Life expectancy dropped in the U.S. last year; despair is blamed, hope is the answer, and we have it to share.

Life expectancy in the United States dropped last year, and not from disease, war, or natural disasters, but due primarily to increases in both suicides and drug overdose deaths.  The statistics can be read in this article: Fortune: Here's Why Life Expectancy in the U.S. Dropped Again This Year  The associate professor who co-authored the report for the CDC, Steven Woolf, said "We are seeing an alarming increase in deaths from substance abuse and despair."  On average, 115 people die in America each day from a drug overdose, six per day from alcohol abuse, and the suicide rate has increased 24% between 1999 and 2014.  As a nation, we are losing young people at an alarming rate from causes whose root is despair/hopelessness.

There are public policy answers that might help stem the tide, there are things that can be done in the arena of public health to mitigate the worst aspects of this crisis and save lives, but these are not solutions to the question of why so many people in America are hopeless.  Our ancestors had less food, less comfortable and secure shelter and clothing, more fear of lawlessness and violent deaths, lived in a less free society with more injustice, worked longer and harder, were more subject to sudden death by disease, lost more of their children to scourges we have cured, had less education, less recreation, and less opportunity to change their lives for the better.  And yet it is here in modernity, with our unparalleled access to recreation and entertainment that despair and hopelessness have taken hold.  Material prosperity is not alleviating emotional poverty, why?

The element that will typically be left unaddressed in the debate that will follow this alarming report is spiritual health.  Hope is not solely a factor of economic or political situations, well off people in free societies (i.e. America) do not automatically have it, and those living in crushing poverty under repressive regimes do not automatically lack it.  Hope is a quality that mankind can possess, which all other forms of life on this planet are unconcerned with.  Hope is a difficult to define state of mind, but one we recognize when it is present or missing.  Hope is built upon things greater than ourselves, it thrives in community and wilts in isolation, and it hinges upon our expectations of the future.

We are less connected to our community than our ancestors, that much is certain.  We may see far more people in a given day than they could have dreamed of, but we interact on a genuine human level with few of them, and our technology has consistently striven to eliminate the need for true human to human interaction.  This is a part of the problem, but not its root, for that we must go deeper.

When Job lost nearly everything of value in his life: his business, his children, and his health, his wife despaired; who can blame a mother for doing so after enduring such pain?  Job chose not to despair, not because he was a unique human being, but because he understood something fundamental about human existence: it belongs to God.  Job responded to his wife by saying, "Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" (Job 2:10)  Later, in response to his friends' attempts to understand his tragedy, Job said, "Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him" (Job 13:15).  Job did not understand why he had suffered, he didn't see a purpose or a reason for it, but he did not give in to despair, he did not rage at God or take his own life, because even at the lowest point imaginable in his life he still knew who his Creator was, knew that God's love transcended the circumstances of life, and knew that one day he would stand before God in judgment.  Even when life told him otherwise, Job had hope because he was adamant in his belief in the goodness of God.

Hope is not our own creation, we cannot socially engineer it, we cannot package and sell it, it is a gift from God, a gift for those in relationship with the one who created them, sustains them, and will one day live with them.  As a runner, I can't help but like Isaiah 40:31

Isaiah 40:31 New International Version
but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint.

To live without hope is to live as a shell of what you were intended to be.  The Church of Jesus Christ is the caretaker of the hope that was given to humanity in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  When he ascended into heaven, having completed the Father's mission by securing the ultimate victory over sin and death, Jesus entrusted the sharing of that Good News (i.e. The Gospel) to his followers.  Since that day, nearly 2,000 years ago, the Church has attempted to share the news that God is willing to forgive those who repent, is willing to save them from the fallen state of humanity if they believe in his Son, and is willing to transform them, by the Holy Spirit, into the likeness of Jesus.  This news is hope beyond our imagination, it is light shining in the darkness, water to those dying of thirst, and it is free.  Freely given, freely received.  It is also available to all, men and women, young and old, of any race or nation, all are eligible, all are invited to join those who have found hope in what God has done for us through Jesus.

