For a video version of these thoughts, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vbh7LZ73-I&feature=youtu.be
In the 1600s, there was a well-known scientist by the name of Galileo Galilei. Through his scientific research, he discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, a discovery that was controversial and met with condemnation from the Catholic Church. He was considered to be a heretic because his discovery apparently contradicted verses in the Bible such as Joshua 10:13 or Ecclesiastes 1:5 that would seem to imply that it is indeed the sun that moves, not the earth. Consequently, Galileo was placed under house arrest. While this seems absurd today, it’s important to note that yesterday’s “heretic” is now a well-known and revered figure in the history of science.
The Old Testament tells us in Numbers chapter 9 about the nation of Israel wandering through the wilderness and how they followed a cloud, which was a visual symbolization of God. Verses 17 and 18 of this chapter say in the New Living Translation, “Whenever the cloud lifted from over the sacred tent, the people of Israel would break camp and follow it. And wherever the cloud settled, the people of Israel would set up camp. In this way, they traveled and camped at the Lord’s command wherever he told them to go. Then they remained in their camp as long as the cloud stayed over the Tabernacle.” The next few verses talk about how sometimes the cloud would stay overnight, or for just a few days, or sometimes for months or even longer. The point is that the cloud frequently moved.
At times, I find myself frustrated at how life moves forward without me! I like personal rhythms and routines, and I like to “crack the code” of everything that I do so I can systemize it and handle it with maximum efficiency. However, the methodologies that I develop to handle life and work often become obsolete as things change, policies change, children grow, and technology advances. As I get older, I have an increasingly difficult time even understanding modern music from a stylistic standpoint, but I do keep listening to it so I can acclimate and not become a complete parental dinosaur.
Music keeps changing and evolving. Life keeps moving. Technology keeps advancing and changing. Science keeps developing and bringing new discoveries and teaching us more about what is happening in our world and how it works. Faith is supposed to do the same.
Growing up, I was raised in a small, conservative Pentecostal denomination. One of their unique beliefs was that divorce absolutely sinful, and remarrying after divorce was even more sinful because any marriage after divorce was adulterous in nature. Yes, I know this isn’t a widely held view in Christendom today, but that was my belief based on what I was taught and my personal interpretation of Scripture. So imagine my surprise when I met someone who seemed to have a personal relationship with God and was in that “divorced and remarried” category. It didn’t make sense to me since sin was a separator from God that would fuck with your relationship with him.
Moving several years down the road, the next major domino in my faith that I remember falling was the fact that sin was as big of a separator as I had believed it to be. This view primarily changed when I left my little denomination and started attending a non-denominational Charismatic church. The pastor taught about this thing called grace, a word that I’d heard all my life but never fully understood. I realized that God loves in spite of your sin and that your relationship with him is not dependent on his grace or whether you fucked up or not.
It was in this church and in this context that I met and married my wife, and the year after our marriage we felt a “call” to move from our home in Idaho to Las Vegas, Sin City itself. Our reasons for moving were very much spiritual in nature, and we moved with a sense of purpose to go “deeper” in our walk with God, but as I write this four and a half years later, I see that there was so much more meaning to our move than we realized at the time.
If you want to believe that our move was “divine,” then I would say it was for the purpose of removing us out of our comfort zones and away from family and friends to be able to grapple with the realities of our faith directly without any outside distractions. What we experienced in Las Vegas was “deconstruction,” the ripping apart of our faith piece by piece as we have been working our way through evaluating our beliefs, searching for what is actually true and real and throwing out the garbage.
Since moving to Las Vegas, I have personally moved from being politically and spiritually conservative to being politically and spiritually liberal. Unlike what some people would claim, this move isn’t because I’m “compromising” the truth, but rather its based on my most honest searching for truth. My wife has been ahead of me in some of these areas, and in other areas I’ve been ahead of her, but for the most part we’ve both arrived at the same places.
One of the biggest issues that I’ve changed my belief on is in regard to the LGBTQ+ community. Traditionally, Christians believe that anyone represented by one of these letters is living in sin, but I’ve come to see this in a completely different way and I can actually defend my position on the basis of Scripture, even though my view of Scripture is also different than it used to be. This blog isn’t intended to be a defense of my position, but rather I am using this as an example of the larger point that I am making, which is that the cloud has moved.
American Christianity has become synonymous with gay-hating, Trump-supporting, right-wing, closed-minded political and spiritual beliefs. When I step back and look at society as a whole, I have to wonder if where we are now is a result of the cloud moving, or life progressing and evolving, science moving forward, technology advancing, etc. Before I move on, let me be clear. I am not suggesting that everything that progress has brought is positive or good. Just because its new doesn’t mean its good. What I am proposing is that perhaps today’s heresy is tomorrow’s good and tomorrow’s normal, and if this is true, why not just embrace it?
Scripture does not inherently prohibit slavery in both the Old and New Testament, at least not that I’m aware of, so how is it that Christians today are anti-slavery? To be clear, I am also against slavery, but I am simply pointing out the fact that there is no specific Bible verse that says “thou shalt not own a slave.” There were Christians throughout history who owned slaves and somehow believed they were justified in doing so, so the fact that all Christians today would condemn slavery is a testament to an evolution of thought and belief and interpretation of Scripture.
