Where Will God Go?

Years ago a woman approached me after our weekly church service. Since I was her pastor, she wanted to tell me something she had experienced in order to hear my perspective.

She said that, as a young teenager, she had experienced various forms of abuse, both within her family and at church. One day she made a firm decision about her life, a decision she carefully explained to God.

“God,” she said, “I want you to know that I am going to start drinking and partying and doing all kinds of things that I don’t think you’re going to like.”

She told me that she heard words in her head—tender words that she believed were from God—saying, “All right. I’ll go with you.”

During her years of self-destructive behavior—right up through her time in rehab—she never doubted that God had been with her all the time. She had no illusions about God’s approval or endorsement of her behavior. She believed that she had broken God’s heart, but that he still remained quietly with her.

I had to really think about this one. It was an important question: In our worst circumstances, when we have chosen paths of pain and dehumanization, does God abandon us or wait patiently alongside us, grieving over our self-inflicted choices?

I think that the biblical history of Israel has something to say about this. What do you think?

[My most recent novel, The Haunts of Violence, was inspired by the conversation I had with that woman]

Sin Makes You Stupid

When the Bible uses the term “sin,” it isn’t just talking about people misbehaving. Sin is a bigger, darker concept than just the idea of being naughty. Sin is an orientation away from God—essentially forgetting about God—and looking for meaning and identity in other things. Ancient Israel did that when they abandoned God and chased after numerous fertility gods, idols that seemed sexier and more functional than the God who had rescued the people from slavery in Egypt.

Sin also creates victims. Along with all of us sinners, there are those who are the sinned against. These are people who have been abused, neglected, oppressed, used, and discarded. This victimization often results in an identity grounded in pain, and pain always demands medication.

The biblical imagery of sin includes one of a person walking along a path that is sure to end up in a proper destination. And then the person decides to wander off that well-worn trail and do some exploring. Once off the path, the person becomes disoriented and loses all sense of direction. Fear and desperation emerge and the person embraces a new identity: A person who is lost.

Wilderness experts often caution people about what to do when they get lost in the woods, because too many people do the wrong things when they lose their way. Once off the trail, they panic, exhaust themselves, get dehydrated, and get even more lost than they were in the first place.

That’s a good biblical image for sin. And, as a wise man once said: Sin makes you stupid.

When followers of Jesus start following other desires, stupidity isn’t far from the scene. When our identity as kin to Jesus changes into something else—as lonely people, misunderstood people, needy people, addictive people, suffering people—our desires demand fulfillment from a source that is other than God. There are all kinds of stories of extra-marital affairs, substance abuse, thievery—you name it—that take place within the shared life of churches when people’s identities shift and wander off the path, the way, that is Jesus.

Psalm 73 says it well:

“When I was beleaguered and bitter, totally consumed by envy, I was totally ignorant, a dumb ox in your very presence.
I’m still in your presence,
but you’ve taken my hand.
You wisely and tenderly lead me,
and then you bless me.

You’re all I want in heaven! You’re all I want on earth!
When my skin sags and my bones get brittle,
God is rock-firm and faithful.” (vv. 21-25, The Message)

Looking for What God is Doing

“The recurrent error of our technologically conditioned age is to look for what’s wrong in our lives so that we can fix it, or what needs doing so that we can have something worthwhile to do. There are things wrong that need fixing; and there are jobs that need doing. But the Christian life starts at the other end—not with us but with God: What is God doing that I can respond to? How is God expressing his love and grace so that I can live appreciatively and in obedience?” (Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 138-9)


This week I had the privilege of teaching the first of a two-week intensive course on the subject of the church and mission in a global context. At one point we began talking about how the church’s mission begins, not with a question about historical tradition (“we’ve always done it this way”) or cultural preference (“what do people like?”), but rather with an inquiry about what God is doing in this time and place. The church’s role, we decided, was to participate in what God was doing in the world around us.

So I asked for examples of how we’ve seen this work in our respective faith communities. It took a while (for me, too), but we did have stories of people coming together in prayer and conversation, seeking to grasp, even in weakness, fear, and trembling, God’s ongoing activity and preferences, and then taking the risk to join into the missional party that was already going on.

I came home from that first week in Phoenix on Saturday night, and jumped right into a full, life-giving day on Sunday. After a rich and reorienting worship gathering, my wife and I had lunch with friends, sharing stories of joy and pain, hope and faithfulness. In the evening we hosted some young Venezuelan friends—children of the partner churches in South America who had grown into adulthood and were now making their respective ways here in the States. It was a day of fullness and life.

As I take a little time to reflect on these past days (without that time of reflection, the days often just melt together, blending with the mundane and routine, losing their significance and meaning, becoming part of the purée of time), I am asking the two questions that Peterson poses: “What is God doing that I can respond to? How is God expressing his love and grace so that I can live appreciatively and in obedience?”

Every pleasant relational experience is not necessarily a signal that one’s life direction has to change or that a new vocation must be embraced. But reflecting on experiences that bring life and joy allows for the consideration that the Spirit of God—the source of life—is always at work, and that work is seen in the lives of real human beings, all struggling to find their place in the world.

So, on this, day, I ask those questions on a personal level, not just for the church. Maybe you are asking them as well. May God surprise us with his mysterious responses.

Ordinary Time - Dark Sayings

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,
things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.
We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done. (Psalm 78:1-4)


Every family has a bit of scandal in its history—a cousin abandoned her family and ran off with the milk man, an uncle took up counterfeiting and did time in Joliet, a great-great-grandfather stole horses for a living and got hanged in Tucson, and so on. Some folks in the lineage just seemed bound and determined to besmirch the family name, not caring what it would do to future generations.

But they’re probably not the first characters that come to mind when your kids want you to tell them a story. You wouldn’t start out with, “Well, did I ever tell you about your great-great-great-aunt Alice, who ran a whorehouse in Pittsburgh?” No, probably not.

