Christian Men Confront Two Codes

This column appeared in the Morning Call in 2006 and won the Amy Outstanding Merit Award. I think it's worth a reread now and again.

I enjoyed reading the bestseller, “The Da Vinci Code” and anticipate seeing the movie. It’s a thriller with action from the first pages and intrigue until the last. It was hard to put down. However, the further I read the more I felt God using Dan Brown to confront me and my fellow professing Christian men.

This fanciful tale celebrates goddess worship. Brown fictionally charges the Roman Catholic Church of suppressing evidence that Jesus believed in and practiced goddess worship by marrying Mary Magdalene. The church’s motive? To help men dominate women.

Brown rightly reports that religions more ancient than Christianity worshiped goddesses alongside gods. In fact, often ancient Israelites worshiped the goddess Asherah which included sacred male and female prostitution even though God strictly forbade it (Exodus 34:10-17). Sadly, Brown reverses historical truth. Where clans and cultures substituted worship of created male and female idols for worship of the invisible Creator God, their worship reinforced repression and abuse of women rather than freeing them to enjoy a mutual relationship with men.

The Old Testament reveals a God who, in this repressive context, began the long process of lifting woman to the position of equal dignity and rights he originally intended. The ancient goddess worshiping cultures defined women as property. Husbands “kept” them to produce sons. Reproductive success defined their self worth. Goddess worshiping men used them to act out, in ritual intercourse, their hopes that the gods would make their farms fertile. Reading the Mosaic Law against this backdrop, I cannot help but see many ways God began to restore women to the mutual status that pagan religion denied. Not the least of which was to forbid ritual prostitution!

Then came Jesus. He elevated women even further. Rather than seeing them as objects of sex, even ‘sacred’ sex, he insisted on viewing them above their shoulders and deeper than their skin. The New Testament speaks of women prophets and of a woman apostle. Paul, often misunderstood, wrote “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Both are exalted, equally reflecting the Creator’s glory.

Confession. Christian men have often failed to live up to the Creator’s ideal for us. We often misinterpret biblical texts to keep women “in there place.” We often expect women to serve our wants in marriage. And, if Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker are right in “Every Man’s Battle,” most, if not all of us face temptation to view woman as sexual objects. The further I raced through Brown’s novel the more I felt confronted with a reality I didn’t fully appreciate in the past.

At best, every temptation to use women for my own purposes puts me in league with the goddess worshipers in “The DaVinci Code.” At worst, such temptation also tempts me to abandon my commitment to the God of the Bible and his relationship Code. In the words of the Old Testament prophets, I prostitute myself in goddess worship.

Goddess worship exerts its powerful attraction just as much on men today as it did for ancient men. I believe it expresses itself in seeking multiple sexual partners in order to meet one’s own needs. Enjoying pornography turns women into used objects as much as Dan Brown’s curator of the Louvre turned an unnamed woman into an object in a basement sacred sexual ritual.

Rather than creating a wonderful harmony between male and female, a so called yin and yang relationship, goddess worship acts like poisonous gas seeping into our lives, slowly eating away at our ability to experience true and lasting harmony between equal and highly valued persons. Husbands grow dissatisfied with a wife’s body because it is less than physically perfect, too boring and familiar or not functioning the way we imagine it should. The honeyed voice of goddess worship betrays “till death do us part.”

The Bible begins with Adam and Eve setting themselves up to be their own gods. Looking back, the New Testament observes that consequently people exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped created things instead of the Creator. Broken, empty and oppressive relationships with women give witness to the lie that many professing Christian men live.

“The DaVinci Code” is many things. An engrossing read. Bad history. For me, as a professing Christian man, it has also become a powerful reminder that I cannot divorce my sexuality from my loyalty to the God of the Bible and his righteous Code. To view women and to physically interact with them, including my wife, in any other way than God reveals in the Bible, is tantamount to abandoning God for a goddess. In effect, I become a practicing pagan rather than the Christian man I profess to be.

Thanks, Dan Brown, you’ve helped to strengthen my faithfulness to God — and my wife.

A Jekyll And Hyde Christmas

I am schizophrenic every Christmas. And I am determined to stay this way. No medications accepted! In fact I cannot think of a healthier way to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Christmas excites joyful anticipation every year in me. And it should.

That God would love a sinner such as I so much that he would come into my world to make a way for a personal relationship with God, well, “how wonderful a love like this!” Now that’s a perfect gift.

I am ecstatic that God isn’t Santa who checks his “Naughty and Nice” list twice to determine who gets the lump of coal instead of a precious gift. God knows I have been naughty! I don’t deserve anything good from him. Yet by his grace I have been saved rather than by my own merit. “Joy to the world!” Pull out all the organ stops and let the sound reverberate until the Christmas Eve crowd can’t stand the volume. Then quietly sing “Silent Night” as candlelight spreads through the congregation and we bask in the glow of the spreading hope Jesus brought with him.

Sometime during the preparation season of Advent, something usually stirs in my spirit, like a strange chemical reaction. It transforms a joyous man into a brooding one. Dr. Jekkyll becomes Mr. Hyde. The potion that produces the unpleasant change? It spills from the pages of Matthew and Luke.

There is a dark side to Christmas that we fail to celebrate at great risk to the experience of God’s work in us and in the world. So I welcome Mr. Hyde and celebrate an unsung and little recognized triad of Christmas qualities.

