You almost feel sorry for Pastor Worley. At the moment I published NC pastor: “Let’s put all the queers and lesbians behind electric fences and let them die,” the video of Worley preaching that all gay people should be sequestered behind electrical fences and left to die had been viewed 308 times. As of this writing it’s been viewed 546,368 times. And that’s made pastor Worley the most reviled pastor in America today.

Worst gift ever

The motto of pastor Morley’s church is, “The Home of old time Religion.” (It’s also apparently the Home of random Capitalization—but never mind.)

Old-time religion.

For a lot of people—for me—that phrase indicates something awesomely admirable. It evinces a set of values and a way of life that is perfectly honorable. When I think of people who, a generation or so ago, were imbued with what we now call “old time religion,” I think of people anyone would be proud to be. I think of people who were hard-working, clear-headed, family-loving, giving, respectful of others, humble before the God they spent their lives endeavoring to emulate. *

My 90-year-old friend Sam grew up in a Baptist farming family in Oklahoma. To this day Sam does more hard work before the day’s sun goes down than I do before a month has gone by. He’s been married seventy years. He’s read his Bible for one half-hour every night of his life. When Sam bows his head before a meal, he doesn’t do the rote toss-off. He closes his eyes tight; he spends time at it. He means those prayers.

Sam means everything he does; he never dials it in. Yet at the same time he’s gently detached from everything he does. Because he knows that it’s all just grist for the great turning mill of God.

America was built on the values still alive in good Christian men and women like Sam and his wife Sharon. Such people have always been the backbone of our country. And that’s no mere cliche. That’s how we have lived. That’s who we have been. Such people and their lives are the very roots of our inspirational American tree.

And we’re certainly aware of the compelling spiritual value of that old-time religion. We feel it even in the words—well, maybe not in the actual psychotic words—of pastor Charles L. Worley. We feel the allure of Worley’s surety; our hearts quicken at the clarity of his conviction, the passion of his heart. Yes, Worley is a monster. But, like Frankenstein, he’s a monster made almost entirely of things we know to have once been naturally healthy and good.

So what happened? How did so much of Christianity, which used to be such a decent and honorable thing, degenerate into a national joke that’s anything but funny?

Well, to speak to our current time, gay people happened. For all of Sam’s generation and before, the question of the civil rights of LGBT people virtually never came up. But today countless numbers of people are boldly proclaiming that they’re here, they’re queer, and that even hardcore, old-timey, right-wing reactionary Christians had better get used to it.

And such Christians can easily do that. The bridge from “God didn’t make Adam and Steve!” to “God bless the union of Adam and Steve!” is exactly this short.

So why aren’t even the most conservative Christians lining up to cross that bridge?

Because they’re afraid that while doing so the vicious troll Heresy will pop up from his hoary abode beneath the bridge, and with his long claws and terrible fangs attack them.

They’re afraid they’ll lose what’s most precious to them, which is their relationship with God.

They’re afraid that discarding what they think of as so fundamental to the Bible’s integrity will mean the whole book falling apart in their hands. And they’re afraid they’ll then have nothing with which to defend themselves against all the world’s devilish trolls.

Their fears about this are entirely unfounded. Every day thousands of Christians are rethinking the “clobber passages” (so-called because they have been traditionally used by Christians to “clobber” gay people), changing their minds about homosexuality, and finding that their faith in God—and their sense of God’s faith in them—is not only not compromised, it’s greatly enhanced.

And in crossing that bridge they found, to their happy surprise, no troll at all.

There’s nothing wrong with Christianity. There’s something wrong with many Christians, of course. But that’s only because Christians are people and people are imperfect. But all of us can, and most of us do, evolve.

The pastor Worley as we have him in his now-infamous video displays a great many troll-like characteristics. But the man can change. He does, after all, believe in the irresistible power of the transformative love of Jesus Christ. In what we can dare to hope is his hour of need, let us pray that the pastor fully opens himself up to that power. I’m praying that he does.

And guess what? So is Sam.

Brothers and sisters, can I hear an amen!?

* I am of course also aware of all the reasons for which “old-time religion” conjures up nothing good at all.

[UPDATE #1: Some ninety minutes after posting the below, all the contact information on the website for Providence Road Baptist Church was removed. But don't let that stop you from emailing Pastor Charles "Let 'em fry or die" Worley at pastor@prbcnc.com. ]

[UPDATE #2  Monday, 8:15 p.m.: The PRBC website has gone away. Along with its FB page. And Worleys e-mail account. Ka-boom.]

Meet Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church (“The Home of old time Religion”), located at 3283 Providence Mill Rd, Maiden, NC 28650. In this video excerpt from one of his recent Sunday morning sermons, Pastor Worley offers his thoughtful suggestion for resolving the debate over gay rights.

The good pastor’s idea for “gettin’ rid of all the lesbians and queers” is to build “a great big large fence” around all the gay people, electrify it, and then allow the people penned in by the fence to die.

Pffft. And people thought the gay issue would be difficult to solve.

