God Knows Your Secret Shame and Loves You Anyway

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.--Romans 8:38-39 NRSV

On Sunday, I preached a sermon on Romans chapter 8.  It’s one of my favorite passages of scripture.  Its promise that nothing shall separate us from the love of God, not even death, is one I read at bedsides and gravesides.  Its words comfort me in my moments of shame and doubt.

As I shared Sunday, in my decades of ministry, I have found that most people aren’t too afraid of the things on Paul’s list (with the exception of death) separating them from God’s love.  No, what they are really afraid of is that their own failures, mistakes and hurtful actions are what set them outside the boundaries of God’s love. 

What would American Christianity be if it didn’t have shame to heap on people?  For a religion that is supposedly about a God who will give anything to be in relationship with us, American Christians sure spend a lot of time talking about how far away we are from God and God from us.  Without people being motivated out of shame, I suspect most American churches would have to close their doors.

If one is at all honest, we all have secret places deep inside ourselves where we carry our shame.  We keep those places secret, because we suspect deep down if anyone knew what we know about ourselves they could never love us.  Frederick Buechner says these secrets create “the central paradox of our condition — that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.” 

This desire to be known combined with our fear of being found out twists us into conflicted people who then act in all sorts of unhealthy ways.  We medicate our shame through drugs and alcohol, block out our shame with non-stop sessions staring at our screens (phones, tablets, TV’s, etc.) and minimize our shame by competing with and putting down others.  Sadly, American Christianity has done as much as anything else to make this condition worse.

The promises of Romans 8 stand in contradiction to the shame messages we are drowning in.  If all the powers of creation—even death—cannot separate us from God’s love, then nothing inside of us stands a chance of doing so either.  God knows our deepest secrets and our most shameful actions, but God still loves us.  In my favorite novel, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson writes these astounding words, “Love is holy because it is like grace - the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." Hear that?  It doesn’t matter whether we consider ourselves worthy of God’s love or not. 

The social science researcher Brene Brown has become a bestselling author and a viral online sensation for her writing about shame.  (It’s almost as if Americans are suffering from a shame pandemic!)  She writes in a blog post,

I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful – it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.

I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.

I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.

I’ve been on the receiving end of truly vicious behavior from people in the churches I’ve served, but the most vicious of all were the people who secretly believed they were unworthy of love.  Their secret belief, of course, became anything but secret, because their desperation to prove their worth informed their every action.  Power plays, triangulation, cutting people down behind their backs, control issues, passive aggressive behavior—all result from people who deep down feel they are not loveable.

If only churches spent more time declaring the promise “nothing can separate us from the love of God,” then maybe our churches, and our society, would be much healthier.  I wish for you more moments where you can live out of the assurance you are worthy of love.

Grace and Peace,
Chase

A Progressive Minister Reconsiders "The Way, and the Truth, and the Life"

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”--John 14:6 NRSV

I was raised to believe Jesus’ words, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me,” were simple and clear.  The only way to get to heaven was by accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, which meant saying “the Sinner’s Prayer” and being “saved.”  Yet, even in Southern Baptist Sunday school classes questions cropped up, such as “If I was raised in Saudi Arabia to be Muslim and never met a Christian to lead me to Christ, would God send me to Hell?”  The official answer was “yes,” because Southern Baptists were all about evangelizing the entire world, yet even a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid like me had trouble with that logic.  Really?  God would send somebody to eternal torment in the fiery pits of Hell—forever—because through no fault of their own they never had the chance to become a Christian?  If so, then God doesn’t sound particularly loving or even fair.

Also, from an early age, it was apparent that many people who prayed the right prayer and had their ticket to heaven could be just plain lousy human beings.  If one was honest, often the people inside the church condemning people outside it acted worse than the so-called “heathens.”  Early on I began to feel a cognitive dissonance which led me to note the clear lines of who is in and who is out I was presented with at church could become awful blurry.  As my world expanded and I began to know Christians of other denominations (many of whom I had been taught were not “true” Christians) and people of other religions, my clarity over who were truly God’s people and who were not further eroded.

Frederick Buechner writes this about what it means to be a Christian:

Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). He didn't say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn't say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could "come to the Father." He said that it was only by him — by living, participating in, being caught up by, the way of life that he embodied, that was his way.  Thus it is possible to be on Christ's way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ, and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don't even believe in God.