However, that’s exactly what the psalmist does here. He warns everyone that he’s about to speak dark sayings, and that the intention is that these stories (or songs, in this case) will be passed on from generation to generation. It’s a scandalous family history of a people who had experienced the faithfulness and goodness of God, only to turn away from him over and over, suffering the consequences of their unfaithfulness, running back in sorrow, then doing it all over again. It’s a mess, really. And the psalmist wants the kids and the grandkids to hear it straight.

If I had been around when this Psalm was written, I probably would have suggested editing out the long list of national failures (maybe replacing them with the simple phrase, “Sure, there were mistakes along the way, but . . .”) and focusing on the deeds of derring-do, the grand successes, the amazing discoveries, and the profiles of piety. Now, that’s how you write a résumé.

The stories, however, were passed on, and they remain in our Scriptures. They aren’t just stories of an unfortunate past; they are stories that include us and speak to all of our possibilities. I can find myself in the ancient accounts of a people forgetting about God. I am confronted with my own amnesia when it comes to God’s goodness and provision in my life. I have way too many times where I have taken matters into my own hands and ordered God to the margins so that I could show him how things are done. I have dark sayings of my own.

It’s a good thing to recall where we’ve been and where we have the potential to go. When our confidence rests in ourselves, humility is usually abandoned, and we edit our memories. When our confidence rests in God, humility comes to life and we recognize who we really are and appreciate our potential for disaster. We have a shared family history that reminds us of that possibility.

I am comforted as I read the dark sayings of Psalm 78, because the story is not without redemption. There is faithfulness to be found, but it doesn’t come from our ancestors of the faith. It comes from God:

Yet he, being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; often he restrained his anger, and did not stir up all his wrath.
He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and does not come again. (38-39)

It might be difficult for us to remember who we are, but God remembers. I’m glad for that, but it should still cause us to tremble just a bit.

The Priority of Ministry in the Debate about Homosexuality

There are some interesting, unexpected twists in the Bible. For example:

Jesus defies theological tradition and heals people on the Sabbath, claiming that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

Peter and the council in Jerusalem accept the idea that uncircumcised Gentiles are as favored by God as the Jews, after Peter shares his story of witnessing the Holy Spirit fall on his new, non-Jewish, God-fearing friends. (Acts 10-11)

Paul pushes against multiple religious sensibilities when he tells both Jewish and Gentile Christians to let their convictions guide them regarding eating meat that has been sacrificed to idols.

These are examples of how theology is impacted when preceded by ministry.

Jesus preferred people over theological tradition and scandalized his opponents. Peter engaged with the Gentiles in Antioch long before Paul developed a theological framework for what had happened there. Paul’s concern for how Jews and Gentiles were going to live as one people as followers of Jesus formed his thinking about religious dietary regulations.

I’ve been talking to some people (again) about the various controversies regarding same-sex marriage and the place (or even the possibility) of gay people in the life of the church. The polarizations that have resulted from the larger discussions out there have done little except to fragment churches, denominations, and people.

We in the west tend to sort things out by starting with the abstract (theories and theologies) and then moving toward some sort of ministry practice or standard of behavior. But what might happen if we began by engaging with real, live people instead? That isn’t to say that having theological convictions isn’t important; it’s that theological convictions should arise out of our engagement with Scripture and with what we believe that God is doing in the world.

Denominations have crafted two polarized responses to same-sex marriage, with any number of variations in between them. One pole is grounded in particular texts of Scripture and denies gay people membership in the church. The other operates out of a conviction of God’s love for all people and fully embraces gay people and affirms gay marriage. They both begin with a theological standard and follow with a standard of behavior.

I am curious about what would happen if some of the leaders in these various groups sat down with some gay people who claimed to be followers of Jesus, and asked them to talk about how they saw the spirit of Jesus at work in their lives? If there were couples at the table, they could be asked how they were experiencing and demonstrating the presence of Jesus in their relationships. Then others in the room could offer their own testimonies. I wonder if the people would be challenged in the way that Peter was challenged when he saw the Holy Spirit at work among the Gentiles? Or would the room just be silent?

I’ve had such an experience. I have spent quite a bit of time with some devout Christian friends who were also gay. I have heard their testimonies and stories, of encounter and faithfulness, of deep struggle and pain, of joy found in salvation and in the presence of Jesus. We have prayed together and prayed for others together.

At the same time, I was raised with some very traditional and negative views about homosexuality. A long time ago I had to start living between the tension of my received convictions and what I was seeing in the lives of my friends. This has not been abstract for me—the process began in earnest when I became a pastor and there were gay people who came to my church. These were not people with some kind of political agenda. They were, like me, people who wanted to orient their lives around Jesus.

I’m hoping that some folks will rise up—people like the apostle Paul—who will help us with a responsible, theological way forward. We need someone who is willing to revisit our Scriptures without simply editing out the parts that offend. We need someone who is willing to take on the risky task of exploring what God might be doing in some unexpected places (there’s a lot of that in the New Testament, as I recall) without simply declaring that all is okay, everyone is okay, and let’s all just get along (I’m pretty sure that none of us is okay. That’s why we trust in a lot of things about God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, and the need for reconciliation).

There are precedents for this kind of thing throughout church history. It’s never been easy and it won’t be easy now. That is, if anyone is willing to do it.

Honoring Dr. Richard Mouw

Last night I attended a gala celebration honoring Dr. Richard Mouw, retiring president of Fuller Theological Seminary. It was great fun, and the love and appreciation that was poured out to the Mouws was delightful. People who know Dr. Mouw enjoyed teasing him publicly about his commitment to Calvinism, but also celebrated him as a generous Calvinist who had a deep love for the whole church and for people of faith in general.

