Category: Theology

The Truly Arduous Task

The early twentieth century French writer Andre Gide once observed, “To free oneself is nothing; the truly arduous task is to know what to do with one’s freedom.”

That truly arduous task took a significant turn 224 years ago today when some intrepid pioneers in Philadelphia adopted these words and the articles that followed them:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

On this anniversary (an official holiday!), I’m tempted to parse each of those highly-charged clauses and phrases in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, but I’m particularly struck by the second one: “to form a more perfect Union.”

That laudable goal has been repeatedly tested in American history, especially when it seems at odds with the seventh phrase, “the Blessings of Liberty.”

The Tea Party end of today’s political spectrum has exacerbated that tension between union and liberty in rather stark terms. Some of them apparently believe that we ought to let people die if they don’t have health insurance, which is quite a price to pay for liberty’s “blessings.” (I’m not making this up. Read about it here.)

There’s much more at stake here than the same old partisan bickering over the role of the federal government, not least is how we will define and practice “liberty.” If it means the freedom not to care about the less fortunate, even when they’re dying, why bother with perfecting our “union”?

I suppose we could imagine a “union” formed by those who look alike, are like-minded, and have all the resources they need to take care of themselves. If so, then the U.S. Constitution would form a more perfect country club, but certainly not a country.

What we do with our freedom is as much an arduous theological task as it is a political one.

In the history of Christian theology, freedom has never meant living without constraint, or the freedom to do whatever we want. The grace of God in Christ frees us from bondage to sin and also thereby frees us for living into that grace with others.

The freedom to live for and with others appears in clauses eight and nine of the Constitution’s Preamble: “to provide for the common defence” and to “promote the general Welfare.” As U.S. citizens have always realized, that’s far easier said than done.

Christians have likewise realized how difficult freedom can be. I’ve been thinking about that just recently in my work on the Blessings Project of the Episcopal Church, which has been collecting and developing resources for the blessing of same-gender relationships. As part of that work, we’ve tried to address the ongoing (and centuries-old) challenge of living with disagreements in the Church – the religious version of forming a “more perfect union.”

Reflecting on that daunting task, my colleagues and I kept coming back to this: Christian unity is not a product of our own efforts but is instead a gift from God. The Church enacts that gift in baptism, which initiates us into the Body of Christ. Salvation, in other words, is thoroughly social and communal.

More pointedly put, baptism joins us to God by joining us to others who are different from us.

Now that’s a rather peculiar claim, and remarkably similar to trying to form a nation from people who don’t have anything else in common but a “constitution.”

St. Paul (no less) insisted on this view of baptism by urging the Galatians to set aside the social and cultural distinctions with which they were most familiar and which threatened to keep them divided. If you are baptized, Paul claimed, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Christians are united, not because we agree with each other about everything or because we happen to like each other’s company, but because God has joined us together in Christ (whether we like it or not).

In that sense, both the Gospel and the U.S. Constitution are wonderfully and terrifyingly peculiar (to say the least). My salvation is inextricably bound to the salvation of others; my life in the United States is tied to the lives of everyone else in this country (whether I like it or not).

Those are not aspirational statements. They are facts, and the challenge in both cases is to learn how to live into the fact of our deeply interconnected and intertwined lives, not only in the Church and not only in the United States, but also on this planet.

As I’ve tried to do that In The Episcopal Church, I have been pleasantly surprised by occasional moments of feeling remarkably connected, even fondly so, to those with whom I profoundly disagree. Those were clearly moments of divine grace (trust me on that), which I would have missed had I not stuck with the struggle.

On the night before Jesus died, according to John’s gospel, he prayed for unity. In the midst of that prayer, Jesus commanded his disciples to love each other, a reminder they likely needed to hear. But this commandment was not a grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it onerous obligation. Jesus commanded it so that they might have joy (John 15:9-11).

As we mark the anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, let’s take some of that peculiar Gospel energy into our civic lives. That will demand a lot from us, and it won’t be easy to live fully into that “more perfect Union” in an amazingly diverse society. But if we stick with it, and with God’s help, we may yet discover in new ways that the “truly arduous task” can lead us into joy.

Voicing a Vision: Compulsory Marriage, Part 3

Marriage is not necessarily sinful, just a distraction from the more important work of ministry. That was what the Apostle Paul seemed to think (1 Corinthians 7:25-32); and the Church has never figured out what to make of it.

