A few months ago, I listened to a sermon series on the Beatitudes from Mars Hill Bible Church. One particular sermon by Rob Bell really struck a chord with me. In this talk on Matthew 5:6, Bell was attempting to repaint the idea of hungering and thirsting for righteousness in a way that is more congruent with Jesus’ world view.
Let me back up a little by giving you a quick (and probably lacking) overview of Bell’s approach to the Beatitudes. In short, the Beatitudes aren’t instructions on how to receive the blessing of God as much as they are proclamations of who God sees as blessed. For instance, when Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he is not saying, “In order for God to bless you, you have to find some way to become poor in spirit.” Jesus’ point is that God is with the least of these. God is with those who are not spiritually rich. God is not with those who “deserve it,” whatever that may mean. So Jesus is attempting to help his listeners understand this deep truth: God blesses the people whom you don’t expect to be blessed.
Again, Bell is emphasizing that these sayings by Jesus should NOT be used as formulas to earn God’s blessing. To do this, we fall into the trap of a works based theology.
With Matthew 5:6 in particular, Bell explains how he understand Jesus’ words: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” For Bell, Jesus is talking to those who have a deep and unquenchable longing to see justice in a broken world. So often, these are people who experience oppressions, injustice, and, well, wrongness. Because of this, they hunger and thirst for rightness, or righteousness to prevail over injustice.
We all have a little of this in our lives. We see oppression, hunger, poverty, and pain in the world, and we want it to be made right. Sometimes we misdirect this desire to situations that don’t deserve such attention.
I have been most guilty of this recently with the whole NBC debacle and their dealings with Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno. I saw what happened to Conan O’Brien as an injustice, and my hunger and thirst for righteousness was temporarily misdirected to that cause. But in reality, Conan is a multi-millionaire. He’ll be fine. He doesn’t need my help. My hunger and thirst was wrongly directed for a time.
But many times, our hunger and thirst to see justice is properly directed. We begin to side with people who experience real and damaging trauma, most often inflicted by those in power, and we ache for them. Sometimes we find ourselves in need of justice, and our hunger and thirst for righteousness drives us to cry out to God for his grace and blessing. In this, we find the words of Jesus comforting. God is with those who hunger and thirst to see God’s justice in a real way.
Now, all of us have different areas where we direct our “hungering and thirsting.” A friend of mine at work has a heart for racial reconciliation, and her desire for justice is most directed there. Another friend sees the poverty and oppression in Latin America and puts his energy and resources to work to see justice there.
We all have our areas where we hunger and thirst.
For me, there are a few areas, but none so great as my desire to see my gay brothers and sisters in Christ accepted into the community of God where they belong. Yes, I know. Not a popular thing to say in some Christian circles. Gladly, I’m not alone, even though it may feel this way sometimes.
In short, I feel the Church has done a serious disservice to a large number of gay Christians who find their identity in Christ and have come to terms with their sexuality. The Church has wrongly interpreted a few vague passages in the Bible in order to condemn what they do not understand, and quite honestly, I can no long stand idly by.
This injustice has to stop, and the wheels are finally in motion. Many devout Christian men and women are beginning to see that, for the last 150 years or so, the Church has gotten it wrong. The Bible does not, in fact, condemn homosexual orientation, and, in reality, the writers of the Bible know nothing of homosexual orientation.
What I would like to do over the next few blogs is to tackle a couple of the more recent “anti-homosexual” misinterpretations of scripture in hopes that I can show where we as a Christian community have erred. I’d like to start with one of the most commonly misunderstood biblical narratives, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Hopefully you will hear my heart through all of this. I have a deep hunger and thirst to see God’s justice in this world. I have an unquenchable desire to see wrongs righted. And above all, I approach this topic out of love – love for God, the Bible, and my gay brothers and sisters in Christ.
Also, please remember that this is me writing – Jon. Your son, brother, uncle, and friend. I am not being deceived by Satan. I am not trying to justify sin. I am not trying to send the Bible down some slippery slope. I have enormous respect for scripture, so much so that I refuse to allow it to be read at face value. I also have a deep love for God, and I want more than anything else to see God’s will done on earth. And for me, God’s will is that we no longer oppress people because of their sexuality.
I pray that you would come along with me on this little journey. I also understand that you will disagree with me, and that’s fine. But please, hear me out.
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I know this kind of thing is a little taboo when it comes to blogs, but I feel the need to do it anyway. I’m sure you can forgive me.
