From Disgust to Loving Presence

SUMMARY

Josh Jaynes explores the tension between our understanding of God's holiness and Jesus' willingness to be with sinners. He challenges the common teaching that "God cannot be around sin," noting how Jesus (who is God) was consistently comfortable around sinners - so much so that religious leaders criticized Him for it. Josh introduces the concept of the "psychology of disgust" and "negativity bias" that causes us to create distance from people we view as impure or contaminating.

Through the parable of the Good Samaritan, Josh highlights how Jesus deliberately chose a Samaritan - someone Jews found utterly disgusting - as the hero who crossed boundaries to show mercy. He quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, suggesting we must "regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in light of what they suffer." Josh concludes that God always bridges the gap to be with us, and likewise calls us to stop dehumanizing others and instead cross divides to be present with those from whom we might naturally distance ourselves.

TRANSCRIPTION:

It's always good to be with you guys today. I always get to see some faces that I haven't seen in a long time, but also faces that I know from 20 something years ago. Thank you for that reminder. I also, I've had actually multiple old jokes made at me this morning, so that's wonderful. Thank you, Bill Starcher.

Bill wanted to make certain that I knew, obviously, as we were kind of catching up or whatever, he's like, you know, you have a lot more white in your hair than you used to when you came here, which is funny to me that Bill's making any jokes about anyone's hair. So I feel like I just need to get that dig in, especially since I have the microphone at least for a few minutes. So, no, it is always good to be here. And I've said this to you guys. Hopefully you hear this from me every single time I get to come and get a chance to fill in for Carl.

I have so many wonderful memories of this place, so many wonderful memories of getting do ministry with so many of you and so many of your kids. And getting a chance to speak from this stage is always a very humbling experience. And so with that, let me pray and then we'll jump into today, God, we come before you, hopefully God, with open hearts, willing and ready to be changed, to be transformed, but also God in the midst of whatever anxiety, change and transformation may bring. God, that I pray that we are grounded upon the truth that you are love. That before we ever did anything, we were loved.

That we are not a people defined by what we do or don't do, but we are defined by who you believe us to be, that we are made in your image. And we can claim that with confidence this morning. Father, we surrender to you because we know that you are good and we give ourselves to you, God, because we know that you bring life. And so this morning, as we wrestle with your scriptures, as we wrestle with your heart, we pray again that you bring life. It is through Jesus the Christ that we pray.

Amen. I will tell you, as I was prepping for today's sermon and all the things that I was kind of wrestling with and stuff that I wanted to share with you all, I kept coming to a little bit of, I don't know, a little bit of a brain block because I kept thinking, what is this like, easy kind of on ramp into today's sermon? What is a maybe a quick story or a. A quick little analogy or anecdote or whatever it is that we can kind of Jump into this and there's a little bit of a soft entry or an easy on ramp. And I will just tell you I do not have one of those this morning.

I have no softball questions, I have no soft entries. It is just simply like, let's just dive into this, let's wrestle this morning. And again, hopefully, and I used some specific language in my prayer a minute ago because I do believe them to be true. And that is like we can really wrestle with hard things because we know God is love. We can really wrestle with hard things and we can dive in into difficult subjects and difficult conversations because we are grounded in the fact that God is always for us, us and God is always with us.

And so let's do that this morning. I know that when we wrestle with scripture, when we wrestle with God's heart, there are times that it seems as though interpretations that we have of God over here and interpretations that we have of God over here and maybe scriptures that we've wrestled with there or experiences that we've had in our lives, they don't seem to line up. And there are times that we just have to hold those tensions together and we have to be able to say this is true and this is true. And I have no idea how they work together. That's what it means when we say God is bigger than us, God is greater than us, God is beyond us in a lot of ways because we have to wrestle and say these things may not make sense in my mind, but somehow God is true in both of these things also.

There are things that we believe and there are things that God is. And those things aren't always correct either. And so we have to go on the journey of deconstruction and reconstruction and construction and then maybe some deconstruction and reconstruction and construction. And that's just called life. And hopefully, hopefully what you believed, or at least some of the things that you believed and I believed 20 years ago, are not the same things that I believe today.

I hope I have grown past some of these things. I hope people like some of the folks that I was blessed to study under even at this church and from this stage or the elders that I got to serve in this church and work with formed me and helped me learn some things and rethink through some things that I maybe had thought when I was a child or maybe in my 20s or maybe in my 30s and now that I'm in my 40s, I'm going hmm. I don't know that I think that anymore or maybe I just step back and I'll just tell you flat out and say, I don't believe that anymore. God has changed something in me. And there are things like that.

