My neighbor, the alien

This is the way I remember it.

The traffic circle at the end of the taptap route from Port-au-Prince to Pétionville is a bustling place. If you don't mind dealing with fast-talking money traders, you can pull out your U.S. dollars and argue for a few minutes about the exchange rate you'd like to get, although if you have white skin, you're better off going to the back room of the One Stop Market on Route de Delmas, where it's just you and the Lebanese businessmen who run the business.

If it's shoes you're looking for, you can find them on the sidewalk. A local machann sells them in a display that runs about ten yards and three or four feet deep along the sidewalk. God only knows where the shoes come from, or the housewares being hawked thirty feet away, next to the store that will copy your keys if there is electricity, or if they can fire up the delko. The merchandise is decent quality, though you'd better be prepared to argue about the price. There are no price tags on anything, and if the machann agrees to your offer too quickly, you can bet your bottom dollar that you just let yourself be fleeced.

There are places to eat here, too. Back in 1993 at least, you could buy a plate of spaghetti for $1, if you didn't mind streetside dining while Haitians stopped to watch the blan eating like they did; or you could buy hot, fresh laboul for two gourdes if you were feeling adventurous, or if your stomach already had grown accustomed to the local bugs and parasites.

But if you leave the circle, walking away from the vendors who sell soap outside the business that got dechouke'ed when Baby Doc lost power, and you start down Route de John Brown, on the lefthand side of the road is a small hole-in-the-wall diner called Ti Luc's.

Ti Luc's was a restaurant frequented by the taptap drivers. The owner had a few employees working in the kitchen for him, making hot rice and beans and serving it up for $1 a plate to hungry drivers, and selling cold glasses of Coke with ice made from water that had been certified potable and safe to drink by Camep. (At least it met U.N. standards for potable water when it left the water plant.) My friend Ibrahim had discovered the place, and he shared his discovery with me.

Now there are rules about being a missionary in Haiti, and while no one will acknowledge these rules, we all know that they're there. Most of them pertain to how well you integrate into the Haitian culture, and they essentially boil down to this: Don't. Don't learn the language, don't buy stuff from street vendors when you can buy it at a store, don't take public transportation when you can have your own vehicle, and don't get to know the nationals. Not too well, anyway.

That's an unfair characterization, especially to the career missionaries who have lived there for years, and even moreso to those who live outside the capital. But it's not unfair to admit that at least when I was living in Pétionville fifteen years ago, there was a strong community of missionaries, primarily expatriates of the United States, and we didn't mix with the Haitian nationals nearly as much as we should have. The ex-pats had their own church and two schools, and even had an English-language bookstore that catered to their needs until it went out of business in 1991.

So I was a big hit whenever I showed up at Ti Luc's to get some lunch. Because while missionaries and other American nationals did go out to eat at restaurants from time to time, they usually went somewhere with a fancy-sounding French name, like Les Cascades or Le Belle Epoque, or they went to one of the American-style pizzerias. They didn't go to a hole in the wall like Ti Luc's.

I'd like to say I got to know the owner on a first-name basis, or that I got to know some of the regulars particularly well, but I didn't eat there often enough for that. But I did make a big splash in my own way, one day, when I overheard one of the taptap drivers wondering aloud what I was doing there.

"Mwen grangou," I said. "É manjé-a bon, non?" (I'm hungry, and the food is good, you know?")

He quite literally jumped out of the chair he had been sitting in, and into one at another table. He grinned widely, and laughed as he said, "Gadé! Blan-an palé Kreyol!" ("Look out! The white guy speaks Creole!")

This event, sixteen years past and two thousand miles away, came back to mind this Saturday night. I was at the charter school, waiting to lock up after the moving crew finished unloading the truck into our new rental space on Elizabeth Street. It was about nine o'clock, and the crew had been working for about five hours. I'd got them a pitcher of cold water to drink, but I wanted to let them know that I appreciated their efforts on our behalf. It's only the decent thing to do, to talk to people who have been breaking their backs working for you.

"Mucho gracias, señores," I said to two of the crew while their chief talked on his cell phone with their supervisor.

"¿Habla usted español?" one of them asked me. He seemed shocked, and I suppose he might have been wondering if I had been listening in on the conversations he and his co-workers had been having.

"Un poco solamente," I said, and he smiled. "Yo no estoy fluido." (Just a little. I'm not fluent.)

"¿Es usted un americano?" he asked, then, a little more hesittantly, in English. "You were born here?"

"Sí, señor, yo soy de los Estados Unidos," I said.

He acted surprised, as though he couldn't believe that an American could speak Spanish at all, and he asked me twice if my parents had been born in the United States. Presumably, I suppose he was thinking, if one or both of them had come from somewhere else, that might explain how it was that I could speak Spanish at all.

"No," I said. "Ellos son de los Estados Unidos tambien, de Pennsylvania. Yo tengo amigos y amigas quienes hablan español, y ellos son mis maestros." (My parents are both from Pennsylvania. I just have friends who speak Spanish, and I've been learning from them.) He looked unconvinced, as if he considered this unlikely, but his co-worker took my side and pointed out that there really are a lot of Hispanics in the area.

So I simply pointed out to him what seems obvious to me: "Sí usted puede a hablar ingles, yo necessito a hablar español." If you can speak English, then I need to speak Spanish.

I know some people have taken the attitude that immigrants need to learn English, and to be fair, I suppose they should, because English is the de facto language of the nation. But this attitude often gets taken too far, and we consider the task of integration to be their responsibility alone. This is all wrong.

In the eyes of God, we are not here-firsts, and johnny-come-latelys. That's a childish mindset that we try to see our children move past by the time they start kindergarten. What we are, instead, is communities of neighbors; and neither community has the right to make demands of the other, but only of ourselves. While I hope that my Hispanic neighbors, including the day-laborers as well as professionals, will take the time and make the effort to learn English so they can walk more easily in our world, I hope that we can make the same effort so that we can walk through theirs.

As we make that effort together, we can discover much that is new, and learn not only about our neighbors, but about ourselves as well. It's a frustratingly slow process to learn a second language, but with each time that I cross the language barrier and connect with someone who didn't expect it, I'm reminded just how much it's worth it.


Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Sola Gratia

We often take grace for granted, or think of it only in terms of wiping the slate clean for forgiveness, but there is more to it than that. Grace often gets overshadowed in our endless declamations over morality and right-vs-wrong, but in the end grace is the only thing that matters.

It's easier to appeal to the stark nature of Law and Morality than it is to walk through the treacherously gray footing life gives us, but when all is said and done, grace is the only guide worth having. And it's more comfortable to talk about Right and Wrong than it is to extend grace to people whose actions, whose choices, and whose lives put us ill at ease, but in the end, grace is our only hope.

One last thing about grace: Once you've received it, you have no choice but to extend it.

Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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The doctrine behind 'Good Omens' (spoilers)

The thing about "Good Omens" is, it's just as fresh and original the third or fourth time through as it is the first time.

Bar none, this is the finest novelization of the Apocalypse that has ever been written. Leave "Left Behind" under the short leg of your table, where it's actually useful; and never mind the attempts of other authors to cash in on Antichrist fever. If the End of Days doesn't happen the way authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett describe it, there needs to be a do-over.

The bulk of the action takes place in what is supposed to be the last week of history as the armies of heaven and hell amass for the epic conclusion of their war, at the culmination of human history. There's only one little problem. The forces of hell accidentally misplaced the Antichrist shortly after he was born, and no one's really sure where to find him.

As the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride their motorcycles toward Tadfield, England, a demon and an angel who have been living on earth for so long that they can't bear to see it destroyed, join together in a desperate effort to find him and avert Armageddon.

Not surprisingly, the book is full of oblique references to "The Omen." For instance, the infant Antichrist was meant to be switched with the infant son of an American diplomat, as in the movies. The satanist nun involved in the switch suggests "Damien" as a name for the baby, as he was named in the movies. And so on.

Originally published in 1990, "Good Omens" was ahead of the curve for the millennial craze that eventually spawned "Left Behind," so "The Omen" at the time was the most recognizable story to feature the Antichrist.

The fast pacing and British humor that Pratchett and Gaiman bring to the book are reason enough to return to this book again and again; but these two are intelligent writers, and there's enough meat in the book to draw me back long after the jokes will have worn out. (If that ever happens, which seems unlikely.)

