Healthy Liberal Christianity is NOT a New Age Religion

Greetings,

Either I’ve accumulated some useful wisdom in my years or I’ve become a suspicious old curmudgeon. (OK, maybe both!) I offer here some thoughts on the latest round in the genre of “How To…” books that are enjoying such great popularity these days. This is not a book report, so proponents of these approaches to spirituality may have some legitimate gripes with my conclusions. (That’s what the comments section at the end of this blog is for, after all.

Perhaps the prime example of “the latest spiritual rage” is “The Secret” with its personal application of “The Law of Attraction.” Essentially, this law states that we can attract what we want/desire/need by means of an attitude of mind. If we have a negative attitude, we will attract negative things, but if we have a positive attitude and visualize the outcome we desire, The Universe is just waiting to give them to us. A corollary to the law according to “The Secret” is the belief that The Universe contains such abundance that if all of us learned to attract what we wanted, The Universe would be able to fill all of our orders. (And by the way, IT would accomplish this feat without creating scarcity in other areas of life and without toxifying the planet!!) While I have observed some experiential truth in “The Law of Attraction”, I’m concerned with its application.

All right, even I can hear my negative tone. Apparently, I’m violating the prime directive of “The Secret”. Regardless, I need to point out that the purpose of this approach is to achieve abundance and happiness by maintaining a positive attitude. And that is exactly where I take issue with it.

The pursuit of happiness is not a new issue, either in the political world or in the world of religion. We know from the Hebrew Scriptures that the Prophets of Israel railed against the cult of Baal. They saw the Baal worshipers as believing that proper ritual would bring people what they desired, namely a good harvest, fertile wombs, and probably improved social status. In short, it would keep them happy. Worship of the God of Israel (at least as I understand it in its healthiest manifestation), on the other hand, was not based in convincing God to take proper care of them. It was based in the trust that if they obeyed God’s Law (that, by the way, mostly had to do with the integrity of the community) they would then thrive AS A COMMUNITY! True worship of God never pitted the interests of some people against the interests of others. It all came down to how people in the community took care of each other.

If we look at a different tradition, we see that the Buddha preached detachment from stuff. Both happiness and sadness were seen to be manifestations of the desire for stuff, and even happiness itself, to the degree that people could experience it, turned out not to be satisfying. So, the Buddha taught people how to eliminate their suffering, which is not identical to teaching them how to be happy. In his culture and in ours, happiness is just one more commodity that someone is going to try to sell you.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is also not about the accumulation of the means to be happy. It’s all about how people take care of each other – about how they function as the embodiment of the Realm of God. You know, “Love one another as I have loved you.” I have preached and written elsewhere about the startling realization that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the very things that our culture teaches us to pursue in order to be happy. I summarize those qualities as Safety, Comfort, Power, and Status.

However these varied religious traditions conceptualized God (if they did at all) health always had something to do with community and with the way people chose to relate to the rest of creation. It boiled down to a fundamental choice: Find a way to manipulate the Divine so The Universe will give you what you want, or Learn how to be a full participant in creation, relating to the rest of it as if it were an extension of yourself. In Jesus words, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

That’s my issue with so many of these popular approaches to spirituality. They’re fundamentally selfish. They foster the adolescent refrain that: “I want what I want, when I want it! And I have a right to get it, too!” Of course, if I don’t get what I’ve asked for, then I have no one to blame but myself. I must have let too many of those pesky negative feelings into my consciousness.

By the way, any religious tradition can be modified into some version of “The Secret.” American Protestant Christianity has its own (very popular) version. It’s called “The Theology of Abundance.” Its unofficial subtitle is: “How to become wealthy without guilt!”

I am not suggesting that unhappiness is any more noble or healthy or spiritual than happiness. How much happiness we have is just not the central measure of the successful life. Happiness and unhappiness are emotions that we experience as we go through life, but they are not the point of life at all!

It has always been important for communities to learn how to be healthy. Some have done it better than others. But it has never been so crucial for us to give up our focus on the desires of the individual and practice being a community – even a community of faith. The spiritual surprise in a healthy community is that individuals actually have more opportunity to differentiate and grow into their deepest identities. Individuality and Community are not opposed to each other. Selfishness and love are the opposites.

