Forgiveness is personal

Corrie Ten Boom was 52 years old when the Nazis came for her and her family.

For two years, the Ten Booms had been helping to hide Jewish families and other refugees during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. When she was arrested, Ten Boom and her sister Betsie were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where Betsie died. Ten Boom survived, and when the war ended, she returned home and established a safehouse for refugees.

Two years later Ten Boom was back in Germany, sharing with the internationally reviled German people a message that God forgives. One night, at a church in Munich, she recognized a member of the audience. He had been one of the guards at Ravensbrück.

At Ravensbrück, Ten Boom had known hunger and want. She had been stripped of all her possessions and forced to walk naked past the guards. She had been forced to sleep in beds infested with fleas. Her sister Betsie had died, one of an estimated 50,000 women to perish at Ravensbrück. Prisoners there had been starved, overworked and even experimented on. Ten Boom had endured and witnessed unimaginable suffering, and this man had been a part of it.

And he didn't want just a divine pardon. He wanted hers as well.

If you've heard the story, you know how it ends: She forgave him. (If you don't know the story, go read it.)

Corrie Ten Boom's story is one widely shared in Christian circles, in no small part because it is so amazing. It's hard to imagine a more difficult request than the one the former Ravensbrück guard made of her, and it defies belief that she actually forgave him. It's not just amazing; it's supernatural.

That's one of the reasons we often lionize Ten Boom and portray her as a larger-than-life hero of the faith, but when we do that we miss out on so much. We can draw inspiration from saintly heroes, but following in their footsteps is too daunting if they wear seven-league boots and we're left to chase after them in sandals. There is hope if we remember that seven-league boots only go one step at a time.

We'll start with the first step. Let's suppose we could approach Ten Boom the afternoon before she arrived in Munich. Maybe she's having a cup of coffee, or maybe she's writing her thoughts down on a piece of paper. She sees us coming, and smiles that encouraging smile of hers, so we ask her the big question. Has she forgiven the people responsible for the death of her sister, for all that she had suffered and seen during the Holocaust?

The words wouldn't even be out of our mouths before we realized what a stupid question this was, not to mention rude and presumptuous. Of course she has forgiven these people. She's in Germany, isn't she? While other survivors of the camps were weighted down with horror and grief, or quietly rebuilding their lives and starting new families, Ten Boom had come back to the land where she had suffered, to share God's forgiveness with the nation that had visited such evil on the world.

And then there was Ten Boom's work in the Netherlands. She hadn't just been caring for Jewish refugees and other victims of Nazi savagery; she also was providing shelter for jobless Dutch citizens who had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation.

How could anyone think to ask if she had forgiven? Of course she had.

Her encounter with the former Nazi brings out the one thing missing from this forgiveness narrative: the human element. It took his self-awareness and his desire for forgiveness to set this amazing story in motion. It's easier to forgive in the abstract, but it's much more meaningful to do it person-to-person. If the former guard hadn't been in that Munich church that night, he never would have asked Ten Boom to forgive him; and neither of them would have experienced that soul-shaping moment.

It's not just enough to offer forgiveness carte blanche. For real, deep and meaningful forgiveness to happen, someone needs to ask for it, and someone else needs to give it.

So where does that leave us when people are unaware how badly they have hurt us, or in even worse situations, know what they have done but don't care, because they don't see it as a big deal? Is it possible to forgive someone if they don't ask for it? Even the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the grandfather of teachings about forgiveness, says that God's forgiveness is free but we are required to acknowledge our sins and to repent of them, rather than merely feeling sorry about them.

Think about the story of the rich young ruler. He wanted to follow Jesus, who told him that mere belief wasn't enough. The ruler also needed to part with his wealth and give it to the poor around him. Unfortunately, the money meant too much to him, and the young ruler walked away, prompting Jesus to lament that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Compare that to the story of Zacchaeus. As a tax collector, Zacchaeus used his position with the Roman government to extort money from his countrymen. Jesus didn't even need to prompt him. During dinner, Zacchaeus pledged to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay fourfold anyone he had defrauded, after which Jesus declared that salvation had come to Zacchaeus' house.

Jesus seems like a forgiving guy. You're left with the impression from these two stories that he's going to have a good relationship with Zacchaeus going forward. The other guy? Not so much.

So where does that leave us? I've heard for years the merits of letting go of things, and there have been many times I've given that same advice to other people. And letting go seems like excellent advice when someone is overreacting, like being angry because their favorite seat was taken, or because someone else ate more cookies than was fair.

The trouble is, it's easy to let it go and forgive when someone is five minutes late picking you up, but not so much when they completely forget about you, leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere and potentially put your life in danger. It's easy to let go of an inconvenience. It's much harder to forgive when someone has really hurt you.

At best, letting go may be the first stage of forgiveness, one where no one learns anything, except for how inexcusably awful other human beings can be. But maybe that's the highest we can aspire to in some circumstances.

Author Madeleine L'Engle once described herself in a situation where she realized she needed to forgive someone but couldn't find the strength to do it. So she prayed this: “God, forgive the son of a bitch,” and found that in the end, it was enough. It was a start.

And so, for those who have wronged us and who make no attempt to set things aright, we pray to the Lord: "Lord, forgive the sons of bitches." Amen.

So say we all.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


1 | 2 | 3



Tweet

Forgiveness: It's a struggle

I've been having a hard time with forgiveness lately. I'm sorry, did I say lately? It's been a problem for years. More than a decade, even.

Fourteen-and-a-half years ago, my wife and I opened our home to a foster child. At the age when our own daughter could climb stairs, feed herself, draw pictures with crayons or pencils, and communicate her thoughts with laughter, tears and words; Isaac could barely stand, much less walk. His vocabulary consisted of wordless but excited moaning, and he had no idea how to play. (He could sit still for TV, though. His parents taught him to do that extremely well.)

We didn't do this alone, though. I was from Pittsburgh and my wife was from Tuscon, Ariz., but we did have the support of our church, a community of believers we had been a part of since we came to the area. As one they stood before God and swore an oath to support us as we took this child into our hearts, and to support not just us, but also another couple who were offering their home to his sister.

Isaac's problems were worse than we initially realized, but for those first few months things went gloriously. One of the women in our church was a licensed social worker, and at the beginning she and her husband handled arrangements for supervised visits. They gave us support in other ways too, as she gave us perspective, explained state regulations and even offered advice on how to engage a 2-year-old who was used to being ignored.

Isaac's mother had started coming to our church several weeks before the state removed the children from her custody, and Carla had difficulty understanding boundaries; so other friends ran interference for us. And everyone expressed great enthusiasm for what we were doing. If shouldering the burden of caring for someone else's abused child is Paradise, then that winter was Eden.

The serpent had arrived in Eden by springtime. The pastor our church had hired a year previously was showing his colors, as he used his pulpit to manipulate, to bully and to control. As quickly as he had drawn new congregants in his first several months, he was now driving people away, and as they went, our support network unraveled.

The social worker and her husband disappeared from the scene first. Then other people began to realize that they were overextended, and they began to pull back as well. We couldn't. There was a child depending on us.

I want to say I don't blame these people, but I do. I hear from time to time how this person or that one is facing trouble and needs prayer, and I walk away. I see how others are respected in the churches they have moved to, and all I can feel is disgusted. The betrayal hurt that much.

My wife bore the worst of it. In addition to the extra attention Isaac needed, we had to care for our own daughter and there was a second child on the way. Harder still, I had started a job that spring that demanded more than 50 hours a week, including almost all day Monday and Tuesday. I could get relief by going off and working in the garden, but for my wife, Eden became a cage with iron bars.

She tried to get help. She called people from the church and asked them to watch our daughter for an hour or two just so she could attend a medical appointment. They told her no.

