True Christian Worship

 

When Jesus and Paul write, in scripture, about Christians avoiding lawsuits, they’re not condemning the practice entirely. Lawsuits in New Testament times weren’t about justice, but money (sound familiar); the side with the most cash or political clout won. Biblical prohibitions on lawsuits are about both public perception and fairness.

Christians should be able to work out differences with each other or, at the very least, within the congregation. Far more important, though, is the avoidance of a system that prioritizes the powerful over the weak. Throughout scripture, almost more times than you can count (although, because its the Bible, someone always does), our holy text aligns Christian duty with the poor, the foreigner, widows, and orphans – the forgotten, vulnerable, and marginalized.

We are, above all, to be on the side of the weakest in society.

Modern US Christians know all about the context of lawsuit provisions, that they’re more about fairness than the value of lawsuits, because we sue people all the time. We sue for the rights to do just about whatever we want, whenever we want, if we can even remotely justify it through proof texting.

This is just the modern form of New Testament justice. We’re using the first amendment to the US Constitution as a cudgel, to beat those around us over the head. These suits are not defenses of anything, but offensive maneuvers meant to gain and maintain the powerful position Christians occupy in this society.

I know you’ll hear lots of preachers decry “religious persecution” these days, because Christians don’t have full reign and freedom to act in any manner they see fit, but they clearly don’t understand either the word “christian” or the word “persecution.”

Christians are using lawsuits to ensure “religious freedom,” but the real effect is to establish our beliefs and practices above and beyond vulnerable or marginalized groups in this country. We’re selling it to our people by claiming vulnerable and threatened status ourselves, but that’s not something we’ve got any right to do, since we believe our side has already won (that’s what the whole cross and empty tomb business was about).

Now we’ve got congregations violating COVID orders to meet in person, claiming it’s a religious right.   

Listen, I’ll be the first person to advocate for Christians to break the law on principle. I believe whole-heartedly that God’s laws are higher and more important than human laws – in fact, I don’t think human laws are worth anything at all and I don’t think Christians should ever feel obligated to follow any of them ever.

Now a lot of human laws align with Christian principles – like caring for those left out and vulnerable – in fact the US legal principle of protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority seems entirely compatible with Christian thought and practice. As Paul says, our freedom does not give us license to do anything, but empowers us to care for those around us. Christian freedom is not unfettered.

When this whole pandemic thing started, I was dead set on living without fear. As a general rule, I try not to care too much about death. I’m not a reckless person (I’m pretty risk averse, honestly), but if some moral action will make me less safe, I try not to worry about safety. In March, I was firmly in the camp of going about regular life, COVID be damned. No disease would make me live in fear.

Then I was educated. I found out that not everyone is at the same risk of infection and that symptoms vary wildly among different groups of people. The issue was not about whether I would be infected or not, but whether I would infect others who would have a much tougher time of it than me.

That’s a different story. It’s not about being willing to risk my life or my family’s, but being willing to risk the health and safety of everyone else. This is where the Christian mandate to care for others, to sacrifice our own freedoms and rights for vulnerable people comes into play.

I am willing to risk the lives of others for principle. I won’t kill to save a life. It’s wrong; I won’t do it. That’s a hard and fast Christian principle. Nowhere in scripture, though, does failing to gather for corporate worship rise to such a level. In fact, the earliest Christian worship, the corporate worship practiced by the people closest to Jesus himself, was done in small groups, in homes!

During a public health crisis, worship is not curtailed – since every single thing every single person does at any moment in their life is worship (whether its worship of God or something else) – worship can’t be curtailed. I know not meeting in person is difficult, but it’s not a religious principle worth people’s lives.

If it were just “our” lives, that would really be another matter. Maybe you disagree with me, that meeting, in person, for corporate worship is worth the risk. That’s fine. I’m happy to defend your right to do that, but you’ve got to find a way to do it that doesn’t endanger others. If you want to create some congregational bubble, where people can live and worship together away from the rest of society, by all means, do it. The NBA is doing it. A lot of military installations are doing it. That works.

