Cussing My Head Off ...

“I’m pissed off, and I am not going to take it anymore.” Was that one strong enough? How about – “I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore.” Any better? Maybe better to be more simplistic, something on the order of just plain old – “damn it”. Have I communicated my frustration effectively yet? Do you get it that I am mad? And being a follower of our Creator God, does my choice of language seem contradictory to you? Most Christians I know think that cussing, or swear words, are evil and in fact a sin. I say they are wrong, here’s why …

Ironically, my thinking on this topic has been heavily influenced by two figures, George Carlin and Jesus Christ. Find that hard to believe? But they seem to agree on this topic. George points out that when you examine our language, our speaking, and our communication in a deeper thoughtful manner – you realize that all we have is words. Some words are spoken to generate an emotional response, some are considered slang or having multiple meanings, some are considered guttural in nature and are used mostly for shock value. It is the last category that tends to comprise what we now call swear words, cursing, or like they say it down south – cussing.

But any modern curse word you can think of is really only a word. No different than any other word, except in its commonly held definition and purpose. A highly derogatory word for a woman’s genitalia for example, is often used to describe a particularly objectionable woman herself. Also used, is a technical reference to the female of the canine species or perhaps references to general sexual promiscuity. You see, I have just called to mind three words in your head without actually spelling them out for you. But everyone knows what I am talking about. It is the application of these three words that conjures up the “shock value” of the speech itself. And thus, three words with only slightly relevant associations, become swear words in the English vernacular.

George Carlin nearly pioneered this thinking in his now infamous bit entitled “Seven words you cannot say on television”. I love that one. What’s more I used to play his CD of it, in my car on family vacations with my young teenagers in the car. Does that shock you? It shouldn’t. George merely makes the point that our language is a product of our thinking, and our association of words is largely dictated to us. We rarely think independently from the masses, and therefore we deserve what we get, be it in politics, language or society in general. My intention was not to teach my children “how” to swear effectively – they would learn that really well in school. My intention was to teach them something much deeper – how we speak is an indication of how we think, and what we value.

This is where Jesus continues the lesson. In His day, swearing had a bit different meaning than ours. Swearing or vowing in His day, was language used to commit oneself to a binding agreement or contract between two people. If you swore to provide 2 cows to your neighbor by the 25th of the month, on the head of your first born daughter – then you better fulfill the contract, or your daughter’s head would literally be cut off. It was no light matter. The words were strictly and literally enforced. Christ pointed out the fallacy of this thinking by advising we “simply let our yes be yes and our no mean no”. He further pointed out that we “control” nothing. “Leopards cannot change their spots.” “We cannot add one day to our lives by simply wanting it”. In effect we can’t control anything, so it is pointless to swear before God, or before each other as to the validity of our commitments.

But Christ had more to witness on the topic. James and John a couple of His first picks for disciples were known throughout their home geography as “sons of thunder”. The literal meaning of this meant – they swore like sailors – conjure up an image of a Marine with Terets. And these 2 were the first representatives of the meek, mild, savior. Peter went off half-cocked all the time, and had no formal education; you can only imagine the choice of words these “fishermen” were used to saying prior to really knowing Jesus. Yet there is no written reprimand of Christ to correct the language of any of His disciples in the entire New Testament. And in my reading, I have not found the use of curse words in what they said.

Christ too got angry more than once, when he saw how His temple was being treated by the folks who were supposed to be ministering to their fellow believers. The level of apostasy that turns true religion into a purely financial industry made Christ very angry. Enough for Him to take physical action and “cleanse” the temple by overturning the tables setup for money making, and scaring the money changers out of the place. But nowhere in scripture was there recorded a tirade of curse words during the process. Nor are the pictures of Christ using a horse whip accurate. For a brief moment, divinity simply flashed through His humanity, and when the money changers looked at Him their own sinfulness was revealed. This image was too intense for them, and they fled on their own from the revelation. The witness to this truth, is the fact that immediately after the “cleansing”, Christ ministered to the children and believers who had come to the temple. If you run screaming swear words, and cracking a horse whip, into a room of children they will be the first ones out the door (and you should prepare for a heavy lawsuit and criminal penalty).

More important to Christ than your ability to speak, or your choice of words, was the thoughts behind them. Using appropriate legal language to break the commitment to honor their parents, was deemed wrong by Christ in His time. Christ saw that commitment as binding for life. Every time local leaders tried to trick Christ with no-win questions, he would confound them by revealing their motives, and showing them what was really important. Using religion to justify murder was how our Savior was killed on this earth. Upright, believers, who professed a lifelong belief in the coming Messiah, refused to accept the truth when they heard it, and using proper language and horrific motives, crucified the very Messiah they should have worshipped.

