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.