The Scandal of the Gospel

Over at Connexions Kim Fabricus posts an excerpt worth reading from my favorite author, James Alison from Alison's book Faith Beyond Resentment.

You can read the post here:James Alison on a closer look at the Gospel Scandal. A small snippet:

In fact, the obvious reading of the gospels suggests that the real scandal is the possibility that when God himself becomes present in the midst of a particular human group, those who are scandalised are not scandalised by the heaviness of his demands. On the contrary, they are scandalised by the fact that God himself does not fit into the scheme into which, according to them, God should fit. It is not that God is too sacred for ordinary people to be able to bear it, but that he is so little sacred that religious people find it impossible to bear it.

James Alison, Faith beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2001), p. 178.

"Last Rites" / Sacrament of the Sick

Here is an article from our local paper which fits my experience as a hospital Chaplain: Catholics Who Seek Last Rites are Advised to Plan Ahead

The retired Catholic Bishop Anthony Pilla of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese points out:

"So many times people don't want to be anointed because they think that might mean they're going to die.

"But it's not just a sacrament for the dying," he said. "It's for the sick and the recovering."

Pilla said he even recommends the sacrament -- now commonly called the Sacrament of the Sick -- to expectant mothers, people facing surgery and the elderly.

This has been a public service announcement by your friendly foreign female Methodist minister.

Thoughts on Hell

I feel that, for my own sake, I need to write a post on hell. I doubt I'm going to say anything that anyone else hasn't said already but I feel that I need to do this for my own benefit.

If you want a thorough-going review of where the concept of hell appears in Scripture and what its function is, I recommend the recent posts by UMC pastor Ben Witherington: Hell? No?, Matthew 10:28 - Why Anihilationism is not Universalism, and And Now - The Case for Permanent Residence in Hell.

I certainly can't do even half the job that Ben did. My only point would be that the broad concept of "hell" certainly does appear in Scripture. Although I think that the popular concept of hell is generally quite different than the many and varied images in Scripture.

So why are so many people getting their virtual knickers in a twist over the debate about whether hell exists and who God might send there other than the fact that Rob Bell has recently written a book on the subject: Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived?

Here are some thoughts:

+++ If you're out looking for converts, it's easier to convert someone who has hit rock bottom in their life and/or is scared shirtless. Evangelists have always noted how relatively easy it is to convert those who are really desperate. One great technique is to try to cause someone to become desperate by frightening the Bejezus out of them. Either convince them that they are a totally worthless human being or that they will go to hell if they don't convert. Literally, we keep trying to scare the hell out of people. Which doesn't work if God doesn't actually hate people enough to send them to eternal torture.

+++ In consequence, the popular version of Christianity that many people believe is that The Gospel Message is "You are a sinner and headed for hell but God sent Jesus to die for your sins. If you accept Jesus as your savior, you will be saved." That's what a lot of people think it means to be a Christian, so no wonder they don't like it if hell gets demoted to a non-Gospel issue. As someone once asked me "If we're not certain that non-Christians aren't going to hell, why would anyone want to be a Christian?" Yes, the person who asked me this was someone who was constantly proclaiming how good God is and how wonderful it is to follow Christ.

+++ A lot of us use fear to motivate ourselves and others. You know what? I do this too. Someone recently asked me what I do on days when I feel emotionally overwhelmed and don't want to see patients. I laughed and I replied that, if I'm being brutally honest, what I do is I try to scare myself with the reminder that if I spend days not seeing patients, I'll lose my job. I don't want to operate that way - and it's certainly not the recommended way for a Chaplain to motivate herself - but that was the honest answer: fear is what gets me off my butt. If we remove the fear, we might have to find another motivation.

+++ Many Christians seem fixated on the idea that if God loves us Christians then this love necessitates hating everyone else and sending them to hell. We seem to believe that there is a limited amount of divine love and mercy to go around and that God can only spend it on certain people. Along with many other Christians, I find it to be a monstrous image of God that God would "save" an immoral and unethical Christian who "said the sinners' prayer" but that God is ready and eager to damn a non-Christian who lived a moral and ethical life and who imitated Jesus. (Yes, I know about grace and I know that understanding the Gospel is always a balance of love and grace, but I'm not going into that here.)

I do believe that there are images of "hell" in Scripture. I also believe that these pictures are many and varied and sometimes even contradictory.

