How Now Shall We Behave?

Good morning!  Grace and peace to you all this 3^rd Sunday in the Lenten season.  It is indeed well into the Season of Lent and as such, I feel compelled to be honest with you: I really wanted to preach another sermon this week.  Oh, I had a number of things floating around in my head and after hearing Craig’s sermon last Sunday I thought I’d just spot off of him.  He brought up a number really excellent points and given our church’s mission to really grow this year I thought they bore repeating.  I still think that, but as so often happens Sunday’s plans wind up in Monday’s garbage can, and so I wound up writing a very different sermon.

                My friends, it is 2016, and in case the incessant ads, the mudslinging and the personal attacks haven’t made it obvious, it is most definitely an election year.  Let’s make no bones about it, a lot is at stake this year.  As a nation we must decide what to do about the so-called Islamic State, the Syrian refugee crisis, there is China and their ecological disasters, there is continued questions of global warming, what to do about Planned Parenthood, America’s Silent Prison dilemma, Marijuana Legalization, and racial tensions the likes we have not seen in decades.  Indeed, if there can be any adjective, any one word that can be used to describe the years 2015 and 2016, it is the word “Unrest”.  People sense that life is coming to a turning point, that we are on the verge of great change either good or bad.  Anxieties are very high and tensions politically, socially, and economically loom like a shadow over everything – neither the dinner table at home nor the water cooler at work is safe from it.  What has become even more evident to me this week, however, is that in light of these great questions we as Americans are taking every opportunity to treat one another like garbage.  In this week alone I have personally witnessed more blatant racism, violence, and self-righteous indignation than I have since my children were born, and I want to entreat you all as fellow Christians to have nothing to do with it.

                I remember looking up our gospel text early this week, and remember being struck with how incredibly apt it is for the times we live in.  You see the 21^st century and the first century were not really all that different.  Political unrest, danger from armed terrorists, failing religious institutions, corrupt people in power, and a culture’s dying way of life - All of these were just as much the terrible realities of 16 AD Judea as they are in 2016 America.  It is almost as if the times might change but people just never do.  And just as we face the same realities as they did so we see the Jews making the same kinds of mistakes we do.  Did the Jews of Jesus’ time sit down as family and truly seek good answers to their problems?  Did they join together across religious and political barriers, reaching across the aisle so to speak to make the world a better place?  No.  No I dare say they were just as prone to splitting into political parties and religious movements as we are, and in a world so full of differing points of view, with so many people with so many competing interests, the humans did then as the humans do now.  They blame.  They point fingers, the find someone, ANYONE, with whom they can say “See how life would be a virtual Eden if these people just…weren’t…here.”

                The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus has an opinion about this kind of behavior, and we find it in our gospel lesson for today.  In the ancient world, calamity and tragedy were often thought to have happened because of the person’s sin.  Even though the Hebrews had in their Scriptures the Book of Job which makes it very clear that sometimes what happens to people has absolutely nothing to do with a person’s own righteousness and relationship to God, people still come up to Jesus to point the finger.  “Jesus,” they say, “did you hear about those Galileans Pilate had executed at the altar, mixing their blood with the sacrifices?  How terrible they must have been!  Can you imagine the sinfulness of those men that they should die in such a way?  Imagine what the rest of the family is like.” 

                This last part is very, very important.  It is the unwritten understanding that would overshadow this entire conversation from front to back.  When we read these ancient texts with modern eyes, we must understand their culture is not ours.  Individualism as we know it does not exist in these ancient cultures. A son or the daughter is not a person unto themselves but they are the extension of their family.  If the son or daughter is evil or is guilty of sin, it is because the entire family is evil and guilty of sin.  You don’t have this kind of conversation with someone just to bring up an interesting anecdote; you bring it up because you are looking for a scapegoat; you are looking for living prey.