There's an interesting humanism at work within "Good Omens" that expresses itself through the framework of Armageddon. Since Adam was raised not at the center of power, as the son of a powerful American diplomat, but as the son of nobody important in Tadfield, England, he's grown up free of the influence of both heaven and hell. He's just pure boy, loving the things a boy loves, doing the things a boy does, and seeing a resolution to the War in Heaven that neither heaven or nor hell apparently anticipates.

The book also repeatedly underscores the role and nature of humanity itself, as the unconsidered third party in this war. The angel Aziraphale and his demonic colleague Crowley, regularly are surprised by a capacity for goodness in humanity that astounds Aziraphale, and a capacity for evil that shocks Crowley. Crowley, we discover, took credit for the Spanish Inquisition even though he had nothing to do with it; and Aziraphale blows up the radar guns of police, because he always assumed that hell's side had come up with them.

In a sense, the humanist themes of "Good Omens" are a rejection of popular Christian eschatology, which often juxtaposes harmonious depictions of Christians leaping straight from earth to heaven via the Rapture, with horrific descriptions of the Great Tribulation, in which God pours out of his wrath upon the earth, and a third of all living things perish, a third of the grass burns up, and a third of the stars are darkened, and so on.

The existence of God himself isn't called into question in the book, ironically enough, although that admittedly would be hard to do when you have angels, demons and the Antichrist himself running around as major characters. God instead is treated fairly respectfully; the questions about his ineffable purpose, such as "Why put a tree right in the middle of a garden and say 'Don't eat from it' instead of planting it somewhere remote and inaccessible if it's such a bad idea?", are hardly new questions, and have in fact bedeviled Christian and Jewish thinkers and philosophers alike for thousands of years.

Crowley and Aziraphale wrestle with these questions themselves after Armageddon passes with the world unexpectedly still intact. Crowley ultimately rejects the notion of history as a cosmic chess game between God and Satan; and, given God's omnipotence and omniscience, decides that it is, instead, more like a very complicated game of solitaire.

Like any good piece of fiction would do, "Good Omens" ends there, leaving readers to sort out for themselves such questions, as well as the general morality of evicting humanity from Paradise over a piece of fruit.

As I once wrote about "It's a Good Life," the Twilight Zone episode where 6-year-old Anthony Fremont sends anyone who displeases him to "the cornfield," stories like this serve an important function for Christians and for the church, if we will let them.

Far from being attacks, they usually are thoughtful critiques of the message that Christians present as coming from God. Sometimes they point out ways that we have bowlderized or just avoided difficult or painful truths; other times, and I think "Good Omens" falls into this category, the stories can and should shore us up, and draw our attention to faults we never admit to ourselves or one another but that are painfully obvious to anyone who has listened to us for five minutes.

(In this case, I'd have to say it's the self-righteousness that glories in the suffering of non-Christians, combined with the narcissism of the prosperity groups that most push the Rapture. Gaiman and Pratchett serve this up in the midst of the Apocalypse with a scene involving an American televangelist who embodies both those traits.)

When you get down to it, "Good Omens" really isn't primarily meant to be a depiction of the Last Days or of biblical prophecy, any more than the book of Revelation is. It's a rollicking good tale, with several themes beyond those I just outlined. The book of Revelation, while it does contain prophecy, is primarily a book about the majesty and glory of God, and the promise that however bad things are, we can be assured that Good will prevail.

And isn't that a more meaningful story than the one they like to tell in church about the Antichrist?



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Thoughts on Wandering

Gordon Atkinson is writing a series on the history of his San Antonio, Texas, congregation over at High Calling. The strength of his writing, as always, is in the stories he tells and the thoughts that they stir in the souls of his readers.

As someone who spent his share of time in exodus, looking for something deeper, something more real, or something simply more home, I found this comment of his to be especially thought-provoking:

God is not opposed to his children wandering for periods of time. The Children of Israel wandered. Jesus wandered through the desert and on mountains. Even Paul wandered around Arabia in the years after his conversion -- his great dark period for which no scholar can account. If you think you know where the Creator of the Universe is leading you, there is a good chance that you will be wrong. And even if you are right about your ultimate destination, you’ll likely be surprised by the wandering route that God has in mind.

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A load of dolumbs

A couple months ago, a friend of mine and I noticed that the word verification mechanism at Blogger increasingly was using strings of characters that either were really words, or at least came close.

One of the more interesting logisms was "dolumbs." I say this primarily because my friend noted that dolumbs looks like a word, but means nothing. But as I contended, it's easy to deduce the meaning of such a logism in context, and trotted out several possible uses:

1. The crew was overcome by a severe case of dolumbs.
2. It was a difficult operation, but fortunately the patient had come to a state-of-the-art hospital where doctors had all the necessary equipment, even a set of dolumbs.
3. The salad bar was full of everything Freddie would need for his meal. There were plump red cherry tomatoes and mounds of grated cheese, the bins were heaped with mounds of croutons and delicious bacon bits. But when Freddie saw the dolumbs, he knew he truly had found the holy grail of salad bars.
4. "Whoa!" Pete cried, elbowing Vern in the chest. "Check out the dolumbs on that babe!"
5. The gym teacher was furious. He'd seen some useless students in his day, but this class had to be the biggest set of dolumbs he had ever come across in 36 years of public education.
6. "I might be a dolumb," thought Melvin, "but at least I'm no rathro like Kevin."

In each of those examples, the supposed meaning is fairly obvious and easy to determine. As used, dolumbs means boredom or perhaps an illness; a piece of surgical equipment; something eaten with a salad; some aspect of a woman, presumably one that makes her attractive, although it could be something else, like jewelry or an article of clothing; an unimpressive or uninspiring student; and lastly, some undesirable appellation, like "loser" or "dork." Interestingly, one could argue that the word refers to the same thing in all six sentences, though I have no idea what possibly could fit such a wide range of uses.

The truth of the matter, naturally, is that dolumbs is essentially meaningless because it is not a word. We can run it up one flagpole or another and assume a meaning from the way it flutters in the breeze, but a shift in the wind or the use of a different flagpole is all that it would take to wrench it away from that assumed meaning and send it blowing away.

It lacks the weight of a thousand years of usage to shape its definition; the force of the mass consent that defines the words contained in the English lexicon, the experience of hearing it and speaking it; and the vast tomes of poetry, drama, essays and other literature that give words meaning in any language. In short, it lacks the necessary context to be a real word, and not just a neologism.

I don't mean to belabor the point, but it's an important one. In the third example, Freddie recognized the eatery as the holy grail of salad bars. The Holy Grail refers to the legendary cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper.

A thousand years or so of English and Continental literature have established the Grail as the most sacred of relics, capable of bestowing immortality or other great treasures on anyone worthy enough to find it. The weight of that literary, cultural, and historical context allows us to use the phrase "holy grail" in a metaphorical sense; i.e., this is the salad bar before all other salad bars. For the afficianado of salads, there is no better place to be than the restaurant with this salad bar.

The word even holds up to being used as a verb. Were I to write "Stephen has gone a'holy-grailing," most English speakers will grasp the sense immediately. Conversely, the meaning of "Holy Grail" is so fixed in our minds that a sentence like "Frank took his Holy Grail for a walk" is just nonsense. I might use "Holy Grail" in place of the word "dog," just as a salesman might refer to mattresses as "dog kennels," but the misuse of the term throws the meaning of the sentence into doubt and imbues the discussion with a surreal, Pythonesque feel.

If this is true of words we speak, it is even truer of the stories we fashion from them. We understand stories firstly from the context of our own experience. In the case of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," I've encountered people whose reactions ranged from the intended enthusiasm for Scrooge's redemption to scoffing at the story for empty-headed sentimentalism, to disapproval at its liberal message that Scrooge should pay Bob Cratchitt any more than what he is contracted to pay him. The strangest take on it I ever heard was a psychosexual one: that Scrooge didn't need the spirits of Christmas to change him, he just needed to have sex. (No, I'm not making that up.)

I imagine a swineherder in a remote South American tribe would have no reaction at all; if he had no knowledge of Victorian England and Christmas, or if his ghost lore allows no room for helpful spirits, the story is likely to be completely meaningless to him. So meaningless, in fact, that it would be impossible to translate it directly.

