It is an accident of the calendar that today marks both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. I was joking with the staff earlier today that instead of preaching tonight I should just show the clip from the Barbie movie where everybody’s dancing in a big circle and all of a sudden Barbie looks at all the other Barbies and says, “do you guys ever think about dying?” I had a colleague who shared a picture of a pink and red Valentine that said, “Roses are red, ashes are gray, we’re all gonna die, happy Valentine’s Day.” Quite a convergence. In fact, the church’s director of adult discipleship, Janice Yates, has created several slightly irreverent Valentines, along these lines, that you will see linked here.

It’s an accident of the calendar that today marks both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, and it’s an accident of geography that each year as we mark this solemn occasion, we do so just as the jonquils are pushing up from the ground, when everybody’s starting to thaw out just a little bit, when there’s a green sprig of grass here or there, football is over, and of all days, today is the day that pitchers and catchers report for spring training. It feels like we’re finally looking ahead to spring, and yet for some reason, you good Christian people have decided to come have ashes rubbed into your face as the pastor reminds you that you are going to die. Later in the service, the clergy will impose ashes on your foreheads, and as we do so, we will alternate between saying, “From dust you were created. To dust you shall return.” and “Repent, and believe the Gospel.” 

I should admit that Ash Wednesday is one of my favorite days of the year. Maybe this is surprising. I just don’t think that the world does a very good job of reminding you that you are, in fact, finite. I don’t even think the church does a good enough job. One day, you will stop breathing, your body will fail, and you will die. It is simply a fact of life, perhaps the fact we hide the most from one another.

I likewise don’t think the church always does a bang-up job of reminding you of your sin. I know I don’t. You are made in the image of God, you are a person of sacred worth, you are deserving of love and worthy of grace. But you are not perfect, and I do not mean this in the old “take me or leave me, I’m not perfect so just deal with it” kind of way. I mean it in the, you have places in your life where you need to grow now kind of way. You hurt others. You fall victim to the human sin of valuing things and using people instead of valuing people and using things. You miss the mark, not just here and there, but if you are like all of the people I know, like, you miss it quite a lot. I do too, by the way.

I don’t mean to wallow. I just want to remind you, as your pastor, that you are going to die, so will I, that there are parts of your life which run counter to the intentions of God, just as there are parts of mine that do the same. It is simply the truth that we’re eventually going to die, and in the meantime, we have a problem with sin. I also want to remind you that the acceptance of the first thing may well help you address the problems of the second. Accepting death may well help you address the problems of your sin. I mean, I don’t know how you’d calculate this, but I wonder what percentage of sin has as its genesis the human desire to live forever. I know that’s the impetus behind wanting to have the most money, the best stuff. It’s the reasoning behind wanting to have the most fun toys, the fanciest cars, the biggest hous. On Valentine’s Day it strikes me that this is also why people who seem to use others for physical pleasure instead of valuing others with self-giving love, why these people engage in the behaviors they do. It’s all about wanting to avoid the realities of death. And yet, and yet you are going to die. Everyone is going to die. Every material thing dies. From dust you were created. To dust you shall return. Repent, and believe the Gospel.

I suspect that in some ways this desire to avoid the realities of death was behind the behavior of the people Jesus was talking to in this evening’s scripture passage from the Gospel of Matthew. These were the showy people, the ones who wanted everybody to know just how much they had it together, with their showy religion and their showy prayer and their showy fasting and their showy possessions. Jesus says, don’t be like the hypocrites who want it blasted everywhere when they give their money away. Don't’ be like the hypocrites who pray prominently in public so that everyone sees just how faithful they are, as if that were its own reward. Don’t be like the hypocrites who fast and walk around as if they are miserable, just to show others that they are Super Christians, miserable for Jesus, as if that were the point. That’s not the point at all. Repentance is the point. Growing in Christian love is the point. Inching closer to God is the point.

It is telling to me that it is in this section about hypocrisy, about showy religion, that Jesus goes even further, as we sometimes say in the southern church, he goes from preaching to meddling, when he says this: “Stop collecting treasures for your own benefit on earth, where moth and rust eat them and where thieves break in and steal them. Instead, collect treasures for yourselves in heaven, where moth and rust don’t eat them and where thieves don’t break in and steal them. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Eventually, you are going to die. Everyone is going to die. Every material thing dies, as moth and rust eat them, or thieves come in and steal them. Somebody else is going to live in your house, work in your office, go through your stuff.

