Hello there!
So I’ve decided to post a couple of new things for the first time in ages. It’s funny how quick we can all be in resolving ourselves to do something, stop doing something, keep something updated etc. Alas my resolution to a regularly updated blog has somewhat diminished, although with the new year rapidly approaching I’m sure to only make a similar resolution again. Maybe that’s okay…
Anyway I wanted to post a spoken word piece that I wrote a few weeks ago for a ‘TED talks’ event at my university. A friend and I were asked to present the Christian perspective on sexuality (or rather a Christian perspective on sexuality). Anyway I ended up writing this on the morning of the event in a moment of early morning inspiration.
I just wanted to get across the futility of what I call ‘bouncer Christianity’ as if we should be able to say who can and can’t come into God’s church. We’ve seen in the very recent past how the church has used various platforms and media opportunities to preach Christian morality and idealism, I’m thinking specifically about the examples of gay marriage and women bishops. In John 14:15 Jesus says; ‘If you love me you will keep my commandments’, it is from a relationship with Christ and an encounter with his love that we are transformed. We can’t preach morality before we preach Christ.
Anyway here it is:
All of us here, we live in a society
Where sex and sexuality can become our soul identity.
Like a product and a mould, like a tale to be told. We’re all breaking at the edges with the images we’re sold.
And don’t mistake these words for being moralistic or self righteous, I’m just presenting the case before us, the sights that fill our high streets.
We’ve come to a place where the shell outweighs the substance. We put sexuality before virtue, our identity in sexual factions.
But what of Christianity? What does this Jesus have to say? When history is marred by Christian bigotry, by judgement and by hate?
I will present to you the Jesus of my faith, he’s not a God who comes in wrath or hate but with a father’s love embrace.
You see for far too long Christianity has sung an outside-in, legalistic song.
The God some claim to follow today is the God they’re misrepresenting tomorrow. If you’ve been told that God is mad at you, I stand with you and weep with sorrow.
Who did this Jesus hang out with? Prostitutes, thugs those of ‘doubtful reputation’, not the religious, not the self-righteous not those that claimed perfection.
It was the religious who plotted and put to death the man that I follow, the man that rose again.
You see Christianity isn’t a bill but an extravagant love letter, it’s not about our righteous deeds but his love that lasts forever.
But what relevance has this with the subject at our hands?
It’s got infinite relevance! Unrelenting insight that seeks to widen our plans.
Because it all comes down to one simple truth, God isn’t a God of captivity but the one who sets us loose.
So don’t use your sexuality as some feeble excuse to not know the one who formed you, the one who loves you through and through.
Jesus meets us exactly where we are, religion expects people to come so far.
Christianity isn’t about where we’ve been, it’s inside out not outside in. It’s change through knowing a God who loves you, not appeasing the religious who scream above you.
You see we’ve got this whole thing wrong, the church presents sexual idealism before it presents the One.
You can’t receive moral standards from a person you don’t know, Jesus says if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.
So give relationship a go.
Overflow 