May 20, 2012

American Idols – Violence

American IdolsAmerican Idols – Violence
Genesis 4:1-16
Sycamore
Creek Church
Tom Arthur
February 28, 2010

[Note to reader: This is a manuscript and not a transcript.  While I prepare a manuscript, I don’t preach from it.  All the major points are here, but there are bound to be some small differences from the sermon as it was preached live.  Also, expect some “bonus” material that wasn’t in the live sermon.]

Peace, Friends

Violence is all around us in our culture.  It’s almost impossible to avoid it.  Every morning when I open up the newspaper I’m greeted with the day’s news about violence.  It’s around the world.  It’s in our nation.  It’s also local.  It’s so local that for several weeks now as I’ve been driving to and from the office, I’ve been greeted by signs at the corner of Jolly and Aurelius seeking cage fighters.  UFC is pretty cool on TV, but all of a sudden when it’s someone you love (your friend, boyfriend, son, husband…these martial arts sports are mostly guys right now) stepping into that cage, it’s not quite so cool anymore.  Violence is in the movies and TV we watch.  It’s in the sports we enjoy rooting for.  The long-term effects on the brain of concussions in football are just beginning to get attention.  We all know the joke: I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.  Violence is in our pastimes from video games to books.  Perhaps most tragically, it’s in our homes.  One in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and one in nine men will too.

Today we continue the series: American Idols.  We’re looking at the things in our culture that compete for our attention and our worship.  These things shape our imaginations in ways that might not be in line with the way that God’s love shapes our imaginations.  They deform us rather than reform us.  Today we’re looking at violence.  Violence goes back a long way.  It’s not something we Americans invented.  Let’s begin with a story from Genesis of the first murder.

Genesis 4:1-16 (NLT)

1 Now Adam slept with his wife, Eve, and she became pregnant. When the time came, she gave birth to Cain, and she said, “With the LORD’s help, I have brought forth a man!” 2 Later she gave birth to a second son and named him Abel.

When they grew up, Abel became a shepherd, while Cain was a farmer. 3 At harvest time Cain brought to the LORD a gift of his farm produce, 4 while Abel brought several choice lambs from the best of his flock. The LORD accepted Abel and his offering, 5 but he did not accept Cain and his offering. This made Cain very angry and dejected.

6 “Why are you so angry?” the LORD asked him. “Why do you look so dejected? 7 You will be accepted if you respond in the right way. But if you refuse to respond correctly, then watch out! Sin is waiting to attack and destroy you, and you must subdue it.”

8 Later Cain suggested to his brother, Abel, “Let’s go out into the fields.” And while they were there, Cain attacked and killed his brother.

9 Afterward the LORD asked Cain, “Where is your brother? Where is Abel?” “I don’t know!” Cain retorted. “Am I supposed to keep track of him wherever he goes?”

10 But the LORD said, “What have you done? Listen — your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground! 11 You are hereby banished from the ground you have defiled with your brother’s blood. 12 No longer will it yield abundant crops for you, no matter how hard you work! From now on you will be a homeless fugitive on the earth, constantly wandering from place to place.”

13 Cain replied to the LORD, “My punishment is too great for me to bear! 14 You have banished me from my land and from your presence; you have made me a wandering fugitive. All who see me will try to kill me!”

15 The LORD replied, “They will not kill you, for I will give seven times your punishment to anyone who does.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him. 16 So Cain left the LORD’s presence and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

This is God’s story for us today.  Thank you, God.

I’d like to focus today on one verse: “You will be accepted if you respond in the right way. But if you refuse to respond correctly, then watch out! Sin is waiting to attack and destroy you, and you must subdue it” (Genesis 4:7, NLT).  I think what we see here is that Cain’s primary problem wasn’t with his offering, it was with his reaction to what happened with his offering.  He is given the freedom by God to respond in a loving way.  He is given the freedom to choose reconciliation.  Sin is crouching at the door of his heart waiting to pounce, but Cain can master it and subdue it.  His anger and frustration need not destroy him or anyone else, but Cain chooses rather the path of violence.

