For The Romans 13 Crowd

Because it is a crowd but you've likely just haven't put that together yet.

I've been sitting on this one for a hot minute, knowing full well that at the beginning of anything to do with Covid restrictions, that they were going to be called legal, while entirely otherwise, and that the kind of legality we have nowadays, is starkly different than the kinds of legality when Romans 13 was penned by Paul and the Holy Ghost. 

Those direct comparisons can't be made. Between the two time periods at the very least. And of all the times we needed to have a little nuance, this was one of them. 

When the scriptures talk about rendering to Ceasar and submitting to authorities and honoring the governor, they are talking about a military dictatorship in practice. That's what Rome was. The Jews and Samaritans didn't vote Pontius Pilate in or Herod for that matter.

The government of the Romans was not a representational legislative assembly with a senate to back them up. It was a much more primitive version of the system we have. Like a Commodore 64 is to your latest MacBook.

Most importantly in all of this, is the nuanced Latin and Canadian verb and noun comparisons. Specifically, in the complete absence of a charter of inalienable rights given to all citizens of Rome. One that is a higher authority in and of itself to the government representatives they could elect. Rome did not afford this kind of power or authority to its citizens. Canada does. At least on paper.

That Charter guarantees things and if not heeded to, damns people to the kinds of tyranny that were put down by military force before it was enacted. 

These rights and freedoms are, in fact and comparison, the Caesar we render our lives to. The governors we are to be submissive to and the authority over us at this time that was ordained by God himself is us in this case. Being a good citizen and making use of rights afforded to you is a part of God's plan for the parliamentary democracy you are in. Because just as it bade well for Christians to be politically diplomatic and non-violent with the Romans, it pays to be an active voter in Canada. And you only get to do that legally by the charter of rights that recognizes that freedom and right.

It's God who wants you in His divine will to be able to peaceably assemble and to believe, think and practice the religion of your choosing. 

It's his divine will that our American neighbors have the right to bear arms as well. 

And the reason I know it's His divine will for these things isn't because of special revelation or a specific portion of scripture that deals with attending a modern-day mosque or owning a .50 cal rifle in California. No no no. It's because if the Bible talks about a generalized principle, then that principle is part of a greater part of human experience and needs to be contextualized to the reader's time while holding a principled commandment from the writer's time. We don't have lampstands and talents and tares or any number of specific things the Bible mentions about day-to-day life. But we do have principles. Or at least we did at one point. Principles that a reader could pick up from scripture and exegete into their lives and sermons. Principles that were bigger than the text itself because they spoke to the desires and will of God throughout the scriptures.

This reader-writer thing got glossed over pretty quick when churches needed a way to get out of the direct fire in the first few months of Covid. We are some of the last few places where large groups of people meet for a purpose that isn't controlled or taxed by the government here in Canada. And we're tax-exempt as nonprofits. I knew they were going to close down churches eventually what I didn't know was if that was going to be by force or fiat.

A fiat church closure was members taking a scripture that instructed civilians under a military dictator, in Roman-occupied Palestine, as if our Premiers and Prime ministers had an ounce of the authority a Caesar would have had or any of his delegates.

A forced church was one where the members knew they lived in a parliamentary democracy. One where their representatives literally represent them in parliament and provincially in the legislatures. One where, in the case of the then overused word unprecedented emergency, the authorities could act and ask of their constituents unprecedented things that it normally and legally couldn't. But when the precedent of covid being uncontrollable by government actions became a reality and the representatives stopped representing them, then the situation changed. 

Not the rules mind you. The law was still the law. But under the Canadian Charter of rights, no law, which we as Christians would be bound by our faith to follow, could be made to abridge, abrogate or amend the rights recognized in said charter.

So it did not matter if a church stayed open in defiance. They were obeying Romans 13 as much as a church that closed because both were afforded that right through the same document that is supposed to empower the people before and through elections above the government that represents them in parliament. And both those perspectives were part of God's will for us to obey authority structures that he ordains to be placed over us, which does include how much of that authority is ours to rule over ourselves. 

The inherent blindside of any democratic system is that eventually, sinners get to a majority position and vote/emergency decree that it stays that way. 

What then Christians. When your faith is outlawed will you turn yourselves in like Peter did in Acts 29

Oh, wait. That's right. That portion of scripture doesn't really exist and neither do we as modern-day Christians if Peter didn't evade the local law enforcement simply wanting to make sure things remained firmly in the Pax Romana.

The entire political discourse and movement rest in the hands of an almighty God and on the shoulders of Christ. And for you, Christan, pastor, believer in the slightest. Your job is to worship him before anything else. And to render to your rights what is your rights, and to your God what is your God's.

Because eventually, like all lesser kingdoms, even your rights will oppose Christ's rule.

It's only a majority vote away in the House of Commons. 

The Insufficiency Of Gathering Online

Take a moment and find someone to hug, but first, go get a fishing rod. 

With their consent of course. The last thing we want to do in church or online is to do things against the will of others. Especially with fishing rods.

But find that person and give them a good ole Christian side hug. So you can both face the same way and read this post together. Because you need to be together to do this because we are about to separate you. 

