Ten Spiritual Realities That I’m thankful for

1.  I’m thankful that Jesus’ death created the possibility of a meaningful relationship with my maker.

2. I’m thankful that Jesus’ life was lived as an example so that I can figure out what God would do, and also as an act of solidarity with us.

3.  I’m thankful that we have to work, and trust, and grow; it’s not a one-shot magical transformation.

4.  I’m thankful that God is a God of the opressed, of the underdog, of crazy reversals of the world’s way of seeing things.

5.  I’m thankful (though baffled) by the idea that God invites us to create reality with him through service and prayer.

6.  I’m thankful that I’m allied with the global church in this effort.

7.  I’m thankful that I’m located in Fellowship Holden in this effort.

8.  I’m thankful for the ability to praise and worship.

9.  I’m thankful that God works through scientific laws, usually, and values thought as much as feeling.

10.  I’m thankful that I’ll spend eternity in God’s kingdom.

Pissed off

I’m pissed off.

Through what was mostly coincidence, I’m pissed off about the topic of homosexuality and Christianity.

I’m writing to vent.  And I’m writing because all you good people who leave me comments, every now and again, you help bring a little balance to my sometimes lopsided views of things.

At any rate, my wife was chanel surfing and she ended up on this Rosie O’Donel reality show.  There’s some kind of cruise for gay families, in the process of adopting kids. 

I find Rosie so annoying.  And clearly the show was made by people who had an agenda.

But this doesn’t do anything to change my rage.

There was this protest by some ridiculous church.  About people wanting to adopt other people.

 

I get it.  I think.  I get it that the people in that church think that they are doing the right thing.

But I have experience with what it’s like for kids who want to be adopted.  We had a foster child.  I work with kids in the system.

It’s not that it’s evil.  But it’s utterly a crap shoot.

There are very, very evil places for kids to be out there.  Horrible places.  Places where they are neglected and abused. 

And there are people who want kids.

And I just wanted to scream at the church, “You’re not helping!”

And perhaps I’m being unfair.  The show didn’t tell the church goers story.  It’s possible that they are doing more than protesting.  I would have a great deal of respect for them if they were like my friend Steve, who takes foster children in.  Or if they were working to make the system better.  Or if they were working to keep kids out of the system by enabling parents.  Or if they were working to keep kids out of the system by helping people not get pregnant in the first place.  Or even if they were spending time and energy trying to promote adoption from straight parents.

Most of my rage isn’t so much for the adult parents.

Most of my rage is for the kids. 

Some of my rage is around what a terrible witness these people are of Christ’s love.  The only redeeming view of Christianity in the whole thing was the pastor who was on the cruise.  She was doing the marriage ceromony for some of the gay couples.  These ridiculous protestors started singing songs about Jesus, and the pastor, she stood by the gay people, but she sang along.

It was incredibly powerful: this woman, through her actions, she was saying “Yes, we have Jesus in common, you protestors.  I know all the songs and stories, too.  But I make my stand over here, with the least of these.”

Should she have been doing gay marriage ceromonies?  Is it right to be gay?

I don’t know.  But I do know some other things. 

It’s so hard, because in discussions like this, it’s easy to say “Jeff, we can’t be ruled by emotions and anecdotal stories.”

And that’s half way true.  But it’s also true that behind every anecdote is a real human being.  And we can’t ignore real live human beings. 

The following are little snippets that I can personally verify.  And really, my connection to the foster care system is not all that extensive.  There are amazing foster parents.  But there are also stories out there much worse than these:

I know of a little girl who was in foster placement who lived in this home overrun by rats.  Years later she still, sometimes, slept with her hands over her ears because she was afraid they would crawl in.

I know of another little girl who lived in a foster home where only one person spoke English.  She did not speak Spanish.  The night that she was taken from her mother, she had no way to communicate that she was terribly afraid of the dark.  She stayed up all night.  Every day she would throw up at the end of the school day, knowing where she was headed back.