While there has never been a coherent tradition of “marriage theology” in Christian history, we can say this much: the Church usually reacts to whatever else is going on in the wider culture or in its own ranks, whether in response to Greco-Roman marriage practices, the privileging of monastic vocations, or the emergence of an official state contract that decided how to divvy up property for legitimate heirs (which happened relatively late in European history).

Today’s complex socio-religious landscape threatens to lure the Church into that familiar, reactive pattern – either the Church embraces or rejects the State’s decisions about civil marriage.

Civil marriage equality ought to be a no-brainer for the Church – it’s a civil contract to which any couple should have access. But is that all the Church wants to say about marriage? Will the Church simply baptize Las Vegas wedding chapels and be done with it? Couldn’t Christians offer something a bit more compelling, something people want to hear but don’t expect the Church to say?

The Church has an unprecedented opportunity today to voice a vision of human relationships that speaks to how people really live their lives, and in the process, advance what Jesus called the “kingdom of God.” I don’t know everything about what that vision ought to entail, but here are just a few thoughts toward it, clustered around families, finances, and fidelity (yes, I like alliteration).

1. Families

A recent congressional hearing on the “Defense of Marriage Act” highlighted the paucity of coherent arguments among those who oppose marriage equality. Among the several absurd things now on the congressional record is this: “Marriage makes a family.”

No, actually, it doesn’t. Civil marriage makes a contract between two people. That contract comes with a lot of benefits, but “family” is not among them. My mother and I are a family, not because we have a contract but because of the love, care, compassion, and commitment of our relationship. That’s what “makes a family.”

The Church could voice a vision about families by, well, turning to Jesus. When told that his mother and brothers were waiting to see him, Jesus said, “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50). And when he was dying on the cross, Jesus looked at his mother and his beloved disciple and said, “Woman, here is your son.” And to the disciple, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26-27).

Let’s be clear here: The State does not (and probably never will) recognize either of those two Gospel forms of family as a family. But the Church can and should do that. If the Church did, thousands of people would be profoundly grateful.

2. Finances

If I lost my job tomorrow, my health insurance would become exorbitantly expensive. Linking health care to employment is among the more absurd features of American culture. And marriage matters here because of another absurd feature of American culture: If you’re unemployed but married to an employed person, you can get access to your spouse’s health insurance.

Why in the world should affordable health insurance be linked to whether or not you’re married? As I noted in Part One of this mini-series, health insurance is just one reason why the so-called “freedom to marry” quickly becomes the “necessity to marry” just to get access to a physician.

There are many other financial benefits that attach to marriage, and the Church might turn to Jesus (again) for developing its own voice. Jesus looked rather askance, to say the least, at the privileging of some types of social relation over others.

The Church could voice a different vision by insisting that we no longer live with economically or socially privileged relationships. Everyone should have equal access to what everyone needs to thrive and flourish, regardless of the relationships to which they are called – both human and other animals. I know that sounds like socialism. Don’t blame me; blame Jesus.

3. Fidelity

Everyone knows what “infidelity” means without having to spell it out – a spouse broke a sexual rule. But that kind of marital fidelity emerged in human history mostly to protect property inheritance rights for legitimate heirs.

Biblical writers had a dramatically different view: faithfulness is not about what one cannot do, it is instead what enables one to do something better. The Hebrew prophets denounced the “adulterous” practices of Israel because they weren’t caring for orphans and widows, or showing hospitality to strangers, or tending the land responsibly, or practicing economic justice for the poor. Faithfulness to their covenant with God would have enabled them to do all of that and more.

The Church could offer a compelling vision of fidelity by paying attention to Jesus (again). We know a good tree, Jesus said, not just be looking at it but by the kind of fruit it yields (Matthew 7:16).What does your relationship (of whatever type) enable you to do to make the world a better place?

Civil marriage contracts don’t make families, and they don’t create financial justice for all, and they don’t empower people with the gifts of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). That doesn’t make civil marriage “bad,” just short of the Gospel mark toward which the Church could and should aim.

But covenantal relationships (of various types), entered into deliberately and with spiritual intention, can create families, and promote economic justice for all, and bear fruit in households and communities of remarkable generosity, hospitality, and compassion.

That’s the vision the Church could be voicing today by saying unequivocally two things at the same time: 1) civil marriage equality is good and necessary for social justice; and 2) civil marriage equality is not nearly enough for a Gospel vision of human thriving.

If the Church voiced that vision, we’d see many more people saying “I do” to queerly Christian discipleship.

