 In our last post, we looked at the harmful way the church usually interprets Jesus’ command to his followers to “take up the cross, deny yourself, and follow me”. We talked about how denying self in the traditional self—calling the self wrong, then pretending it doesn’t exist anymore—is a dangerous untruth that leads to abuse. Fortunately, it is possible to retain a sense of self, and even uplift the self, while following Jesus’ injunction. The first step to denying the self is, ironically, admitting we have one. You will never be free of yourself. You will never be able to see with eyes other than your own or speak with a voice other than your own. Your hands are yours, not somebody else’s. Their hands are theirs too, not just extensions of yours. This is all inherent in Jesus’ command! Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me.” If the self doesn’t exist, who is doing the taking up and carrying? Also, by personalizing the cross to each of us, Jesus implies that our sacrifice is part of the journey. If there is no self, what is being sacrificed, and what is the cross for? “Denying self” by pretending one doesn’t have one invalidates the need for the command. It’s a cheap way of getting the self off the cross by doing some kind of earthly penance that we prefer instead. The more you try to rid of yourself of yourself, the more you’re drifting away from what Jesus is saying. Jesus command does not deny that we have a self. Instead it acknowledges the self, then claims that the self has a purpose beyond itself. The self exists. The self is intrinsic. The self matters. At the same time, the self is not the center of all things. The self takes a journey beyond itself, through which the meaning of its existence is found. Notice that this interpretation of the command does not require a value judgment about the self! The traditional interpretation claims that the self is bad (and thus should be gotten rid of). That’s neither necessary nor helpful. Selves are often beautiful. Selves are also broken. Neither the beauty nor the brokenness sufficiently define the self.  This admission solves the terminal tug-of-war in which faith and society are currently engaged. It’s no accident that those who advocate against “organized religion” or the idea of church appeal to the sanctity of the self. The church has all but mandated this by spreading the lie that selves are bad! People who have been hurt by the world (some by the church’s very message) don’t need to hear that! They need to hear a different truth, that the self is precious and worthwhile and has sanctity. That selves are beautiful is also true. The church should be claiming this as strongly as the “broken and imperfect” piece. If anything, our communal faith journey should uplift as beautiful and beloved those whose selves have been damaged, while reminding those whose selves have been overwhelmingly affirmed by the world that none of us are perfect. Both of these are in line with God’s teaching; that which goes to the cross is beautiful and experiences brokenness all at the same time. Jesus’ command to deny the self does not speak of the quality of the self as much as its centrality. It is a claim that no matter how beautiful or broken your self is, the answers and meaning to existence cannot be found inside the self solely. Self-beauty, though real, will always be personal, not able to translate perfectly to the universal. Self-brokenness, though real, will warp any solution that relies on the self. Jesus claims that truth is found when we translate the beauty and brokenness of the self for the sake of our neighbors and the world. The journey of the cross is lived out by Jesus. It’s unique to him, both personal and powerful. But that journey was not made for him, but for the sake of the world.  Jesus’ journey transformed the world, bringing grace to all of us who are imperfect and crying out for hope and relevance in the midst of death. Through the cross, Jesus filled us up infinitely, uniting with our deaths and lives. Along with that filling comes the assurance, “You are beloved. You are beautiful. Your self does matter. Now you can stop worrying about those things and instead pour out this message from yourself for the sake of the people alongside you. Your brokenness is just another avenue through which my grace will pour. Be blessed.”