Now, with hunger and violence more rampant than ever in our world, with global warming threatening to make it difficult, if not impossible, for human (and other) life to survive on this planet, with the increasing distrust between the “Haves” and the “Have-Nots” or between groups that speak, look, believe, or worship differently, the stakes have become enormously high.

Today, the prophetic voices of many religious traditions ring loud in our ears: “Learn to be a healthy communal organism, or perish!

Will we listen and respond? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, if we insist on taking seriously “The Law of Attraction”, let’s use it to attract healthy community rather than trying to manipulate either God or The Universe to grant us personal Power, Safety, Comfort, or Status.

Wayne
“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking is not.” The United Church - of Christ

A Funeral Sermon

Greetings,

It’s relatively easy to engage in theological speculation around topics of interest. But, healthy Liberal Christianity is not worth much if it is not useful and well grounded in a wide variety of pastoral situations. As you know, ministers perform funerals with some regularity. Many of them are for “good deaths”: people who have lived long enough and who have experienced some level of abundance. Others are more difficult because the level of suffering of the dying person can sometimes reach intolerable levels. There may be some sense of relief that “the strife is o’er”, as the words of the hymn express it. But, then there are those deaths that are so unexpected and seem so grossly unjust that we are hard pressed to address them at all.

Last week a twenty-five year old Elmira fireman died when the truck he was driving back from a call went off the road. My attempt to come up with words for family, church, and community members, and for the firefighters who gathered from miles around feels totally inadequate to me. Still, I offer those words from that funeral service for your consideration.

Wayne

Pastoral Reflections
A Service of Celebration for Ryan T. Barker
July 12, 2008

Several years ago, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner wrote the best selling book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” The title seems appropriate for us to consider as we gather here. Millions of copies have been sold and I believe that millions of people have found some measure of comfort from Rabbi Kushner’s words.

I suspect, however, that many of those who bought the book actually misread the title. They hoped for the title to be “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.” I can relate to that desire. But this is not a new question. It’s been around for as long as humans have dealt with tragic events. And many very bright and learned people have come up with countless attempts at answering it.

At times like these, when a whole community in concert with a family join in a desperate attempt to make sense of the senseless, all those other less than adequate answers tend to flood back into our consciousness and conversation. I know you’ve heard many of these. Perhaps you’ve even tried to make them work for you.

The first one is something about trying to fathom God’s Will – as if God had something to do with selecting someone like Ryan to die at this time. Sometimes it takes the form of “Maybe God needed him in heaven more than we need him here. (No, that doesn’t work for me either.) But, I suppose the purpose of such attempts is to comfort ourselves by believing that God knows more that we do, so maybe this makes sense from God’s perspective. (Nope – still not helpful.) When those approaches don’t work, sometimes we try to convince ourselves that “he’s in a better place” – whatever that means. But whether that’s true or not, it completely misses the point of our grief.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of such comments, you know that however well-meaning they might be, they really don’t help much. Those comments might even make you angry. You know that this is not the time to be cheered up or helped to feel better. Maybe later that will happen. Suffice it to say that all attempts to answer the “Why” question, probably just make things worse.

So what do we do? Is there another approach? How do we wrap our understanding around the death of this generous and loving friend, brother, son, husband, and father?

If I have learned anything in almost four decades as a minister, often struggling with this question, it’s that trying to understand does not lead us to healing; because…, there is no belief – nothing that we can manufacture in our heads – that will take away the pain, make the loss any less enormous, or give us a way to “get over it.”

No. There is no getting over this, or any other, significant loss. Our losses become permanent parts of our experience that are integrated into our being. The only healing – if you can call it that – is a very slowly developing notion that this or any other significant loss can never be the sum total of who we are or of what we have experienced. Throughout our lives, we will continue to accumulate significant experiences – some wonderful, some difficult. Over time, we gradually find a place within us where we can create memorials to those whom we have lost. Our challenge is to make those living memorials – not tombs of death that we carry around, only to haunt us.

Again we’re faced with the question, “So what do we do?”

First of all, we can remember that we’re not alone. Jane, you and the rest of Ryan’s family are surrounded by people who care about you. They’re not here to pity you, for pity always boils down to something like – “I feel bad that this has happened to you, but I’m secretly glad it didn’t happen to me.” No, I believe that everyone here knows the personal experience of loss and grief. They have gathered in a compassionate embrace, not to pity from a distance. Pity is no relationship at all, but compassion fosters a deep human bond that helps us all find barely enough courage to take our next small step.

