Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Matthew 16:24
These are hard words to hear for those of us who live in middle class, suburban America. I don’t mean the words are hard to take. I mean it’s difficult for us to even process these words of Jesus and imagine they are directed at us. The words enter one ear, search for purchase and, finding no soil, they exit the other ear. We claim to be followers of Christ. Yet what aspects of our lives seem to correspond to this command to take up the cross?
The words of our Lord are typically stark, unrelenting, and global. He does not propose taking up the cross as one way to follow him. Cross-bearing is the only way to be a disciple. Jesus calls every believer without exception to take up that cross.
To put it another way, the Christian life is a matter of sacrificing our lives for our brothers and sisters, of showing love to those who hate (or claim to be indifferent toward) us, and of being persecuted for our faith. Discipleship is costly. When we proclaim the Gospel we must make this clear. Our hearers must be allowed to consider the cost. As Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.”
But if we aren’t suffering ourselves, we may feel foolish delivering such a message. “Come to Jesus and suffer!” we cry from our comfortable homes. “We lack nothing, but on behalf of Christ, we call you to give up your lives!” I suppose we could point to the minute and barely perceptible ways in which we do suffer. If we are believers at all, there must be some suffering to point to. But if our suffering isn’t obvious, it seems foolish and petty to draw attention to it.
Our lack of suffering–and our lack of willingness to suffer–makes it almost impossible to bring the Gospel to certain segments of society.
Take the poor. How do we call them to discipleship if we won’t sacrifice our luxuries, comforts, and even necessities for their sake? Shall we call them to take up the cross on Christ’s behalf when we won’t take up the cross on theirs? The response of the church to this dilemma is depressingly predictable. When was the last time your denomination or your congregation tried to plant a church in the inner city or any poor area? Even if we give lip service to such “projects,” how much are we willing to sacrifice to make them happen? Are we willing to become as poor as they if somehow we might make them them rich in Christ? To take some of Paul’s words out of context, “I am talking like a madman!”
Or what about calling people from other religious traditions? A Muslim who converts, a Buddhist, a Mormon, even a Catholic will face immediate rejection and persecution by their former coreligionists.
Or take homosexuals.
This is the worst situation of all. We don’t suffer, yet we call gays to a lifetime of suffering. And we behave as though we, unlike they, don’t need to suffer. We’ve redefined discipleship so it isn’t about bearing the cross, it’s about family. Now the Christian life is centered around a husband and father who’s the head of his house, a wife who submits, and children who obey. It’s hard enough for straight singles to latch onto this paradigm. But at least singles have hopes. One day they too may enter the ranks of full-fledged Christians by becoming a loving husband or a submissive wife with children in tow.
But what about gays? We call them to become eunuchs for the kingdom while we live comfortable lives. Or perhaps we tease them with the enticement that God will “cure” their homosexuality if only they have faith. That’s even less kind than telling cancer patients they’ll be healed if they convert.
As gay marriages and civil unions become more common, that call to costly discipleship gets even tougher. We’re calling them to abandon the family they have (or at least to complicate that family life rather severely). And for what? So they can come to a place where they’re not allowed to have a family. When we define the Christian life in family-focused terms, that essentially means we’re calling gays to be second-class citizens in the kingdom of heaven. Come to Christ! You can sit in the back of the bus. The call is snobbish and condescending if, indeed, we bother to make it at all.
But if we define the Christian life as bearing the cross, suddenly we’re calling gays to be among the greatest in the kingdom. To make that call, we have to be bearing the cross ourselves. We need credibility. Otherwise the call will still seem snobbish.
But wait. It gets worse.
The problem is more than calling gays to suffer when we don’t suffer ourselves. The problem is that Reformed and evangelical Christians have been the cause of much suffering among the gays. Sure, we say we hate the sin and love the sinner; but do our words and our actions really reflect that? How many gays would look at the evangelical church and say “Those Christians sure do love us”?
