Not Even a Hint

I was thinking about Ephesians 5:3 last night.

“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people.”

At least in my religious world, we tend to focus on the first part of the verse, that we shouldn’t have a “hint of sexual immorality.” I suspect the idea is that if we go around willy-nilly, even if we haven’t been sexually impure, we can still lose credibility with those outside the church if they think we’re just like everyone else.

But the verse goes on to talk about “any kind of impurity” and “greed.” I’d never really noticed that before. I don’t think we’ve really emphasized that part of the verse near as much as we emphasize the sexual immorality part. I’ve never seen that verse used when someone wants to buy a big house or buy another car or whatever. Why is that? Why is it that we’ve set up sexual immorality as the end-all sin when the Bible seems to consistently bring up the issues of money and greed?

Is it because our culture today is so much more sexual today than it was 2,000 years ago and so it has become a more important issue? From what I know about 1st century culture this probably isn’t the case (um…temple prostitutes?). Regardless, could we also make the argument that greed hasn’t remained a huge problem? And perhaps we could argue that in America greed has become the norm, if not an honored virtue (every actor, rock star, and rapper to show up on MTV Cribs - see photo...oh, nevermind that estate isn't from Cribs, it belongs to Pastor Joyce Meyer, my bad).

Here are a couple things that come to mind…

The parable of the guy who builds the bigger barns to store all of his stuff, and then dies that very night.

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. What is the only sin mentioned of the Rich Man? He doesn’t give anything to the beggar outside his front door.

Jesus reads the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue about how he came to bring good news to the poor. Woe to you teachers of the law who are clean on the outside and on the inside full of greed (paraphrased, see Matt 23:25).

We could go on and on of course, but I guess my overall question is, why is it that 2,000 years ago Jesus talks so much about money, wealth, greed, poverty, etc. but today it’s talked about so very little. A family in the church replete with sexual immorality (the husband or wife is adulterous, the teenage kids are having sex, etc.) is likely to be called out and go through some sort of process which may result in their being removed from the church. But can we imagine a scenario where a family equally fraught with greed (excessive sized house, not giving to the needy…I’d better stop there lest I be talking about a family you know and step on any toes – wouldn’t want that) might go through a similar process?

Don't Ask the Fish

OK, so I was just listening to this talk radio show and they were talking about the final season of the Sopranos coming out. Anyway, this one guy had, some time ago, become Mormon and so he’s stopped watching R rated movies (which includes the Sopranos). But what he was saying was really interesting. He was talking about how after not being exposed to the violence and sex and language for awhile you become more sensitive. Now, he says, when he sees even movies with a lesser rating, he’s often a bit shocked by what passes as PG-13 for instance.

He also talked about how one time back in college he didn’t have cable for a year. This time the experience was less due to religious influence and more on the financial side, which can prove to be far more persuasive at times. Well after a year he finally got cable again, which he was quite stoked about, and for about the next week he had the same sort of conversation over and over with his friends. He’d go to them every day and be like, “Whoa, did you see [such-and-such] last night?! Did you see that one thing? Can you believe that?” To which his friends would respond, “What? I don’t remember that.” Until after further provoking that might finally result in his friends remembering whatever crazy/provocative/delusional thing it was he saw on TV. His friends were simply too desensitized to have noticed those things as unusual or memorable.

“And,” he said, “that lasted about a week until I became just as desensitized as everyone else.”

His point was that we become ultra-sensitive (or is it just less desensitized, but in relation to everyone else we only think it’s ultra-sensitive?) after we’ve taken a step back and removed ourselves from the situation for a bit.

Here’s what it made me start to think about though. I wonder what types of implications this has on us and the Bible. I mean, how desensitized have we become to the Bible and what it says?

The beauty of creation, relationships, community, men, and women.

The wonder of healings, sacrifice, symbolism, and women.

The horror of floods, plagues, genocide, and war.

Much of it becomes lost on us as we’re submersed in the story over and over. Sadly, while there are many advantages to growing up in a healthy church, I’m not sure this is one of them. Much as a small boy who’s grown up amidst death and violence on TV could never conceive of being shocked or appalled by a show like the Sopranos, a girl who’s grown up in the church may never be struck by the gruesome nature of a flood or an army coming to destroy a whole group of people – men, women, children, and goats. What might that look like? What might that smell like for heaven's sake?

Or, on a more positive note, what about the wonder of Jesus coming to a small fishing community in a backwoods part of the Roman empire and healing blind people? Or the shear brilliance of some of Jesus’ responses to questions. Or that He dared to proclaim that his own time, a time of persecution which eventually resulting in a war that ended in the destruction of the temple, was the “year of the Lord’s favor.”

Or what about this, the idea that that guy from 2000 years ago is still alive today and is still claiming that this is the “year of the Lord’s favor.” If that doesn’t sound absolutely ridiculous to you…exactly.

I don’t know about you but I want all of these things to hit me again for the first time. I’m just not sure how to make that happen.

There's this saying, if you want to know what water is like, don't ask the fish.

Liturgy

Awww…I get it! I just had one of those moments – you know the ones where all of the sudden all of the tumblers fall into place, the lock clicks, and the key turns. I’ve been hearing lately that our generation is becoming increasingly fond of liturgy (liturgy is like doing worship by way of ritual, that is to say you have to get up and do something). For awhile now I’ve been really perplexed by this. When I think of liturgy I think of ritual and when I think of ritual I think of all sorts of bad things.

In fact, here’s some free association for you on the term liturgy from my own gray matter; boring, Catholic, Orthodox, repetitive, slow, gray haired people, orthopedic shoes, stand, kneel, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel…

Ok. Anyway back to my revelation. I realized that liturgical worship is actually really well suited to our modern (or should I say postmodern) generation. I mean we’re all clinically ADHD, right? We’ve got so much multi-sensory stimulation that we can’t sit still. Kindergartens and grade schools are drastically reorganizing their teaching methods to deal with the fact that we now have our brains hooked up to a metaphorical Ethernet cable as opposed to the previous generations that were plugged in to a 56k modem, so to speak.

You see we can’t just sit down and do any single thing for very long. Our legs get fidgety, our eyes begin to wonder, and we start thinking about food or geopolitics or cartoons. So we pull out a PSP, an iPod, or a text-message enabled cellphone to keep us occupied for a bit.

So there’s this thing called a labyrinth, which is sort of like a maze except there’s just one way into the center (no dead-ends) and you take the same way out. The idea is you walk at your own pace and pray as you go. That’s it, just walk, reflect, pray.

Well what if all of the sudden this middle-school kid (or 26 year old) who can’t pray more than 2 consecutive minutes without his mind wondering or drifting off to sleep (after all, prayer is done alone and in silence with your eyes closed and head bowed), maybe all the sudden they can do this labyrinth thing and pray for 30 minutes.

Question: Is this so different from a “prayer walk”? What makes one liturgical (read: boring) and one nonliturgical? There are all sorts of other liturgical things besides the labyrinth but the question still stands for our example. And I don't have an answer.

I don’t really know all of the implications of this epiphany yet, but I wonder what it could mean for how we do our “personal relationship with God.” I mean, maybe the 20 minutes of Bible study and 10 minutes of prayer time in a silent room (think “Quiet Time”) worked great for those who came before us. But maybe instead of trying to force that same old method (and failing miserably and feeling guilty for it) we can try something new (or should I say really old). Maybe this opens some interesting possibilities.