Monthly Archives: December 2019

Entering a new decade . . .

On the penultimate day of the year 2019 The Christian daily Dagblad Trouw published an article with the following headline: 2019: More burn-out, more atheists and more electric cars. The growing number of electric cars in the Netherlands is a welcome contribution to combat the serious climate change that threatens many facets of our existence. Opinions on the increase in the number of atheists in the Netherlands (by about eight percent in ten years) differ. On the one hand, there are still large groups of believers who view this trend with regret, while on the other hand many think this is a very positive development. For many, religion is a curse rather than a blessing. The increase of the burn-out phenomenon is extremely worrying. What can be done to reduce the workload of a large part of the working population, so that burn-out can be prevented.

Of course, many other things have changed in the second decade of this century, in a positive or negative way. The feeling of security has decreased among the Dutch population, while crime has in fact decreased! The population has increased by about 700,000 people. For a considerable part (over 400,000) this is due to the arrival of migrants. This increase is much less significant than many populist politicians want us to believe, with their claims that the country is flooded with fortune seekers from all over the world. Their alarmist messages that Islam is becoming stronger and stronger are also premature, to say the least. In the past ten years several religious communities have shrunk, but the United Protestant Church in the Netherlands and Islam have remained virtually at the same level. Among others changes in the past ten years are the enormously increased use of smartphones and the use of the social media, and shopping on the internet! And then, of course, there is the exploding concern about climate change.

But at the turn of the year – and this time at the transition from one decade to the next – we are not only looking at what has happened, but also at what the coming years will bring us. We hope for more peace, and less global polarization. Above all, I, for one, hope there will be a change in the upcoming presidential elections in the United States. And in our own lives we hope for health and energy for ourselves and our loved ones, and for joy and satisfaction in our activities.

It goes without saying that I am also thinking about the future of the Church to which I belong and which is dear to me. Will we see the changes that many, with me, are longing for during the world congress in July in Indianapolis? Will we get new leaders who will let go of the stifling approach of the past ten years and who will give the church the breathing space that is needed for a healthy development of our faith community? I am referring to space for the regions of the world to color Adventism within the culture and world view of their part of the world (this alone can offer a solution to the ongoing impasse surrounding the role of women in the church). And I am referring to space for the individual believers, to be allowed to think independently, to ask questions and to find their own answers within the contours of a common tradition.

This is my last blog of this year. I managed to post a new blog every week. Not every piece was equally profound, but it is nice that every day there are still dozens, and often a few hundred, readers. A warm thank-you to all of you, and God’s blessing for the new year!

Enjoying Christmas

It’s Boxing Day—seven thirty in the morning. I am sitting in the living room and just made myself a cup of tea. Everything is quiet. The Christmas tree and other Christmas lights create extra atmosphere in the room. A great background for writing a blog.

We have enjoyed Christmas so far, and expect that this 26th of December will also be a nice day. Unfortunately, in the Netherlands, the “second Christmas Day” (as we call it) is also increasingly assumed the character of ‘boxing day’, on which the religious character of Christmas is pretty much pushed into the background.

We started on the path to Christmas with an interdenominational Sing-In on December 21 in the interconfessional church building in the center of our village. We thoroughly enjoyed it, and were happily surprised that the mayor read the Christmas gospel. On Christmas Eve the Advent congregation in Harderwijk had a beautiful Christmas service, which was entirely organized by the teenagers of the local church. Chapeau! On Christmas Day we enjoyed a beautiful concert of the West German Broadcasting Company (WDR) on TV and, of course. we did not want to miss the message of the Pope and his Urbi et Orbi blessing, as well as the speech of the Dutch king. I was happy to see on Facebook a short Christmas message from Pastor Ted Wilson, the president of the Adventist World Church.

