Perceptions from a Pewboy

In about a month, a couple thousand United Methodist laity and clergy will gather on the beautiful campus of Grove City College for an important time that we call “Annual Conference.” We will sing and worship together. We will honor retiring pastors and ordain some new ones. We will study Scripture and hear presentations.

And, of course, we will discuss and debate legislation.

For some reason, my prayerful preparation for this year’s Annual Conference has taken my thoughts to Chuck Klosterman’s relentlessly entertaining novel “Downtown Owl” (published in 2008). The novel focuses on life in the mid-1980’s as it unfolds in the eccentric small town of Owl, North Dakota—a town where cable television is not available and where “disco is over but punk never happened.”

As the people of Owl proudly resist the narrative of popular culture, they invest their energies in those time-tested realities that seem to be woven into the DNA of the town’s lifeblood: high school football, hating the government, reckless sexual relationships, and the copious consumption of alcohol. In Owl, normalcy is impossible for outsiders to define, and even the lifelong residents have stopped trying.

Interestingly, church life is still important to a portion of Owl’s population. In fact, the local Roman Catholic church is very pleased with the arrival of its new priest, Father Steele, who is “a young, fat, affable, nebulously feminine individual who—in stark contrast to his predecessor—did not assume that all women were the intellectual equivalent of cows.”

In what I consider to be one of the most hilarious (and realistic) literary treatments of ecclesiastical decision-making that I have ever encountered, Klosterman takes the practice of Bible study (in a Roman Catholic context) and makes it the center point of a church-related controversy. The narrator in the story sets the stage in this fashion:

Traditionally, Roman Catholics are not big Bible scholars. Catholics focus on the Gospels; the rest of the Bible is what Protestants arbitrarily memorize for no obvious reason. Father Steele wanted to change this…[And so] five middle-aged women agreed to meet with Father Steele every Wednesday morning in the basement of the church rectory to debate the Word of God. That was September. By October, Vernetta Mauch hated Melba Hereford the way Nixon hated JFK. The feelings were mutual.

At the heart of this controversy is the question of what a Bible study should include. Vernetta Mauch believes that Bible study is best treated as an opportunity for individuals to relate the biblical stories to their personal experiences, and Vernetta has become quite adept at this practice. In fact, according to the narrator, “there was not a single anecdote from either Testament that Vernetta could not connect to specific dramatic events in her own personal history, or even to semi-dramatic events from the previous Friday.”

In short, Vernetta approaches Bible study as an opportunity to discuss the intersection of Scripture and her personal journey, much to the disdain of Melba Hereford. Melba, under the influence of a vastly different hermeneutical approach, resents what she perceives to be Vernetta’s efforts to use the Bible as a springboard for egocentric revelation: “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melba interjected when Vernetta tried to use Christ’s damning of a fig tree as a means to criticize her husband’s insistence on buying a new lawn tractor. “Buying a lawn mower has nothing to do with the Son of God. You’re ruining the Bible for everyone.”

For Melba, Bible study is not to be a time of personal revelation and application. Rather, it is to be a context for intellectual discernment in which a safe and dignified distance can be maintained between Biblical truth and the people who are pondering it (preferably in silence). So passionate is Melba about this conviction (and her dislike for Vernetta) that she encapsulates her angst into an administrative point of order: “I want to make a new rule,” Melba says during a Bible study. “From now on, no one can talk about their own life during Bible study.”

Like all good church people, they put it to a vote. The final tally was 3-2 in favor. As a result, “Owl now had the only Bible-study group in America where it was forbidden to tell any story less than two thousand years old.”

Klosterman’s deft and creative literary exploration of this fictional (but wonderfully true to life) milieu brought me to simultaneous laughter and sadness. I laughed because I heard in Vernetta and Melba the voices of hundreds of my past parishioners, all of whom had passionate convictions about what should and should not be included in everything from Bible study to worship, everything from sacramental practice to church music. The laughter, however, was accompanied by a strange sense of sadness over my remembrance of the Vernetta’s and Melba’s I have encountered over the years who wound up hating one another because of their drastically divergent views of what the church’s ministry should and should not accommodate.

When I ponder the relationship between Melba and Vernetta, it is impossible for me not to think about two women in my very first appointment who were locked in a seven-year feud over whether the American flag was to be located stage-right or stage-left of the altar. (Interestingly, when I suggested to them that it may be best for the American flag not to be present on either side of the altar, since Trinitarian worship bears witness to a Kingdom that transcends nationalistic identity, both women found an unanticipated unity in their shared dislike for their pastor’s “newfangled ideas!”)

I suppose that my point (and, I think, Klosterman’s) is that church can be a tricky place. It is a place where great potential exists for mystical intersections between the eternal and the commonplace. And yet, given the eccentricities, passions, and personalities of the church’s people, it can also become a fragmented and compartmentalized environment in which people are either loved or hated depending upon which compartment they choose to occupy. In such an environment, it is often difficult to avoid jumping into a murky sea of distorted priorities—a sea in which the church’s people are far more interested in the school of red herrings swimming around them than they are in the One who walks on the water and invites his followers to join him there.

And yet, after all the literary dust had settled, my reading of “Downtown Owl” left me with a feeling of gratitude for the church and its ministry. Klosterman, perhaps unintentionally, helped me to remember that the Church, at its best, is the only environment in the world in which Vernetta’s and Melba’s can be confronted by biblical truth and challenged to live into the reality of making Christ-centered peace amidst divergent convictions. The risk of such an environment, of course, is that people might wind up hating one another if their desire to win the argument become more passionate than their desire for Christocentric koinonia.

But, every once in a while, I still find Melba and Vernetta sitting beside one another in the same pew (or in the same row at Annual Conference)—singing together, praying together, and allowing the cross of Christ to bridge the gap between their contrasting personal preferences. In those moments, I tend to be awestruck by the church’s holy potential that is occasionally and beautifully realized.

I look forward to seeing many of you at Annual Conference. Please pray for our time together at Grove City. Pray for our Bishop as he prepares to preside. Pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon that robust gathering of United Methodist Christ-followers. Finally, pray that all of our “Melba’s” and “Vernetta’s” will be drawn closer to one another and closer to the risen Christ, whose Lordship is always far more unifying than our differing viewpoints are divisive.

Her name is Emily. She is a college student; a gifted singer/songwriter; a joyful and winsome participant in the pilgrimage; and a faithful follower of Jesus. She is also my friend.

Recently, Emily e-mailed me for the purpose of picking my brain (and sharing her own thoughts) on the issues of predestination, God’s sovereignty, and human free will. (You know, the kind of light stuff about which people chat while enjoying a latte.)

We came to the conclusion that our back-and-forth e-mail conversation might make for the kind of interesting (albeit lengthy) blog post that might resonate with those of you who are at all intrigued by the longstanding theological effort to speak meaningfully about how it is that predestination and free will relate to God’s sovereignty.

What follows is a composite of my e-mail dialogue with Emily, shared completely with her knowledge and permission. I greatly appreciated, not only the theological territory that we explored, but also the spirit in which differing viewpoints were accommodated.

Emily: Hello Eric Park!

Eric: Why, hello Emily!

Emily: I wanted to reach out to you because your most recent Facebook post about “freed will” (as opposed to “free will”) was really relevant to the heavy theological concepts that I’ve been hashing out lately. I really just want to share and discuss my journey with you and hear your thoughts.

Eric: Ah, the plot thickens. Good!

Emily: So, up until recently, I never gave the concept of predestination any significant thought; this is most likely due to the fact that the idea scared me and didn’t really align with what I felt I knew about God. So I just brushed it off as a controversial topic which I chose not to believe in.

Eric: I think I see where this is headed.

Emily: I have been dating a great guy for the past three months. So about two months ago, we were having a discussion in which he mentioned that he believed in predestination. It took me off guard, and when I asked him why, he replied, “because it’s biblical.” We didn’t discuss it any further, but his words planted a seed in me that has been growing like a weed ever since.

Eric: Looking for some theological weed control, eh? OK. I’m game. Go get the beverage of your choice, put on your jammies, and get comfortable. This is probably going to take a while.

Emily: I’ve been approaching these questions from what I believe is a healthy perspective: one of reliance on God’s righteousness (something on which we’ve been focusing heavily in my Bible study, which has been helpful) and my human inability to comprehend Him and His ways.

Eric: This is a good place to start—by acknowledging that we will never be able fully to comprehend the mind and methodology of God. Therefore, a conversation about God’s providence must always begin with humility and an earnest recognition that, irrespective of our particular interpretation of the pertinent biblical texts, we will not be able to fit God’s providence into a theological equation.

In my experience, both staunch predestinarians and staunch “free-willians” are often guilty of saying more than God has clearly revealed. I will attempt to avoid this pitfall in our conversation, although I will most likely be unsuccessful at points.

