God Hates Sin

The topic of sin has been on my mind recently and I thought it might be good to blog about it.

I suspect that both friends and foes (as well as friendly foes) might be surprised to hear that I believe that God hates sin.  

However, I suspect that no one will be surprised to hear that I believe that God loves sinners.  Not just because that latter idea conforms to what you probably already think of my views.  But also because "God loves sinners" is a deeply Methodist doctrine.  A Methodist emphasis (although not a distinctive) is that we hold the concept of prevenient grace dear to our hearts.  In plain English, this means we believe God wishes to be in relationship with all people who have ever lived.

However, that doesn't mean that God likes sin.  On the contrary, sin is what keeps us alienated from God rather than in relationship with God, so it's a no-brainer that God hates sin.  So, yes, God hates sin.

It's not actually so much the concept of "sin" that worries me.  It's the concept of "hate".

What do you think of when you hear the word "hate"?   Each individual will probably hear differently.  

When someone says "I hate it when I ask you to do something and you ignore me" do you hear the other person simply saying "I'm coming here today with a totally neutral request to ask you to change your behavior" or do you hear some negative emotion behind that?

Now, let me ask you another question.  

How do you think that someone who has been physically abused by a family member would hear that sentence?  How do you think that someone who has been sexually abused by someone bigger and stronger would hear that?  How do you think that someone who has been emotionally abused by someone close to them would hear that?

What do you think that someone who has been abused hears when they hear the word "hate"?  What do you think they hear when they hear "God hates"?

And what's the relevance of my question?  Well, social scientists believe that at least 33% of women have been abused by someone close to them during their lifetimes and that at least 25% of men have also been similarly abused.  Social scientists also suspect that these numbers may be under-reported.

So, as Christians, do we really want to send the message that "God hates something or someone or even some action" to the 33% of the population who is hurting and most in need of healing?

I can hear some people now objecting that this is the sort of thinking that has led to the wishy-washy, anything-goes abandonment of values that got the world into trouble in the first place.  I think we can take a stance against sin without preaching "God hates" (behaviors or people) and I intend to address that in my next post.  

I'm going to suggest that both sides of this question are at fault:  both the law-and-order advocates as well as the advocates of passivity.  The problem is not that God loves sinners or that God hates sin.  

The problem is that human beings engage in black-and-white thinking and behave in reactionary ways.  Christianity is supposed to encourage wisdom, among other things, so I think it's the duty of Christian teachers to point to wiser ways of behaving.  Wiser than "That's OK, let's not have any rules or boundaries" and wiser than "If we make God look like a Tough Guy, people will be too afraid to sin."

Spiritual But Not Religious - Bring it on!

A number of my Facebook friends have been "liking" a post by The Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel entitled Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me. There is also a longer article posted here at The Christian Century website.

I'm actually a fan of Day1 ministries and, when I first saw the article, I didn't think too much of it. But there have been a number of "likes" and a number of comments about this article's honesty.

And I'm uncomfortable with all the positive comments and I'm trying to figure out why.

The first reason I'm uncomfortable is because of what I learned to call "parallel processing" in Clinical Pastoral Education.

The story in the longer article about the man who was born into a particular Christian denomination and felt hurt and injured by it is one that I can very much identify with.

I spent about ten years outside of the Church, as someone who was "spiritual but not religious", too afraid to seek out any Christian community lest I be told yet again that God loved me but didn't like me and that He (masculine gender with a capital H) expected my unquestioning subservience to men as a sign of my commitment to Him.

So I'm glad that, during that time, I didn't meet a clergyperson who said "Please stop boring me" in response to my spiritual struggles of that time. It was a time of genuine spiritual journeying for me. It turned out to be a period of genuine liberation back into the Christian community. And I might well have been completely done with Christianity altogether if someone had said that to me at the wrong time.

But my second niggle is this: I think a lot of the discussion I've seen is conflating "head religion" with "heart religion". (I realize these are awkward terms, but I'm using them deliberately right now in order to avoid more well-known terms over whose definitions we might be tempted to argue.)