I know of several kids who were sexually abused by foster siblings.

I know of a few who were sexually abused by foster parents.

I’m not saying that we ought to just start tossing these kids out of foster care to any knucklehead who shows up.  I am saying that there are safe guards in place to determine the suitabality of adoptive parents.  If those safe guards are so weak, if that background check is so pathetic, that we decide we’re going to leave them in these temporary places, which are sometimes dumping grounds and money-makers for people because somebody is gay…

(A quick note on molestation and sexual abuse: Most pediophiliacs express a preferred gender of victim.  However, this gender does not correlate to the gender of adult they are attracted to, nor is it higher in practicing homosexuals.  In other words, a child molester is just as likely to be a straight as gay)

Partners…

Somebody (I forget who) said “I’d have an easier time with Christians if they weren’t so busy stepping all over each other to climb up on a cross.”

There are all sorts of things running around in this criticism.  Some of the things it points at are things that to me aren’t criticisms at all.  But I think it’s also lampooning our tendency to quietly suffer, to humbly allow ourselves to be hurt, ridiculed, and insulted.

For example, somebody has repeated a behavior over and over and over again.  We think about the whole idea of forgiving somebody 70 X 7 times.  And so we’re mostly sure they are going to do the same hurtful thing again.  But we think we’re doing what we’re supposed to do when we let them.

Sometimes I allow myself to be hurt by others.  And I call up a picture of Jesus on the cross.  And I feel pretty good about it, in a bad kind of way.

This morning I read this in Ephesians 5, “5For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.^[a] 6Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. 7Therefore do not be partners with them.”

I wonder if I always skimmed over this.  I wonder if I didn’t have fresh eyes to see.  I wonder if it sounds different in other translations.  I always thought that the admonition was to not be decietful with other people; I thought this was saying “Don’t be partners in crime with someone”

But that’s not actually what it’s saying.  It’s saying “Don’t allow yourself to be decieved by others.”  And the reasoning is fascinating: don’t allow yourself to become a victim because when we do this, we create victimizers.  When we act like prey we are helping others to learn to become a predator.  

The last verse does use that word, partner.  But it’s not talking about a conscious, willing partnership.  It’s saying that when we allow others to decieve us we are entering into a partnership nonethless.

Just for clarities sake, I’m not claiming that every time we are victimized are we partners.  The whole point is those cases where we know what we’re doing, where we allow ourselves to let this happen.  There are real predators.  There are are innocent victims.  When somebody is doing something unexpected to hurt me then there is no partnership. 

There is more advice which runs contrary to the way we Christians often do things.  Later in the chapter it says Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. 12For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. 13But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, 14for it is light that makes everything visible.”

What does it mean, to “mention what the disobedient do in secret”… Is it when we sit around in a small group, and share with everybody that so-and-so keeps hurting us and we pray that they will stop?

If it is, then I have some changing to do. 

It seems like this verse is saying that we have an obligation to go to the person hurting us and tell them, bring the light to them.  This is one way to make sense of what follows:

 This is why it is said:
   ”Wake up, O sleeper,
      rise from the dead,
   and Christ will shine on you.”

 15Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, 16making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”

Here, what jumped out at me was the word, wise.  So often when we set ourselves up in these situations where we forgive and forgive and forgive, we know that there is a level on which we’re being quite stupid.  Rationally, we know what’s going to happen.  In honesty, I find it kind of refreshing to be told to be wise around these things.

For me, this all leads to questions about how best to reconcile these truths to the reality of the cross.  It can almost appear that Jesus did the thing we’re told not to do.  He unwisely partnered with us in all our sin.

Interestingly, the next part of this chapter is one of the most-talked about in all of the bible.  It’s the one about husbands and wives submitting.  It’s used as the basis for traditional thought and progressive feminist thought in Christianity.  It’s used in weddings, as a model for devotion to spouses, as a model of devotion to the church.