Allow me to give you a bit of my personal history related to the theological issue at hand. I first began to struggle with the predestination/free will debate when I was 15. A Presbyterian friend said to me in the school cafeteria, “Do you believe that God predestines people to heaven and hell?” That single question opened the door to a time of theological discernment that, in many ways, has continued for over thirty years. I talked to my Dad about it, which, for me, was always an awesome place to start. Dad, in a language that I could comprehend, helped me to understand the different ways in which Christ-followers have approached the issue over the centuries. Dad also helped me to understand that we, as United Methodists, have historically aligned ourselves with the Arminian viewpoint while not separating from those who see the issue differently. I read everything that I could get my hands on. I plowed through Calvin’s Institutes and the works of Arminius and Wesley (arrogantly believing that I could fathom the profundity of their theology as a 15 or 16-year-old!). While I did not come to any firm conclusions, I had a pretty clear understanding of the significance and the expansiveness of the issue by the time I was 17.

During my college years, I had a number of both pleasant and unpleasant interactions with students and faculty who had been schooled and trained in Reformed Theology. The pleasant interactions were pleasant because the person with whom I was speaking saw his/her viewpoint as one approach among several approaches that could be accommodated by Christian orthodoxy. The unpleasant interactions, by contrast, were unpleasant because the person with whom I was speaking had become, in my opinion, rigidly dogmatic to the point of idolatry. In fact, I remember being told by a fellow student once that, if I did not fully embrace the doctrine of double predestination, I was guilty of perpetuating a truncated understanding of God’s sovereignty, which would place my salvation in jeopardy. When I responded that I must have missed the verse in Scripture that makes one’s stance on predestination a soteriological litmus test, the conversation pretty much came to an end.

All of this is to say that I am no stranger to this conversation, Emily. The responses that I offer below may help you to understand how one humble pewboy has navigated his way through the deep theological forest.

Emily: I have been very motivated to seek more knowledge and understanding. I found in my own studying that my boyfriend was accurate in his assertion that predestination is explicitly pointed to throughout scripture, and many unsettling questions were raised: How can I believe in an all-loving God when that same God creates people only to use them on Earth for His will and then condemn them to damnation? Where is this supposedly all-sufficient grace for those who are not chosen?

Eric: Okay, this is where it gets interesting. You have articulated a hermeneutical position that demands a clarification of terms. Specifically, you have asserted that “predestination is explicitly pointed to throughout Scripture…” The question is, what kind of predestination does Scripture describe? If you will permit me to focus on the 3 segments of Scripture upon which predestinarians have historically built their case, it may help us to cut to the proverbial chase. Those three segments are as follows:
1. God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus;
2. a clear reference to predestination in Ephesians 1; and,
3. the frequently-debated Romans 8 and 9.

First, concerning the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, while it is most certainly true that, ten different times, the book of Exodus speaks of God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, it is also critical to realize that, five different times in Scripture, we are told that Pharaoh “hardened HIS OWN HEART” (Exodus 5:2; Exodus 8:15; Exodus 8:32; Exodus 9:34; and 1 Samuel 6:6). If we are going to be thorough in our interpretation of Pharaoh’s hardened heart (and Paul’s reference to it in Romans 9), we must resist the temptation to read into Scripture the idea that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart in a manner that was against what Pharaoh had already decided to do. In my opinion, a far more holistic reading of Scripture is to see God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as God’s effort to utilize redemptively a rebellion that Pharaoh had already decided to wage. In other words, God hardened this particular heart, not against its owner’s will, but in concert with what Pharaoh had already decided to do. God raised up for destruction, not a random and expendable “vessel,” but a vessel that had already made a firm decision to set itself violently against the purposes of God. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, then, can hardly be seen as a biblical foundation for a rigid doctrine of predestination.

Second, turn with me to Ephesians 1, where we find these words:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined (or predestined) us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6)

Here Scripture makes clear that a doctrine of predestination is absolutely necessary if we are going to interpret Scripture faithfully. We are told in no uncertain terms that God “chose us before the foundation of the world” and “predestined us for adoption.”

So, the critical question for me is not “Do I believe in predestination?” (Yes, I do—because Scripture reveals it.) Rather, the critical question for me is “What kind of predestination is it that Scripture reveals?” This is a different question altogether.

When Ephesians tells us that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, who is the “us” that is being described? A staunch predestinarian would most likely say that the “us” refers to each individual soul—meaning that God “chooses” who is saved and who is damned. In a more Arminian hermeneutic, however, the “us” is a corporate and collective reference to all of those who have CHOSEN the way of Christ—which against the backdrop of the entirety of Scripture, makes much more sense to me. God chooses us how? IN CHRIST, says Ephesians—implying that God chooses those who have chosen well. God chooses those who have chosen to be in Christ.

When Ephesians tells us that God predestined us for adoption, what is it that is being predestined? Is it our individual choice? A predestinarian sister or brother might say yes. I believe that it is far more consistent with the entire narrative of Scripture, however, to come to the conclusion that it is not our individual choice that has been predestined, but rather the methodology of our salvation. How is it that we have been adopted? AS HIS CHILDREN THROUGH JESUS CHRIST, says Ephesians—implying that God predestined a Christological and salvific adoption FOR THOSE WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO ALIGN THEMSELVES WITH CHRIST.

Quite frankly, Emily, this nuanced and corporate understanding of predestination is the only interpretation that enables me to make sense of 1 Timothy 2:3-4 and 2 Peter 3:9, both of which affirm that the desire of God’s heart is for all—ALL—to be saved. There are no qualifiers present in those scriptures that would lead us to believe that ALL is a reference to a pre-selected assembly. Rather, the clear teaching is that God desires for ALL to be part of the elect. God desires that ALL would come to a knowledge of God’s predestined Way—Jesus Christ.

Emily: I found over the course of all of this that I admittedly felt something of a confused hardness toward God and his decision not to rescue everyone, as my understanding of the Calvinistic doctrine would suggest. Thank you for directing me to scriptural evidence that suggests otherwise.

Eric: Finally, come with me to Romans 8 and 9. I have already addressed the issue of Pharaoh, which covers a good portion of Romans 9. I would simply add that, for me, a key reference in Paul’s teaching is found in Romans 9:22: “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, HAS ENDURED WITH MUCH PATIENCE, the vessels of wrath made for destruction?” I highlight this verse for the purpose of raising a question: Would divine patience and endurance be required on the part of God if God were simply dealing with people whose choices and behavior were divinely predestined? In other words, why would it test God’s patience to endure the behavior of a “vessel” whose behavior God had already predetermined? I assume you get my point. It is thoroughly possible (and perhaps advisable) to believe that God raised up Pharaoh for destruction, not in the sense of predetermining Pharaoh’s decisions, but in the sense of giving Pharaoh over to an evil course of action that Pharaoh had already chosen. If this were not the case—if Pharaoh were not responsible for his immoral choices—than Paul’s reference to God’s patience and endurance would make no theological sense whatsoever.

And what about Romans 8:29-30? “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined…and those whom he predestined he also called…and those whom he called he also justified”

Again, one of our predestinarian friends may cite these verses as proof positive of God’s isolated predestination of individual souls, some to eternal salvation and others to eternal damnation. However, I would ask you to read the text carefully. Raise the same questions that I raised concerning Ephesians 1. What is predestined in this moment of Scripture? Is it individual acceptance or rejection of Christ? To say “yes” to that would be to bring us into tension with God’s clearly-revealed desire for ALL to be saved. Rather, as was the case in Ephesians 1, what God predestines is not our individual choice, but the consequence of our choice: “to be conformed to the image of his Son.”

To put it another way, when Romans 8 tells us that we have been predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus, we are not being told that our CHOICE was forcefully predetermined. Instead, we are being told that, if we love God and respond to God’s call and God’s purposes (which, by the implication of Romans 8:28 is the result of our God-graced decision-making), then God has predestined us to be justified. Did you get that? God predestines for justification those who have utilized their God-graced ability to respond to God with love and obedience.

Emily: The suggestion that our predestination is not of our salvation but rather our justification is one that I had not considered, and find myself very attracted to. It liberates the entire issue of free will to be a separate conversation. Furthermore, it affirms the kind of deep, dynamic, intimate, nuanced and intrinsically REAL nature of a two-way RELATIONSHIP with our creator, one which I feel I have been experiencing and growing in for the better part of my life, but which my recent thoughts have called into question.

Eric: Excellent points. I should make clear at this point that, based upon what I have written thus far, some of my Reformed sisters and brothers would be quick to cry “foul.” Over the years, I have been accused of manipulating semantics for the purpose of making Scripture say what I want it to say. Perhaps my critics are right in that regard (although I hope not). The bottom line for me is that I see nothing in the biblical texts I have referenced that necessitates and justifies a rigid and ungracious doctrine of double predestination. Can a doctrine of double predestination find a place under the large umbrella of Christian orthodoxy? Absolutely. But is the doctrine necessary? Absolutely not. In fact, based upon my interpretation of Scripture, I would argue that embracing a doctrine of double predestination is not even the best and most holistic reading of the biblical texts. If, however, a sister or brother in Christ chooses to espouse such a doctrine, that is a difference of theology that the body of Christ can accommodate.

