Monthly Archives: April 2019

Faith

Is God not mad… just disappointed?

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How do you think God reacts when we do wrong?

I asked this question to a group of 7-12 grade students from our student ministry last night. As always, I told them that there were no wrong answers. If the question asks what you think, and you say what you think, then you get the answer right. While they couldn’t possibly answer the question incorrectly – unless they were lying – I was hoping against hope that they wouldn’t answer, “I think God gets mad at us.”

And they didn’t say, “God gets mad at us when we mess up.” Hooray! Youth ministry win.

They gave the answer that I think a lot of people (including sometimes me) would, “I don’t think God gets mad at us when we mess up… It’s probably more like when we do something wrong and we get caught by our parents. Then they say something like, ‘We’re not mad. We’re just disappointed that you did this.‘ Like I don’t think God gets mad when we mess up, just disappointed.”

 

We’ve come a long way since the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God theology. Most of us are passing on a view of God that isn’t this powerfully vengeful being watching over us who punishes us when we mess up. We’ve come a long way from our hell-fire and brimstone God who will throw someone into eternal damnation for swearing too much or having sex. We have replaced this angry, vengeful view of God with a view of God that is far more tame and human. In this view, God doesn’t want to punish us, God’s feelings just get hurt a lot. With this outlook, God is a friend who we didn’t sit with at lunch or a good parent that caught us in a lie.

At my private Christian middle school (circa  2007) we often unironically sang a song in chapel time called, Can He Still Feel the Nails. It goes like this:

Can He still feel the nails every time I fail?

Can He hear the crowd cry “crucify” again?

Am I causing Him pain, when I know I’ve got to change?

Because I just can’t bear the thought of hurting Him.

Yeah I know. A song that I think many would fairly deem manipulative.

While myself and many in my thought sphere have – in adulthood – laughed at the vast fallacy of that song and other sayings like it, I think we’re still walking around with much of the residue from those views. We’ve abandoned a view of God who hurts us because of our imperfection, and we have adopted a view of God who is hurt by our imperfection. So while we’ve been so right to run from this vengeful view of God, we may have sat down someplace that we need not stay.

 

This may get fairly philosophical for a bit. Roll with it.

I also just want to say, at a certain point, theology and theological arguments are in some sense broken and unhelpful because we cannot – though we may try – divorce ourselves from our different perspectives. So many people have different ideas and views on the Divine, and perhaps God is big enough to hold all of them. That said, I’ll try and make an argument that may be helpful.

So is God disappointed in us when we fail? Or when we don’t do our best?

A key underlying assumption to even asking this question is God cares about my own personal thoughts and actions. If God does not, then how could we disappoint God? We of course, cannot disappoint someone who does not care. So for the sake of argument, let’s say that God is concerned with me as an individual (my thoughts, actions, being).

Our view of God as a father or parental figure seems to really play into this view of a disappointed God. If growing up, my mom always told me, “Don’t smoke,” and she never saw or became suspicious of me smoking, she would likely expect that I don’t smoke. At that point, if she expects that I haven’t ever smoked, and she catches me smoking, she would be disappointed. Her expectations for me as her son were not met.

Our view of God as a friend can lead to this disappointed view of God too. If every week my friends and I play trivia on Tuesday night, it becomes an expectation of the friends in the group that I will go play trivia with them every Tuesday. At that point, if I bail on trivia, they could be disappointed with me. If I’ve never gone to trivia with them before, and hanging out with them every week is not an expectation, then how could they be disappointed?

Disappointment is a result of unmet expectations.

If we believe God is an omniscient, omnipotent being who is continually creating the universe, it seems unlikely to me that God would be anything less than fully aware of our past, current, and future pitfalls. Does God expect that we will be perfect or close to perfect? Does God even expect that we will give our best effort?

When I truly think about the bigness of God, quippy phrases like “Jesus expects our best” don’t hold up. It may make for a best selling keychain at LifeWay, but upon further examination, where do we even get that? An easy response would be to point me towards literally any of the commands of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. Good. But have you ever told someone to do something and not expected them to do it? Have you ever pointed someone in the right direction knowing it’s in their best interest, and still expected them to go their own way? I have, and I would argue that this is could be how Jesus felt.

Throughout the stories of Jesus that we have in the Bible, I have a hard time finding one that describes Jesus as disappointed. (Disclaimer: I could be wrong, and that’s the fun part about putting stuff on the internet.) However, I find a lot of times when people come to Jesus with expectations and leave disappointed. When the rich young ruler comes to Jesus explaining his goodness, expecting a warm embrace and pat on the back, Jesus asks for what he knows the man won’t give, obedience at the cost of his stuff. The man left disappointed. The religious leaders often came to Jesus with questions expecting to be affirmed as correct or to entangle Jesus, but they always left disappointed or even angry.