I realize that in our denomination the church leaders often have to maneuver very carefully around Christmas. After all, there are quite a few fellow-believers who are opposed to Christmas celebrations. It is, they say, a pagan feast and Bible-believing Christians should have nothing to do with it. It struck me that the message of Pastor Wilson on Facebook, in addition to many positive reactions, also received a lot of negative comments. Many of these comments went something like this: Shame on the president of our church that he sends such a wrong signal and leads the church down the wrong path.

Is Christmas of dubious origin? Yes, it certainly is. But is that a problem? In and around the Christian church many elements can be traced back to non-Christian traditions and customs. But if those things have been ‘christianized’, and have been given a totally new content, it doesn’t really matter where those customs originated. One could even argue that one of the characteristic aspects of the Adventist church service also has a very dubious origin. The Sabbath School is not an Adventist invention but was copied from the Sunday School, as it developed in various Protestant churches in nineteenth century America. Sunday school was, of course, linked to the Sunday and the celebration of that day was associated with the worship of the sun god. Is this a reason to abolish the sabbath school?

I was alerted to the example of the dubious origin of the Sabbath School in an extremely informative article that I found on the website of Adventist Today. Here is the link: https://atoday.org/paganisms-gift-to-us/

It is curious that many conservative church members object to celebrating Christmas. They generally appreciate Ellen White’s opinion, but when it comes to Christmas, they set her positive statements about celebrating Christmas aside. For her, it was especially important that we celebrate Christmas in a way that echoes, loudly and clearly, the message of the feast, namely that the Savior was born. Yet, for her the social aspects were not taboo either. For example, her son Willy even seems at least once to have dressed up as Santa Claus, with his mother’s approval. (See: http://www.truthorfables.com/EGW_Santa.htm)

I’m sorry so many of my fellow believers don’t enjoy Christmas. Of course, the message of Christmas must be central to everything we do on and around Christmas. And that message should not only be in our minds as we enjoy the Christmas tree, the the candle lights and the beautiful carols. It is the message that we must take with us, into the last week of the year and into 2020.

The “Hondsrug” and the “Hunebedden”

Last week I preached in the Adventist church in Emmen. The group of Adventists in Emmen is a relatively small but stable congregation, where I like to preach. The distances in the Netherlands are relatively small, but for someone who lives in the west or in the center of the country, the province of Drenthe feels like far away. Because there was a special offer for two nights with breakfast in the Van der Valk Hotel, just outside Emmen, my wife and I decided to leave for Emmen on Thursday and spend two days exploring the largely unknown surroundings. On Thursday we visited the new zoo, Wildlands, in Emmen. The fact that we had free tickets was an extra enticement. We were happily surprised by what we got to see. The way this zoo is designed makes it very worthwhile to visit!

On Thursday we decided to follow a route along a number of villages in the Hondsrug area. The Hondsrug is a region in the province of Drenthe that is so geologically interesting that UNESCO has chosen it as a geological nature park. It is a narrow strip of about 70 kilometres in length, which is a little hilly and is also considerably more wooded than the surrounding parts of the province. It is also home to most of the 52 or so ‘hunebedden’ –the oldest monuments in the Netherlands.

I don’t know anything about geology, but a little reading gave me some background knowledge about the origin of this special type of landscape. Allow me to quote a paragraph from a Wikipedia article: ‘During the penultimate glacial period, the north-western ice flow plowed through the northern part of the Netherlands, resulting in the straight and parallel ridges, the so-called megaflues’. The article goes on to mention that this unique process, some examples of which can also be found in Canada, took place some 150,000 years ago. It was a nice experience to get better acquainted with this interesting part of our country.

Large boulders came along with the enormous ice mass that was propelled from Scandinavia. Much later, in the so-called New Stone Age, these were used by the ‘Hunen’ to make elongated tombs–sometime with a length of some 20 meters–in which they could bury their dead. These ‘Hunen” were part of the funnelbeaker culture, which lasted from about 3400 to 2850 BC.

