

Love Letters to a Rainbow Group

Copyright 2016 John Torgerson

Published by John Torgerson at Smashwords

All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.

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### Book Contents

Prologue

Letter 1 - How This "Blog" Will Be Done

Letter 2 - Why Stories?

Letter 3 - Father's Day Reflections

Letter 4 - Wounded

Letter 5 - Who am I?

Letter 6 - Who am I in Christ?

Letter 7 - Our Identity in Christ

Letter 8 - Sex: Love or Law?

Letter 9 - Is Homosexuality a Sin?

Letter 10 - Equality in Christ

Letter 11 - On Mission

Letter 12 - "Be still and know that I am God"

### Prologue

"Religion is not for me. Just look at all the religious wars there have been." So I was told one time by a man in a brief philosophical discussion.

My response was, "Well, there have been a lot of wars related to marriage and sex also, and we still do both."

While these family wars begin with only two people, the repercussions reverberate to friends, extended family and children down to the second and third generation.

Even the language of war and peace applies to sex and marriage. Here is what General Douglas MacArthur said in a short message as representatives of the US and Japan signed surrender documents ending World War II.

The problem [of war] basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence [revival] and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural development of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

MacArthur said, "It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh." Christians often use the expression "get saved", and in the proper context, it is not a wrong expression. But we do not find that expression in English translations of the Bible. Rather we find the expression "be saved" many times. It is like the expressions, "be kind" or "be good". It has to do with what we call "life".

"How's life treat'n you today?"

"Well, I'm breathing in air, and my body absorbs the oxygen, which combines chemically with the food I ate, which produces energy in the form of heat and muscle energy..."

Yes, our life is animal life, but the life that excites us (and oppresses us) is spiritual - whether we believe in God or not. Furthermore, while in the privacy of our work room we may take pleasure in writing a song or painting a picture or constructing a mechanical device (that's me!) - yet the savor will be short-lived unless that action connects with other people in some way. We are relational beings - not in the image of a flock of sheep or a gaggle of geese - we are relational beings in the image of God.

In 2012 one man was intrigued by what I had written about same-sex marriage on our church web site. He was partnered with another man at that time. We had several e-mail dialogs and one lengthy phone conversation. We met at the 2013 Orlando Florida International Conference of GCI (Grace Communion International) and spent some time together at the conference events. In 2014 he invited me, for the second time, to a closed Facebook group of around two dozen people. I declined the first time, but with some thought I accepted the second invitation. I began what I have now titled _Love Letters to a Rainbow Group_ just after Christmas in 2014.

This was not just any "rainbow group". This was a group of people who had a background in the Worldwide Church of God - often abbreviated WCG. The transformation from WCG to GCI was unique for every person. A minority of WCG members made that transformation. I did make that transformation. For me, it was a transformation from living life based on the Bible to living life based on believing who Jesus is. And I need to make perfectly clear that the transformation was NOT a transformation from believing in the whole Bible to believing in Jesus' teachings. You will have to read this book to understand that.

It was my intent from the beginning to present marriage as a special spiritual relationship. And I also planned to frame that presentation within my own life story of "spiritual recrudescence [revival] and improvement of human character".

My "improvement of human character" was one of coming to understand who Jesus really is. Who Jesus really is and what he has done for all is the Gospel. Believing and living the Gospel is our life in a new reality. The New Testament calls that "new reality" a life "in Christ" - an expression that appears dozens of times in Bible. In other words this is a presentation of Christian theology within my life story.

You will find that the essence of living and sharing the Gospel can be expressed in a Tweet and can be lived and shared by anyone regardless of educational background. Because what I have to share with you is based on my life story, you will find that key ideas will be repeated in different contexts. I can almost guarantee that you will be surprised by Jesus in the very first letter. So this book might be classified as "circular theology" rather than "systematic theology" which is taught in seminaries.

These letters are not a marriage "how to". Nor is this a culture-war barrage. In marriage language, this book is really a story of how I came to know the God of love. If we have a deeper understanding of God's love, then we will also have a deeper understanding of the most profound form of human love, which is marriage.

If there is any one purpose in these letters, it is a plagiarism of the Apostle John's purpose statement in the fourth Gospel:

"But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (John 20:31)

This is my first communication to the rainbow group just after Christmas in 2014:

My Christmas cards this year are similar to this image - but that picture shows a snowy scene where there's only one old building and only a few unpruned trees. Psalm 46:10 is on it also. The inside said, "This Christmas and throughout the year, may God's love touch everything you do." I can't use my Christmas card picture here because it's copyrighted.

This picture is of my grandfather's farm from about 1880 - a picture that I recently received and restored using my computer image editor. My grandfather was born in 1853, and with a little playing with numbers, it would be reasonable to guess that I'm around 110 years old. Wrong! I'm 69. But I can share some stories from the early 1900's that were told to me.

Beginning in earnest in the new year, I am going to share significant parts of my life story with you - beginning with what I've heard about my grandparents. When I'm done I hope that I will have something that will help some on all sides of the current marriage debate to hear God's voice saying, "Be still and know that I am God."

Book Contents

### Letter 1 - How This "Blog" Will Be Done

The "Rainbow Group" was a secret Facebook group. To communicate to the group I posted a link to a web page on the Grace Fellowship web site. (www.dellsgrace.org) They could communicate back on Facebook (open to the group). Or they could communicate with me privately by e-mail. I suggest that you go to that site and click on "Contact Us" and you will see my status of vocational ministry.

December 30, 2014

Dear friends in Christ,

[Here I deleted the specific instructions pertaining to dialogs between the group and me.]

As I work on my laptop I am using a wireless keyboard and mouse with a large external monitor. I have room to tape all 25 of your printed profile pictures around my screen. I did that to remind me that you are loved children of the Father, and not a project. I need to do that because I find it easier to be a "project person" than a "people person". I've only met two of you face-to-face, and I can say that I know only one person fairly well. And I am thankful to that person for his persistence in inviting me to this forum despite my earlier reservations.

I have decided that these communications are "letters" rather than "chapters", "parts", or "episodes".

On the Grace Fellowship web site I have three published columns that deal with same-sex marriage, and I removed them a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to take you on the journey that led to the positions that I expressed in those columns. But I have changed my mind on that because they all show my understanding of theology and the Gospel. (Most of my columns have been in the church page in the _Wisconsin Dells Events_. But I have had several featured columns in that paper as well as in Madison's _Wisconsin State Journal_.)

It seems that all my writings and preached messages are really Gospel messages. If I plagiarized Paul and told you "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" I would fear to sound self-righteous. (1 Cor 9:6) But the stories that I will be sharing with you will show you how I came to know God and the Gospel over about a 60-year period. Knowing God and living the Gospel is really a life-time journey, but maybe I can spare you a few bumps along the way.

I will close this letter with one of the columns that is already in the Grace Fellowship website. It's my Christmas column from last year, but it's also a Gospel column, so it's relevant for any time of the year.

My next letter to you will explain why it is necessary for me to share stories rather than writing some "marriage flavored" theological paper.

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." (2 Cor 13:14 )

John Torgerson

Our new word for Christmas is the old word, "believe"

"Peace on earth, good will to men." We see those words on Christmas cards. We hear them in profound Christmas sermons from deep-voiced expositors of scripture. We hear them in the high voices of children in a Sunday School Christmas play.

The words seem unreal, and we tune them out as soon as the Christmas wrapping paper is stuffed into garbage bags - if not sooner.

The seemingly impractical idealism of those words is described in the third verse of the Christmas song, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day": "And in despair I bowed my head. 'There is no peace on earth,' I said. For hate is strong, and mocks the song of 'Peace on earth, good will to men.'"

But that song does not leave us in that funk. The fourth verse says, "Then peeled the bells more loud and deep: 'God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men."

A nice comeback. But how do we get from verse three to verse four?

We don't.

Jesus brings us from verse three to verse four. You might be thinking, "Well of course! The wrong failing and the right prevailing - that's Heaven after we die."

OK. I'll give you that. But when we pray "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" we pray for some peace among believers here and now.

So then the question becomes, "How does Jesus bring us from verse three to verse four?" The answer is simply what we tell our young children to do at Christmas time. We tell them to believe. We simply believe that Jesus did what he came from Heaven to earth to do, and that is to declare everyone innocent of all wrongdoing. The wrong has already failed; what we have done wrong has no power over us as far as God is concerned. What we have done wrong cannot exact a fine, put us in jail, or even send us to Hell.

By believing we get peace from Jesus because we don't have to get even with someone who has wronged us. We have the freedom to treat that person as another human being. That's loving our enemies. Of course there will be times when we have to prevail on the justice system to protect ourselves and our neighbors, but even the US justice system demands that we treat criminals fairly. Jesus didn't say life wouldn't get messy at times.

So does anyone get condemned to Hell?

I assume that most of you reading this know the "Golden Verse of the Bible", John 3:16. Now listen to the next two verses: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son."

When we do not believe what Jesus did for us, then we are not peacemakers because we see most everybody as guilty, and so we "stand condemned" by other people. We live in a hell of our own making. And apparently it is possible for people to not believe on the "other side" and "stand condemned" there also. C. S. Lewis said that the doors of Hell are locked from the inside. I think he's right.

Our new word for Christmas is the old word, "believe".

John Torgerson - Christmas 2013

Book Contents

### Letter 2 - Why Stories?

The Father says to all of us today, "You are the son or daughter that I have always wanted."

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January 6, 2015

Dear Friends in Christ,

The subject of this letter is stories. In preparation for what I want to say to you in these letters, I am reading _Ministry in the Image of God - The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service_ by Stephen Semands.

I have always said that I am not a reader. I have joked that I went to seminary so that I could pay people to beat me to read - at least half true! Yes, seminary made me more of a reader, but I still do not read fiction. I know there are fictional stories that have deep meaning. I will never read an English version of _Les Misérables_ , but the theatrical version has deep meaning for all.

I was given the book " _Ministry..._ " in early 2009 at GCI's New Pastor's Conference, and I really couldn't get into it. I apparently eventually read all of it because I see underlining and notations all the way through. So apparently the underlining and notations were only on the pages, and not in my brain.

This time it's making a deep impression on me, and I believe it will significantly change the way I say some things to you in these letters. I guess I'm finally old enough to appreciate the book - I hope you all mature faster than I do!

I will share this quote with you and then share a relevant column that I wrote a couple of months ago - both pertain to our processing of life stories. Then I will come back with some final thoughts.

From page 136 in a chapter titled "Gracious Self-acceptance"

The eternal particularity and otherness of the three persons whom we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remind us that God cherishes and delights in the uniqueness of each human being. Have you learned to cherish and delight in yourself and all that you are as God cherishes and delights in you? Have you celebrated the fact that you have a story and calling unlike those of any other person? Have you come to the point of gracious self-acceptance?

Our stories are never played out alone. Our stories are played out in connection with other people as we interact by direct contact or by media contact. We read, hear, and experience.

The following column was written just before Election Day in the US in November 2014. And in this column I make the point that our stories, in relationship with other's stories, color our worldview. And our worldview colors how we interpret our experiences with other people and with God.

Talking politics and religion

It is common wisdom that talking politics and religion is unproductive.

Why is that? Thomas Jefferson explained that pretty well in this quote: "The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory."

That's so important that I created this picture of what Jefferson said.

In short, what we read, hear, and experience influences what we believe politically and theologically. And what we believe politically and theologically influences how we interpret what we read, hear, and experience. Therefore when a conservative and a liberal debate each other, it is as if they are in different worlds - and indeed they are.

Now let's turn our thoughts to religion alone.

Some Christian theology books include a diagram similar to the one that I have shown. It is called a hermeneutical circle. Hermeneutics is the study of how to apply the Bible to our life experiences.

As in politics, the circular reasoning shown in my hermeneutical circle diagram is unavoidable. What I read in the Bible, what authors I choose to read, what I hear from preachers, what preachers I choose to listen to, and my experiences in life influence what I believe about God. And what I believe about God influences how I interpret what I read, hear, and experience in life.

So is there a "right" or a "best" kind of circular reasoning?

Here is a story from Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" that helps us have an answer to that question: Prince Hamlet is presented with clear evidence that his uncle Claudius killed Hamlet's father in order to become king. Hamlet then plans to kill Claudius in revenge. He finally sees Claudius alone, but Claudius is praying. Hamlet thinks, "I can kill him now, but he's confessing his sins, and if I kill him, he'll go to Heaven! But if I just wait a while, he's sure to sin again. Then I'll kill him, and he'll go to Hell." (My paraphrase)

So what is the problem with Hamlet's thinking? The problem is in the "I believe" part of the hermeneutical circle. Hamlet believes in a God who gives us laws to define wrong behavior and gives us a pardon of our wrong doing if we ask for it in the right way. If we die in an unpardoned condition - too bad for us.

In contrast, God does not threaten us with the death penalty but rather offers us life as a free gift. That's called grace. John, the first century theologian, said that his writings were "...written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (John 20:31)

That life is offered freely now, even though believers have to deal with a lot of people who believe in a different God. We treat all people so as to affirm that life or introduce that life. And we can only do that with the help of the Holy Spirit.

I think religious discussions can be peaceful and productive if at least one person believes in the God who gives life. This is good advice for politicians too!

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(So there's the Gospel message for you today. I think I will slip in the Gospel in every one of my letters.)

Near the end of my first letter to you I said, "My next letter to you will explain why it is necessary for me to share stories rather than writing some 'marriage flavored' theological paper." So now I will give you a few reasons why I am sharing stories.

1) I just like history - in particular His-Story (the Bible) and his-stories and her-stories in general. I was riveted by the seven-part Roosevelt series aired on PBS last year. I am a member of the local Dells historical society, and I have turned three family history talks into amateur documentaries with my videography and video editing skills.

2) I took a class in seminary titled "Family Systems". In that class we were asked to look back at least three generations and analyze how family circumstances and relationship patterns influenced relationship patterns in succeeding generations. We all need to realize that the "experience" component of the hermeneutical circle affects our beliefs about God.

3) The Bible is all story. Even the law passages pertain to particular people at a particular time and place. The same is true for the Wisdom books. Here is a quote from the introduction to _The Jesus Storybook Bible_ , a book that I would recommend for reading to children:

Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn't do. ... But the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you should be doing. It's about God and what he has done.

We get to know ourselves and one another by knowing our own stories and the stories of one another. The Bible is a storybook and God is the main character; we get to know Him by reading stories of His interaction with humanity.

4) Much of our public discussions consist of sound bites, Facebook sayings, tweets, signs carried by marchers, billboards, bullets, suicide bombings, beheadings - as well as Bible verses that are cited without reference to the story that contains those verses. These communications seem to be dialogs between labels more than between people - labels like G, L, B, T, Q, liberals, conservatives, progressives, political "tribes", and religious "tribes". Furthermore, the list of labels is different in the Eastern culture compared to the Western culture. In these letters you are going to hear the story of one person and the conclusions about marriage that my conscience demands me to teach to others. Probably none of you will totally agree with those conclusions, but I'm pretty sure that I will raise some issues that you have not thought of.

Many of you have more stories to live than you have lived. May you always see your story inside the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. May God bless your individual stories, and may they be a blessing to others.

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 3 - Father's Day Reflections

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31)

May we all remember that our believing is a joyful, daily present tense action just as the verb "have life" is a present tense action.

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January 15, 2015

Dear Friends in Christ,

This letter comes to you later than I had planned. My life in the last few days has been filled with tasks related to being program director for a community supper, trying to unify our local ministerial association, doing a couple of nursing home Protestant church services and trying get more local pastors or lay-leaders to do services in those nursing homes.

As I implied in my last letter, I am fascinated by stories. As a member of the local historical society I have been video-recording talks of family histories of people in the Dells Community after which I get pictures from those families and turn their talks into quasi-documentaries. I did two of those in the last month, but a video I did a year ago was not completed. So I spent several hours over the last few days in conference with that speaker in order to get ready to complete the project. (The guilt of waiting so long on that project exceeded my guilt in getting this letter written!) On top of that my good laser printer probably needs replacing, so I bought some ink jet cartridges for my ink-jet printer - only to discover that they were 6 years past the warranty date - and now I have to resolve that problem with the store.

As I sat down to write this letter last night I felt spiritually drained. As I watch my own ongoing life story (and that is an perplexing statement!!) I am amazed on how such inconsequential happenings can affect my spiritual zeal. I should know better at an age of almost 70. So I settled down, reviewed some of the scriptures I had recently read in _Ministry in the Image of God_ , and prayed my usual stumbling prayer and went to bed.

This morning I had breakfast and some prayer and scripture reading. I did my morning workout - which is a quarter mile walk over and back to a horse barn where I help out for an hour or so. I have a treadmill and weight machine right beside me now, but I would rather do work that accomplishes something in my world.

Now it's 8:25 am; I'm showered; the caffeine from breakfast is still activating the Holy Spirit - one of my personal theological positions, that I will publish some day.

The following is a column that I published in the local newspaper before Father's Day (in the USA) last year. It is already on my web site, but I have re-formatted it for your reading. I will come back with some comments afterwards.

Fatherhood is Deeper than a Day

I have good memories of my father. He was born in 1894 and his father died in a farm accident when my dad was ten years old. I never heard my dad talk about his father in a positive way. He had more warm feelings for his mother, but at age ten he began to share the care for his mother with his other ten siblings, and those memories were apparently more vivid for him.

My grandmother on my mother's side had a child out of wedlock, which must have been devastating considering the morés of the early twentieth century. She married another man, and she died at the birth of my mother in 1904. My grandfather chose not to raise his daughter, and she ended up with a farm couple who were in their fifties. They apparently did not know how to raise a child, and from what I have heard from my dad, her relationship with her stepparents was what we would call today, "elder abuse".

