For Beck, Falwell and their ideological peers, the argument basically goes like this:

1. Christ commanded his followers to give to the poor and the needy.
2. Christ did not suggest that the government’s job is to redistribute wealth. Individuals, not governments, are to help the poor.
3. Therefore, social and economic justice are bad, dangerous ideas.

The flaw in the logic is in the assumption that because he didn’t say that it was government’s job to give to the poor, it follows that a government that does is evil. There is a huge leap there.

The reality is that Christ didn’t make arguments for government policy at all, in either direction. Part of the reason could have been because he lived in an empire, not a democracy. Who knows. But it’s folly to presume that because he didn’t say the government should prevent social injustice, that we should assume he preferred a government that perpetuates it.

I honestly don’t know how a political leader could hold those two ideas in their head at the same time. If you believe personally in giving to the poor, helping the widow and the orphan…why would you not want your government to protect and help those same people? Why would you promote a political or economic system that systematically marginalizes some and lavishly rewards others, and then work to alleviate the suffering of those same people when you leave work? Why would you not go beyond helping those who are already hurting in your neighborhood and try to address the systems and powers that lead to injustice in the first place?

It simply does not make sense that you would spend your weekends at the soup kitchen, would donate a 10th or more of your income, and go out of your way to help someone in need while at the same time desiring a government completely unconcerned with those same people.

There is a difference between a government that is run by the church, and a government that happens to operate in a way that is consistent with the personal beliefs of the citizenry. While the separation of church and state is a vital and necessary doctrine (one that Christ himself would not have disagreed with), it does not follow that the state and church should operate according to opposite or contradictory beliefs.

The funny thing is, the people who rail against economic and social justice are often the same people who vigorously work to have the government adopt their views on marriage, abortion and the like. Why is it acceptable for the government to address those issues and not issues of systematic injustice?

But actually the devil is immensely beautiful. Like Brad Pitt times a billion. Or me, times ten.

He was one of God’s greatest accomplishments. He was smarter, more creative, more charming than we can imagine. And even after the fall, his outward beauty never diminished. Nor did his creativity, intellect or charm.

It’s a difficult thing to wrap our minds around, that the personification of evil would be contained in a thing of beauty and brilliance. And yet when you think about the concept of temptation, it makes sense. If you really did live in a world where you were being silently opposed, prodded, tempted to do things that weren’t in your best interest… you’d probably trip up a lot less if your tempter was an ugly dude with a snarl, wearing tights with mustard stains going down the front.

I think one of the points of that story is that a lot of the things we think are good can be very bad for us. Hard work can be good. Hard work that leaves your family lonely and your life out of balance is not. Money can be good. Money as an end to itself, or used to buy another BMW when there are families living in tents outside the city, less so. Beauty can be good. Beauty that is used as a tool to manipulate, or as a basis for exclusion, not good.

C.S. Lewis talks about how one of the best ways to tell people a lie is with the truth. And while we live in a world of broken economies, broken families and broken lives, it’s hard to find the culprits, the ones who cause all the pain. That’s because the culprits aren’t wearing red tights and holding pitchforks. It’s actually pretty hard to find people who are overtly evil and ugly and mean. Most of the bad stuff that happens in the world is the result of lies masked with the truth.

Our markets lie in ruin and global commerce is threatened because while hard work and innovation are good… unmitigated, perpetual growth and expansion are ultimately destructive and unsustainable.

Because we think beauty and nice things are good, we create and consume as much as we can, willfully ignoring the consequences on our planet’s resources and on the gross inequity between us and our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world.

Because we believe in the importance of the self, we ruin countless relationships and marriages because we refuse to compromise or truly put the other person’s needs before our own.

Because we want families to be safe, we train our children to avoid people that don’t look like them, perpetuating cycles of racism, sexism and classism (which is particularly egregious because, according to spell check, “classism” isn’t even a word.)

When we look into our own lives, it might make sense for us to examine how things that we might have once thought of as good (or that others might still consider good) could be harming us or those we love.

It might make sense to consider whether our workaholic tendencies are a good thing if our relationships are suffering.

It might makes sense to examine whether our desire for more requires that other have less.

It might make sense to think about whether hard work drive are always good, considering they might be driving us in a direction that is ultimately destructive.

It might make sense to think about whether our love for country masks us to the injustice and pain others feel at the hands of our military or economic systems.

But to do so will take work, because it’s very likely the worst part of ourselves isn’t wearing red tights. It’s probably hidden in plain view, inside something beautiful but ultimately deadly.

