361. (classroom) sermon on Mark 1:4-11

[PREFACE]

I know I just posted up a “sermon” a few days ago and here I am, putting up another one.

What can I say, it’s just what I’ve been doing in grad school lately.

This sermon was written for my homiletics (preaching) class.

One of the things we’ve been learning in the class is the importance of context. Not so much the biblical or historical context of the text one is preaching on (that’s been covered in other classes), but the context of the congregation. The sermon, if it is to be effective, must take into context the people to whom it is delivered.

The sermons we write for this class are written for our classmates.

I make a point of saying that because it really does shape where I go in the sermon and might help you make sense of some of the places I go in the message. (It also helps make sense of the odd paragraph breaks and the sentence fragments – they’re written in such a way to help me deliver the message. It’s hard to explain. When I write something that’s going to be read, I write one way. When I write something that I’m going to read, I write another way. This is an example of the latter.)

Our teacher tells us that sermons are for a particular people in a particular place at a particular time. Because of this, she frowns on reusing sermons. A part of me wonders what she’d think of me posting up this sermon – something written for grad students, in a classroom, a few days ago; rather than for a somewhat anonymous audience, on the internet, for whenever you happen to click on it – but here’s the thing. I’m posting this up because I want to reference it in another post I’m working on.

…and to be completely transparent with you all, I’m posting it because I really like it.

[END PREFACE]

Mark 1:4-11

(4)John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (5)And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. (6)Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. (7)He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. (8)I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’

(9) In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. (10)And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. (11)And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Can we get this right out in the open, right at the beginning, and say that this is a strange text? For one thing, in Mark’s Gospel, John just appears out of nowhere. Poof! Preaching repentance and baptizing people out in the wilderness.

What’s going on here? I mean, if he’s out there in the wilderness, how did people find out about him? And why were they drawn to a message of repentance?

And it’d be one thing if there were just a few people out there, checking out this space oddity, but Mark tells us that people were coming from all over – “from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem.”

Can you picture the scene? A throng of people, the hot sun, a hot wind stirring up the dusty air? And at the center of it all, a man with an ugly, brown, camel hair tunic – bits of grasshopper and honey still clinging to his beard.

And what’s he saying?

“Repent! Be baptized! Be washed, be cleansed of your sins!”

And that’s striking enough because sins aren’t forgiven out in the desert, they’re forgiven in the temple. But in a way, it’s not so surprising because there have been eccentric teachers like this before preaching other wild and wooly messages.

No, it’s the next thing he says that really catches their attention.

He says, “Don’t look at me, there’s someone else, someone greater. I’m just getting you ready for him.”

Now this is really new. Previous wilderness “messiahs” have always pointed to themselves as the solution. But this guy? He’s pointing them towards something else, someONE else, something coming but not yet here.

Still, I’ll admit, I had a really hard time getting my head around this story, especially when it came to preaching on it – where’s the good news? I mean, Jesus hasn’t even begun his ministry yet, what is there to preach on? What on earth does it have to do with us today?

And then it came to me.

In a way, John was heading up the first Occupy movement – the Occupy Judaism movement.

Because what is the contemporary Occupy movement about? A bunch of people who see systemic injustice being done and want to do something about it. And so they take to the wilderness of the unsheltered urban streets – a wilderness starkly different than that of the Judean desert, but perhaps no less dangerous or uncomfortable.

And John didn’t actually come out of nowhere. Mark tells us that he came preaching, right out of the pages of prophecy – Isaiah 40:3, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” And what does that mean, to make straight paths? I think the larger context of the Isaiah text makes this clear.

“Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”

A level playing field – the very message of the Occupy movement.

Because I wonder if a landscape strewn with valleys (people living lower than others) and mountains (people living high above) is a land that blocks out the light for far too many?

Is it inequality that Isaiah is concerned with here? Is this the message that John was bringing, the message that so many were attracted to?

John is out there in the wilderness, preaching repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And he’s calling forth a society where access to the grace of forgiveness is no longer controlled by the powerful few but available to all.

Back then, the only people who could forgive sins were the religious elite, those of the priestly clan. This was a system that was supposed to create community but somehow it had gotten corrupted. It became about power and prestige rather than holiness and blessing. And the people knew it and that’s, I suppose, one reason why they were drawn out in the wilderness to John – for free access to forgiveness.

And not just forgiveness.

Again, the oddity of John was not just his clothes and his diet. No, he was offering something even stranger: a hope – a hope not based in himself and not even in a distant, abstract, holy God, but in another person. And that seems obvious to us now, but imagine their surprise back then. Imagine the strange, hopeful mystery that John was inviting them into – to look and to wait for someone else.

Because it’s one thing to say, “I am the answer, I am the one to put your hopes in.” It’s another thing entirely to say, “I’m just the messenger telling you to buckle up because someone else is coming who’s going to take this world in an entirely different direction. And repentance? That’s getting you turned in the right direction so you don’t get whiplash when the change does come!”

Anyway, I suppose that’s one way to look at John the Baptist. But how does that speak to us today? What’s the message for us?

When I started working on this message, I complained a lot. I thought it was unfair to be given a text which, really, is prologue. Jesus’ formal ministry doesn’t begin until another four verses after my pericope. How do I preach on that?

And then it hit me. Maybe I have the easiest passage of them all. Because the parallel between then and now, that story and ours?

Divinity students at The Seattle School, most of us envisioning ourselves going into some sort of ministry informed by the Gospel of Jesus – we are John the Baptist.

We point to hope in a world desperate for some hope to cling to. More than that, we point to an embodied hope, a physical hope, a storied hope.

And in this increasingly secularized world, a world where we can hold a computer, disguised as a phone, in our hands. A world that can harness the atom to power (or to destroy) our cities. A world with flight and medicine and the internet which can simultaneously topple regimes and deliver pictures of cats with silly captions to make us laugh.

In a world like this, I wonder if we might look like John the Baptist. No, we might not dress in uncomfortable clothes or eat bugs, but the message we believe, the message we bring? Isn’t that just as odd if not more so?

For those of us in the Theories of Culture class, we are learning that lasting world change never happens in a vacuum. It requires a whole host of disparate elements to come together unpredictably, uncontrollably.

