Questioning the Answers

When Certainty Ceases to Make Sense

The Good News of How Bad We Are

By Leave a Comment

A couple weeks before the Corona lockdown ensued, I met a friend for breakfast on a Sunday morning at a local diner, a decadent dive of sorts that probably hasn’t been renovated in 30 years, has a menu that stretches to the Idaho border, and serves cinnamon rolls that are as big as your head. 

It’s the kind of place where I’d picture a 57-year-old hardened detective nursing a cup of coffee as he uses empty sugar packets and a smoldering ashtray to intently recreate a crime scene for a rookie cop sitting across the table, all the while allowing a cigarette to dangle precariously from the corner of his mouth, its smoke streaming up and disappearing into a dense haze that blankets the air. Back when smoking in public was a thing, of course. 

That morning, as I slipped into a dark-green vinyl booth and waited for my friend to show up, there was no such excitement going on. Four older women were at the table next to me, their conversation nondescript. A couple people sat at the counter on the other side of the restaurant. 

After a few minutes, two men carrying Bibles came in and sat down at a nearby table. I’d guess the older man was in his fifties, the younger man probably in his thirties. The older man’s Bible was very large. A statement piece, of sorts.

I didn’t pay much attention to their doings, figuring they were going to have a Bible study over breakfast. “Knock yourselves out, guys,” I thought to myself. “Just be careful where you wield that big ole thing.” 

My friend showed up and we started to catch up on the latest goings on in our lives. As we talked, we’d occasionally hear a distinct comment from the Bible Table. It was mostly the older guy, who seemed to be getting louder for emphasis. The table was in my line of sight and I noticed the man growing more and more animated as the conversation continued. His big Bible was flopped open, small pieces of paper with notes on them scattered about.

It was clear they weren’t having a Bible study. The younger guy didn’t have his Bible open at all. He was listening to the older guy, responding mostly with nods and uh-huh’s . 

My friend and I weren’t interested in what was transpiring at that table, but we kept clearly hearing the words “gospel” and “sin” rising to the surface. Then it became clear. He was practicing a sermon, and the more he mentioned sin, the louder and more animated and intense he got. This diatribe was definitely meant for an audience.

He started to throw in the word “cross,” at which point the intensity was mixed with palpable indignation. We could feel it from our table, exchanging almost uncomfortable glances with each other. 

Occasionally, he broke out of “preacher” mode to mentor the younger man, insisting that “people need to understand,” and mentioning “the congregation,” “sin,” and “the cross.”

We did our best to block out the distraction, but then, after the man returned to preacher mode, he said something neither of us could block out.

“No matter how good you feel, you’ll never know how bad you are.”

The words were delivered with bold intensity. With conviction. With a rage that was controlled, yet unmistakable. 

My eyes locked on my friend’s, stunned. His jaw dropped in disbelief.

“Wait. Did he actually just say that?” I asked. Thinking maybe I misheard, I repeated the words. “‘No matter how good you feel, you’ll never know how bad you are.’ Is that what he said?”

My friend nodded. “Yeah, that’s what he said.”

We stared at each other, stupefied. 

My jaw clenched and I felt my blood start to boil. Part of me wanted to storm his table and unleash a string of f-bombs and tell him what he could do with his gigantic Bible. 

But I took a deep breath, looked off to the side and then back into my friend’s eyes, and simply said “Can you believe that’s the world we came from?”

He had a slightly nauseated look on his face. “I know.”

It’s super ironic, because “gospel” means “good news.” And this man’s passionate exhortation was peppered with the term.

Yet, the gospel that’s been crystallized within the greater Christian world has a huge element that, unfortunately, can be summed up with what this man said: No matter how good you feel, you’ll never know how bad you are.

Sure, it may be packaged more attractively, edited for consumability, and delivered with more finesse and grace, but that’s the underlying message. 

At the very core of who we are, we’re messed up. We’re lacking. We’re unworthy. We have no intrinsic value apart from choosing the proper response to being told that we’re messed up, lacking, unworthy, and without intrinsic value. 

And, as this gentleman was so eager to point out, we better not forget it. “You’ll never know how bad you are.”

This message wasn’t only happening at the table in the diner in preparation for a Sunday sermon. It’s a message that’s rampant. 

And damaging.

Words have power. We all know that. Science has proven it. The Bible even speaks to this effect. 

I’ve made some bad choices with my kids over the years and I’ve said some things I wish I hadn’t, but I would never, ever think of saying something like “No matter how good you feel, you’ll never know how bad you are.”

