Coming Out II: Paradigm Shift

This is the second in a series of posts about my coming out story. See the first here. The names of individuals in these posts are changed to keep identities safe.

I was in the midst of a paradigm shift.

The underlying theme of my spiritual life has always been my sexuality. It’s hard to ignore. Coming to faith in an Evangelical Baptist church, sex was constantly a topic in youth group (along with drinking). The approach was something like this:

Never have sex. Wait till you’re married. Never drink. Wait till you’re 21.

Which basically meant the guys’ accountability group was dominated by confessions of masturbation, porn, temptation, and that make out session that got a little too heated at last weekend’s party (though, granted, these were the edgy topics; sometimes we never got past “lusting with the eyes”).

For me, that meant that the constant thing on my mind was:

God, if they only knew.

To say the least, personal purity and peity was the central theme of my theological development (my church’s theology, like most Evangelical churches, had strong pietistic influences). In fact, you could say that purity, salvation, and conservative politics were the only themes of my theological development. So, when I got to college, well, my Baptist training went into full effect: I rejected the party scene completely. No drinking. No sex. In retrospect, I must have seemed pretty boring to my dormmates.

As I started to piece together my position on my own burgeoning sense of sexuality freshman year, I too realized that my theology was not nearly robust enough to deal with the demands being placed upon it in Theology 10001 (a required course for all Notre Dame undergrads). Oddly enough, “it says it in the Bible” in support of Protestant belief is not sufficient to counter thousands of years of Catholic theological Tradition. Moreover, I began to realize that the Bible doesn’t actually say anything all that clearly. “Don’t drink, don’t have sex, don’t get abortions, don’t let gays marry” didn’t actually constitute a theological system either; so, under pressure from a loving Theology professor who “danced for Jesus” in class, I began to look for a faith I could sink my intellectual teeth into.

At the same time, I became increasingly convinced that my sexuality needed to be treated and removed.  Looking back, my resolution to remove my sexuality had a reciprocal relationship with my theology: not only was my theology shaped by that resolution, the theology I developed fed and strengthened it in return.

I turned to Calvin’s writings and slowly became more and more Reformed in my thinking. My reason for doing so,: Calvin’s strong sense of the human depravity; that we are utterly immoral, in need of a perfect savior.

You see, I hated my sexuality. To me, it just made me different. It made me something vile, something wrong, something detestable. By extension, I hated myself. To me, I was more broken than everyone else. I saw myself as a leper, an outcast, someone unworthy of any affection, of any attention, of any friendship. I seethed with hatred toward myself and my body and my ‘condition’.

It followed that I wanted to rid myself of my sexuality.

In the Reformed view, we’re all vile, wrong, and detestable until we’re made clean by God. The utter depravity of man is a major part of Calvin’s theological understanding: we’re helpless to help ourselves out of our misery and need God’s grace to intervene on our behalf. In fact, it’s so major for the Reformed understanding of Christianity that I was encouraged regularly by Reformed preachers, both at my church and by podcast, to understand myself as depraved in order to better understand God’s grace and God’s exaltedness.

I loved it.

I didn’t want a theology that demanded that I love myself, that said God takes me as I am and loves me despite my sin. No. I wanted a theology that said I was despicable, as I knew I was, and that God would make me clean, and I would have no choice in the matter because I couldn’t do it myself.

Using that hatred, I unleashed volley after volley of psychological attacks on my sexual preference: Vile. Wrong. Destestable. Lustful. Arrogant. Bastard. Unworthy. This thing, this thing, it makes you unclean. But God, God makes you clean.

Fast forward four years to Chicago.

My homophobia was being ripped to shreds in my friendship with David, my out gay friend. There was nothing to hate about him. He wasn’t a Christian, granted, but he was just a person: broken like the rest of us. And just because he was gay didn’t make him more so than anyone else. My constructs and stereotypes began to fall apart and I began to fall for him. 

I feel literally torn. I find myself in a place I know all too well – caught between the call of Christ and my attraction to other men. There’s this guy who makes me nervous, nervous like I felt on my first few dates with my ex. I find myself stuck: who am I? If God is healing me, why these feelings? Am I to feel guilty? Sorrowful? Excited?

Everyday, I feel like I have to deny who I am to follow God.

But that’s what He’s asked of me.

O God, you ask too much.

Speaking with my pastor after coming out, he gave a good frame for it: the facts of my experience weren’t lining up with the worldview that I had come to develop.

The only solution, it seemed, was to abandon the worldview.

I prayed. Hard. But slowly, slowly, it seemed as if this was exactly where God was leading me: to embrace my sexuality and, well, then only God would know what would happen. Celibacy? Relationships? A life of singleness? A life with a husband and family?

I figured it was probably celibacy.

So, I identified as gay, out loud, for the first time December 12, 2010.

