Connections Part II -Boomers, Millennials Despite

Connections – Part II

A Boomer Regretting Purity Codes and Rejoicing in Millennials.

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            A motivational speaker I saw years ago on television repeated a famous phrase to his audience saying, “If something is important enough to be done, it is important enough to be done well.”  He then told how he didn’t like that saying because it kept too many people from working to the point that they could do something well.  He liked instead to say, “If something is important enough to be done well, it is important enough to be done poorly until it can be done well.”

            I am by age, a boomer.  Lately have been reading blogs mostly by millennials.  I am not an expert on millennials.  What I have been reading may not be typical of what millennials believe.  I am like someone that happened to jump into the Atlantic Ocean.  That would not make me an expert on the Atlantic Ocean, for how I would describe the Atlantic Ocean after diving into it would be dependent upon whether I jumped in near the shores of Jamaica, or if I dove in near the northeast coastline of Newfoundland.  I would only be able to tell you about the Atlantic from diving into one small portion of that ocean.  That is about how well I know millennials.  I’ve read some blogs and have felt a connection to those whom I have read.

            I am trying to write honestly in this blog while writing with two groups of people in mind.  I want to write something to encourage some newfound millennial acquaintances and I want to write to my fellow boomers because ultimately I believe both the boomer and the millennial need each other for the sake of the cause of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I say this despite some tendency toward very different understandings of life in Christ.  I and many of my old Boomer friends tend to be conservative, traditionalist, and patriarchal.  Many of the millennials I am reading announce themselves as progressive, feminist, and Christian.  But I think I am learning that a lot of differences matter less if you are willing to get to know a person enough to get to like them.

            I have met most of my newfound millennial friends on Twitter.  I am only on Twitter because I read a blog that blessed me.  I wrote a blog in response to that blog, and felt I should at least tell the woman about the blog I had written in regard to her blog.  I didn’t want to write what would look like an advertisement for my blog in her comments section.  Her blog site pretty much narrowed down my writing to her through the use of a Twitter account.  I joined Twitter to send her the tweet and signed up to follow her tweets in order for my tweet to get to her.  She responded kindly to my blog and even signed up to follow me on Twitter.  I wasn’t sure about the Twitter thing so at first I tried not to bother her too much.  But she would tweet to those following her about ordinary things in life, with warmth and a sense of humor.  Once in a while we had little conversations.  I think my favorite went something like this.  She was in Tennessee on a hot day, but is a gal normally living in a cooler climate.  She tweeted, “Who invented the air conditioner and has he been sainted yet?”  When it didn’t seem like anybody was going to respond I tweeted “I don’t know who invented it, but I am sure he did more good in that invention for more people than I ever will help in my life.”  Being something of a lover of trivia I couldn’t leave well enough alone and looked up air conditioning on Wikipedia.  I tweeted to her that it looked like “Willis Carrier invented the air conditioner but hasn’t been sainted.  I added though that it took Joan nearly 500 years to be sainted.  I still couldn’t leave the thread alone and wrote back, “Isn’t getting your name in Wikipedia sort of like being sainted?”  She wrote back, “Ha! Ha! St. Willis of Wikipedia!”  When you have an exchange like that, where there is a sense of warmth (or coolness since we were talking air conditioning) and also with a bit of a sense of humor, you will probably be inclined to speak with some kindness even if you later discover you disagree with the person about something.  You won’t get in a hurry to throw bitter insinuations against the person.  Instead even if you will discover something you have to disagree about, you will want to express your viewpoint without having to forfeit the level of friendship you have come to know in your comments toward one another.  I know the Scriptures speak of how two must be agreed to walk together, but I think the converse is sometimes just about as true.  If we allow ourselves to walk with someone for a while we may well discover what we have to actually share and enjoy with one another.  Once we start walking together we will discover the reasons we were meant to walk together.

