Really don’t wanna go to church.

There’s a guy whose blog I’ve followed for years. Since about 2020 or so, he’s really been telling his readers, and anyone else who might listen, to quit their churches. Stop going, he says. Just stop. Stay home. You’ll be a lot happier.

And I get it. There were times in my life where I didn’t wanna go to church either. For the usual excuses.

SLEEP! What moron decided church services should happen first thing in the morning on our day off? I’m not a morning person; I don’t like anything first thing in the morning; not work, not school, not even breakfast. Give me an evening service.

CHAPEL COUNTS, RIGHT? I went to a Christian college, which had daily chapel services. Every morning, 25 minutes of worship songs, 25 of preaching. (Sometimes more music, sometimes more preaching.) A week’s worth of chapel provides plenty of both those things… so why go to a church service to get more? That became my excuse for skipping church for a semester. Me and a lot of other students.

I’M OUT OF TOWN. The other excuse that semester was I already have a church… 100 miles away, and impractical to visit every Sunday. And since I have a church, why visit some other church? So I used this reason to ditch all the nearby churches, none of which I cared for. And I did go to church whenever I went back home on college breaks. But while I was at school, I figured it was okay to miss 10 weeks of services.

DON’T GOTTA GO EVERY WEEK. Which… is actually true. If you’re in leadership, and I often am, you’re obligated to be there weekly. If not, you can miss a Sunday here and there. Now, when I was in my don’t-wanna-go phase, it wasn’t just here and there; it was a lot. And I know a number of Christians who only attend once a month; and of course there are twice-a-year Christians who only visit Easter and Christmas. If that; sometimes they just watch the Easter and Christmas services on YouTube.

WE HAVE FREEDOM IN CHRIST! In context, the passage about freedom of conscience Ro 14 is about looking out for weaker Christians, not the freedom to be irresponsible. But as you’re well aware, irresponsible Christians don’t give a rip about context.

I CAN DO THIS ON MY OWN, Y’KNOW. In my late teens I had grown really annoyed with the people of my church, so this was my excuse for a few weeks. ’Cause we totally can do a lot of this stuff on our own.

• Pray?—no problem.
• Sing worship songs?—easily done.
• Learn from fellow Christians?—I have Christian books. Nowadays I have the internet. There’s no shortage of Christian content.
• Study the bible?—okay, I got a study bible.
• Tithing? Well kinda. I could donate money to myself for “religious” expenses. Or I could give money to charity. Or I could spend all of it at a Peets one afternoon while I sit there reading some Christian book; wouldn’t that totally count?
• Take holy communion? Um… I could eat saltines and grape juice on my own, and call it communion. Problem is, the vital element in communion is, y’know, actual communion with fellow Christians. So that makes it tricky.

Same as all our other rituals which require the participation of fellow Christians. Plus evangelism: Once you share Jesus with someone, where do you take ’em so they can be taught Christianity and mentored? Well I could do it by myself… but that’d mean I’m starting a church, right?

There are plenty more excuses out there. Some of them get pretty complex, and as a result they kinda merit whole articles, because it takes a little time to take these excuses apart. But for plenty of Christians, any excuse will do. They simply don’t wanna go. So they don’t.

The first psalm: Meditate on the scriptures.

Psalm 1.

For years I’ve been writing about psalms, but I’ve never written anything on the first one. Even though it’s the second psalm I memorized. (The first was the 23rd, and honestly I got it memorized because of the Keith Green song.) I used the text-to-speech feature on my Macintosh Quadra to recite Psalm 1 in the New International Version to Edvard Grieg’s “Í höll Dofrakonungs úr Pétri Gaut,” or “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” as we call it in English. So now it’s permanently in my brain that way. I suppose I could re-memorize it to the Scottish metrical version… but nah; what’s important is it’s in there.

But yes, I retranslated it for this bible study. Didn’t make it rhyme yet.

Anyway. The first psalm, Beatus vir, “Blessed is the man,” begins the first book of Psalms. If you’re thinking, “There are five books of Psalms?” yes there are; they’ve been mashed together into the one book of Psalms in your bible, but originally they were five. We don’t know who wrote Beatus vir, though some folks will claim it’s Ezra because it’s about meditating on the Law of Moses, and Ezra was a scribe, and scribes did just that. But that’s a lousy reason to insist Ezra wrote it. Anybody who thinks there’s wisdom to be found in the Law would appreciate this psalm, and anybody back in bible times who felt that way would’ve written such a psalm.

