January 21, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I’ve been giving thought to my comments a few days back about the young man who burst into our Bible Study to condemn us for being tolerant of homosexuals. Was I “too rough on him” because he was “rough” on us? I couldn’t really respond to his rants that night, because he continued to praise Jesus and lecture us at high speed. So I saved my response for this blog.

It may be that all Christians will never reconcile about this thorny controversy involving human sexuality. But I don’t think it’s the sexuality issues which divide us, but our very approach to faith and grace, to the Word, to how God communicates with us, and to spiritual authority.

I am reminded that long before anything about homosexuality hit the church’s radar in the 1970s (after the Stonewall rebellion of June 1969), fundamentalist Christians were already in sharp disagreement with the “mainstream” about many issues of faith and authority.

Fundamentalism is at heart a rebellion against human and church authority and a persistent if not obsessive pursuit of absolute truth. Even saying that prompts me to sigh for them. Good luck on the absolute truth part, people. You may declare (by human authority) that every word of the Bible is the same as the Word of God, and that it is all true—without error even in matters of astronomy and mathematics, completely divine and without human content—but that does not make truth any more accessible or any easier to be absolute about.

The Bible contains a lot of stuff which may be true but may also be completely irrelevant to our lives today and our spiritual questions today. People who want the Bible to be an absolutist’s Answer Book must struggle to make sense of its contents. They try to find an answer to every question, no matter how forced, and they must be inventive to find a contemporary context for which the Bible has “answers.”

For example: Is there any accessible, eternally-valid, good counsel in the story of Ezra, who proclaimed that God was judging the nation because its men had married foreign women, and that it was God’s will that all these families be broken up–that the foreign women and their children simply be expelled from Israel [Ezra 9:1–10:44]?

I am not making this up. It’s not said in just one verse—it takes two chapters for this to unfold. And although it is in the Holy Bible, no one today except a white supremacist would try to use it to provide relational or sexual guidance.  Ezra’s view of God’s will was to keep the Jewish blood lines pure and to get rid of foreign, pagan idolatrous religions which were influencing Israel and diluting its pure worship of God. For anyone except the Jewish people to attempt to use this stuff to apply to other lands, other centuries and other ethnic groups, or to tout ethnic purity in any way, is a misapplication of the biblical word.

Then there’s the problem that in the New Testament Jesus forbids divorce as being against the will of our Creator [Matthew 19:3–9; Mark 10:1–12] and puts the divorced parties into the sin of adultery.

It might even be fun (okay, a little devious) to challenge the fundamentalist man who burst in last week to condemn us for our tolerance. He himself is of mixed ethnicity, so I wonder how he takes the Book of Ezra.

Well, what is our approach to faith and grace, to the Word of God, and to spiritual authority?

I looked back at some things I posted on my theological site:

The mission of this site is a small part of the mission of Jesus given to his disciples: to go and to teach. It claims no authority other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the Good News that God our Creator has accepted us and redeemed us, through the death of Jesus, and not by our own deeds, merits or intentions.

God’s love is as unconditional as it is everlasting. And it is linked to the certain knowledge that Jesus poured out his Spirit to his followers and thereby detached the Word, the power and the mission of truth and light from authority tied to human institutions. Institutions such as the church can and do share in this Spirit, but they cannot control it.

There’s the thorny part, laid open:  if church authority or even biblical authority, literally applied, cannot control the work of the Spirit, then how do we know—when we disagree—who is right? The one who loudly praises Jesus with every breath?  The one who can quote the most scripture from memory?  Or the one who patiently restrains one’s anger and meditates about the deeper things as if they matter.  What matters in my reflection on the matters of the spirit is two-fold. I believe we and all Christians should be grieved by and ashamed of our disunity—our tendency to “part company” with one another when there are thorny issues on which we do not easily come to agreement.  But at the same time, I cannot accept strident fundamentalism which claims the authority of the Bible to condemn others and to reject our faithful/different reading of the holy texts.  We are all under Christ’s orders to remain one body, one people, so we are impelled to listen and speak, to give and take so that the Holy Spirit’s gifts may enlighten us all.

