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BONUS (4b): Going Deeper With Pastor Jim Mueller
233 Plays4 years ago
In this bonus episode, Jill Devine sits down with Laura Fleetwood and Jim Mueller to ask the questions she had while listening to Episode 4.
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The Normal Goes Along Way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation.
00:00:41
Speaker
This is a bonus episode of episode four of Normal Goes a Long Way.
Bonus Episode: Pastor Jim Mueller
00:00:46
Speaker
I'm Jill Devine and in episode four, Laura Fleetwood and Pastor Jim Mueller sat down to talk about what it means to be a Christian and how does that look in your life? During that conversation, I wrote down a bunch of questions. So in this bonus episode, I ask Pastor Jim all of my questions based on his conversation with Laura.
00:01:07
Speaker
Here we are in the studio. I'm here with Jill Devine, our host of Normal Goes Long Way and Pastor Jim Mueller. And this is a follow up to the really fascinating conversation that we had.
00:01:20
Speaker
in the previous episode about the question, what does it mean to be a Christian? As you all know, this is Jill's journey. She's asking these questions and she's wrestling with these concepts. And she took a lot of notes while Jim and I were talking. And so take it away, Jill. What do you want to know about that conversation?
Public vs. Private Schooling
00:01:40
Speaker
I don't think you addressed this, Jim, but this is gonna be an inside joke, I think, between Laura and me about my education question. When you were growing up, did you attend a private school or a public school? Yeah, I wasn't allowed at private schools. No, I was a public school kid. I went to a ginormous high school with over 3,000 people.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, ginormous. I went to church, but there was never a thought of me going to a religious school, even for college. I was gonna go to a public university. I went to University of Texas. You did go to church growing up. Yeah, I went all the time, and my church was pretty boring. The sermons, the messages every week were long and boring and completely irrelevant to my life. The music was old and traditional,
00:02:40
Speaker
There was usually a lady who was very nice, but she sang in an operatic voice quite loudly right behind my head every Sunday, because we were the kinds of people that went to church at 8 a.m., sat in the same spot, and yet...
00:02:56
Speaker
Yet for all of that, as irrelevant, as unhelpful as all of it was, I always loved Jesus and therefore was always willing to go. I never had to be dragged out of bed to go to church on a Sunday. And I know that's really weird. And now I'm a dad. And that's something I always look for in my kids. Like, do they
Experiences in Public School
00:03:20
Speaker
actually want to be doing this thing that we're doing? Yeah, yeah, that was my background.
00:03:24
Speaker
Well, it's a question that I'm asking because there is this assumption that if you go to public school, it's so much different than going to private school. And then if you're in private school, you're always
00:03:38
Speaker
There's just a lot of assumptions. And we talked about that when I interviewed Laura and Ryan. I want to start changing that as well. I don't know that I, I mean, I can't just do it, but the fact that some people choose to go to a private Christian school, not for status, or that's how I viewed it growing up. That's why they went.
00:04:02
Speaker
It was a status thing, not because they wanted to grow in their faith. So that's just a side note as to why this is very interesting to me as far as the difference between a public and a private school.
00:04:16
Speaker
I think I agree from my experience growing up. My experience growing up, it did seem like only the very elite wealthy families chose most private schools or there were examples of some older Christian schools that were a part of the church and some of the families in the inner city in Houston chose to go to those schools for their kids because they felt like the public schools in the inner city were dangerous or perhaps
00:04:46
Speaker
not providing the education they could.
00:04:50
Speaker
Now, my high school was dangerous. We had gangs in my high school. We had gangs made up of every different racial group that you can imagine, a very diverse school.
Role of Adults in Faith Formation
00:05:00
Speaker
In junior high, I was held up at gunpoint, mugged, so to speak. We had shootings at parties that I went to. Yes, I partied in high school. Yes. Oh, good, because I made that confession, too. Yeah, don't tell anybody. No, Laura confessed that she went to church hungover, so just know that.
00:05:20
Speaker
No comment. But not only were there shootings at my high school, shootings at parties that I went to, guns pulled on me like at the door of my friend's home. I mean, that stuff happened. And so I know some people make decisions on schooling or where they live.
