House of Cards

House of cardsSo, I’ve been asking all these questions. I hit on a few pretty big ones – why did Jesus come? Why did Jesus die? – and so forth, which led me to question the model of atonement that I grew up with, and hadn’t even really noticed before. I was aware that it didn’t work for me, I couldn’t make it make sense, but had never imagined that might be because it wasn’t right, or right for me, I imagine the thought police would rather I said. I hadn’t imagined that there could be other possible models. So, I found myself asking, and questing, as I began to write about here. And then I thought I’d do some reading. I read a lot of blogs, and found some interesting thoughts on the subject, eg. here. I asked someone whose opinion I value and respect, even if I don’t always agree with it. I’d like to ask some other people, too, but haven’t found the right opportunity. Then I came upon an ebook that sounded interesting – not definitive, you understand: I’m not ready to look for answers yet, just for questions. And reading it has been interesting. I’m not yet half way through. This morning, on my commute, I was reading it. I was reading Tony Jones, the author, state categorically things like

what I’m saying is that Jesus (God) really, materially healed people…really, materially died…And Jesus (God) really, materially rose from death

and thinking “of course I agree with that. I’ve always agreed with that…oh, wait, do I?”…

…and I then I thought about other things I’d read previously, like the brilliantly-phrased

a problem with the penal substitutionary understanding of atonement, it seems to me, is that there’s really no reason for the resurrection. It’s little more than Jesus’ ‘Ta-Da! See, I told you I was divine!’

And suddenly, the questions I was asking got harder, got personal. Not “why did this happen?”, but “why do I believe this happened?”, which of course leads to “do I believe this?” – and on, and on, and my paradigms crumbled around me as I realised: the only reason I believe what I believe is because I choose to. Not because I actually believe it at all – I honestly can’t say whether I do or not – but because I wanted to believe those things.

X-files - I Want to Believe poster-8x6

(Why, oh why, did you have to go, Fox? I love you so!)

My faith, my worldview, has developed thus: as a child I was severely and damagingly brainwashed. As a young adult, I stepped casually away from those things – put some distance between me and they, because I didn’t feel safe around them, but neither did I feel safe leaving them behind, so still I took them with me. As an older adult, a “mature” student at university, I suddenly felt I had to reject a lot of what I’d been taught, because it couldn’t be right – the things I was learning showed me that.

So then I wandered about in the wilderness, of course. Then, as a grown-up (supposedly), I found myself working in the church. And I listened, and watched, and felt love. So eventually I felt safe enough to begin looking, questing. I read the New Testament, and somewhere in Romans something clicked. Something made sense that hadn’t before (funnily enough, I’m no longer sure what it was, but it felt important at the time), enough that I could allow myself to step into the world of church, religion, faith. A personal faith journey -  I can’t deny that I was on one, but I would have struggled to accept it as such during those early stages.

Since then, I’ve listened to things, sought out teaching and preaching and text and subtext; have questioned, listened, challenged, read; have brought myself to the front of the wave and crashed myself onto the beach over and over again. I have learned some things, but I have been taking baby steps, or not even that: tiptoeing around the edges of what might matter. Why?

Because I couldn’t, wouldn’t, let the idols fall. I could not let go of the false teachings I grew up with, even though I knew them to be destructive and painful for me. So I had sorted through them, picked up the bits that I could stomach, greyed out the rest, and mashed them up into some kind of personal religion. Eww. This is not a good thing. It’s an interesting thing, and I shall very much enjoy unpicking it. What I need to do now is to explore the real questions; to find out what I actually can and do believe, if anything. This is very scary. I have a lot to let go of. I may well duck out sometimes, pretend it’s all ok again, clutch on to those strands of before. But now I can no longer deny that I’m on a personal faith journey – I am journeying to find my faith, because at this stage I have no idea what, or if, I believe.

Although the road is scary-looking, I’m not scared. I’m excited. As a journeymate for this beginning, for just now, I am taking Karl Barth, whose writing I have fallen in love with, regardless of what he’s saying (what can I say? I’m a wordgeek – and I’m not even sorry!).

I like to think that I’m adult enough to be able to explore and enjoy things not just because I agree with them but sometimes because I don’t. I don’t yet even know which things I will or won’t agree with – that’s the whole adventure!