Buechner’s words line up with my experience in churches all my life.  I’ve heard more sermons and attended more Bible studies than I can count purporting to reveal what a person must believe to be a Christian. Yet many of the people who heard those things along with me swore they believed but were at the same time, by anyone’s measure, pretty terrible at loving their neighbor.  At the same time, I’ve met self-identifying atheists who demonstrated love in ways I could only call Christ-like. 

To be fair, I should also state that I’ve known churches and the members who make them up who prided themselves on their diversity of belief.  They focused so much on accepting all beliefs that it was hard to see why they gathered at all.  Their “progressive” form of Christianity didn’t lead to them sacrificing anything for anyone.  The Jesus Christ who called his followers to “take up their cross” was abandoned for an esoteric and utterly bland Jesus who asked nothing of them.  Being open-minded was a code word for white middle class liberal detachment from the suffering in the world.

I'm currently serving a congregation in the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ.  The founders of the Disciples desired to eschew denominations and simply be “Christian.”  They repeated slogans like “No Creed But Christ” and declared the Bible was the only rule of faith.  Yet, such slogans are much harder to live out in practice than in theory.  Some estimates put the number of Christian denominations at over 39,000.  Many of those denominations claim the Bible as their only determination of what it means to be Christian, yet the number of different denominations proves how difficult it can be to agree on how the Bible determines who is a Christian.  The differences among Disciples of Christ churches reveals the difficulty of “simply” looking to the Bible for answers.

I continue to call myself a Christian and believe the label matters, so if pressed, I would have to say there has to be something between rigid dogmatism that excludes most of humanity and a relativism that makes all distinctions meaningless.  Getting more specific than that is tricky.  As Philip Gulley says about Christianity, “attempting to construct a definition suitable to all, is both undesirable and impossible.”  Even though a concise definition of what it means to be Christian is “impossible,” I still like what Gulley has to say on the matter, “If the church claims Jesus as its founder, it should at least share his values.”  I suspect Diana Bass also has it right when she says, “Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.” 

In today’s American culture, the fastest growing religious group are those who claim “none of the above” when forced to declare their religion.  This doesn’t mean they are atheists but rather that the old classifications no longer work for them.  Yet, these same people when asked often declare they are attracted to the teachings and ethics of Jesus, if not the dogma declared about Jesus.  Likewise they value friendship, community, and relationships based on love and service, but they are finding these things in settings other than traditional religion.

The good news for those of us who still hang on to Jesus’ words about being “the way, and the truth, and the life,” is that what Jesus meant is apparently much broader and more expansive than religious people in his day or our day were willing to accept.  All those “nones” out there may still be “Christian” even if they reject the label. 

Does that mean the church as we know it and our church in particular are no longer relevant?  Maybe.  But as Philip Gulley writes, “if history has taught us anything, it is that renewal blossoms in the most unlikely places, perhaps even in the church.”

Grace and Peace,
Chase

The Prejudice of Love

I sought the Lord, and he answered me,

    and delivered me from all my fears.
--Psalm 34:4 NRSV

In this week’s posts, I’ve been sharing about how my understanding of what the Bible is and how it should be used has changed along my journey.  I’ve also been reflecting on Rachel Held Evans’ book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water and Lovingthe Bible Again.  Evans does a great job articulating the ways her understandings of the Bible changed along her journey, and she offers a helpful way for Christians to make use of the Bible that doesn’t force it to be a biology textbook, a personal handbook or a political policy paper. 

In a chapter titled “Deliverance Stories,” Evans begins talking about the Exodus narrative and its annual reenactment at Passover Seders.  This story has sustained Jewish people through unimaginable persecutions, pogroms and the Holocaust.  Then she notes how the same story inspired African American slaves and the Civil Rights Movement centuries later.  This powerful story of God being on the side of oppressed and enslaved people transcends culture and time to speak anew to those who need it.

Yet, the Bible doesn’t just contain stories of inspiration and deliverance.  It also contains verses and narratives of violence, subjugation and abuse.  Among abolitionists like Frederick Douglas there was concern about making the Bible a part of their movement, because of how Ephesians 6:5 had been used to justify slavery: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.”  Yet, they ultimately chose to hold onto the Bible rather than throw it away.  Evans offers this explanation from scholar Allen Dwight Callahan:

African Americans found the Bible to be both healing balm and poison book.  They could not lay claim to the balm without braving the poison. . . The antidote to hostile texts of the Bible was more Bible, homeopathically administered to counteract the toxins of the text.

