Consider a young couple contemplating marriage.

If I were conducting their premarital counseling, I would suggest that they spend serious time discussing how they usually respond when the universe fails to deliver what they expected, wanted, hoped for or thought they deserved. Because it surely will.

Do they tend to look for someone to blame, perhaps themselves, or other people, or the government, or God?

Or do they see these occurrences as opportunities for learning and growth?

Seeing their daughter heading for a life-time commitment to a blamer, what parent would not want to raise a red flag?

Human beings look forward to things that have not happened yet in small and big ways. For example, we form a mental picture of an immediate future with a cup of fresh coffee. We get up, make a pot, and that future becomes actualized in the present in the moment of that first sip.

We create mental pictures of future states in the more distant future: graduation, that new house, new job, our retirement. We form expectations. We predict, hope and dream. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes wrong. We are surprised or disappointed.

We don’t mind when the universe delivers something much better than we expected or deserved. Even so, our prediction was wrong, and this can be dangerous. We can imagine we are exceptional, lucky, blessed by God, the kind of person that can beat the odds, for whom the usual rules do not apply. But there is always a day of reckoning.

In broad strokes there are only a few views of the future. 1) It is predetermined by the laws of nature. 2) It is determined by the decrees of God. God knows the future because He has decreed what is going to happen. 3) What we call past, present and future are just words to describe the human experience of a sequence of moments, but to God it is all one great eternal now. 4) The future is wide open, made up of infinite possibilities, anything can happen. 5) The future is somewhat open, with a finite number of possibilities. God allows many possibilities to be actualized in ways that sometimes make sense and sometimes seem random, but He is ultimately in charge of the whole show.

Which of these is correct? How do we know?

The future exists for us in mental pictures. Visions. Daydreams. Fantasies. Sometimes nightmares. What the future is like for God, or if it even exists for God before it happens, is above my pay grade.

We call some people visionaries. “Some men look at what is and ask why, I think of things that haven’t been and ask why not?” Sometimes the universe does not deliver what visionaries thought and hoped was possible. The answer to “Why not?” is simply. “That’s why not.” “It is what it is.” “Nice try” “The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry.”

Consider Kipling.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

We place our bets based on hopes and expectations of a future result. And we don’t always get it right. Then what?

Our future, and the future of every young couple dreaming of marital bliss, depends more on how we respond when we are wrong about the future than when we are right. Every time we get it wrong, we get to practice our response.

Job thought he lived in a world of clear, linear cause and effect; the future was bright for the righteous and bleak for the wicked. And then… the unexpected and unjust came crashing in, a painful present wiped out the pleasant future he was counting on.

In the midst of his loquacious complaints, he croaked out a few ragged affirmations of faith: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that in my flesh shall I see God.”

Here’s a poem my mother wrote after my brother’s death:

We tend to be much bounded by the earth

And limitations based on time and sight.

We sometimes forfeit things of greater worth,

By holding on to what we deem so right.

The eye of faith can see without a doubt

God working still, though unexpected thrust

Destroy the hope of what we dreamed about

And claimed as ours. There is a peaceful trust

That knows God’s purposes all spring from love.

He never errs, He sees beyond to day.

His ways are higher than our ways. Above

Our thoughts His thoughts and sometimes through delay

The fastest answers come. So I will rest

Assured within His love, I have the best.

Some of us remember R.E.M.’s hit, “Losing My Religion.” Unless you were raised in the south you might think the song was about a loss of faith. The melancholy melody would point you in that direction. Actually, it is not nearly profound as it sounds, as I learned in an interview with the composer.

“Losing one’s religion” means losing one’s temper, and likely saying some rather unreligious words in the process. As in, “If you keep that up, I’m likely to lose my religion.” And we can imagine what that might mean!

But quite a few people do in fact lose their religion in the other sense. That is how they would describe their walk away from the religious tradition in which they were raised.

Some walk away from “religion” but want to remain “spiritual.” Some just want to be done with the whole thing.

But that is not as easy as it seems. Something tends to become “religious” in our lives, even atheism, science, or our would-be pure spirituality. We find ourselves developing dogmas and creeds, rituals, liturgies, and a “worshipping” community, often online. We find there are heretics out there who disagree with us.

