We’d love to keep you in the loop on all the things happening at Eureka Christian Church. Fill out this form to get a weekly email that will include news and updates from our website.
Grace Dearhamer, Peace Intern
Meet 2023 DPF Peace Intern Grace Dearhamer!
Of course we already know Grace at Eureka Christian Church! But what you may not know is that she is serving as a Disciples Peace Fellowship (DPF) Intern this summer. As part of this role, she will be sharing regular updates on her blog . Here is her first post! You can follow all three DPF interns as they blog about their experiences this summer.
Good luck Grace! You are in our prayers as you serve on our behalf this summer.
Will God forgive me?
Will God forgive me for whatever it is I have done, or must I continue to suffer?
We might re-frame the question this way: If I repeatedly hurt myself or another person, or, for example, if I relapse into the very thing I told myself I would never ever do again (and that I told my loved ones I would never ever do again); given just how deep my regret is, and given just how much damage it’s done to my relationships, will I ever feel the feeling of forgiveness again? Will I ever feel again what it feels like to be whole? Will I ever feel restored or reconciled to the person I’ve hurt (or to myself)?
A theologian once said, sin and forgiveness run “horizontally” and “vertically.” Sin and forgiveness involve both our relationship to God and our relationships with other people. On the one hand, when we hurt people we care about (or when we do harm or hurt to ourselves) God unfailingly forgives and draws close to us when we ask. But this doesn’t negate or erase relational damage. In a vertical sense, we are always accepted and loved by a God whose spirit nourishes every possibility of life within us. This is true even when we cause pain, feel regret for it, and in the aftermath struggle to accept or love ourselves. However, in a horizontal sense, relational healing and forgiveness take time. Relational healing is a process. Meaningful relationships weather powerful storms, but they are fragile when trust is broken. When a relationship is damaged or a wound reopened, healing is a long and winding path. It requires love, time, honesty, and re-building the foundations of fidelity or trust. Depending on the damage caused, the path doesn’t always lead where we expect or want. Sometimes reconciliation keeps a safe distance, especially when the damage caused is cyclical or abusive. Horizontal forgiveness, especially for serious relational damage or pain, is long-haul soul care.
What about when I know I’m forgiven horizontally and vertically, but I continue to struggle (internally) with my regret? What about when I’m unable to forgive myself?
Suffering is painful, especially if it is regret. But suffering is also the soul’s attentiveness to the deep feelings that pass through us. As Henri Nouwen might say, suffering is a place where we encounter ourselves laid bare. When suffering is unrelenting, we need to seek help. But when suffering is redemptive or meaningful, it can attune us to the possibility and hope of healing and wholeness in God’s bright and loving future. God’s forgiveness does not cease. The judgment of God is that forgiveness and love have the final say. But it’s also true that healing from deep spiritual or relational hurt is like healing from a severe physical injury. Wounds need to be dressed, bathed, cleaned, and redressed through the habits of attentiveness, listening, honesty, hope, and trust. Healing and forgiveness aren’t feelings only; they are a process.
Will God stop forgiving me one day if I repeat my sin?
Will God stop forgiving me one day if I repeat my sin?
One way to think about the question is to put it this way. Does God’s forgiveness run out? If I do the same thing again (which I promised myself and God I wouldn’t do), will God stop forgiving me for it?
On the one hand, Jesus seems to teach that forgiveness is at the center of God’s nature, and God’s forgiveness doesn’t run out. No matter how many times I sin (or act in contrary ways to the love and humanity of God revealed in Jesus toward myself or another person or the world), God’s arms are open. This, for example, is the main point of Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). The love of God doesn’t give up on us; it waits for us and celebrates our homecoming.
Divine love is boundless and eternal. Divine love is enough to accept us and welcome us even when we struggle to accept and love ourselves. The judgment of God seems to be that forgiveness and love have the final say.
What are the unforgivable sins?
What are the unforgivable sins?
This is a thoughtful question, and it’s one the church has wrestled with for a long, long time. In the New Testament, Jesus says (Mark 3:29) “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” What should we make of this? Does Jesus draw a line in the sand when it comes to God’s forgiveness and love? I thought God’s forgiveness and love were boundless?