Keeping it Civil: Compulsory Marriage, Part 2

The marriage equality train has clearly left the station. After New York, it’s only a matter of time until it rolls through the remaining 44 states. This is good news and the Church has good reasons to board that train. But as I suggested last week, the Church shouldn’t leave its theological luggage sitting on the platform.

The freedom of religious expression in the U.S. means at least this much: The Church is not beholden to the State’s definition of marriage. And as Andre Gide once noted, “To free one’s self is nothing; the truly arduous task is to know what to do with one’s freedom.”

So what could the Church to do with its freedom when it comes to marriage? Here are just three broad suggestions:

1. Let’s Keep Changing Marriage

Opponents of civil marriage equality insist that this movement will “redefine marriage.” Let’s hope they are correct. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Recall just two important ways in which marriage has already changed.

The Bible reminds us that “wives” were once considered a lovely form of property – and the more you could acquire the better. This took an extraordinarily long time to fix, and we still see hangovers of that legacy in today’s wedding rites: fathers “giving away” their daughters and women taking on their husband’s names. And do note that marital rape was not considered a crime in every U.S. state until 1993.

Let’s also recall that prior to the abolition of slavery Africans were forbidden from marrying at all. After abolition, “miscegenation” (mixed-race marriage) was illegal in this country. And it was not until as late as 1967 that state statutes forbidding such marriages were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (in a case rather deliciously called “Loving versus Virginia”).

Mildred & Richard Loving

For a very long time, the institution of marriage was an excellent tool for subjugating women and maintaining white supremacy. Thank God marriage changed. But we’re not done.

I hope same-gender married couples will continue the centuries-long evolution of the institution of marriage toward an egalitarian partnership and that those who benefit from this privileged relationship will use their privilege to dismantle the economic and social benefits that attach to it.

That’s an uphill battle, to be sure. The Church should be leading that charge, and a good first step is to keep civil marriage civil.

2. Let’s (Really) Separate Church from State

In most jurisdictions, clergy are agents of the state for marriage licenses just by virtue of being clergy. Others can be temporarily deputized to sign that document as well, but why should ordination to Christian ministry have anything to do with a State contract? It’s time for that to stop.

The minister’s signature on that document implies that the Church endorses the State’s definition of marriage. Do we really? Civil marriage is a contract and the State cares mostly about how to adjudicate the fallout when the parties break that contract. Surely the Church wants to say something more than that about marriage.

Imagine instead that day when the State no longer allows clergy to sign civil marriage licenses because the Church’s standards are too high. Imagine the Church offering a vision of the covenant of marriage that is far more robust than any legal contract. Imagine the Church celebrating many different kinds of covenantal life for the sake of its Gospel mission in the world.

We can take a small but important step in that kind of imagining by detaching the State’s contract from religious ceremonies. To that end, personally, I will no longer sign the state’s marriage license for any couple; let’s keep civil marriage civil.

3. Let’s Value God’s Blessing

This should be obvious, but for some reason the Church doesn’t seem convinced. Consider just two among many recent examples.

Presbyterian minister Janie Spahr got into trouble last year for signing California marriage licenses (when they were legal for same-gender couples). Since 2000, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has actually allowed ministers to bless same-gender relationships, but they can’t sign the state’s contract for them. Janie would not have stumbled if she had just witnessed the state’s marriage and then later blessed the relationship. The logic is distressingly clear: the State’s contract trumps the Church’s blessing.

Consider as well the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, where same-gender clergy couples are now required to get married, as the State of New York has made that option available. Many of those relationships were likely already blessed and affirmed in the Church. In the language of the new diocesan guidelines, the state’s marriage contract will “regularize” those same-gender relationships.

The logic here is equally distressing: merely blessed relationships are “irregular”; only the State can “regularize” them. Does the Church really have so little regard for its own pronouncement of divine blessing?

If we kept civil marriage civil, the Church might rediscover its theological voice and find something to say about marriage that the wider society might really like to hear. In the third and final part of this mini-series, I’ll suggest just a few things the Church could say.

I can’t do that alone, however. I do hope all of us who care about the queerly good news of Christian faith will plunge into this conversation and fine-tune that voice together. I believe more people than most Christian clergy realize are eager for us to listen carefully and then to speak….

I Do and So Must You: Compulsory Marriage, Part 1

Full civil marriage equality for lesbian and gay couples now stands within reach. If the Roman Catholic governor of New York can get this done, so can everyone else. This is nothing short of amazing and cause for great celebration. If we’re not careful, however, this heady moment could derail a queerly Christian witness to the good news of the Gospel.

