I’ve Seen The Devil

For several months I haven’t had much to do with religion. While I’ve retained my personal faith in God as I understand him expressed through Christ – I haven’t been to church in ages, haven’t read my bible in longer and don’t remember the last time I said a prayer. I’ve been busy trying to make ends meet, provide for my family and pursue my own personal interests. But the events of last weekend in Virginia have brought a whole flood of religious thoughts back to mind. I’ve always had trouble seeing the relevance of faith in the banality of daily life – but it’s also always been the lens through which I see the big picture. You could say that I’ve got a far-sighted faith. Because I don’t see good and evil in so many little things, it was easy to pay no mind to questions of faith for a long time. But then a very big display of pure evil reared its ugly head and all of a sudden I’ve got religion again. I’ve seen the Devil, and he woke me up.

 

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t healthy spirituality, but it’s where I’m at on this journey and I can’t ignore it now. The notion that any person, much less an entire group of people, is less a child of God than me is disgusting. It is wicked. It is satanic. It baffles my mind that thousands of people can march in the streets wearing hoods or carrying flags emblazoned with swastikas on Saturday then go to church on Sunday. How has the Christian faith gotten this so entirely wrong? How can a faith spend so much time insisting on the timeline of creation and miss the reality that every single person who has ever drawn a breath, regardless of their skin colour, language, culture, religion, sexual orientation, or gender is equally a child of God? How can white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other prejudice exist in a person who has been taught that the image of God is imprinted in our DNA? These thoughts are incompatible.

 

Worse still, how can anyone who claims to follow a man who said: “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” then use violence and intimidation to advance those wicked beliefs? The dominionism on display is not of Christ. Some have suggested to me that I need not concern myself with these goings-on because they are in another country, and the majority of the perpetrators are of a different Christian tradition than my own. But I can’t accept that. First of all, what happened in Virginia was not an isolated incident. Events like that, though often not to that scale, take place across North America all the time. The Klansmen who marched are not limited to a few states south of the Mason-Dixon line, they are not even limited to the United States. Earlier this year KKK literature was distributed right here in my town, an hour east of Vancouver, British Columbia. This weekend there is to be a rally of this same collection of evil in Vancouver. It’s not a far-away problem.

 

It’s a white problem. It’s a power problem. It’s a privilege problem. Of course, not all white people hold these views. In fact, I imagine that an exceptionally small minority of us do. But in precisely the same way we expect all Muslims to speak out against terrorists like ISIS and Al Qaeda (they do), and in precisely the same way we expect leaders of African American communities to speak out against drugs and gang violence in their communities (they do); white people have a responsibility to speak out against the evil and the terrorism in our communities. So I am. I’m a deeply flawed man, and a terrible example of what a Christ-follower should look like, but in humility, I beg you, my white Christian brothers and sisters: stand up, speak up, take action. Hate has no place in our communities and our churches. This is not the time to sit on the sidelines, to twiddle thumbs, or to shake heads. This is the time to be men and women of exceptional strength and character and oppose those who would fight for a satanic notion of white supremacy.

 

This is precisely one of those moments that Jesus talked about when he said that the King would divide the sheep from the goats. We will be called to account for what we did when our brothers and sisters were being oppressed. There are a great many things that I will hang my head and tearfully ask God to forgive me for on that day, but I know that sitting in silence at this moment cannot be among them. The devil is on full display through the ideology of white supremacy, for God’s sake rise up against him.

 

Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.

God Called, She’s Mad

So there’s an old joke that goes something like this.

One day in Rome the Pope is sitting in his study and a group of his closest cardinals burst through the door shaking and pale. The Pope sees their concern and asks them what’s wrong. They reply that God is on the phone. The Pope says “that’s wonderful, why are you so frightened?” The cardinals respond, “She’s mad.”