Let’s start with context for the passage. In chapter 3, Jesus is just beginning his public ministry. Crowds begin to follow him. They marvel at his teachings and healings. He calls his disciples. Word of his healing and love spreads. Other religious leaders take notice of him (along with Jesus’s family). Feeling afraid, they wonder about the source of his otherworldly power. His family and some of the religious leaders conclude that Jesus must be possessed by an unclean or evil spirit. They confront him. Jesus’s response takes the form of a logical argument: Really people? Would an evil spirit do holy things like heal and restore life? “Can Satan drive out Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand!” In other words, he says, if evil were to do good things like giving and restoring life and sharing God’s forgiveness and acceptance and home with folks who long for it most, then evil would be contradicting itself. Therefore, the power at work here (to heal and give life) is divine power.
Given the context for this strange teaching–“whoever speaks ill against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin”–what might Jesus mean?
Jesus might be saying this: “Listen up people. If anything is unredemptive, it is the refusal to accept God’s Spirit of acceptance, or the refusal to accept that God accepts the world (especially the marginalized) in love. We “quench” or “douse” this Spirit when we refuse to accept God’s radical acceptance and love for the world. When we call evil good, and good evil, our soul hungers-on for liberating grace and wholeness, and we contribute to others’ hunger too. The eternal judgment of God is that healing and wholeness have the final say, not fear and exclusion.”
Still, is Jesus saying there are sins so terrible God will not forgive them? For example, if I say bad things about God, or if I speak badly of the Holy Spirit who heals and restores life, or if I struggle to get with the program of God’s radical acceptance, then am I out of luck if I later wish I hadn’t said or done those things? Does God’s forgiveness and acceptance end when I’m mad or angry and then through my fear I say angry or mad or hurtful things about God or God’s life-giving Spirit? If this were the point Jesus was making in the text then the apostle Paul would have certainly been out of luck. If anybody did unforgivable things that doused the Spirit of life, it was Paul. But that’s not how his story goes. Paul needed to encounter the living Christ for the scales to fall from his eyes. Maybe the only unforgivable (“eternal”) sin is a world without the possibility of forgiveness and acceptance, but that’s not the world God made. Like Paul, when we try to fashion a world like this for ourselves, God saves us.
When I was young, I remember being taught to think that Mark 3:29 was Jesus drawing a line in the sand of God’s forgiveness. Don’t step out of line, or God will eternally punish you. But God in Jesus is not a God of fear and enmity. In Jesus, the eternal judgment of God is that healing and wholeness have the final say, and the Spirit of healing and wholeness never stops seeking to nourish every possibility of life within the soul.
Is it OK to not believe in literal heaven and/or hell?
Is it OK to not believe in literal heaven and/or hell?
When it comes to any idea, I don’t think we can or should force ourselves to believe things that contradict what we’re able in our conscience to accept as true.
Heaven and hell are strange ideas, especially the idea of hell. If by “hell” we mean a place God creates and designates for eternally tormenting people unable to accept Christian faith, it introduces a number of logical problems to the idea that God – in God’s essential nature – is loving, just, and merciful. For instance, it’s a difficult argument to make that a just and compassionate deity would say, after creating humankind, “Let there be eternal and unforgiveable torment for the ones who do not accept or love me or my message.”
It’s worth noting too that much of the imagery in popular Christianity that describes heaven and hell in this way (bliss for the one and torment for the other) are largely shaped by medieval and renaissance literature, like Dante’s Divine Comedy (graphic images of sinners in hell tormented eternally) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (devil with pitch forks looking to collect souls). These images are a long way off from what the biblical writers in the apostolic era and the early church would have envisioned regarding the afterlife. Paul speaks of the resurrection of the dead. The gospels speak of the “kingdom of God” where righteousness, peace, and joy in the Spirit define life together with God. Many first century Jews (like Jesus) held the belief that once a person dies, we go to “the place of the dead” or sheol (in Hebrew). For most first century Jews, sheol was neither good nor bad, just a place where souls live on as shades of their living selves. It was later that Christian writers developed elaborate doctrines of heaven and hell as afterlives of bliss or torment.
Heaven and hell are also tricky ideas because they are so fraught with use and abuse by Christians who use them as a cudgel to try and force conversion. I remember hearing the message so many times when I was young, “If you don’t repent and believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, you’ll go to hell. If you want to be with God in paradise forever, then you need to believe.” Theologically, I think this is a spectacularly unsound way to think about heaven and hell, because it reduces the Christian faith to a cost benefit analysis, instead of an adventure (worthy for its own sake) toward the heart of God.
