Sexual Orientation - Part 1

I have painted with broad strokes in this blog, but now, addressing this explosive issue, it's time to be cautious and circumspect, to paint with the most precise tool.

So what do we know for certain?

1) Jesus loves the little children; Jesus love me this I know. This is all settled. He knows all; sees all; loves all

2) Jesus died to pay for our sin; we are called to walk away from that sin, with every bit of strength we have; the gospel is participatory

3) The New Book is our guide to what's true. The whole thing, not isolated parts,
must be evaluated. The Old Book only applies in cases in which the OB is referenced in a NB passage

4) Looking at passages demands an understanding of context, ancient culture and the meaning of certain Greek words: none of those disciplines are impossible;
I believe an accurate, NB conclusion can be found to the question of sexual
orientation.

Before I continue, it is important to understand that whatever the NB says about Sexual Orientation, Gay Unions/Marriages should be legalized. This is a Civil Right, and the Church has no right to stop Civil Rights. If the Church has a gay agenda, it needs to work that out with individuals of the Lesbian/gay/bi-sexual/transgender community. Whatever gay people are, they are human beings who Jesus loves. "God hates Fags" signs are just an abomination to God.

You don't need to be a NB scholar to figure that out.

The Choice to Choose Life

I believe that life begins at conception, that God has a place in Heaven for all babies, delivered or discarded. I recognize the power of hopelessness; the despair caused by conflicting choices; the overwhelming power of lust; the misguided belief that a baby will solve life's problems; ignorance about birth control options; and the selfishness of those who should know better.

There were an estimated 1.5 million abortions the year before Roe v. Wade was decided and the same number last year (2007).

What I know about abortion comes first hand. My niece is the result of a relationship my brother had with a college sweetheart. My brother might have opted for abortion - he was twenty and had no moral opposition to it - but his girlfriend was steadfast in wanting to deliver the child. Not to raise the child, but to put her up for adoption. Abortion was illegal then, but money always trumps the law, and there was enough money between the two families to buy a good abortion doctor in the D.C. area.

Instead, my brother's sweetheart went to a Home for Unwed Mothers, had the baby, and placed her into the hands of the adoptive parents.

I wish Planned Parenthood would talk more about adoption with its clients. It has a legal right to talk about terminating a pregnancy, but it seems uncertain about advocating another path for some of those coming in to use its resources. I understand that organizations tend to lock on to a particular approach, but there is a downside to abortion - emotional baggage and depression for those having second thoughts after an irrevocable action.

Planned Parenthood does a great job with contraception, but nothing could help my friends Sally and Billy, who were so fertile together that nothing could keep them from conception. Ann and I lived in a communal house in Boston with them in 1969-70, and Sally got pregnant 3 times in less than eight months. This was also pre-Roe v. Wade, but Billy and Sally never considered a child. They received great support when Sally first got pregnant, and the commune helped pay for the first abortion, by a veterinarian off the back alleys of New Orleans. A second pregnancy brought questions and less support from the community. That was also terminated in New Orleans. There was a communal thud when she got pregnant the third time, which led to a legal abortion in California, which was in the process of liberalizing its abortion statutes. Sally didn't come back after her third abortion. She has lived the rest of her life unable to have children.

Chuck and Molly got pregnant the summer of 1969. Molly was a strong Catholic, and after I tried as hard as I could to get them to abort the child, they still opted for marriage and family. That took Chuck out of the hippie world, and it was thirty years later that he told me he knew immediately that Molly was his soul mate; that he was destined to marry her regardless of the pregnancy. Anything conceived by the two of them, he said, could never be aborted. Marriage made him an adult in a hurry, but he and Molly will celebrate their 40th anniversary in 2009. They seem happy, with three happy kids.

Bill Clinton once said that nobody likes abortion, and I think that's a fair statement. Pro-choice people aren't pro-abortion; they want women to be able to choose the outcome of their pregnancies; Pro-life people aren't anti-choice; they want pregnant women to choose to allow the fetuses inside them to live.