The consequences of this path are immediate.  Once Cain has killed his brother Abel he fears being murdered himself.  Violence creates a culture of violence that the violent then live in fear of.  There is a great irony in this story.  Cain says he is not able to take God’s sentence for fear of being killed!

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of this very same situation in the civil rights movement.  MLK was first and foremost a Baptist preacher.  He drew his inspiration and guidance primarily from the black church tradition of following in Jesus’ way.  In an essay titled “An Experiment in Love” he outlines a philosophy of active non-violent resistance to the unjust laws of segregation and discrimination.  He says:

To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe.  Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness.  We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force.  Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding (A Testament of Hope, 17).

MLK had in mind not just the defeat of unjust laws but reconciliation between whites and blacks.  If this was the ultimate goal, which I believe must be the ultimate goal for any Christian in conflict, then violence will never succeed in bringing about that goal.  Violence must be met with love, not hate.

Many have taken MLK’s active non-violence resistance to be an invitation to let someone walk all over you while you sit by passively and let them do whatever they want.  King spoke to this impression in the same essay saying:

It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist…It is not a method of stagnant passivity…For while the non-violent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong.  The method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually.  It is not passive non-resistant to evil, it is active non-violent resistance to evil (A Testament of Hope,  17-18).

In other words, to meet violence with love rather than hate and more violence is for the bravest among us, not the cowardly.  Evil must never be met with passivity.  It must be actively resisted, and if one is to follow in the way of Jesus, it must also be non-violent.

Something King understood is that the violent are never unredeemable.  God’s grace is still available even to the violent.  God’s grace can transform even the violent.  The mark that God puts upon Cain suggests that God is still providing for Cain.  Cain fears being killed himself, and God provides protection.

The book of Genesis tells several different stories of individuals working out their conflict in non-violent ways.  These provide models for how we might do so as well.  Not all of them are ideal, but they are all acceptable.

First, Abraham and Lot in Genesis 13 resolve their conflict by putting distance between themselves.  Second, Jacob and Laban in Genesis 31 do the same thing and take it a step further.  They draw up a legal contract of sorts, a covenant signified by a boundary, that will keep them apart and from hurting one another.  This is a kind of ancient personal protection order.  Third, Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33 resolve a long-standing hurt with the threat of violence when Jacob gives gifts and outwits his brother in a game of language.  Fourth, and perhaps the most ideal, Joseph in Genesis 50 responds to his brothers’ violence against him by forgiving them and even blessing them.  Certainly Joseph’s response is the ideal, but sometimes in our broken world, the ideal is not available and one of the other options is the best possible non-violent option.

Recently our church was taught a model that contributes to a culture of reconciliation.  It is called the Role Renegotiation model.  I know, that’s a mouthful to say, but the model outlines in many ways the details of what Joseph did with his brothers.  Let’s take a look at it by pretending that we’re in a situation where we are seeking a roommate.

The beginning of any relationship is gathering information.  We put the word out that we’re looking for a roommate and someone responds.  We sit down and talk about what our expectations are of one another.  Eventually, we find someone with whom we think we can live and we make a commitment to move in and sign a lease together.  There is a period of productivity and stability in which we pay the bills together.  Everything is great.  In fact, your new roommate has a killer entertainment system that you enjoy using to watch movies.

One night you’re already in bed when your roommate comes home.  You’ve got an early morning meeting and you want to get a good night’s rest.  Your roommate doesn’t even realize you’re home.  He comes in, turns on his entertainment system, and all of a sudden you’re laying in bed and greeted with Aerosmith blasting in the living room.  This is a pinch.  You expect that when you’re trying to sleep, that it will be quiet.  So you get out of bed, and tell your new roommate that you’re trying to sleep.  He says that he’s sorry, and that he didn’t realize you were even home.  He plugs in his earphones.  No problem.  That pinch or broken expectation was as easy as a quick fix.  But something begins to happen.  This scenario plays itself out over and over again.  You start to notice a pattern so one night you call a house meeting.  You go back to the beginning of the relationship and you renegotiate your expectations of one another.  In the end, both of you agree that music won’t be played through the speakers past 9PM except on the weekends.  Ahhh…back to stability in the house.  It’s a good thing.

