Category Archives: Notable Quotes

Sunday Non-Random Song: Keith Green, “Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful”


Some Christian friends and I were recently talking about what it means to “give your heart to God”. The one thing we could agree on was that we worried we weren’t doing it thoroughly enough! Perhaps, we thought, the first step is simply surrendering those spiritual performance anxieties into God’s hands.

Whether the object of our devotion is God or an earthly beloved or vocation, we sometimes confuse surrender with renunciation. Is devotion best measured by how much you push other things out of your heart to make room for God? Unless those affections have become disordered in some way (selfishly possessive or addictive), I would say not. The God of the Bible persistently asks us to rethink the scarcity mindset that makes us see interpersonal relations through the lens of desperate competition. In my Father’s house are many mansions.

Surrender, on the other hand, could be about trusting God to protect and give meaning to the life we already love, and thereby coming to see God’s presence in more and more places. We go from being Martha, who is anxious about many things because she thinks it all rests on her shoulders, to Mary, who sees that only God keeps the cosmos in existence from one second to the next.

For me, giving my heart to God starts with remembering that (1) I have a heart and (2) there is a God. That is, it’s about re-opening, yet again, to the vulnerability of joy and trust and hope, which requires me to rely on the God who has guaranteed that those qualities will ultimately triumph over cruelty and meaninglessness. I might think that that kind of God is a nice idea, but I can’t say I believe in Him until I actually act as if He were there to catch me when I fall (or am pushed).

That inward softening often happens when I sing worship songs. Something about opening to the flow of breath relaxes my emotional center as well. This simple, powerful song by Keith Green always moves me in that direction. I hope it warms your heart as well.

Read more about Keith Green on the Last Days Ministries website. He devoted his talents to spreading the gospel through music until a plane crash tragically took his life at age 28.

Oh Lord, you’re beautiful,
Your face is all I seek,

For when your eyes are on this child,

Your grace abounds to me.

Oh Lord, you’re beautiful,

Your face is all I seek,

For when your eyes are on this child,

Your grace abounds to me.

I want to take your word and shine it all around.

But first help me just to live it Lord.

And when I’m doing well, help me to never seek a crown.

For my reward is giving glory to you.

Oh Lord, please light the fire,

That once burned bright and clear.

Replace the lamp of my first love,

That burns with Holy fear.

I want to take your word and shine it all around.

But first help me just to live it Lord.

And when I’m doing well, help me to never seek a crown.

For my reward is giving glory to you.

Oh Lord, you’re beautiful,

Your face is all I seek,

For when your eyes are on this child,

Your grace abounds to me.

Oh Lord, you’re beautiful,

Your face is all I seek,

For when your eyes are on this child,

Your grace abounds to me.

(Lyrics courtesy of www.sing365.com)

Advice to Myself, Across 20 Years


“I once believed in causes too, I had my pointless point of view…” —Billy Joel

I turned 39 this week, and I intend to stay that way for quite some time. (And if you get that reference, you’re older than me, haha.)

Twenty years ago, I was named one of Glamour Magazine’s Top Ten College Women, either despite or because of the fact that my hair was the size of a small hedge and I had no idea how to apply eyeshadow. Yes, I was a diversity hire: the crazy poet quota. The magazine treated us to a lovely weekend in NYC, including a Revlon gift bag and a visit to the MTV studios, and published our pictures in an issue with Cindy Crawford on the cover.

Earlier this summer, a Glamour staff member sent us alumnae this intriguing question:

We would like to know what you would tell your Top 10 College Woman self. If you could go back in time and give yourself some advice at the moment that Glamour honored you, what sage nugget of wisdom would you like to impart? We’re considering sharing some of your advice with our upcoming winners in the magazine.

With that in mind, here’s what I wish I could have told Jendi-in-1992:

Don’t be afraid to embarrass yourself in the service of the truth.

You have a right to believe that you are beautiful.

There are as many ways to perform femininity as there are female-identified people.