Planned Parenthood is committed to reducing the number of abortions by providing contraception to help women avoid pregnancy.The Pro-Life Lobby (driven by Conservative Protestants and Practicing Catholics) has concluded that the only acceptable form of birth control is abstinence. A break on this issue could end a coalition that is, historically, tenuous at best. There is nothing in Protestant Theology that prohibits the use of birth control. Abstinence may be the best message in the house of righteous believers, but how realistic is it to a street kid looking for love in all the wrong places? Not very. I want every kid to know where babies come from and how to prevent them from sprouting at the wrong time. If churches don't want sex education for their students in schools, give them out of class time to teach birth control in a more reserved and righteous way.

This is not about propriety, it's about the best way to save the unborn - that is, to keep them unconceived. Christians should bow down before Planned Parenthood in thanksgiving over all the millions of pregnancies they have prevented. Would that we had prevented a hundredth as many.

So if everyone dislikes abortion, and education about contraception and the ready access of birth control are both available to all adults (older than puberty), what more could be done to decrease the number of pregnancies that end in abortion? All candidates who wants an abortion should be presented an accurate representation of available options regarding the future of the child and a truthful explanation of what abortion is, including how it affects a woman's body and emotions.

Children under 16 getting abortions should, post-abortion, be exposed to films that explain the stages of a baby's growth in utero and have long acting birth control devices implanted to prevent serial abortions.

The pro-life and pro-choice groups must unite to stop unwanted pregnancies. Positions regarding pro-life and pro-choice need to be clarified, and rhetoric about "baby killers" and "taking away a woman's rights," must be curtailed. Will it be enough for the Religious Right to see the 1.5 million abortions become 500,000, or would it rather see 1.5 million driven back into dim alleys by the revocation of Roe v. Wade?

Can the Church reach out harder for those in hopeless pregnancy with places to live, pre-natal care, loving support and post birth assistance for those keeping their children?

I know that this struggle looks a lot like the abolition movement, but laws regarding abolition were impotent for 100 years after they were passed, 150 if you count equality as a black man being nominated for the U.S. Presidency.

I still believe that the Church should be committed to direct involvement in the lives of those it wants to minister to, not to legislation that makes ministry more difficult, then unnecessary. Why do we continue to look to the State, not to God?

It's because we're drunk on America and patriotism and think that citizenship here obligates the Church to be a legislative instrument, not an independent voice for change. Increasingly, that doesn't work for me. And it just doesn't jive with the New Book.

Paper Tigers

I remember when I first started my life as a Christian. I was inundated with inside information which attempted to build barriers between me and those outside the faith. There is a natural division that occurs when one holds strong opinions about right and wrong in a culture that has moved from those opinions, but the war Christians fight should never be an engagement against people who disagree with them. The battle is against evil; against spiritual wickedness; it is not against "flesh and blood." Jesus never looked to personalize sins; He was adamant about the sins of scribes, pharisees and false teachers. but he was more interested in personalizing salvation to those who followed Him, exposing the gap sin had created between God and man (which is what the Sermon on the Mount illustrated) and revealing Himself as the savior who bridged it.

Christians and non-Christian both have values. When absolutes standards are rejected, human beings are adept at living in the grey, at abiding in the "moral of the moment," at foraging ideas and finding ways to survive through compromise. Absolutes give birth to "temporaries," and these multiply extravagantly. I want a path more powerful than this, but unfortunately I know many Christians who take the same approach to life's challenges as those who are indifferent or opposed to Christianity. "Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream," encouraged the Beatles. Do what feels good; be natural; go with the flow; ignore the rest.

Which brings us back to the one crucial area and three critical issues of the last 40 years: sex, and sex in three areas: personal morality; reproductive rights; and sexual orientation.

PERSONAL MORALITY: Let's start at the beginning: it IS natural to want to have intercourse - early and often, married, engaged or single. The 7 year itch is real, and wanting to plant your seed in as many females as possible IS an evolutionary trait. It is natural to protect yourself from outside harm (using a gun if necessary), bear and raise children safely (getting yourself as much accumulated security as you can), to celebrate using drugs and alcohol, to dance and frolic late into the night, to play music and howl at the moon.

Dylan said "if dogs run free, why can't we?", and a girl I met while sharing Jesus at the University of Maine tempted me with that line. I thought about spreading my seed for an instant (probably 2, actually), but turned down her invitation to "talk about Jesus in her room." She was exotic and I remember the moment now, 37 years later.

