ASM149 Ask Pastor Sarah

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what if we asked our faith questions to an actual pastor step aside science mike this week it's ask pastor [Music] [Applause] even though he sarah not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith in life welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life only this week i'm not answering any questions at all in the studio with me is my dear friend pastor sarah heath of costa macy first united methodist church in costa mesa california and host of the saunderless podcast so we've got 10 questions to handle and now we're going to get it started [Music] all right as i mentioned right up top we're doing something different this week in the studio with me is sarah heath say hello sarah hi have you heard you've heard her voice on the liturgist podcast before she's the person who came up with the whole science mic thing at that fateful party in denver uh so a huge person in my life my spiritual formation a dear friend and there's this thing that happens where you all ask me uh you love hearing from me of course and i appreciate it but you asked could i bring other people on and i did i brought on scientists with biologos and i brought on peed ins to talk about theological issues and then you said hey why don't you stick around and have a conversation with these people instead of having them make your show for you and you just getting a vacation week so i totally understand that dynamic and that's what we're going to do this week we're going to go through 10 questions uh submitted by people on patreon uh to sarah as a an inclusive non-coercive woman pastor which i i just think is like an ideal expression of clerical authority today um clergical clerical clerical lady of the cloth lady of the golf i love it so but before we do that i've got a few events i want to tell you about like may 7th i'm going to be in minnesota for the jesus rode a dinosaur faithful youth ministry in a scientific age conference with a little someone known as christa tippett so not bad uh company there as well as a bunch of other great speakers and then uh folks in ontario you canadians i'm coming to the skylight festival on july 27th and also i don't usually talk about events this far out but october 26th and 27th i'll be in montreat north carolina for the evolving faith conference now why do i mention a conference in october now well it's hosted by rachel held evans and sarah bessie two of my absolute favorite uh spiritual leaders and then their roster at this event includes jyn hat maker austin channing brown jeff chu audrey assad cindy brandt propaganda who you'll hear more from on an announcement through the liturgists soon uh oshetta moore kathy escobar me science mike adrian neves nish wiseth peter inns sandra van opstell jonathan martin solvi gleethogg will gaffney and cheryl bridges jones so excuse me john's and that's like an incredible lineup of spiritual leaders that embody incredible theological diversity incredible racial and gender diversity orientation diversity so this is going to be amazing and the reason i'm mentioning it now is because tickets are going super fast the early bird tickets what they thought would take a month to sell out sold out in 23 hours and general admission tickets i'm looking at they've sold over a hundred today so i would expect this event to fill up in the next couple of weeks so if you're thinking about wanting to see that lineup of people october 26th and 27th you want to go to uh evolvingfaithconference.com for information on other events i'll be a part of go to asksciencemike.com click on the events button and that will get you in so what do you say let's talk to pastor sarah [Music] so as my regular listeners know as science mike is going through somewhat of an identity crisis right now oh no because i try to figure out how the structure works oh and um i do like doing the question and answer episodes i just feel like it gets monotonous if that's all we ever do right um and the live science mike is going through you're not going through it i am not no my identity is is quite we could have that that could be a pastoral conversation the podcast is not um and i it's kind of you know this show for me is like my safe refuge from the insanity of the liturgists yeah that makes sense because there's so many creative people involved in the liturgists i don't think we've ever done something the same way twice so i compensate by doing ass science mic exactly the same every week with no variance um and oddly enough this strange thing happened where um assignments mike just kind of found some subscribers and they never leave my dad's one of them and you never get it it's just the same number of listeners every single week unless it's a live show and then it goes up ah and then back down when it's not a live show oh and i asked my patrons like what should i do and uh they said why don't you interview people you know we like the liturgists but what if there's something like kind of less edited a little more raw ooh a little less planned so i did one with a guy named bart campolo he's pretty great people went crazy and i called it a pastor for atheists yeah um which is great i think secular people need pastoral care in their lives but then there are people who aren't atheists they don't want to be secularists but they have like a lot of baggage with churches i've never i've never met these people if you're wondering my church is a little bit of a refuge for what i like to call the nuns and duns yeah or what we call the spiritual nomads so that's my jam i really enjoy people uh who have gone through sort of deconstruction and who are trying to reconstruct those are the most interesting people um currently in my ministry i think and then those who have been around for a long time they're also they've also got if you're stuck in the faith if you're if you stuck around it's not an easy thing to stick around so you've got a lot of questions and you've had to work through things so i love those people because they're asking great questions and thinking and you literally helped me work through all that yeah like you were there when i i told a room full of people i don't believe any of this yeah and then you were there when i sobbed outside do you want to know one of my favorite moments from that weekend and you probably don't even remember this is uh so you were an atheist at that point and uh i stood up and told my story and i was so close to leaving ministry for a lot of personal reasons and just feeling like yeah i give my all to this thing and i don't know if i want to be it like i felt like i was a nun you know i just felt and i remember i finished like telling this whole story and then uh rob bell asked everyone who would want to go to sarah's church and all these people actually raised their hand and you were one of them and later you came up to me a guy who at that point in time was an atheist and you said to me i really wish my daughters could meet you and i remember thinking this southern baptist atheist wants his daughters to know me and you said i really think it's important that uh people know women who are doing ministry and i thought it was the weirdest thing for a you know at that point someone i didn't know quite yet and it felt so encouraging to me and the best part of it all is now i know your daughters and they're a big part of my life and i think it's just this beautiful thing that you were so supportive even if you weren't sure about the whole gig yeah well i thought if there's going to be pastors at least half of them should be women yes at least half yeah um not everyone has that opinion actually strangely enough i'm aware of that not as experientially anymore i do live in a little bit of a spiritual bubble yeah spiritual and political bubble people like besides mike i think you i think you spend more time with liberal and progressive people and that's an accurate uh statement that's an accurate charge but i i have noticed your church is like a really great place for people who are in that state of like i don't know what how do you how do you handle that tension between holding on to kind of orthodox christian theology yeah and making people like me not feel like because i never felt like i was a a fixer-upper project for you i always felt like we related genuinely yeah we were friends um but i'm literally like i'm a i'm not just i don't just identify as a christian i'm a member of the united methodist church which is my tribe uh how how do you handle that balance i think for me because i relate to that struggle so i became a united methodist when i was um really kind of in high school and in college because i moved from canada and we didn't have the united methodist church we had the united church of canada which funnily enough is only in canada weird how that is huh um but i had to choose this as a denomination for myself because when i went to seminary the deal was i could kind of like pick any denomination right and i chose a denomination that has something known as the quadrilateral which is like my favorite way of looking at theology because it requires that you look at scripture tradition reason and experience so for me when i'm sitting with people who don't have the same faith background as me or they don't have the same beliefs or maybe they think about christianity in a totally different way i'm able to use those four quadrants as ways to relate to people so for me i never could do a faith that didn't have reason i need to bring my brain into it and i thought i was being really crafty by having you preach at my church about reason and then you preached about why reason is sometimes bad he totally flipped the tables on me it was great so good he was such a good uh it was great but i think that's what i do i always come into everything i was trying to make reasons sound like like 25 of how you should view things yeah instead of 100 instead of 100 exactly and that's what it is right it's a balance and i think that allows me for me the way i look at scripture and we'll get into that with some of the questions for sure but um scripture is within