Someone said to me recently, “I am a staunch conservative.”

I told them their secret was safe with me. I would not embarrass them by telling anyone.

It’s not something to brag about. The Gospel does not lean to the right. Unconditional love and forgiveness are not conservative concepts.

But I do sympathize with folks who claim the name “conservative.”

They may not can help it.

A study from New York University suggests that the conservative brain is wired to resist change.

Researchers say there is a “spike” in brain activity when we make an error.

We respond by doing things differently. But not so for “conservatives.” The “error spike” is lower.

Conservatives have a more rigid cognitive system, one more resistant to seeing error and more drawn to the status quo.

And the conservative mind is less responsive to evidence.

“So,” say the authors of the study, “conservatives are not likely to be convinced by logical persuasion.” Conservatives have a mental comfort zone from which they will not move.

Tell conservatives that the image of Christ in the book of Revelations does not agree with the teachings of Jesus, they cannot hear you.

Tell them gay people are just people who happen to be gay, they cannot understand.

So, homophobia and racism live on—because “we have always done it that way.”

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If you have been thinking about giving us a visit—do it this Sunday. Give witness to what you believe. Worship at 11:00.

Rev. Max, you go from one extreme to the other.
You reject the claim of conservative Christians for the
inerrancy of scripture and reject things like the miracle
of the Flood, then you push an outlandish miracle like a
healing at Lourdes. I am mystified as to your purpose in
this.
Tom—

Well, Tom, my purpose is to provoke people to think.

Scripture is glorious. It is a window to God. But it is not inerrant.

The image of God in the Flood Story as a loser who goofs up, destroys his creation, and then regrets it is not consistent with the teachings of Jesus about the nature of God.

But the healing of a young girl, Marie Le Marchand, at Lourdes in 1882, is supported by considerable evidence.

The girl had advanced lupus, TB, and huge sores covering her legs.

She was “oozing blood.”

The great novelist (and atheist) Emil Zola, wanted to debunk Lourdes and healing.

Instead, he witnessed the healing of the young girl.

A doctor also stood by and followed the girl to the hospital. Her lungs were clear. The sores were gone.

She was still healthy 16 years later.

I told the story two weeks ago to push you to decide: To what extent will you accept evidence that challenges your own ideas about how life works?

Do you have to run from the evidence to maintain your theology?

My faith is rooted in evidence.

I don’t have to run.

I don’t have to pretend.

I am secure in the understanding that God works in our world. +++

Concert—tomorrow—Sat. the 14th —6:00 p.m.

And Rev. Beverly Tye preaches this Sunday.

An Atheist Meets a Miracle

Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a prominent French novelist and an atheist.

He hated Catholicism.

He particularly hated the claim that Mary had appeared to a peasant girl in Lourdes in 1858.

Lourdes became a place of pilgrimage. And there were reports of healings.

Zola determined to prove it was all a fake.

On the train down to Lourdes, he saw a young girl named Marie, age 16, who had three diseases for which there was no cure at that time: advanced lupus, TB, and huge ulcerations on her legs.

Her face was eaten away, distorted by the lupus, and “oozing blood.”

Zola decided then and there she would be his test case. And he was standing by, along with a doctor, when Marie entered the baths.

She came out changed.

Her face looked normal.

It was clear that she was healed.

The doctor said, “Ah, Monsieur Zola, behold the case of your dreams.”

Zola said, “I do not want to look at her; she is still ugly to me.”

The doctor accompanied her to the hospital. Her lungs were clear. She had no medical problems. And she remained healthy many years later.

Zola said, “Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes healed, I would not believe in miracles.”

I include a couple of healing stories in the book I am still working on, Discovering God.

Such accounts are not hard to find, even accounts verified by doctors.

But where do you stand on this? Does a God who heals fit in with your theology?

Let me know.

Write to me at the e-mail address below.

Does God heal?

I love hearing from you.

[email protected]

An Unseen Presence

On 9/11, the center of impact on Building Two of The World Trade Center was the 81st floor. Only four people who worked above that floor survived.

Ron DeFranco was one of them. But he says he did not make the descent through fire, smoke, and darkness alone. An unseen presence was with him.

When he hit a wall of debris blocking the stairs, he crouched on the floor to get under the smoke. He was in despair.

A voice said, “Get up!”

It was insistent.

The voice addressed him by name and told him he could do it.

All the way down he felt pushed, guided, sometimes even lifted.

“An angel led me through the fire,” he said.

Moments after he made it out, the building came down.

Another person buried under the rubble that day saw Christ standing before him. He knew he was safe.

These stories are told in John Geiger’s bestseller, The Third Man.

(Not a good name for this kind of experience, but it has a history.)

I shared with you recently the story of popular singer M.I.A. (her stage name).

She was in an isolated place with no phone service and was so ill she believed she was dying.

Then Jesus appeared to her, silently loving and encouraging her.

M.I.A. was Hindu and didn’t like Christianity.

But she was faced with a new reality.

She said, “When you need help, it is Jesus who comes to save you.”

Accounts like these are too numerous to ignore.

How do you deal with them? Do they fit your theology?

Do they lift you or trouble you? Let me know.

My e-mail is below.

[email protected]

That’s Good News

I find myself in witness to two groups of people:

The first is conservative Christians who break the first commandment. They place another god above the only God there is.

Their god is the Bible.

They see it as inerrant and infallible. It all speaks with equal authority. If Jesus does not agree with a passage in Deuteronomy, then Jesus must shut up and fall in line.

He can rise no higher than, nor say anything different from, what has been said before him.

Inerrancy strips Jesus of his authority to preach a unique message of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness for all people.

There is not a biblical inerrantist in the whole world who truly believes Luke 6:27-36—including this word: “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

Conservative preachers seldom preach from The Sermon on the Mount.

It is simply irrelevant to them.

But there is another group I find myself in witness to: Christians on the far left.

These folks reject the meanness of right-wing Christianity. They know what love is. They just don’t think God does. God is seen as impersonal, uninvolved.

These good folk have taken an overdosed of Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, and Elaine Pagels.

They don’t believe in a God who does anything.

And I am calling both extremes, left and right, to a new place—not between.

Not in the middle.

But above.

To a Christianity rooted in the experience of God. The God we meet in experience is the God we know in Christ.

And this God is neither mean nor impersonal.

And that’s Good News.