Have you noticed that when you’re out to eat and order a Coke, the wait staff will often says, “Is Pepsi OK?”  That’s because they’ve been trained to make it clear that Coke and Pepsi are separate brands.  In trademark law, the owner of a brand has a responsibility to enforce the brand’s identity.  If someone is selling a different product under the name of your brand, you can lose the trademark to that product if you don’t take legal action to enforce the trademark.

Yes this branding metaphor has roots in a consumer culture.  In such a culture trademarks are important. Samsung can’t make and sell something called an iPhone.

Is this a legitimate metaphor to use when talking about communicating the gospel?  I think so.  We are called to communicate the gospel in the language of the culture in which we find ourselves.   We may pretend that we don’t like being in a consumer culture–even as we consume more than any other people in the world or the history of the planet. But here we are, all of us profoundly affected by this consumer culture.

Brand = Name = Reputation

And there is a concern in Scripture that corresponds to the consumer culture concern for trademark.   A person’s most precious possession is his or her name.  God goes to great lengths to protect the integrity of his Name.  Using his name in vain is, in the language of our culture “trademark infringement.”

A name is something that often precedes a person.  You live you life and gain a reputation, and people who don’t know you personally have heard of you.  They know your reputation.  Your name precedes you.   They are inclined to receive you or not, based on your name.

Like it or not, Christianity has a name in our culture–a reputation that precedes it before people engage it personally.  And this reputation powerfully affects whether people are inclined or disinclined to receive it.

Why shouldn’t it be so?  Jesus himself said, “Ye shall judge them by their fruits.”   Isn’t it fair to judge a religion by the reputation that those who carry the name Christian have?   We certainly judge other religions by that standard.

Who Establishes the Brand Identity in the Public Sphere?

So what is the most powerful force in American Christianity over the last thirty years?  Evangelical Christianity, hands down. All the sociological surveys indicate that it is so.  Politicians cater to it and it pays when they do. This means the evangelical Christians have a powerful impact on the reputation of Christianity in this place.

As insiders, we can believe all the good things about this movement that we want to.  We would be justified in doing so.  The warmth of the people, the concern for missions, the good deeds that go unnoticed all over the world, the money given to good causes, the volunteer hours for good deeds.  It’s all there and it’s real.   But alongside all that is another public face that powerfully affects our reputation in this place.  His reputation too.

For decades evangelicals were known for avoiding involvement in the public square. They didn’t vote as much as other groups.  It wasn’t cool to be involved in politics.  Then something shifted in the 1970’s.  A number of very high profile evangelical and fundamentalist leaders decided to get involved in the public square.

What was the name of the first multi-denominational organization devoted to this?  The Moral Majority, named by a political operative named Paul Weyrich.

Is this how Christians are to be known in the public square? As the Moral Majority?  Wouldn’t it be great if we were known as moral people? But is it wise or biblical or representative of the Spirit of Jesus that we should call ourselves, “The Moral Majority”?   Especially when President Nixon used the term “The Silent Majority” to refer to all those who supported his policies, while he was busy breaking the law.  That was the cultural precursor to the term, “Moral Majority.”

What if instead of calling ourselves, The Moral Majority, we called ourselves, The Friends of Sinners, or The Broken Majority?

The Moral Majority waxed and waned and was replaced by another organizition: the Christian Coalition.  But the Christian Coalition was a politically conservative organization made up of Christians.  Is that the reputation of Jesus we want to promote?  Jesus the Conservative? Jesus the Liberal?  Jesus the Libertarian?  Jesus the Socialist?  Jesus the Facist?  Jesus the Republican? Jesus the Democrat?

This organization waxed and waned and was replaced by Focus on the Family–founded by Dr. James Dobson as a resource for marriage relationships and parent-child relationships, etc.  But over time it became increasingly political, and when the Christian Coalition tanked, it formed a political arm called The Family Research Council, another politically conservative organization made up of Christians.   Against abortion, gay marriage, gun control, the science behind global warming–the usual hodgepodge, some good, some bad, some debatable, depending on your point of view.

While this was happening over the course of ten, twenty, now thirty years, most pastors in evangelical churches–myself included for too long–didn’t notice how powerful the cultural impact was becoming.  We were like the frog in the pan of water that rises slowly to a boil. We were convinced of the dangers of a secularity that wasn’t as tolerant as it claimed to be.  We felt marginalized by a residual disdain for faith in some institutions–the secular university for example.  We felt like a minority group within society, even as we were becoming something very close to a majority.   And we were and still are concerned about abortion on demand through six months of pregnancy and with a broadly defined “health” exception well into the ninth month, right up to birth, as the  law of the land–the most libertarian approach to abortion in the world, perhaps, the least legal protection for unborn life, less legal protection than many European nations.

And there were very shrewd politicians who took advantage of us.  Richard Nixon being the first, but not the last.  He even snookered Billy Graham, our chief spokesperson.

The Religious Right

And we became allied with that movement called “The Religious Right.”  By we, in this context, I mean mainly white, suburban evangelicals.  Talk about a branding problem!  By an unfortunate coincidence when the brain hears “right” it doesn’t just think, the opposite of “left.”  It thinks the opposite of “wrong.”  Put this together with the first evangelical-fundamentalist political organization of note, The Moral Majority.  Is it any wonder we gained a reputation as self-righteous, as people who proclaim themselves to be righteous?