Get therapy and a decent haircut.

Someday, you will have good sex.

You don’t have to wait for someone else’s permission to grow up.

Style knows no dress size.

Don’t go to law school.

You’ve got to be your own mommy.

Walk away from any relationship that threatens your safety or your integrity. No exceptions. There’s always another way to reach your goal.

Every five years, you will completely change your mind about something important, so don’t be a butthole to people who disagree with you now.

Other Sheep Africa Leader Protects the Marginalized in Kenya


This article from Michgan’s MLive.com profiles the courageous work of Rev. John Makokha and his wife Anne Baraza at Other Sheep Afrika-Kenya, an independent offshoot of Other Sheep, the international ministry that advocates for GLBT Christians in the developing world. The former United Methodist minister currently serves at Riruta Hope Community Church, where his wife is a leader in the Riruta United Women Empowerment Programme.

Rev. Makokha recently completed a multi-state fundraising tour for Children of Africa Hope Mission, a charity that cares for AIDS orphans and homeless children in the slums of Nairobi. I had the pleasure of meeting him last fall at Rehoboth Temple Christ Conscious Church, a gay-affirming Pentecostal church in Harlem.

From the MLive article:

The Rev. John Makokha explains with obvious pride in his voice that his United Methodist church that’s nestled in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, is a house of worship that embraces open hearts, open minds and open doors.

That’s a watchword widely supported in Methodist circles in the U.S.

But the catchphrase comes with a price for Makokha who, along with his wife, Anne Baraza, have dedicated their ministry to reaching out to gay and lesbian people in the East African nation where people can still be imprisoned or stoned to death for being homosexual.

For that reason, and several others, pastoring the church and his Children of Hope school has made it a tough row to hoe for him, Makokha said last Sunday at an adult education forum held at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Grand Rapids.

Homophobia is the culturally accepted norm in Kenya, but it’s a standard tinged with irony, Makokha said. Gay political and church leaders stay lodged deep in the closet but are famous for publicly proclaiming gays, lesbians and bisexual people should be put to death.

And Makokha’s bishop has cut off funding to his church and his school for neighborhood children, many of them AIDS orphans.

“They say we are promoting sin,” said Makokha, 43, senior pastor of Riruta United Methodist Church, who is on a fundraising/public awareness campaign in the U.S. through June 15.

But Makokha, who also is director of the gay and lesbian advocacy ministry, Other Sheep Africa, says that mentality neuters the gospel.

“Jesus came for us sinners, whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, white, black, green, or whatever,” he said, a grin spreading across his face.

“In my church, we work for inclusive compassion. When Jesus came to this world, he came for all of us.”

Other Sheep Africa helps women whose husbands died of AIDS by securing micro loans so they can operate their own businesses making handmade necklaces and bracelets. It also teaches classes on human sexuality and human rights.

Memorial Day Song: “Grant Peace, O Lord”


This hymn was written by Welsh clergyman Charles Henrywood. See more of his contemporary lyrics for classic tunes at New Hymns in Old Clothes. Sing along at Mission St. Clare (The Daily Office).

Grant peace, O Lord, across our strife-torn world,
Where war divides and greed and dogma drive.
Help us to learn the lessons from the past,
That all are human and all pay the price.
All life is dear and should be treated so;
Joined, not divided, is the way to go.

Protect, dear Lord, all who, on our behalf,
Now take the steps that place them in harm’s way.
May they find courage for each task they face
By knowing they are in our thoughts always.
Then, duty done and missions at an end,
Return them safe to family and friends.

Grant rest, O Lord, to those no longer with us;
Who died protecting us and this their land.
Bring healing, Lord, to those who, through their service,
Bear conflict’s scars on body or in mind.
With those who mourn support and comfort share.
Give strength to those who for hurt loved-ones care.

And some there be who no memorial have;
Who perished are as though they’d never been.
For our tomorrows their today they gave,
And simply asked that in our hearts they’d live.
We heed their call and pledge ourselves again,
At dusk and dawn – we will remember them!