This move of using the “more Bible” to “counteract” texts used to hurt and oppress is the answer for those of us who wish to make use of the Bible for liberation and love rather than judgment and hate.

The rabbinic tradition of Judaism has always been about putting different parts of scripture in dialogue with one another rather than forcing a nonexistent consistency or agreement as conservative Protestants do.  Jesus answered his critics in this way by citing scripture to defend healing or picking grain on the sabbath.  The apostle Paul, himself a good Jew, likewise cited scripture to justify his message in the face of critics.  The insistence that scriptures can only mean one thing and they all must agree with one another made by so many Christians flies in the face of scripture itself.

Evans is quick to note, however, that “just because a single biblical text can mean many things doesn’t mean it can mean anything.”  She cites segregationists using the curse on Noah’s son to justify calling African Americans subhuman, the Puritan’s use of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan to justify the slaughter of Native Americans, and recently politicians using the example of King David to justify their candidates’ assaults on women as wrong uses of Biblical texts. 

Anytime the Bible is used to justify the oppression and exploitation of others, we have strayed far from the God who brought the people of Israel out of Egypt.

So, how do we make use of the Bible to counteract the “poison book?”  Evans says, “there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, What does this say? But, What am I looking for?”  The question is not whether or not we pick and choose from the Bible (everyone does that whether they admit it or not), but rather how we pick and choose.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?  Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free? 

We will find whatever we are looking for in the Bible, so we’d better be looking for love.

For 21^st century Christians who want an alternative to the abuses of the Religious Right, the answer is not to be found in discarding the Bible but reading it with the “prejudice of love.”  As people have done throughout Christian history, the answer to Bible texts that oppress and harm is not tossing the whole thing out but rather responding with the texts that liberate.  This is what African American Christians have done, LGBTQ Chriatians have done, feminist Christians have done, Christians with disabilities have done and Christians from developing countries have done again and again.  Rather than throwing the whole Bible out, we must “pick and choose” with humility and love.

Grace and Peace,
Chase 

It’s Time to Be Inspired Again by the Bible

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

--Romans 8:37 NRSV

In my daily posts this week, I have been sharing my experiences with the Bible along with the perspectives of Rachel Held Evans in her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again. 

Evans, like many Christians I suspect, understood the Bible to be different things at various times in her life.  In her childhood, the Bible functioned as a storybook.  Her first Bible was a Precious Moments one with a “doe-eyed David on the cover, two baby lambs resting in his arms.”  As a teenager, the Bible functioned as a handbook “because it told me what to do” and she turned to it for instruction in relationships, dating and other concerns.  Then in college the Bible became “an answer-book, or position paper, useful because it was right.”  In her young adulthood, however, she continued to ask questions and her understanding of the Bible changed again.

The more time she spent “seeking clarity from scripture, the more problems [she] uncovered.”  Things she had been taught were biblical, such as “restrictions on women’s roles in the home and church, the certainty of hell for all nonbelievers,” became “muddier in the midst of lived experience.”  The Bible became “an unsettling version of one of those children’s peekaboo books.”

Beneath the colorful illustration of Noah’s ark was—surprise!—the violent destruction of humanity.  Turn the page to Joshua and the battle of Jericho and—peekaboo!—it’s gencide.

Well-meaning family and friends gave Evans all sorts of books and tools to prove the Bible was “true” and to justify all the things in it that were contrary to her experience of God (e.g. slavery, polygamy, violence, war, genocide, etc.), yet their efforts only weakened the Bible in her eyes.

This is the point where so many people raised in Christianity depart from their faith.  Their childhood and adolescent understandings of the Bible and their religion run into other worldviews that leave them questioning and usually rejecting the belief system they were raised in.  Yet, for Evans (and also for me), that didn’t happen   Evans writes,

When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not—static, perspicacious, certain, absolute—then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic. 

Yes, the Bible has been used to justify horrible things in our world, but it has also inspired people to do radical and wonderful things that benefit our world.  Discerning between those two ways is our task, a task made easier when we allow the Bible to be “what it is, not what [we] want it to be.”  Evans finds a useful metaphor in the function of fairy tales:

Citing G.K. Chesterton, author Neil Gaiman often noted ‘Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

The Bible’s stories inspire us to experience a God who provides abundance in places where we think there is only scarcity, life when we only see death, and redemption where we only see shame.  It doesn’t have to be a handbook or policy position paper.  We can recapture some of what we knew as children—the “magic” which enabled us to experience awe instead of the cynicism we took on as adults.