This probably is not the message you came to hear tonight, Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way, but I have to tell you, I find it immensely freeing. Immensely freeing. For one, if it really is the fear of finality that causes me to horde stuff, or to act like a hypocrite, or to try and make other people believe that their sins are worse than mine, if it is the fear of finality, the fear of death that drives all of that misery that I inflict upon myself, then it becomes a whole lot easier to navigate the world, because for as difficult as it is to deal with my sense of fear, it’s a whole lot easier to address that singular feer than it is to address the multiple expressions of greed that flow from it, on top of the hypocrisy, on top of the envy.

And for another thing, some of the most settled people I have known in my life are people who are comfortable with death. I mean, in a sense, John Irving was right when he wrote in The World According to Garp that ultimately, we are all terminal cases. But it is the people I know who have most come to terms with the fact of their own eventual deaths who are the happiest, the most generous, the kindest, even the funniest. The most fun to be around. It’s especially true of many of the people I have known who are actively dying, at least if they are given the gift of having time to wrap their heads around it, and once they have done so. So many unimportant things pass away before the body passes away, and thanks be to God for that. Things worth focusing on come into focus. There’s a clarity there. A gift, even.

I wish there were a way to get this clarity without remembering the inevitability of our own deaths. If you have a strategy that will let me properly understand my relationship with God without my own having to do the work of dying one day, I’m all ears. I wish it were so. But I am starting to believe that death does not have to be immediately around the corner for each of us to attain this clarity, this deepening focus, this willingness to grow in love and faithfulness, this peace. All that is required, at least on our part, is two things: remembering that from dust we were created, and to dust we shall return, and then repent, and believe the Gospel. All that is required is to remember that these truths are also gifts. Thanks be to God Amen.

Maybe this is controversial for a pastor to say, but every time I come to scripture and read something like “do not fear” or “don’t be anxious” or “be slow to grow angry,” I don’t love it. I certainly don’t mean to argue with scripture, but one thing I know about myself is that you can tell me all day long not to be afraid, but I’m wired to be a fearful person. It’s just who I am. I’m not controlled by it, thanks to some good therapy, but fear is just part of my fabric. In a very real sense, telling me not to fear is about as effective as telling me to turn purple and grow a tail. It’s just not going to happen.

Or take this passage from the Epistle of James, certainly a beloved book in the New Testament. I bet many of us can quote its most famous line, “faith without works is dead,” which is both well-said and true. The command here to be slow to anger though, while nice, is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to tell me to be quick to listen. I can always do better on that front. It’s fine to tell me to be slow to speak; like many preachers, I have some room to grow in that department. But even though I’m not a particularly angry guy, I bristle when I read scripture that tries to tell me how I am supposed to feel. The Bible doesn’t get to decide how I feel. I don’t even always get to decide how I feel. How I feel is how I feel. That’s what feelings are, right?

Now, none of this means that ignoring this passage is the right move; I mean, it is in the Bible, after all. And there are some things we can do about the anger thing. But before I get to that, it’s probably worth asking: What is anger? Why does it exist?

Anger, of course, is a struggle in many families. Many of us carry with us the experiences of our childhood. Maybe your family expressed anger too much; maybe anger was continually present in your home. Maybe your family was afraid of anger, as many are, and you never learned how to express it properly. Many of us struggle with anger in one way or another, but I don’t think avoiding anger altogether is the right move. Jesus got angry, you know, so angry at one point in the Gospels that he turned over the tables of the moneychangers! And besides, this passage in the Epistle of James doesn’t say you should never get angry. It says you should be slow to anger.

So, what is anger anyway? Now, I’m sure there are as many definitions of anger as there are people listening to this message. But in my own life, anger is made manifest most often when what is does not line up with what ought to be. When someone cuts me off in traffic, instead of minding their own business, I can get a little angry. What is does not line up with what I think ought to be. When my kids stall and stall and stall at bed time, when all I want to do is get under the covers and go to sleep, I am liable to get a little angry. What is does not line up with what I think ought to be. When I inevitably step on the toy car that was supposed to have been put away after I asked fourteen times, thank you very much, I am liable to get a little angry. What is does not line up with what I think ought to be.