Our visit to the Hondsrug made us think about a number of things. It is rather difficult to fit the dates mentioned for the ice age that created the Hondsrug, and even for activities of the hunebed-builders, into the time scheme of a creation that supposedly took place in the recent past, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. However, to be honest, I am not overly concerned about this.

How the ice ages of the past fit into modern climate research does raise some more questions for me. According to the geologists, their research has shown that in the course of tens of millions of years there have been about 23 ice ages – a very long process in which a number of times the earth (or at least a large part of it) became a lot colder and then considerably warmer again.

While I was thinking about this on the Hondsrug, thousands of climate experts and politicians were meeting in Madrid to discuss the recent global warming of our planet. They tried to agree on measures that could limit this warming to around 2 degrees Celsius. According to most of the Madrid participants, mankind is to blame for our current climate change and there is therefore an urgent need for mankind to take action on a global scale. As far as I have followed the discussions (and as far as I am able to follow them), it is indeed important that we realize that we are stewards – at least to some extent – of our climate. Like Donald Trump (and also some horrible Dutch populist politicians), we cannot claim that the climate issue is a huge (left-wing) hoax. But at the same time we should perhaps also realize that in the past there have been major fluctuations in the earth’s temperatures and that there may also be factors at stake that we do not know or understand, and that are not under our control. Unfortunately, many things are often much more complicated than they appear to be at first glance or are described in media reports such as De Telegraaf (a Dutch newspaper that I tend to compare with the FOX news channel).

A medicine for a restless society

After my grandfather passed the age of seventy, he came to live with our family. He spent his days working a little in the garden, going for a short walk, and reading in his easy chair. My life and that of many of my peers is very different. My diary is still full of appointments and my ‘to do’ list includes a series of projects that I hope to work on in the near future: the preparation of sermons and lectures, the writing of articles and of one or more books. And then, there is a list of people I plan to visit and there is a pile of books in the living room besides my chair, that I hope to read in the near future.

I am no exception. Many pensioners say they are very ‘busy’. There are so many things they feel they have to do that they wonder how they used to have time to work. Sometimes there is some exaggeration, but the fact that the lives of many elderly people are different now from what they were one or two generations ago, is undoubtedly true. Fortunately, many older people are now much fitter than their peers in earlier times. The average life expectancy has risen considerably and the social possibilities and expectations have changed dramatically.

For those who are still fully engaged in the labor market, life has also become increasingly busy. We once thought that the ever-increasing mechanization and subsequent computerization would make life much easier. Some futurologists predicted that within a few decades we would only have to work 15-20 hours per week, and that there actually would be no more work for many people, thanks to machines, computers and robots. The average working week has indeed become shorter and the average working week is now around 40 hours, or a little less, for a large part of the working population. What strikes me most, however, about the recent protests in the Netherlands of many professional groups (especially in health care and education) is that people not only want to have more salary, but that they also complain about the ever increasing workload and the accompanying pressure. And gradually the phenomenon of ‘burn-out’ has reached epidemic proportions.

Employees are now often expected to be available at all times, and the boundary between work and leisure time has in many cases become quite blurred. Many activities may have become easier and physically less strenuous, but there is infinitely more to report, to consult and to communicate. Many processes have become far more complicated. Take the domain of health care, for example. Much more has become possible in the treatment of diseases and the rehabilitation of people, etc. These developments cause a great deal of extra work and stress for many people in caring professions.

I notice that I need a weekly rest. God foresaw that man would need such a time of rest and he created time for us human beings in units of six-plus-one days. After every six days there had to be a period of rest—-for body and spirit. Because I preach almost every Sabbath, there is often not much rest on that day. For many people—for pastors and lay people who are active in the Church–the Sabbath is often not the oasis of rest it is supposed to be. This point does not receive sufficient attention.

