Archives for May 2014

People Are Dying

May 27, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

A while back, I was reading an online article and the author was going off on a Christian anti-gay tirade. It wasn’t a “God hates fags” tirade, but a tirade nonetheless, laced with plenty of insistence on the Bible’s clear teaching.

I’m not sure what about this particular article on this particular day brought me to this point, but I got pretty worked up, thinking to myself “People are dying! Gay people are dying! They’re turning to drugs and alcohol and they’re committing suicide, often because the Christian community is telling them in one form or another that their sexual orientation isn’t okay. And they’re dying!”

I was surprised by how intense my reaction was. And after settling down from what felt like my own tirade, I started to wonder if I was just overreacting and blowing it completely out of proportion.

And I thought about my own church and how delicately and maturely I think it has handled the issue of homosexuality, not trying to push anything as controversial as reparative therapy and not labeling gay people or making them feel inferior. Not promising that if you just pray hard enough God will change your sexual orientation. And always coming from a standpoint of “this doesn’t define you and it doesn’t affect how God feels about you.”

Sure, there are exceptions. People sometimes make insensitive comments. People can make absolutely asinine comparisons, saying things like “Well it may be in my nature to be prideful, but that doesn’t make it okay” (insert eye-rolling emoticon here). And I actually had to get up and walk out of a sermon once when a great-hearted, amazing young man asserted with great zeal that God says it’s detestable for two men to lie together. (Note to self: don’t get sidetracked here by talking about how God also says it’s detestable to eat shrimp.)

So yes, there are exceptions. But, by and large, the issue is handled with grace and tact and love and compassion.

Of course, it’s still treated as a sin, so people with same-sex attractions need to be okay with a lifetime of celibacy if they’re not interested in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex. After all, my church has never been one to compromise when it comes to the clear teaching of the Bible (it’s that “ultimate truth” thing I talked about previously). And for most of my Christian life, I never understood how a church could possibly be accepting of any form of homosexual relationships.

In fact, when I was a young, overly zealous Christian, I was in Chicago on a business trip with about eight others who had come from different cities. One of the men was gay and he was a Christian. Of course, in my mind, he couldn’t have been a true Christian. And I was stunned to hear that his church’s congregation consisted predominantly of gay and lesbian people. I didn’t even know such a thing existed. (Yes, I was young and somewhat naive, but keep in mind this was also a long time ago and homosexuality was much more taboo at the time than it is now.)

Needless to say, he and I had some intense and heated exchanges. They were totally civil and there were never any personal attacks, but they were heated nonetheless. At least on my end they were. In retrospect, he was strangely calm and at peace and he didn’t seem at all bent on changing my point of view.

We waded through several scriptures in an engaging debate of sorts. Some of his explanations were fairly well backed up, but others seemed entirely spurious to me at the time. Finally, I pointed out that all those passages didn’t really matter, because the apostle Paul clearly says that homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God. Issue settled. Case closed.

His response? “We believe that we will.”

I’m pretty sure my blood pressure went through the roof after such a ridiculous comment. In my mind, I was screaming “Who cares what you believe?!?! That’s not what the Bible says!”

My intentions were genuine. And so was my zeal. But time, experience, and reflection all have a way of changing our understanding and perspective – if we’re receptive. If we’ll consider the fact that God may actually be trying to move us in a new direction.

I think about the intentions and zeal of those who are currently upholding the church’s traditional stance on homosexuality – at least when it’s done with love and compassion and doesn’t involve people carrying around “God hates fags” signs. And I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that people are genuine. They desire to do what they believe is right in the eyes of God and to uphold the clear teaching of the Bible.

But I’ve gotten to a point where I think phrases like “clear teaching of the Bible” can be hugely problematic, for many reasons.

For example, I really think it would behoove us all to consider that hundreds of years ago when Galileo put forth that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe, the well-meaning church tried him for going against the authority of the scriptures and twisting them to fit his own agenda. The church then deemed him a heretic and would’ve had him put to death if he hadn’t recanted. Even after he did recant, he still had to spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

Can you even imagine? And all because he wanted to tell people that the sun didn’t revolve around the earth? What difference does that make, anyway?

The problem is, this Galileo example is so patently absurd to us that people will say “But homosexuality is different.” I have a couple things to say about that.

