Category: Uncategorized

On Deconstruction and “Reconstruction”

I’ve spent a long time in deconstruction circles. I was deconstructing before it was cool. I was deconstructing before deconstruction was even a thing. In some ways, I still am.

I won’t belabor points I’ve already made elsewhere about faith deconstruction not being about Jacques Derida and how it’s hard to guide somebody else through a place when they already know the maps are wrong.

But for this post, I think it’s important to say (repeat) straight from the get-go that I get twitchy every time somebody acts as though the reconstruction of one’s deconstructed faith is God’s intended outcome of deconstruction, as though it’s where everybody is supposed to end up.

You still believe in everything you believed in before; you just have better reasons, or you’ve let go and let (somebody else’s idea of) God.

I’m not okay with that. I’ve said in the link above that deconstruction is a wilderness and a desert and everybody comes out in different places (yes, that’s the same link).

But I was talking to a friend today about the whole “reconstruction” idea, because I have been building.

I’ve been wrestling with something (I don’t think I’ve posted about it, but maybe I have), and it’s an idea that I pulled from Matthew Paul Turner and Rachel Held Evans about not just tearing down, not just saying “Evangelicalism bad!” (though to be clear, a lot of stuff in evangelicalism is bad, but I’ve written about that elsewhere) but also about… what are we going to teach our kids about faith?

So this isn’t about reconstruction in the sense of rebuilding something that was there again the same way. It’s about building something new in its place.

To be clear, if you’ve come out of the woods of deconstruction in a place of atheism or agnosticism or some other religion besides Christianity, or a different branch of Christianity has become home for you in a sense that it really is home and doesn’t still feel kind of strange or off, and it’s resolved your concerns, at least as best you think they can be resolved, if you think they should be; if that’s what makes sense for you and is giving your life whatever meaning you think it can, wonderful.

If you’re still lost in the woods and don’t trust that any of the maps are right, stay there as long as you need to in order to find your way to somewhere that feels true. I’m not going to try to drag you out, and I don’t have any magic boxes that will teleport you out. No one does. Sorry. That’s not how this works.

This is for those of us who have found ourselves on the edge of the wood in a patch of good land.

And it’s not a guide so much as an idea:

I don’t think faith reconstruction is, or should ever be, about reconstructing things the way they were.

You left for a reason. You didn’t walk away from your faith community because it was inconvenient, or because it was too difficult to obey your truth, or because your faith wasn’t real, or because it really just only needed a few minor tweaks.

You left – and so did I – because it was rotten at its inerrant core, because it was a house of cards waiting to collapse on itself, and because you realized it had caused unfathomable harm, not just to you but to others.

You can’t reconstruct that. And you shouldn’t. It’s dangerous, unhealthy, and harmful.

To borrow from Paul in Galatians 2:18, “But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor.”

In my “reconstruction” conversation with my friend today, I said that maybe if reconstruction was reconstruction in the post-civil-war-south sense, or at least how it was supposed to be, that might be okay.

I’m not a historian and I don’t really want to look it up because I’m not super concerned about it, so the analogy might be completely flawed, but from what I remember, when the USA rebuilt the south, it was (supposed to be) rebuilt in ways that completely rearranged how society worked.

People who had formerly been enslaved were granted the right to vote at the point of a gun and promised 40 acres and a mule. (That check came back insufficient funds, to quote MLK, but it was promised).

The goal of that reconstruction wasn’t to leave the same people and ideas in power. It wasn’t to make sure white people kept running stuff, or to return all the formerly enslaved people to the plantations where they had been enslaved.

It was not to put Jefferson Davis back in charge, to rebuild the armies of the southern states so they could go to war again and the south could rise again and fight for States Rights To Keep Owning Other People.

No, they decided those things were Bad, and that was not how reconstruction was going to go.

The way things were reconstructed was (supposed to be) a way that kept certain elements that were core – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I guess – but also a way that fundamentally changed the social order.

I realize that not only is that illustration not the way it happened, it may not be the way it was even supposed to have happened. But you get the idea.

We can’t go back to the place we came from. We’ve wandered around in these woods for a long time, but there’s a clearing here. We’ve been here a while and we’ve decided we’d like to stay, actually. We’d like to stay and build something here.

