One request: When you share how pastoral care is done in your tradition, please do so from what you know, not from what “the instructions” say should be done. And be constructive and helpful.

Tell us a little about yourself, your journey as a Christian and your current ministry.

I grew up in the Midwest, in a moral, Protestant home, attending United Methodist churches. During my senior year in high school, after a move across the country that shook my foundations, I had a spiritual awakening and responded to an altar call in a Southern Baptist church, where I was re-baptized. I went to Lancaster Bible College in Pennsylvania. There, I became convinced of a call to enter the pastoral ministry. My wife and I were married after graduation, and our first congregation met in one of those historic, quaint, white steepled churches in Vermont, and there the people taught me much more about how to be a pastor than I taught them about Jesus.

After five years, we moved back to Chicago to go to seminary at Trinity in Deerfield. I was studying under some of the finest teachers in the world, pastoring a small church, our children were being born, and we had many wonderful friends supporting and encouraging us. However, there came a point after I graduated that I felt I needed some mentoring and more experience on a church staff. We also were trying to determine where we would put down roots as a family. So, when the opportunity came, we packed up and moved to Indianapolis. Here I served in a non-denominational church as the associate pastor with an emphasis on worship and music, but I also did a lot of pastoral care, teaching, and leading mission trips. Then I became the senior pastor in a sister congregation. After a rather difficult experience there, God opened up the opportunity to serve as a chaplain in a hospice program. Soon it will be five years since that journey began.

God used many past experiences to prepare and equip me for this work. In Vermont, our small church was a parish church. Because we were the only congregation in the village, I visited the sick and did funerals for all kinds of people, including complete strangers who’d had vacation homes in the mountains and wanted to be laid to rest there. We also had a significant population of older folks and shut-ins that I learned to love visiting. That was also true in the other churches where I served—I just seemed to connect well with the senior citizens. Also, while in seminary, I took my first CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) course, and was introduced to the inner workings of the hospital and how to serve patients. Since then, I have always appreciated the strong connection between medical and spiritual care.

I consider my grandmother to be one of my greatest examples for ministry. After my grandpa died rather early in life, she devoted much of her adult life to caring for her elderly neighbors, friends, and fellow parishioners. Her simple and faithful service showed me what it means to be the salt of the earth.

I have always believed that pastoral ministry is about prayer, proclamation, and people-work. As my favorite pastoral author, Eugene Peterson, says, it is not about “running a church.” Frankly, I am appalled at how these perspectives have gotten turned around in today’s church, and how little attention is given to foundational ministries like pastoral visitation. It is a forgotten art.

That is why I am glad to be in a position now where personal work can be my primary focus. Every day I visit individuals and families in their homes, in extended-care facilities, and in hospitals. My job is to enter their worlds, befriend them, show them kindness, listen to them, answer their questions when I can, and provide various kinds of spiritual support that may help them find peace at the end of life. I have often imagined that Jesus’ earthly ministry must have been like this, as he went from village to village and house to house, engaging people in their own settings, exhibiting compassion, providing healing, giving hope.

Another reason I love my job is that I work with a team of skilled and compassionate professionals who all do their parts to serve our patients and families with regard to their medical needs, psycho-social needs, personal care needs, and, after a death, needs associated with the grieving process. Hospice is a wholistic service—covering body, soul, and spirit, and respecting the processes involved in the final season of life and beyond.

1. I first thought of this interview when it occurred to me that evangelicals don’t seem to have anything close to the resources of other traditions when it comes to pastoral care of the dying? Am I right?

In my experience, most people and churches in the evangelical world have their focus on fellowship and activism. The kind of work I do doesn’t fit the model very well.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had an evangelical friend or pastor ask me, with a sour look on his face, “Do you really like doing that?” They recognize that caring for those who are seriously ill and suffering is a part of life, but it’s a part they would rather avoid and deal with only when absolutely necessary. Not a regular part of the “mission,” you might say.

They know how to put people on the prayer chain. They know how to make a meal and bring it to a family that is going through a hard time. If there is something active they can do, like get a list together of folks to help the family with errands or cleaning house, etc., they might be able to organize some practical assistance. These things can be quite helpful, and should not be looked down upon. However, beyond that, there’s not much in the paradigm, especially if you’re talking about pastoral visitation. And we haven’t even talked about ministering to dying people who are outside the church, which is not even on the radar of most pastors or congregations.

It certainly was not an emphasis in my education. We had few pastoral care courses in my evangelical Bible College and seminary. Nor is it emphasized in churches. I don’t know many evangelical churches that have programs like the Stephen Ministry for equipping believers in caring ministry. The more pervasive model seems to be that churches will support a parachurch ministry and expect the work to be done by them. It’s not really part of the church’s mission.

With regard to care for the dying, most pastors and people have not been taught that it is a good use of their time, that it is Christ-like and genuinely helpful, to simply sit with people, actively listen to their feelings, and not feel like you have to give “answers” or put the situation in an understandable theological framework so that folks might know the divine “reason” behind what is happening. Evangelicals don’t usually have a great deal of good language with which to pray for these folks, either, and it may be the rarest of things to find an evangelical worship service (or even funeral service) that contains rubrics for lament or recognition of grief and loss.

Don’t get me started on “mega-church” pastoral care. From what I’ve seen, it’s non-existent.

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on evangelicals alone here. Other traditions have more experience and better tools for being pastorally present with people, but that doesn’t mean it always happens. Mainline pastors often drop the ball here too. I’ve seen many a Roman Catholic priest do a perfunctory anointing of the sick and never really connect personally with the family. One can read the most beautiful prayer from the Book of Common Prayer without feeling or expressing any empathy whatsoever. Nevertheless, I have found that pastors and parishioners in the older traditions at least understand that this is one of the things the church and her ministers should be doing.

Ultimately, in my view, this is another area where the church (at least in the white, suburban culture with which I am most familiar) has become conformed to the death-denying, suffering-averse, productivity-centered world we live in. How is sitting with the dying gonna help build my church?

2. Is a significant part of this deficit because of evangelicals’ lack of liturgical resources?

That lack certainly doesn’t help. When most of our prayers begin, “Lord, we just want to thank you for…,” it signals that we might suffer from a lack of language to appropriately relate to life’s awesome mysteries. Purely spontaneous prayer doesn’t work because we simply don’t have words when we are in a situation that overwhelms us.

But why do we rely on that? After all, we claim to be Bible-believing people. No book on earth contains human expressions of sorrow, pain, anguish, grief, disappointment, anger, guilt, loneliness, or fear like the Bible. We just have to read it! But because we haven’t really internalized the Scriptures, we don’t know how to be human, we don’t know how to pray as real people dealing with real life before a real God.

Walter Brueggemann writes about “the formfulness of grief.” One thing we learn from Scripture is that, in the chaos of suffering, we need a sense of clarity and direction in the midst of our disorientation. So, we lament. The lament form gives us a pattern by which we may express our grief, contemplate our faith, and make a way through the wilderness of suffering. We usually don’t have the words. We’re too overcome. It hurts too much to talk. Appropriate liturgies give us profound words to speak when we can’t, words that in turn speak to us, give us perspective, and help us survive.

3. Do evangelicals have a model of a “good death” or does their theology move them in the direction of asking God for miracles?

Coming to grips with the terminality of a loved one is a process for everyone, not just evangelicals. The difficulty of the process also varies depending on the situation. Losing my 90 year-old grandmother is sad, but I probably would not suffer undue shock or dismay, especially if her death followed a normal course. I would be happy that she had lived a long life. I would rejoice in memories of what we shared in life together. I would be grateful that she was able to be comfortable and peaceful, with her pain and symptoms managed well at the time of her passing. Most of us would probably call that a “good death.” We would be concerned and sad, we would offer prayers for her and the family, but I doubt if we would be calling all-night prayer meetings asking God to intervene.

However, a young person, a woman in the prime of her life, a robust middle-aged man, a person who is not at peace with God or others…in such cases the diagnosis of a terminal condition throws us all out of whack. And it should. The question then becomes—What are our options at that point? I’m not sure there is a single “evangelical theology” that speaks to the situation.

