April 18, 2004 - "A Conversation with a Former Skeptic"
A coversation between Dr. Stephen C. Lien, Rev. Dee Cooper and a BPC member

Pastor Lien:I want to introduce our guest for today. She has been a member of this congregation for a number of years, has served as an Elder, and is an entrepreneur. In the course of several months of conversations with Carol and several others, we asked her if she would be willing to share her faith journey with us as well as represent the skeptical voice in all us, which is what she is going to do in a moment. So at this time I want to call on Carol to share with us what has been going on in her life.

Carol: I want to tell you a story about a transformative experience that I had during lunch in Santa Monica a couple of years ago. But first, some background, as my assignment was to tell you about a journey and not just an event. I was raised in a Presbyterian church in a small town in a rural county in southern Indiana and went happily to Sunday school and vacation Bible school and church camp and youth group . . . and honestly, it never even occurred to me to believe what I heard there. I could not understand Christianity and in my heart I couldn't feel anything about Christianity to be true. So at twelve, after confirmation class, I did not join the church. I was not trying to be difficult, I was just surprised that anyone would expect me to stand up and say in front of other people, "I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior." Quite honestly, I had no idea what those words meant and so I didn't say it. And honestly, I never looked back.

So I was an agnostic -- a proud, idealistic agnostic for a couple of decades. And that was how I lived. I was not interested in religion. I was interested particularly in institutions that embraced the full value of women and girls. I was interested in changing the world for the better. I was a bit arrogant about it. I was interested in revolutionary ideas. In my thirties, in Los Angles, before I met my husband, I got my good buddy, Karen, to go church shopping with me and we didn't really think about going to any Christian churches. We went instead to a Sikh temple, a Buddhist service, several Jewish synagogues and, honestly, a couple of disastrous experiences with New Age religion. I actually got into an argument in the middle of a service with a New Age leader and I really can't recommend it.

As the two of us tried on these religions, I will say I was always heartened by how warmly we were welcomed everywhere. So many people wanted to show us the truth - the real truth - their truth. And then I got married and had children and very reluctantly felt a pull to do something for my children's spirits. Well, I thought, you know, those Presbyterians are predictable. Nothing too bad, nothing too radical can happen at a church like BPC. So I started coming to BPC strictly for my children.

Well, I started listening up on Sunday morning and I was shocked. What I heard, if you took Christianity seriously, what a world we would have! Just one example of what I heard here that just seemed extraordinary to me - this teaching of Christ: Love thy neighbor as thyself. We should all love each other irrationally, wildly, and abundantly, as much as we love ourselves.
I thought, could this be serious? Well, there are probably a lot of you who have mustered that kind of selfless abundant love for others, but frankly, I had to get the hang of it. And I got the hang of it by first feeling it for my children. With children, you just love them effortlessly and abundantly. And I thought, well, maybe this crazy-kind-of-parent love seemed for me like an earthly glimpse of Christ's love. Well, hearing this "love thy neighbor" ideology at BPC, I started to really wonder what the world could be like if we all really loved each other in this wildly abundant Mommy-or-Daddy-kind-of-way, where you see both the good and the bad in people and you just love them straight on through it. I think that is what Christ had in mind.

So this is finally where the lunch in Santa Monica comes in. I was sitting one day at lunch, yet another business lunch, in a "cool" Santa Monica restaurant and I decided to try an experiment. I would fill the time with wild, abundant, Christ-like love. We had ordered lunch from a scrawny, incompetent of a waiter, some young guy who I barely even noticed as he lackadaisically took our order. He was not attentive; he was not helpful. I remember feeling, "Hey, guy, I'm the customer, pay attention to what I want." But while we waited for our food, looking honestly for a way out of boredom, I forced a transformation of my heart. I became his mother. That unknown woman somewhere who delights in his every move, who doesn't care that he is a lousy waiter, because she knows his dreams; who sees his spirit; who remembers the fragrance of his baby breath and the soft touch of his toddler skin and who remembers the exuberance of his four-year old smile; who sits at home now somewhere and longs to see that smile.

Well, this homely, incompetent waiter returns to our table with the wrong food. And it was astonishing how much he had changed. I barely noticed how he bumbled our order, but I delighted in his mind being on more important things. I barely saw a bad haircut, but saw how shiny and nice his hair looked against his collar. I didn't see how scrawny he was, instead he moved with grace. He just seemed to glow with promise and looked exquisite. And when I couldn't help but beam at him with just crazy affection, he looked over at me and cocked his homely, lovely head and looked at me wide-eyed, puzzled, confused. I had to peek cautiously over my children's shoulders to see what Christ's love is, and when I dared to try to live it, I managed to sustain at first that kind of love in one meal, in one place, for one person. But when I did, he glowed with grace and so I think did I. It can be done and that is revolutionary.