But I think that there is a different read in the fuller context of the chapter.  The additional truth we get when we look at the whole thing is this: one act of submission is to not allow ourselves to be victimized by people’s habitual sins.  Wives submit to husbands by preventing them from acting in anger.  Husbands submit to their wives by preventing them from acting in greed… and vice-versa.  We shouldn’t just accept mediocrity from each other.  But we should call each other out, we should challenge each other, we should not partner with their sin by allowing ourselves to be victimized by it.

The second half of this chapter of Ephesians talks about being presenting in purity.  It explains I think, why Christ wasn’t partnering with us in our sin.  He had the power to destroy it, so he did.  And I think maybe there is this implication that we should do the same, first for our spouses then those around us.  When we have the power to destroy sin in others’ lives we should.  We feed their sin when we constantly forgive them and then position the person to do it again.

Of course this can be taken t far.  There is lots about forgiving verses forgetting, codependent relationships, etc. that I haven’t even touched on.  But it’s interesting how seeing just a couple phrases and viewing a chapter as a whole can bring this whole other meaning to scripture.

Hope for the future

I was feeling discouraged today.  It was about some ongoing things that I’ve been really struggling with.  Things I work so hard at but never seem to make any progress.

They are partially things outside of me.  Things I don’t really have control over.  But things that impact me greatly. 

But I had this epiphany.  One of the things that following Christ means is believing– truly believing– that tomorrow will be greater than today.

There will be thorns that will be pulled from my side in this life through Christ.  And thorns that are left in my side until this life is done.  But the thorns will be removed.

It can be so easy to pay lip service to this idea… that tomrrow will be greater than today.  In the midst of pain and hurt, though, it’s hard to have faith in this truth.  In that wierd, contradictory, circular way, Jesus gives me faith to believe in Him.  And believing in him means believing in all sorts of things: facts about His life on earth, facts about His divinity, but most of all, the idea that tomorrow will be greater than today.

God in the Cinammon Rolls

So, I’ve discovered cooking this summer.

I’m not up to anything elaborate.  Actually, nearly all of it has come from a cook book Emeril made for kids.  But it’s been both a yummy and interesting diversion.   It occurred to me that there all sorts of interesting theological ramifications to cooking.

This first occurred to me as I was measuring out the sugar for apple muffins.  I scooped out the sugar, and the measuring cup was almost full.  It occurred to me I had a couple choices: First, of course, I could declare that “almost full” is close enough.  If I did this, I’d dump it into the mixing bowl and continue on. 

Secondly, I could put the measuring cup back in the sugar bag and bring it out again.  When it came out, I knew it would probably be slightly over full. (Isn’t that how it always is: either too much or not enough?)

Finally, I could get all compulsive and level the top off with a knife if it came out that way.  Or I could pour the slightly over-full cup in the mixing bowl.

To use the under-full cup in the mixing bowl felt like an act of stinginess.  To pour in the overly full cup felt like an act of generosity.  And to level it off felt like an act of legalism.

I realize that this association probably says something about me having an unhealthy relationship with food.  But it also says something about the act of providing nourishment for my family, about taking care of their needs in a manner that is much more direct than what I am used to. 

 I’m the families “bread winner” (interesting term, that.)  Work can sometimes feel so disconnected from the money that pays our rent and grocery and other bills.  Investing some time in making some food is so much more of a direct line between me and the nourishment of my family.

As I was kneading the cinnamon roll dough, it was all between my fingers and smelling good.  The physical-ness of the act was probably therapeutic, but, it also felt somehow like an intimate connection between myself and my family, even though I was the only one awake at the time.   Maybe it was because it was like massaging somebody’s shoulders.  Maybe it was because generally I hate having sticky stuff on my hands and I was (in some tiny sense) sacrificing for them.  

I was putting those things together and hoping that it’d come out the way it was supposed to.

