Back From Church Camp

Two amazing things have happened recently, but as I was out of town as a counselor at a high school age church camp, I haven't had the time to relay them.

I will remedy that now.

First, last Friday I got carded at an R Rated movie.

I know. Awesome.

I had never in my life been carded at a movie before. In fact, I forgot that they could card you at movies.

Despite having turned 30 on my last birthday, the ticket seller assumed I must be 16 and therefore unable to see an R Rated movie.

(However, no one at the church camp mistook me for a youth. At least not to my knowledge.)

The second amazing thing that happened was a bit of divine insperation...

Paintball On Ice.

How awesome would that be? It came to me at breakfast, the sport fully formed in my head. I really want to play it.

Anyway, I'm way behind on things in the news and the political world especially as I've been out of touch for a full week (although I did hear that Tiger won the US Open on a broken leg and a torn ACL, unbelievable) so anything more in depth will have to wait till later.

After all, my Google Reader has over 300 unread items.

My Sermon

Yesterday, I preached a sermon.

I'm not a preacher, I'm not even exactly a minister.

But, I have been working at a church as the Interim Youth Minister for the last few months, and my post is about to end.

Yesterday, the minister was out of town at an area church camp, and he asked me to fill in for him. I said yes.

I have to admit, I thought it would be much easier then it was. I have a new found respect for those that write a sermon every week.

No doubt some subjects are easier to preach on then others, but still it is a hard task and I don't envy those that must fulfill it weekly.

Thanks to some good talks with a couple people during the week and a flash of inspiration early Saturday morning, I had my sermon written by lunch time on Saturday. That's pretty good for me.

If you're interested, you can read it below...

Scripture Readings:
Genesis 12:1-9
Matthew 9:18-26
Romans 4:13-25

Last Sunday, I was teaching CYF Sunday School and we talked about Faith and Doubt. I’d love to tell you that I chose that subject in order to prepare for this sermon, but I have to be honest, I had not even looked at the scripture for this week as of yet. I’m a bit of a procrastinator. My mother’s here this morning, she’ll tell you. There were far too many evenings growing up when I would go to Mom and ask if we could go to the library. She’d patiently tell me that the Library was already closed for the day and ask why I needed to go, hoping that I just needed some new reading material.

I would answer something about a report due on some strange and foreign country the next day. She would then get exasperated and after a lecture about responsibility and such we would head to a bookstore. Not surprisingly we invested in a set of Encyclopedias fairly early in my childhood.

So, knowing that about me, it should come as no surprise that last week’s Sunday School lesson was not meant to be in any way a preparation for this sermon, but I lucked out. It turns out talking about Faith and Doubt was in fact perfect for this sermon.


I asked the high school students to define the words Faith and Doubt, and I got some pretty good answers. But we also joked about some of the definitions that you often find in a dictionary.

We figured that if you looked up faith you would see…
FAITH: the absence of doubt.
Well, that’s not very helpful. Let’s look up doubt.
DOUBT: the absence of faith.
And now we’re even more confused.

It is clear that the two are connected. Despite our belief that if we looked them up in a dictionary we might find something very similar to the definitions that we joked about, I don’t really think that those definitions are true.

In fact, I think that it’s not only possible but probable that you can have faith despite some doubt, and I know for a fact that you’re going to have some doubt with your faith. After all, it’s only human to doubt. We aren’t perfect, and we can’t understand God’s perfection, therefore it is only natural that, as humans, we cannot have perfect faith. We can certainly try for perfection, we can strive for it, but we aren’t perfect and we will fail. We can say we believe fully and completely, we can want to believe fully and completely, we can act as if our faith is perfect, but we aren’t perfect and we will fail.

And that’s okay.

One of my Movie Labs that I’ve led at various churches (including this one) and at various camps over the years explores the idea of faith as addressed in film. For those of you who don’t know, my degree is in Radio-TV-Film and I minored in Religion and one of my passions is exploring the relationship between religion and film and especially in how religious themes are portrayed on screen. In my lab cleverly titled “Faith in Film” I explore the difficulty of faith as experienced by Mel Gibson’s character in the movie Signs and Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact.

In the film Signs, Mel Gibson’s character is a preacher who has lost faith in God following the death of his wife. Ultimately, it is through things she tells him in their last conversation that he is able to save his family and that his faith is ultimately restored. Had it been solely up to him, however, his faith would never have been restored.

In Contact, Jodie Foster’s character is a scientist and an atheist. She claims that since there is no scientific proof in God there is no reason to believe in God. However, in the third act of the movie she has what can only be termed a religious experience and despite all proof to the contrary, she believes that that experience occurred. Her faith in science was strong, but when science seemed to argue against that which she knew to be true, she no longer had easy answers. She just believed. Without that experience she never would have had faith in something bigger then herself, but because of it, even though she still has her doubts, she believes.

It would be out of character for me to not bring up Star Wars. You see, the first film came out in May of 1977. I was born in December of 1977. You know what they say about things you experience in the womb shaping you? Well, it isn’t my fault that I am a huge fan of the Star Wars Universe, my parents shouldn’t have gone to see it before I was born. It probably would have saved them a lot of money in Star Wars action figures over the next decade.