My early church upbringing was in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition. My understanding of that tradition was more about not being other things—not being Catholic, not being Pentecostal, and (heaven and unbridled free will help us all) not being Calvinist—than it was about actually being something in particular. I left that tradition in my early thirties, but found that my bones remained Wesleyan-Arminian.

I took those bones with me when I became a student at Fuller in my early 40s. I took at course from Dr. Mouw and later, after I graduated, participated in a number of seminars that he led over the years when I was a pastor. I’ve worked at Fuller for over seven years now, and Dr. Mouw’s influence on me has continued.

People like Richard Mouw periodically get in trouble now and again with the general Evangelical populace. The trouble comes from their willingness to engage with people that we Evangelicals don’t typically see as appropriate conversation partners. Dr. Mouw has engaged in dialogue with Jews, Muslims, and Mormons, not seeking to syncretize systems of belief, but to look for common ground upon which to begin in discussion and relationship. It is a conversation that can only be had among people who are deeply committed to their own faith. Dr. Mouw comes to the table as a Christian, first and last, and a Calvinist one at that. A lot of listening and new understanding has come from that work.

I was once in a pastors’ seminar with Dr. Mouw, and the topic was the Atonement. Many of the pastors in the room (including me), were reacting against the dominance of the penal substitutionary mode of defining the Atonement, and the way the theory seems to have limited the theological imagination of the Evangelical church. Things were getting pretty rowdy when Dr. Mouw took the microphone and told us, with a bit of consternation in his voice, “I still believe in substitution, but not when it pits the Father against the Son.” Those words stopped us and changed us. I know they changed me. Our perspective grew, and I’m glad for that.

After all these years, I still, for the most part, have Wesleyan-Arminian bones. I understand a bit more about that now, and my skin is comfortable adhering to that rickety theological skeleton. But there’s something new in that anatomical mix, and it’s that I now have some Calvinist cartilage.

I thank Dr. Mouw for that. If he’s an example of what it means to be a Calvinist, then it’s got to be a good thing.


(Dr. Mouw also wrote the foreward to my book, Shadow Meal: Reflections on Eucharist. I’ll always be grateful for his kind contribution.)

Miracles and the Expansion of the Church

There are conversations floating around the cyber world about how the more developed theologies of the north and west (mostly Europe and North America) might help inform and shape the church as it emerges in the south and east (Africa, Latin America, Asia). As the historian Mark Noll points out, while the church of the southern hemisphere might have all sorts of denominational affiliations, beneath it all is an underlying Pentecostalism—that is, a belief that the supernatural world is as real as the one we see and touch every day.

The church of Europe and North America has been deeply shaped by the Enlightenment, and belief in things supernatural has fallen on hard times over the last 300 years. It’s not that Christians have no interest in the subject, but it appears to be much less robust than what is seen among Christians in the parts of the world where the church is dramatically growing.

I wonder if the expansion of the church in the southern hemisphere will reshape us in the north and west rather than the other way around? Or will these newly-developing Christian movements become a different kind of Christianity altogether? Will there be, for example, a church in one half of the world that prays for God to heal people’s bodies, and a church in the other half that doesn’t?

It’s interesting to me that the subject of prayer for healing has, for several hundred years, been controversial except among Christians in the southern hemisphere. They seem to take it for granted. The rest of us don’t.

It’s a sketchy thing, this theology of healing. I know it has traveled some rocky roads, with some claiming that it all died out with the last apostle, and others insisting that everyone could get healed if only they could drum up enough faith. Neither of those ways of thinking has been helpful, in my view.

But what if our southern friends are right, and the expectation of God bringing health to sick and injured people is appropriate for us? What will that mean?

Will it mean that medical care should be shunned? I don’t think so. But perhaps we can think about putting medical care in a new perspective. Most cultures offer some sort of care through medical professionals, and perhaps, even without realizing it, such efforts reveal something about the image of God that is imprinted upon all people. As a result, we can’t help but find ways to care for one another. But such care need not be seen as the last word.

Will it mean that we recast healing as an expectation that is embedded in the Atonement? I hope not, although there are still people who make that claim. We might need better theologies of healing, but locking it into some kind of transactional package deal is not the answer.

Will it mean that all people should expect to be healed? No, and for two reasons: First, it just doesn’t work out that way. Second, we all end up dying in the end anyway. Yes, my friends, we are all going to die. Have a nice day. ☺

Here’s a possible way to think about this, a way that could help us dialogue creatively with our friends across the globe: Physical healings that come as a result of prayer are signs of the Kingdom of God. They are not guarantees, they are not based on adequate levels of faith, and they are not the result of neatly organized theologies. They are signs that God’s kingdom is a partial but present earthly reality, a reality to be fully realized when God draws all things together in the new heaven and the new earth.

So, I keep praying for people to be healed. I also go to the doctor (even though I’m in a crummy HMO and supernatural healing is sounding better to me all the time) and try to do things that positively impact my health. I try to expect that God will actually work in people’s physical lives, but I don’t demand it or crumble in disappointment if nothing seems to happen. Whether we live or die, whether we remain wounded or are restored, our lives rest in God’s care.

Healing is a sign of the Kingdom.

Prayer for healing is a sign of the Kingdom.

Caring for one another is a sign of the Kingdom.

Trusting God in all circumstances is a sign of the Kingdom.

And so, we pray: Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.

Being Present and Closing the Distance

I read a great article yesterday in TIME by Joel Stein about the Millennial generation. I’ve done some study about generational cohorts and I find all of this stuff very interesting.

However, I also find the ongoing micro-cohorting to be somewhat distressing. The more strictly we define generational cohorts (Builders, Silent Generation, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, etc.) the more we separate from one another. We already find it natural to separate through technology (isn’t it amazing how someone appearing as a text on your phone is of greater interest than the person sitting across the table from you?), and generational separations increase the distance.

