Reconciling Ministries Network

Once More Into the Battle!

Reported by Peter L. DeGroote

Dean Snyder, Senior Pastor at Foundry UMC in Washington, DC has been a supporter of reconciling ministries since before there was any organized reconciling effort. During his State of the Church sermon this year he included a statement of three personal goals, one of which is focused on changing the UMC Book of Discipline. Below is that portion of the sermon with only minor editing, reproduced with his permission. You can see the entire sermon at:  http://www.foundryumc.org/sermons/11_15_09.htm.

From Dean Snyder's Sermon:

The claim that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” was put into the UMC Book of Discipline in 1972, the year I graduated from seminary and served my first full-time appointment. It happened on my watch and I intend to do everything possible to fix it on my watch.

The way ahead is not clear. We have worked so hard for so long to change the United Methodist Church and the progress doesn’t feel anywhere commensurate with the effort.

I’ll be honest. I can’t see the way anymore. I can’t see how we will get to where we need to go.

I can’t see it but I do believe this: if we continue to work, if we continue to educate, to legislate, to agitate, to protest, to dialogue, to love… a breakthrough will come. I think it is going to be a breakthrough that will surprise us and I am believing it will happen during the next five years. 

I don’t know what it will be but I believe it will happen.

Did you know that Rosa Parks was not the first African-American to get arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in the South to a white person?  Irene Morgan was arrested in 1946; Sarah Louise Keys in 1955. Nine months before Rosa Parks 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same Montgomery, Alabama bus system.

Rosa Parks was not the first, but, for reasons no one completely understands, when she did it there was a breakthrough. No one could have known it in advance.

In 1964 African-American Methodists had been working for 24 years to end the central jurisdiction—the structure of segregation in the Methodist Church. They had educated, they had dialogued, they had organized, they had legislated, they had protested. Then during the 1964 annual conference Methodists were voting on a resolution to merge with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. A young reserve delegate from west Texas got up to the microphone and offered an amendment to the merger resolution saying that the Methodist Church should not take the structures of segregation into the merged church, and the resolution won. It was a breakthrough. No one would have ever predicted it would happen. By the way, the young reserve delegate who made that resolution was William Astor Kirk, our own Bill Kirk.

(Many did not know this about Bill. In attendance at the 11:00am service, the congregation rose as one in a long and grateful ovation.)

There is a story in the book of Judges in which God sent the Israelites into battle against the Benjaminites. The Israelites lost; twenty-two thousand Israelites died in that battle—in a battle God sent them into. The Israelites mourned and wept that night.  

The next day God sent the Israelites to fight against the Benjaminites again. The Israelites wept before the Lord and they inquired of the Lord, “Must we go up against the Benjaminites again?” The Lord told them to go into battle again. They lost again. 18,000 Israelites died.

The Israelites wept and mourned and asked the Lord not to send them into battle again. The Lord said, “Go up, for tomorrow I will give them into your hands (Judges 20: 19-48).”

Sometimes God sends us into battles we will lose. Sometimes we lose the battle again and again. There are casualties. We weep and mourn and ask God to not send us into battle anymore. I don’t know why God sends us into battles we will lose.

But then God says, “Go up one more time, for tomorrow I will give them into your hands.”

There will be a breakthrough. I know we are tired. We are grieved, but tomorrow God will give them into our hands.

It is because of this kind of commitment that I am both glad and proud to regard Rev. Dean Snyder as a leader, a co-worker, and a friend.

October 11, 2009: A Message for the Church

By Peter L. DeGroote

I didn’t need Time magazine to know that the National March for Equality on September 11, 2009 was a youth movement.

Time estimated 200,000 participants. A veteran of earlier gay rights marches, my estimate was a little higher. I also estimated that 80% of the people were under age 35. Of that total, roughly 80% were under 30. Of that total, roughly 50% were under 25. Whatever the exact numbers, young people were in an overwhelming majority.

