Hello my friends,

I hope you are all having a wonderful March. Idaho is being its typical self. We had snow this week and its supposed to get up into the 60s all week next week! Seasons are changing.

As I was looking over all the major social and political issues being discussed this last week, from IVF, abortion, Gaza, immigration, and more, I found myself thinking a lot about how we Christians are called to use our rights and our freedom in scripture.

So, as with all my newsletters, I’m not attempting to give an answer to this topic, but to think with all of you about it as we move forward in this election year.

First, here are some resources to consider.

​-Awakening to Justice: Faithful Voices from the Abolitionist Past This exciting new book just arrived in the mail from the Dialogue on Race and Faith Project. Its team of authors include my mentor Diane Leclerc, as well as Jemar Tisby, and Esther Chung-Kim. It is available for pre-order now for a March 26th release.

​-The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More than Our "Correct" Beliefs by Peter Enns. I'm sure you have heard of this book by now. It fits well with our topic today and it is one that I feel conveys well the dynamic we are seeing in much of American Evangelicalism.

​-Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is probably one of the biggest classical influences over my theology, right next to John Wesley and Soren Kierkegaard. This classic book is his pastoral writings that explore the Christian faith in community, specifically during his time as a German in seminary during the rise of Nazism. It is one I come back to often.

​-The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics by Richard B. Hays. This was actually one of my textbooks in seminary for my ethics class. It profoundly challenged me to think about moral and ethical issues through the lens of the New Testament. While it is thick, I feel as though you would find it to do the same for you.
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-Some housekeeping: I also wanted to mention a bit of house keeping for my newsletter. Many of you have already asked about the address at the bottom of my newsletters. Convertkit requires a permanent address for every newsletter sent. The address you see at the bottom is Convertkit’s headquarters in Seattle. I’m using this with their permission until I can find an affordable PO Box here in Boise. It has been a surprisingly long process to get this changed. Several months in fact. A lot of you have sent me mail, which I always love. So if you’d like to do that at some point, let me know and I’ll get you a different address here in Boise to get it to me.

Okay, onto today’s content.

How Are We Christians Called To Use Our Freedom?

I want to begin today on a personal note. Many years ago, a member of my church almost died as a result of an ectopic pregnancy. As you may already know, occurs when a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus. Almost all ectopic pregnancies—more than 90%—occur in a fallopian tube. As the pregnancy grows, it can cause the tube to burst, causing major internal bleeding and even death. This very wanted pregnancy had to be aborted. The fertilized egg was removed.

As I listened to her story, I was so challenged and humbled. I realized in that moment I knew so little about reproductive health, abortion, and the complexities of life. I had very strong convictions about these things and even preached about them. Yet, when I heard this story, from someone I deeply cared about, I realized in that moment that I not only didn’t know as much as I thought I did about something I felt so strongly about, but I also didn’t have these issues framed in the context of love. It was only framed in an arbitrary moralism and abstract, yet passionate ideas of right and wrong. I thought all abortions were murders, yet this aborted pregnancy I just learned about didn’t feel that way at all. I had yet to walk alongside someone who I cared about and be forced to navigate the complexity of the issue in the context of love.

This experience had a deep impact on me. With my wife and I expecting our second child at the end of this month, I have continued to be shocked not only by how little I knew about pregnancy, birth, and female health, but also how little it is taught and circulated. What is more, how little this complex issue is understood by those who make laws that directly impact it.

The more I think, learn, and study about this particular issue, the more I’m convinced that we frame the starting point of our social conversation about it wrongly. We frame it in terms of “pro-life or pro choice” or “when does life begin?” When for me a more truthful humble place to start would be, “isn’t all of life interconnected? Then who do we think we are that we have that kind of cosmic understanding to discern when life begins? Who do we think we are to put ourselves in the position to dictate the lives of others?” Or “are we not talking about two lives here? Not just embryos or babies, but the women who carry them? Shouldn’t we attempt to have our beliefs about these complex situations match the complexity of the issues themselves? Shouldn’t they be shaped by love?”

We live in a time where our perceptions about humanity and our technological innovations are both rapidly changing. It is so arrogant to claim to have all the answers on such complex issues in our rapidly changing world. I just think too much of our political dialogue is centered on making brash declarations about things. We should be asking better and more thoughtful questions instead.

