The pastor of one of the largest churches in Houston was casually acquainted with a friend of mine who was pastor at a smaller neighboring church. They at least knew each other well enough to say hello and call each other by name. My friend was considered an “up and comer” in clergy terminology and this mega-church pastor offered him a tip on church growth: “If you want your church to grow, you have to have a conservative cosmetology of the world. Lean on that for teaching the creation story and your church will grow.”

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the mega-church pastor, but the word is cosmology, not cosmetology. What he was saying in his malapropism was to ignore the attempt to merge science with faith by sticking to the conservative interpretation of the Bible that would claim allegiance to a literal understanding of the Bible. Some have politicized that understanding of the Bible in our time and idolatrously called it “inerrancy.” The irony of that claim is even they don’t believe the Bible is inerrant. A five-year-old may struggle with a literal understanding of the world, but most adults grew through that period of learning a long time ago.

On the issue of the debate between faith and science, I don’t see them as polar opposites that must necessarily square off against one another. They are complementary and in need of one another. I don’t see science as a secular attempt to disprove the Bible implying it is merely an ancient book of wives tales and false information about the world. But neither do I expect my faith to ignorantly thumb its nose against science and say it is an idolatry designed to keep me from believing in God. In truth, science and faith desperately need one another.

The Bible is not a book of science although it does reflect the science of its time. The cosmology of the Bible (the way the ancients understood how the world was constructed and held together) was a flat-earth notion of the earth suspended between the waters above (sky and clouds) and the waters below (subterranean waters).

So Genesis tells us in the story of Noah that when it started raining, there was the unrelenting rain from above. It also tells us the mantle of the earth cracked releasing the surging waters from below and the known world was swallowed by water from both above and below and subsequently drowned. I believe the point of telling the story this way was to recall the creation of the earth in the first creation story of Genesis 1 when God separated the waters above from the waters below and suspended the earth between them. I believe the collapse of this system in the flood was God’s way of reverting the creation back to chaos. In short, the story of Noah is a mythologized way of describing God’s anger over the reality of humankind’s disobedience against God. So angry was God in this story that God blew the Creation back to chaos as it was before the world was made. Do we continue to believe today in this kind of cosmology even though the Hebrew Scriptures clearly teach it? Some ministers do but I do not.

Today, we would regard many of the Bible’s stories as healthy examples of what some would call Hebrew mythology. That term recognizes there is much in the Bible we could call images or analogies or simply “truth told in story fashion.” By implying the Bible should be understood literally rather than figuratively, we’ve done a disservice to faith. We’ve tweaked the nose of faith and made it jump through our flat earth need to make it something it was never designed to be. The ancients would be the first to guide us to accepting the world as God has given us curiosity to know it. All of that makes me love the Bible even more, doesn’t it you?

Go figure. I was sitting in Panera’s one morning last week enjoying a cup of coffee and their free wireless service and cruising the net checking into a few of my pastor buddies on their church websites. I typed in the address of one church and the screen instead showed me a message indicating that the site was blocked for security reasons. Somehow I heard a voice from the TV watching in the late 1960’s: “Danger! Danger! Danger!” I was blocked from seeing the church website by the site blocker designed to keep us out of cyber-trouble.

Gosh, I’ve never heard of a church site being blocked because it had been deemed dangerous so I saw where I could get more information about why this particular website had been blocked. I learned that it was blocked because it was considered either a cult or a part of the occult! Then it dawned on me I was not being blocked by my own software but by Panera’s web blocker. Their server was set to filter certain words or phrases deemed evidence of a religious cult.

Flannery O’Connor half a century ago reportedly observed once that, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Does that mean the church is suspect to being dangerous as a cult? Where is the line that separates healthy faith from weird faith? How do we tell just when we’ve crossed the line? Even the Apostle Paul understood this: “For some, the word of the cross is foolishness, and to others, it’s the power of God” (I Cor. 1:18).