Some religions currently doing business as Christianity need to be lost or rejected. N.T. Wright would ask young self-identified atheists at Oxford to tell him about the God they don’t believe in. Invariably the rejected deity bore little resemblance to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He affirmed their rejection of these critters.

Sometimes rejection of a caricature can be a step toward finding the real. But often the road is long and hard. And some never find Him, even though He never gives up trying to find them.

Paul Tillich, in his little classic, Dynamics of Faith, defined faith as “ultimate concern.” That about which we are ultimately concerned is the object of our faith. Which means that no one is without a faith and a religion of some kind, since all have concerns and among them there is an ultimate. It is part of being human.

The object of our faith is profoundly significant. As Tillich says, “Ultimate concern can destroy us as it can heal us. But we never can be without it.” If you want to dig deeper, here is a helpful article.

There is tremendous spiritual hunger these days. Unlike the quest for broader horizons that we saw in the 1960s, and delight in possibilities yet unconsidered in psychedelics, sex, and the East, today it is a quest for certainties. This adds a harder, darker, more serious, less creative, less tolerant dimension.

Certainties don’t welcome other hypotheses or the uncertainties of agnosticism for dialogue; rather they require the errors of contradictory dogmas for energy and validation.

Creating a religion of your own has become very serious business indeed. It can take you into the courts, and into the streets. It divides churches and families. It can lead to bloodshed.

We want our religion customized to our minutest personal preferences and grievances. Then, paradoxically, we use all the means at our disposal to bring everyone else into compliance, or at the least to subject the uncompliant to ridicule. Our religion must be ours and it must be right. And you better agree and affirm. Live and let live doesn’t work anymore.

I believe that the impulse to customize a religion of our own is part of a larger drive to customize everything, and that this dynamic is itself our true “ultimate concern.”

In the midst of all this I am grateful for the option of receiving a religion not of my own making within a tradition that allows only minimal customization. And, unlike Rome or Orthodoxy, the Anglican way is unencumbered with the burden of being “the one true church.” In these two dimensions we are out of step with the times.

May we hold happily steady and calm and grateful.

“How is that working out for you?” People often ask this sarcastically when the obvious answer should be, “Not too well.”  It is an invitation to reconsider and perhaps to try something else.

But sometimes the answer is, “Just great!”

We’ve all heard the old saw: “Your current program is perfectly designed to deliver the results you are getting.”  That’s good news if you are very happy with your “results,” the life you are experiencing. There is no need to look for anything else. Your program is perfect!  Just keep doing what you are doing.

But nothing is static. Even if you change nothing on your side of the equation, the world around you is changing, more rapidly than ever. What worked well today is unlikely to deliver the same results next year.

Was there a season in your life when your wardrobe was perfectly in style? If you are still wearing the same clothes now (and they still fit!), they may be lovely, they may be “classic”, but they are not in style. What would it take to stay in style? At some point even “classic” threads become a “costume”.

Sometimes we just don’t know how something is working out for us. The feedback loops are too long or confusing, as when the gains (or pleasures) are immediate, though temporary, while the losses (or pains) are hidden, though lasting. This is far more the rule than the exception.

Christendom has been sustained by belief in the long-term (eternal) benefits of living the Christian life. These are so great as to outweigh short-term losses. “For the joy set before him” (long-term), Jesus endured the (short-term) agony of the cross.

In this week’s Epistle lesson St. Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). If someone were to ask him: “How’s that Christ-follower thing working out for you?” I think he would honestly say, “Painful at times, in the short-run, but glorious in the long-run. And strangely there is something glorious about that even now.”

How we can expect people today to follow Christ, captive as we are in the pursuit of short-term gains and pleasures and immersed in a rapidly changing, fickle, ruthless world? How, especially if His followers are just as caught up in the sad madness as everyone else? Do we have a viable alternative, a counter-culture, that makes Romans 8:18 plausible and even attractive?

I didn’t give much thought to the title of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” until this morning.

In Greek mythology the titan Atlas is condemned to support the heavens on his shoulders. In statuary he is depicted holding the world. Hence, we speak of “bearing the weight of the world on one’s shoulders”.

Rand equates the doers of this world, the creative, ambitious men and women of action who are thwarted by government and bureaucrats, with Atlas. What would happen if these folks “shrugged”, packed it in, quit, surrendered?

