Refusing the Nuclear Option--July 29, 2022

Refusing the Nuclear Option--July 29, 2022

"If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you who is wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer--and before unbelievers at that?" [1 Corinthians 6:5-6]

Everybody knows the saying:  "Drastic times call for drastic measures."  The trouble is, everybody's also easily convinced that whatever times they are living through are "drastic" ones.  And once you've told yourself that the special nature of your particular situation gives you permission to do something extraordinarily desperate or extreme, but which you wouldn't let others get away with, the consequences can become really bad, really fast.  I hear politicians, pundits, and talking heads on TV throwing around language like "the nuclear option" when they want to take severe and unusual action, as though they have forgotten there is always fallout when a nuclear bomb goes off--and usually it is hard to contain or control.  [Isn't that the lesson of every Godzilla movie and post-apocalyptic dystopia, as well?]

The thing is, we live in a time and a place where extreme, and often drastic, measures are threatened with more and more frequency, and with less and less regard for the damage that would be done if someone finally chose "the nuclear option."  In a time of arch polarization where the language of "looking tough" is easily confused with actual decent leadership.  We live in a cultural moment where pushing things to maximum levels of conflict is passed off as "character" rather than sheer dumb stubbornness, and where the ones who look for off-ramps to de-escalate tensions are often called "weak," "cowardly," or "gutless."  So of course, in an environment like that, where we keep being told that we are living in desperate times, we are going to tell ourselves we have permission to do desperate things and go to extreme measures rather than looking for common ground or lowered tensions.

And here, the apostle Paul would like to have a word.  In both his congregation's first-century setting as well as ours in the twenty-first century, there are voices pushing toward greater and greater conflict, convinced they must do so because "these are drastic times."  Unfortunately, the twenty centuries in between reveal just how many terrible things can happen when people tell themselves they are living in exceptional circumstances.  Paul, however, would remind us that maybe the sky isn't actually falling in most areas of our lives at any given moment, and that we don't get special permission to take the nuclear option against someone else just because we are mildly inconvenienced.  And maybe there is a difference between living in times of "mild inconvenience" and "drastic" or "desperate" ones.

Once again, the context here is the question of how the followers of Jesus resolve conflicts and address disputes with one another.  And Paul has been making the case that these ordinary run-of-the-mill disagreements could be resolved in-house within the Christian community, possibly with the mediation of other wise voices from within the church, rather than taking one another to court. Importantly, he doesn't say there could never be a situation where a church member would take a grievance to a public/Roman court, but he does seem to think that an awful lot of routine situations don't require that.  Most of the time, we aren't living in extreme circumstances, and so the nuclear option--taking one to a civil court and pushing the conflict into more extreme territory--shouldn't really be on the table. 

It's probably also worth remembering, too, that from the early Christian perspective, the Roman Empire wasn't terribly reliable when it came to administering actual justice. After all, our central story is of Jesus' wrongful torture and execution by an empire that was more interested in making an example out of rabble-rousers than actually serving justice.  And Paul himself had lived through plenty of wrongful accusations, beatings, near lynchings, stonings from mob violence that never seemed to be reined in by the authorities, and corrupt trials.  So the Empire didn't have much of a track record among those first generations of Christ-followers of producing righteous resolutions in trials, but rather was known for brutality and caprice in punishing people whether they were guilty of anything or not. You can easily imagine Paul saying, "Why would you want to take a case to the same judicial system that crucified Jesus when he was innocent, and that always seems to let the lynch-mobs off the hook after they've nearly stoned me to death?"  And you can easily envision him thinking, "If we Christians take our petty disputes to Roman courts for resolving our conflicts, we'll be legitimizing the same crooked system that killed our Lord--why would we do that?"  By comparison, finding a way to resolve differences without involving the Romans seems a lot better, doesn't it?

The only reason, then, that you would be itching to take your dispute to court in that context would be if you were convinced that you were entitled to skip right to the nuclear option.  If you were more interested in devastating your opponent and taking a gamble on using the Roman "justice" system as a blunt instrument to bludgeon them into submission than you were with actually achieving justice, you'd have no qualms with taking your neighbor to court like this.  But... if you were willing to let tensions simmer down, and to take the time to talk things through, then maybe going to the local Caesar-endorsed tribunal wouldn't seem like the right course of action.  And that's just it: when we are truly committed to setting things right and restoring damaged relationships, we'll be less likely to resort to scorched-earth tactics that cause irreparable damage to others.  When we are just trying to hurt or punish someone for the sake of our wish for revenge, we'll tell ourselves we are justified in taking extreme measures.

So, today can be a chance to calm things down, lower tensions, and lessen the drama in our lives.  While there are still plenty of loud voices peddling outrage and pushing us to threaten people with "nuclear options" in our lives because we are convinced our situations are so unique and special as to warrant it, we can be the voices of wisdom that take a breath and strive to preserve friendly relationships over punishing for revenge.   That may not always get headlines, because peacemaking is often quiet work.  By definition it often happens without the courtroom drama of the movies.  But it is worth trying, exactly because it is hard for anything to grow again after you've salted the ground or scorched the earth.  And we are called to be people who can envision a future beyond our present conflicts in which new life sprouts once again.  That can only happen, however, if we haven't wiped everything out under a mushroom cloud.

Today, pass on the nuclear option.   Do the hard work of finding common ground, even if we only uncover it one inch at a time.

God of both peace and justice, keep us from bitterness, pettiness, and the need for revenge, so that we can restore injured relationships and make reparations with one another.

Recognizing the Tools--July 28, 2022

Recognizing the Tools--July 28, 2022

"Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?  Do you not know that we are to judge angels--to say nothing of ordinary matters?" [1 Corinthians 6:2-3]

I've got to be honest with you: these verses feel a lot like one of those click-bait articles you'll see online that take a legitimate news story but phrase the headline in such a sensationalistic and outlandish way that it becomes very easy to misunderstand unless you read the whole thing.  For example, I saw a headline recently that said, "Scientists detect heartbeat signal coming from deep space," a title that makes it sound like astronomers have literally heard the vital signs of some living organism coming from deep space.  It would be really easy--but really wrong--to glance over that headline and take it to mean that observers have found proof of alien life in outer space.  But of course, that's not what the actual story was about; it was about a high-energy radio-wave that pulses regularly, called a repeating fast radio burst, that almost certainly comes from a particular kind of star.  So the headline is true... but really easy to misconstrue.

Now, I don't think that the apostle Paul is trying to be deceptive here, or that he's intentionally misleading anybody with this notion about judging the world.  We've been working our way through this letter for long enough, too, that I'll bet you know Paul isn't trying to sensationalize his writing like a piece of online click-bait.  But these verses definitely belong in the category of headlines that make you do a double-take or spit water out of your mouth when you read them.  And if we were going to be the kind of irresponsible readers who take a verse or two out of context to suit our purposes [which is a terrible way to read, but also a pretty common one among church-folk, to be honest], this passage would be ripe for misunderstanding.

