Visit us at: 30 Good Minutes.org

         

"If Grace is True"
Twenty-two years ago I was called to pastor my first church: a small, rural Quaker meeting in the Midwest. We Quakers were musically challenged and had to draft a Baptist woman to play the organ. In addition to her musical talent, she possessed a keen radar for heresy. My second Sunday there, I said something in the sermon that caused her to be suspicious of my theology.

After meeting for worship, she approached and asked if I believed in hell. I told her no, I didn't think so. I had dabbled in the history of religion enough to be suspicious of hell. No matter what church I attended, it was always the other people who were going there. Then she asked if I believed someone had to be a Christian to go to heaven. I told her that made no sense to me.

That afternoon, she began working the phones, calling the elders to report me, threatening to leave if I weren't fired. Pastors are as common as starlings, while organists are a rarer breed, so her ultimatum caused much anxiety. After church, the next Sunday, the elders asked to meet with me and gave me the option of recanting or being fired. “Just say you believe in hell so we can get beyond this,” the head elder said.

I sat there wondering what I'd have to say the next time the church needed to get beyond something. Though I'd hoped to last longer than three weeks in my first pastorate, I couldn't bring myself to affirm that woman's vision of God and I was fired. I went out to the car where my wife was waiting.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Good news and bad news,” I told her.

“Tell me the good news first.”

“We get to sleep in next Sunday,” I said.

But word travels fast in Quaker circles and by that afternoon I'd been invited to speak at another meeting. It was a meeting with a reputation for theological rigidity and I wasn't anxious to be their pastor. So I preached a sermon whose theme was the sentence, “If you can't love homosexuals, you can't love God.” I really didn't want to work there.

Afterwards, they filed down the basement while I sat with my wife in the meeting room upstairs. I could hear them talking through the heating ducts. At one point, an elder tromped upstairs to ask me if I believed in hell. I told him no. He appeared somewhat shaken by that revelation, then hurried back downstairs to report my sacrilege to the others.

If Quakers voted, they never would have called me. But several persons pointed out that I was new to ministry and deserved an opportunity. Besides, I heard one man say through the heating duct, being new to ministry we won't have to pay him very much. Well, that settled it. I was at that congregation four years. By the time I left, I believed in hell.

Years ago, I rejected the idea that God sends people who don't believe the “right” things to hell. I didn't do that with any sophistication. I couldn't cite respected theologians or quote from the Bible. Hell just didn't seem right. Because I was in a religious climate which discouraged questioning, I kept my convictions to myself. It took many years for me to share publicly what I believed privately: hell is killing us. The moral decline of a religion begins when it creates a hell, a place of punishment and torment where those who are different must go. As soon as religions create such places, they inevitably create the outsiders who go there, giving themselves tacit permission to do to them whatever they wish. Hell is killing us. It starts by killing our moral sensitivity. It ends, almost always, in the death of others.

I was speaking at a church this past winter. Afterwards a man approached me and said that as a progressive Christian he didn't even believe in an afterlife. “I think the Church needs to stop talking about heaven and hell,” he said.

I wish we had that luxury. But when hell is killing us, the Church needs to talk about it.

So let's talk.

Conversation with Philip Gulley

Delle Chatman: Thank you so much, Philip, for that message and thank you for the courage of it, the bravery of it. Lydia and I have read your book, “If Grace is True,” and I'm sure both of us have very strong reactions to it. But I want to start our conversation by asking you this question: Why do you think Christians who follow Jesus, who is love incarnate, get so exorcized by this notion of hell and damnation? Doesn't it seem to you to be a bit paradoxical that the first question is, “Do you believe in hell?” as opposed to “Who do you believe Jesus is? What do you think is primary among his teachings?” How do you explain that eagerness to get to this thumbs down thing?

Philip Gulley: Well, I think it's probably indicative of a relationship that's always been present in the church and this is the relationship and the struggle between grace and between power. And to be able to create a hell and to send people there who don't believe like we do gives us great power. Unfortunately, it's not a power that we've been able to exorcize with any sense of justice and mercy. We just kind of casually assign people there and what damage that does to them.

Lydia Talbot: Philip, you said it took you many years to empty hell and the book you've given us, “If Grace is True,” is really a journey of how your mind has changed over these years from serious judgmentalism on issues of salvation and sexuality and others to an inclusiveness, an embrace, a compassion for all God's children. Now, would you say that absolutism that defined your early Christian training was a great disservice to the Christian church?

Gulley: Well, it almost seems to be the place that many of us start. I've been paying attention to how we instruct children and I think because we fear them straying we tend to teach them absolutes. The bad thing with that is that as we age, we ought to move away from that and be able to reflect and engage life without such rigid moral boundaries and codes. It really gets in our way, I think, of ethical living and spirituality. There is a real comfort in that kind of absolutism, but the Jesus I read about was really no friend of comfort. We are really called to be uncomfortable sometimes.

Chatman: He made people in his own society uncomfortable. He made the religious leaders in his own society uncomfortable. And you point out one of the ways in which he did that was by establishing this relationship with God which was Father, and even Abba or Daddy. So there was an intimacy, there was a closeness, a familiarity that made the rabbis of his day want to tear their clothes. I mean literally.

