A Long Obedience In The Same Direction

My friend, a courageous LGBTQ advocate, went to a musical over the weekend and posted about it on Facebook.  I caught up with her at work today to talk about it. The musical was "Pray the Gay Away" .  It shares the experience of LGBTQ people as related to the Christian church.  It has a scene depicting shock therapy to "correct" a gay man's improper sexual urges.  My friend told me she wanted me to see the musical. I told her I was uncomfortable going because the way it was marketed made it appear that people of faith would be lampooned.  I asked her if it gave a caricature of the right wing fundamentalist or if it dealt thoughtfully with the challenge Christians face between loving LGBTQ people and upholding their belief in the authority of scripture. She told me there is a scene in the musical near the end when a parent of a child who has come out sits with a clergy member, discussing the scriptures that forbid homosexual behavior.  She said the mother

Today I turn 50.  It's caused me to reflect on these past ten years and many changes that have happened in my life. When I turned 40 it was 2009 and I was in transition from working full time at Christ the King Network Resources back into part time church pastoring and part time administrating.  Our children were 13 and 10. There were fears of what the teenage years might bring, but our family of four was intact. When I turned 40 I knew there were some troubling aspects of the version of Christianity I was living and teaching to others, but I still buried those questions and doubts deep within me, fearing speaking them out loud or really seeking different answers. In the past 5 years I've grown up a lot.  Trials of raising teenagers who are now out on their own have tested me and forced me to examine who I am, how I react to things, and what it means to have healthy boundaries.  Through self examination and the help of a counselor I've identified patterns of thinkin

I'm extremely blessed to live across the street from waterfront properties in my neighborhood.  I'm doubly blessed to have wonderful neighbors who have told my wife and I to come over any time and sit on their adirondack chairs overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  I took them up on that offer last night and was treated to the kaleidoscope of changing colors in the sky including this picture. After sitting in solitude for a few minutes, my neighbor came out with a couple glasses of wine and we enjoyed the beauty in front of us together. He asked me, "What does this bring to mind of God for you?"  Interestingly I had been thinking about that already.  For as I sat and watched the sunset I thought back 24 hours to a comment a friend had made to me.  She said how amazed she is that God paints the sunset for us every night.  I understood how she felt, but my internal thought was, "That's a beautiful sentiment, but I have to disagree." Does God act

For decades I've been reading the four accounts of Jesus' life and teaching - the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  From a young age I've enjoyed reading "red letter" editions of the Bible which use red fonts for the words spoken by Jesus. This has the effect of lifting those words up a little higher off the page.  These red letters communicate to the reader, "Pay attention to these words more than the rest." But are those the words that Jesus really said? Here are some thoughts about that issue. First, Jesus spoke in Aramaic.  The gospels were written in Greek.  They are translated from the Greek manuscripts into English.  Anyone who has ever worked translating from one language to another knows there is NEVER 100% word for word accuracy because different languages work differently than each other.  Translators have to come up with different sentences to convey the meaning of the original speaker. Second, the gospels were not writte

I've been reading the Bible several times a week for a few decades.  There are not too many times I'm surprised by someting I read at this point, because I've read it before, and many parts of the Bible I've studied in depth. But I have to admit that when I read the Bible, even though I'm very familiar with the words, the actual meaning and what I'm supposed to do with those words here in 2019 on North America can be difficult to discern. This hit me recently when I read "The Parable of the Wedding Banquet" in Matthew 22.  This parable starts out with Jesus giving this introduction, "The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son."  So, as I get ready to read this familiar parable, I figure I'm going to receive some helpful information about how the Kingdom of Heaven - God's rule and reign, God's realm including God's interactions with God's creatures - works.  Here's the parable:

We've had a very difficult past few years navigating a lot of pain and brokenness in our relationship with our son.  Recently, after a long time of silence between us, we spent some time together.  People around me who know how difficult it has been talked with me about the situation, and I heard a few of them say things like "You and Ann are so strong."  "I can't imagine how you two have remained joyful through this."  "I think you've handled this really well." Those are obviously nice things to hear, since there is regularly a voice in the back of my head telling me that how I've handled things has been wrong and that I'm to blame for the pain and brokenness.  But when I heard the nice things from my friends, I've said things like, "Well, you just learn to be strong day by day."   Or something like, "It's been quite a learning curve." But I realized yesterday that I've missed an opportunity to speak

For the past few years I've been exploring answers that help me with many intellectual difficulties I've had with standard Evangelical answers to questions about the Bible and the Christian faith.  I've assembled quite a collection of books by authors like Pete Enns, Brian MacLaren, Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, and Thom Stark.  I've listened to countless podcasts by these same authors or others whose thinking parallels theirs.  This morning I met with a friend named Scott who has been exploring down the same path I've been traversing.  We are both deeply committed to following Jesus Christ.  And we're both coming to grips with the fact that we no longer believe the same way we did earlier in our lives.  We get together every couple of weeks to discuss what we've been reading, listening to, thinking about.  It's exciting to have someone to voice doubts, questions, new ideas, wrestlings over matters of faith with.  It's good to know there is no que