2 billion people in the world live on less than $2 per day. 1.8 million children die each year because they don’t have clean drinking water.

And I sit at a fancy dinner with my friends, polishing off the second bottle of wine, lamenting the fact that my 401k has lost 25% of it’s worth this year. I fret because I might have to put off purchasing a new suit or a cinema display.

I’m inconvenienced by the economic downturn, while millions of people around the world are getting destroyed.

Argentina went through a period of hyperinflation not too long ago that took out 80% of the country’s wealth and virtually wiped out the middle class. When my wife and I were there this past March we saw the lingering effects – thousands of families bringing large white bins into town on trains, picking up cardboard that’s been left on the streets to sell for tiny amounts of money. People that used to have jobs, that worked hard, had their entire lives torn apart by an economic tsunami.

We would spend hours over dinner talking about how crazy it was that these people would have to bring themselves down to that level in order to survive, while their neighbors (ex-coworkers? ex-friends?) would walk right by them with their fancy clothes to the club. Ignoring them entirely. Thinking to themselves “well, that’s how life works. Glad it’s not me.”

We couldn’t understand it – it wasn’t like watching a kid in Africa on some DVD. It wasn’t far away – it was right in front of them. And they ignored it.

We were disgusted. And then we ordered another bottle of wine and talked about how great our $20 steak was.

There’s an opportunity in all of this. I’m fairly certain that we’re heading towards a major economic disaster – that the worst is yet to come. I think that picture of Buenos Aires isn’t too far from what our world could be like in the next 10 years.

And assuming I survive it without joining the ranks of those devastated, I have a choice. I can cling ever tighter to my money, and sit in my house thinking smugly about how I was just more talented or luckier than those fools outside…

Or I can soften my heart. I can remember that more than just about anything else, my God’s heart was for the poor, the broken, the disenfranchised.

The church has a long, rich history of coming to its senses during times of crisis, but I’m concerned that we are no longer a people who know our history, who know about our God’s heart for “the least of these”, who really believe that the purpose of all the wealth they’ve amassed over the last 40 years was their own consumption.

I’m praying that a nation of Christians who for decades have become drunk on excess finally see the incredible disparity between them and their neighbors (which for the first time in history includes people from the other side of the world). I’m praying they wake up and see that the three cars and the McMansions and the spas and the Prada bags have done nothing but blind them to the incredible pain in the world.

I’m praying that we figure out that one of the reasons this generation is so disenfranchised with the church is that it seems more concerned with building a bigger sanctuary or electing a President that won’t raise their taxes than it is practicing the same spirit of radical love that the God they follow appears to deem so important.

The upheaval of the last few months can be that catalyst. It has the potential to be a wakeup call. And we can either complain about how our nest egg has shrunk, or we can confront the reality that all around us people who previously had very little now have nothing.

It’s an opportunity I pray that I take advantage of, that my church takes advantage of.

We live in the most powerful country in the world, perhaps in the history of the world. We have prosperity, a massive military, and are the world’s only true superpower.

We call ourselves a Christian nation. “In God We Trust” is printed on our money. Our president is sworn in with a Bible. We say the pledge of allegiance as a nation “under god.” The identity of the church has been grafted into the fabric of America to the point that the majority of Christians have a hard time distinguishing between the two.

But here’s the crazy thing – the story of the Bible is the story of a God who never associated himself with a superpower. He wanted a people “set apart” from the world, a people with no king other than Himself, a people who did not hoard their money, did not fight their enemies, who tried to love people and reflect God’s glory in everything they did.

The early church understood these things, and tried to embody them. They lived during the peak of the Roman empire – a nation similar in might and prosperity. And they did everything they could to set themselves apart from it. Consider the following – how many of these statements sound like anything you’ve ever heard from a Christian or a church?