And slowly but surely we began to lose effectiveness in the one thing we were commanded by our true founder to do: preach good news to every nook and cranny of creation, including the one we find ourselves in.  People on the outside of our faith stayed away in droves.  Yes, we gathered our own into larger and larger churches.  Along with them came people who didn’t mind the reputation that we had gained in the wider culture, or were willing to ignore it. But many others bothered by the reputation that preceded us in their perceptions of us wouldn’t be caught dead in an evangelical church. And not because they are disinterested in Jesus of Nazareth, whose reputation, remarkably remains pretty good as soon you make the obvious point that the founder isn’t always well represented by the followers.

Colorado Springs, We Have a Problem!

Now we’ve got a problem and a big one: a branding problem.   And we have a problem in our own communities, because perfectly devoted and wonderful believers also happen to be politically conservative, rather than politically liberal if forced to choose between those labels. They are conservative for many different reasons–a distrust of big government, a belief that we need to reemphasize personal responsibility, etc.

How do pastors say, “The Religious Right” doesn’t represent all Christians, without sounding like they want to replace the Religious Right with the Religious Left?  Especially when many evangelical Christians have been socialized not to consider that there might be a difference between Christian and conservative or between Christian and liberal?  That this might be a very complex combination of identities, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not.   Pastors who object to the identification of Christianity with the Religious Right are branded by many conservative believers as liberal, outsiders, bad people, traitors.    So we tend to keep our concerns to ourselves.

The fog is lifting, but it’s still a real mess, and pastors don’t like messes.  But there’s a lot at stake: the name of Jesus for starters.  And we will answer to him for how we face this problem, which we cannot do by minimizing it.

Abram heard actual words: “The Lord said to Abram ‘Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you.” Did he hear the words through his ears? the vibrations of speech striking his tympanic membrane?  Or did the words by-pass the ear drum and go straight into the mystery of his consciousness which can’t be pinned down (yet) by any means?  Does it matter?  He knew as we know when we hear words.

He had no Bible, no text, no Torah.  He heard a voice.  Does God want less for us who have the Bible, the text, the Torah, the accumulated history of millennia of believers finding their father in Abraham?

The only question is: are words meant to be heard? Abraham heard words.  Are we meant to hear words?  That is, are we meant to  experience words conveyed in-with-through a voice–the words of a personal being?  One can read the Bible literally and it remains letters on a page or a screen:  letters to which we assign our own voice or the voice of someone other than the One who inspired–breathed–the words in the first place.

We can spout opinions regarded to be orthodox without having heard the words.  We can do this even when we believe the Bible to be the literal word of God.

So what?  That’s inadequate.

Provin’ Ourselves Right-Thinking, the Easy Way

In our current American evangelical community ethos, we prove our tribal loyalty, we demonstrate our presumed faithfulness to God by asserting our committment to the literal words of the Bible, as though that is enough.  I understand why we do this.  It is because we’ve been in a century long debate with those who seem to be influenced by literary trends that only deconstruct the text and in so doing question whether the text of Scripture or any text for that matter can bear any meaning other than the meaning brought to it by the listener.  As though there is no such thing as person-to-person communication.

We want to be earnest, real-deal believers in Jesus.  I do.  So we are not satisfied with a deconstructed text or a deconstructed Jesus.  We long for the risen and reconstituted Jesus, the once dead but now living Lord.

But we take short-cuts.  One of the short cuts is the adoption of the opinion that if we use this word “literal” in reference to the Bible, we’re saying what it is God wants.   The instinct to want to say what God wants is commendable.  The short-cut is not.

Believing the text to be the literal word of God isn’t enough. Or what we often mean by that is not enough.   We can read the text literally with no voice attached.  This is what the written word allows us to do: reduce a spoken word into a symbolic code.  In the process, the voice is not conveyed. The voice has to be imagined, inferred,  or better yet heard by a work of the Spirit riding on the symbolic code of the letters.  Can we be open to the text but not the Spirit?  I think so.

Please Don’t Mention This to Your Psychiatrist

Ah, but there’s the rub!  How frightening!  How imposing!  How intimidating! How out of my control!  Gosh that’s brazen, bold, almost sounds crazy, that letters on a page or a screen could be ridden by the Spirit like the wind, and the breathe of God could be conveyed within us and we could experience–feel, think, whatever it is that happens within us with a person speaks and we hear–God.

Let’s take it a step further: the Bible itself bears witness to our faith in Jesus as Abrahamic.  Abraham is the father of all who believe.   His connection with God is a paradigm, a pattern for ours.  And Abraham heard words from God, even without a text, before any text had been gathered.  If we believe the Bible to be inspired, as I do, then we believe that the God who inspired that Bible has the capacity to communicate with fallen, broken, paganesque, godless people such as Abram, such as ourselves, with an immediacy that is frightening.  God may certainly do this in any way he chooses.

So What?

How would this affect us practically? It would mean that in addition to reading the Bible we would aslo meditate on Scripture.  Our meditation on Scripture is a different mode of engagement than our mere reading of Scripture.  Different things will come to light, different aspects of our being will be engaged. We will undergo God in a way that we don’t–or don’t always or readily–when we simply read Scripture.

Both are important.  But of the two, meditating on Scripture, is I think, more important.  Why? Because it is available to all people, not just to people who can read and who have access to a readable text.  Those who simply hear the words of Scripture from another human being may meditate on those words–what most believers through most of church history did when they were unable to read or had not access to a text.

Speak Lord, Your Servants are Listening!