And we have still REFUSED to learn this lesson in Christianity. Christian beliefs are SO often associated with hate speech. Christians carrying signs at protest to offer death to homosexuals. Christians who take it upon themselves to reason they should kill abortion doctors in order spare the “innocent”. Christians who devoutly support a death penalty in spite of evidence that many “innocents” have been wrongly executed, and even those who are guilty are offered hope through a plan of salvation by God. Christians, content to sit in judgment of others, while full of sin in their own lives. Complete hypocrites. Complete abomination – liars, whoremongers, adulterers and these are those who profess to serve our God. And you worry about cussing?

Shock jocks, use language to achieve the exact same result as those who swear. But they do it for money. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern to name a few. Ironically, I hear less condemnation on Howard’s show than on Rush’s. But then I hear no hope on Howard or Rush. I am angry because I want the hate speech to stop where Christians are concerned. Angrier still because I know the hate speech comes from a heart diseased with the same condition. Words do reflect our motives, and our attitudes. When our minds are occupied by love, and by the transforming power of our Creator God, we do NOT condemn our brothers. Instead we see our own need of Christ, and simply love our brother unconditionally. His need of Christ and reform of his life, is exactly like our own. We are all THE SAME. We all desperately need Christ. We all radically need a change in our thinking and our motives, that will lead to a much better level of spoken words.

Christ focused on the motives of what we say, not on the particular words. He sought to correct problems where they originate, not just superficial symptoms of much larger problems that lay underneath. I can politely, in the sweetest of words, declare my absolute apathy for your life and your problems. More to the point, I can lie and fake a superficial interest in you as a person, and have no real underlying interest in you. In this, I reveal the absolute lack of God in me, and overabundance of evil. Better I tell you how fricking much I love you and mean it; than use extravagant words to convey no real emotion and leave you alone. I wish Christian’s would get pissed off, at hypocrisy in their own lives. I wish they would get a passion for love back in their hearts. I wish they would hate seeing their religion turned into a simple financial enterprise. If enough of us did, we would not have to worry about cussing, we would be too busy loving, and the whole world would change for the better …

Barefoot, Pregnant, & in the Kitchen

Who comes up with these sayings? More to the point, whoever believed this was an expected role for a woman? I have heard of cultural disparities but even against some of those, this tag-line seems extreme. In “traditional” Japan, for instance, women walked several paces behind their husbands as a sign of respect. But even more than 50 years ago when this might have been more normal in Japan, women always wore shoes, were frequently out of the home itself, and child rearing was still an important decision – note that not many Japanese families had 10 or 12 siblings. So where does this stuff come from?

The sad part about tag-lines like this; is that some folks believe this to be the ONLY expected role of a woman, and that somehow God set it up that way. Of course this is yet another lie spread by the master of lies who often blames God for the things he initiates. But while most Christians will dismiss this idea of a role as the poop-factory it is, they still cling to a few preconceived ideas about roles we take on in our marriages and the church; i.e. who should have them; and in general our attitude about them.

For instance, the text advising “wives to submit to your own husband’s” is now completely out of favor; mostly because it has been overused, and is rarely quoted completely. Most preachers stop at Ephesians 5:22 and do not continue the thought all the way to verse 25. If they did, they would get a better picture of the kind of “submission” the inspired author (Paul) intended. But in these texts is a key point that has been largely missed by greater Christianity, the role of submission to God. Even the council to wives to submit to their husbands is followed by saying “as unto the Lord”. We tend to ZOOM in on the submission part related to the husband, and forget totally the submission part related to God.

This is our human weakness showing. Men like the idea of a woman having to “give in” to their final authority under the auspices of marriage so this is the part of the text that gets the most attention. But I submit, the first part is null and void without considering the entirety of the advice. Submission to God MUST preempt even the thought of submission to men. Until we are willing to want what God wants, need what God needs, and love how God loves – we are in no position, i.e. we have no ability to submit to each other. Submission of our will to God is the beginning of Salvation. It is the mechanism of our freedom from sin, and our entrance into enlightenment.

Through submitting our will to God, we humble ourselves, and accept His gift – the gift of Salvation – of being saved from our sins and ourselves. This is what God has been longing to give us. It is NOT about going to heaven. It is about being made free from the bondage of sin. To be made free, someone has to do the work, and that someone is NOT you. You cannot. More to the point, you WILL not. Your entire life is proof positive of this. Humans do not have the will to become perfect, let alone the inclination. Most of us are content in the evil we hurt ourselves with. It is a rare thing that the evil produces enough pain in our lives to make us truly crave change. But were we to see evil as it truly is, were we to understand its horrific affects in our lives, in the lives of those we hurt, in the lives of those who care about us and our victims, we would crave to be freed from the evil we are slave to commit.