Secondly, we remember that while this loss is very personal, we are also intimately connected to all who grieve. So, we, here, remember the families of soldiers who have died in war. We remember the families of the 30,000 people who die each year in traffic accidents in this country alone. We remember those who are permanently wounded and those throughout our world who struggle daily with poverty and hunger. Don’t misunderstand, I am not telling you to look around to see how much worse it is for others and to count your blessings. That would be a cruel thing to do to you.

I am simply reminding all of us about how much opportunity there is for human compassion. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” He didn’t mean that there was anything particularly noble about loss and grief, or that we should be happy no matter what we have lost. His statement was simply a reminder – a recognition – that in a community whose “glue” is compassion, people connect profoundly around the reality of their human losses.

In grief, social status is irrelevant, competition is silly, and fear and hatred are wasteful. Only compassion can keep us healthy – not just as individuals, but as a family, a fire department, a congregation, and as a community. Jesus had a term for compassionate community. He called it the Kingdom of God.

Let me say finally that while there is no good answer to the question, “Why did Ryan Barker die?” there is a very good answer to the question, “Why did Ryan Barker live?” You carry the answer to that question within you – in your memories – in all you learned from knowing him and relating to him. Your challenge now, is to transform all that he has been to you into that living memorial – passing on the goodness, keeping the memories alive. The celebration of his life is not confined to this funeral service – this is just the beginning. You will continue to celebrate his life through your relationships, your acts of loving service, and your dreams.

The grief will not go away, but you may find, in time, that there emerges in you a holy compatibility between your experiences of grief and your experiences of joy. In the midst of your future celebrations, you will ever be aware of the hole in your life that his absence has created. And in the midst of your tears you will find hints of treasured memories and new, joyful experiences that will bubble up to live in harmony with your sadness.

I encourage you to share both with one another in loving compassion. Blessed is the compassionate community that mourns and celebrates together. Amen.

God Is Not a Being...

Greetings Fellow Seekers,

I would like to continue developing some of Karen Armstrong’s ideas as they relate to our search for a well grounded and healthy expression of liberal Christianity. In one of her lectures a couple of weeks ago at the Chautauqua Institution she said: “God is not a being; God is being.” This statement may address at least one of the issues that exist between liberal and conservative expressions of Christianity.

To think about this, we must begin by articulating the difference between a metaphorical and a literal reading of Scripture (and other writings, too). Fundamentalists point to the words of Jesus as being literal descriptions of God and Heaven/Hell. Liberals have sometimes had a difficult time countering that argument, largely because reading Scripture metaphorically has fallen into disrepute in our modern age. Do we water down the text when we affirm that Jesus was not actually saying that God was a male figure who lives in a celestial place called Heaven?

I would argue that we are not watering it down at all. To read metaphorically is to honor the immensity and otherness of God. To read these texts literally is to confine God to these limited human terms. According to Armstrong, even to refer to God as a “being” who exists someplace apart from creation limits who God can be. We have no words and images that could possibly do justice in describing God in any concrete way.

Human experience contributes to this paradoxical situation. Humans have had countless experiences of being in relationship with the divine, even though we have no absolute way of describing that relationship. We are left with the affirmation that the relationship is important. Jesus talks (metaphorically) about God’s care for all of creation and that God provides the means for us to exist on this planet. That human decisions, based in greed and fear, create serious social injustices is a commentary on humanity, not on God. Liberal Christianity affirms, furthermore, that God’s caring is for all of humanity, even for all of creation, and that it is not meted out to some individuals at the expense of others. I remember how furious I was several years ago in the aftermath of the Columbine school shootings. A woman being interviewed on the television stated that she had been confident all along that her children would come out safely as a result of her prayers and confidence in God. So, what did that say about God’s caring for those parents who lost children in that shooting?

If God is “a being”, then it is too easy for us to project our own fears, narrow thinking, and judgmental attitudes onto God. That said, we wonder if it makes any difference at all to relate to God if we can’t at least get some protection out of the deal. I suggest to you that it makes all the difference in the world to affirm one’s relationship to “Being”. If we see ourselves as separate, then creation becomes a hostile place and we then need to believe in the notion of a protective deity to help us through. If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as part of “the web of life” then there is a direct connection between the health and well-being of creation and our health and well-being.