It was like breathing free air after years in a prison cell.

Coming Out I: O God, You Ask Too Much

This post is the first in a series of posts about my coming out process. Links to subsequent posts in the series will be provided at the end of each post. 

O God, you ask too much.

I wrote this in my journal on October 19, 2010. It was 2:00am on a weeknight; I had work the next day but didn’t care. I was fervently praying, occasionally sobbing, to God in my apartment; sometimes kneeling, other times pacing. I felt torn, crippled, angry, and broken.

You see, I had spent four years of college trying to get rid of my attraction to men and, after so much progress, was back to where I started.

I’ve liked other boys since I can remember—my first crush was a Swedish boy in first grade whose family moved after that year—but it was in seventh grade homeroom that I first asked myself that terrifying question: “Am I gay?”

Having been told homosexuality was wrong and a choice, I told myself “No. I choose No,” and tried to put it out of my mind. I was mildly successful.

In high school, I joined an Evangelical Baptist church; my parents drove me to Sunday School and bible study during the week until I could drive myself. I concerned myself with my grades; robotics club, then drama, then crew, were added to my quickly growing involvement in church.  I didn’t date much, save one five month relationship sophomore year, and really didn’t care to. As time passed, the question, “Am I gay?” kept growing in the back of my mind. But I continued to concern myself with other things.

Come Freshman year at Notre Dame, however, that question became impossible to ignore. By second semester, I had the pressing sense that this, whatever this was, was something I needed to figure out. And fast. I hit an all time low in my emotional health: I struggled to get out of bed, cried at all hours of the day for no reason, and, despite a desire to be with people, grew increasingly anti-social. I felt that people didn’t know me. I knew exactly why.

So, I began telling my new friends about my struggles, to mixed reactions. Looking for help, I found Exodus International. Exodus claimed to provide “a way out” of homosexuality for those who wanted to leave it: homosexuality was contrary to the way God made human beings, the result of the way we were raised, and a purely lustful attraction. Through therapy and prayer, change, to become heterosexual with redeemed sexual attraction, was possible.

Bingo.

For the next four years, this was the center of my life. I built a theology around it, asked my friends to keep me accountable for my same-sex temptations, sought out others who felt the same way and helped them see the light: that this was not the way we ought to be, that change was possible. I became increasingly serious about my faith, delving into theology textbooks and my Christian community, using a variety of therapeutic methods to reign in my wandering eyes.

My senior year I dated a girl and was getting ready to go to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary after working with some of the top Evangelical minds in the world.

Everything was going according to plan.

But it fell apart.

First, I realized I wasn’t financially able to go to seminary.

The week after, my girlfriend and I broke up.

Stuck at home far from college friends, I lacked a Christian community around me. My high school church, which I had already grown weary of in college, was hardly the fount of support and closeness my college group had been.

I resolved myself to continue my part-time work at Kohl’s until I could figure out what needed to happen next and to do my best getting involved in church. That was, until I got a job offer in Chicago working as a researcher at a large media agency. So, I picked up everything and, three weeks later, drove to Chicago to start my new post-grad life.

Things were looking up.

Until I met my first ever gay friend.

He was cute. Funny. Smart. Confident. Humble. I suddenly found myself head over heels for the guy; but, weirdly, unlike any attraction to men I had had before, it wasn’t just that he had a cute ass or a nice jaw-line or defined pecs. He was just a great guy.

My theology was suddenly shot to the core: after four years of therapy, I liked a guy. A guy who seemed to like me (like, for real, not just a straight guy). And it wasn’t lust. It wasn’t purely sexual. There was something good there. Something… beautiful about it.

Shit.

I feel literally torn. I find myself in a place I know all too well – caught between the call of Christ and my attraction to other men. There’s this guy who makes me nervous, nervous like I felt on my first few dates with my ex. I find myself stuck: who am I? If God is healing me, why these feelings? Am I to feel guilty? Sorrowful? Excited?

Everyday, I feel like I have to deny who I am to follow God.

But that’s what He’s asked of me.

O God, you ask too much.

To be continued.

James Alison on Jesus as the Other

“… the irruption of what is utterly other, utterly gratuitous, is not simply a delightful thing. It is a terrifying one… What is other to us, in a more distant sense, if you like, the ‘removed’ other, like visiting a foreign country whose language we don’t know, and whose culture we don’t understand, is both exciting and frightening…

“Well, if that’s true of the ‘removed’ other where we do have a certain sense of shared basic human sensitivity with the locals, then how much truer is it of the ‘utterly’ other, the purely gratuitous that in its first manifestation is both exhilarating and terrifying. However, the risen Lord was not only utterly ‘other’, for it was possible for the disciples to recognize him. After a bit they were able to say, ‘It is the Lord’. However, this was not a case of encountering something familiar in the midst of what was other… No, what the disciples were able to experience was that the wholly, gratuitously other, was made present to them as a giving back of someone familiar. Not someone from this side gone there, but someone from there given in a wholly new way, that was yet a continuation of the way they had sensed him as being given while he was with them before his death. This meant that the wholly, gratuitously, utterly other was no longer simply strange, but, without ceasing to be other, was a presence of recognizable, familiar, love for them. This was the beginning of the recasting of the deisciples’ perception of God, the wholly ‘other’, in terms of Jesus, the risen Lord.”