00:05:43
Speaker
probably on safety, none of that seemed to deter my parents from the path I was on. There was never an assumption that I wouldn't, that we would move or that I wouldn't go to that school anymore. It's just maybe the reality of, hey, this is the world and what are you gonna do with it?
00:06:03
Speaker
I think the impact on faith formation of a child has way more to do with the
Visualizing God and Prayer Names
00:06:10
Speaker
involved adults in their life than anything to do with where they go to school. That's what I'm learning. 100%. Sure.
00:06:19
Speaker
Oh, if you go to a school and you can make deep relationships with adult mentors and with friends who all share the faith you have, it's just as powerful. That's beautiful. And it's really beautiful when maybe that's not getting nurtured at home, I think.
00:06:37
Speaker
But what happens at home is number one. What happens in your Christian community is number two. And then those friendships around you and that could include the people that you meet at your school or your neighbors in your neighborhood. So my next question for you in the previous episode, you asked us to close our eyes and picture God. Yeah.
00:07:01
Speaker
And it made me realize, like you said, if you're picturing a white man with a beard, that's not it. And then I got very confused. And so I wrote down, so there's no picture of God anywhere. No one has seen
What if Adam and Eve Didn't Eat the Apple?
00:07:20
Speaker
him like people have seen Jesus.
00:07:22
Speaker
There seems to be some instances where the term face-to-face is used, and this is in the Scriptures, but we get no physical description of God at all, and so the only picture I could muster of God is the picture of Jesus, the God who we could see
00:07:46
Speaker
the God who is here, the God who is human, the God who is with us. And when I muster my picture, it's like I said in the previous episode, a Jewish peasant.
00:07:58
Speaker
First century probably looked like a lot of his family members and his family members probably looked a lot like his tribe. That's the only picture I can imagine. Like God's beyond my understanding of everything I look at. I don't know if he has a head. He could have a tail. I don't know. Although we're made in his image. So.
Afterlife and Salvation Before Christ
00:08:20
Speaker
I'm kind of confused. I mean, I understand, but I don't understand. Yeah.
00:08:26
Speaker
Now, there was a time when he made himself visible in a way by the cloud that went along with the Israelites so that they could be reminded that he was there, so he took the form of a cloud. But obviously, that was just a representation so that their human eyes could
00:08:49
Speaker
him in some form. So yeah, I'm the same way. I only picture Jesus if I think about... I actually really pray to Jesus mostly. That was a confusing part for me too when I was starting to like, who do you pray to? Do you pray to
00:09:10
Speaker
The Lord, Jesus, God, Father, who are they? Which is a whole other episode. And somebody had said, well, I just say Father because that's who it is.
00:09:25
Speaker
That's kind of modeled in the Lord's Prayer too. So that seems safe, but if you look through the Psalms, which the Psalms are really a collection of prayers and hymns of the Jewish people, there's all sorts of ways that they address God. And the Bible has over 100 names for God. Most of these are like titles. So like creator is a name for God or a title for God. It's a way of addressing God, great creator.
00:09:53
Speaker
So I would say invent your own words, just make them nice words. I know we're going to do a series on the Bible, but just as we're talking about it, when you are reading it, pretty much any time you see a capital letter in front of he or
Old Testament Sacrifices and Jesus
00:10:10
Speaker
creator, things like that, that's referring to God.
00:10:14
Speaker
The translators tried to do some of that. So yeah, there are indications in an English Bible that the translator would would Capitalize a word like a lot of times if you see the word Lord and it's all four letters are capitalized That's an indication in an NIV translation that it's referring to the word Yahweh
00:10:41
Speaker
which is the Jewish name of God. It's a weird word of these sounds that we make when we breathe, these letters in the Hebrew word. And it seems like it is based off some sort of way of saying it kind of means I am, I was, I will be. It's like I am, but it doesn't have a tense. Could be future, could be past, could be present. So that word Yahweh,
00:11:11
Speaker
sometimes mistranslated Yahova or Jehovah, that word Yahweh is typically in an English Bible translated or written L-O-R-D, Lord, all capitalized. So you'll see that, yes. Okay. Next question. This is going to be a weird question probably and I think I know the answer is I don't know.