Unfortunately the stability doesn’t last because your roommate is laid off.  The next month he can’t contribute to the bills.  This is a bigger broken expectation than just a pinch.  This is a crunch.  There are several ways to respond to this crunch.  The first is to just gut it out.  You figure that you’ve only got four more months on the lease and then you can find another roommate.  You live in boredom and apathy in your own home.  You rarely talk to your roommate.  You co-exist, but that’s about it.

A second option is that one day you come home and your roommate’s stuff is all packed up and gone.  He’s left the house and moved in with his parents.  He never told you this was going to happen.  It was a “silent exit.”

A third option is that you say to yourself, “It’s going to be OK.  He’ll find a new job in a couple of weeks.  I’ll cover him for one month.  It’s the loving thing to do.”

A fourth option is to go back to the beginning of the relationship and renegotiate.  You call another house meeting and you sit down and talk it out.  You agree to cover his expenses while he’s looking for a new job and he agrees to pay you back when he gets a new job.  You also agree that if he doesn’t have a new job in a two months, that you’ll have to look for a new roommate because you don’t have the financial ability to cover both his rent and your rent for more than two months.  At the end of the two months, your roommate has found a good new job and is slowly paying you back.  Ahhh…back to stability in the house.

There’s one last option.  You call the house meeting and your roommate and you can’t come to an agreed upon conclusion.  You do agree that it’s time to find other living situations.  He moves back in with his parents and you find another roommate to cover his part of the lease for the remaining four months.  This is a “planned exit.”  No feelings hurt.  In fact, you agree that should the situation arise in the future, you’d both be happy to consider being roommates again.

This model of relationships is built on clarity of expectations.  The temptation in any conflict is to go talk to someone else about your broken expectation and complain about it.  We all seek to find someone who will join our pity party.  We want someone who will agree with us and heap curses upon the person who isn’t living up to our expectations.  The Christian way of resolving broken expectations is to go talk to the person who broke them.  This is the path of reconciliation!  None of this is possible if you don’t first make the attempt to talk to the person directly.  I’d also encourage a good dose of humility in these kinds of conversations.  It may be your expectations that need to be changed!

Right now I’d like to practice this model with you myself.  I as your pastor was pinched last Sunday.  Let me explain.  There are many ways in which this church has exceeded my expectations this past month in terms of missions.  We raised over $5,000 for Haiti.  We collected many Haiti health kits.  We also collected personal items for needs closer to home at the Compassion Closet.  Kids Creek even joined in and collected items for the Holt Food Bank.  Wow!  That’s a lot of money and items.

Last week we had the opportunity as a church to give not only our money but also our time with the Church of Greater Lansing’s Food Drop.  We collected $1,050 for this in our Christmas Eve offering.  This was joined with 32 church’s offerings and altogether over $109,000 was raised.  Wow!  Last Sunday we were invited to deliver 2,800 boxes of food to people in need in the Greater Lansing Area.  Only six people from SCC showed up and two of those were Sarah and me.  Is this a problem?  I think we can do better than this, don’t you?

The temptation for me would be to go home and talk to Sarah about it and complain to her, or to talk to my clergy friends and complain about how SCC didn’t meet my expectations for giving not just money and items but also their time, but none of those conversations are in the right place.  The right place to discuss a pinch is with those who pinched you.  So that’s what I’m doing now.  Why didn’t we meet my expectations?  The reasons could be many.  Some of them might even be that the expectation wasn’t communicated well.  Or maybe we were having mission fatigue after collecting all those items and money this month.  Whatever the case may be, this is an invitation to begin a conversation about if and how we can do better in the future.  Leave a comment on the blog with an idea about how we can do better or continue the conversation with me.

