Middle Class Christianity

During yesterday’s sermon I talked about the opportunity the homosexuality “issue” affords us to reflect upon key Christian concepts like salvation, grace, repentance, love and judgment. Because of our sometimes narrow and even distorted understanding of these words, we may be ill-equipped to think about, much less talk about a complex issue like homosexuality.

Take the word “judgment,” for example. Since I’ve moved to the northeast, I would have to say that if there is one sin that most people assume is the unforgivable sin, it’s judging. I pointed out yesterday that judging is as essential and inevitable as breathing. Even saying that we shouldn’t judge is itself a judgment. One cannot not judge. We are all constantly judging what’s right or wrong, what’s appropriate or inappropriate, what’s helpful or unhelpful. We judge our own behavior, and we judge other people’s behavior. (Evaluating other people’s behavior is partly how we judge how we’re going to act.) Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world.” Paul tells the Corinthian church,

Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church! I say this to shame you (I Corinthians 6:2-4).

As far as the Corinthian church is concerned, Christians were failing to address issues like incest, prostitution and believers taking each other to court. Paul said that Christians who engaged in such practices were making a mockery of Christian freedom.

The critical distinction we often fail to make is between judging and being judgmental, or between judging and condemning, or between critiquing and being critical. I won’t repeat all the examples I gave yesterday. (If you haven’t heard yesterday’s sermon, you can find it at http://www.switchpod.com/users/bellref/feed.xml.) I’ll be giving a couple more examples next week.

Is homosexual practice a sin? Some people would respond with, “Who am I to judge?” If what we mean is, “Who am I to condemn?” then I would say, “Exactly.” But if what we’re meaning is, “It’s not my job to decide what’s right or wrong for another human being,” then I would have to say, “Actually, that is your responsibility, especially if that person is part of your “body,” or what the New Testament calls “the body of Christ.” Otherwise Paul’s counsel to the Galatians would be meaningless: “Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore them gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted” (6:1). We name and address sin in ourselves and others not in order to condemn but to restore. There is judgment that seeks to wound and condemn, and then there is the judgment that seeks to illumine and heal.

One of the things we judge is the significance or weight of a particular sin. We know that all of us are works in progress, and it isn’t our business to address any and every sin in each other’s lives. What we address, and how we choose to address it, also requires judgment; hopefully wise, Spirit-led judgment. Again, deciding not to address an issue or to even think about it is itself a judgment. We cannot not judge.

I’m not saying at this point that homosexual practice is a sin. I’m just saying that we shoot ourselves in the foot and reneg on our responsibility if we throw up our hands and say, “Who am I to judge?”, and then turn around and judge (even to the point of condemning) others who are trying to take this biblically-mandated responsibility seriously.

Another word that is often misunderstood is “suffering.” I’m not going to say very much about this now, but I do want to point out that the New Testament assumes that all of us are going to suffer. Suffering is a part of everyone’s life, and for believers, there is the additional suffering that comes because we have decided to follow Jesus. Sometimes people suffer just because they are Christians. Recently, I read an article by a former Muslim whose life has been pretty miserable since becoming a Christian. Sometimes people suffer for their moral stances. Dietrick Bonhoeffer suffered imprisonment and ultimately death for taking a stand against the immoral Nazi regime. Last week I read an article about a lesbian woman who began her own gay rights magazine and was a leader in the gay rights movement, but then left all that behind when she gave her life to Christ. In the article, she was honest about her struggles. She has been spurned by her gay friends, has gone through a crisis of faith, and has mixed feelings about her experiences with the evangelical community.

All of us live in a Christian culture that I sometimes refer to as “middle class Christianity,” which has less to do with our particular standard of living than a mentality or ethos that focusses on personal fulfillment and a sense of entitlement. We are entitled to receiving a certain level of income, to being married, to being happily married, to having a family, to having a rewarding job, to being healthy, to being part of an exciting church…and the list goes on. We assume that whatever we lack in any of these areas is temporary and that God will come through for us in the end. What this means is that we’re not very good at suffering. We’re not very interested in learning how to do it, because we just want it to go away, and we’ll just wait and pray until it does — but thank you anyway.

No wonder we have so little to offer people who suffer because of same sex attraction. It’s so much easier to say, “Let’s just change the rules, shall we?” My point here is not to say that homosexual practice is wrong. I’m just saying that we are ill-equipped to talk about this issue because of our less-than-biblical understanding of words like “judging” and “suffering.” This is true of people on both the right and the left. People on the left are saying, “We just need to change the rules,” while believers on the extreme right are saying, “You just need to let us pray for you, and you won’t feel these desires anymore.” None of us does suffering very well. 

Thing is, middle class Christianity isn’t biblical Christianity. I was born and raised in a middle class Christian world. Because of some middle class Christian assumptions, I’ve made some serious mistakes in my life, mistakes that I deeply regret. How have I changed? (To the extent that I have changed.) Spending time in the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, has been key. It’s a different world, and a different worldview. For me it takes reading long passages of Scripture in a single setting. Only then do I seem to get a “feel” for what life in the kingdom of God is really supposed to be like.

Yesterday I said that many people who say they like Jesus but don’t like Paul, haven’t read Jesus. They haven’t spend any extended time in the gospels. Actually, Jesus is harder to understand, harder on people and harsher in his tone at times than Paul. It was Jesus who said, “If any want to follow me, you will need to take up your cross daily and follow me.” You see, it’s not a matter of whether we’ll have to take up a cross, it’s what cross we’ll have to take up.

A basic gospel principle is that all suffering can become a gift, even if it doesn’t start out that way. Even if it’s caused by the devil, God can redeem it. It can be turned into a gift. It can become a blessing. This is the gospel, the good news; that something as evil and horrible as the day Jesus died could become “Good Friday.”

Henri Nouwen is arguably the best known spiritual writer of the last half-century. I’ve included several of Nouwen’s quotes on this blog. Nouwen was a Catholic priest whose career included teaching at Yale and Harvard, and who chose to spend the last years of his life living with the mentally disabled at a Christian community called L’Arche. What most people don’t know is that Nouwen’s sexual orientation was homosexual. This didn’t become public knowledge until after his death. For many of us, discovering this about Nouwen illumined the the intense pain and loneliness that lies just below the surface in so many of his writings. One wonders if Nouwen could have written with such spiritual depth and insight without this particular suffering. We know that Nouwen struggled with bouts of depression, once to the point of having to be hospitalized. Yet, what a fruitful life and ministry, a life that has touched millions of other lives.

Sometimes our best friends aren’t those who respond to our suffering in a knee-jerk way by trying to make it go away. Instead they point us to that biblical world, that kingdom world, where suffering can be redeemed and become fruitful. Nouwen himself wrote:

Sometimes our sorrow overwhelms us so much that we no longer can believe in joy. Life just seems a cup filled to the brim with war, violence, rejection, loneliness, and endless disappointments. At times like this we need our friends to remind us that crushed grapes can produce tasty wine. It might be hard for us to trust that any joy can come from our sorrow, but when we start taking steps in the direction of our friends’ advice, even when we ourselves are not yet able to feel the truth of what they say, the joy that seemed to be lost may be found again and our sorrow may become livable.

Just as Nouwen’s struggles with his sexual identity produced spiritual insights that have blessed many, many people, I pray that our own struggle to understand issues around sexual identity may lead to insights that will inform and enrich all of our spiritual lives.

Explore posts in the same categories: Sexuality, Sin, Suffering, Uncategorized