And it means that we are to anticipate, expect, yearn for, an experience of perceiving the voice of God in a way that fits us in the way that Abram’s perception of God’s voice fit him.  Just as well: we can’t get into his head to know how it felt to him to hear, so we can only trust, anticipate, expect, that something analogous will happen to us–that as the seed of the Seed of Abraham this too is possible for us.   This thing which is frustratingly not under our control, but within the possibility of who we are.

Until we are moving into the reality of this, I think much of our banter about the Bible and it’s meaning may be just that, banter.

“A bruised reed he will not break, and smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” Our master is like that.  He is the master of gentleness,  extreme gentleness.

And where is such gentleness especially called for?  Remember the woman caught in adultery?  The religious leaders full of zeal for righteousness nabbed her in the act and brought her to Jesus for a ruling.  They were within their rights.  She was wrong.  They were right. Her deeds were an offense to God and the community and to them.  They had Scripture to back it up.

But when they brought her to him, he knelt down and wrote in the sand. Doodled, maybe. He refused to look up at her or them.  He refused to speak.  He refused to engage them in their display of righteousness, because it wasn’t true enough for him.

In fact, in the whole account, he NEVER spoke to them about her,  as though she were none of their business.  He had something private to say to her. Presumably we only know if it because she told someone when she was ready.  They were not privy to this.  No doubt they went about declaiming how soft he was on sin, being a sinner himself.

In our culture-war mode we can afford to rail against this and that and the other.

Not pastors when it comes to the people who would be regarded as the sinners of our day–the people on the outs of conventional religion.  And not evangelicals who seek to represent the friend of sinners.

Gentleness means not speaking before you know what you’re speaking about.  It means holding your tongue often when you DO know what you’re speaking about.  It means listening carefully to the experience of others with a view toward understanding their struggles. Can you see what they are facing from within their own experience, alongside your own outside view?

In my early days as a pastor, I was sometimes more concerned with being right than being gentle.  And in my being right I was often most wrong because the righteousness I manifested was not good enough.  Not pure love enough.  It was ordinary religious righteousness.

Young Pastors Take Heed

Can you think of any group of people whom Jesus would long to engage through the church in extreme gentleness?     Thirty years ago the church began to relate to divorced people seeking remarriage with this gentleness, even though many of them were divorced for the wrong reasons in the first place, making any remarriage a simple matter of adultery by any reading of Scripture.  By the consensus of the church a hundred years ago, rare indeed was the divorce that could legitimately result in a remarriage. People divorced and remarried and quietly quit their religion.

Not too long ago, annulments in the Catholic church were very rare. Today they are common.  Not too long ago, Protestant churches weren’t so hot at making room for divorced and remarried people.  We forget that the great apologist, C.S. Lewis was married late in life to a divorced woman, Joy Davidman.  There’s hardly a church in the United States that would blink at his marriage today, but in his day–not so long ago–it was outside the bounds of the Anglican church.  Based on their best understanding of the Bible, mind you.

I had a nice tidy understanding of that issue–divorce and remarriage. I studied the Scripture on this issue more than any other pastor I know, actually. But human life is messier than the neat and tidy categories I derived from my study. But with experience, I wrestled with the Scripture touching on these questions from a different perch, based on a more informed understanding of what people go through when their marriages are messed up or when they are messed up within their marriages.

We’re not just accountable for our interpretation of any given text of the Bible. We’re also accountable for the perch we adopt when making our interpretation.

What Informs our Pastoral Approach to Divorce and Remarriage?

Do you think our approach to divorce and remarriage is just a simple matter of deciding what the texts mean?  Or is our approach also affected by knowing people–and loving people–who are in bad marriages or married to bad people or are struggling with their own intractable human weaknesses?   There isn’t an evangelical pastor in the United States who doesn’t know and love someone whose divorce and remarriage wouldn’t pass the Scripture test.  Many of them are evangelical pastors, board members, prominent leaders.  Is this good or bad?  Perhaps it’s both, perhaps it’s mixed, perhaps it will be revealed by One who knows better than we do,

Is this fraught territory?  It sure is.  We want to uphold marriage and keep married people, especially those with children, from giving up on their covenant promises too soon or for the wrong reasons.  But we’ve managed to find our way to a gentle approach to this issue and for good reason.

Are there other groups of people we just don’t know?  Or don’t care about?

Jesus wasn’t gentle with everyone though, was he?  Sometimes he was quite ungentle with his own disciples, especially when they wanted to keep the circle small.  He was extremely ungentle with the religious leaders of his day–but his assertive, sometimes scathing rebukes, were in the service of his strategy for dealing with sinners.

We need to get our gentle back.

How Do We Get Our  Gentle Back?

How DO we get our gentle back?  This doesn’t happen by figuring out how to think correctly about gentleness or the balance between gentleness and severity.  It doesn’t happen by arriving at the correct view of whatever behaviors bother us.  Oh there’s work to be done there, for sure–serious wrestling to be done.  But that does not get our gentle back.

Gentleness happens by meditating on Scripture, by spending time in the Presence, by allowing the Presence proximity, by silence, by communion with God, by facing one’s own stuff in relationship with others. It happens as we  step through the portal Jesus has opened for us into the love of Abba, Father.

The more we have anything to say on these issues, the more we must be pickled in this love.  And I do mean pickled.  Sitting in the love of the Abba, Father like cucumbers submerged in brine, soaking it in.

Advice to young pastors: get thee pickled in love.  Praying isn’t enough.  Study isn’t enough.  Thinking clearly isn’t enough.  You must be pickled in love.  Wasn’t this what made Jesus gentle, without turning him into a wimp?  Wasn’t this what drew the sinners to him like tweenage girls to the Jonas Brothers?  Isn’t this the Jesus who has healed us whenever we’ve been healed?