Without that sense of connection, the best we can do is to generate pity for others who are worse off than we are. If, however, we are part of the web, then compassion is possible. In Karen Armstrong’s terms, our “kenosis”, which means emptying of ego, is virtually equivalent to affirming that we are all “one” through our connection to “Being”.

She goes on to say that practicing compassion involves using ritual to maintain our awareness of being connected to “Being”. Our religious rituals are not done to please God or to live up to some standard of religious behavior. Our rituals have only one purpose: to transform us from ego-based separate entities into participants in a living system that is something like a family. In the process, our capacity for real compassion increases along with our motivation to address social injustices, and in this way, our rituals help us to create healthier communities.

We live in a culture that values rugged independence, so there are few places where we can learn true compassion. I hope that Healthy Liberal Christianity offers such a place. At least that’s the kind of place that we at the Park Church are trying to become.

Wayne
“Become compassionate as your God is compassionate.” Luke 6:36

Historical Theologian, Karen Armstrong at Chautauqua Institution

Greetings readers,

I hope you missed me last week. I was away at the Chautauqua Institution, specifically to hear a series of lectures by Karen Armstrong. She has written about 20 books about various aspects of world religions and is able to put each in historical perspective. She helps us see how many religions have approached the problems of the world in somewhat different ways while affirming that they all bring a remarkably similar core value to the struggle. Her overall topic was “What is Religion?”

For those who are interested, there is a pretty complete summary of each of her five talks in The Chautauquan Daily. They can be found on line at http://www.ciweb.org/Chautauquan%20Daily/2008%20Newspapers/

The summaries are in the issues from June 25 to June 30.

Though I had read several of her books before attending her lectures, I was thrilled to be hearing her live. I was moved by the depth and breadth of her historical, theological, and psychological understanding and by the significance of her work on behalf of the world.

She began by talking about the danger of the relatively recent emphasis on “certainty” in religious belief. Certainty is a direct product of the scientific enlightenment of the last 500 years. Before that, it was rare for theologically astute people to argue about intellectual belief or historical accuracy. The emphasis was always on behavior and commitment. Dr. Armstrong made it clear that in early Christianity, when people who were being baptized made a confession about their beliefs, they were really saying “I make a life changing commitment to God”, rather than “These are the literal beliefs that I proclaim to be true.” Similarly, revelation is a life-changing embodied experience, not a divine recitation of religious facts. The purpose of creation myths, for example, is to teach us something about our relationship to the divine in life, rather than a textbook description of precisely how the world and we humans came into being. Even the “doctrine” of the Trinity is not meant to be a correct description of God, as much as it is a mystery about the various ways that the divine intersects and interpenetrates our existence.

So what? You might ask. Well, we see all the time that the demand for certainty makes it necessary that someone has to be right so the rest must be wrong. The resultant anxiety around the demand for certainty becomes the motivation for fundamentalism and for the physical and emotional violence and destructiveness that always goes with it. In short, the (impossible) quest for certainty makes the world much more dangerous, feeding religious terrorism like nothing else.

A related idea is that when too much religious energy is invested in right believing, then less is available for compassionate action. I’ll go into that idea in greater depth later, but for now, suffice it to say that most of the religions we know in the world came into being in response to chaotic, violent, and destructive cultures. They each bring a version of “The Golden Rule” in a way that transformed those cultures, at least for a while, and at least in part, into more compassion-based cultures. Each of these religions requires what is referred to as kenosis – that is, an emptying of ego – in order to make room for a more compassionate understanding of others.

(From my own research: In Luke 6: 36, we find the words, “Be compassionate as Your God is compassionate.” In Greek the word for compassion is ‘oiktirmones’, and in Hebrew the corresponding word is rahum, a word that is derived from the Hebrew word for womb. Compassion, then, is mother-love, in the sense that the womb is where the space is created (kenosis) within which new life comes into being. And the mother is forever connected to the life that has come into being in her womb.) See Isaiah 49:15

Finally for this installment of the blog, I want to tell you that Karen Armstrong was one of the recipients of a TED Prize in 2008. “The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources that are generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, that's the least of what they get. The real prize is that they are granted a WISH. A wish to change the world.” (from http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/6)

Go to the TED site learn about the organization and to see the specifics of Karen Armstrong’s wish for the world.

