Paying Taxes

I received my property tax bill today. I’ll be paying several thousand dollars. My assessment was higher—not by much, thankfully—than last year’s. Some of the taxes I pay will go to the Town of Cobourg, some to Northumberland County, and the rest to local schools. The bottom line, though, is that I’ll be paying several thousand dollars for things like policing, roads and engineering, transit, streetlights, and so on. I don’t mind one bit.

The truth is we need to pay our taxes if we expect the services that make Cobourg, and Northumberland County, a great place to live. I’ve lived overseas in Manila. People don’t pay much in the way of taxes there, and both the city and the national government are lousy at collecting taxes. That means that poverty is rife and that there is no safety net. A large portion of the population lives in shanties and slums unregulated by government. Road and public transit shortages mean traffic is jammed nearly 24/7. Tap water isn’t safe to drink. Power is intermittent during storms and even when you otherwise least expect it. If you really need to get something done, you pay a bribe to make it happen.

Now don’t get me wrong. The Filipino people are wonderful in every respect. But they are also victims of a political system that doesn’t serve them so much as it serves the rich family elites installed by Spanish and American colonial governments to keep people in line. Those entrenched elites continue to milk the system for all its worth, in spite of two or three popular street revolutions to throw the bums out. And a fair tax system just isn’t in the elite’s interest, since the country’s very dysfunction is what keeps them in power.

So I’ve lived in a country without much by way of taxes, and it is a disaster. And I’ve travelled all over the world and seen similar disasters in places like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya and Indonesia. And what occurs to me now is that I’ve been in a lot of countries lately where the problem is that there just isn’t enough government—and what there is is crooked. When I hear Republicans or Conservatives or Libertarians preach that less government is always better government, I’m not persuaded. In some situations, it may be that a bit less government is a good idea. I’d love less military spending, less bureacratic waste, fewer jails, fewer multi-million-dollar government-agency consulting contracts for former politicians like Newt Gingrich, and fewer gazebos in far flung corners of Tony Clement’s Muskoka area riding. (Yes, that last example does sound less serious than Newt's consulting, but it is so Canadian!) But less government is not an unqualified good thing. If you disagree, take a vacation in Haiti or Rwanda and see for yourself.

So, whenever I write a check to the Canadian or American governments, or my municipal government, I both wish it could be a little less, and I say a prayer of thanks for a system that works: for uncommon peace and safety by world standards, tons of fiscal transperancy, and the privilege to democratically engage in the process of government. There is just no sense in complaining about life in Canada. Our freedom to get involved and do something would be much wiser than complaining. In fact, in our democratic system, the submission to government that the Apostle Paul asks of Christians in Romans 8 has to be understood as a willingness to submit to our systems' need for responsible democratic involvement in government.

            Which brings me back to taxes. In the end, I believe that the Apostle Paul was exactly right about taxes too. “Pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.” It is the Christian thing to do.

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.

What Do You Mean, "Peace?"

           A few weeks ago the big multi-colored light show went up in Cobourg’s Victoria Park, a few blocks from where I live. The park is full of snowmen and Santas and sleighs. I have to admit, too, that the whole thing is quite pretty.

            Of course, the lightshow makes no mention of Jesus. As far as the Cobourg goes, there isn’t any room for Jesus in the park. I have to admit, even though I understand that secular government has to make reasonable accommodations for those of other or no faith, I am a bit grumpy about it. Though it brings a smile to my face to see how St. Peter’s church, across the street, responded to the town’s secular light show with its own tiny, perfect, subversive little manger scene on the front lawn.

            But before we blame the town of Cobourg too much, perhaps the Christians among us ought to ask whether or not we’re guilty of the same thing. We often water down the meaning of Christmas too. Take, for example, how we debase the word “peace.”

            Let me illustrate. So far I have received nine Christmas cards. Three mention peace. The first one says, on the front, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth Peace.” On the inside it adds, “May the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.” Just in my heart? So what happened to peace on earth?

