bedspreads, literature, rap and the gospel

The pastor at church this morning talked about a pregnant bedspread. He drew a metaphor between a child cleaning his room by shoving everything under the bed and calling it "clean," desiring expediency and apparent tidiness rather than legitimate cleanliness, and Christians shoving their sin under the proverbial bed in order to appear spiritually clean, both to themselves and to others. You know, the typical southern "I'm fine."

The pastor ended the sermon with the following question: "Would you rather have a perfect room or a perfect Savior?"

Well, first off, I'd more often than not rather have a perfect room. Because if I had a perfect room, I wouldn't need a perfect Savior. And needing a perfect Savior means...well, just that. I am so needy and broken, that I need someone outside of myself to save me. And no one really likes admitting that.

Which relates to a conversation I had with some students recently. We were discussing The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, and we were talking about the reaction of the narrator to the Real People versus the reaction of the ghosts to the Real People. It led to this whole discussion on the attractiveness of the Gospel; how to non-believers, the Gospel is unattractive due to the fact that it requires one to admit that they are broken, they need a perfect Savior, their beds indeed have a whole bunch of chaos shoved up under them, impregnating their bedspreads. The gospel can only be attractive if one sees past the unattractiveness of it being true. Which requires the work of the Holy Spirit.

Which reminds me of the Coldplay song Lost+, featuring Jay-Z. Towards the end, Jay-Z raps, "...see success and its outcome/ See Jesus, see Judas/ See Caesar, see Brutus, see success is like suicide/ Suicide, it's a suicide/ If you succeed, be prepared to be crucified..." Now I don't think Jay-Z's definition of success is the one I'm using here, but the truth of his words is poignant anyways: success is suicide. Granted, in reality the suicide comes first; success is a direct result. Whereas for Jay-Z and Chris Martin, suicide is a result of success.

Which brings me back to the bedspread. Nobody wants to have to commit proverbial suicide to achieve success. We don't want to need a Savior. We'd rather have a perfect room. But the problem is, a perfect room isn't possible. And a perfect Savior would be better anyways.

The rap section of Lost+ ends with Jay-Z saying, "And the question is, is to have had and lost/ Better than not having at all?" I don't really think that's the question at all. But that doesn't make the rest of his words any less true. And maybe that's the point.