Pastor Lien: We appreciate your courage, Carol, in sharing in front of the congregation and for your willingness to represent a viewpoint and provocative questions we will explore in this conversation among the three of us.

But before we do that, just a little more context and a Scripture verse from which I want to take a metaphor that I think is appropriate for us. The Old Testament Book of Genesis, the thirty-second chapter, starting at the twenty second verse - I won't read it for you, but I will tell you this little story and you can then reference it for yourself. I think many times in our Christian faith, we think when you come to faith, it is an all or nothing deal. And when you come to live in this relationship with God, you are supposed to put aside all of your questions or struggles or doubts. We think that faith is the absence of doubt. And I don't think that is the case. I think that faith is holding together the doubts and the struggles at the same time. It is living in the ambiguity, many times, of where our heads can't take us. I think we need to understand that as Christian people, God delights in our minds. God is the one who gave us our inquisitive minds in the first place and so delights when we struggle and agonize.

There is a particular image in the thirty-second chapter of Genesis. One of the people we might call a hero is named Jacob when we first meet him in the Old Testament. But there really are no heroes in the Bible, except one, and that is God. All the rest of the people have all kinds of idiosyncrasies and so did Jacob. He was really a crook. He was a dissembler. He was a twin - Jacob and Esau - and Jacob managed to connive and swindle his brother out of his birthright and was an unsavory kind of character. Years into his life, he was about to reconcile with his brother and he was very fearful about it. And the Scripture tells us a story about the night before he was going to see his brother. Jacob was all alone all night long wrestling with an angel. And he wrestled with this angel - perhaps a representative of God. Perhaps the most important part of the metaphor is someone who is struggling to make sense of the life that does not often easily yield to making sense. Jacob struggled with the angel until daybreak and the angel said, "Let me go," and Jacob said, "I am not going to let you go until you bless me." But before the angel blessed him, he touched Jacob's hip. So from that day forward Jacob walked with a limp.

This is a wonderful image about our lives - sometimes when we have encountered God or a terrible crisis in our lives, we limp from henceforth. And the angel blessed Jacob and asked what is your name. It is Jacob. No longer, he said, shall it be Jacob, but your name shall be Israel. And Israel then became the father - one of our ancestors in the faith, and the father of Israel, the nation. He encountered God and his life was changed. And so it is with us. We encounter God and our lives are changed, but we retain our minds - we retain our questions. And what we need to do as Christians is to figure out ways to have that kind of dialogue, both within our congregation and with the world outside the church, so we too can learn comfortably to wrestle with God and live in faith.

Will you join me in prayer? God, help to continue to engage our minds in places that are fearful or anxiety-producing for us. We pray that you would take off our blinders on the things that we need to hear from you; that you soften our hearts and lighten our minds. Let us find even in this conversation some truth that we didn't possess before. May we find permission and a freedom-like angry children coming to a parent to say, "How come? Why not? What if?" And to find a delight in our relationship with you, who loves us more than we can say, more than we can imagine. So bless this conversation, God, in your name we pray. Amen

We're just going to scratch the surface of some things this morning. One of the things we ask is that you don't isolate a sound bite. These things need lots of elaboration. We're just going to barely touch the surface of some things, hopefully whet your appetite. Carol is going to ask some questions and we're going to take it from there.

Carol: Well, this is a dream come true, Pastor Lien, Pastor Cooper. Since I was twelve years old, after confirmation class, I wanted to get a really clear answer to that question "What does it mean to say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior?" What does that mean specifically?

Pastor Cooper: Pass.

Pastor Lien: That's not allowed! OK, Carol, you will find many, many different answers from Christian, Protestant people all over kingdom come. They are all over the map with that kind of answer. Let me provide a couple of things and maybe Dee can provide some others.

