Derek (also see this post) has this older cd that Ivy told me about entitled, “House Show,” in which he plays 10 songs to a live audience, with some pretty challenging and interesting things to say inbetween. If you know anything about Derek Webb, well…I was just going to put in a phrase or two to encapsulate what I think of him and what he’s trying to do/say, but I should let you research that and decide for yourself. Anyway, there is one particular segment of his discussion about the Gospel that I especially thought about today, and I basically typed it out, not quite word for word, but it’s close.

(This is a smidgen of track #12, “Intro to Wedding Dress”)

“I think that so often we try to make it our job to make the Gospel easier for us to preach and easier for people to hear in order to not get into trouble and to not be confrontational. See, here’s the truth: you can’t just preach the Gospel and not get into trouble. You just can’t do it. As hard as you might try, you can dress it up anyway you want. But if you’re really preaching the Gospel, you’re going to get yourself into trouble and you’re going to be in trouble as well, because, again, the cross is both beautiful and offensive. It must be both. It is both, there is no other Gospel for you to preach. So in the ways that we seek to dress it up, or to “neuter” the Gospel, to rob it of it’s great offense and therefore it’s great beauty, then we’re no longer preaching the Gospel. We’re not doing anyone any favors by making the Gospel easier to hear, because it ceases to be the Gospel. It’s not safe to bodly preach the Gospel, it’s not. You might as well just get to preaching it and getting into trouble; our same Gospel that we’re told will literally set mother against daughter, son against father, not bringing peace but a sword. Dangerous work we’re in as believers, perilous work, that we have before us to preach the Gospel, not only to each other, but to the outside world, the unbelieving world. It’s not safe work. Safe is not a word that I would use to characterize Christians, or Jesus or the Gospel, it shouldn’t. If it is, then it might not be the Gospel we’re preaching. And it makes me think about the great work by C.S. Lewis, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” where these children…find themselves in this other, kind of magical world where all these incredible things begin to happen, and they meet this great lion, Aslan, the Christ figure in the story, and these children when they see him, you can imagine, this huge lion, they’re terribly frightened, they’re scared to death. And they know that he’s king, but they have all these questions, so they go to some that live there that know more than they do, and they say, you have to tell us more about this king, we’re frightened by the sight of Aslan the Lion. Can you tell us, is he safe? Is he safe?? The response that the children receive is not, “Yes, he’s safe. In fact he’s safe for the whole family.” That’s not the response. The response is, “No! No, he’s not safe. But he is good. And he’s the king.” Jesus is not safe, He is not manageable. He’s a wild lion, you cannot tame him. He is not safe, but He is good, and He is King, and you can trust Him…The Gospel we carry is not safe, it is not. It’s not manageable, it’s not efficient. Loving people is not efficient. But the Gospel is good, it is true. But it’s not safe. And so this next song offends its author, as well it should, because it wouldn’t be the Gospel if it didn’t.”  

~Derek Webb