Monthly Archives: May 2012

5 Phrases I Think Christians Should Say More Often

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My most recent blog post made some waves, and I certainly didn’t expect it.  When I wrote down “5 Phrases I Think Christians Shouldn’t Say,” I never imagined that it would be sent far and wide for consideration and comment.

I’ll no doubt offer some more thoughts on those phrases.  As with all public statements, there are other thoughts to give and more clarification needed.

I’ll also probably add to that list, too.  Christians say a lot of unhelpful things in the attempt to explain everything in the world.  I find that fact interesting, actually.  In my ordination I was entrusted to be a “steward of the mysteries” for the community…and yet so much of the community of faith just seems to want to explain away mysteries with vacuous, pat answers that end up being about as useful as a boat in the desert.

But, I’ve been pondering my previous list, and I’d like to offer up some phrases that I think should be said as well.  So, here are 5 phrases that I think Christians should say more often.  And, of course, there are undoubtedly more…

5) “Let’s read a book together; your choice.”

This might seem like a dumb request, or some awkward way to try to curry favor with someone, but I’m absolutely serious.  So many times I find people of faith utterly petrified by engaging in serious conversation over a text that might challenge their faith because they feel they might not have “the right answer.”

And the problem there, of course, is that someone along the line explained faith to them as some sort of equation, a specific formula where certain values must be plugged in for the desired outcome.  In short: we’ve made faith into a system instead of a conversation.

So, here’s an experiment: go to a person of a different faith: Buddhist, Sikh, Atheist, etc.  Or maybe they’re a different denomination of your own faith…whatever.  Engage with someone different than you and invite them to read a book with you, but let them choose.

And go with whatever they choose.

So, let’s say they pick Christopher Hitchens and “god Is Not Great” is what they’re asking to read. Read it.  Let it come into conversation with your faith. And then talk about it.

Or, let’s say they pick a translation of the Qur’an (or if you can read Arabic, read the actual Qur’an).

Read it. It’s not a sin.

Read it and let it come into conversation with your faith.  We need to be a society where people are reading together.  Right now I’m reading The Kingdom of God is Within You  by Tolstoy with a congregation member who identifies as “questioning.”  His idea; his invitation.  Tolstoy is fascinating.  And not only are we having a great discussion about faith and values, we’re getting to know why we think the way we do while also learning more about how the other person thinks.

But for this to work, you have to let them choose the text.  So often people of faith think they only have something to impart on people with other worldviews and nothing to learn.  God save us from such blind certainty.

4) “That’s interesting!  Tell me more…”

Too often people of faith only utter this phrase if they’re talking about gossip.  That’s a topic for a different post, I think…

But what if we said the above phrase when people came to us with a different perspective on God, being, the meaning of life, or the authority of scripture?  What if our first reaction to hearing something that may not line up with what we’ve been taught/have come to believe isn’t a rebuttal or an argument, but an invitation to hear more?

And what if you seriously meant it?

So many times people have said, “that’s a slippery slope…” when it comes to questioning tenets of faith and critically listening to other perspectives.  But just as often I’ve met people who have said, “(that particular tenet of faith) didn’t prove true…so I abandoned faith altogether.”  To both statements I just have to sigh.

When we have been taught that questioning is bad or that all statements rest on one singular foundation, we invite unthinking automatons whose sole purpose in life is to defend their own thoughts, or people primed for disbelief because some premises (like the inerrancy of scripture, for example) just can’t stand up to experience.

Instead, we should invite people to tell us more about their thoughts and beliefs.  And, yes, share our own.  But too often we’re all to eager to do the latter and not interested in the former because…gasp…we might actually be changed in the process.

3) “I can’t buy that…it doesn’t square with my faith…”

This one might rattle some nerves.  Hear me out.

It’s amazing to me that people of faith can shun pornography but buy 7000 square foot homes for a family of four.  It’s amazing to me that people of faith can censor Showtime on their cable TV’s so that their kids won’t see a sex scene, but they’ll spend thousands of dollars on a birthday party for a two year old.

