More Albert Schweitzer, please!

For this Lent, I'm giving up reading stories about churches and sex. I'm sick of it.

Last year, Bill Hybels, whose Willow Creek congregation became a model for the largest-worshipping church in Cape Girardeau, sped up his scheduled retirement due to allegations of sexual harassment. The leadership of this Chicagoland religious organization at first defended then finally admitted Hybels' culpability.

The Roman Catholic Church has been embroiled in a scandal for some time involving priests and sex. My own tradition, the United Methodist Church, just had a worldwide meeting in St. Louis about what to do with LGBTQI issues. The decision satisfied no one -- and a split in the second largest Protestant denomination is all but certain.

My students at SEMO each semester read an article written in the 1950s by the late Pierre Teilhard deChardin -- a Jesuit priest who suggests people in the modern age are too idle. Unlike their forebears, whose every minute was seemingly spent in activities devoted to simple survival, technology has created free time. Far too much free time, in his view. Long before anybody had a personal computer or a cell phone, deChardin wrote that technology may well sound the death knell of our spirits. The same technology that makes life easier makes us bored -- and when we're bored, we get into all kinds of trouble. deChardin's prose is more elegant than mine but this is essentially his message. Read the Old Testament story of David and Bathsheba in Second Samuel, a story about a wandering eye and lust and their inevitable aftermath, and you'll conclude the French clergyman was on to something.

So yes, this Lent, I'm giving up reading about churches and sex. Instead, I'm reading about the great European-turned-African medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer, a German-speaking

preacher's kid, grew up worshipping in a building used by both Protestants and Catholics. Because they used the same structure, the differences between these two groups didn't seem to matter so much. They saw each other regularly, saw one another as friends, and while what they thought about God was somewhat different, they de-emphasized doctrine and concentrated on what they could do together: help the poor, clothe the naked, feed the hungry.

This is the kind of Christianity Schweitzer practiced. Uninterested in the finer details of belief, even though he held doctorates in theology and philosophy, all that mattered to him was alleviating suffering. He became a physician and spent the last 50-plus years of his life as a medical missionary in equatorial Africa -- in what is now called Gabon. Schweitzer died and was buried there. In 1952 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for advancing his life theory, which he called "reverence for life."

Oh, and I almost forgot. As a young man, Schweitzer tried to unearth the mystery behind Jesus of Nazareth. Who, he wanted to know, was the actual man of history beneath the cosmic Christ? His search was captured in a 1906 book, Quest of the Historical Jesus. Frustrated in his attempt to get answers, Schweitzer turned his attention to embracing Jesus' ministry of healing -- and became an M.D. Forbidden to share what were considered heretical religious notions, Schweitzer concentrated on being a doc to the some of the poorest people on earth.

Yes, I need a little Albert Schweitzer this Lent. Maybe reading about his life will get some of the dirt and mud off my spirit.