Why Has This Happened to Me?

These two videos together form my sermon from worship yesterday at Asbury Temple UMC. It's in two parts, so don't forget the second video.

My husband's/wife's deepest needs

I have never cared about gender issues. When I was younger, I would hear people talk about women being disadvantaged in the academy and the workplace, and I would wonder why they couldn't just get over it--be really good at what you do and your gender won't matter. I still believe that to some extent, and I try really hard only to call foul when it's a real issue, but I'm finding that more and more I'm becoming a (*insert heavy sigh here*) feminist. I really hate that word, because it has bad connotations for me, but through life experience (some of it, unfortunately, bad) and just growing up, I'm starting to see more and more the ways in which the world and (sometimes especially) the church screws up gender roles and expectations. It's going to be fun for me when I really come into my prime after being underestimated and type-cast since high school.

Anyway, here's where some of this is coming from: I recently helped with music at a church marriage retreat. To preface, I'm not going to say which church because I don't want to seem like I'm dissing them, which is not at all my purpose. Also, I want to stress that I think a marriage retreat is a GREAT idea. The church needs to do a better job in general of talking about relationships, marriage, love, sex, all of that stuff. Too often I feel like the emphasis is placed on saving yourself for marriage, but then nobody tells you what you're supposed to do once you get there. I'm all for lots and lots of premarital counseling (Protestants, we suck at this. Let's please learn from the Catholics) and lots and lots of postmarital (er, during-marital?) counseling and whatnot. The divorce rate in this country is appalling, and the church is failing couples constantly by not giving them the resources to make and follow through on commitments.

OK, so this marriage retreat. I was behind the scenes for part of it, so I didn't get to hear it all, but some of it sounded really great. I heard lots of talk of communication and honesty, of moving out of an economy of shame into a life of grace, of forgiveness and joy and lots of great stuff. I'm sure a lot of couples were blessed--I know I was, one of a handful of single folks in the room.

I'm writing all this because I want to stress that my hang-up was over something minor. On each seat was a slip of paper with writing on both sides. Side one:

My Wife's Deepest Needs:
1. My wife needs a Godly man and my unconditional love.
2. My wife needs my affection, security, comfort, approval, tenderness, touch, cards and gifts.
3. My wife needs conversation with me.
4. My wife needs my honesty and openness.
5. My wife needs financial security.
6. My wife needs my commitment to the family--be faithful to my wife, share parenting responsibilities, take initiative in home repairs and be the spiritual leader in my home.

Side two:

My Husband's Deepest Needs:
1. My husband needs a Godly wife and my unconditional love.
2. My husband needs sexual fulfillment.
3. My husband needs recreational companionship.
4. My husband needs an attractive wife.
5. My husband needs domestic support.
6. My husband needs my admiration.

OK. Word to Godliness, unconditional love, etc. However, I have a few questions/comments:

-- #2 on side one sure makes women sound needy.
-- The claim that women need financial security is just funny to a woman whose boyfriend refers to her as his "sugar momma."
-- If anyone does house repairs in my family, it's my...sister.
-- Do wives not need sexual fulfillment?
-- Do wives not need attractive husbands? Is #4 on side two suggesting that it's the duty of a woman to stay beautiful for her husband? What about his beer belly?
-- I just hate the word "domestic," even if I've found in the past few years that I do enjoy cooking and cleaning. *sigh*

So...yeah. Just some thoughts. I could get all indignant over some of this stuff, but it's not worth it. Mostly I just found the card funny (yes, I kept it).

Thoughts?

Truth-telling modifies behavior

The question of truth-telling has been an interesting one throughout my life. As a child, I was utterly guileless. The other day, commenting on how my younger brother was grounded for something or another that involved lying--and inept lying, at that--my dad noted that Noah is only slightly better at lying than I am, and we both knew that was a pretty bad insult (if having one's talent at lying slighted can be called an insult). I learned very quickly when I was young that I was a terrible liar, and I had such a deep fear of angering or disappointing anyone that I did all I could to avoid any situation that would require (or maybe I should say tempt) me to lie later.

My freshman year of college, I wound up in a romantic relationship that thankfully did not pan out as horribly as it could have, but still reflected lots and lots of bad judgment. The other person involved had the gall to lecture me on honesty when our whole relationship was largely secret and based on deception. I learned from that mistake, though unfortunately it took me one or two more similar situations to really figure out that any relationship that involves deception is not OK. Period.

A friend of mine was in a scarily similar situation a few years ago and protested my concerns by asking why it was anyone's business what people did with their personal lives. Unluckily (or luckily?) for her, she's a Christian, and folks, being a Christian means that you don't get the kind of personal life we talk about in America--the kind where you keep your problems to yourself and think that mistakes won't affect anyone but you. We are called to bear one another's burdens, and guess what that means? We have to know about each other's burdens. And sins. And mistakes. And joys!