We need to get our gentle back.

Oh what folly!

As though there is a seamless garment called the Christian worldview and a seamless garment called the secular worldview. And a seamless garment called the Muslim worldview. And on and on, ad nausuem.  If you are a Christian, well then, by golly you have a Christian worldview, especially if you have learned what the seven marks of the Christian worldview are.   Once you do a little homework, you see the world through the eyes of Christ!  And if you have a secular worldview, you see the eyes through the eyes of a consistent, pure, unalloyed secularity.   Boo.  Hiss.

Why can’t we just admit it? We don’t know what we’re talking about.  Most of us avoided anthropology like the plague because that’s where you learn about human origins, and that means the “e” word. We’ve picked up our anthropology third hand, like an STD. You could learn more about anthropology from one Wikepeia article than from a whole course on the Christian worldview.

the downside of glib worldview talk

But because we think we know what we’re talking about when we talk about worldview, we blind ourselves to one of the great marvels of the universe and the object of God’s incomprehensible love: people.  Messy, inconsistent, internally inconsistent, self-contradictory, surprisingly wonderful and maddeningly foolish people.  Who have, if anything, a patchwork worldview that defies description.

We distrust people if we sniff out something that might not be part of the mythical Christian worldview.  For example, environmentalists are people who have a secular worldview, or so we’ve been taught. They are concerned about exploding population, so they are generally inclined to say, “Mission Acomplished!” when they hear the command to  multiply and fill the earth.  Many of them support “abortion rights.”

Now are hackles are up, because we see the tell-tale signs of a secular worldview.  When the environmentalists tell us that human activity accounts for the recent increase in average global temperatures, we’re not buying it, because we don’t want to swallow that evil secular worldview whole and entire.  All these things are connected, you know. So we turn a deaf ear to people, real live human beings who bear the image of God people because of this poppy-cock worldview talk.

we baptize our patchwork worldview as the christian one

By assuming that there is a single Christian worldview we naturally assume that if we are really earnest Christians then we must have one.  Our American, Republican, White, Suburban sensibilities get baptized and come out smelling like a rose.  But it’s not the rose of Sharon, I’m afraid.   It’s “eau de somethin’ else.”  I’m not saying it’s bad.  I’m just saying it ain’t a Christian worldview, because there’s no such thing.  There are only people who let Christ into their messed up inner worlds and he sits somewhere inside of that disaster area and says, “Where do I begin?”  while we go around thinking that we have the worldview of Christ–the worldview of an itinerant preaching rabbi during Second Temple Judaism.

And it’s a shame because we could learn a thing or two from cultural anthropol0gy, which is the study of human culture, about their diversity and complexity and marvels and dangers.

We could learn a thing or two about the lenses that shape our perceptions.  This might, if we let it, humble us about our perceptions.  We might understand that brains are not like a roll of Kodak film—God speaks or acts or influences and it shows up on the film just the way it happened as though  we capture his word like your camera captures a sunset.

Instead we hear a thing or two about worldviews from someone who has heard a thing or two about worldviews from someone else and then we use our knowledge to keep a safe distance from people who are different than we are. So as not to be hoodwinked by their worldview.

Don’t drink the kool-aid!

In my dreamy prayer, people in my life–their faces that is–appeared before me and we looked at each other, like a baby before self-consciousness dawns, looks at a mother or a father or a sibling or a stranger in the supermarket and the mother or the father or the sibling or the stranger looks back, and in a brief moment, forgets their own self-consciousness.

You know how it is in your everyday life–there’s always someone, a family member, a co-worker, a teacher, a fellow student, a neighbor with whom you are processing a little relational tension, working through a rough patch.  Even with these faces, it was just this face to face presence.  I was trying to remember while it was happening what the C.S. Lewis book I read thirty years ago was about: Till We Have Faces.

This is what we have in store, knowing God face to face like this.  If ever we get to know another person like this it is but a foretaste of what is called “the Beatific Vision” which is nothing other than being face to face with God and surviving.

Who can blame us if we cling to our systematic theologies in the meantime?  Who can blame us if we receive or patch together our own air-tight orthodoxies through which we can run all of life’s and loose ends and have them come out tied like bows?  It’s a comfortable land of no contradictions, no true dilemmas, no bad choices between two evils–none of the intrinsic-chaotic messiness of the human condition.  The system sees to that.  But it is not the solution.

Signs That We Trust the System as the Solution

How can we tell if we are clinging to the one when only that other–the face to face encounter–is the end of our heart’s longing?  We iron the wrinkles out of the Bible, forgetting that the wrinkles are the sign that the thing is to be worn.  And we are on the constant search to resolve contradictions–between free will and predestination, between James and Paul, between this verse and that–not because the contradictions cannot contain the truth but because we can’t stand them.

And we seek–always, above all things–balance.  We seek to strike the balance between “judge not”  and “go ahead and judge.”   Or between “unless you hate your father and mother” and “honor your father and your mother”  or between, “love your enemies” and “defeat your enemies.”

Balance is so, well, so balanced. Who could object to balance?  Especially in a world so horribly off kilter.   Let us strike the balance between loving the sinner on the one hand, and hating the sin on the other.   Love and hate, perfectly balanced.

But shouldn’t it give us pause when after we’ve done our balancing act, it’s the words of Jesus that always seem to lose their punch?