Historically, in the orthodox Christian faith, accepting Jesus Christ or being a Christian is an understanding, a belief, but more than that, a trust in someone other than ourselves for our salvation. And maybe that is the most fundamental thing -- as Christian people -- trusting in Jesus Christ, God's Son. It is a belief that God loved us, that God sent God's Son, Jesus, to live the life that we could never live, a sinless life on earth, to die, to rise again and to live today. It is to live in a relationship. It is to live in the wonder of love. Accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior might beg the question to a degree: How do we accept Jesus Christ? Do we want to make it something we do? If it isn't doing the Commandments, then I will muster up enough belief to believe in Jesus, then I will accept Jesus. What it is, is an acknowledgment, a submission, a yielding, an admitting, a running out of steam, it's crying uncle, it's saying, "Okay, God, I guess you really truly do love and adore me," and then learning to explore that relationship and revel in the relationship. I asked you in the last service do your children have to accept your love or do you not indeed just lavish that love whether you think they accept it or not, from the time they ruin your life (theoretically)? You get the stretch marks, the morning sickness, and they throw up and fill their pants, and you love them and so it is with us. In declaring God's love, in preaching the Word, in talking about Christ and his death on the cross, salvation happens to us. It is really all of God's doing and ours is to acknowledge, to live in, to learn, to grow, to be in a relationship.

Pastor Cooper: Just to piggyback on what you are saying, is that I grew up learning about God growing up in a church family, so God was just always a part of my life. When my family would go to the mountains, I would look around and say, "How could anyone doubt that God exists?" But something happened throughout my life - I learned about Jesus in Sunday school. I proceeded through a regular faith transformation for myself. I was a very boring child, did everything I was told to, now I rebel later which is fun, but I was a good kid. I just did not do anything to really be antagonistic. I perceive myself as a really good person. I did all the right things that you are supposed to do in life.

I went hunting in college with my father because so many people growing up in Texas, that's what they did. And I didn't grasp what that was about. I understood that the pheasants would die if they weren't thinned out, but I wanted to understand why there was such an appeal to hunting. So I went hunting and a bird flew by and I lifted up my gun and shot and the bird went down. You have to realize the context - I am a huge animal lover. I have two Golden Retrievers. I care for sparrows that fall out of trees. I have a huge heart for animals. I will cry at Bambi every time. And I realized as I walked up to this bird that I had shot, that it was still alive. I looked at my father and said, "What do I do?" and he said, " You need to break its neck to kill it." I just started sobbing. I realized I killed something.

And that to me was a transformational event. I recognized I had the propensity to kill just like anyone else. And all those lines that we use to separate the "us" and "them", the "good " people versus the "bad" people, all that got blurred together because I recognized that though I try my hardest to be good, but I still have this capacity to do the worst possible thing. So that for me was transformational for understanding why I needed a Savior. I could live a really good life, but I needed to be able to approach a holy God and to allow God to approach me -- to reach out to me -- I had to have that transition because I wasn't perfect, and I was filled with sin and will be for the rest of my life. But God reached out to that.

Carol: But that's where it gets difficult. I think most people would agree that the values of Christianity-to live with compassion and patience and humility and to love your neighbor-are certainly a good way to live and that is very admirable and with obvious tangible results. But where it gets difficult, and where the leap needs to be made about that, was Jesus. I can believe Jesus' teachings, but there is a leap then on believing He was divine, believing literally in a Virgin birth, believing literally in a body that had died as we know death and then rose up again. I am not sure whether I heard you say that to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, you must accept that transition to believing in the unbelievable -- the things that aren't of this world that we can logically understand.

Pastor Cooper: The question that I would ask back is what does acceptance of Jesus Christ look like to you?

Carol: Well, accepting the teachings is straightforward and it is hard enough just to live those well. Why be required to take that leap and believe in Jesus as a divine entity? I don't see that it's critical.

Pastor Lien: I think the fundamental part of this that is critical is an acknowledgement that I can't do it on my own. Fundamentally, the Christian faith says that you can never be good enough, you can never follow the rules enough, and you can never emulate the teaching and inculcate it in your life enough to be saved. It is a fundamental acknowledgement of saying "Uncle, I can't do this." Other world religions, we try and acquiesce: we try and earn; we try and get up the ladder, up the staircase-reincarnate-reach Nirvana, enlightenment, whatever it is. In Christianity, God came down to earth because we could not get to heaven.