The March demonstrated once again how communications technology has altered the task of organizing for political and social causes. There was a time when the young had to work their way into the structures of the established leadership organizations before coming into their own. That is no longer true.

To Illustrate: Originally the national organizations representing LGBT folks were less than enthusiastic about the March only to come around as it gained momentum. Also, it was reported that the cost for the March was one-fifth of the cost of the last big national gay rights march and that does not count the additional savings realized as a result of not involving the staffs and mailing lists of the national organizations. Unlike earlier generations, these young folks did not need the existing organizations to control of their program, increase their influence, and finance their movement. Instead, they employed the Internet and many of its social networking tools. 

The Message: The March for Equality on October 11, 2009 clearly demonstrated that those established institutions purporting to be leaders need to do some catching up if they are to be relevant to young folks.

This conclusion is not restricted to secular organizations. In most churches young people are already an overwhelming minority. Attitudes toward LGBT people differ as you go down the generations. Many straight young folks today have grown up with openly LGBT friends and are likely to say that “if you don’t want my friends you don’t want me.”

LGBT folks no longer stand alone and that influence has altered the agenda. The once rather timid call for inclusion has been transformed into a robust demand for the civil rights of all, including LGBT folks. The rights most demanded during the March were for service in the military, equal treatment under the law by way of hate crimes legislation, and same-sex marriage. (Interestingly, the Discipline of the UM Church does support the civil rights of all, including LGBT people.) 

The competitive disadvantage faced by most churches for the interest of young people is represented by the photo below from the website www.FaithInAmerica.com. During the march there were some banners of support from religious groups. However, it was difficult to look anywhere without seeing the posters you can see below calling to End the Harm from Religious-based Bigotry and Prejudice.

The use of the word “faith” is significant. This March for Equality was framed as a call to live out our faith in the proposition that all people are created equal. That principle is in complete harmony with the teachings of Jesus. Who in their right minds would suggest that the church should not support that principle? Unfortunately, young people are hearing too many church folks willing to do just that. 

The message for churches is the same: The March for Equality on October 11, 2009 clearly demonstrated that those established institutions purporting to be leaders need to do some catching up if they are to be relevant to young folks. 
 

Reconciling Tools: Prayer for Enemies

By Peter L. DeGroote

To you who are listening I say, love your enemies. If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? After all, even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what merit is there is that? After all, even sinners do as much” (Gospel of Jesus 7:2-4)*

It is a bit troubling to discover that Jesus did not share the common view that God agrees with our opinion of others.  Instead, he invited us to pray about joining in God’s high expectations and hope for all humanity .

It remains a revolutionary idea. Our traditional social and political arrangements reflect tribal loyalties based on our instincts for self-preservation. They provide us with a safe “home base” to explore our world. Jesus called us to replace those tribal loyalties with a more universal loyalty that finds a “home base” in honoring and respecting (loving) all of God’s creation. (See Reconciliation and Love's Definition).  

Jesus’ call for this new loyalty offers a far more likely foundation for human self-preservation than the tribal loyalties we usually rely on. Unfortunately, both biblical tradition and history are full of examples that illustrate a broad unwillingness to respond to Jesus’ call. A few examples: Both Hebrew scripture and significant portions of the New Testament model hostility and even hatred toward enemies. When the church burned heretics it was identifying enemies while using fear to assure at least outward loyalty to its tribal ways. In 1961 Fidel Castro declared that continued loyalty to the Cuban revolution required an enemy. Contemporary political campaigns are often based on describing its opponents as enemies and targeting them with falsehoods and partial truths. Likewise, we can hear church leaders propagate an “us versus them” world view as a tool for creating loyalty to their group and personal leadership. Many LGBT people have experienced the negative consequences of that strategy.

The danger in being someone’s enemy is in returning the favor by accepting their enmity and labeling them as our own enemy. In a real world sense that dynamic is probably inescapable but the danger is in responding in kind. When that happens we give the enemy the power to define who we are and set the rules of our relationships. (More in a later posting.)