Whatever PHCC’s future may be, any healthy and vibrant future must include its members experiencing this kind of “magic” with the Bible.  There are plenty of churches that use the Bible as a combination biology textbook and self-help manual.  There are plenty of others who basically ignore it altogether as they make their congregations into social clubs.  There are too few who live being inspired by the Bible’s stories of God’s grace and expansive love for all people. 

Grace and Peace,
Chase

The Bible Rarely Behaves

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.
--Psalm 137:1 NIV

Living during the Coronavirus pandemic is frustrating and stressful.  Our normal routines are disrupted, and our carefully made plans are scuttled.  For some us, this time is filled with monotony, while others of us struggle with fear and grief.  The world as we know it has been upended to one degree or another.

The Bible as we know it was formed during times of disruption.  The Hebrew Bible (what Christians mislabel the “Old Testament”) was put largely in its present form in response to the Babylonian Exile (587-538 BCE).  The Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, the remaining part of what had been a united Israel under kings David and Solomon, and took its best and brightest into captivity in Babylon.  Others stayed behind with no king, temple or capital.  This upending of the world caused a crisis of faith and raised questions about whether Israel’s God could be trusted to keep divine promises.

The Christian scriptures (or the “New Testament”) were written in response to another disruption of the world as it had been known.  According to Jesus’ followers, God had sent a messiah unlike anyone expected, rather than a great military leader this messiah was executed.  Furthermore, this messiah rose from the dead.  What could this possibly mean?  For the early Christians, further crises of faith developed in response to its eventual separation from Judaism and the delay of the expected return of Christ.  All of these disruptions raised similar questions to those faced by their Jewish forebears centuries before—namely, can God be trusted to keep divine promises?

In her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, the late Rachel Held Evans does a great job explaining how these crises of faith due to disruptions in the world formed the Bible.  The context that produced scripture helps explain why the Bible resists simplistic categorization by rationalists and fundamentalists alike.  She notes “it’s a bible that so rarely behaves.”

Evans states that the chief problem with how faithful people and those without faith approach the Bible is that we make it all about us.  (This seems to be a central problem we humans struggle with.)  She writes,

Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.

Evans goes on to say, “. . . our present squabbles over science, politics and public school textbooks were not on the minds of those Jewish scribes seeking to assure an oppressed and scattered people.”  What?  It’s not all about me and my politics?

Similarly, on the other end of the spectrum (and in more progressive churches I’d add), the Bible is dismissed as irrational and unscientific.

We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth hyperbole, or symbolism . . . God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate.  Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in a meaningful way. 

Yet, Evans points out, “one of the most central themes of Scripture itself” is “God stoops.”  From walking with Adam and Eve in the garden to journeying with the freed Israelite slaves through the wilderness to dying on a cross, God stoops to be with God’s people.  (Read Philippians 2!)

The stories, songs and poetry of the Bible need not be “true” in the same way a laboratory test is “true” to speak to the most pressing concerns of humanity.  It is not stooping for God to use the things that most shape our identities in communicating divine love and presence.  Evans writes,

It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime.  This is who God is.  This is what God does.

No, the Bible is not about us and our 21^st century worldview, but its ancient writers and editors were human just like us.  The questions they asked are the ones we ask.  Can God be trusted to keep God’s promises?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Is God present with us during moments of pain?  Is death the final word?

To answer these questions, Israel and the first Christians went back to their stories, traditions, songs and poetry.  To understand who they were and why they were where they were, they went back to their origins.  We do the same thing, Evans writes:

Today we still return to our roots in times of crisis; we look to the stories of our origins to make sense of things, to remember who we are.  The role of origin stories, both in the ancient Near Eastern culture from which the Old Testament emerged and at that familiar kitchen table where you first learned the story of how your grandparents met, is to enlighten the present by recalling the past.  Origin stories are rarely straightforward history.  Over the years, they morph into a colorful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale, the shades of their significance brought out by the particular light of a particular moment.

