Tag: gender

Can you be anything you want?

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When I was a kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, my Dad told me that I could be anything I wanted to be, and I believed him. He wanted me to be a doctor, or a CPA, or an Army officer. I became an Air Force officer. Close. Dad’s generation had won the greatest war in human history and times were good. What could possibly be wrong with dreaming that you could be anything you chose?

Well, Dad would never have imagined that his boy might dream of growing up to be a girl.

Now, I never dreamed that, but a lot of folks like my late father might be surprised by the conversations parents and kids are having today. But here’s the thing. While the greatest generation won the great war, it went on to lose the culture war back home. Society started replacing the concept of the transcendent with the concept of self. As churches started shrinking, some replaced the biblical narrative of Creation—Fall—Restoration with “God just wants to bless you and make you happy.” Still other churches replaced cultural engagement with finger wagging.

So, why should we be surprised that a new generation thinks it’s OK to switch genders, or even define “gender” for oneself? Aren’t they just taking us at our word, like I did with my Dad, that they can be anything?

But this is about more than choice.

A small number of people experience a mismatch between gender given at birth and how they understand themselves, and that leads to anxiety and distress. Some churches have treated these folks with disdain; others with unquestioning affirmation. Neither approach is right. The good news is that the historic Christian faith has lots of resources to help.

We are all made in God’s image; “fearfully and wonderfully made,” the psalmist said. Every single one of us is someone for whom Christ died. But we’re fallen, and that means the image of God in each of us needs to be restored.

Jesus didn’t come into the world, become one of us, and die a painful death just so we could be anything we want to be. He did it so he could restore his image in us; so that we could become the persons he created us to be.

God’s idea of what we can become is infinitely greater than any category we were born into, or any new category we create for ourselves. Every person you will ever see is someone loved by God; someone you could spend eternity with.

We really don’t have the power to become anything we choose.

But as the church, we do have the power to give the world a glimpse of the unconditional love of Christ.

Force of the nots

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Surely one of the most powerful verses in the New Testament is Galatians 3:28, where the Apostle Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

We need to teach this to our hearts in divided times like this.

When you look closely at the sentence in Greek, you find that the word “not” is used three times, and the conjunction “and not” is used twice. Five “nots” in one sentence. Paul isn’t saying that our differences are unimportant, or that they’ve disappeared. And he’s certainly not justifying slavery. Paul is pointing to the impact of the gospel; what God has done in Jesus Christ.

Jesus came into the world. He lived the life we could never live and died the death we deserved. Then he overcame death. When we trust him in faith, he adopts us as “sons of God.” In effect, we’re like “mini-Christs,” not unlike Jesus himself.

This oneness in Jesus supersedes every human category. Each person is someone God chose to create, to love, and to be with God for eternity. Each person you meet is literally of cosmic importance.

Yet we live in a culture that insists on labelling and categorizing everyone. Your group, gender, race, religion, preference, and so on, becomes what defines you. And however we see ourselves and others, we can find a cable channel or an internet site to reinforce our point of view, deepening our divisions.

We need to let the “force of the nots” act on our hearts. We need to stand up for the oppressed, and stand against every label that obscures our best and truest identity.

You are all one in Christ Jesus.

Gender roles

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The minister was officiating at a wedding where the bride and groom were serious believers. Again and again, he reminded the bride of what the Apostle Paul himself had said again and again, “Wives submit to your husbands.”

Apparently the minister forgot to mention what Paul said to husbands, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.”

And how did Christ love the church?

By dying for it.

We all tend to pick and choose the verses in the Bible we take more seriously than others. Some verses resonate with our worldview; we love them. Some challenge our worldview; those we tend to ignore. One area where this happens frequently today is in gender roles.

In 1st Corinthians 14:34, Paul says that “women should remain silent in church.” If you’re the minister at the wedding I just mentioned, that verse probably reinforces your worldview. If you think “all people are created equal,” a phrase that is not in the Bible, you worldview causes you to reject that verse.

But we should all ask ourselves, if women were so important to Jesus, and so prominent in the life of the early church, (and they were) why would Paul write something that seemed to contradict what was actually going on? Women were teaching and preaching in the churches Paul organized.

The answer has to be that God is always challenging our worldview, no matter what it is. In this case, Paul was addressing particular cultural practices which interfered with hearing the word preached in church, whether the preacher happened to be a woman or a man.

If you don’t let God challenge your most cherished beliefs, is God really God to you?