But remember, it's not wrong to do things that aren't natural. We fight obesity and struggle to stop smoking. We go through rehab to shed drug and alcohol addictions. We regret past decisions about how we treated the planet. Human beings, in their most natural form, seem hell bent on wasting everything and killing those who get in their way.. We can't glorify people living closer to a subsistence level as some kind, naked ape, because they handle their environment as poorly as their cousins living on Park Avenue, maybe worse. Many of them would split to the lights of the city if they had a chance, and the Amazon is filled with a hundred thousand indigenous people who have. Natural medicine, healthy food and fiber is great, but Whole Foods is suffering right now because when the economy is bad, people eat food with pesticides on them to save a buck.

Christians are doing a disservice when they tell those outside the faith that Christian choices are more natural than theirs. Christian choices are based on faith in the revelation of God's book, the life of Christ and the traditions of the Church, and they are profoundly unnatural. For them to be followed at all is completely supernatural.

It may be normal for a teenager getting through High School as a virgin. But it's weirder in College, and after College? We're on track to the "40 year Old Virgin." Why is virginity important? Like it or not, Jesus demanded virginity until marriage. It's a discipline of obedience, but if you can't celebrate the discipline, then a commitment to virginity is lost in resentment of the instruction.

Most of the traditional moral values haven't ceased: virginity to marriage; one partner; no adultery; rest home. There is a lot more in it than that. What isn't is "hooking up" prior to marriage, adultery during marriage; divorce; serial monogamy. Put away the "what about" questions. You know their answer. The Christian way with sex may be unattractive, but it's simple and straight forward.

By the way, I want nothing to do with your bed. I reserve the right to speak the truth in love about the practices of my culture, but I have no desire to pass legislation to insure that my way is your way. I respect CIVIL RIGHTS, and what happens in your domicile is eminently YOUR BUSINESS. If God's power can't change a heart, I don't expect man's laws to. Christians are about God's power, not man's laws.

SEX: Part 2, REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Tuesday Mornings

Tuesday Mornings I have breakfast with my posse: Bill Gilmore, Dale Kardos and John Liljegren. It is probably the most important meeting of my week, which doesn't mean much, in that since I've stopped working, a haircut is a significant event in my endlessly long days.

Each of these men contribute to my life. Bill is a rock, facing tough challenges with steadfastness and, most often, joy. Dale can bring any conversation into the writings of the Old and New Book. John is a really interesting study: his intelligence and character haven't silenced the voices from his gut. He is the de facto leader of us four, and he has strong ideas about everything.

John has been following my blog some, I believe, because this morning he referenced some of the opinions I recently voiced in it. His concern was that I was advocating that Christians perfect their own lives rather than address the evils of the world. He feared that all I was doing was reducing the size of the Church while letting children, who suffer the most when family values are abandoned, suffer. John was not speaking hypothetically. One of the many things he does is work with at risk children in a disadvantaged part of Portland.

I usually ponder things before I write about them, and I have been pondering John's comments today. I find myself still of the opinion that Jesus' major concern is about the integrity of His church not the sinfulness of the world. Jesus' corrective comments about the culture around Him were specifically directed at the leadership of the Jewish religious community. He didn't rail at Rome, and never mentions (directly or indirectly) its depravity and excesses.

I was never attracted to the "Jesus Freaks" I encountered on the road who preached at me about my sinfulness. The people at The Lord's House made a deep impression on me with the reality of their community. I was chased daily for a month by the prospect of being part of it. I dealt with the cultural, philosophical, intellectual, political and theological issues about faith in Jesus after my conversion. Whoever's tool I was before that, I was unwittingly. Fighting against me might have assuaged some believer's guilt about confronting the sin of the world, but it missed me entirely.

If you read the New Book, you will find that it clearly teaches human sexuality. Jesus was celibate (He could have married without sinning); He encouraged celibacy in His disciples, though some of them were married. Sex was for committed relationships, under the covering of whatever form marriage took in a particular culture. Marriage was monogamous, though some early believers were converted with multiple wives and were not asked to shed wives to walk in faith. Divorce was permitted if a marriage had been shattered by adultery, and separation was acceptable for a number of reasons. Otherwise, marriage was for the long haul.

