They Smell Like Trouble

I am going today to the Sermon Seminar in Austin. I am supposed to speak at lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday. The speeches are supposed to be, as I understand it, light and humorous with a bit of lurking truth. Sounds like I am about to channel Joel Osteen. 

Actually I welcome the opportunity to speak at lunch. At a lunch I can follow the pattern of my homiletics guru Chris Rock, who preaches a rather strong brand of ethics in a comedic lattice. His language is not great, but you hear a Stoic street preacher if you listen through the profanity. 

Well enough of the cognitive dissonance created by mentioning Osteen and Rock in the same piece. What I am hoping to do in Austin is talk about church members on Tuesday and church leaders on Wednesday and make the point that they both smell like trouble, with apologies to Lynn Anderson and his book, They Smell Like Sheep. The fact is that any casual observation of church life will argue that we are all just a mess. Even the New Testament bears witness to the unusual character of some of the saved. Demas and Euodia raise questions about us all. Even Paul was evidently not exactly plain vanilla. I have given up on the notion that church is about being with all the wonderful people. 

I have decided that church is about being about knee deep in the slop of life with all the others who are knee deep, too. When we run into one another and we're being weird, we should just hug, pray and keep slogging on to glory. Even the best of us, whoever that one is, is a mess. But all we messes are being saved. God loves us. We smell to high heaven, and He loves us. Let us love one another.