God came to us, but you talk about at what point, do you tick off a little box -- OK got the virgin birth, got the resurrection down. Who is that has put that checklist together? Is it not human beings? The idea of judgment -- and who's in, and who's out -- is God's, and it is never ours. I think each of us comes to faith in totally different ways and I think some of it is not until we look back that we go, "Ohh, I guess I am a believer." You, it seems to me, had an experience in the restaurant in Santa Monica that was not my experience. I have never even thought about trying to be somebody's father who is waiting on me at a table. Some other people have daily sorts of conversions, or they are in the depths of despair. It is not an intellectual thing -- "Okay, now I will choose to believe in Jesus." But you just wake up and there is this love around you in your hospital room -- there is a God. And this indiscernible thing; it is this movement; it is this intervention; it is this miraculous, mysterious thing -- that is faith. And it is fundamentally; it is letting go of having my grimy hands on my salvation, whether you are trying to emulate Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. I can't do that. I would dare say that every time you go in a restaurant you don't feel like the mother of your waiter or waitress. So how do you do that? Are you going to be super, super vigilant? And take steroids to be like Jesus every time you walk out?

Carol: Isn't that what the Christian path is? Isn't a big part of Christianity to try harder and keep trying? Do all these good deeds?

Pastors Lien and Cooper: No, No.

Pastor Lien: I think there is obviously understanding between us in some of these things. So much of the natural default thinking is "If-Then." IF I do something, THEN God's got it in the fine print.

Pastor Cooper: It's a formula: "If-Then"

Pastor Lien: And what God wants to say to us in the Christian understanding of faith is it is a "Because-Therefore." BECAUSE I already love as much as an eternal God can already love you, THEREFORE, will you live a life that pleases me and works in the world? It's like your children. Do they have to be potty trained before you love them? No. You love them and say, "Because you love me, will you please learn this? Will you please make your bed? Will you please do the chores around the house?" But it is not in order that they earn your love.

Pastor Cooper: And eventually they start responding. And you wonder whether they do respond to your love, but eventually they do start recognizing your love for them, and it is their deepest hearts' desire to do, and to love you back.

Carol: But do you acknowledge that it does require a surrender -- a leap, and there is not tangible evidence that any of this is true?

Pastor Lien: Yes. I mean to remove that from a sound bite understanding. That is what faith is. I have faith that my wife loves me. She proves it in the way she stays with me and assists me in life, but I can't quantifiably put that under a microscope. But I believe it because it is part of my experience. And we make religion out to be a totally foreign experience and that there is nothing that parallels that in my whole world. Well, there are many things that we take on faith. I flip the switch on my lights and I don't know how all of that works. I turn on my computer, but it works. I've never seen the earth from space, but I believe it is round. I believe in the power of gravity though I can't see it. I believe there is air here because I breathe it. I believe that God loves me because I have experienced it. It is by faith. It isn't quantifiable.

Pastor Cooper: But I also don't think God asks us to leave our minds at the door. I don't think we are asked to check our minds and walk in and say I am not going to use my intellect at all. I'm just going to come in here and feel. I think it is "both/and." I think God uses our whole being to be able to wrestle through some of those pieces.

Carol: But given that we're allowed in any case, what is the importance of accepting Jesus Christ. Why is it important for us to make that statement? We're already loved. Is it because it transforms us and how we live? And only that?

Pastor Lien: Absolutely.

Pastor Cooper: I don't believe that there is certain statement, and that is magical. I think we look for that. We look for something that is going to say, "Now I am in; now I have crossed the line."

Carol: But the church has that statement. That is a statement that we are asked to say. That is part of Christianity.

Pastor Cooper: Yeah. I don't think there is a formula of words that if I ask you, then you have to repeat back to me. There are many ways to express that, and all of those are valid.

Pastor Lien: There are parameters around the Christian church that have been established over a period of several thousand years. We need to understand that those are church parameters, and sometimes the mind of God might be different, but in our understanding, if you want to join this congregation, there are vows that you take, that you publicly profess. I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior. You do say those words and I think it is important to self- define. We are not followers of Bahai here; we are not followers of Mahatma Gandhi here; we are followers of Jesus Christ. But where that line is crossed from God's perspective, who am I to do that? And we get really hung up and personally I think at times it is a real smokescreen of "Who's in?" and "Who's out?" and if everybody isn't in, then I'm not in either. The judgment is God's prerogative and never ours, and we have got to get over that. I want to tell people about my relationship with God because it has changed my life. It is the most joyous and exciting thing and has given meaning and purpose to my life. If I've got a new car, I want to take people in it for a ride because I am excited about it. But where they stand with that is God's prerogative and never mine.

Pastor Cooper: I think it is letting go of perceiving that we are the center of our own universe and recognizing that God is the Creator of the universe. It is the whole thing that we can try and try and try, and we can do and do and do, but eventually it really is God's love for us, which has always been present there, and us slowly becoming aware of it. Yeah, I see that here.