It’s instructive that God provides the building blocks in all sorts of different ways.  One of those ways is through the laws of physics and biology.  By all rights, flour and butter and cinnamon and eggs and yeast and stuff should just turn into a sticky mess when you throw them together.  But when you mix them and cook them in a manner that is consistent with the scientific laws that God set up, you end up with cinnamon rolls.

God actually does the real work in everything we do.   All we do is figure out how things work, put them together, and have faith and hope that it comes out the way it is supposed to.  We do the work of planting seeds.  Or sharing the gospel.  Or turning the key in the ignition.

God makes them grow.  Or speaks to the potential convert.  Or igniting the spark plugs.

And sometimes of course, the seed doesn’t grow.  The person doesn’t hear Christ in us.  The engine doesn’t roll over. 

Maybe these cinnamon rolls won’t turn out after all my work, too.  All we have in this life are recipes and hopes that they’ll turn out. 

Another theological ramification of cooking is what I learned about sacrifice.  If I had to kill the chicken I cook, I’d probably be more attuned to this.  I wonder if this is some of the reason that God doesn’t require animal sacrifice anymore.  (I know that there are theological reasons, but presumably, God could have arranged those rules differently if he’d wanted animal sacrifice to outlast the Temple.)  It’s hard for this representation of God’s love to resonate with us, now.

If I had lived in ancient Israel, I’d be killing an animal nearly every day to eat.   The act of sacrficing an animal would connect to my every day experience of killing an animal.   (Especially because of all of the perscriptions about blood and killing animals that the Hebrews contended with in the first place.)  If I lived in the time after Christ, I’d further connect these sacrfices with the crucifixion: if I knew my scriptures I’d know that he so often compares himself to water, and bread, and that this comparison is enacted in the Lord’s Supper.

It’s not even a meat-eating thing.  If I was a farmer, and I watched the crops I’d toiled “dissapear” into my families’ mouths, I’d still be aware that some things must die in order that my family might live.  In the act of cooking, I’m returning myself toward that realization.  The closer I get to making things from scratch, the closer I get to that realization: something had to die in order that I might live.

When I crack open an egg I am reminded that a chicken laid the egg.  If that egg had been fertilized life would have sprung from it.   When I pour in the milk I am reminded that a cow gave the milk.  In different circumstances, that milk would have nourished the cow’s young.  When I pour in the sugar, I know that sugar cane plants had to be hacked down, somewhere far away, in order for me to enjoy this thing that I am now making.

(There is a whole other thing in all this: connections are formed through my awareness that somebody hacked down the sugar plant, tended the chickens and cows, etc.)

If I’d bought one of those nuclear-power cinamon rolls thingees where you burst the canister and then heat the rolls inside, I might have reflected on the machines that created the thing.  Rationally, I’d know that just as many people (and other life forms) where involved in bringing together the various ingredients.  But this is just an after thougt: I’m not holding the eggs in my hands, I’m not pouring out the milk.   I’m not reminded of the fact that things have to die in order for my family to live if I’m operating in a world of prefabricated food stuffs.

It’s a subtle thing, not the first thing we might think about… but it’s incredibly important: things have to die in order for my family to live.

And it’s not a very long walk from this realization to a next one, so much more important: one of the things that had to die, so that my family might live, is Jesus.  His death allowed for the most important kind of life, a deeper life than merely living, a more eternal life than the body will experience.

I’m not saying that we ought to use cooking as a means of conversion, nor am I saying that cinnamon rolls are the place everybody will find God.  But He is everywhere, and as I reflect on this mornings cinammon rolls, I find him there in all sorts of ways.  (They were, by the way, delicious.)

This post was my submission to Watercooler Wednesday, Randy Elrod’s blog carnival.

Love the sinner, hate the sin (?)

One of my favorite reads is the blog stuff Christians like.  The writer does this amazing job at taking a second look at what we’re doing.  He recently mentioned something in passing without exploring it, which is uncharaceristic. 