Break the law, exercise your convictions, but what you’re doing is not Christian worship if it fails to consider the most vulnerable among us (and, by definition, as we covered above, that can’t be us)!

Jesus condemned no one but the religious folks who justified their own self-righteousness. Violating public health orders in places where COVID is running wild is precisely the Pharisaical thing to do. It’s adherence to self-prescribed holy action without regard for the poor and vulnerable.

You may be surprised to know scripture does not talk about AN antichrist – not one single person set up in opposition to Jesus – the term antichrist, in scripture, is reserved for those people who proclaim as gospel some belief or practice that is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. That is what this is.

Those pastors who lead others in violating public health orders in the midst of a pandemic are antichrists. There’s no way around it. It’s direct violation of Jesus’ teaching and example to love those who are most forgotten, to put others before one’s self.

There’s plenty of room for religious freedom, if you’re willing to do it locked away in an isolated enclave. This is the choice many sects have chosen over the years. From cloistered monks to modern day Amish. They choose to isolate as an example of what a holy community might look like. The sacrifices required to do such a thing are noble and honorable.

Those of us who’ve chosen to practice our faith in the midst of larger society are no less called to be an example, but being an example of Christian life in the midst of the world looks different. Our freedoms are different, our interactions with those around us are different, because the context is different.

We’re called to avoid Court, because the courts only deal in arguments over power. Christians find power in refusing it, in being willing to lay down our lives – not for our own comfort and convenience – but because its what’s required to care for others.

If you want to risk your life for Christian principle, volunteer at a hospital, get a job as a nurse or an orderly, work in a slaughterhouse or deliver for Amazon. If you’re willing to give up your health and life in service of Christ, do it also in service of others. That is true Christian worship.

Us AND Them

This was originally published at Misfits Theology Club.

Think about that proverbial uncle, that older, white man sitting across the table from you at that otherwise innocuous party. He makes a comment about “colored” people and you can see the desperation in his eyes for validation. In my experience, anyway, that guy is not looking for validation for his racist ideas, but simply asking to be treated as a human being.

This is the dilemma of the moment: cancel culture. Do we invalidate people because of their backward, out-dated, of offensive ideas? Do we cut off and remove people from our lives because they act inappropriately?

It’s a positive dilemma, despite its problems. It shows we’ve moved beyond the phase of ignoring the offense. That was our old stand-by response, right? We’d hear the Uncle and see the desperation in his eyes and change the subject, leaving both of us feeling empty and unfulfilled.

Because it’s a two-way dilemma.

It’s not just that we struggle to separate other people from their words and actions, but we have the same struggle when it comes to ourselves, as well. If someone judges our actions inappropriate or ill-advised, our first reaction is to take it personally.

“I love you, Uncle Jim, but that’s a really offensive thing to say,” just doesn’t cut it.

It should, by the way. “I love you, but,” should be enough to validate the person and also address their problematic words and actions. It just so rarely works that way.

A lot of that is because we get defensive. We don’t hear the “I love you,” at all or we hear the “but” as invalidation of that love. We hear that phrase as conditional love, which is often more a burden than a comfort. “I want to love you, but you must change.”

Theologically, Christians affirm that love is the only way to change the world. We won’t get anywhere by forcing people into change, through threats, fear, or shame. We live in a world, though, where all of those things are baked into every system. If there are no consequences to selfishness, people will just be selfish.

This is seen in the theological notion of total depravity. Humans are inclined to selfish, sinful activity and only God can change them.

This isn’t wrong, of course, but how, precisely does God change people? Is it through threats of bodily harm? Do we fear Hell so much, we decide to behave? Is it shame or the withholding of love and affection? Those approaches may actually affect what people do, but none of them changes a person.

God so loved the world that God deigned to become a lowly human, live among us, and be executed for showing us a picture of what we could be. Jesus reserved his condemnation only for those prominent figures who refused to acknowledge their own faults and failures.