Put in this context, it’s a no-brainer. If I did say something like that to my kids, I’d probably get lambasted from everyone who knew I’d done it. And rightly so. 

And yet so much of the Christian world is marinating in this very message. Absorbing it, whether consciously or subconsciously and being affected accordingly. 

The problem is it isn’t true. It’s just bad theology. Theology that was surprisingly absent for the first thousand plus years of the church’s existence. 

This is why my blood can start to boil and I want to start dropping f-bombs. Because this message can be crippling and people are internalizing it as truth when they don’t need to. When they shouldn’t be.

My friend and I expressed gratitude for extricating ourselves from that form of religion, then quickly carried on with our time together.

I’m not sure who was ultimately on the other end of that man’s message. But it was a Sunday morning, so I’m sure countless people near and far were about to be on the other end of some form of that message. 

And unfortunately, it’s a fiercely protected message. I remember years ago when I started to push against the message in my own church at the time, only to find myself one night at a table surrounded by people in church leadership showing me scripture to “prove” that in and of myself I was, in fact, an object of wrath.

It was a quick reminder that pushing against something only creates more resistance. So I walked away. I need more than social-distancing from a message that says I’m an object of wrath.

Sometimes I see people standing on street corners holding signs that say things like “You are enough,” “You are worthy,” “You are beautiful.” 

And I think that maybe someday these messages will make their way into the greater church. And that they’ll be sufficient on their own, absent of any form of “You’ll never know how bad you are.”

I’m hopeful that the narrative will change. I’m not sure how it’ll happen, but I’m hopeful. I mean, it is changing in some places, I just wish it would happen more quickly for the sake of those in the pews.

But I guess the Titanic doesn’t turn on a dime.


Image credit (all images from Pixabay):
Field landscape by enriquelopezgarre
Bible by StockSnap
Grassy walk by Tabeajaichhalt

Raging Rivers and Ruby Slippers

By Leave a Comment

The night after I found out that I lost my job, a friend came over with McDonald’s ice cream sundaes in hand. I opened a bottle of wine and we ate ice cream, drank wine, and talked. 

He was great, holding nothing but a positive outlook on my situation, while still validating what I was feeling. 

I truly did have the same positivity, but it was battling against all of the raw emotions that were still churning about. Having him there helped tease it out and give it the air it needed to grow a bit stronger.

At one point, we started talking about the need to take steps. To not sit around and wait for something to look right or feel safe. And to not refrain from taking a step due to the uncertainty of how it could possibly lead to something beneficial.

It reminded me of the story in the Bible when the Israelites cross the Jordan River. He wasn’t familiar with it, so I found a copy of the Good Book, fumbled through it until I found the passage in question, and read it to him, specifically calling attention to the fact that it says the river was at flood stage. “Then it says, ‘…as soon as their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing…'”

He got all excited. “What a great metaphor!”

We chewed on how powerful it was, taking a brief moment to acknowledge that it didn’t matter to either of us if the story “really happened” because its power is found in the truth of the  illustration: The water didn’t stop flowing until the people stepped into it.

We talked about the tendency for us to stand at the edge of our metaphorical rivers and wait for the raging waters to stop flowing before we step away from the safety of the shoreline. 

In other words, we stand alongside a situation and wait for it to look safe or for an obstacle to be removed before we move forward. But only in moving forward – only in stepping into what looks impossible or like it may even harm us – can the obstacle be overcome. 

It was a great conversation and held potent relevancy as we discussed our lives and our futures.

Shortly after, I was reflecting on the conversation and it reminded me of a story I wrote as a late teenager. 

It’s no secret that The Wizard of Oz has always been one of my favorite films. Many people don’t pay attention to the fact that when Dorothy begins her journey down the yellow brick road, there’s also a red brick road adjacent to it. In the story I wrote, Dorothy didn’t have a contingent of little people singing a song about which road to follow, so she got confused and took the red brick road by mistake (in her mind, this made perfect sense because it was the same color as the coveted ruby slippers that she’d been given).

I haven’t read the story in forever so I’m fuzzy on the details, but at one point Dorothy ends up at the witch’s castle with her life on the line and she gets chased to the turret atop one of the castle towers. Desperately trying to avoid being caught, she climbs out a window and, while precariously perched high on its ledge, stares at another tower across the way. 

Unable to turn back, she gazes down at the ruby slippers on her feet, musters up as much courage as she can, and cautiously steps out into the air. The slippers begin to glow vibrantly as something forms under her feet to keep her from falling. 

