A few thoughts on the issue:

First, it seems there are two exceptionally unhelpful positions that both need to be avoided from the outset. The first is that of the Victorian moralist who seems to have confused God for George Carlin since they think that when the Bible condemns obscenity, God has a list of (at least) seven words that are Absolutely and Always Unacceptable. The second is that of the grunge rocker hipster that seems to think biblical prohibitions on language are simply cultural and we shouldn’t let those cramp our style nowadays - especially since one can just as easily prooftext passages that suggest profanity to be OK. Both positions are unhelpful because both are hopelessly reductionistic.

Second, it might be helpful to reframe the question. Rather than asking “does the Bible allow for profanity?” (to which the only honest answer can be “no”) perhaps we should ask “what does the Bible mean when it speaks of profanity?”

Consider - Paul condemns “unwholesome” words in Ephesians 4. Yet in Philippians 3 he says he considers all his good works to be “skubalon” when compared to the righteousness of Christ. Or consider that in Philippians 4 he exhorts his readers to think only of that which is “pure” but in Galatians tells the Judaizers that, assuming circumcision makes you closer to God, they should just go varsity and castrate themselves. Is Paul contradicting himself? For sake of discussion, we’ll assume that he isn’t. Rather, he’s communicating in a way consistent with biblical expectations of how language should be used.

First, that our language be appropriate given the subject matter. Paul’s language is exceptionally when the issue directly relates to the Gospel. On other matters, he is less severe. In other words, the sharpness of our language should not exceed the gravity of its subject.

Second, that our language be appropriate given the setting. A while ago I read a helpful post by Andrew Jones in which he described different culture’s perceptions of “profanity.” He argued, I think convincingly, that the standards of profanity in the west have changed dramatically in recent years. 500 years ago the western world was overwhelmingly Christian and devoutly religious, therefore language that damned - or suggested that someone was outside the favor of God in some way - was most offensive. The Victorians had different concerns. After all, it was their sexual prudery that gave us the terms “dark meat” and “white meat” (because they’d never dream of saying “leg” or “breast”). So for them any language describing “improper” bodily functions was obscene. This standard has stayed with us to a large extent up through the baby boomers. However, in the past 30 years the standard has changed again. As individuals become more alienated from each other and more isolated in our separate little worlds, language that plays on that basic estragenement or isolation most offends us. Our parents’ generation used the word “retard” with impunity, in ours we have the Campaign to End the R Word.

In both cases, the idea is that a Christian approach to language is not so much about hard and fast rules as it is basic principles of respect for creation (language and people) and, by extension, creator. This makes sense given the fact that Christianity at its nature is most concerned with our hearts.

In other words - the Gospel must shape our thinking about language, just as it should every other area of life.

-David Read

I like to adopt certain places here in town as my own and try to frequent them in order to spend time around real people rather than just in my seminary world. I was reflecting on the needfulness of this today as I had breakfast at a smoky little diner a few blocks from where I live. It’s the sort of place where the only seating is at the counter, the coffee is cheap and the food greasy, and the same six old men are always sitting around shooting the breeze.

What always strikes me is how interesting the conversation can be. The other day one of the regulars saw me reading the bible and struck up conversation by saying “So, are you one of them conscientious objectors?” (For those of you dying to know my answer… I’m not going there). Today they were talking about a shooting that took place yesterday at a church not far from St. Louis. One of the fascinating things was realizing that, while the language was more vulgar and common, there was a struggle between worldviews going on just as fundamental as when some Christian apologist tries to debate Richard Dawkins.

One of the greatest struggles for Christians is the temptation to isolate themselves, to form their pack and circle the wagons whenever the world comes near. This is particularly deadly to those of us who are preparing for vocational ministry work.

I have no great insights here, nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. However, I pray that we as ministers might learn to speak to people where they live, to let our path to the pulpit run not directly there from our study but instead through the tangled morass of life.

If the word of God is a sword, we must not simply hang it on the wall each Sunday to be admired by our congregations. We must take it down and teach people how to weild it. We must learn ourselves the feints and thrusts and parries of our enemy, and then show them to our listeners. Otherwise we might as well lay aside our calls. When the humanness of God’s chosen ministers is lost - when they cease to be addressing it to a world of which they are a part - there is no reason to preach.

-John Calvin

What people seem to want is some really impressive story. I was tripping on LSD and a psychedelic angel came and told me to get my act together and preach the word. Or I was on a spirit quest in the Mojave desert and a coyote with the head of Charles Spurgeon appeared to me. Or, at the very least, there was some revival service where I felt a movement in my gut that was more than indigestion and stumbled to the altar in tears.

