The Gospel According to Taylor Swift: Amplifying God's Glory through Diversity

What if embracing your unique 'weirdness' is the key to experiencing God's glory? Take a leap of faith with us as we draw inspiration from the strength and endearing awkwardness of pop icon, Taylor Swift, to explore a faith journey that's anything but ordinary. We speak straight from our hearts about embracing God's glorious diversity, the beauty of being fearfully and wonderfully made, and the calling to be a beacon of God's light in the world. Together, we ponder on the empowering question- do you let your faith paint you a shade of brilliant 'weird'?

Let's take a radical detour from societal norms and discover how adopting the path of Jesus Christ can revolutionize our values, priorities, and relationships. We uncover the resilience of the Jewish people and their authentic faith journey, challenging the church's inadvertent support for conformity. We reflect on the freedom to be ourselves in the church and how it enables us to express our faith uniquely. As we wrap up, we invite a thoughtful conversation with God, as we contemplate on how our faith-tinged 'weirdness' can glorify Him. So, dare to be different, dare to be 'weird'. God's glory awaits!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Resilient Faith, the podcast. Opportunities to find deeper resilience within ourselves can come when life seems most challenging. This podcast is to help you develop that resilience and connection with God. Being resilient and having power starts with faith. Welcome, friends, to the Resilient Faith podcast sponsored by Brentwood Presbyterian Church in West Los Angeles. We are sharing our sermons from our recent series, the Gospel According to Taylor Swift. This was a six-week sermon series in the fall of 2023. It's important in this day and age to talk about current events and pop culture in our worship and be in dialogue with Christian perspectives and scripture. Using Taylor Swift's lyrics and some of her songs as a launching pad, we are discussing some of the important issues and looking through them with a Christian lens. Thanks for listening and we pray that the Holy Spirit reaches you through this series.

Speaker 2: 1:31

Listen to this from Psalm 139. You have searched me, o Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all of my ways. Your word is on my tongue. You, o Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before and you lay your hand upon me.

Speaker 2: 2:02

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths of Sheol, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me. Your right hand will hold me fast. If I say surely the darkness will hide me in the light, become night around me. Even the darkness will not be dark to you. The night will shine like the day, for the darkness is as light to you. For you created me in my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, o God. How vast is the sum of them. This is the word of God for the people of God. You know, I thought it was a little bit strange.

Speaker 2: 3:42

In the New York Times columnist Brian Sieber chose to begin his review of Taylor Swift's Eras tour at Sophie Stadium by not focusing on the four hours of mind-numbing energy she put into that concert, or the parade of nonstop number one hits from nearly two decades of music, or the eight and a half minute deafening standing ovation that she got at the concert, but chose instead to focus on how awkwardly she dances. Of all the things that he could have highlighted, he talked about her being a little bit stiff and uncoordinated when she dances on stage, that she's no Beyonce or Shakira and instead is forced to strut around on the stage a lot and strike a lot of poses and flash a lot of smiles, but then, just as you're starting to think that this guy is an absolute jerk, he spins it around by saying that it's precisely her awkwardness that is maybe one of the most endearing and empowering things about Taylor Swift. She doesn't care that she's not the best dancer, she actually embraces it, strutting around on that stage like she is having the time of her life, like she is the most beautiful and gifted creation God has ever made. And this reviewer goes on to say and the magical thing about that is that in doing so, she frees all of her fans to think and act the exact same way, which really, in my mind, puts her in a long line of great theologians like Mike Giacchanelli, many of the greatest writers of the old and the new testaments, who go out of their way over and over again to say each one of us is fearfully and wonderfully made by God, knit together in our mother's wombs, in the depths of the secret place, created special and unique with the image of God. The amago day emblazoned inside of us created exactly the way God intended for us to be, and it reminds me how, in youth ministry, we were always trying to tell the kids that, if God loves you and created you just as you are.

Speaker 2: 6:29

Who are we to question our own value and beauty? Because, as we were to remind them over and over again, god don't make no junk. But it doesn't end there, because in this video, with its parade of hip hoppers and ballerinas and cheerleaders and break dancers, it takes a step further, affirming one of the greatest truths of our entire faith, a truth that our world desperately needs to hear right now, and that is that it is not just okay for you to be different. God actually needs us to be different. It is not in spite of our diversity that this world is such a beautiful place. It is because of it, it is in our diversity that the full glory of God is completely revealed. And the differences between us, that's what we need in one another and that's what God needs. If God's masterpiece is going to be whole, it needs all of us In every aspect of God's beautiful creation. So not only does God not expect us to be like everyone else. God actually needs us to stand out and be a little different Dare, I say, be a little weird If we are going to be God's light in this world and show this world a better way of living and loving and being together, and so I want to take this morning as we launch our new year of programs and ministries and service to our community in the world.

Speaker 2: 8:22

I want to take a moment to ask you a very important question Are you at least a little bit weird? Do you allow your faith to make you a little odd, a little offbeat, a misfit in this world? Because it should. If you are going to take your faith seriously, if you are going to be a real disciple or follower of Jesus Christ, it causes you to be a bit out of step, a little bit unfashionable and unconventional. The more I study Scripture, the more obvious it becomes that this gospel that we preach and study and claim allegiance to is a call to a radical, revolutionary, counter-cultural movement that, if taken seriously, puts us squarely at odds with the status quo and the powers that be in this world, whereas Taylor would say with the liars and the dirty, dirty cheats of this world. It's been said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you weird. Paul put it like this in 2 Corinthians Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old is gone and the new is here. In his book to the Philippians, paul says that when we become a disciple of Jesus Christ, we become citizens of an incompletely new commonwealth, a new kingdom, the kingdom of God.

