Little Man in a Grey Suit

I was listening to Charles Stanley preach last night during a broadcast of his daily radio ego fest, “In Touch.” I have a perverse fascination with bad theology- I spend some of my drive- time with the media-mogul “men of God” on WNIV, the local, so-called “Christian Radio” network. My favorites (notice that even though I make fun of them I am nice enough to give them a link so you can judge them yourself) are Revi Zecharias- “Let My People Think” (he uses logic to defeat the scourge of “liberal Christianity” and has a cute, middle-eastern accent to boot), Key Life with Steve Brown (he has an amazing radio voice and he knows it) and that pompous, self-important touter of the 5,000 year old earth theory, The Right Reverend James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries.

Dr. Chuck was preaching from a passage in Matthew in which Jesus explains to his disciples that he is going to be persecuted by the Pharisees and then rise on the third day. Peter then gets mad at him and tells him that they are not going to let him suffer because they have to protect their prospects for being head of the Kingdom of God. He tells Peter , “Get thee behind me, Satan..” He made a point that went something like this, "Peter got himself into trouble with Jesus because he was trying to interfere with God's plan for Jesus which was crucifixion and death. We cannot interfere with God's plan. When someone is in trouble we have to stop trying to fix the trouble because we may be interfering with God's plan."



1. First off, he argued that we can’t understand suffering because we don’t understand God’s ways. God's ways include causing suffering so we can learn or become Christians...

- Suffering comes at us randomly and in relentless bursts at the worst of times. We are born to die, it seems, and tthat just does not make sense.
- Suffering is a problem that Christians must wrestle with in their Theology because it presents many difficult challenges if God is to be considered a loving and caring God.
- He is wrong because he assumes from this statement that suffering originates from or is allowed by God. He assumes that God allows us to suffer to teach us a lesson. He assumes that God allows or causes us to suffer so that we can become one with Jesus Christ and not go to Hell. In his view, since God has our whole lives planned, suffering is pre-ordained and a part of a bigger plan.

I don’t think that God has our whole lives pre-ordained. I can’t believe in a God that looks down from the sky and says, “Hey, you, you get to get cheated/ beaten up/ depressed (insert hardship here) because I want you to pay attention to me.” I can’t believe in that God. If God feels it necessary to mess with my head and abuse me all the time to get me more dependent on him, then he is more like Zeus than what is depicted in the Bible. Isn’t it kind of anthropomorphic to assume that God gets upset with us when we don’t indicate our obeisance properly? I mean Zeus used to get mad at mortal hubris and throw difficulty into the paths of egotistical Greek dudes to bring them down.

My God is unlike anything we humans understand and to give God these human qualities is idolatrous and oversimplifying. He kicks Zeus's ass.

2. Second, he asserted that when people are in trouble, we should not try to fix the situation because we might be interfering with God’s plan.

-Isn’t it a sin to try and say that God is doing one thing or another- to assume that actions of the almighty and speak for God? Isn’t that what he is doing when he argues this point in his sermon?

-How are we to know when trouble for someone is God at work? Could we not assume, then, that all trouble that people encounter (homelessness, poverty, disease, depression, lonliness, divorce) is God at work in their lives and not just the result of our universe of physical laws at work?
- Couldn’t this assertion be taken as a rationale by white, upper class Baptists who moved their church from Downtown Atlanta, where there is lots of “trouble” (see above list) to Dunwoody, GA, a desperate Housewife- filled suburb not to “interfere” with the trouble that they encounter and thereby interrupt their extremely comfy lives by helping others? Is he going to apply this rule when God works in the life of his Grandchildren and they get sick, in debt , thrown in jail, depressed or have marital difficulty? Was he grateful when people did not try to help him when his wife divorced him?

I know that if my friends or children get in trouble, I am going to do everything in my power to, at the very least, alleviate some suffering if not facilitate healing.

You're damned right I am going to interfere if not do my best to fix what I can fix.

3. He is almost right on many counts in this sermon.
- He argues that we try to fix people’s pain out of a need to save ourselves the pain of living with the pain of others. We think we are powerful enough to change people and therefore assume the role of God when God is the only one capable of changing a person’s heart. I agree with this assertion in the following ways:
- You can’t fix other people’s pain. You can be with them, empathize, feed them, clothe them, give them shelter and put band-aids on their pain, but their pain is not going to be fixed by you. They have to choose to change.
- It is wrong to slap band-aids on people’s pain just to get them out of the way. I mean it is right and wrong, I suppose. For example, Copper John in Little 5 Points (my neighborhood) asks me for $28.00 for a room on a cold night. I give it to him to get him off of my porch and to alleviate my classic White Man Rich Guy guilt. He sleeps in a warm place for 4 nights but a year later he is still doing drugs and sleeping in doorways because he still has not chosen to improve his life. Yes, I enabled him, but you know, who the hell cares because my money bought him a little temporary pleasure in a life that is (by his own choice) pretty awful.

Chuck’s A Top-Down Leader and Theologian..... God is the Man in Charge of the Man in Charge...

When I heard this sermon I felt really bad for him and knew that thinking God was in control of his destiny in all ways probably kept him from being really depressed. I kept thinking about one night when I was picking up some take-out food about 7:30 and I saw this smallish, neatly-dressed, wrinkled looking man in a grey suit waiting for his food. It was Rev. Stanley and I wanted to go over and hug him and see if he wanted to come over and eat with us because I could picture him walking in his front door with a plastic bag full of a styrofoam container full of take out. I saw him opening it up and sitting on his sofa after turning on TBN and eating all alone by the TV light.

I probably have a lot of this story wrong, but from what I was made to understand by word of mouth and the media Rev. Stanley might have been left alone himself during his marital problems. He had a wife who was, from what I heard, suffering from mental illness and from what I know about him he still spent most of his time on his Empire, In-Touch ministries. We, the public, were all left with the impression that he was neglectful of her and his family. We've all done that before and can't toss any stones. However, I think he missed an enourmous opporunity at the time to let people "interfere" with his suffering by letting us all in his head and telling us how he was dealing with it. I may have missed this sermon, but he may have missed an enourmous opportunity to repent and confess his faults and teach us all how to be better husbands and fathers by hearing about his bad example.

I'll bet he was really lonely at the top and believe it or not, I pray for him often that he does not feel lonely. But, I'm sure that he's a happy guy and I am sure that I would like knowing him if not being his friend, even though I think the stuff he preaches is utter bullshit. I envy his ability to preach sermons and deliever them very well with his admonitions of "Watch This!!!" and "Write this one down!" He is good at what he does. One does not get two huge office buildings on prime real-estate and a huge church like First Baptist Atlanta without being extremely competent and charismatic.

To publicly confess to being a screw-up (like our man Peter) , however, might have meant the end of the In-Touch empire. I mean, the man does have to make a living, I suppose.

OK, So Effing What?
God gives us compassion and an ability to empathize and try our damndest to relieve suffering. He calls us to practice hospitality by sitting around the table with the hurting, the smelly, the ignorant, the lonely, the ill, the poor, the rich and the dying and diving into God’s banquet of life together. We can't always understand but we can be confused and scared together. We should begin by listening to someone’s story and trying our best to understand with judging them and inserting our own wisdom (or lack thereof) into the equation.

God calls us to ask the sad man in the grey suit home to dinner.