Something that has elements of the place we came from – the love and goodness of God; grace, scripture, some of our favorite songs and hymns that shaped us into who we’ve become

We don’t want to build in the authoritarianism, the hellfire and damnation, the penal substitutionary atonement, etc.

Which is good because we don’t want that stuff anyway. No more rickety floorboards, lava in the basement, or razorblade saws in the kitchen walls.

And there’s some good stuff we found on our way through the woods – maybe we’re bold enough to say God revealed it to us through the voices of the Other – that we’d like to integrate, too – stuff about social justice and pacifism and universalism and the like.

There are some churches nearby that we’ve visited, and maybe we’re not fully there, but they seem safe. Safe springs to drink from the water of life; safe construction materials we might use to reconstruct our faith (in the post-civil-war-intention sense).

So, if you’re on this journey and have been slowly reconstructing (not rebuilding the same way!), maybe this blog post will help give you language for what that’s like. It has for me.

MAY GOD BLESS YOU with discomfort,
at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live
deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression,
and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for
justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears,
to shed for those who suffer pain,
rejection, hunger, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand
to comfort them and
to turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you
with enough foolishness
to believe that you can
make a difference in the world,
so that you can do
what others claim cannot be done,
to bring justice and kindness
to all our children and the poor.

Amen

A Non-Traditional Blessing, by  Sister Ruth Marlene Fox, OSB.

A Few Less-Cynical Thoughts about the #AsburyRevival from a Progressive Christian Pastor

In my experience, God is incredibly, even frustratingly generous when people are looking to experience God’s presence.

People who have absolutely no business experiencing the love of God experience the love of God.

This is a post about what has been branded “The Asbury Revival.” If you haven’t heard about it or don’t know what’s going on, this link is as good a summary as any. I didn’t think I had any opinions about it, but then I started thinking about it and apparently do I ever.

1. Something is clearly happening. That’s obvious.

2. That’s not the same thing as “God started a revival there.”

3. But a good number of people there are clearly having experiences that they are identifying as being from God. I have no snarky opinions about that.

4. That’s not the same thing as not having snarky opinions about when people try to manufacture “revival.” I have lots of snarky opinions about that.

But by the accounts I’ve read, this isn’t that. People are having genuine experiences that do not appear to have been manufactured by people with fancy lighting equipment or fancy emotional manipulation about hellfire and damnation. I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but that’s what I’ve heard.

Questions literally nobody asked

Q. But what about a moral transformation? Is this a real revival if there’s no moral transformation?

A. As someone who’s

  • fairly cynical about even the whole IDEA of “revival,” and
  • has some very strong, cynical opinions about previous events that were branded as revivals, and
  • has exactly no stock in the whether previous revivals were of any value whatever,

I’m not the least bit interested in doing any gatekeeping of whether what’s going on at Asbury “counts as a revival” or not based on the social justice outcome or lack thereof, or any other criteria.

I don’t know if it is a revival, and I don’t have an opinion about that. Because I don’t care.

Q. So you don’t think this is from God?

A. I didn’t say that. I think these people at Asbury, or at least many of them, are having a genuine experience of the presence of God.

From personal experience, I suspect there are some there not having any experience of the presence of God whatsoever who wish they were, and maybe a few others aren’t having any experience of the presence of God and are perhaps faking it for clout, but I have no way of proving whether that’s true, and those experiences aren’t the experience I’m particularly interested in for the purposes of this blog anyway.

But in my experience, God is incredibly, even frustratingly generous when people are looking to experience God’s presence.

People who have absolutely no business experiencing the love of God experience the love of God.

People with terrible theology feel validated by these experiences, and people, (uh, me), who had these experiences when they had more deficient and exclusionary theology end up very confused because it seems like that experience of something good from God while believing something harmful somehow either

(a) validates those harmful beliefs, or
(b) means the experience of something good from God wasn’t real.

I don’t think either of those is the case.

I think of it like this: I have two kids. I love my kids a lot. They also frustrate me a lot, and do things to each other that hurts each other.

