The poverty of Paul - TLDR

Paul, the guy who wrote much of the New Testament, wasn't trying to get people to quit having sex. 

He also wasn't trying to get people to a place where they enjoyed what we'd call "Christian culture". 

And Paul wasn't setting up a new religious following that would permanently financially benefit anyone.

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It's easy to project the culture you grow up in on to just about anything.  I certainly learned to project what "church" taught me back in time, into the Bible - as if "Bible times" and the time I was growing up in the church were similar.  

Kind of like when we went to "The Great Passion Play" in Eureka Springs, Arkansas - white people, for the most part, dressed in VBS clothes acting out the life of Jesus - that's what the Bible and it's events were like - we just lined up our teachings and ideas and projected them back into scripture.

It is very hard not to do this.  Everyone does it.  But that doesn't make it accurate or true or right or whatever word you'd like to use.  

It's a way of learning and it's 100% valid, to a degree.  You have to find similarities, at times, between the things you know and that which you are learning - building bridges as it were, to get closer to what you hope is an understanding that's closer to "reality".

Sometimes it works, sometimes it works a little better than other times, sometimes it fails - you get the idea, there's a range of ways that learning can work out over time.  Projecting is a mixed bag and depends heavily on all the things you don't know.

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Paul grew up as Saul and went to school to become a "successful Pharisee".  He was climbing the ladder and making a name for himself - successful tentmaker by trade and zealous for the cause of making people follow the Pharisaical version of Judaism.

It all went south when Saul was confronted by Jesus.  Long story short, he left everything behind and became what we'd called an itinerant preacher (who then went by Paul) with limited resources and no plans to build a personal empire or to make a name for himself.

If you read through Acts and the letters Paul wrote, you see that his life began to suck, to use a slightly more current description.  In Philippians 4, Paul makes the statement that he LEARNED to be content - that is, he learned what it was like to have a lot of access to resources and to have less than nothing.

Paul's work wasn't backed by a local congregation that was regularly taking up a collection and bank rolling him with a retirement account, a house, college fund for his kids, health insurance, etc.

Paul "saw something" when he encountered Jesus and then spent three years in Arabia relearning what it meant to know and trust and depend on God. 

He went around sharing a message of hope in God through Jesus Christ - a message of the complete forgiveness of sins apart from following any law, a message of God living in us through his Spirit, and a message of living life for a completely different purpose or reason than you had lived before.  

He wrote a lot of our Bible from jail.

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So what does any of that have to do with sex, Christian culture, or money?

We have a complex set of rules that revolve around what people are or are not supposed to do with their lives IF they are believers.  We project a lot of things we've received from other religious people on to what Paul and other writers said in scripture - things that they didn't say or didn't emphasize in ways we emphasize.

They include things like:

1. Don't have certain kinds of marriage or sex and if you can't have the "right kind", don't have any at all.

2. Learn to like Christian culture - the songs, the insider language, the rhythm of life that revolves around "going to church on Sunday", a playful separation from the larger culture that blurs the lines just enough to give you space to run back to safety in the event you're accused of something wrong, etc.

3. Living a good clean life so you can advance in the economy, give to religious causes, and retire with enough to allow you to pass along your way of life to your kids with the ability to go further than you.

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So in our culture, we have these back and forth discussions about sex, gender, inclusion and exclusion, minority groups vs majority groups, socialism vs "democracy", rich vs poor, black vs white, etc.

As we've seen recently, this snowballs each year, adding a new or different layer of differences the right versus left sides of culture fight over and religious groups have begun dividing over the same things as well.

Calls of "we need to get back to a time when..." are countered with "you mean back when these terrible things were happening to some people?!" and rather than anyone being willing to slow down and talk and unpack what we mean at our core, people just hurl accusations and insults.

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So again, what does that have to do with anything this post started with?

Just to cut to the chase, it means things like this:

Paul was trying to get people to channel their desires, wants, and needs into ways of living that were helpful in people coming to trust and depend on God.

He was FOR people living a life of trust and dependence on God that was focused so much that they might leave behind their pursuit of wealth, their desire for sex, and the need to be the center of attention.

He referenced sex, marriage, and family (1 Cor. 7 and Eph. 5) as to what they could look like if a person lived a life of trust and dependence on God, not that who you had sex with, whether you're married, or whether you had kids was a higher mark for you as a believer.