Emily: I wonder, how does God’s grace relate to free will in our acceptance of God? And does an emphasis upon God’s perfect sovereignty imply that we do not have free will in any aspect of our lives, or is there a gray area in which God occasionally chooses to intervene and take control?

Eric: Hmmmm. Well, I am a Wesleyan in my theological approach. A Wesleyan understanding of prevenient grace would have us to believe, not in an intrinsically FREE will (since our fallenness has corrupted and distorted our will in this regard), but rather a FREED will—a will that has been sufficiently graced by God to make it possible for “all to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4). It would make no sense for God to want all to be saved if there were not a prevenient grace sufficient to make a salvific choice possible. So, in answer to your question, I believe that God’s perfect sovereignty is manifested, not in the form of a micromanagement of human decision, but rather in a prevenient equipping that makes it possible for us to choose or reject.

Emily: I spoke to my pastor today, and he helped shed a lot of light on all of my concerns. I have arrived at these inconclusive conclusions:

Eric: OK. Good. First, I am very glad that you spoke to your pastor. And, second, “inconclusive conclusions” are precisely the right way to approach theological mysteries!

Emily: Here are my inconclusive conclusions: God’s grace is offered to and is sufficient for all people. God loves all of us and desires for all of us to love him in return. However, we are thoroughly incapable of choosing God on our own. We are granted free will, but in our slavery to sin we are only ever able to use that will to reject Him. Therefore, God’s wrath falls upon us, and we are given our just consequence, death. This is hard to accept, but God is wholly righteous in doing so, and it brings Him glory. But in God’s mercy and compassion, he has chosen some of us to rescue from our own, freely willed decision to reject Him—the “elect”—for which Jesus’s death goes beyond sufficiency and into efficiency. We do not know how God chooses his elect, but we do know it is for nothing we have done, so that truly, we can boast in NOTHING but Christ.

Eric: I agree with parts of this conclusion, but disagree with other parts. I agree that “we are thoroughly incapable of choosing God on our own” because of our enslavement to sin. However, another orthodox understanding of grace maintains that God has made it possible for all people to make a liberated (freed) individual choice either for sin or for righteousness; for alienation or for reconciliation; for Christ or for rejection of Christ. Indeed, this choice is not ours IN WHICH TO BOAST, since it is entirely dependent upon the prevenient grace of God that makes the choice possible. However, it is still a choice. And, as I see it, acknowledging the urgent need for our liberated, freed, individual response is the only way to make sense of the entire biblical narrative’s emphasis upon choice: “Choose THIS DAY whom you will serve.” (Joshua 24:15). To take away the possibility of a grace-enabled individual acceptance or rejection is to ignore a major thrust of the biblical witness and to force a doctrine into the text that the text itself does not support.

Emily: Once we are chosen, God fulfills that salvation completely, giving us a new identity that is no longer enslaved to sin. We are then capable of choosing to do good and follow God, but He is still sovereign. And our new nature which gives us the inclination to do good is still a gift from God, so even in our free will post salvation, we cannot boast in our good deeds.

Eric: For me it is not “once we ARE chosen,” but rather “once we HAVE chosen,” i.e., once we have utilized the grace-created capacity to choose, we are able to experience the justification and sanctification that God has predestined for us.

Emily: As for an approach to ministry, we do not know whom God has chosen, but he uses us as the media through which He brings his chosen people to Himself. What an honor this is, regardless of whether it is done of our own choice, to be used by God in such a way! But in his predestination of our souls, he has taken all of the pressure off. He has called us not to make the Gospel attractive, but to simply preach the truth. It is not our responsibility to convince someone of the Gospel- for then we would be in a way in control of their fate, which of course we are not. It is merely up to God to allow them to understand. Once we have done His bidding and presented them with the word, our work is complete.

Eric: In my own personal theology, as I have probably already made clear, I am not comfortable using “chosen” in the manner that you are employing here. For me, the chosen are those who have by grace chosen well. The elect are those who have by grace elected to respond to God’s gracious initiative. However, practically speaking, our approach to ministry would be the same. Where you have said “we do not know who God has chosen,” I would say, “we do not know who might respond to God’s saving work.” In either case, we cannot afford to pick and choose who it is to whom we minister.

Emily: Yes, we are put on this Earth to fulfill the will of God. Does that mean we are merely puppets on a string? I don’t believe so, but even if we are, there is no one more perfect and loving that I would want operating them.

Eric: There is nothing at all in Scripture—in either testament—that would lead us to the conclusion that we are puppets on a string. All of Scripture bears witness to a much more creative and dynamic relationship than this between Creator and Creature.

Emily: I guess I’ve been in a transitional period in my understanding of God and the world’s purpose.

Eric: I sense that.

Emily: Up until now, my central idea has been love. Love is the inherent definition of God, the world was created so that God could love and be loved, and everything on Earth, good or bad, is an expression of that love. I am now coming to understand that the Earth’s purpose is not to display God’s love, although it certainly does, but rather to bring Him GLORY. Because of God’s perfect, omnipotent nature, He simply MUST be glorified in everything, and nothing else is deserving of glory but Him. All of these questions and answers point to that; for if we had chosen God on our own, we would have cause to boast and receive glory- and that is unacceptable, because it detracts from God’s glory.

Eric: I would suggest that you resist unnecessary dichotomies in your transition, Emily. To believe that our purpose is to bring God glory does not in any way necessitate an abandoning of a commitment to bear consistent witness to God’s radical and relentless love. In fact, if 1 John 4:8 is to be believed—that God IS love—then the only way to bring God glory is to reflect God’s very nature. That nature, according to Scripture, is love.

I disagree with your conclusion that “If we had chosen God on our own, we would have cause to receive glory.” First of all, the phrase “on our own” does not apply in a doctrine of prevenient grace (freed will). Second, to say that we would have cause to boast in our God-enabled decision would be like saying that the drowning man had a right to boast in his decision to accept the embrace of the person risking life and limb to save him.

Emily: My response to all of this is: I am severely humbled and incomprehensibly grateful. I now understand the concept of fearing God.

Eric: Irrespective of one’s theology of predestination, humility, gratitude, and holy fear are the only appropriate responses to God’s saving grace.

Emily: I could continue on this for a great many more paragraphs, but I will end it here. Thank you so much for taking the time to read through this. I am grateful for your perspectives.

Eric: Well, I guess I have indeed offered my perspectives, haven’t I?! Please know that I offer them with a humble heart and an ecumenical appreciation. I pray that I have done so respectfully. Please forgive me if, at any point, I was inappropriately dismissive or cavalier.

It is most certainly not my desire to be pitted against another pastor or another individual. But I did want you to hear from one of your former pastors who speaks from the Arminian portion of Christian orthodoxy.

It sounds to me, Emily, like you have found your way into a Reformed church. If the church proclaims Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and offers a comprehensive and Christ-honoring ministry, then I celebrate your connection there. Be attentive to the fact, however, that even the most discerning among us tend to acclimate to the theological priorities and language of the people with whom we are worshiping and fellowshipping on a regular basis. If this acclimation (and resulting discernment) leads you into a Reformed understanding of Christianity, please know that you will remain my precious and beloved friend and sister in Christ, even though we may wind up differing on some particular doctrines.

I would simply ask you to be careful not to become idolatrous about a doctrine that Scripture simply does not insist upon. More specifically, resist the temptation to allow a rigid doctrine of double predestination to become the litmus test by which you judge all understandings of God’s sovereignty. Also, recognize that Christian orthodoxy is expansive enough to enable us to treat the matter of predestination as an in-house debate, not a thing worth dividing over.

Emily: I want you to know that the viewpoints that I’ve described to you are in no way fully formulated or firmly grounded in my mind. Remember that this entire epiphany (for lack of a better term) took place, really, in less than 24 hours. I certainly am not so confident in my ability to discern and understand God’s providence so as to think that I should rigidly hold to this interpretation (hence my use of the phrase “inconclusive conclusions”). Really I just wanted to give you an idea of where I landed. I am no less than delighted to hear that you disagree with some of what I said.

You see, my goal here is not to arrive at a tidy conclusion and check off “predestination” in the list of categories on which I must determine my stance, in search for a rigid set of beliefs I can cling to. Rather, my desire, and my intention for e-mailing you, is to gather as much knowledge, perspective, and wise council as I can get my brain on. On my own I have not delved into the scriptures with a holistic enough approach to truly trust what I believe at any time—at least when it comes to heavily debated theological concepts that are, in the end, inconsequential to our salvation or how we are called to live, and, like you said, not worth dividing the church over.