“The Christians form among themselves secret societies that exist outside the system of laws.” ~ a letter to Origen

“He called Abraham and commanded him to go out from the country where he was living. With this call God has roused us all, and now we have left the state. We have renounced all the things the world offers” ~ Justin Martyr

“You cannot demand military service of Christians any more than you can of priests. We do not go forth as soldiers wit the Emperor even if he demands this” ~ Origen

“I recognize no empire of this present age” ~ Speratus

“I do not wish to be a ruler. I do not strive for wealth. I refuse offices connected with military command.” ~ Tatian

“All of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools.” ~ Justin Martyr

“The professions and trades of those who are going to be accepted into the community must be examined. The nature and type of each must be established… brothel, sculptors of idols, charioteer, athlete, gladiator… give it up or be rejected. A military constable must be forbidden to kill… a proconsul or magistrate who wears the purple and governs by the sword shall give it up or be rejected.” ~ Hippolytus

“You who are God’s servants are living in a foreign country, for your own city-state is far away from this city-state. Knowing which is yours, why do you acquire fields, costly furnishings, buildings and frail dwellings here? … Acquire no more here than is absolutely necessary. Instead of fields, buy for yourselves people in distress in accordance with your means.” ~ Hermas

“We who formerly treasured money and possessions more than anything else now hand over everything we have to a treasury for all and share it with everyone who needs it. We who formerly hated and murdered one another now live together and share the same table. We pray for our enemies and try to win those who hate us.” ~ Justin Martyr

“The desire to rule is the mother or heresies” ~ John Chrysostom

“Emperors could only believe in Christ if they were not emperors – as if Christians could ever be emperors.” ~ Tertullian

All of this started to change with Constantine, who claimed to be a Christian, slapping crosses on his army’s shields as they expanded the Roman empire. Theodosius later made Christianity the state religion and made it a crime to not be a Christian. Every soldier was soon required to be a Christian. Charlemagne instructed his “Christian” armies to kill pagans who did not choose to be baptized.

One wonders if the last 1700 years have been an enormous, heartbreaking exercise in missing the point. The Crusades, the Inquisition…the War on Terror. Christianity has been so thoroughly co-opted, morphed, twisted that we don’t even realize it. We praise the words of Christ and Paul and then immediately ignore much of what they said.

What if every Christian you ever met was living violently opposed to their God and didn’t even realize it?

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue being good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

But recently, I started thinking about a similar word – disciple. I’m not sure which one came first, but I found it odd that while I always considered myself a person of discipline, I never considered myself a disciple. Truthfully, I never wanted to be.

I bet that people in the first century would have found that odd. I bet that back then, if you were a follower of Christ it was assumed that you would be a disciple. After all, to be a disciple means to, slowly and over time, become the kind of person who thinks and acts like the person they are following. And if you believed that Christ was who he said he was and took seriously his command to put down your nets, pick up your cross and follow him, it would seem that becoming a disciple was not the exception but the rule.

But somewhere along the way that changed. Perhaps it happened hundreds of years ago after Christians stopped being nailed to crosses or stoned to death or fed to lions in front of angry crowds. Perhaps it happened in the 20th century as humanism (and man’s happiness and comfort) became the objective of mankind. Who knows. But at some point it became not just accepted but normal to be a believer but not be a disciple.

To think one way but do (or not do) another.

To talk the talk but not walk the walk.

To call Christ your master but ignore his desire for your life.

I know this has been the case for me, and it has been the case for just about everyone I’ve ever met. The arguments against discipleship almost immediately bubble up – that not everyone is called to do that, that I don’t feel God leading me in that direction, etc etc etc.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more wrong I think that is. The more wrong I think I’ve been my entire life.

You see, Christ rarely talks about heaven, about a life after death. He spends the majority of his time talking about how to bring heaven here to earth – about how by loving each other and caring for the poor and seeking peace and avoiding anger and sharing our gifts and talents with each other we can bring God’s kingdom to our world now.

But very few Christians (myself included) don’t live this way. For us, Christianity is about saying “the prayer” so we don’t go to hell, and then living our lives pretty much the same way we would have otherwise. Only with less cursing. Out loud at least.

Some go further and talk about “growing in their walk with God”, but that doesn’t really mean much other than going to church and praying more often and reading the Bible some more. And when we’re not doing that we’re still ignoring the homeless guy en route to our fancy cars with the bags of fancy clothes in the back that we’ll try on when we get back to our fancy house, careful not to brake too fast lest we spill our fancy coffee drink in our laps and ruin our fancy pants.

No wonder so many people think God is dead. Our lives are no different than they would be if we believed in the tooth fairy. We’re not disciples, we’re just believers. And we sit here, watching Season One of 30 Rock for the third time after another long week at work, waiting to die.

I think there’s another way.

A way that starts with a decision to actually take God up on his offer. A decision to actively learn to walk and talk and act and think the way that Christ did. A decision to become a disciple.

It’s a very recent realization, and I haven’t the slightest idea what a life like that would be like in modern America. But I imagine it involves constructing my days quite differently than I currently do.