However we define ourselves in a given moment is less critical to our lives together than how that definition serves the world and each other. All these things are encapsulated in those words, “Take up your cross and follow me.” Blessings on your beautiful, broken self this day. If you are in pain, be assured that your self does matter. You are loved. To the extent you have power, do not deny it! Try not to exercise that power solely on the basis of the self. Stop. Listen. Ask what this power was given for and who it was meant to help. In neither case do you need to run away from yourself. Instead question and celebrate how God is working through it. --Pastor Dave
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 The church has long wrestled to marry the idea of faith with the reality of the self. Most of us have heard Jesus’ injunction to his followers found in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke: anyone who would be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. We’ve been struggling to interpret that ever since he said it. I’m not sure we’ve been successful. Churches often deal with the issue by terming the self as bad, encouraging the faithful to purge themselves of their selves. That quest has ranged through pseudo-Calvinist purity culture, Catholic monasticism, and everything in between. It’s a dangerous idea for a few reasons. 1. We can never really get rid of our selves. Otherwise, who is the person doing the “getting rid of”? When we try to “deny self” in that way, we replace it with whatever we’ve latched onto without admitting that new thing also involves the self. We call the new thing “universal”, but it’s really just the old self in different clothes. This is how people end up claiming that everybody else operates on “culture” or “misguided information” but THEY operate by “universal truth”. That universal truth is still spoken by a misguided, enculturated self. Denying that the self exists doesn’t actually deny the self, but give it free rein to do whatever it wants without being examined critically. It puts the self at the apex of the universe, in place of God. (Ironic, isn’t it?) 2. Churches like this definition of self-denial, because the church itself wants to be the new, universal, unquestioned truth the self latches onto. How many churches operate on exactly that principle? “Everything else in your life is relative and mistaken, but the thing we offer is universal and unshakable?”  3. This impulse leads to putting down everyone who doesn’t “deny the self” and subscribe to the “universal truth” the church offers. This includes people whose selves are already battered: victims of abuse, people of various orientations, the economically disadvantaged, women and non-binary folks, and more. The empowered people say, “If you won’t deny your ‘self’ and call it wrong, we will call it wrong for you.” This does incalculable damage to people outside and inside the church. Universal truth becomes conflated with abuse and denigration, as does God.
The idea that “denying yourself” means calling everything the self does wrong, then claiming the self is vanquished, is just plain wrong. It’s a position of the privileged and powerful, spending a little bit of their “self” collateral in order to exert control over less-privileged neighbors while retaining superior status. Few people on earth would claim that their self is perfect. Not one of us is capable of ridding ourselves of our selves. Not everybody needs to hear that their self is terrible either. Some people have heard that way too much. We need an interpretation of the gospel that admits the reality of the self, and maybe even affirms the self, without denying Jesus’ injunction to follow him in exactly the way he said. As it turns out, that is a possibility. We’re going to explore what that looks like in our next post. --Pastor Dave  This week we held chapel for our 150 preschoolers. We come together to talk in simple terms about God and the things God does for us, shared in ways three- and four-year-olds might understand. Since this is February, this month we decided to talk about love. When I asked the preschoolers what “love” means, many of them were able to name people they love. They talked about love between them and their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, and friends. These were all good things. Some of them, even at three years old, were able to talk about the concept of romantic love. “Love is when two people kiss each other or get married.” Their examples of love were well-formed and correct. They still left me worried a little. Even in their earliest experiences, our preschoolers were drifting towards a world where love fulfilled the following conditions:
Again, these descriptions were not inaccurate! How else is a preschooler supposed to talk about love aside from, “What mom and dad give me”? At the same time, we spent some time talking about the difference between how God loves us and how we normally think of love.  When we limit love to the descriptions found above, we inevitably end up in a place of loneliness and inadequacy. We define love as “not with us”, but then say it will be ours if we find the right person and do the right things for/with them. As children, we hear this kind of love as behavior control: be good or else Jesus/mom/dad/teacher won’t like/love/reward you. As we grow, we port these definitions over to romantic relationships. “I need someone to be with so I’m not alone and unfulfilled. I need to do X, Y, and Z in order to make that happen. If it doesn’t happen with this particular person, my life will remain empty.” Notice how narrow the line is between our love impulses and unhealthiness. Notice how wide open we become to being controlled, even abused, when these definitions of love stand unchecked.
