Who is among you that fears the LORD, that obeys the voice of his servant, that walks in darkness and has no light? Let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.
Behold, all you who kindle a fire, who encircle yourselves with firebrands, walk in the flame of your fire and among the brands you have set ablaze. This you will have from my hand: you will lie down in torment.
– Isaiah 50.10-11
It is the servant who walks in darkness. It is the servant who does not know where he goes or why. He only knows that he is walking in obedience and relying on his God. It is those who claim to see, those who claim to have a light, that are consumed in the very fire they have created. Those who have ears to hear let them hear.
I am weary of Christians who speak of faith and yet have never stepped into the unknown. Don't tell me you have faith if you have never done so. Tell me that you hope you have faith – for until you undergo such an experience, how can you know? Of course, my question for you is, how is it that you have professed faith for so long and yet have never stepped into the unknown?
I wish Christians would remember these verse before they even think of speaking to those who are suffering. Suffering is so often the experience of that great unknown. Suffering plunges is into that impenetrable darkness. And Christians dare, they fucking dare, to say to those in that darkness, “Oh, well, God is teaching you something through this.” How can they dare to say that? They have become those who are burning themselves and others in the very fire they claim to see by. That answer isn't an answer given to comfort the person who is suffering. It is an answer given to comfort the person speaking. It's defiling. Basically, they can't live in the pain that the other is experiencing and so they provide an answer that comforts themselves – at the expense of the other's suffering.
A professor of mine tells a story of a friend of his (another professor) who lost a daughter in a drug overdose. This friend was teaching a class when the police arrived to say his daughter was found in a pile of garbage in the back of an alley. Some people (my professor not included) decided to tell the father that God was using the experience to teach him something. His reflection on this is profound,
“When these people had to choose between their comfortable theology and being my friend, they chose their comfortable theology.”
Needless to say, this man wants little to do with Christianity or God.
And I see it over and over again with the people that I love. I heard it over and over again when I was kicked out. I've known person after person whose story is like that professor's daughter.
Dear Christians, I will continue to love you and journey with you, even though you break my heart and destroy the people I love. But for today I'll voice a prophetic, “fuck you,” and spend some time mourning. Woe to those who counsel such things. You may find yourselves lying down in torment.
I always thought for sure that she'd be the one to get out of here and make a life for herself.
But we found her in the little league park (in the dugout it was cold in the dark), and no one knew why she wouldn't wake up.
I think she finally made it back home.
-Rancid

(This entry has also been posted at www.livejournal.com/community/abortiondebate.)
Whenever I spend any time observing debates such as this one I am always struck by the ways in which people of all parties only seem to entrench themselves further and further into their own positions.
The issue of abortion is essentially a moral and ethical issue. Such language may not be used explicitly but ethics undergird what is being said on all sides.
However, I think people on all sides fail to persuade because they fail to realise the ways in which narratives empower ethics. This failure of realisation occurs because, within contemporary society, most of us appropriate ethics that lack any formative or comprehensive narrative.
Let me provide an illustration of what I mean. Alasdair MacIntyre, Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University, provides this example. Imagine, he says, a world that resolves to abolish natural science. Text books are burned, documents are destroyed, education systems are overhauled, and labs are shut down. However, after some time, the people of this world attempt to restore natural science. They salvage what fragments they can from the rubble, a few burnt pages here and there. Such people begin to use the language of natural science but terms will be used out of context. They will possess only the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which lack the context from which they derived significance.
Stanley Hauerwas, Chair of Theological Ethics at Duke University, argues that this is what has occurred (on all sides) in the moral realm in contemporary western culture. We possess a simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions, but we have lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.
Thus, Hauerwas says, ethics should not be primarily concerned with statements such as “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.” Its primary task is helping people to see the world from the perspective of a certain narrative.
This essential point is generally overlooked in debates about abortion. The first question of ethics is not “What am I to do?” but rather “Who am I to be?” Simply asking “What am I to do?” causes us to assume that moral situations can be abstracted from history. Indeed, the focus on particular quandaries (pregnancy that is the result of rape; pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother, etc.) reveals our current understanding of ourselves as a people without a history. Such an approach tempts us to view events as isolated situations and not as parts of a purposive narrative.
However, notions like “abortion” are not simply given; their meaning and intelligibility depend on a narrative construal. We can't start with a principle (“a fetus' right to life” or “a woman's right to bodily integrity”) and then deduce that abortion is wrong or right. Instead, we should first learn to dwell within a certain narrative and then operate imaginatively from there.
The problem is that people on all sides of this debate have not seriously considered the narratives that they embody. As MacIntyre says, people on all sides are only operating with fragments of a conceptual scheme. The first step in any abortion debate should, therefore, be to explicate the narratives that are being embodied. To base the debate upon situations abstracted from history, or upon abstract principles, to say, “In situation x, y, and z you should…” will always miss the point.
So to move the debate forward I would argue that the first step is to become aware of the narratives that we are indwelling. The second step is to articulate who we are trying to be. It is only after these steps have been taken that we can tentatively assert certain ethical conclusions in topics such as abortion. When this occurs perhaps debates about abortion will become more constructive than they are now.

