Not The Religious Type

I Can Learn From What God Is Doing In Ted Haggard/ David Linhart (Cambridge, MA)

My dad doesn't follow Jesus, but he thinks the stuff that Jesus is about is noble. He tells me that gospel values are a nice talk that he never sees anyone walk. I tell him about a teen I know who, at first, didn't bring her son to our church, because in her previous church, she had to keep her pregnancy on the down low. Getting pregnant as an unmarried teen gets you kicked out of some faith circles as a reprobate, or at least marked as a bad influence. For all the talk of Jesus' forgiveness and restoration, and the assurance that he meets us where we are, when an opportunity arises to support God's work through someone's weakness, we balk.

But I told her there's only one way that anyone ever gets a kid-- as a gift from God-- and here we celebrate what God is doing. So bring your son! What type of influence might she be on other teens? She will show them what it looks like to grow up, which some do earlier and some do later. Come to think of it, maybe we never get out of that setting, and we simply trade whose turn it is to be the example of God maturing us. I mean, we look to King David's towering stature in retrospect, not always imagining what it might have been like to live under his leadership:

"WHAT? He did WHAT with Bathsheba while we were out fighting battles and he was supposed to be fighting with us?"

"WHAT? The reason my friends are dying of this horrible plague is because David took a census of Israel when God was against the idea?"

In a career with all kinds of contradictions, the consistent thread was that he kept going back to God, openly, so everyone could see what going to God looks like. His Psalms were not sermons, rather his private prayer life made public. Isn't that the same vulnerability of God revealing himself through Jesus, giving us as much of himself as we can handle? Isn't that why God calls David a man after God's own heart-- a heart that stubbornly insists on being fully known, despite the risks? David's example of purity is predictably a wash, because only Jesus sets that example; but David's example of transparency is timeless.

We can learn from what God is doing in Ted Haggard. If he disappears, an opportunity for the gospel to be lived out will disappear. That opportunity is there whenever anyone messes up, barely or colossally, where the only restoration that is effective is God speaking into our actual, individual lives in real time. I'm talking about restoration as a LIFESTYLE, not just recovery from a tragic episode. It helps to see what that lifestyle looks like, so we can support each other in living it together. But if it all happens behind the scenes until we're cleaned up and presentable, then all that's left is, well, preaching.

Ted Haggard and Personal Healing

My local paper this morning reported on an interview Ted Haggard gave with Good Morning America in which he described being sexually abused by a man when he was seven.  He described how he’d never fully addressed that and despite becoming a "a conservative Republican, loving the word of God, an evangelical, born-again, spirit-filled, charismatic, all those things" (the ordering of those statements seems of interest in a different way than we’re heading, but I’ll let that go), that wound never left him and contributed to the pervasive, destructive behavior that brought him down.

I don’t know your take on Haggard.  I’m sympathetic to those who cut him loose after his mega-scandal, and there’s much to question in his conservative stridency and, I suppose, to being a mega-church pastor in general.  But, despite all, I’ve appreciated Haggard over the years and have learned from him (I may address some of the things he’s taught me in subsequent posts).  So all I felt in his fall was sadness.  And today’s story strikes me as the ultimate “no duh.”  Of course he was abused as a child!  The extent of his acting out despite his vocal preaching against those very sins speak of a man in conflict with himself, driven by things he’d like to suppress.  Maybe, as some secular writers suggested, this spoke of his being at odds with his fundamental sexual orientation.  Maybe.  But today’s story resonates more deeply with me.

This is an oft-repeated story—the gifted follower of God is knocked out by unaddressed wounds.  You could argue that Mother Teresa got away with this in her life only to be outed in her death, when her anguish-filled journals were published with the upshot that she’d found little to no joy in God for many decades.  She got the Haggard treatment in some circles—i.e. this proves that she was living a false front at best and a lie at worst.  I regard this just as I regard the Haggard story.  To me, she was totally sincere in what her life was about.  But she had unaddressed wounding from her youth that had to be kept under wraps for the sake of her life’s work.

Why couldn’t Haggard get actual help for that wounding and the acting out that came out of it?  Of course I don’t know, but I have a guess.  His culture would encourage him to shape up—clearly his behavior was out of bounds.  His marriage and ministry were totally at risk if he addressed these things, so his only choice was to take this as a matter of personal will and suck it up.  Mother Teresa did have a confessor with whom she shared these things, but I haven’t heard how she addressed the early wounds themselves rather than their manifestations.

I could go on.  Lonnie Frisbee, this guileless product of the hippie Jesus Movement, had a substantial part in the founding of two significant church movements—my own (the Vineyard) and Calvary Chapel.  And he’s rarely mentioned in those histories because of the unraveling of his own life and his ultimate death from AIDS.  (There’s a gripping if jaded documentary about him if you want to learn more.)

Complex wounds from my own childhood led to ten years of on-again-off-again mild depression before a blend of prayer, wise counsel and my own ongoing dialogue with God moved me past that.  Just this week I’m seeing other opportunities for addressing those wounds—and, thanks to folks like these, getting friendly hints from God of consequences for leaving them unaddressed. 

My pitch: Anyone interested enough in lifelong, potent faith to read a blog like this would be well-advised to learn one more lesson from Ted Haggard and Mother Teresa and Lonnie Frisbee.  Our behavior and mood are driven by something.  Relentless openness to our spiritual friends and to God himself seems like a great start towards getting the kind of powerful prayer and wise counsel that can keep us moving towards God and others for a lifetime.  Taking our issues into our own hands through continual re-resolve to do better and the secrecy that comes with that… that’s a lonely and stressful path, along with being a big, big risk with uncertain, at best, rewards.

Three Cheers for Doggedness!

In response to yesterday's post--which made the simple point that, for all our awesome, sophisticated thinking about this hopefully-fresh and helpful version of faith, we do have to actually DO the faith we're discussing--among each of the great comments, I was especially struck by Trish Ryan's.

This is one area where my new age past has served me well. Through my various seasons of spiritual furniture moving, mediating, and spouting affirmations, I got used to the idea that faith is something you do--that there's a participatory component to it that isn't dependent on how I'm feeling in any given moment.

This helped me when I started following Jesus. Some mornings, the Bible seemed alive with exciting possibilities God put there just for me, and prayer felt like I'd found the hotline to heaven. But then there were the other days--when the Bible was the strangest, most depressing collection of stories I'd ever seen, and talking to God seemed only slightly less ludicrous than conversing with my dog.

But I'd made a decision to pursue this path--so I kept on keeping on. And the results have been pretty great. The stage 4 life, for me at least, involves some practices that look like Stage 2. The difference is that I know WHY I'm doing these things--it's to connect with the living God, rather than just to get my "This is what good Christians do" stamp.

A mixture of dogged pursuit of faith while all the time keeping in mind the WHY of what we're doing... That seems like a pretty powerful prescription for what we're hoping for on this blog.