But if they are up for snuggles, I am up for snuggles. And while I do hope their security in my love will help teach them to be more loving and kind to one another, my snuggles are not contingent on that.

In the same way, I hope that this experience people are having at Asbury will lead them to be kinder, more just people who love God and others more and take action to live out God’s kin-dom on earth as in heaven, but if it doesn’t lead to those things, I don’t think that means their experience of the presence of God wasn’t real.

If we had to be right about everything and doing everything right for God to connect with us, nobody would have ever experienced the presence of God at all, least of all me.

Lest They Do to Us What We Did to Them

Belated thoughts about the Ark of the Covenant and the 2016 election.

I had an idea for a sermon, but it didn’t really make sense for my church, so I’m publishing it here.

In I Samuel 4, Israel fights the Philistines. They lose, badly, so they decide to take the Ark of the Covenant into battle. They lose worse, the ark is taken, and the priests are killed.

But what’s interesting to me is I Samuel 4:8-9:

 Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, in order not to become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; be men and fight.” (NRSV)

The Philistines are afraid that if Israel defeats them and gains liberation, Israel will do to them what they did to Israel.

That’s white fear: if white people in the US are outnumbered, white people will be subjected to the same ill treatment white people have subjected Black and Brown people to.

Nevermind that the goal is liberation for everyone, and that privilege is not a zero-sum game: someone else gaining privilege does not necessarily mean I lose mine.

But that fear that you’ll get treated the way other people with less privilege have been treated? That says that at some level, we already know it’s wrong.

That fear is a powerful thing. Look at that quote again:

 Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, in order not to become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; be men and fight.” (NRSV)

That fear of being treated propels the Philistines to action, and in verse 10, Israel is slaughtered and the Ark of the Covenant is captured.

But… Israel had the Ark of the Covenant when they started this battle!

In theory, at least, God is supposed to be on their side. They have a righteous cause. And they get absolutely crushed by the Philistines.

When I saw that, it reminded me of the 2016 election and how every pollster thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. She would’ve been the first female president, and Trump was absolutely terrible. (Yes, Clinton probably also would’ve been terrible, but not as terrible as Trump, or at least not so obvious and celebratory about it).

All the polling showed Clinton was going to win easily, but it failed to take into account the fear the oppressors had of the people they’d been oppressing.

Take courage, “real Americans,” so you won’t find someone else’s religion pushed on you as you have pushed Christianity on them.

Take courage, men, so women won’t start trying to control your bodies.

Take courage, white people, so that you won’t find your kids unable to get into a good school because someone else has an unfair advantage; so that people won’t assume you did something wrong just because of the color of your skin.

Take courage, cishet people, in order to not have someone else shove their ideas about gender and sexuality down their throat as you did to LGBTQ people.

Take courage, people who have a little money in your bank account because of capitalism, lest a socialist come and take what you have and give it to someone who has less.

I’m not saying everyone who voted for Trump had that fear. I personally know a number of people who voted for him because of his stance on abortion (which is a whole other thing) and for no other reason – at least as far as I know.

But I can’t help believe that what the Philistines say they’re afraid of is relevant for some, if not many voters: That they will do to us what we did to them.

(Double that fear if you stack it with the white American evangelical persecution complex).

It’s possible – if not likely – that Israel might have actually subjected the Philistines to forced servitude as they did to Israel, but in the US, people who are less privileged don’t want to harm people who currently benefit from privilege, antifa hoedown and occasional talk about guillotining the rich notwithstanding.

I don’t think that’s the whole answer to “Why did Trump win in 2016,” but I thought it was interesting and wanted to share.

It also makes me a little anxious for other upcoming elections, because, as this story shows, a righteous cause is not always a match for fear that you’ll be mistreated the way you’ve mistreated others.

What if Judas…

Content warning: Suicide, betrayal. It’s about Judas, after all.

Was a thief because he was desperate?

Maybe he had a sister, a mother,
a little brother,
a former or current lover,
held in slavery
to someone with power.

Maybe he was trying to buy their freedom
A little at a time.

Or maybe he needed a miracle
that Jesus, somehow, couldn’t
or wouldn’t
Do.

