Advent 2022: Rebuilding

Fort Jacques was a hillside encampment erected under the direction of Alexander Petion. Built a few miles south and uphill from Port-au-Prince, it included a storage room, a cistern, several cannons and an escape tunnel that led to nearby Fort Alexandra. Petion ordered it built after the successful Revolution of 1802 against the possible return of the French in the event Napoleon or one of his successors found the former slave colony too alluring to let it remain free.

Over the years after Petion's death, the march of time took its toll and the fort fell into disrepair. Farmers removed stones to mark boundaries. Winter chilled and summer warmed while rains pounded, and the tunnel collapsed. Cannons fell from their parapets and rolled downhill. By the mid-20th century, with this piece of Haiti's history in danger of disappearing completely, the United Nations funded a project to restore it.

By the time I visited it in 1993, it was more or less fully restored. The walls were at full height, and all the cannons that could be found had been returned. That tunnel was still collapsed, but the only major difference was the small chips of stone mixed into the mortar, a signal from UNESCO that the fort had been rebuilt. If someone hadn't told me the history, I doubt I would have been able to tell.

Things need to be rebuilt for lots of reasons. The edifice held up well, but the steady progression of days, like the march of a thousand tiny feet, slowly wore it down. The battlements met their purpose, but there were some attacks that pounded it too hard, and it came apart; or maybe an act of God shook the ground and the house, which provided shelter and sanctuary before just wasn't up to the task this time. Or -- my favorite -- someone took it apart to see how it works.

Whatever the reason -- benign neglect, acts of violence, violent acts, curiosity or something else -- it needs to rebuilt. The good news is that, having seen its weaknesses exposed, we can find a way to rebuild it, stronger.

Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Advent 2022: Faith

Years ago I asked my students to explain what they thought faith was.

It didn't take long before it became obvious that they were in over their heads. A few of them, misunderstanding the topic, explained what they believed. A couple talked about coming to faith. Mostly, though, they gave good examples of empericism and the scientific method at work.

I've known a few adults who don't understand faith either. They hold a name it and claim it theology that says if you just believe something hard enough, and don't admit to any doubt, miracles will happen. That's a cruel kind of faith, because whe we try to be stupider than we are, we usually succeed. People with this kind of faith often are the sort tell everyone that their cancer has been healed, and will find ways to ignore the growing mass right up to the moment the undertaker comes for them and the whisper campaign begins that their faith wasn't good enough.

"Faith," Priscilla tells us, " is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It's not rooted in empirical evidence, but it doesn't fly in the face of it either. It rests in our ability to imagine an invisible word. We can't point to justice, or measure the weight of love. No one has heard trust jump into a pile of autumn leaves, or sat with friendship in the garden sipping lemonade and listening to the bananaquits. Like God, none of those things is real enough for that.

But as many of us do with God, we place our faith in those things and allow them to shape our lives with meaning.

Advent 2022: Grace

I once heard a campus minister define grace as God's Riches At Christ's Expense.

As backronyms go, this one excels because while it's not particularly insightful, it does manage to misportray one of the fundamental mysteries of the Christian faith. So while it's not theologically sound, is it at least clever? Also no.

I dislike this sermon in a bottle because it pushes the notion that grace is all about Christ stepping in and getting a divine whoopin' with God's righteous paddle that he had meant for us. Grace is so much more than that.

What is grace? 

To begin with, grace brings heaven down to earth so that it can join us in our dance halls, throw darts with us at the corner pub and celebrate all the joys and drudgery of being human. At the same time it lifts us to heaven so that we can walk through fields beyond the reach of angels. In this dance that she choreographs grace closes the distance that separates us from God and from one another.

So it is grace that comes in the darkness as everything falls apart, puts her hand on your shoulder, and says, "I'm here. It'll be okay." It's also grace that says "I'm really upset by what's happened, and I need to know if you're ready to talk about it yet, because we can't ignore it."

When your car breaks down on the highway at 11 p.m. on a summer night, it's grace that gets out of bed, drives through the darkness and comes to the rescue. Grace ihabits summer afternoons of simple delight, as you play in the creek chasing mudskippers or trying to build a dam; and she also lives in the silent meditation that comes with burning driftwood at night on a beach empty of all but you and Old Man Tide.

Grace lies in wait at the end of a long trail, in the cabin with a warm bed, a kettle of soup on the fire and a candle in the windowsill, egging you on one more mile, one last road, one final step. But she walks with you too, and she has been known to pick up and to carry hikers when they've gone as far as they can, have nothing left to give, and collapsed in the snow mere feet or entire leagues from their destination.

You don't earn grace; in fact sometimes it seems unreasonable or unfair when she lavishes her kindness on others who seem less deserving or less needy than ourselves.. Grace can even feel brutal. People who know her well speak of her cruelty when they meet her in the loss of loved ones, in the death of dreams and in pains so deep that they can be expressed only as an endless howl that comes from the soul.

I have found grace to a divine, golden thread that is woven through all the cloth of our life, ineffable, incomprehensible, impossible to explain but through metaphor, and yet powerful enough to transfigure any experience and every moment into a flash of lightning. In her hands a sow's ear becomes a silk purse, even as that purse remains the ear of a pig.

Grace is always free. Free for the asking, yes; but always freely given.

Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Advent 2022: Looking

Do we find Truth, or is it revealed to us? 

We used to argue about this a lot when I was in college. It seemed like the most important thing in the world at times. 

Eventually I realized that it doesn't make a bit of difference whether you discover something or someone goes to great lengths to show you where it is. You need to look at it and figure out what it's for.

A call for the church to be a safe place

Here we are again.

Over the weekend, a gunman entered a nightclub in Colorado and opened fire. Five people were killed, and another 17 were reported injured. The club appears to have been targeted specifically because it caters to the LGBTQ community.

The death toll isn't as high as at the Pulse nightcllub in 2016. Reports from Club Q indicate that a military veteran was at Club Q when the attack started, and with that combat experience, courage and help from other patrons, and some luck, they were able to stop the gunman.