Allow me a bit of leap as I ask, “What if God ‘shrugged?'” The first chapter of Romans is one of the most haunting passages in scripture with its triple repetition of the phrase, “God gave them up…”

²⁴ Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity…

²⁶ For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions…

²⁸ And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 

C.S. Lewis wrote that ultimately there are only two destinies for humanity. There are those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.”

I am told that there is one word a narcissist cannot bear to hear. It is when, in response to their demands or drama or antics, the person they are trying to manipulate simply shrugs and says, “Whatever.”

As cold as it seems, could there come a time when God says in response to our narcissism, rebellion and rejection of his overtures, “Have it your way” — at least for a season? Could we be there now?

What if God simply withdrew His hand and let human nature take its course? The world we know today does not require the kind of active punishment we see from the hand of God in the Old Testament. Punishment, if not total annihilation, is built into the system. If “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” how long would we survive if a good God ceased His efforts?

Philosopher Charles Tayor, in his great little book, “The Ethics of Authenticity” develops the implications of our modern conviction that human choice is an ultimate good. I.e., a thing is right because I chose it out of my authentic self. No further justification is needed. Righteousness resides in the choosing, all the more so if I choose it against the norms. The irony is that if there is no higher standard than personal choice, our choices become meaningless and trivial and ultimately devoid of the value they claim.

What happens when, floating in a sea of fellow choosers, no one cares what we choose? “Cool.” “You do you!”

Imagine Frank Sinatra reaching the grand climax of his anthem, “I did it myyyyyy wayyyyyy.” There is silence in the hall, no applause. Then a voice from the cheap seats calls, “Yeah, me too” “So what?” “Who cares?”

I’ll never forget when my English professor told me that Robert Frost was being sarcastic when he wrote that taking “the road less travelled by” had “made all the difference.” It was like being told there was no Santa Claus! But a closer reading reveals this is in fact the point of the poem. Seeking significance in an age drained of transcendent values, old men tell themselves “with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence,” that their choices made a difference. All the difference between what and what?

Novelist Cormac McCarthy tells us that this is “no country for old men” — old men with the values and clarity, meaning and significance of that other time. It might be the lucky ones who get shot by honest bandits before they live long enough to see what has come to be.

Taylor makes the case that choices only have meaning in the face of an ideal greater than choice and individual authenticity. It takes ideals to give Choice A superiority over Choice B, and thereby provide any significance to the existence of chooser. Those ideals are fading away and with them any basis for meaning.

Similarly, “authentic” self-assertion relies on opposition for its energy.

What happens when no one pushes back? What happens when nothing is transgressive or wrong or shocking or counter-cultural? When society says, “Whatever.” We may have to manufacture opposition and “enemies of progress” just to validate ourselves a little longer.

When nothing is right or wrong, nothing matters. When nothing is good or bad, nothing is better or worse. “Nothing is real,” and there’s “nothing to get hung about.”

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me

How could it matter? There is hardly any me to matter to! I am fading away, another ghost with a cellphone and a credit card.

But don’t worry…

There is no pain [even though] you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying

Meaning and significance are becoming distant memories.

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb

T.S. Eliot imagined that the world would end not with a “bang, but a whimper.” Or maybe a yawn and a shrug.

Lord, please don’t give up on us. Help us turn back to you.

I’m talking about shalom, which is qualitatively much more than the absence of overt conflict.

People often comment on the atmosphere of peace they feel at St. Peter’s. It is a gift from God, but like all gifts, it makes us into stewards. Will we guard and nurture and even multiply the gift?

The price of peace is margin. Is it any wonder it is so rare?

Margin is just too high a price to pay for most Americans. Actually, its not margin itself, but what it takes to create margin. Margin requires discipline, budgeting our time the way we budget money.

Old Testament scholar, Victor Hamilton told us freshmen this story from his college days. After completing a grueling exam, his professor called him into the office and said, “Vic, you did very well on this exam, but let me ask you a question. Did you alter your normal study routine in any way in preparation?” Of course, he had been up into the wee hours preparing. His professor said, “It is more important for you to maintain your schedule than to ace exams.” It was a lesson he never forgot and he passed it on to us.

