Favorite Tweets One Year On

            I’m really busy this week. I have to write a sermon about Jeoffry the cat in Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. Last week it was a sermon on the green glasses the Wizard of Oz handed out to citizens of the Emerald City. I'm running out of creative energy.

            So, instead of writing an entirely new post, I’ve decided to share a few of my favourite tweets on the one-year anniversary of my joining the twitter sphere. Most are mine, though sources are added when they’re not. I’m not offering them in any particular order. If there is an attribution to make, you’ll find that too. Here goes.

• Kindness is love in work boots.

• All our time, talent, and money is the budget God put us on to be his full-time ambassadors of reconciliation.

• “. . . nothing can more effectively set people at odds than the demand that they think alike” (Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Religion).

• The less convinced I am in scripture’s infallibility, the more impressed I become with most interpreters’ hubris.

• Leave difficult things to books (Augustine).

• The conceit of parsing one text ever more closely to get at the truth. No! Let all of scripture settle in your heart and mind.

• God is especially ineffable when we lack curiosity.

• Working for that moment when my sermon isn’t a lecture anymore.

• In a post-literate era we need more preaching like Jesus': parabolic, dissonant, beautiful. Less like Paul's: faux linear, abstract.

• Why is Conrad Black in Canada when 1000s wait years and years? Send him packing to make room for a real refugee!

• Mayor Ford. As dumb as Clinton, but without the social grace. A tragic figure (and crook) like Nixon, but in a slapstick comedy.

• The status quo is nothing other than an excuse to avoid the sharp edge of the gospel. 

• Spiritual warfare? That's turning the other cheek.

• Too many prayers for personal aches and pains. Not enough for the healing of the nations.

• Now these three remain: denial, fear, and the status quo. But the deadliest of these is the status quo.

• We need an immigration policy for the tired, poor, huddled masses. Not a policy that targets PhDs, high skill, and rich types.

• Look at the world through your tears. You will see things that dry-eyed you would otherwise miss.

• Preachers need to remember that beauty is redemptive.

• In the Old Testament, we are told thirty-six times to love the stranger, and only twice to love our neighbour. (Douglas John Hall)

• I pray you not speak of these little things. Think of me and the trouble I'm in at being found out. Oz to Dorothy and Harper to us.

Which one is your favourite? Maybe I'll write a blog post on that one! Next week.

PS--if you're interested, you can sign up to follow my tweets @DrJohnSuk

Did God Really Tell You So?

Late one afternoon, a few months ago, an apparently well-heeled young woman showed up at my church. She was neatly dressed, drove a nice car, and spoke with authority and confidence. I didn’t know her. She told me that while driving west along Highway 2, God told her to stop at our church because God told her we would provide a place for her to stay for the evening.

This presented me with a theological problem. You see I don’t believe that God speaks to people about where to spend the night. So, after making sure she wasn’t in trouble, I told her so. She wasn’t pleased. I offered to connect with the Salvation Army, which has provision for emergency shelter. She refused, but asked if she could use my phone to call another church. I wonder if she also told them that God had informed her that they would provide her lodging?

Does God tell you things? Put things on your heart? Give you dreams? Maybe, for example, God is telling you that it is time to change jobs or vote for the Conservatives. Or stop cheating on your wife? Or get a divorce?

I hear people say these sorts of things all the time. It is as if some people think they have their own personal pipeline to God . . . like this year’s group of Republicans running for President of the USA. One of the best tweets of 2011 came from comedian Kelly Oxford. She tweeted, “Cain, Perry, Bachmann all claimed God told them to run for president and all are out of the race. God is hilarious.” According to Rick Santorum’s wife, God also told him to run. She may even be right, because he still has an outside chance. But surely, they can’t all be right. Ironically, the candidate most likely to win is Mitt Romney, who most Evangelicals claim isn’t even a Christian, because of his Mormon faith. I wonder what God is telling him?

I’d be impressed with such claims except, as I’ve said, I just don’t believe them. Never have. Why not? Well, for starters, if there is one thing all pastors learn sooner rather than later, it is that the human heart—and mind—is deceitful above all things. And so we all have a tendency, when we believe in God, to want to believe that just about any intuition or hope or dream we have is from God.

Of course, this approach to faith is very dangerous because it adds up to giving our intuitions, hopes and dreams divine authority. When someone says, “God put it on my heart,” who is going to argue? Until, of course, the hollowness of such claims is too obvious to ignore, as when five or six Republicans all claim that God told them to run for president.

I recently read Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking Fast and Slow. In it, he describes ten or twenty ways in which the human brain easily believes things it shouldn’t, makes up “just so,” stories to confirm its biases, and often makes quick intuitive judgments based on far too little evidence. To make matters worse, the slower, rational, deeply informed part of the brain that is supposed to keep odd beliefs and intutions in line is usually far too slow and lazy to do so. So people will say, “God told me so” and believe it long before the more thoughtful part of the brain ever has a chance to ask, “really?”

Is there an alternative to believing that you have a direct line to God when it comes to decisions, hopes, and dreams? Sure—though this is a more difficult—and truer—path. Use the values that God’s Word in scripture (as opposed to a private pipeline) are all about, values such as love, justice, mercy, and humility, to guide your decision making. And then use your brain to weigh the decision, thoughtfully and carefully. Because that is exactly what God gave us brains, rather than pipelines, for.