James Alison, Knowing Jesus (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1994), 15.

Space to Breathe: I’m Back and Changed

Exactly one year ago, I posted for what I thought would be the last time on this blog. I was at a crossroads in my life: I had just moved to Chicago, started a new job in an industry that I knew nothing about, and was living on my own for the first time. I was also plagued with spiritual doubts: doubts about who I was, who God wanted me to be, and how to continue living my faith.

I stopped writing. In part this was intentional: I needed space. Space to breathe, space to process, space to figure stuff out with God. In part, it was because I just couldn’t write about these things anymore.

I realize now that during college, when I first started writing here, I had a hard time empathizing with people. To be honest, I was kind of a jackass. Cavalier. Arrogant. It pains me sometimes to think about how unyielding I was. You see, I never had a chance to go through that whole “Who am I?” crisis that most people go through. My freshman year I was pretty sure who I was; my biggest worry was where I fit in. My identity crisis never really happened; at least, if it did, it wasn’t really a time of discovery for me and I barely remember it. So, when I saw students around me questioning and exploring, pushing the limits of their self-understanding and faiths, I didn’t understand: what? You drink underage? Just stop. It’s not hard.

Seriously.

When I got to Chicago, that confidence in my identity was disrupted big time. Big time.

Following an intense two and a half months of struggle, December 13, 2010, marked the first day of my life as an out gay man.

And, my God, it felt good to finally be honest and embrace that part of me. Still does.

The past year, I’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs. At the outset, the coming out process wasn’t horribly painful: there were a few friends who were upset or tried to convince me that this was the worst possible decision for my life. But, you know, that’s okay. I spent the first few months figuring out my stance on homosexuality, doing a lot of reading, meeting with pastors, and trying to wrap my head around everything. A few months into that process, however, I found myself face to face with the reality of my journey and, hurt, left the church and wasn’t sure if I was a Christian anymore.

Eight months, a relationship, and countless drunken nights later, I’m back in the church and ready to start thinking about these things again.

I’m working on a series of posts which will discuss what I’ve been learning this year. If you’ve followed my blog previously, you’ll notice several things:

(1) My theology is drastically different, but still profoundly evangelical.
(2) My understanding of Scripture has evolved, I think for the better.
(3) I still sound like an Evangelical.
(4) I’m going to be more honest about my personal life, with reservations, of course.
(5) In that vein, the occasional profanity may find its way onto here. I’m sorry that it bothers you if it does, but I won’t be sorry for their use.

I’m looking forward to putting into words the thoughts that are swirling around in my head about Jesus, Church, and life as a gay Christian, and to hearing feedback. Stay tuned, folks.

Surrender – My Last ISI Talk

This is a transcript of a talk originally delivered at Iron Sharpens Iron, an interdenominational ministry at the University of Notre Dame, on April 15, 2010. I needed to hear this message again tonight: perhaps you do too.

First things first. Tonight, I would like to apologize for my unsightly facial hair. Many of you know that every year MOG goes on MOG camping. Part of the tradition is not to shave after Easter. So, I haven’t shaved since last Wednesday. And it kills me. But, because MOG camping is one of the highlights of my year, I do it. I want to see every man here on MOG camping. Anyway, I hope that you can avoid looking at my facial hair while I talk, or, at least, avoid judging me for it. Some of you, however, might not even notice that there’s anything different about my face – which is great, on the one hand, because you can easily ignore my facial hair. On the other hand, you’re able to easily ignore my facial hair. Oh well.

Second, what I talk about tonight is something God has been teaching me for four years. Four years! And he’s still teaching me. Don’t think I come from a place of superiority or from having learned all these things. Christians have a lot of concepts which they might know intellectually, but have never made it down to their hearts—God is still working these things into my heart and I speak to myself as well as to you all.

Because of this duality between intellectual and heartfelt knowledge, I find Christians say a lot of things without knowing what they mean. We say things like “I am justified by grace.” But what is grace? What is justification? We sing songs that say things like, “I bow before your throne.” What does it mean to bow before God’s throne? Or, “I’m on my knees/offering all of me/Jesus you’re all this heart is longing for.” If you’re standing and not kneeling, what does it mean to say you’re kneeling? What does it mean to “cast down our crowns” at his feet?

