Tag Archives: religion

May 25, 2012 · 7:28 am

Have We Lost Our Core Purpose?

Rev. Tom Griffith recently wrote an article about the structure of The United Methodist Church where he states that the core business of the church is NOT “making disciples of Jesus Christ.”  He writes,

If we truly believe in the Wesleyan concept of God working through God’s prevenient grace that brings a penitent to the point where s/he is ready to accept God’s saving grace, we must admit that we are not the ones who are doing the “saving” or creating of new disciples. That is God’s job!

Griffith goes on to say this:

Rather, our core business, from no later than 1840 on, has been the creation of worshiping congregations or communities in every possible geographic community.

He also states,

It was the job of those congregations, not to “save” peoples’ souls but to give to those whom God had “saved” a place where they could live in Christian community and grow in their discipleship.

This is a pretty radical statement, and it makes huge sense to me.  I personally have wrestled for years with the question, “How do I make a disciple of Jesus Christ?” No matter how I parse the question, I end up with the same answer: I can seek to live as a disciple, but for me to “make” a disciple indicates a power I just don’t have over the life of another, nor is it a power I should have.  That is in God’s hands–I am a participant in that task but not the primary mover.  I do not save people; I offer them a way to hear and respond to the saving grace of Jesus.

I am in the midst of writing a book about the church as garden, and am more and more aware that it is my job to create good soil where the seed, AKA “the disciple,” may grow, reproduce and serve others, but I myself can’t make the seed do its job.  I can only create the best place for it to live into its potential.

The actual growth of the seed is very much in the hands of God and is also affected by multiple outward factors, such as weather, systemic diseases, unexpected pests and dozens of other things that are out of my control.  My primary job is to provide rich and supportive soil so the seed can grow well. That’s what the worshiping community can and should do.

I look afresh at Matthew 28:17-20, here from The Message translation.  After the resurrection, the eleven disciples are looking for Jesus.

The moment they saw him they worshiped him. Some, though, held back, not sure about worship, about risking themselves totally. Jesus, undeterred, went right ahead and gave his charge: “God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.

Jesus has the authority–and gave a responsibility to those who followed him closely: “Go out and train everyone.” That is what Methodists have historically done by our methods. That’s what makes us Methodist.  We train those who are responding to that glorious prevenient grace by giving them a place to grow, thrive, and reproduce, and in so doing, feed the world.  When we are not doing that, we have lost our way. And that is best done by the local connection where people can indeed say to one another, “How goes it with your soul?”

Out of these worshiping communities has come some of the greatest good offered to humanity.  Hospitals and other significant health care movements, schools and universities, food and clothing for those who need it, political action to address systemic societal injustice, and courageous voices to speak prophetically about sin and oppression.

The problems come when those great goods become the reason for the worshiping communities to exist, i.e., when the local communities have purpose only to keep the things outside the immediate community alive.  When that happens, the core purpose has been breached and we find ourselves desperately trying to keep the lifeboats in working order because the mother ship is rapidly sinking.  Lifeboats are wonderful–but we really need a healthy mother ship as the base.

To touch yet once more then, on the structure of The United Methodist Church, here may be the problem:  the function of the lifeboats have taken priority over the health of the main ship.  There are times when, as pastor, I find I must actually protect the congregation from yet one more initiative by a lifeboat ministry because to support it means taking a plank out of the side of the main ship, i.e., the local worshiping community. Eventually, we’re all going to sink.

Can we wait for the next General Conference to address this, or expect that those who benefit most from lifeboat ministries to change their focus?  Perhaps it is up to those who have been given opportunity to serve the core purpose of the church, the local communities of worship, to take a powerful stand for our health and vitality, while retaining our holy responsibility to the larger connection.

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May 18, 2012 · 5:28 am

More on Sexuality, Acceptability and the Church

Here is a good, and a little bit funny, article on the nature of “biblical” marriages.  If you don’t want to read the whole article, here’s how the author sums up the nature of “traditional” marriages with a biblical foundation:

Traditional marriage is one man with multiple wives, multiple concubines, wives conquered in war and wives acquired in levirate marriage, possibly including girls under the age of ten, but definitely not including anyone of a different ethnic group, in an arranged marriage with disposition of property as its purpose. That seems very different from “one man, one woman,” does it not?

This goes to my contention that most people really don’t know very much about what the Bible does say about a lot of topics, including slavery (very much affirmed), role of women in church and society (pretty well denigrated), arranged marriages (pretty well the norm), polygamy (more than acceptable), rape (not really a problem–just marry her afterward and bring her along with the rest of the wives), nature of clothing (no blended fabrics acceptable), the nature of the priesthood (no lame, no sexually disfigured permitted), and a host of other things.  I’ve written more about some of those things here and here.