I worry, for example, that at least one diocese in the Episcopal Church has so quickly boarded the state’s marriage train that it left its theological luggage in the station. The Diocese of Long Island, responding to the recent marriage equality legislation in New York, is now requiring its clergy in same-gender relationships to get married. Some of these couples may have had their relationship liturgically celebrated and blessed already, yet Long Island is now relying on the state’s civil contract to make those relationships religiously legitimate. (Read more about those diocesan policies and their national implications here.)

In microcosm, Long Island casts the ongoing confusions between Church and State in bold relief. Surely Christians want to say something more about marriage than whatever the state says about it. But what do we want to say?

I recently heard feminist Catholic theologian Mary Hunt preach a wonderful sermon in which she applauded the inevitable march toward full marriage equality and then urged us to imagine how we can do better.

Marriage, she said (rather provocatively), is not a right but a privilege. Health care, on the other hand, is not a privilege but a right. We can do better than marriage equality if we detach the basic human right to health care from the privileging of just one kind of relationship. If we continue to make human rights contingent on a privileged relationship, then the “freedom to marry” quickly becomes the “necessity to marry” just to get affordable access to a physician.

In a similar vein, Christian ethicist Marvin Ellison has noted that the divorce rate is so high in the United States because the marriage rate is so high. Ellison would have us notice, in other words, that marriage has become the default position for what it means to be a grown-up, a rite of passage into being a responsible, contributing member of society. Here the “freedom to marry” becomes the “pressure to marry” just to look like an adult.

In the midst of this ever-shifting cultural landscape, the Church has good reasons to applaud the freedom to marry as a matter of social justice. But is that all? The Church can and should do better. The Church can and should bear witness to something other than the economic necessity to marry or the social pressure to marry, and the Church could do this by turning to its own theological traditions.

To be sure, there is no single, coherent theology of marriage in Christian history, but there are rich theological themes in that history that we can still tap today. Christian traditions, for example, invite us to consider marriage as a vocation to which some but not all people are called. There are many other vocational paths through which we can bear witness to the good news of the Gospel and the Church can and should celebrate them as well.

Other themes in Christian history also come to mind to provoke our spiritual imagination – the creation of households (of many various types), the significance of covenants (rather than contracts), how relationships of all kinds empower us for ministry in the world, to name just a few.

Most of all, perhaps, many married couples know what the Church seems rather strangely to have forgotten: marriage is not the best thing we can hope for. Yet over the course of several centuries in the modern West, the Church has baptized marriage as the apex of human fulfillment – just ask the modern wedding industry how much it costs to celebrate that fulfillment.

Both Jesus and the Apostle Paul would find such exultation of marriage rather strange indeed, as both of them suggested something quite different: rather than marriage, union with God is the apex of human fulfillment. At its best, marriage can only reflect and point to that hopeful promise and, thankfully, other types of covenantal relationship can do the same.

Everyone who wants to enter into a civil marriage contract should be able to do so. The Church should say that, loudly and clearly. The Church could also say something else: no one should feel compelled to get married for economic or social reasons. And to those who don’t want to get married, the Church can offer some queerly Christian hope: you can live a full, meaningful, responsible, adult life – even if you’re not married.

Will the Church say those important things? Only if it ends its collusion with the State. And I’ll say more about that in Part Two. Stay tuned.

Trinitarian Finger Pointing

The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the queerest things about Christianity, and I honestly don’t know exactly what or how to think about it. As many Christians will celebrate Trinity Sunday tomorrow, I do think it’s important to remember what Buddhists like to say about doctrine: “the finger is not the moon.” The best we can hope for from any doctrine is that it will point us toward something important, but it can never capture it.

Liberal Protestants tend to shy away from Trinitarian doctrine, but I have at least three reasons (appropriately enough) why I queerly love the Trinity: you can’t sell it on Wall Street; it irritates politicians; and it won’t fit on a Hallmark greeting card. Here’s what I mean:

1. You Can’t Sell it on Wall Street

We live in a world of nearly total commodification. There’s hardly anything left on this planet that can’t be packaged, advertised, and sold. Big banks even made billions from packaging and selling something that didn’t exist and no one understood: the future value of debt.

The Holy Trinity, by contrast, resists every attempt to package it – even by theologians. Every attempt to say exactly what the Trinity means never quite works, sending the theologian back to the drawing board. And that’s how it should be.