On the level of "head religion", the Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniels makes lots of a very valid points. Theology seems to be one of the few areas where people who have never studied think that they know as much - or often think that they know more - than those who have studied. It's also ironically one of the few areas where it's actually difficult to come up with something that someone hasn't thought of already; and often that someone who thought of your brilliant insight before you did lived 1500, 2000 or 5000 years ago.

There is most certainly a type of liberal Christianity which seems uncomfortable standing inside the historic Christian tradition and which is embarrassed to own the truths, the tradition and the historic understanding of Christianity. A type of liberal Christian who tells someone "Well, your truth is as good as mine." And Daniels is correct, I think, in telling us to stop pandering to this point of view.

However, on the level of "heart religion", I believe that "spiritual but not religious" is often a genuine journey of searching for many, many people. And I'm uncomfortable with dissing that genuine search by telling someone to stop boring me.

I don't think that genuine "heart religion" - the kind of religion that ultimately locates us in a relationship with God and with other human beings - is something that we simply appropriate without some kind of struggle to make it our own. No human relationship is without its give-and-take and I don't believe a relationship with God is either.

Somewhere along the line, in order to have genuine "heart religion," we must question, listen, compromise, apologize and maybe even argue and forgive.

To the "Spiritual but not religious," I say: I'm happy to listen to you.

Don't expect me to pretend I'm not a Christian. Don't expect me to apologize for being a Christian. And, because I'm human, don't expect me to be able to tolerate forever being told how silly or stupid my faith is or how my theological education is worth nothing.

But I'm willing to listen to your story with respect if you are willing to listen to my story with respect - yes, even without trying to convert you. I trust in God that much that I don't need you to believe as I do.

Great is Thy Faithfulness

A sermon preached on Wednesday June 20, 2011 at the hospital chapel: Great is Thy Faithfulness

Regret

I love how God sometimes gives us gifts out of the blue. A gift that a friend and I received a few months ago came in a mutual conversation where we determined that the emotion she was experiencing was the emotion of regret.

I mention this because people in our culture today don't think too much about the concept of "regret". And we think too much about things like blame, guilt and anger. When things go awry, I think that we often reach for states of mind like guilt, blame and anger when what we're really feeling is regret for a situation.

Here are a couple of examples of regret.

A woman leaves home very early in the morning for her early-start job. Her disabled husband is asleep, as usual, and she decides not to wake him up. Later in the day, she learns that he had a stroke in the middle of the night and she is wracked with guilt. If only she had tried to wake him up at 5:00 am, she would have realized that he was unconscious and called an ambulance.

A grandmother is looking forward to seeing her grandchildren over the weekend when her daughter rings to tell her that something important has come up and the grandkids won't be able to come over. The grandmother gets angry at her daughter and blames her daughter, even as the grandmother is telling herself that her daughter couldn't possibly have foreseen this event and that it's not her daughter's fault.

In my opinion, both of these situations are examples of regret. They are also situations where our culture is often more accustomed to reaching for the describers of "guilt" (in the first instance) or guilt's opposite number "blame" (in the second instance).

What's the difference between guilt/blame and regret?

The purpose of guilt is to alert us human beings to the fact that there is a moral or ethical choice for which we have a responsibility.

So, in the first example, if the woman had tried to rouse her husband, found him unconscious and then shrugged her shoulders and decided to go off to work anyway, then she should feel very guilty indeed; she had a moral responsibility to her husband's well-being that she abdicated.

Why is it important to understand the difference between regret and guilt/blame? Because if we understand the difference, we have a method of moral discernment. We will know how to avoid blaming people (ourselves or others) who didn't actually act unethically or immorally. We also have a process of discerning when someone does actually need to be blamed and when an action needs to be named as wrong.

And, finally, we can also learn to feel some strong feelings of regret in situations where there is no actual blame. The woman in my first example, for instance, will have strong feelings of regret. And strong feelings of "if only". And those feelings need to be mourned and cried over. What she doesn't need to feel is guilt, however.

Church Growth

Graham has an excellent post on the subject of "church growth":

"…when did trying to follow Jesus, humbly, become overtaken by management speak?"

Reflecting on the holy feminine

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death."


It was a death in the middle of the night at the hospital. When you are the Chaplain on-call, you work your usual 8:30 am to 4:30 pm shift and then you pick up the night pager from the Spiritual Care office. From 4:30 pm onwards, all spiritual emergencies in the hospital are in your hands.

