Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep922: The Stability of Scandalous Adoration: Dr. Greg Coles

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Greg gave a killer talk at this year’s Revoice conference. If you missed it--here it is! Here’s the blurb: What does it mean to adore Jesus in a world that sees our adoration as scandalous? Taking our cues from a few of the Bible’s most notorious worshippers, we’ll celebrate together the stabilizing power of worship — a power no one can take from us. Greg is the author of Single, Gay, Christian (InterVarsity Press, 2017) and No Longer Strangers (InterVarsity Press, 2021). He holds a PhD in English from Penn State and lives in Idaho's Treasure Valley, where he works as a writer and speaker. Greg is a Senior Research Fellow at The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender and curates most of his creative activities at gregorycoles.com. Interested in designing the conference T-shirt for the Theology in the Raw “Exiles in Babylon Conference?” Submit your design to [e-mail] The top 3 designs will get free access to the conference (in person or virtual) and the #1 selected design will get free access to the conference and the afterparty and dinner at my house.  Designs must be submitted to Chris by November 26th. Feel free to use various slogans like “Exiles in Babylon,” “Exiled,” “Theology in the Raw,” “Raw Theology,” or other one-liners like “Allegiance to a kingdom not a political party,” “Jesus is political not partisan” or whatever. Or use no wording at all. Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. This episode is the third of three talks that I've released on the podcast that were given at the Revoice Conference back in... When was Revoice Conference? Back in early October. So the first talk that I released was with Misty Irons, and the second talk was from yours truly, from me. And this talk is from my very good friend, Dr. Greg Coles. Greg should need no introduction to most of you,

but he works for the Center for Face, Sexuality, and Gender that I serve at as well. He is the author of Single Gay Christian and another book called No Longer Strangers. He has a PhD in English from Penn State. And if you've hung out with Greg for more than five minutes, you know that he is one of the most delightful, amazing human beings that God has ever created. And his talk at Revoice was super awesome. I mean, that was not a shock to anybody in the room, anybody that knows Greg, but I was like, man, I would love to release this talk on the podcast because it was super challenging, convicting, encouraging, and all of the above. So please welcome back to the show for, I don't know how many times it's been on, but here he's kind of on in a different way by giving his talk.

Please welcome to the show again, the one and only Dr. Greg Coles. I want to talk to you today about the scandalous adoration. So in July of this year, I moved to Boise, Idaho, which is a city known for its thriving gay celibate community, with churches at every street corner eager to welcome people like me into worship, into fellowship, even into leadership. I am, of course, just kidding. Not about moving to Boise. That part is true. But the church situation for LGBTQ folks is, let's just say it's complicated and leave it at that. My first time in town, I attended no less than three different churches. The 9.30 a.m. service at church number one wasn't quite over by 10.30, but I snuck out the back anyway and drove across town to attend church number two at 11 15

then I drove home baked some granola ate a very late lunch and just barely finished washing dishes in time to attend church number three's 5 p.m service I wasn't totally sure where any of these churches stood on LGBTQ issues I had some educated guesses and at least one second-hand report, but nothing especially concrete to go on. All three websites were silent on the matter. I seriously contemplated broaching the subject using a tactic that I like to call the billboard, which is the strategy where you attend a church wearing an article of clothing that is so unspeakably fabulous that people ask, what are you, gay? And then you say yes, and then the conversation just goes from there.

But alas, I am very conflict avoidant and also a very unfabulous dresser. No one stopped to inquire about my sexuality on the basis of my solid colored t-shirt and jeans. By the time the acoustic guitar playing worship leader at each church had asked us to stand for worship and strum that melodious first G chord, I still had no idea where the rest of the church stood on issues of sexuality and whether they wanted me there or not. As we sang about our love for Jesus, I wondered whether the people standing in my vicinity believed I was even capable of loving Jesus. I have a hunch that the dynamic I'm describing applies to a lot of us in

this room and, of course, to our beloved friends online as well. So many of us know what it feels like to be unsure of our welcome among our Christian siblings. We know what it's like in the moment we're supposed to be worshiping Jesus to look around the room and wonder, if the people around me knew my story, would they be scandalized by my worship? Here's what happens to me in situations like this.

I start mentally rehearsing all the arguments I might need to keep my future critics at bay. What if the woman in the next row up, the one with the sunflower print dress, wants to know why I've stopped trusting the Holy Spirit for heterosexual healing so that I too can be fruitful and multiply? What if the

well-dressed yuppie to my left makes a point of explaining to me that he doesn't call himself a lying Christian or a murdering Christian or an adulterous Christian because Christians shouldn't identify with their sin? By the time the church service is over, I have refuted their arguments so many times in my head that I start perversely hoping that we actually do get into a fight, right? It's kind of like decorating for a funeral and then hoping someone dies so that people can appreciate your flower arrangements. Now, I hope the rest of you are much more spiritually mature than I am and that you waste much less time mentally arguing with people you've never actually met.

