WISDOM AND MINISKIRTS
By Dr. Mike Halsey
While taking a walk through Walmart past the frozen food
aisle featuring artery-clogging desserts, a husband, wife, and teenage daughter
crossed my path.
My first thought was, “How could a father let his daughter
out of the house looking like that?” There she was in the shortest of
short-shorts with a shirt almost as bad. She was old enough to know better
and he certainly was.
But I’d jumped the gun. I shouldn't have addressed that question to the father. My question should have been to the husband: “How could you let
your wife out in public looking like that?”
It was as if the mother was in competition with
her teen-aged daughter for “The Immodest Attire Award.” It might be a
stretch to say that the daughter looked like a nun compared to her mother, but
you get the idea.
Really, they were almost dressed alike, but if there were such an award, the mother would have won the trophy.
Did you read this online headline? “Sun City Poms: Retirement Mecca's Golden Girl Cheerleaders.” With the
headline came these first two lines of the story: “With age comes wisdom—and
miniskirts, pom-poms, and some rad stunts.” Those lines inform the reader what
the over 55 ladies group at their retirement community is all about. The
article came with pictures of the Pom Poms going through their routines.
In describing their routines, the author wrote, "One woman got stuck three-quarters into her split. It seemed like no one in the group was particularly concerned by this and looked on for some time as she got into a position where she could actually stand up again." Wisdom? What about adult dignity?
One person, having read the article, commented on one of the pictures of a Pom "Girl:" “I’m all for fitness all the way through the senior years. That’s fine, but this picture is just silly for this woman and her age. She appears senile. I love that she’s fit, but it just looks so silly.”
It reminded me of a
parade I saw which featured grown men wearing silly caps with tassels, zooming around in go
carts with their knees up to their chins. Puerile.
You've noticed the ubiquitous TV sitcoms in which it appears that high schoolers wrote the script. There's a word for it: "sophomoric." Go to a movie theater and the dialogue is an all-out assault on your ears. The vocabulary is that of the immature, the crude, the coarse. Let's be honest; it's the vocabulary of the plebeian.
The plots of the movies are juvenile. The characters are Superman, Batman, Ironman, the Green Lantern, Spiderman, and the Hulk. "The James Bond series," someone said, "is a cartoon for adults." (Which brings up the fact that, beginning in 2003, more Americans from the ages of 18-49 watched the Cartoon Network than CNN.)
We could multiply
examples of adults acting like children, such as parents at youth football and
baseball games getting into arguments and fist fights with each other, the coaches,
referees, and to take the cake, even fighting with the kids on the field.
Or we
could cite a former chief executive getting
himself impeached, thereby earning the title, "America's First Teen-Aged President."
How about parents going to their children’s teachers and
yelling at them, or in some cases, getting into fisticuffs with them?
Adult behavior and language have become so childishly demented at professional football games that national sports radio commentator Collin Cowherd refuses to take his family to the games. In the Philadelphia Eagles' stadium, they have four jail cells to hold unruly and violent fans. Alcohol + immaturity = violence.
But enough. Let's survey the church world. The songs we sing are childish, repetitive, simplistic choruses. It's to the point that twenty-somethings know no hymns. We've replaced "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" with "A Comfy Mattress is Our God." Maybe we should close our church services with "My Hope is Built on Nothing Much" because the sermons we hear are shallow, worldly success success stories candy-coated with a Bible narrative. The materials we study tell us to "Read Luke 2 and put the name of the town in which Jesus was born in the blank below." The songs, the sermons, and the materials don't breed a single serious, mature thought. They combine to keep us children.
The childishness of Christianity today is in direct contrast to Paul's statement in I Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I
talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me."
To talk like a child, to think like a child, and to reason like a child is the essence of immaturity in an adult. The author of the book of Hebrews had to flat out tell his congregation that he wasn't going to cater to their lack of maturity, but that, under his leadership, they were going "to press on to maturity," by going into the deeper doctrines of the faith and the application thereof (Hebrews 5:11-6:3).
We sometimes plow right over Luke's account of Christ's leaving His parents and sitting with the Temple teachers (Luke 2:41ff). That's an account of the maturing of the Child. He was twelve years old, and was beginning to assume adult responsibilities. What is your church doing to advance the maturity of those twelve and up?
If your church is putting you and its youth under the Mosaic Law, it's keeping you and them childlike and immature. If you're hearing the gospel over and over again for the bulk of the sermon time, your church is breeding perpetual children. If you're hearing "David and Goliath," accounts with no meaning to them other than moralism, they're keeping you a child.
Is it time that we demand of our leaders that they begin to teach adults like adults and treat adults as adults?