            The second card has a pretty picture of a cute country church with a horse and sleigh on the cover. Inside, it says, “May your Christmas be filled with the gifts of joy and peace.” This peace is nothing but a romantic nod in the direction of nineteenth-century Christmases past.

            The third card says, “Winter Wishes,” and inside, “wishing you the quiet beauty of a peaceful holiday.” That’s it. Here peace is nothing more than a warm fuzzy for my heart.

            None of these cards gets close to describing something like Biblical peace. Isaiah says that the Prince of Peace is working for a time when every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be fuel for the fire. Biblical peace encompasses an end of all the world’s wars. The Biblical idea of peace is shalom, where each one of us is in right relationship with God and every single one of our neighbors all around the world, from Canada to Palestine and North Korea and beyond.

            And Christians are supposed to be ambassadors of that peace, today—ambassadors of reconciliation, says the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 5. We are called not merely to speak just to people’s hearts or hopes for a quiet, tranquil dose of Christmas cheer, but we are called to be God’s ambassadors to speak to the powers of this world.

            A daunting task. But, if nothing else, Christianity is an invitation to live large. God invites us all to be part of a cosmic peace process. Question our government’s choice to fight offensive wars rather than serve as peace-keepers. Reject the need for bloated military spending on ever more high-tech fighters that can only serve the military needs of our neighbors when our citizens are freezing in the dark in Attawapiskat. Condemn the sale of armaments to despotic regimes. Write politicians. Support peace organizations like Amnesty International and Doctor’s Without Borders. When you pray for healing for Aunt Sally’s gall bladder, don’t dare to forget to pray for an end to heavy losses of civilian life in places like Afghanistan and Syria in the same breath.

            My friend Mark VanderVennen recently wrote a book about peace entitled Hope in Troubled Time. Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from South Africa, wrote the foreword. In it, he said, "peace is not a goal to be achieved but a way of life to be lived."

            The bottom line is this. Let’s not debase or water down the peace language of Christmas. As much as Jesus cares for our souls and wants us to feel warm fuzzies, what he actually wants is for our feet to follow his in the struggle for world peace. 

          

Second "Not Sure" Video Posted by Eerdmans

Eerdmans did a television interview with me at my Grand Rapids launch. I posted part one yesterday, and here is part two. The interview covers topics such as why one can't really have a personal relationship with Jesus, ethnic churches, why prayer isn't about power, and the kind of response I've had to the book so far. It comes in four two-minute segments. Check it out!

John Suk Video Interview (part two)

"Not Sure" Video posted by Eerdmans

Eerdmans recently interviewed me about my new book, Not Sure: A Pastor's Journey from Faith to Doubt. I've never been able to speak off of the top of my head as well as I can write, but I do think these turned out pretty good. Check them out!

Interview with John Suk about faith and doubt

Does the Gospel Have a Short Shelf Life?

(This is a sermon I preached on the theme of "gospel," based on Isaiah 61 and Colossians 1:1-8. I asked for advice about what to say about the gospel's relevance on Facebook, and incorporated some of that into the sermon. So, I'm interested in knowing whether or not you think I got the relevance of our good news out there in this effort. And thanks for everyone who helped me think it through. John)

            

            Have you heard the good news? Western society, as we know it, has been saved!

            In fact, Western Society as we know it, from Apple.com to McDonalds to Wall Street was actually saved 2500 years ago, just before the flowering of classical Greek civilization. In the years just before Plato and Aristotle and Sophocles and their invention of drama and philosophy and science, evil Persia was trying to conquer Greece. But at the Battle of Marathon, the forces of Greek Athens defeated the violent, repressive Persians and their strange ideas. Winning the war against Persia was such good news that Philippides ran all the way from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens, 42 kilometers, without stopping, to announce the good news—“We won.” And then Philippides died of exhaustion.

            Now, doesn’t the Athenian victory at Marathon just make your head spin? Doesn’t it make you want to party and dance?

            Or not?