I once heard the story of a Muslim saint called Rabia of Basra. She was known around her town for praying loudly in public spaces and for carrying around a bucket of water and a torch wherever she went. She would pray aloud, “Lord, if I worship you in order to gain an eternal reward, then take this torch and burn down the riches of paradise. If I worship you for fear of torment, then take this bucket of water and douse the flames of hell. But if I worship you because of your worthiness, then hide not your face from me.” I think I agree with Rabia. If all the heaven and hell business turned out to be false, and if the afterlife turns out to be more like sheol or eternal rest or sleep awaiting its new beginning, Rabia’s bucket and torch would have us consider the possibility that loving God and enjoying God’s love in this life would be enough in itself.
I do think that heaven and hell are powerful metaphors for things we experience in our lives here and now. For example, Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says that hell points to the realities of despair and anxiety, when life becomes a prison to itself, or when we feel cut off from God and meaningful life with others. When life is an exile to joy and hope, or when we are exiles to our true self or the ground of our existence (God), then life becomes a hell. Kierkegaard calls this “the sickness unto death,” which in his view threatens the life of God in the soul. On the other side of it, for Kierkegaard, heaven might be when we know and enjoy divine love – and meaningful fellowship with other people through divine love – and when we are conscious of the possibility of joy and hope as gifts that abide with us, even in the shadowy valleys of life.
Heaven (or life with God) points to the acceptance that we are accepted and loved by a loving God. Whatever higher reality they do or do not point to, perhaps the words “heaven” and “hell” are best understood as symbols (sometimes rather clumsy ones) for pondering the boundless mystery of God’s love and the soul’s journey into God’s heart.
If heaven is our destination, why do we have this time on earth?
With heaven being eternal, why must we endure this time on earth? With heaven being our destination…why?
One way of thinking about the question would be to phrase it this way: Why does God put people through the aches and pains of living on planet earth, if, in the end, God has already destined people for eternal life with God? Couldn’t God have created heaven on earth – or earth in heaven – in the first place? Did God really need to go through the trouble of creating humans like you and me (people with the capacity to inflict and endure suffering) in a world fraught with danger and risk when God could have just launched life 2.0 from the start?
Theologian John Hick answers a similar question in his response to the problem of evil. The problem of evil in Christian theology refers to the apparent contradiction between the goodness and omnipotence of God and the reality of evil and suffering in the world. If God exists and God is wholly good, then why does God permit evil in the world? Why does God fashion a world in the first place with the capacity for injury and suffering? Is this really the best of all possible worlds God could have made? Why didn’t God create the world as a heavenly paradise from the start? No stubbed toes. No getting old. No sickness or disease. No injustice or discrimination. Just bliss. If God can’t do this, then God isn’t all powerful. If God chose not to do this, then God isn’t wholly good or loving.
John Hick says that one possible answer to this question might be found in how we think about what it means to be a person. Part of what it might mean to be a person, is that we are “free and responsive beings,” capable of engaging our environment and the people with whom we share life. He argues that freedom and responsiveness are essential components of what it means to be a person. Both of these too (freedom and responsiveness) are essential to love. Love is not coerced; love is a gift freely expressed. According to his argument, a world without risk and responsibility, or one in which people were coerced by God to “freely” avoid evil, or one where pain and suffering did not exist (or never existed), would logically rule out any real possibility for humans to grow as persons, to cultivate virtues like trust, hope, and faithfulness, sacrifice, vulnerability, courage, wisdom, patience, and others.
We don’t know why – in the infinite expanse of God’s eternal life and love – God creates a world so fraught and fleeting. There’s a mystery at the crux of life’s impermanence and God’s eternal nature. Maybe it’s the only possible world suitable for human beings to grow, develop, learn, play, feel joy, suffer loss, wrestle with anxiety, and anticipate with hope the possibility of future joy.
In the Genesis stories, when God creates the world, God calls it good. God rests in its shade and walks among its hills. God strolls in the garden in the cool of the evening. God delights in its streams and valleys. Maybe ours is to do the same, to delight in the gift of life and time and space – and the infinite promise it holds – as long as we have breath in our lungs.
What is heaven like?
What is heaven like? What and where is heaven? How do we know what comes after death? What is life after death like?