Those whose tradition emphasizes miracles, divine intervention, and healing would likely view the situation as absolutely NOT God’s will and would marshal all their resources to fight the devil they blame for the person’s illness. Others would be more stoic and submissive. Some might emphasize trying to understand what is happening, looking for “reasons” to satisfy the Christian perspective. Most all people will bounce up and down on a roller-coaster process of anticipatory grief, needing someone to be with them for support and encouragement all along the way.

In my view, that is the bottom line. No matter where people are with regard to their specific reactions to end of life issues, no matter their theology or conditioned response to tragedy or loss, they need support. They need a calm, reasonable, caring human friend to sit with them, who is available to listen and support them. I have sat with families that have all kinds of reactions, and my approach has been fairly consistent—BE THERE. Period. Trust the process, rely on the active presence of God, and walk down the road with them.

4. At what point is it appropriate for a minister to talk about death when a family may be refusing to speak about it?

The subject usually comes up naturally if folks have access to the kind of support I just talked about—a calm, reasonable, caring human friend to sit with them, who is available to listen and support them. Occasionally, a compassionate minister or friend may need to help someone face reality and speak the truth plainly when it is being denied. But most of the time, it is clear that people know what’s going on, and they just need time until they can talk about it.

We have all kinds of people who come into hospice care, and they come from a variety of faith and non-faith backgrounds. Some are on-board and realistic from the beginning. Others say “Don’t mention death or use the word hospice. Hide your badge so mom won’t know you are from hospice.” Some refuse to sign “Do Not Resuscitate” orders because they can’t imagine not trying to bring dad back if possible. They put off making funeral arrangements or getting necessary documents together. Some don’t want the chaplain to visit. A friend of mine said he once had a patient who called the chaplain, “the sky-pilot,” the person you only see when you’re ready to be launched into the afterlife! Other folks struggle when grandma doesn’t want to eat anymore, and so they keep trying to force food into her. Many people refuse to give or take pain medications, especially morphine, because they view that as crossing the line and forsaking life.

So, in hospice we have to be gentle with people and respect their journey. We pretty much don’t force anything but emphasize giving good information and the kind of supportive presence that will give people permission to talk about things they’d rather not face. I’d recommend ministers and friends do the same. Again, it’s not efficient. It takes time. But it is loving, and the “small miracles” we see every day of people being helped and supported through some of the toughest experiences of their lives are worth as much as seeing Lazarus come forth.

5. You deal with many people with little or no faith resources for approaching death. What is your pastoral care strategy in that situation?

First, let me make a foundational statement about what a chaplain is and is not.

Because I am not a pastor in a local church but work for a healthcare organization, I must approach things differently than a minister would. A church pastor has a covenant relationship with his people and serves them with a whole system of theological understandings and expectations in place. A chaplain, on the other hand, must honor the spiritual and religious commitments of patients (even those that he might deem wrong), and serve them according to their own faith traditions. So, if I get a Buddhist patient, unless she wants to talk about the Christian view of God and salvation, it is not my job to force that on her. I will ask if she wants support from someone in her own religious community. Only if she asks me, or I get her permission, will I share my faith with her.

Secondly, let me lay a theological foundation for the way I approach everyone.

The doctrines that have guided me from the beginning in this work are the Bible’s teachings on creation and common grace. God created each human being in his image, and by his grace and providence he sustains us all. I meet and deal with people first based on our common humanity under God. Every person is my neighbor, and I am called, simply, to love my neighbor. Being a chaplain means involves specific ways of doing that. It’s more of a “love your neighbor” ministry than a “win the lost” ministry (though I’m not always sure about the dichotomy).

Furthermore, because I believe in common grace, I do not understand my job as bringing God to people. He is already with them, and he is already working, no matter who they are. To reference Eugene Peterson again, my duty is (1) to recognize that God has gone before me in every encounter, (2) to discover some of what God is doing in that person’s world, and (3) to figure out how to best cooperate with God in what he is trying to accomplish.

So, when I have a new patient and family without a faith background, I meet them on their turf as neighbor and friend. I do not have an agenda, other than to listen and learn how I might be of assistance. I tell them I am available as a spiritual and pastoral resource, if that is what they want and need, but my main job is simply to be there with them for support. I always offer to pray for them (and ask their permission to do so), and I try to make my prayers personal, filled with Biblical language, and focused on God’s love for people and his promises to be with us in Christ.

I find that this kind of approach often leads to more discussion about “spiritual things” than if I would try to force the matter. One joyful consequence is that I have been asked to do many funerals for un-churched folks, and at the funerals I always try to clearly present the story of Jesus, his salvation, and the hope of eternal life.

I’m not sure evangelicals in general think in these terms. We are often weak on creation and common grace. Instead we see God mainly at work within the community that is separated from the world. We also identify his work primarily with specific “spiritual” matters that we focus on. We sometimes don’t do well simply as human beings living among fellow human beings who are our neighbors, all walking together through the common experiences of life. We are often too “spiritual” for our own good, and for the good of others.

6. What sorts of things make the process of grief difficult for evangelicals?

In my first grief support group, I learned something as I listened to folks talk—It is hard to go to church after losing a loved one. I’ve heard that particularly from those who’ve lost spouses.

* First of all, nobody knows how to relate to Joe anymore now that it’s no longer “Joe and Mary.”
* Second, few know what to say, and this leads to many awkward and some hurtful encounters.
* Third, you (the bereaved) don’t know what to say either, especially when the song leader keeps telling you to smile and be happy in Jesus, and all your brothers and sisters keep saying over and over again, “Remember, she’s in a better place.”
* Fourth, you have to sit through something alone that you had always done together; and if your spouse ever sang in the choir or did something up front regularly, then it’s hard to be there and watch others take her place.
* Fifth, the church revolves around fellowship and activism. But you would rather be alone, and you don’t have the strength to teach middle-schoolers right now. You don’t fit any longer.
* Sixth, since the church is “focused on the family,” you feel like a fifth wheel all the time when you are around other adults.
* Seventh, you have to sit and listen to the “7-Day Sex Challenge” sermon series and other such silly talks from the pulpit.

I have heard some incredible stories. A woman I know lost her young son in a tragic accident. Not long afterward, she went to church and stayed in the sanctuary after the service, crying there in the pew. The pastor came by and said, “Now, now, let’s not forget our witness.” That may be the cruelest sentence I have ever heard pass between one human being and another.

Other clichés or stupid remarks well-meaning Christians use include,

* “She’s in a better place.” That’s right. By faith we trust that our believing loved ones are being comforted in God’s presence. But what about the bereaved? Is he in a better place?
* “God never gives us anything more than we can bear.” Really? Then why does Paul exhort us to “bear one another’s burdens”? Some things must be too heavy for one person to carry alone. Don’t throw it off on God. He may be asking you to lend a hand.
* “I know exactly how you feel.” No you don’t. Not even close. If you did, you wouldn’t say that, you’d probably just join the crying and give the bereaved a hug.
* “I remember when so and so died…” Guess what? No one wants to hear your story right now. This is not about you, or someone else. This is about someone drowning in loss.
* “Just call if I can be of any help.” Let me clue you in on something. This person does not have strength to pick up the phone and ask for help. This is time for others to take the initiative. Help or don’t help. But be quiet about it.

I tell grieving people all the time just to expect that people will say stupid things and not to take it too personally. Most folks are downright pitiful when it comes to knowing what to say at times like this. Add to that our discomfort with the whole death and dying thing, and the fact that it doesn’t fit into our paradigm of church activities, and the result is usually not a pretty picture.

The overriding issue is that we have lost all sense of the time and energy involved in the process of grief, and we have not allowed space in our lives to let people grieve the way they need to. There is usually a big rush of caring and expressions of sympathy in the first week or two after someone experiences a loss, but then, since we have to get back to our lives, we expect that the bereaved will somehow just magically “get over it” and get back to his.