Almost every other word here is loaded with possible ways we could get terribly confused.  We could misunderstand "the saints" for some special sub-group of especially virtuous Christians, and take it to mean that there is a special council of super-Christians who will govern the world like something out of a conspiracy theory [this is an easy mistake to make when we refer to some special Christians from history with the title "saint" when we rarely do that for one another today].  Or we could take this as Paul's endorsement that Christians right now should oversee the world's governments and that the institutional church should be a higher authority than secular leaders--and from there, it would be an easy [but disastrous] leap to make to say that Paul is directing Christians now to seize power from civil governments with violence because he says we will "judge the world."  And then the whole notion about judging angels throws me for a loop--Paul asks this question rhetorically, assuming his readers are already well aware that one day they will "judge angels," as though there is a lot of pending litigation among the heavenly host.  Any one of those phrases is an off-ramp into outlandish conclusions and bad theology.  So, please, let's be careful not to take any of them.

Ok, if we are trying to avoid missing the point of these verses, what's this actually all about?  First, a reminder of context.  We saw in yesterday's verse that Paul is now going to be addressing the situation of church folks taking their disputes to the local civil courts for lawsuits, rather than resolving them within the community.  His point here seems to be that the Christian community is a better venue for dealing with our conflict than taking someone to a civil court.  That's where this business about one day "judging the world" and "judging angels" comes in.  Even if it seems odd to us, Paul and his readers seem to already have been familiar with the idea that in the new creation, we'll be part of overseeing God's redeemed world.  And so, if we'll one day be tasked with adjudicating and supervising the new heavens and new earth, we might as well get used to resolving disputes and healing conflicts right now in ordinary situations.

I don't know about you, but my immediate reaction to that business about angels and judging the world to come is to stop and ask, "Wait--what kinds of conflicts would need to be resolved in glory?  Why would angels need anyone to mediate a dispute for them--do they even have disagreements?"  And I've got to tell you, I just don't have any good answers for those questions.  I tend to assume that in glory, we won't be petty and selfish anymore that we would get hung up on a fight over property lines or inheritances anymore.  I can't imagine anyone having an argument over which way the toilet paper goes on the roll, or the need for polarized political parties.  And I just don't have even the foggiest notion of why angels would need someone to render a verdict or resolve an argument for them.  But maybe I don't have to understand those things to get Paul's point for the here and now.

Whatever our existence is like in the new creation, both Paul and Jesus seem to envision a restored and redeemed humanity returned to the role God intended for us in the beginning--to be stewards and servant-guardians of all of creation, like gardeners overseeing the garden, which is a role of supervision and leadership.  I don't know what that will look like, but I get the idea.  I can hold on to that hope that God's intention for a redeemed humanity to take our rightful place alongside God's own care for creation to nurture, shape, and delight in the world, like a gardener deciding how to train the vines, or where to prune the grapes, or how to arrange the zinnias and marigolds--except on a cosmic scale.  And I can get the idea that if one day the glorified Lord Jesus will appoint you and me to oversee some corner of that new Garden of Creation, then sure, we had better get some practice at leadership and oversight now.  If God thinks we are worthy to help in supervising the new creation, we are surely up to the task of helping one another resolve disputes in the present moment where we are.

And so, to come back around to this day and this life, Paul's point is to say we as the Christian community really are equipped and able to help one another to resolve their disputes and heal broken relationships.  If the moment someone else has a problem we shrug them off and say, "Sounds like you need to take them to court," we have let down our friends and shirked our responsibility to be instruments of renewal and restoration right now.  If we think we are too busy or too important to be bothered with helping friends to reconcile and restore a broken relationship, it says something about how our priorities have gotten out of whack.  And if we think we don't have the skill or credentials to help them to set things right, Paul is here to tell us that we indeed have all we need in Christ to help one another resolve our disagreements and mend fences with one another. 

In a culture like ours that tends to professionalize everything--making it seem like every problem requires a paid counselor rather than a circle of good friends, or that every argument has to be fought with lawyers rather than with honest give-and-take--maybe we need to be reminded that we do have what it takes to help resolve conflicts, if we dare to use the skills at hand.  We have the wisdom to discern a good and right resolution, and we have the right tools in our toolboxes to work together.  Sometimes we just need a reminder to recognize we have them.

Lord Jesus, help us to see the tools, wisdom, and insights you have given us already to deal with the challenges and conflicts of daily life.

Not Needing To Be "Right"--July 27, 2022

Not Needing To Be "Right"--July 27, 2022

"When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints?" [1 Corinthians 6:1]

Sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself, honestly, a question like this:  "Do I really want to resolve this conflict I'm in, or do I just want to be proven right?"

We often tell ourselves, when we are dealing with a strained relationship in our lives, that of course we just want to avoid a knock-down, drag-out fight, mend fences, and move on with our lives... but deep down, some part of us is actually spoiling for a fight--because we want to win it.  We want to be victorious, and we want the people we're having a dispute with to lose, and to lose publicly.  And for that to happen, we need to make our conflict into a battle--with a winner and a loser.  And like all trials by combat, the "winner" will be judged to be in the right, and the "loser" will have to take their defeat as a verdict that they were wrong.  

But once we've headed down that path, an insidious change has already begun, quite possibly without our even noticing it.  Once we tell ourselves that what we really want is to be shown that we're the winners, we've shifted away from achieving actual justice or restoration of wholeness... and toward a winner-take-all zero-sum game.  And the trouble with making every conflict a clear-cut war with two opposing sides in which one must be the champion and one must be defeated is that it reduces all of our interactions as human beings in to black-and-white, either/or binaries, when real life is often a lot messier and has shades of gray, not to mention a whole spectrum of colors.

That's the thing about a trial in a court of law: it is generally set up as a forum to determine winners and losers, rather than to recognize that in a lot of our conflicts, everybody has been wronged a little, and everyone has contributed to the problem.  And once we are committed to a mindset that frames our conflicts as battles with one winner and one loser, it is really hard to imagine it being anything else.  Like the saying goes, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  If you decide the situation you are in is a fight, you are automatically going to do whatever you must to be the winner rather than the loser--and sometimes that makes people willing to destroy their relationships with other people in pursuit of being declared "the champion."

This is actually something I usually spend a good bit of time discussing with couples as they prepare for marriage, because the way we frame a conflict has a way of narrowing the possible outcomes we will accept.  If my spouse and I find that we cannot agree on where to go out for dinner to celebrate our anniversary, say, and I am determined to see that as a conflict to be won or lost, I could end up demanding my choice of restaurants at the cost of harming the person whose relationship I am supposed to be celebrating.  That treats the victory of restaurant choice as more important than the people with whom I am in relationship.  I would hope that my example makes it obvious that the relationships in our lives are worth cultivating more than "winning" an argument or a debate in most cases, but so often we miss that same dynamic in the rest of our lives.  In a culture like ours that is so hell-bent on looking like a "winner," we forget that sometimes the cost of victory is not worth the fight.  Maybe we need to be reminded that some things don't have to be battles in the first place.

I think that's what Paul has in mind here as he changes gears in his letter--it's the idea that maybe everything doesn't have to be framed as a fight with a winner and a loser, or where one side is wholly innocent and the other is entirely in the wrong, either.  Part of the trouble with taking disputes to court as our go-to reaction ["You'll be hearing from my lawyer!"  or "I'm going to sue you and make you pay through the nose!" or that kind of thing] is that we are already setting up the situation to be that kind of black-or-white binary, when chances are the real situation is messier and more complicated than that.  Rarely does one friend just out of nowhere deliberately harm or upset another friend.  Quite often, whatever erupts in an argument or dispute has been simmering for some time, or is festering and ignored because people don't want to deal with the issues between them.  Quite often, each person has done something to contribute to the current impasse.  And on the flip side, quite often there is a resolution to the conflict out there in which each person can get their needs met, where both parties also contribute to setting things right.  But that's not going to happen if both sides have come with an army of attorneys looking for victory and blood.

