Read the original article at MiamiHerald.com | Copyright ©2012 The Miami Herald

Sometimes, people hide inside the Bible.

That is, they use the Christian holy book as authority and excuse for biases that have nothing to do with God. They did this when women sought to vote and when African Americans sought freedom.

They are doing it now, as gay men and lesbians seek the right to be married.

The latest battleground in that fight is North Carolina, where voters go to the polls Tuesday to render a verdict on Amendment One, which would add to the state constitution the following stipulation: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”

Mind you, the Tarheel State already has a law on the books banning same-sex marriage. The would-be constitutional amendment is meant to double down on exclusion. And if you read the language carefully, you saw what many observers have seen — that it can also be interpreted as denying legal recognition to unmarried heterosexuals.

Not that this holds any sway with those who hide inside the Bible. “God has defined marriage,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins in a Sunday sermon quoted in the Charlotte Observer. “It is not up to us to redefine it.” In a letter to the editor, an Observer reader put it thusly: “You either believe [the Bible] or not.”

One wishes those people could spend a little quality time with Matthew Vines.

Vines is a Christian, a 22-year-old Harvard undergrad raised in a conservative evangelical church in Kansas. He is also gay and says he grew up being taught that the Bible condemns his sexual orientation. He took two years off from school to research and study whether or not that assertion is true.

The result is The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality. It’s a video — you can find it online with a simple Google search — of a speech he gave in March at a church in Wichita that has become a minor sensation. Small wonder. Vines’ speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same sex marriage, wrote that it “revolutionised” her thinking.

Vines points out, for instance, that the frequently quoted condemnation (homosexuality is an “abomination”) from the Old Testament lawbook of Leviticus has no application to Christians, who are bound by the teachings of the New Testament. He explains that St. Paul’s admonitions about the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” stem from modern mis-translations of ancient Greek terminology.

It is fascinating stuff, and there is not nearly enough space here to do it justice, but the salient point is this: Matthew Vines is not some godless heathen lobbing bombs at Christianity from outside its walls. No, he lives inside Christianity’s walls, still holds the faith in which he was raised. So this is not an outsider’s attack. It is an insider’s plea.

One hopes that plea is heeded. Vines’ speech is long — a little over an hour — but well worth the time, particularly for those seeking to reconcile first-century faith with 21st-century social concerns..

Many in North Carolina — many around the country — are swimming against the tide of human freedom and blaming God for it. Again, this is not a new thing. We saw it back when God was for segregation and against women’s suffrage.

How convenient it must be to lay your own narrowness and smallness off on God, to accept no responsibility for the niggardly nature of your own soul. Vines’ video is a welcome, overdue and eloquent rebuke of the moral and intellectual laziness of throwing rocks, then hiding inside Scripture. It is a reminder, too.

You don’t go to the Bible to hide. You go there to seek.

Read the original article at MiamiHerald.com | Copyright ©2012 The Miami Herald

If you think you may have an interest in such a small group, please let me know. Spiritual direction, also known as spiritual companionship, is both an ancient and a contemporary practice, rooted in the understanding that exploring one’s spiritual life may be undertaken as an intentional practice—not just prayer, or church participation—but a contemplative work developed in partnership with one who has been trained in helping others to discern and notice the presence of the divine in their daily lives. I became interested in this kind of experiential training (which was not offered when I was in seminary!) because it seemed to me that these practices are more useful than ever, as we work to be a spiritual community equipping its members to “reflect the path of Christ” not just in their religious lives, but, most importantly, in your lives in the world of work, school, family, culture, and community.

It is easy to see how crisis or catastrophe challenges one’s sense of the presence of the divine in daily life; more and more, I think, the hardships of daily life are in similar ways challenging and attenuating our ability to sense the holy and carry it with us as we work and live. The time immersing myself in this discipline of spiritual companionship has enlightened my work as a pastor, and deepened my ability to perceive the presence of the holy in hard times.

I have noticed and been deeply grateful for this richness of experience as I worked my way, pastorally, through the liturgical and spiritual terrain of Holy Week and Easter this year, so soon after the death of my mother. As many of you already have experienced in your own lives, the death of a parent challenges and changes our experience of our faith and of our ordinary life perspectives. Working through the stories of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection were challenging for me this year: trying to engage the practices I was taught in my Spiritual direction work, I was especially appreciative of the witness of Mark’s gospel this year: how the proclamation of resurrection may not be loud, joyful and certain in all times. The women of Mark saw their experience begin first in a recognition of emptiness; second in a willingness to watch and pay attention, and finally, in embracing a sense of awe at the mystery of the holy—so much that we cannot perceive nor understand. Resurrection joy came to them so slowly—as they left the emptiness of the tomb behind, left the old ways in the past, and went forward (“to Galilee”) to seek the presence of the Risen Christ. It has been, as a friend of mine observed, a Mark kind of Easter.

Like Mark, I am grateful for the witness of patience, steady love and companionship I have received from all of you during this season of loss. As ever, I see the risen Christ most clearly when I seek him in the community of the faithful here at Riviera. In our baptisms, adoptions, new member gatherings, confirmation classes, worship and play together, as well as in our times of standing with each other in challenge or loss. The ancient tradition of the Church says that Easter is such an important festival for our re-creation as God’s people that, like the first week of Creation, it requires a full “week” of Sundays for us to begin to live into the Easter experience. So we have seven weeks of Easter—each Sunday, a day in the week of God’s new creation, as we ponder, play, and pray our way into resurrection life. May this season of Easter—all seven weeks of it!—be a time for you each, as well, of appreciating the open and even empty places in your own lives, and gratefully making way for experiences of awe, a pondering of life’s mysteries, and the tentative growth of the newness of life of resurrection.

–Laurie