Of course, I shouldn’t talk. I’m a Baby Boomer, and it was my generation that celebrated the “Generation Gap,” claiming that we couldn’t relate to anyone older than us. Nevertheless, the separations continue and the distances increase.

Churches have suffered because of this separation, and not because they are victims of such cultural movement; it’s because they have organized around it. Many churches (particularly Evangelical Protestant churches) separate everyone by age and generation as soon as they walk in the door. It is not uncommon for young people, once they graduate from high school and are no longer able to be in the youth group, to walk away from church because they see no place for them there. No place in what we call The Body of Christ, where diversity is assumed. Wow.

I remember reading in Margaret Wheatley’s book, Leadership and the New Science, that organizational leadership of the future will be about finding new ways to be together. That will be challenging in a world that is struggling to figure out what it really means to be anywhere with anyone, now that space and time have lost their power over us.

I had a long and happy conversation with my mother yesterday (yes, over the telephone, which is unhindered by the distance of miles between us), and I found myself thinking about how the days race past us and we don’t remember much about where we’ve been or what we’ve done. Over time, what will we all remember? Will it be the zillions of text messages we’ve sent and received? Will it be the last minute meet-ups that caused us to leave someone after a few minutes of conversation in order to see if something better is going on elsewhere?

Or will we remember extended conversations with people we love, watching them face-to-face, recalling their laughter, their words, their ideas, hopes and dreams, and how we also found space to share ourselves in those encounters? It’s true that we can do some of that via the Internet (I confess that I love Google Hangout), but I wonder if our memories are imprinted on our brains as effectively when we limit our encounters with others to only certain senses. When proximity, touch, and even smell are eliminated, does our capacity to remember diminish? I don’t know. But maybe.

I think I’ll invite some folks over for dinner at my house. We’ll cook up some good food, share some wine, and talk and laugh late into the evening. Maybe we won’t even look at our phones, because nothing better will be going on except what is happening in those moments in time, when we are present to one another, allowing the experience to be burned into our mental circuitry. Perhaps one day in the future we will call that memory up and cherish it.

It is interesting to me that the Eucharist is always shared in person. We stand or kneel with others, we take bread and wine, and in that experiential moment, Jesus says,

“Remember me.”

Engaging with the Reality of God's Work

I have been reading Mark Noll’s very helpful book, The New Shape of World Christianity. As he describes the character of the global Christian church as decreasingly European and North American, and increasingly African, Asian, and Latin American, he asks the question, “How much are the supernatural events that fill the pages of Scripture to be considered normative examples for what happens right now?” (p. 36) This is a question that is often answered differently in places like Africa than in Europe or the US.

Theology in the western world often remains abstract. For example, people still argue (to a lesser degree than in the 1980s) about the “inerrancy” of the Bible. People who stand for use of that word in relation to Scripture are seen by their detractors as narrow in their thinking, while those on the other side are often characterized as having a low view of Scripture.

But the debate isn’t typically about whether or not Scripture is authoritative; it’s about what language best describes that authority. The problem with our use of language is that it can only approximate reality and can allow us to remain abstract in our thinking.

When the view of inerrancy is examined, it is usually a claim that only the original manuscripts of the Bible are inerrant—without any errors regarding theology, distances between cities, number of soldiers on the battlefield, and so on. Most people recognize that the ancient manuscripts we have today show variances in them, so the focus is only on the original documents—the ones with the fingerprints of Moses, Isaiah, Matthew, John, Paul and all their friends on them.

Except that we don’t have those documents.

So “inerrancy” can remain only a theory. It is not possible to verify the claim. Yet, most of us still believe in the authority and inspiration of the biblical texts. Some of us just don’t think that “inerrancy” is the right word to describe the character of those texts.

But we can get really tangled up in the abstractness of the conversation, separating ourselves into camps based on theory, debating about the character of Scripture and missing something that our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world seem to grasp: That Scripture tells a story that is living, and we live today in the ongoing reality of that story. The language that describes that story doesn’t alter its character or its effect.

And many of our non-western friends claim that supernatural occurrences still happen—things like healings, exorcisms, the raising of the dead, and so on. For them, the Scriptures are not, for the most part, abstract at all. Noll comments,

“With only some hyperbole, we might say that although some of the world’s new Christian communities are Roman Catholic, some Anglican, some Baptist, some Presbyterian and many independent, almost all are Pentecostal in a broad sense of the term.” (p. 34)

Pentecostal and Charismatic folks in our culture have also made claims about the ongoing activities of the supernatural world, but in our theological work most of us can stay in the world of theories—whether about the nature of Scripture, proper images of the Atonement, creation and science, etc.—and never move into the work and activity of God in the world. Our brothers and sisters in the south and east haven’t separated theory from purposeful practice.

The rest of us have a lot to learn from them.

On Abortion and Artificial Categories

I appreciated Rachel Held Evens thoughtful post regarding her evolving views regarding abortion. It continues to be a difficult and painful debate (it is rarely a conversation, and I appreciate Rachel’s attempts at civil discourse), especially with the recent discovery of the horrors inside Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic.

As the Gosnell case unfolded, I began thinking how the arguments for “ pro-choice” (which have actually devolved into arguments that are “pro-abortion”) have successfully altered the public perception of life by segmenting and depersonalizing the early stages of human life in order to turn the discussion to things abstract and legally categorical.

So, zygotes, embryos and fetuses end up having little or no relationship to the human beings that will emerge at birth. It’s a handy way to win the argument, and it has been fairly successful in the western world in altering people’s thinking about the acceptability of abortion.

How do we who follow Jesus respond to this? Christians are not unified on the subject. We easily fall into the same public categories of pro-life and pro-choice, the former being conservative, the latter progressive.

The securing of victory for pro-choice proponents has been found in the law. The law has offered legality to the practice of abortion even while setting boundaries to the timing of the procedure—boundaries that are often pushed.