                But Jesus will have none of it.  “Do you think these men were worse sinners than all the others because they died in this way?  You think these people were garbage to be burned when the reality is it is your attitude that’s garbage.  This is not how God expects you to treat people and unless you repent you too are going to perish - only in a far worse way.  You think those eighteen random people who died when the tower fell were more guilty, you think those families were more despicable than any other living in Jerusalem?  Unless you all repent of your attitudes, you too are going to perish.  And let me tell you why.  A man had a fig tree you see, planted in his vineyard, and when he came to inspect it he saw that it has failed to yield any fruit for years.  He tells the manager of the vineyard to cut it down, because if it hasn’t born fruit by now it never will and it is just wasting soil.  But the manager pleaded with the owner, sir, let me pay special attention to it.  Let me dig around it and fertilize it.  Let me give it every opportunity to succeed and if by this time next year it still hasn’t yielded a crop then, yes, it deserves to be cut down.  

We are all being watched, Jesus says, we are all trees in a vineyard being inspected and indeed being specially cared for so that we can be as successful for the kingdom as possible.  It is fruitfulness; not purity, not righteousness, nor even being correct, that God is looking for and if we want someone to be worried about, Jesus says, be worried about that person you see in the mirror first.

Ladies and gentlemen, we think we have moved beyond these lessons.  We haven’t.  We think somehow we’ve become better sorts of people these past 2000 years but let me tell you the same issues that plagued them still plague us.  We think we have become the exception rather than the rule.  We aren’t.  We are still a people who would rather be right than be good and there is nothing, there is no one whom we will not grind into the dirt to get that feeling. 

I am Pro-life, like I suspect many of you are.  I do not doubt for an instant that an unborn human life is still a human life with its own rights and protections.  The child deserves to be recognized for the life that it is.  But I was challenged, you see.  I was challenged by my Pro-Choice counterparts and I realized something.  I wasn’t really pro-life.  When it came down to actually saving the lives of unborn children I in fact bore no fruit.  I could not point to one human life that I had saved.  There were no babies alive because of me, I did nothing to alleviate all the social pressures that our women go through when forced into the question of whether to terminate the pregnancy.  I could have stood up for equal pay, I could have stood up for a living wage so having an unwanted child wasn’t an economic death sentence.  I could have lobbied for more affordable adoptions.  Of the nearly 300,000 children in the United States that have no permanent home, only 7000 parents adopted in 2012, leaving a mother choosing between abortion or adoption with the terrible reality that her child might never find a permanent home. Tens of thousands of potential adoptees age out of our foster care systems every year, and with it the very large likelihood of never graduating school, never holding a job, and with roughly half of them falling victim to substance abuse.  I didn’t want to actually save babies, because if I wanted to do that I was given plenty of opportunity.  The end result of my actions was not to reduce the number of abortions in my country but to make young women feel alienated and abandoned when they needed a brother most.        

Now you may say to me, “But Keven, wait just one minute!”  I want you to stop, I want you to stop right there.  That feeling you have, that emotion that is making you uncomfortable right now, I want you to stop and look at it.  All those arguments you are mustering in your head, all those indignations you are feeling right now.  This is what Jesus is talking about, valuing our positions more than we value other people.  Just as ancient peoples valued the belief that a person can be judged by the family they belong to, so we value the belief that a person can be judged by the party they belong to.  We blame them, we turn our nose up at them, we judge them as unworthy because after all it is just so obvious how wrong they really are.  We do this for hours on end but never once do we ask the question, “Am I being fruitful?”

