Betrayal

Ah, how the heart is bent towards self-righteousness! Even criminals look down on other criminals. That's what happened in a strange story from Spain. According to the First Thoughts blog a 64-year-old man in the city of Jaén reported a home burglary. The victim, who happened to coach a youth soccer team, listed several electronic appliances as stolen.

Days later, police received an anonymous call from a payphone. It was the burglar, informing them that he had left three videotapes in a brown envelope under a parked car. Apparently, the stolen tapes were evidence that the soccer coach was also a criminal. The thief included a note stating that he wanted the police to do their job and "put that (expletive) in prison for life." Nine days after the burglary, the police arrested the soccer coach.

The article concludes: "There is a well-worn adage that evangelism is one beggar telling another where to find bread. (But) so often, I live out my Christian faith more like a criminal telling the cops where to find the crooks. This should not be. When I find myself picking up the phone to report that others have fallen short, may I instead speak the words of another thief: When you come into your kingdom, remember me (Luke 23:42).

Michael Meyden, a 57-year-old father was sentenced to two years in prison for spiking fruit smoothies with a prescription sedative during a sleepover, in an attempt to make his daughter and her three friends go to bed. After Meyden dosed the girls, two of them blacked out, leading the third girl to text her mother in a panic, leading to the discovery of the incident. The girls were taken to Randall Children’s Hospital where they tested positive for benzodiazepine. Meyden pleaded guilty to three counts of causing another person to ingest a controlled substance, a felony.

The three 12-year-old victims and their mothers spoke in court, expressing their deep sense of betrayal and lasting harm.

One girl said, “Adults are not people I can simply trust anymore. They are people who scare me and make me think twice: What if they were to hurt me the same way as Mr. Meyden?”

Another girl, whose best friend is Meyden’s daughter, tearfully stated, “I trusted him because he was my best friend’s dad. He abused that trust.”

The third girl directly addressed Meyden, saying, “I am disgusted by the look of your face and your actions and all that you have done. You are horrible and I will always hate you for what you have done.”

“You played Russian roulette with my child’s life,” one mother told Meyden. She detailed how her daughter, “barely five feet tall and on a good day 70 pounds soaking wet,” had dangerously high levels of the drug in her system.

Another mother condemned Meyden’s behavior, stating, “No decent parent feels the need to drug their own child and her friends. No decent parent puts their hands on drugged and unconscious young girls without nefarious intent.”

Meyden explained he had spiked the smoothies because he wanted the girls to sleep so he could rest, but admitted he was overly fixated on getting them to bed. “My whole life is destroyed,” he lamented. Judge Ann Lininger acknowledged his remorse but emphasized the severe impact of his actions, telling him he had “created some tremendous wreckage through your decisions.” She praised the victims for their bravery and pursuit of justice, describing them as “strong, articulate young women who experienced an unfathomable injustice.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is an example of how extreme selfishness can lead to behavior that harms others resulting in a dramatic betrayal of trust that children place in those in authority over them such as parents, teachers, or church leaders.

In Fall 2022, the Gas app exploded in popularity among high schoolers, but a vicious, unfounded rumor caused its popularity to nosedive, confounding its founders in the process.

Titled after the internet slang “gas up” which means to flatter someone or give them good feelings, the app allows students to share anonymous compliments with their peers. But mere weeks after it reached No. 1 on the Apple store, rumors began circulating that Gas was being used for sex trafficking.

One user said, “I have a Glock and I’ll come into your house and kill all of you,” said Nikita Bier, the startup entrepreneur who founded Gas. “The messages are very detailed, and they’ll send like 150 of these messages because they’re so angry. We have had emails saying, ‘what you’re doing is disgusting and I’ve reported you to the FBI.’ We get countless messages every day from users about it.”

According to Bier, the rumors intensified after parents, teachers, news reporters, and public safety organizations amplified them without knowing if they were true or not.

One such agency was the police department in Piedmont, Oklahoma, which later had to post a retraction. Piedmont Police Chief Scott Singer later said, “That posting was the result of a post that was forwarded to us, which we later learned to be a bogus posting. As a result, we talked with the CEO of Gas, and we have determined it was a bogus posting. We have removed that from our Facebook page and informed the schools that any postings about that were discovered to be false.”

