We're online!

Check out the new website at www.myencounterchurch.org.

This Blog Has Moved!

Check out the new site at:

www.myencounterchurch.blogspot.com

I'll be posting all of my new posts on the the above site. Brooksidedaughterchurch won't be updated any longer.

What Does Batman Know About Sin?

I think if Jesus lived today, he would have told less parables and made more short movies on his Macbook. Okay, that may be an overstatement but the point, I think, is true. Jesus was, in all likelihood, one heckuva story-teller. He usually communicated deep spiritual truth using average Joe kinds of people. Yet, sometimes his stories took fantastical and bizzare turns (see the Rich Man and Lazarus) to communicate that truth.

Stories are powerful, especially when filmmakers invest millions into making them as extraordinary as possible. But it can sometimes take a keen eye to glean a bit of truth from what often amounts to 90 minutes of explosions, violence, and love making.

Take the latest in the Batman saga, for example. In my humble opinion, the movie was such a smash hit (excuse the pun) because for the first time in any Superhero movie there wasn't this false dichotomy of Good vs. Evil. Many times in movies Evil is portrayed as Good's equal and opposite. Evil is sometimes cast as an alternative "kingdom" led my some genius bent on world domination. I submit to you that the evil Jesus talked about in the Bible was not of this brand. Nope, Jesus talked about an evil that was completely dependent on the good stuff that God already made. Sex is good (see previous post); adultery is bad. Desire is good; greed is bad. You get this idea that evil is a parasite. It thrives only on the destruction of the good stuff all around us. It isn't logical or coherent. It's chaos. Just like an apple that starts to rot, the "rot" isn't trying to turn the apple into something else. It doesn't have a strategy. It just destroys the apple until nothing's left.

The Dark Knight captures this perfectly. There's a scene in the movie where Joker just stole a whole warehouse of money. He's got $100 dollar bills stacked in a very neat 40ft high pyramid. A mobster is asking the Joker about his "plan" while henchmen are on top of the pyramid pouring liquid and watching it cascade all the way down.

"Plan!? There is no plan. I just want to see it all burn." The Joker flicks a match and a million dollars is instantly on fire.

That's evil. There is no plan. It's simply destruction. Sin, as we understand it, is simply destruction. It may look like a strategic way to get ahead but it ends the same way. The plan is burned up.

Earlier this morning, I read that fmr Senator and Presidential Candidate John Edwards admitted that the daughter of his mistress was in fact his. If pressed, I'm sure Edwards would agree, "Plan? There was no plan to my adultery." The "plan" could only end in destruction.

Surrender the Queen...gone missing?

Some of you may be wondering why it looks like I haven't posted in a very long time. Ok, I got behind...true. But also, I removed the lengthy post called "Surrender the Queen" because a small publication called "The Banner" bought the rights to the article (to be published at a later and unknown date). "The Banner" is free and you can subscribe at www.crcna.org.

The Ultimate Church Planting Sermon Topic

It's my conviction that when things aren't going too well in church planting (when numbers are down or when people don't seem as engaged as they used to) planters can pull out all the stops and preach on that one topic we know everyone will pay attention to: Sex.
Well, Encounter Church (that's the name of our new plant) isn't quite off the ground yet but I've been called in by another church to address this topic with their college/career group. It was awesome. Here's a summary. I've included my favorite lines. I hope it makes sense without the full 20 minute context. I spoke on the Song of Songs out of the Bible. It's a fascinating (and graphic) read. If you open it up to read it, you should know that the headings are Beloved (her), Lover(him), and Friends (friends). The poem is a dance of this couple's love story. Like all romantic comedies the dance is sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always beautiful. Sometimes commentators break the poem up into five encounters between the couple between which days or years could have gone by (remember its a poem).

Opener: I've been married 4 1/2 yrs and Kristin will tell you that in no way qualifies me to speak on this topic.

Encounter 1: SofS (1:2, 10) They get to know each other...and they like each other.