Time went on, and soon it became evident that Isaac was returning to his birth parents. We watched as the progress he had made in our home was torn up by the roots and thrown out. If our church was grieving with us, we couldn't tell. By midsummer, the church had all but fallen apart, and the people who had sworn to be with us were nowhere to be seen.

Isaac had come into our lives with a great deal of fanfare, but when it came time for him to depart we were almost completely alone. When I came home from work at two in the morning and found my daughter sitting at the stop of the stairs crying because her brother wasn't around, I was there to comfort her.

When the quiet and the grief overwhelmed with a depth too profound for words, the community I had believed would be with me, was gone.

So I say this to my old church: You screwed up, big time.

These people had sworn before God that they would be there for us throughout the entire time we fostered. They sang our praises, and told us how our faith inspired theirs. When we lost Isaac, they were nowhere to be found. We didn't even get a lousy sympathy card. One person when I saw her barely a month later actually told me to get over it.

Those last two really hurt. Fifteen years later, and forgiveness is still a struggle.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


1 | 2 | 3



Tweet

Donald Trump, born-again Christian?

So, apparently Donald Trump has accepted Christ.

That is the report of James Dobson, coincidentally one of the evangelical leaders whose support Trump has been courting as the Republican Party heads into its convention. Trump is decidedly toxic, with the result that many prominent Republicans are keeping their distance, even as they pledge to support him as the presumptive nominee. Of course, as a Christian, Trump would be able to lay claim to God's forgiveness, which he famously has said he has never needed; and then Christian voters throughout America would be obliged to support him too. The alternative is Hillary Clinton.

As my younger brother would say, "That's nice, Gary."

Trump is racist, mysoginistic, xenophobic and a liar; and he preys on the worst and basest impulses in people. As such he is unfit for city councilman, let alone the White House. Religious beliefs (real or feigned) are irrelevant to a candidate's worthiness of public office. His lack of moral character makes him the worst candidate from a major party in at least a century.

As to the claim that he's suddenly become a Christian, I call political opportunism. Want me to take claims of a recent conversion seriously? Claims of conversion don't mean a thing without a changed life. Urge him to drop his vainglorious pursuit of the presidency and to show fruit in keeping with repentance. He might start with the command of Christ to "Sell everything you have and give it to the poor, so you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come and follow me."

Trump should never hold office, but at least that way he'll have done something meaningful with both his life and his money.

If Trump comes off like someone deliberately exploiting religion for votes, the ones who comes off truly terrible are James Dobson and Jerry Falwell Jr., who are attempting to spread their legitimacy in the evangelical world over Trump. Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family as part of his effort to spread his gospel of how to raise children, has had waning influence in the evangelical world despite retiring from that particular ministry several years ago.

But if we must be honest, this is not terribly surprising. Dobson is someone who loves power and has a naked hunger for influence. That's been evident since he leveraged the audience of his show to get a seat on the Meese Commission on Pornography, but it has been especially evident since the heyday of Focus on the Family during the Bush administration, when he was threatening to put senators whose votes he disagreed with "in the hot seat."

Falwell's father was much the same way, and though I know precious little about Falwell Jr., it looks like the apple didn't fall far from the tree.

I doubt very much that the two men are making up a born-again story for Trump. My best guess is that they want it to be true, since that would appear to grant legitimacy to supporting Trump's White House ambitions and to telling rank-and-file evangelicals to support them as well.

What this tells me is that these two men, and other evangelicals who are "advising" Trump, are willing to accept a man who represents the opposite of Christ's teachings if they believes it will give them the potential for influence. To Dobson, Falwell, Michelle Bachman and their fellows, bigotry, xenophobia, philandering and self-aggrandizement are all preferable to having a liberal in the White House, at least when you give them a Christian gloss.

It is heartbreaking how far they have fallen.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.
Tweet

Forgiveness: It's a burden

I wish someone could explain to me how forgiveness works.

That sounds so childish, doesn't it? “Forgive and forget” is one of the first lessons I remember my parents teaching me when I was a child, and I've always tried to teach it to my children too. Don't hold on to the things people do that hurt you. Forgive them, and then move on. Forgiveness is life itself. Refusing to forgive someone poisons wells so that the water becomes bitter. It salts the earth so that the crops won't grow, and festers like an open wound until it kills the injured relationship.

Forgiveness is basic to the Christian faith. The disciples asked Jesus how to pray, and he put forgiveness right at the heart of the prayer he taught them. And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.

This goes far beyond a mere religious observance like fasting or showing up at church on Sunday. Jesus made it clear that forgiveness is absolutely mandatory for anyone who wants to be counted his follower. For if you forgive men their sins, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their sins, neither will your Father forgive your sins. 

It doesn't even matter how badly the person wronged us. The people crucified Jesus, and his final words still included a plea for their pardon. Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing.

It doesn't matter how many times the same person has hurt us. The disciples came and asked Jesus how many times they should forgive the same person, and even generously suggested that seven times would be enough. Not seven times, Jesus answered, but seven times seven times.

In some ways, that doesn't sound so hard. Anyone can forgive a moment's rudeness or an evening of disrespect. At an opportune moment, or in the light of the morning, you approach the offender, show her the injury and let her understand how she hurt you. Most people are decent enough to be mortified, apologize profusely and make things right. You'd be a cad not to forgive in that situation.

But those slights are mild, like forgetting to say thank you, or slapping someone in the face. Forgiving affronts like that is easy. The big stuff is much worse. How do you forgive someone who betrays a confidence and leaves your secrets exposed and your shame laid bare to the world? How do you forgive your abuser, or someone who breaks his marriage vows? How do you forgive anyone who denies, rejects or mocks who you are; or who dismisses the agony you're going through and blithely tells you to get over it?

How do you forgive people who swear before God that they will walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death with you, and then abandon you when it starts to get dark?

How? Goddam it, how?


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


1 | 2 | 3


Tweet

Battle of the Bathroom

A couple days ago, President Obama weighed in on the North Carolina bathroom debate and told people to get over it.

North Carolina, of course, is where the state Legislature passed a law specifically to overturn a local ordinance in Charlotte that protected the right of transgender men and women to use the bathroom of the sex they identify with. Raising the morals alarm, the Republican governor and Republican-controlled state Legislature rushed to protect the women and children of North Carolina from hordes of imaginary child molesters disguised as women. The president has sided with the transgender community and issued an executive order to all states that links federal education aid with the protections they have in place for transgender children, particularly the right to use the bathroom that matches their identity.

The shit predictably hit the fan, and I'm sorry to say that I've lost respect for people I've known for 18 years, over the way they've surrendered to moral panic.

Calm down, everyone. It's worth noting that transgender people for years have used bathrooms of the sex they identify with. All the Obama administration has done is to reaffirm the right that they already have. Why are we suddenly worried now? No one is trying to give anyone special rights. The GOP is simply trying to take them away.

There are no documented cases of child molesters and rapists claiming to be transgender so they can enter the women's room and sexually assault girls or women in there. None. On the other hand, there are plenty of cases of transmen and especially transwomen being physically and sexually assaulted, and even killed because people feel threatened or skeeved out by their presence.

We're called as believers to protect the helpless and to defend those who live on the margins of society. That includes the transgender. What we are doing is putting the lives and safety of transgender people at risk because we are afraid of an entirely different group of people. That makes no sense, morally or legally.

There is a real human cost to the fear being whipped up over this manufactured issue. I read a story a few days ago about a ciswoman who was verbally and physically assaulted because people felt she didn't look feminine enough to be in the women's room. Transwomen already are at risk of assault, including sexual assault; sending them into the men's room is only going to increase that risk.

