As I was mulling over and feeling sad about David’s sin, this weekend, but then feeling hopeful about, you know, the incarnation, I kept banging in to the incredible news that a gentleman (to use an overly high word) in England has self identified not only as female, but also as a little girl. He doesn’t feel like he’s 50, he feels like he’s 6, and so there we are. He gets to live with a middle aged couple and that couple’s children and grandchildren, and of course there’s various kinds of sexual deviancy involved (I bet I can’t still say that, can I) and everybody’s ok with it. Of course, the man/little girl’s wife and seven children, I don’t know if they’re ok with it. But I’m sure they must be, who could not when someone is being so brave and wonderful.
And then I smacked into some article over at Salon. Turns out America is doing a terrible job at teaching young people about sex. The schools don’t have enough sex education. They need lots more because young people, high schoolers, don’t know that they’re getting lots of terrible STDs and it turns out that lots of them don’t even know how to use condoms and stuff. There are numbers and everything to back this up.
So here’s my two cents, shaken together, flung out at the wide world, and I know it’s a total novel and crazy idea that nobody has ever heard before, so bear with me.
If you deprive people, even young people, of the opportunity to know that they are not that good, that not every impulse they have is a golden dream of goodness, but just affirm everything that they do all the time, then no amount of sex education is going to deal with the problem that you’ve created. The problem is that the human soul, turned inward on itself through sin, wants to devour all other people and be the center of the universe. A large, fifty year old man, in a little girl’s dress and pigtails is the logical, necessary ending point for a culture that thinks that the human soul is good and must be affirmed.
I know, what a crazy thought. But see, the shame, the embarrassment of sin is still there, even if nobody can talk about it. There has to be some kind of external way to deal with the wretchedness of the soul. We can’t kill animals any more, and spill the blood out as a sacrifice for sin. Animals are people too! But we can fuss a lot a lot about the weather, and the changing temperatures of the earth. And we can kill people we can’t see, like infants in the womb. If we do that enough, then the troubling horror of a man leaving his wife to live as a little girl can be kept at arms length and we can have a little celebration of peace and love.
I had the chance of having Elphine and her friend help me in Sunday school. And I wondered allowed why Mary would so suddenly go to see her cousin Elizabeth after receiving her news. I struggled to find words. “Long ago,” I said to all the upturned faces, “it used to be that if a young lady was going to have a baby before she was married, she could be in a lot of trouble.” They all looked at me like they had no idea what I was talking about. “And Mary,” I said, pointing at Elphine, “wouldn’t have been too much older than her. She would have wanted to go right away to be with Elizabeth who knew what God was doing and how special her baby was.”
And that was the moment of hope, for me. Because it wasn’t like Mary and her family thought that everything was great and that they were having a lovely time. They were oppressed, by Rome, by the ordinary difficulties of life. And God could have stood afar off and left them, left us, to sort it out. But he didn’t. He came, he actually increased the trouble, especially for Mary, but he took the trouble onto himself.
We can’t properly love God. We are unable to. We need help. We need a savior. Not a super hero. Not a soothing affirmation that we’re ok when we’re clearly not. Not another chance to do more evil. We need a savior. This poor man, and his poor family, and all the children of America and the west who are being lied to about sex and themselves, they all need a savior. At the moment everyone is pretty sure they don’t want to hear it, the message of our badness and Jesus’ saving work is more urgently needed than ever before.
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