"If you know me well you know I always have a song playing in my head. I don't go searching for the songs. They play based on what is going on in life. Sometimes they are songs I have not listened to in a decade.
This week the songs that have been stuck in my head are "Selling the News" by Switchfoot and "They Will Know We are Christians by Our Love" which is the mix of it being a hymn and the Jars of Clay version.
Its one of those weeks where the songs in my head feel heavy. Normally I find comfort in the songs in my head... this week they feel like a weight because I look around and Selling the News is darn right how many news outlets are treating this week (remember I have a love for journalism) and my heart weeps every time my head plays They will know we are Christians by our love because I look around this week and I can not see that in the culture. All I can see when I look at the Evangelical American church this week is tribalism. I think we often confuse that with love.
Love does not dishonor others. Love does not easily get angered. Love does not seek self interests. Love is not rude."
I wrote about #metoo almost a year ago. I had really hoped we as a culture had come farther in the lat year.
Let me be really clear here because somehow this gets lost often... I am an independent. I have voted for people from multiple parties. I was raised this way. Political tribalism is NOT something I grew up with. Growing up there was not good and evil party. There were people.
This is still how I look at politics today. I do not assume anyone is evil because they are in one party or another. You can click on the politics tab above to read all of my political views, I am rather open about them.
My issue this week is with evangelicals.
You can not justify wanting to end abortion, which evangelicals view as sin, with justifying sexual assault. I am not claiming to have made a ruling on what the supreme court nominee did or did not do, we have a legal system that is set up to work on that if we allow them to do their jobs. My issue is how people have said that sexual assault is ok if it gets us what we want. The majority of evangelical Christians say they do not care if he assaulted anyone or not, they only care about the abortion issue. How blind are people.... do people not understand that rape leads to a lot of abortions in our country. You are working against yourself if your goal is to lower the number of abortions by saying "boys will be boys" and "17 year olds do dumb things, they can not be responsible for that." You can not call millennials snowflakes because they do not take as much responsibility for their actions as you think they should if you tell them that generations before them should not be held responsible for their actions. Am I the only one who sees the cycle here?!
Once again, I am not looking to hang the supreme court nominee, my issues are with the words the church has used this week. The things the church has said.
You can not justify ending one sin with another sin. That is not of Jesus. Jesus has no list of acceptable sins.
My heart is broken today because I look around and all I see is lack of love. Go read my #metoo post... I did not report ANY of those events to any governing body.
I am also struggling with parts of my upbringing. I can not even count the number of times at camp growing up I was told what was or was not ok for me to wear. No one ever stood at the pulpit and told the boys how to dress. I see how this still effect me today. I put on a dress not long ago which was a perfectly acceptable dress. I was wearing it to church and was antsy while we were getting ready. Honestly the dress is not low cut however in my mind all I could hear was years of being told how to dress to best be a good Christian. Brent could see how much I was struggling. He does not understand it at the same level as he did not grow up in Christian culture like I did. I walked into the bedroom and put a scarf on and he started to laugh and told me to go find an evangelical looking scarf. He knew that years of being told my body is an issue led to the fact that I was uncomfortable in my own skin. Somehow as a society we need to find a balance here. I do not think that boobs and butts need to be hanging out however we need to find a better way of communicating that in a way that is not shaming to women and creating scars on their hearts. This leads to the thought that if a woman is raped it is her fault due to the clothes she is wearing. If we as a church are known for that being our view then we are failing.
People don't take ownership of things, they just double down. This is not how repentance works though.
I am in the process of writing a book that will tell our story and what God has taught me. It is currently in the editing stage and I wanted to illustrate a point better and went looking for a Bible passage that I knew the passage but not where it is located. Goggle failed me... not really I found the verse but only after ending up on a website first that says that anyone the preaches that the gospel is about love is wrong... that it is about hell. This website was not some anti-church site... it is written by a minster in the US who is actively preaching that God is not love. I struggled to follow his claims, and you have to omit large parts of the New Testament to follow his logic however the fact is there are many Christians who believe that. They believe the gospel is about sending people to hell. They believe there is no point in helping people. they believe there is no point in love. My head and heart just hurt.
This week I went back and read several excerpts from Brian Zahnd's books and started reading the eternal current and listened to a podcast with Shannan Martin and the only conclusion I can come to at this point in the week is that maybe the American church is trying to both be the bride of Christ and the bride of politics and that never works out. That we are just so use to our culture being referred to as Christian that people do not understand what is from the Bible and what is not. Andy Stanly said recently that one of the worst things in the American church is that we believe our culture is Christian. We do. Even when we say culture is against us we marry so many things together that do not belong together. We justify one sin with another. We justify why we don't need to love people. We say things like "all democrats are evil" when 91% of congress are Christians and congress is not 91% republican. We are fools if we trade short term politics for long therm eternity. We do not have eyes of the Kingdom of heaven then.
Once again, my issues are when we say we have no want to listen to what someone is saying if they are not on our team, when we underplay sexual assault, when we call people names, when we care only about politics, when we are hypocrites (go play out the difference between how the church treated Bill Clinton and right now), when we don't think big picture about our words.
I look at my girls... who based on them having a disability are statistically more likely to be sexually assaulted then their peers and my heart weeps and I feel like the church is the last place that would love them if that happened today and they were talking about Medicaid... the likelihood is that my girls will fight for social programs because they literally help keep them alive. But if my kids are fighting for social programs and are sexually assaulted will the American church even listen? Will they be told there is no point in even listening to them because of their politics? I am heartbroken because that is not of Jesus.
We need to show people who Jesus really is...
I just keep praying for a wake up call. That the American church will start looking for Jesus.
I am really struggling with going to church on Sunday but barring the girls having a medical issue we will be there... because I know God is bigger then this. I know God is love. I just weep that the only version of God so many people ever see is not a God of love.
So the rest of the day the song Patron Saint of Rock and Roll is in my head.