Speaker 2: 10:02

When you begin taking Jesus Christ seriously, it changes you. It ruins you in the very best sort of way. It's an invitation to be a part of God's upside-down kingdom, where the values and the priorities of this world are turned on their ear. Following Jesus Christ messes with you, messes with your relationships, with your values and your priorities. It messes with the way that you define and measure success, the way you conduct your career and your job, the way you spend your time and your free money, the friends that you choose, the jokes that you're willing to make and willing to laugh at. It changes what's important to you and what you value. It changes the way that you understand your social status and your politics. The truth is that as we start to put God's kingdom and all of God's children as our top priority, it messes with our politics, whichever political affiliation you have.

Speaker 2: 11:21

You start to realize that Jesus would support some things in each party and not support other things in each party, which makes you set a little bit adrift. It makes you not quite easily fit in, because that's what Christians are supposed to be people who don't easily fit in. We're supposed to be a little bit weird and in an odd sort of way that's both a comfort and a challenge, isn't it? It's a comfort because it doesn't matter who you are. If you look the right way or you're talented or powerful or successful. You don't even need to be normal to be loved and accepted here. Your worth as a person doesn't come from what you do or don't do, or who you know or how well you fit in. Your value is a given because you are a uniquely made, dearly loved, beloved child of God.

Speaker 2: 12:35

Out there, the things that make us different and unique are typically frowned upon, but in here, our uniqueness is a cause for celebration. It's what brings color and texture and variety and beauty to life, because the church doesn't value the same things that the world does. To be a Christian and live out this authentic Christian life is to stop being afraid that we don't look good enough or look the right way, or trying hard to pretend that we're something that we aren't. In the church, we are given the freedom to just be ourselves. I'll never forget the first time I walked through the church, I thought that I had stepped into some kind of alternative reality. They were welcoming at me and accepting me just as I am. I didn't need to be cool or pretend I was cool. I didn't need to be popular or important or look any certain way. They welcomed and loved me just as I was and it changed me. It really changed me. So this calling is a calling that brings comfort, but it also brings challenge.

Speaker 2: 13:58

I mean, let's face it, most of us in this sanctuary, our big struggle is to look any different from the world around us, isn't it? There is a lot of pressure out there, explicit and implicit, in our society, in our culture, to fit in, to become just like everyone else, and the reality is that most of us in the mainline Protestant church, particularly Presbyterians, were very good at fitting in. There's a lot of payoffs and a lot of perks to not challenging the status quo, but Jesus tells us that if we fit in too easily, that something is wrong. Even the church gets caught up in this pressure to conform. The truth is that the Christian church throughout the centuries, particularly the mainline church, we have been just as much about creating and indoctrinating good, respectable citizens in the cultures and the countries that we are operating in as we are about preaching the revolutionary, radical, subversive gospel of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2: 15:08

In his book Resident Aliens, the director of the Doctorate of Ministry program that I'm in the first reader for my thesis, william Willamon, argues that this cooperation that cropped up between the church and the state, working together to try to create some kind of shared but compromised vision of a Christian culture, began back in 313 AD when Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan came about. And it didn't start to end here in our country at least, until a hot, sticky summer afternoon in 1963 when the Fox Theater in Greenville, south Carolina, going against the blue laws of that city, opened up their movie theater on a Sunday afternoon, god forbid. And since that day the church has been slowly losing its grip over our culture and our society. And while many bemoan the loss of status and privilege and power in our society, willamon and many other scholars actually applaud this chance, this opportunity for us to examine and address some of the ways that we have tended to well sell out our beliefs in order to remain the darling, the pet of our society's dominant power structure.

Speaker 2: 16:43

The Jewish people have always been so much better at this than we are. Throughout their various exiles, they're well acquainted with what it means to live as strangers in a strange land, to be a colony in a hostile culture. This has always been an integral part of the Jewish faith. What rabbis have told their people through the years? It's tough to be Jewish in our society telling their children that's fine for everyone else, but not fine for you, because you are special, you're different. You're a Jew. You have a different story and different values. That should be our story every bit as much as well. Willamon would argue. This is what we've been missing for the last 1700 years.

Speaker 2: 17:33

This loss of prestige and status that we're experiencing now gives us a chance to recapture some of our uniqueness, to take some stands, to stick out a little bit, to be a little weird. So let me ask you again are there things about your life that don't quite fit in? Do you allow your faith to cause you to stand out a little bit, to stick out like a sore thumb? As we launch this new year at BPC, I want to challenge you to take some time this week to enter a conversation between you and God, to spend some time praying, if you are willing, and to simply ask God, god, in what ways are you wanting me to be a little weirder, a little odder with my circle and my life and my friends? In what ways would you like to see me fit in a little less, stick out a little more, shake off the expectations of the world around me in order to be a bit weirder for your glory? Is that a conversation you're willing to have? Would you do that for me this week? Well then, let's together say amen.

Speaker 1: 19:38

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