Pastor Ryan Gaffney

Often people assume that because i am a “Man of God” (their words not mine) I therefore must have a certain political affiliation. And therefore a certain opinion on things that matter to them, like environmental protection and LGBTQ rights.

The truth is, that as a Christian, I think it is extremely important to not let my political affiliation become my religion. To not let my political affiliation decide how I feel about important issues. I have to be Christian first, and partisan…ninth… or later. I do have opinions, but they’re informed by the Bible, and not by which team or which tribe happened to agree with me last time.

Let’s talk about BLM

I love me some Dave Bautista. That shouldn’t really surprise anyone, he is very loveable. He does a great job in physical roles as well as comedic ones, and doesn’t lack in dramatic chops when they are called for. So I was really ready to see My Spy when it came out, and I hope it’s legacy is not damaged for having come out only on streaming services. Here is my Reflection:

I want to talk for a little bit about the dumbest part of the conversation around Faith and Reason. The “Burden of Proof”. That’s the question, of who it is, in a given debate or conversation, that is required to support their ideas with evidence, and who holds the “default” position. It comes up in every single dang conversation about the Existence of God between theists and atheists, with both sides insisting that they don’t ever have the burden of proof by virtue of who they are.

This is of course, not the case, but even if it were it would be dumb.

Whoever makes the claim has the burden of proof. So if an atheist walks up to a Christian and says “There is no God” then the atheist would have to prove that claim they made. Meanwhile if a Christian walks up to an atheist and says “There is a god” it would be on them to support that claim.

The sorts of atheists who like to get in arguments on the internet and elsewhere try to avoid this obvious reality by claiming that atheism is not a position at all. They will tell you that atheists do not believe that there is no god, (which would be a statement that could be defended or not) but merely that they “lack belief in a god” which is like, just, whatever bro.

Regardless though, whether or not it is part and parcel of the belief system called “atheism” if a person of any persuasion makes a claim on any sort, “You’re wrong” or “That’s dumb” or “there is no god” then all their posturing about the precise definition of atheist becomes irrelevant. “Okay, so you are an atheist that also believes my Christianity is incorrect. Go ahead and tell me why”

Would-be defenders of Christianity tend to posture in a way that is more complicated, but no less irrelevant. Every society believes in some kind of God as it develops, it is only after quite a bit of time they think of atheist. Perhaps it is a “properly basic belief” a la Immanuel Kant. Perhaps there is an evolutionary argument for it, or against naturalism. Perhaps Calvinism is true and affirmative belief can only come from the Holy Spirit through the Word of God. Whatever! It’s irrelevant! Because no matter how much advanced philosophy and theology you utilize, if you bring up the conversation it’s on you to support it.

But all of that doesn’t even begin to touch on the real idiocy of this metadebate. And that’s what this is, it’s a metadebate. It’s a debate about debate. In every debate there are two sides, there is a PRO and a CON, or an AFF and a NEG. One side talks first, makes a claim, starts a discussion, the other side is defending. The PRO has the burden of proof, the other side has what is called “presumption” meaning that if there were ever a tie, should the other side fail to furnish any argument at all for their perspective, or any evidence, or should both sides manage to thoroughly shoot down the others in exactly equal proportion. The CON would win the debate.

And that’s all you get. You win ties. You do not get to sit back and do nothing. You do not get to be the judge of whether or not the PRO/AFF side has demonstrated their point with absolute certainty or to your personal satisfaction. All you get, by not having the so dutifully avoided “burden of proof” is the presumption in case the other side says absolutely nothing.

That word “proof” throws people off. It doesn’t mean a smoking gun. Circumstantial evidence is enough to overcome presumption in virtually any debate context.

So suppose a Christian makes the claim, takes upon herself the burden of proof. She says “Jesus is LORD”, at which point an atheist, choosing to debate her, can either say “There is no such thing as the Lord” or they can be more careful and say something like  “Independent of whatever I believe or don’t believe, I think you are wrong about that” either way, the Christian has the burden of proof.

Then suppose that the atheist does nothing, confident they do not have the burden of proof.

Well then they lose the debate, obviously. As long as the Christian says anything at all, even terrible evidence will win against nothing. “My grandma told me so and she’s real nice” is better than nothing. The only way the say-nothing atheist would win is if the Christian also said nothing. Then the atheist would win on presumption.

Do you see how completely, totally pointless this whole argument is?

Let’s do another one to break up my shameless self promotion. Actual content that isn;t meta Whohoo.

Judges.

Less Whohoo.

Who likes the book of Judges

Nobody likes the book of Judges

I LOVE the book of Judges

It is so much fun, it is so interesting, it is so irreverently insightful, and absolutely never ever boring like “some” books I know of

But I get it, It gets a bad rap and I see why. It does not play nicely with others. It does not conform well to the filter we like to put most of the other books through in which everything becomes a morality story or an example of how to live. It’s violent and sexually explicit and we don’t expect that from the bible.