I get the desire to protect my three daughters and other girls from sexual predators. But statistically speaking those sexual predators are far and away most likely to be cisgender straight men than they are gay men, women of any orientation, or people of any other gender. So we handle the risk the way parents always have: Don't send a small child into a public bathroom unaccompanied, even if it means that she's going to head into men's room with her father. Little boys are at a higher risk of being molested by a trusted sports coach than a little girl is by a stranger in the women's room.

We cannot and dare not marginalize one group of people, the transgender, because of a baseless association with another group of people, like sex offenders. There is no justification for it spiritually or morally or legally.

When we listen to fear as we are doing now, we always end up regretting it.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.
Tweet

The Church I Want

Let me tell you about the kind of church I want to belong to.

I want to belong to a church that welcomes people of all gender identities. I don't care if you identify as the sex you were born as, or as a different one. You may be androgynous, genderfluid, transgender, or something else. It makes no difference to me.

I'm a cisgender male. Come, be welcome. Sit next to me, and let's talk about "Captain America: Civil War," and argue the respective merits of the sides Tony Stark and Steve Rogers took. Let's argue whether the Star Wars prequels should count as canon, and see if we can outdo one another in hating Jar Jar Binks. Tell me about your favorite books and the last time you saw live theater.

I want to belong to a church that welcomes people without regard for whom they're attracted to. Gay? That's great! Heterosexual? No problem. Asexual? That's fantastic! Bisexual? Pansexual? None of that matters. Got a fetish? I won't bat an eye. Let's discuss theology, let's talk philosophy. I never studied Søren Kirkegaard or Socrates, although I used to fake it when I was younger. Maybe you can explain them to me so that I'll go read them for myself and understand them for real. I'm all ears. Come sit down and break bread with me. We'll share a bottle of wine as we talk.

I don't care about your past, if you've been a sex worker and you're ashamed about it or you've been a sex worker and you're proud of it. I don't even care if you're still an active sex worker. None of that matters to me. Maybe you've got an idea for how I can get my kids to clean up after themselves, or how I can get more tomatoes from my garden. I'd love to hear it. Let's hang out, swap gardening tips and tell each other our stories.

Are you a refugee fleeing war or famine? I so want my church to welcome you, without asking irrelevant questions like what religion you belong to. Come find sanctuary. All that matters is that you are hungry and weary, and we have the means to give you rest. It's yours for the asking, without condition or reservation.

Actually, I do belong to a church like this. It welcomes all these people and many more, regardless of their racial and cultural backgrounds, their age or their abilities. It's an amazing thing to witness. I see glimpses of it from time to time, as from a far-off country.

And I'll fight with all the strength heaven gives me to see that church touch the earth and be found here, even if it's just once and only for a moment.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet

Leaving Egypt: Justice and only Justice (Part Three)

Well, it appears I have written myself into a corner.

When I started writing about the Exodus about a week ago, it was the result of a brief discussion a friend of mine and I had had together about the Exodus as a type of redemption. Tim's a preacher. That Sunday he went off and did his thing, while I continued to kick my thoughts around and puzzle over the way the story has two endings. By Wednesday last week, I realized that my thoughts had stretched beyond one blog post, and had become a short series.

If you've read the first two parts already, you can see the progression I had in mind. God miraculously intervenes and delivers Israel through the ten plagues, and brings the nation to birth in the Sinai desert. In the desert he gradually weans Israel from a childlike dependency on him for its every need, and moves them toward a more mature relationship where they're ready to enter the family business of redeeming the nations.

The idea I had in mind for this third post was that the Torah – the Law of Moses, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures – expressed God's desire for how Israel should do this.

This is nothing new, of course. The book of Genesis repeatedly states God's desire to bless Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and make them into a great nation, so that all nations on the earth would be blessed. Located along the major trade routes of the ancient Middle East, Israel was in a perfect position to spread the news of a god who had a personal involvement in history and who was nowhere near as capricious as the other gods of the region.

In itself, the notion that Law can exist independently of the whims of a king is a pretty big contribution to world thought. A lot of the ideas expressed in the Torah are heavyweights in their own right, such as the proclamation of the Jubilee year, when every debt in Israel was to be forgiven, every slave emancipated, and the entire nation celebrating for a year. That idea was so memorable that the Founding Fathers of America had a Bible verse engraved in the Liberty Bell: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land."

The Law was also big on keeping punishments commensurate with the severity of the crime. Under the Torah, breaking someone's arm or blinding them in one eye wasn't grounds for capital punishment, as it once had been in some ancient cultures. Instead the worst you could expect was a punishment equal to the crime.

But this is also true: The Levitical code is easy to bash for its harshness, because it's pretty damn harsh.

Among other things, the Bible calls for the death penalty for several things that just don't warrant it. Adultery, for instance. Disrespecting your parents for another. Gay sex. Even being a rape victim.

I mean, what the hell is up with that? Next time someone defends a business owner's right to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, citing “freedom of religion,” ask them if they think a rape victim should be executed if she doesn't scream for help when she's attacked. It's right there in Deuteronomy 22:24.

Still, it's important to read any piece of literature in its socio-historical context, to get its meaning. Adjust for the patriarchal culture it was written in, and maybe you can excuse the sexism in the book of Proverbs, which uses the imagery of a sexually aware young woman as a predator of young men — but fails to present the young man as a sexual predator of women. The Bible after all does hold women repeatedly in high regard – Deborah and Esther save the nation, and Jael is a war hero, for instance; and the book of Proverbs also uses a feminine image of wisdom as the standard that men should seek. Even Paul, who gets accused of sexism because of what some misogynists have twisted his teachings to justify over the centuries, blames the Fall on Adam rather than Eve, and hails the woman Junia as chief among the apostles.

But stoning a woman if she's raped and no one hears her screaming for help?  The nicest spin I can put on this commandment, is that it's a good idea to avoid false accusations of rape. #NotAllMen and all that. Sometimes I can't help but think that the people who wrote the Bible just got it wrong. This is one of those times.

I can already hear someone arguing that we have to take the Bible the way it is, and that if we start cherry-picking the parts of the Bible we don't like, we're setting ourselves up over God. I'm going to call bullocks on that one. For starters, there is not a person alive who views the Bible as sacred and does not already cherry-pick. For another, it's the easy way out to say "take it as it is" and not try to figure out what's going on beneath and behind the words.

As a whole the Christian Bible is a library of smaller books written across an ocean and written from as far back as perhaps 3,000 years ago to as recently as only 2000 years ago. It is written in three different languages that most of us don't speak today, and comes from a culture that many of us would find incomprehensible and intolerably oppressive.

Simply reading Leviticus 20:13 and concluding that God hates gay sex is as irresponsible as reading Job 38:22 and concluding that God keeps snow in warehouses, or reading Revelation 7:1 and determining that the earth is a quadrilateral. Or as reading Deuteronomy 22:24 and concluding that if a woman claims rape but no one heard her scream then she's lying, and couldn't have been terrified, intimidated, drugged, coerced or manipulated – and therefore was a willing accomplice and should be executed.

Even someone in a patriarchal society should have been able to realize that that one is just wrong.

Now I know at least one person who is going to be appalled by what he will consider my wholesale rejection of biblical authority, and I'm sure there are other people who are going to be disappointed that I'm willing to come this far and not renounce my faith in zombie Jesus or my imaginary friend in the sky.

But amid the arcane rules over Temple worship, the dietary restrictions that even Jewish people argue over, and the sometimes confounding legal code and bizarre restrictions it imposed, there is one principle that emerges throughout the Torah: Seek justice.

Rabbi Hillel famously said, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbor.” The Torah itself puts it like this: “Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Deuteronomy 16:20).