The problem is, my “call” to ministry - the reason I’m in seminary now preparing to be a pastor - is about as drama-free as you can get. It makes a pretty lame testimony, especially if “testimony” means the sort of thing that gets the congregation fired up before the offering. Here’s why I feel called to the ministry:

1. I want to do it. I remember being 15 years old and having my pastor at the time ask me if I had ever thought about being  a minister. I hadn’t. “Huh,” I thought to myself that night, “That might be kind of cool.”

Since that time I’ve certainly considered doing other things, but the desire to pursue this path has been consistent. I love the thought of caring for and shepherding a community of the Lord’s people. I enjoy studying scripture and trying to teach it to others. I get excited about the thought of administering the sacraments. It’s something the Lord has given me a heart to do.

2. I seem good at it. I’ve got a ton to learn, but the Lord seems to have gifted me in ways that make sense for being a pastor. I can read and communicate pretty well. When I meet with people and discuss life and the gospel, it seems helpful to them. I don’t want to portray myself as being better than I am - Lord knows I have a long way to go - but there are some basic abilities I’ve been given that seem to fit well with vocational ministry.

3. Other Christians have affirmed me in it. Over the years, brothers and sisters who I trust have encouraged me in my desire. I’ve been encouraged by my pastors and my peers in the sense I have that I could be a preacher. They’ve told me I have the gifts and personality to fulfill the calling well.

And that’s the sum of it. That’s why I feel called to the ministry. I don’t want to cheapen the “supernatural” experiences people have received in any way. However, I think a little sober reflection on these three areas is far more important (and trustworthy) than seeking some vision where heaven opens and a burning coal touches your tongue, at least for most of us.

Am I sure that I’m supposed to be a pastor? Of course not. If I end up doing something else, I’ll conclude that I wasn’t and seek to live out my calling wherever Jesus puts me. But for the time being, I’m trying to faithfully pursue a very normal, everyday experience of calling  to the ministry as best I can. And I think that’s good enough, even though I’ve got no psychedelic angels to guide me on my way.

It was published in Critique earlier this year and is by a woman named Karen Baldwin, I found it exceptionally helpful and I hope you do too.

“As you give thanks today for what you have, I would respectfully ask you to consider carefully the words you use. The things we say reveal a lot about our goals, our values, and our theology. What we say often reveals what we really believe about God. I would humbly submit that thanking God for our current circumstances can sometimes be a way of whitewashing over the fact that we have been very successful in our pursuit of the wrong things. In the cases where this is true, it is our fault, not God’s. Thanking God for the results does not change this. So be thankful for those things you have that moth and rust cannot destroy, and for those things that thieves cannot break in and steal. (See Matthew 6:19-24) These are your true blessings. As for the other stuff, I would humbly suggest that those material things (I will not use the word ‘blessings’ here) have been given to us to give away.”

When most of us hear stories like these our minds harken back to guilt-laden sermons and pep-talks at youth groups - talks that amount to little more than, “Do better and feel bad when you don’t!” But Taylor suggests that there’s another way to think about such admonitions. It’s not that Taylor is unaware of the sort of legal guilt that Christian adults often use so skillfully on children - at one point in his talk he said, “No one does guilt like baptists.” But Taylor suggests that we can understand his teacher’s admonition in this way - “This is the story you’re living in and for the story to go forward, you have to do this. The story doesn’t work if you don’t.”

Just as Aragorn has to emerge from the Paths of the Dead, just as Aslan has to arise victorious from the Stone Table, just as Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth have to end up together, and most to the point, just as Jesus has to conquer death, so Dan had to ask this girl to dance. The story doesn’t work if Aragorn or Aslan die or if Mr. Darcy ends up marrying Caroline Bingley. Intuitively, we know how the story is supposed to go and something inside us twists in rebellion when it doesn’t turn out that way. That’s why stories like No Country for Old Men or A Farewell to Arms disturb us so. The goal of such “guilt”, therefore, isn’t to motiviate socially acceptable behavior through the use of psychological guilt. The goal is to open doors through which people can enter into the stories in which they’ve been placed.

Monday evening I got one of the phone calls. I had this devotional all planned out, ready to deliver, when it came – and it changed what I wanted to say. A girl I work with, 30 years old, soft-spoken, in the process of applying to graduate school for English, had died suddenly over the weekend. She called a friend because she was having trouble breathing, and by the time her friend arrived she had already passed away. The phone call was from my boss, who was clearly reading verbatim the company policy about how “It’s alright to grieve in these situations.” The ensuing conversation was surreal. I tried to ask her how she was handling it, but she seemed at a loss. The only hope she had, the only thing to block the pain of death, was a few empty platitudes and some free corporate grief counseling.