As Christians, we say a lot of things without really meaning them. How could we? We don’t know what they mean. But we like saying them, or singing them.

I myself realized this my freshman year of college and I stopped singing worship songs; at least, songs I would have classified as “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs, meaning they’re super emotional and very simple. There’s this song that I used to sing in high school youth group that was utterly devoid of meaning for me at that time: it’s called “Surrender.” We just sang it tonight. Its chorus goes something like this: “And I-I surrender/all to you/all to you.” One of the verses says this: “I’m singing You this song, I’m waiting at the cross/And all the world holds dear, I count it all as loss/For the sake of knowing You, for the glory of Your name/To know the lasting joy, even sharing in Your pain.” What does it mean to know lasting joy? To share in His pain? What is it to count something as loss? I mean, there are these intellectual concepts but, I don’t truly know what it means to give up everything.

Consequently, tonight, I want to talk about surrender. It’s a tricky concept. We can think of it in a variety of different ways. Oftentimes we think about surrender in military terms: generals surrender their armies when they have lost the war. We can also think of this in terms of prisoners: I surrender myself as a prisoner. Or, perhaps, I can say I surrender custody of something I’m really possessive about: like a box of Cheez-its. I mean, I love my Cheezits and they’re hard to part with. In any case, we really mean something like this: I am agreeing not to fight against whoever it is to whom I am surrendering. I’m agreeing not to struggle, and thus, in a sense, I’m yielding my strength. Instead of fighting against some other, I’m allowing her to have power over me.

An example of biblical surrender is good here, and for that, we’re going to turn to John chapter six; I’m going to be jumping around a bit, but we begin in verse 52. Will you all please stand with me out of respect for Scripture? I have bolded parts of the passage that I would like us to read together, if you would read aloud with me.

35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst…”

52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.

56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.“

60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”

65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” 66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?”

68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

The word of the Lord. Please pray with me.

This is a really interesting, very long passage. As you can see from the verse markings, I’ve had to cut out a good portion of it for the sake of time: over half of the actual sermon Christ gives. But we have enough here to get a good glimpse of what this story has to say about surrender.

A quick aside: many of us will come to this passage differently. Some of us will take Christ’s language to be highly literal; others will take Christ as being highly figurative. I’m not here to arbitrate this kind of debate tonight. Instead, I want to look for a deep symbolic meaning in this passage that all of us, regardless how literal we take this passage to be, can agree upon.

At the most obvious level, this passage is about a choice that Peter makes juxtaposed against a choice that the crowd listening to Christ makes, referred to as “many of Christ’s disciples.” The question that Jesus presents both of them is: do you want to go away?

I mean, no matter whether you think Christ is speaking at a literal level, the fact of the matter is that He is talking about the audience eating His flesh and blood. That’s pretty intense. Can you imagine a teacher standing before His audience saying you must eat of me? Even today in our loose, pluralistic society, warning lights go off. Here’s yet another crazy! The thought of the audience must have been this: Jesus has gone off the deep end. Or else, how is this supposed to work? Maybe He doesn’t mean what we think He means? So they ask: how is this to work?

But Jesus doesn’t recant or explain, but instead amplifies and makes explicit the same message. He repeats: you must eat of Me. So, the crowd chooses to leave. All that are left are the Twelve.

And Christ asks them, “Do you want to go away as well?”

Here, we get Peter’s response on behalf of the Twelve. It’s astounding. At the most basic level, we understand the passage as Peter saying “No, Jesus, we’re going to stay.” But there’s more to it than that: Peter says “To whom shall we go?” Think about what this implies. If I ask someone “to whom will I go?” after being asked if I’ll leave, there is desperation in the question: it implies that there’s no place else to go. His response amounts to this: you’re asking me if I going to leave? Jesus, where else am I going to go?

This is incredible. Jesus is presumably talking about cannibalism, asks Peter if he wants to leave, and Peter just says, “I’ve got no place else to go.”

This is insane. Your leader says something along the lines of “by the way guys, you have to eat me” and you say “alright”? This is no light thing and, No, this is not a normal response. This is incredible. In this short little sentence Peter completely radicalizes his walk with Christ. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that Peter perfectly understands what Christ means here. He’s not picking up what Christ is putting down, or so to speak.  Otherwise He would say, “Yeah Jesus, you make total sense to us, why would we leave?” No. His response is desperate: there’s no where else to go, I will stay.

Here’s the catch, though. Peter responds to Jesus, “Where shall I go?” But this is exactly what Jesus was teaching the entire time.

Earlier, in 6:30-33, the crowd asks Jesus for a miracle like that of the manna which Moses gave Israel in the desert. They want Jesus to prove Himself to them: they were impressed somewhat by the multiplying of the loaves, which occurred just before this. But they demand another sign.

