Christianese, Bad Mistakes, and Embracing Sin

For some unknown reason, Christians have developed their own language called “Christianese”.  Nobody teaches a class on it.  In fact, many Christians would claim that this secret language doesn’t exist.  But, the further you are immersed into the culture of Christianity, the more familiar you become with “Christianese.”  

We use phrases like “bearing fruit”, “in the world not of it”, and “washed in the blood” that, when used outside of the Christian micro-culture, only isolates and segregates those who are not a part of it.  

Watch what happens when those in the “secular world” (more “Christianese”) try to decipher the language.

However, there is one term that has been so overtly “Christianized” and so egregiously misused that it has completely lost its original potency…SIN.

Sin is an uncomfortable and somewhat antiquated term that is only used in religious contexts.  When my kids disobey, I don’t say, “You’ve sinned against me!” When I do something wrong at work, my boss doesn't call me a sinner.  When someone is tried in court, the judge is not convicting them of their sins.

It's uncomfortable because it leaves us with no wiggle room- no one to point the finger at.  We can't put our sin on someone else, and it leaves us feeling a bit hopeless and condemned.  So, in order to escape from the harshness and weight of the word, we use a different term. A friendlier term.  More culturally acceptable.

Mistake.

We joke about bad mistakes we've made in the past.  How you broke our arm at that party.  That goth phase you went through in college.  That one girl you dated who still likes every one of your photos in Instagram.  Those are mistakes.  A mistake is something you made on a math test.  A mistake is what politicians call their affairs.  A mistake implies you had insufficient knowledge- that you didn't know any better.

But what do you call a premeditated mistake?  What do you call it when you know you shouldn't do something, but you go ahead and do it anyway?  What do you call it when you know you shouldn't be drinking again, but you do it anyway?  What do you call it when you know you shouldn't be losing your temper at your kids, but you do it anyway?  What do you call it when you know you shouldn't be sleeping together, but you do it anyway?

Why do something that hurts you, and then do it again?

Maybe, the issue is deeper.  Maybe you're not a mistaker.  Maybe you're a sinner.

A sinner is basically somebody who knows better but does it anyway.  And that is so much better than being a mistaker.  Because, if you are a mistaker, than you have no need for forgiveness- only correction.  And, if you are unable (or unwilling) to be fully corrected, than you will forever be a mistaker.  Forgiveness is the way out of our mistakes.  The only catch is we have to call it what it is.

Sin.

Whenever Jesus talked about sin, he talked about it in the context of a relationship.  Sin breaks relationships.  And we get this.  Think about the damage that is caused in your own relationship when somebody knowingly chooses to do something hurtful against you.  When that level of damage occurs, it's not enough for the other person to say, "I'll do better next time.  It was just a mistake.  I didn't know."  No!  Something in you knows you can't go on because admitting a mistake happened doesn't restore the relationship, does it?  If they think it was just a mistake, then they won't be sorry. 

The only way for the relationship to be restored is for the offender to acknowledge they knowingly hurt you and embrace the fact that there was an offense ("Christianese"= repent and ask for forgiveness).

When Jesus talks about sin, he talked about it in the context of the relationship between God and you.  He said that God wants to restore the relationship between Himself and you.  But, the only way for that relationship to be restored is for you to ask for forgiveness.  But, you're not going to ask for forgiveness until you acknowledge the fact that you have sinned.  

You are a sinner!  Embrace it!  Own it!  Acknowledge it!  Quit pretending that you have your life all together; that with enough will-power and self-control you can change the behaviors and choices of your life.  You know you can't.  Your wife certainly knows you can't.  And that counselor you visit who claims you will one day unlock the key to changing your behavior knows you can't (but you're paying him $100 an hour, so he's not talking).

The difference between Jesus and so many Christians today is their view of sin.  I know countless Christians who use sin as a form of condemnation and an impossible burden to overcome.  They bludgeon people with their sins while forgetting about the one who can forgive it.

Jesus took a different approach.  He wanted you to own the fact that you are a sinner.  Quit hiding behind it, just come out and admit it (nobody's perfect anyway, so he said).  He claimed that if you owned the fact that you are a sinner, that you don't have it all together, and that you need help; only then would you be able to seek the forgiveness you've always needed to be apart of the relationship you never knew you wanted. (Read Jesus' story here about forgiveness) 

I know we would all like to think that we are just mistakers in need of correcting, but we are in fact sinners in need of forgiving.  That's hard to admit, regardless of what you think about Jesus.  Embracing the idea of sin alone leaves us feeling condemned.  So we resist (probably because condemnation is the loudest theme in the Christian church...especially if you are a "None").  But, Jesus taught that embracing the fact that you are a sinner is actually a means an end- an end that you can't get any other way.