We do it with the best of intentions. We love Jesus but he speaks in such an unbalanced way at times.  Who ever heard Jesus speak and came away saying, “What a perfectly balanced take on the truth!  Jesus, you struck the perfect balance!”

Read any book by an evangelical pastor to any evangelical readership, any book by any priest to any catholic readership, and you find a never-ending balancing act.  I mean this, and not that.  Distinctions galore.  One the one, and on the other. Going up to the edge of a cliff, but always pulling back.   And so often the truth that these books tell is a dull one.

Compare this to the bare naked words of Jesus in the gospels, resonating with the fire and anguish and tears of the Hebrew prophets, with the cravings of the psalms, the dancing wisdom of the proverbs, and the strange but compelling stories of Genesis and Exodus and Joshua.   As different as day is to night.

Perhaps that’s as it should be, or perhaps it’s simply as it must be, or maybe it just is.

Having tasted both, I like my truth straight up in all its mystifying and maddening wonder.  I like the like I like my wife, personal.

How does that actually work: love the sinner, hate the sin? Easy.  You love the person but you hate their sin.  Exactly.  You hate THEIR sin, which is easy.  I hate your sin.  You hate my sin.  But we love each other even as we hate each others’ sins.  Please, where can I can get into that community?  Sounds like a wonderful place to be.  Once they’ve hated each others sins away, that is.  Behold the community of love that hates your sins away!

How’s that working out for you?  Love the sinner, hate the sin.  How’s that working out in your marriage, say?  Honey I love you, but I hate your sin.  I love you too sweetheart, but I hate your sin even more.  Good night.

As a pastor, you get a good chance to practice “love the sinner, hate the sin.”  I find that there are only certain sins though, that I actually hate.  I don’t hate greed.  I don’t hate gluttony.  I don’t really hate fornication.  (Don’t tell me I’m supposed to. I already know that.)  The fact is, I sympathize with these sins.  I can totally understand how someone might slip in their direction.

I’m very suspicious of the fact that so many heterosexuals are so adept at hating the sin of those who crave sexual union with their own gender.  It seems as though we ought to distrust convenient, easy-to-come-by hate.

The Sin I Hate With a Passion

Now take my  hatred of adultery.  I HATE men leaving their wives for younger women. It’s so slimy. James Dobson made it easy for Newt Gingrich to apologize on his radio show for leaving his cancer ridden wife for a young intern, at the time Gingrich was busy condemning Bill Clinton for his attentions to a young intern.   I wanted to cancel my subscription to Focus on the Family. And James Dobson has been faithful to his wife for longer than I’ve been alive.  Let’s just say it didn’t put me in a judge not, lest ye be judged mood.

I knew a guy who left his wife after she was diagnosed with MS.  I wanted to throttle him.  I’m sorry,  I forgot.  I loved him, but I hated his sin. I wanted to throttle his sin–choke it, kill it.  Only it was in him.  As Paul put it so concretely:  his sin was residing in his members.  One particular member, actually.  Give me the box cutters and I’ll take care of that sin for you, buster.

Hate is not pretty, is it?

I really do have a thing about men who leave their wives for younger women.  I judge this harshly, I really do.  Or do I judge them harshly?  How would I tell the difference?

On a lot other sins, I’m a softie.  I understand.  I’m sympathetic.  I don’t come down so hard. Ask people who worry about me.  They worry that I’m not tough enough on sin from the pulpit, or rather, the music stand.  Usually not their sins, of course.  Rarely do I get special requests to condemn these.

But I can say with confidence that I hate these guys doing this. (I’m back to the adulterers now.) What was that I just said? I hate these guys doing this.  Does that mean I hate thse guys or that I hate these guys while they are doing this or that I hate it that these guys are doing this?   See that’s the thing about hate.  It’s a tiger by the tail.  I try to sic him on the sin, but he’s hungry for the sinner.

Doesn’t it seem as though hate is not very interested in abstractions like sins separated from persons? Hate is looking for someONE to hate not someTHING.  Like that Jefferson Airplane tune, “You gotta find somebody to love.”  Or in this case, hate.

I haven’t had much luck being a redemptive voice with a lot of these men whose sin I hate.  Perhaps they were able to feel the fact that I hate their sin so they were not eager to open up to me.  Usually, these guys  just slink away from the church and don’t answer my phone calls. With a few notable exceptions.

Maybe I’m Just No Good At It

Perhaps it’s just that I’m not very good at this hating the sin business. Correction: I’m VERY good at this hating business.  It comes very naturally, once I give it a little room to breathe.

Hate.  Meditate on that word. Murmur it over and over.  Hate, hate, hate, hate.  Do you like what it does inside? Me too.  Delicious. I especially enjoy hating other people’s sins, which is the beauty of “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

But what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.  So how does that work for you?  Try loving yourself and hating your sin.  Consider one of your besetting sins.  Now meditate on that sin saying, I hate my sin, I hate my sin.  This is how men trapped in pornography feel about their pornography. They hate it.  It doesn’t get them very far, though, because hatred isn’t much of a redemptive thing, and it’s difficult to aim it precisely, at the division between joint and marrow, at the mystical boundary between the sinner and his sin.

So this is the problem with “love the sinner, hate the sin.”   It sounds so crisp and clean, like a scalpel. But in reality, it’s a rusty butter knife.  May I take out your infected appendix with my rusty butter knife?  Granted, “love the sinner, hate the sin,” is a big improvement over “hate the sinner, hate the sin.”

Maybe it’s just me that is the problem. Maybe everyone else is good at this.  But I find my own hatred very difficult to wield.