Of course, Pastor Worley, being a man of the cloth, is hardly inured from compassion. He makes this very clear with his suggestion that we “fly over and drop some food” to the masses of imprisoned gay people. So it’s not like he wants them to just starve to death. That would be cruel. This is, after all, a Christian leader bound by the love of Jesus, not a morally repugnant, astoundingly ignorant, semi-literate, hate-filled meathead who wouldn’t know Jesus Christ from Cujo.

Pastor Worley just wants all gay people to live behind an electric fence until they grow old and die. And who doesn’t want to be fed for free until they die of old age? It’s like social security—but with electricity. And less travel. And food falling on your head.

Pastor Worley also wants to separate all the gay men from all the gay women: he wants to keep two separate electrified pens. Because (one assumes) otherwise some of the gay men might sleep with some of the gay women. And we all know what that would mean: gay babies. And then where would it all end? We only have so much money to spend on fences, airplane fuel and food that bounces. So, in this one instance, separate but equal would have to work.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about his extremely novel social experiment, please do not hesitate to share them with Pastor Worley, at pastor@prbcnc.com. I’m sure he’d be glad to hear from each and every one of you.

After all, if you can’t count on Christian pastors to be open to new thoughts and ideas, what good are they?

A quick comment about why I gave Pastor “let ‘em fry or die” any time at all.

Got this in; thought I’d answer it.

Dear John,

I grew up in a evangelical church that did not condone questions. Questioning was of the devil, and we were to simply believe what we were taught.

I bought this hook line and sinker until, at sixteen, I had an epiphany.

While sitting in a service where my cousin was made to stand in front of the congregation and apologize for embarrassing them for getting pregnant out of wedlock, it struck me: How could this be the wishes of a loving God? If this is truly what God wanted, then God could only be petty and unkind.

Sitting there, I realized all the cruel and judgmental things I had been taught to say to my LGBT brothers and sisters, Catholics and basically anyone who wasn’t just like us. That was the moment I lost my faith. And that was the moment I walked away from Christianity entirely. From that time forward I prided myself on being a student of reason, logic and rationality.

Now, fifteen years later, I am a social worker pursuing my Master’s degree, a wife and mother of an eight-month-old. And yet, I find myself missing God, missing a church community, and missing having faith in something. How do I intertwine the two? How do I trust the Bible as the word of God, and as the only image I have of Jesus, when I know it was written hundreds of years after Jesus’ life by some dead dudes—and then some other men got together and decided what got to be included in the Bible.

How do I have faith in something when faith itself is truly irrational?

Also, I cringe when I hear the word Christian. Fear, judgement, bigotry. These are the words that have come to be associated with Christianity, and I know the truthful pain in those things. I don’t ever want to go back to that.

So, I don’t know why I’m writing this letter. For some guidance, perhaps? Some words of reason from someone who also has no time for a God only interested in punishment? Perhaps some hope that for once my questions will not go unheard?

Where do I go from here? Thank for listening.

First, faith is not at all irrational. If faith is irrational hope is irrational. Hope is faith; it’s the belief that things can get better. Without faith there is no hope.

The truth is that your life is already informed by faith. If it wasn’t, you’d have already committed suicide. (Which is why “It Gets Better” is exactly the message emotionally desperate young people need to hear.)

Your concern isn’t really that faith is irrational. Your concern is that your faith in God is irrational. Which is to say that you fear that God does not exist.

Yet you miss God. Which means for you God does exist.

Youston, you have a problem. But one that’s easily fixed.

Here’s the thing: there’s nothing in the slightest irrational about believing that God exists. In my experience atheists are generally keen on passionately arguing this point, but the fact remains that it makes no more sense to posit that there is not a God than it does to posit that there is. You can believe in God and still be a rational person. Millions of people do it every day. I do. Copernicus did. Isaac Newton did. Galileo did. Rene Descartes did. That list is endless. Belief in God informs and sustains the vast majority of people, most of whom are perfectly rational. It’s always been that way, and always will be.

Your beef isn’t with God. Your beef is with people. People have trashed your relationship to God. You were raised in a terrible church led by a terrible pastor. But that church and pastor were no more representative of God than the Mafia is representative of justice. Beneath their respective veneers of honorableness, both are thug-based organizations whose true purpose is to instill and exploit the most elemental kinds of human fears. Both organizations are sustained by effective victimization and bullying.

But so what? Bad people are everywhere amongst us. There are always going to be bad pastors, bad preachers, bad teachers, cops, nurses, accountants, doctors, farmers, tinkers, tailors, spies. The world is, and always has been, lousy with bad, mean, stupid people. You were raised in church where too many such people had way too much power. But those people aren’t you. They got it wrong. They’re twisted it all up. They were mean-spirited. They were ignorant and lazy. They urinated all over the truth and dared to call it communal bread. But you didn’t do any of that that—and when you were old enough to think for yourself had the brains to stop falling for it.

Today you have a life. You have a career, aspirations, a husband and child. And like most parents you desire for your child to grow up amidst noble ideas and ideals, inspired by admirable role models, believing in the enduring value of altruism and charity, being part of a community that is decent, supportive, productive.

Nothing wrong with that, to say the least. And a good church, run on good principals and headed by good people, brings that to the members of its family. Anyone who says differently has never been part of the life of a good church.