I will write at a later time in more detail about how I think Healthy Liberal Christianity is consistent with Dr. Armstrong’s work.

I invite you to comment on what I have written, but even more on what Karen Armstrong is doing on behalf of the world.

Wayne

“Become compassionate as your God is compassionate.” Luke 6:36

Glorifying God

When I was newly ordained, I was required to teach confirmation classes using a standard “catechism”. At that time it was important for the confirmands to know the correct answers to these questions. I remember reading in the Westminster Catechism, one used by several reformed theology protestant churches, that the “chief end of [man] was the glorification of God.” Of course, in addition to that “end”, faithful humans also were in line to receive the reward of salvation in the process. But the purpose of life and, by extension, the purpose of the church was ultimately to glorify God. I must confess to you that I’ve been struggling for a long time even to figure out what glorification of God is supposed to look like. To many religious people it seems to have something to do with giving credit to the only One who deserves credit for anything. Somehow, human obedience, refusal to succumb to temptation, piety, and gratitude also helped to add up to the glorification of God. While the word is still used, even in liberal protestant liturgy and worship, I wonder how many people are left who still see the glorification of God as their primary purpose, or how many are left who still go to church (if they go at all) to get support in this holy task.

Bear with me; there’s a question embedded in all this. Is the glorification of God the only way to understand the purpose of creation, and not just human creation, either? And furthermore, what role might the liberal Christian church play in helping people work toward some alternative end?

If, for the sake of argument, glorification of God is not really about how we behave or how we believe, then could it have something to do with who we are or who we are becoming? If we assume that we are created in the image of God (or even that all creation embodies the image of God in some way), then who we are or who we are becoming takes on primary significance.

For me, this question is best addressed by edging out onto the bridge that hangs between the theological notion of creation and the scientific notion of evolution. In many Christian circles these have been cast as opposites for so long that it is difficult to connect them. I have believed for a long time that evolution could be seen as the “how” of creation, but the question about the purpose of creation invites us to take another step and embrace evolution as a sacred process.

Recently, I have been rereading a book by Loren Eisley called “The Immense Journey”. It was written 40 or 50 years ago and I haven’t looked at it for a long time. I remember, however, from my initial introduction to this beautiful book how moved I was at Eisley’s profound, almost sacred, respect and amazement at the wonders of the evolutionary process. I’m sure I’m not the first one to come to this conclusion, but, aided by Eisley’s images, I find myself believing that the sacred purpose of life is to evolve. What makes this a fascinating idea is that human beings have attained a level of conscious awareness that makes it possible for us to observe, think about, and intentionally participate in the evolutionary process.

No doubt, there is plenty of room for growth and development in the human race. For one thing, we humans tend to operate at a relatively immature level of ethical development. The lion’s share of ethical thinking seems to revolve around either not getting caught, or around the potential rewards or punishments that we deserve as a result of our behavior. Even the catechistic “glorification of God” is too often construed in reward/punishment terms, or in terms of the need to survive at the expense of others. Such thinking supports all sorts of violent attempts to address the problems of the world.

So, how might life and society be different if we based human behavior less on selfish pursuits and more on improving our abilities to relate and cooperate at more profound levels? For humans to embrace a higher ethic, it will probably be necessary for us to allow our image of God to mature, too. It won’t work for us to continue to see God as a demanding (though probably loving) parent, who throws divine temper tantrums when we don’t behave.

A radical Christian idea is that we embody the divine and that the divine is in an evolutionary process of coming into being in and through us. If we see it that way, then our ethical task is to become as fully our unique selves as we can. We honor God, not by obedience or by giving credit. We honor God by maturing and taking responsibility for our lives, our relationships, our social systems, and even our destiny.

We must be honest, though. Maturity is scary. We may find it necessary to make sacrifices. We may even need to get out of the way as a human race so the evolutionary process can go on. As Jesus died so we might live, maybe in time, we will die so life can go on. This, of course, is only speculation. Evolution is a very slow process.

Still, I have come to believe that Healthy Liberal Christianity will help people and cultures mature, even beyond their need for the church – and even beyond their need to cling selfishly to life. We liberal Christians have a lot of work to do if we are to mature in our understanding of Jesus’ sacrifice, but it’s difficult work, and not for the faint of heart.