Is this too abstract, or too naive, to suppose that dialogue between opposing views must continue? As it stands, a favorite technique of fundamentalists is to stir up uncertainty and doubt in the minds of people that the more open, flexible or tolerant views about faith and grace they were taught are wrong.  To me, this is exploiting people’s fears, not giving people the tools and power to live out the Word through meaningful discipleship.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Note: The subject of Christian unity was treated in Sunday’s sermon January 27, 2007.  Download PDF file here: ricsermon2008.pdf.

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January 17, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

We had an astonishing and unsettling occurrence last night at the outset of our mid-week Bible Study. A friend of someone in our community came in, agitated, stood up to praise Jesus and then thoroughly condemn us for tolerating homosexuals. Chapter and verse!  He read us the riot act, and then bolted for the door—several times, returning in between.  He continued to interrupt even after I had announced that we would now be about our prayers and was already naming those in our community who had prayer concerns!  I am still trying “to process” what happened and how I handled it, and how I feel after it is all over!

First there was the hubris of a Biblical know-it-all fundamentalist.  He was the answer man who can set us all straight because the Bible is The Answer Book, and he knows his Bible cover to cover. In this case, he was unaware that several of us in the room had studied the passages he had in mind far more extensively than he—to the point of reading and even writing articles and books on the subject. The Biblical view of homosexuality is complex and does not yield straight-forward or conclusive answers, regardless of how many “know-it-alls” insist that it does.

But being a Biblical liberal here only inflames the conservatives, who are sure they are right and therefore are on God’s side. We can’t simply argue that the Bible is full of social prejudices – that does not fly with people who sincerely believe that the Bible contains no errors and was dictated word for word by the Holy Spirit into the ears of its writers, in fact that the Bible contains no human content because it is God’s Word. We’re simply are a world apart on this, and no amount of shouting in a room will make that fundamental difference go away. (I wonder if this isn’t behind a lot of Biblical ignorance/uncertainty of our own people, who do not want to be drawn into the exactitude of fundamentalism. They are gun-shy about stating anything of their faith and knowledge because it can never be as seemingly solid and impregnable as the position of Christian conservatives.)

He was also full of rapid-fire relentless speech for a few minutes—imitating what he has no doubt learned from preachers, especially the fast-talking charismatic radio and television personalities who seem to be so full of faith. For this style of argumentation it is important to keep talking, even if highly repetitious, so as (1) not to lose one’s nerve; (2) not to give someone else opportunity to respond or disagree.

We don’t study the Bible that way. We don’t arrive at truth that way. We don’t formulate our public teachings as a church—local or national—that way. But it is an effective technique that has made televangelists millions of dollars!

I might have countered this outburst—and I did later in the evening, after he bolted form the room—that the Bible’s apparently strict ethical teaching about human sexuality contains some elements that most people would find odious today, and even the most conservative heterosexual Christians among us do not live by them.

For example, the Bible’s answer to rape is really horrific from an ethical point of view. It is not and cannot be the final answer in a Christian sexual theology. The Mosaic law requires the rapist to marry the woman he has raped, without possibility of divorce, and there is no other punishment! Or is there? In the case of Shechem, is it the appropriate punishment to kill the rapist and his entire family and all his compatriots? Does Genesis 34 belong in a Christian sexual ethic? If not, why does Genesis 19?

The religious right—such strident students of every word of the Biblical text—must somehow know as well as I do that a lot of bad ethics and unusable teaching about sexuality is scattered all over the Scriptures. It may be that there is so much uncertainty in the Bible’s sexual ethics that conservatives have latched on to one small matter—homosexuality—that they think they can be absolutely certain about, and therefore feel like they are doing their religious “duty to warn” sinners about the wrath of God.¹ There is no complete view of human sexuality in the Bible we have, and on some matters such as homosexuality there is so little which actually is decipherable that we cannot rely on it. But in fact, the less said in the Bible on a given subject, the better for an “answer man,” a Biblical “know-it-all”, and the more certain his answers, because it is so much easier to “flip and point” to the answer than to wrestle with conflicting or confusing ideas and their implications.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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January 12, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I just learned this morning of the death of someone I’d been trying to get closer to. He died apparently of a drug overdose after a drug binge—depressed?—that had cost him his job.