From your shoulder to shoulder side hug take a step apart left and right but keep holding hands. You're still together, right? Of course, you are. You are just in a different position. The position isn't as intimate, but it is still intimate. You likely don't hold hands with just anyone, but you'd likely hold hands with someone you'd be willing to hug and be hugged by. 

Now let go of your hands, are you still together? well, of course, you are. You're just not as intimate. You are together in the same amount of space as before, but you are no longer intimately together, you are just together. 

Now move as far away from each other as possible in the room you are in. If you are in a megachurch this can be a challenge but will prove the point even better I think. Make sure you can still see each other, even if it's across a big auditorium or conference center, but remain in the same room. Are you together? Of course, you are. If you're not then the space that congregations of people gather in can determine whether or not you are in congregation with them. But it doesn't because you and your former hand-holding hugger are still together. 

Now leave the room. Are you together still? No, you are not together anymore. A wall and possible two now separate you. You are separated. You could holler down the hall of the room to speak to each other. communication could still be possible, but togetherness is not. You are separated. 

Return to the hug proximity and now for maximum effect. You'll need a fishing rod. Have one of you hold the reel and one of you hold the hook, with the line between you and the rod adding leverage. 

Welcome to Church Online. Literally.

From hand-holding, proximity are you together, or are you separated? Because you are now connected. and does that make a difference? Will it make a difference in the handhold distance that the rod can reel you in?  Because I imagine it will make more when you corner yourselves oppositely or leave the room. The best part of fishing is the fight to land the ones aiming to get away. To catch. And as churches that aim to be fishers of men. You think we would be familiar enough with fishing to know that fishing is not catching is not caught, and that our tackle might be impressive but a caught fish is a caught fish, and a lure or line or rod is only as good as its ability to bring fish to you. So you can be together with it. 

Because nobody boasts about the fish they've hooked, they boast about fish they've caught. They boast about fish they've landed and eaten and mounted on the wall. But the ones that got away are nothing but vainglory and exaggeration. And the ones that nibbled are nothing more than passing dismissal of details.

1 Corinthians 1:30-31 ESV

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The churches that moved to gathering online did so with a tragic ignorance of how the internet works. Because if distance and fishing line can merely illustrate the difference between together and apart. Then the internet, your church's servers, your congregation's devices, and the thousands of miles of phone lines and fibre-optic cable, must certainly, concretely, keep us apart. Not to mention that what is seen on a video screen is not what is happening on the church stage at the same time. The real life events of the in-person church are translated into computer code at the camera, to be relayed and then retranslated into code that is displayed as a visual representation of what's happening on stage at your screen. With dozens of intermediary points where the information is routed between the two. You are not participating in worship with the people who are in person. You are essentially reading a series of numbers that have taken the form of pixels in as close to real-time as possible. That the reading looks like real-life changes nothing about the act of code being displayed in the font of pixels for you to process as a visual medium. You would not call a written account of what happened at church, church. But the only thing that has changed about the writing down of the events that happened at church was the language that they were written down in. Whether it was English, Hebrew, Python, or C++, it makes no difference. Transcribed religious services are not religious services in and of themselves. No matter how good they look on Facebook live.

The problem is that it looks like we are together when we log into a Livestream of our church and we are on our couch and they are behind the pulpit. But the reality, the one made by God and beholden to him and him alone for definition and control is that we are separated by multiple layers of things that keep us apart. The fact that it looks like we are together, Even that it feels like we are together, is a lie after all is said and done/prerecorded, because we call it one thing and it is another.

What it boils down to is who gets to decide what a thing is or is not. It's basic theology of creation. Is a pastor to camera to screen to congregation chain of connection the same as the air between two people who are about to hold hands and side-hug in a sanctuary? The internet was not created for people to be together. It was created to allow people to be connected when apart. 

Which is only a problem when the church since its inception has been the assembly or gathering of the Christians together, not a technology that connects people when apart. 

What churches did by declaring that online church counts as church, was to call something that they had no part in making both on the human side of the equation or the John 1:3 side, a name that did not mean what it meant. We called something that wasn't church, church, as if that was a call for us to make. And by doing so, sinned. Because anywhere else in scripture when someone said one thing but meant another. It was a sin. This wasn't deception for the preservation of life like in Exo 1:19. this is saying an action as integral as worship is one way when it clearly and demonstrably is another like Acts 5:1-11

What the church could have done when it needed an online church the most was the opposite of an online church. 

There is nothing unbiblical about home churches and in a time of need where it would be dangerous to gather in great numbers. The benefit of living in a time where the internet is a thing is that a father who works hard all week and reads his daily devotions, would not suddenly need to craft sermons for his family on a weekly basis. He could use a recorded sermon for his pastor but not call the watching of that video, church because it wasn't church and worship with his family at church because it was church. House churches and home churches have existed in orthodoxy for centuries. Online church became a widely accepted technical heresy in ignorance of that. What a church's Worship and Arts department produces online for content, could be used by families, forced into house churches by circumstance. Used to facilitate a house church model. Yes, we couldn't gather in the numbers that we could before, but the house church model could have executed massively given the cohort framework it was presented with. Every household could become a missionary to its closest neighbors, inviting them for some of the only human-to-human contact allowed during the pandemic. But what we did almost universally across the board is take the video venue multisite model for churches and apply it as if the venue part of that equation didn't factor into that. 