I don’t know, is it too grandiose to say that we’re living in just such a time today – a time when the world is pregnant with new possibilities, a time when change is in the air, a time when more and more people are becoming aware of the injustice of inequality – and, more importantly, are willing to do something about it?

A time when the air all around us is rich with the gospel message of hope and love and freedom.

John tapped into the change that was already in the air in his time – that’s what drew people to him. People were desperate for change, for hope, and for someone powerful who could get them out of the mess they were in. And there was John, getting them ready for and pointing them towards Jesus.

And that’s what we get to do.

But I don’t want to sugar coat our task. Yes, ours is a good, hopeful work in a world and time ripe for change, but we would do well to remember that ours will also be a difficult, messy, maybe even dangerous work. I mean, John got himself jailed and then beheaded.

But we also do well to remember that out on the banks of the Jordan River with John’s voice crying out in the wilderness – Jesus showed up for John.

360. reflection on Micah 6:8

[PREFACE]

One of my classes this semester is called Essential Community. It’s goal is to introduce students to the need for and complexities of creating a community where people can gather to know and to be known.

That sounds like a simple task on the surface, but there’s a pretty big difference between a group of people in a room and a community. The former can be likened to a party – fun and social but not particularly deep. The latter can be though of as people who come together to bless and to be blessed, to teach and to learn, to give and to receive.

One of the final assignments for the class is to write and deliver a sermonette on the verse, Micah 6:8 – the theme verse for the class.

…and I like what I came up with and so I thought I’d share it here.

[END PREFACE]

8 He has shown all you people what is good.
   And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
   and to walk humbly with your God.

I love the verbs used in Micah 6:8: do, love, walk.

I love that the call is to DO justice – justice as a verb. Here, justice not an abstract principle or idea, but justice is something done, something put into practice. Cornel West says that “justice is what love looks like in public” – and I would add that it’s what love looks like in the commons. [We spent a lot of time on the idea of the commons in class.]

But we have to be careful here because the pursuit of justice can lead to the diminishing of one’s enemy, of the oppressor. It can dehumanize the person or group perpetrating injustice and when dehumanization happens, any manner of retaliation can be justified – justice-ified.

Which brings us to the second verb, “love.”

And how are we to love? Mercifully. This is not tough love. It’s the opposite of that. This is tough forgiveness. And what’s the difference? Tough love is tough on the other, often under the guise of justice. Tough forgiveness, however, is tough on the self for the sake of the other. Because forgiveness, true forgiveness, is always hard on the self.

We are wronged in some deep, dark way and we demand that things are made right – an eye for an eye, or a heart for a heart broken. And we want justice. But justice unfettered by love hurts all involved. We wound the other in retaliation and in doing so, we wound ourselves.

But justice, tempered by love expressed in mercy calls forth life.

Which brings us, finally, to the verb, “walk.” And how are we to move through this world? We are called to walk humbly. And as Jesus’ second greatest commandment will remind us, we are also called to walk humbly with our neighbor, through the commons, through life.

Three verbs: do, love, walk.

Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

It all sounds so simple doesn’t it. But our time in class and with the readings has shown me that these verbs are anything but easy. Not easy to understand, not easy to implement, and certainly not easy to live. And we can be left feeling powerless or lost.

But I wonder if there’s actually a fourth verb in there. What if we saw the word, “with,” not as a preposition, but as a verb? “With” as an action, an activity. We don’t do or love or walk alone. We do them with. I do them with you. You do them with me. And we do them together with God. Can you feel the activity embedded in the word – it bristles with life lived out together.

Which makes me wonder if perhaps the most important verb in this verse is the verb, “with.”

And so, what does the LORD require of us?

To do, to love, to walk, and to with.

359. damage and desire (part three)

(Part one here.)
(Part two here.)

[PREFACE] (feel free to skip)

When I set out to write about how the church has (mis)formed my views on dating and desire, I never anticipated that it would extend into a three part series. I also didn’t anticipate all of the positive feedback I’ve received through comments, facebook messages, and emails. Really, I began writing these posts for myself – because writing is how I work through things spinning around in my head. The first two posts in the series were relatively easy to write, because hindsight is 20/20 and so it wasn’t hard to look back and talk about how the teaching I received was bad theology and to highlight the various ways that bad theology ended up damaging my dating life. It’s a helluva lot harder to try and look forward and come up with more constructive ways to think christianly about desire.

Because to be honest, it feels like uncharted territory.

I’ve done more reading in preparation for writing this blog post than I ever have before. Hell, I’ve done more reading for this post than for some of the papers I’ve written for grad school. For something that plays a huge part in every christian’s life (sexual desire), it’s shocking how few books there are that deal well with this topic. I’ve drawn a lot from Rob Bell’s book, Sex God and from Lauren Winner’s book, Real Sex. I read and flipped through a few other books (some of them more academic, like Stanley Grenz’s book, Sexual Ethics).

And then.

And then I found Amy Frykholm’s stunning book, See Me Naked. It’s a revelation. If anything I’ve written in this series has resonated with you in any way, you MUST get this book.

As with a lot of what I’ve been writing lately in regards to my evolving theology, many thoughts are half-baked and are very much a work in progress.

Lastly, I’d like to state that I’m writing this post primarily to work through my own thoughts around the topic of damage, desire, and dating. So most (but not all) of what I write will be about how these issues impact straight, single males. I hope they’ll be of use to those outside that demographic, but to address this topic in all its permutations would be far beyond my current time and talent.

[END PREFACE]

Before we can get to a better way to think theologically about desire, we first need a brief history lesson.

In biblical times, there was no such thing as dating. At all. Marriage was primarily a pragmatic affair – something more akin to a sterile business transaction. Marriages were arranged. They were designed to ensure financial stability. And more importantly for the sake of this discussion, these marriages took place at a very young age – usually in the early teenage years.

Because of this, there’s a very good reason why the Bible has a lot more to say about adultery (sex with someone else’s husband/wife) than it does about fornication (the more general category of sex between unmarried persons) – because there weren’t many unmarried persons around to fornicate with, but there were a lot of married people to adulterate with.

