Honor as an expression of love: the problem of Christian military service

I heard something from the pulpit on Easter that I didn’t expect. I heard an endorsement of the United States military. The truth is I haven’t really heard anything from the pulpit at my church that is overtly political, and even if there was something political that was said, it wasn’t really what I would describe as patriotic. So this was a bit of a surprise for me. In fact, we started attending this church almost three years ago, and even in passing I’ve only had two discussions that could be deemed political. One is recognizing that a member of our congregation will be running for the state assembly in the next election. The second came when I recommended the book What about Hitler?: Wrestling with Jesus's Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World to another member of the congregation. The extent of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “That thing you said tonight reminded me of a point in this book I read. It’s called “What about Hitler…” You should read it. It’s really good, and I think you’d like it.”

Other person: “Yeah, it’s probably pretty good, but books like that scare me because I’m not a pacifist.”

So there we have it. In conversation I generally try to stay away from the word pacifist because I think it is oftentimes misunderstood, but the longer I read scripture, the more I am convinced that Jesus was not and would not be happy about the idea that people solve problems by killing each other. I believe the Bible teaches us that we are all made in God’s image and he loves every person equally. If this is the case, and I believe that God chose to do the unimaginable to take on human form, (Paul called this “pouring himself out as to nothing” in Philippians 2) live a life of humility, suffer, and die so that my relationship with God might be restored, then it would be ridiculous of me to think that God would do this only for me, but not for everyone else. Easter marks the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the grave, and the conquering of death. In a turn of phrase I enjoy, Jesus’ resurrection is the final victory because it brings about the “death of death.” This is a somewhat old phrase, but the longer I meditate on it, the more I appreciate the xDisciplex A.D. song of the same title. So far I don’t think I’ve said anything that any Christian would disagree with. 1. God loves all people equally. 2. God poured himself out into the person of Jesus in order to restore relationship with me, and therefore, with everyone. I have done nothing to deserve such favor, and this is what we call grace. 3. Therefore, everyone in the world has equal access to the grace of God as demonstrated by the cross of Christ, the power and efficacy of which is demonstrated by his resurrection. Okay. Glad to see we’re all on the same page.

Given the above, let me move on to the particulars of what was said today in our church. We have been studying the Ten Commandments, and using the phrase from 1 John, “God is love” as a summary statement about the Ten Commandments. “The ten words are all present within the one word,” our pastor would say. He went on today to define what love means, and stated, “Honor is an expression of love.” He went on to say that the two fundamental ways we show love are to honor and delight in one another. He then did something quite powerful and profound by restating the Ten Commandments in the positive using the word honor. When you do that, it comes out looking like this:

1. Honor God.

2. Honor God Alone.

3. Honor God with your words.

4. Honor God by resting on his rest day.

5. Honor God by honoring you father and mother.

6. Honor one another’s right to life.

7. Honor the sanctity of one another’s marriage.

8. Honor one another’s possessions.

9. Honor one another by telling the truth.

10. Honor everything your neighbor has as his or hers.

At this point, I was really enjoying the sermon, but then he went on to say something that caught me off guard. It was quite unexpected. I am quoting it here directly, because I don’t want to misrepresent what was spoken:

“When we honor, we extend that kind of love. It is absolutely fitting that we honor our military. Why? Because they serve. They are willing to give up their lives for the love that they have of country and the people who make up the country. And so it is only fitting and right (since they have such a great love for the country and for the people of the country and are willing to give up their lives in defense of it) for us to honor them, or love them back. It’s only right…. And so too in our relationship with God, and so too in our relationship with one another.”

On the one had, he’s right. If we believe that God loves each of us equally and we are to model that love to each other, then we have the duty to honor the men and women in our military. But that is because they are fellow human beings, not because of how they may or may not serve us. The truth is, if you’re in the military, you have to be willing to not only give up your own life but to take the lives of others. Doesn’t this directly contradict the command to “honor one another’s right to life?” Isn’t that the same command that Christians cite when we advocate against abortion? Because abortion takes the life of a human being, it’s wrong. Period. Now some will say we should insert the word “innocent” into the last statement. A baby that hasn’t been born hasn’t done anything wrong and is therefore innocent, while an enemy soldier has done something wrong and so it is okay to kill them. They aren’t innocent. But wait right there. I’ve done plenty that is wrong. I’m no innocent. Does that mean that my right to life shouldn’t be respected either? Not to mention the soldiers. If my brother goes off to war and is killed by an enemy combatant should I have no reason to be angry that his life was taken by another? How can it be just that if he is in the street and another person shoots him down it’s not okay, but if he gets killed on a battlefield it’s suddenly okay? If that’s the case, then we don’t have any right to mourn our dead soldiers at all. We cannot use their lives, deaths, and memories as reason to continue on in our path to war. They died at the hands of a justified enemy whom we therefore have to right to persecute. Brimlow quite eloquently dismantles the argument that a just war is one that spares the lives of the innocent, so I am not going to take this argument any further, but I hope the point is made. First and foremost, military service requires that we ignore another’s right to life, which we are commanded to honor. It doesn’t matter that the person is an enemy soldier. They are a person whom God loves, just as much as he loves you and as much as he loves me. If that is the case, our taking of the other’s life is a verdict that we despise God’s love. Rather than extending the kind of grace and love modeled to us on the cross we spurn that love and model quite the opposite to the other. Even if we can’t get past the fact that the other is our enemy, Jesus takes the initiative by telling us that we are to love our enemies! He tells us that even the tax collectors and Gentiles (the "evildoers" or the “bad guys” to his audience) love those who love them. But we are to love even our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:43-48). Wow! If we ever thought the Old Testament law was hard to live up to, we sure as hell better stay away from Jesus. Even without a desire to make our enemy our friend, we must love them anyway. Wow. With that in mind, what does military service look like for the Christian? How do we love our enemy – the soldiers/nation we are pitted against – while still following the orders of our commanding officers to kill them? To bomb their cities? If there are any men and women in the military who read this, I would welcome your response, because I couldn’t do it. I know me. I’m way too angry of a person to pull that off.

