Who can you trust?

The South is full of nice pastors and nice churches. It surprised me when I first came here. There was a nice church that I went to my first Sunday in college. The ladies there offered to give me a ride from campus every week if I wanted it, then passed my name over to a church where they thought I would fit better. I wore a head-covering and they were kind of over that at their church. The new church called, sent someone to pick me up, doted on me during the service and treated me to lunch at a members home that afternoon. The nice old ladies also told me to be safe when I went home for Christmas because I wouldn't want any of the Arab terrorists getting me. It was my last Sunday there.

Then there was a nice church that I went to for over a year. There were nice young couples who were leading the small group--until the pastors found out their marriage was in serious trouble. Then one of the pastors took over the small group with his wife in their nice and very big house. I was pretty happy with the church until the day that one pastor mentioned in passing that many women consider themselves abused when they really haven't been and it shouldn't be a cause of divorce among Christians. He said it nicely. He was also nice enough to sit down with me and talk about my concerns with his statement afterwards. He explained that it was verbal abuse he had been referring to. Physical abuse would be cause for separation. I never quite trusted him afterward. Yet surprisingly it was the same pastor who gave me the measure by which I have evaluated others since. "Never follow a man's teaching until you can see into his life." He was talking about the danger of idolizing television preachers and such not.

I turned it around on him instead. I couldn't see into his life at all. It was, as many leaders lives are, opaque. You have to take the man at his image and his word. You receive charisma. You are persuaded. His wife is perfect. His kids are good. They are always dressed for the cameras. And you never get to know them at all. Pastors often perfect a combination of hospitality and isolation. Everyone comes over and no one sees them as they are. Our family managed it. I know the job from the inside. It's why I can spot it every time.

The next time I picked a church, I picked the one I am in now. It leaders are....not perfect. One of them would be more at home as the head of a construction crew. It's what he did for years and he acts like it. He's brusque, not nice. If you go to him crying, he'll probably tell an awkward joke with a little hopeful half laugh and grin. Like salt, very salty. But he'll help you out with anything you need too: a pick up truck, a couch to sleep on for the night, a visit to the hospital. You can count on him, just don't count on him for soft words. Another pastor when I started attending was the head of an outdoor leadership program. If there is ever a pastor I have butted heads with, it was him. But he was a pastor I could have a fair fight with. There aren't many of those. He moved on to Kentucky and it made me sad. We had another pastor who was an avid Rolling Stones fan and would quote some piece of classic rock, something from 80s TV and some quircky piece of pop psychotherapy in every sermon. Not to criticize it--no, he believed in it. He really believed in old rock, 80s pop, and Freudian psychotherapy, and the Bible and Luther. Though we are an Anglican church. A church in Texas snagged him up, and we are the poorer and he the richer for it.

The biggest question mark for me though was our head pastor, or as we say in the Anglican tradition, our priest and rector. He was a great preacher, of quiet and short sermons (compared to the great expositional works of my father that is). But I couldn't figure out who his wife was for the first few Sundays. I was so used to wives being on display--the great pastor props. It kind of surprised me when I figured out that he had a wife and many children, all of whom were at the church. None of whom were poster kids. He would actually pay the kids a dollar if he used their lives as examples without their permission. They had privacy.

But what was behind the privacy? It turned out he was just a plain man. His wife is a beautiful and stylish woman who has things to do besides being a second, unpaid staff member. She runs one prayer meeting a month. As far as I know-that's it. His kids go to public school and have gymnastic competitions. Two of them are adopted. All of them are loved. His oldest daughter hates sitting alone during the sermon. His wife doesn't cross herself when she prays. One of his sons has now grown up and is somewhat involved with the youth group. All of them are allowed to be themselves. And our priest is himself too. Plain and simple and incredibly nerdy. He has encyclopedias on prayer books. He consulted them when I came to the office with a pastoral question. Then he told me he wasn't sure, but his best guess would be... And that he made a C in Pastoral Counseling and it was an accurate reflection of how good he was at it. Which is true, by the way. But he is a good pastor. He is the best pastor I have had yet because he doesn't try to be any bigger than, or any different than what he is. He doesn't veneer his family either. It's the first time I have trusted a pastor as a person. Also, he has two bishops he has to answer to. I don't have to be the one who would have to correct him. It's incredibly freeing. It's why, with all the faults of my church, I haven't left. I feel that it would be hard to find that kind of leader again. I am learning a lot from watching him. And I do watch.

Jeremiah's disappointment

What do you do when you grow up in a godly, pastoral community with good friends and relatives as mentors and it turns out that everything they were doing, saying, and teaching was dead wrong? They were predicting the results of political actions--wrong. They were teaching the importance of rituals--wrong. They were teaching you the nature of God--wrong. They were giving you great promises for prosperity in your life--and their promises were lies. And they were all so very wrong.