Today in the West, sex is part of getting to know someone. You will have eight partners (on average) before a committed relationship leads to living together; engagement and marriage are normally reserved until plans for children or pregnancy itself. The average marriage lasts 8 years and is followed by a pattern of serial monogamy.

I follow Jesus' way because it is Jesus' way. I have no expectation that anyone else, outside of the circle of faith, will do things His way. Cultural Wars are only important if something is gained through them. If children are better off raised in long term, monogamous relationships, then such relationships should be encouraged. Unfortunately, if the focus in a marriage becomes the partners first, not the offspring, then kids will inevitably be put at risk. Whether such risk is greater than that created by ongoing abusive, neglectful, loveless family environments is best determined by sociologists, whose determinations are colored by their political orientation.

As The Moody Blues sang, "just what you want to be, you'll be in the end."

It's simple for me. I have a blueprint about life. I just have to follow it diligently and make it real. And I want to say up front, it's hard as hell, and I think it was hard when everyone believed that it was the right path.

The right path is normally hard. The theologian who declared that "the will of God is the path of least resistance" sold bridges on the side.

A Victorian Mother

My mum was an aristocratic English woman, trapped in the body of a prudish Australian. I know nothing real about my mum's sexual history before she met my dad, or during the brief period they were engaged.

I knew she was repressed about this part of her life, but I also knew, from the rhythmic creaking of their bed in the the next room, that mum and dad were having sex. I found Viagra among dad's prescriptions after his death, indicating that he and my mother were sexually active well into their 80s.

My mother first explained sex to me when I was 12. It was a very incomplete description, and I became aware that sex was something decent people didn't talk about. My earliest sexual experiences were masturbation, which I enjoyed immensely. When my mother discovered spent seed on my sheets, she pulled me aside and told me that boys who masturbated went blind. It was an evil, filthy thing to do, and she was sure that I wouldn't be having any more "wet dreams." That's when I discovered the added uses of toilet paper and value of long sessions behind locked bathroom doors.

The question that grew during my early teen years was "why?". Why no drinking, smoking, masturbation, premarital sex, pornography? When I dared ask, I was insulted by comments demeaning the character of one who would ask such questions or by the more common "because." "Because" was a lame answer, but what else did they have? Both fine people, my parents were generations past absolute moral standards. They were operating on cruise control, guided by traditional values and fear of anything that challenged those values.

I struggled to break out of fear of and guilt regarding sex, but lived in the shadows of the words which had been spoken to me. I believed that sex was a natural part of life, unrelated to the "because" word, but I couldn't perform when given the chance, one of the earliest sufferers of an epidemic we now kindly call erectile dysfunction (ED).

I finally got it right (much to my relief) and got together with the woman who is now my wife. We lived together for 18 months, withstanding withering looks and criticism from both of our parents, scurrying around late at night to be together when staying with them, suffering obvious discrimination in every way from a culture still obsessed with the way things "should be."

In January 1971, Ann and I dedicated ourselves to Jesus and both decided that we should stop living together. Neither of us wanted to do something "because," but wanted to act on specific instructions we believed we had found.

There is more to this story . . .

Vegas

Contracting a name is usually a sign of fond familiarity. Nicknames are created out of affection. Some are a little rough, but most reflect true friendship. Nicholas becomes Nick, but to my relatives and wife, I will always be Nicky.

Everyone calls Las Vegas, "Vegas." I mean everyone. Only foreigners or rubes use its full name. I don't think there is affection in "Vegas," rather notoriety. "Things you do in Vegas stay in Vegas." It's a separate reality.

Vegas.

I was there from Tuesday to Saturday on a trip my wife meticuously planned to celebrate our anniversary. She wanted to take me to see Cirque de Soleil's production of "LOVE," a celebration of the music of the Beatles. The show was fantastic. It was an experience of a lifetime. I appreciate fully what my wife did. The only problem was that the show was in Vegas.

Shortly after we arrived, Ann asked me what I'd like to do during our time in town. Vegas exists for one reason - gambling, and everything else supports that. I have an addictive personality, and I could really enjoy gambling. Fortunately, I have learned that I have little luck, and gambling rewards those who are lucky. I believe that double blind, placebo using, massive test group studies would conclusively show that some people are luckier than others. And I am one of the others.

