five-question interview about Interstellar with "Science Mike" McHargue.
(WARNING: There are major plot points from the film discussed here, so if you haven't seen the movie and don't want any spoilers, I would recommend waiting to read this interview until after you've seen Interstellar)
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1) Rob: The premise of the film is that the earth's agricultural sustainability is dying. I'm curious about whether or not this is even possible and whether or not science would be able to find a way to overcome such a thing through greenhouse agricultural or other awesome things people can do.
Mike: This is certainly possible. Desertification is one of the most prominent effects of climate change, and deserts are very poor for agriculture (obviously). Satellite imagery reveals how quickly our blue-green world is turning brown. The problem with using anything like green houses or mass desalinization/irrigation is cost and scale. We don't have the economic capacity to terraform our own lands on that large a scale. Just look back to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to see how quickly soil can turn on us if we don’t manage our resources well.
2) Rob: There's a scene in which a group of astronauts goes down onto a planet and are there for one hour (to them) but then return to the mothership, and it's been twenty years. In the film, it is said that this happens because of Relativity.
Mike: That's real! Relativity indicates that time and space are part of a single fabric (spacetime) and that gravity warps spacetime. This means time isn't some universal metronome, but instead a local variable that varies with speed and gravitation.
Our own solar system has a star [the sun], and stars are massive. The extreme degree to which the sun bends space time means that Mercury's orbit doesn't work out quite right in Newtonian physics. Einstein's relativity, however, perfectly predicts Mercury's behavior. In this way, you can say that Mercury has a "relativistic orbit." It's a small effect to be sure, but it's measurable.
Black Holes have incredible gravity, so much that light can't escape. Because of this immense mass, they warp spacetime far more than any star. A very close orbit around a black hole could actually cause time to stretch and distort the way the movie claims-but there's one problem.
Any orbit close enough to stretch time like that would likely destroy a planet. Of course, the black hole in Interstellar is actually a Super Massive Blackhole rotating at near light speed, so its relativistic effects are more pronounced than a conventional black hole, but I still wonder if there is a safe, stable orbit that allows this kind of time dilation without wrecking the planet (to say nothing of constant orbital bombardment from matter falling toward the black hole at a high fraction of light speed). Some of Jupiter's moons experience terrible tidal stress, and won't last all that long as a result. A planet that was close enough to a black hole to have such dramatic time dilation could be torn into pieces very quickly or smashed to bits by particles and other matter racing into the event horizon.
3) Rob: There's also some craziness with a wormhole. As far as a plot device, it's a pretty Deus Ex Machina kind of moment, in that it seems to just show up exactly when it's needed. I am curious about if wormholes are actually real, or if they have only been discussed theoretically.
Mike: Wormholes are real, but the only ones we know about are tiny--like subatomic tiny. Many physicists believe that quantum entanglement happens via wormholes. That's great for quantum entanglement, but it's not going to take a spaceship anywhere.
Now, I did read a piece in Wired that talked about the visual effects in the film. They had to write a new rendered to deal with the way blackholes curve gravity, and they consulted a physicist to get the math right. The visual of a black hole and wormhole are probably among the most accurate we've produced for film.
4) Rob: The whole point of the film is that these humans are looking for another planet for humanity to inhabit. Do you think something like this could actually exist somewhere in the universe? If so, are we already looking for something like that? Follow up: What is the likelihood that a planet like that would already be populated? Doesn’t Steven Hawking believe that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe? I mean, if there is another habitable planet, how likely is that it would already be inhabited?
Mike: Planets are common. Really common. Now that our telescopes have gotten better, we find exoplanets all the time. It looks like planets far outnumber stars in our galaxy, and we have no reason to think that’s not the norm everywhere. Some small fraction of those planets likely have conditions similar to earth: reasonable gravity, liquid water, stable temperatures, and active plate tectonics. Some small fraction of those worlds probably harbor life—to say nothing of planets unlike the Earth that could host life that is different than life here. Our galaxy is likely teaming with microbial life, although a lot of those microbes may look nothing like ours.
The problem is the scale of the galaxy. We just don’t have the technology to cross interstellar distances today, and the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter theory make me wonder if we ever will.
5) Rob: How in the holy crap did Coop go through a blackhole and somehow end up in some kind of five-dimensional vortex that led directly to his daughter's bedroom? I realize that this is a contrivance of the film, but I didn’t even understand the scientific rules that supposedly got them there. By that point, I felt like I was re-watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, and my brain was saying, “Shhh. Just go with it.” Can you help me with this?
Mike: In Interstellar, singularity was used as the ultimate deus ex machina. We don’t understand what happens inside a blackhole, and blackholes remind us that we are pretty ignorant about one of the fundamental forces of physics (gravity). What’s possible inside a blackhole? No one knows. Very bright physicists have all sorts of ideas: they may be Universes of their own, they may contain this Universe in a strange sort of recursive loop, or they may be gateways to other realities. Nolan exploited this to allow Cooper to travel across space time via the tesseract, itself a three dimensional representation of this “fifth dimensional” reality. Additional dimensions of space are theoretical and generally associated with string theory. Interstellar seems makes an assumption that the brane model of the Universe is correct. In the future, particle accelerators may prove these ideas untenable, but for now the assumptions are reasonable on some level, especially for a feature film.
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Thanks so much to Mike McHargue for indulging my curiosity and letting me post our conversation here.
If you enjoy this kind of thing and want a lot more of it, I recommend reading Mike's blog and listening to The Liturgists podcast--especially this week's episode on Interstellar.
If you want to hear an excellent presentation by Mike on the topic of faith and the human brain, you can listen to his talk from June 2014 at Collective Church in Fort Worth, Texas.