Faith Questions
Rev Mark A. Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 5, 2012
5:00
This is an annual tradition in our community of where you submit questions of faith and it’s my job to try to answer them as best as I can off the top of my head. That’s always something of a challenge but it’s a lot of fun, and we call this sermon “Faith Questions,” not just because these are questions of faith, but because that’s what faith does. It questions. Faith questions. And so, we throw it open now to hear the questions. Lisa’s going to read them for us and we will do our very best, or I will. I’ll do my very best to respond.
Did Jesus himself ever claim to be the Son of God and the Messiah and all that? Did he always know? Can I be Christian if I have doubts about Jesus?
Did Jesus claim to be Son of God, Messiah, and all of that? And did he know who he was? Can you be a Christian and have doubts? I want to start with the last one first. Of course you can be a Christian and have doubts. Doubt is an essential part of faith. If there were no doubt, there would be no faith. Faith is itself an act, not because we have no doubt, but in spite of our doubt. We might doubt what these things mean but faith is acting in confidence of them regardless. Moving on, I will come back to that point.
Jesus..It depends on which Gospel you read. In Marks’ Gospel Jesus is very secretive about his identity. He in fact, every time someone says, “I know who you are Jesus, Son of the most High,” he tells them not to tell anyone. In John’s Gospel he goes around talking about it openly. And so, the question is, in a biblical understanding, how we look at the different gospels, but we also know that Jesus did make some claims about who he was. Now, he certainly did not reject these titles. In Mark’s Gospel, even where he is the most secretive about his identity, when the high priest questioned him and says, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” He answers, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man coming with the angels of Heaven on the clouds.” And so, Jesus is not as explicit as we perhaps are used to thinking of him being but he certainly does claim the title. Now, that being said, what does that even mean? What does it mean to talk about Jesus as the Son of God? Does that imply special relationship? Does it imply divinity? Does it imply paternity and biology? What does this term mean? And there have been many many arguments and debates and conversations over the centuries on exactly what that meant. The first three centuries of the Christian church were spent in exploring what do we mean when we say Jesus is the Son of God? And we used a few creeds along the way to help articulate it. But that doesn’t mean that conversation is over. That doesn’t mean that every Christian has the same understanding of what that Son-ship means or what it should mean to you. For me, the Son-ship, at the very least, the Son-ship of Jesus means that there is a relationship that Jesus has to God that is unlike ordinary relationship, that is a relationship of intimacy, of the kind of intimacy that a father and a son share. At its very base, that what it means. How you wish to continue to understand it in terms of the development of the trinity and in aspects of divinity and humanity—those are ongoing conversations and really require much more than a couple of minutes of an answer to go into. I will by way of commercial say that in three weeks we are starting a new sermon series and the first one is “Think This: We Believe Jesus is the Son of God,” and we will be exploring that in greater depth. What I do want to say is, for the person who wonders if their own doubts about that Son-ship kick them out of the Christian fold, there have been very very many in the history of Christianity who have had what we would call a low Christology, that is, a low view of Jesus’ relationship to God. Christians go everywhere from believing Jesus was an ordinary human adopted by God in effect, claimed by God as his own to God’s own divine Son born to God and descended down. There’s a large range of belief possible in that, and all of them have been expressed in the Christian tradition, and I would say to anyone who is wrestling with doubt as to how they understand it is that it does not kick you out of the faith. If anything, it invites you into the faith to wrestle with exactly that question.
What does Methodism say about suicide? What about self-harm?
Methodism is not quite one of those religions that has all the things written out somewhere. We don’t hold a candle to the Catholics when it comes to having that kind of thing. That being said, we do tend to take a very strong view on the sanctity of life. But we are also very much a tradition of both kinds of traditions. So we have no particular teaching that says for example “If you commit suicide, it’s an unpardonable sin.” It’s not the kind of thing we have a teaching about regarding anything really. So we don’t actually take position in that same way. What we would say is that suicide represents a brokenness, a deep brokenness, in an individual that we should feel compassion for and that if anything we should be all the more motivated to reach out to all those who suffer, all those who feel even drawn toward feelings of suicide and despair. And that our task is not to determine what the eternal status of the soul of that person is, but to try to ensure that there are fewer people who need to go through that difficult torment where they even come to a place where they feel the need to take their own life. So we don’t have teachings that just spell out the destinations that people get depending on the sins they commit and what other acts that they take. We do care very much about life and we do recognize that there are tragedies in life that are beyond our understanding. I think what we do is that we approach issues like this with grace, with grace for the person who committed suicide, with grace for the family who still mourns, with grace for all those who struggle and wrestle with deep brokenness. And so I think really that’s our answer to that question.