One of the basic tenets of humour is that you give your audience something unexpected, and the reason this joke works is because God is a ‘he’, right? Now when it’s a joke people laugh and move on. But what happens if you suggest that God is a she in a forum other than humour? Just ask Eliel Cruz, a writer who covers issues of faith and sexuality and a voice I strongly recommend listening to, about some of the responses to a piece he wrote in which he referred to God as she. Closer to home you could ask my wife (whose painting, photography and sketching can be found at http://kiamsaco.deviantart.com/) about the response to her posting of a quote on our church’s facebook page in which God was referred to in the feminine.

After talking to these people you can see that there are a range of responses, some incredibly positive – but many very, very negative. There is a very hostile attitude toward references to God in the feminine from traditional Christians. It’s a hostility I can, to a point, understand. After all the references to God as masculine are very obvious in scripture, while the references to God as feminine are fewer and often entirely obscured in English since our nouns don’t have a gender. Jesus was a man, he referred to his father, and the pronouns from Genesis to Revelation are masculine. We were brought up with the notion that God was a he. To this day my default pronoun for God, and that of most people with whom I speak, is still he; and I think that is rather harmless. The problem is not in picking a pronoun for God, that’s something language requires of us. The problem is when our picking of a pronoun warps our view of God.

You see, while we refer to God as he – God is not a man.

Jesus, who those of us with a Christian perspective pretty much have to agree has the best knowledge of who God is, says very clearly that God is spirit. Also we can go back to the very beginning and see that both male and female were created in God’s image. Beyond these fairly obvious readings that should bring us right out of the need for a debate of God’s sex, there are a large number of references to God as Mother in the Old Testament and in Hebrew there are a number of occasions where the word for God is grammatically feminine. This is not to say that God is a woman, God is spirit.

The problem as I see it is that we are, as always, trying to define the divine in human terms. We’ve got the whole thing backwards! We ascribe masculinity (or femininity) to God, when what we should be doing is finding the fingerprints of divinity in women and men. God doesn’t embody masculine or feminine traits – humans have the image of God in ourselves. God is perfection, we are the ones with traits and characteristics of it. She doesn’t have our traits, we have his.

Where our problem becomes an issue isn’t in a debate over which pronoun to use for God, both work and both are biblically appropriate. The problem is when we mistake our linguistic need for pronouns, for God being limited to our understanding of masculinity and femininity. When we insist that God is a man, we exclude many wonderful aspects of divinity that are expressed in typically feminine qualities. When we insist that God is man we exclude our mothers, wives, sisters and woman-friends from the image of God they deserve. When we insist that God is a man we limit our thinking of the powerful ministries godly women can and should perform. When we insist that God is a man we end up with the Mark Driscolls of the world.

We need to be able to see God in spirit and in truth, and we need to be able to see her image in her daughters as much as we see his image in his sons. We also need to be able to be free to change our approach. God as a father can be a beautiful and powerful image, but what about the child of an abusive father? Do we really want to insist that a person brought up by an evil man think of him every time they picture God? Even within our humanity – how much better off would we be if we could see God in our children when they exhibit qualities associated with the other sex? Instead of calling a boy who cries a sissy we affirmed him as sharing traits of God and told him that even Jesus wept?

God doesn’t have a sex, but she’s awesome and I’m glad to be her son.

Bring Back The Prophets

Another week and another white police officer goes free for killing another unarmed black man.

Another week and another $300,000,000 is made in profit by Wal Mart (in the US alone) while 30,000 people in Canada were homeless.

Another week and nearly another 10,000 women were raped in Canada.

And if these facts from the US and Canada disturb you, I regret to inform you that they get worse when you look into the poorer parts of the world.