Encounter 2: SofS (2:6) The... ummm... physical aspect of the relationship is catching up. (2:16 "My lover is mine and I am his") This line is HUGE. Sometimes I think our conversations about sex spend way too much time on the minors and forget the majors completely. We talk about how it feels (good), we talk about how often we want it to happen (more), but we often never get to what it's all about. I would argue that SofS is less about sex and more about whatever it is that makes the woman in the poem say, "I belong to my lover and my lover is mine" (it's a repeated refrain). This book is about that. This topic is about that. Sex is about that. So what is that?1 In Genesis 2 God made man ("ish" in hebrew) but creation was still incomplete so he made wo-man ("ish-ah" in hebrew) "for she was taken out of man." So you have woman being taken out of man.

Separated.

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother to be united to his wife. They will become one." This isn't about gender roles. Don't go there. This is about people being separated and longing to connect deeply with another. God made them that way. Sex (Tim, my latin translating brother might help us here) comes from the same word as "Sect." Sex is about separation and uniting. We as human being are about being separated (and unhappy about it) and longing to meaningfully connect with another.

Encounter 3: (SofS 3:1-2) The woman is desparetely looking for him. You can hear the terror in her voice. She’s afraid. She doesn’t just fear the fact that she can’t find him, she worries that he doesn’t want to be found. But remember the aim of this book (this is about that). She isn’t just afraid of losing a really great sexual partner, she fears being completely cut off. Alone. We feel her pain. Because we are wired the same way. We fear being alone. It’s why even adults are scared of the dark. It’s why newborns need to be held. It’s why we leave the TV on in the other room even when no one’s watching it. Nobody wants to be alone. We’re just not made that way.

Here’s where it gets complicated. Some people choose to live alone. Celibate. Sexless. That seems like a working definition of hell. But remember this is about that. Sex is about fulfilling a God-given longing to meaningfully connect with another. Is that what we’d call “sexual energy?” Now here’s where it gets weird. Was Mother Theresa using every ounce of her “sexual energy” to meaningfully connect with the poorest-of-the-poor in downtown Calcutta? I think so. And I think she left the world a better place. What are we doing with our sexual energy?

If you can have connection without sex (Mother Theresa), can you have sex without connection? Just watch an old rerun of “Friends” or “Seinfeld.” Of course you can! But what happens to the that when everything is just about the this? Paul wrote a long time after the SofS. He wrote in Eph 4 about giving over to temptations (of any kind). He said it dulls our sensitivities. He didn’t say sex was bad. He just said that improper exercise of sex (or anything!) makes us callous. He said being callous makes us crave a higher intensity. In the end, we long for more and more and can never be happy. This can happen with anything. I have a friend who is an alcoholic in recovery who has a saying, “one too many…a thousand isn’t enough.” The alcoholic isn’t happy with a microbrew. It isn’t about the wheat and barley in an Oberon. So the alcoholic finds Natural Ice. Way more alcohol; tastes like garbage. But soon even that isn’t even. The alcoholic lands on Five o’ clock vodka (bottom shelf and Meijer). It tastes like that stuff you clean goo off your car with but it’ll get you loaded in a hurry. You can see the progression. Alcohol can be a good thing but quickly turns bad. Sex also turns bad. Casual Sex (sex without connection/commitment/compassion) dulls your sensitivity too. Casual sex impairs your ability to ever connect with another. Too much and, like the alcoholic, you’ll never be satisfied and left with a complete inability to connect meaningfully with another human being. I think that may be hell. And that’s what the woman in the poem fears.

Encounter 4: She eventually finds him. And if you take the time to read her reaction to finding him, she’s pretty happy. She hasn’t been neglected. He didn’t break up with her. She’s…connected again. But then we come to 5:2 and 3. We can imagine a good deal of time has passed. Maybe months; maybe years. He is standing outside in the rain. She is already in bed. Maybe he was away on business. She’s in her room and she can hear pebbles clicking against the window. It’s classic Romeo and Juliet. Something straight out of the movies. The fireman/model/lawyer comes riding up to her place on a white horse ready for the climax of the movie, the happy ending. He risks his dignity, his reputation, everything.

