Bible Questions/Bible Answers

"I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask insistently and with some humility for us to receive the answer from it." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from a letter to Rudiger Schleicher.

During the Reformation and through subsequent centuries, the church was divided about the nature of the sacraments--transubstantiation, consubstantiation, real presence, memorial, and how many sacraments are sacraments. These debates over questions of "what is it?" tore the churches apart. Of course, the debates weren't just about the sacraments, but also about power and who yielded sacramental power. One of the things I love best about my Wesleyan theological heritage is that it shifted the conversation about sacraments from "What is it?" to "What is it doing?" Wesleyanism tends to leave the nature of sacrament to mystery ("musterion") and emphasize that the Trinitarian God is present and working in and through the sacrament. This emphasis is empowering, humbling, and uniting.

The divisive conversation about "What it is" has shifted since the Enlightenment to the question of the nature of Scripture. The fight over the nature of the Bible is even more entrenched because it has even more to do with power. As the authority of the institutional church declined and as human beings increasingly looked to science and observation as a tool to know what we know, scripture was given a new role as a sort of legal authority on the nature of all things. It began to be read as a tool to say "See, the way I think things should be is the way they are because God said so because look here he said exactly what I say in his book and so you have to just swallow it or be against God." And so, now we have debates about the authority of the Bible, inerrancy, infallibility, etc.

What is the Bible for? What does it do? Why did God give it to us? How does it function in our living? Those are better questions. They are uniting questions. They are questions that lead us to listen to God through scripture humbly, to be taught rather than to look for tools to impose our views and ways upon others.

In my experience, I have encountered people with extremely varied views on the nature of the scriptures who humbly yield to the voice of God through it and find a meeting place for a living relationship with God when they read it with open heart. I have also encountered people with all kinds of views of the Bible who use it as a tool to impose their ways and ideas upon others and who never seem to humbly yield before God and seek answers for which they honestly don't know the answers as they listen to God through the Bible.

Provenance

I am a book person, and to book people, the word "provenance" has special meaning. Provenance refers to a book's particular story, its connections to its previous owners and its special relevance as an artifact because of what it meant to the people who have handled it.

For example, I recently read a story about Umberto Eco, the brilliant academic, author, and bibliophile who became famous with has first novel, "The Name of the Rose," in which a monk is murdered by poisoning. The monk had a habit of licking his fingers when he turned the pages in a book, so his murderer put poison on the pages of a book. Eco got the idea for this weird means of murder from a nasty old paperback he bought for 70 cents in a secondhand bookshop. The book had gunky pages that were stuck to one another, and Eco was so disgusted that he had the thought that someone could get sick or die from handling the book. Then the thought occurred to him that a book could be used as a murder weapon. The rest is history. And that little paperback, which was once worthless, is now a valuable and treasured part of literary history. That's provenance.

I suppose one day I will die and someone will cart my many books to the Goodwill. That's fine by me, as long as they get to someone who might read them. At the same time, my books have provenance, too. I wish I could let it be known to whoever makes the decisions about my books one day that these books have stories beyond the ones contained on their pages.

For example, I have my great-grandfather's set of the Harvard Classics, the five-foot shelf of over 50 volumes of the world's greatest literary works. I use them, too. I've read fairy tales to my children from them, my father read the works of a Quaker abolitionist from his grandfather's set when he visited me once, I have little markers from things I've quoted popping out of the tops of the volumes. Frederic Attwood gave them to his son, William Attwood, my grandfather. Long after his death, my grandmother let me have them. They were printed in 1909. My little girl was born over a hundred years later. From time to time she sits on my lap so that I can read the original Cinderella story to her. They are more than books to me.

