Creatio Ex Nihilo

Mythbusters: Do You Hate Your Body?

         Do you hate your body?  Statistics show that a good portion of you would answer “yes” to that question.  There are entire industries that rely on us hating our bodies.  Beauty products like make-up, hair color all exploit at our insecurity about our bodies.  In many advertisements women are portrayed as unhealthily thin, and a body image is promoted that leads many young girls into struggles with eating disorders.  Even healthy products and services like exercise equipment and gyms motivate us to change our behavior by preying on our low image of our bodies.

Beyond that, most advertisements presume we hate our bodies, even if they aren’t specifically selling us a product to improve them.  Think about it.  Have you ever seen an out-of-shape person in a car commercial?  From watching TV, one might even assume that the best way to get a hot body is to drink beer, since, at least in commercials, it seems all the people with the best bodies drink beer or at least attend beer-related events.

One would expect that Christian culture would offer us an alternative to holding our bodies in low esteem, but sadly that is not always the case.  In Christianity, it seems that not only do we hate our own bodies, we hate everyone else’s body as well.  In fact we hate the idea of bodies.

For the most part, throughout much of Christian history, the human body has been portrayed as something in which evil resides.  The body is where all kinds of human lusts and desire fester that must be repressed and eventually done away with.

Mythbusters: Clean Slate

This week Pam and Don Heatley preached together.  They each wrote sermons and intercut them.

Don: The Apostles Creed does leaves out some important topics.  No mention is made of the Bible or how we should interpret it.  No theory of atonement is professed. No mention of a correct view of how Jesus’ death accomplishes forgiveness, only that we believe in the forgiveness of sins.  Why was forgiveness so important?  As we have seen over the past two months, many historians believe that this creed, from the second century, was written to bust the myths of Gnostic Christians.  

In the movie “Full Metal Jacket”, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman berates a new recruit by screaming in his face, “What is your major malfunction?”  For a second century Gnostic, the answer to that question was simple.  Ignorance, not sin, was humankind’s major malfunction.  What we all needed was not forgiveness, but enlightenment.  Certainly ignorance and lack of enlightenment are a major problem facing humans.  One need only to look at most Christians who appear on TV to prove that point.  But a central observation of Christianity is that our alienation from the divine is not due to lack of knowledge, but an abundance of disobedience to what we were created to be, and the brokenness that results from it.

 

Pam:  One evening about 10 years ago, I was at a wedding.  I didn’t know the family that well and was seated at a table with people I didn’t know either.  Sometimes that can be a disaster but this time I found myself with two women, Ella and Grace who were very friendly.  I would say they both seemed to have been in their 70’s.  They were best friends and you could tell.  They finished each other’s sentences and looked at each other knowingly when the band played a certain song like the same memory had come to both of them.   I found myself asking them a lot of questions about where they grew up and their friendship in particular.  They told me how they met when they were very young and how they enjoyed playing at each other’s houses even though their families were very different.  

 

As the conversation proceeded they started to tell me a story in which one of them hurt the other very badly and they didn’t talk for 20 years.  They were both in their early 20s at the time and both planning to be married.  Ella had set her date and was happily making her wedding plans that included Grace as her Maid of Honor.  Everything was going on nicely until Grace chose the day for her wedding.  She picked the Weekend before Elle’s, which meant she would be on her Honeymoon and unavailable to participate in Elle’s wedding.    Elle was devastated.  She told Grace she would not be in her wedding either.  Feeling hurt and rejected Elle did not call Grace again and Grace feeling misunderstood knew her call wouldn’t be wanted.  That began 20 years of avoiding each other.  They each thought the relationship would never be the same.

Mythbusters: Who Needs Church?

When Pam and I began Vision eight years ago, we had, as the great theologian Desi Arnez often said  “lots of ‘splanin to do.” we had to explain this church and the vision we had for it. People asked us a lot of questions.  Often,  they were questions that were coming from such a different mindset, that we could not even begin to answer them.  Questions like, “Why are you starting a new church in Warwick?  There’s already a dozen of them.”  Or, “Why do you advertise your church?  Do you actually want people who don’t go to your church to come?”

How do we even respond to that?  I remember once explaining to a woman from another church, that yes indeed, we wanted to reach people who did not currently go to church and invite them to come and be part of the Vision community.  I even suggested that she might want to adopt the same approach in her own church, to reach beyond the walls of the building and connect with the many people who didn’t have a church home.  She looked at me in shock and said, “Well if they don’t go to church, we certainly don’t want them here!”

Unfortunately, that attitude is all to common in many churches today and in one form or another and has been present throughout the history of the church, and religious communities in general.  The Apostles Creed says we believe in the holy catholic church, but sadly the church often twists the word holy (which means set apart for a special use) into meaning exclusive and unwelcoming. Here’s the thing, when the church ceases to seek community with those beyond its walls, it ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ and instead becomes something else.