  Now I don’t care what side of any issue that you are on.  Pro-life, Pro-choice, Pro-business, Pro-Earth, less filling or tastes great – Every single issue we as humans side upon is just right enough to win followers and just wrong enough to earn enemies.  None of us is so without sin that we can pretend we don’t taint everything that we touch.  Ladies and gentlemen, it is not about who is right, it is about who is teachable.  It is about who is willing to be challenged into growing into something greater.  If we are so sure, so completely convinced, so thoroughly loyal to our particular understandings that we would sooner lose our soul than admit maybe the other side has a point – that maybe they are just as human, just as right and just as wrong as we are…well, guess what?  Jesus says we might just get our wish.  Unswerving loyalty and Unrepentence are two sides of the same coin.  If we want to be unswervingly loyal to someone, if we want to pour our hearts and souls into a cause that’s right,   Scripture is very clear on Who that is supposed to be and He cares far more about how we act toward each other in our disagreements than what those disagreements actually are.  Let us resolve to better this election season.  Let us stand out amongst the name-calling and the backstabbing.  Let us be an island of refuge from the destructiveness of self-righteousness, because no matter what side we hold or what philosophies we adhere to we realize that above all we are Christians first.      

Amen and Amen         

The True End of Our Religion

Sermon from John 6:24-35

Good Morning!  As someone who has earned both his Master’s of Divinity and his Juris Doctorate, a lot of people ask me what it’s like going from the legal profession to that of Christian ministry.  Well, for one thing I find I can cross running water now, and the ability to cast a reflection really helps when shaving.  People wonder why I have only half a beard… well to be honest it’s the half I still can’t see.

In at least half seriousness though, I sum up what it’s like going from attorney to pastor as my Moses moments and my Rameses moments.  I called being in the legal profession my Rameses moments.  Most people think it’s because the Pharoah was the villain in the Exodus and that we like to think of laywers as villains, but truth be told that isn’t really it.  I call them my Rameses moments because I would be at party, a social gathering, or just waiting in line for a burger and someone would inevitably ask me that terrible question: “So, what do you do for a living?”  And I would answer them like this, “I’ve graduated law school and I am trying to be an attorney.”  And at that point these waves of people looking for free legal advice would come crashing in almost drowning me with thousands of inane selfish questions.  Now, however, I have what I call my Moses moments.  People ask me what I do professionally and I say, “Oh, I’m a preacher,” and it is as if the breath of God goes before me, driving back the seas of people looking to avoid the religious person, and I can walk to my destination unhindered as if on dry ground.  What can I say, it’s handy if there’s a line at McDonalds and I’m in a hurry.

It’s unfortunate, but as any parent of any child knows, offer heavenly advice that pays dividends both in this world and the next and it goes largely ignored, but offer earthly advice for earthly gain and people will mortgage their houses and spend their children’s college money to get their hands on it.  I guess the logic must be that since heavenly advice is given freely it must be worthless.  Such is not only the world that we live in today but it was also the expectation of the crowds in our gospel lesson for today.

Our lesson begins where last week’s left off.  Having performed the deeply Jewish miracle of feeding the crowds in the wilderness with an unending supply of food, Jesus  disappears up the mountain when the crowds saw him merely as another human prophet and yet sought to make him king by force.  Jesus, however, did not stay on the mountaintop but rushed to be with his disciples during the night as they were caught in a sudden storm.  The crowds, already painted by the apostle John as quite thick-headed and oblivious,  set off to the nearest city in order to look for him: Capernaum.

   When they found him on the other side of the lake they ask him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”  Jesus, however, as he so often does in John’s gospel, answers the crowds by not answering them, at least not directly.  He replies to their question by going deeper, by answering not their words but addressing the very reasons why they are there in first place.  He says, “Truly, I tell you are looking for me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate and had your fill.”  Now, in John’s gospel, the word that he uses to describe Jesus’ miraculous actions is not the word for a miraculous act, not “du-na-mis”  but “say-my-on” literally the word “sign”, the word used to describe the placard outside a merchant’s stall  or the wooden boards outside of town telling you what city it was.  To John, Jesus’ miracles were not mere acts of power, they weren’t  just interesting abilities or strange supernatural events - they were signposts, acts that by their very nature pointed the viewer to something greater, something heavenward.  Jesus says to the crowds, you are not here because you saw something that pointed you to the Father, you are not here because God is even remotely that important  you, rather you are here because your bellies were filled in especially interesting manner and that’s about it”.  He tells them “Do not work for food that spoils, but rather put your efforts into food that endures unto eternal life.  This food the Son of Man will give you, for upon him has God the Father given his seal.” 