No gambling. More shows? No one in town I wanted to see. Gourmet food? I am on a perpetual diet. Shopping? I don't have to go to Vegas to discover how much I hate to shop. Outdoor activities? It was 95 degrees by 10 am and 106 degrees by 2 pm. No amount of dry makes 106 tolerable.

I liked our room; I liked the show: I got along with Ann most of the time. The truth is, I hated Vegas when I meandered through there in 1969, and I hate it today. I hate mindless, glassy eyed women feeding money (no more coins) into slot machines that never pay out as much as they take in. I am frustrated to see men ride the roller coaster at the black jack tables, losing then winning then losing again. The House can ride the wave indefinitely; gamblers can't.

I am most disturbed by the hundreds of women I saw who were dressed down in an attempt to hook up.. There might have been thousands; I only noted the ones who looked and smelled drop dead gorgeous and were dressed in outfits so scanty that prostitutes would never even think about wearing them.

My son-in-law Mike observed that people suspend their moral standards when they come to Vegas. You may not do anonymous sex in Akron, but you can in Vegas, and no one even cares. You may never pay for professional sex in Denver, but in Vegas, lines of pitch men click cards and hand out literature about immediately available call girls to the throngs walking down Las Vegas Blvd. I didn't see obvious signs of less tolerated forms of sexuality, but I'm sure you can find pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia in Vegas.

I am saddened by suspended morality. I have no right to demand that Vegas be shut down, any more that I have the right to insist that homosexual unions be banned (if I believed they should be banned, and I don't). It's important to remember that civil rights don't have to fit religious standards. The Church has no right to insist that the society that surrounds it resembles it.

Vegas can continue to be what it is. My only form of protest is to not go back there and to share my attitude about the place with others. I would strongly encourage everyone spellbound by Vegas not to suspend whatever values they hold when they are there. If you think something is wrong and you do it, you have to deal with guilt or reassess your standards. Some people wear their guilt better than others, but suspending values in the middle of the desert, drunk on free booze, squandering the summer's earnings, waking up next to someone you don't know seems to be pretty guilt inducing.

People can choose to be better than they are or worse than they are. Vegas brings out the worst in people, and I guess its ongoing popularity is an indication that humans want this, at least part of the time.

But I don't want it, at least not anymore.

Remembering

I will be off the next 4 days. Today is my 36th wedding anniversary, and Ann and I will be on the road until Saturday.

No, I won't tell you where.

All You Need Is Love

I love the Beatles.

But some people don't believe in love. They don't think that relationships can be any more than friendship and hooking up. They realize that butterflies in the stomach, passionate embraces and the sinking feeling that you have when you're apart pass. All things pass. The most you can hope for is that the great, optimistic feeling of those heady first days lasts for years instead of months. Unfortunately, the more times you've been around the block, the shorter the block gets.
The more time you've moved along, the easier it is to pack your bags.

The New Book is all about love. There are three Greek words in the New Book defined as "love." The words translate as erotic love, friendship love and perfect love. In God's economy, the most valuable currency is perfect love - patient, kind, forgiving, hoping, believing, caring. Add to that erotic and friendship, and you've got the real deal.

People want to believe in Jesus and love and hope and forever together, but what most have known is brokenness and pain, absent parents and screaming dinners, blended families and midnight weeping.

It's too hard to believe "til death do us part," so when orgasm yields to family, the expectation is serial monogamy. Twelve years of marriage, a couple of kids, then relationships, maybe even a second marriage, but probably not.

The Church should be able to address the broken nature of modern relationships, but the Church suffers divorce as much as the unchurched. There is no power in statements spoken horizontally. Don't tell me what the book says, show me your life.

I say it's real. you say, show me. That's fair enough.

A Touch of Testosterone

I know. I have a male perspective on things, and an obsession with orgasm is probably one of them. "The L Word" has taught me, however, that women are as concerned with that event as men are. It's a new world - females lions are roaming the svelte land looking to mate as aggressively as males are.

The world's different than it was forty-five years ago. We were just moving into young, unmarried, straight sex back then. We asked our parents, "Why can't I have sex with my boyfriend/girlfriend? We're in love and want to be together." Except most of us asked that question under our breath or in our heads. Sex was subterranean until 1967, then thousands were coupling publicly at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and no one could do anything about it.