Maybe heaven isn’t so much of a “where” as a “when.” The Scriptures suggest that whatever heaven might be, it is most certainly when we are together with God. We don’t know what it might be like as a future reality beyond material life. Early Christian theologians referred to the mystery of heaven or eternal life as “glorification.”
Maybe the most we can do is ponder images. In the Hebrew prophets, Isaiah writes about the “beatific vision” where the lion and lamb are at peace with one another; war and conflict and human strife cease. In the Christian scriptures, Jesus preaches about the kingdom of God where the last are first, the downcast are uplifted, and where the soul is at peace with self, others, and God.
Earliest Christian views on the afterlife (especially in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans) lay claim to the idea of the resurrection of the dead—that in the fullness of time, when the kingdom of God finally and fully dawns, those who have died will be raised to share forevermore in Christ’s fate, and death would be swallowed up.
Christian theologian St. Augustine once said in his spiritual autobiography The Confessions, that since God had made us for God’s self, “our soul is restless until it rests in God.” For Augustine, heaven simply meant something like “happiness in God,” which we experience here and now in our lives. Heaven now anticipates unending or eternal happiness with God in unbroken continuity.
Whatever the afterlife might be like (try as we might to imagine it through our physical senses or imagination), and however human conscious life is finally and fully transformed—where memory, intellect, and imagination are fulfilled or perfected (glorification) in the light of the Son—heaven, in a fundamental sense, means the hope of ongoing life in the presence of God.
C.S. Lewis tells the following story, in which he imagines the mystery and beauty of heaven, which is invisible and unimaginable to our senses, but glimpsable through the eyes of hope. In his analogy, he compares earthly beauty to heavenly beauty by comparing the experience of seeing a pencil drawing of a sunrise (lines on a page) and experiencing the colors and rays coming down from the horizon with your own eyes while basking in its warmth. He says:
“Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause.
For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But,’ she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ ‘What?’ says the boy. ‘No pencil marks there?’ And instantly, his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition—the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the colored three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.
So with us. ‘We know not what we shall be;’ but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape; not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.”
Journey to the Galapagos
Come join us as we “travel” to the Galapagos Islands this summer at Eureka Christian Church!
Our summer worship series will focus on the book The Galapagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey by Brian McLaren. This is “one part travel guide, one part spiritual memoir, and one part ethical & theological reflection” (Preface, p. ix). Each week we will explore a different spiritual theme as we also learn more about the Galapagos Islands. Many thanks to Gary and Barb Baner, Karen Fyke, Abby and Carolyn Reel, and Tracy Simmons for providing visuals for this series.
This Sunday, June 4 will be an introduction. Here is a preview.
McLaren writes:
“Most theology in recent centuries…has been the work of avid indoorsmen, scholars who typically work in square boxes called offices or classrooms or sanctuaries, surrounded by square books and, more recently, square screens, under square roofs in square buildings surrounded by other square buildings, laid out in square city blocks that stretch as far as the eye can see…There is nothing inherently wrong about [this] civilized, indoor theology.
Except this: theology that arises in human-made, human-controlled architecture…will differ markedly from theology that arises in conversation with the wild world that flourishes beyond our walls and outside our windows and cities…a wild theology that arises under the stars and planets, along a thundering river or meandering stream, admiring a flock of pelicans or weaver finches, watching a lion stalk a wildebeest, gazing at a spider spinning her web, observing a single tree bud form, swell, burst, and bloom” (The Galapagos Islands, p. xiii-xv).
As I see it, this indoor theology has also contributed to some of the environmental issues the global community faces today. We are increasingly detached from the wild world. We have spent so much energy controlling it and consuming it that we haven’t left ourselves any breathing space, any soul space to contemplate it or celebrate it. I have spent most of my life in cities, for example, going from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned stores and places of work. And while I have long-enjoyed walking, before moving here, it was mostly in neighborhoods. On sidewalks, dodging cars.
This detachment has consequences.
Because what we don’t know, we don’t appreciate.
What we don’t appreciate, we don’t value.
And what we don’t value, we don’t take care of.
For many of us, that “wild world that flourishes beyond our walls,” as McLaren puts it, is “other.” It is separate, completely foreign.
But here’s the thing.
It isn’t other, separate, or foreign. For we are part of it. We are inseparable from it, in fact.
Now I know that we have done a mighty masterful job at deceiving ourselves here, but the truth remains: what happens out in that wild world affects us. What happens out in that wild world is us, becomes us.