But that's for next week.

In the meantime ask yourself this:

Do you resist the idea that you are a sinner?  Is there something offensive about that?  If so, why or why not?

Be open.  Be honest.  This is the Christian Safe Zone.

Super Powers, Religious Groupthink, and Why Jesus

PHILIPP NEMENZ VIA GETTY IMAGE

I want to be a superhero.  Not in the figurative sense like I want to be a hero figure to my boys, or take on a profession that emulates heroism.  No, I legitimately want to be a superhero.  Super powers.  A suit.  The whole deal. And growing up, I thought the Bible confirmed this long-standing desire to be super.  Jesus himself says in Matthew 17:20 that “faith can move mountains” (paraphrasing there).  So, I thought that if I believed hard enough, that I would develop the power of telekinesis.  I would be sitting in class, focusing as hard as I could at the pencil on my desk, believing that it would move.  It never did. 

I was bummed (still am a little honestly), but I realized later on in life that faith has indeed moved many mountains.  Medical mountains, cures for diseases, childhood diseases that don't even exist anymore because somebody believed this could be eradicated.  Educational mountains, racial mountains, the mountain of slavery, civil rights, we can go on and on.  And it’s all because somebody said, "I believe I can do something about this." The power to believe is the most powerful force at mankind’s disposal.

Belief is behind every good and bad thing we have done as humans.  America got started because a group of people believed differently than England.  And after a bunch of words and a war, we won.  About a hundred years later, that same nation was divided because people believed differently about state and human rights.  And after a bunch of words, there was a Civil war where over 800,000 men died.  Every national or international conflict starts with a difference in beliefs.  That is the power of belief.

Belief empowers us to try, try again, anticipate, hope, imagine, create, and improve.  But, belief also causes us to constantly look for evidence to support what we think is true.  Once you embrace an approach or a belief system, you will almost instinctually look for evidence to support it, and filter out anything that doesn’t.  And then, out of a desire for community, we will look for people or groups that support what we believe to be true.

This is why there are so many different religions, so many factions of Christianity, and so many denominations.  Because once you get into a community where you have shared belief, that community supports your belief system, and then helps filter out the rest.  And if you believe deeply enough in a religious system that is supported by a community of like-minded believers, that religion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I believe that God hears prayers, rewards faith, and punishes evil.  Jews believe that Abraham left his family and went to a new place because he believed that God would start a new nation through him (the nation of Israel).  Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel spoke to Muhammad gave him specific revelations from God, and that the Koran encapsulates the prophet’s teachings.  Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Agnostics, Atheists all have beliefs they live by.

So, if I believe all of that, why am I a Christian?  Why did I make a career out of what some people call nothing more than an evolutionary coping mechanism?  Why Jesus?

When Jesus died, those closest to him believed that he was dead (not dead for a few days and then coming back to life…dead dead) Peter, John, Matthew, his brothers, even his own mom believed it was over.  They believed he was a powerful teacher whose controversial statements got him killed.  They believed he was not the Messiah they had been waiting for to save them.  They believed he was not the Son of God he had claimed to be.  And, they believed that their lives were in danger because of him (that part they were right about though).

You see, what makes the teachings of Jesus, Christianity, so much different than any other religion is that Jesus built the whole system around who he was.  He claimed to be the “resurrection and the life”.  He claimed to be the “Savior of the world.”  He claimed to be the long awaited Messiah.  But, you can’t be those things when you’re dead.

And so, after all of the parables, all the miracles, all of the teachings, those closest to Jesus lost faith in the end.  They ran away.  They hid.  They lied. The twelve disciples that we hold in such high esteem now wouldn’t even leave the safety of their homes to visit their friend’s grave because they were so scared.  One of Jesus’ closest friends, Peter, even denied he knew him.  That’s what they tell us about themselves; that they were cowards.  They believed that the death of Jesus meant the end.

But then, a few days later, these same cowards go into the streets of Jerusalem to preach about Jesus.  Think about that attitude reversal for a second.  This wasn’t years or even months later.  This wasn’t in a different country or city.  A few days later, in the same city that there friend and leader was murdered, they are out  there preaching his Gospel.

And when Peter and John and the rest of the disciples went into the streets of Jerusalem, do you know what the crux of that message was?  It wasn’t, “Believe that Jesus is who we says he is.”  It wasn’t repeating any of Jesus’ famous stories.  It wasn’t repeating the Sermon on the Mount.  None of that.  They had four points: You killed Him, God raised Him, we’ve seen Him, say you’re sorry!  (Don’t believe me?  Read it here.)