I imagine it means not sleeping in until 11 on Saturday, or spending three hours getting my butt kicked by a 9 year-old in Madden football on a Sunday afternoon.

I imagine it means centering my life around the same disciplines of study, prayer, solitude, fasting, simplicity, and the like that hundreds of Christians before us have used to draw closer to God.

I imagine it means working my tail off at work, not for a promotion or money or equity or bragging rights but because God gave me breath and and a brain and the ability to make things look pretty and words sound compelling.

I imagine it means being much slower to anger, not allowing myself the demented joy that comes from holding a grudge.

I imagine it means sitting down with my wife and honestly assessing how we spend our money, and determining how much we’d need to give away in order to truly be stewards instead of misers.

Most importantly, I imagine it means asking God what he really wants me to do with my life – what my part to play is in this grand plan to bring heaven to earth.

I imagine it means to stop sitting on the sidelines.

Belief is easy. Following is much more difficult.

For all my writing and thinking about treating the poor like real people, I still stubbornly do the same stuff I’ve always done. Not always, thank God – these days it’s more like a 50/50 chance. But what’s my criteria the 50% of the time when I turn down the man or woman begging me for help?

This afternoon as I sat down at my coffee shop and opened my brand new laptop and talked on my iPhone, I got a sick feeling in my stomach. It’s pointless to pretend like I’m something I’m not – and what I’m not is humble, magnanimous, generous of heart. My wife and I don’t have a condo – who cares. Our walls are bare and we only have a couple of (really nice) pieces of furniture in our apartment. It’s ridiculous that I contemplate these facts and sometimes convince myself that I’m living the way God intended me to live.

30 or 40 years ago, a man and a woman gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. They loved him, took care of him, went out of their way to protect him and keep him safe. He grew up, fell in and out of love, thought about what he wanted to be when he grew up, got a job, did his best. Somewhere along the way, things took a turn for the worse. Who knows what the catalyst was – losing a job, an inability to get over heartbreak, losing his parents. Maybe drugs or alcohol or some other vice. Whatever it was, it led to a deterioration in his life, one that he hasn’t recovered from.

I walked by a man today who has parents somewhere who love him and wish they could help. Maybe has brothers and sisters who are ashamed of him, or wish they could see him more often, or wonder where he even is. He likely had dreams that seem terribly distant, and faces a reality that is colder and harsher and more difficult and humbling that I can even begin to imagine. Who knows what he would have done with the money had I given it to him – regardless of motive, he is certainly harder on his luck than I am.

But as long as I continue to look down, I can convince myself that none of the above is true. As long as I don’t have to look him in the eye, I can tell myself that he’s an alcoholic and he deserves whatever’s come to him and that he should just get a job.

As long as I’m looking down, I don’t have to confront the fact that he has a heart that aches, emotions that have to grapple with the fact that his life isn’t like everyone else’s. I don’t have to think about how he long ago stopped being treated like a member of society and started being treated like something to be avoided, ignored, or worse.

As long as I look down, I can pretend he’s not a person.

I have no idea why Christians waste so much time trying to prove themselves via scientific method. It won’t happen – I would submit that it can’t be done. The tragedy isn’t that God can’t be proven scientifically – the entire premise is flawed from the beginning. Science is a process of observation, repeated testing in controlled environments, etc. How does one put a God outside of the confines of human existence into a beaker?

The tragedy is that believers feel they must appeal to science as the ultimate authority. It’s understandable, as science has replaced God in the modern age as our source for answers. We long ago decided that a God and, say, evolution are entirely incompatible, declared the concept of a God as completely unreasonable and moved on, determined God as unsound since we can’t prove it.

Thing is, science doesn’t tell us a lot of things we continue to believe.

It doesn’t expalin why we consider a God absurd but think a universe that just has always existed (for no reason we can explain) to be perfectly reasonable.

Why, if adaptations and mutations take generations to take place, we think it perfectly acceptable that the first organism somehow knew to reproduce itself.

It doesn’t tell us why we, apparently unlike any other creature in existence, are conscious. Why we know we’re going to die, why we beat ourselves up about the stupid thing we said to our friend or loved one, why we wonder if we look fat in the yellow shirt with the green horizontal stripes.

It doesn’t tell us why we wear clothes, why we go out of our way to communicate our uniqueness through noserings and purple hair and three piece suits and REO Speedwagon t-shirts.

Why we spend an average of four hours a day watching television.