I also have a set of Brittanica Great Books, the other big collection of the best writing human beings have produced. The family of Rev. Torrence Maxey gave them to me from his library after he passed away. Torrence Maxey was an amazing man--a United Methodist pastor and District Superintendent who had served as a chaplain in combat during the Korean War. During the Civil Rights Movement, Superintendent Torrence Maxey once went uninvited to a church meeting in which the congregation was voting to leave the denomination because they wished to exclude African-Americans. He informed them that they had no authority to make such a choice. They physically threw him out of the meeting. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which supported what Rev. Maxey said to them in the beginning. That case affirmed that church buildings could not go with a congregation when they left the denomination and held the Methodist Church together through the battles over racial issues. Appropriately, I also have Rev. Maxey's six volume Sandburg biography of Abraham Lincoln.

One day I got a call from the widow of another pastor, Bob Beckley, who had spent most of his career serving a number of roles at Huntingdon College. She told me that he had left quite a few books and that he would have ben pleased if someone would take them who could appreciate them. When I went to her home, she took me to his upstairs study, which was packed with several thousand fine volumes. I didn't want to be greedy, but I also didn't want to disappoint her, so I limited myself to taking about a hundred of the things I found most useful. Only later, I realized that several were signed, including signed copies of books by Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Emerson Fosdick.

I especially treasure books given to me by perhaps the holiest man I've known closely, Bishop Paul Duffey. He gave me his set of Interpreter's Bible Commentaries. They are underlined and annotated throughout, a sign of his deep engagement with scripture and his sincere life-long efforts to live what the Bible teaches. He also gave me a set of commentaries that were given to him by his student appointment when he graduated from seminary. I had a few others that had belonged to Bishop Duffey's mother, Bible Study books she had used in a class at Montgomery First UMC. I gave those to David Saliba to thank him for officiating my daughter's wedding. I couldn't think of anything more precious to offer him and anything less would have seemed cheap for the gratitude I felt to my brother for being a part of that holy and happy day. That's provenance.

I have books my grandfather gave me, too. When I was a little boy, he would ship me cases of things he had read when he was a little boy himself. Some of them have his name written in the front covers in little boy script. The Penrod books, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped. I learned to love to read from the same books that hooked my beloved grandfather.

I have my mother's Bible. When I was a teenager, she took me out to eat one day. She slid a worn out, underlined, highlighted, falling apart Bible to me. She said, "If I had made different choices in my life, I might have been able to give you things I wasn't able to give you. But because of the choices I made, I am able to give you this instead." I have many Bibles, but this one is the most precious, because this one represents the costly and precious nature of God's Word.

For the last several years, Rev. Al Harbour has been slowly bequeathing major parts of his enormous ministry library to me. His books, too, are ragged, underlined, loved and used. He has given me countless books by modern spiritual gants like Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. They give testament to his deep connection to God. They encourage me to dig deeper into prayer. They always remind me of Al, our friendship across generations, and the partnership we share in the Gospel that spans decades.

I have books signed by my former professors and others who came through while I was in school--Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Brueggemann, Gail O'Day, Jaroslav Pelikan, Luke Timothy Johnson, President Jimmy Carter, Roberta Bondi, lots more. I always felt a bit awkward asking my teachers to sign their books, but they were always gracious and usually a little embarrassed to be asked. I'm so glad I got them signed anyway.

I have thousands of books and hundreds of stories. I have Rev. Bob Calvert's 19th century Book of Ritual from the M.E. Church. I have a shelf of books written by my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my mother. I have the copy of "Black Like Me" my father gave me when I was a teenager, a constant reminder of the family heritage of commitment to racial justice he passed to me and I passed to my children.

I have books whose provenance is about my own life story--for example, my New Interpreter's Bible Commentaries, which I bought semester by semester when I was a dirt poor student pastor. I've used them for teaching and preaching ever since, ever mindful of how much they cost me when I used scholarship money each term to buy one volume at a time. Travel books from life-changing trips. My stacks of tattered and marked Bibles.

