God Particle

On July 4th, news outlets around the world buzzed with excitement about a remarkable scientific discovery. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced the discovery of the long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson (sometimes referred to as the "God particle.") Now I don’t claim to understand all this stuff; in fact, I’ve tried reading up on it, and I know I don’t understand all this stuff!  Apparently  discovering the Higgs boson is important because it would prove the existence of the Higgs field, which has something to do with how particles attain mass.  And I guess that’s a big deal.  I know how I attain mass, and that’s all that matters to me.  It’s losing mass that’s the mystery to me.  Anyway, I read someplace that the Higgs field hypothesis is the simplest of several proposed explanations for that phenomenon, which makes me feel pretty stupid since I literally can’t understand even the simplest of explanations.

The Higgs boson particle is the final missing ingredient in what's called the Standard Model of particle physics. This Standard Model supposedly explains how every visible thing in the universe was made. (Note that it doesn't explain Who made everything.) It also explains the forces acting between visible things.

Last December, the scientist and theologian Alister McGrath wrote a fine introduction to the Higgs boson particle. McGrath claims that physicists believed in the particle for years even though they couldn't see it. He wrote, “Some tell us that science is about what can be proved.  The wise tell us it is really about offering the best explanations of what we see, realising that these explanations often cannot be proved, and may sometimes lie beyond proof.  Science often proposes the existence of invisible (and often undetectable) entities – such as dark matter – to explain what can be seen.  The reason why the Higgs boson is taken so seriously in science is not because its existence has been proved, but because it makes so much sense of observations that its existence seems assured.  In other words, its power to explain is seen as an indicator of its truth.”

He then moves from scientist to theologian when he writes, “There’s an obvious and important parallel with the way religious believers think about God.  While some demand proof that God exists, most see this as unrealistic.  Believers argue that the existence of God gives the best framework for making sense of the world.  God is like a lens, which brings things into clearer focus.  As the Harvard psychologist William James pointed out years ago, religious faith is about inferring ‘the existence of an unseen order’ in which the ‘riddles of the natural order’ can be explained.”

One MIT physicist had this to say: "A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96 percent of the universe that remains obscure."  Check it out: for all of our advances in science, most of the universe remains a mystery to the human mind.  There are some who claim that science is a threat to faith; some who claim that science has rendered belief in God irrelevant and outdated, no longer necessary to understand the universe.  But, even given that 96% is just an estimate, it still leaves plenty of room for God. 

You don’t have to reject God to believe in science, and you certainly don’t have to reject science to believe in God.  You just have to reject the statements of those who, in their hubris, claim that understanding 4% of anything puts you in position to make claims about our ability to comprehend the other 96%, or the existence of a Who behind the what.

Keeping Mystery in Church

When Albert Einstein was asked if he believed in God, here was his response: "I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist [someone who believes that the divine is synonymous with the universe]. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws."

Einstein tried to express these feelings clearly, both for himself and all of those who wanted a simple answer from him about his faith. So in the summer of 1930, amid his sailing and ruminations in Caputh [Germany], he composed a credo, "What I Believe," that he recorded for a human-rights group and later published. It concluded with an explanation of what he meant when he called himself religious: "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

I’ve not done the research, but my sense is that atheism in the form we know it is a rather recent phenomenon in human history.  People in various cultures around the world and throughout history of tended to believe in something.  Mystery—that which could not be explained and would never be explained—was all around.  It was undeniable, and it made no sense to deny the existence of the divine.  I’m guessing that it’s only recently, in the age of Enlightenment rationalism, that atheism could find any soil in which to take root.  There arose the overly-optimistic belief that whatever we couldn’t explain now, eventually we would be able to, and we wouldn’t need a god to do it.  But there sits Einstein, the poster child for Enlightenment rationalism, declaring that there is something we cannot and will never understand because it are beyond our ability to understand or even experience,  and that thing is God.  And now more than eighty years later there is a growing consensus among many scientists that there is a limit to even the most intelligent person’s ability to understand the workings of the universe.  Mystery exists, and it is impenetrable. 