Maybe the sum of money he needed
was a little too big
To find in the mouth of a fish.

Maybe Jesus noticed,
Maybe they all noticed,
but didn’t say anything.

Maybe when the woman
broke the alabaster vial
worth $17,000 or more
his face fell
right along with his heart
and as the nard poured over Jesus
he thought to himself:

That could’ve saved them.
Maybe “the poor”
it could’ve been given to
had names for him.

What if his betrayal
Was because he knew nothing would come of it?
Or wait –
What if Jesus was in on it?

Continue reading “What if Judas…”

The Last Battle

“If you really trust God, one day he’ll [sic] show you that my problematic theology is right.”

If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time, you probably have seen pieces of my deconstruction journey.

I’ve wrestled with whether God will save everyone, whether Jesus’ death on the cross was to appease an angry God, how God feels about LGTBQ people (love), how to read the Bible, the nature of God, God’s love and God’s judgment, whether Jesus would be a Republican, creation and evolution, the rapture, pacifism, feminism, socialism, whether I believe in the resurrection…

Until this past week I thought everything was shaken that could be shaken, but that’s a different story.

But in spite of it all, I still wrestled with a narrative that I picked up from talking to people who still hold many of the beliefs I had long since abandoned:

That if I really trusted God and was in relationship with God, eventually I would come to understand why the things I’ve come to believe are horrible are actually loving and holy and righteous and good.

Continue reading “The Last Battle”

Running Errands for the Devil

When I was 21, I got swept away by the love and goodness of God. I felt that God loved me and I was undone and swept into a kind of alive faith that was all about the love of God and that was super reckless because I was ready to do whatever God wanted.

There’s a scene in the Bible where Jesus has this huge moment where God says “You are my beloved son, and I’m so pleased with you” and then Jesus immediately gets hauled off to the desert to be tempted by the devil, and I feel like that’s pretty much what happened to me.

Two of the temptations went along the lines of, “If you are the son of God, do this random hard thing because I said so.”

Jesus quoted Deuteronomy and avoided running errands for the devil.

Me? Less so.

I read a book called Under Cover that said I was supposed to submit to any and all authority because God put authority over me, which (according to the CREEPY author) meant that even if my dad was abusive and I was literally 21, God put my dad in authority over me and I needed to move back in with him and obey him. (Yeah, YIKES.)

But since there were Bible verses that got stitched together to indicate that this was exactly what God wanted, God who loved me – that is, because I was God’s beloved son… I did it. (Non-spoiler: it was terrible).

And then I found that one verse where Jesus told the rich man to sell everything he had and give it to the poor and come, follow me.

I had some money saved up that I was thinking of using to put a down payment on a house, and I felt like God was telling me that I needed to give it all away. I felt it was not as important where I give it away as that I needed to not have it.

Thanks be to God, a friend pulled me back from that ledge.

I later used that money for my freshman year of college.

It was only much later that I came to realize that these things I was doing (or being tempted to do) “for God” weren’t actually things God wanted me to do.

They had nothing to do with loving my neighbor. There was no kindness in them for me. There was nothing good for the world in it. It was brought on by anxious navel-gazing.

There was no good reason for this other than some fancy philosophizing and randomly stitching verses together to build some kind of creepy cultish theology.

It just turned out to be harmful to me and useless for the world, at best, and harmful to me and the world, at worst.

Now to be extra-clear here, I don’t think it makes me a bad person to have fallen for that. It happened because of a sincere faith. Misguided, but sincere. It took me a long time to identify that as “running errands for the devil” rather than just “I’m being obedient to God.”

It’s been super transformative to identify it as busywork I got sent off on rather than what God wanted me to do, because I don’t have to worry anymore that God will send me off to do something like that, and the fact that I can identify it as such now makes me more likely to be able to identify similar tactics in the future.

Anyway, what errands have you run for the devil?*

*I don’t have strong opinions about the existence of a personal devil. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but if there is I’ve always been inspired by this story about Smith Wigglesworth:

He claims to have awakened one night and seen the devil himself sitting in a rocking chair by his bed. He was alarmed until realized it was the devil. Then he said “Oh, it’s only you,” and went back to sleep.