Why don’t they see our love for them? Is it perhaps because the love isn’t there? Or is it that the love is unexpressed? At the very least we’ve got a serious communication breakdown, don’t we?
So here’s a partial answer to that ridiculous question I posed in an earlier post: How do we start suffering? Let us begin to love gay people as we ought to have loved them all along–deeply, sacrificially, and without condescension.
This will probably involve finding ways to make our repentance for past failures to love them. It will mean standing apart from those who hope to restrain gays with the sword of the State and conquer them via culture war. (The way the Spirit subdues us to himself is sweeter and far different.) The likelihood is that others who claim to follow Christ will misunderstand, misrepresent, ridicule, and despise us for this stance. Very good! When our own discipleship is costly, perhaps we will gain the beginnings of credibility with those we hope to call.
Let us have gays into our homes and into our lives. Let us introduce them to our children, to our neighbors, to our churches–not as some sort of project or as evidence that we deserve a medal for going “above and beyond”–but as our friends whom we love.
I’ll want to talk more about the subject of homosexuality as the days go by. Conservative Christians need to do a lot of thinking and a lot of repenting on this score. (This post constitutes a little bit of both on my part.)
Meanwhile, let me direct you to the web site and the blog of my good friend Misty. She’s done a lot more thinking and acting on this subject than I have. Further, Misty has some of that credibility I’ve been talking about. The Lord has been gracious enough to allow her to suffer for the sake of these friends whom she loves. Thus, Misty is uniquely situated to help you work through the issues involved using Scripture and the love to which Christ calls us all.
And finally, as you seek to have your heart affected concerning this subject, remember the other things I’ve mentioned. Remember the poor and seek to suffer with and for them. And remember those whose culture or religion would make it particularly costly for them to hear the call of Christ. Let us seek to serve them as well.
The world is filled with opportunities to bear the cross if only we aren’t afraid to find them.
30 November 2006 at 10:25 am
Hello, Bill.
Where to start?
My background: not reared in faith (secular), converted in college and went headlong into an IFCA environment, found the Reformation via Horton et. al. and after a few years of calling myself a Christian finally understood the Gospel, and have come to outright reject even the term evangelical as a self-descriptor, favoring (Reformed) confessionalist much more since it seems to capture my own Protestant perspectives. Thus, while I take exception to your lumping Reformed and Evangelical together, I certainly understand it as I think most Reformed anymore are like cats who think they are dogs and embrace all things Evangelical.
I have great sympathy for those who stand against the broad demonizing of homosexuals and the really bad Evangelical theology which seems to inform as much. Coming into IFCA circles from a broad, educated and cultured secularism I was taken quite aback by many things obviously, and never really caught on or fit in. one of those things was the established homophobia. Now I know things are complicated and I don’t mean to trivialize complicated cultural value systems, etc., but the way in which the homophobia was embraced unquestionably was, and still is, off putting to say the least.
I married into Evangelicalism. My wife’s whole side is fundy-evangy. I have coined my own term called REF (revival-evangy-fundy). My brother’s wife is a cutting edge mega evangy, as well as some of her own family, while my brother, if our own background was the same which I believe it was, remains distant from it and pretends he gets a lot of it for marriage’s sake (he-he). My wife’s brother is gay and HIV. You can imagine his own experience having grown up in the IFCA environ.
I give that background for reasons I hope you find obvious. It always helps to somewhat know who it is with whom you speak, I think. Now to my main point.