****
Mr. Henrywood says, “I’ve always believed that Remembrance should not be limited to the dead—important though that is. Neither should it be a vehicle for glorifying war. If we loved one another as commanded war would be just history. We don’t but that shouldn’t stop us asking for help to do so.” Read more about the inspiration for this hymn here.

Christian Hope Is Impossible


After reading my last post about Jesus’ triumph over death, my neighbor Sara Langseth shared with me an email she’d written to some friends, with whom she was discussing radical environmentalism and the future (if any) of our planet. Sara has been reading a book by Derrick Jensen, who argues that our industrial culture is turning natural resources into poisonous waste at such a rate that our individual green-lifestyle choices aren’t going to fix it.

Unsettled by Jensen’s call to bring down this culture through violent resistance, but unconvinced that personal virtue is enough, Sara finds herself musing about original sin:

Even my numb brain wonders whether Jensen’s eager endorsement of blowing up dams is any more of an answer. I wonder, really, whether the only thing left to do is say that I — we — are being broken to bits by our own powers, our own principalities, and that the very first thing we have to do is feel this, in any small way we can. Feel it and know that there is no personal morality here. That this isn’t about whether a “green” activist will smile and give me the thumbs-up
> because I compost my apple cores and ride my bike around. Again, if I were able to understand Christian theology, I’d say I was talking about original sin….

…This is why I am a Christian, even with all the absurd BS that being “Christian” means to all of us: because it’s not about my personal morality. To everyone who argues that “the world is a better place” because of some small thing I might do to make it die more slowly — my point was that this is NOT the point. My point is that we may well be absolutely screwed, absolutely doomed, and that I can not separate my culpability from yours. I feel like sometimes I have to sit with this and let the horror of this penetrate my bones. I have to hang on my own cross and ask, “Eli, eli lema sabacthani?” Otherwise I’m going to be hopelessly goggle-eyed and ridden with denial.

“Eli lema sabthani?” – “My God, why have you forsaken me?” – is what Mark and Matthew record Jesus saying on the cross before he dies.

(Luke and John make him much more confident about the whole thing.) The Mark and Matthew version is pretty rich: Jesus’ death is a real death here. He loses everything — the Son of God is utterly alone — God has lost God.

(It’s a rich quote for other reasons, but I’m going to stop with that before I get wordy and pedantic.)

I don’t think the point of Christianity is to quickly bypass horror and death with syrupy promises of resurrection. The pious picture of the Christian saint giving a sappy smile as the lion comes to eat him is utterly, utterly wrong. My point is that Christian hope comes from somewhere in the middle of the contact point between the lion’s teeth and the saint’s jugular. It’s a hope that shows up when hope is impossible. It’s a hope that makes no sense.

I do not understand this hope, and I do not know why I believe in this hope — or even IF I actually believe in this hope at all. But it’s the only straw I’ve got, the only thing I can hold onto that doesn’t break to bits at the moment I grasp it. And it’s the only straw I can grab that makes me turn around and believe that the world is real, and makes me want to love it.

I am not going to go blow up a dam.

My own temptation to despair is usually ethical rather than environmental–the cruelty and indifference of human beings towards their own. The common root of the two dilemmas may well be the same failure of our imagination to see other sentient beings as ends in themselves. Impossible hope is the only honest hope, sometimes–the only one that isn’t complicit in this failure, but rather allows us to keep our eyes open to the pain, not minimizing it as “good religious people” who are supposed to “think positive”.

The Real Resurrection: Freedom from Fear


As we all know, the much-predicted Rapture didn’t happen yesterday. Or it did happen but we were all so bad we were left behind. Or the Kingdom of God has actually already come, but no one was excluded, so we didn’t notice.

This last possibility sounds to me closest to the teachings of Jesus. Wasn’t he always saying that the Kingdom of God is within us? And, as N.T. Wright notes in his many writings on the Resurrection, this miracle was taken by the first Christians not only as proof of personal immortality, but more importantly as a sign that Christ was the Messiah and the new age had begun.