It’s amazing to me that people of faith can see money as “theirs” because they earned it, but can look at another person’s sexual orientation and see it as a “choice.”

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t have a 7000 square foot home.  I just want you to think and ask if your faith has anything to say about it.  And if so, what?  I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong answer here; I just want to see that conversation happen!

And the point of me bringing this up isn’t to cause someone to feel guilty, it’s actually to ask the question: Does your faith have anything to say about what/how you consume?

And if so, does your checkbook reflect it?  Money is just as powerful as sex, and yet somehow it seems that Christians only want to talk about sex and not about money (probably, in my view, to distract from their use of money…but that’s also a different post).

2) “You’re right, I struggle with what is written in the Bible there, too…”

I’m a pastor who wrestles with the Bible.  I think every person of faith (and arguably, everyone) should wrestle with the Bible..and any text.  Converse with it. Engage it.

Don’t look at scripture like an encyclopedia that just gives “answers;” view it as a conversation partner!  Professor David Lose at Luther Seminary in Minnesota writes eloquently on this in his book Making Sense of Scripture. (The title is misleading in that he doesn’t actually offer a way to “make sense” of scripture, but a way to view scripture)

His point, though, is that when we look at the Bible as simply a reference book, we don’t engage it.

But if we engage it, then when someone with a different worldview brings up the fact that it’s hard to accept that God really sent “she-bears” to devour children who were mocking Elisha’s bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24), we can admit it!  It’s ludicrous to believe that that actually happened. Plus, I’m balding, and I sometimes get mocked.  Please, Lord, send the she-bears!

And it doesn’t hurt my faith, or my witness, to say that it doesn’t make sense because I don’t believe that the authority of the Bible is dependent upon the absolute inerrency of every little verse.

One of refrains that I heard over and over again from atheist/agnostic readers of the previous blog post was that it was refreshing to see/hear a person of faith who actually thought.  That fact made me sad because it means, by and large, that unthinking morons are the poster-children for faith in the eyes of many skeptics.

And, yes, I know that is not a charitable description…but I’m not sure how to soften that phrase and still make the despair it causes me hit home.  And part of that perception problem, I think, comes from the fact that people of faith refuse to admit that some of the Bible is weird and doesn’t seem to square with experience.

And my mention of 2 Kings, by the way, doesn’t mean that I write off the book or even that I want to exclude from the canon.  It’s there; it’s not my place to exclude it.  But I converse with it.  I make a distinction between story and history.  I make a distinction between fable, myth, and fact.  And I admit that scripture can hold all three…and that that doesn’t have to impede it’s ability to have Truth.

1) “That’s not OK…”

As evidenced by some of the responses I received over the weekend, some Christians are all too ready to say that it is not OK for me to suggest that we dump “Love the sinner; hate the sin” as a phrase.

I’ll just repeat my belief that this phrase, no matter how you want to defend it, is disingenuous.  I’ve filed it under “complete nonsense” in my file cabinet.

But we need to speak out when people who represent the faith say things that are outrageous and downright dangerous.  I know, that’s a statement that involves a lot of subjectivity.

An example?  Where is the public outcry from people of faith against the pastor in Maiden, North Carolina who preached that homosexuals should be corralled and given just enough food to survive in an effort to let them die out?

If you’re wondering what I’m referring to, you can find the video here.

It is graphic.  And despicable.  And disgusting.  And I cannot see how it squares with my faith.  And I will tell anyone and everyone so. (By the way, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their list of mental disorders in 1973, no matter what the Focus on the Family might want to tell you.  And I think it is high time that the church remove it from the list of spiritual disorders, too.)

Now, it’s true that this pastor is small-time.  The community he serves is small, and his influence is small (although I see his video is now on CNN).  But if we hear this extremely vehement nonsense and keep quiet, can we be surprised that people think this is what all people of faith believe?

