Be Strong, Be Kind, Be Reasonable

I haven’t done this in a long time.  For one thing, no one was reading them, so no one was missing them, but mostly because I just didn’t feel moved to say anything.  But I am moved to continue now and then to work on them, so I am going forward, assuming that someday these things are going to be of use to someone.

 

I thought about writing one after I saw Heaven Is For Real.  As a movie, I suppose it was okay, but I couldn’t really watch it, because I was distracted by the attitudes of some of Greg Kinnear’s parishioners.  Maybe this was just added for plot twist, but I was bothered by how much they were bothered by the idea of someone saying Heaven is for real.  And by the newspaper giving credit for the boy’s recovery to a prayer circle.  If they didn’t think the prayer circle was going to work, why have a prayer circle?  And if they did think it was going to work, why not give credit where credit is due?  What kind of witnessing is that?  Hiding your light under a basket, that’s what that is.  But I suppose there are people professing to be Christians and sitting in pews every Sunday and not really believing that the things they are saying they believe will come to fruition.  I don’t get it, but I suppose it happens.  And I didn’t have enough to say about it to create a post.

 

And maybe I don’t have enough to say this time either.  But lately, I have been running into a lot of non-believers, and I have been having a hard time figuring out how to deal with them.

 

I know that there is a very small chance that anything I say could change their minds, but I also feel that I must say something.  We are supposed to bring as many people with us as we can, and it would be wrong not to try.

 

And I also know that someone who has decided not to believe will use whatever they can as a reason to do so.  Or not do so.  And I know that anything I say to them will only sound foolish in their minds.  But I still feel that I should try.

 

On the other hand, it feels almost like walking into a trap.  I don’t want to debate specifics with someone who doesn’t believe the whole.  They want to talk about the pieces when they don’t understand how the pieces fit together.  And since they don’t understand it, any answer you give is dismissed.  And I am getting tired of being attacked by people who don’t understand what they are attacking.

 

Generally, I just feel sorry for people who can’t open their minds or their hearts or step away from their calculated logic long enough to experience the true joy and wonder of God and Christ.

 

And I try to remember that most people who are hostile towards Christians feel that way for a reason.  They have history with people who didn’t understand or misrepresented the word and try to impose difficult beliefs upon them.  And I am sorry for that.

 

In one of his sermons, Joel Osteen said “You are the Lord’s Personal Representative”.  Personal Representative.   That’s important.  I don’t just represent a faith, I represent Him.  If that weren’t such a long phrase, I would write it on my hand, so I would see it and remember it whenever I am about to open my mouth and be rude.  You can’t be rude, you are the Lord’s Personal Representative.  What will this person think of the Lord if you are tacky?

 

So before these non-believers all I can think to do is Represent.  Be strong, be kind, be reasonable.  Listen, nod and present my point of view.  And walk away.  Represent by example.  At least that’s what I think I should try to do.  I try to remember that we have been promised that the Holy Spirit will supply the words when we don’t know what to say.

 

And I try to remember when someone asks those What If and Why Does He questions, whether they just don’t understand or they are trying to trip me up, that Jesus said we were not to put God to the test.  That may not be the answer they are looking for, but it will have to do for now.

 

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  Ephesians 5:8 

A Point of View

It was brought to my attention recently -- because my daughter posted a link on facebook -- that the Salvation Army does not include gay people in their organization due to their interpretation of Romans 1:18-32, which they believe states that homosexuals, particularly homosexual parents, which I assume means gay people who adopt children, should be put to death.

This raises a couple of questions. 

First, do we discard everything the Salvation Army does because we don’t agree with them?  I made a joke on facebook about not buying my work jeans there anymore, but the truth is I don’t shop at the Salvation Army.  I don’t find anything there.  I shop at Goodwill and commercial second hand stores.  But I do put change in the bell ringer pots, and I’ve done the Angel Tree a couple of times.  And if we all stop doing that, then people who need our help, maybe to have a Christmas dinner or Christmas presents under the tree or a warm coat, could go without.  And I remembered the passage where a couple of the disciples tell Jesus that they saw a guy casting out demons but not doing so in the name of Christ and they told him to knock it off, and Jesus said No, don’t do that.  Let him be. 

So, I decided that as long as the Salvation Army was doing good things, and there wasn’t anyone else offering the same thing, it was okay to drop change in the bell ringer pots.

And then I looked at Romans 1:18-32.

I am not going to type it out here, because it’s a rather long passage, and that’s a lot of typing, and I wouldn’t want to infringe on any translation copyrights, and some of it is not pertinent.  But it is a rather inflammatory passage.

The first thing you have to do before looking at anything that comes out of Paul’s letters is to remember who they were written to and why.  According to the notes in my Bible, Romans was written to Christians living in a dangerous time, in a city that didn’t particularly want them and had already demonstrated this through violence.  Paul was trying to convince them to remain true to their Christian ideals while not drawing too much attention to themselves.

I thought it was very interesting that they go all the way back to verse 18 to start, because like all good Topic Sentences, verse 18 lets us know who we are talking about.  “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.”   Verses 19 through 23 talk about those to whom God was revealed but who chose to reject him.  Verse 21 says “for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.”  And then he talks about idol worship, and he says that God gave up on these people and let them be as wicked as they wanted and let all the bad things that their bad behavior created fall on them.   That particular thought is repeated a few times.  God just let them fall into degradation, because they chose to ignore him.

Homosexuality isn’t mentioned until verses 26 and 27. “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions.  Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another.  Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”  (The notes in my Bible say that this isn’t actually talking about homosexuality but about people whose sexual appetites have gotten out of control.)

Then there are a whole list of people who are worthy of death.  Including gossips and rebellious children.  I am a terrible gossip.  And I don’t know many children who would make it past the age of fifteen, if we got rid of everyone who rebelled against their parents.  The list also includes haughty people, and boastful people. 

I looked at three different translations, King James, God’s Word and Revised Standard Version, and none of them say the words “put to death”.  They say worthy of death and deserve to die.  But there is quite a difference between those statements.  Put to death implies the act of killing. 

We also need to remember that when Jesus talks about death and dying, he was usually speaking of the spiritually dead.  As in Let the Dead bury the dead.

So what I get out of this is that there were people who became Christian, confessed to loving and knowing God, understood what it was all about, but turned their backs on God to become idol worshippers and porn addicts and evil nasty people, and God said if that’s how you want to be, okay, be that way.  I will let you sink into the muck that you are making.  And you deserve the spiritual death you are experiencing.

That’s what I see.  Someone who wants to see God condemning a particular group of people that they don’t care for or fear or who creep them out could possibly see something else.  If they shut one eye and turned the page sideways.  I have been listening to sermons recently by a man who is really on about traditional churches who in his view are misrepresenting the message of Christ, and he’s seeing the church symbolized in every passage, every parable.  I don’t see it, but he’s looking for it, so he does.

We have the choice of how we decide to interpret the Bible.  We can look at verses with an angry, militant view, and we will find what we want to find.  We can be directed by our fear and our anger.  Or we can look at the verses with love in our hearts. 

 

The Kingdom of God is among you.  Luke 12:17