Dear PCUM family-

In uncertain times like ours, it's tempting for people of faith to expect the Bible to provide clear and easy answers. Go this way, not that way. This is good; this is bad. These people are right; these are wrong.

When we give in to that temptation, we're using what our tradition calls God's Word as one of those instruction booklets, something we keep in a drawer and pull out to read only when things aren't working and all else has failed. But the "quick fix" approach doesn't usually produce the results we need. Maybe that's because the people who lived and then wrote about their relationship with God in the sixty-six different books of the Bible didn't see faith as a last resort. They saw it as a relationship, something they had to work at every day, a journey of discovery and change that--whether, on a given day, they were good at it or not--kept them close to God.

When we're tempted to go for the quick fix, we Christian-types might do well to learn from our "Mother faith," Judaism. There's an old saying that goes something like: "Christians turn to scripture to end a conversation, but Jews turn to scripture to start a conversation."

A life of trust in God, the life of faith, is that conversation. It doesn't always produce the answers we'd like or even expect, but it does keep us close to God, and it always takes us--individually and together--somewhere we need to go. I like a couple of the destinations the young theologian Rachel Held Evans's arrived at in her too-short life. In her book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking On Water, and Loving the Bible Again, Held-Evans said:

“Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.”

“The church is not a group of people who believe all the same things; the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.”

In Christ's peace,

Pastor Greg