And this is the gift of Salvation, a freedom from the bondage of sin, that only Christ can create in the human heart and mind. We must allow Him to do so. In order for that to occur, we must submit or yield our evil, carnal, nature, our natural decisions up to God and let Him decide for us, sometimes in spite of us. If we try to keep control over our decisions, we end up making the wrong ones over and over and over again. In order for us to achieve Salvation from evil we must learn to submit. This is our weapon. It is not our strength of character that frees us from sin, but the recognition of our only hope in God. It is His strength, made perfect through our weakness, through our submission. It is His work to eliminate sin in us. We must let Him and stay out of the way.

But the entire process of Salvation depends on our willingness to submit. So of course, the devil targets submission and packages it as the worst of all crimes to commit. Rather than put God in the picture, the devil has only to use the truthful argument that women should NOT be submitting to men. That is actually true, and even Biblical. The text does not say for women to submit to men, it says “to their own husbands”. But it is easy to forget this distinction and maintain the original premise that women should not submit to any man. The devil fosters a spirit of independence in each of us. His intent is not to insure we do not submit to each other, but to make sure we forget to submit to God. Submission to God changes lives.

To further inflame the process, the devil invents tag-lines like the title of this BLOG entry, and then throws it out there as if it were from the Bible itself. He attacks weak minded men who are already prone to chauvinism and gets them to start misusing scripture to beat women over the head with. He tries to associate the first part of the text with the tag-line above and blend them together. But this is all lies, told by the father of lies, intended to keep us ALL from submitting to God. Submission to God brings about the enactment of Salvation in our lives right here and right now.

After yielding up our will to the Lord, we become changed. We begin to see things differently. Where once was arrogance, now we see the wisdom of humility. Where once was only self-interest, we see now the wisdom of truly loving another – to sacrifice at all costs for the happiness of another without any thought of our own gain in the process. This wisdom can only come to the changed heart, to the heart that has been literally re-created by our Creator God. This is what being Born Again truly means. It is not uttering silly sounds that masquerade as a ‘divine’ language while gyrating across the floor claiming to feel the Holy Spirit. That chaos is not a sign of redemption, it is a sign of anarchy. Being Born Again is the process of submitting our will to God, of trusting in Him to save us like a baby must trust its parent to keep it alive. All of our thoughts, all of our desires, all of our habits must be reborn with a new insight. That is being Born Again.

But nothing comes to those who strive to maintain control, which is only an illusion anyway. Women who will NOT submit to their husbands, usually will NOT submit to God either. But the danger is not just for women. Men are counseled in that same text to “love their wives as God loves the church”. Hello!!! Christ literally died a tortured death to redeem His church. He loves it more than His own life. He gave EVERYTHING to it, and for it. But again men are NOT capable of this kind of love, until they too learn to submit their own wills to God. Men cannot understand the beauty of this sacrifice, and the deep fulfillment of the gift of loving someone, until their own minds have been freed of the bondage of evil. Men too must submit, before they are truly capable of loving. But too many men have ignored this prerequisite and defined “loving their wives” to suit their own self interest. In this we miss the blessing the Lord intended, and again misuse His word.

Men want to win the arguments with their wives focusing on the idea that their wives should be submitting, without asking themselves first – why is there an argument in the first place? Is it over money, career, friends, food, or household items? Then no argument could exist, if like Christ did for His church, the husband simply demonstrated His own love for his wife. Where men were meant to lead, was in the spiritual matters of the home. In this area, they were “supposed” to be the authority. Men were to set the example of submission to God, before expecting their wives to see the wisdom of submission to them. It is easy to love a man who submits himself wholly to God, as it easy to love a woman who does the same. But again it is submission to God that BEGINS this process, and for that matter completes it. Without submitting to God first, failure is sure to result.

Once we accept the humility of submission to God, we are far more willing to accept His council in whatever format it comes. The roles we take on in the church can come without expectation if we look first through humbled eyes. When we accept our condition, and our healing, we are thankful for God’s guidance whether it comes from the mouth of a child, or a parent, or a friend, or a stranger, or even an atheist. God can send us guidance through anyone. He is not constricted by prejudices against sex, or age, or race, or even orientation or beliefs systems. He is willing to work for ALL men, and through ANY who are willing to be used. We should not judge the truth by the package it comes in. We should accept the truth and adhere to the council without glorifying the messenger, only the message. Were we to see this, our lives would be so much more full, so much better …