I am very hesitant to strictly define my faith by a set of beliefs named after an old theologian. I stubbornly refuse to allow myself to place God in that kind of box, or become so arrogant as to believe I fully understand much at all about God’s methodology. With whatever knowledge I have gained on subjects like these, I just pray that in my conversations I can lovingly continue to acknowledge the credibility of several interpretations- so long as they are not glaringly in contrast with what scripture teaches. Thank you for helping to bring me to that place.

Eric: I, too, am grateful, Emily. Your good thoughts and insightful comments have forced me to spend more time thinking about God’s sovereignty than I have spent in a long time. You are helping us both to move more deeply into holy mysteries.

Emily: The cry of my heart is only to know the truth of God’s own word. I want to be careful not to overly dissect the language of scripture in an effort to project my own constructed belief system onto it. The Bible is, and always will be, the final determinant in what I believe- so I definitely am trying to study it more. As a matter of fact, prayers for diligence, patience, discernment and humility in that task would be very appreciated.

Eric: I am indeed praying for you, Emily—even as I type these words. You know, the conversation that we have had here may prove to be helpful to others who are struggling to find their way through some of these issues. Please pray about whether or not you would be willing to allow me to share this conversation as a blog post. If you are uncomfortable with that, I completely understand and will abide by your wishes. However, I think that we have probed some depths here (in a conversational way) that would prove helpful to some of our sisters and brothers.

Emily: I would be honored if you used any part of our conversations in your blog! You just go for it. But let me know so that I make sure not to miss it!

Eric: Super. I will keep you informed.

Emily: I love and miss you, friend. I hope you’re having a good week! Love Always, Emily

Eric: I love and miss you too, Emily. Thank you for allowing me to stand with you upon the sacred ground of prayerful discernment and theological dialogue. Your friend, Eric

These are hard and important days, friends—days in which matters of love and covenant commingle with issues of legislation and judicial parlance; days in which diverse people unified by a deep faith attempt to find their way into the synergy between the cry for justice and equality and the cry for holiness and biblical integrity; days in which marriage is too often seen as something to debate rather than the relational tabernacle in which a covenantal love can be nurtured, protected, and honored.

I struggle schizophrenically between saying too little and too much. As a clergy person, speaking too loudly on social issues such as same sex marriage often draws the ire of those who maintain that a pastor must be a pastor to the entire church and must be careful not to become divisive in her/his ideological alignments. On the other hand, speaking too softly—or remaining silent altogether—draws the prophetic critique of those who (to borrow the powerful language of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) believe that far too many church leaders “stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities” or, even worse, remain “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”

Over the years, I have tried, probably unsuccessfully, to stand upon the bridge between positional extremes, believing in my heart of hearts that the bridge upon which I have stood is nothing less than the durable and unifying Lordship of Jesus. The danger with standing on a bridge in times of ideological conflict, however, is the potential of being shot at from both sides—attacked from two directions for not being decisive enough (or courageous enough) to locate oneself on one side of the bridge or another.

And yet, even as a bridge-stander, I am desperately committed both to justice and holiness, both to equality in the human community and equanimity in the interpretation of our sacred texts. It is precisely this commitment that has generated a host of personal convictions that I am holding with a particular sense of urgency these days.

One of those convictions is that, irrespective of ecclesiastical ordinances and Disciplinary references (most of which are the necessary byproduct of the church’s painful struggle to establish sexual ethics that are at once biblically rooted, intellectually sound, and experientially authentic), I do not want to see my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters (many of whom are deeply-devoted Christ-followers) unfairly denied the federal benefits that I, as a married heterosexual man, so often take for granted. Outside the issue of the church’s sexual ethics, after all, is the issue of equitable care for the heterogeneous human community.

Regardless of where the church stands in the ongoing conversation about sexual ethics, there is, in the Christian narrative, a clarion call to be non-discriminatory in the determination of who it is with whom the church shares its Christocentric love and ministry. Would the church ever demand theological agreement before offering food to a hungry person? Would the church ever withhold medical care from someone until the person assented to a list of theological propositions? Would the church ever make a particular theory of the Atonement a prerequisite before providing clothing to a needy family? If the answer to these questions is as obvious as I think it is, then one is compelled to wonder why the church would insist upon a consensus on sexual ethics before encouraging its culture’s government to provide equal benefits to all of its covenantally-committed couples.

In a related personal conviction, I also do not want my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to be without a fair opportunity to validate publicly and to solemnize communally their committed relationships, regardless of their church’s particular stance on the issue of same sex marriage. The church’s theologically-nuanced and multi-layered discernment related to human sexuality is an often-painful work in progress. Human sexuality is a regular agenda item in the prayerful conferencing of Christian believers, all of whom approach the issue with passionate convictions and diverse ideas. After decades of earnest study, dialogue, and debate, the church has not been able to reach a consensus on the issue of homosexuality. Christians of vibrant and authentic faith differ widely in their viewpoints. Some believe wholeheartedly that Scripture and tradition settle the issue. Others believe that reason and experience demand a reinterpretation and a reimagining of the pertinent biblical texts. There is no indication that consensus is anywhere on the near horizon.

The light of this reality illuminates a critically important question: What recourse is given to committed gay and lesbian couples who disagree theologically and ethically with their church’s prohibitions and who yearn for a means by which to bring communal consecration to the covenantal love that they are committed to preserving? Some Christ-followers would approach this issue restrictively. This Christ-follower, however, believes it to be morally equitable for a theologically-neutral government to provide the kind of solemnization for the same sex couple that many churches are not theologically prepared to offer.

Some of my sisters and brothers in the Christian community will no doubt come to the conclusion that I have gone too far in my allowances. Others will feel that I have not gone far enough. My goal has not been to create further rancor or division. Rather, my goal has only been to raise the possibility of a more compassionate, holistic, and justice-driven approach to an issue that is all too frequently reduced to sound bites, divisive rhetoric, and Facebook debates.

In the end, my heart’s desire is for the church to move beyond debilitating dichotomies in order to frame the foundational question differently: Regardless of one’s sexual orientation, what does it mean to practice the kind of stewardship over one’s sexuality that enables even one’s sexuality to become something doxological—a song of praise offered to the Giver of every good and perfect gift?

On Wednesday, February 13th—Ash Wednesday—millions of men, women, children, and youth will participate in what is surely one of the most peculiar practices of the Christian tradition. One by one, they will willingly receive the imposition of ashes, a cross-shaped smudge on an otherwise ruddy forehead.

What an odd thing to do! On all the other 364 days of the year, we utilize mirrors and Kleenex for the purpose of making certain that there are no unsightly smudges whatsoever on our visage. On the occasion of Ash Wednesday, however—one day of the year—we actually go out of our way to place an unsightly stain upon ourselves. How bizarre is that?

Here is, I think, a pertinent question: Why?

Why do we do it? Why the unsightly smudge? What is the spiritual significance of the facial besmirching? Or, to put it in the vernacular of our day, what’s the deal with the ashes?

Here are a few responses to that question:

1. We wear the ashes as a sign of our Acknowledgement.

2. We wear the ashes as a sign of our Subordination.

3. We wear the ashes as a sign of our Humility.

What’s the deal with the ashes? First, The ashes function as a sign of our ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. More specifically, when we wear the ashes in the right spirit, we express outwardly our inward acknowledgement of our sinfulness, our brokenness, and our neediness before God. The stain of the ashes dramatically calls to mind the stain of our sin, thereby compelling us to acknowledge both the reality of our iniquity and the urgency of our need for the only One who can cleanse us of sin’s pervasive stain.

A man said to me once, “It sure is a whole lot easier to confess someone else’s sin than it is to confess my own.”

It is most certainly the case that, like that man, we are often much more comfortable with second or third person confession than we are with a first person acknowledgement of our wrongdoing. It is far less of a vulnerable condition for us as long as we keep the focus on the sins of others. On Ash Wednesday, however, we do not wear someone else’s ashes. We wear our own. And, when we wear those ashes, we lay aside our proclivity for focusing on the sins of others long enough to acknowledge the depth and stain of our own personal condition of sin and our own personal need for divine grace. What’s the deal with the ashes? The ashes indicate an acknowledgement of our sinfulness, our brokenness, and our neediness before God.

Second, we wear the ashes as a sign of our SUBORDINATION. More specifically, when we wear the ashes in the right spirit, we express our willingness to be subordinated to the Lordship and saving grace of Jesus Christ. The stain of the ashes is a visible reminder that we are neither self-sufficient nor self-reliant. Rather, our salvation is entirely dependent upon our willingness to be subordinated to a Redeemer who can make us holistically clean.

When I was ordained an elder back in 1994, the bishop placed around my neck a stole symbolizing the yoke of obedience. When I wear that stole, I am indicating my willingness to be subordinated to the to the covenant of ordination, to the ministry of the church, and to the calling of Jesus Christ.