A video venue multi-site church is still a church because the congregation still meets together to use the live or recorded sermon as part of their assembly. That same model works with home churches but only if it's stated. Saying that from home you are doing the same thing as you were at the multisite's specific location is the same as saying you caught someone else's fish. It's demonstrably false, but we said it as if it were true. 

But there was never a youtube video, a Livestream, a pre-recorded easter or Christmas eve special service that constituted church during this time. The same way a person in another room while fish hooked by their distant side hugger could not say they are together while being reeled in. 

The fisherman might feel what they have hooked but what's hooked is a mystery until it's taken a hold of or at the very least seen close to the boat. Until the size and species of the fish are held by the fisherman, its strength is overcome by effort and the rejoicing of those in attendance with the fish, The catch means nothing. It's as fake as the fish you can catch online too. Made of code and not of the substance of souls.

2 Corinthians 3:3 ESV

And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Consilience, Covid, And Youth Ministry

Definition of consilience:

The linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a comprehensive theory.

These things shouldn't be related in a meaningful way. Other than the light one shone on the other during some of the darkest days the western teenager had faced in some time. But Covid and youth ministry both showcase a curious pattern that has caused me to stop and think recently. And I'd like to take a stab at explaining it.

When I was a youth pastor I ran the math on how many kids were a part of an active youth program in the town my church was in, and how many kids were in the age demographic of all youth programs offered to the same demographic. When I mapped the two numbers together I got a fairly simple graph that I encourage all youth pastors to do for their own ministry at least once. Between my youth group, 4H club, and the Mormon church's youth program, 1-2% of the town's youth was involved in a faith-based or faith adjacent (being located in a church but not for gospel-oriented purposes) youth program. My goal, until I was asked to leave for an overtly evangelical method and practice, was to get that number to something above 3% by aiming at 10% and to have that 10% be because of my church. 

Long story short it didn't work, but the percentages stuck with me and I could never figure out why. They seemed important but I couldn't make it add up to something meaningful.

And while as a general rule I advise never doing the math on any given topic. Here, the numbers point to something significant. The numbers being and behaving similarly but from a different source and angle. That angle is churches that didn't enforce the covid mandates. 

In a different city, there were a few hundred churches, and in the midst of a global pandemic, and among a long list of unprecedented things, a precedented number came up again. 1-2%.

Consilience, as read above, is when two sets of principles link, forming a comprehensive theory. And somewhere between the small rural church youth pastorate and the large city church attender, the consilience of the average attendance of a youth group and an anti mandate church linked up like Mennonite's at a barn dance. Why? Because God is gracious, that's why.

By any rational metric youth, ministries don't work. The money and time spent on them don't add up to a statistical change in the demographic of teens that feed into them. Take your youth group's average attendance and then take a list of high schools and middle schools represented there and divide the two numbers. Are you making a difference? The math would suggest no, but we all know what an ounce of salt does to a pound of hamburger. Where is God's grace? It's in the making sufficient of His strength through our weakness. Or did you want to call decades of population parody-based youth min? Yes, your youth ministry used to be 20 kids and now it's 40 kids. Did your church grow at that time too? If it did, you didn't grow your ministry, your ministry grew with your church. A very different thing than you being the reason your youth ministry is above and beyond what a natural population demographic would forecast for any given church in your area. 

God's grace is that even though by metrics a ministry might be counted as a net loss, by his desires his will is still done. Your baptisms still count, your salvation stories still mean names in the book of life. and the worship that happens at youth during worship time still magnifies the name of Christ. God's grace in providing for a representative youth ministry is just as holy and wonderful as it would be for an explosive youth ministry. One that turned a whole graduating class into Baptists or baptized 4-6% of a city's grade nines. But to conflate the two of both being successful in the same way, would be questionable. Which is why I'm asking the questions. Because what really counts in youth ministry is that God's mission is being served and Christ's gospel is being preached. What counts is that the church is being the church.

Because of all the things we really needed to nail down, the church being the church was on the top of that list during this pandemic. Because what church looked like as it took a very drastic set of circumstances and made some drastic changes in the last few years. Zoom church did not exist as orthodoxy before covid. Now it questionably does. That's important. Because if it wasn't church, God's grace could compensate for it. And we would never know that what we were doing was a technical failure spared by an omnipotent and gracious God. We would never know we were sinners saved by grace. The baptisms would still count, so would the service to the poor, but we would have and at the very least could have been not doing church at all. Doing what we thought was a missional gospel-centered effort because it felt right and it was representationally valid. 

The consilience of 1% of churches in the area that refused to change what was orthodox pre-covid. Refusing to gather exclusively online, refusing to worship in masks, refusing to stop meeting together, refusing to hum quietly, refusing to render to AHS what was not AHS's, lines up rather perfectly with the 1% of youth in an average youth group, but in the opposite direction.