First, Galileo’s unfortunate situation was anything but absurd at the time. It was a thing. And clearly a very big thing. Because it brought into question the very understanding of truth as thought to be defined by the scriptures. And that can feel scary and dangerous.

Where I come from, we warn of the dangers of twisting the scriptures to fit one’s own agenda. And that’s precisely what the church thought Galileo was doing. He was charged with “glozing the said scriptures according to (his) own meaning,” and thus putting forth a teaching that was “contrary to the Holy Scriptures.”

Secondly, yes, the issue of homosexuality is different than our planet’s location in the universe. When we say it’s different, though, we mean it’s more serious. We say things like “It’s a salvation issue.” The implication is that we’re playing around with eternity in hell and so it’s not to be taken lightly. I get it.

But I also think we make a lot of assumptions around that view and base it largely on Paul’s assertion that homosexuals won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Personally, I’ve come to believe that what Paul and many of his contemporaries defined as the kingdom of God was far different than what a lot of Christians today think the kingdom is. And with all due respect for one of the greatest contributors to the New Testament, Paul didn’t always know what he was talking about (I realize such a comment might be controversial, so I’ll discuss it in another post).

Meanwhile, I’ll put forth that the church likely did see the situation with Galileo as a salvation issue. It’s certainly not out of the question, given the intense reaction and the claim that his teachings were “contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scriptures.”

Typically, when I’ve considered issues throughout history where the church and many Bible believers were ultimately shown to be wrong in their use of the scriptures – the Galileo debacle is merely one of many – my tendency has been to assume that if I’d been around at the time, I would’ve had the proper understanding of the Bible. Sure, the church as an institution may have been jacked up and clearly “majoring in the minors,” but I wouldn’t have been. I would’ve been on the side that, over time, came out on the right side of the issue. In other words, I would’ve been standing up for Galileo all along. Or the slaves. Or the Jewish people. Or the African Americans. Or…

After all, who doesn’t like to be right, right?

Well, I’m no longer going to assume I wouldn’t have been holding dogmatically to a “biblically based” position that would ultimately fall by the wayside as time marched on and people evolved in their understanding of what was right or true. I now realize that such an assumption would require an embarrassing level of arrogance on my part. And this is partly why I no longer think that what I’ve historically believed to be true about homosexuality “in God’s eyes” is actually right.

As far as it being a salvation issue – the implication being that anyone in a homosexual relationship is at risk of spending eternity in hell – maybe we should consider the hell that’s being created here and now for the affected people.

Maybe we should consider that our current Bible – in most Christian denominations, anyway – consists of 66 books, composed over the course of nearly a thousand years and yet, when taken as a whole, there are very few references to what we call eternity, let alone our typical, modern understanding of salvation, heaven, and hell. (I’ve become fascinated lately with the evolution of Christianity and how it seems that it was only over time that a primary focus on the afterlife emerged).

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So was I overreacting to the anti-gay tirade I mentioned earlier? I don’t think so. People are dying. And many more are experiencing extreme pain, suffering, and turmoil because of dogmatic beliefs – either their own or those of others – that in the grand scheme of things could very well be as irrelevant as the understanding of our planet’s location in the universe.

We may be tempted to laugh at the absurdity of the Galileo misfortune, but I’m pretty sure no one was laughing back then.

Maybe there’s something we can learn by looking at the mistakes that have been made throughout the history of Christianity and humbly considering that we likely would’ve been on the wrong side of those issues as well, all the while quoting our Bibles to prove our position.

Cognitive Dissonance, Anyone?

May 21, 2014 By admin 1 Comment

Over the last few years, I’ve been amazed at some of the things I’ve learned about how our brains work. The incredible abilities they have to process and sort and prioritize and filter. The instrumental role they play in our health and the power they have to help us heal.

In and of themselves, these things aren’t earth shattering or entirely new concepts to me. But it’s been particularly interesting to consider some of the things through spiritual lenses; namely through the lenses of Christianity.

Two things in particular have stood out to me. The first has to do with the documented evidence about the benefits of meditation. Things like how it reduces stress and increases our ability to focus. It allows us to deal with challenging situations and can help modify our behavior for the better. And the time we “sacrifice” to spend in meditation is gained back exponentially because of how much more focused, healthy, effective, and at peace we are.

