Labels

Gender has nothing to do with sex and sex has very little to do with coitus. It sounds unreasonable but it is true. Perhaps this will be explained towards the end of the post.

I listened to a sermon today on the way to work by a young man in NYC. To tell the truth I am not sure what the sermon was about. He started out by decrying the sins of the Calvinists and then spent over two-thirds of the sermon talking about legalism. I may be a Calvinist, I am not too sure, but I know for sure that I am nowhere near a legalist. So I wonder if the two categories are somehow mixed-up in his mind. To further complicate the issue he listed three subcategories of Calvinist. He named the Calvinist, New Calvinist, and NeoCalvinist all as subdivisions of Calvinist thought.

Oh what a tangled web…

This got me to thinking about labels. I was raised in an environment of labels. Just being a Christian was not good enough. We were Baptists and to further differentiate us from the rest of the body of Christ we called ourselves “Independent Baptists.” To even further subdivide the world many of my friends at that time classified themselves as “Independent Fundamental Baptists.” Some on the lunatic fringe even went so far as to label themselves even further based on their views on the Second Coming so you see churches that advertise themselves as “Independent Fundamental Pre-Millennial Baptists” and on even further than that.

My question today is why?

These labels lack definition. For example, I challenge you to look up the words democratic, republican, conservative and liberal. I bet it won’t take you very long to determine that a very large portion of the people who use these labels are not truly what they describe themselves as being, i.e. most conservatives are really liberals and republicans are no more republican than democrats are democratic. It is actually funny sometimes to watch the politicoes hurl poorly defined epithets at one another.

What do we need labels for anyway? I am just me. God shows me stuff everyday. They may not be new things but they are lines of thought that I haven’t understood before and the Lord has turned on my understanding for some reason and now I understand what I didn’t before. The odd thing is that we have no label for my spiritual path. After living the better part of my life searching for a good label I understand finally that there is not one.

God has shown me something from every religious group I have ever studied, including the majorly weird ones. God has put people in my life of every background from transgendered anarchistic atheists to tongue-speaking Pentecostals to spell-casting vegan Wiccans and pagans. The thing I’ve learned is to listen to the spirit of God and learn why God put this person in my path. While I am to tell the Gospel to everyone sometimes the best way to tell the Gospel is to love your neighbor…

whatever their label.