The concept that he just mentioned was the idea of “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

This is sort of the equivalent, I think, of saying “You, you’re not like all those other” (fill in whatever opressed or minority group you’d like here.)  The person saying it feels like he’s all hip and on the cutting edge.  The person hearing it only hears what they percieve as ignorance.

If somebody said that they love me but that they hate something which I consider fundamental to my very identity, I would be– at best– annoyed.  If they said “I love you but hate the fact that your liberal leanings.” Or “I love you but hate the concept of fatherhood in general.”  Or “I love you but I hate all teachers” I would not express the appreciation this comment seems to want.

I know that we can argue all day that when we say these things, the things we hate is really sin, unlike fatherhood, teaching, etc.  But in a way that’s the whole point: the people who we say these things to, generally they don’t see the issue– whatever it is– as a sin.  It’s sensible for us to debate this point with them.

It’s even reasonable for us to do exactly what we say we’re doing: Love the person while hating that sin. 

What’s not reasonable is for us to use this statement as a tool of evangelism.  It’s unreasonable to expect that saying this is going to give a free pass to lecture and judge somebody.

 

 

In Laws, out laws, enemies, family, having your cake, and eating it too

Yesterday, I blogged about how we like to pretend that situations are win-win, like they are easy compromises when in fact they are difficult and actually do create winners and losers.  Today’s sermon at Fellowship church, given, of course, by Marty, helped to clarify my thinking in this direction and also to spur it off in a few other direction.

The most direct repurcussion to what I posted yesterday: Marty was preaching on some really tough words of Jesus.  He said that people try to soft pedal these words, chalk it up to cultural differences, translation errors, etc.  I don’t think I’m putting words in Marty’s mouth to say that I think he’s right in some healthy skepticism at these attempts at explaining the hard stuff away.

It occurs to me, in fact, that this is another way of trying to have our cake and eat it too.  We have our cake by saying I accept the whole of The Bible.  We eat it to by saying that when it’s hard to swallow parts we can just rationalize and explain the hardness away.

There’s actually something really reassuring about the fact that this stuff is not easy.  The reassuring part is this: we could reasonably, rationalized be accused of making up a faith that was easy, that confirmed the perceptions that we had before we allowed ourselves to be changed by the scripture. 

The hard truth might not be fun.  But the very fact that it is hard actually helps to confirm the truth of it.  The very fact that we are trying to conform ourselves to the words, rather than the other way around, this implies that we are behaving obediently.  In Brian McLaren’s words, we are allowing the scripture to read us.

If I struggle with Jesus words, I am inevitably lead to question of where MY problems are.  If I begin with the assumption that the bible is true, and I really wrestle with the fact that Jesus is supposed to be more important than my biological family, I can turn my view on myself.  I can begin to see that there is idolatry in my attitude.  I was attempting to hold my family above the creator of the universe.  On the other hand, if I begin with the assumption that my world view is correct, then I will work hard at finding ways to make scripture not mean what it seems to mean.

This is not to say that we should instantly simply assume that Jesus’ words should always be taken in the “hardest” sense possible.  He did, after all, promise that his yolk was light and easy.   What I’m getting at here is that reasonable understanding is huge, but we have to be careful not to delude ourselves into taking the very easiest way out.

The fact that Jesus came with a sword to set us against those in our biological family is hard.  I think we should really hold onto this difficulty.   We should not try to escape the reality that people we love very much might end up our enemies. 

But we should hold this reality next to the reality of what Jesus told us to do with our enemies.  He told us to love them.

Holding these truths next to each other is harder than just taking one and running with it.  This isn’t a win-win, really.  This isn’t letting one of Jesus statements counter act another statement so that they cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter in a cheesy science fiction novel.

This is letting his words meaning penetrate in a real way.  As we wrestle with Jesus meaning it determines the “wrestling moves” we use.  In this case, it leads to me the following questions:

#1) Does it look the same to love an “enemy” and love an “ally”?