Now, self-harm, again, we don’t have a list of sins. People ask all the time, “Is this a sin in Methodism?” And I don’t know. We don’t have a list like that. What we do is we have broad ideas that we respect persons and life. But again, Methodists don’t view sins as crimes. I don’t know if you know that. John Wesley didn’t see sin as crime and punishment the way a lot of other traditions do. He saw it as an illness from which we need to be treated. And just as you wouldn’t judge someone who came down with the flu for being a horrible sinner, nor should you judge someone who is afflicted in any way emotionally, spiritually, physically. We seek hearing rather than judgement. So we view someone who suffered, had suicidal tendencies, or who is engaging in self-harm not as someone to be judged or someone who is breaking any kind of rule, but as one who needed to be healed and one who needs our love and our compassion and needs more fully to understand how much God’s love and grace is available even in the midst of that brokenness. That is I think is first and foremost what we believe.
Based on what’s written in scripture, how do you think Jesus would tell men to act in modern society in order to be better Christians? Would it be any different from the best way for women?
Well, that depends on whether the question means what is written about Jesus in scripture or what’s written in scripture. I think Jesus kind of spelled it out for us in simple terms. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s really it. That’s the ethic right there. Love means self-sacrificial giving of one’s self for the sake of someone else’s well-being. It’s whole, it’s pure, it’s not sentimental, it’s not sappy. It’s none of those things. So Jesus’ command is a unisex command honestly. It’s to love one another as God has loved us. It is to love your neighbor as yourself. I don’t know that Jesus was a big fan of the gender roles. I know that Paul sometimes was and that those who wrote after Paul were, but Jesus seems to be the one who had women disciples, to be the one who appeared to them first before Peter and the other men. He seemed to be the one who engaged in a kind of radical understanding of the people of God that changed a lot of those rules. So, my sense is that Jesus’ advice would remain the same: to treat one another with love out of righteousness. That may look different for men and for women, I don’t know. That may look different for me and you, that may look different for any two individuals as to how you live out that love. I don’t know that there are set patterns. I know there is a set requirement that we treat one another with love and with openness and with respect and mutuality. And I also don’t know that all men today are in some particular state that they need to be talked out of or kept into, whether they need to be manly or something. I’m not really sure what that even means, except that men of God are men who are strong in love, who are not afraid to take risks for those they love, who are not afraid to share and prop up those who are weaker. That strength is a very different kind, the strength that Jesus teaches us about is a self-giving strength that’s not an imposing power strength.
If we believe in a loving God, how do we justify or reconcile the horrible things, such as things in the Bible like the plagues and God hardening Pharaoh’s heart?
I want to come to the first thing first, the general idea. The second one, about how we reconcile the loving God with the exodus story is a separate question. I’m a big believer in the freedom of the world. That is, I believe in free will strongly. I believe that God gave us free will because God loves us. Because I don’t believe it is possible to actually love something that is not free to reject you. I do not believe it is possible to love an emotional slave. That’s not love. That’s control. And so I think in order for us to be capable of loving God, we must be free else God cannot truly be in a relationship with us. What that means is that, when we are free, we will make choices and there are consequences of those choices that will affect other people. That I will act in ways that may hurt you. I will say something that may set up a situation in which you will hurt someone else that I’m not even connected to. That my freedom, our freedom, has consequences and people suffer as a result. Where I think the good is in that, is that it is far more important that we be free than that everything work out for us. That God never guaranteed us that everything would go well. God guaranteed that he would be with us even when things do not. I also believe that the world itself is free, that the creation is free, not just us who can make choices. We live in a universe where subatomic particles seem to go wherever they want and don’t care very much about what we think. We live in a universe in which there is tremendous dynamism in nature, tremendous diversity of expression. Life on this planet is made possible by the fact that tectonic plates can slide over one another and keep the geothermal cycle going. Those same plates cause earthquakes in which innocent people suffer, but it is part of a grander system of the freedom of the creation itself. That causes that. Now there are things that I don’t understand. I don’t know why God didn’t find some other system in which those things could have been avoided. For me, what I understand is that in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of the innocent suffering, God is still there.