But let’s put that aside for a moment. My point was not to argue for Christian nonparticipation in military service. There are very intelligent Christians who argue the exact opposite point as I do. I fully admit they are smarter than I am. If they can really figure out how to kill people and love them at the same time, I’ll simply concede that it’s possible, but I don’t know how to do it, so I won’t be joining the military any time soon. (I’m too old now anyway, but I wouldn’t have even when I was younger. My arguments were not quite as nuanced as they are now, but the general thrust of my thought was already forming, even in that confused teenage mind of mine!) The point I really want to make is this: as Christians, if we are to follow the advice of my pastor and honor the men and women in our military because of their love for country and the people in it, we are obligated to do the same for those who serve in the militaries that oppose ours. When we fight a war against another nation, is the love of country or the sacrifice of life any less for the soldier on the other side? No! It simply cannot be. Certainly there are different circumstances in other nations. Some have mandatory, conscripted military service. Everyone is required by law to serve in the military. Does that mean they don’t love their country? Perhaps for some. But our military recruits with the promise of paying for a college education, or good pay in an uncertain job market, or stellar veterans benefits upon discharge. Does that mean those people love the United States any less? Perhaps. But we can’t know that. I don’t know how much an individual in the military loves me or my country, and I can’t know how much the person on the other side loves his or her country. What I can know is that the sacrifice of life on both sides is equally as costly. Therefore, if I am to honor those in the United States military it cannot be because of their love for country. It must be because of God’s love for me. When that is the case, then it also must extend to those who serve in militaries that oppose ours.

The point of this post is not to pick on the pastor of my church. I love him dearly, I respect him, and I will continue to sit under his teaching. He is a much wiser man than I am. However, I think in general we fail to understand how radical the call of Jesus is on our lives when he calls us to love others. Even more generally, we fail to understand how radical the call of God is when he tells us “I am love,” or “Do not murder.” It’s so radical that from one sentence to the next in a sermon dedicated to expounding the love of God we fail to consider the love God has for our enemies. To be fair, what I have written only summarizes about the first 10% of the sermon, the rest of which was quite good. However, this point stuck with me through it all, and I thought it was a good point of discussion. I still want to continue on with the theme of dependence in my next blog post, but this was relevant now, so here it is. Additionally, I should note that I had been kicking around for weeks what I wanted to write on dependence, and the same pastor said several things over those weeks that helped moved my thought forward. In fact, the week after I wrote the piece he then spoke about dependence in a smaller study group, so I really do owe a debt of gratitude to him for that. The next post will continue the theme, and the theme of this post will even be worked in a bit too, so perhaps it is fitting this entry comes first. As always, I welcome your comments.

"The Poverty of Independence" or "The Wealth of a Dependent Life"

There is a certain amount of responsibility that comes with freedom. Often we consider freedom in itself a virtue: “I am free to decide my own destiny.” “I have a right to free speech.” Freedom is part of the American ethos. In many ways, that has served us well, but there is a poverty inherent in freedom. This poverty is something we have a hard time identifying because being independent—free from the constraints others would put on us—is almost universally seen as good. As a nation we celebrate independence from England with great exuberance. Perhaps this reflects as much a desire to eat and party as it does a love of independence, but we party on may other occasions (birthdays, Christmas, memorial day, even Spring Break) and those rarely have quite the same kind of highlights as the flag-waving, BBQing, firework-watching kind. If we believe the rhetoric of American foreign policy, we are even in the business of making sure others don’t squelch freedom throughout the rest of the world. Officially, we are in the business of encouraging democracy and ensuring freedom worldwide. This post isn’t intended to be political, so I don’t intend to go beneath the surface of the propaganda that fuels our war machine. The point is that when independence is always right, to think of independence as creating poverty among us doesn’t make much sense. And yet, that is exactly what I want to examine. The rhetoric of freedom and independence we take for granted is an insidious and devious lie. We believe it, because we want to be free. We don’t want to be dependent. We don’t want to be bound. And yet being bound in dependence is exactly where we find freedom. So let us examine a bit more closely the poverty of independence and the wealth of dependence.

The lie of independence is that none of us is free. At least not in the way we think about freedom. We’re not free because we all bear the burden of the consequences that result from the actions of others. Often the reason that injustice is allowed to continue in the world is because we are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the part that our actions play in perpetrating the injustice. When we begin to recognize that as people it is better to be responsible for each other than to leave each other to our own devices this makes it much harder to ask those for whom we are now responsible to continue to suffer. In my early 20s, I moved to the east coast of the United States. The first 6 months I was there I found myself with very little money. I made just enough to pay rent and put gas in my car. I lived very simply. I often didn’t have enough to buy food, so I learned how to survive with less. There was a store close by where I could buy a 20-pound bag of rice for a few dollars, and that would last months. I would often live off rice for weeks at a time. About once a week I would buy some vegetables too, and that was enough. I forgot what soda tasted like because I only drank water, and when someone gave me a soda after months without, it was so sweet I couldn’t even finish the can! If my paycheck was really good, then I would treat myself to a gallon of milk. Not only do I have an unusual love for milk, but in that situation it served a double-purpose. A big glass of milk when I got home would quench my thirst and satisfy my hunger. Those of you who read this should not mistake my life for one of abject poverty or asceticism. I still socialized with friends regularly, I was able to travel, and I made a friend whose parents owned a delicious Persian restaurant nearby. She often brought me leftover vegetarian delights. If there was any point in my life when I was the most independent, this was probably it. Other than my parents giving me about $200 early on after I moved and paying the deposit on the room I rented, I didn’t even get money from other people. I was obligated to no one. Yet in the freedom that earning a meager salary gave me to come and go as I pleased, I was poor. When compared to the rest of the world I was rich even then. I owned a computer, a car, had a place to live, a TV, a phone, and an internet connection. Suddenly the simple life doesn’t look so simple. Nevertheless, in the eyes of most Americans I was poor. I was probably below the poverty line, but things worked out just fine. Besides, after those first six months I got a new job, and pretty soon thereafter had more disposable income than I’ve ever had before or since. The poverty that I experienced in that time in my life, while financial at first, was really the poverty of independence. When you’re free from obligation to anyone, you’re really a slave to yourself, and that makes things worse for everyone.