That forty-one year old man and that thirty-one year old woman probably saw their courtship as a "last chance" when they got married in 1936. My dad thought my mother's abuse would not happen in their marriage. He was wrong. She spoke evil of my dad and many other people, except her only son \- me - born in 1945. Despite that dismal marriage, my dad loved me and loved my mother. To his dieing day he managed our family finances with depression-era spending habits so that mother would have the finances to go to a nursing home if she had to. I didn't have the heart to tell him that those savings would barely last a year in a nursing home.

(One of two pictures that I have of all three of us.)

What kept dad going was his belief in God. That God was a God who said that marriage - good or bad - was until death. He was a God who said that marriage came before sex and if one fathered a child, the man became a father and a husband for life. These were the laws of the pre-World War II era.

We Christians believe that "God is love" and we pray to a God named "Father". That obligates us to do something to improve fatherhood. Returning to the "laws" of the pre-World War II era will not work because we demand our rights to separate sex, marriage, love and children. The result is that one in four American children live without their biological dads.

Laws cannot change hearts - not governmental laws - not Bible laws. "...the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you should be doing. It's about God and what he has done." That's a quote from the preface of a children's Bible story book, so this is not deep theology. Living life, including being a father, is all about believing what God has done.

In the Old Testament God whispers what he has done; in the New Testament, God shouts. God the Father loves us as pure and holy people because Jesus forgave all our sins at the cross - all people - past, present, and future - no strings attached. My father loved my mother a tiny bit like that. The only thing that we can do is to believe what God has done and surrender to God's love. In that surrender, we show and tell God's love to all we know - most certainly including our spouses and children. That's what is called living "in Christ", an expression that appears dozens of times in the New Testament.

Thus we are earthly images of a deeper heavenly reality. In that reality God is the male who is in union with us as a female. And in that union we partner with God to help other people become believers. In that reality, there will be plenty of challenges in our life, but I am convinced that there will be fewer challenges that originate from within a marriage.

My father may have said that he believed in pre-World War II morés. But that third person of God, the Holy Spirit, will direct us to live in Christ, rather than in law, as long as we do not demand our rights to live otherwise.

John Torgerson (June 2014)

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Last time I said, "I think I will slip in the Gospel in every one of my letters." I think there is plenty of Gospel and plenty of theology packed in that column. Much of that will be repeated in subsequent letters. I, too, have had to have many repetitions of the Gospel presented to me over the last twenty years in order to get a good sense of what the Gospel is.

However I will comment on two points in that column.

First this one: "...we demand our rights to separate sex, marriage, love and children." That is a comment from a Christianity Today article from about ten years ago. The exact quote was more like "Today's culture tends to separate sex, marriage, love and children." In my last letter I said that I dislike cultural labels "like G, L, B, T, Q, liberals, conservatives, progressives, political 'tribes', and religious 'tribes'." Therefore naming a culture that "separates, sex, marriage, love and children" has the problems of all cultural labels - they do not precisely describe any individual, geographical area, or decade. But in my experience of growing up and working in middle class rural/suburban areas, I think the label is fairly accurate. It is not as if separating sex, marriage, love and children is new - what does seem to be new is a general acceptance of that point of view.

I'll cite one story to illustrate. In a later letter you will get to know Joey a bit better (not his real name). He has had one failed marriage and has had three children from three different women, none of whom he has married. His father left the family when Joey was in his early teens, and he desperately wants to be a better father than his father was. One time he told me, "I have always wanted a family". Another time, in conversation while stopping at a gas station, I (probably judgmentally) said, "Joey, it seems that you used these three women to achieve your goal of having a family." He couldn't escape me because I was giving him transportation. HE BLEW UP and stood outside the car and FUMED for a few minutes. He came back and told me in no uncertain terms, "If two people are in a relationship they WILL have sex!!!"

I had never heard that expressed so clearly before. But I don't think that would be said in the pre-World War II era. But that doesn't mean that there was some past "golden era" when people did sex and marriage "right". My perception is that the difference between the pre-World War II era and now is that today we see cohabitation, pre-marital sex, abortion, and homosexual sex as accepted and normal. And that is only a perception from the perspective of a seventy-year window of time in small town and rural USA. If we have read the Old Testament stories we know that in the times of the patriarchs there were some really strange marriage and sexual things going on.

Secondly: What my Father did in our family was what _Ministry in the Image of God_ describes. He was unknowingly participating in the ministry of Jesus Christ to the Father through the Holy Spirit. In other words, he was showing my mother and me what God the Father is like by the way he treated me and my mother. You will hear more about that ministry in later letters, so I will not comment further.

Was he a theological giant? No, he had only a fifth grade education. But the Holy Spirit can be active in anyone \- even a non-believer. But the Holy Spirit cannot act in us if we refuse to believe that God's love forgiveness of sins universal and unconditional. More of that later.

"Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in every way. The Lord be with you all." (2 Thes 3:16)

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 4 - Wounded

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace. - Jer 8:11

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. - Isa 53:5

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January 15, 2015

Dear Friends,

The subject of this letter is "wounded." "Wounded" is not a happy word, but peace is. And it seems that we must pass through woundedness to get to peace. It also seems that the healing of wounds in this life is incomplete, as is our peace.

Last time, I spoke about my father and the generation before him. I will add a few more details and then say some things about my mother and the generation before her.

I said in my Father's Day column, "I never heard my dad talk about his father in a positive way." I do recall one time when he was dealing with my mother's verbal abuse, he said something that indicated he had been treated badly by many people. He then said "Even my own father...", and he didn't finish the sentence.

My second-hand recollections of my father's past life seem to dominated by a only few sentences, and those sentences spoke of hardship. I suppose that might be normal. Father's have always lectured their sons with words like, "You think you've got a hard life? Well, when I was a kid...."

Two sentences are stuck in my brain: "When I was a boy, I had to plow with a walking plow and horses, and I was so small that the handles of the plow kept hitting my ears."

The second one has two versions: "I remember getting up in the morning...

...and the tea kettle on the wood stove was frozen solid (version 1)...

...and there was nothing to eat in the house (version 2)."

My dad was drafted in World War 1. Fortunately for him (and probably for me, too) was that he served at the Texas/Mexican border rather than fighting in the trenches in Europe. The reason for that deployment of troops was that Germany had offered to help Mexico invade America, with the goal of seizing back lost lands. That would keep the US out of a European war.

Dad's Army days were a mixed blessing. He had a new circle of friends; he had an opportunity to travel beyond the Midwest (his only opportunity). His 5th grade education served him well; he wrote letters home for servicemen who could not write. However military life is different from civilian life, and he said, "In the army you get hollered at from the time you get there to the time you leave."

I have his discharge papers. His moral conduct was labeled, "Exemplary".

So my dad's woundedness was dominated by hardship and poverty and some abuse from my mother and others. He said to me more than once, "If I knew what this [my marriage] would be like, you would never have been born."

As it was, I barely made it into this world - born to a father who was 51 and a mother who was 41 after 9 years of marriage. I was born caesarian. That procedure was deemed serious enough so that I was born in a bigger hospital than existed in my home town. I found a cancelled check in the family bible - made out to three doctors dated about a month after I was born - two-hundred dollars. Dad never spread out payments if he could help it, so I'm sure that was the full amount for the doctors. I am sure he did not have any kind of health insurance.

I cannot say more than I have said already about my mother's father and mother. But I can say something about the relationship between me and my grandfather on my mother's side.

Relationship?? He died 14 years before I was born!! Yes I will explain!

In thinking about that grandfather, Christian Moen, over recent years, I have been fed bits and pieces of his life from several second and third-hand sources. I have known for a long time that he gave up my mother to Peter and Loise Farness to raise when my mother was a year and a half old.

However, the "bits and pieces" were negative. I heard that different people took care of my mother after her birth and that when she was taken in by the Farnesses there were worms in her diapers. Another third-hand reporter used the modern word "abuse", implying that they raised my mother to do farm work and take care of the Farnesses in their old age. I processed and interpreted this input and imagined that my mother was "dumped" on several families before she was adopted by the Farnesses. So I had a pretty dismal picture of my mother's life between birth and marriage.

Also, I had a negative image of Christian Moen for not raising his daughter...

...until a couple of months ago. Do you remember the farm picture that I used in my introduction to this series of letters? Well, I had worked on restoring that picture and was about to distribute it to some relatives, but I could not find the image on my computer, so I had to re-scan it and re-restore it. I dug the original out from a box of old pictures, and I found this picture mounted neatly on a cardboard backing. On the back, in my own handwriting, were these words: "Pete Farness in buggy - Christ[ian] Moen holding Christena [my mother] & Mrs Loise Farness"

I apparently wrote that annotation on the back when dad was alive - in the late 1970's at the latest.

My first thought was, "No, Christ Moen did not 'dump' my infant mother on various families. At least in this picture I have a record of Christ Moen having concerned contact with the family who was to raise my mother."

Furthermore, I know that my mother came to the Farness' home when she was a year and a half, and that seems to be the girl in this picture. This had to be in 1905. In 1905 there were no smart phones or even private cameras. The four people dressed up in their Sunday best, having arranged for a photographer to come out and take this picture. I imagined a 53 year old man (looking at least 10 years older) wanting a picture of this event (the adoption) and his little girl at this time.

And in proofing this letter, I had another revelation. I have a picture of my grandmother in an album, and in my handwriting I wrote her name years ago: "Anna (Jenson) Moen." My mother's given name was Anna Christena Moen. Christ Moen embedded his love and grief in my mother's name. But she chose to be called Christena Anna Moen. Was that choice an expression of her wanting to be connected to her living father rather than the Farnesses? Was that the reason she was abusive to her stepparents? I will never know.

And realizing these things I had a new respect for Christ Moen. This was the early 1900's and Christ was a farmer less than three miles away from the Farness home. This was the best that Christ could do for his daughter at the time.

Every time I reflect on this recent episode in my life, including now, I cannot totally fight back the tears.

From a copy of Christian Moen's obituary I learned that he married in my grandmother Anna (Jensen) Moen in 1901. Between 1901 and my mother's birth and Anna's death in 1904 there was also another daughter who died at birth.

So there was woundedness in my grandmother Anna's life - a child born out of wedlock and the associated stigma shared with that child - marrying an older man (apparently) and a death of a child. Christ Moen married late in life and shared those wounds with Anna before the death of his bride only three years after their marriage.

In my Father's Day column I said, "They [the Farnesses] apparently did not know how to raise a child, and from what I have heard from my dad, her relationship with her stepparents was what we would call today, 'elder abuse'." I believe the "elder abuse" is fact and I know that her behavior contributed to my woundedness and my dad's woundedness. However the statement that the Farnesses "did not know how to raise a child" is a pure guess.

My father experienced the woundedness of losing his father at age 10 and having to share the farm work with the other siblings still living at home. He experienced the hardships of early 20th century life and the Great Depression followed by a challenging life with my mother.

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. ( Isa 53:5)

At the age of nearly 70, I can say I have experienced a partial healing and a partial peace - peace enough to be open about my woundedness and I will share more of that in future letters.

...do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6-7)

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 5 - Who Am I?

There is strength in the name of the Lord  
There is power in the name of the Lord  
There is hope in the name of the Lord  
Blessed is He, who comes in the name of the Lord

[From the song In the Name of the Lord written by Raymond Brown, Ragan Courtney, Camp Kirkland.]

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February 6, 2015

Dear Friends,

The last two letters detailed some of the wounds of my grandparents and parents. In the previous letter I said that I would share some of my own wounds in this letter. But before I do that, let me talk about the word "wounded".

Christian writers like to use the word "broken" to describe humanity. That usually refers to our sinful nature, and I don't want us to think that "broken" and "wounded" are the same words. Jesus was wounded; he was physically beaten and murdered. He was wounded by broken people, but He was not broken - He did not have a sinful nature. In the Jeremiah 8:11 passage that I started with last time, the context demands that the word "wound" does refer to our sinful nature. ("They have healed the wound of my people lightly...")

As I look at what I wrote about my parents and grandparents there were wounds caused by broken people and wounds caused by what seems to us as time and chance.

I appropriated the word "wounded" for this series of letters fairly recently when watching the PBS TV series last year titled _The Roosevelts: An Intimate History_. This seven-part series on PBS chronicled the lives of President Theodore Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Roosevelt family came to the Americas in the late 1600's and split into two branches. Franklin was of the Hyde Park branch; Theodore was of the Oyster Bay branch. Eleanor, being of the Oyster Bay branch, became the wife of Franklin, thus uniting the two branches.

In the first segment, biographer Geoffery C. Ward says this:

I think all of the Roosevelts were wounded people. They had things happen to them which they had to overcome and somehow all of them learned ...that people could overcome things, and that it was worthwhile to help people overcome things.

They achieved greatness; they overcame; but their wounds were never healed.

Theodore was wounded. It was said of Theodore that if he were growing up as a boy today he would have been given Ritalin to calm down his hyperactive behavior - a behavior that both helped him and hindered him his entire life.

Franklin was wounded. At the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC, this quote from Eleanor is inscribed: "Franklin's illness [his paralysis from polio]...gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons - infinite patience and never ending persistence."

Eleanor was wounded. She had to deal with her feelings of rejection (including rejection by Franklin) in order to be an aid to her husband and her country.

They overcame and helped others overcome. What was the key? I think the key was revealed in the first minute of the first episode of the series:

One drowsy summer afternoon in 1908 on the fifth floor offices of Carter Ledyard & Milburn at 54 Wall Street in Manhattan the junior clerks were idly talking about their dreams of the future. Most hoped just to become partners one day. But one had far bigger dreams. He didn't plan to practice law for long, he said. He intended to go into politics and eventually become President of the United States. The speaker was just 25 years old. He had been an undistinguished student and he was an indifferent lawyer. But no one laughed. His name, after all, was Franklin Roosevelt.

[Both quotes from The Roosevelts: An Intimate History - A Film by Ken Burns. Episode 1 - Get Action (1858-1901)]

I think it is appropriate here to borrow the ideas from the song at the beginning of this letter. Franklin Roosevelt saw "strength, power, and hope" in the name Roosevelt. And a great many people in the United States in the 20th century did also.

The word "name" in the Bible most often means who that person is. It's more like a business card than a name label. I made up a Jesus business card some years ago, and here it is.

The mission of believers in this life is to join Jesus' ministry to the Father by the Holy Spirit. In other words, we must know who God is and show who God is by how we treat other people. Our relationships with other people will be unique according to our talents and in our woundedness.

So who am I?

Psychologists say that one who is an only child tends to think like an adult earlier than other children. That seems to be true for me.

A pivotal revelation of who I am came to me around age 12. Given the way that my brain is apparently "wired" it was predestined to occur in some way before I entered teen age. I was scanning our four TV channels one Saturday morning and I stopped at a half hour show where Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) was illustrating Bernoulli's principle by levitating a balloon with the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner.

That highly acclaimed TV show in the 50's and 60's launched the careers of many boomer science teachers and scientists. To say I was hooked on that Saturday afternoon is a gigantic understatement! On that day I determined that if we were ever rich enough to own carpeting and buy a vacuum cleaner I knew what I would do with that vacuum cleaner right after taking it out of the box!

I faithfully watched that weekly TV program through high school. In those years my spare time was filled with batteries, wires, homemade telephones, kites, hand gliders, recording phonographs, solar cookers, lenses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, developing photographic film, table-top model steam turbines, static electricity generators, electric shock coils, magnets, electromagnets, homemade electric motors, home electrical wiring, homemade crystal radios, tape recorders, electronic kits, TV repair, TV and radio antennas, vacuum tube and transistor amplifiers – and probably other such things that I have now forgotten!

This was just fun "messing around". (I am pretty sure you will hear that term "messing around" in a later letter!) However it was more than just messing around; I could understand these things. I could explain through words and demonstrations how these things worked. I recall that when I was in the sixth or seventh grade our little one-room school put on a science program with parents invited. The title of the program was "Magic With Magnets and Elecs With Electricity." Never mind the fact that we never defined the word "elecs." What mattered was, I was the star of the show!

Throughout my high school years, science projects kept my zest for science alive, all the while taking science courses that seemed to me to be too heavy in "book learning." By my sophomore year, I knew that I wanted to be a physics teacher. Unashamedly, I wanted to be Mr. Wizard incarnated.

Therefore, I knew a major part of who I am before becoming a teenager.

Who a person is comes from both nature and nurture. On the nature side, my dad was quite a self-trained mechanical engineer. Steam power was still big in his young-adult years and he built several working steam engines, including a model steam tractor which I still have. Despite the fact that we did not have indoor plumbing, he was the first in our neighborhood to own some modern conveniences - a tractor on rubber tires instead of steel wheels, an electric freezer, and a television set.

So I seem to have inherited his mechanical and technological sense. Later in life I also thanked God that I did not inherit my mother's paranoia and irrational behavior.

I recall one time when my mother was criticizing my dad in a teasing way. And I remember siding with her against my dad. However, by the time I entered High School I was very clearheaded about the fact that my dad "had it together" and something was wrong with my mother. That doesn't mean that I wasn't embarrassed to be seen with either parent.

My experience with my parents causes me to believe that if only one parent lives "in Christ", children of such a marriage have a good chance of also living in Christ as they transition into adulthood.

(I want to add here that when I share something from early childhood I believe that I am telling the truth, but I also know that we "edit" our memories of childhood as we recall them and re-recall them in adulthood.)

I have always been physically small and in my child and early teen age I was smaller than my peers. Also, I do not remember ever playing with other children before I entered the first grade. (There was no kindergarten at that time for the rural one-room school buildings.) With my size and my shyness, my parents entered me in the local school at age seven instead of six.

There were four students in the first grade that year. I remember walking into Hopyard School with my dad before any other students came, and my teacher said, "I think I know who you are." The other thing I remember is that we had some free time on the first day, and the "agenda" for that time was playing with either clay or toys. And I did not know how to play with other children. I was invited to join in by Roger, my other male classmate, but I just stood there.

I suppose I got over it, but I was always shy and passive. I recall a time in the first or second grade when I refused to play with other children on the playground. I don't remember the cause or the solution or how long it lasted; I just remember one of the older students trying to talk me into playing with the others.

