Tim Stafford's Blog, page 31

Sermon: What We Need

Here’s the audio of the sermon I preached last Sunday. You can either stream it or download.

The sermon is about God’s justice, his setting the world right. I examine the beautiful, little-known Psalm 72. There is mention of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, along with Abraham, David and Jesus.

Gnostic Sexuality

Gnostic sexuality sounds like an oxymoron, but Andy Crouch makes a very interesting argument in the latest Christianity Today that advocates of gay marriage stand on the side of de-bodied sexuality,  seeing the only essentially important facts as those of the heart–will and desire. Whereas traditional Christian sexual morality is rooted in the creation story, with the bodily realities of male and female defining our identities.

Crouch points out that the terminology rapidly replacing “homosexuality” is “LGBT,” reflecting a wider variety of sexual identity than “gay” and “straight.” He adds that Q and A (for “queer” or “questioning” and “asexual”) and even I (for “intersexual”) are increasingly mentioned by those who find existing categories inadequate. That’s not surprising: gnosticism is a highly fluid way of understanding reality.

Sexuality involves both body and heart. But where you start makes a big difference in where you end up.

(I remember years ago struggling to understand what Andy Comiskey was saying about the “ex-gay” movement.  I was so caught up in “sexual orientation” defined as persistent desire that I found it difficult to grasp that there might be a more basic sexual orientation. Comiskey never denied that same-sex orientation was real and strong and highly resistant to change. But he insisted that a more fundamental reality was that of male and female.)

At the end of his essay, Andy Crouch asks whether orthodox Christians have any common ground with our LGBT neighbors. He says that we do: “All of us know, in the depths of our heart, that we are queer.” That is, we struggle to make sense of our desires, which never align very well with our bodies. He mentions pornography as the perfect evocation of desire that seeks to flee the body, to live purely in the realm of yearning after images. “Every one of us is a member of the coalition of human beings who feel out of place in our bodies east of Eden. And every one of us has fallen far short of honoring God and other human beings with our bodies.”

 

In Faint Praise of Politicians with Inner Lives

Here is an interesting exchange between David Brooks and Gail Collins in The New York Times:

Gail: One last question before you go back to working on your book. I know we’ve agreed that politicians don’t generally seem to have a rich inner life. Any exceptions?

David: Anthony Weiner? I’m trying to think. Obama does have a lot going on inside. Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog Democrat from Tennessee, is very reflective, not always to his political benefit. I guess I’d give Jerry Brown the benefit of the doubt too.

I find you can usually count on the ones in Bible study groups, whether they manage to live up to their own creed, to have at least applied a set of standards to evaluate their own behavior, however unambitiously.

The whole dialogue, if you care, is here.

Trayvon Martin

My work on God’s Justice, the Bible with notes on justice, has changed my understanding of justice. Nothing illustrates it better than George Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Much of the argument filling the airwaves has to do with justice and the rule of law. One side is confident that the jury was prejudiced, the prosecution incompetent, the evidence-gathering flimsy, so that all together Trayvon Martin’s life was thrown to the wind and a guilty man exonerated. The other side says that the rule of law defines justice, and that by all the standards of law Zimmerman was tried and found not guilty.

Courtroom procedures dominate our western conceptions of justice. The definition of justice is: everybody gets what they deserve. If you are a victim, you get recompense. If you are a perpetrator, you pay. We work it out in the courtroom, where strict and traditional rules control everything. It’s a well-regulated, zero-sum game, with the judge as referee.

The biblical conception of justice also lands in the courtroom very often, but the function of the judge is different. He or she is empowered to set things right. “Justice” is not in following procedural rules. “Justice” lies in repairing what is wrong. That may involve punishing the guilty. It may involve recompense for loss. But it surely involves many other actions at every level of life.

God, the ultimate source of justice, is determined to set the whole world right. The Bible is the story of how he has set out to do it. It is a story, not a set of procedures or rules. It is a drama, full of setbacks and disappointments. It takes time. But the just character of God is that he will not let it rest. He will keep his promise to bring the full flourishing of his creation and the destruction of evil. If you want to talk justice, make sure it includes justice to God, who made everything that is and loves it. Talk about a victim of crimes! Until justice flows from pole to pole like a mighty river, he has not got what he deserves.