The thing about independence of the kind I experienced is it teaches you to think about yourself first. Even the most altruistic person in the world has to do this when you’re independent. If no one else is going to help you or take care of you, you have to do this yourself. And believe it or not, that takes up a lot of time! Between whatever work we do to earn money, feeding ourselves, and managing day-to-day tasks, there isn’t a whole lot of time left over to think about anyone else. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I grew up in Los Angeles taking public transportation. My parents had cars, but they both worked, so during school breaks if I wanted to get anywhere it meant getting on the bus. If you’re like me and you took the bus in Los Angeles in the late 80s and 90s, then you learned the same thing I did: busses suck. They take forever to get anywhere. Even when you hear the logic of public transportation being more efficient it seems obscene because the busses just get stuck in the same horrible traffic as any car. The difference is, they have to stop every few blocks on top of it! Never mind if you have to transfer between lines. When I was 19 I bought my first car and it cut the commute to work from an hour and half to 15 minutes. There should be no question why we all wanted off the bus!

But things have changed a lot since then. In 2008 I went back to school to earn my degree in Global Studies. Part of that degree involves taking part in L.A. Term, and that means taking public transit everywhere you go. Being a veteran of the L.A. public transit system, I wasn’t all that excited about it, but by taking part I was amazed at how much had changed in 10 years! Sure, it still took longer than a car, but the busses ran more frequently and it gave me time to read for school and catch glimpses of the city that would have been missed on a freeway overpass. A year after doing L.A. Term, I packed my family up and took them with me on the Global Learning Term. Interestingly, this is an independent semester abroad where students complete academic fieldwork, but the entire experience is about learning how to build community outside of your everyday environment. Now several months removed from that experience, we both still desperately miss the deep feelings of community we built with our friends abroad. Part of moving overseas also means you don’t bring a car with you! This meant that for the time abroad my wife and I were raising our kids with only public transit available to us. It ended up working out fine; where we lived the bus came right outside our place 6 times an hour during the day, and 2-3 times an hour later in the evening. Sure it meant that there were times we chose not to do things because there wouldn’t be bus for us to catch, or we would have to leave an event to make sure we got a bus home in time to put the kids to bed, but even with the inconveniences that public transit can create, not ever having to strap the kids into car seats was one significant bonus!

In a society where it is normal to own a car, choosing to use public transit is a choice to become dependent on service from others. It means that the choice to travel is bound by when and where someone else has decided there is enough demand to create a route. This can present a problem for a family with young children. My wife and I have a family car, and it is our primary mode of transportation, especially when we all need to be in the same place at the same time. There are practical reasons for this. While abroad, we lived in a medieval European city. The closest bus stop to our house in L.A. is a longer walk than the entire length of the city center there! But beyond that, let’s assume for a moment one of our kids has some emergency medical problem in the middle of the night. How are we going to get to a hospital? Certainly not walk for 15 minutes to the bus, wait up to an hour for one to come because it’s during off-peak time, and then go to some strange hospital because the one we normally would have gone to isn’t on a bus route that runs in the middle of the night. No. We’ll get in our car and drive there. But what if you don’t have a car and you still have an emergency? That is where we found ourselves while abroad. My son tripped and fell in our living room and cut his face open on a glass coffee table and had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment. So how did we get there? It wasn’t on an hour-long bus ride! We called the emergency phone number and an ambulance was sent to get us. My son still talks about the ambulance ride because he was so excited that there was a bed inside that he rode in. Now in Scotland, that’s no big deal. Medical care is socialized so you don’t have to think, “how am I ever going to pay for this ambulance ride? My insurance will never cover it!” But here in the U.S., had we faced the same situation, that ER trip would have bankrupted us. So instead we own a car.

The problem with all of this is, cars are killing us. In L.A., we all complain about the traffic, but we’re not willing to give up driving. Personally, I think if you drive in this city, you shouldn’t be allowed to complain about traffic. And that goes for me too. My plan is to sell my car and upgrade to a bicycle once I have a steady job, but this blog post isn’t about transportation issues. Rather, the transportation serves to illustrate a point. If we all chose to use public transit instead of driving our cars, there would probably be a much better public transit system. And that isn’t because there would be more money being invested in transportation. It would be because we would all be personally invested in it working well! We might even be willing to fork over extra dollars from our taxes to have special transit lines that operated at regular intervals through the night to trauma centers and ER rooms in case a family had an emergency. Or better yet, we would be willing to admit that providing medical coverage for everyone in our country is better than the system we have now no matter how much it costs. We would realize we pay a higher social cost when families have to decide not to seek medical attention for their sick children because they simply can’t afford to do so, or the care they do get is so poor they might as well have stayed home. We would make sure an ambulance ride would be a sense of relief that care was being administered instead of dread that it could never be paid for. But the point of this post is not to be political. I’m no socialist. I don’t think governments are omniscient or omnipotent and exist in order to solve all of our problems. However, as people, we live in community with each other and either suffer or gain because of the actions of all of the others. This necessarily has social and political ramifications, which is why I bring them up. I use those to illustrate the point rather than to argue the merits of a particular policy. If we move back to the example of transportation, we can languish in our cars, complaining about the traffic we sit in to get to a job where we slave to make the payment for the car we couldn’t afford to buy in the first place, much less afford to fill with gas and pay for maintenance, insurance, registration and repairs. Or, we can do something different.

