What will happen if I love?

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - G.K. Chesterton

There must be a reason Jesus told us that loving our neighbor is the greatest commandment next to loving God. He not only commanded us to love but he went out and did it himself without regard for his own reputation, safety, popularity. . . and ultimately his life. The rabbi who defended adulteresses and prostitutes. The holy man who touched lepers and other unclean types. The king who was abandoned to torture, mockery and a humiliating public death.

We speak of his suffering in reverent tones because that's how he atoned for our sins. That's the theological side of the story. But the human side of the story is that his sufferings came about as a direct result of loving all those despised, unwanted people. The hatred, the persecution and the outrage that led to his crucifixion came about because he healed a withered man's hand on the Sabbath and stood up for a prostitute who dumped a fortune in perfume on his feet and other such scandals. So when Jesus commands us to love as he loved--and also commands us to suffer as he suffered--he is speaking of two sides of the same coin. You cannot love the way he loved and not suffer the kinds of consequences he did.

Many Christians will fight you tooth and nail if you dare to bring up loving gay and lesbian people. The way they talk, you'd almost think there was a verse in the New Testament where Jesus answered and said to his disciples, "Know that you should love one another, as long as the conditions are right. Amen." That must be it, because all I ever hear is: I know we should love people, but I oppose the gay agenda. I know we should love people, but I'm not going to approve of their sin. I know we should love people, but they're indoctrinating my child at school. I know we should love people, but I'm not going to be manipulated by a bunch of sob stories.

What I'm actually hearing is this: Love sounds like a great idea, but I'm afraid if I love I something bad will happen. Yes, something bad will happen, but not what you think. Loving gay people probably won't lead you to approve of sexual sin, but it will most likely get you accused by fellow Christians of approving of it. It won't mean you'll support schools indoctrinating your children about homosexuality, but you will have to face the more real worry that the church is indoctrinating them to despise gay people. And you will definitely listen to people's sob stories, but instead of feeling manipulated you will never stop aching over the needless pain and injustice so many gays and lesbians suffer on a daily basis.

Simply put, loving gays and lesbians will mean many of your friends will forsake you, you will never be a part of the "in" crowd at church, your reputation will be tarnished, and you will carry the sorrows of others around in your heart until you feel like you're going to break. Downside: you will suffer. Upside: you will know the blessing of following in the path of a certain Someone who walked in those sufferings before you.

Discomfort level

I just heard recently that a gay Christian friend of mine is going to be leaving his conservative church. Even though he is not in a gay relationship and never has been, he is being shunned by a core group of people in the congregation. The only excuse they have given for the way they treat him is, "We're not at a place where we feel comfortable interacting with gay people."

Sure, I get it. That's my favorite Bible verse too. The one that says, "They will know that we are Christians by the way we love only those brothers and sisters with whom we have come to a place where we feel comfortable interacting."

Which also brings to mind some of my favorite passages out of the Gospels where Jesus goes around touching, healing, befriending and sharing meals only with the people with whom he had gotten to a place where he felt comfortable interacting. Because if you want to change the world, that's the winning formula right there.

Speaking of changing the world, I can't recall any time in church history where the gospel caught fire and spread because Christians were interacting only with those respectable people with whom they felt comfortable. Saint Patrick, who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland, largely ministered to slave girls who suffered being raped regularly by their masters. John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible in English for the benefit of lay people, whom the church of his day regarded as "swine." John and Charles Wesley were condemned by the clergy of their day for preaching the gospel in open fields to the uneducated masses.

If there's any spiritual lesson to be learned from the past, it is run, don't walk, from any temptation to center your Christian life around being comfortable, respectable and insulated. No great spiritual advancement has ever happened in the kingdom of God because Christians were afraid to love the really tough-to-love people.

Which is why there's hope for my gay Christian friends, because I see so many of them struggling to love their straight brothers and sisters in Christ in spite of our perverse ignorance and obnoxious self-righteousness. From a certain perspective we are the really tough-to-love people, not them. We need to understand the true nature of our spiritual situation. If we don't get our act together and learn how to love, the kingdom will surely march forward without us. And gay Christians will be leading the way.