I would argue that disappointment is much more a human emotion that we feel towards God than the way God feels towards us. God lavishes love and grace upon us expecting nothing in return. No conditions. We don’t really get that because even in the purest forms of human connection, we expect some form of reciprocation. Even the best, most loving parents feel hurt when their children turn their backs on them. God is simply not this way.

 

To explain what God’s Kingdom and grace is like, Jesus tells the story of a younger brother who didn’t want to wait till his dad died to get his stuff and get on with it. This son goes to his dad and essentially says, “I want your stuff now, I don’t want to wait.” Storyteller Jesus doesn’t then say, “And the father was disappointed.” The father does what his son asks and gives him his share, and the younger son left. The father gave of his love and treasures with no conditions. While the younger son is off burning the candle at both ends, we don’t hear that the father is up all night weeping. Instead, what we see is a father who is waiting for his son to come home. When the younger son returns home, he expects his dad to be mad, or at least disappointed, but instead what he finds when he gets home is a warm embrace and a party. The only character in the story that is disappointed is the older brother, who didn’t understand the bigness of his dad’s love.

We are loved by God without conditions. Immense, pure love, way bigger and better than we love our girlfriends or our kids. Understanding that God’s immaculate love is unphased by our screw-ups or straight up screw-overs is going to help us let go of a whole lot of shame. Believing that we’ve in some way let down the Creator of the universe is a terribly shame-inducing way to live. And shame wrecks relationship. Our fear of disappointing God has for too long kept us from total communion with God and each other. When we feel convicted that we’re in the wrong, believing that God is disappointed keeps us from running home instead of pushing us to running home faster.

When we’ve taken God’s good things and twisted them for our own devices, God isn’t mad or disappointed, God just wants us home. A warm embrace and a party awaits.

Faith and Culture

boys will be…

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October 7th, 2016

It was a Friday evening, and I was in a hotel room in Atlanta. I had made the trip from Nashville to Atlanta to interview for a youth ministry position at a church there. It was a Friday night,  and it turned out to be one of those times when you don’t remember where you were because something significant happened specifically to you; you remember where you were because something happened out in the world and it seemed eternally significant. After meeting some of the church leadership for dinner, I had returned to my hotel room and turned on the radio coverage of the Chicago Cubs divisional round playoff game against the San Francisco Giants. Then, as had become a habit during the months leading up to that night, I turned on the news to see what was happening with the upcoming election. What I found was more than I had bargained for.

That night the Washington Post had released an Access Hollywood tape of a conversation between soon-to-be-President Donald Trump and television personality Billy Bush from about 10 years prior. They were on a bus pulling into where Trump would be making a cameo on a soap opera that day. The conversation that we all overheard seemed to stop the nation for a night. At one point towards the beginning of the footage, Donald Trump is telling Bush about a failed sexual conquest:

Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

Unknown: Whoa.

Trump: I did try and f*** her. She was married.

Unknown: That’s huge news.

Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.

She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —

I moved on her like a b****. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony t**s and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

This was plenty bad, but it gets worse. The listeners can hear the laughter of Bush in the background. Fueled by the affirmation, Trump continues when they see Actress Arianne Zucker:

Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab ’em by the p****. You can do anything.

As much as I didn’t want Trump to be elected and had been hoping that something – anything – would derail his campaign, those words made me sick to my stomach. My intestines tightened and my face felt flushed.

I clicked from news channel to news channel, and everybody was covering it. Showing the video. Using the p-word on TV. Somehow, even this was becoming a partisan issue. The Trump campaign and surrogates had already begun to spin this potential deathblow as merely Locker Room Talk. There were men and women alike claiming that this was simply boys being boys. Saying that this type of conversation was normal.

Thinking that this was surely something that people would be unequivocally condemning on social media, I opened up Facebook. Many of my friends had shared articles detailing what the tape revealed, most saying that this was unacceptable behavior from someone wanting to be the President of the United States. But what I found under their posts in the comments section was appalling. So many people replying things like this real comment thread from a friend’s post:

“How about supporting a liar like Hilliary.”

“Trump has his issues bit I’d rather support him than the alternative”

“I’ve heard all kinds of “locker room talk” but I will never stand for a women who trashed other women that were raped and abused in the White House..she admits she is different when public compared to when she is private..laughed when she got a man off with 2 months in jail for raping a 12 yr old girl..the list goes on and on..y’all are beyond insane if you don’t vote for trump..BELIEVE ME”

“Preach it Jeff!!!! I am way more concerned with Kill-liar-y’s actions than something Trump simply said over 10 years ago!!!!”