the united methodism we say that scripture is primary but never alone which is really different to how a lot of other denominations see it so i've always had that ability to sit with people that don't think the same way as i do and feel really comfortable and kind of actually love those conversations and i think it grows and stretches me it's only been in the last couple of years that i've really run head-on into folks who that's not the case for them they can't be around people who think differently than them and i don't know if it's because we're getting more and more siloed um but it is really interesting how from my perspective that's kind of what my faith is all about if i look at jesus and what he was able to do is to hold on to his own beliefs and hear the beliefs of others right that's my favorite thing about this show yeah is um 48 of the listeners are republicans did you know that no i didn't know 48 of assists mike listeners are republicans they don't hello republicans um and uh about 12 are conservative evangelicals and about 12 are atheists okay and so there's this um like when i read the emails and i go through my social media i don't get a a monoculture i don't get a silo right and the people who listen to the program i get like a lot of pushback and i'll get i'll get from the same thing i say i'll get uh really heated feedback from social justice advocates and really heated feedback from conservative evangelicals on i didn't go far enough in their direction yeah you know what i mean yeah i might experience that because that's one of the things that's been i was trying to set you up yeah as a pastor who preaches um people give feedback to pastors um and i think they forget sometimes that uh you know every week you're getting up there and doing your best to you know represent something or an idea or whatever it might be and so people give feedback and it's so funny because sometimes i'll get feedback that's literally like oh yeah you didn't go far enough or you went too far um my thing i think is so important is that a church is a place where for me in my community it's a place where a conservative needs to be able to sit next to um you know someone who's way on the other side and i think it's important because i think that's the kingdom of god for me it's where you know lion and lamb lay down together and i'm not saying either side is the lion or the lamb but they lie down together and i think it's one of the only places that i see right now um in in america in particular where people of differing opinions for a moment sit with the humanity of the other there are other spaces but this is an intentional weekly time when i want to be able to get together with people who didn't vote the way i did or who don't think the way i think and i choose to see their humanity above and beyond the other things because i have that shared belief that we're all children of god and so if we're all children of god then um i need to be able to sit with someone who i don't agree with and sometimes it's the worst like it's a really hard thing to do um but i think it's important to have that space and that's why like even through my own doubts our own fears i still think church is important it's uh you know it's something i've given my career so far to right and a lot of people are you know post church and i get that i understand that um but for me it's almost uh it's a practice to be able to sit in a room with people and do the same things together that are really formational and i'm looking you in the eye and we're present together and i'm sharing a little bit of me and you're sharing a little bit of you and we are together and i don't think there's a lot of places that we get to do that well speaking of church communities yeah a friend of mine on patreon named michael who spells it differently than i do so michael i apologize if i'm mispronouncing your name mikael macau michael i think it's michael um but here's his question for you [Music] what conversations would you try to have with and how would you approach people who may be interested in joining a church community because they exclusively feel interested in the social and community aspects of an inclusive church and not necessarily the belief components i think some of us have a soft interest in the spiritual open-mindedness of a very open church as opposed to pursuing a completely secular humanist space and michael i would imagine you represent an absolutely immense number of listeners of this podcast yeah uh and you also represent an immense number of humans uh i think that i love the language by the way of uh being spiritually open uh i think for for what those conversations would look like for for me because this isn't just a question it's a reality in my own church community there are people of varying beliefs and there are there's like one guy who always tells me i'm still not a christian like like every week it's like a check-in just so you know so you know i'm still not a christian all right but he's like the most christ-like person um and i think i love having these conversations with him and i love having conversations with other folks who are interested in um what makes me tick or what makes other believers in this tick why why is this thing happening i think it's beautiful when you could honor it and not just consider it silly or i had one friend when i told her i was a christian she um acted as if i just told her that i believed in santa it was she was like oh that's so cute she actually said that's so cute sarah um and i so i go into the conversation in uh the los angeles area no oh okay oh that does sound like something they would say it was definitely in portland or seattle to be like oh christian that's cute wow yeah uh you still exist no this was in canada so i grew up in canada until i was 14. okay and then i moved to mississippi godless canada and then i moved to mississippi which has the like i guess they own the rights to god at this point so i went from one extreme to the other which might explain how i ended up in the middle um i love to have the conversation of why this space why okay that's great if you're um questioning or you're interested you're always going to be welcome here the beauty of our belief system is it's not always orthodoxy although i'm i have quite orthodox beliefs for a lot of folks it's orthoprax so orthopraxy being like how are we living out this the messages of jesus so if you want to think of jesus as like a guru not the way i see it i do believe in the divinity of christ but i i think this is this beautiful opportunity for us to live out the way of of jesus because the way of jesus if we're honest the i hate to say this but like the real way of jesus and not the way that we've sort of especially america has sort of taken this story and made it into something entirely different but the real way of jesus or the way that i seem to be able to see in scriptures um is really this peaceful and loving way and i i know that can only be to the good so i would welcome you in my space and then i would want to talk to you about uh why the space for you was was important and what you were looking for i think some folks come to our church for the reason also that we don't have a chance to be intergenerational in very many spaces think about it we everything's siloed uh and so our church is a space that has tried to intentionally be intergenerational and that's actually you know people are always like how do you have millennials and the answer is because i have really old people too and our millennial folks who are so far away from their own family want to be in that and so it's a family-like atmosphere so i usually ask people a lot of questions about why this space for them and then i asked them to be as respectful of my beliefs as i'm gonna be of theirs and um i also say you know maybe by the end of this you will be you will be but maybe you won't and it's that moment where i realize i'm not jesus and i can't bring you to uh you know sometimes the language is like bring them to salvation um i don't think we ever really can do that i think it's god um you know i believe in this thing called prevenient grace or the grace which is before and the idea being god's always there and you just gotta turn your uh face toward um and so yeah i would be excited to have you in my group macau michael mickel it's m-i-k-e-l which really seems like a better way to spell michael than m-i-c-h like i spell michael if it's mchale i actually the problem with m-i-k-e-e-l is it is it's a good way to spell michael or mchale where's m-i-c-h-a-l it's just a bad way to spell it michelle michelle and i'm trying to remove my southern accent from it i'm saying in normal english if you actually pronounced it with every letter part oh yeah because it's a sh anyway and i'd also like to say we're we're social we're social primates yeah so i think anytime you gather with people if they'll accept you as you are that's a healthy thing for you the danger is when there's this coercion if you're going to be in this community you need to be like us you need to believe these things you need to not like these people and that's really hard because i do get a lot of flack from other uh pastors or other communities or even um folks who say like shouldn't you have people sign off on these things and i always say i feel like we're we're always changing as people and so some of the things i would have signed off on three years ago i wouldn't sign off on now and some things that i'll sign off on three years from now i would never sign off on now so the idea of saying these are the beliefs that you need to have to stay in this community suggest that if i no longer have those beliefs i'm no longer welcome in this community and that is just heartbreaking for me heartbreaking for me yeah i've experienced that firsthand yeah i remember that but i mean it's true like if you believe if you change you don't belong here anymore it becomes a subtext ish okay rachel asked i've heard theologians sort of refute the idea of original sin by pointing out that the genesis story doesn't say that adam's sin was the moment sin entered the world i'm