Look, I don't want to be naive and say that every dispute can be figured out with a friendly chat while some church folks listen in.  But I do think that Paul wants us to make use of the gift of community that we have in each other rather than immediately turning every disagreement into a legal battle.  I do think that at least some of our conflicts between one another can be resolved by talking with one another and seeking the good of all, rather than framing everything as a do-or-die ultimatum.  I do think that our culture has found a way to commodify even conflict, so that we will turn arguments into litigation that pays legal fees and destroys relationships.  And I do think that Paul would direct us first to talk things through with each other, and even to have wise and trusted voices of other followers of Jesus to help mediate.  And when we use those kinds of conversation to ratchet down the pressure, we can shake off the false assumption that our disagreements must always be fights to the death.  We can, in those kinds of conversations, stop and question why we have gotten suckered into making everything an us-versus-them contest that only one side can win, when maybe there are ways everybody can get what they need.  At the very least, we can ask those kinds of questions and see where it leads.

A long time ago, someone taught me that sometimes saying you are sorry is a way of telling the other person you are more interested in keeping a friendship than you are in being right.  And if that is anywhere close to the right ballpark for the wise course of action, maybe today can be a day we stop and pause to mend relationships rather than unthinkingly letting ourselves get swept up into making every disagreement into a death-match.  Maybe being proven "right" in front of others isn't all it's cracked up to be.

O God, give us the patience and self-awareness to pause and find creative ways to resolve conflicts together, rather than making everything into a fight to be won or lost.

On Not Being Dictators--July 26, 2022

On Not Being Dictators--July 26, 2022

"For what have I to do with judging those outside? Is it not those who are inside that you are to judge? God will judge those outside. 'Drive out the wicked person from among you'." [1 Corinthians 5:12-13]

I don't get to dictate when my neighbors mow their grass, or how frequently they vacuum their living room carpets.  I don't get a vote on when the parents of my children's friends set for bedtime in their houses, or what TV shows their children are allowed to watch.  And I don't have veto power on questions of whether the other household on my block lie profusely or cuss like sailors, or how frequently they shoot fireworks in their own back yards.  I might have opinions on all of those subjects [in fact, I do--especially on that fireworks one...].  I can even offer my input to those neighbors if that would be helpful.  But what I don't get to do is dictate how those other families raise their kids, keep their house, or maintain their yard.  I get to help set policy in my own house, but I don't get to be the boss of what happens under other roofs.  That's just how it is.

To be sure, I have both the ability and the responsibility to keep things running wisely and well under my own roof.  I do have the obligation to set reasonable bedtimes for my kids [and the grown-ups] in my family.  I do have the authority to determine when to mow my own grass.  And it does fall to me to teach my kids not to lie or be crude with their language, regardless of whether anybody else in the neighborhood does the same, and regardless of whether it is or is not a crime to lie, cuss, or speak hatefully.  With my own children, I can say, "That's now how we do things in this family," or, "This is the way we treat people in this house."  But I don't get to force others outside of my household to do things my way--in fact, I really have pretty limited power in "forcing" even the ones inside my own household.  

Well, to hear the apostle Paul tell it, things are not much different when it comes to the Christian community.  Within the community of Jesus' followers, we absolutely do have the mutual obligation to hold one another accountable, to shape one another in the likeness of Christ, and to let others shape us as well in his same image.  We do have the ability to set policy for how we lead our lives, and we can say things like, "Belonging among the followers of Jesus means we are committed to the way of love--that's not negotiable."  We can say things like, "Abusing others, or objectifying other people, or treating others like they are disposable--that is not our way of life.  That is not what Jesus has called us to be about; it's not how we do things in this household."  But when someone removes themselves from that community [whether officially and explicitly renouncing their faith, or by refusing even to listen to the guidance of the rest of the community, we don't get to keep control over them.  We can say, "We'll be here, ready with the door and our arms open, if you decide you are ready to come back for our shared life together," but we don't get to boss them around once they have left the community of faith.

And even more to the point for Paul, we don't get to set policy for the world outside the Christian community.  Let me say that again, louder and clearer for the people in the back row:  to hear the New Testament writers themselves tell it, Christians do not get to dictate the rules or set ourselves up as judges over the rest of the world.   We do not get to impose "our" way of life on those who do not share our faith in Jesus.  Period.  And note: this is not merely the opinion of some modern secular politician with an ax to grind--this is the position of the apostle Paul.

This is one of those wake-up calls that a lot of us Respectable People in the church need to hear again--or maybe have never heard before or realized was in the Bible.  It is all too easy for us to decide, because we are convinced we have found the truth in Jesus, that we have the power and authority to make everybody else do as we want... in the name of King Jesus.  We may well be certain that our ways of doing things are right and good and wise [of course we do, otherwise we wouldn't think or act the way we do, right?].  But we don't get to enforce how others do things beyond the bounds of our community in Christ.  And even among those who do share our faith in Christ, you'll notice that Paul doesn't think any leaders in the church get to use violence or oppression to punish people they think are out of line.  The most we can do, as we saw last week, is to confront people with the truth of how their actions are affecting us and others, like an intervention, and to hold in front of them the example of Jesus.  That's our power.  That's our authority.  Nothing more and nothing less.

If I can understand [even if I don't like it] that I don't get to be the boss of how my neighbors raise their kids or run their households, then this point of Paul's really shouldn't be controversial at all.  Again, we may or may not like the choices others make outside the community of Jesus.  And we may well have brilliant ideas for alternative ways to do things, how to live our lives, or how to raise up the next generation.  But our way of exerting any influence has to be by example rather than by edict--the world has to see that there is something compelling in the ways we live with one another and for one another, rather than only hearing us complain that we don't think Christians are in charge enough.  Like Emanuel Cardinal Suhard put it so well, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even stirring people up, but in being a living mystery.  It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."  Or, as Jesus insisted among his closest friends and followers on his last night with them, "By this, all people will know that you are my disciples--if you have love for one another."  When we are faithful to our calling, the world will know we are Christians by the ways we love, not by our constantly grabbing for power to tell others what to do.  The Bible itself here is directing us NOT to impose our ways on the wider world.

Today, then, our calling is two-fold: with other followers of Jesus, we continue as we always have to keep holding each other accountable and challenging one another to live in the ways of Jesus more and more fully.  Where we are clear on that, we will have a powerful witness that will draw others to want to know Jesus and his way more fully themselves.  When we aren't really sure what the way of Jesus might look like in a particular situation, we need to give each other grace and allow for some difference--just like there's some flexibility on bedtime in our household depending on whether it's a school night and whether people have been acting cranky or not.  And with regards to the wider world that does not share our faith in Jesus, we cannot expect them automatically to do what we think they should do, just on our say-so.  We can offer input, we can make our case for why we think a particular course of action is right and wise and good, and we can embody our convictions in our own lives to back our words up with substance. But we don't have permission, at least not from the actual New Testament, to presume that because we are Christians that we get to dictate how others do things, or that it is our job primarily to seek positions of power where we can enforce our particular agenda.  That ain't Jesus, and it isn't Paul here in this passage, either.