In one way or another, many of those practices and commands have been either conveniently ignored or explained away by taking a larger view of the overall message of the Bible.  I believe that overall message centers on two things: giving glory to God and acknowledging the redemptive work of Jesus Christ so we might live in reconciled intimacy with that Holy God.

The way we humans handle our sexuality must be addressed.  But questions and guidelines about the way we handle this part of our lives cannot serve as the final dividing line between deciding who is worthy of grace and who is not.

Where slavery is concerned, most people today take the larger view. Even though the practice is clearly affirmed and even encouraged in many places in the Bible, we say today something different.  We affirm that respect for all creatures stamped with the Imago Dei means we will not agree that one person gets to own another person, strip that person of basic rights, and use that person at will, discarding him or her when usefulness has ended.  Most Christians today are horrified to hear of ongoing practices of young girls sold into sexual slavery (happening all over the place) or people being put in concentration camps and stripped of all dignity (check out the book Escape from Camp 14--this is taking place right now in North Korea).  We take strong moral stands against such injustices.

When are we going to take the next strong moral stance against injustice?

I began to change my views of the legitimacy of same-sex attraction when I began doing some reading and study of those who are born “intersexed” or with ambiguous genitalia.  In a small percentage of births, it is impossible to say clearly, “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl.”

I started asking myself, “Did God make a mistake with these children?”  ”Does God love them as much as God loves those who are more clearly defined sexually?”  ”Must someone born this way be barred from Christian leadership because we consider them fatally flawed and incapable of speaking as God’s mouthpieces?”

While those with SSA and the Intersexed are not the same, the questions that come up are the same.  When is someone a “mistake” or an “abomination” because of the way they are made?  Are only some people born in the Image of God? If so, what defines them?  For a long time, those few were much defined as male, with lighter skin, and property owners.  Everyone else was just a bit less, somehow sub-human.

So, I ask, “Is this a holy way to look at those who are different?”

I know I read the scriptures through the eyes of one who has generally felt left out of those who could be considered holy and acceptable before the Lord God.  I’m female and lefthanded.  Both of those factors have been suspect for generations.  The meaning of word “left” comes from the same Latin root, “sinestra” that the word “sinister” comes from. Left-handers have long been looked up as broken, wrong, just a bit evil. As for women . . . there are still many places in the world, including some places in the US supported by influential Christian denominations where women are very much excluded from the public square, from leadership, from positions of spiritual authority.

Who is right?  Who is wrong? Each side will argue its position by various biblical texts and theological pronouncements.  Often, each side condemns those on the other side to an eternity of separation from God.

And the world in need of grace walks by and says, “Well, it certainly can’t be found there.”

The church rightly has huge, huge issues with what is known as the “gay lifestyle” of unrestricted and wanton pursuit of sexual gratification.  Presumably, we also have huge, huge issues with the heterosexual pursuit of the same thing.  But only one of those concerns gets airing as “unholy” or “unacceptable.”   We need to refine our stance so that all of our sexual practices come under the exposing spotlight of the Holy One.

And remember, our call is to seek justice, act with kindness and mercy, and stay humble before our God.

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Filed under Bible, calling, gay marriage, grace, Imago Dei, injustice, Justice, kindness

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May 16, 2012 · 4:17 am

The Human Tendency: We Murder One Another Over the Details

Most of us can agree on major goals.  For the church, it is “Love God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul and love your neighbor as yourself” and “Make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” We can rally around those things with unity and purpose.

BUT . . . the moment we seek to determine the details in the “how” of doing those acts of love and the work of being and making disciples, our unity often dissolves into interminable, soul-destroying squabbling and even death.

So, we make rules.  We do it as a nation with our Constitutions, our national, state, and local regulations.  We do it as a church with our Book of Discipline, with our committee and votes, with Robert and his Rules of Order.

We need them.  We need guidelines and structure.  We need what I have often called “the boundaries to our playground” so we can find creativity within that space as well as safety.

Ideally, the older and more mature we grow, the larger our playground becomes.

Ideally, we ourselves become more and more trustworthy and we use our own trustworthiness to trust others.

Ideally, we gain greater and greater freedoms to explore, to learn, to grow as confidence in one another grows and we can lessen the number of rules that govern our lives.