Now, with regard to the exodus story, we have a story that is being told that is all about defending God’s sovereignty. The story of God as Israel’s king defeating the Pharaoh as Egypt’s king. God as a king for liberation and human freedom is defeating the king of slavery and tyranny. And so, it doesn’t do well for the purpose of the story for God to ever be out of control. And so thus, Pharaoh’s heart is hardened because God made it so as opposed to setting up Pharaoh and God as equal rivals in that story. So, I think in that story, there is a literary reason why Pharaoh is presented as having his heart hardened in order that these plagues continue. If we were to look at it without that interpretive lens over it, we would see that all the plagues are the consequences of choices made toward injustice, choices that people make that we all feel the repercussions of.
What does it mean to walk by faith rather than sight?
Faith is the assurance of things unseen. Faith is trust. You all know what a trust fall is, right? Where you fall backward into someone’s arms standing behind you? In order for a trust fall to work, the person has to be standing behind you. You cannot see that person. You do not know for sure that they are there, and that’s why it’s a trust fall. You have to trust that they are there. That’s what faith is. Faith is trust. And so, we don’t walk by only the things that we see. If we were, we would trust in very little. If we could only live by what we saw, we would not know, we would not trust in the people we love. As soon as they leave our sight, how do we know that they’re not bad mouthing us? We don’t. But we trust them enough. How do we know that the person we love and let go and is far away from us is not betraying our trust at this very moment? We don’t know that, but we trust. Because that’s what faith is, and we don’t walk by what we see. The skeptics do, or think they do, but they fill in a lot of gaps on their own too. But what it means to walk by faith is that we live in a world where we have to trust. I believe strongly, that faith is a lens and we choose to look through it. We could see the world as a world populated by cynics, as a world populated by people are only out for their own game, people who will stab you in the back just as soon as look as you. We could see the world that way, as a cold, hard place of random chance and odd circumstance, and things just happen and there’s no rhyme and reason to it. We could see the world that way. Or we could choose to see it as a world of wonder, as a world where God is active, as a world in which love abounds. Faith and hope abound. We could see the world that way and that’s what it means to walk by faith. It’s the world we live in to. And that’s what that means.
If the Methodist flame is for the Holy Spirit, why don’t we talk about the spirit more? What does the symbol of the UMC (cross and flames) mean?
The first part is really easy. The cross and flame…the cross is the Christological sign, that’s the Jesus symbol. The flame is for the Holy Spirit. That’s the third person of the trinity. It has two tongues of flame representing the union between evangelical united brethren and the Methodist Church in 1968 to create the Methodist Church. So there’s all kinds of symbol meaning content in that. Why don’t we talk about the spirit more? We should. Part of it is a mainline Protestant discomfort with that because the spirit has tended to be the focus of groups more Pentecostal than we and we don’t always know how to process that theology. But also because the spirit is kind of dangerous. The spirit goes where the spirit wills, and we like things we think we can get our hands around. So, perhaps we should talk more about the holy spirit. I think it’s a function of some historical theological trend, but it’s not something that we’re not supposed to be talking about. Part of the problem is we’re never here for Pentecost, you’re all gone for the summer when that’s our big deal, Holy Spirit Sunday. So, maybe we will have to sneak Pentecost a little early this year.
Is cremation Christian? Or is embalming? What are we supposed to do with our loved ones? It’s all so fake and so expensive.
We don’t have a hard and fast rule on this, such as in Judaism or Catholicism where there might be different rules about burial and so on. I think any treatment of the dead that respects the body, the respects the created person and the embodied life, is appropriate for Christians. For myself, I prefer burial because I wish to return to the very earth from which I came. That’s going to happen to me no matter what, whether I’m turned to ash immediately after death or over 100 years, I’m going to wind up dust either way. So, I don’t know that it matters long term theologically. I think much more needs to be talked about how we talk about death and how we talk about the dead, whether we treat the body as simply an empty shell from which a spirit has gone or whether we treat it as the very thing God will redeem and renew at the end of history when we are all raised to new life. I think it’s much more in the broad strokes than in the small strokes. How we view the body and how we view death is the bigger issue, so we don’t have these rules whether it’s more Christian to be buried or not to be embalmed and so on.
Do I have to use pre-made prayers or psalms to pray or can I just make it up?