00:11:33
Speaker
But I couldn't help but write down for those that know most people, even if you're not really deep into your faith, know about the creation.
00:11:43
Speaker
and Adam and Eve and sinning, and that's what broke us, okay?
Catholicism vs. Christianity Misconceptions
00:11:50
Speaker
But I wrote, what would have happened if they didn't eat the apple? And I've never thought of that until you were talking, there was something that you said that just made me go, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, what if? And I don't know that anybody has the answer, but I'm still curious.
00:12:13
Speaker
I think they bit a pomegranate, by the way. No, we actually don't know what kind of fruit it was. We usually draw apples, right? So, yeah. Oh, really? I didn't know that. No, we usually draw apples. We don't know what kind of fruit. We really don't? No. It was just... We really don't. It just says fruit. Oh. Yeah. And so, like, weird people like me will speculate, well, what kind of fruit grows well in Israel during... Yeah.
00:12:36
Speaker
And was the Garden of Eden even in Israel? Don't confuse me more. Let's go with Apple. What's the answer? I think we know the answer. It would have been amazing. God put the couple in the garden and He gave them the command to increase and multiply and to tend it. Because the picture of what it would have been like is the picture at the end of Revelation, the very end, bookend of the Bible at the very end.
00:13:05
Speaker
What started as a garden and then got broken in the middle of the Bible is restored in a new garden city with feasts and trees on both sides of a crystal river. If
Denominations and Christian Unity
00:13:20
Speaker
it had never been broken, people would have been perfect and holy and amazing and loving and beautiful. And when that hope was lost, you can imagine the despair that God had and the despair that Adam and Eve had.
00:13:35
Speaker
because they were already experiencing it. I mean, they're hanging out in the garden in the cool of the morning and they have no shame. They're walking around naked because Adam's got perfect abs and...
00:13:50
Speaker
Eve is just gorgeous. Like everything's working out great. They're perfectly in love. They perfectly make love. The creation is the way it was supposed to be. And then it was lost. So I think we know that if it was so it was so good that it was going to become even something so much better. Heaven.
00:14:13
Speaker
What we describe as heaven, but it's the picture we get in Revelation of this new creation. It would have become a garden city that they had the chance to cultivate and grow. I mean, I can even imagine, you know, was God planning to send more people, create more people?
00:14:35
Speaker
I think God had such great dreams for everything he was doing. But you know what? That's not what chapter three is. In some ways, we all feel in our gut that we've lost the garden. Every time you see something happen in this world, and we all do, I know you do Jill, you see something, you're like, oh, it's not supposed to be this way.
00:14:58
Speaker
How do you know that? Because somehow
Embracing Cultural Diversity
00:15:00
Speaker
we all carry the loss of the garden, the grief of the loss of the garden inside of us. And then when we see something good, we know it's good.
00:15:10
Speaker
When you two were talking about the time in between things were broken and things were just crazy and finally God's like, and I'm paraphrasing, so tell me if this is wrong or right, but God's like, I gotta do something about this and he sends us Jesus. And Jesus is what leads us to what we get today. But something that was discussed, you guys were saying,
00:15:36
Speaker
What I wrote down was, what about the people in between? In between the time of God and Jesus, what happened to them? Because you guys made it sound like anybody that passed away didn't go to heaven, or they didn't have an afterlife. Nothing happened until Jesus came, but that was a really long time. Is that an accurate statement?
00:15:58
Speaker
Well, it probably is not because in the Old Testament itself, it talks about their ancestors who are going to be with God. So the Jewish people always believed in an afterlife. They always believed that God was up to something and that he was restoring his people. And in the New Testament, there's like a weird verse that says that Jesus descended to the dead or Jesus descended to hell. It's translated both ways.
00:16:28
Speaker
And the early church, when they talk about it, they always seem to say the message of the gospel of Jesus' salvation has made it to everyone. It will make it to everyone.