Other faith communities have learned to do it better. For example, Orthodox Jews have an entire 12-month process of tradition and liturgy for the grieving, which is lived out by the bereaved and faith community alike. However, in evangelicalism the issue again becomes, “How does allowing someone the time and space to grieve fit into our paradigm of fellowship and activism?”

7. If death has come in tragedy, how can evangelical ministers acknowledge that kind of loss while also upholding hope?

As a hospice chaplain, I don’t deal with a lot of sudden deaths, accidents, and the like. I have as a pastor. In the moment, helping people in these circumstances likewise involves finding a way to serve with true human compassion. By God’s grace, I want to be that reasonable, levelheaded, quiet and supportive presence, who can walk faithfully with those going through the tragedy.

A woman in our church had a grandson who died in an automobile accident. She asked me to come to the home where all the relatives, friends, and church members were arriving to be with the family. This was a very expressive bunch, temperamentally and theologically, and the room was filled with wailing and crying and people letting out their emotions in unrestrained ways. What did I do? For most of the evening, I stood with my back to a wall, off to the side and was simply present. Every once in awhile I quietly greeted someone with a hug or pat on the shoulder, but that was about it. I literally did nothing. Yet, if you would ask that woman today what she remembers most about me being her pastor for more than 9 years, she would tell you it was all the help I gave her that night.

After a tragedy, it is important that the pastor and folks in the church realize that the bereaved who are left behind will need support that may require extraordinary attention in the short-term and consistent loving care for the long haul. Hope doesn’t come through words alone, but through a solid and reliable support group that sticks with the hurting.

Having said that, words are also important. Regular participation in the liturgy, which rehearses the fundamental truths of the Gospel over and over again, week after week, and which enables people to feed on God’s saving and sustaining presence through Word and Sacrament, can provide genuine help in reorienting those whose lives have become radically disoriented by tragedy.

8. How does the Gospel inform your work as a hospice chaplain?

The Gospel is the announcement that, in Jesus, God’s new creation has broken into this fallen, dying creation. Through Jesus Christ, the promised new day of God’s rule has dawned, and because of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit, he has dealt the decisive blow to sin, evil, and death, and is creating a new people who will be with him forever in a new heavens and new earth. Until that new creation is revealed in its fullness, those made new by Jesus are called to live in this fallen world as God’s representatives. It is through his new people that God fulfills his mission of taking this Gospel to all the hidden corners of the world, announcing and creating newness everywhere.

That is a grand plan and vocation, but its outworking could not be more down-to-earth. Jesus said the Kingdom unfolds in small, hidden, subversive, often undetectable ways. A primary way it spreads is when one person made new humbles himself to serve another person in need. The Gospel doesn’t set us above other people, it sends us to kneel before them so that we might wash their feet. It doesn’t make us less human, but more fully human; doesn’t separate us from the world around us, but sends us into every part of that world to love and serve our neighbors.

And that’s why I love what I do so much. As a hospice chaplain, it is my privilege to go into places where people are hurting, crying, dying. By God’s grace, I pray that I may announce and create a bit of newness each day for those bound by sin and death. That’s Gospel ministry to me.

I wish I knew better how to translate this into counsel for every church, pastor, and Christian. In my view we need to abandon the misguided missions that intoxicate us, and come back to Gospel basics. Forget “building a great church.” Share the good news. Visit the sick. Give relief to the suffering. Sit with the dying. Comfort the bereaved. Be generous to those in need. Be hospitable. Love your neighbor. Live in fully human ways among your fellow human beings under God.

This is not a new “law,” but the Gospel lived out, the “Jesus-shaped” way that the Spirit constrains us to pursue.

Several times a week, I have to read folders containing psychological evaluations of prospective students. They are often quite daunting and detailed. The stories range from ordinary to nightmarish and disturbing. I must read and review the psychiatric evaluations and counseling histories of all students who are seeking admission to our school. After reading, I make a recommendation as to their appropriateness for us. In some cases, I do an additional interview, and make an evaluation based on the interview and the information.

I’ve ministered with young people and adults long enough to have seen a lot of mental illness–from my father’s depression to the suicides of co-workers and young people to the many episodes of emotional and mental illness I have encountered in church and community. I’ve visited hospitals for the mentally ill, counseled families and individuals dealing with the mental illness of a family member and helped individuals decide to seek help for everything from depression to delusions of being God.

For many years, the majority of my work week was counseling individuals at our school. In these hours of counseling, I saw all kinds of human emotional brokenness, much of it related to what we commonly call mental or emotional illness. I continue to deal with people who have sought psychiatric and psychological help, and many of our students are on psychiatric medications.

As a Christian, a minister and a servant, I am compelled to look at the subject of mental illness and make some important decisions. While the subject is tossed around without much seriousness, it is a matter of immense human pain and suffering. It is a dimension of life that Christians cannot pretend is not present and all around them on any Sunday or Monday.

Is there such a thing as mental illness? Many Christians are suspicious of the psychological worldview that diagnoses human behavior in terms of “illness” and “disorders.” Can Christians have anything to do with a way of looking at human beings that is rooted in an atheistic worldview? Is the use of medication ethical and permissable for Christians? Can we accept descriptions and diagnostic terminology rooted in psychology rather than scripture?

Is mental illness a manifestation of spiritual forces (demons) or the result of personal sin? Many Christians have embraced models of dealing with human behavior that respond to what we call mental illness with scripture-based behavior modification, scripture memory, repentance and spiritual warfare, even exorcism. Is it ethical to seek to “cure” mental illness?

Is there mental illness in the Bible? Did Jesus encounter the mentally ill? Where in the Bible can we see mental illness? Were Saul, Jeremiah and Ezekiel mentally ill? How would Jesus or Paul respond to a mentally/emotionally ill person?

What is the church’s responsibility to the mentally ill? How should they be viewed and included in the Christian community? Should the mentally ill be allowed to be part of the ministries of the church? What about their experience of God? Is it valid, or a manifestation of their mental illness?

What does the Gospel say to the mentally ill? What does it say to all human beings about the mentally ill? What does their presence among us tell us about ourselves? How is mental illness related to “true humanity?”

I’ll address these questions in future posts.

One of the realities of being a semi-regular correspondent with an audience returning day after day looking for something new from your pen is the fact that you will be writing during all the various states of the human experience. Christian writing on the internet has the tendency to sound as if it is always coming from the warm glow of the study, with drippings of devotional gold appearing on the page after hours of prayer and meditation. I’d judge that to be, almost universally, a myth, and I’m not much on mythologies in my Christianity.

There are times that one may be writing out of boredom, other times out of emptiness or despair, and even holding onto the crumbling edge between faith and unbelief. There will be times I will write from a season of joyful usefulness and other times I am writing in the slop of my own sinful pigpen.

That would be today. Reporting live and in person from a week that contained some of my biggest sinful binges this year, I’m Michael Spencer. Your Internet Monk. (Two hours from any priest to confess me and the Baptists will just tell me to take two church services and I’ll feel better next week.)

When I tell anyone that I have shocking sins, they are generally shocked. I am the one who is supposed to speak about shocking sins, but whose sins shouldn’t be shock-worthy. The implication is, of course, that the audience actually has a list of “shocking” sins- running a drug cartel, frequenting prostitutes, rooting for the Yankess- that come to mind when I say my sins are shocking. If I said, “I was a rotten husband,” they would sigh with relief. Thank God. Nothing serious.

I was a rotten human being for most of last week. I was also sick. Probably with H1N1. I just dealt with it, but the day I was most miserable was also the day my wife needed me to be the most attuned to her needs and helpful to her.

Calvinists love to preach that we are dead in trespasses and sins, and that’s a true and important component of the Gospel. What is unfortunate is that rather than letting the metaphor be, well….metaphorical, i.e. the life of God is not in us, well meaning enthusiasts try to make being dead the only significant fact in human experience. As is so often the case these days among the theological class, the failure to let all the Biblical images and metaphors live together without having a “there can be only one” party has serious pragmatic results.