We need to decry Robertson and Graham publicly when they make ridiculous comments.  We need to call Olsteen into question when he says that God wants you to be rich. We need people of faith to say that Mark Driscoll doesn’t speak for me or my faith when he starts spouting off about masculinity or marriage in ways that are derogatory to both men and women.

And we need to do the same with some others in the faith, too. Luther, Wesley, Calvin…not to mention modern day heads of the church, are not infallible.  Some of their writings deserve some denouncing.

And until people are willing to call such things ridiculous loudly, publicly, and without exception, we can’t be surprised if people dismiss Christians as unthinking and hateful.  And we can’t be surprised, either, when people defect from faith in an attempt to distance themselves from this sort of thing.

I’m a reluctant Christian at times because I think that we, too often, only engage the world and those around us with a defensive stance as if we have something to prove.  Engage life in a meaningful way, in a way that calls faith into practice; in a way that invites questions and not just recitation.  Engage this world in a challenging way.

Oh, and while you might have expected the #1 phrase that I wish Christians would say more often to be a cuss or a curse, I just figured that would go without saying…

5 Phrases I Think Christians Shouldn’t Say

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Sometimes I curse.  I don’t pepper my language liberally with curse words like people might pepper a house salad, but sometimes I curse.

It surprises people to hear that pastors sometimes curse.  But really, that’s all I can do sometimes.  When you see terrible tragedy where you have absolutely no response other than sadness and despair, cursing happens…because you can do nothing else.

Likewise, sometimes when I see utter beauty a word will slip through my lips, brought from the very depths of my emotional being where words live only to be used in situations where no word seems appropriate.  Usually that’s a curse, too.

Pastors sometimes curse.  Christians sometimes curse.

And, really, I hear things slip from Christian mouths with reckless abandon that I believe are far worse than curse words.  Here are just 5 (there are undoubtedly more):

5) “That’s not Christian…”

I’ve heard this a lot.  I once told a person that I meditated.  They responded, “Well, that’s not Christian you know…”

Sigh.

See, the problem with that line of thinking is that it narrows what can be identified with living a life in Christ.  Rob Bell does a great job in his book Velvet Elvis on dissecting the danger in turning the word “Christian” from a noun (as it’s used in the Bible) into an adjective. In the noun form, a Christian is a follower of Christ.  In the adjective form, it describes an action…presumably an action that a follower of Christ should/shouldn’t do, and therefore sets up categories that have definite barriers. And in doing so, it implies some judgment that is unwarranted at best and untrue at worst.  Consider these phrases that I’ve actually heard:

“It’s not Christian to fire that person.” (Implication: A Christian can’t do some things because they’re seen as “mean”)

“It’s not Christian to think those sexual thoughts.” (Implication: A Christian isn’t sexual, or if they are, they don’t think about it because God hates sex and real Christians can control such things)

“You can’t do yoga!  It’s not a Christian practice…” (Implication: A Christian can’t borrow from other faith traditions…or, apparently, stretch with intentional breathing on rubber mats)

“You can’t get a tattoo; it’s unchristian to defile the temple of God.” (Implication: God has an opinion about the tribal band around your ankle)

People say it all the time, and while a generous interpretation of their words might be to assume they are calling a specific action/thought into question, the reality is that they just end up calling the person doing that thought/action “unchristian”…to hurtful consequences.  For those questioning or skeptical of faith, it erects another barrier, and further narrowly defines who is in or out of a relationship with God.

What if someone were to say, “It’s unchristian to make that amount of money”? Or, “It’s unchristian to have a house that large because you really don’t need that much space”?

We should ban “Christian” in the adjective form.  We can’t use it with any consistency.

4) “I love the sinner but I hate the sin..”

Great.

See, the problem that I have with this phrase is that it assumes that “sin” is a specific action that is done/can be undone.  If that’s the case, name the specific action that you hate.

“I love you, Tommy, but I don’t like it when you break my glasses.”  “I love you, Sarah, but I don’t like it when you kick my shins.”