Unique among laws, the Torah makes the pursuit of justice not just a civic obligation but a religious one as well, and a deeper religious obligation than matters like ritual cleanliness, using the right bathroom, or even who has sex with whom. Hebrew prophets like Moses and Jeremiah stressed compassion for others and justice to be the sine qua none of religious behavior. Prophets like Amos and Hosea had little to say about violations of the kosher rules or priestly rituals, but plenty to say about oppression and social injustice.

Even Sodom, famously (and inaccurately) linked with homosexuality, was destroyed for offenses like arrogance, cruelty to strangers, and the oppression of the poor, according to the Bible (Ezekiel 16:49).

This principle carries over into Christianity, or it least it was meant to. Some of Jesus' most powerful teachings, like the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, place a premium on providing social justice; and James the Elder in his letter says that a faith that produces no works is a faith that isn't worth talking about. Justice, and a desire to see it done, is one of the defining characteristics of the God we worship as Christians, a justice animated by love for the afflicted, the powerless, and the disenfranchised.

Before the founding of the Republic, William Bradford saw the Massachusetts colony as having received a divine mandate to be a city on a hill, which light would show the people of the world what the Christian faith is meant to be. This was a motif President Reagan cited regularly throughout his presidency, albeit in terms of a civic rather than specifically Christian religion.

That's a bold ambition. The Torah called for a sabbath year, where debts would be canceled and slaves released; and it called for a Jubilee, which returned all land to its ancestral holders. The Torah also forbade collecting interest on loans, and required the people of Israel to treat foreigners among them with dignity and respect. For his part, Christ crossed social, ethnic and language lines and talked with people who were considered untouchable, took care of people's physical needs indiscriminately, and told the wealthy to give all their money to the poor if they wanted to follow him.

That's the sort of religion we should celebrate the freedom to exercise. Instead, lately, we've seen states such as Mississippi and North Carolina making the news because of “Freedom of Religion” laws they have passed guaranteeing the right of (usually Christian) business owners not to provide cakes, floral arrangements or other wedding services for same-sex couples.

That's a shocking contrast. We've subverted the religion based on the teachings of Jesus so that we can keep other people at arm's length in the name of morality. This is neither justice, nor is it a passion set alight by divine love. It is cold and doctrinaire, valuing people less than a moral code.

Demographically this is also the same group opposed to providing health care under the Affordable Care Act and that often opposes raising the minimum wage. It's a strange perversion of religion that won't support the happiness of same-sex couples as they begin a life together, but will insist that people who need health insurance shouldn't receive it, and that employers should be free of obligation to pay a living wage to their workers.

The pattern goes on. During the past year, two of the remaining presidential candidates of the Republican Party have called for turning away refugees of the Muslim faith, or for an outright moratorium on immigration of Muslims. And we all know what Donald Trump has said about Mexicans.

Meanwhile, our criminal justice system punishes white people far more leniently than it does convicts of color. A European American convicted of a violent crime can expect a sentence comparable to the sentence an African American receives for a nonviolent one. The Voting Rights Act, which once safeguarded the rights of African Americans in the South for decades, has been gutted; and in its wake, a series of laws has arisen that disproportionately affect their right to vote, to prevent voter fraud that objectively does not exist.

These are all things that should anger Americans as a betrayal of our country's values. For those of us who profess to be a people of faith, they should be a call to action, to transform our society and to establish justice.

Some 3500 years ago, God brought Israel out of Egypt, and set the people on course to transform the world around them with a law where the pursuit of justice was a religious observance. Under the kings David and Solomon, they did a decent job, so that the joint kingdom experienced a golden age and had an influence that reportedly went far beyond its borders.

“Justice, and only justice, you shall follow.” That is the mark of true religion.

In fact, it's the kind that God cares most about — and the only kind our neighbors ever notice.

1 | 2 | 3


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet

Leaving Egypt: Time to Get Growing (Part Two)

There is a story I heard once about a boy who was afraid to climb the stairs at his family's new house after they moved.

Where on earth do kids get these fears from? It's a silly fear, all things considered, but what are you going to do? People enjoy what they enjoy, and they're afraid of what they're afraid of. Still, it's a problem. So the boy's father makes him an offer: “Climb up to the first step, and jump off. I'll catch you.”

Now the boy is young, maybe only 3 years old. He's in awe of his father. Compared to the boy himself, the father is a large and powerful presence, someone who fills the room just by being there. He can be overwhelming and stern, but at the same time there is a tireless joy that undergirds the father's entire personality. It's more than a little perplexing; but the boy loves him, and so he agrees.

The first jump is more of a step than a leap, but the father is true to his word. He catches the boy before his foot touches the floor, almost before he even has had time to realize that his feet have left the first step. The boy smiles, and his father lifts him up onto the second step.

“Now,” says his father, “jump off the second step. I'll catch you.”

The boy is nervous. This step is ten inches off the floor, but his father is standing there, eyes full of encouragement, his arms stretched out. The boy takes a breath, closes his eyes and does it.

This time there's a moment of fear, but it's mixed with the exhilaration that comes from free fall. The boy feels his father's strong hands close on him, and maybe he even hears his dad make a whooshing nose like an airplane as his father swings him back up and puts him on the third step.

“Do it again!” the father says, and the boy laughs. “I'll catch you.”

Each time the boy jumps, his fear recedes amid a rush of excitement. It's a wonderful game they're playing, and by the time they have finished the fifth step, the boy's fears are forgotten. The stairs are no longer monstrous. They're exciting, wonderful, fun! Laughing with abandon, he needs no encouragement to climb to the sixth step all by himself.

“Now,” says his father, arms crossed in front of him. “Jump.”

The boy doesn't even hesitate. He is a bird in flight as he leaps off the stairs and into empty space, arms upraised. And then, the unthinkable happens. His father doesn't catch him. He doesn't even move. Instead, his father watches as the son lands on the wooden floor at the foot of the stairs with a loud thump. As the boy begins to cry, he sees on his father's face an emotion we can only describe as ironic satisfaction.

“There,” says the father. “That'll teach you.”

I'll admit that the first time I heard this story it left me bewildered. What kind of man plays a practical joke like that on his kids? It's just cruel. But of course, like all good stories, this one has layers that you have to think about before you can understand it.

The key here is the last line: “That'll teach you.” What's the lesson being imparted here, that you shouldn't trust anyone, not even your parents? That's a pretty sick and cynical lesson. It's not much better if we say that the lesson is that we should listen to our fears and avoid stairs. It's obvious that the father loves the boy, given that he spends so much time playing with the boy and teaching him not to be afraid. With that in mind, it stands to reason that the intended lesson is more nuanced than our immediate reaction would allow.

At the very minimum, one obvious lesson is that it's still stupid (and risky) to play on the stairs. Another is that sometimes the people you depend on will fail you, and that even though your father has been watching out for you, you won't always be able to count on him like you would like to.

And of course there is the obvious interpretation that this isn't a story about the mean things fathers do to their kids at all. It's a story about God, and the journey of faith that the Israelite people have had over history, beginning with the period right after God freed them from slavery.

In Christianity we often think of redemption as a fixed point in our lives. In some denominations this comes at the moment of baptism, when a priest prays over an infant and that child is cleansed of original sin. In other churches it comes later, with a personal prayer of repentance and commitment to following Jesus.

Regardless of how this act of redemption occurs, it's an accepted truth within Christianity that we are born out of harmony with God and need to be restored to that perfect peace. You can view it as something like passing through a wicket gate. One minute you're standing before the gate, groaning beneath the heavy weight tied to your back like sin. Then you step through the gate, kneel at the Cross, and the burden falls from your back. There will be dangers along the road and you'll have to pass through Vanity Fair, but in times to come, you can point back to that moment and know something real happened, and that you're now walking on the king's highway as a loyal subject.