So why this history lesson. What does it matter to our discussion of how the church deals with desire today?

Because the biblical texts that the church likes to cite in regards to sex and desire have nothing to do with the dating world we live in. In fact, there are no scriptural references one can appeal to that address the modern practice of dating and courtship. None. It’s a cultural convention that has no parallel in the world of the Bible. That should have radical implications for the way that the church applies biblical teachings in its discussion of desire, but sadly, it seldom does.

Take Matthew 5:27-30 – a verse that constantly got hammered into my head every time the church talked about desire.

(27) “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ (28) But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (29) If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. (30) And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

Right off the bat, one has to note the word “adultery” in verse 27 and 28 – sex with a married person that you’re not married to. This is NOT a teaching that applies to single people – at least not directly. Pummeling singles with this verse without qualifications is lazy, irresponsible exegesis.

Take some of the other verses commonly cited when talking about desire (1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Thessalonians 4:3-8, Ephesians 5:3, to name just a few). Read those verses while keeping in mind that they are speaking to an audience that got married in their teens (and almost all of them would be married) and you begin to see that they have nothing to do with the dating/courtship world we live in today. These are verses concerned with protecting the sanctity of marriage – keeping husbands and wives committed to one another in a covenant relationship – NOT with controlling the desires of single people.

Today, we might look at the ancient world and say, that it’s awful that they got married so young – we consider that statutory rape. But really, there’s a kind of genius to it. All those budding desires, all of those bodily changes and the curiosity and exploration that goes along with them? Because they got married young, all of those new feelings could be freely explored within their committed marriage relationship. And that’s the way it was meant to be. That’s the kind of beautiful sexual exploration of desire that the Bible is concerned with honoring and preserving in those verses about fleeing from sexual immorality (by which the authors meant, adultery, not pre-marital sex).

Here’s a brief contrast of their world to ours:

Then	Now
Married young, early teenage years.	Median marriage in the US, 27.
Sexual curiosity, awakening, of puberty happens when married.	Sexual curiosity, awakening, of puberty happens outside of marriage (see above).
Marriage arranged.	Marriage self-directed. People date in order to find a marriage partner.
Set, recognized, and accepted customs, practices, and behaviors regarding marriage.	Conflicting ideas, narratives, rules regarding dating and marriage

Those are just a few cursory examples of the contrasts but I think it’s clear that applying biblical teaching about desire from their time to our time can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be a simple, straightforward process.

And I realize that I’m being repetitive here, but I’m doing so because I’m trying to drive home a vitally important point: the verses in the Bible talking about fleeing sexual immorality (and adultery) are primarily talking to married persons because they were written to a world where almost everyone was already married.

But we don’t live in that world anymore.

But if the Bible is written to a world that knows nothing about dating and single adults trying to figure out how to handle their desires, then what do we do?

I think the first thing the church needs to do is to be honest about this disconnect. Every time the church talks to singles about desire and dating, it should say right up front that it’s extrapolating (a more polite way of saying that it’s making it up as it goes along). And the reason why this admission is important is because it leaves room for something that is FAR too lacking in the church’s teaching around desire: grace. Unconditional, radical, all encompassing grace.

This is a grace that needs to go both ways. The church should extend grace to congregants who choose to disagree with its teaching and congregants should extend grace to the church as it tries to accomplish the very difficult task of bridging the ethics of the ancient world with our own – something I’m going to attempt to do in the rest of this post (much grace, much appreciated).

First things first.

A confession.

When I started reading books about sexuality and desire and ethics in preparation for writing this post, I really wanted to find someone who could make a credible case for biblically sanctioned premarital sex. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, this would be the easiest way to come up with a modern take on the Bible and desire wouldn’t it? I mean it’s so tempting and easy to say that since the Bible has next to nothing to say about premarital sex, that maybe we should just say that it’s not prohibited at all. Since all the warnings against indulging in sexual immorality are only for married couples then maybe singles are free to copulate and explore sexual desire in any and all forms in their search for a compatible marriage partner.

So I confess, that’s what I wanted to find, because, whoo-wee! wouldn’t that preach on a Sunday morning?

But I couldn’t. At least, I couldn’t find anyone who could make a credible case for that stance. People have tried, but not convincingly (at least to my mind).

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let me bring a word into this conversation that is sorely lacking in the church’s discussion of desire.

Pleasure.

Isn’t that a beautiful word?

The fact that I never heard that word in any of the church’s teaching around desire speaks volumes about why things are so awry.

But why is it important to bring pleasure into this discussion? Because I think pleasure can be one way (though certainly not the only way) of bridging the ethics of the ancient world with our own. At the very least, it’s a way of resolving the nasty mind/body dualism (the idea that the desires of the body are bad and need to be rigorously contained/controlled by the mind) that fear-based teaching on desire engenders.

See, pleasure is something we experience in our bodies. It isn’t something we can wear, it’s not something we can eat, it’s not something we can (or have to) learn. We might wear things that please us, we can eat things that please us, and we can learn to experience pleasure more deeply, but it’s not a thing in and of itself. It’s something that wells up within us in response to something that happens outside of us.

You’re driving to work, the sun rises, and in that way that only early sunlight can, the city is illuminated. And pleasure wells up within you.

You go to a concert – the sound washes over you, the air is electric, filled with the endless possibilities of performance. And pleasure wells up within you.

You treat yourself to something delicious (a chocolate cordial, perhaps) – you put it into your mouth, you bite, and fruity, syrupy sweetness coats your tongue. And pleasure wells up within you.

And here’s a really good one.

Your significant other runs her fingers through your hair – slowly, caressing the curve of your ear as she draws her hand towards the back of your head. With the tips of her fingers she teasingly plays with those tiny hairs on the back of your neck. She closes her eyes and pulls your lips toward hers. Soft, warm, wet – flesh presses into flesh.

And deep, luminous, pleasure wells up within you.

God created a sensuous, tactile world. Genesis tells us that God created a world, a good world. And despite the Fall, there is still much goodness in the world. God meant for us to take pleasure in the goodness of this world. In fact, God designed our bodies to enjoy creation – to take pleasure in the exploration and experience of it. Why else would he have created us with such sensory-filled bodies?