The genuine faith of that 1% was never in question but the methods of what the 99% were up to sure were. If 99 kids out of 100 aren't finding Jesus at your youth ministry can you call what the 1% was doing a success? You could in their youth groups. In their churches. But that means what the 99% are doing might just be a failure. Might just be something God's grace has to cover and compensate for. Something that the efforts of the 1% can't touch because of their weakness and their need for Christ's strength. 

Mapping success in ministry to technicalities is painful because it confronts us with this weakness. It means that numbers matter because those numbers map to people. It means that 99% of churches not doing real church and practicing an insufficient ecclesiology were wrong. Not winsome, not timely, not agreeable, or peaceable, wrong. And that 1% of churches doing the opposite were right.

How do you fix this?

I rightly do not know. but I can take a guess at the youth group side of this consilience. 

A youth pastor makes enough in a year to fund a new high school teacher in waiting through an educational degree about every two years. What if 200 churches in a city all sent their youth pastor to college for a teaching degree and kept them employed afterward until they secured a job in a school within their church's proximity for the youth group. An urban mission to which the likes of any city had never seen. There aren't 200 teaching positions available at any given point but an army of 200 teachers to be in waiting for that potential mission field would be a linchpin for the gospel's progress in any city. Not because it's a biblically-based method or because it's proven. But because it maps to what is already happening in that field from the other direction. Anti-Christian and post-Christian teachers are the norms for most high schools by hook and crook and opposition to a biblical youth age 13-18 is also. But declaring that 1-2 hours a week at youth group, is somehow going to compete with 7-9 hours a day at school. From people who deny our faith and actively teach against it at times, is laughably naive, and why God's grace rests so heavily on our youth programs.

That naivety will not change the fact that lives were changed at your last youth retreat, that souls were saved after the worship night and that students did grow deeper in their faith after bible study. But it will mask the fact that a 1% ministry is statistically insignificant to a population unless it does in fact change the population. Unless it is in fact salt or light to the world and its ground beef

So when 1% of the church at large held fast, stayed open, and suffered scorn, prison, and wrath. We at very least need to ask if that 1% is making a difference. If that 1% is working.

When we do that bit of math, we encounter a troubling statistic indeed. 

The 1% of churches that refused to be mandated and restricted, almost all, doubled in size. Saw growth on a level most churches only dream of. By every metric church's used to use for success pre covid as well. They mapped their strategy to the realities of the God they worshiped and didn't let lesser magistrates change how they rendered anything to Him. And consilience comes back to echo that choice as every church that chose to close or augment or downright alter their worship during this challenging time, used those metrics to call themselves a success before the first lockdown ever started. 

Matthew 9:9-13

English Standard Version

Jesus Calls Matthew

As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.  And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.  And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”  But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

How many Tax collectors started going to churches that remained open. How many prostitutes to churches that they did not have to hide their face in. How many adulterers and fornicators made it to church in person while others gathered exclusively online, right next to Ashely Madison dot com and Tinder

Maybe we'll never know or be truly known for it. 

But you have to admit. It does line up nicely. 

On Arbitrary Righteousness And Truckers

You can't say you tried to save a drowning child while standing on the side of the deep end with the intent to swim out to save them.

No amount of intention saves a drowning child. It takes a body that knows how to swim. A body to dive. A body to take hold of another, and a body with strength to pull both of them out of the deep end to safety.

There is nothing arbitrary about our bodies and the things they do in real life.

So as we see the arbitrary dropping of mandates. Mandates about our bodies and how we cover and move them. As we see masks come off of children in the deep ends of our society, while they stay on shallow adults until March 1st. We have to ask ourselves. If we've been drowning all along. In a deep end of best intentions and dire consequences.

What most of this boils down to is consistency and compliance. We were told that if we all consistently wore masks the virus would be stopped. But when we asked about the consistency of the masks themselves we were given a perverse sort of freedom that we liked because we were a perverse kind of people. The deep end of mask use doesn't care if you prefer to wear a bandana or if you're going to double mask. It knows what works and what doesn't because it wasn't always as subject to public malpractice as our current lifeguards and current drowning victims are today. 

When multiple levels of swimmers are all thrown into the deep end it becomes drastically clear who's making it to the edge of the pool and not. 

A seasoned and fit (read, fit tested) silicone half-face respirator, with fresh p100 particulate cartridges makes it to the edge of the pool from a powerful dive to the center. With no thought about the danger of deep water or the fact that the lifeguard was busy doing poolside politics at the time. He wears a speedo because it reduces drag and is muscle-bound and sleek. Most importantly he does what he is visibly made to do. The silicone half-face respirator is not arbitrary in the least. Everything he does in the water is intentional. 

This is why when the lifeguard said that you have to be able to swim to enter the deep end he dove in because clearly, he could swim. But as he turns around, towel in hand to see who else was in the pool, he's faced with an awful scene.