This news has triggered a lot of shock in me, and I found myself questioning our mutual friend hard, as if it were not possible, or somehow the news was not true.

He had a lot going for him, which makes this seem like a total failure of hope and grace. He was a Christian, knew his Bible well, was confident and enthusiastic about both his work and his children (although divorced), and knew the 12 Steps of recovery. He had come with a good friend to our Bible studies on numerous occasions, was affable and stable.

Something completely eclipsed my friend’s path to recovery, however, and snatched his life away.

And sadly—as so often happens—he shut others out when he was in his greatest need and hitting bottom in his greatest depression. I have learned that he refused to go into a detox and rehab facility, and was found dead in his home days later.

As a Christian teacher and Pastor, I feel a huge sense of defeat that I never got or found the right opening or opportunity to get closer to this man. Could I have played a role in redemption for him? Would I ever have been the one he might have called when he hit a low point in life?

It strikes me how often religion plays such a feeble role in the recovery and redemption of human life. Yes, he knew the Scriptures and could quote them as well as may lay people. But what happened? Where had the Christian faith let him down so that in successive moments of poor judgement and discouragement evil forces could pull him completely under?

The pull, and the destruction, of addiction is real and powerful. These are the demons of our times, and they are legion. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, they remain quite plentiful and available in our country. Drugs and alcohol are costly but not so prohibitive as to make anyone avoid them because of money. In any big city, drugs are especially easy to get.

What is not easy to come by is an absolutely confidence in God’s redemption and grace. This seems to be in short supply– and those who have it cannot always successfully reach those who long for it or need it the most.

And the recovery process is not for wimps. The Twelve Steps are not twelve wishes. They are hard, even demanding work. They require our attention over the long haul—for an entire lifetime—in order to grow in the spiritual strength that nothing can shake or damage or pull under.

As much as I feel defeat in this dark moment, my defeat tells me not to give up or become cynical. My effort—and all of our effort—is critically needed somewhere out there to chase the evil demons of life away, and to be a steady, reliable, unshakable friend for those who lose their nerve or their way. Probably more than anything, we need “street smarts” to understand the demons and to recognize their power.

Posted in Health, Faith, PRAYERS, Recovery, Ministry, Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

January 5, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

This past week I’ve been having a little fun wearing my other hat as an amateur webmaster.

Yesterday I launched a new web site as a birthday gift to Carl, www.ijustlovemychickens.info. The phrase comes from his videography — he’s been featured on four television shows with his now-celebrity chickens. (How many chicken web sites have you seen with a videography list?) On a segment taped for “Beverly Hills Vet” for the Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, Carl is captured saying very sincerely, “I just love my chickens!”

Doing the site was totally fun and frivolous because his hobby of raising free-range chickens brings him a lot of pleasure, and brings a smile to everyone else’s face. I hope this site will help Carl connect with a lot of people who are interested in raising chickens, and other birds, in an urban setting.

Carol, a Japanese Silkie hen, says hello to some admirers.

I’ve also included a link to our church for a good reason. Carl’s generous plan for the use of the extra eggs he receives from his hens (in good weather, he can get nearly a dozen per day) is to donate them as a fund-raiser. Eggs are “auctioned off” at Hollywood Lutheran Church in half-dozen cartons. The winners of the eggs make a cash donation to the church’s Food Pantry fund, so that the Pantry can afford to buy less-exotic necessities and fresh foods for distribution to the poor and hungry in Hollywood.

Of course, Carl is doing all the work, and paying for the food to keep the chickens producing all those extra eggs. But he would say the cost is negligible – it’s “chicken feed.” (There’s a whole page of chicken clichés and trivia, including a Bible study on the question, “Which came first …?”)

Such “chicken feed” projects remind us that generosity is not expensive. Ordinary people can do a lot to help others without costing them as much as a latte per week.

The Food Pantry is one of the Community Services we try to maintain at our church. Another one that I hope will take off as spring draws near is our Community Garden. Neighbors who sign up to till some of the soil and grow vegetables or flowers promise to share a tithe of the land’s produce with the Food Pantry. Our merciful God, and the Department of Water and Power, provide the water. Generosity does the rest.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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