These are small things, of course. Silly, even. Sometimes the thing that is, is much bigger and much more difficult. When people have trouble finding well-paying work because of a disability or the color of their skin, I can understand their anger. What is does not line up with what ought to be. When churches exclude people made in God’s image, as if it were the church’s job to be God’s bouncer, I can understand the anger. What is does not line up with what ought to be. When whole classes of people feel ignored; when people do the best they can but never seem to be able to get ahead; when society expects you to move on quickly from grief, as if such a thing were possible; when racism, or sexism, or ablism, or homophobia, or ageism run rampant; when cruelty is rewarded; when bullies flourish; when hypocrisy reigns; when the widow and the orphan are left to fend for themselves, well, I can understand the anger. I mean, good grief, it makes me angry, and I’m rarely on the receiving end of this sort of thing. I think it’s supposedto make me angry. What is, in each of these circumstances, does not line up with what ought to be.

And so it is that the writer of the Epistle of James says that everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry, but he doesn’t say that you should never be angry. I’ll say it more strongly than James does: If you look around at the state of the world and don’t get angry sometimes at how things are going, you ought to check your pulse!

Be slow to grow angry, but be angry about the right things. Being inconvenienced is not the same thing as being marginalized. In fact, much of the message of the entire Bible is that we are to look out for one another, to do as Jesus said in the two greatest commandments, to love God and to love others. And a big part of loving others is about finding the places where what is does not line up with what ought to be!

It ought not to be, in a world of abundance, that children go hungry. It ought not be, in a world set apart as the creation of God, that Christians would get lost in the weeds, missing out on God’s grand vision of the beloved community, for everybody, I mean everybody. And, crucially, it ought not be that those who have lost spouses or parents should face great difficulties through no fault of their own, if we as Christians do the fundamental work of justice and care and love.

“True devotion,” the writer of the Epistle of James writes, “the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.” These words, this advice, is especially important for Christians in the 21st Century, as we find ourselves enmeshed in what I have heard described as “the outrage industrial complex.” It is true that there are plenty of things out there designed to make you mad. And in its own perverse way, being angry can be fun, at least for a little while. But it is likewise true that anger for its own sake is unfaithful.

Just the other day, a friend was telling me about what happens to certain trees in the midst of wildfires. The fire begins at the roots, and in some species the fire burns the tree from the inside, such that you can’t tell much is wrong with the tree until you take a whack at it, and you see the flames licking out from within. Dealing with anger is very much like dealing with fire in this way. If you aren’t careful, it will burn you up from the inside.

And so, if you are looking for some feedback as to whether your anger is righteous or whether it serves no purpose other than to burn you up and leave you hollow, you could do worse than this little passage in the Epistle of James. You could call it the Anger Test, or the orphans-and-widows test, maybe. Ask yourself: Have you been quick to listen? Slow to speak? Has your anger come about slowly, deliberately, and upon reflection? Does your anger have a direction? Does it face outward, towards the needs of others, rather than your own comfort? Does your anger cause you to act in love, rather than in self-defense? Does it cause you to welcome the word planted deep inside you, rather than to burn you up from the inside?

It's not easy, this work. It is much easier to go along with the masses and get angry about whatever the controversy of the day happens to be. It’s much, much easier to go along with the masses when you find yourself feeling tweaked, or called to account, or challenged in your approach to work or family or life or faith. But when I look at scripture, when I look at the writings of the prophets, or of Paul, when I look at the sayings of Jesus, I don’t see them lifting up selfish stubbornness as a virtue. I don’t see them holding up self-righteousness as a virtue. I see them lifting up virtues like “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

When I look to scripture, I see our fore-parents telling us to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry - and what’s more, to be angry about the right things.

It’s not easy, this work. Some days it feels a bit like a fool’s errand, and I find myself wondering whether I’m up for the job. But then I come across teachings like this little passage in the Epistle of James, and I am reminded that it may not be easy, but that “every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from God, the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. God chose to give us birth by God’s true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything God created.”