It doesn’t tell us why we love, why we fly in the face of evolution by continuing to be largely monogamous. Doesn’t say why we enter into destructive relationships, why we miss our high school sweetheart, why we’re afraid to approach the beautiful girl across the room even though our advanced, rational minds know that there exists no true downside and that they biologically represent the best “seed” for our offspring.

It doesn’t explain why we spend 80 hours a week working in a job we hate, why we kiss our bosses ass, why we try to sabotage the advancement prospects of the new guy, why we really care whether Fridays are business casual. Why we’re willing to spend every waking hour struggling to start a business so we can give the world a five-speed nose-hair trimmer or decorative mailbox shaped like a giant shoe.

It doesn’t explain why we sit in college classrooms debating the reasons for our existence. Why we’re so uncomfortable with someone else having a different set of beliefs than we do. Why we hate the guy across the room because they are republican or democrat or a Raiders fan.

It doesn’t explain why we simultaneously want to reject a creator or any moral absolute but doggedly continue to believe in evil. Why we feel wronged if someone kills our wife or lies about our character. Why, if we are simply carbon and water and our lives have no purpose outside of what we decide them to be, it continues to be important to adhere to rules and laws and beliefs that are all social constructs to preserve order but don’t serve any true purpose.

Why, if our only reason for existing is to continue our species, we so often go out of our way to destroy it. Why we’re the only creature in the world that consistently ignores it’s biological needs. Why we pump ourselves with artificially produced food, smoke cigarettes, basejump, have unprotected sex, start wars, emit greenhouse gases and commit suicide.

Why, if there is no evil, we immediately go back on it when we’ve been wronged. Why, if there is evil, we’re somehow exempt ourselves, and that time we cheated on our spouse was different.

Why we feel anger, envy, pride, depression, loneliness, despair.

The crazy thing is that while Christianity (Judaism, Islam, whatever) are woefully inept when it comes to scientifically proving the existence of their God, science is ridiculously unqualified to tell me why (not how) I exist, and why I do the occasionally magnanimous, usually insane, frequently stupid things that I do, why I feel compelled to sit in front of a bright screen to write a blog post at 1 in the morning.

Which is why I don’t particularly care that RRT finds my belief in a God silly. Because if they truly believed what they thought, they shouldn’t care what Kirk Cameron thinks.

And in thinking about it, maybe I should be.

As a Christian, you often hear from the pulpit that you are to vote your beliefs. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that the realm of politics as we know it shouldn’t be a realm in which the Christian actively dabbles.

Christ never tells us to vote, to pursue government office, to involve ourselves in the creation of the laws of the world. Instead, it tells us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to the Lord what is the Lord’s. This was more than just an edict that we should pay our taxes – it was instructing us to be in the world but not of the world.

Politics, it seems, has always been primarily about two things – power and compromise. There are many in our country who I believe truly pursue politics out of a desire to do good, and I’m sure other countries and times have had similar men and women. But the pursuit of power has been ever-present, and the primary tool for gaining such power (outside of war) has been compromise.

But the Christian isn’t to seek power. And as everyone knows, Christianity is known for many things – compromise is not one of them.

I don’t think a Christian can be in office and serve according to their beliefs. I don’t think they can be for the environment, against capital punishment, anti-war, pro-life, and economically closer to a socialist than a capitalist (I’m well aware of the irony on that last point – I never said I was a good Christian.) In a world of compromise, something has to give – the edges have to be rounded off to appeal to one group or the other.

And while compromise is difficult, power is destructive. The corruption that comes with ever-increasing power seems pretty consistent throughout history, and Christians are kidding themselves if they think they are immune. One look through a sixth grade history book tells you all about the Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials. In each case, Christianity has been very closely tied to the state.

Separation of church and state – most people don’t know that the term came from Jefferson on behalf of a group called the Danbury Baptists, and was written to keep the government out of the church…not the other way around. Christians weren’t trying to force their way in, but simply keep the government out.

It was our idea.

In most ancient cultures, the religious leaders were the political leaders – often considered divine and of infallible judgment. One of the most notable exceptions? Israel. The priests and the king were separate groups with different structures and complete autonomy (although individuals did blur the lines at times.)

Looking at the headlines these days, it’s not hard for me to see why. I look at politics and I see posturing, quid pro quo, sound bites and stump points. I see everyone looking to play angles, to say whatever they need to get votes.

