2005 Life Lessons

Another year, another set of lessons. Before moving to the bullet points a brief chronology for those of you following up from last year…

When I last wrote Life Lessons I had moved into new digs and had begun a new job. I was regularly attending an Episcopal church and things were starting to look up after lots of setbacks. This past year has provided its own new challenges.

Last year I described the way that I got to meet Gary's parents over the Christmas holiday. This spring I was able to take Gary home to meet my family and friends that I grew up with. For a first time in Kentucky I think that he did pretty well.

There were a few surprises for him of course. The first time I drove right up on a median dividing the road and made a left turn across it he nearly died. But that's the way things are done in the big city of Draffenville. Gary got his share of good local fare, but we also had an incredibly disappointing catfish experience at one of the better restaurants in the Kentucky Lake resorts. Luckily my old friend from school, Lucia, was there to make up for the disappointing meal with fun conversation and reminiscences.

The temp job at the mortgage help desk was going well and I was tagged to become the supervisor as my own supervisor was promoted to greener pastures. But a routine reference check turned into slander and for two months I was unemployed. A private investigation and lawyer later, I am completely vindicated in my full-time position with the same mortgage company. Within my first six months I was recognized with an award and a cash lump sum for outstanding work.

Gary and I moved in together in July and went through the adjustments of trying to pack two households worth of stuff into one small home. This took some creative negotiation and off-site storage, but here we are. As I write this Gary is itching to leave the city and find a larger place to live surrounded by acreage to keep neighbors at bay.

On the church front Gary and I suffered a setback when the Episcopal Church demanded ritual that neither of us could in good conscience embrace. We stuck around until the summer and began a tour of local churches with contemporary worship. However, one of the hallmarks of local “hip” Christianity is its intolerance for homosexuals. So St. John’s remains a sort of home, though I am often left cold by what I perceive as a lack of spontaneity in worship. The spiritual quest continues…

One other high point for me this year (and anyone who has known me in the past six years will understand why): I got to see Darlene Zschech and several of the musicians from Hillsong Australia at a Joyce Meyer conference back in October. Of course, Joyce wasn't all she could have been. Too busy letting her husband, Dave, tell us about why we need to reclaim our godly heritage from the likes of the ACLU and the homosexual activists. (Yeah, that went over well...) But Darlene and company were AWESOME for all five of the worship sessions where they led.

So let’s get on to the lessons and at the end, I thought I’d list some reading references that have shaped the year.

It’s easier to get into Heaven than into the Anglican Communion.

I have to credit Gary with the pithy formulation of this lesson. When Gary and I went through confirmation classes in the spring, we were taught that the Episcopal Church practices both confirmation and reception in accepting people into the Anglican Communion.

For children raised in the faith, infant baptism is the norm, with vows made by the parents and community of faith to raise the child with Christian values. At an appropriate age, children baptized as infants then confirm their intent to take those vows seriously and live them out for themselves. While historically it is the candidate that confirms, the process has come to mean that the candidate is confirmed – a somewhat subtle difference at first blush that moves the action from the candidate to the Church.

The Episcopal Church receives those who are baptized outside of the Anglican Communion, but whom they still recognized as Christians if they are (1) baptized with water (2) in the name of the Trinity. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

But now enter diocesan politics… The regional governing structure of the Episcopal Church, known as a diocese, is free to exercise certain political autonomy in its choice of who is received and who is confirmed. Some dioceses only receive non-Episcopal Christians who have gone through confirmation in the Orthodox or Roman Catholic traditions. Others will receive any Christian as defined by the criteria above. It’s the local bishop’s choice as head of the diocese. Apparently the decision rests on the bishop’s value of Apostolic Succession, a tradition that claims that Peter was the first authority of the Church and that through the laying on of hands his authority has passed through the centuries to all successive bishops of the Church.

Those who recognize the authority of Apostolic Succession believe that confirmation must be accompanied by the laying on of hands by a bishop. Historically this symbolized the official impartation of the Holy Spirit to the candidate. And this is where the rub came in for me.