What will these emergencies be? Someone who has been given some bad medical news, and is scared in a way they never thought possible? A mother who has been in the hospital with her gravely ill child for the last two weeks and has reached her wits' end? An hysterical relative beating his head on the brick wall (I actually witnessed this)? Or a family who is sad, but calm; who knew that their elderly relative was dying, had a chance to say their good-byes and who are experiencing a sad sort of peace?

It was the latter situation that I walked into at 1:45 am one early Spring night when Administrative Services paged to let me know there was a death. I wakened out of a sound sleep and tried to come to my senses, to prepare myself for whatever state the family would be in.

As I opened the door into into the large room on the Palliative Care unit, I encountered approximately 25 family members as well as the deceased. The patient was elderly, an Irish-American matriarch. Her visitors were about 18 female relatives and about 7 men.

As I entered the room, it was quiet and peaceful. Some family members were crying quietly. A number of eyes looked at me and a number of mouths smiled sadly.

"Thank you so much for coming in the middle of the night, Chaplain. The priest gave mom Last Rites the other day, and we are thankful for that. We know she is with God. But we wonder if you would say a prayer for her while we are all here?"

As I usually do, I asked about the deceased and what the family wanted to pray and I tried to incorporate that into my prayers. As I also usually do with Catholic families, I suggested that they join me in the "Our Father" and "Hail Mary" afterward.

I hope a prayed a good prayer of commendation and blessing for their matriarch. But it was the "Hail Mary" that I remember. Because somewhere in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, all the men stopped speaking. And, along with these 18 other women, we were praying this prayer asking Jesus' mother to keep us all in her prayers up until the hour of our deaths. And we stood in the presence of this family matriarch who seems to have taught her family some small thing about dying well or they wouldn't have been there in the first place. Holy Mary, mother of God, were you praying for this sinner at the hour of her death?

Christian Non-Violence Explained

Christian non-violence is very easily explained: "Thou shalt not kill". Jesus wasn't kidding about all that "hippy stuff that he laid on pretty thick".

All killing is a sin. When Joe kills your brother, it's a sin and it's a sin when you kill Joe in retaliation. It's a sin when Protestant Northern Irish kill Catholics and a sin when Catholic Northern Irish kill Protestants. It's a sin when countries kill in war; killing done by a State doesn't automatically make killing alright and blessed by God.

And: Just because you think it's OK to kill a certain category of person and I don't think it's OK to kill that category of person, that doesn't mean that I hate you, and it doesn't mean that I think it's OK to kill people like you. All killing is wrong. Simples.

Women are People

I went to an interview last week. My current one-year contract will end in August and I need to find full-time work. One of the nice things about having a one-year contract is that your current employer fully expects you to get another job and you don't have to sneak around behind their back interviewing. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm really awful at being sneaky.

Since I'm looking for Chaplaincy jobs, I went to an interview with a healthcare organization which is still sufficiently unknown that you probably wouldn't be able to guess its name. I had my first interview with the (male) Executive Director and the (female) Assistant Director.

Have you ever walked into a room and instantly felt a rapport with the other people? It was like that. They told me enthusiastically about their organization and how it was the best place they had both worked. This statement was backed up by genuine and enthusiastic example after example and I came away from the interview feeling "Wow! I want to work for these people! They seem genuinely committed to their patients' well-being."

Then the trouble started. The second interview was to be with the Chaplains. They are all male, I was told. No problem, I said. My previous profession was still dominated by men and I've often been the only female on a team. I've never had problems working with men.

Of course, you never know how you are perceived by others. But I walked into that interview room with the Chaplains feeling incredibly positively.

About half-way into the interview, the obvious leader of the group asks me "As you can see, we're all men here. Would you have a problem being the only woman?" Answer, absolutely not...etc. etc. (as above).

"But, if you were a part of our team, would we be able to have the same kinds of conversations that we have now?" My mind is boggling as I try to imagine how a group of male Chaplains has a conversation that would be inappropriate for a female Chaplain to hear. Answer: "I have no idea what kinds of conversations you have now, so I can't answer that."

