Beauty for ashes

Posted on by
Reply

Recently I was listening to something that made me ponder the question: if I could ask God for a “re-do” — if He could take me back in time and prevent every instance of sexual abuse, rape, and intense suffering at the hands of others — would I want that?

I was reminded of something I wrote a decade ago in a private online forum. We were a “tribe”, a group that were helping each other heal from sexual abuse and trauma. This is a slightly edited version of my response to an eloquent post from one of our members:

Yes, we’ve lost a lot. And the losses are overwhelmingly painful and deserve to be grieved, need to be grieved. But I’ve clung for hope to the second part of that journaling assignment, where we write about what wasn’t stolen from us. I’ve also clung to a phrase from the Old Testament about “God restoring what the locusts have eaten”.

When I felt like a hollow, decimated shell, barely alive, little more than a reservoir of pain and desperation, irreparably broken and crushed, my therapist and you, my tribe, saw in me what I couldn’t see. You helped me to believe in the truth of what you saw.

God doesn’t undo the past or replace everything that’s been lost. But I’m living proof that He restores, that He gives beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and a beautiful garment for our tattered, heavy-laden spirits. My prayer is that He would continue to do that for you, my dear friend.

Back to now… would I wish that these debilitatingly painful, anguishing, despicable acts had not been done to me? I found myself wishing that certain people, for their own sakes, had not sinned so egregiously, but I could no longer say that I wished such things had not been done to me. (I wish that I had sinned far, far less, and that I had not responded so sinfully to the sins of others.)

What I am even more sure of now is that God is a redemptive God. He is the God Who heals. And I’m not just clinging to hope — I have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord. And, although the past decade has had its own share of loss, difficulty, and grief, I’ve experienced depths of beauty, joy, and praise that I never dreamed possible.

Why I stopped celebrating Reformation Day

Posted on by
Reply

It was a gradual process. To be honest, even during my time in the “Reformed Camp”, even while a member of the OPC (often satirically dubbed the One Perfect Church) and even when some online referred to me as Truly Reformed, I had uneasy feelings about celebrating Martin Luther. I’d read some of his writings in the original German, rather than their sanitized English translations, and — well, let’s say that I would have embarrassed myself and scandalized the conservative families at our church Reformation Day parties if I had quoted some of the more offensive literal translations.

So I kept my opinions of Martin Luther mostly to myself. My poor husband had to listen to my annual spiel of, “They wouldn’t think Martin Luther was so wonderful if they knew what he really wrote!” Probably to his great relief, we weren’t in the Reformed Camp that many years. Once we returned to my Baptist roots, Reformation Day celebrations were a thing of the past.

More years went by, and all sorts of things happened. Long story short, I found myself, most weekdays, praying by myself in a small historic church building in our town. During that time, John 17 began to break my heart. As hard as I tried not to cry on my Bible, there are still tears stains where I would fervently pray Jesus’ prayer for us:

20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

That prayer didn’t just break my heart. It changed so much of what and how I thought about the Church. It became a guiding principle and a strong motivating factor in the years that followed. And it opened up questions for me… lots and lots of questions…

But, more than anything else — schism became a source of grief, rather than a source of pride. Disunity, I was forced to admit, was contrary to the very will of God.

I was still Protestant at the time, and yet the very idea of the greeting each other with “Happy Reformation Day!” struck me more and more as incomprehensible. If I truly love my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and want Him to be glorified, shouldn’t I view schism and disunity as a cause of mourning rather than celebration?

_________________________

Edited to clean up typos, misspellings, and poor wording — and to add this explanation:

OPC = Orthodox Prespbyterian Church. For more info, see here.

Faith Journey | Loving the Church

Posted on by
Reply

Another blast from the past, 20 years ago:

When Saul was confronted by Jesus on the road to Damascus, Jesus did not say, “Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?” He did not say, “Saul, why are you persecuting the people under my command?” He said, “Saul, why do you persecute Me?”

When someone hits us, we say, “Don’t hit me!” We don’t say, “Do not hit the arm under my command.” We feel hit; we feel pain. We do not sense ourselves as separate from our bodies.

When we persecute the Body of Christ, we persecute Christ. When we tear down the Body of Christ, we do this to Christ as well. He has chosen to be united with His church, to be the Head of the Body.

I’m a preacher’s kid. I’ve seen the dark underbelly of the church. I have the battle scars to prove that we as Christians shoot our wounded. I’ve fired more than a few rounds myself. I have good reason to be wary of fellow Christians, to be reluctant to fully commit myself to a local expression of the Body of Christ. My problem is not with Jesus; it’s with some of His followers.

Or so I tell myself.

The sad truth is that I do not love the Body of Christ as I should. And there is only one possible explanation for this coldness in my heart. It is because I do not have enough love for the Head. God forgive me.

May I love Jesus more. May I love all of Him, with all of my heart, mind, soul, strength. May I love Him passionately and zealously. May I love Him with a broken and contrite heart. May I love Him in purity and holiness. And then I will love His Body as I should.