As I have worked through my own take on this thorny thing called homosexuality, I have come to believe that both sides of the table agree on a very essential facet of belief: people ought to be happy, healthy and whole. It is this that I question. On the evangy side, we get the idea that while all things are subject to sin, evidently sexuality is the one piece of human make up that squeaked under the door; all people are born straight and choose to be gay. You know the routine so I won’t rehearse it all here, but suffice it to say that we get yet another window into the blatantly anti-Calvinistic theology of evangy’s. since sin is tantamount to psoriasis and can be managed and held at bay, gays can be cured. So we get hosts of “make ‘em straight factories” where pernicious gays are shoved through the intake as icky gays and come out the other side just like us, voila. Not only do we service ourselves by believing that we don’t have to actually inhabit a world where gays actually exists thereby making ourselves feel more comfortable knowing our world is down a few more homo’s, we get to sell the world, including the gays themselves, the idea that they too can be comfortable by fitting in and being straight (all the while never even treating the possibility that some of our views are impugning and dangerous, acting like there couldn’t possibly be anything fault in us that is wrong). on the other side of the table, we have those who simply want to make homosexuality perfectly acceptable. Don’t change the individual, change the taboos of society so that the gays can fit in and be happy, healthy and whole.
My point is, I simply wonder not about the nuts, bolts and details of homosexuality, etc. but about our broader assumptions, namely we are to be happy, healthy and whole. And whether we change the gays or change society, what we aim to do is lessen suffering. Each side seems to offer up a nice, happy solution to the problem. To the question, “well, what do you propose since as Americans we must come to a conclusions that renders the pursuit of personal happiness so cough up something good,” one says, “change ‘em! It can be done. Here is our simplistic plan to hold balloons under water,” while the other says, “nah, let the balloons go.” Perhaps it’s the underlying assumption that all is supposed to be well that trips everyone up? For my part, I don’t offer up easy solutions. Life is hard, difficult, complicated, confusing and can just be plain messy. Making gays straight is as plausible as fixing autistic kids. Sorry for the brashness, but when a mother holds up her formerly autistic kid on TV and says “you can do it, too,” I bristle. Same for the entire anti-gayism school of thought.
I know. Easy for a straight, happily married male to say. But my answer, which seems to make no friends very easily, seems like the most realistic one. I hold that homosexuality is not a valid sexual expression, but that is about all I share in common with evangy’s. we depart sharply on how to address the whole thing and I don’t pretend to come up with easy answers. I find both sides of the table do, though—easy answers I just can’t swallow. I envy no Christian the problem of homosexuality.
Like I said, I have a gay BIL. The story is complicated. But in my own view he is more than gay. I don’t pretend to put on some sort of show, to overcompensate for the blatant homophobia to which he was subjected and be a bleeding heart. I find that really condescending and patronizing, an di think so do they; evangy’s do it, promising to be able to fix gays to fit in, a feigned sympathy so that the anti-gay stuff might be an easier sell. I am not personally disgusted by him; as a straight male I have the typical mystified sense about it all, I get being gay about as much as thermal dynamics (which ain’t much!). being raised in broad secularism, I simply do not have the template of anti-gay; I don’t know what it means to be so disgusted by it. I don’t naturally understand my in-law family’s programmed sense of disgust and very real discomfort. But I cannot accept, at the same time, that it is valid given my Christian confession. You can see how I make no friends either with him or his parents!
Anyway, all that to say I think the issue is broader than “what to do about homosexuality.” I think we want easy answers, typically American. How about life is hard, complicated and sloppy? How about the idea that those of us who believe it to be invalid are indeed subject to thinking we have all the room in the world to nurse sinful dispositions towards gays? How about it is much more involved than, “let’s throw our bleeding heart arms around gays or let’s extend them false hope in being ‘cured’”?
zrim
30 November 2006 at 1:04 pm
zrim,
You said “I hold that homosexuality is not a valid sexual expression.” Could you clarify what you mean by that? “Valid” just seems like a bit of a strange word to use. As a word it seems to call into question the genuineness of a gay’s sexual orientation. That does not seem to be what you are saying, at least I hope not. Do you simply mean that homosexuality is sinful?