We do not talk about God’s love being localized in a particular time, place, or person. We do not make it conditional, a reward for “good behavior”. We do not speak of it being out there somewhere, waiting for us to find it. When we speak of God’s love, we speak of something that’s here with all of us, at all times. We say God’s love redefines us, not leaving us broken, but filling us up. We say that even if a person were alone, without a friend in the world, they would still be beloved and beautiful. We talk of our life’s mission not as obtaining or hoarding God’s love, but sharing it just as it has been shared with us. We have plenty to give. Life is better when we do so. Starting from the assumption that we are being filled, that love is with us every day, and that we have something important to give leads to better relationships with the world—and with ourselves—than we have when we assume that we’re empty, needing to make the right decisions with the right people in order to be loved. --Pastor Dave
Ep. 60 - Amputations? Fires? General mayhem? Justin and Dave get medieval with Jesus in the words of Matthew, Chapter 5.
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!
Ep. 59 - The Sermon on the Mount continues with salt, light, and the Law. Does identity spring from what we do or who we are, or is there even a difference?
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!
Ep. 58 - Who was Jesus speaking to in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount? re these Beatitudes or platitudes? And what's up with purity culture in the U.S. anyway?
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!  In our last post we referenced a discussion of sexual ethics with our middle-school group at church. We acknowledged the weirdness surrounding the topic, but admitted that it was caused not by sex itself, but by the strange, stunted way our culture deals with it. We also affirmed that scripture gives us ethical guidelines to deal with sexuality, but these tend to be more global ethics. The specific passages of scripture that most people think deal with sex tend to be limited and steeped in their historical context. We have perfectly good assertions about ethics that cover sexuality, but we don’t reference them when we talk about sex because we put sex in a separate category than everything else in our lives. This ends up in inadequate, sometimes terrible, discussions of sex and sexual ethics. Sex and faith do belong in the same sentence. Sex is one of the ways in which human beings interact. Those interactions are meant to show love and goodness. To find the deepest sexual ethics in scripture, we need to turn to the deepest words we can find about how to treat other people. We don’t have to look far to find examples of goodness towards our neighbors. These two saying from Jesus form the bedrock of everything we do, including sex. Matthew 22: 34-40 34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  Matthew 7:12
12 “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. These are the two scriptures we shared with our middle-schoolers as the foundation of our sexual ethics discussion. We first asked, “What does it mean to treat another person well?” The answers seem to be loving them as you love yourself, seeing love of the neighbor as an extension of godly love, and treating them as you’d like to be treated. Then we asked how those statements would apply to sex and all the things that go into it. We talked about viewing other people as human beings, not just objects. We talked about being able to hear “yes” and “no” and feel healthy about either. We talked about using words that affirm and speaking things that are honest and true. We talked deeply about enthusiastic consent, and that relationships that aren’t right for everyone involved aren’t right, period. At no time did we say or imply that sex and sexual desire are wrong. We did talk about making sure that sex was healthy, good, and fully joyous for all participants. We talked about how power imbalances, inebriation, or inhibitions make it impossible to have that surety. We also talked about how it’s difficult to be sure at younger ages, and how waiting to engage in sex is smarter, not because sex is bad or mysterious, but because it’s only right when it’s healthy. Finally, we talked about the dangers of abuse, and how that can happen either in families and marriages or outside. Viewing sexual ethics as part of our larger ethical framework helped us talk about these things in an easier, healthier, and I hope more productive way. I believe there’s a larger call among us to discuss these things, weaving together sexuality and faith instead of keeping them separate, torn apart by our cultural obsessions and shame. I hope all of us, adults and teens, can have more of these conversations, and have them in a better way. --Pastor Dave
Ep. 57 - Why did Jesus call the disciples in the Gospel of Matthew? Out of what? Into what? And when DOES a new decade start anyway? Justin and Dave hash it all out.
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com! |