As happens when these things do, there's the usual hand-wringing and the usual vapid offers of thoughts and prayers over the bloodshed. How could this happen? 

Really? Let me explain.

For the past several months, the nation has heard Republican politicians and conservative talking heads all over the country fret and fan the flames of moral panic over the transgender community, imagining unseen dangers in children attending going to the library for storytime with drag performers. It's a familiar political tactic from the Right. Create the sense that American values are under siege, so that riled-up voters turn out on Election Day. So Matt Walsh bemoans an imagined epidemic of genital mutilation. Jordan Peterson gnashes his teeth than Elliot Page, in the final stages of gender transition, had breast reduction surgery. Mixed with this pervasive outrage is misinformation that conflates gender care with gender transition, to spread the lie that children whose sex isn't being surgically reassigned are using litter boxes in the school bathroom because they think they're cats.

What's missing? Not a matter of perspective, but a matter of decency. People may claim that the conservative alarms are overblown but sincere, that there are legitimate concerns about the message being sent to children regarding sexuality and gender, and while "we may hate the sin, we certainly love the sinner."

You know what happens when we hate the sin but love the sinner? The "sinner" dies, that's what happens. They get beaten to death in Wyoming, they jump off a bridge in New Jersey to escape their tormentors, or they get gunned down while they're out having a good time with friends in one of the few public spaces where they feel free to be themselves unreservedly.

Do you want to worry about the message kids are getting? Worry about this one. For the past year especially gays and trans folk and their allies have been described as pedophiles and groomers, part of a satanic conspiracy out to convince innocent boys to change their sex just to play on the girls lacrosse team.

I for one am through entertaining such insanity with aguments based on science and medicine. It's past time for conservatives and especially conservative Christians to start answering for their bigotry. Teens who don't identify as the sex they were born as aren't sick. They aren't insane, possessed or even confused. But because of the culture war tactics conservative voices keep employing, those teens are at a heightened risk for bullying, depression, suicide and sexual assault. 

You want unnatural? You'll find it in places like Florida, where it's illegal for teachers to discuss gender identity or sexual orientation with teens who are struggling with being different and not measuring up to social expectations. You want sick? It's in the culture war politics of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who wants to fine or fire teachers who feel compassion for their lgbtq charges and try to help them. The message DeSantis and his GOP allies are sending? We don't want you to get help or express yourselves. We want you to be quiet, stay in your lane, and be who and what we say you are.  The inevitable end of this bullying? Dead teens.

In contrast with all this, the Bible presents us with a God who created Adam as nonbinary. It was only later that God removed the feminine aspect of his creation and gave her a life of her own as Eve. The Bible reveals a Creator who defies easy gender assignment. God creates both male and female in his image. He identifies as masculine throughout Scripture but in a stunningly beautiful image compares his relationship with his people to that of a mother nursing her child. 

The end result of the GOP campaign against the transgender ends in places like Club Q where people with easy access to guns, fed a diet of fear of paranoia, stand over the dead, believing the lie that somehow they have struck a blow for freedom and righteousness.

We serve a God who is holy and who commands us to be holy. He gave us an ethic to live by, a code of holiness that comes with a promise that if we follow it, then we will live and draw others to him. It's a line in the sand that he drew, and that line is clear: Love. When the bully comes for the weak, defend the weak. Take their part, hide them under your wings and face the bullies with the question every bully fears from someone with authority: "Is there a problem here?"

The church is on the wrong side of this fight. How will we stand before God when he calls us to account for our reckless and hateful language? Be thankful that God is merciful. If we repent, there may yet be time for us to be saved.

Healing touch

We don't even know his name.

Some of the people Jesus performed miracles for, we know their names. whom they were related to, or at least enough for a basic Twitter bio. Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha. Blind Bartimaeus. Tamar, daughter of Jairus, leader of the synagogue. The Syro-Phoenician woman.

This guy? We've got nothing. He was a vagrant. He had no name, no home, no family. His identity could be expressed in one word: leper.

If he were killed while resisting arrest, there probably wouldn't even be an inquest.

Leprosy is a relentless, unforgiving disease. It kills nerve endings so that those who have it feel no pain when they're injured. Burns don't burn. Cuts don't smart. And when you don’t know you’re hurt, your injuries get worse. Bruises blossom like flowers. Nicks and cyts fester snd become open wounds. As the disease runs its course, it disfigures its victims more and more.

In order to keep the disease from spreading, and (let’s be honest, to spare people the sight) many ancient societies -- and even modern ones -- would send lepers into colonies away from human habitation, where they posed no threat to the health and welfare of anyone else. If a leper came into town or even just met someone on the open road, people crossed the street to avoid them. If they got too close the people would even throw stones at them to drive them away. 

In biblical times, the lepers even had to ring a bell to warn people they were coming and to stay away. "Outcast!" they would shout. "Leper! Unclean!"

Our unnamed hero took a different approach. When he recognized the stranger on the road was Jesus, he cried out, probably with more than a little desperation, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean!"

Jesus, you see, had gained a reputation by this point. He was someone who could heal lepers, and did. But what he did with our hero was even bigger than that.

People have an innate and inescapable need to be touched. For infants, touch is an instinctive part of the bond they share with their mothers. Put a struggling newborn in skin-to-skin contact with her mother, and her temperature will stabilize, her racing pulse will slow, and she'll trade her agita for serenity.

This fundamental need for touch continues throughout life. We gauge the trustworthiness of others with a handshake, thrill to the feathery touch of fingers on our arms, relish the intimacy of holding the hand of a loved one, relax amid a backscratch or massage, and draw strength from a hug. And sex is overwhelimingly about touch from the start of foreplay to the warm glow of aftercare as you lie wrapped in your partner and the two of you drift off together.

Deny someone the intimacy of touch, and you can watch them start to fidget and make up for the loss. They crack their knuckles, they hug themselves. They'll run fingers over their own hands and over their own arms. It's all an exercise in self-soothing, but it's a losing battle. People suffering from skin hunger often will slide into anxiety and depression, and are at an elevated risk of mental and physical illness.