If you’re interested in a somewhat dated but poetic treatment of the evolutionary process, read “The Immense Journey” by Loren Eisley. And if you are interested in exploring some startling speculations on the purpose of life and it’s possible sacrifices, take a look at “Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics” by Diarmuid O’Murchu.

I’ll be away next week, so the next post will be during the first week in July. Thanks for reading and for the comments you have made. They mean a lot to me.

Wayne Gustafson

"Our Faith is 2000 years old, our thinking is not." United Church of Christ

Gay Pride

This Saturday, June 14, is the annual Gay Pride Event in Elmira. For some (perhaps even most) religious groups, the demonstration of pride by those of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual orientation, is seen as an affront to God. For other religious groups (The Park Church among them) a Gay Pride event is a way that a radically disenfranchised group can affirm their human dignity, and is therefore worth our support and our advocacy on their behalf.

As we consider these positions, perhaps we need to take a look at this word “pride”. An incorrect understanding of the word simply adds fuel to the fire of the controversy. In English, we use the term in two very different ways. One has to do with pride over an accomplishment, and the other has to do with pride in being who we are. Complicating matters even more, each of these meanings can be used in healthy or unhealthy ways. For example, we teach our children to be proud of their accomplishments, seeing that as a way to encourage their development. On the other hand, we don’t want people to use pride in their accomplishments to elevate themselves over others (or even God, for that matter) in an arrogant way. In the same way, we teach one another to have pride (perhaps more like dignity) about who we are as human beings, but at the same time we don’t want people to use their self-pride to set themselves over others because of certain human qualities like is done in racism. As dignity and affirmation, pride is good. As arrogance or as evidence of superiority, it qualifies as one of the seven deadly sins.

From everything I’ve ever known about gay pride events, the purpose is to give appropriate space for human dignity, so that people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. don’t have to hide their identity away in shame. They can stand in the light and be who they are, and it has nothing to do with arrogance or superiority. That’s what we support and encourage, and that is why this church co-sponsors these gay pride events.

Some may think that The Park Church is trying to change what we perceive to be the narrow minds of others. But that is not our purpose. We, simply, support this event on behalf of a segment of the human population that has received way too much judgment. While we don’t expect to change any one else’s opinion, we can at least say how we have come to believe as we do about the issue of homosexuality and the church’s response to it.

I will speak for myself and not presume that others, even from Park Church, would describe their beliefs in precisely the same way. So, here are a few random thoughts of mine about why this congregation has chosen to be identified publicly as “Open and Affirming” when it comes to sexual orientation:

First of all, at judgment day (whatever that might be), I believe God would be more interested in why I was not more compassionate rather than why I was not more judgmental.

This church’s Open and Affirming stance is based on our compassionate response, not on believing that we are right and other positions are wrong.

All theological positions find their biblical support in the particular passages they select (while others are ignored). Here are some that I choose to use.

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” I John 4: 16b

“Love does not insist on its own way.” I Corinthians 13: 5b

Therefore, regardless of my interpretation of right and wrong, who am I to proclaim that God wants God’s own way, and that I must enforce it.

Jesus says nothing about homosexuality.

But, he says a lot about being judgmental: “Don’t!”

Paul also addresses the dangers of judgment in Romans 2:

Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. ²You say, ‘We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.’ ³Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? ⁴Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? ⁵But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

And finally, from Luke 6: 36, Jesus says, “Be ye compassionate (sometimes translated “merciful”) as your God is compassionate.”

Many people (gay and straight) have told me that their orientation was clear to them at a very young age. That fits with my experience of being aware of my attraction to girls when I was only 4 or 5 years old.

According to my reading and according to thousands of conversations, I can’t come up with any reports of people being talked into adopting one particular sexual orientation or another. It is true that someone might be encouraged to experiment, but I have been told by gays who try the straight life that they soon find out that it is not natural for them. Straights who experiment with the gay life, also learn that it is not natural for them.

Without going into too much detail, there also appears to be a serious problem with Biblical translation. It is not appropriate to apply a 21^st Century interpretation onto words that belong to another age, language, and culture. The best scholarship I have been able to find indicates that

• the sin of Sodom was lack of hospitality,
• that the words used in the New Testament refer either to ritual prostitution or “man-boy” relationships where there is a serious power differential. (And those are problematic for other reasons that have nothing to do with sexual orientation.)
• Those words do not refer to adult loving relationships. That said, strong arguments are made that we really cannot know precisely what Paul meant.
  