As Augustine once noted many centuries ago, “si comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you understand something, it’s not God). To put this in another way, Trinitarian perplexities can help guard against idolatry. Or to paraphrase Augustine, if you can sell it in the gift shop, it may not be an idol, but it’s not God, either.

2. It Irritates Politicians

Fortunately, not every politician needs to be irritated, but more than a few do. In an era of dissolving social safety nets and in a society where the top 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth, more than a few politicians need to be reminded about the corrosive legacy of modern western individualism.

That reminder will irritate them, especially if they believe that every man (or rather, every rich, white man) should live for himself. Respecting the rights and dignity of every individual is good, but not at the expense of destroying any notion of the common good. It’s even more irritating to these politicians to talk about this with theological language. The Holy Trinity can work really well for that.

Trinitarian doctrine developed, in part, as a way to describe the very heart of reality itself as social. Some theologians find the language of choreography helpful for this. In the dynamic interrelations of the Trinity, we cannot distinguish the divine dancers from the divine dance; indeed the dancers are the dance and vice versa, and the dance itself is endless, deathless love.

As social creatures created by a social, dancing God, we are bound together, inextricably interwoven with each other – friend and stranger, lover and enemy – and all of us need each other to hear the music, learn the steps, and dance our way into the abundant life that God intends for all. That’s both a hopeful and a challenging view of reality, regardless of political party or income bracket.

3. It Won’t Fit on a Greeting Card

Actually, there’s not much I can think of worth saying that does fit on a greeting card – unless the card is really big. Take love, for instance. If love is more than a feeling or a sentiment, I don’t see how we’ll ever squeeze it into an envelope – and I think that’s a good thing.

I’ve been learning a lot about love just recently from working with my colleagues in the Episcopal Church on developing resources for the blessing of same-gender relationships. We’ve been trying to craft liturgical language about how relationships of any kind can become a blessing to the wider community when committed love brims over into lives of hospitality, generosity, and service.

There’s something Trinitarian going on there. Augustine, for example, experimented with several ways of talking about the Trinity, including this one: “The Lover, the Beloved, and the Love Itself.” I like that, especially when other theologians expanded on it by suggesting that the Love itself was uncontainable, welling up and spilling over from the Lover and Beloved into the act of creation – and that includes all of us, as we are caught up more and more into the great dance of divine love.

No, the finger is not the moon. But I do find Trinitarian finger pointing not only hopeful and challenging but also inspiring, enticing, and inviting. So, shall we dance?

Peculiar Pentecost: An Agenda

The tide is turning. Can you feel it? Newscasters and sports figures alike are “coming out.” Marriage and/or civil unions are taking root in more and more jurisdictions (the latest polling numbers now show a majority of Americans supporting marriage for same-sex couples). The Presbyterians will welcome openly gay and lesbian clergy. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed and the U.S. Justice Department won’t defend the “Defense of Marriage Act” in court.

That’s pretty heady stuff. The prize, it would seem, really is within reach.

But I’m not popping the champagne cork just yet. Sure, backlash is a real possibility. But I worry more that the sights are set too low. Legislative and judicial victories rarely change hearts and minds, for example. And changing an ordination policy doesn’t automatically change congregations. And what kind of change do we want, really?

A similar dynamic seems to have seized the first disciples of Jesus. On the brink of the risen Jesus’ ascension, they ask him whether that profound moment of resurrection signaled at long last the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel (Acts 1:6).

The disciples’ question is not quite so random as it might appear. The “kingdom” they had in mind was the only benchmark they had ever known for the good life. Surely in that moment, when even crucifixion can’t thwart God’s mission in the world, it’s time for the “happily ever after” moment and roll the credits. I mean, really, after death is conquered, what’s left?

Quite a lot, apparently.

Here’s the peculiar part: the resurrection of Jesus was not the end of the story, not by far. According to Acts, those disciples still had an amazing adventure stretching before them. The Spirit they received on Pentecost empowered them to take up the Jesus-revolution where Jesus had left off – and take it even farther.

A short list from Acts offers a glimpse of what that looked like: overturning economic systems that keep the poor in poverty (4:34-35); resisting institutional authorities jealous of their own power (5:17-26); dissolving social and class boundaries (8:25-40); and reshaping cultural and religious standards of propriety (10:9-30). In what is perhaps the best shorthand description of what a peculiar faith can do, Acts declares that those early Christians turned the “world upside down” (17:6).

That’s pretty heady stuff, too – and that work isn’t finished yet either, not by far.