But really, I haven’t heard this phrase used in those ways.  I’ve only heard it used when people are talking about identity.

“I love gay people, I just hate that they act on their homosexual orientation…”

There we go.  There’s an honest statement.

And an unhelpful one.

It’s unhelpful because, you can’t love me apart from my sexuality.  I really don’t think you can.  It’s part of what makes me who I am, even if it’s not the whole of my definition.  So, if you were to say to me, “I love you, but I hate that you’re heterosexual…” I would probably stop listening right then and there because, well, I wouldn’t believe you.

You can’t love me and yet hate an essential part of me.  This phrase is disingenuous.

3) “You need to surround yourself with some good Christian people…”

I once had a well-meaning friend tell me this when I was trying to sort out a problem.  I think they were suggesting that I seek faith-based advice.  I understand that sentiment.

But one of the problems with this sort of thinking is that, well, when you live in a bubble all you breathe is soapy air, and you may begin to think that is all there is.

As a pastor, people want me to have office hours at church.  But in all seriousness, I can’t all the time.  If I don’t go to the coffee house a couple times a week, I suffocate in my bubble.  I need diversity because it is only in diversity where my thoughts, beliefs,  and ideas are challenged.

And really, if I only see Christians all the time, I’m a pretty crappy pastor.

It is narrow to believe that somehow surrounding yourself with only one worldview will help you see the world better.

And besides, sometimes Christians surrounded people and then burned them on stakes…

2) “You just have to do God’s will…”

I am utterly suspicious of people who claim to know the specific will of God.

I’m even more suspicious of people who claim that God’s greatest wish is to have us be in a relationship with God.  I think this is where much “praise and worship” music get it’s singular focus.

In the abstract, I get what they’re saying.  I think God does desire for humanity to live in shalom with it’s creator.  But to claim that this will takes precedence over God’s desire to have humanity live in shalom with one another, and with the environment, and with other creation is, I think, short-sighted.  Theology runs into a similar problem when it focuses so much on “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” and fails to mention the other persons of the Trinity.

We run into real problems when we begin to think that with regard to specific situations (like, say, my future husband/wife) that God has one will.

I cannot see how that can be true.  I love my wife.  But do I think she’s the only person in the world I could have married?  Do I think that I’m the only person in the world she could have married?  No.  I don’t.  She’s bright, beautiful, and funny.  There are lots of people who would have asked her to marry them (and still might…she’ll just have to say “no”).  Likewise I’m beautiful and funny (jury is out on the “bright”), and could have found another partner.

I just found her and we decided to do this. (It was actually much more complicated than that…and a bit more romantic…)

I hope this gives some freedom to those in the world who believe that there is only one right job, one right spouse, one right school, one right anything that they must find or else they’re missing out on God’s will for their life.

And this leads me to the number one…

1) “It’s all in God’s plan…”

That you lost your baby.  That your sister was murdered.  That you got cancer.  That your life is in shambles.

I really can’t think of a worse thing to say to someone, especially when they’re in pain.

We cannot use God to fill in the gaps between events and the people they effect.  We want to give solace, to promise that there is a purpose behind madness, but if there is one thing that the cross shows us definitively, it’s that God takes the pain in the world and makes resurrection.

But we should not think that this means that God makes the world’s pain, or the specific pain in a person’s life.  It’s an important distinction.

One of the reasons I left faith for a while was because I had heard too many times that God was flipping switches on people: causing children to die, cancer to spread, poverty to happen, etc.

Not only do I think that saying this to someone is adding hurt to hurt, I think it breaks the second commandment.  When we say such things, we use God’s name in vain; we use it “uselessly” as the word is better translated.

So when you’re confronted with the news of your friend’s tragedy or a relative’s pain, stand in solidarity with them and scream, “Dammit!” I’m a reluctant Christian at times because I think that those who call themselves Christian don’t think enough about their words.

