Faith Works 8-2-24

Faith Works 8-2-24

Jeff Gill

On taking offense in a constructive fashion

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There's piety, and there's discipleship.

I wouldn't want to say they can't and don't overlap. They often do.

My personal piety runs to practices that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to any person interested in my faith; not all Christians follow the same devotional habits nor would I say they should. You could make a case that, especially in our public faith, any thing we do or say should be at least potentially a recommendation to others, a sort of evangelistic statement in deed and word.

The Apostle Paul famously complicated this question with his statements about marriage, which (at that point in his life, anyhow) he said was not for him, but others might be different. You can look that one up.

In a church I served, we had a program on Bible reading which I supported, adding in an option for listening in your car to your scripture passages on cassette tapes. Someone came to me, sincerely but rather insistently, arguing that this was a mistake: people should read a printed Bible while sitting still, or it didn't count. I pointed out Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch's situation where the latter was reading Isaiah while riding in a chariot, and the reaction was not a happy one to my comparison.

Piety may well be a worn leather-bound King James Version, but discipleship is being well-versed in the Bible, however you access the text. I think we can get general consensus on this.

Piety would include, I'd argue, faithfulness to my word, including my wedding vows; discipleship means extending grace and opening paths into church life for those whose lives may have followed some crooked paths, not always of their choosing. More bluntly, I strongly affirm fidelity in marriage, but I think we've learned that when the church becomes an army that shoots its wounded, and casts off anyone who's been through a divorce as unworthy for membership, let alone leadership, it runs the risk of preaching only to the converted, of being the proverbial "museum for saints, not a hospital for sinners."

I was thinking about this subject because of my recent writings about how faith communities can promote trust, and an intersection with my historical researches venturing into an orphanage effort in my religious tradition in the 1890s. A strong woman in leadership opened up a "foundling hospital" and welcomed abandoned mothers, but was driven out of her role when she refused to bar unmarried mothers from her facility. Married men, of course, were the group that ushered her out the door; she went on to start over and open up a home for mothers in need of all sorts.

My first thought on reading this was "I wonder about those men." It's unfair, perhaps, but I couldn't stop myself from suspecting that not all of those men had been chaste in their singleness or faithful in marriage themselves. Maybe they were. And in wanting to promote marriage and commitment, they took their piety and pushed it over onto how they wanted both discipleship and mission to be practiced, shoving mercy to one side.

More locally, I have been puzzling for months now over a billboard on a major highway, overlooking a field soon to host high school sports, with two toothbrushes in a cup and the oblique legend (on first reading, at least, to the naive) "Conserve energy. Shack up."

The folks behind #TheEnvironmentExcuse want to be clever, certainly not pious, about climate change. To do so they toy with an issue I think is near to my sense of discipleship. I'm not advocating a return to social stigma around cohabitation, but I can't help but wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general, and feel discomfort because it's against the goals I would want our youth to see held up.

What do you think?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on his piety and discipleship every day, with mixed results. Tell him how you'd like to decorate a billboard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

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