Thanksgiving Metaphor for Family Unity
00:16:40
Speaker
And so all those who were, quote unquote, asleep, the Bible says.
00:16:45
Speaker
Those who are dead, they were waiting for His resurrection. They were waiting for this. So Jesus and His death descended to the dead to save the dead. So no, God's plan of salvation works for all generations, past, present, and future.
00:17:03
Speaker
Now, it's interesting because in that time, which would be what we call the Old Testament time, God gave his people lots of rules and rituals so that they could be saved. They could be forgiven.
00:17:19
Speaker
And it's interesting to think about why he did that. I mean, we can only guess, but it seems to me like he was preparing. He was preparing these people that he had chosen to be his people to understand that there had to be a sacrifice because most of the ways that they would atone for their sins had to do with a sacrifice of literally an animal, which is foreshadowing the ultimate sacrifice.
00:17:49
Speaker
So you can see in this kind of beautiful picturesque way how God was doing what he needed. And that's why it says in scripture, when the time was right, he sent Jesus. He was doing something the whole time. We can only speculate what that was, but it was something that had to be done to prepare for that ultimate birth of a little baby.
00:18:13
Speaker
Well and you know Cain and Abel were born after the fall or maybe before the fall but they were born but
Podcast Closing and Feedback Invitation
00:18:20
Speaker
neither of them was the Christ and subsequent every generation like you're waiting for them you're waiting for them you're waiting for them that everything had to be perfect.
00:18:30
Speaker
The only thing I would say about the Old Testament and their sacrifices, it forgave their sense, but only very temporarily. It was very temporary. So every sacrifice was about a particular thing. It wasn't about the condition.
00:18:45
Speaker
And that is what only Jesus could win. So like, you know, you messed up on your taxes, maybe you sacrificed a canary, you committed a far bigger sin, maybe sacrifice a heifer. They have this whole intricate system in the Old Testament. I don't even think that's worth going into unless you're a real Bible geek.
00:19:16
Speaker
What they were doing is trying to learn to follow God and to take what they do in life seriously. And so it's very ritualistic.
00:19:26
Speaker
But it's also funny that later on in the Old Testament, there's times where the prophets speak for God and they're like, your sacrifices don't mean anything to him. And they're like, what do you mean? How could that be? We're impressing God. No, no, no. That's not what impresses God. He's just having you take baby steps. Maybe when you understand that there's always a punishment or sacrifice when you mess up, maybe it'll teach you not to mess up so much. So it's like a slow thing, but the whole time God was always up to something better.
00:19:55
Speaker
And I think for me and my personality, when I was thinking about those people, I'm just a, I care about other people. Like I was like, oh no, they're sad and hurt and done. And you know, I mean, that's just my perspective. There's different things that I'm reading in the Bible now and I know that nobody would ever,
00:20:21
Speaker
Maybe some people would think to ask those questions or whatever. So this is also part of my personality, like worrying about these people and wanting to care for them. It's a very divine quality in you. We should all want that.
00:20:35
Speaker
I think this might be my last question to wrap up with the whole Christianity and what it means to be a Christian. At the beginning of the episode that you did with Laura, you guys talked a little bit about religion and Christianity, like the difference. And it made me think of this recent conversation I have with my dad, and he said,
00:21:04
Speaker
that he was always led to believe or thought or didn't understand that you're a Christian when you're Catholic. Now, this is not to go against any kind of religion, but he was like being a Catholic was what you were. You were Catholic and there were Protestants, but you weren't a Christian. You were a Catholic. Everything was that. You were a Catholic.
00:21:31
Speaker
And I don't even know if it was me just talking to him like, well, that is a Christian. You're a Christian. Whatever religion, you're a Christian. And then we kind of started talking about Christianity a little bit. But that's very interesting to me that I think that there are probably quite a few people
00:21:50
Speaker
that are in that same boat that don't realize, oh, I'm a Catholic, but that means I'm a Christian. And that's what we have to do. Like, that's what's exciting to me. Like, come on, this is not about religion. This is about being a Christian.