It is here that John leads us to believe that perhaps, at least on the surface, that Jesus has finally broken through to them.  “What must we do,” they ask, ”to do the work that God requires?”  While on the surface it would seem that perhaps the crowds are finally reaching out in faith, seeking honestly to live life the way God wants them to.  The reality is this answer is incredibly odd.  For a Jew, steeped in the law and prophets since their birth, for a Jew to ask anyone what the Hebrew God required of his people is akin to a lawyer asking a judge when it would be okay to object.  It’s a very basic matter and the fact that you are asking that question betrays what your priorities truly are.  A lawyer who didn’t bother to read up on basic trial procedure is one who doesn’t value his client or his profession.  Likewise a Jew who doesn’t know how God wants them to live is a Jew who saw no value in either his God or his people.  It is an answer that betrays the hearts of the speakers and foreshadows how this conversation with Jesus is going to end.

Working with what he has, however, Jesus answers them in very basic terms.  “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”  It’s a very basic answer, one that is practically meant for children.  The whole of the Jewish religion was based on this precept, to be a Jew was to obey God’s messengers, to believe in the people that God sent to them.  That’s what Prophets were, from Moses down to Malachi.

How do the crowds reply?  With something that is just mind-numbingly ridiculous.  Like little children waiting for the great Zambini to do another magic trick, and specifically after the miracle that mimicked both Elisha and Moses, they ask, “what miraculous sign will you give, that we might see it and believe you?  Our forefathers ate manna in the desert, as the scriptures say, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”  A people who did not believe Jesus after his first miracle want another one?   Are miracles mimicking, no outdoing, your own Prophets so commonplace that you need more to verify where this man comes from?  But still they want to see another miracle, going so far as to quote the Hebrew Scriptures as their reasoning, except in fact that exact line is not found in the Hebrew Scriptures.  It is a hazy rememberence, something close enough in the fog of memory over an item of only passing importance to them.

But Jesus does not quibble semantics, rather as he does throughout John’s gospel he goes to the very heart of the problem.  “You want a sign to prove that I am a Prophet, believing it was Moses that somehow gave your forefather’s bread from heaven.  Moses does not give you bread from heaven, my Father does.  The true bread from heaven is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Still not remotely getting it, the crowds respond, “Sir, from now on give us this bread.”   

Now, if you all are beginning to think that this is by far the worst pastoral visit ever, you’re probably not that far from the truth.  What is amazing, here, is that Jesus does not ever throw up his hands and give up on them.  Rather, he takes the opportunity to once again reveal who he really is.  Using the Divine Name reserved for Yahweh, he says, “I am the bread of life.  Whosoever comes to me will never go hungry and they that believe in me will never be thirsty again.”  Unfortunately, however, as the scene continues, the crowds despite being given another chance at faith don’t take it.  Indeed, as John’s account continues it becomes extraordinarily evident that this group of people just never will. 

You see, ladies and gentlemen, to be among the faithful is to argue with those who just will not get it.  There are people so mired in this world’s darkness that when the light comes to them they reject it because they will not understand it…they will not understand it because they will refuse to even try.  Reading through our gospel lesson today, it is clear that the crowds cannot see what Jesus is talking about. They cannot see because they are so very occupied with what is worldly.  Indeed, as Jesus tries to help them by confronting the very motives the crowds have for seeking him; it seems the crowds are just completely obsessed with getting Jesus to give them more bread.  “What sign will you do this time, will you give us bread like Moses?  How about now, will you give us the true bread from heaven?  We want this bread from now on!”  Jesus was right about them, they didn’t come to Jesus because they saw the signs, they didn’t come because their hearts yearned for a relationship with the God who made them sustained them and redeems them, they came because they ate their bread and had their fill and that’s about it.  They came not to be fulfilled, but merely to be filled full.