            I don’t know exactly how to describe this first of persons I met on Twitter.  An acquaintance is one to whom we offer respect and privacy knowing that we are not yet ready to regard each other as friends or kindred spirits.  Sometimes it is best to offer one the respect for an acquaintance than to too quickly speak of them as friends.  Friendship comes with a commitment cultivated by an understood invitation to companionship in this joined journey we call life. But neither do I wish to lightly dismiss the warmth of humanity I have discovered in reading and feeling her words.  I have also experienced kindness from others among my newly found friendships or acquaintances.  Friend or acquaintance, mostly acquaintance I think but friendship only degrees away.  So if I say acquaintance think it not for lack of enjoyment of what each of you have given to me; and if I describe you as a friend think me not expressing empty flattery.  Maybe this first of persons I have met on Twitter is here especially to remind me that whenever I poke out words on my keyboard to fly into the outer space of the internet, then the one reading these words will be a human being.  Some of you may not remember a borrowed VHS from a video story saying, “Please be kind, rewind.”  Such words are perhaps still good words to place upon a keyboard, or at least in my mind to be remembered when pressing a send sign.  “Please be kind, rewind; another human on the other end of this line.”

            One of the reasons I am a traditionalist is because the Christian tradition is like a meandering river flowing through the ages from its source to its destiny, soaking up human experience and offering water to thirsty souls each time it cuts its channel across the banks of humanity.  Tradition is not first and foremost something at which you point and say “tradition teaches us” as if tradition is merely meant to be a trump card in a debate.  Tradition is never that simple.  We boomers, we Evangelicals made some big mistakes in our emphases that we expressed.  You millennials have inherited the debris we have left behind.  One day in church history readings our descendants will look with strange faces and say what . . . at what you may now say what  the, you know what I mean?  Tradition weaves our human story the good and the bad to be learned from our errors and our contributions.  Tradition is a sacred stream cut along the banks of human flesh linking our source, our places, and our destiny.  Our descendants will wonder how foolish we boomers must have been to create our varied versions of the purity codes.  But they will underestimate the sorrow it created upon those imagined helped by our excesses.  Tradition will remember the story to preserve the lesson minus the sorrow.

            It was not until my new friend/acquaintance and sister in Christ wrote about her having to reject the purity codes, with a sense of sorrow near bitterness that I began to think of how my soul had been affected in a similar way.  But I was of another generation and could not yet think that what we were creating in our words of teaching were words that hindered humanity and created sorrow.  I could only imagine that I deserved to feel the suffering for my sins.  It took a voice outside of my experience to awaken in me a sense of something that had gone wrong, yes really wrong.  Believe me, for I am sure that people of my generation intended something far different from what we created.  We imagined we were setting you on higher ground than where we started, to help you when the floods came.  But it turned out we were only hiding you from a possibility of developing your humanity without the perverted strangeness and weirdness we created with purity codes.  It is what happens when we imagine that it is good to place a fence around sin.  We never by our plans and schemes can do away with sin.  We can only interrupt the growth of our humanity.  We cannot live in this world and be kept away from the temptations of sin.  If that is what is needed there is a prayer with such a petition in praying the “Our Father” but no human can create that place where we will be hidden from the temptation to sin.  That is dear millennial what we boomers forgot in our haste to create the purity codes.

            We boomers were born in a country which sort of took a lot of pride in its being a place of religious freedom, although most of us thought of that freedom mostly in terms of the varied branches of Christianity.  If you want to understand how Boomer Evangelicals were shaped you might find this original introduction to the classic movie “The Ten Commandments” interesting.  For your generation it is now clear that my generation’s hope of preserving the country through culture wars is a lost cause.  But we were shaped in another age by those who believed that a good law protected us for lives of freedom and then we began to imagine that enough laws might create in us righteousness, which was never true to the words of wisdom offered by law, prophets, sages, the divine or his apostles.  For by law, there comes the knowledge of sin and not the deeds of righteousness.  We imagined and were disappointed you did not join us in that doomed venture.  We are filled with gloom as our lives limp towards the evening and sunset of our years, while you struggle to build new foundations, to forge a new vision where God’s love may bloom and flourish.  It is easy to see now that we, in our best efforts, simply made the work you have to do all the more painfully difficult.  I think more than you realize many of us feel the pain of our follies, and it is no comfort that you too will create follies for your little ones.