Not all Christ-followers are called to ordained ministry—to wear stoles. But all Christ followers are called to be subordinated to the grace and the Way of Jesus Christ. In that regard, the ashes function like a liturgical stole for those who dare to wear them, reminding us of that salvific and liberating subordination. What’s the deal with the ashes? The ashes indicate our willing subordination to a Savior who raises us up from spiritual cinders.

Finally, we wear the ashes as a sign of our HUMILITY. One of the most substantive obstacles to faithful discipleship is an exaggerated sense of self-centeredness or self-importance. Please do not misunderstand me. In God’s eyes, it is most certainly true that each one of us is unequivocally precious. The biblical witness is clear about that. And yet, as precious as we are to our God, the salvation story does not center on us. Rather, the story centers on God and what God has accomplished both in us and for us.

In the orthodox Jewish faith, there is an important tradition. On their day of atonement, many orthodox Jews wear the garment in which they will one day be buried. They do this both to humble themselves and to remind themselves that they will one day return to dust. They wear the garment to help themselves to remember that the main character in their faith story is an eternal God, not any fragile human being.

On Ash Wednesday, figuratively speaking, we wear the garment in which we will one day be buried—the garment of ashes to which we will eventually return. We do not do this to be morbid. We do not do this to generate depression or despair. We do it to remember our place in the scheme of things. We do it to be humbled. We do it to remember that we are not the main character in the story of our life. God is.

What’s the deal with the ashes? They are not exclusively a “Roman Catholic thing” (as I have heard some Protestants describe them). They are Christ-follower’s sign of acknowledgment, subordination, and humility. I encourage you to receive the ashes meaningfully this year and to help others to receive them meaningfully as well. Allow the ashes to bring you into a deeper awareness of your desperate need for the only One who can cleanse us of our deepest stains. That One is Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, with whom we journey in the Lenten season, all the way to the cross and all the way to the empty tomb.

As a follower of Jesus, I am often far less interested in the particular position that one holds on an issue than I am in how one arrived at that position and, even more important, how one engages with both those who hold a similar viewpoint and those who approach the issue with different convictions.

I have long believed that arriving at a passionately-held opinion is the least-demanding portion of ethical discourse. Strong opinions, while they may involve a certain degree of deductive or inductive reasoning and sophisticated cognition, require no artistry, nuance, or relationship. They demand nothing more than an individual’s intellectual assent to an articulated position. Following the intellectual assent, the opinion often becomes as comfortable for its holder as rhythmic breathing—rarely contemplated, but regularly expressed.

Holding strong opinions is the easy part. Everyone can do it and normally does.

The real challenge of ethical discourse, however, involves the territory that surrounds the opinion. Has the opinion been reached in a manner that is intellectually holistic and experientially reinforced? Has the opinion been cultivated with a reasonable attentiveness to all of the available data and not simply the portions of data that reinforce one’s preexisting predilections? Has the opinion been liberated from the weight of rhetoric and tested with the scrutiny of an open and rigorous mind? And is the opinion held with the kind of flexible intellectual grip that permits illuminating engagement with differing viewpoints? These are the questions that lead one well beyond the simple “speaking of one’s mind” and into the undulating terrain of ethical contemplation and moral decision-making.

If one is a Christ-follower, the task becomes even more complex. Christianity’s narrative is one that is rich with seemingly absurd instructions: Do not simply speak the truth (or speak one’s mind), but “speak the truth IN LOVE” (Ephesians 4:15). Do not simply insist on a particular course of action, but incarnate a spirit that is “not arrogant or rude…or irritable or resentful. (1 Corinthians 13:5). Do not become idolatrous about particular opinions, but be perpetually aware of the fact that “our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect (1 Corinthians 13:9).

In the face of a rather complex social issue in his day, the Apostle Paul addressed the question of what Christ-followers are to do about eating meat that had been offered to idols, since there existed an ethical disagreement between those who felt free to eat what they wanted and those who felt obligated to adhere to strict dietary laws. Paul’s counsel in the matter bears witness to his conviction that, at least in certain ethical matters, the particular position one holds is less important than the manner in which s/he holds it: “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak…If food is the cause of [people’s] falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.” (1 Corinthians 8:8-9, 13).

In this particular moment of Paul’s interpretation of Christian ethics, he expresses the rather countercultural idea that one’s individual viewpoint cannot be so monolithic and uncompromising that it refuses to be subordinated to the integrity and preservation of that diverse and heterogeneous community that Christians call church. In other words, to borrow Paul’s language from earlier in this same portion of Scripture, agapic love is the governor of individual opinions and not the other way around, since “knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1).

What does all of this have to do with the current debate on gun control? Much, I think—at least for followers of Jesus. Followers of Jesus, if they are to be true to the narrative by which they are called to live, must be specifically Christian, not only in the opinions that they hold, but also in the manner in which they arrive at those opinions, steward those opinions, and communicate those opinions. To borrow the Apostle Paul’s framework, Christ-followers are simply not permitted to elevate a particular conviction about eating meat (or, for that matter, owning guns) above their moral responsibility to preserve the kind of Christ-centered community that is durable enough to accommodate differing viewpoints without rancor, without malice, and without a sharp-edged insistence upon one’s own rightness.

The Christian narrative, of course, in no way removes from the Christ-follower the blessing of being able to develop and hold passionate opinions and convictions. Christians are not called to be devoid of individual perspective. What is powerfully unique about the Christ-follower’s individual perspective, though, is the way in which the Christ-follower is called to manage and articulate it. Specifically, Christ-followers are called to hold and offer their convictions in a manner that bears consistent witness to their stubborn refusal to value their opinions over their relationships with those who do not share them. I see this as a critical portion of the sanctification of individual perspectives.

In light of the urgency of this sanctification, I offer the following thoughts—my own personal opinions, mind you, held firmly but with a flexible grip:

1. Christ-followers would do well to make peace with the fact that intelligent people of deep and authentic faith reside on both sides of the issue of gun control. Three days ago, I shared a meal with two Christians that I greatly admire, one of whom is a pacifist who sees no value whatsoever in President Obama’s new gun control proposals (since, in his words, “the peace we are called to manifest will never be legislated.”) The other Christian at the table was a soldier, hunter, and gun-owner who believes that President Obama’s new proposals are “desperately needed in this country, if for no other reason than to establish the right tone and boundaries for how the issue is approached.”

While I personally gravitated toward the viewpoint of the soldier, I found myself deeply encouraged by the absence of bitterness in the conversation. These were not rhetoricians insisting on the absoluteness of their own rightness. They were brothers in Christ who seemed genuinely interested in how the other person arrived at his conviction. I did not have the sense that either man had become idolatrous about his opinion; or that either man felt that the Kingdom of God (or the American Constitution, for that matter) depended upon the promulgation of his conviction; or that their individual perspectives were more important to either of them than their shared friendship. Rather, I sensed that I was in the presence of two men of deep intellect and even deeper faith whose respectful disagreement about gun control found a comfortable home in the context of their mystical and durable oneness in Christ. On that afternoon, the salad bar at Eat n’ Park became a Eucharistic meal, where differing opinions were nothing but optional side dishes to the shared Bread of Heaven and Cup of Salvation.

2. Christ-followers would do well to remember that, in a specifically Christian conversation about moral behavior, the foundational question is never “What do I have the right to do?” but rather “What IS right to do?” It troubles me when Christian people limit their ethical conversations to debates about the nuances of their constitutional or civil “rights,” since, for Christ-followers, the primary concern is not the preservation of identified rights but the transformational and Spirit-enabled pursuit of righteousness.

This is not to suggest that the clear enumeration and protection of constitutional and civil rights is not an important conversation in which to participate. Such rights, after all, are an integral portion of the maintenance of a fair and just nation. In a specifically Christian morality, however, the concept of inalienable rights (which is not at all a Biblical concept) is never the starting or ending point of any conversation. Rather, Christocentric ethics are grounded in a different set of questions: What is the most right thing for me to do? What is the most helpful and edifying thing for me to do? Am I being called to sacrifice something for a greater good? Am I being called to defend something because of a Biblical principle? What decision will represent my very best effort to work toward a just and merciful outcome? How can I best bear witness to my primary identity—not my identity as an American citizen with inalienable rights, but my identity as a baptized follower of Jesus whose national citizenship, while important, is secondary to his/her Christological citizenship?

Such questions will not always lead two Christians to the same ethical viewpoint, especially on a controversial matter like gun control. My fear, however, is not potential disagreement. My fear is that, in the current climate, too many Christians are arriving at an opinion without an honest wrestling with the right questions.

3. Christ-followers would do well to remember what history has all too frequently taught us—that vitriolic fundamentalism of any sort normally distorts the pursuit of moral truth and replaces the dynamic hunger for righteousness with a stifling and malicious desire to protect and promulgate a particular ideology. Concerning the particular issue at hand, fundamentalism is alive and well:

*“They will have to pry my gun out of my cold dead fingers!”