Christians have faced off with both abortion and infanticide in the past. In the earliest years of the emerging Christian movement, one Christian writer highlighted the common cultural practice of abandoning unwanted infants outside the city limits where they would either die of exposure or be killed by wild animals. He indicated that neither Jews nor Christians discarded their children that way, and were even known to rescue abandoned babies and take them into their own families.

Until the late fourth century, infanticide was an accepted practice in both Greek and Roman societies. But there was a technicality: To avoid actually committing murder, the unwanted infant would be left out in the wilderness, where it would either die of exposure (a natural process) or be rescued by the gods or a kind traveler. One defender of the faith remarks:

“First of all, you [pagans] expose your children, so that they may be taken by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown!” Tertullian (c. 197, W) 3.26.

His response to his pagan detractor? We don’t do that.

We’ve created a lot of technicalities in our culture as well. We have legal lines that we think offer us protection and justification. That might work in the public square, but it shouldn’t work for we who follow Jesus. There’s an artificiality to that perceived safety zone that is proven every time the law is changed. The law of the land may be important, but it often speaks more about majority preference than it does ethics and morals (for example, in the mid-1800’s, the Supreme Court ruled that states were able to enslave human beings imported from the southern hemisphere. We’re all probably glad that there were people who claimed that the law didn’t speak for them).

Rather than thinking about human life (or any life, for that matter) as a series of disconnected phases, I prefer to think of life as a unified trajectory that starts with conception. There is an inevitability to the cellular creation that we call a zygote: It’s destiny is to emerge into the light of day and become present to the world.

And, for we who follow Jesus, we might also say that such a life is intended to affirm and nurture the life it encounters in the world. If we are going to use the term “pro-life,” then it ought to relate to more than the denial of the practice of abortion. It should relate to how we view war, capital punishment, and poverty for starters.

I’ve spoken of this before in relation to gay marriage. If we fall into the pre-created categories of discourse that come to us from the public square, then we stop short of thoughtful theological reflection on issues of tremendous importance. We in the church seem to be particularly short on that kind of reflection these days.

O Lord, make haste to help us.

On Rediscovering Graciousness

On Saturday I will officiate at the memorial and graveside services for a dear friend who died a few weeks ago. He was loved and honored by the people in his life—many were his faithful church family.

I visited him several times before he slipped away from us. I came straight from church on one visit and brought in the order of service that contained the morning written prayers and scriptures. As I read them to him, he gripped my hand and closed his eyes, and then thanked me for those few minutes of shared worship.

He was a man who relished his friendships and loved his life of faith in Christ. While he continued to grieve the loss of his wife, who died a few years earlier, he found great comfort in his relationships with friends and fellow worshippers.

There is a fine graciousness in that kind of life.

In contrast, I find myself flipping through Facebook posts today that make sure we Christians know exactly who we are supposed to despise and who we are allowed to accept. People still want to excommunicate Rob Bell, flush the church down the toilet, mock theological education, and smash those who are on one side or the other of the gay marriage debate.

Please hear me sighing very loudly right now.

Social media, blogs, websites, etc. are fine places to share ideas. However, they have also provided uncontrolled environments for saying anything we want about anyone we want, and making sure it goes out to our zillions of cyber-friends.

This church (universal) of ours is supposed to look something like a light in relationship to the rest of the world, as I recall. Those who identify with Jesus are ones who are to be marked by love. I worry about how that is going for us.

A picture comes to mind: A stunningly beautiful cathedral—a structure whose very architectural design bears witness to the glory of God—defaced by a blanket of graffiti. After a while, you quit seeing the essence of the building. You only see the rantings of those whose only contribution came out of the can of cheap spray paint.

I guess it would be too much to ask us to quit throwing accusations (isn’t Accuser one of the translations of the word Satan? That job has been taken, friends!) and instead start talking to one another. After all, we might actually hear other people and either learn something new (which for some, is the slippery slope toward heresy) or find that what we thought about them was in need of correction.

In doing so, we might learn that we are engaging with real people, people loved by God, and people trying to orient their lives around God.

We need to rediscover graciousness. My friend, whose life we will celebrate on Saturday, reminds me of that.

Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.

Dethroning the Big Stories

In all the commotion created by the debates surrounding same-sex marriage, I have to wonder if there isn’t something else going on, something that reaches beyond this topic to a larger cultural upheaval.

There is an interesting characteristic of the shift in western culture that philosophers and theologians refer to as “postmodern.” It’s a kind of vague term that points to a movement in culture after the modern period, a period in history marked by the certainties and perceptual frameworks that emerged out of the Enlightenment.

There were a lot of assumptions about life that came about over the last few hundred years—assumptions about dominant power (mostly white, male, and European), marital relationships (exclusively heterosexual and linked to both the state and the church), economics (increasingly dominated by what people are now calling “the haves”), science (marked by the belief that people can be purely objective in their observations), and religion (mostly dominated by western Christendom).

Each of these assumptions carried the conviction of a larger story that drove actions and practices. And as long as the people who constituted a majority kept the story alive, the domination remained in tact. That’s sort of how the thinking goes.

I wonder if the dismantling (okay, redefining. Whatever) of traditional marriage is part of the larger culture’s willingness to deny the power of any story that claims dominance over competing narratives. After all, the gay community is a very small percentage of the overall population (probably somewhere around 3%). Yet, almost half of the US population is in favor of gay marriage. Half of the citizens of the US are willing to let the old story of heterosexual marriage as the exclusive and dominant story of committed relationships be removed from its prominent position.

In a similar way, we’re seeing that in other areas of western culture. The Occupy Wall Street movement, as scrappy as it was, was an attempt to dethrone the powers of western economics. The attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular may be an attempt to dethrone faith from its position of power and favor.