JDF
30 November 2006 at 1:25 pm
hey, joel.
let me first say that i still consider myself working through all this, so sorry for any fuzziness.
let’s see…i would hope that much of what i said above would help to interpret what i mean by invalid, but let me put a finer point on it, as it were: i do not question the authenticity of a gay orientation, no. so when someone says, “i’m homosexual,” i take his/her word for it. i do not come reply at all with anything akin to, “no, you’re not; it’s all in your head; you just think you are; you have chosen to be; snap out of it, etc.”
what i do mean by it is just as you suppose: it is not conducive to righteous living, is sin and cannot be recognized by a confessional view as morally acceptable. i might add that it is very much against my natural grain to say all that and very often feel as though it is an out of body experience to utter such words. my upbringing shudders at such drastic language. however, i can conclude nothing else per my confession. as to how this plays out in the real world, how it is fleshed out, etc. is wily to me.
does that help?
zrim
30 November 2006 at 9:46 pm
Zrim,
Thanks for those contributions. It sounds as though you and I are thinking our way through some of the same questions and arriving at at least some of the same answers. (Maybe even all the same answers, but we’re both on a journey here; so it’s too soon for a final pronouncement.)
I particularly like your observation that there may be a mistaken premise driving both sides of this discussion. I notice Reformed as well as evangelicals presenting Jesus as a “solution” to life’s problems without really examining what sort of solution he provides.
We expect that solution to come on our terms and in this life. But Jesus provides a more radical and permanent solution that involves more sorrow in the here and now, but at the last a resurrection and consummate joy.
I like the NRSV translation of 1 Peter 1:13. I’ll add some emphasis to make the point clear: “Set ALL your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed.”
Too often we want to hedge our bets. We want to say, yes my hope is set on Jesus at his coming. But I have some hope for the nearer term as well. It sounds so reasonable. But Scripture constantly calls us to put all our eggs in that future basket and to let that future hope guide all our actions and understanding in the here and now.
1 December 2006 at 9:16 am
“We expect that solution to come on our terms and in this life. But Jesus provides a more radical and permanent solution that involves more sorrow in the here and now, but at the last a resurrection and consummate joy…Too often we want to hedge our bets. We want to say, yes my hope is set on Jesus at his coming. But I have some hope for the nearer term as well. It sounds so reasonable. But Scripture constantly calls us to put all our eggs in that future basket and to let that future hope guide all our actions and understanding in the here and now.”
truer words were never spoken. my hunch is that when i hear words like this i see plenty of heads nodding at them yet not quite getting it. a superficial read of these words will render such polite nods. our hope is entirely future. until then, we must endure no differently than the pagans (of course, i recognize there are sufferings for the sake of the gospel that pagans cannot endure). there is no magic cure to our natural ills. i have come to speak in terms of a fulcrum between this age the one to come. Christ is the fulcrum that is at the center of the two ages. like you say, what we are tempted to do is move that fulcrum into this age and say He solves our this-worldly problems instead of our other-worldly one. of course, He is free to do that and i don’t rule that out wholesale, but ordinarily He does not, and we do well to live ordinarily. i am not beyond wanting to pull that fulcrum into this world, for sure. as long as my life is comfy it is easy to keep that fulcrum between this age and the one to come. when the doctor says “it’s malignant,” so to speak, who among us isn’t tempted to pull in that fulcrum? i think the same happens when it comes to this topic. it is a very complicated, nuanced and layered existence we find ourselves in. i can empathize with wanting to create easy, or easier, answers. but i also find i simply cannot swallow them since they just never come through. thus, it is a hope in the age to come that finally wins the day. that sounds negative, pessimistic and very uninspiring to the flesh…but i can’t do much else.
good things,
zrim
1 December 2006 at 1:47 pm
You know, I was just reading through some more of Misty’s blog postings. She really does some good thinking and presents some good angles.