            That’s the trouble with good news, isn’t it? Good news usually has a short shelf life. For example, one day you are single, then you meet the right guy, and you fall in love, and pretty soon you’re engaged. Good news! So you tell all your friends and they “Like” your announcement on Facebook and they plan a Jack and Jill party for you. The next Sunday everyone crowds around you at church and looks at the ring and oohs and aahs and then, just like that, it’s over. The next Sunday no one asks you about your engagement anymore. People have moved on. Good news has a short shelf life.

            And that is a problem for the Bible, and the story of Jesus too, don’t you think? Isaiah says the Messiah will be anointed to preach good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, and he will proclaim freedom to the captives. Good news!

            And, in fact, that is exactly what Jesus did. Even more, he died for the sins of the world, too. Even rose again on the third day. Paul, in our text from Colossians is still beside himself when he talks about it, even 30 years after the resurrection: “We always thank God, he says, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have . . . the gospel is bearing fruit and growing.”

            But it is now 2000 years later. Are we still elated, with Paul? Are we so excited about the gospel that it continues to bear fruit and grow among us, in surprising and new and numerical ways? Do you stay excited about the gospel even when you have tests to take, or weddings to attend, or jobs to keep? Or has the gospel of Jesus, like the good news of Marathon, passed its “best before” date?

            Besides, some of the reasons given for being excited about having a Messiah back then just don’t seem to resonate much in our day and age, anymore. We have OHIP and modern medicine for healing; welfare, unemployment insurance and food banks for the poor. We have counselors for the brokenhearted, and the church will even pay the bill, if you use our CAP program from Shalem. On top of that, unlike the people Isaiah was writing to, we’re not exiles in a foreign land. And unlike the people Jesus ministered to, we’re not living under a foreign dictatorship. Life is actually very good for most of is. So what makes the gospel good news in the middle of our already much better than average lives?

            In fact, there are some great Biblical & theological reasons for thinking of the gospel as good news. I was reminded of that this week, on Facebook. I put up a post saying I was writing a sermon about how the gospel was good news, but then added some comments to the effect that it seems like old news that doesn’t get anyone excited. I asked my Facebook friends if they had any ideas about how to convince people that the gospel is still good news for today.

            I got lots of suggestions. One CRC minister said that, quote, “the good news is that god continues to move in and through us as the body of Christ as we bind up the brokenhearted, as we share out coat with him who has none” and so on. That is, the gospel will seem like good news if we do the wonderful but difficult things the gospel asks of us. I thought that was a good answer, as far as it went. It is true. But . . . is that tidy theological explanation really going to make our teenagers, or a middle-aged long-time member bored with church going to sit up and take notice? Will it make us dance?

            Someone else said that “how can experience of the God that we’re ultimately made to be in relationship with be anything but good news?” Well, for those who have the experience, great! But he is in heaven and that is a long ways away. And what about all those people who don’t have that experience, people who are distracted, or people who are bored by church, or people who have doubts, or people who are depressed, or people who can’t really be bothered to study the matter—which covers a lot of people!

            Another Facebook friend said it is all about the already and not yet . . . that is, Christ has already risen but he has not yet returned, and we have to somehow concentrate on what we know has happened and thus imagine how it is going to be when Jesus returns. But then, in a moment of light-hearted honesty, he also said, “tough stuff! That is why you get paid the big bucks. I’m sure they listen to you.”

            But it is tough stuff, because the gospel is ancient, and there just are a million and one excuses, or reasons, or whatever for leaving this building and never coming back because you have decided it isn’t relevant anymore, or it is just old, old news.

            So I have to say something about why you should never leave. I have to say something in defense of the goodness of the gospel, even after 2000 years. So here it is:

            The gospel is still good news, because even if you ignore it, even if you are distracted by your toys or responsibilities, and even if you find church boring--the God of the whole cosmos is really here and really did the things this book [The Bible] said he did. Even if your life goes on without you hardly noticing it, nothing in you, good or bad, can cancel out the overwhelming cosmic reality of a God who wants you all for himself, who wants you so badly that he was willing to die for you, in spite of all your hang-ups, distractions and shortcomings. None of these things can make God, or what he did, go away.