Injustice is a plague, inequality is at levels that has, in generations past, led to revolutions, violence is rampant and every time I read the news the bad news seems to get worse. What makes it worse yet is when I see people like me, who aren’t directly impacted by it, either pretending it’s not so bad or even blaming the victims. How many white men said that Eric Garner should have just submitted to the police? How many middle class people say that the poor just need to work harder? How many men say that those women should have dressed more modestly or stayed home with their knitting? I’ll confess there were times in my life when I’ve said all those things. I was blind to injustice, inequality and violence. I was ready to blame the victims but something changed when I stopped talking and started listening to the voices of people who didn’t look just like me.

Something that makes all of this even worse is the deafening silence I hear from the (predominantly white middle-class) Christian community with which I associate. Particularly sickening when I hear those same insults coming from the lips (or keyboards) of my brothers and sisters. To hear a Christian say that the oppressed minority just needs to submit to unjust authority takes a theology that misinterprets Paul and forgets Jesus. To hear a Christian say that the inequality of our economy is acceptable, good or a natural result of people’s efforts utterly ignores Jesus. To hear Christians say that victims are responsible for the crimes committed against them insults the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

If we truly were the body of Christ as we are called in the New Testament, Christians would be at the forefront of the cries for justice. Furthermore it would be all Christians, not just those who also belong to the less privileged categories. Of course Christian people of colour speak out against racism, of course Christian women speak out against violence, of course Christian poor speak out against inequality. Although even in those categories you can find some who want so desperately to fit into the model of privilege idolized by the dominant church culture that they speak out against their own needs. I wonder how much of a difference we would see in our society if those of us in the positions of privilege took the welfare of all our brothers and sisters as seriously as we take our own?

What would happen if we called the sin of racism what it is? What would happen if we called the sin of greed what it is? What if we called the sin of violence what it is? What would happen if the church was once again filled with the Holy Spirit and the Gift of Prophecy?

Yes, I pray that God will once again gift the church with prophetic voices.

Here are some examples of Biblical Prophecy:

Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. – Isaiah

Thus says the Lord of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart. – Zecharaiah

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it. – Ezekiel

Therefore because you trample on the poor and you exact taxes of grain from him … For I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins … I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies … Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. – Amos

These are prophetic voices and oh how we need them today. What makes it difficult is that our cultural dominance finds us in the position of oppressor more often than oppressed, and while the voice of prophecy is music to the ears of the oppressed it scares the daylights out of the oppressor. I also think it’s no coincidence that as the general understanding of prophecy has shifted from hard calls for justice to mystic predictions about the future that the tones of many culturally dominant Christians have hardened when speaking of others.

Until we learn to weep in white churches as loudly as in black churches when unarmed black men die at the hands of white authority we fail to understand what kind of kingdom Jesus was talking about. Until we accept that the malnourishment of those who can’t afford to eat equals the malnourishment of our own spirituality, we fail to understand what kind of kingdom Jesus was talking about. Until we understand that every act of violence hurts our whole society we fail to understand what kind of kingdom Jesus was talking about.

My prayer is that God will raise up a new generation of prophets to call us back to the faith and justice Jesus lived.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. – Jesus

The Church Of My Dreams Part 1

I have a dream; it’s about church. Yes, I really am that much of a nerd. But if you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it. If you read our earlier post you’ll know that despite the baggage that comes with it, I continue to identify as Christian. For all the flaws in my community it’s still mine and I value both my faith and the people with whom I share it. Now even if you’ve never been in your life, you likely know that Christians have a thing called church. Church is a concept that means different things to different people. For some it’s a building (let’s meet at the church), for some it’s an organization (Anglican Church), for others it’s a group of people (anytime you see the word in the Bible). 250,000 words in the English language and still…

Anyway, when I talk about church I generally mean the group of people. So how does this group of people come together, what makes a group a church? I grew up in an environment that (to oversimplify just a little) taught that it was agreement on theology that made us a church. I don’t really like that answer. If I’m being perfectly honest it’s probably because I’ve grown in a way that has caused me to challenge a few of the theological principles that hold my particular tribe of Christendom together, and since that was the instrument of unity I’m feeling left out. Why can’t we still be a church even though I disagree with some of the things the majority of the group believes? I still love the people, we still profess the same faith in Christ, I still want to accomplish the overall mission assigned to us.