McLaren is right: We need a wild theology. A theology that marvels at the stars and the planets, that meanders alongside the streams, that admires pelicans, spiders spinning webs, and the blossoms of spring. A theology that contemplates and celebrates.
“We imagine,” McLaren writes, “a wild theology that doesn’t limit itself to Plato and Aquinas but also consults the wisdom of rainbow trout and sea turtles, seasons and tides. We imagine a wild theology whose horizons are measured not by thousands of years and miles but by billions of light years. We imagine a wild theology that is articulated in books, yes, but also in stories and songs, in foods and feasts, in dances and lamentations and pilgrimages that resonate with the turning seasons and rhythmic tides of the natural world” (The Galapagos Islands, p. xv).
Sign me up! I want to find God “where the wild things are.” What to come along?
I’ll see you Sunday.
Jennie
Worship at 8:15 and 10:30 a.m.
On-site at 302 South Main Street Eureka, Illinois
Online at eurekachristian.org/worship-online or facebook.com/eurekacc/live
Discovery Day Camp
Experiencing God’s Good Earth, June 26-29
Eureka Christian Church is pleased to offer “Discovery Day Camp: Experiencing God’s Good Earth” for children and youth ages 4 through just-completed 8th grade. This fun week of VBS-style learning activities, crafts, and singing will take place June 26-29 at the Wuethrich Farm near Carlock.
Each day begins at 9:00 a.m. at the farm. Our Pre-K children will go home before lunch at 11:30 a.m.
Students who have completed kindergarten through 8th grade will stay for lunch and then head off for a different field trip destination each day. Their program ends at 3:00 p.m. each afternoon.
All children and youth need to wear closed-toed shoes and bring a water bottle. Kindergarten, elementary and middle school participants also need to bring a sack lunch each day.
Cost is $15 per child, with a $40 family maximum. Friends and extended family are welcome. Please fill out the registration form and return it with payment to Eureka Christian Church (302 S. Main, Eureka, Illinois 61530) by Wednesday, June 21.
A Healing Church
Our “Healing Waters” series addressing the wounds caused by religious trauma ends this Sunday, May 28. In the sermon, I will be inviting us to become a healing church. Here’s a preview.
According to “the latest U. S. Religion Census from 2010-2020, the share of Americans with a religious affiliation dropped by 11 points.” And not just, as you might be thinking, on the East and West Coasts. The share of Americans with a religious affiliation also “sharply declined,” to quote the survey, here in the Midwest middle (Ryan Burge, “How Religion Influences Politics,” quoted in The Week, May 26, 2023, p. 12).
Why is that? We can blame all sorts of things, of course. Distractions, incessant busy-ness, the current “what’s in it for me” American malaise. But we would be sinfully remiss if we did not also turn the mirror to ourselves, get those logs out of our eyes, and ask the questions:
What we have done to drive people away?
In what ways has our Christian proclamation become irrelevant or even damaging?
Jesus, my friends, is not the problem.
The Good News he came to share and embody is just as needed and life-giving today as it ever has been. He came to bring abundant life. He came “to preach the Message of good news to the poor; to announce pardon to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind; to set the burdened and battered free; to announce, ‘This is God’s year to act!’” (Luke 4:18-19, The Message). Jesus came to offer food to the hungry and a cup of cool water to the thirsty. He came to offer welcome, hope, healing, forgiveness, peace.
Much-needed Good News, all.
No, Jesus is not the problem. The problem are those theologies, teachings, and practices that lead to distorted images of God, self, and others—which in turn lead to alienation from God, self, and others.
We call ourselves “a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.” Eureka Christian Church, are those just pretty words?
What kind of Christians and what kind of church are we going to be? Are we going to be the kind of church that contributes to religious trauma? Are we going to be the kind of church that—perhaps more insidiously, more temptingly—keeps silent in the face of religious trauma?
Or, are we going to be the kind church that lovingly, faithfully, tirelessly carries Jesus into all the broken places and all the wounded hearts that are all around us?
We call ourselves “a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.” Disciples, do we mean it?
I’ll see you Sunday.
Jennie
Worship at 8:15 and 10:30 a.m.
On-site at 302 South Main Street Eureka, Illinois
Online at eurekachristian.org/worship-online or facebook.com/eurekacc/live
