By now everybody knows about David Letterman's recent confession. Almost nothing shocks me anymore, but one aspect of his announcement was jarring: the audience laughed. As Letterman soberly explained what had occurred and how he planned to repair the damage from his bad behavior, most of the audience laughed repeatedly.
Some have suggested the audience members thought this was some kind of sketch. Maybe so, but it wasn't funny. Letterman wasn't smiling or mocking or reading a script. Watching the announcement the next day on YouTube, I could only wonder, "Will these people laugh any anything?" A few days later, a well known New York media critic exclaimed that this was the best moment in television since a popular movie star appeared on a late night show ten years ago to explain his tryst with a prostitute in a taxi cab!
This is what passes for popular entertainment at a time when many in the Church have argued that we must be more in tune with pop culture! Leaders of the Emerging Church not only celebrate the popular culture in their their sermons, but insist that we all must become more "relevant." If people are looking for spiritual truth in racy movies and vulgar TV shows, we need to be familiar with those movies and TV programs. Otherwise, we look out of touch and "irrelevant" to our media savvy generation.
Several years ago, Os Guinness wrote a book with a difficult title: Prophetic Untimeliness. The skinny little volume has a more vivid subtitle: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance. He explains that the measure of relevance in our culture is timeliness- does our truth easily mesh with the perceived values and needs of this moment in history? The idea that Jesus Christ is the only way to God is very offensive to intellectuals who believe all roads lead to God. So in the name of relevance, we should downplay that idea or forget about it entirely. If the Virgin Birth is hard for our generation to swallow, let's just lose it! And if Americans are more interested in saving the environment than saving souls, let's pick up a cross and lead the "Ban CO2" parade.
Guinness explains that the nature of prophetic truth requires that it frequently seems irrelevant to our age. That is, a prophet tells us the things we don't want to hear. He can be absolutely and eternally right, but seem utterly out of sync with our age. If we aren't willing to be out of step with our society, we can't possibly live out the Wisdom of God- or speak it.
In 1 Corinthians 1:17, Paul explains that our presentation of God's truth can become so eloquent, so smoothly crafted, that we empty the Gospel of its power! There are many times when we simply need to allow the Word of God to strike a spiritual blow; to be experienced it all its irrelevant, offensive, timeless glory. Sadly, that doesn't happen very often in the Relevant Churches of 2009, and many in our culture are laughing all the way to the Grave.
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