Reality:  we layer law upon law, rule upon rule, restriction upon restriction because much of our experience of life has been littered with betrayal, broken trust, power plays, unchecked aggression, and the wanton disregard of others in our efforts to expand our own little fiefdoms.

In politics, business and the mafia, betrayals, power grabs, and aggression are winning plays.  But in the church, we really are expected to live by different rules.

And yet, as much as we try to do so, we find ourselves following the same path  Then we do what people have done from the beginning: look to the legal code to find the answers.  The more we look to the code, the more that code has to expand to answer every contingency, thwart every possible power play, provide in advance for every betrayal, and, if cleverly enough written, offer special privileges to a certain elite.

This is human history.  This is what we do.  This is what we are doing today.  This is, among other things, The United Methodist Church.  This is the Roman Catholic Church.  This is Sharia, Islamic religious law. This is the holiness code of Orthodox Judaism.  This is the world of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots.

This is the world that says, “My reality and opinion is the only reality that counts.  If yours is different from mine, then I must legislate yours out of existence. If that doesn’t work, then I must expel you from my community.”

This is the world I think Jesus broke into and said, “Whoa!!!!  You’ve missed the boat.  Again!”

I believe that God’s world is an extremely open place–but that is MY world.  Others completely disagree with me.  Years ago, I would have violently disagreed with me if I had known then what I am thinking now about theology, sexuality, the nature of God, the nature of the Holy Scriptures and the nature of the church. My internal world has changed radically over the years.

Forty years ago, I would have called the present “me” a heretic and demanded that the present “me” recant or be expelled.

Forty years ago, I would have burned the present “me” at the stake.

Forty years ago, I would have gone to holy war over those details because I just knew that I was right.

I still think I am right.  But my “rightness” is not the same as it was.  It is not the same as that of many of our African brothers and sisters in the faith.  It is not the same of my beloved husband, whom I love dearly and respect highly but with whom I disagree seriously over some major issues.  And we are both profoundly Christian, both United Methodist clergy and both have given our lives over to God.

At its best, that disagreement is held, nurtured, honored and covered by grace.  The wide umbrella of The United Methodist Church is our genius and our hope to actually live and offer that same grace to a world in desperate need of it.

At its worst, that disagreement leaves only room for one of us to live. The other must die.

At its worst, that disagreement says that those who recognize a spectrum of sexuality to be expressed within the bounds of holy covenant must be labeled as “non-biblical” or “heretics” or even “beastial” as I understood one delegate to General Conference affirmed.

At its worst, that disagreement means we write a book of rules so large, so thick, so indecipherable to the majority of the church that only the elite of the elite can decode it and make binding pronouncements about it.

At its worst, it means there will be only one person left standing when this fight is over:  the one with the biggest gun.

The song says, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.”  Can we, and those with whom I so hugely disagree and who so hugely disagree with me, find peace without insisting the other change?  Can we possibly trust the redemptive movement of the Holy Spirit both in our lives and in the lives of others to bring us to perfection while, in our moving on to perfection state, we work side by side WITH our disagreements to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven?

Can we?  I think so.  This does not mean we stop saying, writing, blogging, or tweeting what we think is true.  It does means we recognize that others just don’t think the same way.

It doesn’t mean we don’t have a rule book or organizational structure.  It does mean we work to raise trust and lower the amount of minutiae so we are freed for creativity and exploration and the explosion of grace that we need.

Let’s keep the conversations going and the doors open.  Let’s lay down our swords.  Seriously.  Everyone.  Put them down.  Quit demonizing the “other.”  Respect each other’s worlds and opinions.  Create a holy structure big enough for us all where we can live in holy connection.  Let us speak our truths freely.  Let us disagree with respect and honor.

I will say this one thing:  the church that refuses to “agree to disagree” over issues that are not central to our faith but where a significant minority disagrees with the majority position (like sexuality) is in serious danger of ringing its death bell. For some are clearly saying, “my way or the highway” and are sure they are speaking for God.  That is the big difference in my forty-year ago self and my current self:  I no longer say I speak for God with absolute certainty.  I still speak for God, for I am called to preach, but with great trepidation and humility because I have learned this well:  I just might very possibly be wrong.

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April 25, 2012 · 9:23 am

Getting Free

It has been a strange week.  Still in brain fog most of the time from the anesthesia of surgery (more info here, here and here), coupled with some fairly strong pain relievers, I found myself more physically still than I can ever remember.

Time for the life of the mind with reflective thought delights me, but my best thinking seems to take place when my physical body is in action—walking, gardening, doing routine pedestrian but necessary tasks.  Most of those activities had to be set down during the days of healing.