What’s been particularly striking to me, though, is the fact that studies have shown that meditation actually activates the part of our brain that’s tied to compassion. And to take it a step further, studies also show that compassion is linked to happiness, contentment, and fulfillment. So if we make meditation a regular part of our lives, we’re more likely to help others and be happier.

The reason I find this so interesting is because it shows us that good actually lies at the very core of who we are and who we were designed to be. Sure, we may struggle to tap into it, but it’s there. That may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but it is to me. And that’s because I’ve spent most of my life living within a Christian story that in many ways says the exact opposite. It’s a story that emphasizes a fall. And with this fall, sin came into the world and effectively ruined everything.

Now I don’t think many people would deny that we invite all kinds of garbage into our lives and make destructive decisions that ultimately cut us off from experiencing the fullness of our humanity. But what we hear quite commonly within Christianity is that God had to go to extreme measures to deal with the sin problem. To pay the price for our shortcomings. We hear that without the sacrifice of Jesus, we’re not worthy to enter God’s presence.

Indeed, in the Christian story, we are often told that the only reason God can look at us at all is because he sees the blood of Jesus rather than seeing the stained, sinful people that we truly are at our very core. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years I’ve heard that, without Jesus, we’re actually enemies of God. This is a disturbingly familiar theme, one that’s partly due to the NIV’s thoughtful mistranslation of the Greek text from Romans 5.

So in this story, we somehow went from being given the breath of life and pronounced “good” to being objects of God’s wrath. To reinforce this idea, we have occasional stories throughout the scriptures where God is shown to strike people dead for various reasons. We have priests taking extreme measures in the Old Testament to ensure they weren’t struck dead due to their “unholiness” when they entered the temple.

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And for a bit of extra color, we throw in stories about how a rope would get tied around the priest’s waist so if God did strike him dead the others could pull the dead body out from a safe distance without risking their own lives. Sure, the rope story is likely an urban legend, but it shows the ideas of God that have permeated Christianity for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

What does all of this say about God? Or perhaps more importantly, what does it say about us?

All of this leads into the second thing that stood out to me, which involves how our brains get wired. It goes something like this. As our brains get exposed to something over and over, they establish neural pathways. In other words, they get hardwired.

And once that happens, an auto filter process kicks in. The brain welcomes anything that lines up with the ideas or beliefs that are already in place as part of the hard wiring. But anything that conflicts with the established wiring merely gets discarded. It just goes out the window. And it’s all done automatically, requiring no conscious effort on our part. This is precisely why it’s so hard to teach an old dog new tricks, so to speak.

Here’s what’s fascinating to me about all of this. It means that it’s entirely possible for the disturbing elements of the Christian story to get so deeply embedded into our subconscious minds that the elements of the story that are supposed to breathe life into us get auto filtered and subsequently tossed out the window. And we don’t even realize it.

We can hear “God is a loving, merciful God,” but if our brains have a neural pathway that says “God kills people for lying,” then our brains open the window and toss “God is loving” right outside. At a subconscious level, it’s as though we never even heard “God is a loving, merciful God.” Think about that for a minute.

We can hear “You are valuable to God,” but if the brain is hard wired with “…but only because Jesus died on the cross to keep God from having to unleash his wrath against you,” well… you get the point.

Now I realize these examples might seem a little extreme. And I fully acknowledge that many – if not most – Christians probably have healthy Christian-related neural pathways in their brains (I certainly hope they do). But what about the people who don’t? There’s no denying that we all process and internalize things differently. And much of that has to do with our backgrounds, experiences, and personalities.

Two people can sit through a sermon about the crucifixion of Jesus and one can leave feeling energized, loved, hopeful, and ready to go tell everyone this amazing story, while the other feels completely defeated and just wants to go crawl into a cave. Same story. Two vastly different effects. And it’s not just as simple as the latter person needing to “get over it.” It’s much deeper and more complex than that, especially when you consider that people may not even be aware of the factors at play in their own experience.

I think about the number of Christians I’ve known over the years who just seem to be stuck in one way or another. Who feel like they’ll never measure up to God’s expectations or like they’re continually falling short somewhere. Sometimes there’s guilt. There’s often shame. Maybe there’s a sense that God isn’t really all that interested.