Now, it may not look that way, because suffering and injustice haven’t disappeared yet. What has changed, in light of the Resurrection, is how we may confidently respond to them. This article from religion professor Eric Reitan’s blog explains why. It’s worth reading in full, but “fair use” requires that I only quote a portion, so don’t stop here.

…Taken in relation to the cross, the empty tomb has further meanings. It declares that what is conceived from a terrestrial standpoint as ultimate and total defeat, as final humiliation, is none of these things from the divine standpoint (and hence from the most complete, enveloping, and hence truest standpoint). Crucifixion, after all, was not merely a means of killing that involved intense physical suffering before death. It was also a graphic means of intimidation and a tool of public degradation. Human beings were treated worse than things—not merely as something to be used, but as objects of contempt. The purpose of crucifixion was to express towards a human being the very antithesis of respect.

To have the power to crucify another human being was to have the power to take away their lives in a manner that first stripped them of everything that gives life any value. And it was, at the same time, an act of triumphantly crowing over one’s victim—displaying for all the world to see just how helpless, just how disgraced, one could make another human being (before ultimately turning them into a thing in truth, that is, a corpse).

The empty tomb symbolically represents what such efforts at mortification achieve from God’s ultimate standpoint. We might express it as follows: “Look into the tomb and you begin to see what you’ve accomplished by such exercises of power. The tomb is not merely empty. It has been emptied. In the place of a corpse there is new life, eternal and incorruptible.” The empty tomb erases the pretentions of coercive power to define human worth. It declares that the use of force to degrade and destroy is less than impotent. It has become the means whereby the intended victim has been exalted, whereby the target for destruction has been made indestructible.
…

Like many of us, I’m not nearly close enough to living that way. Yesterday, thousands of people were happily anticipating the end times. Without sharing the superstitious aspects of their faith, or their comfort with the notion that some people will be forever excluded from God’s presence, I would like to have more of their settled hope for a future where God defeats death and makes all things right.

There’s no easy way to that goal. No shortcut but to live as if it were true, as Jesus told us to do. That includes forgiving people who have “degraded and destroyed” precious things in my life, because otherwise I am still granting them power that belongs to Jesus alone: the power to say who I am.

The Acid Bath of Atonement


“Till on that cross as Jesus died/The wrath of God was satisfied…”

These lines from “In Christ Alone“, one of my favorite contemporary Christian songs, sum up the penal substitution theory of the Atonement — what the average person thinks of when you say “Christ died for your sins”. It’s a powerful but troubling formula that connects God’s love with violence.

Liberal Christians sometimes condemn this theory as “divine child abuse”. I feel sympathy for that point of view. And yet, as Experimental Theology’s Richard Beck observes in a recent post about his prison Bible study group, perhaps “doubt is the luxury of the privileged”. Traditional atonement theory seems to resonate most with people who are in extremis. Yes, this story about God is grotesque, terrifying, mysterious — and so are their lives. Richard writes:

The metaphors of penal substitutionary atonement speak to the issue of human guilt. No other suite of metaphors so powerfully addresses this facet of the human experience before a Holy God. Thus, I do think it would be rash to completely do away with penal substitutionary thinking. It performs a task that no other view of atonement can perform.

The problem with the penal substitutionary metaphors is that they are so very strong. Too strong to be deployed on a regular basis. And that is the real problem. It’s not so much that penal substitutionary thinking is wrong, it is rather that it is wrongfully deployed. Penal substitutionary atonement is at its best when deployed rarely and only in the most extreme circumstances. It can’t be everyday fare. The trouble is that it IS everyday fare in many churches. Penal substitutionary atonement is like a very strong acid. It has to be handled with care. And if you handle it as much as we do in our churches, often and carelessly, you end up with chemical burns. Thus many Christians are pulling away from churches in pain.