            The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus are all just as real as the air you breathe. The love of God for you is far more certain, and costly for Jesus, than anything anyone is ever going to do for you. And all the wonders of nature, the birth of Alys (who we baptized today), the starry skies on a moonless night or the fish that swim in Rice Lake – all these wonders are nothing compared to what God has really done in Jesus or the fact that God wants you and I to be his love in a broken, violent, and dangerous world.

            Listen. I know you might have to do a bit of digging around in scripture to convince yourself. I know that you may have to look past some of the shortcomings of the people in this church—or any church—to really get a sense of the power of it. I know that you may have lots of reasons to prefer being distracted than applying yourself to considering what I have said. But I also know that none of this makes it any less true that God loves us fiercely. He wants your knee to bow and your tongue to confess along with every other knee and tongue in creation. And he wants it so bad that even though he was God, he became human to convince us, and died on a cross to make it so.

            That birth and death was a long time ago. Like the Battle of Marathon. But the love? The eternal hope? The life he has given you to live in love? The adventure of it all? That is for today. Like Isaiah says, “Now is the year of the Lord’s favor.” And like Jesus says, when he quotes our passage from Isaiah. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Good news.

The Idiot Box

My wife and I do not own a television. We never had. Judging by the reviews of this year’s TV season, so far, we’re not missing much.

However, our refusal not to purchase a television isn’t really related to our dislike for what’s on television. My pet reason for not having a television is that many scholars suspect that watching even a small amount of television detracts from the ability to read well. Repeated exposure to TV develops the synapses and neural pathways in the brain that decode television; but this brain development seems strongly correlated to lack of development in the reading center of the brain. For Christians, who are people of the Word—undermining the ability to read well and deeply is a spiritual issue.

Even Camille Paglia, a famous culture critic best known for celebrating television’s role in the “repaganization of Western Culture,” understands how television is dangerous in this respect. She writes that in the second command God forbade the use of all images in heaven above and earth below because God understood that such images create a powerful, spiritual urge to ignore words. So Paglia calls for “the enlightened repression of our children,” by which she means rigorous word-centered education to the exclusion of TV, if we want our kids to become all they can be. Commenting on this insight, Neil Postman said, “With the Second Commandment, Moses was the first person who ever said, more or less, “Don’t watch TV; go do your homework.”

So what about your TV watching habits? I have a few suggestions. First, inform yourself about the State of the discussion when it comes to the benefits and risks of TV viewing, especially for children. I’d recommend Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. In my book, Not Sure, you can find a long bibliography on the relation of television to reading on page 42.

Second. Make reading together a family-time priority until well after the kids are reading on their own, a lot, with pleasure. As an added benefit, you’ll double and triple your cuddle time. My wife and I took turns reading to our children for an hour a day until the oldest was well into high school. That daily hour is easily one of our kids’ best memories of growing up.

Third. Don’t ever allow the television to play when a parent isn’t watching along. Children of all ages need instruction and wisdom about what they see on television because television mostly portrays a fanciful world without God where greed, envy, and several more of the deadly sins carry the day. That’s a very jaundiced view of how things really are; kids need another perspective to interpret TV for them.

Finally, if you don’t have time or energy for the above—and I take it that includes a lot of this blog's  readers—I have one final suggestion. It cuts through all the difficulties that go with having a television. Get rid of it.

Our family fell into life without a television when I was in seminary and couldn’t afford cable, much less the television itself. Somehow that circumstance has become a blessing that continues to give and give. Over the years we’ve avoided countless hours of uncommunicative stupefaction and had discussions, reading, and lots of other fun activities instead.

The bottom line here is that all the time and energy it takes to watch television responsibly may simply be out of reach for most of us. On the other hand, all those extra hours without a television could provide a rich, rich resource for raising kids in the way they should go. All for the price of a trip to the trash can.