On August 19th, 1991, Boris Yeltsin stood on top of a tank and defended demoracy against a socialist coup. He credited his inspiration to reading the stories of Lech Wałęsa.
Lech Wałęsa helped play a key role in inspiring Poland towards democracy. He credited his inspiration to reading the stories of Martin Luther King, Jr.
MLK boycotted the bus system and was a voice for civil rights and anti-war struggles. He credited his inspiration to Rosa Parks.
Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, opposing an unjust law.
That's it. It took courage, but it's something we could all do, right?
And if you trace the thread, one person's act might have lead to a major setback to communism's reign. One act played a key role in breaking the chain.
What one thing might you do today that echoes into eternity?
(h/t my D.S. Linda for the inspiration).
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I try to be sensitive to church-state issues, even when no one else has problems. I fretted for a while about a proper commencement scripture for my town's High School Baccalaureate (yes, it's a Christian-based service in my part of the world). For any others looking for Scriptures that are not expressly narrowly religious or come-to-Jesus, here's my 60-second scripture and speech:
From the Prophet Jeremiah 6:16 (NRSV)
Thus says the Lord:
“Stand at the crossroads,
And look,
And ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way lies;
Then walk in it and find rest for your souls.”
As graduates, you stand at a crossroads today,
The wind is at your back, many paths and choices before you.
My parting words for you are simply to know your story
to think and reflect on how you got here.
Everyone has a story, a good one or a difficult one.
Whatever your faith tradition is,
you have an ancient story too.
As you prepare to take that first step past this point,
know that you have a choice
You can repeat the mistakes of the past,
or choose new paths that lead to life.
The world is open before you.
May you find assurance and peace knowing
that no matter what you choose
you are never alone in your journey.
Amen.
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It's not everyday that a mega-church talks about gay issues. Below the fold is my liveblog (well, offline-liveblog) that I wrote while watching Adam Hamilton preach on Homosexuality as part of his church's When Christians Get It Wrong series.
The series deals with a why young adults do not identify with Christianity, and to self-reflect and see if there are places where Christians get it wrong. 92% of young people surveyed said their #1 image of Christians is "anti-gay" according to George Barna, author of "UnChristian." While Adam repeatedly says this sermon isn't about letting childish ways dictate the church, but rather to let them hold us accountable to when we lose touch and possibly lose our way. Indeed, if the stats are true and 5% of the population is gay, then 5% of his 16,000 member church is 800 people. That's a huge number of people to care for!
Hence the sermon. It's awesome, watch it. Then check out the liveblog below the fold. NOTE: The following is not an accurate rendition of Adam Hamilton's sermon as an artistic whole: the following are summaries, and possibly bad summaries. Any critique or challenge that follows are not the judgment of one Methodist minister on another or attempts to interfere with another's ministry. They are just reflections.
Why is Adam talking about this topic? The world has changed.
When Adam was younger he said that people who said they were gay would be seen as having a mental disorder. Thought it was a non-issue and he "didn't know any of them." He just accepted it and didn't have to wrestle with it.
But today, youth know gay friends and know them. They are protective of their friends and have bad feelings when churches bash their friends.
My Response: Familiarity breeds affection. By an ever-more-inclusive culture coming forth, Christians have to discern which are society's permissiveness, and which are ways how God is calling us to grow in our outreach and inclusiveness.
The Debate about homosexuality is about how we read and interpret scripture.
"This book is not a simple book. To read the book oversimplistically is to do it a great injustice."
All Christians pick and choose which scriptures to follow.
Can't eat pork because it is unclean
Capital punishment for working on the Sabbath.
401ks and retirement plans are storing up treasures on earth.
Women are to keep silent in the church.
Women's dress is to be plain.
Best line: Jesus says if your eyes or hands sin, cut them out.
"if you are a biblical literalist, please hold up your stubs for us."
Adam found many images of God which are difficult to reconcile.
In OT, God says to burn priests' daughters who are prostitutes...but Jesus sat with prostitutes.
1 Samuel, God says to wipe out all the people: women and children too. Did God really tell Saul that even the babies needed to die because of something their ancestors did? But Jesus was forgiving on the cross.
My Response: This is an effective summary of the ways how we all interpret scripture and we don't follow the practices that are "clearly" contextual. Thus a literalistic reading of Scripture is not only folly, it is not practiced.
Did God change or did human understandings of God change?
"Word of God" in the bible rarely means written word, but is used in reference to speech or the Holy Spirit or Jesus teaching.