I don't believe, however, that belief in God's sending people to eternal torture in hell is an integral part of the "good news" of the Gospel message.

As Christians, we need to learn that there is Good News in the Gospel of Christ without us imposing more bad news on everyone else. My blogging friend, John Meunier, just blogged on Acts 10:34-43. Now, there is some good news. Unless, of course, we think that God can't love us unless God hates someone else.

I Got my Book Today!

I got Rob Bell's "Love Wins" today.

I promised my friend Allan R. Bevere that I would post a review of it over on his blog. I hope I stick to it and read the book soon. I'm a bit of a scatter-brain when it comes to books and I have about seven on the go at the moment.

Here's a paragraph from the introductory chapter which indicates what Bell himself thinks the book is about:

Of all the billions of people who ever lived, will only a select number "make it to a better place" and every single other person suffer in torment and punishment forever? Is this acceptable to God? Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God?

I'm looking forward to reading the book.

The Gospel Message

Image taken from: Slap Upside the Head[1]







I'm not much in the mood these days for posting long posts, but something someone said on a friend's Facebook thread got me thinking. It was that "the Gospel message" is: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

Now, I'm hardly going to disagree with this. And, just in case you harbour a sneaking suspicion that I do disagree with the statement, let me assure you that I wholeheartedly agree with it.

My question, however, is: "What does it mean to believe in Jesus as Lord?"

You know, we talk about how our faith is supposed to be relevant to our everyday life and, frankly, unless we unpack what exactly it means that Jesus is our Lord, I don't see how we make "good news" out of this statement.

What I learned as a child was that I should "accept" Jesus as my Lord: that is was some kind of cognitive agreement like: "Oh yeah, I believe in gravity. I believe that it's fact that when I let go of something it falls to my feet." "Oh yeah, Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, that's a fact."

So what?

I think we need to unpack that statement a lot more if it's going to be "good news" for me, for you or for our world.

What do you think?

---

[1] I am simply crediting a website for a great illustration. Please let's not be distracted by the general content of the website.

Jesus Hates Taxes

Jesus Hates Taxes With thanks to a Facebook Friend

Missional Church

This is one of the most insightful articles on the subject of "mission church" that I've read in a long time, particularly from a US perspective which often still seems to insist that "If we get our marketing right, they will come back". Uh uh.

The Death of the Funeral Society

The Believer

Oh, Number Two!

When I posted on the subject of Creating Godde in my own image, I expected some negative reactions, but the kind of negative reactions the post received has been rather interesting.

Setting aside the whole "feminist issue" for a minute, one of the more interesting comments was from a fellow Methodist who objected to my first comment that I was waiting for the inevitable **** to fly. I wrote four asterisks, and my colleague pulled out the old card of "Let's all be horrified that an ordained minister (and a woman at that?) has made a scatological remark."

I'm going to put myself on a limb again, but I don't believe that there is anything immoral or unethical with making scatological remarks. I accept that some may find such words distasteful, but I think possibly the greatest worry is about being indelicate.

We also have all these "cute" words for excrement (is that a naughty word too?) like "number two" and "doggy do" and "poo poo". Are four asterisks really all that much more offensive? And, for that matter, what really is wrong with the words "shit" or "crap"? (yes, I dared to write them)

It's a topsy-turvy world. I wonder if those who take offense at four asterisks are writing letters of protest to the television programmes that are showing people jumping up and down shouting "Oh my God! Oh my God!"? (Are you offended that I dared to write those words? It's technically taking the name of the Lord in vain, but my bet is you're not nearly offended at that as what I wrote in the previous paragraph.)

Or what about getting outraged at articles that spin the truth so that people are presented in the worst possible light or presented as meaning something that they didn't mean? God forbid that those with sensitive constitutions should see four asterisks, but, hey, tell as many half-truths as you like and hope that others will interpret everything in the worst possible light.

We don't care about truth or taking the Lord's name in vain, but don't offend our eyes or ears with Number Two.

A Thought Experiment - Did I ask you to breed?

Here is a thought experiment that is born out of two recent stimuli: 1) the recent discussion on the repeal of the Health Care Law and 2) paying my property taxes.

Some of my politically conservative Christian friends and colleagues have been opining about how God doesn't like it when the government forces people to look after other people. So this got me thinking about my property taxes.