But we should

After all, we live violent and sexually explicit lives don’t we? Most of us"? Unless we are very very insulated from that stuff. How much of your life would you have to hide from God if God could not bear the sight of blood or urine, or stand hearing about the means of reproduction God himself invented?

The key to making judges delicious, I’ll submit to you, is in allowing it to be what it is and not asking it to be something else. It’s not Mr. Rogers Puppet Time. I like that trolley as much as anyone else, but it’s not the gold standard for everything that’s good. Instead Judges is something very much the opposite. Consider this.

If Joshua is a WWII era film. Judges is a Vietnam movie.

What is Joshua like? The national hero, with the cause that is wholly just and right, marches onto the scene. He is faces with danger, with difficult choices but we, the audience know that whatever he does is going to be right, because he is our man and we trust him implicitly. In the end the heroes reign victorious over the forces of evil. That’s WWII.

Judges comes in after that and says “Sooo, that war we won?” We actually made some compromises we shouldn’t have in order to win it, and now skirmishes are continuing and the next generation is ready to be a lot more honest about the reality of the situation. Particularly: war is ugly, bloody, and often morally grey. A lot of us wonder if we should be involved with it in the first place, but it never seems to go away. Here is the reality. Here are the heroes and the villains, they are mostly the same people. But while you are here let me tell you some incredible stories.

Ehud and the locked door murder mystery.
Deborah and Yael, in the world turned upside down.
Gideon who was like Joshua except in the ways he wasn’t
Jephthah the pirate king
Samson the superhero

Fun adventure stories. Written for adults. With meaning and insight, but not with a neat little moral at the end.

Judges.

Read it.

One thing I am really hoping and praying for in the midst of this pandemic is for more Christian content creators to collaborate and intermingle so that their audiences intersect and engage with one another. That is such a beautiful thing the internet does and it would be a shame if we as Christians were so used to NOT doing that that we failed to. My attempt to fix that is called Best Movie Ever where I invite the ministers I know to do what I do, talk about the movies they love with a theological lens.

I hope you enjoy the first of many videos in this format above, and if it makes you hungrier for more Scott Pilgrim (or if you need a refresher) check out THIS free table read from the cast 10 years later

One of the last articles I wrote before putting the last blog to bed was about broccoli.

Specifically, it was about how I had learned to roast broccoli in order to bring out it’s flavor and make it enjoyable to eat without covering up it’s broccoliness. And that I thought it would be a worthwhile goal to treat scripture the same way.

I always intended to make something od a series out of that and I never got a round tuit, but since we are doing this again let’s talk about everyone’s least favorite book, the Book of Leviticus.

Seriously.

I actually did a series of 12 count ‘em 12 sermons on Leviticus in two parts at my current church and I am still working there, because Leviticus is fascinating, and more than that it’s fun.

you know what else it is? Bloody, disgusting, complicated, rigid, and old fashioned. The authors knew that about it when they wrote it. The earliest readers knew that about it when they first loved it.

So often we try to protect Leviticus from that, and it’s a mistake! Leviticus is meant to be old. It was old even when it was new (the first community to read it enthusiastically and compile it into Torah was reading it long after the events it describes) but as an old book it illustrated what it looks like when a community seeks to follow God with all their heart. The questions that community asks, and the things they try to do. It demonstrates just how much of our daily life it touches when we start asking those questions (all of it)

And what’s so cool about it. so FUN about it, is that it doesn’t do all that with a series of long theological and ethical treatises. No. It deals with the issue of holiness from the perspective of spectacle.

Do you want to know what God is like? Light a fire big enough to consume an entire calf. Don’t leave the area while it burns. Do you want to feel how faithful God is? Live for a week in a booth or a tent. Do you want to know how evil defiles things? Start thinking very carefully about everything you touch, and everything that touches all of those things.

Leviticus, is a ancient book of really really incredible children’s sermons.
 
And if you want to watch what that all looks like from the pulpit, I have video

And of course when one thinks of revival of a project, it also bears mentioning some things that have changed since “Fear of Whales” about my call to ministry. I’m not only an ordained and established minister, I’m also a father.

We welcomed a beautiful baby girl into the world on Juneteenth, and I got to bring her home on father’s day. Now the world is entirely different.

I don’t tend to talk about my major life changes here with you, I have, this past decade, kept most of these posts strictly ideological. I didn’t talk much about my wedding, for instance, or the romance that took place before it. But then, back then this was a blog about my apprehensions, mistakes, and ideas in preparing for ministry. Now it is becoming something else. So maybe I will begin to. As a pastor, in many ways it is safer, less controversial, less of a confidence issue, to talk about my own life than it is to talk about my ministry experiences. I am as curious as you are to learn what this may become.