The instruction to pray for our enemies has often been understood as a prayer that somehow God would intervene in their values, world view, and behavior so that they would come to accept our perspectives and be more like us. The arrogance of that notion is the assumption that we have “the right way;” that we understand God’s views; or that we have the sole understanding of how creation is supposed to work—the implication being that all other views are wrong.

Over the years I have come to understand that praying for our enemies is less about them than it is about me. Jesus’ Prime Directive is to love or honor and respect all that God has created. To pray for an enemy is to seek insight and understanding sufficient to honor that person’s creation. (Perhaps meditation is a better contemporary word than prayer.)

Any increased insight or understanding does not compel me to agree with such a person, only that I come to understand.  Once understood, what do I do about it? Everyone will agree that it is a struggle. Likewise, we cannot focus only on understanding our enemy. We have biases, prejudices, and structures in our world view that have to be examined in relation to our own spiritual health and willingness to honor and respect others. Jesus’ teachings also include strategies to pursue those objectives.

Obviously, there is much more to live and talk out. This is not a solitary adventure. Your comments are welcome.

*The Gospel of Jesus. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar. Santa Rosa, CA, Polebridge Press, 1999.

Reconciliation and Love's Definition

By Peter L. DeGroote

Jesus’ Prime Directive of loving God and others points us toward reconciliation. Standing in our way is the hopeless jumble of definitions for love that include emotional infatuation, pious devotion to prayer, and much in between.

At the heart of the problem is our theological fracturing of love’s meaning by use of three of Greek philosophy’s several categories:  

• Agape: The self-sacrificing love of God or Jesus.
• Philios: Arising out of freindship of men, particularly through shared military and work experinece.
• Eros: Having to to with the sensual and sexual.

These categories often lead to wacky conclusions. Three of the more obvious examples:

• We can think love is central to romance and sex even when those relationships can be filled with aggression, manipulation, and a sense of conquest.
• We can think that our works of charity define us as loving people while we ignore the structure of human relationships that cause poverty, homelessness, and hunger.
• We can sing If We Only Had Love while meaning "if only everyone thought the way I am thinking."

As for the Bible:

• Hebrew Scripture defines God’s steadfast love largely in terms of God’s activity; human love has to do with either following the rules of God or in acts social justice and personal mercy.  
• The Apostle Paul provided some characteristics of the loving personality, such as patience and kindness and the lack of arrogance, boasting, and resentments. While pointing to underlying principles, they do not define love. Also, in one of his more mystical moments Paul observed that while everything else passes away, love never ends. Eternal dimensions are difficult to define and measure (See 1 Corinthians 3).
• Jesus’ conceived of love within a matrix of human motives and values that frame all relationships, a matrix that inextricably tied our relationship with God to our relationships with each other. (John Wesley said it this way: Don’t tell me you love God if I can’t see it in the way you treat others.)

Instead of an objective definition, Jesus told us to take action that would result in our discovery of what he was talking about. Not only did he build the front porch to a household of reconciliation, he handed us the keys to the front door, to a reconciling way of life.  

Those keys included forgiveness, turning the other cheek and praying for our enemies, to name only a few.

The prayer for enemies is particularly revealing when coupled with the instruction to love our enemies, a revelation that God does not share our feelings about our enemies. We are pushed along to grasp that loving God means to join God’s expectation and hope for all humanity. Living in harmony (love) with God seems to mean living in harmony with others, with all of God’s creation. This is called reconciliation.

As I explore Jesus’ instructions, the word “love” increasingly falls by the wayside. Its definitions are so broad as to become meaningless. Harmony with God and others, harmony with God and God’s creation becomes useful. Accepting the understanding that God has the same hope for others as God has for me, I increasingly say, honors God by honoring others and respects God by respecting others.

There is much to explore. 