The Maps Are Wrong:

Five Things You Need to Know to Guide Someone Else’s Deconstruction Journey. Step 1: Don’t.

1. Don’t.

Unless they explicitly ask you to.

That’s it. That’s the post. You’re welcome.

Okay, fine, yes, I actually have a lot more to say about this.

Every time I have encountered someone authoritatively saying, “this is how you SHOULD be deconstructing,” I just think to myself that this person doesn’t understand deconstruction. At all.

But first, let’s get this out of the way:

2. Jacques Derrida Has Nothing To Do With This.

JD is the guy who originally coined the term “deconstruction” however long ago he coined it, to mean… something, my academic friends know what,. But he’s dead and when people say they’re deconstructing, they don’t mean what he meant when he made up the word.

And they’re not wrong in using it that way. Dictionaries track usage, not some abstract meaning that God handed down to English speakers. People know what they mean.

From my research, David Hayward was the first person who used it to mean what people who say they are deconstructing their faith mean by it.

So if someone tells you they’re “deconstructing” and they’re not an academic who has ever read or even heard of Jacques D, knowing what he meant by it will probably not be helpful in you having a clue what they’re talking about and you should probably just yeet Mr. Derrida’s definition straight out of the discussion.

3. What People Mean by “Deconstruction”

It means different things to different people. Personally I like Greg Boyd’s illustration of the House of Cards, where all your core, most important beliefs are like a house of cards and if one falls, the whole thing collapses.

I’m also fond of my illustration of a snow globe: you start with a worldview where everything is connected, or a web of knowing, and how a certain professor of mine kept trying to crack my worldview and I kept patching the pieces together and trying to make it hold together until a classmate suggested I just… let it break and see what happens.

Deconstruction, for me, means calling your most core beliefs about reality into question. The existence and nature of God, heaven, hell, who goes where and why, whether arbitrary rules about morality have anything to do with faith in God, and what these pieces have to do with each other.

It’s the undoing of authority, the questioning of the most important things you believed to be true.

It’s a vast desert of lostness, an Escher painting, it’s the staircases in Harry Potter that change orientations and destinations at random.

The reason you can’t guide someone else’s deconstruction is that deconstruction by its very nature is a thing that can’t be guided by the old authorities.

Continue reading “The Maps Are Wrong:”

Should Joe Biden Get Communion?

I don’t think it’s right to jump to “yes” immediately. I think it’s right to land there eventually, but I have serious concerns about jumping directly to “yes.”

Content Warning: Literally all of the content warnings.
Racism, sexism, sexual assault, homophobia, transphobia, rape, murder, child abuse… I think the only thing that’s not in here is suicide. They will be mentioned but not discussed in detail.

I’ve been (not really) following this story about the US Council of Catholic Bishops plotting to get US President Joe Biden excommunicated because he doesn’t think abortion should be illegal.

I saw that it’s a thing the bishops are considering, and I’ve heard a lot of hubbub about it. Mostly I’ve seen this tweet from Rev. Daniel Brereton, who I follow on Twitter and greatly appreciate.

Also this one.

Before I go any further, I need to emphasize: I agree with him. I very much agree with him. Open communion is a hill I will die on.

However.

There are a few things about this tweet that make me uncomfortable.

Continue reading “Should Joe Biden Get Communion?”

The Cucumbers, the Melons, and the Leeks

Maybe the spiritual exile of former evangelicals and fundamentalists isn’t an exile at all. Maybe it’s an exodus… and Jesus is the Promised Land.

A couple weeks ago I was out for a run and listening to an episode of Make Me Smart. Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood were talking about how Uber won the fight to not have to treat their drivers as employees (provide benefits, etc). It reminded me of this poster from Despair.com:

Image: (De-)Motivational Poster with a picture of the pyramids, captioned “ACHIEVEMENT: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.”

Which got me thinking about how the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.

Which got me thinking about the exodus.

Which for some reason got me thinking about their complaints when they were wandering in the wilderness. They say in Numbers 11:5-6,

We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.

Which made me think about my own spiritual journey and the things that I miss about when I was an evangelical.

