AMERICAN CHRISTIAN PORN STARS

or Christian Love is Pornographic

We appeal to tradition
but Sola Scriptura.

We appeal to history
but not institutions.

We appeal to clear readings
but not readings which are clear to me.

We appeal to Jesus
but not his followers.

We appeal to creation
but not the world.

We appeal to order
but not when it contradicts.

We appeal to judgment
in place of love.

We appeal to his division
but not his teaching.

We appeal to his existence
but not his work.

We appeal to the Great Reformation
but reject the current one.

We appeal to preferred status
but see equality as oppression.

We count all the Christians in the world
but call most of them fake.

We make our religion personal
and our faith communal.

We build walls to protect ourselves
and keep the other out.

We push down the immigrant
and shoot the handcuffed in the chest.

We praise the fight for freedom
but free few from poverty.

We wake up to a broken world
only to break each other’s spirits.

We dream for a better world
then realize that’s his dream too.

We see our dream as shared
and we share in its building.

We gather our friends for worship
and embody GOD’s grace.

We build up the body
when we embrace
that our neighbor’s body
is like ours
is like his
is the same
and we reject that evil,
infiltrates, persuades, blinds,
for the good is in us, shared.
We share in
the divine reality in
the divine creation
celebrated by divine creatures
of love and hope.
Our shared dreams dance,
intermingling seductively,
pornographic without exploitation,
in the textbook definition which says
that porn is what is publicly objectionable–
it is not the naked breast that titillates,
but the baby being nourished,
the intimacy shared between son and mother
or two or three or the crowd in the club
pulsing to the rhythm
which is pornographic to the puritan.
He doesn’t like the closeness of compassion;
bodies so close they share the same space.

Christian love is pornographic because it upsets us;
we object to that intimacy, afraid
(Do not be afraid!)
And we beg for him to call to us: (Come!)
but look down and sink into the sea.
But we forget that Peter, too walked on water.

The dance of lovers, of peacemakers;
the dance of Mary and the woman with oil,
letting her hair down in the seduction of praise
and love and respect wiping his feet with herself;
the dance of the suffering woman
grabbing his clothes;
the dance of the disciples gathering and feeding and serving
and gathering up the crumbs;
the dance is a lover’s dance, a dreamer’s dance,
obscene only to the one who rejects the embodiment of love.