I remember my dad trying to teach me the alphabet before I entered school. I don't remember any success. I do remember taking a discarded envelope and copying the letters in the address section with a pencil on the envelope, and I remember the approval of my parents. I remember being read to by my dad before entering grade school and thinking that there must be some system to this "reading stuff". "If I knew the magic key I could read", I reasoned. Maybe we started reading in school by just connecting letter combinations with words; I'm not sure. But I remember being disappointed in that there was no "magic key" to reading.

From the fourth grade to the eighth grade, we had a teacher who spent most of her time with the younger children. Roger and I were the only students in our grade because one girl was held back a grade and another girl moved out of the area. I remember Roger and I setting our own pace in some subjects like arithmetic, where we worked our way through a workbook. I think we both learned to be more independent because of that situation.

I turned out to be the scholar/scientist; Roger was interested in athletics. I spent quite a few sessions on the phone helping him with math problems in both grade school and high school.

Roger and I were the last eight grade graduates of Hopyard School. Roger became a high school business teacher and athletic director and coach. My first grade teacher is still living. I saw her at a Hopyard reunion about thirty years ago and we reconnected several times in her present home as we shared our joys and wounds. We have exchanged greetings every Christmas since then.

I was going get into my personal identity in my relationships with others and with God in this letter - including early perspectives on sexuality. But this letter is already long enough so I will continue in the next letter.

I hope that I will get that letter to you sooner, but vocational ministry in retirement has led me to spend some time with individuals one-on-one. Just in the last two weeks I have been given two opportunities to dialog with individuals - one a conspiracy theory enthusiast and one who apparently has a staunch evangelical stand that demands that "real Christians" must have had a specific kind of conversion experience. As with you, I don't have to "win arguments" and I don't have to worry about presenting the right arguments so that they will see their way to Heaven. I just will share my story with hopes that they may have new insights on the God revealed by Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, my name (what's on my business card) in my public school years might include words like "scholar", "scientist", "teacher" and maybe even "seeker of magic keys". (I wouldn't use the term "magic keys" today, but I believe I can say that I think like a physicist. Physicists look for a few big ideas that encompass many smaller ideas.)

It would be a long time before I really understood that I must "...believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you [and I] may have life in his name." (John 20:31)

There is strength in the name of the Lord  
There is power in the name of the Lord  
There is hope in the name of the Lord

There is indeed. May we all grasp that truth more fully every day. Blessed is He, who comes in the name of the Lord, and blessed is he or she, who comes in the name of the Lord.

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 6 - Who am I in Christ?

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. (James 2:8-12)

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February 27, 2015

Dear Friends in Christ,

When I go back to my home town of Baldwin some will know a few facts about my church life: I grew up in a Lutheran church background. A few years later I told relatives and friends I would not send out Christmas cards anymore. About 25 years later I resumed sending Christmas cards. A few years later I reconnected with some old friends as I passed through Baldwin when I was doing my Master of Divinity degree at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

And some people will ask, "What happened?"

My short answer is this:

When we are children we assume the faith of our parents and those around us. As we enter teen age we must write our own personal creed while still having many questions and doubts. Some leave the faith their childhood and figure out life on their own. Some of those come back to a faith similar to their childhood faith; some don't. Some find a faith that seems surer in an effort to cling to a faith that offers fewer unanswered questions and doubts. I was in that last category, only to find out at age 50 that my answers were mostly wrong and my doubts were still very real.

I began to cling to that defective faith in my senior year of high school and I would "hang on" for the next 30 years. So I will share a few highlights of that story to communicate more of who I am and the beginnings of who I am in Christ.

In early 1964 I heard a voice on the radio that sounded confident and said a lot of really exciting things that I didn't know. Very soon I entered the realm of Garner Ted Armstrong and Herbert W. Armstrong. Garner Ted had the same talent for getting a listener's attention that his father, Herbert W. Armstrong, had. Herbert was the founder of the Worldwide Church of God.

I respected the elder Armstrong more than his son. Maybe that was because he was close to my dad's age. I remember that when the "old WCG" gathered their flocks at the annual fall eight-day festival Herbert would make the rounds to each festival site (up until 1977 when he got too old). In those years I always thought that Herbert Armstrong's presence at a festival site was the high point of the eight days. Yes, I was into cult hero worship.

Allow me to rephrase (with edits in brackets) what I wrote in the last letter about science.

This [old WCG theology] was just fun "messing around". However it was more than just messing around; I [thought I] could understand these things. I could explain through words and [scriptures how life worked with this theology.] I recall that [in 1975 I started to do some speaking at church services.] Never mind the fact that [I seldom spoke of Jesus]. What mattered was [I was trying to make the "messing around" less messy.]

I like knowing. I like revealing secrets. I love proving to someone that what they always thought to be true, is false. There is plenty of opportunity to do those things in teaching physics. After all, I earned A grades in almost all my college physics classes, including some pre-graduate school physics classes. I was Mr. Wizard incarnate! (Yes, in a law-based theology it is practically impossible to avoid self-righteousness!)

I said in the last letter, "...I think like a physicist. Physicists look for big ideas that encompass smaller ideas." But that kind of thinking never really happened in the "old WCG".

Of the over 4000 sermons that I heard in the "old WCG", one really left an impression on me. It was in 1971 or 1972 - about the first or second year of my life in Wisconsin Dells. The speaker intended to show some principles on how to tell which Old Testament laws to keep and which not to keep. I was riveted to my seat with Bible open and plenty of notebook paper for notes. After the hour sermon (at least) I did not walk away with "big ideas" that explained all our "do's and don'ts". It was a great disappointment - in that sense, the sermon was memorable.

Why did I stay so long? I can answer that by describing my actions in the summer of 1976, when I took an Epistles of Paul class at Ambassador College in Pasadena. Greg Albrecht taught the class, and a major assignment was to write a background paper on an epistle of our choice. I chose Galatians because I had heard that some WCG members had left the WCG after studying that letter on their own.

Greg was aware of the challenge before me. When I said I would do Galatians, he said, "Well, that should be interesting."

One passage, Galatians 4:10-11, was critical. Paul told the Galatians, "You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you." All creditable commentaries view this statement as Paul's condemnation of the Galatians being convinced by certain teachers that some Jewish worship practices must be integrated with the worship of Jesus. The WCG's yearly worship calendar was based on the Jewish calendar, so that required we in the WCG interpret Galatians 4:10-11 differently from what we read in virtually all commentaries.

The WCG had literature that explained what this passage "really" meant. But I would write a paper that would nail this passage down once and for all. I had to do this because if the Sabbath and holy days were obsolete, our identity would be shattered. I had to do this because the Holy Days were happy times that I did not want to give up - especially the eight-day Feast of Tabernacles. I had to do this because I did not want to believe that Herbert Armstrong, who I worshipped, could be wrong. I had to do this because our "true end times" view of how God would set everything right was based on the Holy Days, and if the Holy Days are obsolete then our view of the "end times" was wrong. I had to do this because I loved my church family and didn't want to disappoint them. I had to do this for my dad. By this time he had become a member and I couldn't bare thinking that I had led him down a wrong path. I had to do this because I wanted to explain this better than anyone else before me had done.

I got an A on the paper.

Garner Ted was put out of the church in 1979; Herbert died in 1986. Then followed almost a decade of holding on to the WCG foundation (mainly consisting of our list of do's and don'ts) while making more and more changes in some of our beliefs.

The culture in that decade was such that I could ask in a Bible study, "Why does God tell us to not eat the bacon bits on my salad, when I can ruin my health much more by downing a bag of potato chips and a few cans of beer while watching a football game on TV?" The bottom-line answer was, "God says so."

The year 1994 came with God being two persons (Father and Son) and the Holy Spirit being an impersonal force. The year ended with the WCG espousing the Trinity, resulting in many members saying "I've had enough". Near the end of the year I said, "Now that we've got this 'Trinity stuff' under our belts, there shouldn't be any more changes in the WCG." A prophet, I am not!

The "changes" of 1995 were to strip us of our identity. Our identity was mainly our "do's and don'ts list" as well as an exalted view of the WCG's place in church history and prophecy.

I will conclude with what I said in my last member letter (the February 2015 letter) to the scattered members of the Dells Church - although I did some revising.

When the Dells Church was meeting, I was the one to "get the ball rolling" on remembering milestones. We counted the beginning of the Dells Church from the year 1965 in the Blue River/Richland Center area. So in 1980 we had a 15th anniversary celebration; in 1985 we had a 20th anniversary celebration; and in 1990 we celebrated the 25th anniversary.

In 1995 things were massively changing, and we did not celebrate a 30th anniversary.

So here we are at the 50 year point from the Richland Center/Blue River days and 20 years from the "big changes" in 1995. Wow!

I will recount one milestone event that happened in early 1995, as I was deciding whether to go with "the changes" or not. I was in my 27th year of my 35-year teaching career. I stopped into Dale Maher's room over my lunch period, and I was fighting back tears as I explained what was happening in our church. Dale was a lay leader in a Baraboo, Wisconsin church. I asked, "How can I be wrong about the Sabbath when it is so clear in the Ten Commandments?" His answer was, "Jesus is above the Ten Commandments." (Note here that my theology all about what to do and not do in order to be a part of "God's plan".) Also he said, "I will pray for you", and I had never heard that said to me before that day.

So I took the next day off of work, and fasted. On that day, I read through the Gospels just to make sure that Jesus didn't contradict Dale's statement. That was it - I was launched into a new life.

In fasting and praying and studying in that one day, I'm not saying that I was some "spiritual formation giant". I'd spent the last 30 years doing stuff to please God so that I would have a part in "God's plan". So "doing something" on one day seemed natural.

However, I did realize that I was beginning a new life, so I suppose it was good to set aside a special day to mark a new beginning.

Also, I'm not saying that I had great spiritual wisdom in deciding to go with the new way. The pastor at the Dells at that time, Doug Peitz, led us into the new way deliberately and aggressively. Other WCG local churches were not as fortunate. I have no way of knowing what I would have done if the Dells pastor had "dug in his heels". Nevertheless, after a few months our congregation was down to half its former size. It would decrease by half three more times before we ceased to meet weekly at the end of 2011.

In studying chapter 2 in the letter of James using Cathy Deddo's book on James, I can see a clearer way of understanding the concept of Jesus being "...above the Ten Commandments."

In the first four verses James points out that the recipients of his letter are discriminating. A rich well-dressed person gets preferential treatment over a person who looks poor. He is talking to Christians about actions in Christian church gatherings, so he gets to the Christian point right way by saying "My brothers, show no partiality [prejudice] as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory."

Verses 5 through 7 point out that the poor can very likely "hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ" much better than the rich.

Then James says: "If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. Yes, this "law" is quoted first in Leviticus and several times in the New Testament. Yet to keep this law, most of us must have faith in ourselves rather than "faith in our Lord Jesus Christ". (Verses 9-10)

Then James says: "But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, 'Do not commit adultery,' also said, "Do not murder.' If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law."

The New Living Translation sums up verses 9 to 11 quite clearly: "...the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God's laws."

Therefore, truisms like "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," or a body of law like the Ten Commandments, really do not guide us when we speak and act with another person. Our speaking and acting depends on our own ability to interpret truisms or commandments.

Therefore, James' strategy in relating to another person is this: "So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty."

Living under "law of liberty" is living by holding "the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory." We see Jesus for who he is and how he relates to people. He rules by love, not law. He does not put himself above people and rule by power. And the believer relates to other people with that kind of freedom. The Holy Spirit speaks to the believer to help him relate in love. If we hear a voice that says, "Go for a power play" that's not the Holy Spirit. If the voice speaks with a "Jesus accent", that's the Holy Spirit. Jesus is indeed above all written law.

The year 1995 was the beginning of seeing the light of who Jesus is and what that means in our relationship with God and with one another. Today, when I write or preach a directive (something to do or some change to make in our lives) I always try to explain the "Jesus reason" behind that directive. You can see that idea being hinted in my letter to the editor that was published a little over a week ago in the _Wisconsin State Journal_. I did not have the confidence to say those things in 1995.

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The next letter to you will share the milestones that have given me the confidence to say what I said in the above letter.

As we observe the rest of Lent and come to the climax of the Jesus story at Good Friday and Easter, let us meditate and teach about how that story gives us a reason to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves.

And if we are parents or teachers of young people, encourage them to share their doubts and questions. Give them "Jesus reasons" for what they do or don't do in life.

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 7 - Our Identity in Christ

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen (2 Peter 3:18)

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1 John 4:1-3)

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March 13, 2015

Dear Friends,

A week ago Friday and Saturday I did three care center services - one assisted living, one nursing home, and one memory care center. For these messages I usually pick one of the lectionary readings for the Sunday that follows and I make one point about Jesus in the passage in about five to seven minutes. The half hour service is three songs, a short message, a prayer of confession related to the scripture and other prayers, and a benediction. These services usually take a half hour.

Oddly, the four lectionary passages seemed to connect with my life in the "old WCG". The OT passage was the Exodus 20 version of the Ten Commandments, which we believed were fundamental laws for living.

The Psalm passage was the 19th Psalm that included verse 7: "The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul;" (I mentioned last time that in my 30 years in "old WCG" I never really understood what the expression "law of God" meant even though it was mentioned often.)

The Gospel passage was John 3:13-21. It is John's version of Jesus' cleansing the temple and astounding the Jews with the statement, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The "old WCG" did not understand that God coming to earth as a human being started a new covenant.

Those three passages could, with some exposition, be platforms from which to jump from the fuzzy Old Testament image of God to the true image of God. (Col 1:15)

But the epistle reading (1 Cor 1:18-25) presented an almost effortless glide between the two. I considered verses 22 and 23 as pivotal:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,

On the front of my half-page bulletin, I inserted this outline:

\----------

Christians don't preach and teach:  
\- How to have good health  
\- How to get along with people  
\- How to stop bullying  
\- How to be nice to your neighbor  
\- How to get rich  
\- Not even how to have a happy marriage!

We preach Christ crucified, and that changes how we treat our bodies, changes our relationships (including marriage), and changes our finances.

\----------

I suppose some of the above points might surprise some people. Most would rule out "good health" and "How to get rich", but the others might be good sermon topics.

So how does believing in "Christ crucified" change "how we treat our bodies, our relationships, or our finances"?

First of all we must realize that all these points are relationship issues. Clearly, "getting along" and "bullying" and "marriage" are relationship issues. However, so is "good health" unless our interest in being healthy is totally selfish. Likewise, managing our finances and possessions is a relationship issue unless we are totally selfish about our possessions and money.

God is all about relationship.

However, "old WCG" preachers, including me, would never connect "Christ crucified" with living life. Other Protestant preachers might urge people to "trust Jesus" but the "old WCG" would regard that as "sugar-coating the Law" or just "sweet impractical Protestant sentimentalism."

So how do we appeal to "Christ crucified" in these issues? Let me illustrate with the issue of bullying in a practical preaching situation. I am a member of a group called "Faith Leaders for Health Relationships" which is a committee of pastors, lay leaders, and chaplains who advise Hope House on issues related to different kinds of abuse. (Hope House is an advocate for women in domestic abuse situations. ) We sponsor events where speakers address these issues. Most of the speakers are secular social workers and law enforcement personnel.

Occasionally we will have one of the pastors do a presentation, and the topic of pastor presentations was brought up in discussion. I mentioned to the group that a Christian pastor should not sound like a secular presenter when speaking on any social/relationship issue. That was met with a brief silence, and I decided not to pontificate.

Near the end of the meeting, one pastor mentioned that one of her youth group members was sponsoring a "No Name-calling Week" in school as part of an anti-bullying program. That gave me an opening to clarify what I said earlier. My comment was something like this:

"This illustrates what I said about Christian pastors speaking on social issues. A 'No Name-calling Week' is a great idea for a public school. But in a Christian church setting we can do much more. We can appeal to the truth that Jesus has died for every person and loves every person. A person who really believes this cannot elevate herself above another person or put down another person."

That seemed to make sense to the group. That's where I am now in how I see life integrated with theology.

But twenty years ago, when I spent that fast day deciding to go with the "new way", I was far from where I am today.

So let me compact those twenty years in a few milestones.

Milestone 1

This is a review from last time; Jesus is above the Ten Commandments. All I understood at the time was that our life - our interactions and relationships with other people - what is "right" and what is "wrong" - has something to do with Jesus rather than law.

Milestone 2

The "Spring Holy Days" of 1995 arrived; we still worshipped on those days; it was simply too soon let go of them. But we had to preach and teach the new way. I was assigned a sermon on that day with the title "The Meaning of the Bread". But I wanted to talk about "How does Jesus lead us in living life?". That's what I really preached on.

That message was a correction to that 1976 Galatians background paper I wrote at Ambassador College. For almost two decades I was bothered by that paper - in particular those WCG-damaging verses in Galatians 4:10-11 - "You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you." I tell you honestly that every time a new translation of the Bible came out, I would check how Galatians 4:10-11 was rendered - hoping that a better translation would put down my doubts.

In that letter Paul tells a story of how Peter was influenced by certain Jews to discriminate against the Gentiles. Paul recounted that he corrected Peter by saying, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?"

What was Peter doing wrong? What was his "sin"? All of verse 14 explains: "But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?'"

Being "in step with the Gospel" defines "doing right". Not being "in step with the Gospel" defines "doing wrong". I didn't really know what the Gospel was at the time, but I did say that "the Gospel of the Kingdom of God" was not the only words to describe the Gospel (which Herbert Armstrong seemed to think). By 1995 I could do a computer count of words in the New Testament, and "Gospel of Christ" far outnumbered "the Gospel of the Kingdom of God."

Milestone 3

In the Fall of 1995, I was assigned a sermonette with no specific title or topic. I chose to explain Acts 16:31, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." I choose to use a mutually beneficial human relationship (like parent and child or husband and wife) as an image of the relationship between us and Jesus. At least it was a step away from obeying laws, but I don't recall how I developed the message.