The shame for many like Einstein is the assumption that since we cannot penetrate this Mystery, the Mystery cannot reach us.  The wall of impenetrability works two ways, in this way of thinking.  That is because to them, this Mystery in impersonal: it does not have a will, it cannot express intention and then make that intention real.  But in Jesus we believe that that is exactly what happened.  That the Mysterious Three-in-One Creator God has a will for his creation and he entered that creation to see his will accomplished.  Jesus is the reflection of the Father, and we must understand that in seeing Jesus, we are seeing enough of the Father to understand his will for his creation.

But we must not make the mistake of thinking that in seeing Jesus we understand everything about the Father.  We must not remove the sense of the mysterious that has always been a part of the Christian faith, and I fear that we often do that when we essentially reduce God to our Sugar-Daddy in the sky.  If more and more people are realizing that Mystery exists, surely when they come to our churches they should be able to find that it still exists in our churches as well.

Spectacularly Normal

Do you know what the most popular flavor in the world is?  No, it’s not chocolate.  It’s vanilla.  The most popular flavor in the world is vanilla.  Now, if I were to say that a person’s personality is vanilla, what would that mean to you?  That they have the most popular personality in the world?  No, it would mean that their personality is rather bland and ordinary, boring even.  Since when did popular mean bland or boring?

    But that’s what we do; we think that to be effective you have to somehow be special, somehow stand out from the crowd, be more gifted than the average person.  And we bring that thinking into the church.  I’m all for talking about the spiritual gifts in the church—Paul certainly teaches about them.  He teaches that every Christian is gifted.  The problem is that in our society “gifted” means special, well above average.  Schools have gifted programs for the really, really smart kids.  Only elite athletes like Lebron James or Peyton Manning are called “gifted.”  In our society, if everyone is gifted, no one is, not really.  To say that everyone is gifted just seems like a language trick to boost people’s self-esteem, kind of like a children’s competition where every child gets a ribbon, not just the winners, so that no child views themself as a “loser.”

     But in the church, everyone is “gifted”?  Most of us aren’t buying that.  Most people don’t feel that special, because, by definition, most people are average.  Most of us are in the big hump in a bell curve, not the extremes.  But the truth is that 99% of God’s work is going to be done—well, OK, God is going to do 99% of the work, but of the 1% that humans have to do, regular, average people are going to do 99% of it, and if they don’t, it won’t get done by the extraordinarily gifted people.

    The problem is, the books are written by the gifted people.  No, it’s true.  I mean, who wants to read a book on prayer by a person who doesn’t pray much, who struggles with finding time to pray, who finds that when they do pray, most of their time is spent thinking about other things and wondering if prayer really works.  What publisher is going to publish a book on prayer in which the person tells the story of how Aunt Martha got a rare disease and was on her death bed and so they prayed and prayed and prayed, and as they were praying the phone ring and when they answered it, they got the news that Aunt Martha…had died.  Yet most of our prayers lives are lacking the kind of dramatic stories that sell books or get published in Guideposts.

    The same is true with evangelism.  The books on evangelism are written by people who are really, really good at evangelism.  They just naturally seem to fall into conversation with others about Jesus, and end up praying with them.  All their neighbors were once pagans who have now given their hearts to Christ, and every person they sit next to on an airplane ends up praying to accept Christ. 

I’ve sat next to plenty of people on airplanes.  I’ve even tried to talk to a few.  Most are friendly enough, but most don’t really want to talk.  They’ve got their iPods, or they are deeply entrenched in work or a book, or whatever.  I’ve engaged a few in conversation, but invariably they get around to asking what I do for a living.  I’m a pastor.  Oh, really?  That’s great.  What denomination?  Baptist.  Oh, well, that’s nice.  Yeah, that’s a real conversation stopper as they sit there and stir their Bloody Mary.  I’ve not yet had a significant spiritual conversation on an airplane, much less lead someone to the Lord on a flight.  As soon as I do, you know what I’m going to do?  Write a book on evangelism.

    Regular people read these books on evangelism, and they feel guilty for not doing more, and they vow to do more, but it never lasts, does it?  So they take the approach Homer Simpson once advocated to his daughter, Lisa.  She was down after trying something significant and failing, and Homer said, “Now, Lisa, if at first you don’t succeed, stop trying.”