Leviticus is the one exception. Homosexuality is punishable by death. But then, so is eating lobster or wearing clothing made of a polyester blend! We must, therefore, put those proscriptions in their proper context.

Clearly we do not believe that homosexuality (broadly understood) is unnatural, and while we do not understand why people are born with different sexual orientations, we believe that they must determine what is authentic for them. Our job is to love them and to help them have a place in the world where they can be who they are. That the existence of diverse orientations might cause discomfort or confusion does not provide adequate reasons for us to judge them.

So, we will continue to affirm the dignity of human beings, we will continue to identify ourselves publicly as an “Open and Affirming” congregation, and we will continue to support gay pride events.

Images of God

There are so many things to write about that I hardly know where to begin. Political, economic, social, and religious controversies abound. But for today, instead of getting caught up in one controversy or another, I want to write about a fundamental perspective that may affect how we view all of the above issues. I am thinking about how we imagine God to be.

Of course, because God is beyond all direct knowing by humans (my assumption, anyway), human experience and imagination generates a myriad of images. In Healthy Liberal Christianity, we consistently remind ourselves not to confuse our images with the realities they attempt to describe. Still, our images are moving and profound, and they do affect how we see things.

For example, some divine images are associated more with “theism” or “deism”. Oh, you don’t know the difference? Well, theism sees God as having something like a human personality (although necessarily bigger and better) and that personal God shows caring by being involved in human affairs. This God heals, chastises, teaches, and intervenes, often in response to human requests (prayers). Deism posits a God who created the universe, who set it into motion, and then who went on vacation. The deist God is sometimes referred to as “the divine clockmaker” who builds the clock, winds it up, and then stands back to let it run.

There are other divine images that are less person-based and might include “life itself”, or “love”, or “energy”, etc.

Thinking about the theist images for a moment, I have noticed that images can mature and change over time. Let me give you a few examples. Many people believe in “The Santa Claus God.” You know, the one who is “making a list, checking it twice, going to find out who’s naughty and nice.” This is the God who is most interested in whether or not we are behaving ourselves and who will reward “niceness” and punish “naughtiness.”

Others believe in the image of God that I call “the genie in the lamp.” This is the God who intervenes in human affairs on request (or perhaps on demand). We “rub the lamp” by our religious rituals and prayers, the divine genie pops out, does the requested tasks, and then returns to the lamp until needed again.

In my counseling practice, I have anguished with the confusion that many of my abused clients have carried for years about why God didn’t intervene to rescue them from their abusive experiences. They sometimes wonder if the Santa Claus God was punishing them for their naughtiness, or why the Genie refused to come out of the lamp to work in their behalf. With only those images to draw from, then the ongoing abuse must mean either that the victim is being punished or that God is somehow unable or unwilling to help. These are terrible prospects.

So, it becomes necessary to identify yet another image of God. I call this one “The God of Presence.” The God of Presence neither punishes nor rescues. This image of God shows caring by being intimately present throughout human experience – including the best and the worst. God’s presence is more than companionship. It’s more like God experiences every bit of human experience along with us and brings divine meaning to it. No matter what we go through, we are never left alone.

Is it really possible for God to be God without having to intervene in order to show caring? This is a much debated point between conservative and liberal positions, but I don’t think there is any way to declare a clear winner in either direction. We must, instead, remember that all images of God are inadequate, whether creator, clockmaker, parent, judge, or any other image. Still the imagination continues to generate divine images. For example, one possible image of God is creation itself, including its embedded evolutionary process. From this perspective, creation is not completed, nor has God ceased speaking to creation (“God is still speaking”). Perhaps, then, our task of co-creation is to mature into divine fullness – beyond our prejudices, beyond our fear-based reactivity, and beyond our attempts to measure human acceptability by means of obedience. Perhaps we have the capacity to develop a richer and deeper ethical foundation for our communities and our relationships. Perhaps, as Jesus intimated, we have the capacity (and the responsibility?) to become more godlike in our Evolutionary Process. Perhaps we will discover that the divine maturation process in creation is actually indistinguishable from evolution.

For now, it simply feels right to keep learning, to keep growing, to keep healing – in short to keep evolving.

Blessings on our divine journey.

Wayne