Milestone 4

In my final year of Seminary, I took a required Integrative Seminar class. One of the assignments was to respond to one of three questions. I chose this one:

A fellow on Sean's dorm floor claims to be a homosexual. "OK," says Sean, "I know there's a biblical rule against this. But why?" Sean's friend is a member of a liberal church. This church is open, loving, and accepting. His friend says, "Your church's prohibition is just a power play, an attempt by the church to impose its Victorian inhibitions on other people." Sean wonders why God would care how a person chooses to enjoy life. Isn't that a personal choice?

This was my kind of assignment. It was the physicist's challenge of trying to put a number of small ideas under one or two big ideas.

First of all, I made the topic about "Victorian inhibitions". Then the "small ideas" were mainly cohabitation, pre-marital sex, and homosexual sex. Here are a few excerpts from that paper. [Brackets indicated a current addition]

But should life choices depend on biblical rules? Specifically, if we get all the biblical rules on a subject, will we always know what to do to please God? I think we can answer that by walking into a law office and notice the thousands of volumes of law books - containing hundreds of thousands of laws and rulings - but still not enough for all the decisions of life.

...Jesus said, "The work of God is this: to believe on the one who he has sent." (John 6:29)...[therefore] - what we do or refrain from doing in life - is connected with believing in Jesus.

[Here is the big idea]...Believing on Jesus means telling the Jesus story in our life. Is this idea biblical? [I said "yes" based on Phil 2:1-11, Eph 5:2, 22-33, Titus 2:11-12, 1 Cor 6:15]

...Can we tell the Jesus story by having sex without commitment? ... The Jesus story says that He committed himself before we accepted Him.

...Can engaging in homosexual love and tell the Jesus story? Jesus himself said that human beings were created male and female, and He always placed marriage in the language of husband and wife (as does the entire bible). Jesus was the creator who made us male and female. (John 1:3, Col 1:16) Homosexual relationships do not tell the Jesus story.

For that paper, I got an A. That was unfortunate because I stayed on that theme of "telling the Jesus story" for a couple of years. The impetus for this was that I had just realized that the Bible is one grand story, which is true. But the problem is that if I say "You tell the Jesus story", it is a directive for action - something I tell you to do. Therefore, this is awfully close to trying to please God by obeying laws. Therefore, at this time I was still thinking of my relationship with God being dependent on what I do. That God did not need to come to earth as a human being. He does not need to be the "Christ Crucified". This Jesus is just a good moral example.

Milestone 5 - '...and that has made all the difference'

Prose is not adequate for this one. I have to introduce this with a little poetry from Robert Frost's - "The Road Not Taken".

The poem describes the thoughts of a person choosing between paths while walking in the woods. It's an allegory of the choices we face in life. The traveler chooses the path that was showed less wear and muses about perhaps coming back and exploring the other path. But he realizes that this is unlikely to happen.

The poem concludes this way:

I shall be telling this with a sigh  
Somewhere ages and ages hence:  
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by,  
And that has made all the difference.

"that"? - What is the "that" that "made all the difference"?

The key to the "that" is a story that I cited in Letter 2.

Prince Hamlet is presented with clear evidence that his uncle Claudius killed Hamlet's father in order to become king. Hamlet then plans to kill Claudius in revenge. He finally sees Claudius alone, but Claudius is praying. Hamlet thinks, "I can kill him now, but he's confessing his sins, and if I kill him, he'll go to Heaven! But if I just wait a while, he's sure to sin again. Then I'll kill him, and he'll go to Hell." (My paraphrase)

(GCI President Joe Tkach cited this story in one of his writings; reading Shakespeare is not one of my "things".)

From here we can easily get to the first half of the Gospel expressed in a tweet, which I call a "Trinitarian Theology Tweet":

God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal.

If God's love depends on what we do, how can we know if we are doing good enough? If God's forgiveness depends on the sincerity of our prayer of confession, or on the quality of our repentance, or on the qualifications of a human confessor, then how can we have any assurance of forgiveness? (Of course, confessing our sins before God, or a trusted human confessor, is a good thing to do. We can't understand something unless we put it into words.)

In 2010 I did a Good Friday Sermon titled, "Getting from Good Friday to Easter". And you can see how believing in the universal love and atonement of of God changes how we relate to one another. Here are some excerpts.

[Bracketed words are current changes for the purpose of clarity.]

We must believe that Good Friday has happened for us. It is a message for every human being – to you and to me. It's a message from God that says "I love you." ... The apostle John says "We love because he first loved us."

And the second belief that we must hold is that Good Friday applies to everyone we meet. How will that bring you to Easter?

Let's think about a meeting with another person. I'll choose the name Dale, a name that could be either male or female. And let's say that our meeting with Dale might involve some disagreement, even conflict.

If I give myself the power to decide that Good Friday does NOT apply to Dale, then I am free to take Dale with me into [a land that is NOT the Kingdom of God.] I can, for example, decide that I must win or I will try to get even. ...

But if I surrender to the fact that the grace of Good Friday is given Dale then I surrender my power to do what is natural for me to do. [to win or get even] But in my powerlessness I am free to surrender to a living Jesus and bring before Him a "Thy Kingdom come" prayer: "Dear God, what can I say and do to love Dale in this interaction, knowing that Dale is one for whom you gave your life."

Most often the answer won't be what I want to do or like to do. Often the answer won't fix problems – it will just help me walk in that other person's shoes. God doesn't say that [life in the Kingdom of God] shouldn't be messy. Good Friday was messy for Jesus, too. And a living Jesus walks with us in that messiness to bring us to Easter, the [Kingdom of God] life...

From here I can complete both parts to my "Trinitarian Theology Tweet":

God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal. Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself.

I think the first part of that tweet is pretty clear in the sermon example above. We see that the truth of "Christ crucified" has the potential to bring peace to a conflict. The second sentence in the tweet describes what is happening in the fictional dialog between Dale and me.

In believing that God's love and the atonement is unconditional and universal and in realizing that every human interaction is a missional event, we have a clear "Jesus reason" to listen to the Holy Spirit when we interact with another person. -- EVERY human interaction --- from a casual "Hi, how are ya" to steamy sex! We can tell the voice of the Holy Spirit from our own inner voice, because He speaks with a Gospel accent.

So I will stop at this "high point". What God has done for us is even more grand than dieing for us, and what He has done for one He has done for all. That truth makes all the difference in how we see God, how we see ourselves, and how we see others.

To finish this series of letters I will need to share some of my story of grace and woundedness in relationships, including sexuality - and that will be for future letters.

After that I will come back to the subject of mission and fill in some more details on Trinitarian Theology.

Finally, I will come back and wrap this up. I pray that God will deliver on what I expressed in my first communication to you. "When I'm done I hope that I will have something that will help some on all sides of the current marriage debate to hear God's voice saying, 'Be still and know that I am God.'"

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen (2 Peter 3:18)

May we all do so as long as we draw breath.

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 8 - Sex: Love or Law?

Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Romans 3:19-22a)

\----------

March 27, 2015

Dear Friends in Christ,

Speaking from the male perspective, the sex drive is pretty difficult to control.

This reminds me of a visit to one of my remaining church members. They had a herd of elk on their large farm. And I was puzzled by the fact that the horns of the male elk seemed rather unwieldy as a weapon. In the ensuing conversation I was told that at one time one of the bull elks killed another bull elk during mating season.

Like any normal person, that sent me into a moment of theological reflection. :-) I realized that if God had allowed a male elk to have an efficient weapon (like that of a unicorn) the males might kill each other to the point of species extinction. (Contrary to the _Unicorn Song_ made popular by the Irish Rovers, I think that's why there are no unicorns!)

Well, I am glad that God didn't give human males a rack of horns to reign in our sex drive. "The sex drive does seem to be a powerful force." That's what one WCG pastor in my geographical area was reported to have said in a casual conversation.

I worked with that same pastor on a work project shortly after "the changes" of 1995. And I remember another off-hand statement that was something like this: "I guess now our life [after the 1995 "changes"] is all about realizing that Jesus died for our sins and now we live a righteous life as thanksgiving of what He did for us - but it's got to be more than that." I can't say that that is an exact quote, but I'm quite sure he said, "It's got to be more than that."

All I can say about that is that all thinking WCG members were trying to figure out what life lived apart from rules and laws looks like. My Letters 6 and 7 both recounted my personal journey of that kind of searching.

A few years after "the changes" that pastor was discovered to be in a sexual relationship with an elder's daughter, and he was asked to resign. A couple of years before "the changes" another WCG pastor in the Wisconsin area was writing inappropriate letters (apparently letters with sexual content) to one of the church male teens. And he was asked to resign.

I was more understanding of the pastor who had only laws and rules to hold his sex life in check. The second indiscretion was at least five years after "the changes" and I thought that this kind of thing should not happen in this new life where "the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law."

The Romans passage above shows that rules and law cannot reign in our sexual appetites. (To repeat, I am speaking from the male perspective.) A rule can only be classified as a law if there is a clear stated punishment of that rule. That's why the Ten Commandments are not truly laws. One of my seminary profs called the Ten Commandments a "Table of Contents of the Old Covenant". Shortly after Joe Tkach became WCG president, he said that we can keep most of the Ten Commandments while in a coma. I'm not going to take the space to defend either statement, but I am absolutely certain that love cannot be regulated by any kind of written law.

In 2006 Wisconsin was debating a marriage amendment to the state constitution which declared that marriage be between one man and one woman. At a listening session, one person spoke up and said that "marriage equality" was all about love. I can understand that this person loved his partner, but state constitutions are about law, not love.

Written laws can regulate sex to a degree. One who uses sex to exert power over one who has less power will find that written law has the ultimate power. But when there is consensual sex between people of equal power, law has no power. Therefore, in 1972 the Supreme Court said that single adults had the same rights to birth control that married people had. In effect, the Court was saying that they cannot affirm rulings to discourage pre-marital sex. A year later the Supreme Court gave mothers the right to abort a pregnancy under certain conditions. In other words, the Court could not demand that the two parents love a life before a certain point in the pregnancy.

Several years ago, a small community in the Dells area tried and failed to stop a "gentlemen's club" from starting. We now have two "gentlemen's clubs" in our area.

And it appears that the Supreme Court will soon make same-sex marriage legal in all states. I am sure that none of these legal decisions mention love.

The Apostle Paul says,

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. (Rom 8:1,2)

Also (repeating part of the Romans 3 quote on top of this page)

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Rom 3:21-22)

Paul clearly says that something changed when Jesus came. God didn't change. But we are asked to see some things in a new light - a light that illuminated the nature of God and laws more clearly.

Paul says we are free from the law of sin and death. I think that we can say that all written laws are laws of sin and death. Let me illustrate. I drive down a highway and I see the sign that says "65 mph" (in the US). That's a law. It's not important to me if I pass a truck at 70 mph. I can travel hundreds of miles and not even notice such sign. It's not important to me if I cruise along at 75 mph. But - if get caught transgressing the speed limit by an officer charged with enforcing the law, then I get death... well sort of. Apologist Ravi Zacharias calls money "congealed life", and that makes sense. I spend some of my time (life) at work and I get paid money. Then with that money I buy, food, clothing, shelter, toys, experiences; I convert that money back into life. So if I pay a fine - I give up a little of my life.

Thus all written laws are laws of "sin and death"; they define "sin" and have the power to bring on some kind of death. That includes marriage laws. Civil marriage laws are only important when we fall short of "until death do we part" or when a lawfully unmarried couples wants the respect and/or monetary rights given lawfully married people.

However, the sex act is a love relationship. To tell your sex partner that sex is a legal relationship would be a tough sell. Civil courts and judges cannot mention love in their written decisions. Politicians have mentioned "love" in some recent speeches when advocating for same-sex marriage, and I hope that that kind of talk is limited to political speeches. Can you imagine the US Congress debating love? That would be a great Saturday-Night-Live skit!

Yet our God likes the word, "love". He even claims to BE love - just like He claims to be THE Way, THE Truth, and THE Life. And the only reason that these claims make any sense is that God created us in His image. If you were to describe my image here and also describe me, you would use some of the same words - graying hair - Caucasian - senior citizen (sounds better than "old"). Likewise many words describe the Triune God and the fuzzy image of God (humans) and the true image of God (Jesus - Col 1:15) . "But the greatest of these is love."

Not only does God claim to BE love; He is the only God, among other gods, who is love. Philip Yancy writes,

On our own, would any of us come up with the notion of a God who loves and yearns to be loved? ...love has never been a normal way of describing what happens between human beings and their God. Not once does the Qur'an apply the word love to God. Aristotle stated bluntly, "It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus"—or that Zeus loved a human being, for that matter. In dazzling contrast, the Christian Bible affirms, "God is love" and cites love as the main reason Jesus came to earth: ("Unwrapping Jesus", _Christianity Today_ , June 17, 1996)

Quite often we hear people say that the Old Testament God was a God of law and the New Testament God is a God of love and grace. To answer that, let's briefly consider the Old Testament salvation story - the Passover. When we see the ancient Israelites worshipping the golden calf after being saved through the Red Sea, we simply have to conclude that God saved them at the Passover because of his grace and love.

Note again this Romans 3 passage:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Verses 21 and 22)

Note that the righteousness of God is not a new thing - it is "manifested" (made evident or revealed) and the Law and the Prophets bore witness to it.

[This is an insertion in early January of 2016: The letter to the Romans is a systematic presentation of the Gospel and it requires that the reader follow the threads of argument. Many who affirm only heterosexual marriage see Romans 1 as a key passage. Many who affirm the Bible and affirm that gender is not important in marriage have various ways of explaining the apparent condemnation of homosexual marriage. You may not want to do a thorough study at this time, but Dr. Michael Morrison's study of the first chapter is insightful. He does not expressly deal with the issue of same sex marriage. Rather he sees Chapter 1 as an introduction to the Gospel. And that is the right place to start a discussion of what the nature of our love and God's love is. The link to chapter 1 is <https://www.gci.org/bible/rom1b> ]

Now let's look at an example of how God's love and the deepest human love - marriage - was witnessed in the Old Testament but revealed more fully in the New Testament.

The story is King David's great sexual indiscretion in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. Good commentaries devote many pages to this episode in David's life, but what I am sharing here reflects my hermeneutical circle that includes Trinitarian Theology. (Recall that my "tweet" summary of Trinitarian Theology is, "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal. Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself." Also recall my hermeneutical circle diagram from Letter 2.)

Briefly here is the story: David sees Bathsheba bathing and gets aroused. They have sex and after a short time Bathsheba announces that she is pregnant and David is the father. David then maneuvers to have Bathsheba's husband Uriah have sex with her so that it will appear that the father of the unborn child is Uriah. When Uriah fails to cooperate, David puts him in battle where he is sure to be killed. God then sends Nathan to David, and Nathan tells David a story to help him understand that David displeased God in his actions regarding Bathsheba and Uriah.

God through Nathan does not immediately name the sins of adultery and murder. Instead he says this:

...Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, 'I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. And I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. (1 Kings 12:7-8)

God is the one who gives unconditionally. Therefore in this first part of Nathan's condemnation we have a glimpse of the God whose "love and atonement are unconditional and universal".

Then Nathan says:

Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.' Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.'"...."The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child who is born to you shall die."(1 Kings 12:9-12)

Again we see that "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal" in that God does not kill David. And he lets David's sinful actions take a natural course.

I will interject here that pastors often get calls for material and financial help from non-members. Since the Wisconsin Dells area is known for tourism, often the callers want help to restart their lives where there is hope of employment. One just wanted me to take him to the next town, because the police in that town would allow him to sleep under bridges. With only one exception, the story I hear is that their downturn in life was caused by a cohabitating relationship gone sour. The one exception was a "devoted" couple in their sixties who spent about two months in our area and did some house painting. In the process they got money and merchandise from several churches and people in those churches - including our church and me personally. Then they disappeared.

Back to the David story.

But consider the second part of my abbreviated Trinitarian Theology: "Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself." Here we see the result of not believing who God is. David's mission of ruling in righteousness over Israel and over his family becomes impossible. God says through Nathan, "the sword shall never depart from your house." Why? - " because you have despised me." David despised God in that he did not believe in the God of grace. Therefore his mission could not be completed - his mission of "participating in God's mission of revealing Himself". He could not reveal the God of grace to Israel, nor did he reveal the God of grace to his family, including David and Bathsheba's first son, who was to die in infancy.

Thus we have an example of "the Law and the Prophets bear[ing] witness" to what would be fully manifested in Jesus Christ.

When we despise God by not believing who He is we cannot do our mission of revealing who He is to other people.

Maybe you do not agree with this interpretation of this story, but it is within a hermeneutical circle that describes God and our mission in life in a believable way.

The traditional approach to sexual sins is to name the sin and and make sure that the sinner is somehow punished in this life now. That's exemplified quite well in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter". In modern times we cite the Commandment on adultery and the passages that mention homosexuality and the passages that mention "sexual immorality" and put down people who we think do those things.

When we use the Bible as law we become selective on the passages that we use. What about 2 Samuel 11:27? "And when the mourning was over, David sent and brought her [Bathsheba] to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son."

That statement is significant because Bathsheba became David's seventh wife (at least). God did not say much either way about polygamy in the Old Testament. There I think we have to lean on Romans 3:21-22 - "But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe."

The "newly manifested righteousness" has to do with the fuller revelation of God through Jesus Christ. Yet we know that in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 Paul instructed church leaders to be the "husband of one wife". But if we do not ask "What is the 'Jesus reason' for this guideline?" then we are still looking at the Bible as a law book.

The "Jesus reason" for this instruction was the ideal of the "one flesh" of a couple being an image of Jesus being in union with humanity.

Let me share more of this union as I explained it in my 2013 Easter sermon titled "On Easter Mountain."

I will only mention a few of the things Jesus told his disciples before his Crucifixion.