The rest of the '60s was about sex and love, then Stephens Stills said "If you can't be with the one you love . . . love the one you're with," and he had nothing platonic in mind.

So it was sex within relationships until the early '70s; then sex for Orgasm because you could through the '70s; and an absolute compulsion for Orgasm into the '80; then oops ("Hefner, we have a problem") from the mid '80s on; the fire is less intense today, but safe sex can never lead to no sex, and connecting disease and a fear of pregnancy into an abstinence message is just another illustration of the Church gone wrong.

The New Book has much to say about this, as we shall see.

Orgasm and Epiphany

The early Christian Church struggled with a number of things, chief among them being the relationship of the body and Spirit, which morphed into debate about the Divinity of Christ, the nature of sin and the possibility of God buying back man's soul with "corrupted" blood.

The orthodox theology that came out of three Centuries of debate concluded that the body was not inherently sinful; it was the body surrendered to the Prince of the Power of the Air that was corrupted. This fallen nature was "the flesh," not the corporeal being itself.

Whew! The body's not evil; what it feels isn't sinful. God gave most creatures (He must have been really pissed with those left out) the capacity for immense joy and physical satisfaction, usually in orgasm, a physical release most associated with sex. He also gave man the opportunity to experience intense spiritual pleasure, epiphanies that shook houses and transformed mobs into groups of intoxicated comrades, babbling words they didn't understand.

Orgasm and epiphany are intertwined in the healthiest lives. Sex is best experienced when orgasm is wrapped with something more than that experience alone, when the moment of physical release encounters something greater than the release itself. Sexuality is most complete when there is some additional union, something transcendent. We usually call that union of the physical and spiritual love, and human beings pursue it tirelessly.

Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks find it at the coming together of their hands in the classic tear jerker Sleepless in Seattle.

At The Lord's House, my spiritual epiphany uncorked a physical response which was far beyond any sexual orgasm I had ever had. I was engulfed by a cloud and a white poker moved from my mouth to the deepest recesses of my being. I couldn't stop the ongoing surge of energy that moved through me. I was out of control, in the same way one loses control at the point of orgasm. It was even better than holding Meg Ryan's hand. It brought certainty to my decision to attempt the Christian life, and prepared me for the many tough days I've faced since them.

I really don't know how Christians can live the impossible life Jesus wants them to live without having been touched in a deep and earth shaking way by God Himself. An epiphany and an orgasm.

The spiritual and the physical meeting in a way that changes lives.

Lost Friends

I have had few close friends in my life, and after writing this blog, I have fewer. I don't think I have anything I want to take back or re-state. This Christian thing is about truth, and the things I've written have not been opinions, but convictions.

This means that those who disagree are colliding with more than my ideas: they are intersecting with the fiber of who I am.

I want to keep friends, and I believe in esteeming other people's ideas and feelings. But Jesus is dead serious, and Christ's followers in America have spent way too much time waffling around the truth.

Truth can be painful and revolutionary; it can divide and bring together; it can change you or make you uncomfortable with staying the same.

It can do none of this, however, if it's left unstated.

Over the Hill came Robertson, Falwell and Bakker

Not exactly the image that Dion presented in his song "Abraham, Martin and John," for these three Christian televangelists have done as much harm for Jesus' Church as the three statesmen did good for the United States.

It is not all these preachers' fault. TV is "cool" communication. It operates best when conveying images. It isn't an idea medium, rather a perception one. The evangelists had half a good message, but they slammed it raw and unapologetically into TV land, where many mocked its lack of polish and sophistication. If the message wasn't rejected, those presenting it were. They were prototypical Southern Baptists, with noticeable accents, puffy hair, shiny suits and patriotic giveaway brick-bract, straight from sweatshops in the backwoods of white Alabama.

Those who weren't opposed to an often legalistic message or put off by cultural flamboyance were soon mobilized against a political Christianity, which transformed the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater was scandalized by the moral imperialism of this strange alliance. Increasingly, this became the focus of the evangelists, creating a political gospel, mixing legitimate concerns with a mish-mash of patriotic pandering and historical misstatements.

The failures were underscored by the fact that these ministries were cash cows, unregulated for years by outside oversight. The lives of these men radiated wealth, and glimpses behind Oz's curtain only revealed that there was even more wealth there than imagined.