Bier says, “The app grows on its own, but dealing with the hoax requires a lot of labor.” He’s tried a variety of strategies to counter the misinformation, but it seems none of them are very effective. “The challenge is that you can only fight memes with memes. If it’s not easily screenshotable and exciting it’s not going to get more visibility than the original message.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Nothing can ruin a good situation like poor judgment and unbridled gossiping. As Christians we ought to set an example both by what we say and what we choose NOT to say.

In Delia Owens best-selling book, Where the Crawdads Sing, readers are introduced to a young girl named Kya, living in Barkley Cove, NC. Known to locals as "Marsh Girl,” she had lived a hard, lonely life, abandoned and forgotten by virtually everybody. As her story unfolds, one of those characters return to the marshes of North Carolina. Tate was her first love and had become the only family she knew. He had left the swamp for success elsewhere, promising to return for her. But Tate never returned, and he never wrote to explain why.

One night Tate came up to her front door. Kya is enraged at the sight of him as he attempts to apologize:

Kya, leaving you was not only wrong, it was the worst thing I have done or ever will do in my life. I have regretted it for years and will always regret it. I think of you every day. For the rest of my life, I’ll be sorry I left you. I truly thought that you wouldn’t be able to leave the marsh and live in the other world, so I didn’t see how we could stay together. But that was wrong.

Finishing his plea, Tate watched her until she asked, “What do you want now, Tate?”

He responded, “If only you could, some way, forgive me.”

As Kya looked at her toes, she thought to herself "Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness?”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Kya asked a good question. One with which we should wrestle when thinking about the work of Christ on the Cross.

Revenge really is a dish best served cold--as people who feel wronged by someone else can take up to a year to exact retribution, according to new research. Instant retaliation is uncommon, say Dutch psychologists, who found that only about one person in ten strikes back immediately after being offended.

Study co-author Maartje Elshout said, “Our results show that revenge takes place after some time. Real-life revenge is not so much focused on deterrence, but on restoring self-esteem or a sense of power. The act of revenge does not need to be instantaneous nor proportional.”

In the study, Dr. Elshout and her team quizzed nearly 2,000 people aged 16 to 89 about their experience of revenge. Results show that 14 percent took revenge immediately, within a minute. About 36 per cent took up to a week, with 23 percent striking one to four weeks later. Some 21 percent hit back between one month and a year later, and around five percent took more than a year to get their own back. Dr. Elshout said, “Our findings suggest that revenge is typically delayed.”

Revenge acts admitted by participants in the study include infidelity, damaging a car, disclosing secrets, making false accusations, and trying to get someone fired. Other ways of taking revenge included humiliating someone, gossiping, lying, and breaking a promise.

In the Entre Leadership podcast, author Stephen Mansfield compares how barnacles slow down sea vessels to the affect gossip can have an organization or church. Some of the facts discussed in the podcast:

-Barnacles can slow down ships by as much as 40% as reported by the US Navy.

-Barnacles can get inside engines and can be added weight on the hull.

-Barnacles can actually crack the hull of smaller vessels.

-Barnacles diminish the aerodynamics of the boat.

-The number of barnacles multiply rapidly due to the constant reproduction.

-The US Navy spends $500 million a year to scrape barnacles off ships.

Possible Preaching Angles: Faultfinding; Gossip – Gossip slows down the mission and vision of the church and it affects the health of the body. There is a cost to dealing with gossip, but it’s worth it. This illustration provides a positive way to preach on a negative subject.

A few years ago, Yeshiva University neuroscientist Lucy Brown and her research team distributed flyers across several campuses in the New York area to recruit participants for a brain-imaging study. The flyers had one sentence highlighted: "Have you just been rejected in love but can't let go?" Soon enough, Brown recalls, she had college students—who were asked to bring a photo of their beloved with them—crying in the brain scanner.

The brains of the forlorn study subjects looked a lot like drug addicts looking for a fix. Brown concluded, "In retrospect, it's not surprising that the same areas of the brain that were active in the brains of cocaine addicts were active in these people who were heartbroken looking at a picture of their former romantic partner." "We crave the other person just as we crave nicotine or pain pills; you want to be near the other person, you're constantly thinking about them, we even do dangerous things sometimes to win them back—we don't eat or sleep."

"In Mexico they wanted to be my friends because they wanted to do missions to me, but when I moved to the United States no one wanted to be my friend."

Testimony from a Mexican student who came to study in the U.S. after having received many short-term mission trips from American church groups.

