A number of months before the recreational use of marijuana was going to be legalised in Canada I was with a small group of pastors and Christian leaders. I remember that someone asked with some urgency, “What is the stance of the church going to be when marijuana becomes legal? Just because something is legal does not mean that it is right.”
Of course, the statement about legality vs. ethics is true, but what I found curious about the question was that it implied that a chief role of the Christian church is the taking of stances.
What is the church’s stance on abortion?
On homosexuality?
On war?
What is the church’s stance on birth control?
What kind of political stances should the church be taking?
It is a great error in faith to think that the primary role of the church is to take stances on issues. Christian faith calls us to do what we can to come close to others, to see their humanity, to know that, no matter who they are or what they have done, they are loved by God. Christian faith is a faith of coming together with people. The first question of Christian faith is not, “what is right and what is wrong?”, but rather, “how can I grow in love for all people?”.
This does not mean that there is not right and wrong. Of course there is, and an important part of our life is our moral life. We should be trustworthy and kind. We should be honest. We should let our “yes be yes”. We should not act as if money is more important than people.
All of this matters.
The reason that it matters is that in being kind and loving and trustworthy, we can more easily be brought together with others. Being right for the sake of being right is another matter. Most of the damage that we do in life we do when we are right. That is, if we use morality to look down on others, to judge, to separate, to never give others a second chance, then we fail to see the point of morality.
One of the necessary aspects of maturity for Christian faith is to mature past the point of thinking that faith is about taking stances. Taking stances is easily mistaken as a sign of spiritual maturity, when really it is often a sign of spiritual immaturity. For many years it has been curious to me that Christianity can become about taking stances when Jesus himself did not model this kind of faith.
I used to offer a challenge to people in the church where I was pastor. I would say, “Find me five places in the gospels where Jesus takes a clear moral stance on an issue of the day.”
They couldn’t.
Invariably one story was mentioned. It is from John chapter 8, and is often called the story of “the woman caught in adultery”. Of course, the woman was not the only person in on the adulteress act, but for reasons of misogyny and religious hate, she is the only one dragged before Jesus in a humiliating manner. The real target of the hate is Jesus (the woman is barely a person to the religious men) and those who have done the dragging are offended exactly because they want Jesus to be more of a stance-taker.
“This woman was caught in the act of adultery!” they holler at Jesus. “The law of Moses is clear that she should be stoned to death! What do you say?”
They figured that they had him, and they cared nothing for the woman. Everything in them was moralism that disdained people. They demanded that Jesus take a stance.
He said nothing, but only knelt down and began writing in the dirt, not far from the woman who must have been hunched over, trying to cover herself, trying to disappear into the ground.
The religious leaders began to grumble and demand a response from Jesus.
He then did something remarkable. He said to go ahead and stone the woman, but that the first person to throw a rock was to be a person without sin. He knelt down again and continued to write in the dirt. The men began to depart, one by one, until it was only Jesus and the woman remaining. She had been brought back to life, but did not yet fully know it.
He asked her who was left to condemn her. She said that no one was. He said that he was the only person left and that he did not condemn her. He then said, "Go and sin no more.”
This passage, most of the times I heard it growing up, was used to show the love of Jesus, but also to remind people - “You’d better be careful.” It was used as a passage to talk about morality. The problem with this is that if “Go and sin no more” was a warning to the woman, then why did Jesus go to all of the trouble of not condemning her to start with? Was this really, “I don’t condemn you. I don’t condemn you. But if you screw up again, THEN I will condemn you”?
Hardly. I see that what Jesus was saying to the woman was, “You don’t have to live like this.” This woman had men in her life who dehumanized her by using her body for their own selfish ends. She had men in her life who dehumanized her by labelling her a sinful woman. Jesus was, perhaps, the first man who saw her as a person. He drew near to her. He did not condemn her. He loved her. She did not need to live her life under the dehumanizing definitions of people who failed to love her.
Christian faith calls us to something much better than a stance. Our culture right now is being torn apart by stances. On the political right stances are taken that can easily dehumanize people according to race or gender or sexuality. On the political left stances can be taken in a way that allows no redemption, no personal growth or learning or change. If you expressed a view, even years ago, that is now seen to be unacceptable, there might be little room for growth or moral development. The common posture from the left and the right is a failure to be drawn together with those who are different than us. Stances are taken to be more important than people.
Christian faith ought to show a better way than this.
You may have heard words like “stand firm” if you grew up in the church. In my experience the words were implied to be about taking stances, holding on to particular views, somehow standing against the moral decay in the world.
The trouble is, that if you actually read the Bible you will see that in almost every occasion “stand firm” means something very different than this. At times it is used as a kind of spiritual metaphor, that we are to stand firm in spiritual struggle (Ephesians 6:10-14). At times the words are used as encouragement in the midst of persecution (1 Peter 5:9, James 1:2-4), a kind of “don’t lose hope when power in society presses you down”. Most often they are used in the OPPOSITE way than you hear in many churches. The “stand firm” is issued AGAINST moralism or religious judgment and hatred (Galatians 5:1, 2 Corinthians 1:20-22). If people try to make faith about rules and hard lines and judging of other people, STAND FIRM against this.
In recent years and decades, perhaps no issue has provided a greater example of the failure of the “taking a stance” distortion of Christian faith than that of sexual identity.
Maybe, instead of “taking stances” on matters such as homosexuality and transgender rights, Christians should seek to take on the trauma, even in prayer, that people who have suffered, because of judgment about their sexuality, have carried. For some people churches and religious spaces are the rooms in which abuse and fear and hate have been experienced.
I am exceedingly tired of the church acting as if its responsibility in the world is to take a stance rather than to seek to love. Imagine if all the time and resources and energy spent on “standing firm” on an issue was, instead, spent seeking to understand the pain and hurt and dehumanization that so many people have suffered.
The religious leaders who dragged the woman before Jesus, trying to trap him, demonstrated disdain for the woman. They certainly took a stance and they demanded that Jesus take a stance against the woman. He refused. If there is sin worth talking about in the story, it is the hateful religious sin of the people who dragged the woman to Jesus. He showed a much, much better way and calls us to the same today.
“Taking a stance”, as it has been spoken about in many religious circles, has all too often been a failure to follow the way of Jesus, a failure to love. The Christian call is to see the dignity of all other people, to be drawn together in love - a reflection of the love that God has for all of us.