Such was the problem of the faithful in John’s day and such is the problem with the supposed faithful in ours.  In our day and age the Church seems absolutely beset by problems that are a constant tangent, worldly issues that tangle believers down and gets their priorities set on something other than God.   Turn on the television for even a second and you’ll see many things, like Christians arguing with evolutionists - because Scripture makes it clear that God cannot make adapting life.  The LGBT and the homosexuality question still rages hot - because Christ made it such a focus of his ministry.  Angry hateful people on street corners shout with picket signs - because picking 10 of your own favorite Bible verses to memorize out of context is what makes us Christian.

But what are we to do about this?  How are we at Eastside, a small community little C church, supposed to address the problems of the Big C Church?  I’ll tell you what we do.  We remind the world that there was a reason why Lutheran’s went into the business of church reform in the first place. 

My apologies, but was it the Presbyterians or the Pentecostals that nailed up those 95 theses?  Were the Baptists at the Diet of Worms in front of the Holy Roman Emperor; or was it the Episcopalians protesting indulgences, the selling of heavenly pardons for earthly coin.  In my opinion, I say it’s high time we remind these newbies how we kick it old school!

We need to loudly and proudly remind our brethren just what this business of the Reformation was really about because everybody seems to have forgotten.  The Great Reformation was about Values, Community, and Conscience, not about getting caught up in earthly tangents.  It was about education, in granting the public access to the very Scriptures that revealed who their God is and in a language they could understand, it was not about warring with the sciences.  The Reformation was about Christian community, about valuing everyone from lowly farmer to clergy as well as the king.  It was not about fighting over which people to exclude from bathrooms.  Finally and most importantly, the Reformation was about putting Christ back into center of the life of faith and allowing good men and women the ability to follow their consciences without needless burden by the Church and its earthly traditions. 

At the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, if I know every aspect of the fossil record and can without a doubt disprove evolution for all time, but I have not Christ, what good is it?  If I come down with a signed document from God Himself, saying that he agrees with the Westboro Baptists saying that homosexuals need to be stoned and we should applaud when a one of them is bullied into suicide, but I have lost the meek self-sacrificing rabbi in the wilderness, what good is it?  Though I have memorized every verse in every translation of Scripture and could quote it flawlessly in any language alive or dead, but I miss the Savior, its central point, what good is it?      

John’s Message needs to be our message, and that message is if the point of our faith is an earthly agenda, something other Christ, whom John calls the very Word of God, the true revealer of the Father, if our agenda is anything other than him then it is folly.  If our agenda is only proving other people wrong, proving ourselves right, or simply picking out a good book to turn into an idol, a book where we care about the words on the page but not one whit for the spirit in which they were given, then we are the fools mired in the darkness of our own worldly wants.  In whatever questions we ask and in whatever side that we take, Jesus must be at its very core or our efforts will be worth nothing.  Let us not be afraid to embrace our Lutheran heritage, the rascal whose name we bear as our tradition, and let us not be afraid to remind the world that it still needs us Lutherans to show these Protestant upstarts how it’s done.  Can I get an Amen!?!          

The Disturbing Trouble of a Flawless Theology

Back in Seminary, one of my former classmates related a story of a mother who made the local news by killing herself and her three children.  A suicide note left at home detailed her reasoning quite explicitly.  The purpose of this tragic decision?  She did it to save her children’s souls.  Children below a certain age cannot sin, they lack the maturity and knowledge to fully comprehend their actions, so rather than risking her children losing their faith she killed them so they would never risk the eternal torment of hell.  Because it is a sin to murder however, and the Bible says all murderers should be put to death, but that murderers can be saved too if they repent, the answer to her was clear.  She would drown them all and she would repent in the waters of this new “baptism”.  As a loving mother it was the only right thing to do.

