Father's Day and Sustainability

It was Father's Day this past Sunday and it was good to be with extended family and children on that day. With the bankruptcy of GM and the talk of needing 'greener' cars, the high price of oil this past year, the debates about wind and nuclear power, climate change, and so on sustainability is all very much top of mind as well. However, still this few days after Father's Day I am thinking and wondering more about the sustainability of fatherhood in our culture. Perhaps it is bigger than that, an issue of moral sustainability.

In the news today Governor Sanford admitted he had been missing the past week due to an affair with a woman in Argentina. A few days ago Senator Ensign admitted to an affair with a staff member and gave up leadership roles. Both are conservative Republicans, the party less reputed for supporting such behavior. Of course, many in both parties have had the same problem, as does culture in general. Something like 40% of all children are now born out of wedlock in the U.S. , up to 70% among African Americans. The family itself is looking to be not very sustainable, regardless of what happens to Father's Day.


I heard in a sermon recently that something like 60% of kids who are active in church youth programs leave the church entirely when they graduate from high school and go off to college. These are not all kids, these are the ones that show up regularly and participate. This is clearly an unsustainable approach to building the next generation of Christians.

The Southern Baptist Convention is meeting this week in Louisville, KY, and the news there is glum; church membership and baptisms are falling. If the rate continues, the denomination will be half its current size in another 30 years or so. Unsustainable.

All of this is symptomatic to me of moral unsustainability. Someone has said that we are living on the fumes of prior generations morals, our own moral gas tanks having long since gone empty. The results seem to support that. We attempt to honor Father's Day while abandoning marriage and leaving our children with no father in the home. We think marriage is only about our own personal satisfaction so we cannot distinguish between so-called 'gay marriage' and the real thing. We do not live our faith daily so our children run away from the church at the first opportunity.

Rev. Johnny Hunt at the SBC Convention says we need revival. That is true, but it doesn't go far enough. We need to be actually living the faith, having it as our own. We need to be fueled with our own personal walk with God, not trying to live on the fumes left from the faith of prior generations. Nothing else will ever be sustainable.

The Private, the Secret, the Intimate

The sermon yesterday at our church, one in a series about family life, was about sexuality and its proper role. Much of the sermon was about the current problems with internet pornography and how that is destroying many families. It may well be the biggest sin problem within the church. The fact that an addiction to internet pornography can be idulged in 'secret' is part of the problem, since many are lured into it thinking that it will always remain a secret, not realizing how indulging in this secret sin will eventually destroy their marriage or lead them to other less secret sins with prostitutes, underage partners, or other crimes.



Besides being a troubling reminder of how sexuality continues to be a point of vulnerability for most men and many women, it also made me think about the role of the secret things in life and how pornography turns that role on its head.



In years past it seems to me that I heard more sermons and discussion about how our secret, private life exists to empower our public life. This idea, that the role of prayer, meditation, and marital sexuality provide a foundation of strength to help us resist the temptations of public life, is a powerful concept that I think deserves more attention. At the same time, in parallel to this idea of a private life that strengthens you, was a parallel idea that if you instead had a private life of secret sin you could be sure that it would find you out. In fact, this came up in a family discussion recently, whether that quote 'Be sure your sin will find you out' was in the Bible or just was a saying , so we looked it up and it is in Numbers 32:23, telling the Israelites that if they did not do as the Lord commanded then they should be sure that their sin would find them out. Of course many of the Proverbs talk about this as well in regard to sexual sin and failure to learn the Law among other things. Our private failures eventually become public, even if we are not running for public office.



Today we instead treat the private portions of our lives as the area where we alone should be god. We insist that these are 'victimless crimes' rather than self-destructive behaviors. As the movie Fireproof pointed out, porn plays a role in the failure of many marriages now. Pastoral counselors confirm that they find it to be an issue when counseling marriage problems. Just as we seem as a society to be less and less willing to defer gratification until later (via saving money, for instance) we also seem not to recognize that there are behaviors with penalties that arrive later. There is such a thing as postponed penalties as well as deferred gratification.



Yet the private, the secret, the intimate can provide strength instead of weakness in its proper role. Marriage provides times for both sexual self-control and times for fulfillment that should strengthen our character and provide the fulfillment needed to resist temptation. Similarly, private devotions can provide the knowledge and strength to withstand spiritual deception. Secret sin like porn takes that which should enable our lives and instead undermines it.



Someone pointed out to me many years ago that porn is basically a lie. It is a lie in many ways: the airbrushed photos of 'perfect' bodies, the implants and other surguries to make 'perfect' bodies, the false implication of seductresses who are always available for pleasure, in addition to the lies that it is victimless, that it is just normal, that no one will know, that sex should be just for pleasure and nothing else. These are all lies. But in addition to telling us lies, porn turns our secret life which should be a source of strength into a source of weakness.

Time for Remembrance

June is always a major time of remembrance at our house with birthdays and wedding anniversaries. This week in the news were some other major remembrances as the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe in WW2 was highlighted by President Obama's visit to that site. Since my dad went ashore there a day or two after the initial landing and went through a number of battles all the way to Berlin, D-Day is one that I always remember (also because of my wife's birthday!). This same week was also the 20th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square protests in China, causing us to reflect on the many changes that have taken place in China since that sad time.



This year is also the 25th anniversary of the death of Francis Schaeffer. It is hard to believe it has been that long. As I reviewed his book Genesis in Space and Time this week I was reminded again how very much his writing impacted the way I view the world, especially how I view the culture we live in. His writing on abortion, the arts, movies, literature, politics, and sexuality all caused to me to think more critically about how these things either reflect or deny Christianity. He more than anyone else I have read made me understand what it means to have a Christian 'worldview'.



One comment that I noticed more in this re-visit of his book than I did at the time was his comment that the church is by-and-large a middle-class institution in the western world, appealing to neither workers not intellectuals very much. That is quite unlike in Jesus' time or in other parts of the world like Africa, where the poor and working folks are the predominant members of Christian churches. Certainly as I was growing up the poor and the workers were all that I knew of the church, since that is where I was. As our prosperity has grown, we somehow have lost touch with the poor this country. I am not exactly sure how or what it means, but it is a concern.



As for the intellectuals, I think that they have always been a very small part of the church. Just as with the rich, I think they find it harder than the poor to view anyone but themselves as being in control, including God. Perhaps I should say 'we' instead of 'they'. It is a good time to remember my roots and not get too impressed by my own prosperity and education, which are enormous blessings that I should be more thankful for.

Poetry

I have little patience for poetry. Most of what passes for poetry these days, and for art in general, seems to me to be mostly a rejection of the idea of art and poetry, rejecting form and structure as much as possible. In many cases, it rejects the very concept of truth rather than giving an insight into truth. Yet in the latest issue of First Things a poem caught my attention. That is hard to do. They publish some poetry in every issue, and most of it is really quite bad, but every year or so one will catch my attention. This one is quoted in full below (so it is obviously short). It is entitled 'I Did Not Come to Call the Righteous' and listsMatthew 9:9-13 in the subtitle. Here it is:

We ninety-nine obedient sheep:

we workers hired at dawn's first peep;

we faithful sons who strive to please;

forsaking prodigalities;

we virgins who take pains to keep;

our lamps lit, even in our sleep;

we law-abiding Pharisees;

we wince at gospels such as these.

-Julie Stoner

The allusions to so many various passages of Scripture, and the gathering of them together so succinctly, caught my attention. Being a person who values doing things right, following the rules, it pokes me in a place I need to poked every so often. Art should do that: give you a view of reality, of truth, that you need to see but often don't. My thanks to Julie Stoner for this reminder of the truth!