My dad and I had an interesting conversation the other day (stemming from shaking our heads in amusement at my little brother). He told me about something he heard from a Jewish man who grew up in Europe, I think in the early 20th century. What he said was that being a Jew in Europe meant that you couldn't make any mistakes. If you stole someone, suddenly all Jews were thieves. If you had family problems, suddenly all Jewish marriages were dysfunctional. And on and on. What he said was that, far from encouraging good behavior and high moral standards, this pressure cultivated deception. You had to maintain your outward appearance and reputation, but if you could violate that image in secret, you would.

My response summed up some things I've been thinking about a lot lately. To me, I think the problem is a matter of priority. If our main concern is our image, what others think of us, then the truth can become secondary and inevitably it will be sacrificed if it comes into conflict with the maintenance of that image. Whether it is your economic status, marital bliss, academic prowess or what have you, if other people's perception of that is more important than their integrity, when push comes to shove the truth will lose every time.

On the other hand, if truth is the most important thing, it's a whole different ball game. If you commit to being honest all the time, there are tons of things you might say or do otherwise that you won't do if you know you'd have to tell someone about it. Truth-telling modifies behavior. Sometimes, you may even know that you are behaving in a way that is inconsistent with your beliefs, but trying to change that on your own is not enough. But, if you just tell someone what's actually going on, suddenly whatever you're doing is no longer your personal life, no longer just your business. Suddenly, whether you change a behavior or not affects someone else, and someone else cares.

I wish that I had understood this earlier in life, and also that I had had people in my world at certain points with whom I could be completely honest all the time. I'm still really bad at lying, but I'm ashamed to say that there have been times when I've found myself telling selective truths to different people. For a while at one point, I was basically living two separate lives, one all happy and Christian-y and the other pretty much a mess, but neither really knew much about the other. Oh, and by the way, this person to whom I would have liked to have been able to honest would have had to have been a Christian, or at least someone whose values aligned with mine (because I have plenty of non-Christian friends whose morals rock way harder than those of a lot of Christians out there). There were some people who knew when I wasn't always acting the way I should, but they didn't care because they were doing it too. That's just self-justification.

My thesis is in the subject line. If your first commitment is to truth-telling, everything else has to fall in line with that. If anything else is more important--your looks, your relationship, your popularity, your job--you will find yourself sacrificing truth to that, and though I have neither the time nor the emotional energy to go into what happens when that goes down, we've all been there. Let's hold each other to a higher standard of integrity. Let's be people who tell the truth and are willing to hear the truth from others--without being offended, without judging or condemning. Only in this way can we seek the Truth of the One who made us all.

The Miraculous Feeding of the 5,000

Today, I overheard a snippet of a conversation taking place on the first floor of my house as I walked through the second. "Oh, you Methodists and your non-miraculous reading of that miracle," said one housemate jokingly to another. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and it prompted me to think a little further about my troubles with a particular reading of the passage in question. But I get ahead of myself.

The feeding of the 5,000 (or 4,000...or 5,000, not counting women and children...but still a lot of people...) became a boring narrative for me sometime in middle school. I'd heard it so many times I tended to zone out when that Bible story was being read or preached on.

Imagine my surprise when one time earlier in college a sermon on this Gospel lesson caught my attention. Having drifted off mentally as usual, I was suddenly listening and disoriented. The preacher was wondering aloud whether perhaps the crowd was moved by the generosity of the young boy with the fish and the loaves. Perhaps someone pulled out a piece of bread here, a hunk of cheese there, and before long everyone's little to offer became a lot to eat.

I felt myself immediately averse to this account, but I couldn't explain why. In fact, more recently, my friend said she thought that it would have taken a greater miracle to move the crowd to such generosity than it would have to reproduce baskets of bread and fish. I had to agree with that. But I was still troubled, and I think I'm starting to figure out why.

Let me make it clear that I'm not opposed to this Stone Soup version of the story. I'm open to different readings of the Bible, and besides, the stone soup approach works wonders in the household of which I am currently a part. It isn't so much this interpretation that bothers me, it's where it came from and what it can lead to.

In my Old Testament precept last week, we were discussing a book by Peter Enns called Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Enns attempts to find a way to reconcile a non-literal reading of the Bible with the maintenance of Scriptural authority (to summarize very crudely). In order to give us background on where the debate over the Old Testament and the authority of Scripture began, our preceptor described to us some of the theological and philosophical history of the various issues. He talked about one school of thought that sought to explain, in modern terms, the seemingly miraculous happenings in the Bible. One scenario that struck me was that on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus was walking on a sandbar and simply appeared to be walking on water. There were several other explanations that rubbed me the wrong way, and the interpretation of the feeding of the 5,000 that I outlined before was ranked among those.