Yes. There are clean preachers out there. Billy Graham and Luis Palau come to mind. But for every Billy and Luis, there are 10 new players like Joel Osteen, whose inoffensive message and smooth style is set against questionable million dollar purchases and snits against the lack of luxury in prohibitively expensive leased planes by an contentious wife.

If there is a last word about this, let me be perfectly clear: if Jesus Christ came back today, He wouldn't be a televangelist. Take that to the bank.

Cammo

Once the New Book is in place, Christianity can easily become a systems of do's and dont's, except Jesus came to change that paradigm. His commands were about healing mankind, extending grace to the needy, mending the broken, giving vision to the sightless, and freedom to those in chains.

Because He cared for those who followed Him, He gave them wisdom about life decisions and promises about His provision.

Being a Christian is a profound life, because in the end, people will make decisions about this faith on the basis of how you live it. It has been the lives of those now gone and teaching from of those lives that have changed the world. Christianity is validated by the lives of the faithful.

That's too big a responsibility for some to bear. Instead of inviting others to be imitators of their lives, they concoct a god who is primarily interested in esoteric rules and regulations. Drinking, smoking, dancing, card playing, movies, mixed bathing, hair length, piercings, tattoos, dress, language, job, lifestyle, sexuality - these are Christ's new conditions for entering fellowship, or the new goals of fellowship.

Unfortunately, the life that others are instructed by is one that overlooks demon tattoos on the shoulder of a ratty looking guy entwined with his girlfriend in front of a strip club, whose first words to you are "What the fuck are you looking at?"

If we hide from this man, then we'll never get it right, and the legitimacy of this wonderful faith should be questioned..

Two Roads Diverged

All is not right between Christians and non-Christians. I guess the main issue for those who don't believe in Jesus is the relentless intrusion of the faithful, trying to sell their political agenda and belief system. Christians resent how closed non-Christians are and how their actions have destroyed the moral fiber of the United States.

Common Grace, admiration of the person of Jesus and much of what He said, and a recognition that some good things have been done by Christian activists can't overcome the observation that Christians hold many fanatical beliefs, and they hold them firmly, with little wavering.

It's not just Jesus Christ: it's the Books; it's rapid fire scripture ("yes brother, that's from James 1:4"), given in glass eyed detachment.

Christians are part of a written tradition: truth has been affirmed and passed down, generation to generation, kept inspired by God's power to preserve. Jesus and the Word (sometimes strangely reversed) each have authority over a believers' actions. There is no fluidity in many areas, in others, the ongoing desire to better understand the truth can lead to a reassessment about where Jesus is on certain issues (more later).

Two roads diverged in this world. There are moral free agents, whose decisions about ethical and life decisions come from various sources - good and bad. There are those whose decisions about life issues come from revelation, or perceived revelation. The roads are about personal certainty and Divine certainty, and the roads have gotten oceans apart in the United States since 1950.

With little apparent hope of coming together anytime soon.

Common Grace

I was at a concert at the Baghdad Theater in Portland, Or (my hometown) last year with my wife and close friends the Diskos. The place was jammed, and I had gotten separated from the three of them as I moved through the stifling crowd. I have fought panic attacks successfully over the past 30 years, but the mass of people around me triggered the chest pained panic I have dealt with so often during that time.

I have to get to my wife, I thought in desperation. She has always been able to get me on track. But she was nowhere in sight, and I was sinking fast. I felt the heart attack coming. I was blacking out. I would fall unnoticed in the crowd.

I suddenly realized that I wouldn't fall unnoticed. I would fall in a group of people I didn't know, but some of those people would respond with alarm at my situation, prop me up, clear a space for me to lie in comfortably, call 9-1-1, and talk to me reassuringly until the paramedics arrived.

It's not all good versus evil in this world. It's not always Christian vs. non-Christian.

There is a common grace mankind shares. It's the invisible thing that links us all. It can be disrupted by what we've done or come to believe, but it is part of everything God created. It's easy for Christians to dislike non-Christians; to resent their actions and philosophy. But Christ didn't die for only some people. He died for all He loved: , that is everyone.