I am… the truth.
– Jesus, John 14.6
There are various ways of knowing, different means that I pursue to know certain things, and different forms that knowing takes once I begin to possess it.
When the truth of Christianity is reduced to a forceful objectivity, when the truth of Christianity is reduced to formulas, then such expressions of Christian truth will always miss the point.
This is especially true when it comes to a Christian knowledge of God and Jesus.
Christians should not (indeed, cannot) know God in the same way that they know mathematical formulas. Christian knowledge of God is not similar to the knowledge that 2+2=4. Christian knowledge of God is not static, it is relational. I do not know God like a formula, I know God in the same way that I know a person. This is true because God is not a theory that we can abstract, God is person-al, and we come to know God through relationship. Because such knowledge is relational it will always take place within a certain context, and that context will impact the way in which the relationship is expressed. However, this does not mean returning to a purely subjective knowledge of God. Rather, this means that Christian statements about God must be fully grounded within, and interpreted by, the biblical narrative – and the story of Jesus in particular. To say that, “God is love,” or “God is holy,” are meaningless statements without the context of relationship revealed by the biblical story and our own personal experience with God. Relational truth can never be divorced from the context in which it is revealed. The biblical history of God's relationship with the world acts as an interpretive lens for our understanding of the meaning of such statements.
Jesus makes this point explicitly when he says, “I am the truth.” Truth takes the form of a person, and can, therefore, only be understood relationally. That means that all Christian truth claims – ethical, theological or whatever – cannot be expressed or understand through formulas alone. Instead they are contextual expressions of a relationship that should be moving into an ever deeper intimacy. Christian knowledge is never purely informative, rather, as an outworking of a relationship, it is transformative.

Within the disputations of Isaiah 40-55 YHWH is constantly engaged in a wisdom debate with Israel. Essentially, by appealing to his role as Creator, and therefore the maintainer and guide of history, YHWH is arguing that the way he has set for Israel is the best way. YHWH is defending his wisdom against Israel's protestations. Within the context of 40-55 it is likely that YHWH is saying that he chose Cyrus of Persia to act as the messiah to Israel, Cyrus would be the agent to bring them out of exile. But Israel rejected Cyrus, refusing to recognise that salvation could come from such a figure. As a result the return from exile is long delayed.
The essential problem is that Israel in exile, although no longer worshipping idols, is still idolatrous because she is treating YHWH like an idol. Israel refuses to trust YHWH's wisdom, refuses to recognise that YHWH would act in such new and unexpected ways, and thereby limits YHWH to acting like the idols. And, because they treat YHWH like an idol, they put their trust in the same things that those around them trust in. Therefore, when YHWH does act Israel refuses to recognise such actions as divine – and she only goes deeper into exile as a result.
It seems to me that this is also one of the fundamental problems facing our contemporary western church. Although churchgoers are not actively worshiping idols they are essentially treating Jesus as an idol, refusing to recognise the radical ways he breaks into history. Instead they choose to trust in other things – the financial security provided by a steady job, the illusory safety provided by a suburban neighbourhood, the future hope provided by RRSPs, and so on and so forth. While claiming to worship Jesus, very few people actually trust Jesus for anything significant in their day to day lives. And that means treating Jesus like just another idol. It also means that, for all the Christian talk about longing to see God break-in in radical new ways, most Christians aren't willing to recognise moments when God does – because, as a general rule, God breaks-in in ways that we don't want to call divine. God breaks-in in ways that requires us to transfer our trust to God's actions and agents, instead of the standard people and things that our culture trusts in. Simply put, many Christians don't really trust God's wisdom, and that makes it damn near impossible to follow Jesus.

Within Christian circles it is not uncommon to hear something that goes a little something like this:
Jesus taught us to love the sinner but hate the sin.
Now that expression has always put me off to a certain extent. To be blunt, I never saw that expression cause Christians to treat others more lovingly. There is too much arrogance involved in this statement, too much condescension. When people are viewed as sinners then hating the sin will inevitably lead to hating (or at least mistreating) the sinner.
Some more recent reflection has caused me to object to this statement on an even more fundamental level.
Jesus did not teach us to love the sinner but hate the sin.
What Jesus did do was announce the forgiveness of sins. And he did this be refusing to define people as sinners. Those that the religious leaders viewed as sinners were the ones Jesus openly embraced. These were the ones Jesus journeyed with and ate with (in contemporary western culture we miss how significant and intimate sharing table fellowship was in ancient near eastern culture). Jesus defines these people as Beloved and Forgiven.
Jesus taught us to love our neighbour.
So let's forget that tired expression, “love the sinner but hate the sin.” Instead, let's begin announcing (with word and deed) the forgiveness of sins.

Just before pronouncing the tetelestai, Jesus' dying words in John's Gospel are these:
I thirst.
And I wonder…
I wonder if those who seek to follow in the footsteps of Jesus are bound to die thirsty. I wonder if they are bound to die unsatisfied, empty, panting with a thirst that goes unquenched.
In Matthew's Gospel Jesus dies crying,
My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
And I wonder…
I wonder if those who seek to follow in the footsteps of Jesus are bound to die forsaken. I wonder if they will always be hoping for God to break in, for God to come and enact a radical transformation, a radical act of salvation – only to die abandoned by God.
Dying of thirst. Dying alone. It makes one think twice about following Jesus… and helps explain why so many twist following Jesus into something else.
Still there is this assurance:
Those who hunger and thirst shall be satisfied.
And forsakenness itself can be transformed into an experience of intimate love.
The way of glory is the way of the cross.
And those who would gain their lives must lose them first.

Yesterday my housemates gave me a (belated) birthday present. It was wrapped with a rainbow coloured ribbon. They said they chose that ribbon because I’m…
straight, but not narrow.
Now that makes me laugh.