By Their Fruits: A Sermon

 

You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.

Matthew 7:16-18 New Revised Standard Version 

Evangelical Christianity recently lost two of its stalwart figures, John MacArthur and James Dobson.  My evangelical background is one in which I would have at one time looked to each of them as an authority figure.  As I have grown older I have come to the place where I no longer think of myself as an evangelical. My move from Baptist evangelicalism to Quakerism (and I still think of myself as a Quaker) to Catholicism (and I also think of myself as a Catholic) was driven by a hunger for the truth as Jesus taught it, to the best of my ability to learn.  The decision to become Catholic was a result of a desire for the faith of the early church.  I believe our friends in the Orthodox Churches also have that apostolic faith, which I find in Catholicism.  I believe other movements in the history of Christianity, including Baptists, anabaptists, and Quakers, have been known for apostolic zeal, and have been a blessing to the world.  But for me, as Catholic converts call it, “swimming the Tiber” has brought me to a level of spiritual depth I have never before found.

I think part of this is a desire to go deep in history.  John  Henry Cardinal Newman, an Anglican bishop before becoming Roman Catholic, said, “to go deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”  For me, crossing the Tiber meant I found something I have looked for my entire life.

I am under no illusion that the Catholic church is perfect. It has its saints and sinners just like every church.  I am openly critical of the church in many ways.  I do not believe in Just War.  I do believe in separation of church and state.  I want the Catholic church to open its sacramental life, including marriage and ordination, the sacraments of commitment, to everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

In my book A BRIEF PROCESS PERSPECTIVE ON NATURAL LAW, I have argued that natural law is a helpful and useful tool in Christian theology.  I believe nature does tell us something about how God wants us to live.  The problem is we know so much more about nature than Thomas Aquinas did 750 years ago, or Aristotle, 1600 years before that.  Nature includes some things which people did not know previously it includes.  There is scientific reason to believe gender and sexual orientation are not waffles placed in neat boxes, but spaghetti strung together in a complex and tangled way.  We have reason to believe that neither sexual orientation nor gender are actually binary. 

If science proves contradictory to our theology, I think we need to keep the science and change our theology.  I do not believe there is any virtue in holding on to beliefs just because they are old.  It makes as much sense, given that all humans share 99.9% of the same DNA, to deny someone marriage or ordination based on hair or eye color as it does to deny marriage or ordination based on sexual orientation or gender. 

So the Catholic church has its warts.  It has its moral failures.  I think Catholics who believe the church is never wrong are as mistaken as are the Protestant evangelicals who believe the Bible is free from error.

My own move away from evangelicalism began as I left an abusive cult group which was built around the ministry of an Indiana evangelist, Rev. Loran Helm.  The leadership of this group took it upon itself to tell its constituents where they should live, where they should go to college, and who they should marry, based on supposed revelation from the Holy Spirit.  I think they got more wrong than they got right.  I wrote about the ten years I spent in this group in my book, THE WILDERNESS I LEFT BEHIND.

Many of these marriages ended in divorce.  In my case, I was told that I was not suitable for marriage or to be a pastor because I have cerebral palsy.  There were a number of young men the leaders told they were called to the ministry, but not any of that actually worked out.  In the end, what was left was a string of carnage. 

I was eventually ordained by one of their churches before I became a Quaker minister.  I remember the week before my wedding (I just asked my wife of 40 years to marry me, and she said “Yes,” even though the leader told me I was not to ever get married to anyone without his personal approval—and when I got married I got blacklisted) I got in a lot of hot water, because I encouraged a young wife to separate from her abusive husband.  I still think I did the right thing, but people told me I should have told her to submit and endure.

That kind of thing, encouraging women to stay in abusive marriages, was a common complaint against both MacArthur and Dobson.  In Dobson’s case, there was also the complaint that his approach to discipline was one which gave a green light to physical abuse by parents. In the group I was in, the teaching was to spank, and to keep striking the child repeatedly until they repent for what they did.

Now, I want to say, nobody gets everything right, and maybe nobody gets everything wrong.  I have become a liberal, social justice preacher and Christian, but I have no illusions that progressive Christianity does not have its own faults.

Having said that, I want to plant this seed for people to consider.  If these ministries, Helm, Dobson, and MacArthur, were what they claimed to be, I do not believe they would have left the aftermath of pain and abuse they did.  I do not believe the spiritual wounds these men inflicted on people would be there, if their ministries had been good fruit from good trees.

The Second Isaiah said of the coming Messiah, that a bruised wick he would not put out.  I think that the leaders I am describing here caused many more bruises than they healed, and that is said.  I called my book THE WILDERNESS I LEFT BEHIND because Loran Helm, likening himself to John the Baptist, called his memoir A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS.  It eventually dawned on me that he had led so many people into a wilderness instead of out of one, and sadly, left them there.

Again, none of us gets it all right, and none of us gets it all wrong. But as I am reading, in light of the deaths of MacArthur and Dobson, the painful accounts of those bruised, I cannot believe their work was good fruit from a good tree, and I know much of the fruit of where I came from was not.