“Questioning is of the devil.” Holy cow, man. What else do you need to know about how severely dysfunctional was the church in which you were raised? You teach a kid that it’s evil to question, and you might as well sign that kid up for a full frontal lobotomy. His brain will never be any good to him anyway.

You just need to find a good church, is all. That’s it. That’s your whole challenge. Find a church you like; start going; at some point start bringing your child. Boom. You’re good.

Don’t deny yourself the comfort and knowledge of God just because your parents chose to raise you in a bad church. I say let God back into your heart, and start again. Try it, if nothing else. See how it works for you. Why not?

Dare to be irrational! With God.

And yes, the New Testament was written and compiled after Christ died. The whole Bible is exceptionally dense, intensely complex, and informed by all sorts of stuff that is profoundly difficult if not outright impossible to grasp. But life is exceptionally dense, intensely complex, and informed by all sorts of stuff that is profoundly difficult if not outright impossible to grasp. So they go together really well.

(This is a continuation of The Bible vs. God?)

Here’s the great thing: no matter where any of us comes down on the question of hell, we all find ourselves—today, right now—in the exact same place.

Whether you believe that hell is real and literal, a metaphor, an absurd notion, or even if you believe that Christianity and every other faith-based belief system in the world is an unfunny joke, you still presently find yourself in the exact same position as everyone else.

And that is being in the position of wanting to feel good about yourself. Every person in the world wants to know that they are honorable, decent, truly respectable. We all want the peace and equanimity that comes from knowing that, at any given moment, we are the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

And how do any of us achieve a lasting version of that highest kind of contentment?

By loving each and every one of our neighbors with all of our mind, body, and soul.

We may differ in our beliefs about how we came to be here; we may differ in our beliefs about where we’re going. But during the time that we are here each and every one of us lives under the rule of one universal and irreducible truth: the only way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves in love for others.

If you’ve been following along (the first post in this mini-series is From Hell to Crazy Town; the second is The Truth isn’t liberal or conservative), then you know that on our quick road trip through Christianity we have stopped in Crazy Town.

I’ve called it crazy because I don’t know how else to describe the idea that a loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God also condemns to hell everyone who doesn’t worship him (or at any rate allows such people to end up in hell, which is exactly the same as condemning them himself: choosing to not throw a life-preserver to a drowning man is the same as holding that man’s head beneath the water yourself).

Such a God simply makes no sense. It cannot be. God cannot be at once honorable and despicable.

So what to do? This is hardly a primary concern for non-Christians, of course: they readily dismiss a God they understandably think so shabbily constructed (and marvel at how anyone could take seriously the belief system in which he is the object of worship).

But Christians have a whole other kettle of concern there. And the strain of that shows: when it comes to hell, Christians are all over the place. Some think that hell is a literal location of super-hot eternal damnation. Some think hell is a metaphor for a place where God is not. (I talk about why that’s no better than the traditional view of hell in The Absence of God: A Kinder, Gentler Hell?) Most think hell is real, but concede that they have no idea what that actually means, or what the criteria is for being sentenced to it.

Basically, at this point the whole concept of hell amounts to a churning miasma of conjecture, best guesses, hopes, and acknowledged ignorance.

The one thing, though, upon which all Christians agree, is that God is fair and just. It’s only at the point where that needs to be reconciled with hell that the thinking of most Christians suddenly gets extremely fuzzy.

Ask any one of the hundreds of millions of evangelical/conservative/Baptist-type Christians, for instance, if Gandhi is in hell, and just watch the fuzz start flying out their ears. I once watched Albert Mohler field that very question, and it was like watching a slow-motion film of Fozzy Bear exploding.

So, again, what to do?

Well, as with any problem, before solving this one we need to be perfectly clear as to what exactly the problem is: an ill-defined problem leads to no answer at all.

For we Christians, the problem with hell is what the Bible says about hell.

The problem with homosexuality is what the Bible says about homosexuality.

The problem with women’s rights is what the Bible says about women’s rights.

The problem with Jews (used to be) what the Bible says about Jews.

The problem with slavery (used to be) what the Bible says about slavery.

So we see a pattern.

If what the Bible says runs contrary to what is obviously moral, then Christians have a problem.

Here’s the bottom line for me: I look at the Bible, and I don’t see God or Jesus (or Paul, for that matter) telling me that homosexual love is necessarily immoral. I don’t see God or Jesus (or Paul, for that matter) condoning slavery. I don’t see God or Jesus (or Paul … oops: never mind!–for now) telling me that women are organically inferior. And I don’t see God or Jesus telling me that after they die anyone is ever sentenced to an eternity of suffering.

When I look at the Bible, one of the main things I see is a mirror. I see a book so dense, complex, long in the making, and defined by its tens of thousands of translators that ultimately it functions for people as nothing so much as it does a reflecting glass. We bring to the Bible who we are—our expectations, experience, convictions, doubts, hopes, fears, desires … all of it—and then in it see all that confirmed.

We do that as individuals; we do that corporately, as a culture.

Do I think that we should dismiss, or in any way diminish, the Bible? Most certainly not. But do I think that we need to take pains to ensure that we don’t ever confuse the Bible with God?