I hope that you're really good at worshiping Jesus even when you're in a room full of people who might not want you there. But for me, being in spaces like that puts me into a posture of perpetual self-defense. It makes me want to prove that I'm allowed to be there. To prove my capacity to love Jesus. And this doesn't just happen to me in worship services either. If I'm being honest, a lot of my life as a 21st century American Christian feels this way. Every infuriating tweet, every cruel and tone-deaf denominational statement, every speaking invitation canceled at the last minute because someone discovered that I might be slightly too gay for their taste, every bit of it drives me deeper into debate mode. The more people are lining up to tell

me about everything that's wrong with the way I follow Jesus, the more I hone my arguments, the more people doubt the genuineness of my worship, the more obsessed I become with proving them wrong. Here's the problem. There's a big difference between me proving to people that I love Jesus and me actually loving Jesus. And I'm becoming increasingly aware that these two priorities often work at odds with each other. That the more obsessed I become with whether or not I am perceived by someone else as a follower of Jesus, the less of my heart is left to actually follow him. Way more often than I care to admit, I pour my energies into arguing for my capacity to love Jesus instead of just going ahead and adoring him.

All four of the New Testament gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus with costly perfume. And then in two of the four accounts, wiping his feet with her hair. It's a beautiful picture of adoration, a picture of worship that is intimate and fragrant and over

the top. In each of the four tellings, the woman's action is greeted with consternation by onlookers. The way she adores Jesus is scandalous according to the community's standards. But Jesus doesn't seem to mind the scandal. And as for the woman in each passage, she is apparently so obsessed with Jesus that the criticism of Pharisees or disciples has no power to deter her. Biblical scholars debate the question of how many different events are represented in these four gospel accounts. Three of the stories, Matthew, Mark, and John, take place in the town of Bethany during Holy Week, but the Matthew and Mark accounts seem to be set in a different house than the John account. Only in John's account is the woman named as Mary of Bethany, the sister of

Martha and Lazarus. In the Luke account, which is set in a different city as well as a different household, the unnamed woman is described as a sinful woman, though the particular nature of her sinfulness isn't specified. Now, mercifully, I have no intention of solving for us this afternoon the question of how many different times Jesus was anointed by how many different women in how many different houses. But I do find it noteworthy how often the distinct details of all these stories get collapsed into a single story. People seem to assume that the sinful woman in Luke's gospel must be Mary of Bethany from John's gospel, who must also be the unnamed woman in Matthew and Mark,

who must also be Mary Magdalene, who must also be a prostitute, and so on. These most likely multiple women are treated as identical simply because they all happen to be women who adore Jesus and express their adoration in the same scandalous way. Their sin is assumed to be sexual sin, not because the text says so, but simply because they are women. Notice, too, the kinds of criticism

that the women face as they anoint Jesus. In the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and John, the action is criticized for being too costly, too wasteful, too extravagant. In Luke's account, the woman's gift is scrutinized because of her reputation, because she is an unworthy giver. Not you, the onlookers say. You can't adore Jesus. This kind of adoration is off limits for someone

like you. Maybe one reason I feel so much solidarity with these women who anointed Jesus is that some aspects of their stories feel similar to the experiences shared by many of us here at Revoice. When we express our adoration of Jesus, when we live lives that demonstrate and embody our adoration, a certain subset of the religious community rises up to declare in no uncertain terms that our adoration is unwelcome because of our sinfulness. Surely sexual and gender minorities are not fit to adore Jesus. And an opposite subset rises up to complain about the cost of our perfume. Celibacy, mixed orientation marriage, what pricey repression.

Surely Jesus doesn't want the extravagance of our body's whole devotion poured onto him that way. What a waste. And then, to top it all off, the complexities and nuanced differences of our stories all get lumped together into a single story. Like Mary of Bethany and John's gospel and the unnamed sinful woman in Luke and the unnamed not necessarily sinful women in Matthew and Mark, we sometimes find the diversity of our stories collapsed into whichever monolithic LGBTQ narrative feels most convenient to the community around us. feels most convenient to the community around us. Like the sinful woman whose sin is assumed to be sexual sin, simply because she is a woman, we are sometimes treated as if our own sinfulness is necessarily sexual sinfulness, simply because we are LGBTQ. Here's a little factoid I've noticed

about myself. When I talk to groups of straight people, I tend to spend a lot of my time arguing that LGBTQ people, though we are sinful certainly, obviously, are not inherently more sinful than anyone else. Arguing that attraction to the same sex and gender dysphoria do not in any way impair our capacities to love and follow Jesus. But to be frank, I don't want to spend my whole life talking to straight people. And straight people, I'm so glad you're here. Come again next

year. In fact, a straight friend of mine, she wrote me and she was like, hey, I want to come to Revoice. Obviously I'm straight. Is that okay? And I believe my exact words to her were, bring on the straights. So bring it. But here's the thing. One of my favorite things about the revoice crowd is that I get to take a break from making those theological arguments. Not because I want to abandon them, but because I want to grow concretely into the space that those arguments describe abstractly. I want to spend less of my time and heart and passion just claiming that our community has the capacity to adore Jesus and pour more of myself into the task of actually adoring Jesus. When my soul is set on the task of adoring Jesus, when I'm pouring out the costliest perfume I know how to give, wasting all of my dreams and passions

and my body's prime love-making years on a chaste love affair. Sorry, I'll give you a second to laugh at that one. Wasting all these things on a chaste love affair with a 2,000 year old Jewish man. When I do this, I become like the women who anointed Jesus with perfume. It doesn't matter who's watching. It doesn't matter how scandalous my worship is in their eyes, how they might complain that my gift costs too much or that I'm unworthy to give it.