Here's the thing, though. Redemption isn't a single event. It's a journey. Setting people free is only the first part of God's plan. It's not enough to be free if the first thing you want to do with your freedom is to want to return to Egypt. God's goal all along was to get Israel, a people who had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, to cross the desert and enter the Promised Land.

In order to do this, God has to show the Israelites that there is nothing to fear. So when Pharaoh pursues the people and threatens to trap them by the Red Sea, God gets them to take a leap of faith and then destroys the Egyptian army. When the people grow hungry and fearful of starving, he sends them manna and quail. Then it's water. He even has them set aside a sabbath day for rest and relaxation. His goal throughout this process is the same as the goal of the storied father: He wants his son to overcome his fear and to learn to trust.

But just as the father in the story needs his son to rely on himself on the stairs, God has bigger plans for Israel than simply bailing them out with a miracle every time there is trouble. God wants his people to maintain a relationship with him, as adults

Redemption isn't just a single point in our lives. It's about growing up, becoming self-sustaining, and reaching the point that we can enter the family business.

The people are going to need the Torah.

1 | 2 | 3


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet

Leaving Egypt: Redeemed (Part One)

There's something I need to get off my chest. I'm not particularly a fan of the way the exodus is written.

It's a beautiful and moving story, full of pageantry. You want high-stakes drama? Nothing less than the freedom and even survival of the Hebrew people is at stake. Irony? God appoints an adopted son of Egypt as his agent, to confront Egypt at the height of its power. This is an epic story, one for the ages, as God of the slaves fights their oppressors and takes them down. But as storytelling goes, it's got some flaws.

Let's break it down.

In literature classes, professors will teach you that every story has four distinct stages: the introduction, the conflict, the climax and the denouement, which leads to the establishment of a new normal when the conflict is fully resolved. This is true throughout Western literature, whether you're watching a full-adrenaline movie like “The Avengers” or reading a story like “Goodman Brown,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The first stage is the introduction, in which the narrator establishes what counts as normal. In the story of the exodus, “normal” is pretty brutal. The Israelites have grown so numerous that the Egyptians have pressed them into slave labor. In fact, it's even worse than that. Fearing that the Israelites may rebel or side with the enemies of Egypt, Pharaoh has decreed that newborn Israelite boys are to be thrown into the Nile.

Next comes the conflict, which upsets the status quo. The best conflicts begin small and gradually grow in scope. This is the case in the book of Exodus, where conflict comes as a Hebrew woman named Yochavad hides her newborn son among the bullrushes, rather than let him be killed. Pharaoh's daughter finds the baby and recognizes him as a Hebrew; but rather than having him killed, she decides to adopt the boy and raise him as her own.

The boy, Moses, grows up and discovers his true heritage, and the conflict within the story grows as he does. Eventually Moses kills an Egyptian. When word gets out, he runs for his life into the desert. Out there he meets Jethro, high priest of Midian, and marries his daughter. Away from the palace life, Moses begins to tend sheep.

The climax is the pivotal part of the story. This is when the conflict comes into focus, and the protagonist must decide how to resolve it. The protagonist can do this by fighting to restore the original status quo, or by fighting to overthrow it. If the protagonist succeeds, then our story has a happy ending. If the protagonist fails, it is a tragic ending.

In Exodus, the climax is actually where the protagonist first openly appears. At the burning bush, God appears to Moses and explains that he has heard the cries of the Israelites and intends to set them free. God appoints Moses and his brother, Aaron, to be his representatives and to carry a simple message to pharaoh: Let my people go.

Up to this point, Israel has been the underdog. The only power they have on their side is a single god who skeptics would claim wasn't even strong enough to keep them from being enslaved in the first place. On the other side stand all the many gods of Egypt, the most powerful empire in the world at the time. Here at the climax, God declares that he will fight for his people and take them to a land of their own.

Following this declaration comes the denouement, as God begins to unleash a series of devastating plagues. In our contemporary way of looking at stories, the struggle here is between Moses and Pharaoh, or between God and Pharaoh. In truth, every plague that God sets loose is a blow against a different deity in ancient Egypt. This isn't a fight between Israel and Egypt; it is a proxy war among their gods. Each plague targeted a different Egyptian god, and showed how that god ultimately was powerless against the God of Israel.

The first plague saw the Nile turn to blood. Hapi, the god of the Nile, was unable to stop it. In fact, the Bible notes that the Israelites continued to have safe drinking water, a distinction made throughout the plagues to the very end. The Egyptians would suffer from every plague that hit the land, while the Israelites would be unharmed. Even if an Egyptian wanted to claim that the plagues were being sent by their own gods, they would still have to account for the Israelites not being affected.

Heqet, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, resembled a frog. In the second plague, frogs swarmed out of the Nile and covered Egypt after the plague.

Seth, god of the earth, was next to fall, during the third plague on Egypt. According to the biblical account, Moses lifted a handful of earth and threw it into the air. The dust became a plague of gnats that bit and stung the Egyptians wherever they were. Once again the Israelites were left unharmed and untouched.

And on it goes. The book of Exodus recounts cattle dying in the fields, followed by painful boils that erupted on the skin of the Egyptian people. Hail and fire fell from the skies and destroyed the crops in the fields. After that, a swarm of locusts covered the land and devoured what crops remain. By this time, according to the Bible, many of the Egyptians had stopped trusting their own gods to protect them and had begun listening to what Moses said because it was clear that the God of Israel could be depended on to do what he said.

Finally the sun god Ra was defeated by an unnatural darkness that blanketed the land for three days; and when the firstborn in Egypt all died in a single night, it was finished. Even Anubis was powerless. All that was left was for the people of Israel to walk out of Egypt, as free as they were intended to be. As finales go, this is a big one.

Except if you're familiar with the story, you know that this isn't the end. After that dramatic conclusion, Pharaoh changed his mind and pursued the Israelites, and overtook them at the shore of the Red Sea. Caught between a hostile army and the impassable waters of the Red Sea, the Israelites understandably panicked. They forgot everything that had happened in the past month and complained that God had brought them out of Egypt only to let them die on the seashore.

What came next is one of the most iconic moments in the Bible and in American cinema. We all know the scene by heart: Moses stretches out his staff, and as he strikes it against the water, the Red Sea parts. Israel passes through, unharmed, but when the Egyptian army tries to follow, the waters of the sea rush in and the entire army drowns.

Psalmists and prophets invoked the language of this scene for the next thousand years. The story itself evokes the older story of the Genesis flood that destroyed the wicked while the righteous survived in an ark. To Christians, the parting of the Red Sea foreshadows baptism and the new birth that comes from a life of faith in Christ. No matter your religious beliefs, it's impossible to imagine the Haggadah without the parting of the Red Sea.

But iconic and inspiring as it is, the scene is also anticlimactic. Think about it for a minute. For the past 13 chapters, the book of Exodus has recounted a titanic conflict over whether the Israelites would go free or remain as slaves in Egypt. That issue was settled midway through Chapter 12. It is done. It is finished. Why on earth are we going through it again?

If the story of the exodus were being written for the first time today, what author wouldn't end it with the Israelites leaving the city of Rameses as free people? It's the perfect ending to a perfect tale. God has struck the Egyptians so powerful a blow that they were handing over fine clothing, gold and silver, just to get the Israelites to leave before God did something else. It's a perfect time for the camera to pan out to a wide shot and fade to black before the credits roll.

Instead, we have the miracle of crossing the Red Sea too. It's almost as if the author had two endings he loved, and decided to keep them both instead of getting rid of one.

Either the story is screwed up, or we're missing the point of it.