It's possible for us to derive some meaning from our own context, and if we're close enough to the source of the story, we might even get a semblance of the meaning, but the further we are from the philological, historical and cultural roots of the story, the more likely we are to get it wrong.

One dramatic example of this is recounted in the missions biography "Peace Child." In this story, author and missionary Don Richardson explains that among the Sawi people whom he was living with, treachery was seen as an admirable behavior. Someone who could act like your friend and then destroy you, was hailed as a hero by his clan.

Thus, when Richardson presented the story of Jesus to the Sawi people, the man they admired wasn't Jesus. It was the traitor Judas Iscariot, hardly the hero Richardson had hoped they would embrace. Richardson eventually discovered a meaningful cultural context among the Sawi that enabled him to reinterpret the story to them so that they perceived the same inherent meaning that he did.

The Sawi case presents an extreme and obvious example of missed contextual clues, but if we're willing to admit it, the truth is that we ourselves often misunderstand the stories and misconstrue the message of the Bible ourselves. We do not speak the languages the Bible was written in, we lack the premodern mindset of its authors, and we do not share the cultural mores that they took for granted.

Nor, ultimately, do we possess a knowledge of the extrabiblical literature that helped to shape the mindset of the Bible writers, such as the histories of the kings of Judah. When we do possess such literature, we rarely avail ourselves of it. Relatively few American Christians bother to read the book of Enoch, even though the author of Jude found it important enough to quote from it by name.

One of the greatest problems the American church has in terms of biblical literacy is our assumed familiarity with the text. We all know how Moses came to Pharaoh and demanded that he free the Israelites, and when Pharaoh refused, how God struck him with a series of plagues. Many Americans would be surprised to discover the significant role that Aaron has in this story, just as they might be surprised to discover that Pharaoh would have been Moses' uncle and not his brother.

It goes on from there. Aside from the many ways Hollywood has mined the rich vein of Bible stories, there are many stories that have been told and retold so frequently that they have been reduced to children's tales, with the result that religious folk feel we know not only the story but the moral we're supposed to draw from it.

Why were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego saved from the furnace? Because God rescues people who are true to him. Why was Joseph treating his brothers so harshly when they came to Egypt to buy grain? Because he wanted to test them to see if they had become as mature as he had always been. Who is the Parable of the Prodigal Son about? Clearly, it's about the son who squanders his inheritance in a faroff land and then comes to his senses and comes home.

In each of those three stories, those lessons I have just shared are commonly taught, but it's fairly clear from the actual biblical passages that none of those is the main point.

Perhaps the biggest loser in this too-familiar approach to hermeneutics is Jesus himself. Among evangelicals in particular, the message of Jesus has been reduced to a simple conversion appeal that is shocking in its absence from the actual teachings of Christ found in the gospels.

The repent/confess/believe message has been preached so widely and so thoroughly in America that we often miss the heart of his message, which was a call to a much deeper spiritual revolution than one of simply changing where we go to church and which label we affix to our set of religious beliefs.

Reading the gospels in their proper context reveals a dramatic call that Jesus makes upon us to change how we live here and now, not so that we will experience the Kingdom of God at some far-off date, but so that we might experience it here and now.

There are thorny teachings on the surface, like when Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell everything he has and give it all to the poor; but there are even thornier lessons in the way Jesus taught. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance, took a familiar story in which a virtuous Pharisee saved a wounded countryman on the road to Jericho, and turned it upside-down by making the hero of one of the most reviled people imaginable. It would be as if Jesus told the story in church today and made the hero – the one who receives eternal life – a Muslim, or a homosexual.

What we need -- all of us -- is to return to a sound basis for Bible study. Christianity has bigger PR problems than the Exxon Valdez because of the boorishness of many of our appointed representatives, but we also have bigger credibility problems than a town hall of politicians in no small part because we've forgotten how to read a text intelligently.

That was fairly evident not many weeks ago, as the scientific community took time to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. There was scarcely a news article without a snark about the creationists who insist on reading Genesis 1-3 as a scientific treatise on the origin of species and the formation of planets.

That text is beautiful, affirming the transcendent qualities of God and declaring the value of the life of each ecosystem, from the smallest vernal pool to the deeps of the ocean, but let's remember what it is. It's a myth, doing what all great myths do: explaining the relationships among humanity, the world, and the creator of both. The text continues to relate the moral dimension of God, that he approves of certain behaviors and not of others, and it warns that walking out of faith with God can have disastrous consequences.

These are, in all probability, not stories that originated with the Hebrews, although the Hebrew Scriptures reinterprets each one in a manner that is positively revolutionary. The ancient Sumerians told a story virtually identical to the Noah tale found in Genesis, but there the Deluge was brought about by the vagaries of a god who was tired of the noise people made while he was trying to sleep.

The Babylonians told the story of the world's creation as the result of a conflict between Tiamat and Marduk. Only in the Hebrew Scriptures is there a depiction of a God outside the world, who calls it into being by his own authority, and who regards the people he has put there with affection rather than with a tolerance that often borders on annoyance.

There's a lot about the Bible that can be understood just by reading it casually, and I wish many more Christians would do at least that much. But any responsible reading is going to involve a fair amount of study. To know what the authors were saying, we need to study more ourselves about their values, their beliefs, and their other literature. It may take our faith to places we never imagined we would go, but in the end it's all worth it.

Otherwise, we might as well just be reading a page full of dolumbs.

Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Chicken in Capernaum

Teenage boys are known for doing things that they think will look impressive but that everybody else agrees actually look stupid.

Chicken, the game where two drivers head straight for one another in the firm conviction that the other will veer off first, is one of them. Playing the game requires a lot of stupidity, a lot of alcohol, and an absolute certainty that you will emerge from the game unscathed.

Jesus plays this game all the time.

Look at John 6:22-66. When the passage starts out, crowds of people literally are chasing Jesus across the Sea of Galilee. He's just miraculously fed 5,000 people with a small boy's lunch, and the crowd is begging for more.

Now I'm not much of an evangelist, but when you have hundreds if not thousands of people canceling their plans, breaking off social engagements, and shuttering their business for an unannounced holiday, just to hear what you have to say, it seems to me that this would be a good time to share your message.

Come on, Jesus. This is a premade audience, ready to buy what you're selling. Talk to them plainly, tell them what you want, and you'll have a committed following doing what you're calling everyone to do.

That's not what Jesus does, though. What he does is to play a game of Chicken with them.

First he insults them. You can almost see the people flinch when he says that they've only come because they want something more to eat. He's climbed onto his motorcycle and put on his sunglasses, but everybody figures he doesn't really mean it. No one leaves. So Jesus revs up his bike so loud that the pine trees echo the roar, and he begins moving toward them.

In a moment, the crowd, which only that morning had been so eager to see Jesus that they begged, borrowed and bought their way aboard boats to get across the Sea of Galilee, is tensed up and a little anxious. He talks to them about the Bread from Heaven, and then they decide he isn't really going to run into them. It's just a test. “Give us this bread!” they say, thinking, “Surely that's the right answer! Isn't he going to back off now?”

But if there's one thing Jesus doesn't know how to do, it's to back off. Instead, he calls himself the bread of life, claiming that it's not just what he says and what he does that matter, but that he himself is important. He is coming on fast. His motorcycle is large and loud and intimidating, and everyone realizes there's going to be an awful wreck if someone doesn't veer off.

“This is the carpenter's son!” someone mutters. “Didn't his father fix Uncle Paul's chair when it needed mending? He isn't anybody special.” Jesus is still 30 or 40 feet away, but these people already have decided not to take any chances. They're getting out of his way, their arms twitching and their legs shaking with barely concealed agitation.

But a lot of other people still won't change course. They're close enough that they can see Jesus gripping the handlebars on his own motorcycle, and they can see the sunlight shining on his James Dean leather jacket. He's 25 feet away, and they know he's not really going to plow into them. It's just a test of their faith.

Except now he's taken a perfectly lovely day and he's ruined it by talking about cannibalism. Would-be followers of Jesus are hitting the brakes in disgust, and spinning out in the dust. Some of them are turning down other roads, looking for a messiah who makes more sense, one who doesn't talk and act so crazy.

