Category: Generous

This week was absolute shit. That’s actually the technical theological term for it, believe me. I intend to leave private details private, but just know that I am okay, but I’m going through some things that are… shitty.

Richard Rohr talks about there being two main means of transformation in life. Great Love, and Great Suffering. I believe that I was able to experience Great Love in 2019 through a series of mystical experiences that brought me face to face with Divine Love itself. Apparently, now it’s time for the suffering. Which, given the reality of human experience, was inevitable and which will undoubtedly come again.

I’m not going to pre-judge the transformational impact of this period, other than to say that it may very well have opened my ears to two teachings that came across the interwebs to me this week that I probably would have ignored before.

First, we have Barbara Brown Taylor in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, who spun the Parable of the Sower on its head:

“If this is really the parable of the Sower and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new. The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth.”

I spent most of my life post-conversion convinced that the Parable of the Sower was about the likelihood that I would become a backslidden Christian on the highway to hell. But what if it wasn’t about the ground, but the extravagant sower? I mean, Jesus did have a thing about dangerously extravagant grace.

And then, for the coup de grace (yes, intentional misspelling), I read this sermon from Nadia Bolz-Weber about the Sermon on the Mount:

“See, here’s why sometimes it’s good to ignore the chapter and verse separations. Because it’s so easy for us to default to hearing Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount as pure exhortation. As though he is giving us a list of virtues we should try and adopt so that we too can be considered blessed – you know, be meeker, be poorer, and mournier and you too can meet the conditions of earning Jesus’ blessing. But the thing is, it’s hard to imagine Jesus exhorting a crowd of demoniacs and epileptics to be meeker. He wasn’t telling the sick and the lame what they should try and become, he was telling them you are blessed and you are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world.”

I know for a fact that I read that scripture before and noticed that he looked at the crowds and then gave the beatitudes. But it never hit me before today that this wasn’t just a list of things that God was holding out for the disciples of Jesus when they try really hard to follow him and bad things happen because of it, but that instead this was the fundamental reality of human existence. Why does Jesus comfort you? Because you’re a person who needs comfort. Why does Jesus call you a child of God? Because you make peace. Why are you the salt of the earth? Because you are beloved just by your very existence.

I don’t have a lot to add to either Barbara Brown Taylor’s reflection or Nadia Bolz-Weber’s sermon – you should read them in their entirety. But all I know at this time is that in the midst of suffering, the concept of a God who is not a cosmic bean counter but instead a blesser of everyone where they are makes even more sense. The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous and all that.

It’s all grace.

I am an amateur theology nerd. I can’t escape it. When I’m not reading theology books, I’m thinking about theology. Even when I just couldn’t even with God I was still always thinking about theology. Even when I never prayed I would think about theology.

I almost applied to seminary in my early 20s. But I couldn’t get a recommendation from my pastor because he “felt like he didn’t know me well enough.” Whether that was valid or not, it was ultimately for the best, because a messy deconstruction would have been hell had I been ten years into pastoring an evangelical church.

I still want to go to seminary. Maybe I will do it, or maybe I won’t. I have serious doubts that I would want to pastor a church, and I’m a bit old to go up the PhD track to try to teach. But boy, would I love to study theology.

But the thing that I realized tonight is that while I find theology fascinating, I also find it absolutely, completely meaningless.

Let me explain.

In the end, what is, will be. There is nothing we can do, nothing we can think, nothing we can believe that will change ultimate reality. We’re all buckled into the roller coaster that has left the tracks and is going to crash into the ground regardless of however much screaming and squirming we do. Now, this can be existentially terrifying (and it has been for me). But it’s also profoundly comforting. I don’t have to get it right. I don’t have to believe exactly the right thing. I can just be.

But wait, you say! Don’t we have to believe the right thing to have a good outcome when the roller coaster comes crashing down?

I used to believe this.

But then I started hearing different, absolutely committed followers of Jesus interpret scripture in exactly opposite ways. And then I learned about the human tendency toward confirmation bias and making the world around us fit into our mental wiring. And that made me pretty sure that it’s 100% impossible to ever know what is absolute truth with any level of certainty.

And any God who would send people to hell for believing the wrong contradictory interpretation isn’t really God at all. You know, the God that John said is love? If God’s very nature is love (and it is, this I have experienced personally), then God isn’t going to toss you into hell for believing the wrong thing in a confusing life. And, as a matter of fact, that God isn’t going to toss you into hell at all (or even let you choose that as some would assert – even the older brother will ultimately join the party).

So basically all theology is to me at this point is a bunch of analogies we humans have come up with to try to make sense of existence, suffering, and death. Faulty analogies.

But these analogies, when pondered with love, can point us in the direction of what is.

And that’s why I still love theology.