His main point in 1 Corinthians 7 was along the lines of "quit living for things like you used to" and focus on living with God and each other, in your present condition, as you are right now - quit living on the basis of what you want or what you can possibly gain - change your focus entirely.

He then went on and gave a bunch of concessions like "if you really need too have sex, fine - get married and have it there so you have an outlet and aren't running around looking for it all the time" and "if you're already married, don't look for a way to get out of it all the time" and a bunch of other things in-between.

In short, learn to live in trust and dependence on God where you are currently.  Bloom where you're planted.  Be a light where you are.  But if you have to make a change, fine - do it and, where ever you end up, go ahead and bloom there and be a light there.  Quit living like a person always looking for the next thing.

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ON SEX

It's interesting that both Paul and Jesus said that they wished more people could live as single people and not pursue marriage or sex so much - but that they understood not everyone could handle that.  

In most of the churches today, you're almost automatically disqualified to "serve" in some official capacity if you aren't married and don't have a family.

And THAT is at least one of the reasons that a lot of people struggle over sex, marriage, church, and things in that orbit - we glamorize family and marriage in churches and tell everyone else that they are essentially 2nd class citizens in the Kingdom of Heaven -- they need to live lives in service to others and to remain chaste; serving the church family system and being happy about it.  

And what you typically have had in the past is "learn to hide what you're doing from the church people" and get good at living a double life - go ahead and cultivate a private community of people who are dabbling in church and who don't follow the sexual/family rules of church - just be quiet about it.

So you have people who are pro-family and people who are pro-sexual freedom, each claiming to some degree that Paul and Jesus would be on "their side", while they weren't and aren't on either side of the discussion or debate.

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ON CHURCH CULTURE

In 1 Corinthians 11-14, Paul unpacks what it looked like for believers from different backgrounds to get together and share their life in Jesus.  And it was apparently a challenging mess at times.  They came from Jewish and pagan backgrounds, some wealthy and some poor, some highly educated (relatively speaking) and some not at all, etc.

The main thing Paul wanted them to share with each other in their gatherings was what they were learning about and experiencing with God - and for them to be super clear about what the good news meant for them - super clear!  Don't waste your time rambling on and on just to hear yourself talk.  Don't bring in the way you used to "worship" before unless it's helpful for the whole group that is here in your presence today.  Don't just try to get laughs and likes, do what it needed to help others understand the good news you've come to know. 

That is not a picture of "Christian culture".  Some of the people at Corinth were trying hard to make their flavor, their style, their reference group into what we'd call Christian culture and Paul's point was that Christian culture is whatever makes Christ clear to other people - the message, not the delivery package is most important.

And yet, in our culture, we've made idols out of a lot of Christian culture.  We've gone way out of our way to make those idols sacred and have complex ways of explaining why it's important to life up certain "church things" and to have certain traditions, etc - but we have zero desire to explain it to people who aren't familiar with it and would rather write them off and "too hard" and dangerous for our kids to be around, so "moving on..."

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ON MONEY/CLASS

Paul talked about how the LOVE of money is the root of all kinds of evil.  Jesus said you can't love mammon (power/money) and God at the same time.  Jesus talked about people who built bigger barns rather than considering how to use their surplus to help others (and he wasn't talking about taxes and government).  

And yet with all that, and a lot of other passages I'm not taking the time to list off here, most churches are set up with the idea in mind that a successful, maturing, growing believer in Christ is someone who will develop wealth (relatively speaking) and use it to raise wealthy kids, build a wealthy church, attract others who will be wealthy church goers, etc.

Paul talked about how the pursuit of wealth caused people to be pierced with all kinds of sorrows and how some people actually used.  He talked about people who "peddled the word of God for profit" and how some people used church/things of faith in order to make themselves financially stable - to make a living using "church" as a job.  Paul wasn't against people getting paid for using their gifts, but warned that it is a sticky trap that is hard to work with.

It's baked in to how we "do church" in our culture now.  We have buildings, staff to pay, institutions to support which in turn train the leaders of who will lead people to build buildings, hire staff, etc - it's a cycle that grows and cements itself even harder with each generation. 

Instead of learning to be content, we teach people to be successful.

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These are incomplete thoughts above.  I hope to come back to these soon and do some separate things on each of them - probably as they are in process in our culture and more of a description of what I see going on as it is unfolding - because they are all unfolding as we speak.