I ran across her use of the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin,” and she is correctly critical of it. I began to think some more on why I have always loathed that phrase. First, it comes out of the wider, superficiality-machine of evangelicalism. The first thing that has always struck me about it is the hollowness and shallowness. That’s the easy first strike. But there is more to it than that as well. I have always remembered thinking in my evangy days, “Well, God doesn’t send my sin to hell, but me. So, how is that even a legit notion?” that is, I think lurking behind such ideas is a blatant Gnosticism in which God somehow extracts the intangible from the tangible and deals with the former only. Huh? In my daughter’s child-ready catechism from the CRC there is a question up front that asks what God must do about our sin. The answer is to punish “it.” I re-worked it to say that He must punish US for it. God doesn’t reward or punish “sin” or “righteousness” but those who house such things in their very beings. He rewarded Jesus bodily for His work (and by faith we will be bodily rewarded accordingly for His sake alone, bodily punished if found without faith). Our sin is inextricably bound up in US, in our actual being.
To bring it back to homosexuality then. The phrase seems also to dovetail nicely with the general blitheness which characterizes evangy’ism. Folks prance around telling everyone how much they “love everyone,” tossing figurative lilies around. Gays are not left out, of course. Special “love” that goes above and beyond is for them. Of course, I think this betrays their own sense that such over the top displays must be done towards those who are also so deep down reviled by evangy’s. ( it’s like when I used to purposely harm my little brother and when I realized just how much harm I had done or if I was about to get caught in my injurious action I displayed a put-on sympathy in order to distract from the fact that my own deep-seated sibling rivalry was what I had indulged.) This general sense of blitheness leads me to yet another problem inherent in the phraseology: the complete inability of the speaker to even begin to assess his own inward sinful dispositions toward others. The speaker seems to suggest that he has no deep-seated problems, no disgust, no hatred, no homophobia, no discomfort, etc. for his hearer. The phrase blithely rolls off his tongue and he is cast as a saint because he “loves the sinner…” he has no ability to say, “No, I don’t. I revile him because his orientation utterly maddens me, sickens me and makes me want to pull my hair out.” never do you get that sense from evangy’s who use this term. And in their Gnostic splitting of material and form (a cardinal virtue in evangy circles) they refuse to get at more substantive issues, of course. Body and soul can be individually dealt with. In the end, neither the speaker nor the hearer are served. He, that can be said for all things evangy, not just the issue of homosexuality.
Zrim
5 December 2006 at 12:50 pm
Bill,
Hi, this is Alan. If you recall, we chatted a bit in 2005. We were introduced by Misty. I’m in NYC.
Nice blog post.
I think pointing our that part our call is to suffer is often missed in American Christianity. It’s also being lost in some of the newer evangelical teachings that suggest if we *really* delighted in Jesus we will know more joy and live more fully in this life than if we didn’t know him. (I’m thinking of Ron Eldridge). That’s generally true if, as Christians, we have fun jobs, fulfilling marriages, challenging hobbies, nice places to live and lot’s of money. When those things get taken away and fidelity Jesus means eschewing powerful, joy-inducing, lucrative and fufulling temptations then our faith is truly tested.
I think suffering can be universal, particularly in relationships. Evangelicals have a divorce rate higher than the national average. When it comes to the hard work of being a faithful spouse and suffering through an unfulfilling marriage, Evangelicals regularly demonatrate that their desire to follow Jesus usually ends when their marriages get tough. No wonder our calls to gay and lesbian people to follow Jesus in voluntary celibacy sounds hollow.
What about those wonderful 40-50 year old women in all our churches who are bright and attractive, but can’t seem to find a husband? How long does their faithfulness last when a non-Chrisitan man asks them out and seeks a intimate sexual relationship? No too often.
Perhaps, Bill, certain people can speak with authenticity to gay people. Find people who have stuck with difficult spouses, even forgiving adultery — they can talk about serving Jesus throug a life of suffering. Find those single people in their 40’s and 50’s who pray and hope for a Christian spouse, but who have chosen to remain celibate until God provides one for them. Often they are hoping against hope, but they suffer as they are faithful.
If our call is to self-actualize, reduce pain and feel happy, then, I think, as Zrim points out, anything goes.