Paul wrote in his letter to the church at Ephesus about the transition from hopelessness to hope:  "remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ." - Ephesians 2:12-13

Living life while ignoring our spiritual need, a need all human beings share, is the path to despair.  Faith in Jesus is not a magic elixir, it doesn't take away all our troubles, or make us immune to pain and sorrow, but it does provide a foundation upon which we can stand, a shelter in times of storm.  As the writer of Hebrews put it: "we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged.  We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure." Hebrews 6:18b-19

The local church is a community, a group of people who have acknowledged their own shortcoming and have chosen to put their faith and hope in the sinless person of Jesus instead of themselves.  They are not perfect, but they are will one day be perfected by God.  They are not free from difficulty in this life, but they know that in the next they will see the face of God and all sorrow will be no more.  They worship, pray, and serve those in need, together, because God created us to be social, because we can shoulder each others burdens, and because there is great joy in being a part of the family of God.

Despair has lowered the life expectancy of the average American, but it doesn't have to be this way.  The problem derives from the spiritual barrenness that afflicts so many, and the solution addresses that very problem.  Belief in the saving power of Jesus Christ is faith, and faith belongs to a powerful trio: faith, hope, and love.

Faith is not anti-fact, at least it's not supposed to be.

There is a misconception, among both Christians and non-Christians, that the faith that is centered upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ is in some way anti-fact.  In other words, to believe in Jesus Christ is irrational.  There are some within the Christian community, both now and historically, who would applaud that characterization, for their understanding of faith tends toward the mystical and away from the logical.  While it is true that at the heart of Buddhism there lies an illogical contradiction (i.e. that I don't really exist, that the things I sense are not in fact real), this is not the case with either Judaism or Christianity.  Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) are predicated upon a God who created this universe rationally because God himself is a rational being, and while the nature of God may be beyond our understanding, limited as we are in time and space, we do not believe God to be self-contradictory.  God, whose is spirit, chose to create a universe governed by the laws of physics, a universe in which 2+2=4 and cannot at the same time also equal 3 or 5.  As beings created in the image of God, part of our existence is the way in which our minds understand and utilize logic.  The Rationalist philosopher Immanuel Kant popularized the idea of a priori knowledge, that which we do not need to be taught, but which is hard-wired (as it were) in the human mind. 

How then does faith fit with logic/rationality?  This is of course a large topic, one which has been the subject of many books arguing various nuances.  Let me simply take a brief look at the definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 and the examples that follow it.

"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."

At first glance, this verse might seem to lend weight to the idea of faith as an irrational thing, after all, what else can you say about believing something you don't see?  The listing of the Jewish saints that follows 11:1 confirms that the description is not intended to be one of irrationality.  Beginning with Abel, the author lists one after another of the men and women who, by faith, acted righteously.  If you look back at the stories that these examples refer to, you see that these people were not acting contrary to what their senses were telling them, they were not ignoring the facts on had, they were instead listening to the voice of their creator (often directly through conversations, dreams, or visions), responding to the evidence that they and their ancestors had seen regarding the reality of God (such as the birth of Isaac, the parting of the Red Sea, or the preservation of Rahab when the walls of Jericho fell), and obeying the Word received from God himself.  They were willing to live their lives now, even risk their lives, on the basis of what they knew to be true about God, his power, holiness, and love and were thus making a choice that was both rational and logical to value that which is eternal over that which is temporary.  As the soon to be martyred missionary Jim Elliot wrote in his journal in 1949, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."  It might seem crazy to an observer who does not know of God's history of utilizing his power on behalf of his people, to put one's life at risk to obey God rather than men, but it was not crazy at all to the likes of Daniel, who knew who God was, and acted accordingly.

Obviously, this is only scratching the surface of the discussion of faith and reason and how they interact with each other, but it does lend us an important warning about how Christians ought to think and act in this world.  We are not intended, by God, to be those who reject facts, evidence, and the like.  We are not supposed to be irrational, we are not supposed to ignore truths which are inconvenient to us.  Science is not the enemy of faith, neither are its sub-disciplines of archaeology, astronomy, biology, and the like. 

When Christians reject factual evidence out of hand, often for political reasons, they are simply chipping away at the foundation upon which they stand, strengthening doubt and weakening Truth by rejecting truths they do not like.  It is a dangerous game to insist that an event which occurred 2,000 years, and was witnessed by many and duly recorded, it absolutely True, but that which is observable and quantifiable right here and now is a conspiracy or a lie. 

I am not a Christian in spite of evidence to the contrary, my faith is not an act of defiance against rationality and logic.  I do not claim to have attained faith on my own (as if to give credit to my own mind), it is indeed an act of the grace of God to call lost sinners home through the Holy Spirit, but it is at the same time an action which confirms the evidence which my mind saw then and sees now, not one that ignores it.