#2) How do we go about living our every day lives with people who are “enemies”; how do we strike the balance between loving them and recognizing there is something in them which is opposed to what we are supposed to be doing and thinking and feeling?

Looking foreward to answers,

Jeff

Reaping

There is this field in  my mind and in it I am reaping what I have sewn.

Every day all day I am reaping what I sewn.

And it is always day.

There is one row of the field and it is endless, almost endless in front of me and behind me.  This one row is my row.

There are other rows endlessly to my left and to my right.  Others reap what they sew in these rows.

Strange plants, knee high and desperate for water are in front of me.  They have these fruits.  Strange fruits, wrinkled and coarse.  So feeble are the stalks that one of these little fruits weighs the whole thing down. 

I pluck the fruit from the plant and I place it in a sack tied to my belt at my left hip.  The sack doesn’t ever seem to get bigger when I drop them in, though I do this nearly endlessly.

It doesn’t ever seem to get smaller when I reach in and pluck one out to eat it.  It does not taste like anything and I do not eat because I am hungry.  I eat it in the place where I am endlessly reaping what I have sewn because that is what I must do.

I move slowly and I trample the naked stalk under my booted feet.  I am holding this wooden thing which is tied to something heavy behind me.  It was a thing designed for a beast and not for a man.  A large wooden piece, with two rusting chains trailing back behind me.

The chains are linked to something enormous behind me.  I pull it slowly.  It crushes the naked stalks beneath its wieght. 

The thing that I am dragging digs a rut in the ground.  When I reach the nearly endless end of the row of the field where I reap and sew, I will turn around.

My yolk and the thing which the yolk drags will disappear.  There will be another sack then, at my right hip.   I will walk only slightly faster than before.  I will bend down and place the seeds in the little rut I dug. 

There are things that do not make sense.  One of them is that on the trip down I have enough arms to hold the yolk and pluck the fruit and drop the fruit into the sack.

Something else that does make sense is that by the time I reach the very end of my row in the field the fruits have grown back up again.  I had reaped.  I shall sew.  And the yolk is back.

I do not know why I do not look back behind me.

I know that it is some great boulder that I pull.

It is both a rock and a metaphor and my hands grow blisters that are both metaphoric and true.

That rock is the weight of my selfishness.  It is the weight of my pride.  It is the weight of my hurt.  It is the weight of my self sufficieincy, and my delusions.

It is as large as a house and my hands bleed where I push at the yolk.

And I remember that there was a man who said that his yolk was light and easy.

And yet he said I should take up a cross for him.  He said I should lose my life for him.  He said these things that I did not understand.  He was the one who told me I will reap what I sew.

And I do reap what I sew.  But I do not believe those other things he said.

I keep on not believing them until suddenly I do.

It is not a yolk I am hauling anymore but a cross, suddenly.  A cross.  His cross.  My cross.  The weight is different.  It is light and yet it is not.  Because it is not my strength that carries it but his, his strength somehow through me.

And this is not a burden meant for a beast.  This is a burden made for a man.  It is the wieght I was born to carry.  It is both easy and not-easy, but I was born to carry it and the strength does not come from me, to carry it:  it simply flows through me.

I reach down and pluck one of the fruits by my knees.  I am surprised at its redness.  I am surprised that it is sweet. 

God does not want you to be a comic book geek.

So I have this confession: I managed a comic book store through most of my adolescence.

It was sort of like the Simpsons.  Or that movie High Fidelity.  (except that was in a record store.)   Folks that were pretty low on the world’s pecking order came in and established a completely different pecking order.  In the outside world, coolness was based on toughness, talent (in something useful), competence, money.  Mostly, the folks who frequented the store  were distinctly lacking in coolness.  They were not tough, talented, competent, or wealthy.   These attributes were so low in most of the customers that they could not be measured by any instruments known to man.  As a result, the pecking order in that place had to be established based on different criteria.  (Because we all know that we need a pecking order… If we stopped trying to figure out who was on top we might actually all start to get along.)