I don’t want to diminish the importance of courtroom procedures and prejudicial juries in the George Zimmerman case. I do say that justice requires more, whichever side you are on.

Justice would begin with setting right the hearts and minds of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

Justice would be setting right the racial tension and the fears of crime that evidently roil their community.

Justice would put an end to racial stereotyping and a beginning of embrace between different cultures and ethnicities.

Justice would be economic and social flourishing in that community such that the Trayvon Martins and the George Zimmermans and their families and friends were transformed by hope.

Apparently, those kinds of justice were not being done. What procedures are in play to set them right?

You may say this conception of justice is utopian. And it could be. It has to come down to cases, in each nation, in each community, in each life. But I think unless we consider justice more comprehensively, we’ll never bring real justice to tragedies like Trayvon Martin’s–tragedies that happen, with no publicity, all the time.

The Challenge of Tolerance

With my small group I’ve been reading through the New Testament, doing the “Community Bible Experience” sponsored by Biblica. You read through the whole New Testament in eight weeks, discussing it like a book club. It’s been a mind-expanding experience–much more so than I expected.

Biblica thinks that “versification” has become a problem in Bible reading. That fits. I just finished Revelation, a book I had not read whole in a very long time. I realized I have repeatedly read certain passages, like Revelation 21. But many of the other parts of Revelation I had managed to skip entirely. Reading the whole book, I found myself thinking new thoughts.

There is a lot of Revelation I don’t begin to understand. It uses many vivid but obscure symbols. Its literary form hasn’t been used for 2,000 years, so it’s radically unfamiliar. I can see why the book has attracted so many “experts” with detailed predictions that turn out wrong.

All the same, a few messages come through extremely clearly:

1) There will be continual, Satanic opposition to God’s people, violent and bloody. Suffering and death for God’s people is part of the package.

2) God will triumph over that opposition, preserving the lives of his people who remain faithful (even if it takes resurrection).

3) Evil and death will be done away with for good, and God’s kingdom will unite heaven and earth in a new and wonderful world.

If I lived in Egypt today, or Indonesia, or Sri Lanka, or China, those messages would be very relevant. Many Christians in such places are persecuted, and some are killed for their faith. For them it’s not so different than it was for the Christians who wrote the New Testament, experiencing great pressure from Jewish communities that evicted them from their synagogues, and from Roman communities that saw them as a threat to civic peace. If you became a Christian, you stood a fair chance of facing great suffering as a result. The drama of Revelation made sense.

I find it difficult, however, to relate in sunny Santa Rosa. I live in a very tolerant, very secular environment.

This is the dilemma that Lesslie Newbigin wrote about so searchingly almost thirty years ago. The west, inoculated with its Christian heritage, has become the toughest missionary challenge we face. It resists God not by violence or threats, but by scorn and the substitution of other gods, such as pleasure. Revelation’s sounding trumpets and rivers of blood and monsters rising up out of the deep seem oddly out of touch and unhelpful, as far as I can see.

The only passage in the New Testament that seems to speak to western, tolerant skepticism is Acts 17, which records Paul’s brief sojourn in Athens. There he was treated cordially, listened to with curiosity, and (in the end) scoffed at. But not stoned.

The New Testament doesn’t seem to directly advise those whose neighbors, like the Athenians, treat us politely but with heavy skepticism. Perhaps historically speaking this era of tolerant western skepticism is only a momentary break in the unrelieved hostility that Revelation foresees. To me it seems like something else: a challenge for which we have few directions.

The Evangelical Dilemma

We try to go to church during vacations. Once in a while we are greatly encouraged by doing so; always we get a sampling of the Christian family. Family gatherings are not always to one’s taste, whether we are talking family of the genetic kind or the spiritual. But they are family.

This service was attended by about 40 people, mostly adults over 50, with some children attending with their families. The music was unexceptional and familiar. The sermon was long. The pastor managed to cover much of the Bible and almost all of the core of evangelical Christian theology, as part of a 4th-of-July response to the crisis America faces.

He seemed like a very nice fellow, truly dedicated and not driven by his own ego. He said a lot of very good and true things. But it all came –sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly–through a very white, conservative, traditional-morality frame. The sins of America were abortion and gay marriage, not the neglect of the poor or the immigrant, not greed or idolatry–the more biblical sins. God’s threats of punishment to America were seen in the depredations of Islam or memories of the Watts riots. The preacher recalled watching rioters on TV and asking, “Mommy, are they going to come here?” And he added: “LA became a jungle.”

