The Church Has An Eating Disorder

Last night I dreamt I was directing a play and we had One Week to go before performance. We were not ready, but the play was becoming amazing and powerful. On a break from rehearsal, I was in a moving vehicle, a van or bus. Next to me in the vehicle was a beautiful young woman about 12 or 13 years old. I asked her why she hadn’t been in rehearsal and she said, “I have an eating disorder.” I asked her why and she said, “The walls of the church are wavy. They keep moving in and out.” I understood what she said because as she spoke, I witnessed it. The walls of a large cathedral-like stone building looked like they were rippling in a breeze, like curtains.

Then I woke up.

Interpretation: (Feel free to suggest something different.) We are on this Earth to rehearse the Kingdom of God and invite others to enter the Divine Drama. As the Kingdom is fast approaching, those who know the script and have rehearsed will understand their role and not panic about entrances and exits. This young woman represents the immature believer, the young Church, some will cast her as “The Bride”. But today’s Christianistic Entertainment Empire has no solid scaffolding. The boundaries are blurred, they keep moving in and out and no one questions why it takes a slight political breeze to cause what used to be solid stone to undulate with “every wind of doctrine”. And most of the “Bride” has made herself comfortable in the fog, blessing it with terms like “mystery” or “flexibility”, “new understanding”, “evolving spirituality”. Yet this Actress is anorexic and will not eat the Word, missing rehearsals and entrances onto the stage of the unfolding drama. She may take a tiny bite here or there, but it is very controlled, and may be served to her by a celebrity, a chosen film-series, an app, or a Face Book post. This is the meager diet of too many Christians.

Perhaps her disorder is bulimia. She will eat the Word, then throw it right up. What this looks like is someone (myself included) who will puke out scripture without ever letting it digest and become integrated into her body as protein, immunity booster, or energy. Her malnourished heart is incapable of authentic love, whether for God, or for others. And so she fakes her way through church and life: “loving” her neighbor as she loves herself, by starving them of the Gospel. She works as a chorus girl in vaudeville. As a young actress/dancer in the ’80’s I lived off coffee, cigarettes and diet pills.

She is also eating the national junk food of the “Amorites”. The Amorites are the ones whose “wickedness has not yet reached its full measure” in Genesis 15: 16. The root word is Emori: meaning a “sayer” related to mountain tops, prominence, publicity. So you could say an Amorite is anyone who speaks publicly. The Amorite Kings keep tabs on what dishes are served and who is serving them. This is the new country we live in. Some citizens have bigger platforms, or mountains, than others. We are all residents in the Tower of Babel, each with our own (IP) address. (Did you know Babel means “confusion, by mingling”?) This is our Social, Smart, Connected World; serving up an All-You-Can-Eat Smorgasbord of opinions, mockery, fear, outrage, disrespect, accusation, suspicion, arrogance, and control, creating Tik Tok disciples of seduction, abuse, contempt for authority, contempt for the dissenter, contempt for the authority of Scripture and God*. The bulimic immature Christian who binges on this vomits the same: garbage in, garbage out. Trust me, as a recovering spiritual Bulimic, I relapse when the temptation is too great. Regretfully, when we believers do this, it has the extra nauseating factor of self-righteous hypocrisy that the non-believer ridicules while confirming their deepest suspicions; that Christianity is a sham, and Jesus is just another pop-culture icon who will fall to scandal and be cancelled.

* But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, slanderers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness although they have denied its power; avoid such people as these.

2 Timothy 3:1-5

News Flash: we are humans. Many Christians don’t keep the Kosher diet of The Entire Word but will pick and choose bits here and there; or snack on only the New Testament because the first half is “boring” and was written about an “angry God and His Law that the nice Jesus did away with anyway.” And so we’ve lost the plot.

** But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. There is no law against these things.

Galatians 5:22

On the bright side, many Believers are becoming increasingly aware that they are in the final dress rehearsal. That doesn’t mean they get it right every time. But they now have the grace to practice obedience, forgiveness, gentleness, kindness, patience, or self-control thousands of times, in the car as well as on the keyboard. By grace, the Fruit is organic and what was once a script, a prayer, a Biblical Feast, a Sabbath rest, becomes integrated by the heart that has been circumcised and nourished by the Bread of Life. We are beginning to truly trust the Playwright. But we need His unedited Script. We need to know the Leading Actors, The Setting (Israel), and our part in the final Three Acts of Redemption; Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, with the encore of Shemini Atzeret. We need to rehearse the Kingdom, whether we have a small role, we’re running lights, or sewing White Linen costumes. Then we have One Final Week before curtain when the King of Kings makes His entrance. Tech Week is when it all comes together. And nobody likes the grueling schedule of Tech Week! But in the end we will know our role, because we showed up to rehearsal, having been nourished by the whole brilliant Script.