            I will try to tell you how I think we created the idea for the purity codes.  I feel the need to do so first so that some of my Boomer friends who imagine they did nothing wrong in this endeavor and think it your fault for turning away from good teaching may at least come to question if these purity codes were good teaching.  But also I speak of this that you may understand with your own lives that we who are human do our greatest evil when in folly we try to create our best intentions forgetting wisdom.  Wisdom would teach us that no good thing can be added to which God gives us, who perfects our souls through the crucible and the trials and tribulations of life.  You too will be tempted to think there is a better way for your little ones to learn the lessons of wisdom in their lives.  You too will be tempted to try to hide them away from all temptations beyond their childhood even into their adulthood.

            One of the things that influenced Evangelical Christians in all this, was a sort of understanding of the Bible that reflected Protestant preaching since the time of Luther.  Martin Luther explained the Scriptures as a sort of dialectic, the blending of two opposing truths having to be held in proper tension to one another.  Luther’s dialectic was the Law/Gospel dialectic.  That was part of Luther’s theology, but in Evangelicalism this Law/Gospel teaching became much more exaggerated and minimized into something hardly ever seen in Lutheran circles.  So I do not condemn Luther but say a sort of strange concoction brewed from this dialectic affected many Evangelicals.  The understanding of the Gospel in these quarters became that one preaches men into knowing they are sinners so that they will seek Christ as the answer to the problem of sin.  So gradually the entire focus of such churches became the problem of sin.  That is a focus which once accepted will tend to corrupt everything.  For Christ who came to save us from sin did not come to merely drive us to anxiously seek him, but he came to deliver us from our sins by offering to us God’s own divine life as the sure anchor of a new life that will overcome sin and death.  But everything must become twisted if we imagine that always we need to be convincing people they are sinners needing always to be fleeing to Jesus, for this is strangely in its own incompetence a denial that Jesus has come to present to us eternal divine life in which he beckons us to come, to eat, to drink, and to live.

            The desire to preach men into seeing their need of Christ through their sins leads a church to be sin oriented.  A good sermon is sometimes evaluated by people in these sort of churches as a sermon where people really feel their sins and so they turn to Jesus.  Old timers called it a “come to Jesus meeting.”

            Where this sort of preaching wreaked havoc in my life was in regard to how the Bible taught that whosoever looks upon a woman to lust for her, has committed adultery with her in his heart already.  This purity code that seemed to especially crush ladies in these churches had its male counterpart in how we were taught about lust, not to help us define and eliminate lust from our human experience, but to create in us a sense of how we were terrible sinners that needed to come to Jesus.  A minister with a keen pastoral heart would not leave people to imagine that an attraction to the beauty of a woman when no sin is designed and when no evil thought is contemplated is something evil in and of itself.  But someone in a hurry to make sure people feel their sense of depravity in their lust problem will preach a whole church into conviction for looking upon a woman with lust until a guy who sees a gal he thinks is pretty in his church imagines himself beset by a great sin.  He comes to Jesus to flee not from lust but from natural human affections.  This is not a wise or healthy Christianity but merely a twisted application of what had been once a Christian sentiment.  That was the harm done in me, often through my own desire to zealously discover “my sins.”  I did this to myself in a sort of twisted narcissism even if some went a bit overboard in preaching lust until it made a circle representing humanity and crossed that circle as if to say humanity is not allowed here.  I never realized how that had impacted my life until I read a blog by a millennial where finally I could see how I had miserably failed to distinguish affection, attraction, recognition of beauty, and even innocent desire from the sort of lust that refuses to be satisfied with the wife of one’s marriage covenant.  Or from lust which would viciously dare to objectify a woman as if she were merely an instrument created for a man’s pleasure rather than a living co-equal in humanity and a precious partner in salvation.  I was failing to learn to reject real lust while I was discovering in the name of rejecting lust, to reject much of me that was human.