Methodists believe the authors were not scribes who transcribed, but wrote through human beings who brought with them their own presuppositions and historical contexts.
Adam sees Jesus as the word is the clearest Word of God we can receive.
Read everything through the lens of Jesus
"Don't simplify the bible into a weapon which hurts people, but to recognize its complexity."
Saul would have understood Warrior Gods that Jesus would probably not have recognized.
My Response: I would further push that the words of Jesus were also recorded by men and may also have been contextualized. However, given that words or statements stick out like splinters in my mind, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.*
*Except John's Gospel.
Additionally, Adam augments Wesley's lens and actually narrows it. Wesley considered problematic passages against what he considered to be "The Character of God" which is more holistic than "The Lens of Jesus." There's certainly theological girth to being a "red-letter Christian" and let Jesus' words trump the Scripture, but God seems bigger than that to me.
Primary Scripture is Peter in Joppa (Acts 10) with the sheet with animals that are unclean.
That law is no longer enforced for Peter.
Paul figured out the entire law was a guide but not BOUND by the law.
Everything changed! You are here today on a Sunday, not a Saturday, uncircumcized, eating bacon for breakfast because everything changed!
What do you think the Sadducees thought of Peter when he came back?
Peter knew that God was doing something new.
My Response: Adam makes a great distinction between the law as BINDING and the law as GUIDING. Since the law was no longer enforcable on Peter, he could eat unclean things and preach to the uncircumcized. However, Peter could not throw it out, because it continued to guide him.
What Questions are best asked of the anti-gay passages? Adam asks regarding these passages:
Leviticus 18&20, "does that accurately capture the heart and will of God for all times, or does that capture how people thought 3200 years ago."
Romans 1:26-27, "was Paul talking about Jewish understanding of natural and homosexual prostitution, or was he telling us that our children and grandchildren are considered shameful in the eyes of God?"
"Did Moses accurately capture the heart of God towards your gay children?" and in 4-5 other passages......or does God see our children differently than that?
RESPONSE: Adam is walking the tricky line between which scriptures do we contextualize and which scriptures do we universalize? Are we contextualizing out of convenience? Or are we truly listening to God offer us new instruction coming down on sheets with pigs on them*
*metaphorically...if its literally, I would listen, man!
Why is this Pastor talking about this? Why should straight Christians care?
Adam admits that complementary male-female IS the biblical norm. But 5% of human beings don't fit the pattern. What are we to do with them?
Adam talks about how own experiences with queer people. Names multiple young people who are remarkable and are gay.
"The ones I really got to know were LITERALLY your children. I baptized them, anointed them as children...This is one of your kids."
Adam asks "What are you gonna do with 5% of the church...I don't fully understand everything...But these are real people.
RESPONSE: Truly it is experience which changes our minds!
Closing: Jesus put people before rules. (Jesus and the Syrophenician woman)
Isaac, Jacob, Moses met their spouses at wells: all virgins and perfect, probably.
But Jesus asks a multiple-married and co-habitating woman who is considered unclean for a drink. And that is appalling. They talk and she goes back to her town to tell them about Jesus.
So where in John 4 does Jesus talk about the rules about marriage FIRST before offering her living water? Nowhere.
And this broken, sinning "unclean" woman becomes the first evangelist to her people.
Adam invite us to be those kind of Christians that love people first.
While clearly a joke at an atheist meeting, this video of a "de-baptism" moment actually made me chuckle...then stop and think.
Did you watch the young girl? When the "de-baptism" via a hairdryer was over she raised up her hands and said "I can see!" The people laughed at her clever correlation between baptism and healing miracles.
I laughed too, even at my chosen religion's expense. But as I laughed, I realized something powerful: remembering our baptisms is to reaffirm a God who heals us. I think like this video, many of us de-baptize Jesus and do not see what Jesus' baptism really was. If we connect healing and baptisms, then we fully understand what Jesus' baptism really was.
When we talk about healing, we often conflate two terms: disease and illness. In Arthur Kleinman's 1980s book Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, we have a clarification between the two:
Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of the perceived disease...Viewed from this perspective, illness is the shaping of disease into behavior and experience. It is created by personal, social, and cultural reactions to disease. (pg. 72)
Thus, diseases are cured, while illnesses are healed. Sometimes a disease can be cured, but very often the best that can be done is to heal the illness that surrounds it.