Jesus says to his disciples. "Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?" (John 14:10)

Already the words don't make sense. My pen is in my pocket – so my pocket cannot be in my pen. Jesus, you've got to give us clearer words!

In verse 16 Jesus starts talking about the Holy Spirit. He says, "But you know him [meaning the Holy Spirit] , for he lives with you and will be in you."

Well, we can probably handle that. The Holy Spirit is in us.

Verse 19-20 - "Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you."

And again we have the problem of the "ins". How can someone say "You are in me and I am in you?"

Can we put all this into some grand truth? The theology books that I read in seminary say, "God has put us in union with his Father/Son/Spirit union – with the Trinity."

But we cry out – "I don't understand the Trinity and, Pastor John, and I don't understand what you just said."

But we already said today in our call to worship this morning, "We have come not to answer our questions but to see the face of God."

And that is all we hope for today – to see the union of God with us – to see that God's face is always turned towards us. That's the vision on Easter Mountain - vision not of earth and sky, but a vision of God's relationship with us and our relationship with one another.

How real is this Easter Mountain vision of our union with God?

It's so real that we already sang, "And He walks with me and He talks with me. And He tells me I am His own." In the hymn "He Lives" we sang, "...and he lives within my heart."

How real is this Easter Mountain vision of our union with God?

It's so real that we already heard Jesus tell Mary today, "Go instead to my brothers..." Did you hear that? He called his disciples brothers! And he calls all of us his brothers and sisters!

How real is this Easter Mountain vision of our union with God?

It's so real that we already heard Jesus tell Mary "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." This statement can only make sense if Jesus - after his resurrection - is still, in some way, a human being who identifies with the rest of humanity.

How real is this Easter Mountain vision of our union with God?

It's so real that God calls himself Father and we are called his children.

How real is this Easter Mountain vision?

It's so real that God calls his church the temple of God – that's the place where people could meet God in the Old Testament. Now WE are the place where people meet God.

How real is this Easter Mountain vision?

It's so real that, in the book of Revelation, John refers to Jesus as the Husband and his Church as the wife.

How real is this Easter Mountain vision?

It so real that scripture talks about us eating the body of Jesus and drinking his blood.

How real is this Easter Mountain vision?

It's so real that Paul wrote to the Colossians, "Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." (Col 3:1) ....

How real is that Easter Mountain vision?

It so real that Paul wrote to the Ephesians. "And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus." (Eph 2:6)

The full message is at <http://www.dellsgrace.org/Easter2013.htm>

This is from the perspective of Trinitarian Theology. Do you need to change theology? Not that much. Here is a suggestion. As you sing a hymn, in your mind change the words "me" to "you". A very simple example: "Jesus loves you this I know; for the Bible tells me so." And make the "you" that first gay person that comes into your church. And if you are the David lusting over a Bathsheba (or a Benjamin) pray for that Bathsheba or Benjamin. Pray for that person to know God and reveal that God to others.

Another suggestion - look for the God described by Trinitarian Theology as your read the Bible and worship. It really is easy. I'll give you an example from a short devotional in "Our Daily Bread" titled A Father Who Runs based on the Luke 15 parable that is often titled "The Prodigal Son". (March-April-May 2015 issue, for Monday April 20th) The closing paragraph is below - again change the person in the paragraph.

**This parable reminds me that I'm** [your're] **accepted by God because of His grace, not because of my [** your] **merits. It assures me that I'll** [you'll] **never sink so deep that God's grace can't reach me** [you]. **Our Heavenly Father is waiting to run to us with open arms.**

What if that pastor who had the affair or the pastor who wrote love letters to the teenage boy came into your church? What if a gay person comes into your church? What if a self-righteous straight person comes into your church? Do you treat that person so that she or he is reminded of their acceptance by God?

Of course this is not as simple as it sounds. That's why we need to listen to the Holy Spirit because every relationship event is different - every relationship event from a casual "Hello, how are ya" to "steamy sex".

"God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal. Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself."

I do not believe there is any other hope for reigning in our sexual appetites in a culture where sex, marriage, love and church are separated.

For the Church universal I pray,

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom 15:5-6)

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 9 - Is Homosexuality a Sin?

Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. (John 16:7-11)

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March 23, 2015

[When I finished this letter on March 23, 2015 I included some dialog with readers at the time. Also my discussion of the John 16 passage above was rather disjointed. The present version was edited in early January 2016. The dialog is omitted and the meaning of the John 16 passage has been rendered more clearly.]

Dear friends in Christ,

Is homosexuality a sin? The first time I remember that question being publicly "addressed" by a "Christian" was in 2009 when I was thoughtfully visiting the memorials at the Washington DC mall. My wife was attending a conference in Baltimore at the time. A panel sound truck was making its rounds at the mall. In all the words that were shouted and painted on the truck, what I remember now is "Homosexuality is a sin!!"

That solves nothing. It begins with the premise that we can put something on a "sin list" and make it our mission to tell or intimidate or threaten people so they will avoid that sin. It's what I have called "Scarlet Letter Theology". If you have read the book, you will understand what I mean.

Therefore, I believe I can share more of my understanding of same-sex marriage if I answer the question, _"Do I consider homosexual sex to be a sin?"_

So let's explore the "big idea" of what sin is. (This is my "physics thinking" - finding big ideas that encompass numerous smaller ideas.)

In both Letter 2 and Letter 7, I paraphrased an incident in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, that indicates that God does not forgive us because we confess our sins and sincerely ask for forgiveness. Rather, "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal." That's the first half of my "barebones" version of Incarnational Trinitarian Theology, which I introduced in Letter 7.

So then what is sin, and why should we avoid sin if God has forgiven our sins before we even realize that we have sinned?

The Gospel of John is a theological Gospel, so it is not surprising that John quotes Jesus talking about the "big idea" of sin.

Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. (John 16:7-11)

Today we usually use the verb "convict" to indicate that a legal process has happened to show that a person is guilty. Here the verb "convict" indicates that the Holy Spirit will show the essence (or the "big idea") behind sin, righteousness, and judgment.

Verse 9 ("concerning sin, because they do not believe in me") says that the real meaning of sin is not believing in Jesus. If we DO believe that "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal" as revealed by what Jesus did, then as we engage another person, we must affirm that truth. If I DO NOT believe that Jesus has done this for a person that I engage then I am open to all kinds of disrespect. I can judge that person as being a bigger sinner than I am. I can tell other people about his flaws and be silent about mine. I can disrespect him by not valuing his possessions (stealing). I can disrespect him by not valuing his life (murder).

Therefore, the essence of sin is not believing in Jesus.

The point of verse 10 ("concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer") is that Jesus IS righteousness and you and I are not righteousness. Jesus IS righteousness, just as He IS "the way, the truth, and the life". Righteousness apart from Jesus can only be the righteousness that comes from believing the Great Lie: "...you will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it [embrace our own righteousness] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Gen 3:4-5)

Therefore, the essence of righteous is Jesus himself.

Believing the Great Lie, empowers ME to decide what is good and what is evil. It is the message that Satan, "the ruler of this world", wants me to believe.

Therefore it is 'the ruler of this world' that is judged and condemned, not me or any other human being.

That does not mean that our sins (our disbelieving) do not exact a penalty. To illustrate I will repeat a section of my 2013 Christmas column.

So does anyone get condemned to Hell?

I assume that most of you reading this know the "Golden Verse of the Bible", John 3:16. Now listen to the next two verses: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son."

When we do not believe what Jesus did for us, then we are not peacemakers because we see most everybody as guilty, and so we "stand condemned" by other people. We live in a hell of our own making.

And apparently it is possible for people to not believe on the "other side" and "stand condemned" there also. C. S. Lewis said that the doors of Hell are locked from the inside. I think he's right.

Pope Francis expressed the same idea in somewhat different words in his first Good Friday mass as pope:

One word should suffice this evening that is the Cross itself. The Cross is the word through which God has responded to evil in the world ...a word which is love, mercy, forgiveness. It also reveals a judgment. Namely, that God, in judging us, loves us. Let us remember this: God judges us by loving us. If I embrace his love then I am saved. If I refuse it, then I am condemned, not by him, but by my own self, because God never condemns, he only loves and saves.

(Citation: "The Way of the Cross, Catholic Insight. < http://catholicinsight.com/the-way-of-the-cross/>.) I found the quote in A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel by Bradley Jersak (Kindle Locations 720-723). CWR Press. Kindle Edition.

One final thought about believing is this: Believing is not "digital". It is not "either or". We do not believe absolutely and we do not doubt absolutely. We are all in the place of the father who brought his child to Jesus for healing. The father said to Jesus, "I believe; help my unbelief!". (Mark 9:24)

I remember attending a prayer meeting in a nursing home where someone else was leading the meeting. And one person prayed for his son, who he said was "saved" but he prayed that he should be "saved better". That's all of us from the most villainous to the most saintly. We can all be saved "better". We can all believe "better".

"Not believing good enough" means that we can forget what Jesus has done for all, and so we tend to interact with other people in a selfish way. We tend to think we are better than certain other people. We drown out the voice of the Holy Spirit with our own selfish thoughts.

But remember, not believing (even not believing good enough) is sin. Jesus forgives all sin unconditionally, so in that sense we can say that Jesus believes for us. But as we worship Jesus (personally and corporately) and get to know him better, we will "...grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:18) And as we grow in that knowledge of Jesus Christ we will see all people as equals and we will be more gracious in knowing how to do the second part of my "Trinitarian Theology Tweet", which is, "Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself.

(In the "old WCG" I would talk about "growing in grace and knowledge" and conveniently forget about that phrase, "of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ". Sermons about Jesus were pretty much limited to the times of the year that we noted the death of Jesus. We didn't even preach much about the resurrection of Jesus.)

_"Do I consider homosexual sex to be a sin?"_ It would be for me because I believe the correct expression for coitus is "making love". And once we use the word "love" we are talking about something that God is. _God is love. (1 John 4:8, 16)_ My love is a faint image of the first part of my Trinitarian Theology Tweet" - "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal." If I make love conditionally, that is a blurred faint image. If I make love short of "till death do us part", that is blurred faint image. If I make love homosexually, that is a blurred faint image because God's love is expressed in God coming to humanity a man goes to, and into, a woman's body. My lovemaking should be in the direction of a clearer faint image rather than a blurry faint image. My lovemaking should be in the direction of belief rather than in direction of doubt.

God doesn't just come to us - God is one with us. God is one with us like a man and a woman coming together to be "one flesh". (Gen 2:24 and that passage is quoted five times in the New Testament.) I explained some of the unconditional oneness of God with all humanity in my Letter 8, quoting from my 2013 Easter sermon.

If I engaged in same-sex acts - even in a committed relationship - I would have to believe that Jesus is only nice man who said and did some nice things to a few people - or believe that the Jesus story is entirely fiction.

So I cannot sit in that sound truck in the Washington mall in 2009 and shout "Homosexuality is a sin", but I can look in the mirror and shout "John Torgerson, you have sinned."

Jesus said, "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin (to not believe in Jesus) it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matthew 18:5-6) I taught my children to believe in "God's law" and God's "system" of rewards and punishment. In Letter 6 I recounted the story of my being disappointed where a pastor tried to explain what "God's law" was. I taught my children live by something that I did not even understand!

Despite my failing to teach my children about Jesus, my two grown children have loving marriages, but they are wounded by my teaching. Their path to marriage has been bumpy - but it is for all of us in various ways. We have two grandsons from our daughter and son-in-law. My son and his wife do not plan to have children. The love is real in both families, and that is God's grace (unmerited favor). The Holy Spirit can help us love even if we don't believe in God. But if we do not recognize or acknowledge God's grace, then we cannot do our mission, which is to pass on the knowledge of who Jesus is to others and to succeeding generations. That is, we cannot do the second part of my "barebones version of Incarnational Trinitarian Theology" which is, "Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself."

Do I deserve "to have a great millstone fastened around [my] neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea"? I taught my children rules and I did not know what believing in Jesus means. In placing rules over believing in Jesus, I taught my children to sin. Yes, I deserve to have a great millstone fastened around my neck and be drowned in the sea. Thank God, that he doesn't give us what we deserve!

Does God let us off the hook because "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal"? We don't know what happens in "the age to come." A few years ago, Mike Feazell said that "on the other side" murderers might have to face the people they have murdered. It's not unreasonable that my three decades of false teaching will have repercussions for generations - generations that I will have to face.

That's a speculation. All we can say for sure is that "God is love" - past, present and future. That was the point of my first, and only, video post to you all. If you missed it, it is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R1ilthSSK0&feature=youtu.be

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (2 Cor 13:14)

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 10 - Equality in Christ

For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Romans 3:19-22a)

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May 25, 2015

Dear Friends in the Rainbow group and fellow members of Grace Fellowship,

This will be an unusual letter. You who get my monthly member letters are getting this letter. You who are in our rainbow group will also be getting this letter. Not a single word will be different. I think this letter has a message for both groups. [I changed some real names to fictitious names on October 24th 2015.]

(I mentioned that I was corresponding with a rainbow group to you, the member group, in my December 22, 2014 and February 10, 2015 letters.)

This letter is longer than the other eleven letters, so I have links to the five major sections.

Letter 10 Contents

1 - Woundedness

2 - Two miracles in my life

3 - Avoidable woundedness

4 - I believe...

5 - Equality in Christ

1 - Woundedness

I have completed nine letters to the rainbow group; this will be the tenth. The fourth letter to the rainbow group was titled "Wounded", and I talked a lot about the woundedness in my family from two generations back to my generation. In that fourth letter I mentioned that my maternal grandmother had a child out of wedlock, then married a different man (my grandfather), then died at the birth of my mother. My mother was adopted by a couple who were about 50 years of age. She became a bitter, paranoid person and made my father's life very difficult. My parents were old when I was born as their only son. Mother was 41, dad was 51. As to our financial status, I can say that we paid cash for everything, but there wasn't much money for anything but the basics. In the fifth letter I shared my joy in science and I also shared some of my life at the grade school level.

Woundedness comes in the forms of poverty, natural disasters, and physical and mental illness. It also comes in ways that don't really fit in any of these categories. They are the realities of what we say married life will be. And since marriage is an image of our union with God, these are also the realities of our life in Christ. We express these realities in most marriage vows:

I, [man's or woman's full name], with the help of God, take you, [woman's or man's full name] to be my lawful wedded [wife or husband], to have and to hold, from this day forward, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part. This I pledge to you. (Part of the current GCI suggested marriage ceremony.)

As I am writing this in early May 2015, the news is filled with horrible storms in Texas and Oklahoma. Earlier this year there was a gigantic earthquake in Nepal. We call such things "acts of God". I suppose many illnesses might be called "acts of God" also in that they don't seem fair and we cannot determine any cause on our part. There is no way of determining if the "acts of God" or the destructive "acts of man" have caused the most woundedness over the millennia of human history. I am guessing that the "acts of man" trump the "acts of God". I am also convinced that if we did not have to drain our economies due to the "acts of man" there would be plenty of money to rebuild homes and rebuild lives due to the "acts of God".

My monthly mailed letters mostly go to about a dozen GCI members who formerly attended the Wisconsin Dells congregation. Most of the members are not able to assemble with a local GCI congregation because of distance and/or age. Of these members, only my wife and I and one other couple are regularly attending a local non-GCI church.

We who are in the member group have lived more than half our lives; there is only one possible exception. All of us could make a case for our woundedness being "not fair".

And some of us might say, "I just can't stand this anymore". I say this only because I remember an incident related by Dr. Bangore, a local psychologist. He spoke at several Dells teacher inservice meetings during the 1970's. One time he told of a very troubled lady who came to him with some issue that she thought was unbearable. She continually repeated the statement, "I just can't stand this any more". So Dr. Bangore asked her, "Just what do you mean? What is it that you do to 'not stand' this?" I know that several of you in the member group are having health struggles where you are getting close to saying "I can't stand this any more".

I don't know much of the struggles of you in the rainbow group, except one with whom I have had some significant discussions.

All in the member group and all in the rainbow group would be delighted to find a quick, easy fix, like Alex shared with me a few days ago. I've known Alex in a professional way for decades, and he attends the church that Karen and I have been attending the last three years. We have begun some dialogs about science and theology.

The subject of the first dialog was the book, _The Healing Code._ The words on the cover of the book promised that the "truths" in this book would bring physical and mental healing, and even financial healing. Alex was particularly interested in talking with me because the book integrated quantum physics with healing, and I have a better knowledge of physics than most people. Quantum physics is weird stuff, so I wasn't surprised that the book made claims that are hard to believe.

Finally Alex cited an occurrence mentioned in the book where someone experienced a spectacular physical healing after being given a "healing code". So I naturally asked, "What is the code? Is it series of letters or numbers? A series of practices to do? A song to sing? Words to repeat?"

Alex replied, "You've got to get the book."

I explained that I just don't have the time to deal with this kind of thing. But Alex was insistent. So after some banter, I said this: "Alex, you and I have a terminal illness. We both have gray hair. That's a symptom of the terminal illness that began in our twenties. Since that time more cells in our bodies have been dying than have been replaced. We call it aging. Now, Alex, if the next time I see you and you look like you're twenty-one, then I'll buy the book." And that concluded our first chat. Our next chat will be on radioactive dating in archeology.

Quick fixes for our struggles are appealing. In the last two weeks, I participated in two different prayer sessions at care centers. In both of them there were passionate prayers for healing - healing that would enable people in the care centers to live more tolerable lives independently at home. They wanted something to change dramatically. I will probably pray a prayer like that for myself some day. But by the grace of God I'm still able to do physical work as I am approaching seventy.

Most dramatic interventions are only partial. In the first century James wrote this to fellow followers of Jesus:

Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits. (James 1:9-11)

Those of us who are not the powerful, and not the rich, and perhaps not in the best of health, are to "boast in our exaltation". Our exaltation is being blessed "in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (Eph 1:3) We were made alive "even when we were dead in our trespasses" (Eph 2:5) These are just two of the many astounding truths in the letter to the Ephesians.