As we turn our attention toward communion, I think we will see that God served all humanity by being present to us.  God was present to Adam and Eve in the garden.  God was present to Abraham and the people of Israel. God was present to the prophets.  God was most fully present to all humanity in the person of Jesus, God in the flesh.  Jesus served all humanity by rejecting violence and submitting to death upon a cross.  When faced with hate, he met it with love.  In doing so, he turned death upside down and conquered it.  We too can enter into that story of conquering violence with love.

May it be true in our lives not just by our own power, but by the power of God working in us whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Next Steps (share your experience with these next steps in the comments section):

1. Read some of the conflict stories in Genesis… (Genesis 13, 31, 33, 50, & Psalm 133)
2. Role renegotiate… (with someone you need to reconcile)
3. Explore Martin Luther King Jr. @ www.thekingcenter.org
4. Other

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American Idols Songs – Vote Now!

American Idols

I (ahem…Thomas) just added a plug-in that lets me run surveys embedded in my blog.  So each week as we get songs suggested to us for the American Idols series, I’ll post them here for people to vote on.  We’ll vote on one or two live in worship.

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Tom Arthur’s Obituary

I’ve been reading the obituaries this week.  I have been deeply struck by them.  So many people die so young.  I’m reminded of my own mortality.  Several years ago while I was living in Petoskey, another man named Tom Arthur died and many people commented to me about having a double take when seeing his obituary in the paper.

Reading the obituaries has got me thinking about what I would hope my own obituary said.  I thought I’d take a crack at writing it myself.  This isn’t necessarily what I think is true about me right now, but rather what I hope would be true about me by the time I die (hopefully later rather than sooner!).  Because obituaries are expensive, I’ve tried to keep this short.  What would you want your obituary to say?  Write your own and leave it in the comments.

Tom Arthur

Tom & SarahTom was a friend of God.  This showed itself in his friendship with the poor and the poor in spirit.  He lived simply so that he might give more away.  He shared what he owned.  He lived by faith rather than fear.  When he felt God was calling him to something, he pursued it even if it scared him.  He sought to live by one simple principle: entire devotion to God.  Tom was not perfect but he pursued ever increasing holiness.  He was humble enough to ask for forgiveness regularly, both from God, from his family, and from those around him whom he had wronged.

Tom is survived by a large spiritual family.  God used him to bring many to love God with everything they’ve got.  He was a means of grace in people’s lives helping them to see and live into their own calling and vocation.  While many will miss him, Tom was able to mentor new leaders who have aptly stepped into leadership roles in the communities he helped create.

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American Idols – Songs about Violence

American IdolsDuring this series on American Idols, we’ve invited everyone to suggest songs about the theme for the week for us to vote on.  Below (in no particular order) are the songs that were suggested this past Sunday for next Sunday’s theme, violence.  We asked people to submit song suggestions that were  not obviously pro-violence or anti-violence.  We were looking for songs that were in the gray area to make the voting a little more complicated.  Songs with one or more  asterisk showed up one or more times.  Come this Sunday and see which song(s) we’ve picked.  Then vote!

Hero of War by Rise Against
Whatever
by Our Lady Peace
Freak on a Leash
by Korn
It’s a Hard Knock Life
by Jay-Z
Highway to Hell

Theme from the Godfather
Titanic theme song
CSI theme song
Headstrong
by Trapt*
Slim Shady
by Eminem
Another One Bites the Dust
**
I Shot the Sheriff
**
Gunpowder N Lead
by Miranda Lambert
Goodbye Earl
by Dixie Chicks
Concrete Angel
by Martina McBride*
Alyssa Lies
by Trace Adkins
Thunder Rolls
by Garth Brooks
Papa Loved Mama
by Garth Brooks
CSI Miami Theme Song by The Who
Eminem songs
Fifty Cent songs
Folsom Prison
by Johnny Cash
Mack the Knife
Welcome to the Jungle
by Guns-n-Roses
Let the Bodies Hit the Floor
by Papa Roach
Where is the Love
by Justin Timberlake
Gangsta’s Paradise
by Coolio
Dirty Deeds
by AC/DC*
Face Down
by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
DMX
I Gotta Say it was a Good Day
by Ice Cube
Kung Fu Fighting
I Want to be Bad
by Willa Ford
We Will Rock You
by Queen
Pop Evil
Red Rag Top
by Tim McGraw
Paper Planes
by MIA
Soldier
by Phil Driscoll
The Best I Can
by Queensryehe
Paparazzi
by Lady GaGa