Maybe someone will care enough about the books to hear the stories attached to them, and maybe someone will want to preserve them in some way. It's very doubtful. Lord knows, my wife would love to never move them again. What "provenance" really means is that the people, relationships, and stories associated with the objects are the source of true treasure, not the objects themselves. So I take heart knowing that what is truly precious about my books can never be taken away, even when they and I are long gone.

Illegal Alien Separated from Parents Dies in Custody

A small child illegally crossed the border from her homeland as her family sought asylum from political persecution. They lived as strangers in another country without proper documentation for several years and had to hide from the authorities.

Her family was eventually found and arrested in a raid. The children were separated from their parents. She was detained in a facility. She contracted a communicable disease and died in custody.

Her name?

Anne Frank.

The Military Historian and the Soldier

I once had a friend who was a world-renowned military historian, perhaps the most knowledgeable Vietnam War scholar alive.

Interestingly, he had never served in the military himself. He knew more about what soldiers had done in the past than any soldier alive. But he had never been in combat, never followed an order, never taken a pledge, never put on a uniform.

We are all tempted to be experts on the Christian faith rather than disciples of Jesus. We can know all about the Bible without ever being gripped by the living Word of God. We can know all about great saints who have come and gone without letting Christ's glory overtake and overwhelm us. We can easily become people who know all about what God used to do in the world while we never notice the miracles all around. We can become experts in mission strategy who never live with a sense of Gospel call. We can drone on all day about the theology of the cross without ever abandoning our lives in self-sacrificial humble love.

May God deliver me from being a military historian and instead make me a soldier for his peaceable Kingdom.

Christian Celebrity as an Eye of the Needle

Two somewhat prominent evangelical figures have recently announced their apostasy via social media. One, Marty Sampson, has led worship and recorded with Hillsong for decades. The other, Joshua Harris, was a pastor and author of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," a book with inestimable influence on the courtship habits of two generations of evangelical young people. Both have had successful careers and made enormous amounts of money producing content for evangelical culture since its heyday in the 1990s.

We who follow Jesus should grieve the loss of faith for each of these men. We should earnestly pray for them to find authentic discipleship and to find healing for whatever has caused their need to break with the faith.

It's also wise, as much as possible, for the Christian community to do exit interviews with those who walk away from us. We would do well to not only hope for repentance for those who abandon the faith but also to seek redemption for ourselves for whatever signs of brokenness in our community these apostasies reveal.

Perhaps a good place to begin would be to question whether we should have Christian celebrities at all. From the very beginning of the faith, we have had prominent Christians. But most of history's famous Christians have, at the very least, become famous as an accidental by-product of doing something purely for the Gospel's sake. Many of them have run from celebrity and self-promotion. In the early church, many bishops had to be seized by force and made to serve because their humility caused them to run away and hide rather than be promoted.

Jesus himself continually ran away from celebrity. Jesus was the only person ever worthy of worship, and yet he continually commanded those whom he healed to keep quiet. Whenever he sensed that the crowds wanted to make him king, he would run and hide. He lived his life very carefully in humility with actions that determined that he would die a shameful death and be completely dismissed by the greater culture. Most Christians throughout time have recognized that an attention-seeking Christian leader who actively self-promotes in an effort to build a career in Christian ministry has completely missed the point of what it means to follow Jesus.

I am a pastor, and so I can't help but be a public person. I can't help but earn my living and making a wage through leading others in Christian practices. I have always understood that my vocation is filled with spiritual peril. I've made many intentional choices to undermine my own capacity for building myself as what our culture would call a "brand." Sometimes painful choices to sabotage my career in ministry for the sake of my soul and the integrity of my ministry. But I am always aware that in living as a public Christian, even for a person like me, a mediocre, mainline, traditional, small-town pastor, I am seeking to pass a proverbial camel through the eye of a needle.