And desire? It’s designed to draw us towards pleasure. It’s the precursor to pleasure. God places desire in our bodies to drive us out into the world he created so that we might take pleasure from the experience of it. In contrast, shut down desire and you shut down all that life is meant to be lived for. You corrupt God’s design for the world and there’s a word for that kind of corruption. It’s called sin.

Going back for a second, the genius of the ancient world lies in the fact that they got married just before or just as sexual desire began to bloom in their adolescent bodies, so they were able to explore all of their bodily and sensory changes within the safe confines of a marriage relationship.

But we don’t live in that world anymore. In the US, the average age that people first get married is their mid to late twenties – more than a decade later than our ancient ancestors. Raging hormones, unfamiliar bodily changes and urges – all of those things take place in bodies unfettered by the safe confines of marriage. And the Bible has no direct, relevant guidance for people inhabiting these bodies.

And so we have to (gracefully) extrapolate. We have to guess. Which isn’t to say things are hopeless. Because isn’t that just how life works? We don’t know what to do, we can’t find adequate guidance, and so we take a chance and make our best educated guess. I’d say that all the bad teaching around desire I got growing up was the church’s best guess at the time. Based on the results, I’d say that it probably wasn’t a good guess.

And so I’m gonna step out on a limb and see if I can posit a better guess.

And it’s here that I’m deeply indebted to the work of Amy Frykholm and her book, See Me Naked. She offers four “mechanisms” (not rules) to help guide us in our explorations of pleasure and desire.

1. Discernment
    
   I love that she begins with discernment. Because it places the onus of developing a sexual ethic, not in an abstract, external authority, but in that liminal, wondrous space between the individual, the other, and God.
    
   One of the problematic aspects of the church imposing strict rules on dating and desire is that it severs relationships – relationships between people and their own bodies, between people and other bodies, and between people and God who created them uniquely and wonderfully.
    
   In contrast, living with discernment means that a dating couple needs to turn towards one another (instead of a set of rules) and prayerfully discern how they will navigate the commingling of their desires and their exploration of pleasure while honoring one another and God, their creator.

2. The cultivation of wonder instead of fear
    
   Again, this is a wonderfully helpful guideline mechanism. It works in partnership with the discernment discussed above. It’s a balancing force – because discernment without the exploration that wonder elicits can become clinical and theoretical. Wonder explored without discernment can lead to reckless indulgence.
    
   In writing about the cultivation of wonder, Frykholm offers the following:

   In this alternative sexual ethic, we commit to addressing whatever part of us that seeks to be numb and dead instead of an active and living presence in the world. This principle asks us to rigorously address whatever it is that keeps us from living and being fully present to ourselves and to each other.

   That’s so revelatory and life-giving and beautiful (and so unlike anything I’ve ever heard in the churches I grew up in) that it brought tears to my eyes as I read it. Because life is meant to be lived – lived in all of its abundance.

3. Aliveness
    
   By “aliveness,” she means a carefully attuned awareness. It’s a process. It’s learning to be aware of the things that bring us life and the things that suck it away.
4. True, deep, real pleasure as an avenue to the Holy
    
   This is such a lovely way to think about pleasure – to see it not as something to be feared or shamed or withheld, but as an avenue to the Holy. And the only way to use pleasure as a means of encountering the Holy is through discernment, wonder, and aliveness (awareness). Because undiscerning, unaware pleasure seeking can all too easily devolve into a selfish cycle of empty self-fulfillment – what Frykholm calls “thin pleasure,” and if we’re not alive to it, we can easily miss it.
    
   In talking about the cultivation of deep pleasure, she shares a story about her friend’s eleven-year-old daughter. Entering puberty, this girl was beginning to sense unfamiliar changes in her body. She told her mother that she was afraid getting older. Her mother comforted her fears, saying,

   Your body will know more pleasure than you can even now imagine. You are going through a period where your body is going to learn to feel pleasure, and you will be amazed.

   Stunning words of love and wisdom.
    
   What a beautiful thing it is to tell someone to see pleasure as a guide through the murky, uncharted waters of adolescence. This is a mother drawing her daughter towards life, into the life abundant. There is trust and relationship here – the opposite of what rule-making brings.
    
   (And I hope it’s not too late for me to learn that lesson in my own life.)

One last bit.

Earlier, I mentioned grace. The idea of grace saturates the Bible but it seldom gets mentioned in discussions around desire. But that may be where it’s needed most of all.

Because here’s the thing. Nobody handles desire perfectly. Nobody. Especially in today’s confusing, highly sexualized world. And even if a church somehow found a way to teach intelligently, sensitively, theologically about desire, people are going to prayerfully discern different ethical guidelines for their relationships. And even as they create guidelines and boundaries for themselves, they’re gonna screw up.

However they make their way through, they need to know that God is still madly in love with them, that they are no less than they were before whatever “mistake” they might have made, and that they always have a place in the community of faith.

They don’t need shame.

They need grace.

We all do.

[POSTSCRIPT]

These feel like uncharted waters, my friends. And I am a more unfamiliar navigator than most so I would love to hear feedback, questions, push back, concerns.

Feel free to leave comments below or message me on facebook.

Thanks for reading.

358. damage and desire (part two)

(Click here for part one.)

[PREFACE]
(Feel free to skip, but please read the “one more thing” bit.)

First off, a disclaimer. I’m going to be turning forty in a few months. I received the teachings I’m critiquing here way back in my late teens and early twenties. The statute of limitations on blaming the church for my relational problems has long since expired. In my own mind, I’ve already forgiven those pastors, teachers, and leaders – all of whom had the best intentions in teaching what they did. They were just passing on what they had been taught and what had worked for them.

That said, their instruction sure didn’t work for me or help me grow and mature in how I interact with women I’m attracted to. So while it’s one thing to say, “hey, that teaching I grew up with was bullshit,” it’s another thing entirely to figure out what to do next. And for me, I’ve found that the only healthy way to move forward is to make a brutally honest assessment of where things went wrong and how that’s affected me since.