glad you're here we're already beyond my level of theological sophistication irony yeah ironys right but then they don't say anything about romans 5 right which was where i understood that doctrine to come from as the one man sin entered through as through one man sin entered the world etc etc i wish etc etc was in the bible translation anyway yeah and i understand it to be connected to the genesis story does romans reference genesis to talk about original sin and the resulting fallen state of the world what are your thoughts on this passage in any case oh romans 5. i might have to look that that's the atom the original uh do we have a bible near us uh i have several but i've found they're not as fast as internet bibles and internet bibles are super by the way this is super mainline if you ask evangelicals they just start like reciting the scripture well that's where i was like oh no we've just shown that i don't have that superpower and then main liners are like i think romans is in the new testament this shows you how much of it this is how much of a dork i am though i'm like oh i think which theologian was the original right so if i look if i think about it we'll see if i can think i think if we look at it it'd be ironeas oh seminary professors i hope you're not listening but iron ace was the first to sort of connect the idea of original sin to genesis yeah so 512 is what uh yeah death through adam so the idea of jesus being the second adam so jesus comes to that's that's sort of the language that it's talked around and paul you know many people would say that paul was fighting against gnosticism right um so the idea that like the body and one is sinful and one is not and so it's sort of this um joining of saying humans as a whole are sinful instead of like your flesh is full so there's like that's i see interesting yeah this is just me there i'm just the opposite of paul neither the body nor not spirit or sinful yeah so interestingly enough it really is paul's theology here now this is where it gets tricky um i recently spoke um on paul at an event and i had to admit and i say this quite often paul and i broke up in college and then we would only mutually talk about our friend jesus when we had to uh in that you know as a woman in ministry a lot of people use paul's words to be quite um difficult for me and so when i went to seminary i actually took a whole class on paul because paul really fascinated me especially because a lot of people have elevated the words of paul above the words of christ which is super interesting but how i look at this uh rachel is kind of how i look at a lot of pauline writing or the words that are associated with paul in that this is the theology of paul now paul's theology is usually reactionary so you have to ask what's happening around him so why because he's battling for what what christian theology is going to be right yeah and he in no way i don't think paul i think paul would be quite shocked to see that his stuff was canonized right i think he was working it out um i i think about it sometimes as if someone were to pick up my journal right now and publish it like some of my thoughts are again we're on this spectrum of change and so some stuff has been canonized that um this is paul working out the theology for the church right they didn't have this theology of original sin which is interesting so how do we look at it i happen to think this is just sarah this is not the united methodist stance by the way but i happen to think that original sin is a harmful theology if we say that at our very base we are not good because when i look at when uh god created us in the story of genesis right everything is good the only thing that's interestingly enough the only thing that's not good is when we're told we're alone that's the only part of creation that god says this is not this is not good for adam to be alone right but we seem to be so focused on but then they fell and now we have sin and now everybody has sin and i i think that can be harmful particularly i've dealt with babies when they've passed away and weren't baptized in time what does that mean can we forgive their sin and i i just think it's really harmful to think of a baby as a sinner honestly now i think we are all born with part of us uh that sort of faces towards um sin depending on how you look at sin but we we do have this temptation within us to be um not the greatest people uh but i think at a very base level and this is my opinion i don't think we're born sinners i think we're born with the ability to sin but i don't think we're born sinners so if you want to ask me what do i how do i look at this first i look at this first how i look at most of pauline writing which is that it's really helpful and i'm learning to love it now but it has taken me a while to look through it because i think for a long time i saw it as these are the words written then that mean these absolute things now how do i reconcile that with my experience so we talk about scripture tradition reason and experience i am experiencing the holy spirit to be moving in ways that maybe don't align with some of the things that we find and we don't always have the other side of the conversation like i said paul's writing is mostly reactionary so if we don't know what he's reacting to then it's really difficult for us to even comprehend what he's trying to say in this i always think it's helpful with paul to think uh of someone trying to filter a pharaceutical education through mysticism yes he's wrestling like what is righteous so i'm starting to question everything i used to know hey in the context of this light what is righteousness now what do i hold on to what yeah and what is cr what is what does christ have to do with that um it's kind of the journey we're all there has to be some personal skin in the game correct based on his uh initial reaction to christ's movement yeah and persecuting and yeah and executing yeah christians yeah you know what i mean so there has to be whoops doesn't work right so there's this tremendous like what is when when i think about paul talking about sin right and the the primacy of sin in our lives without christ um i can't help but also connect with him calling himself the king of all sinners right autobiography auto say that word for me yeah autobiographical thank you i don't think paul liked paul that much no no no no and we see that throughout we see that throughout it is uh as hard and that was part of my reconciling with paul it's as hard as i could be on paul paul is harder on himself yeah and i think that's why i think he would have been shocked by his own words being canonized because i don't think he thought of himself that highly he really was someone who is trying to figure out i used to be this person how do i reconcile who i am now and if we are talking to most of your listeners if we're talking to a lot of the people i work with the truth is they have that same journey they're on and so if we look at paul with this sort of gracious look and say okay here's someone working out the theology um and what can we learn from that and what what did how is he translating the jesus way to a church and he's the first one who's gonna make it into a structure right there's no structure before so he's taking the first stab at it and we're like that's the way it is forever well and paul lucked out with his like gentile work and his work with the jewish diaspora spread across the roman empire because that means he wasn't in jerusalem when rome destroyed it and it means that his writings also weren't stored there so we lost most of the early church's writings and theologies and yeah the women's stuff went missing because it's interesting they recently found women's writings um what would the church look like if we had found women's writing one historian i read said that they referred to the church in jerusalem as the mother church yes yes well i and you know what easter is happening this weekend and my friend joked that only women should preach although they'll hear this after easter you'll hear it after easter but well then we've got a time warp yeah say when easter happens um easter happens right and my friend joked and i think this is quite clever what would the world how would christianity be different if only women could preach on easter sunday because in the story in every single gospel it's the women who discover christ resurrected first so what if women were the only ones who could speak on easter i think that's interesting but yeah i support it yeah yeah of course you do i love it all right uh yeah so anyway i guess rachel i hope that helps i know rachel i would just say i think paul's obsession with the fallen state of the world is paul's obsession with his father the fallen state of himself and what that light meant to him i want to do what's right but i cannot do it i know what's right yeah somebody should write a book about that in cognitive neuroscience okay teaser jamo has a question hey science mike and pastor sarah exclamation point exclamation point huge fan of assigned spike and the liturgist and i am very grateful for your work i've been going through a period of deconstruction uncertainty doubt and right now i feel that i don't know what to believe about anything you are in the right space jamo i was raised in a united reformed church with five-point calvinism tulip what what my ad-lib infant baptism no women in office and the list goes on i love my parents and have a lot of respect for them and what they taught me in regards to how to respect women be a good husband and seek a godly wife but being a single man at 27 in 2018 is a pretty rough time i hear you buddy social media only perpetuates this and it seems difficult to not only find someone to run in life with but also someone who can be okay with where i'm at in my faith whatever that looks like from one day to the next what advice do you have on finding a godly woman for a guy that doesn't even know what god looks like most days whoo somebody's been hearing a lot of equally yoked right oh wow yeah uh so we forgot that was a thing yeah that's a thing so uh equally yoked is a statement that's