In “The Seven Habits,” Covey talked about the “P/PC Balance.” P stands for Production. PC stands for Production Capacity. If you achieve a lot of P but diminish your PC in the process you are on the path to bankruptcy. And, as we know, bankruptcy comes “very slowly, then all at once.” An overworked or undermaintained machine will keep running just fine with only minimal warning signs, until it quits — often for good.

Runners know that pace is crucial, even in races as short as 800 meters. Certainly so for anything longer. You can’t expect to catch up at the end what you mismanaged at the beginning.

But there is more than one way to mismanage pace. I learned this hard way.

To break 40 minutes for a 10K race I knew I had to average 6:24 per mile. I had done it in training and was eager to do it officially. I intended to do my first couple of miles at 6:15 to allow for fatigue later on.

There were time-callers at each mile. I misheard the call at mile one. Only getting the last two digits, I heard “… :45”. I panicked. I thought I was at 6:45 — 30 seconds slow. So, I poured on the steam. In fact, it had been 5:45, and my second mile was even faster. And I was in big trouble. Running anaerobically for that long, I had built up a oxygen deficit that I could not recover. I slowed down. I even walked. My fellows gave words of encouragement. It wasn’t coming back. I retired from the race in shame.

Mid-career breakdowns can be crippling. But they don’t have to be.

My great-uncle, a captain of industry in his day and philanthropist, was known to ask (himself mostly): “How much is your peace worth?” When he found himself getting anxious or exercised about something, and his peace draining away, this question pulled him back.

Always a man for efficiency and getting the most bang for the buck, he knew that there were few things more valuable than peace.

By brute force you can sometimes win, but the cost in lost peace makes it a Pyrrhic victory at best.

It would help if we could measure peace the way we measure money. “That opportunity will cost me X units of peace. Is it worth it?” “I don’t think I have enough peace to pay for that.”

Everything in our culture seems to be a conspiracy against peace. Peaceful people make lousy consumers — of almost everything. Anxiety and stress make this world go round. But it’s a death spiral. We are circling the drain.

As we consider any opportunity, even genuine needs, let us ask, “Can we do this in peace?” “Do we have the margin?”

Perhaps for a season we should say, instead of “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”, “Go, love and serve the Lord, in peace.”

Sadly, I’ve known a lot of tireless Kingdom workers who accomplished a lot, but without peace. Worse, they sucked all the available peace from their environment. Often it was their staff, their families, and especially their children who paid the “peace price”. Someone always does. Who is paying it in your world?

Beware of becoming a “peace banker” for habitual borrowers. They will take all you have to give and ask for more, one small crisis at a time. Consider saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I have enough peace to cover that.”

And as we celebrate victories and accomplishments let us not forget the question of the wise old professor: “Well, done. But did you alter your regular routine to achieve it?” And my great uncle: “How much peace did it cost you, and was it worth it?”

I propose a slight alteration to Covey’s model: “P/PPC Balance,” where PPC stands for Peaceful Production Capacity.

Time-management is only one way to increase our PPC. Can you think of others?

Being at peace with God is the “first and greatest” PPC multiplier. Peace with each other is “second and like unto it.”

So are:

• peace with the past, especially your regrets,
• peace with the future,
• peace with yourself,
• peace with your body,
• peace with what (and who) you can’t control,
• peace with your mortality and the inevitability of pain,
• peace with the fact of consequences,
• peace with those who hate you, misjudge or just misunderstand you,
• peace with those who have done you wrong,
• peace with those who got what you wanted, and don’t deserve it,
• peace with those who won’t learn from their mistakes,
• peace with the hypocrites and the freeloaders and the holier-than-thous,
• peace with the injustice, imperfection and general fallenness of this world,
• peace with the provisions and promises of our Risen Lord.

These “peaces” will cost us something. Mostly pride and illusions about who we are and what we deserve. We’ll have to lay down some rights and resentments and critiques and blaming. Which is harder, that or time-management? Why not try both?

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peace-makers.”

The first two Amendments to the Constitution are getting a lot of attention these days. For most of my life the 2nd has been controversial. Only recently has the 1st come under serious challenge.

Lately I’ve been thinking that the 5th may be more important than we thought, especially the part about not being compelled to testify against oneself. We may find that the right to “plead the fifth” is not just for mafiosos and corrupt politicians.