Hell, yes.

This is a continuation of yesterday’s From Hell to Crazy Town.

Before jumping in, though, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss something that invariably arises whenever I initiate the kind of conversation with which we’re now engaged; namely, that I believe whatever I do because I’m a liberal, or “progressive,” Christian.

When I first started thinking about problematic Christian issues—whether or not hell is real, whether God considers homosexual love in and of itself sinful, whether or not non-Christians can make it into heaven—I had no agenda whatsoever. I couldn’t have. I was too new to Christianity.

At the moment I suddenly and out of nowhere became a Christian, all I “knew” (the quotes by way of acknowledging the eradicable difference between subjective and objective knowledge) was that the core Christian story was true: that God, wanting to alleviate people’s suffering, incarnated himself as Jesus, took into his body what amounts to all the world’s negative karma, and in the most dramatic fashion possible (which ensured it was never forgotten) obliterated that body, and thereby established a means by which any person, at any time, could fully reconcile themselves to God.

That’s all I knew. That was the totality of what got rather intrusively imprinted upon me at the moment of my conversion. Beyond that I had zero thoughts about Christ, or God, or anything related to them. I didn’t know homosexuality was an issue for Christians. I didn’t know anyone thought women should or shouldn’t be pastors. I knew it was pretty insufferably obnoxious for Christians to act like only they could get into heaven, but I didn’t know there was an actual doctrine behind that. Beyond their actual European history, I barely knew the difference between Catholics and Protestants.

I just never cared much about Christianity. Because it always seemed too stupid to care much about. Sexually repressed, passive-aggressive non-geniuses wanting Big Daddy in the sky to like them most of all, so that they can live happily ever after.

I mean, you know: not exactly alluring, this side of a lobotomy.

Anyway, once God broadsided me in a way even I couldn’t ignore, I thought, “Oh. Well, that’s a game changer.” And then I entered the game of Christianity. Then I learned about all the controversies percolating away within this group into which I’d been so summarily recruited.

Well, upon my conversion it did not occur to me that I was supposed to stop thinking. God didn’t come to me, and say, “Believe in Jesus Christ! Now go home and throw away all your books! And dumb up your talking a little! And ignore the fact that Christian music is the sonic equivalent of baby food! Enjoy it! Sing along!”

Nothing like that happened. (Interestingly enough, though, what did happen is that just about the third thing I thought following my knocked-to-my-knees moment—the Big Thought that came to me just as I was reaching for the doorknob leading from the little room I was in back to the outside world—was: “It is not now my mission to turn non-Christians into Christians. That is not part of being Christian.” Weird thing to have come over you just then, right? But it’s that moment which later led me to write I’m OK – You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers, and Why We Should Stop.)

When I think and write about these things, I’m more than prepared to be wrong. I welcome the chance to learn that I am wrong. It’s for that very reason that I take the time to so carefully mark each step of my way along these paths. If I misstep, I want someone to tell me where and how I’ve done so. I want to hear of an error in my reasoning, an inconsistency to my logic. That way I’ll learn. That way we all will. How can that be a bad thing?

I’m just like anyone else. I like belonging to a loving and supportive group. I like knowing that I’m aligned with what’s best and good. But those kinds of desires cannot stop me from noticing that, say, “God is loving and all-powerful,” and “God punishes everyone who doesn’t worship him by burning them alive throughout all of eternity” are statements so blatantly incongruous that they positively scream for reconciliation. And shrugging and claiming inviolate ignorance of God’s ways and will is a shamefully inadequate response to that incongruity. It’s like me repeatedly punching someone, while all along saying, “Gosh, that’s weird. I wonder why this person here keeps getting punched? Oh, well. What can we do? It’s hard to figure out these kinds of mysteries.” Punch, punch, punch.

We must never fail to go where sound reasoning take us. Doing so means failing to live up to our potential. If we believe in God, then we must believe that God desires us to use the agile, capable minds with which he blessed us. And we must furthermore believe that God is not in the slightest way threatened by our doing so.

Jesus promised that the truth would set us free. It then follows that we should always endeavor to discover the truth. And I see no reason not to do so fully confident that the nearer we draw to the truth, the nearer we draw to God.

I don’t care if it’s liberal or conservative. I just want the truth.

Follow-up: Is hell necessary?

I recently gave a talk to this group, who asked me to address the question, “Is hell real?”

In all of the world, it’s hard to imagine any question easier to answer. Watch:

No one knows.

See? Easy-peezy.

We can think we know if hell exists; we can hope, trust, and believe that we know. About hell we can guess, assume, surmise, deduce, and speculate. But until someone returns from The Great Beyond with a video recording—or WikiLeaks gets really good at what it does— actual knowledge of whether or not hell is real will continue to be denied us.

We. Don’t. Know.

We don’t know what happens to us after we die, and we don’t know what (if anything) was happening with us before we were born. We exist in a continuum of consciousness bookended, at either end, by absolute blanks.

This fundamental not-knowing is fundamentally not good for us. We like/crave certainty—especially about anything as organically vital to us as what happens after we die.

And what do we do in the face of our forced ignorance on that subject? We do what we’re designed to do. We keep fighting. We keep struggling. We keep searching for certainty.