Why Blood Atonement Theology Weakens God

Why Blood Atonement Theology Weakens God.

I just discovered Christian Piatt’s blog and am loving exploring it. It feels as though he has done some wrestling with some of the questions I’m currently swimming in – and I’m interested in his answers. I’m not rushing to find my own answers – quite happy to tread water awhile before I race off and get myself into trouble – but am going to take this one into the week with me to think about, along with my gleanings from this morning’s service. It feels as though I might find much spiritual manna in this blog. Thanks Christian!

Gleanings

This morning’s service discussed the story of blind Bartimaeus. It’s a story I like, one I always seem to get more from, every time I go back to it. To be honest, the sermon didn’t work particularly well for me: it ranged about too much, tried to tie up too many things into nice little shiny-happy-people packages. But I did enjoy it – it was delivered well, both the preacher and the reader had lovely speaking voices, and many of the individual points made were interesting to me. My primary gleaning, the thing I’m taking home to chew over as the week goes on, is this:

Bartimaeus was in need, and reached out to Jesus. The disciples, we the church, shushed him up because he was an inconvenience to us. This guy was someone who needed the church. And the church was too self-involved to hear his cries. Jesus wasn’t, of course. The preacher actually laid this out rather more effectively than I am now, but the point is this: how many times do we do that? Constantly, I reckon. Now I want to look back and see how many times the disciples did that, too, because I seem to remember it’s more than once!

This is what church is about, right? Bringing the lonely, the broken, the needy to God, to find Christ and in Him “The Way”. To share love. To share faith. To nourish. To teach. To heal. To care. To bring about and enact the Kingdom. This is what Jesus was about, right? So why, even from the very beginning, even in those closest to Jesus, right at the moment of the recreation, do we reject everyone? Why would we rather share with ourselves, each other, the like-minded, than with those who are asking for our help – those we profess we want to serve?

Can any of you say it’s different today in your church?

“There’s none so blind as he that will not see”

Baby Steps

I seem to be in a different place. I seem to be on a journey, spiritually. I find I’m full of questions, asking all the things I never thought to ask before, never challenged when I was being brainwashed as a child. It seems to me that I probably ought to feel foolish for asking these things, but then again, they are things I don’t know, despite a lot of time spent in ‘Christian’ circles of various sorts. So they’re valid questions, to me at least. I’ve been having some help with one of the most fundamental questions I’ve yet come up with (“what was the point of Jesus, exactly?”). And that has been good. I feel as though I have made some progress, though I’m not yet settled at any answers as such. But this time of questioning brings me back to a problem I’ve faced for a while: where do I turn for spiritual guidance? Obviously, I can turn to the Bible, and to prayer, and that’s certainly helpful. But I’m a person with a severe tendency to internalise things in ways that only become more destructive the longer I’m left to my own devices, so I now acknowledge fairly robustly that I need some human help in these things. I’ve always needed others to bounce off, academically, and some of this stuff is academic, amongst other things. I think I’m rather more of an extrovert than I’ve ever realised. So – where to go for guidance, advice? There are problems with turning to my minister. Though I love this person, I find it hard to trust them, and fear deeply the many agendas that seem to be running in amongst our relationship with each other. Besides which, this minister, like the other many ministers I deal with in my day job, has no time for pastoral care. There are other priorities. “Pastoral ministry” is a fading model. So – the ministry of all believers, right? Find an elder, preacher, leader, friend – some one I can trust and whose opinion I can value. Struggling. There are those people, I guess. But I suppose I’m a bit too selective, and they tend to be too busy, or distant (in one way or another), or otherwise unavailable – or I make them unavailable to myself. This is probably a pattern of mine, to be honest, though the situation I’m currently in certainly exacerbates things. So I follow lots of blogs: I figure that if I find I hit stuff I simply can’t countenance, I just quit following; if I hit stuff I disagree with, it may well be a good opportunity for exploration; if I hit stuff that nourishes me, then I’m a winner. This is ok. It’s good. It gives me lots of different perspectives, angles, views. I like it. But I do crave a real person, one who will talk back to me, who will challenge my thoughts and words, and feed me in those ways. I would love to share that kind of a relationship with someone.