Love may not be the cheapest, easiest, or most efficient way to get people to say and do the words and actions we want from them, but it is the only way for any of us to become the kind of people we were created to be.

It’s not enough to tell Uncle Jim that’s he’s valuable, regardless of his offensive words and actions, he has to know it, to feel it, to be loved. Part of the problem may be his past damage – that others have treated his so poorly he no longer knows how to receive love – but more likely than not, the root cause (for him and for us), is our inability to separate the value of people from the things they do and say.

That’s not to say we can’t have boundaries. If Uncle Jim is going to continue saying racist things, he’s not going to get a public forum – as far as I can help it – although I have to be careful to continue those conversations in private so as not to transmit my opposition for his ideas to the man himself (and to show I’m not writing him off with his beliefs).

We also have to protect ourselves in those cases where our foundational, bedrock ideas are in direct contradiction to those of someone else. Someone who believes in non-violence is going to be able to sustain only limited interaction with someone who’s quick to justify a fight. They may be able to dialogue and show love for one another in certain circumstances, but they probably can’t be roommates.

We have to work hard to define our relationships in ways that treat people as people (including ourselves) – even if that’s our main disagreement with them. We are called to love our enemies, but that’s much easier if we’re the ones who’ve labeled them enemies than if they’ve intentionally set themselves up in opposition to us.

I imagine this also requires some measure of relationship to begin with. If the only connection we have to each other is disagreement about a certain idea, we cannot see each other as human beings. The offensive words and actions must be secondary to the humanity of our opponents. I must understand you in order to really understand what you say or do.

That doesn’t mean you let the words or actions go, but you must address them in the context of the person you know. And we have to be fair to their humanity – which, at least if you’re a Christian, is equally valuable to the humanity of everybody else.

It’s one thing to stop watching a TV show or not buy concert tickets because the ideas of the actors or musicians are offensive to you – there is no personal relationship there – it’s quite another to say “you can’t work on my car, because you don’t care about the poor,” or “you can’t bag my groceries because you haven’t recognized your white privilege.”

Morality is not a battle to be won. Christians believe love is already victorious, we’re just waiting for the effects of that victory to work their way through the world. Whatever ideas or actions we wish to see eradicated are already dead; we don’t need to kill them again, and we definitely don’t need to kill those people clinging to the corpse.

Racist, sexist, selfish, and offensive words need to be addressed, for sure – ignoring is no longer an option – but we have to remember hate harms both victim and perpetrator, even if in different ways. If we can’t walk beside both parties, with the care and concern appropriate to their specific context, we’re not living out the gospel.

No one gets written off or we’re no better than “them.”

If You Vote, You Can't Complain

This was originally published at Misfits Theology Club.

I decided to stop voting in the run up to the 2008 US Presidential election. I found myself genuinely believing that this Barack Obama guy might be able to solve the problems of the world. I’m not sure I used to word savior, and I wasn’t treating him like a messiah, but I started to feel convicted.

I felt convicted again when I got to the end of Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President, and he talked about how many people had literally died for the right to vote and that sacrifice had to be considered if anyone was going to willingly stop going to the polls.

That year I ended up voting on behalf of one of my immigrant co-workers (after all, the outcome of the election had far more impact on her than on me), but it started me on a journey of discovery.

A lot of my seminary classes focused on the Kingdom of God – basically THE central theme of the gospels, but not something super emphasized in my evangelical upbringing.  I started to see how God’s Kingdom was an alternative to the kingdoms of the world and how even democratic systems distract Christians from the full practice of their faith.

The real insidious accomplishment of US democracy is its claim to politics. The word politics really just means the way in which people interact publicly. There are so many different ways to do politics, but in the US we’ve come to (falsely) believe that our system of elections and elected office are the only way.  If you want to change the world, change the laws.

Every system of power aspires to universality; it’s a further means of control. Louis XIV of France famously said, “l’etat c’est moi,” “I am the State.” Caesar put his face on money and democracy’s egalitarian, ‘everyone gets a voice’ mantra does the same thing.