This man was a leper. No one would touch him.

"Lord," he cried, desperate to get Jesus' attention. "If you are willing, you can heal me."

Jesus had all sorts of ways of healing people. Sometimes they were gross, like the time he spit in the dirt and smeared mud across the blind man's eyes. Sometimes he used his dramatic voice, like when he stood outside the tomb of his friend and called "Lazarus, come forth!" Other times he just gave the word, and healing was done. The gospels record that he even healed lepers this way.

Not this time.

"If I am willing?" he asked, disbelieving. "I'm willing. Be clean!"

With that, the evangelist writes, Jesus reached out and touched the man.

By that point, healing the leprosy would have been an afterthought.

Copyright 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Reassessing the Woman at the Well and our Legacy of Misogyny

It was midday.

For most of the women in the village, the day had begun at least six hours earlier, before the morning sun had even appeared. Stirring in the cool darkness before dawn, they had lit fires from coals kept overnight. There had been breakfasts to fix, torn clothes to mend, bread to bake in the village ovens, and a thousand other chores demanding attention.

But most important of all was the early-morning trek to Jacob’ s Well, to fetch the day’s water.

It was an active time, but it was a lively and social time as well. While they waited with their jars, away from their husbands and their men, they were able to talk freely. As they fetched their water, the women shared their news: how sisters and grandmothers were doing, which merchants were coming to town with what wares, which girl had caught which boy’s eyes, who was pregnant. They shared advice: how to treat an illness, how to keep a man’s heart, how to avert a hand raised in anger.

They talked, and that could be bad enough; but when they stopped talking, that could be even worse. Fotoni had been at the well too many times when the voices fell silent and the whispers replaced them. She had felt the eyes of the other women linger on her as she walked past, and she had bled when haughty eyes and upturned chins had cut her deep.

Fotoni no longer went to Jacob’s Well in the morning to gather her water when the air was cool and comfortable. She went instead when it was noon and the air baked like the village oven. She went at noon when she could get water in peace, and she could be alone. There was never anyone else at the well at midday.

And then one day, there was.

* * *

Fotoni saw the man before he saw her. He was a Jew in his late 20s or early 30s, and he sat near the well by himself, doing nothing in particular. His face and his robe were coated in the dust of the road, and he looked tired enough that he posed no greater threat than the usual insults Jews and Samaritans hurled at one another. She could handle those; she already had endured far worse.

She stepped closer, and the man heard her. He turned, and to Fotoni’s shock, he spoke to her.

“Can I have a drink?” he asked, and with that simple request, Jesus began the longest recorded conversation in the gospel with a woman.

It was a conversation that would end with Fotoni returning to the village and telling everyone she could about the strange man she had met by the well. She told them how he had looked right through her as if he could peer into the deep parts of her soul, and she shared the strange conversion they had shared.

“He told me everything I had ever done,” she said.

And when she had finished talking and saw that they were as intrigued by her reports of this enigmatic man, Fotoni dropped the question that had been burning like a coal in her heart the entire time.

“Could he be the messiah?”

* * *

There’s a lot we don’t know about the Woman at the Well. The Orthodox Church canonizes her under the name Fotoni, but the Bible never even tells us that much. All we do know is what she and Jesus establish in their conversation; She’s Samaritan, she has had five husbands, and at the time the story takes place, she is living with a man she is not married to.

Into the silence of the biblical record, the church has whispered details that could have come from the village gossips and scolds. Married five times, and don’t you know that divorce is a sin? The man you are with now is not your husband. This is a brazen hussy, boys, a sinner who leaves one husband after another, and now shamelessly shacking up with a sixth man.

Loose, the tongues say at the Bible study.

A prostitute, preachers declare from the pulpit.

Bad character, everyone agrees. A lost sinner, in need of a savior.

Even the time she went to the well testifies against this woman. The evangelist specifies that the Samaritan woman went to draw water from the well at noon. “The sixth hour was when loose women went to the well,” I recall one college Bible study leader sharing.

I’ve no idea how normative my experiences are, but it seems that every time I’ve heard a sermon or read a commentary on the woman at the well, the preacher or the writer always wanted to make sure we understood what a wretched sinner the woman was. The message is that no matter how bad your sin, no matter how far you’ve fallen, you’re not beyond the reach of God’s love. Just make sure you appreciate what a sinner you are.

But what if that’s not the message of the story? There’s what the gospel says, after all; and there’s how we interpret it. Standing in the middle of the two is all the layers of narrative we’ve repeated so many times that we just take it for granted that it’s part of the text.

We do this all the time. It’s a problem we have with this story, but in truth it’s part of a larger problem in the church and how we read the Bible.

Popular view in the church makes Eve responsible for the Fall of Humanity, even though Scripture teaches otherwise. The Apostle Paul puts responsibility for the Fall on Adam, telling us that “death entered the world through sin, and sin entered the world through one man” (Romans 5:12). To make it absolutely clear, Paul explains that Eve was deceived, but Adam flat-out disobeyed (1 Timothy 2:14).

The Bible tells us that David abused his royal position to summon Bathsheba to the royal palace and have sex with her. The incident gets so bad that it ultimately destabilizes the throne, and the Bible lists it as David’s one major failing (1 Kings 15:5). Look around and you’ll find no shortage of apologists looking to excuse David of sexual assault and instead accuse Bathsheba of laying a trap to lure him into adultery.

The gospels describe Mary Magdalene as someone from whom Jesus once cast seven demons (Luke 8:2), and suggest she was a wealthy and important woman. Meanwhile, the most popular detail people know to share about her is that she was a prostitute – a slander first told in the sixth century during a sermon by Pope Gregory, who identified her seven demons with the Seven Deadly sins.

And the Woman at the Well, whatever her name is, gets caught in this same net of shaming and is dragged through the mud.

What do we know about her? She was married five times. Was she widowed? Was she divorced? The Bible doesn’t say, leaving us to make our best guess. But as a Samaritan woman in the first century, Fotoni would have had little say in either situation.