            Now, I have no idea what this woman suffered from.  Post-Partem could be a culprit, maybe she was abused by a religious person – on this side of the tragedy there is simply very little left to us to understand.  I will, however, mimic my esteemed classmates astonished reply, “Her evangelical theology was flawless”.  The truly scary thing about that story to any clergy-member of conscience is the fact she might not have had any mental illness at all.  That in the end she simply could have, honestly and faithfully, followed the tenets of her religion to their only logical conclusion is just as likely a possibility.

            When I read this article, “8 Steps to confront your wife’s sexual refusal,” (found here http://biblicalgenderroles.com/2015/05/23/8-steps-to-confront-your-wifes-sexual-refusal/), that is the exact thing I am reminded of.  After reading the article in its entirety, which I recommend the reader here to do the same before continuing, the first thing that came to my mind is that this man’s evangelical theology, a theology that says men have a “right” to sex from their women “even if she is grudging about giving it”, is similarly just as flawless.  From an Evangelical Biblically Inerrant point of view, God wrote Scripture and since God wrote Scripture to be plainly understood, any command within Scripture clearly included in the New Covenant needs to be understood as a command of God.  Context and qualifiers are to be avoided, as any variation from the Scripture’s “plain meaning” is sin trying to work its way into your interpretation of Scripture.  So, strictly speaking, he is absolutely correct.  The scripture plainly says that women should not deny their husband’s sex, going against Scripture is sin, and as “sin” the husband has a right, no, A DUTY to drag his  marital sex squabbles in front of the congregation and the congregation must in turn demand her repentance or expel her. – and that’s what horrifying.

              Now, as a trained and educated clergy person, I would point out that 99.999% of Evangelicals don’t bring their theology to this conclusion.  Technically the only medicine allowed in Scripture is to “stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses” (1 Timothy 5:23), and scripture is quite clear that the proper response to someone being ill is to call the church elders to pray over them (James 5:14).  With that said, very, very few see going to the Doctor or taking Pepto-Bismal as being unfaithful to God, even though strictly speaking those options aren’t found in the Bible.  They do this because, quite rightly, they understand that the author never intended those consequences.  When Paul wrote to Timothy he was expressing a loving concern for his protégé’s health and was not commanding everyone for all time to cure their stomach aches with fermented grape juice.  When James wrote that the faithful should pray over their sick there is no intimation that it should be done instead of medical help.  Indeed, in the ancient world as now, that if reasonable medical means exist to treat an affliction it was understood that they should be used – it’s why Paul feels free to tell Timothy to have wine for that stomach ache in the first place.

            

 Likewise for the Scripture the author uses for his argument. 

“Now in response to the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have relations with a woman.”² But because sexual immorality is so common, each man should have his own wife, and each woman should have her own husband. ³ A husband should fulfill his marital responsibility to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband. ⁴ A wife does not have the right over her own body, but her husband does. In the same way, a husband does not have the right over his own body, but his wife does. ⁵ Do not deprive one another sexually—except when you agree for a time, to devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again; otherwise, Satan may tempt you because of your lack of self-control. ⁶ I say the following as a concession, not as a command. ⁷ I wish that all people were just like me. But each has his own gift from God, one person in this way and another in that way.” – I Corinthians 7:1-7(HCSB)(emphasis his)

            Any normal person would read this Scripture and see that Paul is acting as a pastor to his congregation and giving marital advice.  That he is not giving a command for all time and all people (or even Corinthian people) is obvious from the passage itself.  Indeed, Paul never calls such sexual denial sin, rather any congregation could see that if you deny your spouse sex you can expect a pretty miserable marriage and the problem will eventually fix itself, one way or another, without need of further congregational involvement. 

            The problem is the author answers this, too, and again his evangelical theology is flawless. 

His concession (or opinion) is about celibacy. He is prefacing the statement he is about to make as his opinion – that he wished everyone could be celibate like he was as there are many advantages to serving God as a single person. But he realizes that celibacy is a gift God has only given to a chosen few, while the rest of men and women ought to marry.