And the worst part is that Jesus acts like it's their fault, like there's something wrong with them for chickening out. Following him was supposed to make things easier, and provide answers. Instead, he's throwing what answers they do have into doubt and he's making things harder.

“Does this offend you?” he asks. He's close enough that people can see the look on his face, and they're wondering what they ever saw in this uneducated crazy man from Nazareth. “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life.”

When Jesus started his little game, there was a huge crowd. By this point, most of the people have scattered. The miracles were nice, and everyone loved the way he showed up the religious leaders and always seemed to make a place for the common people, but somehow they never realized he could be this difficult. A few people remain: his twelve disciples and a handful of others, but that's it. They know what's coming, but they're not going to get out of the way.

When no one backs down in a game of Chicken, there's a nasty collision when the motorcycles hit each other head-on. You fly off your bikes, you ram into one another, and you smear yourself down the road, scraping flesh, blood and bone across gravel and asphalt. Even with protective gear on, it's not unheard-of for players to be Life-Flighted to the hospital, where surgeons race the clock to save them from the fruits of their own stupidity.

It must have been something like that in Capernaum when Jesus got off his bike and looked around at the carnage. Bodies lying all around, limbs twisted at strange and painful angles, blood pouring from open wounds, because these people knew that Jesus wouldn't turn off and yet still wouldn't get out of his way.

“Are you going to leave too?” he asks them quietly.

It's Peter – broken, battered, bruised and badly beaten – who answers. “Where else can we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”

A statement of faith like that doesn't come easily. It's born in that soul-crashing tangle of faith and pain, that point when the questions you have can't be answered and the answers you do have just don't make sense anymore. It's born in that awful collision when what Jesus always has been, meets what you've always believed him to be. It's born in that awful moment when he tells you to let go, and you have to decide whether to do as he asks, or to hold on tighter and demand that he bless you first.

It's when we reach that point, that we finally can start to discover the purpose behind Jesus' love of Chicken. It's when we reach that point, that both we and he know beyond a doubt that we really do belong to him, and it's at that point that the real journey of faith begins.

Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Political changes in evangelicalism

Michael Spencer has an interesting article at Internet Monk on recent reports of the trend of younger evangelicals to self-identify as politically liberal. He makes several interesting points, one of which is that there have been progressive Christians around all the time, if people were willing to look for us.

He is correct — both voices have been there all along, for those who knew where to look. But following the victories of the Religious Left in the 1960s, the Religious Right rose to ascendancy in the 1970s by politics about “values” (usually morality) rather than about social justice. In my own experience at least, a concern with social ills often was dismissed in evangelical circles as following a “social gospel,” which somehow was less sacred or True than the spiritual gospel being pushed instead. The Religious Left didn’t disappear during all this, but it did fade, and as is often the case, the crowd of moderates gradually shifted toward the voices on the Right that were dominating.

It’s not entirely fair to say that “the media” anointed the leaders and speakers for evangelicals. Most were chosen by evangelicals who listened to their programs, distributed their material, and made the phone calls that they were asked to. It’s not reasonable to fault the media for noting who the political power-brokers were in Christian circles; the fault lies with us for ever elevating them to that level.

I am curious to see how the leftward shift plays itself out in terms of evangelicalism. It’s been made clear to me by a good number of evangelicals that the tent isn’t big enough for me because of my political viewpoints — even though my religious views fall squarely within orthodoxy. That sort of political bellicosity, combined with an eagerness to define evangelicalism along narrower and narrower doctrinal lines, led me several years ago to ditch the evangelical label. I’m happy now to be known as “post-evangelical” or, more simply, “not evangelical.”

From what I’ve read, my experience is hardly unique. Some people, like Gary Olson, are trying to reclaim the evangelical label for the inclusivity it once represented, but from what I can tell, that hasn’t been happening. If the strident voices on the Right politically continue to push away those who don’t toe the party line, how long will this new generation of politically liberal Christians be willing to identify themselves with a movement that’s become known for not wanting them?

Slippery slope

The air around me is alive with the scrape and din of rocks striking one another as as I slide down the slope.

I'm no longer trying to get back to the plateau where I once comfortably stood with my fellows. I'm not even sure how far up the hill it is. I've had to accept that it's too far behind and too far above for me to go back. Even if I could measure the distance, I couldn't make the return journey. The entire side of the hill where I am is a mass of shifting stones and sand that makes it impossible to get traction.

There's no going back, but at this point that's not a problem. I don't want to.

I was told that if I ever stepped off the plateau that I would find myself on a slippery slope with no firm surface to plant my feet, and I've found those words to be oddly prophetic. I haven't raced pell-mell toward destruction, but I've never been able to fully arrest my slide either. I've slowed sometimes, and once or twice I've gained a measure of respite atop an especially large rock, but it never holds for long. I manage to catch my breath, and then something in the mass of rocks shifts, and my slide starts again.

It's terrifying. It's exhilarating. It's freedom.

Others are shocked or even alarmed to see me going down like this, but this is where I'm most comfortable. It's where I belong.

I started out on the plateau when I was 18 and had just awoken to the wonders of God. Like others who discovered something they had missed seeing as children, I took my lead from those who been awake a while longer. What I saw was that the Bible was taken seriously, because it was the Word of God. And because it was the Word of God, you had to believe what it said.

I had never encountered this level of regard for the Bible before, growing up in a mainline church. There, we regarded it as sacred, and we read short passages from it every Sunday, but I personally couldn't have said why. We just did.

Among the believers I now found myself with, disagreeing with the Bible would be like disagreeing with God, because it was his Word, plain and simple. And treating the biblical narrative as anything less than a literal record of what it reported was tantamount to disagreeing with what it said. It was about as close to heresy as you could come without actually falling into it.

If 2 Kings 20 said that God made a shadow go ten steps backward as a sign for Hezekiah, then he really did. If the book of Jonah said a great fish swallowed the prophet, then that's what happened. There were allowances made for figures of speech, like Joshua stopping the sun, but everything contained in the Bible was true and factual and authoritative, because God had said it. It was his Word.

And if we started taking some parts of the Bible at less than face value, then where would we be? On a slippery slope, headed toward destruction.

So, although there were times that I would walk to the edge of the plateau with a question in mind and watch the pebbles at my feet come loose and begin to roll downhill, for years I kept myself safely on the plateau.

And then one day, I discovered that the plateau had become a cage.

Some people see doubt as an enemy of faith, a highwayman who stands in the road and assails her with any weapon he can find, and so they try to outfit faith with clever arguments, with safe company and familiar routines, and even with sheer denial. And so, for them, the plateau is a welcome place to be, and so they stay there, along with other people who have their own reasons for living there.

I like to think of faith and doubt as old friends who, when they meet each other on the road, take one another's hand and abandon well-trod paths for unfamiliar ones that they can explore and enjoy together. And so, one day I gave voice to questions I had deferred for years. I opened the cage, walked to the edge of the plateau, and took a step into the empty space above the slippery slope.

Does it really matter if Jonah didn't ride in the belly of the whale? I asked, and decided, no, it didn't. What if Moses didn't really write the Pentateuch? What if the book of Esther is a piece of fiction? What if the book of Job is? What if the book of Genesis is a collection of myth, legend and folklore? What if the Bible is only as inspired as "Les Misérables," and no more or less?

With each new step I took, more of the rocks came loose and slid away, carrying me farther down the side of the hill, so that before long I was caught in the the roar and clatter of a massive landslide. I know some people who have gone this way and been crushed to death beneath the avalanche, and God knows how my hands and knees are scraped and bruised and I've got a goose egg or two from the times I lost my balance.

But this is a journey that can't be stopped once it's begun in earnest. I've known a few people to insist that God dictated the writing of the Bible, word for word. It doesn't matter if we're talking about the poor grammar of Mark's gospel or the more refined Greek of the Johannine epistles. God wrote it, and he can write any way he wants.

For most of the rest of us, it was more of a given that God had done it "somehow," that he had inspired these writers, and they produced the works he wanted, colored by their personalities and experiences, yet still infallibly expressing his will and intent without error. It's as though God temporarily switched off Paul's capacity for sin while he wrote his letters, or completely overcame Jeremiah's sense of self as he wrote his scrolls.