It was time to learn once more just to be, not do.  In other words, to live as a human being, not a human doing.

The lingering effects of the meds made what I hoped to be extended writing hours nearly impossible.  It was not a time to create, be productive or do any of my normal things.  I could primarily sit and receive.

With the beautiful weather here, I spent many of those “being” and receiving hours on the front or back porch, reading, sitting, listening to the birds, picking aromatic roses and spending long minutes savoring their smells and textures.

And I read voluminously.  Books, newspapers, stories, both real and imagined, of people’s lives, loves and losses.

News of politics, economics and world events bounced in and out of my mind.  I became engrossed in a book called Camp 14 about a young man’s escape from a horrific prison camp in North Korea.  Untold thousands of people are imprisoned there right now, routinely beaten, starved and tortured, and occasionally put in forced marriages for the purpose of breeding children to be brought up as slaves to produce necessary food and goods for that totalitarian regime.  The young man portrayed in the book was one of those children.

Another engrossing book was one man’s story of growing up in a tight-knit, insular religious environment. They periodically split and re-form as one group decides that more rigid rules must be enforced to ensure community purity.  Eventually, after years of agony, separation, fear, suffocation and reconnection, the author left his community, finding elsewhere the joy and salvation he had been forever seeking

I read both of these in one day.  In both, an unexpected theme surfaced:  these men escaped because someone in their utterly different worlds offered them a glimpse of life that had possibilities of freedom, both physical and spiritual, they had never even dreamed of before. Light entered where there had only been darkness and despair before.

Both men walked treacherous paths to escape, and still walk complex paths to wholeness and healing.  Both embrace Christianity.  Both have stories of extremely limited educational opportunities, with strong authority figures that dictated the details of daily living.  I want to think that the tight-knit religious community made those decisions for the best of reasons, and the corrupt leadership in North Korea for the worst of reasons, but the outcomes were chillingly similar.

As I read, I knew again that I want to live as someone who has found truth, and has found truth that sets me free, not imprisons me.  I seek to base my life upon the goodness of God, a goodness that compels me to offer goodness to others.

I’m not naïve.  I know we live in a broken world where cruelty, wickedness and the wrong use of personal, political and military power seem to prevail.  I also saw in my “being” week so much goodness.  Meals, conversation, flowers, notes, cards and holy friendship filled my home.  Prayer sustained me.

The light of the kingdom of heaven can break in anywhere—no matter how dark the environment.  Light comes because you and I, ordinary people who chose to walk in the light, reach with love to those who long for it.  Let us not let the world down.  It really does depend on us.

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March 20, 2012 · 10:35 am

In Heaven As It Is On Earth

I wish I could get it across that what Jesus lived and taught has almost no relationship with the “hate-ianity” that masquerades as Christianity across the press, airways and religious institutions today.

What should be a grace-infused, fully-life-giving, all-welcomed, heavenly-spaces-opened, mystery-explored, forgiveness and reconnection-enjoyed experience has turned into a “gotta hate gays, gotta vote republican, gotta be sure and send everyone who believes differently to eternal conscious torment” religious charade.

Now, the “gotta-hate” group makes better headlines. And the “gotta send everyone else to hell” mentality makes for tighter cohesive groups where if we are in, we are really in. A kind of emotional security many need comes with that.  The “gotta vote Republican” mindset makes it so much easier to skip the nuances and sub-texts of the political debates and positions, and just take the easier non-thinking stance where we vote as the loudest voices insist.

But, I ask, is this the way we want to live our lives? Is this what we hope eternity with God will look like?

I ask that last question because I suggest we are in the process of creating our own eternity.  Consider the story Jesus told in Luke 16 about the rich man who indulged himself all his life. In so doing, he cared not one bit about the poor one who sat at his gate, ill and barely surviving on food dropped from the rich man’s table. After both of their deaths, the rich man discovered that his eternity mirrored the hellish earthly life of the poor man whom he had ignored. The poor man found comfort and care in eternity denied to him before.

So I wonder . . if the way we live is primarily hateful and exclusive, will our eternity also be the same? After all, if God turns out to be the manifestation of perfect love that willingly gathers in those whom we’ve already deemed unacceptable, then the hate and exclusiveness embedded in our souls would make us loathe to enter a place filled with those we’ve despised so thoroughly.

Many pray daily or weekly (or at least everyone once in a while) these words: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The highest and happiest call of all is to do that kind of “God’s kingdom coming” living and working while on earth.