been said in a lot of churches for a lot of times and people have assumed that it meant that my significant other needs to believe exactly how i believe in the exact same way that they believe but mike i'm going to ask you a question do you and jenny believe the same way that you did when you got married no did you and jenny both go through it jenny and you went through it in different ways right yes i'm not sure jen i don't believe the same thing now oh no i know you don't um so i think when we talk about what a godly woman is that's that's it and that's i gotta admit to you that's got a little bit of a trigger for me there uh only because a godly woman is uh you know in some ways and in some uh areas meant women were to be quiet women were to run the household women you know aren't to be uh in the church as a leader i like that you said in the office um but i think if you're looking after uh looking for only a godly woman you're not looking for enough what do i mean by that i think you should be looking for someone who's a partner in life and belief structures and what we think aren't actually that helpful in the relationships that i because i get to be involved in a lot of relationships because of my position and because of um yeah i just have a lot of friends that are married i've noticed that it isn't necessarily that they believe the same things or that they um have the same beliefs about every little thing but it is about do we look at life in a similar way are we excited about the same things are we um able to find common ground when we don't believe the same way are we able to sit in that together so if you're not a godly man currently why are you looking for a godly woman is another question right um and what's your definition of godly so what i would say is yes being single in 2018 for any age isn't easy um but why don't you look for your partner and a person to um live life with i have so many friends whose family originally weren't okay with their partner because of differences so my one friend is southern baptist and she's marrying a catholic and for her parents that was just like really difficult until they realized how he treated their daughter until he they realize how they do life together as partners who are like incredible for each other and they bring out the best in the other they wouldn't have necessarily if they had followed some of the rules it sounds like you you feel like you need to follow they wouldn't have found each other so what was their common thing was a tv show they both watched and their friend was like i literally don't want to talk to either of you about the show anymore you need to talk to each other and that's how they met so i think look for things that like things that you have in common that aren't just based around what you think the old understanding of godly woman is because that's who you used to be and it sounds like that's not who you are anymore and i have a feeling you're gonna land somewhere else so i think even if you're reconstructing i don't know that a godly woman is exactly what you're looking for it might be what your parents are looking for but i think in the end they'd rather have you with someone that is a is a partner in life what do you think i'm not married by the way i mean they addressed the question to both of us [Laughter] um i need a piece of information i don't have but she may not she may not respond to being shouted at she i also think they went to starbucks oh they went to starbucks so she's not here so what i was going to ask jenny when is when we started dating but i haven't dated or been single since the 90s oh geez um the late 90s 98 somewhere in their 98 or 99 is when jenny and i started dating jeez we got married in 2000 so it's been a long time since i've thought about dating oh that's good that's good news like yeah just not a thing for me and so i don't know how people do this now i don't either i think there was um there was an internet when i dated jenny but people didn't no we didn't date no using the internet no we did not people didn't text there was no text there was aim remember that uh if jenny jenny used to page me she would beep me on my pager and i would go find a telephone and call her and then i got a cell phone but she would still page me because cell phones were so expensive to use you would use a landline first and uh i mean this is and a lot of you don't even know what a pager is here's the thing that makes me upset about this whole thing is that there are people who do not know the fear of calling someone's home and having to speak to their parents or their roommates or their roommate or like yeah nope so i i'm a i'm a fossil i'm a relic from an air when i was dating computers didn't pick who people would encounter and decide whether also you couldn't look on someone's facebook page if i wanted to learn about jenny i had to ask her a question yeah and then listen to her answer it which i actually think is maybe i'm romanticizing i actually think that's a superior system yeah i think that texting and facebook and all these things have really kind of killed our ability to be present to the other so i'll just tell you how i did it in my day when i saw a girl and i thought she was cute or i liked the way she talked or whatever i would walk up to her and i would have a conversation with her it's very intrusive and then this might be terrible advice today but i if if she looked gave me any cues that she was interested then i would uh i would take a huge risk and i would invite her out to dinner or coffee or a date yeah in person again i couldn't text her yeah i couldn't send an internet message so you're getting rejected in person if possible and everybody's like that's a terrible system no because by doing that i just indicated to another person they were worth the risk of humiliation right so i create a preemptive investment and i kind of put it on the line and uh most of the time it worked were you looking for a godly woman um depends on what phase of life i was in right um when i had when i asked jenny out i was looking for a godly woman sure i was a southern baptist but when you look at this it sounds like he wants someone who's externally a godly woman meaning that his family i want to look at a redemptive use of that phrase yeah godly meaning like a good person a person concerned about things on a longer time frame is not superficial a person with some connection to the divine you know that's better you're a deeply godly woman can we say though that requires having that conversation right because you're not gonna figure that out talking to people that's that's where i'm going with the only answer is just talk to people um and you know if you're raised united reformed church like it doesn't sound like it's your jam so don't go to a united reformed church find some community where you can be who you are and people are okay with that and that's going to make it easier to meet people the the de-institutionalized state we are in now as america where we're tearing down all our social institutions yeah is one very necessary and two very alienating there are some good things to institutions that just allow people to be present together in a physical space um so you know what i'd one of the main reasons i wanted sarah on this week was to redeem that idea of gathering corporately without making it brainwashing or dogmatic no institutions of patriarchy or white supremacy nope or ableism or heterosexism how can we do communities well in ways that that make all of humanity in not just included but welcomed and valued and needed because that's going to fix a lot of other problems we're having around isolation depression suicide and yes letting computers pick who we date it's this hard thing of a we have to be willing to be embarrassed and it's a risk relationships are always risk whether it's friends or you know mike and i have been friends for a lot of years now and there have been times when we've had to bring things up with each other that are risky how are you going to hear that how am i going to and the beauty is those moments where you actually risk and so that's how we walk away from what year is it 2018. we met in 2012 2012 yeah i think so or 2011. it's 2012. yeah that's a long time yeah wow yeah okay uh m has a question em i like that hello science mike and pastor sarah and thank you for the leadership you bring to your work very kind em thank you my question regards having patient discussions of faith in this ever divisive world we live in i'm currently in a relationship with someone who grew up with a conservative understanding of the christian faith and though i grew up in a more progressive faith community my deconstruction began at the age of 13 and only in the past year have i begun to identify as christian again thanks much to science mike and the liturgist i liked how that sounds like a band from the fifties science mic and the liturgists it can be uh difficult for me to engage in discussions of faith with my partner as much of their understanding is based on a traditional conservative interpretation of the bible and i interpret the messages to be taken in the context of the author the audience and history how do you engage in conversations specifically with a partner about faith issues with as much empathy and love without getting frustrated and without frustrating the other person when your views differ my partner and i are very much in love and happy yet this is one area where we approach the table with two very different perspectives thanks for your help oh this is a very personal one for me as i was reading that i was thinking that yeah i may have gotten through a similar experience recently and actually a lot i find it really interesting i think i um i myself am so interested and curious about the uh emotive expression of the evangelical church so i end up dating in general i've ended up dating guys that were from the evangelical background i think because um that's not the tradition that i came out of but it was one that i've always been super attracted to so i think i've always been not attracted to it i was just trying to be like evangelicals are