Soren Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this danger to his discipleship. He went out of his way to avoid attracting admirers. He wrote under pseudonyms. He would leave his study and allow himself to be seen at the opera so that people would think he was lazy and shallow. When he felt that he needed to break an engagement, he made himself appear to be a jerk to his fiancee so that no one would think him noble and so that his fiancee would have easy closure from the relationship. He would be horrified that so many people would eventually become admirers of him and his work. He tried hard to keep this from happening, because he only wanted his work to inspire others to encounter Christ and never notice himself. Kierkegaard's way is unknown in a world of self-promoting Christian celebrity.

I cannot begin to understand what it would be like to be a famous Christian "influencer" filling an arena of adoring "worshipers" in a massive concert-style "event," dressed in the hippest clothes, projected on a jumbotron, and at the same time be expected to authentically maintain a living relationship with a God who shows his values by becoming a peasant murdered by an illegal lynching. I cannot imagine the pressure put upon the marriage of a man who earns millions of dollars and creates a personal industry around identifying himself with a purity movement. How can people in these circumstances not become victims of this celebrity culture? What relief these men must feel after freeing themselves from such a terrible burden.

I have no judgment towards these two men or the many, many more who have likewise walked away from a faith that was so vapid. They are all victims of a culture, even if they unwittingly helped produce it.

My sincere hope is that these two men have not truly abandoned the faith, even if they think they have. My hope is that they have merely abandoned a brand of Christian culture and pseudo-discipleship that cannot help but be fake. I can't help but think that many, many people who live as Christian celebrities are already apostate without realizing it. My prayer is that these two will encounter the real thing. My prayer is also that we all in this American-individualistic, selfie/insta/Kardashian, cult-of-personality culture will likewise lose faith with Christian fakery and be seized by a true savior who invites us to join him on the lonely but satisfying path to the cross.

Kids Acting Up in Church

From time to time a child makes a scene in church and parents or kids' workers freak out about it, or I see a young mom apologizing for their child's behavior in church on social media, or I visit a church and someone prepares me not to be offended by a particularly rambunctious child. In all of these situations I try to minimize the situation as graciously as possible, sometimes making an affirming comment, sometimes smiling and engaging the little person, sometimes gently coaching a volunteer or nursery worker. Behind closed doors with staff people, I have a number of rants about this subject that I'd like to share more broadly. Oftentimes, I'd very much like to stop a church service and share my rant with the congregation, but that's never appropriate. I feel compelled to share publicly my thoughts of this issue:

All people are loved by God unconditionally and their presence in the house of God is a treasured gift. The church's job is not to make them behave. The church's job is to embody Christ's embrace of his children and make sure that these kids want to be in God's house because they know that they are at home with family.

My conviction about this is grounded in our theology. We believe in Gospel, not law. We believe that trying to get people to act redeemed causes them to be confined and either live in chains or to rebel. We believe that God's true law is the law of love, that a living, righteous law is an expression of the fulfilling of the law to love God and neighbor. We believe that when we are fully loved by God, we will learn to reflect that love toward neighbor and that our behavior will straighten itself out on its own.

Unfortunately, many churches fail to embody our theology in the way they treat children. They act as if the purpose of church is moral training. It's because of this bad theology that many adults don't go to church anymore even though they believe church is great for children--they think children need instruction in good behavior but they believe they learned all they need to know when they were kids in church decades ago.  Church is not a finishing school. Church is about the people of God glorifying God for God's sake and being transformed into the image and likeness of Christ by freely receiving the fulness of the love of Christ.

Many children's activities are designed around getting the kids to sit down and shut up, to act right and be good. Undoubtedly, children need to learn to be kind to one another and they sometimes need to be protected from one another so that church is a safe place for every kid.  But sometimes I see adults treat kids in such a way that the unspoken message is, "We are in charge here and you need to learn to tow the line and act right." That's the spirit of law, not the spirit of Gospel. Gospel always sets people free, never compels, constricts, or oppresses. Gospels only trains our behavior to embody love of neighbor.

