The Bluffs, the Ocean and the Sunset

June 23, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

On the western edge of the vast Los Angeles sprawl is the “colony” of Malibu. A separate city, it is famous for the wealthy people who have houses there, especially high on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It is equally famous for being overtaken by annual brush fires, or in the rainy season, sitting helplessly as mud- and rock-slides erode its scenic cliffs into the Pacific Ocean below.

This is my “Malibu Metaphor”: Fundamentalist piety is like a rocky promontory overlooking the sea. Those who claim and stand upon the promontory feel superior. They have all the answers. They have enshrined and set the Bible itself in concrete up there. They will go to any lengths to shore up their bluff (pun intended), and they look down on anything below which laps at their stony, hard, solid certainties.

But down below the waves are relentless. These waves represent a greater reality than even a rocky outcropping or high bluff. Because at the base of every promontory the sand collects—formed from rocks which over time broke and fell and were pounded into smaller and small pieces.

It is easy, from the top of a promontory, to suppose that everything at the bottom is “fallen,” like Adam and Eve in the Garden falling into sin. It is easy to suppose that everything “down there” is inferior or worthless—flotsam and jetsam, driftwood and entangling seaweed, oil slicks and shipwrecks. So fundamentalist piety looks down upon everything else, including all other expressions of the Christian faith—all other religions, humanism, doubt, agnosticism— and all those who do not share the stony hilltop with them.

In the physical world off the coast of Malibu, both the rocky cliffs and the sandy shore and waves are all part of the reality. But how people understand the reality will affect where they take their position.

I believe fundamentalism stands on this promontory, clutching a Bible it believes to be inerrant, invincible, a solid rock. But just as surely, it will certainly be eaten away by the waves crashing and splattering at its base. The religious right rejects and despises LGBT people with our “relentless” agenda. They fear that everything we do and are will undercut their bluff, even as they pretend nothing can hurt them.

But the greater reality is the ocean of humanity, in all of its salty, briny diversity —bearing every form of life with the constant change of tides.

The tide has risen. Now the tide is in. The ocean-rich swell of life itself is breaking down the bluff.

For those of us in the LGBT/Christian movement, we know we are in the same soup as all the rest of humanity—those who are doubters, ex-Christians, skeptics, cynics, godless pagans, atheists. It doesn’t bother us, because we stay afloat by grace alone. But all of us, those faithful and those who know no religion have the same relentless force against the lifeless, inert cliffs from which our stony opponents look down on us.

Where do they suppose Jesus would be in this scenario? On the top of the bluff, admiring the sunset of a solid religious establishment? Or in the soup, the mix, the tide of life that is gradually making a sandy shoreline out of the bluff above? The Jesus I see in the Gospels mixed with people who were sinners, tax collectors, Samaritans and foreigners — outsiders, non-practicing Jews, people with debilitating illnesses, the poor and those without hope and without resources. None of them were smug. None were high-placed. And those who started to pick up stones in order to bring down a woman caught in sin were themselves cut down by his withering judgment.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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