Their disdain has no power to stop me. Christ's beauty makes everything else irrelevant. That's the kind of worshiper I want to be. It's the kind of worshiper that in my best and most Jesus-saturated moments, I am. And my prayer for Revoice is that we would be a community full of worshippers like that. I don't just want us to be good worshippers when we're here in this precious space, surrounded by people who understand and affirm and share in the scandalous costliness of our

adoration. I also want us to be good worshipers when we get home, when the mutters of our critics get louder, when it feels like the eyes around us are looking for evidence of how little we love Jesus. I want to close with two brief stories, each of which I think illustrates a principle that can help us live lives of genuine scandalous adoration. Story number one. While I was driving across the contiguous United States for my move from Pennsylvania to Boise, I did a lot of channel surfing on the radio. At one point, somewhere in the state of Nebraska, where, and this is a side note, but I kid you not, the tourism slogan in Nebraska right now is Nebraska, honestly, it's not for everyone. At one point in Nebraska, I stumbled onto a song whose

lead singer's voice I recognized immediately. It's a Christian band that I dislike for a whole host of reasons. Not only because their background vocalists sing way too many flat notes and parallel fourths, and not only because the lyrics are usually pretty cheesy and hackneyed, but also because a lot of their songs conflate the gospel with culture wars and political conservatism,

and because I have a hunch that they'd probably prefer my company if I were like 86% less gay. I was about to switch to a different radio station, gladly severing my adoration for Jesus from theirs, when the Holy Spirit very inconveniently stopped me and said something along the lines of, Coles, I dare you to be edified by this song.

To which I said, I would rather not. But I stuck around and dang nab it. Much to my chagrin, I was indeed edified by music I dislike, made by people who would probably dislike me as I stared out at a Nebraska horizon that is honestly not for everyone. The apostle Paul says in Philippians 1 that he rejoices whenever Christ is preached. Even when the people preaching hate Paul's guts and are motivated by their own selfish ambition. and are motivated by their own selfish ambition. I'm not quite at Paul's level yet, but I'm trying to learn to take delight whenever and however the truth of the gospel is spoken. Whenever and however the name of Jesus is worshiped,

even when that worship comes from voices that wouldn't want me singing alongside them. In fact, I am coming to love the subversive power of adoring Jesus by way of songs whose writers cannot imagine me adoring Jesus. Story number two comes to you, compliments of the gay eavesdroppers society. It's a real thing. Look it up. A month or two ago, so I'm told, the name of one rather notorious celibate gay Christian came up in conversation among some folks who we might say are not the biggest fans of the re-voiced crowd.

Apparently, after the group had discussed all of this celibate gay man's supposed theological shortcomings in detail, one of the people in the conversation sighed and said, on the other hand, he does really seem to love Jesus a lot. When I first heard this story, I was very irritated. But the longer I sit with it, the more I love it. Despite all of this group's theological critiques, all their carefully curated proofs that the gays could not be Christian, nor could the Christians be gay,

they couldn't get around the evidence of this man's love for Jesus. His very life, the Holy Spirit within him, his scandalous perfume-pouring adoration was a better apologetic than any other argument that could have been marshaled in his favor. I'm certainly not suggesting that our goal in adoring Jesus is to be noticed by others and have them finally admit that maybe we're real Christians after all. On the contrary, Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter 6 that our acts of devotion to him are meant to be done in secret. The best kind of worship is the kind of worship for which we don't get any credit from others. The kind of adoration so consumed by the person of Jesus that the perceptions of our religious peers are just irrelevant. I don't think we need to waste

too much time fishing around for a better argument, a more comprehensive answer to prove our belonging within the kingdom of God. I would rather see us live the kingdom, be the kingdom. Adore Jesus with such scandalous obsession that the people who stumble across us can't help saying, I want what they have. I want to be that caught up in the glory and the beauty of Jesus. In the Matthew and Mark accounts of the woman who anointed Jesus, accounts of the woman who anointed Jesus, Jesus concludes his defense of her actions by saying, truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her. It's weird in a way that the same two gospel accounts where we're told this woman will be remembered are the accounts where we know the least information about her. We don't have her name like the woman in John's gospel,

or even a mention of her past sinfulness like the woman in Luke's gospel. Literally the only thing we know about her is that she's a woman who somehow got her hands on some really expensive perfume and is willing to scandalously waste it all in her adoration of Jesus. That's what makes it into the history books. My prayer for us, friends, is that we would be every bit as forgettable as that woman and every bit as memorable. Hey, friends, if you've been blessed, challenged, encouraged, or angered by this podcast, would you consider supporting it through patreon.com? That's patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw, all the infos in the show notes. You can support the show for as little

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