Disagreement over theology seems a stupid reason to break up the band!

So what should hold us together? In my dreams, and one could argue there is a strong foundation in the Gospel for this position, a group of people who love one another is a great starting place. After we have that foundation of mutual love, I think a degree of agreement helps. But where I differ from many is over what we should agree. Where the church of my background suggests that theological agreement is the key, I think that agreement of purpose is a better place to start.

What’s the difference?

If we read the Gospels Jesus seems to be a pretty practical messiah. He healed the sick, he fed the hungry, he cast out demons, he raised the dead. Sure he also taught, but his teachings were less about the high-minded concepts discussed in the theology departments of Universities and Seminaries and more about what it means to love and be loved. I too think that the central theme of our group should be practical. We will still discuss ideas, and even engage in the foolishness of a group of mortals trying to describe the divine. But ideas don’t have to be the thing that holds us together.

If you’ve ever taken theology you’ve likely heard that one of the purposes of church is to provide a community setting for worship. I had one professor who made a point of instilling this idea into the heads of his students. To be fair to the good man, the class was called Worship. Now without getting too off topic and writing an essay on what worship is, been there, done that, got the B on my transcript, let’s say for the purposes of our discussion that, among other things, worship entails demonstrating our devotion to God. To that end I want to share a couple texts from scripture that have formed my thinking on what God wants in the way of service.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction,

Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.

There are other things, of course. But because of the way I read the Bible, from the character of God I understand as expressed through Jesus and the inspiration I experience from the Holy Spirit – service to my fellow human beings is service to God. When Jesus walked the streets of Palestine he wasn’t handing out books explaining a theory of what the Kingdom of Heaven could be; he was feeding the hungry and healing the sick at the same time as telling them that the Kingdom of Heaven was already in their midst. It’s actually a pretty ubiquitous message in the gospel. So from my point of view, worshipping God is more about doing good for the people around me and less about being right in my ideas about him.

This is actually great news, because the hungry person doesn’t care if I have good eschatology as long as I can make a good sandwich.

So I dream of a church in which people are brought together by a desire to do good for their neighbours. You might say, well that sounds like a service club more than a church. To that I’ll say two things. 1: Ok. If the worst thing you can say about my church is that we spend too much time serving people you’re not going to hurt my feelings. 2: It is still a spiritual endeavour, the love of Jesus is my motivation for desiring to do this. And love is also vital. The church of my dreams is a community bound by love, not bound by intellectual agreement. When I dream of church I see a group of people who would do anything for the person sitting next to them. They would consider it an honour to help their brother or sister, they would look for opportunities to do good and they would treasure the friendship of those in the community. Generosity, mercy and joy are all pervasive in the community I see when I dream.

Now don’t get me wrong, ideas and the discussion thereof still play an important role in the church of my dreams. But that discussion looks very different than what I see when I meet with churches on the weekend. We’ll save that for another post.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another – Jesus

No Room For Islamophobia

One of the sad realities of the world is that large and powerful nations require an enemy to maintain their systems. There are long-winded economic and political explanations for this, but in short it comes down to fear being an incredible motivator both for production and control. We need an enemy because that’s what motivates the development of new technology, industrial production and also because it’s what leads us to depend on the government even at a cost to our own civil liberties. I don’t think it has to be this way, but a review of the last 100 years of history has shown it to be a reliable trend.