The point is, that whether we are willing to admit it or not, we are bound to the people around us. We aren’t really free. Our actions have consequences that resonate outwards from us and affect other people. On the one hand, I am free to make my own choices. I do have the freedom to decide how I am going to live my life. But that freedom is bound by the fact that what I choose makes a difference (positively or negatively) in the lives of others. It could be something a simple as choosing to drive my car when I could use public transit. The car is certainly more convenient, but when I choose the bus I choose community. When we choose dependence we choose community. If I only drive, I don’t know what it means to get on in the city without a car. When we choose dependence we make visible the truth that we all do life together whether we like it or not. Independence helps me live with the illusion that my actions don’t really have consequences. I get to ignore that there are other people in the world. I don’t want to know them, and I shouldn’t bother getting to know them because their business is their business. The problem with that kind of attitude is that Jesus tells us life is better in community.

Christians often talk about being saved from things. They talk about being saved from sin, or from hell, or from “the world.” The problem with this is it completely ignores the fact Jesus didn’t talk so much about saving us from things, but saving us FOR things. Jesus was in the business of teaching what the kingdom of God looks like, and that often involved what people are busy doing there. At the end of his time on earth he instructed his followers to go into the world. Paul writes in Ephesians that we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works.” At the conclusion of John’s Revelation, he sees the vision of a city where God dwells “among the people.” and if that weren’t enough, God gave us concrete examples of what living in community is supposed to look like within the Old Testament. When Israel was given land after the Exodus an entire tribe was not allowed to own land. The Levites were to spread out among all the tribes, and the other tribes were required to provide them with physical sustenance. In return, the Levites served the other tribes by looking after the tasks associated with religious worship. Also in Old Testament law, landowners were required to leave some of their crops unharvested so those without means to produce their own food could glean from the crops of others.

The state of California places a surcharge on all metal, plastic, and glass cans or bottles. In our state it’s called CRV, short for California Redemption Value. The reason for the name is that in theory, you can take all of those items to a recycling center, and redeem the value added tax the state placed on the item. At first this was an incentive for people to recycle rather than throw those items away. But the value isn’t that much – somewhere between 5-10 cents per item. When municipal sanitation services stared providing bins for recycling, the exercise of physically taking your recyclable goods to a recycling center to redeem your few cents per item became more hassle than it was worth when you could recycle them at home. So most people throw their goods in the bin and forego the money they could have redeemed from the state. This has worked out well for California because it’s money they technically offer back to people, but which they usually refuse. However, in Los Angeles, there are now people who go around to different neighborhoods and dig through people’s recycling bins looking for bottles and cans they can redeem. I would assume most of these people are very low-income, or there is a lot more money to be made digging through other people’s garbage than I can imagine. Either way, every week there are people who visit our street to collect bottles and cans. My household is like most in that we don’t bother going to the recycling center, but after seeing the same people digging through our trash for items to redeem, we started separating out our cans and bottles into a separate bag that we put out for them to take. Sometimes they come before we’ve taken the bag outside, and then we try to run out and hand it to them. In this simple act we recognize that we can choose to be a blessing to others and it doesn’t cost us anything but the money we were choosing to forego anyway. More than anything, I like to think of this simple act as a way of saying we recognize our own ability to create or destroy community. I should make clear that we don’t have relationships with these people. They’re very busy looking for cans and bottles and don’t generally stick around to talk, but we can recognize that even in this superficial interaction we are all doing life together, in the city, and in the world. My mother-in-law once referred to the can-gatherers as “gleaners,” and it seems fitting. Not only is the CRV much like unharvested grain, but here we have the ability to offer the one thing we know we can do to help make life a little more pleasant for these people we don’t know. The challenge is to continue looking for ways to do that.

But the cost of not doing so leads me back to the poverty of independence. Independence means we all lose. When it’s bottles and cans, I lose the CRV and the others lose time digging in my recycle bin. When it’s a car it means that everyone stuck in traffic loses, the environment loses, and those who don’t have the means to own a car lose because transit service will remain inferior as long as massive portions of the population remain uninvested. When it’s medical care, we all lose because some can afford it, some cannot, and people suffer and die.

When we choose independence we actually choose poverty. We choose freedom, but we’re never really free. We choose a lie. The Christian faith teaches us that God is community (the Trinity). The Biblical text reminds us that people exist in community and our actions have grave consequences for others whether we know it or not (reference Genesis 3). And yet we are so taken with the idea of independence and freedom that we swallow the lie. God calls us into community, and Jesus asks us to love and serve each other. And this doesn’t have to be done out of some pious religiosity. It doesn’t have to be some massive sacrifice where we say, “look at all I did to travel across the world and give my money and luxuries to poor people.” In fact, Jesus condemns that kind of behavior. He tells the religious leaders who make a show of their generous gifts that a widow who gives very little out of her poverty is righteous before God, but they heap judgment upon themselves (Mark 12). Rather, our choice for dependence can be done with a simple recognition of the fact that if we make it a point to be mindful of others and how our actions affect them, life is better for all of us.

In many ways I am poorer now than I was even in those early months on the east coast. I have a family to support and debt to service and I’m unemployed. But I live with a whole bunch of people that love me and my wife and my kids and we try to support each other the best we can. When I consider the others who live outside our home (including my parents) that help support the financial needs of this house, the community grows even bigger. And that’s just when it comes to money. I don’t have the luxury to decide on my own what to do with my money because I depend on others for it right now. I am responsible to them to use their money wisely. Even if I was earning it all myself, I would be responsible to my wife and kids for how we use our money, not to mention the rest of our community. So I say dependence is wealth, even when we have no money. Dependence draws us together and forces us to rely on each other so we can know what our needs are and how we can help each other. Dependence creates community, and independence breeds death because it is a lie. Let us be mindful of our community, both nearby and across the globe. Let us remember we depend on them and they depend on us and live accordingly. Let us remember that the call of God is a call into a community, modeled in the very nature of God himself, a community in which we give of ourselves and receive from others. Let us live in the wealth of dependence.

