Damaged Goods? You Don't Get To Define Me

The past couple of days has seen a proliferation of posts in the more progressive segment of the Christian blogging community about the way the church deals with sexuality, sin, and shame. The ones I've seen have been concerning the treatment of gays in the church and the purity standard impressed upon young people in conservative churches. The comments after these posts have been painful, amazing, angering, and saddening, yet very thought provoking. Two posts and their following comments, Torn: Chapters 7-11 and Do Christians Idolize Virginity?, at Rachel Held Evans' blog, and Sarah Bessey's post, I Am Damaged Goods, at A Deeper Story, made me do a lot of thinking of the culture of shame and the concept of damaged goods that I have experienced in the past from a former church.

It's not just gay people and young people that get the unhealthy message of shame from conservative churches; lots of divorced people have that nonsense forced upon them, too.

The Lens of Grace

We all have our own individual ways of looking at things, especially Scripture. I started changing my spiritual lens prescription a couple of years ago, during a relationship with a very sweet lady.

We had known each other since childhood, and had many mutual friends from our school days, some of whom were now living openly gay. At this point in my life, I had pretty much given up on any form of churchianity, so I didn't really care much at all about what any church had to say on any topic. She was determined to change my thinking about the Church and Christ, so we had many discussions on Scriptural topics.

One night, we were discussing a lesbian couple we know and she said to me, "You know, what they're doing isn't any different in God's eyes than what we're doing, if you look at it legalistically." That stuck with me, and as she was a dedicated church-goer, I asked her how she could reconcile her openness and acceptance with what is written in Scripture.

"I try to look at people through God's grace, instead of His judgment", she replied.

The Sacredness of Our Stories...

In her post from earlier today, Rachel Held Evans wrote a couple of passages that got me to thinking along some different lines than her post.  The first, "We have become a Church that judges one another by how we judge one another, and that makes me sad." and the second, "As any mother of a gay child or survivor of sexual abuse will tell you, when we talk about sexuality, we are talking about real people, real bodies, real families, real lives. To forget this is to subject our fellow human beings, created in the image of God, to a sort of theological objectification that robs them of their humanity and renders their stories, their experience, their backgrounds, their spirituality, their relationships, their struggles, and their joys down into something I can either “affirm” or “condemn,” something that is either “pure” or “defiled.”", came from entirely different sections, and seeing the connection between the two isn't quite as obvious when reading her post in its entirety.


Echoing Richard Beck, it's easy to see how both of those sections relate to boundary psychology of inclusion/exclusion, but what if the solution, at least for some of us, might be something very personal, something deep within our own boundary that we're trying to exclude.

Sexuality and The Church

2013 is looking to be quite a year in the Christian blogosphere concerning issues of sexuality. Several bloggers are taking up series of posts concerning sexual abuse, homosexuality, etc., and doing so in a way that reaches out in a spirit of reconciliation between sides and respect for Scriptures.


I wish I could be one of them.


Maybe it's just the gray weather getting to me or the beginnings of a cold, but I just can't see why anyone tries to make any sort of appeal to the hearts and minds of fundamentalists. They've shown that they have no intention of giving any consideration to the arguments from the progressive section of the church, so why waste the time and energy?


Maybe it's time for a good old-fashioned schism.

Christmas is Pagan?

Well, it certainly has its roots in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia, and the commercialism of much of modern Christmas relates only to the worship of Mammon, but the liturgical tradition we celebrate at this time of year is purely Christian.

Why in the world would I (or any other thinking person) write about this? There are a growing number of Christians who insist on keeping the Old Testament commandments. Not just using the Ten Commandments as exemplars, but in keeping the spirit, if not the letter, of the OT law. That's a great thing to do for orthodox Jews, but for Christians who live under Grace and not the Law?

It Was Not A Silent Night...

It won't be a Silent Night in Houston, Texas tonight with a strong winter storm headed this way...And it wasn't a Silent Night all those centuries ago...

While many houses will have sleeping children awaiting their presents in the morning, many houses will be filled with tears for those that are gone. Some houses will be filled with the moaning of the sick and hungry. Some will be filled with violence and shouts of anger.

Why?

The mass murder at the school in Newtown, CT on Friday has dominated the news and most of the blogs I read. Predictably, many Christian bloggers are talking about guns or mental health; political solutions to a problem that transcends politics.

I'm not going to advocate anything about those two issues in this post.

I want to go to the heart of the matter.


What kind of God would allow something like this to happen, and why?


On the surface it seems that God is at best an uncaring, absentee thought lord; allowing horrific tragedies and evils to occur, disrupting our lives, worldviews, and theologies.


But perhaps, these things are allowed to happen, not out of His apathy towards us, but out of a caring far deeper than we can comprehend.

Inspirations

On 7 Nov 2012, A young man named Ryan Woods passed away after a brief but courageous battle with cancer. I only knew him online, but his walk in his final days and his previous work and writing have left a deep impression upon me. He had a great impact on many other lives as well, and his legacy will continue for many years to come.

Big God? Big Problems, Perhaps...

This is in response to Richard Beck's response to Tony Jones' challenge to progressive theological bloggers.

As a psychologist, Beck is acutely aware of the attitudes and actions of his students when they speak of religion, worship, and theology. He has written several times about the emphasis of the "awesomeness" of God in contemporary worship, and what attitudes this might bring about.


Yes, God is big. Immense. Over-Arching.

Awesome, to be sure.


But more importantly, he is, and embodies everything.

Everything.

Big, small. The universe and the atom. The Alpha and Omega.


We tend to love the ecstatic feeling of the big worship services that declare and magnify His greatness and glory, yet we tend to become uncomfortable, as a society, when challenged to look deep inside ourselves for Him in the smallness of our being.

Really, People?

We want to get our collective drawers in a wad about the opinion of a chicken magnate and some politicians that disagree with him?

We want to choose up sides about how Caesar should be using the wages of our labor to do God's work?

Puh-leeze, we need to get over our self-centeredness on these kinds of issues.


We want to conflate our Christianity with our polity, and the result is that we make both ineffective and useless.