I should say at this point that I manipulated my way out of the pecking order.  I didn’t do the right thing and squash it.  The stereotype holds true: in those sort of specialized mom-and-pop stores, customer service means that you might wait until they left the store to mock them.  My status as the guy running the store established me as some sort of nerd Alpha wolf.

At any rate, I observed the heirarchy that they established.  It was not based on competence or toughness or money.  It was based on treating every ridiculous and insiginificant detail of whatever comic book was cool like it was divinely inspired.  It understates the case to say that the attitude was as if the characters were real.  The real world paled to isignificance when compared to the importance of whatever revelation had just been unvieled in Spiderman, or whatever X-man had just been brought back from the dead, or what new fact about the Sanman’s realm had just been brought to light.

Ignorance was dealt with scorn.  Disagreements that would be seen as insignificant matters of opinion by normal people were treated as objectively verifiable and critically important.  And whoever was wrong had not only missed out on issue blah-blah-blah of title blah-blah-blah.  They were somehow morally deficient.   They were placed at the bottom of the heap by a group of people who normally inhabitted the bottom of the heap.

They had these Comic Book Conventions.  Yes, they are everything you’d imagine them to be.  Put these sad little people in a room with the creaters of the focus of these people lives.  There were basically two different ways I ever saw this go:

Scenario A: The creator was some frustrated art student.  He treated the fans with contempt.  Questions about continuity, trivia, and details were seen as irrelevant.  The fans drank this contempt like a fine wine, and chased after these guys all the more.  They seemed to have this sense that the creator actually possessed all the answers, but just didn’t want to share.  The fans seemed to believe if they were just persistent enough, eventually the artist would give in.  (Anybody seen Misery?)

Scenario B: The creator was basically a grown up fan and seemed to relish the silly-seriousness of it all.  He had answers worked out to the questions and apparent contradictions.  He could quote issue numbers off the top of his head just like a fan.  (Anybody remember Galaxy Quest?)

I got this image in my head today.  It was a dialogue between a creater of some work of art (I don’t care what: an opera, a comic book, a movie, a TV show, a novel) and some over-the-top fan.  (He probably lacked some basic sanitation skills.  This is unfortunately another portion of the stereotype that my experience bore out as true.)

I have this image that the fan might open with some question about characterization.  And the creator might ask “what did you think of it?”

And the fan might express curioisty about how the warp-field-gizmo-whatsit works.  And the creator might ask “But did you like the story?”

And the fan might proudly ask for an explanation to the apparent contradictions that come to light if you watch the directors cut of one thing and contrast it with the Europen pilot episode of the other.   And the creator might ask “But did it move you?  Were you effected?  Inspired by it?  Anything?”

God is of course the creator of everything that there is.  The creator of creators.  The creator of comic books fans.  The creator of comic books.  The creator of stars.  And belly button lint. 

And as I thought about God as the creator, I had this realization: I haven’t really grown out of these ridiculous debates.  I don’t read comics anymore, so I’ve changed the subject matter.  (Actually, if you want to know the deep truth, every now and again, when I think nobody is looking, I’ll open up one of those old comics.)  These days I don’t listen to conversations about who the toughtest Robin was.  I’ve disengaged from conversations about whether Kirk was cooler than Piccard.  I’m no longer interested in what color of Kryptonite gives Superman a wedgie.

These days the conversations I’m involved in are a little more likely to be about predestination or the nature of the trinity.  But the thing is, It’s hard for me to imagine that God views them as much different than I now see those ridiculous conversations in the Comic Book store.

Before the doctrine police prepare there rebuttals, I’d like to say that there are a few– a precious few– of these conversations which might be important.  I am not making the claim that all discussions about doctrine are irrelevant.  But I am willing to be make the claim that almost all of them are.

It’s not that they are not destructive by themselves.  But they are addictive to somebody like me.  And then there is that pecking order… I have to say that the ghost of that old pecking order it comes back, every now and again.  We’re a little more suble and sophisticated.  Most of us are good at hiding it from ourselves when we’re busy dividing the world into the groups of cool kids and un-cool kids.