The churches they were in were dry and the Holy Spirit had given up and left decades ago. The pastors were abusing their wives and kids. The missionaries had mental health issues that would terrify your average psychiatrist. The salvation they were preaching turned out to be a water-baptized version of hypocrisy: a nice whitewash to hide all their junk behind. A pretense at a changed life had been erected only so that no one would question the insular, rotten existence they really lived.

When you found this, you would question God. You would doubt his existence, you would doubt his word, you would doubt any inspiration and calling you had ever felt. You would doubt his goodness, you would doubt his power. You would doubt his love. You would doubt his gift. You would doubt his church. You would question any sense of obligation you might have felt to this negligent Being and his screwed up people. And you would yell. A lot. And cry. Buckets worth. And sometime down the road you would find yourself in shriveled little heap on the floor, curled in a fetal ball, saying, "I don't know, God. I don't know you, and I don't know how to pray. I can't read the Bible and I don't know what it means. And I want to give up. This is too hard to believe. But if...If you might be something different than all this that I've seen... then maybe...."

How do I know that process? I know it because I lived it. Not just my life with my messy family, but a half dozen or more Missionary Kid friends with their families deserting them, abusing them, neglecting their basic medical needs then blaming them for their broken bodies. Divorces, sex addictions, alcohol addictions, domestic violence--all within the missionary community that I was supposed to revere. We were the priestly cast. This was the priestly cast. The role models of the church. This. Mess.

Jeremiah was a priest. A priest from a small town who had always looked forward to going to Jerusalem and serving in the temple. That is a priest's life goal. He was given the gift of prophecy and felt honored. He was going to join the ranks of prophet-priests. He had listened to them all his life. They gave the people of Israel such comfort, such good guidance. They lied.

Jeremiah discovers this and explodes! He states that no one, not a single person can be trusted (9:4-6). He asks God to punish people (12:1-4). He mourns the "heritage" which he has had to turn against (12:7-13). He tries to alter God's word by reminding him that the other prophets promised God would save Israel and not destroy it (14:13). He prays for people even though God had commanded him not to (14:19-22). He pleads with God when his prophecy dries up (15:15-18). And finally, after years of telling everyone the truth only to have them all go about their lives and make him look a fool, Jeremiah shouts to God: "O Lord, you have deceived me and I was deceived!" (20:7). There is no possible stronger way to call God a liar. The word of the Lord has become for Jeremiah "a reproach and derision all day long." He thinks "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," and then finds that he cannot avoid this. He has to speak what he has learned.

Jeremiah's is a priest who loves the priesthood, who loves the word of God, who loves the worship of God and who loved God himself. Yet he has been betrayed. He is betrayed by the priest hood. He is tricked as a young man thinking things to be the word of God that are not. The worship of God has been twisted out of reasoning yet kept enough like the original to be a parody. And who is God? How can a young man who has been so disappointed by his mentors and religious leaders possibly know? Yet whoever this God is, Jeremiah is his prophet. And he is driven by a love too strong to give up on his people, his message, his God. A betrayed and disappointed love that holds on.

What do you do when you have to speak against the community you grew up in love with? The people you were so proud to be a part of? The nation you were honored to be from? When they are wrong. When they punish you for speaking the truth. When you are expected to keep secrets and keep silence. When you want so much for your anger not be just anger but to bring someone healing somewhere. To build something. But everything around you is built so badly that you have to tear it down.

I hate it. I hate every time I have to speak out against it. I give up too easily. I lose my voice. I walk away from the conversations. I dream about joining a different community and abandoning my original one altogether. How can I prove to someone that their economics are ungodly? That their "calling" is ruining the basic structure of piety required of their lives? That the Bible they believe they "know" is not the same as the Bible the way it was meant to be read? How can I sound sane in the madness when I am so mad at them? How can I possibly communicate that my "heresy", my "disloyalty" comes from my love of this very community? That I am unwilling to let it go stubbornly down the drain. That I will love God--even if I have to totally relearn who he is. And all this is about as pleasant as having a tooth pulled. The same tooth pulled over and over again.

I guess that is why I try to hide sometimes. It's why I prefer not to be introduced as a missionary kid. Why I have definitely stopped using the term evangelical to describe myself. Why I go for months without reading the Bible because I am so wounded by its interpretation. Yet its words echo around and around, gaining new meaning with greater distance--a big picture.

I am grateful for Jeremiah's moody and depressed Scriptures. Without them, I wouldn't have the narrative I need to know what to do with the betrayal of this thing called the church. I'm not sure that I do know entirely even with Jeremiah. His story isn't hopeful. It just provides one avenue that I can live. One life in which I can see a bit of my own and grasp onto a tiny bit of something like hope, or at least like determination.