My translation second. I figured first I’d give you the version from the 1550 Church of Scotland prayer book. They sing it to the same song as “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Psalm 1 Scottish psalter

1That man hath perfect blessedness,

who walketh not astray

In counsel of ungodly men,

nor stands in sinners’ way,

Nor sitteth in the scorner’s chair:

2But placeth his delight

Upon God’s law, and meditates

on his law day and night.

3He shall be like a tree that grows

near planted by a river,

Which in his season yields his fruit,

and his leaf fadeth never:

And all he doth shall prosper well

4The wicked are not so;

But like they are unto the chaff,

which wind drives to and fro.

5In judgment therefore shall not stand

such as ungodly are;

Nor in th’ assembly of the just

shall wicked men appear.

6For why? the way of godly men

unto the Lord is known:

Whereas the way of wicked men

shall quite be overthrown.

You want it to sound authentic, try singing it in a Scottish accent. Go ahead; I’ve got time.

The Jesus prayer.

In Psalm 123.3, the psalmist asked the LORD to show grace to his people. Quote it? Why sure.

Psalm 123.3 NRSVue

Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us,

for we have had more than enough of contempt.

The Septuagint translated it ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς, Κύριε, ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς/eléison imás, Kýrie, eléison imás, “Mercy on us, Lord, mercy on us.” And in Jesus’s Pharisee and Taxman Story, it comes up again.

Luke 18.9-14 NRSVue

9He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

To this day you’ll hear Christians pray a variation of Psalm 123.3, plus the taxman’s prayer, and Jesus’s name for good measure. We call it “the Jesus prayer.” It’s a really simple, really popular rote prayer. Probably the simplest.

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ (or υἱέ Δαυὶδ/“son of David”) ἐλέησόν με, τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν/Kýrie Yisú Hristé, yié tu Theú, eléisón me, ton amartolón. “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Sometimes it gets shortened all the way down to Ἰησοῦ ἐλέησόν/Yisú eléison, “Jesus have mercy,” or Χριστέ ἐλέησόν/Hristé eléison, “Christ have mercy,” or most often Κύριε ἐλέησόν/Kýrie eléison (yes, same as in the Mr. Mister song), “Lord have mercy.” But no matter the form it takes, it’s the “Jesus prayer.”

It’s similar to what Bartimaeus shouted at Jesus to get his attention. We pray it for the same reason. We want mercy.

Mark 10.46-52 NRSVue

46They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

Good for him. ’Cause when we pray the Jesus prayer, sometimes we get naysayers who object to our praying this prayer. “Stop the vain repetitions. Mt 6.7 KJV That’s not how Jesus taught us to pray!”

Actually it is how he taught us to pray. In his Persistent Widow Story, he taught us to be persistent, to cry out to God day and night, and not lose heart. Lk 18.1-8 This is that. It’s the prayer equivalent of a knock on the LORD’s door. It’s not a vain repetition; we’re praying for good reason! (Better be, anyway!) We’re knocking so the door might be opened to us. Lk 11.9 Sometimes we gotta knock more than once. Sometimes we gotta get loud. But when we mean it, we’ll get his attention. He’ll hear. And respond.

The Judean leaders plot to kill Jesus.

John 11.45-53.

In the other gospels, we read of Jesus annoying the Pharisees of his community to the point they start conspiring with the Herodians to kill him. Mk 3.6 But that’s in Herod Antipas’s province; that’s in the Galilee. Judea’s a whole different province.

In Jesus’s day, in the 30s CE, Judea was run directly by Rome, who sent a procurator—at this point in time, the prefect Pontius Pilate—to keep the peace, and make sure the Romans got their taxes. But day-to-day stuff was handled by Judean nobles, who mimicked the Roman senate by creating their own senate. They called it a συνέδριον/synédrion (Syriac ܣܢܗܕܪܝܢ/sanhedrín), “sit-together, council,” and people get the idea this was a legislative or judicial body. It really wasn’t either of them: It was an oligarchy, same as the Roman senate. These were the noble families, the rich families, the “important” people of the province, presided over by the temple’s head priest. (Until the Romans took over, the head priest was also the king of Judea; now he was just appointed by the procurator.) Bound by the Law of Moses—although they certainly bent it every which way—but yeah, they ruled the province wherever the Romans didn’t.

