Do you ever want to act out once in while?  I mean throw things at the TV or drink too much beer or eat half a cheesecake?  Do you ever want to stand up in church and tell someone who has had the same prayer request for the last 59 Sundays to just stop whining and get over it?  Has the urge to join an AIDS awareness group in the name of Westboro Baptist Church ever come over you?  Welcome to the human race.  I think we all get tired of being good and playing nicely with the other kids once in a while.

If we judge being good with how Jesus acted, he is not the poster boy for “good” behavior.  He hung out with prostitutes and beggars and drunks and sick people.  He went into church and disrupted the “natural” order of things by turning over the tables of the guest ministry.  He let women pay for things for him.  He even allowed himself to be executed for blasphemy.  And yet we revere him.

I think that most of our religious structures are designed to “help” us be good.  Why else would a group of people who are supposedly freed from the bondages of the law choose to proudly display the 10 Commandments everywhere.  If we can really live lives free from the strictures of the Old Testament Law, why do we need to be reminded of the way in which we should act?  “Free” means no obligation.  “Paid in Full” means I owe nothing.  “Gift” is just that, a gift, no repayment necessary.  Yet we constantly hear messages and read books on how we should act and what we should wear and with whom we should be friends.  We proudly wear those WWJD bracelets, not because we are going to go out and befriend the friendless, but because we need reminding to “act right”.

I was a Methodist for a while in my younger years.  I still have a few Wesleyan leanings.  I believe in moderation, in small doses. That “moderate” part of me finds it ironic that Wesley wrote and taught and preached against the evils of drinking tea while working on a beer recipe that didn’t have so many hops in it.  A man after my heart, on the beer thing at least, I love a good malty ale.  I’d hate to hear what he would say about my coffee drinking, as I sit here drinking an espresso while I write.

No matter how hard the vocal part of Christianity wishes to have a “Biblical Worldview”, culture will find a way to worm itself into church.  For a long time, we had a sort of unspoken dress code in church.  You could mostly tell those in leader ship positions because of the “uniform”.  Dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie.  Women wore dark dresses or dress suits and blouses buttoned up their chins.  Don’t dare show humor (men) or flesh (women).  Then, nearly overnight, we began to dress in “business casual”, then blue jeans.  No one wore ties or dresses (unless they were those hippie kind of 60’s throwback skirts).  I would sometimes feel like I was in a time warp going back to 50 years ago.  Culture will erode the best system of beliefs, given a chance.

Should it?  I don’t know.  I just know that most of our Christian teaching comes from one man, the Apostle Paul.  A lot is gleaned from the Old Testament, but most of that is to get us to tithe and not sleep around and be good.  There I go again.  I mean, if we just loved each other, would we have to be told to be good?