I'm afraid I'm too far down the slope to be entirely satisfied with the vagueness of that explanation either.

Here where the stones rattle and shift as I slide another ten feet, I can't see the single, unifying vision that I would expect to find running the length of Scripture with that manner of inspiration. The Bible contains a broad polyphany of voices, often in harmony with one another, and often in opposition.

At times it exudes the narrow xenophobia of men like Ezra, who regarded the presence of Gentile wives among the Israelites as a stain to be removed no matter what suffering it caused the sundered families. Other times the voice is as comforting as fresh cookies and a glass of milk, like the book of Ruth, which celebrates the inclusion of Gentiles in the covenant. In the Torah you see the same essential conflict: allowances to exploit foreigners, and orders to treat them with great kindness.

I batter my hands and kick with my feet to find some way to steer my descent, but the gravel and the broken stones don't give me much control. Earlier biblical authors clearly saw God as a tribal deity who gave his people moral laws to follow but who unmistakably had a preference for his people. By the time of Isaiah he had grown in their understanding to a transcendent deity who cares for all the nations and desires to draw them all close to him.

The Bible seems less a consistent stream of unchanging revelation than the writings of a people who were seeking to know and understand God at the same time that he was seeking to know them. Their understanding, which had begun to bloom by the book of Isaiah, reached its full flower in the person and teachings of Christ.

It's a flower that grows here amid the rocks where I have been scuffed and bruised, battered and beaten, torn and scraped, on a downward slide I began close to three years ago. The flower refreshes me, soothes my aches, heals my scrapes and bruises, and assures me that I will make it alive to a place I once thought was only ruin.

I once was taught to think that the Bible had talismanic qualities, that it was a special book, above reproach and free of any error or blemish. I don't know if I can say that any more, personally, though I may one day find a way to say it again in light of new understanding.

For now, while the greater problem lies in our interpretation, I accept that the Bible also has errors in its science and in its history, that there are areas where its morality is downright appalling to me, and that there are other parts where its theology just makes no sense, no matter how often I read it.

For now, from where I sit on this slippery slope, I have to accept that the Bible is inspired in the sense that all great literature is inspired, and perhaps a bit more. It's written and edited by people who were seeking something deeper than what they knew. These were people who set out with the intent to write Scripture and pursued God and his wisdom with everything that they had in them. For all their faults, they hungered for God, and wrote what they did because they wanted to share what they had found.

For all their differences, those voices are united in their passion for God. What brings all those voices into focus, what gives them all unity, is the revelation of Jesus.

Thank God he's there. I don't think I could stand this trip down the mountain without him.

Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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A living hell

Hell is a blanket that will not keep you warm.

Hell is unrequited self-love. It echoes like an empty mailbox on Valentine's Day.

Hell is winning the first baseball game of the season, and the last baseball game of the season, and every game in between. It is being rejected when you didn't even know you had applied.

Hell is always thinking about the life you wish you had, the life you hope to have, the life you will never have, and never about the life you do have. It is having everything you ever wanted.

Hell is knowing you are wrong; it is knowing you are right. It is absolute certainty with no room for doubt, for learning, or for growth.

In hell, the damned know themselves as they are, but are unable to change. The dream of heaven is so strong that they can reach out and touch it, but they lack the faith to do so.

When you are in hell, you always get your way.

Hell is a land where the sun never sets and the stars never show their face. It is a land where there is no rest from toil and labor. No one dances in hell. No one laughs. They do have sex in hell, or something like it; but it is a sad and lonely act of desperation as the lost strive for something that they know is beyond them, and it only leaves them feeling empty.

There are no schools in hell, no books. In hell, there is nothing left to learn, nothing left to accomplish. There is nothing left to look forward to.

Hell is the distance between yourself and other people.

The way to hell is paved with no intentions at all; we simply lay it one brick at a time, unthinking, on a long, steady, lonely slope that we tread our entire lives.

Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Repo man

About seventeen years ago, I was living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I was a resident missionary with STEM Ministries.

STEM is a missions organization with a focus on the North American church. By providing groups from the United States and Canada with short-term experiences in third world nations in the Caribbean and South America, it hopes to awaken the church in two of the wealthiest nations on Earth to the global scale of God's work.

In other words, it might seem really pressing to build a state-of-the-art nursery with a cappuccino bar for the workers, but there are Christians in the Dominican Republic where they'd be grateful for a corrugated tin roof to keep the rain and sun out.

It's a pretty straightforward proposition: Show American Christians what the rest of the world is like, and let God challenge their preconceptions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you forget right away, sometimes your experiences in the third world stay with you for the rest of your life.

While I was there, one of the nationals we worked with came to the ministry with a problem. He needed money, or the bank would take the land he and his family had been living on. Seventeen years is a long time, so I don't remember all the details. What I mostly remember is Steve Schmidt, our base director, mentioned that another missionary he knew would categorize this fellow's problems as the wealthy ignoring the plight of the poor, if not outright taking advantage of them.

Steve dismissed that as nonsense, since as he (correctly) pointed out, the fellow in question did have the money for the bank payment, or at least he used to. Like many people, he had used the money for other things, including things that he hadn't needed.

That's actually a common situation in Haiti, I'm afraid. A boujwa will come and buy a piece of property from someone for a handsome price, and tell him that he's going to build a house there in 10 years or so. Ten years will come and go, and then the boujwa will start building his house.

The former owner of the land, sadly, will still be on the property and will no longer have the handsome sum, which he theoretically could have used to buy land elsewhere, buy some goats or pigs to start a business and raise his family out of poverty, or something of the sort. Sadly, the owner usually will have done none of those things, and now has nothing left to show for the money he once was paid. It's all gone, and soon they are not only out of the money, they are out of the place they have lived for years.

There's no denying that the fellow who sold his home and then frittered away the money -- aside from any money that was put to a good use, like sending the kids to school -- made some really stupid decisions with his money, and in the end has to shoulder responsibility for his plight. On the other hand, it's a pretty cold thing to throw a family out of their homes, and leave them to fend for themselves.

Steve isn't that cold. He gave our national colleague some of the ministry's designated mercy money -- not enough to cover the whole payment, but a good chunk of it. The idea was that he would have to earn the rest of the money somehow, and make some adjustments, rather than us encouraging dependency on the "rich white missionaries."

Still, the story has stuck with me for the past 17 years because I can't shake the fundamental wrongness of evicting people from their homes. That feeling has stayed with me, and in recent months has grown still stronger, as banks that essentially preyed upon people by offering them mortgages that they couldn't afford, all in the name of making a buck. And while those homeowners have been thrown out onto the street, figuratively or literally, the executives responsible for the mess have been raking in huge bonuses even as the economy comes crashing down around the ears of the rest of us.

One fellow I know -- a dyed-in-the-wool God-is-a-Republican sort of Christian -- insists that capitalism is biblical. I'm not sure entirely how he justifies that, but there you have it. American-style capitalism unquestionably grew out of the Protestant work ethic practiced by groups like the Puritans and the Moravians, but it's quite a stretch to my mind to see Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" as being in sync with a text that never really got into particulars of economic theory beyond things like stressing the value of honest weights. At best, I can say that it is an extrabiblical economic system that can be shaped by biblical values of compassion (as opposed to the greed that drives the market most times).

But you know, home ownership is one area where capitalism keeps running afoul of biblical values, I think. In the U.S. economy, if I default on my mortgage, the bank theoretically has the legal right to foreclose on the mortgage and kick me, my wife, and our children, out onto the street.It doesn't matter if I've lost my job because of what the financial giants have done to the economy, it doesn't matter if they sold me a predatory mortgage for a market price that is three times the house's actual worth. If they have my signature on that mortgage contract, theoretically they have the legal right to kick me out of the house and try to sell it to recoup their losses.

There's something else at work here, though. While the hardcore apologists of a free market will expound on the virtues of tough love and making people take the consequences of their bad choices like parents disciplining an unruly child, it's not hard to find public sympathy for homeowners who are falling prey to economic forces that they have no control over.

There is something fundamentally unjust about evicting people from their homes. Not just unfair, but unjust. There is a fundamental connection between people and the homes they live in that we violate at our peril and to our shame.