My leeks and melons and cucumbers

There was an evening this past summer when I was driving to the beach with Ryan and tuned in to a Christian radio station only to hear a Republican Christian railing against Democrats in a way that indicated he had learned about Democrats only from Fox News, or something even more partisan, and had never met a Christian who voted Democrat. While I was watching Ryan play on the playground, I wrote in my journal, “It’s like a whole other religion.”

I didn’t know it would be this hard not having a progressive Christian radio station, where the songs weren’t randomly spiced with all manner of terrible theology and the talk show hosts didn’t believe people with my political affiliation were not only unChristian but acting in bad faith.

Another time, a Saturday morning, I was making pancakes and it took me back to my childhood when my mom used to make pancakes on Saturday mornings and we would listen to the latest episode of Adventures in Odyssey by Focus on the Family. Adventures in Odyssey (AiO) was one of the highlights of many of my childhood days – especially Saturdays, when the new episodes came out.

I listened to a few episodes as a deconstructed-fundamentalist adult and YEESH. Many were… pretty bad. Stereotyping atheists as immoral because they didn’t believe in God, for example. All the villains were so because they weren’t Christians. One of my former favorite episodes, “A Name Not A Number,” featured an arch-villain named Mustafah, with a terrible fake middle-eastern accent. Another villain, if I recall correctly, explicitly said that he could do whatever he wanted because God doesn’t exist and therefore morals are irrelevant. MWAHAHAHA.

All kinds of stuff that just… doesn’t feel safe or right anymore, even though I uncritically accepted it as a child.

I feel it. I keep feeling that sense of exile, of being away from something that was good, and not being able to go back.

Except that it wasn’t good. It was filled with all manner of stuff that was harmful and abusive and traumatic. It was legalism and always being afraid – afraid that my dad would come home, or Jesus would come back before I had really really meant the sinner’s prayer; it was belief in hellfire and damnation, it was smallness, it was always being in service to either fundamentalist or republican ideas.

In other words, it was Egypt.

But I do miss those cucumbers and melons and leeks – the days when I could hear the word “Christian” and safely assume it meant something good; when mainstream Christianity was something that didn’t think I was in the service of the devil.

If evangelicalism was Egypt, then this space, this great unknowing I’ve spent much of the last decade in, is not exile. It’s the wilderness.

Just as Israel gets the new law from God in the wilderness, we who have left fundamentalism have to figure out what it is to exist, how to be human, without being slaves to harmful religion and harmful religious beliefs and practices.

As I mentioned in my last post, I feel like I’ve been wandering in the wilderness for a very long time. I thought of that as I was running, but just in the moment I did, I felt hope.

That sense of despair I’ve had for so many years about being in exile suddenly shifted to a sense of being in the wilderness, freed from Egypt, and on my way to the promised land.

The promised land.

I felt hope that one day I will see the promised land. And it will be better than Egypt. Leeks and melons? How about milk and honey.

As sometimes happens, the sermon I was working on worked its way into my own spirituality.

I was planning my Advent sermon series, “Jesus in the Old Testament.”

The sermon for the coming week was Jesus in the books of history, and suddenly, right there on the road, listening to “Make Me Smart,” I realized that Jesus was leading me into the promised land.

A half-second later, I realized that

not only is Jesus leading me into the promised land,

Jesus IS the promised land.

THAT was a good and beautiful moment.

put away the gods

I’ve been living in this truth for the past few months and I wanted to share it with you.

I’ve lived for a long time with the haunting worry that I’m wrong about God. The fear that all the good things I have hoped and tentatively believed about God might not be true.

Probably ever since I first started believing them, maybe starting in 2007 but especially starting in 2010/11.

A year ago – it turns out, exactly a year ago today – I wrestled in an unpublished post with what it might look like to commit to it, to dive all the way in. To call Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. heretics because their view of God is so radically different from mine.

I need assurances that the monster-God is never coming back, that this expression of the Christian faith, as I have come to know it, is the genuine, authentic, real-deal Christian faith… and not the bullsh*t I grew up with.

That God is love, and that’s at the center of everything.

That God is good, and that good and love are words whose meanings I understand well enough that, while they may mean more than what I understand them to mean, they don’t mean the opposite of what I understand them to mean.

