KNOW What You Don't Believe But No Idea What You Do Believe?
Have you ever played Jenga?
If you haven’t, it’s the game where you construct a tower of 54 hardwood blocks stacked in levels of three placed next to each other. The whole purpose of the game is to not make the tower fall because once it falls the game is over and whoever made it fall loses, and everyone else wins! I want you to pretend that a Jenga tour, represents the whole of your beliefs, your values, your personhood. As a child adults, all had an idea of the kind of future adult they hope for you to be.
I was taught to respect my parents, do my chores, get average grades, the Bible had all the answers, and to trust the authority of my pastors. Despite the valiant effort of the adults to build a tall, strong and stable tower. There were plenty of forces in my teens and 20s that would poke at the tower of my beliefs. Asking questions like:
was it really a sin to be gay?
why do women seem to do a majority of the work in the church but don’t have a seat at the board table?
If we used the bible to support slavery might we be using it to support the oppression of LGBTQIA+ people?
Was Scripture intended to be a co-authored book about God not by God? etc. etc. etc.
For me, enough people and inward voices poked at this tower, and eventually, it all came down! For some their tower never falls, it only has a few missing blocks that may be easy to ignore, and they persist forward. But for many of us, we had too many missing blocks, and our towers came crashing down. I promise you this isn’t the first generation to deconstruct or recover from church trauma…this has been a part of our human life cycle forever!
Many of the followers of Jesus had left all they knew to follow him… and when he was killed by the state their tower was wobbly and they found themselves with missing blocks in their tower, full of questions. Others had a hard fall and were sitting in the rubble of a fallen tower… game over… what do we even do next? Over and over again we see in Scripture when Jesus teaches something and it says the disciples didn’t know what he meant? Sometimes he would even explain it and they still didn’t get it… Following Christ didn’t mean they had all the answers or understood everything, it just meant they were comfortable with mystery and asking good questions…
Mary & Joseph had their ideas deconstructed around marriage, sexual ethics, what is holy, and what the Messiah looked like totally shattered. The tower of their belief system fell… and with it came the rejection of much of their family and eventually their exclusion from their Jewish community of faith.
Mary Magdaline found herself extremely deconstructed in her faith to the point that she throws herself into a room full of religious men and touches Jesus' feet with her hair, tears, and perfume. This woman who was told by society that her best days were behind her, purity culture deemed her used and unloveable… she hears that Jesus talks to women at wells and isn’t afraid to be touched by women menstruating. The tower of her belief system fell and with one encounter she finds herself constructing a whole new vision of who God is, she finds herself being the first to see the risen Christ.
Andrew, Peter, James & John – 4 brothers left their Fathers fishing business behind, a consistent income, and a familiar family business to follow Jesus… they were working with their Father when they decided to drop their nets and follow Jesus. I wonder how their Jewish Father felt about them following this bronze skin Galilean who preached a more radically progressive gospel? What’s ironic about these four disciples' stories is that after Jesus dies, they don’t know what to do. He turned their whole world view upside down, redefined how they saw faith, and the one who gave them life was no longer in theirs. Their tower had a lot of holes in it, Jesus pushed and questioned most of their views, and values. So what do they do when he’s gone and the tower falls? They go back to the one thing that is familiar to them… fishing! They were fishermen before they met Jesus, now he’s gone so they go back! How often do we do that, when we don’t know what to do or believe we just go back to the most familiar?
The Disciples find themselves fishing all night and they can’t catch anything when they see the resurrected Christ for the first time on the seashore. If their tower hadn’t fallen yet, this would have taken the whole thing down. They come to shore, they share a meal with Jesus and he pulls Peter aside. He knows Peter is likely sitting in the rubble of the building blocks of his faith. Peter has no rock or foundation to stand on…. Amidst Peter’s crisis of faith… full of questions… more questions than answers. Amidst Peter being told a few days prior he would be the rock of the church and yet he finds himself without any ground to even stand on himself, Jesus asks him one question, three times, “Simon, do you love me?” Jesus doesn’t ask Peter if he still believes that He’s the son of God, who died for his sin… he doesn’t ask him if he still believes in the 10 commandments, he asks him nothing about beliefs. He asks him one thing, 3 times! Peter, do you love me!?
Jesus knew that all Peter would need… all we need at the core of our being, amidst any of our: questions, doubts, fragmented beliefs, deconstructed faith, church trauma, family rejections is to love Jesus. I like many of you found myself totally deconstructed, tower down! I knew what I didn’t believe anymore but I had no idea what I did believe. I didn’t know how to rebuild, reconstruct my faith.
So where are you today? Does your tower have a few missing blocks? Is your tower about to fall? Has the tower of your belief system you grew up with fallen? You know after you play one round of Jenga and then the tower falls and you look around the room and ask if anyone wants to play again? Some don’t want to cause it involves the work of rebuilding the tower. While others will play again if someone else rebuilds for them.
I think we can handle the deconstruction or destruction of our faith in a similar way. Sometimes once the tower of our beliefs falls… there should be an intermission, a break, a time to grieve the long wilderness journey that led to the fall. But eventually, we must do something about this mess. Some of us will wait for someone else to just tell us what to believe next. Others of us will rebuild a new tower in a new community and just hitch onto their values and beliefs. But what if we didn’t rebuild the tower…. what if instead of building a tower with the blocks we made a path. Just enough to stand on solid ground, to allow us to take the next step of the journey.
There will be some blocks on the path we may never step on again, we may only look back on them and remember how they led us to where we are today. There will be blocks that we stand on as our foundation and guiding values. For me, my primary block on my path is to love God and love others and be super gay which usually involves coloring all my blocks rainbow. The beauty of making a path instead of a tower is that you can easily move the blocks around again in different seasons in your life and you can acknowledge all the pieces of yourself past, present, and future without discarding or despising the parts of your journey that were hard but still shaped and formed you.
I want to invite you to spend time considering where you are at with the tower of our beliefs… what are the next steps for you in reconstructing your faith out of the rubble to make a beautiful path forward. Let’s take the rubble and rebuild something that will carry us and many others into the next 500 years of Christianity, but this time let’s not make a straight and rigid tower but a winding and wide path that makes room for all the mystery, questions and uncertainty on the wilderness journey ahead…
Josh Lee
Community Pastor (he/him)
Rev. Josh Lee is Forefront's Community Pastor. His experiences have exposed him to a wide spectrum of thought, that compelled him to create greater unity among diversity. He has served as an Associate Pastor in the Assemblies of God & United Methodist Church, Youth Director in the American Baptist Church, Senior Pastor at an Independent Christian Church, and most recently as Co-Pastor at an Inter-denominational Church. Throughout his career and education, he has lived at the intersectionality of both the Christian and LGBTQIA+ community, instilling him with empathy to love God and people without exception.
Josh earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Pastoral Studies from Moody Bible Institute and his Master of Divinity from Garrett Theological Seminary and is ordained in the United Church of Christ.
At Forefront, Josh preaches regularly, while also helping newcomers assimilate, providing pastoral care and opportunity for growth, and connection by working with our deacons in the areas of Connection and Justice and Kidstuf.