The Bible backs me up on that. In ancient Israel, where my friend sees evidence of capitalism at work, that relationship was inviolate. An Israelite could buy the land of another Israelite, it's true, but only for seven years. Levitical law requires that when that seven-year period ended, the land had to be returned to its previous owner. The Torah also instituted the Jubilee, a period that came once every 50 years, where all debts were canceled, all slaves were set free, and all property rights were restored.

And therein lies a challenge for the American church as we stand on the cusp of what may blossom into the Second Great Depression. As we move forward, we must be mindful that we do have neither the right nor the authority to dictate to the rest of society how it should function.

But we should -- we must -- champion justice, and we have an obligation to advance alternatives to what our society practices, alternatives that respect and safeguard the basic dignity of everyone, especially those whose lives so often are chewed up in the cogs and gears of the systems that make our society work.

Some countercultural groups like The Jesus People in Chicago, or A Simple Way in Philadelphia, have explored the power and strength of communal living in contemporary society. Clearly that's not for everyone, but the alternatives are limited only by our faith and our imagination.

In the name of the one we claim to follow, we have a calling to do better.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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A more common way

And now I show you the most common way.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, at least I am in good company.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I still will be impressive and people will respect me for my authority on distracting irrelevancies.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I still will have something to brag about to make others ashamed in comparison to me.

Love is impatient, love can be unspeakably cruel. It is jealous without provocation, it boasts of all the sacrifices it makes, it is proud.

It is rude, it is self-serving, it is easily driven to exasperation, it holds grudges and remembers wrongs committed years ago.

Love tries not to delight too much in the misfortune of others when they get what's coming to them, or at least not to show how much it's enjoying it.

It usually protects, often trusts, occasionally hopes, and perseveres about half the time.

Love fails much more often than we would like to admit.

Where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; and where there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Now we see through a glass, darkly; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall fully know, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. Some day we will understand what love really is.

Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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What we can learn from a sacred cow

I heard a story once about a Christian missionary whose neighbor was a devout Hindu who greatly venerated a cow that the Hindu family owned.

I think most Westerners, particularly monotheists, would agree that venerating a cow is at least foolish, and probably counts as some form of idolatry in the eyes of God. Still, when the cow died, its owner was devastated, so the missionary went and mourned with him. He knew what its death meant to the Hindu man and his family, even though the missionary himself regarded that veneration as at least a foolish superstition that kept the man from Jesus.

In the same way, I think we are called to identify with other groups, when they experience discrimination or prejudice, even when we consider their defining traits to be sinful. We don't need to identify with practices that we consider sinful, but we certainly can relate to the relationships that they have, and their desire to be connected to another person, and even to have children. I don't see how we can afford not to.

The morality or im- of homosexuality (or its sinfulness, if you prefer, though I won't abide a gunpowder word like "evil," even for the sake of argument) is irrelevant to how society as a whole and how Christians specifically treat gays and lesbians. We have the example of Jesus, who held up pagans as examples of faith, children as examples of understanding, and reviled Samaritans as examples of compassion. We have a larger biblical mandate to weep with those who weep, to mourn with those who mourn, and to rejoice with those who rejoice.

Right now some goons are getting headlines because of their unconscionable reactions to the passage of Proposition 8 in California, but by and large in American society today you're not likely to encounter meaningful repercussions to disapproving morally of same-sex relationships.

You may disappoint or anger a few people, but you're not likely to be marginalized or beaten and left for dead, disowned, ridiculed and mocked, or experience the laundry list of other forms of discrimination that gays still encounter in most of this country (or the far worse punishments that await gays in other nations).

But there again, the issue isn't "Who has it worse?" any more than "Is this activity moral?"; the real issue is how Jesus would treat people.

How would Jesus treat people? Well, however you think he might view the morality of a loving couple in same-sex relationship, it's pretty clear from the record of the gospels that Jesus would commend their commitment to one another, respect the emotional and spiritual support they give to one another, and defend them against any who would discriminate against or punish them.

Shame on us if we would do any less.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The healing faith of a child

God shows up in some astonishing ways when we're opening to seeing him.

Like many children, my daughter Evangeline has plenty of stuffed animals, none of which has mattered much at all to her. That changed when her grandmother died. Suddenly, Evangeline bonded with a handmade stuffed rabbit that she has had since she was born, whom she calls Cinderabbit. Evangeline has slept with Cinderabbit every night since Grandma's funeral, and for a while she took her everywhere she went as well.

As my close, personal friend Rykie once observed about the divine love that shone through her own imaginary friends, so I have seen with Evangeline and Cinderabbit. Cinderabbit demands nothing in return from Evangeline for the comfort she gives. She stays as close as Evangeline wants, loves her unconditionally, and listens to the moans and sighs Evangeline doesn't know the words to express.

She is the very expression of God's love in my daughter's life, and couldn't be any more real if her coat were made of velveteen.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Not the gospel: Finding the cause of the conflict between church and world

What's striking about the uproar in Acts 22 is what it's not about.

A quick bit of background. In Acts 21, the Apostle Paul had shown up in Jerusalem with some Gentile Christians and had gone to the Temple. A group from a rival sect of Christianity that was decidedly less liberal than Paul on matters of Torah, told people that Paul had defiled the Temple by taking Gentiles there and that he had been preaching anti-Semitism wherever he went. The ensuing riot was bad that the Roman commander had to bring his army into the city and arrest Paul to save his life.

So, in Acts 22 Paul addresses the crowd from the relative safety of the soldiers' barracks. He starts speaking in Aramaic, the popular language of Judea at this time, and the crowd calms down immediately. "Didn't someone say this guy has been spreading hatred against the Holy City?" someone says. "That can't be true, listen to him talk. He speaks our language with a native accent. He's one of us."

Paul begins talking about his credentials, and they're impressive. He was taught by Gamaliel, a well-known and respected member of the Sanhedrin. Probably by this point people are starting to feel a little uncomfortable about how  they've been acting. Paul shares his story. He mentions that he persecuted followers of the Way, even going all the way to Damascus to have them thrown into prison.

Back when The Point was first launching its North Brunswick congregation, I remember Tim the pastor guy asking why we thought non-Christians were so hostile toward Christianity and the gospel. There were the expected answers about pushy Christians engaging in drive-by evangelism, like the annoying fellow who tries to strike up a conversation so he can give you a tract.

There were all sorts of other reasons too. Somebody mentioned some of the scandals that rocked Christianity in the 1980s, like the Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggart, or the more recent scandal of child molestation in the Catholic church. Someone else mentioned the sometimes pugnacious behavior of prominent evangelical leaders like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell.

And of course someone probably mentioned that the gospel runs counter to all the values of the world.

If that's the case, if people are supposed to greet the gospel with hostility, I'd expect the crowd to lose it somewhere between verses 6 and 16. That's where Paul talks about his surprising conversion to the Way, his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, his miraculous healing, and his decision to be baptized. These are all things that mark Paul's conversion experience.

It's not like people are going to miss that. The Way began in their city some 20 or 30 years earlier. The book of Acts notes that when Peter preached on the Day of Pentecost about 3,000 people became believers. The Jews who were not followers of the Way still knew them. They were related to them, bought and sold with them, and worshiped with them at the Temple or (in the suburbs) at the synagogue. If anyone in the world at this point in history knows the story of Christianity, it's the people of Jerusalem.

Truth is, no one seems to care. If Paul had stopped here, it seems like they would have said, "Eh, it's OK. Sorry about the misunderstanding."

But of course, Paul never did know when to stop. Look at what gets everyone's outrage. It's in verse 21, when he says that God told him to go and preach to the Gentiles. And that's when people start clamoring for his blood. It's not the gospel that drove them to a fury: It was racism, plain and simple.

Even the Sanhedrin, in Acts 23 didn't really care that Paul was a follower of Christ. The Pharisees, who got short shrift in the gospels, are completely willing in verse 9 to let Paul go, since — as far as they're concerned — their only difference with him pertains to his interpretation of the doctrine of the Resurrection. (That Jewish-Christian relations are not as close today as they once were owes a lot to the last 1,700 years.)

So I think about that question that Tim asked, maybe three years ago. The answer I gave is "the chip on our shoulder." I've talked with many people, including Jews, about Jesus and what I've found in him. Over the years I've noticed that people don't mind an honest discussion about religion and spirituality. Many even find it interesting.