I am ending this post here. I hope to develop this theme of dependence and community further, exploring some of the practical results and the Biblical impetus for it, but that can’t be done here. This post should serve as an ample introduction to the topic and we’ll soon get into specifics. Besides, this is exceptionally long already. As always, I welcome your comments.

A Christian response to same-sex marriage

A few weeks ago I visited a church, and during the sermon the congregation was being challenged to move beyond the box it often finds itself in. This particular person was talking about how he was at a social gathering and several of the people there spent a great deal of time criticizing the church as a way of explaining their disdain or non-involvement with Christianity. I wasn't there, so I don't know what the comments were exactly, but the speaker said that for the most part he agreed with the critique that was being offered. There are a ton of things wrong with the way the church operates, not the least of which includes what it means to be in solidarity with—working with and on behalf of—the poor. This is certainly more of an issue with the American church than it is in other places, but the spread of "health and wealth" doctrines being exported from American pulpits certainly can't be overlooked. But that isn't the point of this post. For this post, I want to focus on the American church and our interaction with a specific group of marginalized people. You see, although it is good that the church seems to be moving towards a realization that we have a duty to love the marginalized (anyone who has read the gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry can't deny the radical nature of what it is he was doing, and if we really are followers of Jesus there is much to be desired) we still have a tendency to define for ourselves who the marginalized are that we are willing to associate with, live with, and love. I'll explain that statement shortly, but first back to the sermon. The speaker was right to challenge the church to move in a direction in which it sought to love those who otherwise might feel excluded from the life of the church. He admonished the church for allowing itself to become politicized and alienated from the people with whom we seek to share the good news of the gospel. Because of the church's desire to be heard, to "take a stand" on issues, we have lost sight of the people on whom the issues themselves stand. As an example of this he said, "When people hear that I'm a Christian that means they already know where I stand on abortion and gay marriage. I don't have to say anything. It's assumed. It's not a point of conversation, and I'm not interested in things that don't give the opportunity to start a conversation." Here is the point at which I want to dive in.

For those of you who don't know, I used to work full-time for a pro-life advocacy group. I'm still pro-life, but a dedication to the pro-life cause doesn't come with all the trappings of the stereotypical conservative political rhetoric for me. In fact, I've found myself at odds with several people because I see my dedication to life as directly connected to my understanding of scripture, and this has precious little to do with conservative politicians and political movements. Gustavo Gutierrez wrote that God is the God of life, and so it is right to oppose anything that is an agent of death. In his context, that meant the unjust political structures causing people to starve. The poor needed to be liberated, and his theology of liberation gave the church the means by which it could come alongside the poor. Abortion isn't wrong because of any other reason other than that God is the author of life, and abortion is an act that deliberately creates death for those with no voice. But in these cases it's easy to see where the church should stand and why. However, on more subtle issues, the question becomes a bit more difficult, and that is what I want to explore here. The speaker said people are able to assume because he is a Christian they know where he stands on gay marriage. There is no question but that the church has been embroiled in controversy over issues of homosexuality for centuries, but it is somewhat unique in recent decades the kind of political overtones that have crept into the discussion, and a shame that the church has allowed itself to be drug into these kinds of discussions. Perhaps more accurately, the church has jumped at the chance to be involved in the discussions. I'm not sure which is worse, but my goal here is to share my struggle and hope that in so doing I benefit and those who read benefit as well.

In order to approach the subject of homosexual marriage and the church, we must remember the sociological function marriage fulfills. Marriage guards the creation of family. Societies determine what are and what are not legitimate marriages in order to create stable familial structures. This has played out in just about any imaginable way throughout human history, but the union of familial groups and procreation are always connected with some kind of ritual, one that we call marriage. Within the history of the Christian church the right to unite people in marriage was reserved for the church hierarchy for centuries. It has only been since the Reformation and the rise of powerful nation-states that there would be any reason for a difference of opinion between those the state recognized as a legitimate family unit and the church. This has led to the conundrum we find ourselves in today. Should the church recognize "legal" or "civil" marriages, or should it be concerned only with its own? I was at a wedding recently, and joked that because even at the conclusion of the ceremony the two would not actually be legally married for weeks they would have to wait to have sex. The joke didn't go over too well at my table, and I was sternly reminded they were married "in God's eyes" and that is really what counts. If that is the case, why do we bother with the legality of filing the paperwork to begin with? What's the point?

The point is that we live in a society in which the state is the ultimate authority, not the church. It doesn't matter if the church says two people are married. When the pastor closes with "by the power vested in me by God and the state of _______, I declare you husband and wife," it's really the state that matters more than God for the practical living out of the marriage in our society. I've had more than one set of friends that decided to get married before their weddings. They planned a wedding, they had the ceremony, but weeks before (and in one case a year) they got married. Now, if that doesn't tell us the marriage is really and practically sanctioned by the state, I don't know what does. I think this is why the church has gotten so embroiled in controversies surrounding gay marriage. The church knows that if the state says same-sex couples can be married, the church has no power to say otherwise. Even if churches refused to marry same-sex couples, the state will recognize their union anyway as long as an agent of the state makes it official. So why is the church involved in the debate at all?

From a practical political point of view, denying marriage rights to same-sex couples doesn't make any sense at all. It is in the interest of the government to legalize relations between people because it means there is a more durable union, the populous can be managed more easily, and taxes can be levied more effectively. When unsanctioned familial units exist, this is a problem for the State. Being able to codify homosexual unions is the only thing that makes sense from a political standpoint. The only reason it hasn't been done at a national and for many at a state level up to this point is because of political pressure by the opposition. But it won't last. The unions will be ultimately recognized by the state because it is in the interest of the state to do so. So why would the church choose to engage in such a losing political battle?