The first century was a bloody period in Samaria, Galilee and Judea, and it was all too common for men to die at the end of a Roman sword or spear. The death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE led to an uprising against Roman rule that saw the city of Sepphoris burned and hundreds of men crucified to enforce obedience to Roman law. Before his term as governor ended, Pontius Pilate would bring a bloody end to another uprising in Samaria itself in 36 CE.

If any of Fotoni’s husbands died at Roman hands, from illness, or from simple bad fortune, she would have been left bereft and dependent upon customs like the kinsman redeemer to see that she was provided for. Each partner she had lowered her value to potential suitors, like a steak another person had taken a bite of.

Was she a multiple divorcee? That likewise was outside her control. A woman had no recourse in first-century Samaria to demand release from a toxic marriage, but her husband could send her away for any reason he wanted. Jealousy? That was his call. Bad cook? Fair enough. Ugly? Who could blame him? No children? You are divorced, divorced, divorced.

Five husbands in, no matter her age, Fotoni would have been in a desperate spot. That sixth man wouldn’t take her as his wife. He wouldn’t hide her shame. But if she gave him sex, he’d give her a place to sleep. He’d give her food. He’d let her survive.

Fotoni wasn’t a reprobate. She was alone and in a desperate situation, doing what she needed to do to survive. Her day was spent existing, trying to find what scraps of dignity and life she could find, under whatever stone they were hidden; while she tried to avoid the notice of others so she could forget the humiliation life had given her.

And then she met Jesus down by the well.

***

Wells play a prominent place in courtship in the Hebrew Scriptures. When Abraham sent his servant Eliezer to find a wife for his son Isaac, Eliezer found Rebekah at the well. She agreed to marry Isaac, and returned to Canaan with Eliezer. When Moses fled Egypt, he met Zipporah at the well. They later married, and she joins him on his return to Egypt to free Israel.

And now here we have Jesus, sitting by a well, and asking Fotoni for a drink.

Jesus wasn’t there by chance. He knew what time it was. He knew the mores of the day, and he knew who would go to the well to fetch water in the heat of the day.

Not prostitutes.

Not sinners.

Outcasts.

Jesus went to the well at noon because the only people he would meet there would be of no account, someone whom no man would respect and whom no woman would either, not because of anything they had done but because society is cruel. When Jesus stopped Fotoni and asked her for a drink, he invited the scorn of anyone who saw him talking to her but he also elevated her to the role of a benefactor

And then he went further, and initiated a discussion with her about God, about salvation, about Torah and worship, and treated her like she was a learned elder. In a few short minutes, Jesus showed Fotoni more respect than she’d had in years and restored the dignity and self-worth she’d always known she deserved.

Jesus saw how weary she was from her life of labor and isolation, and offered her living water, a symbol she picks up on immediately. And then, in a final flourish, he revealed himself to her, and made Fotoni the first Samaritan entrusted with his revelation, and sent her, spirit soaring, back to her village where her status was raised from “that woman” to chosen emissary of the messiah.

The men who tell the story of Fotoni today – and let’s be honest, it’s usually men – love the story to have its little embellishments about her supposed moral lapses. It’s a cruel and pernicious sexism that wants to imprison women for faults real and imagined, to keep them silent and in their place, and to remind them to be grateful for the bare minimum.

We tell victims of sexual harassment and sexual abuse to be silent, and when they demand justice instead, we complain that they’re hurting God’s work. When they’re in abusive marriages, we tell them to remain in submission; and when they don’t, we shun them and rally around the abusers they’ve left behind.

That’s because we don’t understand what holiness is. We think of sin as a violation of a legal code, one that requires condemnation, but that they’ll be spared because they have received all the right beliefs and doctrines. It’s an old and Gnostic heresy that says that that holiness can’t abide the presence of sin.

The gospels come from a culture built on honor and shame. A woman like Fotoni was shamed, and shame drives us away from one another. Holiness, as revealed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and through the life of Jesus, scours the countryside looking for a sheep the rest of the flock abandoned. It turns the room upside-down to find a coin missing through no fault of its own, and when it sees someone who’s been broken down, abused and turned away, holiness doesn’t tell them they deserve what’s happened to them.

Instead it sits and waits for them, and when the moment comes, it acts as natural as can be and invites them into a conversation.

“Can you get me a drink?”

Dancing with the Raggedy God

Today is Sunday. 

There was a time when Sunday was a sanctuary. You went to church, and maybe you even enjoyed it. Sunday morning was a time for worship and dancing with God. He let you lead at first, but once you had found your footing and knew the steps, he gradually and gracefully took the lead and you began to follow.

It was an intricate dance and a heady time on the floor with him. Whether it was a classic waltz, or something brisk from your high school days or early adulthood that moved you as smoothly as butter on a hot griddle, you loved it. As the two of you danced across the floor, you picked up and considered new ideas, gained new perspectives, and wondered at new information. 

Those Sundays at church were a personal golden age. Sunday was a time you could give from your own passions, and others would welcome it. You could lower the bucket into your own well of knowledge and people would drink. You poured out your heart for the sake of others, and Sunday at church was a place where that gift was prized. 

Maybe it even was a time for friendship. Together with others at church you celebrated sacraments like going out for lunch after the service, or talking with one another in the hall while the preacher blathered on endlessly during the sermon. 

Whatever happened during the week, Sunday morning was always fresh start. Church was where you belonged. The people there were your people. The tribe was yours. You enjoyed going there.

But that was before. 

Somewhere along the way, something went wrong. It was bad. You stopped enjoying church but kept going out of obligation. Just getting there became a struggle, but you pressed on because of what it used to be, until one day you finally just couldn't anymore. 

You stopped. It was over.

Now when Sunday rolls around, the only sanctuary you want is another hour in bed, and the most transcendent thing you touch is your pillow. 

What did it? Were there predators loose in the sanctuary? Did people promise to stay with you all night, and then leave once it started getting dark? Did you look behind the curtain and realize that there was nothing there but an old man playing with knobs and levers? Did you give the church your treasure and then find it sitting on the curb on Monday morning, awaiting collection?