I'm not sure what irritates me more, but let me give you a few scenarios.

1) That brilliant evangelical professor who managed to avoid all liberal, feminist, Catholic and Orthodox sources--and looks at you like they would be totally and obviously irrelevant to his topic.

2) That brilliant and liberated seminary graduate who assumes that since you are a woman you obviously have the highest respect for and agree with all the feminist authors he has ever read--though all those authors disagree with each other.

3) That well meaning church person who takes care to make sure you understand that the gospel is the main message of the Bible--without asking you any questions and therefore missing the fact that you just spent the whole last year teaching this.

 I am still struggling with the feelings that I got all last year though this summer. The looks and comments that people would give me suggested that my teaching Bible was either somehow a cute and sweet little thing, or a dangerous liberal feminist experiment, or else that my views were horribly old fashioned and I wasn't nearly daring enough. And though the last is closest to the truth, what I'm wondering is, How the hell did I manage to get accused of all three at once? I love theology, but my experience in the world of Bible scholars so far has not been very encouraging. I'm torn between wanting to move to more daring communities where I would be more welcome or moving on to a different discipline all together. I have several other fields I enjoy just as much that don't result in nearly the same level of personal attack. But then I think, wouldn't that just be giving in? Isn't that exactly what all those nay-sayers want? I will have lost the right to be on the field if I take my ball and leave now. And yes, I do want to play on the same field as the men, in the same sport as the men, and be as good as the men. Theology isn't dependent on body mass or the circumference of your biceps. So I think I ought to be allowed.

What the Bible doesn't say

Teaching Old Testament Survey this last year made me take a deep and deeply discomforting look at my beliefs about revelation, inspiration, and canonization. My journey into the topics actually began three years ago when I bravely endeavored a master's thesis on the topic, The Mother's of the Disciples. By the end, my topic was more closely, Mothers of the Gospel. One day, I will have both brains and guts to rewrite and publish it under that title. But in terms of inspiration and canonization, the Gospels and the New Testament are straightforward. They name as their sources real historical figures who we can place in historical time and space. We even have copies of the documents showing up within the century in which they claim to be written, nearby where we know their author to have been. It is immensely comforting that way.

Not so with the Old Testament. Even the parts of the Old Testament that look like they claim an author are--well--not necessarily by the author claimed. The Books of Moses: probably not by Moses. Isaiah, not probably written by Isaiah. The Proverbs of Solomon: collected several kings later. The Psalms of David: only half by David.

So what in the world does someone who believes in revelation do with this? I do really believe the Bible contains revelation in both the Old and New Testaments. In fact, if you believe the New Testament is reliable, you have to believe the Old Testament is reliable. You are logically obligated to this conclusion because the New Testament cites many portions and passages of the Old Testament as its source of authority.

But there are other books that the New Testament cites as well. Books we don't have.

And there are books the Old Testament cites as its sources of authority, books like "The Book of the Wars of the Lord" cited in Numbers 21: 14. The Book of Jeshurun, chronicles of various seers and prophets and kings, books that discuss angelic matters, books from which the proverbs of Solomon or the psalms of David were collected. There are all sorts of books--real, authoritative, inspired books; books with authority to be cited as sources of significance in which the readers of the Bible could find the historical and spiritual record of the events cited only in brief in the text we have inherited. But these books to which the authors refer were more important to the authors than their own work. The authors looked to the books they cited as their sources of history, of revelation, for discussion of angelic mysteries. If the author of Kings had thought that the book of Kings was all we would have, he would never have written it as he did. He did not believe himself to be the final word of God. He believed he was writing the things of God in a way that God would approve of. Did he think that two and a half, maybe three millenia later that would be all that remained as inspired canon? I doubt it.

Which is why I have reached the conclusion that we cannot deduce anything from what the Bible doesn't say. Frankly, we are missing pages of our Scriptures. The pages we are missing might very well have something to say on the topic. But we don't have those pages. It's not simply that those pages have been ignored for centuries or passed out of popularity around the time of Constantine. Some were, some did. But some passages were simply destroyed. Perhaps they were burned at the library of Alexandria, perhaps they passed out of mind when Baghdad was so badly ruined that blood ran ankle deep in the streets, when bishoprics sat empty or illiterate men held the office in cities hundreds of miles away passing the position down to their illegitimate sons. Perhaps some texts had passed out of existence a thousand years before, when the temple in Jerusalem was sacked and the gold carted off; or the other time, when it was burned and the gold melted down over the rocks, each turned and scrapped so that a soldier could bring home more booty. Did texts from the tent even make it into the temple? A tent doesn't provide much protection from the elements. They didn't have archival paper back then. Some texts would have been stored in jars, but even jars risk mildew. Some in chests, but even chests get termites. A few treasures, like the Ten Commandments perhaps, would have been preserved by being carved into stone. The other best way would be clay tablets. But we don't have clay tablets of the Pentateuch dating back to this time. It doesn't mean there weren't any, but we don't have them. It's a problem for anyone studying the Old Testament.