Here’s a great link to a Lary Crabb article on Adultery.
http://marriages.typepad.com/marriages/2004/05/larry_crabb_on_.html
Peace,
Alan
5 December 2006 at 1:19 pm
good points, alan. much of what you suggest is exactly why i have completely rejected evangelicalism and have fully embraced a reformed confessionalism. the former, in its perpetual adolescence, simply cannot withstand the complexities of life. i know of no other religious system that so comports with all the absolute worst of a self-absorbed culture, yet similtaneously lambastes that very same culture for its self-obessesion. so that not only it is a complete, confused mess per se, but also can be the height of hypocrisy and arrogance. i realize those are very strong words, but i say them with full knowledge of what sorts of things they imply: that the gospel is NOT resident within evangelicalism. inasmuch as i am surrounded by them in my family, this is not to say evangy’s are not intelligent people, well-meaning people, upright and good people, etc., and it is not to say that aren’t christians. but the system they have is actually an enemy to the gospel and its wider implications. i am no fan of wild and unreigned critiques of evangelicalism (or its members), but that is not because i seek to defend it.
btw, there was an “alan” that posted on rev. jason stellman’s “de regnis duobus cult” a while back. i found his posts well thought out…i wonder if that’s you (?).
best,
zrim
5 December 2006 at 4:57 pm
Zrim,
Well, to be honest, I’m including Reformed Confessionalism within the Evangelical tent. Our statistics for divorce are the same.
I served as an elder in a PCA church in NYC for 8 years. Our church was pretty unique in that we ministered in Greenwich Village and had a large AIDS outreach. We were considered unusual in our denomination. Gay people felt comfortable in our church.
On the other hand, some people stayed faithful to their marriages, some didn’t. I personally felt as if I didn’t have radical enough of relationship with Jesus to really speak to people in the gay community with any authentic, Spirit-wrought humility. But, praise God, some people in our church did.
I’m not so sure Reformed Confessionalism is the answer. Humility, born of suffering, transcends denominational labels. Oh, yes, and love — the sweet love of Christ — can be found many places. I’m finding it among certain Anglicans and Roman Catholics who have offered spiritual counsel to me in my time of suffering.
Peace,
Alan
6 December 2006 at 10:00 am
well, i am just not quite as gnostic about the love of Christ. it has to be born of something, substance must take a legit form. i am not naive as to think that reformed confessionalism “is thr answer” somehow. but love divorced from truth can be found anywhere. i had that in my secular upbringing. muslims and mormons can have a “humility born of suffering,” cant’t they?
6 December 2006 at 2:18 pm
Zrim,
Humiliy born of suffering is part of the process of sanctification for the believer in Christ. No one is suggesting that you let go of Reformed Confessionalism, however, remember what Bill is talking about is also aimed at the Reformed community. Being Reformed does not guarantee a humble spirit and a burning love for Jesus.
Love divorced from truth is not real love. As truth divorced from love is hollow.
And when I meant denominational labels, I was still talking about serving the gay community from a a Christian perspective within the church.
I’m glad you are finding more theological and spiritual wholeness in the Reformed Faith. It has much to commend it: it takes the church and the sacraments seriously, it stresses the primacy of grace in salvation and sanctification, and it understands the nature of God’s covenantal dealings with humaniry.
You might enjoy reading things by Jack Miller, who was something of a Reformed pietist. He succeded in taking the doctrines of grace and helping people sink them deep into their hearts so that they were confident, yet humble and on-fire servants of Jesus.
Peace,
Alan
6 December 2006 at 3:57 pm
“Humiliy born of suffering is part of the process of sanctification for the believer in Christ. No one is suggesting that you let go of Reformed Confessionalism, however, remember what Bill is talking about is also aimed at the Reformed community. Being Reformed does not guarantee a humble spirit and a burning love for Jesus.”
i understand that you are not suggesting that. and i also understand bill’s words are aimed at us as well. trust me, any illusions i had about the reformed faith being some sort of magic hall or guarantee to keep me from the bad stuff in evangelicalism has been shattered long ago!
thanks,
zrim