The Bible uses disease and sickness as metaphors for sin from cover to cover. (In fact, given its prescientific interpretation of illness, sin is often seen as the cause of illness.) Sinners are sick. Fallen humans are diseased.

What’s interesting about this is that when we say someone is “sick,” we are often eliciting compassion and understanding. Rarely are we saying that a person is responsible for themselves and what they do in the same way they would be if they are healthy. Sickness is….an excuse.

Of course, metaphors have a focus and that is true with saying we are diseased and Christ is the great Physician who “comes to heal the sick, not the healthy.” Sin as sickness is one of the ways we understand what is happening in Jesus’ healings and miracles. Isaiah said that we are healed by his sufferings. All our diseases were placed on him says the prophet and the Gospel.

I’m glad about what I come to know about Jesus’ attitude toward me as a sick person. In a 1983 column, Dr. John Piper explored the sickness metaphor as an image of the community of Jesus. About Jesus as the great Doctor and ourselves as patients he said

Christ is walking among us. Not because we are so much fun to be with but because he loves to make house calls on patients who glory in his medical expertise. He is not partial to the healthy. But he has a special fondness for the homeliest, weakest, sickliest patients whose eyes sparkle when he enters the room….What a motley sanatorium we are! Paralyzed, clubfooted, humpbacked, pockfaced, nearsighted, cancer-eaten! But there is life at Bethlehem! The Doctor’s here! He’ll touch any sore without a flinch. And O, how it soothes. He spends time. He talks. He looks you in the eye. He takes your elbow when you rise. He asks how Jake is doing. He promises he’ll be back. And he comes!

Actual, physical illness amplifies the greatness of God’s compassion, and it also illuminates my wretched sinful condition. In illness, my sinfulness takes on cartoonishly monstrous dimensions. I become the Godzilla of sin.

By mid-week, I was miserable, feverish and feeling as if I’d been hit by a bus. These are the flu symptoms I recognize from the few times I’ve had the flu.

My first- sinful- thought is that I cannot miss work. I’ve never missed a class for being sick in 18 years. I’ve never missed a day of work for being sick, including being in my room to meet families on Family Day….when I had Chicken Pox. (I covered them in make up.) I’m feeding my idol of being essential, irreplaceable and absolutely necessary.

See. Shocking. It’s Halloween.

Mid week my wife needs me to be in charge of matters on an important day. I’m willing, but now that I’m sick, I’m doing everything with the attitude of a captured and tortured prisoner of war. Nothing is too small for me to immediately think of myself as the only person of worth on the planet. When she needs me to be attentive and sensitive, I am…..to me and the flu. Of course, I season this with some classic verbal idiocy, whining and pouting so that my sin isn’t just ordinary, but especially cruel.

I’m almost worse than useless for the situation we have to deal with that day and I make the whole matter far more stressful for her. Of course, all I can think about is the flu that seems to be settling into my chest.

And then, as my final performance, I come home and go to bed…..in order to get up the next morning and act as if the whole focus can now be off her and on me and the flu.

The next day, I’m supposed to help get the house ready for visitors if I feel better. I can barely make it to work, and when I come home, I crash again, offering no help. My flu eventually causes a change of venues for the visitors- my daughter’s home- and I am left alone to recover. I’m dimly aware that it must be hard to like me when I’m sick and as I start to feel better my suspicions increase that my wife, who has treated me as any sick husband should be treated and with more kindness, probably should have smothered me and blamed the swine flu. No jury in my county would convict her.

Sin and sickness. Sinners and sick persons. Jesus loves us as both. That’s more than I can comprehend. Because in my illness I am short-sighted, self-consumed, uncaring toward others, hyper-sensitive, dictatorial and immaturely manipulative. Once I’m over it, I want to put all my rotten behavior in the “Well, I was sick” file, but even I can’t entirely buy it.

I’m just a sick, rotten, selfish jerk. With a lot of repenting to do and a lot of sin to confess.

Sometimes, really, the Gospel seems too good.

But then, when I’m not sick, I’m still a sinner. I live in ways contrived to excuse my sin, avoid the truth and keep up a religiously acceptable front.

It takes the swine flu to show me, and remind me, that with just a small push, I’m very comfortable living in the mud.

Gracious God, our sins are too heavy to carry, too real to hide, and too deep to undo. Forgive what our lips tremble to name, what our hearts can no longer bear, and what has become for us a consuming fire of judgment. Set us free from a past that we cannot change; open to us a future in which we can be changed; and grant us grace to grow more and more in your likeness and image, through Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen.

The incarnation may be the greatest stumbling block that Christianity places in the road of faith, but that stumbling block is the cornerstone of everything Christians believe about Jesus.

What does the incarnation mean for all of us? The incarnation means that God has personally crossed the unimaginable gap between himself and every human being, becoming one of us, and making it possible for every person to know God by way of the path of being human. In Jesus, God comes to us as one of us, speaks to us in human language, relates to us and draws us into relationship with himself without requiring us to be anything other than what we are: creatures of flesh and blood, human beings to whom God is a mystery and the curtain beyond our limitations is impenetrable in our experience. In Jesus, God comes to us, in life, through death, beyond the curtain and in simple words and signs.

The incarnation is the complete refutation of every human system and institution that claims to control, possess and distribute God. Whatever any church or religious leader may claim in regard to their particular access to God or control over my experience of God, the incarnation is the last word: God loves the world. God has come into the world in the form of those of us who bear God’s fingerprints and live in God’s world. God has come to all of us in Jesus. The incarnation is not owned, controlled or distributed by a church. It belongs to every human being. In Jesus, God comes to every one of us with no one else and nothing else in between. The incarnation is not being sold or downloaded. It is a gracious gift to every person everywhere, religious or not.

To make the obvious point, I don’t think think those who affirm the real presence in the Eucharist are trying to control the incarnation. But it is a danger. In my tradition, the implications of the incarnation are seldom considered, and preachers act as if they are “connecting” people to God via sermons, services, music, etc. Our denomination actually suggested that churches use this motto one year: “First Baptist Church: Connecting People to God.”

I’m deeply distressed by that mentality in general, no matter what the specifics happen to be. I hope that the incarnation gives to all of us a sacramental view of reality, no matter what our view of the specific sacraments of the church happen to be. Jesus comes to every person and for every person in the incarnation. This is a truth that is not mediated by the church. It is proclaimed and offered, but not ever controlled.

It’s the kind of rethinking of evangelicalism I like to do, and it will challenge you, especially if you were raised in the church with all kinds of assumptions about those outside of it.

Is there really a God-shaped void as Augustine described? What if we listened to what atheists said about themselves? Could we still evangelize, or must they buy our assumptions first?

If you live and work around serious unbelievers, this will be a crucial essay for you.

READ: A God Shaped Void? Maybe Not.

- Life After God, Douglas Coupland, (p. 359) HT to Tim at Sacrosanct Gospel

Did you ever wonder why Jesus didn’t call anyone from the religious establishment or extant established religious movements to be one of his disciples? I think I’m starting to see it more clearly, both in the gospels and in my own experience.

It’s a shame that so many Bibles insert section headings and subheadings all over the place where they aren’t needed or helpful. Take for example Mark 3. It’s a very important passage, and the insertion of so many divisions breaks up what is clearly a unit with implications as a unit.

3:1 Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. 2 And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. 3 And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” 4 And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. 5 And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. 7 Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea 8 and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him. 9 And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him, 10 for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. 11 And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” 12 And he strictly ordered them not to make him known. 13 And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. 14 And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach 15 and have authority to cast out demons. 16 He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); 18 Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, 19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. 20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.” 22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.”

You can find many good expositions of this passage, but I want to quickly note all the things that are going on around Jesus as he chooses the apostles.

1. He breaks the traditions of the Pharisees in the context of the Synagogue.
2. The Pharisees and supporters of Herod begin the plot to kill Jesus.
3. Jesus heals and cast out demons outside of the approved authorities of Judaism.
4. He appointed and authorized a group of unqualified, ragtag disciples to lead and continue his movement. The symbolism representing a symbolic “New Israel” wouldn’t have been missed.
5. His family concludes that he is “out of his mind,” most likely based on everything Jesus has been doing outside of the expected and approved confines of official Judaism.
6. The scribes from Jerusalem, representing the official assessment of Jesus, announce that Jesus’ power and authority are demonic.