Carol: There is such a reluctance to make that leap beyond what we can see logically and deal with, because then you're into the realm of craziness out there. And people take religions -- all religions, including Christianity -- and go very badly awry with them and do all sorts of terrible things in the name of Christianity. There are plenty of examples we can think of. And it has been this way forever. And so once you leave this realm of logic and the intellect, there is really danger, and Christians have to recognize that there has been a lot of good in the world due to Christianity and lot of bad, rightly or wrongly, in the name of Christianity. How do Christians respond to that?

Pastor Lien: Poorly.

Pastor Cooper: I think we try to hide it.

Pastor Lien: And we don't acknowledge that there is a difference and many non-believers, if you will, have an impossible time differentiating between Christianity and Christians and they are not one and the same. Christians are still sinful, selfish, self-centered human beings just like non-believers; it is part and parcel of our creation. There are many bad things that have been done in the name of Christianity that we need to confess and renounce and work to do better. We need to that when we bear the name of Christ. We also need to say Christians are not the same as Christianity and God is not the same as Christians.

The same is true for love. We're out of the realm of logic when we're in love. Love does not make logical sense and there are many horrendous things done in the name of love. And we are in the realm of trusting ourselves to something that we cannot see. And we don't give up on love just because some people abuse that. I think the same thing has to be true in our Christian lives.

Carol: A different kind of question. We pray together. We do celebrations and concerns together. In the Christian community, we pray and clearly there are good things that happen to good people and bad things that happen to good people. It is hard to understand what we mean by prayer. You can have two babies and one will live and the other won't. It is just unclear what we mean by that. Is there a supernatural effect that takes place when we pray for those two babies? And if so, what happens, why does one live and the other not?

Pastor Cooper: You ask a theological question for which many scholars over the years haven't been able to come to a conclusion. So to have a definitive answer is difficult. But if the question is, "Does prayer change us or do we change God's will in prayer?" I think the answer many times is that it's both. When we look at two infants that come forward, and one survives and the other doesn't, and we ask, "Was the family more faithful? Were our prayers better for that infant?" I don't think the answer is "yes." I think it makes the presupposition that God places that disease on that child as a test of faith. I disagree with that entirely. I think God allows freedom that suffering does occur and suffering occurs as the result of sinfulness in the world. I am not going to claim that it is because of the parents' sinfulness. I think it could be the environmental conditions that we have let go of, or whatever, but when I pray for people, I have been asked, do you pray for a miracle for not? I do, but I don't presume to know what that miracle is going to look like. The miracle may be something very different than a cure and those are two different things.

Pastor Lien: I talked to a physician just a week ago in the intensive care unit at St. John's Hospital and I don't know whether a believer or not, but he told me about a double blind study, people who were prayed for and people who were not prayed for, intentionally. And the people being prayed for or not prayed for did not know who was being prayed for. This double blind study found that those who were prayed for recovered faster, had fewer side effects, and got out of the hospital faster than those who were not prayed for. I think that the thing that we should understand about prayer is that in order to be obedient, we are commanded to pray. We are invited to pray. As a parent, I want my children to bring whatever is on their heart or mind to me. I don't want them to edit even though they are coming to me with a ridiculous request or an extraordinary request, it affirms a relationship with me that they would come and open up their heart and life and share what is on their mind with me. I think one of the most miraculous things that happen in prayer is our openness to a movement of God in our own life. If I am praying for someone who is grieving the death of a loved one, a parent, a friend, I think I am open to an intrusion of God's spirit in my life that I will be more compassionate to that person, that I will be God's instrument of healing in that person's life.

Evil is a part of our world and it will be with us until the day we go home to be with the Lord. It is terribly unfortunate, but we really have to be careful in the Christian church that we do not lay blame on God, where blame is really not appropriate -- where it might be sin and evil in the world or some hedonistic, selfish person that is affecting these things.

Pastor Cooper: We don't create prayer to have a formula effect that if you pray a certain way, this will happen.

Carol: The double blind study at the hospital, what then is the mechanism by which those people did better than the others?

Pastor Lien: I have no clue. That God knows and I don't.

Pastor Cooper: Columbia Hospital now has a program that has a paid "pray-er" who goes in and prays for people in surgery because they have seen such effective results in peoples' healing.

Pastor Lien: Our time is up. I want to say thanks and to reiterate again, we're just getting started. We could go on for hours and I want to say thanks to you, Carol, for what you have done.

Share this sermon with a friend.