I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition where, at the time, the doctrine of the Priesthood of All Believers was highly esteemed. In this faith tradition there is no infant baptism. Rather, children come to an understanding for themselves of their faith and only then make accept it. I was sixteen years old the first time a Catholic acquaintance informed me that Peter was the first pope, from whom all Church authority flows. I very ungraciously laughed at the concept until I fell to the floor gasping for breath.

Follow this up with my participation in the Charismatic movement with its emphasis on communion with the Holy Spirit, and the idea that a bishop’s touch would impart to me that which already lives in me from my childhood on and has been actively working in my life for many years becomes simply ridiculous.

In the end, Gary and I both asked to be received into the Episcopal Church, recognized as Christians in whom the work of the Holy Spirit is already evident. But this was not to be, and so we continue to worship some Sundays alongside the Anglicans, unreceived and without the bishop’s impartation, somewhat disappointed by the inflexibility of tradition, but recognizing that it’s God’s Church anyway…

Paul’s words on the courts must be put in perspective

In the chronology above I mentioned hiring a lawyer to clear up the slander of my name this past year. Having been raised in the camp that distrusts lawyers and teaches that Christians don’t take their affairs to civil courts, this decision was a tough one for me. I have reconciled my decision based on a couple of factors.

First, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians addressed a group of neighbors in a house church. They shared a community as well as communion. And their central belief was in Christ. Paul admonished these early believers to act out what they professed as their core spiritual values. But in our day, Christianity is an institution for many rather than a personal set of values – a sort of key to the door like membership in the Elks Lodge or the Rotary Club.

Secondly, the hammer was too large to ignore. Without the slightest hesitation to ponder the credibility of what she was repeating, someone decided to spread rumors that I had sabotaged equipment and destroyed data. For a person like me whose occupation hinges on IT skills, this was absolutely devastating. Without addressing the situation, I would never work in my chosen field again.

When I looked at the corner I had been painted into, I was compelled to reevaluate my acceptance of Paul’s words. The only surprising thing to me is that even as I question the very fundamentals of my faith, I was willing to accept this minor teaching without question.

Buying on credit is spending tomorrow’s prosperity today.

I am now 36 years old, but I think I may have finally internalized this fairly simple concept. For 2005 I paid out over $300 in compound interest for things that I had purchased on credit. I have now paid off all of my debts and hope to remain debt-free from this point forward.

I was raised among fundamentalists who equipped me with the tools to question the very faith which they taught.

I have touched on this concept in several places before. But I guess this was the first year that it came into sharp relief for me. The effect was somewhat chilling, as I began to wonder exactly what it means to be a Christian.

From 1910 to 1915 a series of pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth was produced outlining what would become known as the Five Fundamentals:

literal inerrancy of the autographs
the virgin birth and deity of Christ
blood atonement
the bodily resurrection of Christ and the imminent return of Christ.

It is from these writings that fundamentalism originally drew its name.

Raised under the tutelage of moderate pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention, I was taught about the formation of the Bible and equipped with the tools necessary to read and seek answers for myself. While the takeover of the SBC by ultraconservatives has produced a new environment where no questions are allowed, I appear to have been born for such a time as this, having passed through a window of opportunity during which pastors were free to equip people for the spiritual journey. Here are some of my current conclusions:

Literal Inerrancy Of The Autographs
Only recently did I put two and two together on this one. This tenet refers to the original Scriptures, which no longer exist. We have some relatively old copies of the Bible, but none of the originals have actually survived. But more importantly, this concept depends on what has come to be known as the verbal-plenary tradition, which claims that God spoke, the "author" wrote it down free of all error. However, it is clear from the variety presented in even the earliest extant texts that scribal error has produced many different versions of the sacred texts.

A pastor friend of mine once told me that she believed God did not leave us a copy of the original scriptures because our human impulse would be to place it under glass and worship it. Unfortunately, this appears to be the case even with the leather-bound Authorized Version and even more modern translations today.

I have come to conclude, scribal errors aside, that while the Bible was inspired by man’s communion with God, it is still written with all of the assumptions and understandings of its human authors. Thus, it won’t match science on a literal level and will always have to be read with a critical eye towards its interpretations of historical events.