"Are you sure you wouldn't have any problem working with a group that is all men?" Answer. "As I said, I have worked in a lot of majority-male situations before, and I've never had a problem. But if you would have a problem working with me, then, yes, I would have a problem with that. Why would anyone want to work somewhere where they were not wanted?"

"You're not....(5 second pause for thought)...one of those...(pause for thought)...flaming feminist man-haters, are you?" (Hey, good job you paused to consider your words, huh? Who knows what might have come out if you hadn't stopped to think!) Answer: "As I said, I've worked with men for over 15 years. But if don't want to work with a woman, then I have absolutely no interest in working where I'm not wanted."

When I recounted this story to my female supervisor back at work she said "Welcome to the Christian Church in America."

I know this doesn't just happen in America. I recount the story simply for the sake of telling it because I think these stories need to be told. Christians talk about how their views are discriminated against in civil life and here we have a bunch of male Chaplains working for a non-church healthcare organization who are being sexist with impunity. So, as with many secularists, it's hard for me to have sympathy with this perception.

Church?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that God does not do his work in us apart from the experience of suffering and pain….

If this is true, then churches will need to be places where such trials and tribulations can be openly admitted, dealt with and learnt from, rather than avoided and shoved under the carpet.*

Read more at: Connexions: House of Pain

* Graham Tomlin, Spiritual Fitness: Christian Character in a Consumer Culture (London / New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 125-27.

"Getting" Jesus

Hat tip to Graham. And Christians wonder why non-Christians don't want any of our "Good News". It often seems that non-Christians "get" Jesus better than we do.

Some tid-bits from the video:

If you're a Christian who supports killing your enemies and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself.

...Christians have been lawyering the bible to try to figure out how "love thy neighbor" can mean "hate thy neighbor" and how "turn the other cheek" can mean "s***w you, I'm buying space lasers". Martin Luther King gets to call himself a Christian because he actually practiced loving his enemies.

...Jesus lays on that hippy stuff pretty thick. He has lines like "Do not repay evil with evil" and "Do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you." Really. It's in that book you hold up when you scream at gay people. And not to put too fine a point on it, but "non-violence" was kinda Jesus' trademark. Kinda his big thing. To not follow that part of it is like joining Greenpeace and hating whales.

Being Real

Over at his blog, my friend John Meunier asks the question When is Honest Too Honest? It seems that over at Chad Holz's blog, he has posted about dealing with a specific sort of addiction.

So John wanted to ask the question, what sort of information should we suddenly let people know from the pulpit? A fair enough question and I answered John with an "I don't know" before reading Chad's post.

But on reading Chad's post, I find myself wanting to ask a different question: When can the church learn to be real and to deal with real issues that real people face on a daily basis? If I am reading Chad's post correctly, he admitted that he was addicted to pornography and entered into a twelve-step program to deal with his addiction. He preached on the subject and it was not well-received by the congregation.

I can totally understand that. And I can totally understand that it would be a shock for the congregation to learn about their pastor's addiction one Sunday morning from the pulpit, but I'll leave that question of the use of the pulpit to John's blog.

What I'm more interested in is why we can't "be real" in church. I'm more interested in why twelve-step programs seem to provide more spiritual healing than our faith communities. I'm more interested in why people feel that they can't ever admit to the minister that they are angry at God, afraid of God or not sure about God.

And I'm interested in why we all - lay and ordained - collude in what often seems to me to be a centuries-long culture of enabling each other's fear and addiction.

This is a think-piece. I don't have any answers here. What I do know is that if we can't admit to ourselves and to at least one other person what our real stumbling block is - hatred for our father, anger at God, shame at being addicted to pornography - whatever our imperfection (aka sin), we haven't got a glimmer of hope of beginning our spiritual healing.

The church is, by and large with some exceptions, invested in maintaining our belief that we don't really sin - or that we don't have some thoughts, feelings or behaviors that we think are shameful or improper. And then we collude in helping others maintain their belief that they don't really sin.

I also believe that the shame that keeps us from being real, and our institutional enabling of allowing ourselves to hide our sin, means that we don't really believe in God's forgiveness or grace. Our actions speak louder than our words and our actions say: "We don't really believe that being wrong can be forgiven. And we don't really believe that we can become holy."

