Serving God?

I've been troubled lately by the way in which we bandy around the terms "Serving God" and "Giving Glory to God". Such terms lie at the core of Christian practice, but are largely undefined by the Christian community, leading one to ask "How do I serve and give glory to God?"

There seem to be two points of departure for these expressions that I want to explore. I'm going to start with the idea of serving God.

In order to understand what it means to serve God we need to understand what it means to serve. As I see it, serving occurs either when needs are met or values are affirmed. I serve my wife when I meet her needs (emotionally, physically, relationally, etc), or when I affirm and act in accordance with her values.

When this criterion is applied to God, I am instantly aware of the fact that I cannot meet God's needs. Beyond that, it seems presumptuous to assume that God even has needs. So then, when we read in the Scriptures of serving God (Ps. 2, Rom. 12, Eph. 6, Josh. 24, etc), we tend to assume something of the meaning of service and seldom deign to linger on the question. The assumption I grew up with was that serving God meant not sinning ("...Keeping oneself unstained by the world" Js. 1:29b), and living a morally pure life.

This understanding is still, I believe, correct, as I understand that the Bible affirms this as part of serving God. But it is not the complete picture of how we serve God, as the Bible makes it perfectly clear that more is at stake here. Pervasive throughout both Older and Newer Testaments is the repeated emphasis on serving other people and taking care of their needs (James, Micah, the Torah, The Gospels, etc).

This then reveals that in order to fully serve God we need to serve other people as well as avoiding sinful living (Matt 7 - "What you have done to the least of these you have done to me").

The second part of the question pertains to giving glory to God, and is similar to the idea of serving God, but it has as its point of departure an assumed value of words. What I mean by this is that when I think of giving glory to God, I immediately think of someone doing something great and then saying "I'm giving all the glory to God". This is, I think, okay and fine, but I don't think it actually gives glory to God, but instead increases the glory of the person saying it. This is because simply saying "I give all the glory to God" doesn't actually do what it claims to do, and as such is a lie unless accompanied by the corresponding action. In fact, the person saying it is often lauded for being so humble and righteous, thus increasing the glory of the person.

So then, if simply saying that we glorify God is not actually glorifying to Him, how then do we do so? Again, it ties back into the fundamental reality of God in Christ in humanity. God chooses to work through people, and if you achieve something great, or have your financial need miraculously met, there was always someone else involved in the process. Someone instilled in you the desire for excellence, or someone sacrificed some financial security to meet your need. Nothing comes from nowhere, but always from somewhere and as the result of many factors.

Now then, going back to my first point about serving other people, giving glory to God is recognizing the ways in which He works. If you want to truly glorify God, thank the people He used to bring about whatever it is you're thanking Him for. "What you have done to the least of these you have done to me". This doesn't mean neglecting God in the realm of recognition, it means being for what God is for: His glory in His creation. And the crown jewel of that creation is people. Glorifying and serving God means being for people and using your abilities and talents to serve them.

Now let me give this some teeth. If we only go half way in this, or if we remain as we are currently, trying to serve God through moral purity and glorifying Him with the power of words alone, we are sinning. All good lies have half an ounce of truth in them. Doing half the job and not the full job is the same as not doing it. The serpent's temptation in the Garden in Genesis 3 contained some truth, but in the end that small truth was a big lie. The origin of sin involves half truths, and in the same way our half obedience results in complete failure.

Continuing Thoughts on Gender and the Semantic Breakdown of Communication

What has become obvious from my previous post on Gender is the frustrating lack of clarity in the English language. Words seem to carry different weight depending on the person reading/hearing them and the person writing/speaking them. This is due, I think, to two things.

First and foremost, I believe that for Christians words have an inherent "meaning" that we assume to be absolute. This is itself due to the protestant impetus of being "people of the Word" and the unfortunate development of English within this tradition. The Greek word logos that is translated "word" in English carries a different meaning than our English word, "word", and means something more akin to "revelation". But we read it as "word". The association that we make between "word/Logos" and "word/word" means that over time we equate words with Jesus. Thus, our communication is boiled down to speaking and writing cognitively.

