Fightin' Words?

I just want to hold my grandchildren today and remind them I promise to make the world better for them. Even if they choose the need to make a difficult decision regarding a pregnancy, even if they discover they are gay or trans or whatever color of the rainbow they learn themselves to be, to keep them safe from classrooms riddled with dead kids, to promise to love them regardless and to never stop fighting to make the world safe for them.

Reminder for the Christians out there: We are called to be salt and light and make disciples as we go, never called to legislate our views of morality on the world in which we live. This world is not our home, and no political or religious extremism will ever make it so. Jesus never told his followers to get political power and change the Roman laws to be more like pre-King Israel.

There are believers on both sides of these issues. So for all you "I'm right, you're wrong" believers who feel like you have the hotline to God that the rest of us don't, remember that church history is filled with reformers who needed to correct the established church over and over again that they didn't have everything right any more than any of us do. Also, know that none of these issues are requirements for faith or indicators of its presence or its absence. Your understanding of scripture isn't absolute. Nor is mine. All believers would all do well to remember that.

When you come for bodily autonomy, you're targeting my daughter and my granddaughter. When you come for the right to marry your chosen human partner, you're targeting my nieces. When you come for the rights of trans folks to exist equally in the public square, you're coming for some of my best friends and my chosen family. So, yeah, damn right I'm gonna fight you on this. Know that well. 

False Dichotomies of Faith

Be careful, my fellow believers, when you start to divide things… Your job is to be salt and light, flavoring and shining, not separating.

There isn’t a separate sacred world and secular world. Although there can be sacred and secular mindsets. Nor are their sacred and secular jobs. Nor are their sacred and secular items (like music or pen sets or figurines). As believers, we unite the whole by being sacred in that one single world.

And we’re to enter into that one world with love and not as a clanging cymbal. We to be salt and light, not as a sort of morality police. We (as we go) make disciples one person at a time, not trying to change the world top-down from a place of cultural, political, or community power or authority, but grassroots, one at a time, from a place of lowness, humility, meekness, patience, long-suffering.

Sacred is the image of God that is part of creation. Too often, we define it as something it is not, i.e., an arbitrary (gnostic pretty much) grouping of things that are "God things" (like church and clergy, etc.) and secular as things that are "not-God-focused" like your regular job, your kids playing recreational sports, music, etc. 

It's a false dichotomy that came about with Kierkegaard in developing the move from reasonable faith to a leap of faith. He began with the physical (the real) and the spiritual (the woogie boogie, not his words, but the idea), and the culture of Christendom ran with it, dividing the clergy from the regular workers, the study of theology from the study of nature and science and literature and other God-infused disciplines, dividing sacred activities like prayer and reading scripture from secular activities like helping a neighbor build a house and tending to a garden (caretaking God's creation). 

We took it to its natural course post-Great Awakening by creating full subcultures of so-call sacred things and so-call spiritual things. That's given us such heresies as the Christian music "market" and Christian stationery sets, to avoid having to mess with their "secular" counterparts.

I'm referring not so much to the biblical ideal of sacred, which is defined as being set apart and is a matter of the heart (all over the old testament in regards to sacrifices) but the human ideas that get passed around as what sacred means in order to draw arbitrary lines in God's creation and in the great wealth of knowledge in that creation, whether originating from devotion (theologic) or discipline (rational/scientific/philosophical). Sacred in the OT pretty much only comes into play in regards to sacrifices and offerings. It is we believers who abused the word to make it mean something different. And that's the point of all my comments today. We keep trying to beat that same dead horse to divide between the right and wrong, when sacred has nothing to do with that. The divider is between sacred (set apart) and selfish (held onto) not sacred (spiritual) and secular (non-spiritual). 

I just don't believe in the myth of the "secular world." It's just the world. 

And the sooner we stop talking like it, the sooner we'll be better equipped to be actual salt and light rather than referees who stand on the side and judge.