It really all does come back to the ways we embody the way of Jesus with integrity in our own lives and community.  Where we are authentically in line with the way of Jesus, we have a compelling witness for the world.  Where we are just grasping at power like a demagogue or dictator, we are showing the world that we aren't worthy of the power we are clutching at, and that we shouldn't be trusted with it if we get it.  

Live like Jesus.  Love like Jesus.  Let that be enough to make us living mysteries for the world to see.  And let's see where that takes us.

Lord Jesus, enable us to give up on the misguided project of seeking to put ourselves in positions of power to dictate over others, rather than simply walking the way of Jesus and letting that be compelling enough as it is.

Fashionable Sins--July 25, 2022

Fashionable Sins--July 25, 2022

"I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons--not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not even eat with such a one." [1 Corinthians 5:9-11]

It is telling--and, I would add, heartbreaking--that church bodies have gone through splits and schisms over questions of what counts as sexual sin, but I don't know that I've ever heard of a Christian denomination having a crisis because it took too strong a stand calling out greed or abusive language from its members.  And yet here is Paul, moving immediately from his concerns about sexual sins to "the greedy and robbers," as well as "idolaters," "revilers," and more.  Funny, isn't it, how easily we give ourselves permission to pick and choose what we get to condemn in others, and which things we are going to give a pass to--or try and baptize into virtues like " ambition" or "success."

Okay, time-eth out here.  We are headed back into the minefield that is this section of First Corinthians, and as I warned at the outset last week, we run the risk of stepping on something that is explosive.  Paul is not interested in pulling punches, neither with his readers in the first century nor with us in the twenty-first century.  That said, all too many people have been clobbered by Respectable Religious People who have selectively weaponized verses like these [and others yet to come in subsequent sections].  Plenty of folks have had targets put on their backs, been disowned by their families, or kicked out of their churches because somebody decided to take selected parts of this passage with rigid literalism and aggressively enforce violations of it, while almost certainly NOT having the same impulse to excommunicate any big givers whose wealth might have also made them guilty of greed.  Too many people have been told they are damaged goods or damned to hell because of their relationship status by folks in churches who have no problem with other, more influential big names speaking slander, insult, and abuse at others--even though Paul lumps "revilers" in the same category as those who are "sexually immoral."

My point here is not to say we should crack down on sin by kicking everybody out the first time they mess up on any of the items in Paul's list here, but rather to compel all of us who might want to see ourselves as "righteous," "pure," and "holy" to take an honest look at the convenient double standards we tend to trot out with a passage like this.  And by the same token, I'm not saying we should just give up on our calling to hold one another accountable with a shrug.  The trouble is how often Respectable Religious People decide which sins to get "tough" on, not based on which gets the louder, clearer, or more frequent warnings from the Scriptures, but based on who has power.  And if any of us found ourselves grinning and chanting, "You tell 'em, Paul!" to ourselves last week when Paul was calling out the man who had "taken" his father's wife, but are quietly grumbling to ourselves today now that Paul has turned his sights on greed, idolatry, and verbal hatred, then it's clear we are part of the problem.  In an age where greed is often re-branded as "the American dream" and where hateful or abusive speech is spun as "looking tough," it's easy to give a pass to hate and avarice because they are fashionable sins, while vilifying people whose flaws don't make them more prestigious or powerful.

So, yes, we will have more we have to deal with from Paul regarding particular matters of sexuality, and there are going to be even more places of contention there [just truth in advertising, there].  But for today, we need to follow Paul's lead and watch how the apostle himself doesn't make sexual sin the one be-all, end-all of transgression--but rather, he is concerned in all sorts of areas with variations on the same recurring problem with human beings:  we keep using people and loving things.  Sexual sin, as we began to look at it last week, is in so many ways, a matter of using people or treating them as objects, while greed is the inverse problem:  it is loving things at the expense of loving neighbors.  In truth, they are two sides of the same coin.  But if we find ourselves shaking angry fists only at the cases of using people but stare at our feet in silence when it comes to excessively loving things [or money], we've got a deeper problem.

Today, maybe it's worth checking on ourselves before we start kicking anybody else out--to check and see whether we've been ignoring the things [like greed] that Paul is not afraid to call sin, but which no contemporary church has been willing to split over.  Maybe we should be honest about where we have been harboring double standards, and do some work on ourselves, before we start clobbering somebody else who has already had Bible verses used as a weapon on them.

Lord God, make us honest with ourselves, so that we no longer give a pass to our favorite pet sins, while making other peoples' sins to be irredeemable monstrosities.

The Free Side of the Sea--July 22, 2022

The Free Side of the Sea--July 22, 2022

"...For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." [1 Corinthians 5:7b-8]

Every time we start sliding back into the same old mindset of Respectable Religion, a voice like this one reminds us of the shocking truth:  Christianity is not about how we save ourselves from divine punishment by our good behavior, but rather how we live now in light of how God has already saved us.

I have to confess, coming to these verses today kind of caught me off guard when I read them, because Paul really changes direction on us from the flow of his train of thought leading up to this.  Earlier in this chapter, Paul was warning against dangerous sin, and how the community needs to take a caring [but still frank] stand against destructive behavior in the congregation.  We've been hearing direction, in other words, about what WE are supposed to do... and what we are NOT supposed to do.

And sure, being a follower of Jesus orients our lives in a certain direction, which includes a certain way of life--toward Christ's kind of love, courage, truth-telling, and goodness, and away from greed, fear, deception, and apathy.  But it's really easy once we hear that to turn the whole Christian faith into a matter of mere morality--of just improving our good behavior and thereby avoiding hellfire.  And to be honest, that kind of Respectable Religion sure is popular--a lot of folks still basically see their faith as a matter of rules to be obeyed in order to avoid divine punishment, where "getting saved" becomes, for them, a euphemism for "getting better at compliance with those rules."

You might even expect Paul, who has lately been exploring his metaphor of yeast for the pernicious power of sin, to give a warning like, "Beware of consuming that sinful yeast--or it will poison you!"  Or "Those who have eaten the yeast of sin will be cast out from the heavenly banquet, because they hath filled up on bread before it even started!"  Something ominous and threatening, based on our good or bad behavior, right?

But that's not what Paul does.  We expect the old apostle to zig, and then he zags.  We expect more fire and brimstone warnings about the infectious spread of sin, and instead Paul doubles back and reminds us that God has already done the saving in Jesus--the question is whether we will live like it is true or not.  