1 | 2 | 3


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet

An empty 'maranatha'

It's Sunday evening. My family is gathered around the dinner table as we have every Easter for the past fourteen years. There, in the center of the table, a wine glass stands on a saucer next to a bottle of wine.

“How much joy have we had this year?” I ask, and fill the wine a quarter of the way. “This much?”

My girls know the drill. “More than that!” they answer, and I fill it halfway to the top. “This much?” I ask.

“More than that!” I pour again. Three-quarters. “This much?”

“More than that!” Wine flows, and a moment later wine fills the cup past the rim and splashes joyously to the saucer below. We have friends. We have a home. We have one another. Middle Daughter has found a passion for the stage that will carry her well into adulthood. Oldest Daughter is in the home stretch of her junior year and thinking about college. For Youngest Daughter, every day is a new adventure, every moment a treasure to unpack. Life overflows with joy, and with love.

After we have measured our joy but before we eat the meal, comes what I am finding is the hardest part of Easter. My own wine glass in hand, I turn to Youngest.

“Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he told us he would return one day,” I tell her. “Open the door and invite him in.” I quickly add: “Don't let the dog out.”

Youngest knows the routine by now. She opens the kitchen door and peers out into the back yard. “Maranatha,” she calls. “Come, Lord Jesus.”

There is a pause. Jesus doesn't come. “Maybe next year,” I say. Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening, but surely tomorrow. 

It's been about two thousand years. How long are these Last Days supposed to last, anyway?

I had my religious awakening in 1988, about six weeks after high school graduation. While I was away at college I soon found myself drawn to an Assemblies of God church off campus. Services there were lively and boisterous, a marked departure from the staid Presbyterianism I had grown up in. There was an immediacy about worship there that I had never felt before, a sense that we were in the very presence of God and not just admiring him from a distance.

With that immediacy also came an urgency. Christ could return any day. The modern nation of Israel had formed in 1948, an event that to many evangelicals fulfilled key biblical prophecy in heralding the Second Coming. Adding to that urgency were the dramatic shifts in the popular zeitgeist and in geopolitical power over the course of that one decade.

For much of the 1980s the entire nation had lived under the cloud of nuclear war. Made-for-TV movies like “The Day After” in 1983 and “Countdown to Looking Glass” in 1984 carried the fear right into our living rooms. Conflicts like the military downing of a Korean Air Lines flight in September 1983 set the nation's teeth on edge. Even the pop culture reflected this fear, with songs like "99 Red Balloons" and "It's a Mistake" imagining nuclear war breaking out over a simple misunderstanding. (As it nearly did.)

Then in the late 1980s, reforms like glasnost and perestroika led to the breakup of the Soviet Union. One by one the Baltic republics declared their independence and established democratic governments. The Berlin wall came down, and suddenly there were talks of reunifying the two Germanys for the first time since World War II.

With that much change afoot, it couldn't help but feel that Judgment Day was coming. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, armchair interest in biblical prophecy shot up in a way it hadn't since Hal Lindsey had published “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970 and Christian moviemakers started producing B-movies like “A Thief in the Night.” Jesus was coming! No one knows the day or the hour, but still it had to be soon. It had to be.

Except Jesus didn't return. In fact it's been 68 years since the founding of Israel, an event so significant that Edgar Whisenant once wrote a popular book, “88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988,” prompted by that event. (Spoiler: It didn't happen.) Whisenant later predicted the return of Christ in 1989, 1993 and 1994 as well. Jesus didn't return then either.

'And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.' — Matthew 24:14

This has been going on for a while. The church fathers were so convinced that the Parousia was coming within their lifetimes that the Bible contains apostolic letters reassuring people not to panic that they were dying of old age before Christ's return. He's coming, Peter says. Just be patient. It's been about 1,980 years. How patient do we have to be?

I don't have a good answer for that. I'd love it if I could find a neat and tidy conclusion that makes the interminable wait seem worthwhile. The gospels tell us that Jesus is going to return, and it's in the creeds that we recite; but year after year keeps going by. We keep waiting, and he keeps not returning.

Why do we do this? Is it because the Second Coming is supposed to be such a major event? At the Parousia, that wondrous appearing of Jesus, we're told that all will be made right. Fish once more will team in rivers and streams whose waters will be restored, and herds of buffalo will stampede across the plains again. The wicked will no longer feed off the anger in the land and turn us against one another, and the arrogant will no longer walk in the halls of power.

When Christ comes, we'll recognize the dignity of one another without pause or exception. We'll recognize the wrongs we've done one another over the centuries, and we'll ask forgiveness for not setting it right sooner. We'll apologize for separate drinking fountains and for glass ceilings, for stolen land and for stolen labor. We'll dismantle empire and repair the damage it has caused, and as we get to know our neighbors, we'll wonder why we ever avoided them before.

Is that why we wait, to remind ourselves what the Kingdom of God is supposed to look like? Do we have the promise of a Second Coming so that we can take seriously what he said the first time he came, and start working on that in the meantime?

“Maranatha,” my daughter dutifully says. There is a pause. Jesus doesn't appear, just like he didn't appear last year, or the year before that.

“Maybe next year,” I say, and I think: “I doubt it.”

That doubt is all I have, Lord. I give it to you, and pray that it's enough.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission. Tweet

Saturday and the dead Christ

Holy Saturday must have felt like the worst day in all of history. There had been bad days before, but this, the disciples agreed, this was as bad as it could get.

They had marched into Jerusalem the previous Sunday with Jesus on a donkey as the crowds waved palm fronds and threw their coats on the ground amid cries of “Hosanna!” Their moment had arrived. Change was afoot, and there they were, riding the wave that was going to sweep through Jerusalem, to all Judea and across the rest of the world. The day of redemption was at hand, and not only were they to witness it, they were part of it.

When did that hope begin to fray? Was it outside Jerusalem, when Jesus looked down on the city and foresaw his own death, and began to cry? Maybe it was inside the city, where the religious leaders were on edge more than ever. They used to debate, argue and judge. Now their questions carried daggers, and they used their words to conceal dangerous traps.

The menace that hung in the air that week took its toll on the disciples every time they breathed. The land was parched for want of justice, and people in the crowd itched for Jesus to light the fire of revolution. The leaders of the people knew this, and they looked at him with fear and worry and undisguised hatred.

Even Jesus himself seemed to be losing control. In the Temple he hurled one stream of invective after another at his opponents, and he talked about his death more and more as each day passed. The disciples closed ranks and talked, and when Thursday night came they told him they had two swords. Hope, still strong, had begun to stumble a little.

That night the soldiers came without warning and arrested Jesus. For a moment panic set in, but hope remained. And why shouldn't it? Peter and the other disciples had seen Jesus in tough spots before, and he always managed to get out of them.

Just in the past week, they had seen the Pharisees and the Sadducees and even the Herodians lob one tough question after another after Jesus. Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? If a woman gets married to seven husbands and each one dies without her ever having a child, whose wife will she be at the Resurrection? Who gave you the authority to make such a scene in the Temple?

Every question masked a sword pointed at Jesus' throat. All week long the questioners had swung them at him in an effort to show that this messiah bled, and all week long Jesus avoided taking a single hit. The Sanhedrin had it in for him, everyone knew that. They had tried to take Jesus down before and it never worked. Pilate was a brutal dictator, but if the best minds of the Sanhedrin couldn't trap Jesus, how could a Roman? And if it did go wrong, there was still the Passover Amnesty.

And yet, somehow it did go wrong. Pilate and the Sanhedrin didn't let Jesus go. He didn't pull off a last-minute miracle, and somebody else was released for the amnesty, who didn't deserve it. Jesus was convicted and sentenced, and he died gurgling blood like a common thief. Not knowing what else to do, the disciples went and hid, hoping it was all some horrible nightmare.

