Forget the Church, Follow Andrew Sullivan's Jesus
I was browsing in a bookstore today, and happened upon last week's edition of Newsweek. The cover featured a picture of a modern-day urban working class Jesus hittin' the streets. The title blazing across the middle of the page: "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus, by Andrew Sullivan."
I haven't read the piece, but knowing a bit about Newsweek, and knowing a bit about Andrew Sullivan, I can pretty much tell you what's in it. Let me guess. It'll talk about how the Christian church, or any organized religious institution (don't want to be ecclesiastically insensitive now), is just not meeting the needs of people. It'll say that we just need to get back to the Jesus who told us about love and peace and equality and democracy and really touched us with transcendent meaning.
Most likely he included some conciliatory stuff to assuage the worries from that group of Jesus appreciators, and some other niceties to appease this other group of Jesus affecionados. And he probably belched some things about what the church to could do to be more real and inspiring, as well as some ideas about how anyone could really address the world's bad things by just paying attention to Jesus. I'd bet he concludes with some pithy remarks designed to get readers to believe he's just right there with them in their struggle... and so is Jesus.
"How can you be so unfair!" I hear. "You don't even know what he said!"
I don't have to. I know what Newsweek is about, and I know what Andrew Sullivan is about. Never in a million years will they ever talk about Jesus.
They'll only talk about the World System's Jesus.
For instance, Newsweek is only a loud spokes-hole for that World System, the vast network of law administration services for a populace wholly given over to their rank sinfulness. This system's Jesus is marketed as the face of that network, only a spectacular icon to get people to commit to Caesar's rule over their affairs, a perfectly legitimate operation I might add. Andrew Sullivan is merely an extraordinarily eloquent writer employed to use spiritual, religious, and even biblical language to shackle people more firmly to the System.
Sullivan himself is a sexually reprobate individual, an avowed homosexually active man with a very vocal defense of homosexual behavior. It is not even that he has homosexual feelings or has been seduced into a homosexual act. The greater sin is that he promotes it openly, declaring with millions of other World inhabitants that homosexual acts should be widely celebrated. Is this my own opinion? No, it is Jesus who says this. Check out the beginning of the 18th chapter of Matthew, you can't miss it.
I'm not going to get into all the issues related to homosexuality, but I do want to point out that I do agree with Sullivan that the church fails to provide any meaningful context for understanding these issues, but that is because the church is not The Church. The World's church is just a branch of the World System, and Sullivan's critique of it is ultimately impotent unless its "blown cover for cover" purpose achieves the ends of the top World operative. The True Church is so marginalized that no one listens to them, but then, World inhabitants are so deaf to Truth they wouldn't even know what it sounds like.
The case in point regarding sexuality is that any sexual sin is an exploitive act, including a homosexual one. It is not as much whether or not someone's homosexual behavior affects me, it is that a homosexually-minded individual exploits another when engaging in physical intimacy with another of the same sex, just as much as an adult expoiting an underage individual does. Furthermore, any abuse of another in a sexual way is simply a form of human sacrifice, the appropriating value from another at his/her expense.
To Andrew Sullivan's credit, maybe in this piece he is crying out for someone -- traditionally considered to be in "the church" -- to share with him Jesus, to free him from his agonizing spiritual slavery. Maybe he is brashly blithering about the conceptions of Jesus with which he is familiar, hoping somewhere in there is one that someone will tell him is the real one.
I do pray for Andrew Sullivan, and for the editors of Newsweek. Jesus tells people to do that, too. But as assigned administrators of Caesar's public relations operation, as much as they are out of presence of God doing Cain's work, they're just doing their job. Any one of them can never know Him unless they get out of the World and into the Kingdom. When Andrew Sullivan eventually says, "Yes, I deserve to have a millstone around my neck and thrown into the deepest sea. I've been terribly, terribly wrong to promote something that is wretchedly exploitive and wicked," and then turns to the Jesus Who Holds the Universe in His Hands, and Also Saves With the Most Abiding Love, then I'll know that he means it.
Yeah, I deserve to have a millstone around my neck too. I've done some horrific things to others too. Deceit, murder, betrayal, theft -- even sexual exploitation. The entire range of human sacrifice practices. But I turn to Christ and His mercy to understand mercy, and do it and learn more of it then do it some more. And then I can see -- indeed revel in the profound value of self-sacrifical sowing-to-life for those whom God has put into my life.
