I’m sick of going to church to hear topical sermons. Sermons that use dozens of excerpts from passages all throughout the Bible to make a point, as if I was incompetent enough to not be able to pick up on what was said the first six times. I’m sick of being surrounded by the topical love of God. I’m sick of how loosely we throw around the word unconditional, as if that were the only characteristic of God. I’m sick of us, as a people, constantly trying to put God into the box of our comfortability. 

What if we actually decided to grow up and quit being spoon fed our beliefs? What if we moved passed the bullshit of what we want to believe, what is easy to believe, and —oh I don’t know — allow God to be who He really is in our lives? The Bible is not topical. The Bible does not skip around to prove a point about homosexuality, abortion, love, or anything. There is no magical break in the middle of Acts that says “go forward to Revelations to prove this point.” 

I wonder how much deeper our beliefs would be if we legitimately taught, in our churches, how to look at the Bible. If, for instance, we looked at the whole passage, reading for contextual clues of meaning: actually try to discern what the passage is all about.

For instance, how many weddings have you been to where the passage from 1 Corinthians 13 is quoted? The one that talks about how love is patient, love is kind, it does not boast… that one? It’s a beautiful passage, describing how love ought to be, describing some of the characteristics of God’s love. But it is immersed in a series of letters from Paul to the church at Corinth, berating them for their repulsive behavior. At one point Paul even says that he is glad to have had no part in the baptizing of these people, that is how far they have fallen. If we were to actually look at this passage in context, instead of just the 13 verse of chapter 13, we get a completely different level of depth to the passage. But no, we just want the topical, surface level version of Christianity, so we only read about how patient, kind, and selfless love is. 

Today I went to a church which required a name badge to get behind the scenes. A church whose stage was set up for a televised broadcast, full of lights, cameras, and fog machines. It was purely theatrical magic. I heard a sermon about baptism that could have been summed up in a 5 word sentence. Completely and entirely topical, consisting of 80 percent stories about the pastor’s life, 15 percent biblical excerpts, and 5 percent connection to the actual topic. All summing up to 100 percent emotional pull on on topical bullshit through subtly flashy entertainment. 

I had more of an insight to God through the three little girls sitting in front of me, who when they first saw each other, excitedly ran to embrace one another jumping up and down and holding the embrace for almost a full minute, displaying pure, untainted, genuine love, than I did from the pastor throughout the entire sermon.

There was a lot that was, in my eyes, wrong with the way that church was run today. However, as I was walking out, I realized this: The true challenge we have as a congregation is moving past a brainless herd of cattle into cognitive human beings who can actually think for ourselves. We need to step up and own our faith, challenge our faith, and grow past the horribly inadequate answer of unconditional love into a better understanding, a deeper understanding of God. And even in those repulsive sermons, it is our responsibility to at least try and find the message of God. Because you see, if God can take the premature death of a loved one, the sex trafficking of a child, the genocide of a people in Darfur, and other countless unfathomable realities, and work good through them, then I am pretty sure He can handle the outcome of a pathetically executed, theologically inaccurate half assed job of a sermon. For ultimately, somewhere embedded in todays sermon, in every days sermon, is the message of God. We just have to listen for it.