The powerful and rich and healthy may seem to not seem wounded, and maybe a few are involved in worthwhile "pursuits" their entire lives. But they will "fade away in the midst of their pursuits". Aging will take its final toll.

Letter 10 Contents

Book Contents

2 - Two Miracles in My Life

The James passage does not mean we cannot have occasional spectacular interventions from God. They have a purpose in our lives, too. I do remember two dramatic personal occurrences that I think I can confidently call "miracles".

The first occurred in 1971 as I was completing my third year of teaching in Kewaunee, Wisconsin. Kewaunee was about a five hour drive from where my aging parents lived near Baldwin, Wisconsin. My parents were getting to the age where they were having health problems, so my plan was to resign in Kewaunee and get a teaching job near Baldwin or the Twin Cities. Also, I was driving about a two-hundred mile round trip to Milwaukee in order to attend WCG church services and other church activities.

There was a unique problem for me, however. Being a member of the WCG, the fall Feast days required around two week's absence each fall as well as some other days off during a school year. I had successfully done this in my 1970-71 school year in Kewaunee, and I likely could have continued. But could I get a new job knowing that I had to be "up-front" about my required days off?

I started the application process that spring. In passing, I mentioned to the principal at Kewaunee that in my job interviews I would be honest about the required days off. His response was, "If you're going to do that, you'll never get a teaching job."

The time dragged on into June. That summer I was given a grant to spend eight weeks at the University of Wisconsin-Superior for learning to teach one of the new physical science courses of that era. My dad called me from home and said that the physics teacher at the Wisconsin Dells High School had resigned, and I should call for an interview. I came home to Baldwin that weekend and arranged for a Sunday afternoon interview. (Saturday "business" was not permitted in the WCG.) After the interview, I planned to proceed back to Superior.

This job was absolutely amazing! The WCG was building a fall festival facility at the Dells. It was scheduled to be completed by the fall of 1972. The teaching job was a perfect job for me - science, physics, and audio-visual coordinator - AND a sizable WCG church congregation was there! If Ambassador College in Pasadena was Heaven then I thought this was surely a suburb of Heaven! (Out in the local churches we seldom heard about contention at "Headquarters".)

The interview with the District Administrator went well. We talked about the days off that I needed, and he was already aware of those days. The following Tuesday I was called and told that I had the job.

Later that summer, I offered my dad the option of living with me in a rented house in the Dells. I was surprised how exited dad was about that idea. Mom couldn't really comprehend what that would be like, but when we moved in that fall, she also warmed up to the idea quickly.

Of course, I was praying for a job as soon as I decided to resign at Kewaunee. Some others were praying, too. Did I think that God was "blessing" me for my faithfulness? Did He bless me because I was honoring my parents? Even in that "obedience-culture" I believe I can honestly answer, "No."

Now, forty-four years later, these are my thoughts. First I didn't even know God in 1971, so I have to say that getting to work for the Dells School District in an ideal job was pure grace.

Secondly, I am enough of a scientist and mathematician to realize that my getting the Dells job might have been pure time and chance - "the luck of the draw", as we say. That may be a scary thought for some, but I rather think it's a healthy thought. I think it's rather self-righteous to say "God blessed me" to myself or to other people. The same is true for expressions like "God spoke to me and said...". I suppose that my objection to such statements is that that's just not the way us old "Norwegian Lutheran farmers" talk.

We must live in faith rather than certainty. Then we are more apt to respond in faith - not to pay God for his "blessing" but to offer thanks for his grace. And that grace will be expressed in passing that grace on to others.

The second seemingly miraculous occurrence has to do with my marriage. This will be a longer story. But first let me share, as concisely as I can, some of my own woundedness in relationships with others as I transitioned from a child to an adult.

When I was really little I remember my mother saying things like "Here comes your Pa" so I thought that dad was called "yerpa". I remember dad straightening me out on that. But ma called dad "Emil" and I called my dad "Emil" until my uncle straightened me out on that at about age twelve, as best as I can recall. Mother and dad did not have endearing names for each other, like "Honey". To this day I find it unnatural to call my wife "Honey".

In 1952, an "I Love Lucy" episode showed Lucy breaking the news to Ricky that they would have a baby. Lucy did not have a chance to tell Ricky, so she goes to Ricky's nightclub show and anonymously requests the song "We're having a baby, my baby and me". Ricky walks around the tables singing and finally realizes that Lucy made the request. From all this I surmised that somehow only married couples can have children, and the husband has no direct part in the whole process.

Now, on our small dairy farm I was shown a calf being born and I was allowed to watch a bull breeding a cow. But the scientific thinking of mammal reproduction being common to all mammals, including humans, was too sophisticated for me. And that was pretty much my thinking for the duration of my grade school years. When I entered high school, I remember seeing a wall chart on human reproduction and my thoughts were both "Now I know for sure" and "I am not surprised".

In high school and in college I never dated. I helped decorate for the Junior Prom in high school, but I didn't go to the prom. I had a secret crush on a classmate in history class but I didn't dare ask her for a date. I was a poor farmer's kid and she was a cheerleader. I didn't know how to start a date. I got up my courage to talk to a girl I liked in college, with the hope that I might at least ask her out. But my opening line was an embarrassing failure, and I never tried it again. My first date was at a WCG Spokesman Cub ladies night at about age twenty-five.

Many churches hold up marriage as an exalted state above the single state, and that was certainly true of the WCG. In that culture one was "complete" as a married person and "incomplete" as a single person.

I finally dated a girl for about a year when I was about thirty, but she called it off. I went through a brief period of pain and then moved on.

I remember one painful incident at the Feast of 1979. The speaker was touting family life and he cited the appeal of TV fictional families like the Walton's and the Cartwright's on Bonanza. I sat through the whole thing fighting back tears.

However, my single years were really not that bad. I took advantage of being single and did some summer traveling, and I celebrated fall Feasts in Norway and in Israel. I was active in the local Church. I was growing as a teacher. My personal identity was in the "truths" of the WCG. My identity was in physics and in finding creative ways for students to experience the wonder and practicality of physics. My identity was not in Christ; I was oblivious to the New Testament expressions like "in Christ" and "in Him", etc. But my identity was not in my sexuality either. Sex was only for married people.

Now on to my marriage with Karen. In 1973 Karen moved from Colorado to the Dells area to marry Ken, a son in a large family. It was a family where the mother became one of the pioneer WCG members in Wisconsin in the late nineteen fifties. The father was a dairy farmer, but the seven-days-a-week regimen of that industry dissuaded him from Sabbath-keeping and being involved in the WCG.

By 1982, Karen had two children and was divorced.

After the divorce, I talked with one of the respected "sages" in the Dells congregation, and I remembered him saying that "Karen is Ken's wife". At the time, I interpreted this as meaning that he was not totally convinced on the WCG divorce-and-remarriage (D&R) decision of 1974. Also, my recollection is that he said something like, "If Ken obliges and jumps off a skyscraper, you're home free." Karen, however, remembers this "sage" as totally affirming a marriage between Karen and me. All I can say is that this "matchmaker" must have had two different opinions at two different times.

I weighed my version of the advice given and decided that I should not give the D&R problem much weight.

At the time, Karen's two children were seven and five years old (girl and boy, respectively). In that early summer of 1982 during church fellowship time, Karen's five-year-old son was speaking with great glee about a sleep-over with dad in his water-bed. And I thought, "I'm not terribly unhappy as a single person. I'm thirty-six. Marriage is OK, but do I really want to compete with 'real dad'?"

Meanwhile, Karen decided to move back to her mother's home in Colorado with her two children to pursue a career as a paralegal.

Just before the move, Ken committed suicide. (I have to assume that the "sage" was a prophet or that he knew Ken was suicidal or that I have "edited" my own memories based on an account mentioned to me later of an automobile accident being a possible suicide attempt. In any case, I am sure that the WCG at that time did not recommend any kind of professional psychiatric help, even if a person displayed suicidal tendencies.)

Ken's suicide removed the uneasiness of my having to compete with "real dad". Before Karen left Wisconsin, we agreed that I would come to Colorado for a visit later that summer. Over Christmas vacation, Karen and I agreed to be married.

During that spring Karen and I conducted a long-distance engagement and house-building project. My mother died about two months before the wedding. She was spared the "ordeal" of my marriage, and we were spared her frequent outbursts and paranoia. That potentially unpleasant situation was removed with no effort on my part. (Dad had died four years previously.)

Karen, too, has been wounded. A divorce always hurts. But she was wounded when she was diagnosed as a pre-teen with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. The spinal fusion surgery that was done in that era left her with an inability to expand her rib cage for proper breathing.

She speaks occasionally of the months in a upper body-cast and of never being able to swim or join in high school or college gymnasium activities. When she speaks of the surgery she often mentions the nude photographs taken by doctors before the surgery. For a pre-teen that may have been more traumatic than the surgery and cast.

She has been on supplementary oxygen since 2000, and her ability to assimilate sufficient oxygen to move around has decreased during the years since then. But after our marriage she achieved her dream of owning and riding a horse, and she is active at an administrative level in a dynamic state-wide 4-H Horse association. She forces herself to drive a thirty-mile round trip two or three times a week to work out in a hospital rehabilitation unit. She will always be my beautiful bride. Things get harder for her year by year, but she has never said, "I just can't stand this any more."

Now I must add two more details in this story; the first one is a bit strange. In our first year of marriage I saw a letter from Ken in Karen's files that she received shortly before he died. He professed his love for Karen and the two children - and he confessed that he was gay. He named one man that he had been close to in a sexual way. In shock and puzzlement, I recognized his name. I knew him from my earliest days in the Milwaukee WCG congregation. I definitely recall that he joined a "group date" in the Milwaukee area that I initiated after I had moved to the Dells. While I knew him from my earliest times in Milwaukee, he was not in the group of guys that I typically hung around with in Spokesman Club and other activities.

Months after reading the letter, I recalled my December 1969 WCG baptism. I remember that an older couple was baptized with me, as well as another guy my age. I am 95% sure that the guy that Ken had been close to was the young fellow who was baptized in the same water in which I was baptized. I still don't know what meaning that might have.

The second incident happened a few weeks before our marriage during the approximately six months between our official engagement and the wedding. It was likely during the time that Karen came back to the Dells in April for my mother's funeral. In those six months everything came together beautifully - the purchase of a lot for building - selecting house plans and starting to build a house - preparing for a wedding and honeymoon - preparing for my doing the finish work on the house after we moved in - and not having to deal with integrating my mother into our new family. Most was done "long distance" between the Dells and Colorado. The house we built was within walking distance of the Feast Site. Today I can walk to the end of my driveway and see that local "monument" of the "old WCG".

After Sabbath services during Karen's visit, I gave a few members a "tour" of the house, which consisted of a muddy yard, a roof, wall studs, a floor, and basement walls. One member said something like, "This is God's blessing for living a righteous life." My first reaction was, "I'm glad I didn't say this."

My next thought is the thought that has stayed with me for thirty-three years. The thought is "I _can't_ say this." I agreed that many things worked out in a seemingly miraculous way. But there was also a change in my thinking. I really didn't think much about marriage until I was really settled in my teaching profession, and that wasn't until I was about a decade into my career. And even then, I wanted to be married because I liked the idea of being married. I liked the idea of perpetuating the Torgerson name. (In my dad's family of eleven children I was the only male cousin who could carry on the name. I adopted Karen's two children and they rightfully retained their father's last name.) I liked the idea of keeping the Norwegian line somewhat pure. I liked the idea of living "happily for ever after."

Our marriage was pure God's grace to two wounded souls - much better than any fantasy. The details that brought us together were indeed miraculous. But banishing those selfish "ideas" was a greater miracle and finding love and some healing for my relational woundedness was a greater miracle. God is patient. From my point of view, it took Him thirty-seven years to get this wounded soul to figure out that when God brings a man a wife, He also brings a woman a husband!

In both of these signs of grace, we have tried to pass that grace on to our children and others.

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3 - Avoidable Woundedness

Now let me turn my attention to those of us in the rainbow group. I have our pictures before me around my stand-alone computer monitor. Even with my age of sixty-nine our average age is significantly less than the average age in the member group.

Many of you in the rainbow group might say that you are wounded in that you cannot have the marriage and family life that many of us in the member group have had. But I know the stories of the member group and I can say that every couple is unique just as individuals are unique. "Living happily ever after" in marriage is the unrealistic dream all those who have not entered marriage.

But there are other wounds in the rainbow group. Many of you in the rainbow group have been wounded by others who want to say that your woundedness is sinful - sinful according to law. (From the previous letter, those of you in the rainbow group should recall that the ground of sin is not believing in Jesus, based on John 16:7-11. For you in the member group, I'll explain that in the next member letter.) These "laws" pertaining to homosexuality are often extracted from six scripture passages that expressly seem to put homosexual acts on a "sin list". Therefore, much of the Christian literature on same-sex marriage on both sides devotes great attention to those six scriptures.

Yes, there are sin lists and virtue lists in the New Testament. I have listed most of them in the <http://www.dellsgrace.org/Bible.htm> web page. But we don't need to believe in God to avoid doing actions in the "sin list". And many who do not believe in God, do a commendable job of doing the actions in the "virtue list". But Christians are called to "live in Christ" or "live the Gospel", and that goes deeper that just avoiding "bad" actions and doing "good" actions.

[This was added on January 10, 2016: The cover article of the November 2015 issue Christianity Today was titled The Power of Our Weakness (p. 41-49). These words on the title page set the tone for the article: "By many accounts, orthodox Christians have lost the culture wars. How they can flourish—not vanish—in a time of retreat." I responded to the article as a letter to the editor, which was published in the January-February 2016 edition of CT. My letter is below:

The authors' hopes for the future are commendable: e.g. working on social projects alongside those who support gay marriage, strengthening marriage, encouraging teenagers to abstain from or delay sexual activity, and defending human dignity. But all of these must be spirit-directed activities that originate in the gospel. Sexual ethics spring from believing that Jesus loves all unconditionally and is an advocate for every human being. Jesus died for all and is therefore the quintessential defender of human dignity.

Gospel-motivated social engagement has the better hope of the gospel being passed on to following generations.]

My story of knowing God that I have shared with you, the Rainbow Group is that we live by the Gospel, not by written law. You in the member group know that I have preached many times that the Bible is not a law book, but a storybook where we get to know the main character - the Father/Son/Spirit God.

_The Jesus Storybook Bible_ says it well in the introduction:

Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn't do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. But the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you should be doing. It's about God and what he has done.

Also I'll remind you of a milestone incident that I shared with the rainbow group in Letter 6. It is an excerpt from the February 10, 2015 member letter.

I will recount one milestone event that happened in early 1995, as I was deciding whether to go with "the changes" or not. ...I stopped into Dale Maher's room over my lunch period, and I was fighting back tears as I explained what was happening in our church. ... I asked, "How can I be wrong about the Sabbath when it is so clear in the Ten Commandments?" His answer was, "Jesus is above the Ten Commandments."

Jesus is above all "laws" of sex and marriage also.

When we live by laws we are on a slippery slope toward comparing ourselves with others, judging others, and wounding others. If we think we are doing a good job of obeying the laws, we become self-righteous and are apt to wound others.

We certainly do want to be "right" rather than "wrong". But if we think that we are better than others because of our "right" positions and have the right to persecute others for their "wrong" positions, that is the self-righteousness that Jesus condemned, and that is wrong.

In a column written for my local newspaper, I "translated" Luke 18:9-14 to apply to those who argue against same sex-marriage from a law perspective.

"To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: John and Don went up to the church to pray. John stood by himself and prayed: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even Don, who is in a gay relationship blessed by his so-called church. I have been married for thirty-three years and I have never even so much looked at Playboy. My wife and I did marriage right; we didn't have sex before our wedding night. But Don stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' I tell you that Don, rather than John, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

Those who affirm same-sex marriage can be just as bad because their arguments are connected to law in two ways. First they look at the six passages that expressly mention homosexuality. In their exegesis of these passages they argue that God does not condemn _committed_ same-sex sexual love. Then it is easy to argue that such relationships are an expression of _agape_ love (the self-giving love of God). In my public writings on same-sex marriage I have never dealt with these passages because I do not believe the Bible is law book.

The second way that same-sex marriage is connected to law leans on the fact that marriage is one of the last vestiges of the _union_ of church and state. Through marriage we will never have total separation of church and state. Marriage involves love, which is spiritual, and the state cannot deal in the realm of the spiritual. State marriage involves common property, custody rights of children and tax privileges, and only the state can claim to have that kind of authority over both believers and non-believers.

Therefore politicians, lawyers, judges, and constitutions have to say something about the marriage. All four of these entities must claim to be right in their conclusions without deferring to any spiritual arguments. It is a form of self-righteousness that government cannot avoid. That self-righteousness easily spills over into the church world as well. And it exists especially in the same-sex marriage "dialogs" within the church as members claim the "higher ground" and deem others as less loving or homophobic. These "dialogs" are often the self-righteous combating the self-righteous.

It is normal for the self-righteous to combat the self-righteous in the world of politics. However, if you are aware of church history at all (as well as WCG/GCI history) you must conclude that it is normal for the self-righteous to combat the self-righteous in church world as well. And people are wounded in the battle.

Can we do this change in sociology and ecclesiology differently from previous church battles and avoid some of the woundedness?

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4 - I believe...

I believe that I can only marry a man and a woman in a Christian wedding ceremony because I believe that the Christian God is a God of gender.

Ephesians 5 speaks of Jesus who "gave himself up" for the church and of husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the Church. I believe that earthly gender words, such as husband and wife, are an image of the grander reality of God with humanity.

I learned the prayer that begins this way from my earthly father: "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." I believe that we hallow the name of God the Father in a miniscule way when a male goes to a female in self-emptying love. I believe that Jesus is really good at presenting our miniscule efforts as magnificent efforts to the Father.