In California, by a very narrow margin, voters approved a ban on same-sex marriages. Of course this ban is being challenged in court, and eventually it will be overturned. If not in court, in another 15 years or so, voters themselves will repeal it. During the campaign surrounding this proposition I saw billboards sponsored by churches urging voters to approve the ban. Some were exceptionally outrageous, insinuating that if gay marriage were not banned, students in schools would be harmed because of their homosexual teachers. If nothing else, did the people who sponsored these ads fail to notice the teachers are already there?! If in fact kids are harmed by association with gay and lesbian teachers, wouldn't that already be happening regardless of whether or not the teacher was legally married? So why has the church reacted so strongly and so irrationally over issues of homosexuality? I think it's because the church has failed to regard sex and marriage with the profound value scripture places on it.

The real question is not who should or should not be allowed to be married by the state. The real issue is what is God's plan for sex? It has been the church's simultaneous obsession with and mishandling of sex that finds us in this quandary. The truth is, the church has no business lecturing others about what it means to regard sex well. Scandals of abusive priests within the Catholic church lambastes the ideal of clerical celibacy, but the sexual promiscuity and adultery protestant church leaders have found themselves in means across the entire spectrum of Christianity, the church has failed miserably. The Biblical text is relatively clear. The New Testament considers any kind of sexual behavior outside the bonds of monogamous marriage as immoral and to be avoided. This is usually addressed in the context of adultery, but extends to other arenas as well, including homosexuality. To argue that this is rooted in the culture of the day and that we have moved beyond such parochial ideas about sex misses some key elements in the text. The majority of the New Testament was written by Jews. One needs only a cursory introduction to the Old Testament to find horrific tales of polygamy, rape, incest, prostitution, and sex slavery. The ideals of a one-man, one-woman marriage covenant are late in coming to the Hebrew people and most of the history recorded in the Old Testament tells us this was not a value being lived out by even the most revered characters. (Solomon and David were especially notorious in this regard). Secondly, the other cultures that surrounded Israel, namely Hellenism and the Roman Empire were societies far removed from the modern ideal of monogamous sexual behavior within marriage, and it certainly wasn't reserved for heterosexual pleasure. If in fact the writers of the New Testament intended their words about sex to be heeded, it was as far from a reflection of their culture as it would be of ours.

We've seen the evidence that Christians across the board don't really take seriously the witness of scripture considering sex, so why do we get so up in arms about when other people don't take it seriously? I've had a few different friends marry their same-sex partners recently. They have committed themselves to each other, as exclusive partners, just as my wife and I have committed to each other. My understanding of what I believe God calls us to in the way of sexual behavior becomes irrelevant when the couples the church seeks to bar from marriage show a greater degree of respect for the marriage vows than those who have free access. Do I believe scripture instructs us about sex that it is designed for one man and one woman to share together within the bonds of marriage? Yes. But this has nothing to do with the current debates about gay marriage.

Let's go back a moment to the life issues I was talking about before. I've not won many friends, especially in Christian circles, by opposing the death penalty or taking seriously the claims of pacifism. It's been even harder when I suggest that on human rights grounds, borders between countries should be opened up for free migration. But all of these things stem from the same place. As a Christian, I must see each person as a human being, loved by and made in the image of God first. Anything else is secondary. Even if those things are criminal, enemy soldier, immigrant, gay or lesbian. The church made a heinous mistake by supporting slavery and segregation in the United States. Praise God a great deal of the civil rights movement was birthed from within the church, but racial reconciliation has been slow in coming and is still being worked out 40 and 50 years later. Let us not make the same mistake twice. By opposing same-sex marriage in the political arena, the only thing the church succeeds in communicating is that we think there is something wrong with homosexuals and they don't belong with us. I had some friends that made shirts as part of a campaign on a Christian university campus with slogans such as "Lesbian? Transgendered? You Don't Need To Be Fixed." Although I appreciate the sentiment, it misses the point just a little bit. The point is we all need to be fixed, regardless of our sexual orientation. If we didn't know it already, we're all broken. The thing that makes us Christians is we believe that only Jesus heals our brokenness.

When it really comes down to it, it's not my job to ask a friend not to marry her girlfriend or his boyfriend. What good would that do anyway? Is there anything positive that can come from that kind of an interaction? The church has chosen to marginalize the very people it is supposed to be dedicated to reaching. We've somehow forgotten that we're all broken, but we are all human beings loved by God and made in his image. Therefore our response must be to accept people for who they are. If we're willing to do this, then let God do the fixing. I think this is really what Jesus means when he tell us in Matthew 7 not to judge others. We can't get the speck out of the other's eye when we've got a log sticking out of our own. If my interpretation of scripture's teaching about sex is correct it means the church isn't in any better place than they gay community anyway. The good news about that is it means we're all in the same place. I can’t do anything to make God love me less. If I really believe the Bible, if I really believe that God pursues relationship with me because God loves me and desires relationship with me, then I must believe the same about everyone else. If I am to model that kind of love to other people, what place to I have cutting myself off from them because they are different from me? Especially, when in fact, we aren't that different to begin with.