            The purity code is an approach to life that imagines living life protected from the possibilities of temptation.  An ethical code is formed to protect a girl from herself as she is handed off from father to husband.  It is as if a woman is created to know two relationships with men in her life; a father and a husband.  But does that ring true to the experience of women who knew Christ or the Apostles?  Christ had not only his twelve disciples following him but there were also dear ladies and young women who followed him.  We must never minimize the relationships Jesus had with the three women named Mary, and the one called Martha.  If we overlook these relationships because Jesus was Savior as well as human being, then we must be all the more careful to never overlook how the same phenomenon is present in St. Paul’s ministry in the Book of Acts.  How many women are mentioned in Acts with connections of varied relationships to the Apostle Paul?  They are described as co-laborers with him in the Gospel.

I raise the issue of St. Paul’s numerous varied friendships with Christian ministry during his ministry to remind us of something obvious that seems to have been missed or made of no importance by the purity code.  The New Testament at points recognizes that even if marriage will probably be part of most people’s future it is always in the New Testament optional.  But the development of varied human relationships is mandated by the call of the Gospel for we are to love our neighbor as ourselves and we are to love the brethren.  We are to love one another, so we have to come to grips with how we are in this life continually to be growing in our capacity to respond to Christ’s love by loving one another.  The purity code suggests that is not the case.  It suggests it is improper to have friends of the opposite sex that you will never sleep with.  Isn’t that a perverse view of humanity dredged up by an obsession with sin?  The Book of the Purity codes fails to honestly differentiate from the experience of a thirteen year old girl who needs to understand the importance of the word “no” in her youth as compared to the life of a twenty-three year old woman still being treated as a child who must not involve herself with male friendships until that right Christian man comes into her life for marriage.  This view ill prepares a woman for having friends who are Christian brothers outside of marriage, but respectful of the uniqueness of the marriage relationship.  To reject the book of purity codes is not to reject the need for faithfulness and moral consistency but it is to reject the idea that a woman is meant to be locked up in a marriage like an inmate in a prison.  If the New Testament is a proper model for human behavior then why did our Lord and his apostles have friends among women who were not their wives?  I suspect it was because they were growing in grace and discovering how to love one another without threatening the sanctity of marriage.

Perhaps I am not saying this well enough.  I am saying that the purity code concept misses the reality in the Christian life that building human relationships is mandated and not an option in the Christian life.  It is actually marriage that is optional.  That is why a purity code that seeks to preserve a woman from serious relationships with men until they are joined to a man in his holy matrimony cannot be sound Biblical teaching.  Marriage is optional, relationships are expected.

The only way to correct the errors of the purity code mentality is to create a different vision for understanding of how we are to seek to overcome sin.  The idea of repeatedly hammering away at men’s sins so they will repeatedly have fresh coming to Jesus moments is not a healthy vision of what Christ came to do when he came to save sinners.  In the historic and ancient Christian expressions of a life of righteousness at least three ingredients were seen as essential to a healthy Christian life.  First one did learn in repentance to say “no” to evil, sin, the lusts of the world, and the devil’s influence.  But no was always a way of turning ourselves from one direction we were going outside of Christ, to turn around and say our “yes” to the call of Christ.  We are meant to say our “yes” to Christ by turning to him in faith that we might live in him and that we might have him living in us.  By faith we have a full-fledged union with Christ.  Thirdly, in Christ we are to realize that we are headed towards a new destiny.  We are told by St. John that we are moving towards the time in the Great day ahead when we shall see God and shall be like him.  Imagine that my brothers and sisters in Christ.  We will see God, the one whom St. John describes saying “God is love.”  We shall see him and we shall be like him.  Presently, our sins even if we don’t dwell on them around the clock are there to kick us in the behind every now and then.  But not at that final “then” at the place of the destiny of everything Christ is doing in us.  In that day we shall see him and shall be like him and death and sin as John Donne might have said shall themselves die.  We shall see him who is love and we shall be as him who is love.  GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING!  GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING!