00:22:06
Speaker
Words are just words. So when somebody sees himself as a Catholic, there used to be a time where Christians, or how you refer to Protestants. So sometimes that can happen a little bit. I think the real question is, do we follow Jesus? That's what it needs to be. That's what it needs to be. Yeah, yeah. So when I use the term Christian, I'm not referring to Protestants.
00:22:28
Speaker
I'm referring to anybody who follows Jesus, whether they go to a Catholic church, whether they go to a Protestant church, whether they don't go to church at all. I wish you did. But even if they don't go to church at all, if they follow Jesus, if they trust Christ as their Lord, as their Savior, and that's who they follow with their life, they're a Christian.
00:22:48
Speaker
And that's what I would say to your dad. That's what I would say to anybody that I meet. Now, some of us get very attached to a particular denomination or an institution or a way of doing things. A title. A title, yeah. We can get very attached to those things. And sometimes, this would be a negative, if that thing becomes the thing. No, the thing is Jesus.
00:23:17
Speaker
And hopefully that thing is doing a good job of cultivating us to follow Jesus. That thing meaning the denomination or the way we worship or whatever. Well, because that's what I, when I say to someone, I'm a Christian, I think it's still being taught or said instead of I'm a Catholic, I'm a Lutheran, I'm a Christian. I think we need to do more of that as a whole.
00:23:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that is kind of the sad part of having thousands and thousands of denominations is we don't feel like we're together as the body of Christ. And that's confusing to me. Yeah, that's hard. That's so confusing. That's another series. But that's part of that survey. I think that that's what some of these individuals may not recognize or understand that it is that.
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah, and it can become a part of the things that seem to divide us. Like in some churches, they don't drink. Some churches, women are not permitted to lead in any way. In some churches, they worship one way and another church, they might worship a different way. There's all these things that are different between us.
00:24:32
Speaker
My hope is we can come to see how united we are. Uniqueness is not bad. It's okay for a unique denomination to have a unique perspective, but what's not good is when the body of Christ gets fractured.
00:24:47
Speaker
And I think as humans, we have this innate tendency to herd together with people who are like us. That's part of our study of sociology. You tend to go towards... And I think as Christians, if you look at Jesus and what he did, he was always seeking out the people who were different.
00:25:09
Speaker
We are very tribal. We are tribal. Maybe that's better than herd mentality. So that is something I think as Christians, we have to be conscious of and fight against. Not that it's bad to be around people who are all like you, but then you have group think, right? And you're not open to looking at things in a different way. And that's become a problem and something that I think more churches should talk about.
00:25:39
Speaker
Oh yeah, we see it in politics, that we're very tribal, we see it in religion, we're very tribal. We see it in segregation, which, you know, now segregation is illegal, but we racially segregate just because that's how things were.
00:25:58
Speaker
And what I would tell people is get out, meet people that are different from you, who look different from you, go to restaurants that you've never been to. I think the cool thing about living in a globalized world is that's changing. Tribal isn't the thing anymore. The question is what will be? And my hope is that it's people reflecting God.
00:26:24
Speaker
That's what I hope. No matter where they're from, no matter what they might prefer, that they are reflecting God. One thing that we're teaching our daughters, and there are two books. There's one called Dear Girl and there's one called Dear Boy. And the two pages that I love are when it says, Dear Girl.
00:26:48
Speaker
Go find people like you, dear girl. Go find people that are different than you. You will not learn about things if you're always with the same people. And you don't have to be best friends with people that are not like you, but they should be in your life. And I just think that even with all of our Christianity talk that even exposing ourselves to other people's cultures or their ways,
00:27:18
Speaker
You might hear something and get something a little bit more clearer than maybe you did at your home church. Just be open. Even other religions. It's good to be a Christian and want to learn about the Jewish faith and the Hindu faith. I mean, we're all God's children. And I think the more you're curious, maybe that's the best word that we could strive to be is curious.
00:27:44
Speaker
Not because we want to abandon what we know to be true, but because every person on this earth is imprinted as a child of God and therefore they are worth knowing.