And so I write the post below as a way to unpack the damage that’s been done. It’s a case study in how an inadequate theology of desire can have devastating consequences. I also write because, well, to be frank, I write because I’m secure enough in myself to just put the junk in my trunk out there. Not to spew, but to help me sort things out in my own head. I also write in the hopes that others will read and relate and see that they’re not alone. Because I know that some of the things I’ll share, a lot of men have experienced to one degree or another. But not a lot of people are willing to talk about what they’ve been through. Because who wants to admit that their dating acumen is no better than that of a high school freshman? And so they feel alone. I know I did. And so I’ll speak up. For me and for them.

Oh, and one more thing.

When I wrote part one, I tried to write (as I always do) for as wide an audience as possible. However, as I suspected as I was writing it and as has been confirmed through comments and emails I’ve received, I can really only write from the straight, male perspective of this issue. I can only guess at what kind of (explicit/implicit) teachings on dating women received in the church and how that’s affected them. My hope would be that it was more positive than what guys like me got, but I suspect not.

And all this damage I write about? At least the aim of my desire did have some light at the end of the tunnel. For most of the LGBT community that grew up in the church? There was no such light. The theology of sexual desire really needs to be rethought from top to bottom, left to right, front to back. I will talk about the LGBT issue, but not right now. My posts are too long and rambling already (just look at how long this freaking preface is). Please know that I am thinking about you as I write and that I’m sorry I’m not addressing your concerns here. But I will.

[END PREFACE]

In my previous post in this series, I wrote about how I’ve found that much of the theology/teaching around sexual desire and dating in the church has been unhelpful for me. Before moving on to talk about more constructive ways that the church can handle these topics, I’d like to get a bit more personal and talk about how this teaching has impacted my own life.

I joked once that this is how I approach a woman I want to ask out:

“so…um…don’t feel pressured or anything because it’s not really a big deal so feel free to say no because you won’t hurt my feelings and I hope I’m not putting you in an awkward position because…oh, you know what? I just remembered that I need to buy bread so I’ll be going now. Have a nice day.”

Thing is, it’s not much of a joke. The reality is even sadder than that. See, that bit of dialogue is not what I say to the woman, that’s what I say in my head as I try and psych myself up to ask her out. As you can imagine, I never end up making a move.

I’m coming to understand that there’s a ton of stuff underneath all that awkward rambling. Because here’s the thing. I know I’m a good great catch. And I don’t mean that in the self-deluded way that early American Idol contestants do. I am objectively a great catch. Not the best bachelor on the market, but certainly well above a lot of what’s out there. I know this. I believe it the same way I believe Macs are better (for me) than PCs – that is to say, the reasons for my belief are based both on personal experience and can be verified by the experiences of others. I have lots of people who will readily vouch for my good-catch-ed-ness (references available). All that to say that it’s not necessarily a lack of confidence that’s at issue here.

So what’s the deal. Why do I completely fall apart when thinking about asking a girl out?

I go back to what I wrote in my last post about how I was taught by the church to fear desire. I was taught that any physical desire felt outside the context of marriage was sin. More than that, I was taught that it was an affront to God – that God saw me as a perverted, dirty, lecherous human being every time I experienced or felt any kind of sexual arousal. The only proper response to such feelings is immediate and utter rejection of those feelings, purging them through the flames of shame. That’s basically what I was taught. Perhaps not so bluntly, but that’s the way I received it.

“But wait a minute,” you might object, “I thought we were just talking about asking a girl out – it’s not like you were trying to seduce her.”

True enough, but in the teaching that I got in the church in regards to dating, they essentially did equate dating to seduction. And yeah, that sounds freaking insane, but really if you follow the logic of the theology, that’s where you end up.

Let me break it down for you.

1. Start with their premise that all sexual desire felt outside the marriage context is sin.
   
2. That leads to the teaching that it’s the job of the good Christian man to avoid situations that could lead to the arousal of desire.
   
3. One situation that will inevitably lead to the arousal of desire is being alone with a woman.
   
4. When you date a woman, you put yourself in just such a dangerous situation.
   
5. Therefore, you shouldn’t date someone until you’re at the point where you’re considering proposing to her. Dating is nothing more than a final proving grounds, a way of confirming compatibility for marriage.

Madness, right? But begin with a theology that fears any and all sexual desire outside of marriage and it’s not hard to end up with just such an outline for “courtship.” And it’s that precise outline that got taught to me.

So back to the situation I was dealing with earlier (my awkwardness in even thinking about asking women out). Take the normal fear and insecurity that everyone feels when thinking about asking someone out. That can be hard enough to overcome but then tack on the fear of having the God of the universe turn away in utter disgust at my inevitable arousal (if not on the first date then perhaps the second or the third) and you can see how asking women out was not a simple, straightforward thing for me.

And so I didn’t ask many people out.

And that’s bad enough, but it gets worse.

The few times I did somehow go out on dates, they never went well. Let me rephrase that. I never dealt with them well. The date itself might have been fine, great even. But insidiously, sometimes the better the date went, the more freaked out I would be afterwards. Because that meant the possibility of more dates. And if that happened then maybe I wouldn’t just have to worry about my own desire. What if I caused desire to well up within the other person? Then I’d really be fucked (in every sense of the word).

And sadly, tragically, I’d find some way to not ask them out again.

Big disclaimer here. I can’t pin all of this neurosis on the church. There are other reasons my dating life played out this way – reasons I don’t have space to go into here (and besides, I’m pretty open in this blog but I do have my limits). But all that bad church teaching compounded, rather than eased my issues in this area.

This is one way that a bad theology of desire can damage a person’s life and why the church needs to rethink how it talks about it.

And I promise I’ll get to ideas about more positive ways to think theologically about desire in my next post.

But let me end with one more really bad theological idea that hindered my romantic life.

You know the carrot and the stick approach to motivating people to behave a certain way? The fear of desire was the stick the church used. The carrot? It’s something I used to call transactional theology (if someone knows the precise theological term for this idea, please let me know). It’s the idea that if you live a certain kind of life or do certain kinds of things then God will bring various kinds of blessings into your life.