That was it!  Do you want to know why the church survived the 1^st century?  Do you want to know why I’m a Christian?  Do you want to know why Jesus?  Because when Jesus died, nobody believed.  Zero.  Natta.  None of them came out later and wrote, “Oh yeah, I believed the whole time!”  They didn’t just believe that something happened.  They saw something happen!  They saw their risen Savior!  God has done something for the whole world.  He raised a man from the dead.

I don’t simply believe that Jesus taught true things.  I believe that something happened.  I believe that Jesus died on the cross for everyone’s sins, and that He was raised from the dead.  And when a man can predict his own death and resurrection, and then pull it off, I go with whatever he says from there on out.

The Church wasn’t launched because of a book.  The Church was launched because of a resurrected Savior.  And the 21^st century Church doesn’t exist simply because the Bible says so.  We believe it because Matthew, an eyewitness wrote about it.  Mark, who spent time with Peter, wrote about it.  Luke, a doctor who interviewed eyewitnesses, wrote about it.  John, who took care of Jesus’ mom, wrote about it.  James, Jesus’ own brother claimed that Jesus was the Son of God (what would it take for your brother to convince you He was the Son of God?)

So, who is Jesus?  2,000 years ago, a single event definitively answered that question for his biggest skeptics.  What’s your answer?

Be honest.  Be open.  This is the Christian Safe Zone.

I'm Not Sure Where to Start

A few weeks ago, my wife received a letter in the mail with her name and address handwritten on the front.  We had no idea whose information was on the return address, and were hoping it wasn't clever junk mail or worse...a Christmas card (I'm sorry I don't get Christmas cards.  You post a picture every day on Facebook; do I really need one of you on my fridge?)  Anyway, we opened the envelope and inside we found a bible tract (something like this), and a generic letter telling us if we have questions about the tract, to visit a church's website.

Two things: 1) How did they get our address!?  2) Kristin must really look like a heathen (which is probably a good thing since I'm writing this blog).  Now, I know whoever sent this meant well, genuinely cared about Kristin's spiritual well being, and at least made some kind of effort to share their faith.  But, I couldn't help but wonder if there is a better way.  If there was something more that could be done than handing out a tract, saying "Jesus loves you", and answering any religious question with, "because the Bible says so."

From my experiences, nobody intentionally sets out to leave their faith behind; they just reach a point where it seems irrelevant.  What we get taught as a child in Sunday school, at church camp, or in synagogue doesn't hold up to the pressure and stress of our current lives. We find ourselves wrestling with questions like: If God is good and all-powerful, why doesn’t he do more to prevent the bad things in this world? Why does prayer seem like such a shot in the dark?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why are some religious people so judgmental and mean?  Why don’t science and religion line up?  And our childhood faith begins to shrink under the pressure of these real-world questions.

Because of this, most of us need a new starting point.  It’s not that what our parents, pastors, and priests told us was wrong.  It was that their faith never became our faith, and thus was not big enough for the stress and rigors of our lives.  So the question is, where do we start?

For most Christians, we grow up being taught that regardless of the question, the answer should always begin with, “The Bible says.”  In childhood, this is enough.  If God wrote a book, there is no reason to challenge what it says.  But for some, “The Bible says” became an incomplete answer just north of our eighteenth birthday.  In college, the Bible gets transformed from an irrefutable religious text to literature.  It becomes scientific, not sacred; factual, not fascinating.  And when spoken of as a book, it becomes a house of cards.  If a professor or a friend is able to prove that only one small detail could be untrue, the entire structure falls.  It’s not that we lose our respect for the Bible; it just seems to lose its relevance to our lives.

The truth is, if you want to restart your faith or share your faith, “the Bible says” is not where to begin.  The first Christians didn’t even use the Bible as a starting point for their faith!  For the first 300 years of Christianity (quite possibly the most explosive growth in the history of the Church), Christians did not support their faith with a book.  Their starting point was not something that was written.  It was something that had happened.  And what’s fascinating is that when we are able to get a glimpse of how the earliest Christians shared their faith with non-Christians, they started with common ground: “There is a God, and you aren’t it.”

The apostle Paul traveled around the Mediterranean ring planting churches during the 1^st century, just as the Church was entering into infancy.  And while he was in Athens, he met a group of philosophers that gathered on a regular basis to discuss and argue the latest ideas (we really haven’t changed much since then.  The only difference now is we can stay on our couch and get on Twitter). 