A non-valved n95 is flailing around in an attempt to breaststroke to the edge. He's making progress but not making things enjoyable because he's splashing around too much. He's in trendy oversized board shorts that restrict his movement and make it hard to do the swimming he thought he could do. He's not drowning but he's also not swimming if you want to call what the half-faced respirator was doing swimming.

A blue surgical mask is screaming at the top of her lungs as she clings to and helps drown a cloth mask in unison. They both obviously thought that since they were together, the deep end wouldn't be so scary. They are both in modest but still appropriate two-piece tankinis that make the wearer look like their wearing a one-piece bathing suit when secretly they are actually wearing a two-piece. The scandal of it all. They match even coordinate with the half-faced respirator's speedo. But looking the part and actually being the part are different things. So they flail as drowning people tend to do.

A pair of bandanas talks politics from the edge of the pool. Because they know that's what the lifeguard is doing too. One floating as if he's drowning trying to get the attention of the lifeguard. Still busy with other non-life-saving duties. They are also wearing speedos but not for drag in the water. they are wearing them to show off to the tankinis and to point out the ridiculousness of swimming in general.

And a face shield is off in the shallow end claiming he's about to drown with the inability to stand up. wearing one of those floaty belts you see in aquafit classes and kiddy pools. 

"Who let these people swim?" Says the half-face respirator. "They can barely float or don't care." He's troubled by the arbitrariness of it all. "And where's the Lifeguard?"

He's still on the phone talking with his boss, looking very busy. Not his real boss, the one who actually pays for things. Not a head lifeguard, but the Rec Center's biggest donor. They wanted a return on the investments he's made in the pool and is very happy so many people are in the water under the careful watch of the lifeguard.

The subtle unease and even anger you feel to governments arbitrarily dropping any mandate. A feeling you have because of poll number, popular discourse, truck convoys, or science that can't be scrutinized by scientists is called a conscience. And what we are learning as a society is that consciences can only be kept underwater for so long. They float to the top like a cork and can save people from drowning in falsehoods if you let them. 

You are right in thinking that the dropping of these mandates is arbitrary because their picking up was just as arbitrary. There was no scrutiny to them but there was authority behind them. Blind authority. Almost no one in Alberta would have been able to tell you who their provincial health minister or chief medical officer was before the pandemic. Unless they worked with these people, an individual may have been aware of their position but never knew their name or political leanings or current policy for the kinds of mandates that would be enacted upon them on the publics' behalf. 

You know who a cop is by their badge and uniform. By their cars and by their flashing lights. Their authority shows up in a very un-arbitrary way when challenged or needed. The same thing goes with firemen and lifeguards, masters of their realms of authority. But the health ministers had to be lofted to their positions to mandate healthy living. A task they did sweet nothing about for over the last few decades as obesity rates skyrocketed and smoking got a newer high-tech version of nicotine to pander to young people in vaping. The public knew about health professionals and ignored them all the same because fast food is well marketed and big mac's beat carrot sticks every day of the week in public discourse. 

But then, when the threat seemed real enough, medical professionals were given the kind of authority that only those who contend with real threats usually have. They were given the authority to mandate actions that they never could have persuaded people to do in the first place, which is why their mandates failed. Like a lifeguard who can walk around a pool and sit in a chair and watch children play in the shallow end. 90% of their job can be done by an amateur, but the 10% that requires a trained professional, can't. Medical officers are not lawmakers. Not people who deal in freedoms and restrictions, not voted in or able to be voted out. They were just as out of place as the dealing lifeguard who let everyone into the deep end. 

A cop persuades you to follow the law by the threat of enforcement and deadly force.

A firefighter persuades you of his ability to fight fires in a Nomex suit and a truck that can pump water at 2000 liters per minute.

But a chief medical officer with no social clout and a representational parliamentary elected premier behind them exercises no real authory. It's is the societal equivalent of someone saying their dad could beat your dad up. Which only works until you find out that their dad is a wimp and remember yours is a trucker. Then, all the time you spent listening to their false authority and arbitrary power, seems like the theft that it was in the first place. 

Romans 13:5 ESV

Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.

Proverbs 16:12 ESV

It is an abomination to kings to do evil, for the throne is established by righteousness.

If you want to feel good about the dropping of these mandates then you need the kind of righteousness that would never trespass a charter right to keep someone safe out of principle. The same way a lifeguard would never let someone convince them they could swim from persuasion alone. They would want to see some skill before they let them in the deep end. They would want to know something works before they say everyone should have to do it. 

But if you feel bad because you can see the double standards now, you can see the authority not being used correctly, you can see that persuasion of good intentions wasn't just absent but never even an option. There is no end to that feeling until the people causing them are arbitrarily removed from power. 

And that is a sinking feeling if I ever had one, because power is never relinquished arbitrarily. 

When Loving Your Neighbor Backfires And Breaks

This is not a post about Covid, it's about sex.

So at one point during the last few years the pulpits of the church, the term love your neighbor was applied to masks.

