Tag Archives: religion

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    “Me Too”

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    Late last year, I read an amazing article about a pastor who became friends with the notoriously disgraced Ted Haggard. (For those of you who don’t keep up with such things, Ted Haggard was a prominent conservative Evangelical pastor who had been caught hiring a male prostitute to join him at hotels for “massages” and crystal meth.) After his scandal broke, Haggard had gotten counseling and then restarted his ministry. Most of us watching from the outside scoffed at the idea of him as a legitimate minister at that point. But in that article, his reluctant friend described Haggard as “excited that the only people who would talk to him now were the truly broken and hurt”. Think about that. Jesus said, “it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” And that’s what those of us who are following in his footsteps are supposed to be doing as well. Prior to his scandal, Haggard was the leader of the National Association of Evangelical Churches. He was a founder of a large church in Colorado Springs. This was a man who was surrounded by and ministering almost entirely to the righteous (or at least the outwardly righteous). It was only after he was disgraced and lost everything that he found himself walking in the steps of Christ serving those who, like himself, were too broken to even hide their sin and sickness.

    Now, I certainly don’t mean to imply that hiring prostitutes and using drugs is a great way to put yourself on the road to serving Christ. But I do think that the story of Ted Haggard has something to teach us. Most Christians want nothing more than to live safe, respectable and prosperous lives. And we are loathe to do anything which would imperil that. To the extent that this allows us to avoid sin, that is fine. But too often, the result is that we are also avoiding becoming the sort of people who can really reach out and serve those who are not righteous but broken.

    Of course, life is not always so kind as to only send you troubles which you have chosen to set yourself up for. Accidents, injuries, sickness, loss and other human beings often intrude on even the most carefully constructed lives. And when they do, the nearly universal response is to ask the basically useless question, “why me?” We feel that somehow life has been unfair to us. We line up all the reasons we don’t deserve our injuries or the scandal of failure as evidence of how unfair life is being to us. But as the saying famously goes, life isn’t about us.

    Ritu Ghatourey has said, “some of the most comforting words that can be heard are me too. That moment when you find out that your struggle is also someone else’s struggle and that you’re not alone fighting that same battle.” One of the things which I have come to suspect as I’ve walked through my own struggles is that so far as there is a reason for the bad things which happen, it may be for just this reason. If I, like Christ, am supposed to be serving and tending to the broken, what can I offer if have never been broken myself?

    If our primary goal is to be comfortable and safe and we eschew following God or life into places where scandal, poverty and suffering may result, we may well find ourselves too comfortable and clueless to help the broken. And how might the knowledge that we are gaining insight, empathy and understanding which will allow us to minister to others in need change our attitudes about our own suffering? If we understand our primary work to be loving, serving and healing ourselves and each other, then no suffering is pointless. No loss is irredeemable. Whatever we are going through, it can be used by God and by us in the ongoing process of redeeming this world.

    After all, this is exactly what God did for us. He became as one of us – he shared in our suffering. He emptied himself and took on our reality as his own. We have a savior who knows what tempts us, what hurts us, what we struggle with and how dark and confusing this life can be. Rather than viewing suffering, scandal and loss as terrible things to be avoided, part of following Jesus and sharing in his suffering may mean doing the same for each other.

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    Disbelieving Forgiveness

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    Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been dealing with some heavy stuff here. I think it’s getting better. Prayers are appreciated. Or if that’s not really your thing, cash is always an acceptable alternative. ;)

    Today, I want to talk about what happens when we refuse to believe we are forgiven. Like everyone else, the people around me have sometimes treated me in ways that weren’t the best or even done outright awful things which I then needed to forgive. Fortunately for me, forgiveness has always come fairly easily. If nothing else, my self interest kicks in and I realize that the benefits of letting go of the wrong far outweigh whatever payoff I might get from hanging onto my hurt. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons. That what other people do is about them and not me, for example. And that it’s easier to recover from being hurt than it is to recover from the way the fear of being hurt warps us.

    However, I have often been befuddled and frankly, hurt, over the years that some of these same people who I have readily extended grace to for some pretty major things were often unwilling to extend grace to me for relatively minor faults and failings. For a while I thought that maybe the problem was that the sort of people who required extreme grace were also the sort of the people who were just kind of jerks anyways. However, over the last couple of years, I have discovered that there has been something entirely different at work.

    What I’ve learned is that either because I didn’t communicate it well enough or they still felt guilty or the easy grace seemed too good to be true, a few of these people didn’t believe that I had really forgiven them. They believed that even if I had openly communicated forgiveness, in my heart, I was secretly angry, hostile and score keeping. Which made it easy for them to see my (numerous) faults and failings as evidence of hostility, passive-aggressive revenge or withholding. The truth of the matter is that I’m just far more flawed than these people may have realized.

    These people who didn’t believe themselves forgiven didn’t just assume that there was an unfinished conflict between us. The assumption of this unfinished conflict colored their whole way of seeing me and our interactions. If I was forgetful or short or overtaxed, they assumed it was if not deliberate, then certainly a sign of my real feelings about them. In turn, they would be resentful or become more demanding or pull away from me. And I would struggle to understand why people who I had extended so much grace to were so quick to judge, criticize and be angry with me.

    Now, my point in sharing this isn’t to brag about how great I am at forgiving. First of all, I can’t claim credit for being temperamentally inclined to forgive. And forgiving should be the norm and not in the least exceptional for Christians. Plus, I’m far from perfect. There are times when I will or struggle to forgive or allow the relationship to break even if I do forgive because remaining in it caused more pain than I was willing to deal with.

    The reason that I’m sharing this is because I think there’s a very similar dynamic which often happens between us and God. God, of course, doesn’t have my imperfections and doesn’t need us to extend grace to him in reality. Yet, I can’t help but think of how often when things don’t go well or when we hit a spiritually dry time, we jump to the conclusion that it’s because God is angry or disappointed with us. We’ve been told we are forgiven, but much like these people around me, we don’t really believe it. And it colors the way we view God and our relationship with him.

    Of course, it could well be that there is some sin or character flaw which God is pushing us to acknowledge and bring to him for tending to. But once we’ve done that, it’s done. It’s gone – between us and God at least. But whether due to guilt or disbelief, many times we continue waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yes, we are forgiven, but there will be a price to pay at some point seems to be our working assumption.

    So when we hit a rough patch we don’t recognize it as a normal part of life or an opportunity to grown, but as evidence that we haven’t been fully forgiven – not until we’ve paid our pound of flesh, at least. And after a while, when the rough patches keep being rough and no rain comes to the desert, we become resentful. “Haven’t I already paid enough for my sin?” we ask ourselves. We demand of God, “what do you want from me? Why won’t you let it go so I can move on? Where’s this forgiveness you promise?” And often, we’ll just withdraw from God. If not entirely, then a certain coldness and lack of enthusiasm creeps into our relationship with him.

    The truth is that even through our rough and dry patches, we have always been forgiven. That work’s been done, but the power of it does remain elusive so long as we disbelieve it and allow that disbelief to be a lens which colors how we see God working in our lives. It seems to me that it is essential to a healthy faith life for us to refuse to see whatever we are going through – no matter how incomprehensible or painful – as a sign of God’s anger or rejection of us. Although it may feel unnatural or even presumptive, reality is that we must give up our disbelief in God’s forgiveness before we will be able to see his movements with any clarity.

    Disbelieving forgiveness can destroy a relationship. I know.

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    Raising Jesus and Original Sin

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    I have this theory about how it was that Jesus came to be born without sin and it is just that – a theory. But I thought I’d share it with y’all because it has real implications for those of us who are or will be parents. Traditionally, it has been taught that Jesus was born without sin because he was conceived without sex. Because somehow it seems, the act of sex by our parents mysteriously implants this dark stain of sin on us at conception. While there is a verse in Psalm 51 which can be read to confirm this view, I personally find the idea that my parents having sex to conceive me made me sinful unreasonable and unconvincing.

    Sex is a good thing. God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. Sex allows the two to become one – to reach past ourselves into another. It brings joy and satisfaction into our lives. It is the means by which we bring forth life and become co-creators with God. It can be misused, to be sure, but how could something which is fundamentally a good also be the thing which stains us before we even have true being? Not to mention that the mechanics of how something my parents did when I wasn’t even there made me bad are problematic.

    I don’t think that Jesus’ lack of sin had its roots in the way he was conceived. Rather, my theory is that his lack of sin came about due to something far less mystical and more practical – from his parents. Mary and Joseph had been told prior to Jesus’ birth that this child would be the messiah. Which means that before he was even born, his parents understood that Jesus was good, holy and anointed. Don’t you suppose that this knowledge influenced the way that they parented?

    Orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus was both fully man and fully God. But most Christians tend to give short shrift to the idea that Jesus was fully man. Rather, they seem to think of him as just playing at being human. He resided in a human body, sure, but otherwise, he was God. However, I think that unless Jesus had fully entered into the experience of being human – with all of its confusion, limitations and struggles – then he could not have been fully human. If he was born understanding why he was here and what he was supposed to do, he wasn’t fully human. If he arrived not needing to be instructed, not having to struggle with self-mastery, not being shaped by the culture and people around him, then he wasn’t fully human.

    We know nothing about Jesus as a child, but certainly he must have cried as an infant. He probably got frustrated and lost his temper as a toddler. Maybe he showed off his ability to burp the Hebrew alphabet to relatives. Or pulled the goat’s tail. Spilt things. At the wedding in Cana when Mary tells him to help out with the wine situation, Jesus responds, “woman, it is not yet my time.” It makes me wonder if he wasn’t teasing Mary about all the times while growing up that she’d told him not to use his supernatural abilities because “it’s not yet your time.” Then there was the time when Jesus was 12 when he stayed behind in the temple while his family headed back towards home. If I had done that, my parents would have killed me. And telling them that I had to be “in my father’s house” would NOT have gotten me off the hook.

    The reason I say that I think it was Jesus’ parents who were responsible for him being born without sin is because knowing that their son was good, they would have responded to his normal childish behaviors differently than those of us who believe we are parenting children born sinful. Perhaps this allowed them to see immaturity as immaturity rather than as a sign of sin. Perhaps this allowed them to see errors in judgment as simple mistakes rather than rebellion or willfulness. And perhaps this different perspective allowed them to avoid passing on their own brokenness.

    I’m not in the least claiming that Mary and Joseph were perfect parents and that is why Jesus was perfect. Parents don’t actually have that must power over their children anyways. But the older I get and the more I work through my own struggles, the more I realize how damaging the message that there is something wrong with me has been.

    When we reflect back to kids that their immaturity is sinful, we make normal growth and maturing a painful process of being wrong and bad. When we reflect a lack of judgment as rebellion, sin and willfulness, we similarly stunt their ability to grow while also undermining their trust in their own judgment. If we reject manifestations of their personality – playfulness, shyness, curiosity, determination – as sinful rudeness, withdrawal, impertinence or stubbornness, we teach them to reject the very tools God has given them to work with in life. And I do wonder if perhaps, working with the assumption that their son was good, Mary and Joseph avoided falling into these all too common parenting errors.

    Of course, Jesus was God. You and I and our children are not. Yet, it seems to me that as people who have been redeemed from the wages of sin through the work of Christ, we ought to adjust our own parenting accordingly. Our kids are not God, but they are made in the image of God. This and not sin is their true identity. So perhaps if we start where Mary and Joseph started – with the assumption of their child’s goodness – we won’t pass so much of our own brokenness onto our own children. Certainly, we’ll do it imperfectly and our own children, not being God, will no doubt actually sin. But if they in turn parent their own children with the assumption of their goodness and pass on less of their own brokenness, we’ll start to look less and less like what we have been and more and more like Christ.

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    Prayers of Futility

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    I start to pray and stop myself. Why bother? It’s not like God’s going to do anything for me. Give me something I need or a blessing or favor. I’ll ask and just be more bitter for the asking.

    I’m not a genie in the sky. I don’t exist to grant wishes and manipulate outcomes to your liking.

    I get that and it’s fine. But you don’t even offer comfort. A little comfort. Is that really too much to ask?

    Do you want a friend who only comes to you when she wants someone to listen to her cry? Again? You know the answers. You know how to care for yourself. You’re going to be OK.

    I used to pray to worship you. To tell you how wonderful you were. To tell you how much I wanted you. That’s all I really want is you.

    I’m right here with you.

    Right. Here in this messy garage. With a cold, rainy wind coming in. And there’s nothing special. There’s no joy. It’s just normal but now I know you’re here in the normal. Only it doesn’t change anything. I don’t understand. What difference does it make if you’re here or you’re not here? It’s all the same. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with you anymore.

    It takes awhile to work it out.

    *Snort.* Of course it does. I’m going inside. The kitchen floor needs washing.

    I know. I’ll be there.

    (Picture credit ASBO Jesus.)

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    So What Happened to Adam and Eve Anyhow?

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    Let’s do a quick horticultural lesson here today on the difference between fruits and vegetables. Fruits, technically, are the fleshy, edible part of a plant which contain seeds. They are produced by plants that flower as a means of reproduction. Vegetables, on the other hand, are plants which are themselves used in part or whole as food. So, for example broccoli is a vegetable because we eat the stems and immature flower buds of the plant. Tomatoes are fruit because they contain the seeds of the plant they grown off of. Lettuce is a vegetable because we eat the leaves of the plant. Apples are fruit because they are the seed bearing part of the plant which grow after the pollination of the tree’s flowers. Get the idea?

    The reason I bring this up is because there’s a little detail which is often missed in the story of the fall which is actually, very, very important should we wish to understand what happened. You see, God forbid eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit is what a plant produces – not the plant itself. Fruit is the end result of a process of blooming, pollination and growth. What God was forbidding wasn’t the knowledge of good and evil, but the end result of it – the fruit of that knowledge.

    (Before going any further, if you haven’t already, you will need to read the previous posts on the fall or nothing I say below will make ANY sense. They are:

    Why Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden?

    The Fall Wasn’t Our Fault

    Does God Sit Around Monitoring Our Thoughts? And Other Pertinent Questions

    Don’t worry. They’re short, We can wait.)

    You will perhaps recall that when speaking to the serpent, Eve said that God had also forbidden touching the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We don’t know if she was mistaken and actually thought she wasn’t allowed to touch the tree or if she was exaggerating to make her point to the serpent. But either way, I think it’s fair to surmise that Adam and Eve were unfamiliar with the tree. Which means that when they ate of the fruit of the tree, they got the results of the knowledge of good and evil without having even started the process which normally leads up to the having fruit to eat.

    The text says that Eve saw that the fruit was useful for gaining wisdom. Wisdom is when you use knowledge and understanding to guide your actions, thoughts and choices. Eating the fruit was useful for gaining wisdom – it gave the person who ate it the chance to live as one who knows good and evil – ie is able to put their knowledge into action. Only Adam and Eve had no knowledge. And without knowledge, the only way to learn wisdom is by screwing up and learning from it. The difference between how the fruit was meant to be used to gain wisdom and what happened to Adam and Eve is like the difference between dropping a newly minted navy seal off in the middle of the jungle with only a what he could fit into his pack to survive on and dropping a kidnapped child off in the jungle with a notebook, two pencils and a fruit roll-up in their Barbie backpack.

    Not only did Adam and Eve have no knowledge, they were immature – not yet grown. And it’s shown all through human history. I love my kids and they love me, but I am quite certain that if they had been able to manage it, a couple of them would have shanked me for having the gall to thwart their will back when they were small toddlers. Fortunately, by the time they were big enough to handle a knife, they had matured and no longer responded to discipline with blind fury. But imagine if the world was run by people with the emotional maturity of a toddler. It would look an awful lot like a world history book, non?

    The story of the fall is usually taught as being a morality tale about obedience to God. All of the details of what happened get swept together into one overarching fact: Adam and Eve had been disobedient. However, if you look at the story itself, you will see that this wasn’t how Adam and Eve saw it. They weren’t worried that God would discover that they had disobeyed him. They were consumed with the shame and fear of being seen naked. To them, their disobedience was barely an after thought. What really mattered to them was that all of a sudden they were completely convinced that there was something wrong, unacceptable and shameful about themselves. Why?

    The text says that when they ate of the fruit, “their eyes were opened”. Often this is explained as them gaining self-awareness. However, all of us gain self-awareness at some point in our lives. But we don’t always freak all the way out about it. Often it happens with us hardly noticing the change. We just become more self-aware. We are less apt to forget that someone else might be watching us. It does tend to make us less free, but usually it’s only really a problem when someone’s disapproval or ridicule triggers that self-awareness. But in the case of Adam and Eve, it appears that the only ones disapproving of them are Adam and Eve themselves.

    I think that what we see here is the damage which occurs when children are inappropriately brought into the adult world. They experience things which normally are reserved for the adults, but do not have the knowledge, maturity or perspective to process what is happening to them. Seeing themselves as one who knows good and evil was an adult activity. And just like when children are introduced to the adult activity of sex by a perpetrator, Adam and Eve reacted with shame. The felt sure that there was something wrong with their nakedness and sought to hide it and themselves.

    I think that what happened would be akin to what it might be like if a very young child were to gain an adult perspective and apply it to themselves. For example, my youngest daughter was known around the house for a long time as Lady Godiva. She was forever stripping down to her birthday suit and wasn’t the least bit impressed at our insistence that she not walk out the front door naked or strip down to her sandals at the park. I also have a 13 year old son who would just as soon allow himself to be stabbed to death as strip down naked in public. What Adam and Eve experienced was probably a bit like what it would be like for my little Lady Godiva to suddenly have my 13 year old’s view of nudity just after doffing her clothing at the playground.

    What Adam and Eve experienced might be explained by considering another example; my husband has repeatedly told us that should he ever lose control of his bowel functions, he wants to be left out back with a gun. Which is ridiculous, of course, but a common enough sentiment. Imagine what it would be like for an infant to understand that we consider pooping on ourselves so repulsive that some people would prefer to die than to live with it. Knowing that wouldn’t suddenly give an infant the ability to control their bowel movements and use a toilet, but it could cause intense shame at a normal bodily function.

    Of course, we don’t view a streaking toddler as some sort of sexual deviant or an infant in a diaper as revolting. There’s nothing wrong with either the toddler or the infant, although as they get older our expectations of them will change. Similarly, there wasn’t anything wrong with Adam and Eve being naked before the fall. And there wasn’t anything wrong with them just after the fall. But lacking all perspective and understanding, they judged themselves harshly for what was both normal and appropriate for them as young children.

    The reality is that Adam and Eve hadn’t changed after the fall – only their view of themselves changed. They faced the daunting task of walking a path meant to be walked with knowledge without that knowledge. They were going to have to learn on the fly, from their mistakes. A task made much harder than it needed to be by the fact that they saw normal immaturity and lack of knowledge as evidence that something was wrong rather than as places where growth was called for. Add in the ongoing work of the accuser – the one who revels in condemning us, in misleading us, in offering deathly imitations of the things our hearts most yearn for an need and you have a recipe for all manner of evil and confusion. The result is the skewed, harsh perspective of themselves and how to deal with life which fallen man and woman passed on to their children, and which their children passed onto their children and which has been passed down through the generations to us.

    Of course, all was not lost. We’ve stumbled and erred and done great harm to ourselves and this creation we were giving dominion over. Yet, God willing, as time has passed we have learned more about ourselves and the ways the world works. We have gained some of the knowledge which we should have had at the beginning of our journey of living as people who know good and evil. And we are hopefully maturing a bit past the wrathful toddler stage of dealing with life.

    When Jesus showed up 2000 years ago, he lived in a world which was utterly shaped by the results of the fall. By humanity’s wrath, its trauma, its fear, its lack of understanding and immaturity. But there was this one people – the ones who God had found so long ago “like grapes in the desert”. And he made a covenant with them to be their God. And gradually, painfully, over many centuries, dealt with them much like a parent might deal with a traumatized, drug addicted child, working to draw them back to himself – to the safety of the ones who love them. He met them where he found them, making offers of safety and rescue when possible and setting boundaries and consequences when needed. And when the time was right, he went in himself. He absorbed all of the sin, fury and cruelty that we could throw at him. And he overcame. He told us to stop worrying about his wrath and accept his forgiveness. From that point on, he declared, our job wasn’t to try to set ourselves right with him – our job was to learn how to love as Jesus had taught us. To gain the knowledge we had been deprived of so long ago. And begin the process of our redemption from the long nightmare we’ve been living. Until the day we have learned to live and love with enough wisdom for him to dwell among us in the new heaven and earth which is the promised end we are heading towards.

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    Does God Sit Around Monitoring Our Thoughts? And Other Pertinent Questions

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    Are there any limits on suffering? Does God sit around monitoring our thought? Does God know everything that’s going to happen before it happens? These are some big questions which I’m going to be tackling today. But first, if you haven’t already, you really do need to go read my last two posts so you won’t be totally confused:

    Why Was The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden?

    The Fall Wasn’t Our Fault

    And you should probably read this post as well to get a grip on what all this is about:

    I Think I’m About to Lose a Bunch of Readers

    Don’t worry – they’re all short. This post will still be here when you get done.

    ‘Kay? All caught up? Alrighty, then. So, I’ve been talking about the story of the fall for the last couple of days. But for the moment, I want to rewind a bit and go back to Genesis 2. In that chapter, God brings the animals to Adam to be named. Words are powerful things - “In the beginning was the Word . . . Through him all things were made.” Naming has been seen in many cultures and in many times as an act with great mythological and symbolic power. And God gave the power to name and label the creatures of his own creation over to the man. This is the act of a God who is willing to allow for the unpredictable and in not threatened by what he doesn’t direct.

    One of the grand arguments of Christianity is whether God knows exactly what is going to happen at all times or if events can be unexpected and unpredictable. I wrote yesterday and in another post on time that I think that there is a difference between God as he exists outside of time and God as he acts within the flow of material creation and time. Outside of time, all that is and will be and ever was exists together and God is complete, whole and unchanging. Within the material world where time exists, God is in dynamic relationship with his creation which does act and unfold in unexpected and unpredictable ways. In fact, I believe that God enjoys this aspect of creation. I think it gives creation an almost game-like quality and allows for true relationship. When God handed the naming of the animals over to Adam, God lost nothing. God does not have our dysfunctional need for control and predictability. He is sovereign all on his own to the point of being able to hand the naming of the animals off to humanity.

    I bring all of that up because one of the questions raised about what I’ve been sharing regarding the story of the fall is whether God knew it was going to happen. It was made very clear to me that the answer is no. Not only was it not part of his plan, it was not something which had been anticipated. As I explained yesterday, the accuser had a role to play in God’s kingdom but it in no way required inviting children into an adult game. God trusted the accuser and did not know that he had it in his heart or mind to do such a thing. (For those who claim that this indicates an error on God’s part, an error is doing something wrong. God did nothing wrong. You could say that God was mistaken in his trust, but this is the sort of “mistake” which God himself claims to have made in other places: Genesis 6:5-6 and Jeremiah 32:35 are two examples.)*

    Now, the question comes up though of how it could be that God did not know the accuser’s plans. Why did he not perceive that there was this dark and malicious intent in him? My understanding is that the separate-ness from God that we experience is part of the game that us to experience life as individuals. It is a separation that is breached only by willingly allowing entry. And we do control entry – I will allow God entry to my Sunday morning, but not to my sex life, for example. God respects the separation as part of allowing the whole process to play out. Life puts pressure on us to allow entry in all areas simply because it is how life is meant to be lived. Outside of time, God knows all things. While working inside of time, God doesn’t go rifling through other people’s minds without permission and as such it was possible for the Accuser to hide his intentions from God.

    Which leaves us with the question of why something so devastating was allowed to exist as a possibility. The reality is that not all things which could happen are allowed to be. We can’t stick our elbows in our ears, for example. We also can’t use our mind-control powers to force others to do our bidding against their will. (So we use money instead. ;p I kid – kind of.) We haven’t been born with the ability to interfere with the flow of time. Couldn’t God have found a way to set everything up so as to eliminate the possibility of the fall? Or to put a finer point on it, is there a limit to the amount of suffering God will allow us to experience? The answer from history seems to be that either there is little or no limit to the suffering which is allowed to exist or that God is incapable of limiting suffering. My own understanding is that God’s creation depends on freedom to function and as such the only things which are not allowed as possibilities are those things which cannot possibly be redeemed. Which means that if it happens or exists, it is within God’s power to redeem it. So although God did not know that the fall was going to happen, it was allowed as a possibility because God is able to redeem it.

    So, I went really meta on y’all today. In the next post we’ll be going back to the actual story of the fall. In particular, we’re going to look at why Adam and Eve reacted the way they did and what it means for us today. I’ll also talk about God’s response to what happened. And after that, well don’t worry – I’ve got more! I’m like a trainwreck you can’t look away from, I tell ya!

    *I know that some of you come from faith traditions in which God’s perfect foreknowledge and control of future events was a paramount teaching. A lot of churches – especially those which follow Calvinist or neo-reform teachings view open theism (the teaching that God is engaged in a dynamic relationship with creation rather than a pre-ordained one) as a serious heresy. So, here’s a link to an explanation/defense of open theism by pastor/theologian Greg Boyd. I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but he’s a big supporter of open theism and includes many scriptural supports for the idea.

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    The Fall Wasn’t Our Fault

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    So yesterday, we left young Adam and Eve standing next to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As I explained, I was told/shown that the tree was to Adam and Eve what the adult world is to a child. Rather than being a temptation or even a danger, it was a good thing which let them know that there is more to life than their childish existence. God told them not to eat from that tree because the experiences of the adult world are not for children to have – adult experiences being the fruit they were not to eat. Under normal circumstances, the existence and close proximity of the adult world does not pose a threat to children, nor is it particularly tempting. Unless one of the adults does something to bring a child into the adult world inappropriately. Enter the serpent.

    It has often been pointed out that the serpent isn’t specifically identified with the character of Satan in this story. However, the serpent was indeed Satan (whatever or whomever Satan is in reality). The connection between the serpent and Satan is made in several places in scripture – particularly in Revelation 12 and Revelation 22. But even more damning is that both the serpent and the character of Satan work in the same way. Satan is a Hebrew word meaning accuser or adversary. In Revelation 12:11, the serpent is described as “the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night”.

    Satan’s job is to serve as an adversary. He does this through accusations. Which is to say that Satan calls the goodness of God, creation and humanity into question by offering alternative explanations for what is going on. So at the opening of the book of Job, we get the accusation that Job isn’t faithful because he loves God, but because God has protected him. When Job remains faithful after losing everything, Satan claims it is only because Job has not suffered physical harm himself. This is what Satan does – looks for any explanation possible to explain away what is good, true, faithful and loving. When Satan tempts Jesus at the end of his 40 days in the wilderness, he uses scriptures to argue that things which are forbidden – grasping power, testing God, etc – are in fact scripturally sanctioned. He offers an alternative vision of reality which Jesus rejects.

    The thing is that Satan had a legitimate role in God’s kingdom. One of the ways to view the existence of the material world is that it is God exploring and expressing the reality of himself through this physical creation. I’m probably going to flub this explanation, but outside of the created world, God exists as whole, complete and unchanging. Within the created world, God can unpack all of that and share himself with us, his creation. One of the ways which we can know and understand something is by seeing how it is and isn’t like something else. God is light – in him there is no darkness. But without darkness, how can the light be known? If there is only undifferentiated light, nothing can be seen or observed. And this is the purpose which Satan serves. He introduces the dark by which the light can become known.

    Or to put it in slightly less abstract, esoteric terms, God is love and created everything in and through love. But what does that mean? Are there limits to love? When people suffer, is that a sign of a lack of love? How do we know what comes from love and what comes from serving self? Satan’s job is to come up with challenges to God. He tells God, “that’s not really love; here’s what’s really going on.” And God then has a puzzle or a challenge which must be resolved in such a way as to demonstrate that love is, in fact, the ultimate reality. This is why the serpent was “the cleverest of all the creatures”. If you are working on a tricky problem and need to step outside your own head for perspective, you seek out the most clever, challenging person you know to offer the opposing view and poke holes in your ideas in order to tease whole thing out. That’s the Accuser’s reason for existing

    So when the serpent approaches Adam and Eve, he does what he always does – he makes an accusation – offers a skewed vision of reality: “did God really say that you can’t eat the fruit of the garden?” Eve’s response is interesting. She actually adds to God’s instructions claiming that they were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil nor were they to touch it. But God hasn’t told her not to touch it. Even before the fall, human had a tendency to err it seems. The serpent responds: “God isn’t worried about you dying. God just doesn’t want you to be like him.” It’s the game he plays.

    Here’s the thing, though; this was a game to be played with God. It wasn’t a child’s game. What we have here is a powerful, clever creature – one whose job it was to act as an adversary for God himself – bringing the grown-up’s world into the lives of children. Remember – the existence and proximity of the grown-up world is neither a threat nor a real temptation to children unless an adult inappropriately involves them in the world of adults. Which is exactly what happened here.

    When this was shown to me, it was impressed on me that what happened at the fall was akin to what happens when a child is sexually abused. The fact that the grown-ups have sex is no threat to children, even if they are aware that it is happening. But when grown-ups involve children in sex, it is horribly damaging to them. Now, you may protest that Eve made a considered decision when she ate of the fruit: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” However, this is exactly what predators do. They induce their victims to make a decision to engage in something which they should never have been invited or tempted to do. They create the appearance of willing co-operation on the part of their victim. In fact they count on this dynamic – children who are being victimized often to do not seek help because they see themselves as culpable in what is happening to them. They are doing something they know they are not supposed to be doing. Which is exactly what happened here with Adam and Eve.

    We have always thought and been taught that the fall was what happened when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and reached for what was forbidden. But it was strongly impressed on my that the fall was in actually an act of abuse by a more powerful creature against immature, unprepared, unsuspecting mankind. And if you look at the reaction of Adam and Eve after the fall, you will see that their reaction is very much in line with how children react after being abused. They feel intense shame. They hide. They blame themselves while also lashing out at those closest to them. This is what happens when a child is traumatized and exposed to things which they are unprepared to cope with. We see it everyday.

    And all too often, callous and unthinking adults do blame victims of abuse as much as the victims do themselves. They say unless you put up a huge fight, it wasn’t really abuse. Or that if the child wasn’t physically forced to do it, it wasn’t really abuse. Or if there was any element of choice involved – the child went there, touched that, listened to this – then it was their fault. But the reality is that a person with power and experience inviting children into adult experiences and exposing them to adult experiences is a predatory abuser. The serpent was a predatory abuser. And Adam and Eves were victims of the worst, most damaging case of child abuse on record. And through them, we all fell victim.

    In my next posts I’ll get into more detail about why such a terrible thing could happen, the aftermath and results of having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what this all means for sin (traumatized people tend to fall into a lot of sin, after all) and some of the implication for our thinking and theology today. But for now, I want to leave you with this: as the story I was being told ended and I was coming back to myself, I sensed God telling that he was so, so sorry for what we’ve all been through. Yes, we’ve handled things badly, but the road we found ourselves walking was a broken one that was never meant for us. He never wanted us to go through so much suffering and it’s broken his heart to watch his lost, broken and suffering children on it. It wasn’t our fault that we lost our place in the garden and our innocence. There’s no going back, but it’s time to lay down the guilt and self-condemnation and allow ourselves to be comforted and redeemed by our pappa whose heart has broken over us and who has always, always loved us.

  • images

    Why Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden?

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    Hi, I’m Rebecca and I’d just like to say at the outset that to the best of my knowledge I’m not actually crazy. And no drugs were involved in the making of this post. Of course, the only reason for someone to start by declaring themselves sane and not drug addled is because they are about to say something which will make people think otherwise. Which is what I’m about to do.

    But first, a little background. Perhaps you recall me saying a few times that I have a bit of a fixation on the creation stories. I rejected a literal reading of them ages ago. A supposedly literal reading is incompatible both with the evidence from God’s creation and the text itself. I don’t honestly know if the stories are a figurative retelling of things that actually happened. Or if they are true myths in the sense that they are not true because they actually happened, but true because they happen all of the time. Probably as far as I would go is to say that they tell the story of a deep spiritual reality which has been made manifest in the material world.

    I think that the creation stories are important because they are our faith’s explanation for the start of all things concerning us. They give us a peek at our true identity, who we were made to be, what our relationship with creation is, how God works and ultimately, hold the key to figuring out what is wrong with us. That last bit seems particularly important to me, as it is very hard to fix something if you don’t know what is wrong with it.

    Over the last 20 years I have spent what probably amounts to an absurd amount of time meditating on and trying to puzzle out the creation stories. There are two things I have learned which are particularly relevant to our discussion here today. The first is that the garden was a place for Adam and Eve live and learn. It was almost like a playground for them in the sense that for a child, the whole world is a playground. Like a playground, the primary purpose of the garden was for Adam and Eve to have fun, but also to develop skills. And like a playground, it probably wasn’t entirely safe, but life with no risk isn’t really the sort of setting which mankind tends to thrive in. Too much is bad, of course, but too little is stunting.

    The other thing I have learned is that Adam and Eve were children. Remember the other day when I explained that adam actually means mankind and that when God made and dealt with Adam, he was dealing with mankind? Well, just like each individual person is born needing time to grow up into maturity, mankind is likewise in the process of growing up. There has been a tendency to assume that Adam and Eve were just like us, only without sin. However, Adam and Eve were just like us the same way that 3 year old me was just like me today. I’m still me, and I may or may not have actually improved since them. But inevitably I’ve grown and changed a good deal between 3 and 39.

    The point being that Adam and Eve were very young. We need only look at their actions immediately after the fall to see this. They were young enough to have no body modesty. They were not yet using the materials around them to make things. When God showed up after the fall, they were hiding like a couple of kids with their feet sticking out from under the curtains next to a broken vase. And when confronted, the response was “she did it!” These were not sophisticates. (I recently learned that this idea of Adam and Eve as children was also held by both Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyons. So I’m not the first to argue/pick up on this.)

    OK, so that’s all interesting and maybe a bit challenging, but now I’m going to go all wack-a-doodle on y’all. See, what happened was that a little less than a year ago, I suddenly got really tired pretty early in the morning. I went to lay down until it passed and had a dreamy-but not really a dream thingy. It was like I was being told a story with a few images. And when it was over, I woke right up and told my husband about it. I’ve shared it with just a few other people in the time since and now I’m going to share it with y’all. Of course, as with all such claims, you need to “test the Spirit” as they say. And I have often prayed that if anything I say is false, that it would be allowed to slip away and be forgotten rather than taking hold and leading people astray, and this is no exception. But I think that if you open your mind to this, you’ll realize that everything I am about to say has been right in front of us in scripture and in human nature all along – we just hadn’t seen it before.

    So, what I was told/shown started with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I have always wondered why in the world just a dangerous thing was put right in the middle of the garden the way it was. Some people would argue that it was a test of Adam and Eve’s obedience or trust in God, but that seems an awful lot like handing your little kid a ball and setting him down next to a highway to play with the warning, “don’t follow the ball into the street now!” Bad parenting. But what I was told was that the tree was actually there for a perfectly good and healthy reason.

    Going back to Adam and Eve being children, imagine for a moment, what it would be like to be children in a world where adults didn’t exist. Not so much where adults didn’t exist in the sense of being there to provide correction or supervision, but didn’t exist in such a way that children would believe that there was nothing more to life than childhood. A lot of us grew up in times when children were basically allowed to run free. We could go for long stretches of time without dealing with an adult. Until pretty recently, it was normal for groups of kids to spend their time together in their own little universe. But always, you knew that there was a world of adults out there. Your child universe wasn’t all there was and you knew it. This was what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was to Adam and Eve. It was the adult world which existed and let them know that there was more to existence than their childish lives.

    Of course, kids do like to peek in on the adults from time-to-time. The hide on the stairs to try and catch a glimpse of what the grown-ups are watching on TV after they’ve been sent to bed. Put their ears up to doors to try and catch what the grown ups are talking about at the dinner parties that the little ones haven’t been invited to. Usually the kids figure out pretty quickly that grown-ups are boring with their talk about politics and money and whether the new drapes go well with the sofa. Soon enough they wander off to see if they can get enough air to fly by using bed sheets and jumping from one bed to another.

    So, one day Adam and Eve were hanging out by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, listening in on the adults. And along came the serpent. “The cleverest of all the creatures.” And what happens next is actually more horrible and tragic than we have ever imagined. But, I have a messy house and dinner to prepare and all that other sort of boring adult stuff that needs to be done. So you’re going to have to stay tuned . . .

    BTW, while you’re waiting here’s some of my other writing which touches on the creation stories:

    Adam and Eve Part 1

    Adam and Eve Part 2

    Original Sin Gets a Bad Rap

    It’s the Prime Directive

  • desert

    I Think I’m About to Lose a Bunch of Readers

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    I have been having a hard time writing lately in part because all I have say is, “I’m miserable and I’m dying and why doesn’t God care about me and I’m miserable and I’ve been abandoned and I’m being ground up into dust and Jesus Christ on the cross – this is never going to eeeeennnnnnddddd!” But really, I’ve said it all before and who wants to hear (or write) that crap over and over again?

    Well, this morning I came across a blog post written by Frank Viola in which he shared a message for Christians in the wilderness. There are A LOT of us in the wilderness right now. I know that a lot of you are in the wilderness. In fact, I could be way wrong, but from where I’m sitting, I would say that it seems like the better part of the body of Christ that is faithful to Jesus’ way (as opposed to faithful to their theology) are in the wilderness at the moment.

    So Frank said something in his message to those of us wandering in the wilderness which frankly, I had never heard before. He said that there is always a price to pay in order to leave the wilderness. Often it is, as he put it “an obscenely high price”:

    We have a biological drive for God’s house. We have a spiritual taste for it. We have a longing, a biological instinct, if you will, driving us to our destiny. And we will never be satisfied until we make the decision, no matter what the cost, to be part of God’s building work.

    That cost may involve the loss of friends. It may mean harassment or shunning from religious leaders. It may mean vicious and ugly rumors, slander, and gossip. It may mean walking in the steps of Abraham, who left all and headed for a city that he could not see.

    It may involve selling our comfortable home and leaving our present job to relocate to another city where there are living stones who are being assembled to form God’s house. (I’ve moved in the past for this. And many of my friends have as well.)

    It may involve gross misunderstanding, criticism, and perhaps thornier problems like persecution.

    (You should go read the whole thing when you’re done with this!) Like I said, this is a new idea to me. I always thought that following God into the wilderness was the price we paid. I never thought of having to pay a price to get out. But as I read these words it hit my that perhaps this is exactly why I have been stuck in the wilderness for so long.

    You see, I’ve been holding back quite a bit. There are things I have been taught and shown over the years that I don’t share. Because they are too radical. By sharing them, I would be cutting myself off from nice, respectable Christianity. I write things all the time which challenge people, but I’ve been very careful not to write the sort of things I fear would get me dismissed out of hand. But maybe that’s the price I haven’t been willing to pay. And that’s why I haven’t been able to find my way of this God-awful wilderness.

    Now, I want to be clear that I’m not saying that the things I’ve written here have been deceptive or untrue. Not at all. But I’ve held back. Like I said, there are things I have been shown and taught in prayer, meditation and even a vision sort of thing or two. And I’ve always known that I wasn’t being given these things just for myself. At some point they would be for others as well, but surely God would create a nice, safe way for that to happen. Something that wasn’t going to cost me too much, right? Because that’s the way he works, right? (I just rolled my eyes so hard I now know what my medulla oblongata looks like.)

    Well, I’m about to die in this wilderness. So maybe making myself sound like a crazy person and setting myself up for ridicule and accusations and losing a bunch of my readers is the price I need to pay to get the hell out of here. Oh well. Fuck it. If that’s what it takes, so be it.

    So, in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to really be turning a lot of your worlds upside down. In a good way. A very good way. We’re going to talk about what is wrong with us, what really happened in the garden, how Jesus was born without original sin, what is going on with our souls and bodies, how the way we raise our kids will either lift or perpetuate the curse, the coming tribulation and new heaven and earth being made manifest among us and whatever else I can think of that I haven’t been willing to let loose with up to now. And some of you are going to say, “that makes so much sense! Praise God!” And some of you are going to say, “blasphemy!” And some of you just won’t be too impressed anyways. But it’s not like any of you are paying my damn bills anyhow, so I love y’all, but whatever. I’m getting the flock outta here. Anyone who wants to join me is welcome to follow.

    Stay tuned, y’all. It’s about to get interesting up in here.

  • If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other

    Moving From “Me” to “We”

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    If you are an American Christian, odds are really, really good that at some point you have been told that as you read scripture, you should try inserting your name for the word “you” in parts of scripture where Israel or God’s people are being addressed. So, I could read, “Rebecca shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of her God. No longer will they call Rebecca Deserted, or name her land Desolate. But Rebecca will be called Hephzibah, and her land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in Rebecca, and her land will be married.” (Isaiah 62:4) It’s not a terrible idea; sometimes we do need help personalizing scriptures and realizing that the love expressed applies to ourselves. Of course, if you do this, eventually you will end up with something like “Rebecca also took her beautiful jewels made of My gold and of My silver, which I had given her, and made for herself male images that she might play the harlot with them.” (Ezekial 16:17) Which is a little too personal maybe.

    Now, if your pastors/teachers are any good at all, they have probably also taught you that in nearly all of the places where God speaks to “you” or even where Paul and Jesus address “you”, unless a specific person is being addressed, the word used indicates a plural you. So it’s more of a “y’all” than “you, Rebecca, sitting over there eating jelly beans.” This ought to be obvious as usually the word “you” is being used to address the nation of Israel or an entire church or the group of people being spoken to. But we Americans are notoriously hyper-individualistic. So with or without a anyone’s encouragement, we do tend to read scripture as if it were speaking to us individuals rather than to a collective group.

    A while back, I became convicted that the hyper-individualistic programming of our culture isn’t compatible with Christianity. I matter as an individual, but I am also part of a larger body. My life is not for me alone, but for the good of God’s Kingdom – a Kingdom which encompasses all of creation. If I see my life and my faith as primarily about me, I am very much mistaken.

    What I came to realize is that countering hyper-individualism isn’t just a matter of prioritizing social justice or even church fellowship. Rather hyper-individualism hides very deep truths about our identities, our purpose and even the meaning of our lives from us. Because the truth is that my life isn’t about “me”. My life and your life and the life of every other human on the planet is about “we”.

    Now, that might sound like some new-agey, mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually very deeply embedded in scripture. Go back to the very beginning. God made “adam”. That’s adam with a lowercase “a”. It means “man” as in “mankind”. God didn’t make A man. He made humanity. And he called humanity Adam. (The word “adam” is actually used several hundred times in the Old Testament. It really does mean mankind/men/people!) When God was dealing with Adam, he was dealing with humanity.

    Ages ago, my husband pointed out to me that with few exceptions, God judges nations – peoples – rather than individuals. I found this idea offensive, frankly. I should be judged on my own merits, not on what the people around me are doing! But the reality is that a culture and a society are made up of the individuals in it. Unless, I am like Abram and have followed God’s lead to come out from among a sinful people, I am part of the society I live in and will be judged as it is judged. Look at the story of Sodom. God agrees that if there are even 10 righteous men in the city, he will not destroy it. In the end, the city is destroyed because it was beholden to a culture of violence, depravity and inhospitality. Lot clearly is not an innocent (he offers up his virgin daughter’s to a mob, after all!). But he does at least stand up to the forces of the culture around him and for that God allows him and his family to escape destruction. We are responsible not just for personal morality, but for how we handle ourselves in relation to the culture around us.

    Shortly before his death, Jesus prayed over his followers and over us – his followers yet to come. In that prayer Jesus prays repeatedly that we would be one as he and the father are one. We often read this as being about church unity. But it goes much deeper than that. Trinitarian theology teaches that God is both one and three. Over the centuries, a great deal of time, hot air and ink has been spent trying to parse out what that means. But what we know is that in some way God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are all one being, despite being three persons – for lack of a better word. When Jesus prays that we will be one as he and the father are one, this is the sense in which he is praying. That we would be both “I” and “we”. Both me, Rebecca and we, humanity, of which Rebecca is one individual. (Of course, theologically speaking, Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are all of one substance which has its own implications for us – am I of one substance with you and just don’t know it? Many spiritual teachers have claimed just that. Our scriptures are largely silent on this beyond teaching that we retain our identities after death.)

    Or let’s consider it another way. Each of us has the same identity. Each human being was created in the image of God. It is, at the root, who we are. There’s an ancient rabbinical saying which Jesus would have known as well that says, “When Caesar puts his image on a coin, all the coins come out identical. When that One who is beyond rulers puts the Divine Image on a ‘coin,’ all the ‘coins’ come out unique.” Yet for all of our differences, we all have the same identity as image bearers. I recently read somewhere else that every person I meet is another version of me. That’s how deeply we are connected. And that’s what we are missing when we are working out of a hyper-individualistic mindset.

    As I started understanding these realities, I rather purposefully shifted my language to reflect the reality that I am not simply “me”, but am part of a larger “we”. It was an illuminating shift. I found that when I’m thinking in terms of “me” rather than “we”, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. But once I started using we language, I could see that the news was about the way we humans were behaving towards each other rather than about discrete events. Movies are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are or were or could be or wish we were or might have been. Our laws and policies are about the way we organize ourselves, set our priorities and treat each other. If I don’t like the way we are behaving, well, that’s an awful lot like when I don’t like the way I am behaving. If I don’t like the way I am behaving, I need to figure out why I’m doing things I know I shouldn’t be doing and set about fixing and unlearning and relearning. I don’t start a war with myself or engage in daily arguments with myself over it. I figure out what the problem is and make real, practically changes to address them. It works the same when we aren’t behaving the way we should.

    Reverend Terry Hamilton-Poore has said:

    According to the Presbyterian Church’s Book of Order, when a person is baptized, the congregation answers this question: ‘Do you, the members of this congregation, in the name of the whole Church of Christ, undertake the responsibility for the continued Christian nurture of this person, promising to be an example of the new life in Christ and to pray for him or her in this new life?’ We make this promise because we know that no adult belongs to himself or herself, and that no child belongs to his or her parents, but that every person is a child of God. Because of that, every young one is our child, the church’s child to care for. This is not an option. It is a responsibility.

    If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each otherThis is how it works – we belong to each other. This has always been true, but this moment in history is probably the first time we’ve been able to see the reality of it so clearly. If I eat chocolate, odds are very good that a child in slavery harvested the beans for it. Another version of me has the life they have because of seemingly innocuous things that I do. My engagement ring probably bought a gun that was used to kill someone. Someone made with the same image as me at their core. I am wearing clothing sewn by a woman in a sweat shop. A woman just like me, only in a different place. And if she were in my place, she’d be wearing a shirt made in a sweat shop too. It’s overwhelming, really to have to face the reality that we human beings can’t do anything without it affecting people a world away who we barely know exist. But if you take that reality and add to it the fact that we all belong to each other, hope appears. The idea that the $100 I was going to spend on a new lamp might actually have been meant for someone else is no longer so strange and incomprehensible. It starts to make sense to me that I was given that excess so I could make sure it got to someone who needs it. We really are all in this together.

    One of the amazing things about learning to think in this way is that rather than my own personal identity disappearing, as those still caught in hyper-individualistic thinking fear is the case, I actually matter more. Who I am is part of a larger whole. If I want the larger whole to be better, then I have to be better. That’s the part that I control. It’s my little piece of the puzzle to work on. And the healthier and more whole I am, the more I am able to tend to others. And as I tend to others, I run into those parts of me which are still broken or immature or neglected. The parts of me which are selfish or prone to dysfunction or scared. And as those are uncovered, I can bring them to God for restoration. Instead of becoming better because I’m supposed to or I want to, I am becoming better so that I can help humanity be better. As we all do it, the world starts to change.

    Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Muhammad Ali sometimes given speeches in support of his social advocacy work. At the start he will hold up one finger and say, “me.” Then he will hold up a fist and say, “we.” Power doesn’t come from the hyper-individualistic me. Power comes from “we”. We are all in this together. We are Adam – mankind. We do belong to each other. And it was Jesus’ fervent prayer that the we would be one as he and the father are one.