Religious (Not Crazy)

“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, ...

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...

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...