Christ’s response? Well, he says, Moses didn’t give you this bread, God did. And the true bread is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

Here’s the miracle: me. I’m the manna from heaven.

Now, consider what this means. Many of us know the story of Israel: after being enslaved in Egypt and then set free, the Jews spent forty years wandering around the desert before getting to the land God had promised to them. During that time, they didn’t grow crops. They didn’t slaughter livestock. Instead, day by day, God provided their food in the form of a kind of cracker: manna. Every morning, there would be manna on the ground outside the Jewish camp. The Israelites would collect the manna and bring it back to eat. During that time, manna was the source of food for the Jews. Manna meant their survival. So, in calling Himself manna, Christ says that He is the thing upon which Israel must survive. But He goes even further. In verse 58 He says, that He is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever. Not only is Jesus manna, He is a new manna, the “true bread” from heaven. The old manna didn’t keep the Israelites alive forever. But this manna, Jesus, does. Furthermore, He implies that his audience is, like the former Israel, also in a desert in need of manna. And only He is eternal sustenance. He is the only food on which they can survive and He will make them last forever.

Think of how important that makes Him. He says to his audience, “You are in the wilderness, exiles from the promised land. You must eat and I am the only thing of which you can partake. I am the food upon which you must rely, the only food upon which you can rely.”

Jesus says of Himself that you must eat of Him or else die. So, when He asks Peter, “Do you want to go away as well?” Peter’s response is rather appropriate: where else are we going to go, Jesus? You have the words of life. You are the holy one of God. There are no alternatives.

Peter understood what Christ was talking about, even if He had no idea what Christ was talking about. Imagine that. It took a lesson which Peter could not understand, a lesson which confounded his mind, that he was incapable of comprehending, to teach him the very lesson that Christ was trying to teach.

What’s the point? Well, think about Peter’s motivation for staying. It wasn’t this: Jesus, you’re a pretty great teacher. I’m going to stick around. It wasn’t, look, you’ve got some great moral principles upon which I can found my life, I’m going to stay. It isn’t, you’re all-powerful and have performed some sick miracles, sure, I won’t go.

Peter’s motivation was that there is no one else. He can’t go anywhere else.

If we take the Bible seriously, we encounter this truth: Jesus Christ as the Son of God claims not only that He is more important than anything which has or ever will exist on earth, but that there are no alternatives to Him. It is in this understanding that surrender can come.

So, what is it to surrender? In some sense, it’s giving up of one’s power. But this giving up of one’s power is not a matter of choosing from many options: Christians surrender to Christ for this reason: there is no place else we can go. Surrender in the Christian faith is the understanding that for life’s meaning, for our survival, for everything, Christ is everything. He is all things. Nothing is more important than Him and no action more important than His cross. Our focus is singular.

However, no matter how much I would like, to I cannot turn to you right now and propose this question: if you found yourself in Peter’s place, what choice would you make? Because I am certain that for most of us who consider ourselves Christians, we would be inclined to say “of course we would.” But that’s not the way this works.

Surrender isn’t told us, nor is it explained. It is demanded of us.

Essential to the Christian walk are decisions of humility versus pride. At the outset, one must choose how to respond to Christ’s entrance into her life. The first few chapters of Matthew make this clear. When Christ first comes into the world, we see two responses: the response of the Magi, kings who kneel and worship a baby in a peasant’s manger, and the king of Israel, Herod, who attempts to kill Christ. One response is humble, the other prideful. We then get questions of pride and humility in our day to day walk with Christ: whether I choose to worship Christ in my actions is dependent on whether I follow Him, whether I will take His will for my life over my own: does Christ know better than me, or I than Him?

But, every once in awhile, decisions come along which rock us to the core. Daily questions like, should I respond in a loving way to my roommate’s irrational anger? or should I help this perfect stranger crying on a bench on the quad? or should I do my bible study? pale in comparison.

When I came to Notre Dame, I was expecting an amazing experience: I looked forward to a dorm life with awesome community, for a bible study where I’d find my best friends, and for the friend group I had left behind at home to be replaced. But it wasn’t. The days dragged on and slowly, I felt God’s presence slipping out of my life. I had once felt called to be at Notre Dame, but, my life began to be consumed by hopelessness instead. I was lonely. Afraid. Abandoned, or so it seemed, by God. My faith was on the rocks and felt hollow. Lifeless. Why did I believe all these things in the first place? Add in some personal struggles with the legitimacy of biblical teachings, and I was ready to walk out. Is this what God demands of me? I asked. To be alone, to be afraid, to be consumed by doubt, confused, angry, frustrated, denying myself?

In a word, no. Instead, He demanded this: that I understand He is everything, that friends, intellectual doubts, confusion, anger, frustration, all of this was nothing.

I sat down one night and read this passage. As I read, Christ asked me “Alden, will you go away as well?”