The reasons the Bible resists the categories of systematic theologians and scientific studies is because it is a response to crisis rather than an encyclopedia set or a biology textbook.  It is a deeply human collection of writings that respond to our deepest longings for connection with the Divine.

Grace and Peace,
Chase 

The Bible Isn’t the “Word of God,” But Rather a Tool for Hearing the Word of God

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

--2 Timothy 3:16-17 NRSV

I was raised the son of a Southern Baptist minister, and unlike most preacher’s kids, I loved going to church.  Going to church as a Southern Baptist meant lots and lots of Bible stuff.  I memorized Bible verses and won prizes in Sunday School.  I learned the classic Bible stories.  I read through the entire Bible and wore out my Bible’s pages with my underlining and highlighting.  I even pledged allegiance to the Bible at Vacation Bible School, right after pledging allegiance to the American flag and the Christian flag (never mind the historic Baptist principle of separation of church and state).  The Bible was the “Word of God” even though the Gospel of John says Jesus Christ has that title.  My Sunday school teachers taught me the Bible was without error, although when I pressed my father on seeming contradictions in it, he admitted there was a human element involved as well.  Nonetheless, the Bible captured me, and even though my understanding of what the Bible is and is not has changed dramatically, the Bible still has not let me go.

By the time I was a teenager, the Southern Baptist bubble I lived in was tearing itself apart because of differing views of the Bible.  On one side were so called “Moderates,” like my father, who were basically still conservative but they believed the Bible should be interpreted in light of its original historical context, and the “Fundamentalists” who said any view other than one saying the Bible was “inerrant” or free of errors was liberal heresy.  The “Moderates” allowed for differing interpretations of the Bible under the idea of “the priesthood of all believers” which meant each believer had their own access to God without any human or institutional mediation.  The “Fundamentalists” said their way of reading the Bible was the only true way, and took as their key issues—opposing abortion, strict gender roles for men and women with men in authority over women, viewing anything as a sin other than heterosexual sexual intercourse within marriage, instituting state-sponsored prayer in public schools and support for the Republican Party.  The “Fundamentalists” took over the Southern Baptist Convention and began purging all dissenters.  In this time period, I learned how the Bible, or at least certain interpretations of it, could be used as a weapon against people I loved.

I went to a Baptist college and was taught by religion professors who had to defend their jobs against fundamentalist critics.  Then I went to a new Baptist seminary populated by professors and students forced out of Southern Baptist seminaries.  In my education, I learned about the “historical-critical method” for Biblical interpretation, which meant understanding the writings of the Bible in their own context and as specific types of literature.  I even learned of Bible scholars who were female, African American, Latin-American and other perspectives who revealed the ways interpretations of scripture had been used to justify, slavery, genocide, colonialism and oppression around the globe.  I even began a Ph.D. program in New Testament at Emory University in Atlanta thinking that the classroom was a space I could finally explore the Bible without being attacked.  Yet, despite all the wonderful things I learned as a doctoral student, I ended up leaving the program, because the academic study of the Bible felt too removed from the pain of everyday people, and the Bible that had captured me had everything to do with the pain of ordinary human beings.

I left Baptist life and began my journey in mainline Christianity in the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a Christianity struggling to work for equality in gender, sexual orientation, race and class, but I was also shocked to find suspicion of and even disinterest in the Bible.  It had been the teachings of Jesus and the words of the Hebrew prophets who had inspired my efforts for social justice, but I found among mainline Christians the Bible was often viewed only as an obstacle to it.  I still find it strange that  in their liturgy and practices mainline Christians say things like “this is the Word of the Lord” about the Bible while at the same time dismissing it.

Even when I believed the Bible was the “Word of God,” I still understood that the Bible could be used for great good or great evil, depending on its interpretation.  I knew that slave owners and opponents of Civil Rights used the Bible to justify their racism, while African Americans and their allies found inspiration in the Exodus and the resurrection of Jesus.  I knew church officials who quoted Paul to justify opposition to women ministers, yet I knew female clergy who took inspiration from Mary Magdalene being the first to testify to the risen savior.  I knew Christians who viewed homosexuality as a sin citing the first chapter of Romans, and I knew gay and lesbian Christians who based their freedom in Christ on Galatians 3:28.  I saw Christians inspired by the Bible to give sacrificially to people in need, and I saw church people use the Bible to justify the meanest forms of hate.  For me, the fundamentalist claim that there was a single meaning of scripture plain for all to see rang false, yet I could never dismiss the Bible outright.  If I threw out the Bible because of all the bad ways people use it, I would also have to throw out all the ways people have been inspired by it to do amazing acts of goodness.

