An Easter to Remember

Happy Easter.  I have to admit those words are hard to say this morning.  Easter is supposed to be time of great joy: a welcoming of new life, new possibilities into the world at spring time.  It is reveling in the triumph of life over death – and I don’t feel it this year.  With everything going on, with the attacks in Belgium that happened earlier this week, with the bombings in turkey and elsewhere that the media failed to report, I just feel … numb.  And that’s just with everything going on over there; over here it isn’t any better.  As Americans we live in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and yet despite this we lead the industrialized world in child poverty, and we use that wealth to have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Whereas similar countries like Germany incarcerate 76 out of 100,000, Italy 85, and Saudi Arabia 161, the U.S. manages to find ways to imprison a whopping 716  people out of 100,000.  Child sex trafficking continues to rise, making up 40% of all human trafficking cases and the FBI has identified the twin cities as one of 13 US cities with high incidents of child prostitution.  Agencies say you cannot be homeless for 24 hours in the twin cities before you are approached to enter a prostitution ring, and the fact is reports also say they only ask so many times.  Urban food deserts are on the rise, our inner city poor have to travel miles to even get to store that has fresh produce and healthy things to eat, slavery is a real thing on our shores AGAIN, and not only does our elected leadership continuously do nothing about any of it, but as a pastor who also is a law school graduate, it infuriates me that I am continually asked to support one of two parties whose frontrunners are either scandal ridden lawbreakers or people who actively advocate war crimes.  So, no, I must confess I’m not feeling it this Easter season.  Everything we’ve done today feels rote, a ritual done because it is expected, not because it is relevant.

                And so I ask myself, how did we get to this place, how did we end up this way as a nation?  Easter has always been the highest point of the Christian year.  Indeed, from what I can tell about the Earliest Church from the writings and structures they left behind, every Sunday used to be an Easter, every Sunday was a celebration of the continuous renewal of God’s blessings of life and when Easter itself actually came around – THAT was a blowout party.  How can it be that Easter, a day that had so much joyous meaning for our ancestors that they would sooner be put to death than abandon it, how can it be that this day has dwindled down to a mere tale, an hour long service where we sing sunny hymns and act joyously for a little bit, only to go home afterward unchanged?  For the Christian, Easter is not just a holiday, it is not just a day where we dress up nicely and allow our children to ingest copious amounts of sugar to move on to a nice ham dinner afterward, Easter is the celebrated Supreme Reality.  Through the eyes of Easter, Death is an aberration, a disease well on its way to being cured.  Through the Eyes of Easter, this body, this world, this existence, are not a dime-store knock offs.  We in fact would not be better off if we were never born; that this physical life of ours contains blessings that not one other creature in this universe gets to experience.  Through the eyes of Easter, I see that Good wins.  That evil cannot have the day.  That all suffering is fleeting, and that one day cruelty, injustice, hatred, and pain will all be things of the past.

                And so I cried out to my God and my Savior, “What happened?”  Easter is supposed to be the Christian identity, how can we live out the joys of Easter, how can we embody its meaning, how can we make it relevant to people, when we ourselves have never once experienced it?  Where … did Easter … go?

                I remember many an Easter from my own childhood.  We’d wake up that Sunday, my brother and I, and we’d go hunting for our Easter baskets.  The sun was usually up, the air crisp; we’d find our Easter baskets and devour the chocolate rabbit plus a few jelly beans before breakfast.  Mom would make pancakes and sausage, but the end result was always the same on Easter Sunday – The church would swell up as exhausted parents would force their children to sit still on a sugar high for an hour.  The pastor would muddle through a sermon, having already done a Good Friday (and sometimes a Maundy Thursday service), learning to crack a joke when a child’s energy levels exceeded the fear of their parents.

                My parents brought me to church every Sunday, not just Easter, but they didn’t really believe.  Like many today they were agnostics and practical atheists.  They didn’t really believe in Jesus or any of this resurrection stuff.  Like the Greeks and their festivals to Zeus, so was Easter to the Christians – a people thoughtlessly playing out their stories and that was about it.  They didn’t come to church, they didn’t bring me and my brother to church, because they believed they were imparting essential life truths to us; they brought us to church to appease their own parents and the society around them.  In truth, as a pastor I don’t really blame them.