 

From Ingoring to Illustrating

by Peter L. DeGroote

At first, I ignored a UM pastor’s blog raising questions about women in ministry. Then, I saw it as an illustration of some basic biblical understandings that reconciling people need to think about.

First, a summary of the posting:

• On the premise that controversy is the only way he can get dialogue on his blog, the pastor asks if women should be in ministry  (See August 6, 2009 posting on http://raymcd.blogspot.com/).

• He cites three passages of scripture: 1Corinthians 14:33-35, Galatians 3:26-29 and Matthew 28:26-29.

• He concludes: “These are three Scriptures used for either side of the debate. Are there others? What do you think? Is there a difference between being on a pastoral staff and being a lead pastor? Should there be any restrictions?”

• Comments are diverse. A common opinion is that women should not be lead pastors.

• The pastor’s response to comments includes a complaint that all but one commentator failed to give a reason for their opinion; the one asserting the position of the UM Church was found insufficient. He also notes that he has not yet shared his own opinion. 

Second, how does this posting illustrate important insights about biblical study that reconciling people need to think about?

• The presentation of three different quotes that represent divergent opinions clearly illustrates that we can usually find a proof text in scripture that supports our own views. 

• It also illustrates how reliance on scriptural lists reduces the Bible to a cookbook from which we can select a recipe of our own choosing. In the debate on ordaining women, people threw biblical passages at each other. Likewise, lists of biblical quotes were used to justify as well as oppose slavery. LGBT folks are well aware of the technique: we find lists of biblical passages thrown at us and we collect our own to throw back (other battles have been or are being fought with these lists). 

• Further, it brings to mind how very often we have to turn to other sources to resolve our conflicts in applying Jesus’ primary directive. An illustration of this was John Wesley’s turning to developments in 18th Century philosophy to oppose slavery. 

• In summary, we discover that we can make opposing lists only because the Bible reflects different points of view—that is why we can make the lists. 

Biblical analysis isn’t easy if we are to seek out spiritual insights and honor those who wrote and assembled the text. In particular, each book must be examined from the perspective of the community out of which it came, that community’s social context, the author's theological perspectives, the literary disciplines of the time, and other such considerations.  It is not an exercise in destroying truth, but in discovering truth in a particular time and place, honoring those discoveries, and determining how they might apply to us in our time and place, both personally and communally. It is a challenge.  

Many of us were raised with the idea that the Bible is the unquestioned and unquestionable Word of God. Recognizing its internal diversity leads us to discover the Bible as a spiritual sourcebook rather than a rulebook, one that invites us to enter into a diverse spiritual world of ideas and practices. We are drawn into discussions both ancient and current, helping us to find our way to meaning for both ourselves and our communities.

When John Wesley Went Beyond His Bible

by Peter L. DeGroote

John Wesley had to go elsewhere when he could not use his Bible to oppose slavery. His response is a model for our own day when searching for ways to think about LGBT people in society and the church.

Wesley's active opposition to slavery and the slave trade developed late.  Despite signs of his concerns over slavery from his very early days, Wesley showed no focused anti-slavery effort until publication of his extended pamphlet Thoughts on Slavery in 1774, 17 years before his death at the age of 88. It became a perennial favorite of anti-slavery advocates for the next 30 years and went through 13 printings to include American editions and translations for European readers.

Wesley did not write it. Instead, Granville Sharp, an English anti-slavery advocate who understood Wesley’s skills in what today we call “mass communications,” urged him to edit the work of Anthony Benezet, an American Quaker, and others. Wesley’s abridgment put many of the anti-slavery arguments of the day into compact and readable form. Inevitably, he seasoned it with his own moral outrage.

