October 3, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Somehow I stumbled on to one of those sites to tell you waht important things happened on every day of the year.  Here is a sampling for today, October 3.  Some of these are pretty amazing, others really frightening:

 1430 Jews are expelled from Eger Bohemia

1789 Washington proclaims the First national Thanksgiving Day on Nov 26

1863 Lincoln designates last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day

1913 Federal Income Tax signed into law (at 1%)

1922 First facsimile photo send over city telephone lines, Washington, DC

1940 Anti-Jewish laws are passed by the Vichy government in France.

1951 Battle of Maryang-San, Korea starts  (not the beginning of the Korean War, which began June 25, 1950)

1952 First video recording on magnetic tape, Los Angeles, CA

1967 William Knight sets X-15 speed rec of 7,297 KPH/4,534 MPH/Mach 6.72.  (Pete Knight was to figure enormously in the passage of Proposition 22, which our present Governor uses to argue against same-gender marriage.)

1974 Watergate trial begins

1990 East Germany and West Germany merge to become Germany.

 Is history moving in the right direction?  In every century fools, tirants, inventors, reformers and bigots seems to have free rein.  God have mercy on us, and upon our history. 

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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October 2, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, visited the Southland for two days this week as part of a major trip to the U.S. Karekin II is the “pope” over 10 million Armenian Christians in the world.

I wasn’t invited to either of the two big events, in Pasadena and Burbank, but I would have loved to be there. Karekin consecrated the marble altar at St. Gregory the Illuminator in Pasadena, a brand-new $5 million church complete with limestone walls and historic dome, in the presence of 1,000 worshipers.

Today he presided at the ground-breaking for a $12 million cathedral being built on Glenoaks in Burbank for the Western Diocese.

Twelve million dollars gets our attention. Not since the Roman Catholic Cathedral downtown has any church been so ambitious around here. Big churches have been closing their doors for lack of younger members. The fact that the Armenians are building a Cathedral for their western province signals their important presence in our community.

For those of us who don’t follow such stuff closely, the Armenian Apostolic Church, which dates back to the year a.d. 301 (!) predates many of the historical developments for which we use the word “Orthodox”.

The Armenian Church even pre-dates a written Armenian alphabet, which was developed to transcribe an oral language already infused with Christian thought. The first significant use of the written alphabet was to put the Scriptures into written Armenian in a.d. 433.

The Armenian church is called “monophysite” to distinguish it from other Christian churches in regard to another arcane and ancient dispute: whether Jesus had one or two natures, and whether or not his divine nature totally subsumes his human nature. Following from that is whether the Virgin Mary was, therefore, the Mother of Christ (Christotokos), or the Mother of God (Theotokos). The council of Chalecdon fought this out in a.d. 451. The Armenian church, along with numerous other national expressions of the Christian faith, never accepted its decisions.

Those ancient disputes were briefly interesting when I was in seminary. Now they just illustrate how old disagreements lose their meaning and become irrelevant. But sadly, they perpetuate a public stereotype that Christians can’t get along. We have enough contemporary evidence of that, without nursing ancient distinctions which few people understand any more.

[Among the many things over which Catholics and Lutherans split hairs in the 16^th century, for example, was “transubstantiation,” an explanation of how bread and wine become or convey (carry) the body and blood of Christ. The categories of reason used 500 years ago are no longer used—by anybody—because they were based on Aristotle’s view of physics, which is completely irrelevant.]

The Monophysite controversy (explained here and here), may be another ancient “ankle chain” holding back the witness of all Christians to a world which is suffering, lost and mired in violence, and threatening the very survival of the Christian faith.

Archbishop Aram Keshishian, the 45^th Catholicos of the Holy See of Cicilia, speaking about the survival of the church, has said:

By survival I do not mean a mere continuity, a barren existence, an inward- looking estate, but a dynamic and creative existence for an effective witness. We are not concerned with our physical survival as such. Nor are we anxious only for the sheer perpetuation of the institutions that we have inherited. We are deeply concerned with the very survival of Christian faith that was transmitted to us as a sacred heritage, as the raison d’etre of our existence.   The secret of survival lies in renewal.