The complications don’t end there, as Jesus pronounces blasphemy on this assessment and publicly identifies his movement as his family, both actions that further complicate an already tense and escalating situation between Jesus and the religious status quo.

Aside from his presence in the synagogue and observances at the temple, Jesus seems to do almost everything he can to telegraph to the official religious leaders of his time that they not only weren’t in the game, they were on the wrong team entirely. God was doing an end run around the theological teams of the time, and Jesus was in charge of the operation.

We don’t know a lot about Jesus’ apostles, but all the information we have gives a simple picture. These men were made up of followers of John the Baptist, fishermen, tax collectors and various disciples Jesus picked up along the way. Likely, few were literate.

None of them were part of the Pharisee movement. If the words of John and Jesus are indicative of how these men felt going in, it’s safe to say they weren’t fans of the establishment.

None of them were officially sanctioned rabbis or students of rabbis. I take their suspicion of Saul/Paul as a new apostle to include his identification with the establishment Judaism these men had never applauded or endorsed.

First century Galilee was a hotbed of Zealot resistance to Rome and “mongrel” religious movements. It was the worst possible place to find people to staff a movement that would have wanted any kind of mainstream respect or endorsement.

Now, I think it’s important that, no matter what we think about the “New Perspective” view of Judaism, that we understand something: many of these mainstream Jewish religious leaders were devout. We know that some in the Pharisee movement were interested in Jesus and some became believers. John’s Gospel tell us that a number of the priests “believed” in Jesus. Certainly there is evidence in early Christianity for the presence of those who were part of the religious establishment.

Jesus condemns the religious establishment for a collection of sins in places like Matthew 23, but Jesus also addresses some in the religious establishment with recognition that they are seeking to obey and honor God. Jesus certainly doesn’t divorce himself from Judaism or declare it to be the enemy. He does draw unmistakable lines regarding the Kingdom of God and his own person and mission.

In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus says “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” Think about that for a moment. Think about what Jesus is saying.

It’s plain to me that Jesus chose the apostles because they were teachable. As stubborn, ignorant, parochial, tribal, petty, selfish and slow to learn as they were, they were still more teachable than the religious establishment. They might not be the valedictorians at Pharisee U, but they could be molded, remade and made useful in the Jesus movement. They could learn about grace, the cross, the resurrection and the Kingdom of God present and at work in Jesus.

The religious leaders concluded that Jesus was demonic. Later, they would demand a “sign” in order to “believe.” When they do “believe,” John says Jesus does not entrust himself to them.

But a broken Peter says “Forgive me….for I am a sinful man.” To Peter, Jesus can say, “When you recover….strengthen your brothers.” To Peter, Jesus can say “Do you love me?…Feed my sheep.”

In other words, despite the tragic-comic characteristics of the disciples, they are still teachable. Thomas will make his speech, but he will kneel before the resurrected Jesus. They would all desert Jesus and head back to Galilee, but when they met the resurrected Lord, they could become bold and fearless world-changers.

These are men who would be slow to accept that the Kingdom of God was offered to the Gentiles, but it is Peter in Acts 10 who says he has learned that God is no respecter of persons.

I bring all of this to mind to say that to the extent that we become like the Pharisees and members of the religious establishment of Jesus day, we probably are not the kind of persons Jesus is going to be able to entrust with the Kingdom.

As I said, the Pharisees and others were often devoid, Biblically knowledgeable persons of strong convictions. They were sometimes prepared to put Jesus into one of their theological categories. They weren’t teachable on the level Jesus wanted his disciples to be teachable.

Following Jesus is not primarily about doctrinal indoctrination. Seminary and conferences, as valuable as they are, are not the paradigms for discipleship that Jesus had in mind.

Jesus’ classroom was the world. His books and lectures were the stories, parables, proclamations and applications that the disciples heard over and over again in various contexts. The center of the curriculum was the experience of Jesus himself, God with us in the world.

Remember that Jesus sent out the apostles to minister the words and works of the Kingdom in Israel before he sent them on their worldwide mission. He wasn’t wasting his time in the villages of Israel. He was training and preparing his apostles. He was working on the project of making them teachable men.

Jesus chose whom he did so that he could begin, not with seminary educations and minds stuffed full of books, but with men who believed, at best, a kind of unsophiisticated folk theology, had a biased cultural background, but who had an openness to Jesus. From that beginning, Jesus would blow up their paradigms and revolutionize their world. He was not preparing them to be the theological faculty of Jesus University or the salesmen at Jesus Incorporated. They were apostles, with a clear mission statement in Mark 3:14-15:

14 And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach 15 and have authority to cast out demons.

We are not in the unique historical roles of the apostles, but we are to be the kind of persons whom, having been with Jesus, our lives are more like him and less like the religious establishment of his day and ours.

Which brings me to the little confession at the beginning of this post. The disciples all came to see they needed God. Not that they HAD HIM, or UNDERSTOOD HIM, but that they needed this wild, unconfined, out-of-the-box God in ways they hadn’t even known they needed him before they met Jesus.

The establishment assessed Jesus on their terms. The disciples came to Jesus all kinds of ways, but in the end, they became the Apostles because they were able to live as men who NEEDED GOD, and the God they needed met them in Jesus.

For example, can you study a text too much?

Let’s say that you came to my house and I had 1500 volumes of books, almost all on Hamlet and related subjects. Extensive reference materials. Everything ever written about the play. Interpretations and commentaries and more interpretations. A small ocean of Hamlet.

You noted that I read Hamlet systematically every day. You noticed that I gave talks on Hamlet and wrote may pages of articles and comments of my own on Hamlet.

One day you begin reading some of my work on Hamlet, and after a while, a thought crosses your mind. Eventually, you look me up to ask me the question that’s presented itself.

Do I believe that everything I see in Hamlet is really there? Or, by studying Hamlet to the extent that I have, do I run the risk of having a lot more to say about Hamlet than is actually in Hamlet? Have I studied a text to the point I’ve lost the perspective of simple, direct meaning in pursuit of what only scholars can know?

In other words, if Shakespeare came into my library, read my articles and listened to my lectures, would he say “Spot on. Keep at it?” Or would he say “Huh? You’ve got to be kidding? Where did you come up with this?”

Can you study a text too much? Too deeply? With too much background? Too much insight? Finding way more than is actually there in the text?

Here’s another turn of the screw for me. I teach Bible Survey, and it’s a four quarter class. That’s basically 36 weeks, five hours a week. 180 hours. Now many of my students are absolute beginners. (The ones that aren’t are given the option of an advanced class.) Many are from other religions and cultures.

I don’t need 180 hours to teach the basic story and message of the Bible to my beginners. I could do it in 9 weeks. I could do it in two weeks actually.

Sometimes when we’re off in some of the less relevant parts of the Bible- the various goings on in David’s family for example- I am genuinely concerned that the main message is getting obscured in all the other material I am teaching. I’d love to teach that “seminar” and keep the main thing the main thing. The rape of Tamar is a fine story and it’s part of our sinful history, but do my Buddhists need to know it in the same course with the gospels?

I have other concerns as well. Preachers find things in the Bible all the time that I don’t think are there. They call them “principles,” and they look great in a book or Powerpoint, but I’m just not very convinced.

At the very least, it appears to me that what the Bible says (God created marital sexuality) and what preachers say (go home and have sex for 30 days in a row) get very confused in the mind of the average listener.

Into this I can throw a lot of other people who pull rabbits out of the Biblical hat for a living.

Does the Bible say all those things that people say it says about politics? Environmentalism? Morals? Raising kids? Success? Prosperity? Health? The future? Global warming? Sex? Scheduled infant feedings? Pokemon? Harry Potter?