Frankly, I wish they’d just curse more.

“Faith and Sex” or “Save Me From Your Concern…”

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“Will you please talk to him?  I’m worried about his salvation…”

I hear that a lot.  I hear it from spouses of people who identify as skeptical/unsure/agnostic/atheist.   I hear it from people who have friends who believe or think differently from them.  I hear it from people who are worried about their gay/transgendered/pierced/tattooed/(insert other conventional taboo here) relative.

I hear it a lot.

And, I don’t question their sincerity.  The church has trained people to be concerned about this.  I just want to question that training…and that concern.

We’ve been conditioned to speak about salvation as a product.  It’s gotten, acquired, assured…what have you.

The problem that I have with this line of thinking, indeed with this concern, is that it implies that somehow we have a say in the matter.  And I realize that there are, indeed, some Christian circles that do believe that humanity has a say in the matter of salvation.  I heard a whole sermon by a prominent pastor at a huge church who assured the gathered congregation that they had to say “yes” to the Christ knocking at the door or else their salvation was in jeopardy.

In fact, I’ve heard scores of such sermons.  And, perhaps at one time, shared their thinking and nodded in agreement.

And believing that we must respond to the gracious invitation of God to reap salvation benefits is a stance that can be intellectually defended. It’s transaction based.  We love transaction based models: they’re concrete, every party gets to do something, everyone gets to act.

But I don’t see how you can hold a transaction model stance and then, in the same breath, utter that salvation “can’t be earned.”  Every time I hear someone say that salvation can’t be earned but then say, “and yet you must accept Jesus in your (pick your location: heart, life, worldview, marriage)” my brain starts going crazy.

Cognitive dissonance.

We run into a problem when we try to parse the word “earned,” but in the business of transaction, “earning” something is providing payment or appropriate satiation. I think a person who believes that you can’t earn salvation and yet must say “yes” to have salvation is not being intellectually honest.

Is not even a “yes” payment, in this instance?

Some might affirm that idea; some might reject it.  Frankly, I don’t see how it can not be an instance of payment.  We’re not talking about passivity here; we’re talking about action, the act of saying “yes,” the act of assenting.

Smacks of earning.  I think it is.

And this is where people start to get nervous.  They start saying, “Well, salvation is a free gift from God, but you can choose to accept it or not.”  And, in some ways, that makes sense, right?  If my local coffee store offers free coffee, I can choose to take a coffee or not.  In fact, proponents of the “free but accept” concept love to use examples just like that.

And that works if we’re just talking about coffee, cars, or other goods and commodities.

But are we?  Do we really want to lump salvation into the category of cars and candy bars?  Because, whether or not we want to, I think that we have.  There are many books that point out this fact, Rob Bell’s Love Wins is but the most recent. I think he does a decent job of exposing how we’ve cheapened salvation by using this transaction model, and in the process have actually ended up limiting God’s grace instead of, as the usual argument goes, limiting free will.

Theology nerds out there will want to blame Anselm at this juncture; I would encourage you not to do so.

It’s not Anselm we need to blame.  His atonement theory has not held sway over the Christian story just by luck or chance: it’s the theory that provides Christians with the most control over the field of life.  We should blame ourselves for reducing salvation to the same kind of transaction as buying a dishwasher.

Now, at this point Christians start to wring their hands and say things like, “Wait…then everyone has salvation?  I don’t need to worry about my atheist/agnostic/questioning/tattooed/Mormon/Muslim neighbor?”

I want to point out here in no uncertain terms that I’m not claiming everyone has salvation.  Any sort of claim I might make on the subject wouldn’t use that phrasing, as I don’t think it’s helpful.

But, in response to the question, I’d ask them to define “worry.”  Do I think you need to care for them?  Yes.  Do I think you need to be salt and light for them and for this world?  Yes. Do I think that their lives will/would benefit from being in a relationship with God and others who are asking important questions about life, meaning, love, and purpose through the lens of Jesus?