My understanding of ecclesiology has gone through a number of changes in these past 20 years. But these words I wrote back then still challenge and convict me.

May I love Jesus more.

Faith Journey | Fads and Winds of Doctrine

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been 20 years since I wrote the following:

While visiting a Lutheran church yesterday, and feeling far more connected to historic Christianity than I do in my Baptist church, it struck me that perhaps modern evangelicalism is inherently at risk of following every fad and wind of doctrine by our very rejection of centuries of Protestant tradition, creeds, liturgy, and means of worship. We have set ourselves up to be our own interpreters of Scripture, to seek after “freshness” and “relevance”, and to look with disdain at what is timeless. It is as if we need to be consantly reinventing the wheel in how we “do church”.

And, frankly, it strikes me as more than a bit arrogant.

How thankful I am to have been in church services where I have had the privilege of praying the same prayers, reciting the same creeds, and singing the same hymns as other believers the world over… for centuries. It is both humbling and glorious to experience this deeper connection to the Body of Christ. How different from the attitude within much of modern evanglicalism that criticizes liturgy as being “stale” and “rote”, that scorns anything from a previous generation, and that wants desperately to be “cutting edge”.

A lot has happened in those two decades. A lot. My faith journey has taken twists and turns I never could have predicted. I was both surprised and amused to re-read this recently, and felt like telling my younger self: WOW, Rebecca. You made some good points but you didn’t go far enough.

Faith Journey | Very Abbreviated Version

Posted on by
Reply

For most of my life I rejected the historic church without even realizing what it was that I was rejecting. Then I came to my senses, decided to look back in history, and traced my theological lineage and beliefs back to my understanding of the Reformation, as if true Christianity got lost quickly after the Resurrection or didn’t exist until Calvin came along and set us all straight. (Only I didn’t really follow Calvin’s teachings but what they had morphed into over the years, stripped of all that would offend our modern Protestant sensibilities.) Then, long story, I left that theological camp and went back to the Baptist world. All seemed wonderful until stuff happened and I got hurt and disgruntled.

So I read a hatchet job of church history, and I found some other disgruntled people to hang out with, and I tried to redefine “Church” to my own liking. I never could quite buy into the idea that two people hanging out at Starbucks, if one of them said something “Christiany”, was what the Bible meant by a “sacred assembly”, but I was almost that far gone.

Along the way, life got messy for awhile, really messy and ugly. Eventually God and I got on much better speaking terms than we had ever been, and I started getting this sense that He was way, way, way more immense and powerful and wonderful than I could ever imagine.

And somehow I realized that He deserved worship that seemed more reverent, sacred, and transcendent than sitting around with a coffee cup — or even than singing along during something that looked and sounded like a secular rock concert with christianized lyrics. It seemed like we should offer Him more than merely what is modern, fleeting, and trendy. Why imitate rock concerts rather than read about how God asked to be worshipped?

So I read about Old Testament worship, and I read the book of Revelation, and I felt like what I’d been doing and thinking was so wrong.

There’s more to my story than that, much much more. But I had to come to grips with the fact that, by ignoring history and tradition, I had basically set myself up as the arbitrator of truth. It was so horribly arrogant of me to think that I and those who agreed with my novel and innovative ideas were right — and 2000 years of far more learned scholars were wrong.

I had put myself out of Catholic tradition, to be sure, but I had also put myself out of Protestant tradition. I was a law unto myself. I was doing what was right in my own eyes.

But instead of crushing me like a bug or whipping sense into my head, God wooed and pursued me with truth, beauty, and goodness. And then He graciously placed in me a hunger for Jesus unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

This convoluted faith journey has taken a a lot of years… a lot of struggle. I’m stubborn at times, and prideful — and prone to wander — and it took immense love (divine and human) to bring me to the point of admitting that maybe I was wrong after all, and the Church was right.

So on Sundays I join with the Saints and Angels in worship, and our worship brings together themes and words from Old Testament through Revelation, and it involves my body and all my senses (as is befitting worship of the Trinity, one member Who became incarnate). It’s truth, beauty and goodness. It feels like a window to Heaven, like we are joining the worship around the Throne. It’s timeless.

But my life is not just transformed on Sundays, nor just the days that I am able to attend Divine Liturgy (or Mass at the local Roman Catholic parish). The Church is so much more than a gathering of people; it’s even more than its Sacraments — I’ve stumbled into a treasure trove of teaching, wisdom, practical help, inspiration, prayer, and much much more. As the book of Hebrews says, I’m “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses” — and now that I’m finally refusing to ignore them and all that they have contributed to Christendom — my walk with Jesus has been transformed. It’s so much more real. It’s tangible and incarnatonal… and yet transcendent.

Jesus’ words, “Lo I am with you always”, have become so much more alive, so much more real, so much more powerful, that I can taste them.