And for a lot of us—and certainly for Christians—that means turning to God.

And when, through prayer and communion with the Holy Spirit within them, Christians ask God what will happen to them after they die, what does God reveal to them? Nothing whatsoever. He remains utterly silent. God never answers that question for anyone. No monk, seer, prophet, holy man, guru, shaman or priest, anywhere in the world, has ever known one whit more about what really happens to people after they die than a biscuit does.

So where next do Christians turn in their quest to solve the problem of the afterlife? To the Bible, of course.

And what does the Bible say about what exactly happens to us after we die? Not nearly enough, mainly: it’s like a piece of Swiss cheese that’s mostly holes: there’s just not much substance there. And safe to say that what is in the Bible about life after death lends itself to myriad interpretations.

Again: not so much with the definitively helpful.

So over the centuries Christians did the only thing left them, which is decide what the Bible says about what happens to people after they die.

And what (Protestant) Christians decided is that after we die one of two things happens to us: we have an extremely good time, or we have an extremely bad time. Forever.

Upon dying everyone goes to either heaven or hell. If in this life you’ve been good, then upon passing you catch the up elevator; if you’ve been bad, then afterwards it’s all downhill for you.

And such a paradigm for the afterlife, grounded as it is in basic reward and retribution, makes sense to us. It feels right. Ultimately the good are rewarded, and the evil are punished. That works for us. Fair is fair.

But to this naturally palatable mix Christians then added an ingredient which, if you are not a Christian, sours the whole thing right up.

Christians decided that when it comes to making it into heaven, being good enough is not good enough. Being honorable isn’t good enough. Being righteous, loving, thoughtful, kind, compassionate, altruistic, and/or self-sacrificing isn’t good enough.

If you want to make it into heaven, decreed the Christians, then you must be a Christian. In fact, they decided, the only thing required to qualify as a denizen of heaven is to be a Christian.

Game changer!

With that, Christians were constrained to confess that the Muslim baby who dies is sent directly to hell.

That the loving atheist goes to hell.

That the Jewish philanthropist goes to hell.

Gandhi? Hell.

Buddha? Hell.

Ninety-five percent of the people who have ever lived? Now suffering in hell.

And suddenly Christians found themselves in possession of what can only be described as a profound public relations problem.

How can such a system appear to be grounded in anything but a moral travesty?

Put simply, it can’t. Right is right; wrong is wrong; unfair is unfair. It is a gross and manifest injustice for God to eternally punish a person for no offense greater than dying while not a Christian. That fact is inescapable.

And yet Christians must try to escape it, of course. No one wants to be playing for team Unjustly Cruel.

And just how do Christians attempt to defend a demonstrably indefensible God? By literally the only means available to them: by claiming that God’s sense of justice is simply beyond the human capacity for understanding.

“Sure, to us it seems cruel and unfair to send all non-Christians to hell,” is the standard Christian defense. “But we’re not God. God’s ways must remain a mystery to us. God’s sense of justice is not our own.”

What God means by the word justice, in other words, is unrelated—in fact seems completely opposite—of what we humans mean by that word. And if that is true, then shouldn’t we straight away empty all of our jails and prisons, and throw away all of our law books? Because isn’t it obvious that we comprehend virtually nothing of the true meaning of right and wrong?

And what about the whole idea of us being made in God’s image? How can we be, when we obviously don’t have anything like his mind or heart?

And when in the Bible God, as Jesus, speaks as he does of peace, honor, righteousness, compassion, loyalty, dignity, truth, and love, what are we to make of those words? On what grounds should we assume that God means by those words anything like what we do?

And then you stop the car, and you get out, and you realize you’re in Crazy Town.

I’m a Christian, and I want out of Crazy Town. I hate Crazy Town. The water tastes awful; the plumbing never works; everyone goes on red and stops on green. People cry at baby showers, and laugh at funerals.

I say let’s take the next exit out of Crazy Town, and get ourselves back on the main road.

Anybody with me on that?

If so, we’ll continue on this trip next time.

Follow up: The truth isn’t liberal or conservative

(This is the sermon of Pastor Bob’s that I failed to get up this past Sunday morning. PB told me that he wrote it with you guys, my readers, in mind. I can see that he did. This sermon means a lot to me personally, because in it Bob reflects upon his recent visit with his grandfather, whom he never had the opportunity to get to know too well. When Bob returned home after his visit with his grandpa, he and I sat and talked for hours about all that visit had meant to him. It made for a very special time with my friend. Anyway, here’s a little church for you tonight!)

“Friend of God’s”
A sermon by Pastor Bob
Text: John 15:9-17

John 15:9-17

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.

–A few weeks ago, I was in North Carolina with my Grandfather.

–He is currently 97.

–I say currently, because he fully expects to reach 98 soon this year, so for intensive purposes, he is 98, or if you round just a little bit, about a century old.

–It’s a little staggering if you think about it.

–So many stories, so much change.

–But being with my grandpa made me think not only about all of his experiences, both the good and the bad, but what it means to love for a century.