What about the view of women in the Bible? In the Old Testament, women were largely thought of as property to own, and in the New Testament they were given elevated status but still weren’t thought of as valid spiritual authorities…so to take the Bible at its surface, I would have to dominate my wife in our home and would never be able to listen to the teaching of a woman, especially in a spiritual context. But oddly enough, my denomination growing up (along with many other churches and denominations) endorsed and supported female leadership and teaching in spiritual contexts.
If the Scripture does not need to be taken literally in regard to slavery or female leadership, then what about the LGBTQ+ issue? Is it possible that there is cultural context that could support the acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in Christianity today? I believe that that is possible, and I believe that in the coming decades this is going to become less and less of an issue in church circles to the point where we won’t even talk about it anymore, just like divorce used to be a major issue in churches (even outside the one I was raised in) but now isn’t really thought of as a major sin.
Over history, science has changed and helped us understand the world better. We’ve moved from believing that the sun revolves around the earth to understanding that it is factually true that the earth revolves around the sun, in spite of what some Scriptures seem to imply. We don’t endorse slavery anymore as Christians. Many Christians accept the teaching of women leading in church settings. The cloud has moved.
I could layer this thinking over many issues, but the larger point is that we need to be open and accepting of new ideas, even ones that on the surface may appear to be heretical. Things aren’t always what they seem to be, and it’s important to remember that we all have bias in the things that we believe. All we can do now is do the best we can with the information we have and not be closed to reviewing and accepting new ideas.
This larger pattern of thinking is why I’m comfortable affirming LGBTQ+ people from a Christian standpoint. It’s why I’ve changed my political view to realize that there are a lot of viewpoints on the liberal side of the aisle that can be affirmed by my faith and my views of God and the Bible.
Within the first year of meeting my wife, I saw a powerful image that I believe was divinely inspired that I have held onto and returned to over and over again. It’s this thing that I call the river of grace. The basic idea is that there is this river that is flowing that twists and turns and keeps moving, and to get into this river is to surrender to God, surrender to his grace, and allow that river to take you where it will. It’s scary and wild, but it involves complete trust and surrender to the grace of God. One of the specific things I remember is that trying to hold on to something on the side of the river meant that you were not fully surrendered to this grace and to this weaving and twisting of the will and purpose and plan of God for your life. To hold on meant a lack of trust.
When I initially saw this image, I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined that the river would lead me to this place where my faith looks so drastically different than it did when I first saw this image. I would have never imagined that there would come a day when I would fully affirm the validity of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. I would have never imagined that the foundation and core of my beliefs would be simply that Jesus based everything on love, and that that’s the only real “rule” or guideline for sin that I have, because in my former thinking that theology would have been too “fluffy.”
And yet…here I am. Floating down the river with these new beliefs. Following this cloud and its new system of viewing the world.
All I know is that love was ordained by God to be the foundation of everything that I do and think and believe. It’s the simplest of standards but also the highest of them. I’m quite sure that I fail at it in some way every single day, but all I can do is grow and learn and try to do my best. If God is real, then I believe that he is love, he is the essence of love, and he is the essence of good. If he is real, then I believe in his unconditional love for me as for every human being on this planet.
Allowing myself to be swept up in this wild, wonderful river of grace has been magical and exciting and scary and sometimes frustrating, but it is good. It is so good. It is liberating and freeing. When I stopped worrying about how well I was following the chapter and verse of every single scripture in the Bible and instead just leaned into and rested in the love of God, allowing this river of grace to carry me where it wanted to, I found true rest and true freedom. I see now what I couldn’t see before, that even in my most liberated previous Christian state, I was still bound and blind and I couldn’t even see it. But now, I’m free. And I imagine in a few more years, I will look back at the time when I wrote this and perhaps realize that there are things today that I can’t see that I will be able to see then. Because then the cloud will have moved.
I think many Christians, particularly American Christians, are staying where the cloud used to be in the name of “faithfulness.” We ourselves have moved away from following the witness of the Holy Spirit and what he is doing in the earth today to simply settling into places where perhaps the Holy Spirit was in the past but is no longer. What God did yesterday isn’t the same thing that he’s doing today, and today’s movement of the Holy Spirit is not going to look the same as it will tomorrow, or in ten years, or when my own children are grown and living lives of their own. Yesterday’s faith-based take on politics shouldn’t look the same as today’s faith-based take on politics, because the world isn’t the same place today that it was yesterday.
If you believe the same things today that you believed yesterday, or last year, or ten years ago, then I would strongly challenge you, the reader, to evaluate where you are at. Have you grown? Have you learned? Have you changed? Are you stale? Are you still living in yesterday?
I’m grateful for the journey that I’m on. I’m grateful for the places I’ve been, and the places I’m at, and I’m grateful for the places I will go. Those places are yet out of sight, but my prayer for myself and for you is this:
May we always surrender to this wild river of grace. May we always let go and allow ourselves to be swept up in the river of God’s love and grace, no matter where it leads us. May we always be open to learning and growing and to seeking the truth, no matter where it leads us.
The Edgy Christian 