I was shocked. This wasn’t about the other candidate, who happened to be a woman. It was about human decency and the level of morality we expect from men in our society. I didn’t know what to do, but I felt like I needed to say something. People needed to speak up in reasonable and just ways. So I commented back in the thread:

Jeff, what locker rooms have you been hanging out in? I played sports in high school and spent a ton of time in college dorms with groups of guys, and never did I hear the graphic vulgarity that Donald Trump used while describing his sexual exploitations of women in the video. This “boys will be boys” attitude is the reason that so many are sexually assaulted every single day in our country. My heart breaks for our society that a man like this is in contention for the highest office in our country.

I don’t know what I expected to happen next. Maybe I had hoped that I would change everyone’s mind. Maybe I just hoped that I would “win” this Facebook bout with a stranger. Another guy commented back:

Michael Clinger, don’t even know you, this post just stumbled along my feed but give me a break man. Denying that you never heard vulgarity like that and you are a grown man is simply blasphemy.

For some reason, I remember this hitting me harder than listening to the words on the tape. It hit me harder than seeing people on TV defend Trump’s words. I had entered into a gunfight with only a knife. He was implying that either I wasn’t a man or that I had no integrity. Neither were true. Both hurt.

And there alone in my hotel room with no one to talk to, I cried.

 

You know the rest of the story. Donald Trump went on to win the 2016 Election in a sizable Electoral College victory. Despite being investigated for the last two years, it has been reported that Donald Trump himself was most likely unaware of any Russian interference and did not personally collude with a foreign agent to steal the 2016 Election.

Still the most shocking statistic to me: 81% of white Evangelicals voted for President Trump.

 

So how does someone get to the point where they will talk that way with another television personality? Or for regular folks like me, how does a man get to the point where they will talk in such a demeaning way? And then when that happens, how has our society gotten to a place where that is seen as normal?

Boys will be boys.

A statement commonly made around groups of boys and men of all ages from the womb to the tomb. I don’t know where this phrase originated, but when used it means that when groups of boys are together, they often do things that are reckless, adventurous, and mischievous, and that’s just how it is. We use the same phrase when a 8-year-old accidentally throws a baseball bat into the screen door, and when a pair of drunk 40-year-old men verbally assault an 18-year-old college basketball player. When the older 6-year-old brother cuts the hair of his 3-year-old little brother, and when a group of fraternity brothers throw a pledge into the trunk of their car and leave him there for hours.

Girls misbehavior is not so easily excused with a quippy phrase. Girls will be girls does not apply when two women get into a verbal altercation at a bar. It is not an excuse when two high school girls get caught peeing on their softball teammates mouthpiece.

Parents spend most of their lives warning their daughters about boys. Don’t be alone with a boy. Don’t talk to strange men. Don’t be out alone. Don’t be out late at night. Don’t wear that dress. Don’t talk that way. Don’t lean in for the kiss. Say no. Say no. Say no.

For all of the time that we spend warning our daughters about boys, we spend almost no time teaching our sons not to be the boys that daughters have to be warned about. We don’t teach boys that it’s not ok to refer to women as hoes or b*tches. It’s not ok to talk to your guy friends about women’s breasts and butts and what you’d like to do with them. It’s not ok to stand or sit too close to a girl that you don’t know. It’s not ok to ask personal questions to girls that you don’t know or just met. It’s not ok to touch girls that you don’t know, or even most girls that you do know. It’s not ok to whisper in the ear of a girl that you don’t know. It’s not ok to approach a girl that you don’t know who is by herself and looks distressed. It’s not ok to comment on a girl’s appearance in passing. It’s not ok to ask a girl in passing if she has a boyfriend or to ask what she’s doing later. It is not ok. That’s a lot, but I could go on.

And if you think that those guidelines are too much, or you think “How then can I even talk to women?” Just don’t. They’ll be ok, likely even better off.

A big reason that we have the amount of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment that we do is because we let too many of these seemingly small things slide. No one just wakes up one morning as a sexual predator. If we don’t address these issues as men to other men, nothing will change. 

 

There’s a couple more elements of the Access Hollywood Tape that are important to note, not because they are the most incendiary or the most clearly vile, but because they are the types of things that we don’t often callout or even notice. Understanding their problematic nature may go a long way.

When Donald Trump and Billy Bush get off of the bus, they are greeted by actress Arianne Zucker. After a brief hello and introduction, this is what happens:

Bush: How about a little hug for the Donald? He just got off the bus.

Zucker: Would you like a little hug, darling? [Zucker hugs Trump]

Trump: O.K., absolutely. Melania said this was O.K.

Bush: How about a little hug for the Bushy? I just got off the bus. [Zucker hugs Bush]

Zucker: Bushy, Bushy.