We may chuckle at the variety of quaint or strange cultural customs which have taken root in Christianity in these two millennia—like devotion to St. Mary, the kissing of rings and crosses, marble altars, elaborate and expensive vestments, swinging smoke in little brass pots until nobody in the room can breathe—it must all seem irrelevant in our culture.

But of course, to say that means that our culture affects Christian proclamation because the Church is always defending itself within its context. Our culture (U.S.A., 2007) seems to belittle anything which is not material, hip or cool, contemporary, momentary and sensual. Alas, this is why researchers like The Barna Group believe that Christianity will just disappear in a few years if it doesn’t adapt to American ways.

Personally, I am more inclined to think that American culture will disappear first, since it is based on a foundation which is unsustainable: privilege, national hubris, materialism and ill-gotten wealth, conspicuous consumerism, cheap labor from abroad, waste, violence, instant gratification. Do we really expect Christian faith to conform to those measures of human experience?

I would rather be numbered among “the irrelevant” that trace their spiritual roots back two thousand years, and continue using quaint, ancient customs.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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October 1, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“When people stop believing in God, they don’t belief in nothing,” said my friend Dr. Shelby Lee, who was pastor of a large Congregational church in Phoenix a generation ago. “They believe in anything.”

Something keeps drawing me back to a subject I first publicly opened several years back in a support group: the difference between religion and spirituality.

Religion has a bad reputation these days — not only because evangelicals and fundamentalists have attempted to define (read: re-define) and interpret the Christian faith for the general public. Islamic terrorists and other angry young men in the Middle East (terrortoryists?) who kill themselves and hundreds of others don’t exactly draw new people to Islam, either. A few years back, it was the so-called Protestants and Catholics killing each other in Northern Ireland. You get the picture.

I have been trying to voice some of the distinguishing characteristics of religion and spirituality out of my own experience, rather than resorting to the experts who have written many volumes, I’m sure. Here are a few observations:

• Religion doesn’t actually need a God who is still working and creating, or a Savior who will return. Religion is a self-sufficient empire.
• Religion gives lip service. It is richly ornamented with costumes, architecture, music, potentates, doctrines and rules.
• Spirituality is a lived awareness of not only God but of the inner spirit and its capacity to be open to God.  An indwelling spirit signifies that the two have come together, converged.
• The holy books of many world religions, including the Bible, contain both religion and spirituality, but they can and should be distinguished in these writings.
• Religion may preserve and offer a wonderful spiritual core , but not necessarily.  If the spirit simply dies or “goes out” of a religion, the loss of it may or may not be noticed by anyone who practices that religion.

In our times we see many people experimenting with new- age religion or some old stuff brought back from the dead, like neo-paganism. Ironically, the distinction between religion and spirituality is applicable to these groups as well. Many of their new adherents seem to enjoy the religious trappings of Wiccan, Druid or other systems, but may be so caught up in the ritual that the spirituality is neglected or forgotten.

It seems that both religion and spirituality are completely innate to the human experience. What amuses me are those contemporaries who have no use for, or who have fled from, Christian churches, saying that they were just full of a lot of meaningless rituals and un-spiritual hypocrites. Yet some of these people walk right into the arms of another faith, or make up one of their own, and dive right into the rituals.

Religious ritual, and all that comes along with it, is not in and of itself bad, dead or useless.  It can be distracting, however. It may hide or obscure the true spiritual core of the faith. This is certainly true with the Christian faith, where for years we have made a careful distinction between the religion of Jesus (his inner spirituality, unity with God “the Father”, and compassion for all people) and the religion about Jesus.  In a recent publication of The Barna Group, for example, young people ages 16–29 are more and more disinclined to have anything to do with the Christian church. And one of the chief reasons identified by the new study by David Kinnaman is that the Christian church does not resemble Jesus.

When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).

Even to raise this question about the resemblance of the Church to the model we have in Jesus is at least the beginning of a search for deeper spirituality, not more religious trappings and ornamentation.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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