Crossan goes on to talk about the movie Philadelphia, starring Tom Cruise as Beckett, a gay lawyer with AIDS. He concludes with this connection:
My students all understood that Beckett's disease cannot be cured, but they could also see eventually that his illness is being healed by the support of his partner, his family...Curing is not available, but healing is still possible.
Seen in this light, the healing power of Jesus Christ may not come in wild moments when the blind can see, but comes in the constant care and concern given to healing the illness, the walking and coping that we struggle with daily. When we offer love and care to those who find themselves unloveable, we are co-healing their illness with Christ. Their disease is in the hands of God and of Science, but we can do something about their illness.
I have done one too many funerals for people that have passed away too early in life from cancer. A God who heals disease is not my understanding of God, though I certainly leave room for God to act as God will. However, a God who heals illness, who offers us pathways and possibilities that lead to a healing of the illness surrounding a disease and perhaps leading to a regression and healing of the disease...that's a God I believe in and that's the call to nurturing and healing that I understand to be part of Christian mission and ministry.
In summary, healing can be understood as more than a one-time healing of a disease, but as a process of coming to terms with an illness in helpful ways that bring forth the Spirit in another.
Same with Baptism. I don't understand baptism as the washing away of a disease or the cleansing of Original Sin. God has already done that with God's grace (prevenient, for the Methodists taking score at home). Baptism is not a one-time event where the clouds part and a dove come down. Rather, Baptism is a process that establishes the baseline and every moment after that is steps that remind us to seek personal holiness in our lives: to deal with the "illness" so to speak. As my friend Will Green wrote yesterday:
Sometimes it feels that baptism is an act of entering a church and becoming a member. Sometimes people think that baptism is a necessary precursor to being saved. Sometimes it is seen as a promise to be a good parent. Sometimes baptism is thought to be an expression of mercy to children and newborns.
I think that baptism is way to claim the power of the Holy Spirit in one's life. Living as a disciple of Jesus Christ connects us to God and being connected to God affects our life.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks of his two baptisms. Really. His first was in the river with John, yes. But Jesus seems to speak of a second baptism in Mark 10:38. The disciples ask to be on the left and right of him...not knowing that Jesus would be crucified between two criminals! Jesus speaks of a cup from which he must drink, and a baptism with which he must be baptized. Everything in this passage is prophesying his death and the most-likely end of anyone who wants to emulate Jesus.
I take from this passage what Marjorie Suchocki took from it in God, Christ, Church: that the baptism of Jesus began in the river with John and concluded in the rain on Golgotha. His three-year baptism is his anointing as the Christ and it is in his life and death that we are made one with Christ. It was not a one-time event but a process of discovery, faith, and fidelity to the God who walks with us.
So it is with us. We are not baptized, dunked, made into cookie-cutter Christians and God is happy. As Peter Rollins writes in How to (not) Speak of God, that's like giving a lover of nuts a thousand nuts without any center: giving to God the "saved" bodies of baptized Christians without the fearsome spirit of charity and missions that comes from a lifetime of identifying with Christ. Our baptism must be understood as a process that nurtures, heals, and forgives us for a lifetime, and it is powerful to remember. If God who acts in our lives acts in process not phenomena, then our baptism is not a one-time phenomena but a process of seeking personal holiness.
Do you see the connection? Baptism is not the healing of a disease, but the coping with an illness: the power of the Holy Spirit given to us to help us cope with our troubles and feel connected to a God who is beyond our knowledge. Because it is a process, the presence of a congregation affirming a baptism is necessary to say that "we will walk through this healing with you and be accountable to you and you to us."
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This Sunday is liturgically the Baptism of Jesus Sunday. Let's not give into the temptation to say that it happened as a historical event and be done with it. Remember that Jesus's baptism sustained a life of struggle, healing, teaching, and power. Let us all remember our own baptisms and the waysin which we can live out ministries of healing, nurturing, and struggling for justice. In doing so, we resist the temptation to De-Baptize Jesus and relegate his baptism to a one-time event, but instead fully recognize his baptism that carried him from the river to the cross and will carry us from whatever pits of despair we are in to the left and right sides of Jesus, our Christ.
Whew. That was two hours of writing I didn't expect. Time for bed. Thoughts?
Rev. Jeremy Smith Musings from a United Methodist Pastor who is also a technology nerd. It's funny how often the two intertwine...View my complete profile
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Disclaimer: all original content reflects the personal opinions of Rev. Jeremy Smith, not the doctrinal positions or statements of the United Methodist Church local and global. all linked or quoted content represent the source's opinions, not Jeremy or the United Methodist Church.