Talbot: And in the book you say intimacy with God is like making love. That's a beautiful image. Say more.

Gulley: Well, just this idea that when we care for someone and we are intimately involved with something, that isn't something we dread or fear, it's something we anticipate, we enjoy, it's a rich experience, it's a holy experience. And yet that never seems to translate in our relationship with God. We often approach God out of a deep sense of fear, of guilt, of inadequacy, that somehow I have failed, that I now stand under judgment, and that God is looking for the least excuse to crush my life.

Chatman: To banish us and send us to our room!

Gulley: Unfortunately, the church hasn't done much to dispel this myth and it's a real tragedy.

Talbot: You begin your book with a story of Sally who really was an impetus, sort of a Rubicon moment for you in your understanding of grace. Can you tell us about Sally?

Gulley: Well, Sally was a woman who had done everything wrong in life. A drug addict, her neglect of her children led to the death of one of her daughters. Something interesting happened, though, to Sally as she aged. And I've noticed that this happens as we age, we grow wiser and we desire relationships and that our relationships to be more meaningful. And that was true of Sally. She was beginning to explore a relationship with God but before she could ever get to church, before she could ever pray the magic prayer that people say we must pray, she died.

Talbot: And you had to do the funeral. And you were one of the ones who had scorned her during her unfortunate life. So how did her redemptive chapter in her life, as you say she turned, how did that turn you?

Gulley: Oh! This is the wonderful thing about being a pastor. You get a front row seat to humanity's struggle. And one thing you learn if you're a pastor is not only the brokenness of people but also your own inward brokenness. And so you get over this illusion eventually that you're perfect and that's why God called you to ministry. As soon as you give up that illusion about yourself you are able to see others more charitably.

Chatman: You explore this idea—or reality, I would say personally—that experience, our experience of God is as legitimate as our experience of Scripture and as our experience of doctrine and dogma as it's handed out from generation to generation. And you talk about how people tend to be suspicious of experience because it's subjective and it's personal and it's idiosyncratic, and “Who are you?” We know who Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were but who the heck are you, right? And yet I really resonate with that because—and I think everyone really resonates with it—because we wouldn't be Christian if we didn't have these experiences that somehow make us aware of this other presence that is compassionate and merciful and loving and rescuing, you know.

Gulley: And everything is experience. The Bible...what is the Bible? It's a story of people's experiences with God. What are dogma? What are doctrines and creeds? Well, they are codified descriptions of our experience with God. And the question is then, if we take all of those other peoples' experiences of God so seriously, why can't we take our own experience of God seriously?

Talbot: And you say in the book—the premise of the book—is that God saves every person. Now, you were so on fire with this revolutionary change in your own understanding of the faith that you sought out people that you were taught to suspect. Can you talk about that?

Gulley: Yes. And if you grow up in the church you're always given a list of people to avoid!

Talbot: And you found a multitude of people. Tell us.

Gulley: Gay people and poor people and people of different races and cultures, people whom I had been taught were cultic, Mormons. And you go and engage and what you see in these people is what the old Quakers used to say, “You see that of God in every person.”

Talbot: And you saw that in Kevin. Tells us about him.

Gulley: Kevin was actually a man that Jim knew. Jim, the co-author of the book, is active in prison ministry. And one thing that's amazed me in listening to Jim's story about working with convicts and going into prisons is the depth of grace among many of the men that he's encountered. We often dismiss them as morally inferior or they wouldn't be in jail in the first place we tell ourselves. That simply isn't true. Many of the men that Jim has encountered in prison were just simply broken people who didn't have our blessings of love in life. And in them Jim has met some profoundly gracious, wonderful people who've transformed his life in a powerful way.

Chatman: I'm so struck by how that follows Jesus' example. He hung out with the people that you should never touch: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the sinners, the poor. These were his fans, you know, and the people that he sought out. And we know that Peter and even Paul in the time that they knew in prison found out that was really a venue where souls could be saved.

Gulley: Sure. And, you know, the thing about it, Delle, is that Jesus, of course, encouraged us to visit the prisoners. Now, we always assumed Jesus told us that so we could save them. You know what I think? I think Jesus told us that so they could save us.

Talbot: Talk about how your mind changed on the issue of sexuality and your friend that you grew up with.

Gulley: Yes. Well, it happened easily for me because my younger brother is gay and suddenly something that I had been taught was an abomination I'm confronted with when my little brother comes out of the closet, whom I love. He's just a wonderful man. And so suddenly these neat little categories that I had drawn in my life no longer made sense and I had to think again about what it means to be sexually moral and to be sexually responsible and loving. It really changed my point of view.

Chatman: I think your book is such an invitation to all of us to expand our notion of God, to expand our notion of how much love he has for zillions! And how hungry he is to be close to all of us.

Gulley: That's right.

Chatman: Thank you so much, Philip, for the gift of this book.

Talbot: And I love that image of the father putting his little boy to bed and saying that God will be with you, don't be afraid of the dark. And the little boy said, “But I thought there would be somebody with skin on him!” That's wonderful! Philip, you are terrific and we thank you.

 

Home | Schedule |This Week | Sermons| Topics | Short Video | About | Print | Links | Contact Us | Donation