Maybe you were honest about who you were, or your friends were, and then the people you thought were your tribe proceeded to reject you because they didn’t want honesty after all. Or maybe after years of hearing people stress the value of integrity, you saw them turn on a dime and say we could wink at corruption and even cruelty if we gained control, and to your horror you realized that control was all that had mattered all along. 

In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it? The point is, a place you needed to be safe, wasn’t. People who claimed to love and value you, didn’t. The place of belonging, wasn’t. 

And now you're here. Alone, jaded, disappointed, more than a little bitter about the whole affair and even entertaining some brutal doubts about this whole God thing. 

Who can blame you? I certainly don't. The way you feel right now is natural and normal after the betrayal you've experienced. And you're not alone, either. Look around and you'll see that the number of people with you in this dismal place are legion.

Like you they have been kicked and stepped on; abused, disbelieved and gaslit; used and exploited; ignored when they wanted to serve, told that in true complementarian fashion God made men to lead and women to follow; or just told to have faith in the leaders and not challenge them with questions. Like you they've come upon pretenders who claim to act with God's authority and have the gall to tell you that you're hurting God's kingdom when you speak out about what they've done.

Like you they've been driven out and pushed away, and told they weren't good enough, if they were told anything at all.

Like them, you're hurt. You need to rest. You don't know if you will ever go back. I hear you. 

God is not disappointed in you. He doesn't hold it against you that you feel this way. 

If all you can do this morning or today is to lie under your covers, then God will lie there next to you. If the only worship you can give is to stream Batman on Netflix, then God will sit and watch with you. 

The failure isn't yours. Take all the time you need to, and when it comes time to move on, don't go back. Move forward.

The God you once believed in is not the god of the mighty and the pious, but the god of the outcast and the ragged. He drives along forgotten country roads in a rusty old Buick, past weather-beaten mailboxes, looking for those who have been chased away; and he hikes through undeveloped and even liminal places to find those who have given up. 

Your church sucked, but you don’t. 

The raggedy God welcomes you as you are, and he’ll dance with you again. 

 Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

David and Bathsheba, and Nathan

It's David and Bathsheba season right now on Twitter.

The church goes through this so regularly it's almost a part of the liturgical calendar. On one side are voices that cast Bathsheba as a vile seductress, bathing at night in the mikveh where David could see her. From another box come the voices of those who cast the blame on David and Bathsheba equally, as two adults who consented to an adulterous liaison. A third group considers the relative power of an Iron Age king and a woman whose husband is away from home and concludes that since Bathsheba lacked the power to safely and confidently say no, that David was a rapist.

It's a powerfully affecting story, as evidenced by the strong passions it elicits. To understand it properly we need to consider the dynamics each of the players bring to the drama, and then ask ourselves which character we should emulate, if any of them.

For starters, there's David. As a former war hero and as king, David enjoyed a high profile, and the things he did drew notice because of who did them. Sent an army to war? People knew. He stayed home? They would have seen that too.

It was ordinary and proper for kings to lead their troops to war. It could spell trouble if a general led the effort and came home victorious and popular with the troops. Thrones had been lost over things like that. In fact it was precisely his high profile in the campaign against the Philistines that had endeared the people to David over King Saul, his predecessor.

David may have had good reasons for staying in Jerusalem. Maybe he had injured his leg, or he was receiving an important embassy. It could be had a serious illness, or it could even have been as pedestrian a thing as getting older. Who knows?

The point is, he stayed. People noticed.

Then one night when he was unable to sleep, he looked out across the city and saw Bathsheba bathing in her mikveh and he sent for her. He didn’t go himself. He sent someone for her.

Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, was away at the front. Someone arrived at her house and told her that her presence was requested at the palace. She had no choice in the matter. The king had sent for for her, so she went. She ended up staying overnight.

A king like David has secrets, but this was never one of them. Whoever went to summon Bathsheba and escorted her back to the palace knew. The guards on duty knew. By morning there would have been whispers all about the palace. Kitchen staff knew. Servants who scrubbed the flagstones knew. Lunch wouldn't even be on the table the next day before everyone in the palace knew. Nothing flies faster than gossip, and a story like this would have had wings

They might not know the particulars, though some surely did; but they knew enough. Rumors spread like fire, even when it’s risky to repeat them.

Bathsheba’s visit was an open secret.

A few weeks later Uriah showed up at the palace, drawn home from the battlefield by personal request of the king to deliver a report any number of other people would have been better suited to give. Maybe someone felt sorry for the soldier and told him the rumors about what had happened weeks earlier, and maybe they didn’t. But however far the embers had died down, Uriah's unexpected appearance blew fresh air on them and added tinder too. Before long what  David did had become the most open secret of his entire reign.

Then Uriah tragically died at the front, and David took a personal interest in comforting his widow, whose pregnancy by this time was becoming more evident.

People can do the math. They knew Uriah wasn't the father, but David was the king. No one dared to say a thing.

No one but Nathan,

In one of the most amazing stories in 2 Samuel, Nathan strolls into David's presence with a tale of a wealthy farmer who stole the only, beloved lamb of his poor neighbor and butchered it to feed a guest rather than butcher one of his own sheep. David, incensed, orders the wealthy man thrown into the dungeon for the rest of his life for his act of cruelty.

And then Nathan springs the trap: "You are the man."

This is what makes Nathan one of the most memorable prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. He performs no miracles, appears in no other books, and makes no prophecies. But he sees sexual exploitation and abuse, and unlike everyone else, he calls the king out.

Nathan speaks truth to the powerful. He risks his life to call David to account for raping Bathsheba and murdering Uriah. We all love Elijah with his theatrics, but Nathan is the prophet for our times.

The Catholic Church covered up sexual predation for decades, and moved wolves around so they could find new flocks to prey on.

The Southern Baptist Church ignored Bathsheba when she spoke up, and told Nathan he was harming David as he did God’s work. Leaders like Denny Burk even complained that the money being spent to address the history of sexual abuse and bring justice would be diverted from the more important missions work of the church.