Growing up I was taught it was a literal sin not to vote. Maybe not so bad as having sex outside of marriage, but certainly on par with dancing. Civic duty was synonymous with Christian duty, just another example of the grand Constantinian bargain. The legitimacy bestowed by the first “Christian” emperor came at the great price of the Church’s subjugation to the State. Whether Empire, Kingdom, or Democracy, the Church has historically served as an accessory to power.

Despite my provocative title, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for Christians to vote; I do think it’s wrong for Christians to vote out of a sense of obligation. Christians should never have to pick between the lesser of two evils, because Christians always have another way: the Way of Jesus.

We’ve long been told that those who don’t vote have no right to complain, but I’d argue the other way: those who vote are participating in a flawed and ultimately fruitless system; you’re voting for democracy as the means to a right and proper future.

Churchill was citing a well worn phrase when he said “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.” That’s probably true, if we’re speaking of nations, but Christianity itself is an alternative and the one alternative politic (or kingdom or government) that we should feel confident in to produce the eschatological future God promises to us.

Acts 2 outlines the early Church sharing goods and caring for each other in a kind of benevolent anarchy that fully aligns with the Kingdom of God, explained by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Of course that only existed for a short time and it would be impossible for a nation to adopt. Christianity requires voluntary association; it can’t be imposed upon people.

Those counter arguments are true and valid, but they are also misleading. The very notion that we must have nations or leaders or voting or governments at all is not a Christian concept. Jesus, and the writers of scripture take the existence of those things as given, but they don’t require them. In fact, much of scripture is an explanation of how God’s people can be a faithful people in the midst of and in spite of the governments and nations around us.

Citizenship, then, becomes the primary Christian concern.  We can’t be Democrats or Republicans (or even Americans), because we already have membership in the Body of Christ.  I am tangentially a citizen of the United States by virtue of my birth, I might vote for a Democrat or a Republican in some specific election, but I can never be those things, because my allegiance lies with Christ.

That’s not to say elections can’t be politics, but they can’t be all of politics.  Christians must rely on the practice of the gospel as evidenced in our communities of faith, for our primary political expression.  Our congregations are called to be examples of the Kingdom of God.  We’re supposed to show, through our lives and relationships, how people can love and care for each other without threat of punishment or exercises of coercive power.

In the end, I do vote. I vote for representatives – the US House and Senate, my State legislators, the town council. A “Christian” means of doing life in community naturally involves people getting together and hashing things out.  We might rue how partisan and politicized our deliberative bodies are these days, but their purpose is still right and true.

I refrain from voting for positions of sole authority, like governor or president. I just don’t believe those kinds of positions are possible for any human to handle without compromising their integrity. Christ is the head of all and we can be nothing but members of the obedient body.

I don’t advocate for my position on elections; I don’t think it’s universally right or wrong. It’s where I’ve found a balance between answering the democratic call to participate in the town, state, and country in which I live, and the Christian call to the alternative politics of the Kingdom of God.

I try not to fault people for their own voting choices (although I will be quick to tell people it’s okay not to vote, if they don’t feel comfortable doing so).  I do hope, though, to be a continual reminder, to myself and others, that the electoral system is not the only way to do politics, that it’s not the primary way, nor the best.

We must put and keep our faith in the politics of Jesus, lived out in communities that bear his name.  We must remind each other that our hope lies not in armies or laws or elections, but in the Kingdom of God, as evidenced in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If you have complaints about the system, stop participating in it and embrace the power and promise of the politics of God’s people.

The Faulty Evangelical Hermeneutics of All Lives Matter

This was originally published at Misfits Theology Club.

 

You’ve heard it. Probably from a particularly active aunt on Facebook. The out and out opponents of racial justice tend to avoid the phrase in favor of more inflammatory statements that demean the movement as a whole, but lots of well-meaning white folks insult the cause of racial justice and simply don’t understand why “All Lives Matter” is so problematic.