Next Theme: Security (fear and power)

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Photoshopped

This past week in my opening sermon for the American Idols series, I tackled our culture’s fascination with beauty, particularly as women receive the brunt of it.  Here are a couple of links that will help you explore further the impact that Photoshop has had on our images of beauty.

Metropolitan Magazine (a spoof) thanks to Girlpower

Fillipa Hamilton and Ralph Lauren thanks to ABC.com (check out the other “photo editing flubs”)

Photoshop of Horrors thanks to Jezebel.com

Dove Evolution video – A remarkable short video about the evolution of a real woman into a billboard ad:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

Or check out the original website by Dove for several other similar videos.

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American Idols – Fame

American Idols

American Idols – Fame
Genesis 3
Sycamore
Creek Church
Tom Arthur
February 21, 2010

Note to reader: This is a manuscript and not a transcript.  While I prepare a manuscript, I don’t preach from it.  All the major points are here, but there are bound to be some small differences from the sermon as it was preached live.  Also, expect some “bonus” material that wasn’t in the live sermon.


Peace, Friends

What do you worship? That’s a question we may not ask ourselves, but the way we live our lives provides an answer. What most fully captures your attention and imagination? Money…power…sex? Through this series that we’re beginning we’ll be exploring six different idols that capture the attention and imagination of our American culture.  This series, like the last, Unpleasantville, will use the stories in the book of Genesis.  Today we begin with fame.  Let’s start with the scripture passage from Genesis chapter three.

Genesis 3 (NLT)

1 Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the LORD God had made. “Really?” he asked the woman. “Did God really say you must not eat any of the fruit in the garden?” 2 “Of course we may eat it,” the woman told him. 3 “It’s only the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God says we must not eat it or even touch it, or we will die.” 4 “You won’t die!” the serpent hissed.

5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil.” 6 The woman was convinced. The fruit looked so fresh and delicious, and it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Then he ate it, too.

7 At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they strung fig leaves together around their hips to cover themselves.

8 Toward evening they heard the LORD God walking about in the garden, so they hid themselves among the trees. 9 The LORD God called to Adam, “Where are you?” 10 He replied, “I heard you, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.” 11 “Who told you that you were naked?” the LORD God asked. “Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?” 12 “Yes,” Adam admitted, “but it was the woman you gave me who brought me the fruit, and I ate it.” 13 Then the LORD God asked the woman, “How could you do such a thing?” “The serpent tricked me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.” 14 So the LORD God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this, you will be punished.
You are singled out
from all the domestic and wild animals of the whole earth to be cursed.
You will grovel in the dust as long as you live,
crawling along on your belly.

15 From now on, you and the woman will be enemies,
and your offspring and her offspring will be enemies.
He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

16 Then he said to the woman,
“You will bear children with intense pain and suffering.
And though your desire will be for your husband,
he will be your master.”

17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you listened to your wife
and ate the fruit I told you not to eat,
I have placed a curse on the ground.
All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.

18 It will grow thorns and thistles for you,
though you will eat of its grains.

19 All your life you will sweat to produce food,
until your dying day.
Then you will return to the ground from which you came.
For you were made from dust,
and to the dust you will return.”

20 Then Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all people everywhere. 21 And the LORD God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife.

22 Then the LORD God said, “The people have become as we are, knowing everything, both good and evil. What if they eat the fruit of the tree of life? Then they will live forever!” 23 So the LORD God banished Adam and his wife from the Garden of Eden, and he sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made. 24 After banishing them from the garden, the LORD God stationed mighty angelic beings to the east of Eden. And a flaming sword flashed back and forth, guarding the way to the tree of life.