    Well, don’t stop trying to pray, and don’t stop trying to understand the Bible, and don’t stop trying to tell others about your relationship with Christ.  Maybe what we ought to do is stop reading books written by the natural-born evangelists.

    The work of the church is always done by regular people.  You may not feel extraordinarily gifted, and that’s not what Paul was talking about.  He was saying that when ordinary people get involved in the work of the Kingdom, the Holy Spirit will supply them with everything they need to be effective.  What you do may not be spectacular enough to warrant a book deal, but that’s all right.  There’s only one Book we really need anyway.

The Master Sculptor

There’s a story that is told about a sculptor—sometimes it is claimed that it was Michelangelo, but it probably wasn’t.  Oftentimes in the course of telling and retelling general stories are attributed to famous people to bring them to life.  But in the story there was a famous sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble.    A little boy who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left and right.  He had never seen a sculptor at work, and he had no idea what was happening.  But when the boy returned to the studio a few weeks later he saw, to his great surprise, a large and powerful lion sitting in the place where the marble had stood.  With great excitement the boy ran to the sculptor and said, “Sir, tell me, how did you know there was a lion in the marble?”  The sculptor said, “I knew there was a lion in the marble because before I saw the lion in the marble, I saw him in my heart.  The secret is that it was the lion in my heart that recognized the lion in the marble.”

I don’t know a thing about sculpting or how most sculptors work.  I know something about writing.  Usually when I sit down to write I have an idea of where I’m going and it’s just a matter of getting there.  But sometimes I have no idea where I’m going.  I’ll start heading in a direction but I end up someplace else, somewhere unexpected, and I’ll wonder, where did that come from?  It didn’t start out as a voyage of discovery, but it became one.  Every once in a while I’ll do an exercise where I take a pen, a blank sheet of paper, and set a timer for fifteen minutes, and just write without pausing for fifteen minutes, not self-editing, not worrying about spelling or grammar or even legibility.  The goal is to get out in the open what’s inside—it is truly an exercise of discovery.

The Master Sculptor already knows what’s in the marble, because he has seen it in His heart.  The art of sculpture is the art of seeing, and only then is it the art of chipping away everything that is not a lion.  But here’s where the metaphor breaks down.  Whereas a chunk of marble is inanimate and has no choice but to submit to the hammer and chisel of the sculptor, that is not true for us.  We have a choice.  You and I have to choose to submit to the Master sculptor and His vision for our lives.  In order to do that, we have to give up our vision of our lives.  And in order to do that, we have to see what God sees. 

In Romans 8:15-17, Paul warns us not to fall back into a spirit of slavery, but to pay attention to the Spirit of God who tells us that God is our Father and we are his children.  And that is what God sees when he looks at us, and if we see anything else, we are seeing an image that leads to slavery.  The work of the spiritual life is the work of coming to terms with the fact of our adoption into God’s family so that we no longer feel the need to strive with God (and, often, against others) to gain his forgiveness and acceptance, things that are already given. 

He sees what we really are; we have to learn to see it as well.

Missions and Discipleship

Last week our Sr. High students were on a mission trip to Philadelphia; this morning our Middle School students left to go there.  Mission trips have been a regular part of our Student Ministry for well over a decade.  This is normal for our students; to them, this is one of the things Student Ministry is all about, and they probably can’t envision a Student Ministry without mission trips.

But it wasn’t always the case.  When I was growing up in church, Youth Ministry (that’s what it was called back then) was about youth retreats, Bible studies, lock-ins, and fun trips to King’s Dominion.  And meeting girls.  Had to mention that, since I married a girl I met in the youth group.  And the truth is, back before I could drive, for the most part I saw Pam in church.  95% of our “dates” consisted of being with each other at youth retreats, Bible studies, lock-ins, and fun trips to King’s Dominion.  I’d like to think I was a very spiritual teenager, but it’s closer to the truth to say that I just wanted to be with this very cute girl.

