Prayer and Soul Care
Christian relationships bound in truth are expressed in the way we pray for one another, the burdens we share with one another, and the sympathy we have for one another. Let us be faithful to pray that all is well with body and soul of our brothers and sisters in Christ!
One of the books of the Bible that I have come to appreciate over the years is the letter of Third John. This short letter from John the Apostle to his beloved brother Gaius is packed with timeless, practical principles for members of Christ’s church. But there is one verse that is specifically helpful when we consider how we as brothers and sisters in Christ should pray for one another. I believe if God’s people would consider the ways John prays for Gaius in this letter and begin to pray for one another in this way, not only would our prayer lives grow stronger, but relationships in the church would also grow deeper, and the souls of men and women would be strengthened.
In the second verse of this letter John writes,
Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul.
This prayer of John lays out three clear ways in which we can and should pray for one another as those who are walking in the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:
Wellness in Circumstances (v. 2a)
Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you…
Think for a moment what “all may go well with you” could include. Consider how it would change our prayer and our relationships within the church if we committed to praying that all may go well with specific members of the body. First of all, we would need to know more about the different areas of their everyday lives. We would need to spend time talking to them getting to know them on a deeper level. This in itself would strengthen the relationships we have as we walk in truth together.
Praying for the general well-being of the church family would mean we are praying for their life within the church, their family life, their vocation, their ministry, and their financial well-being.
Wellness in Body (v. 2b)
Beloved, I pray…that you may be in good health…
This is one we are usually devoted to. Our prayer meetings, personal prayers, and family prayers are often filled with prayers for those who are sick, those who have been injured, and those who may be facing death. This is good and right for the church to do. When people are going through times of physical suffering and affliction, they need not only the comfort of God to persevere, but the wisdom of God to understand what he is seeking to teach them during this season of life.
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Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools
Queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors.
Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:
A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. This traveling minister, who describes drag ministry as a “divine duty,” is lauded by a Florida pastor as “an angel in heels” after appearing in that church in a sequin dress to deliver a children’s sermon and denounce the privilege of Whiteness and cis-ness.
At Duke University’s Methodist-affiliated divinity school, pastors-in-training and future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: “You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.”
And the Presbyterian News Service offers online educational series such as “Queering the Bible” (2022) and “Queering the Prophets” (2023) during Pride Month. A commentary in the former refers to Jesus as “this eccentric ass freak” who challenged first-century gender norms.These examples from this year and last are just a few illustrating how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.” Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
Thus it is in the presence of the sexually marginalized—such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon—where we find the presence of Jesus. In the language of queer theology, queerness is a sign of God’s love because “queer flesh is sacramental flesh,” and authentic “Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise,” whereas traditional Christianity has been corrupted into “a systematic calumny against hedonist love.”
Such claims may seem outrageous and offensive to the uninitiated, as do the antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group of provocative drag queen nun impersonators scheduled to be honored at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night” on June 16—this coming Friday.
But queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors, said Ellen Armour, chair of feminist theology and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
Back in 2018, Duke divinity students walked out in protest during the divinity dean’s State of the School speech to demand a queer theology course. Today Duke Divinity School offers a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, Theology, and Ministry, “where we privilege questions of gender and sexuality in the academic study and practices of theology, ministry, and lived religion.”
Queer theology is punctuated by a penchant for the outrageous and the scandalous, deploying graphic, carnal—and at times pornographic—imagery for shock value and dramatic effect, but its core religious claims are dead serious.
“Critics will say that a ‘Queer Jesus’ is a perverse or blasphemous fiction, invented by queer folks for reasons of self-justification, or accuse me and other LGBTQI Christians of being deviant,” queer minister and author Robert E. Shore-Goss wrote in 2021.
Shore-Goss is an ordained Catholic Jesuit priest who fell in love with another Jesuit, resigned from the Society of Jesus, and worked as a pastor in the MCC United Church of Christ in the Valley, in North Hollywood, Calif. MCC stands for the Metropolitan Community Church, reputedly the world’s most queer-affirming denomination that includes churches that perform polyamory nuptial rites to marry multiple partners.
“Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present,” Shore-Goss wrote. “Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders. … Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power.
“They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
Shore-Goss initially agreed to a phone interview for this article, then canceled with a rushed email: “Wait a second I searched Real Clear Investigations and it is a GOP organization, and I will not help you in the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people. They are full of grace and healthy spirituality.” Isaac Simmons, the Methodist drag queen known as Penny Cost, also initially agreed to an interview, excited to hear that this reporter had read six queer theology books, sections of other books, along with other materials: “Just about all of those books are on my bookshelf!! You are definitely hitting the nail on the head!” But Simmons/Cost never responded to follow-up emails to set up a phone call. Other queer theology experts either declined comment or did not respond. One, based in England, requested a “consultation fee.”
Encountering the established scholarly oeuvre of queer theology is an introduction to titles like “Radical Love,” “Rethinking the Western Body,” “Indecent Theology,” “The Queer God,” and “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a tome co-edited by Shore-Goss that “queers” every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, exceeding 1,000 pages. Queer theologians invite readers to see God as a sodomite, Jesus as a pervert, the disciples as gay, the Trinity as an orgy, and Christian unconditional love as a “glory hole.”