So when is the proper time to deploy penal substitutionary atonement? Like I said, penal substitutionary thinking is at its best when it speaks to profound human guilt. Specifically, some of us have committed such awful sins that our self-loathing, guilt, and shame destroy the soul. We cannot forgive ourselves. Only a very strong concoction can wash us clean. Penal substitutionary atonement is that chemical bath. It’s strong acid–You deserve death and hell for the life you’ve lived–making it the only thing powerful enough to wash away a guilt that has poisoned the taproot of a human existence. Nothing more mild (e.g., the moral influence views I so love) can speak to this issue.

So, it seems to me, there is a proper time to pull the beaker of penal substitutionary atonement off the theological shelf.

But here’s the trouble. Most of us live bland bourgeoisie lives with bland bourgeoisie sins. Few of us have lived catastrophically immoral lives. Thankfully so. But this creates a bit of a disjoint when a preacher throws penal substitutionary atonement at us. It just doesn’t resonate. The strong acid just burns us. The notion that God demands our death for these slight infractions AND that God will condemn us to an eternal torment of excruciating pain makes God seem, well, rather crazed.

This feeling gets worse when penal substitutionary atonement is thrown at children. In these contexts the deployment of penal substitutionary metaphors can seem obscene and psychologically abusive. Again, the issue for us is the incommensurability between the offenses of the children (not playing nice on the playground) and the penal substitutionary view (for these infractions God will punish you forever in hell). Continuing my chemical metaphor, kids shouldn’t play with acid.

The point I’m trying to make is that penal substitutionary atonement isn’t bad per se. The problem is that penal substitutionary atonement is a victim of its own strength. It has suffered not by being a bad idea, but by being handled too often and too carelessly. Some people do live in such a hell of guilt that only the vision of God’s death sentence, something they feel deep in their bones to be justified and proper, can reach the depth of their self-hatred. So we shouldn’t throw penal substitutionary atonement out the door. We just need to understand its proper function and place.

Christians just need to go to chemistry class.

To expand on Richard’s point, when I first converted, my core issues were guilt and shame. The story of the “cleansing blood” freed me from the crippling compulsion to be perfect. That’s a familiar conversion story for a lot of people. The problem comes when churches try to return people to that place of self-loathing, as if it were the only way to rekindle the emotions of gratitude and love that led us to Jesus. We’re not allowed to actually start living in grace, to see ourselves and our neighbors truly through the eyes of God as the good creations we were meant to be.

At the same time, sin is an ever-present condition. We will feel guilty again, maybe for good reason. Don’t be too proud, too liberal, too smart to rejoice that “it’s still the blood“.

Have a blessed Good Friday.

HuffPost Asks: Is the Bible True?


In a column published earlier this month at the Huffington Post, David Lose (author of Making Sense of Scripture) asks this teasing question in the headline, but then points out that what we typically mean by “true” is based on post-Enlightenment concepts that were alien to the Biblical authors. Narrowly identifying “truth” with “fact”, we have no choice but to line up on one side or the other of the liberal-conservative divide, either contorting ourselves to align the text with the latest scientific and historical discoveries, or assuming that because this can’t be done, the Bible lacks authority. Lose begs to differ:

…Both sides, however, miss the literary nature and intent of the Bible as stated within its own pages. Take for example Luke, who in his introduction acknowledges that he is not an eye-witness to the events he recounts but depends on multiple other stories about Jesus. He writes what he calls “an orderly account” so that his audience may believe and trust the teaching they have received (Luke 1:1-4). Or consider John, who near the end of his gospel comes clean about carefully arranging stories of Jesus so as to persuade his readers that Jesus is the messiah (John 20:30-31). The gospels — and, indeed, all of Scripture — do not seek to prove but to persuade. And so John, convinced that Jesus is “the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), portrays Jesus as clearing the Temple of money changers at the very outset of his ministry because he, himself, is God’s sacrifice. Similarly, Jesus dies on the Day of Preparation at the exact moment the Passover lambs are slaughtered. John’s aim is thoroughly theological, not historical.