And Jesus’s raising of Lazarus threw ’em into a panic.

John 11.45-48 KWL

45So, many of the Judeans coming to mourn with Mary,

upon seeing what Jesus does,

believe in him.

46Some of them go off to the Pharisees

and tell them what Jesus does.

47So, the head priests and Pharisees gather in the senate

and say, “This person does many miracles.

48When we leave Jesusᴾ free to do so,

everyone will believe in him,

and the Romans will come,

will take us away,

plus the land and the nation.”

Well that escalated quickly: “If everyone believes in him, the Romans will destroy us!”

As I said, the senate consisted of all the important people in the province. Many of ’em were Pharisees, and Pharisees had a whole End Times Timeline which told of a Messiah coming to overthrow the Romans. Of course if you don’t believe Jesus is that Messiah—and they didn’t, ’cause Jesus didn’t act at all like they wanted—it means his overzealous followers might try to overthrow the Romans anyway, and you wind up… well, with what actually happened in the year 70. This fear the senators articulated in the last three lines of verse 48? Spot on.

The head priest, Joseph Caiaphas, then stepped in and shrewdly said no, things don’t have to be that way.

John 11.49-50 KWL

49A certain one of them, Joseph Caiaphas,

being head priest that term,

tells them, “You² don’t know anything,

50nor do you² consider this:

It is better for you² that one person might die for the people,

and the whole nation might not be destroyed.”

If it sounds a little bit like a mafia don trying to quiet the agitated members of the other crime families by saying this could easily be solved by whacking the troublemaker… well yes it does. Oligarchs are oligarchs, you see.

On sexists. Sorry, “complementarians.”

COMPLEMENTARIAN kɑmp.lə.mən'tɛ.rɪ.ən adjective. Sexist: Believes men and women are inherently unequal in authority (to lead, teach, or parent) and rights.

2. Believes men and women should adhere to [culturally defined] gender roles, and complement one another by fulfilling the unique duties of those roles.

EGALITARIAN ɪ.ɡæl.ə'tɛ.ri.ən adjective. Believes all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunity.

Honestly, I really dislike the term “complementarian.” It’s what logicians call a weasel word: It’s one of those words people use instead of the proper word, ’cause they don’t care to tell you what they really mean. Or they’re in serious self-denial about what they really mean.

Bluntly, “complementarian” is Christianese for “sexist.” Because that’s exactly what they mean: Women and men aren’t equal; there are things men can do which women mustn’t; if women dare do them, they’re violating the social order which has kept men in power all this time God’s will. Because God supposedly wants his daughters to perpetually have a second-class status. That’s why he didn’t give ’em penises.

The proof text of this misbegotten belief largely comes from the story where God curses Eve, and women in general, for her sin. Because Eve violated his command to not eat of the Tree of Knowing, childbirth is gonna hurt, and her man is gonna boss her around. Ge 3.16 Sexist Christians quote this passage all the time… and nary a word about how Jesus came to earth to undo these curses.

Jesus undoes sin and death; he undoes Adam’s curse of having to fight the ground to get food from it; and he undoes sexism. There is no male nor female in Christ Jesus. Ga 3.28 Women are co-heirs of his kingdom.

In my article on sexism I point out the bible goes even further. Women are depicted as equals in apostleship, prophecy, wisdom, mentorship, preaching, teaching, ministry, and leadership. When people aren’t sexist, nor suffer from toxic attitudes about masculinity, they easily see this in the scriptures and embrace it. They see it in the world around them as well: The Holy Spirit has clearly empowered many women with these abilities.

But sexism is everywhere in our culture, and therefore is everywhere in Christendom.

And to be fair, not all of it is because of sexists. Some of that sexism has been institutionalized. The Roman Catholics are kind of an obvious example of this. Most of ’em, including the pope, cardinals, and bishops, try to put women in leadership and ministry roles wherever they can. But they’re completely buggered by official church doctrine, which claims the Roman Catholic Church is infallible. Seriously. And if you’re never wrong, it becomes darned near impossible to backtrack when you are wrong—like when you limit the priesthood to men, because sexists in the Roman Empire limited the priesthood to men. And since all the leaders in the church have to be priests, that shuts women out of leadership, and there’s no way to word a workaround. So Catholics try to compensate by doing everything they possibly can to include women otherwise. But yeah, till they confess the church can be (and has been) wrong, they’re forever hobbled by this doctrine. Forever flawed.

