The man you see above is not a particularly close friend of mine. Our friendship has tended to oscillate ever since I was first encouraged to seek out his advice on how to live more like another friend I had come to know, Jesus of Nazareth. Even though he didn't really know Jesus at all in the physical sense, I was told, he knew him very well spiritually."See what Paul has to say," my friends told me.
So I called him up one afternoon, and told him what was on my mind: ministry. For a long time, he had some good advice to give. Lots of ideas about how to organize pastors, elders, deacons, the works. He was truly a good counselor, like a Jesus-infused Dr. Phil, only with a bit more of a temper and propensity for using curse words (at least when around the Galatian friends I knew).
I met him for some prayer after breakfast one day at the summer camp I always went to, though, and he sounded different. "Women should be silent in the church," he said. I was stung. Even a little frustrated. I had female friends who wanted to be pastors. "Maybe he's just a little pissed off today," I said to myself.
A few years later, as I left for church one Sunday, I heard him tell the wife of a friend to submit herself to the leadership of her husband. "Your husband should lead and rule over you as Christ over the entire Church," he said. "No way," I mumbled to myself. "Can't be what I just heard." Weren't we all equal, with no divisions of race, ethnicity, gender or economic class, like he had also assured me? I found myself disagreeing with him more and more. He was less refreshingly insightful, and more contradictory, than he used to be.
"Your gay and lesbian friends are sinning," he said to me another few years down the line, as we talked over a cup of coffee during my first semester of college. I remember that day. We had just settled down to talk. Like usual, he wasted no time. He was never one to beat around the bush, always shooting you straight whether you liked it or not. He was indefatigably confident, as assured as he had ever been when launching into a long, boisterous discourse on grace, eschatology or personal morality (or sometimes a mix of the three). The hounds of hell weren't going to stop him. They never did. I listened as politely as possible. I let him have his say about the subject, let him tell me about how he remembered saying the same thing to the local church in Rome years ago, when they called on him to settle their theological crises during the prime of his writing career.
When he finished, I set my cup down and, respectfully but firmly, told him our conversation that day had reached an end. I needed to reevaluate the benefit of our friendship.
After that, we didn't talk for a long time. We still don't talk very often, to be honest. I find him too frustrating of a friend to sit down with, more often than not. Always tooting his horn about his closeness to Jesus. Always telling everyone how, or how not, to live their personal lives. Always droning on about how the end of the world will come soon. He became a bit too obsessive and other-worldly for me.
I feel like giving him a piece of my mind after all these years, but most of the time, it's not worth it, anyway.
He'll say what he always has. And that's fine.
Sometimes, we'll have to agree to disagree, respectfully.
1 comment:
I personally think that Paul was a man of his times, but was also much more progressive than the church gives him credit for. The "historical" Paul allowed women in ministry, and, as part of his sitz im Leben, did condemn both homosexuality and pederasty. But, I also remember than many of Paul's mysogynist tendencies were just part of his time and place. Many of the sayings attributed to Paul were added by later authors.
Within the western tradition of Christianity, however, Paul seems to be the paradigm by which Christ is measured. And that bothers me. Paul ought to be measured through Christ, not the other way around. All in all, I like Paul in his zeal for spreading a God fo grace and love in a progessive fashion for 1st Century Asia Minor and the Near East. But I think that his message needs to be translated into a 21st century context as well.
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