On that note, I think I have mentioned before how bad I feel every time I make a blog post about blogging. I talk about the nature of what I am doing and my vision and my goals, and I apologize for not updating more. and then I start updating and then I do it again. I’m not apologizing this time. I’m a dad I have more important things to do than write this blog, if I stop updating, that’ll be why. But i also have the potential to grow and learn, and build an audience as this blog has done before and could again, and this post, this post right here, it’s not even really for you. Dear reader, if there even is even one of you. This one is for me. This one is about getting back in the habit of putting pen to paper week after week after week. And I’m going to have to do that for a while before anyone wants to read any of it.

I am trying to work on taxes today and it is really really hard. I am not sure why it is, but the US Federal government and I have never been able to see eye to eye with regard to my finances. No, it’s not the usual complaints about what percent I am taxed and the Patrick Henry styled stubbornness and greed disguised to my own eyes to look like patriotism. It isn’t that. I get it. We have to pay some money and out of the deal we get roads and bridges and meaningful public programs and works. That’s fine. It’s the process that drives me up the wall. I’ve never been able to get all my forms together in just the way the government wants me to and turn them in on time. And often when i do… It still doesn’t work out.

If the government knows how much they want me to pay why can’t they just bill me?

I type this, trying to create content, trying to keep a blog up that costs less in terms of effort and is updated more than previous attempts, and yet I find myself wanting to delete, wanting to not post. Because why? Because why court controversy about something so stupid by stepping into a political sphere. And yet day by day politics steps further and further into my sphere. We can no longer acknowledge that black people matter without that being some kind of political statement. We can no longer listen to experts about epidemiology. Sometimes politicians literally teargas groups of clergy in order to step onto church grounds without permission and take ridiculous photo ops to make themselves seem righteous. And half the country defends them. Space to be uncontroversially in favor of anything at all is washing away.

At what point do I stand for something because it’s true. At what point do I write about something because I am feeling it?

Especially especially especially because nobody is actually reading.

The previous Post’s Hamilton video was a good example of MOVIEPASStor, one of my channels. Here is the latest example of my other channel.

So what Kind of “Content” have I been working on lately while I have been gone? Well Just stuff like this

As I look back on the hundreds of quick articles I have written. I think about their value. And there is some. Some substantial value even. It’s just going to take a great deal of work to uncover and transform that value. The same is true for my body of sermons, or even the other sermons this church owns from previous pastors in their employ. here’s the thing. Good content, whether visual art, writing, video, whatever, has two steps in it’s creation. Making it, and making it good.

First you write junk, and then you revise that junk until it’s good. That’s how you get good writing.

There are some good Ideas I’ve stumbled over in the last 10 years. I wonder if anyone will ever revise those ideas into something good.

I try to read a lot of books. I don’t always succeed. The War of Art is one I made it through, it was nice and short (although longer than i needed it to be, and dealt chiefly with the problem of resistance and how to overcome it. But there is one other very important idea at the core of this book that I’d like to talk about now. And that’s the idea of identity.

When do you become a writer?

At what point in your career do you become a writer? When you write your first book, when you get it published by a reputable publisher? When someone buys it? When it makes it to the top of a best seller list? or before that? Maybe when you first write something worth publishing. Or when you get an article or an essay posted in a periodical, or when you make money for writing anything, or when you think of the idea and resolutely set about doing the work such that nothing will distract you. Or earlier still.

Stephen Pressfield says you become a writer when you decide to be. You become a writer whenever you want, when you start to answer the question “what do you do” with “I’m a writer” or “I’m an author” instead of “Well I work at Starbucks (or whatever) but one day I hope to write.” Everything else, Stephen argues, is just degrees of the same thing. Identity is in your choice to identify, everything else is hard work.

So I’ve decided to be a online content creator. That includes being a writer, a YouTuber, a web designer and yes (sigh) a self-promoter and marketer. I’m a pastor, but I’m also a writer, and one day I will write a thing people will pay me for. I know I will. Because I already decided to, and all that’s left is hard work.

Years and years ago I was inspired to start a little blog while i was in college. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote into what became “A Fear of Whales” which chronologed my very long (10 year) process of becoming a full time ordained pastor. I stopped and started, had seasons I was more and less inspired to write. And eventually i stopped completely for years. I had reached the portion of my process that was more confidential, and I didn’t want all of my undeveloped thoughts to be published just then, and then after that, I was ordained, and the blog just stopped making sense. I was no longer that person afraid of whales. I was preaching in Nineveh. (or in this case, Orlando)

It’s time again to start again. The process is over, the first call is stable, and while I might no longer be well described as “fear of whales” I am ready to return to the regular discipline of putting my thoughts on the internet, or at least I think I am. I am doing a lot of other internet content creation this can work with. But I will talk more about that in another update.

Blessings all and I will see you soon, or at least you will see me, in the next article.