For this reason, the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon “verifiable facts” — a notion largely foreign to ancient writers — we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger “truth” that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is “true” based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.

By way of illustration, recall for a moment the scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction when the two main characters, Jules and Vincent, argue over how to explain what happened when a drug dealer unloaded his handgun at them at close range but missed them entirely. Vincent (played by John Travolta) believes it’s a freak occurrence. Jules (played by Samuel L. Jackson) considers it a miracle. Jules’ defense of his judgment bears closely on our discussion. In response to Vincent’s assertion that what happened didn’t qualify as physically “impossible” and therefore could not be considered miraculous, Jules says, “You’re judging this the wrong way. It’s not about what. It could be God stopped the bullets, he changed Coke into Pepsi, he found my … car keys. You don’t judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt God’s touch. God got involved.”

Jules’ sense of the criteria necessary to assess truth is far closer to that of the biblical writers than that of not only Vincent but also both contemporary liberals and conservatives alike, as he asserts that the ultimate criteria of truth isn’t factual accuracy but a compelling, even transformative witness.
…

This is a nice attempt at a third way between the liberal-conservative impasse. Still, it seems to me that there are some factual claims in the Bible that we simply can’t get around. Did God become man, or not? Did He raise Jesus from the dead, or not?

If you say no, or yes only in the metaphorical sense, your version of Christianity may be good and satisfying for you, but it’s still fundamentally different from the “yes” version. Death and sin are real, historical, scientific, this-worldly facts. A God who enters into the concrete realm where these conditions hold sway, in order to triumph over them, is a different God from one who only inspires us from afar and strengthens us spiritually within.

The facts of the Incarnation and Resurrection haven’t been proven by Enlightenment scientific and historical methods. The Resurrection could even be disproven by them someday. In the meantime, I believe in them because that story offers me the “compelling, transformative witness” Lose describes. But in order for the magic to happen, I have to believe in them as facts.

And that, perhaps, is why attempts to reconcile religion and liberalism never completely succeed. A Christian like myself believes in certain scientific and historical facts on the basis of non-scientific, non-historicist criteria. That necessarily scandalizes the modern mind. Even the postmodern turn away from factuality into narrative, such as in Lose’s article, doesn’t take you all the way there, because some facts (most of all, death) are impervious to anything we say or feel about them. As my husband likes to say, nature gets a vote. But I want to believe God gets a veto.

Letter to an Evangelical Friend, Part 2: Obeying Jesus Without Knowing Him?


Last week I posted some of my email dialogue with my evangelical friend “Denise” about gay rights, the Bible, and how we choose our bedrock principles for discerning God’s will on such controversial issues. Her letter culminated in the following invitation to self-examination:

“…Speaking just for myself here, I have had to say to Jesus: ‘If it turns out those aspects of Calvinism which so trouble me are right, and that faithfulness to You means I have to accept their views, then I have to choose You.’…Might it be that one reason you don’t any longer want to read books/arguments contradicting your position is that deep down you wonder if you ever might be faced with that choice, and definitely don’t want to ‘go there’?…I just wonder which would come first, were it to come to that? Jesus, or your position on the gay issue?”

Denise and I are close friends, and our dialogues always take place in a spirit of love and humility, with respect for each other’s boundaries and for the limits of human knowledge of the divine. My next remarks, then, are not intended to apply to her.

I’m troubled by the power imbalance that can occur in debates between gay-affirming and traditionalist Christians when the latter make the rhetorical move of questioning their dialogue partner’s level of submission to God, Jesus, or the Bible. Suddenly the ground of argument has shifted from our intellectual disagreement to a personal defense of my core faith. This is not a conversation that anyone should be forced to have when friendship and trust have not already been established between the speakers.