This is God’s story for us today.  Thank you, God.

“Fame?” you may be wondering.  Andy Warhol said that everyone in the future would have their fifteen minutes of fame, but how do you get fame out of this story?  Were Adam and Eve looking for fame?  No, probably not, but there are three themes that pop up in this story that in our culture add up to fame: knowledge, immortality, and beauty.  Add these three up in America and you’ve got fame.  Let’s take a look at each one.

Knowledge

In Genesis 3:5 we read about the serpent tempting Eve saying, “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil.”  Knowing.  There is a kind of infinite knowledge we seek in America.  It is a desire to know and experience everything first hand.  We are not content to rest in others’ knowledge.  We want to experience the knowing ourselves.  It is a function of our western individualism.  We are a Wikipedia generation.

Take media for example.  According to a University of California study, the average U.S. household consumes 3.6 zettabytes of information a year (TV, video games, internet, etc.).  One zettabyte is one billion terabytes or “the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.”  We consume a massive amount of information and knowledge!

The king of media these days may just be the internet.  Sarah and I don’t even have a TV.  Just a computer.  I was unable to find how much storage capacity the internet currently holds, but I did find the weight of the amount of information traveling across the internet.  According to Discovery Magazine, all those little ones and zeros behind all that information traveling across the internet are made up of electrons, and each of those electrons weighs something.  When you add up all those electrons the massive amount of knowledge and information passing through the internet ends up weighing only 0.2 millionths of an ounce!  That is “roughly the same as the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-­thousandths of an inch across.”  So what does all that information really add up to?  Not much.  I’m reminded of a passage from Ecclesiastes which says, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (12:12).  I have that verse printed on all my bookmarks to remind me that knowledge without God doesn’t weigh much.

There isn’t anything wrong with knowledge.  Faith often seeks understanding.  We’re talking about priorities and proportions.  Idols are often good things taken disproportionately.  To dethrone this idol in your life, consider this week fasting from media. Turn off the TV.  Turn off the computer.  Turn off the radio.  Sit in an information silence this week.

Immortality

The serpent continues tempting Eve by contradicting God and saying, “You won’t die” (Genesis 3:4).  Our culture is always looking for the causes of death so we can escape death.  Do you know what the number one cause of death is?  Car accidents?  Heart disease?  Cancer?  No.  None of these is the number one cause of death.  The number one cause of death is birth.  If you are born, you will die.  My dad likes to say, “There are only two things you have to do in life, die and pay taxes.”  You can’t escape death.  It will come some day.

Last week’s Time magazine had a cover story titled “The Science of Living Longer.”  It’s something we all want to do, live longer.  In 2007 we spent $2.24 trillion on health care (New York Times Economics Blog).  That’s 16.2% of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) or $7,421 a person.  We also spend $5 billion a year on vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements (CNN Money Magazine).

Then there’s our weight loss industry.  We spend $35 billion a year trying to lose weight, and still somehow amidst all this we’ve got a childhood obesity epidemic on our hands.  Once again, there’s nothing wrong with health care, vitamins, and trying to lose weight.  I myself have a covenant with my pants.  I will never leave them nor forsake them.  That means that when they’re too tight, instead of buying new pants, I lose some weight.  This covenant ends up costing me less over the long-haul (I eat less, and I spend less on clothes!).

The question here is one of proportion and priority.  The body is a temple of God’s Spirit, but don’t make it into an idol.  To resist this idol worship of wanting to live forever, this week consider remembering your mortality by reading the obituaries or visiting a graveyard.  One day you too will show up in one of these places.  One day you too will die.