My struggle really comes down to this. Scripture continues to make clear that God’s plan for sexuality is one that involves lifelong monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. The sticky issue is that marriage is not defined by the church, but by the society in which the church exists. If we take literally the story of Adam and Eve, there was in fact no person around to marry the two of them before they engaged in sexual relations with each other! One could argue that marriage requires no ceremony at all, but just a promise between two people before God, like Adam and Eve. (For those who watch Grey’s Anatomy, this is one of the reasons I love the post-it marriage of Derek and Meredith. They take that just as seriously, if not more so, than any of the other characters treat their marriages!) Over the centuries different marriage customs and traditions evolved within the Hebraic community written about in the Bible, and an even more diverse set of customs developed in the other societies that existed. It is a unique place we find ourselves today in that marriages are legal contracts. But this means that the church has no real authority to demand the legal contract between two people be made illegal, especially if those two people don’t recognize the church as an authority in their lives to begin with. The church is equally impotent when it comes to barring divorce. And yet, people within the church get divorced all the time. It is because of the litigious nature of marriage in our society that the church has no business seeking to disallow others from being married. Rather, the church has a duty to share the truth of God’s love with the world and this includes the witness of scripture about sex. I will address this problem in the next paragraph, but before I do, let me make clear that I believe marriage is much more than a custom that allows people to have guilt-free sex. Marriage is much more than that! If it were nothing more, then it wouldn’t provide anything special within which sexual activity is supposed to be bound. But the issue that the church has expressed with homosexual marriage is not the marriage itself, but with the sex those people will be having. Maybe in some future post I can talk about marriage in more depth, but this is focused more on the nature of sex rather than on the nature of marriage.

The problem we run into with this is that the church doesn’t take sex seriously. We are ready to understand why men commit adultery. (Sometimes we even blame their wives!) But we aren’t willing to recognize that this is the same kind of sin as a homosexual union. Writing that sentence is hard. I don’t want to offend my gay and lesbian friends, but as a Christian, if I am to take the Bible seriously, I have to acknowledge that homosexual behavior is sin. I also recognize that most of my behavior is steeped in sin, and I need God’s grace to just make it through each day. The hard part is that sexual sin is a lot harder to deal with than other sin because our sexuality is a core aspect of how we construct our own identities. As a heterosexual male it is easier for me to accept the Bible’s teaching that sex is meant for within heterosexual marriage. Before I was married it meant that I still had the hope of one day expressing myself sexually with my wife. But for someone who is homosexual this means giving up one of the core marks of how we understand our own selves. I don’t think the church has fully grasped what this means. We hear people say things like, “just don’t do it anymore,” or, “choose a different lifestyle,” but it isn’t that simple. This is why Paul writes “Every other sin a man commits outside his body, but the [sexually] immoral man sins against his own body” (1 Cor 6:18 NASB). Paul understands to give up a part of our identity to be refashioned in the image of Christ is a radical calling, and so he also writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:17-20, NIV). Paul’s language of a new creation recognizes the radical call of the gospel on people’s lives. Those who call themselves Christians should be different because they are reconciled to God. And that is what Paul exhorts us to do: be reconciled to God. We can be reconciled because of the ministry of Jesus, which reveals God as not counting people’s sins against them.

So what does this mean? What does it tell us about the church’s response to homosexuality and gay marriage? It means that the church really has no business trying to control the way the state defines marriage. That is a losing battle and it does not serve reconciliation but creates alienation. However, it also means that the church would be remiss if it fails to identify sin as sin. But this sin is not limited to homosexuality and abortion. We are just as guilty when we refuse to identify the evil structures creating poverty and death that Gutierrez talked about or when we accept heterosexual adultery or sexual activity outside a lifetime monogamous commitment between two people. But the good news is that it isn’t the job of the church to declare people sinners. The good news is that the church’s job is to declare God desires to reconcile himself to sinners, which all of us are! The Bible gives us clear indication that some sins are harder for people to give up than others, but the call of the gospel on our lives is radical. Each day I live only by the grace of God and trust God to work in my life to help me eliminate sin. This is good news for me because it means I don’t have to pretend I’ve got it all together or that I am more holy than someone belonging to a marginalized or labeled group. I trust and hope there is a day when homosexual couples feel free to engage in the community of the church, not because the church stops recognizing the Biblical witness of what is and is not sexual sin, but because we are able to recognize ourselves as embroiled within the same sin and possessing the grace given by God to grow beyond it. We are only able to grow beyond out own sin because God doesn’t count our own sin against us. If that is the case, we have no business counting other’s sin against them. In my own life, this means I’m not going to ask my friends who have same-sex partners to get divorced. I’m grateful that they have found someone they love so much they want to commit their lives to each other. At the same time, it means that if I was asked whether or not I approve of homosexual activity, I could say with confidence that I believe God wants to reconcile himself to each and every one of us regardless of our sexual behavior. This may mean that we need to give up part of our constructed identity in favor of who God declares us to be. If that is something I am unwilling to do, it means I have no business calling myself a Christian. It also means that I must honestly understand the radical nature of the gospel message and to continue to love my friends (and my enemies for that matter) regardless of whether or not they have a desire to engage in the process of reconciliation with God. All I can do is echo Paul’s words, “We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” My hope is that as I continue on my own journey of reconciliation others will join me, but I also recognize that although the call to reconciliation is overflowing with grace, it is a radical call. It is one that asks me to love those whom I come in contact with regardless of how they treat me. It is one that asks us to allow God to define who we are and what is best for us rather than doing that ourselves. And that is the scary part, because I am just as broken as the next person no matter what our sexual orientation might be.

Names without faces

This being my first blog post, perhaps I should explain why it is I've created it. My wife does a wonderful job blogging about our life so family and friends can keep up with our happenings, but the intention of this blog is a bit different. The intention here is to share some of my thoughts, insights, or struggles. The idea here is reflected in the title of the blog: to search with community. I'm not a diary keeper; the intention is not to write for the sake of writing, although Sometimes writing things down helps in thinking them through. The intention here is not to be particularly eloquent or show off polished writing, but to authentically struggle through issues, to present them in a specifically personal framework and ask those who read them to dialogue with me about them. Because it's my blog, I determine the content of the original posts, but my goal is to welcome honest discussion from friends who want to search through them with me. With that said, what follows is the first "post proper."