Except, of course, for our fearless leader – a man who I used to think stood the course because he believed in it, but whose stubborn streak and complete willingness to bend (or break) rules reeks of a stubborn love of power.

All the while, the gap between the rich and the poor gets ever wider. A social security and Medicare crisis looms and no one is willing to address it for fear the painful measures will hurt them in the polls. And in the face of a massive pile of evidence that we’re rapidly destroying our planet we continue to debate how much of an impact we’ve had on it instead of doing whatever we can to solve it.

I’m tired of it. Increasingly, I want nothing to do with it. And perhaps that’s as it should be.

One Degree Of Separation
The first thing that amazed me about the whole scandal was my proximity to it. I knew the guy. When I was in high school, I went to church there. I met my prom date there. I shook his hand. Seemed like a very nice guy, and a guy who had an immense amount of love in his heart.

We’ve all grown up watching television and reading the newspapers, and are used to seeing people become infamous. We’re used to reading and watching, mostly in a detached way, as these people become the butt of jokes on late night talk shows and blog posts. I’m no different.

But I’ve never actually known one of these people. I’ve never looked them in the eye. This was different.

To watch a guy’s life – his family, his profession, his entire being – be absolutely torn apart in a matter of hours…was heartbreaking. I couldn’t believe how much venom came spewing out from people all over the world towards a guy they’d never met. I watched as he was interviewed in front of his wife and children, humiliated. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Actually, I’m sure I have. I just had my eyes closed. Probably spit some venom myself.

The Church Gets It Wrong

As I read the letter he wrote to his congregation, I cried. He had been dealing with homosexuality his entire life, and he obviously despised himself because of it. He was raised in a church that told him that he was evil, a leper, someone to stay away from. He knew that if he confided in his fellow Christians, they’d likely respond with some venom of their own. It wasn’t something he was allowed to even be struggling with, so he bottled it up. And as anyone who’s been a teenager can attest to, bottling something that strong up is an extremely difficult thing to do.

Christians are sometimes afraid to challenge the prevailing wisdom of the day. Just as it’s highly unlikely that Christ would have had slaves or treated women like second class citizens, I really don’t think he’d approve of how the church is handling the homosexuality issue. I understand that it’s a messy, controversial issue, one that is driving a wedge even deeper into the country, and even into church congregations. I don’t have an answer. But what I don’t believe is that the way to love and support the gay community is to tell them that God hates gays.

What the church has done is to label homosexuality as the last taboo. Lie and steal at work – fine. Cheat on your spouse – it’s okay, we can help you. Even the murder can be brought into a community of acceptance and love. But homosexuality? Good riddance to bad filth.
Here’s the thing – man has always, ALWAYS tried to create “in crowds.” It has tried to look for ways to make certain people special and make certain people…outsiders. We don’t have to learn how to do this – it’s hardwired into our brains (go to a kindergarten playground and watch a while.) We do it in school, we do it with fraternities, we do it with “patriotism”, we do it with sports teams, we do it with celebrities, we do it with clubs that require keys to get into.

And the church is not immune – not by a long shot. God’s grace is an amazing gift, but it doesn’t mean we walk the world with halos. Instead of thinking of the body of Christ as something that is all-inclusive, open and available to anyone and everyone, we think of it as a special club. We wall ourselves up inside our churches and our bible studies with people from similar economic, social and lifestyle orientations, and as we get comfortable, we lift the drawbridge.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but until Christians learn to stop it with the in-crowd mentality, we won’t be living our beliefs. Christians are all fallen people – nobody lives a life consistent with the will of God. That’s why we needed a savior in the first place.

So please, until you can go through the week without stealing a glance at the pretty guy or girl down the hall, until you can take your paycheck, pay your rent and put a little aside for food and then promptly give the rest away, until you can realize that maybe you don’t need the enormous house and the sports car, until you can honestly pursue a goal not because of your ambition or greed but only because God wants you to, until you can invite the poor and the hungry and the sick and the socially spit upon to your house for dinner….until you don’t have any skeletons in your closet, be enormously thankful that your brokenness is accepted, and give that same gift to everyone.

Haggard was one of your most giving, most loving pastors. He was a gift to the church body, to his family, to his friends. But because of the way the church approaches his struggle, he was forced to keep it inside, and it destroyed him.

The church is full of Ted Haggards – people who are forced to keep something as powerful as their sexuality locked up. And until the church changes its approach, until it creates a place where anyone is welcome, where any issue can be talked about openly, their lives are going to be miserable.