Derelict Theology

I’m sure I got your attention. This coming weekend is our semi-annual purity weekend for our youth group, and Erin and I are feverishly preparing for it by making copies, praying, stuffing folders, buying candy, and spending time figuring out who is going to do what. Thankfully there are some people taking the heat off of us as far as what to eat, and that makes a huge difference.

Why is it that in a culture obsessed with sex, we seem to always have a problem talking about it. When we hear others talking about it, we either label them as “pervs”, “nymphos”, or “dirty”. We take something that God created to be beautiful and enjoyable within the boundaries of marriage, and we turn it into the “dirty little secret” that we blush about and whisper about over coffee. In a way, I think we’ve created our own monster as far as “Christian culture’s” response to sex. By not talking about it, by making it an unsaid taboo, we’ve made it more desirable, especially to youth seeking to rebel against their parents and what they believe. We then in turn lament over our children choosing premarital sex when perhaps one of the reasons they are choosing it is the danger….they shouldn’t be doing something so forbidden.

So, this weekend, we hope to change that line of thinking. Seeking to teach youth about sexuality is always uncomfortable, knowing that they will have questions, and we might not have answers. But, that’s what I’m called to right, to wade into uncomfortable territory even at the expense of my own comfort in search of truth and light. I really hope we find it this weekend.

This week at our church we’re having a Baptist Doctrine study. Some people cringe or groan inwardly when they hear the word “doctrine” but all it really means is what we believe. In fact, dictionary.com defines it as simply “Something taught; a teaching.” As for what is contained in that teaching, this week it relates to what sets the Southern Baptist denomination apart from others. While we could certain spend time on the media and even other denominations’ negative perception of Southern Baptist, instead we’ve chosen to simply look at some key things that make us different, if you will. Yesterday we studied about salvation, and the church, and tonight was about scripture, and what we believe about it. I guess one of the things that the teacher said tonight (btw, the teacher is Dr. Ray Van Neste, a former seminary professor who now teaches at Union University in Jackson, TN.) was that when we read parts of the Bible it should rattle our cage. I got to thinking about how often my cage had been rattled, so to speak, lately, and I realized that it wasn’t very often. In fact, when confronted with scripture that I didn’t know what to think about, I would just smile and nod. He challenged us to not just read the scripture, but to really read it, wrestle with it, and take it in. I’ve heard all this before, but for some reason tonight it made a lot of sense.

There should be things in the Bible that, if we have been Christians for awhile, we should still be struggling with. We should never claim to know it all, or to have learned it all. We should still continue to scour the scriptures to glean truth from their words, and if you’re not convinced, take a gander at 1 Corinthians 5 and see if that’s not a chapter that rattles your cag, or disrupts our modern way of thinking about “doing church”. I guess what tonight woke me up to is the reality that weekly I ask people to be enraptured in the scriptures, and yet I am not. It’s something I most definitely need to be about more.

I started Donald Miller’s second book, “Searching for God Knows What” last year around September or October. Due to time, or other books getting in the way, I only just finished it this past week. That may make me seem quite lazy when it comes to reading, but I think that the way I read it is better. Why, you may ask? Because there were times when I just needed to digest what Miller was saying, and it would take a few days for that to sink into my life. Miller uses the text to get to us to think about the search for faith, and what it means to interact with the world around us. In fact, it ends up being not so much about searching for God rather than having found him, what do we do now? I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with Miller in places, but the point that he struck me with the most was about how we view Jesus.

What is our view of Jesus? I’m not talking about the spiritual sense, either, but the physical sense. Is it like this:

Or rather, is it like this?

What Miller says basically is that Jesus was ugly. His proof text is Isaiah 53:2, which reads: “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”

Since Jesus was not attractive, and his message was not attractive, there was nothing that drew people to him naturally, or ideologically. Those that were not turned off by his appearance could have been turned off by his message. But when we look past those things, Miller says, when we look past the outer layer, we find a beautiful being of love, light, and hope, and a message that reveals the same. And yet, what most of our world cannot get past is that Jesus was a not a white, middle class, Republican and to go to Heaven you have to be just like Him. (thank you, Derek Webb)

That chapter of the book stuck with me more than anything, because it’s easy to say that Jesus sympathized with all our sins and sorrows, but we can’t easily imagine the son of the God being not so handsome, can we? It even feels wrong to say that He is “ugly.” But, as I read through the book, I realized why I’d grown so tired of paintings with “english jesus” as I like to call him, with his white skin, flowing brown hair, and perfect complexion. I realized that I was tired of them because they did not represent the truth that my heart already knew. The man who was whipped, beaten, and killed for our sins doesn’t have to be beautiful to draw us to Him, we just have to be willing to see with a different set of eyes.