Student Ministry has changed, and that change is actually quite recent.  When Richard arrived 14 years ago the youth ministry was primarily about youth retreats, Bible studies, lock-ins, etc.  They took trips, but the trips were to things like Centrifuge, which was basically a week-long retreat filled with Bible studies, fun activities, and worship.  But after a couple of years Richard started eschewing CentriFuge for MissionFuge, which kept some of the elements of Centrifuge but only in the evenings; the days were filled with missions work.  Since then he has mixed in straight missions trips to places like New Orleans and Mexico with MissionFuge.

We are also seeing this shift occurring in church life in general.  I don’t ever remember the church I grew up in sponsoring a mission trip.  We took up offerings to support missionaries, but none of us “back home” ever went on the mission field and got involved ourselves.  The extent of our involvement was financial support, prayer, and attending classes to learn what missionaries did on the mission field.  But we began to sense that something more was needed; something more was required of us.  Jesus command to go into all the world and make disciples became more personal, and it didn’t seem enough to pay someone else to go into all the world and make disciples.

Some question whether such trips actually do more than placate a guilty conscience with the idea that we’re actually doing something.  What good, some ask, is going someplace for one measly week, and then leaving?  There’s some merit to that if that is indeed what is going on, but for the most part it’s not.  These trips are to established areas of mission work, usually helping missionaries who are there year-round do things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.  And while any one individual or groups leave after one week, they usually are following one group and will be followed by another.  The actually presence of Christian groups doing ministry is thus extended for weeks, months, or even years.  MissionFuge has been in Philadelphia every summer for many years.  The work is cumulative.  When Richard took young people to Mexico, they were part of a group that built a medical center one week at a time, one group at a time.  Eventually the center was built.

This Christmas a group from our church is going on a mission trip to Belize to work with missionaries from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.  We are following that with another trip to the same place next June, with plans to establish an ongoing relationship between our church and the ministry there.  We hope that we will be sending groups there at least twice a year, but the real hope is that we’ll have a stream of groups going, perhaps three or four each summer and more throughout the rest of the year.  In that way we can join with others in being the presence of Christ, ministering on a consistent basis and forming ongoing relationships with new friends in Belize.

I am convinced that discipleship is incomplete without missions, that in fact discipleship without missions is not discipleship at all.  I am all for the spiritual disciplines which develop our personal relationship with God, but without missions such discipleship can just be an expression of our self-absorption, our desire to have our lives be happy and fulfilled, as if God created the world so that humans could feel good.  Missions helps to get us out of the mode of feeding into our lives and into the mode of feeding into other's lives.  It gets us out of our world and into God's world.  It moves the focus from trying to figure out what God's will for our lives is to see that God is at work in the world, and his will for the world doesn't need to be figured out, it's plain to see.  And then missions moves us from using the spiritual disciplines to find ourselves to using them to lose ourselves to something bigger.

And that may not lead to happiness, but it seems to me that it will lead to fulfillment and significance, and it's hard to see how a person who is living a life of significance would be at all dissatisfied with their lives.

Creepy Jesus

One of my neighbors knocked on our door last weekend, and when Pam let her in she was carrying a large framed picture.  I was upstairs and couldn’t see what it was, but I heard my neighbor, who is a nurse who works in a senior center, explain that it was a picture that used to belong to one of the residents, a mentally challenged woman named Carolyn.  Carolyn had no family, but she was much loved by my neighbor and her family.  When Carolyn passed away last year, the few possessions she owned were given to my neighbor.

Among them was a somewhat well-known picture of Jesus based on Revelation 3:2, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”  The picture shows Jesus standing outside a door, waiting for it to be opened for him.  There is no doorknob on the outside; it must be opened from the inside.  You don’t need me to explain the theological significance of that.

But that’s not the point.  My neighbor was bringing the picture to us because she didn’t know what to do with it.  She’s kept it in her garage, but she didn’t want it in her house.  She didn’t want to keep it.

Because it’s in 3-D.  3-D Jesus.  You don’t need to be wearing special glasses or anything; he just kind of pops out at you.  Trust me, it is a little disconcerting. 

She said she used to ask Carolyn, “Carolyn, doesn’t that picture bother you?”  And Carolyn would always say, “No, I like it.”

But my neighbor said, “It’s kinda creepy.”  Yeah.