And here response? … “I’ve taken off my robe. Must I put it on again?”

Rejected. He laid it all out there. And she turns him down. You can just feel for the guy can’t you? Because when you were in 9^th grade and when you attended your first school dance, you walked up to the girl you’ve had a crush on for the whole year. You were five feet away, she made eye contact with you, you smiled at her, and she…ran away. You laid it out there and she said “no.”

It’s that fear of rejection that might prevent you from putting yourself out there ever again. When you take a risk for love, or dating, or whatever, you give the other person a great deal of power over you. Now let’s up the ante. I’ve been treating sex as a highly intimate act of connection one person can have with another. A big part of that is the fact that during sex a person offers him or herself completely to the other person. Those words from that second encounter ring true, “My lover is mine and I am his.” The act of sex entails taking off everything that might protect you. You take off all your clothes and expose your body and your heart. What happens in that next moment is huge. What’s the other person going to say. Will she be impressed? Will he be kind? You have just given yourself to the other person. And not just for those fleeting moments. In the days and weeks after too. Will he tell his friends? Will she make fun of me? After sex, you don’t belong to you any more. Your life isn’t yours. You are connected. So when looking for a sexual partner, someone to connect with, are you ready to trust your life to him, or to her. I don’t think you can know that you’re ready to connect to someone until your ready to give your life to them. And I don’t think you know that you can give your life someone until you marry them. Everything else is much too great of a risk. It’s a risk not just of being rejected, yes, that will hurt. But it’s a risk of coping with that rejection by “losing all sensitivities.” Sex with rejection will dull your ability to connect. You might try to amp it up to feel connected again but is a nasty spiral. It’ll leave you with your greatest fear, a complete inability to meaningfully connect to another person. It’s being alone. The definition of hell, I mentioned earlier. That’s the risk.

Encounter five: There was rejection. There was the risk of disconnection. He laid out his feelings for her and she was too tired to answer back. Then she came to the door, but he had already given up. They spend the chapter looking for each other. Their last encounter is spent with finding each other. Chapter 6:1 Where has your lover gone? I’ve found him. He’s in the garden. The poem ends with three chapters of them celebrating their love (and their bodies). They’ve risked everything, but this isn’t the risk. This is the reward. Two lovers embracing each other. There’s cheesy romance lines, there’s kissing, there’s fruit that definitely means something else completely. You get the picture. This is sex as it’s supposed to be. Sex about connection. This about that. And our Romeo and Juliet, to use the words of Taylor Swift, “Will never have to be alone.”

But why? Why is it this way? Why are we ingrained to seek connection with someone else? Sex is about connection, we know that. But we long to be connected so much more than sexually. As I mentioned we leave our TVs on when we’re not around. We stay up at night texting our friends when we should be sleeping. We’re not really friends with someone until we’re facebook friends. We’re not really interested in someone ‘till we read what they had for breakfast on twitter. I’m not against any of these things. I’m just saying that it is how we are wired. It’s how God wired us. Probably because he’s that kind of God. Yes, the Facebooking, tweeting, texting kind of God. Maybe you’ve heard about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I don’t think you can talk about God without talking social networking. We get it from God. The Father stays in constant contact with the Son, the Son gets all the tweets from the Spirit, the Spirit reads all the Facebook status’ of the Father….even before time. Do you get it? God is three-in-one a perfect relationship, perfect connection with himself. Connecting is what God is all about; connecting is what we’re all about.

But as perfect as our three-in-one God is, he took a risk. Looking at us from across the dance floor, he risked it all. If he walked across the gym in his full glory, she…we…would have run. He would have terrified us. His perfect holiness would have shamed us. And so he came in humility. As a crying baby who grew into an awkward teenager who grew into a average–joe-kind-of-guy. Who died. Naked. Exposed. Knowing that not everyone would accept him. Some would laugh. Others would spread rumors. Some would believe. You might believe. It was worth the risk. Because now you’ll never have to be alone.

1 Bell, Rob. Sex God. Grand Rapids: Zondervaan, 2007.