As one who was once ardently hyper conservative on the issue of abortion, I find that my heart breaks so often over how much distrust and even demonizing beliefs I was conditioned to hold towards women regarding this issue. So much of the conversations I’ve had in my life and ministry framed women’s immoral behavior as the greatest cause of unwanted pregnancies and that they are just selfishly out for themselves if they even think about ending the pregnancy.

Creating evil, nameless, faceless women is really convenient for stoking fear and passion over the issue abortion, but it is deeply unloving and so unlike Jesus. It denies the reality that every woman is created in God’s image. It denies the reality that every single person’s life is different and so are their beliefs. It denies the complex nature of pregnancy and the numerous ways women can become pregnant, even against their will. It denies that at the end of the day, women are the ones most impacted by pregnancy, not legislators or clergy.

When we make arbitrary decisions about what they can and cannot do, we simply deny their personhood and the complex reality of their lived experiences. We do to women exactly what I often condemned “liberals” for doing toward babies, dehumanize them and deny their personhood by only calling them "fetuses."

I have walked alongside people who need to make the most difficult decisions of their lifetime. Decisions like finding out they are pregnant and being so filled with joy only to then find out they had been diagnosed with cancer. They wouldn’t be able to have chemo while being pregnant. What was so joyful then turned into an agonizing decision between their life and the life of their baby. No one deserves to be in a situation like that. What would love dictate from us? Would we want them to be able to have all the resources necessary to make the impossible decision they need to? Or would we rather the state make that choice for them and their family with narrow, rigid, and vague laws on what even counts as “a threat to the life of the mother?”

As a former fundamentalist Christian, I know that narrow and rigid beliefs are so much easier to hold. They are also so much easier to turn into political weapons to stoke fear and animosity towards other people. Compassion is seen as so ineffective in the populist playbook. You need to drum up fear and hostility to win elections and narrow, rigid beliefs are the best way to do that.

The same is true in our lives as Christians. It’s much easier to make absolute claims about truth when you don’t know the people you’re talking about. Especially when you think the person you’re talking about is evil rather than someone you are called to love. This counts for all the hot button issues we are currently facing. From reproductive health, to immigration, to human sexuality, and more, it is so much easier to hold narrow and rigid beliefs about these things than it is to address how complex these issues actually are. While this narrow mentality is easier, it is also very dangerous. Because narrow and rigid beliefs about complex issues have a habit of becoming laws.

One of the main reasons I wrestle so much over these things is because of scripture. I want to just highlight a few of the places that I believe gives us a moral framework on not only how we are to use our rights and freedom as Christians, but what loving our neighbor actually looks like.

The first place I want to look at with you is 1 Corinthians 8. In Corinth, it was common practice to sacrifice meat to idols before it would be sold in the markets. Others could simply go to a temple where the meat was being sacrificed and enjoy it there. This created a problem for Christians, because this meat was sacrificed to false gods and eating that meat was seen as an affirmation of those god by those who worshipped them.

What Paul is does in this chapter is quite intricate. He first addresses the complexity of the issue and draws the same distinction between knowledge and love that I’ve been trying to write about today. He says right in verse one, “Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.” But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God.” This is powerful. The way of love builds others up, while knowledge alone puffs ourselves up and tears others down. Love must then inform our knowledge of issues, not the other way around.

He goes on in the next few verses to explain that one can eat meat sacrificed to idols because “we know there is only one true God.” Idols hold no power, so eating meat sacrificed to an idol is morally neutral for the believer themselves to do. Yet he makes it clear that they can’t just stop there because the issue isn’t that simple. He encourages the Christians in that community to keep their love for others at the forefront of their mind.

He explains about the knowledge of God being the one true God in verse seven by saying, “not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.” Then English word “weak” here is an unfortunate translation that is more condescending than Paul intended. The Greek word he uses here is asthenés, which in this context, speaks to more about experience, maturity, or simply not having a strong belief on a particular issue, rather than just calling them weak.