Am I being sentimental or hyperbolic when I say that? Let me put it this way. If you want to know how God is working to advance his kingdom, observe what he is doing among the people on the margins. The poor, the homeless, the persecuted, the forsaken, the ill, the feeble, and the despised. God calls his people from within those situations and uses suffering to train them in love, forgiveness, patience and meekness. They may never get to be senior pastor at the newest megachurch everyone is flocking to. They may never even be allowed to lead a Bible study. They may struggle just to be accepted in their churches. But they are the ones whom Christ will lift up, they are the ones he will strengthen, and they are the ones he will reveal himself to. If you despise them, you do so at your own spiritual peril.

Suicide, part 3

We are told at the beginning of the Book of Job how the whole deal got started. God and Satan were having a dispute over whether Job worshipped God from a true heart or whether his motives were purely mercenary. My guess is that this conversation was only a small snippet of some ancient dispute between God and Satan from way back. Satan was the one who had tricked Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit after all. He'd scored one against God there, so he figured Job would be more easy prey. He was saying that all he would have to do is destroy everything Job had and Job would renounce God in a heartbeat. God had more confidence in Job than that. He told Satan to go for it.

Job, knowing nothing about all this, saw everything he'd worked for in his life get trashed for no apparent reason. He managed to hang in there until, in a second wave of affliction, Satan struck him from head to toe with boils and he finally broke. He asked God what he did to deserve this. He demanded to know what sin he committed that brought this on. He wondered if God was capable of wickedness. He wondered if God had become perverse. He accused God of pulling rank on him--the rank of being too big, too powerful and too righteous to have to answer to a lowly mortal. The problem with God was . . . he was God.

O that a man might plead with God
As a man with his neighbor!
(Job 16:21)

In the end God answered Job, but it's not quite what we expect. God could have told Job about his conversation with Satan. He could have explained to Job that it was just a test of faith, that he didn't commit any great sin. He could have defended himself point by point against Job's accusations that he was being unjust, reckless and aloof.

But God knew that Job, in the throes of his sufferings, wasn't looking for "an answer." Job didn't want to be handed a list of reasons. "Well, you see, I'm conducting this test . . . it'll work together for the cosmic good . . . you'll get your life back when it's over . . ." None of that. The answer God gave was the only one Job craved. God appeared to him.

I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees Thee. (Job 42:5)

Job saw God with his own eyes and that was all the answer he needed. God rebuked him, too, (rather mildly considering the intensity of Job's accusations) and didn't answer him point by point. He reminded Job that his ways were beyond understanding. He appealed to everything about his wisdom and greatness that Job already knew but had become blinded to in the thickness of his sorrows. Essentially God asked him, "Don't you remember who I am and why you once trusted me?"

Job had to accept that there were reasons behind his sufferings he could never understand. Instead he had to find comfort in the presence of the One who held those answers. In the end Job was rewarded and God restored to him all that he had lost. But like all the Old Testament books, the message that the Book of Job contains is only a partial answer. Because even as we come to the close of the story, none of Job's accusations against God were ever answered. They still remained. How God can afflict us with no explanation. How God is accountable to no one and is too terrifying to approach with a complaint. How God is just too big and powerful for us to deal with when we are weak and crippled and in pain.

In other words, even God could not remain satisfied with the answer he gave Job. Not while those accusations still stood. His fuller answer was yet to come in the New Testament, and once again he knew that our souls would not be content with a dry list of reasons. We crave fellowship with a God who is not only willing to draw near but to come down, find out what it's like to be us, walk in our shoes, suffer as we suffer, in crippling, excruciating pain. The only answer God could give to Job was to become a man himself.