Barak Obama just said that the sermon on the mount approves of civil unions between gays. Really? John Hagee says there’s a “Jesus diet” in there. Hope it works better for me than it did for him.

Is all that theology I keep hearing from the theological types really all there? I don’t mean there in some form that you can remix, cook, stir, add, microwave, season and serve as whatever dish you want. I mean is what Joyce Meyer has in all those books really there? Do you need Barth’s dogmatics to explain the Bible?

Is all the Dobson agenda really in the Bible? All the psychology of Biblical counselors? All the science of the creationists? All the denominational distinctives of the various denominations?

Now I have as much admiration for lifelong Bible study as you can have. I’ve given the study of the Bible years of my life and the major portion of my education and energies.

I know it has riches and transforming power. I know it is a full library of doctrine and a wonderful collection of law, literature and liturgy.

I believe it is God’s inspired word. It’s authoritative for me and my faith.

But I suspect we’ve looked too closely, and seen a lot that’s not there. I believe we find, arrange, display, demonstrate and defend a lot that isn’t really plainly taught in scripture. I am afraid the Bible is a Rorschach test for many people, and what the see isn’t clouds. It’s rabbits and a train and…..

I believe that if we take the Bible as literature, we would be able to say something like this:

The Bible is an extensive collection of literature that, when taken together, presents the story Christians call the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Christians believe this book is inspired by God and interpreted by the Spirit of God, but it remains a book written by human authors and understood primarily in the obvious ways we approach any literature. The message of the Bible answers the biggest, most important and most vital of life’s questions and proclaims God’s saving message to all persons. The rich literary contents of the Bible can occupy anyone with much study, but in its basic message- its essential, Christ-centered message- there is a remarkable directness and brevity. You do not have to be an expert on first century Judaism or the sociology of sacrificial systems to understand the Bible. The message is ably summarized in the Gospels and elsewhere in the New Testament. Even a child can understand it, believe it and live it.

If we leave the impression that the Bible needs an army of Ph.ds, thousands of brilliant preachers with 3 degrees each or a library of commentaries to be understood, proclaimed and applied, we’re distorting the truth.

Thank God for all the knowledge we have about the Bible, but we’re not gnostics looking for the “secret message” in between the lines. It’s a book, with a plot, a story and characters. Read it- or skim it with some help, get the New Testament message clear, and you are good to go, grow and live.

In fact, what we need is more reminding, recollecting and repeating of the Bible’s message, and less addition to that message.

Study it less? Maybe. Maybe live it, live out of it, communicate it and teach it more. But what we’re looking for in the Bible is fully and completely there in the one Paul said he always preached: Christ Jesus: the crucified Lord.

Here’s my original review of Schaeffer’s book, and a later link to an interview with Schaeffer.

“My father sexually abused me.”

“Both of my parents are in prison on drug charges.”

“My dad had another wife and kids in another town, and we just found out last year.”

“My mom slept with different men every night. I’m realizing she probably did it for money.”

“Our family almost starved because of my mother’s drug problems. The state finally took us away from her.”

“Two of my foster families had boys in them who sexually abused me.”

“My dad raises pot and makes meth. It’s just a way of life where we live.”

“My brothers sexually abused me for three years.”

“My brother is a sex offender who’s been in and out of prison.”

“My dad shot my mother, then shot himself. My brother and I were at school or we would be dead.”

“We moved every month. Mom just couldn’t keep a job because she couldn’t stay sober.”

“Mom is simply too unstable a person for me to live with. My grandparents had to raise me.”

“I was with my dad when he committed suicide.”

“Our pastor physically abused his children. I saw it many times.”

“One of my school teachers tried to seduce me into a homosexual relationship. I’m sure I’m not the only one.”

“My own porn addiction started with my dad’s addiction. It was everywhere in our home and still is.”

“I’ve never seen my dad sober on a weekend. Never.”

“Having a mother with severe mental illness is hard. I had to be the adult in our family most of the time.”

These are some of the stories I’ve heard in counseling over the years. All true, and many of them in multiple editions. Because of the particular population I minister to, these kinds of life-stories are common. They are the wall-paper of the rooms I inhabit. There is not a moment of the day I’m not surrounded by these stories and the people they belong to.

I’m a great believer in the intersection of story and life. I don’t know all that much about psychology or therapy, but I know a few things about story, characters, plot, conflict, development, complication, metaphor, symbolism, resolution, climax and the elements of a story. The Gospel is God’s story. The Biblical story is God’s story. The invitation of God is to join our stories with his, and to come to terms with the elements of our own stories in the context of the story that reveals a new world and new people in the image of Jesus Christ.

I encourage those I minister to to see their lives as a story, and the statements above present some of the elements which they must come to terms with in making their own stories meaningful and coherent. It is often these painful elements of their personal narratives that hold significant keys to other parts of their life stories.

In coming to terms with our own sin, we must come to terms with the sins of others and with the sinfulness of the human race. This is fundamental. There is no other context for the human story. We have sinned. We have been surrounded by sinners. We have been brought up, raised and taught by sinners. Those who love us most are also sinners, and some of them have done terrible things that have affected us.

Recent discussions involving my responses to Frank Schaeffer’s autobiography Crazy For God have brought these issues to the forefront of my mind. Is Schaeffer breaking the fourth commandment? Is he sinning against his parents? Should he be condemned for the pain he is causing to others by telling some of his own story? Does love and humility demand that Schaefer tell his own story without telling of the failings of his parents? These are important questions for those of us who believe in the power of a life story accounted and recorded.

Is it humiliating to parents and family to tell the story of a sinful family? Is the entire idea of telling an authentic story of our lives actual a kind of fetish, nurtured and fed by the publishing industry, media and the internet? Is personal authenticity and truthfulness a mask for cruelty, selfishness and phony self-justification?

All of these questions have been raised in the context of discussing Schaeffer’s book. My own writing on the web has been characterized as a kind of voyeuristic “expos(ing) your whole life to the internet” in search of some “hit” of authenticity. Such criticisms have long been raised against what I do here. (Interestingly, this is one of the topics I’ll be speaking about at Cornerstone ‘08.)

These are substantial criticisms, and I agree with many of them. When I teach the Ten Commandments to students, these issues come up around two commandments: How can you honor your parents if they have not behaved honorably? How can you obey the command to tell the truth without being sinfully cruel? (”Mrs. Harper, your baby is rather ugly.”)

I’ve answered these questions in detail for years, and I am well aware that they contain many subtleties. In particular, the students whose stories are summarized above deserve an answer in how to come to terms with their own stories and still honor their parents.

There are several points I make in that regard. The Bible is brutally honest about the sins of its major characters, and this is because the truth about human sinfulness is a major theme of God’s story as he tells it. God is not sinning by telling the stories of sinful creatures. He is being truthful, honorable, merciful and loving. Adam, Cain, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Samson and Peter are our fathers, too.

God’s truthful telling of the human story is not accusatory, but factual. It is not self-justifying, but necessary for proper diagnosis. It is not humiliating to God or to human beings to speak truthfully about sin.

The idea that it is humiliating to talk about the sinfulness of our families is, in terms of the Biblical story, bizarre. This is who we are. The agenda to mask our sinfulness is a deadly spiritual poison. The strength of the Biblical worldview lies exactly here. If a person finds it humiliating that Frank tells of a marriage between sinners or that his father was depressed or his mother excessively zealous, they have abandoned the Biblical view of human sinfulness and substituted a false piety.

The story of the cursing of Ham is not telling us that it is always wrong to speak of the sinfulness of parents. It is telling us that we can selfishly grandstand our parents sins for derision and that is wrong. But to say the only choices are silence and sinful derision is simplistic.