This is Paul's surprising Gospel move.  Instead of doubling down on the "Be good or else" spiel he's been on, Paul says that Jesus is like our "paschal lamb"--the lamb that was sacrificed for the Passover, the great feast of ancient Israel's deliverance from enslavement in Pharaoh's Egypt.  Calling Jesus the Passover Lamb is a bold move, because in the Passover story, the people don't "do" a thing to earn their deliverance from Pharaoh or their rescue through the Sea.  God insists, "I will fight for you; I will deliver you--you have only to be still and witness it."  The eating of the Passover Lamb was part of Israel's ancient remembrance of how God had done the saving, apart from their earning, achieving, or morality--simply on the basis of God's commitment to keep a promise and to liberate the captive.  The Lamb was sacrificed, and its blood was put on the doorways of all the households in Israel, protecting them when God passed through the land to strike down the firstborn of Egypt.  But the people didn't have to "do" anything to make it happen--it was a gift.  The annual celebration of that deliverance, the festival they came to call the Passover, included eating roast lamb and unleavened bread, to remember their hasty escape from the clutches of Pharaoh that happened so quickly they didn't even have time to wait for dough to rise before baking it.  But commemorating the Passover isn't something you do in order to get God's help--it is a celebration of God's help that has already come.  It is a recognition of your new life on the other side of being delivered.  It is about living joyfully as people who know they already have been rescued.  

That's what Paul is saying here about Jesus--Jesus is the ultimate Passover Lamb, sacrificed for the sake of the whole world.  Like a line of Rob Bell's puts it, "There is blood on the doorposts of the universe."  And because Jesus has already accomplished God's great rescue in the cross and resurrection, like a whole new exodus--not from Pharaoh but from death itself--now, we are called to celebrate in ways that are fitting with that rescue.  In ancient Israel, celebrating freedom from slavery took the form of the Passover meal--the lamb, the unleavened bread, and probably a cup of wine pointing ahead to the sweetness of the Promised Land.  Now, Paul says, celebrating what God has done in Jesus means that our "unleavened bread" takes the form of being people of "sincerity and truth."  

Look at how that turns this whole conversation upside-down:  instead of scolding us to be good in order to escape divine punishment, Paul says, in effect, "God has already done the saving in Jesus, like a whole new Passover and Exodus--I'm just telling you to celebrate that it is already true by being truthful and sincere people."  And just like that, we've been pulled out of the old routines of Respectable Religion that make everything about whether our behavior is good enough to avoid a heaven-sent smiting.  Just in the nick of time, we've been rescued from mildewy moralism and into the story of a God who saves without waiting to ask "if we've been good this year" like a celestial Santa.

Dear ones, this is the Gospel that is worth staking our lives on--not that if we are good enough [or pray hard enough or belief correctly enough or vote a particular party into office consistently enough] we will have proven ourselves worthy so God will then save us, but rather that God has already done the rescuing.  The Passover Lamb has already been offered up, before we did a thing or even knew it had happened, and the Sea is parted at our left and right already.  The only question is whether we will dare to let our lives look like the honest-to-God celebration of people who know they have already been rescued, because there is already blood on the doorposts of the cosmos.

In case you found yourself getting pulled into the dry and deathly regimen of moralism, let Paul's words hit our ears in new ways today.  It's not about how much we have to do [or avoid doing] in order to save ourselves from God's punishment.  It's always been about taking seriously the news that God has already done the saving, and we are living on the free side of the Sea right now.

Lord God, enable us to live as people who know we have already been set free.

Like Garlic and Gym Socks--July 21, 2022

Like Garlic and Gym Socks--July 21, 2022 

"Your boasting is not a good thing. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened...." [ 1 Corinthians 5:6-7a]

You could call it the Bryl-Creem Principle:  a little dab will do ya.  

For good and for ill, it's true--a small amount of something potent has a way of affecting everything it touches.  That was the marketing gimmick for the hair product called "Bryl-Creem," and it's true of lots of things, pleasant and unpleasant alike.  Spices like garlic, paprika, hot pepper, or cumin have a distinctive flavor, and a little of each goes a long way.  The smell of one old gym sock left in a bedroom, or one person's cigarette if they smoke in your car, has a way of lingering and sinking into the walls or upholstery so you can't get it out even after a lot of scrubbing and a long time passing.  Good and bad alike, these things permeate the whole environment in which they are placed, whether it's a simmering pan of sauce, a teenager's room, or your SUV.

And it's the same with yeast being worked into dough as well.   A little bit--say, a tablespoon or two--will be enough for a recipe that produces two hearty sized loaves.  It really is almost like magic, taking a small amount of those earthy smelling granules, working them into flour and water, and with time and some warmth, watching the dough rise and grow far larger than it had been at the start.  The discovery of yeast to make dough has to be one of my favorite and most important accomplishments in human history, and I can only guess and wonder how our ancestors figured it out.

But the curious thing about yeast in the Bible is that it's sort of a two-sided coin, at least as a metaphor.  Jesus uses yeast leavening bread as a parable of the kingdom of God--he says that just like a woman will take a small amount of yeast to mix in with the flour, so the small but potent presence of the Reign of God in the world brings about the transformation of the whole.  There, the Bryl-Creem Principle is a good thing--a little dab will do ya, and a little yeast [the Reign of God] will have a profound effect on the whole world.  But on the flip side, you get times like this snippet of Paul's from First Corinthians, where the metaphor works in the opposite way.  Here, the idea that a little yeast will leaven the whole batch of dough is an ominous warning--it's rather like saying, "I've just put a little bit of arsenic in your tea."  A little goes a long way there, too, and you're not going to want to let anyone put even a tiny amount of poison in your cup.  

Just as surely as a small amount of something good can exert a positive influence on the whole--whether garlic in your sauce, yeast in your dough, or the presence of kindness in a community--a small amount of something rotten can make the larger whole into a mess, too.  If my kids hang out with friends who swear like elementary-school-aged sailors, I'm going to hear those words coming out of their mouths, too, without fail.  If a family gives a pass to "just a little bit of racism" from their curmudgeonly uncle, everyone else in the family gets the message that that's OK... and it grows and festers.  And--as is the case in Corinth as Paul writes to them--if we let someone continuously treat others as objects rather than people for the sake of their own gratification, it's going to affect all of our relationships to everybody else.  "Sin," to use the church's technical word for it, is rather like putting arsenic in your tea--a little permeates the whole and makes all of it unfit for sipping.  

So here's the conundrum we have to deal with, both as Bible-readers and as Jesus-followers: if small things sometimes influence the whole for good and sometimes influence the whole in bad ways, how do we hold both together in tension?  Jesus, for example, was notorious for hanging out with all the "wrong" types of people--the ones labeled notorious sinners, alongside the sick, the outcast, the unwelcome, and the left out.  He saw that as a crucial part of his mission--after all, as Jesus puts it, the physician is there for the ones who are sick, not for those who are already in good health.  On the other hand, Paul is right, too, that a community can be infected, so to speak, by the presence of rottenness that grows and spreads.  To use our addiction-and-intervention metaphor from yesterday, when a family has someone struggling with addiction and the family doesn't address it eventually, the dysfunction taints everything--it becomes easier to lie about all sorts of things, not just the addiction.  It becomes easier to ignore other destructive habits.  It sets the example for others that the substance abuse doesn't have any meaningful consequences, and it reinforces everybody else's role in the family system keeping things the way they are.  So sometimes you have to confront and even cut off from someone unwilling to get help or make change, not only for the sake the of the person with the addiction, but for the sake of the rest of the family as well, even for generations to come, who will inherit the patterns, habits, and hang-ups that come with our choices in the present.