He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hide their face,
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Surely our griefs He Himself bore,
And our sorrows He carried;
Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten of God and afflicted.
(Isaiah 53:3-4)

Jesus excelled Job both in righteousness and in suffering. He knew what it was like to be accused and afflicted and rejected for no apparent reason. As the Son of God, his fellowship with his Father sustained him through these hardships. Yet as he drew nearer to the moment of his death, as the persecution intensified and his friends fell away and he found himself captured and tortured and condemned, he sought for God yet encountered only silence. In his most desperate hour, God found himself abandoned by God. We are told that when Jesus hung on the cross, he cried out,

"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
(Matthew 27:46)

If you've ever been there, you know that this is not a question. Jesus was not asking to be told, "You have to be forsaken so you can bear the sins of the world. It's part of the plan. The atonement, remember?" Jesus knew that, but for him, in that moment, this was not an answer. He was alone, his heart was breaking, he was suffering something no righteous man, no divine being, should ever have to suffer. And he wanted to know why.

Sometimes the only comfort you can give to someone with a broken heart is to say, "I know." At one time God could not say this to us; but he wanted to. So he did what it took to be able to say it. God was forsaken. God broke. God asked the question that was not really a question. It was his final answer to Job.

Suicide, part 2

Well-meaning people will assure you that things are going to get better and there are plenty of joys you have yet to experience that are worth living for. Over time I've actually found this to be true. But when you're lying at the bottom of that dark pit looking up at the small circle of light above, those words seem like empty promises. You tend to be in a more skeptical frame of mind than the average person.

Because even if things do get better, you wonder how life could hold such bitterness in the first place. You've seen the ugliness behind the veil and now people are saying you can go back to pretending it isn't there? Why would you want to hop onto their merry-go-round when you know it is spinning in the middle of a wasteland? But then, there is no point in resenting them. Isn't it God whom you really question?

A closer look at Job reveals that it wasn't so much the loss of his children, his servants, his animals, his property or his bodily health that he found so devastating, but the near loss of his faith. He went straight for the heart of the matter when he vented his disillusionment with God. Who was this God who would allow such things to afflict a man who had served him so faithfully? Behind the veil Job saw the reality of his own frailty before an unrelenting Power who had a right to do as he pleased for reasons completely hidden from view. How could Job, a lowly, fallible human being be expected to play the game of life with a God who held all the cards, dictated all the rules and always produced the winning hand?

If I am wicked, woe to me!
And if I am righteous, I dare not life up my head.
I am sated with disgrace and conscious of misery.
And should my head be lifted up,
Thou wouldst hunt me like a lion;
And again Thou wouldst show Thy power against me.
(Job 10:15-16)

Doesn't matter what I do, Job says. If I'm wicked I'm doomed. If I'm righteous I'm disgraced by my sufferings. If I rise from my misery you'll just tear me down again like a lion.

For he bruises me with a tempest,
and multiplies my wounds without cause.
He will not allow me to get my breath,
But saturates me with bitterness.
If it is a matter of power, behold, he is the strong one!
And if it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?
Though I am righteous, my mouth will condemn me;
Though I am guiltless, he will declare me guilty.
(Job 9:17-20)

In other words, Job says, you can't win with God. He can afflict you all he wants with impunity. Power and justice are stacked on his side. Even when you think you are right, he can prove you wrong. You may think you are guiltless, but it is only his verdict that matters.

Why then hast Thou brought me out of the womb?
Would that I had died and no eye had seen me!
I should have been as though I had not been,
Carried from womb to tomb.
Would he not let my few days alone?
Withdraw from me that I may have a little cheer?
(Job 10:18-20)

Why did God bother to make me? Job says. Why couldn't I have gone from womb to tomb instead of suffering all the miserable stuff in between? Couldn't God allow me a little happiness and leave me alone? Go away already!

The Bible isn't endorsing this perspective so much as acknowledging Job's real feelings as he fights for the survival his faith. Yes, these complaints were a function of Job's faith. Because if he were faithless he would have simply cursed God and walked away. Instead, desperation pushed him beyond the restraints of his normal pious fear. To save his faith he risked bringing his impious accusations openly before God in hope of getting an answer.