We know that Revelation is apocalyptic literature with grand themes of good versus evil and spectacular visions in Heaven and on earth. I believe that the four references of bride and husband in Revelation are a heavenly reality imaged by earthly reality.

In Jesus' long prayer to the Father recorded in the seventeenth chapter of John, He says, "I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." I believe that Christians are to participate with Jesus Christ to make the Father's name known, and that is how Jesus "will continue to make it known".

When Paul writes to the problem church of Corinth he says "Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, 'The two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality." I believe that the "one flesh" argument has something say for those who are married. I believe that the "one flesh" argument has something to say for those who try to become one flesh without being married.

The "one flesh" statement of Genesis 2:24 is repeated five times in the New Testament. I believe those expressions are images of God being one with us.

The writer of Genesis was inspired to say " _Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh_ ". I believe this describes God coming to Adam and Eve, to Abraham, to Joseph, to Moses and to the prophets, and to other Old Testament heroes and villains. I believe that "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world."

The writer of Genesis was inspired to say, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." I believe that this connection to gender signifies that gender is a reality in God's realm that is imaged in the earthly realm.

Jesus' ministry added the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to human vocabulary with special meanings. It took the church about five centuries and the WCG six decades to call the Holy Spirit a Person and speak of that Person with the male pronoun "He". I believe that the maleness of God is his desire to be one with a female, which is all of us.

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5 - Equality in Christ

We in the Western world advocate for equality through law. That is not a bad thing. But the law cannot reach the heart of a person. The Holy Spirit must do that. When we preach a sermon or read from the Bible we must bring every passage and every thought to the practical level of how we treat our neighbor - or our lover - or the one we love deeply - or our enemy. I often cite this quote from Karl Barth.

"On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of every human being, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father; and we have to deal with him on this assumption. If the other person knows that already, then we have to strengthen him in that knowledge. If he does not know it yet, or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him. On the basis of the knowledge of the humanity of God no other attitude to any kind of fellow man is possible. It is identical with the practical acknowledgement of his human rights and his human dignity. To deny it to him would be for us to renounce having Jesus Christ as Brother and God as Father." (Quoted from the Amazing God Blog from The Humanity of God, p. 53. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982)

This is an expanded version of my "Trinitarian Theology Tweet" mentioned in Letters 8 and 9, which is "God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal. Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself."

"God's love & atonement is unconditional and universal" is another way of saying "we have to think of every human being, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father".

"Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself" is another way of saying, "If the other person knows [about God's unconditional love] already, then we have to strengthen him in that knowledge. If he does not know it yet, or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him."

For us in the member group, we have no choice but to do this within our woundedness. One way or another, we have already said that we will do God's work "in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health." At best, deliverance from our infirmities will be partial and temporary.

But you in the rainbow group are much younger than we are. I have read some accounts of the pain that gay people have experienced in not being able to be married in the traditional way. I will have to remind you, however, that every young person looks ahead and sees "happily ever after" rather than "want", "sorrow" and "sickness".

But I cannot discount that pain of not being able to have an intimate, loving, life-long relationship with another person. You have posted these accounts on our group page. To try to get inside your pain, I might think back to that 1979 Feast message about family. But that was only one of those momentary emotional experiences. Within hours I was planning the rest of the week. Within days I would go back to my classroom to make up for the teaching that didn't happen when I was absent.

We are different people with different kinds of woundedness. And one difference between you in the rainbow group and me is that, in my formative years, I never considered my sexual identity to be central to who I am. That is not my great wisdom or spirituality. I just happened to chronologically grow up in the world where the sexual revolution was just starting, while living in the sexual mores of the pre-World War II era.

Another difference between you in the rainbow group and me is a reality that those of you under age twenty-five may not want to hear. So I will try to "soften the blow" by reminding you that your automobile insurance is more expensive before age twenty-five because your capacity for judgment is lower before that age. In my Family Systems class at Bethel, I recall reading that an only-child starts thinking like an adult earlier in life than a child who grows up with siblings. I am convinced that that was true for me.

And the final difference between us is that many of you in the rainbow group have experienced the woundedness of being put down by the self-righteous. I have addressed that earlier in this letter, and this should not be in the church. Whether we are in a church that affirms same-sex marriage or in a church that affirms only traditional marriage, we must begin our discussions on this with "I believe". I am not saying that that will solve all problems. But we who espouse the theology and position on same-sex marriage that I have outlined, should be able to avoid responding to self-righteousness with self righteousness. I will share more of this in the final Letter 12.

The member group and the rainbow group are already equal. We both have to show the love of God within our woundedness if God does not grant a miraculous healing. All of us must heed James.

Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits. (James 1:9-11)

Those of us who are not the powerful, and not the rich, and perhaps not in the best of health, and perhaps cannot have a married life, are to "boast in our exaltation". Our exaltation is being blessed "in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places." (Eph 1:3) We were made alive "even when we were dead in our trespasses" (Eph 2:5)

In Trinitarian Theology, we say that all are exalted, but not all believe and know that they are exalted. It is for us, the wounded, to tell people of their exalted state. That's the second part of the "Trinitarian Theology Tweet", which is, "Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself."

Let me briefly share an incident that happened about a week ago at a luncheon of retired staff of the Wisconsin Dells School District. (I keep a contact list of those retirees and arrange for the biannual luncheons. I also pass around bits of news in that group through e-mail and print.) During the time in the luncheon when we were sharing news, Allen, a former colleague and math teacher, explained why his wife, Millie, was absent at the luncheon. She had been battling cancer for four years. The first round of chemo promised a high rate of success, but failed to deliver. A second kind of chemo promised only a 20% probability of success, but it has slowed the growth of the cancer. Allen concluded by saying that Millie believes that she will not be cured of this cancer. But they have felt the power of people praying in their church, and Millie has a positive attitude.

A quick, dramatic healing would be what we all want. But it would not have much to say for the wounded who might be tempted to say "I can't stand this any more". We will all come to the point where there is no more physical healing. "Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation."

You in member group can mightily thunder the Gospel from your pain, from your nursing home bed, and from your physical weakness. May God give me the grace to do the same when that time comes for me.

To you in the rainbow group, let me say this. Western world governments are moving to give you a quick, easy fix for your woundedness, which is legal same-sex marriage. In Letter 11, I will share some stories about my efforts in revealing the love the Father to people who have been wounded in relationships. (You in the member group heard some of this in my December 2nd letter last year.) Many of these wounds go back at least a generation. Some of these wounds are irreversible because of bad decisions made during the young years of lower capacity for judgment. If you take the quick, easy solution of acting on your sexual desires outside of marriage or within a sexual union that is only marriage by law, you have an uncertain message for those who are wounded differently. Allen and Millie do not have that problem. My member group in their pain and sick beds do not have that problem.

I am all for equality - not equality by law, but the equality that I believe God gives. God is our Father, and Jesus is our brother. Every one of us is called to show the self-emptying love of the Father, and most of those efforts are done without being healed of our woundedness. That is the kind of equality that glorifies God and makes the Gospel good news for all.

In my introductory communication to you in the rainbow group, I said, "When I'm done I hope that I will have something that will help some on all sides of the current marriage debate to hear God's voice saying, 'Be still and know that I am God.'"

I'm not done yet. In the next letter I will give some examples of that second half of my short version of Trinitarian Theology which is "Through the Holy Spirit, believers participate in God's mission of revealing Himself."

Then I plan to conclude with some of my hopes for Christianity within the reality that for the foreseeable future there will be both churches who affirm same sex marriage and also churches who only affirm traditional marriage.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Romans 3:21-22a)

May we grow in that righteousness as we touch the lives of those meet each day.

John Torgerson

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### Letter 11 - On Mission

"It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing." (Eph 2:1-10 The Message)

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July 29, 2015

Dear Friends in Christ,

For me, this month of July was practically over after Independence Day. I spent the early days of July getting ready for Northern Light Camp. (The camp was July 12th to 18th - one of 19 GCI youth camps in the USA.) I did two classes. One class was on making rubber-band-powered airplanes. The other class was on beekeeping, where we did some honey extracting and learned some things about honeybee life and life with honeybees.

We had a chapel service each day at camp.

What are we trying to accomplish at these teaching times? A passage in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians offers a partial answer to this question:

What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. (1 Cor. 3:5-7)

So we hope to plant "gospel seeds". This year many campers had attended Northern Light in previous years, so hopefully there was some planting, re-planting and watering taking place at these chapels.

In this third chapter, Paul also writes:

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.(Verses 10-11)

What does that foundation look like? This passage from Ephesians 2:1-10 was the theme passage for all the chapels: (That was the passage that began this letter.)

You probably recognize that as the foundational salvation passage. For some of us the old King James phrases might still be in our brains: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Eph 2:8)

The verse I quoted above from 1 Corinthians 3 is also critical: "For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ." (Verse 11)

I have already shared much about the days in the "old WCG" when we built a foundation on obedience to laws. But, in July's Dells Church member letter, I reminded the members of Grace Fellowship to not be too hard on ourselves, either. We did what we believed God wanted us to do. That is only sinful if we believe we are better in the eyes of God than other people because of our obedience. And each of us has to self-examine if that was, or is, our attitude. The WCG/GCI transition experience over the last 20 years should help us eschew that attitude today.

At the chapels there was one phrase that was repeated many times: "God knows you the best and loves you the most." And that is true of me and is true for all of you. And we all should be able to truthfully say that to every human being that we meet.

[All of the above is the introduction of my July 2015 letter to the scattered members of the Dells Church - with some editing.]

Living and sharing the Gospel

The subject of this letter to you is mission. It has to do with the last line of the Ephesians 2:1-10 passage quoted above, which is, "He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing."

What is the "work that we had better be doing"?

Some might say that all Christians have a "duty" or "obligation" to evangelize. But the term "evangelize" usually implies a strategy with a goal in mind. Sometimes the goal is expressed as "getting people saved". And that is a clear contradiction to what was quoted above:

Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. (The Message, verses 7-10)

Believers do not "flip a two-way switch" where we are sometimes in "evangelization mode" and sometimes in "normal mode". Nor do we somehow help people to transition from being ignored by God to being loved by God. Nor do we "get people saved"; Ephesians 2:1-10, quoted above, challenges all these ideas.

Our mission is to "Live and share the Gospel". GCI's motto has been "Living and sharing the Gospel" even before we changed our name. I think it's a good motto.

Is living the Gospel enough?

Is it necessary to include the word "sharing"? Doesn't "Living the Gospel" say enough? Doesn't that describe most of our life? Doesn't that describe how a believer interacts with both believers and non-believers - with both friends and enemies?

I don't pretend to speak for GCI on the origin or the implications of that motto, but for me it is important to include both participles - both "living" and "sharing".

We see great examples of "living the Gospel" all around. Since 1995 the NBC nightly television news has a feature called "Making a Difference". This weekly feature cites individuals who have accomplished great acts of unconditional love. I don't ever remember Jesus or the Gospel being mentioned in any of these episodes.

I do remember one "Making a Difference" episode where the teen age son of a Moslem man was murdered in a five-dollar robbery. The murderer was apprehended and jailed. The Moslem father went to jail and forgave the murderer and started a movement in his area to stop the cycle of violence. I would say that that's living the Gospel. At risk be being denounced by many Christians, I would also say that that's "being saved". I think of the expression "being saved" as meaning "living a saved life". The expression "getting saved" is never found in the New Testament. In GCI's Trinitarian Theology we might say that all people have gotten saved. When we believe in Jesus (i.e. believe the Gospel or believe what Jesus has done for all) then we are "being saved" which is a life "in Christ" and a life of continual transformation by the Holy Spirit.

I cited the example of that Moslem father in a newspaper column several years ago. And one reader felt the need to remind me of passages like Acts 16:31 - "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." That reader also sent me a tract on why "good people" won't "get to Heaven".

This same idea was expressed by a visiting speaker at the church I attend. (I do not worship at a GCI congregation.) This speaker spoke about his mission and passion for reaching deaf people. He closed his talk by saying, "If we don't reach deaf people with the Gospel, the first words they will hear in the resurrection will be Jesus saying 'I never knew you.'" I spoke to him personally afterwards and pointed out that it is quite logical that the majority of all humanity has never heard the name "Jesus" or ever had the Gospel presented to them. He replied that his view of scripture (i.e. his hermeneutical circle) demanded that he take the stand that he expressed.

A common defense of this man's position is that we have no right to think that God's judgments are unfair. I can understand that point of view. But I want to make the Gospel (the Good News) to sound good. And it's hard to make the Good News good when we have to acknowledge that most of humanity won't "get to heaven" because they didn't "get saved" before they died.

In discussing these ideas, one person quoted this verse to me. "For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few." (Matt 7:14) The person I was talking to was an individual who kept many of the "old WCG" rules but did not fellowship with any group. I have to believe that his unsaid message to me was that he was "one of the few" - and I was not. When we live by rules instead of the Gospel, self-righteousness rears its ugly head.

So let me conclude this section on sharing the Gospel this way:

First, realize that one of Jesus' names is Judge. (John 5:22) But Jesus is the true image of God (Col 1:15), and human justice systems are a faint image of God's justice. So if we picture God's judgment like a human justice system, then we are thinking backwards. Instead, God's justice is the reality and our human justice systems are faint image of God's real justice.

Secondly, God's justice IS unfair according to our justice systems. It is unfair because He knows all of us best and loves all of us the most.

Thirdly, non-believers can live lives that are consistent with the Gospel in many kinds of human interactions. The Moslem man who forgave the murderer of his son is an example. Right now I am looking at a plaque on a wall that says "Live well, Laugh often, Love Much". That is an expression that might describe Gospel living. Naturalists (those who believe that all existence is an outcome of physics laws) might say that this is evidence of "the human spark" (a term coined by a PBS video series by that name). Believers have to say that the "human spark" is the Holy Spirit. He is available to all as long as we do not insist on our own personal system of righteousness.

Our own personal system of righteousness is when we are "like God, knowing good and evil". (Gen 3:5) Being "like God knowing good and evil" is quintessential self-righteousness. We can all cite stark examples of people and historical movements whose defining actions are "like God knowing good and evil" such the dictators Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot. Christians have been guilty of these kinds of atrocities also. Some who translated the Bible to English were burned at the stake for that action. One was put to death by less horrific means, and years later they dug up his bones and burned them. Crazy!

Fourthly, like unbelievers, believers can live lives that are consistent with the Gospel in many kinds of human interactions. And like unbelievers, we who see ourselves as believers, also often drift into being "like God, knowing good and evil" which we call "self-righteousness". It is hard to avoid self-righteousness if we live by laws instead of the Gospel.

Finally, sharing the Gospel involves knowing the source of our Gospel living. We obey Jesus' simple first words in the short Gospel of Mark: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel. (1:15)" To repent is to change our whole view of reality. God is not in the image of a human judge nor is He in the image of a really good and wise human father. Rather, He is the quintessential judge and the quintessential loving Father, and human judges and fathers are faint images of the reality.

To summarize, believers say "Be like God" and "I will never be good enough" and "My life is a life of transformation by God". "Good" non-believing people can only say, "Be like me. I'm pretty good and don't need much transformation". Believers must live the Gospel, but also must put the Gospel into words. A few theologians might be able to express the Gospel in a multi-volume series. But all of us should be able to express the Gospel in words \- in a page of writing - in a tweet - and in anything between the two.

Here is a Gospel statement from _The Jesus Storybook Bible_ (also quoted in Chapel 5 in the GCI 2015 camp chapel curriculum)

For anyone who says yes to Jesus  
For anyone who believes what Jesus said  
For anyone who will just reach out to take it  
Then God will give them this wonderful gift:  
To be born into a whole new life  
To be who they really are  
Who God always made them to be  
Their own true selves  
God's dear child.

Conclusion: Living and sharing the Gospel

Yes, we must both live and share the Gospel. Living the Gospel means that we affirm or introduce the Gospel in every interaction with another human being by how we respect and treat that person. Sharing the Gospel means that we can put the Gospel into words in many contexts of life - realizing the Gospel is always bigger than the words that we might say. That is because "the Gospel" = "the Word" = "Jesus".

Living and sharing the Gospel is that "work that we had better be doing". That is the believer's mission.

Living and Sharing the Gospel - Three Personal Examples

Example 1 - Joey

You met Joey briefly in Letter 3. I met Joey and Angie in the spring of 2009 when they phoned our church and asked for some financial help. I met them at church the following Sunday. Angie was pregnant with their daughter Jean. They needed financial help in setting up a household. Joey was living in a rented house at the time; Angie was living at home. (All names are changed for the first two examples.)

After our meeting on Sunday. I met with Joey later in the week, and things were worse than I could have imagined. Joey was in his late twenties. His father left the family when Joey was 13. Joey fathered a son and a daughter previous to Jean, and all three children were conceived out of wedlock. He was legally married to a woman who had four children of her own. That marriage was "on again, off again". Joey's second daughter was fathered with Angie during one of those "off again" periods.

I helped Joey fill out divorce papers a couple of years ago. I don't know if everything has been processed, but I'm quite sure that there is no hope for that marriage.

Joey has ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) for which he gets a monthly disability payment. He cannot work in large groups. So he collects recyclable metal and sells the metal for extra cash. "Junking" is what this business is called. As far as I can recall, I have never seen him drive the same car or truck in any two-month window of time. If he has a truck or car in the fall, he sells it for cash to get through the winter when junking is hard to do.

With his ADHD, Joey's goals literally change by the hour. Joey "pawned" a coffee can of change for which I gave him $50. He promised to redeem the change in a week for $50 in cash. It's been about a year and a half and I still have the coffee can of change. I've added some of my own change to the can over the last few months. It's Jean's "piggy bank". Over the past year he has had some cash flow problems and we thought about dipping into the stash of coins. But we both agreed that we shouldn't do this. I could pretty easily live until Jean graduates from High School, and I may be holding her graduation gift money in that coffee can in my house.

He's had financial help from Grace Fellowship and some from me since I have known him. Since Grace Fellowship is no longer operating and I retired from a post-retirement part-time job, any help through me is now is only in special emergencies.