Mike Love, 83 years old as of 2024, is one of the original members of the Beach Boys, known for his contribution to such hits as "California Girls," "Help Me Rhonda," "I Get Around," and others. But according to an article in Rolling Stone, the most important thing to know about Love is that he meditates twice a day, without fail, and has done so for years. "It helps you deal with whatever you're dealing with," said Love. "I meditate in order to cope with things."

And over the years, he's certainly had a lot to deal with: a former wife had an affair with his cousin Dennis Wilson, also a member of the Beach Boys; Love's name didn't make it onto the publishing credits for many of the Beach Boys early songs—something Love filed a lawsuit over; as well as a strained relationship with Brian Wilson—considered to be the genius behind the Beach Boys.

So has years of twice-daily meditation helped Love? When asked what he would say to his cousin and former band-mate Brian Wilson if he were standing before him, Love responded, "I'd probably say, 'I love you,'" moisture gathering in the corner of his eyes. "And I love what we did together. And let's do it again."

But then he gives his head a shake, narrows his eyes, any wetness there drying up, frowns and once again gives voice to what no amount of meditation can ever smooth over. "I've been ostracized," he says quietly. "Vilified …"

Tennessee Williams's short story "Something by Tolstoi," tells the story of Jacob Brodsky, a shy Russian Jew who runs his father's bookshop. Jacob's dream seemed complete when he married his childhood sweetheart, Lila, a beautiful, exuberant French girl. The life of a bookshop proprietor suited him fine, but not his adventurous young bride. An agent for a vaudeville touring company heard Lila sing and talked her into touring Europe with their show.

In the process of explaining to Jacob that she had to seize this opportunity and leave, she also cleft a chasm-sized hole in his heart. But before she left, he gave her a key to the bookshop and said, "You had better keep this because you will want it some day. Your love is not so much less than mine that you can get away from it. You will come back sometime, and I will be waiting.'"

Lila went on the road, and Jacob went to the back of his bookshop. To deaden the pain, he turned to his books as someone else might turn to drugs or alcohol. Weeks turned into years. When fifteen of them had passed, the bell above the bookshop's front door signaled the arrival of a customer. It was Lila.

The bookshop's owner rose to greet her. But to her astonishment, her abandoned husband didn't recognize her and simply spoke like he would to any other customer. "Do you want a book?" Stunned and trying to maintain her composure, she raised a gloved hand to her throat and stammered, "No—that is—I wanted a book, but I've forgotten the name of it." Regaining some poise, she continued, "Let me tell you the story—perhaps you have read it and can give me the name of it."

She then told him of a boy and a girl who had been constant companions since childhood. As teenagers, they fell in love, eventually married, and lived over a bookshop. She told him their whole story—the vaudeville company's offer, the husband's brokenhearted gift of the key, the return of the wife who was never able to part with the key. How, after fifteen years, she finally came to her senses and returned home to him.

Then with a desperate plea she said, "You remember it—you must remember it—the story of Lila and Jacob?" With a vacant, faraway look, he merely said, "There is something familiar about the story. I think I have read it somewhere. It seems to me that it is something by Tolstoi." Only the heartbreaking, metallic echo of the key dropping to the hard floor interrupted her horrified silence. Lila, having let go of the key as well as her hope, fled the bookshop in tears.

And Jacob returned to his books.

Possible Preaching Angles: This story could set up a sermon or sermon series on how disappointing or tragic life events crush our hopes and dreams, but the gospel can restore our hope in Christ's ultimate victory.

In the past 40 years in the U.S. we've witnessed a massive decline in our openness to trust other people. A recurring survey asks people, "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?" In the early 1960s, significant majorities said that people can generally be trusted. But by the 1990s the distrusters had a 20-percentage-point margin over the trusters, and those margins have increased in the years since."

A study from University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business concludes that being ignored at work is worse than being harassed or bullied at work. Across three separate studies, a team of researchers measured the effects of ostracism and harassment in the work environment. The researchers defined ostracism as "an individual or a group neglecting to take actions that engage another [co-worker] when it would be customary or appropriate to do so." In other words, ostracism involves anything from having one's greetings go ignored, being excluded from invitations, or going silent when another co-worker tries to enter the conversation.

Surprisingly, the study concluded that ostracism, which seems better than overt harassment, was actually more painful. One of the lead authors of the study said, "We've been taught that ignoring someone is socially preferable—if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. But ostracism actually leads people to feel more helpless, like they're not worthy of any attention at all." According to the study

Receiving attention from others signals that one exists, matters to others, and affects others in that environment … In contrast, being ignored, excluded, and shunned signals that one is so inconsequential as a social being that one is unworthy of others' attention or reaction.