A lot of Christians feel they can't relate to Job because he insisted he was righteous and did not deserve the calamity he suffered. But actually it was because of Job's scrupulously righteous life that he could be such an able spokesman for the rest of us. His righteousness made him bold with God, more bold than someone whose guilty conscience would silence him in doubt. Job had no such reserve. He just let God have it.

In all my bitter wanderings and dark thoughts, I never dared to go where Job went. But if existential pain can be translated into words, I can affirm that Job's questions and complaints were exactly my own. God used Job to articulate what many of us cannot. He has even published Job's charges against himself in the Holy Scriptures, uncensored, for all of humanity to see. And he demonstrates by the restraint with which he rebukes Job and the abundance with which afterward blesses him, that he is not willing to crush or condemn those of us who rail against him in our desperation to believe in him.

Suicide, part 1

Suicide is when your soul lies at the bottom of a dark pit, feeling painful to the touch. I don't see it as an act so much as the state of mind that went on long before. It's looking around and seeing what everyone else seems to be blind to. The whole world appears to have gone insane. Everyone is busy, busy, so damned busy and enthusiastic about carrying on with their lives as if there were a point. They eat and drink and work and sleep as if life promised some hope or outcome worthy of all the effort. Their talk is even more disturbing. "Gotta see the new Harry Potter movie." "I'm looking to get a raise soon." "Let's try the new restaurant down the street." This is why people get out of bed every morning?

There was a time in my life when I drove my soaring hopes and expectations straight into the concrete wall of reality and spent quite a few years afterward cleaning up the crash site. Some people call it depression and will direct you to the appropriate medication. I think medication is a good idea but for some reason I didn't go that route. I took the gradual way out, rebuilding my faith and my psyche bit by bit, observing and examining the whole process until one day I was far enough out of the pit to see daylight. As a result I still feel an organic connection with the former days. I don't like to soar too high anymore, since I know how far it is to fall. A thin cloud of melancholy still hovers around me as a reminder.

What makes the difference between being in the pit and getting out? I realize this is a problem many people are anxious to solve, so bear with me when I say that I'm not so sure that my perspective on life from "within the pit" was altogether removed from the truth. There are many truths I saw most clearly when I was in my depressive state. The world is overrun with insanity. We chase after vain things. We hardly reflect on our lives. We do very little that truly touches the lives of others in a meaningful way. Happiness is much too fragile in this life, too dependent upon fickle people, upon changing circumstances.

The hardest part to deal with was not the facts of the situation, but the lack of honest acknowledgement from other people that the situation even existed. The isolation, in other words. No one I knew was willing to lay it out there, which is why I was amazed to find that Job, that ancient saint of the Bible, had traveled these paths long ago:

Why is light given to him who suffers,
And life to the bitter of soul;
Who long for death, but there is none,
And dig for it more than for hidden treasures;
Who rejoice greatly,
They exult when they find the grave?
(Job 3:20-22)

That's just a sample. You should read the whole chapter. I think it's great that the Holy Scriptures give air to a bitter speech that every pious Christian would instantly condemn out of Job's mouth. Sometimes life really is that painful, that Job longed to dig for his grave like hidden treasure. The Bible says so. God knows.

The hard questions

We have a problem in the church where as soon as you start contemplating questions out loud that spring more from honest struggle than orthodox thought, you get cluck-clucked into silence. Yet I’ve known lots of people who wonder, for instance, if God is evil, or if he’s just up there toying with us, or if he’s playing some kind of cruel joke. I’ve heard lots of gay Christian people ask why God has allowed them to be homosexual, thus consigning them to the hardships and ostracization that come along with that. (Even if you believe, as many do, that God created you gay, it only pushes the question back a step to why God would knowingly create someone to be a part of such a persecuted minority.) But you don’t have to be homosexual to be able to relate to having such questions. I think everyone who walks by faith has to deal with them at some level or other.