You see, 66.95% of my property taxes are going to our public schools. In a town that voted Republican, in a county that voted Republican, in a State that ousted the Democratic Governor for a Republican one. We are really Republicans around here. I can vouch for that because I keep hearing about how all the government wants to do is tax us and take away our freedoms.

It's kind of ironic. I voted twice for an increase in our property taxes for the purpose of funding schools and not only do I not have children in the local school district, I don't have children full stop. I did it because I believe that we have to look after one another in society and that the education of the children in this community is about the good of the whole, not about me.

I figure I'm something of a mug. My neighbors apparently believe that there is something ethically wrong about helping me with my healthcare in the event that I can't pay for it, but that there is nothing wrong at all about me paying for their kids' schooling.

So, my proposal is this: It is ethically wrong to expect other people to pay for your kids' education. Did I ask you to breed? If you can't afford their education, then don't have them.

Let me review my property bill. 66.95% to the school district can go and I'm not going to pay the $22.71 for the zoo, either since I never go there nor the $50.23 for the county parks or the $77.40 for child services. You can strike off my bill the $154.80 to the Board of Developmental Disabilities and the $104.48 for the County Mental Health Board since no one in my family is benefiting from either of their services. I'm also not paying the $20.30 for the bond retirement since I didn't live here and couldn't vote for it.

So now that I have refused to pay taxes to entities that me and my family do not directly benefit from, I have reduced my tax bill by 86.68%. I can see the attraction of the principle of "It is unethical to make me pay for community services that I don't want and that don't directly benefit me." Tea Party, here I come!

Are Women Human?

My friend, Dave over at 42 has just pointed to a brilliant blog entitled Are Women Human? which, according to it's subtitle is dedicated to "Debunking complementarianism and other myths of gender"

For those who don't know what complementarianism is, it's the view that men and women are equal in the eyes of God except that God has reserved leadership for men and "followship" (my word) for women. Or to slightly misquote George Orwell's characters in Animal Farm it's the idea that all people are equal but some are more equal than others. I think that the sound-bite "Are Women Human?" captures this idea perfectly. Check out the blog.

Creating Godde in my own image

I’m coming out of the closet: I have decided to create God in my own image. Really, I have.

I’m going to call Her Godde. Godde is a white middle class woman. Or, in your case, Godde might be an African-Caribbean young woman, or a disabled elderly Latina.

Someone else’s God might be a 3-month old Asian boy with a congenital heart defect or even a white, middle-aged, middle-class man.

I’m absolutely, utterly serious. Here’s the deal.

Christian theology has long asserted that God has no gender and that God is neither male nor female. Yet, if we’re being honest, Western Christianity traditionally pictures God as a powerful white male who is not elderly but old enough to have power and influence and still be physically virile. The CEO of Exxon, perhaps.

Jesus, despite his ethnicity and cultural context, we have pictured as a younger version of the CEO-God. Of course, Jesus was certainly male. And we’ve also been happy to envisage him as white and powerful, a sort of up-and-coming CEO to God’s Chairman of the Board image.

So, if Jesus is divine and male then God must also be male. And Jesus called God his Father, so that must be the way that Jesus wanted all his followers forever after to refer to the first person of the Trinity, right?

Hmm.

British Methodism – I speak only for the tradition in which I was ordained rather than trying to speak for other traditions – affirms that every person is made in the image of God and that we each bear that image within us.

Bearing the Imago Dei does not mean that any one of us bears God’s complete image. Scripture tells us that God created both male and female in God’s image. Thus, woman is not a complete image of God. And man is not a complete image of God. But together we complement each other and bear something that is closer to the image of God than one gender or the other on its own.

Many conservative Christians are not only happy – but indeed eager – to point out this complementarity of gender when it suits their purposes.

So, tell me why tradition, and much of conservatism, insists that we must think of God as male and that we must conceive of the male human being as being a complete image of God and the female as representing no aspect of God whatsoever?

But here is why I am really creating Godde in my own image: because I realised that I have spent over 50 years not being able to get in touch with the Imago Dei in which I was created because “everyone knows” that God is a man.

Did I think that God is a man? No, I did not think that. Did I believe that God is a man? I didn’t believe that in my head, but I sure believed it in my heart and in my gut. God could not be part of me because God is not a woman. Even if I have “received the Holy Spirit” and the Spirit is in me, the Spirit is a man (not in Greek or Hebrew, but certainly in popular Western thought).