Joey's goal is to make peace with the legal system so he can have some custody of Jean for a couple of days each week. Another goal is to be a better father than his father was. A third goal is that Jean will graduate from High School a virgin. Joey couldn't make it through high school himself.

Just before camp he asked to leave a rusty-junky trailer in my yard over night so he wouldn't have to spend extra gas pulling it around for a few hours. My experience with him is that an "overnighter" might stretch into a month or two. I was leaving for camp and Karen was leaving for a 4-H horse event the next day. I told him that Karen would be instructed to call the sheriff if the trailer is still there when she comes home. (I know that the local police and sheriffs know his name!) He really bristled at that, but I explained to Joey "I will deal with you, but Karen doesn't have to." That seemed to calm him down.

Our encounters are sometimes unpleasant - especially when I say "No" to a request. But he does trust me enough to store the coffee can and to ask for help when he has no one else to turn to. My goal is to present a Christian life to Jean. I would like to see her go to camp when she is old enough, even if I have to pay the whole cost personally.

I have taken some opportunities to share the Gospel in words, but he is not ready. I will not cut him off as many people have done. But I have to admit that I have to say a quick prayer to do the right thing when I hear his voice on the phone.

Example 2 - Felicia

Felecia called me in early spring three years ago. She needed to have someone mow her lawn because her-five year-old child, Brent, would not mind her while she was operating the mower. Including Brent, she has had three children by three different fathers. One of the fathers is in jail for molestation. Another of the fathers was denied custody because of one or more incidents of inappropriate physical punishment. (She initiated the charges against him.) That child is in foster care. I'm not sure of the status of the third father, but her child by that father is also in foster care.

We solved the immediate problem of the mowing by me mowing a couple of times and by her paying a minimal amount to Jim, who you will meet in the next example. There wasn't much rain that summer so we got through the growing season with her having to pay very little for lawn mowing.

Felicia lives in a large house that is approximately 150 years old. The exterior is neatly sided with vinyl siding; the roof looks solid. The old front porch could use some paint, but the general appearance of the house, garage, and yard is as neat as could be expected for a woman who must be careful of every penny.

A lot of work has to be done inside, but it's livable. It would be more livable if she could dispose of a lot of things that she will never use. I have done some plumbing repairs with no charge for labor.

I haven't looked into her finances but apparently she has taken advantage of many kinds of government assistance. Recently her mother has been moved to permanent nursing home care.

Of course her real problems are her choice of lovers and her inability to discipline her children. Her middle daughter, Annette, came home late last year for a "trial run" at living at home.

She asked me for help in getting Annette's room ready. Felicia had a queen bed mattress, and she ordered a matching frame and box spring from a resale store. I borrowed a pickup and transported those items to her home. There was no problem with bringing the disassembled frame upstairs. But I could not maneuver the box spring up the stairwell, even after temporarily removing a rail. So I spent much of a day, cutting through the wood of the box spring so that it could be bent around corners. I reconnecting the cuts with thin metal plates and screws after the box spring was moved up stairs. All this took a full day.

It was a valiant, but futile, effort. Annette would not obey her mother; she had some problems with running around the house naked; she and Brent could not get along. After about three weeks, Annette had to be placed back into foster care - permanently this time.

Just a few weeks ago, Felicia told me about an incident that occurred several years ago. I'm not sure how long ago this was. It may have been before any of her children were born. A man thirty years older offered her some help for a period of time. From what I can remember of that story it seemed as if she was living alone in the house at that time. The "help" turned out to be an exchange. The deal was "I'll help you if you help me". You can fill in the details.

This past winter, Felicia and Brent did come to the church I attend on Wednesday nights. The Wednesday night gathering goes like this: Men cook - men fellowship - women do a lesson and games with the young children. On the alternate Wednesday nights women cook - women fellowship - men do a lesson and games with the young children. Brent liked these activities and even participated in a practice for Easter services. He and Felicia also attended Easter services.

The Wednesday night gathering ended with the school year, and neither Felicia nor Brent wanted to regularly attend Sunday church. I think Brent made the decision.

As with Joey, my goal is to not "dump" them. I have made some attempts to express the Gospel in words to Felicia. We talked once about baptism since neither she nor Brent have been baptized. Brent will be old enough for camp next year, and Grace Fellowship still has some money for camp scholarships. (We have given four scholarships since Grace Fellowship ceased weekly worship.) The Gospel cannot be forced. In a perfect world, the Gospel will be passed on from one generation to the next. But often that is not the case, even in "good church families".

Example 3 - Jim

Jim told me that at his birth, the doctor told his mother that Jim would never be able to do much of anything, having both mental and physical problems. The physical problems are not obvious deformities, but apparently there are issues that require some constant medication for seizures. He was a student in high school when I was a teacher. He graduated from high school at age 21. He has a driver's license and he drives himself to jobs like lawn mowing and janitorial work. So he has done much better than what was predicted at his birth.

Jim's parents have separated and both mother and son are active in the church they attend. Jim and his mother even helped our church at an outreach activity when Grace Fellowship was still holding weekly services.

Jim has been blessed by being very teachable and he has also been blessed by a pastor in our area who has been a good teacher in his life. In our conversations he will often quote something that "Pastor Dave" said.

He had problems with an employer and he decided to quit that job. I don't know both sides of the story, so I can't say more.

Three years ago, after he had gotten another job, I told him that if he could hold on to a job for a whole summer we would take a trip to the John Deere plant and museum in Moline, Illinois. He is definitely a John Deere fan! He held up his side of the bargain and we did the trip.

We decided to make a fall trip an ongoing tradition. The next fall we went to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Last fall we went to the Railroad Museum in Green Bay and the Experimental Aircraft Museum in Oshkosh. We haven't decided where to go this fall.

Jim can live and share the Gospel better than most Christians.

"He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing."

\-- the work that we had better be doing - even in our woundedness.

The Next Letter

I will close this series with a twelfth, and final, letter. I will continue on the theme of mission - "the work that we had better be doing." That letter will address the reality that there will be churches that differ in what constitutes Christian life and ethics. As you should know by reading this far, I do not believe that we should settle these differences by biblical rules. Rather we settled them by what constitutes Gospel living.

In this last letter I will be especially mindful of what I said at the very beginning: "When I'm done I hope that I will have something that will help some on all sides of the current marriage debate to hear God's voice saying, 'Be still and know that I am God.'"

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom 15:5-6)

John Torgerson

Book Contents

### Letter 12 - "Be still and know that I am God"

Be still, and know that I am God.  
I will be exalted among the nations,  
I will be exalted in the earth!"  
The LORD of hosts is with us;  
the God of Jacob is our fortress.  
(Psa 46:10-11)

\----------

September 4, 2015

Dear Friends in Christ,

To "be still and know that I am God" is pretty easy...if you are all alone. We are now more than a year away from our national elections, and many hopefuls are anything but still.

Also, "being still", within the church is probably just as difficult as being still in an election campaign. That has been the case from the very beginning of the Church in the first century. And so I come to last letter in this series asking "Can we break tradition and have some peace in this controversy over marriage?"

For some direction on how to view this controversy, let's look at the the first century church through the pen of James. (I am indebted to Cathy Deddo for this fresh look at James in her book, _The Letter of James, Meeting the Father of Lights in the Midst of Our Darkness_.)

Beginning in chapter 2, we see James addressing judging by appearances (i.e. discrimination). But do note that he is talking about discrimination "as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." He is not talking about discrimination in the secular world.

My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, "You sit here in a good place," while you say to the poor man, "You stand over there," or, "Sit down at my feet," (James 2:1-3)

This should be clear to both those in the Church and outside of the Church. But James goes higher than that.

...have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called? (Verses 4-7)

In verses 4 to 7 James shows the flaws in discrimination within the Church. He is essentially saying, "You are looking on the outside of some people and seeing something bad, while ignoring the heart that is inside. And you are looking on the outside of other people and ignoring the corruption that is inside." Even this should be obvious to both those in the Church and those outside. James goes higher still.

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. (Verse 8)

James now rises to the height of a saying of Jesus. It was apparently a saying well known in the Christian world, and possible versions of this saying were known in non-Christian world also. He says that if we fulfill that law, we are doing well; and he implies that none of us "really fulfill" that law. And there is a hint here that the Church should not live by maxims - even Jesus' sayings. But James does not stop here.

But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. (Verses 9-11)

Here James rises to height of the Decalog. He says that in misreading a person by outward appearances, the Churches are picking and choosing what laws are important. In other words, they are showing discrimination between laws. He concludes that anyone who says, "I like this law but not that one" is a lawbreaker.

So now let's translate verses 9 to 11 in our marriage controversy today. The first translation describes those who affirm gay marriage. I have bolded the "translated" sections:

But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, **"The man and woman shall become one flesh"** also said, **"Love one another".** If you do not obey **"The man and woman shall become one flesh"** but do **"Love one another",** you have become a transgressor of the law.

What follows would be the translation for those affirm only one-man-one-woman marriage.

For he who said, **"Love one another"** also said, **"The man and woman shall become one flesh** ". If you do not obey **"Love one another"** but do obey " **The man and woman shall become one flesh",** you have become a transgressor of the law.

As many as half of marriages fall out of love. And the best of us do not obey "Love one another" all the time in marriage.

Therefore, if we see marriage as a law issue, neither side of the marriage debate can claim the higher ground before God.

So verses 12 and 13 show James' solution to this mess.

So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

The word "judgment" in verse 13 is in the context of comparing ourselves with one another as outwardly shown by how we treat one another, i.e. by how we speak and act. This kind of judgment involves one person seeing oneself as better than another and/or one person seeing ones own sins as being less serious than another's. James concludes that mercy accomplishes more than judgment.

The line of thought in these two verses is that because mercy triumphs over judgment, we are to speak and act as those who are "judged under the law of liberty".

This "law of liberty" is mentioned in similar language in Romans 2:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. (Verses 1 and 2)

In Letter 8 I defined all written laws as laws of sin and death because "they define 'sin' and have the power to bring on some kind of death."

Therefore the "law of liberty" is simply living "in Christ" or "living the Gospel". In the previous letter I said, "Living the Gospel means that we affirm or introduce the Gospel in every interaction with another human being by how we respect and treat that person."

We need to know God as one who "knows us best and loves us the most" (again, a quote from the previous letter). All our speaking and acting is from the premise that "God knows YOU the best and loves YOU the most."

Yet the perception of both those in and out of the Church is that Christianity is just another system of rules. Furthermore, sexual morés have been based in laws, not on the Gospel. How long has this existed?

It certainly exists today. Here is a quote from the most recent issue of Reader's Digest (September 2015) that illustrates how the secular world sees the Bible, Christian values, and Christian life.

Scripture's power comes from its malleability. You can read it in any way you want to. If you are a violent misogynist, you will find plenty in the Koran or in the Bible to justify your viewpoint. If you are a peaceful feminist, you will find just as much.

p. 18, Points to Ponder section. REZA ASLAN, PHD, religious scholar, on The Daily Show with John Stewart

We may sneer at such an unholy view of scripture and God. But there is some truth in this statement, because the Bible is story, and we all know that different readers will interpret the same story differently. If we read the Bible as a story of God coming to earth to rescue humanity, then we will find Jesus on every page.

If we do not look for Jesus on every page, here is what our theology is likely to be:

1) A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

2) God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3) The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4) God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5) Good people go to heaven when they die.

("In the Beginning, Grace", Christianity Today, by Mark Galli, October 2009, p. 24. The study was first published in 2005 in the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton.)

This "creed" is subjective, rather than objective, because it is a summary of interviews of 267 teens. Nevertheless, I think I would have agreed with this "creed" when I was a teenager more than fifty years ago.

So how long has the Church leaned on written laws and principles for their sexual morés? I'll let theological analysts ponder that question, but as far as I can tell it is at least as long as I have lived - and I turned seventy a couple of days ago.

So then, how can we have some peace in the marriage debate? How can we avoid splitting or "church hopping" over this issue. How can we avoid giving up on Christianity altogether on this issue? How can churches in a small community advance the Gospel together in their community?

I believe we have to know God as a Father who loves all His children unconditionally and we do have to preach and teach from the viewpoint that the Bible as a story that reveals who God is. And we must see marriage from the perspective of who God is.

And I said (or at least implied) all of that in my first letter where I printed my 2013 Christmas column. The words in brackets are the only changes.

The answer [to how we can have peace in the marriage debate] is simply what we tell our young children to do at Christmas time. We tell them to believe. We simply believe that Jesus did what he came from Heaven to earth to do, and that is to declare everyone innocent of all wrongdoing. The wrong has already failed; what we have done wrong has no power over us as far as God is concerned. What we have done wrong cannot exact a fine, put us in jail, or even send us to Hell.

By believing we get peace from Jesus because we don't have to get even with someone who has wronged us. We have the freedom to treat that person as another human being. That's loving our enemies. Of course there will be times when we have to prevail on the justice system to protect ourselves and our neighbors, but even the US justice system demands that we treat criminals fairly. Jesus didn't say life wouldn't get messy at times.

Yes, this can be messy. In the New Testament letters there are many messy situations. But God did not put us in a world where a finite number of laws cover every situation.

I always accompany my wife on a few weekend 4-H horse events. And I will usually visit a church on Sunday. I have visited mainline churches who affirm same sex marriage and some who don't. Of those who do, I hear the Gospel in songs and in the message. Of those who don't, I also hear the Gospel in songs and in the message.

But I also look for the Gospel. And I even re-interpret what was said or sung so that it is clearly a Gospel message. I suppose I am critiquing someone else's sermons and I should listen to some of my own recorded sermons - and cringe! But for those of you who preach, be aware that most of your listeners will not translate your message into a Gospel message. I believe that many, or most, of your listeners will interpret the application portion of your message as being about "what you should be doing" rather than being "about God and what he has done." (These are phases from the Jesus Storybook Bible and were quoted in Letters 2, 3, and 10) As speakers we must be deliberate about connecting the Gospel with living life.

So while we can divide Churches into affirming and non-affirming churches, the truth is that is there is a whole lot gray area between those two poles. If there is any one rule, it is watch out for self-righteousness.

For non-affirming churches, who base their view on law, (i.e. the six scriptures that seem to expressly mention homosexual acts) self-righteousness is almost guaranteed because they have to choose what passages agree with their pre-conceived stand and they must explain why the love passages don't apply. There is also the self-righteousness of assuming that their stand is correct, and they find no value in someone else's' story of how they came to a different conclusion. The solution here is to base their stand on the Gospel.

Affirming churches will also need to base their stand on the Gospel. Their arguments usually begin with a law-based argument that assumes that the six pertinent passages do not apply to a loving same-sex non-celibate relationship. Their Gospel stand seems to be that their same-sex relationships are the same as the love between a man and a woman. Here, also, there is a high probability of the self-righteousness of assuming that their stand is correct and they find no value in someone else's' story of how they came to a different conclusion.

Based on what I said in the previous two paragraphs, it seems clear that there are different views of what the Gospel is. But is that so bad? I believe the average non-worshipper (and even a lot of worshippers) don't even know that there is a Gospel! Churches and Christians dialoging on the Gospel??!!! What a wonderful thing that would be!

In these letters I have argued that human marriage is an image of Jesus' union with all humanity. (Note the "I Believe" section in Letter 10.) So what should happen when a gay couple walks into a non-affirming church?

We should take a graceful family approach based on a model of what we already do for cohabitating couples - with the caveat that we look at this from a Gospel perspective, not a law perspective. The Gospel perspective on cohabitation is simply this: The Word, who became flesh as Jesus (John 1:1-3), became one with humanity before there were any humans. It's an unconditional done-deal. There is not a cohabitation period where Jesus checks us out to see if he wants to marry us. (See Letter 8 where I included a section from my 2013 Easter sermon discussing the union of Jesus with all humanity.)

Nevertheless we should be happy as the cohabitating couple is happy, and we are sad with them in their trials. Their children are part of our church family. Even in the "old WCG" I don't know of any church families that did not love their grandchildren who were born out of wedlock. If we want to bring a clearer version of the Gospel into their life, pray for wisdom, and pray that any change in their understanding of marriage will be because of the Gospel, not because of law-based pressure.

In the Church, cohabitating couples and same-sex non-celibate couples are similar in that their relationships do not reach any higher than their own efforts to love each other. Therefore they have little to say to Felecia and her son Brent. They have little to say to Joey and his daughter Jean. (You met those people in the previous letter.) They cannot " join him [Jesus] in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing." (Eph 2:10 - The Message Version that I quoted in the previous letter)

At best, their mission work to "participate in God's mission of revealing Himself" is to reveal Jesus as a teacher that teaches us about love rather than reveal the God who IS love. (The quoted portion is from the "Trinitarian Theology Tweet" which was mentioned in Letters 8, 9, and 10.)

Taking this stand is of great benefit to parents with children. Children get to see all people respected and loved while growing in how to live and share the Gospel.

How about the other way around? What if the church I attend comes to affirm same-sex marriage? First, I would treat any same-sex non-celibate couple as outlined above. I would express my concern to leadership based on the Gospel. If I were a parent of children, I would teach my children a Gospel-centered approach to sexuality. Beyond that, I would lean on the Holy Spirit, as I would hope to have been led by the Spirit up to that point.

Be still, and know that I am God.  
I will be exalted among the nations,  
I will be exalted in the earth!"  
The LORD of hosts is with us;  
the God of Jacob is our fortress. (Psa 46:10-11)

In my first communication to you I said, "When I'm done I hope that I will have something that will help some on all sides of the current marriage debate to hear God's voice saying, 'Be still and know that I am God.'" To whatever extent that has happened, God gets the credit. I don't think that God will be exalted among all nations until Christ returns. But maybe the marriage debate can turn into a Gospel debate to the extent that God will be exalted in more lives.

God bless you all.

John Torgerson

Book Contents

\- End -