In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention, some of that sexism has been recently institutionalized. Baptists previously didn’t have a problem with women pastors; plenty of Baptist denominations have ’em. But sexist pastors have gained control of that denomination, and even though the independence of individual churches is supposedly a hallmark of the SBC, their sexism takes precedence: No church can have women pastors. No women can preach. No loopholes.

Complementarians are willing to accept the idea women can be saved. (How kind of them.) But as far as ministry and responsibility and authority in the kingdom are concerned, they get all of that. They get the comfortable jobs, the titles, the respect, the power. They get to rule. They get to cover up sexual abuses—which are more apt to happen when there are no women in power, and is absolutely some of the reason they’re kept out of power.

Nope, complementarian men get all the plum roles in the kingdom, ’cause conveniently for them, their gender norms insist that’s their role. And women have to joyfully submit to this truth.

Yep, it’s a power thing. These men want to be in control, and wanna claim God made things this way even though many men lack good character, personal responsibility, and integrity. They want to deny women the ability to sharpen iron, to be an accountability partner, to be “an help meet for him” Ge 2.18 KJV —an equal who can do what he does. And if it were true women were inherently this way, it shouldn’t take rules and enforcement to keep ’em down. Shouldn’t continually result in the men who enforce this, to be fruitless and graceless, and behave evilly towards their women. And all women.

Ancient heretic theories about Jesus.

The New Testament never clearly, bluntly spells out, “Here’s precisely what Christ Jesus did and how he works.” Systematic theologians and legalists would love it if the apostles did precisely that, but they didn’t, and so if we want to know those details, we gotta dig around the bible and find them.

Here’s the thing: Most of those details are not all that hard to find! Anybody with a decent bible translation and basic reading comprehension skills can get at ’em. The problem is people don’t always like what they find.

Fr’instance the people who want to know what Jesus looked like. And a basic description is actually in the bible! Right here:

Revelation 1.14-15 KJV

14His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; 15and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.

White hair, bronze skin. Sound like any of the White Jesus paintings, statues, and crucifixes you’ve seen? Of course not; because plenty of people want Jesus to be white like them, and insist he is, and this passage of Revelation mustn’t be taken literally. Amusingly, these are often the same people who take every apocalypse in Revelation literally. That’s their trick: Cherry-pick when and where you want the bible to be literal, based on personal preference. Which is bad theology, but in these cases they’re happy with bad theology.

And we gotta watch out lest we do the very same thing. We all have our biases. We come to the scriptures with an idea already in mind, and wanna find proof texts to back us up. Sometimes the scriptures just won’t do that! And that’s okay; we’re wrong, and the scriptures are meant to correct us when we’re wrong. 2Ti 3.16 But too often we refuse to accept we’re wrong; too often we convince ourselves our clever ideas are really God-ideas, and the scriptures gotta prove us right! If being right is more important than being scrupulous (and for too many people, it absolutely is), we’ll subtly tweak the scriptures this way and that till they do “prove us right”—and that’s how we get heresies.

The ancient Christians ran up against a whole lot of heresies, ’cause for the longest time the Roman Empire practiced freedom of religion. No, seriously. As far as the Romans were concerned, so long that it didn’t interfere with keeping the peace, you could worship any god you pleased. Yes they persecuted Jews and Christians, and that’s because they were told these religions did interfere with keeping the peace. Peace was all they cared about, and like the comic book character Peacemaker, they’d kill as many people as it took to get peace.

Otherwise the Romans let you worship just about any god. You could even introduce new gods and build temples, and start synagogues and teach newbies about your god. A number of gnostics did precisely that, and taught all kinds of heretic weirdness. Some of these gnostics claimed to be Christian, taught their bizarre interpretations of Jesus, and some of those ideas leaked into Christian churches and led ’em astray.

In our day we also have freedom of religion. And, yep, gnostics who teach weird heretic things about Jesus, and start churches and sell books. They make good money at it. They get fans, which feed their pride and make ’em think they’re all the more clever and inspired. And their ideas also leak into Christian churches—and threaten to lead people away from God, his grace, and his kingdom. These aren’t little errors. They’ll trick people into rejecting God.