You can absolutely make it up! I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The guy who wrote those psalms…he made those up. This idea that somehow people back then got to be original and we don’t is really curious and doesn’t really reflect the Holy Spirit working in our midst. This is a personal preference question. Some people choose to lose themselves in the tradition and choose to read the psalms and meditate and let the psalms or any prayer speak through them. In effect, the way you transcend with a mantra when you chant, where the words suddenly lose meaning and you transcend and you are in communion with God. And there are people for whom coming up with their own words is distracting, and so I would use these words in that moment and transcend. It’s why jazz musicians, when they get together, play the blues in A because everyone knows the transitions and no one has to worry about what you’re going to do and you can riff, you can solo, you can transcend. So some people like the structure because it gives to them that liberation. Other people say that what I’m feeling right now is expressed with these words and I don’t think those words are in the psalms so I’m going to pray my own, and that is perfectly fine. God hears all our prayers whether they’ve been in the Book of Common Prayer for 400 years or whether they’re disciplined, whether they’re in the psalms or whether you just came up with them in your own spirituality. We are free to both.
Which James Bond character (as in which actor) personality is more like Jesus?
It’s got to be George Lazenby, doesn’t it? He’s the only one that made a commitment to marry someone and stay with them forever. But Jesus is not James Bond. Jesus is not here on a mission and then goes somewhere else. Jesus stays with us. Jesus suffers loss. So I think everyone’s least favorite is George Lazenby, but I think if we’re going to be honest about who Jesus is for us, I think that’s the guy.
These answers do not come ex-cathedra. They are not with the papal seal of approval. They are not sacred writ. You should keep asking these questions. You should challenge me on them if you still don’t understand or you’re not quite sure of my answer because the purpose of this service is not to give you answers so that the questions go away. The purpose of this service is to validate the asking of the questions and to say how important it is as people of faith to ask important questions and to live into your faith.
7:00
How does God speak to me? How can I listen for God? Sometimes I feel like I’m praying to ceiling instead of God. What’s up with that?
How does God speak to me? God speaks to every one of us a little bit differently. I actually think that on balance God speaks to us not in the way that we are most inclined to expect God to do so. That is that the heavens open up or a voice comes and we have some sudden epiphany. My sense of it, and my own experience of it, is that God tends to speak to us through the fabric of the universe and often through people. In my own experience, when I was arguing with people who told me I should be going to seminary, I spent most of my time saying that I should not, that it was not for me. The sheer volume of voices of my friends and of people who knew me and people I went to worship with…ultimately, that’s where I began to hear the word of God. It wasn’t a calling in the sense that a voice came down from heaven and said “Mark, go to Wesley Seminary.” It didn’t say that. Rather it was all these different voices of all these people in my life who seemed to be speaking with one accord. It was these same people who then affirmed my sense of call. It was that same community and the continued community that I still find God speaking to me. So, for me, God speaks through community. For me, God speaks through the witness of many, not simply the sudden revelation of one. Now, I don’t think that there is a way that God speaks to us, but I think if the questioner is wondering where is the response, the questioner may be looking in the standard Sunday school model of how God talks to people, a sort of big booming voice with a clear answer right there. In my experience, God speaks in more subtle ways but in ways that are no less powerful, as God spirit moves out in the community and the community reflects those. So, I would say to the questioner, that they might want to look to a new understanding of how it is that God speaks, because I think God speaks in a whole variety of ways. Through the community, through the creation itself, through the sort of oddities of life.
Why is God no longer so obviously present and active in our lives? In the books of Bible, prophets have magnificent visions and see very obvious manifestations of God. So we encounter small miracles, why don’t we have these bigger, greater encounters?
Why don’t we have bigger, greater encounters? I don’t know that we don’t. I don’t know that someone who has seen a vision of the church that welcomes all people regardless of orientation or gender identity has not had a prophetic vision. I don’t know that people do not have these experiences. In fact, I know that there are people who do have profound experiences of God. I think part of it is that we are looking back at the scripture as a chronicle of events rather than as a theological interpretation of an experience and that it may be that those who had the same powerful experiences of God were experiencing God in precisely the same way that we do but more inclined to speak of it in a poetic way with a language we no longer speak. It may be that we ourselves have become so dull to the way God works in the world that we are no longer capable of seeing how God is doing these things. See I don’t know that God had one plan of action and abandoned it for something different. I definitely don’t agree with those who argue that the age of prophecy is over and that God no longer speaks to us that way. Martin Luther King had a dream…that’s a prophetic vision. When others spoke out for justice and righteousness, those are prophets, those are people speaking out and having those same visions. I think perhaps we are lacking the language to be able to describe them the way that are forbearers did, but I don’t believe that God is any less vocal today or any less present today than God ever has been. It may be that our ability to see it or to describe it or to interpret it has changed.