Yes.  Unequivocally, yes.

Do I think you need to wonder in the late-night-sweating-anxious-pondering way about what will happen to them after they die?

No.  I can’t say that I do.  Because I don’t think there’s anything that you can do about it.

Truly, I don’t think you can.

I think it’s dishonest to worry about people because you want them to adopt your worldview.  I think it’s dishonest to worry about people because you’re unsure of whether they’ll go to heaven, hell, Pluto, or Middle Earth after their last breath.  We should worry about people for the sake of their life now, not after death.  Millions of Christians go without feeding the Christian poor because, well, we care more about their salvation than we do their stomachs.  Likewise, millions are spent on Christian missions where bellies aren’t attended but “souls” are.

Pass out bread and keep the Bible.  Or, better yet, live the scriptures and pass out bread.

So, finally, what do I think about salvation and having/not having it?  I go back to an ancient model, a model of promise.  Christians cling to an eternity spent with God based on a promise.

Nothing more, nothing less.

The Christian doctrine(s) of salvation, heaven, and hell that have cropped up over the last 2000 years have been largely a disservice to the message of Jesus.  People set their eyes on post-life and begin to ignore this life, or people begin to think they have salvation in the bag and then stop engaging or critically thinking.  Or…well, I’ve mentioned some of the other “or’s.”

It’s a travesty.

Part of the benefit of living on a promise is that you take it for granted.  The promise, that is, not the relationship.

I think we need to continually foster a relationship with God, and that we need to foster a relationship with others that asks questions about God, life, and salvation.  And I do so not because I hope to get something, but because I think it is good.

But the promise of salvation?  I leave that up to God.

And with God, nothing more than a promise is needed, actually.  It’s in human transactions where we feel the need to deal with payment and satiation; guarantees and insurance are for human transactions.  God has always operated on promise and covenant.

“But what about them?  What about those that don’t believe or say “yes” to God’s invitation?”

Yes, what about “them?”

Whenever I do pre-marital counseling, I always do the “faith” discussion with the “sex” discussion.  I feel like the attitudes of both our sexuality and our spirituality need to be similar: we invite; we don’t coerce.

We can’t coerce someone into having sex with us.  That is a terrible use of power, and makes the choice ultimately not their own.  “You’ll do it if you love me,” is neither a real invitation nor attractive.  “Believe in Jesus or your salvation is in jeopardy,” doesn’t seem all that different.  It’s not honest or attractive.

And truthfully, when someone says to me, “Please talk to them; I’m worried about their salvation,” I have to wonder what they think I’ll be able to do.

I can only do what they can do: invite.

You can’t argue your way to faith (or out of faith, actually, despite many of the New Atheist writings of today).  It has always happened by invitation, promise, covenant. And to dangle the idea of salvation as a reality or non-reality based off of belief/response seems pretty coercive to me (not to mention intellectually dishonest).

I believe that a life lived in relationship to God is life-giving.  It’s salvatory here and now, in this life.  I believe that salvation after death is real and a mystery; as mysterious as the paradoxical cross I stare at every Sunday that testifies both to humanity’s hate and how God turns humanity’s hate into an act of love.

And, like all mysteries, it’s not to be gained or attained, mastered or bought.  It’s to be held, contemplated, treasured…and in doing so, lives are changed.

I’m a reluctant Christian at times because we’ve turned salvation into a business transaction, and one that’s focused on death rather than life.  It breeds panic, unhealthy evangelistic practices, and pietistic but baseless concern.

So, before we begin to be concerned over someone’s salvation, perhaps we should take a step back and think of our own.  Did our saying “yes” to Christ save us?  If so, then aren’t we what got us our salvation?  Wasn’t it our yes?

And if the thought of that makes your stomach turn, as it does mine, then perhaps we need to lift our salvation up to God and say what I think is the most intellectually honest statement about this subject, “You take care of it.”

And then go back and begin inviting people into a relationship with God that has more to do with the here and now.