Virgin Birth And Deity Of Christ
In 734 B.C. the prophet Isaiah conveyed a promise to King Ahaz as a sign that Israel would not be wiped out by the Assyrians:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Isaiah 7:14

The Hebrew word rendered here as “virgin” is almah and it literally means a young woman. And seven years after this prophecy was delivered to Ahaz, his son, Hezekiah was born. Though Ahaz caved to Assyrian pressures, Hezekiah later ascended the throne of Israel and brought about several religious reforms.

In the Greek translations of Isaiah, almah was rendered as parthenos which means virgin. When Matthew’s gospel was written, quoting from the Greek translations of Isaiah, the miracle of virgin birth was presented as a sign of Jesus’ supernatural origin. In their first-century understanding of biology, a father plants his seed in the fertile ground of a woman. There was no knowledge of DNA and chromosomal contributions of genetic material from both parents when producing a child.

I do not believe that God is bound by a human understanding of scientific principles. And admittedly, if God needed to, I believe that God could impregnate a human female without the help of a human male. But in the end, my Jesus does not need to be the product of a human/divine mating ritual to be known as the Son of God. I believe that by this story the early Christians were attempting to encapsulate in words their experience of Jesus Christ and his life-changing power as something that transcended their understanding of ordinary humanity.

Blood Atonement
While the first two issues didn’t cause me any problems at all, this fundamental is the one that I have been dealing with over the past year. And as I came to question and explore, I experienced no small amount of existential angst. In the hodge-podge of theology that is my faith tradition there was never an inkling that something might be amiss in the concept of Jesus’ death being absolutely necessary in the process of restoring at-one-ment between God and humankind.

But the more I question, the more I find it impossible to understand how or why a God of absolute Love would require the death and destruction of that which is without sin in order to restore the bonds between humanity and a perfect Creator. This is not to say that God is accountable to me. Indeed, God’s thoughts are well beyond mine. However, this theory of blood atonement as it is explained in Scripture and preached in our pulpits does not align with my experience of the infinite mystery and all-encompassing Love of the Deity that I experience through the person of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit.

And then like a bolt of lightening from the blue everything crystallized:

I believe most of the Bible is metaphorical in its attempt to explain our connection to the Divine. Why would the book of Hebrews, the primary doctrinal center of blood atonement in the New Testament, be any different?

Writing to a group of first-century Jews, would it not make sense for the book’s author to have used familiar symbols from the Passover and the scapegoat offered up to the desert demon Azazel as described in the book of Leviticus? [1]

Paul tells us that we now know in part and prophesy in part. [2] But I believe that as we continue in our journey with God, God is making clearer to us what we could not see before. In my own walk with God I have come to believe that the blood atonement concept is an imperfect metaphor when applied as it is today.

Bodily Resurrection of Christ
Probably the one tenet with which I have the least trouble… Sure, there are those who say that the followers of Jesus stole his body and made him a god. But until proven otherwise, I have no qualms with the Resurrection, but also no investment in its literal authenticity.

Imminent Return Of Christ
In the first-century world, Paul urged Christians to abstain from marriage and look expectantly for the return of Jesus. If all Christians had followed his advice while at the same time adhering to the prohibitions of sex outside of marriage, Christianity would have died out. Alas, two millennia have passed and still there is no return of Jesus.

The dictionary defines imminent as “about to occur, impending.” I’m not sure that I can go there… If anything, the belief in the imminent return of Jesus has wreaked havoc on our world. Many Christians who are sure that Jesus will return any day have a tendency to discount our abuse of the environment and the welfare of the poor. And why shouldn't they? After all, if the end is about to come, why waste time addressing issues that will soon be resolved?

But in spite of the hype of end-times enthusiasts, I am convinced that there are no more wars or rumors of wars today than there were when Jesus walked the earth. Global satellites make us more aware of the atrocities we commit as a species and the natural disasters throughout far flung regions of the earth, but this does not mean that they happen any more regularly now than in ages past.