Now the masks in question are simple enough to understand while the loving your neighbor bit might be a bit more complicated. Because at one point any mask was both allowed and in fact loving your neighbor by wearing it. A cartridge filter full-faced respirator was loving your neighbor, a bandana was loving your neighbor. The cartoon bedsheet recycled handmade unit your grandma made for you was loving your neighbor. The message was clear and the practice was near orthodox. Put something on your face, love your neighbor. 

Simples.

But then the creeping admittance of the quality of masks began. Truly it's been there all along. We all knew masks were a spectrum of good and better. But now better is getting put into the spotlight, and we get to see if it's the kind of good loving your neighbor is. The very second we switch from any mask counts to any mask better than this counts, you stop loving your neighbor and you start protecting yourself. We are about to switch from an act of preservation to an act of self-preservation. You see you can make the argument and demonstrate the usefulness of almost any mask stopping your sneeze from reaching your neighbor, but an N95 stops their sneeze from getting to you. The half-face respirator does the same and a hazmat suit which is the end of this spectrum treats the person on the inside and the person outside very differently. 

This switch erects a fence between the neighbors we loved. Makes an us and a them and instead of insisting we are all in this together with good intentions, we become all in this at the same time with some very distinct barriers between us. But then again, what makes better neighbors than good fences?

Can you love your neighbor by protecting yourself first?

Is it not love when you forego the protection they may not have? 

Is love being equally unprepared, like a bandana in close contact, we could use the greater personal protection, but at the cost of protecting ourselves and no longer our neighbor.

The problem the church faces is that we applied a theology of grace to an object of wrath. We said something was beautiful when in fact it was disposable and contaminated. And that contamination was never dealt with. It found its way into every part of our lives under the auspice of love when in fact it was nothing more than darkness. We believed in a thing called love.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 ESV

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends...

We were not patient when we took masks that don't protect us from a virus as if they did so we could do the things we had done before.

We were not kind by excluding people who would not wear these inefficient masks.

We boasted of their effectiveness, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

We arrogantly compared them to clothes as if masks were a matter of pants in public.

We rudely insisted on this way or nothing in our churches. Well, not nothing, you could always visit us online.

Don't get me started on irritability and masks.

Best leave resentment out too. 

Did we rejoice in wrongdoing? Well, We called a thing that doesn't work a thing that did. It's a grey and troubled water that rejoicing in would be questionable, to say the least. We most certainly did not rejoice in the truth. 

We believed a lot of things, bore a lot of things, hoped for and endured a lot of things, all while wearing these masks. Asking ourselves if this would ever end. 

At one point we decided that loving your neighbor was what we were going to do. And we would have done it if not for our approach. We tried to love with a broken idea of love, of saying one thing but meaning another. Ignorance is only bliss until truth shows up. And truth is about to show up in every box of N95's that will actually stop this bug from infecting people who wear them. Just not the way we've lovingly said masks would from the get-go.

Why this is a problem is because of the dichotomy of actual vs. real protection and barriers in the practice of the Christian faith. Because if loving your neighbor was possible with a barrier that doesn't stop the virus from being transmitted, then how on God's green earth are you going to argue a condom doesn't make sex, not sex by being an actual barrier between offending sexual body parts. Especially if a non-Christian or a Christian for that matter says sex with a condom isn't real sex, the same way we said loving your neighbor with a mask that didn't work was love.

"You can't conflate the two things, Mikey" They'll say.

Oh really? If only there were scriptures that talk about actually touching things.

Exodus 25:10-15 ESV

The Ark of the Covenant

“They shall make an ark of acacia wood. Two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and outside shall you overlay it, and you shall make on it a molding of gold around it. You shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet, two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it. You shall make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold. And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry the ark by them. The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it.

And...

Samuel 6:6-7 ESV

And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.

Tell me, does your understanding of the Biblical instruction and definition of extramarital and pre-marital sexual sin, talk about the contact of genitals or orgasms. Because I can guarantee if you said wearing a mask was loving your neighbor, you think it's orgasms and can't defend it from your understanding of the Bible. The very same way David lost Uzzah's life by putting the Ark of the Covenant on a cart instead of using the poles that were meant for it. And the reason why is because you thought intentions of safety through an ineffectual mask wouldn't pave a road to hell. 

When does sex become sex? We were told at youth group that asking for a line was the problem in and of itself. That knowing how far was too far was the wrong heart to have about something as serious as sex. But now in the age of infections and breakthrough cases and contact tracing and jabs, We find ourselves ironically preoccupied with how close people got and whether or not bodily fluids were transmitted. 

Matthew 15:8-9 ESV

“‘This people honors me with their lips,

    but their heart is far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

    teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

The masks were never about safety, they were about principles, and you didn't have any. You had emotions. Emotions won't save you or your neighbor. But they will make you feel good like all orgasms tend to do. The truth of the matter is that it wasn't the false notions of sex with protection that made you sinful it was the lust. And your anger at the unvaccinated made you their murderers, heaven knows the virus wasn't statistically likely to do it for you. And now you are faced with the slowly encroaching problem of real barriers and the compromises you'll make to use them. The looming threat of N95's protection on the shelves beside cherry-flavored permission to sin. 

