Posts

Where is God in American Politics?

We claim, we Christians, that our God is everywhere. He is omnipotent and omni-present, too big to be imagined and always with us. This week I’m in the news. I’m watching Christine Blasey Ford testify on C-SPAN and then reading about Anita Hill on Wikipedia. I’m watching history repeat itself and hearing my Christian brothers and sisters say things like “We have to love the accuser and the accused”   “Leave judgment to God” “We are praying for Brett and his family” And, behind closed doors, “He’s pro-life” and “What does it matter? Nothing happened in the end?” Where is God in these times and these manners? In us, purportedly his people? I sincerely doubt he’s in the temple “praying for Brett and his family.” He showed up to temples for confrontations with the religious elites of his time, reminding them that their suppositions were out of line with his true nature. Reminding them that the Brett Kavanaugh’s they love so much are not the people he came for
Post a Comment
Read more

Arriving

“I haven’t really had to cry yet since I moved, and I know that doesn’t sound like much, but—” But it feels a little like victory. I heard someone say this recently, and I couldn’t have agreed more. Arriving in new places, new jobs, and meeting new people has taught me to expect the sort of struggle that leaves me crying at the smallest of problems. When I moved to Korea, a dog barking at me could make me cry. Even that homeless dog knows I don’t belong here! For me, finding the paths I need is the most crucial part to feeling like I belong in a new place. How to get to the grocery—oh. It’s closed? Where’s the next nearest grocery? That’s closed to?!—how to get from the parking lot to my office to the nearest bathroom—no, not that bathroom; it has a cockroach living in it—and where to find a reliable source of ice cream and cookies. I’ve been in my new home of North Carolina for two weeks now, but I kept waiting to write this blog. It doesn’t count , I kept saying,
Post a Comment
Read more

Leaving

If you’re a Christian-nerd who keeps track of these things, you’ll know that two big-name pastors have left their big-name churches recently. Bill Hybels, Willow Creek megachurch pastor, retired to the now-familiar refrain of accusations of improper conduct with women in his church . And just weeks ago, Nadia Bolz-Weber passed off her church, the House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS, pronounced “half-ass”), with one of the most moving sermons of all time . If you have 15 minutes, listen to it. I, too, am engaged in the spiritual practice and litmus test of “leaving.” If I believed in the separation between church and life, I might think it was too grand a thing to compare my networks and workplaces and family to the churches of Bill Hybels and Nadia Bolz-Weber. But I don’t. I believe that each of us founds a church around us, whether we acknowledge our pastorship of that church or not. Like all pastors, we are responsible to God for the ways we treat others, our environme
Post a Comment
Read more

Knowing Right from Wrong

If you thinking knowing right from wrong is easy, are are . . . well . . . wrong. “Don’t lie” is one of the clearest commands of the Bible. Throughout Proverbs (14:5), the epistles (Colossians 3:9), the Old Testament law (Leviticus 19:11) and Jesus’ words calling the devil the “father of lies,” (John 8:44) God’s will is fairly clear about lying: it’s immoral. And yet the Bible shows that even this clear moral law is not absolute: Jacob deceives his father to receive his brother’s birthright (and God blesses him, Genesis 35); the midwives lie to save the lives of Hebrew babies (Exodus 1); and Mordechai instructs his niece to lie about her identity as a follower of God (Esther 2:10). The Bible regularly contradicts itself in this manner because life is messy and morality must be considered contextually. What is moral in one context would be immoral in another context. It is the task of the mature Christian to consider her own actions to discover God’s will. It is the hallmark of a
Post a Comment
Read more

"Inappropriate"

Last week CNN reported that the Trump administration excluded one of their reporters from a press event for asking what they described as an “inappropriate” question. (The Guardian, July 25, 2018) “Inappropriate” is one of those words that seems innocuous until someone uses it to describe you. And when that happens you realize that what is “appropriate,” is very powerful and very contextual. When Jesus shows up on the scene for all of three years of ministry, he did a lot of inappropriate things. He ate with tax collectors and sinners, consorted with prostitutes, and did his very best to disturb every person he ever met in order to instigate change. Change, protest, disruption: these are part of our Christian heritage. But so is stability and order. Paul writes desperately to the early churches, instructing them in how to establish institutions that won’t tear each other apart at the first sign of disagreement. He encourages slaves to submit to their masters and in
2 comments
Read more

Faith Tests

Once I said something—a small, off-handed comment—that made a friend of mine think that perhaps I wasn’t “saved.” A few years later, a professor at Fuller Seminary wanted to check to see why I wasn’t “where the other students were” when it came to matters of faith. Failing other peoples’ faith tests has been a reoccurring event in my adult life. That ought to mean I condemn faith tests, and yet I find the practice useful and employ mine constantly.  My faith test has one question (and it’s not “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”): Have you ever realized the Bible or your church was wrong and chosen to believe in a good and loving God of justice anyway? Follow-ups might include, have you ever been deeply disturbed by the Bible or made an outcast in your church? Have you ever found Jesus outside of the church and chosen to follow that Christ (no matter what she looked like) instead of the one preached from the pulpit? The Bible lets me down almost
1 comment
Read more

Blessed Are the Border Control Agents I Belittled in Montreal

Image
Blessed are the weak, the powerless, the outcast, the demoted—for theirs is the kingdom of God. This is the “backwards” gospel, the upside-down nature of God’s Kingdom that I love so much. The times in my life when everything has fallen apart and I’ve been hopelessly disillusioned, this is the only truth that saves me. Our weakness is God’s strength. When we are vulnerable, we are most likely to have eyes to see and ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church and to the world around us. Barbara Brown Taylor says that these thorns in our flesh are “how God defends us from . . .stainless steel Christians who want to cleans the church of problematic people.” My weakness is temper tantrums. When things don’t go my way, I turn into an adult-sized toddler. I was in Montreal on my way back from vacation earlier this week. I was happy, relaxed, content—I had just been on vacation! They made us de-plane in order to go through border control (which we then had to repeat
Post a Comment
Read more