It’s a strange interaction to read through no doubt, and even if you watch it, it may seem rather harmless, but there is something underlying that needs to be spoken about. Neither Trump nor Bush has met Zucker before. These are strangers. When Bush asks for hugs for Trump and himself, it’s not a true ask. There’s power dynamics at play here, Bush and Trump with the clear leverage. “How about a little hug for the Donald?” is said in a way that you would tell a little girl to hug her uncle. Here’s the thing:

Women should not be treated in this way. At least in modern society, we’re starting to empower women to say no and teaching our little girls that their body is theirs and no one else’s, but what we’re not doing is teaching boys that it’s not ok to approach girls in that way. We’re teaching girls not to take it, but we’re not teaching boys not to make those attempts.

Women and their bodies are not objects for the enjoyment of others. Though no one would come out and say the contrary (hopefully no one would), we send that message implicitly as we raise our girls. When we pick our 4-year-old girl up from preschool and see that she’s playing with a boy, we ask “Is that your boyfriend?” As if she being just friends with the boy isn’t pure and good the way it is. We imply this when we say to our aging daughters, “How about a hug for Uncle Jon?” We send this message in churches when we tell our teen girls that they need to save their bodies for their future husbands. We have to be aware of the implicit messaging that is happening.

Men, clearly there are prohibitions for the ways in which we approach women that we don’t know, but there should also be prohibitions for the ways we approach women that we do know. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re her teacher, pastor, or relative, there are still ways that you should not initiate physical contact with a woman. If she wants to hug you, she will come in for a hug. We have turned our heads and looked the other way too many times when pastors or family members abuse their power and position. 

 

Here’s the last thing on the tape that I’ll talk about. Talk of sexual conquests and objectification do not happen in a vacuum. As a man who has lived a mere 25 years on this earth, I have both heard and said things that I regret about women in front of other men. It’s not uncommon for men, but especially for teenage boys, to speak about women in ways that are alarming. Locker room talk certainly exists, though very rarely to the graphic degree displayed on the Access Hollywood tape. In every situation regarding this kind of interaction, there are two types of people, the talker, and the enabler. On the tape, you should be able to figure out that Trump is the talker, and Bush is the enabler. In my life, I have been both, and I would assume that most men have. Both positions are born out of personal insecurities and a lack of conviction. Neither are acceptable.

Three months ago, I was with some friends (men and women), and we were heading to our cars in a parking lot in Brentwood. For those not familiar with Nashville suburbs, most would refer to Brentwood as a “good part of town.” I think to most people, “good part of town” just means bigger houses and whiter people. We stopped to talk for a minute, and we were laughing as two boys aged 16 or 17 were walking past us to their car. One of the boys said to our group, specifically the girls, “B*****s always be playing, with your heart and with your d***.” One of the girls I was with responded and the boys proceeded to yell back as they drove away. I was honestly shocked. As far as fight, flight, or freeze is concerned, I was in full freeze mode. Once again, my intestines felt like they had tightened up and my face felt flushed. I legitimately was having a hard time processing what I was feeling or thinking about it. My surprise regarding the situation pointed to my naïvety. The girls weren’t as shocked. They had experienced moments like that before.

As I reflect on that experience, I think about how it was just one of the two boys doing the talking. The other was there, laughing along as if it were the funniest thing ever. And that’s most of us men, most of the time. For too long we have sat on the sidelines and shamefully chuckled as we have let our peers believe that what they do and say is not only ok, but it is valuable. And I certainly know the tension of the moment. There are too many times to count in my life in which I didn’t speak up. Too many times where I was intimidated at the thought of being ousted from a group. But enough is enough. We have to start taking one for the team. Men, let’s call each other to a higher standard. It will be awkward and difficult, but what’s worth doing that isn’t hard?

There is a difference in acknowledging that conversations amongst men in which women are objectified are normal, and in viewing them as an acceptable aspect of life. In 2016, American Evangelical Christians showed that culturally, we are the enabler. As enablers, we don’t really believe that what is being done is right, but we have counted the cost of standing up to the talker, and we’ve decided that it’s not worth it. It’s easier to laugh along at what’s being said than it is to point out the talker for what he is.

We have failed in holding each other to a standard of morality and human decency. Churches have failed in extinguishing the fires of misogyny and objectification and, in many cases, have stoked them. More than that, American churches have for too long enabled male leaders to dodge the issues behind the facade of not wanting to be “political.” The “moral majority” that arose during the 20th century has become the immoral majority. Christians, we need to be speaking honestly about what we will no longer be standing for. It is time to rise up and cast aside our prejudices and broken systems. Even if that means blowing it up and starting over.

It’s easy to see these issues as too big to tackle, but the thing about time is that we can make major progress in just one generation. Let’s not hand down the same baggage to our kids that we were dealt. We have to start teaching boys from an early age that they need to respect the girls in their lives as equals, and that they need to stand up to other boys when they are speaking negatively or harmfully to or about girls. What our young boys hear now will shape who they become. Let’s stop shrugging off misogyny and objectification as “boys being boys” or as “locker room talk.” No more excuses, let’s be better.