–My grandpa married a few times (a hazard of being almost 98), and surely had his share of love for friends and relatives. But what I learned most acutely in my last visit with him, was how much he loved Jesus.

–Beside a rather huge picture of his last wife, Dorothy, was an equally impressive cross.

–As it turned out, my grandpa had been a relatively active Christian most of his life, and certainly in the last half of it.

–It was a great comfort for him, that I shared his enthusiasm for this Jesus Christ.

–And one of the most memorable moments for my ministry was to share communion with my grandpa.

–To break apart that small dinner roll, to share a cup of juice and pray the Lord’s Prayer together with hands held, and God’s Spirit present.

–I realized, in that moment, that we shared something more than our genetics.

–That we were both caught up in a love that captivated our hearts, our whole selves, despite the difference in years, and the family hierarchy of grandfather and grandson.

–That, really, we were more than that.

–We were friends.

–Our gospel reading for today speaks of such a friendship.

–“I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends…”

–Jesus calls his disciples “friends” because they know something.

–It’s not that they know everything.

–As a matter of fact, they will get a lot of things wrong.

–They will betray Jesus, deny him, and even doubt him to his very ascension.

–But in the end, most of them will get something right: they will know that they are caught in a relationship that beckons them to God.

–That somehow, the man that stands before them—who eats with them and leads them into both uncomfortable and exhilarating places—that this man is the Son of God.

–Somehow, some way.

–And that despite centuries of the early church trying to codify this knowledge, it is ultimately found in the most accessible and elusive possession of them all: love.

–As I sat across the table from my grandpa (who looked uncannily like my father)

–As we played numerous hands of Euchre (a card game particularly favored by Mid-westerners)

–I realized that we shared a love that went beyond the few times we had been together over the years.

–It was a friendship forged not by shared experiences, but by a faith that would not let either of us go.

–To be honest, I’ve never thought of faith in terms of friendship.

–My friends have always been those folks in my life that shared a particular interest or circumstance:

–My friend Kevin and I grew up together in elementary school and as neighbors.

–We shared many bike rides and hikes together.

–My friend Keith in high school, who shared my passion for skiing and playing computer games into the wee hours of the night.

–My friend Dean in college, who shared the same crazy idea of studying physics and electrical engineering.

–He taught a Colorado boy how to eat Japanese food, and I taught him, my friend from Hawaii, how to drive on icy roads.

–And after many other friends made at work, graduate school and in ministry, including good friends like Mark and John, I continue to be grateful to one special friend who puts up with me on a daily basis: my wife.

–I think that somehow, our friendships are just the beginning of what it means to love.

–That they are guideposts to a love we can barely comprehend.

–And I don’t mean a soft, wishy-washy love, gushing with sentimentality, but a love forged with hands that dare to touch the sick,

–With a love that pauses a group of grown men to wait until a child is blessed.

–With a love that empathizes with the hungry and the lame.

–With a love that is so blind to the walls that divide people that it eats with tax collectors and shares a drink with a Samaritan woman.

–With a love that burns so brightly, that when lifted up into the horror of the cross and down into darkness of a tomb, it cannot be extinguished.

–Such a love burns the soul, firing it into something that is more than new—it is resurrected.

–Friends, I call you “friends” for that is truly who you are.

–We are friends of God and together we are friends in God.

–We share a God together, a Christ who fires our lives with hope and promise.

–And a God who cannot but shape who we are and what we are to be as a community.

–Are we different? Yes.

–Do we share both common and separate interests? Yes.

–Will we agree on every political, economic or even religious point? No.

–Are we friends? Yes. Friends in a way the world cannot fully define, for we are friends in God’s love.

–Can you see this?

–Do you believe it?

–Now, I have to confess that I have always found Jesus’ language of “commandment” to be a little funny with regard to love.

–What does it really mean to be commanded to love someone else?

–It seems a little unintuitive to me.

–After all, how can I force myself to love anyone?

–And how can I love someone if I don’t even like them?

–I think the worse interpretation of the command to love is the often stated this way: “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.”

–But what people usually mean by this is: “Hate the sin, despise the sinner and love thyself a little more.”

–I don’t think this is quite what Jesus is trying to convey when he commands his disciples and us to love one another.

–Rather, our best clue is found in verse 9 of our gospel reading, a continuation of last week’s text where it speaks about abiding in God.

–To abide is to dwell in another’s presence, and I can’t help but think that this is the best definition of friendship and ultimately love.

–To love someone is to dwell in their presence, to abide in them.

–It is not to look at them through a big piece of glass like a bug in a jar, but to crawl in that jar and be with them, live with them, hurt with them, and love with them.

–It is in such abiding that someone we used to call “other” simply becomes “friend.”

–When Jesus commands his disciples to love, he is commanding them to open themselves to the reality that God deeply loves God’s creation and God’s creatures.

–Enough to die for them and even enough to live for them.

–My own experience is that God puts such people into my life, if only I would be aware of them,

–People who might not become my best friend, but whom I connect with even for a moment.

–Opening a door, sharing a smile, asking about their well being, abiding, abiding, abiding, loving, loving, loving.

–For when we open ourselves to such friendships, we are ultimately caught up in a love that is not our own, but flows from a gracious God.