*“People who aren’t in favor of gun control are ALL addicted to the pathological violence of our culture.”

*“I don’t see how ANY CHRISTIAN could NOT be in favor of stricter gun laws, especially in the aftermath of what happened in Connecticut.”

*“The ONLY WAY to ensure our freedom as a country is to preserve the right to arm ourselves with the same kind of weapons that our military has. It is our ONLY protection against the development of tyranny.”

These very real and current viewpoints may raise significant issues for the conversation, but the tone of the viewpoints resonates, not with a passionate yearning for a just and truthful discernment, but a fundamentalist impulse to fixate on a conviction while dismissing or demonizing those who do not agree with it. The church behaves like the church only when it refuses to allow any ethical conversation to be stifled by the compartmentalizing rubrics of fundamentalism.

4. Christ-followers would do well to manifest the kind of authentic humility that enables the cultivation of a healthy supply of “I may be wrong”-ness. Again, by this I do not mean to suggest that Christians are to relinquish the blessing of forming strong opinions on important issues. I am convinced, however, that we practice specifically Christian ethics only when we operate with a keen awareness of the important differences between “conviction” and “certainty.” Convictions are discerned and lived; certainty is established and protected. Convictions can live peacefully with opposing convictions; certainty normally seeks to defend its territory. Convictions can be held firmly but gently, with a profound awareness of our incomplete knowledge; certainty often demands a tighter grip and the illusion of omniscience.

Related to the issue of gun control—and all other issues—Christ-followers are at their best when they manifest the kind of genuine humility that heartfelt convictions permit but that rigid certainty resists.

5. Christ-followers would do well to commit themselves to making certain that their contemplation and discussion of gun control bears witness to the “new creatures” that they have become in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) and the new birth that Christ makes possible (John 3:3). No matter whether one opposes or supports gun control reform, it is essential for the Christ-follower to resist the ethical schizophrenia of being christologically reborn but behaviorally and practically heathen. If Christ has made one new, then even the manner in which one articulates one’s perspectives and participates in public debate must be under the transformation of sanctification.

Practically speaking, this will mean that Christ-followers will listen respectfully and attentively to opposing viewpoints, thereby avoiding the temptation to become nothing more than “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

It will mean that Christ-followers on both sides of the issue will refuse to allow the issue itself to become a divisive litmus test for relationship, thereby ensuring a commitment to being “patient and kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.”

It will mean that Christ-followers will become far less interested in jumping on the bandwagon of convenient and divisive rhetoric and far more interested in standing on the solid ground of ever-expanding discernment, thereby generating a spirit that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Most of all, it will mean that Christ-followers will live with a perpetual and holistic awareness of the fact that, irrespective of what decisions are made related to gun control reform, our life-giving hope and deepest deliverance are not to be found in the preservation, reformation, or interpretation of a constitutional amendment, but in Christ’s astoundingly gracious invitation to participate in an often countercultural and radically peaceable Kingdom in which “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

(Three years ago, in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, I wrote a post in which I explored God’s relationship to human suffering. I have re-worked, re-crafted, and re-written that post in response to the recent shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I hope that this is helpful for those of you who choose to read it. I offer it prayerfully and reverently as I stand with all of you upon the sacred ground of our shared grief.)

The recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut compels me to ponder the issue of human suffering and God’s relationship to it.

Throughout my ministry, I have often heard people give expression to a profound and ultimately unanswerable question in the midst of their experiences of suffering:

Why?

“My child has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Why would a loving God permit such a cruel reality?”

“People in the village that I visited in Africa are so poor that, every morning, parents there have to choose which of their children will get food that day. I don’t understand why God would tolerate that kind of hunger for so long.”

“I trusted my husband completely, but he shattered my life by telling me that he doesn’t love me anymore and running off with someone else. Why would God permit me to fall in love with a person who would cause me such pain in the long run?”

I am sure that all of you could add your own personal conversations to this list.

Yesterday, while looking for a few Christmas cards in the local Hallmark store, I overheard a new expression of the “why” question. It went like this:

I just can’t bring myself to buy a religious Christmas card right now. In fact, after Friday, I’m not even sure what I really believe about God anymore. How can God be real—no, what I mean is, how can God be GOOD—if he allows innocent children and teachers to be murdered in a matter of seconds. Why wouldn’t a good God do something to prevent such unimaginable violence?

In my own arrogance, I long to be able to answer the “why” question in a way that is succinct, poignant, and reassuring, thereby impressing people with my theological acumen while at the same time putting people back on the right theological track. I long to be able to fit human suffering into a concise theological equation, one that validates the comforting axiom that everything happens for a reason. The fact of the matter, however, is that this humble preacher is as ill-equipped as everyone else to answer the “why” question.

The narrative that I endeavor to preach, after all—the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments—never provides its readers with a detailed theodicean apologetic. In the Old Testament, the man named Job never receives an answer to his impassioned “why” in the midst of his hardship. The man named Abraham is never pacified with an explanation of the divine mandate to sacrifice his son (a mandate that is eventually rescinded, but not forgotten). In the New Testament, Jesus offers to us no elaborate explanation of why poverty exists, why leprosy seems to have the upper hand, or why the journey to salvation must include a hideous cross.

All that Scripture offers to us concerning our “why” questions is a cryptic affirmation that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and that God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8), which can hardly be described as a satisfactory explanation for a cancer diagnosis or a massacre in an elementary school classroom.

And yet, while Scripture stubbornly refuses to answer the “why” questions related to human suffering, Scripture does place before us the strangely unsettling image of a weeping and suffering Christ. We find him weeping over the sin and brokenness of Jerusalem. We find him weeping over the death of his dear friend Lazarus. We find him breaking and bleeding and wailing on that Roman instrument of death called the cross.

Such images are significantly more than theological masochism designed to titillate the sensibilities of future generations. Rather, if we truly believe that Jesus represents the fullness of God’s self-disclosure (and I do), then the image of a weeping and suffering Christ is nothing less than a stark and worldview-altering revelation of the very character of God. To put it in the simplest of terms, if Jesus represents the fullness of God’s self-disclosure, then a weeping and suffering CHRIST means that we have a weeping and suffering GOD.

Not a God who remains at a safe observational distance, orchestrating and micromanaging human suffering for the purpose of testing our mettle. Not a stoic God who refuses to be moved by the tragic segments of the human pilgrimage. Not a coldhearted and emotionally hardened deity who capriciously dispenses rewards and punishments—“Here, let’s see how the people of Connecticut deal with this.”

Not that kind of God.

Instead, the blood and tears of Christ bear witness to a God who is so thoroughly invested in humankind’s journey that the divine heart actually has the capacity to break to the point of weeping; a God who has poured the divine self so thoroughly into the human condition that God cannot help but break where we break, bleed where we bleed, weep where we weep; a God who loves us with such a wild and profligate love that God takes every portion of human suffering personally, receiving it into God’s very self in such a way that human and divine teardrops commingle in a mind-boggling relational intimacy.

And, according to Scripture, that’s not even the best part.

The best part is that God refuses to allow death and suffering to have the final word to speak. When the weeping is finished, when God and the people of God have wept for long enough, God goes to work in transformationally redemptive fashion, thereby ensuring that the weeping gives way to resurrection.

I probably do not have to tell you that Scripture is replete with resurrectional experiences: the people of Israel finding new hope and new life in their Egyptian captivity; Lazarus coming forth; the church in Acts moving from Stephen’s martyrdom to newfound evangelical fervor; Jesus of Nazareth walking out of a tomb that could not contain him. When we dare to move beneath the surface level of these resurrectional experiences, we find the beating heart of a God who seems to specialize in bringing new life out of certain death—a God who loves to grab hold of despair for the purpose of transforming it into hope; who loves to grab hold of tragedy for the purpose of transforming it into an opportunity for sacrificial ministry; who loves to grab hold of brokenness for the purpose of initiating a powerful movement toward wholeness.

None of this, of course, implies a twisted system of cause and effect. That is to say, we need not believe that God’s way is to CAUSE a mass shooting as a means to some redemptive end. Such a methodology would make no theological sense to the heart of a God who weeps so easily and deeply.

But, in the mysterious and often inexplicable progression of the human journey, when a tragedy does occur, our comfort and hope are to be found, not in the answering of the “why” question, but in the revealed nature of our weeping and resurrecting God, whose intimacy and vulnerability compel God to weep and whose creative grace compels God to redeem and resurrect.