Thank goodness some skeptical family members didn’t accompany us. They would have hated it.

I thought afterwards that we had seen a very good example of the current evangelical dilemma. We have very important truths to tell. And we have people willing to serve their neighbor and make genuine sacrifices. But these liberating truths and this servant lifestyle are imprisoned in a cultural frame that appeals to a shrinking minority of Americans. Among the rest, it either promotes disgust or (more commonly, I think) isn’t taken for a serious possibility. Evangelicals who feel that they are not getting through then try harder and speak louder.

It’s a dilemma very similar to that facing the Republican Party (to which evangelicalism has tied itself). But political parties are capable of changing their ideas and their approach as the wind blows. (Consider, for example, how Republicans and Democrats have switched sides when it comes to judicial activism.) For Christians it’s a little more difficult.

In the last 30 years evangelical leaders have experimented with various kinds of cultural relevance–seeker friendly, purpose driven, emerging, emergent. That’s a strength of evangelicalism–cultural adaptation. But it doesn’t seem to have worked. Some people think that these adaptations have merely deepened evangelicalism’s tendency toward moral therapeutic deism–aligned with the culture, certainly, but at the cost of anything distinctive or prophetic.

The majority of the evangelical church takes the opposite approach. Like my vacation pastor, they speak with greater alarm, urging the faithful to cling tighter to old-time religion. This falls easily into oppositionalism and polarization and self-righteousness. God help us all!

 

The End of the Guilty Conscience

While writing notes on the psalms for God’s Justice, I am re-reading C.S. Lewis’ Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis’ reflections seem a trifle strange to me this time. He focuses on aspects of the psalms that seem repellant to him as a modern, Christian reader. He makes me think that times have changed, or I have anyway.

For Lewis frequently invokes the guilty conscience, which approaches God in fear and trembling not because of God’s might but because of God’s judgment. With such a mindset the worst thing is to presume on God, to speak brashly and self-confidently. And this is, generally, the puzzzling feature of the psalms for Lewis: they are brash. Lewis’ first chapter is on the psalmists’ longing for God’s judgments to rain down on the earth. To Lewis “the Christian pictures the case to be tried as a criminal case with himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as the plaintiff. The one hopes for acquittal, or rather for pardon; the other hopes for a resounding triumph with heavy damages.  Hence he prays, ‘judge my quarrel, or ‘avenge my cause.’” [p. 10]

For the psalmist insists–against all the instincts of a Christian like Lewis–that he is in the right. God knows, he says repeatedly, that he is blameless. He sometimes lists the things he has not done: “Though you probe my heart, though you examine me at night and test me, you will find that I have planned no evil; my mouth has not transgressed. Though people tried to bribe me, I have kept myself from the ways of the violent through what your lips have commanded. My steps have held to your paths; my feet have not stumbled.” (17:3-5)

That is the sort of thing that Lewis takes as incipient Pharisaism. It sounds too cocksure, it sounds arrogant and insufficiently conscience-stricken. Better the more introspective (though rarer) confession of Psalm 51: “I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me…. surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” (51:3-5)

I suspect that the influence of N.T. Wright has gradually drawn me to be comfortable with the psalmists’ proclamations of innocence. They are not claiming to be perfect, but they are claiming that they are on God’s side and have acted like it. Similarly, the apostle Paul: “as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.” [Philippians 3:6]

The medieval Christian, I am given to understand, approached God with great fear; he was afraid of hellfire because of his many sins. That was Luther, who to his everlasting relief and joy discovered God’s mercy. Luther thought of God’s justice with something like terror; whereas the psalmists too obviously thought of God’s justice as the sweetest thing. They longed for it, they dreamed of it.

When the psalmist claims to be blameless, he is not exactly saying (if I read him correctly) that he therefore deserves to be vindicated. He has not been so perfect as to put God in his debt. That idea would be nonsensical to him. Rather, he is saying that his blamelessness puts him squarely on God’s side. He is saying he is no traitor and no hypocrite. He has stuck to a God whose very nature is justice, who has promised great things to his chosen people, who will set the whole world right with peace and justice to the benefit of the poor and oppressed and those whom he has rescued from slavery in the Exodus. That is the side the psalmist claims to be on. He is a loyal subject to the God of justice. Let justice reign.