like your bad boy on a motorcycle it's just really funny it was yeah my parents were really disturbed one time i brought home a southern baptist and my mom made me read their stance on women that was my story like instead of a leather jacket and a harley it's like a like a bible in a way king james bible and king james they were just super upset about you no local coffee i think why are they so into that now um i think for me because i am interested always in hearing another voice right and so maybe yeah it is a bit of a bad boy thing but it's also because i like those parts of me to to experience those parts of me and to question those parts of me i think uh how you come to it is sort of how do you have those conversations as you step into it saying you know i'm not trying to change your view and you're not trying to change my view and the beauty of it is we can share and have difference of opinion and it's not going to change who we are in relationship to each other and we don't do that enough because i think humans are so afraid of of change right and they're afraid of being wrong in general and i think we we stick to our guns and i think the realization that like i'm not coming to you with this to try to change your mind and i think the mistakes i've made in the past honestly um in particularly recently was thinking like oh well here's some things i really think you should believe instead of being like hey it is great with me if those things don't change because it's still your great who you are is enough period and i'm not asking you to unless you think that something they're doing is very harmful to them then that's a different story or a harmful belief that you think is harming them um i think that's a different story but yeah i don't think i think you come to it with like a a super open-handedness um i have very little interest in convincing jenny to believe anything different than what she believes about literally anything right because if you believe that that's the thing it will bubble to the top and i think that's where some of the anxiety can be released it's not up to you to have your partner believe the way you believe that's not your job but you can have beautiful conversations about difference and for me i love those conversations um but i just recently have learned how to be more um i think present and open to those and not so like well i have you know cause honestly when i talk about these things it's a loaded gun because i have this degree that people think oh then she knows all the answers but sometimes i'm just playing around with the questions myself and so what i'm landing on may not actually be what i think but i'm playing around with them and i have to remember that i have this degree that sometimes seems like i know the answers and i don't except for today because you're asking me yeah i think it's great though that your partner and you are very much in love stick to that and one thing about your question how do you have these part conversations without getting frustrated don't pretend like you know what you're talking about yeah you already know your partner doesn't know what they're talking about so now internalize the idea that you don't either that's one of the most helpful things in my life ever has been the realization that i could be wrong about anything and i am probably wrong about most things yeah yeah i mean the idea like even the people that hung out with jesus didn't get jesus right right so how am i going to presume i have all the right answers um and i think because my job is tied to that sometimes i can think i need to and i don't have all the answers all right here we go mike great name by the way mike has a question hi pastor sarah hey that's me sorry got me my spiritual journey has taken me from a secular childhood to an intellectual fascination with world religions to periods as a committed tibetan buddhist episcopalian emergence christian and disillusioned atheist now i find myself in a place which i think in many ways is similar to where science mike is at and sometimes i call myself a naturalistic mystic i like the rhyme there by the way that sounds like a really great rapper i'm the naturalistic mystic contemplative scientific pantheist or half christian half buddhist half atheist too many halves it's three over two which is just one and a half it just means you're a very full person anyway anyway i said anyway then the letter says anyway when i was losing my christian faith i became pretty scornful about theology i regarded it as nothing more than an exercise and finding some compelling words to justify things that the author had decided were true about god basically making stuff up to make your preconception sound impressive but just recently i've been reading a theological book about mental illness by a friend of mine it so happens that he and i both live with bipolar disorder and i was all set to roll my eyes at his theology what is set to roll your eyes look like like you're just like ready to roll your eyes i get it but instead i've been cheering along with it and i believe that the thing that's making it ring so true for me is that he never tries to fit his experience into the box of some traditional belief structure despite that he and his book are both pretty orthodox instead he searches for theological stories that make sense in light of his experiences in other words making stuff up to justify his preconceptions i'm having trouble figuring out why the very thing that used to annoy me about theology is making his book seem so authentic i don't think it's just because my friend or because our shared experience is mental illness anyway my question is in your view what's the appropriate role of a personal experience in constructing theology is theology simply telling stories that make sense of one's own personal spiritual experiences including shared ones and hope that those stories will resonate with someone else's life if so i think maybe i'm okay with that and thanks all right so remember earlier i got to say my favorite word which is quadrilateral i i do remember that so this is a quadrilateral question because i think experience is important personal experience is important right but i don't think personal experience should sit alone when it comes to theology even when we look at practicing theology or understanding so theology just the study of god i don't think we can just use personal experience because personal experience is like personal right but i think experience can sit with tradition reason experience and scripture if you're looking at theology particularly christian theology so using the bible as scripture and so yeah i think everybody needs experience faith isn't faith or our expression of theology isn't our expression of theology you can't be a naturalistic mystic without having had experiences more importantly experiences that matter right you don't just keep believing something unless you have an experience that's reaffirming that re making that happen so i think this is an example of why i think you're looking at his book and you're hearing him do a great job of using it sounds like tradition so he's got stories that fit in experience and using reason to why this makes sense within the christian tradition or faith what do you think now we need we need shirts let's say wesleyan af yes that would be your shirt and it's funny because i for me i had to have a faith that i couldn't i i charles wesley the founder of methodism john and charles charles is the brother you're right so john wesley the founder of methodism uh who was never a methodist no it's actually well and i don't jesus was never a christian that's also true we've all you know we've made structures that'd be hilarious if he was though what are you trying to do with your life jesus i just want to be more like me what would jesus do that's how i'm living what would sarah do that's what i'm doing that's incredible yeah actually that's super deep actually if you think about it for a while i think uh you're experiencing uh a great way of looking at faith and using we all have a lens through which we look at faith theology it's not possible to do theology without experience it's not possible you have some sort of experience you always bring yourself to the study of anything you cannot i was trying to think it was possible to do anything with that experience no and it is but what is it a few things float yes breathe breathe earlier i complained that i breathed too much and then mike reminded me that every human breathes like that's an interesting thing to have shame about gosh my breathing only i could just not breathe well i feel bad for my podcast editors because i feel like they spend most of their life removing all my extra breaths breath so i wouldn't know how many of my breaths have to be removed but i guarantee you greg nordine could tell you at the drop of a hat about my breathing patterns and whether they're a problem or not i just did it i feel like am i like radio now i'm really conscious of my breathing yeah sorry but i feel like i put them pretty consistently in sentences and make them pauses oh yeah i don't know just radio thing anyway point being mike thanks for your question and i think uh you're asking good questions which is part of theology asking good questions and you didn't ask me so i'm i'm speaking out of turn here but i would think once i'm gonna give you permission to speak thank you as a woman in the church i've always wanted to do that i like it go ahead um one of the things that makes theology compelling to me is when it comes from the margins or marginalized voices since that is also where the christian faith came from which is a super quadrilateral thing okay christopher has quite a question oh this is uh this is one full page get ready get ready everybody's gonna be a lot of breaths yes pastor sarah my wife and i have recently stopped attending the church we both grew up in and held leadership roles in this has been a long fight and a slow retreat through struggles with abusive leadership and our own evolving faith we're in a season right now where we'd love to be able to just attend a church like