I don’t know when Jesus will return and that’s okay. I’m in good company, since Jesus told us himself that he didn’t even know when that would happen. [3] And perhaps I’m more productive for it. I will continue to walk the earth, to learn and explore, and to share what I learn with anyone who cares for a little honest discourse. When God is ready, Jesus will return again. Are there dangers to my approach? I suppose so. But during this past year I came to this summation:

Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
In parallel I say the unexamined god is not worth worshiping.
I am riding a fine line.
On the one hand, I risk inventing a god who is small enough for me.
But to worship without thought opens me to worse sin.

Side note: There is only one line of the entire Nicene Creed that stirs anything within me.

The leading line and the line of impact read:

He (Jesus) will come again to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

Why is that so important to me? What deep Truth is held within this ancient line written in the fourth century in an attempt to quell controversies within the Church? I don’t know. But when I join in the profession of faith, something deep within my being is stirred by this line.

I have no doubt that Bishop John Shelby Spong is an intelligent and earnest man, but his 21st century stance on a first century religion leaves little comfort for the masses.

Over the past couple of years I have read a great deal of Bishop Spong’s writings on the need to make Christianity relevant to our world if it is to avoid extinction. However, I find his dogged determination to eliminate every last vestige of mystery from our faith to be counterproductive.

Our faith asserts that humans are created in the image of Deity. I contend that by removing the supernatural from all aspects of ourselves, we leave nothing but the mundane. If this is the case, even God’s mercy upon my soul will be of cold comfort when facing the sheer waste of existence. I don’t have all of the answers, but it seems to me that we must make room for the unknowable in our experience or risk erasing all meaning from life.

That being said, I am unable to dismiss the concept of evil spirits.

In my life experience there are rational explanations for most things. And even as I attribute certain events to the hand of God looking out for my well being, I am aware of the physical nature of the universe and how all things work together in an orderly fashion. In my life view Paul’s assertion that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose [4] is compatible with a universe that functions according to principles that can be observed and, in some cases, leveraged.

But in this rational system that defines my life I am unable to come up with another explanation for the presence of dark forces that sometimes directly interact with human beings and our environment. While modern thought would dismiss the possessions described in the Scriptures as schizophrenia, depression or dissociative identity disorders,

I believe that these physical and psychological conditions may be the manifestations of events in the unseen, spiritual dimension of our lives. This is an area that still continues to unfold for me…

Christian Universalism may be on to something.

So after digging away at blood atonement and all of that, what is there left? I've come to a few conclusions regarding the nature of salvation that are not considered orthodox. Yet here we go...

When I first met Gary, he used to talk about his "All dogs go to heaven" approach to eternity. In his estimation, if God were a loving parent then it would not be possible for God to allow finite children (human beings) to make situations that would affect how they would spend eternity. Just a parent wouldn't allow her child to crawl over a cliff, God would not allow us to make a decision that would eternally damn our souls to unspeakable torment in hell. The idea that God would interfere in the free-will decision of a human made me cringe (and still does).

During this year I've been doing some study on Christian Universalism and have come to some new conclusions:

God is Love and looks out for the best interests of all of us.
God will not violate my free will. To do so would invalidate any choice that I have in entering into relationship with God.
I am responsible for my choices and will live with the consequences.
In my finite mortal state, I am incapable of imagining an eternity in which I am cut off from the source of all being, the God of Love.
God will honor my choice to live outside of communion with God.
Jesus made a way for ALL people to come into communion with God, regardless of any characteristic that human beings may deem "unworthy" of God's love.
Hell, therefore, may be a consequence of choice, but cannot be an eternal state from which there is no redemption. While a person is free to stay there as long as s/he wants, God is ready to accept anyone who is ready to live in relationship.

What!?! I know some of you are probably scratching your heads. But the more I study the scriptures, the more inescapable I find this conclusion to be. And it balances Gary's accurate (in my opinion) assertion that mortals cannot conceive of the infinite and eternal consequences against the need for humans to have free will in order to truly make choices.