Even where a personal context exists, an individual’s relationship with God belongs to the realm of sacred mystery where words fail. We should hesitate to speak of it or demand that others do so, lest we violate its intimacy or, by dragging it into conceptual space, make it too rigidly specific and idolatrous. It should not be put on display to prove a point. And if that point remains unproven, will not that core faith also be shaken? Would traditionalists rather see me agree that Christ is not my Lord, than remain a Christian who happens to support GLBT equality? Sometimes it seems that they would.

In reflecting on Jesus’ life and death, I had the thought that God’s life among us took this particular form to establish once and for all that we should not worship any power other than love. Love is the only power that God retained when he was born as a homeless, illegitimate, peasant baby, and died as a criminal whom the secular and religious authorities conspired to execute.

Therefore, when Christians invoke power-based concepts (God’s sovereignty, Biblical authority) to limit actions that compassion would otherwise recommend, one could say they are reverting to a worldly misunderstanding of what it means for Jesus to be Lord.

****

Here is what I wrote to Denise:

I can’t imagine Jesus would ask me to take a position that seems incredibly cruel and factually unsupported (to the very best of my cognitive abilities) as proof of my obedience to him, because then the concept of “Jesus” would be emptied of all content except inscrutable absolute power.

Certainly I can, as an intellectual exercise, entertain the possibility that God-in-Jesus could turn out to desire child sacrifice (to use an extreme example that nobody is arguing for, although one could say that Christian parents who cast out their gay children are enacting a present-day version of this story). Kierkegaard considered this very scenario in his commentary on the binding of Isaac, and if I remember my college philosophy class correctly, he came down on the side of the “teleological suspension of the ethical”—namely that God could command us to do something that seems totally evil and pointless according to our best judgment as human beings, but we should do it anyhow.

The problem with this position is that it takes away the main reason I believe Jesus is Lord—as opposed to Kali the Destroyer, Satan, Mother Nature, etc.—which is that Jesus is supremely loving, compassionate, nonviolent, humble, a defender of the radical equality of all people, and someone who privileges just outcomes over rule-following. I am a Christian because I want to believe God looks like Jesus, and because I am a better person when I try to look like him too.

It’s possible that the God who runs the universe is so alien to our ideas of kindness and goodness that we should just shut up and do whatever He says. But there is no workable way to implement this. There’s no unmediated, uninterpreted access to God’s will. When we suspend our own evidence-based judgment and suppress our compassionate instincts, we are only handing over our soul to some other human being who is all too happy to tell us “what God wants”.

When I take a stand on gay rights, I don’t see myself as relying on my personal feelings and “subjective ideological preferences” against Scripture and tradition. I’m speaking out of the collective experiences of all the gay people who have struggled, often at the price of their lives, to love God and their neighbors while honestly living the way God made them.

One could be more justified in saying that certain non-affirming Christians are privileging their personal preferences (about gender roles and human sexuality) over the evidence of science and psychology, not to mention the testimonies of their silenced gay brothers and sisters. We seem like isolated heretics and random individualists only because there are many more who are afraid to bear witness. Religious, familial, and civil discrimination collude in preventing gay and gay-affirming Christians from connecting with one another to create a new spiritual community and a new interpretive tradition.

It seems to me that on the issues that preoccupy us both—salvation for non-Christians in your case, or the permissibility of homosexual relationships in my case—we ourselves are personally not at risk. You are a Christian, and I am straight. Our anxiety springs from the yearning to have all others enjoy the same blessings that we have received. Based on the movement of the entire Biblical narrative toward an ever-widening membership in “God’s chosen”, it also seems to me that this motivation is greatly to be trusted, as a reason to choose one Biblical interpretation over another.

The two issues seem similar to me in another way. If God loves everyone and desires their well-being, whatever God commands must ultimately turn out to be for the benefit of every person. Eternal damnation, with no possibility of repentance and forgiveness, might be good news for some abstraction like “God’s sovereignty”, but it can’t possibly be of any benefit to the souls thus punished. Similarly, overwhelming evidence suggests that the results of suppressing a person’s sexual orientation are deeply traumatic for that person, which is why anti-gay rhetoric usually focuses on the benefits to “us” (society, the church, etc.) from getting rid of “them”. One simply can’t make the case that the closeted person himself is better off, spiritually, than one whose body and soul are integrated.