This would be okay if life were monolithic (of one type of communication), but it isn't. Nor is it dialectic (of only two options). Instead, communication requires context and connotations. Words do not have an absolute meaning aside from what is assigned to them by the people using them. This leads me to my second point:

We've assumed a Platonic Reality of meaning. We believe that somewhere outside the Cave of human experience there lies a real thing that is "Meaning". We believe that at their core words have a meaning all of their own, and nothing can change that. This of course stems from the New Testament writers borrowing Platonic language to communicate the ultimate reality of God as beyond the scope of human experience, which is of course true. However, due to the human inclination to draw lines of association and find "like kinds", we quickly (or not so quickly, depending on who you read) developed "Realities" of things like Truth, Justice, Love, Meaning, etc. Thus we constructed Idols of penultimate things in our own minds that exist, if not as parts of God, at least in the same realm as God. Thus, to think of words like "Truth", "Meaning" or "Love" as self sustaining entities like God is nothing short of idolatry. Only God can be God.

This phenomenon translates into an assumption of the absolute nature of words and meaning.

Now here's the kicker: we don't actually know what the words we are using denote and connote. And such was the case with my previous post on Gender. I assumed a certain meaning of gender that was not shared by everyone the world over. So here's what I mean by "Gender": Gender is a function that a person performs or is expected to perform by society. It is an office or position, not a biological reality. Gender identification then refers to the social position a person finds themselves identifying with emotionally or psychologically. Gender is thus a means of identification for an individual within a communal setting, and is closely tied with the way that individual understands him/herself.

What I was addressing was not sexual orientation or biological sexuality. There is of course a correlation between Gender and biological sexuality/sexual orientation, but the two are not the same thing. I was instead addressing the emotional agony that accompanies social homelessness, or, loss of ability to identify with a social office, and how Christians ought to react to such people. Which is to say how people ought to react to such people.

Forgive my oversimplification, but this is only a blog post.

Thoughts on Gender

The whole issue of Gender and Gender Roles is so inextricably tied to self identity that there is no wonder that it is a sensitive topic. At some point close to our existential core we feel the need to identify with a Gender.

This becomes problematic when we identify with a Gender that is not what society assigns to us. Whether we like it or not we are not born entirely free; we are born into a set of assumptions and expectations for what we will be and become.

Further complicating the issue is that social expectations are not static, but are dynamic and fluid in nature, changing from place to place and time to time. This means that what may be a social expectation for a specific gender in one place may not be the expectation in another.

This becomes even further complicated by the fact that technological advances allow us to see what the social expectations of gender are in other parts of the country, and even the world. This then reveals that expectations and norms develop at varying speeds depending on innumerable external factors, such as information sharing, points of origin, religious affiliation, etc.

Now that the web has been illuminated, allow me a few words to try to make sense of it, and help point to a better way of operating within this world we live in:

First, we need to understand that our expectations on Gender are not a static, timeless, universal reality but are in fact tied inextricably to our context and the myriad factors that created such. In fact, the expectations on Genders have changed remarkably in the US while I've been alive, so much so that people identifying with the female gender are now the primary breadwinners for American families. This means that social norms are changing during my lifetime, but not everywhere. Today, I am at home while my wife is working. I'm doing the laundry, cleaning the bathroom, making the bed, doing the dishes. This was the Gender expectation for women when I was younger, but not now and not here. This then leads to my second idea:

Gender roles change. Then change back again. Right now, my wife is the breadwinner for our family. But in the future, she wants to stay home and raise our family. Then our current Gender roles would be reversed. I think one of the follies of talking about Gender roles is that we assume they are unchanging and universal. That just isn't the case. Nor should it be.

Now to my third idea.
Awareness of the variances of life. Know that the way I understand the world, or even the bible, is not the only way, and while I need to be faithful to my convictions, I also need to acknowledge that as a sinful human being I do not have a corner on God or on truth. I could be wrong entirely! And so could you. That is why we truly need to rely on grace, and extend grace to others. For people who identify with a different gender than what is assigned to them, the loss of identity is compounded exponentially by people who harass and condemn them as "weird" or "depraved". Have we no compassion? No one chooses to have an identity crisis, especially one as significant as Gender!