I’ve been slacking a little with my blog; I realize that. My slacking has little to do with laziness or lack of content. In reality, I have a lot of content bouncing around in my head that I am just dying to put into text. The problem is that this content is very sensitive and polarizing, and when I do finally put it to text, I want to do it right.
So when I’m ready, I’ll lay it on you. But until then, I just can’t bring myself to post anything else, be it deep and thoughtful or cheap and shallow.
Stay tuned! The next several blogs should be interesting…
I inherited a jet pack from my dad. It’s just like the kind you see in the old movies – silver with two little rocket engines on the back. The thing is pretty incredible. My dad tells me that you can fly over 100 mph with this thing. He heard so many stories about his grandfather’s exploits with the jet pack – how he would do circles around Philly and race birds and take his wife for rides. This thing is really cool!
Right now it’s hanging in my garage. It’s been there for years. I’ve never tried it out or really thought much about it, but I know it’s the real deal. The stories are so compelling, and they’ve been handed down through my family for years. I don’t have to take the thing out for a spin to prove anything to anyone. It’s the genuine article.
A friend of mine came over the other day, and I took him in the garage to show him my prized possession. He was impressed! But then he had the nerve to ask me if it really worked. “Of course it does!” I told him. I was blown away that such a good friend of mine would mock my family history in such a blatant way. Needless to say, I don’t speak with him anymore. He’s not welcome in my house.
But I can’t say that his comments didn’t make me think. I mean, I’ve never seen this thing used, and neither has my dad. I don’t know what kind of fuel it takes or how to start it. For all I know, it could be made of cardboard and Elmer’s glue. I guess I could try to see if it works, but in all honesty, that’s just too much work and too scary. I guess I’ll just chose to have faith that the stories are true.
Why do we approach theology and doctrine the same way? We have these “truths” that have been handed down to us through the years, and we refuse to test them. We don’t want to hit them with any hard questions because we’re scared they will just shatter – and if one aspect of our faith shatters, what’s to stop the whole thing from being blown to bits?
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and in the same way, unexamined doctrine is not worth holding. So take some doctrine that you or your faith tradition holds dear. Hold that doctrine in your hand. Look at it. Study it. Ask some tough questions of it. Find out what the critics of that doctrine have to say and listen to them. See if their tough questions are valid. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. In the end, your faith will be better for it. You will understand why you believe what you believe or you will realize what you believe is not as essential as you thought. And that’s OK. Things change.
With any doctrine or theology, there comes great complexity, and to ignore that complexity and refuse to examine the doctrine or theology is dangerous. That’s one of the things that I would like to do with this blog: talk about the complexities of issues that we take for granted. We always want to push people to take stands on issues – “Are you pro-gay marriage or anti-gay marriage? Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Do you believe in hell or don’t you? Are you a liberal or a conservative?”
Dear God, please help us to be OK with complexity. Help us to understand that you created this world with many shades of color and not just black and white. Help us to be a little less “absolute” and a little more loving, gracious, and connected to you. Help us to be flexible not for flexibility’s sake, but for the sake of the gospel. Help us to stop examining the leaves and start seeing the forest.
Help us to identify doctrine cautiously and with great fear and trembling instead of harshly with no regard for those around us.
Help us to start now.
Time for another rant. Apologies to all. Those who think I complain too much can stop reading after this period.
Still with me? Thanks for letting me have an outlet for my “Christian frustration.”
If I hear or read someone quote Paul out of context one more time, I’m going to lose my mind. I feel like I have read Paul’s list of “who will go to hell” far too many times in the last month or so. You all know the list. I don’t need to post it here. Just read Paul’s letters to Timothy, and you’ll find it.
First, let’s talk for a quick second about context. When someone says “read that verse in context,” they don’t necessarily mean “read the verse that are before it and after it.” Of course this is helpful and usually adds a lot to an interpretation of scripture, but it doesn’t end here. Context all means all things historical, cultural, geographical, related to genre, etc. All of this must be accounted for in order to arrive at a workable interpretation.
I know what you’re thinking (well, maybe I do): “But Jon, we can’t all be theologians or Bible scholars. We have to be able to pick up the Bible and read it at face value. We can’t all read the Bible so critically as you seem to want us to.”
Fair enough. But is this really reality? We all read a lot of things every day. I would venture to say that with everything we read, we are acutely aware of all things “context.” Sure, we may not necessarily have to think long and hard about the context, but that’s mostly because what we read was written very recently and from a context we all know very well.