What is it that the Bible once said, that we don't have anymore? It would make a difference in how we discuss things. But I can't argue my points from what the Bible doesn't talk about. How did Deborah get to be recognized as a prophetess? I don't know. The Bible doesn't say. Perhaps she wrote a book that did say. I just don't have it. What was her role as a prophetess? Beyond the short snippy little descriptions of judging from under a tree (what?) and leading a single battle where someone else got the credit, I don't know. Perhaps she offered sacrifices: it doesn't say she didn't. Perhaps she only gave women marital advice, and the battle was the single exception. Who is to say? The Bible doesn't. Perhaps it once did. Perhaps we should listen for echoes of what it once said in the histories and traditions that have made their way down to us. But in the mean time, the conclusion to which OT studies led me most firmly is this: do not argue from what the Bible doesn't say. A great deal of what it did say was lost.

I had a conversation which kept me up writing last night. Here is an edited version.

There is no one so powerful as an isolated teacher of religion. Even if they don't think of it as religion, but that is what it is. It is a belief systems. Their beliefs control people. Nothing in the world is as powerful as that. I can't let just anyone control me. All sorts of people will offer to teach me a million life changing belief structures. How can I choose between them? Who would I trust? Why would I let one person shape me--one, out of a million--control my inmost thoughts?

If you are my friend, I would give you that power. That is the only reason I ever would. I only give my friends the power to determine the course of my life. I give them a voice in shaping my conscience. When they say, "I am gay. I love God. I think He loves me." I say, I know you. I love you. I know I want my God to love you. I know you are my friend, and you do not normally tell lies. I do not assume about my friends that they have told a lie when I have no proof. When you tell me you experience God's love, then I trust your experience. I add it to my worldview. Maybe it is uncomfortable. Maybe it means I have to rearrange the furniture in my spiritual house. But you are my friend, and you are welcome. I will make a space for you to fit. You will shape my worldview, because you are in my world.

My friends tell me about the world and about religions that are found in it. When I think about religion, I think of several friends who had siblings abused by their youth pastor. I think of terrified little kids who were spanked for their sanctification. I think of missionaries who left their families to do God's work. I think that I don't like that kind of religion. I don't like it at all.

But I also think of other friends. When I think of prophecy, I think of friends who have prophesied. When I think of visions, I think of visions my friends have seen. I think of the Spirit as one who has been among us, among me and my friends when we were laughing or maybe crying together. I know God. He is one of my friends. He too shapes my worldview because He too shapes my world.

I will only trust what you say about God, if He has been in the room with me at the same time as with you. If we've had a conversation with Him together, then I know that you know Him. I know we are talking about the same God, though we might have very different relationships. But if we've never met with Him together, then I can never be quite sure. Perhaps our conversations have had similar scripts, but I can't know we have have a similar God.

I know a Spirit who is alive and dangerous. He sometimes hurts me. Sometimes He leaves me alone for much longer than I asked for. My God sometimes lets things happen that He doesn't want. Sometimes silly things I ask for and shouldn't have. Sometimes really terrible things, like missionaries who abuse kids. Yes, I know. It's happened close to me. It's happened to me. Don't try to prove from the Bible that God had a reason for it. He didn't. He hated it. My God sometimes hates things.

My God is a picky God. You have to act the way He likes around Him, and He's everywhere. You have to be nice to old people around Him, and you have to be nice to little animals too. Actually, I am picky about how my friends act to old people too. My friends are like parts of me. I care about how they act. God is also picky about other things being done His way, like He wants you to use water and food and wine to remember Him by. Most of my friends like to be remembered. They like you to keep in touch. My God is the same way, because my God is my friend.

My God is cryptic, persnickety and moody. He's also funny. He likes to pull pranks and make puns. He likes people who have the courage to fight with him. That's why we get along. We're always fighting. It's our relationship.

I always tell Him things that need fixing. Sometimes He tells me its my job. I say its too big and He is the cosmic fixer. We fight about that. I yell at Him when He lets bad things happen to people I like. I yell at Him when His people do things to me that I don't like. Yelling is one way we talk. Sometimes, I yell myself out, then I have a good cry, grab a cup of hot chocolate and watch a movie. When the movie is done, I slip out to the balcony. "Oh God," I say, "the stars are beautiful." And He grabs a cup of hot chocolate and sits out there watching the night sky with me.