211. plash

This week and next I am working at a risk management and reinsurance company in Minneapolis through a temp agency. It’s been a bit of an adventure figuring out what exactly I’ll be doing, because at first it seemed that they thought I was an idiot or something. Then they discovered that I had print experience, scanning, proficiency in Microsoft Office, mail room, etc.

Essentially, I’m working with a four-person temp team that the company I’m working for has outsourced a lot of their office support needs to.

Mostly, it’s a lot of waiting around for a project to come up. On my first day, the girl I’m filling in for basically told me to bring a book. Thankfully, today I was doing mail runs (and scoping out cute males around the office–I’ve a crush on the cute guy who sits around the corner), which mostly involves doing a walk-around of both floors to check designated drop trays for any out-going mail.

For my first two days there while I was “training” (i.e., they were figuring out what I was going to be doing), I basically hung out at the front desk with the receptionist. She’s an early-middle-aged Latina with, as I soon discovered, a pretty massive inferiority complex. In the few days I’ve known her, it’s made me wonder how irritating I come across when I give in to negative thinking. She’s also one of those individuals of a certain age where you keep your head down, do your job, watch the clock, and check off the days until retirement.

Let’s call her “Paulita.”

To her credit, Paulita has been working on expanding her mind through reading and exploration of history (she calls it “research”); and she is curious about many things. However, we had a conversation yesterday morning that tested the limits of my tact and incredulity.

Even though it’s technically not allowed, she goes on the Internet to read articles and look things up. For example, yesterday afternoon we were talking about the Civil War and a visit she had to the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. In that conversation, we learned that Lee married the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, George Washington’s wife. The relation is through her son from her first marriage to Daniel Custis, who died in 1757.

Ah, Wikipedia.

Yesterday morning, while Paulita was on break, I found an article from LiveScience.com on Google News: 3,300-Year-Old Tomb with Pyramid Entrance Discovered in Egypt. She’d mentioned a fascination with ancient Egypt the day before, so I showed it to her when she got back. She mentioned something about wondering if the pyramids were built before or after Stonehenge, and I recalled learning that the very earliest of the Egyptian pyramids (c. 2,670 BCE) were built around the same time as construction on the Salisbury plain began. The circular bank and ditch enclosure of Stonehenge were first excavated around 3,100 BCE, whereas the stone rings weren’t erected until around 2,600 BCE. The Pyramids of Giza were built during the Egyptian 4th Dynasty (c. 2613 to 2494 BCE).

(I looked up all these dates just now. Don’t worry, memory usually prevents me from going full-scale nerd most of the time.)

During all this, Paulita mentioned “Biblical times” at several points, most confusingly in reference to Stonehenge. I’m assuming she was using this phrase to mean “ancient,” but at this point my brain started going into damage control mode. When I mentioned that this kind of building was going on all over Europe around this time in the Neolithic period, that it wasn’t just Egypt, she seemed slightly perplexed.

“But, how is that possible?” she asked. “When God confused the languages and spread everyone out to different parts of the world, how could there have been time for them to have built Stonehenge?”

… big eyes.

“Um… what was that?” I asked, trying to sound as if she’d used a Spanish phrase that I hadn’t caught.

“In Genesis,” she replied. “Have you read the Bible? The Tower of Babel? Men wanted to build a tower to reach to the heavens so they could become like God, and God confused their language so that they couldn’t understand each other and finish building it?”

It was at this point that a sort of United Nations general assembly popped up in my mind. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be “that” kind of atheist and tell her outright that the Bible is a book of myths that never actually happened. On the other hand, I totally wanted to be “that” kind of atheist who tells a well-meaning Christian lady that her holy book is a collection of myths that never actually happened.

Finally, I said, “Oh, yes. That. I was raised Christian” (here she made a gesture as if to say, Then you know all about it!) “… but, you know, there’s nothing in the historical record that I know of that mentions anything like that.”

Her eyes widened a little. “Oh,” she said, sounding dubious but intrigued.

I tried to steer the conversation towards some of the reading I’ve been doing lately about human evolution; about evolutionary differences between Europeans and Africans; how one group of Homo sapiens went south and developed darker skin to cope with the sun, and another went north and developed lighter skin to cope with lack of sun. Their languages evolved differently with them, depending on where they went and how cut off they were from other tribes. And during the Neolithic period, humans started settling down, building huge stone monuments like the Pyramids and Stonehenge as community gathering places to mark transitions in life– birth to death.

This is obviously a condensed version of a lightly meandering conversation that was interrupted by co-worker and the phone ringing. But hearing Paulita attempting to cross-reference history with events in the Bible was… jarring.