It is not easy, this work. But it is the very work for which you were created, you beloved child of God. Thanks be to God.

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(originally published May 2015)

If there's one word that gets thrown around more than any other in the church's ongoing debate about full inclusion of LGBTQ people, it's "orthodoxy." Those who oppose full inclusion (or, less pejoratively, those who argue that the Bible does not allow for same-sex weddings or LGBTQ clergy) argue that their position is the orthodox one. Implicit in this argument, and sometimes said aloud, is the idea that those in favor of full inclusion stand against orthodoxy. You can see more of this kind of thing here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here. In far too many of our conversations about sexuality, orthodoxy means nothing more than standing against full inclusion.

It's a shame that we have so narrowed the word "orthodoxy" in this way, for orthodoxy is a gift from God to the church. Orthodoxy, broadly defined and broadly understood, holds us together as believers in the triune God, such that we celebrate one church, one Lord, one baptism. Orthodoxy ties us to the early church creeds, so that more than simply being on the same page, as it were, we may be in mystical communion with one another, and with God. In the Nicene Creed (part of our doctrinal heritage as Christians, and printed in the United Methodist Hymnal), we declare:

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.
We acknowledge one baptism
for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen

Orthodoxy, then, is about connecting us in one church, not about dividing us. It is certainly not about picking one issue to be the plumb line of faithfulness: particularly an issue not mentioned in the Creeds.

It has been absolutely remarkable, then, to watch the speed at which we've seen the term "orthodoxy" turn into something it has not traditionally meant. This narrow funneling of the term does not do justice to the wideness of God's mercy, nor is it faithful to the rich witness of the Bible. I will acknowledge the necessity of using Biblical interpretation to arrive at a position of full inclusion (more about this in a bit) but I will not cede that I am unorthodox. Never mind the fact that the ancient creeds don't actually mention the Bible; I see nowhere in the ancient beliefs about the Triune God where an argument about full inclusion of LGBTQ people stands in opposition to what the great councils of the church discerned to be good and true about Christianity.

I do not want to put words in the mouths of those who use the term "orthodoxy" to describe an opposition to full inclusion, but when I hear this term in this context, I find the speaker often actually means that he or she does not believe that God does new things outside of the knowledge base of those who wrote the scriptures under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, if it were true, the Holy Spirit would have told the original writers of scripture. Since the Holy Spirit did not do this, anything that stands outside the knowledge base of the original writers of scripture is unorthodox.

The problem with this argument is that this is never what orthodoxy has meant! Orthodoxy, throughout history, has meant a devotion to first principles of Christianity, in particular the creeds. Even G.K. Chesterton, the great Christian apologist, noted that "when the word 'orthodoxy' is used [in his book of the same name] it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed."

Nor is orthodoxy, understood in a Wesleyan context, anything resembling what we have warped it into, in the context of our debates over sexuality. We certainly believe scripture to be primary--in this way, I am an unabashed evangelical!--but nowhere in our founding documents do we pretend that God only speaks through scripture. Those who conflate "orthodoxy" with opposition to full inclusion sometimes point to the fifth Article of Religion of the Methodist Church, "Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scripture for Salvation," as guiding their understanding that no truth exists outside scripture. But read the article for yourself:

The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

Not only does the fifth Article of Religion not say that scripture contains all that is true about God, but it implicitly acknowledges that new truth may be discovered outside the scope of scripture, even as it declares that nothing necessary for salvation is found outside of scripture.

Relatedly, those who argue that orthodoxy stands in opposition to full inclusion say that the Biblical witness is clear, and that those of us who argue for the acceptance of the practice of homosexuality within married, partnered relationships are privileging experience above scripture. The argument goes that the problem with the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral is that we misunderstand the role of experience within it. Experience, then, is not about saying "I experience something else to be true, so the Bible must be wrong," but rather, "I live out the Biblical witness in my experience." Let me be clear: I have no problem with this critique of the quadrilateral! So often, in this individualistic culture, the only thing that matters is my own experience. Church, I believe, calls us to understand experience much more broadly.