Think about it … we give up a perfectly good Sunday morning to go to church. We dress up and sing old songs and hear someone speak to us for half an hour while we sit there pretending to listen. We even sing while passing a shiny brass plate from row to row. Some put an envelope in the plate or lay a check upside down while others put in a buck or two or ten. Some even sit in small rooms with a dozen or so other people and talk a lot about themselves and each other and talk a little about the Bible. This is not just something they do every now and then because they’re urged to do this every week.

But if you listen closely, you’ll hear some really wild stuff! Once a month they drink the blood and eat the body of Jesus. They hear stories of how Jesus walked through walls and healed a few and ticked off the pious. There’s even talk about people coming back from the dead, one so dead the Bible admits his body has been in the grave long enough to “stinketh.”

Finally after talking a long, long time, the preacher urges people to “invite Jesus into their hearts.” They’re encouraged to get up during the song and walk down the aisle to tell the preacher about wanting to do this. A few weeks later, the person and the pastor step down into what looks like a hot tub (only they’re both wearing white robe-like garments that makes both of them look silly) and the pastor dunks the person under the water. Again … words, words, words.

Weird! Strange! Odd! So is it a wonder the software pulled this website aside and made if off-limits?

Barbara Brown Taylor tells a wonderful story about a man who came to her after the end of a worship service and told her of all the changes he intended to make after hearing her sermon on commitment. He claimed God told him he needed to make all these changes as a sign of his obedience to God. He said he was going to quit his job the next day and sell his house and give all his possessions to the poor and on and on about all these radical changes he intended to make. She was shocked! Inside were these thoughts clamoring for voice: “Wait a minute! Take a breath! Go home and sleep on it before doing all this!”

So I ask you … how is it we’re to live out this strange and wonderful sense of faith by being a follower of Jesus? How is it we walk the line between faithful sanity and religious wackiness? What does being a follower of Jesus mean in our time and how risky are we willing to practice our faith? When you get it figured out, please let me know. I struggle with these things as much as you do.

Most of us live with the shallow notion there is only one faith, one way of believing, one way of living the faith life. I suppose in some obscure way that may be partially true but when it comes to living the faith, it’s also true faith is like a cloud that hangs suspended above us floating at the whimsy of an unseen wind.

The other day, I was sitting outdoors reading a book when I decided to stretch my neck and rest my thoughts by looking up at the sky. I looked up at the clouds scattered across the sky and noticed they weren’t all in motion to the same degree as others around them. No one cloud was like any of the others around it. There were similarities to be sure but every cloud was distinctly its own being separate and apart from any of the others.

One was headed in one direction and just below it, another skirted underneath headed in a slightly different direction. It looked for a moment there would be a collision but what would it matter? They were clouds, not cars! Around the fringes of each cloud, I could see how they were constantly disappearing and reappearing. I suppose if I could have seen the entire cloud clearly, I would have noticed the entirety of the cloud was simultaneously melting and morphing. Faith, like the clouds carried aloft above us, is dynamic and alive.

A while ago, I commented almost off-handedly that I tossed in the wind as some unfiltered metaphor: “Faith is liquid.” In that moment, I was struggling with the idea that faith is so much more than a confession that can be written down and put in a frame and hung on the wall where it can be ignored. The finalities of faith resist being boxed in by words no matter how fervently we push them. For many of us faith is a set of ideas we give verbal assent to without necessarily having struggled in articulating what they mean.

That’s like the young man or woman who stands at an altar and says the words of their vows of marriage without knowing one whit of what they mean. After all, what do they know of love? The commitment to love someone is not contained in the words said under the bright lights of a happy day surrounded by family and good friends. The commitments of marriage are pounded out in daily habits of love and forgiveness and grace. Love is a shared journey of discovery guided by maps that are only sketched out on uncertain scraps of paper.