I realized as I moved across the floor that this meant I was safe, surrounded by many caring, compassionate people, who regardless of their opinion about Jesus Christ, are loved by God nevertheless and show that in their humanity.

I made it to my seat. It was a hell of a show.

I have yet to have a heart attack.

aussie rules, vegemite, kanagaroos and Holden Cars

I was born in Melbourne Australia in 1949. I'm proud to be Australian, and I have a huge Australian Flag tattooed on my arm celebrating my homeland. I love Australian Rules Football, Vegemite sandwiches, Kangaroos and some Holden cars (the small, fuel efficient ones).

My father was a Yank, which means that I carry a US Passport, too. I get the same chills you do, when I marvel at men on the moon, troops in Kuwait, improbable Olympic gold and the pure character of many Americans.

Jesus never married us to our cultures/nations. Patriotism is not a necessary part of the Christian life. Jesus said give Caesar his due (non-revolutionary statement); give God His due (revolutionary because no one other than Caesar should be getting anything).

Samuel Johnson said that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," and certainly scoundrels have sold the Church the idea that the US is a Christian nation with Christian forefathers and an innovative Constitution that uniquely guarantees religious rights. No country is Christian; there is no spiritual Israel; most politicians are corrupt, happily manipulating issues in a way that makes action by Christians necessary to rescue "our way of life," by get their politicians elected.

Certain ideas will never be true: "Christian nation," "the right side in a war," 'swearing allegiance to God" when bearing arms.

Christians can choose to participate in Caesar's world as much as they want to, understanding that what is required of them by God is to pay taxes and obey the nation's laws (as they don't conflict with God's commands about helping the poor and needy and making disciples). The Church needs to filter what comes back from deep immersal in the culture ( especially from law enforcement and the military) so that it is not hypnotized by the National Anthem.

We could actually start that filtering by taking the US flags down in churches. The Church has fought the State over slavery, voting rights, prohibition and unpopular wars in the past. We are not a political party, but a moral free agent, encouraging unity and facilitating the pursuit of good policies/actions. We have 60 million people who can be plugged into these good things (environmental, reproductive, AIDS support, racial reconciliation, rescue of distressed schools, intervention with at risk youth). We are not the state, and we would be about our business whatever government ruled from Washington.

If I can stop thinking about all the great things Ian Thorpe did for Aussie swimming in the 2004 Olympics, then we can dim the lightning bolt cracking by the 41 year old women trying for gold at Beijing. Olympics time is one big patriotic blow out. Maybe American Christians should look closely at all the people and countries God loves.

Exactly as much as He loves us.

Flavors

The Lord's House was a smorgasbord of Christian faith. Because most of us were coming from varying places outside the faith, we occupied various locations in it there. Which meant that we were a wild bunch of fanatics who agreed on little other than faith in Jesus. The lapsed Catholics brought an ecclesiastical flavor to the House. They were monk like and had reverence for church sacraments and even for Jesus' mother, Mary. The Jewish believers were immersed in the Old Testament and in Jesus as He walked in the role of Messiah. People with no Church training hunkered down with the New Testament and read, trying to figure it out. What does this experience mean?

Two things kept us together: we had all had intense encounters with the Son of God; we thought that we were among the last believers in the world. We believed that we were what was left to weather the end times.

Flavors testify of disunity today, which hamstrings Christian faith. Those believing in immediate, personal grace (evangelicals) chide those who believe in sacramental grace (Catholics) and question their salvation. Liberal denominations are marbled with all sorts of belief systems, which are all summarily condemned by evangelicals without even being evaluated. And the evangelicals are divided by often tiny theological nuances.

Someone saying he believes in and is committed to the Lordship of Christ has the right to be acknowledged, wherever he comes from, whatever his race, or economic situation, in jail or in an office, straight or gay.

When the hammer falls in the West, and faith costs something again, flavors will once again be flavors. When it's uncomfortable being a Christian, the faithful alone will stand up and declare their identity, and all the differences will be complimentary. A bouquet of flowers replacing bunches of ragweed.

When you are isolated in a cell for 5 years, with no contact with anyone else, you don't ask your new neighbor the denomination of the fish he has completed in the little visible space you share.

It won't matter then; it shouldn't matter now.

It didn't matter at the Lord's House; it won't matter when the heat's turned up; it can't be allowed to matter today.