If we want to honor our parents, we will be truthful about them, applying all the categories of the Biblical story to them: honor, love, mercy and sinfulness. It is in the context of telling us of his own repentance from sins against his parents that Schaefer tells of his parent’s sinful humanity. Those who find this “humiliating” have decided that the Bible’s view of human beings is, when we tell it, humiliating. Schaeffer does not “drag his parents through the mud” for resentment’s sake. Anyone who says so hasn’t read the book. Schaefer’s affection for his parents is deep and moving. His regret for his sins against them is genuine. But his commitment to not let the Schaeffer family be “icons” is also real, and while many in evangelicalism find this painful, I applaud it. We’ve had enough of the Ted Haggard version of evangelicalism. I’ll take a human Luther- flaws, failures, violence, racism and all- over the icons of contemporary reformed and evangelical celebrity worship. (I suggest any reader curious about Frank Schaeffer find his Book-TV lecture and note his attitude toward those whom HE ALLOWED AND ENCOURAGED to make his dad into a cult figure. Frank holds HIMSELF responsible for the distortion of his dad from a very tolerant man into a culture warrior.)

The second commandment we often discuss is the command of truthfulness. This commandment does not remove other commandments. Truthfulness is not an excuse for cruelty, self-justification, manipulation, whining or being hurtful to others. When I have been accused of advocating “authenticity” that excuses the worst kinds of hurtful, immature and selfish behavior, I want to respond that far from it, I feel all the weight of the command to love one another, etc. even as I encourage my students to tell the truth of their own stories.

Clearly, some Christians would prefer where the specifics of family or community sinfulness were not told in any published form. I understand the prudence of telling a story “behind closed doors.” I’ve never asked a student to come to our chapel and tell 500 other people that their father was a meth dealer. But some may choose to do so in the telling of their own story. I cannot take away that right. I can impress upon such persons that they must be loving, honorable, forgiving, merciful and respectful. I can warn them of the danger of voyeurism. But I cannot tell someone that their telling of how the Gospel story became their own story cannot include the truth about the matrix of human influences, actions and examples that made them the person they are.

There is no commendation or extra points for being “authentic” to the point of hurtfulness, cruelty and grandstanding. At the same time, there are no extra humility points either. Solomon did not recount his father’s adultery, but God did. Those who have a sinful or evil influence in their lives have to decide, in their own callings and living, what is the proper place to tell- or not tell- those portions of their stories that include the sins of others.

I can best apply this to my own life. When I speak of my father’s struggle with mental illness, I tell many things he did that are not flattering. For example, my father was so ruled by fear that he refused to allow me to participate in simple things like Little League and school trips. I have spoken about the racist atmosphere in my home when I’ve talked of my own journey to accepting others. I am not humiliating my father in these stories. I tell them while loving, honoring and applying the Gospel to him and to all who hear me.

The effects of my own telling of portions of my life story is always overwhelming. Thousands of people have written me in response to confessional essays on this web site to say that my writing has opened the door for them to accept the truth of their own lives, to not feel alone and to remake their own stories with the reconciling good news of the Gospel at a deeper level.

I understand some would not choose to do this. What I ask is that those who have, like Frank Schaefer, chosen to put their own story of guilt, grace and Gospel in context not be attacked as humiliators or promoters of cruel selfishness.

I long for a church that is as truthful as an AA meeting. At such a meeting I only have to say I am an alcoholic. But I may CHOOSE to tell my story in detail, parent’s sins included.

It’s a choice, and those who have done so have helped millions with the common grace of God. They have retold their life stories with sobriety and serenity at the center. They have described the story of human sinfulness with some detail added, but without cruelty or disrespect.

We are a long way from these kinds of churches, and many who read this would avoid such a church altogether. So be it. I can’t determine what is right in every case. I can only say that in my ministry, telling our stories truthfully builds a community of love and hope today where all are welcome to tell their stories- including the forgiveness and grief over ghosts of the past- because of the one who reconciles and forgives us all.

Jesus is not humiliated by the human story or by your version of it. He has a way of owning stories and making them another way of telling his own.

Some of my thoughts after reading The Atlantic Monthly’s feature story on The Golden Compass. Chataway cover’s the director’s response to the Atlantic Monthly’s article.

There is no more important single distinction in theology than the difference between being God-centered and man-centered. After years of listening to various Christians explain their faith and its implications, this distinction remains: Are we talking about a God-centered reality or a man-centered reality?

This is especially important to me because I call myself a Christian humanist, and I am very loyal to what that means. Humanness, in the Christian sense, is a God-defined reality. It is an experience whose definitions can only be talked about reasonably in the light of the humanity of Jesus. In the incarnation, we see what true humanity was meant to be, can be and will be.

In my Advanced Bible class, we spent today reading some of the statements of Phillip Pullman regarding his Dark Materials Trilogy. I am no expert on Pullman’s variation on rejecting the Christian faith, but what I read this weekend is garden variety Freudianism. The sexual awakening defines the human being, and religion, society, family, etc., grow up around this experience of sexuality.

Our salvation, if I am reading Pullman correctly, comes from accepting the inherent goodness and freedom that comes with sexual awareness and awakening, and our concern ought to be to rid ourselves of religion and other irrational restraints on sexual freedom.

In the midst of this, Pullman says that the original sin was (somehow) sex. Apparently he believes that the forbidden fruit was to have sexual relations. A crucial aspect of the Dark Materials stories is the replaying of a version of the garden of Eden, with two young teenagers experiencing an implied sexual awakening.

Jews and Christians, of course, look at this sort of thing with amazement. The Genesis accounts tell us that God invented sexual intercourse, said it was not good for man to be alone, created sexual chemistry itself, made “one who fits” to be Adam’s mate, blessed their “one flesh” union and commanded them to keep at being fruitful and multiplying until the earth was filled and subdued. Compared to the God of gnosticism, Yahweh was downright sex obsessed.

It’s in Judeo-Christianity that sexual pleasure is described in detail in the Song of Solomon. It’s in Christianity that the marriage bed is honorable. It’s in Christianity that God says to spouses don’t deny one another sexual union and your body doesn’t just belong to you but to your spouse.

If the original sin is sex, then God is certainly the author of sin. If God is against sex, he certainly could have fooled me. Is it somehow odd that God is against ways of being sexual that desecrate what sexuality means as his gift? Saying there is a wrong use of a gift is hardly the same as despising the gift. If I give my son a car, I will take a strong interest in how he uses it.

This is typical of the way many skeptics take a Freudian approach to Christianity at the expense of a fourth grade reading of the actual texts themselves. God-created, God-defined, God-commanded, God-sanctified sex is a good thing, not to be refused, but to be lived in prayerful thanksgiving.

It is a great example of what the Bible means by being “God-centered humanness.” Without the “centering” of God’s creation, blessing and command, sexuality is autonomously (or rebelliously) “man-centered,” and frankly, disastrous. The sexual liberation men like Pullman have in mind would turn the most sacred of embodied relationships into a matter of power, violence and natural competition. If Pullman wants to convince me that “killing God” and leaving us to our own definitions of sexuality is the path back to paradise, he’s got a lot to overcome. What I can see of the sexuality that results from our own versions of freedom isn’t encouraging.

God-centeredness does present the unbeliever with another starting place, one that cannot be manipulated. A personal, creator God who is, who speaks and who works all things according to his purposes. For Christians, this God centeredness is the story of Bethlehem, Calvary, Easter and Pentecost. It is the story of an final and complete recreation of all things. It is the acceptance of God’s boundaries, God’s definitions and God’s commandments.

Human beings have an academy full of psychological, social and philosophical explanations for such outmoded ideas about God. Like Pullman, the system-makers of man-centered unbelief are confident that we will do much better defining humanity ourselves.

To be God-centered is to be realistic about what happens when we attempt to humanize ourselves in a self-referential way. Our worst characteristics come to the fore, unrestrained. Our knowledge becomes a constant manufacturing of excuses. Power, greed, lust and arrogance become the currency of our interactions. We constantly assure ourselves that we are on the right path, all the while explaining our guilt, emptiness, rage, cruelty and perversion as the leftovers of our enslavement to religion.

This is a lie. If Christianity is correct, it is a lie and we know, on a deep human level, that it is a lie and we know that we are suppressing the truth. The worship of the creation, and the defining of the creature as a God superior to all other deities will turn us in upon ourselves. We will, in the end, sacrifice our children, our most precious human gifts and our humanity itself on the altar of freedom.