But will it stand up under pressure?

Increasingly people are being condemned not only for their words but for their thoughts. The police in England recently demanded that a man tell them what he was thinking as he prayed silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic.

They don’t have a Fifth Amendment in England, nor a Constitution for that matter. We have one, but will it protect us in the moment of truth?

In the show trials of Soviet era and in Communist China, prisoners were compelled to make lengthy, earnest and impassioned public confessions often weeping for their “offenses.” These did not lighten their sentences, but they did end the torture.

I’ve been thinking about potential conversations, not in a law court, but just informally, when I might be grilled about my opinions. People often want to know where the pastor stands on this or that issue. Sometimes the query is sincere; sometimes it is a trap. In many cases the wisest thing would be to follow the example of Jesus at His trial and just remain silent (as a lamb before his shearers was dumb).

How much longer will it be possible to smile and say, “I’d rather not talk about that. Let’s respect and enjoy each other even if we don’t agree on this”? I know of life-long friendships terminated because someone would not vehemently agree with (confess to) the other’s position.

Here we are. Not what most of us expected. Remember the old saying: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” It stood me in good stead on the elementary school playground. Nowadays words have become nuclear in their potential to destroy, not the hearer, but the speaker.

If any of us ever run afoul of the State or an “activated” citizen, I’m pretty sure it will not be for any physical offense, but for our words and thoughts. “Whatever you say, and even what you don’t say, can and will be used against you.”

I hope this is just a phase. Human history records discernible cycles that include hyper-puritan moments, when we seek uniformity in lock step, we go witch-hunting, -burning, and -gassing. People who watch these things say they come around about every 80-90 years. They might be on to something.

How tragic that we have reduced the nearly infinite wonder and complexity of being human to a few opinions, usually about a few flawed fellow mortals. Think of all the ways humans can enjoy being with each other; we are made for each other. It can be a lot of fun– cooking, eating, playing, laughing, joking, singing, praying, putting on plays, practicing our toastmaster skills, watching our kids play together, cleaning up a stretch of the creek or the highway — even bowling!

Have we become so insecure that any difference of perspective feels like a physical threat? Have we run out of real problems to solve, real needs to meet? Are we not spending enough time outdoors? Is it time to unplug? Happy, confident people do not try to enforce conformity or crush dissent.

Dallas Willard once said, “If there were a better way to live than being a disciple of Jesus Christ, Jesus would have been the first to tell us about it.” Let that sink in a second. Can you imagine Jesus knowing a way to live that would bring us the greatest possible good and keeping it secret? Even among those who doubt the divinity of Christ, and the miracles and all that, few believe He had the ill-will to hide or withhold something good. 

Following that line of thinking here are five questions.  How we answer them shapes us deeply. 

1. Is there a God?
2. If so, does He know what is best for us?
3. If so, does He want what is best for us?
4. If so, has He revealed what is best for us in a way that we can understand it, act upon it, and begin to experience it in my own life here and now?
5. If so, where can we find this revelation, and why should we trust it?

I wonder what it would be like to raise these questions with someone in a non-church situation.   Could you visualize using these five questions as an evangelistic conversation starter? 

The first question is not as simple as it used to be. Do we believe that there is a God who actually exists, who is not a projection of our imaginations and not altered by our preferences? Is there a God whose unique existence is at least as solid as ours? We exist as we are, not as others imagine we are, nor wish we might be, nor try to make us be. Does God exist like that? If not, then there really isn’t much need to go to question number two. Only if there is a God who exists outside of our heads do those questions make sense.

If such a being exists, but He doesn’t really understand human beings in general and me as an individual and doesn’t know what is best for us all and for me in particular, then His views are at best a curiosity and have no real significance to me.

Moving to question three, notice I did not ask, “Does God love me?”  That’s an important question, but with the word “love” so damaged and confused these days, I thought it might be clearer to phrase it differently.  Wanting someone’s best is actually a pretty good definition of love. If someone says they love me, and they don’t want my best more than their own advantage, well, I don’t need that kind of love, do I? 