What they don't like, of course, is being lectured, and pressured, and being beaten with the hell stick. And of course no one likes getting into a discussion with someone who expects there to be a fight and so is ready with the biggest stick, best stock answers, and nicest boxing gloves so they can be guaranteed a win.

Paul's audience reacted badly to his message because of their issues. Christians' audiences today react badly because of ours.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Let's Pretend. Actually let's not any more

My experience with evangelicals is that there is a game of Let's Pretend afoot that the faith has been largely consistent from the time of Abraham down to the present.

Clearly there is some truth to this, but let's not kid ourselves. Our interpretation of Scripture, our concepts of morality and justice, and many of our doctrines have changed, sometimes drastically over the past two millennia. Not only do we like to believe that extrabiblical concepts like capitalism and democracy were important to ancient Jews and ancient Christians, but we also have changed our understanding the Bible itself.

Honest faith must also admit honest doubt, and honest doubts need to be acknowledged and explored. God is big enough to handle tough questions, and it's not as though he's surprised when we ask them. Refusing to voice them leaves us with unresolved questions and a lingering, festering suspicion that we've been sold a bill of goods.

Satan's one example. Popular Christian culture has a lot to say about the rebellion in heaven, the way the highest of all the angels led a rebellion that ended with a third of the angels cast into hell and becoming demons. This is a great story, and I love it as much as the nice guy, but it's not exactly in the Bible. It's older than John Milton and "Paradise Lost," but as far as I can tell, the story first gained traction a few centuries after the canon was complete.

The gospel presentation has changed too. These days we share the gospel by describing how all have sinned against God, putting us under sentence of death because God is holy and cannot abide the presence of sin or sinful people. The good news is that Christ stepped in and took that punishment in our place, satisfying God's need for justice, so that we can be spared the pains of hell as long as we accept Jesus as our personal savior.

That's quite a bit different from the older doctrine of Christus Victor. It also differs quite significantly from the first recorded creed "If you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. For it is with the heart that you believe and are justified, and with the mouth that you confess and are saved" (1 Corinthians 10:9-10).

Unlike our modern gospel presentation, which requires personal confession of sin, there's nothing in that creed about confessing sin. It's all about confessing Jesus' sovereignty and resurrection. See the difference?

There's also the matter of sexual mores and morality. For centuries, the Christian concept of marriage looked radically different from our Western norm of getting married in church before having sex. In older times, couples would cohabitate and have children before getting their union blessed by the a priest, sometimes years later. The church in some parts of Christian Europe even recognized trial marriages that aren't that different from today's practice of premarital cohabitation.

Nowadays it's heterosexual married families ûber alles. The insistence on marriage-vows-first very well may be closer to what God desires, but I don't think we're kidding anyone but ourselves when we claim that the way we do things now in the West is how they've always been done or properly should be done always.

And so it is with hell. When Jesus talks about hell, he's describing the city dump outside Jerusalem. When we talk about hell with its picturesque and exquisitely grotesque torments for the dammed that go on day and night without stop, we're influenced by the Dante's hauntingly beautiful poetry in "The Divine Comedy."

We owe it to ourselves to do better than supporting a folk version of Christianity. It's essential to chase down the original meaning and intent of the Scriptures. Scrape away the barnacles and see what the hull of the ship is like underneath.

What does the Bible really say about hell, about heaven, about demons, about Jesus, and about even itself?

One quick example of how hell has been developed, away from the biblical teaching. Matthew 25 shows the exalted Son of Man judging the nations, and separating them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. To the goats, the wicked, he says, "Depart from me into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels."

The funny thing is, the audience to that particular speech was a group of people who clearly believed in him. They recognized the Lord when they saw him, and asked in bewilderment, "But did we not heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons in your name?" If the term Christian has any meaning in the context of that parable, this group was in like Flynn.

Or there's the servant -- not an enemy, but a servant -- whose talent of gold is taken away and given to another; the servant whose debt was forgiven and then was beaten and thrown into prison. I've never heard these understood as anything but metaphors for hell, and yet the people being thrown there are all servants of the king/master/lord, thereby marking them as people whom today we would identity as Christians. So who is hell for?

Quite often, the Bible does not say what we have been taught to think it does, and though the investigation often leaves me with more questions than answers, I find that I prefer the uncertainty of faith to the cold hard certainty of what I was once taught to settle for.

We've been playing this game of Let's Pretend for far too long. Isn't it time to rediscover for ourselves what the Bible really says, and let that shape our faith?



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Mike and me

Several years ago, my friend Mike told me that he was transgendered.

At the time, I recall, it made little impression on me. He's a good friend of mine, and I knew he was a good person, and that was what mattered. I didn't know much about gender dysphoria, only the old cliche erroneously attached to homosexuals, about "being a woman in a man's body." We had some lengthy discussions pertaining about gender and identity, and life moved on. He was determined to remain a man for the sake of their three children, and that appeared to be that.

Of course, where identity is concerned, that is never that. When a person is required to be something other than what they are, the strain of the pretense builds over time and takes its toll in one area or another. Depression and withdrawal ensued, demanding their pound of flesh from his marriage and every other relationship he had.

And so, some months ago, Mike decided it was time to begin transitioning. He started taking antiandrogens, a prescription drug that suppresses male hormones, and something broke that had survived fifteen years of a sometimes tumultuous marriage. Earlier this year, Mike and his wife, Lynn, formally separated. He moved into an apartment of his own, started taking female hormones, and began going out increasingly as Shelly.

It's been rough. While she has found several transgendered friends in the city where she lives, Shelly has had to face the bigotry of people who see her as a predator or a pervert. Her own parents recently cut her out of the will without even having the courage or the decency to tell him in person that they were doing so. Her father had the indecency to heap abuse on her when she decloseted herself to them about four months ago, calling her a despicable parent who was abandoning her kids, when the truth is that she's probably more involved now -- still as a father -- than when she lived in the house with them. The sickening irony here is that her father has been emotionally distant, verbally abusive, adulterous and a drunk most of Shelly's life -- and yet he has the audacity to lecture Shelly on how she's a bad parent.

And, despicably, a minister told Shelly's mom that they were right to disown her, that it was what God would want them to do. I don't get that. I really don't. Where does Jesus advocate or model any such moralistic stance with anyone? The gospels present Jesus as someone who stands by people, no matter what. Prostitutes, adulterers, thieves and lepers with hideous open sores all felt comfortable and welcome in his presence.

And so, even as people ask me how I can do it, I'm standing by Shelly, because she's been my friend for years. I can't imagine not sticking by her. I've been genuinely upset by some of the stuff that other people have done in reaction to this decision to transition, but all the same ... I feel rather left adrift at sea by this whole thing.

It's odd in some ways that it's rattled me this much. I've had other friends, both men and women, tell me that they're gay, and it didn't even make me blink. In some cases, we've become better friends afterward. I've known Mike [Shelly] is transgendered for years, and yet this turn of events has left me unsteady, uncertain and, in a sense, staggering. I intend to stand by her, because we've known each other for so long and have always been close, but it's a challenge all the same. As much as I'm supportive of her, I just don't "get" it, probably because I've never felt that I was anything but a guy. It's a mystery to me how she can feel that she's actually a woman in a man's body and that these exterior changes are changing anything.

Yet there's no denying that she's happier, and more alive than I've seen her for years. I'm glad she's got friends, and I'm glad she's found a support network, and I'm glad that I can continue to be a friend for her. I'm glad she's willing to take the risk on me that I won't be a royal bastard and dump her too, to escape having to deal with my own confusion over her gender identity.

In the end, after all, my confusion is my problem and not hers, and given that she's paying such a heavy price for her own situation, it would be unfair and unreasonable to demand that she pay mine as well.

I just wish there were a chart for these waters I find myself sailing with her. I wish the sun were out, and that these uncertain clouds weren't darkening the sky. I wish I knew where we were going, and I hope the ship is seaworthy enough to get us there.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.

It's called 'self-righteousness,' not 'tough love'

They disowned him. They freaking disowned him.

Back in February, my friend Mike came out to his parents. He explained that he is transgendered and that he and Lynn were separating as he transitions into life as a woman. This went about as well as one would expect it to. His mom was crushed that he had decided to live a "homosexual lifestyle," and prays that he'll return to Christ, and his dad -- who routinely cheated on his wife and was emotionally absent from and uninvolved with his children -- castigated him for being selfish who was and abandoning the kids.