Over that 100 years the English speaking world (and her allies de jour) have had 3 major enemies. In the first half of the 20th century the Germans played the role of the bad guy, from the Kaiser to the Fuhrer we didn’t trust the Germans. The villains in movies all spoke with a German accent even Donald Duck played a Nazi. After the second world war, when Germany was no longer a reliable enemy, we picked a former ally as the new bad guy and declared Moscow’s Kremlin to be Enemy HQ. While we did get to retain a few of our German propaganda stereotypes thanks to East Germany, the primary antagonist in our story was now the Red Menace of the Soviet Union. I have to confess; even though this stereotype cooled (perhaps not entirely) with the breakup of the Soviet Union the year I turned 9, it’s impact was strong enough to send a chill up my spine the first time I stood in Red Square nearly 20 years later. However, like Germany before her, Mother Russia was no longer the motivator of fear the Western Empire needed by the end of 1991.

Enter Fundamentalist Islam.

Just as the Soviets were waiting in the wings to take Germany’s place, there was a new villain on stage as Comrade Gorbachev took the final bow for the Soviet Union. This villain was different from the previous two actors to play the role in a few significant ways. First of all the new enemy was not limited by geography. Second, this enemy is defined by a religious understanding and not an ideological one.

Please let me make something clear now – I understand that the majority of Muslims condemn acts of terrorism and do not want to associate them with these acts.

Despite the broad views of some, many in the West view Islam as the enemy of our values and way of life. This misrepresentation has been advanced in the public eye through terrorist acts like those of 11 September 2001 in the United States, 11 March 2004 in Spain, 7 July 2005 in the United Kingdom and others leading up to last week here in Canada. Due to the politicized nature of such attacks, the shared religion of the attackers and the claims of responsibility from fundamentalist and terrorist organizations, it has been easy to paint a picture of Islam as the enemy.

But that picture is nothing more than a badly done photoshop.

Because the truth is that Islam is not our enemy. Sure you can find people who quote a passage here and there from the Quran and suggest that their faith promotes violence. Well guess what? The Christian Bible contains the following gems “Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” and “I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his neighbour” So maybe before we get too up in arms about a few of their verses we can understand that there are parts of our own sacred text that send a terrible message when portrayed out of context as the teachings of our faith.

Beyond doing some study study and finding out that the Quran explicitly prohibits the taking of a life and considers neither the Christian nor the Jew to be an infidel; I have come to be friends with many Muslims. I lived in a majority muslim country from 2008-2011, and both over there and here at home I have come to know many great people of this faith. I have friends who are Sunni and friends who are Shia. I have friends from North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and some who were born right here in Canada. I have friends who are devoutly religious and others who are quite secular. I work with Muslims, I eat with Muslims and on occasion I even pray with Muslims. If there is one message I have heard loud and clear from every single Muslim I have ever met, it is this:

Those who commit violent crimes in the name of Islam are like Satan.

The real enemy, since our society still seems to think it needs one, is not Islam. The real enemy is fundamentalism, of any stripe. Because when people come to the place where there is no room for an alternate understanding, where people who disagree or question are seen as the enemies of God and where violence is justified in dealing with those enemies they will always be a threat to others. We cannot allow our society to fall further into the trap of Islamophobia. They are not our enemy. One thing Christians share with Muslims is the belief that there is only one God, therefore logic must dictate that we are both his creation, his children. Sure we have different understandings of God, and there is a place for respectfully discussing them and learning from one another. But we must remember that we are one. One flesh, one blood. My biggest fear with this renewed threat of terrorist activity is not my own safety or security, it is that my good friends of the Islamic faith will once again be subject to terrible prejudice.

We cannot let fear of the other overtake love for our brother.

I have other sheep that are not of this fold. – Jesus

Theological Pet Peeve #1

If there is one Christian catchphrase that annoys me more than others it is probably “biblical world view”. Just writing it sent a chill right up my spine. I hear it so often among church folk, preached from the pulpit and blogged about on Christian blogs. Every time I hear the phrase I want to stand up and shout 2 questions. The first, “do you understand what the Bible is?” The second is like it, “do you know what a world view is?” Because according to my understanding of both – they don’t fit together. Square peg, meet round hole!

I don’t look at my glasses through my glasses.