How on earth are you going to navigate a world where other people can make you sick because of their lack of PPE? How will Christians maintain their witness and love their neighbor when they will and can asymptomatically give them a disease? How do we run a kids program without knowing if everyone is vaccinated? Look at all this due diligence, stacking up like mint and cumin. Eventually, someone is going to take it personally, and get sick personally, and is it really the worst thing in the world to be sued as a Christian for giving another your cough?

1 Corinthians 6:6-8 ESV

but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!

Or maybe, just maybe, the answer isn't finding ways to sin but finding payments for it. We sing songs about being desperate for the grace of Christ. At least we did in the '90s. And we're lost right now, like 1 sheep out of 99. The only person who is going to save us is Jesus. And he's not going to do it through an AHS update or a vaccine or a mask.

He's going to do it with a cross.

Everything else we do is filthy rags.

Isaiah 64:5-7 ESV

You meet him who joyfully works righteousness,

    those who remember you in your ways.

Behold, you were angry, and we sinned;

    in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?

We have all become like one who is unclean,

    and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

We all fade like a leaf,

    and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

There is no one who calls upon your name,

    who rouses himself to take hold of you;

for you have hidden your face from us,

    and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.

Godless Thoughts On "The Social Dilemma"

Like a previous post, I did on another social shockwave found here, I sat down to watch The Social Dilemma this weekend. This time with my teenager in tow. Determined to make a decent review of the film. If, for nothing else, than it being a decent film that is in need of one.

This won't be just a paragraph or two of high praise for the hard-hitting investigative journalism in the piece. As much as the film is worth-while like all works of art, even this one has some problems with it. And those problems in this case especially are godless.

As the film started with the awkward first takes of the tech experts that noticed the social dilemma, I started to notice a common theme among their joint worries. They all could see the problems facing them, because of them, even in the recognition of the power and magnitude of the good some of them had created. Still, they all seemed blissfully unaware of the origin of the problems they were seeing in the rise of The Social Dilemma. That problem is a complete lack of sin forward theology. 

I have no doubt that each of the people interviewed has some concept of good and evil. All humans do, skewed or not. But the way in which these tech geniuses and investors stumbled at the question of "Who is responsible for this problem" was telling. Maybe the director was doing this on purpose, if he was, it was brilliant. But when asked about the issue they all drew confused and complicated stares, like children caught by their father in the garden asking "Who told you, you were naked?", with the answer being themselves. A knowledge of sin and the savior from it, changes your use of the internet. It shows when you ask people about it and the thought of that dichotomy doesn't cross their minds or lips. The answer to who is responsible for, not just these problems but all problems online, is us. Or rather, us sinners.

The second problem is that this wasn't a fact by fact, idea by idea exposition on the problem itself. It was a narrative, in fact, three of them if you were looking closely. You had the story of the problem itself from Tristan Harris's perspective, for the most part. The story of the family trying to break their phone addictions at the request of the matriarch. Finally the story of Ben's avatar self and the three faces of A.I ( Advertising A.I. / Engagement A.I. / Growth A.I.)

This isn't a problem when addressing this issue. Most sermons do this these days. Weaving narratives to support a fact exposition or a truth in a long-form of media isn't a horrible thing or even a dishonest thing. However, it can be if it's not explicit. When we watch an episode of the Trials of Nature, David Attenborough skillfully overlays his narrative over the scenes of majestic wildlife being displayed for us. We get a hint of David's opinion of what a Lion might be thinking as he hunts and kills the gazelle, what the lion's motivations are, and aren't in contrast. But these are overlaid with the lion actually hunting and eating said gazelle in the video. 

We don't get the gazelle or the lion with the Social Dilemma. What we get is a simplification of every fact and facet of these narrative's lives. This is understandable for Harris's perspective. Trying to wrap our head around something like this would be hard so to achieve that he simplifies his years of experience and first-hand knowledge for us to understand. But the other two narratives are telling in a way that finds a new corner of godlessness to roost in. The perfect, multicultural, nuclear, family and their teenage and pre-teen woes is a tired trope, so when it's adjusted to make the son so susceptible to online influence that he joins an extreme centrist protest rally because of failing boy-girl social skills. This alone should be something to make you think.

Not only because the concept of an extreme center political movement would be hard to find in real life, but rather that it depends on the other side of the screen to happen. A screen populated by a three-man team of evil and heartless characters. The A.I.'s were a brilliant piece of work but made decisions and calls based on Ben's activity or lack thereof online that only a human would. Moral judgments and decisions that only a person with a theology of sin would make. They were the cartoon angel and devil on bens shoulders. His electronic conscience if you will. And make no mistake their black clothing and then contrast beige and soft-voiced singular replacement at the end of the movie was intentional. 

Algorithms can be made to make those decisions but again we come to the godlessness of the presumptions of this film. Those algorithms aren't actually doing that. Their programmers are. Sinners cause the evil we find online because sin is where evil comes from. it's not a single-minded trio of programming eccentricities doing this evil it's a coder in silicon valley who did. And who is that coder getting his virtues and vices from? When God is absent from the story, it usually means the Devil is writing it. 