The Christian faith had nothing left to offer me. My friends felt shallow. Worship was just singing. I had morality. I had rationality. What need had I of Christianity? At this point, following “God” had only brought me pain, agony, and frustration. I should have just gone to Wheaton with my best friend. Or to NYU. Was I called to be here? Was I really?

But, try as much as I could, I realized I couldn’t walk away: at the end of the day, I knew that no matter what, nothing could satisfy me like Christ. There were no alternatives, no matter how much He demanded of me and no matter how confused I was at His teaching.

Without Him, everything seemed meaningless.

Like with Peter, Christ demanded of me surrender, to acknowledge that He was all in all and that I could not satisfy myself anywhere else. He called me to give over my very will to Him. It is not as though I didn’t know this before: but until that moment, until He demanded of me, I never really understood how difficult a demand surrender was.

Peter and I, however, did not find the power to surrender in ourselves. Quite the contrary, Christ says in John 6 – no one can come to Him unless it is granted to Him by the Father. This surrendering is a gift found in Christ upon the Cross. It is in Jesus, who surrendered Himself to hell, separation from the Father whom He had been with since eternity, and to death. In that surrender, in His obedience, we receive this hope: God is one who has surrendered, but in doing so conquered. How amazing. We surrender to a God who makes surrender into victory, who makes death into life. How can we not bow to that power? Further, the promise is there for us: in our surrender we shall be made new. And this gives us strength, strength to persevere.

Peter and I both encountered something hard: a wall of sorts. Teachings and demands that we couldn’t conceivably say yes to. The temptation is to walk away, or to slacken our pace, to fall behind. To not take everything. To rely on some of our own wits, something besides Christ.

Until we are presented with this choice, to choose God above ourselves, to surrender everything to His sufficiency—only then do we finally understand: He is everything. We learn in the act of surrender what surrender is. I can’t teach you. Christ must. And it won’t be easy.

So, the question is not: will you surrender? The question is, what won’t you believe? What are you holding out on? Are you going to take all of the Christian faith seriously? And if not, why? Where and when is God calling you to surrender? Will you partake of Him only?

Sometimes we sing about what we don’t understand. Well, tonight, we’re going to return to the two songs we sang earlier: Surrender and the Wonderful Cross. We sing these songs with renewed meaning: the cross is wonderful and not only does it demand our lives, our souls, our all, but gives us the strength to give everything. And so, in light of the cross, we surrender everything.

But, perhaps tonight you’re not at a place where you can say that you do surrender. When we sing, we also sing of how we should be: what we pray God would make us into. I urge to use these songs to pray this way tonight.

Perhaps you’re not sure what I’m talking about. Maybe you want to talk to me more about surrendering and more about who Christ is. I encourage you to talk to one of the ISI leaders, to your prayer group, or to grab coffee with me sometime. If you come up after we can exchange email addresses.

Surrender is a life-long process: there are moments in which it is easy, but, more often, moments in which it is difficult. Yet, in those moments, Christ demands of us everything. Take the cross, understand that it truly is wonderful: in it we are satisfied, in it we find Christ is sufficient, that He is our survival and that in surrender, we are raised again to new life.

Together, let’s respond to the Lord in song.

Mark Noll on Christian Intellect

“Learning may have a greater tendency to inculcate pride than some other human activities, but only relatively so. Business executives who boast in their firms, parents who boast in their children, gardeners who boast in their tomatoes, patriots who boast in their nations — all are called, with scholars who boast in their books, to subordinate the object of their affections to the absolute glory that belongs to God alone.

“A Christian appeal for Christian learning also will not presume that learning is the ultimate or only value. Instead, by following Paul’s precepts in 1 Corinthians 12:14-26, the Christian who is committed to the life of the mind will regard the tasks to which other believers are called with the same respect that he or she accords to the intellectual life. Just as, in the apostle’s phrase, ‘the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you,” so the scholar cannot say to the illiterate believers, ‘I don’t need you.’ And vice versa.

“Evangelical culture in America has run to antagonistic polarities: conversion to the exclusion of gradual growth in grace, the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit instead of the contemplation of God in the created realm, the prizing of popular wisdom over against pronouncements from authorities, a fascination with heaven while slighting attention to earth, a devotion to the supernatural and a neglect of the natural. A Christian appeal for Christian learning does not ask for these polarities to be reversed — for example, to have the natural exclude the supernatural or the present exclude the future. It calls rather for the mutual interdependence of the body, a reunion of characteristics that American experience has ruthlessly divorced, and a willingness to acknowledge that the sovereign Christ can be exalted by humble activity in every legitimate sphere of human life, including the life of the mind.”

Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994): 32.