That was about what he expected. Mike had figured that since they've known him for 40 years, have seen him with the kids, and will have the chance to see him continue to be involved with his kids, that they would come around in the end. Or at least his mom would.

Well, surprise, surprise. Today he got a certified letter letting him know that his parents had revoked him as executor of their estate, removed him from their will, and left everything to his children instead.

They didn't even have the integrity to talk with him about it. His parents sneaked around behind his back, with his sister, and then they had the gall to claim the moral high ground, saying that this was his decision, and that he had left them no choice.

What. The. Actual. Hell.

How can people do things like this and still sleep at night? They're treating him like a moral and spiritual reprobate without even listening to him, they are changing family dynamics to exclude him, and they effectively are trying to drive a wedge between him and the rest of his family. And then, worst of all, they blame it all on him, probably in the name of "tough love."

One by one his supports are being kicked out from under him: church, friends, and now family. I don't get it. This is supposed to be love? Or is it a moral message? "Look kids, this is how you should treat someone whose choices you disagree with."

He told me all this and was so overwhelmed by the sense of outrage I felt on his behalf that he started to cry. Aside from his therapist, who is paid to take his side, no one else has seen him as a wonged party.

Mike told me he plans to talk with his parents some time soon, about the way they went about this. He thinks his mother's conscience is bothering her. She wrote the letter explaining what they had done, and its tone suggests to him that she was going along with her husband's Morally Righteous Anger for the sake of avoiding a fight, rather than following her own heart.

Me, I'm just appalled ... and I'm glad that I can be there for a friend when he needs me.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Drawing the line that separates canonical from not

I have a question for friends and readers who have been to seminary or otherwise have studied such things: How exactly is the line drawn between canon and noncanon?

At the time the Christian Scriptures were being written in the first century, there was a host of other communication, discussion and even writing going on that formed the context in which the church understood the epistles and other books we now regard as canon. Take the book of Enoch for example.

Ostensibly written by Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, the book of Enoch dates to about 300 B.C.E. It tells the story of the watchers, a group of angels who fathered the Nephilim in Chapter 8 of the book of Genesis. Other parts of the book include a series of eschatological parables that include references to a righteous messianic figure called the "Son of Man," a detailed work of astronomy that lays forth a 364-day solar calendar, and finally a series of visions meant to foretell the history of Israel down to the Maccabees.

Protestants and Catholics alike take their lead from the Council of Nicea, which in 325 C.E., rejected the Book of Enoch from the canon. But at the time the New Testament was being written, Jude didn't know that. He cited the Book of Enoch twice.

The first time Jude cites the Book of Enoch, he refers to a dispute between Satan and Michael over the body of Moses. Jude uses this as a caution against judging one another. Later in the book, he refers to God binding angels in chains of adamant for their rebellion, as an assurance that God will judge those who teach unsound doctrine.

We can get the essentials of Jude's message without knowing the particulars of the Book of Enoch, but surely familiarity with the book helps.

This isn't like reading a commentary by Charles Spurgeon or John Wesley to understand a parable or a difficult passage of the Bible. In this case, one of the authors of the Bible was familiar with a book that we reject and saw so much value in it that he drew on it to make his point. How much wisdom are we meant to draw from the Book of Enoch when we read it to illuminate Jude's writing?

This isn't confined to Jude. There are a lot of ahas we either miss or misunderstand because we lack the background noise that the writers took for granted. Noah flips out because Ham saw him passed out naked. Zipporah stops God from killing Moses by circumcising her firstborn son and throwing the foreskin at his feet, How much do you want to bet these passages would make sense if we had more extrabiblical material from that era?

I'd really like to know how that line was drawn, and what implications it has for understanding the Bible the way we do today.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Christians and profanity

From "Toward an Evangelical Theology of Cussing":

Conservative evangelical Christians have long been known for shunning all sorts of behavior considered by others to be morally neutral or enjoyable. Whether it’s drinking alcoholic beverages, smoking tobacco products, playing cards, going to movie theatres, dancing, or even drinking coffee, “fundamentalist” Christians are often viewed by outsiders as having a God who is not only a white-clad, frowning prude, but also a “Cosmic Killjoy.”

However, the study of cussing, kakalogology, has a less refined history among Christians in general and evangelicals in particular. This lack of definition has caused many outright offenses and some extremely awkward social situations. These range from blurting out words that sound mischievously like curse words but are, in fact, not, to a teacher or preacher’s hesitancy to utter the word “hell” in reference the place of eternal torment.

What does the Bible teach concerning cussing? Can there be a Christian consensus on kakalogology? How are we to determine, in an age of words that did not exist in biblical times, what is appropriate and what is foul? If the Christian is to avoid uttering certain terms, we need to know what those are so we can at least keep an eye on them. And if there is a world of vocabulary available for communicating God’s message, shouldn’t we also be free to use it?

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The kind of Bible study I'd like to lead

I'm hosting a weekly Bible study on the book of Judges starting this Wednesday, but it's anyone's guess whether anyone besides me actually will attend.

I'm trying to do mine a little differently from how I've usually found Bible studies to be done in the American church. Specifically, I want to set aside many of the preconceptions we bring to the Bible when we read it.

Some of them are Golden Book assumptions; for example: "Why did God save Daniel from the lions? Because Daniel was faithful."

Others have to do with our assumptions about the morality of the Bible heroes. We assume that Joseph was a virtuous man whom God honored because he was faithful to him the whole time, or that Samson killed all the Philistines as an act of devotion to God.

Neither of those is a particularly deep reading. The Genesis account is clear that Joseph wanted nothing more than to make his brothers suffer for all that they had done to him once he had them at his mercy. As for Samson, he killed the Philistines he did mostly because his pride had been hurt and he wanted to get even. Neither of them is much of a role model in those stories.

Beyond that, I can see plenty of exploration of the character of God himself. If we question and explore the motivations of the characters in the Bible, at some point we have to remember that God himself is a character in the Bible, with motivations stated and unstated, goals and conflicts that he must face and overcome.

And if we're giving the Bible an honest reading, we have to admit that there are some shocking things in there: the genocide of the Canaanites, the near total destruction of the human race in a global flood, and even young men getting mauled by bears for making fun of a prophet's baldness. We need to recognize problem passages when they come up, and face their problems honestly.

Even without getting into the odd passages like "Zipporah at the Inn," where God plans to kill Moses until Zipporah circumcises their son, there are times we have to stop and ask "Is this really God we're talking about, the same God we sing those nice songs to on Sunday morning?"

These are questions that make us stop and reassess what we mean when we say that Scripture is divinely inspired, infallible and inerrant. They even make us stop and ask whether God really is good, or if he just has good publicity agents.

I've found over the years that raising those questions is an important part of growth and of faith. Proverbs cautions us, "Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him." Doubts drive us into deeper faith because questions make us seek meaningful answers.

That sort of exploration is something I've seen to be largely absent in Bible studies I've attended, not just at the church I now attend, but elsewhere as well. What I have seen instead is a lot of contentment to repeat things we've heard before and to pass them off as deep insights, or to get sidetracked into discussions that have nothing to do with the passage at hand.

The truth is, the Bible is one of the most widely misunderstood books in Western literature, probably because it's actually a piece of Eastern literature. It's misunderstood by non-Christians who react to it based on unpleasant experiences with Christians, and it's misunderstood by Christians themselves.

That's a shame, because it really is a phenomenal piece of literature, and like all phenomenal pieces of literature, there are some deep currents that flow through its pages. If we're willing to pull up our oars, stop rowing our way, and just let those currents carry us where they go, we'll all find it to be a much more fascinating and spiritually insightful book than we've ever realized before.

This sort of honest search is something that I think will engage people who consider themselves to be spiritual but not Christians, and it should engage Christians as well. One attitude I consistently have encountered is contempt for Christians who swear unswerving allegiance to the Bible yet have no idea what it actually says or make no attempt to deal with issues like Paul's apparent sexism, the appallingly strict penal code in the Mosaic law, and so on.

I'd like to lead a study that does those things. Naturally, I can't get the church to promote it along with the other Bible studies.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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