So what about the kid who makes a racket in worship? Isn't that kid a distraction from the purpose of worship? What about the kid who doesn't pay attention during the children's minute? What about the kid who squirms or yaks at parents or makes faces at the people in the neighboring pew?

Thank God for those kids! They bring life and vitality and a reason to stay awake to the people all around them. In all actuality, most worship services are improved by the kind of distraction caused by kids acting up. I'd certainly prefer the kind of distraction caused from a little kid acting like a little kid than I would a room full of people who are all acting properly and barely keeping awake.

Those kids are a tremendous gift to us. Everywhere in American Christianity, and especially in the United Methodist Church, we are concerned about losing our children. We are concerned about the aging of the church. Why would kids want to come to a church that treats them like they are pupils in school who need to sit up straight and behave?

No one is making these kids come to church. No one in today's culture is going to force them to come to church. They don't have to be there. The days when young parents make their kids come to church out of habit and good citizenry have come to an end. Parents will not drag their kids to church. But, when properly loved and accepted in a fun and Gospel-drenched manner, many children will drag their parents to church or at least find a way to come whether their parents bring them or not.

Kids acting like kids in church don't ever distract me. Not ever. Never. Not when they get loud. Not if they run into the chancel and mess with the microphone. Not if they break free and run all over the place. Not if they throw stuff from the diaper bag so that it loudly reverberates when it hits the stone or wood floor. Not when they sing or yell during the sermon. Not when they dance in the aisle during a hymn. Never ever.

I believe that parents are always, always, always more concerned about their kids being a distraction than anyone else.

I believe that there is no more terrible sound in a church than the horrific silence of a church with no kids to make little kid noises.

As a practical matter, when I look out on a congregation, I generally find that the kids are almost no distraction, but the adults trying to get the kids to behave a a major distraction.  Oftentimes, no one notices a squirmy toddler until someone tries to quiet down or subdue the little person. If you must be concerned about some kid being a distraction, please don't create a distraction by trying to restrain the kid. No one but you, whoever you are, you uptight grown up, cares about the distraction of the kid until you try to restrain the kid. Let the kid be a kid and no one but you will be distracted. Restrain the kid, and now we are distracted. Let it go. Seriously. It's OK.

If the Gospel is true, then we can love these kids, treasure them, give them a family that wants them to be there, find joy in their energy and enthusiasm, keep them busy and fascinated and engaged. And we can expect that the love that they receive will eventually returned in all kinds of ways, including joyfully and freely growing into cooperation with the church's non-distracting, well-behaved worship culture. I'm not sure if that last bit is entirely a good thing.

So grown ups, young moms, children's workers, and all others, pretty please... When kids act up in church, please don't worry about it. Let them be kids. We want them there. Jesus wants them there and, after all, it's his church, not ours. God is the audience of worship, not us, and he's not distracted by his children acting up in church, he loves it.

Me too.

My United Methodist Family

I have not used social media to comment on the recent Called General Conference of the United Methodist Church that addressed LGBTQ+ issues. I will not directly do so here or in any social media post. Many of my online friends are not United Methodists, and this conversation is a family issue. The many Methodists who have talked to me about these decisions have shared views that encompass the full spectrum of our connection. Anyone who is within this family has a right to share their thoughts and feelings freely. But anyone else--it feels to me like they are commenting on my parents' divorce. It's not their business. One reason this is a painful time for us is that we are family with each other and family fights are the most painful.

We all live within our covenants. Our covenantal relationships define our lives. When our covenants are tried, our identity is on the line. Every covenant is tried from time to time. We must sometimes make hard choices to stay in covenant with those with whom we share life or to break covenant. Scripture teaches us that God is a covenantal God, that God keeps covenant with people no matter what. Still, we are fallen people and covenants force our unfaithfulness to bump up against the unfaithfulness of others. Every family, nation, congregation, marriage, friendship faces this challenging dynamic. Sometimes it hurts. From time to time, we are compelled to break covenant. Most of the time, sticking with the covenant forces us to learn the true meaning of love.