By this point in the film when Ben is getting arrested at a rally and we are finally seeing the truly dark side of the vanilla Web. A light sprinkling of bitter chocolate on a quickly melting sundae. Some really dark sweetness is avoided like the silent killers they are. And for the life of me, I can't tell why. 

This movie didn't come close to the issue of online porn, not once! In all the narrative back and forth the teenage boy somehow finds an extreme political movement to join post friendzone before he finds Pornhub. Not only is this not realistic, by its selective avoidance, but the film also skirts an actual problem that is being faced on these social networks. 

The amount of teenage porn that transfers on these networks and on their devices, teens sending pictures of themselves and others if they get a hold of them is staggering. This hot button topic isn't even grazed, neither is the real-time abuse of these connections for even worse crimes like human trafficking and child sex exploitation. Entire swaths of "wrong" exchange for a fake "right" narrative or two, that can't be compared and hence aren't scrutinized for truth. 

Which brings me to my final problem. That is the wholesale avoidance of the partiality found on these social networks. To show that these social networks somehow exist with such control and algorithmic manipulation as only an after effect of the humanized algorithms is blatantly ignorant (or knowing of, if I'm right) about the controversial topic of online censorship. Everyone from the ground floor workers to CEO's of these social networks has been called out for this. From online comments to U.S. Senate hearings. All about the topic of Online censorship. Ideological bias runs deep on these platforms and to have a documentary not mention this topic once, but insist through a series of narratives that the algorithm is the biggest problem, is not just wrong, it's godless. A kind of partiality that doesn't recognize it's own trappings. 

By the end of the film, I realized what I was looking at, not a single-sided view of the issues, but a half blind stumbling into the real moral issues of the dilemma. One we face as a socially connected race of humans. We're slowly becoming and chasing the dream of heaven but doing so with human means. In heaven, we will be truly known as we will truly know. Online we are known by that which we edit and filter and exposed for what we actually are in our actions and deeds (all it takes is the latest data breach or hack.) In heaven, there will be no sin only virtue. Online we can be any kind of sinful we want, so long as we can find our community to call it a virtue with. 

The social dilemma isn't a problem of man and machine interacting in sub-optimal ways. It's an ever more accurate vision of Heaven, just without Jesus involved. Which is no heaven at all.

What every social network needs is more Christians being Christians. Acting as if God's will would be done online as it is in heaven. (Shameless book plug I know.) Ben's political leanings could have been challenged by weekly attendance at a church. His family's struggle to limit phone use blessed by a prayer shared around the table instead of politics and rules for the sake of rules. Unashamed and unafraid Christian friends to challenge Ben's involvement and posting online extreme centrist groups and posts. And Christian communities to be involved with where is teenage romantic affections could exist and be directed to godly partners of the opposite sex. Both online and offline.

The social dilemma isn't just a problem of humans interacting online. It's a problem of Christians not interacting with humans online. 

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. 

Matthew 5:13-16 ESV

 

The Need Of Theology In The Fog

 

One of my favourite writers often says that for most writers themselves, it's not a matter of being able to write but rather having something to say. 

As a Christian author, I've struggled around this problem for a couple years now. Not in the way you would struggle against an opponent or a physical circumstance. Like a mountain or dense forest. But like one struggles in a fog. Able to run full tilt in any direction, but foolish to do so. 

That same author is doing something profound through his platform these days, he's bringing an ancient philosophy school to the modern light and really hitting it out of the park with it too. Peoples lives are being changed and for the better. All from him having a thing to write about. And what I have noticed is that I too have an ancient way of thinking that verifiably could help people like the other author does, but seems to flounder in the marketplaces and popular discourse. There is something odd about Christian books and how we have segregated them away to places only Christians would find them. 

With rare exception, the world of Christian books seems to be few and far between unless surrounded by Christians or directed to Christians. We do not have an apologetic voice loud enough for the market that isn't already coloured with the assumptions of a Christian audience after the book release.

What would a Christian book about sex look like if not meant for the saint but rather the sinner? Not just an extra thick copy of the KJV lobbed at our view of their perversion, but a book that starts with gospel aimed at truth with "compromise" being it's the only victim. Christians seem to be really good at writing book for Christians by Christians but I'm not so sure about writing books about Christianity for Non-Christians. Gospel centred prose and research on everything from the bedroom to the boardroom.  

We believe we have the distilled truth of an almighty God when it comes to everything that claims the New York Times bestsellers title every day the list is refreshed. Business, sex, management, and money all owned by the same God who gave us the gospel. In the fog of Literature, where opinions are as dense as anything we might find in the wild, there is a light that has existed for centuries. Ancient wisdom, hope, and joy to break like the dawn over a misty valley where everything is cool and in need of said warmth. As we watch the world change and struggle in its own fog, of political turmoil and cultural decay, we have that same light to shed on others. perhaps we just need saints to start turning that light on when and where it's needed. 

What would it look like to write books for the world, from our response to the gospel, with the truth of the scriptures, for the world? In but not of as the gospel of John reads. 

John 17:14-19

English Standard Version

14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

I for one plan to find out.