We are addicted to our false image of Being Good and to our false belief that God is not really gracious and forgiving.

And so churches become places where pastors who get help for a sex addiction are at risk of getting the sack. Like any family which is deeply invested in a systemic addiction, we have to expel from our midst those who are on their way to recovery.

Isn't it time for the church to become a different kind of community?

In Memory of Robert A. Berardinelli

Robert A. Berardinelli (Bob), long-term resident of Waite Hill, Ohio and more recently of Hudson, Ohio he entered into rest May 21, 2011. Beloved husband of Ursula (Sandi) Berardinelli (nee Kohls), married for 55 years. Dear father of Pamela Garrud (Trevor), Christina and Raf (Roxanne); cherished grandfather of Rina. Bob was preceded in death by parents Anthony and Anna and brother Raymond. Bob was founder and President of Continental Title for 25 years, a founding member of the Italian-American Cultural Foundation, a member of Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity, a Korean War Veteran, a supporter and Board Member of Willoughby Fine Arts Association and Breckenridge Retirement Village as well as a member of many professional societies. A Service of Remembrance will take place on Friday, June 3rd at Lake Forest Country Club in Hudson, Ohio at 11:00 am. Family will receive friends before the service at 10:00 am. In lieu of flowers, it is requested that contributions be made to the charity of your choice.

Hymns

Feeling nostalgic for UK hymn tunes:

God With Us in the Journey

A sermon for tomorrow God With Us in the Journey

Belief

What does it mean to believe in something and how does belief differ from faith? Well, I don't know exactly. People seem to make this dichotomy over and over but I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that belief is lived out in our actions. If we say that we "believe" something but we live our life in a way that is inconsistent with our purported belief, then we don't really believe it.

I often think of "those daring young (wo)men on the flying trapeze" when I think of belief. If you believe in your ability to make safe contact with your partner, you don't need guide-wires. If you want to believe in your ability to make safe contact with your partner but don't dare go without the guide-wires, then you don't believe. Although you may want to believe. As a side comment, this photo on the left of one trapeze artist catching another in mid-flight without guide-wires was in the minority on my first search page. If you do an image search for "trapeze artist", you get a lot more options like the one on the right: people using guide wires.

I think we all use guide wires at some point in our faith lives. As a culture, for instance, we say "In God we Trust" but what what we really trust in is the stuff on which that slogan is written: The almighty dollar. We say that we believe that Jesus is our Savior but we live our lives as if our accomplishments are our Savior or our children are our Saviors or our lifestyle is our Savior. Most of us are practical atheists although many of us want to believe.

Of course, owning up to our unbelief is difficult. Particularly if you're a Christian. And even moreso if you're a Christian minister.

I write all this by way of asking questions and in the hope that there is something valuable in being transparent and truthful and open. I hope that God is gracious enough to deal with my own unbelief and I have an intuition that this is where the heart of God's grace lies.

But I think we Christians need to own up to the fact that our deeds don't match what we say we believe and that is why we are wide open to the accusation of hypocrisy from those outside the Church. And we are even more hypocritical when we declare that we believe in Jesus but we just can't live as if we believe. That's the dissembling that most folk but us see through in a heartbeat.

Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.

Saved by our ideas about Christ?

Excellent post by Craig Adams: Hopeful Inclusivism. Craig writes:

Think about it a minute. This means that no one can come to God the Father except through the grace & mediation of Christ. There is only one source of light and grace for all people. From Jesus’ perspective these words can be taken to mean: "there is no access to God except through my mediation."

Too many modern evangelicals have misunderstood it to mean: "there is no access to God except through consciousness of Christ." We know there is salvation in the name of Christ. How God will judge those outside of the faith is none of our business. Christ is the Way — not our experience of Christ.

Good Friday Sermon: My Lord, My God is Crucified

More Hell

There is still a lot of talk about Hell in the Christian blogosphere in the aftermath of Rob Bell's book "Love Wins".

A question for readers coming out of these discussions:

True or False? "If you don't believe that God sends (most) non-Christians to a torturous hell, then you are denying the Lordship of Christ."

Discuss.

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.