normal people we're in no rush to jump back into leadership though the ultimate goal is to find somewhere that we feel welcomed safe and happy to volunteer our time too the problem we're running into is that every time i head to the website of a church we're considering checking out i can't seem to find one that ticks the right boxes for me wishful thinking i know i'll look up a church that seems to match our style of worship only to find the staff page populated solely by old white dudes with people of color rarely making an appearance and women relegated to roles like administrative assistant or receptionist the doctrine sections tend to be rife with paragraphs espousing things like eternal conscious torment verbal plenary plenary inspiration and literalist end-time jargon etc it has occurred to me now i don't know what the word plenary means although i've seen it many times of course there are also the more mainline churches that have satisfyingly gracious open and welcoming theology and social views we'd love to be a part of a community like this but there are certain stylistic things that make it hard for us to engage in the worship being a musician and graphic designer i just don't know if i can sit through any more handbell choirs and mauve robes with bulletins typeset in the papyrus font [Laughter] maybe we're being too picky that is just so mainline just great old churches with beautiful buildings turning red maybe we're being too picky i know that the purpose of the church is not to make us happy go figure but it is too but is it too much to ask for a place that ticks off all the theological and social boxes but also utilizes music and artistry that feels authentic and at home in the 21st century i know there are churches like this in more urban areas but we are way out in nowhere illinois i guess my question is this what compromises do you think are worth making in search of a spiritual community should we find a church that shares our values and beliefs despite not feeling able to engage in their liturgical practice or do we look for a place that can give us the church experience we're looking for and helps us feel the presence of god despite certain faith statements we can't exactly get behind do we hold these differences in tension knowing that none of us ever have it all right for me the prohibition of women in leadership would be a deal breaker but i could look the other way on differing opinions on baptism for instance looking forward to hearing your thoughts chris so i immediately thought he like looked the other way when baptisms were happening does every time a baptism so this is actually a question i think a lot of people are asking right now um i tend to say that uh for instance united methodism uh has a theology that seems to be really uh helpful for uh particularly people of the 21st century and for people who are uh like i say the nuns and nuns however many of my brothers and sisters have churches with the mauve robes um papyrus font i would actually be excited if they got to papyrus pond um so then the question becomes how do we reconcile because i also know tons of my brothers and sisters who are in evangelical churches and they don't believe what the churches believe and not just i don't mean like there are great evangelical churches actually yeah that's all over la like really progressive people interested in super conservative churches because they're stylistically yeah because they're artistic and they want they want an artistic expression so what do you do what do you hold on to what do you let go of so for me i'm really lucky and that i got to create what i wanted to be a part of so we are a church that is liturgical because liturgy to me is uh is really helpful uh but we have music that is both ancient and modern so we do hymns as well as songs the other problem we have is a lot of the worship songs the theology around it can be really difficult and by that i mean it can be pretty sappy and not in ways that are um helpful but in ways where jesus can almost sound like your boyfriend in odd odd ways like i i had a friend who is not a christian and we played a game called is this a worship song or a love song and he was like i don't know sometimes i asked jenny to bend beneath the weight of my love and mercy i wish i wasn't a visual person sorry i couldn't help it um but i think if i were having to make this decision because i have had to make this decision before i spent five years in a church that didn't believe in women in ministry while i was a lead pastor at another church because i really needed to be around artistic people because i play music i love music i needed to be around people who were singing what i felt like were modern songs so for me i get it i've been there um and this wasn't in nowhere illinois i like wanted to know where you were from because i was hoping you would stay near me i was like come on so my question is since you don't seem like you're quite ready to create what you need because it sounds like you need to just be receiving right now um a season of receiving a season of just participating in something i would think honestly it would be easier to be in a community that had similar theological beliefs to me than it would be to be in a community where the music was really great but at some point that's all there was for me so and then maybe later you can be part of the change i want to say as a main liner who doesn't have a budget who didn't have a budget in any other church that i've been a part of until recently where we could have a graphic artist what a gift for you to even say hey let me take an afternoon and take your bulletin and take out your papyrus fawn and let's try something different um the other thing you have to think too is some of the mainline churches are dying because they're holding on to things that aren't necessarily liturgical it's just this is the way we've always done it and if you go to one of those communities you're going to feel as crushed as if you're going to a community that was had great music but had a theology that you couldn't handle so i think it's really sitting down and making a list of like what are the deal breakers so there aren't a lot of churches that allow full leadership of women there are many mainline churches but there aren't a lot of uh non-denom churches that would allow a woman oh how that always feels weird coming out of my mouth allow a woman to be a lead pastor so you have to ask some of those questions i would also not recommend going to a website as the way of figuring out what the community is all about because i don't think you can learn some things but you can't learn all things finding people who are actually part of that community is probably a little bit better way of doing that the other thing is if you become part of a community that has theology that you find to be really harming you've become part of it whether you wanted to or not and you're tithing to the perpetuation of this so i think for me i would rather go to a community where i'm like man handbells what am i gonna do about it and then figure out a way that when i'm ready to step in and maybe be a part of that changing because a lot of these places want to change but they haven't had people who were capable of doing that um or who were interested in doing that so music for me is not what it used to be it used to be i needed great music and now i need i'm lucky i have great music now but for a season i put up with music that i maybe wouldn't have chosen myself so i don't i'm not a huge fan of like the 90s contemporary christian music stuff like it really wigs me out a little bit but methodist churches for a while thought that was the way to be modern and so it was the 2000s friends but we were still rocking the shine jesus shine sometimes but i would rather put up with that in a community that was perpetuating healthy theology and love of self and love of god and love of neighbor than being a church that had really great fog machines and really good good-looking worship leaders but didn't have that thing that i needed i don't know what do you think because i think it is really interesting here how many people go yeah they actually apologize to me they meet me and then they apologize to me for the church they go to like i go to blah blah but it's not because i believe what they believe i just really like this part of it and i think yeah but now you're adding to the numbers of people who are sitting there and people are assuming believing what you believe i mean they already know my answer what do you look for in a church it affirms you as you are yep challenges you to become who you are becoming that's the entire formula for me and you know i'm a little bit of a church refugee right now i still kind of identify my tallahassee church as our home church i wish i lived closer oh my gosh that would be amazing um we visited some churches i like most of them my family is like chris where you are but i need like this thing and like every church i go to as long as the theology is not horrifically violent i love so i literally went to a church in cincinnati hyde park united methodist oh yeah and um like my favorite service was the traditional service yeah because it was just all these like faithful older people yep and i went to a church here in you know just down the road a little tiny methodist church yeah that means not that one another one uh la canada non-methodology oh gosh yeah it took the whole family which by the way you take you take a young family into a tiny methodist church of older people like beagles yeah yeah much excitement yeah uh have you met john he's under 50. exactly exactly but these their men's choir saying and i didn't want to say the name of the church i'm guessing none of them listen to podcasts but the men's choir came up and um it was older gentlemen yeah and not strong singers not your favorite and i loved it yeah because it was authentic yeah and they'd taken like it was clear they had rehearsed together this was like a very real expression of faithfulness and i was moved to tears yeah right so um i have a a cup that a couple gave to me at my church so i've been