While I believe in the inspiration of the Bible it is still a collection of writings. World view is how I interpret the world, like a pair of glasses. That includes how I interpret written works, even the divinely inspired. Now that’s not to say that the core values of my culture, which include faith and religious beliefs, don’t play a role; they do. But it just doesn’t make sense in my understanding of world view to say that I have a view shaped by something that I interpret through that view. Furthermore, if there were a truly biblical world view then Christians of every culture would interpret both the Bible and the experience of faith the same way. We don’t and that’s because we filter everything, including the sacred texts we read, through our own world views.

The Bible is 66 (or more depending on your tradition) books, not 1.

Book stores are misleading places. You can go into one and find a shelf or more filled with Bibles. They have paperback, hard-cover and leather bound. They have formal translations (word for word out of the original languages) like the King James and English Standard, dynamic translations (phrase for phrase) like the New English Translation and paraphrases like The Message. Then many stores have the same options in languages other than English. But they are all lies! No, I’m not saying that the content of the Bibles is false. But this notion that the Bible is one book – that’s the lie.

If we accept tradition there are somewhere around 40 different authors writing over a period of about 1500 years. All the way from a Hebrew shepherd and revolutionary who lived somewhere around 3500 years ago and spoke a very primitive form of the Hebrew language to a Greek doctor and missionary who spoke a fairly well developed form of Greek just less than 2000 years ago. Even if you eschew tradition and accept the critical dates of modern scholars the dates range from about 1000 years before Christ to a few hundred years after and still written in different languages, different places and by vastly different authors. While I believe that the same God inspired each of these men to write, their circumstances and environments have a direct and powerful influence on their writings.

Moses, Micah and Matthew all had different world views – how can a book containing all 3 have just one?

Then there is the question of which lens you use to interpret the Bible. There are some who interpret the Bible as primarily historical, and read it from Genesis to Revelation as one grand epic. There are some who interpret the Bible as primarily allegorical and read the whole thing as if it were a sacred myth. There are some who interpret the Bible as primarily cultural, and others who interpret it with nothing other than a critical eye. Personally I try to use all methods as they are appropriate. The parts that are obviously cultural I read as culture, the parts that are clearly allegorical I read as allegories, the parts that are historical I read accordingly. And while I accept that God inspired the Bible writers – I read it with my brain turned on.

Believing that God inspired Paul and understanding Paul’s time and place are not incompatible ideas.

Of course after you have come to an idea of how you read the Bible there is the question many Christians want to avoid – how do you deal with the contradictions. Now I’m not talking about silly differences like a variance in counting or a year or two being recorded differently. I’m talking about big, bold contradictions. Like the time Jesus saved the life of an adulterous woman even though Moses wrote that God commanded she be put to death. Better still, the time that Paul wrote not to eat in the company of sinners even though Jesus did so all the time. They are there, the Bible is full of contradictions and while the apologists can spin themselves dizzy I’m prepared to admit that they exist. The question is how do we deal with them? For me it’s a pretty simple process. I try to compare what the whole of scripture says on the subject, because while one phrase here or there may be out of line the totality usually sends a consistent message.

Ultimately, for me, whatever the rest of it says, Jesus holds the trump card.

The reason for this is because while parts of the Bible are history, I don’t read it as a history book. In the same way, parts of the Bible are stories but I don’t read it as a story book. I read the Bible as a revelation of God. My purpose in reading the Bible is to understand him and if we’re being perfectly honest some parts of it reveal him much more clearly than others. Some of the Bible’s authors were messed up people living in evil times, and some of them had a pretty scary picture of God. But in Jesus I see the clearest picture.

I don’t want a world view that includes things like stealing wives from neighbouring tribes, stoning people and slaughtering entire nations. I don’t even want a world view that includes some of the stuff in the New Testament, like telling women to sit quietly in church and ask their questions when they get home. The Bible points me toward a God who I want to know, it gives me the story of Jesus who I want to be like and it promises me a Holy Spirit whose voice I want to hear. The world view I want doesn’t come from the pages of a book – but from having my heart and mind transformed by a living God. So you can keep your “biblical world view”, I want a Jesus world view.