And 3,000 years later we’re still pooh-poohing what David did, as though it were equally Bathsheba’s fault, and not something so vile that Scripture singles it out as the one thing God held against David.

Stop making excuses. Be like Nathan, and have the courage to blow the whistle on sexual abuse when you see it. Especially when the guy doing it is hiding behind the mantle of how much he loves God.

He’s doing more damage to God’s kingdom than calling him out ever could.

Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

One final mountain to climb

When Moses was old and full of years, and his legs were no longer as fast as they once had been, God called him up the mountain.

The prophet climbed for most of the day, until the sweat on his face had turned dry and his skin was pulled taut like the papyrus scrolls he had held and read as a boy in pharaoh's court. His hair was matted to his head, and his eye had begun to twitch in time with the strange pulsing noise that came from the sun. His head was light but his arms were heavy, and God spoke to him as he had many years ago.

"Moses," the voice said. "Look down on the land below."

The prophet looked, and it was a beautiful thing to see. A river flowed through the land, and watered trees and fields alike. The prophet could almost taste the figs and the dates growing on the trees, he could almost smell the honey the bees kept in their hives, and his tired throat could feel clean water coursing through it.

It was a good land, he thought. "Flowing with milk and honey," as they used to say.

"Moses," God told him. "Lie down."

So Moses lay down, and the grass atop the mountain was soft and soothing on all the places where he ached. It was a nicer bed than he had lain in for forty years as he had led his people through the desert. It carried him back to his younger days in Midian with his wife; or further still, to the luxury he'd known in the royal court. It was odd to think that all this time such comfort had awaited him up here in a mountaintop meadow.

"Moses," God said. "You can no longer feel your legs."

And it was true. He couldn't. They had been bothering Moses for days beyond reckoning, and the climb up the mountain had brought aches to places he'd never felt before. But now they were relaxed and it seemed as though his legs had drifted away.

"Moses." He'd heard the voice of God thunder between the mountains when he'd climbed Sinai, but now the voice of the Almighty was little more than a whisper and he had to strain to hear it. "You can no longer feel your arms."

It was such a relief. He had carried such heavy loads with those arms, but they were fading away.

"Moses. Close your eyes."

The sky disappeared. The evening sun and the clouds vanished from view. There was no sky, there were no birds. All the prophet could hear was a steady drumbeat that filled his chest, his ears, his whole head.

And then -- "Moses. You're dead."

And there was silence on Mount Nebo. 

 

Copyright ©2022 by David Learn

Going, going, going, gone

 After 16 years, my church and I appear to have reached a parting of the ways. As the old saying goes, "It's not me, it's you."

It's a bittersweet thing, this parting of the ways. Because a church is a community built around a shared religious identity, it can be the foundation for deeply meaningful relationships; work of great psycho-emotional, spiritual and social labor; and a source of stability that anchors us amid difficult days. But it can also be deeply alienating, a source of heartache and frustration, and the cause of contention both internally and with others.

The split has its catalyst in the recent departure of our lead teaching and founding pastor. Tim and his wife came here about 17 years ago with a team of church planters. About two months ago, they announced they were leaving in order to be closer to their aging parents.

It caught us off-guard, as a church. There was no succession plan, and while a church can survive on its own momentum, that will only carry it so far. So the elders decided to form a transition team to keep the church going while it looks for a new pastor.

Good plan. Who's on the team?

Well, the elders appointed themselves, the worship leader, the children's ministry leader, the two hospitality leaders, and the two outreach leaders to the transition team. That's it, and that's the problem.
It's not the individuals chosen for the team, per se. I genuinely like and respect most of them.  It's how it was done, and what wasn't done at all.

The elders, who are not elected by the congregation but appointed by sitting elders to what apparently is a lifetime position, simply picked the transition team, and that was it. No congregational say in who handles the search, and not even an invitation to anyone who might be interested in being a part of the search to join the time.

That's it. A team that is essentially accountable to no one, consisting of three married couples and three other people.
To their credit, they're letting us know what they've decided to do and where things stand. And they "welcome input," which practically speaking means if you have an idea they'll politely listen to it, but if they don't see it themselves, they won't advocate for it, and it quickly will be forgotten.

But I'm patient and don't want to be unduly cynical, so I send in a list of questions I have about the process.

And wait for a response.

And wait.

While I'm waiting, I approach one of the elders and explain that I'm interested in being a a part of this effort. I point out that while I was on the school board I three times was part of the team that looked for a new director, and the third time I led the search myself. This is a school with an $8 million budget and over 50 employees. Hiring someone to do a search like this could cost a few thousand dollars, but I'd give my professional skills to the church for free.

And I delicately point out that it's a good idea for the search to solicit involvement from all the active stakeholders in the congregation: ministry team, elders, parents, youth.

I get told, no, they're not bringing anyone else in.

Then two weeks after I sent in my questions. I get told "I'm sorry you feel frustrated by the lack of response," but still no answers to half my questions.

So yeah, part of me is feeling the pain of rejection, because I wanted to have an active part in this search. I've been a part of this church for sixteen years, and have always lent a hand when asked. But when I've asked to help out in some bigger capacity -- lead a Bible study, be a part of church leadership, engage in mercy ministry or social justice projects, run a drama ministry, preach a Sunday service once in a while -- I never get a response, even though these are all things I've done in the past.

Not "no," just .... nothing. No reason, no explanation. Nothing.

Sixteen years I've been here, and nothing of myself that I value is worth anything to this church. Not even the part that generally believes a no is almost as easy to accept as yes, especially when someone takes the time to share a coherent reason, even if the reason is stupid.

I stuck around as long as I did because the previous pastor guy was a close, personal friend of mine, and as we were friends I knew he listened to me. I had his ear.

Now I've got nothing but "I'm sorry you're bothered by bothersome behavior" and "Sorry, we have no use for you. Go sit down and be happy while we make decisions for you."

That's too authoritarian for me.