Except it wasn't a nightmare. The sun came up Saturday morning, and Jesus was dead. They had thought Jesus was the messiah, sent by God, and now he was dead, and people don't get better from being dead. Everyone knew that, and if they doubted, all they had to do was to look inside some of the tombs outside the city. Jesus was dead, and hope with him.

How long do you think it took until Peter felt like an idiot? Three years ago he'd had a wife, a home and a job. Now he had no way to support a wife or family, and the authorities were watching him to see if he would follow the example of Jesus and try to start a movement of his own.

What about John and James? They were the sons of a prominent rabbi, a member of the Sanhedrin. Their father, Zebedee, owned a fishing business, one that they had stood to inherit. They had given that up and now faced a lifetime of poverty.

Matthew probably had lost the most, financially. Before he became a disciple of Jesus, Matthew had been a tax collector working with the Romans. With the authority and power of Rome behind him, he not only could compel people to pay taxes, he could extort as much money as he wanted them for his own livelihood. People had pretended to be his friends because of his wealth and influence, but that had all changed three years ago. Anyone who remembered him now would remember him as a collaborator with the Roman occupiers, guaranteeing his life would be unpleasant and short.

And on it went for each of the other disciples. They had wasted three years of their lives on a dream, for nothing, for a man who had been good with words. He seemed to have come right out of the old days, when prophets knew how to perform miracles. but in the end he was just a man like every other man. Just as human. Just as mortal.

Jesus had promised them all something worth believing in. “The Kingdom of God has arrived,” he had told them. “Mountains will be laid low, and the valley will be raised up. The rich and powerful will use their wealth and influence to serve the poor instead of themselves. The outcast will be an honored guest at the feast. Women will enjoy the same respect afforded men. Everyone will have the chance to come in and sit at the table together. There will be justice.”

Now Jesus was dead, and all those promises had died with him. That whole Kingdom of God thing? Not going to happen.

I know someone out there is reading this who wants to interrupt and say that Sunday is coming. But here's the thing about Sunday: When it's Saturday, you can't see Sunday. It's too far off. On Friday you can hope for a miracle, but if you put your head inside the tomb on Saturday, there's a body there.

The body is wrapped in linen that's been stained with thickening blood and ooze, and it smells awful. The stench of death is so strong that you want to gag. They took Jesus on Friday and they flayed the skin from his back, and after they had tortured him to death, they shoved a spear in his side. All those smells that the body keeps inside have been brought out into the open. You can touch the body, but it's not going to move for you, no matter what you do. The muscles are stiff with rigor mortis. No one will answer when you call, and there's no one to give you hope. He's dead.

Saturday is an agonizing place to be. You believed with all your heart all that you had been told about this man, but suddenly that belief just isn't enough. You staked your hopes, your faith, your future and your very identity on Jesus, and suddenly it turns out that he's not who you thought he was.

How on earth could I ever have believed Jesus was the Son of God? That's a question you'll ask yourself a lot on Saturday, if you're willing to be honest with yourself. Did you honestly think that people rise from the dead? You know better than that, and so did the disciples. The tombstones of Judea were as full as the graveyards of the 21st century. Check out your family tree sometime. You won't have to go back very many generations before you find withered branches. Dead is permanent. You know that in your very bones.

It's surprisingly easy to kill Jesus. I've seen parents do it by rejecting their children over their sexual orientation or gender identity. I've seen churches do it by telling women that they have no place in ministry, or no right to teach; and turning liberation into a prison. When Christ is dead, his promises of love and value have no meaning.

I've seen educators kill Jesus by suppressing science and concealing history. One day, their students get older and discover what they weren't taught in school. They realize that evolutionary biology actually makes a lot of sense, and so does the rest of science. Or they discover the side of history Christians are ashamed of: jim crow injustice, chauvanism, terrorism and war; and they wonder what else we're not owning up to. When Christ is dead, his claim to be the truth rings hollow.

Sometimes life itself is enough to kill Jesus with deep pains and bottomless griefs that have neither reason nor explanation. When Christ is dead, there is no end to suffering or to tears. All that there is, is an endless Saturday, a body in the grave, with no way out.

Holy Saturday is a place of reckoning. Some of us may come here only once, for a little while, and then we leave. Others of us return again and again. Sometimes Saturday lasts only a day; sometimes it lasts for years.

Come in to the tomb, Christian. Make your peace with the end of Holy Week, and listen to the worms moving. It's Holy Saturday, and Christ's body isn't going anywhere.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet

Dying of thirst

I want you to think about the thirstiest you've ever been.

In March 2010 I returned to Haiti to assist at the Quisqueya Crisis Relief Center with its efforts following the earthquake. I'd been up all night the night before, on an airplane with its dry, air-conditioned cabins. After that I stood in a crowded tropical airport so hot that the shirt on my back was plastered to my skin within minutes. All I'd had to drink since leaving home was about a quarter-cup of water given to me on the plane. I should have known better. But I didn't.

I'd been standing in the sun for 30 minutes, looking for the ride I was told might be able to come get me, when I noticed my head was hammering at me. My skin was red and starting to ache. And my stomach wanted to revolt, but there was nothing in it.

 I was dehydrated, and I needed a drink of water — badly.

This was just poor planning on my part. The adult body sheds about a quart of water every day just through run-of-the-mill perspiration and breathing. We lose another one to three quarts each day through urination. Think about that. Your body is roughly 60 percent water, and in the course of a day you can lose a gallon of it just by living.

As dehydration sets in, the body begins to move water from its cells into the bloodstream. As the water leaves, cells begin to shrink. The throat parches. The tongue becomes a clumsy, inarticulate piece of meat. Fine and even gross motor skills decline, sharply. Your head starts to hurt and it gets harder to think clearly.

Let it go too long, and the kidneys can start to fail, which lets the body's toxins build up in the bloodstream. Soon the organs begin to fail, and then death follows. People can survive weeks without food, but only a few days without water. Water is life.

It's no wonder then that in ancient times it was considered an act of war to fill someone's well with stones. And it's no wonder that the psalmist compares worship to thirst:

As a hart longs
    for flowing streams,
so longs my soul
    for thee, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
    for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
    the face of God?
— Psalm 42:1-2

It's Sunday morning and I've come to church to worship, but I'm dying of thirst. Think about the sort of song you're likely to hear on Sunday morning at church. If you go to a church like the one I attend, chances are good you'll hear songs about how wonderful it is to be saved, or how we much we love Jesus. There's nothing wrong with appreciating salvation or loving Jesus, but there's something essential missing in both songs: a sense of adoration.

Think about those songs, and then listen to this. It is one of the most beautiful recordings of "Holy, Holy, Holy," one of the most beautiful songs ever written for corporate worship. The entire focus of this song is not on we feel, it is not on what Christ did for us on the Cross, and it is not about how we desire to know God better. It is a song about the holiness and majesty of God. Who wouldn't love to hear music like this in church?



Older worship songs like "Holy Holy Holy" have fallen out of favor in recent years among worship bands, which is a shame. These were songs that had a lot of thought put into them. They contain solid doctrine, and often possessed some good melodies too. We still sing them hundreds of years later, because they were that good.

There are any number of reasons why older songs, particularly hymns, have fallen out of favor. For many of us the word hymn is enough to send us cowering under the seats in whatever space our church rents. It conjures unpleasant childhood memories of attending a church we didn't enjoy, and enduring the uninspired singing of the entire congregation as they were accompanied by an organ played at the same tempo by the same woman every week, year after year. For many of us, hymn denotes boredom and irrelevance, the exact opposite of what we require church and particularly worship to be.