These philosophers were discussing what framework the world should be viewed through in order to make the most sense.  And, like most people in their culture, they believed in a pantheon of gods.  But, they willingly recognized that these gods still left a void in their pursuit to feel whole.  Today, while we don’t worship Apollo, Zeus, or Aphrodite, we worship the gods of love, wealth, and power.  And just like those 1^st century Athenians, we recognize that all of the money, power, and sex in the world don’t make you feel whole.

The Athenians were so cognizant of this void that they even erected an altar “to an unknown god.”  They were covering all of their bases.  And Paul took this opportunity to introduce his new friends to the central message of Christianity.  But, he couldn’t start with “the Bible says” because there was no New Testament!  So, Paul found common ground. 

He argued that there was something in everyone that wonders, questions, and seeks, and that these desires come from our Creator.  In fact, this Creator so desperately wanted us to seek Him that He entered into His own creation in the form of a man…Jesus.  And Jesus came to explain what God is like and to reconcile humanity back to Himself (you can read the full story here).

This was not easy for Paul’s audience to digest.  They had never heard of Jesus, and the notion of a single god was absurd.  But, to think that this God had entered creation in the form of a man only a few years prior was completely insane to them.  But, one thing was certain: Paul was not asking them to believe in a book, but to believe in a person.

The question he left them with is the question that anyone exploring faith must answer:

Who is Jesus?

But, that’s for next week.

In the meantime, I want to give you a homework assignment.  Sometime this week, answer these two questions to yourself:

·      How and when did your faith journey begin?

·      How well has your faith held up under the pressure of your life?

Be honest.  Be open.  This is the Christian Safe Zone.

How a Podcast Ruined Me

There are certain defining events that change our perception of the world around us.  It could be the death of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, or the prognosis of a doctor.  Mine was a podcast.  Well, that and me leaving a career in ministry, but that’s a story for another post (and to ease your mind, no, I didn’t do anything immoral to get me fired.  I left on my own.)

During the week of October 11, 2016 I resigned from my role as a pastor; effectively ending my ministry career less than 5 years after it started, and listened to a podcast called “Choose Your Own Religion” in which my cousin, Tasha Courtney, was a guest. (Fair warning, the language in the podcast is NSFW.)  In that episode, I listened to someone who grew up in the same church as me, with the same belief system and values as me, describe a religion and a faith that was completely counter to everything that I knew to be true.  Instead of a God of love, I heard of a god of results.  Instead of a faith centered on community, I heard of a faith that isolates.  Instead of big faith, I heard of big budgets.  And if I believed in the god that she believed, then her claims would be right.  The problem was we believed in two different gods.  But how did that happen?

These events rattled me to my core.  I felt guilty and responsible that someone in my own family, whom I love very much, was not a part the Church I also love.  And as I struggled with and thought about Tasha, I realized that her story has become the norm.

According to a 2015 research study, Pew Research found that 35 percent of Millenials (ages 18-35) claim no religious affiliation (or “Nones”).  However, that same research group found that two-thirds (68% to be exact) of these “Nones” have a belief in God.  Like Tasha, they think that churches benefit society by strengthening community bonds and aiding the poor, they just don’t want to be a part of it.

Why?  Where has the Church gone wrong?  It’s like the “Nones” and the Church are in this awkward relationship and nobody wants to ask the question “Is it you or is it me?”  And like in every good relationship, both sides are the problem.

While Millenials by and large think the Church does good things, the Church has a major image problem.  Pew Research reports that, “Overwhelmingly, they [the “Nones”] think that [the Church] is too concerned with money and power, and too focused on rules and too involved in politics.”

Ouch!  The truth sucks sometimes.  While I desperately want everyone (especially those in my own generation) come to see the Church the way I see Her, I also can’t argue with their perception of Christianity today.  So, what are we supposed to do about it?

I believe that at the root of this problem is lack of information.  In general, people are not entirely sure why they believe what they believe.  We shape our belief system based upon what we grew up being told by our parents or pastors.  But, once that Sunday school faith hits the real world (or a professor in college) we begin to question everything we were taught.  At the same time, the Church has done a poor job of instilling and reminding us about the basic beliefs and history of Christianity.  How did Christianity get started (Hint: it wasn’t with Jesus)?  What did the first church actually look like?  Does that match with the way the church is run today?  What does it really mean to be a Christian?

So, this blog is my attempt at meeting you in the middle.  Whether you are a pastor, a regular church attender, or a “None”, this blog is for you.  I’m writing this for Christians on behalf of non-Christians to help explain Christianity.  It’s time to strip away our preconceptions from both sides of the debate, admit that we were both a little wrong about each other, and start over.  Let’s ask the honest questions, look for the honest answers, in the hope that by doing so we will finally begin to understand together what the 21^st century Church needs to do for the 21^st century.

This is the Christian Safe Zone.