The challenge is this: the Christian community is called simultaneously to welcome "sinners" [which is all of us], as we are, recognizing that we are indeed stinkers, screw-ups, and sinners... and to call out the behaviors and attitudes that will fester and kill the life of the whole community if left unaddressed.  The old line says that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints--but the point of a hospital is to help people heal from their hurts and recover from their sickness.  And that means being able to say sometimes, "This is not acceptable among the followers of Jesus--it does not reflect the way of love or the Reign of God."  In Corinth, Paul saw the situation with the man who had taken his father's wife as one of those dangerous situations, because it held the seeds of making every relationship into merely a commodification of bodies.  When we start treating one another as interchangeable objects just here for our own gratification, rather than as human beings worthy of time, care, honor, and love, something truly dangerous to community is afoot.  In our time and place, there are going to be plenty of other examples of things that might seem small but which carry the seeds that could choke off good community.  A little bit of racism, a little bit of xenophobia, a little bit of greed, a little bit of apathy... these things all show up at first in little ways we can be tempted to ignore, too.  But Paul would warn us that the things we look the other way about because we don't want to have to deal with them directly are the things that will overtake the whole before long.  A little bit of yeast gets worked through the whole batch of dough--and if you come from a religious tradition like Paul's which celebrated its greatest festival, Passover, with unleavened bread, it was a reminder that the "little" that goes a long way can sometimes be bad.  A little bit of crabgrass will overtake my yard before long.  A little bit of hatred has a way of tainting all of our relationships.  Just because it's uncomfortable to face that truth doesn't mean we are given a pass on dealing with it.

Taking today's verses seriously, alongside Jesus' unwavering call to welcome those labeled as "sinners," is a really difficult thing.  It means constantly living in tension of radical welcome and radical truth-telling.  And to be honest, we are going to mess it up, probably on a regular basis.  We will sometimes be too harsh--and need to come back around to offer unconditional love.  We will sometimes be too quiet about things we need to speak up about--and in those times, need to learn to find our courage and our voices again.  But we don't do any of it alone.  We have not only the presence of one another, but we are given the presence of Jesus, who both welcomes us as we are, and who gives us the example of what courageous truth-telling looks like.  Today's a day to keep our eyes on Jesus, then.

Lord Jesus, keep our eyes on you so that we know how to welcome and to call out one another.

Scenes from an Intervention--July 20, 2022

Scenes from an Intervention--July 20, 2022

"When you are assembled, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord." [ 1 Corinthians 5:4b-5]

Believe it or not, this is an intervention, not an eternal damnation. 

I know the language in this verse and a half sounds very final, hopeless, and cruel [it's hard to hear the phrase, "hand someone over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh" and think otherwise, I'll grant].  But I'm going to ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment and hear this passage again in the context of the letter we've been working through.  If you get to the end of this reflection and still aren't convinced, message me or leave a comment and we'll go from there.  But for now, let's take another step into this minefield.

When you love someone very much who is also doing something very destructive--whether to to themselves, to others, or both--sometimes you get that person's whole circle of family, friends, and close relationships together and you hold an intervention.  You confront the person, sometimes with prepared statements written in advance, describing the harm they are causing and the importance of this person in your life.  And after everybody in the circle has said the things they need to say, the whole group basically makes an ultimatum to their wayward friend: either the behavior needs to change, or this person will be cut off from everyone else until they get the help they need to make the change.  The person struggling with an addiction needs to get help from rehab.  The one who is wasting the family's money on uncontrollable gambling needs to get help to get back in control and quit.  Whatever the particulars, the idea is that you care enough about this person to confront them with the truth, and with the refusal to enable their destructive behavior anymore.

And then, with that ultimatum made, the choice falls back to the person they have confronted:  will you get help and change the behavior, or will you walk away and refuse?  At that point--and it is heartbreaking and scary to be in that moment of decision--it really can go either way, and all the gathered family and friends cannot be bluffing.  They really have to be prepared to refuse contact, financial support, or whatever else if the person with the destructive behavior will not listen.  If the person decides they cannot bring themselves to part with their demons, the rest of the family and friends have to let them choose to walk out the door with those same demons.  

But even if it comes to that, there is still the hope of change.  It is an even more painful sort of change-producing situation, but there is hope.  If a person walks out of an intervention and refuses to get help, the prospect is that they will sooner or later hit "rock bottom" for real.  Without the help of friends or family to bail them out, without other people enabling their behavior or perpetuating their addiction, the person eventually [this is the thinking at least] gets to a point of desperation where they finally do realize how much they needed the support of everyone else and decides they will seek help.  Sometimes it takes a long while after an intervention has ended in what looked like failure, but still it can happen.  Maybe once you're left alone with your demons, you realize how much your loved ones were right after all.  At least that's the idea.

I can't help but here Paul's words here in similar terms:  he is organizing an intervention from a distance, knowing he can't be there in person to stand in solidarity with the rest of the community that needs to confront destructive behavior, but that he can at least offer his voice through his letter.  And the goal of this intervention is the same as any other--to bring the person who is entangled in that destructive behavior to a place where they must choose either to get help and turn from the old patterns or to walk away with only their demons, but not their friends.  Paul is advising the community in Corinth to make it clear that if the man they are confronting won't see that he needs to change his actions, the community simply makes it clear they cannot continue to enable those old, destructive actions any longer.  His actions will have already broken fellowship with them, but they will not go back to enabling him to continue in them.  It's a move rather like Jesus' direction to his disciples when they go to a town but are not received--the most they can do is to walk away and shake the dust of the town off of their feet in protest, but then they move on.

The hope, of course, is that like in an intervention, that sets the stage for the person who still will not accept the call to get help to really feel what it is like without the support of that community, and that they will then see the need to change their behaviors.  The intervention isn't a final condemnation--it's a last-resort wake-up call to try and get through to someone who hasn't been listening, in the hopes that they will finally be made so uncomfortable by the consequences of their choices that they will seek the help and make the changes they need to make.  When a family confronts someone with a drug addiction, for example, and the person storms out of the intervention insistent they don't want any of their help or advice, the remaining hope is that the person will be forced by unpleasant circumstances to see their need for change.  They may get pulled over for driving while under the influence, or they may get evicted from their apartment and no longer have a family members' couch to crash on.  They may see the risk of their children being placed in protective custody.  They may have a close call in some other way--and the hope is that even those unpleasant situations may finally be what gets through to the person.

That's the idea behind Paul's wording about "handing this man over to Satan."  It's not a final punishment--it's a reminder to the community that at some point they cannot do anything more constructive to assist their friend to make the changes he needs to make.  They can simply draw the line they need to make, and then hope that if their words didn't get through, that the unpleasantness of facing life without their support as a community will get through to them.  And that means that even holding their ground as a community and refusing to keep enabling the person with the destructive behavior is an act of love, and even of hope.  The other thing I think it really important to notice here is that Paul doesn't advice the Christian community to use violence, threats, or intimidation to coerce people to change.  There is only--at most, as a last resort--the willingness of the community to say, "We cannot condone or support your current course of action, and we will not participate in it or enable it.  Until you are willing to get the help needed to get back on track, we will not be able to be in touch."  It is essentially civil disobedience--it's non-violent resistance.  Except instead of a sit-in at a restaurant or a walk across the bridge at Selma, aimed outward at the governing authorities, it's aimed inward at a member of the community.  But notice--nobody is supposed to punch the person or kick them into submission.  Nobody beats up anybody else to make them change.  And nobody threatens to bring this person to the Roman authorities for an imperial flogging or imprisonment.  