Your faith is like a cloud. It’s growing and failing all in the same moment. You can be headed in different directions at times while also recognizing that you are being carried aloft by a power beyond yourself. Call it what you will. Faith is a mystery. Faith is a direction in which you’re headed. Faith is a journey or a pilgrimage. Faith is a way of being formed by the daily habits of being. Faith is a journey blown by the unseen wind. Faith is liquid. 

No matter what you use as a metaphor to say the unsayable, know that God is in all of it with you. God is a part of your thinking and a part of your being. God is with you in the doing of faith, whether you’re succeeding in the moment or failing.

While the Bible tells us we are like a vapor and that we’re like the grass that withers and dries away, we don’t really believe that, do we? Come on, that sounds like such a sad song reminding us all we are is dust in the wind. It’s not that bleak, is it?

I get to sit with individuals and families in those moments when they say goodbye to a loved one that’s been a fixture throughout their lives. They’ve known this person for every breath drawn into their lungs and they’ve known them as fully as anyone can know another person. The only problem now is they’re gone. They died because they had cancer or heart problems or simply got old and died. It almost doesn’t matter how one has died because the important thing is that they have died and someone alive lost someone dear to them. It becomes a poignant time of loss for those who remain.

I’m only now coming to a point of clarity over these perplexing issues and part of my interest in it comes because I sit with folks who are scattered along the arc of life when they are forced to deal with these incredibly powerful issues.

A while back I was with a family that had lost the elderly patriarch who had been the linchpin for the whole family system. This man’s death came unexpectedly even though not everyone in the family grasped the inevitability of the approaching moment of death when it arrived. This dear man was a singularly important figure for almost everyone in the family. What was interesting was how notably this man had left his imprint upon the family. Everyone was touched in different ways by his great spirit, but they had something about which they could be grateful. Everyone had received something that was a part of him … a way of being, a certain strength of character, a particular passion that came from him … you know how this works, don’t you?

More than that, it was obvious looking over the family from the vantage point of the pulpit that the genetic tree had produced fruit that was easily evident in all the faces of the grandkids. It was visible in the way they carried themselves or in the ways they were all eagerly taking their place in the world. They had goals and were already demonstrating their productiveness in the world. All that came from this great life force that emanated from their grandfather.

I think the Bible means to let us know we are merely links in a chain and once our link has been added to the chain, there’s nothing more life has to say about that. Life goes on with its incessant need to move along adding ever more links. There were links before us and there will be links after our time has come and gone. We’re such a small part of the great river rolling through time and eventually we’ll relinquish our place to those who follow after us.

 The leftovers of the Indian summer confirm what we already know … fall is a great time to enjoy the shifting of the seasons. We can bless the coolness of the mornings when we have them as a gift as a nice counterpoint to the afternoon warmth that’s a reminder of the summer.

There’s still time to cook out on the deck. A sweater against the cool evening breeze makes a romantic dinner with votive candles on the table. No mosquitoes as during the stifling heat of summer, just the early evening stars to illuminate the night.

Lemonade is a wonderful treat in the shade of our favorite backyard lawn chair after mowing the grass. Some play golf more regularly. Others take long walks on the weekends. I’ve taken up bicycling and plan to ride to and from the church whenever my schedule allows it. I need the exercise and I have a great set of bike trails available to me that keep me out of traffic and relatively safe (although I’ve learned bikers must keep their mouths closed so they don’t ingest too much wing-born protein).

Last year Kyle Childress wrote an intriguing article about his membership in the National Association of Porching. That’s right, he’s a card-carrying member of a group that revels in the gift of the front porch. “Porching” is a newly minted term that grows from an old and some would say ancient pastime. “Porching is a way to recharge your batteries,” says John Buchino the author of Porching: A Humorous Look at America’s Favorite Pastime, a book that makes the case for the constructive lazing. Buchino is not only a professor of pediatrics and pathology at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, he also has a cool sense of humor.