And then I ponder my own life, with my guilty nature and my tendencies toward legalism and wanting things to be black and white. And I think about how long I’ve been doing this Christian thing and yet the promises that we proclaim – or at least some of them – can often seem so elusive in my own life. And it leaves me thinking “What the heck?!”

But then I consider the hard wiring of my brain and things begin to make a bit of sense. I start to realize that, for whatever reason, some of the unhealthy messages are like very large, fast-moving, well-established rivers. And some of the encouraging, healthy messages are like little streams trying desperately to establish their own routes but they can’t. They just don’t have the power to fight against the raging rivers.

Now this idea is well understood and well accepted throughout psychology. I don’t think anyone is going to argue against the notion that our thoughts are extremely powerful and that if we can harness and control them – and in the process, train our brains – we’re capable of amazing things. And that if we don’t take control of our thoughts, we can be in big trouble.

But many people just aren’t aware of all this. We’re not aware of what our brains are doing. We’re not aware that unhealthy thought patterns or beliefs have been hard wired and are so prevalent and powerful that they’re preventing anything else from getting in. And we’re not aware of the effect these thought patterns have on our daily lives. To some extent, it really is true that our thoughts – whether we’re consciously aware of them or not – create our realities.

With all this in mind, it’s no wonder I’ve known so many Christians over the years – myself included – who can tend to feel empty or mundane or maybe even somehow hopeless but can’t put a finger on why, especially if they’re doing all the “right things.”

The truth is, if we’ve internalized any aspect of the story in an unhealthy way – even if it’s subconsciously – we can be doomed. And chances are we won’t even realize what’s happening. Which begs the question “How is that fair?” Do we really believe God is behind elements of a story that get internalized by some in a way that wreaks emotional havoc? That can actually hinder people from experiencing the fullness and goodness that we often insist God wants for everyone?

This is one thing that got me thinking that maybe there’s something wrong with how we’ve been interpreting and telling the story.

Maybe there’s something wrong with how we approach biblical stories about God turning people into pillars of salt, commanding genocide, hardening a ruler’s heart in order to inflict dire consequences on a nation, or striking a couple dead for being deceitful about a financial transaction.

Maybe there’s something wrong with how we’ve understood God.

And as a result, maybe there’s something wrong with how we’ve understood ourselves.

Experience Vs. Truth

May 14, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Sincerity doesn’t equal truth.

It’s a phrase I’d grown quite accustomed to in my Christian life. Where I come from, this compelling and thought-provoking phrase was used primarily to help others understand that their experiences, no matter how sincere they may have been, may not have been right. Meaning they may not have been in line with the Bible.

This came from a well-intentioned place of desiring to help people understand what it meant to truly follow the Bible and to understand the danger in allowing experiences to either lead us or – worse yet – to influence our understanding of truth.

I’ve spent the bulk of my life happy to sacrifice experience on the altar of ultimate truth. This truth was defined by my understanding of the scriptures, one that was handed down to me by zealous and committed Christians when I was a young adult, and then continually reinforced over the course of nearly two decades. Not only was I prepared to sacrifice my own experiences on the altar of ultimate truth, but I was also insistent that other people sacrifice their non-compliant experiences there as well.

But what happens when our experiences – or those of others – lead us places that don’t seem to align with what we’ve defined as truth? I always thought we should dismiss them outright, perhaps even clamping down all the harder on what we’ve always understood to be true. It seemed like the right thing to do. It was hard to consider that perhaps God might be trying to move me or others in a new direction.

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There came a point in my walk as a Christian where something was eating at me. Something just didn’t seem right about the story. Or at least my faith tradition’s understanding and telling of the story. I couldn’t pinpoint it, though. After all, the answers I’d grown accustomed to still lined up. Everything I was doing added up to my understanding of truth. And because sincerity doesn’t equal truth, I was hesitant to consider what my heart seemed so sincerely to be telling me: that something just wasn’t quite right. That’s a story for elsewhere, but suffice it to say, I’m quite familiar with the struggle between experience and truth.

And speaking of that struggle, last fall I had the pleasure of having lunch with Rob and Linda Robertson. For more than three hours, we sat across the table from each other and shared our lives. I listened to the painstaking, tragic, and yet somehow amazingly beautiful story of the journey they embarked on when they found out their pre-teen son was gay. If you haven’t read their story, you need to. You absolutely need to. Prior to meeting them, I’d read the story and I’d listened to their talk at the Exodus International conference (tissues required), so as we were hanging out together, they shared other aspects of their story.