The question, I suppose, is whether I need to call out these other expressions as heresies, distortions of the authentic Christian faith – even if they are heresies I have embraced. And I am starting to think that at least in my own heart, that answer may need to be yes.

I’ve been wandering in this wilderness for a long time now. Five years ago, I wrote a blog post called “The Wall I Built Against the Monster God,” and every so often I go back to trying to build the kind of connection I felt I had with God back when I was a borderline fundamentalist, and I always seem to start in the same place.

Every time, I rediscover that I have been along this road before. I read that post about encountering God in the chapel at Jumonville. I read poems I wrote that I called “Psalms for Doubters,” and journal entries, and I realize that I’ve been here before.

In some ways it feels like I’ve been wandering in circles in this wilderness.

About two months ago, I was preaching through the entire Bible on kind of a whirlwind tour. I got to the part after the Exodus, after Israel has entered the promised land, and I read these words:

Now therefore revere our God, and serve God in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:14

That is the verse before the famous “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I felt like God was speaking to me, saying that all those versions of God that I had believed in once, even that fear that maybe I’m wrong and God turns out to be not better than I can imagine, but worse… those are gods I need to let go of. I need to put them away.

It’s funny how after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, and even after entering the promised land, even after watching their parents die in that wilderness because they refused to trust in God, they still had these idols.

They still had these artifacts of what their parents believed in. Maybe they were making sacrifices to Yahweh but they were still also hedging their bets on Molech a little. “We’re going to only serve Yahweh, but I’m a little worried that the Egyptian sun god Ra might strike us down for not worshiping him instead.”

And Joshua got up on his soap box and said to them (and to me), “Quit hedging your bets. Go all in. It’s been 40 years. (In my case, 5+). Don’t you think it’s time you put those gods away?”

Put away the gods your ancestors served over the river and in Egypt.

Put away the gods your ancestors served.

Put away the gods.

The gods who were anti-gay. The gods who demanded a blood sacrifice. The gods who wouldn’t hesitate to crush my heart “for my own good.” The gods who were angry, who had no space for nuance; the gods who killed off baby Canaanites because their parents were evil.

Put away those gods.

The gods who were mean and cruel and hung you like a spider on a string over hellfire, who only gave a sh*t about you if you obeyed their bizarre rules. The gods who demanded that children obey their parents without question and threatened them with hellfire for disobedience, who demanded respect for abuse.

Put away those gods.

The gods I have been afraid of because I feared God might secretly be them, or turn into them.

Put away those gods.

The gods clamoring to replace the one true God, who is ahead, who is love and justice, who cares deeply for the poor and the alien, for the rights of the downtrodden.

Put away those gods.

Leave them on the other side of that river you crossed to get into Canaan.

Leave them in Egypt.

Amen.

Hallelujah.

So where does that leave people I disagree with, like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham and evangelicals who have decided Democrats are following the devil and the current Democratic presidential candidate might be the anti-Christ and Donald Trump is the second coming of Jesus?

Are they heretics?

Is it my job to say they are?

I don’t know.

And it turns out, I don’t need to.

The verse immediately after “put away the gods” is “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I don’t have to call them heretics, or call them anything. (But I for sure can’t worship their god).

“The Lord,” as you may know, is an English translation of the word “Adonai,” Hebrew for “My Lord,” which represents the vowel markings under the Hebrew word “YHWH,” the tetragrammaton, Hashem, The Name of God which observant Jews may not pronounce.

The name means “I Am What/Who I Am,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be.”

The God who isn’t held down by people’s self-serving agendas.

The God who is love and goodness, the God who is for justice. Whose goodness is beyond human understanding, but not against it. The God who liberates.

The God who is like Jesus, dying for his enemies.

If Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham and my evangelical friends want to worship the gods my ancestors served in Egypt and beyond the river, the ones who are vindictive and send gay people to hell, that’s up to them.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Okay, technically I can’t decide that for my house; they’re going to do what they’re going to do, but I can use my influence to encourage it.

Note 2: Apparently this thought has its roots in an idea I had two and a half years ago.

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