As Christians, how can we walk the line between being judgmental versus not being supportive of our peers in need?
If the question is like this, “I see my friend engaged in behavior that is self-destructive. How do I support that person without being a self-righteous judgmental jerk?” If that’s the question, then the answer is that love always accepts people for who they are, but love also helps people to see who you see in them. I had a student a few years ago who came to me and was upset. He had a cousin who was in prison and was gravitating towards a white-supremacist group since many people ally with gangs in prison for protection. And, this student was concerned, “How do I tell him I think that’s wrong and yet maintain relationship?” What I suggested was what I think is the same answer to this question. You say how much you love the person and that you know them to be something greater than this. You don’t say “What you’re doing is wrong.” You say “I know who you are and I love you, and the person I see is a person who rises above this.” So that you’re not judging. I don’t think we have the right to judge. I don’t think anyone wants to have that turned back around on us. We don’t judge, we can’t know all the details of anyone’s situation. That’s why we don’t judge. But what we can share is how much we love them and what we would wish for them. We can share that vision of who we see them to be and what they mean to us. And that can really help. Think yourself if someone were to come and either criticize you or say “I see you doing such great things,” which one you would be more likely to respond to. So to me, that is what I think speaking the truth and love is about. It’s not saying, “Hey, I love you enough to tell you you’re an idiot,” or you’re doing this wrong or you’re a moral failure. It’s saying I love you enough to tell you the person I see you are meant to be and lifting up the vision of who you know them to be and who you would hope them to be and allowing them to live into that. So, to me, I think it’s a challenge, especially when people are engaged in self-destructive behaviors, because you want to sometimes come right out and say “That’s wrong,” and sometimes that works and sometimes that’s necessary. But I think we should always start from a position of love where we identify what we see that’s the best in that person and that we articulate that we have and we make ourselves available to help them to achieve that.
Is it wrong to mock young-earth creationists (not to their faces, but to decry their beliefs to others)? They make me angry because they give such a false representation of Christianity.
In law school, we talked about this idea called the marketplace of ideas where truth and falsehood grapple. And I always liked that as much as it frustrated me because don’t you just want to kick falsehood to the curb and be done with it? And yet it doesn’t really work that way. And what the said about the marketplace of ideas is that the only cure for bad speech was more speech. The only cure for bad representation of Christianity is more good representations of Christianity. We can’t shout down nor can we excommunicate, as much fun as that would be. We can’t censure or silence those voices. All we can do is make sure that our understanding of what the Gospel is, the understanding that it’s more gracious, more loving, more inclusive, more healing is being heard. Which means that our task is one of evangelism. We don’t talk about that a lot in this community, although we actually do a pretty good job of it in sharing who it is we are, the God we’re in a relationship with, and what we know about that God. That’s our task to do. That perhaps, if we are that ones that are offended by those who are so loud, then we should be equally confident in the vision of God that we have and we should share that. So, I think the answer to this question is to recommit more fully to what you believe and to share that and to be fearless about it. You don’t have to be as obnoxious about it as the people you are maybe afraid of, but you can share, and I think that’s our task to do—to lift up that vision. If the people out there don’t know what Christianity is really about and what they think it’s about is what one group has said, then that’s on us. That’s on us. Then we have to do a better job of sharing a Christianity that’s about something that is powerful and healing and open.
Why have we given the letters of Paul (and the other Epistle writers) the authority of scripture but not others?
So why are some people in the Bible and other people are not? This is actually one of those questions that everyone assumes that the way the Bible is organized is some kind of conspiracy. If you read or watched the Da Vinci Code, they basically suggest that they got all these people together in a dark room and they said, “No one’s reading that book,” and they put this list together. In reality, the Bible is much more of a best-seller list than it is an editor’s picks. It was that these writings found use in the churches. In the first century, we didn’t have a Bible, we had the Old Testament. We had the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. And that was our scripture. But people began to write. Mark wrote a gospel, he wrote a story of Jesus’ life. Matthew and Luke wrote based on that. John wrote one. And Paul wrote some letters to some churches and those churches read those letters and they said, “this is really good stuff,” and they circulated it to other churches and those churches read it and those churches copied it and sent it to other folks. And what we discovered was by the time we sat down to come up with a list of what books where in the Bible we had a lot of agreement on this. There were a lot of things that we were already using as scripture. So it’s not as if we had all these letters and we said this is in but that’s not. It was in much more recognition of what was already being used in the church. Mark was being read, and Matthew and Luke and John. Thomas not so much. Judas, definitely not. These other apothecal gospels were apotehcal for a reason. They just didn’t have the broad currency of the church. They were popular in one town alone or one sect. And so what we see is that the Bible itself is a product of the church. The Bible does not create the church. The Bible is created by the church as part of an organic process whereby we said these are the stories that tell our story, these are the reflections that reflect our faith, and we put them in here. Now the church was wise enough to include a number of things that were in dynamic tension with each other, that didn’t always agree because they knew that the church was about exploring issues that could not be easily answered. And so we have four gospels, four different ones. We have letters of Paul and the letter of James, and we have Hebrews and Ephesians. We have Revelations and we have Romans. We have these different views on similar issues, but all of them are part of the church’s own reflection and reflected that. So, that’s why we read Paul. It’s because the church early on understood Paul and gave to Paul that authority by the fact that they were reading and reflecting on his works.