Prior to that Spirit-led adventure, the disciples seemed stuck in a first century version of the “gay agenda.” Since the 1980s, that agenda could be summed up with a single phrase: “demanding a place at the table.” I’ve worked hard on that agenda myself. Yet I’m haunted by that “Holy Ghost” who seems much more bent on overturning tables than adding a few more chairs.

The Feast of Pentecost (June 12 this year) offers a great opportunity for an agenda set by that peculiar Pentecost. Maybe “vision” is better than “agenda” – a vision where not everyone looks the same or acts alike or buys into the institutional systems that are, actually, killing us.

A Pentecostal agenda begins with some peculiar if not impertinent questions: Why are health care and tax benefits attached to marriage at all? When will more of us resist the forces of global capitalism that seek to turn everyone into a market niche so we can buy still more stuff while the planet slowly dies? Why are there so few LGBT-identified people at immigration reform rallies and labor union meetings? Now that openly gay and lesbian people can serve in the armed forces, when will we start dismantling the military-industrial complex that compels so many low-income people to enlist because they have no other job prospects?

Even that short list of peculiar questions makes the so-called gay agenda seem rather tame.

Those first disciples asked the risen Jesus the wrong question (as I’m sure I would have, too). Wrong, because the resurrection doesn’t “restore” anything; but it does make everything new – or rather, that’s the promise. And the promise starts to take root when we hear Jesus say this to his disciples: ”You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you” (Acts 1:8).

Well, power to do what, exactly? That’s the question Pentecost ought to pose to every Christian community. Not every community will answer it in exactly the same way and the peculiar visions that emerge will need the insights from all the others. Those first-century disciples quickly discovered something similar, and something else as well: that peculiar Pentecost turned the world upside down.Thank God.

What’s So Peculiar about Christianity?

Christianity itself is really quite peculiar, and always has been, though not always in the same way in every time and place.

The peculiar character of Christian faith never occurred to me in the Evangelical, nearly fundamentalist subculture of my childhood. And it didn’t occur to me when I came out as a gay man, either. The wonderfully peculiar and transforming character of Christian faith has been unfolding in my thinking and living over the last 20 years or so.

To be sure, most Christians today in the North Atlantic rarely think about their faith as “peculiar.” Most of the time, Christianity just blends in with the wider culture and occasionally surfaces among political candidates as a kind of litmus test for elections. This seems rather far removed from the personally transforming, world-altering character of the Gospel that shaped the first few centuries of Christianity and which can still inspire renewal and transformation today.

I never really thought about it that way growing up in the American Midwest. Even though I heard and read the gospel story many times over my life, I can’t quite imagine why I missed just how peculiar it is.

Just to recall, the story of Jesus  that inspired the gospel writers was a story about a Jewish prophet living in a conquered, backwater province of the Roman Empire; about an unmarried, itinerant teacher in a society constructed on marriage and family relations; about the scandalous practice of sharing meals and daily life with the ritually unclean and socially misfit; about a humiliating, public execution at the hands of an occupying army; and reports from hysterical women who seemed to be talking about grave robbers and an empty tomb.

Now, really, that’s a pretty strange, odd and, well, very peculiar story.  It’s out-of-the-ordinary, culturally unwarranted, socially unreasonable, religiously radical, philosophically suspect, and politically dangerous. And precisely for all of those reasons, the gospel writers insisted that this story is “good news.”

Notice that I didn’t mention anything about human sexuality in that account. Given some of the academic work I do at the intersections of sexuality and religion, one might expect to read a bit more about that here. But I believe the Christian Gospel is already quite peculiar all on its own without any help from all the debates around sexuality and gender with which so many churches live today. To be sure, those debates can help highlight some important issues and questions, but they only scratch the surface of the Gospel’s potential for renewal and transformation.

Given the ongoing legacy of the “wedding” between Christianity and western cultural values, I would say we need to retrieve that peculiar Gospel energy to address the social and political mess we find ourselves in today regarding race, ethnicity, economics, class, and a planetary environment on the brink of collapse.

The biblical writer who wrote the first letter of Peter was on to something by referring to Christians as “peculiar.” The whole biblical book of Acts provides story after story of the wonderfully transforming energy of the Gospel. As Luke (presumably) described it in Acts, those early Christians “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6).

I’m convinced that the Christian Gospel still carries that potential today — to turn the world upside down with a peculiar faith, that inspires hope, and transforms the world with love (1 Corinthians 13:13).