B.B. Warfield & Keller on Mercy Ministry

This is in connection with my current dilemma: how to serve the poor in Chicago. I plan on posting at some point, once my thoughts are more collected. Until then, I found this passage to be, on the one hand, profoundly convicting; yet, on the other, profoundly inspiring.

***

“B.B Warfield, in a sermon on Philippians 2 entitled ‘Imitating the Incarnation,’ explains very clearly what it means to follow Christ’s example:

He was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others… Self-sacrifice means no indifference to our times and our fellows: it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every man’s hopes and fears, longings and despairs: it means many sidedness of spirit, multiform activity, multiplicity of sympathies. It means richness of development. It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives—binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours.1

“… Of course, many true Christians do not evidence the social concern the Bible says is a mark of real faith…. Though it may not be in evidence, a heart for the poor sleeps in all Christians until someone preaches grace in connection with the ministry of mercy. This ‘pushes a button’ deep in our soul, and we begin to wake up. Let me give you an example of the kind of preaching that ‘pushes the button.’

Now dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine; you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving… “though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor”… Objection 1. “My money is my own.” Answer: Christ might have said, “my blood is my own, my life is my own”… then where should we have been? Objection 2. “The poor are undeserving. Answer: Christ might have said, “They are wicked rebels… shall I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good angels.” But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving. Objection 3. “The poor may abuse it.” Answer: Christ might have said the same; yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood. Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”2

“Can you feel the Spirit of God ‘pushing your button’ under such preaching?”

Tim Keller, Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road, ed. 2 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1997): 64-5.

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1 B.B. Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1950): 574.
2 Ibid., 480.

On Living in Chicago

So, yeah, I started another blog. This one isn’t about philosophy or theology.

The Would-Be Chicagoan:

http://wouldbechicagoan.wordpress.com/

Some Thoughts on Loneliness

I’ve recently moved to Chicago and, much to my delight, have found an inexpensive place with some great roommates in Chinatown. Overall, I’m really excited here. But it hasn’t been easy: transitions never are. Tonight, I was feeling rather lonely, a feeling which I think pervades much of city life, yet one which also seems to pervade my life.

In my bible study, I’m reading through Genesis again and today’s passage is chapter 19 and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here’s the first part of the passage, verses 1-17:

¹The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth ²and said, “My lords, please turn aside to your servant’s house and spend the night and wash your feet. Then you may rise up early and go on your way.” They said, “No; we will spend the night in the town square.” ³But he pressed them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house. And he made them a feast and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.

⁴But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house. ⁵ And they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know [i.e. have sexual relations with] them.” ⁶Lot went out to the men at the entrance, shut the door after him, ⁷and said, “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. ⁸ Behold, I have two daughters who have not known any man. Let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please. Only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” ⁹But they said, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came to sojourn, and he has become the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and drew near to break the door down. ¹⁰But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door. ¹¹And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore themselves out groping for the door.

¹²Then the men said to Lot, “Have you anyone else here? Sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone you have in the city, bring them out of the place. ¹³For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the LORD, and the LORD has sent us to destroy it.” ¹⁴So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, “Up! Get out of this place, for the LORD is about to destroy the city.” But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting.

¹⁵As morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Up! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be swept away in the punishment of the city.” ¹⁶But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. ¹⁷And as they brought them out, one said, “Escape for your life. Do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley. Escape to the hills, lest you be swept away.”

A few chapters earlier, Abraham led Lot, his nephew, along with all their posessions to Canaan (modern day Israel) from Haran (in modern day Iraq), where Abraham’s father had settled years earlier. Upon arriving in Canaan, it became clear that the two needed to part ways: Lot left for the plains near Sodom and Gomorrah; Abraham followed God into the plains of Canaan.

By the time this passage comes about, much has happened in the life of Abraham: he has made two covenants with God, fathered a son with Sarah’s servant by Sarah’s request, and has been visited by three angelic lords, one of whom may have been God in human form, who promised him a son by Sarah herself.

A great deal also seems to have happened to Lot. We see in this passage that he is no longer living in a tent like before. He has instead moved into some kind of house (v. 4) with a door (v. 10). This indicates that he is no longer a nomad: instead, he has settled down in Sodom, living in the city rather than out in the plains. Yet, he still seems to be an honorable man: he is generous and hospitable to the stranger in his midst (vv. 1-3).

Despite settling down in Sodom, Lot nevertheless doesn’t seem to be totally a part of that community. He certainly considers himself to be: notice in v. 7 he refers to the men outside his home, the men who are asking to rape his guests, as “brothers.” However, the men of Sodom reply by calling him an “alien” and, mockingly, a “judge,” then threaten to treat him worse than his guests (v. 9). Lot, though he has settled in the city of Sodom, is entirely alien to it: a righteous man, mocked, in the midst of a wicked generation.