Thoughts on Slavery rests on the 18th century philosophic concept of universal human rights which served as the foundation for the American, French, and many subsequent revolutions. At the time, the idea of universal human rights had not permeated social and legal thought or the Christian consciousness, nor had it become relevant to biblical interpretation. For example, Wesley’s earlier Notes on the New Testament (1754) has only one comment on slavery (1 Timothy 1:10).   Wesley was silent about all of the other biblical references to which we would turn to today to demonstrate the evil of slavery; he did not see the relevance (Examples: Galatians 3:28, 1 Corinthians 7, Colossians 3, numerous Gospel passages, etc.).

Wesley did bring one theological understanding to the discussion: We are all created in the image of God. This fact of creation was in conflict with the traditional view that the Bible justified slavery as a natural condition in human society.  In resolving that conflict, Wesley became a leader in a new morality that would eventually lead to a new understanding of Scripture. 

It was not a matter of the biblical competence of this man of one book. It was the broader problem of not yet being able to draw biblical implications to a contemporary, moral problem. Religious leaders of the day understood biblical mandates and traditional religious practice to be in support of the legal and economic arguments supporting slavery. John Wesley found his own religious experience and moral instincts pushing beyond those common biblical understandings and traditional religious practices. 

Wesley’s willingness to reach out and incorporate the work of those advocating universal human rights at a time when the world around him opposed such ideas is a model that can be applied to many situations.  In particular, it relates to today's struggle for the rights of LGBT people in both church and society. There are certain moral imperatives derived from the fact of creation even when we unable or unwilling to see them in our Scripture at the moment.

  

___________
As the above is but the briefest of summaries, the following will help to fill out the story behind Wesley’s encounter with slavery.  

Jennings, Theodore W. Good News to the Poor, John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics. Nashville, Abingdon, 1990, P. 82ff.

Marquadt, Manfred. John Wesley’s Social Ethics. (Tranlators: Steely and Gunter.) Nashville: Abingdon, 1992. (Marquadt is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Methodist Seminary in Reutlingen, Germany.)  P. 67ff.

A brief biographical summary of Wesley related to slavery can be found at http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/wesley.htm. Included is a bibliography and useful links to related sites.

For a copy of Wesley’s Thoughts on Slavery” go to:
http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/wesley/thoughtsuponslavery.stm

John Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament can be found in many libraries and United Methodist churches. An electronic version is available at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/notes.i.i.html. Printed copies: Grand Rapids, Baker Books—Usually available through Cokesbury bookstores.

 

From "Open Hands" to "Open Doors"

By Peter L. DeGroote

It started well. The proposal for the publicity campaign was to be “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Hands.” Asserting that an openness to religious experience results in an openness in our thinking, which then leads to an openness in our behavior.

It was good, Wesleyan theology, and it was an organic metaphor equal to those of Paul. The clarity of its logic demonstrated the connections between the three stages while leaving us to meditate on how a change in one leads to changes in others.   

It may have started well, but as Wesley might have said, it ended in a shipwreck. The final result was “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” What happened?  Bureaucracies are the same everywhere. Church agencies are like government agencies: they leak. The leaked details were a little fuzzy, but it seems that someone in the UMC bureaucracy noticed the magazine Open Hands, published by the Reconciling Congregation Program, the previous name of RMN.

This won't do! We need a substitute for “open hands!” The openness of our feelings to the Presence of God cannot lead to opening our minds to the acceptance of LGBT people and then to our reaching out our hands to welcome them! 

The decision was to replace “open hands” with “open doors,” thereby sabotaging purpose, clarity, and effectiveness.  Church doors were already open; the question was (and is) how people were treated once they got inside. “Open hands” dealt with human community, “open doors” with public access to a building (the corrupting influence of mixed metaphors!). 

The original theme of "open hands" would have been a gentle but effective challenge to the way local congregations greet, meet, and incorporate new and different people into their community. Instead, by substituting “open doors,” the theme became an after-the-fact theology of why nearly anyone could walk through our church doors, even if they are ignored. No longer a stimulus for change, the theme became a self-justifying explanation of the way things were. 