Over the years, I have preached sermons, taught Bible studies and as an adjunct taught college courses on the Bible.  I’ve tried to share my understanding that rather than a single book, the Bible is a library of different writings of varied genres, written in different languages by people of different cultures living in different centuries.  It is a collection of writings in dialogue with one another, and it invites us into that dialogue instead of asking us to treat it like a rulebook, a political treatise or as a daily horoscope.  Yet, now I see an amazing lack of concern with the Bible at all.  Not only is our larger culture biblically illiterate, but the loudest Christian voices in it use scripture merely as a justification of their right-wing politics. 

Ironically, at a time when technology has made the Bible the most accessible it has ever been, engagement of the Bible on its own terms is at an all time low in Western culture.  I don’t long for an imaginary yesteryear when people knew the Bible better, because knowledge of the Bible didn’t prevent white Christians from oppressing all sorts of people.  But I do wish for communities of Christians who can be inspired by the Bible’s stories of God working through and on behalf of the powerless.  I still believe the Bible can be a source of liberation, even in spite of all the ways it has been misused to harm and abuse others. 

Growing up, I memorized 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (printed above) and believed it referred to the Bible as I knew it.  Later on I learned that the “scripture” mentioned was probably only what I knew as the “Old Testament”, since the early Christians didn’t really have a “New Testament” yet, and an official list of biblical books weren’t agreed upon until a few centuries later.  I also learned that the “scriptures” mentioned were probably “Old Testament” books translated into the Greek language of the writer’s day and not the original Hebrew used for most English Bible translations.  I also learned that translators disagree on which ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts were the earliest and most reliable to use for English Bibles, so it is uncertain which versions of scripture are actually “inspired.”  I even learned that the apostle Paul may not have written the Second Letter to Timothy.  Yet, despite all that knowledge, I still believe the Bible in all its different languages, translations and packaging remains “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” 

I don’t believe these words in the way fundamentalists mean it when they quote the verses to condemn people they view as evil, but rather I believe it, because I hear the “Word of God’ speaking to me through the Bible and through other people’s interpretations of it.  I still believe the distinction between calling the Bible the “word of God” and understanding the Bible as a means of hearing the “Word of God” (Jesus Christ) in my heart and soul remains an essential one.  I’m not willing to throw the Bible out, because I believe it is a tool for God’s redemptive activity in our lives and our world.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

Don’t Let Them Get You to Hate Them

Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God;^[g] for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.--Romans 12:17-21 NRSV

In my posts this week, I have been reflecting on the book Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott.  I highly recommend Lamott’s writings.  She’s a Christian writer who is vulnerable about her own failings, which is a great relief to me, because she reminds me I’m not alone with my many screw ups.

In Almost Everything, Lamott has a chapter titled “Don’t Let Them Get You to Hate Them.”  When I saw the title, I knew she had written it for me.  She laments the increasing levels of hate in our society coming from all sides, and then she admits to her own difficulties giving in to the partisan hatred so prevalent right now. 

“A friend once said that at the end of his drinking, he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards, and this began happening to me recently with hate.”

She began to struggle so much with hate, she finally prayed and asked God to help her.  God immediately sent two people.  The first was one of the kids in the Sunday School class she teaches:

“I asked one of my Sunday school kids if he believed God was always with him, helping him.  He thought about this for a moment and replied, ‘Maybe forty percent.’  Forty percent!  What if I could reduce my viral load [of hate] by forty percent!”

The second person was Martin Luther King, Jr.  She saw MLK quoted on Twitter: ”Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can.”  As if for effect, her pastor used the same quote in a sermon soon afterward. 

“I thought, ‘I heard it the first time.’  Then at the end of the sermon, wrapping up, she said, sighing, ‘Just don’t let them get you to hate them.’  I have not been the same since.  She ruined hate for me.”

Lamott continues to struggle with hate, but she accurately describes the effects hate has on us.

“Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.  It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.  The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground.  So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can.  We square our shoulders and lift our gaze”

In fact, Lamott writes that instead of viewing the people we hate as objects to destroy, we can begin to see adversaries as “people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training, Nautilus for your character.”  They help us to surrender our hate in the end.  As Lamott notes, when we surrender, we hold our palms forward like “someone is pointing a gun at you” or palms up “begging for help.”  Either way our hands are empty, because we have to put down our weapons.