Assuming at some point you and I have prayed those words, “God’s kingdom come,” the way we live now reveals what we want that kingdom to be like.

Do we routinely denigrate or put down others in order to build up our own position?  Then the heaven we are creating will be a dog-eat-dog world.

Do we grab what we want when we want it without regard to the needs of others? If so, then our heaven will be a place of greed and selfishness.

Do we use anger and intimidation to get our way? Then we would best be prepared to be afraid, even terrified, when stepping into eternity, for fear will be our everlasting companion.

Do we think certain people groups are less worthy than we of privilege and basic human rights?  Then we may find ourselves stepped over and spat upon.

Do we find life adventurous and hopeful?  Then our vistas will expand even further.

Do we celebrate the achievements of others? Then we may enjoy the accolades ourselves.

Do we make into daily habits the practices of patience, kindness, and life-giving light? Then let’s get ready to walk into the light that transforms everything into perfection.

Are we delighted to give forgiving grace to others because we have delighted in receiving that from God?  Then we shall enter into the most transformational of all spaces where lightness of soul gives us an eternity to wander through the heart of God.

That’s what I’m hoping for—and need to live out now.

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March 19, 2012 · 10:20 am

Keeping Silence, and the Destruction of a Generation of Young Women

Those who have been hearing my teaching for a while know how I’ve interpreted the Garden of Evil/Fall story through the breaches of covenant that took place before the woman and man ate the forbidden fruit.  The crafty serpent begins the process by inviting them to doubt God’s goodness:  ”Gosh, all this good food and you can’t eat any of it!  How nasty God must be!”  The woman perpetuates the process by embellishing the truth:  ”Sure we can, but not that main one–if we EVEN TOUCH IT, we will die!”  Then the man puts the finishing touch on it by remaining silent in the face of injustice, knowing that at some level, he is going to benefit when the woman takes the fall for having reached for it first–as he stands there with her.

Here is a well-written article that illustrates that point beautifully. Although I read that blog occasionally, I rarely recommend it because I believe the theology behind it insists that women must have restricted roles in church and society, simply because they are women.  For years, I also held that opinion until disciplined study of the Scriptures opened to me a different world of truth.  However, this post deserves a read by anyone who is concerned about what our pre-teen and teen girls are facing and how they are learning to despise their bodies and devalue themselves.  The author, Kenneth Morefield, is a film critic.  His work may be found here.

In his post on a blog for women in the conservative Christian world, he takes full responsibility for having kept silent in the face of injustice–and very much benefitting by doing so.

I hope his thoughts will be widely discussed among the men in the Christian world.  This silence is destroying a generation of young women.  It’s time to speak out.

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March 9, 2012 · 3:19 pm

It’s OK as Long As It Stays Hidden

Well, I was taking a quick break from digging through emails and paperwork  and decided to check out the New York Times.  My eye caught an article titled, “After Firings and Controversy, the Wedding Will Go On.”  I took a look and saw that it was about a gay couple, long partnered, long open about it, life-long faithful Roman Catholics, one of whom was a teacher in a private Catholic high school in St. Louis.  He and his partner had decided to go to NYC on their 20th anniversary together and marry there, where same-sex marriage is legal.

Again, there had never been secrecy about the partnership, before or after he began to work at that school.

However, the day after he announced their plans to his delighted colleagues, he learned that his employment at the school had been terminated. Here is the stated reason:  ”When he publicly demonstrated a life inconsistent with Catholic teaching, Al Fischer was relieved of his duties as part-time choir director at St. Rose Philippine Duchesne Parish and as music teacher at St. Ann Parish School.”

Now, if I read this correctly, as long as Mr. Fischer and his partner did their dastardly deeds in secret, a secret that was no secret at all, either to friends, students or employers, the diocesan authorities had no problems with it.  But by choosing to make a long-time covenant relationship public and more fully responsible to each other, the ax must fall.

I understand consistency.  I understand standards.  I also understand hypocrisy.  As long as it is kept under wraps, so that the surface looks like it complies, there is no concern about what is really happening.  I suppose that is why it is OK to keep pedophile and predatory priests around as long as all looks well on the surface even when everyone around them knows the truth.

I also ask: have they checked to make sure all their more conventionally married teachers aren’t practicing artificial birth control and are at all times faithful to one another?  Have they checked to make sure all their non-partnered teachers are 100% sexually chaste?  Have they checked to see how many of their priests are abusing alcohol or indulging in pornography? Or is any behavior OK as long as it stays hidden?

And we wonder why religious institutions look ridiculous  in the public eye.

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