One common place you hear this idea is when preachers talk about tithing. They’ll quote Malachi 3:10 where God seems to be saying, “test me on this – if you tithe, I will bless you.” See how that works? If you do this thing (tithe) then God will do this other thing (bless). It gets preached as a transaction and it’s supposed to be bulletproof, a sure thing, quid pro quo.

The way this idea got related to dating was this. IF you set aside your filthy, carnal urges; IF you worry less about finding the right person and worry more about being the right person; IF you spend diligent, consistent, considerable time in prayer and study of God’s word THEN (and only then) God will bring an amazing woman into your life. Just like that. Happily ever after.

And, of course I wanted that, so I did my part. And I kept doing my part. And when I noticed that God wasn’t bringing my wife into the picture I figured I must not be doing my part well enough and so I’d try harder. And harder. And harder.

But here’s the worst part. Even if some new woman started attending church who I thought was smart and cute and awesome, that whole fear-laden cycle I mentioned earlier would kick in and so I wouldn’t ask her out. Or if I did, I wouldn’t ask her out again – even (especially) if it went well. Because that’s what a theology of fear does. The carrot and the stick are supposed to work together towards some common end but in this case, they canceled each other out.

Honestly, I don’t know how anyone from my circle of church friends ever ended up getting married. Somehow, they knew how dysfunctional the church’s teaching was and just decided to do different. And let me let you in on a dark secret. While they were dating? There were Christian leaders who were condemning them. I know because they told me. They told me I was the better Christian.

And now they’re married and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

[POSTSCRIPT]

Shitty way to end a post, I know, but I feel much better now that I’ve gotten that off my chest. Writing does that for me.

I’ll get to some ideas about how the church can better handle this topic (theologically and practically) in the next post.

357. damage and desire (part one)

One thing that’s been great about going to seminary is learning about how much of the theology I was raised with was… well, not wrong per se, but not a good fit for me. For example, a few months ago, I wrote about how I’m moving away from the atonement theory I was raised with (substitutionary atonement) and am moving towards a different theory (the moral influence model). That move has been a good one for me. It’s helped me make sense of a wide variety of theological questions and issues that have plagued me for a long time and that’s been nice.

Moving from one understanding of the atonement to a different one was a nice change, intellectually, but it was a largely abstract, theoretical move. That’s not to say that it hasn’t been important to me, it’s more that it hasn’t had a huge impact on how I see and understand my past and my story. However, there’s been another sort of theological misfit that I’ve been uncovering lately and this one has some pretty profound implications for me and my life. It really does impact how I see and understand my past. It also sheds light on how I’ve ended up where I am today and how I hope to carry myself and be in the world in the future. And how I hope to lead others.

And I’ve actually written a bit about this previously. I wrote about how back in high school and early college, I had some really jacked up teaching around dating. In that post, I kind of poked fun at what I was taught but you know, lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about that time and the more I think about it, the more I’m coming to see how there’s been some really deep, really damaging, long-lasting effects that all that bad teaching instilled in me.

See, here’s the thing. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I’ve never had a girlfriend. I have a lot of different ideas about why my live has been this way but I’m now starting to realize that one of the root causes has to do with really, really bad theology. All that bad teaching around dating I had in church? I’m finding that it emerged from a really poor, really shallow theology of desire – sexual desire to be more specific.

Their theology went something like this. Sexual desire within the context of a marriage relationship is awesome but all sexual desire outside of that very limited context is wrong. Very wrong. So wrong, in fact, that christian leaders (especially youth and young adult leaders, but not limited to them) are well within their rights to use shame, intimidation, false promises, and fear (lots and lots of fear) in order to ensure that all traces of sexual desire are eliminated.

The way that theology of (anti)desire got preached to me was this. Desire outside the context of marriage is dangerous, it’s unpredictable, uncontrollable, and wrong. It’s so dangerous that if you choose to entertain it in any way, shape, or form, it will seriously and permanently fuck you up for life. It’s so unpredictable and uncontrollable that you should have nothing to do with it whatsoever because you can’t predict what you can’t control and you can’t control what you can’t predict. And it’s so wrong that we’re going to immediately brandish you with white hot shame if we even suspect you’re dabbling in it in any way whatsoever… because that’s how much we love you.

I wish I could say that this kind of teaching is just a youth group kind of thing but it’s not. There are lots of books written by/for adult Christian men that are supposed to help them deal with sexual temptation. (Every Man’s Battle is a popular one and there are lots just like it.) Basically these books say that all sexual desire felt outside the marriage context is bad. To combat this, they outline a variety of strategies to ensure that sexual thoughts or feelings never come to mind in the first place. Chief among them is something Steve Arterburn calls “bouncing.” Bouncing is a technique he teaches where every time your eye is tempted to linger on something that can potentially lead to sexual arousal, you immediately bounce your eyes onto something else. So if a man is walking down the street and spots an attractive woman, he’s supposed to bounce his eyeballs onto something else like a tree or his shoes or maybe the clouds in the sky.

There was a time that I bought into these kinds of ideas and techniques but I don’t anymore. And there are lots and lots of reasons I’ve changed my mind.

1. It’s really bad theology.
    
   While it is true that the fullest extent of sexual fulfillment and intimacy is reserved for those in a committed marriage partnership, other forms and expressions of that desire in other contexts are also a part of God’s design for humanity. We have been created as sexual beings. It’s hard wired into our brains. To attempt to be asexual is to attempt to be something less than human and that’s not honoring to God’s design for us. In fact, one could go so far as to say that it’s sin. Let me repeat that so the irony can sink in. Trying to live a life completely free of non-marital sexual desire is sin. It’s a perversion of God’s design for us.

2. It leads to a really dysfunctional emotional life.
    
   Sexual desire is a primary human emotion. Constantly dismissing, neglecting, disarming it can’t be healthy. Because here’s the thing. Desire is such a deep seated emotion that, regardless of suppression strategy, it will find expression somewhere, somehow. Denying it only makes it grow and fester such that when it finally does express itself, it’ll likely be in a very unhealthy, destructive way. Given how poorly much of the church has dealt with this issue, it’s no surprise that more than half of the evangelical leaders listed in Wikipedia’s Christian scandals page are there because of a wide variety of sexual indiscretions¹.
    