In other words, you’re reading my blog right now. Some of you know me. You know where I live. You know why I write. You know from what worldview I write. You know my family background. You even know my audience (since I’m usually writing to US Christians). So you already are well-versed in context before you even read one word of my blog.
Why not be this well-versed with Biblical texts? Sure, it takes a little work, but it’s not impossible. There are even some Bibles out there that will give you a quick contextual analysis of a book or author to get the ball rolling.
My point is that we read critically and we take context into account whenever we read something… but not so much with the Bible. We seem to want the Bible to be a magical book that speaks directly into our personal lives whenever we pick it up. We can read six words at face value, and from there, we build doctrine. Honestly, that scares me.
Let’s work with an example. Someone I know recently quoted the following passage from Galatians (I’m being deliberately vague):
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned! Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
This person wanted to make the point that “liberal Christians” such as Rob Bell, Brian McClaren, and others are presenting a different gospel than the “correct” gospel. Seems fair if you work backwards on this text and approach it with only a surface reading.
What I mean by “work backwards” is that this person, on his own, decided that the message of “liberal Christians” is contrary to the gospel. He then found Paul’s words very affirming to his own point of view, and retroactively made Paul agree with him. In other words, he takes his own bias and uses the text to express his bias.
Rob Bell could do the same thing. He could use Paul’s words to support the gospel he has taught at Mars Hill. He could easily say, “I have preached to you the ‘true’ gospel. If you hear another gospel from fundamentalists that is different than my own, it is not the ‘true’ gospel. Let them be eternally condemned.” Then he could slap down Paul’s words and seal the deal.
But we can’t work backwards with scripture. We can’t take our own point of view and make it the point of view of the authors.
If you take a minute to figure out what Paul is talking about to the Galatians, you see that he’s frustrated that some people would tell his precious Gentile believers that they must first become Jewish before they can be saved (i.e. get circumcised). In other words, some people were adding extra steps to the gospel of grace and faith in Jesus Christ. And Paul, rightly so, is pissed – so pissed he encourages those adding to the gospel to castrate themselves. Awesome!
Then Paul adds this bit about wanting to “please God” instead of “pleasing men (people).” Without belaboring this point, let me just say that he is addressing the Apostles. He has no desire to please them. He does what he thinks God wants him to do, not what the Jerusalem church wants. It gets even more interesting when you go back and forth from Acts to Galatians to see how both Luke and Paul present this discussion around circumcision. Fascinating stuff!
But we don’t get that without checking out the context just a little bit. I’m not saying we need to dive into the Greek or the heavy commentaries. We just need to get better acquainted with the places, people, cultures, lifestyles, worlds, etc. to whom the Bible writers wrote.
If we don’t do this, then we run the risk of making the Bible say what WE want it to say. If we don’t like a certain theological or doctrinal perspective, we can easily use Paul’s words to condemn it. But is that the right thing to do? Is that what Paul is doing? I don’t think so. Paul had a point to what he wrote. He had an audience. He was addressing a specific issue. But we want him to do the talking for us.
It just doesn’t work that way.
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I just realized something interesting that’s happening this quarter at Fuller. I have been working way ahead in one class… I don’t have another assignment due in that class until December 12. Crazy ahead in Fuller time.
But there’s an IDL (kind of like an online class but not) that I had to get extended over from the Summer that I’m way behind on. Like way behind. This is work that was really due in the beginning of September that I still haven’t done.
Something’s wrong with this picture.
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Financial Crisis solved… maybe a little too late:
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Hey.
How’s it going?
Good?
Good.
Just checking in.
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Oh yeah, I’m really in a bluegrass mood lately. Not sure why… I guess since I grew up around this stuff, there’s still a soft spot in my heart for it. My dad would be proud! Enjoy a little with me:
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Well, I just got back from a visit to PA to see my family. I did a lot, but what was especially fun was the two golf tournaments I played with my dad and brother. Good times, but one small fact became painfully obvious: I suck. I wish I could play like I think I can actually play. Ya know?
Which reminds me… Why is everyone so amazed that Tiger Woods won the US Open with a torn ACL? I guess it’s impressive, but it’s also kind of stupid. It’s not like this was the world series or superbowl, and that his team hasn’t made it that far in 80 years. It’s the US Open. It happens every year. Let you knee heal. Listen to your doctors. Win it next year. Instead, he risks his career by playing on a torn ACL. Smart.
Hey, enjoy this video of my brother hitting a golf ball on the 10th tee of Waynesborough Country Club in Paoli, PA:
