I quit dating when I was 19 years old. Since I was agnostic at the time, my reasons were less religious than they were pragmatic: after a bad breakup followed by a short string of disappointing relationships, I realized I’d forgotten who I was or quite possibly had never known who I was to begin with. If I didn’t know who I was, if I kept trying to be all that others wanted, how would I find the person who was truly best suited for me?  How could I find the man who wouldn’t run for the hills when I quoted Shakespeare by heart if I was hiding my geekiness out of shame and embarrassment?

The church, especially women’s ministry, must quit dating secular culture. I know, I know. We’re still heartsick from being dumped for the Hot New GIrl, Science, way back in a Tennessee courtroom. Our egos are bruised from the beatings we’ve taken in the culture wars. We’re embarrassed and a little ashamed. Like the class geek, we feel awkward and out of place. We think others will like us more if we masquerade to be something we are not. So we slap Jesus with a little bit of rouge and matte red lipstick, hoping to make the gospel a bit more attractive. We’ve forgotten that Jesus will never be attractive to those not looking for him. He never has been.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
And no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
And as one from whom men hide their faces
He was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Is 53:2-3)

Flowers and fairy dust will not win the looking lost. The looking lost are looking for an escape from themselves, not to indulge themselves. The looking lost are looking for meaning beyond themselves, not for mindless, empty navel-gazing. The looking lost are looking to be comforted, not to be comfortable. The looking lost aren’t looking for a Church that looks so very much like their sin; they’re looking for a Church that looks like the Holy, the home of the Almighty.

Church, we must remember who we are and not be ashamed. We’re down, not out. On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. How will the looking lost find us if we’re hiding the geekiness of the gospel?

We have to believe that the very sound of the gospel alone is beautiful enough to the ears of those with eternity set in their hearts.

We have to believe that the gospel alone is beautiful enough without the flowers and the fairy dust.

We have to believe that people will come because of, not in spite of, the geekiness of the gospel.

Blessed are you when people hate you
And when they exclude you and revile you
On account of the Son of Man!
Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy (Mt 5:11)

Blessed are the geeks.

Read more in this series:

Open Letter to “Traditional” Women’s Directors
Making Women’s Ministry Work, Part 1: Blessed are the Smokers
Making Women’s Ministry Work, Part 2: Blessed are the Lionhearted

Recently, I wrote a post over on the Her.Meneutics blog in which I revealed that I voted in favor of Proposition 8 in the 2008 election season. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Proposition 8, it is a constitutional amendment that sought to add the clause “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” I explained that, like many people, it was hard to admit the way I voted because I didn’t want to be associated with far-right pastors who preach hatred and violence against gay people.

The purpose of the post was to encourage meaningful and charitable discourse between Christians on the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage. Lately, the dialogue between conservative Christians and progressive Christians has been growing particularly contentious—maybe because it’s an election year. Whatever the reason, conservative and progressive Christians need to figure out a way to treat one another with kindness despite their disagreements.

The post stirred up a maelstrom of vitriolic comments, mainly from non-Christians in the LGBT community. I will not answer the criticisms. Everyone has the right to interpret the beliefs and actions of others in any manner they choose. However, since the purpose of my post was not to defend my beliefs on same-sex marriage, I’d just like to point to others who have spoken cogently and respectfully on this topic.

Beyond that, I’d like to say three things. First, there are good people who support gay marriage and good people who oppose it. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something–probably one extremist view or another. Second, gay marriage has important implications for what kind of society we want to be. It is naïve to think that institutionalizing gay marriage will not have far-reaching implications in our educational systems and our local churches. Third, I am far more concerned about the fact that one in four children go to bed hungry every night, that every two minutes, a woman in the U.S. is raped, that every year 3.3. million counts of child abuse against six million children are reported each year. These issues, and other like, are of far greater concern to me than the issue of gay marriage.

The responses to my post do provide a sobering learning moment for concerned Christians in the following ways:

1.     Homosexuality and gay marriage have become civil rights issues, not moral issues. The LGBT community equates what they perceive as acts of discrimination against homosexuality (like voting against gay marriage) with the oppression of women and slavery. In other words, homosexuality is an immutable genetic characteristic like gender or race.

Since homosexuality is (hypothetically) an immutable characteristic, believing that marriage is intended for a man and a woman is discrimination on par with slavery. The question, for progressive Christians and non-Christians is no longer whether homosexuality is right or wrong, but whether or not gay people are being denied civil rights in the same manner as under-privileged groups like slaves or women.

2.     The movement away from the moral argument to the civil rights argument makes it impossible for Christians to say they oppose homosexuality in practice, but love individual people who are gay. The old, “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is no longer a tenable position to hold, at least in the eyes of the LBGT community. This makes perfect sense if you view it from their perspective. If homosexuality really is an immutable characteristic that cannot be changed, then 1.) God could never have been against it and therefore 2.) Any one who is against it is guilty of bigotry.

3.     Christians will have to take a stand one way or another. The issue is not going away and will have to be dealt with by the Christian community. This will be on an individual and corporate level. Last year, Willow Creek had to deal with this issue when Howard Schultz had to step down from speaking at the leadership summit because of a petition that threatened a boycott of Starbucks if he did not step down from speaking at an “anti-gay” organization.

4.    Conservative and progressive Christians need to dialogue with one another peaceably and respectfully. All Christians have a hard enough time building rapport with the surrounding culture without Christians turning on one another.

5.     Christians will have to find a place for mutual respect between themselves and those in the LGBT community. Christians have to find a way to enter into compassionate dialogue with the LGBT community in a way that honors their identity as bearers of the imago dei but does not compromise our responsibility as Christians to vote in ways that are consistent with Christian beliefs. Ultimately, this issue is about people, not principles. It’s far too easy to forget that many people in the LGBT community are people in great pain and have suffered from a lifetime of searching for validation and legitimacy. How can we point them to a conversational relationship with God?

 

 

We got Patience back in 2002. Paul and I had been searching the Southland for a dog for months when we found her, tucked away in the corner of the Pomona Humane Society. She was sleeping when I first saw her. She was the last of her litter, the runt, and I knew I had to have her. I sent Paul to get the adoption paperwork started while I stood guard at her crate to be sure no one else swept her away from me. After a few minutes, she woke, looked up at me with a bored expression and yawned.

It took me awhile to settle on a name for her because names, and the act of naming, are so important to me and because none of the usual names seemed to fit her. She was such a challenge to train that I ended up naming her Patience, saying that I either had to name her that or take her back to the PHS. For a long time she was one pair of destroyed shoes from being sent straight back. But she wore grooves in my heart, and soon there was no letting her go.

In those days, we lived on the second story of an apartment complex in Azusa, California near the campus of Azusa Pacific University. Patience and I spent several hours each day practicing walking up the stairs. Her little body shook in fear every time she took a step up or down those huge steps. But eventually, she got the hang of it and raced down those steps with unmatched enthusiasm.

Last week I took her to a vet specialist to find out the cause of her sudden blindness. On our way there, I guided her down a flight of stairs, and her whole body trembled with each step, so much like she did when she was young. My heart ached in the remembering and I thought, “It’s not supposed to be like this.” It’s the same ache I get when I plow through the news, but also the same ache I feel when I stand barefoot in the sand on Laguna Beach looking out on the Pacific or when I listen to Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It’s a longing for something just out of reach. It’s like I’m homesick for a place I’ve never seen, that I’m haunted by heaven.

Germans have a word for this longing, this desire for something we cannot quite define. They call it sehnsucht, which often translated as “yearning” or “longing”, but has no exact equivalent in another language. Sehnsucht figured prominently in the work of C.S. Lewis, who described it as an “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what”. Lewis believed that if we find in ourselves a desire for which no experience in the world can satisfy, then we must be meant for another world.