It’s a way of thinking–outward, historical, communal, confident–very different from the introspection and caution of Lewis’ model Christian. Lewis sees it as something pre-Christian, which we can learn lessons from but utterly cannot imitate. I am not so sure. It actually sounds to me not so unlike Peter and Paul and–Jesus.

At any rate, I think western culture has turned firmly away from the guilty conscience. I’m not so sure you can make Billy Graham’s appeal of “peace with God” any more. The postmodern person doesn’t feel a need for it. It’s a language he doesn’t understand.

He does, however, understand the language of justice. He sees that the world needs putting right. The mind of the psalmist need not, I think, seem so alien as it did to Lewis a generation ago.

In Remembrance of Exodus

Yesterday Exodus International, the umbrella group for what used to be called “ex-gay” ministries, announced that they were closing up shop after almost forty years. That announcement came one day after Exodus president Alan Chambers issued an apology to gays and others for the harm done to them by the ministry model they had built based on changing sexual orientation. The message, I think, is that sexual orientation doesn’t change, just as “ex-gay” critics have been saying for many years. Exodus was wrong to offer programs claiming that it does, and wrong to hide the fact of the leaders’ own continuing sexual attraction to their own gender.

Not everybody agrees. For example Andy Comiskey, a leader in the movement for many years, posted an article that vaguely compared Chambers to a snake–yes, that snake. (Comiskey and other affiliates left to start a new umbrella organization more than a year ago.)

Even Chambers’ apology, if you read it carefully, doesn’t apologize for believing that the Bible teaches homosexual practice is wrong. Chambers still believes that Exodus helped many people, himself included. His main impulse seems to be to operate from grace, not guilt; to stop fighting against people who don’t agree with him; and to be transparent about what really happens to homosexuals who try to change.

It has been years since I reported on Exodus, but I’ve had quite a bit of exposure to the ministry over most of its history, including a number of in-depth interviews. An important caveat for anything I (or anyone) may say about it: Exodus was always a very floppy umbrella over dozens of tiny organizations. Practically the only thing they all agreed on was to have an annual conference. They never shared funds or organizational control between their affiliates (which, by the way, have not gone out of business). Naturally given this lack of structure, there’s tremendous variation.

One thing I will say is that it was never a deep secret that homosexual feelings persisted. I had a number of Exodus leaders say as much to me over the years. It’s true that they didn’t necessarily mention that fact when first meeting with desperate, guilt-laden, deeply closeted men and women who came to them for help.

Most of the Exodus leaders were Christians of a charismatic or pentecostal persuasion. They believed in transformation. They wanted to offer hope, not uncertainty, the same way charismatics do someone coming to them for healing of brain cancer. However, none of the people I interviewed spoke of transformation as a simple, magical, pray-once-and-it’s-done business.

As I reported in 2007, “An older, wiser ex-gay movement is certainly clearer about what it has to offer. Early hopes for instant healing have given way to belief that transformation occurs through a lifetime of discipleship.”

I had attended the annual Exodus conference. I wrote, “This conference features little motivational hyperbole. Alan Chambers, the low-key opening-night speaker, emphasizes that there is no step-by-step formula for overcoming homosexuality. ‘Hear me loud and clear: You’re not going to get cured this week. … We don’t choose our feelings, but we do choose how we are going to live. I choose every day to deny what comes naturally to me. … I have to rely on Jesus Christ every day.’”

What many ex-gay critics failed to note was that Exodus wasn’t started by preachers or psychologists in order to minister to benighted homosexuals. It was launched by homosexuals who, because of their Christian faith, sought help and rarely found it in the church. So they started tiny, starving organizations that offered understanding and hope. Most of the time churches kept these organizations at arm’s length, as though homosexuality might be catching, while at the same time directing to them the regular flow of agonized Christians struggling with their homosexual identity. The closest parallel is AA–a grassroots organization run by victims for victims. Whenever I talked to Exodus leaders I was struck by the gallows humor, the lack of triumphalism. I wrote in 2007, “This may be the only group in America that realizes all the way to the bottom that when you decide to follow Jesus, you don’t always get to do what you want to do.”