We are all going to face the pain of death in our lives. Friends, co-workers, loved ones… even our own deaths are inescapable. How to we handle the grief? We cannot simply deny it is there. No matter how much we try, we cannot make death any less great. Sometimes we like to pretend like it’s just a step through the door into “a better place,” but this simply is not true. Death is our great enemy, the heart of the curse, the ultimate consequence of human rebellion. We cannot make death less great, but what Paul gives us in his letter to the Thessalonians is a hope that is greater still. Because of the hope we have in the work of Christ, we can endure grief with our eyes fixed on Him.

But what is this hope that we have? How, in the face of Christian brothers and sisters falling one by one into the bleak sleep of death can Paul call the Thessalonians  to encourage one another? What hope can we find in the face of something as cold and dark, as bitter and ruthless as the grave?

The story I heard growing up in churches was that our hope was, when we died, our souls would go to heaven. Detached from our bodies, we would drift in a sort of immaterial bliss for all eternity. Many people mistake this for the heart of the Christian message. While this story is half-true, I am convinced that it is neither great enough to overcome the pain of mortality nor the primary message that God would have us hear. To understand the depths of the Christian hope, we must follow Paul’s reasoning in this passage.

The first thing we need to recognize is that our hope is in Christ’s resurrection. In verse 14, Paul tells us that, just as we know Jesus rose from the dead, we may hope in a future resurrection of all those who have died when Christ returns. We need to be clear about what this means. The hope of the Bible is not that our bodies die but our souls get heaven as some sort of consolation prize. It instead tells us that one day our bodies will be raised from the dead. Look at how Paul reasons here. Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, we have the hope in verse 16 that when Christ returns, “the dead in Christ will rise.” Jesus Christ triumphed over death on Easter morning. His very body which was beaten, broken, pierced by nails and a Roman spear, walked out of the grave three days later, restored and glorified. Thus it will be for each one of us. Just as Christ’s body was raised, so too will ours. Death no longer has final power, either over soul or over body. It has been vanquished.

Not only do we have the hope of Christ’s resurrection, we also have the hope of Christ’s return. In verse 16 Paul says “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God.” This is an image of a triumphant return. This means that our hope is even bigger than in just our bodily resurrection. It is, in a sense, the hope of the resurrection of all things. The power of death has been broken over our bodies, but the reign of sin and death will one day be finally and fully brought to an end. This is what John means in Revelation 21 when he says “Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” In Christ’s return, we have the hope that this whole broken world will be made right, and our grief will finally and fully be swallowed up.

So then, we are to grieve with hope because of Christ’s resurrection and Christ’s return. But how do we do this? Any hope, even a true one, can feel like a platitude in the midst of grief. Our answer is this: when we stand beside the casket, when we visit a loved one’s grave, when we face our own death one day, the only answer is to endure grief by fixing our eyes upon Christ. We must not seek to minimize death, to explain it away, to ignore it. By giving the Thessalonians the command to “not grieve like others do who have no hope,” Paul gives us permission to grieve. But through our tears, we must look to our Savior. We must see him, raised flesh and blood, standing over the tomb that thought to swallow him. We must meditate on His victory. Death cannot break our backs, heavy though it is, when we have the hope of Christ’s triumphant resurrection to enliven our hearts. What’s more, we must recognize that just as Christ has defeated death, he will return to set all things right. The risen Savior who now sits bodily at the right hand of God the Father will once day descend with a triumphant shout and a trumpet fanfare, and in his coming the shadow of the grave will finally disappear. The hope of Christ’s return enables us to labor now, though death be biting at our heels, because our labor will not be in vain. He will come one day, and all the dead in Christ will rise, and we will live with him on a world made new forevermore. Fix your minds on that day, pin your hopes on His coming, and your grief will be transformed.

The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the great confessions of the Reformation, is this: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The answer speaks deeply of our hope:

“That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.”

Brothers and sisters, in life and in death we belong to Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, who will one day return to make all things new. In our grief let us look to Him and Him alone for our hope. Death is indeed the great enemy, but it is a paltry thing next to the power of our hope, our Lord, our Savior.

1) Weeping for the brokenness caused by sin.

2) Examining our own heart to ensure that it is properly humbled by the gospel.

3) Engaging with the problem we want to address.

Most the time, my sin consists of reversing the order.