And yet experience does play into my understanding of scripture, and our communal understanding, because each of us reads scripture through the lens of our personal experience. Far from being about my experience subverting or overwriting scripture, my experience colors the way I read the words on the page and the understanding I have therein. I can no more remove my own experience from the equation than I can give up my own name! I read scripture as a human--we read scripture, together, as humans--and my social location necessarily colors my reading.

Thus, I must necessarily interpret scripture when I read it. There is no other way for me to be faithful, as scripture cannot simply be implanted into my brain. It must pass from the ink on the page, through the air, into my eyes, through my optic nerves, into my brain, where it co-mingles with everything else lodged in there. You read scripture the same way. I pray that I may discern God's will through the scripture, but the very existence of the step between the writing of scripture and its presence in my brain--namely, my reading and comprehending it--means that scripture must be interpreted. To pretend that there is no interpretation necessary, as many fundamentalists do, is to miss the fact that those of us who read it tend to be human.

It is simply impossible to not interpret the Bible! We may disagree over the interpretation, but interpretation is a necessary part of following Christ, honoring scripture as primary, and expressing faithfulness to the historic creeds of the church. These are necessary practices in the service of maintaining orthodoxy, and they can lead to disagreements about how God is calling us to live in the modern world, but those disagreements do not necessarily mean that one side is faithful and the other is willingly otherwise. In other words, when people conflate orthodoxy with belief about a single issue not mentioned in the Creeds, what they seem to be doing is subverting the historic meaning of orthodoxy so that they may control what it means.

I cannot speak for all who believe in full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the life of the church, nor do I mean to put words in the mouths of those who cry "orthodoxy!" in these conflicts. If I am demonstrating unorthodoxy in terms of what "orthodoxy" has always meant (that is, being in agreement with the historic creeds of the church), I am open to being called out.

But if we are going to have this discussion--and it is time to have this discussion, Church--let us at least be fair with one another and refrain for assuming that everyone who disagrees with my position  or my side is, by definition, a heretic. That kind of argument has not exactly been good for the church throughout the centuries.

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For several years now, I have considered myself an evangelical. I’ve not always thought of myself this way, but it is a term that does represent my upbringing in a nondenominational church. Now, I serve a denomination that considers itself to be both mainline and evangelical, which is a pretty find needle to thread.

And for several years, I have had to argue, at times, with those who do not believe I deserve to be called an evangelical. I was too focused on social justice, or I had too loose an understanding of Biblical interpretation, or my politics did not align with the Moral Majority, or I struggled too much with the idea of inerrancy: never mind the fact that I chose to go to seminary at Emory, where I would argue that the announcement of the death of God was quite premature.

I have also argued, at times, with those who claim evangelicalism as being little more than ascribing to a specific political platform or rigid set of doctrines; I believe evangelicalism to be a richer tradition than this.

I realize now that the evangelical conundrum is this: do we prioritize purity or breadth? That is, is it our top priority as evangelicals to defend the purity of the faith, thus leaving some people out of the family, or is it our top priority to spread the Gospel as far as possible, even if the message gets muddled every now and again, like a game of Telephone?

In other words--and forgive the limits of these metaphors--are we called to be couriers or defenders? Yes, we are called to be both, but there is a sense in which each of these sensibilities runs headlong into the other.

As for me, I have a tendency to believe that being a courier requires more courage than being a desk-bound defender. A courier risks broken relationship, being labeled an almost-Christian. It is easy to hide behind a computer and accuse everybody else of being heretics. It is more difficult to go out and do the face-to-face work of making disciples.

But then, others would say that the army loses a whole lot more soldiers than UPS loses couriers. Faith requires limits, after all. I can still hear my seminary professor Luke Johnson reminding us that if the Biblical canon were not closed, we would not be able to do the work of Biblical interpretation, for we would have nothing to protect us from completely going off the rails.

I tend toward the courier side of things because it is the nature of my personality to deliver. It is also in my nature to question whether boundaries are in appropriate places, or whether we’ve just marked the lot at the corner of the driveway because that’s how it was marked when we moved in. But that's my personality. It is a reflection of the way God made me, but it does not stand in opposition to the way God made you.

I wonder: if much of my own understanding of what it means to be an evangelical is driven by the makeup of my personality, how much religious infighting is just personality conflict masked as Truth?

In other words, what if we're both wrong, and the missing ingredient is actually humility?

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