I’m sure one could quote chapter and verse about hating sin.  Especially from the Psalms.  The Psalmists were good at praying things like, I hate their guts! Correction: I hate their sins!

I Love You, But I Hate Your Guts!

Actually, why couldn’t it be: I love you, but I hate your guts? We are not, after all, our guts–surely we are distinguishable from our guts. I certainly wish to be distinguishable from mine.

Still, I’m sure there are verses in the bible to back up hating sins, hating things, not people, etc.   I guess I’m not very good at it.  I’m not to be trusted with it, yet, perhaps. Maybe others are more trustworthy.  It wouldn’t be the first time someone else was ahead of me in the line!

Jesus, of course,  calls us to hate. But oddly, he doesn’t call us to hate sin.  He calls us to hate our fathers and our mothers.  He didn’t hear the thing about loving our fathers and mothers but hating their sin. Obviously, I’m being provocative for a purpose. I’d like to provoke a re-examination of “love the sinner, hat the sin.” In case you hadn’t noticed, this is not a dissertation–more like one half of a dialectic.  A thinking out loud post.  One might say a venting out loud post.

Here’s what makes me suspicious of “love the sinner, hate the sin”:  the truth of Jesus doesn’t come to us in simple little sticky phrases that make dilemmas easy.  The truth of Jesus often plunges us into dilemmas. Like “judge not, lest ye be judged” to pick one of his sticky phrases. Sticky enough to get caught in our throat on the way down.

The truth of Jesus is often a truth from which we recoil when we hear it. As it opens up regions of the human heart never before laid bare.

So, “love the sinner, hate the sin?”  How about, “love the sinner, period.”  Dear Lord Jesus, show us the way. You’ve had plenty of practice.

Post Script for Readers: This post introduces a new blog category called Thinking Out Loud.  We all need space to think out loud, including pastors.  Biblical truth is not plain and simple, obvious to everyone truth. It is personal truth which means it needs a full on engagement of mind, heart, soul strength.  These aren’t issues that we can just bat around on a blog; we need to pray them through. Much of the stuff I post–at least the ongoing themes–are things I’m thinking through and praying through and the blog format is invaluable to me because it allows me to hear what others in the wider faith community (and beyond) think in response to my thoughts. We’re meant to affect each other, because truth is a communal, not an individual treasure.  No one of has it right.

Until we understand this about ourselves and face it and find our way back to being evangelical, our movement will continue to shrink in the United States. Until we do, it ought to.  If we’re not evangelical, God will find someone who is, whether or not they use the label.

Face it: we’re known for thinking that we’re right about so many things.  We’re right about abortion and gay marriage mainly.  We’re right about what’s wrong with the world, in general.  We’re right about our politics, our religion, our interpretation of the Bible. We’re right about evolution being wrong and climate change not being exacerbated by human activity.  That’s right: most of the climate scientists are wrong, but we are right about climate change. A typically evangelical sensibility, I’m afraid, in these dark times.  We’re right about liberals and their mushy-headed ways.  We’re right about truth being objective, even though the truth we claim is a subject, not an object.  We’re right about the so-called Christian worldview trumping all others because we heard a talk on worldview once and now we’re all anthropologists.   And on, and on, and on.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Being Right

Please don’t make me assure you that there’s nothing wrong with being right. All right. There’s nothing wrong with being right.  Unless our desire to be right eclipses our passion for the gospel. And we end up being known for being the people who argue and assert and dissect and inspect what’s right and what’s wrong as if it’s a holy calling.  We’re the truth squad instead of the grace brigade.  Which, I’m sad to say, is too true of us these days.

It’s not our job, as evangelicals to be right. That’s not what we’re here for. That’s not what we’re about. God is right. He has it covered. We, on the other hand, are sinners. That means that we are of the stock that ate from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Ever after we have had the pernicious feeling that we know what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, ourselves. We can figure that out and be very sure of what it is. And tell other people. We have even come to think of this as our job, our divine responsibility.

Is this what it means to be evangelical?  No.

To be evangelical is to be preoccupied with communicating the message of good news.  Good.  News.  What’s wrong with you and me and the world is not good and it sure isn’t news. It’s bad history–bad, boring, unimaginative history; “old news” the ultimate oxymoron, not good news, the thing the world is dying to hear from us.  Convincing people of what is right and what is wrong is not our job. That is the job of the holy Spirit.  Our job is to be evangelical–telling and being good news to anyone who will listen.

I feel the weight of our concern for being right like a millstone round our neck and we’re on our way down and don’t have a reasonable plan for how we might take a next breath.  Dear Jesus, help us.

At our best we are activist, inventive, unembarrassed,  globally minded, community networking types, who are willing to place our bets on a happy ending.

We Do Stuff

We volunteer to help out. More than any other religious group.  We teach Sunday School. We usher.  We send teams to New Orleans, long after the camera crews are gone.  We run homeless food pantries.  We like to get stuff done.  And we like to do it for Jesus, to please him, to advance what we believe to be his cause. Carl Safina, my crappy atheist friend, and by that I mean he’s as crappy an atheist as I am a Christian, told me that he spoke to a religious group about the environment and they received him warmly.  “But I had the feeling,” he said, and I knew what was going to follow, so I filled in the blank and said, “that they liked to study it more than do much about it.”  How did you know?  he said.  I knew that if they knew all about the environment, they probably weren’t evangelicals.   If they were evangelicals, they’d probably be a little suspicious of Carl,  but once convinced, they’d want to do something to do about it.  Because at our best, we like to do stuff.