As an evangelical pastor, though, I understand. In fact, it’s time for me and my compatriots to take responsibility for the “All Lives Matter” blind spot that’s so infected our ranks. A lot of it is a direct result of our carefully curated theology and the way we interpret scripture to avoid the pitfalls of “dangerous” heresy.

Evangelicals have always been leery of “works righteousness,” the notion that something we do could somehow earn our salvation – that salvation could be a transaction instead of a no-strongs-attached gift from God. In trying to avoid this false doctrine, we’ve made Christian faith about nothing more than what we think in our heads and the ideas we affirm as correct.

We cling to Romans 10:9 – “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Intellectual assent – a thoroughly modern, western concept – has become the end-all and be-all of evangelical faith.

We’ve done this without acknowledging that a Greek conception of “belief” inherently involves action. For the language and culture into which scripture was written, you did not “believe” anything unless you acted upon that belief. Intellectual assent is entirely foreign to scripture or the earliest Christian traditions.

We’ve traded one form of works righteousness for another. Instead of something we do providing salvation, we earn our salvation through the power of good intentions. It sounds sacrilegious, but it’s how we operate.

When faced with the failures and shortcomings that clearly expose the gaping chasm between who we are and who we’re supposed to be, we cling to “Jesus Christ is Lord.” We’ve said the right things and believed the right things, which trumps whatever actions we’ve done or failed to do.

“All Lives Matter” is our disembodied affirmation of truth, regardless of the physical reality around us. It is more important to evangelicals than recognizing the reality that black lives clearly don’t mean as much as white ones, because our theology has taught us that intentions trump actions.

Yes, yes, “faith without works is dead,” but we treat those actions more like a bonus – extra credit on the quiz of life. Optional.

How can we get away with that? How could so many be convinced that merely stating an ideal (like “Jesus Christ is Lord” or “All Lives Matter”) could be more appropriate than addressing the very real ways those ideals are not born out in the world around us?

Simple, we’ve also been taught that Jesus came to save us.

While it’s true that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ does provide salvation for you and for me, our salvation was not the point of God becoming human, walking among us, submitting to death, and being raised to new life.

Your individual salvation is not worth all that.

Many evangelicals have been told that even if they were only one who would ever believe, Jesus still would’ve died for them.

I’ll agree that if you were the only thing that existed in the universe, floating around in the vacuum of nothingness, that God would love you enough to die for you alone.

That’s not reality, though. The universe exists, with all its multitudinous and complex creation. You and I don’t exist in a vacuum. We exist as part of a gigantic, infinite reality, which God loves so thoroughly and completely, down to the last quark and atom, that God’s sole purpose is to love that reality into its created purpose.

Your salvation and my salvation are made possible in Jesus Christ, but only as means to an end. We are saved so we may participate in the salvation of everything. We are saved to be part of a world that operates as God intends it to operate.

When we say “Jesus Christ is Lord,” we’re merely asserting a future reality and committing to work so that future reality becomes a present reality.

Jesus tells a story about a rich man who leaves various servants in charge of various sums of money. Two of them go out and use the money to make more; one servant hides the money, saving what he has so nothing will be lost when the rich man returns.

For too long, evangelical theology has condemned us to be that risk-averse servant. We’ve taken the good news of the gospel and we sat on it, afraid to lose it by engaging the messiness of the world and seeking to participate in its transformation into God’s Kingdom. We were welcomed into the front door of heaven and we’ve camped out there, afraid to explore the house, for fear of breaking a lamp or tracking mud on the carpet.

All Lives Matter is a future reality; it is entirely consistent with God’s intentions for the world and Christian faith is confident it will come to be made evident to everyone at some point.

We will never realize that future reality, though, unless we are obedient to the God of our salvation and invest the gospel gift we’ve been given in real, tangible action to combat the lived reality that, today, in our world, our country, our neighborhood, our church, some lives – black and brown lives – do not yet matter as much as other lives, as much as they deserve to matter, as much as they will matter once the investment of this gospel comes to fruition in the promised and certain future.