I honor the humility and sincerity of your struggle with obedience to Scripture. But to me it looks like a struggle between a natural inclination toward compassion, and a fear that this compassion is impermissible. That way of life doesn’t attract me.

Finally, to return to where you began, I absolutely agree with you that faith in the Person of Jesus requires some doctrinal container to shape it. That’s actually why this whole opposition between obedience and inclusiveness makes no sense to me. I follow Jesus because he stands for some very specific values, inclusiveness being among them. I don’t think he intended it to be very mysterious, either. In all the actions he took to manifest God’s nature working through him, he appealed not only to law and Scripture, but to logic, the poetic imagination, and the evidence of people’s senses. God’s idea of good and bad is different from ours, sure. But in every example where Jesus makes this point, he’s revealing God’s love for outcasts, never shooting down as “disobedient to Scripture” a person who crosses social and religious identity boundaries in the name of love.

That is why, even if I turn out to be mistaken on the gay issue when I stand before the throne of judgment, in the meantime I’d rather err on the side of inclusion.

My Interview on the Mass Cultural Council ArtSake Blog


Last year I was honored to receive a fellowship for poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Since then my gratitude has only increased, to see the publicity support that the MCC gives its fellows and finalists. In conjunction with our reading last week at Forbes Library in Northampton, the MCC’s Dan Blask interviewed me on their ArtSake blog. Here’s a sample:

ArtSake: Along with your poetry, you also write fiction and nonfiction. Do you approach writing prose differently from the way you approach poems?

Jendi: Yes, definitely! Poetry and fiction must be written by hand with a mechanical pencil in a 6×9 Mead Five Star notebook. Nonfiction, by which I mean my blog posts about gay rights and Christianity, is written on the computer. I don’t know how to shape a narrative in creative nonfiction. There are too many facts, and most of them were hard enough to live through once.

When I write poetry, I’m not thinking about an audience. What wants to be written, gets written. It’s like a computer’s self-diagnostic. I write to find out what I think. Naturally, my values and preoccupations are reflected in the poetry, so in that sense, it often contains a critique of society, but it’s driven by my own need to express my authentic inner experience, rather than to have a particular impact on others. (Though I wonder whether the two are really so separable – doesn’t every self-disclosure cherish a tiny hope of being recognized and responded to in kind, however much one tries to cultivate self-protective detachment?)

My novel-in-progress is about a young fashion photographer in 1990s NYC who struggles to reconcile his faith and his sexual orientation. With this project, I have more of a conscious intention to bring about social change, along with telling an entertaining story.

Writing a novel is harder than poetry because it’s impossible to be in the “flow” for that length of time. With a poem, by the time I figure out where my subconscious is taking me, the trip’s over. I don’t have much opportunity to get in my own way. Far more planning has to go into the novel, which means that there are many chances for self-consciousness and ideological agendas to seize control, instead of letting the work tell me, itself, what it needs to be. I counteract this problem by conceiving of the novel as a collaborative effort between myself and my characters. They’ve got to retain the freedom to surprise me. My job is to see enough of the big picture so that they don’t get lost and despondent, but not be so directive that they lose their independent life force. It is a constant, elaborate, frustrating, fascinating dance that calls on all my relationship skills, and maybe even improves them in the so-called real world.

I do my creative writing by hand because this slower, temporally linear method allows intuition to take the lead. Writing on the computer, it’s too easy to pull back and see the big picture, to let the analytical mind start rearranging and criticizing, and skip past that quiet inwardness where the soul of the poem or story gestates.
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Read the rest here. Videos of myself and my talented co-readers Rosann Kozlowski, Nancy K. Pearson, Cynthia Morrison Phoel, and Jung Yun are available on the Winning Writers YouTube channel.