For Lamott (and for me, maybe for you too), she reached a point of hating the way she was feeling—hating the toll hate was taking on her soul. 

“Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol.  It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.  Am I free of such toxicity now?  Well about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal.  I’ll take it.”

I wish you forty percent less hate in the coming week.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

You Can’t Fix Yourself or Anyone Else

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.--Luke 9:24 NRSV

For most of human history, we humans were so focused on survival we had little time for introspection.  Indeed, in many places today, people live in conditions where daily survival takes all the energy they possess.  For those of us, however, who are privileged enough to have our essential needs met, we get to work on self-actualization.  If you spend much time studying religion, philosophy, psychology and so on, much of the wisdom of the world boils down to finding answers inside of yourself, at times a difficult task since a consumer-based capitalist society insists in millions of ways what you need can only be found in what you buy and possess.  In Christian terms, this process might be called discovering "who God created you to be" or the “image of God” inside.

This week, I am reflecting on Anne Lamott’s book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.  In a chapter titled “Inside Job,” she writes, “There is almost nothing outside you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you are waiting for a donor organ.  You can’t buy, achieve, or date serenity.  Peace of mind is an inside job, unrelated to fame, fortune, or whether your partner loves you.”  This disappointing news comes with a corollary: “Horribly, what this means is that it is also an inside job for the few people you love most desperately in the world. . . They have to find their own ways, their own answers.”   In other words, most of what we fill our days with—trying to “fix” ourselves and/or “fix” others—accomplishes little to nothing.

Lamott notes most people develop two tactics for survival in the world: constructing a success-based personality and hoarding as much as possible.  Both tactics ignore our inner world.  She describes them as looking for nourishing bread in the hardware store.  “I can live on Paydays and Corn Nuts for only so long.”  If we are fortunate, along the way we discover “spiritual bakeries” where we are truly known, connected to the world and valued for who we are.  In such spaces, we find belonging “in new friends, communities, the most ordinary elements: we break the bread, bless the cup, and share.”

In relationships and communities of belonging, we discover the truth about ourselves: we have value.  Lamott asks, “Could you say this about yourself right now, that you have immense and intrinsic value, at your current weight and income level, while waiting to hear if you got the job or didn’t?”  If we are enough right now as we are, if we cannot add value to ourselves by finding something out there “for sale or to achieve,” where is it?  Lamott answers her own question, “It’s everywhere, within and without, around and above, in the most ordinary and trivial, in bread and roses, a glass of water, in dawn or midnight.  All you have to do is want to see.”

Accepting one’s own value comes with a price: accepting everyone else is enough as they are too.  “Even the horrible relatives you can’t stand.’  Accepting the truth that nothing outside of anyone else will “fix” them means accepting your efforts to “help” them won’t work.  By “help” Lamott refers to the “unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves.  Help is the sunny side of control.” 

Lamott has written extensively about the family she was raised in and her parents’ alcoholism.  She is a recovering addict and so are her brothers.  Surrendering to her higher power, God as known in Jesus Christ, was painful and difficult.  Accepting the fact that she could not do the same for her brothers, that they had to do it on their own, was excruciating.  When her son’s addictions became evident, it was too much for her.  Lamott couldn’t resist trying to save him. 

She shares, “Grace helped me throw in the towel.  Or rather it helped pry it out of my cold, dead hands.  I got help—for me.  I stopped routinely giving my son money and a place to sleep.  I accepted that he might end up dead and that I absolutely could not save him.  It was the very, very worst time of my life.”

Finally, when her son ended up in jail, she refused to bail him out.  She “found the strength in the old formula of failure, terror, impotence and grace, the terror that if I fished my kid out again, this person I had loved far more than anyone else on earth would die.  I had gotten him an apartment, a good used truck, a credit card, and I could see he was worse.”

Her “default setting” of saving and fixing her alcoholic son resulted in her spending tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of sleepless nights until she hit bottom.  She says, “I became a recovering higher power.”

The good news is that when she stopped trying to save her son, he ended up hitting his own bottom.  He found the help he needed in an AA group where older sober men offered him the support he needed.  Her son is alive and in recovery, but she still counts the months, weeks, days and hours since his last drink.