But yes, they did sometimes talk and write triumphalistically, and seemed sometimes to promise great transformation of sexual orientation. They publicized apparent successes, and ignored transparent failures. Backsliding and moral failure were frequent, especially in the early days. Most importantly, most of those who joined their programs failed to experience lasting and meaningful change of sexual desire. For many, such failure was shattering.

Homosexuality is defined by erotic desire for your own gender. Despite much thinking and theorizing, it remains unexplained. Homosexuals do not choose their desires any more than heterosexuals do. But where do these desires come from? They make no evolutionary sense. 

Homosexuality is not exactly “like” anything else, but I think it is helpful to put it into the context of other forms of desire and our attempts to control or change them. Alcoholism is an example: the desire for alcohol is persistent and unexplained, and it is very difficult to change. AA has some success, as does the Betty Ford clinic, but also lots and lots of failure.

The prevalence of obesity, and the general failure of all dieting programs, should equally warn us against any suggestion that we understand desire or know how to transform or control it. If food desires are that strong and resistant to change, surely sexual desires are more so.

But this should not lead to a counsel of despair. Change is difficult; change is not impossible. Some people do lose weight. Some people channel or sublimate their homosexual desires. The current ethos of sexual liberalism would suggest that any attempt to limit sexual expression is inherently stifling if not damaging. But Christians (and others) are likely to find this an unproved assertion, and to regard the legacy of sexual liberalism as highly questionable. Granted that there have been improvements in our lives since the beginning of the sexual revolution, is the overall impact really positive?

 Exodus is gone, and with it any sense that Christians have a “cure” for homosexuality. A lot–not all, by any means–of homophobia has gone too, largely because a generation of homosexuals had the courage to come out and give the rest of the world a chance to know them as ordinary human beings. It’s clear that homosexuals are being visibly integrated into mainstream American life–into the military, into marriage, into sports. They have always been there, of course, but not visibly so.

Christians have to figure out how to deal with this. The impulse to love and accept is strongly embedded in our Scriptures. But so is the belief that homosexual expression is a distortion of God’s intended sexuality. This poses a terrible dilemma. Exodus seemed to point a way out of it: homosexuals can change. Now we know that homosexuality is part of the human condition, that it persists. We know that homosexuals are not “them” but “us.” Difficult? Yes, but not unprecedented. So many aspects of human life are unexplained, persistent and contrary to what we believe should be so. We are creatures of such contradictions, seeking to live in our present reality with love and acceptance, yet also with the powerful urge for transformation. That is why I lie awake at nights. That is why I pray.

Two Favorite Topics

As many of you know, two of my favorite topics are baseball and justice. It’s rare that I can connect the two, but a blog post from my friend Dean Anderson does just that. It’s a review of 42, the film about baseball great Jackie Robinson and the year he began to play in the major leagues as the first black player. As Dean points out, it came to be because of the particular sense of justice in both Robinson and the Dodgers GM Branch Rickey. In this fortunate case, the cause of justice accorded with winning. Which, according to the Bible, it always does in the long run. But, also according to the Bible, it does not necessarily do in the short run.

It’s a great, short post which includes a terrific quote from Martin Luther (though not about baseball–we’re still looking for that).

Thoughts on the Problem of Evil

A friend told me about a dinner conversation that turned to the question, “Do you believe in God?”

One couple said, “We don’t believe in a God who would allow such terrible things to happen.”

My friend didn’t know what to say. She had already admitted that she believed in God. Genuinely troubled, she came to me to ask, how could I have answered?

As I told her, it’s a tough question that philosophers and theologians have grappled with for thousands of years. The commonest response is to refer to free will. God made creatures with freedom. If he put a stop to all evil, he would violate those creatures’ freedom. Human beings would no longer be human, but something more like robots.

I think that’s a pretty helpful answer, though perhaps overly abstract.

Writing about God’s justice has made me think about it from a different angle. I have taken more seriously the Bible’s statement that God did, at one time, consider putting a sudden end to all human evil.

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created–and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground–for I regret that I have made them.’” (Genesis 6:5-7)

Would you really like God to do that?

I believe in a God who chose not to instantly put a stop to evil, but set about transforming the human heart– a very complicated operation.