Of course these heretics already refer to us orthodox Christians as “heretics”—they’re entirely sure they’re right and we’re not. And to be fair, we’re all wrong in one way or another. But these folks are so wrong, they’re rightly called heretic: Their beliefs stand a really good chance of leading people away from God. They prefer their ideas over what God actually reveals about himself. They figure either God’s revelations are wrong, or misinterpreted—whereas they got it right, and how clever of them to see what others don’t. How wise of them; how inspired; what special favorites of God’s they must be. And all the other delusions pride can trick us into.

Heretic theories tend to fall into one of five categories:

1. JESUS IS ANOTHER GOD. Most heretics figure Jesus isn’t the God, but a god. Another god. The God created Jesus as another god under him, like his vice-God, or prince of all the angels, or demiurge who does all the work while he sits back and rules. Jesus is some powerful being who’s not the very same One True God.
2. JESUS ISN’T REALLY GOD. Jesus gets called “the son of God,” but that’s just a title the Hebrews gave their messiahs, their ancient kings, to indicate how these guys weren’t gods, but only worked for God. And same as all we other humans are daughters and sons of God. Like us, Jesus is another one of God’s creations. He’s still Messiah, a great teacher and prophet; he’s gonna rule the world; he’s the best human God ever made. But not God.
3. JESUS ISN’T REALLY HUMAN. Jesus is in fact God; he’s definitely God. But he couldn’t fully give up his divinity to become human (and why would he?) so his humanity was only pretense. He appeared to be human, lest he freak people out too much. But he’s fully divine, wearing what appeared to be a human form.
4. JESUS IS A DEMIGOD. In pagan religions, gods and humans bred and made demigods, half-and-half hybrids who were either supermen or lesser gods, like Herakles and Perseus and Aeneas. Demigod heresies describe Jesus these ways—part-God instead of entirely God, part-human instead of fully human.
5. JESUS IS GOD—AND YOU CAN BE GOD TOO! A number of pantheists have wormed this idea into Christianity: Every human being has a divine spark in us, and Jesus fanned his own spark into full-on divinity. Now he’s teaching us to do the same thing. Follow Jesus, and you can become God too.

Whereas, to answer these theories, orthodox Christians aver:

1. Jesus is the same God, Pp 2.6 and God is One. Dt 6.4 There isn’t another God.
2. Jesus is as God as God can be. Jn 1.1-2
3. He’s human; Jn 1.14 more human than humans are, ’cause we sin, which dings us quite a lot.
4. True, to become human, Jesus was depowered, Pp 2.7 and had to perform miracles through the Holy Spirit’s power. Ac 10.38 But godlike power doesn’t make you God; it’s like saying arms and legs make you human. Divine nature does, and Jesus absolutely has that. He 1.3
5. There’s only one God, and we’re not him… and Jesus is.

Trust in the Lᴏʀᴅ. [Pr 3.5-7]

Proverbs 3.5-7 KJV

5Trust in the LORD with all thine heart;

and lean not unto thine own understanding.

6In all thy ways acknowledge him,

and he shall direct thy paths.

7Be not wise in thine own eyes:

fear the LORD, and depart from evil.

 

Too often this passage is interpreted to mean, “Turn off your brain, and just trust God.”

Which is entirely wrong. These verses are found in Proverbs, in the Old Testament’s wisdom literature, and the whole point of wisdom literature is to remind us to turn on our brains. To make wise, thoughtful, informed decisions instead of instinctive, emotion-driven, gut-level, stupid ones. Stop following your impulses and start using your head.

Part of the problem is that word “heart” in verse 5, and what people think it means, versus what it actually means. The ancients believed humans think with our hearts. Not feel; that’s a medieval idea, and the ancients believed we felt with our guts. But because people nowadays assume “What does your heart tell you?” means what do your emotions tell you, we read that idea back into the bible—where it doesn’t belong!—and think “trusting in the LORD with all my heart” means all our feelings. Not our minds. Not our intellect. Just the feels.

And yep, this is how we fall right back into instinctive, emotion-driven, gut-level, stupid decisions. We go right back to not being wise. But God wants us to be wise. He didn’t make your brain solely so you could memorize pop lyrics, remember who was angry at whom in what reality show, and the multiplication tables you never use anymore because now you can ask Siri what 20 percent off $19.95 is. Use your head to follow him better.