in a a church that's uh sort of redeveloping so we uh had when i got there there were 17 to 27 elderly mostly elderly folks and then they brought me in and with me came a lot of diversity that first week and we have just ever since then been growing and the interesting thing is we're growing not just in older people or younger people because we have a lot of millennials which is um unique but we also have um a lot of older people who are moving to the area and they find their method of church and they go in and they're like this is a very vibrant methodist shirt i haven't seen one in a while but i have a mug it's like a like a what do you call it anyway it has uh someone got engraved on it first united methodist flawless because when i first got there for over six months we had a woman who just played an accompanist who just played on the chancel so like on the stage but i couldn't see her no one was leading worship so it was just the most awkward music you have ever experienced and she's a wonderful pianist and um things would go wrong all the time and i would always say if you're yelping this um the word you're looking for is flawless because it was not flawless at all and we've since grown and we have a worship leader and we have amazing man but the worship leader told me the reason he started coming to the church was he loved how authentic it was and he said i i love you know you keep saying like joke around about well something's gonna go wrong every week like a microphone is gonna something's gonna pop i'm gonna forget something it's going to something awkward is going to happen and he said for him as someone who's worked on staff at like huge mega churches for him this sense of this is authentically who these people are is so beautiful that he worries that it's going to get too polished can you imagine worrying like that oh this could be too good and then it'll change the whole atmosphere so i love that i think go somewhere where you feel like being authentically themselves where the theology is something that is helpful to you like you say they'll accept you who you are that you can bring your friends to um and i think it is it's a it's a question that so many people are answering and asking and wondering and all of you you might find that if you stretch yourselves there might be growth or gosh this word but like maturity on the other side there's a one there's a first presbyterian church in fort smith arkansas and um a couple co-pastors it they're some of my favorite people and uh the first time i attended weather services they had no worship leader yeah and i was like the evangelical me went what are you doing how does anyone know what to do but it wasn't because all these faithful presbyterians like just start singing from their hymnals but then i i was struck in a second after my like evangelical panic attack of like the beauty of a congregation singing to christ just itself it takes away performance it's not a performance there's no performance there's no performative part of it um so our goal with my staff i say we're going to try to make it as least likely like as least awkward as possible so people aren't um taken where they're distracted because it's so awkward that's that's our goal like don't make it awkward so that people are uncomfortable and distracted but instead let's authentically be ourselves we're not the we're not we're not the best at everything great question chris thank you yeah robert's got a quicker one sorry yeah we are so many questions my question is what books or other media has inspired you recently oh so i recently uh started listening to suzanne stabile i think it's her last name and she actually was recently on my podcast hold on yes you got her new book i just ordered it i haven't got it yet you've got an advanced copy she wrote oh because you reviewed it mike is so much cooler than me the path between us and she was on my podcast which i thought was so sweet of her and she i'm a two with a three i don't know if you talk about the enneagram on ass science mike but in the enneagram some of my science fans get real annoyed but yes sorry about that guys yeah so she suggested that i read henri nouwen's journals and that is what i've been reading and inspired by it i also am rereading a friend of ours um jonathan martin's book yes how to survive a shipwreck oh it's great that book friends it's so good he can write oh that boy can write uh so that's been something that's been really inspiring to me um and i've been listening to suzanne and ian ian's podcast which is uh the road back to you on um on podcasting i also uh i listened to a podcast called the dollop it is not appropriate and a pastor shouldn't recommend it but it has been really great and helpful for me do you know the dollop no but you just intrigued me by saying it wasn't appropriate for a pastor yeah so it well it's a lot of cussing and guys that have a really tough time with christianity but they are two comedians who read uh real history stories okay and it is really helpful because they really dig in so that's what's been inspiring me lately also art i'm a big artist person and i've been listening to propaganda a lot oh my gosh yeah his stuff's so good i didn't know about prop until after he came on the podcast and that's kind of the best i'll get some of his records and i was like whoa yeah he's good precious puritans oh my gosh oh gentrify it does this whole body of work today it's good so that's inspiring me uh okay wayne says hi sarah my question is about hearing a voice of god how do you look at passages like first king 19 and first samuel three and mike's ones i know and mike's hearing i was here when you were eight and i'm here now i have my own surprising experience of hearing another voice than mine i think the divine speaks what do you think i think the divine speaks too uh i don't know what that means does it mean an actual audible voice that if i had been standing i was not standing beside you on the beach i was inside um would i have heard that voice i don't know um i don't know how the divine speaks i know anyway sorry i don't think so i was giving i was being open-handed about it that's very beautiful i appreciate that um [Laughter] then we'd have to go me or him eight which one of us true that's true um i think the divine speaks today for sure i am uh i haven't experienced it but i think the divine has spoken to me through other people um i have had experiences that make no sense where people know things they shouldn't know and give me a word or a message or um something that i needed that i didn't you know and however you want to look at that i think the divine uses all kinds of different ways to talk to us okay aaron asks how do you interpret passages in the bible that make women seem more unclean than men such as the law about how long a woman is unclean after a female birth in a male birth yeah after reading the bible often in my quiet times as a child and young adult i came away with a distorted view of men and women that i'm still trying to unlearn well what's interesting is they were actually very progressive views of women for the time right so uh women uh even included in the idea of being able to be part of uh ruling and and be part of the message is is was actually revolutionary for the time you wouldn't have had religious rules for women in the same way so in some ways i think it look you have to contextualize it i think um i think you know the divine is still speaking in a lot of those ways and a lot of things i think that you have to look at how even progressive for the time these ideas of um yeah and also sanity art sanity that's not the word i wanted what's the word i want sanitation thank you gosh sanitation um was an issue right but the idea of a woman being more unclean when she has a woman a child that's a woman um a child that's a girl i you don't have full-born anyway point being i think that as we look at it uh we have to lift it the contextualization of it and we have to look at sort of um how things progressed or moved along later on in scripture because you see jesus particularly the woman at the well things like that speaking to people who would have been considered unclean and treating them as clean and then there's also the vision of things that you once declared clean are unclean i declare clean now so we have this sort of understanding that yes maybe there was a season and a time that women um were considered more unclean but that was also happening in the general context as well patriarchy rose with agriculture sorry a little anthropology there it's true it is actually very true okay mallory has our final question for you sarah are you ready i'm ready hi sarah hi there do you believe that the bible is uniquely inspired by god in a way that gives it more authority than other religious books or teachings since you are a pastor i would guess that you have a special affection for the bible but do you ever seem to hear the voice of god in other religious texts as well as i've met many people of other faiths they all seem to have met god in the context of their own holy book this is fascinating to me thank you oh uh so i do find the bible to be uniquely helpful for me in my spiritual you've got to move toward the mind i thought you were dancing i didn't know what you were saying that was me pantomime mean get closer to the mic i'm really uh thick sometimes um i think i was trying to dance with you that was like okay we're dancing scripture all right um i think the bible is uniquely helpful for me and i think i find god's beautiful story of love and redemption for us weaved in a unique way throughout the bible i also have read other obviously i've read a lot of other uh religious teachings and i have found things that were um helpful for me however i do find for me the holy scripture of uh the bible is my holy scripture right but i find it very interesting a story that i tell often because it makes me laugh a couple of years ago i used to do a service for thanksgiving with the islamic community in my area as well as the jewish community and myself and another pastor we did this sort of thanksgiving's the one holiday