I will stay true to my covenant with the United Methodist Church. I will do all I can to seek repentance for myself and grace toward all others.

I have many dear United Methodist friends who are gay, or have children or grandchildren who are gay, or who have ministries with people who are gay. These precious children of God within my denomination are hurting right now. So I hope that my affirmation of my church will not be ill-timed to cause any more hurt.

But I still deeply love the United Methodist Church and all my brothers and sisters, no matter what their views or recent behavior may be. I sincerely hope that our denomination will hold together and that our gifts will continue to be shared with the world-wide body of Christ and for the sake of the healing of the world's suffering.

I share a few of those gifts worth preserving:

First, our denomination provides perhaps the safest environment for the the protection of children and other vulnerable populations of any expression of American Christianity. Our polity, policies, and culture protect the vulnerable and hold predators accountable.

Secondly, the United Methodist Church affirms the ministries of women as consistently as any church. I mostly grew up in more conservative traditions and watched my own mother have her calling to ministry consistently rejected. One reason that I hope our conservative and progressive wings hold together is that our connection provides perhaps the best place in American religious life for a conservative woman who is called of God to fulfill her potential in sharing the Gospel in vocational ministry.

Thirdly, all United Methodists share a deep and practiced conviction of activist mission. When my town was recently devastated by a hurricane, Methodists from around the country came to help us. Some came from WCA churches. Some came from progressive churches. Some held deeply exclusive views, and some actively support full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in all aspects of the life of the church. They all felt compelled by their understanding of the love of God to do something to help our community. We welcomed them all and were grateful to them all.

Fourthly, while United Methodists have theological disagreements, I believe we have the best theology. The world needs Wesleyan theology more now than ever. We have the best understanding of individual and corporate grace and redemption.

We struggle to understand how that theology is applied--we all believe that God loves us as we are and yet God's love transforms us into something else. While we disagree on what transformation looks like, I truly believe that, by and large, we are genuine in our desire to offer welcome to all people. Even the most conservative Methodists I know (with few exceptions) are quick to say that we need to love everyone and welcome everyone. Our ideas of what love and welcome entail are not consistent. But it is worth recognizing that many traditions are not this way--many forms of American Christianity are actively hateful to all kinds of people and seek to drive people out. Again, I say this not to minimize or excuse. But even in the most conservative churches I've served, I've felt comfortable when inviting gay people to church to tell them that no one would be cruel to them or make them feel unwelcome. Before I was a Methodist, I have been in churches where this was not the case.

Fifthly, United Methodists do not have celebrities. If you're thinking that Will Willimon or Adam Hamilton are exceptions, you don't have the first clue what a cult of personality driven religious community is about. Believe me, this is a very good thing. We are not free from our own forms of pride and vainglory, but we have a kind of humility built into our ethos that keeps in check a kind of spiritual cancer that our culture celebrates and many church cultures embrace.

I could go on and on. Methodism almost universally values substance over show. It embraces learning without empty intellectualism, theological clarity without dogmatism. It's community based. It has systems in place to provide financial accountability at all levels. These are good things and they are rare. I was not raised United Methodist. Perhaps I still have covert's enthusiasm. But I believe, warts and all, we are a great option, maybe the best option.

I have become increasingly careful not to expect the United Methodist Church to conform to my ideas of what it should or might be. In "Life Together," Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that we enter the Christian community not as dreamers making demands, but as grateful participants. I am grateful to the people of the United Methodist Church that they welcomed me, a sinner and an outsider, and have given me a treasured place. They have nurtured my children and carried me through untold difficulties.

The United Methodists who have extended grace to me, loved me imperfectly but well, and made me who I am, are people who fit every description--conservative, moderate, progressive, straight, gay, WCA, Reconciling, Southern, Northern, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Many have joined the Church Triumphant and are, I pray, interceding for us even through this tribulation.