So picture you are a person who just started following Jesus in Corinth and recently stopped worshiping idols. This transition isn’t and overnight flip of the switch for you. There is so much to learn and so much to unlearn as you grow in understanding of your new faith. You then just learned that idols are false gods at the last church gathering. As you left that gathering, you spot an elder of the community eating meat in a temple that was sacrificed to an idol. Given what little you knew of your new faith, this could cause great confusion or even cause you to abandon Jesus over seeing what you perceive to be hypocrisy and lies. This is what Paul sees at being at steak here. (meat pun intended).

Paul then ends by saying, “Be careful that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way and wound their conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.”

I feel like we could replace “idol meat” here with many of our current social issues and still hear Paul’s particular guidance. He is asking followers of Jesus to not only know the context they are in and know the people who occupy the world around them, but to also conduct themselves in a way that best shows love towards others, rather than just focusing on their own beliefs. Even if it means denying themselves, like not eating meat ever again for the sake of another.

Paul doesn't tell Christians in Corinth to condemn others for having different beliefs about idol meat than they do. He doesn't tell them they should eat idol meat and not care what others think, because not doing so would be bowing to the culture and caving into being "politically correct." He doesn't tell them that it is their right to eat idol meat as Corinthian Christians and to not be allowed to do that simply because it might cause someone else to stumble is an infringement on their individual liberties. Rather than any of that, he tells them to be very mindful of what other people believe, put their love for them first and foremost, and then conduct themselves, their rights, and their freedom accordingly.

This is a constant refrain all throughout Paul’s letters. In Galatians 5:13-14 he writes, “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom for selfishness; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Calling his audience to be like Jesus in Philippians 2:3-4, Paul writes, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” Even Jesus himself stated in Matthew 25:31-46 that when he returns, his metric of judgment would be based on “whatever you do for the least of these."

I think this has such powerful implications for us American Christians today. So often we look at political issues in terms of making it legal or illegal, rather than in terms of love and self sacrifice. We would prefer to just have a politician make something illegal, like abortion for example, while not really caring about the collateral damage it may cause or how advocating for such laws might damage our public reputation as Christians.

We tend to look at political issues solely through the lens of what we believe without ever taking into consideration what other people believe and how that might impact their view of a political issue.

Imagine if instead, we advocated for policies that might cause us to be taxed differently (an actual self sacrifice) in order to make a positive impact. Rather than advocating policies based in a particular ideology or moralism, we advocated policies that would help people in impoverished circumstances, that would reduce the cost of quality childcare, improve family leave policies, and provide greater access to education and healthcare that would make reproductive care safe and effective while making many abortions that would otherwise happen unnecessary. Would this be a way that “love builds up?”

Tragically, so much of the recent public Christian conversation around political issues isn’t centered on discerning how we Christians should exercise our rights and freedoms in a way that cares for and centers other people, especially the most vulnerable. Instead, more often than not, it centers around how others need to live and exercise their rights and freedoms in ways that we morally approve of as Christians. It centers ourselves and our privilege. In the process, we so often fear and demonize those “others,” like women, immigrants, Palestinians, and LGBTQ+ people and frame them as our enemies.

I could be off the mark in how I articulated things here. Again, I’m not claiming to have all the answers. I want to think with you over these complicated topics. I just know my heart consistently breaks over how many Christians are heard in the public square making these huge issues all about Christians all while making people who they see as on the "other side" of these issues out to be enemies, all while not spending anytime understanding the complexities of the issues they claim to care about. It's like they are eating meat sacrificed to idols while not caring at all how it impacts the beliefs and faith of others.

If Jesus said his disciples would be known by their love for others, then when we are known for our own puffed up knowledge, narrowly rigid beliefs, and tearing down others rather than building them up, we are not only not loving our neighbor as ourselves as Jesus called us to, but taking his name in vain while carrying out the opposite.

It is difficult seeing such a clear and thoughtful moral ethics mapped out in our Bibles from people like Paul only to see many who claim to be Christians in our day not embodying it towards the pressing political and social issues of our time. I just can’t imagine the kind of incredible impact we would make if we collectively committed to love others the way Jesus called us to love. That's the kind of world I want to live in. That's the kind of world I want for my kids. That's the kind of world I want for everyone.