I am a Christian, not a Scripturian.

If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him. – Jesus

Baggage Claim

One of my absolute least favorite parts of air travel is baggage. Baggage is the reason I have to be up at 4 to catch a 7:30 flight from an airport less than 30 minutes from home. Baggage is the reason I look and feel like an idiot at check-in when it’s a jacket overweight. Baggage is why I am late for lunch despite landing at 10. It’s baggage that gets crushed, lost or sent to the wrong airport. The baggage claim at the airport, especially a major hub, is an excellent place to witness human misery. But the baggage difficulties of travel are trivial compared to the baggage we walk around with in our lives.

The baggage I am thinking about today is that which comes when I use the word Christian to describe myself. You see, as soon as I say that I am a Christian people who don’t already know me make assumptions about me. Typically they are not the assumptions I wish people would make. Studies have shown that the public perception of Christians is that we are anti-science, homophobic, and exclusive. I can protest those assumptions and even provide evidence that I am none of those things, but the perception exists and one man’s protest isn’t going to change it.

 To be fair, while those things may not be true of me, they are assumptions that, as a group, we’ve earned.

 So the question arises, what can I do to distance myself from these perceptions? How can I let people know that I accept scientific evidence even though it contradicts a literal reading of Genesis. How can I let the LGBT community know that I love them, want to see them treated with respect and dignity and afforded unconditional legal equality? How can I make it clear to people of other faiths that I respect their views, believe that their understanding is valuable, and even hope to grow by learning more from their wisdom? I won’t lie to you, the thought that the simplest way to do that would be to ditch the label associated with those negative perceptions has tempted me more times than I care to count.

If I just stopped calling myself a Christian I wouldn’t have to carry the baggage.

 But that doesn’t sit well with me. Because while everyone at the baggage claim may say that I have an ugly bag, what’s inside it is incredibly valuable to me. Just like I can’t take a trip without the things I’ve packed inside my suitcase – I can’t make the journey that is my life without my faith. You see, my relationship with Jesus means more to me than what the baggage of Christianity looks like at carousel 4. And what about all those ugly assumptions? The truth is that there is nothing I can do about what people assume when all they see is the bag – but I can make certain that those who see what is inside begin to see its value. That’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done within the Christian faith. We need to repent of the negative things we have done and start to make new impressions – but that’s not going to happen overnight.

In the meantime we still need our bags if we’re going on a journey.

 So here I am, bags in hand. On the outside a casual observer can make a myriad of assumptions. But what have I packed? To me Christianity is about Jesus. Inside my bag is a heart for all God’s children, a compassion for the disadvantaged, a love for the outcast and a passion for the oppressed. Inside my bag is a desire to feed the hungry, heal the sick and visit the lonely. In my bag are words of forgiveness and mercy for sinners and words of pointed chastisement for oppressors. Inside my bag is a burden to go out into the world and live a life that reveals the character of an all-loving and ever-merciful God. Nowhere in my bag will you find a demand to ignore or twist the evidence in the world around us to read a text in only one way. Nowhere in my bag will you find a hatred for another human being. Nowhere in my bag will you find a notion that my bag is the only way to pack for a journey.

 My hope is that when I meet someone who is put off by my baggage I will still have the opportunity to open it up and share what’s inside. It’ll take time to unpack everything and share that what’s inside is not as ugly as the bag. But I sincerely hope to have that time. I also do hope to one day be able to have the Christian faith seen from the outside the way I see it. But I understand that change will take even longer than the first. Despite this, it’s still my bag and I still need it for my journey.

My baggage may be ugly, but what’s inside is worth it. So I will claim it and head for the next leg of my journey – I hope you’re willing to join me.