Indeed, there may be something bigger going on.

So, again, I have to ask: In this new world of uncharted waters, what will be the church’s posture? We can hunker down and reinforce our walls of protection, keeping all new ideas out. We can take the walls down altogether and embrace everything that comes our way, allowing the shifting preferences of culture serve as our interpretive guide for faith. We can embed our convictions in our preferred political party and hope for shelter and a renewal of our power. In my view, each of those options are perilous in their possible consequences.

Maybe, for we who follow Jesus, it will become a time to rediscover who we really are when we no longer enjoy a place of favor and prestige in the culture. As Christians—particularly in the western world—are increasingly marginalized, we might have to recapture our identity without the advantage of cultural dominance.

As the accouterments of power and dominance are slowly stripped away from the western church, when our resources dry up, we will look around and wonder what has happened to us. What will we see? Will we see nothing? Will we see a purely secular world where faith has no impact or place? Or will we see “. . . Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone”? (Hebrews 4:9)

Remember: When it comes to Jesus, where there is death, there is always resurrection. Resurrection is not resuscitation; that’s just the reanimating of something that’s dead. Resurrection is new life altogether.

The Danger of Easy Answers

I have had the same conversation with three different people. The conversations were at different times and the people were not acquainted with one another. All three were gay.

Two were women and they told me the same story. They had been in traditional, evangelical churches for years and had struggled with their sexuality since they were children. After a while, overcome by the stress and anxiety of resisting what they had come to believe was an unavoidable reality in their lives, they accepted their gay identity. They also asked God to continue to love them, and believed that he had.

They left their traditional churches and went looking for new faith communities. They both told me that they had tried several gay-friendly and gay-specific churches, but had come away disappointed. Yes, they had been accepted there. But the churches, they claimed, were all about being gay. They said they wanted to be in places that were all about Jesus.

The third person was a young man. He was Catholic and had traveled 50 or 60 miles to visit a church were I happened to be speaking that morning. We talked between the services and he told me a similar story about being disappointed with the gay-friendly churches he had visited. He said to me, “I need to be in a place were I can be helped to know how to live.”

I wonder if we can do that? I don’t have any quick and easy answers regarding gay ordination or how churches will minister to gay couples and their children. But I wonder if our churches will be able to open their doors wider than before, recognizing that people like my three friends may come in. Can we accept them in order to help them orient their lives toward Jesus and to be encountered by the Holy Spirit? Can we trust God’s love and presence to bring transformation like we hope for everyone? Can we help them to know how to live?

The easy answers say that homosexuality is simply a choice to have sex with a person of the same gender. It’s a sin and it must be stopped in order for God to be accepting toward that person, or so the argument goes. If you read Mark Yarhouse’s very helpful book, Homosexuality and the Christian, you’ll find a greater complexity than you might have expected.

The easy answers also claim that everyone needs to be afforded the same rights, everyone’s equal, and everything’s okay. This way of flattening out human diversity and brokenness risks committing spiritual malpractice (as I posted yesterday). If we claim that everyone’s just fine as they are, then we’d better be right or we leave people to the ravages of their sin. And that means all of us.

There are no easy answers here. There really never were. If we look at what is happening around us and start asking God if he is present and doing something in the midst of significant social and religious disruption, we might find some surprises ahead of us.

Peace, Peace, When there is no Peace

I’ve noticed a lot of people on Facebook sporting the red logo with the equal sign in it. It seems to refer to marriage as an equal right for all.

I’ve written on this topic before, confessing my view that marriage is the recognition of a pre-existent, committed relationship and a privilege recognized by a community rather than a right. But that’s another discussion.

The debates I’ve listened to regarding same-sex marriage assume something similar on both sides of the issue: That on the preferred side, everything is okay. Everything is good.

On one side, the argument claims that heterosexual marriage is okay, good, and a proper standard. On the other side, the claim is made that homosexuality is also okay and good, and should be afforded the same rights granted to heterosexuals.

Both sides claim that, in their respective camps, everything is good. Everything is okay.

But what if they’re both wrong?

I argued yesterday that we heteros (what an awful label!) need some rethinking about how really okay we are when it comes to marriage.

This challenge needs to reach across all the arguments. We’re not okay. We’re all a mess. And to say that gay marriage is a good thing strictly on the basis that everything is great and we just need to get a long and let each other have whatever it is that we want is insufficient. The broader culture is prone to that form of resolution, but we who follow Jesus need to dive a little deeper in that pond than everyone else.

If we say that our side is good and the other side is bad, or if we say that everything is good, we may be crying out with the screwball prophets of Jeremiah’s time whom God critiqued by saying, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)

We are a wounded people, gay and straight alike, and we dare not claim peace, peace, when there is no peace. We dare not insist that all is good when all is wounded. We need to treat our wounds with care. To do otherwise is to risk spiritual malpractice.

I have worshipped with gay friends who sought after sacred space that, rather than focusing on being gay, focused on Jesus. I found that I could stand side by side with those friends in my own brokenness and seek the One who heals our wounds, numerous as they are. Maybe all wasn’t good, but we could affirm together that God is good, and together we threw ourselves on his love and forgiveness, and sought for a way that we might live in his grace.

I don’t know how churches and denominations are going to resolve the gay marriage issue (and how gay people might connect in the life of the Christian community), at least in this generation. It may not be seen as such an overwhelming issue a generation later. We’ll have to see.

But in the meantime, if I can’t stand next to my gay brother or sister as a broken child of God, then I probably can’t stand next to anyone, nor can anyone stand next to me. We need a new starting place in this conversation. If we start with rights then the contest will be won by those who wield the greatest power. If we start with everything being okay, then nothing will be okay.

But if we begin as co-humans, broken and wounded, yet made in the image of God, then perhaps the conversation will change.

Really—Is This Marriage?