Reading – books, blogs, Bible – here’s the thing: I just end up with  more and more questions. Like:

  • what’s the virgin birth all about?
  • if we accept the virgin birth, how can we call Jesus ‘son of David’?
  • why wasn’t Jesus a girl?
  • is it because men tell the story?
  • what’s with all the gnashing of teeth?
  • how come Jesus prays to himself (God)?
  • if Jesus was all about bringing the Kingdom, rather than all about dying, how come he kept on predicting his death as if it were inevitable?
  • at what point did it become inevitable?
  • what actually matters?
  • how come Timaeus sounds like a Roman name?
  • how can God be both ‘just’ and ‘merciful’?

Silly things. Many more silly things swirling around. And yet, so important!

We are all unequal

Reblogged from Take back the poetry:

Spotted this video thanks to Anna Drew, Methodist Church media person, about all sorts of reasons to avoid church – and then go anyway.

I thought of it when I found this. I wrote it a couple of years ago when my wife asked me the old "What do you want out of church?" question...

We come together

because things are not right…

Read more… 293 more words

A seriously good definition of church here from Jeremy Woodham. I've been battling over the past couple of days as to what church is, should be, and how it is or could be boundaried. It's been a battering time, emotionally, as I found despair in what I heard from some other people. Thankfully, there are those who think differently.

Finally!

Finally!My mother is by vocation a teacher. She spent years training to be a teacher. She is good at it. Her methods are effective and challenging. She loves it. She believes in it. I can hardly imagine her ever doing or being anything else; it is just who she is.

The sad thing is, she’s spent her entire adult life resisting that. Not the teaching – she does that (she can’t help herself!), and does it well – but the system. She hangs around the system, shouting from the sidelines, or just watching disconsolately. She dabbles around the edges: does things which are teaching but are not quite in the system proper. She behaves like this because the system makes her angry and afraid. I don’t blame her – she has a point. Formal  education here is not as could as it could or should be, at least in part because of the mis-management of the system.

I do struggle with her cowardice: I see the damage her self-distancing has done to her (mitigated, of course, against the potential damage that ‘playing the game’ might have done her), and I also see the waste: what the system (and by extension the world) has lost because she has chosen exile; the ways she could have enhanced things; the difference she could have made.

So it came as a sudden blow – like a kick in the stomach – when I realised today just how close my path is to hers. I heard myself say (internally) that I couldn’t do something because of the anger and fear I feel when faced with the system. It’s a different system: church. But the fears are similar, and the effect of those fears…? Well, I don’t know. I just know how I felt when the blow landed today. Should I be preparing myself mentally, emotionally, spiritually for formal ministry of some sort? Despite my fears, disillusionment, anger? Then I got to thinking….maybe it’s exactly because of those things that I ought to take the suggestions seriously. I could make a difference, precisely because I see and dislike the mis-management of the system.

So, reeling from being punched by God, I gave in. Ok, I’ll listen, and think about this, seriously. So later on I sat down and read through the ‘signing up for ministry’-type  document I stashed away some time ago, unread. And it’s ok – I was relieved to learn that I’m off the hook, for the time being at least. I simply couldn’t take the vows, as it were: I don’t believe all of the things I’d need to believe to do that. So I’m clear for now – space to think and to be. Funnily enough, I have believed each of those things previously – it’s my new-found anger and disillusionment that’s keeping me from the church. Is it keeping me from God, from my own spirituality, too? Possibly, actually: something else to think about.

I’d love to pick a fight with someone; with one of the people who have so damaged my trust. I’d like to sit them down and tell them how it feels, how it hurts, what they’ve done, and then ask them what they thought they were doing, how they justify it to themselves. And maybe, in their answers, I could find enough of their fear, remorse, or folly to breathe new life into my faith. Would that mean I could believe in the potential of the system again? Or is the whole principle torn down for me now? If it is that, what next? The temple curtain was torn in two to let the people closer to God, right? As I stand in the ruins of this temple, do I now need to try to build it back up again, or to do something different, something new?

 

 

 

Finally comes the…err…?

PrayerfulSee, the thing is, I don’t think that I do ‘believe in preaching’.