Christmas exalts personal sacrifice and loss. Yes, Jesus left heaven, not considering equality with God something to be grasped. But he did not accomplish this great humiliation except through Mary’s own significant loss. Lost dreams of what life would hold for her and Joseph. Lost respect from neighbors who knew better than to believe a teenager claiming to be pregnant and a virgin. We could discuss Joseph’s losses when he agreed to proceed with the marriage. And what of the losses to both sets of parents?

Very often God only accomplishes his work in the world through the willing sacrifice and personal loss of devoted people. No carol celebrates this holy calling of sacrifice. Yet we must celebrate it. Emanuel came not to fulfill our dreams but his. Without this realization Christmas becomes only another occasion for self-amusement or self-pity. Christmas can become a time when we ask ourselves, “Is my Christian life all about me or all about God?”

Christmas, fully told, heaps suffering onto sacrifice. Imagine Mary’s late term donkey ride to Bethlehem and her giving birth attended by sheep and rodents. Now imagine the agony Bethlehem’s parents soon suffered at King Herod’s hand. The Magi visit and the presence of an infant king precipitated the slaughter of their youngest sons. Then came the difficult refugee years in Egypt.

A fellowship rooted in suffering describes the first Christmas context. All year Christians seek God for the elimination of suffering. And we should. It’s biblical. Yet, Christmas offers a time to celebrate the fellowship of suffering that comes to God’s people. Here is wonderful opportunity to meditate on the value of suffering, even its necessity to God’s Kingdom. Paul claimed a desire to “know…the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.” Christmas is an ideal time to ask “What suffering do you need me to experience in order to advance your Kingdom plans?”

Who has not experienced the connection between loss and suffering, and vulnerability? Who of us has not built strong defenses even offenses as a result? We work hard to become invulnerable as persons and as groups.

Christmas flies in the opposite direction. Here an all-powerful God nurses in total vulnerability at Mary’s milky breast. Martin Luther reminded us that we have not begun to grasp the mystery of the incarnation until we have bent close enough to the manger to smell Jesus’ dirty diapers. And God chooses to enter the world through two vulnerable nobodies who must flee to Egypt for their lives.

Dare we celebrate vulnerability at Christmas? What assumptions might the Spirit of Christ begin to unravel if we shift from operating out of strong defenses to risky vulnerability? Dare we celebrate a God who hangs on a breast?

I don’t like my Mr. Hyde Christmas. But I need it. I need the whole truth. Even when I don’t fully understand it or know how to practice it, I need to celebrate it. Only this way can I open my spirit to God’s Spirit and experience the gradual transformation of my life in his image.

Three women, three deadly battles, only one healing

Cancer cells marauded from one organ to another like the barbarian hordes spilling across the Italian Alps on their way to sack Rome. These bloodthirsty invaders ravaged three precious women this past autumn.

Mary always sat next to her sister toward the front of the church. One could tell by her face that worship was more than punching a religious time clock. Then, one Sunday, Mary disappeared. Surgeons had to saw through her skull to remove a tumor full of those microscopic marauders. Captured, some were taken to a laboratory where specialists discovered they had migrated from another part of her body. There would be more enemies to face after Mary regained her strength. Meanwhile, the enemy was free to conquer.

Mysteriously, sometime during her recovery, the onslaught stopped. Finally, strength returned and technicians performed additional scans in preparation for a new battle. But the cancer had disappeared!

Today, Mary sits next to her sister singing and smiling as she worships a healing God.

Neither Marilyn nor Georgine sit next to their husbands anymore. Nobody knew cancer had launched a massive invasion of either woman's body, until one organ began to wither under the assault.Marilyn and Bob had just joined the church. In fact, Marilyn was the reason he was back in church after more than 20 years spent gambling life and loved ones away. His laugh and her sweetness perfectly complemented each other. Then the pain came. And the surgery. The cancer diagnoses. More cancer. And death, barely after we had begun to pray for healing.

We had more time to ask God to heal Georgine. She and her husband, Jim, worshipped and fellowshipped regularly at Calvary, but had connections to many churches. People from all over joined in the prayers. Sadly, as the prayers ascended, her body descended ever closer to death until it finally took her.

Both husbands doted. Cared. Prayed and loved. But the deadly cells spread, unstoppable by any earthly force, and unstopped by any heavenly force.

The Calvary Wesleyan family just began using a beautiful new Welcome Annex with a spacious Fellowship Foyer. Before anyone had a chance to fully appreciate the facility, these newly painted walls and beautifully carpeted floors enfolded the casket beds of two women we'd come to love.

Three women. Three deadly battles. Only one healing.

Praise God for one healing. I don't understand why there weren't three. I think I understand the prophet Isaiah's words better today. ''For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.'' They sure are.

Doubt could define me today, even bitterness. I'm not one for blind, irrational faith. One can rationally expect an all-powerful and perfectly loving God to heal three out of three cancer-invaded women. Disappointment with God is not easy to stomach.

Yet, while God's ways often confuse me, he chose to reveal himself in a way that has convinced me that he is trustworthy, even when he is confusing.

Thinking about all the possibilities, I have concluded that the four Gospel writers recorded firsthand and reliable accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. If this is so, then the One we sing about at Christmas as ''Immanuel.'' God with us, has revealed a God who personally experienced a horribly ravaged world, embraced the worst such a place could dish out when he died, and conquered it when he returned to life in a resurrected body.

So, sorely missing two women and rejoicing with a third, with renewed appreciation, I will sing the Christmas carol refrain, ''Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth.'' Only, this year, I'll sing about three daughters of earth and the One born that all three would live forever!