But for now, saying “All Lives Matter” is like hiding the gift of God away, afraid to invest it for fear of loss. It is a rejection of our scriptural mandate to believe (not just intellectually assent) that Jesus Christ is Lord. That belief must be manifest in action. Our salvation is not our own; it is an investment, on behalf of God, for the redemption of the whole world.

It is time to escape the evangelical hermeneutics that have for so long held us back from this reality!

More than a Protest

This was originally published at Misfits Theology Club. 

Grey haired and visibly nervous, standing alongside a little girl on a porch covered in American flags, this white woman held a sign that said, “I have a voice and you will hear it.” Marching with 1,000 or so high school and college students in my home town, I wasn’t quite sure what message that voice was hoping to deliver. As we passed, ever so slightly, with great trepidation, she joined in, “Black Lives Matter.”

My heart broke, but out of joy and not disappointment.

White people are used to chanting. Despite the odd anti-vaxxer or gun rights advocate, most of us aren’t down with protest, either. The system generally works out pretty well for us, so we’re not used to challenging it. I know how difficult it is to first say, then yell some words that won’t be well received by everyone around you, by people who look like you.

This sacrifice of comfort and security is nothing compared to the sacrifice of reputations, livelihoods, and life so many people of color endure for the cause of freedom and justice, but it’s not nothing. George Floyd’s murder, more than any other moment in my memory, is driving white people to action. Sure, not enough white people and not enough action, but more than previous movements for change have led us to expect.

As Al Sharpton said in his excellent eulogy for Floyd earlier today: there is something in the air right now that tells us it’s a new season, a season of change. The last dozen or more tragic black deaths have led to protest, sure, but also questions of “will things ever change.” This time does feel different.

I don’t think we’ll see the changes we need or even the changes we want, but we will see some things change.

I am proud to march for black lives and against police violence, but I have a hard time calling myself a protester. I’d like to think of myself more as a forecaster. Protesters are saying ‘things needs to change,’ but forecasters are saying ‘things gonna change.’ There is an inevitability to forecasting, a confidence, a belief in the future.

My faith tells me the future in inevitable, that all people will enjoy the love and peace for which God created this universe. There will be no injustice and people of all nations will live together in the light of God’s goodness.

The chasm between reality and utopia seems uncross-able, and yet we march with a conviction that it is just over the next hill. White Christianity has often forsaken action for a belief that nothing we can do could ever bring about God’s preferred future. “If only God can act, what good are my feeble hands?”

Of course, those feeble hands are the only ones God has. Yes, divine action is required to make the world right, to set the universe into its proper orbit, to fulfill the dream of God’s already/not yet Kingdom, but that divine action is the work of the Holy Spirit in and through us. Our feeble hands.

Our black and brown sisters and brothers have never not known that. We’ve given them no choice in life, but hope and faith. There has never been a reality that “worked okay” for them.

It’s high time we not only recognize a reality that does not "work okay" for everyone doesn’t "work okay" for us either. As simple as it may be, it was an act of courage for my white neighbor to make a sign, to step out onto the porch, to take the hand of her granddaughter, and join in what had to feel like a foreign cheer.

When Paul writes "there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female," he is not negating the diversity of the body of Christ. He is not telling us that we must somehow assume a monolithic Christian culture where everyone looks the same. Paul is telling us that the divisions we make, the lines we draw between otherwise arbitrary differences are null and void.

It is human nature to categorize. We draw lines between “us” and “them,” as a matter of course. According to Paul, our Christian duty, when those lines are drawn, is always to step onto the other side. For Christians, there is no “them” only “us.”

The challenge for white people, the place we always stumble, is our inability to bring “them” over to “us.” We are happy to make “them,” “us,” so long as its done on our terms. We fail to relinquish control of the narrative – a requirement to truly find our identity in Christ.

“Us” must become “them” to find our true purpose together – a whole new “us,” that is not defined by the lines we draw or the distinctions we make. It is a world of – at least at first – discomfort and disconnection, a world of forecasting, not our preferred future, but God’s.