This is, of course, due a complete lack of imagination on our part. Back when I was in college, Word Records published an album called "Our Hymns," a collection of classic hymns rearranged along then-contemporary sensibilities by Christian bands like Petra and singers like Amy Grant. Far from organ music, these songs sounded like they could have been written in the 1980s.

One of the songs included on the album was "O God Our Help in Ages Past," published in 1719 by Isaac Watts. Phil Keaggy gave it a hauntingly beautiful intro. Keaggy trimmed it to the first and final verses, threw in a Bach composition and made it possible to appreciate the soft, meditative sound of the song and its lyrics.


   

The same album included "'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus," as recorded by Amy Grant. The song was written in 1882 by Louisa Stead after she and her daughter witnessed her husband die in an attempt to rescue a boy from drowning, and soon fell into financial destitution without his income.  I've heard worship leaders dismiss older songs as irrelevant because of their age, but I confess that is an argument I've never understood. The joys and the sorrows that birthed these songs in the first place are just as meaningful today, and with some effort any song can be arranged to any other genre.


   


Forty years ago, it was difficult to find a church where songs such as these were not in currency. It didn't matter if you were Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, Baptist or Catholic. You could walk into any church of any other denomination, and the chances were good that you would find the familiar hymns of your own church contained with that denominational hymn book.

That's a power to music that we often don't appreciate. Studies have shown that when a choir, a congregation or even a stadium full of people begins to sing the same song together, the experience produces a measurable physiological effect on them. Singers' heartbeats and respiration begin to synchronize, and the group forms a cohesive collective identity through the shared experience.

Now stop and think how this approach to worship can mend some of the splits fracturing the church.

Consider "Just A Closer Walk with Thee," as recorded by folk musician Joan Baez. It starts off a little slow, but just wait until she hits her stride, around the 1:20 mark. (There's no one else like Joan.)




Because these worship songs were so common, they often became woven into the identity not just of the church but of the larger community itself. A lot of churches lament the declining spiritual influence of Christianity in America. Small wonder when we've abandoned the music that once helped to knit us together, regardless of age, denomination and region, in favor of music written only within the past few years — especially when the selection changes every few weeks.

Worship is meant to be a congregational experience. Too often that is not what happens. Rather than one person or even a group leading the congregation in worship, what is happening in our churches is a shift of our focus to the band and its performance, We crank the volume up like we would for the radio or at a concert, and the band plays the songs it has rehearsed for that week. This isn't a bad thing, but with the volume pounding, worship ceases to be an active, participatory experience because we're listening to the music instead. New songs are never bad, but in order for the congregation as a whole to join in on the worship, they need a chance to learn the song. That doesn't happen if the songs change to a new set before the congregation can learn them.

There is power in singing familiar worship music, just as there is in telling familiar Bible stories. While we should never close ourselves to innovation and new music, we're wrong to ignore the much greater participation that comes when we invite the congregation to sing familiar songs.

We're dying of thirst out here, and these are familiar channels where the water flows.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet



Still reading? I based this on something I wrote earlier. You can read it here.

Russell Moore doesn't like me

Russell Moore doesn't like me.

It's not that big a deal, to be honest. I've never had the privilege to meet the esteemed Dr. Moore. If I hadn't encountered his declaration “The word 'evangelical' no longer has any meaning,” embedded in a tweet by Rachel Held Evans, our paths would still have yet to cross, even online. But cross our paths did, at least online. And in that interactive noninteraction, something about me rubbed him the wrong way, and he decided he disliked me enough to take the time to block me from reading anything else that he tweets.

I don't meant to make a big deal out of this, to be honest. I'm more amused than I am bothered, and even more puzzled than I am amused.

Moore, if you've never heard of him, is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Judging by his Wikipedia page, we have a few doctrinal differences. He believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, subscribes to the doctrines that one must be a Christian to enter heaven and that everyone else descends into a literal hell of eternal torment, and favors complementarian gender roles. I'm sure we could have some rather lively discussions if we wanted.

On the other hand, Moore also is the adoptive father of two children. Anyone who looks at orphans and says “They are my family” is someone who lives in the very heart of God. All his other work — be it as pastor, professor, theologian or ethicist — is straw compared to that bold act of love. That makes him good people in my book.

I encountered Moore's tweet embedded in one of Evans', and Twitter being what it is, I followed Moore's tweet back to Moore's stream. I found this particular gem, which amused me and reminded me of the old joke: Why do Baptists oppose premarital sex? Because it may lead to dancing!

Further down his feed came two tweets that I responded to. One had to do with Planned Parenthood and federal funding, and the other with the ongoing debate over whether it's discriminatory for Christian business owners to refuse to provide cakes or floral arrangements for same-sex weddings, or discriminatory not to allow them to do so.

Here are the two tweets and my responses, in their entirety. First is a retweet he had made on the subject of abortion and Planned Parenthood funding. It's not evident from the tweet or the rewteet, but I assume Moore is opposed to both.

@amandacarpenter @drmoore It's true. Federal funding supports the vast majority of PP's work. Not a cent goes toward abortions.

— Wicker Gate (@WickerGate) February 27, 2016

The second, a tweet of his own, on the issue of catering for same-sex weddings:

@drmoore @Andy_Taggart They consider baking cakes to be wrong? Probably shouldn't be running a bakery, then.

— Wicker Gate (@WickerGate) February 27, 2016

Now, I don't want to be too hard on Moore. I'm sure he has no idea who I am. It's possible he missed the John Bunyan reference, and assumed that "Wicker Gate" is a reference to something horrid. Importantly, @WickerGate isn't my main Twitter account. I created it a little more than two weeks ago as a platform for voicing my religio-political views separately from my more personal tweets. In that time the account has acquired zero followers of its own.

It's quite possible Moore felt that I was trolling him, even though my comments were polite and conversational in tone. I really can't blame him. The Internet is full of trolls, and he probably deals with them on a regular basis. It's not like I'm a well-known blogger like Rachel Held Evans or Samantha Field.

But then, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Moore doesn't know who I am. He doesn't know if I'm looking for answers, if I'm hoping to initiate a discussion from his tweets, or if I'm just weighing in with a different opinion. He can't tell any of those things about me, and yet he still blocked me. In itself, that's not a big deal.

But I keep having these encounters with evangelicals once they begin to suspect that I don't belong in the camp, which is odd when one considers that evangelicals proclaim themselves the possessors of the eternal truth of salvation in Jesus Christ, and want everyone to come into the fold with them. It's hard to come into the fold when the fold keeps turning you away. And yet it does.

An editor at a Christian magazine wants to buy something I wrote about surviving cancer -- until he discovers that I support same-sex marriage, and then suddenly he wants nothing to do with me. A woman at the church we've been attending for 18 months is friendly and welcoming – until she discovers that I plan to vote Democratic, not Republican, in the upcoming presidential election. Then, suddenly, I shouldn't even bother coming to church.

I'm a voice worth listening to, until it becomes apparent that I'm not a six-day creationist and don't believe in the Rapture. The negative reaction gets even stronger when I profess my belief in the humanity of Jesus. God only knows how the church would respond if I were openly gay, transgender, polyamorous or otherwise declaring an alternate sexual or gender identity.

Actually, I don't need divine revelation to know how that would work out. I have plenty of friends whose experiences illustrate quite clearly the dangers of being out in a conservative evangelical setting. In the end, this is nothing like any of those. In terms of offense, being blocked on Twitter by a complete stranger ranks far closer to 1 or 0 than it does to 10.

I leave it to the reader to determine what lesson, if any, is to be drawn from my recent experience on Twitter with Russell Moore. I don't know Moore's heart, or what sort of evening he was having. In the final analysis, here is all that happened: On a Friday night in February, I logged onto Twitter and tried to engage with Russell Moore.

And he closed the door in my face.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Tweet