Think of the guy who professes to “love” a girl but is eager to express that “love” in ways that are anything but the best for the girl. Or say a parent, who professes love for a child, but raises the child in a way that does not contribute to the child’s strength and well-being and maturity.  Or say a wife who year-by-year grows weaker or more fearful under her husband’s “loving” care. That’s why I kept it simple: “Does God want what is best for us?”

I admit, it would be easy to feel a kind of Socratic “cornering” to this line of questioning, like a good trial lawyer playing the jury.  If you answer affirmatively the first three questions, there is no logical reason not to obey anything that this kind of God says. The only logical reason to disobey God is to believe He doesn’t know or want what is best for me, or both. But I’m not trying to corner anyone into obedience. That takes care of itself under the right conditions.

Logically you can’t respond to the first three questions in the affirmative and the fourth in the negative.  Consider, given the universal human penchant to hurt and harm ourselves and others, to abuse power and to seek our own pleasure at the expense of other people, animals, and this beautiful world — if God knows and wants what is best for us, He must reveal the way to a better life, and He must do it in a way that we can understand and act upon.  Right? 

(Some would say God must do more than “reveal”.  It’s time to shut the whole program down, as in the days of Noah. But I won’t follow that rabbit for now.)

In the last century there were a number of intellectuals who said we need no revelation from “above”.  What with Darwin, steam power, electricity, the telegraph and the League of Nations we were figuring it out just fine without the revelation of a good and wise God. All we needed was time to let reason and science flourish without the inhibitive forces of superstition.

World War One put a damper on that optimism.  Then came the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Stalin. Mao. Pol Pot. The last 80 years of futile little wars, trillions spent on destruction, the fouling of the oceans, burning the Amazon, rampant drug addiction, moral degradation, sexual confusion, AIDS, human trafficking, cruelty, neglect, corruption, an epidemic of distrust and bitterness, social media insanity and hatred, lab-enhanced viruses, and a 30 trillion-dollar national debt. I’m pretty sure we aren’t figuring it out very well on our own; we need help. Maybe the aliens will show us the way. Maybe AI.

If we answer question number four negatively, then we must not believe that a wise God wants what is best for us.  If He knows but does not want our good, then He is simply evil. If He wants it but does not know what it is, then really, what use is He to us? If He knows it but reveals it in ways we can’t grasp or act upon, ways that only confuse and frustrate us, turn us against each other, and ultimately do not work, then He is a particularly cruel kind of evil.

Question five requires a choice, a decision. There are lots of revelations on offer these days in the great religious marketplace of our pluralistic society. There are numerous scriptures and ways of interpreting those scriptures. Which will we choose to believe is the authentic revelation of the God who knows and wants our best, and why? Will it be the one we were raised to believe in? (Or anything but the one we were raised in?!) The one that our friends believe in, if we have any religious friends? The one that seems to produce good results in the people who believe and follow it? Will it be the one that affirms our current life-style and values? We make our choice for some set of reasons, and many of them might be subconscious.

How can followers of Christ hope to encourage others to become His disciples too? Why should they care what the Bible says? Do we have a part in helping others to accept the proposition that the revelation contained in the Bible, rightly understood, is the expression of a God who knows us, loves us, knows what is best for us, and wants us to know it and experience it?

Today many people are confused. Many are suffering. Their lives are far from any conception of the “best” or even the tolerable. The Bible makes no sense to them. The Christian life they have seen in others makes no sense to them.  It is hard to blame them for rejecting much of the Christianity they have seen. What is the answer?

What if the credibility of the Christ-following life is in our hands? What if it is on us to be the reason people should choose the Bible as the written revelation of God’s best for humanity and all creation, and Jesus Christ the best living example?

A former colleague closed his letters and emails with the signature line, “Kingdom first!” It always called to my mind Jesus’ offer in Matt 6:33: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.”

Stephen Covey, in his classic “7 Habits,” demonstrated that the only way to protect our priorities from getting lost in “the thick of thin things” was to “put the big rocks in first.” Here’s a clever video.

In English “first” can be understood as a function of time, and of priority. Sometimes both. For example, if exercise is a priority, it might be a good idea to do it first thing in the morning.

The motto of my alma mater, The Stony Brook School, is “Character Before Career.” Most of her graduates have had successful, some stellar, careers in the world of business, science, law, medicine, education, the military and ministry; and I’m sure the character emphasis made a difference.

