Year-round silly season

In the late 1960s, women rose up and demanded to be taken seriously. We were not fluffy decorative creatures, but strong and competent human beings worthy of equal space on the world stage. A few years later, gays and lesbians demanded to be taken seriously—weary of relentless social shaming and pretending, they craved respect for who they were. At almost the same time and for the same reasons, transgendered individuals demanded to be taken seriously. Then illegal immigrants, and the obese, and blatantly lying presidents who shook their fingers in the nation’s face.

The great irony is, while we insist on being taken seriously, God is the only One who does.

Every human being is owed some respect for being human. Still, it’s tough to take seriously those whose actions are basically unserious. A few cases in point, drawn from recent headlines and social media:

• Wesleyan University sets aside housing for LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM students, because the ho-hum LGBT categories are not inclusive enough. There’s not enough space in a single column to define all these; one’s gender is now limited only by one’s imagination (or the 50-odd varieties of gender now offered on Facebook, plus one fill-in-the-blank).

• Brian Williams, the $10 million man of NBC News, is called out for making up stories about himself. Good call, but puzzling that it took so long, since he was purveying easily falsifiable stories for over a decade.

• Personal “drama” rules the lives of young and not-so-young people who see themselves as the stars of their own soap opera. Most are women, but men frequently and dramatically swear off drama, only to come back for more of it.

• While the Middle East burns, the internet explodes for about five hours over the color of a dress.

• Donald Trump is thinking about another presidential campaign.

The “silly season,” formerly reserved for holiday weekends, seems to be going on all the time now as individuals and groups stake out their own version of reality in the public square and demand affirmation simply because they are standing and demanding. God appears in debate, if He appears at all, as an indulgent grandpa or a cosmic killjoy.

“You hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you” (Psalm 50:17). The great irony is, while we insist on being taken seriously, God is the only One who does.

Go back to “the beginning,” when He shaped a man out of dust, stamped the dust with His image, bent down to breathe eternal soul-hood into him. Soon after, humans were throwing each other into the bargain bin, to be devalued, pawed over, and mutilated.

It looked like time to take out the trash, but what did He do? Tell us the truth. Offer correction, firmly—even harshly, but to teach a wayward colt you must first get its attention. And not just once: Over and over, He brought the rebels bucking and rearing back to the starting line. Again and again, He stated the terms and gave us another chance.

It might have been wiser to shoot the unruly beast, but what did He do? Put on flesh, display righteousness, bend His own neck to the yoke, suffer the penalty. And after wrestling death itself, He returned with such radiance and power that some former rebels now reflected a little glory back.

Obviously a cue to bring down the curtain of history, but what does He do? Roll out time’s carpet, throw open the gates of heaven, and commission His Spirit to bring in more—all the way down to you and me. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” (Hebrews 3:15). He wants a crowd to celebrate with.

He will have a crowd, but only on His own terms. Not because He’s arbitrary and autocratic, but because those are the only terms. He’s everything we honestly love, but also everything we’d like to avoid, like accountability. There are those who talk of God incessantly but “cast [His] words behind” them (Psalm 50:17); to them He’s the mountain peak of inspiration, not the valley of decision. The cross rebukes them: He still, and will always, take us more seriously than we take ourselves.

Email jcheaney@wng.org