Lot is alone in Sodom. Yes, he has his family, but, we see later that this wasn’t quite enough. Here’s the rest of the passage, vv. 23-36:

²³The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. ²⁴Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven. ²⁵And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. ²⁶But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

²⁷And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the LORD. ²⁸And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.

²⁹So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived.

³⁰Now Lot went up out of Zoar and lived in the hills with his two daughters, for he was afraid to live in Zoar. So he lived in a cave with his two daughters. ³¹And the firstborn said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth. ³²Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.” ³³So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down or when she arose. ³⁴The next day, the firstborn said to the younger, “Behold, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine tonight also. Then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.” ³⁵So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. ³⁶Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father.

Lot’s wife and daughters were not righteous women: Lot, even in the company of his family, was alone.

Interestingly enough, Lot’s wife and daughters are actually, like Lot, experiencing and responding to loneliness. Lot’s wife is, presumably, from the area around Sodom, since Lot was married after leaving Abraham. So, when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, it is her childhood home which is destroyed. Suddenly, Lot’s wife is cut off from her people and her heritage. She responds by looking back, disobeying the command of the two angels who were destroying the city (v. 17).

Lot’s daughters have a different kind of loneliness: marital and familial. Both fear that they will not be able to have husbands and children, to have families of their own, because their father is old and they have lost everything with the destruction of the city. Their solution: get their father drunk so that he has incestuous relations with them, giving them children.

Upon reflection, these three examples give us three different ways which we might respond to loneliness. For Lot’s daughters, they devise a scheme which eliminates God’s provision or plan from the picture: they produce a broken, backward way to satisfy the loneliness of their hearts. Lot’s wife responds by looking back at what was: she is alone and, instead of living with her husband and children, focuses instead on where she had been. Both of these, however, remove them from God’s promise and His blessing.

Lot responds differently. In the midst of a city of rapists, he remains faithful and upright, concerned for the safety and well-being of strangers–he is hospitable and righteous despite being alone because of that righteousness.

A.W. Tozer says this of the Christian:

The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not expect things to be otherwise. After all, he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his own soul-land; who but God can walk there with him? He is of another spirit from the multitudes that tread the courts of the Lord’s house. He has seen that of which they have only heard, and he walks among them somewhat as Zacharias walked after his return from the altar when the people whispered, “He has seen a vision.”

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Saviour glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

Genesis 19 gives us as Christians a warning, a command, and a hope. It warns us that as righteous men and women in the world, we are to expect it to be lonely; there are few who share our desire to please God and, even if we find those that do, our relations with them are wrought with all the brokenness of humanity. Nevertheless, we are commanded, like Lot, to continue in our righteousness despite the fact that our righteousness, our new nature, is the very thing which causes us to feel alone.

We will, however, fail to live in this way. Lot, even though responding in righteousness to his situation, doesn’t maintain his righteousness. In an act of cowardice and desperation, he offers his daughters’ virginity to the men outside his home to protect his guests; he attempts to sacrifice his daughters rather than himself and, so doing, fails to deter the men. Like Lot, we will eventually break. Like Lot’s wife and daughters, we will constantly seek to look back and look to ourselves to solve the loneliness in our hearts. We will fail.

Yet there is hope.

When Christ came to earth we are told that though the world was spoken into being through Him, the world did not recognize Him, “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1). He, like Lot, was was an alien to those He considered brothers; and He, like Lot, responded in righteousness: but, unlike Lot, it was in perfect righteousness. You see, Christ sacrificed Himself for strangers, us, but even further, his sacrifice cured, not simply deterred, the enemies at his door. He took upon Himself the fire and brimstone of God’s wrath such that those who alienated Him, us, might be made righteous such that He is no longer alien. Christ’s sacrifice ensured not simply His own complete righteousness, as Lot’s would have, but even ensured the righteousness of the very people who cast Him out.

This gives us a two-fold hope. On the one hand, it assures us that though we may fail in pursuing righteousness in the midst of our loneliness, Christ has ensured our righteousness such that we need not worry; instead, we are to look to God, not the past, not ourselves, to be righteous.

Second, Christ, in making us righteous as He is, creates a community of righteous people. When He returns in His glory, we are promised that we will be made one with Him; in that moment, loneliness will cease. For truly, in loneliness we desire the community of the three persons of the Trinity, who serve each other in a perpetual dance for eternity. When we are united with Christ as His bride at the end of time, we become part of that community: then, only then, loneliness ceases entirely as we, for eternity, become part of the deepest, truest community which has ever been or will be.

I’m a little lonely in the city, but I take hope: Christ was righteous in the midst of loneliness and this enables me to live for Him and to look forward to a time when I will no longer be lonely.

Sufjan Stevens — All Delighted People

Getting ready to move to Chicago, so not much time to write. In the meantime, here’s a new song from Sufjan Stevens. Pay attention to the lyrics.