The story that most of us in Western Christendom have received growing up goes something like this. Six thousand years ago, God created two literal human beings named Adam and Eve. They lived with him in a perfect garden until one day Eve was naughty and believed a snake who tempted her to eat a forbidden fruit. She shared that disobedience with Adam and both of them were cast out of the garden and punished with death and suffering. Because they were naughty and disobedient, all of their descendants had this “naughty gene” as a part of them, and all of creation which was initially created good became twisted and so all sorts of nastiness entered the universe.

Then, one day, about four thousand years later, God incarnated himself into an individual by the name of Jesus. Jesus was an overall nice guy who taught us all to be nice people to one another, and most importantly to repent of our sins continually. He then died on the cross to make a payment to his angry Father who was otherwise going to send everyone he had created to a nasty place called hell where the fire would never be quenched and the worm would not die. But for those very few who accepted Jesus into their heart, the payment would be effective and they would not have to go to that nasty place. As long as they kept being generally nice people who continually repented of their sins and didn’t do anything really bad like be gay or have an abortion. But for everyone else, it was fire. Sorry!

But what if we got the story all wrong? What if we focused on the part of the story that made us feel like we and our tribe were the chosen people and everyone else outside that we actually didn’t like already were really evildoers? What if we chose a story that allowed us to be okay with our own brokenness because we didn’t engage in the sins of “those people?”

Maybe, just maybe, if we opened our eyes and listened to the story that all of creation has told since the beginning of time, and that the scriptures have attempted to tell us from the very beginning, and that Jesus modeled for us in his life, death, and resurrection, we would hear the melody of a song that is very different and much, more beautiful.

In this story, a trinitarian God always in loving relationship with its other parts creates this universe 13.7 billion years ago by incarnating one part of the Trinity, Christ, in all of creation. This God is a lover, who, to paraphrase Richard Rohr, loves all things by becoming them. And God sees that the universe that God has created is good, good, good, good, very good. And into this universe, through processes of natural selection, God creates living things on at least one planet, and a very intelligent primate that can perceive the universe, it’s physics, and even God. Now, the universe is not perfect and this primate does terrible things to its fellow primates as well as to creation, but God incorporates the good with the bad for the sake of a master blueprint God has in store.

So, after 13.7 billion years, a specific incarnation of the Christ that has existed in all of creation from the very beginning comes into the world as a baby, Jesus of Nazareth. This baby grows as any human would, ultimately becoming a man (as Rohr also teaches and which rings true, with a feminine spirit) who is given a mission by God the lover to live a life in the shape of all reality. Jesus spends his three years of ministry loving EVERYBODY and especially the outcast, welcoming the broken, healing the sick and the spiritually and mentally oppressed, feeding people, and building a beloved community on earth. And he teaches this beloved community, and anyone who would listen, that they should do the same in order to be the first fruits of what God had planned since the beginning of time.

But the world liked the first story better. So after Jesus spent his three years in ministry, the religious leaders conspired with the empire to kill Jesus. But this, too, was part of the blueprint God had laid out since the beginning of time. On the cross, in solidarity with the imperfections and suffering of all of creation, Christ suffered and died.

But the blueprint also had one more part. After three days, the specific incarnation of Christ named Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected as the universal Christ. His resurrection was the first fruits of God making “all things new.” The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was the pattern of all creation. The shape of all reality.

But again, we missed the point. Because after an initial period of the early church getting what the story meant, and with the exception of a few monks, nuns, and mystics who also understood the story, by and large the church decided it liked the first story better.

This is an excellent article on why so many people like me are leaving evangelicalism.

Faith has never been easy for me.

I was raised in a home without any religion whatsoever, and basically considered myself agnostic through High School, although for some reason I never considered myself an atheist. Even though I was never taught much about religion, I would still from time to time pray to God/whatever. And I LOVED Christmas. I remember being little and looking for the Star in the sky on Christmas Eve, being too ignorant of the Bible and of science to know that it was a one time event two thousand years ago. But perhaps I was a budding mystic even then. That was basically the extent of it for me. And to counter any religious stirrings I might have had, we had the original Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right, people telling me I was going to hell, and all those “wonderful” things about conservative American Christianity in the 1980s.

So in college I met some Christians who didn’t seem like that. They didn’t judge me, they all seemed to like being around each other, and so I went to their Bible Studies. And I fell in love with the real, historical Jesus. The Jesus who was nothing like the Religious Right. The Jesus who would not condemn those that society was quick to condemn. The Jesus who was on the side of the poor and the oppressed. The Jesus who exposed the hypocrisy of the Religious Right of his day. And so I decided to follow him.

But, still, faith didn’t come easy to me. I remember struggling with the idea that my High School friend who had probably kept me from committing suicide during a really dark period in my life and had later committed suicide himself could possibly be in hell for it. I struggled when the evangelical prayer toolbox left me feeling like my prayers were bouncing off of the ceiling. For a time, I had to excuse myself from a house church I was a part of because of the pastor’s interpretation of the Revelation of John (eschatology is hard). I had weird thoughts that God would punish me physically if I sinned.