The last week and a half I've been working a temp job as I continue to look for full-time work. Last week was relatively miserable. The place I've been working is a tutoring agency that is in the process of getting ready for an audit  by the school district. They hired four temps to help alphabetize, copy, and file all the documents that are needed. The work was insanely repetitive and profoundly mind-numbing, but at least the majority of the time I was with the three other temps and we were free to talk with each other. On Thursday they asked me if I was available to come back for another week, and my hope was that this week I would have something slightly more stimulating to do.

This week, other than filing for hours on end I got the added bonus of stuffing envelopes with forms that need to be mailed out by the organization. All that, and I also got to be alone with the six massive filing cabinets instead of having three other people with me. It would be really easy to complain about this kind of work. I didn't go back to school and earn a degree to be filing papers into folders. Anyone who can read and has the slightest bit of concentration to make sure they don't grab the wrong folder could do what I have been doing. In other words, a third grader has enough education to pull off this job. That being said, one of the few things that kept us entertained the first week was sharing the names we thought were particularly interesting for one reason or another. Some were especially creative, others were exceptionally long (including one I found that was 15 syllables!), but it's easy to forget that these names represent real students; the folders and paperwork were nothing but names without faces as we filed one document after another, but this week I was alone and although I don't particularly enjoy solitude I had the opportunity for some reflective thinking because of it.

Last year I had a friend whose daughter traveled to Africa for a couple of weeks to do missions work with a group from her school. After returning to the U.S. she was having a tough time figuring out how to reconcile what she had just experienced with rejoining "normal" life here in the U.S. One of the advantages of getting my degree in Global Studies is that we are constantly asked as students "what does it mean for us to live in solidarity with the world's poor?" We're asked to examine what it means to be children of privilege in a starving world. Don't get me wrong: this is a question I'll likely be searching to find answers for the rest of my life. But I think that's the point. The point is to be mindful of the fact that we are children of privilege as we go about our daily lives. In being mindful, perhaps we are able to make small decisions about how we live our lives, to make the small changes we know how to make now in order to do something differently. The big changes and the big chances will come; I can deal with those when they do, but today it's about being mindful, about choosing the small things now so that the big things come naturally when the opportunities present themselves. I wrote my friend's daughter a letter. In it I shared my own struggles of returning from countless "missions," and in it I didn't offer any answers, but tried to help her frame the questions in order to allow her to search for the answers on her own. They tell me it did her a lot of good, and I'm glad about that. I can't really take credit for it because other than giving some details about my own personal experiences I borrowed wisdom from about a dozen other sources to say what I did. (Thankfully I wasn't writing a paper, otherwise it would have meant a giant bibliography for the few pages of writing!) Anyway, this is where the names without faces come in.

As I filed documents I reflected on the fact that the vast majority of the tutoring this agency does is paid for through public funds. I didn't know it before now, but the district will pay for 30 hours of free tutoring for students who qualify. (How one qualifies is still a mystery to me, but I know it is a tiered system where individual school have to qualify first and then students within those schools qualify individually). In any case, most of these students aren't doing very well in school. I've seen their test scores after all. In fact, I met one of the tutors, who said it's a challenge when they get the occasional student that is doing really well in school because they don't have anything else to give them. This essentially means that the vast majority of the students served by this agency have been labeled as deficient somehow. They need tutoring because they aren't performing at the same level as other students. One of the things I've seen reflected in the scores are low "language arts" scores coupled with parents at home who speak a language other than English. In other words, many of these students are labeled as deficient because their parents don't speak the same language as their teachers. It also means they are better qualified to be a tutor than I am! I couldn't get a job tutoring in the district because I can't speak a language other than English. I would counter that these students aren't deficient when it comes to "language arts." Rather, they are gifted. They are speaking, writing and understanding multiple languages at a young age. There are other areas of academic difficulty that may exist, and the hope is that tutoring really will help, and that got me thinking.

Doing this job for the past couple weeks could really suck. It is boring, and I wouldn't want to do it full-time. But it's more than that. It reminds me that although it wouldn't pay the bills long-term, I am still a child of privilege. I still get to go to work in an office and listen to my iPod while I file and I wait to find a better job. There are billions who would dream to make the pittance this stop-gap measure is paying me. I get to call a stop-gap what others would consider a blessing beyond measure. And it's being mindful of that which reminds me that I don't have to focus on the fact that an agency hired me to come perform mindless temporary work. If that's all I see, then of course I'll be miserable. But if I remember that each of these names comes with a face then it isn't so bad. Maybe the work is boring, but if I remember that I am really working for them, for those faces, then it becomes an act of loving service. If by taking two weeks to get paid to do mindless filing I can support students labeled as deficient to better themselves, it's worth it. If the students are better off having been tutored than not having been tutored, and I help contribute to make that happen, then the last two weeks become worth it. My work is more than a mindless bore; it is a support for those faces with names. They may be faces I've never seen, but it doesn't mean I can't be mindful of them. We may not ever meet most of the world's "bottom billion" (see Paul Collier) but that doesn't mean we can't be mindful of their existence and let that shape the kind of lives we lead. So thank you children of Los Angeles for teaching me, for reminding me to be mindful of those who the world would label as deficient. My prayer is that I would continue to learn that there is no one we can't learn from. Even those we may think are deficient are rich in their ability to teach us if only we would learn from them, even when they aren't there.

It was in thinking through this I was reminded of a verse in the Bible that perhaps now I am only beginning to understand. "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving" (Colossians 3:22-24). I'm certainly not a slave, but my hope is that in serving the children of Los Angeles I have served the Lord. The tutoring agency becomes relatively unimportant in this picture except as a means through which that service can be executed. In that sense my "master" is not whom I serve even though they are the reason for my paycheck. Rather, my service is and always should be unto the Lord.