Sermon Video: Come and see what God has done - Psalm 66

In a psalm of praise, the author speaks of our need to shout for joy to God, to sing the glories of his name, and then recounts the awesome deeds of God for his people and all mankind.  In addition, the psalm mentions that God preserves his people from "slipping" (immorality) through testing them with hardships.  In the end, the people of God, who have been shown the mercy of God, need to speak to others and share "what he has done for me."

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: Praise to the Lord of harvests - Psalm 65

In this psalm David writes of the praise that awaits God for calling us near to him (his holy temple) and forgiving our overwhelming sins, and then writes of the many awesome and righteous deeds of God on behalf of his people, focusing in particular on God as wondrous creator who has set up the earth to give forth abundance.  In our own experience, we live in an era where material abundance has never been greater, where hunger and starvation (while still a threat) are no longer the common experience of mankind.  That being said, we have even more reason that David to echo his praise of God, to continue to uplift the name of our Savior.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

The foolishness of "stay in your lane"

The slang phrase, "stay in your lane" has recently been invoked by the NRA to tell doctors that their opinion (in reality, bloody and often horrific expertise) is unwelcome in the controversial debate in America regarding gun control.  {Washington Post 11/11/18 - ‘Being silenced is not acceptable’: Doctors express outrage after NRA tells them ‘to stay in their lane’}  Rather than weigh in on the topic of gun control, a topic I have already bemoaned regarding its vitriol and lack of civil discourse {If I say anything about guns}, let me instead pontificate a bit about the phrase itself, "stay in your lane".  It should seem obvious that when such a phrase is used to try to keep women or minorities, for example, in "their place", that it blatantly violates a Christian worldview based upon Biblical principles.  After all, the Word of God takes pains to point out repeatedly that from God's perspective, "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28, NIV)  There is no such thing as a legitimate "place" that belongs to men, or to women, to any ethnic or racial group, to the rich or the poor, to citizens or non-citizens, or any other such distinction.  That such "places" do indeed exist in both the minds of many, in the rules and regulations of society and institutions, and is even enshrined in laws, is a testament to the fallen nature of humanity and our endless capacity to divide each other in order to lessen our God-given equality and God-ordained responsibility toward our fellow human beings.
That man-made groupings used to belittle or devalue other people ought to be anathema to the people of God is illustrated by Jesus choosing to make the hero of one of his parables (the Good Samaritan Lk. 10:25-37) and the recipients of his healing (The centurion's servant Mt. 8:5-13, the Canaanite woman's daughter Mt. 15:21-28) be foreigners whom the self-righteous of his day would have certainly told to "stay in their lane" and away from the Messiah.  Jesus didn't stop with demonstrating God's love for people beyond the Chosen People in terms of race, he also made sure to touch lepers when he healed them, breaking a powerful taboo in the process.  For Jesus, nobody was out of bounds, nobody was a lost cause.
Beyond the affront to Biblical principles of equality, the use of "stay in your lane" also exhibits a gross misunderstanding of where problems come from in society and how they can be mitigated.  Societal problems, whether gun violence, drug abuse, prostitution, gambling, or a host of others, do not exist in a vacuum, do not affect only those involved in them, and cannot be lessened without the help of more than those directly involved with them.  Should doctors be involved in gun violence issues?  Yes.  Should teachers be involved in the opioid crisis?  Yes.  Should ministers be involved in homelessness?  Yes.  Why?  Because we are all created in the image of God, we have all been given the task of combating evil in our midst, and while we hold out no hope that the world's ills can be "solved" while humanity remains in rebellion against God, we do certainly believe that we can and must work together to shine the light in the darkness.
I, as an ordained minister, will not "stay in my lane", whatever that is supposed to be.  I will also not tell non-ministers that they have no business commenting on the affairs of the Church, on theology, or on ministerial ethics.  I am willing to, and I ought to be willing to, listen to the laity of the church, to involve them in ministry, and to heed both their advice and their warnings concerning my ministry.  Arrogance is not an option, dismissal of the value of the contributions that can be made by the overlooked or the outcasts is not an option.  I am a shepherd of the sheep, an honor and a burden, but I am also no more than another worker in the field of the Lord.
We as a society face daunting challenges, this is no more nor no less true today than it has been for thousands of years.  If we are to make a positive difference in confronting these challenges, if we are to help those in need and thwart those intent upon evil, we must do so united, willing to accept help where it can be found, willing to give help wherever we can.  There is no room for "lanes" in the Church of Jesus Christ, so don't worry about staying in one.