She hesitantly takes the next step onto thin air, fully supported as a walkway forms beneath her. The walkway continues to extend itself – but only as far as each step that she takes; it never extends out in front of her. 

Fear sets in as she hears her pursuers. She looks back to see them starting to climb out the window after her, causing a paralysis that steals her focus and courage. The walkway begins to erode under her feet and she feels herself losing control, but once she regains focus and moves forward, it solidifies and she gets to the other tower and through the window. She turns back in time to see the walkway dissolve, and I’m guessing that her chasers probably fell to their demise.

When I penned the story, I had no real concept of the notion of deliberately stepping into nothingness with only the trust that somehow things will be okay. I certainly wasn’t familiar with any biblical stories to that effect (though there may have been some other influence that middle-age has caused me to forget). But interestingly, even though I don’t recall many details of the story, that scene has always stuck in my mind with arresting clarity.

A couple nights ago, my kids and I were watching Onward, Pixar’s latest flick, and there was a very similar scene. There were no ruby slippers, of course, but there was a magical staff. 

I’ll be honest. I had a brief response of internal indignation that my scene – my 30-year-old scene living on faded pages tucked away in an old Pee-Chee in my office – had been repurposed by Pixar. 

Okay, so it was more like indignation mixed with excitement (“See, I actually do have good ideas!”) and a dash of regret (“Aww, I shouldn’t let my stuff just fall by the wayside…”), along with a quick battle of scarcity vs. abundance (“If I don’t hurry and get my other ideas out there, they’ll be used up by someone else and then what?” “Wait, no, the pie is big enough for everyone. There’s plenty to go around. Plus, this scene is different enough from mine.”). 

It’s amazing – and slightly exhausting – how much can go through your mind in a split second.

Anyway, I quickly refocused so I could absorb the scene. 

As I watched the Pixar character take his steps, I thought about what the scene was representing. I also thought about Dorothy in the story that I wrote decades ago. And about the Israelites crossing the Jordan River thousands of years ago.

And I thought about how stories can serve as fantastic, nonthreatening illustrations of powerful truths that can have enormous significance in our lives.

Of course, it’s one thing to watch these things on a screen or read them on a page. It’s something else when we’re faced with these situations in real life. 

So I also thought – perhaps most importantly – about myself and how I hope that each time life brings me to the edge of another raging river, I’ll have the confidence I need to step into the water.

Corona and the End of Times

By Leave a Comment

Someone asked me recently if I miss my job. I said I miss my colleagues more than anything. A big part of that, of course, included using giphys via Slack to communicate our emotions and responses to any number of things facing us in a given day. 

One of my favorites was from The Simpsons Movie and it was a shot of the community church next door to Moe’s Bar. A dark shadow covers the sky in what’s thought to be the beginning of the apocalypse. In a panic, all the people flee the church and disappear into the bar, while all the people in the bar flee for the church. Hilarious. 

I don’t know if the end of the world is an innate fear that we have as individuals or societies, or if it’s largely something that’s been propagated by religion. I suspect the latter.

To that point, the other night, my kids and I were finishing dinner and we were discussing some of the new norms of dealing with the current coronavirus pandemic. 

At one point, they started talking about all the claims being spouted on social media about how we’re in the end times. Talk of the rapture. The mark of the beast. Punishment by God. The return of Jesus. 

And all the other visually compelling and irresistable stuff that’s rooted largely in the Bible’s climactic book of Revelation. 

Oh boy. 

In recent years, we’ve had a number of conversations about the Bible. What it is. What it isn’t. How it should and should not be approached. How these perspectives differ vastly from many Christian communities, and why they differ. 

These chats were meant to help them navigate the variety of backgrounds in their own social circles, but also to provide some context as to the rather abrupt departure years ago from the church we attended.

All of that said, I was pretty sure that my kids weren’t likely to be negatively impacted by all this talk of the end times, but I didn’t want to make assumptions or take chances. 

After all, kids are impressionable. 

I was a bit younger than my daughter when some proselytizers left a cartoon evangelism tract at my house that depicted a man being thrown into a lake of fire because his name wasn’t written in the Book of Life.

And my oldest brother was somewhere between my daughter’s and my son’s age when the youth group he attended watched an “end times” movie in which he distinctly recalls people letting out blood-curdling screams as they were hauled off to be beheaded after refusing to accept the mark of the beast.