Here’s the blog-post that got me thinking:

http://wolsblog.com/when-is-a-sermon-not-a-sermon/

I hear what the writer is saying…I think. But I don’t ‘get it’.

On several levels.

I expect to be corrected. But here’s where I’m coming from:

The mention of ‘spiritual snobbery’ feels to me to be the accurate one, possibly. Ok, I’m not a ‘preacher’. Why not, particularly given that a lot of friends and colleagues seem to think I could or should be a ‘priest’ of some kind? Because I don’t think that I believe in preaching in the ways that the above blog-post implies I ought to. I think many things. I believe many things. I believe that many of my thoughts & beliefs have been influenced by Divine Inspiration. As far as I’m concerned, I ‘wrestle’ with the texts. Over and over, and over: and find new things over and over, too. But nowhere in who I am do I find any kind of suggestion that I have found something in amongst that wrestling that I have a right to ‘preach’, to announce it to listening ears, proclaiming it as being ‘from God’. I also happen to believe that I do have some idea about how to breastfeed and how to rescue your carpet from candle wax and how to do my day job and how to guide my kids through life, at least from my point of view. But I don’t have any delusions that my beliefs/opinions/findings/instincts in those things are of certain benefit to anyone else, or that I have a right to impose them on them.

Don’t get me wrong: I love being preached at! Hypocritical though that may be, I’m a serial consumer of sermons. I get a lot out of them. I value them. I even occasionally enjoy them. But even so, I would argue that I don’t necessarily ‘believe’ in them. I don’t believe that the preacher is a messenger from God. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe they can act as a conduit for whatever God wants to say. I just believe that God does that in spite of the preacher’s words, rather than because of them. God shows up because God shows up.

But to imply that some preachers are offering something more than their own personal experiences of the text worries me. That does seem like spiritual snobbery: that they, somehow, have found a path to ‘hear’ God reliably and relatably, which is something I have never managed to do, despite a lifetime feeling I ought to somehow have had those ‘direct’ experiences (thanks to a childhood squandered in various incarnations of the Pentecostal tradition). Am I somehow less, somehow failing, somehow so sinful that God won’t share with me? By this definition, I can never be a ‘preacher’ (that may be just as well!). And yet here I am, blogging.

Yes, I do get the irony. Why am I bothering to write here? I write for me, if I’m honest. I write because/when I’m angry, more often than not. I write as a form of prayer. I write as escape, and certainly as part of my process of ‘wrestling’. I don’t seek readers. I don’t have readers very much. By taking the pulpit, a preacher takes responsibility for the souls and spirits and mental health of the others in the room. I admire those people hugely. I’m just glad I don’t ever have to pretend to be one of them.

Interestingly, I do believe in worship in a wider sense. I feel very deeply that collective singing, reading, praying, talking, sharing (and yes, story-telling, though to a lesser extent) are extremely important; important to community, to faith, to soul-growth, spirit-growth, and to ‘church’ (both that which church is and that which church ought to be). I believe in the ecstatic in worship. I belive God comes to us in those ways. I believe the Spirit can speak through those cracks. I believe that shared proclamation like that can change people’s hearts and minds and let God in. And here’s another thing I do believe in: teaching. I believe God has representatives among us – those we call teachers. Evangelists. Fellow travellers. ‘Faithful’, in Bunyan’s parlance. I believe there are a great many people who can teach me a great many things. I sit at their feet, just waiting to hear the words drip from their mouths. I believe that God will speak to me through them. So what’s the difference?

I’m less clear here: not because things are unclear, but because I don’t trust myself. I feel as though I am influenced on this by a whole bunch of negative stuff I wish I’d never had to encounter, and I’m finding it difficult to unpick which are the things I learned in those dark teachings and which are things I feel ok to trust.

Hmm. This is hard. I think I’ll have to come back to it, perhaps. The more I write now, the further from my faith I feel. Maybe God’s doing that. Maybe I’m on a wrong path. I just know that I got angry reading the post. It made me feel that I wasn’t allowed, valued, Godly, because I don’t have those experiences. This is an old familiar feeling. I have absolutely no doubt that this is exactly not what the blogger was intending. I just wonder if he’s forgotten that it’s different for other people sometimes.