What amazes me when I read this passage these days is actually how restrained the actions of the community are.  Paul never takes an approach that we have to round up the "sinners" and throw 'em in jail or beat them up or execute them.  He doesn't see the church as the community that serves up vengeance or punishment.  Paul doesn't see the Christian community doling out judgments--the most we can do is to have and hold good boundaries.  When others won't listen, we don't "force" them to listen or do what we want.  The most we can do is the most a family can do for one of their own who is entangled in a mess of destructive behavior like addiction--they hold an intervention, and if the person still refuses to wake up to the truth, we have to part ways, in the hopes that it is only temporary.  But the action, even when it is neither fun nor easy, always comes from a place of genuine love--love both for the rest of the community which is threatened by one person's destructive actions, but also love for that person and the hope that change can come for them, too.  This kind of intervention-style approach is not to be taken lightly--you don't trot out these extreme, last-resort kinds of measures because someone was late to a meeting or the preacher's sermon was too long [please don't do it over the sermon length]. But it is sometimes the only way the community can get through to another person while still respecting their autonomy to make their own choices--even if they persist for a while longer in making bad choices.

This is one of those tools I hope we don't have to use very often in life.  It is painful all around to be brought to this point.  But it is good to know that, like the ability to hold an intervention for a family member with a drinking problem or a gambling addiction, we do not have to keep enabling destructive behavior, and we do not have to make ourselves the judge, jury, and executioner.  We can simply tell the truths we know to tell, and hope that one way or another, we can all be brought back together in good and healthy ways.

And if I am honest, part of what gives me hope is the assurance that there is a community of people who care enough about me to hold me accountable, too, and who will speak truths I need to hear to my ears, even when it is not easy to do.  That, too, is mercy.

Lord God, give us the courage to care for one another enough to confront when necessary, and enough to listen when others have difficult truths they need to tell us.

On Belonging To Each Other--July 19, 2022

On Belonging To Each Other--July 19, 2022

"For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing." [1 Corinthians 5:3-4a]

Here's another dangerous step into the minefield: none of us [he braces for an explosion] is the sole authority of our own lives.  [He looks around to see the fallout and waits for the dust to settle.]

In the Christian community in particular, I am not the lone stakeholder in my own life, and my decisions are never just mine to make.  To be honest, this is a pretty important notion within both the Christian and Jewish faiths [not to mention most other faith traditions], and it directly collides with the hyper-individualistic "Nobody-can-tell-me-what-to-do" mindset of contemporary American civil religion. As strange as it can sound to American ears that are used to everything being about "my and my personal rights," the Christian faith has a lot more in common with the idea popularized in the Zulu and Xhosa traditions of South Africa known as "ubuntu," which says that my humanity is bound up in the humanity of everybody else.  It's often summarized by the shorthand expression, "I am because we are," and it doesn't start with me as the lone individual but with our life together as community. For American churchgoers who are used to having faith reduced to a set of correct personal beliefs to get yourself into the right afterlife location, it will always sound a little strange to discover that the New Testament itself is a lot more interested in our life together as community than it is with my individual rights.

But only with that much clear will Paul's claims here make any sense.  He is writing to the congregation at Corinth from hundreds of miles away, and yet he claims that he can speak with authority to the situation going on there, and that the whole community has a stake in the messy love triangle between a man, his father, and his father's wife.  To a culture that treats, "I can do whatever I want and nobody can stop me" like a national creed, it is startling to hear Paul insist he has both the authority and obligation to step in and address the situation.  But he does, and he lays the groundwork--following Jesus' blueprints--for the Christian community to be the kind of place where we do take responsibility for one another's well-being and hold one another accountable.  And even though it can be uncomfortable to deal with, it really is good news that we can be that kind of community for one another.

When a congregation or larger group has to deal with allegations of abuse or misconduct, for example, it is often painful and difficult for the whole community to have to tell uncomfortable truths, or remove people from situations where others could be harmed.  But it is absolutely essential for a community that cares about the well-being of the most vulnerable to be able to step in and stop behavior that risks harming others.  Similarly, if a member of the Christian community is steeped in racism and promotes that kind of hatred toward other people, the whole community has to be able to speak up and call out what is anti-Christ about that kind of conduct--regardless of whether someone insists "I have the right to think whatever I want."  The church's job isn't to prosecute people for crimes, but it is our role as a community to make it clear what is, and is not, in line with the way of Jesus. And in the same way, when someone is fighting a losing battle with addiction, sometimes the rest of the community has the obligation to step up and compel the person to deal with it in an intervention--to get the person to see that their current choices are affecting others, even if they cannot see that, and even if they insist, "It's my life and I can do what I want."  Because that's the thing--none of us really has "just my life."  Each of our lives connect with everybody else's, and my choices leave marks on yours as well.  

I can't ignore that I bear responsibility for how my life sends ripples into the lives of others, and just saying, "It's my right to do what I want" doesn't give a hall pass to go trampling through the lives of others. If we have built our systems and structures only in terms of "me and my rights" we will not have the tools to be able to say, "Well, but what about our responsibilities to one another?"  But if we are willing to see, as Paul would have us do, that we all have a stake in each other's lives, then it will mean sometimes we have to speak up and say, "This kind of conduct is harmful to all of us, and it cannot continue."  It is that sort of truth-telling that makes it possible to offer help to those who are either already hurt by someone else's destructive choices, or to those who need to change their actions and to be able to be restored to community.  None of it is easy.  None of it is fun.  And it cannot be about anybody's need just to control others.  But it is necessary for us as a community of people whose lives are messy--and whose lives depend on one another's--to be able to intervene when someone's actions and choices endanger our collective well-being.

Today, our challenge is not to make ourselves into nosy meddlers or busybodies.  But it is our calling to be ready to speak up when someone's actions are causing harm to others, and to address those situations, regardless of how uncomfortable it can be, or how much it runs counter to our American obsessions with "me and my rights."  Sometimes love calls us to set aside worry about "my rights" so that I can more fully be present for the needs of my neighbor, and sometimes love will call them to do the same for me. That's how we navigate this life together--we have each other.

Lord God, give us the courage to speak up for the well-being of our whole community, even when it means telling difficult truths together.

Because People Are Not Objects--July 18, 2022

Because People Are Not Objects--July 18, 2022

"It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with this father's wife.  And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you?" [1 Corinthians 5:1-2]

So I'm just going to start by admitting that the beginning of this chapter [and much of the next] feels like walking into a minefield, and it feels like there is going to be no way to avoid stepping on something dangerous and causing an explosion.  I'll still invite you to come along for the journey if you are feeling up for the challenge of it, and I'll do my best to be the one to bear the brunt of whatever fallout there is when I do.  But fair warning: this is tricky territory to navigate ahead.