Two vivid images emblazoned for a lifetime into the psyches of impressionable kids. 

Did they paralyze us for life? Of course not. But the thing is, fear can seep – or be pounded – into our psyches. It can find its way into our cells.

So yeah, my kids and I had a talk. Or perhaps more accurately, I talked and they mostly listened. And in the case of my daughter, it was somewhat begrudgingly. 

“There are some things that are important to understand…” 

Now, the church that I spent many years in wasn’t into End Times theology, but, institutionally and individually, we did hold the rather traditional Christian perspective that the Bible is God’s inerrant word. I don’t think anyone really knew what to do with the book of Revelation, though, so we generally just avoided it altogether. 

Thankfully, quite a few years ago, I ended up rather unexpectedly learning quite a bit about the history of Revelation, including how its apocalyptic style of writing was very common at the time. In fact, there were all kinds of similar writings floating around the Christian communities back in the day. This one simply isn’t as unique as most people might think. 

It was all hugely insightful to me and allowed me to step into this conversation with some confidence. And most notably, with zero fear.

“The book of Revelation was never meant to be taken literally and it does not predict the future.”

Much to my daughter’s dismay, this led to a tangential conversation when my son asked why people think that the Bible does predict the future. We kept that one brief because it’s a complex topic and I knew there wouldn’t be patience for a deep dive. 

Returning to Revelation, I went on to explain that it’s an imagery-laden text full of symbolism that’s reflective of the political turmoil from the time when it was written. Beasts and dragons and whores – all symbolic representations.

“Dragons and what?” my son asked, perplexed, eyebrows raised.

“Whores,” I repeated.

“That’s what I thought you said.” He turned to my daughter and they exchanged curious glances. 

And the Number of the Beast? It’s simply a reference to the Roman Emperor, Nero. Somewhat anticlimactic, for sure, but true.

“There was this thing called ‘Gematria’ and it was a way to assign numbers for letters. 666 was how you spelled ‘Nero.’” 

At this point, my son’s interest was really piqued, but my daughter was beyond ready to be done. 

I tried to wrap up the conversation quickly, telling them that it was a super tumultuous time the people were living in and that all the symbolism was essentially a way to talk discreetly about the government and the things that were going on. Also, it was a way to give the people hope.

The kids started talking over each other. 

“How do you spell that word?” my son asked, as he went for his phone so he could Google “Gematria,” while my daughter asked with exasperation, “Whyyyyy are we having this conversation?”

I spelled the word for him and then answered her.  

“Because there are a lot of things in the world that can cause fear and anxiety. And the last thing any of us needs to be dealing with is fear that’s being caused by religious beliefs.” 

We wrapped up the conversation and moved on for the evening, but not before the kids showed me a few video clips of various people – including a pastor – speaking of these dire times and warning the return of Jesus. 

In the day or two following the dinnertime conversation, I started to think that maybe I was overreacting to the whole thing. Maybe I was being overly sensitive.

Then I happened across an online discussion relating to the flick that my brother had told me about. I perused the comments from people who had seen it as kids. Turns out my brother wasn’t the only one it wreaked havoc on.

Some choice highlights included people who recalled it as an element of an “effed up childhood,” the source of unbelievable childhood trauma, something that scared “the living shit” out of them. 

Good stuff, huh?

One girl credited her most vivid childhood memories to the night she saw that movie (and the others in its series) at an all-nighter at her church.

And yet another person said that the films, coupled with the book of Revelation itself, served as “nightmare fodder” for the remainder of her youth.

Okay, so even though my kids weren’t subject to this movie or any of the subsequent films in this genre over the last several decades, I guess I’m not overreacting. This stuff can have a powerful impact.

The thing that’s ironic – unfortunately ironic, in my opinion – is that the only reason the book of Revelation made it into the Bible to begin with is because there was a theory at the time that it was written by one of the disciples who walked with Jesus (a theory that’s long been discarded by nearly everyone in that field of studies). 

And it was only included somewhat reluctantly, it seems. Some churches – I think maybe Eastern Orthodox? – actually excluded it from their canon of scripture because they knew it didn’t belong there and that it was being misused.

Yet here we are. Sigh. 

It’s unlikely that the book of Revelation is going anywhere. Maybe someday evangelical America will be able to approach it a bit more responsibly. 

In the meantime, I guess we can all rely on Simpsons giphys to make light of something that really doesn’t warrant the fear and power that it’s wielded over the years.

(Side note: At the time of this post, said giphy can be seen here.)