What Pullman sees as slavery, the Bible tells us is the only true freedom. To imagine that we are autonomously free and left to the discovery of meaning though sexual awakening is an abyss that should fill any rational person with terror.

Pullman has said he wants to destroy the tired old grey-bearded tyrant that is the Christian idea of God. I have good news. The God who is, the God revealed in scripture, the God incarnate in Jesus, has already destroyed such notions for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. It is those who prefer slavery to the wonder of being truly human who remain obsessed with that tottering old tyrant. For those who know the true God, there is true freedom and true humanity.

Greetings.

First, let me say I have thoroughly enjoyed the last year or so since I came across your website. It has been a blessing for me. You’re probably thinking I’m setting you up for something. Not really. I do have an issue to kick around with your Why Do They Hate Us? article. And I will keep reading your blog and listening to the podcasts. They are a blessing.

The thing I wanted to kick around with regards to the moral issues that oftentimes put Christians in a bad light is the way sin is treated so casually. You say we should not get uptight about a funny song about divorce. Okay, that’s fair. But for the kid who is going (or has gone) through it may not find it so funny. You say,

“These incidents show something that evangelicals need to admit. We are frequently unable to see humor, absurdity, and the honest reasons for humans to laugh at themselves. What very normal, very healthy people find laughable, we find threatening and often label with the ridiculous label of “the devil.”

I have no problem with humor done right. But for the group of men looking at pictures of naked women and carrying on and such. They laugh, they invite others to join. (This kind of thing has actually happened in the office where I work.) But to say that this kind of thing is wrong puts you at odds with those who indulge. These kind of people are very normal, very healthy people who find this kind of thing laughable. In their mind there is nothing wrong with this kind of thing. Now, I don’t go so far to say this kind of thing is “of the devil”. But there is definitely a place for a Christian to make a stand.

I don’t want to make this a long email. I’m wondering where you draw the line between the kind of thing you talk about in your article and the scenario that puts the Christian in a compromising position between good harmless humor and crossing the line to cause himself or another?

Bob

Bob raises a great issue that I’ve wanted to write about for some time. Today seems like a good day because I both received this email and I taught about Humor and Irony in my AP English IV class.

Humor seems to be a uniquely human capacity. I am sure there are corollaries in the animal kingdom, but so much of what we as humans find humorous has to do with uniquely human capacities of intelligence, reconstructing reality, communication, the perception of incongruity and so on. So I want to start by saying that we have a holy responsibility to display God’s glory in humor, as it is certainly related to what it means to be made in the image of God.

The report that Jesus never was humorous is quite misplaced, in my view. We may not have a report of his laughter, but his ability to make others laugh is obvious. This is rooted in many places in the Bible where humor is used prophetically, pastorally, didactically and pragmatically. (See Proverbs, for example.)

Humor has a diversity of uses, ranging from the harmless to the destructive to the good. For example, a fat joke can hurt someone deeply, while another example of humor featuring the obese might move someone to be more gracious or sympathetic, actually increasing compassion. Humor has a tremendous humanizing potential, but that humanizing process will reveal what we mean when we say we are “human.” We may elevate that definition or demean it with humor.

Humor is something we perceive in reality but it is also a way of retelling, remembering and reconstructing reality. Humor is a shared perception of reality brought to light with the particular skill of the comic. Of course, our creation of humor is a subtle and dangerous path. My father taught me that people are funny, but it’s my depravity that find ways to laugh at people as beneath me. Humor often precedes horror, and they are not unconnected.

Christian conservatives and fundamentalists (including those who will continually deny being fundamentalists) are obviously ambiguous about humor, and not without some good reasons. For example, these types of religionists will carp about a mild joke using sexual content, but they will hold their adversaries up for endless ridicule based on physical characteristics and caricatured theology, and even defend the practice as loving.

More importantly, many Christians are unclear on when they can join in the laughter that other people may find in a particular situation. Put a group of conservative Christians into a movie surrounded by unbelievers. You’ll soon notice Christians making an attempt not to laugh, even at what they know is funny, because of their belief that to laugh at some things unbelievers find humorous amounts to compromise. Others will be compelled to appear offended, and some genuinely are, while the majority of the audience laughs. Perhaps the minority is in the right, or perhaps they are seeing and hearing something quite different in the humor presented.

For example, I find Carlos Mencia side-splittingly hilarious, but some of his humor crosses lines that I would not cross as a Christian communicator. For example, Mencia will plainly lampoon the stereotypical behavior of various ethnic groups. I can’t think of many more effective ways for someone to see the truth of their behavior than to have it made the object of skillfully revealing humor. Who can say what the humor of Richard Pryor did to help many of us finally see ourselves as “white people.”

But is the humor approving of what is sinful? Is it approving of all the kinds of language used in the description? Is the end result the normalizing of what is wrong? These are important questions, and they must be asked in the context of a Christian witness. In looking toward a Christian approach to humor, C.S. Lewis has proven helpful to me.

C.S. Lewis divided humor four ways in his book The Screwtape Letters. (Chapter 11): Joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy. Joy is the air of heaven and Screwtape finds it rare and mysterious. We’ll pass on it and look at the other three categories.

Fun, according to Screwtape, is all fizz and not of any real use to demons because it is insubstantial. I wonder if Screwtape missed a number of rich possibilities of perverting fun into idolatry and addiction, and not just meaningless diversion. Perhaps contemporary America would inspire him. (Perhaps the current evangelical “worship revolution” would inspire him.) We live in a culture where entertainment is an unquestioned good, and this has tremendous potential for evil. While God has created us with the capacity for fun, there are questions about how those capacities can be exercised morally and in a God-glorifying way. Much about human life is both fun and funny, and need not be avoided, but what is fun is not necessarily a gift of God.

What Screwtape called the “joke proper” is humor based on incongruity, and as such as great capacities for common areas of truth. But unbelievers and believers have varying attitudes toward truth. Screwtape sees contemporary humor having the great potential of removing shame, thereby making all sorts of thing that are wrong, evil or shameful to be acceptable.

Here Christians do have to make judgments, and those judgments are not simple or always predictable. Elsewhere, Lewis says that it is not a good thing when someone insists that all persons exercise total abstinence in an area where temperance is appropriate. So it is with humor. Complete abstinence seems like the easier route, but I am convinced that temperance, which will risk some participation that the teetotaler refuses, is the better route. So I prefer to risk engagement with humor rather than to avoid all worldly varieties of it.

So if I imagine a joke being told in the office about sex between an elderly married couple, there is the possibility of an insight into humanity, grace, acceptance, the true nature of sexuality, even knocking down some of the sexual idolatry of our culture. Or one can abandon the entire topic because it touches on sex.

There are things that are sacred, but whose sacredness does not preclude humor. In fact, in some cases, it is humor that upholds sacredness that is generally despised. Shakespeare often used the “Fool” to be the court prophet, especially in King Lear. It was the light of humor that actually was the light of truth.

Lewis’s fourth kind of humor is flippancy, which he defines as sheer derision for the sake of mockery, with no actual humor at work. This is the incessant humor of our age that laughs at nothing, laughs at everything, has not a hint of the true intelligence, compassion or truthfulness of good humor, but simply stands over a subject with a leer, insisting on the recognition of its own superiority. Bob’s description of men looking at naked women and laughing seems flippant to me, not funny. The song “I’m Gonna Miss Her” seems like a good humorous shot at the absurdity of our values in America.

Sadly, this kind of scoffing is common among those Christians who incessantly and cruelly deride others with no good will or actual humor, but with the club of their own superiority and the applause of the in-group.

I cannot guide Bob in how to navigate his own office or friendships. I agree that lines must be drawn, but I believe Christians are called to be funny and that it is often a sin to be too serious. It is a lack of grace that cannot extend charity into humor. It is a lack of humanity that cannot laugh at what we all are or what we all may become. We should not try to laugh like the world, but we can laugh with the world where truth, love, grace and other virtues are heard in the laughter.