Beauty

Beauty is funny thing.  It is one of the classic virtues.  The problem with beauty in our culture is that we have set a standard of personal beauty that most of us cannot achieve.  Our standard of beauty gets mixed in with our idol worship of immortality by focusing on youthful beauty.  We all want to be young in the way that we look.  And even the young want to look like someone else.  We are ashamed of how we actually look.  This isn’t something new.  Once Adam and Eve eat the fruit we read that, “At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness” (Genesis 3:7).  Their nakedness, the beauty of their bodies, hadn’t been a problem before, but now having gained the knowledge that sin provides, they were ashamed of the beauty that God had made.

Women certainly take the brunt of this in our culture.  There are tons of things floating around on the internet that show how images of women get Photoshopped into a certain kind of mold.  Maybe one of the best is a Girlpower website that features a magazine cover called Metropolitan.  The magazine cover looks like any women’s fashion magazine that you could pick up in the checkout line of the grocery store, except that this magazine cover lets you see what the girl on the cover looked like before her body was cut and trimmed and painted.

One of the subtle ways that images like this affect us has to do with our teeth.  On this magazine cover you see the young woman with a set of bright white teeth with no gaps, but when you toggle the image to see what her teeth looked like before they were modified by Photoshop, you realize that like the rest of ours her teeth are yellow and like the rest of ours between them there are gaps.

This might not seem like much of a big deal, but I went to one of the big department stores this week and took a look in the toothpaste aisle.  I actually bought one of each kind of toothpaste that they sold (I’m going to donate all this toothpaste to Compassion Closet), and put them in bags based on which ones have whitening agents in them.  I ended up with three bags of whitening toothpaste and about a half a bag of non-whitening toothpaste!  This whitening toothpaste seems to me to be a fairly recent phenomenon.  What has happened, I think, is that we have seen Photoshopped images of people with pearly white teeth so often now that we think our teeth must be just as white.  The standard for what we are to look like is no longer real people but a created image.  Life imitates art.  We have lost the creature.

It might seem like the color of your teeth is a small thing to pick on.  Certainly it is.  The problem is that it is just the tip of the iceberg.  What happens when this same impulse to make a person look like a picture ends up going so far as Ralph Lauren took it in a recent photo shoot of model Filippa Hamilton.  They altered her waist to the point of absurdity.  She may have the proportions now of a Barbie doll, but if women try to emulate this look in the same way that we try to make our teeth look white, we’re going to have some seriously ill, both physically and psychologically, women.

Or take the case of skin bleaching.  Many of my black friends talk about skin bleaching techniques they or their family or friends have used to try to make their skin lighter because “white is beautiful and black is not” according to the standards of our culture.  There are many of these kinds of product out there.  The safety of some of them is questionable.

While women experience the brunt of this idol in our culture, men are not immune to it.  There is a relatively recent push for men toward what is referred to as “manscaping.”  This pressure to shave various parts of the body is coming from images men see in advertisements and movies.  A major razor company has a whole section of their website devoted to this practice with pithy little sayings about why it’s important for men to shave various body parts such as their armpits saying, “An empty stable smells better than a full one.”

We may have begun looking for fame but what we’ve ended up with is shame.  We are ashamed at how we look rather than content to be diverse reflections of the image of God.  To fight against this idol in our culture, consider this week trying to find the beauty in each person by seeing people with God’s eyes and as creatures made in the image of God.

Humility

As I said earlier, all of this is really a question of proportion.  Knowledge, health, and beauty are all at their fundamental essence good things that God has created, but our culture takes them and expands them out of appropriate proportion.  We seek infinite knowledge, immortality, and a youthful beauty that lasts forever.  I’d suggest that an antidote to all this is the practice of humility.

Going back to the story we read that the serpent says, “You won’t die!…God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5, NLT).  We want to be more than we are.  We want to be like God.

The problem is that we were already created not just in the image of God but also in God’s likeness.  We can’t do anything to be made like God.  Only God gives that gift.  Fame in our culture is a desire to be like God by what we do.  Rather than seek after this idol, let us first seek after God who is the only one who can give such gifts.  This is not about what we can do.  It is about what God can do.

May it be true in our lives by the power of God, whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Note:
For further reflection on the role of photoshop and images of beauty, check out this post.

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