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course this study also has implications for how we accept or reject one another in the body of Christ.

According to researchers at Erasmus University carrying a grudge can weigh you down—literally. The researchers asked study participants to write about a time when they'd experienced a conflict. Some were instructed to reflect on a time when they didn't forgive the offender, others were told to think about the time they did forgive the person, and a third group wrote about a comparatively dull social interaction. They were then given a small physical challenge: jumping five times, as high as they could, without bending their knees.

They then asked their human guinea pigs to jump as high as they could, five times, without bending their knees. Those who had been thinking about a time when they'd forgiven jumped highest, about 11.8 inches on average; those who had written about their grudges, on the other hand, jumped 8.5 inches. There were no significant difference in the jumps of those in the non-forgiveness and neutral conditions. In another, similar experiment, people who'd been set up to think about a time they held a grudge estimated that a hill was steeper than people who were thinking about a time they forgave someone.

The results suggest that the "weight" of carrying a grudge may be more than just a metaphor. The lead researcher for the study wrote, "A state of unforgiveness is like carrying a heavy burden—a burden that victims bring with them when they navigate the physical world. Forgiveness can 'lighten' this burden."

Here's a deeply moving story from Iraq. It's a story of betrayal and the fracturing of a relationship. The New York Times reports it this way: "The afternoon before his family fled the onslaught of Sunni militants, Dakhil Habash was visited by three of his Arab neighbors. Over tea, his trusted friend Matlul Mare told him not to worry about the advancing [ISIS] fighters and that no harm would come to him or his Yazidi people. The men had helped one another over the years: Mr. Mare brought supplies to Mr. Habash's community and he bought tomatoes and watermelon from Mr. Habash's farm and sometimes borrowed money.

But his friend's assurances did not sit right with Mr. Habash. That night, he gathered his family and fled. Soon afterward, he said, he found out that Mr. Mare had joined the militants and was helping them hunt down Yazidi families. 'Our Arab neighbors turned on all of us,' said Mr. Habash, who recounted his story from a makeshift refugee camp on the banks of a fetid stream near the city of Zakho, in Iraqi Kurdistan. 'We feel betrayed. They were our friends.'

It would be the last time the men saw each other, as they were swept into different spheres of Iraq's fracturing sectarian landscape, where militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are filling their ranks with the country's disenfranchised Sunni Arabs.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sadly, this story gets played out over and over again—throughout history, communities, families, marriages, friends, and churches.

In his best-selling book The Telling Room, Michael Paterniti shares a true story he heard when visiting his father's ancestral village in Sicily. Every day while he was in the village he saw a very old woman walking with her cane, struggling up a steep road to get to the local cemetery. It was said that at her tortoise pace, the walk from her home to the cemetery and back took about six hours out of her day.

What grief inspired her difficult daily walk? Was she driven by sorrow over a departed child or a deceased husband, the love of her life? No, the locals told Paterniti that she was driven by Astio, or bitter hatred. Her archenemy was buried in that cemetery. So, rain or shine, the old woman walked up the hill every day to her enemy's gravesite, just to spit on it one more time.

When we experience relational hurts (whether through actions, words, or lack of encouragement), we often use phrases like "She broke my heart," or "He hurt my feelings," or it was like getting "punched in the gut." Researcher and neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman thought this was just too coincidental, so he set out to study the pain of social rejection. One of his studies involved putting people in a brain scanner while they played an Internet video game called Cyberball where three "people" (a subject and two computerized "players") toss a ball around to each other. The point of Cyberball is to make the research subject feel rejected. At first, all three players toss the ball to each other in turn. But at a certain point, the other two players cut the poor research participant out of the game. They toss the ball just to each other. Even though this is a silly game in a research study and has no bearing on real life, the research subjects were really hurt. They started feeling distress. They felt rejected. When they came out of the scanner, they kept talking to the researchers about how upset they were.

The most interesting part of the study is how their brains processed the social rejection. To the brain, social pain feels a lot like physical pain—a broken heart can feel like a broken leg, as Lieberman puts it. In his book Social, Lieberman writes, "Looking at the [brain scans], side by side, without knowing which was an analysis of physical pain and which was an analysis of social pain, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference." In other words, "When human beings experience threats or damage to their social bonds, the brain responds in much the same way it responds to physical pain."