                As the first generation after the 2^nd world war and as the first generation to really go to college, they had questions honestly raised by their education, questions that quite frankly their rural blue-collar parents had no idea how to answer.  A factory or an office worker knows little of history or the historical process and the only archeology a farmer engages in is when the plow happens to dig something up.  Of course, as a man with a law degree who graduated seminary, I now know those questions could have been answered.  The scholarship to answer those basic questions of faith had been around since at least the forties; my parents simply chose not to look for them.  At the end of the day, feeling forced into doing something they didn’t want to do, it was easier to surround themselves with shallow worldly questions than to be honest and seek after deep spiritual answers.

                Of course, I don’t really blame my grandparents for this either.  Times were changing and changing fast.  Their children moved far away into the city, got an education.  They entered into a profession, instead of just finding a job.  As a nation we went from horse drawn buggies to muscle cars and propeller planes to jets that broke the sound barrier.  Computers, smart watches, and phones that most people don’t talk on but just use to take pictures and text.  Gay Marriage, Transgendered people, multiple religions, it was a dizzying array of changes to throw at a people who grew up having their milk delivered by wagon.  To ensure their children didn’t lose their roots, they did what their own parents did to them and what their parents did to them: they used the power of the family to drive their children into their place.  They called, they nagged, they threatened to cut people from their will and at times even exiled their own children to make an example to the rest of the family.  They didn’t foster faith so much as they drove home the words and practices that made themselves feel comfortable.  They didn’t love their children no matter what, if they wanted to do that they would have journeyed with them in their questions instead of insisting they repeat the supposed answers.  When their children asked them if Jesus was real or if the resurrection was myth they could have responded “I believe so, but that’s what I was taught.  Let’s ask our pastor, or let’s see if we can go to a seminary professor and see what they have to say.  In fact, let’s make a project of it this year.  Let’s talk to many pastors and lots of different professors and see if we can’t help.”  To be honest, however, I don’t know that my grandparents ever made their children feel safe enough to ask those questions.  Tradition has been called the “Tyranny of the Dead”, and with every act that my grandparents did to isolate their children, to manipulate family, it was done with exactly one haunted look in their eyes – the look that asked “What would my parents think if they were alive today.”

                Ladies and Gentlemen, I propose to you that we are not achieving the Easter Experience because none of us want to go through Good Friday to get it.  We all want the incredible joy, the freedom, and the triumph that Easter represents, but we refuse to put to death the things that are keeping us from it.  Like a dog with a large stick, we want to hold on to the things we feel entitled to and yet we remain baffled when we can’t seem to get through the door.  Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and to experience the phenomenal life-changing joy of the Resurrection they had to put down everything that they were raised to value.  The Jewish people of the first century commonly believed in a Messiah of War, that violent righteousness and vindication would ever somehow inaugurate God’s kingdom of Peace.  That had to die.  Many Jews dreamed of a Jewish theological state, that tenets of true Jewish religion would become enforceable by law.  That had to be killed.  The Jews of that era also believed that the Jewish way made them better than everybody else and they believed that the gentiles could never be the people of God, too.  That racism had to be put down.  Everything they hoped for, everything they felt entitled to, everything they ever believed in, all of it had to be shattered and the broken pieces of their desires piled up in a heap at the foot of the cross before they could experience the fulfillment of God’s promises to them and before the enduring pieces of their faith would be revealed.  It is no different for us.   Easter, ladies and gentlemen, was the good news no one was looking for or even would have wanted, but once lived it was the joy that could not be stamped out.  We can have that Joy too.  Even in today’s world that seems to create one new nightmare after another, we too can experience victory.  It is not gone, it is not irrelevant.  We too can embody the resurrection reality and when confronted with those nightmares we can know it’s just a dream.  The terrible evils that we encounter are passing, we will one day wake up from them.  But even so, through Easter we are given power and we are reminded that even though we are asleep we can still control the dream.  What makes a nightmare a nightmare is the feeling of our own powerlessness.  Easter tells us that powerlessness IS A LIE.  The world as we experience is not the world as it has to be, it can change!  But it takes us putting down that which makes us a nightmare to others.  It takes us going through our own Good Friday and trusting God to pick up what’s left.  

                So, ladies and gentlemen, what will it be?  Will this Easter be just another themed Sunday, one out of 52 others but with a duck or a bunny motif, one where we sing sunny songs and then return to the world at large; to our businesses, to our homes, to our lives that force us to be fake people eternally hiding behind a shallow mask, serving a world that literally just wants you to pay bills, mop floors and die?  Do we want that or do you want something more?  Because a better life is waiting for you if you do.

Amen and 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.