The rejection of “open hands” was also a rejection of Wesleyan tradition. The metaphor's origins lie in a verse from 2 Kings 10:15: "Is your heart as true to mine as mine is to yours? .... If it is, give me your hand" (NRSV).  Taken from a context of warfare, we might not use it in the same way today. However, it was the scripture for John Wesley’s seminal sermon The Catholic Spirit (Catholic meaning universal). The first line of that sermon states, "It is allowed even by those who do not pay this great debt that love is due to all mankind, the royal law."

It had already been determined that love was not due to those LGBT people who had already been invoking the Wesleyan tradition through the name of their magazine.  It then became "necessary" for the church--who was supposed to represent the Wesleyan tradition--to depart from it and to ingore what Wesley called "the royal law."  The result?  A hollow theme; a sound bite changing little.

Correcting God's Mistakes--A Sinful Pursuit

By Peter L. DeGroote

A number of years ago I was in a congregational discussion of recondition that included people from the Transforming congregation movement. They are convinced that LGBT folks can be transformed through the power of religion. Curious about how they could be so sure, I asked how they measured their success.

One has to understand that the transformational groups are largely concerned with gay men; they seem little concerned with those represented in the LBT portion of the acronym. That focus reveals their sexism, which is expressed in their definition. The measure of success is the accomplishment of a physically intimate relationship between a gay man and a woman.

That measure fails any test of reliability. The mechanics of sexual performance can be accomplished for purposes far removed from personal fulfillment or the pursuit of healthy relationships. Of particular importance, the measure ignores the woman’s views of the encounter, particularly her view of the thoughts or fantasies that may be necessary for the gay man to “prove himself.”  The woman is reduced to a mere functionary, the means by which a gay man can prove that he measures up to a peculiar definition of what it means to be a “real man.”

Such a standard reverses most religious thinking about relationships; that is, they best begin with the development of intimacy in other areas, physical intimacy being an outgrowth of an already developed relationship. That wisdom is frequently ignored but the consequences are minor compared to the urging of sexual intimacy with a woman simply to prove you are not gay.

Underneath this peculiar measure of success is an even more peculiar notion that LGBT folks are an incomplete act of creation, a mistake by God. Consequently, someone must step in and correct God’s error, for God certainly did not intend such a thing to happen. The arrogance of that notion is overwhelming.

It is not only arrogant, however; the notion is sinful. Jesus’ prime directive requires that we seek to live in harmony with God and God’s creation. We fail to honor and respect (love) God’s creation when we try to correct those parts we find inconvenient. Loving God involves honoring and respecting God’s creation.

Also, the transforming group’s measure of success is sinful. In the first place, it is sinful because it teaches a person to deny his own creation, to deny the creation that God has given him/her. Secondly, the measure is sinful because it transforms the value of women by placing them in a perverse situation that debases and dishonors their sacred worth.

Reconciliation and the Prime Directive

By Peter L. DeGroote

When we lose sight of Jesus’ prime directive, we lose sight of reconciliation. The prime directive is to love God and others. Its goal is our reconciliation with others and with all of God’s creation.  (Loving others requires honoring and respecting the creation into which all of us have been placed).

The prime directive can be easily overlooked for two major reasons.

First, Jesus inextricably tied the love of God and others together; we can’t have one without the other. We cannot claim to love God if we do not love others. Further, to love others is to love God, even if we are not even thinking about God and--perhaps--even if we are unaware of the idea of God. 

• In contrast, we commonly claim God as a personal or group possession rather than the common Creator of all humanity, indeed, of all creation. Sometimes we go so far as to say that God is on our side as we do battle with the rest of God’s creation.

The second major reason we can easily overlook the prime directive is that our definition of love is so hopelessly jumbled that it can be used to describe emotional infatuation, a pious devotion to prayer, and much in between.

• In contrast, the very idea that love can mean honor and respect for God and God’s creation is regarded as an irrelevant, if not adolescent, idealism in the practical working of our world and its institutions.