As I continued in the evangelical world, the tensions increased. The concept of the Bible being inerrant made no sense to me since there were obvious contractions between accounts of the same story. The need to make the Bible literal, especially with regard to the Creation narratives, made me come to the conclusion that either the literalists were wrong about the earth being six thousand years old, or God was evil to make the universe look billions of years old.

And then there was homosexuality. I could never reconcile the idea that the same Bible that told of a God of infinite compassion, love, and forgiveness could condemn people to hell because of who they are or who they love. It came to a head when I was serving as the “Social Concern representative” for my church and that denomination decided that it needed to come out publicly in favor of a political initiative to officially outlaw gay marriage, and it fell to me to stand in front of the church in support of this so-called “Social Concern.” By the grace of God, I was able to express my opposition to the pastors, even though they went ahead without my involvement. I resigned my position shortly thereafter, and while I would like to say that I heroically left that church because of that moment, I did stay around for awhile before leaving because of this and other issues. Always a work in progress, sadly.

But about this same time, God gave me new wineskins. In the gospels (Matthew 9, Mark 2, and Luke 5), Jesus talks about not being able to put new wine in old wineskins because the old wineskins had become rigid and would burst as the new wine continued its fermentation process and expanded. I went to a conference in Pasadena, CA called Politics and Spirituality with Jim Wallis, Anne Lamott, and Richard Rohr as its keynote speakers. And suddenly, it clicked.

It was wonderful learning in a community of believers who saw Christianity as primarily an expression of the love of God for all people and not an exclusive clique providing fire insurance for the “elect” few. It all felt very subversive coming from a reasonably conservative evangelical environment (although this being California, not nearly as conservative as in other parts of the country). No offense to Jim Wallis, but Anne Lamott and Richard Rohr stole the show for me. I loved the way Anne Lamott told stories about kindness and the love of God. One of her stories that stays with me to this day was about how she would call out to kids in her Sunday School class who were wearing certain shirts and then hug them and tell them that they were so loved and so chosen. Being a father of really small kids at the time, it spoke to me about the love of Christ for all people.

And then there was Richard Rohr.

I had never heard anyone speak the way he spoke. The concept of “how you see determines what you see” was transformative. The introduction to the ideas that the dualistic mind of the Western church is not the way the early church and the great mystics saw reality and the fact that we needed to have a “non-dual” mindset in order to truly grasp the nature of God reoriented my prayer life forever. And learning contemplative practices at the feet of probably the greatest contemplative of my lifetime was truly an honor. It absolutely transformed my faith.

I left that conference and devoured everything off of the evangelical “safe and approved” list. Brian McLaren. Rob Bell. More Richard Rohr. Anne Lamott. The Internet Monk, Michael Spencer, who sadly passed well before his time several years back. Robert Farrar Capon. And many others.

I finally had an intellectual construct for what I had intuitively felt my entire Christian life. I didn’t have to subscribe to the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture because the scripture itself doesn’t claim to be inerrant, and in fact is a conversation among the people of God that God uses to point us to Christ. I didn’t have to believe that everyone not in my tribe was going to hell, because the arc of the scriptures points to a God who has generated a “tidal wave of grace” that will eventually “soak everyone,” to paraphrase Michael Spencer. And I didn’t have to believe that my LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters were not a part of this story because the dissonant voices in scripture used to justify their exclusion were outside of the narrative arc of what God is trying to communicate to us through word and tradition.

And I learned to love the historic church, contemplation, and mystery.

But I was still evangelical, despite my non-evangelical beliefs. Or at least attending evangelical churches.

After a few years of tremendous spiritual growth, I think I just kind of settled into life. I wasn’t happy in evangelical churches and generally felt like an “other” who couldn’t speak up about what I really believed. If they only knew, they would kick me out for sure. But I also didn’t really want to rock the boat and so I just kept my head down, kept my mouth shut, and tuned out the things I didn’t agree with.

But that’s changing. God has awakened me again. The funny thing about contemplative prayer is sometimes God shows up. And when he shows up, things change. It’s changing again.

2016 was a watershed moment for my faith. After years of trying to hold onto the tension between my obviously non-evangelical theological views and my desire to stay within the evangelical tradition I belonged to my entire Christian life, the election forced me to jump completely off that train. But it wasn’t until this week that I finally viewed myself as being fully outside of the tent of evangelicalism.

And I have to tell you, I feel free.

I really don’t know WHAT I am yet, and perhaps a label is just reductive and should be avoided anyway. But it ain’t evangelical. And it feels great.

I no longer have to care what evangelicals think of my theology. I no longer have to just go with the flow in a church where the majority of the people I see on Sunday somehow think that it’s okay to vote for white supremacy because abortion or Hillary or lols or whatever. I no longer have to keep looking for an evangelical church that will support me as I am in my spiritual journey because I’ve realized that construct is the mythical unicorn.

Maybe I will end up in a mainline church, or maybe I will find a group of like-minded people and start something new. But the days of pretending and worrying are over.

I’m free.