I think when it comes to scripture, when it comes to wrestling with who God is, that we have to step back and we have to say, are these two things that are definitely true? And I don't know how to make sense of them. So I'm just going to say, yes, I will live in the tension because I know God is good. Or these are some things that I think and these are some things that are true about God. And I need to rethink what is actually true about God.

And that's the discernment process. And I can do that without fear. Again, why? Because God is love. Because God is good.

I am not defined by my belief system. I'm defined by his goodness. Thank goodness for that. So let me give you an example of some of the things that I've wrestled with throughout the years and some of the things that I to still sometimes wrestle with in my own heart or even hear a little bit in church sometimes. God is holy.

Yes. I think we would all claim, yes, God is holy. What does that mean? I mean, if I were to go around the room this morning and say, okay, give me a little bit of an understanding. When you hear God as holy, what does that mean to you?

And we would talk about things about how God is perfect and God is without sin and God is spiritually pure and all of these things are true. And then we get a little bit of the. And I'm not putting. I'm not being sarcastic when I say this, but we get a little bit of that churchy language in there where we say like, God is set apart and God calls us to be set apart. And then as we start to wrestle with all of the things that that may mean, there are times that we've ended up with translations or interpretations of Scripture.

And I remember hearing this as a kid, and I still hear this in church, at least sometimes. Things like, well, God cannot be around sin. Anybody ever heard that before? Ever been taught that before? O how does that make sense if Jesus is God?

You know what I mean? Like, how do we make sense of that if Jesus is God? Because Jesus seemed pretty comfortable around sin and Jesus seemed pretty comfortable around sinners. And I'm not saying Jesus sinned. I'm just saying he seems pretty comfortable around it to such a degree that that's at least one of the reasons why the Pharisees and the Sadducees didn't like him because he wasn't keeping himself pure and set apart from those types of people.

And that becomes this conflict that sits there. But we create a theology, in some cases an interpretation that says, well, God can't be around sin. And then we have to wrestle with Jesus and then we gotta do some sort of crazy mental gymnastics to make it make sense instead of actually maybe just rethinking sometimes maybe I don't have that correct. Maybe I need to think through a few things and rethink and allow God to deconstruct some of the things that I've been taught.

Because when we start to wrestle with this holiness of God, this set apartness of God, and then we get the scriptures telling us who Jesus is and his name is Emmanuel. He is God with us. And make a distinction here. It's not God for us, he is for us. Don't get me wrong, but it's not God for us, it's God with us.

He makes his home. John tells us he tabernacles, he sets himself up in the midst of us who dwell with us. And again I come back to we see this God in the form of Jesus, who is extremely comfortable around sin and sinners.

That's an important distinction for us to make. It's an important thing for us to wrestle with that this is not a God who says, I am going to be distant from you. And oftentimes when we wrestle with sin and we talk about what sin is and how it impacts our lives, we end up assigning to God that this is this God who creates distance from the sinner.

That's just not scripture. If I'm just being honest with you. And you can go all the way back to the garden. Yes, there are consequences for Adam and Eve's sins. There are consequences for sin entering into the world.

And even in this banishment from the garden, we act like God created distance. But have you read Genesis 4? God is having a direct conversation with Cain.

Humanity is the one who consistently chooses or tries to create distance with God. And God is the one who was consistently trying to bridge that gap. That's the beauty of a God who hangs on a cross and says, I am with you, I am for you. This story is really interesting to me. When I wrle with, when I wrestle with the parable of the Good Samaritan, I hope this morning you don't end up with like the lullaby effect.

And that is like, I've heard this story so many times. I'm Going to go to sleep and then I will, you know, I'll kind of wake back up as this dude who's standing up here, who maybe I know or I don't know, kind of praise us out and we get on with our next song.

Let's wrestle with something maybe we've heard a lot. I think what's sitting in the midst of this story, I think what's sitting in the midst of a lot of the things that we wrestle with as Christians, that we wrestle with as people, just in general, is something called the Psychology of Disgust. One of my favorite books that has been such a formative thing for me, and some of you in the room know me pretty well. And so you know that reading is. Man, that is something that's life giving for me.

I love to read. Richard Beck, who is a professor at Abilene Christian University, writes a book called Unclean. It is a wonderful book. And one of the primary things that he discusses in this book is this psychology of disgust. And in the psychology of disgust, you have all of these things that are kind of coming together.

It is this deeply ingrained emotional system that works to protect us, to protect our bodies from contamination. We are doing everything we can to kind of separate ourselves or create some space and create some protection from harmful things that may enter our body or enter our hearts or enter our minds. And so we're creating this distance between.

