Monday, May 01, 2006

The Emerging Church speaks (curses) out

The Emerging Church continues to make waves as it comes out of its shell. One of the major portals to engage with Emerging Church culture is THE OOZE. In one of the featured articles, they have "updated" a familiar Bible story but incorporated some pretty shocking language. This story is about Judas but even the gnostic rag "The Gospel of Judas" doesn't contain such vulgarity as seen below:
No one hated rich people more than Judas. Seriously, he hated them. Judas said the problems our people were having could be traced back to all sorts of abuses by the establishment and the powerful people who were in charge of things. He hated the professional priests and their rich supporters. He hated their nice houses, fancy clothes, and high-dollar religious festivals.

Before he met Jesus, Judas lived out in the desert with the Essene zealots. He told us he left them because b******* politics were ruining the movement. I don’t exactly remember the details, but it was something like that.

. . .

But you’re not going to believe what happened next. You couldn’t guess in a million years. The woman walked over to Jesus and broke the neck of the bottle on the edge of the table. Everyone jumped because it was pretty loud. Then she poured it all on the top of Jesus’ head and started rubbing it into his hair and whispering stuff in his ear.

I know. Unbelievable.

It kinda seemed like a long time that everyone just stared at them without saying anything, but I think it was just a second or two. Then Judas said, “Oh s***!” He and a couple of the guys jumped up and ran over to where Jesus and the woman were. Judas said, “What the h*** have you done, you stupid b***!”

Jesus got everyone calmed down and back to their places around the table, but for a minute there, it was quite a scene. Judas put his face in his hands and shook his head back and forth, saying, “That woman just poured twenty-thousand dollars onto his head. Do you know how many people we could have fed with that money?”

Then he jumped to his feet and yelled at her again.

“You know you just killed a bunch of kids, right? You DO know that. Little children. Children who might have lived will now die. Because of you. That’s right, dead children. I hope you sleep well tonight. You probably will because people like you don’t give a d*** about anyone or anything but themselves.”


1 comment:

Jim Pemberton said...

Testimonials on the inside cover:

"Dude! I can like totally relate to the scriptures now, because they like speak my language." -Kirsten Muddle, College Student

"#$%*^&, this is cool. I didn't know these #$%^&*^& words were in the Bible. Now I can tell all those Christian prudes where to go because this @#$%^ is Biblical." -Bruce Meyer, Line Worker

"It just makes the Bible stories come to life and represents cutting-edge achievement in Biblical scholasticism." -Dr. C. M. Lyon, Professor of Theology and Biblical Textual Critic

"I can say that this version of the Bible is one that we can live with. It's message is accessable to the children of today and it's language is on par with many of the other books we offer here for our students." -Lotta Puinaire, Elementary School Librarian