I say that in particular because our culture--and the American church within it--has a way of both saying too much and simultaneously too little about matters of sex, love, and the curious phenomenon of both having and being bodies in this physical world.  On the one hand, sometimes church folk get so hung up on matters of sex, gender, and sexuality [quite often when one group decides it has "the one true Biblical perspective" and cannot be convinced otherwise] that they can talk of practically nothing else.  Church groups have splintered--and are splintering again--over questions over sex and sexuality--and even when the ones doing the splintering insist it's not "just about sex," they generally tip their hand and reveal that's really what's gotten them so riled up.  And in a wider national culture that has not only come through the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but has come back through several reactionary counter-movements and new waves and new counter-waves, it certainly can feel like all anybody is ever talking about is their particular takes [often for church folk, dressed up to look like they have additional Scriptural backing] about who is allowed to have what kind of relationships with whom.

On the other hand, at the very same time, church folks often just assume that what the talking heads of radio and TV preachers have told them is the only thing Christians have to say about sex and sexuality that we never dig any deeper for ourselves into what biblical authors actually saying.  We tend to settle for stopping with the level of, "Well, I heard a preacher once say that X, Y, and Z are all bad, and I have never looked any more closely at the Scriptures to see whether their arguments hold water, so I just assume that whatever is different from my experience must be bad and wrong."  And so we end up as church saying too little about the ways we relate to one another and the kinds of relationships we have with one another.  Maybe we are just tired of all the noise of angry fire-and-brimstone preachers that we don't want to even try to say anything at all.

But for however we've gotten here, that does seem to be our problem: we church folk find ourselves tempted simultaneously to talk only about our hang-ups about sex and these bodies of ours, and at the very same time, to just keep our heads down and not say anything than what the loudest voices, inside and outside of the church, have already said. 

And I get it.  I really do.  I often find myself tempted to hide out in that place of, "Everyone else is shouting so much on this that I really don't know how helpful it would be to add one more bit of noise into the fray."  And sometimes I think that discretion is indeed the better part of valor.  But sometimes, that also seems an awfully convenient way of avoiding having to say things that will upset some people... but which others are desperately needing someone to say.  <Gulp.>

Can you feel us stepping over the barbed wire and into the minefield now?  Well, here we go....

It seems to me that one huge problem we American Christians are going to have in any conversation about sex and sexuality is that we are predisposed to frame practically every conversation on any subject in terms of "rights."  We are taught by the voices of our culture that everything should be seen as a matter of what I have the "right" to do [notice how that was the way so many folks interpreted issues like masks or vaccines during the worst of the COVID pandemic], and we have a much harder time seeing ourselves as belonging to one another in relationships of love, obligation, and mutual care.  And, at the risk of setting off the first of possibly many landmines over the next few conversations, the writers of the New Testament are just not interested, generally, in talking about "my rights" but rather about the ways we love, honor, and care for each other.  So much of what passes for Respectable Religion in this land shouts [loudly] that nobody can ever infringe upon "my rights," when the real beating heart of the Christian faith is a God who forgoes the "rights" and "privileges" of being God for the sake of the rest of us.  Paul regularly and explicitly tells his readers that the way to think in the mindset of Christ is NOT to say, "Me and My Group First," but rather to put the well-being of others at the forefront.  It is to recognize that my thriving is tied up with the thriving of everybody else--or as Fannie Lou Hamer put it so well, "Nobody is free until everybody is free."  That kind of thinking doesn't just settle for looking out for "my rights," but rather says, "What seeks the well-being of everybody?"

And this, I think is where the mindset of American culture [including a lot of church culture]  parts ways from the perspective of the New Testament writers.  A perspective that says, "My individual rights are all that matters," can really easily get comfortable with treating other people as objects for my gratification, to be used, commodified, and disposed of whenever it is convenient, rather than seeing other people's bodies as worthy of honor and respect as much as our own.  In a culture that commodifies everything and makes even our bodies into consumer goods, it is easy to say, "I can objectify others... so long as the market will allow it."  In that kind of mentality, other people become simply service providers, as interchangeable as different brands of the same product at the store. And in a land where we take it almost as a national motto that "The customer is always right," it is damnably easy to see ourselves as customers and other people simply as products there for our consumption--and disposal.

This is where Paul really gets hung up.  The situation that has come to his attention is one where a member of the church in Corinth has apparently taken his father's wife [I'm going to hope that's a stepmother, rather than an Oedipus situation] for his own girlfriend, and this just scandalizes Paul.  We don't know the details of the legalities--whether one relationship had been formally ended with a divorce or the other had been legally recognized with a marriage.  But what we do see is that Paul seems really upset about the way this situation has simply shattered relationships--between the father and the son, for sure, and also between the father and his wife, not to mention whatever fallout there is with extended family, like siblings or stepchildren.  The arrangement Paul describes cannot have come about without someone treating someone else like they were disposable--whether the father had been so cold to his wife that he treated her like garbage, or the son was willing to wreck his relationship with his father to have his stepmother as his girlfriend, or both of them had treated the woman in this scenario like a prize to be won rather than a human being.  In other words, at some point, somebody treated another person's heart like it was disposable, and used others in the situation like they were objects and commodities rather than relationships of love and mutual obligation.

That seems, honestly, to be the real issue for Paul.  A lot of church folk get bent out of shape over things that Paul really is less concerned about [more on those in conversations to come--we'll get there], but what Paul really seems upset about is when we treat others like they are merely disposable consumer products, easily exchanged and thrown away for another model, like everything is for sale.  We don't seem to notice in our land and time how much we do commodify people--or that it is a flaw, rather than a feature of late-day capitalism.  But that's where Paul seems to be truly riled up--somebody in that messy situation in Corinth decided that other people's hearts weren't as important as their own physical impulses or need for romance, and Paul is upset that somebody's heart got made into collateral damage so easily.  The son's position had to come down at some point to some version of, "I don't care about your relationship, Dad and Step-Mom--I want her for myself." And regardless of how much input the stepmother did or didn't have [let's be honest, this was not likely to be a situation where she was given much say in the matter, too], at the very least the son has decided that he's willing to split up his father's relationship for the pursuit of his stepmother.  That sounds like one person is treating someone else like he is disposable, and the other person like she is a product there for his consumption. And that is a shame--a literal damn shame.

I want to suggest as we move forward that this is the real key to understanding Paul's take on relationships--and sexual ethics as a subset of those relationships.  It's a matter of treating others, not as objects here for our use and disposal, but as beloved children of God, made in the image of God, whose minds, hearts, and bodies are worthy of the same love as we afford ourselves.  When that becomes clear as our guiding star, it has a way of putting some issues into greater urgency than our culture gives them, and also makes others seem much less controversial than the Respectable Religious People would have us believe.  At the heart of everything is how we love--and loving people means not objectifying them or regarding them as disposable consumer products.  And if that is true, then all of our relationships are in regular need of revision so that we don't end up "using people and loving things," as the old saying goes, not just the relationships with romantic or physical dimensions to them.  

A great deal changes--or is at least poised to change--when we no longer see our relationships framed in terms of "rights I can demand" and instead live them out in terms of "people worthy of honor to whom have mutual obligation and care." But that's the first step in this minefield--and along the way, we may well find something unexpectedly good, beautiful, and compelling about living our lives for the well-being of others.  Tomorrow, we'll dare to take the next step past the barbed wire.

Lord God, enable us to love other not as objects of commodities, but as your beloved children, who are worthy of our care, respect, and dedication.