We Invent Stuff

We invented the altar call.  What a concept!  Invite people to take a physical action, to walk up front in front of other people, to signify their willingness to surrender to Jesus.  Jesus said, “Follow me!” And people either stepped forward or hung back.  We invent ways for people to step forward.   I don’t think the altar call works like it used to, but I think we’ll invent something else.  Because that’s what we do.  We invented Sunday School.  But it’s even better than it sounds, as in invention. Because it was invented by D.L. Moody to gather poor kids who didn’t go to school before public education was widespread.   He wanted to teach them to read, so they could read the Bible.  Isn’t that great?  He wanted to teach them to read BECAUSE HE LOVED A BOOK!

My daughter has a (boy)friend who spent two years in the Peace Corps in Bolivia.  His job was to teach villagers to drill for their own fresh water.  He learned a drilling method created by an evangelical missionary that cost about five dollars per drill using stuff you could get at any hardware store.  It could be used by hand with an ingenious pulley thinga-ma-jiggy.  I could go on and on about things we’ve invented.

We Couldn’t Care Less

What you think about us, that is, so long as we’re sure Jesus likes what we’re doing.  Man, that’s a refreshing thing when its working right.  It brings a freedom from group-think that groups need from time to time to move forward.  People who couldn’t care less can really change things up sometimes.  Certain things can only change when enough people get to that point.  My friend Joseph, the guy who mentored me when I was a puppy dog believer, suggested we go door to door offering to pray for people and tell them about Jesus.  I said, “Won’t they think we’re religious whackos?”

“So what?” Joseph said.   I liked that about him.

I’m no historian, but if you scratched around in stacks at the library, I’ll bet you’d discover that behind every progressive movement, ever culture-wide moment of social transformation for the better, there were people, many of them evangelicals, who decided to care less what someone thought about this or that.  And because they did something that needed to change did change.

We Know There’s a Wide World Out There

Nicholas Kristof, from the New York Times, that liberal rag, calls evangelicals, “the new internationalists.”  Our government gives less to international aid as a percentage of our budget than many other nations.  But evangelicals have an international relief corps that dwarfs the Peace Corps by many magnitudes.  Gosh, we’re everywhere.  Ordinary people in evangelical churches go to far off and far out places to do stuff, even when the State Department thinks it might be a little dicey where we’re going.

Ask any linguist where the world of linguistics would be if it weren’t for missionaries going out to every nook and cranny of creation to learn some strange tongue spoken by a thousand people or so: painstakingly figuring out what people are talking about when know one else in the world can understand their language.

We Know How to Improve Your Social Capital

Robert Putnam from Harvard, that training ground for liberal ideas (I’m having too much fun with this!) traces the preciptious decline in social capital that has plagued us, literally plagued us since the Baby Boomers came of age.  Every generation since the World War 2 Generation has suffered a decline social capital–how much meaningful human contact a person in a given day–and this decline has resulted in higher rates of depression, suicide, headache, GI distress, physical malaise, and other bad things.

Putnam, who to the best of my knowledge is secular in sensibilities, says that one thing which has reversed a decline in social capital over the course of American history is a religious revival. And most of the religious revivals in the history of the country have been evangelical ones.  We’re in the revival business baby. If you join a church, it turns out, you enjoy as 40% increase in your social capital. Unless you sit in the corner and don’t talk to anybody.

My friend Don, who was also a crappy atheist, came to faith in Jesus because his mother went to an evangelical church and when she was sick with cancer, people from that church rallied to care for her, in a way that took his atheism out of him.

And We’re Suckers for a Good Story

Oh yes, we are, at our best.  I’ve spent many a morning, I won’t tell you where, reading “Drama in Real Life” from yes, the Reader’s Digest, and without fail, two-thirds of the way in to the story, I’m choking back tears because something wonderful and unexpected happens to save the day.

Here’s the thing: we’re not afraid to believe that God himself would appear two thirds of the way into a story that is THE story of the way things AND the way things could be, and not just get chocked up, but believe it to be true, and seek to enter that story or let that story intersect our own and re-write it from within. We know life sucks, but we’re placing our bets on a happy ending.

Jesus was surrounded by religious critics. He seems to have them primarily in mind when he uses the phrase, “the world.”  As though there is something characteristically “of this world” with religion.  As if there is something so very secular about religion in one of its classic manifestations.

“And when he [the Paraclete, the Comforter] comes, he will show the world how wrong it was, about sin, and about who was in the right, and about judgment: about sin: in that they refuse to believe in me; about who was in the right: in that I am going to the Father and you will see me no more; about judgment: in that the prince of this world is already condemned.” (John 16: 8-11)

upside down to see right-side up

There he goes again, turning things upside down to make them right-side up.  He and his disciples have been under intense scrutiny. The critical eye of religion has been on them: glaring, staring, baring their error.  The world has been at work on them, doing what the world does best: accusing, condemning, judging good and evil.

So it is better for his disciples if he goes, because until he goes the Spirit will not come; the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Advocate, the one who comes alongside them to defend them against the world in orthodox garb–one of the world’s favorite costumes.

The Spirit will show the world how wrong it is concerning sin: that the Word was among them, but understood him not; that Scripture testified concerning him, but they were so sure of their Scriptural mastery that they refused to come to him, “that they refuse to believe in me.”   This is sin: this the mark that is in the process of being missed and when we miss this, we’ve missed what sin is, even when we’re sure we know what it is in others.