Did you know there are health benefits from such good habits as sitting on the porch? The average porcher burns up as much 50 calories an hour just sitting. Some would say that number increases slightly by rocking at a faster clip.

You see some of us who are overworked and frantic with anxiety would look upon the porching crowd as, well … good-for-nothings. They are social radicals who are challenging the very social fabric of our society that would suggest that unless you are doing something, you’re lazy. “Most people in America move at a fast pace and I don’t think we take time out enough. (Porching) may look like you’re doing nothing, but actually, you’re taking time to relax, reflect, and to be conscious of the world around you,” Buchino says.

John Buchino has a saying for the more learned among us: Porchare Humanum Est. Forgotten all the Latin you learned in high school? It means, “To porch is human.”

Kyle Childress quotes the Holy Book from Micah:  “… nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:3-4). Childress is quick to remind us that right there in the ancient Hebrew prophecy there’s a recommendation that a part of God’s vision of shalom is the endorsement of porching. Porchare humanum est … perhaps is to remember, “To porch is also divine.”

Surprise of all surprises! Guess whom you’ll find on your porch? The God of all creation is a well-known porcher from eternity past. In the quiet noise of the night, you’ll find an instant companion there to greet you, ready to engage you in all kinds of interesting conversations, and the peace of silence to be savored just in the presence of one another.

Like a long stare into another’s eyes, most of us eventually break away our eyes and look somewhere else. It’s too intense, we feel. It’s too much and feelings of inadequacy disrupt the power of our gaze. That’s the effect thoughts of our dying have upon us. It’s like a long stare into the piercing, unflinching look from another.

As a pastor I meet with all sorts of people who are in all sorts of places in relation to their own death. Sometimes the prospective death is his or her own. They stand in the doorway and wonder whether they have the courage to go on. On other occasions I meet with the surviving loved ones who must plan a memorial service. We meet in homes, hospitals and funeral homes and think out loud what must be said and what must be remembered.

Browning Ware Pastor Emeritus of the First Baptist Church of Austin for many years also had prostate and bone cancer. Browning wrote a regular column for the The Austin American-Statesman and he used that column to share what it meant to him for his body to be the carrier of such an invasive disease. At the end, he was living near the shadow of death at the time and unflinchingly shared what it was like to stand that close to the doorway separating mortality from eternity. In his column from the fall of 2003, he shared:

Several of my friends believe that I know a secret. They are convinced that my illness has invested wisdom in me that is rare, difficult to come by, but worthy of exploration. I get the feeling that they want me to report on what is hidden around life’s last limiting corner. ‘Browning, what do you see beyond the horizon?’ I don’t observe as much detail as some of my friends would prefer. I have no magic vision of my future beyond death. I trust my traveling companion, Jesus. He promised to be with me. He is enough. But, my friends return and press their questions: What do you want your best, your last thoughts to be? This is my answer: I want to be present, as fully present as is possible, to what is happening around me and within me. I desire no special exemptions, but simply the pleasure of answering ‘Present’ when my name is called. I want to be glad when these moments are fully mine.

Browning’s article stirred up a response from the Austin community of readers eager to know more. A few weeks later he shared these thoughts:

I recently shared my desire to be fully present to what is happening in my life. A teacher friend agreed. He said many of his students, however, envisioning their own death, want to die suddenly in an accident or to die quietly in their sleep. I want to be there when it happens! The story of my friends plying me for secret wisdom reminded me of the incident surrounding David Hume’s death. The arch skeptic carried on a life-long exchange with a divine who was convinced that Hume would recant on his deathbed. The minister made frequent trips to Hume’s bedside and had the good fortune to visit Hume on the morning he died. To the minister’s chagrin, the old skeptic Hume died peacefully and happy. The truth is, I suspect we die pretty much like we lived.

Browning’s unbroken gaze was encouragement for those of us who wish to be present at every stage of our lives. To be fully alive and aware of God’s present mercies is our goal.