It's visceral in a lot of ways, it's intuitive. And oftentimes with this psychology of disgust, it is irrational. If I'm just being honest, we. And I'm certain this probably happened to at least one person in the room. And I'll use one of his analogies from the book.

You may have swallowed spit this morning while you were in the room. You just swallowed it. But you spit it in a cup and I ask you to drink it and you’ll like yeah, nope, I ain't doing that same thing, right? But one is internal, and I don't have to see it and I don't have to think about it. And one of them is external.

And I'm going, nope, not doing that. But probably right now, some of you are even thinking to yourself, oh, should I swallow what's in my mouth now? Or should I. Like, what should I do? Because is it gross or is it not gross?

But that's what we're talking about, right? Like this conversation of this irrationality that oftentimes sits in when it comes to this psychology of disgust that we're looking to create barriers we're looking to protect ourselves. And the interesting thing about the psychology of disgust is it often moves its way into a moralism. It moves its way into our social circles. It moves its way into how we interact with others.

And so, sitting in between demographics and certain kinds of people, we wrestle with the psychology of disgust because there are just certain kinds of people that we see as repulsive. And I am going to protect myself at all costs from being impure or from them tainting my purity. No offense, but has it ever been my job to keep myself pure, or has it been my job to surrender to a God who makes me pure?

One of them means God's the actor at the center of the story, and one of them means I am. And if I put myself at the center of the story, I have a whole lot more in common with the Pharisees then I do the man that stands before God and says, have mercy on me, God, a sinner. So you wrestle with this story. We wrestle with all of the things that are taking place here. And this comes from another side psychology, thought process here.

And for those of you, like I said, who were like, man, where was this softball entry that he was talking about? I told you, there isn't one. It's called negativity bias. It is the understanding that the negative is more powerful than the positive. Years and years and years ago, probably in 2006, I was on the third floor with the teenagers, and I used an analogy.

I had a. Some of you may remember this, some of you who were with me, because I see you, and now you have children and you're married and all the things. And that does make me feel very old.

But I had a clean bottle of water, and I had another bottle of water that was actually yellow Gatorade that I was making it look like it was something else, okay? And I poured just a little bit of that yellow Gatorade into that perfectly clean water, and I offered it to a little blonde girl named Amanda Day. Some of you will know. And I said, Amanda, do you want to take a drink? And immediately, you could see the disgust on her face.

No, Because Amanda actually believed that I would do something like that as opposed to just using Gatorade, which said more about my character and lack of trust from the teenagers, but it is what it is. And I was like, hey. But I said, Amanda, like. Like 99.9% of this water bottle is pure. It's perfectly fine.

It's only this one little bit that's in there that makes it bad. And she's like, right. But then it kind of goes through everything. And you. I'm like, m. I'm not going to do it.

That's what I'm talking about when I say, like, this is the type of disgust, this is the type of negativity bias that we're constantly wrestling with. Because negativity bias says even that little small bit is going to ruin all of the good. And yet here is this one man in the form of Jesus who creates this one church and then sends him out and says, you have the power of God in you and you will be a greater influence, and you have more power than every bit of the negativity that we call sin and death. Do we believe that? I mean, do we really believe that?

Or do we just sing about it sometimes, preach about it or teach about it? Or do we wrestle with the same situation that in a lot of ways you see this expert in the law wrestling with, where he is, asking the question, but who's my neighbor? Who do I have to love? Who do I have to include? Who do I have to be around?

Or maybe to use the name of God, who do I have to be with?

Who can I protect myself from? And then you get this story, and here are three people, a priest and a Levite, who probably could easily just have been, if they weren't in the story, buddies of this expert in the law who seemingly have it all figured out. They realize, yes, this man is hurt, but in some form of fashion because of the way that they understood the purity codes of the time, we're not going to do ministry for this man because it would have tainted them, it would have made them impure, and they would have had to then step out of ministry for a little while, for a few days, go through the ritual process to get clean again. And so they leave this man to die on the side of the road. Why?

Because I have to protect myself from being impure instead of entering in. And then if Jesus wasn't. I mean, at this point, let's just be honest. If we know the things that are taking place with the Samaritans and we understand how Jews perceive Samaritans, Jesus isn't poking the bear here. Jesus is taking a two before to the face of the bear.

I'm serious. Like, this isn't a poke. This isn't a little bit of a jab. Like, this is a 2, 4. Because when you start to think about who the Samaritans were and you start to think about all of the ways in which the Samaritans were disgusting.