By “queering” holy writ and “cruising” the scriptures—two of the ways in which queer theologians use gay slang to describe their hermeneutical strategy—God’s revelation is “coming out” (of the closet), and those who opt to transition their gender experience the power of Christ’s resurrection. In the apocalyptic proclamation of the pioneering queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid: “The kenosis [self-emptying] of omnisexuality in God is a truly genderfucking process worthy of being explored.”
Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news.
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Do You Know What Tomorrow Holds?
Consider especially his parable of the rich fool as found in Luke 12:16-21: And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” We all need to learn from this story and take it to heart. Will you make it through the night?
In the 1995 song “Days Like This” by Van Morrison we find this refrain: “Oh my mama told me, There’ll be days like this”. We all can have them. It might be a quite shocking or hardcore day that we did not see coming and was quite unexpected. My recent reading reminded me of this reality.
Now and then something I read will jump off the page and really impact me. What might seem like a rather ordinary and unexceptional sentence really struck me when I read it last night. I refer to Richard Phillips’ new 2-volume, 1400-page expository commentary on Genesis (P&R, 2023). I was reading his remarks about the Joseph story.
You would know it well. Except for chapter 38, the last 14 chapters of Genesis all revolve around Joseph. That is a full quarter of the entire book. In this narrative we clearly see the providence of God throughout. What people planned for evil, God planned for good (Gen. 50:20).
The sentence he had penned which grabbed me was this one: “Like Joseph, none of us knows what any given day will bring” (Vol. 2, p. 330). Yes, it is rather obvious, but still… Most of us wake up each morning fully expecting the day to go like most of our previous days. We usually do not expect that any major, dramatic event will occur.
Joseph would have woken that morning like most others, yet by the end of the day he found himself heading off to Egypt, sold as a slave – all because of his brothers’ intense dislike of him. Wow, I bet you he didn’t see that one coming! Talk about your day not exactly going as you expected it would!
My Own Story
Most of us might have days like this. When people ask me about my testimony, I have to say that what happened to Joseph sorta happened to me one day. No, I was not sold into slavery and bundled off to Egypt. But it was still quite a radical and unexpected day.
The day was August 15, 1971 – it was the day I became a Christian. There I was that morning, minding my own business and doing more of the same of what I had been doing for quite a while. I woke up and drove with a friend from my hometown in Wisconsin to Madison. I often enjoyed going to Milwaukee or Madison to get some new rock albums (although they could be found in Sheboygan).
I bought three albums that day – two of them which I still remember. One was a new Moody Blues album. I also scored some more dope – a bag of psilocybin (magic mushrooms). We got back home, and I jumped on my bike to ride to some friends’ place to do what we did just about every day: listen to rock albums and take a lot of drugs.
But I never got to hear those albums nor take that dope. But I wrote all this up before, so if you don’t mind, let me share some of that here:
Cheryl, a hippy girl that I had known well, was with a few others, driving down the street in the opposite direction.
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The Kingdom and The Church: Closer Than You Think
Once we understand that the local church is the witness to and manifestation of the kingdom the Bible makes more practical sense. In the kingdom, possessions are shared so that no one has to suffer want. That’s why the needs of the covenant community are met through the deacons. In the kingdom, unrepentant sinners are barred from entering. That’s why we have membership and church discipline. In the kingdom there is relational harmony and everyone is accepted by God and delights in God through his Son Jesus Christ. This is not only the goal of the church, but only in the church could we ever expect to see these realities.
It has become commonplace in parts of the missional discussion to make a strong emphasis on the distinction between the kingdom and the church. I agree the two are not identical. Try replacing “kingdom” in the gospels with “church” or “church” with “kingdom” in the epistles and you quickly realize synonyms they are not.
But like the proverbial rear view mirror, might these objects–the kingdom and the church–be closer than they appear?
What are We Talking About?
The kingdom is often described as God’s reign and rule. I like to particularize this definition by pointing to the first and last chapters of the Bible. Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22 give us a picture of the kingdom. Where the kingdom is present there is peace, provision, and security. Mourning and pain give way to joy and comfort. Human relationships work right, and our relationship with God is free and confident. Most importantly, in the kingdom God is all in all. Consequently, the wicked will not inherit the kingdom. They cannot belong to God’s realm, because sin cannot stand in the presence of the King. In the kingdom, everyone worships and reverences the King.
This literal heaven on earth is what the kingdom of God is like. Adam and Eve lost it in the garden. The Israelites lost a type of it in the promised land. And Jesus came to usher in the fullness of the kingdom once and for all, culminating in the day when the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15).
Where Will We See It?
If the kingdom of God is heaven breaking into earth, Eden being replanted, the New Jerusalem nailing in stakes, then we should expect to see the kingdom almost exclusively in the church. Of course, the church, living in the world, ought to embody the principles of the kingdom.
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