Is Christianity One Long Nag?

            This past Thursday, at 4 a.m., I awoke with a start. I don’t know why, but it surprised me. I can count the number of times I have not slept through the night on the fingers of one hand.

            But there I was. Awake. So, I made myself a glass of warm milk. I drank it. I lay down on the couch. And soon enough, I was asleep again. Simple.

            The next morning, I drove Irene to the airport. On the way, she asked me why I thought I woke up in the middle of the night. I said, “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m worried: about finding people for the Art Show, about launching the Strategic Plan, and about this coming week’s annual staff-planning meeting.” And, as I said this, I also grumbled about the traffic, because it was very slow at the 401/409 interchange. “Darn it,” I said, “Darn it.” And that’s putting it lightly.

            So, Irene said, “Don’t be so uptight. Relax. Just relax.” I mentioned that I had a sermon to write, too, so I had a double right to be irritated by how traffic was eating into my day. “Darn,” I said, again. “Darn.”

            “Stop it.” Said Irene. “I mean it. Don’t be so uptight. You’ll sleep better.”

            Irene was nagging me. So, I was irritated. I said, “Irene, how about a bit of empathy, please? Dear? I mean, you can’t turn irritation off and on just like that. I need time, sympathy, empathy to get over it. So, stop nagging me!”

            And, like the angel she is, she did. She stopped nagging me.

            But oh, how I hate being nagged. We all hate being nagged. Which is why, when later in the day, while reading the Sermon on the Mount, I felt like pulling my hair out. It just never stops.

·      Blessed are the meek. (That is, maybe, be a pushover.)

·      Blessed are the pure in heart. (Be a saint.)

·      Blessed are those who mourn. (Make sadness a habit.)  

·      Be light.

·      Be salt.

·      Don’t be angry. (Well, that is impossible.)

·      Don’t look at another person lustfully.

·      Turn the other cheek.

·      Do not worry.

·      Give the coat off of your back.

·      Pray. Forgive. Seek first the kingdom.

·      Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.

           The Sermon on the Mount just never seems to stop. Nag, nag, nag. Divine nagging. 

           Oh, and I know that there are ways to read the Sermon that try to reframe it as encouragement, or a response of gratitude, or as aspirational rather than law, or as counter-cultural and subversive, or as comfort—at least when it comes to worry. But, let’s face it. It sounds like nagging. Add to the Sermon on the Mount every other New Testament suggestion about best behavior and it is easy to be overwhelmed. Theologians can talk all they want about how Protestants are not into works righteousness (good), but the truth is we are into works nagging. On and on.

            And actually, one of the biggest challenges I face, as a preacher, is avoiding this sort of nagging in the pulpit. I mean, who wants to come to church to be nagged every week? Here’s ten rules for a happy marriage, five guidelines for being a Christ-like man, and three rules for raising children. Seek social justice. Crush racism. Reconcile with First Nations peoples. Embrace the LGBT cause. Ask your friends to church. Greet visitors. Give money. Volunteer time. Pray! Repent! Relax! But whatever you do, be good, do it right, do it now!

            Is this what church is all about? Nag, nag, holy nag? It doesn’t make for much fun on Sunday. What’s the solution? Is there an antidote for dealing with all that holy nagging?

            Well, in the hope of offering some constructive thoughts about dealing with nagging, I have come up with ten ideas. Maybe one will speak to you.

            1. Celebrate. Instead of feeling bad every time you do not respond to an otherwise justified nag, celebrate your successes. Did you shovel snow for your neighbour? Hold your tongue with a naughty child? Sign up for a monthly cash donation to the Food Bank? Well, celebrate! Have a cigar or a cup of licorice tea. Unless we learn to associate doing good with celebration, it will always feel like a chore.

            2. Grace. We’re Christians. We claim to live by grace, which means when we have nothing to celebrate, we count on the divine to forgive us as we forgive others, even when we don’t deserve it, and may have asked for a nag. So relax, and live in that grace.

            3. Exercise. I walk the dog for an hour every day. It isn’t always fun, but it does keep my blood pressure down and my muscles mostly spry. We can exercise our spirits too, by making a habit of doing daily good, instead of merely doing occasional random acts of kindness. The more we exercise our good, the more likely our good will be strong, and the less likely we’ll need to be nagged.

            4. Adventure. Remember, life should be an adventure. So, do good for the thrill of it—for the hope you give people you will meet along the way, for the healing and happiness you will see in them, for the political and business cultures you can change, for the surprises that will overtake you when you when others notice your good. Doing good should be an adventure, a refusal to sit on your laurels and an insistence on making someone’s day, instead. You see, no one on an adventure needs to be nagged to press on to the goal.

            5. Community. Be part of one. When your energy for good flags, in communities there is always someone to pick up the slack. When you fail, there is always someone to embrace you anyway. Communities live in grace together and get it done together, so that it doesn’t all depend on you.