   On a more personal note, I know of at least two pastors who were a part of my life who stepped down or were forced out because of multiple sexual liaisons. In fact, one of these pastors preached a particularly strict procedure for dating – one where you didn’t go out on single dates with the person you were interested in until you were seriously getting ready to propose to him/her.
    
   Of course the most common way hidden/suppressed desire gets dealt with is through pornography. But that’s a topic way too big for this post. Maybe some other time.

3. It doesn’t work.
    
   In the world of psychology, techniques like bouncing are known as behavioral modifications. The problem with behavioral techniques is that they only work for a short period of time because it doesn’t deal with root causes. If you’ve ever done any gardening, you know that if you only pull a weed up by what’s on the surface, it might look like the weed is gone but wait a few days and it’s back again. The only way to really get rid of the weed is to yank it out, roots and all. Bouncing eyes is like pulling the surface part of a weed. It’s just not a long term solution to the problem of misplaced or inappropriate or uncontrollable sexual desire.

4. It can easily lead to misogynistic tendencies.
    
   Techniques like bouncing are based in fear (fear of sexual desire) and as Yoda once said, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to misogyny.” Poke around the Christian interwebs, in forums that discuss sexual desire (keyword, “lust”) and you’ll soon find men blaming women for tempting them. Rather than honoring what’s uniquely beautiful about the opposite sex, it reinforces objectification – the idea that for men, women are merely sexual(ized) objects, not complete persons.
    
   It’s a terribly mixed message. On the one hand, there are all sorts of pressures urging women to be beautiful (as if that’s all they have to offer) and then on the other hand, there are Christians who are saying, “hey, hey, tone it down! Can’t you see that what you’re wearing is causing me to sin?” Where’s the line? How frumpy is frumpy enough and who gets to decide?
    
   And why are only women getting blamed?
    
   Men (yes, even Christian men) play a huge part in the confusing mess of conflicting standards that women have to negotiate. Why doesn’t this ever get questioned in the church? Why does it seem like it’s always the women who get called into question?

[POSTSCRIPT]

I know I’ve only critiqued ideas in this post. I’ve tried to debunk what gets taught in a lot of churches but haven’t offered any alternatives. Stay tuned – I hope to get to that in future posts.

In the mean time, I’d love to hear thoughts/questions/comments/criticisms in the comments.

[END POSTSCRIPT]

¹Also significant, almost half of the people listed were involved in homosexual affairs which, to me, suggests that the church’s stance against homosexuality is not just theologically outdated, it’s also tremendously damaging for clergy – but that’s a whole other topic for a whole ‘nother post.

in the mean time…

I know I haven’t been posting here lately.

But while I haven’t been writing here, I have started up a new blog. It’s kind of like the opposite of this blog. Where as I’m overly verbose here, there I’m pithy to a fault.

Basically what I do is read through the lectionary readings for the day and write up a haiku based on something that stood out to me. That’s it.

I’ve been at it for a few weeks now and it’s been fun (mostly).

I do hope to post again here soon. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, here’s where I’ve been writing these lectionary haikus:

http://lectionaryhaiku.wordpress.com/

Photo by: C Lynn Steele

356. thoughts on delivering my first sermon

About a week ago, I got to preach my first actual sermon. Prior to this, I had been a part of a house church and I had co-led a small group Bible study for Quest Church, but I had never actually preached in front of an actual congregation, behind an actual pulpit.

Couple thoughts regarding the experience.

1. Sermon prep is HARD work!
   For one thing the text I had to preach on was pretty difficult:

   Matthew 5:10 (TNIV)
   Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

   I mean the plain sense of the text is pretty clear. Jesus is saying that people who get beat down for doing good (no good dead goes unpunished?) are blessed.

   But there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.

   Read in the context of the Sermon on the Mount (SotM), Jesus is using this verse and the ones that follow (Matthew 5:11-12) to prepare his audience to hear the heart of the sermon – the idea of fulfilling the law (Matthew 5:17-20). What Jesus does in the whole of the SotM is a radical reconceptualization of what it means for Jews to follow the Jewish Law. In a way, this last part of the Beatitudes serves as a transition point between the blessings of the Beatitudes (sort of an appetizer) and the main course of the meal (fulfilling the Law).

   From a preaching standpoint, that’s a lot of material to unpack. But that’s just dealing with how the verse was heard in the time it was preached and that’s only part of what a good sermon does.

   The other part is tying the original message to a contemporary application and that was also difficult. Because while it’s easy to find present day examples of Christian persecution in the world, a lot of that persecution happens far outside of America. I wanted to find a way of talking about persecution much, much closer to home.

   In trying to communicate all of this (the historical context along with contemporary application), I went through a bunch of drafts, trying to cram all this information in. The first drafts were hopelessly academic and abstract – a reflection on all the research I had done. While that might have made for a nice essay for grad school, it did not communicate well to the intended audience.

   Thankfully, I have a mentor who’s helping me prepare for my eventual church plant and after reading one of my later drafts, he gave me some really great advice about how to boil my ideas down to their essence. The sermon you see above would have been a mess without his advice.

   Granted, this was my first sermon and I learned a lot in the process (both the prep and the preaching) but I gotta say, it was WAY harder and took WAY more time than I thought it would.

   But you know what? I loved it!

   Well, most of it, because…

2. Perspective – short term

   I’ll be totally transparent and honest here and admit that after preaching my sermon, I was left wondering how much good it did.

   Because here’s the thing. I thought about all the times that I’ve been in church and just let the sermon drift on by me. Take the average Sunday morning service. On the Monday after church, if you asked me what the sermon that Sunday had been about, probably two thirds of the time, I’d have a really hard time recollecting. And that’s assuming I stayed tuned in during that Sunday’s sermon.

   Preaching is an art – a kind of performance art. You do all this prep work beforehand and then you present what you’ve come up with and then it’s out of your hands. Once it’s out there, it belongs to the audience and they’re free to accept, reject, forget, or even completely misunderstand it.

   It’s quite a sobering experience.

3. Perspective – long term

   Despite those doubts about the actual effectiveness of my sermon, I realized something else.

   While any given congregant might not be impacted by any particular sermon, I was still struck by the awesome responsibility that preaching is.