we all hold in common so what we would do is we would do a service project together we would talk about each other's scriptures we would sort of share our different traditions around thanksgiving because it was a place for us all to agree and gather and it was just they were wonderful leaders and this kid comes running up we're meeting at an islamic center this kid comes running up he's panicked he's absolutely panicked because i had put my bible on the ground and within uh the tradition of their of their community and their understanding of the holy word of anyone's holy word is that you never put it on the ground and you never turn your back to it so i had just draw i had like six bibles in the back of my car that i just had like thrown back there at that point and i just had a bible and i had walked in and i was speaking that night so i just threw the bible down by my chair and he was like no no i don't teach her i think you forgot like so worried and brought it to me and treated it with such care and compassion and love and it wasn't even his holy scriptures and i thought oh i have a lot to learn from that i don't do i hold these words as so uh sacred and holy to treat it in such an uh intense way and no the answer is no i don't and so um since then i would only do that with a harry potter series i know i got in trouble today earlier for having not read those yet dang it i like how i say yet like they just came out it's never too late my mom's actually from the area of england where they filmed it but i think uh the scripture for me is primary or the the holy bible is primary but i hate the word even like the holy bible you know people when they say the old testament my jewish friend was saying this to me one time please stop calling it the old testament when you're talking to me because to me there's nothing old about it it's called the hebrew bible the hebrew bible or you know scripture because it's scripture across the board everyone calls it scripture so when i say the holy bible i mean both old and new testament within our understanding or the hebrew bible and i do i find god uniquely in there because for me the story of jesus and the incarnation is uniquely um important to my story what about you she didn't ask me oh man that one's just you again they already know i've got a whole i gotta book out you know they i gotta look out there's no mystery left with me no but i mean about these particular issues yeah yes that's what i meant by the book i forgot to mention as inspiring and helpful for me as i've been following more and more in love with scripture because for a while i was just contextualizing everything but then i've kind of come back around to where i'm finding more mystery and awe in scripture peter eans oh yeah peter ian's um and i know you've talked to him before he has an incredible podcast uh called the bible for normal people i have been getting a lot of we didn't ask bible pete you did he hosted the program uh answer people's bible squad bible questions oh i love that yeah he's he's a he's a he's a he's a banff he's a bad ass mother father father he's a banff for sure i love it i and that's helped me fall in love with scripture again because i do love the word of god as as much as it's hard and it's a thing you have to wrestle with the other thing i would say about scripture and i would hate if i didn't get to say it is that um scripture is meant to be wrestled with right yes what are you laughing at i was laughing because you were saying i hate if i didn't get to say it like i was about to play oscar's music i don't know and your time on the program i feel like i've been talking a lot it's a lot of talking um but scripture is meant to be wrestled with and actually we learned that from our jewish brothers and sisters they argue with scripture and midrashic reading is to argue with the scripture and the meaning of it and within christianity sometimes we are told the story that like you need to understand exactly what it says and that's what it says but that's not being in love with something if i just like said oh i i understand mike there's nothing more for me to learn about mike even though you said there's nothing more to learn no the beauty of it is is i have more questions to ask of you i don't take you at face value i'm going to keep asking questions and that's what i get to do with scripture and part of me loving scripture has meant that scripture could handle me saying i'm just not sure about you right now but i don't walk away from you because it's only when we stop asking questions of things when we just believe things at face value then we're no longer in love with it [Music] so i like the holy bible that's what i'm saying not the king james version i even like the king james as a historical doctor as a historical document and it's kind of fun to hold on we'll take a little field trip here oh geez do you have a cake do you do oh ooh it's his most oh it has your name inscribed on it this is my childhood bible my uh great grandmother gave this to me on the occasion of my birth uh so this was like my this is how i learned the bible looking at these maps and there's just something about please read it in your radio voice when thou sittest to eat with a ruler consider diligently what is before thee and put a knife to thy throat if thou be a man given to appetite be not desirous of his dainties for they are deceitful meat labor not to be rich cease from thine own wisdom wilt thou set thine eyes upon which is not oh for riches certainly make themselves wings they fly away as an eagle toward heaven there's a shakespearean sort of quality to the king james that i find delightfully absurd i do kind of love it like what does it mean to hunger after someone's dainties that actually sounds kind of dirty it's not super dirty i don't want to know about your data you have appetites hold a knife to your throat and don't hunger after a man's dainties i mean hello [Laughter] i mean who hasn't hungered after another man i often hold the knife to my throat when it happens uh i think it's hard because i have a lot of bibles people only call they they call that the holy bible like that's the scripture if it's not in that translation i mean there there have been wars fought over this there's a high school bible's next to it that's an niv um yeah we had the niv and then my grown-up bibles there and the message the message and then bibliotheca which is a five-volume set it's beautiful though including that's yeah now it sounds like we're talking dirty but i still probably read the nrsv more yeah that's what i read i don't know why so for me you want to know why i read the nrsv because when i was in grad school uh the language students and the students who are and the professors and teachers who are greek and hebrew and aramaic scholars they say the nrsv for them is currently the most scholastically accurate of original language well there we go okay the more you know hey there's one thing you know why i ordered that because i had so many learned people yeah we're like yeah i just read the nrsv i was like really just over and over so i got one and then i found it like i found that when i read that bible i had to do less work to contextualize like when i would go look at other resources and be like well that's pretty much just what it said in the first place yeah you know what i mean if i and so this word really looks like it's more no it's actually a pretty good first shot there that's why when people say like i preach nothing but the bible i always say which bible and how do you preach anything like you can't leave your human self outside of house you see next to the bibles i have the falloquia which is the greek orthodox fathers yeah kind of like their second book next to that are pete inn's books and then spong's uh biblical literalism and gentile heresy and then a good book adam hamilton hamilton yeah but so just sort of like that's like my like bible neighborhood up there on the bookshelf um that people like how do you read the bible well it's basically those books combined with those books you know and then the god delusion you know who i get a lot of roomie you ever read roomie yes roomie for me has a lot of for me moments where i feel connected to god in reading roommates yeah if you'd if not you would be dead soulless well we've done an hour and 28 minute podcast here that's really long i'm guessing greg will we'll give it a slight haircut but hopefully not too much i like just running like it is sarah thank you oh thank you not only coming on the show but devoting such a huge block of your day to doing so oh i loved it uh and if you don't live if you do live near costa mesa california you'd be remiss if you didn't visit first united methodist yeah if you don't and you're like gosh i really like sarah i'd like to hear more from her what do you know you have a podcast called saunderlust saunderless the podcast and you can also hear if you want to hear my messages you can go to first united methodist church online and you can actually download my messages if you want but saunderless is my own personal journey of faith and finding happiness so i'd love for you to check that out we'll put links to sarah's stuff in the show notes on this episode of ask science mike just google ask pastor sarah science mike that should probably be the first it'll probably be this episode so uh we'd like to thank as always the patrons on patreon for submitting the questions on this week's program we'd like to thank uh andrew golucky for his work in pre-production on ask science mike we'd like to thank greg nordine the producer of ass science mike who makes the final decisions on what goes on the air and as always and a lot of decisions in our lives that's true yes plus if you ever uh want the dirt on me greg has all the raw files of every podcast i've ever done so he can in my career in three seconds uh want to thank jeff bodiford for writing the ask science mike theme song and i want to thank you all for listening i'll be happy to talk to you next week hi dad i know you listen to every episode of ask science mike i'm not sure you listen to every episode of my podcast