In the prelude to his book, Renovation of the Heart, a cornerstone book on the nature and process of spiritual formation,Dallas Willard points out that this desire not only allows us to peer in on “another world and another life”, but it also gives us a glimpse of what we can pull from that world into the world of the here and now. Willard says that the New Testament fleshes out what is actually possible in this life, that our life can be like “rivers of living water” (Jn. 7:38) and that we will “be able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:19-20).

Willard argues that few Christians actually grab hold of these promises because of the distance we see between our life and the life we see described in the New Testament and because we don’t approach life in the right way. “The perceived distance and difficulty,” Willard writes, “of entering fully into the divine world and its life is due entirely to our failure to understand that ‘the way in’ is the way of pervasive inner transformation and to our failure to take the the small steps that quietly and certainly lead to it.”

Spiritual formation molds us into the kind of person that will be at home in that other world we desire, that place free of death and decay, the one we see only in the corner of our eye. But change is so difficult, isn’t it? How does spiritual formation break us of the old habits and addictions that keep their firm grip on us and prevent us from moving forward, deeper in, the Christian life? Is it even possible to change? Starting this Monday, we’ll be looking at what Willard says about spiritual formation and the steps we can take towards a deeper Christian life we work through the book, Renovation of the Heart.

 

This week, we’ll be focusing on the three pillars that serve as the foundation for this blog: living well,
loving well, and leading well. These “pillars” are best conceived as three strands woven together–each one critical to the other. In other words, I don’t think it’s possible to live well without loving well or to love well without living well. And both living well and loving well are important to the task of leadership. Without living well, our leadership becomes hypocritical, hollow, shallow; without love, our leadership is dictatorial and self-serving.

People who want to work towards a better world must have a shared vision of “living well” or “the good life”. But what exactly does it mean to live well? Sometimes its easier to arrive at understanding of something by seeing what it’s not, and I know the ways I have not lived well. The college years of partying and chasing highs through drugs and alcohol. The seminary years devoted to another kind of addiction: workaholism. I broke my own back working four jobs taking full-time doctoral classes. But those are obvious ways I did not live well. Less obvious are the minutes, hours, I wasted on worry or bitterness, or the years I spent turned inwards, focused exclusively upon myself and my problems. In those ways, I failed to live well.

The question of how to live well is a question as old as time. For the Greeks, the concept of eudaimonia (happiness, welfare, human flourishing) was the cornerstone of Aristotelian ethics and political philosophy. Eudaimonia (human flourishing)–or what it is that constitutes the good life–was as heatedly debated in 300 B.C. as it is today–some thought the good life was pleasure and wealth while others thought it was rooted in a virtuous, wise character.

For Muslims, living well was found in worshipping God in all aspects of life and being obedient to what He revealed in the Qur’an. For Hindus the good life is wrapped up in the idea moksha, which is obtained by self-realization through the practice of yoga. For the Israelites and most contemporary Christians, living well means trusting in God and in living in loving obedience to His laws and commandments as revealed in the Scriptures.

But for Christians, the good life–human flourishing–isn’t simply punitive or negative. It isn’t found by looking inward and navel gazing or in looking upward and just obeying all the rules. Jesus taught better than that. N.T. Wright comments, “While other religious leaders of the day saw their task as being to keep themselves in quarantine away from possible sources of moral and spiritual infection, Jesus saw himself as a doctor. There’s no point in a doctor staying in quarantine. He’d never do his job.”

Similarly, the good life is a life focused outward–grounded in love for God and demonstrated through obedience, and love for others, demonstrated by compassionate action, especially for the disenfranchised. The art of living well is discovering what thoughts, attitudes, and habits move us toward the good life and what moves us away.

On January 25, 1996, the rock musical Rent, which tells the story of a group of impoverished artistsliving in New York City, opened on in an off-Broadway theatre. Since that humble beginning, the musical has grossed over $280 million, earning both a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Musical. In the song Seasons of Love, the cast asks how you quantify the value of one year of human life. In daylights? In sunsets? Inches? Miles? Laughter? Strife? There are so many ways to measure a year of human life, the song concludes that love is the only proper measure of the value of human life.