(Untitled)

[mahf]

Nothing original here, just an annotated audiography. Two really good things to listen to. I know they're long, but you have mp3 players, you have ipods, you drive places, you sit at computers for hours at a time. Check them out!

MP3 Link #1: "Women, Gifts, and the Body of Christ" by Mike Cope

This guy Mike Cope preaches at Highland Church of Christ

Comments

Re: Jesus would spit Don Miller out of his mouth in a heartbeat

[mahf]

First of all, I don't like your use of the term lukewarm, I think it comes from a silly reading of Revelation 3. For some reason, people seem to read it like cold=non-Christians, hot=good christians, and lukewarm=mediochre christians, who are to be understood as even worse than anything else.

A much more sensible reading is to note that both cold and hot water are useful for good things. Cold water for drinking, hot water for bathing, but lukewarm water is good for nothing. So lukewarm doesn't somehow mean "mediochre" but instead "useless". Not in between really crappy and really good, but just really crappy as opposed to good.

In that light, your statement doesn't really make sense.

Second, the thing I found worthwhile was in the middle, when he talks about the kinds of questions christianity answers. I still think he does a good job of that and you haven't interacted with it at all.

Third, you're just being ridiculous to say that every sermon you've ever heard is like this. Your criticisms are contradictory. If A) this is a carbon copy of every sermon you've ever heard but with pop culture instead of scripture, then B) how can it be different enough for you to suggest that his interpretation of Christianity doesn't jive with the Bible? That just doesn't make any sense.

I tend to think that A just doesn't hold up. I think his interpretation is substantively different than the fundy one, but also (at places) more consistent with scripture. You obviously think the fundies have the Bible right. I'm not going to get into that argument, but I think taking a group of ancient documents at face-value from a modern perspective is a pretty idiotic way to read it.

I know the awful fundamentalism you continually rail against is what you heard growing up, and I know its what pissed you off, but I don't think you've actually interacted much with other perspectives. If you actually try to figure out what the books of the Bible might have meant in their cultures, you'll probably conclude (like most people who do this) that interpretation isn't that simple.

Re: Jesus would spit Don Miller out of his mouth in a heartbeat

[mothwentbad]

When I said that every sermon I've ever heard is like this, I meant in style and in tone. It felt like the popular Baptist sermons I heard growing up, in that it's more about trying to be likable than it is about anything else. He hates rocking the boat. He warms up the audience by assuring us how much of a sweetie he is, with some disarming story about how he lost a golf club or put his shirt on backward or something similarly trite and harmless. He talks down to us in that way that schoolteachers talk down to children. He uses baby metaphors and constantly makes it clear that he's explaining something important and sweet and life-affirming to us. He refuses to make a point because points are pointy and dangerous. He is the sworn enemy of texture. As far as formatting goes, he has the art of the First Baptist Church of Merritt Island, FL sermon down pat.

It reminds me a lot of how Hell is approached these days - it's very vaguely approached, it's not popular to go all Dante on that stuff anymore, there's just this canned argument that's supposed to make everyone happy: "God is nice, so he wants everyone to go to Heaven, but he has to punish sinners, too, and everyone sins, so we all have to go to Hell. So just try really hard to not sin so much and make sure you feel really sorry about it and it'll be ok. There, any truly well-meaning person easily can and will do that, right? Are we all happy?"

It's the meticulously rehearsed posture of "sincerity", and it's either blind, dishonest, or both, depending on who's doing it. It's the hand-holdy actions of a peddler of the 5-paragraph essay format and annoying fashionable etiquette tips for Baptist housewives like "it's ok to tell people what you don't like about them at any time and with no regard for their receptiveness to talking to you as long as you balance each negative out with a positive".

He sounds so much like yet another lesson in what the appropriate range of emotions is. This wildly unsatisfying approach to talking about human existence is how I learned that a much-too-large portion of myself is disrespectful, undignified, and entirely my burden to repress, and that there's something wrong with me for not being happy about that. It's the kind of talk that comes from someone who wants you to be happy even if it makes you miserable.

I should stop, because as I go on, particularly anywhere after the first paragraph, I drift closer to describing the world I grew up with as the memory of what I had listened to in the clip fades. I do know that it definitely evoked the upliftingly-controlled sentimental and gratuitously overwritten paint-by-numbers sermons that we had sit and listen to every week for hours at a time while we sat around getting hungry for the Olive Garden. I mean, what else were we going to do all morning, do work in the community? God forbid.

Re: Jesus would spit Don Miller out of his mouth in a heartbeat

[mahf]

Yeah, I can see what you mean. I suppose I am less averse to the sort of friendly tone he takes because I grew up hearing much less friendly sermons. Old school sermons where they didn't gloss over hell or anything like that.

I too have found a lot of problems with american chrisitianity's understanding of sin, grace, hell, etc. I think our western minds want to divide things out in an analytical way, and our consumer culture wants to hash out exactly what it is we're selling at what price. But a 1st century Jew never could have understood things that way. That isn't what they would have read in those texts.

Christianity that amounts to what you said, just try not to sin and try to feel sorry about it when you do, isn't worth anybody's time. I think, on the other hand, that the Bible offers a really rich way of understanding all of the emotions we experience. I get the sense from the Psalms that it is entirely appropriate to feel the whole range of emotions and that repression is not at all the way to handle them. I get the sense from the Prophets and from Jesus that going to church on Sunday is worse than meaningless if it doesn't support you towards serving in the community the rest of the week.

And I get the impression that this is the kind of Christianity Don Miller is for, despite his anxiety about the Bible and need to be liked. I think the questions he asks are his honest questions, even if he has to say it in a way that will make people like him.

Anyway, the reason I posted Don Miller was because of a specific interaction and few specific things he said. So hopefully that gets me a little repreive. I'll post something else that'll give you another example of that "thoughtful reading" stuff that doesn't allow for the ridiculous mess that is american upper middle class suburban mc'christianity.

Once again, thanks for your comments.