What he is stating in this passage is, if you don’t have the gift of celibacy and you do get married, you have a solemn obligation to have sex with your spouse, you cannot deny them unless it is mutually agreed by both of you for a short period of time.

Now I can disagree with this, and in fact I do, but the problem is I have to leave Evangelical Interpretation to do it.  As a man educated in the history and language of the Scriptures, I can tell you Corinth wasn’t exactly a den of chastity and self-control – so much so that the Corinthian Church had a member within it who was married to one of his father’s wives (1 Cor. 5:1) and the church was okay with it.  Sexual immorality was a problem within this church, which is why Paul touches on the subject not only in 7:2, but 5:1, 6:13, 6:18, and finally also in 10:8.  This rather loose environ is why he refers to sexual immorality “being so common” and also refers to their “lack of self-control” concerning it.  Because of its commonality, Paul reinforces the marital relationship as an appropriate outlet in his response to the Corinthian church’s questions, but Paul’s point is hardly that he wants people to be celibate - he wants his congregation to learn to keep it zipped!  Not only this, but it should also be added that the author is also picking and choosing his Bible translations.  Verse 7:6 in the Greek simply says, “but I say this as a concession, not a command.”  He is deliberately picking a translation that plays to his interpretation, which is why he picks from only one of the two possible English translations that includes the phrase “the following” or least its idea.

However, all this would mean very little to a number of those on the right.  You may choose whatever Bible you wish and it counts just as much as God’s Inerrant and Infallible Word as any other, no matter how it would disagree with other translations.  You can pick the Bible that plays to your own petty biases all you want.  Indeed, not only do you get to choose whatever you want to be “God’s Word”, you get to refer to anyone who calls you out on this fact as “liberal” and “Non-Bible-Believing.” So not only can we not refute him by showing him different Bible translations (or, heaven forbid, get him to actually learn Biblical Greek), but I can’t even do so by pointing out that his preferred translation is highly out of historical context.   I have to point to “flawed and sinful human knowledge” as opposed to his “Perfect Word” for that.    

            And this ultimately is what is the most disturbing.  This man’s Evangelical and Conservative Theology is so closed, so circular, so indelibly flawed (The Bible is God’s Word and must be obeyed, I have chosen the verse I prefer in the Bible I prefer, by obeying that verse I am obeying God) that it is literally impossible to show this man how wrong and how damaging he is being.  His theology has so disconnected him from reality he honestly can say in one sentence “A husband ought not to feel guilty for having sex with his wife when she is not in the mood if she yields, even grudgingly “ and say he does not condone rape in another.  He honestly thinks that dragging their sex lives in front of the church, doing no extra work on the house, and “removing her funding” doesn’t amount to passive-aggressive manipulation on the husband’s part, but that it is all inherently tied up to the duties of the male under the doctrine of “Biblical Headship.”  He has even gotten himself to the point where he can call people "haters" who point out that his advice violates domestic violence laws!

“For all of the “Rape Accusers” out there, especially the ones that are hurling applications of domestic violence laws at me – I have written a special post just for you.”(emphasis mine)

            Just like the woman who killed herself and her children, this man’s Religious Right Theology is incredibly harmful and destructive.  His advice, unlike Paul’s, is going to get a number of men nothing but a lost house and alimony garnishments at best;  prison and a lifetime of obeying sex offender reporting requirements at worst.  WE AS CHRISTIANS OF GOOD CONSCIENCE NEED TO OWN THIS.  We let Christian theology reach a point where literally any fool with a Bible translation gets to speak for God.  This man has no theological training, no understanding of human psychology, no time spent as a pastor and yet his beliefs not only allow him to wear those mantles but compel the vulnerable to trust him for no other reason that he sprinkles choice Bible verses throughout his website.  American Theology has created monsters and real people are going to be hurt by it.  It’s time we all sat down and had real honest conversation about the kinds of believers we are making, and the discussion needs to happen yesterday.