It was a stark reminder to me that almost half of Americans still believe that the Bible is real history, and actually happened.

I just…

… can’t…

… mind…

… stuck…

… snrgsflmsnojrssss…

026. whether the weather…

The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.

These are the words of my pastor, John Piper, in his recent blog entry on DesiringGod, writing about the tornado that struck downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon—specifically, that it struck Central Lutheran Church where the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America was meeting to decide whether or not to allow homosexuals to serve in ministry within the church. They met again on Friday to vote “whether gay and lesbian pastors in committed relationships should be allowed to lead individual congregations” (Minnesota Public Radio), and passed the motion with a 559-451 vote, repealing an earlier ban on gay clergy “unless they agree to remain celibate” (Star Tribune), essentially acknowledging the validity of same-sex relationships.

On the one hand, I respect and admire John Piper as a pastor and teacher. He believes firmly in the primacy of God’s word. He preaches the love of God to everyone, and the joy and full satisfaction to be found in the death, resurrection and lordship of Jesus Christ—or, to use his motto, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” On the other hand, he also believes and teaches that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle, incompatible with scripture and the teachings of the Church. Piper doesn’t dwell on this like some in the pulpit do, but rather stresses that all humanity is sinful (straight and gay alike) and in need of the grace of God, and for that I appreciate his ministry.

It’s moments like this that unhinge me completely and make me start questioning everything all over again. Part of me does feel like my sexuality is broken. I can’t imagine a life in which I’m not attracted to men, but since when has my lack of imagination ever stopped God? Even after deciding to pursue a relationship with my boyfriend, there are still unresolved doubts and fears in my spirit that come from a fear of being wrong about something so significant. How can a man I have listened to and trusted to deliver the word of God faithfully and accurately be wrong on this issue, or there be such consensus amongst other pastors and theologians that I also admire who agree that homosexuality is at best a neurosis and at the very worst an abomination?

There is this definitely a divide over this issue. The ELCA motion to allow gay pastors was passed very narrowly, with a 2/3 majority—a small but statistically significant difference of 108. I’m sure there were a wide variety of opinions at the conference. Lutheran CORE, a coalition for reform within the ELCA, has renounced the decision as well as their recognition by the ELCA “as an Independent Lutheran Organization that officially relates to the ELCA”, essentially encouraging “faithful” members to split and withdraw their support from the denomination.

There are to many differing positions on this issue, ranging from the usual outright condemnation (though to varying degrees of vituperation) from conservative denominations and theologians, to blanket acceptance from the more liberal and reformed sects of Christianity (the Methodists and the ELCA, for instance), and they all seem to find ways of supporting their arguments with Scripture. Traditionalists hold to the status quo on interpretation, pointing to the role of the Holy Spirit and the sovereignty of God in the authorship of the Bible; while progressives argue that the authors of scripture were writing from their own cultural perspectives, with a very little understanding of human sexuality, and were addressing a contemporary audience, so different standards apply to modern interpretation.

To cite theologian Virginia Mollenkott, to deny homosexuals their right to live in same-sex relationships is to deny their full humanity as sexually created beings; and along those same lines, C. Ann Shepherd writes in The Bible & Homosexuality in reference to the oft-quoted Romans 1:26-27 passage,

“When the scripture is understood correctly, it seems to imply that it would be unnatural for heterosexuals to live as homosexuals, and for homosexuals to live as heterosexuals.”

Personally, I have never experienced attraction to women, or sexual interest in women, even as a boy. I have always had a sexual curiosity about men that eventually blossomed into sexual desire for them. Yet the only messages I get are that I must either practically beg God to change me into a heterosexual, or choose and maintain a cloistered celibate lifestyle through Bible reading and prayer. So what are young Christians like myself supposed to do when there is a complete lack of agreement in the faith community about our sexuality? Are we, like Piper cries, distorting the grace of God into sensuality?

Now, I fully agree that the Biblical model of marriage is the one we must adhere to. Human sexuality must be expressed through appropriate vehicles in order to keep it from running amok and causing societal damage. I believe this applies to homosexual relationships as well, for we are no less human because of who we are attracted to, and gay men especially need to exercise sexual restraint. But to say that the gays are “going straight” by moving towards monogamy is just as bad as accusing black people of “going white,” betraying a basic misunderstanding of what it is to be human. That something as complex as sexuality should be expressed in only one way, in a Western, monocultural manner, seems absurd.

So there it is. I’m out of thoughts for the time being. Need to process now.