In the debates I’ve heard within the context of the church regarding same-sex marriage, the call to preserve marriage as a union between a man and woman is referred to as “traditional.” It’s a fairly accurate term, since marriage has been looked at that way for a very long time. It is too bad, in my view, that anyone who finds a shift in that tradition difficult is often labeled as a hater or a denier of human rights.

On the other hand, those of us who are heterosexual followers of Jesus and interested in the debate about marriage might be missing something in the conversation. There’s a mirror being held up to us and we are avoiding taking a look at the reflection.

First of all, while the statistics are a challenge to accurately nail down, the evidence suggests that divorce rates in the US are ridiculously high (including for folks who are Christians), marriage rates are falling and premarital co-habitation is rising.

We have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: Is this the tradition we are seeking to preserve? It is, after all, our reality. Or is it a lost ideal that we treasure? Is traditional marriage something that we heteros have mangled and crushed so thoroughly that it is hardly recognizable as marriage any longer?

There’s a story of an artist who would take several cellos, smash them with a sledgehammer, cover them with resin, and then sell them as art. It was as though he was asking the art community, “What do you think: Is this art?”

It seems like the gay community is lining up for marriage licenses and asking the rest of us, “Given that you’ve slaughtered the traditional concept of marriage, what do you think: Is this marriage?”

Second, when we look closely at all the people whose images are reflected in the mirror, do we only see them and us? If we look carefully we will see a common humanity that stands in tragic solidarity before God, all made in God’s image and yet fractured and broken. At the same time, it is a humanity that constitutes the world that God loves, a world that God, through Jesus Christ, is reconciling to himself, not counting their trespasses against them (see 2 Corinthians 5).

Since the battle for same-sex marriage rights may be over, we heterosexual Christians have the opportunity to do some self-reflection and start the conversation anew. Rather than point outwardly at the other while attempting to preserve a sense a righteousness, it is time for us to confess our own brokenness before God—including the sexual misadventures, fantasies, and deviances that roll through our heterosexual minds—and recognize our complicity in the sins of the world (see Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 about the connection between the mind and sin).

If we expect to participate in the ongoing ministry of Jesus in the world, then we will have to do so confessionally and with repentance. Our rapidly changing culture—one in which our story of faith is losing its dominance—is still our context for ministry. We don’t minister in the abstract; we minister in what is real.

And to do so with integrity, we need to look deeply into that mirror.

Same-Sex Marriage and Ministry

According to a recent TIME cover story, the fight for same-sex marriage is close to being over. A CNN Religion Blog article reveals changing attitudes toward homosexuality on the campuses of Christian colleges. With an increasing number of Americans—especially younger Americans—declaring their support, it’s probably all over except the final state and federal blessings.

The debates, however, are certainly not over, especially in the Christian community. And the debates are challenging. Do we stand firm in our traditional convictions, or do we, as some have argued, wake up and join the movement of a culture that may have already left us behind? The questions are difficult and are fracturing Christian communities and denominations.

If, indeed, the marriage ship has sailed, maybe some other questions need to be entertained, regardless of the position that is held regarding same-sex marriage: What will ministry look like in this new landscape?

There are a number of possible future scenarios to consider as well.

A married, gay couple walks through the doors of your church. Is there room on the cross for them to put their hands next to yours and mine?

A child comes to our Sunday School with a neighborhood friend. When his two mothers show up to visit, will that child be able to share his church with them?

When your state approves same-sex marriage, will a gay couple be able to find spiritual counsel at our churches when their relationship hits the rocks?

When a gay couple moves into the house next door to mine, will I be able to answer the question: Who is my neighbor?

The church has had to deal with difficult questions before. In the early days, the first Jewish Christians had to come to grips with Gentiles who were being encountered by the Holy Spirit, but lacking a Jewish identity. It took them a while to learn how to be one family of faith. Not too long ago, divorced people had a tough time finding a place in the church, and the church didn’t know (in general) what to do with them. Now we do ministry. Many churches have divorce recovery groups, and have learned to explore the depths of God’s love, forgiveness, and grace when it comes to remarriage. Some—but not all—have even worked through the issue theologically.

We will inevitably, regardless of our position on same-sex marriage, have to deal with the ministry implications of this sea change in our culture. That the culture is rapidly changing is indisputable. And while culture influences our perspectives on our faith, it cannot be the sole criteria for interpreting our faith. Culture is, however, our context for ministry.

How will we do this?

A Lenten Reflection for March 14, 2013

“No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” (John 6:44-45)

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)


It is interesting how we think about the ways that we approach God. We are an independent, free-will kind of people, and we know how to make our choices. So we choose to get up on a Sunday morning and go to church. We choose to take a particular seminary course because it fits our schedule. We choose to come forward to take communion, even though we’re not sure we really need to.

I’ll bet that Moses thought that way when he approached the burning bush. But he didn’t choose to be on holy ground—God summoned him there and then told him to take off his sandals.

I don’t believe in free will anymore. Will, yes. But not free will. My will just isn’t all that free. It’s polluted by all kinds of outside forces that have formed me over time and is influenced even now by voices and events around me. There is no purity of will to be had.

So I don’t think I can approach anything having to do with God as though I am a being with pure, unadulterated will. And perhaps, like Moses, when I think I am choosing in my freedom to engage with God on some level, I am actually responding to his summons. And by the time I realize where I am, he tells me to take off my sandals.

In all our fussing and worrying about choosing what will please us and stressing over things like our devotional life, it might be helpful to stop and consider that we don’t come to anything related to Jesus except that the Father has drawn us. And in our weak lives of prayer, it is the Spirit of God who steps in and intercedes on our behalf, not condemning our weakness, but carrying us through it.