Of course, God is not black either. Or disabled. Or gay. Or transgendered. If you’re any of those things, you have to think that the Imago Dei inside you is a straight white male. A foreign invader. Not really part of you. You bear no image of the divinity. But if you are ready to confess to God your sin of being female, black, gay, disabled, or whatever, then God will be happy to put his “normal” corrective image within your field of vision, even though you will never be able to change the way you are.

So, I have decided to create Godde in my own image. And I hope that you too will create God/Godde in your own image in the same way. I’m not going to pretend any more that God is a powerful, white middle class male CEO. And if you don’t believe that either, maybe together we can begin to change the world one person at a time.

Love Divine (Blaenwern)

"Love Divine" to the proper tune.

And Can it be That I should Gain

Feeling nostalgic and thought I'd post one of my favourite hymns.

I Know You Know

Dear Mom:

You know how you give me those things that you don't want? The stuff that you don't want to throw away because they might come in handy and someone could use them? Like the containers that lunch meat comes in? Or the disposable plastic cake carrier that the "Royal Dairy" (let the reader understand) ice cream cake came in?

Well, I'm going to walk out your front door and put them in the garbage bin. And you know that. And I know you know that. And you probably know that I know that you know. It's just that you can't bear to be the one to throw them out, so I'll do it for you.

Just sayin' is all.

Love,
Daughter

Mercy, Not Justice

Recently, I went to pray with the family of a deceased elderly patient. I'd met one of the children a few days previously when I went into the room to introduce myself to the patient and this particular (middle aged) child. The patient was polite but firm, no that patient didn't need a Chaplain. So, here I am a few days later with all the children praying with them upon the - not unexpected - death of a parent.

"Tell me about your parent" I asked. The children told me that the parent had been angry with God on account of the tragic death of another one of their siblings a number of years ago. Then one of them asked me a question that I've been asked once before in my short tenure as a Chaplain: could God accept their parent into heaven if that parent had been angry with God over the death of that child? And then one of them said "We want you to pray for mercy, not justice."

Justice? I passionately believe in God's justice. But I'm not so sure that God's justice has a lot to do with the "sending to hell" of a person whose heart is broken. And that's what I said: "I don't think that God condemns a person to hell for having a broken heart." Now, I have no idea if this particular individual was "going to heaven" but I'm certain in my own heart that they aren't going to be "sent" to hell against their will for not being able to get over their grief.

I also noticed that, when I said that, all the children started crying and they all thanked me afterward.

Here is one place where I think popular notions of salvation and what it means to be a Christian do Jesus and Scripture a disservice. Popular Christianity has turned "faith in Jesus" into some kind of an intellectual assent that has nothing to do with Justice. So, we name people as "just" who assent to certain ideas about Jesus. And they don't even have to actually try to change their lives according to Jesus' teachings; all they have to do is assent to certain ideas about him. And we name as "unjust" people who don't assent to certain ideas, even those whose heart is broken. And we are certain that such people are "unjust" even if they visit the sick and imprisoned and feed the hungry.

This accounting-version of what it means to be a Christian also does a disservice to the concept of "Justice". Any honest reading of Scripture on the subject of "justice" will demonstrate that the biblical concept of justice is not some kind of complicated, abstract, doctrinal mental Olympics. Scriptural justice is very similar to plain, straightforward, everyday justice: don't harm others. Don't steal, don't exploit, don't take advantage just because you can. And it's also more than that: God's people are called beyond the don'ts into the realm of the do's: Do help, do give a hand up, do empower.

Faced with an unjust person whose soul cries out to God: "I harmed, I killed, I stole, I was self-centered, and I'm proud of it. I don't want anything to do with repentance and I don't want anything to do with You. Eternity in Your presence would be hell" I believe that God will grant the person's wish to be outside of the Kingdom for all eternity.

I do not, however, believe in a God who sends a broken-hearted parent unwillingly to eternal torture on grounds of "justice".

If God's mercy is ultimately smaller than the best mercy that we humans can conceive of, then ours is indeed a very small god.

Blogging on blogging / blogging on chaplaincy

I notice that a number of bloggers who I read are currently writing apologetics about not having written much lately. Some are contemplating stopping blogging all together. Some are vowing to blog more next year. And one of my favourite bloggers seems to periodically vow off blogging for a specified period of time but then seems to find that he has so much to say that he can't help himself and a flurry of posts appear.