Letting go of the illusion that we can buy or achieve something “out there” to “fix” ourselves is a lifelong struggle.  Letting go of the illusion that we can “fix” the ones we love instead of letting them find their own way is an even more difficult lifelong struggle.  Yet, with God’s help we can get better and better at it along the way.  This is what Jesus meant when he said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”  When we discover the “life” we are losing isn’t really life but just a bad imitation, we begin to discover what true life really is.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

Hope During This Pandemic Summer

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

--Hebrews 11:1 NRSV

How are you holding up in this pandemic summer?

Me?  I feel like every day is blurring into the next day.  Summertime can be like that in the best of times, but during the coronavirus it’s easy to look up and find a week or two has just blown past without my realizing it.  I think part of my loss of a clear sense of time is a defense mechanism.  There’s been so much bad news in this dumpster fire of a year that I feel like I’m more than a bit mentally fatigued.  Covid-19, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor and so many others, no baseball, businesses being shut down, crazy high unemployment—and weren’t we supposed to have “murder hornets” at some point?

I’m looking for some hope right now to smack me out of the daze I’m in.  So, I picked up a book on my shelf that I’ve meant to read for some time: Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott.  Lamott has been a favorite author of mine since I read her 1999 memoir, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.  Lamott’s brutal honesty about how difficult life can be mixed with her stubborn optimism and faith in spite of those difficulties has given me the permission I needed at times to simply sulk or wallow in my helplessness so I could get it out of my system and get on with my life.

In her acerbic way, Lamott admits how difficult life can be: “I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity, because of, well, other people; and death.”

Since childhood, Lamott shares, whenever she is in a tall building or a high place, she has had the irrational urge to jump, not because she particularly wanted to die but because life was just hard.  A life spent dealing with psychiatrists and therapists has revealed she is not suicidal but rather just someone who struggles with anxiety and has trouble filtering the pain she sees around her. 

A therapist made her promise that whenever she felt the irrational urge to jump she would tell whoever she was with in order to “break the spell” and begin thinking rationally again.  This has resulted in a lot of friends, family and even strangers becoming quite alarmed.  The most helpful response she received came from a Coptic priest she was with on a mountain in Egypt.  She confessed all her life she had felt an urge to jump off high places.  The priest shrugged and replied, “Oh, who doesn’t?”  Robbed of her own shame, Lamott could laugh at herself and move back from the edge.

Lamott writes that all of life’s truths are paradoxes.  We may feel overwhelmed, hopeless and irrationally pulled toward the edge, but at the same time, if we are honest, we cannot avoid the miracles and beauty in life.  She describes friends who have experienced unimaginable tragedies in their lives who somehow find life again, eventually.  She writes, “[Such people] are blown over by something this catastrophic—how can they not be?—and their roots barely stay in the shifting soil.  But life holds on. Little by little, nature pulls us back, back to growing.  This is life.  We are life.”

If we feel overwhelmed by the pain of life—pulled toward the edge—we are at the same time pulled toward the joy of life.  This paradox turns out to be a reason for hope.  “If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change, and something else about it will also be true.”  She points to the daily headlines and says, ‘I have never witnessed both more global and national brutality and such goodness in the world’s response to her own.”  For every horrible occurrence, one can find people and organizations struggling against the odds to repair what has been broken.  Life keeps going.

Lamott is a Christian and can’t help but believe there is another reality just out of sight, going on at the same time as ours.  She writes, “Is there another room, stage left, one we cannot see?  Doesn’t something happening in the wings argue a wider net of reality?  If there are wings off to the side or behind us, where stuff is unfolding, then reality is more than we can see and measure.  It means there are concentric circles rippling out beyond the life we see being acted out on stage.  I believe there is another room, and I have experienced this reality, beyond our agreed upon sense of actuality.  But that’s just me, with perhaps an overeager spiritual imagination and a history of drugs.  I don’t actually know that a deeper reality exists, but I believe that it does.”

So in this hazy summer of the pandemic where time seems to paradoxically stand still and move by too fast, if you find yourself needing some hope to wake you up, trust there is more going on behind the scenes and just offstage than you can see.  It’s a paradox.  Life is hard, but despite the evidence to the contrary, God is working in the world right in front of you and me in ways we cannot perceive but that are nonetheless real.

Grace and Peace,
Chase