            6. Compromise. The evil at the root of nearly all nagging is the presumption that everyone else has to do it your way; or, that you have to do it the way everyone else does it. Nagging is absolute, for all time, legalistic, black and white with respect to what is good, and as dangerous as the hard edge of a granite counter top is for little kids.  I say, “Forget all that.” Offer and accept compromises. Meet people half-way. Compromise isn’t failure—it is a way of moving ahead at a different speed.

            7. Be Picky. My wife, Irene, learned early on in her career that if she offered every kind of counselling, her potential clients would view her as a jack-of-all-trades who was an expert at none. And potential clients wouldn’t pick up the phone to check her out. So, Irene became picky. She focused on couples’ therapy, and nothing else. She became an expert. Her focused advertising brought in lots of leads, and her business flourished. When it comes to her counselling, or any other good, people are less likely to nag experts. So, do good, but be picky about the good you focus on. That’s okay.

            8. Love Yourself. We’re supposed to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. So, doing good for our neighbours requires that we exercise supreme kindness towards ourselves, first; that we love ourselves. Generous self-love is an antidote for the feelings of low self-esteem and defeat that constant nagging invite.

            9. Fertilize. In ancient Israel, salt was a fertilizer for that region’s alkaline soils—as it still is in that part of the world today. To be the salt of the world is to help people grow, to help them become fully human. Grow people by blessing them, fertilizing them, with thanks and congratulations.
            Nagging, by way of contrast, is a poison that brings people down while rarely convincing them that they do need to change their ways. So, whether you are the boss at work, a mom or dad, a teacher or a card player—grow the people you’re with. Build them up. Don’t nag.

            That’s it. Just nine random thoughts, after all. Maybe someone else can come up with a tenth!

Against Nature?

            A few weeks ago, the Toronto Star ran a story about a gay woman, Anne Tesluk, of Bowmanville, Ontario. She sent her daughter to the local Catholic School because she was herself a Catholic. Tesluk was also thrilled that her school, St. Joseph’s Elementary, distributed the blueprint for a plan to help teachers tackle discrimination of all kinds, from racial to religious to discrimination based on disability or sexual orientation.

            That is, she was thrilled until she read in the fine print of the school document that homosexual people are “objectively disordered.” Tesluk was so shocked and offended that she decided to go to the local Catholic school board to ask that the offending phrase from the blueprint be removed. In a way, the story is surprising—what Catholic person, after all, doesn’t know that the Catholic Church takes this stand? Perhaps especially, what gay Catholic mother? Be that as it may, I wish Ann the best of luck, because her concerns for how such statements demean and marginalize gay people are right on.

            In my denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, things are about the same, unfortunately. We’d say that homosexuality is “against nature,” or “against creational norms.” People who argue that homosexuality is against nature believe that God reveals his intention for sexuality, at least in part, by divine norms or laws that can be deduced from the natural order. In my tradition there is actually a very deep philosophical well of reflection on whether or not such norms actually exist, and if they do, to what extent can we know them? The last question is really important. It is hard enough to interpret Biblical texts. But how does one interpret nature with a view to arriving at appropriate ethical conclusions? It can’t be easy.

            For example, I’m reminded of a person who once said to me, “Homosexuality is wrong. Anyone can see that God didn’t create two men or two women to fit together. The body parts just don’t align.” This person is saying, in effect, that what seems to be our “natural design,” should be the rule for how body parts get used. The argument, right or wrong, is an important one.

            However, it is worth noting here that not only is nature hard to interpret if you are reading it for  ethical norms, but it would also be very hard to develop a consistent application of such an ethic. Human activity, after all, is replete with actions that seem “against nature,” that few of us therefore regard as being against God’s will. In the area of sexual practice, for example, masturbation, oral sex and even kissing are actions that involve the use of the body in novel and not necessarily “normative” ways, at least given the primary uses of the plumbing and appendages involved. But beyond sexuality, the list of things humans do that they were not “designed” to do is endless. If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings. If we are supposed to bear children in pain we dare not use epidurals. The list goes on: in vitro fertilization and/or surrogate pregnancies, birth control, transplanted hearts, heart valves made of pig flesh, genetic engineering, artificial (not natural!) hips or knees or even facelifts . . . all of these technologies involve leaps of the imagination and use of the body in ways that are novel and imaginative. 

            Meanwhile, one supposes that if a behavior really is against nature, you would not find it in nature. Suffice it to say, however, that homosexual behavior has been widely documented in nature, including among chimpanzees. Homosexuality, like having red hair or an IQ of 170, isn’t so much against nature as it is just not that common in nature.

            Naturally, the ethics of homosexual behavior—like the ethics of heterosexual behavior—are complicated and deserve more reflection than I can give it in a short blog post. But arguing that homosexuality is against nature just isn’t going to work for me--or Anne Tesluk.