Anyway, in that first movie, Luke is flying through the canyon in the Death Star and he turns on his targeting computer for one last try to destroy the Death Star before it can blow up the planet housing the Rebel base. The Rebels had to shoot into a tiny hole at the end of the canyon, and the last two attempts had failed. The attack plan seemed impossible. Suddenly he hears a voice, the voice of his dead mentor, that tells him to turn off his targeting computer and to trust in the Force. Despite his doubts he allows the Force to flow through him and Luke saves the day.

In each of these cases, the characters are forced by outside elements to overcome their doubts. In each film, the character would not have been able to succeed without the outside influence, the words of the dying wife in Signs, the religious experience in Contact, or the words of comfort and advice from Obi Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. In the same way, our faith in and of itself is not enough either. Either because of doubts or our own imperfections, we can only achieve anything through faith combined with the help of God.

In the scripture that I opened with, Paul talks about Abraham’s faith. He argues that it is the strength of that faith that guaranteed what God had promised him, and that faith is what guarantees his descendants (aka us) the same thing.

Paul says that Abraham believed even though his body “was as good as dead” and despite the “barrenness of Sarah’s womb” that faith is what delivered God’s promise to Abraham.

Sounds good. “Have faith, God will work miracles for you.” Except that isn’t exactly the way that it happened. We know that while Abraham and Sarah had faith, they also had some doubts. We’ve heard the stories. They wanted to believe, but they also knew that Sarah was barren. She wasn’t going to be having children that would father many nations. I mean, sure God’s powerful and everything, but some things are simply impossible.

If Abraham was going to be the father of many nations, God must have meant someone else would be the mother. So Abraham took matters into his own hands. He tried to bring about God’s promise in his own way because of his doubts.

Did God look at that lack of faith and say, “Never mind, I’m going to choose someone else”? No, instead God gave Abraham and Sarah a miracle despite the doubt. God took the faith that they did have, an imperfect faith filled with doubt, and perfected it.

Doubt isn’t a bad thing. Perhaps my faith while growing up that I would get my assignments done and turned in on time no matter when I started them could have used a little more doubt. I’m sure that some doubt would have fostered preparedness, which would have at the very least made my parents breathe a little easier.

God doesn’t expect us to be perfect, because God knows that we aren’t and cannot be perfect. It is that which makes our relationship with God so important. We do what we can, hopefully the best that we can, and God comes in and perfects it.

God sent us a perfect example to illustrate this. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Jesus’ humanity caused him to die on the cross. Jesus’ divinity allowed him to rise from the dead. Without the imperfection of humanity, Jesus could not have died, and without the perfection of divinity Jesus could not have risen.

In Matthew, we heard the story of the unclean woman who comes up behind Jesus and touches the hem of his garment believing it will heal her. Jesus tells her that it is her faith that has healed her. Her faith is rewarded even if we might question the way that she went about getting healed by Jesus. It seems to me that had her faith been perfect she would have stopped Jesus in the road and asked him to heal her, but perhaps she doubted that he would do so.

After all society viewed her as unclean, and it was believed that anyone she touched or anyone that touched her would also become unclean. She might have felt that Jesus would not be willing to make himself unclean in order to heal her and so she took it upon herself to touch him. Despite her doubts in Jesus, her doubts in his willingness to help her, her faith was rewarded and she was healed.

God expects us to be imperfect, because that is who we are. God is perfect and only through God, and our faith in God, can we ultimately be perfected.

In Sunday School last week we ultimately decided (after taking a few detours to discuss upcoming finals and whether or not Chimichanga is a real word, after all we aren’t perfect), we ultimately decided that although we should always strive to have a strong faith, we knew that we would have some doubts. But luckily Jesus told us that even faith the size of a mustard seed was enough to move mountains, and that is a good thing, because often it is our doubts that seem to be the size of mountains and our faith can seem very small and insignificant beside them, but with God’s help, that small and seemingly insignificant faith can overcome even a mountain of doubt.

Is Tonight The Night?

Senator Barack Obama is 42 delegates shy of the number required to clinch the Democratic nomination. (The number changed when the rules committee decided to award Florida and Michigan the ability to seat their full number of delegates, but counting each delegate as half) 31 delegates are up for grabs tonight in the final two contests of the Democratic primary process, which admittedly isn't enough to sow it up for Obama this evening, but reports indicate that after the two processes end a number of the Super Delegates (about 200 of which remain uncommitted) will flock to his side giving him the requisite 2118 delegates ending the long and hard fought nomination process.

The Associated Press announced that Clinton was ready to concede the race either this evening after the two final primaries or tomorrow morning, but only minutes later, Senator Clinton's Campaign Chair refuted that story. (Read CNN's article here)

My feelings are that chances are good that Obama will have the requisite number of Delegates to claim victory this evening and shortly after Clinton will concede, but due to the fact that there are two contests remaining today, Clinton doesn't want the news that she is preparing to concede to get to the public.

Either way, Nancy Pelosi seems determined that the race will be over by the end of this month saying, "I will step in, because we cannot take this fight to the convention." She was saying that she will make sure that the remaining Super Delegates make their decision to back Obama or Clinton and bring this long race to an end so that the party can get itself together in order to take on McCain in November.

It should be an interesting night as six months of Obama/Clinton might finally come to an end just in time for six months of Obama/Clinton together against McCain. (I officially now believe that such a pairing is not only possible, but probable. I'll have more on that in it's own post.)