So here is my blog on my blogging.

I haven't been blogging a lot. But I'm not contemplating giving up. And I'm not going to vow to blog more in the near future either.

A good part of the reason is my new "job". Or rather the Clinical Pastoral Education Chaplaincy training that I'm doing at a very large hospital near where I live. The job, you see, has a way of putting things in perspective. By "things", I mean mainly life, faith and theology.

Theology is actually very important in Chaplaincy, because if you don't know what you believe, it's hard to help other people sort out what they believe. And it's hard to set people in the right direction if you don't know what you believe about God. "Does God forgive me?" "Am I not getting better because I don't have enough faith?" "Why did God let my newborn baby die when she didn't do anything wrong?" These are big questions. And they are difficult questions without easy answers.

Maybe that's why historically the church has liked to keep its eyes on the kind of theology that tries to count how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Will 5-point Calvinists get into heaven? Does God really love Arminians? Can God save those who hold a Christus Victor theology of atonement instead of a penal substitution model?

Don't get me wrong. I still love theology. But some of the more esoteric stuff strikes me as not having anything to do with real life and real faith and the kind of relationship with God that sustains a person through a long illness. Oh, and by the way, the "Accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour" model also doesn't really cut it either.

The wonderful thing about being a chaplain is that I get to see real, genuine miracles every day. I also see real, genuine people of deep, deep faith being told by God "Your loved one will not receive a healing or a cure; it's her time to come to me." And it's inexplicable why some people get the miracle and others don't. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.

Oh, there is one other dirty secret of Chaplaincy. Non-Christians get miracles too. People of other faiths and people of no faith. God actually does appear to be as merciful as the best mercy that human beings can conceive.

So that's the background to why I'm not blogging much. I'm still taking this all in. My faith in God is rock solid. My faith in the church and in platitudinous theology not so much. I feel like I'm going through a "dark night of the words". I can't describe the kind of faith that I think really gets us through the crises. But I think I know it when I see it.

A Word in Time

Today is the celebration of the festival of Christ the King and this week's appointed bible readings focus on the theme of "The King of Kings". Bible study written by me over at A Word in Time.

Faith in Your Damnation

I don't have faith in your damnation. You whose Christianity doesn't meet some standard of "good enough". Or you who are a Jew, a Muslim, a Bahai'i, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Pagan, or maybe "spiritual but not religious", I don't have faith in your damnation.

Don't get me wrong. You and I might both very well be damned. But, thanks be to God, it's not my job to decide who, if anyone, is damned. That job belongs to God.

However, you might very well have got the impression from many of my fellow Christians that the main meaning we Christians derive from our faith is that you are damned and we are not. And I don't blame you if you've got that impression because I think that's the main message that Christians have communicated.

After all, some would argue, why be a Christian if everyone else is going to get into heaven too?

We've made the "good news" into the message "Good news! God will love you if you are just like us and believe exactly what we tell you to believe." But the flip side of that belief is "Bad news! God doesn't love you for who you are."

The only people who can't seem to see through this message is us.

That's a funny kind of faith - a faith that mainly focuses on the question of who is outside the Holy Fence. To talk to a lot of Christians, it's as if there isn't actually any meaning, reconciliation with God or salvation to be found inside Christianity, so we need to find our meaning in the idea of "Thank God I am not like that sinner." (Oops, didn't Jesus have a parable about that?)

Do we Christians really believe that there is good news at the heart of Christianity? Can we stand before God, just me and God, and find forgiveness, reconciliation, transformation of life? Or can we only feel "saved" if we have the comforting knowledge that there are some people who God just doesn't like - not now, not ever?

Obama, a Socialist?

I thought my American friends might find this post by my friend Doorman Priest interesting:
Joke of the Day

The Democrats are to the Right of our Right wing Party, the Conservatives. Our Left Wing party, the Labour Party, is Socialist. To any American readers please be aware that European Socialism is not the same as Stalin's Gulags or Kim Il Jong's worker's paradise. Some of you would get along just fine here: democracy, free press, a fairly civilised political landscape ... oh no, not that last one: you wouldn't recognise that. And we tend to lock up dangerous people rather than giving them talk shows to host. Just saying.

I become mildly offended when some folk insist on discussing Socialism as if it's symbol is 666. Really people, think before you speak!