Jesus’ teachings are not definitions but behavioral guides that set us on paths of discovery towards living in harmony with God and others. So often mistaken for something called a Kingdom of God, Jesus left us with a vision of a domain of God built into creation—a location for becoming who we are and are meant to be.

From our earliest primal memories we have sensed a great gap between us and other species. Early Genesis stories describe us as the culmination of God’s creation and/or beings that are given the gift of power over the earth and its other inhabitants. Today, science is steadily increasing our knowledge of how we are a part of the fabric of all life. Having emerged and evolved from other forms, we remain inextricably connected and dependent on other species and the physical structure we all share. We are also learning of the choices we face of either living in harmony with the rest of creation or damaging it, in some ways irreparably. 

In a time and place that knew nothing of our science, Jesus' prime directive refocused the Genesis lessons by asserting that we are meant to live in harmony with our Creator and all that God has created. In order to do that, he taught that we need to love, honor, and respect both God and all of God’s creation—the prime directive.

When we lose sight of Jesus’ prime directive we lose sight of reconciliation.

A Good Question!

By Peter L. DeGroote

1. Some of Jesus’ followers were threatened by a man who was not of their group healing in Jesus’ name and asked if they should stop him. How might we answer the question today? 

When others who are not of our church, denomination, beliefs, or faith do as Jesus taught, should we denigrate their motives, try to stop them, or take pleasure in their activity?
The way we answer these kinds of questions affects our definition of reconciliation.

2. The earliest gospel, Mark, reports that Jesus said, "Don't stop him! Whoever is not against us is on our side" (9:40).  The other gospels reveal a difference of opinion in the early church:  

A. Matthew: "The one who isn't with me is against me, and the one who doesn't gather with me scatters" (12:30).

B. Luke uses both: 
(1) "Whoever is not against you is on your side” (9:50).
(2) “The one who isn't with me is against me, and the one who doesn't gather with me scatters" (11:23).

4. Did Jesus teach contradictory ideas? That seems unlikely.
So, what is happening here?

A. The inclusive version (if you're not against us, you're with us) reflects the earliest gospel tradition. Corresponding to Jesus’ efforts to tear down walls between people, it is in harmony with his prime directive of loving God and others, the path of reconciliation.

B. The exclusive version (if you’re not with us you're against us) reflects the suspicion, oppression, and even violence directed toward the early church. Needing to know who they could trust and where they could feel safe, they sought to clearly define their group in relation to others. The upshot was (and usually is) the erection of barriers around their (our) group.  Erecting barriers around groups is a survival skill from our early tribal history. Defining “we” often means defining “them” as a threat to our survival. They become our enemies.

5. Several strains in Christian history and tradition introduce several conundrums for a follower of Jesus, three of which follow: 

A. Christians have rejected, demonized, and even killed those who differ with them. In direct conflict with Jesus’ prime directive to honor and respect God and others, (love) it is difficult to understand how a claim of being followers of Jesus is possible.     

B. A preoccupation with our own salvation can result in self-centered, self-satisfied, and self-righteous attitudes, something Jesus warned us about in any number of ways.

C. We can be led down the path of thinking that confessing Jesus as our Lord and Savior is sufficient. Jesus taught a way of life, not a creed. How can we call him Master or Teacher if we do not do what he said? 

6. The task of Jesus’ followers is to apply his prime directive in their time and place. Our history reveals many steps and missteps. Each generation is faced with questions that require attention. In our time and place, such questions would include the following:

A. Are non-Christians who honor God and others (love) with or against Jesus; with or against us?

B. Do we demand that people accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior before we will honor and respect them?

C. How do we deal with others (creations of God) who think differently than we do?

C. Are we to demand that people believe what we believe or are we to be like leaven in the world?

D. Do we dare to say that God is with us, but not with others?

E. If Jesus is the way to God; do we insist that we are the way to Jesus?

Note: Scripture quotes are from Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels. NY: Macmillan (Polebridge), 1993.