I told my friend once while he was pastor, "The elders can appoint to run ministries or lead a Bible study whom they want. It's their choice, and I respect that, even if the answer makes no sense. And if I really don't like it, I know where the door is."

That I do.

And I'm walking through it.

On Believing in the Bible

 I got asked Wednesday if I believe in the Bible. As God is my witness, I have no idea how to answer.

Believe in the Bible? How could I not? The 66 books that comprise it -- 73 if you're Catholic, and 81 if you're Orthodox -- express the foundations of the Christian faith. It's all there, from the Fall of Humanity, right through the Crucifixion, and all the way to the end. Heaven descends to earth and God's fondest wish comes true as he walks among us. The Bible says that, and I believe it.

But it sounds so cheap to put it that way. I'm amazed when people actually read their Bibles. But believe in it? What does that even mean?

The Bible talks about a dome that's placed over the earth to keep the land dry. When it's time for it to rain, God has to open floodgates in the dome to let the water through. The Bible also talks about warehouses filled with snow, and it mentions talking donkeys and snakes with legs. It names people who lived for 900 years, women who gave birth when they were 90, and men who had children when they were even older than that. With its left hand the Bible tells you to roast the sacrificial meat and not to boil it, and with its right hand it says of that same sacrifice that you should boil the meat and not roast it.

The Bible tells us that Jesus celebrated the first night of Passover with his disciples, and then it tells us that he was crucified on the first night of Passover at the time they were sacrificing the lambs.

Believe in the Bible? Is this a statement of faith, or a declaration of identity? "Stand back, for we are the people who believe in the Bible."

I remember when I believed in the Bible like that. It gave me such a headache. There are a handful of places in Scripture that appear to say women have no business being in ministry. They're mostly in letters Paul wrote, and they read like someone spilled fresh pizza on a nice new rug and couldn't get the stains out no matter how hard they tried. There are a half-dozen other passages that read like someone butchered a pig on fresh linen. They're called clobber passages, and people use them to justify throwing children out of the house for being gay.

"You have to read Scripture the way it is," I often was told. After all, we believe in the Bible.

But the Bible's an old book, and not even one book. It's a library, a collection of mythology, legends, folk tales, law, history, poetry, philosophy and folk wisdom, genealogy, census records and polemic. It includes personal correspondence and letters to whole communities, and a couple books written in a style so rare today that it's hard to tell if the author wrote it in code or just after he found some colorful mushrooms to snack on. The Bible was written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago on the other side of the planet in Hebrew. Aramaic and Greek, by a group of people who didn't even wear pants. Anyone can read it, but to understand it properly is going to take work.

The Bible is the record of a conversation, a long one, among a people who were trying to get to know God while he was trying to get to know them. Because it's a conversation, there are a lot of voices and they don't always agree. Some are harsh and xenophobic, like Ezra. He saw his people marrying Gentile women and said "You're polluting the holy race! Get rid of them." Others are as  warm and welcoming as a plate of fresh cookies and a glass of milk, like the book of Ruth, which welcomes and praises the very women whose presence drove Ezra crazy.

They were all included for a reason, but they're not equal in value. Jesus' favorite book was probably Isaiah, and like a good Jew, he knew the Torah well. You know what he didn't quote? The book of Judges.

Who believes in the Bible? The one who reads a clobber passage and decides, "Yup, gays are sick and in rebellion against God," or the one who tries to reconcile what he's been told the passage means with the sister who was there for him when he desperately needed someone? The one who listens when he's told what the Bible says, and accepts it; or the one who listens, thinks about it, and studies for years to understand the people and society that produced the Bible, so she can understand it in its original context?

Do I believe in the Bible? It takes a lot of hard work, but I'm doing my best.


Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

A heavenly choir of voices

 In the book of Revelation, St. John the Divine describes a moment when he was swept up into a heavenly worship of service.

There before the throne of the Lamb, John reported seeing a choir of the saints, gathered from every tribe, nation and language singing the song of the Lamb. If you’ve ever attended a multilingual service, you’ll have to agree. It is an experience as tremendous as it is unforgettable.

One Sunday morning a million years ago when I was a middle school teacher living in the Lehigh Valley, I got up early one morning. got in a car with two co-workers and someone I’d never met before, and made the trip to 51st Street. There we visited Dave Wilkerson’s Times Square Church, a church that without question reflected the demographics of its city. If there is any church with representatives from every tribe, nation and language, this was it.

How do you lead a church like that? One could say “You’re in America, learn English,” but this church didn’t do that. The sermon was in English, with running translation provided into a babel of language. When it came to worship, though, they did the only sensible thing. They took turns.

This particular week, worship was led by Filipino members of the congregation. In Tagalog.

The Tagalog choir took their spots on stage, and they began to sing. Don’t know Tagalog? No problem! The songs were in play at a lot of churches, songs like “He is Exalted” and “Lord I Lift Your Name on High,” so they were easy enough for congregants to sing along with in their own language.

And they did. While my companions and I sang in English, people around us sang in French, Spanish, Bangladeshi, Kreyol or whatever other language they preferred, or they tried to read the words on the screen and sing along in Tagalog. It was an amazing experience. It wasn’t Babel; it was Pentecost.

A multiethnic church in my own city does this as well, on a smaller scale. When I visited a few years ago, worship was conducted in three languages, as lyrics in Korean, Spanish and English wove in and out in a groundswell of praise.

I don’t know exactly why Times Square Church took the approach to worship that it did. Maybe it was the path of least resistance, maybe they saw in it a fast track to growth that English-only services wouldn’t provide. Maybe Wilkerson just loved the sound of Romanian in the morning and knew he could get it in rotation this way.

What I do know is that little decisions like that go a long way to deciding what an organization will look like when it grows up. Give the hungry a plate of food and give the thirsty a cup of cold water, and people will sit and talk with you. Celebrate their language, their culture and their heritage — give them a place at the table as grand as your own — and you’re setting them up to be partners and friends for the long haul, ready to give all they have for the mission.

That kind of relationship isn’t something you just find in a church. That’s a piece of heaven.

