A severed head

In Season 2 of iCarly (and if you’ve never watched iCarly, are you even living?), the 3 friends go head-to-head (pun intended, keep reading) with the Dingo channel over content the channel stole from iCarly’s web show. While there they find the head of the Dingo channel’s founder in a glass jar and locked it in a cryogenic freezer.

Comedy gold right there, people. Comedy gold.

Well, maybe it’s funnier when you watch it than when you read about it, but at any rate, that opening paragraph is important to set up this not-so-funny statement: there is a danger that today’s church is worshipping a severed head.

At the end of a powerful string of verses describing the exaltation of Jesus, Paul concludes with this:

And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way. (‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭1:22-23‬ ‭NIV‬‬, emphasis mine)

It is not only popular but pretty well accepted to love Jesus while leaving the church. It leads to all kinds of cute sayings like “I love Jesus but hate church” and others like it. It can take us to places where our dissatisfaction with the body leaves us without one. The danger here is that while we probably still love Jesus, we may only be loving a head. Jesus without the church is no different from that frozen head at the fictitious Dingo study.

Admittedly, some bodies may be easier to love than others. I mean, I’ve been fighting my body for a bit over a year now over some pounds that I put on that don’t seem to want to let go. Bodies go through seasons – some we love more than others – but we don’t cut them off and try to live without them. It is the same in the spiritual. Every local church has body issues, but the answer can’t be to only love the head and cut off the body.

Let’s stop holding up a severed head for the world to see and start showing the world a body that can love one another in good seasons and bad.

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