Please do not interpret this post as a theological sidestep. Believe me, I would still like to have an answer to the “why” question in the aftermath of the tragedy in Newtown. But, in light of the fact that the “why” of such a tragedy is nothing short of inscrutable, I am compelled to consider the possibility that the more significant and urgent question to ponder is “where?” More specifically, where was God when a mass shooting brought a sudden end to twenty-eight lives? That is a question that we CAN answer, and the answer is this:

God was right there in Newtown. God was right there, in the Sandy Hook classrooms, offices, and closets. God was right there, standing with those children, teachers, and staff members, holding those precious souls in tender arms, experiencing their pain, their terror—their death—as intimately as they did. God was right there, in the hearts of the brave teachers, administrators, and first responders who did everything they could to protect the vulnerable souls that had been entrusted to their care. God was right there, in the thick of it all, feeling the pain of every death, sharing the pain of every tear. Because that is who God is. Intimate. Personal. Vulnerable. Emotional. Incarnational. Wounded. Crucified.

And, when the weeping stops for a while, God will still be right there, gradually but steadily leading a devastated people into a new season of hope and redemption—leading people out of death and into new life, new strength, new possibilities.

That, too, is who God is.

The following is an e-mail that I sent out to as many clergy on the Washington District as I could on the Saturday morning after Friday’s horrific tragedy in Connecticut. I share it on this blog for two reasons: First, because there are some clergy on the district who are currently having e-mail difficulties but who do have the internet capability to visit this blog; and, second, because I thought that some of you may be interested in knowing how one humble and shaken pastor (yours truly) is processing yesterday’s terrible events. Blessings to all of you.

A LETTER TO THE CLERGY OF THE WASHINGTON DISTRICT

Hello, my friends and colleagues.

Even as I type these words, I am praying for you as you make ready to lead your people in various ways this weekend. As we experience the third weekend of Advent, we stand together on the difficult ground of an incomprehensible tragedy that has brought our entire nation into a profound grief. Even this morning, I remain in stunned and painful silence as I contemplate the journey ahead for the family members and friends of those precious souls in Newtown, Connecticut who lost their lives senselessly yesterday at the hands of a murderer whose motives will never become fully clear to us.

As I put on my Facebook wall last night,

I hesitate to interrupt the reverent silence that today’s unfathomable tragedy in Connecticut demands. And yet, I long to connect with you, my sisters and brothers, even in these occasionally-superficial chambers of Facebook. I am grateful that our lives intersect in meaningful ways, and, tonight, I kneel with those of you who believe in the power of prayer. I pray for devastated parents and family members who are broken beyond words. I pray for survivors who are holding horrific memories in their deepest thoughts. I pray for police officers, paramedics, doctors and nurses, and members of the school’s faculty and staff, all of whom are serving as agents of order amid chaos and as instruments of healing amid agony. I pray for children who are terrified and for parents who are clinging tightly to them. Tonight, while I have no easy or satisfactory answers to offer to the questions that all of us are asking, I join many of you in leaning more deeply into the abiding presence of a weeping and grieving God—a God who breaks and bleeds with us; a God who sustains us with the blessed assurance that sin and death are never given the final word to speak; a God who, in the fullness of time, saw fit to come to us in the stark vulnerability of a child. Blessings upon all of you as you process what has come before us and as you stand with others upon the sacred ground of our shared sorrow.

We do not know precisely why tragedies like this happen, or why people make the decisions that they do. But we do know Jesus. And, because we believe that Jesus is the fullness of God’s self-disclosure, then, since we find Jesus weeping in at least three different places in the New Testament, we must also have a God who weeps. Not a God who sits back indifferently and micromanages human suffering and tragedy. But a God who is intimately present with us in the midst of even our most agonizing times—hurting where we hurt, breaking where we break, weeping where we weep.

Where was God during yesterday’s shooting? God was in the classroom with those children, teachers, and staff members. God was holding those precious souls in his arms, experiencing their pain, their terror—their death—as intimately as they did.

This conviction makes a huge difference to me, friends, because it addresses the question of how God relates to human suffering. If we are to take Jesus seriously, then we must conclude that God relates to the tragedy in Connecticut tenderly, personally, and emotionally, not distantly or cold-heartedly. Let us never forget, after all, that, in Jesus, we find a God who allowed even his own Son to be brutally crucified for the sake of our redemption, thereby revealing to us that God knows a thing or two about enduring the suffering of a child. How could such a God not be heartbroken by yesterday’s events?

Of course, Jesus also reveals to us that it is in the midst of death and suffering that God does some of his most powerful and redemptive work. Sustaining the grieving, healing the broken, and providing a spirit of life and hope in the face of death is what God does best of all. I am confident that, even in this moment, God is hard at work to bring supernatural comfort, healing, and deliverance for all of those who are personally connected to yesterday’s tragedy.

As you lead your people this weekend, please know that I am standing alongside you in prayer. Offer to your people the Gospel that we treasure so dearly. Remind your people of how this tragedy should make us all the more grateful that God saw fit to step out of eternity, wrap himself up in our fragile flesh, and come to us in the most vulnerable way imaginable—as a helpless infant. Speak to your people afresh about the reality that I articulated in my Facebook post—the reality that, in Jesus Christ, sin and death are never given the final word to speak.

I am deeply grateful for all of you and for the ministry that you offer so faithfully. I simply wanted to connect with as many of you as I could on this Saturday morning, for no other reason but to encourage you and to let you know that I am holding you all in my prayerful heart.

With love,
Eric Park

In the animated Christmas classic, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the viewing audience is introduced to the Island of Misfit Toys. The toys living on this island are ostracized from the other toys in the world because they are functionally or cosmetically flawed. On this island, for example, there lives a squirt gun that only shoots jelly; a toy train with square wheels; a stuffed elephant with spots; even a Charlie in the Box who laments that he was not given the name “Jack.”

The mood on the Island of Misfit toys is understandably somber. The misfit toys long to be played with, but no one ever comes to the island to claim them. Each Christmas Eve brings about a particular sadness on the island as the inhabitants realize that other “normal” toys will be joyfully embraced by eager children the next morning. The misfit toys, on the other hand, can only dream of such an embrace. After all, in the words of one of the misfit toys, “no one wants to play with a Charlie in the Box!”

As a child, when I watched Rudolph for the first time, the Island of Misfit Toys inspired me to believe that all of my toys were imbued with a personality and a network of emotions. As soon as the show was over, I literally ran to my toy box and pulled out some of the toys with which I had not played for months—the Magic 8 Ball; the Weebles; the Etch a Sketch; the Rock’em Sock’em Robots; the G.I. Joe doll (who was missing an arm due to a grueling struggle with the family dog). When all of these toys were scattered before me, I proceeded to whisper to all of them the sentiments that were emerging from my 5-year-old heart. My whispers that evening sounded something like this: “None of you are misfit toys! I promise! You’re still special, even though you might not be as new as my other toys! Don’t be sad, ’cause you are the toys that came first!”

It was a memorable manifestation of the beautiful innocence of childhood.

It occurs to me that the birth of Jesus some two-thousand years ago was God’s mysterious and glorious way of whispering precisely that same message to all of humankind: “None of you are misfit toys, I promise! All of you are precious! All of you are worth ‘playing with’! I’ll never throw you away!”

Part of the good news of Christmas, in other words, is that each one of us matters to the One who created us, regardless of our size, shape, history, temperament, or situation in life. In fact, we matter to God so deeply that God would settle for nothing less than pouring the very best of divinity into a Bethlehem feeding trough for the sake of our salvation and redemption.

It comes down to this, I suppose: Christ came even for the Charlies in the Box and the spotted elephants. Because, in the Kingdom of God, there is no such thing as a misfit toy. I am deeply grateful for a place in that kind of toy box.

On the eve of World Communion Sunday, I find myself reflecting on what it means to live eucharistically instead of settling for what might be described as spiritual fast-food.

In my own discipleship, I must confess that, in the hyperactivity of the daily journey, I too often settle for the fast-food of a Facebook comment, a hasty e-mail response, or an abbreviated text message instead of making time for the “broken bread” of a more personal and incarnational interaction.

I too often settle for the fast-food of a hastily muttered invocation instead of investing myself in the sustained bread-breaking of authentic and attentive prayer.

I too often settle for the fast-food of quickly-voiced sarcasm instead of honoring someone with the holy bread of sensitive silence.

I am not suggesting that there isn’t a place for spiritual fast-food. (Where would we be, after all, without periodic “drive thru’s” in the life of prayer and discipleship?) If spiritual fast-food becomes the norm, however, instead of an occasional option, then our spiritual diet becomes something less than healthy and holistic. I have a feeling that anyone who reads these words will understand precisely the reality that I am describing.

I have no easy remedies to offer. But, for what they are worth, I offer three liturgical components that I have utilized in both corporate and individual worship over the last couple of years. The first component is a call to worship. The second component is a prayer of confession. And the third component is what I have entitled “A Shared Commitment to Eucharistic Living.” I pray that these prayerful words will be of some help to you as you celebrate Eucharist tonight and tomorrow and as you go forth from the Lord’s table in order to live eucharistically in a world that often prefers fast-food.