What is the policy on swearing or “bad words?” Should we only be concerned about the ones that take the Lord’s name in vain (even though they seem otherwise minor)? What about the really vulgar or sexual ones?
First, I would ask whose policy? I don’t know whose policy so perhaps the Methodist Church’s policy. We don’t have these kinds of policies. We don’t make these bright-lined rules, like Anglo-Saxon words of four letters are not permissible in this situation, and so on. We don’t have these. In fact, I don’t know that there are any bright-line rules. There might be a time when you need to use profane speech. Maybe it’s the only way to get somebody’s attention. Maybe it’s the only way to speak to somebody. I will say at the beginning of the year when we were doing S’mores with S’Methodists and toward the very end, a young woman and her friend came stumbling by. They’d been out, and she saw what we were doing and she asked who we were and when I told her, she went on a rant about religion. It was clear that she had heard that other version of religion that that other questioner had asked about. She was going on and on about how “you people think you have to do all these things to get into heaven, etc…” It was clear that the image of Christian faith that she had gotten was a depleted one. It was an unhealthy one, it was counterproductive, and it wasn’t the gospel. And she said and this is what people think. And I said to her, your version of Christianity is bullshit and needs to die. And she stopped and she looked at me and she understood in that moment that I was judging her for the hundreds of “f-bombs” she had already dropped, but also that I spoke the language that she understood and it was direct and showed the seriousness with which I agreed with her. That I was saying, “Yes, I’m not going to cover this in a platitude.” I’m not going to say that every time profanity presents itself that you should use it. This is maybe the second time I’ve sworn in the pulpit, but it’s not just the words. We get focused on the rules. We get focused on what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. And I want to move us to getting thinking more dynamically about that. I want to move us to thinking about faith in a way that’s more relational. Earlier this year, we were having our sermon about sexuality and I talked about ethics of sex as sacramental and treating things as if they were sacraments, treating something as if it would convey God’s love and grace. Can hate-filled speech do that? No. Hate-filled speech doesn’t need to be profane to be hate-filled. Loving speech, maybe it has some colorful words and yet somehow manages to convey grace. I would like to think that ultimately in that moment I was able to convey to that young woman that there’s another version of the gospel out there than what she’d heard. And in a way that got her attention and maybe made her think. So, I don’t know that there’s any bright lines. I don’t know that taking the Lord’s name in vain, that’s not just saying things like god dammit or Jesus Christ and things like that. That’s when you say that you will do something in God’s name and you don’t. On some level, hate-filled Christians are taking the Lord’s name in vain by claiming the name of Christ and then living out lives of hate and judgment and violence. That’s taking the Lord’s name in vain and that is a serious thing. But that goes far beyond cursing. That goes right up to the abuse of religion, the use of religion as a prop instead of something that actually guides our lives. So, I would encourage the questioner not to try to think too categorically and not to worry. I think sometimes these questions come from places of anxiety, like “I want to make sure to get it right. I don’t want to cross the line.” God is far more gracious than that. We live in a relationship with a God of grace, not a God of rules. The Bible reading we had tonight, yeah it was illegal to eat that grain on the Sabbath, but Jesus responded that sometimes the rules yield to the needs of people. So, I don’t want us to be a rule-based Christianity, but a Christianity grounded in love and faith, not in the rules of religion. I think there’s so much more power to a faith like that. So, I would just encourage the questioner not to get too bogged down in rules, but to think relationally at all times about what is helpful when building somebody up, what is helpful in sharing a message of love and grace with someone.