For these two amazing people, experience didn’t merely have a fender bender with truth. No, truth and experience had a head-on collision. The truth of what they always thought God was telling people through the Bible unraveled as they allowed God to move in their lives, trusting that God was speaking to and leading them in a powerful way. In a way that seemed to be in conflict with the words that they had always thought defined truth.

As I listened to Rob talk about painfully coming to know the presence and truth of God in a more intimate way than he had ever experienced before, I was captivated, but also stunned as he uttered something that on the surface seems almost unthinkable. It was the incredible paradox of enduring the ongoing pain from having lost his son – the ultimate outcome of what began as his family’s well-intended attempts to uphold what they believed was God’s truth – with having gained a transformed faith and a newfound intimacy with God that he wouldn’t trade for anything. Take a moment to read that again and then a minute or two to ponder it. Especially the “that he wouldn’t trade for anything” part. How is something like that even possible?

I was speechless. How could I possibly listen to a story so powerful and painful, so transformative in a hauntingly beautiful kind of way, and deny its truth? The fact is, I didn’t deny it. I felt it. I embraced it. And I celebrated it.

But what really humbles me is that there was a time in the not-too-distant past when I could’ve listened to their story and somehow had the arrogance and audacity to utter some variation of “sincerity doesn’t equal truth.” And then go on to share Bible verses in a good-hearted attempt to warn this couple that they were being sentimental, that their souls were in jeopardy, and that they were clearly being led astray by Satan, all the while certain that I was standing up for God’s honor (as if God really needs me to do that).

Sure, I might not have done it in the moment (I certainly hope I wouldn’t have been that tactless). And regardless of when or where it happened, I would’ve done it with overflowing, genuine compassion. Absolutely. And my own heart probably would’ve been breaking in the process, feeling their pain, all the while urging the importance of letting go of sentimentality in order to embrace truth. It’s what we call “speaking the truth in love,” as the book of Ephesians puts it.

And I know that some people think that by not taking such an approach, I fall in the category of someone whose faith is weak or who is simply listening to what his itching ears want to hear. Perhaps someone who is just being sentimental himself. Because depending on how we approach and interpret the Bible, there may be very little room for us to give weight to experiences. In fact, there might not be room at all.

But if we don’t truly trust that God can use experiences to move, shape, and transform us, to guide us into new depths of growth and understanding and being human – all of which may very well conflict with what we’ve always thought to be right and true – then what do we have?

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After all, many of the stories within the pages of the Bible show us that experiences move people to play key roles in accomplishing something greater than themselves. Moses received his calling to lead the Israelites out of slavery through a mysterious experience related to us in the story of a burning bush. In the story of Jonah, we read of a man who was so opposed to preaching about God’s goodness to a group of people who fell outside the tribal boundaries of the Jewish nation that it took being thrown from a ship into a raging sea and spending time in the belly of a fish to push him in the right direction. And in the book of Acts, Peter had a visionary experience on a rooftop which led him to a conclusion that flew in the face of everything his Jewish tradition had taught him about what was “clean and unclean.”

I get the desire for unchanging, ultimate truth. I’ve clung to it for most of my life. Not only does it seem responsible, but without it, we fear that everything will unravel because there won’t be any certainty. Nothing to hold on to. Peter probably thought the same thing in the book of Acts. Maybe that’s why his initial response to eating something unclean was an emphatic “Surely not, Lord!” Because this experience – where he was being called to go – didn’t align with what he thought to be true. And what he thought to be true was based on his faith tradition and an understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures – his Bible. Think about that.

I think it’s natural that we all want ultimate truth. One that’s clearly defined, black and white, and never evolving. But maybe the truth we’re desperately after is actually less encompassing than we think it needs to be, and yet, in another paradox, somehow all-encompassing at the same time.

Maybe there’s far more of a simplicity to ultimate truth. One that’s desperately uncomfortable, at least initially. And maybe that simplicity is that God is God. And God is enough. And so if we find ourselves being called to move beyond the certainty of the status quo to uncharted territories, we can do so with confidence, knowing that God can take care of it all.