I’m still recovering from an emotionally draining study on Job I did for a women’s retreat last October. But I also came away inspired by Job’s gutsy confrontation of hard questions, where he pretty much accuses God of wronging him, of trashing his life for no good reason. See, normally when we study Job at church, we hear about the first part of the book, how God took everything away from Job, and how Job responded submissively and did not abandon his faith. But then the whole middle section, where Job’s three friends argue with him and Job starts asking tough questions, gets glossed over really quickly. Instead we skip to the end, where God appears to Job in the whirlwind, Job puts his hand over his mouth, God restores Job’s family life and wealth, and Job rides off into the sunset.

The reason the middle section gets glossed over is that it’s too gnarly to deal with. Job accuses God of being unjust, perverse, sadistic, you name it. Plus, it is dissatisfying because God doesn’t answer Job point by point. In the end it is faith that buoys Job, for in the midst of these accusations he brings, he is also clinging to the hope that God will give him answers. Yet when God does finally answer Job, God points merely to himself. And not mainly to his acts of moral goodness, as you would expect, but to the evidence of his greatness, wisdom and power. So Job is left to decide. Are his questions and his anger and his perplexity so great that they ought to outweigh his faith in the God who created all these wonders?

I think this is what it’s like for us too. I don’t think it does us any good to run from the hard questions. Job didn’t. I think we have to bravely ask them and determine what we really think. Do we really think God is evil? Cruel? Sadistic? In my own ponderings I’ve decided that I won’t answer those questions based on someone else’s relationship with God. You can always ask why God allows people to starve or get tortured or become orphaned or whatever. But that’s how God is dealing with another person’s life, not mine, and besides you will always meet people who’ve been through really bad stuff who can tell you with all honesty that God has been good to them. How God works in other people’s lives will always remain a mystery to those of us who aren’t them. As Aslan says in the Chronicles of Narnia: “That’s his/her story. That’s not your story.”

When I look at my own "story" I see that God has been good to me. Overwhelmingly good, far beyond what I deserve. The times I question his goodness are when I’ve asked him for something that I thought was good and I felt I got something evil in return. To borrow from Jesus’ words, I asked for bread and feel like I got a snake back. Likewise, I’ve known plenty of people who have prayed for years for God to take away their homosexuality, God didn’t do it, and they had to deal with all the consequences of that. I’ve known gay people who entered into opposite sex marriages, thinking they were submitting to God’s creation design, only to have it blow up in their faces years down the road. They too feel like they got a snake in return for their sincere, godly prayers.

Again, I don’t know why these things happen in other people’s lives. But there is one thing I’ve learned in my own life from walking by faith these twenty years, namely, that I can’t tell at any given moment how things will turn out, or whether there is a greater purpose for this apparent evil that’s befallen me. Faith pushes forward, seeking to know the good that will come out of it. My faith, for reasons that are often a mystery to me, cannot rest satisfied with the conclusion that God hates me and is out there screwing up my life. Even during the times I think that, I know deep down that I don’t really believe it, and I find myself waiting around for further developments. And I find that the things I do know about God, his great love for me, how he gave his Son to die for my sins, how the wonders he displays in his creation point to the far greater wonders of heaven, all these certainties draw my faith forward, and make me unwilling to wallow permanently in the apparent despair of passing circumstances.

So I weigh my certainty in the goodness of God against the doubts I have which are tentative, and I can only conclude that I ought to wait and hope. While it is not the answer, from the perspective of faith it is answer enough, enough to keep me seeking what the next chapter in my story might hold.

Bill Baldwin's blog

My friend Bill Baldwin, whose exegesis of Romans 1 appeared in an earlier post, has started a blog called Better Covenant, Better Promises. I was going to wait a couple of weeks to let him get going before mentioning it, but already he's posted something that's too good to ignore. Here's Bill talking about Christians who call for gays to "take up their cross," while caring little of what that would entail for them:

We don’t suffer, yet we call gays to a lifetime of suffering. And we behave as though we, unlike they, don’t need to suffer. We’ve redefined discipleship so it isn’t about bearing the cross, it’s about family. Now the Christian life is centered around a husband and father who’s the head of his house, a wife who submits, and children who obey. It’s hard enough for straight singles to latch onto this paradigm. But at least singles have hopes. One day they too may enter the ranks of full-fledged Christians by becoming a loving husband or a submissive wife with children in tow.