The God of the Bible is not an abstraction. He is engaging, summoning, participative, purposeful. And having been summoned by him to worship, serve, learn, pray, love, and dine, how do we respond? Do we keep our sandals in tact because we choose to do so? Or do we remove them in obedience to the One who has always been calling us to stand at his flame?

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:25-26)

A Lenten Devotional for March 1, 2013

Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. . .

But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God . . .

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73: 1-5, 16-17, 25-26)


There are a lot of things I have failed to learn in life, but there’s one thing I’ve caught on to: When I have pursued something (like a job opportunity, for example) that comes out of desperation, desire, greed, or competition, the level of satisfaction ends up ranging from just okay to completely disastrous. But when I’ve sensed that God’s fingerprints are on something, embracing it always turns out to be the best thing. I think I’ve learned that.

The psalmist confesses his envy toward those who do not acknowledge God yet seem to prosper. He doesn’t get it, but then begins to see things clearly when he goes “into the sanctuary of God.” I imagine him stopping, looking around, sensing God’s presence, and realizing something that he had almost forgotten on his stumbling, slippery journey: “Whom have I in heaven but you?”

I am intrigued that the psalmist’s trigger point came, not over his dinner, not as he strolled along the beach, but rather when he entered the sanctuary of God. In the midst of his worshipping community, in the place full of symbol and incense and candles and music and people, he remembered who he was. This was not a remembering in individual isolation, but one that came within community.

While I recognize that this organism we call “the church” can also be stumbling and slippery at times, it is the place where I come to remember who I am and who I am not. I can look enviously at the world around me and desire things that have little to do with my life of faith, but in entering the sanctuary of God I encounter the opportunity for my eyes to open and see once again what is real.

In those moments I just might recognize that “my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

Same-Sex Marriage and the Lost Love Between Church and State

The topic of same-sex marriage is still causing a stir in the US, from the White House to every state in the Union to just about every church in every city. It’s a subject that cannot be dodged.

According to this morning’s CNN article, almost of half of US citizens are open to the idea of gay marriage, and even more are fine with the idea of civil unions. When you break down the polls by religious affiliations, the numbers are mixed, with Roman Catholics being considerably more open to gay marriage than are Evangelical Protestants.

I think there might be something important going on here, and I believe it may transcend the arguments about the sanctity of marriage (being evidenced by how the government defines and affirms marriage). Here’s a text of Scripture to consider on the matter:

“. . . if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” (Matthew 5:40)

These are the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The context is about how his followers are to respond when confronted by an “evil doer” (v. 39). Many today would say that those advocating for gay marriage are well within the ranks of the evil doers. Whether or not that is the case, there is, I think, something to consider here.

We have been sued for our coat—the defining of marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

Perhaps we will have to also give up our cloak—our partnership with the state in defining, affirming, and establishing marriage. Think about it:

•Some churches would be uncomfortable (at the least) with a co-habiting, unmarried couple in their midst, but would not typically raise a concern if the couple had obtained a legal marriage license (at City Hall, in Las Vegas, or wherever) prior to applying for membership.

•There is a distinct partnership between church and state in a marriage ceremony. I have officiated at a number of weddings, and when I pronounce the couple “husband and wife,” they are married, and the government takes my word for it. However, if the county recorder’s office doesn’t receive the signed marriage license in due time, there will be no recognizable marriage for that couple, either by the state or by the church.

Let’s face it: The church in the US has been holding hands with the government when it comes to marriage for a very long time. It has been an unquestioned and comfortable partnership because we have operated under the perception that we share a common interest when it comes to marriage. The problem is that we don’t have matching agendas when it comes to marriage. The government affirms marriage because it offers the possibility of safety and stability for the raising up of families (and future citizens), and creates legal boundaries for property rights, child custody, and so on. But the church typically affirms marriage for different reasons. For the church, marriage has something to do with reflecting the image of God and creating nurturing environments for human beings.

The push toward same-sex marriage is clearly deconstructing the concept of marriage as it has traditionally been known. So perhaps the government needs to drop the word entirely and simply grant “civil unions” to any two human beings who qualify for such unions (marriage—even traditional ones—are not rights as people currently claim. Not everyone has the right to get married. You can’t get married to someone if you are already married to another; you can’t get married if you are not of a certain age; etc.). If the government decides that such unions serve the self-interests of the nation, and if sufficient popular (read: voting) support leans that direction, then it will happen, regardless of the label put upon them.

So where does that leave Christian communities? What would happen to us if we separated the sanctity of marriage from the legality of the state? Would marriage really die, or would it be reborn? We might have to consider giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. And very likely, we will have no choice.

Finding a bridge between consumption and production

In his book Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, William Cavanaugh writes, “Consumerism is an important subject for theology because it is a spiritual disposition, a way of looking at the world around us that is deeply formative.” And, “The problem is a much larger one: changes in the economy and society in general have detached us from material production, producers, and even the products we buy.” There’s a way to test this out: Ask a child where fruits and vegetables come from. If the child names a grocery store rather than a farm or an orchard, then there is probably a disconnection between consumption and production. Ask the same child where your church came from. In fact, ask yourself the same question. How many people know that a number of thriving churches started out as small group Bible studies or as church plants struggling with meager resources? I have an idea. Let’s give this a shot and see what happens. 1. Start buying produce from local growers rather than from big-chain grocery stores. Take your kids and grandkids along and help them see where things come from. Plant a garden and participate directly in the production process. Share the produce with your neighbors. 2. Connect with an organization that supports fair trade exchanges and buy things from places where you can actually see who made the item you are buying. Learn to see that real human beings dirty their hands making the things we enjoy. 3. Interview someone from your church who was involved in its beginnings, or at least who knows the church’s history. Help you and your loved ones to appreciate where buildings, parking lots, children’s ministries, etc. actually come from. None of these things will entirely break us from the ravages of rampant consumerism, but they might be ways to rebridge the gap between what we consume and the people and processes involved in production.