–It is here that we find our deepest joy.

–And when we are able to share our faith, to express what animates our very being, then our joy may be complete.

–A few weeks ago, sitting in an Assisted Living Center with my almost 98 year-old grandpa, I found that joy and it will never leave me.

–Friends…

–God bless you in your friendships, those close and far away.

–God bless you in the friends you have yet to make.

–And may you know an abiding love that holds you each moment and into eternity.

–In Jesus Christ.

I am often criticized by finger-wagging Christians admonishing me not to judge others.

So I thought I’d take a quick moment to say that of course I judge others. I have to judge others. I’m stuck judging others. Judging others is a necessary byproduct of having a brain—and a sense of morality, and a conscience.

If you can tell right from wrong, you judge.

And you can. So you do. All the time. And you know it.

I judge others; you judge others; everyone is always judging everything and everybody. Show me someone who doesn’t judge others about two hundred times a day, and I’ll show you a corpse.

I don’t judge who people are; that would be obviously insane. But I sure the [bleep] judge what people do. If I come home one evening and find someone raping my wife, for instance, you can bet that I will right away formulate a judgement about that. Someone kicking a dog, beating a child, showing up at the funeral of a fallen soldier carrying a “God Hates Fags” sign?

Then hand me a gavel and call me Judy. Because I will straight away be in the judging business.

Since there is virtually no way not to, I am going to judge the actions of others (which is the sole legitimate criteria any of us can have for evaluating another). And if I judge that a person is doing something wrong—that he or she is, or is attempting to, in any way violate the free will of another—then I am going to judge whether or not I can do anything to help right that wrong. If I can, then the time for judging is over, and only action remains. If I can’t help, then … well, then that’s a drag. (And it’s also pretty rare; there’s always something you can do.)

“Judge not lest ye be judged” sounds awesome. (It also sounds like what’s in the Bible, but isn’t, exactly; the King James Version of Matthew 7:1 reads, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” which the NIV renders, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”) But I know there’s no way I or anyone else won’t judge others. Which leaves me to conclude that that famous injunction is meatier and much subtler than it ever gets credit for being.

I don’t think that “Judge not lest ye be judged” means, “Don’t judge.” I think it’s a deliciously clever way of saying that all of us, all the time, are being judged, and that we’d do well to live our lives accordingly.

(The four pieces below were originally published separately; I thought I’d here collect them into one piece.)

My Runaway Mom

My father ditched out on his/our happy, middle-class suburban life when I was eight years old. (And this was long enough ago so that once their marital vows became mutual “Ciao!”s, my mom and dad became easily the only divorced parents in the neighborhood. It was so weird being, suddenly, the kid with the radically unnatural home life.)

Poof! Instant Dad-B-Gone! One minute I was part of a nuclear family—Father, Mother, eleven-year-old sister Nancy, seven-year-old little Bro (me), dog, cat, hamster, guinea pig. And the next minute my family went nuclear.

My dad moved into a one-bedroom bachelor pad some twenty miles from the suburban tract home in which my mom, sister and I continued to live.

At least I got to stay in my house. That was … nice.

Except that two years after my dad left that very house, my mom left it, too.

I was, like, “What the [bleep]? Is it the hideous green shag carpet in this house? Is that why everyone keeps leaving? Cuz we can change that, you know!”

First, as part of our happy, whole family, my mom was (more or less) Donna Reed herself; next, liberated from what she took to calling her “emotionally retarded” ex-husband, she rather instantly transformed into a pot-smoking, rap-session-going, Vietnam-war-protesting college student. And then, two years into being a single mother (and a real babe of one, at that: believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve watched a succession of college professors nervously fidgeting on your couch as they wait for their date with your mom to sort of kick in), my mother became no mother at all. Because she totally disappeared.

“I’m going to the store for some milk and bread,” she said one sunny afternoon around one o’clock. She then took her keys, purse, and sunglasses from off the dining table.

“Be right back!” she said, closing the door behind her.

And then it was three o’clock, and she hadn’t come home yet. Pretty weird.

Then it was six o’clock, and she still hadn’t come home yet. Pretty darn weird.

Then it was eight o’clock, and dark—and still no mom. Okay. Completely freakish.

Then it was midnight, and my sister and I were just frantic with worry. (I have no idea why neither of us thought to call the police. Well, I know I didn’t because I had no idea cops even did stuff like find lost moms. If my sister—who was thirteen by then—thought to alert the authorities, it makes sense, given the severely disturbing way my mother had begun treating her once our father had left, that she just might freakin’ not.)

Next morning, and still no mom.

My Runaway Mom–and Her Surprise Replacement

But then guess who did show up back in our house the morning after my mom didn’t? Our dad! After two years away, our six-foot-four, physical phenom dad just … turned the front door key, walked on in, and was home again.

About the first thing he saw upon his Big Entrance was my sister and I more or less huddled together on the couch, scarfing Oreos and shivering from fear.

After prying us off him, he said, “Kids, I need to talk to you.”

We were definitely all ears. What with us figuring our mom was dead and all.