But what about gays? We call them to become eunuchs for the kingdom while we live comfortable lives. Or perhaps we tease them with the enticement that God will “cure” their homosexuality if only they have faith. That’s even less kind than telling cancer patients they’ll be healed if they convert.

As gay marriages and civil unions become more common, that call to costly discipleship gets even tougher. We’re calling them to abandon the family they have (or at least to complicate that family life rather severely). And for what? So they can come to a place where they’re not allowed to have a family. When we define the Christian life in family-focused terms, that essentially means we’re calling gays to be second-class citizens in the kingdom of heaven. Come to Christ! You can sit in the back of the bus. The call is snobbish and condescending if, indeed, we bother to make it at all . . .

But wait. It gets worse.

The problem is more than calling gays to suffer when we don’t suffer ourselves. The problem is that Reformed and evangelical Christians have been the cause of much suffering among the gays. Sure, we say we hate the sin and love the sinner; but do our words and our actions really reflect that? How many gays would look at the evangelical church and say “Those Christians sure do love us”?

Why don’t they see our love for them? Is it perhaps because the love isn’t there? Or is it that the love is unexpressed? At the very least we’ve got a serious communication breakdown, don’t we?

Human suffering

I've been studying the books of Job and 1 Peter because of a women's retreat this past weekend where I had to give some Bible studies on the topic of suffering. The question of why human beings suffer in this life is something every major religion has to deal with, because if God is truly benevolent, then to allow suffering would seem to call his benevolence into question.

The remote cause, according to the Bible, is the sin of Adam. Through Adam's sin this once-utopian world became corrupted and broken, and all the laws of stable, sane existence got thrown into awry, like the delicate inner-mechanisms of an expensive watch getting flooded with sea water. For those who inhabit such a world, redemption, atonement and the coming of the heavenly kingdom are the only permanent answers to our present sorrows. Those of us who believe in the world to come are to live our present lives with a kind of patience, optimism, self-sacrifice and love for others that can only characterize those who are invested in a future hope. Another way to put it is that we follow in the example of Jesus himself, whose atoning death has paved the way for this very hope.

The thing about suffering, though, is that when you are going through it, your soul craves so much more than theological articulations about remote causes. Understanding the ancient sin of Adam is not much comfort to me when I'm in pain. And although, like Job, I understand that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away," and I can bow with creaturely acceptance to the mysterious workings of One who is wiser and greater than me, the greatness of God is more crushing than comforting during times of perplexity and loss. This was Job's complaint:

For He bruises me with a tempest,
And multiplies my wounds without cause.
He will not allow me to get my breath,
But saturates me with bitterness.
If is is a matter of power,
Behold, He is the strong one!
And if it is a matter of justice,
Who can summon Him? (9:17-19)

Job says that the problem with God is that, as God, he can be of no comfort to us. Since he is the Almighty, when you have a quarrel with him you have no recourse, because he will always be in the right. For all his wisdom God, being God, simply cannot understand what it is like to suffer as a human creature. He would have to become human to truly understand what it's like.

So that's exactly what he did. I think God knows that we don't really want neat theological answers to questions about suffering when we are going through it. I think he knows that the best answer he could give us is not to thunder words down from heaven, but to come down and walk upon this earth, in Job's shoes as it were. And so after he was abandoned by his closest friends, tortured all night by a band of thugs, sentenced to death like a vile criminal, and forced to spend the last feeble hours of his life hanging on public display, like some kind of captured, half-dead animal strung up as a prize, God found out what human suffering was all about. He even knew the anguish of feeling abandoned by God. "My God . . . why have you forsaken me?" God experienced what it was like to feel abandoned by God.

So many of us who have sought to walk by faith have felt abandoned in our sufferings. Yet now God can say he's been down that road too. I believe it is his answer to our questions about why we suffer, not addressing our intellect but the craving of our souls. Because in his compassion for us, he understands that words are not enough.