Suffering #7: Enduring the Whirlwind
In this lesson, the teacher takes a brief detour from the planned curriculum to address a specific and deeply painful form of suffering: "the whirlwind" of cancel culture and social rejection.
The Anatomy of Disgust The class opens with a visceral exercise in which the teacher asks students whether they would drink their own spit, drink juice with a cockroach in it, or eat his homemade "John the Baptist" cookies baked with whole roasted crickets. The universal reaction of revulsion illustrates the concept of disgust, a protective reflex God gave humans to keep us away from health and safety threats. However, the teacher explains that this natural reflex extends beyond the physical into social and moral disgust. When someone is perceived to have committed a moral offense, society often reacts with the same protective revulsion, refusing to associate with them.
The Whirlwind of Cancellation: Cancel culture occurs when an individual is pushed out, rejected, or cut off from a community because they are perceived as morally dirty. The teacher shares a personal experience of facing a terrifying "whirlwind" of anxiety, job insecurity, and social rejection after a controversial parenting view landed him on the cover of the Boston Herald.
When people are canceled, they are treated like a virus or a contagion; friends and community members sever ties out of fear that associating with the "infected" person will ruin their own reputations. The teacher connects this to the biblical concept of the scapegoat, explaining that fearful groups often try to secure their own unity by pushing an outcast into the wilderness. In Jesus's day, lepers experienced this exact social rejection—they were totally isolated and had rocks thrown at them because their physical disease was wrongly assumed to be a contagious moral failure.
Jesus and the Ultimate Cancellation: The lesson points out that Jesus himself is the ultimate example of a canceled person. Despite doing nothing wrong, he was falsely perceived as a Sabbath-breaker and a blasphemer, rejected by the crowd in favor of Barabbas, and subjected to the supreme, shameful social rejection of the cross. When believers eagerly participate in canceling others today, they often believe they are destroying a monster, but in doing so, they become the monsters themselves—much like the Apostle Paul before he met Christ.
The Gospel Response: Contagious Holiness. The gospel completely flips the script on how to handle the socially rejected. Instead of running away from people deemed "contagious" (like tax collectors, prostitutes, and lepers), Jesus moved intentionally toward them. When Jesus touched the leper, he didn't wait for the man to get clean first. Jesus reached out while the man was still contagious, but Jesus didn't catch the disease; instead, Jesus's own holiness, life, and healing proved to be contagious to the leper.
Pastoral Application: The teacher warns that the enemy uses the intense isolation of social rejection to drive people to despair, sometimes even leading to suicide. Therefore, believers must refuse to jump on the mob's bandwagon. Even when we fundamentally disagree with someone's choices, Christ frees us to override our social "disgust" reflex and maintain the relationship. Christians are called to willingly enter the lives of canceled, rejected people to bring them the healing and acceptance of Christ, even if it means risking being labeled as "contagious" ourselves.