“Now Nancy, John,” he said, “What I have to tell you isn’t … very easy to say. Your mother has, it seems, um … taken a little vacation. She’s not going to be living here anymore. I’m not sure exactly where she is going to be living—in fact, I’m not sure where she’s gone to at all, or what’s happened to her. I’m sure she’s fine, though. The main thing for you to know is that I’m back now, and that I’m going to be taking care of you from now on, or until we can figure out what’s going on with your mother. For now, everything’s going to continue exactly as it was before—except for without your mother. Now come on—you kids need to get to school.”

Yeah. Because what we really needed right then were lessons in geography.

What made the whole event particularly … different, is that when our dad came back to live with us, he brought with him someone else to live with us, too. It turned out he’d gotten (surprise!) married, to a fairly tall, square-shouldered, bombshell-figured, ramrod-backed, blue-eyed woman of Swedish extraction wearing form-fitting Capri jeans, a crisp white sleeveless blouse, and a blonde wig coiffed into something that managed to say at once, “I’m a healthy, fun person upon whom you can absolutely depend,” and “Are you sure you don’t have any Jews hiding in your basement?”

Maybe five minutes after introducing his new wife to us, my dad requested that my sister and I start referring to her as “Mom.”

I looked for guidance to my sister. If she could call this new woman “Mom,” then I could, too. But I saw that just then Nancy had lapsed into “Brain Overload: Can’t Talk” mode. So–what the heck—I jumped in.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Mom.”

I tried to smile when I said it. I have no idea what expression actually appeared on my face.

My New Mom, Choppers

The next morning—a Saturday, her first in her new/our old home—my new mom backed me alone into a corner of my bedroom. With her nose inches from mine, she spoke in a voice kept low, but infused with a kind of feral menace I’d never before heard in an adult.

“I want you to listen to me, John. You and your sister mean absolutely nothing to me. The only thing the three of us have in common is your father. I never wanted a family; I never wanted children. I’m here for two reasons only: because I love your father, and I love this house. This house is worth something—and in ten years, it’ll be worth more. Just like your sister, you’re welcome to stay in this house until you’re eighteen. But not a day after that. And while you live here, you need to make sure this house—my house—doesn’t deteriorate in value.”

She shot a look at the posters on my wall—a Sierra Club poster of some pretty woods that said, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the Earth,” a poster of the text of “Desiderata,” a hippie-style black light poster of Buddha, and so on.

“Those come down today,” she said. “I don’t want you to put anything on these walls again. The tack holes detract from the value of the house.” She glared hard at me. I was terrified she was going to bite me. God knows she had the choppers for it.

“Do we understand each other?” she asked.

I think I managed to nod yes. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t pee my pants.

And then “Mom” was gone—off, I assumed, to clue my sister into Our New Reality.

And it was just after she left me again alone in my room that I discovered what in a million years I wouldn’t have thought possible: I could miss my real mom even more.

The Return of Mom 1.0

What had happened to our real mom was something my sister and I wouldn’t find out for two years after she’d left—after, for us, Life 3.0 had begun. During those two years we heard not so much as a peep from our mother. We didn’t know if she was dead, or kidnapped, or had runaway, or what. No phone call. No note. No visit in the middle of the night. No secret, coded, critical little communique that I was forever desperately searching to discern. Just … silence. Nothing.

As gone as gone gets.

To this day, whenever I see on TV or read about parents who have a child who’s been abducted or disappeared, I think, “God, I can’t imagine how that feels.” And then remember that, actually, I can.

And you don’t even want to be my wife coming home from somewhere later than she said she’d be back. Poor thing. If she’s, like, an hour late from somewhere, and didn’t call so I wouldn’t worry, I can totally milk my Serious Abandonment Issues to get free foot rubs out of her for a week.

It’s wrong, I know.

As it turned out, my mother hadn’t “disappeared” at all. She had, instead, been all along living and working (as a librarian!) only a few miles away from our house. For those whole two years, she’d essentially been right up the street from my house. Upon reentering our lives (“Son,” my dad said to me one day after I’d come home from a Little League baseball practice, “your mother called”—and just like that my legs gave out from underneath me), my mom explained to me how she had needed to get away to “find” herself; it turned out that, as she put it, “God never wanted me to be a mother.” And her idea whilst finding herself had been to remain utterly hidden from the children whom God never intended her to have, so as not to interfere with my sister and I settling into the life that God apparently did intend for us as a correction to his earlier mistake. It was right around the time of her Big Return that my sister and I also learned that our father had, in fact, known all along where our mother was—he’d been in regular contact with her, we learned—but that he never told us what he knew, because he felt it would be less painful for us to imagine that our mother somehow couldn’t communicate with us than it would be to know that she could, but simply chose not to. He was dead wrong about that—any closure beats no closure—but you can’t blame a guy for trying.

My sister ditched out of our home when she was but fifteen (and without question that was the Suddenly Missing Immediate Family Member that wounded me the most). I managed to gut it out until a couple of months into my seventeenth year.

And then—early out of high school, living in big city sixty miles away, trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door in a ghetto neighborhood—my Fun Life Ride really began. (You can read a little bit about that then-new life of mine in my post, Labor Day, and Me Not Getting Killed By a Coke-Dealing Pimp.)