But I know that I still make judgements.  Focusing on the things that divide us isn’t good because it focuses me on these things, and this is not where my focus is supposed to be.

Someday, I think the creator of the  universe will ask me “What did you think?  Did it inspire you?”

I hope I’ve got a pretty good answer ready.

This post was my entry into Marty Holman’s weekly blog Carnical, Monday Moments.  Click here to check other great posts at the carnival.

 

Don’t be a local Yokel

I want to share some overarching thoughts about romantic relationships between Christians and non-Christians.  This is my broader, more theological post on the subject.  You can click here for a summary of my personal experiences on the matter.  Or click here for the beginning post of a longer testimony of how I came to Christ.

Theologically speaking, here’s how I see the matter:

I’m not sure that there are any good reasons to view a romantic relationship as any different than any other kind of interaction we have with folks who aren’t Christians.  A romantic relationship might be more intense than many other relationships.  We might spend more time with our special friend, and this should certainly figure into the equation.  To be really blunt, hormones ought to figure into the equation as well.

Bult ultimately, it doesn’t seem to me that this situation is any different than any time we, as emissaries of Christ, venture out into the world into places that could have temptations for us.

I believe that we should be venturing into Hells on Earth to rescue people and set them free.  We shouldn’t just go on missions and then go home.  We should be missional, we should be the mission.

But we should be wise about it.

We all have our temptations.  We shouldn’t make our missions fields in the same places our temptations lie.  I think that this would be a bit like Jesus throwing himself off the temple knowing that the angels would catch him. 

There are some situations we shouldn’t get ourselves into.  Most of these depend on the person.  Some people most definitely should not engage in some types of close personal relationships with people who are not Christians.  I don’t think this is a sign of a weak or immature faith, even, just a wise recognition that we all have places we should not go.  But should we make a blanket statement about all Christians?

If there’s any reason why I haven’t see it yet.

The most frequent attempt at explaining why is in 2 Corinthians.  I’ve had one good reason for quite some time for thinking it’s ridiculous to use this as an argument against “Mixed” marriages.  I’ll run through that first.  Then I’ll explore a second reason that this doesn’t work.  This second argument was brought to my attention in the last couple weeks.  (Thanks to that person.)

2 Corinthians 6: 14-16 says : Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial^[b]? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols?

Reason #1 why this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t get involved with non-Christians: The word “yoke” had a very specific meaning in Jesus’ time.  It referred to the specific rules that a Rabbi lived by.  Rabbi X might think that walking a certain number of miles was acceptable on the Sabbath, for example.  Rabbi Y might think that this was too many.  A yoke was the specific, nit-picky, down-and-dirty rules that a follower submit himself to.

Therefore, it’s exactly right to say that we shouldn’t yoke ourselves to nonbelievers.  But it’s exactly wrong to think that this means we should shun, ignore, or ostracize them.  If a person were to get romantically involved with a non-believer, there is probably no truth more important than this: have a relationship with them, but do not submit yourself to the nit-picky, bottom line rules that they live by. 

Reason #2: It seems that Paul is talking to a church community about the wider community.  He’s not talking about individual relationships, based on the context.  If we read the surrounding verses, it seems like a modern understanding might be something like “Just because the rest of the world watches UFC fights, or buys blood diamons, or takes God’s name in vain, that’s no reason for you as a church to do the same things.”

I don’t want to say that it’s easy to get involved with someone who lives by a different understanding of the universe.  It’s brutal and hard and there are no easy answers.  But sometimes, the reasons we stay clear of these relationships don’t seem very Christ-like.   We appear fearful of the non-believer and his (or her) impact on our faith… Or perhaps even worse, we appear unwilling to sacrifice and suffer.  Fear for our faith or cowardice before suffering are certainly not traits that Jesus modeled.