The Spirit will show the world how wrong it is concerning who was in the right: that he who is to be condemned for heresy, will be raised from the hertic’s grave and then ascended to God’s right hand in vindication of all he said and did and is; that the world in its favorite disguise is shown to be wrong about him, “that I am going to the Father and you will see me no more.”  This is righteousness: that he alone is in the right and everything and everyone is in the wrong until it and they align to him.

The Spirit will show the world how wrong it is concerning judgment: that the accuser, the condemner, the snake who convinced us it is ours to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that we can be like God, knowing good and evil with certainty and clarity and confidence, enough to render our rulings,  is himself accused, condemned and ruled to be wrong, “that the Prince of this world is already condemned.”  This is the judgment: that the accuser is condemned already as are we when we sit in his seat of judgment.

Until we feel the blood rushing to our heads, we’re not seeing the world as Jesus sees the world.

Let me assure you, I have no interest in ejecting anything from the Bible. I don’t think anyone would give a rip if I pronounced such a judgment. The Bible would keep on rolling along as is before I came along. So I’m disinclined to trust my authority let alone my capacity to get out the Thomas Jefferson shears and start cutting away.  Perhaps Vatican III might want to take that up, or better yet, Jerusalem II, but little old me?

But the idea that every book, every writer, ever jot, every tittle of the Bible has equal weight or significance? I don’t know how it’s possible to engage the Bible that way–at least not consistently.  I for one wouldn’t want to try.  That’s not to say the whole kit and caboodle isn’t inspired.  It’s simply to say we can’t engage any collection of writings, any book, any narrative, any person, any meaning-soaked entity that way.

We distinguish between the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets among the Hebrew prophets, don’t we?  Because Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel are obviously more significant in scope than say, Obadiah or Amos.  No knock on the minor prophets, but there is a reason we call them minor prophets.  Doesn’t mean the minor prophets don’t belong among the Hebrew prophets or that any one of them is uninspired.

Jesus Did It Too

Jesus spoke of weightier matters of the law like justice and mercy.   Weightier than what?  Other matters of the law.  Other legitimate, inspired matters of the law.  He made a very big point of teaching what he believed was the heart of the Law and the Prophets–the bulls eye, the center of the middle, because this is important for us, even with sacred things, maybe especially with sacred things: to have the em-PHA-sis on the right syl-LA-ble.

Is Genesis weightier than Ecclesiastes?  I think so.  Is Exodus weightier than Genesis?  Mike thinks so.   Is Philemon weightier than Romans?  Most wouldn’t think so, except Onesimus, whose freedom was at stake in that letter. When the church was wrestling through the legitimacy of slavery as an institution, Philemon became weighty indeed.  Did the Holy Spirit tuck that little gem of a letter away for a time when the church would finally have ears to hear the cry of the slaves?  I think so.  But I digress.  None of this discrimination or relative weighting is pitting one book or writer of the Bible against another as they are wrestlers who could toss each other out of the ring.  It’s honest and meaningful engagement with the sacred text.

Maybe my problem is that I’m a pastor who often has the pleasure of introducing the Bible to people who have never cracked it open before.  People who think Christ was Jesus’ last name.  They have no particular doctrine of Scripture and if  I were to set them straight by saying The Bible is the Word of God, their eyes would just glaze over.  They need to taste and see what the thing is.

So generally speaking I start them off with the gospels so as to introduce them to the remembered words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth.  If this doesn’t appeal to them, I’m not thinking Romans will.

I don’t think it’s an accident of history that the earliest Jesus communities were founded on what Luke meant by “the apostles teaching.” The remembered words and deeds of Jesus, circulated by word of mouth, before they were downloaded on an Kindles,  were the first catechism for those very early communities.  There’s something central about the gospels.  The early church came up with the Apostles’ and the the Nicene Creeds.  I don’t think any subsequent summary of faith holds a candle to these two summaries.  Not even, dare I say, the Vineyard statement of faith.  And the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are rooted in those gospels (and the book of Acts.)   I mean this is the love story.

Speaking of Nervous

See, I get nervous when anyone gets nervous about asserting the PRIMACY of Jesus.  I mean, Jesus is the final word. Any words after Him are commentary. Like Paul, or the author of Hebrews, or James.   Wouldn’t Paul insist on the same?   Wouldn’t he tear out what remains of his hair if we were to claim that his words had the same weight as his Master’s words?  He argued for his rightful place among the other apostles, those so called pillars, as he referred to them. The man didn’t lack a sense of his own importance. But  I wouldn’t want to be the one to suggest to Paul that his words were in a league with his master’s words, not on one of his best days.   Which doesn’t mean Paul wasn’t inspired to write what he wrote, or that he doesn’t belong in the canon.

Actually, I get nervous around all this nervousness.   Luther was not the nervous sort.  He read the letter of James and called it “an epistle of straw.”  I think that means that he thought it was crap.  You gotta love Luther, and you can see why he loved Paul.   Hey, if you’re gonna sin, sin boldly!  If you’re gonna pass wind, aim it in the direction of the devil!

Me?  I love the letter of James.  If this guy wasn’t the blood brother of Jesus, he sure did a great imitation.

If James sat down with Paul, I think they would disagree over works.  I think they’d have a royal row over the royal law of liberty.

I think it tells us something important about the Holy Spirit that He inspired both men to write what they did.

I think it tells us that the Holy Spirit is not a systematic theologian.  He is personed truth guiding us into personed truth, not systematic truth, and there is a difference.

Oh, oh.  Have I made even more people nervous?