   A moment ago, I likened preaching to an art, and that metaphor works here as well. The long term impact/influence of a great artist usually isn’t contained in any one piece – it’s recognized in the body of their work. But in order to have that impact, the artist must have a vision that they are trying to communicate – a vision large enough to encompass a lifetime of work.

   The thing that struck me about preaching is how important it is to have some larger vision about what the Bible (more specifically, the Gospel message of Jesus) is about. What is the grand narrative of the Bible into which the Christian life is lived?

   This should be a narrative that’s large enough to make sense of all that goes on in all areas of the universe – from individual tragedies that befall particular congregants, to societal upheavals, to local/national/global political dynamics, to discoveries in the area of science.

   It should make sense of ethical dilemmas both mundane (what to do when your co-worker keeps stealing your red stapler) and profound (how to weigh the benefits of stem-cell research with the need to respect the dignity of human life).

   It should also be accessible to the average congregant. It shouldn’t be some complicated theological construct that only Bible geeks can understand, but at the same time, it should be able to hold up to critique both from within the realm of Christian thought as well as from without (for example, it should be able to offer a compelling response to the New Atheism movement).

   One thing I want to make clear here. I’m not saying that every person who wants to go into full time pastoral ministry should have an understanding of the Gospel that can live up to all these standards (I know I don’t have that!) but tI think it is something to which pastors should aspire (I know I do) because, again, as with the artist, the larger the vision, the better the chances of long term impact.

   All that to say, the act of preaching drove home to me the enormity of the task that I’m taking on as I work towards planting a church after I’m done with grad school. Clearly, I have a lot of work to do.

4. Audience feedback

   For the bulk of my adult life, I’ve been involved in bands. From my mid-twenties to my late-thirties, I spent more time in bands than out of them. In fact, it was because of a band (Harrison, RIP) that I made the move out to Seattle almost five years ago.

   During all that time with a bunch of different bands, audience reaction was never a big deal for me. From a show where after playing our first song, only three kids remained (of the hundred or so that were there when we started the song) to playing in front of almost a thousand people opening up for My Chemical Romance way back in 2005, as long as I was having a good time on stage, it didn’t matter to me how the audience reacted. Of course it was nice to hear from people who said they enjoyed the show, but even when we got an icy reaction, I didn’t care.

   Preaching was a slightly different experience for me.

   I had to preach the sermon twice on Sunday morning and I’d say that the earlier service reacted better to my sermon than the later one. And I was surprised at how much that affected me. Now for the most part, I feel good about how I did at both services but I have to admit that for one of the first times in my life, I understood what musical artists mean when they say they feed off the energy of the audience.

   By the way they laughed and looked up at me, I got the sense from the earlier service that they were right there with me, and I gotta admit – it was a great feeling. I was able to relax and be a bit more spontaneous in my delivery. And I don’t want to suggest that the latter service was unengaged or hostile – far from it – but they didn’t laugh quite as loud and some of the expressions I saw weren’t as supportive as what I saw earlier. And I have to admit that it got me to question what I was communicating. Had I missed something in my research? Was my application completely off base? Was this the wrong message for this audience?

   I stuck to my outline (I didn’t really have a choice) and made it through the rest of the second service just fine, but I was struck by how much just a small bit off difference in audience reaction subtly changed the way I thought about and delivered the message.

   Because here the thing…

5. I delivered a challenging message

   The way this verse is usually preached, the people in the congregation are made to feel that they are among those who are being persecuted for righteousness – maybe they experience workplace ridicule because people know they’re Christians – and so they should take comfort in Jesus’ message that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

   I took a different approach. I tried to say that the kind of righteousness that the world needs today is one that is based on relationship and reconciliation. And that’s a nice message, but I took it one step beyond. I made the case that if one really takes the task of working towards relationship and reconciliation seriously, it means that one WILL encounter persecution.

   The kind of relationship and reconciliation I was challenging Quest with is the kind that works across divides.

   Take a look at Matthew 5:43-44:

   “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…”

   There are two ways to pray for someone who’s persecuting you. One is to pray against them, the other is to pray on their behalf, for their benefit. Jesus’ admonition to love one’s enemy and the Greek word behind the word “for” both suggest the latter approach. And I would suggest that the only way to pray on behalf of someone who’s persecuting you is to understand why they’re doing so and that means stepping out of your own shoes and into those of your enemy even as they’re persecuting you. (Gosh, I wish I had used this bit in my sermon!)

   Quest is full of people who work hard against all kinds of injustices and violence on behalf of the victims of that injustice and violence. That’s already extremely challenging, difficult work but I was asking them to do more – to understand the oppressor and to pray FOR them. But how do you pray on behalf of an unjust system that traps people within cycles of homelessness? How do you pray on behalf of a perpetrator of human trafficking?

   I was asking Quest to step into the realm of the impossible for the sake of righteousness.

   Which brings me to my final observation.

6. The importance of conviction
   I started this post talking about how hard it was to do all the sermon prep, but the thing I now realize is, even though almost all the research I did on this text never made it in to the actual sermon, it did give me the confidence I needed to deliver a challenging message. So even though I knew I was delivering a message that some might not recieve well, I believed in it. I could back it up if challenged. I believed that this was God’s word for God’s people at this church at this point in time. And I couldn’t have gotten there without the time and the research.

All in all, the experience was a tiny glimpse into what I’m ultimately working towards – planting a church back in Hawaii.

It was a sobering look into a part of what I’m getting myself into and on the one hand, I’m beginning to realize all the work I have yet to do to really be ready. At the same time, I’m also realizing that as far as I still need to go, I know it’s something I can do. More importantly, it’s something I want to do. When it comes to preaching, I know I still have weak points in my preparation and my delivery but I want to get better.

In other words, despite all the difficulties, despite all the work, despite the long road ahead of me, I want to continue pressing forward. Although I normally don’t like speaking in such grandiose terms, I do feel like God has been preparing me for this. All the crazy randomness that I’ve lived through, all the seemingly meaningless dead ends and odd experiences, all the years of doubt and frustration – they’ve all led me to this pursuit that I never, ever would have chosen on my own.

God.

God really does work in mysterious ways.