They were routinely called or referred to as unclean animals or dogs, for those of you who don't know. And just to kind of make certain raw on the same page, the Samaritans were Israelites who intermarried with foreign people, especially after the Assyrians conquered the Northern kingdom. And Jews saw these Samaritans as ethically mixed, as impure, and also as full on heretics. Samaritans rejected that Jerusalem was the proper place of worship, and instead they built their own temple at Mount Gerrazim.

You remember in John chapter four, when Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well and the disciples show up. And it's not just that Jesus is hanging out and talking to a Samaritan, to a woman, it is most definitely that he's actually speaking to a Samaritan. So Jesus is really getting scandalous here.

But to say that Jews were disgusted by Samaritans is an understatement.

So when the expert in the law is asking these questions, who is my neighbor? He has a worldview, he has a scriptural interpretation for why he doesn't enter into relationship with certain folks. He has rationalized. Did you hear it in the text? Trying to rationalize.

He has a rationalization for how good he is and why he does what he does. And he is unwilling, at least in this moment, to rethink some things and instead does the mental gymnastics in order to affirm how he feels.

Even at the end of the story. Did you catch. How did you catch the response when Jesus says, so who do you think? Who do you think is the one who showed mercy? He says, who do you think lives this out?

And the guy, the expert, the law says, well, the one who showed mercy. In the Greek, probably somewhere, it says that he threw up in his mouth a little bit after having had to say that, because he has to promote the Samaritan as the one who. Well, that's the one. That's him.

And sitting at the center of this, I think at least one of the things is this, or maybe it's a way for us to understand it today is this psychology of disgust that that type of person, that type of behavior, that type of belief system, oh, I can't be around those types of people because the negativity bias sets in. And I believe that the negative is absolutely more powerful than the positive.

And so as we wrestle with this name this morning, Emmanuel, when you see a God who is with us, as I said earlier, he seems awful comfortable in and around sin and in and around sinners.

And he raises up a church and he says, this is who I want you to be for the world.

And if we're just going to get real honest about some things this morning, think about the way our country is operating right now, the things you're seeing in our country right now. I hear this constantly, especially in regards to politics. We are more polarized now than we've ever been. In whichever side you fall on, I am disgusted with the other side. In fact, I heard a recent politician make this claim.

I hate them. I really do. I hate them.

And we enter into a world where we're trying to determine will I or will I not allow proximity to these people of these kinds of people while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.

Before I had ever come to Christ, Christ came to me. Before you had ever come to Christ, Christ came to you.

Maybe in the words of C.S. lewis, Christ calls you to be a little Christ for the world.

I'll use another one. And like I said, so many of you in the room, several of you, you know me well and you know that my all time theologian beyond the apostles. And then of course, Jesus himself goes back to being 15 years old and being introduced to this person for the first time. I love Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I love Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer makes this statement, and I do believe. And I'll start to wrap up with this, I do believe. This is in some ways the anecdote, the cure for disgust. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do and more in the light of what they suffer mean. Read that for you again.

This statement actually hangs on the wall in my office. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

And here is this God who steps into our world, who says and sees that sin is what we are suffering with. And he enters into the suffering and says, I will be with you. And when he raises up the church out of the grave and sends us back into the world, that's the idea. Did you catch the way that he spoke in the parable, do this and you will live. The question was, how do I enter the kingdom of God?

And Jesus almost doesn't answer the question, but he really does answer the question, do this and you will live.

Because the power of God at work within his people destroys negativity, bias and the power of God within his people. Means that the person across from me, regardless of their behavior, is a person made in the image of God who deserves. Because God says so, my love. And if God is who he says he is, not just my love, my presence, my proximity.

The one funny thing about being a guest preacher is I have no idea where you are at in your journey. And I have no idea if that's what you needed to hear this morning.

So I'll give you two thoughts to finish. Maybe you need to hear that there is no distance that you can create between you and God, that he won't bridge that gap. There is no distance.

There is no distance that he would not cross to be present and in proximity to you, with love Or maybe, maybe like the expert in the law who knows a whole lot of scripture, maybe you need a two before to the head. I do sometimes that says stop dehumanizing others and stop creating distance between you and others and be filled with the spirit to cross that gap and to be Jesus.

I don't know where you are, but I beg you to wrestle. Not because you are up in the air on God's love for you, but because of God's love for you. Let me pray for you and we'll be done. God, we love you so much. We thank you for who you are.

We thank you for the way that you care for us. We thank you for the way that you move and you come to us. And God, we want to be solidified in your love. We want to know that's who you are, that we can rest in it, be empowered by it. And to be empowered, God to go and be like you is Jesus the Christ that we pray.

Amen.