She brought it to us because she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, not because of it’s attachment to Carolyn but because it’s Jesus. 

“I can’t just put Jesus on the curb with the rest of the trash, can I?”

I have people come up to me all the time for spiritual counsel—at the gym, at the grocery store, while I’m eating at restaurants—and for all kinds of reasons. 

“Where is that verse that goes…”

“Will we see our pets in heaven?”

“Are Mormons Christian?”

But this was a first.  Is it wrong to throw 3-D Jesus away, even if it creeps you out?

Like I said, I’m upstairs listening while my neighbor is on the landing explaining her problem to me and Pam, so I can’t see the picture.  I can’t get the full effect of the 3-D.

So I ask her, “Does Jesus look at all Jewish in the picture?”

“No.”

“Does he look like some guy from Michigan or Minnesota?”

“Yes.”

“Then throw it away if you want.”

“I know.  But I can’t.”

What do you do when you have a creepy 3-D picture of Jesus that you want to get rid of?  Apparently you take it to your pastor-neighbors and let them do it.  I guess because we won’t get in as much trouble for it as someone else might.

So now 3-D Jesus is by our front door.  No one has taken him out to the trash yet.

Maybe I’ll use it to scare away the salesmen who keep knocking on our door trying to give me free estimates on new windows or siding.  Or those young people trying to sell me magazines so they can go to Hawaii.  Just open the door holding the picture in front of me.

Maybe I can work a deal with the Mormons the next time they come.  I’ll listen to them for thirty minutes, but they have to agree to take 3-D Jesus with them.  Let the Mormons throw 3-D Jesus away.

I mean, I love Jesus—but the 1st century Jewish 2nd person of the Trinity version, not the creepy 3-D white-guy-from-Minnesota version.

The Facts "Bear" It Out

As a follow up to the video on the previous post, the following was first published by The Baylor Proud Team in Athletics, Baylor 2012.  If by chance you find all this bragging about my alma mater somewhat insufferable, keep in mind two things:

1) I'm not used to Baylor being this successful in the major sports, so cut me some slack; and 

2) It's my blog. 

Baylor football, basketball, baseball set NCAA record for combined wins

Last summer, when it looked like the Big 12 Conference was about to fall apart and Baylor would be left scrambling for a new league, pundits across the nation said BU didn’t belong in a major conference. One year later, their songs have changed, thanks to Añodeloso — the Year of the Bear.

Let’s put some numbers on the Year of the Bear… When you add up the 2011-12 records for Baylor football (10-3), men’s basketball (30-8) and women’s basketball (40-0), you get a combined mark of 80-10. Those 80 total wins are a new NCAA D-1 record; here are the top five:

Year         School          FB   MBB   WBB  Total wins  Combined record
2011-12  BAYLOR     10     30       40           80         80-11 (.879)
2008-09  UConn          8     31        39           78          78-10 (.886)
2007-08  Tennessee  10    31        36           77          77-11 (.875)
2010-11  UConn           8     32       36           76          76-16 (.826)
2006-07  Ohio St.      12     35       28           75          75-9 (.893)

But let’s take it even further. Baylor baseball’s win Friday over Kansas State improved the Big 12 champion Bears’ record to 44-13. Combine that mark with football and hoops for a “Big Four” total, and you get a record of 124-24 — setting a NCAA D-1 record for combined wins across those four sports.

Year          School              FB   MBB     WBB    BB    Total wins  Combined record
2011-12    BAYLOR        10    30           40      44     124               124-24 (.838)
2003-04   Texas             10    25           30       58     123               123-31 (.799)
1984-85    Oklahoma       9     31           23       55     118                118-29 (.803)
2008-09   Oklahoma     12     30          32       43     117                 117-33 (.780)
2002-03   Texas             11    26           29       50     116                116-35 (.768)

With baseball ranked No. 6 in the country and only just entering the postseason, Baylor should be able to tack a few more victories onto that total before all is said and done. Add on Robert Griffin III’s Heisman and Brittney Griner’s consensus national player of the year honors — a combination only recorded one other time in the last 50-plus years — and this has truly been a year to remember.