Instead of the purity codes we should have taught our millennial children that they had an opportunity to grow in grace, to learn to love one another, to learn to love not primarily for their day of marriage, but for a yet greater day when we would see him and be like him.  There is the goal and all who have this goal St. John says will purify themselves.  That is a purity code to hunger and thirst after all the days of our life.

            I hope in writing this I have spoken to the Boomer who has made his or her share of errors in this life.  We knew better, we understood in other things that putting a fence around God’s commandments to keep people from being tempted usually only hindered them from becoming human.  We knew that and still we missed it when we created these seemingly brilliant purity codes.  We did it with the best of intentions and yet we did it to our sons and daughters, the very ones who we loved more than anything else in this world.  If we had but realized what we were doing or what harm it would do upon some of our sons and daughters we would have long ago repented with tears and begged God’s forgiveness and that of our sons and daughters.  But we never saw it.  No parent wants to put a millstone about the neck of the son and daughter they love.  But our errors may do just that.  Boomers, if we have done that let us ask God to forgive us and let us ask our children to forgive us.

Millennials be tender even though you have been sometimes hurt and your lives sometimes made a sort of hell because when you broke away from these restrictions your parents imagined you broke away from them and from the faith.  Your churches treated you poorly because you were headstrong.  You were hurt.  Even so be merciful for soon you will have your own little ones and you will imagine ways you might keep them from temptation that also will involve placing fences around the ordinary temptations of life.  By all means give a a little child your constant protection, but slowly allow them to take their steps toward adulthood and all its spiritual dangers.  Train them well and then see how well they take their training and apply their own faithfulness to that test soon to come.  My Millennial brothers and sisters you will discover soon enough that no parent relishes giving their child into the unknown of adulthood, but rest assured when they know you are making your way in our Lord, then they will speak of you with joy and pride even if they don’t quite why you feel you have to reject some things they taught you.  Let them know your heart toward Christ and toward them, that there remains love for them.  Be not hard on them for even in parenting as in all things in the Christian life, we know only in part.  Our salvation is never because we know in full but always because we are known in full.  Remember that He who secures our salvation is one who overcomes both our sins against others and those sins steeped in pain pressed upon us.

Remember that and close your eyes and let the healing begin knowing that the one thing and only thing really true in this universe is that God is love and he has demonstrated that love in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  Let that truth fill your souls and let that truth guide your future steps.

            Because we have such a Savior I believe that we who are Boomers and ye who are millennials can begin to learn to walk together towards that day.  We have sinned.  You will too.  But God in Christ is bigger than our sins, bigger than our sins against him, and bigger than the sins inflicted upon us.  I fully believe that we who are boomers will be incomplete in life unless the millennials in our lives are walking next to us.  I fully believe that millennials will be incomplete without us boomers who will depart from your lives hopefully only after leaving you a heritage for which you may be thankful until you have finished running your course.  I fully believe there is enough sin in both of our camps to ruin this world and I believe there is enough love in Christ to overcome all our sins put together.  There is an African proverb that says “If you want to walk fast walk alone; but if you want to walk far take someone along.”  I dream of seeing boomer, millennial, and all between walking together.  We will be then be joined to a future generation to be raised in the love we learned when at last we began walking together.  “If you want to walk fast walk alone, but if you want to walk far take someone along.”  God bless you with His great love in Jesus Christ.