Sullivan may certainly speak of those things too in his piece. Mercy, grace, wholeness, I figure that's all in there too. Great words, yes.
But if it isn't real, it's just World piddle.
I haven't read the piece, but knowing a bit about Newsweek, and knowing a bit about Andrew Sullivan, I can pretty much tell you what's in it. Let me guess. It'll talk about how the Christian church, or any organized religious institution (don't want to be ecclesiastically insensitive now), is just not meeting the needs of people. It'll say that we just need to get back to the Jesus who told us about love and peace and equality and democracy and really touched us with transcendent meaning.
Most likely he included some conciliatory stuff to assuage the worries from that group of Jesus appreciators, and some other niceties to appease this other group of Jesus affecionados. And he probably belched some things about what the church to could do to be more real and inspiring, as well as some ideas about how anyone could really address the world's bad things by just paying attention to Jesus. I'd bet he concludes with some pithy remarks designed to get readers to believe he's just right there with them in their struggle... and so is Jesus.
"How can you be so unfair!" I hear. "You don't even know what he said!"
I don't have to. I know what Newsweek is about, and I know what Andrew Sullivan is about. Never in a million years will they ever talk about Jesus.
They'll only talk about the World System's Jesus.
For instance, Newsweek is only a loud spokes-hole for that World System, the vast network of law administration services for a populace wholly given over to their rank sinfulness. This system's Jesus is marketed as the face of that network, only a spectacular icon to get people to commit to Caesar's rule over their affairs, a perfectly legitimate operation I might add. Andrew Sullivan is merely an extraordinarily eloquent writer employed to use spiritual, religious, and even biblical language to shackle people more firmly to the System.
Sullivan himself is a sexually reprobate individual, an avowed homosexually active man with a very vocal defense of homosexual behavior. It is not even that he has homosexual feelings or has been seduced into a homosexual act. The greater sin is that he promotes it openly, declaring with millions of other World inhabitants that homosexual acts should be widely celebrated. Is this my own opinion? No, it is Jesus who says this. Check out the beginning of the 18th chapter of Matthew, you can't miss it.
I'm not going to get into all the issues related to homosexuality, but I do want to point out that I do agree with Sullivan that the church fails to provide any meaningful context for understanding these issues, but that is because the church is not The Church. The World's church is just a branch of the World System, and Sullivan's critique of it is ultimately impotent unless its "blown cover for cover" purpose achieves the ends of the top World operative. The True Church is so marginalized that no one listens to them, but then, World inhabitants are so deaf to Truth they wouldn't even know what it sounds like.
The case in point regarding sexuality is that any sexual sin is an exploitive act, including a homosexual one. It is not as much whether or not someone's homosexual behavior affects me, it is that a homosexually-minded individual exploits another when engaging in physical intimacy with another of the same sex, just as much as an adult expoiting an underage individual does. Furthermore, any abuse of another in a sexual way is simply a form of human sacrifice, the appropriating value from another at his/her expense.
To Andrew Sullivan's credit, maybe in this piece he is crying out for someone -- traditionally considered to be in "the church" -- to share with him Jesus, to free him from his agonizing spiritual slavery. Maybe he is brashly blithering about the conceptions of Jesus with which he is familiar, hoping somewhere in there is one that someone will tell him is the real one.
I do pray for Andrew Sullivan, and for the editors of Newsweek. Jesus tells people to do that, too. But as assigned administrators of Caesar's public relations operation, as much as they are out of presence of God doing Cain's work, they're just doing their job. Any one of them can never know Him unless they get out of the World and into the Kingdom. When Andrew Sullivan eventually says, "Yes, I deserve to have a millstone around my neck and thrown into the deepest sea. I've been terribly, terribly wrong to promote something that is wretchedly exploitive and wicked," and then turns to the Jesus Who Holds the Universe in His Hands, and Also Saves With the Most Abiding Love, then I'll know that he means it.
Yeah, I deserve to have a millstone around my neck too. I've done some horrific things to others too. Deceit, murder, betrayal, theft -- even sexual exploitation. The entire range of human sacrifice practices. But I turn to Christ and His mercy to understand mercy, and do it and learn more of it then do it some more. And then I can see -- indeed revel in the profound value of self-sacrifical sowing-to-life for those whom God has put into my life.
Sullivan may certainly speak of those things too in his piece. Mercy, grace, wholeness, I figure that's all in there too. Great words, yes.
But if it isn't real, it's just World piddle.
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