My issue isn't so much that I'm so attached to and dependent on the miracle status of the stories from the life of Jesus that I can't give them up, like a child with a security blanket. I won't call down curses on someone who says the demoniacs in the Bible were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill. (By the way, it seems to me that curing someone of a mental illness is at least as impressive as casting out a demon.) What troubles me about this whole train of thought is the obsessive need to explain everything. Faith is an art that requires an ability to live in the tension between the known and the unknown, the revealed and the unseen, the fulfilled and the yet-to-be. Certainly we should be exploring the Bible with minds that are open to new inspiration, but we should not take our need to explain so far that it becomes an attempt to control and manipulate the text. And we must never forget that while alternative explanations of Bible stories may be interesting, when they become the focus, we miss the point. The technicalities of how a miracle occurred should never become more interesting or important than the Miracle Worker. Explore possibilities, share new ideas, ask questions; but don't get rid of the mystery.

Fully an academic institution AND fully a faith community

After 4 years of lurking in the halls of Langford and Westbrook, I'm finally a student at Duke Divinity School. I've been around so long that there are faculty who think I'm a third year, and plenty of people who I'm sure must wonder what in the world is taking me so long to get an M.Div.

Anyway, in the process of going through ordination and of explaining some of the philosophy of DDS (Duke Divinity School) to others, I came across an interesting question: How in the world can a place function both as a competitive academic institution and as a community of faith? Are we primarily students or primarily ministers?

I'm a big fan of holding things in tension, so the distinction doesn't bother me personally, but orientation was rife with instances of faculty and administrators actually sounding confused as to how to define what the heck we're doing here. I heard one person tell me DDS is first and foremost a graduate school; another said that ministry is a priority over against academics. One faculty member tried to explain that DDS is most importantly academic, AND most importantly faith-based.

Like I said, nonsensical "both/and" statements like that don't bother me. The main reason for this is that we have a Savior who is fully human AND fully divine. Christians should be used to this kind of nonsense. But that doesn't mean that living out our identity as divinity SCHOOL students and DIVINITY school students is easy.

I've had some people react with surprise when I tell them that most of my professors begin class with a prayer. I love that we do that, even though I know full well that the love of Christ isn't going to keep Dr. Smith from giving me an "F" in Church History if I don't study.

Then there's the funny question of spiritual formation. DDS tries to be intentional about forming not only the minds but also the hearts of its students. Part of this effort is the required spiritual formation group to which each first year is assigned. You don't get a grade or really any credit for it, but you can't move on to your second year of seminary without it. That class is itself in many ways the embodiment of the fine line we're walking between academics and faith.

I guess we'll just see how this plays out. I already know Duke thoroughly for the competitive academic institution that it is, and I know the Div School is no exception, so I'm not going to pretend the competitiveness isn't there. But I also know that for the most part my classmates are going to be far more willing to help me out than perhaps some were in undergrad.

"If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it" (1 Cor. 12:26). As weird and awkward as it might sometimes feel, we are all one body, and it does me no good to get an A in Hebrew if the seminarian sitting next to me can't remember the alphabet.

2009 Wright Room

Glow Sticks

(This post totally steals an idea from my boyfriend, Gary Mitchell, www.myspace.com/visionrise.)

Consider a glow stick. (Bear with me.) Now, erase everything you know about glow sticks. In fact, forget the "glow" part. We'll call them...all right, I can't think of a great name, so just imagine all you know is that these are small liquid-filled plastic sticks.

What uses could you think of for such an object? Today, my youth came up with a few: paperweight, necklace, Christmas tree decoration, action figure stand; you could play catch with it or use it as a toy for your dog to fetch. You can certainly do some things with it.

But we all know what the real purpose of a glow stick is--I mean, it's right there in the name! A glow stick is supposed to glow. And how do we get it to glow?

Exactly. We break it. Until it is broken, a glow stick can never fulfill its real purpose. It can be lots of different things, but never what it was meant to be. With the breaking comes light.

In college, my boyfriend and his roommate had a tradition surrounding glow sticks. Every time someone they knew came to Christ, they would break one. They collected these glow sticks as reminders of their friends who had been broken--who had surrendered to Christ, admitted their sin and need of forgiveness, submitted to the will of God.

The glow stick image goes along well with 2 Corinthians 12:9--"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." In our pain and suffering, God enters in to reconcile us to him and to make us whole in his love. In our brokenness, God shines a light we cannot see when we think we've got everything together.

Earlier this summer, I marked the 2nd anniversary of an extremely painful event. After helping me turn the day into a celebration and helping to give me good memories of that date, Gary brought out a glow stick. I had heard his explanation before, and I admit I had thought it a little cheesy at first. But wept as he broke the stick and gave it to me, saying that he was proud of me and he could see how God was using me in my weakness to serve others.

Today, I did a glow stick demonstration with my youth at the end of a discussion about why bad things happen. Afterwards, I was wearing my sample glow stick around my neck, and a question from one of the kids showed me another dimension to the metaphor: "Can you turn it off?" asked Kristopher. "No. No, you can't." I smiled. Sure, it's an imperfect comparison, because glow sticks do fade...but then again, maybe that's about right. We often need to be reminded of our need of God. Maybe we don't have to be broken drastically over and over again, but faith is not a one-time thing where you get it or you don't--it's a process. Some of us might need to go through Wal-Mart's entire stock of glow sticks before we get it.