At first this seemed strange to me and more than a bit unsettling. but then I studied some more. John Calvin and his friends unleashed on the world the concept of predestination, which in its purest form asserts that God knows from the beginning who will make it into heaven and who will end up in hell. Our modern concept of personal choice and consequence stems from a rebuttal to this argument that was proposed by Jacobus Arminius, who believed that free will was still compatible with a sovereign God. When I take the long view of history, the ideas of a Dutch theologian that have only been around for about 400 years don't hold nearly the weight they did for me as a child when I thought that God had handed them down at the dawn of creation.

Preposterous you still say? How can it be that Adolph Hitler and I would share a place at God's table in the hereafter? How could any of a great number of "sinners" make it into heaven? Well, the way Martin Luther told it, we are saved by grace, not works. And the Scriptures themselves point out that salvation is a gift of God given freely to ALL. There's no footnote that says you have to earn it.

What about all those passages about who will and will not inherit the Kingdom? Well, I believe an uncluttered reading of the first written gospel (Mark) will show that when Jesus is quoted as speaking of the Kingdom, he was talking about the here and now -- living a life of peace and joy in the midst of our earthly struggles. The hereafter is not our major concern as God will take care of that. What we need to focus on is living in the Kingdom now and spreading this good news to others.

This is all great news for the prodigal, though I suspect that many Christians feel a lot more like the older son who faithfully stayed home and worked in the service of the father. How easy it is to begrudge the grace of God to those we feel have squandered their inheritance while we have toiled away, trying to work off the grace that God has given us... If only we could see, as the father in that story tried to explain to his oldest son, that all of the Kingdom is ours in the here and now. We can enjoy ourselves now. There's no need to push it all off for some time in the hereafter...

You can never go home again.

My parents sold our home when I was in college. In fact, while I was in college my parents moved six times! Moves came with such regularity that we worked out a system by which my mother would just mail me a map with the route to get home marked on it.

This past year I took Gary to see the town where I grew up in Kentucky. As part of our trip, we visited the two churches where the bulk of my early spiritual formation took place. We walked through the empty pews and looked at all of the stained glass. In the first church’s vestibule hang portraits of each of the men who have pastored the church. So many faces since I left there. In the second we actually stayed and talked a while with the new pastor who filled us in on the decline of my hometown. When the easily accessible coal veins had been exhausted, the mining companies moved on to easier areas. My hometown stands nearly empty now. Anyone who could get out did. Most of my high school friends are now scattered to other areas.

I left Russia six years ago and with each passing day I feel as though I lose more of the skills that I had developed to live there. I can still read the newspaper or listen to a broadcast, but when it comes to speaking, my memory often fails to immediately grasp words and I sometimes pause to think about grammar as I speak.

In my adult spiritual life I have left behind the Southern Baptist Convention, the church of my reawakening in Northern Virginia and the mission field that led me to Pennsylvania. Each in its own way has been closed off as a place where I do not fit in. And being a gay man who questions the Five Fundamentals above, I am a leper in most quarters of the modern Church.

Some of my moments of greatest clarity occur in the shower. It was at one of these moments when the following words came to me:

I look at God with a scowl. I am a child, distrustful of the parent who didn't warn me that it was going to be this bad.
"Would it have made it any better if I had told you in advance how bad it would be?"
No... not really. I had no frame of reference, no understanding. Some things you just have to go through before they make any sense.

Jewish midrash tells us that God spoke to Abram while he was a boy among the pagans of Ur. And with this awakening of his consciousness he began the metamorphosis that would make him a stranger even among his own people. When God told Abram to “Go!” he left behind all that he had known and journeyed into the unknown.

Sometimes I feel like the same thing is happening to me. I ask too many questions. And I too have had an experience in which I have heard God call my name and claim me as his own. But I have been given promises as well that I hope to see realized one day. The land of my youth will prove too small for what God has in store for me. And his kingdom will have no end. Amen.

[1] Leviticus 8:5-28
[2] 1 Corinthians 13:9
[3] In Mark 13:32 Jesus is reported as saying no even he knew when the end would come. But in his quotation of Mark, Matthew left Jesus’ specific reference to himself out in Matthew 24:36.
[4] Romans 8:28

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