00:27:57
Speaker
Jill, what you said about your daughters, I have a lot of hope for the future in that way. Because when I think about my parents' generation, they kind of grew up with one or two genres of music that was kind of what they all listened to. And then maybe people from a different group had their type of music, and that was pretty much it. And I think about my generation and my kids even
00:28:24
Speaker
We all kind of listen to the same stuff. We listen to pop music, rock music, and hard rock music. We listen to rap. I listen to R&B. I listen to country sometimes if it's good. Like all these different styles of music and it's not weird to listen to all of it and it doesn't matter where you come from. When I traveled to every single state in the country except for one and I'm going there today. I'm flying to Utah today and everywhere I've gone there's a country station.
00:28:53
Speaker
Now I'm from Texas and everybody assumes in Texas all the radio is country music, it's not true. And it's also, you can't stereotype anywhere in this country and that's because we are a diverse, beautiful place to live. A place with freedom and a place where all people now experience that freedom finally, finally, finally. And so that's what's so cool I think for our kids and the future generations.
00:29:21
Speaker
is they don't know what it's like to live in a world with segregation. They don't know what it's like to live in a world where you're not exposed to every food group from around the world. And I'll tell you what, the restaurants that are in your town, that matters because that teaches diversity. What you eat at your table matters. The people that you're around and who your friends are, that matters. So I have a lot of hope for the future.
00:29:47
Speaker
I am done with my questions, but something that I was hoping that you could end with just to hit me when you were talking about that. You have said this before in a sermon about making sure the kids are at the Thanksgiving table. I never thought of that until you did talk about that. And I was just hoping you could explain that a little bit.
00:30:10
Speaker
Don't have a kids table for Thanksgiving. Don't have a kids table that's separate and in a different room with their conversation. And then have the adult table where the adults do adulting.
00:30:23
Speaker
What a terrible way to celebrate as a family. So what I've done at one Thanksgiving, and then I started doing this ever since is we would take our dining room table and then take our kitchen table, which is six feet long. It's pretty big too. Um, and we will put them next to each other. So it makes like a long, a long, but we still didn't have enough seats. So then I got banquet tables, folding tables, and attach them and kind of made an L and some of those seats were a little bit out of the room.
00:30:53
Speaker
But the idea was this that everybody belongs at the table because everybody mentors everybody. So I want the grandparents to hear what the grandkids are talking about. I don't want just the kids to be quiet and listen. I want everybody listening. I want everybody talking. So I think it's important as a parent to like don't don't get a lots of TVs in your house.
00:31:17
Speaker
you go watch cartoons because you're four and you go watch sports because you're a 14 year old boy and you go watch Pretty Little Liars because you're a 15 year old girl and dad's going to be on his own watching a war movie. Like we fragment so much in our culture and it's like the art of the family movie night, the art of having a Thanksgiving table that's big enough for everyone. There's something in that.
00:31:42
Speaker
And there's gonna be times where we're segmented. There's gonna be times where something's not appropriate for the kids. There's too many of those times though. So I'd like to, I'd like that metaphor of a big awkward table and a table so full that you don't have enough china. You gotta get paper plates. Amen. That's a good table. An easy cleanup, right? Yeah. Thank you, Jim. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Jill. Thank you, Laura. God bless everyone out there too.
00:32:11
Speaker
So what did you think? What did you think about this episode? Thumbs up, thumbs down. Let us know. We would love to hear from you. You can interact with us on Facebook and Instagram, at normalgoestalongway, also online, normalgoestalongway.com.
00:32:29
Speaker
If you think that someone could really benefit from this podcast, share it with them. Let them know what we're talking about, and maybe you have something that you want us to talk about. The best way to interact is to go to the website, like I mentioned, normalgoestalongway.com or social media, Facebook and Instagram, at normalgoestalongway.
00:32:50
Speaker
on our next episodes. Get ready for this. And there are some big questions that I would love to ask God. Like you look at suffering throughout history or even the suffering today, you know, how could that be right? Why don't you jump in and fix that? Why don't you take care of this? I've been to Africa many times and go, why?
00:33:15
Speaker
Yeah, why do bad things happen to good people? You know, that's a question. That is a super big stumbling block and a big question.