Call to Worship
Leader: In a world of fast food, we hunger for the One who is the Bread of Life.

People: In our spiritual dryness, we thirst for the One who brings living water.

Leader: Come, Lord Jesus, satisfy the deepest hunger of your people!

People: Come, River of Life, and quench the thirst of our waiting souls!

Prayer of Confession
Eternal God, in a country where food is often consumed quickly and thoughtlessly, we confess that, all too often, we fail to live by the thankful and Eucharistic spirit that Christ makes possible. Instead of developing a healthy diet of prayer and worship, we often prefer the fast food of “how to” literature and “quick fix” conferences. Instead of partaking of the nourishment of authentic community, we often choose the fast food of spiritual self-reliance. Instead of gathering at the banquet table of your grace, we often stuff ourselves with the fast food of superficial busyness. Forgive us, God. Liberate us from an idolatry of fast food, that our entire life might become a thanksgiving feast, offered to the living Christ, in whose name we pray.

Words of Pardon and Assurance
Leader: Hear the good news: Christ is both the living water and the bread of life! When we come to him with a penitent heart, he will nourish us with the good food of his forgiveness and redeeming grace. In Christ, we are forgiven and free.

People: In Christ, we are forgiven and free. Thanks be to God!

A Shared Commitment to Eucharistic Living
(prayed in unison)
Almighty and everlasting God, in your grace, we will live eucharistically by allowing the Lordship of Jesus Christ to hold redemptive authority over every portion of our life and ministry.

We will live eucharistically by allowing the Holy Spirit to prevent us from becoming cynical, hateful, or bitter in any circumstance.

We will live eucharistically by occupying even the nooks and crannies of our life with prayer, so that our whole day becomes an extended dialogue with you.

We will live eucharistically by daring to be prophetic amidst injustice or untruth.

We will live eucharistically by following Jesus with such passion and devotion that people will no longer be in doubt concerning who occupies the throne of our heart.

We will live eucharistically by refusing to become provincial about our portion of the church’s ministry.

We will live eucharistically by experiencing community wherever it is to be found and by abandoning the illusion of self-reliance.

We will live eucharistically by loving you with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, so that there is no room left in our life for other “deities.”

We will live eucharistically by feasting on Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, instead of gorging ourselves on the the tempting and transitory things that the world often places before us.

We are yours, O God, and yours alone. Bring us into alignment with who you created us to be, that the entirety of our life might be nourished by a eucharistic spirit rather than a fast food mentality. We ask this in the name of the One who is the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Would you describe yourself as patriotic?

The word “patriot” is a derivative of a Greek word that essentially means “of one’s fathers” (as in “forefathers”). In a more general sense, the Greek word from which we derive the word “patriotic” means “relating closely to those of one’s country.”

Based upon this foundational etymology, I feel very comfortable describing myself as “patriotic.” Even as I type these words, for example, I am cognizant of my profound gratitude for my forefathers and foremothers who sacrificed much—some their very lives—to create a land of liberty and hope. I am even more grateful that, in those seasons of moral blindness and failure, when America accommodated incomprehensible evils such as slavery, slaughter, and civil war, the nobler impulses at the heart of our nation’s identity inspired new and, at times, countercultural patriots to stand against accepted atrocities until others began to recognize the truth of their prophecy.

One of my dearest friends (who happens to be a soldier) has experienced several lengthy deployments in recent years. When I look into his eyes (and the eyes of his family), I am instantaneously reminded of the fact that patriots are alive and well. My friend, and thousands like him, are willingly placing themselves in harm’s way all around the world, laboring sacrificially for the freedom and integrity that America, at its best, dares to champion.

I am free to write these paragraphs on my own personal blog only because of those past patriots who have gone before me and those current patriots who protect me. I feel inseparably connected to their character and am ever grateful for their bravery. In short, their spirit of patriotism inspires me to love my country, its ideals, and its nobler principles.

I hope that what I have just written will help you to understand with greater sensitivity what I’m about to write.

As much as I love my country and as deeply as I respect its flag, I am frequently concerned about the church’s willingness (and perhaps even eagerness) to generate what I perceive to be a dangerous fusion of patriotism and discipleship. In the American church’s zeal to create what might be described as a nationalistic spirituality—a spirituality in which one can carry a cross in one arm and an American flag in the other—we have produced a “theology of the state” in which discipleship to Jesus Christ is inappropriately measured by the degree to which it produces good Americans (good citizens).

I am not suggesting, of course, that good discipleship and good citizenship are mutually exclusive. After all, history has proven time and time again that cross-carrying has a way of producing humble and selfless people (which has been crucial in the development of America’s moral center). My concern, however, is that Jesus never called people to a governmentally-defined citizenship. Nor did he establish the church as a bastion of nationalism. Rather, Jesus called (and calls) us into a new Kingdom—one that doesn’t negate our national identity but transcends it, thereby helping us to live in a transformed relationship with both nation and world.

Put simply, in the Kingdom inaugurated by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the water of baptism is thicker even than the blood of the patriots. In that regard, our covenant relationship with the Christ-follower in Iraq is more defining for us than our connection with the American agnostic who is living right next door.

This Sunday, many churches will not think very deeply about the complexity and the importance of these realities. All across the land, American flags will be an eagerly-accepted portion of Sunday’s liturgical environment, as will be the pledge of allegiance and, in some cases, the national anthem. Am I suggesting that this is somehow unforgivable or unredeemable? Of course not. I do pray, however, that, during its 4th of July services, the Church does not lose sight of the fact that Trinitarian worship always bears witness to the Way of Christ—a Way that cannot be linked to any one nation’s interests nor contained by any one nation’s boundaries.

Back in the early 1990’s, I served a church in North Carolina that was 9 miles north of Fort Bragg. The congregation there was replete with current and former soldiers. The spirit of patriotism in that place was understandably strong, as was evidenced by the large American flag that was prominently located just inches from the altar.

One day, a faithful member of that church came to see me in the sanctuary. She was the well-educated, fifty-four-year-old wife of a career military man, and she was every bit as patriotic as her husband was. That day in the sanctuary, she was troubled about something.

After some pleasant conversation, she arrived at the heart of the matter. “I want to tell you something,” she said to me, “and I don’t want you to judge me for saying it.”

“O.K.,” I responded. “I promise that I won’t judge you.”

“Well,” she said, “it really troubles me to have THAT in our sanctuary.” She pointed to the altar space.

“Do you mean the altar,” I asked.

“No,” she said, “not the altar. The flag. I want you to know that, every Sunday, it bothers me to have the American flag so close to our altar.”

I had never encountered this sentiment before. I was momentarily dumbfounded and speechless.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I love my country and its flag. I really do. My husband has spent his entire life in the military because he loves this country so deeply and I’m proud of him for doing that. In fact, I can’t sing a single verse of ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ without weeping.”

“O.K.,” I said, “so what’s the problem with the flag?”

“Well,” she said, “my husband and I have lived all over the world because of his military service. That means that I have friends all over the world. My two very best friends are from Germany and Italy. They come to visit me every year.”

I still wasn’t getting the point.

“When they come to visit me,” she continued, “I want them to come to church with me, since both of them are faithful Christians.”

All that I could think to do in the moment was to affirm her desire to invite people to church!

“Don’t you get it,” she said to me. “When I bring my German and Italian friends to this church, I want them to see the cross and the pulpit and the Bible and the stained-glass windows. But I don’t want them to see the American flag and the altar right next to one another.”

“Why would that be such a problem,” I asked.

“Because,” she said, “by putting them right next to one another, we change the meaning of both the cross and the flag. The flag can help us to remember our national identity, which is really important to me. But the cross is bigger than that. The cross is about salvation. It’s about eternal life. It’s about the whole world.”

She paused to reflect upon what she had just said.

“I guess it’s like this,” she continued. “When my foreign Christian friends walk into my church’s sanctuary, I don’t want them to feel like foreigners any more. I want them to feel like they’ve come to a home away from home. I want them to know that they are part of us.”

That conversation, which made its way into the journal that I kept at the time, initiated a struggle within me that continues even to this day. It is a struggle to discern the nature of patriotism, the nature of discipleship, the difference between the two, and the dangers of synthesizing them too quickly. I don’t want it to be a struggle that alienates those of you who might disagree with me on this issue. But I do want it to be a redemptive struggle—one that compels me to think more clearly about everything from nationalism to liturgical imagery.

At any rate, that conversation from the early 1990’s is part of the reason why my favorite patriotic hymn is “This Is My Song.” It is a hymn that enables me to be patriotic enough to acknowledge that “this is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.”

At the same time, the hymn helps me to guard against nationalistic idolatry by forcing me to remember that “other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.”

May God bless America where it warrants a divine blessing. May God bless all the world’s nations in the same fashion. And may God bless the Church around the world as it continues to bear witness to the Kingdom in which our defining citizenship is to be found.