The biblical Sabbath has been a focal point of the Adventist principles from the beginning of our church’s history, but more than ever before it is now a ‘present truth’. The Sabbath can be a medicine against the pressures of the relentless pace of the twenty-first century. Clearly, according to the Bible, the Sabbath falls on the seventh day of the week, which we usually call Saturday. But it is no longer our greatest concern that people understand on what day the Sabbath falls on (although that is not an insignificant detail), but that we succeed in convincing people that celebrating the Sabbath is a tremendous blessing for body and soul. The Sabbath is God’s gift to man and it is important that the people of our time learn to unpack that gift and to enjoy it.

Traditions

The word ‘tradition’ has Latin roots. My Latin is quite rusty but there is enough left to remember that the word goes back to the Latin verb tradere, which means: to deliver, to pass on. So, a tradition is about passing things on from one period to the next, from one generation to the following. In itself it is a rather neutral word.

For many Protestants the term ‘tradition’ has a distinct Catholic ring to it. The reformers promoted the Sola Scriptura principle (the Bible alone), but Catholics maintain that through the centuries the church has generated a treasury of wisdom and insight (the tradition) that provides a source of revelation, besides the Bible.

Adventists usually speak in negative terms about ‘tradition. In addition to what they consider unbiblical Catholic traditions they also discovered in other Christian denominations a predilection for ‘dead forms’ and ‘unchangeable traditions’. What was said and done in various denominations, was, they said, not put to the test of Scripture, but was largely derived from documents and decisions of synods which together formed a rather cast-iron ecclesial tradition. In their condemnation of traditions, Adventists sometimes (often?) tended to forget that every institution develops traditions and that this is also true for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. And they often failed to recognize that other religious communities have, in fact, some beautiful traditions. Some of these at times make me rather envious.

Traditions are not limited to churches and to the religious domain. Countries and ethnic groups have many traditions. Many of these are good and should be preserved. Some are not so good or even morally wrong (e.g. bull fighting, female circumcision, student initiation rituals). Some traditions are imported (mainly from the USA) and are quickly adopted, as for instance: Valentine’s Day, Halloween and Black Friday. All of a sudden the Black Friday craze has captured the Dutch imagination (or is it: the lack of imagination?).

Recently some Dutch traditions have become rather controversial. On December 5/6 the Dutch celebrate St. Nicolas—the annual feast for the children. It is the time for giving presents (rather than at Christmas time, although giving Christmas presents is slowly also become a tradition in the Netherlands.) A few weeks before December 5 St. Nicolas makes his entry, accompanied by a group of black helpers. There is increasing opposition to this aspect, which, it is argued, combines the concept of servility with that of blackness. The helpers of St. Nicolas can no longer be black, some groups insist, while others feel strongly that this old tradition has nothing to do with racial discrimination and must not be diluted in any way.

This past week has seen considerable unrest in a few quarters of the city of the Hague, after the city has banned the traditional fires on New Year’s eve. Last year these fires led to dangerous situations and the regulations have therefore been tightened to the extent that, in fact, the traditional fires will be a thing of the past. Many are convinced the city has taken a wise decision, but others feel deprived of an important tradition!

I believe it is wrong to be locked into traditions that must continue-no matter what. Yes, traditions must have continuity, but there should also be the freedom to constantly adapt. I look forward to the coming weeks with many Christmas traditions. Some of these traditions may gradually disappear, while other, new traditions, will emerge. We need traditions in our personal lives, in the city, region or country where we live, and also in the faith community of which we are part. It contributes to what we call identity.

To be quite honest, if some traditions would disappear from my church, I would not miss them. But a church must definitely have traditions. If there is nothing we can hand on to those who will come after us, things that we find important and that make us what we are—and this is more than a list of 28 ‘fundamental beliefs’—we are in a sorry state indeed. Being grateful for the traditions that have been handed on to us, while feeling free to adapt them, when and where desirable, and creating new traditions ourselves and handing these on to those who come after us—this make a faith community into a living movement.

(Adapted from my blog of September 19, 2012)