The secular world values and rewards character traits like honesty, integrity, and self-discipline that Stony Brook tried to instill. But I’ve been pondering, what if the motto were “Kingdom Before Career”? How would that have been incorporated into the curriculum and activities of a school? How would my student days have been different? Would that emphasis have altered the profile of our alumni? Would the world have been as welcoming of young men and women saturated in the values of the Kingdom? Would the world have been any different?

It’s fascinating to observe which Bible verses come to define the Christian life and identity. John 3:16 is certainly in anyone’s top five. We frequently identify people as “believers” or “non-believers.” Before the disciples and their converts took the name “Christian” they were called “followers of the way” in the book of Acts. One would assume that “followers” would also be “believers” and vice versa. Perhaps the terms are synonymous, but carry a different nuance, at least to me.

In Kenya church folks made a distinction between being “a Christian” and being “saved.” That is strange to our ears, but there one could be a Christian by virtue of baptism and church attendance and decent behavior. The title “saved” designated those who had been touched by the East Africa Revival and who lived and prayed and sang and testified in the manner of that revival.

Here is where I’ve been going: Is it possible to be “a Christian” or “saved” or a “believer” without being a “Kingdom seeker?” Or a “Kingdom first seeker”? I can speak for myself. I was baptized as an infant. I “asked Jesus into my heart” at age 5. I responded to many “altar calls” and made many “rededications.” I had a strong and temporarily transforming encounter with the Holy Spirit.

In retrospect I could see all of those experiences as species of “Kingdom seeking” or at least a hunger for God. But is this what Jesus meant when He said, “Seek first the Kingdom…”? What should we make of that word “first”? For what percentage of my life, even my life in ministry, has the Kingdom been truly my first priority? Only God knows for sure, but I have a pretty good idea. (And a pretty reliable gauge to measure it.)

There are wonderful promises attached to this invitation from Jesus. Jesus makes this offer in the context of anxiety about other things. “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’…. But, seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.” One of my students once asked me with great anxiety: “I’ve been seeking the Kingdom all my life, but where are the things?!” He never saw the irony because he had still not gotten the point.

When we stop to think about it, most of our anxiety is rooted in concern about things other than the Kingdom. We tend, like my student, to see Jesus’ statement as a key to unlocking material provisions–food, shelter, clothing. Then, with these in hand, we will be relieved of anxiety. Except there are never enough material possessions to calm an anxious heart. In fact, it usually works the other way.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what Jesus meant. He wasn’t interested in giving formulas for success and prosperity. He called people into a new world and a new consciousness characterized by peace. When we seek first the Kingdom we get the Kingdom, and having the Kingdom relativizes everything else Whatever we find we have of food, shelter, and clothing, (or popularity or friends or “success” or control or prestige or authority or… ) is more than enough.

Is it too much to say that anxiety is a symptom of a Kingdom deficiency?

Capable of generating great wealth or poverty, delight or misery, wisdom or folly, knowledge or ignorance, skill or incompetence, this most valuable possession is all yours. Though someone is trying to take it away from you almost continuously, they cannot succeed without your permission. Any idea what it is? Attention. Your attention.

These reflections were triggered by a speaker who used the phrase “pay your attention.” It made me think, “Yes, my attention is actually mine.” And “pay” is a good verb. It reminds us that attention is something valuable, and something we choose how to spend.

How much attention do we have? Is it something you can accumulate like wealth? Not quite like wealth, perhaps, which we measure in quantity. But we can increase the intensity, focus and quality of our attention.

Like gold, attention has the value of a limited resource. But actually, the limiting factor is not attention but time. In each moment, you have only a limited supply.

What if instead of “pay” attention we thought in terms of “investing” our attention. That might be more accurate. Attention + Time = well, Everything. We are the product of what we have given our attention to for how long? And what we have not given our attention to.

“Pay attention!” said the teacher. “But I am paying attention!” said the little boy.

I don’t think anyone has an attention deficit, per se. Attention is there in abundance. We are just “paying” our attention to something or someone else. “Pay me your attention!” says the teacher. Ah, there’s the rub. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.

The most important task of life is learning what is worthy of our Attention + Time.

I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed in this, or the language used, but it is an important issue and I think the dialog is instructive.