Copyright 2022 by David A. Learn. Used with permission.

Prayer as a scavenger hunt

 One of the toughest jobs in a church is the youth group leader.

Pastors only have to deliver the sermon once a week, visit a couple shut-ins, and survive the live-action Call of Duty: Modern Warfare roleplay with the board of elders (often with real ammo). The secretary just has to answer the phone, let visitors into the church so she can discourage them properly by staring at them from behind her desk, and eat lunch every day. The elders just need to sit around being right.

But youth group leaders? They actually have to work.

Youth group leaders have the unenviable task of taking a religion founded 2,000 years ago on the other side of the planet, among a people who didn’t even wear pants, and making it sound at once reasonable and exciting. They have to this for an audience — teenagers — at an age when they will be the most disaffected, ask the most mind-bogglingly basic and therefore challenging questions, tell you when they think you are wrong (most of the time) or just stupid (the rest of the time), without ever once appreciating how much work went into planning your sophisticated and deeply spiritual activity of making them burrow face-first into trays of gelatin to retrieve the keys that will unlock their handcuffs.

And somehow, amid all that, youth group leaders are supposed to engage them with questions many adults don’t have time for, like “What is my purpose in life?” and “What does it look like to be a person of integrity?” when the teens are actually thinking things like “Holy buttered Moses on a pogostick, Gwen looks hot! I wonder if I can get her to sit next to me in the church van on the way to Six Flags tonight?” and “The new collectible diecast model of the Millennium Falcon goes on sale at midnight tomorrow. How am I going to get the other $283.17 I need to buy it?”

The youth group leader at my church a few years ago knew better than to teach the kids church history; or to try to engage them with gross activities like burrowing through gelatin, especially since Patrick knew he would never successfully engage them in gross-out activities like cleaning up. Instead, he decided to engage them with mysticism.

Christian mysticism comes with a few advantages that work well for those who teach it. One is that it sounds edgy because it’s free-floating and based on popular conceits about God rather than anything actually taught in the dusty old pages of Scripture. The other is that while this gives it countercultural appeal, it doesn’t actually involve Tarot cards, Ouija boards or incantations to Chthulhu performed over a pentagram, so it usually comes with some degree of job security as the Bible never actually forbids it.

So one week, Patrick decided to teach the kids about visualization.

“I want you to imagine a person,” he told the half-dozen or so teens in his charge that evening, “and take a sheet of paper and draw them.”

The teens, or most of them at least, dutifully averted their eyes from Gwen and stopped imagining riding in the back seat of the van with her, and started visualizing these new people in the way only teenagers can. They were people fit for a freak show. Orange skin. Three eyes. No noses. Missing limbs. Extra limbs. As it was mid-October, one unfortunate wore a jack-o’-lantern on his shoulders and carried his head in his hand like a latter-day Brom Brones.

“Now we’re going to take a few minutes and quietly pray for these people.” Patrick said.

“O Lord, please reattach this man’s head before his pumpkin rots” went one prayer.

Another that ascended to heaven: “If you let me ride in the back seat with Gwen, I’ll give all my allowance to feed starving orphans for the next year.”

The prayers finished. Youth group ended. The pictures ended up in the recycling.

“What was the point of that?” asked Luke. He was one of the youngest members of the youth group.

“Didn’t you hear? Patrick said next week we’re going to Walmart to look for these people and share the gospel with them,” said Emma.

The idea went over badly at once. Even allowing for the unfortunate medical conditions the teens had visualized in their pictures, no one in the youth group had any interest in socially awkward activities like getting thrown out of Walmart on a Sunday evening for approaching complete strangers and telling them they were going to hell unless they changed their religion.

The next Sunday rolled around, and all the teens had come down with an illness, been called away at once to a dying relative’s bedside in the Dominican Republic, or otherwise were unable to attend.

All of them except Luke.

Luke’s parents were devout believers, and while they didn’t hold with all Patrick’s ideas, they believed that it would be a healthy trauma for Luke to practice sharing his faith, no matter how much he cried about not wanting to go and meet the person he had drawn.

But Luke hadn’t just drawn someone with blue hair. He’d been reading H.P. Lovecraft late at night with a flashlight under his bedcovers, and he’d drawn what he’d been reading: a great green monster with wings like a bat’s, yellow eyes like a snake’s, and a mouth with a hundred tendrils and teeth like needles.

Patrick drove Luke to Walmart, and there they met Chthulhu.

 If I had to pick one song to define Rich Mullins' legacy for me personally, it would be "Hard to Get."

Released posthumously on "The Jesus Album," "Hard to Get" is a song about the struggle of an honest faith to reconcile the assurances of Christ's presence in our weakness with that weakness itself. It asks with steadily increasing anguish whether Christ hears us, if a God who is beyond our understanding can understand our griefs and sorrows. The song sweats blood over these questions so hard that it finally finds its answer in that struggle.

It's an amazing song on an impressive album. And if the writer of an article I just read on Medium is correct, the song may owe its depth to Mullins' struggle to accept himself for who he was.

Mullins, the writer contends, was gay.    

The music of Rich Mullins was fairly inescapable in the late 1980s and early 1990s if you attended an evangelical church.

I just read a fascinating piece on Rich Mullins, that he was largely closeted his whole life, and the ways he wrestled with the notion that God loved him while the church loved only what it wanted to see

And in that painful struggle he understood the gospel at a fundamentally deeper level than you or I ever will

I had never heard nor cared. The Jesus Album was the only record of his I liked. But I read it fascinating article on Medium today

Yeah, I saw/see the appeal. But except for a few songs and that one album, he never did much for me

But that album — esp Hard to Get, and Man of no Reputation— has some of the finest meditation on the gospel I’ve ever found

It’s the raw and pained faith that comes from weakness, the sort of faith that white cishet men often chastise for weakness because we so badly misunderstand what faith and strength really are

It’s why I like and approve the church’s newly adopted approach to Bible study ; ie, how do you feel about this passage? What bothers troubles you about it?