I will never know precisely what possessed that brave, beautiful woman to join the chants today, but I suspect it was a confidence, deep down inside, that the uncertain world of the future was better than the well-known one that was just "working okay" for her.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m more and more convinced we need “them” to show “us” what it means to live into it together.

Come, Lord Jesus.

(Photo by Doug Loosarian)

The Power of Why

This is a post I published at Misfits Theology Club.

 

I snapped at her – the small, gracious woman who gave so much of her life to children’s ministry in our congregation – I snapped at her in a way that was most definitely cruel, if instinctual. I was the associate pastor at a very traditional, conservative-leaning congregation.  Seminary trained.  Third generation. Pastor’s kid.  I was supposed to know, to go along, to say the right thing.

We were discussing some lessons we were planning, maybe for VBS. I brought up that one particular passage may be a little complex for younger children to fully understand. She responded that children are used to being told what to do, that sometimes you just need to obey. Kids can be told “God said it, we don’t need to understand.”

“I do.”

Innocuous words, but the tone was unmistakable.  I regret the way they came out, but certainly not saying them.

The very background that was supposed to form me into the guy with all the right responses, the one to toe the party line; the background that was supposed to provide me with an endless supply of Sunday School answers, did just the opposite.  I can’t stand them.

In the years since this particular awkward conversation I’ve learned to be more diplomatic, more “pastoral,” as they say.  I try not to crush the faith and spirit of generous, good-natured servants of God quite so quickly.

But the point remains.

I do need to know why God is asking me to do something.

Maybe it’s a failing. I’m willing to entertain that option.  Perhaps I simply lack the faith I’m supposed to have and rely too much on my own intellect. I’ve definitely been guilty of that before.

I’ve found, though, that when people dismiss the question “why” on matters of faith, it tends to limit the experience.  Those “trust and obey” traditions feel empty and deficient and entirely unsatisfactory.  When the “why” is encouraged, though – or at least tolerated – the expansive nature of God and faith becomes real; the power and potential of the divine in the world seems limitless and worthwhile.

“God said it and that’s good enough for me” is a profound statement of faith… if you’re 100% confident God did, in fact, say it.  AND you’re 100% confident you correctly heard what God said.  AND you’re 100% confident you perfectly understood what God meant.

We create false certainty, because uncertainty is so terrifying, but there are other choices beyond blind obedience and the scary unknown.

I’m more and more convinced that if we’ve searched for the answer, really struggled and prayed and studied and searched to answer why God might be asking us to do something and we still can’t figure it out, maybe we’re missing the point.

Back in Genesis, God accepted Abel’s offering and rejected that of Cain.  Why?  It doesn’t say.

Your pastor or your mother or your Sunday School teacher might’ve come up with an answer, but the truth is they don’t really know any more than you do.  Scripture doesn’t tell us.

That uncertainty can be scary, if we think the point of Genesis 4 is to teach us what offerings are worthy and which ones aren’t.  But maybe that’s not the point?  Maybe Genesis 4 is teaching us that our offerings matter far less than whether or not we are our brother’s keeper, that our responsibility to God and to each other is not dependent on our favor or status or situation?

An unanswered ‘why’ might simply mean we have to dig deeper, look closer, take a different perspective, and get creative.  Too often we’re limited by the either/or boxes our biology tells us everything should be.  Reality is not black and white and there is always another option.

1 Peter instructs us to always be prepared to give an answer for the hope that we have in Jesus Christ.  I don’t think “God said it” will be good enough for any “outsider” who asks, so it’s not good enough for me.

I still believe what I eventually got around to saying in that meeting where I reacted so strongly to the dismissal of the “why:” Our kids deserve the limitless possibilities of this magnificent creation in which we live, and that comes only if the “whys” are encouraged.

This is my first post here at The Misfits Theology Club. I hope everything I write and every conversation I have revolves around the question of what God is calling us to do and why.  That is the core of faith and life.  That is how we become the people God created us to be.